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hris Abani Peter Ackroyd Douglas Adams Scott Adams Keith Altham Paul Au<br />
om Baker J.G. Ballard Iain Banks John Battelle John Baxter Samuel Beckett<br />
ellow Thomas Bernhard Maurice Blanchot Jorge Luis Borges Angela Bourke<br />
ichael Bracewell Charlie Brooker Charles Bukowski Julie Burchill Jason Bur<br />
ryan Burrough Albert Camus Paul Celan Bruce Chatwin Annabel Chong E.M<br />
ioran Diablo Cody Douglas Coupland Quentin Crisp Mark Danielewski Don D<br />
illo John C Diamond Stephen Dorril Patricia Duncker Nic Dunlop The Fall Ste<br />
an Fatsis Tibor Fischer Mark Fisher Michael Foot Franz Ferdinand Athol Fuga<br />
nna Funder Alex Garland Harry Gibson William Gibson Allen Ginsberg Grah<br />
reene Peter Guralnick Half Man Half Biscuit Keith Haring Bill Hicks Tom Hod<br />
inson Gert Hofmann Nick Hornby Michel Houellebecq Gary Indiana Derek Ja<br />
an Linton Kwesi Johnson Ed Jones Gabriel Josipovici Kevin Kelly Naomi Kl<br />
em Koolhaas Kruder And Dorfmeister Andrey Kurkov Emma Larkin Abby Le<br />
yndham Lewis Jack London Leo Marks David Markson Gabriel Garcia Marq<br />
ertie Marshall Cedric Mims Alan Moore Morrissey Patricia Morrisroe Cookie<br />
ueller Ben Myers Jeff Noon Cees Nooteboom Angus Oblong Will Oldham P.J<br />
’Rourke Lawrence O’Toole Chuck Palahniuk Tim Parks Arvo Pärt Ulf Poscha<br />
15 Years of<br />
ichard Powers Thomas Pynchon Matthew Robertson Bruce Robinson Jacqu<br />
oubaud Robert Sabbag Peter Saville Alberto Sciamma WG Sebald Will Self<br />
upac Shakur Mark Simpson Iain Sinclair Michael Marshall Smith Sonic Youth<br />
alph Steadman Suicide Damo Suzuki Swans David Sylvian David Thomas (P<br />
bu)Hunter S. Thompson Colm Tóibín Amos Tutuola Stuart Walton Alan Warn<br />
velyn Waugh Belinda Webb Irvine Welsh The White Stripes Tony Wilson Chr<br />
Books, Music, Art, Ideas
<strong>Spike</strong> | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com<br />
Introduction<br />
What Is <strong>Spike</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong>…<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
… And What Is In This PDF?<br />
<strong>Spike</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> is a collection of interviews,<br />
features and book reviews with and about various<br />
authors, artists and musicians from 1995 to<br />
2010. I originally set up the site to publish my<br />
own reviews and interviews, and it snowballed<br />
from there. <strong>Spike</strong> has had a small army of contributors<br />
over the years, all of whom are listed<br />
on the <strong>Spike</strong> Roll Of Honour. Thank you to each<br />
and every one of you.<br />
I had no set criteria about what should be in<br />
<strong>Spike</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong>, except whether I found it personally<br />
interesting. As such, it’s a glorious mess<br />
of the high brow and low brow. Certain themes<br />
kept coming up again and again – sex, drugs,<br />
post-war French philosophy –and certain writers<br />
kept reappearing too, notably J.G. Ballard, Will<br />
Self, Douglas Coupland, Irvine Welsh, Jeff Noon<br />
and Hunter S. Thompson.<br />
Given <strong>Spike</strong> has been around for 15 years, and<br />
given an actual real book anthology would be<br />
financially cataclysmic, this snazzy PDF built<br />
by my good friend and <strong>Spike</strong> contributor Jason<br />
Weaver was the best way to showcase 150 of<br />
<strong>Spike</strong>’s articles. There’s over 400 more interviews,<br />
reviews and features on the website, so consider<br />
this a sampler of <strong>Spike</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> and a gateway<br />
into exploring the rest of the website.<br />
How This PDF Works<br />
With 150 articles, it was decided that simply arranging<br />
everything alphabetically by the author’s<br />
surname was the easiest way to go. The tab down<br />
the right hand edge lets you jump to any letter, and<br />
there’s an overview of the articles in each letter’s<br />
section waiting for you. Each of the articles are<br />
hyperlinked from there. Work your way through<br />
the PDF methodically, or make with the clicky<br />
and see what happens.<br />
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<strong>Spike</strong> | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com<br />
Introduction<br />
How <strong>Spike</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong> Got Started<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
I first had the idea for <strong>Spike</strong> while I was doing<br />
my MA at the University Of Sussex in 1995. My<br />
co-conspirator in helping me initially figure out<br />
what <strong>Spike</strong> should be was Adam Baron, who has<br />
subsequently gone on to write four bestselling<br />
novels but perhaps still remains most lauded as<br />
the author of The Man Whose Penis Made Him<br />
Locally Famous.<br />
I’m not sure why I called it <strong>Spike</strong> - the retrospective<br />
explanation I came up with was because I was<br />
fed up of getting my work spiked by magazines,<br />
so I put it online. And it sounded sharp, as in razor<br />
sharp criticism. But I think it had as much to do<br />
with being a huge fan of <strong>Spike</strong> Milligan too.<br />
Publishing online seemed a way to finally get my<br />
writing actually out there, even though in 1995,<br />
there weren’t that many people on the internet. I<br />
had just discovered the web thanks to my friend<br />
and mentor Dave Pearce, who had quickly latched<br />
on to how revolutionary the web was going to be-<br />
come and had invested in at-the-time outrageously<br />
expensive ISDN lines so he could get something<br />
approaching a speedy browsing connection. He<br />
had created the still-burgeoning HedWeb.com<br />
which proposed then-radical ideas about paradise<br />
engineering. Heroically Dave allowed me to<br />
come round his house and spend hours gazing at<br />
his computer monitor in fascination at all these<br />
webpages that were being created by people everywhere.<br />
(Ok, mainly in the US. But it felt like<br />
everywhere). He also taught me HTML (or at least<br />
passed me a doorstop sized HTML manual with a<br />
smile) and has hosted <strong>Spike</strong> on his own webserver<br />
since its inception. Without Dave, <strong>Spike</strong> wouldn’t<br />
have happened, and, given every job I’ve had since<br />
1997 revolves around the internet, I think I owe<br />
my career to him too. Thanks Dave.<br />
I remember thinking there was very little about<br />
books or literature on the web – it seemed like a<br />
chance to get in at the beginning of something. I<br />
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was already a frustrated books and music journalist,<br />
collecting my first rejection slips from UK<br />
magazines. My break into writing for real came<br />
in the form of the formidable Polly Marshall, who<br />
ran the spectacular spoken word club Do Tongues,<br />
which got in everyone from Ken Campbell to<br />
Helen Zahavi to Will Self to Tony Benn. She also<br />
was the Literary Editor for Brighton’s version of<br />
Time Out, Punter magazine (now The Latest). I<br />
started writing book reviews for Polly, and was<br />
given the phone numbers of numerous book publicists<br />
at the major publishing houses who I then<br />
plagued for review copies and author interviews<br />
for the next couple of years. Back then, explaining<br />
the idea of a literary website was hard work, and I<br />
thank every long-suffering publicist who took me<br />
on faith and sent me books. Special thanks goes<br />
to Karen Duffy, then at the now defunct Harper<br />
Collins imprint Flamingo, who provided a lot of<br />
encouragement and good humour.<br />
<strong>Spike</strong> quickly gained momentum thanks to the<br />
contributions, both written and pub-inspired, of other<br />
friends in Brighton, especially Chris Hall, Nick<br />
Clapson, Jason Weaver, and Stephen Mitchelmore.<br />
Steve posted a lot to <strong>Spike</strong>’s blog Splinters and became<br />
a bit of a mentor as well as he introduced me<br />
to some of Europe’s most fascinating writers, particularly<br />
Maurice Blanchot and Thomas Bernhard.<br />
Perhaps most importantly he introduced me to The<br />
Day Today. Steve continues to blog today at This<br />
Space. As <strong>Spike</strong> grew, contributions came in from<br />
scores of writers from all over the globe. Many of<br />
them I have sadly still yet to meet in person, but<br />
fond memories of seeing REM at Stirling Castle<br />
with <strong>Spike</strong> contributor Gary Marshall and several<br />
huge nights out in Melbourne with Antipodeanexiled<br />
correspondent Jayne Margetts makes me<br />
wish it happened more often.<br />
In December 2002, I decided to leave the UK<br />
and go travelling in Australia for six months.<br />
Eight years later, I’m still travelling around Asia,<br />
and I’m now based in Bangkok, Thailand. I write<br />
mainly for scuba diving magazines, and run the<br />
travel websites Travelhappy.info and Divehappy.<br />
com. There’s a coffee table book on the way that<br />
I’ve written with my friend and ace photographer<br />
Jez Tryner called Thailand’s Underwater World.<br />
If any <strong>Spike</strong> contributor makes it out here to<br />
Bangkok, dinner and drinks are on me.<br />
As I’ve become more involved with scuba diving<br />
and traveling, whilst being virtually cut off<br />
from the UK literary scene, I’ve spent less time<br />
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on <strong>Spike</strong> in recent years. However, the enthusiasm<br />
of longtime contributors like Ben Granger, Greg<br />
Lowe and Dan Coxon have kept my interest going,<br />
and introduced me to writers I would otherwise<br />
never heard of.<br />
Meanwhile, numerous superb British literary<br />
sites have joined <strong>Spike</strong> on the Web in recent years,<br />
as showcased at BritLitBlogs.com. Steve Kelly<br />
at the now archived Richmond Review, the UK’s<br />
first online literary magazine, provided a lot of<br />
good advice to me and led the way to the rest of us<br />
becoming, if not respectable, then at least tolerated.<br />
In the 15 years since <strong>Spike</strong><strong>Magazine</strong>.com first<br />
appeared, the internet has fundamentally changed<br />
the way that people access, understand and enjoy<br />
great books. At its best, it has provided a significant<br />
boost to authors whose work might otherwise<br />
get lost, and a way for them to find their own audience.<br />
<strong>Spike</strong> has been a small and erratic part of<br />
that, propelled by the enthusiasm and passion of<br />
its contributors, and much of what’s been written<br />
on the site still stands up well years after it was<br />
first published.<br />
If you’ve read <strong>Spike</strong> before, I hope you enjoy<br />
revisiting through this anthology – and if you’re<br />
new to <strong>Spike</strong>, I hope you’ll stay in touch and see<br />
what comes next.<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Bangkok, October 2010<br />
chris@spikemagazine.com<br />
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Chris Abani:<br />
Becoming Abigail 007<br />
Peter Ackroyd:<br />
London: The Biography 012<br />
Douglas Adams:<br />
The Salmon Of Doubt 014<br />
A<br />
Scott Adams:<br />
Dilbert: Seven Years of<br />
Highly Defective People 016<br />
Keith Altham:<br />
No More Mr Nice Guy! 018<br />
Paul Auster:<br />
Oracle Night 020<br />
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Review [published March 2008]<br />
Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail<br />
Jason Weaver<br />
In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life<br />
biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has<br />
a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like<br />
Please Daddy No and A Child Called It. The covers<br />
usually feature black-and-white photos of sad-faced<br />
kids and the titles are in a hand-scrawled font. I suspect<br />
that the decline of the horror genre is connected to an<br />
appetite for these altogether more real stories. It’s redolent<br />
of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s<br />
inhumanity to man … and then make a programme<br />
about it.”<br />
On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming<br />
Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about<br />
the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian<br />
girl caught up in the skin trade. Except that it isn’t<br />
just about sex trafficking. Nor should it be. Abani is<br />
a thoughtful author who, through the style of his writing,<br />
is at pains to avoid further exploitation of the topic<br />
through prurient entertainment. During interviews,<br />
Abani is both urgent and polemical about the issue,<br />
stating that sex trafficking, after guns and drugs, is the<br />
third largest growth industry in the world. The author is<br />
BUY Chris Abani books online from and<br />
well-researched and the facts of his story are plausible.<br />
Yet he pointedly avoids the documentary approach the<br />
subject might automatically warrant. Instead he offers<br />
a poem.<br />
In 34 short cantos, Becoming Abigail seems, at first,<br />
to be bluntly indicative, short lines expressing fact:<br />
“And Peter came every day. Twice a day. At dawn.<br />
At dusk. To feed and water her. With rotting food. Rancid<br />
water. Sometimes his piss. By the tenth day she no<br />
longer cared. Couldn’t tell the difference.”<br />
The truest thing about Becoming Abigail is a lack<br />
of sentimentality. Though poetic, the narrative style<br />
is measured, its emotional veracity spot on. Although<br />
Abigail is a character with a palpable soul, the more<br />
traumatic events are often rendered almost blandly,<br />
as if cauterized by shock. As a small child, she is untouched<br />
by grief over her mother’s death. It begins to<br />
emerge later, through her games and behaviour. Abani<br />
seems to be saying that we cannot process such drastic<br />
experiences until we have developed the resources to<br />
deal with them. So, trauma resides in us until we have<br />
figured out the puzzle it has set us. This explains the<br />
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numbness towards our own suffering and the time lag<br />
until we truly begin to feel it. It grants us resilience,<br />
protecting us. It might also suggest that sex trafficking<br />
is a societal trauma which needs to develop a process to<br />
deal with it. Books such as this might offer a way.<br />
A relationship of time actually structures the novella,<br />
which flips between chapters headed “Now” and<br />
“Then”. Things begin with a charged description of her<br />
mother’s funeral. Yet, Abigail notes, her mother died in<br />
child birth, so she couldn’t have witnessed it herself.<br />
But if the memory is factually false, it still has emotional<br />
impact and influences the girl’s identity. In this<br />
way, Becoming Abigail explores how memory and the<br />
way we account for our experiences define who we are.<br />
This sounds complex, yet Abani’s technique is works<br />
on us without abstraction. Abigail speaks to us directly.<br />
The intransitive word “becoming” is the key here.<br />
The book is about the liminal state between things – the<br />
gap between girl and woman, male and female, past<br />
and present, Nigeria and England, the space where<br />
things are undefined, as with a trauma which is yet to<br />
be recognized. The book begins with the word “And”, a<br />
broken conjunctive alerting us to the incomplete nature<br />
of things here. In critic Melissa Reburiano’s words,<br />
identity is “not product but process”. In this sense, we<br />
are always in flux, always in a state of becoming. The<br />
novel dramatizes the heroine’s attempts to navigate<br />
these relationships in her struggle to ‘become Abigail’.<br />
BUY Chris Abani books online from and<br />
Simply put, this is a radical reworking of the comingof-age<br />
novel.<br />
The “becoming” of the title is encoded with ambiguity.<br />
The girl is the spitting image of her dead mother,<br />
also called Abigail, a ghost who haunts the book. The<br />
child’s attempts to define herself against her parents is<br />
complicated by the guilt she feels over her mother’s<br />
death, creating a myth almost impossible to overcome.<br />
The title dramatizes the push and pull of becoming<br />
either the mother-Abigail others would like her to be or<br />
an Abigail of her own choosing.<br />
The title also functions as an adjective, raising the<br />
question of what is ‘becoming’ or fitting for a girl like<br />
Abigail. Her father sends her to London because he<br />
thinks it will be good for her. The book is filled with<br />
others’ expectations of how she should dress, behave<br />
and so on. These struggles are further impacted by<br />
the expectations of men who here define themselves<br />
against women. Her father suffers great depression at<br />
his wife’s death. She is portrayed as a kind of crutch<br />
which propped him up, a role which passes to his<br />
daughter. Through his daughter’s independence, the<br />
father loses his wife again. This will have disastrous<br />
consequences. In writing the book, Abani tried to<br />
“evacuate” his masculinity, attempting to write from a<br />
woman’s point of view rather than becoming yet another<br />
male expectation of Abigail’s behaviour. In this<br />
sense, the novel contextualizes sex trafficking within<br />
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the confines placed on women’s existence by men.<br />
Abigail is no fool. She knows at an early age what men<br />
can be like. It is important to show that she is faced<br />
with circumstances over which she can exercise little<br />
personal defence and from which others have failed<br />
to protect her. The boundaries of her life offer Abigail<br />
little room to manoeuvre.<br />
Aspects of Becoming Abigail remind me of Mrs<br />
Dalloway. An interior consciousness creates a resonant<br />
cluster of poetic images which acts as critique of patriarchal<br />
control. Maps, poems, the body, needles, all<br />
are densely interconnected and new relationships are<br />
discovered on re-reading. The second time around,<br />
for example, totally transforms the hiss of a cigarette<br />
as it hits the Thames, imbued now with knowledge of<br />
the decision that Abigail is trying to make. One of her<br />
own favourite images is from a Chinese tea ceremony,<br />
where a lotus flowers. It might stand for how the unexpected<br />
developments in the story unfold layer after<br />
layer. As with Woolf’s novel, an authoritarian doctor<br />
fails to avert tragedy by rubbishing a character’s mental<br />
distress. There is also the London location and the way<br />
icons of government and empire are personalized and<br />
subverted. On the Embankment, the phallic Cleopatra’s<br />
Needle is gently ridiculed. The lions have been placed<br />
the wrong way round and Queen Victoria won’t foot<br />
the bill to have them put right. Abani does London very<br />
well. At one point, Abigail stands on the International<br />
BUY Chris Abani books online from and<br />
Date Line at Greenwich, itself a symbol of colonial<br />
over-mapping of the world, and marvels that such a<br />
thin line can separate time. This is a literal symbol of<br />
how time and place are fictionally mapped. “The line is<br />
a lie,” Abigail often riffs. It is intriguing to see London<br />
portrayed through the eyes of ‘the other’. Greenwich<br />
Market is described in the exotic terms of a souk.<br />
Abigail rides the tube when she first arrives in London,<br />
noting with surprise the variety of white faces. At the<br />
station, she hears the mantra “Mind the Gap”, almost a<br />
slogan for the interstitial theme of the novel:<br />
“Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they<br />
were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility<br />
of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against<br />
either side. That was where the danger lay. What was<br />
it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the<br />
dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t<br />
have told her anything.”<br />
The Thames location also recalls Heart of Darkness,<br />
although here the tide flows the opposite way and the<br />
slave trade is given an ironic twist. The book is full of<br />
subtle but awful ironies. The image of a dog peeing on<br />
a statue, the building of a doghouse later proves to be<br />
more brutal than it appeared and a joke about how the<br />
French see Africans as animals to be tamed whereas the<br />
English don’t see them at all resonates through the latter<br />
