Best of 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Mladen Penev.

Balzac Review - Well, Part of One

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hypnagogics & Nipponophiles

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

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

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

Book Report - November 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Chris Scarborough.

Six Days in Tokyo

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

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

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

Dalkey Archive & Stuff

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

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

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

PAINT YOUR TEETH 5 Line-up

-The Annubhava Orchestra

-oninko!

-Steve Finbow

-Melissa Mann

-Sarah MacLeod + Soddy

-Chikanari Shukuka

-the zen stance

-jim²achin[e]

Sunday, November 22nd @ Gamuso in Asagaya

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

I Laughed Out Loud and I Never Laugh Out Loud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Report - October 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the F***

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

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

& check out the Offbeat Generation at Everyday Genius.

The image is by Eugene Atget.

Beer Machine

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

So...

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

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

Minimalist Book Reports

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

Richard Morgan Altered Carbon - speedy intelligent post-Gibson cyberpunk

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

Jeff Noon Vurt - classic Brit slipstream.

William Faulkner Sanctuary - fetid pulp American gothic.

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

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

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

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

Yasutaka Tsutsui Paprika - Japan Times review coming soon.

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

Susan Onega Narratology - the dryness of academia.

Aleksander Hemon The Lazarus Project - the man can write.

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

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

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

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

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

Roland Barthes Roland Barthes - beautiful & illuminating metabiography.

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

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

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

Martin Amis Experience - probably Amis's best work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above image - Conrad Botes - Weeping Zombie.

Balzac of the Badlands - Promo Video

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

Book Report - July 2009 - Addendum

I managed another two...

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

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

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

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

Book Report - July 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love + Hate

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

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

Cheers

Phobias & Perversions

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

Book Report - June 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robo-Geisha

In the Interim

Weird week. Started off well - managed to get three-year visa & took my passport down to Taito-Ku ward office in Ueno to apply for my alien-registration (Gaijin) card. Should get it back in two weeks or so, in just enough time to fly back to London. It's hot here - humid, cloudy, the air trapped between the land and the ocean, just sitting there, every time I move I sweat. I've been escaping to the cold bath, book in hand. I said "book"! So, Tuesday, shopping in Ozeki (a local supermarket), I encountered my first taste of overt racism (towards Westerners that is). You get the disguised racism - restaurants with no space but are half empty, or bars that are just closing even though it's 8pm; the stares, the looks of shock & surprise... Some of it isn't racist, some of it is because the staff can't be bothered to deal with foreigners, so a crossed finger or crossed arm sign indicating "NO!" is a gesture rather than an affront. Back to my story - I was in Ozeki buying dinner & beers. I go to the cooler to get my six-pack of Enjuku (the Japanese Stella Artois - but stronger) & there's a guy standing there holding a toddler. Now even though Japan has some amazing architecture - both ancient and postmodern - a lot of Japanese have a poor sense of spatial awareness: they don't like to touch but they have no idea that they may be standing on your foot or that it might be their turn to get out of the fucking way. So I'm trying to reach around this guy to get to my beers but he won't shift, so I go around the other side & he moves that way, so I move back & he moves back - not on purpose, just not aware. I make a lunge, grab the golden six-pack & turn. His girlfriend/wife appears clutching some tofu and shouts - I admit not in my direction but I am the only Westerner in the vicinity - something that translates as "Japan for the Japanese!" I look at them but they shoot off towards the daikon (giant radishes). This post is "in the interim" because I'm trying to put together June's book report but keep getting sidetracked & I'm tired so fancied blogging. Things worth checking out: Graham Rae's evisceral review of Green Days' 21st Century Breakdown in 3:AM; a teenage Japanese girl shaving a bear; & Sum by David Eagleman. Photo is of my manor - Asakusa - in 1910 (July to be precise). Cheers.

View From My Balcony

Sitting on the balcony in my new red chair - it has a beer holder, you know - while reading Sigmund Freud's "Three Essays on Sexual Theory", watching a large green & yellow butterfly feed from white & red flowers & listening to the sparrows squabbling, the crows complaining, I thought of the first three lines of a song/poem: "I stayed up all night sweating & all day betting that you'd walk out on me" but now on my walk along the river nothing else comes, there's just the rush & slap of the Sumida, the whisper of traffic, the steely sighs of the trains, bicycles intermittently interrupting my thoughts because the Japanese are a "no, you" "no, you" people, indecisive, wobbling biddies who turn at the last moment, schoolgirls texting while riding, &, now, back on the balcony, the song/poem rears its head once more, "like a ritual blood letting, the sun of our affair setting, no more love, no us, no we... Good job I've given up writing poetry... Deary me...

Balzac of the Badlands

Here is the cover - well, nearly - waiting for a blurb for the back - but it is as near as damn it. I like it. Neo-noir it is. It will be published in October by Future Fiction London & I will be coming back from South Africa to promote it with some readings - not sure where yet but hopefully a pub because I miss them & will have severe withdrawal symptoms by then.

Published alongside Balzac of the Badlands is Andrea Lambert's Jet Set Desolate from which you can read an excerpt over on 3:AM.

Boxes & Books

Our stuff has just arrived from the UK, after a game of mime & bowing with the delivery men, I opened the battered cardboard boxes. I thought we'd got rid of a lot of junk but it seems to have followed us. I stripped out the books - my argument being that it would make manhandling the boxes easier - really, I just wanted to get them stacked until we buy bookshelves. I can't stand rooms without books in them. So, a quick system - contemporary authors (remember Wallace & Bolaño are dead); modern classics - Kerouac, Miller, etc.; classics - for some reason DH Lawrence is the cut-off point for me even though he's only 6 years older than Miller; Japanese authors; history; non-fiction & philosophy. Four main piles: contemporary authors the tallest; modern classics next - oh, shit Ballard's dead as well - have to shift those;  classics with Japanese books on top - the reason that Akutagawa is a Penguin Classic makes this an easy decision; then history, non-fiction, & philosophy in one pile - making for some weird bedfellows: Heidegger snuggling on top of Brian Masters, Iain Sinclair pressing down on Roland Barthes. Damn - I need another pile for books I'm reading or will read soon - OK, just in front - Amélie Nothomb's Tokyo Fiancée (reviewing), Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London (reading & reviewing), & Denis Johnson's new novel Nobody Move - reading next. I've tried to cure myself of this addiction - it's a sort of paraphilia - bibliophilia. But it's no good. They amass. Fuck it. Bring 'em on. 

Weird T-shirt: "Fire and the Bad News Cats" ? Saw a guy dressed in a whole smörgåsbord of animal costumes, wearing a dog mask, & a yellow afro wig going into a porn cinema in Shinjuku. 

Check out the new edition of Lee Rourke's Scarecrow - s'good.

Bubble Dance & Bartitsu Sticks

The image shows Bartitsu martial art techniques. Bartitsu - invented by British engineer Edward William Barton-Wright (a mix of ju-jitsu, boxing, French stick fighting) - was the self-defense method of Sherlock Holmes & if you like Holmes check out this film - Murder By Decree.

Wow - parentheses - that's how my mind is working at the moment - all over the place. Hypoglycemic shock today - had to skip reading - sorry.

When Gore Vidal was asked by a badgering interviewer whether the first person he had sex with was male or female, Vidal replied, "I was too polite to ask." As classic as this: A woman came up to Truman Capote in a restaurant and asked him to autograph her breast. Capote did. Her angry husband strode over, took out his penis and suggested Capote might like to autograph it. “Well,” responded Capote, “perhaps I could initial it.”

While working on my new book Grave Desire - an analytical biography of the necrophile Sergeant Bertrand - I've been researching strange sexual habits. On my walks around Tokyo, I discovered an area not too far from our apartment called Senzoku 4, which is roughly the area of the Yoshiwara (prostitute quarter) during the Edo period of Japan. Its streets are full of soaplands. Prostitution is illegal in Japan but, as with a lot of Japanese laws, there are ways of getting around the edict. According to Wiki this is how things work in a "soapland" 

The client and prostitute first undress, and the client's body, including his genitals, is washed. After warming his body in a bath, the client lies on a mattress while the companion covers herself with liquid lotion for lubrication. Then she slides her body up and down the client's body; this is known as "awa odori," or "bubble dance". Oral sex may be performed on the mat, and if the client chooses, sex as well. When "mat play" is concluded the client and prostitute rinse off and move to a bed for sexual intercourse.

Unlike Amsterdam, Soho, & Berlin's Stuttgarter Platz, the clubs are fronted not by women but middle-aged men who rush from doorway to taxi to greet clients. When I walk along the streets, they dodge back into the buildings. Foreigners rarely get into these places. 

Check out this shunga (erotic artwork) by Katsushika Hokusai - it is the first example of  shokushu goukan (触手強姦) [tentacle rape] - although ~ & please take this in: octopi do not have tentacles.

May Book Report - & Other Stuff

Finally have internet installed & it's super fast. Weirdest T-shirt slogan I've seen so far "Big Pussy Christ Lives". Best bar I've been to BYG (thanks to David Hoenigman). This blog - Morbid Anatomy - provided the illustration. Go visit, you'll find some interesting things there. I found it via boingboing. Favourite places so far - Kanda & its bookshops & the Sumida River. A review of Love Hotel City in the Japan Times. & how about Stewart Home versus David Cameron.

Jonathan Littell - The Kindly Ones: Sorry, couldn't finish. Got halfway through. Boring. Really. The prose is stodgy - could be the fault of the translator - but I struggled. Needs a strong editor. & I was looking forward to it.

China Miéville - Perdido Street Station: Been meaning to read this for years. Miéville's novel is supremely crafted - as in all good fantasy/science fiction, the imagined world (New Crobuzon) is fully realized & ever so slightly familiar. The geographical space of London warped to a steampunk future - sort of like Dickens crossed with William Gibson.

Yasunari Kawabata - The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa: A novel about my new manor. The narrative begins about two blocks from my apartment and then proceeds past my window & into Asakusa's mean streets. A fragmented narrative about the area & its prostitutes & thieves, its writers & con-artists, its actors & geishas. Not tried Kawabata before but I'll read more.

Bernard Stiegler - Acting Out: The pre-eminent post-Heidegger philosopher's take on why he is a philosopher, his post-bank-robber life, & his analysis of a world in which humanity struggles with our push to the post-human - an analysis of the loss of us, the atomization of the me, the proliferation of I in the crazy-mirror world of we. Worth it if you can find a copy.

Larry McCaffery (ed.) - Storming the Reality Studio: An omnibus of cyberpunk fiction and postmodern thought. Fiction from the likes of Acker, Ballard, DeLillo, Gibson, Rucker, & Sterling followed by the thoughts and theories of people such as Derrida, Jameson, Lyotard - even Timothy Leary gets a few words in. Good intro to cyberpunk & late 20thC critical theory.

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow: I read this novel when I was about 16. I carried it around with me like it was a security blanket, a pomo bible, or a can of Stella (or Enjuku these days). It was the Picador edition with the missile head grafted onto the stockings-&-suspender-belt-wearing bottom half of a woman's body. The second time I read it was at university - probably around 1986. Third time around, I'm about 100 pages in.  I remember the denseness of the plot but not the slow concretion of the sentences. I bought a new copy because of Frank Miller's soon-to-be-classic cover. Plus check out Zak Smith's illustrations to GR.

'London after the Rain' by Ben Olszyna-Marzys

Found on Ballardian.

One More Week

Until the internet connection is installed. For now, how about this?

Denken of the Denkikan

Friends ask me why I like living in Japan and why I find it a good place to write. I suppose because when here I am out-of-the-world in the sense that it is not familiar. It is a world that I do not fully understand. I am apart from rather than immersed in the world. Apart not a part. I have to question everything I do. I am not absorbed in but rather absorbing the world around me. There is no "disclosedness" for me, no "being-in" but an attempt to transform the "being-out" to a "being-in". Familiar things become unfamiliar. The everyday presence of objects - the paraphernalia of human life - transform into subjects - I have to interact with "Pocari Sweat" with "Man Smell" gum, with beer for kids, & salt & white chocolate KitKat. So, this unfamiliarity means I am not completely being-in-the-world. So, my daily anxiety - what's the Japanese for "large beer"? Should I cross the road when nothing's coming even though everyone else is waiting for the light to change to blue? Should I use my elbows against the old women in the market as much as they use theirs against me? - manifests itself in a raw full-on face-to-faceness with who I am. It's all to do with a realization of "being possible". Or it could be I just like to look at the women.

Walked the city. On Monday, V & I walked from Shinjuku to Harajuku to Omotesdando, through Shiba Park to Shiba Daimon. Tuesday, afer having lunch in the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, I walked from Yurakocho, past the Imperial Palace, up through Kanda (via the amazing Kitazawa bookshop), past the Tokyo Dome (stopped for a beer in The Hub there and finished China Miéville's excellent Perdido Street Station), & back to Komagome. Today, I walked from Komagome to Shinjuku. Apart from the walk from Shiba Daimon to Shimbashi - not far - I've circumnavigated inner Tokyo.

On Monday, I found three Bernard Stiegler books in Kinokuniya. Foyles didn't have them, nor did Gower Street Waterstones - what's occurring? Also bought The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Yasunari Kawabata which leads me nicely to...

Moving tomorrow to our new apartment in Asakusa - can't wait - just north of "Rokku" the old theatre district. This was/is a "burakumin" area - if you want to find out more about this minority group, go here, or better still read whatever books you can find by Kenji Nakagami. Probably not the best day to move to Asakusa as it's the start of the Sanja Matsuri festival - two million people...

Oh & visit Rick Terror's blog... El good...

Image by Romain Slocombe.

Science Fiction Burns My Fingers

Maybe it's because Ballard died (at last week's Recession Session Live,  Stewart Home {ever contentious} claimed Moorcock to be a better writer than Ballard... not sure "better" is the word but Moorcock's work  does have the wider scope) - or because I'm back in Tokyo with its futuristic buildings & gadgets - but science fiction seems to be in the ascendancy - I am also reading China Miéville's spellbinding Perdido Street Station & have just bought a copy of The Scar so I may be somewhat hypersensitive to things sci-fi (apologies to you purists out there). This week, Chris Beckett's collection The Turing Test was nominated for the Edge Hill Prize for the short story - I liked Chris's quote about being unable to write "straight" short stories & thinking, "Oh, just put a robot in it".

