Spike Book

Chris Abani Peter Ackroyd Douglas Adams Scott Adams Keith Altham Paul Au
Tom Baker J.G. Ballard Iain Banks John Battelle John Baxter Samuel Beckett
Bellow Thomas Bernhard Maurice Blanchot Jorge Luis Borges Angela Bourke
Michael Bracewell Charlie Brooker Charles Bukowski Julie Burchill Jason Bur
Bryan Burrough Albert Camus Paul Celan Bruce Chatwin Annabel Chong E.M
Cioran Diablo Cody Douglas Coupland Quentin Crisp Mark Danielewski Don D
Lillo John C Diamond Stephen Dorril Patricia Duncker Nic Dunlop The Fall Ste
fan Fatsis Tibor Fischer Mark Fisher Michael Foot Franz Ferdinand Athol Fuga
Anna Funder Alex Garland Harry Gibson William Gibson Allen Ginsberg Grah
Books, Music, Art, Ideas

Greene Peter Guralnick Half Man Half Biscuit Keith Haring Bill Hicks Tom Hod
kinson Gert Hofmann Nick Hornby Michel Houellebecq Gary Indiana Derek Ja
15 Years of
man Linton Kwesi Johnson Ed Jones Gabriel Josipovici Kevin Kelly Naomi Kl
Rem Koolhaas Kruder And Dorfmeister Andrey Kurkov Emma Larkin Abby Le
Wyndham Lewis Jack London Leo Marks David Markson Gabriel Garcia Marq
Bertie Marshall Cedric Mims Alan Moore Morrissey Patricia Morrisroe Cookie
Mueller Ben Myers Jeff Noon Cees Nooteboom Angus Oblong Will Oldham P.J
O’Rourke Lawrence O’Toole Chuck Palahniuk Tim Parks Arvo Pärt Ulf Poscha
Richard Powers Thomas Pynchon Matthew Robertson Bruce Robinson Jacqu
Roubaud Robert Sabbag Peter Saville Alberto Sciamma WG Sebald Will Self
Tupac Shakur Mark Simpson Iain Sinclair Michael Marshall Smith Sonic Youth
Ralph Steadman Suicide Damo Suzuki Swans David Sylvian David Thomas (P
Ubu)Hunter S. Thompson Colm Tóibín Amos Tutuola Stuart Walton Alan Warn
Evelyn Waugh Belinda Webb Irvine Welsh The White Stripes Tony Wilson Chr
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com 002
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Introduction B
What Is Spike Magazine… email

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Chris Mitchell
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… And What Is In This PDF? G
Spike Magazine is a collection of interviews, given an actual real book anthology would be Facebook
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features and book reviews with and about vari- financially cataclysmic, this snazzy PDF built I
ous authors, artists and musicians from 1995 to by my good friend and Spike contributor Jason Twitter
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2010. I originally set up the site to publish my Weaver was the best way to showcase 150 of K
own reviews and interviews, and it snowballed Spike’s articles. There’s over 400 more interviews, L
from there. Spike has had a small army of con- reviews and features on the website, so consider M
tributors over the years, all of whom are listed this a sampler of Spike Magazine and a gateway N
on the Spike Roll Of Honour. Thank you to each into exploring the rest of the website. O
and every one of you. P
I had no set criteria about what should be in How This PDF Works
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Spike Magazine, except whether I found it per- With 150 articles, it was decided that simply ar- R
sonally interesting. As such, it’s a glorious mess ranging everything alphabetically by the author’s S
of the high brow and low brow. Certain themes surname was the easiest way to go. The tab down T
kept coming up again and again – sex, drugs, the right hand edge lets you jump to any letter, and U
post-war French philosophy –and certain writers there’s an overview of the articles in each letter’s V
kept reappearing too, notably J.G. Ballard, Will section waiting for you. Each of the articles are W
Self, Douglas Coupland, Irvine Welsh, Jeff Noon hyperlinked from there. Work your way through X
and Hunter S. Thompson. the PDF methodically, or make with the clicky Y
Given Spike has been around for 15 years, and and see what happens. Z
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Introduction B
How Spike Magazine Got Started email

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Chris Mitchell
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I first had the idea for Spike while I was doing come and had invested in at-the-time outrageously G
my MA at the University Of Sussex in 1995. My expensive ISDN lines so he could get something Facebook
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co-conspirator in helping me initially figure out approaching a speedy browsing connection. He I
what Spike should be was Adam Baron, who has had created the still-burgeoning HedWeb.com Twitter
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subsequently gone on to write four bestselling which proposed then-radical ideas about paradise
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novels but perhaps still remains most lauded as engineering. Heroically Dave allowed me to
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the author of The Man Whose Penis Made Him come round his house and spend hours gazing at
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Locally Famous. his computer monitor in fascination at all these
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I’m not sure why I called it Spike - the retrospec- webpages that were being created by people eve-
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tive explanation I came up with was because I was rywhere. (Ok, mainly in the US. But it felt like
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fed up of getting my work spiked by magazines, everywhere). He also taught me HTML (or at least
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so I put it online. And it sounded sharp, as in razor passed me a doorstop sized HTML manual with a
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sharp criticism. But I think it had as much to do smile) and has hosted Spike on his own webserver
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with being a huge fan of Spike Milligan too. since its inception. Without Dave, Spike wouldn’t
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Publishing online seemed a way to finally get my have happened, and, given every job I’ve had since
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writing actually out there, even though in 1995, 1997 revolves around the internet, I think I owe
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there weren’t that many people on the internet. I my career to him too. Thanks Dave.
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had just discovered the web thanks to my friend I remember thinking there was very little about
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and mentor Dave Pearce, who had quickly latched books or literature on the web – it seemed like a
on to how revolutionary the web was going to be- chance to get in at the beginning of something. I Y
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was already a frustrated books and music journal- to some of Europe’s most fascinating writers, par- More A
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ist, collecting my first rejection slips from UK ticularly Maurice Blanchot and Thomas Bernhard. B
magazines. My break into writing for real came Perhaps most importantly he introduced me to The C
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in the form of the formidable Polly Marshall, who Day Today. Steve continues to blog today at This D
ran the spectacular spoken word club Do Tongues, Space. As Spike grew, contributions came in from E
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which got in everyone from Ken Campbell to scores of writers from all over the globe. Many of F
Helen Zahavi to Will Self to Tony Benn. She also them I have sadly still yet to meet in person, but G
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was the Literary Editor for Brighton’s version of fond memories of seeing REM at Stirling Castle H
Time Out, Punter magazine (now The Latest). I with Spike contributor Gary Marshall and several I
started writing book reviews for Polly, and was huge nights out in Melbourne with Antipodean- Twitter
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given the phone numbers of numerous book pub- exiled correspondent Jayne Margetts makes me K
licists at the major publishing houses who I then wish it happened more often. L
plagued for review copies and author interviews In December 2002, I decided to leave the UK M
for the next couple of years. Back then, explaining and go travelling in Australia for six months. N
the idea of a literary website was hard work, and I Eight years later, I’m still travelling around Asia, O
thank every long-suffering publicist who took me and I’m now based in Bangkok, Thailand. I write P
on faith and sent me books. Special thanks goes mainly for scuba diving magazines, and run the Q
to Karen Duffy, then at the now defunct Harper travel websites Travelhappy.info and Divehappy. R
Collins imprint Flamingo, who provided a lot of com. There’s a coffee table book on the way that S
encouragement and good humour. I’ve written with my friend and ace photographer T
Spike quickly gained momentum thanks to the Jez Tryner called Thailand’s Underwater World. U
contributions, both written and pub-inspired, of oth- If any Spike contributor makes it out here to V
er friends in Brighton, especially Chris Hall, Nick Bangkok, dinner and drinks are on me. W
Clapson, Jason Weaver, and Stephen Mitchelmore. As I’ve become more involved with scuba div- X
Steve posted a lot to Spike’s blog Splinters and being and traveling, whilst being virtually cut off Y
came a bit of a mentor as well as he introduced me from the UK literary scene, I’ve spent less time Z
on Spike in recent years. However, the enthusiasm great books. At its best, it has provided a signifi- More A
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of longtime contributors like Ben Granger, Greg cant boost to authors whose work might otherwise B
Lowe and Dan Coxon have kept my interest going, get lost, and a way for them to find their own audi- C
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and introduced me to writers I would otherwise ence. Spike has been a small and erratic part of D
never heard of. that, propelled by the enthusiasm and passion of E
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Meanwhile, numerous superb British literary its contributors, and much of what’s been written F
sites have joined Spike on the Web in recent years, on the site still stands up well years after it was G
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as showcased at BritLitBlogs.com. Steve Kelly first published. H
at the now archived Richmond Review, the UK’s If you’ve read Spike before, I hope you enjoy I
first online literary magazine, provided a lot of revisiting through this anthology – and if you’re Twitter
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good advice to me and led the way to the rest of us new to Spike, I hope you’ll stay in touch and see K
becoming, if not respectable, then at least tolerated. what comes next. L
In the 15 years since SpikeMagazine.com first Chris Mitchell M
appeared, the internet has fundamentally changed Bangkok, October 2010 N
the way that people access, understand and enjoy chris@spikemagazine.com O
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Chris Abani: Scott Adams: I
Becoming Abigail 007 Dilbert: Seven Years of Twitter
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Highly Defective People 016 K
Peter Ackroyd: L
London: The Biography 012 Keith Altham: M
No More Mr Nice Guy! 018 N
Douglas Adams: O
The Salmon Of Doubt 014 Paul Auster: P
Oracle Night 020 Q
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Review [published March 2008] B
Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail email

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Jason Weaver
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In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life well-researched and the facts of his story are plausible.
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biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has Yet he pointedly avoids the documentary approach the Facebook
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a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like subject might automatically warrant. Instead he offers
Please Daddy No and A Child Called It. The covers a poem. I
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usually feature black-and-white photos of sad-faced In 34 short cantos, Becoming Abigail seems, at first, J
kids and the titles are in a hand-scrawled font. I suspect to be bluntly indicative, short lines expressing fact: K
that the decline of the horror genre is connected to an “And Peter came every day. Twice a day. At dawn. L
appetite for these altogether more real stories. It’s redo- At dusk. To feed and water her. With rotting food. Ran- M
lent of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s cid water. Sometimes his piss. By the tenth day she no N
inhumanity to man … and then make a programme longer cared. Couldn’t tell the difference.” O
about it.” The truest thing about Becoming Abigail is a lack P
On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming of sentimentality. Though poetic, the narrative style Q
Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about is measured, its emotional veracity spot on. Although R
the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian Abigail is a character with a palpable soul, the more
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girl caught up in the skin trade. Except that it isn’t traumatic events are often rendered almost blandly,
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just about sex trafficking. Nor should it be. Abani is as if cauterized by shock. As a small child, she is un-
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a thoughtful author who, through the style of his writ- touched by grief over her mother’s death. It begins to
ing, is at pains to avoid further exploitation of the topic emerge later, through her games and behaviour. Abani V
through prurient entertainment. During interviews, seems to be saying that we cannot process such drastic W
Abani is both urgent and polemical about the issue, experiences until we have developed the resources to X
stating that sex trafficking, after guns and drugs, is the deal with them. So, trauma resides in us until we have Y
third largest growth industry in the world. The author is figured out the puzzle it has set us. This explains the Z
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numbness towards our own suffering and the time lag Simply put, this is a radical reworking of the coming- More A
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until we truly begin to feel it. It grants us resilience, of-age novel. B
protecting us. It might also suggest that sex trafficking The “becoming” of the title is encoded with ambigu- C
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is a societal trauma which needs to develop a process to ity. The girl is the spitting image of her dead mother, D
deal with it. Books such as this might offer a way. also called Abigail, a ghost who haunts the book. The E
A relationship of time actually structures the no- child’s attempts to define herself against her parents is RSS
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vella, which flips between chapters headed “Now” and complicated by the guilt she feels over her mother’s
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“Then”. Things begin with a charged description of her death, creating a myth almost impossible to overcome. Facebook
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mother’s funeral. Yet, Abigail notes, her mother died in The title dramatizes the push and pull of becoming
child birth, so she couldn’t have witnessed it herself. either the mother-Abigail others would like her to be or I
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But if the memory is factually false, it still has emo- an Abigail of her own choosing. J
tional impact and influences the girl’s identity. In this The title also functions as an adjective, raising the K
way, Becoming Abigail explores how memory and the question of what is ‘becoming’ or fitting for a girl like L
way we account for our experiences define who we are. Abigail. Her father sends her to London because he M
This sounds complex, yet Abani’s technique is works thinks it will be good for her. The book is filled with N
on us without abstraction. Abigail speaks to us directly. others’ expectations of how she should dress, behave O
The intransitive word “becoming” is the key here. and so on. These struggles are further impacted by P
The book is about the liminal state between things – the the expectations of men who here define themselves Q
gap between girl and woman, male and female, past against women. Her father suffers great depression at R
and present, Nigeria and England, the space where his wife’s death. She is portrayed as a kind of crutch S
things are undefined, as with a trauma which is yet to which propped him up, a role which passes to his
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be recognized. The book begins with the word “And”, a daughter. Through his daughter’s independence, the
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broken conjunctive alerting us to the incomplete nature father loses his wife again. This will have disastrous
of things here. In critic Melissa Reburiano’s words, consequences. In writing the book, Abani tried to V
identity is “not product but process”. In this sense, we “evacuate” his masculinity, attempting to write from a W
are always in flux, always in a state of becoming. The woman’s point of view rather than becoming yet an- X
novel dramatizes the heroine’s attempts to navigate other male expectation of Abigail’s behaviour. In this Y
these relationships in her struggle to ‘become Abigail’. sense, the novel contextualizes sex trafficking within Z

the confines placed on women’s existence by men. Date Line at Greenwich, itself a symbol of colonial More A
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Abigail is no fool. She knows at an early age what men over-mapping of the world, and marvels that such a B
can be like. It is important to show that she is faced thin line can separate time. This is a literal symbol of C
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with circumstances over which she can exercise little how time and place are fictionally mapped. “The line is D
personal defence and from which others have failed a lie,” Abigail often riffs. It is intriguing to see London E
to protect her. The boundaries of her life offer Abigail portrayed through the eyes of ‘the other’. Greenwich RSS
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little room to manoeuvre. Market is described in the exotic terms of a souk.
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Aspects of Becoming Abigail remind me of Mrs Abigail rides the tube when she first arrives in London, Facebook
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Dalloway. An interior consciousness creates a resonant noting with surprise the variety of white faces. At the
cluster of poetic images which acts as critique of pa- station, she hears the mantra “Mind the Gap”, almost a I
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triarchal control. Maps, poems, the body, needles, all slogan for the interstitial theme of the novel: J
are densely interconnected and new relationships are “Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they K
discovered on re-reading. The second time around, were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibil- L
for example, totally transforms the hiss of a cigarette ity of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against M
as it hits the Thames, imbued now with knowledge of either side. That was where the danger lay. What was N
the decision that Abigail is trying to make. One of her it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the O
own favourite images is from a Chinese tea ceremony, dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t P
where a lotus flowers. It might stand for how the un- have told her anything.” Q
expected developments in the story unfold layer after The Thames location also recalls Heart of Darkness, R
layer. As with Woolf’s novel, an authoritarian doctor although here the tide flows the opposite way and the S
fails to avert tragedy by rubbishing a character’s mental slave trade is given an ironic twist. The book is full of
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distress. There is also the London location and the way subtle but awful ironies. The image of a dog peeing on
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icons of government and empire are personalized and a statue, the building of a doghouse later proves to be
subverted. On the Embankment, the phallic Cleopatra’s more brutal than it appeared and a joke about how the V
Needle is gently ridiculed. The lions have been placed French see Africans as animals to be tamed whereas the W
the wrong way round and Queen Victoria won’t foot English don’t see them at all resonates through the lat- X
the bill to have them put right. Abani does London very ter part of the book. The worst irony of all is that British Y
well. At one point, Abigail stands on the International social services thinks it knows what’s ‘becoming’ for Z

Abigail and defines her as a victim. Her relationship I find it hard to be critical of a book like this. Its po- More A
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with her care worker, the only man with whom she etic density roots in the imagination and flowers, giving B
truly glimpses her own identity, is vilified and taken it a perennial afterlife. You live with it and Abigail’s C
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away from her. The removal of this love is, it seems, memories mingle with your own. Which is, I think, the D
crueller to Abigail than the brutalities she has endured. very interplay between identity and the fictional process E
It is vital that the novel itself does equally reduce that Abani is trying to achieve. Abigail’s character has RSS
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Abigail to ‘victim’, the passive casualty of events. an emotional veracity for us in the same way that she
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Instead, Abani juxtaposes the blunt, indicative style of must deal with the processes of her own memory. Like Facebook
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writing with Abigail’s own subjunctive voice, aching the ghost of her mother, Abigail begins to haunt our
with imagination and wishes. Her passions are aroused imagination, which is a more effective way of drama- I
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mainly by the experiences she longs for, those she de- tizing the horror of sex trafficking than browbeating us J
sires and craves to make her who she aspires to be. She with atrocity and data. Our sense of loss is personal, our K
is never simply hostage to her experiences. Like all of empathy more deeply entwined and Abigail is retrieved L
us, her behaviour is self-consciously modified. Abigail from a dehumanized roll call of names and numbers. M
is a character who muses on her own character, with- We might think here of efforts to replace statistics with N
out the Postmodern sleight of hand that might imply. photographs and biographies of those who died in the O
Telling stories is what we do, Abani seems to argue, Holocaust. Hope lies in trying to unthink the unthink- P
who we are. It is inevitable, inexorable, that Abigail able rather than complying with a mathematics which Q
works herself out in this way. Even in the most meagre makes it possible. This poetic meditation on identity R
circumstances, we cannot help but be human. Because is crucial to a deeper understanding of the full cost S
of this, there is always some anchor to the flux, some of human trafficking, which has implications for our
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kind of residual persona: tolerance for brutality disguised behind statistics.
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“These things just happen. Ije uwa, as the Igbos Becoming Abigail is a tough book that wishes to
would say. One’s walk in this life. Interesting that the avoid false comfort to the reader. Yet in exploring the V
Igbo don’t believe the path to be fixed, or even prob- dynamics of its character’s psyche, it insists on hope. W
lematic. It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player, Towards the end of the book, Abigail reflects on her X
not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality experiences in light of her cultural background: Y
always sways the outcome of the game.” “Second chances are a fact of life for the Igbo. A Z

person who lived poor and was buried poor can, when equals, in being noticed as a person and not as a thing, More A
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a relative makes enough money, receive a second in wanting to give rather than being forced to take, in B
burial. Full of the pomp and grandeur reserved for the becoming a human being against dehumanizing forces. C
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rich. So even in death, in Hades, the dead one can We are like the rich relatives who can, by paying at- D
get a chance to taste the wealth that eluded him in his tention to the trafficking industry, eventually sweeten E
previous incarnation, perhaps sweetening the deal for the deal for the women to come. By writing this novel, RSS
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his next one.” Chris Abani suggests how the Abigail’s of this world
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For Abigail, true wealth lies in a relationship of can be given a second chance.  Facebook
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Review [published February 2001] B
Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography email

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Chris Hall
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Those who have read Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and citizens. There is the novelist’s sensibility here, looking
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The Limehouse Golem will recall that the word golem for form: “The emphasis upon finance is sustained by Facebook
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comes from the medieval Jewish for an artificial human the enquiry of the late 20th-century prostitute, ‘Do you
being brought to life by supernatural means, a “thing want any business?’” I
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without form”. Ackroyd’s latest book, London: The London: The Biography rings with the city’s peculiar J
Biography, has itself managed to breathe life into a echoic quality which Ackroyd is always attuned to. He K
seemingly formless city – a tangible sense of London writes that the London Eye has its precursor in the 17th L
as a living organism permeates this remarkable work. century at Bartholomew’s Fair, and that following the M
Indeed, even the endpapers show “seven phases in GLC’s abolition in 1986 “in effect London resumed N
the evolution of Old London Bridge, 1209-1831”, per- its ancient life, with the separate boroughs affirming O
haps a subtle reinforcement of his idea that London is distinct and different identities”. P
a living organism, that it has a “human shape”, echoing For Ackroyd, it is this historical imperative that Q
the seven stages of man. shapes London. “Whenever the opportunity and loca- R
He has a strong faith in London as a palimpsest: tion are offered, it replicates its identity. It is a blind
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“London has always been an ugly city… It has always force in that sense, not susceptible to the blandishments
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been rebuilt, and demolished, and vandalised … one of planners or politicians…”
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of the characteristics of London planners and build- Temporal simultaneity to Ackroyd is as real as the
ers, over the centuries, has been the recklessness with Thames, flowing through time as well as space. He is V
which they have destroyed the city’s past.” quick to point out that “contemporary theorists have W
There is a fascination with London as a built envi- suggested that linear time is itself a figment of the X
ronment (after all, he does say that London is made human imagination”. Indeed, his book itself moves Y
“half of stone half of flesh”), of what London does to its “quixotically through time” forming a labyrinth, and Z
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can be explored from a multitude of entry points. overblown: “London drives some of its citizens mad. A More A
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The book is arranged into themes such as London psychiatric survey in the 70s revealed that cases of de- B
as theatre, crime and punishment, London as crowd, pressive illness were three times higher in the East End C
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London’s radicals, and for every main thoroughfare of than in the rest of the country”. But these criticisms, D
London: The Biography there are scores of delightful like pointing out lacunae, miss the point, for in a very E
or macabre side streets to wander down. Take the fol- real sense, as he himself says at one point, there are 7 RSS
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lowing list of synonyms for prostitutes, which reads million versions of London being written everyday.
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like a bizarre incantation: “…smuts, cracks, mawkes, This is very much the book that Ackroyd has been Facebook
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trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns, building up to, or even the one that he was born to
molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns, write, prefiguring it in his biographies (Blake, Dickens) I
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squirrels…” and fiction (The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor). J
Within each theme we have Ackroyd’s compendi- London: The Biography doesn’t just have sources, K
ous learning tripping the switches between past and it has an essay on sources, and at over 800 pages you L
present. He is no Eric Hobsbawm or Asa Briggs, he is might be forgiven for buying the audio version read by M
neither ideologue nor pedagogue, instead it is through Simon Callow (who is also, incidentally, appearing as N
anecdote and vivid description that we are led through Dickens in Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens). O
labyrinthine London. Ackroyd has put in a heroic amount of research, and it P
Of course, any thesis that London, as it were, imprints would be churlish indeed to disabuse his book of its Q
itself on its citizens is going to occasionally sound definite article.  R
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Review [published October 2003] B
Douglas Adams: The Salmon Of Doubt email

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When I was 12, I bought a text-adventure game called This book has the potential to be excruciating. It
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for my Amiga seems unfair on Adams because many of the fiction Facebook
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500 computer. The box had “Don’t Panic!” written vignettes, non-fiction pieces, emails, and transcribed
in large, friendly letters on the front and showed a speeches were never intended for publication. But I
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green alien sticking its tongue out. Inside was a floppy this misses the point. We know Adams would not J
disk, planning permission for a hyperspace bypass have published them; we don’t expect another Hitch- K
that would require the demolition of the Earth, some hiker’s Guide (though a marketing wag has written L
pocket fluff, and Joo-Janta 500 Super-Chromatic “Hitchhiking The Galaxy One Last Time” on the M
Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (which become opaque cover where “Douglas is dead: Don’t Panic” would N
when the wearer gets scared). The game was written be more appropriate). The result is a collection of O
by Douglas Adams. I decided to buy the BBC Radio insights into a remarkable writer, one who suffered P
series on which the game was based. By the time I from writer’s block, did not suffer from deadlines Q
was 14, I could recite – no joke – the entire six hours (“The thing I most love about deadlines is the whoos- R
of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both radio hing sound they make as they go past”), and had a
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series, including the opening and closing credits. My passionate interest in saving endangered species.
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sound effects were particularly good. The book’s title is taken from Adams’s unfinished
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The author of Hitchhiker is, of course, Douglas Dirk Gently detective novel. Dirk Gently appears in the
Adams. Adams died suddenly on May 11th, 2001. post-Hitchhiker works Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective V
Within days his agent got hold of his hard drive, had Agency and The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul. Gen- W
someone scan it for text documents, burn them to a tly is a typical Adams character: based on someone Ad- X
CD, and set this posthumous publication in motion: ams knew, but when Gently talks, Adams speaks. The Y
The Salmon Of Doubt. unfinished Gently novel is good, though it does contain Z
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a number of ‘placeholders’ to which Adams was no Australia, an email to the American producer of the More A
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doubt intending to return. Its characters are literally un- thus-far unproduced Hitchhiker film, an obituary by B
dernourished but Gently is on form. However, reading Adams’s friend, Richard Dawkins, several interviews, C
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this unfinished novel is either an exercise is breaking no planning permission for the destruction of the Earth, D
your heart (if you are a fan) or an unwanted look into and no peril-sensitive sunglasses of any description. E
the writer’s world where the effortlessness of the final Reading this book is misery. With each eloquently- RSS
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manuscript is a lie based upon plot dead-ends, jokes phrased and humorous comment, one begins to panic;
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that don’t work, and a rhinoceros called Desmond. who is there to take the piss out of life now that Douglas Facebook
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Inside this book you will also find a letter from a is dead? It is possible that other writers will continue to
12-year-old Adams to the editors of The Eagle maga- write in the same manner, but, for me, there remains a I
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zine, an article about testing an artificial manta-ray off doubt; just a salmon of it.  J
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Dilbert is rapidly becoming enough of a cartoon icon alongside the likes of Peanuts.
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to rival the fame of Disney’s most enduring crea- However, with the widespread infiltration of personal Facebook
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tions. Chronicling the trials of a hapless IT engineer computers into the workplace during the 90s, more and
battling against the absurdities of corporate life, the more people began to find Dilbert’s daily dilemmas I
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Dilbert comic strip appears in over 1500 newspapers strangely familiar, especially those which concerned J
worldwide. Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is working for a manager who understood nothing about K
creator Scott Adams’ guided tour of the evolution of technology. The most popular Dilbert strip ever fea- L
Dilbert from geek mascot to unlikely international idol. tures his boss being given an Etch-A-Sketch in place of M
The book assembles strips from all stages of Dilbert’s a laptop and not noticing anything amiss. N
genesis with comments scrawled in the margin by Ad- Adams cannily gauges his audience’s reaction to O
ams as to what was going through his mind at the time. new threads in the Dilbert saga by including his email P
Each of the major characters, such as Dilbert’s mega- address in the margin of each cartoon. As such, an ava- Q
lomaniacal canine companion Dogbert and the witless lanche of Dilbertesque anecdotes arrives in his inbox R
Pointy-Haired Boss, get their own chapters with a brief each morning from disgruntled employees all over
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essay about how and why they appeared in the strip. the globe. Adams freely admits in Seven Years … to
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Thanks to this candid overview, it’s easy to see why using many of these stories as the basis for his strips,
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Dilbert wasn’t an overnight success when the strip first producing the peculiar circularity of Dilbert imitating
appeared in 1989. Adams drew heavily on his eight life imitating Dilbert. Adams has even gone as far as to V
years at Pacific Bell as an applications engineer for have the readers vote by e-mail as to whether Ratbert W
inspiration, with many of the jokes revolving around should get pulverised with a hammer. (They thankfully X
Dilbert’s inherent nerdhood. It was a cult form of voted no). Y
humour for IT professionals which didn’t sit easily The amount of feedback Adams receives from his Z
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nature. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on morale.” Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is B
the burgeoning Dilbert web site, where there is an a concentrated dose of forbidden fun which deserves C
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ever-growing list of draconian companies who have to be kept in the bottom drawer of any self-respecting D
banned Dilbert cartoons from being displayed on office worker’s desk.  E
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Keith Altham: No More Mr Nice Guy! email

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At home with Sting. The in-no-way-narcissistic a pain in the arse!”)
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rainforest dwellers’ friend and tantric sex enthusiast In many ways, this is a bloody awful book: poorly Facebook
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is looking for a space in his sitting room to hang written, littered with typos and spelling errors and reek-
a giant self-portrait. Unfortunately, it soon becomes ing of self-aggrandisement. But Altham really was at I
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clear that this will not match the decor. Eventually, the centre of it all during the 60s and 70s. It was he who J
Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler, suggests that it should go in suggested to Jimi Hendrix the idea of setting a guitar K
the bathroom in place of a print of the Salvador Dalí on fire. And in one of the great forgotten footnotes of L
painting titled The Great Masturbator. “After all,” rock history, he once took Jim Morrison to see Status M
she reasons, “it will just be replacing one wanker Quo (“Tell them to turn down, give up and go home,” N
with another.” sneered the Lizard King). O
For 25 years, Keith Altham was a “friend of the If you’re prepared to endure the leaden prose, there’s P
stars”, as they say, first as a journalist on the NME and a huge reservoir of great stories here. Altham particu- Q
then as PR man for many of the biggest names in rock, larly admires Sting, despite Mr Sumner’s propensity R
from Rod Stewart to Van Morrison and Paul Weller to “to be such a humourless prat”, and seems to have pre-
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Ray Davies. He regressed from representing to Roll- ferred the company of down-to-earth heavy metallers
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ing Stones in the 60s to “Orville the bloody duck” in like Saxon and Uriah Heep, although he loathed their
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the 90s, at which point he wisely decided to jack it all music. Fortunately, he doesn’t allow these personal
in. Rather than writing an autobiography, he’s chosen friendships to prevent him telling yarns that show them V
to spill the beans on his pop star chums in the rather in a considerably less than flattering light. Many of W
cheesy format of individual letters addressed to each of these sail very close to the wind indeed. M’learned X
his former clients. (To Van Morrison: “What can I say? friends may wish to examine his introduction for what Y
What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What would appear to be a libellous statement about that Z
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Connoisseurs will already be familiar with the one Bolan being evicted from the backstage area of a B
about a typically dishevelled Van Morrison turning Rolling Stones gig for sexually molesting Mick Jag- C
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up late for a party (“Did anyone order a minicab?” ger. “Get him out of here,” bellowed the indignant D
shouted the unfortunate who answered the door), leathery Stone. “He just grabbed my balls.” “I didn’t E
and the message Rod Stewart carved into a tabletop realise they were sacrosanct,” responded the Electric RSS
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when he learned that Sting was to be the next user of Elf as he was marched away by burly security guards.
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the Lear jet he was travelling in (“Sting, how come But by a whisker, the accolade has to go to Ter- Facebook
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you ain’t go no sense of humour, you cunt?”). But ence Trent D’Arby, the “silly twisted boy” whose fall
who’d have guessed that underneath his carefully from public favour was even more meteoric than his I
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cultivated likeable exterior, Phil Collins seethes with rise. D’Arby seems to have crammed plenty of over- J
rage at being perceived as “the nice man of pop”? indulgence into his brief brush with fame, but one K
Eventually, he snapped when an unchallenging in- episode proved too much for his female manager. She L
terviewer asked whether he was really as nice as he resigned when he rang her late at night in her hotel room M
seems: “Why don’t you ask my ex-wife?” demanding that she procure condoms for his latest fe- N
For celebrity bitchiness, look no further than Elton male acquaintance. It seems this sexually provocative O
John’s wedding present to Rod Stewart of a £10 gift performer was too embarrassed to make the purchase P
voucher with instructions to “buy something nice for himself. But before leaving, the manager phoned down Q
the home”. And for a real surprise, turn to the chapter to reception in their five-star hotel, whose staff were R
on the Moody Blues behaving badly, which features a made of sterner stuff. Without batting an eyelid, the S
naked, comatose young woman wedged securely into a servile concierge entered the celeb’s bedchamber bear-
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washbasin by her arse while Graeme Edge fires arrows ing a silver platter on which a selection of small foil
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at policemen who’ve been called out to investigate the packets were arranged tastefully and asked if madam
mild-mannered prog-rockers’ raucous partying. would care to make her selection.  V
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Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read isn’t important. Nor is Auster’s distinctly unpretentious
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since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every prose style important. If you wince at clichés like back Facebook
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book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely in the swing of things and to all intents and purposes
readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability that appear on the first half page alone, think of them as I
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to stop reading him once a book is begun. stabilisers for the roller coaster ride ahead. (Elsewhere, J
However, in the end, with Leviathan, I felt this was I read that Auster breaks through his writer’s block by K
too much. I read it abnormally quickly, devouring each typing regardless of the banality of the prose.) L
page with less and less concern for what was written There are two central narratives in Oracle Night – M
on it than for getting beyond that page and to the next both told by Sidney Orr, a New York writer recovering N
page, and the next, to see what was there. from an unnamed illness that was expected to kill him. O
After the last page I was mentally exhausted, nursing He hadn’t written anything in a year until discovering P
a headache. It seems significant that I have no memory a blue notebook in a small stationery shop (that isn’t Q
of the narrative except for the mental image of a forest stationary at all in fact. It disappears overnight.) Any- R
to which a character – perhaps the main character – way, the new notebook somehow enables Orr to write
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removes himself. The proliferation of anecdotes – or a story. Much of Oracle Night is that story.
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stories within stories – means one can’t see the wood I don’t want to summarise the plot here as it is
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for the trees. characteristically involved and would also detract from
The experience of reading Oracle Night is very simi- the essential element of Auster’s novels. The essential V
lar. It’s almost impossible to put the book down as there thing is something impossible to convey outside of the W
are so many compelling stories, one after the other, narrative itself: the evocation of possibility. At each X
even though this is a relatively compact novel (240 step in the story – when Orr enters the stationery store Y
pages). I’m sure I’ll forget most of the stories, but that to discover the blue notebook, when he returns to his Z
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blue notebook as if compelled by an occult power, and contact with our freedom. Reading, or watching a film, B
when, in the story within the story, the character makes reminds us of possibility even as it is removed. And in C
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a life-changing decision – there is a thrilling, uncanny that reminder, it comes true. The obscure attraction of D
sense of freedom. I mean, for the reader. A freedom in a book or a film might be, then, the pleasure of contact E
infinite possibility; innumerable futures present them- with possibility and relief in its withdrawal. RSS
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selves. I have not experienced this so acutely with any But such pleasure has a double edge of course.
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other writer. Indulgence in stories removes us from life; takes us Facebook
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It’s there too in the opening lines of The Music Of to the end of possibility. Auster’s narrative is, as I’ve
Chance: Jim Nashe driving away from his past after said, compelling. It is compelling but in the end doesn’t I
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a windfall of cash. After that, the story takes shape satisfy the indulgent reader. Oracle Night could go on J
and the sense diminishes. Until then, however, no for another thousand pages. Perhaps it does as Auster’s K
particular story is attached to the sense of freedom. complete oeuvre. Yet it does stop. Although, actu- L
Anything can happen. We are free. The beginning of ally, it doesn’t quite. The story within the story is not M
the story is our windfall. concluded. It is shocking and frustrating for the reader. N
So why is do we feel an urge to continue read- One wants to know how the author Sidney Orr and the O
ing rather than to throw the book aside and live that author Paul Auster resolve a chilling situation. At the P
freedom? Probably because we prefer the illusion of end though Orr explains why it is left hanging and we Q
freedom, the possibility of freedom rather than the real realise that it stops precisely for the reason we don’t R
thing. We read to enjoy the specific story that replaces want it to stop. It is difficult to accept, yet not because S
the vertigo of infinite freedom. As with a horror movie, it is wrong.
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we aren’t really horrified. Horror is only the playful This has angered and confused naive readers; those
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withdrawal of a guaranteed safety. And narrative is the untroubled by stories. For instance, Aaron Hughes asks
guarantee. With a novel, we know we have a circum- the right questions but asks them only of Oracle Night V
scribed adventure before us. rather than literature in general. What does it mean, for W
Yet that narrative also makes our freedom come true example, to say that Oracle Night “is not a success” X
for a moment, even if it is only an illusion. The open when the nature of success in literary terms is fun- Y
future may contain infinite possibilities but it never damental to the narrative itself? The answers present Z

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up a novel you become a reader, not a consumer. it.’ [from Death Sentence] B
Orr describes burning the blue notebook in order To begin with death. To work my way C
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to escape its mysterious power; in order to flee the back into life, and then, finally, to return D
nightmare of possibilities it summoned. Indeed, the to death. E
end of the novel seems overladen with terrible events. RSS
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Orr writes: “The true story started only then, after I In Oracle Night, we joined Sidney Orr working his
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destroyed the blue notebook.” way back into life from the brink of death – working, Facebook
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We might compare this with something Auster – or
should we say Orrster? – wrote in The Invention Of named illness was dizziness, where the world became I
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Solitude at the very beginning of his career following blurred and incoherent: a world without form. Almost J
after death of his father: as if language and meaning had been removed from K
his life. It took the discovery of the blue notebook and L
For the past two weeks, these lines from the writing of the new story to return him to both. But M
Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head: that only returns threatens another death, the death of N
‘One thing must be understood: I have said possibility. It is Auster’s rare achievement to keep pos- O
nothing extraordinary or even surprising. sibility alive and kicking even as it suffers a death by a P
What is extraordinary begins at the moment thousand plots.  Q
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J.G. Ballard: Future Shock 032 Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No 088 G
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J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights 048 Jorge Luis Borges: The Book L
Of Imaginary Beings 103 M
J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphor 050
Angela Bourke: The Burning N
Iain M. Banks: Getting Used To Being God 054 O
Of Bridget Cleary 107
Adam Baron: The Man Whose Penis P
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine 109 Q
Made Him Locally Famous 059
Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn 112 R
John Battelle: The Search 062 S
Charles Bukowski: Born Into This 115 T
John Baxter: George Lucas:
A Biography 065 Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush 118 U
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Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography 067 Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie 122 W
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein 071 Jason Burke: Al Qaeda 134 X
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At the risk of turning into one of those dreadful monster. And like all the best monsters, this one turned
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30-something nostalgia bores, the Tom Baker incar- out to be – gasp! – himself. “While we were on our Facebook
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nation of Dr Who has a special place in the hearts of tours about the country to promote the programme, I
those of my generation. Forever fixed in my mind is was often pulled by women who were keen fantasists,” I
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the time I queued for hours with hundreds of other he confesses, introducing tales of hotel room bondage J
grubby pre-teens in a smalltown bookshop awaiting sessions (“A good few of these women wanted to whip K
the arrival of the great man to sign books he hadn’t or cane me”) and general pervery (a university don in- L
written. The cops sealed off the high street, which was sisted on wearing his costume, “and as she threw herself M
lined with kiddies wondering where the Tardis would wantonly on to the wide Holiday Inn bed she growled, N
materialise to disgorge the tousle-haired timelord. ‘Come on, Doctor, let’s travel through space’”). Alas, O
Suddenly he appeared, striding down the middle of the man with the sonic screwdriver had no advanced P
the road in full Who garb, dishing out jelly babies to defence against venereal disease, and soon contracted Q
the gobsmacked hordes. a dose of the clap. R
My illusions took a slight dent a few years back when Dr Who enthusiasts may initially be disappointed to
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I saw one of those unbroadcastable out-take reels BBC find that the programme doesn’t get its first mention
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technicians compile to amuse one another at Christmas, until page 189, but to skip the first 15 chapters would
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in which Baker was shown getting saucy with an assist- be to miss a real treat since Baker seems determined
ant and taking the piss out of K9. But that’s as nothing to show himself in the least flattering light imaginable, V
compared to the revelations in this indiscreet autobiog- as if to demonstrate the veracity of a remark he once W
raphy. It seems Baker’s worst enemy during his years overheard: “He’s quite nice. But there’s something odd X
of national fame wasn’t the Daleks, the Cybermen, or about him, something slightly disgusting.” The book Y
any of the other low-budget latex terrors, but the Shag- opens in wartime Liverpool, where poverty-stricken Z
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young master Baker prayed for a bomb to drop on shed some light on this mystery, get the briefest of More A
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his mother so he’d be orphaned and eligible for treats walk-on parts – barely a paragraph in the case of Lalla B
from the Americans. By the age of nine he’d become a Ward, who buggered off to shack up with proselytis- C
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thurible swinger and learned to fake tears at funerals to ing Darwinist Richard Dawkins – when Baker wishes D
get bigger tips. A year later, he discovered the joys of to illustrate his talent for appalling misjudgement or E
solvent abuse (“I couldn’t walk past a tin of floor polish self-pity. He once even failed to recognise an ex-wife RSS
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without having a furtive snort”), which helped set him at a party.
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on the path to a lifetime of misery and self-loathing, Nor does the story end, as one might expect, with Facebook
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abetted by National Service, the National Theatre and a timelord totty excess, as Baker went on to enjoy sev-
failed attempt to please his family by becoming a monk. eral Soho Boozing Years with the late Jeffrey Bernard, I
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A recurring theme is that common actors’ lament, the Francis Bacon and chums, which provide a further rich J
lack of any sense of identity, which isn’t helped by the seam of anecdotes. These days he happily potters about K
fact that he’s so frequently mistaken for Jon Pertwee, in his local graveyard polishing his own tombstone, en- L
Jonathan Miller and – bizarrely – Shirley Williams. But joying strange encounters with scary fans paying their M
although he’s understandably irked to be accosted by respects, and occasionally treats himself to lengthy N
strangers about the havoc he wreaked on the grammar visits to the household goods department of John O
schools, Baker seems curiously flattered when people Lewis. “I particularly enjoy the ironing-board section. P
remark, as they often do, that he reminds them of a I find I can pass an hour or more admiring the various Q
favourite aunt. Not that they want to be around him for ironing boards. The Brabantia is my favourite. I have a R
long. “I’m afraid I have no gift for friendship,” he writes very good model with a flowered cover, pretty though S
at one point. “I quickly get tired of people and off they fading slightly. It folds so smoothly that all fear flees.
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go. Only the other day I tried to think of a single friend It’s the folding action of good modern boards that has
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I had made in my life and drew a blank.” removed the terror that so many men used to feel at the
But while Baker wallows in his own perversely ap- prospect of opening or closing the old, temperamental V
pealing creepiness, he doesn’t get anywhere near an type of ironing board when naked.” W
answer to the question posed by the book’s title. His Call me a sick fuck if you must, but I closed the book X
long-suffering wives, who might have been invited to liking him even more.  Y
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J.G. Ballard A
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Most famous as the author of Empire Of The Sun and web. This was made largely obsolete by the arrival E
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Crash, J.G. Ballard was one of the most important of Simon Sellars’ fantastic Ballardian.com which is a F
post war writers in the UK until his death in 2008. superb and ongoing exploration of Ballard’s work. G
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His influence on the next generation of novelists – Chris Mitchell  H
including Will Self and Jeff Noon, also featured I
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heavily in Spike – cannot be overstated. While much Articles J
of the acclaim that surrounds Ballard stems from K
his early disaster novels, some of his final books – in Entertaining Violence
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particular, Super-Cannes – show him at the height of Interview by Chris Hall 027
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his powers. Prophet With Honour N
Chris Hall managed to interview Ballard several Feature by David B. Livingstone 029 O
times while freelancing for various publications, and Future Shock P
saved the fascinating, unabridged conversations for Interview by Chris Hall 032 Q
Spike, and Marcos Moure kindly contributed a previ-
ously published Ballard interview in which Ballard Not A Literary Man R
gives a great, self-defining quote: Interview by Marcos Moure 035 S
“I’m interested in science and medicine, the media Flight And Imagination T
landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes Interview by Chris Hall 039 U
of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any V
Cocaine Nights
bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not W
Review by David Livingstone 048
the world of literature.” X
I also set up JGBallard.com in 1998, which was Extreme Metaphor Y
a link page to other Ballard related material on the Feature by Chris Hall 050 Z
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Chris Hall talks to J.G. Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes
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and mail order Kalashnikovs RSS
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It’s been 70 years since H.G. Wells published The Shape because there was a Japanese restaurant called the Hi-
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Of Things To Come but there has been a far more astute roku for many years. It would be impossible to identify Facebook
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chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us your location,” he says approvingly, looking around
in the suburbs for more than half a century. J.G. Bal- the virtually deserted lounge we’re sat in with its palm I
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lard’s gimlet eye for the psychopathology of everyday trees and low-level skylight. J
life has never deserted him. Instead of characters with Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside K
emotions, a history and a moral compass, Ballard’s in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in L
fictional landscape is peopled with affectless casualties London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in M
of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape, Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real Eng- N
searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. This land – the M25, the world of business parks, industrial O
is fiction as biopsy, and its results are devastating. estates and executive housing, sports clubs and mari- P
Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detec- nas, cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts … That’s Q
tive thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super- where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity R
Cannes – to examine what might happen when all and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of
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we have left as an ideology is consumerism. “People violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into
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resent the fact that the most moral decision in their the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”
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lives is choosing what colour the next car will be,” he Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Hea-
says witheringly. “All we’ve got left is our own psy- throw airport, which kills three people. The proposition V
chopathology. It’s the only freedom we have – that’s a of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new pro- W
dangerous state of affairs.” letariat”, with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another X
I meet Jim Ballard at the Hilton International hotel gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private Y
on Holland Park Avenue. “I used to come here a lot healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that Z

they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, un- More A
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civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led, touched resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called B
as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a psychopathology.” C
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charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attack- Ballard continues to be endlessly engaged in what’s D
ing the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the happening now. And as he says himself, he’s bucked the E
National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and trend by becoming more left-wing as he’s got older. He RSS
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then out into the suburbs. is particularly disturbed by the apparently motiveless
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But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take actions of our Prime Minister and has been following the Facebook
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their claims of oppression? At one point in the book, “great smokescreen” that is the Hutton Inquiry. “Blair
there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Ma- has this evangelical commitment to what he believes is I
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rina might change the street names to those of Japanese right, and he invents the truth when he can’t find it out J
film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might in front of him,’ he says incredulously. “I think we’re K
damage property prices…” living in dangerous times and most people aren’t really L
It is full too of perverse inversions and unsettling aware of it. They’re worrying about asylum seekers or M
paradoxes – “Nothing brings out violence like a peace- abortion or paedophilia…” N
ful demonstration’ or “If your target is the global money Does it get harder the older he gets (he’s 73), to an- O
system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam ticipate, as he’s put it before, the next five minutes? P
shop next door.” “I have no shortage of ideas and a peculiar kind of Q
Millennium People describes in part a murder with compulsion to get them down. Not that it makes a damn R
strong affinities to the Jill Dando case. “What all these bit of difference…” S
murders – Hungerford, Dunblane, Jill Dando – have In what way?
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in common,” says Ballard, “is that they appear to be “When you’re a young writer you want to change
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meaningless. There are no motives. Dando wasn’t even the world in some small way, but when you get to
a celebrity. It may be that this is their great appeal. my age you realise that it doesn’t make any difference V
“There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that whatsoever, but you still go on. It’s a strange way W
make up our national consciousness. I’ve tried to to view the world. If I had my time again, I’d be a X
nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may journalist. Writing is too solitary. I think journalists Y
embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which have more fun!”  Z

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Feature [published August 1999] B
J.G. Ballard: Prophet With Honour email

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David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers
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“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!” London Times, and The Independent. Moreover, Bal-
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It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. lard has come to be seen as one of science fiction’s Facebook
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Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of principal intellectual luminaries, and his work as per-
Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many haps the best argument for the genre’s consideration I
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have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece. as ‘serious’ literature. The prophetic Crash, with its J
Though perhaps the first, this unnamed editor was by prescient foreshadowing of western culture’s latter- K
no means the last person to be discomfited by Bal- day fixation upon violence as entertainment, attests to L
lard’s nightmarish, frequently grotesque tale of a small the author’s acuity as a social critic. M
cadre of car-crash fetishists prone to getting their sexual While early works such as The Drowned World brought N
kicks by staging smashups which resulted in very-real Ballard fame, it was Crash that gained him infamy. The O
injuries and deaths. And given the impending release novel’s relentless probing of the intertwined psycholo- P
of horror director David Cronenberg’s film adaptation, gies of sex and violence, presented as a grandiose and Q
it seems a certainty that the moral outrage is due for hyperbolic panorama of crushed metal and battered bod- R
an exponential increase; media mogul Ted Turner ies, immediately struck a chord of primal fear. “There are
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and British cabinet minister Virginia Bottomley have many things that people don’t like to be reminded of,”
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already registered their howls of righteous indignation. Ballard muses. “People are always surprised to discover
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Considering his being “beyond psychiatric help,” in themselves that they covet their neighbour’s wife, or
the amiable, articulate, and consummately-logical that they harbour small racist feelings; they automati- V
James Graham Ballard has managed pretty well: His cally think, oh my God, I’m not worthy of myself. And W
output to date consists of 15 novels, 17 collections of they immediately turn away from it. But if you look at X
stories and essays, and substantial critical work for the entertainment culture that people amuse themselves Y
esteemed British newspapers such as The Guardian, with, it’s obvious that the car crash has a very powerful Z

role to play in peoples’ imaginations …something is were attacked, one of them was overturned. Nobody More A
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happening in the imagination that tends to entangle the would have noticed these cars in the street outside, but B
elements of violence and sexuality, and it’s fed by this re- because they were isolated beneath the white gallery C
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lentless flow of appealingly-violent imagery that we get lighting they triggered enormous, confused emotions. D
in our movies. Crash is an attempt to follow these trends So I thought, this is the green light. And so I sat down E
off the edge of the graph paper to the point where they and began to write Crash.” RSS
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meet. Basically the message is ‘So you think violence is Provoking enormous, confused emotions has always
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sexy? OK, this is where you’re going.’ I see the ultimate been a goal of Ballard’s work. The reasons for doing so Facebook
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effect of Crash as cautionary, as a warning against the go well beyond simple sensationalism, however; Bal-
role of violence and sex in our entertainment culture and lard’s stated aim is honesty via the roundabout vehicle I
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the way the two can become intertwined.” of fiction, an honesty intended to provoke movement J
The concept for Crash germinated in the social towards the humane. “I see myself as a neutral ob- K
confusion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period server; I’m not trying to impose some kind of private or L
coloured by the Kennedy assassination, Manson, and personal vision on the world. All I’m doing is looking M
Vietnam. “Violence took the place of sex, I think, as out and seeing what’s going on in the street. And all N
the most exciting subject available to writers and my fiction is a fiction of analysis, where I’ve tried to O
filmmakers, and became sort of the key engine of the identify certain ongoing trends that seem to be appar- P
entertainment culture. The car crash came into its own. ent,” Ballard asserts. “I don’t think it took a great deal Q
I remember writing in The Atrocity Exhibition about of prophetic skill to guess what was going to happen as R
the psychology involved, and people dismissed it out the 60s and 70s unfolded; I could see all these social S
of hand. They just refused to see.” trends, with an entertainment culture that thrived on
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As a means of testing his hypotheses, Ballard pre- violence and sensation and a rootless urban and subur-
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sented an art exhibition at a London gallery in April, ban population with nothing to do other than play with
1970 where the ‘works’ on display were three wrecked their own psychopathic fantasies. Modern technology, V
cars. “The behaviour of people who visited the gallery whether in the form of a motor car or a motorway or W
absolutely convinced me that I was onto something. a high rise building, was empowering peoples’ worst X
At the opening, people got so drunk, and over the impulses … the technology involved pandered to and Y
course of the month they were on display the cars facilitated the eruption of people’s worst natures.” Z

Ballard’s heightened sensitivity to violence, as well as lessons have stayed with me all my life.” More A
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the corollary themes of isolation and social chaos which Now in his 60s, Ballard may be finally tempering his B
permeate much of his work, may well have its roots in apocalyptic vision. Recent works such as 1994’s Rush- C
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his childhood in wartime China. Born in Shanghai in ing To Paradise, while retaining their author’s signature D
1930 to English parents, Ballard’s earliest years were dry wit and moral imperative, stop short of blooming E
spent in an expatriate’s suburban idyll, a comfortable into nightmare worlds such as those of Crash, High RSS
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enclave of large houses, swimming pools, and servants. Rise and The Drowned World; since Empire Of The Sun,
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With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 his books have taken gradual steps in the direction of Facebook
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and its subsequent metamorphosis into World War II, humour, and even hope. Furthermore, having explored
the Ballard family were removed to internment camps, the distant future and his own difficult past, Ballard’s I
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and their colonial paradise was transformed into a writing seems to be moving in ever-tighter concentric J
killing field; from these experiences, Ballard wrote circles around the present-day reality that most would K
the semi-autobiographical Empire Of The Sun, which recognize, and his characters taking upon sympathetic L
was subsequently adapted to film by Steven Spielberg. foibles belying an underlying humanity as well as their M
Ballard views his years in the camps as a painful edu- external neurotic drive. N
cation in the barbarous capabilities of humankind. “I Appearances would indicate that Ballard is cau- O
don’t think you can go through the experience of war tiously closing in on a central, pivotal point, perhaps P
without one’s perceptions of the world being forever the wellspring of his fertile imagination. Asked if he Q
changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality knows what that point is likely to be when he finally R
in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you homes in on it, he demurs: “I wonder if I ever will. S
see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth Maybe that will be a mistake – sort of like going into
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beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience. The analysis and getting yourself cured; one needs the sort
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war came, I spent three years in the camp, and I saw of support system provided by the element of mystery
adults under stress, some of them giving way to stress, about oneself.” Cured or not, the sense of wonder and V
some recovering and showing steadfast courage. It was mystery remains in his writing – indicating that, editors’ W
a great education; when you see the truth about human opinions aside, the Ballard method of shock therapy is X
beings it’s beneficial, but very challenging, and those working just fine.  Y
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J.G. Ballard: Future Shock email

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Chris Hall finds out why J.G. Ballard thinks Crash is
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One week before David Cronenberg’s Crash opened Such hysteria has not been confined to this side of
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in the UK at the beginning of June, the normally the Atlantic – Crash has only just been released on Facebook
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reclusive author J.G. Ballard appeared at a regional video in the US this month, having been delayed for
press conference and pre-screening of the film in over a year due to the personal intervention of media I
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Wardour Street, London. Cronenberg’s film is based mogul Ted Turner. As the owner of Crash’s distributor J
on Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same title, and the con- Fine Line Features, Turner attempted to block Crash K
troversy surrounding Crash has brought Ballard back being released in the States at all, and only backed L
into the public eye to defend a film which he sees as down when the press caught wind of his behind-the- M
a hauntingly accurate depiction of the book he wrote scenes manoeuvres. N
nearly a quarter-century ago. Ballard for his part is bemused and outraged by the O
It is a measure of the confusion surrounding the film double standards in operation against Crash and cannot P
that it was felt necessary to show Crash to regional understand why the film has been singled out for such Q
newspaper editors and reviewers, as well as having both outrage. What about films such as Martin Scorsese’s R
Ballard and Crash’s co-executive producer Chris Auty Goodfellas and Casino, he asks. Both are “bloodthirsty
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present, to try and dispel the sensationalist media myths and horrific” and “practically a handbook to any yobbo
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that had grown up around Crash since its premiere at wanting to beat someone up.”
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the Cannes film festival … Thanks to the London Stand- Ballard is particularly appalled at the film “coming
ard’s headline that Crash was “beyond the bounds of up against little England at its worst” and characterises V
depravity”, four local English councils banned Crash the British as “a strange, nervous nation” unable to W
from being shown within their regional jurisdiction on defend anything on the grounds of freedom of speech. X
the grounds that it is nihilistic, sado-masochistic and Indeed, it was Cronenberg who noticed that nobody Y
graphic in its sexual and violent content. had defended the film on these grounds. The absurdly Z

aptly-named British councillor John Bull said that in about, that these usual Hollywood conventions would More A
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the light of the Dunblane massacre, you’ve got to look apply to the film is hardly surprising and, further, that B
a lot more closely at the effect on the audience of films they should find a realistic representation of crashes so C
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like Crash. Ballard’s heart sank when he read those alien is testament to the domination of the Hollywood D
comments: “For God’s sake, what can we do when blockbuster genre. A sarcastic Ballard complains that E
people jump to make connections like that?” “Bruce Willis can behave just as sadistically as the bad RSS
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So why is it that people have got Crash all wrong? guys, but because he’s working for the NYPD it’s OK
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Why do we find the idea that there might be a sexual … Add a layer of sexual excitement and you’ve got Facebook
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component to driving and crashing so abhorrent? You the film culture that dominates the planet. We all know
could say that by this very response Ballard and Cro- as drivers that there are young men who cannot bear I
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nenberg have tapped into something. There appears to being overtaken by a woman driver. Young men feel J
be a lot of denial going on. Ballard notes that “people powerful sexual emotions – half of America used to be K
seem to be excited by car crashes or film-makers conceived in cars. There is nothing revolutionary in the L
wouldn’t film them. David [Cronenberg] said to me, idea that there is a sexual component to our idea of, our M
‘Jim – the problem with car crashes is that they’re excitement by, car crashes.” N
damn difficult to film!’ Film-makers wouldn’t make How does he think that Crash differs from this? O
all this effort if they didn’t think people were getting “Crash is honest – it says we won’t put a reassuring P
a thrill from them’” moral frame around it. We won’t pretend this is a Q
This is borne out by the experiences of Crash’s story with a happy ending, and all it’s ambiguities are R
stunt co-ordinator Ted Hanlon. “Usually with car up on the screen. I think that’s what so original about S
crashes, you just line up two cars and let them hit. The it.” The real problem, as Ballard sees it, is will Crash
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more damage and the bigger the explosion, the bet- encourage people to imitate the behaviour. “People
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ter. In this film, it’s the opposite. Cronenberg wanted aren’t going to take this film literally,” he reasons, “it
the crashes to be brutal, nasty, intense and quick, doesn’t invite being taken literally. It’s a very cool, V
as crashes are in real life, and without the attendant almost glassy, rather eloquent, mysterious film … W
explosions or clichéd slow motion tracking shots, in it’s obviously something more than what you see on X
order to convey the immediacy such events.” the screen at any moment. There are no Buicks slo- Y
That people should think, upon hearing what Crash is moing through the air, crashing into buses; obviously Z

something very strange is going on in the minds of the again. Maybe I sound mad but I found the ending More A
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characters. Vaughan is clearly mad.” immensely touching and romantic and full of hope B
Chris Auty thinks that the British find the problem in a dehumanised world.” C
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problematic because the Protestant world has no Ballard is keen to make a comparison of Crash with D
surrealist tradition within which to place or make Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking Psycho: “I think E
sense of it. “Poland, Argentina – these are deeply of Crash as the first film of the next century, if you RSS
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religious catholic countries. They have no problem like. I think that the very influential role of Psycho
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at all with Crash. They think of it alongside Belle de since 1962 will apply to Crash … Paul Schrader Facebook
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Jour, something like a Bunuel movie, which is how [scriptwriter of Taxi Driver] said ‘Wonderful film – if
we think of it. Personally, I see it as a ghost story … only I’d been so honest’, and I think it will impel a I
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it is as though the film’s protagonist James has died new frankness and honesty that will reveal itself over J
and become a ghost and then tries to become human the next few years.”  K
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Marcos Moure’s 1995 interview with J.G. Ballard about
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his novel Rushing To Paradise RSS
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Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction in fact – as he talked to me recently from his home in
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alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of Shepperton, a suburb of London. Ballard is the author Facebook
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automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality, of 16 novels, including Hello America, The Crystal
or navigating through the rubble of modern civiliza- World, Empire of the Sun, The Terminal Beach, The I
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tion, his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced Unlimited Dream Company and The Disaster Area. His J
artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts newest novel, Rushing to Paradise, was just published K
among his influences the surrealist painters Dalí, Ma- by Picador USA. L
gritte, and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom M
he considers to be one of the most important authors of Ballard as seen by Ballard N
the 20th century. MM: How do you see yourself as a writer and what do O
Ballard first entered the literary world as a science you think is your niche in the literary world? P
fiction writer, a genre he soon exhausted and has not JGB: I can’t speak for the United States, but I sup- Q
explored in years. His transition to the mainstream pose some still refer to me as a science fiction writer. R
was not entirely smooth, however. His 1970 anthol- But since Empire of the Sun came out ten years ago,
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ogy, The Atrocity Exhibition, was deleted from the I think people have welcomed me to the mainstream.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux catalogue soon after its Although I’m not so sure I want to be embraced by
the mainstream. I think I’m still what I always was, a U
US publication because of short stories like ‘Why
I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and ‘Plan for the kind of fringe writer. I think I’m an imaginative writer V
Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. After reading who began his career by writing science fiction, but I W
his classic 1972 novel, Crash, an editor wryly com- haven’t written any, really, for a very long time. I don’t X
mented, “The author is beyond psychiatric help.” even consider Crash to be a science fiction novel. I Y
I found Mr Ballard to be quite sane – piercingly so, don’t know whether you’ve read it or not. Z

MM: Definitely. It seems to me that fantastically im- Sadly enough, most science fiction is being written More A
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aginative fiction tends to be lumped in with the whole by the wrong people nowadays. The constraints of B
science fiction genre. a certain kind of commercial fiction have tended to C
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JGB: Exactly. If you look at 20th-century novels, you formularize the field over the last 50 years. D
can see that there’s a sort of mainstream, or what I would MM: Speaking from my own experience, I think E
call realistic or naturalistic fiction. And then there are many people, especially as young readers, are drawn RSS
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the imaginative writers who often tend to be mavericks. to the newness, inventiveness, even classic adventure
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You know Genet, Céline, Burroughs, and so on. And I elements of science fiction, but eventually outgrow Facebook
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like to think of myself as a maverick. I’m certainly not it. As you said, you find the repetition and formula
a literary man, and this is an important point. I’ve met a simply bore you. Especially when you realise there’s I
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great number of writers, novelists rather, English ones so much more out there. Why limit yourself? Why be J
in particular, whose stock of references – their sort of just a science fiction writer or reader? K
instant associations that come to mind when they cre- JGB: I agree with you. That’s true. And that’s why I L
ate and all that – all tend to come from the world of myself stopped writing. People within the science fic- M
literature. Mine do not. tion world never regarded me as one of them in the first N
I’m interested in science and medicine, the media place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who O
landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to P
of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future Q
bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not the and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And R
world of literature. sci-fiers to this day don’t regard me as one of them. I’m S
some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the
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Science Fiction virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.
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20 years under science fiction? Rushing to Paradise V
JGB: No, not anymore. Some of my work was, there’s MM: Your new novel deals with obsessive themes like W
certainly no question about that. And I’m very proud fanaticism, radicalism and militant feminism, all within X
that I was a science fiction writer. As I’ve often said, the frame of the extremist wing of the environmental Y
it’s the most authentic literature of the 20th century. movement. It’s not only eerily timely, it also strikes a Z

raw nerve, especially in view of the healthy wave of Censorship in England has a clear political role. It More A
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anti-political correctness sweeping over the United represents the fear of the established order that given B
States at the moment. any sort of imaginative freedom, or too much of it, the C
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JGB: Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The great talent power structure will collapse. If people see sex and D
of the United States is to take things too far, so that violence treated frankly, they may turn the same frank E
you have these huge pendulum swings of sorts. Always eye upon their own political situation. And start climb- RSS
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correct and then reverse. And then correct and reverse ing up the base of the pyramid towards the apex. The
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again. Here in England, I would say the extremist fringe people in real control sanitise the view of the world for Facebook
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of the feminist movement is largely positive. I’ve got us. Absolutely.
two daughters as well as a son, and they’ve benefited I
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enormously from the feminist movement of the past Best Work J
20 years. England is a very class-bound society, and MM: In his book, The 99 Best Novels Since 1939, K
women, until recently, were practically an inferior Anthony Burgess considers your novel The Unlimited L
class. Most professions were closed to women 30 years Dream Company to be your most important work to M
ago, except teaching and publishing. Nowadays they’re date. Which do you consider your best? N
all mostly open. So we do have a few extremists, but JGB: My most original and probably best novel is O
nothing compared to the US, where you really do have Crash. This is probably where I pushed my imagination P
some very strange people. as far as it has gone. I’ve also got a soft spot for other Q
books of mine, most notably The Atrocity Exhibition. R
Sex, Violence, Censorship, Reality The Atrocity Exhibition is practically incomprehensible
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MM: You said in a recent interview that “Everything to most readers, whereas Crash is directly intelligible.
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should be done to encourage more sex and violence There’s no doubt at all about what the author’s getting
on television”. on about. U
JGB: Yes, I did say that. And I think it’s true. I mean, I V
live in the most censored nation in the Western world. The Unavoidable Question W
There’s no question about that. Many people have said MM: Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? That is, if it X
so. Film, TV, videos, and art are more heavily censored isn’t already an exhausted topic. What is your opinion Y
here than anywhere in Western Europe or the US. of Steven Spielberg’s film version of your novel? Z

JGB: I was very impressed by it. I thought it was a hand. Let’s see, well, I just finished The Moral Animal More A
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fine film. In fact, trying to remain as neutral as pos- by Richard Wright, a study of neo-Darwinism. That B
sible, I think it’s a much better film than Schindler’s was quite impressive. Actually the best novel I’ve read C
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List because it’s more imagined than Schindler’s List. in a while is by that Danish writer Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s D
I think the film is a remarkable effort in many ways. Sense of Snow. I thought it was a wonderful book. Far E
He extracted a wonderful performance from the boy. more than a mere thriller. In fact, it’s a pity that it had RSS
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He was very faithful to the spirit of the book. There are any thriller element to it at all. It was much more than
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always problems when Hollywood tackles a war film that. It was quite remarkable on all sorts of levels. I Facebook
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because the conventions of the entertainment cinema hope it did well in the states. My girlfriend is reading
can’t really cope with the horrors of war. Still, I think it his new one (Borderliners) now I
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was a remarkable film, and more and more people are J
beginning to realize it. Current projects K
MM: What are you working on now? L
Current Readings JGB: I’m halfway through another novel untitled as M
MM: Have you read anything recently that impressed of yet – another sort of cautionary tale. I’d rather not N
you favourably? discuss it in detail though. O
JGB: Well, I don’t read much fiction nowadays, to be MM: Any plans to come over to the States and promote P
honest. Writing the stuff all day means when I read I Rushing to Paradise? Q
tend to read nonfiction. It feeds my imagination. I read JGB: Oh, probably not, I’m too engrossed in the R
a great deal, but I can’t really pick a landmark book off- new book. 
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Chris Hall talks about the dark side of capitalism and the deceptions
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Walking along Oxford Street the day after I finished latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of
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reading J.G. Ballard’s new novel, Super-Cannes, it refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talk- Facebook
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struck me, literally, the total acceptance of the sub- ing about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of
strate of violence in consumer societies when it mani- madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve I
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fests itself. A silent, monolithic crowd hurtled down tonic.” And that’s just what that experience felt like: J
either side of the road as I walked from Centrepoint small, discrete moments of psychopathy. K
to Oxford Circus. I counted the number of times that It was with this in mind that I spoke to J.G. Ballard, L
I was physically forced to move out of the way or get who’d granted me the last interview on the round M
hit head on (five). I counted the number of times I was of publicity he’d been doing for Super-Cannes with N
pranged, bumped or rear-shunted (four). It’s said that the nationals. Unlike most people who interview O
London traffic moves at an average speed of 11mph, Ballard, I wasn’t worried about whether he would P
but pedestrian traffic can’t be far behind. Indeed, it’s be cold and distant or abstract, but simply that there Q
not too fanciful to see in these crowds how the car wouldn’t be enough time with the Seer of Shep- R
has influenced our spatio-temporal perception. You perton. I was right not to worry about any of those
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see overtaking manoeuvres, you see people checking things. His voice has a rhythmic, musical quality,
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their rear views, as it were, with a glance behind be- and his laughter is warm and inclusive. He gives the
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fore moving out. There is the same frustration at slow impression of an eccentric school master with, yes,
moving traffic: the same parameters of territoriality a slightly abstracted air; a patrician whose sentences V
are in operation. end with a heavy emphasis. Ballard is clearly used to W
My shopping trip reminded me of a passage from the developing an idea without interruption. X
book in which Wilder Penrose, the resident psycholo- “The main theme of Super-Cannes,” he says, “is Y
gist of the business park Eden-Olympia, says “Our that in order to keep us happy and spending more Z

as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap clarity of a writer who has never flinched from his More A
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rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of subject matter for the last 40 years. As our narrator, B
course what’s been happening for a while. If you look Paul Sinclair, drives south to the French coast with his C
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at the way in which the more violent contact sports are doctor wife Jane, towards Eden-Olympia, their new D
marketed – American Football, wrestling, boxing – and home, “hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged E
of course the most violent entertainment culture of retinas in the Provençal sun”. Ballard writes of the RSS
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all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the flare of swimming pools on the hillside: “Ten thou-
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darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices sand years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur Facebook
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of appetites flowing. That is the risk.” had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle
Or as Wilder Penrose says in Super-Cannes: “A over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of I
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perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in tritons and stylised fish, inexplicably hauled up the J
even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of K
for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary ge- L
the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that ometers.” Thus we are in familiar unfamiliar territory, M
will keep us ‘buying’? Psychopathy is the only engine in a world we think we know but which is perhaps N
powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the meaningful only retroactively. O
arts, sciences and industries of the world.” Once again there is the Ballardian theme of morality P
Ballard makes the simile with politics – “Hitler reduced to aesthetics, or as Paul Sinclair has it “Civility Q
tapped into all kinds of psychopathic traits in the and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia. By the R
German people, the race hatred in particular: Jews, end of the afternoon all this tolerance and good behav- S
Gypsies, non-Germans, all ‘biological inferiors’. These iour left me feeling deeply bored.” Sinclair is in a world
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were very potent ideas that are probably carried in all in which “A moral calculus that took thousands of years
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of us from our distant past when it made sense to fear to develop starts to wither from neglect, an adolescent
strangers because they were probably trying to steal world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers V
your cattle, kill you or rape your wife. Hitler tapped you wear.” W
those buried layers of psychopathy. It’s an example of Super-Cannes takes off as a ‘why-dunnit’ when Paul X
what could happen.” Sinclair learns that he and his wife have been housed Y
With Super-Cannes we once again have all the cool in a villa whose previous occupant, David Greenwood, Z

had apparently gone insane and killed seven very senior flected the lines of her thigh, as if the car was a huge More A
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executives. Sinclair says: “It occurred to me that three orthopaedic device that expressed a voluptuous mix of B
of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable geometry and desire.” C
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bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind Ballard has said elsewhere that whereas the 20th D
and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this century was mediated through the car, the 21st cen- E
dreaming villa.” As so often with Ballard’s fiction, a tury will be mediated through the home, and as far as RSS
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fusion of inner and outer landscapes has already begun. Super-Cannes goes home means work. “The dream of
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Sinclair is amazed to find that, as a psychologist, a leisure society was the great 20th-century delusion,” Facebook
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Wilder Penrose is prescribing madness as a form of says Wilder Penrose. “Work is the new leisure. Talented
therapy at Eden-Olympia, which Wilder clarifies for and ambitious people work harder than they have ever I
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him: “I mean a controlled and supervised madness. done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfil- J
Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has ment through work. The last thing they want is recrea- K
been throughout history. At times it grips entire nation.” There are references to the flats and houses of L
tions in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever Eden-Olympia as service stations “where people sleep M
been more potent.” and ablute”. The real home is now the office. N
Even though to some extent Super-Cannes, like Co- It’s not quite correct to say, as some have, that Super- O
caine Nights, uses the conventions of a detective novel it Cannes is a companion piece to Cocaine Nights though P
nonetheless contains few of the dead sentences a genre both take place within gated communities of one kind or Q
novel would have. There are no characters crossing the another and both involve on a superficial level a naive R
room to pour themselves a drink – instead they wonder narrator trying to solve a mystery. It’s more that some S
“how the Reverend Dodgson’s Alice would have coped of the ideas in Super-Cannes are taken further than they
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with Eden-Olympia. She would have grown up quickly are in Cocaine Nights. Ballard is unapologetic about
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and married an elderly German banker, then become a this new employment of detective genre conventions
recluse in a mansion high above Super-Cannes, with a saying that if it’s good enough for Dostoevsky in The V
fading facelift and a phobia about reflective surfaces.” Brothers Karamazov it’s good enough for him. W
And yet there are passages that are almost parodic of With his last two books one feels that he is reaching X
Ballard’s ‘concrete and glass’ period: “Her hip pressed a new, younger audience – one perhaps attracted by the Y
against the BMW, and the curvature of its door de- drug reference in the previous novel – and he obviously Z

enjoys this as a professional writer, but as a knowing which had started in Shanghai, had lead him to become More A
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extract from The Kindness Of Women shows, he has an an RAF trainee fighter pilot in Canada. “Flying is a B
instinctive feel for his core readership. This is Ballard very strange experience, it’s very close to dreaming,” C
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describing the audience of an aversion therapy film at he says. “The normal yardsticks, the parameters of D
the Rio film festival: “…they gazed at the screen with our movements through space, are suspended. You’re E
the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of travelling at 150mph, but if you’re 1,000ft up you’re RSS
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the men in the Soho porn theatres, or the fans of certain not moving at all. Likewise, you can be travelling quite
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kinds of apocalyptic science fiction.” slowly coming in to land, yet you seem to be hurtling Facebook
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It seems that the “invisible literature” that he has along like a Grand Prix car. The problem with light
written about, and which acts as compost for the mind, flying is that it’s very unstable and dangerous and also I
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increasingly comes from the internet. Ballard doesn’t very noisy, there’s hardly any time to think.” J
have a PC himself but his girlfriend, he says, supplies So, it’s a transcendental experience for him? “Yes, K
him with sites that might interest him: “She is a keen there’s no doubt about that. When I drive up to London, L
net surfer, she’s constantly giving me fascinating stuff I go by London Airport and I always get a strange kick M
that she’s printed off. Extraordinary articles. Some re- out of watching those big planes taking off and coming N
ally poetic, touching stuff. There’s one site that we first in to land. An empty runway moves me enormously, O
visited a year ago. It’s by these people at a bird sanctu- which obviously says something about my need to P
ary in Norfolk who have been tagging ospreys with escape I guess.” Q
radio transmitters. They’ve been tracking their flights If Ballard’s interest in this bird sanctuary website R
to and from their winter ground, an island off Ghana or seems apposite, then consider another of his favourites: S
somewhere, and they show maps of the routes taken by “There’s this group that got into a disused American
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each bird flying across Europe and the Mediterranean, nuclear silo. It’s wonderful! You’re taken on a tour and
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some of them detour for years before returning to this you can choose alternatives. ‘Would you like to look at
bird sanctuary. Watching all this is deeply moving. It the missile control room?’, ‘Would you like to see the V
lets another dimension into your life.” sleeping quarters?’. It’s straight out of the stuff that I W
Flight as a metaphor for transcendence occurs in Bal- was writing about all that time ago. X
lard's work passim, and he has described in The Kind- “Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative Y
ness Of Women how his own obsession with flying, strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the Z

Bruce Willis films,” he says. “I’m waiting for the first by some sort of neurological process that I don’t hope More A
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new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the to understand.” B
net and to the modern age. It’ll come.” Is there not an echo of Big Brother in Super-Cannes C
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Although he reads across the board of popular sci- when Paul Sinclair is at the Croisette in Cannes? “With- D
ence, he says that he steers clear of cosmology books out realising it, the crowds under the palm trees were E
because “they are a happy hunting ground for, frankly, extras recruited to play their traditional roles, when RSS
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cranks. Multi-dimensional universes or strings and they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals
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black holes – all this stuff is totally hypothetical.” ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale Facebook
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His friend Martin Bax wrote that Ballard has this cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the
amazing ability to know what’s going on in Cape atrocities they had helped to commit.” I
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Canaveral or anywhere without ever seeming to Ballard disliked the self-consciousness of Big J
leave Shepperton, his home for the last 40 years. Sure Brother and would of liked to have seen more of a Tru- K
enough, he’s got the goods on Channel 4’s Big Brother, man Show element where the participants don’t know L
although he claims not to have seen that much of it: that they are being filmed. “It could be done. Candid M
“My girlfriend has been absolutely glued to it, she Camera approached that slightly. You could just take N
voted something like 30 times one evening! I think people in a small holiday hotel on the Costa Brava and O
we can therefore discount the huge voting figures,” he film it.” I suggest that this, as with certain psychology P
says, with a warm, expansive laugh. “I’ve got a feeling experiments proper, probably wouldn’t get past the Q
people are just pressing the redial button.” relevant ethics boards. “Yes, that is the problem,” he R
He doesn’t believe the official 7.5 million viewing says, as if it’s a minor but frustrating obstacle. “But S
figures (“that’s more than the number of votes that the then, afterwards you could say ‘yes, we did it without
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Tory party got at the last election”) but he likens the your permission but here’s a very large sum of money,
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interest in the programme to a Zen-like absorption: “If sign this release form and you’re all going to be stars!’
you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way “ In fact, the very next issue of New Scientist magazine V
then you become obsessed by it. It’s like those Andy that I picked up after speaking to Ballard had an article W
Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Build- about a psychology professor at Stanford University X
ing or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed ob- who, frustrated at just those obstacles put in the way Y
sessively enough becomes interesting in its own right of research by ethics boards, is now running his own Z

reality experiments in a TV series called Human Zoo. because most people have far more imagination than More A
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“Most television is low-grade pap, it’s so homog- they realise, as their dreams make clear. Most people’s B
enised it’s like mental toothpaste. But Big Brother as a imaginations are damped down by the needs of getting C
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slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It was like on and making a living, generally coping with life and D
Tracey Emin’s Bed,” he says approvingly. the imagination tends to be rather repressed in order to E
Ballard is worried that with all the interest in the allow this flow.” RSS
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internet we are forgetting what’s really around the cor- Surprisingly, for all his interest in film and an ac-
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ner: “The rapid development of the internet over recent knowledgement that it’s far more powerful than when Facebook
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years has rather shut out all discussion on the news it’s on TV, Ballard doesn’t go out to his local cineplex
about progress made on virtual reality. I assume that but watches rented movies at home. He gives a surpris- I
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the world’s big electronic corporations are developing ingly prosaic reason for this: “There’s less rustling of J
VR systems, which after all are going to take televi- chocolate papers.” Given that he’s a fan of David Cro- K
sion and movies into completely new dimensions that I nenberg, and has generously praised his adaptation of L
think potentially do represent a threat. When you enter Crash, it is also surprising that he hasn’t seen eXistenZ M
into a simulated environment that is more convincing yet. “I hate all those VR pictures, especially the ones N
visually than the real world, the so-called real world, where people’s faces start to drip on to their chest and O
which of course is itself generated by the central nerv- you realise,” he says with mock surprise, “My God, P
ous system,” he says, as if this is given a priori, “the we’re in a dream sequence and the VR system has Q
temptation may be to stay there. It may lead to my broken down! I hate that.” R
phrase about playing with our own psychopathology as For those of us desperate for more Ballard short S
a game coming true with a bang. I see huge dangers stories, the news isn’t good: “I can’t see myself writ-
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there, but also huge possibilities. We might all learn ing any for a while, partly because there’s nowhere to
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how to play God! There might be a program along the publish them. When I began writing short stories for
lines of ‘Be a messiah. See what it’s like to be Jesus sci-fi mags in the 1950s most of them were between V
Christ or Buddha!’” 5,000 and 10,000 words. Now, magazines want 2,000 W
So God isn’t dead, he’s a latent component in a VR words or a 1,000 words – you can’t develop an idea. X
program? “Yes! Nietzsche was wrong!” he says trium- It’s not just a matter of knocking off a short story, it’s Y
phantly. “This might engender strong social changes, getting your mind into a writing phase where your Z

imagination begins to think in terms of short stories is also a factor. You do your triangulations and all we More A
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rather than novels.” have left is consumerism, what I call the ‘suburbanisa- B
For a writer who responds very much to social change, tion of the soul’. That’s frightening. It may trigger all C
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what does he feel will be the qualitative break between sorts of unconscious reactions. As someone in Super- D
the 20th and 21st centuries? “If the 21st century repre- Cannes says, in a totally sane society madness is the E
sents a radical break with the 20th century then I don’t only freedom.” RSS
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think that we’d be able to spot it. It might be something This line has come up before in Running Wild for
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totally unexpected. It might be that our children and example? “Yes, I am tending to repeat myself in order Facebook
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grandchildren vigorously reject the 20th century and to get the damn message home!” he says with slow em-
everything it stood for. They may look back on it aghast phasis before that gasping, generous laugh reverberates I
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and say ‘Who were these people? They spent all their down the line. J
time killing each other! Why?’ If consumer capitalism Consider the word “triangulation” that Ballard uses. K
gets a little out of hand, and there are signs of resist- It’s a trope that almost uniquely marks out a Ballard- L
ance to the Americanisation of Europe, you might get ian sentence with its three seemingly unrelated objects M
absolute idealism in the young. or events; as if he’s forcing the unconscious mind to N
“The big change I assume is that there will be no construct a narrative to explain them. Take an example O
more world wars, partly because no one will be able to from Super-Cannes: P
borrow enough money from the World Bank to finance “Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I Q
it. Now this changes the game enormously, it’s rather tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the R
like playing chess and the rules being changed by the book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot S
International Chess Federation ‘You don’t have to mate Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in
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the king anymore’. ‘God, what do we do now!?’ I think his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick,
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the knock-on effect will be vast.” There is a certain glee a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? [my italics]
with which Ballard accepts these changes, a state of The contingent world must have pressed against his V
grace that his protagonists strive towards. temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept W
“The decline of political ideology also changes the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for X
things. There’s no real ideological clash between Du- a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across Y
byah and Gore for example. The decline of religion the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.” Z

He says that he’s always been interested in content standing), so it’s odd that at 70 Ballard still hasn’t had More A
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over style, even though he’s arguably our best stylist. much of anything in the way of gongs. Germaine Greer B
“I don’t know if I am actually,” he says uncertainly, has said that he is “a great writer who hasn’t written a C
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before warming to his theme. “I just want to push the great novel”. There might be something to this, that it’s D
message across. I don’t sloganise a political message his entire body of work that we should be assessing, E
but the sort of images that have appealed to me over not the individual novels. One can imagine that for Bal- RSS
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the years – all the drained swimming pools, abandoned lard it’s going to be like a great director or actor never
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hotels, the strange business parks, gated communities receiving an Oscar for an individual film, but getting Facebook
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and retirement complexes – these are what I want to given one for lifetime achievement. How apposite that
convey, the peculiar latent psychology waiting to it seems we will be only retroactively able to acclaim I
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emerge into the daylight. That’s what I’m trying to do. his work in this way. J
Look at the world and see its latent content. I treat the Of course, Ballard has always disdained or been un- K
external world as if it was a solidified dream.” interested in ingratiating himself with any kind of liter- L
Ballard means this to apply to his life as well as his ary social scene. So maybe his lack of a public profile M
fiction: “With all the blandishments of advertisers and is partly a function of this. Plus the fact that he chooses N
politicians, everyone is trying to sell you something. to live in Shepperton (that locus of the twin Ballardian O
What are they really selling? What is the fashion indus- obsessions of flight and imagination, with its proxim- P
try really selling? Not just a new frock or a new pair of ity to Heathrow and the film studios), out at the very Q
trainers, it’s selling something more than that.” edge of west London. He’s unlikely, for example, to R
Super-Cannes involves a world where work is play be offered a South Bank Show after his comments last S
and recreation doesn’t exist. Is writing, for Ballard, year about Melvyn Bragg’s dumbing down of the arts.
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more work than play? “It’s part and parcel of the way I And although he’s transcended the sci-fi genre in which
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live. I mean, it’s not an extraneous activity. There’s no he started (and transformed it) it’s hard to imagine him
sort of office where, as it were, I say ‘right! I’ll have a being particularly bothered about it. In this particular V
cup of coffee and go through the day’s post’ It isn’t like phase of Western literature, one of autobiography, per- W
that anymore.” haps a novelist of ideas, and rather outré ones at that, is X
Ballard continues to be seen as a writer’s writer, his simply unpalatable. Y
fiction a succès d’estime (Empire of the Sun notwith- It’s often said that Empire Of The Sun is his most Z

nakedly autobiographical novel (along with its suc- When the fuel crisis was at its worst there was the More A
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cessor The Kindness Of Women) and of course that’s very real possibility that there would be thousands and B
true. But all of his fiction is no less autobiographical, thousands of abandoned cars on motorway flyovers and C
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even Crash, because of its exploration of inner space. cloverleaf intersections. And this recent prediction that D
One senses that he’s tired of this literalism, which has a giant tsunami is going to swallow the east coast of E
dogged him since he first started writing, and which America. All very Ballardian. “I know; I feel I’ve been RSS
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reached its apotheosis with Crash. For example, a lot of here before,” he says, as if his fiction was a parent and
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people, he says, still think that he loves cars or that he’s reality was a child lagging behind. As usual he’s done Facebook
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a car buff (he drives a Ford Granada for God’s sake!) his triangulations.
because of books such as Crash and Concrete Island, in Angela Carter once said that there is an element I
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his guise as poet of the motorways. “I’m not interested of Glen Baxter’s humour about Ballard’s fiction, and J
in cars at all. But I am interested in the psychology of in a way that’s right, there is this possibility that it K
the car user, the car as a facilitator of latent psychopa- might descend into the ludicrous at any moment. But L
thy or of the latent imagination for good. I think that the point, surely, is that it never does. What humour M
a lot of people do express their imaginations through there is is really so black that it could never escape the N
the cars they own. Imaginations they wouldn’t be able event horizon of laughter. No, a much better analogue O
to express in other ways. Cars are a hugely liberating is to be found with Martin Parr’s collections of Bor- P
force in all kinds of ways.” ing Postcards, especially his latest, Boring Postcards Q
So he doesn’t agree with groups such as Reclaim the USA. Here we find interchange complexes, vast turn- R
Streets or the wider eco movement? “I don’t agree with pike systems, interstates, thruways, empty hotel lob- S
the Reclaim the Streets people at all. I think that the bies, freeways, bus depots, office buildings, shopping
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recent petrol tanker blockades across the country illus- malls, trailer villages, in short all those images of our
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trates how silly it is to talk about the end of the car age. waking, solidified dreams that most of us look at and
It hasn’t ended: more of us have cars and drive further find ugly or brutal but which when viewed through V
in them than ever before.” Or as Paul Sinclair puts it Ballard’s visionary protagonists in their dry, affectless W
in Super-Cannes: “Fanatical Greens always veer off realms, are transformed into something meaningful X
course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus.” and life affirming.  Y
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Review [published August 1999] B
J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights email

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David B. Livingstone
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There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the And there’s the matter of Frank Prentice, who sits in
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lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa Marbella jail awaiting trial for arson and five counts of Facebook
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Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes murder, and who, despite being clearly innocent, has
of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French happily confessed. I
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expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture; It is up to Charles Prentice, Frank’s brother, to peel J
the previously passive, isolated residents have begun away the onionlike layers of denial and deceit which K
staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of hide the rather ugly truth about this seaside idyll, its L
Harold Pinter plays, and lavish parties. At night the residents, and the horrific crime which brought him M
once vacant streets are now teeming with activity, bars here. But as is usually the case in a J.G. Ballard book, the N
and cafes packed with revellers, the sidewalks crowded truth comes with a price tag attached, and likely without O
with people en route from one event to the next. any easing of discomfort for his principal characters. P
Outward appearances suggest the wholesale adop- Cocaine Nights marks a partial return on Ballard’s Q
tion of a new ethos of high-spirited, well-controlled part to the provocative, highly-successful mid-career R
collective exuberance. But there’s the matter of the fire: methodology employed in novels such as Crash and
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The house and household of an aged, wealthy industri- High Rise: after establishing himself as a science
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alist has gone up in flames, claiming five lives, while fiction guru in the 1960s, Ballard stylistically shifted
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virtually the entire town stood and watched. There’s gears towards an unnerving, futuristic variant on social
the matter of the petty crime, the burglaries, muggings, realism in the 1970s. Both Crash and High Rise were V
and auto thefts which have begun to nibble away at the what-if novels, posing questions as to what the likely W
edges of Estrella Del Mar’s security despite the guard- results would be if our collective fascination with such X
houses and surveillance cameras. There’s the matter of things as speed, violence, status, power, and sex were Y
the new, flourishing trade in drugs and pornography. carried just a little bit further: How insane, how brutal Z

could our world become if we really cut loose? at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society. More A
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Cocaine Nights asks a question better suited to As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some B
the 90s, the age of gated communities and infrared faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced C
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home security systems: Does absolute security by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both D
guarantee isolation and cultural death? Conversely, thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard E
is a measure of crime an essential ingredient in a has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it RSS
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vibrant, living, properly functioning social system? propels his novel along marvellously.
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Is it true, as a character asserts, that “Crime and Cocaine Nights doesn’t have either the broad sweep Facebook
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creativity go together, always have done,” and that or brute impact of the landmark Crash, but it retains
“total security is a disease of deprivation”? Suffice enough social relevance and low-key creepiness to I
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it to say that the answers presented in Nights will more than satisfy Ballardphiles. As is often the case J
be anathema to moral absolutists; the world of Bal- in Ballard’s alternate reality, it’s a given that his most K
lard’s fiction, like life in the hyperkinetic, relativis- appealing, human characters turn out to be the most L
tic 1990s, abounds with uncomfortable grey areas. twisted, and that even the most normal of events turn M
On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a out to be governed by a perverse, malformed logic; N
race against time, but as it proceeds – and as precon- that this logic turns out to be grounded in sound so- O
ceived conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve ciological and psychological principles is its most P
– it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look horrific feature.  Q
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Feature [published June 1997] B
J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphor email

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Chris Hall gives a crash course in the fiction of J.G. Ballard
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Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of world that would suddenly disappear or be destroyed.
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Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of J.G. Ballard’s Asimov once defined a short story as one in which if you Facebook
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fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those removed just one sentence then the entire story made no
already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of sense. ‘Track 12’ is about as close as anyone will get to I
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Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the adhering to Asimov’s dictum. J
semi-autobiographical work Empire Of The Sun, will Ballard’s narratives would seem to represent a K
find the rest of his work as resonant and thought- warped inversion of reductio ad absurdum, in which L
provoking as these two novels. With the controversy truth, not falsity, is shown through absurd logical M
and critical acclaim that has surrounded David Cronen- consequence. It’s always too late for going back in his N
berg’s film adaptation of Crash, it is about time that the fiction; there is a kind of inexorable rush hat draws us O
rest of Ballard’s work received a closer look. towards destruction or transcendence and often, both. P
I can clearly remember reading my very first Ballard (For these reasons, Ballard avoids elliptical plots). The Q
short story, ‘Track 12’, among a collection of science fic- moral ambivalence inherent to a lot of his work is best R
tion short stories from the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur illustrated in Crash, where Ballard’s own introduction
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C. Clarke et al, all of whom were then part of the English to the novel seems to be a disguised disclaimer. While
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secondary school curriculum. What set Ballard’s story Ballard himself, off the page, stresses the cautionary
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immediately apart, besides its extreme brevity (3 pages – nature of his stories, his more apocalyptic novels (High
an inspiration to all of us who lazily took up the creed of Rise, Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition) have V
quality over quantity), was the fusion and overlay of in- been continually read as showing nihilistic or pessimis- W
ner and outer landscapes, the public and private colliding tic obsession with decay, destruction and disaster. X
and commingling. Here I first glimpsed the compressed Far from it. Ballard’s work shows a deep concern Y
economy of Ballard’s writing, as if he were living in a with transcendence and the recognition of unconscious Z

forces. As the critic Gregory Stephenson points out, Perhaps making his fiction abstract and detached is one More A
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Ballard is subversive in the true sense of the word (“to way of dealing with such terror. B
turn from beneath”) in that he deals with the uncon- As a writer Ballard has always been more interested in C
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scious mind and its drive to manifest itself through our idea, vision, dream and nightmare than in character (or D
waking ego-consciousness, in a sense to banish time at least character in the usual sense.) The viewpoint of E
and space itself. his fiction is a clinically neutral affair even in first person RSS
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This resolutely amoral tone has certain biographi- narration, where it is usually a doctor or a psychologist.
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cal and psychoanalytic roots in Ballard’s own history. Indeed, in this sense, Ballard’s fiction comes closer to Facebook
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Ballard originally intended to be a psychiatrist before being psychoanalytic rather than science fiction. Some
abandoning his studies in medicine (it is no coincidence of the techniques used in psychoanalysis were partly I
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that he shares the background with William Burroughs). designed to encourage the patients’ defence mechanisms J
Moreover, by the time he was 13, he had witnessed to emerge. Freud argued that therapists should impose K
every kind of conceivable human horror from a child- as little of their own personalities as possible by remain- L
hood spent interned in Lunghua, Japan. It is as if Ballard ing neutral and detached. Crash is like Dr Ballard pas- M
has had this imprinted upon his mind, hardwired as the sively relaying our psychosexual nightmares, listening N
template with which he views the world, filtered through to our defence mechanisms and checking for common O
and fused with it. Perhaps for this reason his stories, es- symptomology. Indeed, Crash seems more like an P
pecially Crash, come across as someone trying to shock extended short story, where the obsession is allowed to Q
themselves with their own fiction. play out in time; a temporally exploded idée fixe. This R
Martin Amis wrote that Empire Of The Sun “gives obsessional quality is evident in a lot of Ballard’s other S
shape to what shaped him”. Ballard bears this out: work. The Drowned World ends with the hero heading
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“People brought up in the social democracies of West- South, towards the heat and insanity of the rainforests.
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ern Europe have no idea of this kind of savagery.” By The American publishers wanted the hero to head North,
the time he was repatriated to England from Japan, Bal- because otherwise it was “too negative.” Ballard points V
lard was 15 and the culture shock is still with him. He out: “But it’s a happy ending. South is where he wants to W
is always going to have an outsider’s perspective; one go. Further. Deeper. South!” X
that, for example, finds the London suburb of Shepper- Ballard’s surrealism has a great deal more affinity with Y
ton where he lives “lunar and abstract” in the summer. pictorial, rather than literary, surrealism. Paul Delvaux’s Z

The Echo features in The Day Of Forever, for example, can we use the adjective Ballardian. More A
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and Salvador Dalí is something of a hero to Ballard, fea- Ballard is none too interested in authorial intrusion B
turing prominently in his books as well as on them. (Dalí’s either – as he says, “The writer’s task is to invent the C
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Nuclear Cross adorns my copy of Ballard’s The Terminal reality” (or as Nietzsche put it: “No artist tolerates real- D
Beach, his best collection of short stories.) Max Ernst’s ity” ) and not the fiction which is all around us – mass E
silent forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and merchandising, advertising, politics as advertisement. RSS
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gnarled post-apocalyptic detritus are redolent of much of David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of Crash,
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Ballard’s early disaster fiction (The Drowned World, The bears this out from his reading of the novel: “…it Facebook
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Drought, The Crystal World). Strikingly, there is also the provided you with fantasies you didn’t know you had
similarity with Yve Tanguy’s strange beaches. The point before. Once they were there, they were real. They I
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is that along with these surrealists Ballard interested in made sense.” Only Ballard can come up with a sen- J
psychological landscapes, i.e. mindscapes. They are all tence such as “What links the first flight of the Wright K
concerned with the externalisation of the mind’s ‘iconog- Brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and L
raphy’. Even with Empire Of The Sun, or, more recently, sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.” M
Cocaine Nights, his most realistic or naturalistic novels The key to understanding Ballard’s work is in the N
are full of these signature images and recurrent themes. fusion or overlapping of internal and external worlds. O
Ballard’s work is also notable for its internal consist- In 1962 he wrote an article for New Worlds magazine P
ency; the deep themes are recurrent but the details, set- entitled ‘Which Way To Inner Space?’ (collected in A Q
tings, plots ideas, – the surfaces as it were – are varied. User’s Guide To The Millennium) in which, essentially, R
I find it curious that so much modern fiction has aped, he sets out his own manifesto. He despairs of the stand- S
say, the style of Martin Amis, but not that of Ballard, ard SF ‘rocket and planet’ story and devices such as time
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who, along with Amis, is the great stylist of postwar travel and telepathy which actually prevent the writer
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English fiction. It would be almost too easy to make from using his imagination at all. He criticises SF writ-
a Ballard pastiche with its lexicon of drained pools, ers for treating time like “a glorified scenic railway”and V
disused aerodromes, terminal beaches and aeropsychic would like to see it treated as one of the “perspectives of W
time. I suspect the reason is because it works only within the personality”. Ballard wants SF to become abstract, X
an imaginative framework, rather than a parochially re- and specifically, he’d like to see more psycholiterary Y
alistic one merely concerned with relationships. Truly ideas of science. All in all then, a stylistic and thematic Z

overhaul of SF. Most tellingly of all, he writes that “I Prentice, an outsider whose brother Frank has been More A
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believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of arrested for murder. Like Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness B
existing literature … (to) be forced to begin again … and indeed Crash, the book is under the spell of an C
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all writers would find themselves inevitably producing alluring and quite possibly insane visionary figure. In D
something very close to SF”. Further, that “no other its description if a society hellbent on leisure, Cocaine E
form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images Nights follows the line of the argument set out in Carol RSS
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to deal with the present, let alone the future.” Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime compares
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Take the short story ‘Manhole 69’ for example, where the cuckoo clock art that came from the gentile Swiss Facebook
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an experiment to eliminate sleep goes horribly wrong culture with the decadent and depraved reign of the
and ends with the subjects suffering from catatonic Borgias that produced da Vinci. I
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seizures. The central hypothesis of this short story is Perhaps the best place to begin with Ballard is his J
that the mind cannot endure continual consciousness, essays – the recent collection A User’s Guide To The K
particularly self-consciousness, and reacts by shutting Millennium amounts to a varied and imaginative read- L
down. They could “no longer contain the idea of their ing of 20th-century iconography: Mein Kampf, Coca- M
own identity”. As in so much of Ballard’s work, we see Cola, Dalí, Burroughs, Elvis, TV, nuclear weapons. N
this inexorable battle between the unconscious and the A collection of Ballard’s journalism from the last 25 O
conscious, with the former characterised as the more years, including book reviews, it points to the sheer P
primeval and ‘real’ part of ourselves. breadth of his interests and showcases many of the Q
Where Crash literalised the term “auto-erotic”, Co- ideas which drive his fiction. Ballard admits to being R
caine Nights does the same for “guilt complex” (note an assimilator of the “invisible literature” of technical S
that these are both psychoanalytic terms). Cocaine manuals, company reports, journals, etc. Indeed, one
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Nights, Ballard’s most recent novel, is something of a of his recommended books of the last five years is the
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departure; the first half of the book reads like a fairly transcripts of black box flight recordings. For Ballard,
straightforward detective piece, with none of Ballard’s it’s a telling choice: over the last 40 years, his writing V
trademark tampering with space-time or individual has attempted to do the same – to record the moments W
psyches. Cocaine Nights’ plot centres on the Spanish at which our lives are most at risk both from the world X
resort of Estrella de Mar, where a housefire kills five outside and from within ourselves. May his own litera- Y
people, and the subsequent involvement of Charles ture become a little less invisible in the future.  Z

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Iain M. Banks: Getting Used To Being God email

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Chris Mitchell meets the relentlessly imaginative Iain M. Banks
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Twelve years and 14 books since the publication of the eyes of the cult’s 18-year-old “Elect Of God” Isis
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his debut novel The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks has Whit. Sent to London in pursuit of her errant cousin Facebook
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become one of Britain’s most prominent and prolific Morag, Isis slowly comes to realise that all is not what
writers. Whether writing mainstream novels as plain it seems either within the cult’s enclave or amongst the I
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“Iain Banks” or science fiction under his ubiquitous Unsaved of the outside world. Banks describes Whit as J
“Iain M. Banks” nom-de-plume, Banks has mastered “a book about religion and culture written by a dedi- K
the tricky art of attracting both bestseller status and cated evangelical atheist – I thought I was very kind to L
critical acclaim. Now 42, Banks’ most recent books, them … Essentially, Isis makes the recognition that the M
the sci-fi epic Excession and the religious cult thriller value of the Luskentyrian cult is in their community N
Whit, indicate that his ceaselessly inventive imagina- values rather than their religious ones. She recognises O
tion is in no danger of slowing down. Banks is first that efficiency isn’t everything, that people not profit P
and foremost a brilliant storyteller. He takes evident are what matters.” Q
joy in being able to push his plotlines as far as they So, are you on a mission? “People usually just ask R
can go, sending the reader at breakneck speed through me ‘What are you on?’ You can’t be too prescriptive
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unexpected plot twists, cliffhanger endings and, in his about what a writer does, but it’s important to me to
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sci-fi, mindbending technological possibilities. As he get these ideas into the books, just for my own peace
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says, “You’re very spoilt as a novelist. You get used to of mind, so that I feel I’m not just doing this to make
being God, basically. No-one tells you what to do.” money, I’m not just writing pageturners for people to V
Yet amongst the sex, death, drink and illegal sub- skim through, put aside and forget. Like anybody else, W
stances that peppers Banks’ writing, there lurks a dis- I want to make the world a little more like the world X
tinct moral probity. Whit tells the story of the fictional I’d like to live in, sad though that is. So I put forward Y
Luddite Luskentyrian religious cult, as seen through these ideas however subtly or cack-handedly to the Z
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extent that I can get away with it. The good thing about in the Indian community would be difficult – so writing More A
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writing is that you can do this in a non-invasive, non- about an 18-year-old female virgin is quite easy!” B
penetrative way, you’re not telling people this is what Whit was a conscious attempt by Banks to write C
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they should do, you’re just presenting ideas.” something quieter and more reflective after the polemi- D
Whit also differs from Banks’ previous novels cal rage of his previous mainstream novel, Complicity. E
because it’s written through the eyes of its female Even though Banks has had a reputation for the maca- RSS
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protagonist. It’s a common complaint about many bre ever since the gothic horror of The Wasp Factory,
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male novelists (Martin Amis springs to mind) that Complicity’s graphic descriptions of corrupt politicians Facebook
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their female characters always remain lifeless stere- being killed off in particularly inventive and horrible
otypes. Banks however ignores gender preconcep- ways reached new stomach-churning extremes. I
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tions as some sort of prohibition to his imagination: Banks has no qualms about the violence in his writ- J
“I just think of the person in that situation, I don’t try ing: “In principle, anything’s OK, as long as I’ve got K
and think as a female character per se … In a sense an excuse to put it in – which is a more honest way of L
it’s easy to be blind to the sexism that’s still around saying, ‘Is it artistically justified?’ You shouldn’t self- M
and somehow manage to ignore the other elements of censor yourself just because you have a gut reaction N
society that still are unequitable in terms of gender that an idea is too horrible. If there’s a reason for it, it O
or whatever,” Banks pauses and then laughs, “but it’s has to be done. There’s a moral point to that ghastliness, P
only stupid or ignorant people who do that.” pain and anguish. Which is why I would absolutely Q
“If you’re a writer you’re supposed to have some abil- defend Complicity’s extreme violence, because it was R
ity to spot what’s going on and to empathise – it should supposed to be a metaphor for what the Tories have S
be relatively easy to write a female character because done to this country.”
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you spend your time in the same society – I think I’d Banks rejects the idea that his science fiction writ-
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find it hard to write from the point of view from some- ing is a way for him to cut loose in contrast to the
one who was particularly gay – there’s a small element tight stricture of his contemporary novels: “The sci- V
of it in Complicity, but it’s very marginal, a childhood fi isn’t really a way of letting off steam. In a sense, W
dalliance sort of thing – and I think that’s because the Complicity was letting off steam, a way of getting out X
gay community is quite separate in many ways. To the all the anger and bitterness I felt about the 80s and the Y
same extent writing about a black person or someone Thatcher years. It kind of varies, there’s no set pat- Z

tern – it’s not like the sci-fi is always playful and the make themselves relatively sane and rational and not More A
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fiction is always disciplined -it’s just that I have more the genocidal, murdering bastards that we seem to be B
fun in sci-fi more or less regardless because I enjoy half the time.” C
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playing by my own rules.” “But I don’t think you have to have a society like D
This is certainly apparent in Excession, Banks’ latest the Culture in order for people to live. The Culture is E
Culture novel which charts the arrival of a mysterious a self-consciously stable and long-lived society that RSS
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entity from another universe into that of the Culture’s. wants to go on living for thousands of years. Lots of
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Banks revels in the possibilities of technology. “Oh other civilisations within the same universe hit the Cul- Facebook
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yeah, I love the stuff, the more buttons it’s got the bet- ture’s technological level and even the actuality of the
ter, when we get voice control it’s going to be so boring Culture’s utopia, but it doesn’t last very long – that’s I
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because there won’t be any buttons. There’s another the difference.” J
moral point here as well. You can’t escape the fact that “The point is, humanity can find its own salvation. It K
humanity is a technological species, homo technophile doesn’t necessarily have to rely on machines. It’ll be a L
or whatever the Latin is. Technology is neither good or bit sad if we did, if it’s our only real form of progress. M
bad, it’s up to the user. We can’t escape what we are, Nevertheless, unless there’s some form of catastrophe, N
which is a technological species. There’s no way back.” we are going to use machines whether we like it or O
In your recent interview with the English edition of not. This sort of stuff has been going on for decades P
Wired (June 1996) you intimated that the only reason and mainstream society is beginning to catch up to the Q
the Culture works is that machines become so intelli- implications of artificial intelligence.” R
gent they save us from ourselves … do you think that’s Despite Banks almost evangelical zeal concerning S
the case? “Not entirely, no. I think the first point to technology, he’s avoided William Gibson and Bruce
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make about the Culture is,” Banks pauses again, sound- Stirling’s embracing of the net. “I don’t have access
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ing like he’s about to deliver a profound insight, “I’m to the internet or email either. I’ve got two answering
just making it up as I go along. It doesn’t exist and I machines which I never switch on. Communications V
don’t delude myself that it does. It’s just my take on it. wise, I’ve got a fax and a letterbox and that’s about it.” W
I’m not convinced that humanity is capable of becom- Banks still considers himself primarily a science fic- X
ing the Culture because I think people in the Culture tion author, due to his now long gone pre-publication Y
are just too nice – altering their genetic inheritance to rites of passage: “I wrote five novels before The Wasp Z

Factory, and the last three were science fiction, which embroiled in litigation and which he’s unable to dis- More A
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have all now been published in a much altered form. cuss outside of the courtroom. More happily, the BBC B
The one just before The Wasp Factory, Walking On have just finished shooting a television adaptation of C
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Glass, almost got published before The Wasp Factory Banks’ novel The Crow Road, although quite how they D
in 1979. The Wasp Factory was written in 1981 and intend to portray the exploding grandmother remains E
published in 1984, by which time I’d already written to be seen. “It’s four one-hour episodes starting in RSS
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Consider Phlebas. So I thought of myself very much November, although BBC programming controllers
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as a science fiction writer as the three books I wrote being a law unto themselves will probably change Facebook
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before The Wasp Factory were all sci-fi. The other two that. Gavin Miller was the director, and there’s quite
never rose to the light of day because they weren’t a few recognisable Scottish actors involved in it: Bill I
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very good, frankly.” Patterson and Joseph McFadden, who was in the film J
“I go to a lot of SF conventions and the authors I Small Faces McFadden is playing the central character K
spend time with regularly are SF writers. I’m Scottish Prentice McHoan. Allegedly the BBC are pretty happy L
and a writer so I’m a Scottish writer, but I don’t mix with it, but that’s all I know. I didn’t have any involve- M
with Scottish writers very much.” So he hasn’t been ment with it and I didn’t want any involvement with it. N
keeping a fatherly eye on Irvine Welsh’s meteoric I think it’s very rare that writers can interfere in that sort O
success then? “I read and was incredibly impressed of thing and not just be a pain in the arse.” P
by Trainspotting and The Acid House. I’m as inter- Banks’ diffidence concerning moving into new areas Q
ested as anybody else in new writers but I don’t keep extends to the PC games industry – “Once you start R
either a jealous eye or a particularly helpful eye, for co-operating with someone else you have to make S
that matter, on them. I’m not sending round people compromises and take other people’s ideas on board.
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to visit them in the early hours of the morning (slips I’m not a team player: that’s one of my limitations”
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into impeccable Don Corleone voice), ‘Mr Banks. – and even writing in other genres: “There’s been flip-
He don’t feel you respect him. We’re gonna break off pant remarks about doing pornography as Iain S. Banks V
your fingers this time.’” and Westerns as Iain Z. Banks … It’s not impossible W
One organisation that might be receiving a midnight that I might wake up one morning and decide to do a X
visit from Mr Banks is the film company who own historical novel, but it would mean doing research – the Y
the rights to The Wasp Factory, which is currently R word – so I can’t see it myself … I think it’s very un- Z

likely, I think I’ve found my two niches. And anyway, when the canals are handed back from the US to the More A
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I’ve just signed another 4 book deal which specifically Panamanians by the year 2000. I tried to achieve the B
states two mainstream and two science fiction novels, same sort of feel at the end of the deca-millennium in C
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so I don’t have to think about it – it’s going be ‘What Against A Dark Background. It’s science fiction so you D
year is it? Oh it must be science fiction time…’” can make it bigger and better with the year 10,000 ap- E
As regards what those books will concern, Banks proaching rather than the year 2000. So while everyone RSS
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remains quiet. Fin-de-siècle hysteria of the close of else’s attention is diverted by the millennium, I’ll do
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the millennium, perhaps? “I’ve done it twice already something else.” Facebook
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– Canal Dreams is set around the turn of the century, Iain (M.) Banks – he’s out there – somewhere. 
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New Fiction [published July 1996] B
Adam Baron: The Man Whose Penis Made Him Locally Famous email
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Adam Baron’s infamous, Penthouse-published tale of sex, feminism and chocolate-flavoured genitals
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My penis made me locally famous. I didn’t find out It does! she exclaimed suddenly. It bloody well does!!
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about it until I got to university. Before then my experi- Two weeks into university I was still a virgin. I had, Facebook
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ence of women was nonexistent. I’d been at a boys’ however, received 23 blowjobs from 12 different girls
school and anyway I was pretty spotty. I couldn’t and heard words such as “incredible”, “amazing”, I
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believe when, all of a sudden, at the Fresher’s Ball, I “Bournville”, “Swiss” and “Belgian” exclaimed by J
was snogging. I was even more amazed when we were mops of hair beneath my bedclothes. I had also been K
in her room. We were both wasted. I didn’t have a clue requested to immerse myself in a glass of milk and L
how to behave, I was terrified, but she knew what to do move vigorously to see if any of the flavour rubbed off. M
and in no time we were naked, in bed. She was kissing It didn’t. N
my mouth. My neck. My chest, my stomach, my…! I went to the doctor. She didn’t believe me. Nor did O
She stopped. she try it out, which I thought shockingly unscientific. P
My God! she said, incredulous. Your cock tastes just But she did see the state I was in and give me a salve. Q
like CHOCOLATE! Okay, so I’ll admit it. For the first year it was great. R
Melanie (her name) wasn’t a shy girl. She must have I could have loads of women, any time I wanted. I got
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told her friend Suzy. I realised this the next day when cunning and made them sleep with me first. I got fussy.
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a very attractive girl, with hip clothes and trainers, ap- All the guys on campus were jealous. People who
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proached me in the union bar and just started chatting. didn’t know me looked wide eyed to see one or more
This had NEVER happened to me before. She asked stunning girls on the arm of a spotty, pale youth, with V
me if I wanted to hear a new CD she’d bought and then lank dark hair and glasses. What’s he got?, they seemed W
we were in her room. Halfway through the second track to ask themselves. X
we were naked. She’d hardly even kissed me before But when the second year came I got really tired of it. Y
her face disappeared under the duvet. There was a whole new year of girls who wanted to try Z
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me out. I felt like an object. A specimen. And there was do I studied all the time. I got a First and went to New More A
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something missing from my life, a yearning. I tried to York, Columbia, for a Masters. I took a deep breath of B
have conversations with girls, in the coffee bar say, but fresh air. Fantastic! It was great! Nobody knew me! If I C
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all the time their eyes would be flicking to my crotch. hadn’t been for the lousy beer it would have been per- D
Their tongues would run over their lips, their eyes would fect. I met Laurie a few months later and we started to E
glaze over. I would make a hasty excuse and leave. It go out. I’d seen her around in the cafeteria on campus, RSS
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was about this time I began to get really upset about it. but it was only when I heard her give a paper on radical
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Everyone had started calling me Hob Nob. feminism that I really noticed her. She wrote about the Facebook
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I say everyone, it’s not quite true. Some people called politics of oral sex. She stood at the lectern in black
me Willy Wonka. jeans, white tee shirt, her hair tied back severely, her I
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Hey, it is NOT funny! I was a person! I was more little fists clenching to emphasise a point. J
than a sexual organ that just happened to be flavoured Oral sex, she concluded, is degrading. The worship- K
like confectionery. Everyone stared at me. All the girls ping of the phallus only serves to enforce the enslave- L
laughed when they saw me. I overheard them talking ment of women. No woman should ever do it, and I M
about me. About it! I think I had a bit of a breakdown, I certainly won’t do it ever again. Ever. Thankyou. N
couldn’t take it. All through my third year I stayed in. I She stepped down from the platform to rapturous O
saw no one. The only person I even said Hi to was Sally applause from a room mainly filled by women. I was P
Hughes, a pretty girl with breasts so huge she seemed to enraptured, entranced. I had to get to know her. Q
look faintly embarrassed all the time. I had overheard Well, eventually we got it together. Having no choco- R
a guy bragging to his friend one day, in the sports hall, late penis to rely on, I had to be myself and for a long S
about what he’d done to them the night before. time she wasn’t interested. But then it all happened.
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Did you shag her? the friend asked. Nights discussing politics, poetry, walks in the park,
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No, the guy said, but I didn’t care. They were the old Cocteau movies. Love, smooth and slow, calm as
best breasts I ever came across. Sally Hughes used to an angel. About a year after we met, she was lying in V
smile at me softly whenever we passed each other in my bed, naked, her black hair blooming like an impos- W
the square. sible rose against my sheets, her flawless skin almost X
I had given up on my little university world. Every- as white as they were. I was so happy. I started to kiss Y
one knew everything. Because I didn’t have anything to her, to cover her with kisses. I wanted to adore her, to Z

make her feel better than anything; sighs escaped her I didn’t listen to her. I knew. There was no way I’d let More A
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like wind from a wood across a wheat field… her even if she wanted to. Never. I covered the insides B
No! she said. of her thighs with my face and rested my hands on the C
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She took me by the scruff of the neck. Not there! tops of her legs. I pushed them apart slightly. She re- D
I stopped. sisted a little but then she opened her legs wider and I… E
Why not? I asked. I stopped. I lifted my head up. RSS
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I knew it, she said firmly. I won’t do it to you. I Guinness, I said, Guinness!!
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won’t. Not… Facebook
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I know, I assured her. I want to do it to you. I don’t
want you to do it to me ever. The author would like to point out that any similarity I
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You will , she said, you will! I knew this would between the character created in this story, and himself, J
happen… is purely factual. His email address is listed.  K
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Review [published September 2005] B
John Battelle: The Search email

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Chris Mitchell
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John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in
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history of Google, although that company looms large Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of Facebook
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throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes $300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his
stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightfor- I
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between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of ward business biography of Google for the good reason J
online contextual advertising which has irrevocably that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot K
changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle rec- of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different L
ognises that the real story about the search engines is search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted M
actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms hundreds of interviews with every key player in the N
race between the big players: what’s important is what industry to piece together an excellent overview of the O
the very act of searching for information on the internet industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily P
means for business and consumer alike. The simple interested in the implications of what the massive leaps Q
act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for R
out billions of times a day and in totality provides an the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business
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unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as
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ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but
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to information are also being transformed by the nature almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives:
of search. Put it this way – once the net becomes a daily how search engines organise and present information in V
part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it. response to our queries. As more and more of our lives W
It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when dis- moves to being managed through the net, the compa- X
cussing search engines, given the frankly insane stats nies who can correctly analyse what we are looking for Y
generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3 and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the Z
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ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the on search engines to drive business your way. More A
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more users they have, the more they can analyse what’s Contextual ads have not only helped advertisers but B
been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked also website owners too. The net’s free culture has C
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for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Inten- always meant that paying for content has been a thorny D
tions, and mastering the analysis of all those billions of issue – surfers loathe registering for access to newspa- E
queries is where the money lies. per archives online, much less paying for it. Google’s RSS
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The most obvious example of the commercial gold Adsense program provided a way for sites to have
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in search queries is contextual advertising, those text relevant ads to their content appear on the page and Facebook
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ads that turn up next to your search results that are in doing so, allowed site owners to earn some handy
related to your query. Still in its infancy, contextual pocket change too. (Of course, I’m biased here: in the I
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advertising has revolutionised online advertising and two years I’ve been running Google Adsense on Spike, J
had a huge knock-on effect on old media. The tar- its monthly revenue has steadily increased as Google K
geted nature of contextual ads – they only get served tweak the system to display more relevant ads). L
to someone who’s interested in that subject; the ad As Battelle has pointed out on his Searchblog, now M
buyer only pays when someone clicks the link – has is a great time to be a publisher on the net, because N
meant thousands of businesses that couldn’t afford to there are more and more easy ways of earning cash O
advertise can now do so and, crucially, get results of from content. Blog networks like Weblogs, Inc which P
real money-in-the-bank business driven by those ads. earn over $2,000 a day from Adsense, or probloggers Q
Shoestring businesses have enjoyed massive sales like Darren Rowse who recently earned $15,000 in one R
boosts as a result of this approach, without having to month from Adsense, show that there’s real money to S
spend vast sums on marketing. The joy here is that be made from providing top quality, regular content.
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everyone wins – the customer finds what they want, the Indeed, Battelle has recently launched Federated Me-
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business gets business, and the search engine makes dia Publishing, which will be teaming up with selected
money for connecting the two together. Advertising sites to manage matching ads to their content. Battelle, V
becomes – shock, horror – useful and even valued, a former editor of Wired and founder of the Industry W
rather than an irritant. That’s the ideal scenario, any- Standard, is already ‘brand manager’ for leading blog X
way, and Battelle provides case studies showing both BoingBoing, and has considerably increased that site’s Y
the up and potentially disastrous downside of relying revenues since coming aboard. Z

As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and muta- More A
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co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block bility, it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be B
in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s no clouds on the horizon. C
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vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in For now, though, search remains a huge success D
the industry. There’s little of the usual business pom- story – Google may well be about to have its own E
posity about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable RSS
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a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by
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material but confident enough to not deluge the reader Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the Facebook
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with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The contextual ad field, each looking to get the competi-
Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free. tive edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use I
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The same can’t be said for the future of search engines. their particular system. Most importantly, all three are J
With the realisation that the potential of search has only continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice K
just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership the Database of Intentions to give you what you want L
of personal information is the major concern, with some quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still M
beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing N
provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the O
movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” user experience first and working backwards. In the P
moral code has also begun, with the company’s current last five years, it has continually gone its own way and Q
leadership of the search field making it walk point for managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and R
the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never S
also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John
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blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration
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quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat that within five years everything in the search world
out to find ways to counter these emergent problems, can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it V
and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set probably will do again.  W
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Review [published January 2000] B
John Baxter: George Lucas: A Biography email

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Chris Mitchell
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Throughout his film-making career, George Lucas has Indiana Jones and The Phantom Menace, Lucas con-
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continually pushed back the boundaries of technology tinually sought ever-grander ways to put the audience Facebook
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in order to realise his ideas on the silver screen. John on the edge of their seats, rather than conveying a mes-
Baxter’s biography of the man is not only an account sage or making social comment. I
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of Lucas’ personal history but also the transformative In doing so, he inaugurated the age of the blockbuster, J
effect Lucas’ fascination with technology has had on where spectacle took precedence over everything else. K
the entire movie industry since the advent of Star Wars. Lucas summed it up himself by saying “I’m a film- L
While Baxter’s biography (published under the maker, not a director. I like the physical part of making M
title Mythmaker in the States) is not authorised and movies. I might be a toymaker if I wasn’t a film maker.” N
he lacked any direct contact with the publicity-shy The strain on Lucas’ health making Star Wars meant O
Lucas, his exhaustive research provides a balanced that he avoided sitting in the director’s chair for another P
overview of Lucas’ career. Although Baxter doesn’t 20 years until The Phantom Menace. Much of that Q
shy away from discussing the detrimental effect of strain was caused by the creation of Industrial Light R
Lucas’ driving ambition on both his marriage and And Magic to produce Star Wars’ special effects, most
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many of his friendships, he prefers to concentrate of which had to be created completely from scratch.
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on Lucas’ movie innovation and the building of the Along the way, ILM created Photoshop, which is
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LucasFilm empire. now the industry-standard computer graphics applica-
What becomes most apparent in Baxter’s portrayal tion, and later Pixar, who became a separate company V
of Lucas is his fascination with technology’s ability and pioneered the digital animation of Toy Story and A W
to create filmic illusion on a grand scale, rather than Bug’s Life. X
a fascination with movies themselves. From his first It’s apparent that Lucas returned to directing with Y
experimental picture THX1138 through to Star Wars, The Phantom Menace precisely because the technology Z
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had finally caught up with his vision. Digital editing al- It’s an immensely readable account that will appeal to More A
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lowed him absolute control over the movie’s execution, Star Wars aficionados and film fans alike. It also acts as B
rather than the fraught creation of Star Wars. a fascinating overview of the way the movie industry C
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Ultimately Baxter’s biography portrays Lucas as a has changed over the last 25 years and how much Lu- D
maverick who refused to kowtow either to Hollywood cas’ independence and interest in exploiting technology E
or to accepted notions of what makes a movie picture. helped shape that change.  RSS
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Feature [published December 1996] B
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography email

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Despite two recent authoritative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore
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argues that Beckett remains an enigma RSS
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It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our writer. Reading the novels and plays one imagines a
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culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease secular monk, yet the dominant impression from both Facebook
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the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilder- of these biographies is of a drunken, womanizing,
ment to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven pretentious and self-pitying young man who was good I
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years after his death, remains as distant as ever. He at sport and languages. I say “young man” because the J
wouldn’t have had it any other way. His fame is due older, wiser Beckett is left relatively untouched. We K
to a play which he said was “misunderstood”. For a never get very close to him. This is a pity if not also L
great Modern writer to become well known it seems inevitable. The pre-war work is discussed at length as it M
he or she requires a degree of similarity to popular tends to follow the details in the turmoil of his growth: N
fiction to tempt people into reading them. Kafka has a manic-depressive mother, psychosomatic illnesses, O
horror, Proust nostalgia, Lawrence pornography, Woolf premature death of a genial father, archetypal Oedipal P
niceness. Beckett seems to lack this. Only Waiting For love/sex dichotomy, unchannelled talent, etc. Q
Godot approaches such familiarity: Morecambe & The later works, however, do not lend themselves so R
Wise in a mortuary perhaps. The rest of the work lurks readily to such links. And these, despite the protesta-
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behind it like a black hole ready to swallow up any tions of the nosy, will be the ones he will be remembered
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cheerful soul wanting something less than an enigma. for. They are passed over almost in silence. This is not
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This suggests we need a biography to help us through because Knowlson and Cronin are hacks interested
the artifice. And these two new biographies certainly only in gossip and obvious life-work correlations, or V
do something like that. because the later work is lifelessly abstract, but because W
After reading both Anthony Cronin’s The Last Mod- they are both aware of the crassness of such an enter- X
ernist and James Knowlson’s Damned To Fame, one prise. The later work is the poetry of confinement, of Y
has a more rounded impression of the man, if not the disintegration and ending (that is, what comes before Z
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death, which never comes). How can the biographer one critic said, Beckett “had a lot to unlearn”. More A
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write about that if the man himself was so active? However, such bad art enables Knowlson and Cronin B
Beckett wrote about these things not so much because to present convincing portraits of Beckett in young C
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he experienced them, although he did, eventually, but adulthood. This is where he had most in common with D
because he observed and felt them impending all the his contemporaries; he was “a young man with noth- E
time. A biographer can only try to understand why he ing to say and an itch to make”, as he said of himself. RSS
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felt this. In revising an apocryphal story, Knowlson Cronin is particularly dismissive of a lot of Beckett’s
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gives us a hint. Krapp’s story of a Joycean epiphany on early itching. He often ends quotations with “Whatever Facebook
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a storm-tossed shore in Krapp’s Last Tape was thought that might mean.” This is refreshing after the uncriti-
to be Beckett’s own experience. It turns out that an cal, if not also hagiographical tone taken by Knowlson, I
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equivalent epiphany did occur but in his mother’s Beckett’s long time friend. J
bedroom as he watched her suffer from Parkinson’s One thing Cronin didn’t have that Knowlson did K
Disease. Krapp’s epiphany is traditionally romantic; was access to Beckett’s diaries from his wander around L
the exaltations of nature provoking a grand idea in the Nazi Germany in the 30s. These provide an important M
individual. Beckett’s real one was less effusive. revision of Deirdre Bair’s suggestion in her pioneering N
He saw how nature has ‘a calm, secret hostility’ 1978 biography that Beckett was ignorant of, or chose O
inflicting intense pain and suffering on loved ones to ignore the effect of Nazi rule. The diaries reveal his P
with pause only for what we call life. It is nothing to awareness and disgust at their attitudes. Indeed, the Q
be celebrated. The wordy flights of Beckett’s youth- people he meets are distinguished by their sympathies. R
ful writings (that is, before he reached 30) side-step And the war itself seems to have been the watershed in S
this awareness in favour of familiar channels of Beckett’s life. If he had gone home to Ireland instead
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talent: show-off shock tactics and autobiographical of staying to help his French friends, he may have
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plundering. So, it is no surprise that Dream Of Fair continued along familiar lines – following the trends
To Middling Women, the novel Knowlson and Cronin of the times and fading as fast. However, the stoicism V
mine most heavily for information, is only available and near-starvation of the war years seems to have had W
because of the author’s death. He did not want it pub- a lasting effect. His only concern from then on was to X
lished during his lifetime because it was too clever write, be published, and write some more. Popularity Y
and derivative. Cleverness tends to be derivative. As was not a confirmation of importance, but pure chance. Z

He seems to have realized that what was important was can frolic in freedom as a No Man’s Land where it More A
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the night sky of nothingness behind the pyrotechnics of is never safe. Beckett was not one of herd playing at B
culture (a phrase of his friend E.M. Cioran). freedom-loving in the tenches, but wandered the No C
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Beckett started to write in French to rid himself of as Man’s Land like Dante in Hell. It was not a deliberate D
much English cultural baggage as possible. His style exercise. He was often surprised at what he wrote. It E
became radically spare. He refused the big picture. In- is not purely intellectual. It was not ‘self-expression’, RSS
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deed, the claustrophobia of later plays and prose is not more ‘unself-expression’. If it was merely the surface
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far removed from the details of war, or at least impend- self, fiction would be only disguised autobiography and Facebook
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ing war: terror, boredom, despair, confusion, gallows these biographies would be even more superfluous than
humour, and imprisonment. Being alone in a room with they already are. Both Knowlson and Cronin are aware I
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only thoughts and memories is not lifelessly abstract. of this and do not try to pin Beckett’s devastating later J
It is the experience of millions of people. To label it work to what was happening in his life or his world. At K
solipsistic or elitist, as many people have, is narrow- least, not directly. They are aware of the acultural prov- L
minded in the extreme. To write from the perspective enance of his inspiration. The biographies are works M
of ‘outside’, which many much-touted writers still do borne of our literary culture’s desire for short cuts, yet N
(Pat Barker, Irving Welsh et al), is far more abstract and carry that restriction with honour. O
non-empathetic. Even if these claim to be the voice of Beckett was aware of a saying in post-war literary P
the lost, silenced or the underclass, their conservative French circles that if an Englishman were to write a Q
attitude to language annexes the ground where these book on a camel he would call it The Camel, while R
voices might speak. Their sympathy is the cruelty a Frenchman would call it The Camel And Love. A S
of the sentimental that Wilde spoke of. They silence German, on the other hand, would call it The Absolute
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everybody in their powerful cries from the trenches of Camel. All the books, of course, would probably be the
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literary tradition. same. Both authors reviewed here are Irish, and per-
Beckett is the writer par excellence of what it is to be haps it is inevitable they would think of something odd V
totally alone, separate even from the self you thought for the titles of their books. And they have. Damned W
you were. Inevitably, this leads to a different kind of To Fame, despite being a phrase from one of Beckett’s X
language; neither formal nor colloquial. For Beckett, letters, is a peculiarly limited title, and Cronin’s The Y
language is not so much the meadow where the self Last Modernist is absurd. This tempts the assumption Z

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at the heart of culture. But this is unimportant; titles B
of books like these are for publicity purposes only. C
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Beyond that, the books themselves help us filter our D
interests. If you want rollocking sub-Joycean romps, E
that is, Beckett and Love, read the early work. And in RSS
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terms of these biographies, if you want encyclopaedic
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detail, read Knowlson’s, while if you want a less rever- Facebook
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ential and more speculative read, Cronin’s is for you. If
you want the Absolute Beckett, read the novels; you’ll I
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never get any closer.  J
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Saul Bellow: Ravelstein email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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“I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face. Bellow to write about him ‘warts and all’. This novel
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No one else on all this earth had such features. This was is the result. Facebook
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the most amazing thing in the life of the world.” So why doesn’t he call Ravelstein by his famous
These sentences come from the final page of Saul name? After all, Martin Amis, Bellow’s wrong-headed I
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Bellow’s previous novel The Actual, which, I seem to protégé, hasn’t changed the names in his recent auto- J
remember, he said would be his last. Perhaps, instead, biography Experience. In his book, Bellow can’t be K
it should be classed as a novella; it ends after only hoping to deny the link. And he isn’t: he has been quite L
104 pages. His latest novel Ravelstein, at 233 pages, open about who Abe really is. That’s not the reason. M
safely reaches novel-length. Perhaps this is the last. But The reason goes to the heart of the novel, and ‘the N
maybe not, because it doesn’t feel like a novel. There is novel’ in general. O
a famous reason for this, and the reason is fame. The short explanation is Amy’s face, which Harry, P
Abe Ravelstein, the eponymous character, is the late the narrator of The Actual, sees, as if for the first time Q
Allan Bloom, political philosopher at the University as the coffin containing her husband is lowered into R
of Chicago and close friend of the novelist. In 1987, its plot. Harry realises that Amy has always been ‘the
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Bloom published a book called The Closing Of The one’ (that is, The Actual), and asks her to marry him.
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American Mind, a singular polemic against what he The novel ends before she answers, restraining the
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saw as the betrayal of American values in the realm of sentimentality inherent in such a scenario. Before she
Higher Education. The book became a surprise best- can say anything, the plot is lowered, as it were, into V
seller and made Bloom millions of dollars. Saul Bellow its coffin. But read his sentence again: he sees Amy’s W
contributed a foreword to the book, and, it turns out, actual face only in standing back from himself. We, the X
was the one who suggested he write it in the first place. readers, don’t actually see her face but we sense the Y
Bloom died young in 1992, but before he died asked unique, mysterious, revelatory moment. Her distance Z
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is necessary for it to happen. A straight memoir is Greek rationality and condemns the Dionysian, value- More A
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more likely to evade this solitary instant with anecdote, less chaos of popular culture. Yet while he blames B
psychologising or uncomprehending sentiment. Here, blaring Rock music for the degeneration of America, C
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the distance of fiction opens to the uncanny singularity he plays kitschy Italian operas at the highest possible D
of experience rather than stuffing it into the require- volume, annoying his neighbours. And while he knows E
ments of genre. Plato like a man holed up in an ivory tower, he is also a RSS
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In Ravelstein, loving friendship has taken the place world-class consumer; he spends like there’s no tomor-
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of romance. The six-times married Bellow is confident row. In fact, he wrote the outline of his book only to get Facebook
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enough in his sexuality (and at 85, a father again) to the small advance in order to placate his debtees.
make it clear he loved Bloom. By fictionalising his In the end, he wrote the whole thing and was able to I
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friend we get more than the ‘schmaltz’ of a tribute. It’s indulge his Liberace-like taste in clothes, furniture and J
a familiar Bellow theme. His best novel Herzog is also hotels. The novel is rich in the textures of $4,000 jack- K
about an academic seen in unfamiliar light. Bellow’s ets and silk dressing gowns. Ravelstein is like Liberace L
son Adam has since written of how it mirrored his in another sense too: he is gay; and recklessly so. He M
father’s life at the time, and how Adam himself appears dies of an AIDS-related illness. Yet he pours scorn on N
as Herzog’s young daughter. He says he can’t read the what he calls “faggot behaviour”. Love and its relations O
novel without unease as it portrays Herzog’s wife, by has been a Bellow theme from the start, and his interest P
extension Adam’s mother, in a very poor light. Yet the coincides with his friend’s. Ravelstein constantly refers Q
novel also shows how terrible it must have been to be to the human striving to find his or her other half, as R
married to Herzog. He is manic, paranoid, distracted discussed in Plato’s Symposium. Yet while Ravelstein S
and dishevelled. He scrawls mad, half-finished letters shares his life with a young man called Nikki, he also
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to ‘the famous dead’ instead of writing his supposedly trawls the Parisian nights for rough trade.
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great academic treatise. Herzog blames his wife’s affair While the narrator of the book, his friend Chick,
with his best friend for his condition, but he protests too recognises a contradiction, he doesn’t set it up as em- V
much; and he knows it. blematic; he leaves it as a foible that all great men have. W
Abe Ravelstein is a Herzog with more self-confi- Chick’s professed innocence maybe a ruse of fiction, X
dence, but we still take what he says with a pinch of enabling avoidance. There are strong clues that Chick Y
salt. His best-seller advocates the clarity of ancient sees through him. Ravelstein encourages Chick to de- Z

velop his monograph on the economist Maynard Key- 60s as the beginning of the Fall of America. What More A
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nes by studying the minutiae of his letters home from led him to think this? The invasion of Cuba and B
a post-First World War reparations conference. Such South Vietnam? The subsequent three million native C
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minutiae, he suggests, reveal the larger truth. Chick deaths and long-term chemical damage? No, it is D
seems to be trying to do the same with Ravelstein: we the academic opposition. He says their questioning E
see the way he holds his mobile phone between his of long-accepted values, and subsequent pandering RSS
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bare knees, and as his expensive Japanese kimono falls to the tastes of the permissive society equates with
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away it reveals “legs paler than milk … the shinbone what the philosopher Heidegger did by supporting Facebook
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long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness.” the Nazis from his University chair. One might argue
Once Ravelstein is dead, the novel becomes more the opposite, and say that US academics were in fact I
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complex as Chick describes how he stalled for a few the true descendants of America’s founding fathers J
years before writing the book. Clearly, the facts weren’t rebelling against unjust Imperial might. It is not even K
enough. Before Ravelstein dies, Chick divorces his hinted at here despite Ravelstein’s fascination. L
self-regarding physicist wife and, soon after, marries He has many ex-pupils in high places in the US Ad- M
one of Ravelstein’s pupils, the meeker, much younger ministration. They are more like disciples. Ravelstein, N
Rosamund. On a tropical holiday, Chick eats a poisoned we are told, sought out the best pupils and taught them O
fish and becomes ill. Rosamund gets him home despite to ‘forget their parents’. Ravelstein wanted each to P
his unwillingness. It saves his life. Only after this near- be a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate onto which he could Q
death experience is Chick able to write the memoir of transfer his learning. Once in power, these disciples R
his dead friend. This happened in reality too. Bellow would call him up and tell him the latest inside news S
says he was “nine-tenths gone”. Perhaps being on the – such as Bush’s final decision to end the Gulf War.
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edge of oblivion gave him the necessary insight, just as Chick is impressed. Ravelstein laps it up. There seems
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it gave an insight into Rosamund’s love. to be no irony intended as Bloom talks to one of his
While Ravelstein’s hypocrisy is suggested, the high-powered disciples, puffs away on a Cuban cigar – V
bigger issue – of America – is barely mentioned. made illegal to punish a defiant nation – and dismisses W
This is odd because it possessed Ravelstein and the ‘foolish anti-Americanism’ of French intellectuals. X
fuelled his best-seller. Perhaps Bellow could not This knee-jerk conflation of opposites is meant to be Y
step back from himself in this case. Bloom saw the an example of Ravelstein’s common sense. One has Z

to remember that as Bloom/Ravelstein published his emergence of Bellow’s lyrical intellectualism. There is More A
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book, thousands of men, women and children were a remarkable passage in the novel in which Chick talks B
being killed and maimed by US-funded terrorists as of finding the way to “communicate certain ‘incom- C
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they undermined or overturned elected governments municables’ – your private metaphysics”; something D
uncongenial to US business interests. And the extreme Ravelstein refused to do. Chick explains: E
Right-wing charitable foundations who paid Bloom/ “To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult RSS
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Ravelstein extravagant salaries were among the challenge. You came into a fully developed and articu-
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most active supporters of these mercenaries and their lated reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal Facebook
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Washington paymasters. There is no mention of such oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval
minutiae in the novel, except for talk of America’s of light between the darkness in which you awaited first I
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“higher need” in the world. Such are the real echoes birth and the darkness of death that would receive you, J
from Heidegger’s time. you must make what you could of reality, which was in K
My impatience with this omission could be dis- a state of highly advanced development. I had waited L
missed as unfairly motivated. But I think it reveals millennia to see this.” M
the failure of the book to stand back enough. Essen- He believes it can be done by returning to one’s earli- N
tially, Ravelstein’s philosophy emerges out of a need est memories, untainted by ideology or habit. He recalls O
to deny one’s parents – that is, to repress whatever when, soon after he learned to walk, he went down onto P
stands behind the façade of desire, intellect, money the street and saw “huge utility-pole timbers that lined Q
and status. The man exhibits such lust for life because the street. They were beaver-coloured, soft and rotted.” R
he was always on the edge of an abyss created by an Maybe it is because this appears in relative isolation, S
inherent contradiction in his life and politics. Chick like the “limp silk fresh lilac drowning water” on page 73
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often wonders about Abe’s working class past but, of Humboldt’s Gift, that these poles develop a presence
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like his sexuality, it is taboo and is dropped each time. like Amy’s face. The mystery is grasped, not dispersed.
He is perhaps too in thrall to the rumbling tank of de- Early in the novel Chick mentions reading of the “poor V
nial to see the victims buried in the tracks. As a result, convulsive” Samuel Johnson touching each lamppost W
Abe remains a two-dimensional figure and the novel on a street, and is fascinated, perhaps because it reminds X
doesn’t have any tension until he is dead. him of his own experience. Ravelstein perhaps wanted Y
What redeems the book, for me, is the brief re- Chick to be his Boswell, but it is Chick, Saul Bellow, Z

who will be remembered, though not for this novel in Ravelstein and Chick are both unpious Jews, but they More A
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particular. Generally, it has the tone of valediction-but- know the facts of history. One of Chick’s friends is a B
not-quite. This could be because Rosamund is the real Romanian implicated in the Fascist Iron Guard of World C
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inspiration of this book, with Ravelstein as the unlikely War II. Ravelstein is appalled and tells Chick that if he D
bonding agent. Though she appears, like Amy’s face is to meet the Romanian again to think of the Jews they E
in The Actual, at the end of the book, she is about the hung on meat hooks: “we must not turn our backs on RSS
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present and future; death is gratefully postponed. In the the millions who died” he says. Chick finds it difficult;
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process, it resurrects Ravelstein. he doesn’t want to think about it. Anyway, he is amused Facebook
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In fact, the question of how the apparently dead past by the Romanian. By the end, we are familiar with this
binds to the present weighs on the novel throughout. characteristic.  I
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Feature [published February 1999] B
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under email