part of the book. The worst irony of all is that British<br />
social services thinks it knows what’s ‘becoming’ for<br />
009<br />
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Abigail and defines her as a victim. Her relationship<br />
with her care worker, the only man with whom she<br />
truly glimpses her own identity, is vilified and taken<br />
away from her. The removal of this love is, it seems,<br />
crueller to Abigail than the brutalities she has endured.<br />
It is vital that the novel itself does equally reduce<br />
Abigail to ‘victim’, the passive casualty of events.<br />
Instead, Abani juxtaposes the blunt, indicative style of<br />
writing with Abigail’s own subjunctive voice, aching<br />
with imagination and wishes. Her passions are aroused<br />
mainly by the experiences she longs for, those she desires<br />
and craves to make her who she aspires to be. She<br />
is never simply hostage to her experiences. Like all of<br />
us, her behaviour is self-consciously modified. Abigail<br />
is a character who muses on her own character, without<br />
the Postmodern sleight of hand that might imply.<br />
Telling stories is what we do, Abani seems to argue,<br />
who we are. It is inevitable, inexorable, that Abigail<br />
works herself out in this way. Even in the most meagre<br />
circumstances, we cannot help but be human. Because<br />
of this, there is always some anchor to the flux, some<br />
kind of residual persona:<br />
“These things just happen. Ije uwa, as the Igbos<br />
would say. One’s walk in this life. Interesting that the<br />
Igbo don’t believe the path to be fixed, or even problematic.<br />
It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player,<br />
not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality<br />
always sways the outcome of the game.”<br />
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I find it hard to be critical of a book like this. Its poetic<br />
density roots in the imagination and flowers, giving<br />
it a perennial afterlife. You live with it and Abigail’s<br />
memories mingle with your own. Which is, I think, the<br />
very interplay between identity and the fictional process<br />
that Abani is trying to achieve. Abigail’s character has<br />
an emotional veracity for us in the same way that she<br />
must deal with the processes of her own memory. Like<br />
the ghost of her mother, Abigail begins to haunt our<br />
imagination, which is a more effective way of dramatizing<br />
the horror of sex trafficking than browbeating us<br />
with atrocity and data. Our sense of loss is personal, our<br />
empathy more deeply entwined and Abigail is retrieved<br />
from a dehumanized roll call of names and numbers.<br />
We might think here of efforts to replace statistics with<br />
photographs and biographies of those who died in the<br />
Holocaust. Hope lies in trying to unthink the unthinkable<br />
rather than complying with a mathematics which<br />
makes it possible. This poetic meditation on identity<br />
is crucial to a deeper understanding of the full cost<br />
of human trafficking, which has implications for our<br />
tolerance for brutality disguised behind statistics.<br />
Becoming Abigail is a tough book that wishes to<br />
avoid false comfort to the reader. Yet in exploring the<br />
dynamics of its character’s psyche, it insists on hope.<br />
Towards the end of the book, Abigail reflects on her<br />
experiences in light of her cultural background:<br />
“Second chances are a fact of life for the Igbo. A<br />
010<br />
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person who lived poor and was buried poor can, when<br />
a relative makes enough money, receive a second<br />
burial. Full of the pomp and grandeur reserved for the<br />
rich. So even in death, in Hades, the dead one can<br />
get a chance to taste the wealth that eluded him in his<br />
previous incarnation, perhaps sweetening the deal for<br />
his next one.”<br />
For Abigail, true wealth lies in a relationship of<br />
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equals, in being noticed as a person and not as a thing,<br />
in wanting to give rather than being forced to take, in<br />
becoming a human being against dehumanizing forces.<br />
We are like the rich relatives who can, by paying attention<br />
to the trafficking industry, eventually sweeten<br />
the deal for the women to come. By writing this novel,<br />
Chris Abani suggests how the Abigail’s of this world<br />
can be given a second chance. �<br />
011<br />
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Review [published February 2001]<br />
Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography<br />
Chris Hall<br />
Those who have read Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and<br />
The Limehouse Golem will recall that the word golem<br />
comes from the medieval Jewish for an artificial human<br />
being brought to life by supernatural means, a “thing<br />
without form”. Ackroyd’s latest book, London: The<br />
Biography, has itself managed to breathe life into a<br />
seemingly formless city – a tangible sense of London<br />
as a living organism permeates this remarkable work.<br />
Indeed, even the endpapers show “seven phases in<br />
the evolution of Old London Bridge, 1209-1831”, perhaps<br />
a subtle reinforcement of his idea that London is<br />
a living organism, that it has a “human shape”, echoing<br />
the seven stages of man.<br />
He has a strong faith in London as a palimpsest:<br />
“London has always been an ugly city… It has always<br />
been rebuilt, and demolished, and vandalised … one<br />
of the characteristics of London planners and builders,<br />
over the centuries, has been the recklessness with<br />
which they have destroyed the city’s past.”<br />
There is a fascination with London as a built environment<br />
(after all, he does say that London is made<br />
“half of stone half of flesh”), of what London does to its<br />
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citizens. There is the novelist’s sensibility here, looking<br />
for form: “The emphasis upon finance is sustained by<br />
the enquiry of the late 20th-century prostitute, ‘Do you<br />
want any business?’”<br />
London: The Biography rings with the city’s peculiar<br />
echoic quality which Ackroyd is always attuned to. He<br />
writes that the London Eye has its precursor in the 17th<br />
century at Bartholomew’s Fair, and that following the<br />
GLC’s abolition in 1986 “in effect London resumed<br />
its ancient life, with the separate boroughs affirming<br />
distinct and different identities”.<br />
For Ackroyd, it is this historical imperative that<br />
shapes London. “Whenever the opportunity and location<br />
are offered, it replicates its identity. It is a blind<br />
force in that sense, not susceptible to the blandishments<br />
of planners or politicians…”<br />
Temporal simultaneity to Ackroyd is as real as the<br />
Thames, flowing through time as well as space. He is<br />
quick to point out that “contemporary theorists have<br />
suggested that linear time is itself a figment of the<br />
human imagination”. Indeed, his book itself moves<br />
“quixotically through time” forming a labyrinth, and<br />
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can be explored from a multitude of entry points.<br />
The book is arranged into themes such as London<br />
as theatre, crime and punishment, London as crowd,<br />
London’s radicals, and for every main thoroughfare of<br />
London: The Biography there are scores of delightful<br />
or macabre side streets to wander down. Take the following<br />
list of synonyms for prostitutes, which reads<br />
like a bizarre incantation: “…smuts, cracks, mawkes,<br />
trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns,<br />
molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns,<br />
squirrels…”<br />
Within each theme we have Ackroyd’s compendious<br />
learning tripping the switches between past and<br />
present. He is no Eric Hobsbawm or Asa Briggs, he is<br />
neither ideologue nor pedagogue, instead it is through<br />
anecdote and vivid description that we are led through<br />
labyrinthine London.<br />
Of course, any thesis that London, as it were, imprints<br />
itself on its citizens is going to occasionally sound<br />
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overblown: “London drives some of its citizens mad. A<br />
psychiatric survey in the 70s revealed that cases of depressive<br />
illness were three times higher in the East End<br />
than in the rest of the country”. But these criticisms,<br />
like pointing out lacunae, miss the point, for in a very<br />
real sense, as he himself says at one point, there are 7<br />
million versions of London being written everyday.<br />
This is very much the book that Ackroyd has been<br />
building up to, or even the one that he was born to<br />
write, prefiguring it in his biographies (Blake, Dickens)<br />
and fiction (The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor).<br />
London: The Biography doesn’t just have sources,<br />
it has an essay on sources, and at over 800 pages you<br />
might be forgiven for buying the audio version read by<br />
Simon Callow (who is also, incidentally, appearing as<br />
Dickens in Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens).<br />
Ackroyd has put in a heroic amount of research, and it<br />
would be churlish indeed to disabuse his book of its<br />
definite article. �<br />
013<br />
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Review [published October 2003]<br />
Douglas Adams: The Salmon Of Doubt<br />
Ian Hocking<br />
When I was 12, I bought a text-adventure game called<br />
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for my Amiga<br />
500 computer. The box had “Don’t Panic!” written<br />
in large, friendly letters on the front and showed a<br />
green alien sticking its tongue out. Inside was a floppy<br />
disk, planning permission for a hyperspace bypass<br />
that would require the demolition of the Earth, some<br />
pocket fluff, and Joo-Janta 500 Super-Chromatic<br />
Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (which become opaque<br />
when the wearer gets scared). The game was written<br />
by Douglas Adams. I decided to buy the BBC Radio<br />
series on which the game was based. By the time I<br />
was 14, I could recite – no joke – the entire six hours<br />
of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both radio<br />
series, including the opening and closing credits. My<br />
sound effects were particularly good.<br />
The author of Hitchhiker is, of course, Douglas<br />
Adams. Adams died suddenly on May 11th, 2001.<br />
Within days his agent got hold of his hard drive, had<br />
someone scan it for text documents, burn them to a<br />
CD, and set this posthumous publication in motion:<br />
The Salmon Of Doubt.<br />
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This book has the potential to be excruciating. It<br />
seems unfair on Adams because many of the fiction<br />
vignettes, non-fiction pieces, emails, and transcribed<br />
speeches were never intended for publication. But<br />
this misses the point. We know Adams would not<br />
have published them; we don’t expect another Hitchhiker’s<br />
Guide (though a marketing wag has written<br />
“Hitchhiking The Galaxy One Last Time” on the<br />
cover where “Douglas is dead: Don’t Panic” would<br />
be more appropriate). The result is a collection of<br />
insights into a remarkable writer, one who suffered<br />
from writer’s block, did not suffer from deadlines<br />
(“The thing I most love about deadlines is the whooshing<br />
sound they make as they go past”), and had a<br />
passionate interest in saving endangered species.<br />
The book’s title is taken from Adams’s unfinished<br />
Dirk Gently detective novel. Dirk Gently appears in the<br />
post-Hitchhiker works Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective<br />
Agency and The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul. Gently<br />
is a typical Adams character: based on someone Adams<br />
knew, but when Gently talks, Adams speaks. The<br />
unfinished Gently novel is good, though it does contain<br />
014<br />
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a number of ‘placeholders’ to which Adams was no<br />
doubt intending to return. Its characters are literally undernourished<br />
but Gently is on form. However, reading<br />
this unfinished novel is either an exercise is breaking<br />
your heart (if you are a fan) or an unwanted look into<br />
the writer’s world where the effortlessness of the final<br />
manuscript is a lie based upon plot dead-ends, jokes<br />
that don’t work, and a rhinoceros called Desmond.<br />
Inside this book you will also find a letter from a<br />
12-year-old Adams to the editors of The Eagle magazine,<br />
an article about testing an artificial manta-ray off<br />
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Australia, an email to the American producer of the<br />
thus-far unproduced Hitchhiker film, an obituary by<br />
Adams’s friend, Richard Dawkins, several interviews,<br />
no planning permission for the destruction of the Earth,<br />
and no peril-sensitive sunglasses of any description.<br />
Reading this book is misery. With each eloquentlyphrased<br />
and humorous comment, one begins to panic;<br />
who is there to take the piss out of life now that Douglas<br />
is dead? It is possible that other writers will continue to<br />
write in the same manner, but, for me, there remains a<br />
doubt; just a salmon of it. �<br />
015<br />
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Review [published June 1998]<br />
Scott Adams: Dilbert: Seven Years Of Highly Defective People<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Dilbert is rapidly becoming enough of a cartoon icon<br />
to rival the fame of Disney’s most enduring creations.<br />
Chronicling the trials of a hapless IT engineer<br />
battling against the absurdities of corporate life, the<br />
Dilbert comic strip appears in over 1500 newspapers<br />
worldwide. Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is<br />
creator Scott Adams’ guided tour of the evolution of<br />
Dilbert from geek mascot to unlikely international idol.<br />
The book assembles strips from all stages of Dilbert’s<br />
genesis with comments scrawled in the margin by Adams<br />
as to what was going through his mind at the time.<br />
Each of the major characters, such as Dilbert’s megalomaniacal<br />
canine companion Dogbert and the witless<br />
Pointy-Haired Boss, get their own chapters with a brief<br />
essay about how and why they appeared in the strip.<br />
Thanks to this candid overview, it’s easy to see why<br />
Dilbert wasn’t an overnight success when the strip first<br />
appeared in 1989. Adams drew heavily on his eight<br />
years at Pacific Bell as an applications engineer for<br />
inspiration, with many of the jokes revolving around<br />
Dilbert’s inherent nerdhood. It was a cult form of<br />
humour for IT professionals which didn’t sit easily<br />
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alongside the likes of Peanuts.<br />
However, with the widespread infiltration of personal<br />
computers into the workplace during the 90s, more and<br />
more people began to find Dilbert’s daily dilemmas<br />
strangely familiar, especially those which concerned<br />
working for a manager who understood nothing about<br />
technology. The most popular Dilbert strip ever features<br />
his boss being given an Etch-A-Sketch in place of<br />
a laptop and not noticing anything amiss.<br />
Adams cannily gauges his audience’s reaction to<br />
new threads in the Dilbert saga by including his email<br />
address in the margin of each cartoon. As such, an avalanche<br />
of Dilbertesque anecdotes arrives in his inbox<br />
each morning from disgruntled employees all over<br />
the globe. Adams freely admits in Seven Years … to<br />
using many of these stories as the basis for his strips,<br />
producing the peculiar circularity of Dilbert imitating<br />
life imitating Dilbert. Adams has even gone as far as to<br />
have the readers vote by e-mail as to whether Ratbert<br />
should get pulverised with a hammer. (They thankfully<br />
voted no).<br />
The amount of feedback Adams receives from his<br />
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readers seems due to Dilbert’s essentially subversive<br />
nature. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on<br />
the burgeoning Dilbert web site, where there is an<br />
ever-growing list of draconian companies who have<br />
banned Dilbert cartoons from being displayed on<br />
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cubicle walls because they’re considered “bad for<br />
morale.” Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is<br />
a concentrated dose of forbidden fun which deserves<br />
to be kept in the bottom drawer of any self-respecting<br />
office worker’s desk. �<br />
017<br />
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Review [published December 2001]<br />
Keith Altham: No More Mr Nice Guy!<br />
Robin Askew<br />
At home with Sting. The in-no-way-narcissistic<br />
rainforest dwellers’ friend and tantric sex enthusiast<br />
is looking for a space in his sitting room to hang<br />
a giant self-portrait. Unfortunately, it soon becomes<br />
clear that this will not match the decor. Eventually,<br />
Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler, suggests that it should go in<br />
the bathroom in place of a print of the Salvador Dalí<br />
painting titled The Great Masturbator. “After all,”<br />
she reasons, “it will just be replacing one wanker<br />
with another.”<br />
For 25 years, Keith Altham was a “friend of the<br />
stars”, as they say, first as a journalist on the NME and<br />
then as PR man for many of the biggest names in rock,<br />
from Rod Stewart to Van Morrison and Paul Weller to<br />
Ray Davies. He regressed from representing to Rolling<br />
Stones in the 60s to “Orville the bloody duck” in<br />
the 90s, at which point he wisely decided to jack it all<br />
in. Rather than writing an autobiography, he’s chosen<br />
to spill the beans on his pop star chums in the rather<br />
cheesy format of individual letters addressed to each of<br />
his former clients. (To Van Morrison: “What can I say?<br />
What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What<br />
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a pain in the arse!”)<br />
In many ways, this is a bloody awful book: poorly<br />
written, littered with typos and spelling errors and reeking<br />
of self-aggrandisement. But Altham really was at<br />
the centre of it all during the 60s and 70s. It was he who<br />
suggested to Jimi Hendrix the idea of setting a guitar<br />
on fire. And in one of the great forgotten footnotes of<br />
rock history, he once took Jim Morrison to see Status<br />
Quo (“Tell them to turn down, give up and go home,”<br />
sneered the Lizard King).<br />
If you’re prepared to endure the leaden prose, there’s<br />
a huge reservoir of great stories here. Altham particularly<br />
admires Sting, despite Mr Sumner’s propensity<br />
“to be such a humourless prat”, and seems to have preferred<br />
the company of down-to-earth heavy metallers<br />
like Saxon and Uriah Heep, although he loathed their<br />
music. Fortunately, he doesn’t allow these personal<br />
friendships to prevent him telling yarns that show them<br />
in a considerably less than flattering light. Many of<br />
these sail very close to the wind indeed. M’learned<br />
friends may wish to examine his introduction for what<br />
would appear to be a libellous statement about that<br />
018<br />
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nice, well-adjusted Michael Jackson.<br />
Connoisseurs will already be familiar with the one<br />
about a typically dishevelled Van Morrison turning<br />
up late for a party (“Did anyone order a minicab?”<br />
shouted the unfortunate who answered the door),<br />
and the message Rod Stewart carved into a tabletop<br />
when he learned that Sting was to be the next user of<br />
the Lear jet he was travelling in (“Sting, how come<br />
you ain’t go no sense of humour, you cunt?”). But<br />
who’d have guessed that underneath his carefully<br />
cultivated likeable exterior, Phil Collins seethes with<br />
rage at being perceived as “the nice man of pop”?<br />
Eventually, he snapped when an unchallenging interviewer<br />
asked whether he was really as nice as he<br />
seems: “Why don’t you ask my ex-wife?”<br />
For celebrity bitchiness, look no further than Elton<br />
John’s wedding present to Rod Stewart of a £10 gift<br />
voucher with instructions to “buy something nice for<br />
the home”. And for a real surprise, turn to the chapter<br />