I love book covers - good book covers - so here's  a treat. Penguin have launched an amazing site charting the changing face of their science-fiction list. Here is my favourite. I own all the Ballard editions (in various degrees of dilapidation & mackerelling). Plus Gollancz is in the process of publishing a set of Future Classics (including M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device)  - the minimalist covers are superb.

Over on 3:AM, Richard Marshall (in his special way) reviews Tony White's steampunk-influenced pamphlet Albertopolis Disparu.

& while I've been writing this blog, random songs with a science-fiction feel/theme have played on my iTunes: Silver Machine by Hawkwind (checkout Stacia), Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun by Psychic TV, & Trans-Europe Express by Kraftwerk.

PS: I had my hair cut today in a Japanese barber's somewhere between Ueno & Asakusa - strange experience - after communicating that I wanted a number 2 (could've been embarrassing), I was offered a small whicker basket - hmm.... ahhh... it was for my glasses (never do know where to put them), then a head massage & a meticulous cropping using a razor & finished off with scissors, my head, face, & neck were washed, dried, then my head was vacuum cleaned for any loose hairs - cool - & all for ¥1,000, about £6.50 - beats Mr Topper's any day.

& you'll see that I've compromised on the blog title...

Addendum

Strange - I received an e-mail from a litzine telling me my story submission had been rejected... Not so strange, you say, your stories aren't that good. Ah, but, see, I hadn't submitted anything... I keep meticulous records, plus the name of the litzine would preclude me from submitting my work... Interesting. 

OK. If you're going to comment on my blog, please don't do it anonymously - that's just annoying & cowardly. What's wrong with a little one-on-one? A bit of back-and-forth? Face to face? Anonymous doesn't cut it. It's like all those Guardian bloggers who go under pseudonyms - if you believe in what you write, put your name to it. 

The Kindly Ones - huh - Jean Genet without the eroticism, Sven Hassel minus the action, Anthony Beevor devoid of intellect - this novel is bloated & in desperate need of an editor. Don't bother. Wish I hadn't.

Nihon Bashing - Or Not

Things I've forgotten about Japan...

Crows: Corvus macrorhynchos japonensis or the Eastern large-billed crow. In Komagome, they start to "cau cau" around 4am. There are surprisingly few pigeons in Tokyo, and it's the crows you will see scouring the pavements & roadsides for discarded food.  Image to the left is by Masahisa Fukase.

Pedestrians: Or should we call them "wandering diagonalists"? Or the phenomenon of not making a directional decision or deciding to turn at the very last second. Or just stop.

Yamanote Line: A Japanese punk band should do a Tokyo version of Generation X's "Day By Day" - 'On the Yamanote Line, round & round & round & round & round...'

Bookshops: Kinokuniya (Shinjuku), Tower Records (Shibuya), & Maruzen (Nihombashi), have better English-language literature sections than most English bookstores. Kinokuniya's philosophy section is a must visit.

Food: Not had a bad meal since we got here. 

Bars: Smoke - argh! Smoking is allowed in restaurants & bars. The no-smoking sections seem to be placed in the middle of the establishment next to the local chain-smokers.

Teeth: Worse than British teeth. Much worse.

I won't do an April book report as the holiday took up most of the month. Below are the books I've read in the period between Thailand & Japan.

RD Laing - The Divided Self: Laing's enquiries into schizophrenia & the place of the schizoid individual in society. An analysis of freedom & categorization. What is it to be sane? To be mad? To be a part of society or apart from it? My only negative criticism in this milestone book is Laing's overpowering ego.

Kobo Abe - The Box Man: If you like your literature weird but with a political foundation, then Abe's your man. Think identity - individual, societal, & national. 

Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet: Classic. Nuff said.

Neil Powell - Amis & Son: The chapters on Kingsley are well researched & affectionate. The chapters on Mart make up some of the most jealous, back-biting, & whiny pieces of writing I've ever had the displeasure to read. What's that cliched phrase? "Get a life, Mr Powell."

Nicholson Baker - Human Smoke: Baker's a weird creature. Of his novels, The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, & Box of Matches are all brilliantly written, precise, microscopic crystallizations of existence. Whereas The Fermata, The Everlasting Story of Nory (why? why?), & Checkpoint are best forgotten. His non-fiction is more consistent. U&I is a disturbing & very funny book about Baker's obsession with John Updike. Following The Size of Thoughts & Double Fold, Human Smoke - through meticulous research - charts the build-up to America's entry into WWII. The chapters comprise newspaper reports, official documents, eyewitness accounts with minimal authorial interference. For those who want a twist on "conventional" accounts of the invasion of Poland & Pearl Harbor, check this out - you might be surprised. I hate the cover.

Current reading: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones - yawn...

Oh, did I mention I have an iPhone 3G?

Thanks & Things

The Recession Session Live! at the Betsey, Clerkenwell, London - what a great night. Well, at least I enjoyed myself, although a little frazzled & stressed. Great to meet people I'd only read or emailed. Thanks to Paul Ewen, Darran Anderson, Jenni Fagan, Will Ashon, David Oprava, Lee Rourke, Christiana Spens, Tim Wells, Cherri Shakewell, Mark SaFranko, Vic Templar, Danny King, Chris Killen, Tom McCarthy, & Stewart Home for turning up & performing. & a big Yeah! to my co-hosts Melissa Mann & Joseph Ridgwell. & also thanks to all who came including Ben Myers, Adelle Stripe, Andrew Stevens, Sam Jordison, & Jo Mortimer, John Murphy, Fiona Barham, & Mike Brady (good to see you, mate.)

Upgraded to Club World for the flight to Tokyo (cheers, Bri), so a great flight during which I finished Nicholson Baker's superb Human Smoke & struggled with Patrick French's biography of VS Naipaul. I love Japan as everyone knows but the bureaucracy is maddening. After spending about 90 minutes signing forms, we picked up our keys for the temporary flat in Komagome. Very quiet residential area but we found a good izakaya. Spent the past few days getting things sorted. Found a flat in Asakusa, north of  Sensō-ji and not an onigiri throw from the Sumida river - just missed the cherry blossoms. Today will be spent changing visa & opening bank accounts. On the first day back, we went to Soft Bank in Harajuku (where yesterday I saw the ugliest Gothic Lolita Transvestite [Go-Lo-TV?] {the picture-link is of someone else}) & V & I bought iPhones - amazing things. I am totally addicted. I bought a case for it yesterday that looks like it was designed by HR Giger.

Can't decide whether or not to switch to Seppuku My Heart... Hmm....

Tokyo Reading plus Amis & Ballard

Opposite is a flyer for a reading I'm doing in Tokyo with David Hoenigman & Kenji Siratori. Next Sunday, I'm moving back to Japan to live in Tokyo - Komagome to begin with & then Asakusa (I hope). 

JG Ballard died yesterday morning & I'll do something soon as a homage to one of Britain's most subversive & brilliant writers. I've been reading Amis & Son by Neil Powell. Entertained & enlightened through the chapters on Kingsley, I became exacerbated & enraged by the section on Martin. Powell is a man who would have us believe that a stint in the army would be good for us, & chastens Martin on his preference for The Beatles over Bach (I can't stand either but The Rachel Papers was published in 1973 not 1773). Powell is also a man who has never seen a football match through to the end (a cricket lover), & doesn't know why Mart uses slang in his novels: well, that's because a lot of people "do" use slang & Mart writes contemporary urban novels. Powell appears to not understand words like "gaff" & "trex" - not even in their context. Nor does he appear to have a sense of hunour - this is from The Information: 

..he sat down in the kitchen and ate a fruit yoghurt so rubbery with derivatives that it reminded him in texture of one of his so-called hard-ons.

That's funny, Mr Powell, not a "dreary adolescent vulgarit(y)" as you call it. Nor does Powell reference or mention Gavin Keulks' earlier study Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 - odd that. The overall tone is a strange mix of Powell's namesakes Enoch & Lord Baden-, parts hectoring, conservative, & old fashioned. But the thing that really pissed me off was the total exclusion of Ballard. In his critique of Kingsley's The Anti-Death League - a science-fiction novel - Powell seems oblivious to the Ballardian undertones & influence. Kingsley's main character is called James Churchill & his lover is Catherine Casement (both thoroughly Ballardian names). By 1966, when The Anti-Death League was first published, Ballard had published the novels The Wind From Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), & The Drought (1965), plus manny anthologised short stories & a number of short-story collections including The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962),  The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) & The Terminal Beach (1964), which Kingsley must have known. Indeed, Ballard recalls:

Kingsley Amis was full of praise for my early stuff; but as with so many English novelists he was vaguely suspicious of the power of the imagination: it could be too much of a good thing. Yet surely the radical imagination is what we seek in a writer; when we read we want to encounter a very different world that will make sense of our own.

Also, Martin has - at length - written about how Ballard influenced him - notably in the novels Other People & Time's Arrow - & about meeting Ballard on a number of occasions. Yet both the influences & the biographical detail are ignored in this rather petty & annoying book. 

JG Ballard will be missed.

So, in a week's time - the return of Seppuku My Heart.

Autistic Realism

I have a theory about a certain strain of writing. Starting with Kafka (or maybe Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet) moving beyond Beckett to contemporary writers such as Tao Lin & Lee Rourke. I'm gonna call it "Autistic Realism" & I'm going to write a longer piece on the subject - it's all to do with repetition, heightened responses to sensory stimuli, differing means of communication, compulsion & ritual. Give me a few months.

Holiday Book Report

On the plane, on the train, on the beach, on the patio, in restaurants, in bars, beside swimming pools & in bed - 22 books... 

Here we go:

Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace: I've never got on with Atwood & this is no exception. A sprawling story based on a true-life crime, it deals with identity & sexuality, class & morals. Highly recommended to me but - sorry, Hamish - I thought it overlong - could have been the flight.

JG Ballard - High Rise: One of my favourite Ballards. The prototype for Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes, & Kingdome Come. A modern high-rise apartment complex gone horribly awry. A brilliant satire on class & desire.

Peter Straub - Koko: Straub's better than King - hands down - he's a better writer, his plots are more intricate without being bloated, & his narrative is driven by ideas not bogged down with needless pontificating. This is about Vietnam & the horrors generated by war & memory - the set-piece in Bangkok is truly scary.

Peter Ackroyd - Poe: Ackroyd's the best of his kind at this sort of thing. Poe's a perfect subject for Ackroyd's research & this is a great introduction to one of the first modern masters.

Roberto Bolano - Last Evenings on Earth: Short stories from a genius. Some of them read like Borges, some like Barthelme, but the author that Bolano most resembles here is Paul Bowles - deeply disturbing tales about writing & the terror of being human.

Henry Green - Back: Green is one of Britain's most neglected authors. If you've not read him before - & I'm sure you have - his nightmare realist approach is closer to Beckett than Green's contemporaries - Waugh, Isherwood, & Lawrence. This short novel is about war, love, & amnesia.

Michel Foucault - Madness & Civilization: A seminal work of postmodernism, M&C is an - or should that be the - historical analysis of Western civilization's responses to madness in all its forms. Essential.

Milan Kundera - The Joke: Kundera's first novel & very assured it is, too. No one, with exception of Bret Easton Ellis, writes about sex as well as Kundera. Add in a bit of Kafka & some spot-on satire of Communism & you're off.

James Ellroy - The Cold Six Thousand: The fouth attempt to read this book. I fucking hate it. I hate it. It's fucking shite.

James Lasdun - The Horned Man: A haunting novel of obsession, paranoia, identity, & madness. 

Dan Simmons - Song of Kali: A great beach read - like a reverse Mao II mixed with one of the better Straub novels. Set in Calcutta, it deals with evil, the authenticity of art, & religion.

Roberto Bolano - 2666: Aparently, from the moment I opened this until its final page, I muttered under my breath, "B******! C***! F*****!" Brilliant. One of the most important novels of all time. C***!

Antonin Artaud - Anthology: One of my heroes. This is a good introduction to Artaud. "Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society" is an amazing essay, as we read it, we watch the author's madness unfold before our eyes. 

Toby Litt - Journey Into Space: See review in 3:AM.

Jack Sergeant - Naked Lens (Beat Cinema): See forthcoming review in 3:AM.

JG Ballard - The Unlimited Dream Company: Found this in the bungalows we were staying in on Koh Samui. Not the best Ballard. The prose is overblown, but in saying that it has more ideas & original imagery per page than most novels out there.

JM Coetzee - Disgrace: No one - well, apart from Naipaul at his most precise & acerbic - writes like Coetzee. A visceral & unflinching look at one man's downfall in a changing world. Brutal.

Tim Robb Smith - Child 44: Nearly out of books by this time & so had to resort to local bookstores. Another good beach read. Frenetic & well plotted, a little too knowingly cinematic for my liking. On a par with Gorky Park. That's pretty good going.

Irvine Welsh - Glue: Another local buy. Not a big Welsh fan - I've read them all thinking I'm going to like one sooner or later but have only been impressed by Trainspotting & Marabou Stork Nightmares. So, pleasantly surprised. A good novel about growing up & the divergent paths our lives take.

Tom McCarthy - Men in Space: Was saving this & was disappointed. Not as good as Remainder. Read like a coupling together of various early manuscripts with an artworld-thriller gloss. Look forward to further novels by Mr McCarthy, though.

David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster: A collection of essays from the late DFW. "Authority and American Usage" should be read by all interested in the English language. But, if I were you, I'd give the essay "Host" a wide berth. 

Bret easton Ellis - Less Than Zero: Can't believe this is 25 years old next year. I read it when it was first published & the prose is still crisp & chill & it retains its nihilistic, Generation X indifference. Impressive. Check out the cover on the link above - beautiful.

That's it. Some things I noticed on holiday. Hardly anyone on the planes and trains I travelled on was reading a book. They played computer games, watched movies, talked in loud Australian accents about whatever first entered their minds. And, on the beach? The top three books to get sand between the pages: 3: various Harry Potter books, 2: Alex Garland's The Beach (natch), and 1: horror of horrors - Shantaram - aaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh!!!!!