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Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth
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anniversary of the writer’s death RSS
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“Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence Like Kafka’s, Bernhard’s writing is easily carica-
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of a revelation which does not in fact occur.” (Borges) tured. This is one of the main problems in the reception Facebook
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Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, play- of the best literature in this country. I have seen an
wright and poet, died young. At this end of the century, advert for Czech beer labelling Kafka “the monarch I
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58 is young. He had been tubercular since his teens, so of mirthlessness”, which told me that the copywriter J
it was no great surprise. Indeed, we are to be grateful knows nothing of Kafka, and probably not of beer K
for his tendency to illness. It was TB, he tells us in his also. Anyone who has read his work can testify there L
remarkable autobiography, that took him to writing. is something oddly funny about it; A Country Doctor M
In a sanatorium – lungs drowning in sputum, aged 19 will have you in stitches. Yet Kafka remains a byword N
and expected to die – he began to write. He believed for depressive reading. The French philosopher Gilles O
it might have cured him too. I remember seeing an Deleuze, however, called him “a man of joy”. The P
obituary following his death on 12th February, 1989. At thing is, you have to be patient; he’s not Bill Bryson. Q
that time I had not read any of his works. Just another Though Bernhard has written comedically, notably in R
novelist I assumed, and did not read the obituary. In the helpfully sub-titled Old Masters: a comedy, he too
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the summer of the following year I found a copy of the is presented as one of those miserable Germans who
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novel Concrete in the magnificent Quartet Encounters can’t accept that life is actually wonderful. This is so
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imprint. I shall always associate that book with a park wrong: he was Austrian.
in an otherwise squalid English city. It is a short enough Generally, we British assume you have be one thing V
to be read in one place. And I have read it in many more or the other. You’re either funny and disposable or W
places since. Certainly it has death written through serious and difficult. I guess it’s partly to do with the X
it, but it cures too, almost. The rest of this will try to satanic rule of marketing strategies protecting niche Y
explain why. identity and such like, but certainly the culture cannot Z
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accept the way literature acts in us, rather than just upon of intellect and intimacy. Being neither, it still came to More A
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us. We assume it to be a pleasant distraction against a the fore because it was the opposite of the other kind B
pre-defined reality. of Great American Novel. It suited the demand that C
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In a way, this is inevitable. What goes on in our you’re one thing or the other: inner or outer. Yet the D
heads daily, hourly, minutely, gets into writing only technique of simulating intimacy reeked of that alone: E
through distancing. Writing something down pro- technique. Luckily, this novel has now been sidelined RSS
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vides a displacement from the anxiety, the boredom as an embarrassment.
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or the confusion of the moment. We want our minds Meanwhile, Realism, whether in historical sweep Facebook
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like the thing written down. It is easy to have this or intimate acquaintance with an individual, prefers
done for you. Responding to a growing appetite for that such excessive literary adventures are limited to I
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distraction, shorthand journalistic cliché has infested unserious Postmodernists. No one should claim they J
our inner lives. Generally, it means we are unable to challenge its intimacy with life. Raymond Carver K
have respect for uniqueness of experience because exemplifies its naive arrogance in his essay on writing L
it is summed up, packaged, placed in a captionable fiction, collected in Fires. One of his maxims, he an- M
context. Soon this context demands total obedience; nounced, was “No tricks”. He had this printed on a piece N
nothing else is relevant. of cardboard stuck above his writing desk. Yet Carver’s O
The private self is subsumed, and we assume we have highly-influential ‘dirty realism’ is one big trick. This is P
to give unquestioning respect to the two-dimensional elided by calling it a “craft”, but craftsmanship is also Q
conceits of ‘ambitious’ fiction covering the ground of trickery institutionalised. His innocence of this is typi- R
journalists and historians (Don Delillo and Tom Wolfe cal of working-class sentimentality. Perhaps he never S
being the current examples). The alternative, where completed a novel because such trickery revealed itself
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it is assumed the self gets full exposure without the over greater length.
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interference of common language, tends to mean the His friend Richard Ford seems almost to be satirising
stream-of-consciousness mode of writing. Take Ha- Carver’s self-abnegatory posing in his touchingly- V
rold Brodkey’s long-delayed, much-hyped novel The overlong novel Independence Day; a terribly funny re- W
Runaway Soul; an 800 page Bildungsroman made up cital of how failure infects and becomes the wellspring X
of dribbling ‘poetic’ language, supposedly reminiscent of writing. Anyway, having a note above one’s writing Y
of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Proust’s great work desk reminding oneself of what to do is enough to indi- Z

cate a need to efface the workings of the imagination. an infinite mediation. Like Bernhard’s. More A
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This despite Carver’s fiction being renowned for its im- Ironically (as journalists are so keen to say in order B
aginative empathy. Rudolf, the narrator in Bernhard’s to assert their distant control) Bernhard began his ca- C
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Concrete sees through the motives for appreciation of reer as a journalist. After giving up his music studies D
Carver’s work: because of illness, he wrote short, precise summaries E
‘People are always talking about it being their duty to of pending court cases for a local Socialist newspaper. RSS
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find their way to their fellow men – to their neighbour, He developed a talent, and an offshoot can be seen in
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as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false the extremely odd book The Voice Imitator: 104 stories Facebook
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sentiment – when in fact it is purely and simply a ques- in 104 pages. The musical background continued in his
tion of finding their way to themselves.’ early preference for poetry, but this soon merged with I
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Carver’s achievement was special, but flawed. It is a the prose to produce novels. The mixing of opposites J
literary equivalent of the self replicating its DNA with might be seen as peculiar to Bernhard’s biographical K
serial partners; never mind the consequences. When details: harsh reality with musical polyphony. There are L
Larkin mordantly quipped “Don’t have any kids your- other details about his childhood even before the illness M
self”, it was as much to do with poems as with children. that are just to depressing to repeat. For these, see his N
The problem is, what goes on in our heads is also autobiography collected as Gathering Evidence. O
literature, in the sense that consciousness is already Harsh reality with polyphony appear in abundance in P
distance. Any privileging of inside or outside means the 1970 novel The Lime Works. It is about the death by Q
a fundamental distortion. It means there is no simple gunshot of a crippled woman. Her husband, Konrad, is R
access through writing to what we want to write about. under arrest. The novel tells the story of the years lead- S
When know-nothings like the BBC’s arts guru Mark ing up to the death in a collage of reported statements
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Lawson complains of writers writing about writers, from local people. This is how it begins:
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he misses this fundamental issue. The so-called self-
reflexive novel is more likely to get closer to the truth “… when Konrad bought the lime works, about five V
than those effacing the conceit. This is why dominant and a half years ago, the first thing he moved in was a W
forms of fiction, and the journalistic definition of lit- piano he set up in his room on the first floor, accord- X
erature’s relation to the world, needs to be set aside in ing to the gossip at the Laska tavern, not because of Y
favour of a mediation between the world and the writer; any artistic leanings, says Wieser, the manager of the Z

Mussner estate, but for relaxation, to ease the nervous pleasure of reading. More A
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strain caused by decades of unremitting brain work, Bernhard’s definitive character is a Thinker over- B
says Fro, the man in charge of the Trattner estate, whelmed by something infringing on his intellectual C
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agreeing that Konrad’s piano playing had nothing to do project; usually imminent death. There are scientists in D
with art, which Konrad hates, but was just improvisa- Yes and The Cheap-Eaters, philosophers in Correction E
tion, as Wieser says, for an hour first thing early in the and The Loser. Rudolf, in Concrete, is a musicologist RSS
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morning and another late at night, every day, spent at trying to write a monograph on the composer Mendels-
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the keyboard, with the metronome ticking away, the son. However, he cannot get past the research stage. Facebook
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window open …” (trans. Sophie Wilkins) He blames his worldly sister: “She’s always destroyed
whatever she’s touched, and all her life she’s tried to I
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It goes on like this for 241 pages. You see how multiple destroy me. At first unconsciously, then consciously, J
perspectives are given, without any privileging of any she’s set out to annihilate me. Right up to this day I’ve K
one in particular. The manic behaviour of Konrad, as had to protect myself against my elder sister’s savage L
reported, is equalled by the persistence of the inves- desire to annihilate, and I really don’t know how so far M
tigation. As it details Konrad’s perceived descent into I’ve managed to escape her.” (trans. David McLintock) N
madness and murder, it threatens the same for the Rudolf’s monomania emerges in the very design of O
investigator. Thus the distant narration is implicated text we are reading: Bernhard’s famous book-length P
in what it perceives. Objectivity, of course, is never paragraphs. There are no natural spaces to stop and Q
immune. It can never reach its object directly. This is reflect. Again, this just begs the question about what R
made clearer in Bernhard’s later novels because they is being avoided, left out, denied. The repetition of S
tend to play with very few voices. Yet despite being “annihilate” in this fairly typical passage shows how
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powerfully subjective, they transcend mere egotism Bernhard’s language is literary, yet not to show how
transferred to the page (go to the Realists for that). U
sensitive the writer is, but to bring forth the way ex-
Realism’s need for the suspension of disbelief is not an perience is bound to literature, and vice versa. After V
issue here: we are swept along by the narcotic prose. all, the only access literature has to annihilation is W
Yet we are also displaced by what it tells us or what the word itself, and perhaps is all we have also. In his X
it doesn’t tell us. Escapism isn’t possible in the usual last novel Extinction, this is made wonderfully clear Y
sense. It means there is always an uneasy edge to the in a favourite passage of mine, where the narrator, Z

an ex-patriot professor based in Rome, talks about are you? Well, you might learn how much you need to More A
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the search for his childhood in an Austrian country fill your own gaping void by reading. Yet for all the B
estate, Wolfsegg: impression of suffocation this gives, there is a clear C
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musical rhythm to the prose. It does intoxicate; a popu- D
“In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell lar form of escape, yes, but not abused by Bernhard. E
myself that I have only to go back there in order to His form of prose weakens the need to choose between RSS
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rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to utilitarian language or lyric indulgence. Bernhard said
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be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your that his prose rhythm owed a lot to music. Indeed, he Facebook
parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your H
uses the life of a musician for the overall theme of one
childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void. of his best novels Der Untergeher. (Literally this trans- I
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You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer lates as “The Undergoer”, but this is ridiculous and J
exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the has been translated as The Loser. Unfortunately this K
most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer pos- loses the allusion to Nietzsche – “Have you suffered L
sible. You have to accept this. All you see when you for knowledge’s sake?” – that is, gone under). M
look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood, The book reads like a prose version of Bach’s Gold- N
but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is berg Variations. And Bernhard uses the real figure of O
why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand Bach’s greatest interpreter Glenn Gould – “the most P
that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of self- important piano virtuoso of the century” – and the Q
protection, I thought. Whenever you look back into the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (although neither is R
past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday by any means identical to the real person) to illuminate
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is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed.” the life of the writer; the Bernhardian kind of writer. In
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(trans. David McLintock) the story, the Canadian Gould is a friend of Wertheimer,
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the Wittgenstein figure, and the unnamed narrator. The
What Creative Writing manual would pass this latter two, we are told, were themselves exceptional V
excessive, uncompromising, monological prose? And pianists but after hearing Gould’s unearthly genius at W
there are another 334 and a half pages like this! One work, they give up hope. They could never attain his X
may ask what’s in it for the reader – I mean, you’re not “inhuman state”. In response, Wertheimer auctioned Y
going to learn anything about the world by reading this, off his piano, took up the “human sciences” and then Z

gave up entirely. He committed suicide, leaving philo- achieved full expression because he wrote out of More A
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sophical notes rather than a complete work. Gould is failure to go under. He understood the dangers of art B
also dead, but naturally; of a lung disease (in reality, he for humanity, and showed respect for the limits of the C
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died of a stroke). imagination. Ironically (again), in accepting the limits, D
This leaves the narrator alone. He tries to write a he transcended them: partly through the invention of a E
monograph About Glenn Gould but instead writes what literary conceit, partly out of lyrical power, partly out RSS
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we’re reading. It is pointed out in the Afterword to the of biographical necessity. Such a form of transcend-
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English edition that the three main characters can be ence is why fiction can be more than just information Facebook
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summarised as a triple-separation of Bernhard himself: or distraction. It can be where the true self emerges;
he is at once Gould the virtuoso artiste, Wertheimer the one’s self with others. Saul Bellow, the American nov- I
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suicide, a self-styled failure gone under; and the un- elist, who shares Bernhard’s waterfall eloquence and J
named narrator. In real life, Bernhard was a virtuoso, of complexity, has spoken of the experience of getting it K
course, and perhaps also a suicide. The last state, being right, and with Bernhardian relish: L
unnamed is therefore appropriate. His living self medi- M
ates between the extremes of Gould and Wertheimer “[transcendence is] just a handle. It’s not the real N
– inhumanity and death – both perhaps preferable. The thing. The real thing is an unquenchable need that never O
unnamed one is unable to go under in art or suicide, stops gnawing at you. And … you feel that you’re be- P
forced to remain, like everyone else, in the usual human ing transcendent in that lousy sense when you are fully Q
situation. Unless, that is, you count his default project, expressive. That’s when it happens to you. Then you’re R
The Loser, as a virtuoso work of art – which I do. In satisfied that you’ve done the right thing. Otherwise no.
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which case, the unnamed one goes on, elsewhere, not Otherwise you fall back on explanations and definitions
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in this book, unto death. and boring discourse. You might as well be a social
scientist and write that sort of stuff.”  U
But perhaps not quite alone. Before death, Bernhard
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Stephen Mitchelmore finds Thomas Bernhard to be elusive within
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two studies of the Austrian writer RSS
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What if everything we can be depends on playing a it is clear that her subject is the paradigm’s essential
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role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it figure. There seems to be no private Thomas Bernhard. Facebook
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would mean that the public self, the one presented to As such, Honegger says he is a particularly Austrian
the world, is not ‘a mask’ but the original; the thing phenomenon. The nation, she says, transplanted the I
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itself. Behind the scenes, alone, we live the mystery baroque theatrics of the old Hapsburg Empire into its J
of self-consciousness. We wonder who it is that wakes cultural life, notably the Salzburg Festival, the state K
at four to soundless dark. Alone, we dream of another run Burgtheatre, and one man: Thomas Bernhard. Each L
life; the one in the biography. Perhaps the oppressive provided an arena for Austria to conjure its self image. M
climate of our culture – as seen in the triumphant ex- In Bernhard’s case, it was invariably a negative im- N
posés of the press and the prurience of Reality TV – is age, as if Austria needed an impression of embattlement O
due to our frantic need to remove in others what we see against a hostile world. For example, when Bernhard P
as a façade in ourselves. And as art is seen as an adjunct received a state prize and made critical remarks about Q
of this removal (‘expressing the inner self’), so the the state in his acceptance speech, a Government min- R
inevitable disappointment in its resistant playfulness ister stormed out and slammed a glass door so violently
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leads to a shift in preference to revelatory biography that it smashed. And just before his death in 1989, he
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and memoir. Could this be stage fright on our part? was verbally attacked by the President (an ex-Nazi),
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Early on in Thomas Bernhard: The Making Of An and physically attacked on a bus by an old lady wield-
Austrian, the first English biography of the Austrian ing an umbrella. Since his death, however, Bernhard V
novelist, playwright and poet, Gitta Honegger says has become a national treasure. His vitriol has been re- W
the apparatus of the theatre is an “annoyingly over- branded, Guy Fawkes-like, into a fireworks display. As X
used existential paradigm”, and she’s right. I’ve only a result, his description of Austria as a place with more Y
used it once and it’s annoying me already. However, Nazis in 1988 than in 1938 (the cause of the President’s Z

and the old lady’s wrath) is safely consigned to history. ing, it is also understandable. Most correspondence is More A
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Like the ‘Anschluss’ and the President’s SS uniform, it unavailable, and friends do not say anything particu- B
is part of Austria’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps this is larly intimate. In fact, the one clear sexual revelation C
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why, in his will, Bernhard refused to allow the publica- doesn’t alter the image of a performer: Bernhard D
tion or performance of his work within the Austrian liked to masturbate in front of a mirror! We’re told E
state for the duration of the copyright; he foresaw his this on page 10, so it’s all over pretty quickly. Instead RSS
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place in the state circus. (The lawyers have since got of a chronological narrative, we’re given themes in
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around this.) which Honegger makes frequent (and wearying) Facebook
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However, the important thing to remember is that it digressions into cultural history and their relevance
wasn’t Bernhard who said Austria was still full of Nazis, to Bernhard, such as the notion of ‘Heimat’, and the I
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it was a character in his play Heldenplatz. And while significance of the theatre in Austria. J
everyone assumes Bernhard meant every word as his In connection with the latter, Honegger rightly makes K
own, those words are part of a whole that, as J.J. Long much of Bernhard’s staging of his experience. In his L
explains in his book The Novels Of Thomas Bernhard: compelling memoirs (written in five short volumes but M
Form And Its Function, demands to be experienced not collected in English as Gathering Evidence), Bernhard N
in isolation as preferred by the culture-vultures, but in recalls events through the eyes of his younger self while O
real time. If this is done, irony leaks into the hyperbole he (the younger self) is also observing or reflecting. He P
and all attitudes become unstable, even irony. In effect, observes his younger self observing from a vantage Q
even after death, Bernhard still performs, refusing to point separate from the ‘action’. One observation point R
become a museum piece. The man himself remains a leads to another and then another. We might see this as S
mystery. So what, in fact, did Thomas Bernhard think? a prime example of Chinese-box Postmodernism where
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Who was he when alone, no longer dancing before the all facts are as hollow as the next, but in Bernhard’s
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appalled Viennese bourgeoisie? These are questions for memoir the gnawing question of origin is always there.
a biography. The facts are plain: Bernhard’s father abandoned his V
But don’t get your hopes up. As Honegger’s sub- mother before Thomas was born, and died during the W
title indicates, there is a plea of mitigation. She says war years in mysterious circumstances; he either killed X
her book is a “cultural biography”; as much about himself or was murdered. He never met his son. Bern- Y
Austria as about Bernhard. While this is disappoint- hard was later punished by his bitter mother who saw Z

her humiliation in the inherited features of her boy. No take us through the minutiae of his daily existence. Yet More A
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amount of virtuoso storytelling and opinionating could while the analysis is very interesting, one longs for that B
prevent the author from being thrown toward the bitter minutiae. Recently, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on C
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facts of his birth, and its consequences, much as we Bernhard revealed that his record collection consisted D
wonder, whilst vomiting, what we had eaten to cause it. almost entirely of the 19th-century Romantic reper- E
Bernhard’s early life was also blighted by the Nazi toire. One might have assumed this great Modernist RSS
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era. He saw at first hand the terror of Allied bombing would have preferred Schönberg and Webern, Bach
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raids on Salzburg. Barely a teenager, death closed in and Haydn over Schubert and Brahms. Apparently not. Facebook
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from all sides. And after the war, when he tried to make (Curiously, this is similar to Beckett). I don’t recall
his way in the world as a trained singer, he was struck Honegger mentioning anything like this. Nor does she I
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down with tuberculosis after working in freezing con- mention the novel Bernhard had sketched out before J
ditions in a grocery store. In hospital, with his lungs full his death. She prefers to skim over the surface, taking K
of breathtaking sputum, he was given the Last Rites. what is necessary for her themed coverage. When it L
Miraculously, he survived when all around were dying. comes to Bernhard’s sexuality, for example, there is an M
Honegger says he wrote the memoir as a record of his exhausting bout of Freudian analysis arising from his N
victory over that death and the attempts at metaphorical father’s absence and his mother’s maltreatment. It is O
suffocation by his upbringing in particular, and Austrian unconvincing only because it is so persuasive. Actually P
society in general. Victory was the result of a decision the same is true of the opinions expressed by Bernhard’s Q
to become himself, to live despite all that suffocated narrators. Perhaps Honegger is having a laugh as our R
him, even though it was futile. I say “futile” because brows sweat over the complexities of Oedipal anxiety? S
all that suffocated him also provided the oxygen. It I would like to think so. In the rest of the book, Freud
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is no coincidence that, despite the oppressive details, gets barely a mention. It is very odd.
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there is a sense of freedom pulsing out of the pages It is also vague. We don’t get a definitive answer as
of Gathering Evidence. Later, the existential energy to whether Bernhard was hetero-, bi- or homosexual. V
of Bernhard’s neurasthenic narrators will also emerge Honegger says he “came between couples”, which W
from this outrageous, paradoxical act of will. suggests one conclusion, but what she means is that X
Perhaps it because Bernhard provides the most use- both sexes were drawn into an ambiguous relationship Y
ful guide to his life that Honegger does not attempt to with the writer. It’s a living example of Bernhard’s Z

elusiveness, and proof of nothing else. Another is the the ‘narrative strategies’ and ‘hermeneutic sequences’ More A
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one major relationship outside his family. It was with a employed to undermine such narrow interpretations B
woman 39 years older than himself. She was a widow of Bernhard’s monological prose. C
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who befriended Bernhard when he was a young writer. For example, he writes that the reflective form of D
She provided a home and material support when he the great, valedictory novel Extinction allows “an E
was struggling. He called her his “Lebensmench” excavation of the past even as it moves forward into RSS
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(Lifeperson); a word he invented. Understandably, the future.” The novel’s narrator fires at familiar targets
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Honegger doesn’t have much to give us on the details – particularly the repression of the Nazi past – even as Facebook
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of this partnership. All windows are opaque. The same he himself succumbs to the same temptation to repress
is true, more or less, for other areas of his life. Indeed, the facts of his own life in order to resist the impending I
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Bernhard is a phantom in his own biography. extinction of the title. Indeed, the targets are not only J
J.J. Long takes a firmer route by concentrating on familiar but familial. Long shows how most of Bern- K
the novels. Bernhard, he says, was “a writer of con- hard’s novels – like his memoir – are concerned with L
siderable diversity, profoundly concerned with the “transgenerational transmission” (that is, inheritance). M
problems and potential of storytelling.” Originally The narrator’s family consists of ex-Nazi parents, both N
a doctoral thesis, The Novels of Thomas Bernhard: sad and monstrous people, whom he loves and hates in O
Form And Its Function uses the technical language of equal measure, as well as grotesque siblings who have P
Narrative Theory to understand the unique qualities not resisted the legacy of repression. As the eldest, the Q
of Bernhard’s writing. Reading it requires a high level narrator inherits the family’s country estate in darkest R
of patience and concentration. Moreover, it leaves Austria when the parents are killed in a car crash. As he S
the lengthy quotations in German untranslated. This also feels that he has not got long to live, he decides he
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is regrettable as those most likely to be drawn to the must return from his sunny life in Rome to redeem the
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book – Germanless Bernhard fans – will be hampered. legacy. We don’t get to find out how he does this until
Presumably the costs involved are prohibitive. Still, the final page. As he goes forward to do this, he reflects V
even monolinguists can gain a good deal from what’s on why it is required. W
left. Whereas Honegger bizarrely accuses Bernhard of Yet the reason why the narrator’s predicament com- X
being a solipsist – someone for whom the world is pels our attention, and gives us pleasure, is his spirited Y
merely a projection of their own mind – Long stresses unwillingness to complete the task. He is forever delay- Z

ing the end in both the action as described (stalling out- book and still believe, as so many do, that Bernhard is More A
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side the gates of the estate) and in the act of storytelling merely a ranting egoist. Those who already know bet- B
itself (spinning variations of anecdotes and opinions). ter will perhaps understand more clearly how Bernhard C
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Long says these delaying tactics are achieved through maintained his high-wire act, though we would still D
“embedded narratives” and “retarding elements”. As a like to know more in physical detail. E
successful doctoral candidate, ‘pleasure’ is not an issue In one brief insight to his working process, Honegger RSS
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for him, but for those of us who turn to Bernhard for quotes Bernhard as saying he wrote “with full commit-
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this reason, it is interesting to note how these tech- ment”; his entire body took part in the creative proc- Facebook
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niques create an experience similar to the reading of ess. Perhaps this is why he preferred to call his novels
a thriller or detective novel. In those genres, pleasure “prose texts” as this suggests a script for performance. I
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comes from the growth of mystery and suspense before Indeed, Bernhard’s many plays are not greatly different J
the inevitable denouement. from the novels. It seems Bernhard himself felt most K
Extinction is similar in that one reads to find out what alive when writing, like an actor on stage even at his L
happens next. However, the distinction is that the thrill- writing desk. Honegger observes that each work was a M
er cannot reproduce the same pleasure on re-reading. reassertion of that early decision to live. Appropriately, N
A new story is required every time. Extinction on the some way into Extinction, the narrator reflects on the O
other hand positively demands to be re-read in order frustrated lives of those stuck in small-town provincial P
to enjoy that delay again and again. In fact it becomes misery from which he, the narrator, had escaped. He Q
more enjoyable as we join with the narrator repeating says they fail to better themselves, to “get away from R
stories and opinions in order to delay our return to the their real selves” because “they lack the intellectual S
mundane world. Unfortunately for him, the delay has energy, because they have not discovered the intellect
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more serious import for the narrator. For a time, we – the intellect around them or the intellect within them
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feel more alive even if our noses are ‘buried in a book’. – and have therefore not taken the first step, which is
This is the great problem and potential of storytelling. the precondition for taking the second.” V
Long’s analysis, which is richer and more complex than So, we might assume that in writing, Bernhard got W
I have space (or patience) to detail, manages to eluci- away from his real self. But “full commitment” means X
date Bernhard’s method and highlight his remarkable he did it with his mortal body as well as his intellect. Y
technical achievement. One cannot go away from this Despite his early escape from death, Bernhard was al- Z

ways seriously ill. He expected to die before reaching More A

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50. His half-brother, a doctor, claims to have kept him B
alive for an extra ten years after that. Mortality was an C
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over-riding theme and writing was at once the escape D
from death’s imminence and its enactment. Barthes’ E
Death Of The Author was more than a concept to RSS
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Bernhard. In fact, in a blessed piece of minutiae, Hon-
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egger tells us one of his favourite games was “playing Facebook
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dead”. It’s a nice idea to think of the novels as the
place were Bernhard plays dead for us. Nowhere else I
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is he more alive.  J
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Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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Not half way through the year but already a book has It is always world
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come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it – the and never nowhere without no: Facebook
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book of the year. that pureness, that unwatched, which one
I am aware that there is something desperate about breathes and I
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such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty endlessly knows and never wants. But a child J
time with an evasive monument. That is the nature of might lose himself inside the quiet and become K
monuments after all. The bigger the monument the shaken. Or someone dies and is. L
more it evades – hence the respect given to a new 800 For near to death one sees that death no more M
page novel spanning generations, the collected works and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge N
of a writer or a definitive biography of a tyrant. Yet the glance. O
book I’m holding is a fragile 53 pages and is published P
by a small press in Sydney, Australia. Blanchot’s gift is to reveal to us how literature is also Q
Nowhere Without No is, ironically, a collection of 13 nowhere without no. His work pursues writing to where R
memorials by translators, academics and poets (some- it disappears into this space, as it separates itself from
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times a combination of all three) in honour of Maurice the reader and writer. Hart reminds us that Blanchot
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Blanchot, the French novelist and philosopher, who wrote (in the third person) of his own experience of this
separation as he faced a firing squad in 1944. Waiting U
died in February 2003, aged 95.
The introduction by editor Kevin Hart explains the to die, there was: V
title. It comes from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy in which W
the poet writes of “a space that has been freed from “a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of X
ordinary time” as experienced by children, animals and beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign ela- Y
the dead: tion? […] In this place, I will not try to analyse. He Z
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and

was perhaps suddenly in invincible. Dead – immortal. - to write is to withdraw language from the More A
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suffering humanity, the happiness of not being im- - to write is to surrender to the fascination of C
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mortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death time’s absence. D
by a surreptitious friendship.” (from The Instant Of My - the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, E
Death, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg) a secret. RSS
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- in the solitude of the work … we discover a
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The shots didn’t come; he was told to run and thereby more essential solitude. Facebook
regained a life where, from then on, he writes, “the H
- art is the power by which night opens
instant of my death [was] henceforth always in abey- (trans. Ann Smock) I
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ance”. Later, he discovered that a manuscript had been J
taken from his room by enemy officers believing it Throughout this extraordinary book, Blanchot traces K
to contain military secrets. Instead of the death of the the impact of the night on the work of various authors – L
author, there was the death of the text. Rilke, Mallarmé and Kafka in particular. If, for Kafka, M
One might say: but this is written in the third person; “there exists only the outside, the glistening flow of the N
it is either fiction or Blanchot is writing about another eternal outside” what does that mean for his world of O
person – perhaps literature itself. That lost manuscript expression, of escape, of liberty that is writing? The P
certainly has the convenience of fiction, standing for question is part of the work itself. In this way, reading Q
the agency and meaning as it withdraws. However, Blanchot is frustrating: there is at once the assertive- R
such a distinction is impossible. By writing in the third ness of the phrases quoted above and a resistance to
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person, Blanchot emphasises the distance inherent to actually saying anything in the usual manner. His as-
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such reminiscence – itself already literature, already sertions serve to obscure what was previously clear.
intimate with death. Rather than offering an alternative to, say, a Freudian or U
Ten years later, Blanchot’s The Space Of Literature is Marxist reading of ‘Metamorphosis’, Blanchot reveals V
saturated with this experience: how each reading has to make a leap over the abyss. W
For the reader, it is intoxicating, yet almost impossible X
- to write is to break the bond that unites the to then put to use. Lydia Davis – pioneering translator of Y
word with myself. the récit Death Sentence – says she can follow the argu- Z

ment line by line yet summary is resisted. “Somehow strangle the voice.” More A
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the experience of reading had to take place moment by B
moment”. This resistance, she finds, is experienced by While Blanchot’s prose can be said to be poetic – C
and Dupin is surely right to detect a “demanding poet” email
most other readers. It is not a criticism. D
Charlotte Mandell – translator of The Work Of Fire behind the prose – it is not flighty and impressionistic. E
and The Book To Come – recalls how she felt a need The silence of the words is achieved by the extreme pa- RSS
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to write to Blanchot to thank him for the silence in his tience and attention to the weight of words – a patience
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words – for the revelation of the space. Her gratitude frequently expressed in doubt. Blanchot’s disciples Facebook
have a remarkable confidence to use key word and H
then is not for the man himself but for his absence,
such is the perversity of his gift. Mandell doesn’t say oxymorons that appear throughout Blanchot’s work I
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whether he replied – though others report replies of – passivity, sovereign relation, forgetfulness without J
exceptional courtesy and concern. Only Jacques Der- memory, the impossible real, motionless retreat, purpo- K
rida – in the address given at the cremation – tells of siveness without purpose – in the assumption that they L
the man himself: brief meetings in a university office automatically plumb the depths as they do in Blanchot. M
throughout which Blanchot wore a gentle smile, and Curiously, they don’t. As Blanchot himself wrote: “De- N
then breathless on the phone toward the end. He seems sire of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge, O
ghostly even in life. knowledge of desire. Let us not believe that we have P
One wonders how much this effacement contributes said anything at all with these reversals.” Q
to the unique aura of his works? Not much, if the at- The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so R
tempts to imitate him are any guide. The poet Jacques much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to
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Dupin writes that in Blanchot’s fragmentary writing: say too much. Such is the silence brought by death
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perhaps. The latter also means the distance between
“his speech yielded a conductive wire of an extreme the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the U
delicacy in search of the ultimate meaning, that which reader’s mind. V
was well beyond one’s grasp and which indicated Michael Holland emphasises the distance in a re- W
from very high up how to pass over the precipices, markable, two-page analysis of science fiction. The X
how to master the turbulence and the proliferation, genre, he says, necessarily “hangs back from think- Y
of the forces of dislocation that exhaust the text, that ing the totality of what it projects – which is to say Z

total transcendence in the here and now”. He means it my work make it impossible for us to meet”. Still, he More A
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denies mortality. And that means such transcendence confirmed to Taylor that Kierkegaard was indeed a se- B
is pure violence: “Sci-fi is thus essentially nihilistic” cret sharer. He helped Blanchot find his own way. This C
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because it cannot accommodate bodily death on the collection, modest in size and character as it is, offers D
level of its narrative. He urges us to read and re-read Blanchot as a guide to us, placing the emphasis firmly E
Blanchot in order to hold off such nihilism. This is on the writing: RSS
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how we can learn from Blanchot. There is no need to
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adopt his style. Blanchot himself did exactly that in “I have long thought that some things are so intimate Facebook
that they can never be said but must be written. Writing H
his own learning.
Mark C. Taylor remarks on Blanchot’s neglected kin- does not merely create distance but also allows one I
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ship with an earlier enigmatic philosopher-writer: “It to draw closer than any spoken word. This closeness J
was … Kierkegaard” he writes “who first realised that must not be confused with presence. Writing brings K
philosophy can be itself only by becoming literature; the remote near by allowing presence to withdraw. The L
and it was Kierkegaard who insisted that the only way lasting lesson of Blanchot is that withdrawal opens M
to be truly in the world is to withdraw from it.” Taylor up the space-time of desire whose absence is death. N
asked for a meeting to discuss it but got a note saying: Though he has been taken from us, he will continue to O
“Though I might wish it otherwise, the conditions of give what is never ours to possess.”  P
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Feature [published June 2002] B
Maurice Blanchot: The Absent Voice email

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Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot
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There are many remarkable facts about the long life of literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly”
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the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of Facebook
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The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre- literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself,
War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced I
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during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that even, Blanchot’s resistance makes him, in my opinion, J
is similar to, but more significant than, Pynchon’s and one of the most important writers. K
Salinger’s; his deep influence on more famous French In my opinion. What is that worth? The question of L
thinkers (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). And, authority – mine, Blanchot’s or anybody else’s – is the M
finally, in this list, his return to public life to oppose invisible centre of our cultural ideology. We all know N
French colonialism in Algeria and then to support the that Liberal Democracy is based on choice; each indi- O
May 1968 student uprising, during which he drafted vidual is free to choose and each individual’s choice is P
pamphlets released by those opposing General de as good as any other’s. So, when I write in my opinion, Q
Gaulle’s autocracy. I remove all weight from the judgement. The complete R
But to concentrate on these facts, relevant as they opposite is equally valid. Despite this, we still make
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are, would be to ignore what Blanchot offers, which is definite choices in what to read, watch or listen to,
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a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That as if hoping, despite everything, for something more
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is, why do written words have so much power over us, than nothing. The act of choice itself speaks of a need:
yet also seem completely estranged from the world for nourishment, entertainment or distraction, or all V
they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature three combined. But we have little guidance on what W
takes us to ‘another world’, we say more than we might and why to choose. Perhaps the recent proliferation X
imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to of award ceremonies and prize competitions for each Y
us relentlessly. “There is an a-cultural aspect to art and art form is no coincidence: the award-winning novel, Z

the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie. swer over and over again.” The philosopher links this More A
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We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitiga- to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to “the B
tion of one’s apparently random choice. At the same sacred voice” emerging from a stone or the stump of a C
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time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation D
meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of with written words: E
Liberal Democracy. RSS
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Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect. “Like sacred language, what is written comes from
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Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and Facebook
thereby always refers back to something more origi- H
too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition
become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the nal than itself. Behind the words of the written work, I
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scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather, nobody is present; but language gives voice to this J
he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offer- absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the K
ing in the process a startling revision of our understand- god himself is never present in his words, and it is the L
ing of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art absence of god which then speaks.” (trans. Leslie Hill) M
and world be what makes it vital and important? In a N
short essay from 1953, published in a new translation If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the O
by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively P
the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the Q
possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates’ human project represented by Socrates. What can be
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preference for speech over writing. done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet
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In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the in literature, luring truth into “the abyss where there
is neither truth nor meaning nor even error”? Blanchot T
guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One
reminds us what was done: “both Plato and Socrates U
can ask questions and receive answers; there is always
the movement of dialogue with those involved always are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime V
mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible. which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved W
On the other hand, written words can only maintain a for moments of leisure”. Of course, Socrates went on to X
solemn silence: “if you ask them what they mean by pay with his life for his commitment to the more seri- Y
anything,” he says, “they simply return the same an- ous matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains Z

emblematic of our notion of the freedom of speech, his not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent More A
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dismissal of writing and art sounds very familiar, very that it is like a future language which is always ahead of B
now, particularly to anyone searching for truth in art. itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it, C
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We can see the correlation between Postmodernism (no which is to say that it is fundamentally without justifi- D
truth, no meaning), popular culture (no error), and the cation.” (trans. Leslie Hill) E
ancient philosophers’ dismissal of art. It is attractive as RSS
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there is another correlation, perhaps the most impor- It does not base itself on something which already
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tant: both are also liberations. In each case, freedom is is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind Facebook
of literature that does not engage with current events H
granted to those previously enslaved to truth. Writers
can let their imagination run wild; there is no comeback. or familiar social relations, and where the style, I
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Instead of celebrating or lamenting this develop- language and subject matter – or lack of it – resists J
ment, Blanchot considers the silence of the gods re- the utility of common understanding. Is modern K
vealed in the written word. He wonders what it is that literature, then, prophetic? L
disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it The nature of the question means the answer cannot M
is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants, be stated as such, only experienced. The moment it is N
to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social, answered, the language of the future is negated and O
psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer, drawn into Socrates’ dialogue of utility. However, this P
he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher, is not to distinguish experience and literature. Contrary Q
pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of to popular opinion, literature is intimate with daily ex- R
his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle perience. Blanchot puts it this way:
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“neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From
“Upon the background noise constituted by our T
this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the
knowledge of the world’s daily course, which pre- U
origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he
clarifies the final word: cedes, accompanies, and follows in us all knowl- V
edge, we cast forth, walking or sleeping, phrases that W
“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it are punctuated by questions. Murmuring questions. X
means that it does not base itself on something which What are they worth? What do they say? These are Y
already is … It points toward the future, because it does still more questions.” (trans. Susan Hanson) Z

We don’t experience the world without this murmur- cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent More A
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ing, a kind of voice-under codifying and animating mother’s room. This is the usual displacement of the B
an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of author’s own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in C
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our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainment- his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another nar- D
distraction, drugged socialising, or plausible theories rator, Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own E
of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot’s unique story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says RSS
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attunement to these murmuring questions – to what this a “slightly disappointing” allegory of the author’s
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resists the Socratic demand – which distinguishes his search for something more original than itself. Beckett Facebook
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work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it is having fun with the conventions of the novel – which
within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work. I
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of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassur- J
news of the moment, he asks certain questions that ing presence like normal characters in a novel speaking K
emerge from the experience of reading the book itself. through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us L
This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel from what Blanchot calls “a greater threat”. M
Beckett’s trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone’s N
Unnameable. Here is a book that has no justification. death would provoke the “ultimate disaster which is to O
It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of have lost the right to say I”. Malone is bedridden, hav- P
polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming ing only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables Q
power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to ef- him to turn his room into “the infinite space of words R
face the author with the usual means of the suspension and stories.” He tells stories – a simple pastime – to S
of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for
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free fall. Blanchot asks, “Who speaks in Samuel farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism;
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Beckett’s books? … Who is the tireless ‘I’ who seems everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:
always to say the same thing?” At first, the answer V
is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this “All I want to do now is to make a last effort to un- W
deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel’s derstand, to begin to understand, how such creatures X
terrible dynamic. are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding. Y
Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less, Z

mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalep- “[an] experience experienced under the threat of More A
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sies of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good. impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a B
The last word is not yet said between me and – yes, the vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar, C
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last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced D
again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.” because it is what is unceasing and interminable.” E
(trans. Sacha Rabinovitch) RSS
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And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies,
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we’re never quite sure, for how can death occur in This is the language of the future. It is “a direct con- Facebook
a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins frontation with the process from which all books de- H
without his support for the stories. So really, it can- rive”: language itself. By asking the simple question of I
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not continue. who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how J
It continues anyway. And according to current Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place K
understanding, this is where ‘the real’ author should where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading L
reveal himself, the one ‘behind the scenes’. Again, the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of M
it is no coincidence that when producers of ‘Reality communication, and thereby the limits of our power N
TV’ proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to O
rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of the point where we are taken to another world (“trans- P
‘what really went on’ – endless promises of a definitive ported” as so many naive readers put it, neglecting the Q
intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn’t. In recent history of the word). Beckett’s Trilogy exceeds R
The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a con- this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the con-
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sciousness stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to fines of novel. The author’s great achievement is to
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a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to
without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot, stay this side. To declare his work ‘absurdist’ or that it U
this is the “malaise of one who has dropped out of real- ‘mirrors the breakdown of religious belief’, as might V
ity and drifts forever in the gap between existence and be heard wherever Beckett’s books are discussed, is W
nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always X
born.” As readers we undergo: in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Tril- Y
ogy has never been accepted into our culture in the Z

same way as, say, Joyce’s Ulysses. “She was present, already her own image, and her More A
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[Note: Blanchot’s essay on Beckett, ‘Where now? image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself. B
Who now?’ can be found in The Sirens’ Song: Se- When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten. C
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lected Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel “Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remem- D
Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in bered, sometimes remembering the forgetting and E
Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage in a transla- forgetting everything in this remembrance.” (Trans. RSS
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tion by Richard Howard. However, both are long out John Gregg)
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of print.] Facebook
In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says H
Blanchot’s own novels, such as Thomas The Obscure,
have a kinship with Beckett’s work; there is constant that novels “show the possibility of what it is like to be I
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dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though, someone else”. Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication J
they are closer to Kafka’s; there are many mysterious to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through K
landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both that someone else. As we begin to understand the per- L
these authors’ humour. His narratives are often insipid. son in front of us, the understanding takes his or her M
However, in the late 1950s, the critical writing and the place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative. N
fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Per- O
genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis haps significantly, McEwan’s latest novel Atonement is P
developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like Q
essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning. R
occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists
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to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a compulsive interest.
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novel appeared called L’attente l’oubli (Translated as Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than
continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps U
Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative
of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room. he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes V
Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from in on itself. When infected with another however, not W
the rest by a printed diamond or star. The spaces disrupt only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature X
straightforward narrative progress. itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in Y
The Law Of Genre – a close reading of Blanchot’s very Z

short novel The Madness Of The Day – this infection richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does More A
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is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre is to point out that in order to do either requires a B
is basically the effacement of that infection. As the scrupulous attention to language. “Whoever wants to C
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dynamic of absence and presence that frequently drives be absent from words at every instant or to be present D
Blanchot’s writing, the direction was necessary. only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied E
In a remarkably condensed early essay, ‘How Is with them so that, of all authors, those who most RSS
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Literature Possible?’ this movement is prefigured. In eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e.
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it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most Facebook
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about the opposition of what we might call traditional exposed to this reproach.” Does this, then, destroy all
and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according I
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cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition) to those who do not consider themselves writers, be- J
has dominated our conception of literature for 150 cause writing is a work of distance from the ‘ecstasies’ K
years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo’s rejection of of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot: L
rhetoric, Verlaine’s denunciation of eloquence and M
Rimbaud’s abandonment of “old-hat” poetry. Sixty “It is the same for those who through the marvels N
years on, it hasn’t changed that much. Think of Mar- of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing O
tin Amis’ famous “war against cliché”, J.G. Ballard’s themselves from all literature. For having wanted to P
expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to Q
ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair touch directly the secret world and the profound meta- R
with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett’s Trilogy could itself physics that they meant to reveal, they finally contented
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be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tra- themselves with using this world, this secret, this meta-
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dition. Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two physics as they would conventions and forms that they
complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the U
camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense
with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled visible framework and the foundation of their works. V
auto-da-fé and so destroy the complacent world of […] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics, W
bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to religion, and emotions take the place of technique and X
prune language of its deadwood so that a conscious- language. They are a system of expression, a literary Y
ness can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular genre – in a word, literature.” (trans. Charlotte Mandell) Z

The experience of these systems of expression, The book is in part about how one deals with disaster, More A
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however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the B
readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the C
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is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also D
‘monsters of ambiguity’ when we read. How are we, as about the disaster of language itself: E
readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is RSS
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precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the “The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the
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oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing. Facebook
This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which H
dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature
is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, I
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life to continue while the victims are all dependent on is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or J
the vampire myth for their living. And the other way extratextual.” (trans. Ann Smock) K
around. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short L
essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before: That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake M
authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself N
in the inscrutability of their presence. through opinion or style. Blanchot’s impersonal voice, O
If literature relies on comforting demarcations of so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster. P
genre to proceed, yet demands a naked openness to the To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to Q
world for the sake of authenticity, then the appearance confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting
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of the printed star in Blanchot’s work is perhaps not just yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obliga-
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a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blan- tion, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.
We are absent from one another as the disaster writes T
chot’s famous late work, The Writing Of The Disaster,
through communication. We are absent even from our- U
a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments
designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obso- selves as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We V
lete definition of the word disaster is “an unfavourable saw this emerge in Beckett’s Trilogy. Yet it is precisely W
aspect of a star”. The star helps us to grasp the possibil- this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together. X
ity of meaning, which we return to at the end of each The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this Y
section, while at the same time threatening break down. absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is Z

central, remains the only medium for the possibility of with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into More A
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a community, even if it is a community of those who nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s sum- B
have no community. The growth in sales of intimate mons is heard.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch) C
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self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public fig- D
ures, and the pathological obsession with personalities But how is this done? The fragmentary work, per- E
and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal haps the apogee of 20th-century Modernist literature RSS
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democracy functions by removing an effective public and philosophy, is Blanchot’s approach. Its refusal to
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life. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Big Brother, insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well Facebook
as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority, H
or at least one’s biographer, is always watching. It is
a political environment that has redefined politics into means both reader and writer are constantly moving I
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a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet J
oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no mean- K
absent voice of a community denied by a misreading ing even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot L
of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, “a M
apparent emptiness of art: combat of passivity – combat that reduces itself to N
naught”. Some might see this as needlessly equivo- O
“Reading is anguish, and this is because any text, cal or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent P
however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end, Q
… is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in R
cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot
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comprehend.” (trans. Ann Smock) says that art’s summons might not have been lost
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on Socrates – the great emblematic thinker of posi-
The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at tivistic Western culture. He might also have sensed U
the end of his essay on Beckett: the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole V
at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only W
“Art requires that he who practices it should be im- guarantee for speech was the living presence of a X
molated to art, should become other, not another, not human being, he also “went as far as to die in order Y
transformed from the human being he was into an artist to keep his word.”  Z

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Body Modification: Remake, Remodel email

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Nick Clapson enters the strange world of body modification
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Tattoos. Piercing. Dreadlocks. Body Art. What is the idea that they are some how more pure, honest and true,
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world coming to? because they reflect the more positive aspects of these Facebook
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It would seem if we follow the lead of much of the so-called ‘simpler’ societies. Attempts are also made
popular press a minority of degenerates are corrupting to suggest a lineage for the use of such body art by I
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our sensibilities, and so we are doomed. However, if the examination of early pre-Christian practices in the J
you take the time to stop and look a little longer, it seems west. However, though this may provide a precedent K
more likely that we actually want to be corrupted. And for body art, it is more pertinent to question why such L
this desire is not new. practices fell from fashion for several thousand years, M
There is currently an interest in utilising the body and in turn, why they would have any pertinence now. N
as a site on which we can extend our creative and Much is made in the literature that surrounds this O
psychic desires, and as such has found itself reflected particular subculture about the need for self-expression, P
in a growing literature of its own. One such book is and the desire to feel part of a community. The subtext Q
Housk Randall and Ted Polhemus’ The Customised of such an argument is that a certain sector of our soci- R
Body. As Polhemus and Randall make clear from ety feel that they can not adequately express themselves
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the start, the impetus for this fashion in changing through the more conventional means of visual expres-
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the body is the influence of ‘traditional peoples’. sion, be it clothes or art. The notion that other cultures
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Other cultures, which have been traditionally termed will provide us with a visual language that will release
primitive, have a history of altering their physical us from this impasse is, however, not new. In art alone it V
appearance for either religious and social purposes. can be traced back through the major canon of western W
And it is this that the later-day primitives of our culture artist, through Jackson Pollock, Picasso, Gauguin, Van X
are trying to tap into. Thus the piercing or the tattoos of Gogh, and back into the depths of the 18th century at Y
these ‘modern primitives’ are legitimated through the least. What is new is the transition from the canvas and Z
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I feel, must be a result of the late 20th century, or dare and the disheartened give up on conventional codes or B
I say it, Postmodern, belief in the breakdown of artist symbols they are signalling to the dominant culture, C
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as unassailable god. Instead, the artist can be any man, and to those who have not yet made that step to identify D
and as a result of the comments of Duchamp and the themselves, that they are out there on the edge. And E
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Also written into the unspoken creed of this grouping some surely are, they are issuing a rallying call to join
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is heart-felt belief that there is a direct correlation be- them, as there is surely safety in numbers. Facebook
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tween the increase in the isolation in our post-industrial The way the people who operate in this cultural
society and the desire for primitivism. It is almost as if space are in actuality, however, very different from I
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that as God was once usurped by science and money, the theory. The more you look at this phenomena J
it too shall necessarily collapse, but his time under the the more you realise that there is no one answer, but K
force of this new godless mass who have found belief instead we are able to perceive a set of answers that L
in some crypto-primitivism and a new hybrid culture. make up a larger question. That question I believe, is M
As such fashion, in all its manifestations, is the tool along the lines of this: we have a culture, one which N
by which these new pioneers of culture seek to bind is straining at its edges. The more diverse the world O
themselves: through self-expression one finds those becomes, or we perceive it to become, the more it P
who hold similar beliefs, those who have similar aims. pulls at its seams. The more we question it and pry Q
However, there is also an ideological factor to be at its secrets the more the stitches loosen. What we R
considered when we consider modes of dress or rituals really want to know is, where do we go from here?
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of display. It can clearly be seen that the members of The answer I think is found in this new interest in
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this ‘fashion’, or as Polhemus describes them, members primitivism, and especially in the ways in which we
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of a “style tribe”, are generally of an underclass which can combine it with ideas of the future. 
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Jorge Luis Borges: The Book Of Imaginary Beings email

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Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change cept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The
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your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality Facebook
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is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry and perception are rendered malleable and human, the
in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe. I
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‘Funes the Memorious’, ‘The Library of Babel’ and In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which J
‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Borges explores the make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of pen- K
concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge, ning a compendium of descriptions of fantastical be- L
a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging ings – dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an M
paths of reality which make possibility itself endless. obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably N
In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps be seen as treading water at best in most other authors, O
unique in literature – the master poet-in-prose of the – and in the case of most other authors the accusation P
infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes would probably be accurate. You can’t readily imagine Q
within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dream- James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales R
like and factual, making the fantastical real, and the for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What
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prosaic extraordinary. In ‘Pierre Menard, Author of could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work
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the Quixote’, he describes a man re-writing Cervantes’ from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista
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work, word for word, without reading the original, and on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of “he could
makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable, write about anything and make it wonderful” – the old V
and beautiful. In ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ another “I’d listen to him sing the phone book” cliché – for W
world – one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the X
thought – floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia format of a scholarly researched compendium allows Y
to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us ac- him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowl- Z
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subject of the fantastic complements completely the augurs of the future the memory of which survives in B
strange insights which inform his vision. the weird sisters of Macbeth. C
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The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius, D
unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salaman- and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men E
der. What Borges brings to his description of these of the day considered all these ‘imaginary beings’ as RSS
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creatures, which many readers may think themselves ‘real’, believed in every bit as much we today accept
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already familiar with, is the learning which marks much the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on tel- Facebook
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of his best work (‘research’ is somehow an inadequate evision screens. These beings informed the landscape
word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly. of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of I
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European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who J
Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches, K
Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather L
surface and recede as the moment demands. more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house, M
Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated the Harpies, who we learn “wielded weapons of gold N
with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of – lightning – and milked the clouds” , all these dwelt O
medicinal qualities: “Buddhists affirm that Dragons in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense P
are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked Q
concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred among them. R
cipher exists to express their exact number.” While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and S
The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and
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Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded show us far more of the subjects than we could have
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to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with
fixed the intervals of the fiery bird’s visits as once every narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is V
1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4,000 W
vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn’t just lie eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on X
down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into the back of the great fish Bahamut, “All the seas in the Y
Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches. world placed in one of the fish’s nostrils would be like Z

a mustard seed placed in the desert”. Under Bahamut is thing. Not at all. Borges is always aware the things More A
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water, and under the water darkness, “and beyond this he describes are as ridiculous as they are sublime, B
men’s knowledge does not reach”. The uncanniness of and a wryness sometimes peers through. Of the C
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cosmology is brought to us with a quiet aplomb, as it strange visionary Swedenbourg, who wrote with in- D
is with the “Fauna of Mirrors” where we learn that the credible vividness of the celestial beings he claimed E
people of Canton believed another hostile world was to know – “as the English are not very talkative, RSS
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behind every reflective surface, the people of whom are he fell into the habit of conversing with angels and
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enslaved into copying our actions for now, but whose Devils.” When the allegorical nature of some of the Facebook
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turn to rise will come, and whose uprising will be creatures is a little too heavy handed for his tastes, he
heralded by … a rogue yellow fish you may see in the is not above mocking it. (The hippogriff is the com- I
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mirror that shouldn’t be there. That such a potentially bination of a griffin and a horse which denotes the J
risible, laughable notion instead haunts the memory is impossible – Luis notes the Greek scholar Servius K
further testimony to Borges’ mastery. somewhat milked this by inventing the ‘fact’ that L
Occasionally the book has guest spots from other griffins must hate horses). Sillier creatures like the M
authors – mainly Kafka and C.S. Lewis – which, good Squonk, (of Aboriginal folklore, which cries to itself N
as they are, simply serve as contrast to the particular vi- until its body disintegrates) appear with a mordant O
sions of the grand editor. Elsewhere in the bestiary we dryness. The entire ‘Fauna of the United States’ are P
meet Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel and Aniel, a four headed of a somewhat facetious nature, such as the axehan- Q
creature surrounded by rings full of eyes, as envisioned dle hound – shaped like an axe, and which eats only R
by the prophet Ezekiel. One of its heads is that of an axes. But what Borges never does is pour contempt S
ox, one of man, one of lion, and one of eagle, “each on the fantastical – he knows its importance too well.
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one went in the direction of its face, so imaginable as Borges knew that while the religions may be wrong
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to be uncanny.” Borges is adept at describing things, in their claim to give us morality, they and their myths
which, in terms of physical human description, cannot have more far more valid claim in giving us a sense V
be described. When H.P. Lovecraft does this, he horri- of wonder, helping the impossible peer in, making W
fies. When Borges does it, he simply entrances. life, rather than existence, possible. It is in no way a X
With all this talk of mystique and wonder, you betrayal of rationalism to find a sense of transcend- Y
could be forgiven for thinking this book a po-faced ent mystery and awe in the Moslem Jinn (people Z

of fire, as angels are of light and men of earth), the we inhabit, would not exist. Part of Borges’ very real More A
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Jewish Golem, (a kind of ancient clay android), or the genius is to illuminate these corners of what makes us B
angelic hordes of in the Christian-informed visions human, with a wisdom so acute it meets itself round C
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of Swedenbourg. They don’t exist, never have, and full circle so as to appear childlike, an endless loop of D
countless crimes have been committed in the names of wild possibility. E
the theologies which conjured them up. But these are Not bad for a book about dragons, witches and RSS
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beings without which the world of the mind, the world gnomes eh? No, he’s not bad this Borges. 
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Angela Bourke: The Burning Of Bridget Cleary email

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Robin Askew
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Enjoyed The Blair Witch Project? Then immerse your- two women. Some of them remonstrated with the hus-
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self in this engrossing and exhaustively researched true band, who insisted that it was not his wife who was Facebook
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story from late 19th-century Ireland. The facts of the burning but a witch, whom he confidently expected to
case are relatively straightforward: in 1895, 26-year-old disappear up the chimney. When this didn’t happen, he I
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Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tip- wrapped a sheet around the charred body and buried it J
perary. Local rumour claimed that she had been taken in a dyke near the family home. K
by fairies to their fort of Kylenagranagh, from where There is, of course, a great deal more to this tragic L
she would eventually emerge riding a white horse. But tale than these stark details convey. Dublin-based M
when her badly burned body was recovered from a shal- academic Angela Bourke brilliantly sets the case in its N
low grave a week later, her husband Michael, father, social and political context, revealing its significance O
aunt and four cousins were arrested. The subsequent at the cusp of change between an older world of folk- P
trial made headlines even in the London press. lore and fairy-belief and the new age of literacy and Q
According to contemporary newspaper reports, industry. While Bridget and her husband were childless R
it emerged in court at nearby Clonmel that Michael and newly prosperous, their jealous peers were not, and
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Cleary had believed his ailing wife was a witch. He the instigator of her unpleasant demise was a toothless,
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gave her herbs from a local herb doctor and then, with limping, increasingly isolated patriarch whose wan-
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the aid of other male members of the household, held ing power over the fearful countryfolk derived from
her over the kitchen fire and called upon her to say, in his ample knowledge of fairy-forts, ghosts, and other V
the name of God, that she was not his wife. Finally, supernatural malarkey. W
she was stripped of her clothing, knocked to the floor, Equally significant in the reporting of the Cleary X
covered in paraffin oil and allowed to burn to death case was the ongoing Home Rule movement. The Y
while being watched by eight relatives – six men and Unionist press seized on this outbreak of ‘barbarism’ Z
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as evidence of the locals’ lawlessness and conse- you may need to remind yourself that these people More A
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quent unsuitability for independence; elsewhere, it burned a woman alive, or stood around and watched B
simply fanned the flames of crude anti-Irish racism. while it happened, but by the time you put the book C
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Bourke’s exemplary scholarship teases out many down, you at least have a greater understanding of D
such strands from this horrific case, evincing a how this gruesome event came to pass and why it E
powerful empathy for all involved. Occasionally, still reverberates to this day.  RSS
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Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine email

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Jason Weaver
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Before his passport read “novelist”, Michael Bracewell their occupying armies.” According to Bracewell, this
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learnt his trade on the first rush of British style maga- Arcady satisfies the “need within the psyche of Eng- Facebook
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zines. Much of Bracewell’s work from the mid-80s lishness to look back to an idealized past…” Nostalgia
could be found in Arena, sibling to The Face but with is apparently intrinsic to our national culture. I
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a considerably higher brow. Sadly, the magazine got The title of the book comes, presumably, from a line J
crushed in the publishing stampede that has instead in The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’. Bracewell’s cause finds a K
brought respectability to top shelf reading. After the strong ally in Morrissey, who sang “A rush and a push L
breakdown-and-prozac cocktail of his last novel Saint and the land that we stand on is ours”. Morrissey is the M
Rachel – a moving meditation on mental distress conscience of lost Arcady: beleaguered, revolutionary, N
– Bracewell has resumed his former cultural com- pastoral and drenched in the perfume of the past. O
mentary. This time the canvas is broader. England Is England Is Mine, however, wants to plot the entire P
Mine purports to have a thesis but is more a collection century through these tinted spectacles. The opening Q
of essays masquerading as a whole, short stories rather chapter deals with the Culture And Anarchy paranoia R
than a novel. His subject is pop. Does this mean pop of the new century and, in doing so, attempts to lay
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as in popular, Pop as in Art, or pop as in Top Of The? foundations. We drop in on Wilde and Waugh and For-
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Well, Bracewell would argue all three. I’m not sure ster to see if they think Old England is dying. We take
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he’s right. in a movie, a War and hear a few poems and songs. It
He claims that domestic art of the 20th century is al- isn’t always clear where we are going. I mean, who V
ways fighting for its own piece of England: “The rebels invited Enid Blyton to this party? Bracewell might be W
in England’s Arcady … are defending the Arcadian excellent on the fine details but his sense of overall X
values that they love, passionately, from what they rec- design is rickety. Whenever his theme comes up, it Y
ognise as abuse at the hands of self-serving tyrants and seems frankly incidental. Z
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Surprisingly, this hardly matters. The book becomes nor does he bring his laptop to the disco. Reynolds, More A
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fascinating, at least to this reader, once it puts the Hebdige and Marcus, on the other hand, those other B
Penguin Modern Classics back on the shelf and turns professors of pop, make their appeal to the eggheads. It C
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on the stereo. In fact, Bracewell writes in such a way doesn’t often translate. When Bracewell’s taste and wit D
to make Art seem a mere rehearsal for pop’s Great compound, the results can be dee-liteful. Of The Cure E
Performance. Bracewell gives both time and energy to he says, “The soul is not so much bared as reduced to RSS
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what he clearly loves the best – his record collection. wandering around in its dressing gown.”
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What is most engaging about England Is Mine is By dealing with relatively unacknowledged areas Facebook
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Bracewell’s insistence on treating pop music as an of ‘prole art’, the book proposes a convincing alterna-
explosive and pensive form, often most thoughtful pre- tive to the received canon, pop or otherwise. Mark E I
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cisely at its most physical. By the time the Mods arrive, Smith’s output is seen as an oeuvre and reverence is J
Bracewell is really guzzling the gas. He casts them as paid to largely forgotten individuals like John Cooper K
smart Modernists rather than the retro-obsessed, tent- Clarke. As such, the approach fresh and fruitful. The L
wearing, hairdrier-riders of public imagination. The entirety doesn’t quite convince the jury, but the mixture M
Mods are asking what others are afraid to: of art forms does have the advantage of comparing pop N
“The question, in fact, was a massive: ‘Who am I?’ with literature favourably, a rare admission. O
The male sensibility in English pop, as it built its muscles There are a few factual errors, the most ironic of P
through Mod, was both a reaction against adolescent which is accidentally renaming Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Q
(even teenage) conformity, and a belief that pop could Back In Anger’ as ‘Sally Can Wait’. Noel Gallagher’s R
be a spiritual quest through the boredom and hostility tempering of the Angry Young Man could have become S
of modern English life in search of self-knowledge.” the lynch pin in a discussion of Britpop’s conservatism
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Bracewell is right in there with his subject. and the oversight is uncharacteristic of Bracewell’s
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The gulf between academia and getting down with normal attentiveness.
The Kids is a whole language apart, which is why ‘qual- Unfortunately, England Is Mine closes as weakly V
ity’ journalism often lacks credibility. It requires deft- as it began. The 90s are telescoped into a single W
ness to pull the trick without the cards all falling from chapter. The passion that illuminates the finest parts X
your sleeve. Bracewell manages it better than most. of the book has withered. The verdict is that the Y
He rarely attempts to score points with the cred police, needle has stuck, repeating the same phrase with Z

decreasing clarity. We exist in a kind of shopping From The Who’s reworking of the Union Jack to More A
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Arcady in which Bracewell consigns the 90s as “an The Chemical Brothers’ smash-and-grab approach B
age of cultural sampling”, the victory of the past to sonic material this has been pop’s prime attrac- C
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over the future: “there is a sense in our archival tion. At its best, pop (and Pop) has no reverence for D
condition, as nostalgic consumers scavenging for the past and is hell-bent on the future. In this sense, E
bargain rarities of the past, that a car boot sale can pop will always be intrinsically Modernist. RSS
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double as a faculty of Cultural Studies.” This is a Michael Bracewell’s book reminds us that England
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mistake; the future is created from the ruins of the really is ours for the taking and, for that, it is a stimu- Facebook
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past and every music that Bracewell celebrates has lating read which does ample justice to its subject. It
hastened that destruction. It is not nostalgia but the is possible for a book to fail utterly in its designs yet I
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reverse, a hatred of the past that attempts to confine still be a thorough success. I found England Is Mine J
us. We want to break it into little pieces and build an inspiration. To demand anything more would just K
anew. This is as true for our decade as any other. be greed.  L
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Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn email

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I judge newspaper TV reviewers by a very high stand- acidly over modern society with TV as its launch-pad.
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ard indeed. Why the hell shouldn’t I? Let’s face it, this Brooker’s writing persona is self-deprecating, Facebook
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is the dream job any human being can have. Sitting, neurotic, unpretentious, and above all seriously pis-
scratching your mardy arse whilst staring out the flick- sed off at the televisual shite shovelled his way. He I
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ers that would bombard your face anyway and getting has a real genius for brief, cutting description which J
paid for it. Jesus! They have to be very entertaining highlights its victim as expertly as it destroys them. K
indeed to offset the sickening pang of envy I get while In the main, his scatological, violent epigrams sim- L
reading one. They rarely live up. ply speak for themselves. Rarely as gut-churningly M
For a few years Jim Shelley aka Tapehead in The offensive as his XXX rated old web site TV Go Home N
Guardian Guide managed to fit the bill. He was witty, they are probably more effective and hilarious for their O
acerbic, mostly accurate, and excreted his metaphysi- relative subtlety (we’re talking very relative here.) Try P
cal bile duct in a pleasingly over-the-top manner. When these for size: Q
he left in 2000 I was deeply worried (what a dangerous – On The Generation Game: “Jim scampers onstage, R
existence I lead!) Which safe trendoid would cast their winking and twitching like a man with a fish-hook
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yawnsome ‘wry eye’ over events now? But thankfully stuck in his glans, and immediately launches into a
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they didn’t choose the safe option, they chose Charlie comic pantomime of such awkward, ill-conceived
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Brooker. And he made Shelley look like an amalgam of clunkiness, you can’t help but wonder if its been
Dennis Norden and Jenny Bond. scripted by a human with a laptop or a dog with a V
Put aside any justifiable lit-snobbery you may have in Fisher Price Activity Centre.” W
thinking that a collection of TV reviews cannot make a – On Davina McCall: “It’s like her brain’s been X
great book. In 99% of cases you’d be right, but not here. spooned out and replaced by a rotating glitter-ball.” Y
Brooker’s is a glorious, venomous vision which blasts – On a Steps TV special: “Ho ho ho, we all love Steps Z
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really don’t we? No. They’re not harmless fun; they’re of everyone) Brooker actually has a humanity about More A
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slapdash trash. H is not a lovable scamp: he’s a blank him seemingly absent in our latter-day Swift. For all B
eyed glove puppet with half the charisma of a discarded his violent imagery, a longstanding vein in his work is a C
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ping-pong bat rotating slowly in a pig trough full of contempt for the kind of sniggering nihilists who watch D
rainwater. This represents untertainment at its finest genuine suffering for kicks. This can perhaps be seen E
and will be warmly welcome by anyone who regularly best in his dissection of some feeble ‘comedy awards’ RSS
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sits in front of the box with a loaded shotgun in their programme door-stepping Les Dennis about his break-
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mouth, trying to pluck up the courage.” up with his wife: Facebook
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And, more obscurely, on finding a DVD boxed “Perhaps I’m a wuss but I think harassing the
set of Planet Of The Apes with Charlton Heston dis- heartbroken for funnies is disgraceful. Clearly the I
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consolate before the Statue of Liberty on the cover: producer, Dan Clapton, believes that human suffering J
“What next? A special edition of Seven in a com- equals big guffaws, so if anyone has any first-hand K
memorative case mocked up to resemble Gwynneth accounts of him having his heart broken, send me the L
Paltrow’s severed head?” juicy details and I’ll reprint them here so we can have M
Childish? Yes. Hilarious? Well I think so. If it was all a good hearty ho-ho together. After all, it’s just a bit of N
fantasy disembowelling of nob-ends in colourful lan- fun, right Dan? Right?” O
guage Brooker could be dismissed as a one-trick pony, Of course it helps that I agree with most of what P
even if that trick is astonishingly amusing. But there’s a he says but even when describing his affection for Q
real vision at work here; stinging, jaded eyes surveying David Dickinson (ugh!), Monarch Of The Glen (gah!) R
a Boschean hellscape of demonic coke-crazed execs and, worst of all Friends (arrrggghhhhhhhhh!) he’s S
ladling poisonous gruel down the mouths of uncom- still funny. I dare say he’d have a few words to say
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plaining dribble-mouthed buffoons. about my soft spot for Judge John Deed too. We’re
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And yet for all the apparent misanthropy there’s a all entitled to like some shite in our lives. Indeed,
cornered and bruised altruism at work here too. Brook- it’s Brooker’s recognition of this, the simultaneous V
er recently wrote Nathan Barley with the immortal fascination and revulsion he has for the likes of Pop W
Chris Morris (the best thing on telly despite what the Idol and Big Brother that makes it very far from some X
nay-sayers nay-say) but while the latter is the greater highbrow denunciation of TV as a whole. This is a Y
comedic and satirical talent (not just of Brooker, but guy who loves the possibilities of what television has Z

to offer, and an enjoyment for even the more throwa- phrases from the piece; “A fascist chorus line”, “An ag- More A
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way aspects of the medium. The Hulkish anger at so ing thundercat”, “A pastel sketch of a lonely duckling” B
much of what he sees is akin to that of a neglected “Do spiders live alone?” This has the effect of spoiling C
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lover. How dare his great love try to fob him of with the surprise within and is uncalled for, like trailers that D
such crap, not well made crap but the likes of The spell out the plot of a film. Two: I’ve read all of them E
Generation Game which “drops off the low end of the before and remember them all anyway. But unless RSS
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stupidity spectrum, to a point where the human brain you’re a sad bastard Guardian reader who has stored
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is incapable of interpreting its signal”? all your old Guides together in a handy binder; you Facebook
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I have only two criticisms of this excellent book. should still get this to have the brilliance of the writing
One: unlike the columns from which they are taken to hand. And if you’ve not read him before; just buy it; I
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they are each headed by one of the most memorable you’re missing out.  J
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Charles Bukowski: Born Into This email

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Pedro Blas Gonzalez
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Charles Bukowski was a solitary man and a courageous prostituted as a ‘theoretical’ entity – but rather one that
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writer. Without daddy’s money to deliver him into high like Eric Hoffer, actually worked for a living. He was Facebook
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places or the protective cloak of a godfather, Hank born in Andernach, Germany in 1920.
forged his way through the world with the sweat of his When asked when he realized he was a writer, he I
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brow and the calluses on his hands. answered: “Nobody ever realizes they’re a writer. They J
Perhaps the greatest compliment that his readers can only think they’re a writer.” He began writing when K
afford him is that of being a self-made man. Publish- he was 13 years of age. He continues, “I just found a L
ing houses, literary magazines – or otherwise – and pencil and I started writing. And I filled this notebook M
academic circles are all rife with opportunists, an full of words. This was the first time the mechanism N
unlimited supply of self-promoters, bigots and moral exposed itself.” O
Lilliputians. These are all fine examples of the relative Bukowski: Born Into This is a documentary that P
and selective relativism that defines the radicalism of follows the trajectory of the writer’s life until his Q
late-modernity. Bukowski felt the wrath of all of these death in 1994. Directed by John Dullaghan, what we R
entities throughout his life. But he had talent, and the encounter in this film is an unadulterated and edgy
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rest, as they say is history. look at the writer of Post Office, Women, Factotum,
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Bukowski’s story is one of genuine sentiment, de- and Hot Water Music.
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termination and a stubborn will that refused to become The film follows Bukowski through the 1940s as he
objectified by the resistance that the world offers all true travelled the country gathering life experiences, through V
visionaries. He went at it alone. An underground, cult his initial attempt at journalism in LA City College, his W
writer who did not readily attain popular acclaim until poetry readings at San Francisco’s City Lights Poets X
the last decade of his life, Bukoswki’s body of work is a Theater, the women in his life and culminating with the Y
testament to the working man – not the straw one that is final months of his life. We witness Bukowski reading Z
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a poem that touches any sentient person’s nerves: “It’s took in 1952, his having to work evenings, and his More A
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not the large things that send a man to a madhouse. will to write during the morning. Admirable too, is his B
Death, he is ready for, or, murder, incest, robbery, fire, relentless will – sending out poems daily and getting C
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flood. No. It’s the continuing series of small tragedies rejected – while he earned his living as a truck driver. D
that send a man to a madhouse…” Bukowski was rich in worldly knowledge. Con- E
Whatever we come to think of the man, he readily sider his well-adjusted, don’t-tell-me-bedtime-stories RSS
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acknowledges that the best compliment he can receive understanding evident in the following lines: “There
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is that he was “a good duker.” Taking the exigencies of is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the Facebook
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life in the chin, he never backed down from adversity. average human being to supply any given army on
In the end, we are reminded that, “What Matters Most any given day. And the best at murder are those who I
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is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.” This is the preach against it. And the best at hate are those who J
true-to-life wisdom of a man who lived out a very diffi- preach love. And the best at war – finally – are those K
cult dream, and one who never came close to benefiting who preach peace…” L
from a silver spoon. Bukowski had very little patience for laziness and M
The film takes the major events of Bukowski’s life people who do not meet the difficulties and demands N
and makes them bare. The viewer is treated to the of life head on. He disliked hippies because of their O
story of his first published works in Harlequin Maga- bourgeois, pampered refusal to get their hands soiled P
zine, its editor, Barbara Fry later becoming his wife. by work. His upbringing during the depression had Q
We also witness the hard times, how he lived on one given him a sound appreciation of the toil that people R
candy bar per day. We come upon Bukowski’s resolve who do not cut corners undergo throughout their lives. S
never to quit even though he encountered rejection Bukowski suffered a great deal from the resistance
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after rejection. Consider his wisdom as displayed in offered him by naysayers. His Notes Of A Dirty Old
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his poem ‘Oh, Yes’: “There are worse things than be- Man columns first appeared in a little magazine called
ing alone but it often takes decades to realize this … Open City. When this folded in 1969, he continued his V
and there’s nothing worse than too late.” column in the LA Free Press. W
We also laugh along with Bukowski’s stubborn Finally achieving critical and financial success in X
refusal to be anything but his own man. His struggles the last decade of his life – his major break com- Y
with the now well-known US Post Office job that he ing at the hands of John Martin, publisher of Black Z

Sparrow Press – we are privy to the life changes alcohol-induced profanity any longer, as that persona More A
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that the older writer underwent. No longer as tense is slowly put to rest. In the end we watch him dealing B
and defensive as he once was, Bukowski now seems with leukaemia, which eventually took his life – an C
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more introverted, the wisdom that he earned now episode that his readers will easily recognize in the D
being something that he kept to himself. At the end interplay that takes place between “lady death” and E
of the documentary we do not see the effects of his the protagonist in his last novel, Pulp.  RSS
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Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush email

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Ben Granger
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Julie Burchill: donchajusluver??!! the praises of history’s greatest monsters (Thatcher
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Well, yes, actually. There once was a time when I and Stalin) whilst occasionally drawing the ire of the Facebook
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agreed with all my Graun reading friends “that bigoted Commission for Racial Equality?
bitch” should be humanely shot, but it seems a very The short answer is the sheer energy, insight and wit I
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long while ago now. My obsession with her venomous amongst all the shit. J
vitriol went from fascinated horror to perverse admira- Reading one of Julie’s better columns is to ride the K
tion in the time it took to squeak “public hanging” in a rapids. A violent tug of agreement here, a buffet side- L
Bristol accent. Every Saturday when I dutifully bought ways into the realms of entertaining irrelevance there, M
my Graun it was, without fail, to her page I turned recoiling at the scathing extremism whilst simultane- N
first. Whilst my comrades sang “ding-dong the witch ously entranced at its vicious and shameless perversity. O
is dead” when she left last year, I felt Id lost a limb, an And along the way, just occasionally finding something P
itchy, scabby limb perhaps but a part of me nonethe- you may agree with that you never thought of before. Q
less. I wasn’t going to follow her to The Times though. And yes, I do love a good wind-up merchant. No- R
Let’s not go nuts here. one can match her for sheer vicious spite. When she’s
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Now I’m not one to “admire the candour” of ‘politi- massacring the vacuous world of celebrity it reminds
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cally incorrect’ columnists as a rule. Watching Richard me of the old Day Today headline “Crazed Wolves In
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Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Taki Store A Bad Mistake Admits Mothercare.” And for
being sodomised by chimpanzees whilst devouring all the knee-jerk reaction, I was amazed to find how V
the bloated corpses of Paul Johnson and Simon Heffer frequently her targets deserved everything (or at least W
at gunpoint would be my dream reality TV viewing. nearly everything) they got. X
I’m an overpaid bigot, get me out of here! So why The bourgeoisie, still dehumanising the working- Y
my weak-kneed ardour for a woman unafraid to sing class, but cloaking their exploitation under a silky Z
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Benneton-shroud of faux-progress. The ludicrous she said and reeling at the rest was a damn sight more More A
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irritancy of pontificating film stars. The moral, hypo- edifying than vaguely nodding at 60% of what Polly B
critical black hole of most journalism. The spineless Toynbee puts out. I don’t read her Times columns, C
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and simpering betrayal of New Labour and the ‘post and by all accounts she’s gone into manic pro-war, D
feminists’ (offering to remove their clitoris and voting extreme Zionist overdrive now, which even I might E
rights if they found the new era of relative equality find too much. But when I hear about her typically RSS
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so awful.) She’d left most of her pro-Thatcher phase savage dissection of the loathsome neo-snobbery of
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behind by the time she’d gone to the Graun; this was a those sniffing at “chavs” I still think “that’s my Julie!” Facebook
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brutal patriot-Commie bruiser. I found myself punch- with a warm glow.
ing the air in agreement (metaphorically of course, I When it comes to her books though, even a fan such I
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am a Graun reader after all), overjoyed that she’d hit as myself remains a sceptic. There was no way I was J
the nail on the head with far greater accuracy than her going to read her hagiographies of Princess Di and K
more measured colleagues. Beckham, no matter what clever class-conscious leaps L
Of course I still strongly disagreed with vast she was doing to laud her unworthy heroes. M
amounts of what she said; the death penalty, Israel, And the fiction? I once read a chapter of Ambition N
Ireland, invading Iraq, paedophiles and the talent of and found it pretty awful, an unconvincing English O
Gareth Gates springing most immediately to mind. take on Dallas and Dynasty, neither of which I liked in P
But even then my perceptions were challenged and the first place. I actually picked up Sugar Rush, Julie’s Q
above all I was entertained. She could even ignorantly lesbian-driven “first novel aimed at a teenage audience” R
defame my idols George Orwell and Mike Leigh as a kind of aversion therapy. This is a woman who S
and I’d still lap it up. When she went into perversity now claims to support George Bush for God’s sake. I
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overdrive, calling for public hanging, and claiming needed to quell my ongoing crush for her perversity.
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suicides should buck their bloody ideas up I just found Surely this rubbish would put me off for good?
the middle-class outrage of those taking the bait on Sugar Rush tells the tale of 15-year-old Kim, a V
the letters pages hilarious (bringing to mind one of her middle-class girl at a private school, who is forced W
classic put-downs “now, before you get out your pink into the nearby rough-as-shite comprehensive due to X
Forever Friends notepaper.”). the financial hardship of her stuffy dad who’s been left Y
Basically, violently agreeing with about 40% of what holding the kids by her feckless mother, herself still Z

trying to live her teens in her 40s. All the familiar themes from her columns crop up, More A
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Left behind by her hard-nosed friend “Saint”, Kim sometimes down to the same wording. The sanc- B
falls under the thrall of the head hard-bitch at the new timonious futility of well-meaning liberalism (the C
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comp, Maria Sweet, aka “Sugar”. Sugar is rough as hell private school and the comp come together in farcical D
and live as wires, and drags the prissy yet uncomplain- ‘exchange’ sessions, a pseudy drama troupe resonant E
ing Kim into her world of ecstasy, vodka, dance music of the one from The League Of Gentleman displaying RSS
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and sarky-faced rebellion, offering her a tang of free- to braying teens the evils of homophobia); the sad
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dom she’s never tasted before. Doubt-ridden, fucked up atavism of ‘the family dinner-table’ and its depressing Facebook
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Kim falls for her sexually as well as spiritually. Their middle-class accoutrements (the means by which her
relationship crashes up and down, side-to-side on the sad dad tries to hold the family together); the hypocrisy I
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winds of teenage abandon. But can such a bliss-ridden of anti-racists who hate the poor (ex-best friend Saint J
union of opposites last? is a bourgeois black who despises “white-trash” Sugar K
What strikes you while reading this is that Julie can with a passion); the joys and contradictions of lesbian- L
only write one way, and that every word in Sugar Rush, ism, higher education being for losers, the fetish for M
no matter who’s speaking it, is very much her own. Soviet-Army uniforms (an art project of Kim’s gone N
Indeed the three main characters are a split triumvirate wrong) … Christ, she even manages to shoe-horn in O
of Jules herself, every bit as cute as the ones in the her newfound passion for Lutheranism (don’t ask…) P
Catholicism and Freudianism she so loathes (actually I The result, is, I’m afraid to say, a lot of fun. Yes it’s Q
don’t know she hates Freud, I’m just guessing). tacky and obvious at times, and yes both the dialogue R
Kim is the shy, intelligent, doubting, deep, wry and thoughts in the book really do stretch credulity S
side; Sugar the spirit of wild working class abandon occasionally too, ringing pretty false as realism. This
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that Julie so admires; while mum Stella is the shallow, is Julie talking, and no-one talks like that, not even
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formerly working-class but lavish spending strumpet Julie in real life. The over-excitable metaphors are
who thinks of no-one but herself and has abandoned endearing and evocative at times, but sometimes they V
her kids, the very demonic caricature of Julie herself really make you cringe. W
the Daily Mail laid on her. Believe me, I’m not play- But you know, much to my regret, I’m not a teenage X
ing slap-dash Raj Persaud here (that being a tautology girl; and that’s the audience for this book. And I re- Y
anyway); it’s pretty damn plain. ally do think they’ll love it, like the young mum I saw Z

avidly reading it on the bus the other day (I’d better I won’t spoil the ending, but I must say I find it a More A
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stop there, lest Julie lead a misguided anti-paedo lynch pretty terrible cop-out by Julie’s standards. A triumph of B
mob against me.) The thing about Julie’s voice is that middle-class safety against the working-class ‘other’. C
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it is indeed perennially adolescent, and this suits the You traitor Julie! What would Uncle Joe say?! But it D
book perfectly. She still seems to be a lost teen aching is I’m afraid to say … sweet, indeed Kim’s whole tale E
to shock the grown-ups. resonates a certain empathy which brings a warm glow RSS
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Much has been made of the “explicit content” of to even to this jaded heart.
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this book (not least by the cover), but in reality there’s So, once again, I’ve been won over. What can this Facebook
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very little muck to be had here (there is one scene of evil woman, this “sociopath” and “moral cretin” (her
group sex, but nothing is described). But she brings the words) do to finally put me off her? Defend the images I
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bitchiness, the longing, the loneliness, the SHOUTING of torture in Abu Ghraib? Oh dear, I’ve just heard she’s J
to make your point that are all part of the teenage con- already done that. Time for more soul-searching you K
dition to life very well. bad, bad boy.  L
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Interview [published June 2005] B
Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie email

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Ben Granger collides with Julie Burchill over several bottles of wine to seek
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out the dreadful truth on chavs, Stalin, Ariel Sharon and Morrissey RSS
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“Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint” There’s no time for a biog here, but suffice to say
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runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancas- my longstanding admiration for the deliriously violent Facebook
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trian abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest punch of her writing, often despite myself, was why I
shit-stirring iconic hack of our times, I wasn’t so much found myself here on the day. No I don’t agree with a I
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afraid of Julie Burchill not living up to her reputation as tonnes of what she says, but for me she has obtained J
living up to it too much. Would she be gentle with me? “Benefit of Clergy”, a phrase Orwell used about Dalí K
If Julie needs an introduction, it’s tough knowing (even though Julie hates Orwell too: worst offence in the L
where to start. Running away from her working-class world in my book). This basically means offensiveness M
Bristol childhood at the age of 17 to scribble speed- is to some extent excused by how well it’s delivered, N
driven venom for the NME at the height of punk, and what’s behind it. But mainly how it’s delivered. It’s O
marrying and deserting Tony Parsons prior to queening what separates Jerry Sadowitz from Jim Davidson, and P
it over the Groucho journo set, skipping gaily from South Park from the Sunday Sport. Q
highly paid column to spiky column in a variety of Julie’s profile is higher now than for many a year after R
newspapers across the land. Enraging the Left with her finally breaking into the previously shunned medium of
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hard-line anti-liberalism and some-time Thatcher wor- TV. A Channel 4 adaptation of her lesbian teen-scream
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ship, the Right with her brazen pro-Soviet Communism novel Sugar Rush will be screened later this year, whilst
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and hatred of the bourgeoisie, and everyone with her her typically pro-prole, contrary and acidly delivered
particular and peculiar blend of narcissism, iconoclasm defence of the much maligned phenomenon of Chavs V
and rudeness. Leaving second husband Cosmo Landes- on the eponymous Sky One documentary last February W
man for an affair with Charlotte Raven, subsequently slung a Molotov cocktail amongst the dinner party set X
shacking up with Charlotte’s younger brother to whom once again. Y
she is now married. Etcetera etcetera. The journey down South is made all the more Z

surreal for me by being stuck on the last leg in the has a brash décor of pink walls and tiger skin couches More A
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train from Euston to Brighton in the next carriage to which mirrors its owner exquisitely, as does the louche B
our glorious leader Anthony Blair, a month before sprinkling of bottles, ash-trays and smoke. Oh yes, and C
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his phyrric election victory, who graciously smirks the small Israeli flag atop the mantelpiece, given her D
over when I take a snap of him. I can’t stand the guy oft-avowed Zionism. Whilst I get my MP3 recorder E
but little plebby me feels like Alice In Famousland. complete with my son’s kiddies mike together, I men- RSS
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Weird, weird. I get to wander for too short a time tion my fellow train traveller which gets the surprising
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round the rather beautiful town of Brighton (never response: “God, he’s sexy, innee? You’re a man, you Facebook
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before visited) with its poignantly derelict pier, until wouldn’t understand.” I also mention how attractive
finally getting the cab round to her spacious detached I found Brighton’s bohemian Trafalgar Street. “God I
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home on the Hove border. Quick fag, deep breath, I never go there. Full of dossers.” I mention a couple J
down the huge garden into the valley of whatsits. of pubs I’ve stopped in (not mentioning I was there to K
Julie answers the door with an imperious handshake steady my awe-struck nerves) “I don’t really go to pubs L
as she invites me to the lair. “You’re Ben? You must much to be honest with you. I don’t want to be the mad M
come in,” intones the famous high-pitched quickfire yet woman sitting in the corner!” N
lilting Bristol burr. She’s half the size she was two years Generous host to a fault, Julie even sends Zoe and O
back and looks lovely in her black and white ensemble. Nadia to the offie when I mention I’d like red wine P
I’d heard she was a nervy character around strangers, which isn’t on offer. When I finally fidgetilly set up she Q
but whilst her initial demeanour is slightly distant, she directs myself and Gary to the house gym- now disused R
is clearly at pains to put me at ease, even introducing me and decorated by a large Cuban flag representing the S
to her fellow guests with the unnervingly gallant “This other great love of her ideological life, Communism
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is Ben Granger, the great writer from Spike Magazine.” – to conduct the interview. Sitting cross legged on the
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(Fuckin ‘ell!) floor we embark.
The guests are Gary Mulholland, music journalist So , how was writing for teenagers different from V
and author of This Is Uncool, Zoe Williams from The writing her novels for adults? W
Guardian (both in capacity of friends rather than inter- “Well, I’ll be honest with you, the first novel I wrote X
viewers), her teenage son Jack, and her cleaner (and for adults was very successful but the other two went Y
bestest friend the world) Nadia. The Burchill abode right down the toilet. So it wasn’t like a choice to write Z

for young people, I just thought no-one’s sitting around column brought to life; one-sided, contrary, mixing More A
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waiting to hear from me in the adult world so let’s inflict pop culture and high sociological comment with B
it on some other poor …” humour and venom. Its subject was the eponymous; C
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Yes, but were you consciously writing in a different way? the baseball capped, Burberry clad, gold jewellery D
“Oh yeah, yeah! You don’t have to try so hard do bedecked folk devils that walk down every high street E
you? There’s a certain reason why people who 20 years in Britain. The butt of every middle-class sneery joke. RSS
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ago would have been writing literary novels, like Gary, As per often Julie has bloody mindedly found a devil-
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like myself, aren’t doing it now. I think I’d fall at the ish cause to defend; a hate-figure for snooty Telegraph Facebook
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first hurdle. But my immediacy, my lack of education toffs, Mail paranoiac patio-sniffers and Guardian
which stop me from doing what Ian McEwan or [mut- liberal snoots alike. I
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ters scornfully] Martin Amis do is part of what we love Asked about why this issue was so close to her heart, J
about ourselves, and what suited a book like this … it the full ferocity of her anger really takes off. The turbo K
was very pleasurable and it felt very normal to do.” Bristol voice takes off, hard in vowels, soft in tone, L
Given your typically hard-line on paedophilia, did ruthless in content. M
you ever feel there was a tension in writing a lesbian “Now, I’m a very idle person and I’m very relaxed, N
novel about 15-year-old girls? I’d heard there was more and my ideal dream is just to lie on the sofa all day O
sex scenes in it initially before they were cut out? eating chocolates. But when I do get agitated and when P
“Naaah there was never any real sex in it because I do get a bee in my bonnet I DO go all the fucking Q
I thought that would be unbearably pervy and a total way. When I was told about things like Chavscum [the R
contradiction of everything I stood for. Don’t go there. website dedicated to promoting hatred of all things S
Though for the TV show apparently she’s older, like “chav”] which I hadn’t known about, and the abuse
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21 so they can make it a bit more hardcore. Is that a they were putting out, I’m afraid I saw red. It seemed
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horrible thing to say? No if it was kids it would be hor- to me that the kind of people who are doing things like
rible wouldn’t it? I’ve had no input whatsoever in the Chavscum ten years ago would have been racists, and V
programme so far but next week I’m going on-set. And would have been that loathsome and that disgusting. W
I’m looking forward to it.” Now they can’t be racists because of the CRE and cer- X
The drama is still to come but the documentary has tain laws that have been passed – quite rightly. But the Y
already been screened. Chavs was a classic Burchill white working class are now the only people you can Z

fucking hate with impunity, and I felt I just had to raise “I just wanted to punch her fucking face in! Listen, More A
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my fucking voice.” I’ve got a friend who thinks al Quaeda have ‘got a B
It should be stressed there is no editorial trickery point’, I can sit with him and listen to that shit, I can C
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involved in Julie’s broadsides here. This is simply how listen to taxi drivers being racist. But when I sit with D
she talks. Very, very fast too. The only other person I a middle-class person going on, I don’t care if it is a E
can think whose words race along as fast as they think kind of prejudice, I just wanna kill the fuckers and I RSS
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is Patrick Moore. think you’ve got no right to say a fucking word, you
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“It’s so tempting to be lured in by the defence of just don’t know fucking anything about anything. To Facebook
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humour and irony. One of the worst things you can say me, it’s not about race, there’s the middle class and
to somebody is they’ve got no sense of humour. If you the working class; us against them. Well, there’s three I
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look at the personal columns, you’ll often see people groups really but that’s the upper class who don’t count J
admitting that they’re ugly or not bright or fat – no-one cos they’re fucking retarded … but put a middle-class K
will ever admit to having no sense of humour. It’s the person in front of me, I don’t care if they’re left-wing or L
final insult, the final thing no-one will admit to. But I right-wing, talk to them for five minutes, and the filthy M
didn’t want to get the fucking joke. If there was a joke fucking snob in them will come out.” N
I didn’t want to get it, just like I didn’t want to get it Even when angry she is increasingly at ease, and O
when my parents were watching Love Thy Neighbour warm in her demeanour. She doesn’t laugh much but P
and thought it was funny to call someone “nig-nog.” does grin mischievously from time to time. Possibly Q
Instinctively, I just thought it was disgusting. To me libellous comments about La Feltz follow. But what R
laughter and great humour comes from taking on peo- would you say to people who claim that chavs are only S
ple above you on the social scale.” a part of the working-class, and that criticising the
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The documentary featured an extremely ill-tem- former is not criticising the latter?
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pered spat with TV “personality” Vanessa Feltz, who “People say that to me trying to be nice, I always
opined that her very worthwhile existence should not say ‘Don’t do me any fucking favours!’ When some- V
be sullied by having to pay her taxes in supporting one tries to differentiate between the deserving and W
welfare payments to such dread creatures. Really the undeserving working-class the black heart of me X
though Julie, you were great friends after the cameras cleaves towards the undeserving ones. My father was Y
stopped weren’t you? a member of the deserving working-class, he ended Z

up coughing his fucking lungs out for three years and But in defending ‘chavs’ culturally, is this not a tacit More A
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dying of tumours because of it. The working-class in acknowledgment that the political fight for the prole- B
the old days kept their heads down, were so fucking tariat is lost? C
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decent and wonderful, and it got them jack shit. Chavs “Naaaah, the fight cannot be lost, the fight changes.” D
are there for a reason, because the decent way, the good So to quote dear Lenin: “What is to be done” politically? E
way, didn’t fucking work. The idea that after the break “I’m hoping to find out. What Marx analysed was ba- RSS
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up of the manufacturing industries and the disrespect sically right, but it’s so rich and strange the way things
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poured on the heads of the trade unions and everything mutate. Who ten years ago would have predicted the Facebook
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the working-class stood for that their would still, decline of McDonalds? Who 20 years ago would have
masochistically, be this class of noble men and women seen the downfall of all I believe in, with the Soviet I
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trudging on and on and on waving banners and singing Union? But because of the strength and the numbers of J
wonderful songs – WHY?! We’d fucking had enough. the working-class, both in this country and globally, we K
We are what they made us! And they don’t like us being will decide what happens in the end and it really won’t L
like that because they know we’re tougher than they are be that bad.” M
and they know we’ll win.” One of the main criticisms levelled at Julie is because N
Julie has gone into an impressively ferocious, lit- her extremes of position are so contrary to ‘accepted’ O
erally breast-beating oratory by this point, suddenly mainstream norms (pro-union yet pro-hanging, mas- P
breaking off to grinningly state “What am I shout- sively xenophobic about the Germans and French Q
ing at you two for, you didn’t fucking do it…!” She whilst showing a fierce anti-racism where black people R
digresses once more, expressing here near eugenic are concerned, pro-Soviet yet pro-Israeli) that she is S
belief in prole supremacy. insincere and feigning them to shock. But while she
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“Did you know there’s this thing called ‘the inde- unquestionably fires forth her beliefs in as provoca-
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structible nine percent’ in society? They’ve all got green tive a manner as possible, hearing her talk about them
or hazel eyes, they can drink the most amazing amount, there is no doubt whatsoever in her sincerity. She quite V
and they’ve got this weird blood group called rhesus clearly really believes them. No doubt that makes it a lot W
negative. I’ve got all these three things and they are ALL worse for many! Her passion when talking about ‘the X
found amongst the labouring classes … listen would I workers’ and socialism in particular is unquestionable. Y
make this shit up?! How fucking mad do I want to look?” I suggest that the success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela Z

is a real international working-class triumph that is be- prostitutes; it obviously wasn’t meant to be like this. More A
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ing unsung. Julie initially suggests he is corrupt from And the things he did to gay people, though I dare say B
what she’s heard. I strongly disagree. he had a good reason … But to turn away helps no-one. C
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“I don’t know enough about Venezuela; I dare say I really think the Left has to take itself apart before D
you’re right. But remember when whatsisname, Or- anyone else, because we can, because we’re stronger E
tega? The Sandinista leader was accused of molesting and more intelligent than the Right.” RSS
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his daughter, well ten years ago we’d have all cleaved There we are then, to reverse Groucho’s old max-
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together and said she was lying, but, thank God for im, whether many on the Left want her or not – pro Facebook
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feminism, how do we know that. I was brought up in a Bush and Blair on the war as she is – that’s the club
Communist household, when I moved to London I met she places herself in at heart. I can’t help but have I
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Paul Foot and was briefly in the SWP, and the one thing a tentative go here; what about her wonderful 2002 J
my dad the working-class Stalinist and Paul Foot the Guardian columns where she ripped “Princess Toni” K
middle-class Trotskyist had in common is they couldn’t to pieces on a weekly basis due to his betrayal of the L
fucking look at themselves, see the bad in their side. Labour movement? M
That’s what attracted me to people on the right for a “That’s simple, Blair is a great war-leader, like N
while, like Alan Clark. What a fucking cool man!” Churchill; useless in times of peace. Who would vote O
She proceeds to launch into an entertaining and fairly for the poor sod after that?” P
accurate impression of Clark fantasising about Russian So you’re not taking away your criticisms of his do- Q
women in his infamously lecherous manner. Julie has mestic policies, privatisation, sucking up to the bosses? R
latched onto the theme of the Left denying its own “I’ve never voted for Mr Blair and I don’t imagine I S
crimes now and, as ever, there’s no getting her off it. will. [This interview was conducted shortly before the
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“My dad taught me that you hide your own sin and 2005 General Election] The last time I voted was for
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you don’t take yourselves apart; I’ve realised recently the Socialist Alliance locally, and UKIP nationally, or
that we’ve got to criticise ourselves before we can was it the other way round? I don’t even remember. V
start on anyone else. In that way lies strength. I love I’ve got nothing to hide.” W
Mr Castro and the Cuban revolution, and it’s achieved She repeats the highly entertaining story of how, on X
so much; they can cure blindness there whereas they her father’s death bed she vowed to defend the name Y
can’t in America, but you go there and see 12-year-old of his old hero Joe Stalin, only to be told by Bill “You Z

ain’t been saying mad stuff about him have you girl? It just knocks you out sometimes if you think about it More A
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He was a terrible man!” too much. That’s why I prefer not to think about it too B
So who are her all time heroes really? much and watch Tricia instead. A great deal of my life C
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“It sounds really mealy-mouthed, but the people who is spent running away from … my brain.” D
no-one knows the name of; they’re the heroes.” In my review of Sugar Rush I presumptuously wrote E
So your other heroes have disappointed you? of the characters: “No-one talks like that, not even Julie RSS
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“I don’t feel disappointed because I’ve grown up, in real life”. I was in fact completely wrong. Friendlier
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very late in life, and I realise people fall short of things (to me at least), and with lots more swearing, but she Facebook
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for a reason as we’re all human. Like all the bad things talks pretty much as she writes. I won’t let the Iraq war
Mr Castro has done to gay people. The heroes are the go though, I’m catching the argument bug off her. I
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people we never ever hear of and that is the essence of “Ben! Ben! What would you rather live under?! J
their heroicness. There’s a certain reason why people of Listen I was brought up as a Soviet Empirist. My dad K
real quality don’t rise to positions of power. People like taught me to believe – literally – that American brains L
my dad; who have nothing to prove. I’ve no element of were one third less the size of ours. It’s been a very M
self-loathing but I do realise that part of my success is hard journey to lead me to support Mr Bush on this. N
just me showing off, and wanting to queen it over other But I do feel that a struggle of the dimensions my O
people, to be frank with you. When you get people like father saw, light against darkness, has emerged in the P
Emma Thompson, Dawn French, Lenny Henry, the Red Middle East. The Arab people deserve everything we Q
Nose lot – unless you tied the fuckers down and wired have. If that makes me a fucking racist then yeah. I R
them up to a lie detector – and then you’d get it – you’d won’t make any exceptions for these filthy rich peo- S
never get them to admit that there was any element in ple, the Saudi dynasty, or the Syrian Ba’athists who
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their desire to be famous other than them wanting to call themselves socialists.”
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help people in Niger. To me it’s the glory of being a But surely the idea that Bush is exporting democracy
human being that we are a mixture of complete corrup- to the Middle East is rather undermined when he lets V
tion and the most shimmering, mercury-like goodness. the CIA organise a coup against democratic Venezuela? W
Of course there are some just purely evil people – like “One thing at a time Ben! When a Hugo Chavez X
Dido – and just purely good people – like Jordan. But can emerge in the Arab world … I know about Al- Y
then there’s the glory and the black hearted corruption. lende. I’m not idealistic about America. It’s a dirty Z

massive beast. Of course they’ll attack democracy in strongly. It was the only thing to watch back then and More A
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their own back yard. But – heavy the head that wears weirdly watching them on a rainy day is a real part of B
the crown – when they stay out of wars we call them my Englishness. God I sound gay, I sound like Morris- C
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filthy cowards – as my grandma used to say – if they sey! But anyway you don’t get strong women on screen D
get involved, they’re imperialists.” any more, a ‘tough character’ in films today is either E
It’s nice arguing with Julie but I know I’ll never win, tough cos she’s hiding her neediness, or she’s a psycho- RSS
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and she graciously changes the subject herself to the path … I don’t think I’m a ‘strong woman’, I hate that
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fact that her dad wanted to emigrate to Russia and her patronising phrase, I think I’m a ‘tough broad’, that’s Facebook
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mum to South Africa, the former for idealism, the lat- what I used to see on screen which I never do anymore.
ter because “They got bungalows!” At heart Julie is a They’re either needy weedy vulnerable wickle things I
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patriot, and emigration is not the done thing. waiting to be hugged – or total fucking looners.” J
“That phrase ‘whinging poms’ it comes from when As was often the case of her columns I find myself K
English people were encouraged to emigrate to Australia agreeing with something I hadn’t particularly dwelled L
for 20 pounds, and they came back, and they literally on. It’s true that Hollywood seems to stand still while M
cried for three weeks in relief, because they missed the society moves on in a lot of respects. N
rain, and the dreariness. That’s the fucking greatness, “There’s a great book by Molly Haskell called O
and the perversity of the English people for me. Every From Reverence To Rape and she shows how, just as P
perverse, dreary weird thing about our people.” women were starting to assert themselves in the real Q
Changing the subject myself, I remark that Julie of- world in the 60s, that was exactly the time Hollywood R
ten writes about Hollywood, and spends as much time started to make films like Easy Rider, One Flew Over S
praising the greats of the past as she does slagging off the Cuckoos Nest, where women are literally either
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the stars of today. What’s the difference? bitches, whores or rapees. Joan Collins played a mis-
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“In 30 years time, will a drag queen dress up as sionary nun twice in the 50s! Not any more. Do you
Sandra Bullock? Don’t think so! Sorry; that’s facile … think I’m like Nurse Ratchett?” V
my mother had no politics but what made her in a way I get short shrift however when I suggest that Basic W
a feminist was watching Bette Davis films; seeing her Instinct is the height of misogyny. “Oh no, that film just X
in Jezebel saying ‘Ah wiiill wear mah red dress’: the makes you want to go gay! Every girl likes that film Y
idea of women behaving as they pleased, stroppily and for a reason, it’s the first time they showed a lesbian Z

as really attractive.” But also an ice-pick wielding psy- cial lady. Rod [Liddle]’s a great young man, he once More A
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chopath? “Yeah well, take the rough with the smooth. told me he applied for my old job at the NME, but he B
As I said earlier ‘no-one’s perfect’” My suggestion that was always known as a lothario. I know one woman, C
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Fatal Attraction is a misogynistic farrago is dismissed a great friend of mine who thought he was so sexy she D
too “No, I don’t think Fatal Attraction means anything. waited for three hours in a Bournemouth Travelodge E
The message is don’t fuck a woman who sits in a loft on just like a promise – but she didn’t get none. Thank RSS
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playing Madam Butterfly, and don’t fuck Michael God I’m not a woman so I don’t fall for him. Simon
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Douglas!” Well, you can’t argue with that. Hoggart? What a dirty old man! Its always the quiet Facebook
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We’re all very drunk now (well I am anyway), so ones isn’t it? When it comes to Kimberley Quinn … I’ll
I just bat random subjects up and let Julie take them. say this and it doesn’t show me in a very good light … I
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First up is Ariel Sharon (readers of a sensitive disposi- I never thought I’d use the word ‘slag’ about anyone. J
tion may wish to skip the next paragraph). Me and my friends, we know prostitutes, we don’t slag K
“To me he’s the God that failed. He could have been them off, but when it comes to her … we use it and God L
such a great man and he’s just a fucking pacifist now. it feels good! Poor Mr Blunkett; fancy doing that to a M
No – don’t leave it! Israel is the only country I would blind man? Where was the dog? Must have been tied N
fucking die for. He’s the enemy of the Jews. Chucking to summat. That’s what I can’t stand; it’s the animals O
his own people off the Gaza; to me that’s disgusting. that suffer in the end. But no, my friends have put it P
I’ve given you want you want; is that the ‘money shot’? around, fucking like sailors and shit, but they’d never Q
He’s a good man but he’s got to learn to stand by his used that word before. But with Kimberley … It’s the R
own people. ‘Cos no-one else will; Christ knows.” Julie creepy fertility relay race thing that did it I think. She S
certainly gets into her stride when I bring up the sordid just wanted to get knocked up. Desperate woman. She
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subject of the Spectator sexual shenanigans which have just wanted some sperm race. Like an egg and spoon
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so dominated the headlines of tabloids and broadsheets race. Or a sack race. Or an egg and sack race – HA HA
alike in recent months. (For the uninitiated, the proprie- HA!! Put that in Ben right??” V
tor, editor and half the staff of the fusty old Tory journal Didn’t you once write for The Spectator though? W
have been caught going at it hammer and tongues lately; “I did some book reviews when my friend Dominic X
the former with our former Home Secretary). Lawson was editing. But then I’ll do anything for a Jew.” Y
“Well it all made me glad I live the life of a provin- Julie’s whirl of conversation swings one way to the Z

next. Very friendly and complimentary, highly libellous ple who’ve offended him at the drop of a daff, they’ve More A
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asides splatter the whole interview. Julie is no stranger restarted a friendly e-mail correspondence over the past B
to the libel courts, but some of her comments will not few years. Clearly he couldn’t resist someone who’s C
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appear on Spike as none of us of course would like to even better at bitching about people than he is. D
see this fine site shut down. One borderline accusation “I adore the man. He seems to be very civilised now; E
about a satirist I adore leads to her virulent hatred of he seems more happy. Isn’t it funny it took America to RSS
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Catholics. When I mention that I’m a Catholic her gen- make him more relaxed? I said to him, ‘You’ve grown
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erous gallantry storms through once more “No, you’re into your looks, you look like someone’s sexy uncle Facebook
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not! Fuck off! Do you practice birth control?!” No of that you’d get off with at a wedding.’ And he said in his
course I’m a very very lapsed one Julie. “See I knew brilliantly witty way ‘Why do you think I go to so many I
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you were, listen, lapsed Catholics are the aristocracy of weddings – known to me are not?’ What a wonderfully J
the earth. I never met a lapsed I didn’t like. But them Morrissey thing to say. Would you sleep with Morris- K
that cleave to their faith. I’ll shoot the fuckers.” sey if he asked and you were gay? If he was straight L
I ask about the time when one of my idols Morrissey and I was single I still think I wouldn’t do it. I’d just be M
walked through her door unannounced back in 1994 to thinking ‘Oh fuck its Morrissey!’ the whole time.” N
a frosty reception… Well, I must confess since early teenhood I’d always O
“God I’d forgotten about that! That was like a very, thought he’s the one man who just might ‘turn my head’ P
very bad marriage in three quarters of an hour: imagine as it were… Q
the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf in the space of “You would?! But you’d have to slap him round a R
three quarters of an hour. It’s not your dream; you’re bit afterwards!! That’s what Madonna said about Billy S
in love with someone for five years and they turn up Ray Cyrus. She said ‘I’d do him, but I’d have to slap
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and we start arguing about whether you should put milk him round a bit and make him cry afterwards because
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in Earl Grey tea or not. I knew I had to get him out of ‘Achey Breaky Heart’’ and I’d have to do that to
before he visited the bathroom; ‘Why do you squeeze Morrissey because – what’s the crap thing he’s done? V
the toothpaste from the bottom?’ Fuck off!” ‘Bengali In Platforms’? Course he’s a genius, but you W
Julie wrote an acerbic piece about their encounter at wouldn’t wanna live with him would you?” X
the time. For “acerbic” read “hatchet job”. Incredibly, While her talk is littered with her trademark bile Y
given Morrissey’s famed propensity for dropping peo- Julie assures me that she is far less keen to cause fuss in Z

everyday life than she once was. many other subjects. Indulging in huge, shared, More A
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“I’m much better than I was. Even by the time I over-emphatic praise of Nye Bevan figured highly. B
was 17 at the NME I was well castrated by then. You (“Idiots always get him mixed up with Ernest Bevin, C
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should have seen me at 13, at the height of my venom! the anti-Semitic git.”) At one point Julie has a huge D
I stopped kissing my mother when I went to bed and slanging match with Zoe and Gary about the merits E
when my dad asked why I said ‘What, is she a lesbian?’ of white immigration (Julie is against, she thinks the RSS
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That’s what I was like!” UK owes black and Asian people a huge debt which
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And in fact she does seem more at ease with herself doesn’t apply to east Europeans). I recall also being Facebook
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than I’ve heard she was, and very content with her life. a coward and slinking away during this, talking to
“Brighton, for all its airs and graces, is a very provin- Nadia instead. Nadia has clearly seen it a thousand I
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cial town, and I like it that way. I don’t want to be like a times before, and its clear why Julie loves her so J
young bunny putting it around, I’m 45 years old, it was much. She’s fantastic, and clearly the calming, sen- K
never my way anyway, I got married when I was 18 and sible one of the pair. “Don’t worry, she’ll calm down L
24, even though I always admired girls that did. It was in a few minutes”, I think she said. And she did. M
never the life for me, to be honest with you.” At one point I harangue Julie for wasting her life at- N
She seems content too with her role in the grand tacking idiotic celebrities when she could be highlight- O
scheme of things. “You know that thing you wrote about ing great social injustices as she did for a very brief P
me [the Sugar Rush review] was so unique, it treated period in her Guardian columns of 2002, campaigning Q
me like a human being which was such a change. I love on issues like the still-toothless corporate manslaughter R
being round young writers, I like to think of writers as law which allows negligent employers to get away with S
a community, as a race. I’m 45 years old , I’m not going murder (literally, if not legally.)
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to write ‘the great novel’ … a dead mother that’s what She explained she found writing such things too
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I’m going to be now, and that’s alright with me.” much of an emotional strain, and that it was too late to
Already seriously sozzled before the interview change now anyway. She was a nasty, witty old hack, V
ended (me,anyway) we break off to join her fellow pure and simple. And she liked it that way. W
guests – and proceed to drink a lot more. The ‘mists And of course, that’s what makes her what she is. X
of Bacchus’ descend on my memory somewhat here The world already has John Pilger. It’s precisely the Y
though I do dimly remember us drivelling on about fact she has “run away from her brain” as she herself Z

puts it which makes her so entertaining. A sledgeham- … straight-off bigots peddling the same old poison More A
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mer cracking a nut; the spectres of Dorothy Parker and week after week, and always kicking the weak, never B
Marx ganging up on straw-celebs like Catherine Zeta the strong, with far higher readerships too – not on C
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Jones and Michael Douglas is sometimes just what you the list. The late-now-but-not-then Lynda Lee-Potter, D
need. Can we really imagine a nice campaigning little bitching hideously about celebs throughout her whole E
Julie Burchill? Brrrr. I must have been even more pis- career, bigger readership again. Her name’s not down, RSS
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sed than I imagined. she’s not coming in. A hundred odd male journalists
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The day after our meet, amidst the industrial hango- with just as ‘messy’ private lives as Julie; they don’t Facebook
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ver, I reflect on the massive hatred Julie inspires. Two get the spawn of Beelzebub treatment either. Could the
years back she managed to take the number 85 spot fact that she can write each one of them into the dirt at I
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in the Channel 4’s most hated Britons poll. Not high least partially explain this bonfire of loathing? I rather J
enough in her view I’m sure. But why was she there? think it could. Julie says people who write hatefully K
Because of her narcissism, arrogance and self-obses- about chavs reveal more about themselves than they L
sion? I’d hazard a guess she’s not the only columnist to do of their targets. Perhaps there’s an element of self- M
suffer such flaws. She is however one of the very few to identification with that. And perhaps she’s right. N
openly acknowledge it, sign-post it, flaunt it, and make Of course I’m hopelessly, and rather pathetically O
a very good joke out of it. compromised (there, I’ve said it first) by spending P
Because of extreme opinions, repeating her obses- sloshed out time in her charming and generous pres- Q
sions? Let’s think of these wonderful creatures we ence. But I wasn’t disappointed. And long may she rain R
call “columnists”. Richard Littlejohn, Gary Bushell bile over us. 
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Jason Burke: Al Qaeda email

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Ben Granger
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The most striking fact Jason Burke hammers through Burke, who has spent the last ten years as The Ob-
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time and again in this meticulous and comprehensive server’s Middle East correspondent, tells two separate Facebook
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study is that Al Qaeda does not exist. Or at least, ‘Al yet interlinked stories; that of the formation of militant
Qaeda’ the organised terrorist group, cohesive and com- political Islamism, and that of the more specific violent I
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plete we hear of in the media doesn’t. I like Spooks as groupings of which bin Laden became a leading figure. J
much as anyone, but I fear we have been misinformed. He traces the roots of modern political Sunni ‘Islam- K
What does exist is a series of interconnected yet ism’ (as opposed to the Shia extremism of Khomeini) L
disparate and competing forms of militant Islamism. as comparatively recent, stemming from Wahaabism, M
Bin Laden’s faction, amorphous in itself and rarely a variant of Islam espoused in the 18th century by the N
termed “Al Qaeda” by its followers is only one part ultra-orthodox renegade Abdul al Wahaab. This was O
of this, yet it has become lazy shorthand for a massive developed into an all-encompassing political doctrine P
phenomenon. Burke does not claim Islamist funda- by an Egyptian, the Muslim Brotherhood founder Has- Q
mentalism isn’t a large, violent and dangerous force, san Al-Banna in the 1920s and 30s. Explicitly rejecting R
but does show that this one key misunderstanding is all Western influence as degenerate, Al-Banna and his
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disastrous if you want to deal with it. For one example, successor Syed Qutb, (another Egyptian campaigning
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the twin towers atrocity could be said to be the work of in the 50s and 60s) sought to recreate the world accord-
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‘Al Qaeda’; the ones in Madrid and Bali cannot. And as ing to the laws of Islam in the early post-Mohammed
another, al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug currently given years as they interpreted it, an interpretation very V
to beheading aid-workers in Iraq has been described as obscure and unpopular at the time in the wider Islamic W
an “Al Queda operative” and “bin Laden’s Lieutenant” world (though, crucially, not in Saudi Arabia, where it X
in highly reputable papers despite the two having never gained credence amongst the ruling royal family who Y
met, and their groups being bitter rivals of one another. used it to re-inforce their legitimacy). Z
BUY Jason Burke books online from and

The more specific story of the violent armed groups no suicides, and being the work of genuinely impov- More A
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which emerged espousing this ideology is detailed too. erished immigrants rather than the disaffected middle- B
Bin Laden, who cut his teeth as so many others did in class types chiefly at work in such atrocities previously. C
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the Soviet/Afghan conflict of the 80s, is shown as start- More than ever now, it is bin Laden and Al Qaeda as an D
ing out as very much the junior partner of Islamic Jihad idea and ideal that is the danger. E
leader Aymar al-Zawahri. It is interesting to learn he had One amazing fact, particularly farcical given the RSS
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no direct contact (as is often reported) with America, neo-con justification of the Iraqi invasion, is that in the
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though the close co-operation with the Pakistani secret first Gulf War bin Laden actually offered up his band of Facebook
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services and the CIA who funded and supported his and fighters to the House of Saud to fight against Saddam
other gangs makes this distinction rather academic. Hussein defending the home of Wahaabism against I
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Bin Laden became seen as a ‘Godfather’ figure due the secularist Iraqi infidel. It was only after this offer J
to his genius for media manipulation, culminating of was turned down that bin Laden truly took against the K
course with the calculated violent symbolism of Sep- Saudi royals, seeing them as weaklings who had to L
tember 11th, also recounted in detail here. But Burke rely on ‘kufr’ American protection. The notion of bin M
also shows the many other groups in action both before, Laden siding with Saddam as a ‘fellow Muslim’ could N
during and after the New York attack, often with either scarcely be further rooted in the realms of fantasy, and O
limited or no contact with bin Laden. The GIA in Alge- shows the true depths of the (deliberate?) neo-con mis- P
ria are shown to far surpass bin Laden and followers in understanding of how their ideology works. Q
terms of violence against their own general population, The media-spawned over-simplification of the R
who had stubbornly failed to give them mass support. Islamist phenomenon is highlighted by the distinction S
The leadership of bin Laden’s faction has indeed been Burke demonstrates between the Taliban government
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decapitated following the US invasion of Afghanistan, of Afghanistan and the gang of bin Laden’s that they
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but the anger caused in the wider Muslim world and the housed. We all know Al Qaeda and the Taliban became
subsequent assault on Iraq has let to a rapid increase in firmly interwoven with each other some time after bin V
the sympathy for and potential recruits to such groups. Laden and his followers first sought refuge in Afghani- W
The Madrid bombing is shown as the work of a cadre stan; what is less well known is the intense dislike the X
not only wholly disconnected from bin Laden, but not latter showed to the former, and how near they came Y
even working in his style any more; no symbolic target, to being thrown out, until it became a matter of local Z

pan-Muslim pride to the Taliban that they could not ment towards militant Islamism. The same goes for More A
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be seen expel bin Laden due to US pressure. In yet the growth of Hammas and Islamic Jihad in Israel at B
another of the myriad intricacies detailed in the book, the expense of the PLO. And also in many other areas, C
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we see how different the Taliban were to Al Qaeda. The not least moderate and/or secular Turkey, Indonesia, D
Taliban were extremist Wahabbi offshoots themselves, and Checnya, not to mention the diaspora in Europe. E
dedicated to fulfilling a similarly atavistic, repressive, This growth was neither natural nor inevitable, and was RSS
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misogynistic and unworkable arcadia, yet at the same undoubtedly exacerbated not only by the dictatorship,
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time they were essentially parochial, rural tribalists to- stagnation and corruption of the governments of Mus- Facebook
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tally uninterested in waging a jihad against the Western lim states, but also by the polarisation caused in part by
world. It was only bin Laden’s machinations and the the invasions of the West (and Russia). I
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US response they received which saw them entrenched None of which is to say that the growth of Islamist J
into the fight against the West urged by the more so- movements are a progressive and legitimate move- K
phisticated and cosmopolitan Al Qaeda. ment of liberation as some on the left have come near L
Burke shows with one illuminating example how the to disastrously maintaining. On the contrary, though M
growth in popularity of this Wahaab cult is far from Burke never makes such an assertion himself, I find the N
organic or inevitable. He spent time with members of description of its leading figures corresponds with an O
the separatist Pershmaga fighters of the Kurdish Demo- almost classically fascist movement. P
cratic Party in northern Iraq following the first gulf war. They are rooted firmly in a disenchanted middle- Q
“[They] were aggressively secular. They had drunk, class, whether doctors like al-Zawarhi or rich business- R
sworn, smoked and I had never seen them pray. Their men like bin Laden himself. They are disenchanted S
slogans were all about liberation and self-determina- chiefly due to a hurt sense of national (or pan-national/
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tion, about rights and democracy … The idea of them religious) decline. They are utterly hostile to religious
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mentioning a ‘jihad’ was almost risible. Though angry tolerance, the Enlightenment, Jews, women or minority
and resentful at what they felt, with some justification, rights, and also to socialism and the labour movement V
were the West`s repeated betrayals, they were still vo- at large. Indeed, al-Banna himself was an explicit W
ciferously pro-Western.” admirer of Nazi Germany. As Burke shows, the hard- X
By 2001, many of these young men were turning core of the real ‘terrorist cells’ taking action against Y
from their seemingly failing secular resistance move- the West are profoundly educated and middle-class Z

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genuinely impoverished backgrounds in the last two only 355 pages it still took me a very long time to get B
years (as he also demonstrates) only goes to show the through it. That’s probably my problem though and – C
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There is still a key difference however, on the whole, to a more vibrant style to a subject like this leaves the E
the masses tacitly sympathising with atrocities through author open to charges of sensationalism. It’s fair to RSS
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desperation and those carrying them out themselves. say though that this book is probably not best for the
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They attract a vast and increasing number of the completely uninitiated, or for someone not prepared Facebook
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desperate poor in their countries, often due to the to give the subject their full undivided attention.
crass stupidity and brutality of ‘infidel’ governments Part of this staid style comes from Burke’s admi- I
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Islamists than the unemployment caused by the neo- Chomsky to those much further to the right. He is K
liberal capitalist policies pursued by New Labour not out to make a point, but simply to document an L
makes the BNP genuine champions of the working area he has reported on and studied for many years. M
poor of England. No-one on the left should see them It’s only in the final chapter that Burke’s views – still N
as anything other than what they are; evil bastards fairly cautious – are made clear. Namely, that only O
given false validation by the machinations of the the continuing resistance of the wider world Muslim P
more powerful. Cream off the followers, but don`t population to the minority teachings of zealots like Q
even think about trying to ‘engage’ with the leaders. bin Laden, Zarqawi and their forbears al-Banna and R
Burke’s study is exemplary in its research, and Qutb can possibly see them off. And that, whatever the
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explains its extremely complex tale with some clar- intentions, arresting the rapid growth this fanaticism
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ity (the extensive indexes and glossaries help too). is seeing has been made much harder by the recent
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It is however an undeniably dry read, a mixture of actions of the West. 
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Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir email
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and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the station as a deathtrap. Foale was on board when Mir’s I
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into the ailing Russian space program, Mir continued to minutes to seal off the module before losing all their L
remain dangerously unstable. Bryan Burrough’s book oxygen. Instead of insisting on evacuation as safety M
is a behind-the-scenes account of what was happening procedure demanded, Foale helped cosmonauts Tsib- N
both in space and on the ground. liyev and Lazutkin block the breach. O
Since 1992, NASA has sent its astronauts to train In both cases, Burrough reveals that the response of P
in Russia’s Star City in preparation for going aboard mission control was hampered by NASA’s pitiful lack Q
Mir. Burrough details the inevitable clash of cultures – of knowledge about Mir and the unwillingness of some R
while the Americans were used to rehearsing for every Russian technicians to share their expertise. Veteran
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contingency on the Shuttle, the Russians adopted a astronaut John Blaha returned from Mir suffering from
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improvisational approach, fuelled by the lack of funds exhaustion and depression, blaming both on NASA’s
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for their space program. The cosmonauts were paid lack of ground support.
bonuses for the efficient running of the station, which Given the daily struggle of the undeniably brave V
led to American accusations of safety procedures be- crew members and the chaos in mission control, it’s W
ing ignored in order to keep Mir operational. difficult to read Dragonfly and remember that the X
Burrough focuses on two NASA astronauts sent to story it tells is factually true rather than a science Y
Mir, Jerry Linenger and the British-born Mike Foale, fiction thriller. However, Burrough doesn’t trivialise Z
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sion of the story alive. up later this year, plummeting into the Pacific Ocean E
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Albert Camus: Douglas Coupland: F
Solitaire et Solidaire 141 From Fear To Eternity 175 G
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After The Disaster 147 Lara’s Book 181 Twitter
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In Search Of The Miraculous 158 The Gum Thief 183
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Interview [published March 1997] B
Albert Camus: Solitaire et Solidaire email

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Russell Wilkinson talks to Catherine Camus about Albert Camus’ The First Man
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In January 1960, the French writer and philosopher clearly demonstrating that his best writing was yet to
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Albert Camus was killed in a car crash along with his come before his tragic and untimely death at the age Facebook
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friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Recovered of 47.
from the wreckage of the crash was the unfinished Catherine Camus and her partner Robert Gallimard I
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manuscript of Camus’ latest novel, The First Man. In visited London in October 1995. At the Basil Hotel, J
1957, Camus had been awarded the Nobel Prize for they discussed the implications of The First Man for our K
Literature in recognition of his most famous novels, evaluation of Albert Camus as a writer and a political L
The Outsider and The Plague. philosopher at the close of this century. The interview M
Fifty years after its original publication The Out- was conducted in French. N
sider is still France’s best-selling novel this century. RW: In your editor’s note for The First Man you sug- O
In October 1995, The First Man was finally published gest that now is a more suitable time for the reception of P
in English, 35 years after Camus’ death. His daughter, Camus’ work. Do you think Camus has been neglected Q
Catherine Camus, elected to publish the manuscript unin recent years? R
edited. Its drafts have been organised into the completed CC: He was never abandoned by his readers. Camus
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text of the novel and authorial notes which supplement is enormously read. He’s the highest selling author in
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its progression and development. As such, The First the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some
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Man shows the rarely glimpsed process of a work in years now. Sales haven’t ever stopped, so to talk about
progress. The novel itself is a deeply autobiographical rediscovering him would suggest that he isn’t read any- V
meditation upon Camus’ poverty-stricken childhood more and that’s not true. It’s just that, in publishing The W
and fatherless family within Algeria at the turn of the First Man I said to myself, ‘this is going to be awful,’ X
century. While it remains unfinished, much of the text but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I’m Y
possesses Camus’ characteristic lucidity and sensuality, not afraid of Camus’ public. I’m afraid of what will be Z
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However, there are indications that today the intel- the day that Camus wrote The Rebel, in 1955, there B
lectuals are coming back to Camus. History has given comes the rupture, and all, nearly all of the left wing C
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them reason to, with the fall of communism. In fact intellectuals become hostile to him. Since he was al- D
it was always the Communist problem which was ready unfavourably viewed by the right-wing, he found E
responsible for the opposition to Camus. It was always himself entirely alone. RSS
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and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstand- Then, during the 80s, those you would call the young
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ing. Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin’s trials. philosophers of France, such as Bernard and Gluxman, Facebook
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Today we can see that he was right. To say that there pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted
were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was to hear in the political arena. They said it was Camus I
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blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today who was right, not those who had slid under the influ- J
we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind, ence of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion K
but before it just wasn’t allowed. Nobody was allowed to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever L
to think that or say that if you were left-wing. Camus since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to M
always insisted that historical criteria and historical modify up until today. Intellectuals of Camus’ age who N
reasoning were not the only things to take into account, had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And O
and that they weren’t all powerful, that history could at that point we come back to literature, and it’s agreed P
always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are that he was always a great writer. Q
starting to think. RW: Which brings us specifically to the publication of R
RW: Do you think that Camus’ work is becoming The First Man. How will this book alter our perception S
vindicated then, after this time of intellectual isolation? of Camus’ work?
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RG: It all depends on the period. Just after the war, CC: We must remember that Camus wrote not even
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the liberation of 1945, Camus was well known, well a third of what he had wished to. The First Man is his
loved by Sartre and all the intellectuals of that genera- posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it V
tion. There is an interview given by Sartre in the USA is his first, because in it you find the signs of his com- W
where he is asked what the future of French literature mitments, and of the whole way of writing as well. This X
is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for Y
is Camus. And so time passes, and a much more politi- those not able to speak for themselves. Z

RW: There are times in his letters to Jean Grenier thought. It couldn’t possibly. He started thinking More A
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[Camus’ philosophy professor in Algeria, published through sensation. He could never think with artefacts B
in the Selected Notebooks] when he sounds unhappy or with cultural models because there were none. So C
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with his work on The First Man. After receiving his it’s true to say that his morality was extremely ‘lived’, D
Nobel Prize, did he feel pressurised to produce his made from very concrete things. It never passed by E
definitive work? means of abstractions . It’s his own experience, his RSS
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CC: He wasn’t writing under the influence of the No- way of thinking. There are those who will find his no-
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bel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in tions about absurdity appealing, and others who will Facebook
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him. The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it’s a social be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria,
recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a the heat and so on. I
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true artist is driven by interior necessities. We can’t talk RW: Since The First Man deals with Camus’ birth and J
about the book he wanted to write because we have childhood in Algeria, it seems strange that Camus’ deep K
barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it, personal involvement with the Algerian nationalist cri- L
but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look sis tends to get overlooked in the traditional portrayal M
at the style of The First Man it conforms much more of him as a French writer. Do you think The First Man N
to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely. will re-emphasise the importance of Algeria in our O
RW: Will we get a clearer notion of his ideas through consideration of Camus? P
The First Man? CC: I hope so. Camus’ was born in Algeria of French Q
CC: Perhaps not, because it’s in quite a crude state. nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony, R
But then, in this condition one sees more, without any although the French colonists rejected him absolutely S
of the artifices of art, without anything having been because of his poverty. Politically, he was in favour
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erased. It is, perhaps, at the same time, more truth- of a federation, and effectively he considered that like
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ful. I think he wanted to write something to explain South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there
who he was, and how he was different from the age should be a mixed population with equal rights, the V
that had been conferred upon him. He was viewed by same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as W
many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football well as all the other races living there. X
pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his ‘morality’. RW: Do you think he saw himself as the first member Y
It’s something sensed, it won’t pass uniquely through of a race of the uprooted, given the absence of his father Z

and the cultural duality of his upbringing? in all his books. The Outsider isn’t Camus, but in The More A
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CC: Not on a political level. He is The First Man Outsider there are parts of Camus. There’s this impres- B
because he is poor, which has never been much to hu- sion of exile. But where he is in exile isn’t especially C
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man beings. He really did know Algeria. He was an in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world, D
exile from his country, but still living in its language. because of his origins. And that’s a complete exile. Just E
Solitaire et solidaire. It’s not like those who are exiled because of his way of sensing before thinking. He’s in RSS
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to a country where the language is not theirs. He didn’t a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any
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have much hope that things would work out, but he case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be Facebook
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wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary…
violence that once such violence is created there’s no RG: … And yet one thing that is evident is that Ca- I
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more room for reflection. And there’s no mediating po- mus could never be a ‘neutral’ man. This is because he J
sition. If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians was committed; look at his real physical involvement K
and Serbs, they’ve all created so much horror that one in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat L
starts to wonder how these peoples can live together, against Nazism. And he always held a profound M
after having done what they have. Already the violence commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all N
has reached such a degree that everybody is living in totalitarianism. For example, it’s often forgotten that O
hate, there’s no possibility of reflection, no mediating Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the P
position. There’s no one who can say ‘this person is Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to Q
wrong there and right here’, and that ‘one is right about travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO R
that and wrong about this’. This is what could allow accepted Franco’s Spain and allowed it a discourse. S
populations, or even two human beings, to live together. Camus was completely intransigent, and that’s not at
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We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and all a neutrality. It’s combat, it’s a man who involved
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enrichment by, our differences. himself, committed himself. Of course, he wasn’t an
existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a V
Albert Camus PLC man of combat. It wasn’t for nothing that he directed W
RW: So Camus tried to live the paradox of being both the Resistance journal called Combat. X
“solitaire et solidaire”? RW: What makes his commitment different from that Y
CC: I think Camus felt very solitary. You can see it of the existentialists? Z

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RG: He always refused to be. man. That’s the first thing, because myself, I’m a B
RW: Another example of being solitaire et solidaire, man.’ And that’s what solidarity is. C
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of being great friends with Sartre but remaining apart RW: Is The First Man his ‘bridge’, then, between ex- D
from the existentialist credo? perience and philosophy? E
CC: Yes, today, we’re starting to see how it works. CC: What the articles which have been written about RSS
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But usually it’s when you get smacked in the face with The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of
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things that you start to understand them. Everyone has these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death. Facebook
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so much hope for a better humanity, and many, includ- The lie is death in Camus. That’s why in Camus’ play
ing Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its be- The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and I
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ginnings. Generosity had a place in people’s hopes. But his mother, because he lied. He never told them who J
Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass he was. They killed him because they didn’t recognise K
through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be him. But Camus also says that nothing is true which L
improved. When Sartre was asked whether or not he forces exclusion. From that, you’re obliged to accept M
would live under a communist regime he said, ‘No, for contradictions if you don’t want to reject certain obvi- N
others it’s fine, but for me, no.’ He said it! So it’s hard ous things about life, certain evidences. If you create a O
to say just how intellectual his stance is. How can you system, and you say ‘here there is truth’, in that kind P
think that never in your life would you go to live in a of pathway [chemin], then you’ll evacuate all the other Q
communist regime and still say it’s fine for everybody? pathways and you’ll kill life. It’s up to each individual. R
A very difficult thing, that, but Sartre managed it. It wasn’t exactly the establishment he attacked. He S
Camus didn’t; and today this is what we are con- said, “if it’s good, so much the better.” His aim was to
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fronted with, I mean what is pure ideology, which help people to live. That’s the most important thing. I
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takes no account of the human context. In economics think for an artist what is most important is to touch as
it’s the same. Economics wanted to take into ac- many hearts as possible. V
count theory over and above human criteria, or the RW: Being written for his mother, do you think The W
parameter ‘man’. And you end up beating your head First Man gives a clearer picture of his ideas on X
against a wall again, it doesn’t work. Not if you make femininity? Y
an abstraction of man. That’s why Camus is more à la CC: It’s true that women appear very little in his other Z

works. They have a very marginal place. But feminin- poverty, but they don’t know what it is. In fact they’ve More A
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ity, yes, effectively there is more in The First Man, got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes. B
not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its It’s the perspective they could never adopt, not in the C
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elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love way Sartre wants to, because they weren’t familiar D
story in it, a childhood love story, Camus’ first. Meur- with them. They could never address themselves to the E
sault [protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were working classes. They don’t know what it means, and RSS
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never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and that gives them a bad conscience about it. Camus has a
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others in his plays, but they aren’t so well known. I greater proximity to those in poverty. Facebook
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think for Camus his mother was more than just that. RW: And does this proximity result from his humility,
She’s love, absolute love. That’s why it’s written for which can been seen in the letters at the end of The First I
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her, dedicated to ‘you who will never be able to read Man to Monsieur Germain, his old schoolteacher? J
this book’. And love is very important in The First CC: It’s because his teacher in The First Man has a K
Man, in that Camus loves these things he never chose, primary place. Camus shows us this teacher exactly how L
he loves his childhood experience in a very real way. he was. The First Man is completely autobiographical. M
Their poverty meant that there was nothing else they The mother he describes is the woman I knew, and she N
could think about but what they would eat, how they was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really O
would clothe themselves. There’s just no room for existed. But it’s also to show that people attach so much P
other things in his family. It’s difficult for others to importance to celebrity, and Camus writes his accept- Q
imagine the position in which he found himself. There ance speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher. R
is no imaginary existence in their lives. Recognition, gratefulness exist. It’s to show that this is S
French intellectuals are mostly petit bourgeois, and what has come from what his teacher did for him. And
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it’s hard to say whether that makes Camus’ work more also throughout the world there are Monsieur Germains
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valuable. I’d rather say that it’s different. Necessarily. everywhere. That’s why I published the letters, so that he
His positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectu- could have a place in the work. But I couldn’t ever act V
als who don’t have that experience have difficulty in or think on behalf of what my father would have said or W
comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tol- done. He’s an artist, he considers himself an artist, and so X
erant because he had already seen both sides of things he takes on the responsibility of speaking for those who Y
when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine are not given the means or the opportunity.  Z