on the Moody Blues behaving badly, which features a<br />
naked, comatose young woman wedged securely into a<br />
washbasin by her arse while Graeme Edge fires arrows<br />
at policemen who’ve been called out to investigate the<br />
mild-mannered prog-rockers’ raucous partying.<br />
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Best stories? Well, there’s a great one about Marc<br />
Bolan being evicted from the backstage area of a<br />
Rolling Stones gig for sexually molesting Mick Jagger.<br />
“Get him out of here,” bellowed the indignant<br />
leathery Stone. “He just grabbed my balls.” “I didn’t<br />
realise they were sacrosanct,” responded the Electric<br />
Elf as he was marched away by burly security guards.<br />
But by a whisker, the accolade has to go to Terence<br />
Trent D’Arby, the “silly twisted boy” whose fall<br />
from public favour was even more meteoric than his<br />
rise. D’Arby seems to have crammed plenty of overindulgence<br />
into his brief brush with fame, but one<br />
episode proved too much for his female manager. She<br />
resigned when he rang her late at night in her hotel room<br />
demanding that she procure condoms for his latest female<br />
acquaintance. It seems this sexually provocative<br />
performer was too embarrassed to make the purchase<br />
himself. But before leaving, the manager phoned down<br />
to reception in their five-star hotel, whose staff were<br />
made of sterner stuff. Without batting an eyelid, the<br />
servile concierge entered the celeb’s bedchamber bearing<br />
a silver platter on which a selection of small foil<br />
packets were arranged tastefully and asked if madam<br />
would care to make her selection. �<br />
019<br />
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Review [published March 2005]<br />
Paul Auster: Oracle Night<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read<br />
since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every<br />
book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely<br />
readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability<br />
to stop reading him once a book is begun.<br />
However, in the end, with Leviathan, I felt this was<br />
too much. I read it abnormally quickly, devouring each<br />
page with less and less concern for what was written<br />
on it than for getting beyond that page and to the next<br />
page, and the next, to see what was there.<br />
After the last page I was mentally exhausted, nursing<br />
a headache. It seems significant that I have no memory<br />
of the narrative except for the mental image of a forest<br />
to which a character – perhaps the main character –<br />
removes himself. The proliferation of anecdotes – or<br />
stories within stories – means one can’t see the wood<br />
for the trees.<br />
The experience of reading Oracle Night is very similar.<br />
It’s almost impossible to put the book down as there<br />
are so many compelling stories, one after the other,<br />
even though this is a relatively compact novel (240<br />
pages). I’m sure I’ll forget most of the stories, but that<br />
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isn’t important. Nor is Auster’s distinctly unpretentious<br />
prose style important. If you wince at clichés like back<br />
in the swing of things and to all intents and purposes<br />
that appear on the first half page alone, think of them as<br />
stabilisers for the roller coaster ride ahead. (Elsewhere,<br />
I read that Auster breaks through his writer’s block by<br />
typing regardless of the banality of the prose.)<br />
There are two central narratives in Oracle Night –<br />
both told by Sidney Orr, a New York writer recovering<br />
from an unnamed illness that was expected to kill him.<br />
He hadn’t written anything in a year until discovering<br />
a blue notebook in a small stationery shop (that isn’t<br />
stationary at all in fact. It disappears overnight.) Anyway,<br />
the new notebook somehow enables Orr to write<br />
a story. Much of Oracle Night is that story.<br />
I don’t want to summarise the plot here as it is<br />
characteristically involved and would also detract from<br />
the essential element of Auster’s novels. The essential<br />
thing is something impossible to convey outside of the<br />
narrative itself: the evocation of possibility. At each<br />
step in the story – when Orr enters the stationery store<br />
to discover the blue notebook, when he returns to his<br />
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writing den, when he begins to write the story in the<br />
blue notebook as if compelled by an occult power, and<br />
when, in the story within the story, the character makes<br />
a life-changing decision – there is a thrilling, uncanny<br />
sense of freedom. I mean, for the reader. A freedom in<br />
infinite possibility; innumerable futures present themselves.<br />
I have not experienced this so acutely with any<br />
other writer.<br />
It’s there too in the opening lines of The Music Of<br />
Chance: Jim Nashe driving away from his past after<br />
a windfall of cash. After that, the story takes shape<br />
and the sense diminishes. Until then, however, no<br />
particular story is attached to the sense of freedom.<br />
Anything can happen. We are free. The beginning of<br />
the story is our windfall.<br />
So why is do we feel an urge to continue reading<br />
rather than to throw the book aside and live that<br />
freedom? Probably because we prefer the illusion of<br />
freedom, the possibility of freedom rather than the real<br />
thing. We read to enjoy the specific story that replaces<br />
the vertigo of infinite freedom. As with a horror movie,<br />
we aren’t really horrified. Horror is only the playful<br />
withdrawal of a guaranteed safety. And narrative is the<br />
guarantee. With a novel, we know we have a circumscribed<br />
adventure before us.<br />
Yet that narrative also makes our freedom come true<br />
for a moment, even if it is only an illusion. The open<br />
future may contain infinite possibilities but it never<br />
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seems to happen for real. Consumed by habit, we lose<br />
contact with our freedom. Reading, or watching a film,<br />
reminds us of possibility even as it is removed. And in<br />
that reminder, it comes true. The obscure attraction of<br />
a book or a film might be, then, the pleasure of contact<br />
with possibility and relief in its withdrawal.<br />
But such pleasure has a double edge of course.<br />
Indulgence in stories removes us from life; takes us<br />
to the end of possibility. Auster’s narrative is, as I’ve<br />
said, compelling. It is compelling but in the end doesn’t<br />
satisfy the indulgent reader. Oracle Night could go on<br />
for another thousand pages. Perhaps it does as Auster’s<br />
complete oeuvre. Yet it does stop. Although, actually,<br />
it doesn’t quite. The story within the story is not<br />
concluded. It is shocking and frustrating for the reader.<br />
One wants to know how the author Sidney Orr and the<br />
author Paul Auster resolve a chilling situation. At the<br />
end though Orr explains why it is left hanging and we<br />
realise that it stops precisely for the reason we don’t<br />
want it to stop. It is difficult to accept, yet not because<br />
it is wrong.<br />
This has angered and confused naive readers; those<br />
untroubled by stories. For instance, Aaron Hughes asks<br />
the right questions but asks them only of Oracle Night<br />
rather than literature in general. What does it mean, for<br />
example, to say that Oracle Night “is not a success”<br />
when the nature of success in literary terms is fundamental<br />
to the narrative itself? The answers present<br />
021<br />
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themselves in the novel under review. When you pick<br />
up a novel you become a reader, not a consumer.<br />
Orr describes burning the blue notebook in order<br />
to escape its mysterious power; in order to flee the<br />
nightmare of possibilities it summoned. Indeed, the<br />
end of the novel seems overladen with terrible events.<br />
Orr writes: “The true story started only then, after I<br />
destroyed the blue notebook.”<br />
We might compare this with something Auster – or<br />
should we say Orrster? – wrote in The Invention Of<br />
Solitude at the very beginning of his career following<br />
after death of his father:<br />
For the past two weeks, these lines from<br />
Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head:<br />
‘One thing must be understood: I have said<br />
nothing extraordinary or even surprising.<br />
What is extraordinary begins at the moment<br />
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I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of<br />
it.’ [from Death Sentence]<br />
To begin with death. To work my way<br />
back into life, and then, finally, to return<br />
to death.<br />
In Oracle Night, we joined Sidney Orr working his<br />
way back into life from the brink of death – working,<br />
that is, by writing. Yet the main symptom of his unnamed<br />
illness was dizziness, where the world became<br />
blurred and incoherent: a world without form. Almost<br />
as if language and meaning had been removed from<br />
his life. It took the discovery of the blue notebook and<br />
the writing of the new story to return him to both. But<br />
that only returns threatens another death, the death of<br />
possibility. It is Auster’s rare achievement to keep possibility<br />
alive and kicking even as it suffers a death by a<br />
thousand plots. �<br />
022<br />
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Tom Baker: Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? 024<br />
J.G. Ballard 026<br />
J.G. Ballard: Entertaining Violence 027<br />
J.G. Ballard: Prophet With Honour 029<br />
J.G. Ballard: Future Shock 032<br />
J.G. Ballard: Not A Literary Man 035<br />
J.G. Ballard: Flight And Imagination 039<br />
J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights 048<br />
J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphor 050<br />
Iain M. Banks: Getting Used To Being God 054<br />
Adam Baron: The Man Whose Penis<br />
Made Him Locally Famous 059<br />
John Battelle: The Search 062<br />
John Baxter: George Lucas:<br />
A Biography 065<br />
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography 067<br />
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein 071<br />
B<br />
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under 076<br />
Thomas Bernhard: Playing Dead 082<br />
Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No 088<br />
Maurice Blanchot: The Absent Voice 092<br />
Body Modification: Remake, Remodel 101<br />
Jorge Luis Borges: The Book<br />
Of Imaginary Beings 103<br />
Angela Bourke: The Burning<br />
Of Bridget Cleary 107<br />
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine 109<br />
Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn 112<br />
Charles Bukowski: Born Into This 115<br />
Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush 118<br />
Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie 122<br />
Jason Burke: Al Qaeda 134<br />
Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly 138<br />
023<br />
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Review [published March 2000]<br />
Tom Baker: Who On Earth Is Tom Baker?<br />
Robin Askew<br />
At the risk of turning into one of those dreadful<br />
30-something nostalgia bores, the Tom Baker incarnation<br />
of Dr Who has a special place in the hearts of<br />
those of my generation. Forever fixed in my mind is<br />
the time I queued for hours with hundreds of other<br />
grubby pre-teens in a smalltown bookshop awaiting<br />
the arrival of the great man to sign books he hadn’t<br />
written. The cops sealed off the high street, which was<br />
lined with kiddies wondering where the Tardis would<br />
materialise to disgorge the tousle-haired timelord.<br />
Suddenly he appeared, striding down the middle of<br />
the road in full Who garb, dishing out jelly babies to<br />
the gobsmacked hordes.<br />
My illusions took a slight dent a few years back when<br />
I saw one of those unbroadcastable out-take reels BBC<br />
technicians compile to amuse one another at Christmas,<br />
in which Baker was shown getting saucy with an assistant<br />
and taking the piss out of K9. But that’s as nothing<br />
compared to the revelations in this indiscreet autobiography.<br />
It seems Baker’s worst enemy during his years<br />
of national fame wasn’t the Daleks, the Cybermen, or<br />
any of the other low-budget latex terrors, but the Shag-<br />
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monster. And like all the best monsters, this one turned<br />
out to be – gasp! – himself. “While we were on our<br />
tours about the country to promote the programme, I<br />
was often pulled by women who were keen fantasists,”<br />
he confesses, introducing tales of hotel room bondage<br />
sessions (“A good few of these women wanted to whip<br />
or cane me”) and general pervery (a university don insisted<br />
on wearing his costume, “and as she threw herself<br />
wantonly on to the wide Holiday Inn bed she growled,<br />
‘Come on, Doctor, let’s travel through space’”). Alas,<br />
the man with the sonic screwdriver had no advanced<br />
defence against venereal disease, and soon contracted<br />
a dose of the clap.<br />
Dr Who enthusiasts may initially be disappointed to<br />
find that the programme doesn’t get its first mention<br />
until page 189, but to skip the first 15 chapters would<br />
be to miss a real treat since Baker seems determined<br />
to show himself in the least flattering light imaginable,<br />
as if to demonstrate the veracity of a remark he once<br />
overheard: “He’s quite nice. But there’s something odd<br />
about him, something slightly disgusting.” The book<br />
opens in wartime Liverpool, where poverty-stricken<br />
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young master Baker prayed for a bomb to drop on<br />
his mother so he’d be orphaned and eligible for treats<br />
from the Americans. By the age of nine he’d become a<br />
thurible swinger and learned to fake tears at funerals to<br />
get bigger tips. A year later, he discovered the joys of<br />
solvent abuse (“I couldn’t walk past a tin of floor polish<br />
without having a furtive snort”), which helped set him<br />
on the path to a lifetime of misery and self-loathing,<br />
abetted by National Service, the National Theatre and a<br />
failed attempt to please his family by becoming a monk.<br />
A recurring theme is that common actors’ lament, the<br />
lack of any sense of identity, which isn’t helped by the<br />
fact that he’s so frequently mistaken for Jon Pertwee,<br />
Jonathan Miller and – bizarrely – Shirley Williams. But<br />
although he’s understandably irked to be accosted by<br />
strangers about the havoc he wreaked on the grammar<br />
schools, Baker seems curiously flattered when people<br />
remark, as they often do, that he reminds them of a<br />
favourite aunt. Not that they want to be around him for<br />
long. “I’m afraid I have no gift for friendship,” he writes<br />
at one point. “I quickly get tired of people and off they<br />
go. Only the other day I tried to think of a single friend<br />
I had made in my life and drew a blank.”<br />
But while Baker wallows in his own perversely appealing<br />
creepiness, he doesn’t get anywhere near an<br />
answer to the question posed by the book’s title. His<br />
long-suffering wives, who might have been invited to<br />
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shed some light on this mystery, get the briefest of<br />
walk-on parts – barely a paragraph in the case of Lalla<br />
Ward, who buggered off to shack up with proselytising<br />
Darwinist Richard Dawkins – when Baker wishes<br />
to illustrate his talent for appalling misjudgement or<br />
self-pity. He once even failed to recognise an ex-wife<br />
at a party.<br />
Nor does the story end, as one might expect, with<br />
timelord totty excess, as Baker went on to enjoy several<br />
Soho Boozing Years with the late Jeffrey Bernard,<br />
Francis Bacon and chums, which provide a further rich<br />
seam of anecdotes. These days he happily potters about<br />
in his local graveyard polishing his own tombstone, enjoying<br />
strange encounters with scary fans paying their<br />
respects, and occasionally treats himself to lengthy<br />
visits to the household goods department of John<br />
Lewis. “I particularly enjoy the ironing-board section.<br />
I find I can pass an hour or more admiring the various<br />
ironing boards. The Brabantia is my favourite. I have a<br />
very good model with a flowered cover, pretty though<br />
fading slightly. It folds so smoothly that all fear flees.<br />
It’s the folding action of good modern boards that has<br />
removed the terror that so many men used to feel at the<br />
prospect of opening or closing the old, temperamental<br />
type of ironing board when naked.”<br />
Call me a sick fuck if you must, but I closed the book<br />
liking him even more. �<br />
025<br />
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J.G. Ballard<br />
Biography<br />
Most famous as the author of Empire Of The Sun and<br />
Crash, J.G. Ballard was one of the most important<br />
post war writers in the UK until his death in 2008.<br />
His influence on the next generation of novelists –<br />
including Will Self and Jeff Noon, also featured<br />
heavily in <strong>Spike</strong> – cannot be overstated. While much<br />
of the acclaim that surrounds Ballard stems from<br />
his early disaster novels, some of his final books – in<br />
particular, Super-Cannes – show him at the height of<br />
his powers.<br />
Chris Hall managed to interview Ballard several<br />
times while freelancing for various publications, and<br />
saved the fascinating, unabridged conversations for<br />
<strong>Spike</strong>, and Marcos Moure kindly contributed a previously<br />
published Ballard interview in which Ballard<br />
gives a great, self-defining quote:<br />
“I’m interested in science and medicine, the media<br />
landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes<br />
of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any<br />
bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not<br />
the world of literature.”<br />
I also set up JGBallard.com in 1998, which was<br />
a link page to other Ballard related material on the<br />
web. This was made largely obsolete by the arrival<br />
of Simon Sellars’ fantastic Ballardian.com which is a<br />
superb and ongoing exploration of Ballard’s work.<br />
Chris Mitchell �<br />
Articles<br />
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Entertaining Violence<br />
Interview by Chris Hall<br />
Prophet With Honour<br />
027<br />
Feature by David B. Livingstone<br />
Future Shock<br />
029<br />
Interview by Chris Hall<br />
Not A Literary Man<br />
032<br />
Interview by Marcos Moure<br />
Flight And Imagination<br />
035<br />
Interview by Chris Hall<br />
Cocaine Nights<br />
039<br />
Review by David Livingstone<br />
Extreme Metaphor<br />
048<br />
Feature by Chris Hall 050<br />
026<br />
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Interview [published January 2004]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Entertaining Violence<br />
Chris Hall talks to J.G. Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes<br />
and mail order Kalashnikovs<br />
It’s been 70 years since H.G. Wells published The Shape<br />
Of Things To Come but there has been a far more astute<br />
chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us<br />
in the suburbs for more than half a century. J.G. Ballard’s<br />
gimlet eye for the psychopathology of everyday<br />
life has never deserted him. Instead of characters with<br />
emotions, a history and a moral compass, Ballard’s<br />
fictional landscape is peopled with affectless casualties<br />
of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape,<br />
searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. This<br />
is fiction as biopsy, and its results are devastating.<br />
Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective<br />
thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-<br />
Cannes – to examine what might happen when all<br />
we have left as an ideology is consumerism. “People<br />
resent the fact that the most moral decision in their<br />
lives is choosing what colour the next car will be,” he<br />
says witheringly. “All we’ve got left is our own psychopathology.<br />
It’s the only freedom we have – that’s a<br />
dangerous state of affairs.”<br />
I meet Jim Ballard at the Hilton International hotel<br />
on Holland Park Avenue. “I used to come here a lot<br />