Finally, one poem or quotes from the poem reoccurred during my reading of the above books. Here it is: 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Bangkok Tales

More Blade Runner than Tokyo, more down & dirty than Hong Kong, Bangkok is like that bitch of an ex you can't get out of your system. All the smells of SE Asia are there: a mixture of fish, fruit, and faeces. Traffic is insane & the dogs are schizoid. A must-visit destination. Went to a few bars with Creation Books' James Williamson. Read 22 books & finished first draft of 20,000-word story. Not too shoddy. & I have an 80% tan - & I don't tan easily. Highlights: Chinatown, river taxi, thunderstorms off Koh Samui, Soi 5 & 8, the food stalls in Big Buddha Beach, the beach dogs (especially Scoobie who took a liking to biting my arse), the Lord Nelson, and the Kinokuniya bookstore in the Paragon Centre (better Eng.Lit & Philosophy section than most British bookshops). OK. I am also now officially Senior Lecturer Extraordinary at North-West University South Africa. I am also writing a non-fiction book for Solar Books. More later.

Image - Chris Coles "Bangkok Soi Dog".

You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

Last blog for a while. This Monday, I go to Thailand for two months - as long as there's no snow & the trains & the tube are working & Heathrow is open. Looking forward to Bangkok, the journey south on the train, lazing about on the beach, & reading & writing . Things that will happen: I will get sun burnt, may get sunstroke, will pick up some strange disease - so far on my travels I've had amoebic dysentery, tick-bite fever, & norovirus leading to two different kinds of coma. I'll be replacing Stella Artois with Chang beer (despite them being Everton's sponsors).

If you're suffering from Hombre-withdrawal...

Three things to read online:

Beat the Dust's guest editor Joseph Ridgwell presents The Recession Session I & II.

3:AM - check out Chris Killen's novel The Bird Room.

Red Peter.

Three things to think about:

Bernard Stiegler.

Alain Badiou.

INS.

Three things to look at:

Dante's Inferno.

Humument.

Bastardoz.

Three things to listen to & watch:

Rip Rig & Panic - Storm the Reality Asylum.

Wire - Outdoor Miner.

Psychic TV - Godstar.

Three things to buy:

Stephen Barber - Cities of Oblivion.

Peter Sotos - Perfect.

Love Hotel City.

Cheers

Book Report - January 2009

This is an express vvvvvrrrrrmmmmm! book report as I do not have time for a full one.

JMG Le Clézio - The Interrogation & The Book of Flights & War: Strange to read three full-blown experimental fictions from the '70s. Worth a look. I've had enough for the time being.

Yasutsaka Tsutsui - Salmonella Men on Planet Porno: Great title, good stories - a Japanese Ballard, Vonnegut, or Wells.

Simon Critchley - On Humour: The Philosopher-in-Chief of the International Necronautical Society's take on the theory of humour. Insightful. Funny. What more can one ask?

Steve Aylett - Lint: a fictitious biography of science-fiction writer Jeff Lint. Not as good as it could have been. There are better meta-biographies.

Alberto Manguel - A History of Reading: Anyone interested in books should read this one - a classic from a man who used to read to Borges.

Roberto Bolaño - By Night in Chile: Sort of Graham Greene on speed & ecstasy - Bolaño's good - damn him. &, no, still not read 2666 - it's coming with me to Thailand.

Ryu Murakami - Audition: see review in 3:AM.

Yasutsaka Tsutsui - Hell: see forthcoming review in The Japan Times.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Television, Making Love, & Camera: The man's a genius. Check out why I think so in my over(e)view on 3:AM.

Withdrawal Symptoms

A change of mind. I've decided not to take my MacBook with me to Thailand. This means I will not be writing a new blog - I'll put ambages on hold for future use. I'm going to try to ween myself off internet use. I usually write straight on to the computer but I am going back to basics & using notebooks & pens. Research will have to wait until I return to UK/go to South Africa. That's a good thing. Sometimes, I get mired down in facts - a quick visit to the BBC website for coverage of the killings on the Rock may lead me to Gibraltar pubs to oldest pubs in Britain to Samuel Johnson to the Johnson family to William S. Burroughs to Patti Smith to Patti Rhodes to Pichunter. & that's an hour gone (at least)... well, as long as I can find some decent videos of Akiho Yoshizawa.

I will be writing reviews and posting from an internet cafe somewhere.

The photo above is by Tod Kesselman. It's from Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley’s Tate Declaration on Inauthenticity. The circled heads are (blue) Lee Rourke, (red) me or Tintin, (green) Melissa Mann.

See you in a few...

Willing Suspension

I'm off travelling on 9th February - about four weeks later than I had planned. While I'm away, probably until end of June, I'm going to morph The Glass Hombre into something else, something colorful, maybe something like this. & I'm going to post photos & videos of my travels to bore you silly & maybe make you a tad jealous. So expect shots of me reading, me drinking beer, me walking aimlessly (hence the title), strange objects, V sunbathing, kathoeys, & my inability to tan. I'm going to Thailand, not sure where yet but definitely a couple of nights in Bangkok, then head south to one of the islands & a beach bungalow; then South Africa to lecture for three months; & then, finally, Tokyo & yakitori. Books I'm taking with me: 

2666 - Roberto Bolaño (still haven't started it - there's a certain fear)

Last Evenings On Earth - Roberto Bolaño

Men In Space - Tom McCarthy

Back - Henry Green

Normance - Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Koko - Peter Straub

Song of Kali - Dan Simmons

Austerlitz - WG Sebald (to re-read)

Life: A User's Manual - Georges Perec (to re-read)

Wittgenstein's Nephew - Thomas Bernhard

Asylum - Patrick McGrath

Journey Into Space - Toby Litt

A Blanchot Reader - eventually tracked down a volume which includes Blanchot's fiction.

One of my favourite things to do on holiday is to find books to read once I've run out of the ones I've taken. Once, years ago in Torrox, Spain, I couldn't find a thing to read, no one there to swap books with, no secondhand bookshops, no shops with kippered crime novels, so I had to resort to the apartment's shelves: they coughed up a Joan Collins autobiography - Past Imperfect (good title), & a dreadful brick-size novel called Nightbloom, which was something to do with an annually flowering orchid & a serial killer. Class.

I'll do the January book report before I go & I'll still be contributing to 3:AM & The Japan Times. Things to come in both - reviews of Ryu Murakami's Audition, Toby Litt's Journey Into Space,  John Giorno's Subduing Demons in America, Jack Sergeant's Naked Lens, Beat Cinema, & Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, plus a short story I've been working on, & an interview with Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

Above image from Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini.

Reading Rat

My review of the International Necronautical Society's Declaration on Inauthenticity at Tate Britain on 17th January 2009, is on 3:AM & also on Surplus Matter.

Read in order to live. ~ Gustave Flaubert.

One reads in order to ask questions. ~ Franz Kafka.

The proper study of mankind is books. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Life happened because I turned the pages. ~ Alberto Manguel.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book. ~ Stephane Mallarmé.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images. ~ Albert Camus.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. ~ Jorge Luis Borges.

Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read. ~ Groucho Marx.

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers. ~ Stan Barstow.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. ~ Umberto Eco.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company. ~ André Gide.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan. ~ Jacques Derrida.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. ~ Gaston Bachelard.

I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place. ~ Franz Kafka.

The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. ~ Walter Benjamin.

3:AM Awards & Stuff

Just as The Glass Hombre is winding down & about to be morphed into something else while I travel - I dabbled with "I Think Therefore Siam" but someone got there before me - it goes & shares the award of "blog of the year 2008" with the wonderful HTMLGIANT. Check out the other category winners on 3:AM.

So far so good in 2009. Jean-Philippe Toussaint & Mark SaFranko providing excellent reading material. Various ideas for non-fiction projects. Going to put together a collection of my unpublished short stories. Speaking of which, a short story of mine "Shadowings" appears in Love Hotel City published by Future Fiction London, edited by Andrew Stevens, the volume also includes works by Stephen Barber, Richard Blandford, Paul Ewen, Michael Gardiner, Ken Hollings, Richard Marshall, Ben Myers, John-Ivan Palmer, Lee Rourke, Kenji Siratori, & Steven Wells. Also check out Stephen Barber's latest - Cities of Oblivion.

The video above is a clip from Ken McMullen's Ghost Dance; it shows Pascale Ogier - who sadly died of a heart attack at the age of 25 - questioning Jacques Derrida on the theory & actuality of ghosts. I wanted to show this clip with Leonie Mellinger but embedding is disabled. If you get a chance to see Ghost Dance, grab it. Along with a few cans of Stella, I used to take girlfriends to see the McMullen masterpiece at The Bluecoat in Liverpool. Class.

Oh, & Stewart Home is blogging - go there.

Top 25 Tracks of 2008

According to my iTunes, which is weird because I thought I spent most of 2008 listing to pre-punk pub rock - Dr. Feelgood, The 101'ers, Graham Parker & The Rumour, Roogalator, etc: Probably why I've also been listening to a lot of The Hold Steady & Meat Puppets. The list seems to veer between poetic ballads - Cale, Cave, bass-driven rock - The Clash, Dandy Warhols, & R&B-inspired white rock - Beefheart, Graham Parker, The Box Tops. Strange that there's no place for Patti Smith, The Slits, & The Ramones. Fleet Foxes are up there because of their lyrics - I'm usually more of a thrash fan. James White & The Blacks make it in there despite the cries of V to "turn off that squawking f****** music!" Laibach & Rammstein don't make the list for similar reasons. I can't listen to music while I'm writing. I know a lot of authors who can. The cover to the left is Doll By Doll's first album Remember. I bought it in 1979 because of the cover - showing Antonin Artaud. They were an OK rock band - good lyrics, Jackie Levin had a great voice, & I remember they had a strong biker following for some reason.

Mykonos - Fleet Foxes 

Jail Guitar Doors - The Clash 

Sequestered In Memphis - The Hold Steady 

Child's Christmas In Wales - John Cale 

Servo - Brian Jonestown Massacre 

Go With The Flow - Queens Of The Stone Age 

Motorhead - Hawkwind 

Final Day - Young Marble Giants 

Alex Chilton - The Replacements 

Almost Black - James White & The Blacks 

Walcott - Vampire Weekend 

Ships In The Night - Be Bop Deluxe 

Breakdown - Buzzcocks 

Diddy Wah Diddy - Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band 

Hold Back The Night - Graham Parker 

The Brides Have Hit Glass - Guided By Voices

Paris 1919 - John Cale 

Neon Rainbow - The Box Tops 

Butcher Boy - Doll By Doll 

Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye - Leonard Cohen 

Shot By Both Sides - Magazine 

Backwater - Meat Puppets 

Horse Pills - The Dandy Warhols 

Sailor - Jethro Tull 

God Is In The House - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Book Report - December 2008

I struggled during December, trying not to read Roberto Bolaño's 2666; I'm saving it for 2009 - which is now. Yes! Actually, I've just started The Interrogation by J. M. G. Le Clézio who I'd never heard of until he won the Nobel Prize for Literature - not being a Nobel kind of person, I was quite happy to remain ignorant, then I saw the newly published editions and the novels (well, the early ones at least) looked interesting. The Interrogation - so far - reads like a hybrid of Beckett, Ballard, and Robbe-Grillet - speaking of which:

Alain Robbe-Grillet - In the Labyrinth: An unnamed man wanders around an unnamed city during an unnamed war; he needs to deliver a package to someone, somewhere. Mesmerizing prose, as simple as the ideas in the novel are complex. The cover of my edition is one of my favourites - a destroyed city with a red dot indicating what? After a little research, I discovered the photo to be of Tokyo after the fire raids.

Keiichiro Ryu - The Blade of the Courtesans: A Japanese historical novel dealing with samurai, ninjas, erotic succubi, & some dodgy sex. Longer review to follow in the Japan Times.

Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke: One of my favourite authors. This is his Underworld - a huge novel dealing with CIA activity in Southeast Asia during the sixties & seventies. If you like DeLillo, if you don't mind a bit of Ellroy, & if you've started but never finished Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, this is the book for you.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic: The novel on which Tarkovsky based Stalker, this is a superlative sci-fi novel, every bit as atmospheric as the film. An existentialist investigation into human future, time, space, & our connection & interaction with objects - a phenomenological yet phantasmical text. A must read.

Jorge-Luis Borges - Fictions: OK - the name of the stalker in RP is Redrick Schuhart, I must have had this in my mind while deciding on what to read next. I've read and returned to read Borges since I was 16, & the stories still haunt me. In "Death and the Compass" there is a character called Red Scharlach who is searching for the secret Name - see below - all things connected.

Tom McCarthy - Tintin and the Future of Literature: An intelligent & fun dissection of the teenage reporter, the comics, the politics, & the life of Hergé. McCarthy's a good read whatever the subject matter &, if like me, you're not much of a fan of Tintin - except the haircut - McCarthy's in-depth analysis is about how to read a text, how to incorporate continental philosophy into subject matters in which it shouldn't really fit - like squeezing a haddock into a tin of Humbrol paint. McCarthy - the English Barthes?

Ken Bruen - Cross: Another brutal Galway outing for Jack Taylor. Bruen nails the prose - short, sharp sentences - Jack Taylor struggles with drink, ghosts, & his need to be cool. Not the best Bruen but better than a lot of contemporary crime novels.

Ian McDonald - Brasyl: Don't be put off by the garish Gollancz cover - this a great sci-fi novel, a tripartite story of Brazil set in 2006, 2036, and 1706. The novel questions our view of reality, characters cross the multiverse - Borges meets Heart of Darkness meets William Gibson. Highly entertaining.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint - The Bathroom, & Monsieur: overview coming soon - 3:AM.

Don DeLillo - The Names: Inevitable really after the Robbe-Grillet, Johnson, Borges, & McDonald. One of the best novels ever written - the novel Borges never got around to writing. Classic. 

Happy New Year.

Addendum

Addition to the blog below: I read another six books in December 2008, so 112 books read, that's one every 3.25 days. Add three UK, two Belgian, & one USA. December's book reviews to come shortly. 

As with Seppuku My Heart, as soon as I leave the UK, The Glass Hombre will cease to exist. Not sure what I'm going to do yet - definitely a travel column for 3:AM & maybe a dedicated website.

Looking forward to in 2009: Love Hotel City anthology, The Offbeat Anthology, the Sergeant Bertrand book, Balzac of the Badlands, & getting back to work on The White Gardens - finally.