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Feature [published September 2000] B
Paul Celan: After The Disaster email

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Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan
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With a variable key to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and
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you unlock the house in which there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a Facebook
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drifts the snow of that left unspoken. return journey to the poem.
Always what key you choose It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s I
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depends on the blood that spurts key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself. J
from your eye or your mouth or your ear. Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a K
poem about poetry. It is clear, I think, that this is an L
You vary the key, you vary the word insensitive reading. The metaphors are too close to M
that is free to drift with the flakes. experience to dismiss it as abstract. Indeed, can they N
What snowball will form round the word get any closer? O
depends on the wind that rebuffs you. Celan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, P
wrote: “I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did Q
This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the so that once, at least, words and what is might join”. He R
German original by Michael Hamburger. The original had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970,
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was written in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line. six months before his 50th birthday. What is Bonnefoy
We assume a translation is second-hand and only T
talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are
the original can provide definitive clarification. But U
as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his
clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected V
of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in his life and poetry. Celan was grew up in the city of Cz- W
Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and ernowitz, then part of Romania, now within Moldova. X
being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports. Its political geography meant many languages were Y
As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer spoken among its inhabitants. In the poet’s home, the Z
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language was High German, while the wider commu- a result: “nothing real could authentically respond to More A
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nity generally used the more latinate Romanian. There this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent: B
were many others in circulation, including Yiddish. only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (los- C
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The last is significant as Celan was part of a large ing itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of D
Jewish community. There was anti-Semitism, for sure, so much absence.” E
but German culture was the pinnacle of Western civili- So for Bonnefoy, an avowed Christian, another death RSS
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sation. It promised something better than feudal snip- becomes another metaphor of hope. If his explanation
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ing. Inspired by his mother’s deep love for it’s poetry, is exemplary, we remain in what Maurice Blanchot Facebook
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he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and calls “the civilisation of the book”, where literature
Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable takes possession of everything – that is, submitting it I
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affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the to a pre-established unity symbolised by the enclosing J
contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements, covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy’s sensitive appraisal K
and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote leaves too strong a trace of the dubious correlation L
his poetry in German; his müttersprache. of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the dis- M
Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated composing reality at a distance, within the inexorable N
from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and de- logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most O
ported the city’s Jews. He never saw his parents again. importantly, an end. P
They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too. Q
father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this, Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surround- R
as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a ing Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as S
writer in the language of his mother and of his mother’s an expert witness to judging the case of her tormented
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murderers. He could not renounce the latter’s language life and suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss
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without renouncing the former’s. Celan was robbed everything.
of his parents’ death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by V
implies the same goes for his müttersprache. stating the potential of poetry: W
“We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words “the poet’s need [is] to get beyond ego in order to X
did not recover his experience. The loss was felt,” he become the voice of more than autobiography. At Y
says, “like a discharge without origin or end.” And as the level of poetic speech, when this happens, sound Z

and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry your golden hair Margarete More A
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individual utterance away upon a current stronger and your ashen hair Shulamith B
deeper that the individual could have anticipated.” (trans. Michael Hamburger) C
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(Note the pervasive river theme!) D
He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her If any help is needed, the line “a grave in the air” E
poetry yet never moved beyond “the dominant theme can be read as the smoke rising from the camp chim- RSS
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of self-discovery and self-definition”. Nowadays, of neys; plain fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the
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course, that theme is enough to launch 10,000 poems poem emerged from reports of small Jewish orchestras Facebook
playing tangos within concentration camp fences, H
beginning with “I”. But what does moving beyond
this theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the often accompanying gravedigging and executions. The I
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least, about that rising tide out of language. Indeed, poem mimics the pace and rhythm of the dance that J
it caused him to lose trust in his most famous poem, had captivated carefree Europe between the wars. Its K
‘Deathfugue’. This is how that poem ends; the subject, first title was indeed ‘Death Tango’. In placing such L
you will notice, is explicit: lightness within the realm of such darkness, an entire M
culture is incriminated. The change to ‘Deathfugue’ N
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while “Margarete” O
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe’s Faust, forgiven P
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but telling Q
drink and we fact that Goethe’s famous oak tree outside Weimar was R
drink you protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration
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camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue T
Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true Song Of Solomon, who is not forgiven. U
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete In post-war Germany the poem became part of the V
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous W
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise X
master from tended to be for what was called the poem’s “mastery” Y
Germany of what had passed – the Holocaust; enabling a rec- Z

onciliation of sorts. Germany wanted to move on. It dictionary. Indeed Spike quite rightly announces itself More A
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welcomed the rising tide out of language as it bore guilt to be “violently prejudiced” against poetry. What is the B
away. The worst was confirmed when schoolteachers alternative? Celan’s poetry is an answer. C
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discussed the use of the poem in class. They agreed it D
was excellent in teaching how poetry might follow a A word – you know: E
musical pattern like a fugue but, they felt, the teaching a corpse. RSS
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should not be side-tracked by talk of the Holocaust. Ce- Let us wash it,
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lan’s subsequent distress led him to refuse to perform let us comb it, Facebook
let us turn its eye H
readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt there
was a tendency toward the dark romance of a ‘terrible towards heaven. I
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beauty’ in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the J
progressive movement of the civilisation of the book, This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of K
enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a literature’s gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to L
Beethoven sonata. most post-war poetry and prose, which sought prac- M
Where did go Celan after this? Does it matter? What ticality, matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted N
does poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a words come as a dark reflection at the end of the poem O
means of reminding us of what has happened and what ‘Nocturnally Pouting’, itself a dark reflection on a bus P
it means, then one wonders why the facts have not journey over an alpine road in Austria. The presence Q
been enough. Perhaps that is the point: the facts have of those departed is perceived in the landscape: in the
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never been enough. Aharon Appelfeld, another writer- “greyed moss”, in the “crossed and folded shafts of
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survivor, reminds us that “the numbers and the facts the spruces” and in “the jackdaws roused to endless
flight over the glacier”. All are keys to those who T
were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a
“stand apart in the world”, each one “surly, bare- U
number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”
Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something headed, hoar-frosted”, each one discharging “the guilt V
else, something more than the facts. But, in general, that adhered to their origin . upon a word that wrongly W
that ‘something else’ remains under suspicion even subsists, like summer.” X
more than the dehumanising facts because ‘something The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that Y
else’ seems to be only self-regarding gymnastics with a reason perhaps begs the question: how does one turn Z

a word heavenward? Isn’t this a rhetorical gesture? Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated More A
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Celan’s title for the collection in which the two quoted the manifold growth of science and technology that B
poems appear is From Threshold To Threshold, and this sought (and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than C
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just about sums up the ‘failure’ of these two poems to to respect it. The consequence of Enlightenment was D
cross the threshold to heaven. As readers we tend to at once to liberate us of the fetters of medieval society E
grasp moments of manifesto-like clarity such as these; and to destroy the traditions by which society kept its RSS
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but assertion is not enough. Despite its practical matter- body and soul together. The contradiction remains with
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of-factness, it betrays failure. This is not to criticise. us, and the agitation of modern culture can be summed Facebook
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Failure is central to the history of modern poetry, al- up as the tension between accepting the wilderness and
though such failure is now usually misunderstood. our instinctive rejection of its freedom. A Celan poem I
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To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlighten- reflects the struggle: J
ment poets of the 18th century – the beginning of the K
modern age – was humanity’s relation to nature. We are Should L
familiar with this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the should a man M
greater Europe, Hölderlin’s inspiration was also “To should a man come into the world, today, with N
be one with all that lives, and to return in blessed self- the shining beard of the O
forgetfulness into the All of Nature”. While he pursued patriarchs: he could, P
it in poetry, others, such as his friend Hegel, turned to if he spoke of this Q
philosophy. But where philosophy feeds off distance, time, he R
allowing the goal of the Absolute – which would be could
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the end of philosophy, the end of history etc – to be only babble and babble
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preserved indefinitely as a self-aggrandising rhetorical over, over
againagain U
device, poetry demands the end without delay: if poetry
remains, distance remains. Where today’s celebration (Trans: Michael Hamburger) V
of nature uses language in an unironic slideshow of W
clichés (see any New Age CD, website or poetry book He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia. X
made of recycled paper) the Romantics recognised only How might a man speak of this time, this ‘destitute Y
failure: words, corpses. time’, as Hölderlin called it, without using destitute Z

words? Celan renews the question. sions of time, enabling us to categorise it in language More A
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If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like and so differentiate it from the rest of the world. Such B
Hegel, then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger. categorisation, however, is restricted by our need for C
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His analysis of the modern age had a profound influ- control, and so the thing disappears from view. We D
ence on Celan’s work, offering a theoretical apparatus become blinded to the discourse of the world; to what E
to his own poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought is revealed. The world becomes an object. This is a RSS
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a new mode of thought to counteract the mechanistic necessary tendency but one that can and must be coun-
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tendency of the modern world. He believed that hu- teracted by the function of the clearing. Facebook
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manity had become separate from its harmony with the Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by
rest of nature, as he believed was in place in Homer’s pointing toward the mood of anxiety that seems to I
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Greece. This separation was due, he thought, to the rise characterise our everyday existence. We spend most J
of dualistic ways of thinking set in motion by Plato. of our time avoiding this mood, of course. He says K
Concentrating on the concept of ‘being’, Heidegger we try to become totally absorbed in ‘the real world’, L
argues that ‘human being’ is not a thing like other things as defined by such dead language, in order to avoid M
(objects in the world as we know it) but a clearing (a facing up to our mortal nothingness as revealed in N
non-thing, a nothingness) in which those things are pre- anxiety. So, rather than liberating us, the techologo- O
sented, where they actually become things. And rather cally-advanced modern world opens a rift between P
than this being an argument for solipsism (the world the public self – the one in which we have in order Q
as function of one’s mind), it means our knowledge of to live without becoming paralysed by anxiety – and R
the world is not a product of boxed-in consciousness. the ‘anxious’ self in the so-called clearing. Heidegger S
Instead of minds making thoughts possible, it is the says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving up
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‘being’ preceding mind that makes it possible for us to our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world
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regard ourselves as minds having thoughts distant from in its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French
‘the real world’. existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme V
This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition from Heidegger, although their ‘absurd’ freedom was W
that has dominated Western thought for the last four foreign to him. A French philosopher more in tune X
centuries. But the clearing depends on a temporal and with Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up Y
linguistic aspect. Things appear in the three dimen- the condition for the present era: Z

“Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disap- believe poetry was the means to open up the world; it More A
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pearing in the mire of a ‘globalised’ world. Nothing, not could rouse the revelation of things in the clearing. In B
even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest, fact, it was the revelation itself. His intense meditations C
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most wrenching love, can escape this era’s shadow: a on Hölderlin’s poetry is summarised by an essay title D
cancer of the subject”. taken from a poem: “… poetically man dwells …” E
This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway Elsewhere he wrote that “Language is the house of RSS
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part of our need to live in the world rather than be Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and
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imprisoned by autism. Selflessness, of course, while those who create with words are the guardians of this Facebook
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admirable in most cases, can also descend into what home.” If that is the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then
we called inhumanity. One of the terrible ironies of this it means, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust, I
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story is Heidegger’s own descent. In the early 1930s, language would have to change in order to rebuild the J
he saw the Nazi party as a political movement capable tainted home. K
of mediating the needs of the modernity with authentic In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan L
existence, making Germany a modern-day equivalent as he was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor, M
of ancient Greece. In 1933, the Rector of Freiburg physically and metaphorically exiled from his homes: N
University, where Heidegger was a renowned young Czernowitz, under Soviet rule, and German, under the O
professor, resigned in protest at Hitler’s anti-Semitic weight of “murderous speech” as he called it. It was an P
laws. Heidegger took his place after an election among imperative because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel Q
the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in disaffection Beckett put it: one writes not in order to be published, R
but never revoked his party membership and referred one writes in order to breathe. Celan could not breathe S
to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Maurice in the old language. The old language was saturated
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Blanchot called “scandalously inadequate” fashion. with the conditions by which an entire culture was able
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Such facts make Celan’s interest in his work more to produce the greatest art and thought in history and
compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent then produce death camps with the efficiency of a fac- V
in the Romantic project. Another example would be tory. No wonder Adorno said that to write lyric poetry W
the terror following the French Revolution. What does after Auschwitz was itself barbaric. X
this mean for poetry? Well, in his isolated time after What Adorno didn’t say, and this has been ignored Y
the war, during his denazification, Heidegger came to too often, is that poetry could still be written only not Z

as we had known it. The new language, the new poetry, with the crimson word which we sang More A
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would be a way of turning us toward that which is over, O over B
absent in our everyday world, that which “stands apart the thorn. C
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in the world”. This formulation, like Heidegger’s clear- (Trans: Michael Hamburger) D
ing, betrays a religious sensibility. After Auschwitz, E
however, God was under radical question. The space One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this RSS
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left by Him, on the other hand, was not: poem, or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and
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an antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is pal- Facebook
pable only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use H
Psalm
Blanchot’s phrase. Celan’s biographer John Felstiner has I
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No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, brought out the allusions within ‘Psalm’ to Jewish and J
no one conjures our dust. Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed K
No one. here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communi- L
Praised be your name, no one. cates before any of these allusion are understood. M
For your sake It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a N
we shall flower. poem as ‘Psalm’ has a biographer (Heidegger says the O
Towards author of every masterful poem is unimportant) and P
you. Felstiner’s book does indeed concentrate on the poems. Q
Despite this, he uncovers the probable origin of the title R
A nothing of his 1959 collection Sprachgitter – Speech Grille.
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we were, are, shall Celan’s mother-in-law retreated to a convent and
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remain, flowering: when the family visited her, she would remain behind
a grill. Such a barrier holds also for poetry’s revelation. U
the nothing-, the no one’s rose.
With One must accept the limit for it to work; the limit is V
part of the experience. Or non-experience. Lacoue- W
our pistil soul-bright, Labarthe’s brief and powerful book on Celan is actu- X
with our stamen heaven-ravaged, ally called “Poetry as Experience”. It characterises Y
our corolla red the poem as something always returning to its source, Z

approaching the inaccessible, and, necessarily, inacces- The difficulty is that language depends on generality; More A
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sibility. The poem returns to the experience itself – the the more specific a word the harder it is to reach across B
revelation in the clearing – not ‘the stuff of anecdotes’ time; we will not connect to the “altogether other” C
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but the etymological origin of ‘experience’: a crossing trapped in time’s crevasse. In fact, it could not be lan- D
through danger. It is a crossing resisted only in what the guage anymore. Yet if it can connect despite risking such E
poem lets us consume as readers: “a poem has nothing isolation, it would be all the more richer. In this respect, RSS
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to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is Celan requires a certain amount of patience on behalf of
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that from which it wrenches away as a poem.” his readers. For example, a late untitled poem in full: Facebook
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So what, exactly, remains before and after this
wrenching? Celan names it himself, in a speech upon Illegibility of this world. I
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receiving the prestigious Büchner Prize: “the poem has All things twice over. J
always hoped … to speak also on behalf of the strange The strong clocks justify the splitting hour K
– no, I can no longer use this word here – on behalf of hoarsely. L
the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.” You, clamped into your deepest part, climb out M
(translated by Rosemary Waldrop) of yourself for ever. N
Perhaps the ‘strange’ can be used no longer because (trans. Michael Hamburger) O
it is already too familiar, too homely. He had to seek P
another word or phrase: “the altogether other”. His This is puzzling, but such puzzlement does not mat- Q
speech, as much as his poetry, has to be attuned to the ter much once one sets the need for facts or conclusive
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demands of experience. Celan also refers to the attempt harmony aside. Less sympathetic critics dismiss his
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to give each poem its own date, its own unique time, so work as ‘hermetic’, sealed from approach. They say
only the writer could know what such a poem is about. T
that it speaks with supreme accuracy.
Why is the world illegible? What is a strong clock? U
Deep in Time’s crevasse I have no answers. Perhaps the lack of a title neces- V
by the alveolate ice waits, sitates a certain blankness in the initial response. The W
a crystal of breath, moment one titles an experience the dangers lessen. X
your irreversible witness Would a biography help us understand this? Probably Y
(trans. Michael Hamburger) not. Celan was adamant that his poetry was accessible: Z

“As for my alleged encodings” he said “I’d rather say: Celan’s work. He recognised him as the only living equal More A
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undissembled ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the B
and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.” It seems poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black C
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odd that a poet so keen – perhaps even desperate – to Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was D
reach across time, to provide us with such realism, a significant move as Celan had developed an intense E
should do so by writing wilfully unreadable poems. sensitivity (one might say ‘anxiety’) toward anti-Semitic RSS
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Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it is the tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated
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poetry’s problem. publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the Facebook
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Professor John Carey of Oxford would disagree. Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary
He is Britain’s foremost opponent of difficulty. In his authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he I
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best-selling book The Intellectuals And The Masses, regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investiga- J
he argues that Modernism – the epitome of difficulty – tion. Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate K
was invented by intellectuals in order to alienate the so- home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi L
called masses, who, newly emancipated from illiteracy, indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the M
were seen as muddying the pure waters of literature. full extent of Heidegger’s culpability. N
Celan indicates other reasons. In fact, the “enjoyment” Generally, not much is known about Celan’s reasons O
Carey demands is really a means of retaining a dualistic for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during P
attitude to literature; of “talking eyes into blindness”, to the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called Q
use Celan’s phrase. Of course, many Modernists were ‘Todtnauberg’. The title reference is explicit; the place R
proto-fascists, yet this doesn’t mean difficulty equals name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the S
Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a “crossing through first half:
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danger” is not mere rhetoric. The dangers led Heidegger
Arnica, eyebright, U
to his great error.
It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the the draft from the well V
greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work, with the star-crowned die above it, W
was a Nazi. One cannot even say ‘had been a Nazi’ In X
because he never said anything that amounted to a re- the hut, Y
nunciation. Late in life, Heidegger became interested in Z

the line in passing, More A

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- whose name did the book B
register before mine? -, he who drives us, the man, C
who listens in, email
the line inscribed in that book about D
a hope, today, the half- trodden fascine E
of a thinking man’s walks over the high moors RSS
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coming dampness,
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word much. Facebook
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in the heart,
(trans. Michael Hamburger) Almost certainly not. The two men walked across I
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woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid. J
As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger K
of the various translations of the poem, ‘Todtnauberg’ was concerned. He displayed his special copy of the L
is barely a poem than single sentence divided into eight poem proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage, M
stanzas. The first of the three above display Celan’s ex- seemingly unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is N
traordinary eye for nature, as noted earlier in ‘Noctur- enough to indicate the blindness of a man, even one O
nally Pouting’. Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted with genius, rooted in his familiar landscape – brought P
for their healing qualities, so right from the start there is out here in Hamburger’s translation of log-paths as Q
the sense of what the meeting is all about. In the third, “fascine”, a word so close to ‘fascist’, the etymological
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the poet signs the visitors book and makes plain his origin coming, as Joris says, from the Latin ‘fasces’ – a
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awareness of who might have signed it before – Ger- bundle of wooden rods – the symbol of fascism.
‘Todtnauberg’, therefore, cannot be regarded as a T
mans being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology perhaps.
He hopes for a word in the heart of the great man. Did coded accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness, U
the word reveal itself? The remaining five stanzas are: or sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in V
contrast to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the W
woodland sward, unlevelled, very openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan X
orchid and orchid, single, once said: “Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes.” Y
coarse stuff, later, clear The lack of a second “itself” in this sentence exposes.  Z

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Bruce Chatwin: In Search Of The Miraculous email

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Nick Clapson on the enduring enigma of Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing
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Bruce Chatwin was a truly singular voice in British travel parties of characters, all set free to live an existence
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writing, and whose silence is now all too apparent. Since untrammelled by the author’s irrepressible ego. Facebook
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his untimely death in 1989 of what was described at the As the format of this new book suggests, Bruce
time as a rare Chinese disease (but which was later ad- Chatwin’s writing was divisible into distinct categories I
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mitted to be AIDS), several collections of his previously – whether it be art, his exploration of what he termed J
unpublished work have appeared. The latest of these is “the nomadic alternative”, or fiction, written in a style K
Anatomy of Restlessness: Uncollected Writings. This which was an assiduous blend of the real with the L
book, however, pays poor service to his name. Published imaginary. The autobiographical piece which opens M
under the auspices of a ‘sourcebook’ of uncollected Anatomy Of Restlessness hints at some of the myths N
work it draws together various pieces from magazines that surround this man. By all accounts Chatwin left O
and journals. The result is a misshapen assemblage that his steady job writing for The Sunday Times with a P
hides gems amongst the weak and the substandard. telegram enigmatically stating “Have gone to Patago- Q
Chatwin’s writing at its best is both thrilling and nia”. This, however, was not the first time that he had R
absorbing, capable of carrying the reader to untravelled made such a dramatic break from security. Previously,
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lands, and Chatwin was always the best of companions. he threw in his job as a director at Sotheby’s in order
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However, if Chatwin the writer was intriguing, Chatwin to live with and study nomadic tribes in the Sudan, of-
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the man was so much more. His rich life, pushed and fering the excuse that his doctor said that he needed to
pulled by his demanding interests, was always present view distant horizons in order to correct an eye defect V
in his work. That is not say that he was example of (a self-confessed psychosomatic illness). The product W
that breed of traveller who batters you into submission of his sudden trip to Patagonia was the aptly titled In X
with endless anecdote heaped upon anecdote. Rather, Patagonia (1977). Y
he introduces you to the sights of exotic lands, vast This first book was most probably the driest of all Z
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and

Chatwin’s output, but which has already been raised to Though clearly a novel, it is also not a novel. Let More A
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near classic status. Chatwin weaves together curious me explain. The main character is a guy called Bruce B
observations with nuggets of historical information who’s travelling around the Australian outback re- C
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which manages to make this more than an account of searching the nomadic culture of the Aboriginal, and D
a physical journey, and that, to me, is the essence of their singing the world into existence through their E
good travel writing. I don’t just want to know what a travelling of the Songlines. This coincidence is further RSS
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cracking guy the author is, and how he managed to get compounded by the fact that ‘Bruce’ records his notes
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out of a scrape with an armadillo whilst travelling in in very same moleskin notebooks that Bruce Chatwin Facebook
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the Amazon with just a piece of used dental floss and a himself was famous for. This book, then, results in
very, very sharp stick. Nor do I want to be laden down being so much more than just a travel book or a novel. I
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with superfluous information on the economic argu- It provides not only a combination of a portrait of an J
ment for the downfall of the Ottoman Empire! amazing culture and a damn fine read; it eventually K
What do I demand from a travel writer then? I want draws the reader into questioning the very fabric of L
to be able to understand them as a person, and know human culture and our Western preconceptions. Who M
why they have undertaken this particular journey. And could ask for more? An interesting aside: Salman N
that means being able to step inside their head and Rushdie, who travelled with Chatwin in Australia O
travel with them. Though this is nearly impossible, whilst he was working on this book, provides an en- P
Bruce Chatwin was one of the few writers that I feel lightening, though brief, glimpse of Chatwin at work Q
managed it. in his book Imaginary Homelands (1991). R
Chatwin was not, however, a straight forward kind of An obvious thread that joins much of Chatwin’s S
travel writer like Wilfred Thesiger or Norman Lewis. work like The Songlines and Anatomy Of Restlessness
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One of the most amazing qualities that sets Chatwin is his passion for nomadic life. This interest is repre-
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apart was his ability to mix fact and fiction in his ‘sto- sented in both the opening section, ‘Horreur du domi-
ries’. As he said himself, “The word story is intend to cile’, which draws together various short pieces on his V
alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the nar- own personal motivations to travel, and the chapter W
rative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at entitled ‘The Nomadic Alternative’. In this chapter X
work.” This is idea is best held in mind when consider- the collection of pieces outline many of the arguments Y
ing his best-selling book, The Songlines (1987). that comprised Chatwin’s own unpublished thesis on Z

nomadism. These pieces, though frequently dense, are her days in the bleak environment of the Peruvian More A
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some of the most rewarding, with Chatwin’s erudi- Pampas, standing on a step-ladder in order to chart B
tion shining through. Chatwin links many divergent the strange lines, often miles in length, carved into the C
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nomadic cultures from around the world, highlighting floor of this desert. We travel with Chatwin to Ghana to D
several similarities of development, and in time puts see the film director Werner Herzog going mad (again) E
forward a credible case for nomadism as equal to whilst filming Chatwin’s novel, The Viceroy Of Quidah RSS
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the sedentary life that has become a universal norm. (1980). We even get to trail around India with Bruce
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If Chatwin is to be believed, civilisation just took a and the photographer Eve Arnold who followed Indira Facebook
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wrong turn somewhere, and chose to plump for the Gandhi’s election campaign shortly before her assas-
inferior option. This, he feels, also goes some way to sination in the late 70s. I
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explain the Western disease: wanderlust. Another crucial aspect of Chatwin’s output addressed J
When viewed in comparison to his own collection in Anatomy Of Restlessness is his unfailing interest in K
of incidental work, What Am I Doing Here (1989), all forms of visual art. Chatwin’s aesthetic was that L
Anatomy Of Restlessness pales. Chatwin amassed in- which championed the primitive and the simplistic, M
numerable fabulous pieces in what must be considered though, whilst at Sotheby’s he was employed as an ‘ex- N
the definitive compilation, and which really renders pert’ on Impressionism. Whilst interested in the theory O
this new book superfluous. The pieces range through of art and collecting, he was also an artist of consider- P
the intensely personal in ‘Your father’s eyes are blue able aplomb himself with his work being published in Q
again’, the dramatic with ‘A coup – a story’ (though the posthumous Photographs And Notebooks (1993), R
Chatwin himself was caught up in the coup in Benin), with a coinciding exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall, S
and the entrancing ‘On the yeti’s tracks’. These short London. Here we are shown his remarkable eye for the
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works, however, are just the tip of the iceberg, with this abstract that exists in all things. Sparse and controlled,
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book containing so much more. his photographs managed to trap the beauty that can
Another remarkable quality of Chatwin’s writing be found in the common and everyday. He crops boats V
was his ability to capture a personality, and What Am and walls in Mauritania, so releasing the power of their W
I Doing Here is filled with accounts of some the unu- dazzling colours and geometric forms. The prayer flags X
sual characters he met over the years. We meet Maria of the Bodnath Stupa, Kathmandu, are framed so as to Y
Reiche, a gangly German mathematician who spends cut crazy patterns in the sky. Z

Chatwin’s photographs also demonstrate keen of his writing. In doing so, it becomes glaringly ap- More A
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awareness of the decay inherent in all life, littered with parent that Anatomy Of Restlessness is an unsatisfying B
images of crumbling buildings, and tatty ramshackle epilogue to Chatwin’s oeuvre. Yes, it is put together in C
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shacks, all breathing what looks to be their last breath. a good accessible form, and yes, it does aim to cover D
Maybe he liked feel that all sedentary life was on its the main areas of his output. However, what is lacking E
last legs, and soon nomadism, the rightful king would is a sense of quality, and as a result much of this work RSS
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come and claim back its lands. Or maybe he just found falls short of being able to be considered ‘important’.
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them beautiful. However, if, like myself, you want one last chance to Facebook
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This brief excursion through the work of Bruce experience the joy of reading a new Chatwin book,
Chatwin has, I hope, served to demonstrate not only his then you won’t be disappointed. Bruce Chatwin does I
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uniqueness, but also convey some sense of the power still exists in these pages.  J
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Interview [published October 2000] B
Annabel Chong: Life Thru A Lens email

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Robin Askew meets the star of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
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“Oh my god – this couple just turned around and gave where they stand and if you really want it rehashed once
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me a dirty look!” Annabel Chong giggles like a school- again, leave Spike right now and turn to The Guardian Facebook
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girl. “It’s like, no sex please we’re British.” Perhaps un- women’s page, where they’re certain to oblige. Op-
wisely, she’d stepped outside her film company’s noisy portunities to interview porn icons, especially those as I
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office to do this interview in the street over her mobile articulate and forthright as Annabel Chong, are few and J
phone, and had spent 20 minutes chatting chirpily about far between, so I decided to seek answers to the ques- K
blow-jobs and erections. Strange that she should be so tions people really want asked. After polling a handful L
easily embarrassed, mind. Ms Chong’s claim to fame is of mates of both sexes, who may or may not be more M
that back in 1995 she set a new world record by having sleazy than the average Spike reader (you decide), I N
sex with 251 men in ten hours, the whole event being found these boiled down to variations on four themes. O
recorded on film and subsequently edited down to a Let’s get them out of the way before we go any further. P
brisk four hours to become a bestselling hardcore porn So Annabel, did you come? “Sporadically, I did. But Q
vid. Also on hand was a documentary crew making Sex: it’s very much like running a marathon. You go through R
The Annabel Chong Story, which was the hottest ticket stretches where it’s just incredibly boring, incredibly
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at the last year’s Sundance festival of independent film. awful. And you get to certain stretches where you’re
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She has always insisted the big gang-bang was a just running on air. That was where I really got into
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feminist statement, turning the tables on men to reduce it and enjoyed it. I’ve always enjoyed extreme sexual
them to a succession of cocks of varying degrees of situations, and this was certainly one of them. There V
tumescence. There’s a debate to be had about whether are some people – they may not be Tom Cruise, let’s W
pornography degrades women, and whether the ap- say – but they’re very comfortable with their bodies X
propriate response is to degrade men right back again. and their own sexuality. I find that ultimately more at- Y
But it’s a monumentally boring one. Everyone knows tractive than a stud who’s just neurotic about what he Z
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looks like, posing in front of the camera and losing his Have we been diddled? “But they just moved them More A
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hard-on. That’s just not very appealing, is it?” along really quickly. There was some humping, but not B
What proportion of the men failed to get it up, then? quite that much. It’s actually less sex than if a woman is C
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“About 66% were not able to perform. And between having sex with a man for 10 hours straight. Now that’s D
you and me, I would have to say that if I were a bloke a lot of sex.” E
I would have tremendous difficulty performing. I think Sex is a fascinating and occasionally unsettling film, RSS
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I’d get this performance anxiety attack and just fail. whose subject comes across as a complicated young
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And up to this day, I really wonder why a lot of the men woman, alternately assertive and thoughtful, damaged Facebook
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decided to do it. It’s bad enough to fail but it’s even and deluded. The gang-bang itself is one of the least
worse to fail on video, where their grandchildren could erotic things you’ll ever see. Silvery pony-tailed Brit I
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check it out: ‘Oh my god, grandpa’s such a loser. He director John Bowen, whose nom de porn is John T. J
couldn’t even get it up.’ Terribly embarrassing I would Bone, also acts as cock wrangler, leading the leering K
think.” fornicators in groups of five up onto a plinth where Ms L
Given that they were recruited through porn mags, Chong waits to receive them. We also meet her creepy M
weren’t you at all concerned that the men would turn middle-aged fan club organiser, some sneery rival porn N
out to be revolting, rancid weirdos? “Oh, they were stars at a convention (“I do film noirs (sic),” sniffs O
rather revolting, some of them. But the whole point of the star of Bitches of Hollywood), and watch Annabel P
the entire exercise was not to pick out 251 studs. It’s playing up to a Jerry Springer audience and charming Q
more like the idea of the UN.” undergraduates at a Cambridge Union debate. But the R
I’m sorry? “You know, the United Nations. You get a story behind the documentary turns out to be even S
little bit of everything. A little sampling of every single more fascinating. Nowhere is the viewer informed that
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shape, size and, you know … colour, I guess.” the director, Gough Lewis, was shagging his subject.
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Weren’t you terribly sore afterwards? “Well, in actual Now he’s apparently ‘gone AWOL’ and she’s agreed
fact if you watch the four-hour gang bang tape itself, to publicise the film to put right what she claims are V
you will realise that a lot of the things were fudged in misrepresentations. What’s more, she’s now making W
editing to make it look as though more sex took place. her own film about what it’s like to be the subject of X
So it really wasn’t that many men.” a documentary. “I get more self-reflective every day,” Y
Hang on. It says here that there were 251 of them. she quips. Z

Annabel Chong was born Grace Quek (pronounced entire context.” More A
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“quake”) in Singapore, 1972. Her Christian parents Even more worrying, we learn that not only has Bo- B
(mum’s a piano teacher, dad’s a schoolteacher) sent her wen yet to pay her the $10,000 she was promised to take C
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to convent school and encouraged her to study law but part in the gang bang, but the assurances she was given D
her “dwindling religious faith and burgeoning sexual- about the men being tested for HIV were untrue. “I was E
ity” were already causing problems. In a traumatic terribly disturbed by that. I felt extremely betrayed by RSS
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ritual, she was exorcised in a local church at the age the fact that they didn’t take the health precautions I
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of 17. In 1991, she moved to London to attend King’s thought they did,” she says angrily. Facebook
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College and thence to America and the University of Late in the film, it’s revealed that she was gang
Southern California, where she was so enraged by raped while in London in 1991. The viewer is invited I
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feminist theory that she took to porn as a kind of practi- to conclude that her penchant for group sex flicks (I J
cal adjunct to her gender studies course. Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team, All I Want For K
Although she still has a tendency to address each Christmas is a Gang Bang) is born of a desire to regain L
question as though it were one of her college essays, to control over this part of her life. She thinks that’s too M
be fielded with maximum cultural studies jargon, An- simplistic an explanation. “Nobody ever does anything N
nabel/Grace (“‘Who am I?’ is a question I constantly for any single motivation. I felt that it was a cop out for O
ask myself”) now seems a great deal more assured than Gough to say that A caused B, because there’s actually P
she does in the film. “It’s rather mortifying to look back more of a story behind the entire rape event. The im- Q
and think to myself, oh my god, was I that vulnerable?” mediate outcome of it was that I was sent through the R
she admits. “But maybe I was.” legal system and National Health Service counselling S
One of the more disturbing scenes shows Annabel system, which was incredibly dehumanising. I felt that
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cutting herself, the clear implication being that the I was nothing but a statistic. Then I looked back on my
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porn industry has driven her to self-harm. In fact, she entire life in Singapore and realised that all my life I
says, the sequence was shot on the day that she and had been processed. I led the perfect life. I went to all V
the director split up, and both of them were doing it. the right schools, I attended the right social functions, W
“I don’t know what came over me. It’s not one of the hung out in the country club, went to church, got the X
prouder moments of my life, but when I saw the film I humanities scholarship. I was the perfect child, but Y
was really astonished to find that he didn’t include the none of it was really my choice. First thing I did was to Z

quit law school and go to art school. It was a big issue. well – like the films from the 70s, which I really admire More A
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My relatives, bless them, actually called my parents to – the women actually do look like women, which is B
offer their condolences. ‘She’s going to starve. We feel kind of nice. Because nowadays the women don’t look C
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so sorry for you.’ So it affected me in the sense that like women – they look like drag queens. And half the D
control became a huge issue in my life. I think what time I’m just sitting there thinking, they don’t look ter- E
you see in the documentary is the process of regaining ribly female do they? As a female viewer that bothers RSS
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control, and it really is a work in progress. Even today, me, because I want to be able to relate to the person
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I’m asking myself whether I’m in control of situations.” onscreen when I’m doing my own private thing. Facebook
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These days she’s made up with her parents, who “I may not know necessarily what good pornography
were unaware of their daughter’s novel career and a is,” she concedes. “I know what I like, so I’m just going I
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little baffled by her popularity when the documentary to make what I like and hopefully it will sell.” J
was being filmed. Partly as a result of her experiences Of course, it won’t sell over here because we have K
of being exploited in front of the camera, she’s now some of the most draconian censorship laws in the L
decided to go behind it, producing her own porn. And world. “I thought about that when I was coming over M
she’s on a crusade. “What I’m trying to do is to target here. I really believe that when you talk about banning N
market my product towards a younger crowd, which no porn because it’s exploitative of women or because it’s O
one is really addressing right now. Or at least to make obscene, then it’s terribly fascist. A lot of people derive P
it more contemporary. I mean what’s up with the big enjoyment from watching adult films. I certainly do. Q
hair? It’s so over. So 80s.” I have been a porn consumer for years, and proud to R
Do you really think porn consumers look at the be one. I think a lot of things are more obscene than S
hairstyles though, Annabel? “Well, if I was a bloke, the average porn film. Like Patch Adams, the Robin
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I wouldn’t want all that frizzy hair crackling all over Williams film. I think that’s incredibly obscene – it’s
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my blow-job. It just seems rather intimidating. It’s like total emotional pornography.”
like being blown by a hedgehog. I don’t think it’s very What with the porn and the documentary and her V
aesthetic. Men have to have jerk off somehow. They journalism and art exhibitions, there’s just one thing W
need to have a wank over some images of people get- Annabel doesn’t have time for anymore. “Your average X
ting it on. They’re just going to buy whatever’s out Brit probably has a better sex life than me,” she moans. Y
there. And if there’s product out there that’s done rather And on that cheering note, I bid her farewell.  Z

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Feature [published November 1997] B
E.M. Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond email

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Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran
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refuses explanation RSS
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“Nothing is more irritating than those works which between groups of sentences appear like sands of the
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‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has desert encroaching on an oasis. Or is it the other way Facebook
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focused on just about everything except a system.” around? That the answer is so unclear is the worth of
What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was Cioran’s sentences. I
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born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois ex- J
priest. In adolescence, he lost his childhood in the coun- ponents of the 19th century. They open wounds. Still, K
try and was moved to the city. He also lost his religion. Cioran is not studied. This is the academic orthodoxy. L
For years he didn’t sleep – until he took up cycling. He And that’s fine. Scholars read texts like drivers read M
passed sleepless nights wandering the dodgy streets of diversion signs. La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Ni- N
an obscure Romanian city. In 1937 he moved to Paris etzsche 40, Existentialism, forever. Alternatively, just O
and wrote, producing what are generally classified as read the sentences. P
‘aphorisms’, collected together under such titles as The “…lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity.” Q
Temptation To Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The The end of a sentence in this case; a place of especial R
Trouble With Being Born. He knew Samuel Beckett, elation and despair. (The want of elation and despair
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who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. Late generating their presence in the vertiginous lack which
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in life he gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the is the peculiarity of consciousness. Reading is like con-
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universe” anymore, and died a few years later after an sciousness in that nothing happens. ) Cioran is lyrical.
encounter with an over-excited dog. His style is a variant on song. At the same time he is a V
I hope none of this helps. writer of solitude and subjectivity. This last word has W
Cioran’s sentences are of little or no help. That is gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin to solipsism, X
their worth. Just think of the aphorisms; each sentence selfishness, ignorance, certainly ‘untruth’. But let us Y
has the company of only one or two others. The gaps wrest it back for as long as we can. Subjectivity is the Z
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state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleep- “As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they More A
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less. “Three in the morning. I realize this second, then know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon B
this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to C
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each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The D
It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the disabused man is different: for him, disappointment E
indictment of birth.” occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to RSS
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A special type of sleeplessness being where one is await it, it is present.”
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oneself forever and knows it. It is also an indictment of To say again then, his disappointment with writing Facebook
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lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the suppression of subjec- was inevitable. But this only drives one on, to divest
tivity, the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’. words of their common usage and apply them to this I
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Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his J
is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a disillusionment with writing’s other products, par- K
revolution lyrical to its evil core. The Volk wanted to ticularly those where disappointment is not an issue: L
sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its ideas, grand narratives, systems. “Philosophers are M
anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Cio- constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad N
ran’s physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt sense.” Elsewhere: “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three O
for those who craved such sleep. He needed it too, to enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is P
stay alive. A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also the system, in philosophy and in everything.” Yet how Q
his saving. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet can one write without constructing some system, even R
it is melancholy that separates us from it.” if it is negative? S
When Cioran began to write in French he had, by “’Optimists write badly’ (Valery). But pessimists do
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then, conquered his insomnia. Exhausted by long not write.” [Maurice Blanchot]
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bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing tries to abide The violence of Cioran’s work, its verbosity and
in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse arrogance, results from a struggle with inevitable V
into the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran’s positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of this. W
writing tends to disperse the ‘three in the morning’ in It demands our opposition. The blank following the X
lyric expression. So, a bit of a disappointment, to say sentences rises up before us. Our exasperation leaves Y
the least. the same silent space hovering there. This is the place- Z

less heaven or hell Cioran is always returning us to. It repulsively anachronistic the journalistic novel is (and More A
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is pointless to oppose or argue – or explain. One can virtually every novel published is a journalistic novel), B
scan the biographical parabola that gives shape to a life, Cioran wonders what is the point of writing more than C
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thereby explaining it and the work, but something is one novel of absence: D
left behind; this place he takes us to. The facts of a life “[the] implicit conception of this sort of art opposes to E
help inasmuch as noise masks silence. But something is the erosion of being the inexhaustible reality of nothing- RSS
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left behind. Generally, it seems students study, review- ness. Logically valueless, such a conception is nonethe-
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ers review, writers write and readers read in the hope of less true affectively (to speak of nothingness in any other Facebook
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avoiding this. It’s what the people want, after all. terms than affective one is a waste of time). It postulates
Cioran has also written essays. They demand the a research without points of reference, an experiment I
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same kind of reading as the aphorisms. It just takes pursued within an unfailing vacuity, a vacuity experi- J
longer. In the landmark essays, the brilliance burns enced through sensation, as well as a dialectic paradoxi- K
long and hard. Still, the tone remains more or less iden- cally frozen, motionless, a dynamism of monotony and L
tical to the aphorisms. While the aphorisms give us the emptiness. Is this not going around in circles? Ecstasy of M
breathing space of a firebreak, the essays threaten suf- non-meaning: the supreme impasse.” N
focation. What is lost is the very sense of its inspiration, This passage – representative of the whole – jerks O
the surprise, the horror, the emptiness of the moment. the steering wheel as if to herald an eternal rounda- P
Instead, Cioran has something to say. In ‘Beyond the bout. But this will be Cioran’s own journey. Instead Q
Novel’, Cioran examines our self-conscious age with of condemning the novelist, and thereby commending R
regard to what helped constitute it – the novel. his own judgement, Cioran gives him the benefit of the S
The essay develops out of the idea that the novel doubt. “Is [the novel] really dead, or only dying? My
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grew out of metaphysical poverty. It allowed us to incompetence keeps me from making up my mind … I
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understand our history and our psychology in a world leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise
where the old certainties were decaying. Yet now that degree of its agony.” V
the decay has reached a zero point, producing the kind Instead of only railing against repetitious failure, W
of works bereft even of the certainty of the self as sub- Cioran gives us the guidelines to which potential X
ject. If you don’t know what novels these are, they’re writers must abide if they are to create an art for the Y
the ones NOT written by journalists. Yet however wilderness. In Kafka’s words, this is the help going Z

away without helping. ‘Beyond the Novel’ adds to the find in his short pieces on other writers collected in More A
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demands of genuine creation, and thus the unexpected Anathemas And Admirations. In particular, the essay on B
joy of what has been and might be achieved. Instead Scott Fitzgerald. Here is a writer one might otherwise C
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of Postmodern cacophony – its sloppy apologia borne ignore: sentimental claptrap elevated to art by a lazy D
on positive negativism – we get to hear the silence world. Cioran lays this aside. What he concentrates on E
behind the noise. One thinks of Beckett, of course, and the time when Fitzgerald awoke from the American RSS
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the equally great Thomas Bernhard. To confirm this, Dream into the intensity of lucid consciousness, some-
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Cioran pulls up in a lay-by and, in a passage one might thing “that transcends contingencies and continents”. Facebook
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describe as uncharacteristic, seems to hold back from By this time, Fitzgerald’s famous books have been
hopelessness and bitter regret: written, the American definition of success achieved: I
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“Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are fame, money and even requited love. “Literally and J
sometimes fruitful … Let us salute it, then, even celebrate figuratively, [Fitzgerald] had lived asleep. But then K
it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from sleep left him.” Why? Returning to the his deepest L
one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last, theme, Cioran answers: “Insomnia sheds a light on us M
we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions which we do not desire but to which, unconsciously, N
and our limits, the futility of having a life.” we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against O
Well, not uncharacteristic after all. This is as near ourselves.” P
to abstract celebration as Cioran gets. He leaves it to Fitzgerald’s inner experience remained despite Q
others with ‘the courage of dilution’ to give us the worldly success, indeed was heightened as a result. On R
succour using the ‘banalities’ necessary for the novel. the heights of his despair, Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Crack- S
His admiration for other writers is due precisely to Up’. Cioran’s commentary on this non-work – it was a
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their ability use the banal surface to reach the subter- series of fragments – is like most of Cioran’s commen-
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ranean. Cioran’s rapid lyricism will not spread into a taries, a commentary on his own procedure, also a series
delta plain of banality to allow such an exploration. of fragments. ‘The Crack-Up’ represents for Cioran the V
This is his limit. direction Fitzgerald should have pursued rather than W
Despite this, he is able to prospect worth by refamil- regarding it as an aberration. He tried to overcome it by X
iarizing us with what is important. Perhaps his most going to Hollywood to write screenplays. Fitzgerald is Y
worthwhile work apart from the aphorisms, we can rightly judged inferior to what he discovered, unlike a Z

Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche. where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald More A
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“Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded was prone to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify B
over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply the inherent hubris of writing and publishing. Aware of C
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upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary, this, Cioran tells us not to worry about those who are D
deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity E
failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it. preserves reason. RSS
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It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between “This is not a paradox … for such brooding over our
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literature and the real dark night of the soul.” miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from Facebook
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In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure our reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses
with sickness. The healthy, he says, keep a certain an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation.” I
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distance from our ‘contradictory and intense’ states, This helps answer a perennial question: why did J
while to be sick is ‘to coincide totally with oneself’. Cioran live so long without killing himself? Sickness K
The former allows us to act. But isn’t it precisely one’s can increase self-pity, thereby reason, thereby self- L
distance from oneself a part of sickness; it is the part preservation. To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our M
which can never act? purpose, we must use both sickness and health, self- N
“When you imagine you have reached a certain de- pity and detachment, the desert and the oasis. To deny O
gree of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots either is either fatal or contemptible. Cioran shows by P
… But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of example, how various the tension between opposites is Q
its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of manifested. His examples have one thing in common R
action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.” it seems: the admittance of lucidity, that which lies S
The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is behind all stories, all systems, all action, all help.
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left to the silent and invisible. ‘The Crack-Up’ is called As academia eschews ambivalence and individual-
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the work of a sick man, yet its impressive lucidity is ism, rewarding instead skills of memory and language,
a histrionics of detachment, more or less identical to it might be worth stepping into the vanishing point V
Cioran’s own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the W
achieve oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely stagnant wounds of our lucidity. X
human, hence our fascination with good and evil. Per- “The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should Y
haps this sharp division between sickness and health is have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him”.  Z

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Interview [published February 2006] B
Diablo Cody: Candy Girl email

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Emma Garman talks to the author of Candy Girl: A Year In The Life
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Of An Unlikely Stripper RSS
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One night, 24-year-old recent Minnesota transplant Even jaded readers will be fascinated by some of
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Diablo Cody was walking home from her dull ad the real-life characters in your book. Like the jizz- Facebook
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agency job when the words “Amateur Night” on a top- licking guy at the peep show.
less bar’s marquee beckoned irresistibly. Even though He’s the celebrity of the book! He would come I
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Cody had only once been inside a strip club – and, with crawling in and lick up as much as he could. The thing J
her idyllic middle-class upbringing, devoted boyfriend that was really fascinating about him was that he was K
and conspicuous lack of emotional scars, hardly fit the so clean cut. He was the last guy you would ever think L
stereotype of a sex industry worker – one try-out as had a habit like that. I shudder to think about it. M
an amateur led to a year of professional hard graft as What else did you come across that fazed you? N
a stripper, lap dancer and peep-show performer. The You know, people who just had really strange fet- O
equally hilarious, titillating and gruesome account of ishes. Incest would come up a lot: People who would P
her exhausting adventure, Candy Girl: A Year In The want you to masturbate as their sister, or their mother. Q
Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, is far more than just an- That was something I was not comfortable with. I tried R
other stripper memoir or dispatch from the dark side: to be pretty game, but that really freaked me out. And,
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Cody’s analysis of what she found within the walls of you know, a lot of cross dressers. There seemed to be a
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upscale men’s clubs and sleazy sex palaces, and within lot of men who wanted to come in and talk about gay
sex. To me that was really surprising, that they though U
herself, is shot through with a laser-like wit and punk
rock sensibility likely to influence all political shades of of the booth as a safe haven for their fantasies, even V
opinion on sex jobs and raunch culture. Cody – who’s though it was obviously straight-oriented entertain- W
now hung up her white platforms to work as a success- ment. That was weird. X
ful screenwriter and arts editor – talked to me on the So you became a stripper as an experiment – were Y
phone from Minneapolis. you surprised to find you became addicted? And Z
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was it the money or the attention? But which would you say is the more exploited More A
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Honestly, I never made that much money compared group in a strip club: The girls who work, or the B
with the people I worked with. So for me I think it was men who hand over the money? C
about the attention, but also sort of an external thing. email
Some of the needier customers, the men who were D
I found it to be cathartic, a very weird, twisted form looking for an emotionally connection, were really E
of self-expression. I think I got addicted to just how preyed upon. They were definitely manipulated and vic- RSS
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subversive and how fun it was compared to my every tims in that way. But most of the time, the women were
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day life. disenfranchised. It’s the societal model for a woman to Facebook
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And you didn’t derive any particular satisfaction be revered and worshipped as a thing of beauty, and
from, say, when you got a promotion at the advertis- in a strip club, it’s actually the complete opposite. You I
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ing agency where you worked. have a roomful of beautiful women, trying desperately J
Right, I didn’t at all, and it surprised me, because if to woo these men. K
I got 20 toy shows at Sex World [the porn emporium Competing with each other. L
where Cody worked as one of the ‘dolls’ who are dis- Exactly. And it really turns the men into little emper- M
played and selected for peep show performances] in a ors and the women into these sad, grovelling creatures. N
night I would feel proud. So that was the one aspect that disturbed the heck out O
Is this something mainstream feminism has still of me. You know, I always thought that strip clubs P
failed to sufficiently acknowledge, how satisfying it would be the kind of places that celebrated beauty and Q
can be to wield one’s sexual power in this way? femininity and it’s really not the case. R
It can. I think it’s something that third-wave feminism How much do the men kid themselves that it’s
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has recognized. On the other hand the one thing people anything other than a financial transaction?
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have failed to recognize is just how unsatisfying and Funnily enough, a lot of them sexualize the financial
unfulfilling the corporate world can still be for women. aspect of it and find it a turn-on to be paying for a lap U
Because no matter how much we’ve progressed, the dance or for female companionship. There were others V
glass ceiling is still so much in place. And I honestly who were obviously in massive denial and seriously W
felt kind of degraded in my day-to-day life, at the white- wanted to believe, “oh, this girl really cares about me, X
collar jobs, because I was always being undersold. she told me her real name,” not knowing that the same Y
Whereas in the sex industry it was so straightforward. girl was mocking them in the dressing room and had Z

given them a fake real name. Every dancer I knew had has become a totally mainstream concept. You hear it More A
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an onstage name and a fake real name for when she in the music … stripper culture is totally mainstream B
really wanted to sucker a guy. But he would actually now, obviously. Now there’s stripper aerobics, t-shirts C
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believe that you shared that information with him be- for girls that say “Porn Star”, all that kind of thing. D
cause he was so chivalrous and truly respected women. And it’s not the world I come from. I came of age in E
You know, “I can earn her trust.” A lot of guys just want the 90s, when we had Riot Grrl music and it was just RSS
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to be the white knight, that’s the persona they assume a more feminist time. I know I’m being a hypocrite
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when they walk into the club. Like they’re going to find by saying that I don’t think a high school girl should Facebook
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some poor little lost girl and save her. be involved in the sex industry, but at least by the age
What do you think about what Ariel Levy has of 24 or 25 I had lived enough to be able to make that I
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called “the rise of raunch culture”, and the argu- decision for myself. J
ment that the phenomenon of women visiting strip What would you say to a woman who’s read your K
clubs is regressive rather than empowering? book, thinks it sounds like an interesting job and is L
I guess I’m emblematic of this raunch culture she going to try it? M
talks about. I’m the foul-mouthed, trash-talking, salty I would say try it, slowly. And make sure that you N
sex worker who has a lot of fun with that stuff. And I maintain control of yourself in the situation at all times. O
guess I don’t read that deeply into it. I think that any That includes maintaining some level of sobriety. P
time people get to reverse roles it’s empowering, and Because honestly, the people who fall down the rabbit Q
for women who get to objectify other women it’s a role hole are the ones who get involved with drugs. R
reversal, it’s empowering and it feels good. There’s And the ones who cross the line into prostitution? S
just no way around it. For me, from a purely hedonistic Exactly, yeah. You really have to know your bounda-
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standpoint, I find women attractive, so it’s fun to go to ries. In a lot of cases I think that escort work and pros-
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strip clubs and it’s fun to watch porn. titution, to me that’s just another more extreme form
In the book you describe meeting a high school of sex work. I don’t beat around the bush. I knew a V
girl who’s working in a strip club, and for her it was lot of strippers who were really quick to point out the W
a regular part-time job, no big deal. What does that difference between them and prostitutes, but honestly X
say about American culture? I don’t see that big of a difference. It’s a controversial Y
I mean, just equating material things with sexuality viewpoint, but I know that I was selling my body and Z

selling my sexuality and I’m not really sure how much And you don’t want to get big fake boobs? More A
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bigger a step it would have been toward becoming an Exactly, I didn’t want to go that far. But at the same B
escort. It’s all so closely related that it struck me as time part of me wondered what it would have been C
like if I had gotten big fake boobs and gone the whole email
funny when girls would get extremely offended by that D
comparison. I would think, you’re in a peep show with nine yards, had that ambition that some of those girls E
a dildo up your twat and you’re asking me to show you have. Because then I really could have gained insight RSS
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more respect! into what that life is like, from a purely anthropological
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So do you have any regrets? standpoint. Facebook
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There are times when I wish I had attempted to take But you would never go back and do it now?
it even a little more seriously than I did. Because it Right – I think it was pretty obvious when I was do- I
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would have been interesting to see what it was like to ing it that I was kind of a dilettante. I probably wouldn’t J
get really entrenched in the lifestyle and be one of the go back and do it now, but I miss it. I still feel a little K
upper echelon performers. Obviously I have a physical twinge when I pass a strip club, and sometimes consider L
limitation in that regard because I don’t look like a ten. going in.  M
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Interview [published December 1996] B
Douglas Coupland: From Fear To Eternity email

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Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the
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problem with American chocolate RSS
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Douglas Coupland is not your average novelist. Since Polaroids is a set of personal essays about moments of
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the publication of Generation X in 1991, he has become life – attending a Grateful Dead concert, an obituary Facebook
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one of this decade’s most important writers, thanks to for Kurt Cobain, a homage to James Rosenquist’s F1-
his unerring ability to capture the zeitgeist of young 11. The book’s closing essay, ‘Brentwood Notebooks’, I
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middle class America in the post-industrial 1990s. takes a fascinating and chilling look at the nature of J
Where Generation X and Shampoo Planet dealt with fame in the wake of the OJ Simpson trial. K
the existential confusion of America’s over-educated With Polaroids From The Dead’s UK publication in L
children, Microserfs documented the movement of November, Spike caught up with Doug via email. The M
technology into mainstream culture. Each book seemed following is the transcript of our conversation. N
impossibly of the moment at their time of publication – O
many said Microserfs must have been speed-written in Hi Spike (or is it Chris?) P
order to cash in on the advent of multimedia, yet in fact I received your three postings. I know it’s strange Q
it was the result of three years’ painstaking research. when you accidentally post the wrong draft. It’s the R
While Coupland is usually portrayed as a ‘spokesman modern equivalent of leaving your letter of resignation
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for a generation’ and a technological evangelist (one under the Xerox machine lid.
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of the short stories on Coupland’s website is entitled If your name is Spike, you’ll be the second one I
know – which is statistically improbable. The other U
‘The Past Sucks’), most accounts of his work fail to
recognise its inherent humour and humanity. Spike is Spike Jonze, lately of MTV video fame, but V
Now nearly 35 and finally settled in his home town of before that of Dirt fame – a short-lived US magazine W
Vancouver, Coupland’s new book, Polaroids From The for 18-25s. He and the staff came up to Vancouver for X
Dead, does something to redress the balance. Billed a day and a half to visit me as part of their ‘Discover Y
as a collection of “photos from the kitchen drawer”, America – a month on the road’ issue. It was great fun, Z
BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and

and then a few weeks later I was doing a reading at You have to watch it because Americans go nuts if More A
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the University of Iowa and they were driving through you slander their chocolate. They really do. I guess it’s B
and heckled me from the back and it was great fun. because it’s such a gratifying signal that goes in early C
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They’d just done this chocolate rating system on Cana- and deep into the child’s mind. D
dian chocolate bars (essentially identical to England’s I wasn’t quite sure about this email interview E
– Kit Kat, Aero… ) and they gave the bars really low business. I had this vision of you sitting there with RSS
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ratings, which sucked because have you ever tried stock answers ready to paste in…
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US chocolate? Hork! They had just come back from Not at all. That would be a fax interview (which this Facebook
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Devil’s Tower monument (Close Encounters Of The is not) or an interview with Duran Duran (or rather, their
Third Kind) where, after they finished a chocolate bar, people). My large problem with interviews (and I do I
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they tossed it out to the prairie dogs. If the dogs ate it, have many problems) is that my brain won’t allow me J
the bar got an extra point. If they wouldn’t eat it, the bar to do serial interviews. Once a question’s been asked, K
lost a point. then my brain rebels against having to answer the same L
I decided that I had to defend my nation’s chocolate’s question again. This makes me appear grouchy. I’m M
honour, so I bought about 12 US bars at the Circle-K hoping the WWW will allay some of this repetition. N
Mart and then we went to my hotel room and had a I’m always amazed at actors and how they can charm- O
Tasting Session. I’d take a bite of a bar, make com- ingly spew forth studio agendas. But then that’s what P
ments, spit it out into a waste paper basket and take they do for a living – they’re actors. Q
a drink of water and move on to the next bar. I de- Did you travel a lot when younger? R
scribed the Three Musketeers bar as having a definite Probably too much. I lived in too many places in S
log-in-the-toilet aspect. They printed this in the chart the 1980s (in no order: Vancouver, Toronto, Sapporo,
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in their magazine and the company that makes Three Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles, Montreal, Stuttgart).Then
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Musketeers bars went ballistic and pulled their ads and in my 30s I visited too many cities with work but was
the magazine folded shortly thereafter. Whew! What a frustrated because I’d ‘be’ in a city just aching to tour V
long story. So, hi. around, but instead I was stuck in a hotel room. I don’t W
Americans are obsessed with putting peanut but- know how sports teams don’t go mad travelling around X
ter in virtually every chocolate bar – why? It smells as much as they do. I suppose it’s okay because they’ve Y
like dog doo. plenty of company. Z

I’m 24… Thanks to your art college training, you seem to More A
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Oh, then you’re due for your mid-20s crisis any day enjoy messing around with the format of your books; B
now. Beware … nobody escapes. Your 20s are muck the photos in Polaroids, the pages of repeated words C
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and shit and pain and loneliness and horror. in Microserfs, the comic strip panels in Generation D
I think I have a headline for this interview… X. Do you read any comic books? E
Indeed! I wish somebody had warned me. I might Not really. Some of the stuff out of Toronto is great: RSS
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have changed a few things. (like what, Doug?) I Palookaville and Yummy Fur spring to mind. And Tin-
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wouldn’t have worried so much. And I would have quit tin when I was younger. But I think I will be exploring Facebook
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smoking at 20 instead of 26, for starters. more stuff in this direction.
Did you admire any writers at 24? Did you do all of your website’s graphics etc? I
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I read many writers but I never really admired written The horizontal panels, yes. They’re a homage to US J
craftsmanship until around 28 or 29. I admired visual Pop artist James Rosenquist. There are so many artists K
artists (all of the Pop artists) and the usual assortment I admire. Warhol, Jenny Holzer (obviously), Damien L
of 1980s New Order/OMD performers. Hirst (he’s cool), Lichtenstein, Barbara Hepworth, M
And would you have wanted to have communi- Isamu Noguchi … I could name dozens. It’s my big N
cated with them? influence. O
Actually, no. I learned rather quickly in art school What do you think of the impact of visual art on P
that someone’s personality is often a million miles culture? Q
away from their work. I’ve been lucky over the past Art in the 20th-century Modernist context is con- R
few years and have met many people I’ve wondered sumed by both design and by industry almost as quickly
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about and it’s been good fun. But it’s always been ac- as it is made. There’s no lagtime any longer.
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cidental–never seeking out. For what it’s worth, I was Don’t you think the most exciting visual art isn’t
driving up the coast yesterday listening to Phillip Glass’ found in the gallery any longer anyway? U
Powaquaatsi, the sequel to Koyanisquaatsi … are you True. V
familiar with them? Wonderful movies both. I met the Damien Hirst brings organic things into the ste- W
director by chance in New Mexico and I told him how rility of the gallery, like the shark and the sheep… X
much I liked them and he snarled at me, so now I try Again, true, but I suspect there’s a bit more to it than Y
and look at the films and not think of him. just that one dimension. Z

… while artists such as Keith Haring, Bill Barker them. I go berzerk (ask my friends) I ask people to read More A
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(The Schwa Corporation) or William Latham (the articles and reviews and give a synopsis, but it’s like B
chap who does the beautiful organic screensavers) having my skin peeled off to read them, good or bad. C
bypass it entirely. email
Microserfs, far more than Generation X, con- D
Agreed. Schwa is majorly cool and we’ve all been nected with a lot of my friends here, in the sense E
mesmerised by Latham’s screensavers. And Keith’s that Microserfs wasn’t American at all – it was the RSS
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well … dead. I’ve actually been a keen fosterer of West’s machine in full swing and we were living it,
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the idea that galleries are no longer the casinos of the loving it and loathing it simultaneously. A sort of Facebook
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shocking and the new. It’s finally sinking in. So many triple ironic self-bluff.
people have their whole lives invested in the perpetu- Good description. I
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ation of that system, so expect much backlash accord- Do you think we’re moving towards a major J
ingly. But it appears museums are getting the point, and paradigm shift? K
if anything, a new Renaissance is looming. No. It’s business as usual. L
Do you think your books have an impact? The way in which the subject of fame reoccurs M
This is something I really don’t think about, Chris. I through Polaroids, from Kurt to OJ, makes me ask N
do them and people read them and hopefully they see an obvious question – is your own fame influencing O
the world differently at the end. In whatever way. your life? Or do you consider yourself unfamous? P
Do you have a sense of distance from your own Personally, I tend to gauge real hardcore fame by Q
work? whether my parents have heard of someone or not. R
Good question, and nobody’s ever asked that one, so It influences life only to a small degree, both for good S
you score ten points (ding ding ding ding.) and bad. Your theory about somebody being famous
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The only way I obtain distance is to not read some- only if one’s parents have heard of them is an excellent
thing and then slam into it with new eyes. With books- U
description. And even then, there are 5.5 billion people
in-progress, it’s hard to give myself much distancing out there and who knows who knows who? V
time. As for older books, I read bits every so often and The eulogy to Kurt in Polaroids – it felt like you were W
wonder at the stuff that was going through my mind unsure as to what to say about him. Caught between X
at that point. As for interviews or articles on myself, I needing to say something and unable to fully say it… Y
can’t read them. I’m simply biologically unable to read I was actually more affected by the overdose and the Z

eerie silence the month before he killed himself. I just think PCs grouch at me because I don’t fall into and More A
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knew something was badly fucked-up somewhere, but victim categories, and Postmodernists kind of like B
had no idea how badly. I wasn’t at all surprised when I me only as long as what I do is construed to be of the C
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heard the news. I’d prepared myself. It’s one of those hyper-moment, “more now than now.” Both seem to be D
deaths that you didn’t think would affect you much but short-term (to say the least!) views. E
does. Jim Henson was one. Dr Seuss was another. All FUN FACT: The next novel is called Girlfriend in a RSS
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three of the above have to do with youth and happy Coma (after The Smiths’ song.)
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memories of youth followed by loss. Aargh! Doug – don’t do it! Not The Smiths – they Facebook
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The question of the essential hollowness of fame, almost ruined my adolescence!
money and material possessions which emerges What IS your problem with The Smiths? They’re I
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from ‘Brentwood Notebook’ and the East Berlin great. Almost all UK bands from the 1980s are great. J
postcards seems to lead to a certain melancholy. Even Bonnie Tyler in her own weird way. BTW: where K
Yes. is she now? Harper’s magazine over here had a statistic L
There’s a Godless but still wholly spiritual element once showing that people are most nostalgic in later M
which figures heavily in your work and tends to get years for the music that was current at the age of 23. N
ignored precisely because of all the PCs and Post- I’d agree. O
modernity which people – interviewers especially Has Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh come to your P
– prefer to favour. What’s even more interesting is attention? Q
that there’s no condemnatory tone to the quest for Yes. It’s extremely popular. I tried reading it, but it was R
these things, only a realisation as to their inherent so thick and Glaswegian. I’m glad the movie got made. S
uselessness. In your work, there’s the day-to-day Drugs and rave culture. What do you think?
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fun of life, the exhilaration and exasperation of in- That’s so American! In a funny way. Anyway, I don’t
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formation overload, but there’s also this meditative know much about rave culture but I like the outfits. I’ve
element that asks the eternal questions. really never spent more than ten hours cumulatively in V
The next book deals with these in a big way (I hope). a nightclub all told. I’m more ‘pubby.’ (a publican? is W
I’ve come to believe that the only decisions that matter there some other word?) X
are those decisions made in the face of eternity. The As for drugs I really have to watch it. Even vitamins Y
future is not eternity. It’s an important distinction. I spazz me out for up to 48 hours. I grew up on the West Z

Coast in the 1970s, which is to say that life was steeped and I think, “Ahh, they’ve read THE ARTICLE.” More A
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in bad pot and magic mushrooms for most of my high Do you have any words of advice for young people? B
school years. I get paranoid on pot, so that was that. Yes. It’s pissing rain out. We’ve just had the rainiest C
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Mushrooms – well, they grow on the front lawns here, October and November in recorded history. The X-Files D
but I’m not sure. I’m really not. studio is ten minutes away from where I live. People E
I’m somewhat suspicious of anything mind-altering. sometimes comment on the calculated use of rain on RSS
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I avoid coke and acid and all sorts of stuff just because the set to create a supernatural effect. They wish! It’s
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I don’t think we’d agree (or perhaps we’d agree too because it never stops raining here. Now you know. Facebook
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much). I know many people who’ve had their lives Care to add anything else, you lovable harbinger
saved thanks to some of the newer meds like Prozac of doom? I
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and Zoloft. I overreact to most pharmaceuticals and can I am not a doom harbinger (oh, it’s all in the eye of J
only really tolerate old standbys like erythromycin or the beholder) but I’ll greedily accept the lovable bit. K
ativan when required. Someone wrote once that I don’t Bye, Chris. L
drink or anything, and this one article, wherever it ap- It’s been much fun. Post me a copy of how it all gels M
peared, has haunted me ever since. People always make in the end. N
goggle-eyes when I have a scotch. I see their reaction Yours here in Vancouver, Doug  O
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Review [published November 1998] B
Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book email

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Chris Mitchell
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Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb same territory as his novels, taking something as incon-
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Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment sequential as a videogame and expanding it into nothing Facebook
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in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give less than a metaphor for life. His skill as a writer has
this tome some literary gravitas, Generation X author always been in making such assertions seem strangely I
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Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides appropriate rather than asinine, but here Coupland’s J
thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story too. meditations only serve to make the vacuity at the heart K
Lara’s Book feels like a mish-mash of various market- of the Tomb Raider phenomenon even more apparent. L
ing ploys. There’s lots of new pictures of Lara herself to There’s a distinct sense that there’s actually precious M
appeal to fevered adolescents, strategic walkthroughs little to say about Lara. This is indicated by the fact N
of the various Tomb Raider games to help those who’ve that far more space is given over to the game-solving O
got stuck somewhere along the line, interviews with the tips than to Coupland’s writing, despite his name being P
games’ developers about how Tomb Raider came into flagged prominently on the front cover. Once you get Q
being, all topped off with Coupland’s prose to maintain past the idea she’s a female character in a video game R
Lara’s cool quotient with the lifestyle crowd. that’s sold lots of copies, there’s not much left. Even
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It’s easy to see why Coupland agreed to be involved the game developers can offer up little else beyond the
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with what is essentially another form of the Tomb observations that they wanted people to identify with
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Raider franchise. Lara Croft is the perfect representa- Lara and for her to be “almost a fantasy object”, which
tion of his love for pop culture and technology, with her is hardly the stuff of profundity. V
movie-star status as a cultural icon throwing up various Among the book’s hyperactive layout there is a W
questions about the blurring of realities, both virtual spread of various fan letters that have been sent to X
and normal. Tomb Raider’s creators Eidos. It’s virtually impossible Y
Coupland’s disappointingly brief prose moves in the to read what’s written in the letters, which is a pity, be- Z

cause the opinions of Lara’s fans would probably have More A

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shed some real light on her popularity. B
Instead, Lara’s Book is simply another addition to C
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the Tomb Raider hype. Those trying to find out why D
Tomb Raider’s central character has caused such a fuss E
will be disappointed, because ultimately Lara Croft is a RSS
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sphinx without a secret. 
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Douglas Coupland: The Gum Thief email

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Dan Coxon
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In recent years Douglas Coupland has achieved a mentary on the nature of the novel itself.
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remarkably consistent output. It’s not that every novel The Gum Thief opens in typical epistolary-novel Facebook
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he’s written has been a masterpiece – no writer man- style, swapping back and forth between two characters:
ages that – but rather that his great novels have been Bethany, a young, disillusioned Goth working in the I
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regularly interspersed with his less satisfying ones. Mi- Staples store; and Roger, a divorced, quiet loner who J
croserfs, Miss Wyoming, Hey Nostradamus! and JPod spends his days restocking the shelves and walking his K
all felt like significant contributions to an impressive dog. Beth discovers that Roger has been writing a diary L
body of work; in between, however, we were handed from her point of view, and once the initial weirdness M
Girlfriend In A Coma, All Families Are Psychotic and has passed she becomes intrigued by the fact that he’s N
Eleanor Rigby, all worthy in their own right but none imagined her so accurately. O
of them causing much of a stir on the literary scene So far, so simple. Coupland then throws another ele- P
(maybe Mr Coupland should stop naming books after ment into the mix: Roger is writing a novel himself, the Q
pop songs). curiously-titled Glove Pond, and the letters between R
This pattern suggests that The Gum Thief should be a Roger and Bethany are interspersed with excerpts
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disappointment, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one of from his own novel. Glove Pond is a woefully shallow
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his finest. Relating the relatively humdrum tale of two and amateurish attempt at the form, but something in
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‘associates’ in a Staples stationary superstore, it often it touches Bethany, and, like her, we feel compelled
sounds like a soap opera rather than the latest offering to read on. As the friendship between the co-workers V
from one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing develops, so the twists of Glove Pond begin to reflect W
voices. To dismiss it out of hand would be a mistake, their lives, albeit with an often-hilarious distortion. X
however, as its relatively mundane surface hides an Just as we begin to get used to this format Coupland Y
intriguing study of the epistolary form – and a com- hurls another character’s voice into the fray, and he Z

continues to do this until the novel’s final pages: the Pond shows us how the best fiction (and even some of More A
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traditional back-and-forth of the epistolary form gradu- the worst) draws upon the writer’s experiences in real B
ally fractures into a whole chorus of voices, many of life, twisting and morphing them to create something C
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them pulling in opposite directions. We hear from new. It shows us that any creative work, no matter D
Bethany’s mother DeeDee, who coincidentally went how amateurish or muddled, has the potential to touch E
to school with Roger, and from Roger’s bitter ex-wife somebody, or even change a life. And most importantly, RSS
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Joan – among others. There’s even a series of attempts it never fails to entertain, as its characters stagger from
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to write a story from the point of view of a piece of one disaster to another, like the affairs of the American Facebook
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toast, as Bethany flexes her own creative muscles. literati reinterpreted by the cast of Dynasty.
If this sounds rather messy and incoherent, then Like Glove Pond, The Gum Thief is a flawed novel. I
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that’s because it often is. With so many different voices It confuses as much as it illuminates, and Doug Cou- J
pulling us back and forth it sometimes becomes dif- pland’s experiments with the epistolary form don’t K
ficult to discern between them, and Coupland doesn’t always come off. In Bethany and Roger, however, L
always manage to conjure up a distinctive voice for he has created another pair of Coupland greats, two M
every new character. people muddling through modern life in any way they N
It’s the novel-within-a-novel that gives us the key can – with the occasional epiphany thrown in along the O
to this intricate web, however, and makes the most way. The Gum Thief may not be perfect, but it’s still a P
memorable contribution to The Gum Thief. Glove damned good read.  Q
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Quentin Crisp: An Englishman In New York email

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Chris Mitchell goes for lunch with Quentin Crisp
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This month sees the publication of Resident Alien, stayed exactly where I was, a blithe spirit revelling in
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the selected diaries of Quentin Crisp. It is difficult to androgynous anarchy, and there was a battle.” Facebook
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surmise whether this man needs an introduction or not, This battle frequently became physical as well as
such is his longevity as a cult figure of quintessential psychological; Quentin’s accounts of the numerous I
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Englishness, “a stately old homo of England”, to quote attacks he endured on the streets of London lend a J
one of his most famous phrases. Quentin Crisp is, after disturbing pathos to The Naked Civil Servant’s blend of K
all, the man who first personified the concept of ‘camp’. pithy insight, amused self mockery and biting sarcasm. L
“If I have a talent for anything,” he states, “it is not for Indeed, the luminescence of Quentin’s prose soon won M
doing but for being.” It was not until the 1960s, when accolades which proclaimed him as a modern day Os- N
he already over 50 years old, that Quentin first rose to car Wilde, a comparison he has always refused. “When O
fame with the TV adaptation of his autobiography, The I was young, I thought Oscar Wilde was so noble. I P
Naked Civil Servant. In it, Quentin documented his thought he sacrificed everything for love. Then, when I Q
early, life-changing decision that “instead of hiding my became older, I realised this was complete nonsense. In R
sexuality, I would announce it.” the charnelhouses of London, Wilde only knew most of
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With his henna’d hair, “gravity-defying” makeup and his lovers by Braille. It was utterly sordid.”
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inch-long fingernails, the young Quentin Crisp cut a Tired of England’s pernicious and parochial charac-
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brave and audacious figure in 1930s London. Indeed, it ter, Quentin moved to New York in the early 1980s.
is hard to imagine the outrage he must have provoked. By this time he was over 70 years old. After running V
As he notes in his book Manners From Heaven: various skirmishes with the US immigration authori- W
“During my Edwardian youth and Georgian middle- ties, Quentin succeeded in keeping his British passport X
age the world (I mean Britain) stayed exactly where and becoming a resident alien. “The English always Y
it was, aggressively conformist and conservative; I say that the Americans are so false. But I don’t spend Z
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my time wondering if the man in the deli really wishes seven in the morning and asked how she could make More A
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me to ‘have a nice day.’ If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t sure that didn’t smudge her lipstick. I said, ‘Don’t drink B
say it, surely.” Quentin warms to his theme. “In New anything, don’t eat anything and certainly don’t kiss C
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York, everyone is your instant friend. If you were to anything.’ You’d think she could have worked it out for D
stand up in this diner now and shout, ‘I’m putting on herself.” Despite his avid socialising, Quentin refuses E
a cabaret’, then everyone would gather round and ask, to buy an answerphone. “To me it would be pure sci- RSS
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‘Where will it be?’, ‘What will it be about?’, ‘Who will ence fiction.”
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you hire?’. If you did that in England, there would be The only concession Quentin makes to his age is to Facebook
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absolute silence, everyone would stare into their soup spend two days a week “doing absolutely nothing” in
and think, ‘How appallingly embarrassing.’” his tiny bedsitting room on the Lower East Side. “I have I
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Quentin is now the most interesting octogenarian on to recharge my batteries. When you live in New York, J
earth, enjoying “growing old disgracefully” as he puts as soon as you leave the house, you are under starter’s K
it, with his purple rinsed hair and layers of foundation orders.” During these quiet moments, Quentin does L
still firmly in evidence. “The problem with England is crosswords – “they are the aerobics of the soul” – and, M
that everyone is convinced that you can’t make a living at the end of each month, writes his diary. Mentioning N
doing nothing. However, in this I feel I have succeeded Resident Alien does not gain the normal authorial re- O
to some degree.” Quentin’s New York existence is sponse concerning a new print baby: “Ah yes,” Quentin P
made up of socialising, film reviewing and various ap- says, “I’ve just finished reading the proofs for that.” Q
pearances in movies, TV and the theatre. “I live quite His eyes twinkle mischievously. “It’s absolute rubbish! R
comfortably on publicity champagne and peanuts. The They’ve taken out all of the dates, all of the places and S
last time I went to a launch I took a friend. He imme- all of the names for fear of causing offence.” He raises
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diately dived for the champagne and I had to say, ‘No, his eyes heavenward in mock resignation, knowing
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no! Act more like a star!’” full well that it would be the most heinous breach of
Quentin also entertains an endless stream of well- etiquette to say anything complimentary about his own V
wishers from all over the world by the simple expedi- new book. W
ent of having his number listed in the New York phone Sadly, even with the publication of Resident Alien, X
directory. This leads to all manner of curious individu- the chances of Quentin returning to these shores are Y
als contacting him. “A young lady once phoned me at slim. “My agent asked me if I would be willing to go Z

to England to promote the book. I have not refused, be- to collect me. It was so big inside that the first time it More A
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cause I never say no, but I have said I will be extremely turned a corner I fell off the seat. We drove to a huge B
reluctant. I am too old for aeroplane travel. Whenever I warehouse and I thought, ‘How fabulous! We’re going C
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arrive, they say, ‘Oh, you must be so tired.’ But I sleep to remake The Charge Of The Light Brigade!’ But then D
the whole way on the plane. They seem to expect the we were told to stand on a piece of paper about twice E
excitement of flying to last the entire journey. What am the size of this table while a half-naked man writhed RSS
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I supposed to do for five hours, sit there saying, ‘Oh between our legs. I looked at Mr Klein and I said, ‘But
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hooray! I’m in the air!” However, when I mention my what does it all mean?’ And that was what they used in Facebook
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home town of Brighton, Quentin fondly remarks of his the advertisement…”
time there at the Pavilion Theatre, shortly before mov- Quentin has often asked himself the same question I
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ing to the States. “Brighton is very nice, but I’m not about gay militancy, a position which has caused him J
sure about the sea. I think the sea is a mistake. I mean, problems in the past. During a performance of his show K
what does it want, banging and crashing away on the An Evening With Quentin Crisp in California, Quentin L
shore like that all day?” relates how “several young men were very angry with M
The last time Quentin returned to the UK was a me. When I asked why, they said, ‘You haven’t once N
couple of years ago to play Queen Elizabeth the First directly asserted that you’re gay this evening.’” Quen- O
in the film Orlando. “It’s the sort of film I wouldn’t tin arches a neatly pencilled eyebrow. “You’d think to P
watch myself in a hundred years.” Movies are much look at me would be enough. Obviously not. And that is Q
more to Quentin’s taste than books: “Books are for why I do not march. I have realised I represent nothing R
writing, not reading. But I am most definitely a fan of grander than my own puny self. I am first and last an S
Mr Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are individual, not a spokesman for any group. I have lived
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absolutely wonderful. The previous day he had seen my life with my sexuality clearly apparent. I cannot do
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Spike Lee’s new comedy flick, Girl 6. “It was a miser- any more.” The provocation of Quentin’s attire should
able film because of its subject matter. Who could find not be underestimated, even in these supposed liberal V
phone sex remotely interesting?” Quentin’s fascination times. With a mixture of incredulity and relish, Quentin W
with the silver screen recently led him to take part in a relates a story from the Edinburgh festival several years X
Calvin Klein advert. “I knew it was important because ago: “A young man was performing a show where he Y
this enormous limousine purred up outside the house impersonated me on stage, complete with clothes, Z

make-up and accent. When he walked out into the street dote. “When I returned to the States after completing More A
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still dressed as myself, he was physically attacked!” Orlando, I was stopped by the passport officer because B
Thankfully Quentin’s days of being harassed on the of my status as a resident alien. He was an enormous C
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street are long gone. He is a venerated celebrity on the man with a shaved head – he looked like an absolute D
Lower East Side. During our conversation, several peo- thug. I thought, ‘Poor me, my time has come!’ And then E
ple wave at him as they pass in the street, and a respect- the officer leaned over the barrier, pressed the passport RSS
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fully deferential young man who introduces himself as back into my hand and whispered, ‘It must feel good to
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Winston comes in to ask Quentin for his autograph on be so utterly vindicated.’” Quentin looks directly at me. Facebook
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a napkin. As I walk him back to his apartment, one of “And it does.” With that, he gracefully takes his leave,
the bums hopefully shakes his cup and greets him with his small figure soon disappearing amongst the busy I
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“Yo! Mr Crispy!” We pause at the street corner to say sidewalks of the Lower East Side. Quentin Crisp – the J
goodbye, and Quentin leaves me with one last anec- definitive Englishman in New York.  K
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Underworld 192 Letter Better 213 Twitter
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John Diamond: Tibor Fischer:
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C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too 194 The Fischer King 216
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Stephen Dorril: Mark Fisher: N
Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt 196 Capitalist Realism 218 O
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Patricia Duncker: Michael Foot: Q
Insanity Clause 205 Uncollected Essays 222 R
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Nic Dunlop: Franz Ferdinand:
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The Lost Executioner 207 Franz Ferdinand 226
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Tsotsi 228 W
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Stasiland 230 Z
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Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves email

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Gary Marshall
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House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve mentioned in the tapes; Truant attempts to explain
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seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of the more tortuous footnotes, adding explanations and Facebook
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footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel analysis of his own, and unnamed ‘editors’ in turn com-
has been described as a “literary Blair Witch Project’ – ment on both Zampano’s and Truant’s comments. The I
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a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with. Navidson Record would have made an excellent spine- J
The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a bar- chiller in its own right, but the analysis and footnotes K
hopping low-life who is losing his grip on reality. rack the creepiness up by a notch. In the early stages of L
When an old man – Zampano – dies, Truant grabs a the transcripts, we know that something scary’s going M
manuscript from his apartment and takes it home to to happen: the footnotes tell us so. N
read it. This manuscript is an analysis of The Navidson As if the layers of comment weren’t complicated O
Record, a collection of videotapes that record some enough, after a few dozen pages things go completely P
spooky goings on in a suburban house. As Truant mental. The word house is printed throughout in blue, Q
reads the manuscript, he reproduces it in full, shar- without explanation; footnotes become longer than the R
ing his observations with us and describing his own sections they’re commenting on, print is desrever or
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increasingly fragile mental state. rotated , entire sections are crossed out; some pages con-
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There are three main stories in House Of Leaves: tain a single word or letter, while others are filled with
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Truant’s reactions to the manuscript, Zampano’s analy- lists of buildings or household amenities. All of these
sis of The Navidson Record, and the contents of the things are reproduced faithfully, resulting in pages where V
videotapes themselves. As the novel continues, each the only text is “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”, W
story overlaps. Zampano adds extensive footnotes to other pages with letters and words missing due to “fire X
his work and attempts to contact the famous people damage” (the gaps are replaced by spaces and square Y
(Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Camille Paglia) brackets), still others with text at crazy angles or tiny Z
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you’ll probably drown. is either an unintentional error or – even worse – a ham- B
The book’s ambition is also its downfall. The crazy fisted “it was all a dream” scenario lifted straight from C
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typography and constant interjections from Truant (and an episode of Dallas. D
others) make it difficult to follow parts of the story and, House Of Leaves is a brave attempt to do something E
in the early sections especially, you’ll be sorely tempted different, updating Burroughs’ cut-up technique RSS
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to throw the book out of the window. Many of the tan- for a new generation of readers. At over 700 pages,
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gents – psychological theories, local history, analysis however, the novel would have benefited from some Facebook
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of photographs, lists of camera equipment – overstay judicious editing, and the overall impression is one
their welcome, and the ending is curiously flat, as if of a writer too enamoured with typographical tricks. I
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the writer suddenly ran out of ideas. Some scenes jar Nonetheless, House Of Leaves is an original and J
with the rest of the book; in particular, Truant’s descrip- unique novel; for all its faults, it’s unlike anything else K
tion of his trip to a bar, where he talks to a band and you’ll read this year.  L
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Don DeLillo: Underworld email

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Gary Marshall
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Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with intrudes on the story itself.
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the internet, Underworld is not a book for the faint- The book focuses on Nick Shay, a former hoodlum Facebook
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hearted. Elegiac in tone and described variously as who now works in the burgeoning waste manage-
DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the ment industry and owns the baseball from the 1951 I
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Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty game, “the shot heard around the world”. In addition J
827 pages and zips back and forwards in time, mov- to Nick we hear from Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoo- K
ing in and out of the lives of a plethora of different ver, Lenny Bruce and the various people who move L
characters. in and out of Nick’s life: lovers, family, friends and M
Following three main themes – the fate of a baseball colleagues. Through these seemingly disconnected N
from the winning game of the 1951 world series, the narratives DeLillo paints a picture of Cold War para- O
threat of atomic warfare and the mountains of garbage noia at its peak – the baseball game happened the P
created by modern society – DeLillo moves forwards same day as the USSR’s first nuclear test – and the Q
and backwards through the decades, introducing char- changes affecting his characters as a microcosm of R
acters and situations and gradually showing the way American society as a whole.
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their lives are interconnected. Very few writers, however, can justify over 800
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Reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web densely-printed pages to tell a story and Underworld
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browser: the narrative focus moves from character to would have benefited greatly from judicious wielding
character almost as quickly as we are introduced to of the blue pencil. Potentially intriguing plots which V
them, and the time frame regularly changes to show feature strongly in the earlier parts of the book – an in- W
further connections between the key players. This de- triguing serial killer subplot, the stories of each person X
vice – literature as hypertext – is particularly effective who possesses the winning baseball – are abandoned Y
in the early parts of the novel and the technique never halfway through the book in favour of overlong child- Z
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hood memories or the inane ponderings of a perform- however. Each vignette is lovingly crafted: DeLillo More A
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ance artist; other stories are neglected for over 400 seems as comfortable writing from the perspective of B
pages before reappearing at the end of the novel, caus- a street missionary as he is inhabiting J. Edgar Hoo- C
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ing an unwelcome jolt as the reader tries to remember ver’s paranoia. The book employs vivid imagery, from D
the pertinent details. painted angels on ghetto walls to the cityscape created E
In this respect Underworld is a victim of its own by mountains of domestic waste, and the dialogue is RSS
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ambition: by trying to cover such a wide range of usually well-observed and thoroughly believable
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characters and situations, DeLillo loses track of some although it does flag when describing Nick Shay’s Facebook
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of them and, in the latter parts of the novel in particular, hoodlum past. Despite its faults DeLillo has created an
the writing feels as if it is on autopilot while the author ambitious and powerful novel which, due to its size, I
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works out what to do next. can also be used to swat annoying children on trains. J
There is still much to recommend in Underworld, Highly recommended.  K
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John Diamond: C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too email

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Gary Marshall
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As far as John Diamond was concerned, cancer happens This is no self-pitying, ‘poor me’ tale. Diamond de-
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to other people. A columnist who is paid handsomely scribes how cancer works, clear-up rates, the different Facebook
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for spouting off each week about whatever is on his sorts of treatment and their chances of success. A sav-
mind, he undergoes tests for the lump in his neck and, agely perceptive writer, he pours vitriol on new-agers I
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rather than panicking, sees it as a potentially interest- and pro-smoking campaigners in equal measure. “By J
ing anecdote. “I imagined myself in a week or two’s all means campaign for some phantom ‘right’ to smoke, K
time not as someone who had been diagnosed as having but don’t believe that right derives from corrupting the L
cancer but as someone who had had a close brush with statistics about what smoking does to you. Understand M
cancer – who’d been through all the tests and then at the it for what it is: the right to play Russian roulette, as I N
very last minute been given the all clear. If anything it did, with the immune system”. Diamond’s descriptions O
sounded even more heroic than the real thing”. By this of his predicament are frequently hilarious – his inven- P
point Diamond had had cancer for more than a year. tory of his well-stocked medicine cabinet reads like P.J. Q
C is, of course, about cancer – what it is, what it feels O’Rourke, albeit P.J. writing about morphine instead R
like to receive the diagnosis one evening as you’re of cocaine.
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watching Eastenders, how it feels to lose four stone Diamond reserves his most vicious criticism for those
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and most of your tongue. Subtitled “because cowards who believe surviving cancer is a matter of the correct
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get cancer too”, the book makes no attempt to portray mental attitude, as if those who die simply didn’t try
Diamond as some brave, heroic figure and describes hard enough. As he recounts his treatment through his V
his twisted pleasure as he uses his illness as a weapon at weekly newspaper column he receives regular missives W
dinner parties, his frequent outbursts of impotent rage from the terminally stupid, “the ones who told me that X
and the often appalling way he treats his wife during as a journalist with a public platform it was my bounden Y
his convalescence. duty to stop operating as a propagandising dupe for the Z
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evil medical establishment, to tell doctors that I wasn’t programme recorded a year previously. Diamond is More A
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fooled by their fake radiotherapy statistics when eve- struck by the difference between the man he is now B
ryone knows that radiation kills, and to put my faith and the man whose voice is broadcasting through the C
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in the Bessarabian radish, the desiccated root of which ether: “he was the one who didn’t realize what a boon D
has been used for centuries by Tartar nomads to cure an unimpaired voice was, who ate his food without E
athlete’s foot, tennis elbow and cancer, as detailed in stopping to think about its remarkable flavour, who was RSS
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their book Why Your Doctor Hates You And Wants You criminally profligate with words, who took his wife and
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To Die, review copy enclosed”. children and friends for granted – in short who didn’t Facebook
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Currently cancer-free, Diamond would shy away know he was living”.
from any suggestion that his illness has been in any Rather than denying mortality, C suggests that it’s I
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way a positive experience. There is, however, a positive only when you understand the fragility of life that you J
message to his story which is best illustrated by one of can fully appreciate just how magical and wonderful K
the book’s most poignant and telling scenes: Diamond day-to-day existence can be. L
is in his car, not long after the treatments that removed M
most of his tongue and destroyed his taste buds. Listen- Coda: John Diamond died on 2nd March, 2001. The N
ing to a familiar show he hears a voice he can’t place, Guardian obituary has the full details of his remark- O
then realises that he’s listening to his own voice on a able life.  P
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Stephen Dorril: Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt email

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Ben Granger
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Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley And Sir Oswald “Tom” Mosley was a pure-grade scion
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British Fascism is an exhaustive re-examination of the from a northern branch of the old land-owning aristoc- Facebook
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man who, far from being a Hitler admiring crank, was racy (Mosley Street in Manchester takes its name from
inextricably bound up with British politics and upper the clan), of the type still rolling in money but com- I
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class attitudes. paratively side-lined politically in the bourgeois 20th J
Many may find the sheer weight of this tome century. With a boorishly uncaring, neglectful father, K
wrongly flattering of its subject, regardless of content. and indulgent mother, his defining character traits were L
Why should such a figure merit 700 pages? Surely this shown early on at boarding school and elsewhere. A M
was, at best, a nearly-man in British politics? He may narrow, directed charm, rampant ambition, intellectual N
have risen to Cabinet level certainly, but then so did laziness, sexual incontinence, untrustworthiness, and a O
hundreds of others. The grimy pack of thugs he came tendency to brow-beat and bully. Above all, a narcis- P
to lead once his mainstream ambitions failed may have sistic sense of self-adoration, belief in entitlement and Q
caused a splash as they bashed enemy heads in, but complete lack of self-doubt, of the type so often found R
no-one voted for them. Surely, ultimately, they and he in his caste. But taken just that one degree further.
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were an irrelevance? Dorril’s expertly researched ac- After service in the air-force during the First World
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count gives the lie to such a view and leaves no doubt War, where he performed with distinction and enthusi-
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that the story of Mosley is inexorably entwined with asm, impetuous Tom managed to secure a position as
the story of 20th-century politics as a whole, mirroring a Conservative MP by the age of 22, the natural home V
the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machina- for a man of his class and connections. He soon became W
tions of high society to the violent desperation of the renowned as a powerful orator in the Commons for his X
underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary party. But this ‘man in a hurry’ was impatient with the Y
player in between. old guard still running both party and country, those who Z
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had allowed the calamity of war to decimate the young ing”, charismatic figure dazzled many. While gentle, More A
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men of the nation fighting abroad, and who allowed warm Cimmie was liked by most who met her, quite B
an untrammelled laissez-faire capitalism to terrorise as many people were as put-off by Mosley’s boundless C
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them with poverty once they had returned. Dorril goes self-importance as were taken in by his charm. While D
into expansive and exacting detail about the clashing praise came from many, his Tory rival Stanley Baldwin E
political and economic trends amongst the elite of the spoke for many more by remarking “He is a cad and RSS
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time. This in itself provides an unfaultable Parliamen- a wrong’un and they will find it out,” before he left
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tary political history of the period, a vivid picture of the party. Cimmie’s delicate nature was in turn tested Facebook
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the flux at work, which formed the background of the to immense distraction by her husband’s countless,
contradictions which made up Mosley’s outlook. He at remorseless affairs – including with her sisters. I
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first identified wholesale with the ‘social imperialists’ Mosley would never be content as anything less than J
in the Tory Party as against its free trade faction. He the biggest fish in the pond. The Tories disappointed K
supported those who, in wishing to save the existing him so he joined Labour, seeing that as the party more L
social order, believed in economic protectionism to capable of delivering the change -still amorphously M
protect a relatively decent living standard for the British defined- that he craved. For a while his ‘radicalism’, N
working-class, bolstered by the exploitation of Empire. advocating wholesale economic reorganisation to O
Such a world-view was entrenched in a romantic con- achieve full employment led a few on the Left, even the P
ception of England, with the foreign (and, sometimes, great Bevan for a short time, to see him as a potential Q
Jewish) ‘other’ as its symbolic foe. This paternalistic leader. Indeed, it is distinctly unnerving to see both the R
ethos was the basic core of Mosley’s philosophy from respect Mosley was shown by sections of both the La- S
thereon, but his contempt for the Empire Tories’ lack of bour Party Left and the Independent Labour Party, and
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innovation made him seek his cause, his following and the seeming ease with which his rhetoric of renewal
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followers, elsewhere. could blend with theirs.
Mosley was as much a figure in ‘high society’ as in As Mosley made his way into the Cabinet of Ram- V
politics, very Tatler fodder. Those he ran with were rich, say McDonald’s doomed Labour government and W
young, louche, promiscuous, glamorous and shallow, of expounded his economic programmes to tackle unem- X
the type Evelyn Waugh at once admired and despised. ployment (Keynesianism with an authoritarian kick), Y
As Mosley married his first wife Cimmie, this “dash- their rejection by McDonald was due to the latter’s Z

timidity rather than any genuine opposition to creep- The BUF was never less than an unabashed personal- More A
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ing dictatorship. Mosley was enraged as his proposals ity cult from the beginning, the logical conclusion of B
were ignored, and immediately split with the Labour the overweening toxic brew of narcissism and megalo- C
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leadership. As this schism occurred, it is a testimony to mania that animated its founder. Massively over- rep- D
both the man’s demagogic charisma and his ideological resented by ex military men like Mosley himself, he E
vacuity that many in both main parties now saw him found it easy to run the movement as army rather than a RSS
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as a possible leader. The ambiguity was such that for party, dominating every aspect of members’ lives. They
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a very brief time Churchill and Bevan alike were keen even had their own uniform, they were the Blackshirts, Facebook
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for him to lead their respective parties. But impatient aping Mussolini’s crew before them. Ex-member Colin
Tom had his own ideas. He had taken his ball home. He Cross recalled the faithful “Even saluted him when he I
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would have his own party. The New Party. went into the sea to bathe at the Movement’s summer J
The New Party was formed in early 1931, it soon camps at Selsey”, and “they whispered his name in K
became clear just what its founder’s forever trumpeted religious awe … he was presented to the public as a L
radicalism amounted to. Fierce rhetoric about change superman. Criticism was taboo and humour nearly so.” M
and national renewal (and the clamour of a throng of At last the man had found the captive audience he had N
restless, violent young men to drive this home) masked always craved. Now all he had to do was enlarge the O
a dangerous and ringing hollow at the party’s ideologi- audience to encompass the whole nation. P
cal core. Its launch was a huge media event at the time, The BUF was always clear in its violence, but it Q
and figures of the stature of Bernard Shaw and H.G. was far from ideologically coherent, even less so R
Wells were initially sympathetic (both being Fabian than the man himself. He took a fair-sized gang S
socialists but with a disturbing penchant for Mosley’s of old Labour comrades with him, but to the great
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coldly elitist, authoritarian and technocratic attitudes). majority of Labour and trade-union men and women,
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The initial boost was short-lived however, and the New the Fascist movement was not just a mistake, but a
Party’s lack of clarity, together with a poor showing sickening anathema. This was a party based on a V
at their first by-election in Ashton-under-Lyne, saw it movement that massacred their brothers and sisters W
heading nowhere in electoral terms. By 1932, the New in Italy, directly supported by the capitalist class X
Party had already changed its name to the British Union in that country. They knew the enemy where they Y
of Fascists. saw it. The organised working-class were forever, Z

fervently opposed. Many more members came from “kosher Fascist” for this very reason. Amusingly, one More A
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elsewhere, including preexisting smaller UK Fascist of Mosley’s early New Party stalwarts was a Jewish B
movements. Amongst them were the British Fas- East End boxer named Ted “Kid” Lewis, who exited C
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cists, an old group of simplistic upper-middle-class the movement with a punch to Mosley’s nose when the D
reactionary blimps who had previously been active latter confirmed that yes, he did intend his movement E
in trying to break the 1926 General Strike. Joining to be anti-Semitic. Furthermore, Oswald explicitly did RSS
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them were more recent and more vicious groups of not sign up to the facetious and insane pseudo-science
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Nazi cheerleaders, whose chief motivation was a the Nazis used to justify their race hatred, casually Facebook
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pathological hatred of ‘Jewry’. Of equal importance denouncing it as gibberish. He mocked the notorious
and greater number were natural Tories driven to a forgeries the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion too. I
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new radical dynamism against the perceived social- The very fact he could then lead a movement openly J
ist threat. This contingent was personified by Daily engaged in repeated violence against this scape-goated K
Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a friend of Mosley’s racial group shows the black-hearted, gangster oppor- L
who threw his paper behind the new movement tunism at the core of his being. The hatred of the Jewish M
wholesale. Meanwhile, the movement was secretly, enemy was a galvanising myth to a movement which N
and illegally, receiving a large chunk of its funding otherwise had little to tie it together, and he knew it. O
direct from Fascist Italy, and, increasingly, (as the With characteristic dishonesty, Mosley dismally P
anti-Semitism increased) from Nazi Germany too. pleaded self defence in his campaign against the Jews, Q
The degree of the extent of Mosley’s anti-Semitism claiming “they started it.” Mosley came to advocate R
is central to the conundrum of his character. It is inter- the expelling of all Jews from Britain who had shown S
esting to contrast his personality with that of Hitler, the ‘disloyalty’. Where they were to go was unclear,
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man he so desired to emulate, failing so spectacularly. Madagascar, or possibly Uganda (“very empty and a
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There is no doubt that Mosley was not possessed of lovely climate” helpfully offered Mosley’s second wife
the overwhelming personal hatred of Jews that so Diana, formerly Guinness, formerly Mitford.) It is an V
engulfed Hitler. He had several Jewish friends prior interesting rumination of what constitutes a truer evil, W
to the BUF. His rival, the hysterically overwrought the deep-felt fanaticism of a Hitler or the gutter-shallow X
anti-Semite Arnold Leese, leader of the tiny, ultra- opportunism of a Mosley. It is however, much easier to Y
fanatic Imperial Fascist League taunted Mosley as a see which was more successful. Z

Adolf met Oswald on several occasions but was into sharp relief at an infamous public gathering at More A
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never fully convinced of him, doubting his commit- Olympia in June 1934. The mass meeting was held in a B
ment, sensing his lack of whole-hearted zealotry. theatrical, explicitly Nuremburg style, the movement’s C
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Goebbels was even less impressed, dismissing him as new Lightning-in-a-Circle symbol (wittily dubbed “the D
“an outsider of small political significance.” Hitler was flash in the pan” by opponents) dominating the hall just E
however genuinely taken with Mosley’s wife Diana. as the swastika did to the Nazi faithful in Germany. The RSS
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He was even more taken by her sister Unity, and the Blackshirts deliberately attracted as many opponents
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feeling was mutual. Mosley married Diana at a secret as possible to this meeting, and then, with a variety of Facebook
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ceremony in Goebbels’ house, having already carried home-made weapons, pulped into bloody submission
out a long affair with her. The contrast of kind-hearted anyone who heckled The Leader. Many serious injuries I
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if naive Cimmie with the coldly ruthless Diana was resulted. Mosley was attempting to prove his control of J
seen by some as emblematic of Mosley’s journey to the “the street” once and for all, yet this one meeting prob- K
dark side. While her portrayal as a Lady Macbeth fig- ably did more than any other act to convince potential L
ure even more malignant than her husband may have a followers of his ruthless, sadistic nature. His unpredict- M
toe in misogynist myth, he had certainly met his match able nature too – probably a greater anathema to the N
with her in amoral callousness. The Mitfords were the British business class. O
epitome of high society elan, and Hitler himself, for The BU suffered a severe propaganda blow with the P
all his railing against “British decadence” was far from Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when a massive crowd Q
immune to the charms of this glamorous set. Diana and of local working-class youths, Jews, Communist and R
Unity, regular and welcome visitors to Hitler, acted as a Labour activists violently prevented Mosley (resplend- S
conduit between Mosley and his new benefactor, while ent in a new uniform explicitly modelled on that of the
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the intelligence services were more concerned with the Nazi SS), from provocatively marching down the street
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Mitford pair than Mosley himself as a threat to the state. in the heart of the Jewish East End. As the Blackshirts
The BUF was to change its name to the BU at the end were protected by police, (many sympathetic to Mos- V
of 1934. Short for the British Union, though its full new ley, or at least distinctly hostile to his leftist opponents), W
title was the rather less innocuous British Union of Fas- the fight was between demonstrators and police rather X
cists and National Socialists, reflecting the increasing than the barricaded Blackshirts themselves. But the Y
influence of the Fuhrer. The thuggishness was thrown victory was real, They Did Not Pass. As Dorril shows, Z

in some areas of London, notably Hoxton and Stepney close of any last lingering chance of a revival in his More A
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support from sections of the East End working-class movement. Unity Mitford shot herself in the head, B
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defeat struck deeply amongst its followers, and seemed afterward. While Mosley and his wife claimed they D
emblematic of the movement’s wider failure. The were still loyal to Britain (whilst agitating for “negoti- E
early membership height of 50,000 had fallen to under ated peace”) the authorities had different views, and RSS
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10,000 by this point. The movement was losing money imprisoned the pair in Holloway Prison. Sympathy
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continually, despite being bankrolled by both the for- was not widespread. Nancy Mitford was one of those Facebook
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eign Fascist powers and Mosley’s own landed estates. who denounced sister Diana and her infamous hus-
Uniforms, banners, headquarters and truncheons do not band to the security services. Several BU members I
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pay for themselves. Intellectually he was without capital either fled to Germany or had moved shortly before J
too. The writers of the day were overwhelmingly Left. war was declared, to fight for the Nazi cause. Some K
The strangely acidic Wyndham Lewis was one of the were propagandists like “Haw Haw” Joyce, others like L
few artists who were taken in for a time by the move- John Amery joined Waffen SS divisions. In keeping M
ment, but even this support did not last the distance. with the stomach-wrenching nature of their treachery, N
Dorril recounts Lewis and Mosley met on several none saw active combat against soldiers, yet several O
occasions in the late 30s, but the former was increas- were active in murderous atrocities against unarmed P
ingly alarmed by the latter’s talk of the sad practical Jewish civilians. By association, Mosley was seen, by Q
necessities of machine gunning the movement’s foes the vast majority of British people, as the most venal R
in the street “when push came to shove”. When Lewis kind of traitor. S
came to write the ironically titled ‘The Jews – Are They Churchill, one of many who once saw Mosley as
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Human?’ in 1937 he was sardonically repudiating his a potential leader of his party and country, decided
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past Fascism. The only noted author to back Mosley to release the man and wife in late 1943 in what he
by then was Henry Tarka The Otter” Williamson. With saw as a humane gesture in relation to the Blackshirt’s V
even his few intellectual allies now taking the piss, who ill- health. The decision sparked mass popular protest W
would take Oswald seriously now? and outrage. The working-classes in particular were X
When Britain went to war with Mosley’s ideological prominent in street demonstrations demanding that Y
masters in Germany and Italy, it was the cataclysmic the key should be thrown away, or the noose brought Z

in. The would-be Leader of Britain was really – truly mob as never before. Accordingly, the calibre of the More A
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– loathed the length and breadth of the land. Oswald UM member was even lower than that of the BU before B
and Diana seemed to bear this hatred with an attitude them, a selection of gangsters, psychopaths and street C
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beyond the straightforward arrogance which was their thugs, with the odd loopy Lord thrown in. D
defining nature, and into a whole other worldly nether- This sorry pack were eventually to find a new E
realm of bitter fantasy. It was the Jews who hated them, scapegoat, and a short-lived new lease of life with the RSS
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the establishment, the government – certainly not the ‘coloured immigration’ of the 50s. As tensions grew in
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good old British people. These demonstrations were sections of the white population towards the novel new Facebook
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the results of the Jewish cabal that had Britain in its migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent,
grip … surely? the UM had some success in actively encouraging I
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His solipsism increased by incarceration, Mosley race riots, in particular the Notting Hill riot of 1958. J
took to writing at greater length, honing his philosophy Their success in leading to smashed windows and K
in ever more verbose terminology. He claimed to have broken bones did not translate into votes however, and L
now moved “beyond Fascism”, and propounded that the fetid nature of their street activity stood in starker M
he had found a unique “synthesis”, beyond the both contrast than ever from Mosley’s increasingly abstruse N
capitalist and socialist ethic, fusing Christianity and theorising. His new vision was of a United Europe, na- O
the ideals of Nietzsche, combining dictatorship and tional boundaries broken down among the great White P
democracy. But the schism between his feigning of brotherhood, who would in turn go to plunder what Q
esoteric high mindedness and the squalor of his day-to- they needed from Africa, using their superior colonial R
day political activities became starker than ever when know-how. Ironic that a movement now recruiting on S
he began his new party in 1947 – the Union Movement. an anti-immigrant platform should have as its ultimate
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The same gang of dysfunctional Jew baiters were to goal the large scale immigration of a white master class
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continue their street fighting, to a mixture of disgust to the African continent. This was grotesque racism
and indifference from the general populace (gaining for sure enough, but it was neither populist nor popular. V
instance less than 2000 votes in the whole of London Even amongst rising anti-immigration feeling, the UM W
during local elections in 1949). The full extent of the could not truly take off. X
Nazi horrors, the millions of innocent souls butchered Ultimately it was to be Mosley’s intellectualism that Y
in the camps, was now evident, discrediting Mosley’s was the final death knell of his movement. The issue of Z

race did indeed strike at the core of British political life Blackshirts before them, but they had moved on and More A
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by the late 60s, and immigration became a key electoral left their spiritual grandpa and grandma Oswald and B
theme. But the UM’s abstract ideas of White European Diana behind. Bitterly jealous of the NF’s success, C
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Unity did not accord with the xenophobic mood ignited Mosley remarked to his private circle, in a statement D
by the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of the Conservative beyond the parody of the most gifted satirist, that the E
Enoch Powell. The sentiment he unearthed and tried to Front was “funded by Jews.” RSS
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harness was as strongly anti-European as it was anti- The pair moved to France, and lingered on as bitter
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black. Those who didn’t like the “niggers” and “pakis” remnants, their reputation rotting in a pleasing reflec- Facebook
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didn’t tend to be too keen on “frogs” and “krauts” either. tion of their withered souls, cursing the cosmopolitan
The Mosleys were livid that Enoch had succeeded on conspiracies that had kept them from greatness, never I
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territory where they had failed. In an amusing glimpse seeing the fault in themselves. No matter that most J
of the couple’s snobbery and delusion, Oswald dubbed saw a malevolent opportunist, in his mind’s eye he K
Powell a “middle-class Alf Garnett”, while Diana de- would always be the great, lost, put-upon prophet. L
nounced him as “far-right” as opposed to their “hard Mosley would periodically attempt to reappear with M
centre”! A truly Fascist party was to gain from the racist attempts at self-justification. Following one such N
rhetoric of Powell. This was not the Union Movement appearance on The Frost Report in 1967 interviewer O
however. It was the National Front. David Frost remarked, “He saw everything through P
The NF was inspired by the same Nazi and Fascist the distorting mirror of his own fantasises, and was Q
ideas that Mosley first fermented in the country. Its irretrievably consumed by them. He would never see R
first chairman was A.K. Chesterton, formerly a lead- himself as others saw him.” S
ing figure within the BU and a close confidante of Os- Oswald died in 1980, and the vaguely sympathetic
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wald. But its simplistic, xenophobic approach was far obituaries he received in certain quarters such as The
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more adept than the UM at tapping into the visceral, Times revealed for the last time that the solidarity of the
base hatred that keeps such a movement going. It was ruling classes will out in the end. V
blacks and Asians who were getting the beatings and Dorril has produced the definitive Mosley biog- W
firebombed houses now, with the added advantage raphy, superseding the absurdly sympathetic soft- X
they were much easier to spot than Jews. The boot- soaping work of Robert Skidelsky, which centred on Y
boys of the NF were every inch the descendants of the Mosley’s Parliamentary career and treated the BUF as Z

an epilogue (a bit like a biography of Fred West which research style, dispassionately observant, pays off into More A
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focussed more on his earlier career as an ice cream a great narrative by nature of the sheer dramatic scope B
salesman.) This is a fascinating story, both for anyone of the story he so meticulously examines. Scene after C
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interested in British political history of the last cen- scene and figure after grotesque figure linger on the D
tury, and anyone intrigued by the tragic tale of a truly psychic retina. The drawing room parties of the man E
diabolical man. Dorril has done an unfaultable job on playing host to every major political figure of the early RSS
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the research, and brings the narrative to life well with part of the century, one by one falling away as he fell
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his grotesque menagerie of characters. There are flaws into disrepute. Mosley’s seaside frolics with his patri- Facebook
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to the book. The author has a background as an ana- cian pals, offset against the pogrom style excesses of
lyst of the machinations of the intelligence services of his nastiest East End thugs, breaking into Jewish houses I
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Britain and abroad, and while this eye for detail has and attacking children within. Mosley’s relentless psy- J
undoubtedly made this work the powerhouse of re- chological torture of his first wife, the most poignant of K
search it is, the endless recanting of certain details, the his bullying victims. Diana fending off the accusations L
exact nature of how the BUF obtained its funding for of sister Nancy that she had supported a movement that M
example, can sometimes drag the story’s flow. More murdered six million Jews with the remark “But darling, N
directly, he concentrates a little too much on the nature it was the kindest way.” The London BUF headquarters O
of MI5’s observation of the movement, when this is that doubled up as a knocking-shop, underlying with P
very much a side-show to the main narrative. This dry grim humour the movement’s crossover with organised Q
style can sometimes cloy over such a long length. Fur- crime. The UM hijacking the teddy-boy youth cult just R
ther, while Dorril is great on the detail, actual analysis as the NF did with skinheads two decades later. The S
is very thin on the ground. The one time Dorril does sheer gall and lack of self-awareness in Mosley’s late-
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attempt an analytical overview, it is with some rather life attempts to rehabilitate himself, attempting a ‘truce’
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tenuous observations about Messianic leaders toward with Jewish leaders without any pretence of apology.
the end, claiming that one Tony Blair shares the traits This is a grim tale that needs only clear explanation V
of this style. Maybe so, but the point is made clumsily and examination to be one of fascination. This is a task W
and without satisfactory justification. Dorril has performed with enormous success with this X
Ultimately however, Dorril’s stance in going for the eye-opening and exhaustive work.  Y
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Patricia Duncker: Insanity Clause email

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Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her
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novel Hallucinating Foucault RSS
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“Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the sub- mixture of intimacy, madness and self-discovery.
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jects that attract most of my attention.” So said the late “I wanted it to be a love story,” Patricia Duncker Facebook
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French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the cen- reveals, “to explain the love between readers and
tury’s most audacious intellectuals, who died of AIDS writers. My life has been radically changed through I
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in 1984. Only Foucault’s books remain as a reminder the books I’ve read and I wanted to describe that.” J
of his existence – but, as Patricia Duncker’s stunning However, Duncker was fully aware of the need to K
debut novel Hallucinating Foucault shows, the impact avoid alienating her audience. “I think your first duty L
of reading on people’s lives can be both terrifying and as a writer is to your reader and you must keep them M
self-transforming. turning the page. What is the point otherwise?” As a N
Originally published by the independent Serpent’s result, Hallucinating Foucault has the feel of a cerebral O
Tail last year, Hallucinating Foucault proved such a thriller, combining the love story between Paul Michel P
success that Picador recently bought the rights to the and the narrator with the mystery of Paul Michel and Q
novel and reissued it. Such success might seem strange, Foucault’s relationship. R
given that few people outside of ivory towers have even In blending the fictional character of Paul Michel
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heard of Foucault, but Duncker’s novel isn’t some dry with the memory of the real-life Michel Foucault,
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academic text that needs to be painstakingly deciphered. Duncker has created a novel which refuses simply to
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Hallucinating Foucault tells the story of Paul Michel, remain a story. It crosses over into real life – so much
a celebrated French novelist who is so distraught at so that for some people, Paul Michel is now more V
Foucault’s death that he becomes insane. The novel’s real than Foucault ever was: “Most of the people who W
narrator is an English student studying Michel’s work have read Hallucinating Foucault have never heard X
who sets out to rescue the writer, so bringing the author’s of Foucault. Some of them thought Paul Michel was Y
words and the author’s world together in a dangerous real – one or two even tried to get hold of his novels. Z
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One reviewer in Manchester said the book was all old the madness in Hallucinating Foucault to do justice More A
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hat to him because his mother had produced a thesis on to what I’d seen. It’s incredibly difficult to represent B
Paul Michel!” people who are living in a different time zone from you C
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Some of the novel’s most memorable and disturbing with respect and generosity – because you don’t want D
scenes centre around the narrator’s entry in the asylum to present them as curiosities or freaks, which is what E
to find Paul Michel. “I have a friend in France who’s Foucault also strove to challenge in his work.” RSS
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worked with schizophrenics for the last 30 years,” The love between reader and writer is evident
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Duncker says. “She’s seen the different ways that from Duncker’s enthusiasm when she talks about the Facebook
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schizophrenia has been perceived during that time – French philosopher: “Foucault once said, ‘I wrote all
because even now, no one really understands it, no one my books to make boys fall in love with me.’ And I I
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knows where it comes from. She holds an open clinic, think there’s an element to that in all writing – books J
so I visited her there with some trepidation and it was are messages in bottles. There was something about K
absolutely incredible. You always think that people Foucault – his vanity, his shaved head, his loom- L
who are off their heads are going to be just a little bit ing presence – that indicated that he desperately M
eccentric, but these people were absolutely mad – rav- wanted to be a writer rather than a philosopher. So N
ing! But there was such a sense of community there; it the character of Paul Michel is the embodiment of O
was harrowing but quite beautiful, in a way. some of Foucault’s unfulfilled desires. It’s my present P
“Paul Michel knows he’s mad and that’s common – to Foucault, in a way. I made the character of Paul Q
mad people are completely aware that they’re raving, Michel as handsome as James Dean and in love with R
that they slide between sanity and insanity. I wanted him – what more could he want?!”  S
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Nic Dunlop: The Lost Executioner email

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Chris Mitchell
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The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my the rest of the regime’s leaders, successfully avoided
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pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories: prosecution. To date, 25 years after Cambodia’s auto- Facebook
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Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Teashop, The genocide, none of the key proponents have been brought
Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country to trial. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s leader, died of old I
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that tries to understand its recent, disastrous politics. age in 1998. J
Where Secret Histories documents Burma’s slide into For Dunlop, seeing a photo of Comrade Duch set K
a real-life Orwellian nightmare, The Lost Executioner something off inside him that made him want to find L
chronicles photographer Nic Dunlop’s obsessive hunt the former commandant. This search provides the M
for Comrade Duch, the man who presided over the engine for his book, fusing the detective work neces- N
deaths of thousands as the commandant of Tuol Sleng, sary to finding Duch with the travelogue of exploring O
Cambodia’s notorious interrogation centre, during the modern day Cambodia. Dunlop interweaves details of P
genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia’s awful recent history within his journey, Q
Between 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power providing a powerful narrative that avoids the dryness R
in Cambodia until 1979 when they were displaced by of traditional historical analysis but does not hold back
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the invading Vietnamese, the ultra-leftist party insti- on dealing with the vast complexities of how the Khmer
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tuted a Year Zero policy which was even more extreme Rouge came to power and the fallout of their overthrow.
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than China’s Cultural Revolution and resulted in the Both John Pilger and David Chandler, Cambodia’s pre-
murder of an estimated two million people – a quarter eminent Western historian, are given major credit in V
of the country’s population. the Acknowledgements for helping Dunlop refine the W
Duch, like every other major figure in the Khmer historical accuracy of his text and this, for me, is vital X
Rouge regime, successfully disappeared into Cambo- as a demonstration of Dunlop’s attempt to write more Y
dia’s jungles when the Vietnamese arrived and, like than a simple, observational travel book. Z
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Instead, Dunlop gives an account of his own, personal is never a sense of getting lost within his narrative. His More A
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journey, not just through the cities and countryside of prose has a real composure to it – it’s extremely simple B
Cambodia but through the country’s history and how without being simplistic, and there is not one verbose C
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his own history has intertwined with it. The reader, word or overwrought sentence here. The understated D
then, accompanies Dunlop as he tries to come to grips tone of Dunlop’s journalism allows the appalling facts E
with understanding Cambodia as a foreigner, as his of his narrative to speak for themselves far more clearly. RSS
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learning and perceptions of the country he is fascinated Without wanting to sound flippant, the search for
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by shift and change over time – and as he questions his Comrade Duch does also have a bit of Boy’s Own ad- Facebook
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own opinions and perspectives about prosecuting the venture to it – and, to be frank, a somewhat suicidal one
Khmer Rouge commanders, and the very nature of how too. Dunlop has worked in South East Asia for several I
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justice can be achieved and carried out. Integral to this years and is well versed in Asian protocol to be sure, but J
journey – and a vital part of this book – are the personal to decide to go looking for one of the Khmer Rouge’s K
testimonies of those Dunlop meets who were both vic- key figures would seem to be asking for trouble. Cam- L
tim and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities. bodia is safe for tourists these days, but outside of the M
It is these conversations that transform the historical cities it is still easy for people to disappear. I’ll refrain N
narrative by placing those momentous events in the from writing anymore about the outcome of his search O
context of their impact on individuals, where they stop for fear of creating a spoiler; I’ll only say that it is a P
being lost in history, if only for a moment, and become truly remarkable story. Q
real people again. For all the citing of numbers and A section in the middle of The Lost Executioner is the R
statistics to measure and somehow quantify the vast- abiding – and troubling – memory I retain of reading it. S
ness of Cambodia’s nightmare, reading these accounts Within the rarefied confines of New York’s Museum
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are what provide the true expression of the murderous Of Modern Art, an exhibition of photos taken at Tuol
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insanity that befell the country. Sleng was commissioned, with an accompanying coffee
The Lost Executioner, then, is a complex book, both table book. The photos have become iconic – black and V
in its attempt to avoid simplifying the recent history white, each individual in the black loose clothes of the W
of Cambodia and in Dunlop’s own acknowledgement Khmer Rouge against a white wall. They are the photos X
of the flux of his own thoughts about it. But, perhaps that were taken on admission at Tuol Sleng – and the Y
because Dunlop’s profession is as a photographer, there taking of those photos were effectively the signing of Z

their death warrant. Only seven people survived their with the limits of photography – that without words, More A
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admission to Tuol Sleng. images are lost without context, turned into disin- B
During its exhibition, MOMA provided no cap- terested aesthetic objects, mere decoration. The Lost C
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tions with the photographs, no names, no details of Executioner is clearly the product of Dunlop’s frus- D
who each individual was, no mention of how or why tration with his own profession, and photography’s E
they’d died. For MOMA’s purposes, these photos loss is writing’s gain. In telling his story of going in RSS
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had stopped being individual records of genocide but search of Comrade Duch, Dunlop also tells the story
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had become mere portraiture. They were nice photos, of Cambodia going in search of answers to its own Facebook
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nothing more. There were no indications that each of auto-genocide and the still-ongoing quest for some
these people had died at the hands of torturers. There sort of justice. For all the grimness of its subject I
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were no calls for justice. matter, The Lost Executioner is a vital book and one J
Dunlop writes movingly of his own frustration that deserves to reach a huge audience.  K
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The Fall: Fall Heads Roll email

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Ben Granger
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It’s time again for the Seer of Salford to blast forth his moments yet.
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enchanted bombast. With more albums now than any- The sound of Fall Heads Roll is very much riff- Facebook
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one can count, and with its title surely a sly reference heavy guitar based , with a decidedly minimalist
to the number of foot-soldiers fallen from his ranks in primitive moog-synth backing, eschewing most of I
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the grand Quixotic battle, a new Fall album stakes its the dance effects which have appeared on Fall records J
claim. Those who care, care. Should you? in the past two decades. Not that there haven’t been K
The trouble with a talent this unique rattling out at great pure-dance Fall moments (‘Free Range’, et al) L
the rate it does is that it gets taken for granted. Does but this particular fan prefers the purer approach on M
this album stand out enough to win back those who’ve balance. The brilliant minimalism of the early 80s N
seen the band’s twisted charm in the past but who’ve period is evoked. O
got tired over the years? And what riffs! ‘Pacifying Joint’ is an incredible sec- P
The patience of the part-timer is tested straight ond track, with a machine-gun snare that will instantly Q
away with first track ‘Ride Away’, a cranky simplistic snag anyone who hears it. If they choose to rip them- R
diatribe against someone who’s pissed the Great One selves off the snag that’s up to them, but it’s as catchy as
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off; literally one-note in all senses. And yet at this point anything by Franz Ferdinand. And once again the “bla
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the faithful (and yes, of course I’m one) will hear that blah blah”’s of Smith’s voice attain a weird transcend-
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Mark E Smith’s always ugly, tuneless voice has, in the ent cohesion. By the next track more incredible hooks
end, taken on an incredible inner-poetry of its own. As with age-old synths are underway. And by the time the V
I believe John Peel once said, it really would be beguil- pop kids are singing along to next track ‘What About W
ing reciting the Yellow Pages. And yet once Smith has Us?’, perhaps they’ll scarcely notice they’re chanting X
frightened off the chaff with this lengthy dirge; The from the point of view of an East German rabbit (or is Y
Fall are ready to thrill with some of their most defining it a Rabbi?) indignantly demanding that Dr H. Shipman Z
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Smith and his lyrics have generally grown more Elsewhere, the song ‘Blindness’ delves into the ex- B
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the weird mystery, at times the scabrous social realism so well. The repetition in the music is a brilliant back- D
and satire of old has been somewhat lost in recent years. drop to the meandering meditation on an unhealthy and E
Here though, several themes of yore are re-examined to paranoid hatred of the narrator’s surroundings “The flat RSS
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great effect, and while of course there’s still great dol- is evil / and full of cavalry and Calvary”. At their best,
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lops of the incomprehensibility that makes them what and they are at their best here, no-one can produce a Facebook
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they are, a little bit more sense seeps in. Smith may be sound quite as menacing as The Fall. Unlike Slipknot
a fervent loather of all things nostalgic, this record is by or assorted goth-goons, Smith has always known that I
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no means a rehash in any sense, and yet somehow some true horror ensues when emblazoned on and interwo- J
of the best spirit of the old in The Fall is at work here. ven with a background of mundanity. In ‘Blindness’, as K
One track, ‘Assume’, goes back to the old legacy in ‘When The Moon Falls’, ‘City Hobgoblins’, ‘Hotel L
of fucking seriously with the English language, and Bloedel’ and ‘Bremen Nacht’ before it, they sound like M
applying strange new laws onto the commonplace they’ve cracked open a scene of everyday life, and N
populace that sound like they’ve been handed down found something unfathomably terrifying seeping out. O
from some Norse Deity gone schizoid. “If you assume, It’s unnerving and marvellous. P
you are a Hu(l)me. If you half assume, you are a Hu(l) The many supernatural themes from previous forays Q
me. If you don’t assume, you are a cap-it-an!!”. That are also present in the deeply mysterious ‘Midnight R
this damned and despised new category of humanity In Aspen’, though this time the backing is The Fall in S
could take its name from either the philosopher David beautiful and subtle mode, and yes they can do that.
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or the run-down district of Central Manchester (more A gentle plucked arrangement introduces a delirious
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probably both, or neither) just adds to the disturbed description of what seems to be a man attempting to
allure. Of equal importance – it’s aligned to a gigantic, summon spirits in the Swiss Alps by firing a rifle at V
siren guitar sound that flattens all in its wake. Even if selected stars. For once, Smith’s periodic preoccupa- W
Smith wasn’t around the band at all (and it can happen tion with the occult seems less to do with Lovecraft and X
if you go see them live; take it from me) instrumentally creeping terror, and more the benevolent engagement Y
alone this bludgeons the living crap out of any musical of a great mind with what may be beyond. And for once Z

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That’s not the only time on this record that the grouchi- all the way through. The first track is the worst track, B
est sod recording today shows an uncharacteristically and there is not one silly piece of crap on the whole C
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warm side. In ‘Breaking The Rules’, a wonderfully product. Lover that I am, that is rare. (Put it this way: D
light uplifting backing carries a mockingly bemused would you like to listen to a compilation album consist- E
tale of a man “who tried to break his mind breaking the ing of ‘WMC Blob 59’, ‘Bug Day’, ‘And This Day’, RSS
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rules”. Probably the closest Smith will ever come to a ‘Fireworks’, ‘Mollusc In Tyroll’? Half of the Levitate
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wry self-mocking acceptance of his popular image. A album? Well, not me.) There’s a fantastic sound going Facebook
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sign of the comfort-zone probably unthinkable just a on all the way though here. I thought I’d forgotten it,
few years ago, during the sorry days of on-stage punch- but here it is again. That others may hear it for the first I
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ups in New York. It seems his fourth (or is it fifth?) time is a minor miracle. J
marriage, this time to keyboardist Eleni has brought If you wanted to turn a friend on to The Fall you’d be K
forth something at least bordering on contentment. just as well playing this to them as the early rockapun- L
I’ve found most Fall albums in the past decade, kabilly days or the mid-80s Brix poppier rockier period. M
however many gems in the first half, tend to run out That in itself is an incredible achievement. Its not just N
of steam a bit on side two. Fall Heads Roll bucks this that you couldn’t imagine another band being anything O
trend more than any other. Even the sillier ones like ‘Bo like The Fall ever again, you couldn’t really imagine P
Demmick’ (a drum-based-track with a concentrated anything being like The Fall ever again. The blooded Q
stream of abuse against one hapless individual – main moon goes on shining, and is no less respected, and nor R
refrain – ”Hey fat-eh!” while conceding “He was called should they be. 
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Stefan Fatsis: Letter Better email

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Jonathan Kiefer discusses the torrid world of competitive Scrabble playing
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Sure, Stefan Fatsis is nice, but he’s also a freak. That And Obsession In The World Of Competitive Scrabble
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is, a passionate aficionado – and an unusual specimen. Players. He is also, of course, the main character. Facebook
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Fatsis is a Scrabble expert. He has written a book about “It is sort of like Plimpton,” he offered, meaning
the game, and can speak authoritatively on its mechan- George Plimpton, the journalist-cum-temporary, I
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ics, history, and cultural significance. And he can play, tongue-in-cheek Detroit Lions quarterback. “Except I J
better than most people in the world. But – and this got good.” K
is important – although his Scrabble skill is orders of Do not think it was easy for Fatsis, normally a mild- L
magnitude greater than yours or mine may ever be, mannered Wall Street Journal sportswriter, to become M
Fatsis is not likely to use the phrase “orders of mag- a Scrabble expert, especially in a mere couple of years, N
nitude,” in conversation or in print, without quotation and especially while committed to writing a book about O
marks. Nor to use words like “azido” and “oiticica” and trying to become a Scrabble expert in a mere couple of P
certainly not “vogie,” because he understands that such years. He devotes many pages to self-flagellation for a Q
words really aren’t usable, not even on standardized stubbornly intermediate ability. R
tests. In Scrabble, however, they’re gold. “The hard part about it was wanting the narrative to
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“You can argue that the process of getting good at turn out a certain way,” he said. “It did add to the pres-
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Scrabble is the most inclusive use of language,” the sure. I was fortunate that I was able to get good enough.
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clean-cut and bespectacled Fatsis said recently, enjoy- Maybe it would have turned out differently otherwise.”
ing the down time between a Reno, Nevada Scrabble After a moment, he added, “Or maybe I would have V
tournament and a Berkeley, California bookstore ap- kept playing until I made it.” W
pearance. “You’re using words that don’t get used. I As you might deduce, Word Freak keeps its subti- X
love that!” Thus is Fatsis precisely the appropriate tle’s promise, and the gravitational constant in Scrab- Y
narrator for Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius ble’s universe is obsession. But, as Fatsis explains in Z
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the text, “I don’t consider Scrabble an obsession in author’s very thorough reporting, from the ‘Horatio More A
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a clinical sense: a disturbing preoccupation with an Alger story’ of Scrabble’s inventor, Alfred Butts, to the B
unreasonable idea.I think of it as an obsession in the fascinating variety of mnemonic systems by which the C
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colloquial sense, a compelling motivation.” In any best players have used Butts’ creation as a laboratory D
case, what writer doesn’t hope for the paid encourage- for their mad science. E
ment of his obsessions? So, were Fatsis to recuse himself, the book would RSS
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Now, in the interests of propriety, an undertaking lose a trustworthy guiding voice, not to mention a natu-
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of this sort must be considered a battle between the ral narrative throughline; its minutiae would become Facebook
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myopia of deep immersion and the insight of distanced overwhelming, even boring; the subculture would
perspective; Fatsis, admittedly unaccustomed to first seem not to contain universal elements but instead ap- I
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person narration, deftly straddled that tension through- pear more rarified than before; and the whole enterprise J
out his book. might start to feel like a titanic William Safire essay, K
“I’m a pretty standard-issue, mainstream newspaper which, though enlightening, has begun to consume too L
reporter,” he said. “The participatory thing always much of an otherwise useful Sunday. M
struck me as a little bit of a conceit.” Fatsis described Instead, Word Freak reads like an anticipated letter N
his first book, Wild and Outside: How A Renegade from a sharp and funny friend, one who takes the ques- O
Minor League Revived The Spirit Of Baseball In tion “What’s new?” quite seriously, and always has a P
America’s Heartland, as a more traditional example of good and true answer. Really, what more should we Q
‘fly-on-the-wall’ reporting. He considered it dishonest expect from good nonfiction? R
to try that in Word Freak. Fatsis is as he seems in the book: disposed to enthu- S
“The deeper I got into this,” he explained, “the more siasm (“I played UNILOBED!” he once interjected, re-
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it became about how I felt.” Fatsis wouldn’t like it if calling the Reno tournament), or, to put it another way,
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people consider Word Freak a memoir. It’s not, but an especially sporting fellow. He even appreciates the
here’s as close as he comes: “When I was nine, in 1972, aesthetics of Scrabble, wherein lies a kind of abstract V
I calculated how old I would turn in 2000 but couldn’t expressionism – the non sequiturs, the shapes of words W
fathom that day arriving; it might not have seemed so themselves, the improbable consonance of consonants. X
terrifying had I known I’d be playing a board game Could the meanings of “crwth” or “exergue” possibly Y
full-time.” This disarming tone also happens to suit the be any more useful or satisfying than their sheer, weird Z

beauty? I don’t think so. Look them up. “It’s not leaving my system,” he said. “I’m not plan- More A
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Actually, Fatsis has staged a relative coup, winning ning to drop out.” Fatsis was referring to the way Scrab- B
the approval of his chosen subculture twice–first as a ble has changed his life. He seemed less concerned with C
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participant, then as a journalist. He has befriended the the way his life, a small portion of which is copiously D
“characters, in both senses of the word,” with whom documented in Word Freak, may have changed Scrabble. E
he traded tolerance, curiosity, annoyance, affection, “I didn’t write it so that people would play more RSS
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and absurdly high-scoring Scrabble games. “They’ve Scrabble,” he said. “I thought I had a good story to tell.
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read the book by now, and responded well,” Fatsis said. If people start playing more games of the mind.” he Facebook
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“One character was way weirder than I thought,” one shrugged, half-bashfully. “I’d be honoured with that
friend told him. “You.” sort of legacy.”  I
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Tibor Fischer: The Fischer King email

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Cliff Taylor gets a rare interview with the reclusive Tibor Fischer
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The scene: a typically wintry Wednesday afternoon. Which brings us to Lesson Three: “Most agents
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Upstairs at The Lift in Brighton’s Queen Road, some and publishers are shits.” The whey- faced literary Facebook
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whey-faced literary types are gathered around a table types dutifully scribble “shits” on their notepads. But
for a seminar of sorts. Their rapt attention is focused one can’t help thinking such tribulations must be past I
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upon The Writer in their midst, a slightly grizzled history for Fischer. After all, he is now the lionized lit- J
36-year-old phenomenon dressed in a less-than-chic terateur invited down from London by Brighton’s Do K
brown leather jacket, clown T-shirt and black jeans. His Tongues spoken word club to read from his new novel L
name is Tibor Fischer. The Thought Gang, which is currently leapfrogging M
How To Get Ahead In The Writing Game. Lesson into reprints and soon to be made into a film. These N
One: “Sleep with someone in publishing,” advises days Fischer gets advances and can afford to indulge O
Fischer, sipping his tea. Failing this, his next tip is to in a little positive vengefulness against those faceless P
stick to Lesson Two: never take no for an answer. “I’m arbiters who are the hate figures of would-be authors. Q
an expert on rejection letters,” he imparts, referring to But what is the secret? demand the gathered R
the 58 negative responses which almost buried alive his would-be authors. How can we too hitch a ride to
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debut novel Under The Frog. “It’s a lottery,” he shrugs. planet Picador? Fischer shrugs again, looking so
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It seems scarcely believable now that the profes- frustratingly ordinary. (He wears brand new Nike
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sional readers of all those imprints could have been sneakers. He was born in Stockport! His mother was
so uniformly myopic when presented with a work as captain of the Hungarian women’s basketball team, V
blindingly brilliant as Under The Frog, which was but there’s no genetic evidence of that either.) He W
shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and propelled doesn’t give interviews and he’s too modest to say it, X
Fischer into the contentious ranks of The Best Of Young but the secret is unsharable anyway, locked securely Y
British Novelists. inside that slightly balding, slightly greying skull. Z
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shows through in the subject matter of his books. comes quite naturally. He is effortlessly, flippantly hip. B
Under The Frog is an achingly funny account of the “The trouble with Nietzsche…” reflects the dissolute C
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horrors of Soviet-era Hungary. The Thought Gang Coffin, “…is that you can never be sure when he’s do- D
gatecrashes the screaming spires and ivory towers ing some levity or not.” E
of academia with an irreverent pisstake on ‘the biz’ Apres seminar The Lift fleshes out as the regular Do RSS
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of philosophy. Meanwhile, his forthcoming novel at- Tonguers arrive for the evening show. Fischer reads first
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tempts to navigate through the history of art. Fischer from Under The Frog, a poignantly hilarious scene in Facebook
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is one of those rare writers who can grapple with which a dying Hungarian peasant is hauled out of bed
huge agenda without trivialising it. and propped against a gate for the purposes of a Soviet I
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“I like to give people a few mental lozenges to suck propaganda film. Next, a bank robbery and one-sided J
on, “ he says, half-jokingly. But Fischer’s comedy Russian roulette incident from The Thought Gang. K
is often black and always honest. Under The Frog It’s a passage pitched somewhere between Hunter L
exposes Cold War insanity by drawing attention to S. Thompson and Quentin Tarantino, but couched in M
its sheer absurdity. Absolute power turns some peo- Fischer’s inimitable vernacular: “…the risk with going N
ple into absolute pricks. Similarly, in The Thought forward was the bloodshed and the feel of zephyrs in O
Gang, he swipes at that other absurd god, Mammon. the gutshangar. It was getting close, armpit wettingly P
“Unquestionably, bank robbery is an illusion,” ob- close to chamber-clearing time and letting the ballistics Q
serves the bank robbing philosopher Eddie Coffin. sort things out, when we heard sirens, the sonic harbin- R
“You take it out but where does it end up? In a bank. ger of the filth.” S
Like water, money is trapped in a cycle, it moves Afterwards there is just time for the author to traffic
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from bank to bank. We take it out for some fresh air.” a few thoughts. When asked what he’d be doing if that
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So what is the genesis of this prodigious comic tal- 59th letter hadn’t been a “yes”, Fischer replies, “Prob-
ent? That rich vein of traditional Hungarian stand-ups? ably journalism. Or working in a leper colony.”  V
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Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism email