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because there was a Japanese restaurant called the Hiroku<br />
for many years. It would be impossible to identify<br />
your location,” he says approvingly, looking around<br />
the virtually deserted lounge we’re sat in with its palm<br />
trees and low-level skylight.<br />
Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside<br />
in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in<br />
London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in<br />
Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England<br />
– the M25, the world of business parks, industrial<br />
estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas,<br />
cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts … That’s<br />
where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity<br />
and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of<br />
violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into<br />
the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”<br />
Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Heathrow<br />
airport, which kills three people. The proposition<br />
of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new proletariat”,<br />
with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another<br />
gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private<br />
healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that<br />
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they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of<br />
civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led,<br />
as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a<br />
charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attacking<br />
the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the<br />
National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and<br />
then out into the suburbs.<br />
But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take<br />
their claims of oppression? At one point in the book,<br />
there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Marina<br />
might change the street names to those of Japanese<br />
film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might<br />
damage property prices…”<br />
It is full too of perverse inversions and unsettling<br />
paradoxes – “Nothing brings out violence like a peaceful<br />
demonstration’ or “If your target is the global money<br />
system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam<br />
shop next door.”<br />
Millennium People describes in part a murder with<br />
strong affinities to the Jill Dando case. “What all these<br />
murders – Hungerford, Dunblane, Jill Dando – have<br />
in common,” says Ballard, “is that they appear to be<br />
meaningless. There are no motives. Dando wasn’t even<br />
a celebrity. It may be that this is their great appeal.<br />
“There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that<br />
make up our national consciousness. I’ve tried to<br />
nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may<br />
embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched<br />
resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called<br />
psychopathology.”<br />
Ballard continues to be endlessly engaged in what’s<br />
happening now. And as he says himself, he’s bucked the<br />
trend by becoming more left-wing as he’s got older. He<br />
is particularly disturbed by the apparently motiveless<br />
actions of our Prime Minister and has been following the<br />
“great smokescreen” that is the Hutton Inquiry. “Blair<br />
has this evangelical commitment to what he believes is<br />
right, and he invents the truth when he can’t find it out<br />
in front of him,’ he says incredulously. “I think we’re<br />
living in dangerous times and most people aren’t really<br />
aware of it. They’re worrying about asylum seekers or<br />
abortion or paedophilia…”<br />
Does it get harder the older he gets (he’s 73), to anticipate,<br />
as he’s put it before, the next five minutes?<br />
“I have no shortage of ideas and a peculiar kind of<br />
compulsion to get them down. Not that it makes a damn<br />
bit of difference…”<br />
In what way?<br />
“When you’re a young writer you want to change<br />
the world in some small way, but when you get to<br />
my age you realise that it doesn’t make any difference<br />
whatsoever, but you still go on. It’s a strange way<br />
to view the world. If I had my time again, I’d be a<br />
journalist. Writing is too solitary. I think journalists<br />
have more fun!” �<br />
028<br />
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Feature [published August 1999]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Prophet With Honour<br />
David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers<br />
of the 20th century<br />
“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!”<br />
It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G.<br />
Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of<br />
Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many<br />
have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece.<br />
Though perhaps the first, this unnamed editor was by<br />
no means the last person to be discomfited by Ballard’s<br />
nightmarish, frequently grotesque tale of a small<br />
cadre of car-crash fetishists prone to getting their sexual<br />
kicks by staging smashups which resulted in very-real<br />
injuries and deaths. And given the impending release<br />
of horror director David Cronenberg’s film adaptation,<br />
it seems a certainty that the moral outrage is due for<br />
an exponential increase; media mogul Ted Turner<br />
and British cabinet minister Virginia Bottomley have<br />
already registered their howls of righteous indignation.<br />
Considering his being “beyond psychiatric help,”<br />
the amiable, articulate, and consummately-logical<br />
James Graham Ballard has managed pretty well: His<br />
output to date consists of 15 novels, 17 collections of<br />
stories and essays, and substantial critical work for<br />
esteemed British newspapers such as The Guardian,<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
London Times, and The Independent. Moreover, Ballard<br />
has come to be seen as one of science fiction’s<br />
principal intellectual luminaries, and his work as perhaps<br />
the best argument for the genre’s consideration<br />
as ‘serious’ literature. The prophetic Crash, with its<br />
prescient foreshadowing of western culture’s latterday<br />
fixation upon violence as entertainment, attests to<br />
the author’s acuity as a social critic.<br />
While early works such as The Drowned World brought<br />
Ballard fame, it was Crash that gained him infamy. The<br />
novel’s relentless probing of the intertwined psychologies<br />
of sex and violence, presented as a grandiose and<br />
hyperbolic panorama of crushed metal and battered bodies,<br />
immediately struck a chord of primal fear. “There are<br />
many things that people don’t like to be reminded of,”<br />
Ballard muses. “People are always surprised to discover<br />
in themselves that they covet their neighbour’s wife, or<br />
that they harbour small racist feelings; they automatically<br />
think, oh my God, I’m not worthy of myself. And<br />
they immediately turn away from it. But if you look at<br />
the entertainment culture that people amuse themselves<br />
with, it’s obvious that the car crash has a very powerful<br />
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role to play in peoples’ imaginations …something is<br />
happening in the imagination that tends to entangle the<br />
elements of violence and sexuality, and it’s fed by this relentless<br />
flow of appealingly-violent imagery that we get<br />
in our movies. Crash is an attempt to follow these trends<br />
off the edge of the graph paper to the point where they<br />
meet. Basically the message is ‘So you think violence is<br />
sexy? OK, this is where you’re going.’ I see the ultimate<br />
effect of Crash as cautionary, as a warning against the<br />
role of violence and sex in our entertainment culture and<br />
the way the two can become intertwined.”<br />
The concept for Crash germinated in the social<br />
confusion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period<br />
coloured by the Kennedy assassination, Manson, and<br />
Vietnam. “Violence took the place of sex, I think, as<br />
the most exciting subject available to writers and<br />
filmmakers, and became sort of the key engine of the<br />
entertainment culture. The car crash came into its own.<br />
I remember writing in The Atrocity Exhibition about<br />
the psychology involved, and people dismissed it out<br />
of hand. They just refused to see.”<br />
As a means of testing his hypotheses, Ballard presented<br />
an art exhibition at a London gallery in April,<br />
1970 where the ‘works’ on display were three wrecked<br />
cars. “The behaviour of people who visited the gallery<br />
absolutely convinced me that I was onto something.<br />
At the opening, people got so drunk, and over the<br />
course of the month they were on display the cars<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
were attacked, one of them was overturned. Nobody<br />
would have noticed these cars in the street outside, but<br />
because they were isolated beneath the white gallery<br />
lighting they triggered enormous, confused emotions.<br />
So I thought, this is the green light. And so I sat down<br />
and began to write Crash.”<br />
Provoking enormous, confused emotions has always<br />
been a goal of Ballard’s work. The reasons for doing so<br />
go well beyond simple sensationalism, however; Ballard’s<br />
stated aim is honesty via the roundabout vehicle<br />
of fiction, an honesty intended to provoke movement<br />
towards the humane. “I see myself as a neutral observer;<br />
I’m not trying to impose some kind of private or<br />
personal vision on the world. All I’m doing is looking<br />
out and seeing what’s going on in the street. And all<br />
my fiction is a fiction of analysis, where I’ve tried to<br />
identify certain ongoing trends that seem to be apparent,”<br />
Ballard asserts. “I don’t think it took a great deal<br />
of prophetic skill to guess what was going to happen as<br />
the 60s and 70s unfolded; I could see all these social<br />
trends, with an entertainment culture that thrived on<br />
violence and sensation and a rootless urban and suburban<br />
population with nothing to do other than play with<br />
their own psychopathic fantasies. Modern technology,<br />
whether in the form of a motor car or a motorway or<br />
a high rise building, was empowering peoples’ worst<br />
impulses … the technology involved pandered to and<br />
facilitated the eruption of people’s worst natures.”<br />
030<br />
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Ballard’s heightened sensitivity to violence, as well as<br />
the corollary themes of isolation and social chaos which<br />
permeate much of his work, may well have its roots in<br />
his childhood in wartime China. Born in Shanghai in<br />
1930 to English parents, Ballard’s earliest years were<br />
spent in an expatriate’s suburban idyll, a comfortable<br />
enclave of large houses, swimming pools, and servants.<br />
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937<br />
and its subsequent metamorphosis into World War II,<br />
the Ballard family were removed to internment camps,<br />
and their colonial paradise was transformed into a<br />
killing field; from these experiences, Ballard wrote<br />
the semi-autobiographical Empire Of The Sun, which<br />
was subsequently adapted to film by Steven Spielberg.<br />
Ballard views his years in the camps as a painful education<br />
in the barbarous capabilities of humankind. “I<br />
don’t think you can go through the experience of war<br />
without one’s perceptions of the world being forever<br />
changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality<br />
in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you<br />
see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth<br />
beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience. The<br />
war came, I spent three years in the camp, and I saw<br />
adults under stress, some of them giving way to stress,<br />
some recovering and showing steadfast courage. It was<br />
a great education; when you see the truth about human<br />
beings it’s beneficial, but very challenging, and those<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
lessons have stayed with me all my life.”<br />
Now in his 60s, Ballard may be finally tempering his<br />
apocalyptic vision. Recent works such as 1994’s Rushing<br />
To Paradise, while retaining their author’s signature<br />
dry wit and moral imperative, stop short of blooming<br />
into nightmare worlds such as those of Crash, High<br />
Rise and The Drowned World; since Empire Of The Sun,<br />
his books have taken gradual steps in the direction of<br />
humour, and even hope. Furthermore, having explored<br />
the distant future and his own difficult past, Ballard’s<br />
writing seems to be moving in ever-tighter concentric<br />
circles around the present-day reality that most would<br />
recognize, and his characters taking upon sympathetic<br />
foibles belying an underlying humanity as well as their<br />
external neurotic drive.<br />
Appearances would indicate that Ballard is cautiously<br />
closing in on a central, pivotal point, perhaps<br />
the wellspring of his fertile imagination. Asked if he<br />
knows what that point is likely to be when he finally<br />
homes in on it, he demurs: “I wonder if I ever will.<br />
Maybe that will be a mistake – sort of like going into<br />
analysis and getting yourself cured; one needs the sort<br />
of support system provided by the element of mystery<br />
about oneself.” Cured or not, the sense of wonder and<br />
mystery remains in his writing – indicating that, editors’<br />
opinions aside, the Ballard method of shock therapy is<br />
working just fine. �<br />
031<br />
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Interview [published November 1997]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Future Shock<br />
Chris Hall finds out why J.G. Ballard thinks Crash is<br />
the first film of the 21st century<br />
One week before David Cronenberg’s Crash opened<br />
in the UK at the beginning of June, the normally<br />
reclusive author J.G. Ballard appeared at a regional<br />
press conference and pre-screening of the film in<br />
Wardour Street, London. Cronenberg’s film is based<br />
on Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same title, and the controversy<br />
surrounding Crash has brought Ballard back<br />
into the public eye to defend a film which he sees as<br />
a hauntingly accurate depiction of the book he wrote<br />
nearly a quarter-century ago.<br />
It is a measure of the confusion surrounding the film<br />
that it was felt necessary to show Crash to regional<br />
newspaper editors and reviewers, as well as having both<br />
Ballard and Crash’s co-executive producer Chris Auty<br />
present, to try and dispel the sensationalist media myths<br />
that had grown up around Crash since its premiere at<br />
the Cannes film festival … Thanks to the London Standard’s<br />
headline that Crash was “beyond the bounds of<br />
depravity”, four local English councils banned Crash<br />
from being shown within their regional jurisdiction on<br />
the grounds that it is nihilistic, sado-masochistic and<br />
graphic in its sexual and violent content.<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
Such hysteria has not been confined to this side of<br />
the Atlantic – Crash has only just been released on<br />
video in the US this month, having been delayed for<br />
over a year due to the personal intervention of media<br />
mogul Ted Turner. As the owner of Crash’s distributor<br />
Fine Line Features, Turner attempted to block Crash<br />
being released in the States at all, and only backed<br />
down when the press caught wind of his behind-thescenes<br />
manoeuvres.<br />
Ballard for his part is bemused and outraged by the<br />
double standards in operation against Crash and cannot<br />
understand why the film has been singled out for such<br />
outrage. What about films such as Martin Scorsese’s<br />
Goodfellas and Casino, he asks. Both are “bloodthirsty<br />
and horrific” and “practically a handbook to any yobbo<br />
wanting to beat someone up.”<br />
Ballard is particularly appalled at the film “coming<br />
up against little England at its worst” and characterises<br />
the British as “a strange, nervous nation” unable to<br />
defend anything on the grounds of freedom of speech.<br />
Indeed, it was Cronenberg who noticed that nobody<br />
had defended the film on these grounds. The absurdly<br />
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aptly-named British councillor John Bull said that in<br />
the light of the Dunblane massacre, you’ve got to look<br />
a lot more closely at the effect on the audience of films<br />
like Crash. Ballard’s heart sank when he read those<br />
comments: “For God’s sake, what can we do when<br />
people jump to make connections like that?”<br />
So why is it that people have got Crash all wrong?<br />
Why do we find the idea that there might be a sexual<br />
component to driving and crashing so abhorrent? You<br />
could say that by this very response Ballard and Cronenberg<br />
have tapped into something. There appears to<br />
be a lot of denial going on. Ballard notes that “people<br />
seem to be excited by car crashes or film-makers<br />
wouldn’t film them. David [Cronenberg] said to me,<br />
‘Jim – the problem with car crashes is that they’re<br />
damn difficult to film!’ Film-makers wouldn’t make<br />
all this effort if they didn’t think people were getting<br />
a thrill from them’”<br />
This is borne out by the experiences of Crash’s<br />
stunt co-ordinator Ted Hanlon. “Usually with car<br />
crashes, you just line up two cars and let them hit. The<br />
more damage and the bigger the explosion, the better.<br />
In this film, it’s the opposite. Cronenberg wanted<br />
the crashes to be brutal, nasty, intense and quick,<br />
as crashes are in real life, and without the attendant<br />
explosions or clichéd slow motion tracking shots, in<br />
order to convey the immediacy such events.”<br />
That people should think, upon hearing what Crash is<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
about, that these usual Hollywood conventions would<br />
apply to the film is hardly surprising and, further, that<br />
they should find a realistic representation of crashes so<br />
alien is testament to the domination of the Hollywood<br />
blockbuster genre. A sarcastic Ballard complains that<br />
“Bruce Willis can behave just as sadistically as the bad<br />
guys, but because he’s working for the NYPD it’s OK<br />
… Add a layer of sexual excitement and you’ve got<br />
the film culture that dominates the planet. We all know<br />
as drivers that there are young men who cannot bear<br />
being overtaken by a woman driver. Young men feel<br />
powerful sexual emotions – half of America used to be<br />
conceived in cars. There is nothing revolutionary in the<br />
idea that there is a sexual component to our idea of, our<br />
excitement by, car crashes.”<br />
How does he think that Crash differs from this?<br />
“Crash is honest – it says we won’t put a reassuring<br />
moral frame around it. We won’t pretend this is a<br />
story with a happy ending, and all it’s ambiguities are<br />
up on the screen. I think that’s what so original about<br />
it.” The real problem, as Ballard sees it, is will Crash<br />
encourage people to imitate the behaviour. “People<br />
aren’t going to take this film literally,” he reasons, “it<br />
doesn’t invite being taken literally. It’s a very cool,<br />
almost glassy, rather eloquent, mysterious film …<br />
it’s obviously something more than what you see on<br />
the screen at any moment. There are no Buicks slomoing<br />
through the air, crashing into buses; obviously<br />
033<br />
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something very strange is going on in the minds of the<br />
characters. Vaughan is clearly mad.”<br />
Chris Auty thinks that the British find the problem<br />
problematic because the Protestant world has no<br />
surrealist tradition within which to place or make<br />
sense of it. “Poland, Argentina – these are deeply<br />
religious catholic countries. They have no problem<br />
at all with Crash. They think of it alongside Belle de<br />
Jour, something like a Bunuel movie, which is how<br />
we think of it. Personally, I see it as a ghost story …<br />
it is as though the film’s protagonist James has died<br />
and become a ghost and then tries to become human<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