Image: Swing - Aleksei Pechnikov

A Great Reckoning In A Little Room

Two weeks, more or less, remain of 2008, so here's the best of... I've read 106 books this year, that's one every 3.3 days, which is down on the last five years... Hmmm... Before I start, here's a list I did for Big Dada himself Will Ashon's blog & one I did on Japanese books for The Japan Times. I read 79 books of fiction, 25 books of non-fiction, & two books of poetry. 51 from the UK, 31 from the USA, 9 from Japan, 4 from France, 2 from Cuba & Australia, 1 from Italy, Russia, Chile & Argentina, & 1 international. Best five fiction (regardless of when published): Tom McCarthy - Remainder; Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke; Roberto Bolaño - Nazi Literature in the Americas; Jorge Luis Borges - Fictions; James Kelman - The Chancer. Non-fiction: JG Ballard - Miracles of Life; Alain Robbe-Grillet - For a New Fiction; Christopher Hitchens - God is Not Great; Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower; Simon Critchley - The Book of Dead Philosophers. That's it. I'm moving out of London on the 21st December. & in 2009 - if it all works out - Thailand, South Africa, & Japan. Thanks to the Feltham boys, the Soho crew, the Primrose Hill mob, Melissa M, Joseph R, Paul E, Paul B, Stephen B, David P, Hamish M, the Andrews S & G, Jo H, Bren O, Mary B, Hels S, Kerrie S, & Hillary Raphael. & for a bit of fun, check out this new website.

Beer & Boasting in North London

I was asked to be featured writer for December's Beat the Dust. There you can find, over eight days, installments to a long short story called "Down Among the Dead" set in Kilburn, Belfast, & Gibraltar. You can also listen to me read the story - took me ages - but, with the fantastic GarageBand, was fun to do. Thanks to Melissa Mann for asking me. Check out all the other stuff there - s'good. 

Brilliant piece by Robert McCrum on the state (rotten) of the publishing industry  in this week's Observer. Depressing read, but someone had to say it. Good job there are decent small publishers. 

Oh, & this made me chuckle.

Ten Things of Interest

Here are ten things that have caught my eye over the last week.

1. The viral video for Adidas Predator boots starring Steven Gerrard & Xabi Alonso above.
2. An article in The Guardian on medical out-of-body experiences in which the patient's idea of the self is located in another person or dummy. The full article - "If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping" - can be found here.
3. The photography of Aleksei Pechikov - particularly this one.
4. The New York Review of Books on Roberto Bolaño.
5. Eyeshots latest rejection letters.
6. & a related blog about rejection letters.
7. trueswords.com.
8. Slavoj Žižek on Obama & the financial crisis.
   
9. Weird street posters.
10. UbuWeb - it just gets better & better.

Cheers.

Book Report - November 2008

November - a theoretical month, in that I read books as theory, concentrating on their form rather than their content. I've been stuck on two things - a short story in which I am saying exactly what I want to say but all the words are wrong. & part two of a novel which I write & re-write but can't seem to get the voices back; they've disappeared. I'm trying to write my way out of a silent labyrinth of sentences that happily delete themselves the moment I apply the full stop. Argh!

William S. Burroughs & Jack Kerouac - And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks: Review coming soon on Stop Smiling.

Stephen King - The Stand: I've read a few Stephen King novels - Misery, The Shining, Cell - I prefer Peter Straub - but King's OK as long as I'm in the mood. I read this to see how (in a very basic move-by-move way) he gets multiple characters through the narrative to the conclusion. Here's what I think: on a word-for-word basis, Stephen King is a dreadful writer; he uses too many words. I know that might sound a strange thing to write but it's true. A man's body makes the shape of an X on the ground - fair enough, we can visualize that - but then King goes on to say, the X is an inverted v topped with a v - yeah, Stephen, we know what an X looks like. He is sometimes condescending, sometimes prolix in his sentence construction, this leads to some sentences being cumbersome & annoying (like this one). His paragraphs just about hold together as emotional & conceptual units. His dialogue is passable. But it is when we get to the chapter that King comes into his own, creating both everyday & macabre characters in circumstances gone from normal to eldritch; these are enjoyable to read and well-constructed. In such an intricately plotted novel, it is the seamless interconnection of these storylines that makes Stephen King a master of his genre.

Tom McCarthy - Remainder: I'm not going to write too much about this as I want to save my thoughts for a longer piece. I agree with Zadie Smith that this is one of the most important English novels of the past ten years. At last, an English writer who, if he fulfills his promise - & I'm yet to read Men in Space - will be worthy of a place alongside Auster, Saramago, Robbe-Grillet, maybe even Beckett & Borges. No pressure, Tom. No pressure.

NHK-TV “Tokaimura Criticality Accident” Crew - A Slow Death: 83 Days Of Radiation Sickness: A very strange & disturbing book about radiation poisoning, medical ethics, & nuclear power - review forthcoming in The Japan Times.

Simon Critchley - The Book of Dead Philosophers: The philosopher general of the International Necronautical Society brings us a witty introduction to philosophy & philosophers. Based on the deaths & lives of thinkers from the pre-Socratic Thales, Solon, & Chilon (sound like Charlton Athletic strikers) to Baudrillard, Derrida, & Debord, this is a joy to dip into, even if some of the jokes are somewhat forced.

Rupert Thomson - Death of a Murderer: One of our bravest novelists - The Insult was the Remainder of the 1990s - Thomson tackles subjects most British novelists shy away from. The story of a night spent by a policeman in a hospital morgue  guarding the body of Myra Hindley. It mostly works, is eerie, thought-provoking, & very well written, yet lets itself down with a touch of mawkishness, a little sentimentality, & some needlessly coincidental plotting. Worth a read, though.

Alain Robbe-Grillet - For a New Novel: Anyone seriously interested in the history & future of the novel should read this book. Some of the essays are over fifty years old, yet are still fresh, challenging, & inspiring. Robbe-Grillet writes about Beckett, Pinget, Kafka, & on the theory of the novel, realism, & novelistic time & space. Very good.

Ted Berrigan on YouTube

Also Frank O'Hara, Gregory Corso teaching, & Robert Creeley reading.

Long Novels

I'm reading Stephen King's The Stand. & very enjoyable it is. Next, I'm going to read Roberto Bolaño's 2666 - both very long novels... but not the longest. So I did a bit of checking on Wiki and Amazon & here's a good list done by word count:

10: Infinite Jest - David Foster wallace - 479,198.

9: War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy- 560,00.

8: Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -580,000 (approx)

7: A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - 591,544

6: Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand - 645,000 (approx)

5: Joseph & His Brothers - Thomas Mann - 750,000 plus (approx)

4: Clarissa - Samuel Richardson - 1,000,000 plus (approx)

3: Mission Earth - L. Ron Hubbard - 1,200,000 (approx)

2: The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil - 1,200,000 plus (approx)

1: In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust - 3,000,000 (approx)

Others, arguably, belong in this list: Artamène a novel in ten volumes by Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry & A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell being the strongest contenders.

I've read five of the top ten - first one to guess which five gets a free blog post on Glass Hombre on any topic they choose. Image - Klorolle (Toilet Paper), by Gerhard Richter.

Nectar of the Gods

Now, I would imagine that most of you out there have deduced that I like to drink Stella Artois - both at home & in the pub. Unlike most beers, Stella has a loyal following - I know Joseph Ridgwell is another huge fan - so it's not surprising that we come up with nicknames for our favourite beverage. We have nicknames for our partners, our pets, our lovers. I've only had a few nicknames - well, ones that I know of: Finney, Little Stevie, Professor Big Nose (don't ask - oh, and if anyone knows how I can get in touch with Beverly Reed once of Bedfont & Great Yarmouth - please tell me), Weevil, and Bug. Strange the last two are insects. Back to Stella: I think "wifebeater" is rather excessive - go on, ask my ex-wives - but there are a few nice ones:

Lugosi - as in Bella.

Lucille - as in Ball - as in Bell of the...

Uri - as in Geller.

Nelson - as in Mandela

Helen - as in Keller - I said "AS IN KELLER" You see what I did there? Whoops!

Paul - as in Weller.

Old - as in Yeller.

& my favourite is - Mr Fritzl's - as in cellar...

Which brings me to something that confused the hell out of me earlier in the week - I started reading this excellent article by Colm Tóibín thinking it was about the Fritzls when it's actually about Thomas Mann and his family.

Anyway, any of you out there who can come up with a nickname for my beloved Stella that makes me chuckle or at least smile, I'll buy you a pint next time you're in London.

Cheers, I'm off to meet Joseph R & Melissa M for a few Mr Fritzl's before the Green Carnation reading.

Oh, yeah - the US elections - great site here.

Book Report - October 2008

A great blog over at Bookninja about book covers & marketing. The winner - Cormac McCarthy's The Road - had me smiling all morning. I apologize early for next month's book report as I'm just about to start reading Stephen King's The Stand and doubt I'll be able to manage another volume during November. Talking of which, I was intrigued by the late & nearly great David Foster Wallace's top-ten book selection as published on J. Peder Zane's Top Ten Books Blog. Some blog commentators think that DFW must have been having someone on. But why? He was being honest about what he liked to read. He wasn't creating a pretentious list of books he thought people thought he should enjoy or one that made him look intellectual. I'm always trying to write a top ten but the list changes too regularly - some days it's all Burroughs & Amis & Kelman, then the next it's Leonard & Ellroy & Raymond, or Bukowski & Fante & Woodrell. Or Stephen King.

DFW's list: 

1. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis

2. The Stand - Stephen King

3. Red Dragon - Thomas Harris

4. The Thin Red Line - James Jones

5. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong

6. The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris

7. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein

8. Fuzz - Ed McBain

9. Alligator - Shelley Katz

10. The Sum of All Fears - Tom Clancy

Interesting. Never been a C.S. Lewis fan. The Thomas Harris books are near-perfect examples of their genre & are well written and fastidiously researched. Haven't read Stranger in a Strange Land for years but will revisit as I will Walter M. Miller Jr's A Canticle for Liebowitz, which I'm surprised isn't on DFW's list. Anyway, on to October's review.

Paul Buck - The E-List: Go here - 3:AM.

Fergus Linnane - London's Underworld: A comprehensive investigation into sex, violence, gangs, & money throughout the last 300 years of London's history. Linnane - author of Drinking for England - recreates the slums of old London town, the sleazy glamour of '60s Soho, & the menacing "families" of the present-day smoke. A must for all London historians. Reads like a novel - as they say.

Eoin McNamee - The Ultras: McNamee does conspiracy well - he's also spot on with terror, angst, secrecy, & some 21st century existentialism. Imagine Clancy rewritten by Nabokov. Poetic when it really shouldn't be. This is a tale of the British secret service - the dark army - in Northern Ireland & throughout the world. If you like Chris Petit's The Psalm Killer, then this is for you.

Hillary Raphael - Ximena: Review up soon on 3:AM.

Edmund White - The Flâneur: A re-read because I was going to Paris. Disappointing from White. Reads like something he pitched his agent over lunch. Rather than exploring the great 

flâneurs of Paris - Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Benjamin, Debord, & Genet, the book is more concerned with areas, restaurants, & gossip. Should have re-read Breton's Nadja  & Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant. 

James Campbell - Interzone: An excellent book on American expatriate life in Paris from Gertrude Stein, through Richard Wright, Alexander Trocchi, James Baldwin, & Boris Vian to William Burroughs, & Brion Gysin. 

Stuart Kendall - Bataille: An excellent introduction to Bataille the man & his work. Covers Bataille's theories of economics, erotics, literature, history, anthropology - situating him as post-Sade & pre-Foucault, & somewhere between the surrealists & the existentialists. 

Georges Bataille & Others - Dark Star: The Satanic Rites of Gilles de Rais: a colection of fiction, theatre, invective, biography, & criticism of the 15th century aristocrat, soldier, satanist, paedophile, & child killer - made the Wests look like the Brady Bunch.

Edmund White - Genet: White took something like seven years to research this biography & it is an immense undertaking seeing as its subject was notoriously secretive & somewhat liberal with facts, names, & dates. Genet is one of the only writers to have actually had an interesting childhood & an extraordinarily full life. From orphan to juvenile offender, from thief to prostitute, from outsider to literary giant - White's biography uncovers the undercover Genet. Genet's still shocking to read - I think it's his use of language - the way you don't expect to read the words he actually uses in the beautiful & immaculate sentences. Almost like hearing Selina Scott say she'd "like to suck your throbbing dirty cock." Well, that's what I think. 

Paris October 2008

Unlike the muscular surge of New York City or the violent confrontations of London, Paris walking is a diagonal saunter, stop, then turn. Expensive - between €7 & €12 for a beer - Paris is still a great city in which to walk & to people watch. There are hundreds of book shops - Russian, Japanese, African; ones that focus on architecture or automobiles, others that are filled to the brim with secondhand volumes. There are at least a dozen good English book stores - Shakespeare & Co being the most famous, while Galignani's is the best. The stalls along the Seine "Les Bouquinistes" are marvelous - Genet used to run one - selling secondhand books, magazines, & posters - I saw one that specialized in war atrocities, & another that had old Playboys, Penthouses, and Hustlers. We went to Café de Flore for a beer. We took in some graves - Baudelaire, Sartre, Desnos, Proust, Cortazar, Beckett, & a few others - photos up soon. Couldn't find Tristan Tzara's tombstone. Also went to addresses where writers lived: Bataille, Breton, Gertrude Stein, & where Genet was born. A longer piece on Paris will appear somewhere soon. Oh, the Moleskine city notebooks are exquisite, handy, & beautiful. What would I do without my Moleskine?

Saturday night, went out for a few beers with Melissa Mann, Joseph Ridgwell, Dave Oprava, & Martin Reed but had necked too much Maximator ("the demanding drinker's choice") during the day, so was not great company.

The image is Paris 1919 by Erik den Breejen.

Walking in the Brain with the One I Love

Below is the story I read at Jo Horsman's Sparks in Brighton on Tuesday night. Rush to get there - frowned at for drinking beer on the train; then couldn't find venue - I always get lost in Brighton; but great audience & a good night; Martin Reed gave Melissa Mann & me a lift home. The photo accompanying this blog is the one projected behind me as I read. Each photograph is commissioned especially for the writer. This one, which I saw for the first time as I took the stage, is bang on & it's by Benjamin D Cooper. The piece - the title comes from a ship signal flag - is part of an ongoing series I write while walking; an impressionistic take on what I see, hear, & think about during my flâneury around & within cities, towns, & sometimes the country - not a big fan of cows (living ones, anyway). & talking of flâneurs - Victoria & I are off to Paris - home of Baudelaire, Breton, Debord, & Burroughs. Right, I'm off to have breakfast with Hillary Raphael. 