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Ben Granger
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The only game in town, and a rigged one at that. In what contemporary cultural fiction as both reference and
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is swiftly becoming ‘living memory’, capitalism is now launchpad for his analysis. He begins with the sugges- Facebook
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the only economic, social and political system deemed tion that the film Children Of Men is the apocalyptic
possible, the logic of its late incarnation invading every fantasy most appropriate to the capitalist age – a sterile I
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aspect of life, culture, even inner thought. So absolute populace representing a sterile culture, not openly to- J
is its mental grip that when international finance capi- talitarian yet nonetheless brutal, completely atomised, K
talism recently imploded in its own greed, devastating all public space abandoned, and connecting with the L
the world, its victims reacted by obediently, meekly, suspicion that ‘the end has already come’. Most impor- M
and pathetically recreating the whole shoddy system, tantly, that there really does seem to be no alternative. N
and handing their public services the bill. Stockholm As Fisher notes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the O
syndrome on a global scale. world than the end of capitalism.” P
Capitalist Realism looks at how the logic of this The nature of this murky triumphalism is such that Q
social and spiritual stranglehold manifests itself in this ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism is a far more amorphous R
a myriad of ways. From the meaningless market- creature than that which appeared in the old ‘capitalist/
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bureaucracy which infests public services, to the worker’ duality that characterised the conflicts of old.
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nihilist-materialism of gangster films and gangsta rap, The new capitalism asserts “we’re all in this together”
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from the faux-humanitarianism of Bill Gates and his (to quote our present regime), the system is everyone
fellow generous oligarchs, to the omnipresent PR of all and everyone is the system – to question its logic is V
business and government functions, now not just a tool to question the logic of life itself, of your own sanity. W
but an end itself. All neo-liberal life is here. As the class war is rejected the savage disparity inher- X
Mark Fisher writes at the fascinatingly digressive ent in the system has increasingly turned into internal Y
cultural website k-Punk, and here as elsewhere uses conflicts, with mental illness spreading at an exponen- Z
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disorder at is core. sleeves informality and quiet authoritarianism”. B
Capital is an eternally shape-shifting “un-nameable In a system where everyone is co-opted, no-one can C
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thing”, tainting everything with the logic of its own be to blame. Witness, as Fisher notes, that “no-one was D
transactions. The brutal logic of the market creates its to blame” at Hillsborough and the Menezes shooting E
own kind of cultural ‘realism’, which Fisher shows (you could add the Union Carbide explosion in India RSS
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as expressing itself in the fetishisation of the rugged and BP oil spill in the US to that) – and literally speak-
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individual in the vogue for gangsta rap and gangster ing this is quite true. Capitalism claims its legitimacy Facebook
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films, reaching their asocial apotheosis in the Hobbe- in the name of the free, autonomous individual, yet this
sian fictional worlds of James Ellroy and Frank Miller, individual has long been lost in a Kafka-esque maze, I
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where no-one and nothing is to be trusted. Fisher uses his face used as a totem as his autonomy is secreted J
gangster films to show the direction of travel capitalist away, forgotten. K
organisation has taken. In The Godfather era of the 40s- Socialist Realism was the official name for the ersatz L
60s, the Corleones were bound together with a ruthless art churned out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hackneyed, M
and absolute loyalty, mirroring the big, hierarchical, servile and trite, the art of ‘actually existing socialism’ N
often family-based corporations of old (where you may had as much in common with the liberationist project O
be exploited but you still have a job for life, ‘at least of Marxism as the plastic Mary’s flogged near Lourdes P
they looked after their own.’). have to do with the Sermon on the Mount. The reality Q
By the time of Heat, De Niro’s character Neil McAu- of ‘actually existing capitalism’ is similarly dislocated R
ley shows himself a very modern gangster by his lack from its projected self-image as that of the heroic, rug- S
of any ties or loyalties whatsoever: “Don’t let yourself gedly free isolated individual.
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get too attached to anything that you are not willing Using his own background in the education system
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to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat as just one of many examples, Fisher shows that
around the corner.” This in turn mirrors the atomisa- while modern capitalism presents itself as the enemy V
tion of the brave new world of “de-centred” capitalism, of bureaucracy, in fact it has proliferated meaningless W
whose lack of straightforward hierarchy only makes its layers of white collar wastage more than any system in X
exploitation more nebulous, casual labour in all areas history. As the system only functions in so far as how Y
of the economy shed in an instant as billionaires lightly it’s appearance can keep its hold over the populace, “all Z

that is solid melts into PR”, and targets proliferate. A neoliberal paradigm with ‘liberal communists’ such as More A
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frantic scramble ensues for formless trinkets with no the philanthropic elite of Gates and Soros giving out B
link to reality. Everyone knows this is meaningless, yet with one hand what they take away with another, that C
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at an official level this cannot be admitted. When Ger- Kafka prefigured the current order better than Orwell or D
ald Ratner called his product “crap” he sinned against Huxley, (and uncannily predicted the call centre while E
this unwritten rule – we all know it but it must not be he was at it), and that the ostensible ‘choice’ of the mar- RSS
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admitted. This is an omnipresent facade, from which ket has worked its way in ever diminishing returns into
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everyone seeks escape by any means necessary. The a zero common dominator, 999 channels of nothing. Facebook
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daydreams appropriate to this Janus-faced world are Deft at sociology, political theory and cultural analy-
the paranoid fantasies of Paralax View or the Bourne sis alike, Fisher is probably at his weakest with his own I
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films, or at a higher level in the nightmare schizoid empirical examples of students at the college where he J
dreamscapes of Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and David has worked. He claims that the listless sense of time, K
Cronenberg, “where agency is dissolved in a phantas- and inability to absorb abstract concepts, that he ob- L
magoric haze of psychic and physical intoxicants.” serves in his students, mirrors the blip-vert consumer M
Writing with a mercurial set of cultural references, mentality of modern market reality. Maybe true, but N
Fisher can shift gear from the ground level of reality this also sounds suspiciously like the moaning of the O
TV shows like Supernanny to the heights of Baudril- teachers at their inattentive pupils over the ages. The P
lard and Lacan without any sense of jarring incongru- piercing vividity of his other insights however more Q
ity. Unlike Slavoj Zizek, another social critic given to than make up for this. R
blending high and low cultural reference points, you While by no means a ‘light’ read, and the odd excur- S
never get the sense that they are being thrown in just to sion into Deleuze and other theorists did shoot slightly
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shock, or to highlight the author’s brilliance. over my scalp, this is not a tome you need a degree
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Fisher shows the modern society as a sinister hall of in philosophy or cultural theory to comprehend – its
mirrors, and illuminates each pained pane perfectly. ingenuity is an open book. And while Fisher’s style V
So many themes throb within this tiny book (just 81 is more often academic in style than not, the forensic W
pages!) as to take your breath away, and this review has imagination and magnificently multifarious breadth of X
only scraped the surface. Other panes – that revolution scope on display means this is anything but a dry read. Y
itself has been absorbed and commodified within the Indeed, he brings to vivid life a somewhat deadening Z

and depressing vision. “The most gothic description of Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher shows with terrifying More A
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capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract insight just how completely it has enveloped us, but B
parasite, and insatiable vampire and zombie-maker, but offers little glimpse of how we can break out. He does C
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the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and however disabuse us of any false hopes, and in dem- D
the zombies it makes are us.” onstrating the enormity of the hold it has on us, shows E
This is a horror show in which we are all trapped. In the rank monster for what it is. Maybe that’s a start.  RSS
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Michael Foot: The Uncollected Essays email

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Ben Granger
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Mention the name Michael Foot and listen out for fact the man was basically right all along – we can
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the automatic sneer. A rolling of eyes at a “disastrous delicately place that trifle to one-side for now. We Facebook
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leader”, accompanied no doubt with devilishly cutting can all still agree however that when it comes to the
asides about donkey jackets, walking sticks or Worzel everyday devious machinations of leading a political I
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Gummidge, delete as appropriate. Gerald Kaufman’s party, and of creating an effective electoral machine J
deathless Wildeanism chiding Foot’s 1983 Labour and vibrant media image for the slick media age, Foot K
Manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history” will did not find his forte. What was? Writing. Journalism, L
be added by the more confident comedians, and much, ideas and writing. M
much merriment will be had all round. Oh, the laughter! Foot began writing in the 30s for a variety of maga- N
Let’s leave aside the fact the economic shit-storm zines and papers, broadly championing the underdog, O
the world currently finds itself in stems entirely from and more specifically drumming up solidarity against P
the Mephistophelian neo-liberal pact which this the menace of Fascism. His 1940 book Who Are The Q
“suicide note” rejected, a pact wholeheartedly signed Guilty Men?, denouncing as it did the Tory Chamber- R
up to by the current ‘realist’ Labour administration, lain government’s appeasement of Hitler, did much
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along with the rest of the world. Let’s ignore the fact to consolidate progressive support for the war effort,
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that the 1983 result was that of a party caught between with the promise of a better society at home beyond.
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the SDP schism, an economic upsurge and Falklands In the 40s he joined the Tribune newspaper along with,
wargasm euphoria. Let’s gloss over the fact that Soviet amongst others, his friend George Orwell, helping V
Communism and unregulated international capitalism establish it as a voice for the Labour Left which stood W
have both been utterly, comprehensively discredited, solid against the hegemony of both US and USSR. On X
while simple logic dictates the democratic socialist into the 60s, concurrent with acting as the conscience of Y
alternative Foot put forward has been vindicated. The the same Labour Left from the backbenches, he found Z
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Nye Bevan, a similarly exhaustive tome on H.G. Wells and vision. The struggle for truth and freedom are as B
was to follow later. important in the literary sphere as in the party political, C
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It was the old rival Denis Healey who said that a poli- maybe more so. Aesthetics, beauty, form and style are D
tician needs a “hinterland”, outside cultural interests to at the very least equal to politics in his thoughts and E
keep them human. No-one could ever accuse Foot of enthusiasms. In discussing Edmund Wilson’s biogra- RSS
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not cultivating his own spiritual and mental landscape. phy of Rousseau, more reference is made to relevant
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The selection of essays here are a testament to the quotations from Byron than to any theoretical road to Facebook
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man’s mercurial mind, the breadth of his intellectual Robespierre. Essays on the history of Hampstead com-
scope. Taken from over a half-century, only a small mon, and the infinite wonders of Venice, perhaps the I
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number touch on purely political ‘issues’ – nuclear least ‘political’ here, are probably the most beautifully J
weapons, the Soviet Union, Irish nationalism. Foot’s written, with an evocation of time, space and place K
preferred form was to discuss the life, work and ideas which is truly involving, even moving. L
of an individual man or woman, and a small majority Foot writes in a style both cultured and clear, mildly M
here are portraits of political figures, usually taken from mischievous, totally lacking pomposity, and wearing N
reviews of biographies or collections from their own its very evident learning lightly. A passion, quiet yet O
work. It takes in leading figures from Labour history pronounced, reserved but unmistakable, is evident at P
and earlier British socialism, from Bevan and Bevin all times. Personal recollections lightly pepper the es- Q
to Robert Owen and William Morris, the still earlier says on those he knows and knew, while the same easy, R
radicalisms of Tom Paine and Charles James Fox. Irish almost conversational style flows similarly into those S
and Indian independence are well represented with from centuries past, creating the pleasing impression
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Indira Ghandi and Daniel O’Connell, as is feminism that Foot was on nodding terms with Coleridge and
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with Emilene Pankhurst and Brigid Brophy. Yet at the Morris just as he was with Richard Crossman and John
same time there are a great many portraits of writers Smith (which, in his life of the mind, he perhaps always V
and characters not best known for their politics – Oscar has been). W
Wilde, James Joyce, Rebecca West, the Romantic poets A clue there perhaps that it takes a duller man than X
and Heinrich Heine – not to mention Peggy Aschroft. this to succeed in the grubby world of leading a politi- Y
That the politicians segue so well into the writers is cal party. The decency consistently evident in his prose Z

also lays bare the absolute absence of the killer instinct icon Edmund Burke; for instance, is hard to take from More A
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needed for leadership. The venom of the zealot isn’t the more partisan. Even here though, he does well to B
there either. Rare asides against Thatcher are dismissive convince. How many of the golf club bores, bigots C
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rather than enraged, bereft of the rabidity she so eas- and blimps who denounced the man as a “dangerous D
ily inspired in so many. Figures such as Ernest Bevin extremist” when he led Labour could demonstrate the E
and others on the Labour Right are appraised admir- barest fraction of his broad minded respect for and RSS
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ingly. Even a review of the autobiography of nemesis interest in competing points of view?
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Healey is genuinely warm and salutary. Tom Driberg, Foot is a socialist in the truest sense, yet forever free Facebook
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the louche old eccentric (i.e. fantasist) and rogue (i.e. of the dogma that dogs too many of his tribe. And free
sociopath) is recalled with the affection of the friend of the great sins too. Absolutely no apologia for the I
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that he was (though the bad points are laid bare too.) crimes of Communism from him – Stalin is condemned J
Anti-Thatcherite Tory and historian Ian Gilmour is here in a brief article taken from the week of his death, K
praised, and there is even a short yet powerful defence written when the rest of the world were paying tribute. L
of Churchill, paying robust tribute to the old reaction- An unequivocal defence of Salman Rushdie taken from M
ary against the modern fallacy held by revisionists on the time of the Satanic Verses furore, shows that he N
Left and Right alike that a deal could or should have would have no part of the alliance with militant political O
been struck with Hitler. Islamism which some on the Left have cynically seen P
This lack of killer instinct means he lacks the final fit to serve. His support for NATO’s bombing of Serbia Q
‘bite’ of the truly great writer too. Eloquent praise pours is more contentious, though, whatever one may think R
freely, but not once is there an effective literary slaying of it, still presents him as someone true to a liberation- S
of a hated foe, not a shortfall that could be levelled at ist vision on his own terms, unaffected by the fact that
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his friend Orwell. such a position would not be popular amongst his own
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This politeness, this sheathed sword and profoundly beloved wing of his own beloved party.
English politeness can irritate. The kind words found Foot sees socialism as the rightful heir of earlier V
for that other loveable rogue’, the Tory Kray-groupie struggles for liberty and autonomy that distinguished W
Bob Boothby seem to be stretching the limits of tol- the great rebels of the past. This is the socialism of X
erance past snapping point. And seeking and finding liberation, not restriction, the vision of liberty which in- Y
the good points even in that other arch Conservative spired the creed in the first place, expanding the vision Z

of the free-born Englishman to include those without tion with this writer becomes that bit clearer. More A
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property. This doyenne of dissenters is one himself, and I have found myself slipping into the past tense in B
when he writes of, say, of the great early Parliamentary writing this review, and yet Michael Foot is happily C
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radical Fox, or the still greater radical writer and pam- still very much alive at the age of 96. When he does D
phleteer William Hazlitt , it is with the knowledge and pass away however, an age of passion, principle and E
passion of someone who has devoted their whole life to philosophy at the higher levels of politics will die with RSS
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it, in both the intellectual and the practical sense. Foot him. It is unthinkable, literally unthinkable that a book
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feels a truly organic lineage to this tribe, a lineage he is like this could appear today. The leaders of today’s Facebook
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more than entitled to. party political machines – slick, shallow, technocratic,
An impassioned portrait of Heinrich Heine, one of faux pragmatic and narrowly philistine – could not I
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the longest essays here, is perhaps the best example of begin to produce anything of the like. You may as well J
the Foot’s infectious enthusiasm, his quiet passion, his expect Fearne Cotton to write an essay on the trans- K
blending of the poetic and political. The personal too, gressive ambiguities of the Velvet Underground. You L
as he describes how Heine came to be his “hero” after can just about see they ‘work in the same industry’, M
discovering her with a beautiful Yugoslavian girl with but nonetheless, a ‘category error’ has occurred. Does N
whom he was once in love, before coming to know him not compute. O
through what he saw as his modern day avatar, the car- True, Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James P
toonist Vicky, who had “every Heinite feature, the same Maxton back in the 80s, but it seems Brown was a dif- Q
diminutive size, the same race, the same iconoclastic ferent man then. On the Tory benches, Michael Gove R
temperament with a comparable artistic gift. He too, makes an effort to engage with the cultural sphere, but S
like my Jewish girlfriend, knew Heine by heart, and this is a very limited exception to the greater picture.
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would summon his hero to his side whenever the politi- Ideas don’t matter. But they should, something that
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cal battle was most ruthless or pitiless.” These personal Foot never forgot. This book is a window to an age of
asides are – springboards to a fine, enraptured paen. As wider political possibility, and of greater political im- V
someone who has never read Heine, I am inspired to do agination. It is also simply an immensely strong body W
so, much sooner than later. “He could never make up of writing on its own terms. And finally it is the truest X
his mind whether he was a poet or a politician”, says tribute possible to the man himself, a giant among Y
Foot of Heine, and the reason for his particular connec- pygmies.  Z

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Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand email

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Ben Granger
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Just because every music critic in the land suddenly thousand megawatt surge of the soaring guitar, the elas-
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simultaneously drools like a sick puppy over some hot tic funk of the swaggering bass, the strange voice that Facebook
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new things, it doesn’t mean said things are actually swings from the mannered to the primal. This opener
that good. The slavish adulation these uber-foppish is fucking sensational, and for once the whole mass of I
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young Glaswegians are getting across the board is tawdry, silly hyperbole seems, if anything, understated. J
off-putting because it has so many bad precedents. It would be impossible for a whole album to carry K
Music mags, broadsheets, tabloids and no doubt on as well as that, but they have a damn good try. Their L
promotional in-house newsletters for the grommet sound has been described as part of the early 80s punk- M
manufacturing industry have been unanimous in their funk revival, but this is a lot more fully realised than N
knicker-wetting praise. When the ‘with-it’ Guardian The Rapture were ever likely to be. There certainly O
allowed the band to edit their own G2 supplement is something almost eerily 80s about singer Alex Ka- P
one was reminded of that dark era when university pranos’ affected tones. But perhaps a better comparison Q
professors and vicars were (quite genuinely) invited can be found with previous press darlings The Strokes. R
on television to discuss the intricacies behind the Both draw heavily from the art-punk of the late 70s,
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lyrics to Oasis’ Be Here Now. Frankly, there’s just but whereas The Strokes are more Television and Iggy,
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not enough vomit in the world. Franz Ferdinand are more Blondie and Buzzcocks. And
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I put this album on therefore expecting an instant it’s the Scots’ songs that stay with you longer.
eye and earful of Emperor’s New Clothing. What I got Lyrically we’re in that hinterland between world- V
was the opening song, ‘Jacqueline’, the most genuinely weary hedonism and humane misanthropy, where the W
thrilling beginning to an album for many, many years. smart are cool and the cool are smart. There’s some X
All the factors that make this record transcend the hype very nice touches. The comically self-obsessed student Y
kick in with an exhilarating and magnetic burst. The in ‘Dark Of The Matinee’ daydreaming of impressing Z
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his as-yet unrequited love by “Telling Terry Wogan from Collins’ rightly maligned crew? I sense a cover up More A
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how I made it / But what I ‘made’ is unclear now / But of Kennedyesque proportions…) There’s only one dud B
his deference is / And his laughter is”. ‘Michael’ is an on the whole album, the insipid ‘This Fire’. C
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impressively leery foray into the world of seedy boy- I’ll temper my real enthusiasm here, and put my D
on-boy glamour, following boldly in the footsteps of sourpuss head on the block by predicting that while E
the genre’s forbears Ziggy, Iggy, Marc, Moz and Lou. this is a great record, Franz Ferdinand will not become RSS
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But really its not the lyrics that make this record so one of the all time greats. Its not the music that will
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memorable; it’s the fact that these must be some of prevent immortality, but Alex’s delivery being just that Facebook
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the most danceable indie tunes EVER, be it the primal too mannered, the enigmatic lyrics not quite grabbing
surge of ‘Jacqueline’, the imperious bounce of ‘Dark you enough. I
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Of The Matinee’, the schizoid pogo of ‘Cheating On I really do hope to be proved wrong about that, and J
You’ or the wraith-like beauty of ‘Auf Asche’. The hit that this album will prove a springboard to even higher K
single ‘Take Me Out’ must be the first hit single since zeniths for the fey young lads. Is this the future of rock? L
Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ to manage the tricky Maybe, maybe not. But in the meantime you really M
job of melding two completely different tunes together must accept that some things are true even though the N
to make one classy song, even if the second part does NME and The Telegraph say they are, and lap up the O
bear a disturbing similarity to the old Genesis hit ‘That’s most exciting band in aeons, tailor made like all the P
All’ (can I really be alone in noticing this blatant rip-off best for the young but old at heart.  Q
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Athol Fugard: Tsotsi email

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Greg Lowe
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South African author and playwright Athol Fugard’s streets were plagued by such ruthless killers who
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recently-published novel Tsotsi, is a compelling and would kill for pennies or pleasure. Some say the word Facebook
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brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s epony- is derived from Zoot suit, the chosen apparel of the
mous protagonist. Set in Sophiatown – a black town- Hollywood hardmen of the day. I
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ship in Johannesburg that was razed in the 1950s to Tsotsi the character is a man without memory, name J
make way for homes for the whites – Fugard uses the or age – though one assumes he is in his early 20s. His K
oppression of the apartheid regime that segregated the name is simply a banner, an indicator of the guiding L
lives of the country’s black and white populations, as force behind his life and actions. Violence. Questions M
a backdrop for the novel’s main setting: deep-rooted about his past are not tolerated, and often lead to more N
racism, the abject poverty of the black community, brutality being dispensed on the enquirer, as Boston O
brooding violence. finds out for himself. P
The book was originally written in draft form in the It is here that Fugard really works his magic. For Q
early 60s, only to be resurrected and reedited some Tsotsi does not have a hidden past that he is trying R
20 years later. The bulk of the story focuses on three to cover up, or one that he is trying to remember: he
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transformational days in the life of Tsotsi, a stone- literally has no recollection. He is an intensely primal
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cold killer who leads a gang comprising of Die Aap, character, for most parts practically devoid of self-
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nicknamed because of his slow brain and immense reflection, but when he does look inwardly all he sees
strength; Butcher, an expert at murdering people by is “darkness”. V
skewering their heart with a sharpened bicycle spoke; The few flashbacks of memory he has act as lighting W
and Boston, who is brainy but a coward. The word bolts that penetrate this darkness, a process that Tsotsi X
“tsotsi” itself means “gangster” or “thug”, and harks finds deeply disturbing. For him it is simpler to view Y
back to a time when many South African township life as ugliness and pain, and for those unlucky enough Z
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to come across the gang, increasingly short. Violence With Tsotsi Fugard has crafted an intelligent and in- More A
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is a survival mechanism, not in terms purely of day to sightful novel. One which humanizes brutality, exposes B
day physical survival, but rather as a means of stability the corruptability of humans, and conversely presents C
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and affirmation. the possibilities for redemption, not in a biblical sense D
Life is a straight line, for Tsotsi, with no memory or but in the more down-to-earth manner in which indi- E
past, just the present, “one continuous moment carrying viduals can take an opportunity to change their life for RSS
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him forward without questions or regrets…” However, the better. While the book reflects a particularly bloody
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this changes when he finds a baby boy in a shoebox, time in South Africa’s history, it is not a gratuitous of- Facebook
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though Fugard avoids making this dynamic overly trite fering. Acts of sex and violence are not described in
or sugar-coated. He is not miraculously transformed by explicit detail, instead the writer zones in on the char- I
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the heart-tugging power of the baby and its burbling, in acters and causal factors. J
fact he is troubled by the fact he doesn’t just kill the child. Perhaps this comes in part from Fugard’s work as K
The turning point comes from the child’s vulnerabil- a playwright – he has written some 30 odd plays and L
ity, and its lack of history. This catalyses a shower of won numerous awards – an industry where special M
fragments of memory from the past which pierce the effects are sparse and context is ever present. At times N
cold, hermetically sealed darkness in which he resides, Fugard is repetitive with his use of descriptions and O
sending him into a psychological turmoil. Even though metaphors, and some of the characters are a little two- P
this turns his world upside down – as the past creeps dimensional, shoring up aspects of the storyline, rather Q
into the present, and his backstory is filled in – his so- than emanating their own complexities. Nevertheless, R
ciopathic tendencies are partially eroded. The flood of none of this detracts from novel’s narrative power or S
emotions, of sympathy and the ability to connect with emotional impact.
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other people, start to diminish his fatalistic nihilism. A The film adaptation of Tsotsi won the Best Foreign
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world of new alternatives is born in its place. Language Film at this 2006 Oscars. 
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Anna Funder: Stasiland email

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Chris Mitchell
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Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. Where Orwell was writing in reaction to the totali-
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Four, 15 years after first reading it. Orwell’s future tarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin, Stasiland provides a Facebook
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vision is an inherent part of our culture now, commodi- collection of personal stories from the police state that
tised and trivialised, denied shock value or reconsid- was seemingly modelled on Big Brother – that of Cold I
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eration due to its very familiarity. Re-reading the book War East Germany caught behind the Berlin Wall. J
and returning to Winston Smith’s world, however, is East Germany’s secret police were known as the K
to feel a distinct unease. Nineteen Eighty Four is a Stasi, and the absurd yet terrifying lengths they went to L
book that has a potent physical effect on the reader in order to meticulously survey and document the lives M
(this reader anyway) – the claustrophobia of Winston of millions of their citizens defies belief. Kafka’s worst N
Smith’s world, the subtle monstrous insanity of its rules nightmare does not even begin to match the reality of O
and regulations and the ultimate futility of resistance Stasiland. Some estimates reckon one in six people P
produce a distinct sense of horror and helplessness within East Germany was an informer. When the Berlin Q
within the reader, activating an involuntary empathy. Wall finally fell, the Stasi headquarters were stormed by R
Orwell’s prose is never better than here, and the shock angry but peaceful mobs who found millions of pages
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of recognition at the similarities between elements of shredded within each building, a last desperate attempt
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his fictional nightmare world and our own grow with to destroy the evidence of the most perfect police state
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each year. Nineteen Eighty Four is one of those truly ever created.
great books that becomes greater with age. Funder describes how there is a team of people V
I write this by way of introduction to Anna Funder’s charged with the task of meticulously reassembling all W
Stasiland because her book shares much of Orwell’s these documents so that citizens can find out what was X
concerns and indeed, provides an excellent, if equally written about them in the Stasi’s files and what became Y
traumatic, real-life counterpoint to Nineteen Eighty of loved ones, friends and relatives. It is an absurd, Z
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Sisyphean task but one that desperately needs to be chapter, Funder feeling compelled to understand more More A
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completed and of course, will never be completed. The about the mechanics of the Stasi’s repression and sur- B
truth for many people is hidden in those mountains of veillance in order to do justice to the stories she has been C
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fragments of paper. entrusted with. This extends to interviewing ex-Stasi D
In her approach to writing Stasiland, Funder also men about their previous jobs, which provides a critical E
pieces together a portrait of life in the East German state counterpoint as Funder recounts East Germany’s brief RSS
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from the personal stories of those who tried to escape it history. The sense of Funder’s own widening interest
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by crossing the Wall, those who fell victim to the secret and accumulation of knowledge carries the narrative Facebook
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police and those whose relatives never returned from forward effortlessly, whilst her prose is almost stark in
the Stasi’s interrogation cells. These are not isolated its simplicity, as if to ensure that she does not interfere I
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anecdotes, Cold War stories, but recollections of how with the recounting of the stories she has been told. J
the Stasi years have impacted on individuals’ lives There is no luridness, melodrama or sentimentality K
through to the present day. In each of those recollec- here, and the compound effect of reading Stasiland is L
tions, the fragility of humans is made bleakly apparent; the same as Nineteen Eighty Four – one of rage and M
the ease with which the Stasi could destroy lives not helplessness, that people’s lives should be so casually N
just through physical torture but by much more intan- ruined for nothing. O
gible mindgames. The state quite literally brutalised For all the bleakness of its subject matter, Stasiland P
its citizens with its relentless untruths, its reshaping of is not a difficult or miserable read, thanks to the quiet Q
reality through rhetoric and hermetically sealing East bravery of the people whose stories this book docu- R
Germany off from the rest of the world; the psychologi- ments. Powered by Funder’s precise prose, Stasiland S
cal and psychiatric fallout of that brutalisation is still is an essential insight into the totalitarian regime and,
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felt today, just as the eventual US exit from Iraq will be whether intended or not, is also a warning about the
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felt for years to come. manipulation of truth, the erosion of civil liberties and
The scope of the book widens with each passing the consequences of perpetual surveillance.  V
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Alex Garland: Half Man Half Biscuit: F
Backpacker Blues 233 Achtung Bono 258 G
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William Gibson: Half Man Half Biscuit: I
Waiting For The Man 237 Trouble Over Bridgewater 262 Twitter
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Allen Ginsberg: Keith Haring:
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Cosmopolitan Greetings 242 Artist Or Radiant Baby? 263
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The Godfather: Bill Hicks: N
Sex And Spaghetti 244 Bad Mood Rising 266 O
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Graham Greene / Evelyn Waugh: Tom Hodgkinson: Q
Literary And Political Catholicism 249 How To Be Idle 271 R
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Peter Guralnick: Careless Love: Gert Hofmann:
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The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley 256 Parable Of The Blind 273
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Nick Hornby: V
Gender Trouble 276 W
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Michel Houllebecq: Y
Atomised 279 Z
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Interview [published May 1999] B
Alex Garland: Backpacker Blues email

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Nancy Rawlinson finds out why The Beach author Alex Garland
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is still unsure of his writing success RSS
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No matter where you go on this small planet of ours, you arrives on Thailand’s famous Khao San Road – the first
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will encounter ‘Garland’s Law.’ That is, for every 10 stop on the well-trodden backpacker’s trail. On his first Facebook
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people under the age of 30 that you meet, approximately night, the man in the room next to him slits his wrists
3.33 per cent of them will have read or be reading Alex and leaves Richard with a map to a mysterious beach. I
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Garland’s first novel, The Beach. Actually, I just made Along with a French couple, Richard sets out to find J
that up, and it already seems too conservative. I have this supposed paradise, where a select community are K
recently been staying in two hostels in the States. In the trying to create their own version of utopia. When they L
first dorm room a Danish girl ripped through the book finally arrive, having survived a harrowing swim and M
in about three days; her friend had just finished it. In some AK-47 toting marijuana farmers, the new visitors N
the second, an Oxford University student was a quarter are welcomed rather uneasily. Tensions arise, not least O
way through, and her travelling companion planned to within Richard’s psyche. You can guess the rest – the P
read it next. On buses in India, on the subway in New book has been described as What I Did On My Holidays Q
York, in international departure lounges everywhere, meets Apocalypse Now meets Lord Of The Flies and R
the distinctive yellow spine of The Beach is truly ubiq- those references are more than just a pat summery. The
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uitous. In case this is still not sounding familiar, a film Beach is essentially a gripping tale of a journey into
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adaptation of the book is currently in postproduction the heart of darkness, but one that is nicely wrapped
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and due to hit our screens in spring 2000. It is directed up in knowing pop cultural references and located in
by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame and it stars a somewhat trendy travel destination. It is not hard to V
Leonardo Di Caprio. Honestly, could it be any hotter? see why it was so swiftly optioned for a Hollywood W
In case you are one of the, oooh, seven people left blockbuster. X
in Britain who are not familiar with the plot, here is a So, you may be thinking, what of the author of this Y
brief summary for you. Richard, a 20-something Brit, mega hit novel? And why, thus far into an interview Z
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write up, have I not mentioned his best selling follow keeping with the ultra-modernism of the book, Garland More A
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up, The Tesseract? Why indeed. More of that later himself has a very low-key approach to his what he B
– for now, meet Alex Garland. Some biographical does. “Writing certainly wasn’t something I thought I C
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details: He was born in 1970, son of the well-known wanted to do as a kid. It was something I chanced upon. D
and respected political cartoonist, Nick Garland. With And, in a way, I don’t think you could say I chose it as E
a resolutely middle-class and intellectual background, my profession. I gave it a try and it worked out, and RSS
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he graduated from Manchester University with a de- I enjoy it and that’s it.” He is similarly down to earth
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gree in History of Art, and was planning on following about his situation. Despite being one of the most in- Facebook
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in a his fathers footsteps before he realized: “There demand authors this side of Nick Hornby, he harbours
aren’t many openings for a cartoonist.” Instead, he no illusions. I
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turned his attention to fiction, and started writing The “There is a business side to writing and if you don’t J
Beach when he was just 23, drawing on his many sell books then publishers won’t print them. You’re K
experiences of travelling (he first went to India when only as hot as your last novel. I think you can reach a L
he was 17, on a school trip, and he now makes several point when you’re not as good as your last novel, you M
visits to South East Asia per year). may have written one or even two bad books in a row, N
The Beach was brought out in 1996, with no big pro- and the publishers will hang onto you. But you need O
motional push from the publishers, yet within a year, it to have proved yourself in a long term way before that P
was a best seller. Rave reviews everywhere from The and I certainly haven’t done that yet. I still feel like I’m Q
Mail On Sunday to Maxim magazine certainly did no doing an incredible bluffing trick and I’m going to get R
harm, but predominantly it was word of mouth that caught out.” S
made The Beach a success. Only three years after he There are those that would agree with this self-effacing
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first put pen to paper, Garland was being heralded as appraisal. Reaction to Garland’s second book The Tesser-
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the new voice of ‘Generation X’ and making Vogue’s act has been mixed. There were some scathing reviews.
most eligible bachelors list. At such a young age, and “A pointlessly elaborate portrait of disparate lives com- V
on the back of a debut novel, this was a rather heavy ing together” was one description. “Tedious, convoluted, W
weight to bear. pompous” was another. Yet others have heaped praise X
Bearing this in mind, his media shy and somewhat on the book (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times Y
guarded manner are understandable. Fortunately, in said it felt like “a Quentin Tarantino or John Woo movie Z

seasoned with some Graham Greene.”) Garland says. “I think if you asked the average literary More A
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It is certainly a more mature and reflexive study than editor whether they thought my work was equitable B
the fast and furious The Beach although personally I with Salman Rushdie’s, they would say no. Well, that’s C
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find myself in with one foot in both camps; I was not not something that bothers me very much and I doubt D
totally convinced by the characters in The Tesseract. very much that it bothers Salman Rushdie.” Garland’s E
The use of film references and American slang works approach to the actual nuts and bolts of writing is simi- RSS
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perfectly in The Beach, when all the central characters larly nontraditional.
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are European, but somehow I can’t quite imagine the “For The Tesseract, I didn’t do any research,” he Facebook
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rural and local characters in The Tesseract coming out confesses. “I’ve spent more time in The Philippines
with lines like: “You’ll be brained by a coconut.” than anywhere else so there was a certain kind of back- I
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Set in the Philippines, the story interweaves three ground detail that I didn’t really have to research. But J
narratives. Sean, an Englishman, is on the run from in terms of putting yourself into the heads of different K
two Filipino mafia henchmen. As they pursue him, he characters, I’m not really fazed by this culture thing. L
stumbles into the kitchen of Rosa, a Filipino village girl As long as people have enough money to live and M
now living with her husband and children in Manila. they are not starving to death, then basically people’s N
Cente, a 13-year-old street child, witnesses the encoun- preoccupations tend to be the same wherever you go. O
ter. “Basically what you have in the book is a group They are worried about their jobs; they are worried P
of people who can’t make sense of everything that’s about whether their wife or husband is happy, or how Q
around them. And I think I use that as an anti-religious their kids are doing. I think I approached The Tesseract R
argument,” Garland explains. “It’s sort of theistic. It’s thinking the culture is quite cosmetic.” S
not even fate. The point is, sometimes things just hap- This may seem like a strange attitude for a man who
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pen to people and it’s not for any cosmic or religious has made so much out of basing his work in exotic loca-
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reasons. Sometimes things just happen that way.” tions, yet there is a sense that Garland uses South East
As the above quote indicates, Garland has a knack Asia as only as a backdrop. What he is really interested V
for seeing and expressing things in a very understand- in is the human story, the development and exploration W
able was, and this is no doubt part of his appeal to a of different mental states. The way in which human be- X
generation turned off by so called ‘classic’ yet im- ings make sense of the world. Y
penetrable authors. “I know exactly what you mean,” Having said this, there is no doubt that at least part of Z

the reason for his success lies his depiction of Europeans real thing that stops you is cash.” More A
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abroad, which coincided perfectly with the explosion Considering his position, lack of money should be no B
in the backpacking market. Locations like Thailand impediment to future trips. But for now, Alex Garland is C
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and The Philippines are now accessible and extremely keeping his feet firmly on the ground. “My philosophy D
desirable places to visit. Garland sums up this shift in of life is just enjoying it, I think. I’ve started work on E
global tourism when he recollects his first travelling another book but at the moment I’m mostly working on RSS
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experience. “My memory is basically that I had a good a screenplay with a bunch of mates; we’re just trying to
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time, and the main thing that I learnt was how easy it see if we can get it together. It’s half set in Chile and Facebook
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is. If you get the money together and a ticket, you can half in Russia and based around a story which links the
pretty much go anywhere you want to go. I suppose I two countries.” Now, who do you think will be playing I
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imagine that there was some sort of invisible barrier the central role? You know it will happen. It’s just a J
that stops you from going to these places, but the only matter of time.  K
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Interview [published August 1999] B
William Gibson: Waiting For The Man email

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Antony Johnston has a meeting of minds with the elusive William Gibson
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about his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties RSS
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William Gibson needs no introduction. But he’s going But despite being trapped in a Leonard Nimoy-style
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to get one anyway. cage of Neuromancer’s success, Gibson continues to Facebook
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Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ visualising a innovate himself both in style and concept. He does not
worldwide communications net 11 years before the rest on his laurels, and looks set to burst forth into the I
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World Wide Web was born. His debut novel Neuro- popular mindset for a second time. J
mancer won all three major science fiction awards – the His latest novel, All Tomorrow’s Parties, is released K
Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick – upon its release. He next month. He is continuing his work in television af- L
is the first name that comes to mind when the term ‘Cy- ter the success of his X-Files episode ‘Killswitch’. And M
berpunk’ is mentioned, known and revered the world the highly-anticipated, oft-speculated film adaptation N
over by authors, artists, rock bands and more. of Neuromancer is finally entering production. He even O
Yet Gibson the man remains startlingly elusive. A finally has an email address! What brought that on? P
professional novelist for 15 years, he has published only “I’ve just been avoiding it,” says Gibson. “Having Q
seven novels (one of which was co-written) and most kids did it for me, I suppose. I couldn’t very well deny R
of his reputation remains, somewhat unfairly, rooted in it to them, so eventually we had three or four different
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Neuromancer. He lives a quiet life with his wife and addresses in the house. It was difficult to avoid it, then.”
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children in Canada. In a staggering display of irony, So can we assume William Gibson is ‘back for
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for many years Gibson refused to even have an internet good’? Like its two predecessors (Virtual Light and
connection, saying the last thing he wanted after a day Idoru) All Tomorrow’s Parties has taken nearly three V
staring at his word processor was to carry on using the years to appear. Gibson admits he’s been somewhat W
computer. Even now, at the height of his success and in slow: “In terms of the speed which I’d always as- X
his mid-40s, he continues to quietly support innovative, sumed genre SF writers worked at, I felt I was hardly Y
street-level art. producing at all. I took a break. Hiatus, as they say in Z
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TV. But now I’m back.” finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside More A
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And with an increased workload, most significantly this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing B
the Neuromancer film. After countless rumours, direc- Aphex Twin’s head. We talked. And we’re still talking.” C
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tor Chris Cunningham has finally been announced to Unfortunately, that’s all he’ll say: “I’ve learned D
helm the feature. Cunningham is a 20-something prod- that discussing these projects doesn’t really help E
igy, best known for his dark, off-beat music videos for them to happen.” RSS
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Bjork, Aphex Twin and Madonna. He’s also a student So let’s talk about technology. Despite the impact
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of the late Stanley Kubrick … but he’s never directed a his work has had on real-world science, most of Facebook
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Hollywood feature. So how on earth did he get this job? Gibson’s fiction is clearly about people and humanity
“He was brought to my attention by someone else. rather than technology itself. Why does he write sci- I
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We were told, third-hand, that he was extremely chary ence fiction at all? J
of the Hollywood process, and wouldn’t return calls. “Because I believe that most social change is now K
But someone else told us that Neuromancer had been technologically-driven, and that new technologies L
his Wind In The Willows, that he’d read it when he was are very seldom – almost never, really – legislated M
12. I went to London and we met.” into existence.” N
After the debacle that was Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson Interesting, because Gibson has also admitted many O
is understandably coy about the whole process. Johnny times that he simply “makes the technology up”. That P
Mnemonic was also directed by a Hollywood novice, was certainly the case with Neuromancer, where the Q
avant-garde artist Robert Longo. Gibson once told me worldwide virtual network was actually inspired by R
that the film they made was “More like Blue Velvet.” watching children become absorbed in arcade games. S
Clearly not the same film that ended up on the silver Does he still do that?
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screen, then. What makes him so sure this one will turn “I do make it up, to a certain extent. But it isn’t the
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out right? toys themselves, the specific tech bits, that I’m genu-
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice,” inely concerned with – rather the way in which new V
he says firmly. “My only choice. The only person technologies impact the social animal in ways that the W
I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of developers of these technologies never thought of.” X
doing it right. Is the Gibson household swamped with subscriptions Y
“I went back to see him in London just after he’d to New Scientist and Astrophysics Today, then? Z

“I don’t do ‘research’, I just walk around. This stuff’s “Granddaddy of dystopian fiction”. Yet nearly all of his More A
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in everyone’s face today. It’s more a matter of not ig- work has an underlying optimism, even what might be B
noring it. Paying attention. called happy endings. C
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“Laney’s node-spotter function [from Idoru] is some “I really don’t think I’m dystopian at all. No more D
sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do. than I’m utopian. The dichotomy is hopelessly old- E
There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, fashioned, really. What we have today is a combination RSS
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if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell of the two, with all the knobs turned up to max.”
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you how; it’s a non-rational process.” So it doesn’t bother him? Facebook
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On a similar note, how does Gibson keep his famous “No.”
‘edge’? He’s no spring chicken. Yet his characters, What does he read himself? Does he follow the rise I
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especially the younger ones, are remarkably consistent of ‘upstarts’ such as Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson? J
with current trends. How does he keep in touch with “I read Iain Sinclair and Cormac McCarthy. But,” he K
the ‘street’? smiles, “I’m always on the lookout for a good upstart.” L
“It’s the same non-rational process, really, but applied Let’s move onto All Tomorrow’s Parties. Did Gibson M
to culture. I think Brian Eno’s right in defining culture always visualise Virtual Light as the beginning of a N
as everything we do that we don’t absolutely need to series? O
do. I just walk around. I look at what people are doing “No. I always back into the trilogy thing. It’s embar- P
– particularly if they’re doing it passionately – that they rassing, really. I swear I thought VL was going to be a Q
don’t really need to do.” one-off. It’s an organic process for me, rather than one R
An image of Gibson wandering around South Central of deliberation. The one text grows out of the other. It’s S
at two in the morning clutching a notebook springs to as though the previous book becomes compost for the
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mind, but I decide not to voice it. next one.” Lovely image, cheers.
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“I’ve always been fascinated by expressions of indi- “I don’t work to any rationale; it’s a seat-of-the-pants
vidual style, particularly in the street sense. I suspect thing. And the extent to which I can feel that it’s not V
that that’s one of the oddest things about me, at least rational, is exactly the extent to which I’m convinced W
in terms of someone being marketed as some sort of that I’m really doing my job.” X
science fiction writer.” In ATP, the Idoru finally becomes a physical entity. Y
But which sort, exactly? Gibson is known as the There’s surely a lot more he could do with that – will he? Z

“No. The world she’ll live in is on the other side of our national print tabs are already way beyond that. More A
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a technological singularity. There’s no way I can even Difficult, if not impossible, to parody.” B
imagine it.” But parodied they are, and ATP’s conclusion con- C
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No seat-of-the-pants fourth book, then. ATP is still a cerning information flow is a dichotomy; on the one D
satisfying conclusion, but it could have gone anywhere. hand, increased informational awareness will change E
Many people were expecting a work on the Walled everything, and on the other it will change nothing (for RSS
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City from Idoru, for example, yet Gibson bypassed it the majority of ‘ordinary’ people). Is this purposeful?
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to get straight to ATP, and the end of the world centred “The resolution of a dichotomy usually lies in appar- Facebook
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around – yet again – San Francisco. ent paradox. But you’ve got your thumb on the book’s
“The bridge was still more resonant, for me. More heart, I think, and I can’t really explicate that for you. I
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fun writing about a physical construct, somehow. And Otherwise we’d be talking about a didactic fiction, and J
ATP seems to me to be about cyberspace everting itself I hope ATP isn’t that.” K
into the physical; about the boundaries starting to blur Okay, time to stir up the nest. ATP essentially carries L
from the other direction … Some of the most impor- the same message as Mona Lisa Overdrive – that pure M
tant boundaries, to me, being about genre: is this SF, a information (and artificial intelligence) will point the N
thriller, none of the above? way to society and mankind’s next evolutionary step. O
“The San Francisco thing probably has something Discuss. P
to do with it being on the West Coast but having the “We seem to be – through genetics, now, mainly Q
core paradigm of a European city. It makes sense in – on the brink of taking ‘control’ of our own evolu- R
European terms; Los Angeles, for example, doesn’t. tion. That’s a matter of ‘pure information’, I suppose. S
SF is a city stressed by Postmodernity, rather than an Though I seem to recall characters in an earlier book
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expression of Postmodernity such as LA.” who used the term ‘pure information’ rather than ‘lies’.
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Yet Postmodernism is essential to Gibson’s work. “But really I don’t see that as message so much as
Throughout this series, for example, the media has mimetic. A depiction of what’s happening now.” V
been portrayed as ever more sensationalist. How close Perhaps inevitable, then, that the meme replicates W
does he think we are to shows such as Slitscan actually from book to book. So let’s get more specific. Harwood, X
coming into being? corporate ruler of the world and primary antagonist Y
“In North America we’re well into tabloid TV, but of ATP, declares that he wants to somehow survive Z

beyond the singularity of the book’s climax. Is he an hell did he come from? More A
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analogy for man’s fear of the future? “I thought of him as literally being someone who B
“Harwood is about human will, so, yes, I suppose he’s wandered in from another book. He turned up one day. C
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about fear. ‘You’re so spontaneous; don’t ever change.’ Wouldn’t go away. After the book was finished I won- D
All suffering is rooted in the desire for permanence.” dered if he weren’t some sort of avatar connected to the E
Gibson smiles. “I heard someone say that in an Indian late William Burroughs. An unconscious expression of RSS
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movie.” Burroughsness. He’s a character Burroughs would’ve
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So is there a moral behind Harwood’s downfall being enjoyed, I’m pretty certain of that.” Facebook
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brought about by three principal characters who don’t Sounds like something straight out of Mulder’s case-
manipulate information the way he does? book. And speaking of which, Gibson’s future plans are I
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“Well, there’s a satisfaction to it, for me. Morals are good news for couch potatoes… J
for fables.” “I’m working on a second X-Files episode with Tom K
We’re running out of time, but I have to ask: just Maddox; talking about doing some writing for Harsh L
who the hell is ATP’s ‘Tao man’? He’s an entirely new Realm, the new Chris Carter series; and getting another M
character, with no name, no background beyond a few book proposal ready. Plus there’s Neuromancer.” N
vague flashbacks, and is completely amoral. Where the Welcome back, Your Highness.  O
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Allen Ginsberg: Cosmopolitan Greetings email

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Graham Duff meets Allen Ginsberg, the self styled “old auntie of the
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Beat Generation” RSS
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Allen Ginsberg – poet, Jew, Buddhist and self styled has Prospero say ‘Thence to Genoa where every third
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“old auntie of the Beat Generation” – is 68 years of thought shall be my grave’. So every 244th thought: Facebook
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age. Forty years on from the publication of Ginsberg’s ‘Oh I’m Allen Ginsberg and I have a history.’ The
infamous ‘Howl’, his latest collection, Cosmopolitan rest of the time [it’s] ‘there’s the tea, I got to go to the I
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Greetings: Writings from 1986-92, has just hit the bathroom, how’s my diabetes? What’s this guy saying J
bookshelves. Sipping tea and talking about his greatest to me?’ So yes, there is the information of being around K
influences William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Car- for 40 years writing poetry and knowing a lot of people L
los Williams and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg is friendly, but then every moment is completely blank and new.” M
assured and (naturally enough) beatific. But perhaps Despite an enormous body of work which bristles N
surprisingly, he’s almost as at ease talking about Sonic with positivity, passion and affirmation, Ginsberg O
Youth and Gavin Friday as he is fellow beats William admits, “I got the reputation of being this negative P
Burroughs and Gary Snyder. nay-saying rebel. I don’t know why. But maybe the Q
With lyrical incantations, dream notations. calypso purpose is starting to come through now after all R
rhythms and haiku, Cosmopolitan Greetings shows a these years. People are beginning to read without the
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writer moving in ever increasing circles, the subject intervention of the media saying ‘these angry, wrath-
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matter ranging from the intensely personal to the pas- ful, idiot people smoking dope in dirty flats covered
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sionately political. I ask if it’s difficult writing under in flies’. That was the official party line of the media
the weight of his past work. back in the early 60s.” V
“My mind is much too fragmented for the solidifi- At this point Ginsberg goes off to take a phone call W
cation of any single thought like that. Consciousness which turns out to be from Salman Rushdie. “I saw him X
itself is discontinuous I think. As a Buddhist, that’s when he came to New York. We did some meditation Y
my take on it. Shakespeare at the end of The Tempest classes together – ’cause he’s got lots of time.” Z
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Ginsberg details the ageing process with undiluted midnight and six am. This being to protect school kids B
candour whilst in his more directly political poems he who are reading my poems in class anyway.” C
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is still on a mission to report the unreported. A vivid conversationalist, the elder statesman of the D
“I’ve always been preoccupied with the intersec- counter culture is at his most animated when recalling E
tion of repressive dope laws, dope dealing by French the routines he used to improvise in his apartment with RSS
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intelligence and American CIA, the expansion of killer Burroughs and Kerouac in the 1950s.
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drugs like tobacco and alcohol and political manipula- “After dinner, drinking coffee, smoking grass, we’d Facebook
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tion by cigarette and alcohol interests, the corruption act this stuff out. We all had different characteristic
of governments, police departments and so on. We are roles: the well groomed Hungarian – that was me. The I
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ruled by fantastic hypocrisy. naive American in Paris with a straw hat – Kerouac. J
“In America the theo-political right – the FCC and Bill dressed up as a shifty vicious governess. Bill would K
Jesse Helms – has seized control of the main market end up creased up laughing on the floor. I think the key L
place of ideas: radio and television. So we don’t have to the Beat Generation was spiritual liberation. Then M
a free market in ideas now. So the censorship that media liberation of the word; the battle with censor- N
normally applied to books and print and film is now ship, sexual liberation. It ricochets out, but it started O
being applied to the electronic media and may be ap- with a spiritual liberation. I always thought that ‘Howl’ P
plied to internet before it’s all over. My own poetry was a very exuberant and positive and funny poem. But Q
has literally been ripped off the air during the day. My at the time it was taken to be the ravings of this angry, R
poems are studied in high schools and colleges, but in rebellious jerk.” These days things are a little different.
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October 1988, Senator Helms – who is subsidised by “I’ve got a really good job. It’s called Distinguished
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huge tobacco interests – rushed through a law signed Professor of English, which means I only have to go in
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by Reagan which effectively means that ‘obscene one day a week.” 
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The Godfather: Sex And Spaghetti email

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Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man,
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from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever RSS
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With The Godfather recently re-released in a new but the core characteristics remain the same. Italian-
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print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our Americans, according to screen law, are sexy, violent Facebook
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screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths, men struggling against the powers that be to protect
screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia their family honour. Their stories are full of the rituals I
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families – all with excessive amounts of blood, plum of heterosexuality performed with glamour and passion J
tomatoes, swagger, sharp suits and great style. I love (weddings, family feasts, straight sex). Their muscles K
them all – I cry at Michael’s wedding, smile wryly flex to grapple with, and glory in, organised crime, the L
at the Don’s death, wince at Connie’s bleating and Catholic church and l’ordine della famiglia: a highly M
thrill at Sonny’s explosions of sex and violence. But controlled and controlling hierarchical patriarchal fam- N
I also hate all that macho posturing, those strangling ily system. O
patriarchal systems, the supplication of wives, moth- After Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was P
ers, daughters to men’s ‘business’. released in 1972, the screen image of Italian-American Q
I want to pay these godfathers due respect, but I masculinity which it established became so popular R
also want to look beyond their dapper costuming and that it entered the realms of social iconography, swiftly
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ask why these representations are so cherished in our reinforced by the likes of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi
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culture. In doing so, I want to suggest that the most Driver and John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever. Don
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interesting thing about Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Corleone’s “I make you an offer you can’t refuse”,
Marlon Brando and their Latin brothers is the way Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me?”, car bumper stick- V
in which their Italian-ness is defined through their ers reading “Mafia Staff Car; Keepa Ya Hands Off” and W
sexuality. The phenomenon of ‘Italian-American’ as endless parodies of John Travolta/Tony Manero doing X
a sensibility and a particular set of narrative conven- that dance in that white suit – gestures which we think Y
tions has shifted over the years since The Godfather, of as Italian-American have become part of our culture. Z
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Italian-American men have stepped out of the screen become somebodies – as in The Godfather, Rocky, and, More A
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and into everyday life and language. rather differently, in Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon B
What it means in screen terms to be an Italian- and Saturday Night Fever. In addition, Italian culture C
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American man can tell us much about what it means had the added attraction of l’ordine della famiglia to D
to be a white man. It is crucial that white male hetero- help (re)glorify patriarchy and put women back in their E
sexuality is made visible, is put under the critical mi- place: in the home, supporting their men from beneath. RSS
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croscope, in this way because it has always maintained However, since the Italian American man’s ‘realness’
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its dominance by virtue of its invisibility. As Richard is so often represented as physicality – we know he’s Facebook
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Dyer has argued in his essay ‘White’: whiteness, like authentic because we can see his sweating body – the re-
heterosexuality, secures power by appearing not to be ality of his heterosexuality is considerably destabilised. I
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anything in particular. It is simply there, transparent, The power and danger of the ‘Italian’ body on screen J
the given and ‘natural’ way to be. ‘Italian-American’ are heavily eroticised qualities. Male WASP heroes of K
is one typification which whiteness has constructed of the 70s, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, are L
itself – a group of stereotypes which provide us with invisible bodies who display little emotion, epitomis- M
a starting point for understanding how whiteness sets ing rigid stoicism and phallic control. In Dirty Harry N
itself up in a dominant position. (1971), Eastwood is always poker faced, never ruffled O
In the 1970s, white American culture seemed to be or sweating very much, his power coolly contained P
in crisis. The Watergate fiasco, the war in Vietnam, the within his .44 Magnum pistol. The Italian man is often Q
rise of black, gay and women’s liberation movements opposed to such straightness, flexing his muscles, get- R
all meant that the hallowed American way lost its directing all hot blooded and passionate, demonstrating his S
tion. Hollywood’s reaction was to look to ethnicity as a body as the signifier of his masculinity and ethnicity.
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means of reinstating the white heterosexual males’ cen- The display of the male body as erotic object is a
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tral position of power, returning him to his role as the troublesome area: how do we make these bodies,
Real Thing. We can admire and trust Don Corleone’s which are supposed to be active, hard, non-malleable, V
power because it does not appear to be compatible with into ‘passive’ objects of the cinema audience’s gaze – a W
WASP power. Italians were a way of getting back to role traditionally reserved for the female body? One X
basics through the depiction of a truly ‘American’ ethic way to do it is through sporting images – the excuse Y
of the struggle for survival in a land where nobodies can for looking at a man’s body being the admiration of Z

his strength in a culturally accepted ‘male’ activity. Americanised enough to remain a hero. More A
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It is often more effectively done through homoerotic Coppola has it both ways, then: whilst the Don is B
traditions of representation, since these are the most successful and all powerful, he is also aging and falling C
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obvious ones available for such purposes. Unlike from his position, lending him a tragic poignancy and D
women, gay men have had the economic strength to creating a nostalgia for the perfect Italian-American man E
market the male physique, from the Athletic Model’s he once was. He is even associated with an ‘American’ RSS
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Guild studio shots of the 1950s to the huge gay porn innocence and abundance: he dies amongst the tomato
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industry of today. In the screen representation of the plants, stumbling into the verdure whilst pretending to Facebook
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Italian-American man there is a tension between the be a monster to amuse his grandson. It is as if the Don
use of such homoeroticism (the spectator is invited to was only performing monstrousness all along so that he I
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love these men) and the denial of homosexuality (the could keep order in his pastoral family garden, so that J
Italian is a virile, heterosexual family man). he could reap the harvest of America. K
“I make you an offer you can’t refuse” The Godfather establishes a range of masculinities L
The Godfather provides the models for Italian- which line up to take their shot at filling the Don’s M
American screen masculinity throughout the 70s. shoes. Sonny Corleone, as played by James Caan, is N
Within its family epic structure, The Godfather’s main the sweating, sexy beefcake Latin of the film, swagger- O
concern is with how to be a man, and Coppola’s men ing about and exploding in sporadic bursts of violence. P
rely heavily on nostalgia. The Don (Marlon Brando) Coppola gives us many glimpses of Sonny’s/Caan’s Q
is guardian and his business is family. The Donis/ body, usually clad in a tight white vest, showing off R
Brando’s image is constructed in opposition to Salazzo his muscled shoulders and his chest hair, which seems S
the Turk’s, his ‘business’ rival, a man who looks like to be as uncontrollable as his libido. The white vest
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the devil incarnate with his oily, flappy face and his is an essential item of the screen Italian-American
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swanky fur-collared coat. The Don, however, is clean man’s wardrobe. Borrowed from Brando’s sexy ethnic
cut; he benignly rejects Salazzo’s offer of a place in the proletarian in A Streetcar Named Desire, whose ‘true’ V
drugs racket as a “dirty business”, choosing instead to feeling gushed forth from every orifice, it allows just W
talk about his “sentimental weakness” for his children. enough of the upper body to be exhibited whilst still X
Salazzo has no family, no “honour” to cleanse him. insisting upon a thoroughly masculine way of dressing Y
The Don is Italian through and through, but he is also for utility purposes only, suggestive as it is of the work- Z

ing man. Sonny actually does no work in his vest, but from the too self-conscious passivity of another Ital- More A
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anxieties about the presentation of his body as an object ian ‘godson’ swaggerer of the film, Johnny Fontaine. B
of desire (for both male and female, gay and straight Like Sonny, Johnny is a ladies man, but his blatant C
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audiences) are dealt with through the heterosexualis- narcissism places him perilously close to a cliché of D
ing, ‘masculine’ violence of Sonny’s body. queerness. Fontaine is an oily wop crooner, complete E
Sonny is the wild card philanderer, always mouth- with greased hair, white suit and frilled blouse; he is RSS
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ing off, complete with ‘Italian’ theatrical gestures. He a sop who has to be ordered by the Don to “act like
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is placed in opposition to Michael’s/Pacino’s strong a man”. It is interesting that, by the time of Saturday Facebook
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silence. Sonny contains too much libido and ethnic Night Fever, these opposed representations of Italian-
crudeness to take the Don’s place; Michael broods American masculinity can become enmeshed (and I
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smoulderingly, Sonny just explodes. However, whilst can remain heroic) in the figure of Tony Manero/John J
Coppola appears to reject Sonny’s passionate Italian- Travolta, who can wear a frilly blouse and still “act K
American machismo in narrative terms (he is killed like a man”. L
off in the most explosive manner), he actually fills the And so the burden of The Godfather’s position falls M
screen with images of Sonny’s exuberance and impres- on Michael’s shoulders. Although Michael’s macho N
sive physicality. Godfather act is revealed as a sham which eats away O
In fact, the eroticism involved in the film’s presenta- his insides, this is less a matter of Coppola subvert- P
tion of Sonny is negotiated through his screen climax: ing gender roles by illustrating that they are a matter Q
his death on the highway. Always the swaggering of social construction, than it is of him lamenting the R
sex object, Sonny’s bodily excesses are ultimately passing of a time when such macho masculinities really S
displayed and punished by being blown to bits. This existed. We may dislike Michael as Godfather because
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way, Coppola can save the virile ethnic masculinity he he is not the benign and noble Brando, and because he
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represents without actually endorsing it. Sonny is mar- is not what the film shows he could have been in an
tyred by this gruesome death on a lonely highway; his earlier time and place – in Sicilian ‘history’, within an V
masculinity has to be torn apart in order to be re-made ethnic narrative. The Godfather locates its ideal mascu- W
in our imaginations, so that we can mourn the Don’s/ linities in Sicily, in a fantasy narrative of nostalgia for X
Brando’s/our loss. the phallic wholeness of the homeland. Enter Pacino as Y
His violent death also saves Sonny-as-sex-object Sicilian shepherd, walking back to his father’s home/ Z

name (Corleone), accompanied by a version of the Day Afternoon, in whom those exaggerated ‘Italian’ More A
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sweeping theme tune arranged for mandolin. This is a gestures become slightly campy; Nicholas Cage in B
rural idyll where boy and girl can meet and fall in love Moonstruck, giving a brilliantly over-the-top portrayal C
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without complications – all the conventional narratives of a sweaty/swarthy/sensitive Italian beefcake; and, my D
of heterosexual romance are employed without a hint personal favourite, John Travolta in Saturday Night E
of irony. Fever, whose excessive emotions are triggered not in RSS
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Coppola’s nostalgic glance at Italian-American response to his family honour but by the state of his
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masculinities makes it difficult to read any critique of hair: as his family squabbles over spaghetti, Tony wor- Facebook
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conventional masculinities in the film. The main reason ries about his coiffure (“will you just watch the hair?
we love godfathers Brando and Pacino is that they are You know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it. I
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such perfect examples of gentlemanly tyranny: they are He hits my hair”). J
so powerful and yet so self-contained. However, the Tony preens himself openly, posing in the mirror K
image of the eroticised male object is a prevalent one in whilst wriggling to the Bee Gees. Like the men in The L
The Godfather and other Italian-American screen nar- Godfather, he prepares his body for action, but he does M
ratives, and this image is potentially a disturbing one to so for dancing, not for fighting. His only possible phal- N
conventional gender relations. lic weapon is his professional-looking long-nozzled O
Throughout the 1970s, the Italian-American screen hairdrier, and his ‘killing’ arena is the 2001 Odyssey P
male was increasingly represented as body, as an ob- discotheque, where he slays them with his grooving. Q
ject of desire for all audiences. The Godfather always In a sense, The Godfather paved the way through R
encourages us to love its men but insists that they the crowded night club for Tony; after the heights of S
remain solid men of action, their screen existence lived Italian-American macho it reached, the only way to
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out with plenty of grand gestures. The thing about The go was down the disco, the only thing to do with the
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Godfather is that it takes itself very seriously indeed; display of those hard bodies was to choreograph their
the key to its seduction lies in its epic feel, its supreme movements to music. Saturday Night Fever brought V
orderliness, its world in which everyone has their place. the nostalgic Corleone masculinities into the future W
I’m seduced by this world, too, but I’m glad that other of the 2001 Odyssey where Italian-American-ness X
Italian-American screen men strutted their stuff and finally had a chance to strut without leaving a trail of Y
shook up its order: Pacino as bisexual Sonny in Dog bodies in its wake.  Z

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Feature [published May 2008] B
Graham Greene/Evelyn Waugh: Literary & Political Catholicism email

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Ben Granger
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Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholi- underdog, siding with the rebellious and the forgotten,
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cism in his writing, George Orwell could always be his narrative home the sleazy underbelly of life. Not Facebook
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relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With so Waugh. His territory was the landed estates of the
the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in southern counties and their intersection with the cold I
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his mind, he was hardly without justification. Polemi- elites of London high society. While his misanthropic J
cal righteousness brimming over, he rashly wrote in satire found endless and endlessly amusing reasons for K
the 30s that the English novel was “practically a Prot- his narrative contempt towards the dramatis personae L
estant art form”, and that Catholic practitioners were of lower gentry and upper bourgeois who populated his M
thin on the ground both numerically and qualitatively. books, there was no denying that, at heart, he identified N
Practically as he put pen to paper however, two of the with them. Indeed, his lampooning of the upper and O
greatest English authors of the mid-century – Henry upper middle classes hinged largely round the fact that P
Graham Greene and Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh – they failed to live up to his reactionary ideal. Moving Q
were surfacing to take the literary world by ferocious outside this caste, his attitude shifts from mere con- R
storm. And it’s fair to say the pair weren’t exactly short tempt to outright hatred.
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on Catholic sensitivities. A bad call from Mr Orwell on While both transcended both, Greene’s style skirted
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this one at least. round the genre of the thriller, Waugh around that of
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In many respects the authors could scarcely be the comedic farce. Greene’s narratives are littered with
more different. Greene’s milieu was the forgotten gangland intrigue, colonial corruption, the grimy and V
corners and back alleys of life. The jittery street gang, sweaty fear of pursuit. Action, in the purest sense, is W
the persecuted runaway, the jaded official in a fading central, as is plot. The characters are conveyed via a X
Imperial outpost. Boozy landladies, failed accountants. direct mental inner voice toward the reader, their dia- Y
Greene’s every fibre was tuned with sympathy for the logue, and interaction with each other being secondary Z
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to this. Again, the contrast with Waugh could hardly 30s the rifts were still raw. It wasn’t too long before More A
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be greater. His narratives are comedies of manners, then that suspicion toward Catholics was much like B
black comedy but comedy nonetheless. His genius that shown towards Muslims today. Worse in fact, with C
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stems from the ironic nuance of the reciprocal voices official sanctions barring the ‘other’ from office, and D
on display, the interaction of their dialogue being vital. from voting. Most Catholics in the country are there E
Unlike Greene, the plots of his novels are essentially by the apparent virtue of the Faith being handed down. RSS
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secondary, framing devices against which the characters In the main they come from immigrant backgrounds,
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can ‘flourish’, were that not so inappropriate a word for chiefly from the Irish diaspora of the past two centu- Facebook
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the languishing on display. These are characters whose ries. A disenfranchised, working class tribe, greatly
inner lives are implied rather than explored, conveyed over-represented in the industrial north of England, I
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in shadow. and in Scotland (this before we even begin to touch J
What they did have in common was an intense sense on Northern Ireland.) None of this, however, applied K
of inner desolation, an acidic looking within, and it to either Greene and Waugh, bourgeois, upper middle L
was their Catholicism that both mirrored and embodied purebred English southerners both. They were Catho- M
this. Read any novel by either author, and whichever of lics by choice, by their own conversion. Outsiders by N
the myriad delights you my obtain from the experience, choice too. O
the lasting impression, the ‘aftertaste’, is a subtle yet Both seemed to want a Faith which underlined and P
distinct despair, an existential dislocation obtained via justified the constant sense of separation they had Q
osmosis from the central characters. “Point me out the always felt towards their peers. They also seemed to R
happy man and I will point you out either egotism, self- want to find as stark and unforgiving a theology to S
ishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance,” declares identify themselves with as possible. Greene converted
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Greene, with Waugh in full agreement. to the Faith in 1926 at the age of 22, following a lonely
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In the past a Catholic in Britain was, by definition, an and troubled youth savagely punctuated by suicide at-
outsider. Even today, Britain is officially a Protestant tempts. Suffering what is now termed bipolar disorder, V
nation with a Protestant monarch, an identity forged Greene spent his whole life engaged in extremes of be- W
in the fire of adversity to the Romanist other. These haviour, not least in his prodigious sexual incontinence X
atavistic rivalries may have dwindled and mean little and proclivities. Greene stated he became a Catholic Y
to the majority of people in the UK today, but in the as something to “measure his evil against”. In later Z

years he adulterously fucked behind Italian altars for by the standards of their own Faith they are beyond More A
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the thrill. There must be a suspicion Greene was play- redemption, sealing their own personal tragedies. Then B
ing with the Faith for his own sense of internal drama, on the other hand, we have Pinkie, the psychopathic C
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much like Dalí, whose use of the religion was a prop to young gangster of Brighton Rock. Here is a truly bad D
adorn his art with ever more outlandishly theological man, and one whose certainty of his own damnation E
accoutrements. Catholicism is after all, a religion of the only serves to spur him on to ever greater evil. “He RSS
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picturesquely ornate, of the dramatic. The stained glass was damned already and there was nothing more to
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and incense filled churches, the arcane blood and flesh fear ever again.” In each case, the religion makes for Facebook
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fuelled doctrines of transubstantiation, the unflinching- a wonderfully powerful and evocative component of
ly Manichean morality, the sheer ancient grim majesty the novels, a character in itself, more than that even. I
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of it all. This is truly the religion of the drama queen. Wonderful for the reader. But wonderful for Greene J
You don’t get that with Methodism. For all this though, himself? Noel Coward met Greene when they both K
Greene was not merely playing with some theological prowled in the same Hollywood circles, touting their L
dressing up box. There can be no doubting the sincerity works for adaptation on the silver screen. He came to M
of his conversion. His private letters show his Faith was remark on Greene’s “strange, tortured mind”. Whether N
central to his life. his Faith served to salve or further inflame the wounds O
In both life and literature however, Greene was a poor of this torture is open to conjecture. P
advertisement for the familiar argument of religion be- Waugh’s conversion was more clearly that of a man Q
ing a solace in life, the “heart in a heartless world”. Two desperate to retreat into a mythical past. This was after R
of his most celebrated central characters, the colonial all the man who proclaimed “the trouble with the Con- S
administrator Scobie in The Heart Of The Matter, and servative Party is it has not turned back the clock one
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the nameless whiskey priest of The Power And The second.” There was a spate of conversions to the Faith
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Glory, are hopeless, tired and desperate shadows of in the 30s of men from the upper-middle-class, men
men, whose Faith only serves to make them spiritual trying to find a mooring, a sense of backward-looking V
as well as emotional wrecks. Both live daily with the solidity in a traumatic age. Once more however, there W
knowledge their actions, be they treacherous or adul- is something far deeper, and steeped in an ambivalence. X
terous, are condemning them, with absolute certainty, Waugh came to prominence as a novelist in 1928 Y
to eternal damnation. These are not truly bad men, but with Decline And Fall, two years before his conversion Z

to Roman Catholicism. Famous and feted at the age of agnosticism is set against the Faith of the Marchmain More A
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25, Waugh continued with the drunken hedonism he family, or in The Sword Of Honour trilogy, wherein the B
had begun in his Oxford years. He was indeed one of aristocratic Crouchback’s represent even more clearly C
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the feckless “bright young things” he wrote about. His the valiant rearguard action of the Church, and indeed D
growing horror at the spiritual emptiness he saw in this old England itself, against all the forces of modernity. E
gadddabout life was what spurred him into the arms of In other novels the Faith’s talismanic status is subtler. RSS
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the Church, which he saw as the most Eternal of institu- Tony Last, the cuckolded husband in A Handful Of
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tions, a haven amongst the creeping chaos. Dust, is presented as belonging to the past, underlined Facebook
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In the views of Waugh, we see in sharp relief the by his church attendance, however vague minded that
antagonism between the heart of Conservatism, and the may be. His humiliation by non churchgoing wife I
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capitalism that it defends. Margaret Thatcher herself Brenda and the vulgar (key word) social climber John J
for instance, would have been personally shocked and Beaver shows once more the clash between the (virtu- K
repulsed if she spent any great time in the company ous) old and the (degenerate) new. It is a mythological L
of her shock troops, the coked up young yuppies of battle between Old England, the rural, certainty, tradi- M
the 80s, as they lined it up on the toilet tops. Waugh’s tion and social cohesion, against the New World, the N
contempt for the fly by night shallowness of the young urban, capitalism, dynamism, change, hedonism, class O
rich sat ill at ease with his support for of the Tory Party conflict and progress. In Sword of Honour, Waugh sees P
without which their lives of philistine luxury would be Guy Crouchback, when he still thinks he is fighting Q
unsustainable. Hence his impotent railing against clocks against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany both, claims R
going forward. The real establishment of England was “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, S
once Catholic of course, back in the 15th century, an all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms”.
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age so long ago as to have lost all contemporary mean- It’s an internal battle the Right will never resolve.
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ing. His Catholicism therefore was a very real sense That Catholicism is no longer the religion of the ‘es-
of clinging to a past so elusive as to be nonexistent, tablishment’ serves Waugh well. As he sees the massed V
grasping at a phantasm. ranks of modernity triumph, as he surely knows they W
In his novels, the Faith emerges as the still at the will, he can psychologically cast himself in the role X
centre, the calm amongst the inferno. This can be seen of the king over the water, exiled valiant victim and Y
most clearly in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s patrician overseer simultaneously. Such was the source Z

of both his art, and the bilious, bitter anger that never Waugh was one of the tiny minority who declared More A
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left him. their support for the Falange. A minority view among B
In Britain we have the paradox that Catholicism authors, but not among the kind of dyspeptic saloon bar C
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– in the wider world so very often the creed of the Tory he came more and more to exemplify and signify D
oppressor over the centuries – is the religion of the as both his age and drinking increased. The Blimpish E
persecuted underdog. This has led to the most bizarre caricature he succumbed to by the end was probably RSS
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and schizophrenic political allegiances and alliances. an extreme rather than a typical example however, and
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In 30s Lancashire, unemployed Communist marchers by a sublime irony was mirrored in the similar decline Facebook
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would doff their caps when passing Catholic churches, into self-parody of Kingsley Amis a generation later, a
at the same time as senior clerics were backing Franco. writer Waugh lambasted as “lower-middle-class scum” I
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Orwell wrote of visiting workers’ houses with “the at the beginning of the latter’s career. J
crucifix on the wall, and the Daily Worker on the table”. Amongst the 30s converts, the Left-radicalism of K
There has never been a shortage of left-wing British Greene therefore must be seen as a great exception. L
writers of Catholic background, but seems fair to say Once again though, the tale is more complicated. Greene M
this has usually stemmed from their ‘outsider’ nature, started out on the Right. Along with many youths of N
their working class and/or Irish background, rather than his class, he acted as a strike-breaker during the 1926 O
the religion itself. With Anthony Burgess – in later life General Strike. After his conversion, he wrote for the P
a bitter rival of Greene’s – we have a descendant of right-wing Spectator magazine and took the side of the Q
the Irish diaspora, his childhood in Manchester’s Moss put-upon Mexican clergy following the revolution in R
Side influenced the Left perspective of his early writing, that country. His earlier novels contained numerous S
his Catholicism informing his later conservative slant. mildly anti-Semitic asides (excised on republishing at
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The upper and middle-class converts to the Faith his behest). In many ways therefore, he seemed des-
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of the 30s however, were far more often doing so for tined to trudge down a classic Conservative path.
reasons which became reactionary by default, even if But Greene was one of those converts, a minority V
that was not the initial intention. In this sense Waugh amongst the Blimps of his class, who heard the mes- W
was the more typical figure. In 1937, when Nancy sage of social justice ring louder than that of defence of X
Cunard sent a survey to leading novelists of the UK hierarchical tradition in the call of the Faith. Greene’s Y
asking which side they took in the Spanish Civil war, vision of Catholicism stirred him to side with the Z

downtrodden in the world, and for him that meant the anticipated. That they failed to receive the backing of More A
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Left. He became an intractable and articulate foe of US the Vatican, that indeed that they were explicitly de- B
imperialism, especially of its machinations in South- nounced by them, he may have found harder to recon- C
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ern and Central America. In 1955 he wrote The Quiet cile. Perhaps this contributed to the weary irony of his D
American, a novel which was to become a classic anti- statement to interviewer John Cornwell in 1989, that he E
imperialist parable. In later years he was to meet and was now a “Catholic agnostic”. RSS
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correspond with Fidel Castro, and while still critical of Had he lived to see it however, he may well have
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the curtailing of religious and intellectual freedom in been heartened to see the success of Hugo Chavez in Facebook
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the country, strongly supported Cuba’s struggle against Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, a new generation
US hegemony. of leaders combining socialism with their Catholicism. I
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In Latin America of course, the populace shared his The latest success of the left-leaning bishop Fernando J
Faith, yet he was conscious that the dominant reaction- Lugo becoming president in Paraguay would no doubt K
ary elements within Catholicism had no interest at all of gladdened him most of all. Who could doubt he L
in his anti-imperialist vision. When therefore, in the would have seen some vindication here, and an answer M
80s a new strain of Faith within the region came to both to the Catholic hierarchy who saw in the Left its N
prominence which shared his vision, he could scarcely great nemesis, and those on the Left who argued that O
contain his intellectual glee. Liberation Theology believers could only ever be reactionary. Waugh, mean- P
combined the apparently antagonistic Catholicism and while, would have spun once more in his grave, a tomb Q
socialism which had both so inspired Greene, uniting already doubtless given to much rapid rotation. R
against the US backed juntas of the subcontinent. Oscar Greene and Waugh may have had diametrically S
Romero in Salvador and Evaristo Arns in Brazil were opposed positions in their politics from their own
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just two of many to speak out the US sponsored repres- interpretations of the Faith. But, transcending politics,
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sion and poverty which racked their nations. Greene what both seemed to take from the Faith in their writing
came to personally befriend another such Liberation was a sense of the complete fragility and frailty of the V
priest, Leopoldo Duran. human condition, the essential unworthiness of people W
That such movements were to fail, crushed by the gained from Original Sin. In Greene this seemed to X
Washington backed strong-men, Oscar Romero assas- inspire a sense of poetic heroism amidst inevitable Y
sinated – Greene, eternal pessimist as he was, no doubt failure and desperation, in Waugh a very real contempt Z

not just for humanity as a whole in the abstract, but for Larkin claimed “Deprivation is for me what daffodils More A
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all human beings individually. That sense of the tragic were for Wordsworth”. B
which under-writes and illuminates the drama in the With Greene and Waugh, the inspiration, the C
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one, the sharp satire in the other, a sense of the comedic framework, the habitat, spark and realm of their work D
and the sublime in both. It also served to solidify the was neither harsh mental state nor delicate flower. E
bond which grew between the two. Melancholic heavy Catholicism was the muse for them both. As a very RSS
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drinkers, red eyes unsatisfied, tilting at the cold Prot- lapsed member of the Faith myself, and distinctly
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estant world from different angles. For all their myriad sceptical as to any positive influence it may lend to Facebook
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differences, the two became firm friends, and remained the modern age, I can at least offer it gratitude for
so until Waugh’s death in 1966. giving the work of both to the world.  I
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Peter Guralnick: Careless Love: The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley email

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Gary Marshall
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I was five years old when Elvis died and, like most What makes Careless Love different is the writer’s
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of my generation, my knowledge of Elvis is derived agenda – Guralnick is first and foremost a fan, and the Facebook
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largely from muck-raking biographies, shockingly bad book is his attempt to show how Elvis’ talent was com-
films, sightings documented in supermarket tabloids promised by his own self-destructive tendencies and I
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and documentaries about brain-damaged Elvis im- the ever-growing number of people who felt nothing J
personators. With the exception of U2’s embarrassing but contempt for the man whilst eagerly awaiting the K
fandom no modern bands list Elvis as an influence and, next hand-out. In this context Elvis’ well-documented L
for most people under 30, Elvis will forever be the penchant for young girls, his serial infidelity and his M
pathetic figure stalking the stages of Vegas. Careless obsessive pill-popping are shown dispassionately, al- N
Love explains how Elvis got there. lowing the reader to develop the picture of a child-like O
The follow-up to the extraordinary Last Train To and desperately insecure man who was encouraged to P
Memphis, Peter Guralnick’s latest book documents do as he wished without complaint or constraint. The Q
Elvis’ life from his Army days to his death in a Gra- ultimate result of this unbridled and self-destructive R
celands bathroom. If anything the book is even better behaviour was a legend who, towards the end of his
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researched and more detailed than the first instalment career, alternated between impotence and incontinence
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– weighing in at over 600 pages, supplemented by and who was frequently so medicated that he could
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detailed notes and explanations, Careless Love almost barely function.
tells the story in real time. The main achievement of Careless Love is the way V
The unsavoury aspects of Elvis’ life have been in which it strips away more than 20 years of accumu- W
detailed endlessly in biography after biography and, lated legend to show the man behind the cartoon image, X
though Guralnick is no Albert Goldman, he doesn’t a story told largely by the people who worked with him Y
shy away from showing the darker side to his subject. and who inhabited the inner circle of confidantes. The Z
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deals struck by ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker which resulted ens his work and frequently rages at the very fans who More A
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in increasingly shoddy product and a punishing live love him unconditionally. Unlike other biographies, B
schedule of up to three concerts per day are shown, not however, Guralnick presents a very real picture of a C
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as the result of naked greed, but as the decisions of a desperately unhappy man who falls into addiction and D
man who understands money rather than artistic fac- controlling behaviour to mask his own insecurities and E
tors. In the context of Parker’s ever-growing gambling inadequacies. RSS
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debts, some of the more bizarre management decisions Taken together, Last Train To Memphis and Care-
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are understandable if misguided. less Love make up the definitive biography of one of Facebook
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Reading Careless Love you’re left with the believ- the 20th century’s key figures. In a sea of biographies
able portrait of a man whose extraordinary vocal that concentrate on the scandalous aspects of Elvis’ I
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talent brought him unimagined success – success that life in order to sell copies, Guralnick’s books bring J
prevented Elvis from maturing beyond adolescence. the man vividly to life, warts and all. The exhaustive K
As recording sessions and live engagements become research can make the book heavy going at times L
more and more farcical and Elvis’ drug use becomes but, for anybody with even a passing interest in pop M
increasingly problematic, Guralnick shows an artist out or rock music, Careless Love is illuminating and es- N
of control who drives away his closest friends, cheap- sential reading.  O
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Half Man Half Biscuit: Achtung Bono email

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Ben Granger
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I may as well declare my stance at the outset: Half lish life; capturing the little things that generally fall
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Man Half Biscuit are Britain’s most under-rated band, of the scale of artistic perception. Nigel is one of those Facebook
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and their singer/writer Nigel Blackwell is not only one writers who show that the heavenly as well as the devil
of the land’s finest humourists and satirists, but also is in the detail. I
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a chronicler of the tawdriness of modern British life If anyone can show me a better melding of love- J
whose vision is shot through with true genius. lorn loss allied to a sarcastic critique of the modern K
Now, those of you who only know the band through middle-class trendy twattery that threatens to con- L
dim recollections of a Scouse voice jokily swearing sume us all than: M
about minor sportsmen and celebrities in the mid-80s N
may consider sending this first paragraph into Pseud’s She stayed with me until O
Corner. But you’d be wrong to do so. People from She moved to Notting Hill P
Birkenhead aren’t Scousers for a start. She said it was the place she needs to be Q
More importantly, in the nine albums the band have Where the cocaine is Fair Trade R
made since their (very) brief period of (relative) fame And frequently displayed
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in 1986 with ‘Fucking ‘ell, It’s Fred Titmuss!’ and ‘I Is the Buena Vista Social Club CD
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Hate Nerys Hughes (From the Heart)’, their vision
(from ‘The Light at the End Of Tunnel’ from last album U
has grown more witty, incisive, bleak, devastatingly
accurate and straightforwardly brilliant than ever, even Cammel Laird Social Club) then please do show me it. V
though the wise downbeat amalgam of realism and sur- And for that matter show me a more kick-ass jangle- W
realism was there from the start. The hardcore whimsy indie rock tune than that which accompanies ‘Perform- X
of The Trumpton Riots has progressed to a more all- ing Rights Society – Quick the Drawbridge’ from 1997’s Y
encompassing patina on the minutiae of modern Eng- Voyage To The Bottom Of the Road. Can’t can you? Z
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Blackwell is a modest, unassuming Wirral man of an attack on The Libertines for their sloppy quoting of More A
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upper-working-class origin, a Thomas Hardy fan with Scripture in ‘Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo’: (“If you’re going B
an outsized bullshit detector, and a turn of phrase few to quote from the Book of Revelation /Don’t go calling C
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could dream of. it the ‘Book of Revelations’ / there’s no ‘s’”). D
In the new album, as per often, he blasts targets near Musically, the album goes for the mid-paced folkier E
and far, high and low, not just the obvious pop idle of edge in general rather than their more rock-out num- RSS
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celebrity culture, but also his more close-to-home con- bers. As ever, the music is secondary to the words, but
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temporaries. Always in ‘indie’ but not ‘of’ it; in the past also, as ever, it fits and complements the lyrics perfectly Facebook
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the alternative music scene has been the chief target of in that its ramshackle exterior nature belies an expertly
his ire, (see the immortal ‘Look Dad No Tunes’) but designed structure underneath. I
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not so much on this album. As he gets older it seems More than in any previous album, the prevailing J
to be the general populace around him, ossifying into themes are cynical disdain for modern societal trends K
idiocy and dullness in middle-age that horrifies him. He combined with an apparently genuine affection for the L
has a pathological hatred of those who’ve got the whole ambience of small-town England, as in ‘We Built This M
world in their house to see the new conservatory. This Village On A Trad Arr. Tune’ and ‘For What is Chat- N
time he kicks against the pricks “with your Del-boy teris? (if you’re not there)’: O
impressions and your CORGI-registered friends”. P
It’s a mark of Blackwell’s deftness of touch, that he Car crime’s low Q
can describe a professional couple in the Cotswolds Gun crime’s lower R
playing pooh-sticks, sharing a tub of gelatine ice-cream, The town hall band’s CD – It’s a grower
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before skipping gaily off to watch Marianne Faithful at You never hear of folk getting knocked on
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the Warwick Arts Centre, and, without any abuse, you the bonce
Although there was a drive-by shouting once U
know exactly why he hates them so much. It’s like Alan
Bennett possessed by the spirit of Johnny Rotten. V
Other topics the album addresses include the sinister Yet that song also approaches the album’s other W
nature of signs advertising vegetable sales on remote theme, often present but here more than ever; allusions X
rural roads in ‘Asparagus Next Left’ (“’Oooh rhubarb to intense loss and depression. I do hope it’s not too Y
– let’s go!!’ / She’s still not been accounted for”) and autobiographical. The CD’s best track to my mind is Z

‘Depressed Beyond Tablets’, (nice BrassEye refer- throughout is the incredibly wide-ranging wit and al- More A
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ence), which contains the wonderful lines: lusions of the song-writing that has been written of as B
‘novelty’ for far too long. Let’s get this straight. Half C
Your optimism strikes me email
Man Half Biscuit are a ‘comedy band’ (Black Lace, D
like junk-mail addressed to the dead Barron Knights, Fat Les, Electric Six, The Darkness) E
Depressed beyond tablets only in so much as The Bible is a self-help book. RSS
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I’ve gone beyond pills And yet, in the end, yes, I suppose you’d have to
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The cloud-face is low on the Clwydian hills find some of their more obvious lines funny to appreci- Facebook
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ate their other qualities. Much is in the delivery and
There is perhaps nothing on this album as instantly context, yet I suppose if you don’t find “Is your child I
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striking as some of their former tracks, no ‘Fred Tit- hyperactive? / Or is he perhaps a twat?” or “It’s a crick- J
muss’ or ‘Life At The End Of The Tunnel’. And as eting farce / With a thickening plot / Act One – Scene K
ever there’s the odd miss on the way. ‘Joy Division One / Brenda Blethyn gets shot” amusing even in the L
Oven Gloves’ has an excellent title but meanders off abstract then the band as a whole is not likely to appeal. M
into the pure silliness most people (who’ve heard of Your loss. N
them) imagine they’re all about. ‘Restless Legs’ is an Here’s perhaps my favourite off the album: “Gour- O
inconsequential observation of, er, someone with rest- anga Gouranga? / Yes I’ll ‘be happy’ / When you’ve P
less legs to the tune of George Formby’s ‘When I’m been arrested for defacing the bridge” Q
Cleaning Windows’ (also underrated in my view but … Part of the joy of the Biscuits is there’s so many R
we’ll save that for another time…) references in the songs you can’t possibly know
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‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ contains the “list of mod- them all, but you can then seek them out (or look
ern malaise” track which features on every album; and T
at this site to help you.) They should be on the
this isn’t one of the best of them, though it does have U
national curriculum. For instance, the above lines
the highly saving grace of incorporating the ‘12 days makes perfect sense to me. If it doesn’t to you, you V
of Christmas’ tune; and including (TV’s DIY SOS’s) could or should embark on a journey examining the W
“Nick FUCKING Knowles” instead of “five GOLD vandalised state of north British motorway bridges, X
rings”. Yes, that makes up for it in fact. which would then lead you to the propaganda tac- Y
Yet despite weaker moments, what is present tics of the modern Hare Krishna movement. It also Z

shows how infectious Blackwell’s humour is. A more about life in modern Britain from this album than More A
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good percentage of it is about sport for a start, and all those in the Gallup Top 50 combined. Easy. B
I can’t stand sport. I still find it funny, and can now If Nigel ever reads this he will probably be most C
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follow a conversation about football without eyes amused some pseud has chosen to over-analyse his D
glazing over and mouth drooling. lyrics. Well screw you Nige. You’re a poet even if you E
This is probably not one of Half Man Half Biscuit’s don’t know it. You’ll still be listened to in 200 years RSS
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best albums. And yet its still fantastic. You could learn time. If I have my way. And by God sir, I will. 
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Half Man Half Biscuit: Trouble Over Bridgewater email

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Gary Marshall
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If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal whiny indier-than-thou brigade is a great way to spend an
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to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit evening, Trouble Over Bridgwater will have you in tears. Facebook
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would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagar- The band’s strength has always been their willing-
ies of the music business mean that the band who brought ness to wring every last drop of humour from a stupid I
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us the immortal lyric “God, I could murder a Cadbury’s idea, and ‘The Ballad Of Climie Fisher’ is a classic J
Flake, but then you wouldn’t let me into heaven / or example of this. Revealing the answer to the not very K
maybe you would, ‘cause their adverts promote oral frequently-asked question, “whatever happened to 80s L
sex” (‘Dickie Davies’ Eyes’) are unlikely to become as popsters Climie Fisher?”, the song recounts how the M
big as Boyzone. It’s a shame because, as Trouble Over clean-cut stars went into the gravel business, with awful N
Bridgwater demonstrates, Half Man Half Biscuit are one consequences. Similarly, ‘Used To Be In Evil Gazebo’ O
of the funniest bands Britain has ever produced. takes gleeful aim at gloomy indie bands, with the gen- P
Like every other HMHB record, the band’s millionth ius chorus “I used to be in a mental hospital but I don’t Q
album (ok, eighth) sounds like it was recorded in a shed like to talk about it”. Other songs are worthwhile just R
and misses its targets as often as it hits them; neverthe- for their song titles: who can resist ‘Twenty Four Hour
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less, there are enough gems on the CD to make it an Garage People’ or ‘Look Dad No Tunes’?
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essential purchase. The usual mix of punky guitars and If your listening tastes are more Celine than Clinic,
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deadpan vocals is present and, to our ears, the standout Madonna than Mogwai, you’ll find Trouble Over Bridg-
track is ‘Irk The Purists’ (“Irk the purists, irk the purists, water goes right over your head – even we found some V
irk the purists, it’s a right good laugh”). The song uses the of the pop culture references entirely baffling. If, on the W
tune of ‘Agadoo’ to devastating effect: “Hüsker Dü-Dü- other hand, you’ve an encyclopaedic knowledge of indie X
Dü, Captain Beefheart, ELO”. It’s a good indication of music and regularly trounce all-comers at the local pop Y
the rest of the album, too. If you think slagging off the quiz, this album is as essential as breathing.  Z

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Keith Haring: Artist Or Radiant Baby? email

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Nick Clapson looks at the man behind the spray can with the publication
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of Keith Haring’s journals RSS
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At the close of the 20th century, trying to find a stable was fully developed.
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definition for the term ‘art’ has become increasingly Haring’s recently published journals, first begun in Facebook
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difficult. The traditional notion of art as the privilege 1977, offer a great insight into his artistic development.
of the educated and wealthy, preserved within galleries These fragments of Haring’s life provide not only a I
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and private collections, has continually come under at- glimpse of his private life, but also go some of the way J
tack by popular culture, from Dada and the Surrealists to outlining Haring’s artistic manifesto. The density K
all the way through to Warhol. and complexity of his thoughts and aims act as a shock- L
One of the few artists that actually acknowledged this ing foil to the apparent lightness of Haring’s iconic M
new, precarious, nature of ‘the artist’ as it emerged was ‘cartoony’ style. This was a man for whom art, though N
Keith Haring. Keith was born in Kutztown, Pennsylva- disposable by nature, was not to be underestimated in O
nia in 1958, and from an early age expressed an interest power. One of Haring’s major ambitions, which he P
in art. After a period studying commercial art in Pitts- stated at an early stage, was to return art to the public. Q
burgh, Haring realised this was not the right direction This at first appears to be a simple task: however, as R
for him. He left in 1976 and hitchhiked cross-country, Haring was to later prove, it was somewhat more dar-
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before returning to sit in on classes at the University of ing than first imagined. Haring did not want to produce
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Pittsburgh. It was here that central elements of his later art that was simply physically accessible, available
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style started to emerge. That style had a self-confessed from the street to the high street store, but art that was
similarity to the work of the French Modernist Leger, also freed from the delimiting vision of the traditional V
and the later work of Jean Dubuffet. However, no artist institutions, be it gallery or critic. It would seem, if we W
is just the sum the of their stylistic influences. By the follow Haring’s lead, that an Art that is easy to read X
time of his first one-man show at the Shafraz Gallery, has far more power than an Art that is simply obtuse or Y
New York in 1982, Haring’s individual approach to art high-brow. Z
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the result of much close and detailed study. By reduc- Warhol managed to re-create the artist, to slap the B
ing the visual elements of his work to what can best be art-world in the face and say that commerce has a place C
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described as icons, Haring managed to produce what in art. With Warhol having broken the mould of what D
amounted to keys which unlocked ideas. However, the was acceptably defined as art and what wasn’t the next E
impact of these images rests not only on this process. generation could now reach out an explore the culture RSS
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What increases their pertinence is their universality. that they found around them. So, by reflecting the
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Haring employed an imagery that seems to connect subcultures that surrounded him, be it skate-boarding, Facebook
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with everyone; the more cynical would liken it to hip-hop or homosexuality, Haring opened the door and
the power of advertising. However, Haring was not allowed real, contemporary life into his art. With ‘the I
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interested in the empty sites of materialism per se. In street’ in his work, Haring instantly made connections J
place of the usual trite commercial messages, Haring with the common viewer – as opposed to the educated K
invested personal introspection and concern into the viewer. Such accessibility was also furthered by his L
public space of advertising, using the directness of the POP SHOP in SoHo, New York, and later in Japan, M
advertising medium against itself. which sold pieces of his ‘commercial art’. N
Another invigorating aspect to Haring’s work was his Haring’s own sexuality also found a voice in his art, O
willingness to address and acknowledge the importance and hence many of his motifs have homoerotic conno- P
of not only popular culture, but also it more shady son, tations. However, to view his work as purely ‘queer’ art Q
subculture. Haring’s work would have been impossible is nothing but limiting. The humour and impassioned R
without the previous impact on the popular conception politicking evident in many of his more sexual works S
of art by both Walt Disney and Andy Warhol. With surely increase their palatability to the straighter audi-
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Disney opening up the viewer to the joy and pleasure ence. As a result, works such as those produced for the
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to be gained from the cartoon figure, not only as an AIDS awareness group ACT UP have now reached the
entertainment, but also as an art form, it was surely level where they can almost be considered as classic V
only a matter of time before an artist managed to tap images of the 80s. W
into this idea. However, to make that step from popular Another interesting aspect of these journals is the X
entertainment to Art, or High Art, would have surely way in which Haring himself dealt with his fame. For Y
been impossible without the ground-breaking work of a man who quickly rose to fame, collected by both Z

major galleries and celebrity collectors, such as Ma- some of the motivations of what clearly must be one More A
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donna, he remained surprisingly level-headed. Even of the key American artists of the late 20th century. B
though he was consistently displayed through Europe, However, they also offer us much more. They provide C
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he still had doubts to his own importance as an art- us with a chance to consider the concerns and fears D
ist, and whether or not he was really cutting edge. of an ordinary man who suffered with the same prob- E
Such modesty is truly a rare gift in the art-world, and lems as us all; self-doubt, love, and fears for our own RSS
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especially significant, in the crazy New York culture mortality. If I were to attain half the compassion and
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of the celebrity artist. The publication of Haring’s understanding that this man achieved in his brief life I Facebook
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journals offer the interested an opportunity to glimpse would I consider myself to be a happy man. 
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Bill Hicks: Bad Mood Rising email

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Even though he’s been dead for seven years, the savage political satire of
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Bill Hicks makes more sense than ever. Chris Hall spreads the word RSS
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If you mention to any intelligent individual under the row of flim-flam – Is It Me Or Is Airline Food Really
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age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live Bad? For my friends and me, just on the evidence of Facebook
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you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky that evening, Hicks was the greatest comedian there
bastard”. However, if you say that you saw Bill Hicks ever had been, or ever would be. I
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live, the reaction is qualitatively different. There is a For some, humourless PC types, his ‘goat-boy’ J
crestfallen look. For those fans who have come to wor- persona threw them off track. It was the side of Hicks K
ship him from his albums and videos, it only reinforces that mined personal, rather than political, obsessions L
the knowledge that they will never see this late and (of course, not necessarily his own obsessions). It was M
very great comedian for as long as they live. He died in difficult for some to square the Marxist, sub-Chomsky N
February 1994 from pancreatic cancer at the pitifully perspectives with a man who would talk about renting O
young age of 32. Clam Lappers and Anal Entry volume 500 from his P
I only saw Hicks play the once but the memory of local video store. Live, Hicks was more extreme in all Q
that evening is as seared into the cerebral cortex as so directions. The time I saw him, people in the front row R
much steak on a griddle. I still have the fading ticket: must have been deafened by his screams of admonition
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“Bill Hicks. Brighton Festival. Sun 10 May 1992. 8pm. to boy pop bands of the day to “Play with your fucking
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Comp”. Complimentary because this was also my first heart!” (How perceptive I was in noting in my review,
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review for the university magazine I wrote for. The ex- with what I obviously thought of as devastating un-
pectancy of that evening was immense. There had been derstatement, that Hicks was “more Lenny Bruce than V
a Channel 4 programme on him and we had picked up Lenny Bennett”). He also had a peculiar air of physical W
snippets from time to time from the NME and Montreal omniscience over the spatio-temporal coordinates of X
Comedy Festival clips. Here was someone taking an the room, where he cadged a Silk Cut from someone at Y
interest in the outside world again, not ploughing a fur- the front of the audience and dropped it only to catch it Z
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us to say nonchalantly “I doubt it…” before lighting it which he replies, and it’s hard not to blanch from the B
in one graceful movement. savagery of it: “Well, I guess I read for a lot of reasons, C
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Even though the act was honed and down pat the main one being so I don’t end up being a fucking D
so that he could riff around it (“excuse me why I waffle waitress.” So there we have it – comedy that E
plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, but RSS
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one more time”) when I saw him at Brighton he was which makes sure to afflict the afflicted as well.
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consummate in fielding questions from the audience In the evolutionary sense, a subject he was particu- Facebook
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(on subjects as diverse as the then recently launched larly interested in, Hicks’s lines continue to be highly
Euro Disney in Paris to how Labour lost the 1992 successful memes: “You’re not human till you’re in my I
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general election). phone book”, “Human beings are just a virus in shoes”, J
I thought of Hicks as soon as Dubyah ‘won’ the US etc. I can’t of been the only one to notice in the dark K
election. One could simply replay the Hicks mate- poetry of Hicks’s faux heartfelt tribute to his dying L
rial about George Bush from the time of the Gulf War Grandma who he wants to see used in stunts in a mar- M
and apply it to Bush II. History repeating itself first tial arts film, the intimation that here was potentially a N
as farce and then as a Bill Hicks routine. Where was great writer too: “Do you want your grandmother dying O
Hicks when we needed him during Clinton’s dreadful like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent P
Presidency? The Lewinsky affair, the impeachment skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its Q
hearings, the Presidential pardons – you feel that he way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet R
would of made such an incredible impact had he lived. Chuck Norris?” S
Who knows, perhaps he would of given direction to the Hicks arrived, in mass media terms, at the tail end of
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growing Western response of anti-capitalism? He was those seemingly monolithic Republican and Conserva-
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that inspirational. tive governments of the 1980s and early 1990s and
Hicks used comedy in a way that Lenny Bruce had what a fillip it was to have such a hardcore exorcism V
used it in the 60s, as a consciousness-expanding one. of our anxieties and anger. We loved the fact that here W
The appeal was one of a manichaean righteousness that was someone you genuinely knew would never sell out X
could of course slide into savage arrogance. There is a (hear Hicks’s response on Rant In E-Minor to a British Y
joke he tells about a waffle waitress who, seeing him company that wanted him to advertise their ‘Orange Z

Drink’). For a while, my girlfriend and I kept our own Mark Thomas said witheringly in interview, “If he More A
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‘Artistic Roll Call’ on the wall, where we would strike couldn’t be angry when he had a few months to live, B
through the names of ‘artists’ who’d just appeared in then there’s something wrong.” (Thomas told me rather C
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an ad for family hatchbacks or a new online banking laughably that he felt that “Hicks is the American Mark D
service (“Do an ad, and you’re off the artistic roll-call Thomas” and that Hicks was doing very similar material E
for ever.”). It was a depressing and shaming list. to him when Thomas went to see Hicks at Edinburgh.) RSS
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Part of the sadness at Hicks’s death was the sense What’s even more galling is the conflation in the
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that a powerful, not just a very funny, political critic minds of some people of Hicks with Leary. Yes, they Facebook
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had been lost, and one who was irreplaceable. He has both smoked a lot, yes, they both wore black. End of
cast a very long shadow for comedians since his death. similarity. Leary is (or should I say was?) a one-trick I
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Someone that unique is always going to bring out the hack, the one trick being No Cure For Cancer, who J
imitators, the paraders of his feathers (the lamentable ended up taking ‘cameo’ roles in films like Judgement K
British film Human Traffic has a Hicks segment on Night and Demolition Man while advertising piss- L
drugs, and even has the gall to end the film with one of weak beer (“Another corporate shill at the capitalist M
his lines). gang-bang”). N
One doesn’t have to strain that hard to hear the tropes The appetite among his fans for all things Hicks is O
or cadences of Hicks in any number of present-day partly a function of the lack of a biography – the Nick P
comedians. I saw Rich Hall, a Perrier Award winner no Doody biography has been due to be published for Q
less, shamelessly adapt Hicks’s Jay Leno fantasy rou- years – or much new material since the posthumously R
tine where Leno, the straw man who has the revelation released Rant In E Minor and Arizona Bay. Given that
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“Oh my God! What have I done with my life?”, shoots Hicks was gigging from the age of 14 in Austin, Texas
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himself and a spray of blood in the shape of the NBC (incidentally where Jenna Bush, Dubyah’s 19-year-
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peacock is produced (with the venomous pay-off: “A old daughter, was recently arrested for under-age
corporate man to the bitter end”). But righteous anger drinking) right through to his death aged 32 there must V
is not so easily commodified or corrupted, as Denis be a lot of material that hasn’t been seen yet. Hicks’s W
Leary must have realised by now. To my mind, Rob friend Kevin Booth, who ran Sacred Cow Productions X
Newman is the only comedian to have come even close with him, runs an excellent website dedicated to Bill Y
to Hicks’s level of insight and intensity. Hicks, which occasionally adds new audio and video Z

clips of Hicks. CBS highlights as “unsuitable for our audience” is the More A
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In America, as far as I can gather, he was a genu- following ‘pro-life’ skit: B
inely marginalised figure, and continues to be. There Bill Hicks: You know who’s really bugging me these C
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was a sense, though, that, as in the case of that other days. These pro-lifers … (Smattering of applause.) Bill: D
great American maverick export Jimi Hendrix, it was You ever look at their faces? ‘I’m pro-life!’ (Makes a E
maybe going to be a case of Hicks making it in Britain pinched face of hate and fear, his lips are pursed as RSS
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first. I met a journalist in San Francisco, Jack Boul- though he’s just sucked on a lemon.) ‘I’m pro-life!’
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ware, who interviewed Hicks for Arena magazine in Boy, they look it don’t they? They just exude joie de Facebook
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the States. He told me that the reason he thought Hicks vivre. You just want to hang with them and play Trivial
was beyond the pale in America was simply that he Pursuit all night long. (Audience chuckles.) Bill: You I
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seemed to be so anti-American. It’s often said, quite know what bugs me about them? If you’re so pro-life, J
rightly, that Hicks was in essence a preacher (indeed do me a favour – don’t lock arms and block medical K
he admitted it himself) and I’ve always thought of him clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cem- L
as Robert Mitchum in Night Of The Hunter, choosing eteries. (Audience laughs.) Bill: Let’s see how commit- M
not self-aggrandisement but enlightenment, beating ted you are to this idea. (Bill mimes the pursed lipped N
sense into comatose America with those fists marked pro-lifers locking arms.) Bill (as pro-lifer): ‘She can’t O
love and hate. come in!’ (Audience laughs. Bill as confused member P
A fascinating Index on Censorship article from De- of funeral procession): ‘She was 98. She was hit by a Q
cember 2000 details the machinations that prevented bus!’ (Audience laughs.) Bill (as pro-lifer): ‘There’s R
Hicks’s segment from being broadcast on an edition options!’ (Audience laughs.) Bill (as confused member S
of the David Letterman show (he’d appeared 11 times of funeral procession): ‘What else can we do? Have
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before on the same show). Hicks’s letter to the journal- her stuffed?’ (Audience laughs.) Bill: I want to see pro-
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ist John Lahr – his Dear John letter to life in some ways lifers with crowbars at funerals opening caskets – ‘get
– is a cri de coeur: “Jokes, John: this is what America out!’ Then I’d be really impressed by their mission. V
now fears – one man with a point of view, speaking out, (Audience laughs and applauds.) W
unafraid of our vaunted institutions, or the loathsome Hicks ends his letter to John Lahr with a passionate X
superstitions the CBS hierarchy feels the masses (the plea for sanity: “This is what I think CBS, the producers Y
herd) use as their religion.” One of the ‘hot points’ that of the Letterman show, the networks and governments Z

fear the most – that one man free, expressing his own For anyone doubting the veracity of Hicks’s analysis, More A
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thoughts and point of view, might somehow inspire a good recent example of news being managed in such B
others to think for themselves and listen to that voice a way that it keeps us “passive non-participants” is the C
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of reason inside them, and then perhaps, one by one we virtual US press black out over the recent Kyoto protocol D
will awaken from this dream of lies and illusions that all under the guise, no doubt, of it being of no interest E
the world, the governments and their propaganda arm, to the American public that the US has an appalling RSS
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the mainstream media, feeds us continuously over 52 environmental record.
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channels, 24 hours a day. Hicks has his revelation while watching the Letter- Facebook
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“What I realised was that they don’t want the people man show the week after being pulled. The scales fall
to be awake. The elite ruling class wants us asleep away from his eyes, and he’s looking at the real reason. I
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so we’ll remain a docile, apathetic herd of passive He’s looking at a ‘pro-life’ commercial. J
consumers and non-participants in the true agendas Gore Vidal once gave a definition of real politics K
of our governments, which is to keep us separate and as “Who collects what money from whom to spend L
present an image of a world filled with unresolvable on whom for what” with the corollary that “no politi- M
problems, that they, and only they, might somewhere, cian in the US dares address that subject for fear we’ll N
in the never-arriving future, may be able to solve. Just discover who bought him and for how much.” Follow O
stay asleep, America. Keep watching television. Keep the money, indeed. And what was one of the very first P
paying attention to the infinite witnesses of illusion we things that Dubyah did as President? It was to cancel Q
provide you over ‘Lucifer’s Dream Box’.” the funding of abortion clinics abroad.  R
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Tom Hodgkinson: How To Be Idle email

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Greg Lowe
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It’s Friday afternoon, and after a particularly busy You see, apart from editing the magazine, Hodgkin-
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week, with only a few things to wrap up, I try and son is also the author of a curious little book, How To Facebook
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scratch off the last important thing on my list of things Be Idle. Broken down into hourly chapters, starting at
to do – interview author/journalist Tom Hodgkinson. 8am and finishing at 7am, it wages a war on work while I
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First I try his London office a number of times, only providing practical and philosophical loafing advice J
to get the following answer-phone message: “This is for every part of the day. K
the office of the Idler [the magazine of which Hodgkin- Chapter three ‘10am Sleeping In’, begins as follows: L
son is the founder/editor], there’s no one in right now, “It’s 10am The successful idler, having avoided the M
we’re not in very often, so if you leave a message it guilt produced by 8am, the culturally determined hour N
might take a while for us to get back to you…” of rising, and the guilt produced by 9am, the hour of O
At 5:50pm Bangkok time (11:50am in England) I try work, may now be awake, and thinking of perhaps get- P
my luck with his mobile number, which I was given “in ting up. Don’t!” Q
case something goes wrong”. The fact that he was either not up, nor in the office R
“Hi, this is Tom, I’ve left my mobile at home today, to answer the phone, came as no great surprise. I fired
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you can reach me at [the number for the Idler office].” off a bunch of questions via email, and left the office
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It appears I am trapped in a Sisyphean cycle of mes- heading for the pub.
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sages left on answer-phones that lead to more messages Hodgkinson practices what he preaches in How To
on other answer-phones, all equally unlikely to be an- Be Idle. He takes the subject of doing nothing very V
swered or to yield in the previously arranged interview. seriously, and aims to inspire more than a quiet chuckle W
Normally this would be cause for concern, but today from readers. “Although the book is a good read, it is X
a smile born from a wonderful sense of irony spreads intended to be taken seriously. I really do believe that Y
across my face. our system of things is anti-life,” he says. Z
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That he takes idleness sincerely is demonstrated “[If we were idle] we would become more alive. More A
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through his fastidious research, which draws on sources We would be less stressed out because we would be in B
as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Lao Tzu, Dr control of our own lives. We would free ourselves from C
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Johnson, Albert Camus and Damien Hirst, who provide the master/slave dialectic and all the other imprisoning D
a 2,500-year-old legacy to loafing (there’s nine pages dualities that control us. Life and work would become E
of further reading on the subject). the same thing. We would become whole people rather RSS
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It has to be said that the end result really is good. than fractured people.”
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Not only is the book thoroughly entertaining, it should But left to loafers like Hodgkinson, wouldn’t the Facebook
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resonate with anyone – except the most puritanical world just go to the dogs?
workaholic bores – who has ever questioned how our “I think the claim is self-evidently false. Idle people I
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lives have become to be dominated by work, time, and are creative and hard workers are uncreative. Is it better J
the need to be constantly doing something, or by feel- to trick people into buying crisps or to grow your own K
ing guilty for being inactive. vegetables? Clearly the latter. It is generally better to L
Hodgkinson says that this angst-driven nine-to-five do nothing than to do something. It creates less harm M
drudgery is only a fairly recent development in terms in the world.” N
of human history. That it is the result of when, some When summing up whether How To Be Idle offers an O
250 years ago, we were ripped from our agrarian exist- intelligent critique of the alienating nature of the rate P
ence by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. This race, or just a self-indulgent lazy man’s guide to life, Q
transformed our previous existence of spontaneous, it’s worth considering the words of the British journal- R
task-oriented work, to one where we were shackled to ist, and celebrated alcoholic, Jeffrey Bernard (quoted S
the ruthless tyranny of the clock and wage labour. in the book) on the matter how those who preach the
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It has alienated us from our authentic lackadaisical benefits of working harder, are normally the people
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state of nature, Hodgkinson adds, saying that the only having a nice time, relaxing and getting rich on the
purpose chirpy axioms – such as Benjamin Franklin’s backs of others. V
1757 utterance, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a “As if there was something romantic and glamorous W
man, healthy, wealthy and wise”– serve are to fill us about hard work … if there was something glamorous X
with guilt whenever we return to an authentic state of about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his Y
doing as we please. own fucking garden, wouldn’t he?”  Z
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Gert Hofmann: Parable Of The Blind email

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The Knocker knocks on the barn door and six men The novel’s frame is this: the six men speak a strangely
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stumble around, trying to get up. The novel opens: “On unified monologue, wandering around the village, on Facebook
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the day when we’re to be painted – yet another new the green, in the woods, eating lunch. Each man has a
day! – a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our story about how he came to be blind. As readers, we are I
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sleep. No, the knocking isn’t inside us, it’s outside, never given more information than the six possess nor J
where the other people are.” The six men narrate as any hints with which to see out of the monologue; there K
“we”, although one of them, Ripolus, is also guide, be- are times when the six may be the subject of practical L
cause he can reportedly see a little. “Ripolus, what can jokes – being told they are in a secluded toilet when M
you see? Simply describe for us what you can see?” they may be on the village green – but we don’t laugh, N
The answer is usually, “Not much.” because we don’t know if it’s funny. We don’t see from O
The novel covers the day when these six men are the outside. We read thoughts and speech. We are blind P
to be painted by Pieter Breughel, “the Painter”, who because we’re stuck like narrative threads in the novel’s Q
wants them to follow each other and fall down into a mass, just as the blind men seem trapped in the telling R
ditch, the image familiar to us as ‘The Parable of the of their own story.
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Blind’, a rural recreation of ‘Matthew XV’, 14: “If the This is why worries over the inaccurate presentation
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Blind lead the Blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” of blindness are beside the point. Do blind people feel
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In the painting, the blind men are about to fall. The themselves all over to work out who they are, first
painting is tense, as the eye follows the chain of men thing in the morning, as these do? No. But this is the V
towards the ditch. What we see is about to collapse. Parable Of The Blind, and the parables are multiple. W
Hofmann’s novel is also tense; not because the six Imagine a page with six tiny figures stumbling around X
narrators may collapse but because the novel as viable in it; they can’t see the perimeter of the page, and they Y
form may do so. It doesn’t. can’t see out into the world. The page is a room, or a Z
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what room, what enclosed world we are in. The six properly, we can be rational about it. These traditions B
men remember the past. They wonder where they are. find their dissection in the contemporary philosophies C
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They have banal conversations with strangers about of ‘the gaze’. In The Parable Of The Blind, it is hearing D
food and the weather and which is the best way to that relates the realistic details of interaction, that is, E
go. They argue with each other and nearly fight. Hof- speech. Without sight, the most pushy of senses, one RSS
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mann’s prose is so concentrated and unrelenting that of the things the novel does is to bring sound and touch
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claustrophobia turns to terrible awareness. There is no back to a narrative, to embody a world not predicated Facebook
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need to explicate. No need for laboured, ‘author’s mes- on the eyes, as Aristotle seemed to think was necessary
sage’ moments, because we begin to read everything when he wrote ‘On Sense And Sensible Objects’, “of I
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into the parable; the leaner in description or the more a those who have been deprived of one sense or the other J
narrative moves in circles or repetition the greater the from birth, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf K
force accumulated. How does a book like this pierce and the dumb.” Hofmann’s novel is a joke on metaphor L
through to us, when there was no vivid description of – which, classically, bridges the inward mental activity M
something we recognised, no witty or psychologically to the world of appearances, left in this novel as a swing N
fascinating dialogue, no grand sweep of history, no bridge hanging over the water – making the parable, ‘in O
denouement? this light’, a parable of the parables. P
One answer is that those very elements begin to seem Standing before a painting, we may well ask a work Q
ornamental to literature’s work, part of which (let’s be to speak to us, and a number of novelists have taken up R
reductive!) is to wonder how communication in lan- the extra-critical task of elaborating this speech or else S
guage might be possible and, if it isn’t, to fail instruc- making up a story – one thinks of a pearl earring – fol-
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tively. How can six blind men stumbling around, speak lowing the irritating trope that we might ‘walk inside’ a
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to us? Do they speak for anyone else as well? They are painting. Hofmann has taken this thought and actually
six men in a painting, here made to fall into the ditch pushed our faces so far into the oil and brush-strokes V
over and over for the Painter to make his sketches. that we cannot see back out, and we cannot see within. W
Sight is most often the sense connected to knowledge, The prose, inhabiting a world of sound and intuited ob- X
as in, “I see it”, “I can’t see round it”, “in this light”, and jects, is spare and clear, like a radio transmission which Y
also the various distinctions between the visible and has been tuned in after an interfering hiss. Z

Christopher Middleton’s translation is excellent – by The narrator (unusual for being six people and one More A
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no means a given in translations from the German, see person simultaneously) often says “probably”, probably B
Michael Henry Heim’s ruination of Günter Grass’s we are here, probably there is a man with a stick, prob- C
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My Century – in that he replicates this sparse quality ably we are being painted by the Painter. Surface is not D
in English without falling into a Beckett-ese, which it given to us for our delight, as in a Quiet novel (Edgar E
might have been easy to do. Middleton is a poet – rec- Allen Poe’s term for the mainstream, ‘official literary RSS
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ommended is his new and selected poems, The Word culture’ of his time, the work he hated and wanted to
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Pavilion as well as the extraordinary prose pieces in tear down), but is constantly in doubt – what would Facebook
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such volumes as Crypto-Topographia – and translator otherwise be a world is here only conjecture: “What’s
of Canetti (his letters), Robert Walser and Nietzsche. going on? we call. And it’s hard to find the way back. I
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His is not a workman-like translation. Hofmann’s We’re in a dream. Lying in a fresh furrow, in a bound- J
forward-drive is here, the unaccountable tension, the less field, half on the surface, half below ground, clouds K
use of sentence on sentence like brick and timber. probably overhead.”  L
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Nick Hornby: Gender Trouble email

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men and women in his new novel How To Be Good RSS
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Men stumble through life bewildered by relationships, Arsenal usually took precedence over his emotional
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terrified of responsibility and unable to articulate their life. His next two books, High Fidelity and About A Facebook
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feelings; or so you would think from the characters Boy, explored similar ideas of how men struggle to
portrayed in Nick Hornby’s novels. Women are only come to terms with modern expectations of sensitivity I
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used to make the men look worse. His new book, How and maturity. They are funny, touching and his male J
To Be Good, deliberately sets out to challenge this characters ring true. K
stereotype. Hornby’s arrival at such a position has been It is surprising for an author so concerned with mas- L
a direct result of the success of his first three books, culinity that he hasn’t written much about fatherhood. M
Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy. All his main characters are, as he puts it: “childless, N
Hornby writes from a small flat two minutes from feckless males,” who don’t have strong paternal ties. O
his beloved Highbury. It is equipped with a kitchen, About A Boy addressed the issue of fatherhood in a P
bathroom and lounge, where framed posters of his metaphorical way but he has never dealt with it directly. Q
books hang proudly on the walls. He obviously spends Part of the reason for this is that his son, Danny, is R
a lot of time here. Hornby is divorced and lives with his autistic. “My experience of fatherhood is going to take
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seven-year-old son in a house near to his office flat. He a long while to filter through to what I write. Being
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is friendly, assured, and smokes continually. He looks the father of a disabled child you have a lot to say, but
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tired and his patchy baldness gives him a disconcerting, it’s so unique you want to do it in a way that people
ravaged look. understand.” V
Born in 1957, he graduated from Cambridge with a His own father left the family home for another woman W
2.2 in English Literature. He then worked as a teacher when Hornby was a young boy. He then moved abroad X
and a journalist before publishing Fever Pitch in 1992. for ten years. Hornby says he has not really thought Y
It was an honest account of how his obsession with about what effect his father has had on his writing, but Z
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adds: “I had an absent father. Fathers haven’t played a are two extremes – England hooligans with skinheads More A
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big role in my books yet; maybe there’s a void where a and women who are subservient to their husbands. Then B
father should be.” He laughs nervously, then moves the there’s the middle where most of us are now. People of C
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conversation on to how the media encroaches on topics a certain generation don’t feel incredibly different to D
formerly only tackled by writers. their partners.” E
Hornby has said that he is tired of men being por- When asked if it is simplistic to say we are all the RSS
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trayed as morons by the media and wants to “redress same, he concedes that “differences do come from our
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the balance.” He argues: “The first two books couldn’t experiences of being brought up a man or a woman.” He Facebook
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have been written 25 years ago. Men writing about how also acknowledges that men can find it hard to express
they feel would not have been tolerated.” themselves. “I’d rather not communicate whereas the I
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He goes on to say that with the advent of feminism women I know would prefer to talk.” J
and changes in the workplace men and women have This is an important change in direction for Nick K
become more equal. “I don’t know any man who can’t Hornby, the beginnings of which can be seen in About A L
change a nappy or cook.” When asked about women Boy. As well as touching on fatherhood it has a female M
earning 20 per cent less than men he quickly points out character that tries to kill herself in a bout of depression. N
that his books only cover domestic life and there is a This is not a positive depiction of women but certainly O
long way to go. “Obviously society is still incredibly more complex than in his proceeding books. P
sexist. It’s difficult when you write about gender to talk His new novel, How To Be Good, is the first time Q
about men and yet be sympathetic to feminism.” Hornby’s main character is female. He explains: “It’s R
Hornby’s books are unbalanced because they only about a woman whose husband has a spiritual conver- S
concentrate on men. Life is confusing for everyone, sion that drives her nuts.” This could be a risky step for
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women included. He agrees: “The flaws in High Fidel- a writer so linked in the minds of the public with men
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ity and Fever Pitch are that the women aren’t rounded and football.
characters. The whole process of writing books and He claims he has not found it particularly difficult V
reading women’s letters about them has made me com- to write: “I wasn’t sitting there thinking ‘Oh my God, W
pletely rethink. I’ve now decided that the men/women what would a woman say in this situation!’ “ He has X
stuff is a red herring.” also given it to female friends and taken out parts they Y
He elaborates on his new position on gender: “There did not think were appropriate. Z

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are so familiar. They have an authenticity that read- B
ers immediately relate to. If he can do the same in his C
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next novel with a female character, it will be a major D
achievement. As he says: “If I’m going to progress as a E
writer I’ve got to stop worrying about gender and treat RSS
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Michel Houllebecq: Atomised email

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Kevin Walsh
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Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors who Bruno (Houellebecq denies that his namesake is based
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inspire hugely conflicting reactions. Some hail him on himself, but the parallels are striking). Sharing the Facebook
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as a literary giant in the European tradition, deftly same mother, they have both been abandoned by dif-
weaving philosophy, history, and science into his ferent fathers and brought up by relatives. Michel is a I
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bleak, challenging narratives, asking those questions scientific researcher at the CNRS in Paris, a cold, un- J
that other more commercially-minded authors shy sympathetic and unhappy character. Bruno is equally K
away from. Others think him hollow, pretentious, unappealing, a misfit former teacher and part-time L
showily didactic and deeply disturbed – not to men- writer, divorced and sex-obsessed. M
tion highly overrated. Houellebecq has a rather disquieting habit of includ- N
And controversial. Very controversial. In 2001, he ing large chunks of economic and social history as we O
gave an interview to the French literary magazine, Lire, plough through the decades of their childhood: the P
in which he said “Islam is a dangerous religion, as has événements of 1968, the legalisation of abortion, the Q
been since its beginnings […] I totally reject all mono- succès de scandale in the 70s of the film Emmanuelle R
theistic religions.” In September 2002 he appeared be- and so on.
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fore a tribunal in Paris on charges of inciting religious But he doesn’t stop there: we are also treated to long
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hatred, and was asked to explain himself. “All I said disquisitions on science and philosophy, not to mention
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is that their religion is stupid,” he said in his defence. particle physics and DNA. Many chapters begin with
“And that’s what you call promoting a book?” said the long – and sometimes mystifyingly irrelevant – quotes. V
president of the tribunal. “Yes, that’s right,” answered Houellebecq is undoubtedly very widely read. The W
Houellebecq, with his customary insouciance. trouble is, he wants us to know that he is. In an effort to X
Atomised (published in the US as The Elementary demonstrate just what a polymath he is, he crosses the line Y
Particles) is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and into what the French call étalage – literally, a spreading Z
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And he sometimes resorts to some very clumsy mecha- it is “very moving, gloriously, extravagantly filthy, and B
nisms to show the extent of his knowledge: at one point, very funny.” C
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Michel and Bruno have an in-depth conversation about Tellingly, the French edition features a sepia photo- D
Aldous Huxley, displaying a highly unlikely command graph of a bored-looking Houellebecq smoking a roll- E
of historical and biographical details. up held between his third an fourth fingers (a trademark RSS
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Perhaps it’s a sign of insecurity. Maybe he has more eccentricity) and a carrier bag draped over his left arm.
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in common with his namesake than he would admit. In the end, though, the book fails to weave a com- Facebook
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The result of the name- and fact-dropping is a patchy pelling story. There are too many undigested chunks
story, where the narrative flow is repeatedly interrupted. of science and politics, too many swerves from high- I
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The early part of the book follows the boys through brow philosophy to lowbrow oral sex. And far too J
their deeply unhappy childhood. These are unexcep- much étalage. K
tional, rather dull and very mundane lives, and the char- But perhaps one of the most unnerving things about L
acters fail to engage any real emotion on the reader’s Houellebecq’s books is his propensity to kill off his fe- M
part. The book swings wildly from lofty philosophical male characters. And Atomised has a high body count: N
thoughts to very basic instincts. the brothers’ mother (of natural causes), and both their O
Later, large tracts of the book are taken up with girlfriends (suicides). Which has, inevitably, led to P
Bruno’s sexual adventures. At a holiday camp – one accusations of misogyny – to add to the anti-Muslim, Q
of whose main activities seems to be cruising for anti-Semite and anti-black charges that Houellebecq R
casual sex – he encounters Christiane, a libertine who has clocked up during his turbulent career. S
introduces him to the joys of the orgy circuit. And this Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Houellebecq has
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points up a key distinction between the uptight Anglo- chosen to retreat to an island off the coast of West Cork,
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Saxon and relaxed French views towards sex (at the from which he rarely emerges. He did venture forth to
last count, there were over 400 sex clubs in France, Dublin earlier this year, when Atomised won the Im- V
catering for both échangistes – wife swappers – and the pac Literary Prize, the latest in a string of awards he’s W
more adventurous mélangistes – orgy-goers). bagged. And to Paris, to run rings round the tribunal. X
Sex sells, of course, which is why the UK version But then he’s very good a running rings round people. Y
of Atomised features a naked woman on the cover, Perhaps too good.  Z
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Gary Indiana: Rem Koolhaas: F
Resentment 282 Content 305 G
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Preserving A Harlequin 284 The K&D Sessions 308 Twitter
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Linton Kwesi Johnson: Andrey Kurkov:
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Inglan Is A Bitch 288 Death And The Penguin 310
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Ed Jones: Emma Larkin: N
This Is Pop 292 Secret Histories 312 O
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Gabriel Josipovici: Abby Lee: Q
On Trust 294 Girl With A One Track Mind 314 R
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Kevin Kelly: Wyndham Lewis:
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New Rules For The New Economy 298 Blast 319
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Gary Indiana: Resentment email

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Historically, the turn of centuries and millenniums Martinez brothers stand accused of murdering their
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have marked periods of heightened popular anxiety, wealthy parents in an ambush slaying, while around Facebook
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social unrest, collective madness, and religious mania. them swirl a discordant cast of characters possessed
From the vantage point of 1997, a little less than two- of varying degrees of spiritual and moral decay. Seth, I
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and-a-half years from two-thousand-zero-zero, our the self-serving New York reporter in town to cover J
own age seems little different: Heaven’s Gaters are the trial; Jack, his taxi-driver ex-lover, slowly dying K
hopping aboard Hale-Bopp, militia types are scanning of AIDS; Frankie, the narcissistic, Cunanenesque L
the skies for black helicopters, and millions of people hustler; Potter Phlegg, the manipulative, exploitative M
inexplicably watch Jenny Jones daily. It’s getting to be psychologist; Cassandra, the washed-up soap opera N
a pretty weird world. actress; JD, a vapid drive-time radio host – all abrade O
And it’s hard to imagine a more fertile breeding against each other, collide with one another in an P
ground for modern insanity than the supercharged, cha- exquisitely choreographed ballet of mutually-assured Q
otic maelstrom of greater Los Angeles, as intensified destruction performed to an accompaniment of lies R
and re-imagined in Resentment. Equal parts courtroom and vacant smiles.
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drama, existential lament, and blacker-than-black While Resentment’s characters gradually grind one
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comedy, author Gary Indiana’s latest offering might another into dust, the Martinez’ show/trial spirals to
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mark the first entry in a new genre: Post-Simpson Trial dizzying heights of absurdity as careerist attorneys and
fiction, a realm where brutality transforms effortlessly psychotic judges jockey for power, a struggle chroni- V
into bland, mildly-diverting mass entertainment, and cled in chillingly-real torrents of self-negating legalese W
where honour, justice, and even reality are relative nonsense. Simultaneously, the violence of the brothers’ X
concepts easily inverted by a clever attorney. crime compounds itself as Indiana’s circle of misfits Y
Resentment’s unifying thread is a trial: The teenaged begin, usually unconsciously, to act out the same be- Z
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trayals and maledictions against each other, in a more virtually mandates reader participation in the form of More A
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subtle but no less destructive fashion. In a succession of thoughtful interpretation and re-interpretation through- B
careful, precise strokes, Indiana meticulously renders out the book, leading in a roundabout way to Indiana’s C
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a portrait of a morally-malformed society whose gov- maintaining our rapt attention. D
erning principles are irrationality and amnesia, where Resentment is a fable of fin-de-siècle madness in its E
justice is a commodity and ethical considerations an most acute stage, a premonitory snapshot of a moment RSS
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irrelevancy – a world whose denizens, poisoned by when order and chaos, reason and insanity are locked
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immersion in a toxic morass of glossy images, pseudo- in fights-to-the-death, the outcomes too close to call. Facebook
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events, and hyperkinetic impermanence, struggle to Indiana has cleverly, cruelly drawn the blueprints for
retain the vestiges of humanity. It’s hell, repainted in apocalypse-in-microcosm – the whimper, not the bang, I
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garish Disney colours. which would signal that the end is near – and left it to J
Wisely avoiding the temptation to proselytize, Indiana his readers to deduce the degree to which art mirrors K
leaves it to the reader to connect the dots between Re- reality. Resentment is subtitled “a comedy”, but any L
sentment’s fiction and real-life events. While purposely- laughter is only a buffer against tears and terror. The M
glaring parallels with the Menendez and Simpson cases engine driving Resentment is Resentment, a bitterness N
abound, additional layers of possible similarity between at having arrived at an inescapable cul-de-sac en route O
art and life, such as the details of individual characters’ to the American Dream – a frenetic, endless loop where P
(psycho)pathologies and their role in governing human we’re likely to claw each other to pieces, a Roach Motel Q
interaction, are left open to interpretation. It’s a tactic that for human souls.  R
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Derek Jarman: Preserving A Harlequin email

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Nick Clapson reflects on the work of England’s quintessential Renaissance man
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By the time you read this, Derek Jarman: A Retrospec- and as such we enter into his world, and his everyday
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tive will have closed at the Barbican Centre. However, life, more as a friend than an observer – no brave face Facebook
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the Barbican Centre’s comprehensive catalogue of the is put on for us, no politeness offered. Instead, Derek
exhibition, which has been published by Thames And gives us truth and compassion, and at times pure, hon- I
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Hudson, gives a chance to re-evaluate the impact and est, anger. He leaps between the meditative contem- J
splendour of Derek Jarman’s work. Though largely fa- plation of his garden and haranguing the British film K
mous for his film-work, Jarman was also a prestigious industry for its complacency, between describing the L
artist and writer, with his artistic skills even pouring omnipresence of the nuclear reactor behind his home M
over into other diverse art-forms such as scenery design at Dungeness and the evils of what he called “het- N
and gardening (yes, gardening). rosoc”. The result is a potent, valuable set of books O
With a man whose output was so divergent, whose pulsing with pure emotion. P
character so like quicksilver, it is hard to pin him down. This truth and honesty is also a quality found in Q
And this is the beauty of Jarman. He was indefinable Jarman’s films; he eschewed the expense and contriv- R
and unique, a British maverick comparable in impor- ance of big-budget films for the simplicity of Super8
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tance to artists such as William Blake, and as such, stock. Even Jarman’s most expensive films were made
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should not allowed to drift to the side-lines of history, at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest Hollywood
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or to be pigeon-holed solely as a queer film-maker. film. His work was radically different, especially
I discovered Derek Jarman myself through his from the usual British attempts at generating some V
journals, published as Modern Nature (1991), and At form of quirky pseudo-Hollywood style. However, W
Your Own Risk (1992). Written as direct result of his this outsider position quite suited Jarman, and as he X
knowledge that he was HIV+ these books offer the said, “I am the most fortunate film director of my gen- Y
reader a startling honesty. Nothing is hidden from us, eration: I’ve only ever done what I wanted”. People Z
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have said that they find his work hard, or just unin- contemporary costume. Again, Jarman looked to the More A
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telligible, but that is part of their charm and power. past, especially to the hidden ramifications of a possible B
Jarman frequently used the camera like a paintbrush, gay history, in order to comment on the situation today. C
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with the visual quotient of a scene carrying the charge That is to say, by re-examining men such as Edward II, D
normally left to the narrative: as it were, painting with Ludwig Wittgenstein or Caravaggio Jarman could shift E
light. However, such concepts are hard to conceive the emphasis of traditional (read ‘straight’) history, and RSS
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by a generation who goes to the cinema not to be trace the previously hidden importance of a succession
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challenged, but rather, have their eyes stuffed with of homosexual men in key roles in Western intellectual Facebook
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Hollywood bubble-gum. That is not to say that such culture. However, even though his films were often se-
films don’t have their place; you just have to learn to rious in tone, Jarman always seemed to have his tongue I
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look at films by the likes of Jarman with open eyes. firmly lodged in his cheek, and concepts that could J
His films were also frequently of a revisionist tone, quite easily dissolve into pretentious drivel, frequently K
with Jarman looking back at history and re-viewing it sparkle with irreverent wit. L
through his own 20th-century eyes, and turning it into The paintings displayed at the Barbican are, like most M
something new, something pertinent. For example, retrospectives, a mixed bag. We travel from the cold N
in 1977 he released his film Jubilee, coinciding with controlled nature of his early abstract landscapes of his O
the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, blending a time-travelling youth to the fiery anger of his compelling last works, P
Elizabeth I and John Dee with oppressed and violent and so can easily trace Jarman’s origins and subsequent Q
punks in sharp commentary on contemporary Britain. progression. The curator has also had the chance to as- R
This concern for the state of the British nation is also semble some of the artist’s personal artefacts, and the S
reflected in his more complex, and yet more visually fact that people stand in rapt attention looking at such
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rewarding film The Last Of England. things as Jarman’s fountain pen or diaries is testament
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Moreover, Jarman was not afraid of re-evaluating the to the lasting power of the man himself.
classics, and produced his own idiosyncratic revisions The last section of the exhibition is the most striking, V
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the more successful with the gloomy intensity of the pitch paintings and W
version of Marlowe’s Edward II. This film, like many the dazzling outbursts that constitute the paintings that X
of his later films, utilised the strength of simplicity with were first shown in the Evil Queen exhibition. These Y
it’s sparse ahistorical sets, and mixture of period and polemical works are Jarman at his most impassioned Z

and his anger and frustration seep through the canvas. changes and grows. Innumerable plants provide islands More A
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Their uncompromising nature was matched by his last of colour that sit in the sea of shingle which flows B
film Blue. This film, with the screen saturated with an through the garden. Driftwood and flotsam punctuate C
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unchanging blue, was his most lyrical. It would be fool- the garden in the form of sculpture and ultimately serve D
hardy to try capture the power and poignancy of this to unify it with the area surrounding it. The result is a E
film in words. With the eyes confounded with nothing bounty of visual delights, made more powerful by the RSS
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but an infinite blue, you are left to the voice-over to improbability of their setting. It is characteristic that
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lead you through Jarman’s imagination and your own Jarman’s writing, even when discussing the creation of Facebook
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in a way that has never been attempted before. his garden in this book, soon breaks down, and becomes
Jarman’s home and garden at Prospect Cottage in a discussion of so much more. Surely there is no better I
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Dungeness, Kent, figure frequently in his last works, example than Derek Jarman of an artist whose work is J
be it writing or film, and some attempt to address this entwined with their life. K
has been attempted at the Barbican. Outside the gallery How, then, are we to remember this man? Should L
local children have made their own gardens à la Jarman he be placed in the shrivelled canon of British 20th- M
to quite good effect. However, nothing can recreate the century art, filed under ‘minor artist’, or should he be N
sense of isolation and strange other-worldliness present cast in the limiting role of ‘queer director’, or just dis- O
at Dungeness. It is as if here everything, including time missed as loud, over-opinionated, English eccentric? It P
itself will dissolve at moment into the vast swathes is symptomatic of artists who work in several media to Q
of shingle. His home and the others around it stand be dismissed as a jack of all trades but master of none. R
stranded in this stark landscape, now dominated and However, this would clearly not be a worthy epitaph for S
threatened by the vast nuclear reactor behind them. a man who obviously excelled in nearly every art form
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A posthumous book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995), he chose to turn his hand to. Jarman was also much
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with splendid photographs by Howard Sooley, captures more, being not only a very political man, but whose
the beauty of the place that meant so much to Jarman. work also had a great feeling for the decline of all the V
I personally had never considered that gardening could positive elements of British culture that have been sti- W
ever be considered an art form, but what Jarman cre- fled and repressed since the start of the Thatcher years. X
ated here is nothing but art, albeit more challenging to Whatever his agenda, Jarman always made himself Y
construct and maintain as it is an art that continually heard and it’s a voice that painful not to hear now. I feel, Z

then, that all us can claim a part of Derek Jarman – he rare vision must be preserved in a unified form in drafty More A
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was an important film-maker, and an undervalued and corridors of history. Jarman, with all his divergent skill B
little discussed artist, and wrote books that will surely and charm, was surely more than just the sum of his C
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stand the test of time. And yes, he was a consummate parts, and that is how he should be remembered. Go D
gardener. To lose an artist at the height of their powers and see this retrospective, watch one of the films, or E
is hard to live with, but to neglect what they left us is even read the books, but do try and take the time to RSS
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criminal. What is important now is that no matter how enter into Jarman’s world. I can assure you, it’s quite an
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fragmented he may become in our minds, this man of amazing place to be.  Facebook
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Interview [published December 1998] B
Linton Kwesi Johnson: Inglan Is A Bitch email