again. Maybe I sound mad but I found the ending<br />
immensely touching and romantic and full of hope<br />
in a dehumanised world.”<br />
Ballard is keen to make a comparison of Crash with<br />
Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking Psycho: “I think<br />
of Crash as the first film of the next century, if you<br />
like. I think that the very influential role of Psycho<br />
since 1962 will apply to Crash … Paul Schrader<br />
[scriptwriter of Taxi Driver] said ‘Wonderful film – if<br />
only I’d been so honest’, and I think it will impel a<br />
new frankness and honesty that will reveal itself over<br />
the next few years.” �<br />
034<br />
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Interview [published September 2001]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Not A Literary Man<br />
Marcos Moure’s 1995 interview with J.G. Ballard about<br />
his novel Rushing To Paradise<br />
Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction<br />
alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of<br />
automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality,<br />
or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization,<br />
his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced<br />
artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts<br />
among his influences the surrealist painters Dalí, Magritte,<br />
and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom<br />
he considers to be one of the most important authors of<br />
the 20th century.<br />
Ballard first entered the literary world as a science<br />
fiction writer, a genre he soon exhausted and has not<br />
explored in years. His transition to the mainstream<br />
was not entirely smooth, however. His 1970 anthology,<br />
The Atrocity Exhibition, was deleted from the<br />
Farrar, Straus and Giroux catalogue soon after its<br />
US publication because of short stories like ‘Why<br />
I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and ‘Plan for the<br />
Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. After reading<br />
his classic 1972 novel, Crash, an editor wryly commented,<br />
“The author is beyond psychiatric help.”<br />
I found Mr Ballard to be quite sane – piercingly so,<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
in fact – as he talked to me recently from his home in<br />
Shepperton, a suburb of London. Ballard is the author<br />
of 16 novels, including Hello America, The Crystal<br />
World, Empire of the Sun, The Terminal Beach, The<br />
Unlimited Dream Company and The Disaster Area. His<br />
newest novel, Rushing to Paradise, was just published<br />
by Picador USA.<br />
Ballard as seen by Ballard<br />
MM: How do you see yourself as a writer and what do<br />
you think is your niche in the literary world?<br />
JGB: I can’t speak for the United States, but I suppose<br />
some still refer to me as a science fiction writer.<br />
But since Empire of the Sun came out ten years ago,<br />
I think people have welcomed me to the mainstream.<br />
Although I’m not so sure I want to be embraced by<br />
the mainstream. I think I’m still what I always was, a<br />
kind of fringe writer. I think I’m an imaginative writer<br />
who began his career by writing science fiction, but I<br />
haven’t written any, really, for a very long time. I don’t<br />
even consider Crash to be a science fiction novel. I<br />
don’t know whether you’ve read it or not.<br />
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MM: Definitely. It seems to me that fantastically imaginative<br />
fiction tends to be lumped in with the whole<br />
science fiction genre.<br />
JGB: Exactly. If you look at 20th-century novels, you<br />
can see that there’s a sort of mainstream, or what I would<br />
call realistic or naturalistic fiction. And then there are<br />
the imaginative writers who often tend to be mavericks.<br />
You know Genet, Céline, Burroughs, and so on. And I<br />
like to think of myself as a maverick. I’m certainly not<br />
a literary man, and this is an important point. I’ve met a<br />
great number of writers, novelists rather, English ones<br />
in particular, whose stock of references – their sort of<br />
instant associations that come to mind when they create<br />
and all that – all tend to come from the world of<br />
literature. Mine do not.<br />
I’m interested in science and medicine, the media<br />
landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes<br />
of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any<br />
bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not the<br />
world of literature.<br />
Science Fiction<br />
MM: So you wouldn’t file your work of the past 15 or<br />
20 years under science fiction?<br />
JGB: No, not anymore. Some of my work was, there’s<br />
certainly no question about that. And I’m very proud<br />
that I was a science fiction writer. As I’ve often said,<br />
it’s the most authentic literature of the 20th century.<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
Sadly enough, most science fiction is being written<br />
by the wrong people nowadays. The constraints of<br />
a certain kind of commercial fiction have tended to<br />
formularize the field over the last 50 years.<br />
MM: Speaking from my own experience, I think<br />
many people, especially as young readers, are drawn<br />
to the newness, inventiveness, even classic adventure<br />
elements of science fiction, but eventually outgrow<br />
it. As you said, you find the repetition and formula<br />
simply bore you. Especially when you realise there’s<br />
so much more out there. Why limit yourself? Why be<br />
just a science fiction writer or reader?<br />
JGB: I agree with you. That’s true. And that’s why I<br />
myself stopped writing. People within the science fiction<br />
world never regarded me as one of them in the first<br />
place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who<br />
wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to<br />
kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future<br />
and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And<br />
sci-fiers to this day don’t regard me as one of them. I’m<br />
some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the<br />
virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.<br />
Rushing to Paradise<br />
MM: Your new novel deals with obsessive themes like<br />
fanaticism, radicalism and militant feminism, all within<br />
the frame of the extremist wing of the environmental<br />
movement. It’s not only eerily timely, it also strikes a<br />
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raw nerve, especially in view of the healthy wave of<br />
anti-political correctness sweeping over the United<br />
States at the moment.<br />
JGB: Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The great talent<br />
of the United States is to take things too far, so that<br />
you have these huge pendulum swings of sorts. Always<br />
correct and then reverse. And then correct and reverse<br />
again. Here in England, I would say the extremist fringe<br />
of the feminist movement is largely positive. I’ve got<br />
two daughters as well as a son, and they’ve benefited<br />
enormously from the feminist movement of the past<br />
20 years. England is a very class-bound society, and<br />
women, until recently, were practically an inferior<br />
class. Most professions were closed to women 30 years<br />
ago, except teaching and publishing. Nowadays they’re<br />
all mostly open. So we do have a few extremists, but<br />
nothing compared to the US, where you really do have<br />
some very strange people.<br />
Sex, Violence, Censorship, Reality<br />
MM: You said in a recent interview that “Everything<br />
should be done to encourage more sex and violence<br />
on television”.<br />
JGB: Yes, I did say that. And I think it’s true. I mean, I<br />
live in the most censored nation in the Western world.<br />
There’s no question about that. Many people have said<br />
so. Film, TV, videos, and art are more heavily censored<br />
here than anywhere in Western Europe or the US.<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
Censorship in England has a clear political role. It<br />
represents the fear of the established order that given<br />
any sort of imaginative freedom, or too much of it, the<br />
power structure will collapse. If people see sex and<br />
violence treated frankly, they may turn the same frank<br />
eye upon their own political situation. And start climbing<br />
up the base of the pyramid towards the apex. The<br />
people in real control sanitise the view of the world for<br />
us. Absolutely.<br />
Best Work<br />
MM: In his book, The 99 Best Novels Since 1939,<br />
Anthony Burgess considers your novel The Unlimited<br />
Dream Company to be your most important work to<br />
date. Which do you consider your best?<br />
JGB: My most original and probably best novel is<br />
Crash. This is probably where I pushed my imagination<br />
as far as it has gone. I’ve also got a soft spot for other<br />
books of mine, most notably The Atrocity Exhibition.<br />
The Atrocity Exhibition is practically incomprehensible<br />
to most readers, whereas Crash is directly intelligible.<br />
There’s no doubt at all about what the author’s getting<br />
on about.<br />
The Unavoidable Question<br />
MM: Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? That is, if it<br />
isn’t already an exhausted topic. What is your opinion<br />
of Steven Spielberg’s film version of your novel?<br />
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JGB: I was very impressed by it. I thought it was a<br />
fine film. In fact, trying to remain as neutral as possible,<br />
I think it’s a much better film than Schindler’s<br />
List because it’s more imagined than Schindler’s List.<br />
I think the film is a remarkable effort in many ways.<br />
He extracted a wonderful performance from the boy.<br />
He was very faithful to the spirit of the book. There are<br />
always problems when Hollywood tackles a war film<br />
because the conventions of the entertainment cinema<br />
can’t really cope with the horrors of war. Still, I think it<br />
was a remarkable film, and more and more people are<br />
beginning to realize it.<br />
Current Readings<br />
MM: Have you read anything recently that impressed<br />
you favourably?<br />
JGB: Well, I don’t read much fiction nowadays, to be<br />
honest. Writing the stuff all day means when I read I<br />
tend to read nonfiction. It feeds my imagination. I read<br />
a great deal, but I can’t really pick a landmark book off-<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
hand. Let’s see, well, I just finished The Moral Animal<br />
by Richard Wright, a study of neo-Darwinism. That<br />
was quite impressive. Actually the best novel I’ve read<br />
in a while is by that Danish writer Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s<br />
Sense of Snow. I thought it was a wonderful book. Far<br />
more than a mere thriller. In fact, it’s a pity that it had<br />
any thriller element to it at all. It was much more than<br />
that. It was quite remarkable on all sorts of levels. I<br />
hope it did well in the states. My girlfriend is reading<br />
his new one (Borderliners) now<br />
Current projects<br />
MM: What are you working on now?<br />
JGB: I’m halfway through another novel untitled as<br />
of yet – another sort of cautionary tale. I’d rather not<br />
discuss it in detail though.<br />
MM: Any plans to come over to the States and promote<br />
Rushing to Paradise?<br />
JGB: Oh, probably not, I’m too engrossed in the<br />
new book. �<br />
038<br />
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Interview [published November 2000]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Flight And Imagination<br />
Chris Hall talks about the dark side of capitalism and the deceptions<br />
of reality with J.G. Ballard<br />
Walking along Oxford Street the day after I finished<br />
reading J.G. Ballard’s new novel, Super-Cannes, it<br />
struck me, literally, the total acceptance of the substrate<br />
of violence in consumer societies when it manifests<br />
itself. A silent, monolithic crowd hurtled down<br />
either side of the road as I walked from Centrepoint<br />
to Oxford Circus. I counted the number of times that<br />
I was physically forced to move out of the way or get<br />
hit head on (five). I counted the number of times I was<br />
pranged, bumped or rear-shunted (four). It’s said that<br />
London traffic moves at an average speed of 11mph,<br />
but pedestrian traffic can’t be far behind. Indeed, it’s<br />
not too fanciful to see in these crowds how the car<br />
has influenced our spatio-temporal perception. You<br />
see overtaking manoeuvres, you see people checking<br />
their rear views, as it were, with a glance behind before<br />
moving out. There is the same frustration at slow<br />
moving traffic: the same parameters of territoriality<br />
are in operation.<br />
My shopping trip reminded me of a passage from the<br />
book in which Wilder Penrose, the resident psychologist<br />
of the business park Eden-Olympia, says “Our<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of<br />
refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking<br />
about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of<br />
madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve<br />
tonic.” And that’s just what that experience felt like:<br />
small, discrete moments of psychopathy.<br />
It was with this in mind that I spoke to J.G. Ballard,<br />
who’d granted me the last interview on the round<br />
of publicity he’d been doing for Super-Cannes with<br />
the nationals. Unlike most people who interview<br />
Ballard, I wasn’t worried about whether he would<br />
be cold and distant or abstract, but simply that there<br />
wouldn’t be enough time with the Seer of Shepperton.<br />
I was right not to worry about any of those<br />
things. His voice has a rhythmic, musical quality,<br />
and his laughter is warm and inclusive. He gives the<br />
impression of an eccentric school master with, yes,<br />
a slightly abstracted air; a patrician whose sentences<br />
end with a heavy emphasis. Ballard is clearly used to<br />
developing an idea without interruption.<br />
“The main theme of Super-Cannes,” he says, “is<br />
that in order to keep us happy and spending more<br />
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as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap<br />
rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of<br />
course what’s been happening for a while. If you look<br />
at the way in which the more violent contact sports are<br />
marketed – American Football, wrestling, boxing – and<br />
of course the most violent entertainment culture of<br />
all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the<br />
darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices<br />
of appetites flowing. That is the risk.”<br />
Or as Wilder Penrose says in Super-Cannes: “A<br />
perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in<br />
even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers<br />
for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive<br />
the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that<br />
will keep us ‘buying’? Psychopathy is the only engine<br />
powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the<br />
arts, sciences and industries of the world.”<br />
Ballard makes the simile with politics – “Hitler<br />
tapped into all kinds of psychopathic traits in the<br />
German people, the race hatred in particular: Jews,<br />
Gypsies, non-Germans, all ‘biological inferiors’. These<br />
were very potent ideas that are probably carried in all<br />
of us from our distant past when it made sense to fear<br />
strangers because they were probably trying to steal<br />
your cattle, kill you or rape your wife. Hitler tapped<br />
those buried layers of psychopathy. It’s an example of<br />
what could happen.”<br />
With Super-Cannes we once again have all the cool<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
clarity of a writer who has never flinched from his<br />
subject matter for the last 40 years. As our narrator,<br />
Paul Sinclair, drives south to the French coast with his<br />
doctor wife Jane, towards Eden-Olympia, their new<br />
home, “hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged<br />
retinas in the Provençal sun”. Ballard writes of the<br />
flare of swimming pools on the hillside: “Ten thousand<br />
years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur<br />
had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle<br />
over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of<br />
tritons and stylised fish, inexplicably hauled up the<br />
mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of<br />
a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.”<br />
Thus we are in familiar unfamiliar territory,<br />
in a world we think we know but which is perhaps<br />
meaningful only retroactively.<br />
Once again there is the Ballardian theme of morality<br />
reduced to aesthetics, or as Paul Sinclair has it “Civility<br />
and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia. By the<br />
end of the afternoon all this tolerance and good behaviour<br />
left me feeling deeply bored.” Sinclair is in a world<br />
in which “A moral calculus that took thousands of years<br />
to develop starts to wither from neglect, an adolescent<br />
world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers<br />
you wear.”<br />
Super-Cannes takes off as a ‘why-dunnit’ when Paul<br />
Sinclair learns that he and his wife have been housed<br />
in a villa whose previous occupant, David Greenwood,<br />
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had apparently gone insane and killed seven very senior<br />
executives. Sinclair says: “It occurred to me that three<br />
of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable<br />
bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind<br />
and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this<br />
dreaming villa.” As so often with Ballard’s fiction, a<br />
fusion of inner and outer landscapes has already begun.<br />
Sinclair is amazed to find that, as a psychologist,<br />
Wilder Penrose is prescribing madness as a form of<br />
therapy at Eden-Olympia, which Wilder clarifies for<br />
him: “I mean a controlled and supervised madness.<br />
Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has<br />
been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations<br />
in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever<br />
been more potent.”<br />
Even though to some extent Super-Cannes, like Cocaine<br />
Nights, uses the conventions of a detective novel it<br />
nonetheless contains few of the dead sentences a genre<br />
novel would have. There are no characters crossing the<br />
room to pour themselves a drink – instead they wonder<br />
“how the Reverend Dodgson’s Alice would have coped<br />
with Eden-Olympia. She would have grown up quickly<br />
and married an elderly German banker, then become a<br />
recluse in a mansion high above Super-Cannes, with a<br />
fading facelift and a phobia about reflective surfaces.”<br />
And yet there are passages that are almost parodic of<br />
Ballard’s ‘concrete and glass’ period: “Her hip pressed<br />
against the BMW, and the curvature of its door de-<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
flected the lines of her thigh, as if the car was a huge<br />
orthopaedic device that expressed a voluptuous mix of<br />
geometry and desire.”<br />
Ballard has said elsewhere that whereas the 20th<br />
century was mediated through the car, the 21st century<br />
will be mediated through the home, and as far as<br />
Super-Cannes goes home means work. “The dream of<br />
a leisure society was the great 20th-century delusion,”<br />
says Wilder Penrose. “Work is the new leisure. Talented<br />
and ambitious people work harder than they have ever<br />
done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment<br />
through work. The last thing they want is recreation.”<br />
There are references to the flats and houses of<br />
Eden-Olympia as service stations “where people sleep<br />
and ablute”. The real home is now the office.<br />
It’s not quite correct to say, as some have, that Super-<br />
Cannes is a companion piece to Cocaine Nights though<br />
both take place within gated communities of one kind or<br />
another and both involve on a superficial level a naive<br />
narrator trying to solve a mystery. It’s more that some<br />
of the ideas in Super-Cannes are taken further than they<br />
are in Cocaine Nights. Ballard is unapologetic about<br />
this new employment of detective genre conventions<br />
saying that if it’s good enough for Dostoevsky in The<br />