You Should Stop – I Have Something Important to Communicate

They’ve knocked down the building where Kenneth Williams once lived. There’s nothing to see now of the former flat at 8 Marlborough House, Osnaburgh Street. The concrete, glass, & steel skyscraper that will appear is a mere skeleton of memories & shadows.

Squirrels mince across the grass. Two pigeons bask in the sun looking like discarded slippers. Once there was a park keeper who knew the names of all the trees. “What is name?” a Japanese boy on his way to the zoo once asked him. “Jacaranda,” the parky replied. The child frowned & grasped his mother’s hand a little tighter.

The canal resembles a brown tie a man has laid out on the bed with the intention of choosing between it & a grey one he is just about to take from the wardrobe when the telephone rings & he has to go downstairs to answer it, it is his wife & he assures her he will be there in no time at all &, yes, of course he’s going to wear the grey tie with his dark-blue suit.

She looks like an actress but probably isn’t. She could be a retired model. She wears sunglasses even though it is overcast, a sweater draped over her shoulders even though it is humid, work boots unlaced even though it is doubtful she has just finished building a wall to keep her safe from people who pretend to be her fans.

He could go in the doctors’ surgery but after he asks if his prescription is ready he forgets & so thinks he will hold on until he gets to the ones in the park but when he gets there he remembers going there the last time he walked past the zoo & doesn’t want people to think he is gay & so he’ll walk to the toilets in the train station or the ones in the town hall where he has to go to pick up a copy of his marriage certificate that he needs to start divorce proceedings.

Magpies, thrushes, robins, blue tits, jays, crows, pigeons, blackbirds, emus, parrots, ducks, swans. A man who drinks in his local pub, a greengrocer, a bookseller, a woman he has a crush on, a woman he once slept with – once, someone he is sure is a politician but he can’t remember his name. A Dromedary, a Bactrian, a goat, some sheep.

The urn is painted the colours of a Friesian cow. It stands guard next to a round table. The table is painted green, as are the three chairs that surround it. Sitting on the chairs are three people of Asian descent. A woman in her sixties, a woman in her thirties, & a young girl not more than ten years old. They are, in turn, drinking coffee, looking at a map, eating an ice cream. A dog urinates against the bench opposite.

Every time he walks past this spot, he remembers a story he read in a national newspaper. He doesn’t want to think about the story – it was one of violence, in broad daylight, everyone saw, no one stopped it – but he can’t help himself & every time he reaches the place where the memories begin, he tries to think of other things – Lego, herons, shiny beetleish cars on the blue-agave sweep of the Westway.

He is sure it is her, but the last time he saw her she didn’t have a tattoo – a barbed-wire daisy chain around her right biceps – yet her eyes are the blue of mischief, her small nose turned up, her full lips red as energy. The last time he saw her he was hung over, waiting for a taxi to take him to work. She had just come from the pharmacist where she had collected a three-month supply of contraceptive pills because she was leaving London to move to Majorca.

Some fathers play catch with their children by the gates of the park, the mothers sit on the grass arranging blankets & boxes & plates & cutlery. Drink containers stand around or sprawl on the tartan – plastic henges of mineral water & orange juice. The fathers’ faces are red & the mothers look at their children quietly willing them to grow up & leave home.

It is the last day of summer. White pieces of cloud float overhead & nothing is redeemed in the dark bunkers of his mind. Sand in his eyes, the great tail fins of American cars drift by, then horses skewered to silent merry-go-rounds, a circus barker, a meat map of a cow, & he thinks of all the rainy days, the grey days, the rotting timbers of his terminal hut on the green-fringed & sun-gilded lagoon.

It began to sparkle in the library, like shiny glucose bubbles the colour of eau de cologne & he realized that when he opened the book the words on the recto & verso pages, sparse & black, looked like pubic hairs & he felt as though he was looking between a woman’s legs & he ran his finger along her spine & she threw her head back & giggled.

Meant Snake to Draw

Busy week ahead. Tuesday 14th October sees me in Brighton at Jo Horsman's Sparks night of readings along with Jo, Melissa Mann, Sara Crowley, Martin Reed, & a friend of Finland-based writer Joel Willans. If you can make it, it's Upstairs at the Three and Ten, Steine Street, Brighton.

Wednesday 15th October, I'll be at the Future Fiction London launch of Hillary Raphael's Ximena and Clarah Averbuck's Cat Life. The party is at The Buffalo Bar in Highbury.

Friday 17th October - I'm hoping to catch Stephen Barber talking about his new book on Artaud Terminal Curses. The reading is at the Metaphysical Library of the Theosophical Society, 50 Gloucester Place, London W1, with David Ellis, Richard Crow, Alaknanda Samarth, Louis Benassi and Angelo Madonna and admission is £6.

Things I want to do: go see the Rothko & the Bacon exhibitions; buy a pair of 8-eye cherry-red DM's; & push on with The White Gardens.

The pic is of my new project "slumbible" - not sure what I'm going to do with it but it seems to have a life of its own.

Oh, & I have an inter(e)view of Paul Buck's The E-List in 3AM: Magazine & a review of Hideo Okuda's Lala Pipo in The Japan Times.

Dudes & Geezers

I'm in Borders in Islington looking at the true-crime books &, as I see one that fits the bill for my research, a squat geezer in his late fifties stands right in front of me oblivious to my presence. I'm about to say something when his equally squat wife leans over and taps the spine of a book and says, "Ain't that the one you're in, love" - Gangland UK - one of the Adams family? 

The photos above are of various "gang" members - The Dudes - a glam/proto-punk group of aesthetes and hooligans - I fell somewhere in the middle. The people are Peter Galyer, Brian Grist (Twig), Stephen Cook (Shakey), Duncan Cook, me fourth photo, and the guy in the shades on the right in bottom middle is Bernie Burvill now doing a cock & hen for robberies involving £37.5 million at Heathrow airport - in this photo, Bernie is on the left - sans shades.

Book Report - September 2008

You've heard of speed dating, right? No, not a quick shag, a pat on the tush, & £2.50 for a bus & a bag of chips, but the highly successful dating system invented by Rabbi Yaacov Deyo - Dey-ey-ey-o. Well, The Glass Hombre brings you speed-reviewing. Eight books in as many minutes and - apart from linking - I'm timing myself.

Catherine Breillat - Pornocracy: Easy - see link to 3:AM.

JG Ballard - Miracles of Life: Superb. Ballard's autobiography. Moving in a way Ballard usually isn't. Calm, incisive. Best thing he's done for a long time. But why didn't he include the time I called him one afternoon when extraordinarily drunk - some people have selective memories.

Hideo Okuda - Lala Pipo: You'll have to wait until the review's published in the Japan Times.

JG Ballard - Kingdom Come: One of Ballard's better late novels - not sure Cocaine Nights & Super Cannes, etc. match anything like Crash, High Rise, & Hello America, but Kingdom Come has all the right Ballardian moments.

David Simon - Homicide: Canongate have done us all a treat re-publishing the book on which Simon based The Wire. Can't wait for The Corner - out in April 2009.

Eoin McNamee - 12:23: David Peace recommended this author to me and I decided to start with the one I thought I wouldn't like, not being a big fan of that waste of space, time, and tears Diana Spencer, nor a conspiracy-theorist - but I was wrong. Similar to Peace in his use of history and research, yet McNamee holds his own. Poetic. Brutal. 

George V Higgins - The Friends of Eddie Coyle: Word-botherers who want to learn how to write dialogue should read this book - better than Elmore Leonard - and Elmore agrees. Class.

Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh: The daddy of postpunk noir does it again with a fantastic near-future thriller. If you like Blade Runner & James Ellroy, this would sit snug in your lazer holster. Zap.

OK. I overran by two minutes, but so what? The chick left after I mentioned porn & asked whether she wanted chili sauce on her kebab & a Tennent's Super & White Lightning snakebite before we climbed the ladder to the yeasty pit. Always the same, always the bleeding same.

Foyled Again

Great night out last Friday night. Thanks to Rebekah for allowing See You Next Tuesday - The Second Coming to piggyback on the regular Tales of the Decongested night. Readers included Grant Perry, Martin Reed, David E Oprava, Elaine Chiew, Jo Horsman, & myself. Met up with Joe Ridgwell & most of us went to The Carlisle Arms for a few beers & a chat. Plans - well, October's book reviews are going to be late as I'm busy with a number of things, not least proofing the novel, attempting to find time to carry on with my new one, & planning to move back to Japan early 2009. I know most of you might not like the combination of football (soccer) and toilet humour - but this was inspired. Watched La Haine for the first time in a long while - what I don't remember about it is the moments of almost fantasy-like cinematography & narrative - the cow, the shot on the balcony where Vinz, Hubert, and Saïd are alienated against a hazy & unreal Paris backdrop, their personas brought into stark relief. The photo of the aftermath of the reading is is by David E. Oprava & reminds me of another photo.... Cheers...

Excited

Well, I have very exciting news & am probably being a right pain in the arse (ass) round about now, but sod it. I've just signed a contract with Future Fiction London, an imprint of Creation Books, to publish my novel Balzac of the Badlands - &, yes, I can now put it in italics. It should be out in October 2009 - that seems a long long way away, but, hey. Before then, check out the other volumes - Ximena by I (Heart) Lord Buddha author Hillary Raphael & Clarah Averbuck's Cat Life. A small, bipedal, endothermic, vertebrate animal that lays eggs informs me that forthcoming titles may include an anthology of contemporary Tokyo-based stories & a new novel from Stephen Barber. More news when I have it but don't hold your breath - that would be silly.

Apart from that, a quick blog on 3:AM's buzzwords on the re-published Homicide by The Wire's David Simon - also check out Lydia Lunch, Francis Bacon, & Melissa Mann all on 3:AM.

Favourite things spotted in the press this week:  In The Guardian, Richard Williams manages to cite Arte Povera & Marcel Duchamp in his review of Capello's new England. This from the wonderful & always interesting boingboing. Liverpool beating Manchester United 2-1. 

Plus the very sad news of the death of David Foster Wallace.

No Reason

Not much to report - hence the title of the blog - no reason to post this apart from to upload the Boris Vallejo painting Cyborg. Vallejo just about gets it right between kitsch and fantasy. 

I grew up in Feltham in southwest London - satellite of Heathrow, the reservoirs, & motorways, Feltham is pure Ballard territory - he doesn't live that far away - & in Kingdom Come I sense the fear I always feel when I return to my hometown with its barely suppressed racism, its poverty, its NF & BM supporters, the grey faces echoing the constantly rebuilt concrete of the shopping centre, the football shirts (Chelsea, QPR, Brentford, Fulham), the teenage mothers, the teenage fathers with their cut-here tattoos, & I feel some of it inside me, trying to force its way out. This week, put in a position I would normally relish - faced with a man who needed a slap - I demurred, kept my hands to myself, remained calm. Unlike me. I think the Ballard helped. You can take the boy out of Feltham, &, just maybe, you can take Feltham out of the boy. 

The image accompanying this reminds me of my escape & that Feltham made me who I am in its image. Like the Young Offenders' Institution that settles on the outskirts of the town like a familiar crow, a reification of the town's unconscious fears, my relationship with Feltham is one of distrust & disquiet. Don't go there.

Book Report - August 2008

Streets full of rugby league supporters - Hull & St Helens - never seen so many beer guts. Outside the Northumberland Arms (surely one of the worst pubs in London) it looked like a bumper-car/Pere Ubu-lookalike convention. Read a lot this month - had a week off, so... 

James Lee Burke - The Tin Roof Blowdown: My first Burke, so to speak, & I enjoyed it. Burke's eulogy to New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina.  Dave Robicheaux comes up against, drug crime, gangsters, religion, & politics in a fast-paced poetic thriller. Robicheaux has appeared in many of Burke's novel & is a little clichéd but the novel expertly creates fiction out of reality, exposing corruption & crime while revealing human negligence & impotency.

Ken Bruen - London Boulevard: Fancied something London-based after New Orleans. Bruen is one of my favourites. This novel is a rewrite of Sunset Boulevard & set in Holland Park, Notting Hill, & Ladbroke Grove. A West London thriller. Not sure if it works but the writing is as sharp as the action. 

George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution: Looks like I'm on my own little crime spree. This time, I've done a runner to Washington DC in 1968 around the time of the assassination of Dr King & the riots, looting, & arson that followed. In an intelligent, socially aware novel, Pelecanos deals with family, politics, crime, & love. An important book on race relations in America during the sixties.

Thom Jones - The Pugilist At Rest: One of the great contemporary short-story writers, Jones should be mentioned alongside Carver, Cheever, & Boyle. In stories about boxing, Vietnam, & drinking, Jones rivals Hemingway, O'Brien, & Bukowski.

Nick Flynn - Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: When it was first published & heaped in windows & on tables in all the major bookstores, I stayed away from this book, shaking my head & muttering, "Oh, god, not another memoir by an ex-alcoholic." & then someone, & I can't remember who, told me it was good - like Bukowski, Fante, Miller. So I strolled into one of the major bookstores to buy a copy, then another, & another & then I tried the independents, the second-hand stalls & stores. Not a sausage. Got it on ebay. It's well written & interesting to a point, but also slightly smug &, I'm afraid, in the background, I thought I could hear the more-righteous-than-thou preaching of a twelve-stepper.

Denis Johnson - Angels: Perfect. Better than I remember. Sad. Haunting. Buy it. Read it. Pass it on. 

John Healy - The Grass Arena: Now we're talking. The true tale of a London-Irish boy who grew up to be a thief, an alcoholic, & a shit-hot chess player. Beautifully written, honest, & emotional, this memoir needs to be read by all interetsed in London, drinking, redemption, & chess. The last few pages grated somewhat - but then, I'm a heathen eejit.

Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: Review coming soon in The Japan Times.

John Williams - Michael X: See review 3:AM Magazine.

David Goodis - Black Friday & Short Stories: If you've never heard of David Goodis but like Raymond Chandler & Jim Thompson, well, check him out. A great writer of noir. Black Friday reads like a thriller written by Harold Pinter before the politics set in. Snappy dialogue, sexual tension, guns, guilt, & glugging. I'm saving the stories for later.