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Nancy Rawlinson finds legendary dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has
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not mellowed with age RSS
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Twenty years ago, a landmark album was released awareness, fighting racism, and music. Born in Chap-
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in the UK. Dread Beat An’ Blood was Linton Kwesi letown, Jamaica, in 1952 he came to England at the Facebook
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Johnson’s debut recording, the first time his political age of 11 to live with his mother in Brixton. It was an
poetry had been accompanied by the powerful beats of traumatic experience, compounded by the hostility and I
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reggae. This new form of music, revolutionary in terms racism of Britain in the early 60s. Before long he had J
of language, content and style, came to be known as joined The Black Panthers. “That’s where I learnt my K
‘dub poetry’ and Johnson is still the foremost and most politics and about my history and culture,” he has said. L
uncompromising practitioner of the art. Using the pat- “That’s where I discovered black literature, particularly M
ois of Jamaican speech, Johnson articulates the Black the work of W.E.B. DuBois, the Afro-American scholar N
British experience and uses the rhythms of reggae to who inspired me to write poetry.” O
get his message across. Armed with this new political awareness, Johnson P
In the past, he has been called a prophet. “Yeah, was laying the foundations of his future recording Q
yeah, I don’t take these things seriously. I just think it’s career while he was still at school, with the poetry and R
another media tag,” he says dismissively. “The music is drumming group, Rasta Love. After graduating from
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compatible with the poetry in so far as I am writing out Goldsmiths’ College, he began to write in earnest and
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of the reggae tradition and some of the poems are writ- his first collection of poetry was published in 1974.
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ten are within the perimeters of the reggae structure. Since then he has released three more books and a total
And it’s oral poetry and oral poetry lends itself to the of 11 albums – but that’s not all. His achievements V
rhythms of music.” outside of the studio have also been considerable. He W
Considering his commitment and personal history, has edited the journal Race Today Review, made a radio X
perhaps Johnson’s success is no great surprise. His series on Jamaican music for the BBC, reported for Y
whole life has been based around increasing political Channel Four’s race relation series The Bandung File Z
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and helped found Creation For Liberation, the seminal custodial sentence than a white person, that the ACPO More A
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Black Arts organisation of the 1980s. – the Association of Chief Police Officers – has come B
He has been involved with innumerable campaigns, out and admitted that racism is institutionalised within C
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set up his own record label and received honorary the police force, that the black nurses within the health D
degrees and awards. His work is now taught in univer- service for years have gotton a raw deal. When one E
sities up and down the country. I could go on, but you thinks of all these things, yeah, Inglan is a Bitch. I still RSS
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get the picture. There is no doubt that Linton Kwesi believe as passionately in the same things I did 20 years
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Johnson is totally committed to improving and drawing ago, and although we have made some head way, the Facebook
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attention to the Black British experience. Considering struggle for social justice is still on.”
this, it seems almost sacrilegious to ask: Is his work as As ever, that struggle is clearly articulated on his I
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relevant now as it was 20 years ago? new album, More Time. Some are already saying that J
On this point, Johnson has no doubts. In the two it is his best work yet, a work in which the political K
decades that Linton Kwesi Johnson has been making and musical sides of Linton Kwesi Johnson are more L
music, his political stance has not shifted an inch. “I strongly interwoven than ever. Ultimately, the feel is a M
think Tony Blair is a natural born Tory. He’s a natural touch lighter than in the past; the mood seems that little N
born Tory who would have been quite comfortable bit more optimistic. Johnson seems to agree. “Well, O
on the left of the Tory party with people like Kenneth some of the poems are optimistic, forward looking. I’m P
Clark and Michael Heseltine.” he tells me. And what writing about the possibilities of life. I try to make the Q
does he think the most pressing political issue of the music suit the mood of each poem. Like on ‘Reggae R
day is? Without drawing breath, he gives an emphatic, Fi Bernard’, a poem about the death of my nephew, I S
two word answer. “The police.” tried to conjure up the music of the Jamaican marching
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His 1980 collection of poetry was entitled Inglan Is bands, who would traditionally form part of the funeral
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A Bitch. Despite the many battles that have been won, procession. But to an extent, you know, it’s about the
he stands by that statement. “When one looks at what banishment of grief and the celebration of life, so in V
happened to Stephen Lawrence, when one thinks of that sense the music might be brighter. It’s a poem W
the fact that a black person is eight times more likely about how we can benefit from life.” X
to be stopped and searched than a white person, that There are also hints that this album is perhaps the Y
a black person is five times more likely to be given a most personal Johnson has ever made. Two tracks, Z

‘Hurricane Blues’ (previously released without music modern combinations of music and politics. “If it’s More A
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in 1996 on the LKJ Acapella Live album) and ‘Seasons done well, it can be very entertaining and very fine – B
of the Heart’, are “poems in which I was trying to ex- but it has to be done well. There is always a danger C
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plore some inner landscapes.” And then there is the title of the music dominating the words. You have to very D
track, ‘More Time’. careful about how you do that. But as for rap, when E
Whilst clearly a statement about the working condi- it’s done badly it’s just boring. The only rap record I RSS
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tions and hours forced upon the poor and disenfran- used to have, or I still have, is Grandmaster Flash, ‘The
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chised, I am left with the impression that it applies to Message’. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything that Facebook
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Johnson himself. “There is no reason why we can’t tops it. I never heard a rap tune that can better that.”
work less hours and enjoy our lives more,” he tells What Johnson does is outside the vagaries of musical I
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me. “But if we do get more time, we have to organise fashion and he is not a man to pander to trends. The J
ourselves to get some benefit from it. What is life if we message of the music is all important. “I do worry in a K
cannot get some pleasure from friends and family, from sense that people might forget that I’m a poet and just L
relaxation and contemplation? Most people do not have get off on the music but I always like to think of it in M
an idea of what their human potential is, we are so used this way, that the music articulated in a good way, and N
to not having time.” also the views are plain and clear and articulated well. O
As you might expect, his own preferred forms of But I don’t want people to forget that I’m a poet.” P
relaxation are far from extravagant. “I enjoy being with So how does a man who’s political views have not Q
people. Socialising. The simple things, the simple things changed for 20 years, and who’s musical style resists R
in life are the ones that give me pleasure. Going to the influences manage to sound so contemporary? And S
pub and having a pint, playing a game of dominoes or a how does he manage to cross so many borders and
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game of pool. Being with my grandchild. Little things reach so many people? Maybe it’s because the issues
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like that. Reading a good book. Eating a good meal.” he writes about are still as relevant today as they were
Some may feel that although Johnson is progressive in 1978 and until they go away, Linton Kwesi Johnson V
in his ideals, his music style bears no mark of the revolu- will always be there, dragging them quite literally onto W
tion in technology that has taken place since he started the centre stage. X
recording. “Well, I’m not a luddite in that respect,” he “In a sense, even though a lot of my poems are Y
says, although he seems ambivalent about other more about the black experience, as well as other things, Z

I’m not a ghetto artist. My audience is not a black More A

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audience, my audience is a broad cross section of B
people, so I don’t think I’m preaching to the con- C
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verted.” He has played all over the world, from D
Japan to Turkey, Iceland to Brazil, and with his new E
album, he looks set to attract a whole new audience. RSS
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“I just make my records and write my poems and I’m
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just grateful that somebody bothers to listen to it,” he Facebook
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says. Somehow, I think it is the audiences and record
buying public who should be grateful.  I
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Ed Jones: This Is Pop email

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Gary Marshall
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It wasn’t a rock gig, it was an event. Journalists from weight around in TV studios to thinly-disguised allega-
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all the major music papers were there, and even the tions about Cast. The only band spared Jones’ vitriol is Facebook
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local newspaper had marked the event with a special Stiff Little Fingers, with singer Jake Burns portrayed
supplement. Celebrities air-kissed backstage, and the as a decent bloke in an industry notorious for backstab- I
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band took the stage in front of thousands of people. For bing and one-upmanship. J
Wigan musician Ed Jones, the gig should have been a Although Jones’ anger sometimes overpowers the K
triumphant homecoming, a sign that the years of tours story he’s trying to tell, This Is Pop is a fascinating in- L
and recording had been worthwhile. Unfortunately, sight into the realities of the record business. As Jones M
Jones was in the audience. describes in detail, very few bands are actually making N
The band was The Verve, and the gig was the now- any money – even though they were appearing on Top O
legendary show at Haigh Hall. Jones was the bassist in Of The Pops, the seven members of the Tansads had a P
the Tansads and, a few years previously, had played to combined income of £25 per week. Touring is shown Q
packed venues with The Verve as the band’s support in its true colours, and the bickering over publishing R
act. While Richard Ashcroft and co went stellar, The royalties is depressingly familiar.
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Tansads stumbled from one disaster to another. Hating It’s obvious from the text that Jones still believes that
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his former friends, Jones quit the band in disgust. the Tansads could and should have been pop stars, al-
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Is Ed Jones bitter? You bet. Ostensibly the story of though few non-fans are likely to agree. For most peo-
a band whose success never matched their ambition, ple, the Tansads were an uncomfortable cross between V
This Is Pop is an extended v-sign to Jones’ former band The Levellers and Half Man Half Biscuit, a moderately W
members, record company and peers. Over the course talented novelty band forever destined to play the bot- X
of the book he paints a less than flattering picture of tom of the bill at festivals. Jones clearly doesn’t see Y
several indie heroes, from Jarvis Cocker throwing his it that way, although his occasional descriptions of the Z
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band’s songs and lyrics do little to dispel the impression at all. Like most autobiographies, there’s a strong ele- More A
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that the band’s lack of success might not just be due to ment of self-justification running throughout the book, B
the machinations of an evil record industry. and the few attempts at self-criticism are unconvincing. C
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One of the problems with This Is Pop is that the Had Jones waited a few years before committing pen D
events described in the book are relatively recent, and as to paper, however, This Is Pop would have lacked the E
a result Jones lacks the self-awareness found in similar splenetic outbursts that make it so compelling. RSS
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books such as Giles Smith’s Lost In Music. While no For all its faults, This Is Pop is very enjoyable and
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doubt important to Jones, the frequent tangents describ- Jones is an entertaining writer. The vitriol is balanced Facebook
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ing how he comes to terms with the death of his father by some very funny moments and, if you have even a
sit uncomfortably with the rest of the story, and the con- passing interest in the music business, you’ll find plenty I
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stant bitterness frequently damages the credibility of his to get your teeth into. If you’re an aspiring musician, J
tale. In particular, the portrayal of Tansads singer John This Is Pop is an essential read – if you reach the end of K
Kettle is so devoid of any redeeming qualities that you the book and still want to be a pop star, you’re probably L
start to wonder how Jones could have worked with him insane enough to make it.  M
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Gabriel Josipovici: On Trust email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian, it cannot be admitted without suggesting the possible
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was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked interdependency of real and written worlds. The impli- Facebook
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what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to cations of such a possibility, resisted by Tarbuck, has
reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!” led to what we might call the literature of suspicion, I
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He didn’t elaborate. You wouldn’t expect him to. Actu- where doubt hinders every move toward plain truth J
ally, he repeated the phrase, perhaps impressed by the (think of the daunting classics of modern philosophy) as K
sudden acquisition of critical acuity: “Pure escapism!” well as to the literature of pure escape. This opposition L
His answer troubled me. What was being escaped, I is usually referred to as “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow”. M
wondered. As it was a chat show, answers weren’t on However, because neither wants to contemplate any N
the agenda and the host carried on about something alternative, both positions are essentially the same. O
else. Of course, if he had pursued the issue, the ratings Gabriel Josipovici’s new critical work suggests as P
would have declined as the audience pursued “pure much. On Trust: Art And The Temptations Of Suspicion Q
escapism” on another channel. With no answer for me, is an investigation into how admitting to the unworldli- R
however, the problem remained on my mind. ness of literature might yet still allow free range into
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After reading this book, I realised why I was trou- truth. “The problem”, the author says, “is how to keep
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bled: Tarbuck wants literature to escape words as suspicion from turning into cynicism and trust from
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well as the world. This had not occurred to me. The turning into facileness”. Initially, the suspicion of lit-
words allow him to suspend his bellowed belief in their erature described in the book seems to be a problem V
unworldliness, allowing an escape into another world. of our century’s worst events rather than Tarbuck’s W
But the possibility that words might construe his belief everyday psychology. After all, the mechanised slaugh- X
in the primacy of the real world, in the same way as it ter of the First World War prompted the challenges of Y
facilitates escape into the other, is not admitted. Indeed, Modernism, and the atrocities of the Second prompted Z
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Adorno’s infamous phrase that “to write lyric poetry deepest possible insight. Josipovici sums up this shift More A
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after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But this book pursues in a startlingly sweeping passage: B
suspicion of art deeper into the roots of our civilisation. “[the] denial of the dual vision … in the end entails C
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Josipovici traces the turn away from trust as far back a denial of the world we live in and, ultimately, of our- D
as Plato’s response to Homer and St Paul’s to the Bible. selves as embodied beings existing within that world. E
Plato turned the gaze of reason on The Iliad and found Yet such is the nature of suspicion that, once unleashed, RSS
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it wanting, while St Paul took strict moral lessons from it appears to produce a totally convincing and self-con-
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Old Testament stories where, as Josipovici show us, sistent world, not simply an alternative way of looking Facebook
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there is only ambiguity. Both responses indicate a radi- at things but the only way there can possibly be.”
cal shift in consciousness, one that we are still mired This is remarkable because it questions the cultural I
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in. The essay on Homer’s epics and Greek tragedy traditions of two millennia. Yet it is precisely tradition J
reminds us of what came before. Josipovici calls it “the that Josipovici sees as the way to resist suspicion. For K
double vision”: “a sense of life in all its goodness, hap- despite the internalisation of the shift inward, the legacy L
piness, abundance; and death as finality, which must of the ancients remained enough to appear in the work M
be accepted as part of that abundance.” Despite our of the most profound artists; Dante and Shakespeare N
promisingly Godless age, this sense of life and death in particular. They show how we can always turn to O
remains alien, probably because there is a space left the past for help. These writers appear as pivotal in the P
by God’s departure. We would rather have this space history of Western literature, and so too in the story this Q
for our purpose than be void of purpose, to rephrase book tells. R
Nietzsche. Josipovici says this is the legacy of Plato’s In spite of working within a craft tradition, both writ- S
and St Paul’s removal of death as finality. Without the ers managed to include in their work the sense of its
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immortality of the soul, the real world of goodness, breakdown. Dante’s troubled yet necessary move away
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happiness and abundance comes under suspicion. from Latin into vernacular Italian was made with the
Emphasis is then placed on the individual. He or help, literally and fictionally, of Virgil, and Shakespeare V
she is subtly dislocated from the communal tradition. adapted stories of kings losing authority (Richard II and W
As a result ‘a whole new world of inwardness’ is Lear being the examples here) to represent the ‘essence X
opened. Hence the rise in Confessional literature (St. of a vanishing world’ – that is, the tradition of consensus Y
Augustine, Rousseau), something still mistaken for the turning into one of authority – although of course ‘au- Z

thority’ necessarily destroys tradition; authority asserts. to some daffodils. That ‘self-expression’ is a limited More A
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Without consensus, the old forms were compromised, anarchy may explain why contemporary art has lost the B
and there wasn’t any ready-made replacement. respect it once had. As art strives for the greater truth, C
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What fascinates Josipovici is the way Dante and it has to admit to its limits – words on a page – and D
Shakespeare renewed their respective arts without de- thereby undermine its authority. Many budding artists, E
nying this change. They did not become sterile artists discouraged by this paradox and keen to appeal to the RSS
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asserting dead formulas, nor did they lapse into silence. newly suspicious public, accept that writing is only a
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Their Romantic descendants, on the other hand, were plaything, a place of escape, mitigated perhaps by social Facebook
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plagued by both sterility and silence. Even those who or historical relevance. The best thinkers turn instead to
did manage to create something found it was not what disciplines (the very word reveals its attraction) such as I
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they expected. Wordsworth’s major work is only the science, politics and philosophy, where the truth does J
prelude to a grander work that never got written, and not have to rely on words (so they assume). Literature K
Coleridge’s most powerful poems were about the loss of gets Irvine Welsh. L
his poetic sensibility. The Great Work became increas- So, when Josipovici reaches the 20th century, the M
ingly difficult to conceive, not because everything had pressure is at its peak. Literature has lost much of N
been done already, but because the limits provided by its pre-eminence; it has been superseded by other O
consensus had disappeared, and this is a double-edged forms. Yet perhaps those who claim that film is the P
freedom: having no limit is also a limit. It is a condition most important art of the 20th century are right only Q
we are still with. Wordsworth and Coleridge managed in the way they are right if they say that Totalitarian- R
to achieve something only in the questioning of their ism is its most important political system. Film, like S
authority. Josipovici shows this was done as a response a tyrannical regime, depends on appearances. It bears
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to the change, as Dante and Shakespeare had responded no reflexive commentary. Literature is different.
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before them. Implicitly, it refutes Romantic notions of Josipovici shows how three otherwise very dissimilar
the centrality of individual psychology and biography. 20th-century writers responded to their suspicion of V
Still, however, our culture assumes personal author- art with reflexive commentary. Now this can often W
ity to be the pinnacle of artistic achievement. So the lead to a novel without narrative tension, it’s what X
popular awareness of the Romantics remains one of gives ‘experimental’ art a bad name, but what makes Y
‘self-expression’ – the assertion of the self in response Proust, Kafka and Beckett special is the tension within Z

their work. Josipovici argues that this is the tension Modernists it had to be achieved, like a game already More A
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between extreme suspicion and the miraculous trust lost in advance; something we resist instinctively. B
of each writer in the act of writing. The essays on Kafka and Beckett are equally illu- C
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In the first essay, he makes this point in exhilarating minating. In each, Josipovici makes close readings to D
fashion by showing how Paul de Man, a famed modern show how their work moves forward without lapsing E
deconstructor of literary pretension, misread Proust to into cynicism or facileness, or if it does, how each writer RSS
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such an extent that Proust becomes the deconstructor learns from it. It reiterates Joyce’s words about mis-
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of theoretical pretension to come. What De Man disap- takes being the portals of discovery, at least to a genius. Facebook
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proves of is Proust’s openness to change, traced over But perhaps they are geniuses because they learn. And
the 3,000 pages of In Search Of Lost Time, when he perhaps true learning requires an element of trust, an el- I
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should be demanding single, certain truth. De Man is, ement of self-sacrifice. This would complicate applica- J
Josipovici persuades us, an unwitting Romantic who tions of, say, evolutionary psychology to the production K
has mistaken disillusionment for truth. Proust, it seems, of art. Still, one might see this term “trust” representing L
is the true realist, helping us to see the overall shape of the author’s hesitation before commitment in that it is M
life, where change and death are central, obscured only a nebulous term, and also Romantic. Plato and St Paul N
by our everyday abstractions of reality. “In our daily would then have good reason to be suspicious. Perhaps. O
life, we are too busy, in too much of a hurry, to respond But at least it follows its own logic in not prescribing P
fully to people or places”, Josipovici writes. “It takes a certain kind of art and instead leaves future artists to Q
death to jolt us out of our abstractions, to make us realise find their own way. In the meantime, On Trust helps us R
what the person really was in the fullness of their being. toward to the space where this rare art might emerge, a
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Death or art.” This reminds us of his reading of Homer. place that turns out to be not one of mystical revelation,
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But whereas in ancient times such jolting gravity came but as ordinary as life and death itself, and perhaps all
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lightly, as it was internalised, with Proust and the other the more revelatory for that. 
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Kevin Kelly: New Rules For The New Economy email

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Chris Mitchell
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Despite its dry title, Kevin Kelly’s book isn’t just the executive editor of Wired magazine, Kelly skilfully
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another self-styled business bible for the information avoids falling into the trap of proclaiming technologi- Facebook
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age. Instead, it’s an overview of what he terms the cal utopia. He acknowledges that the idea of a silicon
“network economy”, which is not only superseding chip in every item may seem sinister to some and em- I
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the old paradigms of the industrial economy but trans- phasises that technology is not a global panacea. J
forming how we live. But his arguments about the rise of the network K
The network economy has been brought about by economy are made all the more convincing by his L
the ever-increasing connectivity between machines, continual reference to real-world examples, such as M
most obviously demonstrated by the internet. But Kelly corporate behemoths General Motors and IBM strug- N
argues that such connectivity goes much deeper. The gling to adapt to new demands precisely because of O
continually decreasing cost of silicon chips means that their size. What was once their big advantage has now P
there will soon be one embedded in every object that become a disadvantage. Kelly is not so much interested Q
we make, from computers to clothes to chocolate bars. in speculation about the future as to what is happening R
These “dots of intelligence”, as Kelly terms them, at the moment.
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bring about the connection of everything to everything For the consumer in the street, this flow of information
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and with it, the flow of information required for com- should mean that they increasingly get exactly what they
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merce to make ever more informed decisions about want, as companies stop producing for mass markets and
satisfying the demands of the consumer, wherever they start catering for sizeable minority markets. This extends V
are in the world. It’s those businesses which react fast- from tangible products to information itself. The way in W
est to the changing need of their customers who will which the net is beginning to overshadow television as a X
prosper from the network economy. news source is one such example. Y
While one might expect visionary hyperbole from The only subject which Kelly doesn’t address is the Z
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glib use of the phase “global economy”, which in real- businesses, it seems strange that a huge section of More A
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ity misses out most of Africa and Asia, where many the world’s inhabitants appear to have been ignored. B
have never made a phone call, let alone encountered a New Rules For The New Economy does an excel- C
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silicon chip. lent job of articulating the realities of the network D
For a book which discusses the new opportunities economy, but it also begs the question about those E
that technology is bringing both to consumers and outside it.  RSS
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Feature [published April 2000] B
Naomi Klein: Ad Nauseum email

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Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo
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“If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill your- Klein covers issues as diverse as labour rights, censor-
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self… there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s ship and education, and how the rise of the brands has Facebook
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spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are affected them. The resulting book is likely to disturb
fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves – it’s the even the most hardened of cynics. I
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only way to save your fucking soul.” – Bill Hicks “When deep space exploitation ramps up, it will be J
After reading No Logo, you may feel that Bill Hicks corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar K
was understating things a little: by the end of the first Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.” L
chapter you’ll be en route to the nearest McDonalds – Fight Club M
with a crate of Molotov cocktails. In the early chapters of the book, Klein describes N
No Logo is a book about brands, which means it’s a the rise of the brands. Originally an importer of cheap O
book about popular culture – Golden Arches, the Nike Japanese clothing, Nike successfully reinvented itself P
‘swoosh’, Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks cof- as a “lifestyle company”, selling an ideal rather than Q
fee. It’s about the television you watch and the newspa- any particular physical product. As Klein reports, the R
pers you read, the theme parks you visit and the films most successful brands don’t actually make anything
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you go to see. It’s about magazines and rock music, – from Tommy Hilfiger to Nike, they outsource their
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universities and the internet. In short, it’s a book about manufacturing, and the companies themselves concen-
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everyday reality – or, rather, what lies behind it. trate on the all-important brand ubiquity.
The connection between brands and corporate irre- Through advertising, the companies encourage peo- V
sponsibility has been highlighted before – Nike’s links ple to buy products that act as advertisements for the W
with third world exploitation are well documented – but brand itself, turning a nation into what one executive X
No Logo digs much deeper. In an attempt to describe gleefully describes as “walking billboards”. Levi’s Y
the rise of anti-corporatism and ‘culture jamming’, repaints an entire street to promote its Silver Tab jeans, Z
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footwear companies become synonymous with sport- achievements that have undoubtedly helped to make More A
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ing achievement, and beer companies co-opt music the world a better place.” – Barry Delaney, creative B
festivals to promote their products. Like the narrator partner at Delaney Fletcher Bozell, Management Today C
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in Fight Club, customers don’t choose products on the Where No Logo excels is in the chapters detailing the D
basis of price or effectiveness; instead, they ask them- ‘achievements’ that the above reviewer believes “have E
selves “what sort of dinner set defines me as a person?” undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place”. RSS
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Where No Logo surprises is when it describes the Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands
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less obvious, and arguably less ethical, forms of brand have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers, Facebook
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promotion. According to Klein, companies such as increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic
Tommy Hilfiger use black ghettos as seedbeds for their wages, and the continual erosion of workers’ rights. I
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brands, recognising the white middle-class fetish for One executive responds to calls for a “living wage” by J
black urban culture and employing local youths to ‘talk saying, apparently without irony, “while the concept K
up’ products to their peers. A similar technique was is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities L
used by the Daewoo car company, which paid students and realities of our business environment”. When two M
to drive its cars and enthuse about them at every op- McDonalds employees successfully win the right to N
portunity in an all too real echo of The Truman Show. union recognition – almost unheard of in the fast food O
If you spend any time on the internet, you’ll see enter- industry – the company simply shuts down the branch. P
tainment companies doing the same thing on message Klein argues that McDonalds has deliberately pre- Q
boards and newsgroups. sented itself as a company that employs teenagers while R
Klein doesn’t need to lecture you about the increas- they look for their first ‘real’ job. Despite a workforce S
ing ubiquity of sales messages – she lets the facts speak that is considerably older and better educated than the
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for themselves as she describes universities where pimply youths of repute, this successful image-making
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Coca-Cola is “the official soft drink”, schools where enables the company to keep hours and wages at levels
the mega-brands have their logos on textbooks and toi- which, in any other industry, would attract howls of V
let cubicles, and university departments wholly reliant protest. Klein also describes the conditions inside call W
on corporate sponsorship. centres, which have been described elsewhere as “the X
“No Logo demeans the causes it purports to celebrate dark, satanic mills of the technological revolution”. Y
by offering a narrow, fashion victim’s perspective on In Britain, as in America, call centres are one of the Z

few growth industries, traditionally located in areas of class interests as well. Journalists entering the system More A
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high male unemployment and employing a workforce are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to B
largely comprised of part-time, female – and low-paid these ideological pressures” – Noam Chomsky C
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– workers. One key area highlighted by No Logo is the increas- D
One of the most disturbing parts of the book is ingly incestuous corporate world, where the same E
when it focuses on the issue of censorship. As the companies own television stations, record companies RSS
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book explains, the strategies of retailers such as Wal- and newspapers. British readers will be familiar with
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Mart – essentially, bulldozing the competition out of the Sun newspaper’s regular plugs for Sky TV and Fox Facebook
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business – means that, as one record company execu- Movies, all of whom share the same parent company,
tive admits, “Wal-Mart is the only game in town”. It’s but the book describes how the links between com- I
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something the chain hasn’t been slow to realise, and panies can alter the news itself. An expose of theme J
the company’s pro-family stance means that it regu- parks by ABC was spiked after the reporters uncovered K
larly practices censorship. Magazine covers have to shocking events at Disney, ABC’s owners, and Klein L
be pre-vetted by the company; if they aren’t and Wal- describes a number of similar occurrences in other M
Mart feels the cover is ‘inappropriate’, the publication news media. N
will be de-listed – in other words, the retailer will This ‘corporate synergy’ has an effect on politics, O
never stock that publication again. Record companies too. Klein recounts how journalists are expected to P
regularly tone down releases to make them appropri- give certain politicians an easy ride if those politicians Q
ate for Wal-Mart’s censors, and magazines know bet- are responsible for handing out valuable broadcasting R
ter than to feature anything less than wholesome. It’s licences to a newspaper’s parent company – a tradition S
a worrying trend as, through sheer economic muscle, that’s also well-established in the UK.
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Wal-Mart effectively controls what the public is al- Klein argues that corporate interference can also
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lowed to read, watch or listen to. cost lives. The majority of American universities work
“Media concentration is high, and increasing. Fur- in ‘partnership’ with brands, carrying out research or V
thermore, those who occupy managerial positions in helping develop new designs for training shoes. Klein W
the media … belong to the same privileged elites, and asks whether such links devalue the traditional inde- X
might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, pendence of universities – almost every sponsorship Y
and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own contract, explains Klein, includes a ‘gagging clause’ Z

that prevents any criticism of the corporate benefactor. “Let’s remember November 30 and the days that More A
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The tale of the student expelled for wearing a Pepsi followed as the launch of the Seattle Rebellion, the B
t-shirt to his college’s Coca-Cola day is amusing, but anti-corporate resistance that will reshape society in C
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Klein quickly follows this by describing how corporate- the next 10 years. It wasn’t a skirmish or an opening D
sponsored drug trials uncovered potentially fatal side salvo, but a manifesto etched in the streets by tens of E
effects in the sponsor’s products. When the researchers thousands of people.” – Adbusters RSS
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attempted to publish their findings in scientific journals, The closing chapters of No Logo investigate the grow-
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the universities were threatened with the termination of ing number of protests against globalisation, of which Facebook
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their lucrative sponsorship contracts, and the research- the Seattle Riots of late 1999 and the current anti-GM
ers were promptly sacked. food campaigns have been the most visible. Although I
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On the face of it, sponsorship seems the ideal solu- both events occurred after the book’s completion, they J
tion to the growing problem of funding for educational help to reinforce Klein’s conclusion that the rise of K
institutions, but many campaigners are worried about global brands and increasing consumer awareness is L
the growing presence of commercially funded learn- leading to a growing backlash. M
ing materials in schools and colleges: as the Centre One of the most visible forms of anti-corporatism N
for Commercial-Free Schools notes, “when [the] is ‘culture jamming’, espoused by groups such as O
Consumers Union collected and evaluated examples Adbusters and the band Negativland. Culture jam- P
of these materials, it found that 80 percent contained ming attempts to subvert the ubiquitous advertising Q
biased or incomplete information, and promoted a messages by spoofing them or altering their meaning R
viewpoint that favoured consumption of the sponsor’s in Situationist-style pranks, and the Adbusters site in S
product or service or otherwise favoured the com- particular offers a ‘culture jammer’s toolkit’ together
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pany and its economic agenda”. In an article aimed with a gallery of spoof adverts.
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at schoolchildren, activist magazine Adbusters argues Klein rightly questions the effectiveness of these
that “companies profit by changing the way you think. tactics. While the proponents talk of their activities V
Representatives of the drug Prozac will come to your with missionary zeal, the corporations are hardly W
school to ‘teach’ you about depression. Exxon has changing their policies as the result of a few spoof ad- X
[an] ecology curriculum that shows how clean the verts. As Klein points out, culture jamming has been Y
environment of Alaska is”. co-opted by the very advertisers it aims to subvert – Z

see the recent “image is nothing. Thirst is everything” the tide of globalisation and media concentration. The More A
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campaign by Sprite, or MTV’s continual adoption book rightly highlights the role of the internet in help- B
of ‘underground’ imagery to reinforce its own brand ing activists to organise and disseminate information, C
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identity. Even anti-corporatism has become a market- and the outcry over genetically modified foods dem- D
able commodity, as the success of major studio picture onstrates the effect that a well-organised, single-issue E
Fight Club demonstrates. campaign can have. By comparison, the demonstrations RSS
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Klein is more enamoured with activists such as against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle seemed
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the defendants in the McLibel trial, who successfully to have no clear agenda and, by degenerating into riots, Facebook
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raised awareness of many of McDonalds’ activities, made it easy for the media to dismiss any legitimate
and the semi-political Reclaim the Streets movement. protest as the work of subversives and ‘terrorists’. As I
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Rather than the outlandish hippies the media portrays Klein points out, Adbusters magazine is starting to J
them to be, Klein discovers that the people involved resemble the very media companies it urges its readers K
in the movement are attempting to make people think to fight against, while she cheerfully admits the irony of L
about the way in which every available part of civic massive global corporations publishing anti-corporate M
space is saturated with advertising. polemics such as No Logo, which are marketed just like N
It’s in this section of the book that No Logo falters. any other product. O
While Klein clearly believes that Reclaim The Streets No Logo is a powerful read – Chomsky without the P
is one of a number of groups that will define the politics paranoia – and, if you have even the slightest interest Q
of the future, the fact that most of the population believe in popular culture, it’s an essential one. Unfortunately, R
the group’s members are all drug-crazed anti-car crust- while it’s easy to share Klein’s concerns, it’s much
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ies shows the difficulties inherent in swimming against harder to share her optimism about the future. 
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Rem Koolhaas: Content email

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Edmund Hardy
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Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother heavy, brick-like publication. Content is paperback
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and has come up with a new concept: Big Vermeer. I and flimsy, colourful and kaleidoscopic. “Dense, Facebook
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imagined contestants marooned in very detailed inte- cheap, disposable” as the editor says on page 16. “It
riors. Actually, the connection is more an art-historical is almost out of date already. Content is dominated I
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musing: we want to see people doing things indoors, by a single theme, ‘Go East’. It is an attempt to il- J
and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas lustrate the architect’s ambiguous relations with the K
now it’s ‘A contestant in the diary room’. It is “an forces of globalization, an account of seven years L
alchemy of transparency and daylight” which trades spent scouring the earth – not as business traveller M
in intimacy. This is one of around 80 articles, features or backpacker but as a vagabond – roving, searching N
and graphic presentations rearranged into a book from for an opportunity to realise the visions that make O
their original place in Content, the magazine of Rem staying at home torturous. Content is, beyond all, P
Koolhaas’ OMA-AMO firm. a tribute to OMA-AMA’s commitment to engaging Q
There’s something ineffably cool about Koolhaas, the world by inviting itself to places where it has no R
that wiry and opinionated architect who is utopian authority, places where it doesn’t ‘belong.’” Kool-
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and Postmodern, who floats in “the amniotic fluid of haas wants this book to be the equivalent of doing
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global fashion” and who has designed many a dazzling the splits in classical ballet: a moment, immobile,
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project – see his in-construction fortune-cookie shaped, stretched between realization and speculation, as, I
criss-cross silver design for China Central Television suspect, he believes architecture to be. V
in Beijing. In his practice the idealism and breadth of a This book is a compendium, a glossy cabinet of idea, W
Mies van der Rohe or a Walter Gropius is fused with a observation, wit from Rem and his associates. It has X
political and social engagement with the world. politics but no single viewpoint. It arcs from the US west Y
OMA’s previous statement book was SMLXL, a big, coast to Japan. It is various but always interesting like a Z
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particularly high quality global magazine. imagination as did New York’s World Fair of 1939 More A
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It begins by cataloguing ‘urbicide’ – violence in urban and Osaka’s 1970 Expo: tying into Content’s theme B
environments – from the “subversion by mass transit” of ‘going East’, the forthcoming Expo 2010 is seen C
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of Los Angeles to “cyclical construction, restriction, as an opportunity to reorient the world’s idea of itself D
and destruction” in Jerusalem; West Bank and Gaza and its designs for the future. I particularly enjoyed E
settlements. The articles here are urgent, sometimes a piece on libraries and the search for civic space – RSS
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playful, always serious. Koolhaas finds “the greatest “The library represents, maybe with the prison, the
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concentration of Utopias ever known” in Moscow; the last of the uncontested moral universes. The moral Facebook
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idea and practice of a museum is challenged in arti- goodness of the library is intimately connected to the
cles on LACMA (LA’s big all-round gallery) and the conceptual value of the book” – and the Koolhaas I
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Hermitage in relation to the market influence; Prada is solution, in Seattle, is a large honeycombed building J
seen askance in ‘Prada Yada’ and other pieces. There’s of huge spaces and screens showing the arrival and K
a long and excited, er, presentation (full of maps and exit of books complete with a new “continuous rib- L
figures and ideas about the need to build a “Eurasian bon” numbering system from 000 to 999 to replace M
arc”) on the EU and its political possibilities. Koolhaas the “much-compromised” Dewey Decimal. N
has designed a new flag which consists of all the EU Whether one likes the idea of a central Mixing O
national flags squashed into strips and presented from Chamber and a Book Spiral or not, the energy and P
west to east: a kind of United Colors bar-code, a strong scope of his plans and ideas are exhilarating. Every Q
‘ID’ to stand next to the US Stars and Stripes and the regular user of public libraries can relate to the search R
blue and white of the UN. Britain’s tabloids got hold of for biblio perfection. My personal favourites are the S
that one and The Sun soon launched an attack: “nutty”, beautifully lit Berlin City library and the pod-interior
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“batty”, they said while reporting how “expert opinion” at Peckham. Turn the page and Content moves on to
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had deemed the flag to be “a deckchair.” plywood minimalism, perfume flasks to mix your own
Elsewhere, we look forward to Expo 2010 in male-female smells while on the go, and a short his- V
‘Shanghai Exponential’ and consider what makes tory of post-Berlin wall world politics (‘The Second W
a successful World Expo. London’s 1851 Great Empire’). X
Exhibition showcased the advances of industrial That’s not to mention the 1km high Hyperbuilding Y
revolution in all nations, and made a mark on popular or ‘Red Radio’, the story of how Communists in the Z

60s battled for Africa’s radio-waves in their belief that who write idiosyncratic and visionary books – Le Cor- More A
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global revolution would start on the heart-shaped conti- busier’s Towards A New Architecture, Robert Venturi’s B
nent. And then the man who once wrote Delirious New Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture – the C
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York, writes about that city in decline, and instead gets contribution of Koolhaas’ latest is in its wide-ranging D
delirious over Hanoi, Shanghai and Seoul. attack, its fearless engagement with the world – fear- E
Rem Koolhaas is ever the iconoclast – against the less in that it accepts its own ephemeral place at one RSS
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grain, outspoken, inspired. In the tradition of architects particular moment. This, then, is Content. 
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Kruder And Dorfmeister: The K&D Sessions email

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Chris Mitchell
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Despite the rise of dance music in the 90s to the point there in the first place. Cue Kruder and Dorfmeister,
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where it’s arguably overtaken rock’n’roll as the defining two DJs from Vienna who’ve quietly produced some of Facebook
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sound of popular music, remixing is still something of the most stunning and startling remixes in the last five
a dirty word. It’s unsurprising given the way pedestrian years and made it their trademark to leave the spirit of I
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remixes are continually used as filler on singles and a track intact while twisting it into something utterly J
even albums when an artist has run out of inspiration to different. In fact they’ve been so quiet this album came K
produce anything new. out last year and I only heard it a month ago… L
That’s not to say that there aren’t remixes which beat The K&D Sessions is a double CD compilation of the M
the original track hands down – Fatboy Slim’s chart- best of those mixes – 140 minutes of music that takes in N
topping reworking of Cornershop’s ‘Brimful Of Asha’ artists as far apart as Roni Size, Depeche Mode, Bomb O
being a classic example – but they tend to be the sonic The Bass and Bones Thugs ‘N Harmony. Citing names P
exception rather than the rule. Even when remixes are is a bit pointless though, because it would be wrong to Q
entrusted to other artists, there’s no guarantee of qual- think of The K&D Sessions as just a bunch of individ- R
ity, as exemplified by the uniformly awful mixes of ual remixes, only listening to the tracks where you’re
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Underworld’s floorfilling anthem ‘King Of Snake’, familiar with the original. Half the fun is that K&D
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murdered by the likes of Dave Clarke, Slam and, er, take on tracks by folk you’ve never heard of – Rainer
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Fatboy Slim. Trüby Trio, anyone? K&D revel in mixing all sorts of
The easy way out is to produce a track that sounds music, whether it’s rap, jazz, jungle or whatever other V
nothing like the original whatsoever. This may well genre you care to name. As such, it’s an immaculately W
produce something musically more rewarding, but it’s crafted, unclassifiable album to get lost in, where every X
missing the real point of remixing – and that’s bringing track imperceptibly segues into the next so that you’re Y
something new to a track without destroying what’s never quite sure where you are, but wherever you are is Z
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worth hanging around. sublimely moody mix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Useless’, More A
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As you’d expect from a record on a label called G- where Dave Gahan’s weary voice is given centre stage B
Stoned, the overall atmosphere of The K&D Sessions over nothing besides pared down bass and is all the C
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is laid back – you won’t hear any screeching 303s more powerful for it. Not that K&D are techno-angst D
or encounter superfast bpms here. Instead, there are merchants, producing beautiful but chilly soundscapes E
beautifully precise drums and sublimely warm deep in their bedrooms – their sound is organic, elegant, RSS
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bass lines which create their own distinct sound with- eclectic and endlessly inventive.
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out becoming repetitious. Add their ear for dropping In short, then, The K&D Sessions is one of those Facebook
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just enough melody over the top to create a simple but albums that comes out of the blue, providing a whole
opulent sound, and you have music that makes 3 in the bunch of surprises to make even the most jaded get I
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morning a wonderful place to be. If you really want a excited about music again. It’s a bit like when a friend J
half-arsed “sounds-a-bit-like” reference, then it would gives you a tape of bands you’ve never heard of and K
have to be David Holmes, but the comparison doesn’t you wind up leaping round the living room listening L
do either parties justice. to it. These are remixes which transcend their original M
K&D are also refreshingly fond of keeping vocal incarnations to become K&D’s own and a whole new N
tracks almost intact, rather than obliterating them com- universe to explore with it. What more do you want for O
pletely. Nowhere does this stand out more than their £12.99?  P
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Andrey Kurkov: Death And The Penguin email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt reader: his pet Misha, the penguin of the title. Misha
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plainness of the prose combine with the perverse con- came from an impoverished local zoo when they of- Facebook
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geniality of the foreground subject matter to make one fered its animals as pets to anyone who could provide
carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot food for them. Viktor took the penguin because, I
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is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared, abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had J
that is, to the foreground. been feeling lonely: “But Misha brought his own kind K
Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives in a tenement of loneliness”, we’re told, “and the result was … two L
block in Kiev, capital of the relatively new nation of complementary lonelinesses”. M
Ukraine (not The Ukraine). Like many of us in the De- Misha’s presence in the novel is glorious. Whatever N
regulated World, he doesn’t have a permanent job and Viktor does, Misha is somewhere in the background O
relies instead on contacts to bag the odd journalistic asking for attention by not asking. We always want to P
assignment. There is a lot of time off. We join him as he know what he’s doing, how he is, what he’s feeling. Q
tries to make use of his empty time by writing fiction, Whenever we read of Viktor’s exploits, and they are R
something he’s always dreamed of doing on a perma- copious, we think of Misha standing somewhere in the
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nent basis. He wants to escape the teasing ghostliness background, his emotions, if he has any, concealed by
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of the short story and write what the real world thinks his expressionless exterior. The only hint of an answer
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is the real thing: a novel. Instead, he sits at his kitchen comes when Viktor runs him a cold bath and he flops
table and writes another short story, later hawking it into it happily, or when he is taken to a frozen lake dur- V
around a few newspapers. ing the winter months and he disappears into a fishing W
This might be the beginning of many other worthy, hole for ages, bewildering alcoholic fisherman when he X
socially accurate novels portraying post-Soviet eco- pops out again. Y
nomic ‘reform’. But Viktor has a saving grace for the In my fictional experience, only Karenin in Kundera’s Z
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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, and Balak in S.Y. and then Viktor is hired by a mobster to attend funerals More A
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Agnon’s Only Yesterday do pet animals (in this case with Misha at $1,000 a time. But nothing is revealed; B
both dogs) appear so accurately and memorably. How- Viktor worries, relaxes, worries again. Time passes, C
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ever, Misha is a suffering penguin: he has depression. that’s all. A friendly militiaman offers Nina, his niece, D
An elderly penguinologists, as he calls himself, tells as Sonya’s nanny, and she promptly becomes Viktor’s E
Viktor that Misha is superheated under his two layers lover without, it seems, any passion passing between RSS
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of fat, and nobody would be happy feeling like that, them (that “complementary loneliness” again). Life
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would they? Viktor feels sorry for his pet but doesn’t carries on as dully as usual and Viktor continues with Facebook
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seem to make much effort to cheer him up except to ply his obelisks at his kitchen table.
him with lots of seafood. So what makes this such an amusing, affecting, read- I
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Misha remains in the background as most of the able novel? Well, if Misha the penguin is so attractive J
novel is taken up with Viktor’s life. He gets a job writ- to us in his silence, mystery and apparent sadness, then K
ing obituaries for the main Kiev newspaper. He makes the “death” of the title is his abstract equal – standing L
a name for himself with the philosophical flourishes behind the action, waiting, inscrutable, not asking for M
and elegiac, allusive nature of his obelisks, as he calls anything, yet preying on one’s mind (in fact, I’m told N
them. His editor pays him well in US dollars. The plot that the Russian original means “Death of a Stranger”). O
revolves around the behind-the-scenes ramifications of The pleasure it affords us as we read is the same pleasure P
these obituaries. This is also why we turn the pages, Viktor gets from his writing. It is an oddly comforting Q
though more in agitation than pleasure. We want to find voyeurism on life in general, a life which is elsewhere, R
out what is going on and how it all works out. the subject of endless conjecture (the ‘plot’ we are all S
In the meantime, and the meantime seems to last most in search of). We watch it all from the perspective of a
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of the entire 227 pages, we live in Viktor’s world, full of place where nothing happens – Viktor’s mind, the obit-
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events suggesting something dark going on elsewhere, uaries he writes, this novel in particular and literature
waiting to spring into his life with violence, yet also in general. We watch it all with death and the penguin V
quite flat. A man, touchingly known to us as Misha-non- blinking impassively in the corner, and we are oddly W
penguin, leaves his young daughter Sonya with Viktor moved. We don’t want it to end, no matter how plainly X
and then disappears. A man turns up and says he’s tak- written or routinely translated it is. It complements our Y
ing Sonya away with him, but he soon disappears too, loneliness.  Z
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Emma Larkin: Secret Histories email

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Chris Mitchell
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This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly teen Eighty Four. All politics, teaching and literature
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an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George are ruthlessly policed and scrutinised, with imprison- Facebook
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Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories: Find- ment for the smallest misdemeanours regularly meted
ing George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop is actually out. Torture and disappearance are the norm. Corrup- I
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a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in tion and unemployment are rife, and Myanmar’s one J
the fate of pre- and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been sole beacon of hope, the activist Aung San Suu Kyi, is K
published in the USA under the less lyrical title Finding still under house arrest. (Larkin explains the reverence L
George Orwell In Burma) surrounding Suu Kyi is due to her being the daughter M
Governed by one’s of the world’s longest serving of Aung San, who is widely considered the hero-father N
military dictatorships, which has managed to wholly of the nation who led Burma’s independence from O
destroy the infrastructure and prosperity of argu- the British; her continued refusal to be intimidated by P
ably Asia’s most naturally wealthy country, Secret the murderous tactics of the regime have led them to Q
Histories provides a ground-level view of the perils repeatedly smear her as a “foreign devil” thanks to her R
of living in modern-day Myanmar. Emma Larkin, a marriage to Englishman Michael Aris).
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British woman who speaks fluent Burmese (sadly her Secret Histories, like Anna Funder’s Stasiland
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biographical sketch is, indeed, too sketchy to ascertain which describes life in the totalitarian communist state
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much else), follows the geographical path of Orwell’s of East Germany, provides a personal perspective of
five-year residency within Burma, revisiting the cities a truly appalling regime that lets the reader begin to V
and outposts of one of the former British Empire’s understand what it is like to live day to day under such W
most far-flung territories. an oppressive government. One thing that endeared me X
Along the way she exposes quite how much Myanmar to the Burmans straight away was their love of reading, Y
has become the living embodiment of Orwell’s Nine- as described by Larkin: unsurprising due to the lack of Z
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real information which they receive, but also a national an insight into what drove Orwell to write – it was on More A
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pastime and passion that has led numerous people to his return from Burma to England that he horrified his B
preserve secret libraries of books that have otherwise family by announcing his intention to resign from the C
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been banned by the authorities. colonial service and become a writer. D
Whilst everyday life is undeniable misery in Myan- Secret Histories is truly a vital book, and, with E
mar, the people who Larkin describes are still full of Stasiland, seems to be opening up a new genre (I’m RSS
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life, some how finding the will to live and live fully hating myself for writing these words): female writers
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despite their most restrictive of circumstances and to providing a personal perspective of political troubles; Facebook
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try and make tiny but vital movements towards making not personal as in their own perspectives, but in that
their country become free again. they piece together the histories of the states they’re I
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This book is transformative – before I began reading writing about through the stories of those who have J
it I knew virtually nothing about Burma – at the end of lived within it. This strikes me as a vital counterbalance K
its 230 pages, I feel I’ve gained at least a valuable gloss to our more traditional, and of course wholly necessary, L
on its modern history and, wholly secondary to that, overview histories.  M
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Abby Lee: Girl With A One Track Mind email

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An interview by Chris Mitchell
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[Ed note – this interview was conducted before Abby You get a lot of comments on your blog and you
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Lee’s real identity was revealed by a ‘quality’ Sunday interact a lot with your readers. How much time Facebook
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newspaper days after the publication of GWAOTM. does it take up? Do you generally like your readers
You can read about Abby being stalked by journalists – do you think they get where you’re coming from? I
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and the subsequent fallout on her blog] I do try to reply to comments on the blog as best I J
Getting the book published must be a real buzz. can, because the interactivity between my readers and K
Do you plan to keep going with the blog and write myself is an important part of the blogging experience. L
more books (i.e. go pro), or will working in film I don’t get a lot of time to do this though, so my input M
remain your priority? can be a bit sporadic at times. That doesn’t seem to N
It has been a real buzz, yeah: I’m very excited about matter though: often my readers will be having a debate O
it all. I really hope the book will reach more people that with each other in the comments box and I really enjoy P
would otherwise not have read the blog, and that will reading their opinions and views. Q
get them reading about sex too. It would be wonder- Overall my readers are a pretty clued-up lot and I R
ful if a debate about sex could ensue – it’s about time feel hugely complimented that they enjoy reading my
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we talked openly about it, I think. As for continuing words – and come back for more. Occasionally I get
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the blog, well, I’ve been writing it for over two and the odd troll – who really doesn’t get what I am about,
or who feels they need to make a moral statement about U
a half years and I have no plans to stop yet: I enjoy it
too much. I think as long as it gives me pleasure and I women/sex/sexuality – but my regular readers will V
have the time, I will keep going with it. I am currently challenge their views and often, come to my defence W
working on another couple of book ideas which I hope too. When I started the blog, I never thought that com- X
to develop further; it would be wonderful if I got to plete strangers would be arguing my perspective on Y
pursue even more of my writing now. sex; I am honoured that they do. Z
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There also seems to be a burgeoning community Receiving emails from both women and men telling me More A
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of other sex bloggers (for want of a better phrase) – I have struck a chord with them, or that they empathise B
has that let you meet new friends online or off? with me, or that they have learned from my experiences, C
I’ve met quite a few bloggers actually, both sex email
makes what I do seem so worthwhile. I never thought D
writers, and non-sex writers. I’m not sure if we’re a that there would be so many people who connected to E
‘community’ as such, but there does seem to be a kind my writing; with the thousands of emails sent to me, RSS
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of ‘blogger’s code’ which we all uphold: respecting saying exactly that, I guess I was wrong.
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privacy and anonymity, regardless of the subject mat- The worst thing to come out of writing the blog, is, Facebook
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ter we write about. It has been very refreshing to meet I suppose, the fact that I – and my life – still have to
other sex bloggers – to know that I am not alone in my remain so hidden, and that I can’t enjoy the success I
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thoughts – and I count a few of them as good friends. my writing has achieved. I’m in no rush to lose my J
Ironically, the bloggers I’ve met are the only people anonymity – I really do need to uphold my, and others’ K
that know ‘me’ as well as know my blogging persona; privacy – but it’s frustrating that I can’t proudly state L
none of my offline friends know I write the blog. out in the open, that the blog and book are my doing. M
Can you talk as frankly to your real life friends So, sadly, there’ll be no book signings, or meeting my N
about your feelings as you can write them down for readers, or anything like that. It’s a shame, but I’ve O
the blog? made this bed now, so to speak, so I’ll just have to lie P
Sadly, no. I am reasonably open with my friends in it… Q
generally, but the explicitness of my thoughts – both With the blog to book angle and the witty explicit R
sexual and emotional – are hidden from them. I’d love sex discussions angle, there will be inevitable com- S
to tell them all about the blog and book, but it would parisons to Belle De Jour’s debut. Did you read and/
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really be like them reading my personal diary, which is or rate her book?
not something I want to happen! U
I’ve been reading Belle’s blog since she began writ-
What’s your best / worst experiences to come ing it; it was what inspired me to start my own. I haven’t V
out of writing the blog and being a minor net celeb read her book, so couldn’t comment, though I would W
(albeit anonymous)? say from her blog, that I think she’s a superb writer and X
The best thing to come out of writing the blog, is to although her writing is a bit emotionally distant, I love Y
know that I have, in some way, touched some people. her style. I have no idea what she’s like as a person, Z

but I’d definitely meet up with her for a beer: I think my thoughts, and somehow, picked up readers along More A
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we’d have a few laughs. And perhaps exchange some the way who wanted to read what I wrote about. And B
sex tips too. whilst doing it, I learned of others doing the same, and C
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Do you think there’s more room for more women have made some good online friends as a result. It’s D
to write sex blogs? Is it good education for men to worth doing – if you have something to say, and the E
be reading this stuff so they can get more of a clue time and dedication to say it. RSS
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about what women are really after? Given your anonymity, how peculiar did it feel to
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I think there’s room for everyone to write sex blogs, meet up with Lex from Naked Loft Party when he’s Facebook
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not just women. I am overjoyed that there seem to be already familiar with your entire sexual gamut?
so many female voices out there though: it’s about time Is there something liberating about that? Does it I
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that a different – non-sexist, non-passive, progressive create new taboos? Or does it just make everything J
female – perspective on sexuality broke though into the exceedingly polite? K
mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better. It was brilliant fun meeting up with Lex from L
As for men reading and learning, well, from the Naked Loft Party [NSFW, unsurprisingly]. It was a M
amount of emails I get from men, it does appear that bit odd, with both of us having pseudonyms and not N
this is the case; that they really DO want to know what knowing what each other looked like – it felt like a O
women want, not just so they can please women, but blind date when we met – but it was wonderful to P
so they can enjoy sex more themselves. If just one finally meet in the flesh, so to speak, the man whose Q
couple have better sex as a result of a guy reading my writing I had admired. R
blog, then I think that’s an achievement and something It wasn’t odd at all that he knew of my entire sexual S
to be applauded. history, because firstly, I also knew of his, and secondly,
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If a girl wanted to start out writing her own thing I knew from his writing that he was very open-minded
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or getting involved with talking to others on their person and would think nothing of any of my sexual
own blog, what would you advise? escapades. So when we met, I felt relaxed in his pres- V
Would it sound corny if I said “just do it”? Because ence; it was a meeting of minds – of like-minded minds W
really, that’s all she’d need to do: just start up a blog – and the connection we had online, translated into a X
and write – that’s all I did. I wrote for myself, from face-to-face one immediately. Y
the heart; I have always been honest and open about It actually did feel very liberating meeting him, be- Z

cause I could be myself completely and not maintain a Hopefully by doing this, more women will be able More A
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facade – it felt like a huge weight was lifted from me, to state their needs; will be able to express their wants; B
very refreshing. will be able to take a more active role in their own C
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A lot of your posts recognise that women should enjoyment; and as a result, both women and men will D
be able to be wholly uninhibited in bed without behave better sex. That’s what I reckon, anyway, and from E
ing chastised for doing so by men, other women or the emails I’ve been sent, I suspect many others think RSS
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society in general. Do you think things are getting this way too. My fingers are crossed that this happens:
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better for women in that sense? having a more open dialogue about sex can only be a Facebook
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I think, and hope, that we are moving in the right di- good thing.
rection with this. I do, of course, support the view that And finally – do you have any words of advice for I
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women are not passive creatures who have sex ‘done’ young people? J
to them: we have wants and needs and desires, just as First, have oral sex, and by this, I mean TALK about K
men do. However, I don’t want to preach that women it. People need to be able to have an open dialogue L
‘should’ have to be some kind of ‘tiger’ in the bedroom, about sex before doing it, then they’ll be able to discuss M
because I think that gives off the wrong message to what they want and how they feel. And, as a bonus, N
young women and men: sex should be about equality, talking about it can be like foreplay – it can be very O
about two people sharing something, about having fun, erotic to discuss what you might like to do – so having P
not about one person fulfilling a fantasy representation a dialogue is an important part of the sex act. Q
of what their sexuality ‘should’ be. Second, I would always advise having safe sex. I R
Saying that, whilst I do seriously question the view always have condoms on me, and think anyone think- S
of female sexuality in the media (given that women ing of having sex, should do so too: there is no excuse.
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are almost exclusively either ‘pure virginal’ types, or Boys need to practise putting them on when alone,
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‘naughty slutty’ types), I also think that women do so they become familiar with them; girls can practise
need to get more active in bed and take charge of their putting them (with their hands or mouth) on a sex toy V
sexuality – regardless of how society views them. We or even a cucumber, for that matter. The point is to get W
need to move beyond the stereotypes and create a new familiar with them, so it becomes part of the sex act: X
version of our sexuality; one that will encompass our it can be very erotic doing so. If someone refuses to Y
desires and wants – from our viewpoint. use a condom, then refuse to have sex with them: it’s Z

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to sex should be just as acceptable as saying ‘yes’, in B
my opinion. C
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Lastly, having an open mind, a willingness to learn, D
being giving, and being considerate, are much more E
important qualities to have in bed, than attempting to be RSS
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the world’s greatest lover. Talking about what you want
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with your lover, expressing how you feel, being safe Facebook
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in what you do, will all contribute to a good time – so
have fun!  I
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Wyndham Lewis: Blast email

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Ben Granger
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First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just genius. The one truly original British art movement of
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been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centu- the first half of the 20th century was animated almost Facebook
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ries, when the Great British reading public scanned the single-handedly by one man’s bile. But what was in
covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to it? Blast includes examples of Vorticist art by Lewis I
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the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were and his contemporaries, his own art and literary criti- J
in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their cism, his unstage-ably extreme two man play Enemy K
thoughts on encountering this shock pink punch, this Of The Stars, poetry by Ezra Pound, and short stories L
blinding black statement of intent, forcing the eye to by Rebecca West and Ford Maddox Brown. Most M
flinch in its wake. Most would find it abhorrent, as peo- notable however was its first section, and most unique N
ple do with genuinely new ideas. But these ideas tend construct, the Blast Manifesto. O
to find a way. This cover was an electric flash, herald- This manifesto is printed in the typography of contem- P
ing a storm threatening to engulf the formal pastoral of porary posters, those advertising gaudy entertainments Q
before. The aftershock of this storm still reverberates. such as the circus or boxing match, and cascades forth R
What was Blast? Ostensibly, the first “journal of in aphorism heavy bombast: ”We start from opposite
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the Vorticist movement”, published in 1914, which statements of a chosen world / Set up violent structure
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only ever made it to issue two. In effect, the warped of adolescent clearness between two extremes … We
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premature brain-child of one Percy Wyndham Lewis, only want Tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like
a spiky spiteful self-styled Enemy of the Art establish- hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like V
ment, and Vorticism (“of the Vortex”) was his vehicle a bomb…” W
for unleashing a crusade against them. Each word and Deliberately overwrought, powered by excess as X
image is heavy with the scent of his venom, slashing if by rocket fuel, ready to declare war on art and the Y
at those who wouldn’t accept his self-proclaimed world, “BLASTing” and “BLESSing” the world as if Z
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from stance of some rogue Norse deity. English humour of the manifesto making up this vortex are therefore More A
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is first BLASTED “quack English drug for stupidity wildly and wilfully contradictory, at once revolutionary B
and sleepiness/ Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalis- and reactionary. The contradiction is essential. Lewis C
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ing like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious states in the manifesto “We need the unconsciousness D
chemistry of laughter” and then BLESSED “the great of humanity – their stupidity, animalism and dreams” E
barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild also “Intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter and seer, not RSS
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MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the in the object or content.” The message is essentially the
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ancient fair of LIFE”. France is seen from both sides form itself, and so taken as a piece of writing, it lays Facebook
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too, damned for “SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH”, itself open to charges of shallowness, meaninglessness.
praised for “Masterly pornography (great enemy of What is the use of a manifesto that spends equal time I
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progress), depths of elegance, Great Flood of LIFE lauding and assailing the same targets? J
pouring out of wound of 1797.” Entrancing poetic pro- But there is no ‘use’, because this is art, all of which K
nouncements, mad with possible wisdom, spark with as Wilde said is “quite useless”. The thrill of the angular L
the force and rapidity of machine gun fire. “BLESS sentences, the unexpected words jutting forth like rogue M
ALL SEAFARERS. They exchange not one LAND corkscrews, produce a kinetic rush which is its own N
for another, but one ELEMENT for another. The more reward. Grammar, morality, congruity, indeed sense O
against the less ABSTRACT. BLESS the vast planetary are all swept away by the vortex, an acidic word play P
abstraction of the OCEAN.” which finds its apotheosis in an art of destruction, de- Q
Here was an artform not seen before: writing, but struction of form and format, of meaning itself. And yet R
writing which seeks to attain the form of visual art at the same time, one can find more truth and wisdom S
rather than literature, more precisely aiming to emulate in its scattershot pronouncements than in a hundred
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the ever-shifting contours of the vortex from which the more measured and erudite tomes, in the same way that
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movement takes its name. (Lewis’ friend James Joyce Nietzsche is read far more than Kant. His conclusions
was also beginning to cultivate this ‘writing as visual may be wrong most of the time, but he has a far more V
art’, but Ulysses was only started after Blast was first interesting time getting there. Then again, this is not W
published, and would not be finished for a decade.) philosophy, but entertainment. Entertainment indeed, X
This is a writing which seeks to shake and unsettle the this is writing as art, but taken at its most base level, it Y
mind rather than cultivate or ‘improve’ it. The thoughts is essentially humorous. Z

The manifesto is a hilariously transgressive state- new currents to the storm. Rebecca West’s short story More A
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ment of intent, it’s sadistic screed sham utopian, in the ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ is the most ‘conventional’ B
style of Swift (one of its “BLESSED” writers.) This is narrative here (Lewis, ever contrary, said it was the C
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a satirical cabaret as much as an exercise avant aesthet- only thing in the journal he enjoyed not written by D
ics. Taking apart England, France, “the years 1837 to himself) but its tale of a husband and wife bludgeon- E
1900 – abysmal inexcusable middle-class”, this stance ing each other in a lake combines an elegantly icy RSS
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of the grand nemesis, while its hatred may be genuine, authorial surface voice with a savage energy beneath
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is also a knockabout routine, and Lewis knows it. This which add further prismatic whirls to the vortex. The Facebook
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stance of The Enemy is an anti-humanistic counter-pose art prints of Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth,
to prevailing morality which presents the artist as an Cuthbert Hamilton and Jacob Epstein take Lewis’ I
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evil deity. Indeed, it presents the artist as a simultane- style into still more redolent contours. But they don’t J
ous Anti-Christ and anarchist – to quote a certain later match the inhuman originality of the master. It is the K
descendant – and was every bit as much a cabaret act painting and the prose of Wyndham Lewis that makes L
when his forbear performed it. this vortex spin. Both the prints and the writing are M
Moving on into the pages of Blast – after the art of a poetry of the sharp surface, a harsh, perverse cara- N
Wyndham Lewis’ words, the art of his images. Living in pace, unalloyed and unique. Lewis is the consummate O
the aftershock, we may take it for granted, but this jag- elitist, untainted by the muck of mediocrity. P
ged, fissured assault on the figurative sensibility must The achievement of Blast is to create an aesthetic Q
have seemed terrifyingly alien at the time, inorganic, a all of its own, a complete mental landscape every bit R
re-scalpelling of the soul made possible by the machine as unique as Impressionism or Cubism, feeding into S
age. They would be right, but this optical poetry creates the Dada and Surrealism that followed it. The merest
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the same psychic rush his writing achieves. Take the fragment can find an image of the whole movement,
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fractured curves of ‘Timon of Athens’, or ‘Slow At- perhaps the truest definition of ‘original’ art. Breton’s
tack’. The angular menace, the sheer visceral abandon Surrealist Manifesto had a clear debt to the manifesto V
of these can still thrill today. of Blast. Search on down the decades and the debt con- W
The other contributors to Blast compliment the at- tinues. From the whirling non-linear narratives of Bur- X
tack. Pound’s poetry is still in its infancy, but is still roughs and Atrocity Exhibition era J.G. Ballard, to the Y
so unlike anything which has come before to add savage surreal satire of Chris Morris’ BrassEye, each Z

owe something to its serrated edge. In music, Mark E Its more degraded descendants could arguably include More A
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Smith of The Fall has made explicit the fact his savage every pitiful spitting punk band, and the piss-poor B
jet-sprays of consciousness owe much to this original amoral controversialism of Damien Hirst and Tracey C
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renegade. The late Malcolm McLaren was never so Emin. But then you shouldn’t blame Graham Greene D
honest about the influence of Lewis on his own arch for Frederick Forsyth, nor Hogarth for ‘Mac’ of the E
art prankery, but it was there all the same. Indeed the Daily Mail. RSS
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aesthetic of the whole avant-subversive-transgressive With Enemy Of The Stars, a two-handed play which
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Pistols wing of 70s London punk (as opposed to the sees claustrophobically entwined individuals existen- Facebook
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campaigning-idealist Clash wing) clearly took its cue tially battling it out against an absurdist landscape, we
from the inventively scabrous oppositionalism and see an often overlooked influence on Beckett, with the I
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fractured imagery of Vorticism, from the swastika- Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting For Godot descend- J
Marx-crucifix emblems on their shirts, to the blackmail ants of Arghol and Hanp in their stylised rhetorical op- K
lettering of Jamie Reid’s album cover attacking the position. Lewis’ marred reputation means he very rarely L
eyes just as the journal’s cover did all those years be- gets the credit he deserves for this inspiration for some M
fore. McLaren and Vivienne Westwood even designed of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces of theatre. N
a ‘Which side of the bed’ t-shirt which homaged the Yet of course Lewis’ reputation is eternally marred. O
“Blasted and Blessed” of the original manifesto, with The underside to this thrilling pose, from black-hearted P
new heroes (Eddie Cochran, Joe Orton, Ronnie Biggs nihilism, to the outright Fascism seen in the later career Q
and free radio stations) replacing the originals (Char- of the man, has been explored at great length elsewhere. R
lotte Corday, The Pope and James Joyce), and the new The charge-sheet against this personally dislikable in- S
villains of (Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Max Bygraves, dividual is neither light nor slight. Of course his barbed
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W.H. Smith and the Stock Exchange) replacing the old vision is open to abuse, abuse itself being its life-blood.
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(the British Academy, the Post Office, Captain Cook Aesthetics translated into politics is very often a bad
and Sydney Webb.) The best of Blast’s descendants are combination, as certain followers of that other great V
magnificent. But when your stance is a fetishised op- pugilistic aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche have amply and W
positionalism, it is absolutely vital this is accompanied agonisingly shown. Nietzsche and Wyndham Lewis X
with absolute, dynamic ingenuity. Anything less, and are like gunpowder, their explosions can both ignite Y
the result is childish, boorish, worst of all plain boring. beautiful displays, or lead to incalculable damage. Z

W.H. Auden dubbed Lewis “that lonely old Volcano More A

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of the Right.” A lonely volcano maybe, but one whose B
diabolic lava solidified into the shapes which formed C
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the cultural landscape we still live in. Out of print for D
decades, Blast is now finally available in a new print E
from Thames and Hudson. It’s worth a read, not least RSS
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as this is a Blast from which we still live in the echo. 
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Jack London: The Iron Heel email

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Ben Granger on Jack London’s neglected dystopian novel that rivals
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Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World in its vision of the future RSS
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When it comes to accolades for the most lauded the last have been analysed, critiqued and celebrated to
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prophetic dystopian satirical novels of the early death. There is, however, a third more straightforward Facebook
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20th century, there’s no doubting which are the big great evil of the modern age. The rich crushing the poor,
two. The hyper-Stalinist all-surveillance paranoid the propensity of the forces of capital – when vicious I
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nightmare of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, and the push comes to deadly shove – to react with the most J
distorted DNA-as-play-doh playground of Huxley’s monstrous and tyrannical violence against the organ- K
Brave New World. Occasionally Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ised labour which seeks to grab more of its fair share L
We gets a look-in as a curio, a minor precursor to both, from them. The evil that led to the bloody regimes of M
appearing as it did in 1920, long before that of Huxley Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their tin-pot descendants. N
(1932) and Orwell (1949). There is one however which This was prophesied just as uncannily in Jack London’s O
always gets passed over, despite being written before long-neglected novel. P
both the others, way back in 1908, and overlooked, The action of the book begins in the years immedi- Q
despite being written by one of the most widely ately following when it was written. Labour relations R
revered American authors of all time. That novel is in the USA are plunging as rapidly as the economy,
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Jack London’s The Iron Heel. In and out of print for while the thuggery of big-business against the unions
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decades, The Iron Heel has finally been republished in increases in turn. Goons break limbs at picket-lines as
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the last couple of months by Penguin UK. families go hungry. No fiction there. Poverty spreads
Orwell’s warning about the grotesque parody of so- apace, and slower but just as surely does the Socialist V
cialism offered by Stalin and his acolytes which plagued movement of America (strange fantasy it may seem W
the 20th century, and the grim auger from Huxley on now, but as London wrote, the US Socialist Party, led X
the eugenic, anaesthetic aesthetic threatened by scien- by Eugene Debs, was growing rapidly, at one point Y
tific consumerism which stalked both this century and gathering over a million votes even as its leaders were Z
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being jailed.) she lives. The scenes of misery are jaggedly drawn, More A
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The book is written as the memoir of Avis Everhard, once again, without any need for exaggeration from B
wife of labour leader Ernest Everhard who comes to what London saw daily with his own eyes. C
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lead the workers’ insurrection. Avis is the daughter of a We see both the Everhards and the wider union D
prominent US academic, and begins her account as the movement as a whole as they’re wrenched to snapping E
pampered intellectual circles her family frequents find point. As America’s oligarchs realise the conflagration RSS
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it a delightful parlour game to invite Ernest for debates, to come is a fight to the death, they stealthily cast off
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much as panel games will have the token revolutionary the flimsy pretences of democracy. They organise into Facebook
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on our TV screens today. the great Dictatorship of the Iron Heel. The bloodiest
Ernest, long-suffering, self-taught and assured union repression seen in humanity’s history ensues. I
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man has steely determination and razor intellect. He The novel’s narrative skilfully shifts focus from the J
rips their arguments to pieces, and the smug smiles sub- small scale to the large and back again, the snapshots K
side. In the final confrontation he manages to get one of poverty signifying the minutiae of the bigger vista. L
more forthright and honest plutocrat to admit the truth We see as the dictatorship takes hold it does so stead- M
and discard the flannel. In the end their power over the ily, creepily. The insidious little signs -the silencing N
worker has no moral basis and must be set in steel: and ostracising of academics, the blackening of the O
“In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of names of campaigners, – are shown as Avis’s father P
machine-guns will our answer be couched.” is hounded from his job, and a reformed priest the Q
“It is the only answer that can be given” replies Ernest. family know is hounded into a mental institution. The R
“Power. We know, and well we know by bitter expe- icy paranoia of the witch hunts is evoked chillingly. S
rience, that no appeal for right, for justice, for humanity With the thug gangs bought from the criminal caste by
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can ever touch you. Your hearts are as hard as your the ruling-class to pummel dissent – the wonderfully
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heels as they tread upon the faces of the poor.” named “Black Hundreds” – the paramilitary paratroops
Avis is entranced not only by the power of Ernest’s of future Fascism are equally well predicted. He even V
magnetic charisma, but also by the unpleasant but got the colour right. W
unassailable truth of the frightful poverty which, as he The story continues to centre around the Everhards as X
points out, props up her own classes wealth. She begins the years go on and the Iron Heel kicks in. Congress is Y
to notice the wretched poverty, only streets from where suspended, dissenters are machine-gunned. Scenes of Z

conflict on a gargantuan scale ensue, interspersed with pre-First World War era when the worst nightmare More A
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the individual intrigues within. The desperate hopes of most Western audiences could imagine was a cavalry- B
the revolutionaries are evocatively told in between the charge. The novel was ridiculed at the time in popular C
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details of their struggle. There is indeed no compromise reviews because of its bloodthirsty “sensationalism”. D
up until an apocalyptic finale. Even London himself may have intended the grotesque E
As prediction, satire and warning, The Iron Heel is in blood-bath he portrays in the novel’s later chapters – the RSS
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many ways more prophetic than either Nineteen Eighty full-scale warfare between the haves and the nots – as
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Four or Brave New World. Orwell merely exaggerated, more hyperbolic warning than prophecy. These scenes Facebook
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exemplified and hypertrophied elements of a Stalinist do indeed curdle the blood and wrench the gut, and may
dictatorship which had existed for decades, while the have seemed like fantastical pornography at the time. I
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ruminations of Huxley set still further in the future But they’re no Somme, and they’re no Auschwitz. The J
remain something of an allegory. London was describ- grim reality dwarfed even his savage imagination. K
ing with exactitude a streamlined mechanised totalitar- In other ways, it is not such a mystery why The Iron L
ian dictatorship, backed by big business, specifically Heel has been passed over in favour of its rivals in dys- M
designed to crush the labour movement, when no-one topia. As a novel of ideas, as an imagining of intricacies N
dreamt of such a thing, and which would not actually into the minute grim possibility of the future it does O
be in place for decades. not live up to them. There is no innovation to excite P
Of course his vision was vastly off the mark in the troubled imagination as much as the telescreens, Q
many ways. America managed to crush a far weaker doublethink, Room 101 and Big Brother of Orwell, and R
socialist presence by far less draconian methods, and the mandatory happiness, Soma and biological caste- S
real fascism arrived on another continent. But then system in Huxley. Being more narrowly political than
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we’re not currently living in a post-nuclear dictator- either it does not lend itself to flights of speculative
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ship with cameras in our living rooms, and no-one’s futuristic fancy. No-one is likely to base a reality TV
being bred in tanks yet either. He got a lot more right show on one of its observations. V
than he got wrong. Orwell himself noted that there was a strong streak W
In The Iron Heel London laid bare the whole machin- of the Social Darwinist in London, a sadistic revelling X
ery of a mechanised dictatorship, of the class-based in the cult of violence and the survival of the fittest. Y
mass murder to come, and did so during a pastoral, Given that London was sadly prone to the most vulgar Z

white supremacist racism too, his failings could well better example of London’s gift with the written word. More A
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have turned him to Fascism were it not for the strength The Iron Heel is a great deal more than an insightful B
of his commitment to the working-class cause. Race piece of propaganda however. London always writes C
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itself is almost absent from the novel altogether, a good with a stern poetic vividness. Both stark and lurid, D
thing given London’s proclivities, though an obvious passage after passage in the book grasp so hard it’s E
and glaring blind-spot in a novel about an American impossible not to be drawn in. The narrative is charged RSS
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class-war. A curious fear of “the mob” when pushed to with honest emotional energy, and it convinces as a
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its limits is in evidence too, the auto-snobbery against blood-curdling thriller too. This is a short novel dealing Facebook
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workers who don’t follow your cause:- the perennial with an enormous scope of ideas and events, essentially
flaw of theoretical socialists. attempting to dramatise a Marxist analysis of US soci- I
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Far more importantly though as a novel, by the test of ety. Yet there is never a dull moment. London has the J
plot, persona and prose it is not up with London’s best gift of investing the forays into theory with the same K
either, and in that sense too falls well short of Orwell excitement as exists in the scenes of bloody conflict. L
or Huxley. The cult of personality London indulges The “footnotes from the future” device tagged at M
in sadly undermines the characterisation of the hero the end of each chapter (in which we discover Avis’ N
Ernest Everard, who is ever-so-slightly too much of memoirs have supposedly been discovered in a future O
the Nietzchean superman to convince, even given his socialist age) give the novel a lighter satirical edge P
occasional endearing awkwardness. He veers too close too, off-setting the book’s occasional slouch into Q
to an icon in a Soviet mural. There is a slightly stilted portentousness. R
characterisation in other main players too. In the grand And while individual characters may stray near S
epic of human destiny being described in book less caricature, in the bigger picture London possesses a
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than 300 pages long, people come can close to being rather more nuanced insight into the psychology of
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ciphers, including the narrator Avis herself. those at both ends of the class conflict. The workers
There is no doubt that as a convincing and holistic are the heroes of course, but London does not shirk on V
piece of writing, The Call Of The Wild, that thrilling the corrupting and brutalising effect revolution inevita- W
adventure story which also laid bare London’s Ni- bly has on its agents. And, even more importantly, he X
etzchean sadism, is a better read, more deserving of its recognises that the ruling-class are not just crooks and Y
ubiquitous place on the world’s school curricula, and a thugs. They’d be a lot easier to deal with if they were. Z

“They, as a class, believed that they alone main- lieved it, firmly believed it.” More A
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tained civilization. It was their belief that if they B
weakened, the great beast would engulf them, and Many is the Fascist and war criminal utterly con- C
vinced they have humanity’s interest at heart but email
everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good D
in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without scarcely has it been so well put. E
them, anarchy would reign, and humanity would The Iron Heel then is a flawed but fascinating read, RSS
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drop backward into the primitive night out of which undeniably entertaining, and containing some of the
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it had so painfully emerged … This was the beast most deadly insights of the last century. By one of Facebook
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to be stamped on, and the highest duty of the aris-
tocrat was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by mark, and has been ignored for too long. Here’s hoping I
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unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak its republication by Penguin will see it gain the wider J
humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they be- readership it deserves.  K
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Leo Marks: Between Silk And Cyanide email

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Eugene Byrne
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Leo Marks crops up in the oddest corners of the 20th working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE),
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century. The only son of doting Jewish parents, his the cloak-and-dagger operation set up by Churchill to Facebook
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father owned the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road, infiltrate agents into German-occupied countries and
made famous by Helene Hanff’s book. Marks read his “set Europe ablaze”. The trouble was that all these I
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Freud (who once visited the shop), wrote a lot of stories agents had to communicate with England by wireless, J
and produced the brilliant/notorious script for Peeping but that the codes they were using, as Marks quickly K
Tom, the film about a disturbed young man who kills figured out, were easy to break. L
women with his camera and which virtually destroyed By his own account, young Marks was an insuf- M
the career of its director Michael Powell in the early ferable little smart-alec (he was compiling cryptic N
1960s. And look, here’s Marks again, providing the crosswords for The Times when still a schoolboy). If, O
voice of Satan in Powell’s chum Martin Scorsese’s he argued, he could easily break the SOE codes on his P
equally notorious film, The Last Temptation Of Christ. own, all based on poems, then all the resources of the Q
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you German intelligence services wouldn’t find them much R
think you don’t want to read Yet Another book about of a challenge either. Marks’s job, as head of codes for
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secret codes in WW2, think again. To say that Between SOE, was essentially about devising new codes, then
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Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-45 is about persuading the powers-that-be to accept them, then
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just codes is like saying that programmes featuring finding the personnel and resources (sheets of silk and
Charlie Dimmock are just about gardening. labs to photograph the codes onto them – silk was eas- V
“In January 1942 I was escorted to the war by my ily sewn into an agent’s clothes and could withstand the W
parents in case I couldn’t find it or met with an accident most assiduous frisking by German security-checks) to X
on the way,” begins Marks’ funny, angry, intriguing produce them in the huge quantities required. Y
account of how, at a very tender age, he ended up Marks spent his war sitting at a desk; an anonymous Z
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neighbour, seeing him returning to his parents’ home away to the Gestapo. Marks carried this responsibility More A
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each evening and leaving each morning laden with heavily and he remains angry, bitter even, to this day B
black market food by his Mama sent him a white about the bungling and the bureaucratic in-fighting that C
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feather. When he told his parents (who understood he resulted in so many astonishingly courageous men and D
was some manner of civil servant) that he was to be women being captured, tortured and executed. E
sent to Cairo for a week, his father left the room. “Now These included his special hero ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Tho- RSS
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look what you’ve done,” said his mother. “He’s gone to mas, who was caught late on in the war and endured
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get pissed.” But his father returned after an hour with a unbelievable torments because the Gestapo knew that Facebook
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pith helmet, which both parents made him swear he’d he knew everything there was to know about resistance
wear at all times. in France, but who nonetheless managed to escape. Or I
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In his Cairo hotel, he got talking with the Jewish Noor Inayat Khan, the brilliant daughter of an Indian J
American comedian Jack Benny, who persuaded him prince and religious leader; a capable enough wireless K
that being Jewish, he ought to start taking this war – a operator for the SOE in France, but because of her L
wonderful chance to fight the greatest anti-Semite of religion and upbringing she was incapable of telling a M
all time – a damn sight more seriously. Marks then told lie. Khan died in a concentration camp, as did the most N
him a funny story about an uncle’s efforts to evade the famous SOE agent of all, Violette Szabo, subject of the O
call-up in WW1 and watched in astonishment as Benny postwar film, Carve Her Name With Pride. By late in P
re-told the story, giving a perfect impersonation of the the war, where agents had to use poem-codes, Marks Q
uncle he had never met. “Thank you Jack Benny,” he had decreed that they should at least be originals, as R
says, “for giving me a month’s holiday in the hour we well-known ones could be pieced together by the Ger- S
spent together … And thanks for not being ashamed of mans and the codes broken more easily. Part at least of
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being proud of your race. I wish I had the courage to be Szabo’s fame is due to the one he gave her to memorise:
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one of the troops you’re here to entertain.”
Marks’s war, though, was anything but a lark. It The life that I have V
was part of his job to brief agents on their codes just Is all that I have W
before they were dropped into enemy territory. Their And the life that I have X
life-expectancy was pretty low, and their radio trans- Is yours Y
missions were usually the first thing that gave them The love that I have Z

Of the life that I have Leo Marks still carries the burden of her fate and that More A
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Is yours and yours and yours. of hundreds of others. For that reason alone, his book B
A sleep I shall have demands respectful attention, but there are plenty of C
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A rest I shall have others, too. It’s a valuable historical account (most of D
Yet death will be but a pause the official records of SOE have disappeared, probably E
For the peace of my years because MI6 devoted a lot of its energies to destroying RSS
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In the long green grass SOE rather than Nazism), but it’s also very funny, con-
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Will be yours and yours and yours. veying perfectly the frantic 22-year-old always skating Facebook
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on thin ice and passing off his awesome responsibilities
Violette Szabo was shot in the back of the head in with wisecracks. There’s some interesting bits about I
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a concentration camp in 1945, holding the hands of codes in there as well, but you can easily skip them if J
two other SOE agents. More than half a century on, you want.  K
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David Markson: This Is Not A Novel email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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There’s always someone telling us that the novel is The literary novel, on the other hand, is definitively
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dead. And that is how it should be. As well as offering unclassifiable. Or should be. Hence the regular asking Facebook
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us the chance to laugh at the fools who parrot this of the question: “Why are detective stories/thrillers/
announcement, it makes us ask, for the umpteenth horror novels/science fictions ignored when it comes to I
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time: what is the novel for, exactly? The question literary prizes?” The accusation that always follows is J
should not be answered without referring to a novel in that these prizes are for highbrow snobs. In a recent ra- K
particular. Each novel is unique. Or should be. We’ll dio interview, the question and accusation was repeated L
come to that later. by horror novel writer (and TV presenter) Muriel Gray. M
One of the reasons why cultural commentators, As I listened in a departure lounge filled with airport- N
such as the BBC’s Andrew Marr, proclaim the death novel clutching passengers, I wanted to shout: THERE O
of the novel is because novels have become irredeem- IS GOOD REASON! But I kept my dignity. Until now. P
ably classifiable. Novels that break the rules seem to The reason is because the novel has to reinvent itself, Q
be so mannered, so distant from the world we call each and every time. When a reinvention is achieved, R
real, that they demand to be classified as frivolous it deserves recognition. One cannot use the crutch of
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and elitist. Most of them are. And they seem all the a genre, the alibi of a genre, and expect to receive an
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more mannered and distant because the classifiable award specifically intended for a unique achievement.
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novel has become so refined, so intimate with the Muriel Gray’s horror novels have received critical ac-
deceit of language, that we do not see them for the claim by those who know about such things; Stephen V
very odd objects they really are. Instead, by effacing King no less. Worth checking out then. But you can’t W
themselves in a whole raft of technique, they enable have it both ways Muriel. X
the reader-as-consumer to bypass any doubts and leap In the same interview Gray says she hates writing but Y
straight into what is desired: distraction. loves having written. I suggest this maybe due to her Z
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self-imprisonment in genre. Real fiction is a form of There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt More A
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exploring oneself and the world, perhaps finding one- is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando. B
self and the world, perhaps finding a passage through Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a dam- C
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darkness (forgive the Romantic clichés). Maybe Muriel aged heart. D
should try it sometime. She might even win the Booker Pound died of a blocked intestine.” E
Prize. Or maybe she should stick with horror. In recent RSS
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years, the Booker has tried to appeal to a wider audi- The final two entries here constitute the main bulk
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ence and so last year the shortlist was made up entirely of the whole book: reports on how famous artists and Facebook
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of genre fiction. Or was it the year before? Who cares?
David Markson’s novels will never be soiled by the might expect, it has a strong melancholy edge. I un- I
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attentions of the Booker Prize committee. He would be derstand that Markson is elderly and unwell, so he has J
eliminated early on because of his reputation as an in- good reason to dwell on such matters. Yet to describe K
novator. Anyway, as an American, he is ineligible. His this book as a long lament about imminent demise is L
earlier novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress is about the last to miss the overall effect. It is something wholly other M
person on Earth, although this is not apparent to the than melancholy. N
innocent reader. It consists of short paragraphs of state- At the beginning, the narrator, called simply “Writ- O
ments and self-questioning by a lone woman. Actually, er”, says he “is pretty much tempted to quit writing. P
I haven’t read it, or any other of his novels. In fact, I’ve Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.” So Q
never seen any of them in a shop or a library. But I have instead he presents this trance-like list. Some way R
now read This Is Not A Novel. It is a 190-page bricolage into the book Writer intervenes to suggest it is a prose
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of quotations, anecdotes and opinions on artists, writ- equivalent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. And for sure it
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ers, composers, philosophers and various other high art is like that poem, or a piece of music, specifically a
fugue (that is, “a polyphonic composition constructed U
types. Here is a random sample:
on one or more short themes which are harmonised V
“Timor mortis conturbat me. according to the laws of counterpoint” – OED). Very W
The fear of death distresses me. soon, the reader is unable to escape the special rhythm X
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without of anecdotes that at first seem to have absolutely noth- Y
pictures or conversations? ing to do with literature. Yet in the end, and for the Z

reason that it has nothing to do with literature, it be- for the modern novel. Some might think Markson is More A
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comes clear that it has everything to do with literature. joining in with this contempt; ridiculing the pretension B
After putting the book down, one is compelled to pick of high art. However, the endless unspoken contrast of C
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it up again, not to find out what happens next, but to absurdity and death with Writer’s evident fascination D
re-enter the intoxicating rhythm. with the works of art referred to, only re-emphasises E
our uncertainty about what art is and what it does to us. RSS
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“Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky. One thing is for sure though: the artistic and intellec-
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Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture. Jackson tual achievements of the centuries did not come about Facebook
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by repeating what has gone before. Writer writes:
William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.” “Writer has actually written some relatively tradi- I
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tional novels. Why is he spending his time doing this J
It is significant that Markson tends to refer to high- sort of thing? That’s why.” K
brow artists. The contrast with their more famous Essentially, if pretentiously, genre fiction denies L
achievements is relentlessly brought to the fore. We can death. The reader is cocooned from the world we call M
read this sort of thing all the time about popular artistes real by sticking to the conventions of character and plot, N
on sites such as popbitch.com, but this contributes only or at least by assuming that they constitute what we O
to our enjoyment of pop culture. It doesn’t shock and call “the novel”. Genre fiction does not question itself P
resonate. In This Is Not A Novel, we can’t escape the because it is the means to other ends. It may help us Q
fact that all great art is produced by people who die, through the day, but not our lives. This Is Not A Novel R
while the work survives. A commonplace, of course, is such for good reason. How Markson’s book helps is
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but a brute fact that modern artists confront on a daily something I have been asking myself. And the answer,
basis. They ask, what is the point? It leads to frustra- T
as I have just experienced, is in the asking. But maybe
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this is not an answer. 
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Gabriel García Márquez: News Of A Kidnapping email

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Chris Mitchell
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“The men opened Maruja’s door and another two Colombian political life rather than the magic realism
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opened Beatriz’s. The fifth shot the driver in the head for which García Márquez is famed. These are realities Facebook
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through the glass, and the silencer made it sound no which leave no-one untouched: García Márquez him-
louder than a sigh. Then he opened the door, pulled self has recently become dangerously embroiled within I
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him out, and shot him three more times as he lay the ongoing war between Colombia’s government and J
on the ground. It was another man’s destiny: Angel guerrillas, in a particularly twisted version of life imi- K
Maria Roa had been Maruja’s driver for only three tating literature. L
days, and for the first time he was displaying his new News Of A Kidnapping is the culmination of three M
dignity with the dark suit, starched shirt, and black years research by Márquez, marking a return for the N
tie worn by the chauffeurs who drove government 69-year-old author to his days as a young journalist O
ministers. His predecessor, who had retired the week within the Colombian capital of Bogota. He traces P
before, had been the government agency’s regular the stories of those relatives of Colombian politicians Q
driver for ten years.” who were abducted in the winter of 1990 by Escobar’s R
This quote from the opening pages of News Of Medellin cocaine cartel, an organisation so powerful
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A Kidnapping has the unmistakable ring of Gabriel that it systematically undermined all of Colombia’s
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García Márquez’s world famous prose style – at once civil institutions by murder, abduction and bribery.
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laden with pathos and yet tinged with black absurdity, Given that Colombia produces 80 per cent of the
it could easily have come from any of the Nobel Prize world’s cocaine supply and that Escobar was the most V
winner’s acclaimed novels. Yet News Of A Kidnapping ruthless of the country’s drug barons, it’s not difficult W
is not fiction – in its documenting of cocaine baron to understand why he wielded such influence and was X
Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror in Colombia, the book wanted by both the Colombian and Americans govern- Y
is solely concerned with the murderous realities of ments. Escobar ordered the kidnappings in order to Z
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give himself bargaining power with the then Colom- political credentials with the assassination of a three More A
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bian president Cesar Gaviria, who had embarked on time presidential candidate and a murder attempt on B
a relentless manhunt for Escobar’s capture, with the President Ernesto Samper’s lawyer last year. Their C
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added threat of supporting his extradition to stand trial main demand following the kidnapping of Gaviria’s D
in the United States. son was that García Márquez should take over the E
Based on conversations with the survivors of presidency from Samper, who has faced widespread RSS
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Escobar’s abduction campaign, who were mostly calls for his resignation because of charges that his
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middle-aged women, News Of A Kidnapping presents 1994 election campaign was partly financed by drug Facebook
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an unflinching reportage of the lives of those held in traffickers. García Márquez has rejected the demand
captivity, documenting their despair, fear and hope. At out of hand, saying that he was sure he would make I
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the same time, García Márquez explores the struggle “the worst president” in Colombia’s history. J
which continues to this day between the state and drug However, García Márquez has remained silent K
traffickers for the heart of Colombia. concerning the kidnappers more recent demands that L
Even though Escobar is now dead, killed during a he vouches for the absence of corruption during Ga- M
police shootout in 1993, his legacy of corruption and viria’s presidency. Some have speculated that García N
murder lives on. While García Márquez has attempted Márquez has now been given the horrific power of life O
to bring his considerable influence as a world-renowned or death over Gaviria’s son, depending on his future P
writer to bear on the political problems of his country, co-operation with the guerrilla group. In a further twist Q
that selfsame influence has now caused him to be to the story, the man in charge of securing the young R
caught up in a fresh wave of terror to sweep Colombia. Gaviria’s release is Alberto Villamizar, whose wife S
In April this year, a shadowy group calling itself Dig- and sister’s abductions in 1990 were the impetus for
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nity For Colombia abducted the son of Cesar Gaviria, García Márquez to write News Of A Kidnapping. “It’s
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the former president who battled with Escobar. unusual,” Villamizar has commented, “but everything
The guerrilla group have already established their that happens in Colombia is unusual”.  V
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Bertie Marshall: Text Maniac email

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Chris Mitchell meets Bertie Marshall, the original psychoboy
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When does a debut underground experimental novel to escape the sordidity of his existence. Underpinning
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featuring a stomach-churning mix of depraved sex, the graphic depictions of depravity is a grand guignol Facebook
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hideous death, wanton coprophilia and insane genetic humour, evinced by characters like Miss Thing – Rez’s
mutation gain critical praise from the mainstream likes transvestite sugar mummy – and Countess Handover, a I
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of i-D, Time Out and The Big Issue? bizarre transgender genetic engineer. J
When it’s written by Brighton author Bertie Mar- Marshall’s novel avoids the problem of much avant- K
shall. Psychoboys is his first literary outing and its ka- garde writing, where ‘experimental’ is a euphemism L
leidoscopic narration about the story of Rez, a rent-boy for ‘unreadable’ – Psychoboys is powered by punk-en- M
surviving on the streets of Moscow and Berlin, has pro- ergised, page-turning prose. “Making sure Psychoboys N
voked accolades such as “unique” and “intense” from was readable was something I really had in mind while O
the likes of Grove Press’s Ira Silverberg and American I was writing the book,” Marshall confirms. “It was P
psycho author Dennis Cooper. a reaction against the first book I wrote, which was a Q
In the tradition of all great transgressive literature heavily fictionalised account of my punk days – and R
(think William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Kathy which nobody wanted to publish.”
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Acker), Psychoboys is not written simply to shock. “It’s That Marshall’s first book was rejected is especially
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about darkness and light, fantasy and reality, dreaming strange, given the amount of attention his exploits as
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and being awake, death and being alive,” Marshall says. part of the Bromley Contingent – the first group of Sex
“It’s left up to the reader to decide what they make of it. Pistols fans – has gained from the media, culminating V
There’s no absolutes.” in BBC2’s Arena documentary, Punk And The Pistols. W
Psychoboys portrays the extremities of human exist- The then 15-year-old Marshall changed his name to X
ence, but it does so in an exploration of how fantasy and Berlin and hung out with the likes of Siouxsie Sioux Y
reality collide, and the way Rez uses his imagination before the term ‘punk’ had even gained widespread Z
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understanding. “If someone had said to me that in 20 that mean? Why have labels at all?” More A
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years’ time, being a part of this group that goes to see a This dissatisfaction with being pigeonholed extends B
band is going to pass into popular mythology, I’d have to being classified as a gay writer. “I did this reading C
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said, ‘Um.’ Even stranger is the fact that a friend of mine recently where all the gay literati were there – Alan D
has written a screenplay about the period and wants me Hollinghurst, Alan Mars-Jones, Patrick Gale – their E
to play myself 20 years ago. That’s a real trip.” readings were all very polite, ironic and slightly risqué RSS
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Back in the present, Psychoboys’ pre-publication and I just thought ‘Yuk!’ I don’t fit in with that at all – I
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success has left Marshall bemused by some of the la- couldn’t be further removed from them. Psychoboys is Facebook
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bels being used to try and describe his work. “It’s been certainly not written for a gay market – it’s written for
called ‘queer science fiction’,” he says, “but what does anyone who wants to read it.”  I
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Cedric Mims: When We Die email

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Robin Askew
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The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach is shot through with genial atheism, religion impinging
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contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same only when it has shaped some of the more peculiar things Facebook
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time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets human societies have done with bits and pieces of the
purple on the underside of the body where the blood deceased. But don’t mistake this for a lack of humility. I
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accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal In his introduction, Mims offers this fascinating statistic. J
microbes gobble up the gut and take the opportunity to Since the emergence of our species, 130,000 million hu- K
have a romp around those previously forbidden parts of mans have lived and died. You could comfortably pack L
the body. The pancreas digests itself. Green substances every last one of us into a mass cubic coffin measuring M
and gas are produced in the tissues, causing the skin three miles long on each side and dump it underground N
to take on a bluish tinge and develop blisters, many without making the slightest impact on the landscape. O
of which expand into large sacs of fluid. After four to Mims contends that we have undergone a reversal P
six days, the body starts to become really unpleasant. in social attitudes since Victorian times. Then, death Q
The tongue protrudes from between the teeth, the chest was a national obsession while sex remained taboo. R
swells up, fluid from the lung trickles out of the mouth These days, virtually anything goes on the sexual front
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or nostrils and a ‘disagreeable odour’ develops. but few of us ever see a corpse, since most people die
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Cedric Mims, former Professor of Microbiology at in hospitals or institutions. Anyone who expresses an
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Guy’s Hospital, spares no grisly detail in his self-styled interest in the subject is routinely accused of “morbid
“light-hearted but wide-ranging survey of death, the curiosity”. While it’s difficult to sustain the claim V
causes of death, and the disposal of corpses”. If it’s the that death is the last taboo, When We Die offers what W
Afterlife you want, he’s not much use. There’s a perfunc- might be described as a handy palliative. The anecdotal X
tory trot through the beliefs that sustain the world’s major approach makes it ideal for dipping into, serving up Y
religions, but Mims’ heart isn’t really in it. When We Die themed funereal fun in bite-sized chunks of historical, Z
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scientific and cultural information. his body was chopped into pieces and boiled in vinegar More A
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Take the section on suicides, for example. Here we until the fat and flesh separated from the bones. The B
learn that in the 18th century the British were thought to squidgy bits and bony bits were then sealed in separate C
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have a lax attitude to topping oneself. The French phi- leaden cases and shipped back to Blighty, where they D
losopher Montesquieu argued that this was because of received a suitably reverent Westminster funeral. E
the dismal climate and our predisposition to gloominess, Modern cultural differences are equally fascinating. RSS
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which in turn impaired the ability of the body machinery Islam dictates that the corpse must not be violated by
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to filter nervous juices. But trustees of Bristol’s Clifton cremation or dissection, which presents something of Facebook
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Suspension Bridge who fret over how to stop gloomy a dilemma for medical students in Muslim countries.
Brits hurling themselves to a watery doom from Brunel’s There is now a discreet but roaring trade in infidel stiffs, I
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landmark should consider themselves lucky that we don’t which are shipped out to Saudi Arabia en masse. Those J
share the Japanese enthusiasm for copycat suicides. In peaceable Tibetan Buddhists have some interesting ritu- K
1933, a Japanese schoolgirl threw herself into the mouth als too. On a mountain near the Ganden monastery in L
of a volcano on the island of Oshima. Over the next two Llasa, a special bunch of holy folks called Body Break- M
years, 1,208 people followed her. The authorities eventu- ers are employed to chop up corpses to make them more N
ally responded by building a small fence and banning the agreeable snacks for the local vulture population. O
sale of one-way tickets to the island. Only one subject seems to gross out Prof Mims and P
The past, as we know, is a different country. And they that’s necrophilia, to which he devotes a single meagre Q
certainly did things differently when it came to death. paragraph. But it’s those peculiar little factoids that R
Mims describes the process of classical mummification stay with you long after you’ve put down his entertain- S
in all its colourful detail, beginning with the extraction ing tome. Did you know that Lenin gets a week-long
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of the brain through the nostrils using a pair of pliers, but bath and a new suit and tie every two years? Or that
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also drolly reveals that economy class mummification the British police have seven sniffer dogs trained to
was available to the Ancient Egyptian lower orders. This detect the gases of decomposition coming from bod- V
ignominious process consisted of pumping cedar oil into ies underwater? Or – and this is my favourite – that a W
the anus and then plugging the hole. Before refrigeration, company in Wales has just contributed to the sum of X
important folks dying overseas also presented a problem. human inventiveness by designing a camel cremator Y
When the Bishop of Hereford perished in Italy in 1282, for the Dubai government?  Z
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The Modern Fantasy Diet email

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Seán Harnett argues that fantasy fiction has become a bloated,
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pretentious caricature of its own possibilities RSS
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It’s like looking at Marlon Brando as he is today and re- lingering demise of the genre. If we can’t get your daily
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membering what he used to be: he used to be slim, man. requirement of wonder from fantasy then we might as Facebook
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He used to be dangerous. He used to mean something. well go back to reading those tales of quiet despair (or
Heroic fantasy used to be slim, once. Goddamn but is it quiet tales of despair? Despairing tales of quiet- I
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it used to be lean and muscular, like the heroes and ness?) for our fictional sustenance. J
swordsmen it celebrated. It used to be dangerous. It It’s customary, of course, to blame J.R.R. Tolkien for K
used to tell us stories about ourselves that never ap- this state of affairs. The Lord Of The Rings. What more L
peared in the pages of respectable literary journals does one need to say? The page count, they say; the M
(with their stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet, cosily familiar setting, the bad prose, the dreary exposi- N
stately dysfunction) but were nevertheless more truly a tion: the family resemblance between Tolkien’s work O
reflection of the times in which we lived, and the yearn- and the substandard fiction that pads out the fantasy/ P
ings that impelled us. science fiction section in your local bookstore is clear. Q
No longer: heroic fantasy has grown fat. Bloated. So, yes, an obvious accusation, but a wrong-headed R
We’re not talking a few extra pound around the waist, one. Tolkien is no more to blame for modern fantasy
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here: we’re talking serious glandular problems, shop- writing than Jane Austen is to blame for Mills and
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ping at special stores for the larger individual. We’re Boons novels.
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talking about Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin Consider the facts: Tolkien wrote just two books in
and David Eddings, with their three or five or ten book his lifetime that could be classified as ‘fantasy’ a la V
series, each volume in the series containing seven or the modern definition, and one of those, The Silmaril- W
eight or 900 pages of plodding prose, dull exposition, lion, was released posthumously (The Hobbit should X
unresolved plot threads and attempts to conjure up a be classified, properly, as a children’s book). More Y
sense of wonder so badly executed as to signal the final, importantly, Tolkien was not trying to write a novel Z
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in the pulp tradition of fantasy: he was trying to write and the current spate of fantasy writers. That writer is More A
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literature. However you might feel about the degree Michael Moorcock. B
of his success, it’s hard to deny that there’s something There’s no denying that Moorcock has written some C
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rather appealing about his stubborn attempt to re-create excellent heroic fantasy. The first few books in the Elric D
something old when all around him were attempting to series, The First Chronicles Of Corum and Gloriana E
be ‘modern’. (especially Gloriana) are all magnificent novels. Yet RSS
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He did not really belong in the 20th century, did dear side-by-side with those fine works one must set the
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old Ronald Reuel. He was a man more comfortable substandard epics he has been churning out in parallel Facebook
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with the past, and the forms of the past; he wrote his since the 1960s, in which character names and settings
fiction at least partly as an exercise in creating a saga of change but essentially the same story is told, over and I
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an imaginary past that might live in the present century. over again. J
And that’s the crucial difference: Tolkien’s models were Given that he did invent Elric and Hawkmoon, it is K
the Kalevala and the Icelandic sagas. Although modern regrettable that Moorcock’s career in heroic fantasy is L
fantasy may tip the hat to ancient myths or medieval strewn with such rubbish as The Second Chronicles M
sagas, borrowing images here and situations there, its Of Corum. Like so much of his later work, these three N
real antecedents lie in the pulp fictions of Fritz Leiber, books each begin with an identical account of the call- O
Jack Vance, Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Howard: to-arms and kitting out of the hero, continue with a P
the masters. Whatever you may say about their prose quest narrative that is remarkably similar in each book, Q
(and it was often dull and frequently hilariously bad), and end with an identical climax and denouement. The R
these writers nevertheless told stories with leanness series is the same story told three times. Moorcock S
and bravado and imagination, qualities sadly lacking in tries to justify his cynical treatment of the reader on
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most of today’s writers of fantasy. the grounds that the novels record the ceaseless strug-
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How did we get from there to here? How did we get gle of the Eternal Champion, when really they are the
from writers who could pack a punch in the space of efforts of a hack writer trying to pay the mortgage. In V
ten pages, to writers who can’t seem to tell a story in retrospect, such contemptuous treatment of the reader W
ten books, let alone one? That’s a whole other story but, of fantasy has done as much to set the standard of X
in the Reader’s Digest version, one writer stands out as contemporary mass-market fantasy as anything Tolk- Y
having acted as the bridge between those pulp masters ien ever did. Moorcock has convinced a generation of Z

writers that the key to success is to marry his rate of golden rule of pulp fiction, in whatever genre or what- More A
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output with Tolkien’s bulk. ever medium, is not to overstay your welcome. Tell B
Take, for instance, the case of Robert Jordan. He your story, move the reader, and then get the hell out of C
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started his career writing pastiches of Conan and there. Short, sharp shocks, that’s the stuff: in pulp the D
moved on, after writing a few military historical nov- act of secondary creation doesn’t have to be profound E
els, to The Wheel Of Time series. At last count the series or deep to conjure up in one’s mind images of strange, RSS
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had reached book nine and had, according to a very otherworldly realms. The trouble starts, however, when
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reliable source (my brother) finally managed to inject you stretch a story out. The creases and lacunae are Facebook
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some momentum into his story after four gratingly dull easier to spot the longer you go on. In other words, to
instalments. I wouldn’t know. I gave up reading the continue beyond a certain point you have to be really I
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damn thing after chapter two of volume two. Jordan’s good at what you’re doing. J
world simply held no interest for me. He may follow Jordan is not very good at what he’s doing. But then, K
the Moorcock/Tolkien formula, but he possesses nei- none of the best-selling writers of fantasy fiction are. L
ther Moorcock’s cool anger and strapping disavowal The people writing decent fantasy, people like John M
of received wisdom, nor the lofty poetic impulses that Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Robert Holdstock and Jonathan N
drove Tolkien. Jordan’s ambitions in the field of sub- Carroll, are doing so on the margins of the genre. The O
creation far surpasses his ability to give them adequate trouble is that they are marginal figures, and will remain P
expression, and the world and characters of The Wheel so, unless someone can write a fantasy – in a mode other Q
Of Time remain hopelessly one-dimensional. than the heroic – that has genuine mainstream appeal. R
Now I understand that a man has to pay his bills and If there was anyone who I thought could pull this off S
it’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, is making and be the saviour of fantasy writing, it would have been
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a living from doing what they love, but there has to Neil Gaiman. If you recognise the name it’s because
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be a better way. Tolkien published maybe 2,000 pages he wrote The Sandman, the most talked about comic
of fiction in his lifetime. Jordan churns that out every books series of the last 15 years. They are a deceptively V
two years. The inverse ratio of quality and quantity has intoxicating distillation of Jungian archetypes, EC hor- W
never been more starkly illustrated. ror comics, Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis. Tasting as X
For god’s sake, man, you’re not writing the Bible or if they had been brewed in some age-rimed cauldron Y
the Mahabharata. You’re writing pulp fiction. And the the quaint, knowing, disturbing, moving stories that Z

were bottled and passed around a fervent readership But at least there’s a sense of conflict in American More A
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each month seemed to say all that could be said about a Gods, and that’s something to be grateful for. All writ- B
certain style of fantasy writing. Gaiman even managed ing is, of course, about conflict, and not just conflict C
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to make Milton – that old puritan codger – seem sexy within the story, but informing the story as well. What D
and that’s praise enough, right there. defines a genre is the nature of the conflict that lies at its E
They were pulp fiction at its best. heart. For me, all fantasy writing is specifically about RSS
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Recently, though, Gaiman has published American one conflict, the conflict between the way we think the
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Gods, and I’m not so sure about him anymore. A world is and the way we feel it ought to be. The best Facebook
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breezeblock-sized novel that suffers from its excessive writers in the genre may not be consciously aware of
length, American Gods is basically just a re-write of this conflict, but they do embody it. In his public and I
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The Sandman. We have another strangely passive male private life, for instance, Tolkien was a devout Catho- J
protagonist – called Shadow here, he might easily have lic, but when he wrote he was a pagan. His imagination K
been called Dream. There’s the same extended cast of inhabited the world of the Beowulf poet and mourned L
squabbling gods, demons, sprites, faeries and spirits; the passing of the old barbarian ethos, with its old gods M
the same coy might-be-real/might-not-be real jig and monsters, even as he professed the creed which had N
around the maypole of mythology. There’s even a cute, been responsible for that world’s passing away. O
quirky lesbian college student – all dressed in black, Today’s fantasy writers seem to be mostly pagans, P
no doubt – whose only narrative purpose is to deliver too – at least on this side of the Pond. And when I say pa- Q
a cute, quirky monologue that could just as easily have gan I mean that literally: in the sense that many modern R
tripped off the tongue of Death. authors of fantasy seem to be Wiccans, re-constructed S
In other words, if you’ve read The Sandman you’ve druids, or neo-shamans, penning tales full of right-on
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read this novel. There’s nothing new in American Gods, pagan characters fighting the deadening influence of all
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and that’s the greatest disappointment from a writer those earth-destroying religions, and speaking in earnest
previously so good at showing us old things with new thees and thous of the healing power of the Goddess. V
eyes. I’m worried that Gaiman has no new stories in These writers believe whole-heartedly in what they W
him, and that the remainder of his career will be haunted are writing – and fair play to them – but it does mean X
by the ghost of Sandman, just as surely as Arthur Conan that there is no animating tension to make their stories Y
Doyle’s was haunted by Sherlock Holmes. interesting. In the end, it becomes little more than new- Z

age propaganda and an extended advertisement for the I use the past tense because the work of Gaiman, and More A
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local Renaissance Faire. contemporaries such Holdstock, Carroll and Crowley, B
Neil Gaiman has tension, however. From what I know seems to have exhausted the possibilities of writing a C
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of him I’d peg him as a pagan (if only in sentiment; he ‘Jungian’ fantasy. Appealing to the collective uncon- D
seems to really dig those old-time gods), yet he writes scious is becoming less tenable as a deus ex machina in E
essentially Christian stories of sacrifice and redemption. a world where memetics and evolutionary psychology RSS
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He is also brave enough to show just what dark, bloody, have replaced depth psychology as the essential means
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vicious, vengeful energy hides in the old pagan stories. of understanding the self. It is difficult to see how the Facebook
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Yet, for all his tensions, Gaiman seems less like the kind of fantasy written in the last century can be any-
purveyor of a new style of fantasy writing, and more like thing but a cliché in our brave new millennium. I
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the culmination of an old style, a style I would term the The question is this: can fantasy re-invigorate J
‘Jungian.’ 20th-century English and American fantasy itself in the face of these new conceptions of the K
flourished in a world very much alive to the notion that self? There is some slight hope that a new kind of L
wisdom could be found in those old pagan stories, and fantasy writing could appear, instigated by writers M
that was okay because everyone knew, after Jung, that such as Steve Aylett and China Mieville, who give N
those stories were conduits to the collective archetypes. the impression that they are ready to write ‘weird O
Even C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, so notoriously dismiss- stories’ for a culture that no longer necessarily be- P
ive of ‘Continental’ influences, read and admired Jung lieves in the unity of the psyche, the mythic power Q
(though they always resolutely sniped at Freud). He of stories or the efficacy of any kind of healing balm R
seemed to provide a foundation for fantasy, his theories that doesn’t come in the form of a pill. However, so S
a sort of undeclared manifesto for – and justification of long as such writers are squeezed out of bookstore
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– the genre. They had much in common, Jung and the shelves by the bloated works of Jordan, Eddings,
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fantasy genre; in this one thing, if nothing else: they be- Williams, et al, I’m afraid that we must conclude
lieved in the power of stories; they believed that stories that fantasy will collapse under its own weight V
could teach us something. The great fantasy writers of and metamorphose into a genre as rule-bound and W
the 20th century believed that stories were either healing derivative as the Mills and Boons romance. X
balms of the psyche or agents of unsettlement, chinks in And that would be a triumph even Sauron could be Y
the armour of our everyday assumptions. content with.  Z

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Alan Moore: Voice Of The Fire email

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Antony Johnston
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Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel. invented two things simultaneously, both by accident.
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But Moore has been writing for as long as this ‘The 80s Comics Renaissance’ and the ‘graphic novel’. Facebook
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reviewer can remember. Starting with the odd Future Nevertheless, Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s
Shock and Time Twister for 2000AD, his radically debut novel – and what a novel it is. Spanning 5,000 I
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original subject matter and unashamedly emotional years but never straying from within a ten-mile radius J
style soon led to serial commissions, the most famous around Moore’s home of Northampton, this novel has K
being the award-winning Ballad Of Halo Jones. Dur- the author’s hallmarks all over it. Ostensibly it is a tale L
ing this time Moore, like so many British creators, also of witchcraft and magic; from the first ‘Hob-Men’, M
began working for American comics where the wages, through Elizabethan court magicians, and finally end- N
respect and contracts are more agreeable than here in ing with only myth, the oppressive 20th century having O
the UK. He achieved cult fame with his reinvention of imprisoned and buried humanity’s esoteric vision. P
Swamp Thing, and his craft became ever more diverse But there is far more to this book, hinted at during the Q
and polished. retelling of Northampton legends and finally revealed R
Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel. in the last chapter, where Moore himself takes upon the
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In 1985, by now a writer for at least five years, role of narrator in a very real 1995 Northampton. Voice
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Moore wrote Watchmen, a truly unique and original Of The Fire is a tale of lost myths, of history’s subjective
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comic for its time. Unlike ‘proper’ comics which seek nature. As history must always be written by survivors,
to continue their franchise for as long as economically is any man’s history more ‘real’ than another’s? Who V
possible, Watchmen was written as a limited, closed- is to say? W
arc story. It was written in 12 chapters, it was published Moore is also perturbed by humanity’s loss of vision, X
in 12 chapters – and was so popular it became the first and implores us to dream again lest we be trapped for- Y
full comic story to be rebound in book form. Moore ever in ever-decreasing circles of superficiality. From Z
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the closing chapters it is clear Moore believes we have same jealous, spiteful wives who eventually burned More A
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lost our way somewhere along the line in the name of them. Moore does not profess to understand these B
popular science. But Moore is not anti-scientific per self-destructive acts – can any of us? – but they are C
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se; as he shrewdly points out, even scientists of this told with such emotion, and such naturalism, that one D
century have not discounted the theories of subjective cannot help but feel sympathy for the narrators. Even E
realities. It is humanity’s blind faith and newfound pas- the travelling salesman. RSS
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sivity which endangers us. Does he succeed? In a word, yes. In the manner of
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Moore questions what in our society has oppressed his contemporary Neil Gaiman, Moore has the skill Facebook
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those visions and fancies we once had, where people to convey his passion and allow the reader to at least
centuries ago were pronounced dead by ‘Rising glimpse through his eyes. Only the most jaded and I
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Lights’, ‘the Purples’ or ‘Planet Shock’, and man built cold-hearted among men could read his account of J
grand follies to match his grand dreams. In Moore’s the dying Wise-Man, or the two witches, and not feel K
own words: sympathy, even outrage. Like so many good writers, L
“Everything grand we had, we tore it to bits. Our Moore is especially good at reminding us of what we M
castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious already know, but forget too easily in the onward rush N
poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fuck- of survival; that we all love, we all feel pain, and we all O
ing madhouse. Jesus Christ.” must die. P
For these, and others, are the tales Moore recounts; Paradoxically, within this dark and melancholy book Q
a beggar-woman turned nun who was flogged to death Moore inspires us to think again on the beauties of ex- R
for receiving visions from Wotan. A mad poet who istence; of how precious is our time; and how, if we can S
wrote beautiful verse and harmed none yet died in an just pause to remember the lessons we have learned and
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asylum, sentenced there by his frustrated wife and the bounties we possess, we may yet revive the eternal
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son. Two Imp-summoning witches whose practices fires of history and learn from what they can tell us.
were at once both reviled and sought after by the Voice Of The Fire is a damn fine novel. For a debut.  V
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Patricia Morrisroe: Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography email

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Nick Clapson
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Robert Mapplethorpe has long been a contentious fig- and as result he is frequently portrayed as being cold
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ure in the art world, with much of this debate focusing and detached. Indeed, if Morrisroe is to be believed, Facebook
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on whether or not his erotic/homoerotic photographs Mapplethorpe’s attitude towards unprotected sex after
trespass the boundaries of pornography. This is a mat- being infected with AIDS is nothing short of chilling. I
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ter which becomes especially prejudiced by the fact Mapplethorpe is shown to be a man obsessed by J
that they often deal with the difficult subject of gay money and fame, pursuing both remorselessly through- K
sadomasochism. Much of his other work, however, out his brief life, using anyone he could to achieve his L
deals with more innocuous subjects like portraiture and aims. Paradoxically, though, his objectionable traits M
floral studies. Whatever his subject matter, though, his were balanced by a charisma that constantly drew peo- N
photographs constantly sought to elicit, and so control, ple towards him. By examining this milieu, Morrisroe O
the beauty present in all that he observed, be it Richard has also explored the intimate details of his long-term P
Gere or a lily. relationships, particularly with singer/poet Patti Smith Q
Patricia Morrisroe’s book manages to trace a well- and collector Sam Wagstaff. R
balanced path through Mapplethorpe’s career from Morrisroe has achieved a work of outstanding clar-
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suburban student to New York star, often pausing to ity. She provides not only an exhaustive, yet riveting,
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illuminate pertinent links between his life and art. For examination of a major artist’s life, but also manages
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example, Mapplethorpe’s personal calculating manner to demythologise her subject along the way by care-
is presented as an obvious impetus for his highly con- ful avoidance of the usual clichés. Morrisroe presents V
trolled, almost classical style. By not shying away from Mapplethorpe – photographer or artist, pornographer W
Mapplethorpe’s ‘darker’ pursuits, Morrisoe generates a or celebrity – stripped of his mask, his troubling face X
more exacting image of this frequently disturbing art- available for all to view in the harsh light of history. The Y
ist. She renders Mapplethorpe with a shocking honesty, only evident limitations to the overall success of this Z
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of academic material, and a few stumbling conclusions. B
This book could also have been improved with less of C
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today’s almost obligatory snaps of the artist as a baby, D
and more extensive examples of his work. However, E
the carefully controlled pathos of Mapplethorpe’s de- RSS
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cline into AIDS easily outweighs a few off comments.
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Accessible yet engaging, this epitaph to a truly in- Facebook
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triguing man is going to be hard to surpass. 
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And so to the comeback of the year. Seven years without kids at the back by calling for Dubbya’s death onstage.)
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a contract, self-exiled to LA, the avatar of the awkward So much for the hoary old racism allegations, but does Facebook
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fled his homeland after a bitter divorce with the UK that mean he rejects his new home? As ever in Mozland
music press, all the more sour because the ardour was nothing is quite so simple, after comparing Yanks to I
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once so strong. The eternal chronicler of the downtrod- voracious fat pigs he croons with typically breathtaking J
den seemed himself doomed to obscurity. Being a fan arrogance “but haven’t you me with you now? / And I K
was virtually the love that dare not speak its name. love you”. Its love/hate with the US just as it was with L
But back in 2002, triumphant homecoming shows the UK. This track has been lambasted for the simplicity M
coupled with renewed support from young bands like of its lyrics. The critics forget, as often, that the northern N
The Libertines saw the climate change. If ever there nihilist has always liked to take the piss, and this is a fine O
was a chance to return, this was it. Courting the media example. They overlook too the sumptuousness of the P
like never before, he certainly knows there’s a lot riding tune and vocals. This is a fine opener. Q
on this. No wonder the album cover shows our more ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ comes next, a short and R
mature protagonist with a gun; this is the last chance powerful rocky number that crams in its two minutes
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saloon. Would we be the quarry or would he? a restatement of his pride in both his Englishness and
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The opener ‘America Is Not The World’ instantly Irishness, another scathing denunciation of those who
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upends expectations. This most famous detester of all accused him racism, and an attack on the Labour Party,
things ‘dance’ is singing over a hip-hop/loungecore the Conservative Party, Cromwell and the royal family. V
backbeat. And he’s attacking the ignorance and preju- Not bad for his first Top 5 single! He’s back alright. W
dice of Bush’s USA “where the President is never black, The tempo slows right down for the next three songs. X
female or gay / until that day/ you’ve got nothing to say ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ sets the tone for half the al- Y
to me” (he’s since spelled that out recently for the slow bum in showing that his voice is easily the finest it’s Z
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ever been, but the tunes are often subtle, not “instant.” terpiece. ‘The First Of The Gang To Die’ is the only More A
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The following ‘Come Back To Camden’ shows that ‘character’ song on the album, and the only example B
tendency at its optimum, a beautiful orchestral sweep of Morrissey’s longstanding tradition of Orton-esque, C
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with a near-operatic climax. It’s served with the best of Genet-ish paeans to bits of rough. This time it’s the D
Morrissey’s jaded brand of sepia nostalgia, singing of Mexican gangsters of LA that get the leery treatment. It E
love lost under slate grey Victorian skies and disused may sound unpromising. In fact it’s perfect. RSS
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dark brown stairwells. ‘I’m Not Sorry’ is its nadir; too The crashing guitar backing, the Latino strings, the
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sparse, dull, showing the voice can’t draw you in on frighteningly catchy chorus, everything falls impec- Facebook
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its own even with the tantalising “the woman of my cably together. “You have never been in love / until
dreams? / there never was one” addition to the age old you’ve seen the stars / reflect in the reservoirs” sets the I
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is he/isn’t he conundrum. tone of drama, undercut with wicked humour. “Such a J
Melody re-ignites with ‘The World Is Full Of Crashing silly boy,” he berates the song’s anti-hero, sending up K
Bores’, proving the man’s bitterness and sharp tongue the obvious incongruity of a camp Englishman hanging L
haven’t mellowed with age. “Lock jawed pop stars round with Hispanic gang-bangers. As always, he knows M
thicker than pigshit” are among those lambasted here, his obsession with sexy footpads is wrong; but all the N
easy targets sure, but great fun nonetheless, ending with more bedevilling for that. “He stole from the rich / and O
a very pretty and atypical Beatle-esque bit of reverb. the poor / and the not very rich / and the very poor / and P
‘How Can Anybody Possibly Think They Know How he stole all hearts away” he sings, as the word “away” Q
I Feel’ gets down and dirty and quickens the pace a bit floats to the ether in an achingly gorgeous falsetto which R
more, deepening the album’s abiding sense of paranoia. combines early Smiths yodellings with the power of his S
These songs have been criticised as mere moans about mature voice. It’s enough to make you weep with maud-
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his notorious court cases, but it’s not only everyone in lin joy, and one of his very best songs ever, solo or not.
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authority who is savaged, but anyone who has ever liked With ‘Let Me Kiss You’ we’re back to more subtle
him too! “Their judgment is crazy” apparently. There re- and muted territory once more, but also the album’s V
ally is no pleasing some people. “Fame fame fatal fame”, biggest grower. Over a distinctly Marr-ish arrange- W
to quote an earlier number. But then batty misanthropy ment Morrissey once more does self-deprecating X
was always key to his twisted charm. yearning like no-one else, craving attention while Y
The next track is the album’s centrepiece, and mas- knowing he will be “physically despised”. Once Z

more, at least in song, age seems only to add to his has portrayed a mindset which to quote Larkin is “rusted More A
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beguiling neurosis. He may reside in California, but stiff / and will admit / only what will accuse or horrify / B
he still revels in doing that most un-American of like slot machines only bent pennies fit.” Most times on C
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things; celebrating life’s losers. Quarry he pulls that off with optimum wit and charm. D
The following ‘All The Lazy Dykes’ doesn’t quite Just this once, you are reminded he is a rich middle-aged E
doesn’t quite match up in the melody stakes but as with pop star still griping about a court case almost a decade RSS
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many songs here ends with a hugely moving finale. Its back. A slightly sour aftertaste to a fine brew.
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urge for a downtrodden housewife to find her freedom I was going to finish off by saying You Are The Quarry Facebook
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in Sapphic joy is oddly touching. “I’ve never felt so falls just short of greatness. But having listened to it re-
alive / in the WHOLE of my life” he sings, and as often peatedly for nearly two months I think it may just reach I
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in this album, one stunning inflection picks up an oth- that state after all. It’s the slang-dictionary definition J
erwise slight arrangement. of the word ‘grower’; even songs I dismissed outright K
Onto the penultimate track, ‘I Like You’. ‘America’ on first, second and third listens are now warmed to. If L
apart, most of this album is basically guitar rock with you’re one of the haters who only ever saw Moz as a M
a few atmospheric keyboard extras courtesy of new queasy mix of Kenneth Williams, Eddie Cochran and N
producer Jerry Finn; no huge departure really. But here Eeyore the Donkey this album certainly won’t change O
we have a positively New Order-esque backbeat and an your mind. But those who have seen worth in his gutter- P
overdrive on the electronica. At its heart is a strident, eyed vision in the past may find much to treasure here if Q
killer chorus, where our protagonist seems utterly baf- they only take the time. R
fled by the alien feeling of actually finding someone he Pop’s prole-prince of the outsiders has returned in a S
gets on with. “You’re not right in the head / and nor am more triumphant manner than we could have expected.
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I / and this is why…”, once again, breathing beauty into I still feel it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Viva Hate,
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everyday English phraseology. Vauxhall and I or Your Arsenal. But its unquestion-
With the climax, ‘You Know I Couldn’t Last’, what ably Leeds’ side-streets ahead of Kill Uncle, Southpaw V
should be an arch crescendo to the set sadly ends up Grammar and Maladjusted. And as for the tired old W
overdoing the bombast, with histrionic guitar crashes complaints that it’s “not as good as The Smiths”, one can X
and the lyrics moaning just a bit too much this time. only reply as Joseph Heller did when told each new book Y
Throughout this disc, as throughout his career Morrissey wasn’t as good as Catch 22. “No. But then, what is?”  Z

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Cookie Mueller: Ask Dr Mueller email

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This is one book you can judge by the cover. It shows self-obsessed myth making in Cookie’s writings.
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a home snapped portrait of Cookie Mueller laughing, She discusses taking truckloads of drugs in 1960s Facebook
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her head thrown back and her hand out against the Haight-Ashbury with the same humorous detach-
wall for support. Ask Dr Mueller is 300 pages of that ment that she catalogues a day of domestic disasters. I
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laughter, gathered together from over 25 years worth The overwhelming impression is that Cookie lived J
of her writing about a life that was wild, weird but, so life to the full and everything within it interested her. K
it would seem, frequently wonderful. Cookie is best Most of all, she could equally convey those mad and L
known for her appearances alongside Divine in the mundane moments’ importance on the page, turning M
films of maverick director John Waters. However, as the deeply personal from mere autobiography into N
Waters writes in his introduction, she had many sides: a kind of art. If a writer’s job is to look at what we O
“a writer, a mother, an outlaw, a fashion designer, a all take for granted and bring back something of its P
go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all, magic, then Cookie deserved a huge payrise. Q
a goddess.” Forever on the move, Cookie’s writings Her death from AIDS in 1989, seven weeks after her R
show her restless enthusiasm for everything from art husband died of the same cause, brought an abrupt halt
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criticism to travelling to being an agony aunt. to the stream of stories, reflections, advice and ideas
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Throughout her life, she stumbled into the most collected here. Most books which feature collections
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bizarre situations; everything from burning down of writers’ published and unpublished work are usually
a friend’s house by accident, being abducted on just picking over the dead bones of what’s left, like the V
Highway 31 and fucking chickens for the sake of posthumous Bruce Chatwin industry. Ask Dr Mueller, W
art. (If that doesn’t make you want to read the book, however, goes in the opposite direction – it brings to- X
nothing will). Yet while she certainly led what most gether between two covers a hilarious and fascinating Y
would consider a hellraising lifestyle, there’s no collage of one woman’s journey through life. Z
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because it can’t really be categorised, which makes it one of those glorious collections that reflects the un- B
unmarketable; moreover, Cookie’s fame is limited to predictability and everyday insanity of life. It doesn’t C
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devotees of relatively obscure films and the American matter whether you know who Cookie Mueller is; by D
underground. But this relative anonymity is exactly the the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll wish she was E
book’s major strength. A reader can never be quite sure still around.  RSS
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Ben Myers: The Book Of Fuck email

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Chris Mitchell
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With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book clichés twisted into new shapes, all set against his love
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or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your of London’s squalid glamour. It’s a prose style that can Facebook
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name forever after. Just to make things more difficult, certainly be called punk rock, but the tone of our hero
the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of is far more gentle and even genteel than even the most I
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Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about half-hearted sneer from Mr Rotten. He’s a Cat Stevens’ J
your criteria for choosing a book to read, but some- fan, for Christ’s sake. K
thing written in seven days sounds to me like it will be That notwithstanding, there’s a touch of Hunter S. L
a cramp-stomached vomit of speed-crazed gibberish, Thompson to the prose, which is a compliment not to M
especially if the back cover states it’s “a buckled break- be awarded likely because The Book Of Fuck echoes N
neck rant let loose at punk rock speed”. HST’s style without trying to ape it. It runs in parallel to O
Thankfully, none of these things are true. The Book rather than behind it, connecting a mordant intelligence P
Of Fuck is a homage and a pisstake of the twilight with a sense of amused bewilderment at the predica- Q
world of music journalism, a first person reportage ments in which the narrator continually finds himself. R
of a starving hack sent off in search of a death metal As someone who used to read the music papers reli-
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antichrist superstar called, to the joy of America’s giously as a teenager, back in the golden era of Melody
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Christian masses, the God Of Fuck. GoF is like Mari- Maker at the end of the 80s, The Book Of Fuck has
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lyn Manson, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and GG Allin all a lot of resonance with that time, before intelligent
rolled into one – the bogeyman of popular culture. But music journalism all but disappeared underneath the V
GoF doesn’t get much of a look-in even though the market forces of dad rock and prepubescent market- W
search for him propels the plot – the pages are taken up ing exercises. (Can’t we ban The Beatles ever being X
with the internal monologue of our protagonist, a mix featured on another magazine cover ever?). The Book Y
of furious punning, musical musing and starving artist Of Fuck doesn’t offer up anything particularly pro- Z
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roadtrip of the soul in search of profundity, which is B
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this is a book that wants to be read. Sadly there are nu-
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merous typos scattered through it, but then, that’s very Facebook
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punk rock too so I guess I’ll have to live with it. 
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Names And Their Significance In Fiction 359 Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism 401 F
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Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture 363 Ulf Poschardt: Facebook
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Songs Of The Human Animal 382 N
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P.J. O’Rourke: Mason & Dixon 410 P
Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll 389
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Matthew Robertson: Factory Records:
Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty 392 R
The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461) 413
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Your Abortion” 394 Of Thomas Penman 415 U
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Tim Parks: Destiny 398 Jacques Roubaud: W
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Names And Their Significance In Fiction email

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The importance of names in literature has nowhere spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this
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been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down has a further curious affinity with the ‘Go.dot’ read- Facebook
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the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following ing and one of cheery Norman Tebbit’s maxims: on
that farrago you can be sure that the name “Godot” is yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a I
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missing from any parental Book Of Names (although hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of J
I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around the Tory party? K
stroking their bellies and saying: “Yes, we’re waiting Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip L
For Godot…”) One can imagine the bewildered child with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is M
suffering an intolerable identity problem from having in this tradition that a lot of modern and Postmodern N
his peers forever arguing about what he ‘means.’ neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a O
To some, “Godot” has a kind of cosmic signifier in name’s potential to succinctly allude to character and P
the duality ‘God/Eau’. Less Francophile readings have disposition, often spending months deliberating over Q
insisted it should scan as ‘Go.dot’, a reference to the the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a R
mental and physical movement that must result from truly great fictional name belongs to the central charac-
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Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible sugges- ter in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces:
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tion, although the most interesting and curious, comes Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically ono-
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from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce’s matopoeic, suggesting indignation and outrage which,
Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound V
entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about W
a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot, his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius X
rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part loudly proclaims: “This is an abortion!”) There is also Y
of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle Z
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initial that furthers our understanding of the character. my little party” and concludes that in the end “it is only More A
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Philip K. Dick’s obsession with duality (probably the author’s private satisfaction that counts.” It was this B
originating from the fact that his twin sister died when “wayside murmur” that pleased him the most when C
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only a few months old) led him to invent some glori- rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correc- D
ously unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator tion. etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee E
(as with a lot of Dick’s novels, it is hard to tell) is called jump (especially first person narratives) where we may RSS
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Horselover Fat. ‘Philip’ is Greek for ‘lover of horses’; become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story
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‘Dick’ is German for ‘Fat’. Similarly, for close watch- that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov Facebook
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ers of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for
Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on I
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suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from the ropes and shouting down, “You idiots!” J
deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail & I. James Wood, in comparing young American and K
Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis English writing, recently argued for a fiction of un- L
Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to knowingness and against one of omniscient authorial M
the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/ intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov N
BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author O
obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from P
Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What Q
turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer. varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds R
If there is one author who best exemplifies a predi- patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some S
lection for names and games of the distinctly literary people don’t like the pedagogical voice in modern
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type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there fiction, don’t like being ‘lectured to’, and some don’t
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is paronomasias (a “verbal plague” as Nabokov de- like being told they’re being ‘lectured to.’ Fine. But
scribes it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an Woods, and even more recently, the children’s writer V
anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal, W
their very nature these “delicate markers” will bypass goes too far in implying that any type of Postmodern or X
the inattentive reader and that “well-wishers will bring self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they Y
their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to conceive as a ‘pure storytelling’ form. Z

I can’t help but detect a very conservative sensibility giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms, More A
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here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. B
the ‘Back To Basics’ government campaign: a return to (Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm C
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good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness, bells ringing in itself). D
elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious “Self” of course embodies the ultimate 80s Thatcher- E
cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly ite ‘ideas’ of individualism and survival. But the appo- RSS
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appearing in the run up to the Booker Prize or a Gen- site brilliance of “John Self” is in making it the central
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eral Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs’ reading twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of Facebook
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habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer, things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve
which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative the greed of the players around him. It transpires that I
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reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of Self has been signing company documents twice; once J
course, who goes down for obvious political reasons under co-signatory, once under “Self”: “It was your K
(though it begs the question: who is it that ‘rated’ him name.” This literary playfulness and close attention to L
in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt detail can be traced from Nabokov through the Ameri- M
and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like can heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to N
a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated. Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis. O
Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average The playfulness which employs hyperreal and P
MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand. ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best ex- Q
Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics emplified by Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Here the names R
hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it? are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous S
The importance of a name to plot structure is no- (viz. Pulp Fiction: “This is America: names don’t mean
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where more comically heightened than in Martin Amis’ shit”). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and
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Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a subversion in the name “Yossarian” (which is noted by
financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shak- one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also V
ers. It is the character’s very name that is the source the double “Major Major” (which has recently been re- W
of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs cycled as the title of Terry Major-Ball’s autobiography) X
if you haven’t read the book). “John: is, I think, the and the sub-Dickensian “Chaplain Tapmann”. “Milo Y
perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the Minderbinder” is a personal favourite, conjuring up Z

an image of a kind of entrepreneurial mesmerist who from Misreadings is entitled ‘Granita’ and is a twist More A
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also happens to be mentally ill. However, we also have upon Lolita, where the subject of desire is an old lady. B
Richard Ford’s “Frank Banscombe”, a name redolent In the Nabokovian version the central protagonist is, of C
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of Updike’s great tragicomic figure Harry ‘Rabbit’ course, Humbert Humbert, the name once again being D
Angstrom: thus a more naturalistic name could be said indicative of a double or split image. The similarity E
to suit the subtler pastiche and ironic métiers of Ford of Umberto to Humbert is striking, and “Eco” sounds RSS
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and Updike. like an allusion to the fact that the first name is an echo
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Names become their strangest when the demarca- of the first. Before knowing any better I found myself Facebook
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tions between fiction and reality begin to merge into thinking that perhaps Will Self was a sly allusion to one
one another . Umberto Eco is a case in point. His non- of his mentors (and mates) Martin Amis. But that would I
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fictional name is almost too literary, too good, to be be to confuse art with life. And we all know where that J
the real name of an author. One of Eco’s short stories gets us…  K
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Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture email