Brothers Karamazov it’s good enough for him.<br />
With his last two books one feels that he is reaching<br />
a new, younger audience – one perhaps attracted by the<br />
drug reference in the previous novel – and he obviously<br />
041<br />
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enjoys this as a professional writer, but as a knowing<br />
extract from The Kindness Of Women shows, he has an<br />
instinctive feel for his core readership. This is Ballard<br />
describing the audience of an aversion therapy film at<br />
the Rio film festival: “…they gazed at the screen with<br />
the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of<br />
the men in the Soho porn theatres, or the fans of certain<br />
kinds of apocalyptic science fiction.”<br />
It seems that the “invisible literature” that he has<br />
written about, and which acts as compost for the mind,<br />
increasingly comes from the internet. Ballard doesn’t<br />
have a PC himself but his girlfriend, he says, supplies<br />
him with sites that might interest him: “She is a keen<br />
net surfer, she’s constantly giving me fascinating stuff<br />
that she’s printed off. Extraordinary articles. Some really<br />
poetic, touching stuff. There’s one site that we first<br />
visited a year ago. It’s by these people at a bird sanctuary<br />
in Norfolk who have been tagging ospreys with<br />
radio transmitters. They’ve been tracking their flights<br />
to and from their winter ground, an island off Ghana or<br />
somewhere, and they show maps of the routes taken by<br />
each bird flying across Europe and the Mediterranean,<br />
some of them detour for years before returning to this<br />
bird sanctuary. Watching all this is deeply moving. It<br />
lets another dimension into your life.”<br />
Flight as a metaphor for transcendence occurs in Ballard's<br />
work passim, and he has described in The Kindness<br />
Of Women how his own obsession with flying,<br />
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which had started in Shanghai, had lead him to become<br />
an RAF trainee fighter pilot in Canada. “Flying is a<br />
very strange experience, it’s very close to dreaming,”<br />
he says. “The normal yardsticks, the parameters of<br />
our movements through space, are suspended. You’re<br />
travelling at 150mph, but if you’re 1,000ft up you’re<br />
not moving at all. Likewise, you can be travelling quite<br />
slowly coming in to land, yet you seem to be hurtling<br />
along like a Grand Prix car. The problem with light<br />
flying is that it’s very unstable and dangerous and also<br />
very noisy, there’s hardly any time to think.”<br />
So, it’s a transcendental experience for him? “Yes,<br />
there’s no doubt about that. When I drive up to London,<br />
I go by London Airport and I always get a strange kick<br />
out of watching those big planes taking off and coming<br />
in to land. An empty runway moves me enormously,<br />
which obviously says something about my need to<br />
escape I guess.”<br />
If Ballard’s interest in this bird sanctuary website<br />
seems apposite, then consider another of his favourites:<br />
“There’s this group that got into a disused American<br />
nuclear silo. It’s wonderful! You’re taken on a tour and<br />
you can choose alternatives. ‘Would you like to look at<br />
the missile control room?’, ‘Would you like to see the<br />
sleeping quarters?’. It’s straight out of the stuff that I<br />
was writing about all that time ago.<br />
“Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative<br />
strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the<br />
042<br />
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Bruce Willis films,” he says. “I’m waiting for the first<br />
new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the<br />
net and to the modern age. It’ll come.”<br />
Although he reads across the board of popular science,<br />
he says that he steers clear of cosmology books<br />
because “they are a happy hunting ground for, frankly,<br />
cranks. Multi-dimensional universes or strings and<br />
black holes – all this stuff is totally hypothetical.”<br />
His friend Martin Bax wrote that Ballard has this<br />
amazing ability to know what’s going on in Cape<br />
Canaveral or anywhere without ever seeming to<br />
leave Shepperton, his home for the last 40 years. Sure<br />
enough, he’s got the goods on Channel 4’s Big Brother,<br />
although he claims not to have seen that much of it:<br />
“My girlfriend has been absolutely glued to it, she<br />
voted something like 30 times one evening! I think<br />
we can therefore discount the huge voting figures,” he<br />
says, with a warm, expansive laugh. “I’ve got a feeling<br />
people are just pressing the redial button.”<br />
He doesn’t believe the official 7.5 million viewing<br />
figures (“that’s more than the number of votes that the<br />
Tory party got at the last election”) but he likens the<br />
interest in the programme to a Zen-like absorption: “If<br />
you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way<br />
then you become obsessed by it. It’s like those Andy<br />
Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building<br />
or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed obsessively<br />
enough becomes interesting in its own right<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
by some sort of neurological process that I don’t hope<br />
to understand.”<br />
Is there not an echo of Big Brother in Super-Cannes<br />
when Paul Sinclair is at the Croisette in Cannes? “Without<br />
realising it, the crowds under the palm trees were<br />
extras recruited to play their traditional roles, when<br />
they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals<br />
ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale<br />
cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the<br />
atrocities they had helped to commit.”<br />
Ballard disliked the self-consciousness of Big<br />
Brother and would of liked to have seen more of a Truman<br />
Show element where the participants don’t know<br />
that they are being filmed. “It could be done. Candid<br />
Camera approached that slightly. You could just take<br />
people in a small holiday hotel on the Costa Brava and<br />
film it.” I suggest that this, as with certain psychology<br />
experiments proper, probably wouldn’t get past the<br />
relevant ethics boards. “Yes, that is the problem,” he<br />
says, as if it’s a minor but frustrating obstacle. “But<br />
then, afterwards you could say ‘yes, we did it without<br />
your permission but here’s a very large sum of money,<br />
sign this release form and you’re all going to be stars!’<br />
“ In fact, the very next issue of New Scientist magazine<br />
that I picked up after speaking to Ballard had an article<br />
about a psychology professor at Stanford University<br />
who, frustrated at just those obstacles put in the way<br />
of research by ethics boards, is now running his own<br />
043<br />
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reality experiments in a TV series called Human Zoo.<br />
“Most television is low-grade pap, it’s so homogenised<br />
it’s like mental toothpaste. But Big Brother as a<br />
slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It was like<br />
Tracey Emin’s Bed,” he says approvingly.<br />
Ballard is worried that with all the interest in the<br />
internet we are forgetting what’s really around the corner:<br />
“The rapid development of the internet over recent<br />
years has rather shut out all discussion on the news<br />
about progress made on virtual reality. I assume that<br />
the world’s big electronic corporations are developing<br />
VR systems, which after all are going to take television<br />
and movies into completely new dimensions that I<br />
think potentially do represent a threat. When you enter<br />
into a simulated environment that is more convincing<br />
visually than the real world, the so-called real world,<br />
which of course is itself generated by the central nervous<br />
system,” he says, as if this is given a priori, “the<br />
temptation may be to stay there. It may lead to my<br />
phrase about playing with our own psychopathology as<br />
a game coming true with a bang. I see huge dangers<br />
there, but also huge possibilities. We might all learn<br />
how to play God! There might be a program along the<br />
lines of ‘Be a messiah. See what it’s like to be Jesus<br />
Christ or Buddha!’”<br />
So God isn’t dead, he’s a latent component in a VR<br />
program? “Yes! Nietzsche was wrong!” he says triumphantly.<br />
“This might engender strong social changes,<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
because most people have far more imagination than<br />
they realise, as their dreams make clear. Most people’s<br />
imaginations are damped down by the needs of getting<br />
on and making a living, generally coping with life and<br />
the imagination tends to be rather repressed in order to<br />
allow this flow.”<br />
Surprisingly, for all his interest in film and an acknowledgement<br />
that it’s far more powerful than when<br />
it’s on TV, Ballard doesn’t go out to his local cineplex<br />
but watches rented movies at home. He gives a surprisingly<br />
prosaic reason for this: “There’s less rustling of<br />
chocolate papers.” Given that he’s a fan of David Cronenberg,<br />
and has generously praised his adaptation of<br />
Crash, it is also surprising that he hasn’t seen eXistenZ<br />
yet. “I hate all those VR pictures, especially the ones<br />
where people’s faces start to drip on to their chest and<br />
you realise,” he says with mock surprise, “My God,<br />
we’re in a dream sequence and the VR system has<br />
broken down! I hate that.”<br />
For those of us desperate for more Ballard short<br />
stories, the news isn’t good: “I can’t see myself writing<br />
any for a while, partly because there’s nowhere to<br />
publish them. When I began writing short stories for<br />
sci-fi mags in the 1950s most of them were between<br />
5,000 and 10,000 words. Now, magazines want 2,000<br />
words or a 1,000 words – you can’t develop an idea.<br />
It’s not just a matter of knocking off a short story, it’s<br />
getting your mind into a writing phase where your<br />
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imagination begins to think in terms of short stories<br />
rather than novels.”<br />
For a writer who responds very much to social change,<br />
what does he feel will be the qualitative break between<br />
the 20th and 21st centuries? “If the 21st century represents<br />
a radical break with the 20th century then I don’t<br />
think that we’d be able to spot it. It might be something<br />
totally unexpected. It might be that our children and<br />
grandchildren vigorously reject the 20th century and<br />
everything it stood for. They may look back on it aghast<br />
and say ‘Who were these people? They spent all their<br />
time killing each other! Why?’ If consumer capitalism<br />
gets a little out of hand, and there are signs of resistance<br />
to the Americanisation of Europe, you might get<br />
absolute idealism in the young.<br />
“The big change I assume is that there will be no<br />
more world wars, partly because no one will be able to<br />
borrow enough money from the World Bank to finance<br />
it. Now this changes the game enormously, it’s rather<br />
like playing chess and the rules being changed by the<br />
International Chess Federation ‘You don’t have to mate<br />
the king anymore’. ‘God, what do we do now!?’ I think<br />
the knock-on effect will be vast.” There is a certain glee<br />
with which Ballard accepts these changes, a state of<br />
grace that his protagonists strive towards.<br />
“The decline of political ideology also changes<br />
things. There’s no real ideological clash between Dubyah<br />
and Gore for example. The decline of religion<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
is also a factor. You do your triangulations and all we<br />
have left is consumerism, what I call the ‘suburbanisation<br />
of the soul’. That’s frightening. It may trigger all<br />
sorts of unconscious reactions. As someone in Super-<br />
Cannes says, in a totally sane society madness is the<br />
only freedom.”<br />
This line has come up before in Running Wild for<br />
example? “Yes, I am tending to repeat myself in order<br />
to get the damn message home!” he says with slow emphasis<br />
before that gasping, generous laugh reverberates<br />
down the line.<br />
Consider the word “triangulation” that Ballard uses.<br />
It’s a trope that almost uniquely marks out a Ballardian<br />
sentence with its three seemingly unrelated objects<br />
or events; as if he’s forcing the unconscious mind to<br />
construct a narrative to explain them. Take an example<br />
from Super-Cannes:<br />
“Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I<br />
tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the<br />
book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot<br />
Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in<br />
his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick,<br />
a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? [my italics]<br />
The contingent world must have pressed against his<br />
temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept<br />
the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for<br />
a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across<br />
the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.”<br />
045<br />
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He says that he’s always been interested in content<br />
over style, even though he’s arguably our best stylist.<br />
“I don’t know if I am actually,” he says uncertainly,<br />
before warming to his theme. “I just want to push the<br />
message across. I don’t sloganise a political message<br />
but the sort of images that have appealed to me over<br />
the years – all the drained swimming pools, abandoned<br />
hotels, the strange business parks, gated communities<br />
and retirement complexes – these are what I want to<br />
convey, the peculiar latent psychology waiting to<br />
emerge into the daylight. That’s what I’m trying to do.<br />
Look at the world and see its latent content. I treat the<br />
external world as if it was a solidified dream.”<br />
Ballard means this to apply to his life as well as his<br />
fiction: “With all the blandishments of advertisers and<br />
politicians, everyone is trying to sell you something.<br />
What are they really selling? What is the fashion industry<br />
really selling? Not just a new frock or a new pair of<br />
trainers, it’s selling something more than that.”<br />
Super-Cannes involves a world where work is play<br />
and recreation doesn’t exist. Is writing, for Ballard,<br />
more work than play? “It’s part and parcel of the way I<br />
live. I mean, it’s not an extraneous activity. There’s no<br />
sort of office where, as it were, I say ‘right! I’ll have a<br />
cup of coffee and go through the day’s post’ It isn’t like<br />
that anymore.”<br />
Ballard continues to be seen as a writer’s writer, his<br />
fiction a succès d’estime (Empire of the Sun notwith-<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
standing), so it’s odd that at 70 Ballard still hasn’t had<br />
much of anything in the way of gongs. Germaine Greer<br />
has said that he is “a great writer who hasn’t written a<br />
great novel”. There might be something to this, that it’s<br />
his entire body of work that we should be assessing,<br />
not the individual novels. One can imagine that for Ballard<br />
it’s going to be like a great director or actor never<br />
receiving an Oscar for an individual film, but getting<br />
given one for lifetime achievement. How apposite that<br />
it seems we will be only retroactively able to acclaim<br />
his work in this way.<br />
Of course, Ballard has always disdained or been uninterested<br />
in ingratiating himself with any kind of literary<br />
social scene. So maybe his lack of a public profile<br />
is partly a function of this. Plus the fact that he chooses<br />
to live in Shepperton (that locus of the twin Ballardian<br />
obsessions of flight and imagination, with its proximity<br />
to Heathrow and the film studios), out at the very<br />
edge of west London. He’s unlikely, for example, to<br />
be offered a South Bank Show after his comments last<br />
year about Melvyn Bragg’s dumbing down of the arts.<br />
And although he’s transcended the sci-fi genre in which<br />
he started (and transformed it) it’s hard to imagine him<br />
being particularly bothered about it. In this particular<br />
phase of Western literature, one of autobiography, perhaps<br />
a novelist of ideas, and rather outré ones at that, is<br />
simply unpalatable.<br />
It’s often said that Empire Of The Sun is his most<br />
046<br />
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nakedly autobiographical novel (along with its successor<br />
The Kindness Of Women) and of course that’s<br />
true. But all of his fiction is no less autobiographical,<br />
even Crash, because of its exploration of inner space.<br />
One senses that he’s tired of this literalism, which has<br />
dogged him since he first started writing, and which<br />
reached its apotheosis with Crash. For example, a lot of<br />
people, he says, still think that he loves cars or that he’s<br />
a car buff (he drives a Ford Granada for God’s sake!)<br />
because of books such as Crash and Concrete Island, in<br />
his guise as poet of the motorways. “I’m not interested<br />
in cars at all. But I am interested in the psychology of<br />
the car user, the car as a facilitator of latent psychopathy<br />
or of the latent imagination for good. I think that<br />
a lot of people do express their imaginations through<br />
the cars they own. Imaginations they wouldn’t be able<br />
to express in other ways. Cars are a hugely liberating<br />
force in all kinds of ways.”<br />
So he doesn’t agree with groups such as Reclaim the<br />
Streets or the wider eco movement? “I don’t agree with<br />
the Reclaim the Streets people at all. I think that the<br />
recent petrol tanker blockades across the country illustrates<br />
how silly it is to talk about the end of the car age.<br />
It hasn’t ended: more of us have cars and drive further<br />
in them than ever before.” Or as Paul Sinclair puts it<br />
in Super-Cannes: “Fanatical Greens always veer off<br />
course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus.”<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
When the fuel crisis was at its worst there was the<br />
very real possibility that there would be thousands and<br />
thousands of abandoned cars on motorway flyovers and<br />
cloverleaf intersections. And this recent prediction that<br />
a giant tsunami is going to swallow the east coast of<br />
America. All very Ballardian. “I know; I feel I’ve been<br />
here before,” he says, as if his fiction was a parent and<br />
reality was a child lagging behind. As usual he’s done<br />
his triangulations.<br />
Angela Carter once said that there is an element<br />
of Glen Baxter’s humour about Ballard’s fiction, and<br />
in a way that’s right, there is this possibility that it<br />
might descend into the ludicrous at any moment. But<br />
the point, surely, is that it never does. What humour<br />
there is is really so black that it could never escape the<br />
event horizon of laughter. No, a much better analogue<br />
is to be found with Martin Parr’s collections of Boring<br />
Postcards, especially his latest, Boring Postcards<br />
USA. Here we find interchange complexes, vast turnpike<br />
systems, interstates, thruways, empty hotel lobbies,<br />
freeways, bus depots, office buildings, shopping<br />
malls, trailer villages, in short all those images of our<br />
waking, solidified dreams that most of us look at and<br />
find ugly or brutal but which when viewed through<br />
Ballard’s visionary protagonists in their dry, affectless<br />
realms, are transformed into something meaningful<br />
and life affirming. �<br />
047<br />
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Review [published August 1999]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights<br />
David B. Livingstone<br />
There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the<br />
lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa<br />
Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes<br />
of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French<br />
expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture;<br />
the previously passive, isolated residents have begun<br />
staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of<br />
Harold Pinter plays, and lavish parties. At night the<br />
once vacant streets are now teeming with activity, bars<br />