I'm just about to start reading JG Ballard's Miracles of Life - I'm a little excited. 

Musings

Not been around for a spell but I'm back now & I've been busy. Spent last Saturday afternoon with Melissa Mann & Jo Horsman videoing on the streets around King's Cross - the results can be seen on BTD TV (that's Beat the Dust Television to those who can't figure acronyms) - we also had a good chat and a few beers in The Boot and the Lucas Arms.  

In full swing with 3:AM Magazine as editor & newsletter compiler. Check out some great reviews from Paul Ewen & Lee Rourke, plus interesting interviews from Andrew Stevens.

Anyone who is/was a friend of mine on MySpace - sorry, I've deleted my account - not enough time. 

Reviews coming up of Catherine Breillat's Pornocracy, Mike Philbin's Planet of the Owls and Bukkakeworld all on 3:AM, plus Hideo Okuda's Lala Pipo & Haruki Murakami's book on running for The Japan Times.

The Glass Hombre monthly book report will be coming soon.

Oh, & had a very interesting lunch/coffee with Paul Buck - & I thought I knew a lot of people. 

Taking a stroll along the canal to Hackney & getting back to The Queen's Head in time to watch the Champions League draw. Liverpool can't play any worse than they have in the last four games surely. Surely.

Watchings

I hummed & I hawed and I hummed some more & there was no way out of it - I really didn't want to go see the Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe of China perform Swan Lake in Nottingham. I couldn't escape. Trapped, I sat waiting for the waves of boredom, the scorched armpits, the thirst to arrive but, horror of horrors, I enjoyed myself. Why don't you try something new today? 

Have been half-heartedly watching the Olymipcs - like to get up early & watch the BBC online - a far cry from 24 years ago when John Murphy, Dave Power, & I watched the Los Angeles games on a tiny b&w portable TV, its snow of static made the athletics look like it was being held in a blizzard, while the swimming resembled ice snorkeling. That summer also brings back memories of John Lewis Cornish pasties, the CID kicking in our door, & watching Alien on said TV. One thing is for sure, I'm not going to be in London for 2012 - no way - I know this is pessimistic but I can't see any way London can match Beijing for professionalism (hold on - that's not what the Olympics is about, is it?). 

Quite a few things published in the last week or so. David F. Hoenigman interviewed me for Word Riot. Part 4 of Isle of Bones is in the same issue. Steven Coy of Pequin was brave enough to publish my experimental Story (thanks for the hard work on the formatting, Steven). & if you prefer your short stories a little more formalistic, there's a version of Story here.

Other news, I've joined the editorial board of 3:AM Magazine (thanks to Andrews G & S). Looking forward to it. 

Now, where's that Tchaikovsky CD? I'm going to attempt a double-jointed grand jeté... 

Above image: George Grosz.

Doings

Well, I've been to these places: Lincoln - good secondhand bookshops on Steep Hill, so-so pubs, so so-so I'm not going to recommend any. Doncaster - fantastic food market where you can buy tripe, chitterlings, savoury duck, brawn (head cheese), sweetmeats, good fish - went to one pub - now, do you ever have the feeling your iTunes is following you around? I get it a lot - but I walked into this pub & on came Hüsker Dü's "Something I Learned Today" followed by "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" by Vampire Weekend" & Cockney Rebel's  "Sebastian" - that's just wrong. Whitby - the abbey (from a distance - £5 to get in?) is a goth's dream, stunning ruins; Henry VIII was our greatest anti-architect - and Whitby Abbey (above image by Albert Goodwin - 1922 - rather Caspar David Friedrich-like) is more sepctacular in its dissolution than Glastonbury; but disappointed with food - crab sandwich OK but too expensive, as was V's scampi. & we met a Yaarksheer (cheers Mike Brady) character in The Black Horse - sailor's cap, mutton-chop whiskers, blazer emblazoned with a  white rose and Yorkshire emblem, & he asked us why we were so quiet; probably because we couldn't get a word in in-between tales of his 20-year-old wife, his Olympic-champion daughter & the noise his 12 (I counted) gold rings made as he lifted his personalized pint glass. Robin Hood's Bay - may be revisited when it's not raining & full of hikers - so, probably never. 

Reading: George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution, Thom Jones - The Pugilist At Rest, Nick Flynn - Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Denis Johnson - Angels, John Healy - The Grass Arena. Listening - Conor Oberst, Daddy's Hands (thanks to Chris Killen), Death Cab for Cutie, The New Pornographers, Fleet Foxes, The Hold Steady.  I also noticed while being trapped in a car listening to Radio One that a lot of new music sounds like '80s bands - Simple Minds, Human League - & it's very up-front voice-driven & mostly shite, especially that one about asking for Joy Division at a club - &, no, I don't want to know the name of the band. Watching - Countdown, Heroes. Playing - Wii Sports, FIFA 2008, pool. Drinking - Stella, Old Speckled Hen, Chablis. Eating - a rather remarkable lemon sole with a butter, anchovy, caper sauce made by - shock of shocks - Victoria. 

Occurrences

Before I venture off to the Isle of Axholme for ten days - Ken Bruen, George Pelecanos, Dennis Johnson, & Anton Chekhov coming with - here's what I've been up to.

Went to the beer festival at Earl's Court last night with V & Gary. Great beer - one 11% Belgium brew was truly memorable. Earlier, I had a few drinks with Stephen Barber - lovely guy & seriously intelligent. 

Monday, I met up with Jo Horsman in The Colonies, Victoria. We had a great chat about writing & reading & mental health & illness. Check out her work here. 

I love discovering new writers. If you're interested in crime writing, one of the best books to introduce you to writers yet read is John Williams's Into the Badlands & its reformed sequel Back to the Badlands. David Peace recommended the little-known Russian writer Daniil Kharms - you can find some of his very strange stories here. And what a life.

Coming up on Red Peter this month, we have: Kevin O'Cuinn, Haidee Kruger, Sarah Stodola, & Melissa Mann.

The image above is from an amazing set of paintings by Hisaharu Motoda - apocalyptic Tokyo - here & here.

3:AM Magazine kindly asked me to join their editorial staff, so I'll be doing that when I return.

My friend Sarah Stodola has a new blog - A Veblenesque Gorge.

I'm reviewing the two new Murakamis for the JT.

& that's about it.

Book Report - July 2008

It's too hot. Just got back from wedding - probably the best I've ever been to - interesting people, gorgeous setting, good weather. The Stella ran out about eleven but Old Speckled Hen made a good substitute. Haven't read much this month - it's been busy, but I'm away for ten days in August so hope to catch up then. So here we go... Oh, to read a review of David Hoenigman's Burn Your Belongings, go to The Japan Times.

David Mamet - Goldberg Street: I hate the theatre. I do. I worked at Richmond Theatre for fours years in the flies - great job, but I watched plays every night. I did "get ins" & "get outs," I worked for long hours, so long that I started hallucinating, talking to myself, philosophizing about sheets of silver paper. I find it very difficult to sit through a play - cinema is worse. But I went to Mamet to get some tips on dialogue. The man's good. This book is made up of short plays, monologues, & sketches. Dialogue is one of the most difficult skills for a fiction writer to master - along with Elmore Leonard, Mamet should be one of the first stops in the learning process.

Daren King - Manual: I so wanted to like this & it is better than Tom Boler but I closed the book thinking "So what" & I wanted to think "Yippee! King's back on form - back to the genius days of Jim Giraffe or the cool originality of Boxy an Star." But I didn't think that cos he isn't. For all its postmodern accounts of alienation, finance, & pornography, the novel's "weirdness" is a little too arch, a tad annoying, & blaringly manufactured. King's prose is simple & goes a long way to rescue the novel from its "I-don't-really-care-ness" - shame.

John Williams - The Cardiff Trilogy (Five Pubs, Two Bars & a Nightclub, Cardiff Dead, & The Prince of Wales): Now we're talking. John Williams's amazing book Back to the Badlands introduced me to the work of Kem Nunn & Daniel Woodrell among others. This cracker of a trilogy has introduced we to Welsh Noir. A collection of short stories & two novels dealing with people, crime, love, & violence in the old Tiger Bay (Butetown) area of Cardiff - now known as Cardiff Bay. The same characters appear in all three volumes - Williams is spot on with his description of gangsters, football hooligans, prostitutes, pimps, & people going about their lives in an area faced with extinction. As a plus, Cardiff Dead is one of the best "rock/pop/band" novels I have ever read - bettering Litt, Lethem, Coe, & co. Can't wait to read Temperance Town - it too is set in Tiger Bay - plus check out John's non-fiction books Bloody Valentine & his latest - a biography of Michael X.

Dave Eggers - What Is The What?: This is the literary equivalent of Angelina Jolie playing Mariane Pearl – Eggers & Jolie both too aware of the subject’s worthiness. I have a lot of time for Eggers – A Heartbreaking Work… is fresh & well written – even if it did kick-start the trend of post-modern memoir – Frey, Augusten Burroughs, Sedaris. The man who gave us “McSweeney’s,” “The Believer,” the 826 Valencia centres, & a truly great short story “Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly,” unwisely ventures into ventriloquism here & it doesn’t come off. Why Eggers chose to write this faux-autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the “Lost Boys” of the Sudan, is hard to fathom. Like all bad ventriloquists, Eggers has a problem, the audience can see his lips moving. Eggers' voice intrudes too much in the narrative; the American years sit uneasily with the tragic tale of Deng’s escape from Sudan. The political tone is clumsy & everybody’s just too darn nice. I took issue with the title & that may have trickled into my reading – What Is the What? – not to spoil anyone’s reading – is taken from a Dinka creation myth – but it has echoes of Beckett – rather than a pretentious wink, Eggers might have learned from Beckett’s minimalism; this fictional autobiography – unlike Sudanese boys escaping hunger & death – is overweight & self-indulgent.

Jim Dodge - Stone Junction: One of those novels that slipped through the net of my reading experience. With recommendations from Pynchon & friends of mine, I should have got to it earlier. It's a great read - sort of Pynchon meets DeLillo meets Brautigan meets Don & Fred Barthelme. At times, a little too new-agey for me - I hate hippies - but a good alternative history of counterculture - reminded me of Pynchon's Vineland & the early novels of TC Boyle - that's a pretty good recommendation.  

This Week

Hectic. Went to a Chris Petit night at The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia. Chris read from his ultra-conspiracy-theory novel The Passenger & fielded questions. His work straddles the terms "outsider" & "mainstream" - novels such as The Passenger, The Human Pool, & Back from the Dead are DeLilloesque narratives, whereas Robinson & The Hard Shoulder owe more to the works of Derek Raymond & Gerald Kersh. We all had a few beers & a chat afterwards - nice guy & an underrated writer. Check out The Psalm Killer - one of the best modern thrillers - if you like the work of David Peace & Ken Bruen, then this is for you.

Thursday saw me at The Horse Hospital attending The Suarez Séance - a night of Derek Raymond talk, music, & film. You can read more about it - my review of the evening is in 3:Am Magazine.

South Africa looms once more. Plans to move back to Tokyo are coming along. I just killed a fly. I need more tea. I'm off the carbs, so I'm tired & hungry. I'm not sure of the logic behind Robbie Keane's proposed move to Liverpool, especially at £20 million - though, I'd rather have him than Barrie - Alonso is a much better player. Jim Dodge's Stone Junction reminds me of The Monkey Wrench Gang & Vineland. I have Martin Millar's Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me to read & review and am waiting on Penguin's kind publicity department to send me a copy of
And the Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks, a fictional account of the stabbing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr in 1944 written by Burroughs & Kerouac. I just killed a fly. Where are they coming from? I have more tea. &, yes, I'm procrastinating. I need to edit a review.

The photo above is by Pieter Hugo - one of the "Hyena Men" of Nigeria.

The Big Push

I agree to too many things. Not in arguments. I mean, I agree to too many projects. “Oh, yeah, sure I can write a 2,000-word story/article/review about – take your pick - Japan, bohos, football, Chinese literature.” “Can we have it by tomorrow.” “Yeah, fine, no problem.” Argh! Brain not working, keys not responding, blank screen, blanker page. I was looking forward to writing a blog on the US Presidential elections seen from this side of the ocean - sort of Me Three / Pond Scum reprise but on a daily basis. It was tacitly agreed upon & then the (no names) magazine said I’d have to do it pro bono - and seeing as I’m anti anything Bono, I said thanks but no thanks. & so, after getting three short stories in on deadline & a review way before the cut-off hour, I've decided to put all other jobs behind me & concentrate on two - in the mornings, I will push on with my novel; in the afternoons, I will write that book on Sergeant Bertrand; & in the early evenings, I will edit. I’m also cutting back on internet publications - you’ll all be glad to hear, no more of those pesky mass emails - unless I’m asked nicely by a kind editor... &, so, in closing here’s a link to my short story The Meatballs of Love - this is the one I read at Foyles the other week at Tales of the Decongested - if you missed the reading, here’s the writing. Also check out Jo Horsman’s story Constructing Birds.

RIP Thomas M. Disch

Thomas M. Disch committed suicide on July 5th. He shot himself in the head. He'd had enough. Author of Camp Concentration & 334, Disch wrote novels that defied categorization - like an angry Ballard or a pissed-off Vonnegut. The man had guts. The months leading up to his suicide read like an exercise in pushing somebody to the edge - which his fiction often did - his apartment had been ruined by fire, his partner of over 30 years died, his home in Barryville NY flooded, he faced eviction, he also suffered from diabetes and sciatica. Where's that Purdey? If you can track down his novels - try Forbidden Planet - it'll be worth your while.