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Antony Johnston discusses cities, prose remixing and the death of Vurt
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I meet Jeff Noon in his now-native Brighton, stepping In contrast, he folds his arms and adopts an un-
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off the two o’clock from Victoria to greet a man surpris- naturally grumpy face. “Manchester’s a much harder Facebook
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ingly recognisable from his dustjacket photographs, audience. ‘Go on then, impress us.’ Down here you
casually dressed and affable. don’t feel as if you have to prove yourself before they’ll I
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You heard me. Jeff Noon, the man who made Man- listen to you.” J
chester live, breathe and kill over the course of five He laughs, leading on, and it strikes me that he really K
books, has moved to Brighton. And I’m not the only does seem very relaxed. Not at all the intense, edgy L
person curious as hell to know what that’s all about. character I was expecting. He outlines some of the ap- M
But before we can settle down, Noon leads me out peal of Brighton, and it becomes apparent how much N
the station into Brighton proper, and casually asks if I Noon’s obviously enjoying himself in his new home. O
know the city. I don’t; this is my first visit. So he offers “Brighton’s all about the individual. There’s a sense P
a two-second whistlestop tour, in the process answer- of youth, and a great artistic community. In Manches- Q
ing the question for me. ter, I felt isolated – here I’ve met more people, very R
“Look at that sky,” he says, gesturing upward. It’s a quickly, and started working with other artists much
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dry but dim day, nothing special to my eyes. “Even on more than I did in Manchester.”
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a sunny day in Manchester, you wouldn’t get a sky like We turn down one street in particular which Noon
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that. It’s always grey there.” presents as an example: “Look at this place; Green
As we walk in the direction of the North Laine area, Street. It’s all young businesses, they flock here. Here, V
he explains: “I’ve always loved Brighton, ever since look at this.” He’s paused outside a small shop with W
I did my first one-man shows down here. They were wooden fixtures, old-style fittings, and… “Beads. They X
always a great crowd. I could just tell they were up for sell nothing but beads, for goodness’ sake.” Y
it, laughing at every word.” He’s right. I peer in, and finally realise what he’s re- Z
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afternoon. And the shop’s packed. who does do it leaves, people get upset?” B
“And it always is,” he says with a smile. “Now you The answer may be simply that putting Manchester C
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try and open a shop like that in Manchester and, well…” into words is such a difficult task. It was no easy D
Dead within a week? journey for Noon, and he all but brought about his E
“Yeah. Dead within a week.” situation himself. RSS
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Down the end of the street is a small place called the “I started to feel isolated. I’d been putting these books
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TinTin Café. We step inside and take a table. Noon still out, five books, all about Manchester, and I came to feel Facebook
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hasn’t told me exactly why he moved from Manchester, that … I wasn’t getting the kind of reaction that I would
his synonymous (perhaps even symbiotic) stomping have hoped for. And it’s entirely my fault, because I I
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ground. And it’s something which shocked a lot of kind of set out on a mission. It’s always dangerous J
people. Something I need to know. when you do that.” K
“People are shocked, and I think that’s quite interest- Mission? What mission? L
ing. I’ve been asked that question a lot, and the fact “To put Manchester into the consciousness in terms M
that I’ve been asked it … That tells me something. It’s of prose. To discover, and write in, a language that had N
to do with the fact that hardly anybody writes about come out of the city. And I think on my own terms, I’d O
Manchester, in any medium, in such an intimate way as succeeded in that. On my own personal terms. But it P
I have. I reckon the only other person who’s been asked was definitely a mission.” He laughs, shaking his head. Q
so many times is Morrissey, when he left the city.” “And whenever you set out on a mission, you can only R
He points out that despite the number of artists ever really be disappointed.” S
Manchester produces, nobody would think twice Over the last few years, Noon watched his city slowly
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about Oasis leaving, “Because their work isn’t about disappear. Suffocated under a blanket of rejuvenation
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Manchester. It could have been done anywhere, you called New Manchester.
know?” He laughs and shrugs. “The poor place has been rejuvenated until it can V
“It’s not my fault that I’m one of the few that’s actu- hardly breathe. Which is great, but you have to be care- W
ally taken the city and tried to do something with it. So ful that you don’t rejuvenate into blandness. Increas- X
I think that’s actually a question you need to ask the city ingly, the city I’d been writing about started to vanish, Y
of Manchester. Why are there so few people writing and I have no interest in writing about yuppies living in Z

city centre flats. I’m not putting them down, but it’s just adds, “Obviously, each generation has its own needs More A
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not an area I have an interest in as a fictional subject. and desires. But for my personal generation, that place B
They even knocked down Bottletown.” at that time represents the spirit of individuality, which C
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He’s referring to a location in Vurt, a planning hell of is entirely what my work celebrates. Now it’s moved, D
broken glass and towerblocks, a societal nightmare of and I don’t know where it’s gone. And I’m mostly too E
accelerated residents with no concern for tomorrow. Is old to go looking for it any more.” RSS
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he saying Bottletown was real? Does he think someone else will find it? Was this it,
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“Yeah, ‘Bottletown’ is this place called Hulme. the generation gap catching up perhaps? Facebook
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Hulme was an amazing place, and very typical of “Yeah, I think so. And one of the things which I hoped
what’s happened in Manchester, in a sense. It’s this would have happened by now, was for my success to I
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1960s council place: flats, ‘terraces in the sky.’ It didn’t have dragged other writers up who would deal with the J
work as a family place at all, so all the families moved city in their own individualistic way. That didn’t really K
out. And they began moving young single people in, happen, and I think it should. I think it needs to happen. L
students and so on. Short-term people. Manchester needs that voice, because it’s very hard to M
“So it all started to change, and that’s when I lived say anything against this New Manchester effort that’s N
there. Hulme became this hotbed of activity; lots of building up. So the city needs that voice, the alternative O
bands started there. There were recording studios in the voice. And it needs the alternative voice to be a success, P
flats, totally illegal. And it was very close to Moss Side, to a good degree rather than just being underground.” Q
the large black area, so there was a lot cross-fertilisation This voice … does it have to be a native one? He’s a R
between the cultures going on. Just a mad place. Mancunian, so were Morrissey and Ian Curtis: does he S
“Eventually, they just knocked it down. They had to, feel that sort of experience is necessary to capture the
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it was very badly built and so on. But all that atmos- ‘real’ Manchester?
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phere, all that excitement, has dissipated. And they’ve “No, no, not at all! I mean, a lot of students come
built this new Hulme in its place, which is…” He into Manchester, from all over the place. It just needs V
pauses, choosing careful words. “I mean, I’m sure it’ll people to talk about the city in a certain way. It’s time W
be interesting in 50 years, but at the moment it’s like a for someone younger than me to do that now, because X
toytown. Not an ounce of atmosphere.” my concerns are changing over the years, as they do.” Y
Aware of what may seem to be a nostalgia trip, he I mentioned that because one of the things Noon Z

did inspire with books like Vurt was a sense that no That’s the idea… More A
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matter who you were or where you lived, your town “Certainly, I’ve been writing plays…” He pauses, B
was as good a place as anywhere to tell a story. It’s considering. “I’ve been writing since 1984, doing C
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very easy to get trapped into the feeling that interesting one-man shows. And that stuff wasn’t really about D
things only happen in ‘glamorous’ places, like London Manchester as such. It tended to be quite experimental, E
or New York… just set nowhere. My only big success as a playwright RSS
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“Yeah, and the reason for that is quite simple, but was Woundings, and that’s set on the Falkland Islands!
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a difficult truth for people to handle. It’s to do with “So I didn’t really have that inkling to write about Facebook
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stories, and the kind of environments that allow stories Manchester, and I think that was because nobody was.
to happen. Obviously, with places like New York and There wasn’t the heritage there which you get in, say, I
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certain areas of London, you have an environment that pop music. Pop’s been rooted in Manchester since J
does very readily create stories; it’s to do with the way 1977, the idea that this is a place where you can do K
that people live their lives there. Once you get into the that. So young generations of people automatically L
provinces, of England especially, you start to lose that fall into it.” M
melting-pot of ideas. There has to be a lot of work done. But it seems the final impetus came from an unex- N
It’s much more difficult to write about Manchester than pected turn of events. “I started writing a play called O
it is about Soho, for instance. But these are problems The Torture Garden, again set in a totally fictional P
that writers in the future will have to face and sort out.” environment. But the person I was writing the play for Q
A matter of finding the stories? left the country for a job abroad, and I was left with this R
“Yeah. I think that in a place like Manchester there half-finished idea.” S
are a limited number of stories anyway. And a lot of the At that point, Noon was working in a Waterstone’s
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writers that have written about Manchester have tended bookshop in Manchester. This is the point where eve-
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to concentrate on these certain things.” rything happens; this is where it all turns around. Steve
Is this why Noon chose to make his work ostensibly Powell, the man behind the fledgling Ringpull Press, V
science fiction? As a way of creating a Manchester was also working there. And he needed someone to W
where stories are created more readily? write a novel for him… X
He pauses, contemplating his orange juice. “Difficult “I took the ideas of that play, and turned them into Y
question, that.” Vurt. And that’s the first time that I started to write about Z

Manchester. I wasn’t that conscious of even doing it; that comes out of the punk thing.” More A
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I was a quarter of the way through when I suddenly It will surprise no-one to learn that yes, Noon was B
realised, ‘Hey this could be quite special, no-one’s re- a punk. It was the only time in his life where he was C
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ally done this before, not in this way.’ And that’s when part of a crowd, a movement – “I’m just not like that D
the mission set in…” naturally” – and to him it signifies the real start of his E
Noon’s not the first writer to be halfway through a adult life. He’s at pains to point out that his work is RSS
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project before realising what the essence of the work societal, not just cyberdrugs and urban grit.
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actually is, and he agrees that it’s often the best way for “If you actually examine Vurt, there are serious things Facebook
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a work to come about. going on in there which nobody ever talks about. It’s
“The more and more books you do, the more you about escape, and facing up to the realities of what it I
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think about what you’re doing. I’d always been in- is you’re trying to escape from. This is something that J
terested in Ballard and Borges, people on the fringes happens again and again in my work; it’s one of the K
of sci-fi, though; and the sci-fi thing happened al- themes that I pinpointed as being a typical Manchester L
most accidentally, just came out of the ideas in The story. The need to escape from your situation.” M
Torture Garden.” Certainly, many of Noon’s characters have an intro- N
It almost sounds like one of Noon’s own fictions, the verted quality, continually faced with the temptation to O
random remixing of concepts, words and spaces into retreat into a secret, safe world. His stories are about P
something altogether different. finding the courage to face what you’re retreating from. Q
“I’ve always been drawn to quite experimental art. “I think if you go back to Morrissey’s work with The R
But the idea of experimental art in Manchester at the Smiths, you’ll definitely key into that feeling there as S
time … It’s almost impossible to imagine what Man- well. Manchester in the 70s, when both Morrissey and
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chester was like back then. It was so dark, and grimy, I were growing up, was just not a place to be sensitive,
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and grim. You just can’t imagine what it was like from or to be artistic or creative; it was beaten out of you. So
here. So yeah, when you come to Vurt, you get this quite you do get the sense of escape going on with people V
down and grimy place – a place of shadows – mixing from our generation.” W
with this phantasmagorical world.” What about other, later generations? Are they es- X
Dark, but with a lot of energy, too. caping too? Y
“Yeah, there was that. There’s always been that, and “It’s quite interesting to look at what’s been coming Z

out of Manchester since then, typified I suppose by there. I mean, when Vurt initially came out it reached a More A
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Oasis and Happy Mondays. I mean, the escape that certain number of people, and grew from there, but it’s B
they’re on is just not the same at all. They’re escaping been very slow. Even now, my sales aren’t what you’d C
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into stereotypes, for a start. There’s very little sense of call massive.” D
exploration in their work. And it really does upset me He emphasises the word. “Slow. I know that when E
that Manchester has become associated with that ‘lad- I start complaining about this, my writer friends just RSS
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dist’ image.” say ‘Shut up, Jeff. I should have your problems!’” He
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So who does he regard as closer to the spirit of the laughs again. “But I’d really like to break through to Facebook
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city? Joy Division, perhaps? another level. I’m really into reaching out to people,
He laughs quietly, like a private revelation. “I regard but in an interesting, experimental way. That’s what I
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Joy Division as being the spirit of the city! If you look I’ve always tried to do. I have no desire to write books J
at The Smiths and Joy Division, you’ve got a light just for a few people to enjoy. That’s not really me. K
and dark thing going on there, a reflection of what “But at the same time, I have this really strong streak L
was going on in the city at the time. Whereas, with the of experimentalism [sic] that just kind of pushes things M
new Manchester thing, the ‘New Manchester’ people, a certain way. I just hope that one day it will happen, N
they’re trying to pave over the darkness.” you know? With the kind of age that we’re moving into O
Not something Noon could ever be accused of; his now, we should be discovering new ways of telling P
Manchester is a place where tattooed addicts make stories. And I hope my work becomes part of that. But Q
love to shadows, dogs and humans carnally succumb it’s a long journey.” R
to aphrodisiacs, where a young girl with a deadly kiss Speaking of experimentation, new ages and cultures; S
is the living embodiment of Mother Nature’s power to what is it about club culture in general which appeals to
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destroy. And the sirens never stop. Noon? Much of his work seems almost entrenched in
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Vurt was a watershed book; upon release it, and Noon, club/dub fusion culture, the primacy of the DJ.
made a leap into the consciousness of underground “That goes back to punk again. The most important V
literary subculture. Why does he feel the book had such moment in popular history happened in 1977, when W
a strong impact? And how does he view himself, no white kids discovered dub reggae. From that moment X
longer the underground writer he was? comes everything we now listen to. And it was a com- Y
“Am I not?” He laughs. “I hope that my heart’s still plete revelation to me. I was learning to play the bass, Z

but I’d never really listened to the bass on a record Mars. Again, there’s just that interest in sound. More A
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before. In pop music, it was always guitar and voice; “So the point about club culture is, it’s not so B
we didn’t really know what a bassline was, because much the rave and Ibiza scene, but more the kind of C
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they were always turned down low. manipulation of sound that’s going on, and the way D
“But suddenly, with dub reggae … It doesn’t just turn that that feeds back into the way people live and view E
it up, it actually says, ‘This is the centre of the music.’ their lives these days. I know for a fact, for example, RSS
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The bass and the drum; everything else is decoration. that those young kids over there –” He points at three
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And I think you can follow that moment from there young skaters across the street, “– have a very dif- Facebook
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right into club culture. Hip-hop especially, but also ferent mindset to the one I had at their age. And a lot
house and techno, speed garage, whatever, discovering of that is to do with the way they’re experiencing the I
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the bass and the drum and the beauty contained therein. world, the way they’re experiencing music, film, TV, J
“So with the post-punk scene happening as well, the internet and so on. I’m really interested in that, and K
you started to get this really experimental thing going that’s mainly why I tend to write young characters. L
on with groups, especially bands like Pere Ubu and And these days, that experimentation with sound is M
XTC. You get an interesting space in music, so that fed into the work too.” N
when you now get to a producer like Timbaland, you They also have different drugs. Which is as good a O
can see that his spatial imagination is immense, think- way as any of bringing up the thorny subject. It’s be- P
ing about exactly where he’s gonna place this hi-hat come de rigeur to describe Noon’s work as “trippy.” Q
sound, and so on.” Are, or were, drugs as big a part of his life as it seems? R
Being a big experimental ambient fan myself, I “No.” He laughs; I get the impression he’s asked S
couldn’t help but notice an acknowledgement to Au- this question a lot, too. “Tiny, tiny part. In my work,
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techre at the start of Needle In The Groove. Is it fair, as something that I write about, it’s just a metaphor
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then, to say he simply seeks out experimentation, no for change. It forces the character to change. If you
matter what the artform? look at Vurt, there are loads of ‘cheat modes’ going on V
“Yeah, absolutely. I love all the stuff that happens on in there, by me as a writer. Vaz is the ultimate cheat W
the fringes of the dance scene. The stuff you can’t re- mode; Vaz will get anybody out of anything! But with X
ally dance to, but it’s still a part of the scene. I’m really the feathers it’s more a feeling of, ‘Okay, let’s push Y
into German music at the moment, Oval and Mouse On them onto the next level now.’ And it automatically Z

does it, for me as a writer.” so there’s a certain amount of research going into it. More A
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So much for that popular myth, then. If drugs aren’t But I don’t get trapped by it … and I just exaggerate. I B
part of Noon’s inspiration, what is? Who does he read, go over the top and see what happens. I do think those C
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for example? writers who are bound by the science…” Careful words D
“I read and re-read Jorge Luis Borges, in fact I’m just again … “It produces a certain kind of work, which has E
re-reading his stuff at the moment. He’s one that I come a certain kind of appeal. But it never interests me, that RSS
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back to all the time. The more I write, the more of his hard science fiction.”
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influence comes in there. And J G. Ballard meant a lot Does this follow through into forethought? There’s Facebook
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to me when I was in my 20s.” a theory going round that Nymphomation, for exam-
What about other media, besides music? ple, was planned right from the start, back when he I
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“Painting.” He says it as if it’s the most natural thing wrote Vurt. J
in the world. “My first and natural talent is to paint. He laughs again, but loud this time as his ever-present K
That’s what I was born to do. I trained in painting and half-smile finally splits into a wide grin. L
visual arts at university. But I haven’t painted since “No, not at all! Everything is retro-engineered. M
1984, when I started seriously writing plays. There’s no plan. The last sentence of Nymphomation N
“So really, there’s lots of stuff going on in my work. actually came about by accident… O
Lots of stuff coming from music, lots of stuff coming “I was doing a reading, and somebody asked me what P
from visual arts, and the history of visual arts. And it all I was working on. So I said ‘I’m doing the first book Q
kind of gets mixed up in there.” in the Vurt sequence, set before Vurt.’ And this person R
Does this mean, then, that he doesn’t ‘do’ research asked – completely innocently – ‘What, you mean it S
as such? That it all comes from a big dub inphomix in ends with the first sentence of Vurt?’ And I just said,
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his head? ‘Yeeeaaah…’ But I did have in mind this four book
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“Yeah, that’s just what it is. I pick it up, and it all kind sequence. Honest…”
of gets filtered through my imagination. I don’t do a lot Will we see any more? Is there another Vurt book in V
of research, no.” He laughs quietly. the works? W
“The thing is, my work’s changing at the moment. “No. Now that I’ve moved away from Manchester – X
It’s becoming more real. The project I’m working on and stated I’m also leaving sci-fi – the idea of another Y
at the moment is to all intents and purposes historical, Vurt book becomes a bit … problematic. I might come Z

back, but at the moment I’ve got no interest. the superficial subject matter that they can’t see, I am More A
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“What I will say is that to a certain and very im- on a journey here, and travelling a certain road I have B
portant degree, Needle In The Groove is that last Vurt to go down. C
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novel. Because all the books in the Vurt sequence “I liken my position at the moment very much to J.G. D
have been about the same thing. Which has got noth- Ballard. Ballard built up a very rich series of techniques E
ing to do with feathers, nothing to do with anything over 20 years or so while his work was ‘hidden’ in RSS
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‘science fictional’ at all. It’s to do with the search for sci-fi. And then, with Empire Of The Sun, he started to
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a new family. The escape from a broken family, the write about things which were more real, using those Facebook
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setting up of a new, alternative family, and the search techniques he’d built up. That’s quite interesting to me
to repair a broken family. at the moment, with Needle In The Groove as the start of I
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“Needle In The Groove and Vurt could almost be that. Using all these techniques to focus on something J
mirror-images of one another, in that sense. The differ- that’s quite real, quite emotional and to do with the way K
ence being that at the end, Elliot manages something people live their lives now.” L
that Scribble from Vurt hasn’t got a chance in hell of Certainly, no-one could accuse Noon of not develop- M
sorting out; his relationship with his father. So if you ing his style. It’s one of the things which makes his work N
take this sequence of books as being about that subject, stand out from the crowd, a style which has become O
which I do, then Needle finished it. Obviously, the more fluid and, dare I say, “dubbed” as time goes on. In P
hardcore Vurt fans are going to say I’m being daft with a sense, Noon’s work is more to do with the way stories Q
all this,” he laughs, “But you know, this is what I write are told than the stories themselves. R
about. This is my subject.” “I’m glad you say that, actually. I’m a storyteller, and S
It does make sense; both Vurt and Needle are ostensi- I love telling stories, but the way that I tell the stories is
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bly about single protagonists, whereas Nymphomation what really excites me. The writers I admire are those
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and Pollen are ensemble pieces. There is indeed a people of whom you can read two sentences and just
mirror-image, even though each book in the sequence know it’s them. Those are the people I like. It’s the V
has gone further back into the past. same with music, everything. W
“Yeah, and now I’m doing a historical novel! I just “I do think this whole kind of ‘dub fiction’ thing I’m X
hope people are picking up on these elements in my on at the moment is exciting for me as a writer. I hope Y
work. I hope they’re not becoming so enamoured with it’s exciting for the reader. You just don’t know what’s Z

going to come out of it. It just seems right and correct uid music – in Needle In The Groove. I have to admit, More A
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that it should be happening now, at this space in time.” even to a ‘hardened’ Noon reader like myself, the first B
Right here and right now being the end of the century, few pages of his latest novel were a shock, simply due C
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the nonexistent year double-zero. The year where trend to the extremely unconventional layout of the text and D
itself is outdated, and there is no mode. the way the narrative is presented. E
“Yeah. In this whole kind of pro-Postmodern world “Well, it’s no more unconventional than the way Patti RSS
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we’re living in, I think it’s fruitful that people can Smith sets her poetry out, or Bob Dylan…”
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discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live Maybe not, but for Noon it was a big step forward, Facebook
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now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the and one he’s obviously happy with. Will we see more
prose equivalent of that is great.” of that? Is his work going to continue, and develop, in I
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And has he? Noon has another book due to be pub- that style? J
lished in Autumn 2000, entitled Cobralingus. Is that his “Certainly in these separate projects I’m talking K
liquid fiction? about, yeah. Cobralingus is the first of them, and it will L
“Cobralingus takes this whole idea of remix fiction become more liquid. But in my ‘mainstream’ novels, M
and pushes it right to the extreme. It’s based on elec- there’ll still be an overriding sense of story and narra- N
tronic music techniques, where I take sampled text and tive. I’m never going to lose that. I have no interest in O
I push them through a series of gates. Each gate has a presenting the reader with a kind of ‘destroyed’ narra- P
different effect upon the text, but it’s not done using tive, unless it’s specifically in an experimental setting. Q
computers. It’s all in my mind. And as it works its way But obviously, the experiments that I’m doing will feed R
through, each time it’s a remix of what’s gone before. into the narrative stuff as well.” S
“I’m also starting to write with another writer in This poses a question. If he’s committed to develop-
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Brighton here, and that extends the thought into other ing this style, and now that he’s crossed the threshold
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people – we’re remixing each other’s text. My work’s with Needle, will he feel comfortable ‘going back’ to
become very experimental at the moment, since com- conventional narrative? V
ing to Brighton. Coming here was difficult, as you can “I think it’s to do with being honest to the story you’re W
imagine. Removing myself from the source of all those telling, that’s all. I have this idea that every story has its X
stories took me a long time to even start.” own particular language. A lot of writers don’t consider Y
And Manchester meets liquid fiction – or at least, liq- this at all; they’ve got their style and they do it. But for Z

me, easily the longest part of the process is discovering more akin to poetry? More A
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that language. Once I’ve done that, the book just goes. “No, no, I just have an intense interest in language. B
“Needle was actually written in conventional punc- This is something that’s been growing since Nympho- C
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tuation for a while, until I started to let the ideas of the mation. That was a difficult book for me, definitely a D
subject dissolve into the way it was written, so that the watershed. But in terms of my progression it’s a very E
two can’t be separated. You can’t separate the form important book, because that’s when things started to RSS
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from the content in Needle. And once that happened, dissolve for the first time.”
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the book just kind of flowed out. Nymphomation also feels very self-analytical in Facebook
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“So yeah, if get an idea for a more conventional story, places, almost as if Noon were looking back at this
I’ll set it in a more conventional style. It’s the language, younger person who wrote Vurt, deconstructing his I
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you know? The book I’m writing at the moment has an own text from a modern standpoint. J
invented language, but the punctuation is straight down “It is a self-conscious book, yeah. I think if anybody K
the line, no messing about, because that suits the story. looked back at the progression of what I’ve done, L
But the language itself is an invention.” Nymphomation is definitely where things started to M
Do I detect a bit of a Bauhaus thing going on here? change. Of course, once you do that you’re taking a N
Form follows function, and all that? pathway; and where that leads you just don’t know. O
“Oh, yeah. Form is function. All this comes from I am writing a novel at the moment, but I don’t like P
my painting background. And of course sometimes, talking about it. It’s going to shock people. It’s going Q
form can go against function for a deliberate effect. to surprise people.” R
For instance, you could write about a DJ mixing, but Is that ‘literary shock factor’ important? S
in the style of John Donne … and I have done that at “Oh, yeah,” he laughs. “I’m totally and utterly into
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times. There are moments of that in Needle, writing people who surprise you, that’s me. Sometimes in your
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very elegantly and poetically about something which is life as an artist, you have to be quite brave about that.
very modern and chaotic. And it sets up a kind of mix, Especially if you have a fanbase, because not every- V
a clash of styles.” body manages to get one. But I think at some point in W
John Donne. An odd choice of example, but works your career, you have to take account of that… and X
like Needle are certainly approaching poetry. Is this then move on. Y
what we can expect from him in the future, something “I mean, look at somebody like Terry Pratchett … Z

You can imagine that Pratchett would love to move on. building up there. But it turned into something quite More A
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But can he? He’s gone so far down that road now. And, poetic, almost a kind of prayer, especially on the CD. B
you know, I never want to go so far down that road that And it also ties into things that were in Pollen, the idea C
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I can’t turn off it.” of maps in the mind, maps in reality, and how the two D
He pauses for a moment, considering what he’s just coincide. Again, that comes from Borges.” E
let slip, and laughs. “That’s either brilliant or something That’s definitely a theme of his; is it something he’s RSS
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that should be in Women’s Own poetry corner!” specifically interested in, the idea of mapping the mind
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So experimentation is very important to him, as an and consciousness? Facebook
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artist. If that’s the case, why did it take Noon so long to “Well, mapping the city, yeah. I’m well into this
write an overtly ‘punk’ book? psycho-geography stuff that goes on in London. I love I
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“Did it?” that, the ‘labyrinth’ idea of a city, and how the human J
I certainly think so. His other works may have the mind corresponds to that.” K
sensibility, for sure. But Needle is the first novel which Pollen certainly seems to make that match – between L
actually reads like punk, aside from the subject matter. the city and the person – with Columbus the Xcab M
“I suppose so. A lot of that comes out of me knowing King, whose mind is the city. And he’s another of the N
it was time to leave Manchester. I think it’s fairly obvi- introverts, almost psychologically crippled because O
ous Needle is my ‘Farewell to Manchester’ book. It’s he’s become one with the city. P
me looking back at my life, and how music has affected “Well, there’s a large introspection in me, anyway. Q
it. Note that the furthest they get back on their musical A lot of what I write about comes from my childhood, R
trip is 1957; the year I was born. So it’s quite a con- and knowing that I had this special thing – imagination S
scious summing-up of that addiction to the Manchester – but not knowing how to communicate it.”
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music scene, and both the good and bad sides of that Is there a danger in becoming too tied to a city?
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addiction.” “Oh, yeah. Definitely. I don’t think that you should
Is this why we get the tour round the streets with in any way become tied beyond a number of years, V
Elliot, pointing out places like John Cooper Clarke Ter- certainly these days. There’s just no need for it any W
races, Joy Division Street, and so on? more. My Mum and Dad were born, lived and died in X
“That part actually started out as a kind of satire on the same area. And that shouldn’t happen any more. We Y
New Manchester, and the ‘heritage industry’ they’re have to move on. We have to explore.” Z

He mentioned the internet earlier, as being one of tapes, which I worked to. And then we went in and kind More A
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the elements which contribute to the modern youth’s of co-produced it. It was amazing going in there, be- B
differing mindset. Does he feel the global awareness it cause I hadn’t been in a recording studio for years, and C
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can bring is helping this aim, societally? all this digital stuff they’ve got is just mind-boggling.” D
“Yeah, it’s part of it. I do think we’re putting a lot of Noon’s voice rises a little as he becomes more E
emphasis on the net beyond what it is. But it’s another animated. I get the distinct feeling we’re into a subject RSS
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part of Liquid Culture, like the DJ remix. The remix to Noon wants to talk about a lot…
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me is the ultimate Postmodern artform, and the net is a “I mean, they can do anything, absolutely anything. Facebook
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symptom and a part of that.” They can manipulate the musical input, the signal, any
Noon has finally started experimenting in the ‘DJ way they like. And then coming home again, turning on I
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remix’ area himself. Alongside the novel of Needle the word processor … You just think, there’s something J
In The Groove came an audio CD, executed by David wrong here. There’s a massive difference between the K
Toop and released on Sulphur Records. It’s an ambient way that I can manipulate text, and the way that David L
wordtrip; Noon reads passages from the novel while can manipulate the music on his screen. And I don’t M
Toop cuts them to ribbons, adding an urban underlay of know why that’s built up. N
beats and soundforms. It’s certainly … different. And, “For instance, I’m often changing the sex of my O
on reflection, something which I’m surprised Noon characters. But there’s no button I can press that says, P
hasn’t tried before. How did it come about? ‘Change the sex of this character all the way through.’ Q
“It kind of grew out of some things the publisher said, Ridiculous. There’s no button I can press that says, R
about doing a few tracks for promotional purposes. Just ‘Turn this into the past tense.’ And there should be.” S
to give out to bookshops, initially. And I’ve always Not that technology’s shortcoming are going to stop
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loved Toop’s music, so I asked him and that was it. I him. “With Cobralingus, I’m doing a lot of random
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didn’t know him before this. I’d met him maybe twice, manipulation. But I have to do it all by hand, either on
three times before we actually recorded.” screen or on bits of paper. There isn’t a button I’ve got V
Did Noon have much ‘hands-on’ involvement with that can randomise it for me. Sure, there are random W
the production? text generators and so on, but they’re seen as add-ons X
“Well, I sent him the lyrics, and notes on the musical rather than part of the process of Liquid Culture. We Y
ideas I had in my mind. Working from that, he sent me need to allow words to become part of that. And to Z

do it we need the tools, like they already have with “Yeah, we’re working on something, but it’s taking More A
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music. At the moment, all I have is my mind and a cut ages. I can’t talk about it. I do want that sort of stuff to B
and paste button!” happen, though. We’ve just finished the Vurt play in C
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Cobralingus is being produced through Codex Manchester, which I wrote about three years ago, and D
Books, based here in Brighton. Is there any reason seeing it now … Well, if I wrote it now it’d be entirely E
why Noon seems to favour smaller publishers? Even different. So when I write the film, I definitely want it RSS
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Anchor, his current publisher, is only a small imprint of to come through my consciousness now. I don’t want to
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TransWorld. Is it a control thing? replicate what I was eight years ago, I can’t stand that. Facebook
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“It’s just nice for me to have those two options, re- “So the film, if it does happen, will be interesting.
ally. I mean, I do want to write books that reach people, It’ll be a bit of a surprise, I think, because compared I
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but at the same time I also want to write these books to the novel and the play, it will be the most realistic J
that are just for me. of them all, with the least special effects.” He gives a K
“I don’t really get interfered with that much. I think broad smile, knowing full well that it’s the last thing L
TransWorld don’t really understand me that well,” he people will expect of him. M
chuckles. “I’m the most leftfield writer they’ve got, so But that’s the point; Noon probably couldn’t stop re- N
I’m just kind of left to get on with it. And with Codex, inventing himself if he tried. He’s all about the remix, O
it’s nice to have that intimate relationship with a pub- the experiment; what happens if you take this word, or P
lisher. So it really is the best of both worlds.” that phrase, and give them new meaning? What hap- Q
We suddenly realise the café actually closed 15 min- pens when strangers overhear one another’s thoughts in R
utes ago. There’s a big CLOSED sign on the door, and subjective languages? How do you use one text to tell S
the chairs are up. The staff have been patiently waiting a different story to every person, and every single one
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for us to finish, so as we make ready to set off I quickly of them is right?
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ask the inevitable end-of-interview question: what’s And I realise, as I head back to the train station, that
next? I heard a rumour linking Noon with Hollywood… it’s catching. I’ve been injected with Liquid Culture.  V
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Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day email

C
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Stephen Mitchelmore
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“The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of
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more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way oblivion.” Amnesia sets in “as if … humanity wasn’t Facebook
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that ought to lead there.” – Maurice Blanchot interested in individual names, only the blind survival
How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common of the species.” I
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question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary camera- Daane is, as you might have guessed, a melancholy J
man and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, soul. But his otherwise mundane ruminations have a K
asks it too. He thinks of some of the traumatic events traumatic resonance. Some time before the novel be- L
of his time: gins, his wife and child were killed in a place crash. M
“The woman who happened to be passing by when Alone, in time between jobs, he wanders the streets of N
the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks Berlin with his camera, recording quiet moments at O
whose throats were cut in Algiers, the 20 boys gunned dawn or dusk in a city full of ghosts. This is his way P
down before their parents’ eyes in Colombia, the entire of resisting amnesia, and yet it is also his way of for- Q
trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes getting (“dealing with” one might say) the permanent R
in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury in Johannesburg, absence of his family. The paradox is central to his mel-
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the 200 passengers on the plane that exploded above ancholy and to this novel. How can he move on without
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the sea, the two, three or 6,000 men and boys killed obliterating their individual names? The temptation is
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in Srebrenica, the hundreds of thousand of woman and to dive into work, into experience and other forms of
children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola.” forgetfulness, but to do that, he thinks, would, in turn, V
The list could go on and on. And that fact, Daane lead to the sleep of reason, thereby summoning up the W
thinks, is perhaps the worst. “For one moment, a day, a nightmares already spoken of. X
week, they were front-page news, for several seconds In first half of the novel, we follow Arthur on his Y
they flowed through cables in every part of the globe, wandering. He visits friends in a bar, gets caught up Z
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with dying tramp on the snow-covered streets, visits a ignorant of the reviewers (i.e. Julie Myerson of The More A
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gallery with two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich Guardian) would rather we weren’t reminded of this B
that he is fascinated by, and a library that will, in the and be allowed to plunge into forgetfulness, as if it were C
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second half, change his life. Many reviewers have re- possible without denial. Nooteboom’s achievement D
ferred to this wandering with, at best, condescension. In is to open the abyss of history out of these everyday E
particular, they disapprove of Arthur’s ‘intellectual pos- thoughts. He does this by showing how the rich herit- RSS
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turing’, which seems to mean any mention of anything age of speculation in the arts and sciences derives from
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other than that which will take the story ‘forward’ into the same confrontation with trauma as experienced by Facebook
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forgetfulness. This is a form of criticism that avoids the Arthur. This is seen as a failure by those, like Myerson,
very issue addressed by the novel. Arthur is searching who can see learning only as a trophy to be displayed. I
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for an. He talks with his living friends, and listens to Nooteboom wears his learning lightly but it seems one J
those who are dead, which take the form of memories, can’t escape the philistine thought-police of English K
books, paintings, films, science and philosophy. It helps literary criticism. L
him. It helps his friends. But like all friends, they have In terms of the plot, Arthur contrives to meet a his- M
their limits. And he knows it. They are useful only in tory research student beginning a project on an obscure N
their uselessness. This novel is a part of that scheme Spanish queen of the 12th century. From what little O
too. It has this wonderfully strange quality of enabling is revealed, she appears, like Arthur, to be taking a P
us to maintain contact with what is important to us, that roundabout route in resolving personal trauma. Despite Q
which otherwise seems inaccessible, in that which takes this, both Arthur and readers of the novel seem to be on R
us further away (i.e. ‘escapism’). Indeed, the All Souls’ the brink of relief from endless speculation by falling S
Day of the title is the Catholic holiday (November 2nd) into a love story. But the student, Elik, a fellow Dutch
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commemorating the souls of the dead; another form of ex-patriot, remains mysteriously private despite their
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fiction in which one has to place one’s trust in order to physical intimacy. Through her silence, she prompts
cross the abyss. even more fevered questioning. After a date, she dis- V
On a ferry crossing the Baltic, thinking of the 1994 appears without warning and, when they meet again, W
MV Estonia disaster, Arthur reflects that there is a thin refuses to reveal very much of herself. She prefers to X
membrane between him and chaos, as thin as the win- argue about historiography with one of Arthur’s schol- Y
dow he presses his face to, looking out to sea. The more arly friends. The novelist doesn’t fill in the blanks for Z

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prose. We have to speculate as much as Arthur, another in the narrative, looking down on the events with cool B
reason for lazy readers to complain. Indeed, this novel compassion. It’s unclear who is speaking. Perhaps it’s C
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is, despite its conventional, conversational surface, the voice of all that which cannot be included in what D
packed full of implicit allusions to its own provisional is, necessarily, a circumscribed narrative. Perhaps it’s E
status in relation to its own research. There’s Arthur’s Arthur’s late wife keeping a concerned eye on her RSS
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private film project (that Myerson selfishly misreads as husband. But most likely it is the voice from 500 years
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“solipsistic” when it is precisely the opposite); there’s from now, when the past-as-tragedy has become the Facebook
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Elik’s research project much-criticised by her supervi- past-as-absurdist-comedy, just as the life of the Spanish
sor; and there’s the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich queen seems to us now. Elik’s project was to rescue I
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quietly expressing a latent trauma much like that of the queen from such a fate. Her supervisor warns her J
Munch’s much noisier The Scream. However, the most it might take a decade and be, in the end, futile; no one K
obvious correlation is Arthur’s half-requited infatuation is likely to read the results. But she continues anyway, L
with Elik. While for Myerson all this is inadmissibly perhaps because of that, just as Arthur will continue M
reflexive, it creates a stimulating vertigo for the reader. to pursue Elik. For many, this novel will be similarly N
We’re not allowed to forget for very long that the novel, futile, slow-moving, overlong and provisional, but I’m O
and so its reader, is subject to the same problems of very grateful that Cees Nooteboom has taken the long P
knowledge and its refusal. way round and rescued something precious from the Q
This final point is emphasised by the occasional traumatic inferno.  R
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Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie email

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Jayne Margetts
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The first time I laid eyes upon the troubled cast of a new satirist of the grotesque with a posse who are
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Royston Vasey’s The League Of Gentlemen I almost anything but Ivy League. Facebook
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vomited. Such grotesque, pantomime-scarred charac- Meet Angus Oblong; 27-year-old modern day Frank-
ters, which could turn the stomach with a flutter of the enstein with a deformity fixation and sperm donor to I
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eyelash, stirred the strings of disturbance with all and the craziest family of contemporary abominations out- J
sundry. A BAFTA Award (2000 for Production) con- side of the test tube. His (first major book deal) Creepy K
firmed that comedy had found a new avenue, and that Suzie And 13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children L
it was okay to satirise all that was politically incorrect. salutes them for their warts-and-all-mutation-of-toxic- M
So when a copy of Angus Oblong’s Creepy Suzie And genetics-meets-psychotic-hearted compassion. There’s N
13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children landed grotesque mutant babies, midget albino crossdressers, O
on the doorstep the odds were tipped in its favour. siamese quadruplets, narcoleptic dogs, stupid vampires P
Dysfunctionalism rocks! and fun, fun, fun doses of electroshock therapy galore! Q
P.T. Barnum was a rock god! He was an opportunist. The fun figures that inhabit Creepy Suzie’s landscape R
He was an entrepreneurial voyeurist. And by trailing enjoy the benefits of a contaminated environment and
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his carnival freaks across the backbone of mid-America lifestyle. This is no Sorority House picnic peppered
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circa late-1800s, this vaudevillian parasite put the fun with sunny Californian hormones and bleached silicon
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back into fantasy, the sacred and profane. smiles. The inhabitants of this bleak, black-and-white
We’ve had a host of wannabes since then; Jim cul-de-sac have flaws galore. ‘Emily Amputee’ is a V
Rose’s Circus Sideshow is possibly the heir apparent, prime example: “Emily went to her doctor for her an- W
and in TV terms Todd Browning’s unfortunate band nual checkup. Some paperwork got mixed up and they X
of merry Freaks, and then suddenly, whoosh, out of amputated one of her legs.” Or if you favour a tale on Y
the fictional toxic backwaters of Sacramento comes the homicidal side there’s always ‘Mary Had A Little Z
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Chainsaw’. One of my personal favourites, ‘Jenny, Barton, “I always had a fascination with deformities. More A
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Jenny Jenny & Babette The Siamese Quadruplets’ puts The Oblongs was a show about the kids, it was based B
a new spin on the impetuousness of droll humour. around Milo’s clubhouse and all the ugly deformed C
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Peer group pressure (aka ‘The Debbies’), ‘Sibling kids who can’t otherwise get friends.” D
Rivalry And Happy, Happy, Happy Sammy’ examines This book is original. It’s horrifying. It’s morbid. E
universes populated by hormones, pathological urges It’s Halloween for 365 days a year. In a world where RSS
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and by childhood optimism that has to be stamped animation is gradually eating into the psyche of
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out at all costs. It’s one big, happy, alienated family in public consumption and where cartoon-strip-style Facebook
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Oblong Town. graffiti is hot, Oblong has carved a beautiful niche.
This is a marriage between Edgar Allan Poe and So what if he fantasised that his father “were a sword I
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David Lynch. A tango through the bizarre. And to think swallower and mother a prostitute”. And so what if J
that Oblong spent a slab of his youth languishing away his humour is gallows all the way. It’s time to stop K
behind the grinding machine at the Royal Ground being prejudiced about first impressions folks; it’s L
Coffee Shop at Polk and Vallejo while pumping out time to let the freaks in, to celebrate them and their M
underground comics on the side. His personal bio states own unique Olongesque charm. N
that he then “ended up in California after five years of If you are looking for criticism then you won’t find O
living on the streets and taking it in the butt by ugly old any here. I’ve tried. God knows. I hang my head in P
men for heroin money”. A stint as a clown for a fast- shame at the thought that humour can be so sacrilegious. Q
food restaurant quickly alerted him to his true calling. Look – if American giant NBC can swallow Oblong’s R
Oblong is a mysterious creature whose art screams appeal (and secure his creative vision for cable) – then S
“This is Vaudeville”. He idolises his cartoon children so can we. Okay, so home may be the local toxic waste
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and just as his book showcased the talents of ‘Cross- dump but let’s be fair, these kids are partially human
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Dressing Charles’, ‘Janet’s Butt’ and ‘Carl & The after all, and as such, deserve our support…
Crippled Black Kid With An Eye Patch’, his sitcom A mock children’s book called Mommy Is Going To V
debut, The Oblongs, continues the theme by choos- Die is apparently in the test tube. It’s possible that that W
ing to both empathise and poke fun at the ‘physically small and assorted clubhouse of human oddities will be X
challenged’ (or if you prefer, mutant children). As raising its semi-amputated arms with empathy and joy Y
Oblong confessed to the Sacramento Bee’s David at the mention of more siblings … Freaks rule!  Z
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Will Oldham: Songs Of The Human Animal email

C
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Stephen Mitchelmore
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Who is Will Oldham? Well, maybe he’d like to know either uplifting or upsetting. I can’t decide.
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first of all. As if in search of the proper one, he’s Facebook
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released LPs under several different names. Made
famous by the Palace name (Palace Brothers, Palace is a relief I
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Songs, Palace Music), he then reverted to plain Will even months on end J
Oldham for one record, and now he’s Bonnie ‘Prince’ buried in grief K
Billy. He dismisses any deep meaning behind this flu- are easy light times L
idity of brand name, but such unwillingness to explain which have to end M
is a symptom of the same thing. It’s an unwillingness to with the coming N
secure a ground and remain. Even so, we can be secure of your death friend. O
in saying he is without doubt the best writer in music (chorus) death to everyone P
today. Not only a remarkable songwriter – The Sunday is gonna come Q
Times says “Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen already and it make hosing R
suffer by comparison” – but also a remarkable writer much more fun la la la
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full stop. He’s 29, from Louisville, Kentucky, and his la la la
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latest LP is called I See A Darkness.
It’s both. The pained irony in the drawled chorus is U
Seeing a darkness? Seeing needs light, so there’s
something odd about the title. On the surface it appeals absent in the verse. I first heard Will Oldham on the V
to Goth self-dramatising; one can imagine Nick Cave BBC’s John Peel show singing the equally ambiguous W
giving a record that title. Yet the implications of this refrain: “When you have no-one, no-one can hurt you”, X
inherent contradiction seep in. Listening increases un- from ‘Days In The Wake’ (1994). At first I heard it as a Y
certainty. There’s the song ‘Death To Everyone’ that’s self-pitying lament for a lost love – which is pleasantly Z
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indulgent, but no more than that. Then I heard it as an the experience of reverie is really its imminence making More A
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implicit condemnation of someone protecting a solitude itself felt, rather than actually occurring. In effect, we are B
so pain can’t get in. And finally I heard it as someone experiencing the nostalgia for an impossible experience. C
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completely alone who is hurt by the very fact of “no- Our continued desire for music is a result of unrequitable D
one”. Songwriting, in my experience, is rarely this hope. Our humanity rests in acknowledging this. Go on, E
disconcerting. And it’s not a one-off. The next song on work that one out. RSS
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the LP has the repetition, building to a minor crescendo: Steiner also says that a world without music would
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“God is the answer … God is the answer … God is be “fundamentally non-human”, which makes one Facebook
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the answer!” All of which projects outward: there’s the wonder about the humanity of the deaf. For the living,
answer, out there, look, follow me. But is soon followed however, silence and what comes with it is insepara- I
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by the softly sung line “God lies within”. Not, as one ble from the experience of music. This tends to move J
might expect, the assertion of faith or the bathos of con- against the will. The part of us that wants music would K
descension, but the deepening of the question. Where rather disappear into the ecstatic oblivion of another L
within? Usually in popular music such ambiguity is an life, palpable in the musical experience; I know my M
issue only until it can be set aside. (Perhaps music is part does. Indeed, music tends to be judged according N
ambiguity set aside). George Steiner claims that music to depth of oblivion it reaches – on the dancefloor, in O
actually defines us as human. He expresses wonder at the car, the bedsit, the head. So when the song hinders P
the profound reverie even the most banal of tunes can this disappearance, we resist and say we ‘don’t like’ Q
set in motion. We “pass beyond ourselves” he says, the music. Nowadays, we are encouraged to condemn R
and we become aware of “unfathomable depths”. This the artist for being cerebral, solipsistic and indulgent S
seems familiar enough, and intellectual resistance would if oblivion isn’t forthcoming. The irony, of course, is
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certainly prevent this. Music demands an extra degree of that our resistance is a result of our unique freedom:
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trust to let go and be open to the sounds. Yet I would say our individuality. By celebrating this ignorance popular
our resistance to music is just as important and cannot be culture is a moronic inferno of denial and aggression – V
dispensed with. It too defines us as human. Criticism, let nothing to do with democracy or empowerment. W
us say reflection, is as inevitable as breathing. Actually, The unique thing about Will Oldham’s songs is that X
Steiner says as much; music also “takes us home in an they emerge from this very paradox. Remaining inside Y
unexplained déjà vu”. I would explain all this by saying it explains why his work has got better rather than Z

descended into attempts at false completion: “This is Therefore’ from the LP of the same name, the glori- More A
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what makes a thing last / Want to make what didn’t ously clunky Maya Tone drum-machine infects it with B
happen go…” (‘The Brute Choir’) anachronism. Consumers previously happy to enjoy C
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The music itself is difficult to describe. I don’t know the wittily named sub-genre “melancountry” saw D
much about these things, and I could fall back on this as ‘deconstructing’ the tradition. Even Oldham’s E
phrases others have used – “post-country blues” and Sunday Times admirer called this breath-taking LP a RSS
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“melancountry” being two of the best. But none of them woeful mistake. Clearly, they didn’t like his wrench-
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work really. As for the lyrics, many reviewers, tied by ing of the form. Instead, this actually makes Arise, Facebook
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word limits, sum it up as “Americana mixed with Old Therefore Oldham’s landmark achievement. Within
Testament language”. Again, this seems accurate, but it, the cosmic is infected with the mundane, and vice I
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why would this mixture appeal to a Eurocentric Eng- versa. Or something like that. Perhaps it creates a J
lishman who says that to believe in nothing is already genre all its own: Blucolic? K
to believe in too much? Me, for instance. One must hesitate to analyse the lyrics, for the mo- L
I think it’s not the allusive quality of the language ment the sheet is read, the grammatical nonsenses M
that’s important but the way it fails. For example, and apparent meaninglessness confound the listening N
when Nick Cave “hails the Pentecostal morn”, it al- experience. Despite this, I still want to. The opening O
ludes to the given depth and weight of the Western track ‘Stablemate’, which was also the opening song of P
tradition, which is incidentally why his Goth fans are his set on the recent European tour, is a scene-setting Q
so unwittingly conservative. Cave’s elegantly crafted distillation of dustbowl starkness: R
songs cling to the horror of God’s tragic justice,
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clothed in cosy Victorian melodrama. Goths like to how could one ever think anything’s
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think it’s deeply cultured, and in assuming so appear permanent
how can you sleep when I’m going away U
like Boyzone fans pointing to the violins playing in
the background on Top Of The Pops saying “Look I haven’t a reason left in my head V
Mum, it’s classical music!” We all know it’s only a to not go away W
distraction not an engagement; only a weekend relief X
from good jobs and babies dressed in black. A heavy bass underscores the brooding quality of the Y
However, when Oldham sings songs like ‘Arise, song, and it’s no coincidence that the LP was produced Z

by Steve Albini, ex of Big Black. The words have a scrap the outfit More A
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power because they’re both rhetorical and immediate; and hand me the keys to your car B
the lack of a question mark above makes that clear. if I leave before it is light C
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The fourth track is perhaps the most remarkable. It I’ll be around when you are D
has the never-to-be-forgotten title ‘You have cum in she won’t come; I’ll be gone E
the your hair and your dick is hanging out’. Indeed. she won’t come; I’ll be gone RSS
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The excessiveness of the title is in clear contrast to the
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song’s extreme desolateness. On first listen, it is a deli- It is perhaps bad form to wonder for too long about Facebook
what it all means. Like all songs, a lot has to do with H
cate broken-hearted love song (it reminds me of Philip
Larkin’s late poem ‘Love Again’). The drum-machine how it’s sung and against what music. But what is clear I
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adds a beat every three seconds, confirming the atmos- is the presence of the stillness of midnight; as if you’re J
phere. Here’s it is in full (and the words haven’t been listening to the desperate words of a troubled, not to K
mis-typed either): say sticky insomniac. This leads many admirers to talk L
about Oldham’s empathetic imagination. One writes M
Head start on the frog “you’re not just listening to words and a guitar, you’re N
on the deer and the dog experiencing [his] honest feelings.” Yet ‘honesty’ O
the things we true were taught doesn’t seem right. It’s not “this is the real me” honesty P
loyal torn from our hearts; of the cringeworthy ‘confessional’ singer-songwriter. Q
it’s now so soft underfoot The words from “You have cum…” maybe deeply R
we sleep more than we sleep felt but they are also impersonal. There are three “we”s
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if god could make me cry before a “me” appears. Is this the tyrannical darkness of
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I’d run along the water the collective unconscious pressing on the existential
she won’t come; I’ll be gone loneliness of the one with cum in his hair? Probably. U
she won’t come; I’ll be gone Cum is, after all, where the male is exposed to evolu- V
play with it while you have hands tionary time. It’s where the animal emerges, subject to W
a desperate lack of demands special history. Despite this, we know we have “a head- X
I can’t offer a thing start on the frog”. Our head gives us a start. The song’s Y
better than dying, so take it! desolateness, therefore, is not about the sufferings of Z

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being at all. The “I” of the song is only a possibility set they become what they are. The listening is begun at B
against harsh reality. Will Oldham’s ‘honesty’ then is the very beginning, at the writing, then it’s continued C
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the clarity of his exile. The various names he adopts is in the performing and recording, and then is continued D
a natural off-shoot of this. with whoever listens to it but it isn’t completed … it’s E
In this respect, it’s appropriate that Oldham first something that’s never completed.” RSS
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became well-known by acting in films, most notably “Doing and not doing”: this is basically what it is to
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co-starring in John Sayles’ trade union drama Matewan be a human animal. We hold against the “not doing” Facebook
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(1987). His performance as a teenager caught up in the because it leads to boredom and melancholy. We half
brutal repression of a mining union in 1930s America envy the animal who just lives; who just does. But it’s I
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is startlingly good. Yet no matter how connected his still us as not-doing individuals that desires it. One of J
songs and his acting are, the displacement of identity the great analysts of modern human nature, Friedrich K
central to the actor’s existence is perhaps too limited. Nietzsche spoke of this in 1874: L
In my experience, actors are less interested in others as “Consider the herd grazing before you. These M
being others full stop. They tend to be indiscriminate, animals do not know what yesterday and today are N
mercenary and heartless. The self is willingly exiled. It but leap about, eat, rest, digest and leap again: and O
is not the most appropriate medium for an artist con- so from morning to night and from day to day, only P
cerned with the play of self and its exposures, ellipses briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, Q
and effacements. While Oldham is certainly stagy, it’s enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither R
a stage with the trapdoor fully in view. melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this, S
In a rare interview, Oldham is clear that the move- for he is proud of being human and not an animal and
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ment between the self and its productions plays a major yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants
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part in his writing. Asked if there is anything he does nothing other than to live like the animal, neither
consciously when writing songs he says bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does V
“Doing and not doing. But it’s not that hard cause not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the W
that’s mostly the nature of what’s going on, or that’s the animal: why do you not speak of me of your happi- X
reason for these things to be there. That is the answer ness but only look at me? The animal does want to Y
to what makes them occur. The answer is that they answer and say: because I always immediately forget Z

what I wanted to say – but then it already forgot this a broad-shouldered leopard on Viva Last Blues (1995), More A
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answer and remained silent: so that man could only from which the above song is taken, and a goat per- B
wonder. But he also wondered about himself, that he forming on its hindlegs on Joya (1997). On a sublime C
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cannot learn to forget but always remains attached to recent EP, the subject is even more explicit. D
the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs ‘One With The Birds’ is a love song sort-of, to birds I E
with him.” (translated by Peter Preuss) guess (“Juan with the birds” he joked at his Water Rats RSS
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It’s a neat coincidence that the opening verses of the Theatre gig in London). The song seems to be again
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great song ‘The Brute Choir’ presents a similar situation: about human infatuation with animal freedom. Oldham Facebook
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fits in as many bird names as possible:
Cow-call, and they were all calling I
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together a purple martin in my house, J
describing the way to go she hollers at me. K
I never hurt someone so young why be inhuman, why be like me? L
and I never held someone so sweet like so many robins, like so many doves, M
Makes me want to holler with them like so many lovebirds, with so N
All the way down many loves, O
All the way down like the songs of the bobwhite P
their voices show the way without any words Q
how to hold it back when we are inhuman, R
see the end of the day we’re one with the birds.
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shut their mouths, shut their mouths
(An anorak’s aside: I wonder if with this song Oldham T
and rip the pictures down
withdraw, withdraw, you live so far is paying a discreet homage to Dick Gaughen’s song U
from town ‘Now Westlin Winds’ – a setting of a poem by Robert V
Burns? On Joya, there’s a song based on another of W
Confirming the tension, two of Will Oldham’s LPs Gaughen’s from the same LP, his 1981 masterpiece A X
feature cover designs of animals on the way to being Handful Of Earth. Burns’ poem is equally resourceful Y
human, or the other way round: a compelling portrait of in mentioning the birds of Scotland: the moorcock, the Z

plover and the linnet among others. It’s also a love song exclusion of a cerebral response without compromis- More A
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of sorts. Who knows: influence tends to be unconscious. ing his or her humanity. So, without force, the listener B
He’s already acknowledged the tune’s similarity with is presented with a paradox that never quite lets you C
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Gram Parson’s ‘Hickory Wind’.) forget where you are and what you’re doing, even if D
‘One with the birds’ is a song that wouldn’t offend it at the same time seduces in every musical sense. As E
an easy listening audience. Again, however, there’s our culture ignores what is left over from such failed RSS
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the real oddness of the refrain: “When we are inhu- transcendence, we are prompted to feel individual
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man, we’re one with the birds”. One can sing along consciousness is a problem to be solved. I don’t think Facebook
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merrily without wondering what it all might mean. it needs to be. In fact, it is likely that this failure to fly
Though singing along merrily is, in a way, flying away is precisely what gives us the richness of life. I
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away. In other words, the listener cannot demand an Along with Will Oldham’s music.  J
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P.J. O’Rourke: Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll email

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Chris Mitchell encounters the age and guile of political satirist P.J. O’Rourke
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The American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke recently exaggerated that boyo stuff a little bit, just because it’s
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published Age And Guile, which gathers together fun. I’ve always thought it very important to have a Facebook
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previously uncollected material spanning his 25 years fool in your writing, and here’s one that’s always handy
of journalism. P.J. has built his merciless literary and never sues. I once lived harder than I do now. I I
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reputation on three things: irritating American liberals, was blessed with a self-limiting body. Drink too much, J
abusing chemicals and visiting every warzone in the stay up too late, take too many drugs, scramble after K
world. Usually all at the same time. As he puts it, “I too many 16-year-old girls – I get ill. And the people L
deal with curses of Western society of the past 200 who didn’t get ill – are dead…” M
years starting with the French Revolution. I don’t start So you’ve never tried to keep pace pharmaceutically N
with the American Revolution for the simple reason it with Hunter S. Thompson, your long-time friend and O
wasn’t a revolution. It was some form of parliamentary political sparring partner? Medical textbooks are being P
disagreement, who’s in charge here, sort of thing.” written about that man’s constitution… “Hunter’s very Q
Meeting P.J. O’Rourke in real life, however, is some- shy. People don’t really understand that. He has to get R
what different. Impeccably courteous and good hu- loaded to deal with strangers, he can’t do it otherwise.
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moured, the only vice he displayed in my presence was He takes on that gonzoid persona as a kind of armour
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smoking an enormous Havana cigar. I asked him what against the world. I watch other people gonzoing
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he thought of this difference between the public and the around, I don’t so much do it myself. Hunter’s very
private P.J. “I’m 48 years old. I even had a middle-aged funny if you know him, because after he’s done all V
dream last night. I dreamt I had a 15-year-old mistress. those appalling things, wrecking all the furniture and W
No sex, not even touching. She was just my mistress. scaring everyone out of the room and terrorising the X
And I knew I was middle aged because when I woke place, he turns round and says, ‘Do you think they were Y
up, I was almost glad it was just a dream … I’ve always upset? Did I embarrass anyone?’ ‘No, you just set fire Z
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to the rug…’” kinds of suffering that I really don’t know what it is I More A
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Hunter still seems to believe in the ideal of the Ameri- could do about it. I’ve written about it to the best of B
can dream, as evinced by his last book, Better Than Sex, my ability. I don’t think the causes of it are too mys- C
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which charts Clinton’s inexorable presidential cam- terious. Particularly the sort caused by human folly. D
paign. You seem to take a distinct relish in propagating After finishing All The Trouble In The World, I took E
the image of yourself as a son-of-a-bitch Republican. some time off from my commitments to Rolling Stone. RSS
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Yet much of your writing is distinctly humanitarian in I knew I’d had a good summer because I had tanned
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places… “Well, both of those things are true. People feet. It’s always a good indication of having done fuck Facebook
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on this side of the Atlantic get confused about political all. The next thing I want to do is about economics,
conservatism. It is not an excuse for selfishness. I don’t which also involves travelling, but it should be slightly I
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think that a person is left wing or right wing accord- more pleasant. At least here I’m dealing with human J
ing to whether or not they are compassionate. A lot of endeavour to better oneself and one’s time, rather than K
people on the left, especially the more po-faced ones, the human endeavour to whack each other over the L
have worked that angle. Lots of people are right wing head. It should be a bit more optimistic. I’ve never read M
because they’re selfish, there’s no doubt about that – I an actual explanation of economics that was fun to read N
can’t defend that, I can only point out lots of people So I’m going to pick out different economies around O
are left-wing because they’re selfish too. The Hilary the world that represent different attempts to organise P
Clinton world-view is bossing people around on the socially: socialism that works, socialism that doesn’t Q
basis of a supposed virtuousness – ‘I care more than work, adaptation to a market economy that’s success- R
you care – therefore I’m going to boss you around.’ If ful, adaptation to a market economy that’s troubled. S
they couldn’t operate that system, then no other system There’ll be a Holidays In Hell aspect to it, but at least
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would suit.” people won’t be shooting at each other – much.”
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Your concern about American politics is evident Do you think your writing has any tangible impact
from the most recent pieces collected in Age And Guile. on its readers? For example, the ecological chapters in V
Does this mean your interest in globetrotting is wan- All The Trouble In The World (lovingly titled ‘We’re W
ing? “I am a little tired of the Third World travel, part All Going To Die’ and ‘We’re All Going To Die Any- X
of it’s just age, it’s tough on the system, tough on the way’) provide an excellent retort to eco- hysterics – it Y
gastro-intestinal tract. A little bit of it is facing different might change a few minds… “I just don’t know. So few Z

people read books. America is an ill-educated country. insights and stuff like that, but I think it’s just because More A
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It’s sad what it takes to get on the best-seller list; for I stuck to it. There’s a Woody Allen line about how it’s B
a hard-cover non-fiction book published in the Spring, remarkable how much of life has to do with just show- C
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which is the weaker period, selling as few as 30,000 ing up. And I think about all the people I was working D
copies will get you on the list. Isn’t that shocking for with 25 years ago, many of them much more talented E
a product that costs $20-$25 in a nation of 250 million than I was. Well, I remembered not to die from drug RSS
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people. More usually it’s 50,000 or 100,000, but still, overdose. ‘To do: Don’t die from drug abuse’. Mostly I
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it’s so few. I can’t begin to tell you if it has any effect.” just stuck to it, and a lot of them didn’t. I just kept plug- Facebook
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After 25 years of writing, and nearly a half-century ging away, probably out of inertia more than anything
on the planet, do you have any words of advice for else. And I think if you do keep doing something for a I
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young people? “No, I can’t figure out where I went while, you do learn how to do it. You learn how to work J
right. I love to count it up to my fabulous skill and my around areas of huge inability.”  K
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Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty email

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Chris Mitchell meets Lawrence O’Toole, author of Pornocopia:
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Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire RSS
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It’s a well-worn joke that any dinner-party discussion that access easier, but in doing so, not only has it
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of the internet will inevitably include a mention of find- begun to change attitudes toward porn but the very Facebook
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ing pornography while online. As Lawrence O’Toole nature of the net itself.
points out in his book, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Tech- “The internet has certainly helped make porn become I
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nology And Desire, the internet has been the biggest more mainstream,” says O’Toole. “We’ve now had a J
leap forward for the distribution of pornography since pornographic presidency – oral sex in the White House K
the advent of video. For people in countries such as the and Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress broad- L
UK, which has much stricter pornography laws than cast continually on the news. Or, as another example, M
the US and Europe, the net has opened the floodgates George Michael on Parkinson talking about having sex N
for what was previously considered taboo and banned. in public toilets. Once all that has been brought out into O
“New technologies have always come into the the public, there’s no way back.” P
country bringing the idea that our restrictive conditions Inspired by the passionate debates about porn taking Q
can be cast out,” explains O’Toole. “But it rarely turns place in Usenet newsgroups such as rec.arts.erotica, R
out to be the case. Look at video, which was meant Pornocopia is part history and part analysis of the
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to herald the end of the censor – it’s actually become ways and methods by which porn has emerged from
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a great tool for the censor. But censorship is always the shadows in the last couple of decades and become
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thought of in absolutes. You cannot restrict access to ever more accepted within conventional society.
illegal materials – you can only make it very difficult to “The general reaction to the book has been very V
get hold of them.” healthy and positive,” O’Toole claims, “which shows W
“I’m certainly not an advocate of unrestricted ac- that people are less concerned about porn and I think X
cess to porn,” O’Toole stresses, “but teenagers will the internet has partly contributed to that. People are Y
get hold of this material.” Certainly the net has made beginning to realise you can look at hardcore imagery Z
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and not go mad or blind or whatever.” Secure credit card transactions, password encryption, More A
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“Hardcore is a very nasty term,” he continues, and streaming sound and video are just some of the B
“when all it means is pictures of adults having sex. Fair web technologies that have been pioneered by porn, C
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enough, a lot of people are revolted when they see their and the industry is at the forefront of demanding bigger D
first hardcore imagery, but I think that comes from their net bandwidth for all. Whether you like it or not, the E
own sexual insecurities, which are then transferred future experience of the web is being built on the back RSS
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back on to the pictures. I don’t think there’s anything of the on-line porn industry.
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intrinsically revolting about people having sex or see- However, O’Toole is sceptical that the ever growing Facebook
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ing pictures of it.” popularity of the net in the UK will bring about a change
Even if you strongly disagree with O’Toole about the in our obscene publication laws soon. “Where we differ I
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moral implications of people having access to pornogra- from America and Europe is the attitude of the British J
phy, it’s hard to deny that porn has irrevocably changed establishment, which maintains that they know what’s K
the net: because of the huge revenues involved, porn best for people,” he argues. “Attitudes won’t change L
has always been a catalyst for technology. until the intelligentsia change their mindset, which M
As Pornocopia reveals, porn singlehandedly estab- will creep in eventually from the ground level. But the N
lished video as a commercially viable product and is internet does let people see that there are other attitudes O
now doing the same for DVD and, of course, the net. towards pornography.”  P
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Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have Your Abortion” email

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Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk
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When Brett Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American within The Mail On Sunday laboratory: “Jeff Noon is
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Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid, the Philip K. Dick for the 90s”, it roared. Facebook
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Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. El- Noon’s third novel, Automated Alice, was as much
lis’ literary missile was unlike anything written before. a tribute to Lewis Carroll’s original, opiated Alice In I
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Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking at- Wonderland dream, as it was a journey into Cyberpunk J
tention to detail as a Guide Book On How To Become psychedelia gone haywire in contemporary Manches- K
A Serial Killer could only have come from the author ter. Nymphomation (released a year later) polluted the L
pawing over endless (and actual) FBI case files – even reader’s waking hours with the notion of burbflies, M
if his obsession with detailing designer outfits drove me automated advertisements chanting their slogans and a N
to insanity. But this man captured the 80s generation slow, synthetic, evolutionary genocide. O
with its greed, Darwinian Manifesto and scent of Wall The aforementioned authors have all created a new P
Street’s cold-hearted brutality. language, so to speak. Sprouted buzzwords like the Q
Irvine Welsh carved a new language into our con- historians of old and chronicled the social decay of R
sciousness with his ode to heroin, bleak council estates humanity along the way. Ellis paired savage with
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and a dash of nihilism in 1993 with Trainspotting. savvy; Welsh, lower-class narcissism with narcotic
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Clawing through those initial pages with their illegible decay; and Noon, corporatisation with soulless human
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scrawl and phonetically terrestrial sounds required the existence. They all hacked into the literary, global cog,
tenacity of a saint. shunned the sweet smelling pungency of sentimental V
Then there was sci-fi maverick, Jeff Noon, much less verse and offered up their own versions of the darker W
the enfant terrible than his Scottish cousin. Sci-fi had edge of the sword. X
suddenly become cool again and it was less attributable And then there’s Chuck Palahniuk. Y
to the Asimov school-of-thought than a quote concocted Critic Roger Ebert crowned him the godfather of Z
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“Macho Porn”, while New York Newsday gushed that continue to shock a readership by churning out a novel More A
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Palahniuk’s voice “rearranged Vonnegut’s sly humour, every couple of years. Furthermore, if characters getting B
DeLillo’s mordant social analysis with Pynchon’s antic their kicks by frequenting the local Testicular Cancer C
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surrealism”. In short, the new kid on the block with Survivors group wasn’t enough to shock a readership D
his swag of arrogance titled Fight Club (1995) struck ill-prepared for such irreverence, then his next evan- E
a subliminal chord. This was an author who was much gelical novel, Survivor (1999) would. RSS
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less concerned with sprouting flowery prose and more Admittedly, his second novel was less punchy, less
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preoccupied with stark revelations. guttural than the first, but it was truly original in its Facebook
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Fight Club painted a portrait of humanity drained of storyline. So here was yet another misfit, about to hold
colour. It was gritty and hard-boiled, bleak but over- society to ransom again. Meet Tender Branson, surviv- I
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flowing with wisdom. Tyler Durden, his protagonist, ing member of a Death Cult hijacking an empty Boeing J
was a one-man army. He was the insomnia inside us 747 for the purpose of recording his sordid tale into K
all. The dull, dull thud of an eternal techno beat. A jack- the jumbo’s black box recorder. This was Reverend Jim L
hammer spraying cynicism like a sniper on the loose. Jones on ecstasy with a global score to settle. This was M
Out of control! a day-trip into the darker corners of immortality and N
Fight Club finally found its way onto the big-screen isolation with a slab of comic humour to boot. O
(like Ellis’ American Psycho) in 1999, and was directed Male testosterone took a back seat in 2000 when P
by the controversial David Fincher (Alien 3, The Game, Palahniuk released Invisible Monsters. It was a grand Q
Seven), and starred Ed Norton and Brad Pitt. The film departure from his previous novels in that it had a R
delivered a fatal blow to the solar plexus. With a dead- female (a severely dysfunctional one, naturally) at its S
pan sneer and caustic ambience it hit a raw nerve. Its helm. Brandy Alexander was the Catwalk Queen. She
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message? WE HAD ALL BECOME AUTOMATED had it all. A face that could launch a thousand ships and
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ZOMBIES. We were now indistinguishable from the adored by everyone. But a horrendous car ‘accident’
dead. ‘Hey, the living dead are populating an Ikea fur- changes all of that. From beauty queen to hideously V
nished Metropolis.’ Albert Camus had suddenly found disfigured freak, Brandy personifies our preoccupation W
a worthy successor. with skin-deep vanity and proves that hell hath no fury X
The shock value of Fight Club gave an insight into like a woman’s scorn. Y
the deviant corners of Palahniuk’s mind. He would The majority of Palahniuk’s protagonists are mad- Z

men and reincarnations of Jesus Christ: picture their time around the microscope falls upon two topics – a More A
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creator as a modern-day Dr Frankenstein if you will, serial killer and ‘psychic infection’. “Imagine a plague B
grabbing DNA strands from the Shroud of Turin, a dash you catch through your ears … Imagine an idea that C
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of homicidal vigour, the conceit of a Ronnie Biggs and occupies your mind like a city…” D
smearing them through a contemporary narrative. It’s too good an offer to refuse… E
Choke (2000), his fourth novel, was a screaming On the eve of Fight Club’s release in 1995, Palahniuk RSS
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page-turner, his narrator, Victor Mancini, one of the and I chatted. He was an easy and natural conversation-
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greatest scam artists of all time. While his mother (God alist. He spoke of working as a glorified technical writer Facebook
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bless her) languished in the local hospital, he devised a at the city’s Freight Terminal and of how he churned
new occupation and a great way to make bucks. out manuals on trucks, service and cars in the indus- I
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Go to a restaurant, (make sure it’s full, of course), trial heartland of blue-collar America. He also spoke J
choke on a piece of food, wait for a good samaritan to of cruising along the Portland Freeway one morning K
come and save you, and knowing humanity the way it when a car pulled up alongside him. “A freeway sniper L
is, you can be sure that the hero who ‘saves you’ will pointed a gun directly at my head,” he remembered. M
feel indebted to you for the rest of their natural lives. Palahniuk’s writing is a backlash. It’s about embrac- N
Money of course won’t be a problem again. If they’ve ing disaster and using it as a platform from which to O
saved you once, you can damn well expect they will do mirror society back upon itself. In Palahniuk’s own P
it a thousand times! Add into the equation a few shifts at words: “I figure if you can play on the basis of some- Q
the local theme park and the occasional night out at an thing that really scares people like fights or terminal R
intimate, little sex addiction group (one of Palahniuk’s illness. If you go right up to it and laugh at it, and have S
favourite haunts), and you’ve got a very fulfilling life. fun around it, and really disempower it by doing that,
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Brett Easton Ellis pondered the question: ‘Has our then that’s the greatest thing you can do. I can make
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generation finally found its Don DeLillo?’ The New York people laugh about death, laugh about fights, laugh
Times bestseller list confirms Palahniuk as an author of about pain, then I’ve done my little thing for the world. V
importance, yet regardless of platitudes, this Portland I finally feel complete and liberated.” W
native retains a low key. His latest novel, Lullaby (2002) Chuck Palahniuk is a product of his environment, but X
hit bookshelves in the quietest of fashions, and, again, more importantly, he is THE product of his generation. Y
deals with the darker underbelly of American life. This He is the coroner of the millennium. If there is a ‘self- Z

help’ group gathered in the dark of night, Palahniuk is They are battle-worn and scarred and their trajectory More A
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sure to be there playing the ‘tourist’. His voice is one crude and uncompromising. B
that refuses to be tempered. It is devoid of diplomacy Both the characters and their creator shy away from C
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and rife with a quiet anger. compromise. It is as alien to them as subtlety is to D
Palahniuk’s voice is a shrill scream trumpeting for Anna Nicole Smith. They are holding up a mirror to E
the revolt against order and conformity, but it is also each and every one of us and reflecting back something RSS
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filled with pain and satire. When two of Fight Club’s both ugly and desperate. It’s daring. It’s sexy. And it
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main characters meet it all becomes abundantly clear sneers at redemption. This is what sets Palahniuk aside. Facebook
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why its author has already made his notch in society’s He’s prepared to play the messenger and the Devil’s
belt: “I want to have your abortion,” Marla drawls. Advocate, simultaneously, regardless of the price… I
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Suddenly everything sacred between men and women Yes, our generation has found its Don DeLillo and J
tumbles into a psychotic heap. he comes armed with a scalpel. His literary instrument K
It’s a challenging and confrontational statement. hacks deep into the malignancy eating away at our L
A little on the bolshie side, sure, but necessary. If the society, but still the tumour continues to grow, feeding M
world is in the process of undergoing a ‘collective on pessimism, fatality and dark, dark satire. This is all N
identity crisis’ then Palahniuk is writing a thesis on how Chuck Palahniuk needs to continue. It was all he ever O
to bring it on. His characters travel the dark road from needed, and if the hunger pains should start to growl he P
isolation back out into the arms of communal existence. only needs to look to the news 24/7…  Q
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Tim Parks: Destiny email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of When that film began, I knew my questions would
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adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what not be answered. At that point, the roller coaster profile Facebook
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happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth, of the usual Hollywood movie prompted only weari-
or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find ness, not anticipation. Nevertheless, it was watched I
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the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply and time was passed pleasurably. Of course, its predict- J
frustrating. The credits run and immediately I feel the ability was part of the pleasure. The thing is, I wanted K
need to inhabit the silence and apparent serenity of the that predictability to be taken to the absolute limit. But L
surviving characters. Even in a poor film. Instinctively, what does this mean in practice? Maybe it’s where time M
I ask: what are the characters thinking now? How will stands still and the whole picture appears, as in the N
the events affect the rest of their lives? How will they uncanny vertigo you feel when you catch your own eye O
‘come to terms’ with what has happened? How will they looking at itself in the mirror. You know you are look- P
tell the story to their friends? Despite the insistence of ing at yourself – what could be more familiar? – yet Q
these questions – does anybody else ask them? – we there is also a sense of something alien. It disappears as R
don’t seem to want to know the answers. I mean, we soon as you notice it. The absolute limit, then, would be
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never see films about them. We want only action. the noticing and the disappearance combined. So what
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Such indifference suggests a deep-seated pathologi- would that be like? Well, Tim Parks’ novel Destiny is
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cal fear at the heart of popular culture. It’s not like we a good start. It is an exhilarating experience of vertigo.
are all Odysseus, shedding experience like some The novel begins with the narrator, Chris Burton, a V
fancy-dress outfit. Experience makes us who we are. veteran journalist based in Italy, getting a phone call to W
We are stuck with responses, memories and responses say his son, a patient in a psychiatric hospital, has killed X
to memories. I suppose we watch films like Event Ho- himself. He tells us this, and many other things, in the Y
rizon to displace them for a while. first sentence. It is ten-lines long, and full of clauses Z
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and clarifications about things apparently unconnected miracle of her son’s birth, on our way to the mortuary. More A
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with the death. Right away, despite the appalling news, It doesn’t amount to much. Not when it comes to B
he is comparing it with the latest developments in his understanding. As if by parthenogenesis, I would tell C
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marriage and career. Such is the nature of literary grief, people, to make light of it, to turn it into a joke. My D
we might think; that’s not how it really is. wife would be boasting at one of her dinner parties E
But rather than being just an example of callousness about how different her son was from his father. A RSS
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on the part of the narrator, or an indifference to dramatic son in every way different from his father, she said.
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incident on the part of the author, it is actually a truer It was my first thought upon waking. His birth was a Facebook
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reflection of how one experiences grief. Remember, miracle, she claimed. You had nothing to do with your
Burton receives the news over the telephone. How can son, she shouted outside the mortuary.” I
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such news be close to him when it is comes in the form The style, like Burton’s state of mind, is both J
of electronic noise? The news makes itself felt in the manic and extremely controlled. This is not stream- K
play of the distances between the plain fact and his im- of-consciousness. It is not as random as that phrase L
agination. Burton becomes, at this point if not before, a suggests. Troubling memories from various times M
reader of his life. All action is kindled in the mind. For coalesce with the current event – struggling to piss – N
us, rather than being insulated from the impact of the as if, in all this distress, the divination of all troubles O
news, as we would be in the usual novel, we become is about to be revealed. Hence the title and subject of P
Burton’s fellow readers, living in his uncertain present, the book: Destiny. Q
trying to understand what it all means. The style of Appropriately, Burton hears the terrible news as he R
the narration is repetitious and associative. This could tries to finish a book on Italian national characteristics S
descend into an annoying tic, but works here because and how they determine Italian behaviour. All it needs,
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each sentence is necessary to the narrative. he thinks, is an interview with the elusive elderly
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There is a powerful section where Burton thinks politician Guilio Andreotti (who is, incidentally, a real
about the visit to the mortuary with his wife, as he person). He thinks it will be the culmination, and miti- V
struggles, late at night, to urinate in the house of his gation, of a career in journalism, which he now rejects W
adopted daughter. This one part of a long paragraph: as “the endless description of hell”. The reference to X
“Remembering and forgetting amount to very lit- Dante’s Inferno (Hell) comes during a meditation in a Y
tle, I reflect, remembering my wife remembering the café named after the great Italian poet. Z

This is perhaps too convenient, but it is certainly in Mrs Burton behaves out of character. That is, out of More A
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tune with the question of Destiny. Perhaps it prompted the character that her husband has imagined. One can B
the direction of his thoughts about journalism? Burton thereby understand the novel as the refutation of Bur- C
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says Inferno is a great piece of journalism but that Pur- ton’s thesis – that human behaviour can be explained D
gatory and Paradise, the other two parts of The Divine before the event. And yet, there is, in the form of his E
Comedy, are parts of a pilgrimage to perfection. This narrative, an achievement beyond journalism! It makes RSS
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is something journalism cannot achieve. His book on it one of the most satisfying and memorable novels,
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national characteristics is, therefore, an attempt to get written in English, for quite some time. Facebook
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beyond journalism. However, he seems to have been But one last thing. I said that this novel opens with
pre-empted by another famous English journalist who a ten-line sentence. The most striking thing about this I
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has churned out a book claiming to do the same. He also sentence is that it is almost identical in form and con- J
happens to be Mrs Burton’s lover. Burton doesn’t know tent to the opening sentence of Thomas Bernhard’s K
what the situation is between them. Her vicious attacks final novel Extinction (1986). Indeed, the whole novel L
on him in the mortuary seem to indicate a conclusive is deeply informed by Bernhard’s masterpiece. Does M
dissatisfaction, an indication of an imminent split. But this diminish Parks’ achievement? No, it doesn’t. N
they could just be uncontrolled outpourings of grief. Technical brilliance does not swamp its emotional O
How is he to know? He is trying to understand. resonance. That can’t be borrowed. When Chris Bur- P
From the beginning, Burton seems destined for ton is with his son’s body in a room near the mortuary, Q
doom and gloom. Despite this impression, there is rich he notices three heavy pieces of dark wooden furniture R
comedy in his various encounters along the way. The and a Sacred Heart on the wall. It is there to console S
nature of the book means that the crescendo Burton the relatives of the deceased. Burton dismisses it is a
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leads us to expect is only ever going to be a fiction of “public space that apes the private.” As a result of its
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his imagination. All the set pieces, like the visit to the aping, it is drained of consoling authority. This is an
mortuary, appear to us as fragments pieced together in appropriate definition of most novels: a public space V
the spaces between other set pieces, like his struggle that apes the private. This novel, on the other hand, W
above the toilet, which itself is fragmented by thoughts like Bernhard’s novels, mediates between public and X
of the visit to the mortuary. Instead, there is a quiet, private space, showing us how intimately one influ- Y
optimistic conclusion – which is also a beginning – as ences the other. A wonderful book.  Z

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Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism email

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Lewis Owens meets composer Arvo Pärt
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A few months ago, I contacted the composer Arvo Pärt they acquired Austrian citizenship. They now live pri-
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through his publisher in Vienna. I informed Mr Pärt marily in Berlin. Facebook
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that I was interested in writing a book on his life and Pärt’s minimalist music is rapidly increasing in popu-
music. After reading my proposal, Mr Pärt suggested larity, and his attempt to re-establish the sacred roots of I
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that we met to discuss things further. The first meeting music has a growing appeal. Yet it seems to me that J
took place on Wednesday March 29 at the Royal Acad- without understanding or appreciating the reasons or K
emy of Music, where there was a three day festival in ‘philosophy’ (in a nonacademic sense) behind his often L
honour of his music. The second meeting was at his repetitive tonal compositions, Pärt’s music may seem M
house in Essex, which was followed by a visit to the rather banal and somewhat unimaginative. Therefore, N
nearby Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist. my interest was primarily to understand in greater O
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, south-east of Tallinn, depth the ‘philosophy’ that drives his music. P
Estonia, on 11 September 1935. He entered the Tallinn Eschewing in large part the conflicting tension Q
Conservatory in the autumn of 1957 and was later a of opposing forces that constitutes the dynamics of R
winner of the All-Union Survey of the Creative Work change found in, for example, the later symphonies of
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of Young Composers held in Moscow for composers Tchaikovsky, Pärt’s harmonies suggest an understand-
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throughout the USSR under the age of 35. Although his ing and experience of ‘time’ that is nonlinear and non-
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musical ability was clearly evident, its religious content teleological (that is, it appears to reach no climax or
led to various confrontations with the Soviet authorities ‘goal’); moreover, as it lies outside a linear, teleological V
(his work Credo was banned for over decade) and he paradigm, it is immune from accusations of stasis. W
applied to leave the Soviet Union (and hence relinquish Indeed, Pärt’s work has an underlying dynamic and X
Soviet citizenship) in 1979 with his Jewish wife, Nora. organic unity, which seems to require an intuitive mode Y
On January 18, 1980 they left Tallinn for Vienna where of perception to be experienced fully. This includes an Z
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experience and perception of silence that, much like the as his music; his deep, dark Slavonic eyes pierce you More A
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apophatic mystical tradition of the Eastern Orthodox as sharply as any of his religious works. We discussed B
Church that Pärt embraces, seeks to overcome cha- my intentions to write about the ‘philosophy’ behind C
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otic multiplicity and establish contact with a true and his music. “‘Philosophy’? He has none”, his wife cut in D
authentic unifying essence. Pärt has coined the word sharply in broken English, “he learns everything from E
‘tintinnabulation’ to describes this style of his work the old Church Fathers.” To really understand his mu- RSS
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which dates from the early 70s: sic, she continued, you must first understand how this
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“Tintinnabulation is the area I sometimes wander religious tradition (Eastern Orthodoxy) flows through Facebook
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into when I am searching for answers – in my life, him. Her husband agreed: I was therefore invited to
in my music, in my work … the complex and many- spend a day with the Pärt’s at the Stavropegic Monas- I
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faceted only confuses me and I must search for unity tery of St. John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, Essex J
… everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintin- the following week. K
nabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. Mr Pärt met me from the station, and we spoke of L
I have discovered that it is enough when a single note my work on Nikos Kazantzakis (whom Pärt clearly M
is beautifully played. This note, or a silent beat, or a disliked for being too ‘unorthodox’) whilst we drove N
moment of silence comfort me.” to his house in Essex. For the first couple of hours O
Before our first meeting at the Royal Academy of we discussed my proposed book, eating strawberries P
Music, I attended a rehearsal of Pärt’s Miserere, during and drinking tea whilst being watched closely by Q
which the composer crept stealthily from every corner the numerous severe-looking icons that decorate his R
of the room, from instrument to instrument, bass to so- sitting-room. S
prano, listening, suggesting and often wincing when the Despite the obvious language barrier (I do not speak
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instruments and vocals did not harmonise “like Romeo Estonian; Mr Pärt’s English is commendable but lim-
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and Juliet. My work is like a puzzle or a mosaic,” he ited), it was also apparent that there were further barri-
claimed, “if one piece is lost or out of place, then the ers to overcome if my project was to be given the green V
whole work cannot function properly: the machine can- light. We talked philosophy, theology and music, but Mr W
not turn back once it has begun.” Pärt was visibly uncomfortable and nervous. Any book X
After the rehearsal I was able to spend some time about him, he claimed, must begin with the substance Y
with Arvo and Nora Pärt. Pärt himself is as ‘present’ of music itself – the arrangement of the notes. It is from Z

this musical epicentre that everything else must radiate. like he was during the rehearsal of Miserere, prowling More A
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“If anybody wishes to understand me”, he continued, cat-like from one icon to the next as he explained to B
“they must listen to my music; if anybody wishes to me their origin and symbolism. He was clearly relieved C
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know my ‘philosophy’ then they can read any of the to have left the ‘intellectual’ atmosphere that we had D
Church Fathers; if anybody wishes to know about my created earlier, and to breath instead a more ‘spiritual’ E
life, then there are things that I wish to keep closed … and aesthetic air. I was even treated to a duet by Pärt RSS
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unlike our friend John [Taverner]!” It was clear that my and his wife in one of the Churches.
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proposed project was running into difficulties before he At 5pm, the bells called all the monks and nuns to eat Facebook
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suggested that we headed for the monastery. (as it was Lent, this was their only meal of the day). After
The Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist a monkish chant that seemed to be taken straight from I
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is home to around 25 monks and nuns. It was estab- one of Pärt’s works, we ate our simple meal of olives J
lished under the spiritual guidance of Archimandrite and pulses in silence, listening to a reading from the K
Sophrony, who died in 1993. Sophrony had arrived on teaching of Johannes Climacus. Humbleness prevailed. L
Mount Athos in 1925 and entered the Russian Monas- Soon afterwards Arvo and Nora Pärt presented me with M
tery of St. Panteimon where he began scribbling down a gift: Archimandrite Sophrony’s spiritual biography of N
the teachings of his elder St. Siluoan. Many of his ‘Saint Siluoan the Athonite’. We talked no more of my O
works are to be found in the monastery bookshop. The own proposed book; it just didn’t seem appropriate in P
monastery itself is a mixture of richly ornate old tim- the surroundings. Q
ber buildings that blend beautifully with newer, more As I left the monastery and made my way slowly R
modern constructions. The monks and nuns spend their home, I recalled Pärt’s words and decided to put my S
day in prayer, icon-painting, and in the general upkeep book project on hold for the time being: “If anybody
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of the monastery. A large section of land enables them wishes to understand me, they must listen to my music;
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to grow various fruits and vegetables, and thus remain if anybody wishes to know my ‘philosophy’, then they
largely self-sufficient. can read any of the Church Fathers; if anybody wishes V
When showing me around the monastery, Pärt’s to know about my private life, there are things that I W
demeanour visibly changed. He came to life again, wish to keep closed.”  X
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Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture email

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Chris Mitchell
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In the last 30 years, the role of the DJ has transformed ment programming. While 1940s disc jockey legend
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from being a mere purveyor of pop music to being the Alan Freed never scratch his own tunes together, he Facebook
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creator of pop music. This transformation is due almost introduced a whole post-war white generation to the
solely to the humble analogue technology of the record black music of jazz and rhythm and blues, flying in the I
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turntable, which still thrives in the midst of this suppos- face of McCarthy-era conservatism. J
edly digital decade. In DJ Culture, Ulf Poschardt, editor Just as the DJ was created by technology, so DJs K
in chief of Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, began to exploit that technology to take control of the L
has attempted to trace the evolution of the DJ and his sound of the records they played. With the beginning M
impact on musical culture. of house and disco clubs in the early 70s, DJs sought N
However, Poschardt is not interested in simply ways to extend their audiences’ favourite sections of O
discussing fashionable modern DJs who create their particular tracks, which led to using two turntables and P
own records. He spends the first third of DJ Culture repeating the same segment. Q
discussing the prehistory of today’s DJs, the record From the sonic DIY experiments of Grandmaster R
spinners who arrived with the advent of radio. There Flash, Kool J Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Culture
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are not many histories which can pinpoint an exact date meticulously traces the roots of the modern DJ and the
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and time for their origin, but Poschardt maintains the birth of the record as technological collage, concluding
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DJ came into being in 1906, when electrical engineer with the emergence of drum’n’bass and the seemingly
Reginald A. Fessenden played a record of Handel’s infinite possibilities of computerised music. V
Largo in the world’s first radio broadcast. Poschardt manages to write about DJ culture in a W
DJ Culture details the social influence of this power- scholarly but informal style, interweaving quotes from X
ful new mixture of recorded and transmittable sound, DJs with citations of numerous critical theorists. In Y
along with the DJs’ subtly subversive light entertain- the hands of a less thoughtful writer, this could have Z
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resulted in clumsy prose, but Poschardt uses nuggets of More A

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academic theory to persuasively emphasise the radical B
shift during this century that has happened to music, C
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DJs and society itself because of technology. D
Most importantly, Poschardt reveals the significance E
of something which is seemingly so insignificant – pop RSS
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music – and yet manages to keep a tone of infectious,
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subjective enthusiasm about it. In doing so, he has writ- Facebook
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ten a near-definitive secret history of the DJ. 
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Richard Powers: Plowing The Dark email

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Chris Mitchell
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Plowing The Dark is nothing if not a novel of ideas. Set War. Plowing The Dark is the sort of novel you soon
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in the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Powers’ novel juxta- realise will repay a second reading even before you’ve Facebook
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poses two parallel narratives – one concerning the rise finished the first.
of virtual reality, computer generated simulation that Karpol’s grappling with the hideous complexities I
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reached to become indistinguishable from reality – and of computer code that live under the bonnet of virtual J
the other concerning Taipur Martin, an American taken reality gives Powers the perfect device to trace the ar- K
hostage and held in the Lebanon. These narratives may cane history of its geek genesis, which in turn brings L
seem incongruous at first, but both concern the same in discussions of mathematics, economics and, well, M
thing – the nature of reality. the structure of the universe itself. In a similar way N
For Adie Karpol, the technophobe artist called on to to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Powers takes the O
give visual shape to the computer realities generated computer as the single most important artefact of the P
by the immersive environment known as The Cavern, last two decades and examines its impact upon our Q
fooling her own senses into believing the simulation in reality as much as our creation of new realities using it. R
front of her is real becomes her daily quest. For Taipur Traditionally art has fulfilled the function of creating
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Martin, the American teacher held hostage in solitary new realities, and Powers name drops a vast array of
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confinement for a length of time so long he cannot classical artists in conversations describing the nature
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even measure it, trying to stay sane amongst almost of art and its irreducibility to a binary sequence. Pow-
total sensory deprivation becomes a contest of wills ers’ peripheral characters are clearly ciphers to embody V
with himself. Flickering behind these two narratives certain viewpoints, while the central characters in both W
are the epoch-changing events which dominated and narratives grapple with a tsunami of thought of which X
dictated the last two decades’ world history – Tianamen they can never fully gain control. Indeed, the novel has Y
Square, the collapse of communism and the first Gulf this effect on the reader as well as its protagonists – Z
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Powers’ prose is easy to read, but the density of ideas but work and making love is without real thought for More A
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packed into each page demands frequent pauses to one’s lover. Some of Powers’ sentences on the emo- B
digest what is being said. Whereas most novels take tional lives of Karpol and her friends seem almost like C
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a central premise and string it out over a couple of asides and yet always hint at a melancholy for those D
hundred pages, it feels as if Plowing The Dark only just characters, a fundamental loneliness and an absence of E
keeps the lid on its own complexity. happiness with no idea of where to look for it. These RSS
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Like Pynchon and Delillo who are namechecked moments in the book are perhaps all the more notice-
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as Powers’ peers by several reviewers on Plowing’s able for being moments of emotional vulnerability or Facebook
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book covers, Powers’ prose has a certain cool autho- longing amongst so much intellectual abstraction.
rial, distinctly American, detachment to it. This in turn Plowing The Dark, then, is unashamedly intellectual I
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gives the effect of looking at his characters through a and decidedly demanding of its reader, a near riot of J
microscope rather than moving amongst them – even ideas and imagination that crackles with the electricity K
the Taipur Martin narrative, which uses the second of new thoughts emerging from the old. It feels like L
person throughout, seems strangely removed even as it a third millennium novel – synthesising and distilling M
provides an exhausting empathy with the horror of be- histories of events, of ideas and of people, reshaping N
ing held hostage. This detachment also provides a more and retracing new threads through them, cutting its O
subtle sadness for Adie Karpol, where life is nothing own furlong for what a novel should do.  P
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Richard Powers: Gain email

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Nobody talks much about the quest for “great American human stories. And like Faulkner or Steinbeck, he arms
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novel” anymore; the phrase, once a sneering European his tale with an unrelenting, sometimes unforgiving, Facebook
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attempt at an oxymoron, was long ago answered by emotional grip.
Faulkner, Hemingway, and Miller. To the surprise of The first of Gain’s two interwoven plotlines concerns I
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some, even America – first, the motley amalgam of im- the birth, growth, and ultimate decline of the Clare Cor- J
migrant trappers and farmers; later, the citadel of capital- poration, a soap and chemical manufacturing concern; K
ism and the mecca of disposable pop culture – proved the second, the story of the Bodey family, residents of L
capable of cultivating its own strong literary tradition. the fictional Lacewood, Indiana – a quiet, comfortable M
With Gain, Richard Powers launches his own strong midwestern company town, home to Clare’s mas- N
bid for entry into the canon of America’s best novelists, sive agricultural operations. Aside from geographic O
delivering a work both epic in scope and universal in location, there would seem to be little commonality P
emotional resonance, a contemporary book drawing between the Bodeys and their corporate neighbour, but Q
upon timeless, and often uniquely American, themes. it soon emerges that the destinies of the Bodeys and R
Mining the same rich, long-neglected vein of socially- Clare are destined to meet and collide, and likely with
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aware fiction once plumbed by Upton Sinclair, John cataclysmic results.
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Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis, Powers creates a subtle, Gain begins with the birth of Clare in the 1830s as
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quietly horrifying mirror reflecting the seldom-noticed, Jephthah Clare’s Sons transform their family’s strug-
tragic consequences to life in a modern consumer soci- gling shipping and trading business into a soap manu- V
ety. Like a Sinclair or Dos Passos, Powers successfully factory. Samuel, Benjamin, and Resolve Clare, through W
apprehends and elucidates both the expansive sweep hard work, faith, and assimilation of the new country’s X
and intricate workings of corporate power; like Lewis, ideas and ideals – the land is to be conquered, God is to Y
he succeeds in translating these into human terms, and be worshipped, industry is the Lord’s Work and profit Z

is a sacrament – gradually transform their enterprise avarice, of solemn vows into hollow public relations More A
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into an edifice, a being with a life of its own that will pronouncements, of physical reality into vacant and B
thrive and survive beyond their lifetimes. Clare’s Sons ephemeral imagery. C
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becomes Clare, then Clare Incorporated, its interests Gain is the story of the decline and fall of a company, D
and influence spreading across the land and around a family, and a nation rendered in quiet symbolism E
the globe like the Gospel, like a prairie fire, like a fast- and graceful, elegant prose. In lesser hands, the raw RSS
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growing weed, like a cancer – or like all at once. materials of Gain could have easily been transmuted
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Meanwhile, in the 1990s, Laura Bodey is a divorced into a soap opera or a shrill anti-corporate rant; instead, Facebook
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mother and a successful real estate agent, an American Powers’ careful craftsmanship and almost obsessive at-
Everywoman whose daily concerns revolve around her tention to linguistic nuance, to period detail, and to the I
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work and family: Is her son spending too much time tiny but telling words, phrases, actions, and rituals that J
playing computer games? Is her daughter smoking pot? make up the stuff of existence in 90s America render K
How can she manage the uneasy truce with their father? Clare, the Bodeys, and their world in photorealistic L
Will she make receive a Top Performers award again detail, giving Gain the feel of real life. M
this year? Though the days and years have flown by in a In the end, Gain is about losses, fiscal, physical and N
blur of work, parenting, consumption, and more work, spiritual: A woman who loses her health, a corpora- O
with little time for Laura to realize her own dreams, the tion that loses its soul, and an emerging democracy P
Bodeys seem to have settled into a suburban idyll: Life that loses its way en route to the promised land. Gain Q
is comfortable if not perfect, and the future, although is a modern American tragedy, and like all classic R
unwritten, seems to promise more of the same. The examples of the form, its tragic heroes’ undoing oc- S
multiheaded hydra that Clare has become, however, curs as the result of a catalytic reaction between the
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will change all that. characters’ own hidden vulnerabilities and immense,
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Where was the point where Clare’s Sons’ noble unseen forces greater than themselves; that these
enterprise became a destroyer of worlds, where the are invariably ultimately recognized, once past the V
company dedicated to cleanliness, quality, and purity point of salvation, is the classicist masterstroke that W
became a monster? The growth of Clare is an allegory imbues Gain, like a modern Richard III or Medea, X
of the loss of innocence of a country and its people, with monumental, timeless power. Is Gain really this Y
the story of the alchemical transformation of ideals into good? Yes. Yes. Yes.  Z

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Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon email

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Brevity, the aphorism has it, is the soul of wit. So Pynchon’s always been the poster boy for literate
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where does that leave Thomas Pynchon, whose cur- obsessive-compulsives; to have successfully navigated Facebook
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rent offering Mason & Dixon weighs in at close to his Gravity’s Rainbow, with its (literally!) hundreds
800 pages – and of often-impenetrable stylized ‘Old of characters and multiple opaque, labyrinthine ap- I
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English’ text, no less? proximations of plot, has long been considered a badge J
The real Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, of honour in college English departments, as tons of K
America’s original sub-dividers, took upon themselves well-thumbed paperback copies littering coffeehouses L
the promethean task of imposing the first trace of order and the ‘used’ shelves of college bookstores attest to. M
upon the wilderness that was the new world, drawing To read Pynchon is considered in some quarters akin N
their famous line demarcating north and south. With to membership in an elite, semi-secret society of code- O
his fanciful re-imagining of Messrs Mason and Dixon, breakers or decipherers of hieroglyphics, a courageous P
Pynchon has created a veritable universe, similarly be- and maybe half-mad cult obsessed with ‘getting it’. Q
wildering and untamed, for readers to divide and con- Their patron Saint Thomas has never made it easy; R
quer if they can. Mason & Dixon is a sprawling muddle the enigmatic, likely pseudonymous author remains as
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of historical fact, surreal fancy, fable, fantasy, and oc- much a mystery as his books, having refused all inter-
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casional silliness, underpinned by the quiet insistence – views, rebutted all requests for biographical informa-
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supported, at times, more by faith than evidence – that tion, and successfully eluded the most dogged attempts
somehow it all can make sense; that somehow, given at unearthing his true identity ever since his 50s debut. V
enough courage, dogged determination, or blind luck, Evidently in agreement with Humphrey Bogart that all W
order can be either alchemically divined from chaos or he owes his audience is a good performance, the ephem- X
forced upon it. Like American civilization, both past eral Tom will periodically emerge from the shadows in Y
and present. the form of another cryptic tome to dazzle with verbal Z
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sleight-of-hand, infuriate with quick-change artistry, and unknown, fantasy and fact, science and supersti- More A
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and befuddle with another disappearing act, leaving the tion, past, present, and future; it is about the drawing B
faithful to scramble for morsels of meaning or genius of these lines, the crossing of these lines, the blurring C
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until his next earthly manifestation. and erasure of these lines, and the consequences of D
One critic, in the Village Voice, has already likened doing so. Mason & Dixon’s task, to define the physi- E
reviewing Mason & Dixon to “reviewing the Atlantic cal parameters of America, stands as a metaphor for RSS
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ocean.” With its wilful opacity and encyclopedic the definition and creation of the country itself, as
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breadth of themes and subjects, distilling the novel to performed by the supposedly enlightened and rational Facebook
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a succinct summary while doing it justice is a pretty explorers, colonists, founding fathers, kings, generals,
daunting prospect. Mason & Dixon stands as a para- venture capitalists, and adventurers who did so. The I
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digm of The Novel As Jigsaw Puzzle; here, you’re end result – the divided and sub-divided nation of eth- J
expected to somehow connect the dots between such nic hatreds and strip malls, of class envy and suburban K
elements as a talking dog (“the learn’d English dog,” sprawl, of glittering triumphs and monumental failures L
to be precise), a smiling electric eel used as a compass, – is the measure of their efforts, and the subtly-invoked M
the evils of Indian massacres and the slave trade, the backdrop of Mason & Dixon. N
first British pizza, the world’s largest cheese (the “oc- In large measure, Mason & Dixon is ultimately a O
tuple Gloucester”, a “cheese malevolent”), an invisible, lament for the failure of individuals and nations rela- P
lovelorn mechanical duck which chases a French chef tive to their dreams and their potential, as well as for Q
around the world (“la bec de la mort” – the beak of vanished frontiers – those of the physical world (the R
death), the intricacies of astronomy and geometry, the conquest of nature and the wilderness) as well as the S
dualistic characters of Mason and Dixon, and the om- spiritual (the waning power of religion and its corollary
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nipresent backdrop of collected American, European, elements, faith and imagination, at the hands of science
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religious, and human history into a distinct impression, and commerce):
a coherent whole. No mean feat. “Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? And is V
Distinct themes, however, do ultimately emerge. America her dream? – in which all that cannot pass W
Mason & Dixon is about lines – not only the literal lines in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expres- X
of surveyors and mapmakers, but about boundaries in sion away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, Y
the larger sense: Lines between good and evil, known and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp’d, nor Z

written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, they have taken on. That is what I smell’d – Lethe-water. More A
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seen – serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive One of the things the newly born forget, is how terrible B
Hopes, for all that may yet be true – Earthly Paradise, its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to C
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Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s forget ev’rything. Be willing to wait but a little, and ye D
Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe until the next may gull them again and again, however ye wish, – even E
Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, RSS
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and tied in, back into the Net-Work of points already Time is the true river that runs round Hell.”
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known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Con- Lethe, the river of ignorance in Greek mythology, is Facebook
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tinent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, evidently the creek we’re stuck on without a paddle,
reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the drifting ever away from “the realm of the sacred.” Not I
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ends of Governments, – winning away from the realm altogether a very cheery prospect. J
of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assum- Mason & Dixon, despite frequent humour, makes K
ing them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, for pretty lousy light reading; if the continual digres- L
and our Despair.” sions, daunting thematic content, odd symbolism, or M
And with only a slightly greater synaptic leap, Mason structural oddities don’t get to you, the period narrative N
& Dixon can be read as a rueful acknowledgement of style certainly will. Maintaining the necessary mental O
the fragmentation of the American dream – the disap- inventory of preceding events is a difficulty even early P
pearance of a collective sense of direction and purpose, on, and later, a virtual impossibility. Concentration, Q
as well as possibly morality – a relief portrait of a and lots of it, is necessary for a successful foray into R
country and people adrift: Pynchon’s New World, where brevity is the only thing S
Mason to Dixon: “Acts have consequences, Dixon, in short supply. But for those who dare to attempt the
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they must. These Louts believe all’s right now, – that challenge, armed with the requisite patience and atten-
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they are free to get on with Lives that are to them no tion span, Mason & Dixon offers abundant wit, as well
doubt important, – with no Glimmer at all of the Debt as considerable wisdom.  V
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Matthew Robertson: FAC 461 email

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Chris Hall on Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461)
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In the late 70s, the mysterious, topographical radio graphic designer Peter Saville. In the summer of 2003
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waves of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures appeared there was a big Saville retrospective at the Design Muse- Facebook
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like a burst of energy in an empty void, signifying the um and a book which of course featured a lot of his work
arrival not only of one of the best bands this country has for Factory. Saville’s book presented his art work and I
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produced but also its finest independent record label, other writers put it into context with long, considered es- J
Factory. It’s not too strong to say that Peter Saville’s says; what this book does instead is simply catalogue the K
sleeves for Unknown Pleasures and New Order’s ‘Blue work and provide minimal expositionary notes. Unlike L
Monday’ are up there with Peter Blake’s Sgt. Pepper’s the Saville book, it highlights the work of other people M
Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and involved in the Factory story and shows how it evolved N
Vaughan Oliver’s 4AD covers. The design mostly beyond the visually literate aesthetic of Saville. O
matched up to the quality of the music. The shadow background of the artwork in FAC 461 P
The chaotic, quixotic Factory Records existed from reinforces the idea that these are objects, artefacts, pho- Q
1978 to 1992, from post-punk to rave, and continues to tographed as if from above on mini-plinths. Ironically, R
influence those making music now, not only in nostalgic a lot of the artwork published here that we are forever
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terms but because they were essentially purely about told works best as a 12” vinyl or 33rpm sleeve is shown
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the music – and the design was all about enhancing the at pretty much the exact dimensions of a compact disc.
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music. Ironically, it was on the very front that Factory There is a fantastically pretentious but sublime intro-
couldn’t compete that it ended up competing on – design. duction from Factory co-founder and twat-about-town V
This is the label whose die-cut ‘Blue Monday’ single by Tony Wilson whose register and sentence construction W
New Order, the best-selling 12 inch of all time, cost them is unique. How about this, with its brilliantly ambiva- X
money every time someone bought the record. lent “or”: “It all began after a very, very bad Patti Smith Y
Of course, Factory is most closely associated with the gig in late 77 or early 78…”; or this, explaining the Z
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Factory design rationale, the pick of the crop: “Does the Dry bar, a continental-style bar, one of the first of its More A
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the Catholic Church pour its wine into mouldy earthen- kind in England, all in Manchester. B
ware pots? I think not.” How can one not love this man There’s even info here that’s new to a Factory nut like C
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(other than by meeting him perhaps)? me (and I made sure my son’s initial allowed me to have D
However, Wilson’s got a gimlet eye for the design a FAC family code, though perhaps that’s a retrospective E
success of the Happy Mondays album Bummed, writing justification), such as the f-hole logo which I’d always RSS
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about its controversial inside sleeve: “It wasn’t the fact taken to be f for Factory but it’s actually f for Fractured
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that the woman was middle-aged, it wasn’t the shaved Music, Joy Division’s company (fascinating eh?). Also Facebook
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pubes, it was the colour quality which made the viewer that there was a cigarette pack design for the Joy Divi-
feel dirty. Sheer genius, that.” sion video Here Are The Young Men, got up like 20 John I
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The Durutti Column album The Return of the Durutti Player Special’s – I want to trade my VHS copy now! J
Column (1979) designed by Dave Rowbotham is com- There’s even plenty to drool over in corporate terms K
posed entirely of sandpaper and was inspired by the such as the stationery and the Factory Christmas cards, L
Situationist Guy Debord’s Memoires, “a book bound especially the one from 1987 designed by Johnson Panas M
in raw sandpaper designed to damage all other publica- (they were of course commissioned and absurdly lavish), N
tions around it” – perfect for punk. a cardboard model kit of the Hacienda. O
Of course, Factory didn’t just operate in two dimen- While Saville continued his “grand tour for the mass- P
sions – as Tony Wilson might have said – there was Ben es”, with the New Order covers taking in De Chirico for Q
Kelly’s Hacienda nightclub, for a while the most famous ‘Thieves Like Us’, Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Dynamo R
club in the world, with its chevrons, bollards and cats (1927) for Procession (1981) and appropriating Jan S
eyes – a kind of theatrical industrial space, which includ- Tschichold typography, there is a sense of a dead end.
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ed the Gay Traitor bar, with its spot lights and furtive air Luckily, the Happy Mondays covers rescued Saville’s
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of treachery. (Saville said astutely that “Instead of being anally retentive control freakery and let rip: they were
a monument to the 80s, the Hacienda is the birthplace of garish, often unreadable and trippy. Happy Mondays’ V
the 90s”.) Then there was Factory HQ on Charles Street, ‘Lazyitis’ single by Central Station Design looks as if W
a disused textile warehouse (since the 70s they had oper- they can’t be bothered, which is perfect of course, the X
ated from Alan Erasmus’s one-bed flat) – “a mausoleum bloated lettering slurring its way across the sleeve – you Y
to the corporate brand that the label could never be”, plus half expect the cover to belch in your face.  Z
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Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman email

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Gary Marshall
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In one of his routines, Eddie Izzard explains why super- covering Penman’s first love and first experience of
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markets don’t have toilet rolls on display near the en- mortality, although the unpleasantness of the subject Facebook
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trance in case you think “this is a poo shop! Everything matter makes The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas
in here is poo!”. Your first impression of The Peculiar Penman considerably funnier than the typical tale of I
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Memories Of Thomas Penman may well be similar, as growing up. Penman’s infatuation for the far-from- J
the first chapter revels in the scatological detail of the perfect Gwen cures him of his obsession with his own K
eponymous Penman’s difficulties at school. Blackly bodily functions, and we follow his predicament as his L
funny and completely offensive, the opening chapter home life becomes increasingly demented. Robinson M
sets the tone for the rest of the book. has a deceptively light touch and manages to create as N
You could be forgiven for thinking this is indeed a many uncomfortable laughs of recognition as he does O
‘poo’ book. Defecation is everywhere, from Penman’s belly-laughs, particularly when Thomas describes his P
emergencies in the classroom to the war of attrition – feelings for the love of his life or deals with the first Q
expressed through the medium of dog shit – waged by fumblings of teenage sex. Similarly the parental dis- R
his uncommunicative parents. This is definitely not a cord of Thomas’ dysfunctional family is exaggerated to
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book for the easily offended, encompassing Thomas’ the point of parody without losing its horror.
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Grandfather’s secret stash of pornography (including The dialogue is bang-on for most of the book and
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photographs of “a woman with a duck up her arse”), both Thomas’ secretive relationship with his Grandfa-
teenage opinions of sex and general unpleasantness. ther and his attempts to discover the man’s dark secret V
Robinson, however, manages to stay the right side of are simultaneously funny and touching. It’s the details, W
offensiveness and his novel is highly amusing whilst however, which will have you squirming – from Tho- X
packing a hefty moral punch. mas’ Grandfather’s recollections of the Great War to Y
The novel is essentially a rites-of-passage story, conversations about sex where the girl “would have Z
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done it” if the boy had been able to produce a more Fields. He’s clearly a very talented writer and, in … More A
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appropriate form of protection than a three-foot con- Penman, manages the difficult task of balancing manic B
dom found washed up on the beach. The ill-informed humour and pathos. The war scenes in particular are C
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bravado of teenage boys is particularly well-drawn and graphic and powerful, and the scenes where Thomas D
the scenes where Thomas attempts to smoke cigarettes speaks with his Grandfather on his death-bed are espe- E
or discuss sex with his best friend are painfully funny. cially poignant. Reading this book you’re left with the RSS
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Bruce Robinson has been lauded primarily for writ- distinct impression that Bruce Robinson can turn his
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ing and directing the cult hit Withnail & I, although hand to manic comedy and serious story-telling with Facebook
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his credits also include the screenplay for The Killing equal ease. 
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Jacques Roubaud: The Great Fire Of London email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel matter is frequently incomprehensible, occasionally
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The Great Fire Of London many times. boring and evasive. All these aspects, however, seem Facebook
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No, that’s not true. I have not written anything. fundamental to it; that is, not errors of art and craft.
Rather, I have felt many times the need to write about So, to look beyond these, to direct one’s steady gaze I
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The Great Fire Of London. at the essence of the novel might be to repeat Or- J
But that’s not true either. I have felt the need to re- pheus’ error when retrieving his wife Eurydice from K
move this need; that’s all. the underworld. He looked back as he led her from L
I have assumed that writing would remove the need. the darkness, so breaking his vow to the God of the M
There seems to be no other way. But what is there to underworld. He was not meant to look. She was then N
write? The Great Fire Of London is a fearfully complex condemned to remain in the dark and he was ripped O
book. There are pages betraying the influence of Rou- apart. Orpheus’ dismembered head sings of his loss P
baud’s academic career as a mathematician. I cannot as it floats down a river. Similarly, perhaps, if one Q
understand a great deal of it. But maybe that is a good attempts to retrieve art from the darkness of its book- R
thing. If I wrote about the novel by trying to unravel loneliness by bringing it into the brightness of public
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its fearful complexity, I might ruin what makes it so discourse, its essence might well get left behind too.
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persistently memorable, which isn’t a result of its fear- What’s left would be the beauty of its dissembling
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ful complexity. It is something to do with its underlying architecture; the words of Orpheus’ song. This is not
simplicity and intimacy. But such a statement is itself what makes it beautiful. V
too simplistic. Either way, it is deeply moving and So what is it? One helpful aspect of The Great Fire W
inspiring book. Of London is that Roubaud’s narrator also assumes that X
Not that I would unequivocally recommend rush- writing is his only recourse. Perhaps there is something Y
ing out to get a copy. It is not an easy read. The subject to learn about this impulse, or at least how might affect Z
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what is written. the anguish awaiting me once I break off.” More A

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In the opening chapter, the narrator – who is Rou- His anguish is inevitable, for a reason that soon B
baud himself, more or less, although more or less is becomes clear. Writing holds anguish at bay. Reading C
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perhaps an infinity I can only hope to overlook here – is and sleep help too, he says. They provide the local D
at his desk at five in the morning, drinking coffee. He palliative of ‘escapism’. What we read, though, is not E
listens to the running motor of a delivery truck in the in the form of traditional writerly escapism; a crime RSS
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street below. Immediately, we are with him in the cool thriller, perhaps, or maybe a philosophical abstraction
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solitude of dawn. We reflect in isolation from the world cast from an ivory tower, or even the ‘talking cure’ of Facebook
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in motion; it becomes five o’clock in the morning for confessional memoir. It’s difficult to say what kind of
us too. (Scott Fitzgerald says “In the real dark night of book it is. Yes, it is a novel, even if I found my copy I
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the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day in the History section of a remaindered bookshop. Yet J
after day”; at five o’clock, one begins to write about it). while it partakes of the liberating playfulness of fiction, K
The narrator tells us that he writes: it also looks back – ever so obliquely, yet ever so insist- L
“in minute, close-packed letters, without deletions, ently – into his pool of anguish: the sudden, premature M
regrets, reflection, imagination, impatience” and that death of Alix, his wife. And this really happened. It’s N
he is writing “only in order to keep on going, to elude no fiction.  O
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Robert Sabbag: Snowblind 420 Tupac Shakur: Murder Was The Case 472 F
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Peter Saville: Graphic Sex 422 Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey 475 Facebook
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Alberto Sciamma: Suck It And See 428 Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle 479 Twitter
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W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away 431 Michael Marshall Smith: Spares 482 K
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W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz 446 Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us 484 M
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Will Self 450 Sonic Youth: Sonic Spice 486
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Will Self: Biting The Hand That Feeds 451 Ralph Steadman: Gonzo: The Art 490 P
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Will Self: Self Destruction 460 Suicide: David Nobakht: No Compromise 499 R
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Will Self: Dead Man Talking 464 Damo Suzuki: I Am Damo Suzuki 502 T
Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension 467 Swans: Swans’ Song 506 U
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David Sylvian: The Good Son Vs. W
The Only Daughter 510 X
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Robert Sabbag: Snowblind email

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Robin Askew
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If Howard Marks is Mr Nice – a lovable, educated of the times. His swift transition from dope to coke
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former cannabis smuggler who didn’t touch any- resulted from a calculation of the vastly increased Facebook
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thing harder on principle – then Zachary Swan was profits to be made from Colombian nose candy. (In
Mr Somewhat-Less-Nice. A harder sell to the liberal an amusing digression, Sabbag reminds us that we I
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middle-classes than Marks’s entertaining raconteur, should never underestimate the contribution made J
Swan was an American cocaine smuggler whose me- by illegal drug dealing to his nation’s numeracy: K
ticulous scams became the stuff of legend in the 70s. “The United States of America effectively converted L
One of the true classics of drug literature, Snowblind to the metric system in, or around, 1965 – by 1970 M
has been in and out of print many times since it first there was not a college sophomore worth his govern- N
appeared in 1976. This welcome new edition from ment grant who didn’t know how much a gram of O
Scottish counter-culture specialists Rebel Inc boasts hash weighed.”) P
a rambling, adulatory introduction from Marks (“… These being comparatively more innocent, pre- Q
the world of international dope dealing is fun,” he freebase times, Swan didn’t carry a gun until late in his R
vouchsafes once again, adding, perhaps unnecessar- brief career and never shot anyone, had a moderately
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ily, “It’s fucking great!”) and an afterword (actually enlightened attitude towards women by the antedilu-
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written ten years ago) by Robert Sabbag, recalling vian standards of the time, and – unusually – devised
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how, as a young and ambitious newspaper hack, each of his cunning scams with a loophole that allowed
he was reluctantly persuaded to write the book that his often unwitting ‘mules’ to walk away, much to the V
made his name. frustration of the Feds. W
Too old to be a hippy and Republican by inclination, It’s the mechanics of these ingenious smuggling X
Swan was a smuggler of the old-school, motivated schemes that provide the most pleasure. Increased Y
more by greed than the politico-chemical fervour security measures mean that many of them couldn’t Z
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be employed today, though some remain infallible. Should you be naughty enough to read it as a hand- More A
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For one brilliantly executed scam, Swan spent days book, Snowblind boasts plenty of hints and tips for the B
perfecting a technique for imperceptibly removing and aspiring drug smuggler. (If you’re going to conceal your C
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replacing the seals on jars of coffee. Finally satisfied, stash inside that old favourite the hollowed-out ethnic D
he deposited a leaflet in a sealed jar, sneaked it back wooden ornament, choose something like medeira E
into a store and waited. Days later, he received a call on wood, which has a high specific gravity.) But armchair RSS
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a phone that couldn’t be traced to him from an elderly adventurers who’d prefer not to risk spending the rest
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couple who’d found that they’d just won a free trip to of their lives being sodomised by large South American Facebook
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Colombia courtesy of the coffee company. gentlemen in third world jails will enjoy it just as much
Posing as executives from the company, a heavily for the racy prose, period charm – the description of the I
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disguised Swan and his sidekicks dispatched the couple drug scene in 70s Harlem reads like the script for one of J
from the airport having extracted an agreement that those big-Afro Blaxploitation flicks – and terrific cast K
they would be photographed on their return with the of characters. L
gifts they’d been given. Down south, still-disguised Sabbag’s rich turn of phrase brings brilliantly to M
Swan made a great show of handing over the sou- life such dramatis personae as the psychopathic Jago N
venirs, which were, needless to say, stuffed with the (“There was always a look in his eye which seemed O
finest toot. Abundant witnesses and the couple’s bogus to indicate that his body was metabolising raw flesh”), P
signed agreement – not to mention their genuine inno- Michel Bernier (who “embodied all those individual Q
cence – meant they stood no chance of being convicted characteristics that Americans find distasteful in a R
if caught. Back home, the souvenirs were discreetly man – he was French”), and the aptly named Billy Bad
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swapped for identical if somewhat less valuable ones Breaks, who was so inept that he achieved the singular
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during the photographic session and the contented distinction of being jailed for attempting to smuggle a
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oldsters went on their way none the wiser. joint into Mexico. 
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Peter Saville: Graphic Sex email

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Chris Hall meets legendary designer Peter Saville
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“Peter Saville drives a Skoda”. The appalling idea the house he’s been staying at in West London for the
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scared him off of renting one when it was offered in past two years and might have to move in to his studio Facebook
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place of the VW Polo that he’d ordered. “I know eve- which hasn’t got a toilet. Or blinds. Or a bed.
ryone says they’re really good cars now, but I’m not You wouldn’t think that this was the same Peter I
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gonna be in a test group for them. It’s still a Skoda,” Saville who’s designed some of the most original and J
he says, terrified that people would think he drove one. iconic album covers ever with Joy Division, New K
Instead, Saville pulls up at his studios near Old Street, Order, Suede and Pulp; who’s worked for Christian L
East London in a rented Fiat Stilo, The Doors still play- Dior, Givenchy, the Pompidou Centre, EMI and M
ing on the stereo. His own car, a 16-year-old BMW 3 Selfridges, among many, many others; whose semi- N
Series, is in the garage and he hasn’t quite got used to nal work for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has O
the replacement, checking and double-checking that influenced a decade of “anti-advertising” advertising, P
he’s properly locked it. He’s worried about how much and who’s been recently voted the “most admired Q
the repair bill is going to be when he collects the BMW. individual working within the creative industries” R
In fact, he’s worried about bills full stop. in Creative Review. The Peter Saville who’s been
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He has a big tax bill to pay this month, which he quietly amassing an impressive body of work as a
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says he can’t afford. The bailiffs have been round, who graphic artist over the last 25 years, who at the age of
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he fended off by lying to them, and the phones have 47 is being officially recognised by the mainstream.
been cut off. Plus his own financial involvement in It’s the weekend, which means he’s working, and V
The Peter Saville Show which opened in May at the he’s arranged to do some quick picture editing with W
Design Museum in London, and a book published by one of his colleagues, Sascha Behrendt, just before he X
Frieze, has meant that he’s on the verge of personal meets me. But he’s running late, so they have to look Y
bankruptcy. Oh, and he’s just about to be kicked out of at the prints of a shoot he did a few days earlier for Z
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Stella McCartney while I’m there. He’s dressed in his he could be a poor man’s James Hunt. “Yes, there is More A
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trademark white Helmut Lang jeans, a black T-shirt and some of that going on,” he admits, a little embarrassed B
some tan leather shoes (no socks). He speaks in a soft by this particular reputation, but he’s more interested C
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Mancunian accent deepened by nicotine, and has a disin moving from talk of playboy to Playboy: “I’d like D
tinctive sustain when pronouncing his Rs. Saville puts to redo Playboy magazine. I find it lamentable that E
on his black-framed glasses and goes over to the table there isn’t an intelligent, erotic magazine. There isn’t RSS
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to look at large-format Polaroids of Kate Moss in knee- a magazine that was like Playboy was 30 years ago,
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high leather boots. “The professional situations I have and I find that’s dumb. Why isn’t there any intelligent, Facebook
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at the moment are really quite abusive,” he says matter abstract eroticism? I can find the artist Lucio Fontana’s
of factly. “It’s not a straight, commercial relationship I colour fields incredibly erotic juxtaposed against a bit I
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have with my clients. They come to me for something of Rocco Siffredi [a porn star].” J
special, and yet for the most part they know that they From 1978 to 1991 when he was art director at Fac- K
can get it cheaply and they do, and that offends me. But tory Records in Manchester (which he co-founded with L
I have to take what’s on offer.” Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) he had carte blanche M
He has his lunch at 5pm; a solitary sausage roll, creatively. He designed the posters for the legendary N
which he’s eating from a large white plate with a knife Hacienda nightclub in the city, the album covers for the O
and fork. What about all these flash restaurants he’s Factory bands (Joy Division, New Order, OMD, etc) all P
supposed to go to all the time I thought it’d be a take- seemingly quixotically free of financial considerations. Q
out from Claridges or something? “I go to the Ivy about His artwork for the cover of New Order’s Blue Mon- R
once every two months, despite what’s been written,” day 12 inch in 1983 was die-cut to make it resemble a S
he laughs. “I spend about £20 on a meal.” He goes off to floppy disc, and, depending on whose version of events
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the kitchen area of his white-floored and white-walled you believe, cost the record company anywhere from
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studio space every so often to make himself an espresso 2p to 75p everytime a copy was bought. Which perhaps
in his Richard Sapper stove-top, making sure that eve- would have been fine had it been a limited edition, but V
rything is left clean and tidy. He mentions that he is go- it just happened to become the biggest selling 12 inch W
ing to watch the Monaco grand prix the following day record ever. “What I did in my local zone was how I X
and has been following the qualifying sessions. With wanted everything to be,” says Saville. “I was spoilt in Y
his understated elegance and slightly egotistical charm, the beginning by being given a big playground to play Z

in and remarkable freedom.” rotting away in a warehouse somewhere that we can’t More A
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The very first poster that he designed for Factory with get rid of.” B
its “Use hearing protection” strapline, along with the But Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Suede, C
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architect Ben Kelly’s design for the Hacienda (which forgives Saville’s tardiness. Anderson is a friend of D
Saville collaborated on), foreshadowed the industrial Saville’s and worked with him very closely on their E
warehouse chic that would come to dominate interior albums Coming Up and Head Music. “A lot of it was RSS
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design in the following couple of decades. (After notic- done sitting and chatting and drinking coffee. It’s a real
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ing recently that the originals were fetching £1,500 on exchange and a discussion. It’s all part of his charm. Facebook
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eBay, Saville decided to produce 500 re-editions of the What you miss with deadline efficiency is made up for
FAC1 poster which will cost £100 each. But how much by the incredible level of personal care he takes in the I
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this is motivated by the horror that it’s out of the reach work. He really immersed himself in the music. He’s J
of the masses, and how much by what must be a fairly not driven by money or fame, just a genuine quest for K
easy income generator, is hard to say.) aesthetic beauty.” Saville is currently working with the L
With Blue Monday and the earlier New Order al- photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on Suede’s greatest M
bum Power, Corruption & Lies there was an interest hits cover, due for release in September. N
in coding the work, so that the titles were spelt out in Because of his concerns to get a job done right, Peter O
colour. He pushed this idea further with later albums. Saville and business have long had an uneasy relation- P
With New Order’s Brotherhood (1986) and Technique ship. “There’s no notion in any industry that they will Q
(1989), it was clear whose work it was from the enig- wait for graphic design. They will not wait. They’ll R
matic, restrained and visually innovative sleeve design, spend longer negotiating your work-for-hire contract S
respectively a sheet of Titaanzink metal and a Warho- than giving you to do the job!” he says with rising in-
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lian cherub. One of the persistent legends that attaches credulity. “It’s just the finishing, but it’s in the finishing
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to Saville, is that, like the author Douglas Adams, he that you make it or break it.”
loves the sound of deadlines whooshing past. Stephen Does he think that his deadlines are unrealistic? “They V
Morris, the drummer of New Order, confirms this, are if you want something resolved or of any quality,” W
recalling Saville’s most infamous late delivery. “It was he says. “My problem comes when it’s my work. I X
the programme he did for us on an American tour that become territorial, and self-indulgent and maybe arro- Y
turned up on the last gig, and we’ve still got 1,000s gant. If it takes till next Friday, it’s gonna take till next Z

Friday. You know, I had this mistaken understanding He comes across as a perfectionist, utterly disillu- More A
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of professional when I was younger that it meant being sioned with big business, confused by his being in a B
really good.” He laughs in cynical astonishment. “But grey area where art meets design and wanting to break C
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it’s actually about doing what has to be done within the free of his financial bonds and take a new direction. D
circumstances within which you are allowed to do it.” One can’t help but feel that with the kind of reckless E
The way Saville tells it, his designs have actually in- candour with which he talks about the shortcomings RSS
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fluenced the music. He claims that the musical direction of just about every client he’s ever worked for he’s
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of what was to be Joy Division’s final album, Closer, trying to talk himself away from commercial art Facebook
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was guided by its funereal sleeve photograph by Bernard through autosuggestion. Icon’s photographer, Jamie,
Pierre Wolff (the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself met Saville a few days earlier and was taken aback: I
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shortly before its release). But Morris, who’s currently “He was unable to resist art directing himself in the J
in the studio writing songs for New Order’s next album local playgrounds and parks. And I was amazed at K
where they recorded the ambient music for the Design how open and warm he was.” L
Museum retrospective, is having none of it. “I think Saville clearly has a lot of steam to let off. “Abso- M
that’s too strong, but not for Peter,” he says, laughing lutely everything except the creative act is stretched out N
fondly at such hubris. “I remember him and Rob Gretton as long as is needed and there’s this notion that you can O
[New Order’s former manager] having a discussion and resolve the creative issues and problems [clicks his fin- P
the upshot was that Peter said people bought the records gers] like that’s the bigger the budget the more people Q
for his sleeves, not for the music.” sign-off, the more bland and generic it will be. No one R
“I come to every new job as if it’s Everest to climb wants to take a chance. I mean, what is happening in car S
again,” says Saville, lighting up the next of many, many design? It’s either hideously bland or really quite per-
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Gauloises. “I foolishly approach everything as if it’s verse.” The record industry was only ever going to be
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really important and that it has to be done, in some tiny a professional cul-de-sac for someone fast-approaching
way perhaps, in a way that it hasn’t been done before. 30, and Saville seems more savvy than Machiavellian V
I won’t just repeat myself. I don’t know why I do it. when he says that he “learnt quickly how to manipulate W
Partly it’s about anxiety and fear. Partly it’s about the the record industry to my own ends. I took a selfish, X
music business where people would want something bloody-minded approach to the work and I made life Y
completely different.” hell for the people who were paying for it. To me the Z

work was going to be my passport out of it.” shows his catalogue and advertising work for the fash- More A
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With Peter Saville Associates in financial crisis and ion designer Yohji Yamamoto. The Game Over series B
Factory Records on the verge of collapse, he finally hit of photo library stock images from 1991 for Yamamoto C
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commercial reality in 1990 and joined the Pentagram captures the sense of consumerist exhaustion and D
group in LA as a partner. With Saville’s odd working overkill amid an impending recession, which has been E
hours he rarely gets up before the afternoon and works much copied in terms of its abstraction and typography. RSS
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until midnight and his antipathy, not to say hostility, A Guide To Never-Never Land adumbrates the future
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towards corporate till-ringing, the relationship was of advertising in the 1990s, where the product is so far Facebook
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doomed from the start. “I just will not make this anal- off the page that it almost becomes anti-advertising
ogy between what I’m being paid and how much time advertising. A car production line, all flashbulbs and I
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we spend on it. It gets as much time as it needs.” gleaming surfaces, stretches off into an infinite hell of J
The current interest in Saville has a lot to do with consumerism, as much a break with reality as Saville’s K
the demographics of the creative industries. There is a image is from Yamamoto’s clothing. L
whole generation who grew up as fans of, in particular, When he’s talking about the retrospective, it seems M
Roxy Music, Joy Division and New Order, who are as if Saville’s incapable of letting go and trusting his N
now making the decisions. “When I first met the presi- work to others. “I’m unhappy towards the people who I O
dent of Givenchy Parfum,” says Saville, “he said ‘Oh, do the work for,” he says. “That’s my mood right now, P
Monsieur Saville, I am a fan of Joy Division, I am a fan which is kind of ironic after what would appear to be Q
of Peter Saville.’ I was 45 and he was 39.” a successful show and book. It’s not what you would R
And it wasn’t just with couture fashion. “Throughout imagine. No one has gathered a comprehensive review S
the 80s I saw the High Street convert. At Next, I saw of the work done by Peter Saville Studios over 25 years
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so much of what I’d done for Ultravox. It was every- and looked at it in order to write about it or curate a
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where.” He explains: “At the design firms, the grown- proper show for a museum. Nobody. Has. Looked. At.
ups weren’t hands-on anymore and the work was left The Work.” He says that the Design Museum exhibi- V
to the kids.” tion lacks context, that there is nothing explaining why W
At the Design Museum retrospective (designed by the work is important. And when he says that the show X
the architect Lindi Roy), Saville’s work is arranged is his “greatest hits”, he means it pejoratively. Y
chronologically. The middle section is very dark, and Although he sounds exhausted by the demands Z

of running his business, he talks hopefully about the of understanding the word estate. It led me to ‘Estate More A
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future. There is the Pirelli calendar that he’s working of’. I though, shit, if I retire or die what will someone B
on with the photographer Nick Knight, a long-time do with all of this stuff that I haven’t been able to work C
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collaborator, and which, despite being “a bit cheesy”, out? They’ll put it all together and they’ll catalogue it, D
has kept his interest. A project he’s working on for the and flog it. I thought, well why don’t I?” E
software company Adobe and its Photoshop packaging It would appear to have opened up possibilities for RSS
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neatly ties in his attraction to recycling and to reflecting the graphic designer to move forward with his work
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contemporary ways of living. In 1998, he started to ex- and at last untie himself from those abusive client Facebook
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periment with the Wave filter on Photoshop and found relationships. “A few years ago I was giving myself a
that he could produce stunning digital paintings with hard time about not being an artist because what is it I
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all kinds of imagery, starting with New Order covers. that I do regardless of other things? And then I realised J
“What’s interesting when we make the Waste Paintings oh, I do this [the notebooks]. I’d done the work. I’d K
is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s been filling notebooks for 10 years about the things I L
fascinating. We did one last week and it was mindbog- ought to do preparatory notes. I’d done the work, but M
gling. We did it for the Adobe project. If I could work a I’d never thought about it as writing it.” N
computer, I’d show it to you! It’s beautiful. Print it out This is the big project, after all the hassle with cli- O
it’s done.” ents and the financial frustrations and worries of his P
Saville has spent years agonising over a context or studio work, that he wants to do next, with himself Q
concept in which to place his many boxes of notebooks as client: “I’ve learnt not to leave this kind of thing R
full of thoughts, sketches and ideas. “I was interested in to chance.”
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the industrial estate, the country estate different ways [This article previously appeared in Icon magazine] 
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Feature [published July 1996] B
Alberto Sciamma: Suck It And See email