and cafes packed with revellers, the sidewalks crowded<br />
with people en route from one event to the next.<br />
Outward appearances suggest the wholesale adoption<br />
of a new ethos of high-spirited, well-controlled<br />
collective exuberance. But there’s the matter of the fire:<br />
The house and household of an aged, wealthy industrialist<br />
has gone up in flames, claiming five lives, while<br />
virtually the entire town stood and watched. There’s<br />
the matter of the petty crime, the burglaries, muggings,<br />
and auto thefts which have begun to nibble away at the<br />
edges of Estrella Del Mar’s security despite the guardhouses<br />
and surveillance cameras. There’s the matter of<br />
the new, flourishing trade in drugs and pornography.<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
And there’s the matter of Frank Prentice, who sits in<br />
Marbella jail awaiting trial for arson and five counts of<br />
murder, and who, despite being clearly innocent, has<br />
happily confessed.<br />
It is up to Charles Prentice, Frank’s brother, to peel<br />
away the onionlike layers of denial and deceit which<br />
hide the rather ugly truth about this seaside idyll, its<br />
residents, and the horrific crime which brought him<br />
here. But as is usually the case in a J.G. Ballard book, the<br />
truth comes with a price tag attached, and likely without<br />
any easing of discomfort for his principal characters.<br />
Cocaine Nights marks a partial return on Ballard’s<br />
part to the provocative, highly-successful mid-career<br />
methodology employed in novels such as Crash and<br />
High Rise: after establishing himself as a science<br />
fiction guru in the 1960s, Ballard stylistically shifted<br />
gears towards an unnerving, futuristic variant on social<br />
realism in the 1970s. Both Crash and High Rise were<br />
what-if novels, posing questions as to what the likely<br />
results would be if our collective fascination with such<br />
things as speed, violence, status, power, and sex were<br />
carried just a little bit further: How insane, how brutal<br />
048<br />
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could our world become if we really cut loose?<br />
Cocaine Nights asks a question better suited to<br />
the 90s, the age of gated communities and infrared<br />
home security systems: Does absolute security<br />
guarantee isolation and cultural death? Conversely,<br />
is a measure of crime an essential ingredient in a<br />
vibrant, living, properly functioning social system?<br />
Is it true, as a character asserts, that “Crime and<br />
creativity go together, always have done,” and that<br />
“total security is a disease of deprivation”? Suffice<br />
it to say that the answers presented in Nights will<br />
be anathema to moral absolutists; the world of Ballard’s<br />
fiction, like life in the hyperkinetic, relativistic<br />
1990s, abounds with uncomfortable grey areas.<br />
On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a<br />
race against time, but as it proceeds – and as preconceived<br />
conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve<br />
– it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look<br />
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and<br />
at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society.<br />
As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some<br />
faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced<br />
by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both<br />
thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard<br />
has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it<br />
propels his novel along marvellously.<br />
Cocaine Nights doesn’t have either the broad sweep<br />
or brute impact of the landmark Crash, but it retains<br />
enough social relevance and low-key creepiness to<br />
more than satisfy Ballardphiles. As is often the case<br />
in Ballard’s alternate reality, it’s a given that his most<br />
appealing, human characters turn out to be the most<br />
twisted, and that even the most normal of events turn<br />
out to be governed by a perverse, malformed logic;<br />
that this logic turns out to be grounded in sound sociological<br />
and psychological principles is its most<br />
horrific feature. �<br />
049<br />
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Feature [published June 1997]<br />
J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphor<br />
Chris Hall gives a crash course in the fiction of J.G. Ballard<br />
Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of<br />
Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of J.G. Ballard’s<br />
fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those<br />
already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of<br />
Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the<br />
semi-autobiographical work Empire Of The Sun, will<br />
find the rest of his work as resonant and thoughtprovoking<br />
as these two novels. With the controversy<br />
and critical acclaim that has surrounded David Cronenberg’s<br />
film adaptation of Crash, it is about time that the<br />
rest of Ballard’s work received a closer look.<br />
I can clearly remember reading my very first Ballard<br />
short story, ‘Track 12’, among a collection of science fiction<br />
short stories from the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur<br />
C. Clarke et al, all of whom were then part of the English<br />
secondary school curriculum. What set Ballard’s story<br />
immediately apart, besides its extreme brevity (3 pages –<br />
an inspiration to all of us who lazily took up the creed of<br />
quality over quantity), was the fusion and overlay of inner<br />
and outer landscapes, the public and private colliding<br />
and commingling. Here I first glimpsed the compressed<br />
economy of Ballard’s writing, as if he were living in a<br />
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world that would suddenly disappear or be destroyed.<br />
Asimov once defined a short story as one in which if you<br />
removed just one sentence then the entire story made no<br />
sense. ‘Track 12’ is about as close as anyone will get to<br />
adhering to Asimov’s dictum.<br />
Ballard’s narratives would seem to represent a<br />
warped inversion of reductio ad absurdum, in which<br />
truth, not falsity, is shown through absurd logical<br />
consequence. It’s always too late for going back in his<br />
fiction; there is a kind of inexorable rush hat draws us<br />
towards destruction or transcendence and often, both.<br />
(For these reasons, Ballard avoids elliptical plots). The<br />
moral ambivalence inherent to a lot of his work is best<br />
illustrated in Crash, where Ballard’s own introduction<br />
to the novel seems to be a disguised disclaimer. While<br />
Ballard himself, off the page, stresses the cautionary<br />
nature of his stories, his more apocalyptic novels (High<br />
Rise, Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition) have<br />
been continually read as showing nihilistic or pessimistic<br />
obsession with decay, destruction and disaster.<br />
Far from it. Ballard’s work shows a deep concern<br />
with transcendence and the recognition of unconscious<br />
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forces. As the critic Gregory Stephenson points out,<br />
Ballard is subversive in the true sense of the word (“to<br />
turn from beneath”) in that he deals with the unconscious<br />
mind and its drive to manifest itself through our<br />
waking ego-consciousness, in a sense to banish time<br />
and space itself.<br />
This resolutely amoral tone has certain biographical<br />
and psychoanalytic roots in Ballard’s own history.<br />
Ballard originally intended to be a psychiatrist before<br />
abandoning his studies in medicine (it is no coincidence<br />
that he shares the background with William Burroughs).<br />
Moreover, by the time he was 13, he had witnessed<br />
every kind of conceivable human horror from a childhood<br />
spent interned in Lunghua, Japan. It is as if Ballard<br />
has had this imprinted upon his mind, hardwired as the<br />
template with which he views the world, filtered through<br />
and fused with it. Perhaps for this reason his stories, especially<br />
Crash, come across as someone trying to shock<br />
themselves with their own fiction.<br />
Martin Amis wrote that Empire Of The Sun “gives<br />
shape to what shaped him”. Ballard bears this out:<br />
“People brought up in the social democracies of Western<br />
Europe have no idea of this kind of savagery.” By<br />
the time he was repatriated to England from Japan, Ballard<br />
was 15 and the culture shock is still with him. He<br />
is always going to have an outsider’s perspective; one<br />
that, for example, finds the London suburb of Shepperton<br />
where he lives “lunar and abstract” in the summer.<br />
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Perhaps making his fiction abstract and detached is one<br />
way of dealing with such terror.<br />
As a writer Ballard has always been more interested in<br />
idea, vision, dream and nightmare than in character (or<br />
at least character in the usual sense.) The viewpoint of<br />
his fiction is a clinically neutral affair even in first person<br />
narration, where it is usually a doctor or a psychologist.<br />
Indeed, in this sense, Ballard’s fiction comes closer to<br />
being psychoanalytic rather than science fiction. Some<br />
of the techniques used in psychoanalysis were partly<br />
designed to encourage the patients’ defence mechanisms<br />
to emerge. Freud argued that therapists should impose<br />
as little of their own personalities as possible by remaining<br />
neutral and detached. Crash is like Dr Ballard passively<br />
relaying our psychosexual nightmares, listening<br />
to our defence mechanisms and checking for common<br />
symptomology. Indeed, Crash seems more like an<br />
extended short story, where the obsession is allowed to<br />
play out in time; a temporally exploded idée fixe. This<br />
obsessional quality is evident in a lot of Ballard’s other<br />
work. The Drowned World ends with the hero heading<br />
South, towards the heat and insanity of the rainforests.<br />
The American publishers wanted the hero to head North,<br />
because otherwise it was “too negative.” Ballard points<br />
out: “But it’s a happy ending. South is where he wants to<br />
go. Further. Deeper. South!”<br />
Ballard’s surrealism has a great deal more affinity with<br />
pictorial, rather than literary, surrealism. Paul Delvaux’s<br />
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The Echo features in The Day Of Forever, for example,<br />
and Salvador Dalí is something of a hero to Ballard, featuring<br />
prominently in his books as well as on them. (Dalí’s<br />
Nuclear Cross adorns my copy of Ballard’s The Terminal<br />
Beach, his best collection of short stories.) Max Ernst’s<br />
silent forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and<br />
gnarled post-apocalyptic detritus are redolent of much of<br />
Ballard’s early disaster fiction (The Drowned World, The<br />
Drought, The Crystal World). Strikingly, there is also the<br />
similarity with Yve Tanguy’s strange beaches. The point<br />
is that along with these surrealists Ballard interested in<br />
psychological landscapes, i.e. mindscapes. They are all<br />
concerned with the externalisation of the mind’s ‘iconography’.<br />
Even with Empire Of The Sun, or, more recently,<br />
Cocaine Nights, his most realistic or naturalistic novels<br />
are full of these signature images and recurrent themes.<br />
Ballard’s work is also notable for its internal consistency;<br />
the deep themes are recurrent but the details, settings,<br />
plots ideas, – the surfaces as it were – are varied.<br />
I find it curious that so much modern fiction has aped,<br />
say, the style of Martin Amis, but not that of Ballard,<br />
who, along with Amis, is the great stylist of postwar<br />
English fiction. It would be almost too easy to make<br />
a Ballard pastiche with its lexicon of drained pools,<br />
disused aerodromes, terminal beaches and aeropsychic<br />
time. I suspect the reason is because it works only within<br />
an imaginative framework, rather than a parochially realistic<br />
one merely concerned with relationships. Truly<br />
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can we use the adjective Ballardian.<br />
Ballard is none too interested in authorial intrusion<br />
either – as he says, “The writer’s task is to invent the<br />
reality” (or as Nietzsche put it: “No artist tolerates reality”<br />
) and not the fiction which is all around us – mass<br />
merchandising, advertising, politics as advertisement.<br />
David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of Crash,<br />
bears this out from his reading of the novel: “…it<br />
provided you with fantasies you didn’t know you had<br />
before. Once they were there, they were real. They<br />
made sense.” Only Ballard can come up with a sentence<br />
such as “What links the first flight of the Wright<br />
Brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and<br />
sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.”<br />
The key to understanding Ballard’s work is in the<br />
fusion or overlapping of internal and external worlds.<br />
In 1962 he wrote an article for New Worlds magazine<br />
entitled ‘Which Way To Inner Space?’ (collected in A<br />
User’s Guide To The Millennium) in which, essentially,<br />
he sets out his own manifesto. He despairs of the standard<br />
SF ‘rocket and planet’ story and devices such as time<br />
travel and telepathy which actually prevent the writer<br />
from using his imagination at all. He criticises SF writers<br />
for treating time like “a glorified scenic railway”and<br />
would like to see it treated as one of the “perspectives of<br />
the personality”. Ballard wants SF to become abstract,<br />
and specifically, he’d like to see more psycholiterary<br />
ideas of science. All in all then, a stylistic and thematic<br />
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overhaul of SF. Most tellingly of all, he writes that “I<br />
believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of<br />
existing literature … (to) be forced to begin again …<br />
all writers would find themselves inevitably producing<br />
something very close to SF”. Further, that “no other<br />
form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images<br />
to deal with the present, let alone the future.”<br />
Take the short story ‘Manhole 69’ for example, where<br />
an experiment to eliminate sleep goes horribly wrong<br />
and ends with the subjects suffering from catatonic<br />
seizures. The central hypothesis of this short story is<br />
that the mind cannot endure continual consciousness,<br />
particularly self-consciousness, and reacts by shutting<br />
down. They could “no longer contain the idea of their<br />
own identity”. As in so much of Ballard’s work, we see<br />
this inexorable battle between the unconscious and the<br />
conscious, with the former characterised as the more<br />
primeval and ‘real’ part of ourselves.<br />
Where Crash literalised the term “auto-erotic”, Cocaine<br />
Nights does the same for “guilt complex” (note<br />
that these are both psychoanalytic terms). Cocaine<br />
Nights, Ballard’s most recent novel, is something of a<br />
departure; the first half of the book reads like a fairly<br />
straightforward detective piece, with none of Ballard’s<br />
trademark tampering with space-time or individual<br />
psyches. Cocaine Nights’ plot centres on the Spanish<br />
resort of Estrella de Mar, where a housefire kills five<br />
people, and the subsequent involvement of Charles<br />
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Prentice, an outsider whose brother Frank has been<br />
arrested for murder. Like Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness<br />
and indeed Crash, the book is under the spell of an<br />
alluring and quite possibly insane visionary figure. In<br />
its description if a society hellbent on leisure, Cocaine<br />
Nights follows the line of the argument set out in Carol<br />
Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime compares<br />
the cuckoo clock art that came from the gentile Swiss<br />
culture with the decadent and depraved reign of the<br />
Borgias that produced da Vinci.<br />
Perhaps the best place to begin with Ballard is his<br />
essays – the recent collection A User’s Guide To The<br />
Millennium amounts to a varied and imaginative reading<br />
of 20th-century iconography: Mein Kampf, Coca-<br />
Cola, Dalí, Burroughs, Elvis, TV, nuclear weapons.<br />
A collection of Ballard’s journalism from the last 25<br />
years, including book reviews, it points to the sheer<br />
breadth of his interests and showcases many of the<br />
ideas which drive his fiction. Ballard admits to being<br />
an assimilator of the “invisible literature” of technical<br />
manuals, company reports, journals, etc. Indeed, one<br />
of his recommended books of the last five years is the<br />
transcripts of black box flight recordings. For Ballard,<br />
it’s a telling choice: over the last 40 years, his writing<br />
has attempted to do the same – to record the moments<br />
at which our lives are most at risk both from the world<br />
outside and from within ourselves. May his own literature<br />
become a little less invisible in the future. �<br />
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Interview [published September 1996]<br />
Iain M. Banks: Getting Used To Being God<br />
Chris Mitchell meets the relentlessly imaginative Iain M. Banks<br />
Twelve years and 14 books since the publication of<br />
his debut novel The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks has<br />
become one of Britain’s most prominent and prolific<br />
writers. Whether writing mainstream novels as plain<br />
“Iain Banks” or science fiction under his ubiquitous<br />
“Iain M. Banks” nom-de-plume, Banks has mastered<br />
the tricky art of attracting both bestseller status and<br />
critical acclaim. Now 42, Banks’ most recent books,<br />
the sci-fi epic Excession and the religious cult thriller<br />
Whit, indicate that his ceaselessly inventive imagination<br />
is in no danger of slowing down. Banks is first<br />
and foremost a brilliant storyteller. He takes evident<br />
joy in being able to push his plotlines as far as they<br />
can go, sending the reader at breakneck speed through<br />
unexpected plot twists, cliffhanger endings and, in his<br />
sci-fi, mindbending technological possibilities. As he<br />
says, “You’re very spoilt as a novelist. You get used to<br />
being God, basically. No-one tells you what to do.”<br />
Yet amongst the sex, death, drink and illegal substances<br />
that peppers Banks’ writing, there lurks a distinct<br />
moral probity. Whit tells the story of the fictional<br />
Luddite Luskentyrian religious cult, as seen through<br />
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the eyes of the cult’s 18-year-old “Elect Of God” Isis<br />
Whit. Sent to London in pursuit of her errant cousin<br />
Morag, Isis slowly comes to realise that all is not what<br />
it seems either within the cult’s enclave or amongst the<br />
Unsaved of the outside world. Banks describes Whit as<br />
“a book about religion and culture written by a dedicated<br />
evangelical atheist – I thought I was very kind to<br />
them … Essentially, Isis makes the recognition that the<br />
value of the Luskentyrian cult is in their community<br />
values rather than their religious ones. She recognises<br />
that efficiency isn’t everything, that people not profit<br />
are what matters.”<br />
So, are you on a mission? “People usually just ask<br />
me ‘What are you on?’ You can’t be too prescriptive<br />
about what a writer does, but it’s important to me to<br />
get these ideas into the books, just for my own peace<br />
of mind, so that I feel I’m not just doing this to make<br />
money, I’m not just writing pageturners for people to<br />
skim through, put aside and forget. Like anybody else,<br />
I want to make the world a little more like the world<br />
I’d like to live in, sad though that is. So I put forward<br />
these ideas however subtly or cack-handedly to the<br />
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extent that I can get away with it. The good thing about<br />
writing is that you can do this in a non-invasive, nonpenetrative<br />
way, you’re not telling people this is what<br />
they should do, you’re just presenting ideas.”<br />
Whit also differs from Banks’ previous novels<br />
because it’s written through the eyes of its female<br />
protagonist. It’s a common complaint about many<br />
male novelists (Martin Amis springs to mind) that<br />