Someone Else Would Have Broken Both Of Her Arms

I'm having one of those days. You know how it is. Woke at 5:45am to make the girl a cup of tea before she went off to work, & I thought, "Maybe I'll go back to bed & ponder the mysterious email from Lola saying she would be in England at 11pm the previous evening - I take it that's New York time, so that meant she was here now. But, no, I was still sort of buzzing from going to see Julian Schnabel's film of Lou Reed performing Berlin at St. Ann's warehouse in Brooklyn, which is weird cos that's where Lo lives (not the warehouse... but then again...) The film was good, sort of 21st century Warholian (ie beautifully produced & not in black & white) & the music - orchestrated rock - orchestratally rocked. Berlin (& I can't remember what Paul Morley said about it) is the musical chronicling of the traumatic & violent break up of a doomed relationship. I bought the LP when it first came out - I was 12 & had no idea what most of the lyrics meant & - until last night - actually thought Berlin was the "real" setting - I also thought that Nico could be Caroline - but Reed hadn't visited the city at that point & Berlin is a metaphor (divided city, surrounded by enemies - as Caroline's nickname is Alaska - cold & remote). Berlin is a masterpiece but I'm worried how much the lyrics may have affected my attitude to women & relationships... Thanks to Paul for the ticket & Gary & Rob for being good company while watching Spain beat Germany - & I saw two of my heroes on one night: Lou Reed & Fernando Torres. So, I'm having one of those days where I can't get going. I went back to bed to see if a couple of hours more sleep would set me right. Finished reading David Mamet's Goldberg Street, eventually fell asleep only to dream about slugs in the bed & dogging in the streets around Harrods. Woke again at 11:30 - woah! way late for me, I'm a pre-7am guy - & thought "OK, I have these things to do: finish that Tokyo story, move on with the play I started, edit CJ's novel, research my Sergeant Bertrand book, write that academic article." So, I'm doing this...Meeting the girl later to maybe buy that Vivienne Westwood shirt for the wedding in a couple of weeks (not mine). Now for lunch.

Book Report - June 2008: Part Two

A little early, I know, but the book I'm reading at present will take me into July, so I thought I'd get it down. I'm going away next weekend & I'm already stressing about what books to take - two should do the job - maybe Roberto Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth, or some David Mamet plays, or Daniel Davies' much-hyped (comparisons with Ballard & Houellebecq) Isle of Dogs. So...

Roberto Bolaño - Nazi Literature in the Americas: sort of metabiography in which Bolaño studies the lives of fictitious right-wing writers in North, Central, & South America. At times creepy, violent, & funny, Bolaño is a direct heir of Borges; his writing is crisp & clear, his thinking engaged, & his sense of how we live our lives challenging.

Henry Miller - Sexus: What can I say? When I was 16, this book was my bible. I'd stuff the small orange paperback into the back pocket of my Levi's & stroll around Feltham drinking Newcastle Brown ale looking like a right twat. I've read it a few times since then & it remains a powerful, exciting, & driven piece of autobiographical fiction - Miller's ego is as relentless as his desire. For me, this book is better than the Tropic novels.

Willy Vlautin - Northline: Vlautin's second novel is as good as his first. The grim but gentle tale of Allison Johnson. A twenty-something with a drink problem, Allison escapes an abusive boyfriend; pregnant, she runs away from home & starts work in a diner - a prose poem of the lost & lonely.

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez - Tropical Animal: The further dirty adventures of Pedro Juan - this time in Havana & Sweden. This book is more writerly than the trilogy, more aware of its status & place in the literary canon - like Miller, Gutiérrez's ego is sometimes out of control - the man's 50 - I hope in three years' time, I have a cock like a rod of iron & am able to shag for ten hours straight - I'll let you know - worth a read: a Caribbean Bukowski.

Book Report - June 2008: Part One

According to Wiki: June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with a length of 30 days. The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter & equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. So there. June has been a down-&-dirty month reading-wise. Otherwise, it's been busy, culminating in me reading at Foyles on Friday & going to see Stewart Home talk about Richard Prince at the Serpentine on Saturday.

Richard Price - Clockers: This is an easy one - you can go to Mikael Covey's Lit Up for a contrast with The Wire.

Billy Childish - My Fault: I came late to Childish. He's two years older than I am & we share very similar backgrounds - but his flair for self-promotion, ridiculous moustache, & antipathy to conceptualism (I did once work for Richard Long) put me off. Things have changed recently & My Fault is a coruscating memoir - an honest, well-written account of Steven John Hamper's early life in Chatham, at St Martin's, & his early affair with Tracey Emin. A sort of Kent Gothic - brilliant - & I don't like memoirs. Looking forward to Notebooks of a Naked Youth.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline - Journey to the End of Night: Apart from being one of the best titles for a book in the history of literature - I challenge you to better it - Journey is what writing should be - brutal when it's needed, beautiful when it really shouldn't be, honest - the narrative moves from the First World War to Africa to the USA & to the slums of Paris. If you've never read Céline, this is the place to start. Without Céline, the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, & Bukowski would be very different.

Willy Vlautin - The Motel Life: Last year, I was lucky enough to discover the works of Daniel Woodrell. This year, Vlautin's my big find. This novel is beautiful, sad, & addictive. The simple tale of two brothers living out their lives in motels in Reno. Imagine condensing your favourite Dylan, Springsteen, & Neil Young songs & then writing them out in sparsely poetic prose. Uh-huh.

No Doubt, Indeed, Mos' Def

What a great secondhand-book expedition yesterday. Walked up to Stoke Newington after finishing off (I hope) the Ramones story I've been writing for a year - up Pentonville, down Upper, along Essex to Newington Green, onto Albion & Stokey Church Street. Stokey has two very good secondhand bookshops - Church Street Books at 142 & Ocean Books at 121 - they're both reasonably priced - between £2 & £4 for a paperback - rather than £4-£6 you'll pay in Charing Cross Road & Camden Lock. I picked up a long-sort-after edition of Henry Miller's Sexus (£3.50), Tropical Animal by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (£1.95), & Willy Vlautin's Northline (£2.50) complete with CD soundtrack. Geezers!

I've just finished Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas - Bolaño was a genius - & I don't use that word lightly. Every book I've read by him pushes the limits of fiction. Nazi Literature in the Americas comprises imaginary biographies of South & North American right-wing authors. The writing is as tight as a bullfighter's jockstrap, funny, Borgesian in all the right ways. Can't wait for his immense 2666 coming in November this year. Here's a hint - if anyone's stuck for a title for a novel, story, poem, song, band name - check out the bibliogaphy of Nazi Literature - some great titles.

& I have part two of "Isle of Bones" here on Word Riot & a piece comparing & contrasting The Wire & Richard Price's Clockers here on Lit Up Magazine. No doubt.

Behemoths, Bastards & Bards

I've nearly finished Willy Vlautin's excellent first novel The Motel Life and am looking forward to his second - Northline - Willy is lead singer with alt-country band Richmond Fontaine. Tomorrow, I'm going to pick up a copy of Nick Cave's Complete Lyrics (well, I'm going to do more than pick it up, I'm going to buy myself a copy). Oh, digression: "From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it." - Grouco Marx. Regression: & then I got to thinking about rock/pop stars who wrote short stories, novels or poetry. So I did a bit of research & found out that the Guardian blog page & Ben Myers beat me to it & you can find it here. For what it's worth, my favourite books written by rock/pop stars are: Willy Vlautin's The Motel Life; Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One; Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel - Faulkneresque or as if Johnny Thunders had written McCarthy's Suttree; Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers; & that's about it. The lyrics of Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, & Bob Dylan don't fall into this category, nor do crossover artists such as Billy Childish (is he poet, novelist, painter, or musician?) & Jim Carroll (poet, writer, or musician?). But then how many writers make good rock stars? Stephen King? Next: novels & short stories about the music industry. Give me some ideas. Indeed.

First Line Last - A Cut-Up

Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, David Bowie & now Yu-Han Chao, Joe Dunthorne, Paul Ewen, Steve Finbow, Amy Guth, Stewart Home, Travis Jeppesen, Paul Kavanagh, Haidee Kruger, Toby Litt, Melissa Mann, Martin Millar, Ben Myers, Kevin O’Cuinn, Joseph Ridgwell, & Adelle Stripe on a new site - Parasitic 101.

Oh, and I have a new piece of fiction on Everyday Yeah - it's about Dick Emery and Doctor Dee.

Book Report - May 2008: Part Two

I'm very busy. Tokyo story to write, must get started on that Sergeant Bertrand thing, a Pop Stars in Hotel Rooms to do for Yankee Pot Roast, something I'm putting together for parasitic101 - an offshoot of The Beat; not to mention finishing the Kelman thing, putting some questions together for a Martin Millar interview, & ploughing on with TWG. But for now, here's part two of May's book report.

Dan Fante - Spitting off Tall Buildings: the further adventures of Bruno Dante, our down-at-heel, drink-sodden anti-hero. Fante's prose is lean & mean, Bukowski-esque but without the ego. This is a New York we forget still exists: flop hotels, basement rooms, & decrepit taxicabs. Fante's good. This could have been called Thirst - it reminded me of Hamsun's Hunger.

Howard Sounes - Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life: An OK biography of Bukowski. A little hagiographic for my liking - Bukowski admitted on several occasions that he was an asshole. Sounes's book is well researched & maintains one's interest - unlike many literary biographies. At least Bukowski had an interesting childhood. The one thing that put me off was the introduction by Sounes in which he basically slags off every other Hank biographer - & the quip about Barry Miles - ooh, miaow!

Charles Bukowski - Tales of Ordinary Madness: Now, I used to have every Bukowski book published by Black Sparrow Press & more. Huge Bukowski fan but haven't read him for a while. This isn't the best - sloppy short stories written for softcore publications & newspapers. For a better feel of Bukowski's short stories, try South of No North. Ham on Rye, Women, & Post Office are his best novels.

Joel Rose - Kill Kill Faster Faster: If you like your thrillers pacy, literary, & just plain different - try this. It's a brutal love story with Joey One-Way as hero & villain.

Pedro Juan Gutierrez - Dirty Havana Trilogy: Been meaning to read this for years. Fantastic evocation of Havana & Cuba (not that I've been there but now I feel I have). A Caribbean version of Bukowski's Women or Miller's Sexus but with heat, passion, & rum. Gutierrez's writing is pared down, tight, & erotic. If nihilism was sexy then this would be its bible.

Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam: if you like Camus's L'Etranger, Houellebecq's Whatever, or Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, you'll love this. Trocchi's a Caledonian Camus, a Glaswegian Gide, & an underground legend.

Daniel Woodrell - Tomato Red: My admiration for Woodrell is well documented & this book only adds to my fandom. This novel is in a genre of its own - sort of country-gothic-noir; a backwoods Gormenghast, or an Elmore Leonard novel re-written by Carson McCullers on crank. Brilliant. But why does it have that awful cover?

Cheers

Finbow on Eyeshot & Beat the Dust

Over the past four years, Lee Klein has published six of my stories (and not published a few others); from the first: Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom to the most recent: Let's Do It. Eyeshot is one of the most innovative, challenging, & intelligent literary zines out there. Check out the rejections page - very funny. Tougher Than... was the first short story I had published on the internet and Let's Do It is my fiftieth piece of web-wide fiction. Cheers, Lee.

A relative newcomer to the litzine world, Melissa Mann's Beat the Dust showcases underground writers from around the world. It's great looking, has podcats, chapbooks, & videos; it's experimental, has brains as well as balls, & this month includes fiction & poetry from Tony O'Neill, Ben Myers, Robert Warrington, Mikael Covey, Justin Hyde, Anne Goodwin, & my not-so-good self.

Oh, and the picture is of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Book Report - May 2008: Part One

This isn't a headline. What did they expect to find? Aardvarks made from jelly? Artifacts of the mythical Soblowme tribe? Anyway, as a helicopter buzzes noisily overhead, on to May's book report. In two parts because I read a shedload of books this month - mostly on holiday.

Alan Sillitoe - Saturday Night & Sunday Morning: I read this years ago & enjoyed it. It's even better second time round. Arthur Seaton (great name) is an English rebel without a cause. He drinks, he fights, he smokes, he shags. The Americans have Henry Miller, John Fante, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante, & Mark Safranko chronicling the lives, loves, & brutality of working-class males. What happened to the British counterparts? Sillitoe & Storey &... er... er...

Alan Sillitoe - The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: great title & a fine collection of short stories covering borstal life, petty crime, schools, & working class mores, morals, & ethics. Some stories match & even better Raymond Carver - & if that's not praise, then, well, it's not... Homegrown existentialism. Mucky realism.

David Storey - This Sporting Life: Arthur Machin's (how many Arthur's do you know?) life as a worker, lover, rugby player - brutal, realistic, honest - the prose is as tight as a scrum-half's jockstrap, the voice pitch-perfect - classic.

Ian McEwan - On Chesil Beach: Now, I used to be a huge McEwan fan & I'm not going to go in for McEwan bashing but this nove(ella) is poor, its premise dodgy, & its execution sloppy. In fact, this book is so sensitive, the pages came out in a rash, the cover inflamed with hives. The book's basic premise - I won't spoil it for you - is that expectations about marriage, love, sex, etc., were & are confusing & less than idealistic. So far, so dull. Set in 1962, before the onset of the swinging '60s, the novel's characters are confused by sex, by desire, by their own bodily functions. Now, is McEwan saying that before the existence of free love & tie-dyed cheesecloth shirts a university-educated couple would not have discussed sex, would not have explored their desires (physical or mental) before their wedding night? They would only have to have read Alan Sillitoe (above books 1958 & 1959) & David Storey (1960) - not to mention DH Lawrence - to get an idea of what goes where. There are also some clunking similes.

John Harvey - Flesh & Blood: This is the first Harvey I've read & I needed it to get the sickly-sweet taste of the McEwan out of my mouth. The first of Harvey's Frank Elder (retired police office/private detective) novels. Great atmosphere, tight plot, & well written. I'm not usually fond of these type of thriller/crime novels. Hooked. Better than Ian "uptown top" Rankin. But, then, I've never been able to finish any of his novels.

John Harvey - Darkness & Light: See? It was so good, I scoured the secondhand bookshop of Fuerteventura to find another. This is the third in the Frank Elder series. Not as good as the first but definitely worth a read. He's good at female characters, which a lot of crime writers aren't. Name a memorable (living) woman in a James Ellroy book, apart from his mother in My Dark Places.

Junot Diaz - Drown: Been after this for a while & it was worth the wait. It comes with the usual puffs & plaudits on the back cover &, mostly, lives up to its billing. Stories of Dominican families, children, criminals, lovers, set in the Dominican Republic & New Jersey - a fresh & welcome change from the usual Central/South American fiction - free from the fetid & humid prose of Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, & Cabrera Infante. Reminded me somewhat of Borges's "Man on Pink Corner".

That's part one - part two in a few days.

Oh, & anyone who knows me knows how much pain I went through to post the accompanying picture.