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Chris Mitchell gets a sneak preview of the outrageous film, The Killer Tongue
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This year’s Cannes Festival witnessed an explosion transvestites and tongue in tow.
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of tongues, transvestites and the tightest costumes Meanwhile, her former crime partner Johnny (Jason Facebook
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ever devised with the premier screening of The Killer Durr: Young Soul Rebels, Between Two Worlds) is serv-
Tongue, the debut film from the Brighton-based producing time in a chaingang under the sadistic Chief Guard I
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tion company Spice Factory. Starring Robert (‘Freddie (Robert Englund). Amongst Johnny’s fellow convicts J
Krueger’) Englund and Doug (‘Pinhead’) Bradley, The lurks Doug Bradley. Hearing of Candy’s plight, Johnny K
Killer Tongue looks like a collision between Priscilla: escapes the gang, teams up with Rita, a nun still con- L
Queen Of The Desert and The Evil Dead, with a distinct vinced of Candy’s convent credentials despite the fact M
tip of the hat to The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the tongue has already eaten half of her heavenly choir, N
good measure. and also sets off in pursuit. Volkert Struyken, one of O
The Killer Tongue’s plot is as gloriously camp as its the executive producers along with Jason Piette and P
costumes. The debris from a meteorite slamming into Michael Cowan of the Spice Factory, comments: “It’s a Q
the Tex-Mex desert winds up in the soup of Candy psychotic comedy, but there’s very little gore, no flying R
(Melinda Clarke: Critic’s Choice, Return of The Liv- heads. One thing you can guarantee, it’s going to be
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ing Dead III), a former doublecrossing underworld one of the most memorable films of 1996,” he states,
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desperado currently lying low in a convent. Once said before dissolving into laughter.
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soup is imbibed, Candy becomes host to the afore- What we have here is a comedy horror transvestite
mentioned alien mutant Killer Tongue, complete with road movie of the first order. As Robert Englund V
talking Alien-esque mini-maw. Just for that finishing remarks, “When I got the script, it was very different W
touch, Candy’s pet poodles metamorphose into the drag to anything I had read. There was something about X
queens Loco, Coco and Rudolph. With her underworld the snowballing visual images which made sense Y
enemies in hot pursuit, Candy flees into the desert, to me. I realised that it must have been something Z
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and

like reading a David Lynch script before we all used see that same diversity in the cinema.” More A
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‘David Lynch’ as an adjective. It reminded me a This is reflected by the other key figure in The Killer B
bit of El Hobo, Dust Devil by Richard Stanley and Tongue’s genesis, the 34-year-old Spanish writer-direc- C
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also the Coen Brothers; it has that almost cartoon, tor, Alberto Sciamma. Like David Fincher’s rite of pas- D
story-board aspect to it. It is very strange in its weird sage before his directing debut on Alien 3, The Killer E
kind of juxtapositions – I’ve been calling it a visual Tongue is Sciamma’s first feature film after directing RSS
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non-sequitur.” a host of critically acclaimed music videos. That ex-
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This sort of comment is all the more remarkable perience shows in the fact that shooting for the film Facebook
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seeing it’s concerned with a British film. If Four wrapped up after eight weeks in Almeria and Madrid,
Weddings, Sense And Sensibility and Trainspotting holding to its $6 million budget. I
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have all recently played on their quintessential forms Acquiring the money for such a relatively modest J
of Britishness as their main selling point, The Killer film budget is still a difficult process, as Cowan attests: K
Tongue takes great glee in being a complete hybrid of “It took us nearly 18 months to get it financed. Alberto L
trash Americana and spaghetti westerns. As Michael Sciamma had suffered total rejection when he was tout- M
Cowan of Brighton’s Spice Factory who co-wrote, ing the original script for The Killer Tongue. But after N
produced and organised the financing for the film we got involved and Jason [Piette, the other co-director O
comments: “Spice Factory really doesn’t give a fuck of Spice Factory] did some extensive rewriting, we P
about Channel 4 or any of those people because they were ready to go. We used a front guy as a producer Q
really aren’t interested in the type of movies that we called Christopher Figg who produced the Hellraiser R
want to make. The world’s becoming a much smaller movies ‘cos otherwise people would have said, ‘Un- S
place. People want to be entertained, not go and watch known director, unknown producers, who the fuck are
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My Beautiful Launderette which has only 50 screens, they?’. We used him as the front and then put all the
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all made in the UK, costs £1 million and takes 5 years deals together to make it work. During that process we
to produce because everyone’s trying to make money got a lot of rejections from a lot of people, Polygram et V
out of Channel 4. Our philosophy’s really different al, who couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t W
because it’s grown up from the video age. I think a lot get it. But we did it.” X
of kids from that era who have grown up knowing a The Killer Tongue has eventually emerged as a co- Y
lot about all sorts of different films and music want to production between Spice Factory and Spain’s Lola Z

Films, with backing from the UK’s European Co-pro- Spice Factory reckon they’ve hit a unique formula More A
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duction Fund and the giant Spanish publishing corpo- to fund production of future films without having to B
ration Prisa’s entertainment division, Sogetel. Cowan continually compromise over financing. Spice Factory C
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makes a telling analogy to this complex process: “The are already commanding respect within the British film D
film business is something like the futures market – all industry: “In the beginning we spent a lot of time trav- E
you’re doing is selling names and bits of paper That’s elling up to London to meet a lot of people – now the RSS
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the bottom line, which is pretty shocking when you’ve likes of Channel 4 and British Screen are coming down
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spent so much time trying to create something!” to Brighton and see us. We’re not trying to be cocky, Facebook
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Spice Factory are themselves part of a bigger like we’re going to be a great success, it’s a business
company, Brighton’s Epic Multimedia Group, itself like anything else.” I
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the largest independent multimedia company within “But what we like about the film business is that it’s J
Europe. This gives Spice Factory an added edge as unpredictable, it doesn’t matter how great a script or K
Jason Piette points out: “We’re the only production how much money you have, it’s whether people are L
company in the world that makes both computer going to go and watch it. I think last year especially M
games and films.” This is demonstrated by The Killer proved that. A lot of the major studios have produced N
Tongue game tie-in, Point and Lick, due out later big name movies which haven’t performed in any way O
in the year, and Spice Factory’s development of the whereas a lot of the smaller movies like Clerks, Clue- P
game to accompany the $25 million film Space Truck- less and The Usual Suspects have worked. I don’t think Q
ers, featuring Dennis Hopper. From their dealings people go to a movie anymore just because there’s a R
over Space Truckers, Spice Factory have managed to big star in it. I think it’s all to do with what the story S
persuade Goldcrest to finance their next film Crush is and what they want. And I think they’re looking for
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Hour to the tune of $14 million. something different, because over the last 4 years it’s
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Cowan, a graduate of the National Film School, indi- been so repetitive with sequels etc. Which is where The
cates the great strength of Spice Factory is precisely this Killer Tongue comes in – it’s wild, wacky and it’s in- V
diversity: “We’re not just film producers: we actually yer-face.” And, indeed, in yer mouth. Scheduled for a W
originate product – we’re creative writers and we work September / October release in the UK, Spice Factory X
with other creators. And we also understand the busi- are hoping for a 15 certificate once The Killer Tongue Y
ness side.” Far from spreading themselves too thinly, gets licked by the BBFC.  Z

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W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away email

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Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald
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Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when er, once it is, these details seem excessive. In the end
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the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster, all we are told is of the narrator’s brief acquaintance Facebook
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sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascina- with the melancholy Lithuanian emigrant Dr Henry
tion and regularity verging on Schadenfreude – are the Selwyn, and the curious coincidence that emerged I
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events themselves always placed at a distance, always later. In summary (though this is barely any shorter J
prior to the narrator’s present, as if only ever to be than the original) Selwyn lost his Swiss mountain K
experienced second-hand, as stories? guide in the early years of the century; he went miss- L
The first part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s ing on the Aare glacier. Selwyn, we’re told, remarked M
novels to be published in English, is exemplary. on how deeply this loss affected him, even more than N
It begins with a photograph of a graveyard. Below separation from his wife. The fact doesn’t take up O
it is a date and, below that, a description of a journey much space in the book. But 70 years after the loss, P
to a large house situated in a village in East Anglia. when visiting Switzerland, the narrator sees a news Q
The narrator and his partner are to view accommoda- report of a body being given up by a glacier. It turns R
tion there. There is little or no tension. It could be out to the same mountain guide. Selwyn could not
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mistaken for a straight memoir, particularly as there be told of the discovery because, by then, he had
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are so many photographs accompanying the words. killed himself with a hunting rifle. In fact, his suicide
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Without pleasure or discomfort, the reader can follow is a footnote. It is not presented as a great tragedy.
the litany of precise natural details provided by the There is no speculation on what he was thinking as V
narrator – oak trees, Scots pines, a grassy graveyard, he prepared to pull the trigger, or even why he chose W
a thick shrubbery of hollies, Portuguese laurels, dry, to end his life. The narrator’s journey to Switzerland X
rustling leaves. One expects it to lead somewhere, isn’t detailed either. It’s tacked on the end without Y
and a story of sorts does get told eventually. Howev- the precise details provided at the beginning, while Z
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the chapter itself ends with these lines: to the “passionate bleakness” of “a restless, chronically More A
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“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At dissatisfied mind” that offers us “moral fervency and B
times they come back from the ice more than seven gifts of compassion”. But this doesn’t tell us much re- C
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decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, ally. She also says that the accompanying photographs D
a few polished bones and a pair hobnailed boots.” provide “an exquisite index of the pastness of the past.” E
It’s an oddly glib reflection; a flat reiteration of a Again, so how does that make Sebald great? Pastness is RSS
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Proustian epiphany that doesn’t, in fact, happen. There a great attraction to a culture that fetishises old objects.
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is no richness, no sense of revelation. The presence Indeed, Sebald’s style is called “Antiquarianism” by Facebook
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of the past is down to its bare bones. Another writer, Daniel Johnson in the TLS: deriving from, he says, “a
perhaps with an eye for the main chance, might have peculiar synthesis of English eclecticism and German I
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expanded this into an ambitious tale across the dark perfectionism” where “the past has a more powerful J
decades of the 20th century, involving mountaineering, presence than the present”. That presence is precisely K
forbidden love, religious persecution, exile and war, all its pastness, which is present only as an index of what’s L
framed by the giant sky of the East Anglian countryside. not actually there. A curious paradox – one that would M
But not Sebald. One might say that in this story not probably leave the experts of Antiques Roadshow non- N
only is there no violence, there is nothing much at all. plussed. Like their punters, they would probably prefer O
The presence of the dead is always at one step remove, just to accumulate more and more of it. Hence perhaps P
never quite a full presence in the narration, and though why much is made of the variety of subject matter in Q
his later work does go into more detail, giving a chance Sebald’s novels, like a lumber room in a rundown man- R
for that lost time to re-emerge, the flatness continues. sion ready for an enthusiast’s rummage. S
Jacques Austerlitz, for example, is said to have grown It is also likely that the popularity of Sebald’s fiction is
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up in Wales, but there is no rising inflection in his due to a nostalgia for works that deal seriously with the
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words, no lilt; just Sebald’s familiar, formal prose. At most serious of subjects – all four Sebald novels might
best this can be described as uncanny. Otherwise, there be misconstrued as Holocaust Literature. Certainly, V
isn’t much for reader to indulge in. The fiction vacates Sontag desires something to counter “the ascendancy W
rather than fills the space of literature. of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as norma- X
So why has Sebald been hailed – by Susan Sontag tive fictional subjects”. A nostalgia, too, perhaps, for Y
among others – as a literary great? Well, Sontag points black and white distinctions: Nazis evil, victims good. Z

When we listen to the story of a Jewish refugee, such We can only imagine what that path might have been. More A
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as Max Ferber in The Emigrants, who lost his parents Yet that sense of loss and lack of development is oddly B
in the camps, the obscure hurt has to be acknowledged in keeping with the fiction. It’s as if the novels exist to C
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even if it remains beyond us. In comparison to the deal with the inadequacy of resolutions. What I mean is D
moral confusion of the present, it is much easier for described at the end of Vertigo. E
the reader to feel something. However, Sontag herself The narrator returns to the German village that he left RSS
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doesn’t see things as so clear cut. She ends her review as a youth. This is his first visit for 30 years. It gives
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of Vertigo with Sebald’s own curiosity with “the myste- him the chance to talk about all the goings-on, all the Facebook
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rious survival of the written word”; the dead, as it were, characters and intrigues that make up childhood memo-
returning to us here too, again and again. ries with which he seems to be preoccupied. He meets I
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The question of whether this is a good thing is left, friends from that time, now suddenly aged. One takes J
as it is in Sebald’s novels, unanswered. Yet could the him to an attic room packed high with antiques and cu- K
flatness be a means of trying to mitigate that survival? rios. Amongst the junk is an old tailor’s dummy dressed L
in a 17th-century soldier’s uniform. The narrator recog- M
2. nises it as the origin of a terrible threat that awaited him N
Sebald himself is survived by four novels for which should he enter a forbidden room of his childhood. As O
we can be thankful. The Rings of Saturn followed he used to dream of this ghostly figure, his curiosity P
The Emigrants, then came Vertigo, written before the is stirred and he reaches out to touch the cloth, as if to Q
other two, and finally, Austerlitz. The first and last make some kind of contact with that nightmare. The R
in this sequence can crudely be called a pair: both cloth crumbles away into dust. In subsequent dreams, S
contain stories framed by the narrator’s relation to he also reaches out and touches the soldier: “And every
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individuals exiled from their origins. The middle two time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand,
novels are framed by the narrator’s own wanderings, U
dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the
although they too involve telling others’ stories, usu- token of some great woe that nothing in the world will V
ally an historical figure like Stendhal or Casanova. ever put right.” W
The trajectory is unsatisfactory. As I suggested in a While the dream takes the place of that childhood X
review of Austerlitz, the author seemed to be paint- nightmare, perhaps offering the end of years of uncon- Y
ing himself into a corner. A new path is required. scious terror of the unknown, what replaces it is itself Z

a troublesome lack. One dark thing dissimulates into And Proust: More A
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another. Knowledge is gained yet, while this is appar- B
ently a progress, it buries the expected dissolution of “What the intellect gives us back under the name of C
the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of email
the child’s fear in another darkness. Sebald’s writing is D
precisely this progress; a token of some great woe that the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of E
is present only in the trace of its absence. Not progress our lives, as soon as it is dead, embodies and conceals RSS
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enough perhaps. The “restless, dissatisfied mind” of itself in some material object. Unless we meet with that
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the writer becomes our own experience of reading. We object it remains captive there, captive for ever. We Facebook
recognise it through the object, we summon it, and it is H
look for some concluding knowledge to get us beyond
this apparent impasse, and we continue reading as the released.” (Against Sainte-Beuve) I
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narrators continue on their wanderings, from one place J
to the next, from one book to the next. They are always Both continued writing, as if this would bring life’s K
getting over some undescribed illness or having just splendour. But if the right words summons what was L
gone through “a particularly difficult period” or are hidden, wouldn’t the means of seeking it also be a M
feeling just plain empty. It is a neurasthenic condition means of missing the time where its advantage could be N
familiar to other distinguished quasi- autobiographical lived? Both writers’ unhappy, hypochondriac real lives O
writers: Proust and Kafka. Like Sebald, they sensed a suggest as much. Or perhaps their manner of seeking P
world beyond their own restless, dissatisfied minds. itself was at fault; Kafka certainly felt that way. How Q
Kafka first: can one tell though? When can one know if the man-
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ner is correct until life’s splendour has passed and has
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“It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour for- become words only, mere history?
Perhaps, though, that is the advantage. T
ever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness,
but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It There’s a famous scene in Proust’s In Search Of Lost U
is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If Time when Marcel returns to the Grand Hotel in the V
you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it northern seaside resort of Balbec (locations familiar to W
will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not readers of Vertigo). He bends down slowly to remove X
create but summons.” (Diaries 18 October 1921) his boots and suddenly, he says, undergoes “a convul- Y
sion of my entire being”. His chest is filled by “an Z

unknown, divine presence” which shakes him to tears. Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life’ in More A
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It turns out to be the sudden return in his memory of his which he argued against the obsession with history. He B
late, beloved grandmother; “a complete and involuntary recognised that there is something pathological in the C
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memory”. It is only as her presence fills him like this pursuance of the past for its own sake. D
does he realise that she is really gone. Nothing in fact Instead, Nietzsche says, forgetting is necessary, at E
really happens but it is an exquisite moment for Marcel. least for a time. Otherwise we cannot let go; we can- RSS
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At last, his mourning can take its course. The novel has not sleep.
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many such incidents, spread across seven volumes as if He divided historical explanations into three types: Facebook
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to ensure that each appears with an appropriate intensity monumental, antiquarian and critical. While all served
to the reader, and so, in the same way, to the writer. In life, both history and life suffer if they are abused, I
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both cases, they exist as a passionate report; moments “Monumental history” he writes “deceives with analo- J
of felt distance. It is only in this way that movement gies: with tempting similarities the courageous are K
forward is possible. The same is true in Kafka’s most enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism”. It’s L
powerful stories, where the death of the protagonist, in the kind of history where the phrase “Never forget” is M
for example ‘The Judgement’ or ‘Metamorphosis’, is cried out and becomes itself a monument obscuring N
the means of returning writing to life. The paradox, of what needs to be remembered. Antiquarianism, on O
course, is that this can happen only in writing – a space the other hand, cherishes every little detail of the past P
that is neither fully alive nor fully dead – a condition rather than the big picture. But this means it is unable to Q
actually embodied (or disembodied) in Kafka’s great distinguish between what is and what is not important. R
story ‘The Hunter Gracchus’. The result is the utter veneration of the old because it S
While Kafka’s stories and Marcel’s epiphany are in is old, and the rejection of anything new. Meanwhile,
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stark stylistic contrast to each other, and both to the critical history is used to deal with both: “to shatter and
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Henry Selwyn chapter of The Emigrants, there is the dissolve something to enable [life]”. While critical his-
same toward into life that requires a movement closer tory is useful to enable movement forward, it can also V
to death. How can we make sense of this? be a means of avoiding its lessons: but in both forms it W
is a means of moving on. X
3. Applying this to Sebald, one could say he takes the Y
In 1874, Nietzsche published a long essay ‘On The monument of the disasters of civilisation and exposes Z

them to the gaze of Antiquarianism. Yet while the In Sebald’s case, the space is writing and not the psy- More A
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latter is present in the fiction in what Sontag calls the che, replacing an actual presence with a fictional one. B
“spaciousness and acuity of the details”, they refuse Still, Freudian psychoanalysis would accommodate this C
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the harmlessness of antiques. In fact, they have that as a cathartic process, whereby the gift of writing is the D
potential to summons described by Kafka and Proust freedom from loss. The melancholic energy demanded E
(perhaps what Sontag means by “spaciousness”). of the work itself enables the ego’s release. RSS
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This does not seem to lend itself to moving on. However, in both Nietzsche and Freud, the problem
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Each detail in the story of Henry Selwyn begins to of discussing these issues is not itself an issue. Yet if Facebook
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speak to its narrator: the grassy graveyard, the thick one is to move on, then how much work is involved and
shrubbery of hollies, the Portuguese laurels, the dry, how much is that work responsible for the need itself? I
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rustling leaves. As they build, there is a sense of To clarify, Clewell points out that Freud’s original J
some great woe that nothing in the world will ever theory was in the same vein as his earlier essay ‘On K
put right. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it be? Narcissism’, and she detects “something self-serving L
Forty years after Nietzsche, Freud offered an under- about [Freud’s] description of mourning as a process M
standing of the process of dealing with the weight of of detachment and consoling substitution”. There is a N
history that might explain. In Mourning & Melancholia sense of that self- serving element in Sebald’s relent- O
there is an uncanny outline of Sebald’s apparent fic- less pursuit of stories of others’ lives and suffering, P
tional procedure. As Tammy Clewell summarises: particularly the suffering. It’s as if the more stories the Q
narrator is able to tell, the freer he becomes, yet also the R
“The work of mourning entails a kind of hyperre- more he needs the stories for that freedom. The written S
membering, a process of obsessive recollection during word mysteriously survives in the lives of the writer,
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which the survivor resuscitates the existence of the lost and reader also. Everything becomes imbued with the
other in the space of the psyche, replacing an actual U
spaciousness that we have to escape.
absence with an imaginary presence. This magical res- The danger of such “referential mania” is embodied V
toration of the lost object enables the mourner to assess in a story by another great modern stylist, Vladimir W
the value of the relationship and comprehend what he Nabokov in the story ‘Signs & Symbols’. For the insti- X
or she has lost in losing the other.” tutionalised son of the elderly parents: Y
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“everything happening around him is a veiled refer- 4. More A

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ence to his personality and existence. […] Phenomenal With the publication – now in paperback – of a collec- B
nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the tion of lectures under the title On The Natural History C
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staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow Of Destruction we can now begin to appreciate even D
signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. more that Sebald’s project was beyond melancholy E
His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual reflection. And far from being yet more Holocaust lit- RSS
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alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains erature, work seeking to recover history for the present
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or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful and future, it is fiction as a search for an end, of having Facebook
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way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a done with ghosts at last.
cipher and of everything he is the theme.” The collection’s title itself, while at first appearing I
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to be the loose pretence of a marketing department J
While such extremes of paranoia are not present in unchecked after the death of the author, directs us to the K
Sebald’s novels, his work does share this story’s unease biological sciences where natural history is the precise L
with its expressive self: that is, how much is the writing eyewitness description of empirical data and events M
implicated in creating the problems it seeks to solve (an incipient Antiquarianism). The specific destruction N
or escape? ‘Signs & Symbols’’ power comes not only under examination here is, according to Sebald, under- O
in what it tells us – of mental illness and the ravage of described: the carpet bombings of 131 German cities P
the parents – but the way in which fear and anxiety is and towns, such as on Hamburg on 27 July 1943 in Q
evoked in each step into the story; not in what is explic- which at least 50,000 civilians died. R
itly said but in what words portend. Nabokov’s florid Sebald sketches the natural history of the firestorm.
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sentences evoke forces bearing on all our lives – forces What happened that night is summarised by the un-
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that can move us to aesthetic pleasure as a reader, and named reviewer at the Complete Review as “(huge
that make the son go mad. It is a dangerous confronta- numbers of dead, enormous amounts of bombs, rubble, U
tion, one that Proust, Kafka and Sebald make in their etc)”. The parentheses are symptomatic. Sebald does V
different ways too. not try to wrench human detail from these, as it were, W
Incidentally, Nabokov appears, another sign of a priori euphemisms but to analyse the response with a X
something, as a butterfly catcher in The Emigrants. view to opening debate about the subject. The lectures Y
are surprisingly provisional, and wouldn’t amount more Z

than notes if it wasn’t for Sebald extraordinary ability, ble.” The experience was incomparable, and so words, More A
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as seen in his fiction, to embed the deepest themes in the very means of communication through the tacit B
the apparently superficial. repetition of comparisons, fail too. C
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The title places the clarifying words ‘On The’ in Zuckerman’s remaining memory is significant for D
front of ‘Natural History’ so that the subject becomes Sebald’s project. One might assume that if there was a E
the attempt at recording and, implicitly, the attempt at photograph of the finger, he would have placed it on the RSS
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forgetting. The latter is inevitable, hence the need for page. But not out of prurience. James Wood, in his per-
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history. But what kind? How can we remove others’ ceptive essay on Sebald’s novels, refers to the tragedy of Facebook
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experiences from its bracketed containment without fact evoked by the captionless images placed through-
crippling ourselves – in Nietzsche’s sense – in the proc- out his books. They are not supplementary to the words I
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ess? For sure, Sebald finds the attempts to approach the but confirmation of mutual inadequacy. However, it is J
air war unsatisfactory, almost without exception. Not an inadequacy that contains much referential potential. K
that there were many attempts in the first place. We can The single memory is an equivalence; it orientates us L
assume two main reasons for their rarity and unsatis- toward the traumatic impact of experience even if we M
factory manner: the eyewitnesses who weren’t killed can have no real appreciation of what it means. Indeed, N
had to use all their energy to survive their survival. For the impact exceeds experience. Zuckerman was only O
example (my example), Jorge Semprun’s account of his passing through and what remained for him was only an P
own survival of the concentration camp at Buchenwald image. For the survivors, the ravage seems to have gone Q
is called Literature or Life; he had to choose the latter much deeper. Accounts following the raid on Hamburg R
in order to be able to write this very book much later. tell of the majority of the surviving population – over S
The second comes in Sebald’s reference to Lord a million – wandering through the country, without
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Zuckerman’s abandonment of his plan to write an any apparent destination. They were seen everywhere,
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article for a British journal following his visit to Köln, aimless and torpid. Sebald tells the apocryphal story of
another firebombed city. Simply, he couldn’t find the a woman waiting at railway station whose suitcase fell V
words: “All that remained in [Zuckerman’s] mind” Se- open depositing its contents on the platform, including W
bald tells us “was the image of the blackened cathedral the charred corpse of a baby. X
rising from the stony desert around it, and the memory Many millions went through this and it is more or less Y
of a severed finger that he had found on a heap of rub- absent from post-war German novels and non-fiction. Z

It was also absent from acknowledgement in everyday life and the specific features of our own civilisation, More A
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life. As he grew up, Sebald felt that something was of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in B
being kept from him: “at home, at school and by the the culture of the British Isles. And when we turn to C
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German writers whose books I read hoping to glean take a backward view, particularly of the years 1930 D
more information”. He says it hung over his life like to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at E
a dark cloud. The silence had its advantages of course: the same time.” RSS
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‘the economic miracle’ of Germany after the war “has He makes this movement clear in this analysis of the
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its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built few accounts of the raids themselves by listing the kind Facebook
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into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all of phrases used throughout:
Germans together in the post-war years”. I
“On that dreadful day when our beautiful city was Twitter
Undoubtedly, the reconstruction required a focus J
on the future rather than the past and, inevitably, razed to the ground” K
literature would reflect this. While those in charge L
“a prey to the flames”
were removed, the mindset of nation remained: they M
continued to work hard without questioning, and the “that fateful night” N
companies that supplied gas to the death camps con- O
tinued their capitalist success stories. German indus- “all hell was let loose” P
try became a byword for efficiency (precisely what Q
prompted the invention of the death camps). How- “we were staring into the inferno”
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ever, on the cultural front, German literature faded “the dreadful fate of the cities of Germany” S
behind the fresh new talents of North America. One
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must assume that forgetting is incompatible with great In other words, endless cliché. Sebald says they are
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literature. Appropriate recognition of the genocide of no more than gestures “sketched to banish memory”.
the Jews was delayed. The same happened to their V
The words slide by without gaining any purchase on
own experience of the air war. For this reason, Sebald the past. The truth has not been hidden, but it hasn’t W
accuses modern Germany of being “strikingly blind exactly been registered. But should this be regretted? X
to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel” he Well, when the lecture was first delivered, in 1997, Y
writes “any passionate interest in our earlier way of Sebald felt it was appropriate to remind Germans Z

that this forgetting remained part of: with grand, utopian visions. In this way, they look away More A
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just like the clichéd reportage. But worse than that, in B
“the project of creating a greater Europe, a project repeating pre-war fantasies of mysterious metaphysical C
that has already failed twice [and] is entering a new email
worlds possessing transcendent truth, all these novels D
phase, and the sphere of the Deutschmark – history display “a profound ideological inflexibility”. Sebald E
has a way of repeating itself – seems to extend almost says that the culture was still “in the midst of that peda- RSS
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precisely to the confines of the area occupied by the gogic province which, in the German tradition, extends
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Wehrmacht in the year 1941”. from Goethe … through Stefan George … and on to Facebook
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Stauffenberg and Himmler”.
He claims that the “psychic energy” of this project So of what, one wonders, does he approve? Well, I
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remains in the nation. If it is not brought into the open, he welcomes Hubert Fichte’s novel Detlev’s Imita- J
it will carry on into the future. And that is certainly tions, set in 1968, because it is “not too abstract in K
something to be regretted. character” and includes “concrete and documentary” L
This is not to say there was complete silence about investigations into the raid on Hamburg. Specifi- M
the air war. In the post-war years, fiction did try to cally, the novel has genuine medical reports by a N
approach what had happened. Sebald refers us to pathologist into the victims of the raids. They are O
three writers who wrote about the destruction and straightforward autopsies of mummified corpses. All P
were published. While he finds the novels superfi- fiction pales before such documents. The gruesome Q
cially admirable for at least broaching the subject, he facts make any imaginative effort seem evasive and R
is disturbed by their form and content. For example, pretentious. Stories become only a means of sustain-
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Hermann Kasack’s novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom ing value where there is only flesh and bone. As it is,
(The City Beyond The River) envelops the bombing T
only clinical objectivity has the words for the calam-
raids and death camps into part of one big expression- U
ity. Sebald, of course, doesn’t accept this. While he
ist allegory. Sebald’s literary analysis is objective but concedes that the reports were written in the interests V
his appalled disdain is also clear, particularly as, at the of science, he does say that, within the narrow fo- W
time of the novel’s publication, it was considered of cus of its specialist language, the report “opens up X
“epoch-making significance”. Sebald suspects it was a view into the abyss of a mind armed against all Y
judged so because it appealed to the pre-war obsession contingencies”. In the end, it is only another exam- Z

ple of avoidance masquerading as proximity. He sets his refusal of such supremacy. The word greatness is More A
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scientific analysis alongside the journalistic clichés changed if he is indeed great. B
and novelists’ fantasies. The pathologist’s rational- Sebald’s success, however, beyond such chatter, is in C
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ity clings to a tradition in order to pass through the finding a form appropriate that investigates his deepest D
catastrophe untouched. concerns in the most appropriate way. This is perhaps a E
In order to bring out how the catastrophe made its mark of greatness. RSS
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mark on his own work, Sebald quotes extensively
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from his own. But that was in the German edition. It 5. Facebook
It is curious then that not one of Sebald’s fictional works H
is excised from the English. This is a perverse deci-
sion. Sebald’s excuse is that the original subject of approaches the air war. Not one character is a survivor of I
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the lectures was poetics and it would inappropriate those events. As I noted, the fiction is generally miscon- J
to repeat them now that the subject is the air war. I strued as Holocaust Literature, perhaps gaining more K
don’t see why these lectures don’t count as poetics attention as a result. Austerlitz, for example, features L
still. Each of Sebald’s stories continues that sense of a visit to the remains of Theresienstadt concentration M
being kept from something, of the observer’s isola- camp in the Czech Republic. The tragedy is once again N
tion, which is precisely the relation to the air war. illuminated. This has a fine and necessary tradition. O
The reticence of the narratives is really a patience. Aharon Appelfeld – himself a survivor – approves of P
There is no aggressive push to imagine beyond what fictional representation of the Holocaust because “the Q
the narrator can see and what he hears at second- numbers and the facts were the murderers’ own well- R
hand. Words and pictures remain orientated toward. proven means. Man as a number is one of the horrors
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It continues in us too, his readers. Perhaps, though, of dehumanisation.”
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this isn’t enough. When we bandy around phrases One wonders what the response would have been
if a novel had focussed entirely on individual sur- U
like “literary greatness”, we contain past greatness,
everything we understand to be great: the expansive- vivors of Hamburg or Dresden? We might wonder V
ness of epic, the microcosm of theatre, the language- again because as Sebald’s book appeared in paper- W
making power of poetry, the encyclopaedia of back, so did Frederick Taylor’s study of the most X
narrative fiction. Sebald cannot be included here. At infamous raid: Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February. It Y
least, not on those terms. If Sebald is great, it is in has been received with acclaim in the British press. Z

In the Daily Telegraph, James Holland writes “with a form to orientate the reader toward, to look but not look More A
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this fine, highly readable and scholarly work, we can away at the same time. Where Sebald used a restrained B
finally view the terrible destruction of Dresden with style, Améry is more personal and polemical; he writes C
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renewed objectivity”, while David Cesarani in The with “an implacable resentment”. Sebald is impressed D
Independent, after highlighting Sebald’s implicit that his work manages to “dispense with any kind of E
comparison of the bombings to Nazi mass murder, literary stylisation which might encourage a sense of RSS
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calls Taylor’s an “authoritative and moving account” complicity between writer and his readers.” Cliché and
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that “provides a truer, more fitting memorial” to those ingratiation are not present. Sebald compares Améry to Facebook
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who died. Authority, objectivity and memorials is the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard who, as a
perhaps most welcome to those who were not on the teenager, witnessed the bombing of Salzburg and later I
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receiving end. But how would it appear fictionally? wrote with ferocious contempt for the institutionalised J
It wasn’t until 20 or more years after the war that Ger- forgetfulness in his country. K
many began to acknowledge the effect of its “psychic (NB: it is a shame Sebald’s essays on Bernhard are L
energy”. Certainly, one cannot claim that national aware- not already translated – an edition is required). M
ness of the Holocaust is repressed. Indeed it has become Such a comparison indicates that Sebald is not, as N
commonplace in our idea of modern Germany: think of The Complete Review accuse him, contemptuous of the O
Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, or Harry imagination; entirely the opposite. He is keen only to P
Enfield’s contrite yet overbearing comic stereotype find a form that conveys the process by which the im- Q
Jürgen the German, apologising for the war at every op- agination dispenses with contact with its environment, R
portunity. The latter is not a figure that would have been as in Kasack’s highly imaginative novel. The task is S
possible when Primo Levi or Jean Améry began writing. more complex than the crude opposition between im-
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Améry is the subject of one of three essay appended to agination and reality. Améry’s description of his shoul-
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the main lecture. He was a resistance fighter tortured ders being dislocated under torture is written without
by the Nazis. After the war, he concentrated on his paid ornament. He does not try to convey the pain with the V
work without attempting to write (for the same reason force of adjectives. Above all, his aim is to show that, W
as Semprun). It was only in the 1960s that he published as Sebald writes: “the practice of persecuting, torturing X
autobiographical essays reflecting on his terrible experi- and exterminating an arbitrarily chosen adversary [is] Y
ence. What interests Sebald particularly is that he found not as a lamentable but incidental feature of totalitarian Z

rule but, unreservedly, […] its essential expression.” attempt to bring this into public discourse. It reached a More A
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One cannot read Améry’s essays without confronting peak with the publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s B
the possibility of wider implication of the events of his Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, C
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life. They cannot be read for the find out what happened a book of several hundred pages describing the raids in D
only. In this way, autobiography becomes a means for relentless detail. It prompted an outpouring of blocked E
furthering life. memories across Germany, becoming part of a nation RSS
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For Sebald, Améry remains “the only one who debate about the subject. There was also a lot of anger,
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denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and so- resentment and claims that the raids were war crimes. Facebook
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cially deformed society, and the outrage of supposing Sebald received letters from a middle-class neo-Nazis
that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost proclaiming Germany as the self-defensive victim, not I
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undisturbed.” Indeed, he was so angry that he criticised the aggressor. Sebald is contemptuous. The process, he J
Primo Levi for being too forgiving. It is Sebald’s thesis accepts, has to confront such danger. In this way, the re- K
that the air war is as much part of that deformation as sponses to Sebald’s book become part of the literature. L
anything. It too has to be worked through: repression It is a terribly instructive coincidence that many re- M
is not a healthy option. Sebald’s fiction demonstrates viewers were writing in the lead-up to the invasion of N
the need for patience required for Germany’s “coming Iraq in March 2003. In the Boston Review, Susie Linfield O
to terms” with the Nazi era; how it had to empathise tells of demonstrators equating the bombing of Dresden P
with the victims of its crimes from a distance. The same with the forthcoming Shock & Awe campaign on Bagh- Q
can be said for victims of the air war. Imagination is dad. “I can think of few worse analogies” she writes. R
required rather than objectivity. “The propagators of such analogies would say they S
are using historic knowledge to heighten moral aware-
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6. ness and thus prevent the commission of present and
After delivering the lectures Sebald and receiving press U
future horrors. But I fear that the opposite is true: The
attention, he received many letters from distressed reliance on historic analogies is an evasion of the par- V
Germans, children at the time of the raids, whose trau- ticular, indeed novel, political complexities that face us W
matic memories have had no place to go. One can only now, complexities that have emerged since (but are not X
imagine the scale of the trauma. However, seven years solely the result of) September 11th. Like photographs Y
on from the lectures, there has been a more sustained of starving children or grieving mothers or blasted Z

buildings, such analogies create instant, Pavlovian capable of repeating the mistakes of the past”, and he More A
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moral equivalencies. They shut down critical thought explicitly means the opposition to the invasion. B
and ultimately, therefore, stifle moral acuity.” Christopher Hitchens also uses his review to sup- C
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This is certainly true. It is why Sebald’s complained port the invasion. He is suspicious of the language D
about the clichés of the accounts of the raids. They used by those recovering the air war, such as Sebald’s E
were a careless means of expression and abuse history. “weak qualifier” in the reference to the German RSS
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However, Linfield doesn’t offer an alternative, except population’s “vague feelings of shared guilt” about
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by telling us to use “critical thought” and “moral acu- the Holocaust. “Vague?” he says “Remember what Facebook
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ity”. Maybe these elegant phrases tell us more than the we are talking about”. Indeed. But perhaps “vague”
protestors’ banners, though I’m not sure what. They means unspoken and unformed – which is certainly I
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too seem like gestures to banish unpleasant thoughts. plausible. In conclusion, Hitchens himself refers to J
With what Susie Linfield would compare the imminent Iraqi exiles’ “infinite pain” in supporting the inva- K
bombing, I wonder? How would she demonstrate her sion when it is obvious they would not be running L
feelings about it? the gauntlet of US cluster bombs, or their children to M
Meanwhile, Daniel Johnson, reviewing Friedrich’s endure the legacy of depleted uranium. So much for N
Der Brand alongside Sebald, expresses his opinions remembering what is being talked about. O
about the demonstrators’ comparisons more forcefully. While the majority of the reviewers referred to P
He calls it “moral cowardice” and blames Friedrich for here use the air war to support or to excuse the Shock Q
aiming “his bombshell of a book at the ageing edifice of & Awe blitzkrieg, and all remain suspicious of Se- R
the Atlantic Alliance”. He says the book it enabled the bald’s project of imaginative empathy, they have S
German government to exploit “anti-Americanism”. nothing but admiration for his fiction. Hitchens says
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While he accepts that the comparison of the Nazi Holo- Sebald’s early death is “mourned by all who love
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caust to the air war is “never spelt out” by Friedrich and writing for its own sake” (whatever that means) and
Sebald – he does say that the “impassive accumulation Daniel Johnson says that had Sebald lived, he would V
of gruesome detail serves a rhetorical purpose: to dem- “hardly have been able to avoid the attentions of the W
onstrate the utter inhumanity of the air war.” (If there Swedish academicians”, though exactly why isn’t X
was a humanity in the air war, Johnson doesn’t spell explained. In fact, they write next to nothing about Y
it out.) It all means that the Germans “might still be the fiction. It’s as if they do not know what it is so Z

prefer to keep it in the safe enclave of entertainment to have made clear here, On The Natural History More A
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or salutary token of “some great woe that nothing Of Destruction is a coda to Sebald’s extraordinary B
in the world will ever put right” (so long as it’s the fiction, and for such prominent and serious critics C
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right kind of wrong). Remember it is Johnson who to overlook this is curious indeed. But I would go D
used the convenient half-truth of describing Sebald’s further. These reviewers, mere literary critics, have E
work as “a highly literary form of antiquarianism”. used book reviews to become accessories to the RSS
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Perhaps it is fairly explained by the fact that they crime of killing innocent people, and their fingers
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are reviewing a work of non-fiction. But, as I hope are stained not black, but red.  Facebook
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W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz email

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Stephen Mitchelmore
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(Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of The latter’s champions will insist that Naipaul’s Nobel
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weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car elevation signals that we have passed the literary, if not Facebook
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crash on 14th December, 2001). the political, affects of suppression. The only reason to
In its official press release, the committee for the use the inert language of the past is to resist change. I
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Nobel Prize for Literature praised V.S. Naipaul, the Literature is now a pluralism, open to anyone to flood J
2001 recipient, for “works that compel us to see the the dark corners of experience with the bright lights of K
presence of suppressed histories”. Presumably this is an unfettered imagination. Today, the task of the writer L
the committee’s mitigation of Naipaul’s notoriously is to keep the shining the lights. Martin Amis calls it M
incorrect opinions. Whatever, the statement is curi- “the war against cliché”. N
ously ambiguous. On the one hand, it could mean – On first impression, W.G. Sebald would seem to be O
and probably does mean in this case – the particular very much inside Naipaul’s encampment. In one long P
stories of Indian and African characters previously sentence on page four of his new novel Austerlitz, the Q
ignored in mainstream literature. But it could also narrator tries to “conjure up” an image but something R
mean exactly as it says: “the presence of suppressed else “springs to mind”. Hardly the language of the
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histories”. Not the histories themselves, only their avant-garde. And like Naipaul’s recent novels, there
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remnant haunting the language of the victorious. is a tendency toward autobiography and essay, as if
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Suppression is part of the history, and Naipaul’s resisting the possibilities of the poetic imagination.
restrained prose – more English than the English – is On page 18, the history of fortress-building around V
paradoxically appropriate: ghosts haunt aged struc- 17th-century Antwerp is summarised: the place- W
tures. The conservative literary establishment admire names, the design theorists, the theories themselves X
the style out of nostalgia, while younger writers like and the futility of the enterprise. We even get a plan Y
Salman Rushdie reject it out of concern for the future. of one of the flower-like buildings. No matter how Z

large the fortifications became, we’re told, they drew refugee during the Second World War. His parents More A
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attention to their weakest point and so invited attack. sent him to Britain as the Nazis closed in on Prague. B
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As the story continues through ever new digressions, living in a vicarage as Dafydd Elias. It wasn’t until D
the weakest point is always its own purpose. Aren’t his school days, just before he took some exams, that E
we missing something? we ask. he was told his real name and origin. Although the RSS
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No reader of the book can be unaware that the narra- narrator is also an exile, he seems to need Austerlitz
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tor of Austerlitz has a similar background to the author to act as a conduit for his own search, like a novel- Facebook
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himself. Indeed, in Sebald’s three previous novels, the ist would use a character. Most of the words in the
narrator is much the same sensitive yet dour person. novel are Austerlitz’s, with the narrator adding the I
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Sebald is a 57-year-old Bavarian long established as occasional “said Austerlitz” to remind us. For the rest J
a professor of German literature in East Anglia, and of the novel, Austerlitz tells his story, which means K
the unnamed narrator is an academic who travels the story of his search for the story of his life: “I have L
throughout Europe on research. He admits there are never known who I really was” he says. M
other reasons for his travelling but, he says, they are He tells the narrator that it wasn’t until he had met N
“never entirely clear” to him. On a visit to Antwerp, he him that he was able to approach his past. Before then, O
visits one of the forts used by the Nazis as a detention he says, “an agency greater than or superior to my own P
centre for Resistance fighters during the occupation. capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs op- Q
As he walks slowly down its sinister tunnels, he recalls erations somewhere in my brain, had always preserved R
tortures described by two actual writers, Jean Améry me from my own secret”. With the narrator there to S
and Claude Simon, the former having been tortured listen, the brain’s mechanism is disabled and Austerlitz
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in the very same fort, the latter having written about a is finally able to confront the fate of his parents. Mutual
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fictional character who suffered like Améry. Again one need arises out of shared interests. And as a result, there
is tempted to understand this as an indirect reference seems to be little difference between Austerlitz and the V
to what is going on, particularly once the eponymous narrator. In recalling the novel, it is easy to conflate the W
character of Austerlitz appears. two. Although this is a common enough thing in read- X
Jacques Austerlitz is a fellow academic met on ing novels, here the suspension of disbelief is slackened Y
one of the narrator’s travels. He was a five-year-old because one is not convinced of the distinction. Z

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ing events in their lives in which, with curious regular- ference. The same goes for the character of Austerlitz B
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nauseous confusion. Indeed, it happens in all Sebald’s is similarly opaque despite speaking for the most of the D
novels; the first is even titled after such an episode: 418 unparagraphed pages. E
Vertigo. It’s as if these moments stand in place of the Yes, you read correctly. There are 418 pages without RSS
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revelations the characters are seeking. For example, a paragraph break. This a famous aspect of the work of
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Austerlitz loses himself in the small print of works he the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, for whom Facebook
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is reading in a Paris library as he seeks references to Sebald has professed great admiration. Bernhard,
his father. He doesn’t find any details but discovers, however, created unforgettable characters even if I
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instead, “the most varied and impenetrable of ramifica- they seem indistinguishable from the morose author. J
tions” as he calls it. Rather than finding conclusions, Perhaps it is significant that not one of Bernhard’s nov- K
the possibilities become almost infinite. He is released, els are named after the main character (that is, if one L
albeit briefly, from his obscure torment. Perhaps this understands Wittgenstein’s Nephew as autobiography). M
is why the narrator and his friend are so similar: they It suggests that Sebald’s concern in Austerlitz is for the N
need just a glimmer of otherness to illuminate their mystery of suppressed histories, not for attacking the O
individual darknesses. suppression with vituperative glee, like Bernhard. In P
We too experience this in the otherwise inexplicable both uses of unrelenting monologue, the question of Q
use of photographs and drawings throughout Sebald’s what’s being left out is begged. In Bernhard this has R
novels. In the many reviews of the novel, very little a painfully comic affect, while here it is more tragic. S
has been made of them, perhaps it is assumed they Sebald’s empathy is thwarted as a result because, like
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are merely illustrative. Yet as they are uncaptioned, Austerlitz’s own attempt to get closer to what remains
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the reader instinctively wonders what the connection unclear to him, it always produces “varied and impen-
is between them and the words. It creates one’s own etrable ramifications”. That Austerlitz is an imagined V
moment of vertigo. This had a tremendous effect in The character reasserts the fact, and indicates that the novel W
Emigrants, Sebald’s second novel (though the first to as an art form suppresses as much as it illuminates, no X
be published). For those new to his work, it will prob- matter how much light is beamed into the darkness. Y
ably have the same affect. However, by this, the fourth The “war against cliché” like the other war it alludes Z

to, is a fighting on the wrong front. Austerlitz’s opacity, mesmerising, novels in almost as many years. They More A
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then, is perhaps artistically necessary. If this is the case, are all far more interesting than those on this year’s B
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Will Self is one of those writers who seemed on the Biting The Hand That Feeds E
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Interview by Chris Mitchell 460
incident). Having cleaned up and become a father I
twice over since then, Self has achieved a remark- Dead Man Talking Twitter
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able body of work both in his novels and journalism, A conversation with Chris Hall 464 K
and his output remains both prolific and undiluted. Pre-Millennium Tension L
Chris Hall and Robert Clarke’s subsequent interviews Interview by Robert Clarke 467 M
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and trying to create something different from it. O
I set up a separate Will Self site as a link directory to
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Self related stuff on the web – this has subsequently
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Chris Hall serves up a slice of Will Self with the publication of his second
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collection of journalism, Feeding Frenzy RSS
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Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of this floating series of interviews with women that I was
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your new son, Luther. doing for the Sindie [Independent on Sunday], none of Facebook
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Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on which are in Feeding Frenzy but which will get a book
August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now. of their own. I must of done 20 to 25 women over the I
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CH: So I suppose you’ve had people pointing out the last two to three years but I wanna do about another ten J
Superman connection with your other son Alexis (i.e. before I pick my best women to put in the book. But, I K
Lex Luther)? haven’t found a home for my women yet. I mean, The L
WS: Yes … It just arose. In my experience with names, Independent were happy for me to do them freelance M
they just arise. I was always quite keen on Dmitri be- but to be frank I just wasn’t interested. N
cause Alexis and Ivan so with the third one you could CH: Why did you only interview women? O
have the Brothers Karamazov. But Deborah didn’t WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women! P
think that was funny. CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment, Q
CH: So how do you find the time for all this writing? didn’t you? R
WS: Well, I have cycled back quite a lot this year in WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always
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that I resigned from The Independent before Luther regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real
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was born, so it’s the first time in more or less 10 years sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that
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when I haven’t had an ongoing newspaper contract. So, morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in
I took fairly extensive paternity leave. But, you know to interview someone and you’re constipated and you V
now it’s building back up again. think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go W
CH: No plans for a regular column again? in to see them another day when your stomach is full of X
WS: I don’t think I’m going to take another weekly gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best Y
contract of any kind in the foreseeable future. I’ve got thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an Z

interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same such a devastating piece because I just transcribed an- More A
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time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive swers to questions. Because she talked such complete B
in the other person you just let rip. The problem with bollocks. You know, why bother? C
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interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that CH: Is one of the attractions to journalism the lack of D
there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless. needing to suspend your disbelief so much? E
It’s almost incumbent upon an interviewer to allow WS: I think it’s an opportunity to get you out and RSS
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themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle. about. It gets you interacting with the world in all sorts
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CH: And Tracey Emin, who you said was a termagant? of different ways. It also gives you the opportunity, fun- Facebook
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WS: Yeah … you know I kind of resent it when people nily enough, to suspend disbelief more readily because
interview me and assume that, because I’ve been well- you’re presented with an area of fact that you can then I
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known for a fair amount of time, that it’s kind of open instantly turn into an area of fiction or at any rate em- J
season, but the truth of the matter is that Tracey really bellish in some way. I’m not making great claims for K
liked that piece. You have to ask yourself why is that my journalism but I think that what I do that gives me L
and quite frankly when it comes to Tracey, although cachet and makes editors want to employ me is really M
one or two of her pieces have a certain odd, jejune qual- colour writing, it’s really lifting what otherwise might N
ity, her art work is essentially a peg on which she hangs be fairly dry into something that is quite outlandish O
her media persona which is her main work. sometimes. I suppose I am in some ways a practitioner P
So she didn’t mind that piece and I think that that’s of gonzo/new journalism in that I am prepared to inject Q
what you’re up against with a certain kind of interview my own warped sensibilities into a piece. R
subject. Now with Beckett I’m perfectly confident CH: You say that you read very little fiction now, a S
that she really hated and was upset by that piece and I problem with suspension of disbelief, but do you just
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noticed that after it she started to make some very sour mean new fiction or do you not read the classics?
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comments on the media publicly for quite a while. But WS: No, I don’t read classic fiction either.
you know, she’s a politician, you have to reckon that CH: I was thinking of the Amis line about disparaging V
someone’s going to take down verbatim what you’re your youngers but exalting your elders… W
saying. Why wouldn’t they? WS: What you mean so you don’t see us nipping at X
CH: Do you normally use a tape machine? your heels? No, I don’t think that’s the way I think Y
WS: Well, I think that’s why the Beckett interview was about it, but unlike Martin, I’ve never been a sort Z

of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for More A
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competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely 35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become B
convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t probably the greatest confessional novel about C
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think that literary art is a competition of any sort. heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I D
CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other think undoubtedly so. E
day then? CH: That must have something to do with his subse- RSS
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WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart quent notoriety though.
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from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephem- WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing Facebook
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eral applause of certain kinds? else it would still stand.
CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to CH: Junky’s very hard-boiled isn’t it? I
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a wider audience… WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it. J
WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giv- CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he? K
ing and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based estab- WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts L
lishment represents a kind of infotainment service towards later theories and fictional methods that he then M
for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but N
it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in O
really change someone’s life or supply that missing my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels, P
X factor that makes them exponentially increase that it’s on a par with Nausea or The Fall. Q
their involvement with the world or with literature. R
Those things are not what make a work last. The War and pacifism
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only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay
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that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They
wanted to know why this position is marginalised by U
examples of that, of books that have lasted that you
wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting. the media? V
I’ve just finished writing a long introductory WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of W
essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky. armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion X
I mean who would have thought that Junky, pub- at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t Y
lished back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think Z

the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big More A
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kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to B
paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them C
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us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me D
be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in E
even be conscious, there will be people who simply society where you decide that violence is not the solu- RSS
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cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical tion to car incidents so there can be the same kind of
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to their idea of state authority. decision at a macro level. Facebook
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I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not
think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve claiming to not have those thoughts? I
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got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even J
what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I K
to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live that L
you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and M
as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist N
difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the O
makes it so wrong in so many different ways is that it impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is P
exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious a dangerous thing. Q
argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption CH: What would you do with the World Trade R
i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered Centre site? S
with a similar kind of conditional question: “But hang WS: Mmm … I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on
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on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914 that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of
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then the Nazis would never have come to power”. Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the
So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be snuffing out of that many lives in one place … it also V
pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivo- W
to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get cation between civic pride and something to do with X
really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken the symbolism of what has occurred. Y
to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shoot- Z

ing Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer? always think that because it’s such a conspicuous piece More A
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WS: Yes, that is true. I’ve replaced Mark Lamarr. of physical geography going right through the heart of B
CH: Given that Lamarr became the greasy 50s throw- something that is oppressively human in that way that C
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back, what have they got in store for you? it annuls or at any rate vitiates the oppressive sense of D
WS: I can assure people that that has not been my fate. human geography and provides you with a sense of E
In fact, au contraire, I have become a sinister kind of topography really, because you know you’re next to RSS
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John Dee-type figure who controls Vic’s mind by use a river, you know you’re in a river valley, you know
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of instantiated eye beams which fiddle with his mind. you’re on a planet that has natural features whereas if Facebook
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CH: This just developed organically? you’re just in the middle of Acton then it’s rather dif-
WS: Yes, it developed organically over the show that ficult to hang on to… I
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Vic, Jim Moir, became convinced that I was control- CH: You’ve got it in for Acton haven’t you? J
ling his mind. I think I’ve claimed the upper hand there WS: I’m thinking of moving to Acton actually. That’s K
actually… It was a fun show to do not least because why it comes to mind. I concede that the river may L
it’s pretty good not to take yourself too seriously, and have been why I chose to live in Vauxhall. In fact, I M
to get paid well for not taking yourself too seriously is was looking at renting as an office, a very unusual N
a real bonus. I’m not sure how good I’m going to be house-boaty thing that’s down by Cringle Dock waste O
on it because it’s not quite my humour, it’s not verbally disposal station in the lea of Battersea Power Station, P
based, it’s very visual humour – they are rubber-legged which is this weird thing on two great pontoons built Q
funny men. I hope it works for their sake, after all it’s by a load of Finnish architectural students. But I just R
not my main gig but it is theirs. wouldn’t spend enough time on it to make it practical, S
but the idea of writing on top of a body of water was
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Water, water everywhere enormously appealing.
CH: You’ve written of the benefits to the imagination U
of living near a large body of water. Could this be why Schzoid sensitivity V
you live so close to the Thames, albeit unconsciously? CH: On the South Bank Show a few years back you W
WS: Mmm, I think with the Thames … Mmm, yeah I said that a psychologist had put “schizoid personal- X
suppose that it does help. I hadn’t really considered that ity” on your case notes. Now, this might sound like a Y
aspect of it: it is tidal, it does move. With the Thames I conceit from your own fiction, but I got the impression Z

that you might have interpreted this as meaning that In fact, I counter-attacked. I rolled with the punch in More A
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you were schizophrenic, but diagnostically it means a the initial aftermath. Doing Have I Got News For You B
personality disorder characterised by “extreme shyness was quite frankly a calculated thing to defuse criticism. C
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and oversensitivity to others”. I think that there’s a certain level at which English or D
WS: I did know that, but the same diagnosis had bor- British society operates as a kind of particularly beastly E
derline personality written down as well which would lower sixth form common room. If I’d gone to ground RSS
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be another form of that. But, increasingly I’ve come to at that point I think I would have been in trouble. And
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view addiction itself as a mimetic illness in that way – it it did serve to defuse interest in it. Facebook
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mimics other psychopathologies. People who essential- The other thing is cleaning up from drugs. It made me
ly have addictive personalities are diagnosed as manic less interesting to people in that kind of prurient way. I
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depressive or schizophrenic or certainly depressive. And there’s always that level in the media and society J
What they really are is addicts. The addiction decides, as a whole just as the papers are full of stories about K
if you think of it as an autonomous thing, to pretends illicit drugs and strange sexual practices so that was L
to be another pathology because the addict finds it the basic voyeuristic level of interest in me as someone M
bizarrely more comfortable to think of themselves as who got completely fucked up on drugs and booze. N
schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever, rather And if you’re not doing that anymore then you’re not O
than confront the fact that they are an addict which of vulnerable in that way. P
course means that they’re going to have to stop doing CH: Have you read your brother Jonathan’s book, Self Q
what they want to do above all. Abuse, which is partly about growing up in what he R
CH: So are you shy and sensitive? sees as a dysfunctional family. Can you comment? S
WS: I think I am still quite shy. A lot of the extroversion WS: Well, I can’t. I have read it, but I made a pact
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or flamboyance is always a compensation. It’s better to with myself not to comment on it publicly because
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tough it out rather than sit there cowering. I just don’t do that stuff. What I can say in answer
CH: Did you retreat from the limelight after being to the question is that there are a lot of factual inac- V
found snorting heroin aboard John Major’s plane dur- curacies in it. W
ing the 1997 election? CH: The introduction to Feeding Frenzy refers to a X
WS: No, not at all. Two things happened on that front. cabal of restaurateurs who wanted shot of you say- Y
One was that I didn’t go to ground which was useful. ing you’d tried to buy drugs off the doorman of his Z

restaurant… on the restaurant you’re completely dissing the food and More A
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WS: That was before [the Major incident] of course. the whole culture that they represent in which it’s really B
That was actually a malevolent restaurateur rather than important to drizzle olive oil in a particular way. You’re C
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the tabloids themselves. He was someone who didn’t saying that “Hang on, this isn’t important”. Not only is D
like the reviews I’d been giving his restaurants. it not important it’s a kind of grotesque moral singular- E
CH: So there genuinely was this plan to get rid of you? ity: You’re sitting around thinking about adding huge RSS
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WS: Oh yeah, that’s true. amounts of monetary value to ingredients that would
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CH: A cabal? barely keep a starving Somalian alive for a day. If you Facebook
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WS: Yeah, as far as I know is true as well. That’s not start criticising the food you start to take it on its own
just rhetorical rubbish. terms. You can’t allow it that much credence. You’ve I
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CH: That’s a bit weird isn’t it? suspended disbelief in what’s being done. Whereas my J
WS: No, it’s not weird. I mean I don’t think it was approach was to say ‘I just don’t buy any of this shit’ K
said with any great seriousness. What I think is, you you know. L
know what these guys are like, they all sit around get- M
ting drunk and think “Wouldn’t it be great if we could Novel uses N
bump off Will Self?” I don’t think they were serious CH: I liked the long ‘travel’ piece you wrote in Aus- O
but it does show you the level of naffness and the tralia. You’re very much a spiritual person aren’t you? P
extent to which criticism can bite. I remember Debo- WS: Yes, when I went to see the whirling dervishes. Q
rah pointed out when I said “I don’t know why these Yes, I think so. Middle-age tends to afflict us in this R
fucking celebrity egg flippers get so upset about these way doesn’t it? And I think that cleaning up from drugs
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reviews, you know they go on parcelling up three bits necessarily entails a revaluation of the spiritual facet of
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of radicchio for £45, why are they bothered?” and she yourself. In order to shut off an entirely self-destructive
way of life you have to look for a positive direction. U
said “Well, some of them really do regard what they
do as an art form”. But I think for people viewing my fictional work it’s V
CH: You often just criticised the interior design of the always been there. I think that, this is a broad brush, W
restaurant rather than the food… but people tend to mistake me for a nihilist but I’m not X
WS: Well, these guys, and I do know some of them, really like this at all. Y
aren’t stupid, what they realise is that by concentrating CH: Ballard gets misunderstood in that way too. Z

WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to incredibly powerful cultural idea. More A
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in that respect. I think people who do understand, really Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to B
understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t time, so the text itself has been impervious to time be- C
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understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am cause in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you D
more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able E
writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment. to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold RSS
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CH: What about the other novel you were writing on the probable shape of a kind of aggressively ‘out’ gay
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‘land use’? culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fasci- Facebook
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WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth. nating about Dorian and the way in which gay culture
No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a in the late 20th century has become a synecdoche of the I
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rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a J
revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today. K
engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going CH: So it’s nearing completion? L
to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writ- WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some M
ing for about three years back into a novel. time next year, but when I really get my teeth into N
So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde, something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It O
which is something I would have never done off my just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich P
own back, but having been commissioned to write a Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into Q
screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that prose and I’ve got a book hopefully. R
it will never get made, I wanted to make something out CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers S
of the material I already had. regarding adaptations of your stories?
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I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And
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and 90s, into the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic and Bull, which he wanted to push commercially, but after
I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth, V
an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go W
fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already X
that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has Y
this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an also been optioned for film twice by the producer Chris- Z

tine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry) but nothing has come of there isn’t usually enough road, but by starting in Caith- More A
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it, despite my seeing one excellent screenplay written by ness, on the north coast of Scotland, and having scenes B
a guy called Nix (I kid you not). Otherwise, not a single the entire way to London, I think this story avoids the C
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one of the other narratives has been optioned. usual pitfalls. I’ve even gone so far as to rough out a D
CH: Would you be amenable to films made of your scene plan for it, but because of all the problems men- E
work, or do think it might be disastrous? tioned above, I’ve never gone any further. I also think RSS
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WS: I think for a writer it’s an almost always an artistic ‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’ together with
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lose-lose scenario. Either you take the money and ab- its sequel ‘The Nonce Prize’ would make a good movie. Facebook
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rogate all responsibility for the finished article (which As for the novels, well, Cock would be good (no sight of
then, in all likelihood, ill serves the original), or else the genitals – just reaction shots); and Great Apes, I feel, I
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you take less money and become creatively involved (if could be made quite easily and effectively, by simply J
they’ll have you), in which case, in all probability, your having humans play chimpanzees, without any makeup, K
participation will be vitiated to the point where it makes just half-naked, copulating freely, grooming etc … And L
no difference anyway. I know several of my peers who with subtitles (they would sign as in the book). M
have spent years working on film adaptations of their CH: Any filmmakers you’d trust with your work? N
work, only for them either to come out badly, or else WS: Completely trust? Well, Cronenberg for Cock, O
not come out at all. Martin Amis has it about right when Gilliam for My Idea Of Fun or How The Dead Live. P
he says: “Don’t believe they’ve made a movie of your CH: And finally, what question would you ask yourself? Q
book until you rent the video.” In part, I feel obscurely WS: Erm, I think the question I ask myself most is, and R
satisfied that there have been no film adaptations. To this comes up particularly in relation to this anti-war S
my mind it proves that I’m doing something which can stuff which is the first public political thing that I’ve put
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only be done in the form of prose fiction. Mind you, the my head above the parapet for kind of ever. So I’d be
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bank manager might well have a different take on this. inclined to ask myself: do you really believe that your
CH: Which stories would you be interested in seeing work as a writer represents a significant or a meaning- V
adapted? ful contribution to political and social debate or do you W
WS: I’ve always felt that ‘Tough Tough Toys For Tough think there’s something more you should be doing? So X
Tough Boys’ (the story) would make a great British road that’s the kind of question I tend to ask myself most. Y
movie. The problem with road movies in Britain is that Fin  Z

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Will Self: Self Destruction email

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Chris Mitchell finds out why Will Self doesn’t give a monkeys
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Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning shame is not something Self either desired or required.
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to the phrase ‘mile high club’. Unless you were in a While it may lend an extra edge to the publication of his Facebook
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apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general new novel Great Apes, there’s no room for accusations
election (or living in another country), you can’t have of the election jet episode being a calculated publicity I
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failed to have seen Self’s face plastered over the front stunt; with two children to support and a third on the J
page of every newspaper thanks to the fact that he way, chucking away a £40,000 a year job in the hope of K
snorted heroin on John Major’s election jet. Self was a few more book sales is not an option. However much L
promptly sacked from his position at The Observer, the press want Self to be the new King Of Gonzo, he’s M
was refused to be allowed anywhere near Tony Blair not accepting the coke-encrusted crown. Self took the N
and became the subject of frothing tabloid editorials for heroin because he needed it, like a diabetic needs in- O
days afterwards.. sulin. It was for medicinal rather than media purposes. P
This episode ties in neatly with Self’s already well- Talking on the eve of the general election which saw Q
honed media persona – a former heroin addict, enfant a Labour landslide, Self confesses to being “pretty de- R
terrible of the London literary scene, the English suc- pressed about losing my job – I have a very strong work
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cessor to American Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thomp- ethic and journalism gives me a hit of being a working
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son, as well as being an acclaimed novelist obsessed Joe. It’s a good way for me to feel ordinary – you get up
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with sexual perversity, gratuitous violence and lashings and engage with the world, you work with people. Un-
of Class A drugs, author of such works as My Idea Of fortunately, I’ve had that rather taken out of my hands,” V
Fun and The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis. It’s easy to see he says, referring obliquely to recent events. “There is W
why Self got the coverage he did: his CV is copy which a temptation after something like this to say ‘Well, fuck X
virtually writes itself. you, you fuckers’ and to keep churning it out.” Y
However, being catapulted from cult fame to tabloid Self’s need to remain a working journalist stems Z

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completely self-constructed world. “It doesn’t mat- and the Chain of Being,” he explains. “Swift was the first D
ter how committed you are to your fictional work, it of a long line of satirists in the 18th century to have ape E
really does do strange things to your head if you’re fantasies and construct ape worlds; there’s a Dutch ver- RSS
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just concentrating on fiction,” Self maintains. “Ulti- sion of it, a German version – it became a very enduring
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mately it makes people very arrogant even if they are theme. So I’m not so much writing in the tradition of Facebook
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successful at it because it’s so divorced from the real Swift as standing this long tradition of ape fantasies on
world. It fills your head in that way – you’re sitting its head.” I
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there thinking ‘How do I resolve a plot problem and Self’s self-awareness of his own intellectual history J
thematically embrace all of western culture’, and and the writers to who have shaped his own work K
someone else is talking about how they couldn’t get has been intensified by his dual role as both novelist L
the widget off the production line that morning. You and journalist, putting him in the strange position of M
can’t link those two worlds.” regularly coming face to face with his own literary N
It’s Self’s acute connection to reality that allows him heroes. But he’s ambivalent about the value of such O
to parody it so mercilessly in his writing. Great Apes encounters: “Without being blasé it’s not something P
functions on the premise that its protagonist Simon that appeals to me particularly. I went to interview Q
Dykes awakes one morning to find the world has ir- Ballard for a 1,000 word piece for the Standard and R
retrievably changed; everyone, from his girlfriend to wound up talking to him for 4 hours. I really admire S
his psychiatrist, has transmogrified into a chimpanzee. his work and had the fantastic, incredible bonus of
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Unsurprisingly, Dykes goes humanshit (groan) and Self finding out that he really liked my work too. But that
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follows through the ramifications of his story with mas- was that. I don’t think we felt the need to meet each
terful chimpunity (groan again). Self squarely classifies other ever again for the rest of our lives, although Bal- V
himself as a satirist, feeding off the tradition of Jonathan lard said, ‘If people like you had been around in the W
Swift – who he considers “the satirist’s Shakespeare” – 60s, I would have got out more, but now it’s too late!’ X
and the Enlightenment’s fascination with the arrival of which I thought was sweet. Y
the first chimpanzees in Europe in 1699. “There’s not a lot of point in chasing these person- Z

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about them is their work – in your teens, when you really Self is now encountering, there is something to the B
are taken by books. Milan Kundera says books are like idea that Amis has mapped out some of the territory C
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love affairs and you’ve only got space for about eight that Self is now exploring. D
major love affairs in your life. I think you’re not likely “I was thinking about Martin last night,” admits E
to be disappointed when you meet your heroes but, by Self, “about the way that our careers run quite parallel RSS
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the same token, it’s unlikely to be a great experience.” in some ways. Money was published in 1984, when
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Even so, Self concedes that his being commissioned Martin was the same age that I am now, maybe a bit Facebook
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to interview Hunter S. Thompson would probably younger – and that was his breakthrough novel in a
produce interesting results, and there is still a glimmer way. He’s always seemed to me to be a writer who’s I
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of excitement to his voice when he mentions that he much more interested in writing than I am. Although J
might be visiting Burroughs later in the year, having my actual prose is heavily larded with intertextual K
finally received a personal invitation to the author’s references, I’m somebody who writes without being L
home in Lawrence, Kansas. “I’m going to try and go concerned with the internal mechanics of writing per se M
over in August, if he’s still alive. I was quite upset when – I want to write about philosophy or anthropology or N
Ginsberg died. I don’t want to be disrespectful of the animals, I’m more interested in aiming out and I guess O
dead – mind you, Allen probably thinks he’s still alive that’s reflected in my journalism. P
– but I was never a great fan of his poetry. But the Beat “Martin on the other hand is a bit more weighty Q
movement are who I grew up reading about, reading and serious and academic than I would wish to be or R
about their lives quite intensively. So it was quite weird could ever be. As regards mixing the mandarin and the S
hearing he’d died.” demotic, I think there is a similarity between our work,
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One writer with whom Self does regularly associate but I think Martin has a slightly embattled view of the
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is Martin Amis, possibly England’s most celebrated Great Unwashed which I don’t really tend to have. I
living novelist. Self’s attempt at an interview with don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here but they’re a V
Amis (reproduced in Junk Mail) turned into something scary presence in Martin’s books and I don’t feel they W
nearer to an open discussion of each other’s work as are in mine.” X
writers both documenting the state of England at the So does Self feel like he’s a particularly English Y
close of the century. With Amis having already passed writer? “I feel more like a English novelist than I did a Z

few years ago.” he states. “Because I’m half American, of voice becomes distinctly ominous: “There are no More A
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when I started publishing I felt more on the cusp, an words to describe my contempt for Tony Blair and what B
internationalist. I write with a lot of specific cultural he represents,” he blasts. “Obviously, my personal tra- C
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references. Politically and culturally I regard myself as vails have made things a lot, lot worse, but even before D
European, but Europe is influenced by America. I align all of this shit started happening, I was incandescent E
myself with the utopian socialist libertarian tradition of with anger about what was happening in the election. RSS
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English thought. I am fiercely anti-establishment…” I’ve even been considering voting Tory – that’s how
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Self pauses and then wryly adds, “as you no doubt mad I am, just so when things start fucking up in a year Facebook
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know. I regard myself as culturally English but politi- or two I can turn to people when they’re drunk and
cally completely disaffected.” say, “Yes, I voted Conservative” and watch their faces I
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It’s this disaffection that leads Self to wield satire as a crumple up.” Self pauses and then grins. “There are a J
scalpel against contemporary politics, just as Swift did. lot of good parties on in town and I think I might just K
Asked what’ll he’ll be doing on election night, his tone go out and get rat-arsed.”  L
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Will Self: Dead Man Talking email

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Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self
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Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and derives some of its structure from The Tibetan Book
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he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction” Of The Dead. Of course, Self has used that particular Facebook
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ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his book in his fiction before: ‘The North London Book
prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will be- Of The Dead’ from The Quantity Theory Of Insanity I
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come flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his new and a chapter in My Idea Of Fun. But whereas ‘The J
novel How The Dead Live is divided up into sections North London Book Of The Dead’ was about the fail- K
of ‘Dying’, ‘Dead’ and ‘Deader’, Self has if anything ure of a young man to come to terms with the death L
attacked the page with even more vigour and purpose of his mother, How The Dead Live is very much an M
than before. objective description of what happens to someone in N
So it’s rather reassuring to see Self looking very the after-death plane. That someone is Lily Bloom O
healthy, tanned as he is from a holiday in the Canar- (an evocative name, encoding notions of life and P
ies, reassuring also that the Coke he orders comes death), a 65-year-old American anti-semitic Jewish Q
in a glass with ice. We meet at the Groucho Club in wiseacre who at the beginning of the novel lies dy- R
Soho, London, one of Self’s former haunts but which ing of cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in London.
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he says he hardly ever visits anymore. Outside he It is a Self-like irony that it’s a stiff who provides
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crouches down to chain his 22cc Go-Ped Bigfoot – him with one of his most fully realised characters,
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a small motorised scooter – and strides into the bar especially given that he has been dismissive of the
wearing a black leather jacket, crisp white shirt and a very notion of character in the past. V
pair of well-worn brown Chelsea boots to go with his Self wanted to call the book Deader, but his French W
new cropped haircut. translator persuaded him not to, and instead suggested X
How The Dead Live is a mordant and disturbing the eventual title, which is also the title of a French Y
allegory of life after death and death in life, which film from 1999. When Self was sitting in his study Z

one afternoon mulling this all over, the title of a Derek ist.” So why the obsession with The Tibetan Book Of More A
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Raymond book (aka thriller writer Robin Cook) swam The Dead? “I’ve had this preoccupation with it from B
out at him, and then, he says, he really did have some when we were sitting around rolling joints on it in the C
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agonising over it. “How The Dead Live isn’t perfect for late 70s, and it’s perennial in my work. The point is D
the book,” he admits, and says that initially he wrote that when you push materialism as far as it can go E
an exculpatory forward explaining why he’d chosen then it really shows itself up. People who say they RSS
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the title. “But then, I very much wanted to take my are materialists, they’re hoisted by their own petard.
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voice out of this book. I wanted How The Dead Live to I don’t want to sound like a character in Ab Fab who Facebook
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just happen in the reader’s mind, decoupled from any wants to give it all up and bang tambourines with
presuppositions about any framing of the text in that a bandeau, but that’s pretty much how I feel at the I
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way.” Once again, it’s a novel where the moral fulcrum moment. People aren’t really materialists, they don’t J
is someway off the page. really want the car, the house, the Phillipe Starck K
Although Martin Rowson’s endpaper maps at- juicer, they actually want the cachet, the status and L
tempt to locate the fictional topography of How The the culture that go with those things.” M
Dead Live the world it describes is very much filtered Self is keen to stress that the novel is what it appears N
through Lily. In other words, as the preface from The to be: “It really is a book about death. It’s a Buddhist O
Tibetan Book Of The Dead says, it takes place on Lily’s allegory,” he says, allowing that of course there are P
“mind stage”. Lily’s venom and disgust, her vitriolic satirical elements. When Lily Bloom, newly dead, is Q
wit and bile is well sustained over the 400 pages, but taken away in a mini cab to a suburb of London called R
the ultimate effect is one of poignancy, of playing to the Dulston – really a disintegrating part of Lily Bloom’s S
empty gallery as she clings to her personality. With his own psyche of course – she goes to a meeting of the
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latest novel, Self has gone to the core of the belief that Personally Dead, where they have a 12-step programme
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the essence of the self is the personality. for those who can’t or won’t come to terms with being
So does he have semi-mystical beliefs about death dead.”Why didn’t it even occur to me that there was V
himself? “I have completely mystical beliefs in that only one person who could’ve arranged these particular W
area. I’m off with the fucking fairies,” he says, laugh- elements of my own experience, and cobbled them X
ing. “I always have been. I’ve never been a materialist together into this dreary scene?” At one of the meetings Y
particularly, I’ve always been a transcendental ideal- someone speaks on the topic of “Why Are We Dead?”, Z

about “how disturbing it was to realise that style was – whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever More A
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personalty, and that our sense of self was nothing but widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation.” B
mannerisms and negative emotions.” (There is a great A.J. Ayer joke, in that “death hadn’t C
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Lily gets a job at Baskin’s Public Relations when she thawed his notoriously glacial logic”, and “only such a D
is dead, “typing up still more releases on fresh kitchen- relentless rationalist could gain any succour from these, E
ware, country club launches, innovatory thermal socks the nervous tics of the afterlife.”)  RSS
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Interview [published April 1998] B
Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension email

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Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist
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No other author in recent years has divided the critics and one of the chief sources of vanity interestingly is
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with such relish as Will Self. With three novellas and any notion of posterity.” Facebook
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two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of Clearly Self is walking a tight-rope between his role
short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, as writer and literary mediator, between reporter and I
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he has established himself as one of this country’s most involved spectator. However, what sets him apart from J
inventive and original prose writers. his contemporaries is the unique perspective his work K
However, far from accepting suggestions that after offers of the pre-millennial era, the (post)modern fin de L
being portrayed as the enfant terrible of fictional satire, siècle. His is a fictional world of serial killers, pederasts, M
he now seeks the reward of critical respectability, Self and petty bourgeois angst, a mixture of high art and N
remains as defiant as ever. “My work is intentionally low life which reflects the mundanity and artifice of the O
divisive. In a way I have failed if I even get to that contemporary zeitgeist. “If you can get a contemporary P
point. For a satirist to think in those terms would be cultural reference into the book, get away with quoting Q
absolutely ridiculous.” Certainly, while Self is the main Richard and Judy and you are confident it is going to R
contender to the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes stand, then you have done your job, you have translated
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and Graham Swift, he refuses to think of his writing as the contemporary into the timeless.”
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aimed at any notion of inclusion, however redundant, It is Self’s willingness to acknowledge his literary in-
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within critical tradition of the English literary canon. heritance, along with his reference to popular culture as
“The role of critics in terms of re-interpreting the novel a source of inspiration and ‘immutable intertextuality’, V
for subsequent generations, as a blueprint, as an ana- that distances him from the more incestuous and anach- W
logue of the culture itself is a legitimate view. Yet at the ronistic impulses of contemporary fiction. Inspired X
same time writers, like any other artist can fall victim to by the likes of Céline, Nietzsche and Dostevesky, he Y
all forms of vanity in consideration of their own gifts, shares with them a rage and revulsion, at what Sartre Z

called society’s “self enclosed humanism” and admits saying, and I am often very surprised by the result.” It More A
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that “I was fascinated by the nihilists and consciously is this immediacy and unpredictability that has become B
styled myself in that way as a destructive intellectual a hallmark of his work. :My aim is to write con brio. I C
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force, in so far as I saw my writing as an extension have always thought that you can only write one ver- D
of that role”. Like all great authors , Self writes with sion of a book, and I think that is what hamstrings a E
an overriding sense of his own omnipotence within the lot of people’s approach to the notion of writing as a RSS
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realm of his own imagination. Egotistical, maybe, but search for meaning, a pursuit of perfection. But I really
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vain? No. If, as Self admits that “as you publish more, suffer with a sense of dissatisfaction with my work. I Facebook
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the more peculiarly arrogant you become,” he is also am not sure if it would help if they were crafted better,
modestly aware of his own limitations. I would be a different writer. I am content to remain I
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One of the major criticisms of his work is the way in ragged in that way.” J
which he is concerned more with the use of elaborate If critics have pointed to his apparent irreverence K
imagery and excessive metaphor, at the expense of and lack of emotional engagement towards the act of L
characterisation and plot. Yet it is something that Self writing, he is keen to suggest that “I am fairly mystical M
is willing to admit to. “I think the real problem with about the relationship with the text … a posture of hu- N
my books is the lack of structure. I have great difficulty mility in relation to your own muse is quite important O
with plot and I have never got on with character, and and my personal feelings I try to keep away from that.” P
have always found them very artificial, and essentially Unlike what he agrees has become the life blood of Q
romantic in that way, but I have largely written about contemporary literary discourse: “Self-confession as I R
ideas, and I view descriptive prose, the metaphorical see it a really decadent syndrome … a crisis of imagina- S
aspects of the work as part and parcel of the ideas.” tion and very depressing.” While his work is “nakedly
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Although some of the stories in the new book, such personal”, he opposes any literalist interpretation of his
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as ‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’, ‘Dave work, and is intent in distancing himself from the idea
Too’ and ‘A Story For Europe’ have been published that fiction should pandering to the essentially regres- V
previously in The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis, his style of sive or escapist tendencies of the book reading public. W
composition remains consistent – writing very quickly “To think that would be insane, I might as well write X
and spontaneously – a technique he developed from his Mills and Boon. Every text contains within itself the Y
journalism. “I don’t think of myself much, or what I am idea of an objective reading … those who think there Z

is a subjective reader are full of shit. Just as I am try- other people regard as serious. I regard myself as quite More A
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ing to break down my resistance to writing books, so a puritan. I am quite a prudish person”. B
I suppose at the same time, I am trying to break down The scene however in the concluding story of the C
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peoples resistance to reading them. Book’s aren’t life, new collection, ‘The Nonce Prize’ of a murdered D
they are just books.” child , the victim of a pederasts, whose dismembered E
Somewhat ironically however, Self is a believer in body, dressed only in a Toy Story T-shirt, is bound RSS
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the text as a non-factual body of words which stems to attract criticism. Yet for Self, “an image like that
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from his early attempts at writing. “I had a great deal has a total necessity, the mixing of the mundane with Facebook
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of difficulty with the feeling that I didn’t have anything the extremely horrible. Of course it is deliberately
to say, that everything had been written already and shocking”, but what he plays on is our sense of si- I
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which really bedevilled me.” As a result Self has go multaneous aversion and innate attraction to the dark J
on to essentially redefine his role as an author. “I think of human nature; the necessity to explore the depths K
of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not build- of human potentiality. In a period in which politi- L
ing things. You are removing things, chipping away at cians, priests and the press are agonising about how M
language to reveal a living form, I think I am merely to find a basis for morality, Self’s ideas, lubricious as N
the midwife in that sense.” they seem, are in fact profoundly principled. For the O
True when you consider that he has delivered some of author they represent “a chronic jouissance” which P
the most provocative fiction of the last ten years. Self’s reflects how people are increasingly finding con- Q
stories are “a fundamental assault”, not just on the over summate enjoyment within signs of guilt, despair, R
indulgent and emotional realism of contemporary fic- violence and death. “I am alluding to possibilities S
tion, but on “the antinomies of organised social living”. that we know are actualities. Just as sex and drugs
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“People always say that they are full of sex, and drugs continue to have their own pornography, the focus-
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and violence … I am not writing Jane Austen, but they ing of sexual relief into ritualised posture, the need
are only full of those things in so far as it is necessary to engage in a constructive relationship with power V
for them to mirror what I am trying to describe.” Be- or with society, with having children or the meaning W
lieving that a writer should have the courage of his own of generations. All these things seem to be subjected X
perversions, Self sees his work as “perverse only in the to their own pornography. I hate that about modern Y
sense of the willingness to look upon the things that society, it is revolting.” Z

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many of the new stories; most readily in the gro- ing on that tendency in his work. B
tesquely implausible ‘Flytopia’ and ‘Caring Sharing.’ Often surreal, frequently absurd, and always written C
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Similarly, in the wonderfully conceived ‘Design Faults with a recognisably dark sense of humour, Self’s stories D
In The Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual’, he welcomes us are satiric rather than simply sarcastic. However Self E
the “terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer” is reluctant to think of himself as a true satirist. “The RSS
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as throughout his work, Self continues to explore the thing I coined in my own mind is that to be an effective
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exigencies that modern mass urban living places on the satirists is an act of factitiousness, and that includes Facebook
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human psyche and the human body. The city in general, not talking sensibly about my own work.” While Self
and London in particular, represents a new surface, a takes his work very seriously, it remains deliberately I
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new hallucinatory experience, a sublime reincarnation ambiguous. “Taking the world seriously is not given … J
of the horror and wonder at the rapidly shifting nature and that is what I am continually trying to get the reader K
of the identities and anxieties of his characters and to address … but the problem you have got to face is L
the inconstant historical realities they represent. “The how to suspend disbelief, you have to suspend disbelief M
idea of the modern urban scape is destructive at a very in your own work, you have almost got to believe it is N
fundamental level the notion of scale. People’s idea of true in order to carry it off.” O
the city that they are living in is so grossly different Since the publication of his first book, The Quantity P
from the physical reality that you are actually witness- Theory Of Insanity in 1991, Will Self continues to be Q
ing. There is a marvellous disparity between what is portrayed as very much the archetypal outsider. His R
perceived and what it actually is.” admittedly “muddled and provisional childhood”, S
One of the strength of Self’s work is it’s “internally and his former addiction to heroin for example are
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referential” nature, and in Tough Tough Toys … the well documented, yet with the concept of the avant
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same characters often appear in corresponding stories. garde as redundant as any notion of a central literary
In doing so Self reinforces the common theme in the tradition he feels more at home within the mainstream V
collection, “what it is to be an adult, about concepts cultural sphere. But does being white, middle class and W
and absences of maturity”. It is a theme which is ech- heterosexual leave him creatively isolated, limited in X
oed in his style, as he plays with different modes, with comparison to more recognisably racial and gender Y
elements of pastiche and with character for example, specific literary genres? “I have never seen myself as Z

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being part of an avant garde very hard to imagine, but enough books to be written like that. Certainly I am B
the great virtue of being middle class in this country is not short of fiction. I have enough to last me into the C
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that you are bizarrely anonymous. Your experience is next millennium already sketched out, but I am fed up D
quite commonplace, you become null in that way and with these psycho-analysts and artists. I want to write E
in some ways I find myself curiously liberated by it. If a book about someone who isn’t an intellectual.” As RSS
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I was gay, or black or more Jewish than I am, then it for philosophy: “At best it is sublime, at worst it is
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might ghettoise me.” opera”. Equally, Self relies less on the interface of Facebook
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It is this sense of creative freedom that has allowed drugs and literature as a source of either personal or
Self throughout his career to explore different charac- thematic motivation. “I remain interested in them as I
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ters and indulge his passion for different accents and a perspective, the capacity for drugs themselves to J
rhythms that make up the modern English language, enhance or mediate, to colour creativity, but I am so K
the health of which he is quick to disassociate from conservative in so many other ways it strikes me as L
what he sees as the generally parlous condition of the faintly absurd.” M
English novel. “One of the great sources of solace in my Is Will Self mellowing with age. Not a chance. He N
career is that I no longer have to read fiction … think and his work remain as unpredictable and elusive as O
it is a great help.” While “blissfully unaware” of his ever. For all his honesty and willingness to talk about P
contemporaries, he is conscious of the “warp and weft” his work seriously there is a sense that he is reluctant Q
of the publishing business and the effect this is having to reveal what he calls ‘the back of the theatre.’ As the R
on writers “This year’s best seller is next year’s out of curtain rises on his latest production, and critics prepare S
print writer. But you write a good book now and it will once more to answer the question of Will Self’s literary
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be published. There are so many bad books published importance with customary shouts of “Oh yes he is!”,
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that it has to be true!” or “Oh no he isn’t!”, perhaps a more suitable retort
Will his next book would be a novel? “I could go would be “He’s behind you!”  V
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Tupac Shakur: Murder Was The Case email

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Gary Marshall on the history of gangsta rap as documented in Tupac Shakur:
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Rebel For The Hell Of It and Have Gun Will Travel RSS
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Under the guidance of its founder Marion ‘Suge’ generation, presenting a damning picture of corrupt
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Knight, Death Row Records became one of the most police, institutionalised racism and the greed of the Facebook
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successful and most talked-about record labels of the recording industry.
1990s. Home to Dr Dre, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy While White presents a powerful and convincing I
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Dogg and many others, the label’s roster read like a argument, at times he’s too eager to play the race J
‘who’s who’ of the rap industry and the ‘gangsta’ genre card. A journalist who describes Tupac as “shock- K
in particular. Straddling the line between entertainment ingly handsome” is denounced as racist on the evi- L
and violent reality, the label developed a reputation for dence of those two words, and White regularly uses M
gangsterism and intimidation while its artists seemed magazine cuttings as examples of what he perceives N
to lead the same violent and misogynistic lives they as a subconsciously racist approach to the entire rap O
rapped about. industry. While there is some truth to his arguments, P
Armond White attempts to tell the story of Tupac in many cases he heaps derision on journalists who Q
Shakur, Death Row’s most famous recording artist, may be guilty of cliché or lazy thinking but who dem- R
and place him firmly in the context of Black culture onstrate considerably more affection for his subject
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and society. The son of former Black Panther and crack than he does. While detailing rape allegations, court
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addict Afeni Shakur, Tupac attended drama school and proceedings and lyrical content he seems curiously
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was a gifted musician and actor; his death in a drive- distant from the subject, showing little sign that he
by and the resulting tit-for-tat killing of Biggie Smalls finds anything to like or respect about Tupac. It is only V
(aka Notorious B.I.G.) were generally believed to be when the narrative turns to Tupac’s filmic ambitions – W
part of the escalating rivalry between East Coast and White’s speciality is in film and cultural studies – that X
West Coast gangs. Rebel For The Hell Of It attempts any sense of empathy shines through. Y
to explain the cultural issues that shaped Tupac and his Ultimately White believes rap – and gangsta rap in Z
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and 80s black music from protest songs to Public En- himself with gang members and actively encouraged B
emy, and Rebel For The Hell Of It cleverly analyses the burgeoning rivalry between East Coast and West C
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and contrasts the expression of Black culture in popular Coast artists and fans. D
music over several decades like an angry Greil Marcus. It’s hard to feel any sympathy for the gangsta E
Clearly appalled at the waste of talent and ambition rappers portrayed in these books, the quiet and RSS
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which gangsta rap embodies, White’s novel is well- determined Biggie Smalls excepted. Tupac is vain
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argued but its academic tone ultimately lacks emotion. and hot-headed, drawn to Death Row after yet an- Facebook
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Have Gun Will Travel is certainly full of emotion – other period of jail time for serious assault. Dr Dre is
most of it negative. Journalist and former rapper Ronin shown as an egotistical, self-obsessed control freak, I
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Ro provides an insight into the workings of the Death while other rappers – Snoop included – seem to have J
Row label and clearly differentiates fact from rumour a curious ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ attitude when K
and legend. Ro demonstrates beyond any doubt that, given a choice between advancing their careers and L
preying on the ambition and gullibility of his artists, basic human decency. Ro, like White, highlights the M
Suge Knight made a great deal of money while his art- mainstream record industry as an amoral and cow- N
ists received little or nothing. Few artists had recording ardly business which chose to ignore the activities O
contracts and many worked for free on some of the of Death Row for as long as record sales remained P
1990s biggest-selling albums (Dr Dre’s The Chronic high. It’s an argument given extra weight by the rash Q
and Snoop’s Doggystyle) while Suge received 100% of of legal action and the mass evacuation from Death R
the publishing royalties. Row following Knight’s incarceration. S
Although many of his sources are understandably Despite the titillating content, Have Gun Will
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anonymous, Ro tells a compelling if frightening story Travel is no hastily-scribbled collection of rumours.
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of associates forced to drink urine at gunpoint, busi- Death Row’s reputation for violence and intimida-
ness rivals being sodomised, publicists being savagely tion was well-deserved and Ro tracks down a suf- V
beaten, journalists held over piranha tanks and the ficient number of eyewitness accounts to corroborate W
increasingly deranged and uncontrollable behaviour of his story. The label’s finances and criminal backing X
Knight. Obsessed with movies like Scorcese’s Casino are exhaustively researched, and the result is a Y
(to the point of buying one of the houses used in the comprehensive history of one of the most successful Z

and controversial labels of the 1990s. Free from the notorious Bloods gang and transformed the traditional More A
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political baggage which frequently makes White’s one-upmanship of rap into a Bloods vs. Crips, East vs. B
book heavy going, Ro is damning of the violence West contest – a rivalry which was actively encouraged C
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enveloping the Death Row clique but he’s equally by many sections of the rap media. Ro and White both D
critical of the publicity-seeking moral guardians point accusing fingers at journalists who were full of E
and the political indifference which created the very remorse after the high-profile deaths of Tupac and Big- RSS
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environment the gangsta rappers glamorised. gie Smalls but who actively encouraged the rivalry and
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The stock response to criticism of gangsta rap is violence which caused them. Facebook
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that it’s just entertainment, exaggerated story-telling What both Ro and White’s books demonstrate is
of ghetto life which sells bucketloads to middle-class that the rappers’ deaths were only a small part of a I
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white teenagers. The problem with Death Row was bigger picture. The true tragedy is that, by embracing J
that the line between entertainment and reality became the clichés of gangsta rap, many talented Black artists K
increasingly blurred. According to Ro’s account, as glamorised rather than challenged the stereotype of L
Knight became more and more like the movie gangsters violent Black American youth and simply swapped one M
he idolised he surrounded himself with members of the form of oppression for another.  N
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Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey email

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Ben Granger
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This book is not for people who’ve never, even briefly, hilism of punk for an even more genuinely despairing
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fallen under Morrissey’s spell. Don’t bother; it’ll only generation, with added literacy, sensitivity, wit, and Facebook
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convince you further of the psycho-obsessive nature of tunes. It was something they would never forget.
Morrissey fans in general and the author in particular. Detractors say Morrissey appeals to “the teenager” I
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Don’t bother either if you’re looking for new facts because both he and they are contrary and self-pitying. J
about The Smiths or Morrissey, anything to do with This is of course true. But there are better qualities K
music rather than image or lyrics. It’s Johnny Rogan’s also at a premium in the best of the uppity adolescent L
Severed Alliance or Simon Goddard’s more recent and the everyday work of the Moz. A breathtakingly M
Songs That Saved Your Life you’re after, both of which arrogant precociousness, a visceral impatience with the N
spell out in dry but meticulous detail most of what you banal, the solipsistic knowing you’re not like anyone O
might want to know. And don’t bother if you’re look- else, and the vicious world-weary wit of the damned. P
ing for objectivity, or if you’re turned off by riotously All satirised brilliantly in his own song ‘Nobody Loves Q
over the top prose that out-does even Julie Burchill in Us’ casting both himself and his fans in the role of spoilt R
the school of forging constant rapid, rabid, contentious children (“tuck us in / make us our favourite jam”).
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assertions from very few base facts. Anyone left? Then, As Simpson notes; “Sickness never sounded or felt
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like me, you’ll love it. so good … I may have felt unloved or unlovable but
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Simpson is a True Apostle of the cult of Moz, and I also derived an exquisite, narcotic satisfaction from
like all his ilk found this warped love during a trou- the knowing of these things and to laugh under my V
bled adolescence, described with lively self mockery breath at the perversity of this knowledge.” Laugh W
in a chapter here. The Smiths landed like a chemical indeed, the faithful know there’s more laugh-out- X
warhead upon bored teenagers growing up in the most loud humour in Smiths and Morrissey songs than in Y
soulless decade of the 20th century. Here was the ni- almost any of the swill lapped up by the “oh he’s Z
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sooo depressing” dimwits. Pop, punk and glam rock (which “called for and for More A
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Simpson shows that bright teenagers know long a brief moment seemed to actually offer escape from B
after they’ve packed away their last Dr Martens’ that the humdrum by becoming your own glamorous crea- C
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Morrissey’s self obsession is anything but depressing; tion”). The feminine-centred northern drama of the 60s D
it’s a life-affirming blood-pact of strength against the which at once embraced and damned the working-class E
stupidity of the world; background he came from, and its lighter modern day RSS
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“In assaulting pop’s nostrums and clichés in his own offshoots like the comedy of Alan Bennett and Victoria
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image, Morrissey made it about the one thing both Wood: (“Morrissey’s ‘voice’ is that of the Northern Facebook
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parents and pop music had been united against: intel- Woman, a certain intensity mixed with a certain breezi-
ligence. Forget drugs, forget promiscuity. Thinking ness, a certain desperation mixed with a lot of self irony I
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Too Much was undoubtedly the most degenerate, most …strong, but touchingly vulnerable … a queer fish.”) J
anti-social habit any teenager ever picked up.” Morrissey’s two greatest idols were Oscar Wilde K
With the added get-out clause in the grand tradi- and James Dean. Wilde for his wit and, in the proper L
tion of having your cake and eating it that, while sense of the word, perversity: “an idealist, yet the M
you were vicariously living through the man’s emo- Queen of Cynics, he was a romantic, but was fright- N
tions, you were never really as depressed as he quite eningly realistic; he was a moralist yet completely O
genuinely seemed to be, even through all the wit and dissolute, Morrissey of course is an immoralist who is P
charm. He was doing it for you in Christlike fashion scandalously virtuous.” James Dean for personifying Q
(although this particular Messiah was Mancunian, adolescent rebellion: “Jimmy reflected back as Mor- R
camp, quiffed, flower fixated and more inclined to rissey would like to see himself: a creature who may S
call for people’s deaths than turn other cheek). Lured have been tortured and full of self doubt but always
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pied-piper-like by the first incandescent chimes of managed to look comfortable in his own skin and to
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‘This Charming Man’, this is an adolescent anti- radiate an animal magnetism.” And both, of course, for
fantasy world which still has enough acolytes of all the romantic doom of their exit from this world. V
ages to sell out the Manchester Evening News Arena Simpson goes a bit more out on a limb in proclaim- W
this May in less than an hour. ing his parents break-up was the biggest influence on X
Simpson shows with aplomb the disparate influences his world outlook, totally siding with his book librarian Y
that made the mental make-up of “this alarming man”. mum against his porter dad with all the Oedipus conno- Z

tations that implies. Speculation it may be, but it does celebrating criminality in a far more unnerving way More A
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convince. He’s insightful too on Morrissey’s famously than half-wits like Guy Ritchie. Yet this too is central to B
enigmatic sexuality, rightly stating the unique mixture his allure, glorying like his hero Wilde in paradox and C
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of the masculine and feminine, the fleshy exhibitionism contradiction, squaring a circle, dancing outrageously D
(“A Morrissey gig is an extraordinary, epic, religious on a tightrope of sensitivities in idiosyncratic celebra- E
prick-tease”) entwined with the lovelorn celibacy is tion of the outsider. RSS
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central to his unique appeal, particularly in bringing And to the minds of the faithful, not falling off that
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out the homosexual side to otherwise heterosexual tightrope. Simpson rightly dissects the fatuous music Facebook
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men. Simpson is gay himself but happily does not try to press chorus that damned Morrissey as a racist in the
claim him for ‘the cause’ and is rightly contemptuous of early 90s for singing his mockingly wry song ‘The I
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those desperate to pigeonhole: “What these very help- National Front Disco’ at the same time as genuinely J
ful, very kind people forgot was that the law ‘what’s flaunting the Union Jack and celebrating proper skin- K
not one thing must be t’other’, absolutely correct and head culture; “some might argue that this subtlety is L
inviolable as it is, is a law which only applies to stupid dangerous because it is too artistic and not didactic M
people. And to journalists.” (i.e. patronising) enough”. Simpson argues brilliantly, N
The title of Simpson’s book is a play on Sartre’s though he could perhaps have snidely remarked in an O
essay ‘Saint Genet’, and he rightly makes the obser- aside the never mentioned fact that if the NME’s witch- P
vation that Mozza has a lot in common with Jean G. hunt charges were true this must have been the first Q
Granted, Genet was a tremendously promiscuous ho- Nazi sympathiser in history to be a supporter of Red R
mosexual and Morrissey a celibate introvert, but both Wedge, Anti-Apartheid, Amnesty International, CND, S
were initially feted then rejected by liberals who found feminism, gay rights…
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them a little too complex for their liking, both found The final self-centred joy of Morrissey Simpson
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a transcendent Rousseau-like glory in the seedier side celebrates is his refusal to play the celebrity game; in
of lumpen-proletarian life, and both glorify thugs and an age where even Johnny Rotten parades his wares on V
‘rough lads’. reality TV shows, Mozza remains gloriously aloof, last W
Many people find this both the strangest and the most year’s curious Channel 4 TV doc not withstanding. As X
distasteful side to Morrissey, (“but he seemed like such Simpson puts with typical restraint “A churlish refusal Y
a nice boy!!”) appealing to sensitive little flowers yet to suck Satan’s cock.” Z

The hyperbole of the book can grate when running things very very seriously while at the same time rel- More A
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totally counter to your own thoughts. The pronounce- ishing its own absurdity with a constant self-lacerating B
ment that the young Steven must have found Myra wit. It is under no illusions its subject is a spiteful, dis- C
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Hindley a “bad mother to offset his good mother” honest, difficult sod but loves him more, not less for it. D
takes his speculation to offensively glib depths, and I As the man finally returns with a new album after E
for one can do without anyone talking up the dreadful seven long years, all those nervous fanatics praying for RSS
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Freud – as he does – even in passing. But then someone a new Vauxhall And I (rather than a Kill Uncle) would
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with Simpson’s provocative style is bound to piss off be well advised to have a copy of this book by your Facebook
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everyone at least once during a whole book, and quite bedside to remind you of the childish stupidity and
rightly so. effortless brilliance of your obsession. It will prove I
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The book’s best achievement is it mirrors its subject you’re not mad after all; or if you are at least you’re in J
in being pretentious without being pompous, and taking entertaining company.  K
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Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle email

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Iain Sinclair walked the length of the M25 motorway to research his book
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London Orbital. Chris Hall hears why RSS
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Listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme recently totally remote country.”
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voted London’s M25 the worst of the Seven Horrors of It is the disconnection between our apprehension of Facebook
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Britain in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes
experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in I
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what the novelist, poet and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain London, they live in the tube map of London). London J
Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore K
thought differently. For this was his unique project – to the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island L
walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the ar- Village, described as “an exciting new village com- M
eas that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the munity”, of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t N
huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new. O
by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so, What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the P
comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is Q
in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible suddenly ‘stylish’.” R
landscape disappear. So what does he think about the housing forecasts for
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Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millen- the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task
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nial year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield
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would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating renewal that is necessary in and around the capital?
the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting? “These seem to be projections made from a very privi- V
“Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly leged metropolitan standpoint about something that’s W
exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge X
you were going to find. Getting up really early in this of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion Y
weird landscape. You might as well have been in some of decanting swathes of the populace into these amor- Z
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the city is, I think, a nightmare prospect.” were used to establish, by a network of dubious com- B
This, as London Orbital makes clear, is precisely mercial deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles C
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what the city has always done with its undesirables from the centre of London.” And finding the grave of D
and madmen. Sinclair – an altogether different kind of Hawksmoor in a field just off the motorway was, he E
asylum seeker, but nonetheless wandering around, not says, “quite a shock – this sense of the centre drifting RSS
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knowing entirely where he is – says that he was amazed out as it becomes forgotten”.
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to find the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s Were there any new buildings that he particularly Facebook
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hypothesis about the optimum distance that asylums admired? “I was very struck by the Siebel building by
should be placed away from the city – 20 miles – so Runnymede Bridge in Egham. It just appeared out of I
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palpably confirmed. nowhere between visits. It didn’t bristle with surveil- J
“I was dazzled by the Holloway Sanitarium [now lance – most buildings were incredibly paranoid. It K
Virginia Park] – the ultimate heritage- asylum conver- seemed transcendently strange – there was nobody L
sion,” he tells me. “The thing that disturbed me [about around. It was sinisterly benign.” M
other asylum conversions] was the absence of memory Sinclair’s poetic retains that characteristic samizdat N
– all traces of what had been there before had been can- quality of goods smuggled past the PR checkpoints, O
nily erased, including the name.” his prose always crackling with connectivity. Here P
So should architects be learning more about the he is on the Xerox building: “Uxbridge is made from Q
history of a site? “They should be made to go into the Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with R
landscape to the site and then move outwards from it barbed wire.” S
for a considerable distance and then to come in on it. One of the many treats of Sinclair’s excellent Lights
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Especially the big-name architects who are the worse Out For The Territory (of which London Orbital is
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perpetrators,” he says with a little glee. “They shouldn’t a kind of sequel), is his visit to Jeffrey Archer and
just place something that is simply site-specific to the his penthouse at Alembic House. I wondered if he’d V
person commissioning the building.” thought of returning to him at his new residence in W
As you might expect of Sinclair, he’s unearthed some Belmarsh prison in Thamesmead, south-east London? X
pretty fascinating nuggets. For example, the story of He laughs at the idea, but admits slightly wearily that Y
how the War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval “perhaps we’ve had a little too much of him already”. Z

As for these liminal areas, he’s already looking More A

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ahead. “One day, when the research and development B
has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be C
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turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature … will D
be promoted and paraded.” How apt this convergence E
of Sinclair’s journey with London – to have returned to RSS
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the beginning.
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[This article was originally written for the UK archi- Facebook
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tectural magazine Building Design] 
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Michael Marshall Smith: Spares email

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Antony Johnston
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They say never judge a book by its cover, but the sheer The moral quandary which Smith highlights, quite
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ubiquitousness of Spares (with its oh-so-cool spot- apart from the issue of whether or not the Spares should Facebook
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varnished, blurry-type cover) inclined me to think it have rights as human beings, is the inherent lack of
was the sort of bestselling ‘new fiction’ which gener- responsibility that comes with such a safety net. The I
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ally leaves me cold. Fortunately for me, a friend had rich kids are almost incapable of learning from their J
already read it and liked it so much that she bought mistakes, as the consequences are never drastic. Lost K
everyone a copy for Christmas. Am I glad she did. both legs in a car accident? Hey, no praahblem – just L
Jack Randall is an ex-soldier. Recovering from a chainsaw a couple off of one of your Spares (no anaes- M
military experiment which went horribly wrong (but is thetic required), stitch ‘em on, and within a week you’ll N
not detailed until the closing stages of the book, and be zipping round at 200kph again. O
even then not fully), Jack took a mundane police job All of this is background – the book starts after all P
in New Richmond, a grounded MegaMall – picture this, including Jack’s subsequent breakout from the Q
a flying cuboid city, five miles square. His wife and Farm, has occurred. Luckily, with such a wealth of R
child are subsequently horribly murdered. This sends background plot to cover, Smith’s exposition is un-
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Jack into a paranoid psychotic episode which sees him derstated and conversational, a personal preference of
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eventually working as a maintenance man on a Spares mine. Rather than ham-fistedly inserting great wads of
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Farm with only the local droid for company. flashback and explanation, Smith only elaborates on
Spares themselves are a logical but hideous concept – background when relevant, and then in a fairly offhand, V
clones of those wealthy enough to afford them (the trend matter-of-fact manner. This is not an author who under- W
is for having your children cloned as ‘insurance’), grown estimates his audience’s ability to piece a story together X
and kept as very literal spare parts, to be hacked up and from fragments, and this can only be a Good Thing. Y
used as donors when said offspring has an accident. In addition to the problems encountered during his es- Z
BUY Michael Marshall Smith books online from and

cape from the Farm, Jack also has demons from his mili- ing. It’s just too damn happy, and not a little forced. A More A
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tary and police pasts to deal with. As the book progresses tragic ending – which the rest of the book certainly leads B
it becomes apparent the three issues are linked in some one to expect – would not only have made more sense, C
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fashion, but the reasons are well-concealed and tension but also would have read better. The epilogue is short, D
is maintained right to the bitter end. Just when you think and doesn’t completely ruin the book, but it is extremely E
you’ve been given the key to unlock the whole book, hard to swallow given all that has gone before. To me RSS
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Smith reminds you of something else that still doesn’t fit it smacked a little of either editorial draconianism or
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and you find yourself back on the edge of your seat. authorly cowardice. Still, only a small niggle. Facebook
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Smith’s style owes a debt, I feel, to Jeff Noon, and So – $64,000 question – is it Cyberpunk? As always,
I freely admit this is one of the reasons I enjoyed this that depends on your definition of the genre, and is I
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book so much. It is of course possible the two have another reason I compare Smith with Noon. There’s J
never met or even read one another, their styles simply no actual common-or-garden ‘cyber’ as such, although K
developing independently along similar lines. But judg- there is plenty of NuTech, especially of a biomedi- L
ing by the tone of Smith’s first novel Only Forward cal nature. There’s also a fair amount of horror, both M
(an altogether more upbeat and ‘trad’ novel) my guess body and psychological. Although there was only one N
is that he picked up some Noon and realised what his passage which actually made me wince, it was such a O
style was missing – some Modern British Edge (no, I blinding combination of these two ‘horror-types’ that P
can’t believe I just said that either). I really don’t care if I never read it again. It’s etched Q
Despite Spares’ unstated geographical location, it has firmly enough in my brain to not have to. R
a very American feel – told with a very British tone of But it’s the attitude that comes across most here, and S
voice. I suspect Smith was trying (and perhaps a little Smith has a good handle on both the street-level, amoral
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too hard) to make sure the book would be received well survivalism of Cyberpunk and the art of telling a damn
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on both sides of the Atlantic. Brits are used to plots set good story that makes the genre so inherently indefin-
in America anyway, and the American sense of hubris able. So for what it’s worth, yes, it’s Cyberpunk. But V
remains intact. This doesn’t do any harm, but it would that’s not important here. What is important is that this W
have been nice to see another young British author topical, headlong outburst is only Smith’s second novel. X
actually setting the scene here in the UK. If by that we can assume he’s just getting started, I truly Y
The only part of this book that disappoints is the end- believe we have a great author in the clone vats.  Z

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Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us email

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Antony Johnston
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One of Us. A powerful phrase – belonging, kinship, And one particular memory contains a murder, com-
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camaraderie. Familiar concepts, though this book deals mitted by a woman who has now disappeared. The Facebook
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with them in ways you may not expect. murder of a police lieutenant.
Initially our protagonist, Hap Thompson, seems any- The book starts, like all good thrillers, in the middle. I
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thing but ‘One of Us’. An outsider, a loner with no life, It is only through lengthy but natural exposition that J
an ex-wife, forced to live in exile from his hometown. we realise what has befallen Hap, about a quarter of K
The reader begins to think that perhaps Smith means the way through the book. Though by that time, after L
‘Us’ in the more intimate, author-reader sense. Every- having discovered he is also being pursued by what M
one can identify with the character who feels his life can best be described as Men In Black for reasons N
has been wasted, his best years are behind him and he unknown, we are so snowed under with questions, O
will never again live as fully as he once did. concepts and plot twists that we have far more on our P
Hap is a REMTemp, an occupation whose legalities plate to worry about. Q
are still being wrangled out in court. He receives other Spares, Smith’s previous novel, was a similar ‘one R
people’s dreams, so that they may sleep untroubled. man’s quest to find the truth’ affair, but to compare
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The process leaves him tired but wealthy, though the further would be unfair. What we have here is an al-
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grey legal aspect means he must move from town to together more mature work, with less desire to shock
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town, trusting no-one. Nevertheless, Hap has little and more emphasis on keeping the reader turning the
reason to complain. He knows he screwed his own pages, which Smith does admirably. His previously V
life up, and this is the best-paying job he’s ever had. shown talent for a good plot and deft character is W
Mustn’t grumble. shown to full potential here in a story that contains X
Until, that is, his boss ‘persuades’ him to move into more twists than any given John Grisham novel has Y
another, even more dubious area – memory receival. in its little finger. Metaphorically speaking. Z

Characters are equally well-handled. Hap is an emi- science fiction becomes almost ancillary. Yet another More A
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nently sympathetic man who we cannot help but feel for. young British writer appears to have found a love for B
Many of his internal dialogues and emotional outbursts simply telling a cracking story instead of trying too C
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will bring on sage nods and murmurs of “Yep. Know hard to be clever. No bad thing. D
that feeling”. The supporting characters are crafted with Will it work? It appears to have already done E
similar skill, never crossing the line from archetype to so – Smith has moved beyond the hard-core neo- RSS
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stereotype. Not even the Amoral Head of an Evil Corp. Cyberpunk audience he initially attracted, and is now
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So who is this for? In an effort to help Smith’s seen as a mainstream writer. It’s very hard to pin Facebook
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work reach the audience it deserves, One Of Us is down exactly who will like this book besides a glib,
very carefully described as a thriller, with barely any ‘Anyone who likes a good thriller,’ though that’s as I
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mention of the speculative elements. Even the jacket much as I’ll commit to. Fans, if they can live with the J
design is deliberately modern without appearing too shift of emphasis from speculation, will enjoy One Of K
‘niche’. For once, though, this isn’t unfair – specula- Us for Smith’s impressive skills of character and plot L
tive technology is there to benefit the plot, not vice- twisting. Newcomers will simply enjoy it for what it M
versa. And to reach the (literal) revelation of the Men is – a cracking read. N
In Black’s real identity, such a massive and entirely And the ‘Us’ in question? It’s not who you think. I O
different suspension of disbelief is necessary that the promise you that.  P
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Sonic Youth: Sonic Spice email

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Andrew McCutchen meets Sonic Youth mainman and guitar torturer
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extraordinaire Thurston Moore RSS
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“I moved to New York to fuck Patti Smith” writes wrote a bunch of albums, most good, signed to a ma-
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Thurston Moore, going back, going way back to an jor, became a ‘brand name’, were slated as much as Facebook
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epoch of rock history when Sid Vicious was at his celebrated, but they survived, and they can still shake
most vicious, prowling the Village’s streets after it, as demonstrated by their latest album NYC Ghosts I
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Nancy’s brutal murder, when Lydia Lunch was just And Flowers. And they’re really, really nice. Even J
a “girl on the corner with a nose ring”, and when Moore, who could understandably have an ill tempered K
Kim Gordon was a pretty blond he hadn’t met yet. stoat down his trousers about the way he’s been writ- L
These, and other tasty details of the late 70s New York ten up over the years, (NME described his Root tribute M
scene, are exposed by Moore in an endearingly naff album as “…a snowman celebrating warm weather by N
little short story found on the internet titled ‘On the commissioning a statue of himself made out of more O
Loose’, which ends (gag) with the words; “…and that snow”. Ouch!) is expectant of demeanour rather than P
was when I first kissed Kim”. defensive, gentle of temperament, rather than bitter and Q
Adolescent prose aside, this brief fusion of flesh quietly erudite in a non-threatening, non-Radiohead R
meant more than just two badly dressed kids getting it kind of way. Would a true beret owning, deconstructa-
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on in a seedy loft apartment. It meant that Moore would rock svengali admit to loving the Spice Girls? You’ll
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soon tattoo his upper left arm with the prophetic words, find out. But let’s first take it back to the genesis.
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‘Sonic Life’, and the band we all know, and mostly On a fundamental level, I challenge Moore, little has
love would soon follow. Neither Moore (thank god) changed in Sonic Youth land over the last 20 years. He V
nor I, however, have a Sonic Youth history lesson on nods, and smiles. W
the cards today, and we move quickly over the details You still write songs about Patti Smith; “Yep”. X
to greener pastures. (Check out the dissonant-licious ‘Patti Smith Math Y
In short, Moore summarises for the record, they Scratch’ on Moore’s last solo album Psychic Hearts.) Z
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You still aim to transcend the ‘usual’ with your stand- music to be considered a valid musician in my eyes. More A
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ard rock format; “uh-huh”, and a guitar is still not just Some of the most wonderful moments for me musi- B
a guitar right? “Of course”. cally were machine made and plastic.” C
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So, I push on encouraged by such a wonderful, and “You ask me about Matchbox 20, and bands like that, D
compliant beginning to the ‘difficult Thurston Moore and I say what about Matchbox 20? I don’t know much E
interview’, overlooking Moore’s cruelly un-ironic about them, but they seem to me to exemplify a group RSS
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streak: …and what has been your greatest ‘rock’n’roll of people getting off on the sudden rush of making
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moment’ of recent times? rock’n’roll music, and I think that’s wonderful. Maybe Facebook
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“Well, I was watching the Spice Girls movie” Moore I’m wrong, maybe they are something put together by
recalls, turning unpredictable all of a sudden “and when a machine and then plugged in, I don’t know, but they I
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they cover Gary Glitter’s ‘You Wanna Be In My Gang” don’t offend me.” J
I got goose-bumps. It was chilling. When they came Surely corporate punk bands like the Offspring who K
out in those costumes with all the dancers I thought to resort to plagiarising themselves to make hits must of- L
myself, this is as great as the first time I saw Blondie at fend you… M
Max’s. This is as exciting as sitting behind Sid Vicious “It does, they do, and you know what? Forget the N
at CBGB’s right after he lost his mind. I could just see Spice Girls, it’s American Alternative radio stations, O
being an eight-year-old girl, and wanting to be that.” not mainstream rock and pop stations that bug me. P
“At the same time, there was something freakish We’re considered, in a broader sense, ‘Alternative’, Q
about it, and it struck me as this completely total rock but don’t expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and R
thing. God bless them all, that’s what I say. Offspring. Those bands cater to people their age, and S
You’ve often exalted music as a ‘magic’ medium of we’re hardly of that generation. We’re parent rock in
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information, one which is often more than just the sum a way. Musically we’re a lot more extreme and radical
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of it’s parts, does that apply to what happened between than a lot of those bands that seem to cater to the safest
you and the Spice Girls, in that plane somewhere over aspect of Nirvana the verse/chorus/verse thing, which I V
the Atlantic? always found kind of disappointing.” W
“Hmmm, yeah, it kind of relates to my attitude to “That was an aspect of Nirvana’s music that Kurt told X
music other people call ‘clichéd’ or ‘recycled’. In my me he wanted to get away from. So I find it discourag- Y
eyes you don’t need to be so spiritually involved with ing to see all these bands taking this really simplistic Z

element from Nirvana and employing it to their own in this framework is interesting. More A
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success. I don’t really care. I’m not bitter about it,” he “Most people can’t tell now who wrote what, and to B
laughs sensing the heat of his own diatribe, “but it’s make it more confusing, I wrote some lyrics that Kim C
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not very interesting to me. That’s what they’re calling sings, and vice versa. I like that blurring of identities D
punk rock, but to me it’s as prevalent and as annoying within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that E
as disco was in the 70s. There’s this whole underground can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.” RSS
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of lo-fi cassette-label musicians who are really good. How do you respond to detractors when they criticize
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So I like that stuff, but those kids think of us as being your lyrics as “staggeringly pretentious, and meaning- Facebook
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totally over the hill.” less psycho-babble” (NME)?
And also, while Offspring rant about “flys” and “A lot of the lyrical ideas [that run] through Sonic I
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“white guys”, Sonic Youth are singing free-style lyrics Youth and my solo record [Psychic Hearts] do have J
in a stream of consciousness winding well away from a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat K
the mainstream. Is it true that, when you’re working abstracted,” Moore says, unfazed by the quote. “Es- L
with an ambiguous message and the masses, you gotta pecially when you’re writing them. They’re written M
keep ‘em separated? down with just the poetic sense. They have some kind N
“Not always. Our ‘big hit singles’ gave nothing of meaning to you because it’s emotional, so it’s like O
away, but their popularity probably had more to do trying to translate that emotion literally beyond the P
with the music, and the fact that they were ‘weird’ poetic sense of the words. You don’t want to analyze it Q
sounding by contrast. Every now and again, the so much because I just like the abstract nature of it, that R
‘alternative culture’, by way of momentum swing, is it can take on any shape that you might feel it should S
cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than take on.”
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how it should be like the mainstream popular music.” You speak a great deal of poetry and it’s place in
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“Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic music, I’ve often wondered to myself if Sonic Youth’s
Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all album title, A Thousand Leaves isn’t a coy play on V
had a lot of interest and involvement with expression Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass? W
through words, or poetry or whatever. I hardly think “You know, you’re right, and the first person to X
we’re the only people writing lyrics with that frame of pick that up. (Spike blushes) I didn’t want to draw Y
reference or that frame of mind, but our fusion of styles attention myself to the reference, but yes, that indi- Z

visible notion of art and nature is what I was getting something quite different. For this reason I never go More A
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at. It makes me happy when the slightest intentions back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill, B
can be picked up. Whitman is so amazing don’t you instead of listening to our CDs, comes when the bal- C
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think? (Spike nods) There’s a lot of his ‘New Eng- ance I was talking about can be attained. Everyone in D
land Mysticism’ that we aspire to. The way his words the room can have a shared, communal rock experi- E
seem to breathe, and have colour, and shape, and ence. I’m only too happy to be the conduit of it, after all RSS
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texture. As a member of Sonic Youth, and as a solo rock’n’roll saved my soul.”
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performer I’m also playing with the same type of Facebook
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evocation. The same way he improvises with images Thurston’s ‘Throbbing’ 13:
and words, we improvise with sounds and notes.” I
Funhouse – Stooges Twitter
I’ve heard, and seen you spiral upwards, towards J
White Light / White Heat – Velvet Underground
these trance like improvisational jams live the Marquee Moon – Television K
last couple of times, is that Whitman inspiration Blank Generation – Richard Hell & the Voidoids L
pushing you closer to this almost structure-less mu- Ramones – Ramones M
sical energy? Radio Ethiopia – Patti Smith N
“What I’m aiming for all the time when we play live Damaged – Black Flag O
is a balance between the high energy of loud music, Bug – Dinosaur Jr P
and a calm meditational energy you sometimes find at It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back – Q
its core. Recording tends to restrict too much experi- Public Enemy R
mentation, ‘cause when you’re making a record it’s a Impressions – John Coltrane S
part of you, for that time it’s your whole fabric. But Ege Bamyasi – Can T
when we tour the songs, they tend to get more and more Bleach – Nirvana
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expansive, and actually evolve over time until they are Killer – Alice Cooper 
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Ralph Steadman: Gonzo: The Art email

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Craig Johnson talks to Ralph Steadman about the death of Hunter S. Thompson,
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paranoid flashes and the “terrible betrayal” of modern politics RSS
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“One of the reasons he’s fun to work with – he has a he trans-atlantically expresses all the negative facets of
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really fine, raw sense of horror. By way of exaggera- the human condition to a terrifyingly hilarious degree. Facebook
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tion and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is If we think of the old metaphor of the artist’s pen being
not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very a sword, then Steadman’s scribe is nuclear. I
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darkly.” – Dr Hunter S. Thompson, June 1974 Below is an almost verbatim conversation I con- J
One of the many facets that sets Hunter S. Thomp- ducted with Mr Steadman via a phonebox on Kings K
son’s 70s works apart from other forms of classic Street in Manchester city centre. His rumbling Welsh L
American literature are the growling, snarling, punch- accent was full of charisma, his personality very ac- M
between-the-eyeballs illustrations of Ralph Steadman. commodating, meditatory, thoughtful and warm. When N
Roaring from the pages, his pictures visualise the hor- talking about the death of Hunter S. Thompson a real O
rors of corporate America, ripping the surface to reveal sense of bereavement -the only sort that can be when P
the political greed and other grotesqueries that contort a real friend passes by- was prevalent in the tone in Q
and degrade the human forms within his pictures. With which he talked about him. Amidst rush hour traffic R
his method of isolating and focusing on a physical idi- and passing packets of suit-encased, office imprisoned
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osyncrasy, he explodes his subjects, capturing a hidden flesh, the conversation went thus…
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truth that was hitherto unseen; it’s as if Steadman sees You must have been gutted when Hunter S.
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with the naked eye of a schizophrenic. Thopmson committed suicide.
Bloodsucking business men, venal politicians, dol- I always knew he’d do it, but I didn’t know when. V
lar drugged gamblers, archetypal beholders of nega- It was always the case of I always knew that one day W
tion and power transmogrified into grinning reptilia, I would take this journey but I did not know yesterday X
squarking sharp-beaked birds, gorgons of sheer inhu- that it would be today. That’s how it felt and it was Y
man greed. In the ferocious stroke of a few simple lines way too soon. So upset about it. And I knew he’d do Z
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it but I wished he’d just shot his dick off. Something phrase. He wasn’t no pusher. But he couldn’t stand More A
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that would give him pain but have him talk about it, sloppy drunks and he wasn’t a sloppy drunk cos he B
because instead of shooting away the one exceptionally never seemed drunk. C
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wonderful piece of machinery in his body: his brain! Did he ever frighten you? D
The centre of all his being. The centre of his genius Yes, many times in the car. I wrote a song with him E
really. And he is a genius, no doubt about it as for going once called ‘Weird And Twisted Nights.’ One of the RSS
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down as a great, great journalist writer. He didn’t write lines is “Drive your stake through a darkened heart /
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novels, he took William Faulkner’s advice about fact In a red Mercedes Benz / The blackness hides a speed- Facebook
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being far more stranger than fiction. ing trap / The savage beast pretends.” We’d driven …
I mean I just wonder why he did it? You know if only And this was another one of his tricks, he used to like I
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I could have talked to him. Once! Just to say ‘What the to drive at night with his lights out because the police J
fuck! Don’t be daft, Hunter, for fuck’s sake!’ That’s why wouldn’t see him, a starlit night – “The scar heals K
I thought if he’d shot himself in the foot or something black…” There’s a record of it you can get from EMI, L
… But, you see, if you can imagine: in a wheelchair, a it’s called I Like It (1999). M
man of action, a man who always done exactly what What is Gonzo, Ralph? N
he wanted to do, suddenly realising he has no control Gonzo is a strange manifestation of one’s intentions O
anymore and he’s gonna end up in a home with a lot of to go somewhere to cover it (the story) euphemistically P
old people scared him. It’s that thing: ‘In the end it was as a journalist and yet end up being part of the story, Q
no use, he died on his knees in a barnyard with all the not part of the story but become the story. You make R
others watching.’ It’s that indignity he couldn’t stand one, you have to generate some sort of tension, some S
the idea of. oddness, some unexpected freaky thing that makes it
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What was he like as a character? go, ‘Yes that’s it!’
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He could be mean. He didn’t like sloppy drunks, The other thing is there is no accreditation for gonzo
even though he imbibed so much stuff he was just on journalists, so you go there as an outsider. Like we V
another sort of level I suppose. I don’t know how he went to the Miami Convention in the 70s and we had W
carried on like he did. Like he said: ‘I hate to advocate to get inside without accreditation, that was part of X
drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but the target. It’s to be a rock’n’roll journalist. What’s a Y
they’ve always worked for me.’ That’s the well known gonzotic frenzy? Well it’s me in the throes of an ink Z

splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that ‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved’ More A
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particular time. was how it all started, the meeting with Hunter for the B
I like the gonzo logo that HST used for his Sheriff first time … There’s innocence and experience meeting C
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of Aspen campaign. for the first time! The shoeless episode was the second D
That red fist – by the way it’s got 2 thumbs and 4 trip where we went to Rhode Island to cover the Ameri- E
fingers. Have you noticed? Hunter always said to me cas Cup and I was shoeless and luckily I’d kept my RSS
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‘2 thumbs Ralph, don’t forget 2 thumbs!’ It’s the idea ticket and passport home.
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of a freak isn’t it? Anyone with 2 thumbs is obviously I had my ticket back to New York from Rhode Island Facebook
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a freak or a monkey of some kind, a gorilla. And the (Boston Airport) and then I got a cab and got to 42nd
flower in the middle of the palm, the green flower is a Street where the bar was thankfully still open, the I
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peyote drug plant. magazine (Scanlan’s Monthly) had closed and I was in J
Have you taken much peyote in your time? a terrible state and coming down from psilocybin. A K
No. Hunter was the one who enjoyed all that shit. drug trip, which was the one and only trip I ever had L
I’ve taken coca leaves, I’m very fond of coca leaves and that was when I said, ‘Right, drugs are out entirely.’ M
but I can’t get them in England. I tried them in Peru, I enjoy a drink. And I was palpitating, so I borrowed a N
between Cusco and Machu Picchu is a little stop off on quarter from the Irish barman, cos I had no money in O
the train called Olan Taytambo, and there they sell it New York, nothing in a hell of a city! I phoned a lady P
to you with wood ash and you roll the leaf around the friend called Vendetoce who I knew from the Bologna Q
wood ash like rolling a joint or a cigarette. You put it Bookfair. I made the call and she said “I’m just going R
down the side of your gums and just leave it there and out.’ I said ‘Please, don’t go out, stay there till I get S
you don’t suffer from mountain sickness, anxiety or there, please!’ She could tell I was losing my voice and
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anything at such a height which is 13-15,000 feet above she did stay in.
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sea level. I’ve got a wonderful book which is probably When I arrived I was purple with palpitations and
100 years old called The Divine Plant of the Inca (W. she got a doctor right away and he gave me a librium V
Golden Mortimer, 1901) and it’s all about the coca leaf. injection that put me out for about 24 hours. The irony W
Tell me about when you ended up screwed and of all this was that before this happened I put her in X
shoeless in New York City on one of your first as- hospital with a fracture in Italy when we went into a Y
signments with HST… ditch via my car. Imagine how mad she was to speak Z

to me again! Bless her heart. Anyway that proves there Hahahaha!!!! More A
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are good people in the world… How do you get those ideas when you transform B
HST once described you as having a paranoid people in such frightening animal forms? C
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flash within your character. What did he mean? I see if I can make human beings look like reptiles. I D
A sudden desperate fear that everything something see if I can make them look like hideous creatures that E
terrible is about to happen. Because I always thought would not come out of anything but perhaps … turn RSS
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that my heart would stop beating just like that. Bang! a human inside out … take a human being, supposing
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Why? My question was: ‘Why should it keep beating?’ you can sort of like a rubber glove, turn him inside Facebook
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It’s an odd question but at the same time that’s a para- out and then look at it. That’s how it’s really like.
noid flash. Why take it all for granted for Christ’s sake? When I’ve done a drawing like that and I’ve done a I
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So I never did, and then of course I kept thinking about few, I tried to make the person look as though they’re J
the fucking thing all the time you know and now I’ve completely turned inside out and I called him ‘The K
come to terms with it. Touch wood and touch wood Perfect Gentleman.’ L
now even. He (HST) gave me a lovely head, which What’s your idea of a living hell? M
I’ve got on a cord around my neck. Sort of a strange Not really being the slightest bit interested in what N
primitive face and a long thin piece of what looks like it is I’ve done all my life. Not wanting to do it and O
clay or stone. He said: ‘Wear this Ralph, it’ll ward off then not knowing what to do next. That would be a P
evil spirits.’ living hell. I must have a feeling that: ‘Oooh I’m re- Q
Do you see an essential beauty or aesthetic in the ally excited about this!’ The most depressed times I R
grotesque? have is when I just don’t wanna do anything. A living S
There’s an aesthetic even in watching an operation, hell is not being creative, being utterly devoid of any
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there’s an aesthetic in putrefaction. I mean to watch creative impulse whatsoever.
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how things breakdown and there’s a kind of aesthetic Does the new political scene make you shudder
beauty in that. But it doesn’t mean to say you’re be- more than it ever did? V
ing sick, you do see that but you’d rather not watch I can’t be very interested in what are no more than W
it. It’s not ugliness, it’s just a rather unpleasant beauty, PR men. That’s all they are – PR men for a policy, or X
because there’s nothing ugly in nature … I’d love to a new sort of: ‘Oh why don’t we try it this way?’ As Y
be a fly on the wall or to be a fly on their piece of shit! Hunter said of George Bush: he was a message boy for Z

the big boys, the corporate interests in America. That’s We’ll probably get by you know, but I think we might More A
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all he is. And that’s what’s happening over here, we’ve not be able to overcome what which is we’re doing to B
got spin doctors, people that manipulate everything and the planet. You see, nature will do exactly what it must, C
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everything is manipulation. It’s not winning through a and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even D
feeling one has about a person. ‘Wow! I wanna follow its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a E
that person. I’d vote for him.’ Not because you’ve way, we will go. No doubt about it. We seem to think RSS
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heard something spun about him, but because he feels we have some control over this planet. I once saw a
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something. Like you do about Nelson Mandela, you lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and mov- Facebook
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can’t help feeling the guy’s a good man. It’s passion, ing south, which of course will affect the atmosphere
yeah! Something wonderful. Maybe Tony Blair started and us generally, and it’ll happen more and more. And I
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out like that, when we suddenly thought: ‘Wow at last, as the South Pole starts to melt! We were down in J
a fresh air politician!’ The man was clean and then he Patagonia in December and it was such a wonderful K
had his dour man, but nevertheless honest dour Scots- wilderness, just across the water was the Antarctica L
man, Gordon Brown. and I felt: ‘What an extraordinary thing and what puny M
What are the elements in society that piss you pieces of nothing we are!’ I’ve just been doing a series N
right off? of paintings of that area. Look, all in all I’m trying to O
I’m afraid of the ethos of reality TV which pisses me be an artist, the fact that I was a gonzo journalist-artist P
off. It’s not reality television, it’s completely phoney, of a type, met Hunter Thompson and went that way. Q
things that are made up, phoney! It’s not even fiction, That happened. I can’t do anything about that, I’m glad R
it’s contrived bullshit! And celebs that have done noth- it happened. It was like hitting a bullseye first time in S
ing and they have to be celebs and they have to go on America. But I wonder what I’d have done if I hadn’t
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television. It’s a terribly sad culture to develop or to met him?
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pursue and take it further and all in the name of the Was is you that did that famous caricature of
god Mammon. There’s nothing else in it and I just wish Mick Jagger with those over inflated lips or was that V
there were. And I wish that kids weren’t being fed it Gerald Scarfe? W
all the time. The kids are not brought up to have minds Mind you don’t get me mixed up with Gerald Scarfe! X
of their own as individuals. Some do, some break out. I’ve done the Rolling Stones eating each other. Don’t Y
Maybe it’s always been like that but in a different form? worry, because people always say: ‘Ooh I love your Z

Pink Floyd.’ No I didn’t do that! Gerry came up to me just went off into all sorts of weird stuff. More A
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and said: ‘Can you help me? I like your line.’ And so I was thinking of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrustra’ but B
I said: ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my art teacher? that was Strauss. You like Nietzsche don’t you? C
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Leslie Richardson.’ Whose daughter Lucy by the way, Yeah I do. There’s another guy called Max Stirner D
is Lucy from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. They who wrote some very radical things about politics. E
lived in Weybridge and that’s where John Lennon used He wrote a book called The Ego And Its Own. I don’t RSS
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to go into their antique shop with Julian. And John used know whether I can find it here … [Sounds of shuffling
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to come in there and Lucy was always playing with through papers] … Yes he’s German. The Ego And Its Facebook
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lovely old bits of antique jewellery, they were spar- Own, Max Stirner:
kling things and Julian liked them. And that’s when he I
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thought ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, that lovely Question: What does man believe in? J
song. It doesn’t detract that LSD became part of it. Answer: I believe in myself, the answer of the com- K
She was only 47 and I went to her funeral about four mon soldier. L
months ago because she died, and her mother Lesley Question: What is the principal of the self-concious M
said a really nice positive thing to say: ‘She had a good egotist? N
life. I couldn’t stop her dying…’ You know but … She Answer: Change the question to who instead of what O
was in film, she worked on all sorts of things, on Lord and name the individual. Man is the horizon or zero of P
Of The Rings and was doing very well. A lovely lady. my existence as an individual. Over that I rise as I can, Q
And everyone had to drink pink champagne at her at least I am something more than man in general. A R
funeral. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was played somebody rather than a nobody.
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in the church, it was lovely. Stirner dispels morbid subjection and recognise each
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What sort of music have you been into? one who knows and feels himself as his own property,
to be neither humble nor be fobbed but henceforth sure U
The Grateful Dead of course. I loved Eric Clapton.
And Chet Baker the trumpet player. And I loved footed and level headed. A mist of this body who has a V
Dvorak and loved listening to William Burroughs and character and good pleasure of his/her own, just as he W
Allen Ginsberg reading to music. And I’ll even listen has of his/her own. X
to Gyorgy Legeti. I’ll tell you what he wrote was the This is not transcendental generality. This is the Y
theme for 2001. He was a modern composer who then transitory ego of flesh and blood. You and I cannot be Z

reasoned into one, we are separate beings, two separate degruel, about the big baby creature. It’s a tough one. More A
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egos. It is important to be a self-concious ego in a self- I tell you what I’ve just illustrated: Fahrenheit 451, B
conscious self-willed person. This is not self-obsession. which is the temperature at which books burn, and Ray C
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Those who pretend selflessness are constantly acting Bradbury wrote the book 50 years ago, (he’s still alive), D
from self-interested motives but clothing them in vari- and together that’s what I illustrated for him. When I’d E
ous guises. Watch those people closely in the light of done it, he said: ‘You’ve brought my book into the 21st RSS
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Stirner’s teaching and they appear to be hypocrites, full century. Thank you’. Which is the nicest thing to say.
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of good moral and religious plans of which self-interest The book is as important as Nineteen Eighty Four Facebook
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is at the end and the bottom, but they are not aware of and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment,
this. That this is more than coincidence. In Stirner we because it’s about a fire brigade burning books. So that I
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have the political development of egotism, to the dis- they try and stamp out ideas and a group of people get J
solution of the state. The union of free men is clear and together and each of them take it upon themselves to K
pronounced… learn by heart one book before they get burnt. It’s re- L
ally worth a read. I’d say get the book but you can’t at M
Is that boring the shit out of you? Hahahahaha!!!!! the moment because there’s only 451 copies, a limited N
Just that whole thing gets to me because it is about edition. But I’m sure Simon & Schuster or someone’ll O
self and yet you’re not being selfish. You care about do it. He wrote another wonderful book called The Il- P
people. But you want people to be straightforward lustrated Man. To write Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury Q
and honest in reply, if they can help you or you can hired a typewriter and a room for 38 cents a day and R
help them. Surely that’s better! That’s community, he wrote it in 9 days. Try and read the book cos it’s S
that what we’re afraid of doing and we’re killing it. kinda interesting, a definite must to read because of the
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You know, we’re really destroying ourselves because implications of burning every book in the world.
we’re really making the motivating force of anything U
You worked on Private Eye didn’t you?
we do selfish. Really acquisitive in a way that’s really I did in the 1960s. That was when I got involved V
not the point of it. firstly with Punch, but they weren’t really interested in W
If there was one book that you could now illus- social comment, they wanted jokes. And I went to Pri- X
trate, what would it be? vate Eye with a joke called ‘Plastic People’ and Private Y
I think it’s gotta be Rabelais’ Gargantua And Pan- Eye bought it for 5 pounds and said: ‘More power to Z

your elbow!’ And they published it with a double-page Agnew his Vice-President, and his was in the stocks More A
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spread in issue number 11. That was when Willie Rush- being offered pills by Nixon. Who was always B
den was there, Paul Foot, all those sort of people. Do dressed in black. He was wonderful to draw. That’s C
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you know I’m frightened that most of them are dead. when I had my best times in political cartooning. D
Willie’s dead, Paul Foot died. I think it’s something to It became something when we all suddenly felt: ‘This E
do with dying, I don’t know what it is? [Goes introspec- isn’t about domestic things, this is about life and death! RSS
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tive and semi-silent for a second or two] He was a good Our lives are being fucked around!’ Used to anyone’s
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journalist Paul Foot, very strong left-wing old Labour ends, particularly corporate power with Enron and the Facebook
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guy. But never mind, there’s nothing wrong with that, rest. It was the ‘respectable’ companies in Nixon’s time,
he believed in something! who became monsters as time went by, and they ran I
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That’s what’s wrong with them today, they don’t politics and they still do and Bush is merely the bagman, J
really believe in anything, they’re paying lip service the messenger boy for the dark players. I’m not into K
to something. And that’s not belief but something conspiracy theories, but I think they went into Baghdad L
entirely different. Ad-men is what they are absolutely, for all sorts of reasons which are not made clear. And M
advertising a product. ‘We’re selling you this, it’s the way they use the word: ‘Terrorist … Terrorist … N
called New Labour!’ Or bright new Conservatives Terrorist!’ That’s become a mantra or even a trigger for O
[chuckles], I don’t know what they are. People I don’t fear. Mention the word ‘Terrorist!’ in George Bush’s P
know hahahaha!!! voice and it’s something else. We can see through it but Q
Didn’t that style over substance politics start in we can’t do anything about it! R
Nixon’s time or even Kennedy’s? You see that’s what I think is such a terrible, terrible S
The thing about Nixon was that he really believed betrayal, the trust that people have in government.
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… He was just venal. He didn’t realise how evil he The betrayal of people’s good will, good trust that
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was. I think he was a genuine politician but with things are being done for the best and they actually
a remit of his own. A huge, deep belief in his own ARE being done for the best. Perhaps. But people V
fabulous qualities. His dark scowling face made him betray that and let people down and cheat them. To me W
a bogeyman. For a caricaturist he’s a … a gift! I was that almost fits into the same category as crime and X
able to do all sorts of things with him. The light at torture. One of those unforgivable crimes that torture Y
the end of the tunnel. Offering cyanide pills to Spiro is for me…” Z

The sound of exasperation and anger in Ralph’s of the Welsh language, polite regrets that we hadn’t More A
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voice was genuine, a real rage about the dubious world conversed over a pint and an imploration that I follow B
order of our times. Whatever his age, this guy still has and woo a woman who had mistakenly opened the C
email
the growling edge and essential punch that makes him door to the phone-box; sagacious sounds drowned out D
the greatest caricaturist of the modern era. We tied up by passing road sweeps tidying the days litter from E
our conversation with talks about wine, the fact that the floor of Manchester’s premier street of designer RSS
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the British government wanted to eradicate the use shops and parasitical employment agencies. 
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Suicide: David Nobakht: No Compromise email

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Chris Mitchell
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Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David they’ve thrived, and now they are getting as much ac-
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Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide. claim as they used to get abuse. It’s just as well, given Facebook
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I would have loved to have written this book. Very that both Rev and Vega must be getting on towards 60
much a band biography rather than a personal history now – and having seen them live twice at London’s I
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of Suicide’s two members, Alan Vega and Martin Rev, Garage, it’s evident that age won’t stop them from J
Nobakht assembles a wealth of material that traces generating some of the most beautiful and vicious K
Suicide’s genesis. From the first tinkerings with primi- noise you can ever hope to hear. For all their supposed L
tive electronics in the early 1970s, endless confronta- influence on industrial music, Suicide have an intense M
tional, blood-smeared gigs, through to the release of warmth and humanity to their music – even when N
their seminal self-titled debut album – “up there with they’re sonically scaring the crap out of you – which O
the first Stooges or Velvet Underground album” – the is wholly absent from the more po-faced knobtwid- P
extreme reaction they provoked touring with The Clash dlers that came after them. Suicide are still as vital Q
at the height of punk in the UK (one night someone as ever within an increasingly moribund music scene, R
threw an axe at the stage. A fucking axe!), the involve- still outside it even as they become accepted and as-
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ment of Ric Osacek from The Cars who spent a good similated into it.
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chunk of his own popstar earnings on them, through What’s interesting from Nobakht’s book is how
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to their gradual acceptance during the 1990s and their aware of their own position in pop history Vega and
triumphant string of gigs that they’ve been playing Rev are – much of the book is written in their own V
since 1997 to an increasingly enamoured audience – words, and they are reluctant rock stars. Clearly they’re W
Nobakht covers it all, and it’s one of the strangest and quite thrilled at finally getting some recognition and X
most fascinating pop history stories I’ve read. earning some money to support themselves – because Y
Over 30 years, Suicide have not simply survived, despite being hugely influential, no one actually bought Z
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together enough money to get on to the next album, they do live. B
their new success only comes from doggedly sticking Beyond Suicide themselves, No Compromise pro- C
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to what they wanted to do. At one point, Vega talks vides an evocative description of decaying 70s New D
quite poignantly about his 1980s solo career, where he York and the emerging punk scene around Max’s and E
became huge in France of all places, had a major label CBGB’s, mixed up with the artist lofts where Vega and RSS
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deal with Elektra – and then suddenly got dropped. He Rev first hung out and played their first tentative gigs
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admits it felt really painful to be kicked off the label alongside the likes of the New York Dolls. If Vega and Facebook
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after struggling so long to get paid anything for making Rev seem like New York clichés at times – summoning
music – but also reckons it was for the best. It’s not up death, darkness, lust and disgust, all the usual motifs I
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often you hear a musician openly admit he misses the of that city’s music – it’s because they were the ones J
money that a major label brings. helping create that now-overused vocabulary to begin K
Nobakht does a sterling job of chronicling Suicide’s with. And, as several people point out in the course L
rise over 30 years with a cast of thousands describing of the book, others may throw the same shapes or try M
what a huge impact listening to or seeing the band had to adopt the same postures, but very few get near the N
on them – Marc Almond, Henry Rollins, Moby, Michael intelligence that radiates from Suicide’s own sardonic, O
Stipe, Bono (eh?) – among many others. You’re left in sonic howl. P
no doubt about the huge impact they had. There’s the Nobakht himself stays pretty much out of the text Q
received wisdom that the first Velvets album sold very – he doesn’t really talk about Suicide’s own impact R
badly, but that everyone who bought a copy started a on his own life or the process of writing the book – it S
band – and Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain would have been interesting to see a more personal
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says as much about the first Suicide album. People slant at times and some ‘behind the scenes’ comments
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like Marc Almond say it was the second, more heavily on talking to so many pop stars about Suicide’s influ-
produced and disco-tinged Suicide album that actually ence on themselves. Likewise, the personal lives of V
laid the blueprint for many of the one keyboardist, one Alan Vega and Martin Rev remain firmly out of the W
singer synth bands that were to follow – either way, spotlight, which is both good and bad – reading the X
neither album had much success at the time of their book, you do develop a certain affection for them both Y
release. Either way, while Suicide’s records are great, and it naturally leads you to want to know more of their Z

traditional biographical details. On the other hand, their depictions of what came before them and after More A
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maybe it’s just better to preserve the mystique. On a them, makes for a unique perspective on how music B
pedantic note, I bristled at the one word mention of The has changed from doo-wop to rock’n’roll to punk. C
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Sisterhood, a side project from The Sisters Of Mercy More importantly, though, No Compromise is not D
on which Vega guested, as I would have loved to have an eulogy for a band that was great once but is now E
heard more about how that was recorded. The Sisters just playing the circuit cashing in on their reputation RSS
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were huge fans of Suicide, regularly covering ‘Ghost – what’s life affirming about Suicide is that they are a
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Rider’ as a set closer when they played live. band who are still going strong, still experimenting, still Facebook
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Nobakht’s book is definitely an essential for playing. (See a Suicide gig and the only time you might
Suicide fans – it’s perhaps a little too reverential, actually recognise a song is during the encore). While I
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but then, Suicide deserve a bit of reverence after all the audience has changed and become a lot less hostile, J
the shit they’ve been through. (Although there is a Suicide themselves continue doing just what they want. K
hilarious moment when one person describes seeing True, they still don’t sell many albums, but royalties for L
Suicide as “One guy playing a crappy Farfisa badly covers of their songs appearing on soundtracks for The M
and another guy hitting himself with a microphone Crow and The Sopranos have apparently earned them N
and falling down a lot”). Vega and Rev prove to be more cash than their entire 30-year career of record O
fascinating interviewees, unafraid to try and grasp sales. That such unexpected luck should befall Suicide P
for the big ideas when talking about their sound but is a skewed vindication of both their influence and their Q
not taking themselves too seriously either. Their sound – 30 years old, rooted in the past, playing in the R
self-awareness of their place in musical history, and present, still sounding like the future. 
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Damo Suzuki: I Am Damo Suzuki email

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Craig Johnson meets the legendary member of Can who’s too busy
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looking into the future to care much about the past RSS
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Does anybody ever go out on a Sunday night? I’m jewels of rock music’s cavernous domain and discover
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always too knackered to bother most weeks, but this sounds that truly put character into our souls. It’s then Facebook
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particular night was an unmissable opportunity to see we arrive upon people like Suzuki. A longhaired Japa-
an unmissable psychedelic brain feast. I was out to see nese man born in 1950, with a black wispy moustache I
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a space-man from another age, to see the whites of and wisdom resonating from his eyes, Damo Suzuki J
his eyes connect into the stratosphere. This man was was the singer in the German avant-rock band Can K
Damo Suzuki. This space was about one foot when he from 1971 to 1973. His sometimes serene, other times L
strolled on sagely by after a blazing, intense, intimate terrifying spontaneous vocal delivery and the drugged M
and triumphant performance that came from heart of funk, space-age gothic repetition of the band carved a N
what made Can when fronted by Damo, one of the best significant notch onto the draft of modern music. O
bands of the 1970s. His current band is a world wide Bands from The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, The P
collective called Damo Suzuki’s Network. Musicians Coral have all embezzled from the Can archive to in- Q
that Damo has spontaneously hooked up with on his spired effect. Think ‘Fools Gold’ or Metal Box. Shaun R
vocal journey around planet earth. I didn’t say shit to William Ryder even managed to ram-raid Damo’s
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Damo that night. Too wasted to greet the only man that stoned beat style on the Mondays’ early cuts. And
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can say “I am Damo Suzuki” and not be bullshitting. lest we forget The Fall’s classic pageant to all things
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The legend himself was in the vicinity. In the words wonderful with ‘I Am Damo Suzuki’. And if you didn’t
of the Quiet One: It was all too much. It was all too know, it’s even been expressed that Can’s underbelly V
fuckin’ much. of repetitive drum, bass and glacial synth sound laid W
The man who had just walked-on-by was one of those the groundwork for Detroit artists like Juan Atkins to X
genius-like men that we discover when we traverse the invent techno in the 1980s. The influence, importance Y
works of Beatles/Pistols/Nirvana to unearth the deeper and the sheer funked-out bliss of the band Can should Z
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never be underestimated. I just liked to travel and meet other people For that I More A
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I eventually reassembled the means and energy to didn’t have money, I made money on the street when B
speak to Damo Suzuki. It took nearly 12 months and I have nothing in my pocket to go next place. Street C
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to have the world yet a computer between us, but is where you meet people, just any kind of people. D
eventually we conversed. Manchester – The Wires – I was not only playing guitar and singing. I had no E
Melbourne – And Back. plan. I made some time happening, kind of one man RSS
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What situations led you into singing music? And theatre or painting on the street as well.
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how did you develop that unique style? Could you explain how you clicked so perfectly Facebook
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All creative things begin with Zero. Situation of no into the Can sound? How did that perfect transition
information. If you are free, actually you can find many and that naturalness between yourselves happen? I
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ways to express your feeling … It’s much more natural I don’t know if I was flexible enough or them. But J
and no repetition. This is the moment we are together things were sure that we hated any information, we K
with audience in trance. I don’t think it’s unique … we’re didn’t like to create music like everybody else. We’re L
doing what all we can in the moment … TOGETHER. anarchist. So, for everybody it was easy to create some- M
What sort of music do you listen to? Any new thing. When we create sound we started from zero. So, N
bands out there that have sparked your interest? it’s easy thing. Nobody should not be corrected from O
I listen to almost no music deeply. I don’t need much someone. We’re all in same space. P
information. Before I heard Russian classical music of What were the Can years like for you on a per- Q
20th. Jazz before the 70s, and folk music from around sonal level? R
the globe. I’m thankful for all those sound carriers who It’s almost like school days. Some times you see them S
joined NEVER ENDING TOUR project. I get inspira- on a photo and I remember I was together with them.
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tion from them in this music cosmos, which we are He was good in French and he was trying to be good in
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creating. All those young bands/artist who are finding mathematics. He was always clothed in short pants. To
their roots and creating united energy together. look back is a waste of time. I’m 55, already I have to V
You were a street artist in late 1960’s Cologne What see much more in front. My time is not tick tacking my W
was life like? Did you find wisdom on the streets? time. I’m the pig man. I can’t turn my neck to see back. X
I was street artist not only in Cologne. I performed What was the story or reason for your departure Y
in European continent at that time. It was hippy time. with Can? Z

I left Can after being there for 3 years. It was enough work. It must be a huge worldwide collective? How More A
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for me to leave after Future Days. We’re getting well do you find that experience? B
known band, TV’s there, interviews here. I was only Yes, the list of sound carriers are getting long. Some C
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23 years old and much more curious about another life. big cities like London or New York … is really long list D
Are there any new musical releases this year? that I have to perform there for every month some years E
Very soon comes a double CD called HollyAris … I long. And sound carriers who performed once, they like RSS
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mean I’m going to release only doubles in future, except to make it again … I’m crying for happiness. No mat-
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one CD I edited already. It’s nice to have more than ter which musical field they belongs to. Ages, male or Facebook
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two hours of pure instant composed music which will female, Nationality whatsoever. Or long experience as
never be performed again. HollyAris has two location a professional or who’ve never played since 20 years. I
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recorded live. One is in Hollywood another is Paris. As For sound making is not that important all those infor- J
I perform with local sound carriers. CD 1 called ‘Holly- mation you are carrying … .most important is ambition K
wood’ is performed by sound carriers from Los Angeles which brings positive energy. And we become one unit. L
and Japanese guitarist Mandog. CD 2 called ‘Paris’ is Then we can create time and space of the moment. M
performed by sound carriers from France. After they Do you write lyrics, do you map out ideas or is it N
formed a band called FRENCH DOCTORS as they all pure spontaneity? O
found chemistry between them. And they are record- All is spontaneity. P
ing their first record. After this next one is also waiting What are the many languages in your music? Q
to hit … which comes about a couple of months later. Words has no meaning in sound making. I don’t like R
This is named SUOMI. This is completely different… to sing messages while WE are creating together. I’m
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’Hollywood’ brings you a much more Californian air. not leader of the moment creating. Everybody in that
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‘Paris’ brings you male perfume. But this is hard rock room is involved and everybody have own function,
that I don’t have to force their creativity with my words. U
in Sauna. Suomi means Finland. This double CD is one
is recorded at Turku, I guess the second large city in All music instruments has own words, why vocal must V
Finland. And an another recorded in Helsinki. Sound be middle of all? I use my own language mostly … W
Carriers are two German, an American, a Ukrainian which is non-documented language. My word of the X
and a Japanese (me!!!) moment which is used as music instruments. Y
You bring together many musicians via your Net- What channels do you take to get to the place you Z

reach inside when you create your music? ing is high. Audience is honestly … if they like it they More A
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When sound carriers are on the stage, there works a like it. They are not shy to travel for long distances B
magnet field between us and we get chemistry and it to visit and be in our event. Sound carriers who per- C
works. Sound creating is limitless world of time and email
formed with me mail me to perform with them again D
space. You can go to any direction as we find informa- and some of them organise shows with themselves. E
tion at the moment … one can make one music, two Fancy witnessing a musical legend in close mo- RSS
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can make three music. I mean. It’s our conversation tion then? An icon of the psychedelic-punk age?
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and understanding. The man who taught most of our musical masters to Facebook
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Are you aware of the huge influence you’ve had sing? To be able to see the whites of his wise eyes
on bands like The Fall in the UK? Do you get much sing out sweet and formidable odes. “This is the I
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contact from any UK bands? moment” says Damo, “we are together with audi- J
I say it’s not bad they found something about us, they ence in trance.” We’re not talking Phil Collins here. K
had good tastes. I have many contact with UK bands The venue’s Damo and his Network will be playing L
as I perform every time with different sound carriers in are intimate in size, and should capture a certain M
different cities. Mostly young unknown but ambitious incomparable atmosphere if you’ve never seen his N
bands. To make contact is easy today with internet ac- performance before. Don’t exactly walk on glass to O
cess. Internet is the greatest development for years. see this one-off underground superstar, but you could P
In May you are playing major UK cities. How do try crawling. It might be worth it. And if you wanna Q
you find the UK? join him for a psychedelic freakout session then you R
UK is something special. It works well with instant can always have a word with this guy. He’s cool. He’s
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composing. Even small places there’s always carriers approachable.
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who like to perform with me and their quality of play- He’s Damo Suzuki. 
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Swans: Swans’ Song email

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Chris Mitchell on the end of Michael Gira’s intense, undefinable and
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deafeningly loud musical outfit Swans RSS
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The history of music is littered with the debris of those Gira is not a defeated, bitter individual, however.
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who paid dearly for being different. From the Stooges The death of Swans has been for him something of a Facebook
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through to Suicide and the Birthday Party, there are relief – the shedding of 15 years of misconceptions and
countless individuals and outfits who have, in retro- wornout reputations. Like all great bands, Gira hates I
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spect, redefined the shape of music and yet been criti- Swans being categorised, not so much out of petulance J
cally reviled or simply ignored during their own time. as frustration with the refusal of critics to understand K
It’s a classic storyline, part of the mythos of rock’n’roll that a band can be more than one-dimensional. L
– that the culture vultures have to wait until such explo- Ever since Swans emerged from New York in the M
sions of creative rage and violent self-expression have early 80s, they defied description. Albums like Cop N
self-immolated themselves before they dare go near the and Filth were works of unremitting cerebral and sonic O
still-smouldering corpse. Only death makes such music violence which still remain unparalleled, combining P
safe for consumption. the incessant industrial harshness of drum machines Q
On March 15 this year at London’s tiny LA2 venue, with stomach churning bass and howled vocals. R
such a death occurred. Michael Gira, for 15 years a Managing to make it from beginning to end of one of
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self confessed dictator over an ever changing line-up these early records is a voyage you won’t easily forget.
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of musicians, finally brought about the end of Swans. Bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails wouldn’t even
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Ironically, the spectre of death which hung over the feature on the early Swans’ Richter scale. The track
Swans’ final, funereal tour as it crossed from America titles alone – ‘Time Is Money (Bastard)’, ‘Greed’, ‘A V
to Europe drew huge audiences, even as Gira spoke in Screw’ – reflect Gira’s state of mind at the time. “I was W
interviews of the indifference his music had faced dur- a hard-assed, people-hating motherfucker in the early X
ing the last decade and a half. As is usual, only when we days,” he said recently in an interview with Silencer. “I Y
realise what we’re losing do we understand its value. mean I was a pretty violent and aggressive, disturbed Z
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person, so I guess I made music reflected that, but also spired by Gira watching American TV evangelists like More A
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what I wanted from the experience of music was much Jimmy Swaggert who he considered “great rock’n’roll B
more extreme. I wanted the music to destroy my body.” performers”. But while thematically Gira’s concerns C
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That intensity of thought is what has always separat- remained the same – death, love, God, sex, shame, lust, D
ed Swans from the rest of the record-producing world. pain – sonically Children Of God combined the noise E
Given the depths of emotional extremes which their terror of tracks like ‘Beautiful Child’ with Jarboe’s RSS
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early records explored not just lyrically but physically, haunting oboe-backed ballads ‘In My Garden’ and
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it seems utterly fatuous to call Swans a rock’n’roll ‘Blackmail’. The result was a uniquely unsettling al- Facebook
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band. Rock’n’roll is traditionally feel-good music, bum which went against the grain of everything Swans
whereas for a time Swans were the ultimate feel-bad fans had come to expect. I
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experience. Attending their live performances was a That a radical change was happening to Swans was J
health risk, threatening broken limbs and burst ear acknowledged at the end of their live album Feel Good K
drums, and causing various cities’ police across the Now, recorded during the Children Of God tour. After L
globe to literally pull the plug on them, such was their the final track has played out, you hear Gira’s voice M
decibel measurement. Swans live were the ultimate saying “This is a record of a time now gone. Good bye N
catharsis, where the audience would enjoy being soni- and good luck”. It’s a strange and touching inclusion, as O
cally pummelled into a bloody daze and pay for the if Gira was mindful that many Swans devotees would P
pleasure too. neither understand or enjoy the band’s new direction Q
While this all made good copy for journalists, Gira’s and that this was the parting of the ways. R
reasons for producing such music often went un-no- Before the emergence of the next Swans album The S
ticed, lost in the on stage spectacle of abasement. As if Burning World, Gira and Jarboe produced two albums
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aware that his voice was being lost amongst the noise, under the name Skin. Blood, Women, Roses featured
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Gira effected a massive shift in the Swans musical di- Jarboe’s voice scattered over a collection of diseased
rection with the 1987 album Children Of God. With the torch songs, while Shame, Humility Revenge saw Gira V
arrival of his new partner and collaborator Jarboe, Gira move towards narrative lyric writing for the first time, W
had finally met someone of his own strength who made instead of his previous collage approach inspired by X
Swans spread their wings, albeit schizophrenically. The the brute power of advertising slogans. Both albums Y
whole album is drenched in religious iconography, in- reflect Gira and Jarboe at the height of their powers, Z

generating an otherworldly atmosphere through sound on the same epic scale as Children Of God into the 90s, More A
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textures and patterns where their voices and their stark refining and redefining their sound each time. Love B
yet beautiful words could finally be heard. Both were Of Life, White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity, The C
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classic 3am-on-your-own albums – songs which made Great Annihilator – with each album Swans became D
the world feel a little less cold. more isolated from everybody else, pursuing their own E
By comparison, the Swans next album was a positive unique vision. The final Swans album, Soundtracks For RSS
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riot of colour. The Burning World saw Gira and Jarboe The Blind, almost entirely eschewed song structures in
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completely embrace acoustic guitars and even a cover favour of sprawling ambient montages of voices and Facebook
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version of Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’. music. Assembled mainly on computer, it’s as if the
The fact that it was their own release on a major label technology has finally caught up with the vision of what I
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(MCA) caused cries of “sell-out” and Gira has recently Gira and Jarboe wanted to do with the Skin project 10 J
admitted to feeling ambivalent about this period, al- years ago, generating an atmosphere and a space for K
though after hearing tracks like ‘God Damn The Sun’ their words rather than being tied into The Song. L
it’s difficult to see how anyone thought Swans were It’s easy to see why Gira considers the Swans M
somehow making a deliberate bid for heavy rotation on moniker an albatross around his neck – during their N
MTV. Now that all rights to the music have reverted to 15 years of recording, the name Swans seemed to O
his ownership, Gira plans to reissue an edited version define nothing except who Swans *were* rather P
of The Burning World along with numerous tracks that than what they had become – it’s a virtually useless Q
weren’t allowed onto the original album. term of reference. Seeing as Gira is only interested R
But it was from this point that Swans became impos- in producing what he considers worthwhile – to the S
sible to define. Already thrown by their transformation point of physical collapse and financial ruin – using
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from sonic terrorists to subversive acoustic tunesmiths, the same name to try and embrace his wildly differ-
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many people didn’t know what to expect next. Instead ing output makes little sense anymore. Already he
of building a fanbase, Gira had seemingly wilfully de- is at work under a new name The Pleasure Seekers, V
stroyed it with his restless experimentation. Reviewers which promises an all-acoustic intimacy reminiscent W
continually harked back to their early days in order to of Vic Chesnutt, while there is also the Body Lov- X
find something about the band they could understand. ers project which will generate CD length ambient Y
Meanwhile, Swans continued to produce masterworks tracks. Hearing Gira discuss his current listening Z

choices indicates his restless eclecticism: “Every- Chestnutt album is pretty great, too.” More A
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thing from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Despite his unhidden joy at their demise, Gira is B
Pink Floyd and Nico to more recent stuff like Low, undoubtedly proud of Swans. Their website carries C
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Lambchop, Panasonic, Gastr del Sol … I tend to like detailed information about the series of re-releases D
stuff that’s sonically interesting but has some kind of currently planned of Swans material, which he is in- E
emotional intensity to it. In the van I’ll listen to Hank tending to edit and add to. Even in death, Gira doesn’t RSS
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Williams … Howlin’ Wolf is a constant favourite of play by the rules – while Swans may be gone, he
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mine. Big influence on early Swans. I’ve also been refuses to merely reissue each album untouched. They Facebook
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listening to a lot of stuff from Table of the Elements, remain in flux, perpetually changing – a fitting testa-
this experimental label that’s been releasing stuff by ment to a band which always took the risk of refusing I
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Tony Conrad, Faust, Keiji Haino … and that new Vic to remain static.  J
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David Sylvian: The Good Son Vs. The Only Daughter email
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Ismo Santala
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An album of remixes, the nine tracks of The Good The lyrics tell of betrayals, jealousies and break-ups
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Son Vs. The Only Daughter were made by musicians in the family, but seem to give only bits and pieces of Facebook
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handpicked by David Sylvian to shake up the subdued the whole story. On the cusp of transformation, each
sonic architecture of Blemish (2003). Because most of of the personas is unable to accept the past while at the I
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the names of the remixers are not familiar to me, I can same time remaining ambivalent about the future, to J
only go by what I hear. And what I hear is, by and large, the point where even favourable change is expressed in K
impressive. Most of the new songs make good use of wholly negative terms: “There’s a world of disappoint- L
the spareness of the original material, using Sylvian’s ment to be lost”. The hesitancy to face up to the reality M
lyrical richness and strong delivery as the basis for of the situation (“Place a dummy on the roof / Stitch N
adventurous reworkings. him a tongue / Give him proof”) ends in failure, as it O
When he described Blemish as an “impromptu suite must: “Like blemishes upon the skin / Truth sets in”. P
of songs for guitar, electronics and voice”, Sylvian Even if the remix artists allow Sylvian’s voice to stay Q
offered his listeners both a caveat and a challenge. prominent and undisrupted, many of them play freely R
Because despite of the appearance of guitarist Derek with the lyrical content. When he cuts and reshuffles the
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Bailey on a number of tracks, the overall sound of words of ‘Blemish’, Burnt Friedman produces a ver-
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Blemish is more stripped-down and unpolished than sion that is considerably more affirmative and upbeat
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Sylvian’s earlier solo albums such as 1999’s Dead than the original. In contrast, he overdoes ‘Late Night
Bees On A Cake. The nearly 14-minute title track opens Shopping’, the source album’s most playful track, with V
the album and maps out the emotional territory of the the inclusion of a sickly-sweet chorus. W
later compositions. Shimmers and quivers of electronic Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s rearrangement of the vocal X
ambience are broken by bursts of anxious words: “And parts of ‘The Heart Knows Better’ not only uplifts Y
mine is an empty bed / I think she’s forgotten”. the mood of the piece, but the new place of emphasis Z
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allows for consecutive layers of aural textures to be Little We Need To Be Happy’, brings the lightness More A
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introduced easily into the mix. ‘How Little We Need and hopefulness of the song to the foreground. It is B
To Be Happy’ by Tatsuhiko Asano reveals the pop song not the case that these qualities are something Sylvian C
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well hidden in the caustic original. The remixer hasn’t attempts to deliberately obscure; rather, he reserves D
needed to rethink the lyrics, but instead has built the the sudden brightness until the moment its impact E
celebratory orchestration around the voice. The result can be greatest. In the image of an immense forest RSS
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is a revelation, as if the Blemish version were only a which suffers the loss of single trees, Sylvian has
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rough draft waiting for Asano’s input. hit upon a fittingly spacious metaphor for emotional Facebook
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Yoshihiro Hanno’s ‘The Good Son’ tops the original unrest:
by placing the rank lyricism within a less tense musical I
There’s a fire in the forest Twitter
structure, while still leaving much of Bailey’s guitar J
work intact. In addition to the intro and outro atmospher- It’s taking down some trees K
ics, Akira Rabelais applies numerous subtle touches on When things are overwhelming L
his rendering of ‘Blemish’. The two variations of ‘The I let them be M
Only Daughter’, on the other hand, are solid rather than A measure of The Only Daughter’s success is that the N
mesmerizing. In Ryoji Ikeda’s piano-driven piece, the album allows the listener to return to the source with O
voice and music seem to flutter at a distance from one fresh ears. The pulsating electronics and erratic guitar P
another, whereas the second variant by Jan Bang and plucks of Blemish become the crackle and crumple of Q
Erik Honoré sets them in the same groove. burning leaves. In turn, the energetic overabundance of R
The remix of ‘Fire in the Forest’ by Readymade The Only Daughter sounds like new vegetation push- S
FC, like Friedman’s ‘Blemish’ and Asano’s ‘How ing itself overground from the ashen soil.  T
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David Thomas [Pere Ubu]: Stuart Walton: Out Of It 529 F
“I never volunteer information” 513 G
Alan Warner: Existential Ecstasy 531 Facebook
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A Real American Patriot 517 Belinda Webb: Justified Anger 535 Twitter
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Irvine Welsh 538 K
Hunter S. Thompson:
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Fear And Loathing 519
Irvine Welsh / Harry Gibson: M
Colm Tóibín: Expletives Deleted 539 N
The Story Of The Night 523 O
Irvine Welsh:
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Amos Tutuola: You’ll Have Had Your Theatre 541
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The Palm-Wine Drinkard 525 R
Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner:
Queerspotting 545 S
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Irvine Welsh: Filth 554 U
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The White Stripes: Elephant 556
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Tony Wilson: Fourth Time Lucky 558 X
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David Thomas [Pere Ubu]: “I Never Volunteer Information” email

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Craig Johnson talks to Pere Ubu’s David Thomas
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Think of alternative rock in the 1970s and we im- character created by 19th-century French playwright
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mediately think of The Ramones, Talking Heads, Alfred Jarry? How many bands before them insisted Facebook
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Television as the major musical forces in those heady on having no group photos on their record sleeves?
times. An under-rated band of that much pillaged and And however unshocking, an early Rocket From The I
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productive scene were underground rockers Pere Ubu Tombs tune mouthed the word “cunt” on ‘Ain’t It Fun’. J
– subterranean innovators of the new-wave/post-punk Not many bands did that in 1974. But it’s something K
elementary division. other that sets Pere Ubu apart; something alien, almost L
Along with new-wave band Devo, Pere Ubu had dangerous, ironic and fascinating that lurks within their M
thrashed on the fringes of Cleveland, Ohio’s music out-of-shape yet tight as metal song structures; those N
circuit for a few years in the guise of Rocket From purely dynamic slabs of fury that present apocalyptic O
The Tombs. Lead singer David Thomas had formed landscapes, stellar production and emotions of insanity P
RFTT in 1974 with guitarist Peter Laughner, who that burn your ears out. They dealt in human extremes Q
died of acute pancreatitis or the plain ravages of but were never unlistenable. Singles ‘30 Seconds Over R
rock’n’roll in 1977. After a few years of finely tutor- Tokyo’ (1975) and ‘Final Solution’ (1976) are songs
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ing their school of garage nihilism via Stooges cov- years ahead of their time with an inventive attitude
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ers, RFTT had distanced themselves from the usual that current heavyweights like Radiohead and Franz
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industry career path. With the addition of bass player Ferdinand have just about caught up with a quarter of
Tom Herman, drummer Scott Krauss and keyboard- a century later. First album The Modern Dance (1978) V
ist Allen Ravenstine, RFTT metamorphosed into now stands as a landmark album in that the dubby, W
Pere Ubu. droned out bass-lines and off-kilter sounds were un- X
Something sets Pere Ubu apart from other bands. like anything hitherto produced. (Well, except perhaps Y
For a start how many bands name themselves after a Captain Beefheart.) Z
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An opening song being called ‘Nonalignment Pact’, We have always concentrated on making good mu- More A
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and, as Julian Cope described it, “a classic ‘girl’ song sic. If you make good music people will search you B
with the most Stooged-out riff”, just says it all. Tho- out. Maybe not lots of them. But some. As well we C
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mas’s voice could shriek and whisper, the bursting have always been laissez-faire perfectionists. Seeking D
guitars sounded like M16 gunfire and the cover looked success distracts from the principal function of a mu- E
like utopian propaganda created in Lenin’s Russia. sical group. It offers up temptations to deviate from RSS
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Follow up album, the just as inventive Dub Housing a proper course. I have nothing against ‘success’ – I
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(1978), loosened up the extremes, slowed down the de- love the process of the market in fact – but not at the Facebook
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livery; but equally sounded as though recorded between cost of vision.
Cleveland’s skidrow and the volcanoes of Java and is You’re playing in London with members of Sun I
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widely regarded as their masterpiece. They continued Ra Arkestra and Wayne Kramer. What’s your in- J
in the following decades to release challenging records, volvement with the event? K
all soaked in that American underground experience Wayne is a friend and played a show as a member of L
that makes them a great, almost undiscovered band Pere Ubu a few years ago. I suppose he is ‘repaying’ the M
and a perfect medicine against the corporate crap of compliment. He asked me to guest with the MC5 and N
mainstream music. Arkestra. I am doing ‘Starship. It’s a great honour and O
David Thomas is still lead singer in Pere Ubu, and in I am excited to do it. P
recent times he’s additionally created three albums and Why the transition from Rocket From The Tombs Q
plays live with a band he calls David Thomas and Two to Pere Ubu? R
Pale Boys. Still crossing boundaries and staying true to Because RFTT flew apart and I had ideas I wanted S
his art with the stance that originally set the band apart, to pursue.
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I managed to ask him a few questions that I’ve always When I hear 60s garage hits, I hear some kinda
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wanted to find answers for. Important things, trivial semblance of the Ubu style. What US punk bands of
things. Here’s what I found out about his work, his at- the 60s were you inspired by? V
titude and other stimulating or meaningless details. We were always into the American garage punk of W
I’ve been reading the Pere Ubu manifesto which the 60s. You have to remember we grew up listening X
I find interesting. Things like ‘Don’t seek success’. to all that stuff on the radio. That was what was on Y
What’s the idea behind messages like that? the radio. All that stuff was hits. Very big influence Z

on Pere Ubu along with Velvets, Stooges and MC5. they could make it, and then somehow get back to More A
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Our first engineer and father of our current engineer, America from the other side of the world. Most died. B
Ken Hamann, was the engineer for songs like ‘No- It must take a lot of balls to sing in such unique C
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body But Me’, ‘Time Won’t Let Me’, ‘Green Tam- style. Where has it all come from? D
bourine’, all the early Terry Knight stuff, Bloodrock, It comes from not having a good voice, being tone- E
James Gang, etc. deaf and not knowing what I was supposed to do. I RSS
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Any British bands that have had a profound ef- became the singer because the guitar I bought in order
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fect upon you? to become the guitarist hurt my fingers. So I decided Facebook
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Profound? Probably not. Richard Thompson was to be the singer. I had NEVER sung and I couldn’t hit
a big influence on the early 70s scene as were Soft any notes – I really am tone-deaf. So I had to figure I
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Machine, Pink Floyd (early), Incredible String Band. it out. What I figured out was that music also existed J
Some guys were really into Kinks and Pretty Things. as a spatial and temporal complex so I worked out K
Eno, of course. Kevin Ayres. John Cale. how to use those elements to communicate a story in a L
The track ‘30 Seconds Over Tokyo’ seems pro- musical way that had a semblance of melody. I create M
phetic in its resonance. What were you trying to a phrasing that makes use of those elements, engages N
express in that song? the instrumental elements, and it all somehow comes O
It was a dramatic story of heroism and a book out okay. At least after a couple initial years of trial P
that EVERY school boy read – Doolittle’s suicide and error. That was part of my frustration of singing in Q
raid on Tokyo in 1942 just 2 months after Pearl RFTT – I didn’t know how to handle not being able to R
Harbor. A good choice for our cinematic approach. hear myself. Also in RFTT I sang other people’s songs S
Brief synopsis. US needed to strike a propaganda which I didn’t really understand so I didn’t know how
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blow against Japan right after Pearl Harbor and to to construct them according to my methods and I knew
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suggest to Japanese leaders that they were not safe I sounded bad. As well I have no method to remember
from retribution. Stripped down a flight of B-25s what I sing, i.e. a melody. That’s why every time I sing V
of everything but a few bombs and launched them a song it varies to a greater or lesser extent. That’s why I W
off a carrier which they’d never be able to return to mostly only do material I write with musicians I know. X
(fuel) or land on (size). The plan was to drop bombs The artwork you’ve used on record sleeves is a Y
on Tokyo harbour sites and crash land in China if fantastic portfolio. What’s behind that? Z

Almost all our artwork has been designed by my best Raymond Chandler. More A
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friend, John Thompson. A lot of the pictures were by Any final nuggets of wisdom that you’d like to offer? B
Mik Meilon – friend from the Plaza. I discuss some I never volunteer information. C
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ideas with John and give him the title. He comes up with All the greats have an edge, a certain intelligence D
an idea and we bounce it around a little. The idea was to and David Thomas seems to be one your more cerebral E
do artwork that was more than a self-aggrandizing ego rock’n’roll musicians; so you can get away with asking RSS
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thing – note we never put our pictures on the albums questions like that. And the line ‘If you make good mu-
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except for Tenement Year which we only did because sic people will search you out’, seems to be more than Facebook
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we had never done it. We break even our own rules. enough wise advice that you usually hear from your
The artwork needs to set a mood that cooperates with average rocker. Ubu fit into that cult category of being I
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the intentions of the music. a band that made people want form their own bands. J
What new records do you have in the pipeline? They were dangerous. Scuzzed out. Angular. Violent. K
About to start writing a new Ubu. Writing with Everybody in a rock band should listen to them. All L
Cheetah for possible RFTT album. Working on a 2 Pale the best ones already do. Any UK gigs would sell out M
Boys live album. Compiling Director’s Cut editions of in instant, although no future dates are confirmed; but N
RGS and PA. More movie soundtracks for ICFOS and with an Ubu record in the making, the live experience O
X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Compiling 18 Monkeys is on some distant horizon. The meantime can offer P
– The Film soundtrack. the opportunity to look for new bands that dare stretch Q
What writers do you like? those anarchic, outward boundaries set by Pere Ubu.  R
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Hunter S. Thompson: A Real American Patriot email

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Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters
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I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log Because Hunter S. Thompson Got It.
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in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter He saw the world as it truly is, and the drugs and Facebook
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S. Thompson is dead. guns and women were just a way to temporarily escape
Distraught isn’t the word. that. (Hence the famous Samuel Johnson quotation that I
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Thompson was forever sidelined as a caricature in prefaces Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – “he who J
the last couple of decades, a victim of his own myth- makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being K
making, the crazy old bastard on the hill permanently a man”). Similarly, they are incidental to his work, not L
altered, packing guns and delivering apocalyptic pro- the core of it. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas may M
nouncements on the rare occasions he could bring be a depiction of a drug-crazed doomed sojourn in Sin N
himself to look at a typewriter. Loaded magazine got City, but it is also what it says on the cover: “A savage O
to the point where they were interviewing him every journey into the heart of the American Dream”. P
six months, just so another bunch of wannabe fanboy That was what Thompson chronicled for four dec- Q
journalists could make the pilgrimage to Woody Creek ades. He was first and foremost a political journalist of R
in Aspen, Colorado and meet the man. the highest calibre. Read the first journalism collection
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I periodically had a silly little fantasy of making The Great Shark Hunt or his penultimate, Kingdom Of
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that pilgrimage myself one day and spending some Fear – Thompson sees America through unmasked
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time shooting guns with the good Doctor. Yes, it’s eyes, and as a true American patriot, he despairs of
embarrassing to admit and possibly even more so to what he sees. And he has the guts to say so. Calling V
read, but the point is, Hunter S. Thompson was one President Bush a “whorebeast” in print was funny, but W
of those writers who changed your perception of the Thompson meant it with deadly sincerity. He consid- X
world. Irrevocably. So much so that you’d want to ered Bush worse that Nixon. There was no worse ac- Y
meet him just to check he was real and shake his hand. colade he could award. There’s no irony involved with Z
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Thompson – there’s buckets loads of bleak and twisted and intervention – or the lack of it – is what fuelled all More A
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humour which certainly makes him the funniest writer of his work throughout his writing career. He wanted to B
of the 20th century in my opinion, but Thompson meant be proud of America and for America to truly live up to C
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all of it. the ideals it has ascribed itself. For all the perception of D
And this is what it comes down to. Hunter S. Thomp- Thompson’s “outlaw” status and frequent brushes with E
son was a consummate hellraiser and we loved him for the law, Thompson was a deeply moral man, concerned RSS
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it. But that’s not what made him such an enduring, im- only with the destruction of his own country by greed
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portant figure in American letters. His perception of the and avarice. Facebook
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collapse of America’s moral values both at home and Farewell then, HST. Your passing means one less
in its projection into the world through foreign policy strong voice of sanity in these Satanic times.  I
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Hunter S. Thompson: Fear And Loathing email

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Nathan Cain reflects on the journalistic legacy of an elderly dope fiend
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I found Hunter S. Thompson by accident. I was looking Prohibition Party was one of the most scabrously funny
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through the stacks at my local public library, searching pieces of work I had ever read. It was a wonderful tale Facebook
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for something, I don’t remember what, when I read the of possibility gone horribly awry, and by the time I was
title Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on the spine of an finished with it I had a lot of questions. I
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orange paperback. It sounded vaguely familiar, so I took Who was this lunatic Thompson? Why hadn’t I heard J
it off the shelf. The cover featured a cartoonish drawing of him before? Why was this book classified as nonfic- K
of a man in a Hawaiian shirt with a long cigarette holder tion? Was it humanly possible to behave that badly and L
and a suitcase, looking very guilty about something. A live to tell about it? M
jacket blurb by Tom Wolfe called the work I held in my Thompson was in the right place at the right time N
hand a “scorching epochal sensation.” (Which is, in my and he did the right thing, clamping down on a raw O
opinion, the finest jacket blurb in the history of jacket nerve in the American psyche like a cranked crazed P
blurbs. Congratulations Mr Wolfe.) I was intrigued, so Gila monster, suffusing the collective consciousness Q
I opened the book and read the infamous first sentence, with his own particular brand of poison. In the proc- R
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of ess he became the most celebrated, or at least most
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the desert when the drugs began to take hold…” I had notorious, journalist of his era. Thompson’s poison
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found exactly what I had been searching for. still runs through the veins of America, and by exten-
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I was a 17-year-old high school student at the time sion the rest of the world, whose different regions, in
(an appellation which held the same appeal for me as varying degrees, are subject to regular transfusions V
terminal cancer patient) and the tale of a sportswriter of American culture. Thompson’s trademark phrase W
and his crazed 300lb. Samoan attorney on a drug binge “Fear and Loathing” and its various permutations X
so foul and extreme that it would have turned the most (fear and losing, fear and loaning, fear and loading…) Y
dedicated libertine into a card carrying member of the have become clichés. He inspired Gary Trudeau to Z

create his famous ‘Uncle Duke’ character in Doones- off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depres- More A
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bury, and Spider Jerusalem, the main character of sion that still endures.” B
Warren Ellis’ fine comic book Transmetropolitan, is Indeed, it is worth noting that The Great Shark C
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obviously inspired by the good Doctor. Hunt is dedicated to none other than Richard Milhous D
Back in the early 70s when his fangs were still sharp Nixon and that in the introduction he writes, “I feel like E
no one could draw blood like Thompson. There is no I might as well be up here carving the words for my RSS
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reason for me to write that Vegas and Fear And Loath- own tombstone … and when I finish, the only fitting
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ing On The Campaign Trail ‘72 are seminal works, exit will be straight off this fucking terrace and into the Facebook
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many people have said it many times and there is no Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in
point in dwelling on it now. the air and across Fifth Avenue. No one could follow I
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Thompson was a creature of his times. He thrived and that act.” J
grew on the possibilities of the 60s and turned viscous One of the great literary ironies of the century that K
when cornered by the reality of the 70s. He rose and fell just ended may be that Thompson has lived long L
with Nixon, running out of steam when his favourite enough to fade away and not met the sort of spectacular M
villain was finally run out of town. Thompson’s own end which he imagined for himself. Thompson himself N
description of Nixon’s ignominious departure after his has publicly recognized the awkwardness of his situ- O
resignation, which can be found in his article ‘Fear and ation in the introduction to his first volume of letters, P
Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises,’ reprinted in The Proud Highway, when he writes of pretending to Q
The Great Shark Hunt, is surprisingly joyless. Thomp- be dead while his old correspondence was brought to R
son writes: light, and again imagines a spectacular end for himself, S
“The end came so suddenly and with so little warning this time a high speed motorcycle wreck.
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that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White With the publication of his first volume of letters,
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House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that and the subsequent publication of The Rum Diary,
the scumbag has been passed to what will pose for now which was billed as “The Long Lost Novel,” but was V
as another generation. The main reaction to Richard none of those things Thompson seemed to prove that W
Nixon’s passing – especially among journalists who he is content to sit back and watch as the sort of works X
had been on the Deathwatch for two years – was a wild that generally get published after an author’s death hit Y
and wordless orgasm of long awaited relief that tailed the market. Z

In the last month two new Thompson titles have The beginning of America finds Thompson in a post More A
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hit shelves. The first, Screwjack, isn’t even really a Hell’s Angels funk that lasts for over 300 pages. During B
book, coming in at 59 pages, with rather large print. that time the Doctor wrestles with unfinished articles, C
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It begins with a piece written during Thompson’s a book contract, and attempts to find a new direction to D
first encounter with mescaline (‘Mescalito’ is also take in the New Journalism. E
reprinted in Songs Of The Doomed) , which would At times, especially during its first third, is tedi- RSS
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become his drug of choice, and it only gets less un- ous. No one, especially someone who writes, wants
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derstandable from there. The second piece is the tale to read about another writer’s lack of direction, no Facebook
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of a doomed gambler, and the third, the infamous title matter how much he or she respects that particular
piece, is almost too bizarre for words, dealing with writer. Thompson spends a lot of time agonizing over I
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a love affair between Raoul Duke and Screwjack the a book he is supposed to write about “The Death of J
cat. Interesting, but probably not worth 15 dollars, the American Dream,” As it turns out, Thompson K
unless you are the type of person who simply must considers Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas a side L
have this sort of literary curio. project, and not his American Dream book, which M
The second book, Fear And Loathing In America, posterity has shown it to be. N
Thompson’s second volume of letters, is, unlike As the book progresses, however, it becomes more O
Screwjack, a must read. This book, the penultimate interesting, showing Thompson’s creation of his public P
volume of a projected three volume set is, if you are persona, the character on the front of the paperback edi- Q
going to buy one, the one to buy. Fear And Loathing tion of Vegas trying to sneak out of a hotel with a suit- R
In America reprints Thompson’s correspondence from case full of drugs and some serious unpaid bills, and the S
1968, after the publication of his first book, Hell’s subsequent discomfort that Thompson suffered when
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Angels, through 1976, when the Great Gonzo Legend he became forever confused with one of Ralph Stead-
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had become fully established. man’s drawings. F&L in America shows Thompson for
The letters themselves aren’t as interesting as the ones what he really was, a workaholic writer with a brutal V
found in The Proud Highway, but that is to be expected. sense of humour who has an affinity for recreational W
During the years covered in Thompson’s first volume of drug use, and not a full-time addict who occasionally X
letters he was, for the most part, unemployed, and had became lucid enough to write articles. Y
more time to dedicate to his personal correspondence. The most interesting disclosure in the book is the fact Z

that Thompson was not on drugs when he sat down to as saying that “at least” 45 percent of what he writes More A
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write Vegas. In a letter to his Random House editor Jim is true, and becoming incensed when Gary Trudeau B
Silberman, who stated that he did not think Thompson debuts his ‘Uncle Duke’ character in Doonesbury. C
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was on drugs, Thompson casually admits to being so- Reading this collection, one can’t help but get the D
ber, but asks Silberman to hold his piece on the matter impression that Thompson was feeling pressure to E
because the people at Rolling Stone (where Vegas was keep up an act that no one could follow, and that the RSS
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first published) were absolutely convinced that he had publication of his letters is a way to once and for
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engaged in “a ranking freakout.” all to answer any questions anyone might still have Facebook
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A couple of years later Thompson feels quite dif- about the ‘real’ Hunter S. Thompson so that he can
ferently about the image he put out there in Vegas, live out the rest of his life free from the compulsion I
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complaining bitterly when he is misquoted in Esquire to do himself in a suitably dramatic manner.  J
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Colm Tóibín: The Story Of The Night email

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Peter Robertson
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Short-listed once again for the Booker Prize, this year of The Story Of The Night spans the genocide waged by
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for The Master, about the life of closet-gay novelist the military junta, the gung-ho nationalism of the Falk- Facebook
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Henry James, Tóibín has become even more of a name lands war and Argentina’s phoenix-like regeneration
in Britain. But his hopes were dashed a second time – after wholesale privatization. In spare and fluid prose, I
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in October that country’s most coveted literary prize Tóibín explores Garay’s cultural duality (Argentine but J
was awarded to rival gay writer, Alan Hollinghurst, for of English descent) and charts his meteoric rise from K
his novel, The Line Of Beauty. jaded English teacher to full-fledged yuppie. Befriended L
While Hollinghurst specializes in evocations of the by undercover CIA agents, Susan and David Ford, and M
effete English aristocracy, Tóibín’s trademark is gloom. bedecked in Italian designer suits, he even gets the man N
This tendency is showcased in his novel, The Story Of he desires – the handsome son of a wealthy senator – O
The Night, inspired by his experiences in Argentina. As who leaves home to live with him in a dream penthouse P
a journalist, Tóibín visited Buenos Aires to cover the down by the river. Garay has everything he has ever Q
trials of the Generals who had ‘disappeared’ thousands wanted, so why not leave it there? R
of civilians in the early 1980s; but on humid sum- True, he later goes haywire during a trip to New
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mer nights, crazed with desire, he cruised a cityscape York where he snorts cocaine and ends up as the sexual
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charged with sexual expectation. plaything of a seedy public relations executive. Tóibín
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Tóibín was exposed mercilessly to the self-denial could have glossed over such aberrations but is deter-
of ‘machismo’ – the gay men he met, married or with mined that these should be milestones on the road to a V
girlfriends, boasted that no one would ever know their pitiless nemesis. Even worse, by the end of the novel, W
real orientation. This is not the case with the novel’s the novel’s four most important gay characters (Garay X
protagonist, Richard Garay, who comes out to his and his boyfriend included) have been poleaxed by Y
mother – she expresses “utter contempt”. The narrative AIDS. In an image that will delight many homophobes, Z
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any prospect of happiness is bequeathed to two young, Scudder does not get arrested, or hang himself, or go to More A
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sturdy and heterosexual youths glimpsed raising the Buenos Aires”; but adds that he finds the ending unsat- B
sails of a boat by the ailing lovers. isfactory, admitting that he feels compelled to represent C
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Stating that his priority as a writer is to “hold the mir- gay lives as tragic. Here Tóibín has bedfellows as D
ror up to nature”, Tóibín has compared himself with the distinguished as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin who in E
artist Vermeer. But far from being a faithful chronicler, The City And The Pillar (1948) and Giovanni’s Room RSS
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Tóibín is a gloom-monger. Belying the novel’s message, (1956) produced novels of gay self-loathing which
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most gay men do not die of AIDS and these days the end in murder and self-destruction; but both writers Facebook
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claim of a critic like Joseph Epstein, made as recently produced these works pre-Stonewall. Tóibín – who has
as 1970, that gay lives are “part of the pain of the earth” erupted onto the literary scene at a more enlightened I
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is absurd. The distinguished Cambridge novelist E.M. moment – has fewer excuses to peddle such misery. J
Forster was determined that his novel Maurice should So any chance of this latter-day Jeremiah trading in his K
end on a note of affirmation. gloom? Not if an interview he gave to LIT is anything L
In a recent review, Tóibín wrote: “There is something to go by: “You want loss and longing? You’ll get loss M
heroic about Forster´s refusal in Maurice to insist that and longing. I’ve only just started”.  N
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Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard email

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Jason Weaver
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Aside from the transmogrified strangeness of folk and against one another, disrupting the coherence of nar-
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fairy tales, Amos Tutuola’s 1952 novel The Palm-Wine rative singularity through which most novels stage Facebook
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Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebu- their rhetorical arguments. Fantasy stories, on the
lous comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Meta- other hand, often unwittingly flout their own narrative I
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morphoses, Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice In coherence. The Lord Of The Rings wants it both ways. J
Wonderland, but things behave very differently from We are expected to surrender to the dramatic tension K
even these European gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight of classic narrative logic, where everything is at stake, L
world. I know nothing about the author’s own relation- where every act is terminal and can never be undone. M
ship to Nigerian culture. I would rather meet him as a The logic of Oedipus Rex is inexorable, the “infernal N
stranger on the road, enchanting and a little spooky. machine” as Cocteau called it. But when Frodo lies O
What everyone knows is that David Byrne and Brian dying in The Lord Of The Rings or as the Hobbits are P
Eno named their album of bricolage and technological surrounded by malevolence, the emotional charge is Q
tribalism after Tutuola’s second novel My Life In The defused. A spell is invoked, time is reversed, the slate R
Bush Of Ghosts. Both claimed they had never actually is wiped clean. This is as incompatible with relentless
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read the book, but it would have been a wholly appro- narrative as Pynchon’s and the fantasy story fails on
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priate influence on Byrne’s ‘stop making sense’ lyrics both counts.
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and the circuit- breaking Eno. What is so vital about The Palm-Wine Drinkard is
Every novel simulates a compact universe. It sets the Tutuola’s absolute dedication to the fantastic. All laws V
rules by which that existence operates and, to be suc- of the probable are flouted and everything is elastic. W
cessful on its own terms, it must adhere to these tacit Details are hasty and sketched and sentences often end X
laws. As an exception, Thomas Pynchon’s V exploits with a blunt “etc”. Things are most often described by Y
this by setting two wholly incompatible universes the elements that mark them out, make them what they Z
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are. For brevity, places and things are named by their tails are the organizing DNA rather than psychological More A
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description: “The Red-People in the Red Town” or, depth or moral reckoning. What is the ‘use’ of a fairy B
rather wonderfully, “The Skull as a Complete Gentle- tale? The briefest glance through the Brothers Grimm C
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man”. The latter is a bare cranium that hires body parts or Calvino’s collection of Italian stories will demon- D
and a nice suit and poses in the market place as a kind strate that ‘happy ever after’ is only one strand of many E
of Bryan Ferry in order to lure pretty young women. different outcomes. Often stories will take delight in RSS
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Events are compressed, time collapses, a decade passes punishing the hero. These seem to be stories told for the
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in a sentence. It is, appropriately, a drunken logic. sake of telling, for the sake of variation, imagination Facebook
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The plot, such as it is, follows the eldest of eight chil- and invention. Like turn of the evolutionary dice, folk
dren. His “work”, as he puts it, is to drink palm-wine. tales are always tweaking the seeds. I
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He is an expert and drinks 225 kegs of it a day. He Tutuola’s writing seems inherited from an oral back- J
cannot even drink plain water any more. The drinkard ground. It shares the same splashy colour, the incredible K
is supplied by a tapster who falls fatally from a tree and, and the memorable. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is an in- L
because nobody can tap palm-wine as well as this char- tensely visual story, a vivid engagement with the imagi- M
acter, the narrator sets off for Deads’ Town to find his nation. One impossible to convey in any other medium, N
posthumous incarnation. On the way, the drinkard finds even anime. The sparseness of descriptive detail works O
up a wife, uses all kinds of juju and meets incredible on the reader, like a parasite working on the cortex to P
characters such as “The Invisible-Pawn”, “The Hungry- produce vivid hallucinations. One imagines Burroughs Q
Creature”and “The Faithful-Mother in the White Tree”. enjoying Tutuola’s magic. All other art forms would be R
Inside the White Tree is a kind of hotel-cum-hospital too literal, filling in the spaces that Tutuola is able to S
with a great ballroom. Scale is immaterial in the bush. exploit. How would cinema, for example, deal with the
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It is like a mutilated episode of In The Night Garden or great and elusive time span of this novel, expanding
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an adventure from The Mighty Boosh. and contracting as it does?
The transmission of folk tales follows evolutionary The Palm-Wine Drinkard is mischievous. That the V
principles. Oral traditions enforce that each retelling of journey fails in its original purpose is barely given W
a story will mutate it according to personal and local consideration and there is little in the way of moral X
bias and that the most mnemonic elements will carry resolution at the book’s abrupt ending. At one point Y
from one teller to the next. Fantastic and grotesque de- the narrator must act as a court judge on the hilarious Z

and inspired case of a man who borrows money for a RIBLE CREATURES IN BAG”). These stylistic tics More A
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living. He puts great pride into his work. When a debt give the novel an even greater personality and (to this B
collector comes to claim a pound back off him, the bor- reader) more mystery and vitality. The recognized C
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rower kills himself rather than fail in his occupation. elements of the western novel – narrative resolution, D
The collector himself has great pride and kills himself ethical dialectics and psychological mapping – are E
to follow the debt into heaven. A curious bystander, not considerations of such writing. Unlike The Lord RSS
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who has witnessed this great contest of wills, also stabs Of The Rings, there are no appeals to sentiment or
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himself in order to see the final outcome. On the cases emotional identification. Therefore, no agenda of Facebook
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he presides over, the narrator defers judgement as long good and evil. Similarly, literary decorum is absent.
as he can, offering an appeal to the reader: Tutuola’s style is both loose and terse and reads as I
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“so I shall be very much grateful if anyone who spontaneous. This is both exciting and somewhat J
reads this story-book can judge one or both cases and disorientating, which befits a picaresque journey K
send the judgement to me as early as possible, because through strange, strange territory. Tutuola’s bush land L
the whole people in the ‘mixed town’ want me very is a place of magic, where all the roads have ended. M
urgently to come and judge the two cases”. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is our guide. N
Towards the end of the story, the narrator is able to O
avert a great famine through the use of a magic egg. Post-script: Having written out of ignorance, I did P
However, the crowds this miraculous act brings to his some research. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was originally Q
house are keeping him awake and the grumpy saviour composed in 1946 – quickly, almost on a whim – by the R
decides he’s done enough good work. In this way, Tu- semi-itinerant, basically educated Tutuola. It had an in-
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tuola wickedly sidesteps good behaviour. teresting, meandering path to publication six years later
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Despite its comparisons with other oral traditions, and was quickly praised (by white readers) and damned
(by Nigerian authors and academics). Ironically, both U
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a text, very much a work
of printed fiction, rather than transcription. The book viewpoints seem to stem from the rusty old issue of V
makes great use of parenthesis, abbreviation, appeals authenticity; the novel apparently conforming to West- W
to the reader and a series of charming and sometimes ern stereotypes of the primitive to Euro-American eyes X
baffling banner headlines (“WHO WILL TAKE THE whilst failing in its faithfulness to Yoruban storytelling Y
MOUSE?” and “AFRAID OF TOUCHING TER- traditions to African ears. Oyekan Owomoyela is the Z

most vocally hostile, accusing Tutuola of being intellec- primitives. In recent years, some Nigerians such as the More A
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tually colonized by north-western consumerism, failing author Ben Okri have reclaimed Tutuola as a heavy B
to oppose the colonial mindset in any way and failing influence and some academics, such as David Whit- C
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to demonstrate an authentic Yoruban voice on virtually taker have attempted to place his work beyond a strictly D
any count. Ironically, Byrne and Eno faced analogous post-colonial framework. Actually, it is precisely a lack E
calls of cultural imperialism on their musical safari. of authenticity that makes The Palm-Wine Drinkard RSS
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Tutuola’s disinclination to honour his sources also sees such a thrilling novel to me. It is folk culture’s erratic
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him branded as a plagiarist. Other critics were peeved evolution – a kind of Chinese whispers – that makes Facebook
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at the rough nature of the author’s writing style, afraid it so resistant to the authenticity that so many seem to
that it would indeed stereotype Africans as intellectual want it to represent.  I
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Stuart Walton: Out Of It email

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Chris Mitchell
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Given the jacket cover emblazoned with dayglo euphe- first hand knowledge, and Walton’s narrative feels simi-
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misms for getting altered and the obligatory chortling larly unfettered. There is a distinct academic rigour at Facebook
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review quotes from numerous lad mags, you’d be for- work in the structure of the book, but Out Of It remains
given for wondering at first glance if Stuart Walton’s eminently readable whilst drawing on a huge range I
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book is a paragon of research sobriety. But rather than of sources, both historical and contemporary, for and J
being another cheap cash-in on the still-burgeoning UK against, to indicate the lengths (and depths) to which K
drug scene, Out Of It proves to be a radical and chal- humans have always been impelled to find ways to L
lenging rethink to current day perceptions about drugs change their reality and the fallout of doing so. Indeed, M
and their usage, whether legal or not. it becomes difficult to argue with Walton’s thesis that N
Instead of making any sort of pretence towards ar- we are impelled towards intoxication, however much O
gumentative objectivity, Walton firmly states his case society might attempt to stop us. Or maybe that’s just P
early on by declaring his own experience and interest the predilections of this particular writer. Q
in taking drugs and his contention that becoming in- The numerous political and practical arguments con- R
toxicated is a fundamental human drive rather than an cerning the hypocrisy and ultimate failure of the War
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optional experience, as strong as the primal needs for On Drugs are well-rehearsed and well-rehearsed here,
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food, water and sex. Indeed, Out Of It is partly written but the half-baked theories of drug culture luminaries
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in reaction to the censure from government and medi- such as Terence McKenna and Aldous Huxley do not
cal establishments which continually attempt to restrict get an easy ride either. While being convinced of the V
the populace’s intake of anything which might bring intoxication imperative is one thing, whether the reader W
them pleasure. will go along with Walton’s advocacy of legalisation X
This is a refreshingly honest approach to a subject for all drugs is a different matter, because the fallout of Y
about which most writers have pretended they have no doing so is so difficult to predict. Z
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From the literary point of view, Walton delivers a tion to the literature both of and about drugs – it makes More A
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fascinating chapter discussing the hoary old argument its points effectively without becoming polemical and B
that drugs increase creativity, taking in Coleridge, De shows up many drug-related arguments, both for and C
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Quincey, the Beats and an excellent analysis of Mal- against, to be simply vacuous. Out Of It does a neat job D
colm Lowry’s Under The Volcano. of clearing a path to let a real debate about intoxicants E
In short, Out Of It is something of a vital contribu- and their place in society begin.  RSS
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Alan Warner: Existential Ecstasy email

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Zoe Strachan talks to Alan Warner about French intellectuals
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and the chemical generation genre RSS
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ZS: Your story ‘After the Vision’ was in my opinion in distinguishing between Scottish and other writing?
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the best in the Children Of Albion Rovers anthology AW: It’s like Duke Ellington said about music … there Facebook
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produced by Rebel Inc. It says it was taken from some- is good writing and bad writing and those are the only
thing called The Far Places. Was this a novel? It seems two types. I
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to have similarities to These Demented Lands. ZS: And do you think that the chemical generation J
AW: Yes, a section of a novel and parts of a linked genre has run it’s course now? Were you pleased at K
series of short stories called, believe it or not, Trend being included in that whole thing? L
Fault Team 2, about Highland kids who were into rap AW: That was something invented by an editor called M
music. I might rework some of these stories sometime. Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the N
These Demented Lands came from some other area of 1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short O
my storm tossed imagination. story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think P
ZS: These Demented Lands was a little bit different you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t Q
from your other novels, it was more surreal and in- think you can base a whole literary movement on writ- R
cluded illustrations. Did you think of it as a chance to ing about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered
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be more experimental with your text? me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers
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AW: Well, the illustrations you mention are already in than the writing, there was something egotistical and
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Morvern Callar, the map Red Hannah draws for Lanna, silly about it, ‘Look, we go to nightclubs but we are
for example, or the road sign. I enjoy breaking up the writers,’ so fucking what. I’m interested in great books V
language that way and it sort of takes the reader out of not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used W
the delusion of the text into another delusion! to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much X
ZS: Morvern Callar attracted lots of “Highland rave” better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls, Y
type comments. Do you think there is a point these days colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar Z
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ZS: You’re currently working on a novel called At A You’re spot on, Nausea, The Roads To Freedom trilogy B
Fair Old Rate Of Knots. How would you describe it and Camus’ work were awful important to me, espe- C
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and when do you think it might be published? cially Nausea and The Outsider. I think Morvern Cal- D
AW: (First answer) SORR M COMPUTR HAS RE- lar is an existential novel … and one that taps into the E
ALL ROKE DOW absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern RSS
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(Later) Travelogue from the point of view of a home- is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to
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less guy who has no choice but to travel, and a critique jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she Facebook
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of past Highland/literary/historical landmarks. It could suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man
end up with a shootout at Culloden battlefield! The title she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former) I
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is now The Man Who Walks. I don’t have a clue when domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get J
it’ll be published. dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it K
ZS: You’ve said that you really got into reading with metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it L
authors like Alan Paton and Andre Gide. Who or what so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past M
else inspired you to start writing, and who’s work really the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of N
excites you (intellectually or otherwise) at the moment? death, in that way she’s heroic I think. O
AW: I’M SERIOUS THE KEOARD IS FUCKED ZS: There’s quite a few university courses now on P
Then: Camus (see below), Sartre (ditto), Michael creative writing as a discipline. Do you think that this Q
Moorcock, Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, J.G. Ballard, is a good thing or does it run the risk of reversing some R
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, the music of of the democratization of literature which has occurred S
Holger Czukay. recently (perhaps particularly in Scotland with Canon-
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Now: Same writers and Mark Richard, Annie Proulx, gate and Rebel Inc), and putting literature back into an
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Juan Carlos Onetti and the music of Holger Czukay. academic context?
ZS: Morvern Callar sometimes reminds me a little AW: SORR I’M REAKIG UP HERE V
of Camus’ Mersault or even Sartre’s Roquentin, par- Well I feel guilty about my suspicions because many W
ticularly in terms of her connections with other people. good writers have come out of those workshops, es- X
Were you self-consciously trying to explore existential pecially in the US where there seem to be millions of Y
concepts or styles of narration? them. But I’m secretly appalled by the concept, I think Z

writing is so intensely time consuming and private an been tempted to a complete change of medium? More A
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activity there shouldn’t be much time for gurus and AW: Well I mess around with oil and acrylic painting on B
classes to attend in universities. I don’t think writing large canvas. Abstract stuff. I’ve done a few on empty C
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can be taught … you can be given pointers … be told cigar tubes and I collect out of date credit cards so I’m D
to read certain books etc. but the only discoveries the going to paint on top of them. I’m doing one on top E
writer makes are going to be solitary ones on the page. of Airfix models I’ve stuck to the canvas, I melted all RSS
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I see writing as an existential act, an axis between how the Airfix models into eerie shapes with a blow torch.
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you live your life and literature, the idea that you can I reckon they should sell for millions. I’m interested Facebook
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institutionalise that scares me. It’s also a matter of time, in other forms of writing. I’m working on an original
it might take you ten years to find your style, the idea screenplay and I publish the odd poem. I
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that a uni professor of creative writing can bring out the ZS: Do you think that in the future people will have J
old stylistic KY jelly doesn’t convince me. stopped reading books, that attention spans will have K
ZS: Do you think writers have a specific role in society decreased so much that everything has to be in visual L
to educate or agitate or produce art, or are they just do- and auditory fragments? Or that everything will be M
ing a job like anyone else? virtual and interactive? N
AW: FI COMPUTER AW: I HOPE COMPUTER HAVE ZERO ROLE I THE O
I think intelligence should be legalised, I think, as the FUTURE SORRI THIS LAP TOP HAS REALLQUIT P
poet Robin Robertson says, writers write for the void. ALL THE KEOARD IS SEIZED TR TO SED THIS Q
I feel I make lonely cries and sometimes someone MADA MADA DO SED OUT A SEARCH PARTY R
hears me, a writer can only follow the needs of the Nah, you don’t have to switch books on or log on, S
creatures of their imagination; if writers are going to the tactile immediacy of a book in your greasy palm
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write to formulas, be it the 19th-century English novel will never die. That doesn’t mean people will read
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or Soviet socialist realism (or Chinese) they will be good quality literature though. I don’t think the book
doomed to artistic failure though they might flourish is under serious threat, but literature is. People have V
with royalties. been sounding the death of the book for too long, when W
ZS: A.L. Kennedy recently brought out a book of cinema became huge in the 1950’s people predicted X
poetry, and Irvine Welsh made that record. Have you the end of the novel but movies actually lead to more Y
considered forms other than prose with your writing, or novel reading. I think the “dumbing down” in culture Z

is worrying … the appeal of channel 5 and all these tits on her screenplay of Morvern Callar in between her More A
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and canned laugh game, the idea that ‘art’ is just for busyness with the international success of Ratcatcher B
pretentious wanks etc. etc … All that worries me. But which is surely one of the greatest films ever made in C
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virile art forms survive all kinds of upheavals. Even Scotland. Alan Sharp, the Scottish novelist and Hol- D
with a dying readership people would still write novels lywood screenwriter (Rob Roy, Night Moves, Ulzana’s E
and some of them, great ones. Raid) is working on The Sopranos for Michael. Lynne RSS
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ZS: And are you working on the script for the film of and I will probably do a bit of work together on the final
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Morvern Callar, and do you think it’ll translate well to screenplay, dialect and that, but I really Lynne’s vision, Facebook
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a visual medium? she’s a real artist and I just want to go with her vision
AW: I think Lynne Ramsay and Michael Caton Jones of the film not mine. She’s even said she’ll let me in on I
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are the most exciting filmmakers to come out of Scot- the editing so it should be exciting but with someone of J
land since Bill Douglas so I’m over the moon they’re Lynne’s integrity you’ve just got to let them make the K
each adapting one of my novels. Lynne is still working movie they want.  L
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Belinda Webb: Justified Anger email

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Ben Granger interviews Belinda Webb
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BG: Many people first read A Clockwork Orange when Growing up reading books like Mallory Towers, about
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they’re very young, and fall in love with it. When did all these girls playing hockey in boarding school … in Facebook
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you first read it, and what was your reaction? a way it just served to remind me this is the kind of
BW: Actually I came to it fairly late, I read it just a education I would never have, it made you feel worse I
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few years ago, I was in my 20s. I didn’t want to read in a way. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but the J
it before, I thought it was a boy’s book – a book about contrast was so massive. K
boys who were violent for no reason, which had noth- BG: Your Alex is violent, but not nearly as violent as L
ing to say to me. Talk about judging a book by its the Alex of Burgess, which makes for a very different M
cover! When I did finally read it, from the first page, dynamic to the book which inspired it. N
the language just amazed me. BW: Yes, her violence is much more just about ex- O
BG: The book seems to take a fairly even inspiration pressing anger, justified anger. The Alex of Clockwork P
from both Orange and Manchester itself. Which in- Orange is much more sadistic. That suited Burgess Q
spired you more? who was posing questions about the nature of choice, R
BW: Moss Side is the stronger influence. Moss Side, about choosing between two evils. My Alex comes
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Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock, these areas around more from my own experience. The choices she makes
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Oxford Road, not far from where we’re sitting. Poor I see as positive.
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areas right next to a massive student population. Popu- BG: How much of you is there in Apple’s Alex?
lations which may as well come from different worlds. BW: Well, I was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but at V
BG: The lively contempt Alex shows for the ‘Blytons’ the same time I was the oldest girl in a family of seven W
[her slang word for the respectably and middle-class] trying to keep it together. Like her, I was angry rather X
was presumably inspired by this. than rebellious, rebelling implies you’ve got something Y
BW: Yes, that and the novels of Enid Blyton herself. constructive to rebel against. I didn’t go around beating Z
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shoes! But like her, I was an autodidact, always looking important. Noam Chomsky talks about how language B
for something new. informs power structures, how the words you use both C
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BG: Whereas Clockwork Orange has the fictional signify and inform your politics, where you’re coming D
behaviour-control of the ludovico technique, the Bill from. It all comes together in the book. E
and Bob technique of your book is a direct attack on the BG: Your language is inspired by Burgess’ ‘nadsat’, RSS
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very real techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous and the but at the same time is very different to it. Once again,
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self help industry in general. its nothing like a pastiche. Facebook
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BW: My book isn’t a prediction, but looking at how BW: Burgess was a very intelligent man, and a linguist,
things could go if we follow America in this way, as he was drawing from other languages, Russian, Span- I
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we do in so many other ways. The addiction ‘industry’ ish, Italian. I know English and that’s all I know – I J
is massive in America, whole communities are leaving think that’s enough to be getting on with! I looked at K
this sober, denying life. It preaches that nothing is about English words which we no longer use for whatever L
social conditions, it just says you’re morally defective reason. Latin too, which has long been the preserve of M
in some way. the elite. Once again, as with her intellectual passion, I N
BG: Your Alex is a symbol of autonomy against this wanted Alex to reclaim these things for normal people. O
deterministic outlook? BG: The Mancunian dystopia you explore is female P
BW: It’s about more than autonomy. It’s been said the dominated, with males largely obsolete. Is female Q
characters of the Scottish writers Kelman and Welsh domination a bad thing, or is this one positive aspect of R
are informed a great deal by existentialism, determining an otherwise grim future? S
your own way no matter what the consequences, and no BW: Not it’s not positive. The perspective of the book
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matter what structures are in place. That’s true of Alex is I’d say humanist rather than feminist, and the fact
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certainly, she’s in tune with her inner existentialist! men are on the way out is drawing on the margin-
BG: The invention at work in the language is probably alisation of men today in working class communities V
the books biggest achievement. Have you always been like Moss Side. Male lives are wasted and that’s not a W
into playing with language in this way? good thing. X
BW: On one level it’s a really juvenile thing, playing BG: Some readers might be surprised to see a book set Y
with words like toys. Its like a puzzle thing, playing in Moss Side with little mention made of race, and the Z

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BW: Moss Side has become synonymous with black projects with teenagers in both Moss Side and B
people but there is a large white working-class popu- Brixton. What’s the main advice you would give to C
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are other immigrant descendants, like the Irish, my BW: I think the fact the way I write is not in a main- E
ancestors, too. I was writing drawing from my own stream voice is the main thing, and I hope this encour- RSS
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background, race wasn’t really an issue I was dealing ages young people. People should write in their own
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with. Class on the other hand is. voice and not be deflated. My sister went on a creative Facebook
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BG: Is there a straightforward political message in writing course and it was – you must write in this way
the book? and that way. If you’re going to write in that way you I
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BW: Yes, again, class. Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that may as well be in a factory, dryly sticking different bits J
we’re all middle-class now, he clearly never visited of formulae together. It may sound like a platitude or a K
Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over cliché but staying true to your own voice really is the L
clear. Alex here is a voice that is otherwise not heard. most important thing in writing.  M
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Irvine Welsh A
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Given the level of his fame these days, it’s easy to Expletives Repeated E
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forget that Irvine Welsh spent a long time in relative Interview with Harry Gibson by Chris Mitchell 539 F
obscurity during the 1990s, and even after the criti- G
You’ll Have Had Your Theatre Facebook
cally acclaimed publication of Trainspotting, didn’t H
Feature by Dr Willy Maley 541
really arrive in the mainstream until the advent of I
the movie. Trainspotting (the book, the movie, the Queerspotting Twitter
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play) is one of the cultural landmarks of 90s Britain Zoe Strachan’s feature on Irvine Welsh K
and continues to hold a strange fascination on suc- and Alan Warner 545 L
cessive generations of readers. Harry Gibson’s stage Filth M
adaptation in particular has introduced theatre to a Review by Gary Marshall 554 N
whole new audience who would otherwise never go O
to see a play.
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Welsh’s subsequent output has been interesting
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and uneven - as evinced by Gary Marshall’s scathing
review of Filth, which gets plenty of hate mail from R
Welsh fanboys - and his transformation into a pillar S
of the UK’s literary establishment within the space of T
a decade is nothing short of bizarre. U
I set up IrvineWelsh.com as a link directory to V
Welsh related material on the Net, while Welsh’s own W
official site is at IrvineWelsh.net. X
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Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting has taken the theatre world by storm. Chris
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Mitchell discusses censorship, sincerity and swearing with the director RSS
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Trainspotting has been the cultural phenomenon of of course, completely true. But now I’ve converted him
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1996. Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh-based tale of drugs, and he thinks most theatre is bourgeois shite. The sign of Facebook
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dole and self-destruction has sold over 400,000 copies, a true genius and professional is that they let you get on
the film has won critical acclaim across England, Eu- with it without peering over your shoulder.” I
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rope and America, while the stage version has played Gibson is already well familiar with the intricacies J
to packed houses throughout the country. The stage of censorship, thanks to the problems Trainspotting’s K
versions of four of Welsh’s plays have subsequently language has encountered: “BBC Radio asked me ages L
been collected in the book 4Play. ago to do an adaptation of Trainspotting. Then they M
It’s arguable that the play has been the most extreme looked at it. When they realised that landing on ‘Planet N
of Trainspotting’s three incarnations, its profanity Trainspotting’ means you can’t walk for two lines with- O
and violence sending shockwaves through the theatre out bumping into a cunt, they bottled.” P
circuit. The Times reviewed Trainspotting’s debut last It’s precisely this sort of restriction that makes Gib- Q
December under the headline “West End gets smack in son passionate about the stage: “Theatre is a far more R
the face”. This month the show steams into Brighton’s explicit medium. I’d hesitantly say that gives it the
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Gardner Arts Centre to conclude its seventh production edge over the film version of Trainspotting. But then,
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within a year. The cast of four has gone through 23 the film version was trying to do something completely
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different line-ups in that time, testament to the psycho- different. It’s The Likely Lads on acid. It’s also a mira-
logical toll of enacting Welsh’s narcotic nightmares. cle of marketing. V
Trainspotting’s director Harry Gibson first started work “But you don’t need that in the theatre because you W
on adapting the novel three years ago. Asked if Welsh know it’s bourgeois shite and no one’s going to come X
had any direct input on the stage script, Gibson laughs, and see it unless you put on something really unusual. Y
“Oh no, he thinks theatre is bourgeois shite. Which is, So you just concentrate on being as faithful to the origi- Z

nal as possible. And you’ve got the freedom to do that It’s necessary that they are there. It’s great to be doing More A
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because theatre is the exception to the rule. It hasn’t this kind of stuff because it’s in people’s bloodstreams, B
suffered much censorship since the 1950s. The theatre it’s not classic, it’s not old, it’s not trying to teach you C
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is very much a middle class medium and therefore it’s something, it’s not trying to tell you to live better lives, D
considered quite all right to have arseshagging and all it’s just there like the smell of your own sweat. I really E
that sort of thing going on because it won’t be a bad wish theatre could keep on being like that and not keep RSS
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influence on the proles because they won’t see it. It’s slipping back into being a snobby, musty medium.”
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the telly you’ve got to control because it’ll get through Despite Nightmares’ success, the chances of it fol- Facebook
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to the working class and probably pervert the children. lowing Trainspotting around the country are distinctly
So ordinary people have to put up with tons of censor- limited. “It’s filthy expensive because it’s an epic panto I
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ship all the time on the telly, whereas when they go to from hell. I might do a small version of it in which a J
the theatre they get to hear it like it really is.” small group of naked people savage each other in a K
This freedom of portrayal has been tested to further cage. I’m completely serious about that. I’m very into L
extremes with Gibson’s adaptation of Welsh’s second sensationalism, I’m a shocking sensationalist.” M
novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares. Nightmares makes Even after being immersed within Irvine Welsh’s N
Trainspotting look like Ivor The Engine, with the violent realities for the last three years, Gibson’s next O
story centring around rapist and football hooligan, Roy major project sounds like a major challenge: “I’m go- P
Strang. Gibson’s commitment to faithfully representing ing to do something rather delightful next. I have the Q
the text doesn’t shy away from the novel’s most appall- rights to do a stage version of A.A, Milne’s When We R
ing moments. “If you have to cry or turn away from Were Very Young. It’ll be set in 1924 which will be very
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particular scenes, then you do. But the scenes stay in. lovely and no one will say ‘cunt’ at all.” 
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Feature [published January 1999] B
Irvine Welsh: You’ll Have Had Your Theatre email

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Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play
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Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind on ice and Wildcat’s claws pared by cuts in funding,
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of people who attended football matches at his plays. polemical theatre has reached an impasse. On one level Facebook
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Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record this can be read alongside the failure of traditional in-
in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with stitutions such as political parties and trade unions to I
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writers who can play in any position, it has begun to effect change. With subsidised theatre on its uppers and J
enjoy success on another stage. The country has gone old-style political theatre on a downer, the time was K
from Celtic fringe to cultish frontier. Where it hitherto ripe for the kind of high jinks among low lives offered L
proved fertile ground for English and European theatre, by Irvine Welsh and others. M
Scotland is now growing its own, and exporting it too. Between the formal experimentation of the Citizens’ N
One of the advantages of being a colonized culture is and the radical commitment of 7:84, something was O
that you can break more easily with established forms lost. If the working classes were absent from one then P
and norms. they were straightened out and made presentable in Q
In Scotland the traditional divide between two kinds the other. Neither avant-garde theatre nor agitprop R
of theatre, high brow and low-brow, was crossed by were sufficient in themselves to do justice to those
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7:84 (Scotland) and a new theatre of commitment. This excluded from official culture, an exclusion that was
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shift was reflected in the founding of Mayfest in the literally obscene. Established theatres were slow to
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early 1980s, a Glasgow arts festival backed by the trade respond to the dynamism of popular culture, and to the
unions whose mission was to ‘celebrate not only May explosion in fiction and poetry that was transforming V
Day but also Scottish working class theatre and popular the Scottish literary map. With Glasgow experiencing W
political theatre from other countries’. A key player in a crisis of identity as the workers city was repackaged X
successive Mayfests and in touring community venues as City of Culture, the East Coast stirred. If Glasgow’s Y
was Wildcat Theatre Company. Today, with Mayfest tea was out, then Edinburgh’s was in the making. The Z

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in promoting new writing and showcasing innovative ing, but not in silence. B
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Suburban sermons yielded to urban hymns, as main- tered in posh Edinburgh parlance, the phrase “You’ll D
stream political themes gave way to a slipstream of have had your tea” has a hidden meaning. It implies a E
more subtle and nuanced engagements with politics and poverty of spirit in a host’s attitude to a guest. It says: RSS
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culture. Where John McGrath used folk forms like the “I’m presuming you’ve eaten and that means you’re
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ceilidh as a sounding-board, Welsh’s touchstone is the getting nothing from me”. This rhetorical question is Facebook
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rave culture he knows so well. This new Scottish drama usually attributed to a middle class woman. By contrast,
is arguably less a breach with previous political theatre getting your hole is a working class masculine term for I
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than a fruitful branching out, but it would be wrong to sexual fulfilment. Put the two together and you get the J
ignore fundamental shifts of emphasis. Welsh’s char- kind of hybrid interplay characteristic of contemporary K
acters are not the educated, respectable, law-abiding Scottish culture. L
working class figures found in much traditional fiction The reason Scottish novelists are turning increasingly M
and drama, nor are his communities unified in their op- to the theatre, or opting to have their work adapted for N
position to some faceless authority. the stage, is that they recognise a medium that crosses O
Contemporary Scottish theatre is tuned into popular borders and breaks down barriers much more readily P
culture. It has passed from music hall to club land by than film, which has lost its ability to challenge audi- Q
way of cinema, dance, drugs, football fanzines, jour- ences. One thinks here of Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is R
nalism, rap, stand-up comedy and television. Where the To Keep Breathing (1995), James Kelman’s One, Two, S
content went before the phrase, the phrase now goes Hey! (1994) and Duncan McLean’s Julie Allardyce
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before the content. It is significant that You’ll Have Had (1993), and of course Irvine Welsh’s Headstate, not to
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Your Hole is set in a recording studio. Welsh draws on mention Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares.
club culture, mixing and sampling a variety of sounds. It’s not so much a question of choosing between fiction V
The devil is in the detail, and the verve and vitality of or film or theatre, as a renewed confidence in their own W
local idioms, but there are large themes too – cruelty, voices that sees Scottish writers flitting effortlessly X
revenge, cycles of violence, crime and punishment, between forms. Y
responsibility, guilt. The language of violence and the With theatre, there is always an element of risk, Z

and a unique opportunity to engage with an audi- political theatre and a slow drawing down of blinds More A
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ence in real time. With film, reality is screened, the for drawing-room drama a new hybrid form entered B
inevitable happy ending undercutting any edge. stage left – absurd, enraged and intense, a theatre of C
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While bodies like the British Board of Film Censors cruelty and hate that is at once tender and torn, cool D
maintain standards of hygiene, theatre is completely and comical, with a pen dipped in rebel ink, stylish E
uncensored, blissfully free from the editorialising but possessed of a certain substance. RSS
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and moralising of the powers that ban. Theatre has The social realist tradition was not merely on the side
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survived repeated attempts to stifle it and has in the of the working class, but stood in their way, portraying Facebook
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process emerged as a resilient and versatile space them, representing them, speaking for them. The social
where nothing is unspeakable, where you can in surrealism or hyper realism of Welsh’s writing aches I
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principle say anything, a platform for free speech, with authenticity, touching sore points with a persistent J
a place of absolute freedom and a place of no probing that leaves you trembling. When working with K
mercy. The only cultural form to have been banned Boilerhouse on Headstate Welsh spoke of ram-raiding L
wholesale, prosecuted and hounded by censors for the set. He meant this literally, no doubt, but it is in the M
400 years, theatre has built up immunity to attack area of metaphor and speech that Welsh excels, rather N
from the guardians of decency. Thirty years after the than in any accepted notion of stagecraft. Welsh is not O
scrapping of the office of the Lord Chamberlain, the tongue-tied by authority or ham-strung by convention P
stage remains resistant to most strains of censorship, or classical training. If his plays, angry and experimen- Q
even the most virulent. tal, are like movies, then they are less drive-in than R
Scotland has not always been at the forefront, but it drive-by, marked by a casual violence and a language S
is adapting to change. The move from page to stage is that fairly crackles with cruelty. He has taken the pulse
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all the rage for angry young writers north of the bor- of Scottish theatre, and given it a much-needed smack
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der. The accent is on voice. Duncan McLean insists in the face. Much has been said of Welsh’s articulation
on “a commitment to the voice as the basis of literary of drug culture, but under the influence of film – Mamet V
art, rather than some supposed canonical ‘Officially and Tarantino spring to mind – Welsh is pushing thea- W
approved’ language”. The soul of Scottish theatre no tre, a Class A drug if ever there was one, and giving X
longer frets in the shadow of the English language. In audiences a welcome shot in the arm. Y
the interval between the curtains closing on didactic Not that pride or patriotism are called for. Welsh’s Z

references to “shitey Scotland” capture a growing opening in Leeds. Mercurial and mobile, Scottish thea- More A
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scepticism about modern manifestations of nation- tre cannot be reduced to a single company or venue, nor B
alism. Looking at life through schemie windows, should it be categorised as a movement. Movements, C
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with 20 storey vision, Welsh sees the world with a like parties and trade unions, may have had their day, D
colder eye than the old Scottish school of radicals, not to mention their hole. Instead, we should imagine E
and he manages to be dispassionate, even as his something more akin to a carnival – vibrant, vivid and RSS
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characters burn with a fierce indignation. Prolific vigorous, the stuff of life and the stuff of theatre. Why
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and provocative, Irvine Welsh has left his imprint on have a slice when you can have the whole cake, and a Facebook
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the Postmodern Scottish psyche. He has been called language sandwich to boot? It’s high time you had your
“the poet laureate of the chemical generation”, but high tea. You’ll have had your theatre. I
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Welsh’s appeal is much wider than the popular youth Dr Willy Maley is a lecturer at the University of Glas- J
culture he so eloquently represents. gow’s Department of English Literature. This essay K
As the margins fold back to infringe on the metropo- first appeared in the programme notes to the original L
lis, it is appropriate that a new play by Irvine Welsh is production of You’ll Have Had Your Hole.  M
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Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner: Queerspotting email

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Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of
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the closet… RSS
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Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a emergence and subsequent ‘coming out’ of a generation
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family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose wash- of angry young men who, unafraid of their own feelings, Facebook
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ing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric would dare contest the misogynous and homophobic
tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck rules of the ‘Emotional Establishment’ inside” (Schoene, I
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you are on a Sunday morning. But whatever you do, ‘Angry Young Masculinity’, in Whyte ed., 1995). Yes, J
don’t choose homosexuality. there are (finally) many female authors at the very fore- K
Traditionally, this has been the general feeling in front of Scottish literature. Yes, Scottish poetry boasts L
Scottish fiction over the years. More recently, we have some of the best lesbian and gay writers. So how long M
become familiar with the dull, thudding masculinity of must we wait for this heralded new breed of angry young N
Kelman, Sharp, McIlvanney, Gunn. Even these days, man? And might there also be an angry young woman? O
as Chris Whyte has highlighted, “to be gay and to be Perhaps we need not wait that long. Perhaps the pic- P
Scottish, it would seem, are still mutually exclusive con- ture is not as bleak as an unreconstructed (or should that Q
ditions.” (Whyte, Gendering The Nation, 1995). Now, be undeconstructed?) kailyard in winter. At the end of R
at the end of the millennium, we have hopefully moved the 19th century the ‘kailyard’ (literally, cabbage patch)
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on from our national literary stereotype of the tortured, was all the rage amongst Scottish writers such as J.M.
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lonely (heterosexual, probably homophobic) anti-hero. Barrie, F.R. Crockett and Ian MacLaren. Kailyard litera-
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(Think Cuffee, Laidlaw, Finn, Doyle and so forth). We ture painted a sentimental, highly romanticised picture
have left behind the good old days when women stayed of rural and small town life in Scotland, full of the local V
in the kitchen, entrapping men then withholding their colour of the Scots tongue. The only problem was, it W
love, and potential queers were suitably pathetic, warped bore little resemblance to the often harsh reality of the X
and unhappy. Yet still we cannot readily disagree with time. The realisation that all in the garden wasn’t quite so Y
Berthold Schoene that, “Scotland is still waiting for the lovely didn’t come until 1901, and the publication of The Z

House With The Green Shutters by G. Douglas. rigeur in Scottish fiction to date. It is perhaps due to the More A
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This time round however, the fin de siècle has seen relative youth of the authors themselves that the details of B
the emergence of another new genre, one that seems their characters tend to be just right – they wear the right C
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set to catapult us into the next millennium with rather clothes, listen to the right music, go to the right clubs, D
more truth, not to mention style – the ‘satanic kailyard’ take the right drugs, and so on – for people in their situ- E
(the name comes from a forthcoming essay by Chris- ations. Therefore it is reasonable to extrapolate that they RSS
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topher Harvie entitled ‘Kelman, the Canon, and the will also have the right attitudes, and, “homosexuality
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Satanic Kailyard’). This wonderfully appropriate term has become acceptably familiar, if not yet unremarkable, Facebook
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describes contemporary texts by Scottish authors such for a growing generation.” (Andy Medhurst, ‘Wish You
as Welsh, Warner, Hird, Legge and so on; that is to say Were Queer?’, The Face, Jan 1999). With this in mind, I
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the new generation of Scottish authors writing about let us proceed to examine the texts in question, and their J
Scottish urban working class youth in all its dubious, portrayal of homosexuality, in depth. K
depraved, or just plain deranged, glory. The old cab- Out of the collection of stories which make up The L
bage patch has become the new housing scheme. The Acid House it is undoubtedly the novella, ‘A Smart M
characters are more likely to work the benefit system Cunt’ which is the most interesting as regards homo- N
than the land, and would generally rather settle down to sexuality. Brian, the central character, is straight in the O
heroin and Temazepam than neeps and tatties. However, sense of being heterosexual. However, there is another, P
has there been an equivalent revolution in sexuality? far more important sense of the word in which he tends Q
The satanic kailyard texts that will be considered here to be far from ‘straight’ – that pertaining to drug use. In R
are Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House and Alan Warner’s any narrative by Welsh, this is how we must understand S
The Sopranos, although reference will also be made to the term. Brian’s friend Denise, on the other hand, is
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their debut novels, Trainspotting and Morvern Callar gay, as it seems is Penman. In many respects Denise
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respectively. In the light of these texts then, the ques- is stereotypically camp; he “pouts with a saucy wink,”
tion which springs to mind is: in contemporary Scottish ‘squeals excitedly” and “minces smartly.” Needless to V
literature, why is it suddenly cool to be queer? say, these activities are never performed by a hetero- W
One of the primary aspects of satanic kailyard in gen- sexual male character. Despite his apparent effeminacy X
eral which is important in this context is its relation to though, Denise is easily capable of the aggression typi- Y
popular culture, something which hasn’t always been de cal of most other characters in Welsh. When one of his Z

“young queens” annoys him his reaction is instant, arse – You’re raw sex, Raymie, raw fuckin sex man, I More A
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“BATTER YIR FUCKIN CUNT IN, SON!” He is in tell him.” The emphasis on camp throughout ‘A Smart B
no way ineffectual. Cunt’ may have a significant function in the text, apart C
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Denise and Brian grew up together on the same from providing humour. Marty Roth quotes Andrew D
housing scheme, a place to which Denise says he Britton as saying that the over-the-top performance E
will never return. With the additional knowledge of of camp requires a ‘sense of perversity in relation to RSS
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narrator, Brian explains, “Denise never really fitted bourgeois norms” as well as resulting in “the frisson
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in back there. Too camp; too much of a superiority of transgression” (Roth, ‘Homosexual Expression and Facebook
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complex.” Obviously, Denise did not fit in primarily Homophobic Censorship: The Situation of the Text,’ in
because he was gay, but it is interesting that the nar- Bergman ed., Camp Grounds, 1993). These two quali- I
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rator doesn’t exactly say that. Instead, he gives us ties tend to be possessed both by Welsh’s writing and J
other options to add to our unspoken assumption by his characters; in this case the use of camp helps to K
of prejudice. This is borne out by the fact that even create this sense of transgression. L
when Denise moved away from the scheme into The key point about ‘A Smart Cunt’ in this context M
the gay scene of central Edinburgh he did not find is found in the narrator’s attitude to his gay associ- N
acceptance: “Gay punters that hang around Chapps, ates, Denise and Penman. They are his friends, their O
The Blue Moon and The Duck hate Denise. His sexuality is not an issue for him, or indeed for others P
stereotypical queen stuff embarrasses most homo- in the group such as Veitchy, Raymie and Spud. Brain Q
sexuals.” So in effect Denise is a double outsider has a sound knowledge of the gay scene and the gay R
– rejected both by scheme and scene alike. This is lexicon. For example, he recognises when Denise is S
not as bleak as it may at first seem though; we learn choosing to act like a stereotype, and he appreciates
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that Denise “loves to be hated”. Although he actively who is a queen and that the term does not apply to all
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chooses to be disliked he manages to retain a wide homosexuals. This very aware attitude is thrown into
circle of loyal (and often heterosexual) friends. relief by his diatribe against the crème de la crème of V
Denise is not the only character with a penchant for Scottish masculinity, the Hardman (actually a “big sen- W
camp; Brian himself engages in camp banter with his sitive blouse”), “the Scottish Hardman chips a nail, so X
heterosexual friends, “Raymie sighs … then puts his he head-butts some poor fucker.” In Brian’s schema it Y
tongue in my ear. I peck him on the cheek and pat his is the Hardman, not the homosexual, that is the ‘other’. Z

The reverse tends to be true in his society; at one point men … natural enthusiasm for homosocial contacts … More A
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he is beaten up merely for his association with Denise. might be interpreted as the expression of a latent … B
This fits in with Jonathan Dollimore’s suggestion that, homosexual desire.” (Schoene in Whyte ed., 1995) C
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“homosexuality is so strangely integral to the selfsame Brian does not suffer from such insecurities about D
heterosexual cultures which denounce it” (Dollimore, his own sexuality. On a night out with Penman, appar- E
Sexual Dissidence, 1991). After all, where would the ently a gay man, he explains, “I’d never felt so close RSS
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Hardman be without the gay man? In much of Scottish to anyone, well, not another man, as I did to Penman
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society, as in Scottish literature, the Hardman, or even that night. It was a lovers-without-the-shagging type Facebook
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just the heterosexual man, feels constantly obliged to scene.” Then, after meeting ex-lover Olly, “I went
strive against being mistaken for a poof. over and held Penman in my arms for a long time.” I
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It is a woman, Olly, who actually vocalises homopho- However, just as we become excited and let ourselves J
bic sentiments. To her, Denise is a “fuckin sick queer,” believe that Brian might be about to jump out of the K
or a ‘sick poof.” Unlike Brian, she fears being damned closet we remember that he is, at this time, under the L
by association, “I’m no fuckin fag hag.” Naturally, influence of ecstasy. It seems that in a drug altered state M
Brian springs to Denise’s defence, “he’s my friend … intimate male bonding is more acceptable, and feelings N
stop aw this homophobic shite: it’s a total drag.” This can be acknowledged more readily. O
is rather ironic given Brian’s attitude to women, for Mark Renton in Trainspotting, perhaps Welsh’s most P
example, “the main reason I was here was that it was (in)famous creation, is not dissimilar in attitude to Brian, Q
full of fanny and I hadn’t had a shag in five months.” as is particularly apparent in the ‘London Crawling’ R
One final positive characteristic of Brian, rare in section of the book. Chris Whyte says of this novel, “in S
Scottish literary males, is his ability to indulge in ho- a faithfulness to older paradigms which verges on the
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mosocial activity without the traditional angst. Schoene touching, Welsh’s only acknowledged gay character is
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has commented on the phenomenon displayed by, but a double outsider, an Italian immigrant encountered in
by no means limited to, Alan Sharp’s male characters: London.” This is undeniable (with the exception of two V
“The fear of being mistaken for a ‘queer’ is so great lesbians who are introduced in ‘Feeling Free’), but again W
that the manly courage of angry young men dwindles we can argue that it is Renton’s attitude towards Giovanni X
drastically when they come to realise the ‘dubious’ which is revealing. In fact, he is surprisingly benign – Y
intensity of their own emotional attachment to other given that Giovanni first of all makes a pass at him in Z

a dodgy cinema, and then abuses him as he sleeps (in a to be ‘proper’ – the “gorgeous young queen” doesn’t More A
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particularly unpleasant way!). Certainly, Renton is angry quite count. This is disappointing, after all, in the real B
at first, but he soon ends up comforting and hugging the world no such condition applies for gay men. Perhaps C
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older man, feeling genuine sympathy for him, and in the it is because anal sex is virtually essential in hetero- D
end takes him to a party. Very charitable indeed. At the sexual relationships in Welsh’s writing that it is seen E
end of the night he muses, “ah might end up whappin it as absolutely essential in homosexual ones. Unsurpris- RSS
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up the wee cunt’s choc-box yit.” Whyte quotes this as ingly, in the end Renton concludes that he is only re-
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an especially damning comment, showing just how little ally attracted to women, but comments, “It’s aw aboot Facebook
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Welsh has diverged from older paradigms. However, an- aesthetics, fuck all tae dae with morality.” Mark Renton
other reading might say that within the social and sexual is no homophobe, and goes through a very normal and I
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register of Welsh it is a perfectly acceptable comment; rational questioning of his own sexual preference. In J
considering the manner in which characters talk about comparison to someone like Begbie, for instance, he is K
women they fancy, or indeed love. positively enlightened. L
Besides, how often in Scottish literature do we find Thus far we have only considered male homosexual- M
the ‘male lead’ admitting to picking up a “gorgeous ity. What of lesbianism? It is true that we seem to be N
young queen” and taking him home for a bit of oral experiencing something of a backlash in the wake of O
sex? Renton recalls this incident rather fondly – per- the ‘lesbian chic’ of the past couple of years. As Med- P
haps with amusement – but definitely without shame. hurst puts it in The Face, “dykes are yesterday’s news.” Q
Despite this event, Renton isn’t even bisexual, never Not so for Alan Warner, especially in his latest novel, R
mind gay. He did it because in London normal conven- The Sopranos. The first clue we are given as to what the S
tions don’t apply, “Ye can be freer here, no because it’s future holds for Fionnula (“the Cooler”) comes when
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London, but because it isnae Leith.” It seems that being her friend Chell notes, “she’s been queerer and queerer
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in London is a more potent, more liberating, altered lately, the crazy chick.” No author can seriously believe
state than being on Ecstasy is for Brian. The encounter that readers these days will only take ‘queer’ to mean V
with Giovanni also provokes Renton to consider his strange or odd, so we instantly wonder just how queer W
own sexuality again, “How the fuck dae ah ken ah’m Fionnula is going to become. X
no a homosexual if ah’ve nivir been wi another guy?.” At first, she seems to have the same concerns as the Y
Obviously for Renton gay sex must include anal sex other Sopranos – clothes, make up, drinking, and, of Z

course, sailors. However, when she reaches the big city, ership) than if she and Catriona had been alone together. More A
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Edinburgh, she experiences some of the slackening of Kay herself says immediately, “Catriona isn’t lesbian! B
normal constraints which Renton noticed in London. Just that bit bi.” When Fionnula asks her how she feels C
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Initially, she considers her relationship with her best about it she isn’t terribly enthusiastic: “I was really D
friend, Manda, “she just does all these really funny drunk that night and it just happened” and “It’s really E
things that make me smile and smile, och, those sort of good, Kay says in a way that sounded to Fionnula as if RSS
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things make ya almost fall in love wi someone.” There she might be talking about a bowl of soup or a drink.”
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are echoes of Brian in ‘A Smart Cunt’ and his closeness Nevertheless this perhaps does not reflect her attitude Facebook
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to Penman, but in this case the examination of same so much as her narrative function at this stage – she is
sex friendship marks Fionnula’s first tentative step there to provide an ‘out’ for Fionnula’s sexuality – and I
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towards identifying her developing sexuality. Later on, she does at least treat it as a very normal activity. J
she comments, “ah’ve always known, soon as I’m out The implication which is made by both Fionnula and K
of Our Lady’s am away fro the Port an down here in a the narrator is that Kay can afford to experiment; she L
jiffy.” One wonders if Fionnula, in her Wonderbra and lives outside the Port, she is middle class, she is not M
high heels, would find any more acceptance in the gay a Soprano. Fionnula says, “you have a bit of space an N
scene than Denise. got away wi that scot-free but someone would be sure O
The crucial moment for Fionnula comes when she an clipe on me.” She is painfully aware of the social P
discovers that Kay has had a lesbian experience; that reaction she is likely to get. However this also results Q
she is not alone in her attraction to other women. How- in a pleasing irony; if anything Kay is a triple outsider, R
ever, Kay’s experience was not entirely homosexual, in and her friendship with Fionnula is the only reason she S
that she ended up in menage à trois with a man and a is accepted by the Sopranos in the first place.
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woman, and indeed became pregnant as a result of it. Fionnula’s reaction to Kay’s news is not simply one
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On the one hand this is interesting as it acknowledges of interest or relief that she is not alone. Already at-
that sexuality isn’t necessarily clear cut; both Kay and tracted to Kay, it provokes strong sexual excitement, V
Catriona could be described as bisexual. However, it “downwards Fionnula’s stomach dived and simultane- W
also serves to blunt the impact of what Kay has done. ous a jellyfish sting, right in her fanny, and up, in an X
The fact that a man was involved at all makes it less awful wonder came it’s warm spreadingness.” Warner Y
radical (perhaps for a predominantly heterosexual read- tends to acknowledge and depict female desire very ef- Z

fectively, but this does make us ask why this is an awful Scottish fiction as a whole must behave as a small town More A
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wonder; because it is new to Fionnula or because it is where homosexuality is concerned. B
homosexual in nature? In the end, Fionnula’s coming However, in The Sopranos Fionnula and Kay ulti- C
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out is scarcely a coming out at all as such, “It’s just. mately present a challenge to everyone who is gathered D
Fionnula shook her head, Ah think ah like girls as much for the finale in the Mantrap, or “the Night Fionnula E
as boys. She paused a long time, Maybe more.” Fion- McConnel Slow danced Wi Kay Clarke” – unfortu- RSS
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nula at no point refers to herself as lesbian, even in a nately to the rather twee accompaniment of ‘There Are
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hypothetical sense. This could be an example of the Worse Things I Could Do’. At first they aren’t ‘star Facebook
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trend towards “sex without labels” which Andy Med- attraction” as “Kylah spun onto the floor doing a pretty
hurst envisages, or, “the arbitrary nature of sexual defi- good waltz, with her arms wrapped passionately round I
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nition, the extent to which our sexualities are shaped by the sanny bin.” If that had been how things had stayed J
the larger social discourse” (Martin, ‘Roland Barthes: then a sense of perspective on the situation would have K
Toward An Ecriture Gaie’, in Bergman ed., 1993). Or, been retained. In the Mantrap, however, the act of two L
in Warner’s narrative, as in the Port, lesbianism might girls dancing together is a very big deal indeed. Al- M
really be the Love that dare not speak its name. though their friends are watching, the main audience is N
The Port for Fionnula is similar to Leith for Renton, of men, who move nearer to get a better look. Indeed, in O
or the scheme for Denise, in that it is a place where one sense Fionnula and Kay embody an exceptionally P
the taboo on homosexuality remains firmly in place. As clichéd male fantasy – not only lesbian, but Catholic, Q
Andy Medhurst notes, “the ‘normalisation’ of homo- and schoolgirls as well! Hence it is quite a relief that R
sexuality is a very recent development …there are still when they do actually have sex Warner does not dwell S
plenty of places where queers have to operate in virtu- too much upon the scene, and emphasises the fact that
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ally pre-War secrecy.” As we have seen, these places Fionnula feels as if she’s falling in love.
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are often the very places that Warner and Welsh set This marks quite a departure from Morvern Callar,
their narratives, small towns and the housing schemes where the strong homoerotic subtext between Morvern V
which surround big cities (effectively small towns in and her best friend Lanna is played out in a series of W
themselves). Given these settings it would be unreal- rather exploitative scenes. In some cases a male char- X
istic to expect an ‘out and proud’ attitude from all the acter is present to assume the role of voyeur, at other Y
characters. This does not, on the other hand, mean that times it is left up to the reader to do so. For example, Z

Lanna tends to help Morvern to get changed, always implication being that a same sex kiss is along the same More A
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“biting her lip,” apparently an indication of scarcely lines as an incestuous kiss. “If Fionnula and Kay had B
concealed lust. When Morvern puts on her supermarket been willin to leave it at that, they might of had the C
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uniform, Lanna, “smoothed the nylon onto me with her whole thing forgot, an put down to another drunken D
palms.” Lanna also fastens Morvern’s suspenders before night,” but it isn’t just another drunken night, it is a huge E
a night out, then later on unrolls Morvern’s stockings to stepping stone on Fionnula’s path to self-discovery. RSS
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reveal her glittery knee to the men in the pub. “Everyone She decides, “If You’re gonna burn your bridges burn
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was watching,” and some men whistle at her exposed them,” and goes home with Kay. Facebook
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thigh. When they finally end up at a party, they decide, Fionnula’s best friend Manda is the only one who
somewhat bizarrely, to have a shower together, “as per reacts badly to the situation, “Fionnula, ya can’t go I
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usual … to save time.” This (naturally) allows plenty of around doin that, people’ll think you were lezzie,” also J
opportunity for soaping each other and so on. It is hardly trying to deal with the information about Catriona, “ma K
a surprise when at the end of the night a game of strip oh-so-fantastic sister is a pervy lesbian.” The next day, L
poker turns into a menage à quatre. At first Morvern just Orla suggests that Manda is, “just jealous” and even M
watches, but soon she joins in as well, “I let them do says to Fionnula, “telling you, she would go for it with N
anything to me and tried to make each as satisfied as I you now.” Then the other sopranos turn up and Fion- O
could.” Although Morvern Callar is unusual and pro- nula’s news is soon lost amid all the other things that P
gressive (for Scottish fiction) in that it has a first person have happened; Orla losing her virginity and getting ill Q
female narrator yet is written by a man, Warner goes again, Manda and the bouncer, the reprieve on being R
even further with The Sopranos; moving from subtext expelled. Even Manda now behaves as though nothing S
to actually encompassing homosexuality within the plot. untoward has happened; her initial homophobia ap-
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Although any action between Morvern and Lanna is pears to have been conquered.
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heavily veiled, Fionnula and Kay first kiss in full view So, in these examples of ‘satanic kailyard’ we
of everyone in the Mantrap, in “clear and vivid” light. have seen a gay man with a female name and a V
Kylah gives Fionnula a chance to pretend nothing has violent streak, a male central character with lots W
happened, “when yur wasted enough , you’ll snog, of gay friends, another who has had a homosexual X
that’s the way it goes, I’ve near snogged ma brother experience, a female main character coming out and Y
out of boredom when ah’ve been pissed enough,” the several women with blurred sexual identities. These Z

are the new angry young men and women. Not bad female cast of characters, including a lesbian central More A
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for Scottish fiction. None of these are anywhere near character, in The Sopranos. Welsh subverts it more B
being homosexual texts, after all, “A text is not ho- subtly. At first glance, Renton and Brian might seem C
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mosexual because there are homosexual characters, to follow the norm of heterosexual masculinity. On D
even less because two boys get married at the end: closer inspection, as we have seen, this is not the case. E
such texts are only the transposition of traditional By giving Brian gay friends, or by allowing Renton a RSS
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heterosexual narration” (Martin, in Bergman ed., homosexual encounter, Welsh is in fact undermining
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1993). Warner and Welsh may be cult reading, but a this traditional notion of undefined straight masculin- Facebook
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Scottish Dennis Cooper has not yet appeared on the ity. Both authors have therefore challenged the hetero-
literary scene. These texts do however go some way sexual male stereotype so beloved of Scottish writing. I
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towards normalising homosexuality, by acknowledg- This is part of the reason why these texts are so J
ing that it has a place in mainstream texts as well as important. They do not nod towards any politicised K
in exclusively gay literature. notion of homosexuality because they have their roots L
Earlier on we asked why this normalisation of ho- in a society where people recognise their unequivocal M
mosexuality was becoming apparent in these texts, right to be gay, or to not bother defining their sexuality N
and concluded that it was a necessary reflection of at all. Many Scottish authors remain rooted in a time or O
changed attitudes within the society which they depict place where homosexuality is somehow unacceptable. P
(which of course includes the readers who buy these That time is over, that place has almost disappeared, Q
books). This is certainly true. There is however another but for the most part Scottish fiction has not caught R
important function of this phenomenon – subversion. up. This is 1999, and, according to Andy Medhurst, S
In Scottish fiction it is apparent that, as Schoene says, “the days of homosexuality-as-issue are drawing to a
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“heterosexual masculinity is still commonly regarded close,” and about time too. In Scottish poetry, this is old
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as ‘the normative gender’ and heterosexual men are still news, as poets such as Jackie Kay and David Kinloch
widely believed to be the only adequate representatives have proved. Is the prose world waiting for an Edwin V
of our species …straight masculinity is a given that has Morgan of its own to hammer home the point that it’s W
hitherto remained undefined.” Warner blatantly rejects okay to be gay, even in Scotland? X
this ridiculous, yet tenacious, notion by having a female It’s time for Scottish fiction to get a grip. Come out of Y
narrator in Morvern Callar, and an almost exclusively the closet. Choose the future.  Z

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Irvine Welsh: Filth email

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Gary Marshall
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When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground ages to have sex with almost every female he meets,
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publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, under- in between setting up colleagues for queer-bashing or Facebook
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world-soundtracked cultural event, Irvine Welsh was driving others to the brink of suicide.
described as a spokesman for a generation and the most Robertson isn’t really a bad person, though. As his I
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exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language tapeworm explains in the latter chapters of the book – J
and setting was something of a novelty first time round, yes, the narrator is quite literally talking out of his arse – K
Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits the same ground Robertson has had a tough time. He came into the world L
as everything else he’s ever written. We have deviant as the result of a violent rape, his adoptive stepfather M
sex from The Acid House, Tarantinoesque musings on made him eat coal, and the first love of his life died. The N
rock records from Trainspotting, half-arsed attempts at section describing the death of his first girlfriend is the O
psychology and social comment from Marabou Stork only funny part of the book as Welsh goes massively P
Nightmares and, of course, lots of swearing. As with over the top, piling on the pathos as he recounts how Q
most recent Welsh product, it’s also a shambolic and the poor crippled girl is struck by lightning in a scene R
incoherent mess. that could have come straight out of an Airplane movie.
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Filth tells the story of Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh Unfortunately this bit is supposed to be serious.
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policeman whose life resembles Harvey Keitel’s in The book runs to about 400 pages and fully 300 of
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Bad Lieutenant. Racist, misogynist, homophobic and them repeat the same endless catalogue of sex, violence
psychotic, Robertson devours hard-core pornography and hatred with little in the way of variation. Some of V
whilst mentally and physically abusing himself and the scenes are evidently supposed to be funny, such as W
everybody around him. Despite his appalling personal the set-piece where Robertson attempts to make a video X
hygiene supplemented by a genital rash and an attack of a prostitute being penetrated by a dog or when he Y
of tapeworms (more of this later), he nonetheless man- sleeps with a colleague’s wife after framing her husband Z

for making obscene phone calls. Conspicuous by their the book and then kills himself at the end should pre- More A
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absence are the wit and invention that characterised vent people from wasting their hard-earned cash on B
Welsh’s earlier novels, like the foul-mouthed baby in this pathetic attempt at a thriller. Maybe then Welsh C
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The Acid House or Sick Boy and Spud in Trainspotting. will stop recycling past novels and will attempt to D
Weighed down by the expectations of his audience, write something that’s actually worth reading. To E
Welsh has produced a book that fails on every single describe Welsh as the greatest writer in Scotland RSS
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level: a comedy that isn’t funny, a police procedural is a huge insult to talented writers such as Jeff Tor-
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that can’t be bothered with the details, a tale of redemp- rington, William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Iain Facebook
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tion without any trace of warmth or sympathy for any Banks and Janice Galloway who produce novels
of the characters and a closing plot twist that’s visible which combine well-drawn characters with empathy I
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from the first chapter. and social conscience. J
There’s a tradition in reviewing where you make Although the title works on several levels – Filth as K
sure you don’t give away the ending of a novel for slang for policemen, or as a description of the world L
fear it will prevent people from reading it. Hopefully, in which Bruce Robertson lives – the publisher was M
then, the news that Robertson committed the brutal too restrained. A more fitting title for this shambolic, N
murder he’s supposed to be investigating throughout scatalogical mess of a book would have been Shite.  O
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The White Stripes: Elephant email

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Peter Wild
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Ryan Adams has already said that Elephant is the everything Black Francis was back in the day.
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greatest rock’n’roll album ever recorded (laying to rest, Next up is ‘Black Math’ – you follow the Pixies’ Facebook
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once and for all, his spat with ‘cissy boy’ Jack White). thinking and ‘Black Math’ is Elephant’s ‘Tame’. Fierce
Jack White himself – well, Jack White thinks this is fierce rock with a screaming vocal about mothers and I
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where The White Stripes get off. Nobody is going to breaking backs against all-out reverb and noise. Plus J
buy Elephant. Or rather: the hordes that bought White you get Jack saying “ah-ah-ah-ah-ha” (the first of many K
Blood Cells – Jack White thinks they’ll stay home this such sounds drawn from a huge pantheon of rock’n’roll L
time. Or so he says. staples that look stupid written down and cool as all- M
Elephant kickstarts with a pristine bass sound. ‘7 Hell when sung – later you get “ow a-ha ow ow ow” N
Nation Army’. The first single to be. Whatever you say, in ‘Little Acorns’, “do-do-dodoobiedo” in ‘Air Near O
however you approach this, you don’t expect bass. The My Fingers’ and “Whoo!” – a great barbaric yawp of P
White Stripes are guitars and drums. Guitars and drums primordial garage “Whoo!” – in ‘Girl You Have No Q
and occasional piano. They make a primal noise. That Faith In Medicine’ – all stupid written down, all cooler R
is what they do. The bass is just foolin’, though (it’s than Clint when sung by your man Jack White).
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not bass at all – it’s just an effect – it’s just gee-tar). A nod to another Queen (Freddie Mercury) comes
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Jack White is here with a voice fizzing like magnesium next – multipart vocals cluster about the cruellest cho-
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in water: “Everybody knows about it from the Queen rus (“There’s no home for you here, girl, go away…”)
of England to the hounds of hell”. Oh yeah. This is while – and I shit you not – guitars and theremins all but V
rock’n’roll, pure and simple, all you need to know. haemorrhage. There is relief (albeit short-lived relief) W
When that boy White sings “I’m going to Wichita…” in the familiar lilt of a cover – Bacharach and David’s ‘I X
you sure as shit want to be on the same train … He Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.’ This isn’t Y
whistles and he whines and he roars and he spits – he is Pop Idol though, and Jack White is no Gareth. When Z
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he wails “I need your sweet love…” – he means it (he’s third man, girl, but it’s a fact that I’m a seventh son…” More A
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camped outside your house with a sharp knife and a he slurs lasciviously. “Let’s have a ball and a biscuit B
cold sweat). Meg’s vocal on ‘In The Cold Cold Night’ sugar and take our sweet time about it…” Oh yeah. On C
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seems to respond – yeah, she’s saying, you’re crazy as ‘Little Acorns’, he doesn’t give a shit (“Take all your D
a cuckoo but … you know … I like it. Sounding like problems, baby, and rip ‘em apart…“), on ‘Hypnotise’ E
Sandie Shaw (“you make me feel a little older, like a (the closest thing here to a retread of ‘Fell in Love with RSS
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full grown woman might…”), Meg says “I know that a Girl’ – but, man, what a retread) he’s intent, driven: “I
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you feel it too / when my skin turns into glue…” Okay want to hypnotise you baby on the telephone…” Facebook
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Meg, you say, taking one slow step after another toward The White Stripes are legend, already. They are
the door … legend and they know it – they nod to the past (‘Girl I
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Kitty Empire has already said (in The Observer) You Have No Faith in Medicine’ is like The Rolling J
that the thing about Elephant (one of the things about Stones by way of Jonathan Fire Eater) but this is K
Elephant) is Jack White has this ability (in the course not The Strokes (despite the fact that Elephant was L
of a line, of a song, of an album) to hit every button recorded using equipment that predates 1963). This M
you could ever want, and many buttons you could is – to coin an overused phrase – now. The White N
hardly imagine and a few you’re willing to ignore. ‘I Stripes are having the time of their life (listen to the O
Want To Be The Boy’ finds Jack getting maudlin over last track, ‘It’s True That We Love Each Other’, a P
a girl: “What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull… throwaway duet between Jack and Meg and Holly Q
/ I’m inclined to go finish high school just to make GoLightly: “I love Jack White like a little brother…” R
notice that I’m around…”); ‘Ball & Biscuit’ finds Jack / “Well, Holly I love you too / but there’s just so S
redefining sex and rock’n’roll (in a way that just hasn’t much I don’t know about you…”) – they’re enjoy-
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been done since Prince sang ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ ing every second. The greatest rock’n’roll album
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– the only difference is that Jack doesn’t want to be ever recorded. C’mon. You can keep the hyperbole,
your girlfriend…): “It’s quite possible that I’m your Adams. But it’s pretty damn great all the same.  V
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Tony Wilson: Fourth Time Lucky email

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Craig Johnson hears the Factory Records supremo on the rebirth of his label,
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the Joy Division film, and accidentally creating Frankie Goes To Hollywood RSS
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‘Wilson ya wanker!’ is a statement that has been also played a part in changing modern music forever.
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bandied around Northern England for 30 years now. Way back in 1978 at the Russell Club in Moss Side, Facebook
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The Wilson in question, the original media facilitator Wilson organised a spectacle where Joy Division and
Anthony H. Wilson, is a self-proclaimed wanker, but Cabaret Voltaire shaped the sound of post-punk. Ever I
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he don’t care. One of the most important record label since he’s been a magnet for creative expression, with J
bosses to grace the history of rock’n’roll, his story has a truly survivalist instinct, gusto and resolute desire to K
been told on countless occasions. From regional tel- find the next important thing. Fast forward nearly 30 L
evision news presenter where he sported a punk-green years and a new band have been found with an even M
streaked barnet , via his discovery of Joy Division, the newer sound of British hip-hop in the form of Raw-T. N
Hacienda nightclub, New Order through to acid house Signed to the latest instalment of his mythical record O
and Happy Mondays, Wilson’s been a powerful catalyst label Factory Records, now entitled F4, the Mancunian P
within many great pop-cultural moments in the last 25 collective have the element of danger and experimenta- Q
years. He’s been part of a story that’s involved the birth tion that has always attracted Wilson. Listening to their R
of post-punk, suicide, insanity, liquidation, narcotic debut album one is confronted by deep digital shuffles,
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excess and converting football thugs to the rebellious slick raps that talk of a British urban way of life that is
T
French thought of Situationism and dancing. By creat- sometimes tragic, always real and other times amusing.
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ing Factory records on Palatine Road, Manchester in The point is that Wilson has found another gem and he’s
the late 1970s, signing bands he saw and thought were not resting on the laurels of his glory years; the man of V
important to the progress of rock’n’roll, he’s always passion is still searching and using his media clout to W
promoted an unequalled passion and energy for music, highlight what he feels to be important to music and X
culture, the dynamic city of Manchester and British life. Great rock and fucking roll kids! Y
youth culture. He may be a bit of a wanker, but he’s Asking Tony Wilson a question is easy, extracting Z
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and

information even easier. Ask him something as simple I remember going to a Rory Gallagher gig in 1975 More A
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as the time and you’d receive a cultural pontification at the Free Trade Hall and there was 2,000 people and B
about the lines of the Meridian and the way it effects 1,199 people fucking hated me. And I just thought C
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the Northern psyche. Respectively finding himself ‘What the fuck have I done to these fuckin’ people? D
lost in Swindon and taking his nutcase New Order What shits they are.’ And then about a year and a half E
dog for a walk on the two occasions we spoke, he was later along came punk and suddenly I’m at The Circus RSS
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distracted many times during the conversation. But due and all these kids are like ‘Hey Tone, thanks for putting
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to the sharp thinking of the man, he managed to keep Costello on, thanks for putting Iggy Pop on.’ I realised Facebook
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a solid thread through out and spouted long, detailed I found my generation and they weren’t my fucking
soliloquies about his iconic past, his hip-hop present generation. So people shouting abuse has happened I
Twitter
and things that’ll kick off in the future. for a very long time and I find it kind of amusing and J
What do you say to people that shout “Wilson you irrelevant. K
wanker!”? What sort of bands are you looking for to add to L
I just keep walking and have always ignored it. the F4 roster? M
Funnily enough I’ve got to go to Chorlton in about an A band that’s going to sell a lot of records because N
hour, because Harry Goodwin the original rock’n’roll they’re important. The most innovative is always the O
photographer of the 60s has a show which he asked me most commercial at the end. The Mondays did sell a lot P
to go to. But Chorlton I despise with a passion. I come of albums, they sold a couple of million albums which Q
from Salford, then lived in Marple, went to school in I think is reasonably good, but if they hadn’t had the R
Salford, went to university when I was 18, went to self-destruction they might of sold some more. S
London when I was 21 and aged 23 came back home. What made you want to start a new label?
T
I’m on television as a local reporter and putting music I’d never really stopped I suppose. I had a two year
U
on television, just soundtracks really. I thought my layoff between the bankruptcy which led to London
generation will love this, we children of the 60s, but Records buying Factory, that awful period of Factory V
who in the early 70s were all solicitors, young teachers Too ended and I had to walk away, and when I finally W
and trainee accountants in Chorlton and it turned out got tired of the Space Monkeys we stopped again. It was X
they utterly despised me. Just like all those people who always a question of the next time we sign a good band Y
shout ‘wanker’. we’ll start again. We started again with King Rib and Z

they found a wonderful lead singer, but they became the rest is history. More A
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Simian which are not my cup of tea. I went to see The Who’s designing the imagery for F4? B
Music in Leeds: I was taken out by their manager and I have a graphic designer who I’m very fond of C
email
fell in love with them and I spent six months arranging called Jason Nichols who does In The City’s stuff D
the new label around The Music, and at the last minute and in it’s great having him move on from that to E
their two managers who were friends of mine brought do the record sleeves. He did the F4 thing and I’m RSS
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a third manager in who was a complete twat, he wanted very happy with that. We were originally going to
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a bidding war and in the end signed for lots of money be called Red Cellars and there was a very clever Facebook
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to Hut. It was very depressing and I was outraged for designer called John Walsh designed a Red Cellars
about two years. logo and was doing the whole thing. I took him to I
Twitter
The Music weren’t that good though Tony. meet Raw-T and he met them and experienced them J
No, The Music were that good and they had that and got a logo from one of their boys, took it away K
potential, but the way their managers took them was to work on and a month later had been too busy to L
completely fucking wrong and ended up taking them do it because he had more important work on. To M
nowhere. If we’d have put them in the right environ- which after a few days I exploded in a very unpleas- N
ment then they’d have created a far more important ant manner and said, ‘Fine, the most important thing O
second album. So the wrong environment has just in the fucking world is Raw-T so you can fuck off!’ P
fucked them. In fact I heard someone within their camp Strangely the reason it’s not called Red Cellars is Q
say that to some one the other week, so yes that’s what not just that my partner thinks it’s a good idea cos it R
I think about them. relates to Factory and it avoids a 15-minute explanation S
And as I say it’s never stopped, it’s always if I ever of why it’s called Red Cellars. But it was when I was
T
see a great band. When I saw Raw-T live at In The lying in my bunk in the Amazon rainforest doing drugs,
U
City I was blown away, there were several major la- the very night Raw-T’s first single had to go to press,
bels there who were also blown away. I presumed that and I thought if I call it Red Cellars I’m going to have V
my job with Raw-T would be to bash them around to use John’s logo and I’m so angry at John for being W
the head when they started behaving like twats, and too busy to do Raw-T, and so utterly outraged I refused X
instead the majors all offered them crap singles deals, to use his logo. So I needed to think up a new name, Y
no one offered them a real album deal and suddenly and finally thought F4. That was out of a fit of anger Z

at one of Manchester’s best designers for having been then the revolution I expected in 2002 didn’t happen. More A
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too busy to do Raw-T. I always say to people that the I always think that what happens is that English kids B
portrayal of me by Coogan as an affable fool is very absorb American rock’n’roll and regurgitate it with C
email
sweet but in fact my daughter who is next to me will English irony and sell it back to them. But this time it D
testify, I’m a truly horrible person. And you have to be didn’t happen, it was Welsh kids, one could argue that E
to get things done. Lost Prophets and Funeral For A Friend were in some RSS
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Would you ever start a new nightclub again? way that kinda thing I was hoping for, but it didn’t hap-
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Yes I would but it’d be very difficult. I’d love to have pen so I’m quite happy to accept that. Facebook
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somewhere like The Castle in Oldham where Raw-T But at the moment I’m very lucky to be involved with
go and play, it’s like a cross between an Oldham pub Raw-T who are following in the footsteps of Dizzee I
Twitter
and 8Mile by Eminem. I’d love something like that, Rascal, Wylie and Mike Skinner, in that British hip- J
but then again that’s a fucking nightmare anyway, so hop has found its own voice which is a pretty peculiar K
maybe not. I’d love to do that personally but I can’t thing to happen. I got accused on The Culture Show of L
imagine it happening, I now have so many other little jumping on a band wagon that was already happening, M
jobs in my life and it gets complicated but who knows this was from Q magazine or NME. Whereas the guy N
maybe one day. from Hip-Hop Connection was fantastic, as in someone O
What band in musical history do you wish you who actually knew what he was talking about. It hasn’t P
could have signed? really happened yet, it’s just beginning I think. Q
Everyone wishes they could have signed their own How important has Situationism been to you? R
Velvet Underground; that’s the history of the interest- I was just a fan having been introduced to it by my S
ing side of rock’n’roll. We all would have liked to have acid dealer who happened to be the main translator of
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our own Velvet Underground and that’s about it really. The Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem
U
I got Joy Division, I got the Mondays and now I’ve got in Britain. I was a fan and therefore referred to it a lot
Raw-T and I wouldn’t complain for one moment. in terms of naming things and various bits and pieces. V
What were you talking about when you men- Although when you look back on it in the end I think the W
tioned that music culture was based around 13 year way we did it, by, as Peter Saville once said, in the entire X
revolutionary cycles? 14 years of Factory not one decision was ever taken, Y
I used to think that there was a 13 year cycle, but EVER with an eye to profit. And that was entirely true Z

actually! So in some way we behaved properly. There and that always been how it’s approached. The people More A
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was a contract and the contract said we own nothing, making the film are two American guys; there was an B
the musicians own everything, That was a mistake, but American man and woman from New York that were C
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it was very nice at the time and very idealistic, but look- making the film called Double A Films, however they D
ing back on it fuck the musicians I say. fell out and also the woman fell out with Debbie Curtis. E
We actually I’d say, were responsible for removing An option on a book has to be renewed, and they didn’t RSS
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the world’s greatest rock’n’roll writer for about 15 renew the option otherwise they’d be still be making
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years, which is Greil Marcus, from rock’n’roll. He got the film, but I presume they kept promising Debbie they Facebook
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a copy of our first record and stuck a Durutti Column were renewing it. Some of these Americans have so
sticker on his deck and looked at it for two years think- much money they don’t know what it’s like for us over I
Twitter
ing ‘What the fuck is this?’, and finally discovered it here. No money was paid, the option ceased at which J
was a Strasbourg (Andre Bertrand) political cartoon at point these two guys Todd Eckert and Orian Williams, K
the end of which he got completely involved in it and who had been friends from school years decided to step L
became buried in it and became the world expert on in and take up the option. Todd is a Pittsburgh guy, and M
Situationism. Which is bit of a shame because it took Orian works out of Los Angeles, so it’s a Pittsburgh/Los N
him away from writing until he wrote his Elvis Presley/ Angeles pairing that are doing this. They had actually O
Bill Clinton book which I adore that he really came talked to Sophia Coppola who is a Joy Division fan, P
back to the fold. The greatest book on rock’n’roll is there was interest from her, but in the end they chose Q
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus by a million miles. Anton Corbijn which I think is a great idea. R
What’s your involvement in the upcoming Joy So their choice of Anton mirrored my own choice S
Division film? because I realised that when I had to make a video
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I’m a producer on the movie and in a way I think for ‘Atmosphere’ in 1988 I would have to use the old
U
that’s because it makes it more official having me in- photographs, and therefore it seemed logical to use
volved, (stupidly) and it does reflect to a degree what either Kevin Cummins or Anton. There was only two V
was their concern about the rival film. The rival film photographers who took the great photographs of Ian W
has now completely fucking gone, thank god. There’s and for whatever reason I chose Anton even though X
always only been one project, the film which is based I’ve just recently done a photo shoot with the beloved Y
on Debbie Curtis’s book (Touching From A Distance) Mr Cummins, who moaned at me. He said ‘If I do a Z

photoshoot for you, will you stop bad mouthing me? At three writer is Matt Greenhalgh. So as far as I’m con- More A
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the press conference for the Ian Curtis film you were cerned at the moment these two American boys have B
bad mouthing me.’ I said ‘I wasn’t bad mouthing you. done a fantastic job of choosing the right director and C
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I said you’re a miserable twat Kevin. You are a miser- writer. Obviously the casting will be something of an D
able fuckin’ twat.’ To which he laughed and accepted it, issue, but I have nothing to do with it. E
because he is totally a miserable twat. I did recommend one actor who could play the part RSS
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Anton’s lovely, and I’ve met Anton a few times he played in 24 Hour Party People, he could play
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and obviously he did that video, and the strange thing me, he could play Ian, he could play Martin, he could Facebook
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about that video is, Gretton hated it and told me the play anybody in this film and I was with him the other
whole fucking group hated it. For 15 years I was un- night when he won best actor at The Empire Awards. I
Twitter
der the impression that the group hated it, but it turned He’s Britain’s best actor he’s called Paddy Considine J
out the group loved it, only Rob fuckin’ hated it. So if who played Rob in the film. I kept going to London K
they hadn’t have brought Anton in to do this I’d have going ‘Fuckin’ hell man, there’s a guy playing Rob!’, L
never have found that out. It’s my double revenge and they’d go ‘Didn’t you know that John Simm is the M
on Rob really. ‘Atmosphere’ is a perfect video, but second best young actor in Britain?’ As in everybody N
you can see where Rob comes from, who though it who works in movies knows that Paddy Considine is O
was over-egging the legend of blah-blah-blah. Fuck the best actor in Britain. His first film that made him P
that anyway, to me anyone else touching it who famous was Romeo Brass, obviously he was amazing Q
wasn’t there at the time, it would have been immoral. as Gretton. My only input on actors is that Paddy could R
Whereas because Anton had taken the photographs, play anybody. S
he was fucking around with his own pictures and to Martin Hannett; tell me about his genius.
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me there was always going to be integrity. So now I could talk about Martin Hannett for days so don’t
U
choosing Anton for the film is a great, great move. start me. What’s very strange I think is that most great
And secondly choosing writer Matt Greenhalgh (Burn producers go mad because they only ever find one V
It) who is number three in the Red Productions school sound. Whereas groups can find two or three sounds in W
of rock’n’roll, the top TV drama company in Britain. their career and go through various changes. William! X
Its number one writer is Russell T. Davies (Dr Who), Sorry beg your pardon. William! Y
number two writer is Paul Abbot (Shameless), number [Interlude of Tony sorting out his puppy that is try- Z

ing to play with another dog. Sounds of apologies to The early phase where he was learning about the studio More A
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another dog owner] with Manchester Animation company, which he did B
Every interview I do these days is interspersed with the soundtrack for. Then he pioneered punk with Spiral C
email
this. You stupid dog!! He’s a ‘Blue Monday’ dog. The Scratch and ‘Cranked Up Really High’ [Buzzcocks]. D
dog from the New Order video. I have no time for dogs Then unbeknown to me until I found out years later, he E
whatsoever, but my partner knew that many years ago goes and meets these guys in a carpark on the moors RSS
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I worked with Bill Wegman on the ‘Blue Monday ‘88’ above Burnley and tells them the sound he’s imagining
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video and fell in love with Wegman and his Weima- in his head, off his head on fucking drugs and he drives Facebook
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raner dog. back to Manchester at midnight, they drive back to their
Last November my partner said two things: Number shed in Burnley and they build the world’s first digital I
Twitter
one you should sign Raw-T, number two I’m buying delay machine, the AMF digital delay which is the most J
you a dog for Christmas. They are obviously the most important outboard equipment of the last 50 years. And K
beautiful dogs in the world, but no one told me that it was 15 years later when some guy stopped me and L
in the dog world they are famous for being the most said, ‘I want to thank you, one of your partners changed M
loopy, fucking stupid off-their-head nutcases, so I’ve my life.’ When I realised it was AMF I went ‘No, you N
got this complete idiot dog now! He’s actually had the changed his life by giving him that equipment.’ He O
snip but that would never calm him down, and has got said, ‘Don’t you know where it came from?’ And I had P
me in a lot of trouble with Peter Saville because his no idea it came out of Martin’s head. The first time he Q
girlfriend used to think she was a wolf when she was a ever worked with that digital delay machine was on the R
teenager, loves dogs and wolves, and I got into a lot of song Digital. And that was on the Factory Sample, his S
trouble from Peter for having giving William the snip first day with Joy Division. And then of course he used
T
and it’s made no fucking difference whatsoever. it on Unknown Pleasures and it changed the way drums
U
Back to Hannett. All producers go mad because they sound forever, he used it on ESG and everything else.
normally only find one sound in their life. In fact Mar- So the first thing is he changed the drum sound of the V
tin Hannett found two sounds, and he even came back world forever by the digital delay. W
a third time when he was just having a laugh with the But then what he’s not given credit for, because X
Mondays, so I think he did pretty fucking well. If you ‘Blue Monday’ is given the credit for being the first Y
want to go through the history of Martin very simply. great modern music track which uses computers. In fact Z

although I would never try and cross Bernard because of shit you’re building? Where’s my Fairlight?’ He More A
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he’s extremely clever, (well New Order got the credit), never got a Fairlight, Trevor Horn got a Fairlight and B
but if you look at Bernard’s production of Marcel King the rest is Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the rest is C
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at the same time, and the 52nd Street band, Section history. I’ve very recently begun to claim that we cre- D
25 then it’s obviously Bernard who was doing that. ated Trevor Horn, by stopping Martin getting a fucking E
But Bernard learnt it all by watching Martin. In fact Fairlight. And then the big fight and they go and fall RSS
F
the most important track of all is ‘Everything’s Gone out with each other and it’s the lawsuit and stuff, and
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Green’. If you listen to it, is the beginning of modern suddenly the genius of Erasmus and Nathan, the Mon- Facebook
H
music, and ‘Temptation’ takes it one stage further. And days manager, getting him to produce the Mondays’
then Martin and New Order break up and they go off to Bummed album which was fantastic.” I
Twitter
do ‘Blue Monday’ as the next record, that’s the one that And yes, Bummed is a fucking fantastic album. Along J
quiet rightly is seen as this incredible break through, with Unknown Pleasures, Technique, the first singles K
but nevertheless the important song is ‘Everything’s from New York’s early 1980s all sister rap band ESG L
Gone Green’. and other great works of A.H. Wilson Associated. It M
So Martin created that music and then were it not could be said that Mr Wilson likes the sound of his own N
for the utter stupidity of Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton voice. It could be said he’s arrogant. It has been said O
and Tony Wilson he would have created the next music he’s a twat. And he probably is. Who gives a fuck? The P
because he was desperate to get a Fairlight. It was a point to Wilson apart from the usual record mogul/twat Q
synthesiser computer keyboard, and basically what tag is that he’s added spice and swaggering art to the R
Martin, Stephen and Bernard were doing with soldering British music scene, he’s that way because of that drive S
irons in 1980, suddenly by 1983 there was a machine to spread his gospel on what he likes about music and
T
that did it called a Fairlight. We had no idea what one culture. A question I forgot to ask him was: has it all
U
was, what we knew was that it cost 30 fuckin’ grand been down to luck? What has been his secret, if there
and we were running the Hacienda and you could fuck has been any? It will be interesting to see where Raw-T V
off. So we used to row about this all the time. ‘I want a and his record label F4 end up in the grand scheme of W
Fairlight. You can’t have a Fairlight. What’s this piece musical things.  X
Y
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