William Seward Burroughs

I have a new piece on Lit Up Magazine - it's about William Burroughs' influence on my life, the Dudes, & my addiction to literature. Went with Fi Barham to the launch party of Succour Journal 8. Had a chat with Anthony Banks, the managing editor. Met up with Paul Ewen in The Yorkshire Grey for a few beers & good conversation. Check out Paul's London Pub Reviews - an extremely funny collection of fictions set in London's pubs - what there's left of them; like independent bookshops, a lot of traditional London boozers are closing down. I loved this headline - "Monkey Brains Control Robot Arms" - isn't that a Flaming Lips song? Cheers.

From Welsh to Chinese

I remember reading Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993) while recovering from an operation on my cruciate ligament that I ruptured playing as a striker for John Murphy's team in Regent's Park: cool scar - I enjoyed it (Trainspotting, that is). It was different, slightly experimental. Since then The Acid House was OK, Marabou Stork Nightmares very good, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance disappointing, Filth funny, Glue average, Porno poor, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs very poor, & If You Liked School You'll Love Work I never got round to reading. Anyway, Ben Myers has an interesting blog on Welsh and his rage in today's Guardian - & I stick my oar in occasionally in the comments.

&, yesterday, The Japan Times published my article on Chinese women's fiction - Warrior Woman to Passport Baby. The latter being the title of Yu-Han Chao's first novel.

Come & Have A Go If You Think You're Avant-Garde Enough

There was a time when I'd never miss an FA Cup Final but I don't have a TV & the dodgy live feeds I can find are not only dodgy but it's like watching microbes replicate through a fish tank. So, I'm listening to the Meat Puppets & keeping track of the score. Good piece on Ezra Pound in The Guardian Review here - apparently, both Arthur Rimbaud & Ezra Pound had The Yorkshire Grey, Fitzrovia, as their local. & by coincidence, I walked past the house in which Rimbaud & Verlaine lived in Camden in 1873 (pic left). & I have a new piece of fiction - Isle of Bones (the first in a series) on Word Riot. I managed to get football, pubs, poetry, walking, & my own writing into this post. Not too shabby.

Things I Have Recently Discovered...

..the Turneresque industrialscapes of Sean Thomas, stories & novels of Mark SaFranko - Melissa Mann dedicates a Beat the Dust to the man, a liking for Charles Bukowski after a long hiatus - thanks to the writings of SaFranko and Dan Fante, peeling skin from my body is fun, oh, & writing a story with no holds barred, be afraid, be very, etc...

Book Report - April 2008

I'm bored peeling the blistered skin from my sunburned arms, picking the dried scabs from my scalp, & dosing my cold sores with Germolene, so here's the April book report.

Paul Theroux: The Great Railway Bazaar - One of the great pieces of travel writing. Theroux is a much better non-fiction writer than a he is a novelist; his best fiction is thinly disguised autobiography, & - apart from the brilliant Mosquito Coast - his novels suffer when compared to his travel writing. There's a wonderful egotism running through Theroux's works & it rears its exquisitely made-up face here in Theroux's journey from London to Osaka (mostly) by train & then back to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Express.

TC Boyle: Stories (Death) - Boyle is a consummate short-story writer turning his hand & his tricks to multiple subjects & personas - a refreshing read when, these days, most short-story collections are novelistic in the stories' interconnectivity & character placement. Boyle moves from dirty to magical realism & from humour to horror with mesmerizing ease. His energy is addictive & anyone wanting to learn the art of the short story should read this book.

Gordon Burn: Born Yesterday - published simultaneously in hardback & paperback, this non-fiction novel takes the news of the summer of 2007 & turns it into fiction. Or does it? Burns questions the veracity of the news, the ferocity of the media once latched on to a story - the Madeleine McCann case takes centre stage - Burns questions fiction's response to instant 24-hour news, to blogs, to the slow erosion of historic images (I even found myself feeling sorry for Mrs Thatcher on her lonely walks through Battersea Park - forgotten, forlorn, history, no longer news).

Daren King: Tom Boler - Daren King's voice is a refreshing one in the days of corporate publishing, safe-as-houses novels, memoirs - Tom Boler is the prequel to his excellent Boxy an Star - my favourite King novel is Jim Giraffe - no one writes quite like Daren - anywhere. & he seems such a nice guy as well.

Gordon Burn: Best & Edwards - or Drunk & Dunc as I like to call it. Now, I had to go into a bookshop & buy this thing. I'm a Liverpool supporter for Shankly's sake & I picked it up & took it to the counter as if it were a rabid spider crab. Not just about football & two very different players, but about the change in Britain from the 50s to the 70s & on to today with the millionaire assholes who play the game (Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba, William Gallas) - I'm not saying they're not good players - Ronaldo & Drogba are up there with the best - but the attitude - & not just to football... Hold on, I sound like my grandfather - Bring oos a coop of tea, oor Gladys. I'm that thirsty I could drink a pint of camel's pee.

Paul Theroux: Dark Star Safari - hmmm.... seems to be some sort of thread forming here. Another good Theroux - this time he travels from Cairo to Cape Town by whatever means possible - well, except for flying between the two cities - that would be a rather boring travelogue. In his twenties, Theroux lived in Africa & he returns to see what's changed.

Patrick Hamilton: The Midnight Bell - somewhere in the world, I hope there's a PhD student sweating over his laptop writing a comparative study of John Fante & Patrick Hamilton - if there isn't, there should be - Hamilton does sleaze & drinking & working & love & faith as well as Fante - a gem of a novel set off the Euston Road & oozing down into a drizzled Soho that's streets are lined with prostitutes & wide boys - this is the first novel in the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky - I'm going to do my own piece of research & see if I can locate the pub in which most of the action is set - I have a good idea which one it is.

Right - off to salve my mosquito bites, balm my spider bites, & moisturize my sunburn. Slick.

Kulchur

Monday I went to the Natural History Museum to see the butterfly exhibit. These are live butterflies & moths in a greenhouse, surrounded by tropical plants & fruit. Very hot but enjoyable - amazing swallowtails, tiny yellow things (my degree in Lepidoptera is in the post) & an amazing glass case full of chrysalides & pupae. I was in full Nabokovean joy. Then, V & I went to the main galleries - a nightmare of faded taxidermy & screaming children - the museum has dumbed down to the level that it amalgamates selling toys & coffee with animatronic dinosaur displays.

Thursday, Gary bought me tickets for Pere Ubu's adaptation of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. Hmmm.... I'm a huge fan of David Thomas & the boys from Cleveland. "20 Seconds over Tokyo", "Final Solution" being two of my favourite songs but this show sucked. Enjoyably anarchic, it suffered from a lack of rehearsal & direction. Although there were deconstructed theatre elements incorporated into the production, some of the performers looked lost & it fell to Dave Thomas to keep it together. Plus points - the music & the graphics by The Brothers Quay. Low points - reading from the script, musicians trying to dance/act, & although Sarah-Jane Morris (ex-Communards) was very good, she lost her way... Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. But it was a good night & Gary & I took a few pointers away with us, mostly what NOT TO DO when the brill is up & running.

Friday - got pissed in Soho with John, Bren, Barb, Kev & V. Saturday - got pissed in Primrose Hill with Vince, Neil, Max & V.

Next week: I’m off to Fuerteventura for a week of sun, sand, & reading (& a few beers). Reading material – AL Kennedy’s Day, McEwan’s Chesil Beach, Sillitoe’s Saturday Night & Sunday Morning & The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, David Storey’s This Sporting Life, & in case I get bored with any or all of them (they are all quite conservative reads) I have John Harvey’s Flesh & Blood.

Responses

Yeah, like John Arne Riise responded to that easy to clear centre - use your feet, lad, that's why it's called football! & I never use exclamation marks. Think we'll score at Stamford Bridge, though. Torres had an off night and Čech was superb - let's hope it's vice versa next week.

OK. Responses to two questions. One, seeing as though England are not in UEFA's Euro 2008, I asked my friends who they would be supporting. In preference it goes like this: France, Spain, Holland, Czech Republic, Italy, Portugal. I usually support Holland but because of Alonso, Torres, & Benitez, my allegiance will be with Spain this year.

Sports books: other books recommended -

non-fiction - All Played Out by Pete Davies got a couple of nods & I agree. The Esquire Book of Sports Writing edited by Greg Williams, & Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand.

fiction - Don DeLillo's American-football novel End Zone, Pete Dexter's wonderful crime/golf crossover Train , & nominated by Joseph Murphy, & one of my favourite's: Peter Handke's, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick - a soccer version of Camus's The Outsider.

I'm off to Fuerteventura next week with a plethora of kitchen-sink novels and short stories. Later.

Love & Loathing in London Town

Love:
Yesterday was one of those days when I fell in love with London - again. Bright but nippy weather, streets not too busy, blossom from cherry trees rather than cigarette butts littering the pavements. At about 1:30pm, on Charing Cross Road, just opposite the National Portrait Gallery, I saw a man walking his ferret. The champagne-coloured ferret had sable points & wore a leather harness attached to a lead, he seemed particularly interested in the rubbish bins. When we were kids, my brother had a pet ferret named Eli Wallach (I have no idea why) & it stank. Then, outside Leicester Square tube station, I saw a woman without a nose. Oh, oh! As I was going up the road, I saw a woman who had no nose - she was from either Laos or Cambodia, I think; just a little triangular hole in her face. Then on the corner of Long Acre, two old women were looking at a map, as I approached, they stopped me & one of them pointed down towards Covent Garden & said, "Is that the road that runs down there?" I assured them that it was & that they hadn't wandered onto Unter den Linden or Rozhdestvensky Boulevard & they thanked me for confirming their finger-pointing skills. I also bought from the secondhand book stalls on the South Bank - don't bother getting there until gone noon - Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner & Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, & In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin all three for under a tenner.

Loathe:
One of the best (& last) independent bookshops in London, Metropolitan Books in Exmouth Market, is closing down. It leaves Clerkenwell without a bookshop - sad state of affairs. Also, Quinto's secondhand bookshop on Great Russell Street has closed its doors. A great shop in its prime - I found hundreds of rare books there including Alex de Jonge's Nightmare Culture: Lautréamont & Les Chants de Maldoror. Went to The Plough, one of my old haunts in the early 90s, used to hang out there with Mike Brady & Liam Gillick when they were working for Art Monthly & I was executive editor at The British Council - we used to spend afternoons playing on the golf machine. Do not go to this pub! £3.60 a pint, that's even more expensive than The Atlas - but The Atlas is worth a visit despite the high prices - The Plough is a tourist trap with rude bar staff & jacket potatoes that cost over a fiver. Enough. & on my way home, on Cromer Street, I saw two kids about eight years old, playing scaredy catch with a dead bird.

Sport & Literature

While updating my “status” report on myspace, I realized that I mostly read books, listened to football (soccer) matches, & drank beer. So what if I conflated sport & writing & came up with my top ten sports books?

Sport – Merriam-Webster’s rather vague definition is: “physical activity engaged in for pleasure.” Well, I can think of other physical things I do for pleasure. So, we'll take dictionary.com’s rather less ambiguous “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess & often of a competitive nature” & I can think of other activities… But let’s concentrate on sport – football, rugby, cricket, basketball, tennis, golf, etc. &, for argument’s sake, I'll include chess.

Being a Liverpool fan since the age of five – I have posters & magazines & stuff to prove it, Brendan O’Keeffe (before that I was a Sunderland fan – the horror, the horror) – my top ten will be football-biased. Let’s have a look at other sports. Rugby has always been anathema to me. I was not allowed to play it at school – developed the wrong muscles for a football player, apparently – &, having grown up a mile away from Twickenham, I have always detested the braying, floppy-haired, Barbour-wearing, stripy-shirted, jeans with tan brogue followers (commonly known as public schoolboys) – I’m obviously talking union not league. But a rugby book makes my top ten. Cricket – er... Can’t think of one cricket book I’ve read or would want to read. Basketball – Jim Carroll's The Basketball Diaries – essential reading. Tennis – Martin Amis is good on tennis, see Money (very funny), The Information, & “Tennis: The Women’s Game,” from Visiting Mrs Nabokov; Nabokov was also good on tennis – see Lolita. Golf – slowly becoming a fan – so I suggest PG Wodehouse's The Golf Omnibus, Updike's Golf Dreams, & James Ellroy’s Brown's Requiem. Chess – Nabokov’s The Defense, Ronan Bennett’s Zugzwang & Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel. Bullfighting – Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon would have made my top ten but I’m not sure bullfighting is sport. Boxing – Hemingway again, Jack London, Pete Hamill’s Flesh & Blood, Bud Schulberg’s The Harder They Fall & Thom Jones’s The Pugilist at Rest & Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine – but see below for my favourite boxing book. Some comments & arguments would be nice.

10: A Fan's Notes – Frederick Exley – I put this in because I love it & it not only covers literature & sport but also drinking – so that’s all three on my “status” report.
9: Among the Thugs – Bill Buford – explores Buford’s involvement with English football hooligans & English football
8: The Sportswriter – Richard Ford – an almost-perfect novel – the first Frank Bascombe book.
7: Pafko at the Wall – Don DeLillo – the opening chapter to Underworld & a stand-alone novella. Baseball – interesting baseball.
6: Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby – reluctantly, I have to admit I enjoyed this book – see Brendan O’Keeffe’s blurb on the back-jacket.
5: This Sporting Life – David Storey – Storey brings the kitchen sink to the dressing-room bath – mind oot, loov, you’re trekking mood into the middle-class drawing-room of the English novel.
4: The Damned Utd – David Peace – the first “fictional” sports book on my list but the edges of fiction & non-fiction blur in this book as well as in the work of Mailer & Burn.
3: The Fight – Norman Mailer – Big Norm brings a novelist’s eye to the rumble in the jungle – it’s also about politics, men, Mailer himself – natch.
2: The Hand of God: The Life of Maradona – Jimmy Burns – my vote for best-player ever & one of the great biographies of all time. I wish Jimmy Burns would update it.
1: Best & Edwards – Gordon Burn – what non-fiction writing should be. As a Liverpool fan, Drunk & Dunc have never been high on my “best-ever football players” list but this book is necessary reading for all lovers of football & literature.

Here’s an idea for a football novel – Premier League & England millionaire midfielder is threatened with kneecapping & extortion by gangsters, player turns to fixer for protection, this mobster is then arrested on suspicion of armed robbery & just before he is found guilty & sentenced he does a runner. Oh, no, sorry, that’s a true story.