their female characters always remain lifeless stereotypes.<br />
Banks however ignores gender preconceptions<br />
as some sort of prohibition to his imagination:<br />
“I just think of the person in that situation, I don’t try<br />
and think as a female character per se … In a sense<br />
it’s easy to be blind to the sexism that’s still around<br />
and somehow manage to ignore the other elements of<br />
society that still are unequitable in terms of gender<br />
or whatever,” Banks pauses and then laughs, “but it’s<br />
only stupid or ignorant people who do that.”<br />
“If you’re a writer you’re supposed to have some ability<br />
to spot what’s going on and to empathise – it should<br />
be relatively easy to write a female character because<br />
you spend your time in the same society – I think I’d<br />
find it hard to write from the point of view from someone<br />
who was particularly gay – there’s a small element<br />
of it in Complicity, but it’s very marginal, a childhood<br />
dalliance sort of thing – and I think that’s because the<br />
gay community is quite separate in many ways. To the<br />
same extent writing about a black person or someone<br />
BUY Iain Banks books online from and<br />
in the Indian community would be difficult – so writing<br />
about an 18-year-old female virgin is quite easy!”<br />
Whit was a conscious attempt by Banks to write<br />
something quieter and more reflective after the polemical<br />
rage of his previous mainstream novel, Complicity.<br />
Even though Banks has had a reputation for the macabre<br />
ever since the gothic horror of The Wasp Factory,<br />
Complicity’s graphic descriptions of corrupt politicians<br />
being killed off in particularly inventive and horrible<br />
ways reached new stomach-churning extremes.<br />
Banks has no qualms about the violence in his writing:<br />
“In principle, anything’s OK, as long as I’ve got<br />
an excuse to put it in – which is a more honest way of<br />
saying, ‘Is it artistically justified?’ You shouldn’t selfcensor<br />
yourself just because you have a gut reaction<br />
that an idea is too horrible. If there’s a reason for it, it<br />
has to be done. There’s a moral point to that ghastliness,<br />
pain and anguish. Which is why I would absolutely<br />
defend Complicity’s extreme violence, because it was<br />
supposed to be a metaphor for what the Tories have<br />
done to this country.”<br />
Banks rejects the idea that his science fiction writing<br />
is a way for him to cut loose in contrast to the<br />
tight stricture of his contemporary novels: “The scifi<br />
isn’t really a way of letting off steam. In a sense,<br />
Complicity was letting off steam, a way of getting out<br />
all the anger and bitterness I felt about the 80s and the<br />
Thatcher years. It kind of varies, there’s no set pat-<br />
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tern – it’s not like the sci-fi is always playful and the<br />
fiction is always disciplined -it’s just that I have more<br />
fun in sci-fi more or less regardless because I enjoy<br />
playing by my own rules.”<br />
This is certainly apparent in Excession, Banks’ latest<br />
Culture novel which charts the arrival of a mysterious<br />
entity from another universe into that of the Culture’s.<br />
Banks revels in the possibilities of technology. “Oh<br />
yeah, I love the stuff, the more buttons it’s got the better,<br />
when we get voice control it’s going to be so boring<br />
because there won’t be any buttons. There’s another<br />
moral point here as well. You can’t escape the fact that<br />
humanity is a technological species, homo technophile<br />
or whatever the Latin is. Technology is neither good or<br />
bad, it’s up to the user. We can’t escape what we are,<br />
which is a technological species. There’s no way back.”<br />
In your recent interview with the English edition of<br />
Wired (June 1996) you intimated that the only reason<br />
the Culture works is that machines become so intelligent<br />
they save us from ourselves … do you think that’s<br />
the case? “Not entirely, no. I think the first point to<br />
make about the Culture is,” Banks pauses again, sounding<br />
like he’s about to deliver a profound insight, “I’m<br />
just making it up as I go along. It doesn’t exist and I<br />
don’t delude myself that it does. It’s just my take on it.<br />
I’m not convinced that humanity is capable of becoming<br />
the Culture because I think people in the Culture<br />
are just too nice – altering their genetic inheritance to<br />
BUY Iain Banks books online from and<br />
make themselves relatively sane and rational and not<br />
the genocidal, murdering bastards that we seem to be<br />
half the time.”<br />
“But I don’t think you have to have a society like<br />
the Culture in order for people to live. The Culture is<br />
a self-consciously stable and long-lived society that<br />
wants to go on living for thousands of years. Lots of<br />
other civilisations within the same universe hit the Culture’s<br />
technological level and even the actuality of the<br />
Culture’s utopia, but it doesn’t last very long – that’s<br />
the difference.”<br />
“The point is, humanity can find its own salvation. It<br />
doesn’t necessarily have to rely on machines. It’ll be a<br />
bit sad if we did, if it’s our only real form of progress.<br />
Nevertheless, unless there’s some form of catastrophe,<br />
we are going to use machines whether we like it or<br />
not. This sort of stuff has been going on for decades<br />
and mainstream society is beginning to catch up to the<br />
implications of artificial intelligence.”<br />
Despite Banks almost evangelical zeal concerning<br />
technology, he’s avoided William Gibson and Bruce<br />
Stirling’s embracing of the net. “I don’t have access<br />
to the internet or email either. I’ve got two answering<br />
machines which I never switch on. Communications<br />
wise, I’ve got a fax and a letterbox and that’s about it.”<br />
Banks still considers himself primarily a science fiction<br />
author, due to his now long gone pre-publication<br />
rites of passage: “I wrote five novels before The Wasp<br />
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Factory, and the last three were science fiction, which<br />
have all now been published in a much altered form.<br />
The one just before The Wasp Factory, Walking On<br />
Glass, almost got published before The Wasp Factory<br />
in 1979. The Wasp Factory was written in 1981 and<br />
published in 1984, by which time I’d already written<br />
Consider Phlebas. So I thought of myself very much<br />
as a science fiction writer as the three books I wrote<br />
before The Wasp Factory were all sci-fi. The other two<br />
never rose to the light of day because they weren’t<br />
very good, frankly.”<br />
“I go to a lot of SF conventions and the authors I<br />
spend time with regularly are SF writers. I’m Scottish<br />
and a writer so I’m a Scottish writer, but I don’t mix<br />
with Scottish writers very much.” So he hasn’t been<br />
keeping a fatherly eye on Irvine Welsh’s meteoric<br />
success then? “I read and was incredibly impressed<br />
by Trainspotting and The Acid House. I’m as interested<br />
as anybody else in new writers but I don’t keep<br />
either a jealous eye or a particularly helpful eye, for<br />
that matter, on them. I’m not sending round people<br />
to visit them in the early hours of the morning (slips<br />
into impeccable Don Corleone voice), ‘Mr Banks.<br />
He don’t feel you respect him. We’re gonna break off<br />
your fingers this time.’”<br />
One organisation that might be receiving a midnight<br />
visit from Mr Banks is the film company who own<br />
the rights to The Wasp Factory, which is currently<br />
BUY Iain Banks books online from and<br />
embroiled in litigation and which he’s unable to discuss<br />
outside of the courtroom. More happily, the BBC<br />
have just finished shooting a television adaptation of<br />
Banks’ novel The Crow Road, although quite how they<br />
intend to portray the exploding grandmother remains<br />
to be seen. “It’s four one-hour episodes starting in<br />
November, although BBC programming controllers<br />
being a law unto themselves will probably change<br />
that. Gavin Miller was the director, and there’s quite<br />
a few recognisable Scottish actors involved in it: Bill<br />
Patterson and Joseph McFadden, who was in the film<br />
Small Faces McFadden is playing the central character<br />
Prentice McHoan. Allegedly the BBC are pretty happy<br />
with it, but that’s all I know. I didn’t have any involvement<br />
with it and I didn’t want any involvement with it.<br />
I think it’s very rare that writers can interfere in that sort<br />
of thing and not just be a pain in the arse.”<br />
Banks’ diffidence concerning moving into new areas<br />
extends to the PC games industry – “Once you start<br />
co-operating with someone else you have to make<br />
compromises and take other people’s ideas on board.<br />
I’m not a team player: that’s one of my limitations”<br />
– and even writing in other genres: “There’s been flippant<br />
remarks about doing pornography as Iain S. Banks<br />
and Westerns as Iain Z. Banks … It’s not impossible<br />
that I might wake up one morning and decide to do a<br />
historical novel, but it would mean doing research – the<br />
R word – so I can’t see it myself … I think it’s very un-<br />
057<br />
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likely, I think I’ve found my two niches. And anyway,<br />
I’ve just signed another 4 book deal which specifically<br />
states two mainstream and two science fiction novels,<br />
so I don’t have to think about it – it’s going be ‘What<br />
year is it? Oh it must be science fiction time…’”<br />
As regards what those books will concern, Banks<br />
remains quiet. Fin-de-siècle hysteria of the close of<br />
the millennium, perhaps? “I’ve done it twice already<br />
– Canal Dreams is set around the turn of the century,<br />
BUY Iain Banks books online from and<br />
when the canals are handed back from the US to the<br />
Panamanians by the year 2000. I tried to achieve the<br />
same sort of feel at the end of the deca-millennium in<br />
Against A Dark Background. It’s science fiction so you<br />
can make it bigger and better with the year 10,000 approaching<br />
rather than the year 2000. So while everyone<br />
else’s attention is diverted by the millennium, I’ll do<br />
something else.”<br />
Iain (M.) Banks – he’s out there – somewhere. �<br />
058<br />
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New Fiction [published July 1996]<br />
Adam Baron: The Man Whose Penis Made Him Locally Famous<br />
Adam Baron’s infamous, Penthouse-published tale of sex, feminism and chocolate-flavoured genitals<br />
My penis made me locally famous. I didn’t find out<br />
about it until I got to university. Before then my experience<br />
of women was nonexistent. I’d been at a boys’<br />
school and anyway I was pretty spotty. I couldn’t<br />
believe when, all of a sudden, at the Fresher’s Ball, I<br />
was snogging. I was even more amazed when we were<br />
in her room. We were both wasted. I didn’t have a clue<br />
how to behave, I was terrified, but she knew what to do<br />
and in no time we were naked, in bed. She was kissing<br />
my mouth. My neck. My chest, my stomach, my…!<br />
She stopped.<br />
My God! she said, incredulous. Your cock tastes just<br />
like CHOCOLATE!<br />
Melanie (her name) wasn’t a shy girl. She must have<br />
told her friend Suzy. I realised this the next day when<br />
a very attractive girl, with hip clothes and trainers, approached<br />
me in the union bar and just started chatting.<br />
This had NEVER happened to me before. She asked<br />
me if I wanted to hear a new CD she’d bought and then<br />
we were in her room. Halfway through the second track<br />
we were naked. She’d hardly even kissed me before<br />
her face disappeared under the duvet.<br />
BUY Adam Baron books online from and<br />
It does! she exclaimed suddenly. It bloody well does!!<br />
Two weeks into university I was still a virgin. I had,<br />
however, received 23 blowjobs from 12 different girls<br />
and heard words such as “incredible”, “amazing”,<br />
“Bournville”, “Swiss” and “Belgian” exclaimed by<br />
mops of hair beneath my bedclothes. I had also been<br />
requested to immerse myself in a glass of milk and<br />
move vigorously to see if any of the flavour rubbed off.<br />
It didn’t.<br />
I went to the doctor. She didn’t believe me. Nor did<br />
she try it out, which I thought shockingly unscientific.<br />
But she did see the state I was in and give me a salve.<br />
Okay, so I’ll admit it. For the first year it was great.<br />
I could have loads of women, any time I wanted. I got<br />
cunning and made them sleep with me first. I got fussy.<br />
All the guys on campus were jealous. People who<br />
didn’t know me looked wide eyed to see one or more<br />
stunning girls on the arm of a spotty, pale youth, with<br />
lank dark hair and glasses. What’s he got?, they seemed<br />
to ask themselves.<br />
But when the second year came I got really tired of it.<br />
There was a whole new year of girls who wanted to try<br />
059<br />
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me out. I felt like an object. A specimen. And there was<br />
something missing from my life, a yearning. I tried to<br />
have conversations with girls, in the coffee bar say, but<br />
all the time their eyes would be flicking to my crotch.<br />
Their tongues would run over their lips, their eyes would<br />
glaze over. I would make a hasty excuse and leave. It<br />
was about this time I began to get really upset about it.<br />
Everyone had started calling me Hob Nob.<br />
I say everyone, it’s not quite true. Some people called<br />
me Willy Wonka.<br />
Hey, it is NOT funny! I was a person! I was more<br />
than a sexual organ that just happened to be flavoured<br />
like confectionery. Everyone stared at me. All the girls<br />
laughed when they saw me. I overheard them talking<br />
about me. About it! I think I had a bit of a breakdown, I<br />
couldn’t take it. All through my third year I stayed in. I<br />
saw no one. The only person I even said Hi to was Sally<br />
Hughes, a pretty girl with breasts so huge she seemed to<br />
look faintly embarrassed all the time. I had overheard<br />
a guy bragging to his friend one day, in the sports hall,<br />
about what he’d done to them the night before.<br />
Did you shag her? the friend asked.<br />
No, the guy said, but I didn’t care. They were the<br />
best breasts I ever came across. Sally Hughes used to<br />
smile at me softly whenever we passed each other in<br />
the square.<br />
I had given up on my little university world. Everyone<br />
knew everything. Because I didn’t have anything to<br />
BUY Adam Baron books online from and<br />
do I studied all the time. I got a First and went to New<br />
York, Columbia, for a Masters. I took a deep breath of<br />
fresh air. Fantastic! It was great! Nobody knew me! If I<br />
hadn’t been for the lousy beer it would have been perfect.<br />
I met Laurie a few months later and we started to<br />
go out. I’d seen her around in the cafeteria on campus,<br />
but it was only when I heard her give a paper on radical<br />
feminism that I really noticed her. She wrote about the<br />
politics of oral sex. She stood at the lectern in black<br />
jeans, white tee shirt, her hair tied back severely, her<br />
little fists clenching to emphasise a point.<br />
Oral sex, she concluded, is degrading. The worshipping<br />
of the phallus only serves to enforce the enslavement<br />
of women. No woman should ever do it, and I<br />
certainly won’t do it ever again. Ever. Thankyou.<br />
She stepped down from the platform to rapturous<br />
applause from a room mainly filled by women. I was<br />
enraptured, entranced. I had to get to know her.<br />
Well, eventually we got it together. Having no chocolate<br />
penis to rely on, I had to be myself and for a long<br />
time she wasn’t interested. But then it all happened.<br />
Nights discussing politics, poetry, walks in the park,<br />
old Cocteau movies. Love, smooth and slow, calm as<br />
an angel. About a year after we met, she was lying in<br />
my bed, naked, her black hair blooming like an impossible<br />
rose against my sheets, her flawless skin almost<br />
as white as they were. I was so happy. I started to kiss<br />
her, to cover her with kisses. I wanted to adore her, to<br />
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make her feel better than anything; sighs escaped her<br />
like wind from a wood across a wheat field…<br />
No! she said.<br />
She took me by the scruff of the neck. Not there!<br />
I stopped.<br />
Why not? I asked.<br />
I knew it, she said firmly. I won’t do it to you. I<br />
won’t. Not…<br />
I know, I assured her. I want to do it to you. I don’t<br />
want you to do it to me ever.<br />
You will , she said, you will! I knew this would<br />
happen…<br />
BUY Adam Baron books online from and<br />
I didn’t listen to her. I knew. There was no way I’d let<br />
her even if she wanted to. Never. I covered the insides<br />
of her thighs with my face and rested my hands on the<br />
tops of her legs. I pushed them apart slightly. She resisted<br />
a little but then she opened her legs wider and I…<br />
I stopped. I lifted my head up.<br />
Guinness, I said, Guinness!!<br />
Author’s Note:<br />
The author would like to point out that any similarity<br />
between the character created in this story, and himself,<br />
is purely factual. His email address is listed. �<br />
061<br />
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Review [published September 2005]<br />
John Battelle: The Search<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted<br />
history of Google, although that company looms large<br />
throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes<br />
stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars<br />
between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of<br />
online contextual advertising which has irrevocably<br />
changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle recognises<br />
that the real story about the search engines is<br />
actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms<br />
race between the big players: what’s important is what<br />
the very act of searching for information on the internet<br />
means for business and consumer alike. The simple<br />
act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried<br />
out billions of times a day and in totality provides an<br />
unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial<br />
ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access<br />
to information are also being transformed by the nature<br />
of search. Put it this way – once the net becomes a daily<br />
part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it.<br />
It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when discussing<br />
search engines, given the frankly insane stats<br />
generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3<br />
BUY John Battelle books online from and<br />
billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in<br />
Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of<br />
$300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his<br />
introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightforward<br />
business biography of Google for the good reason<br />
that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot<br />
of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different<br />
search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted<br />
hundreds of interviews with every key player in the<br />
industry to piece together an excellent overview of the<br />
industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily<br />
interested in the implications of what the massive leaps<br />
in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for<br />
the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business<br />
book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as<br />
such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but<br />
almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives:<br />
how search engines organise and present information in<br />
response to our queries. As more and more of our lives<br />
moves to being managed through the net, the companies<br />
who can correctly analyse what we are looking for<br />
and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the<br />
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ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the<br />
more users they have, the more they can analyse what’s<br />
been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked<br />
for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Intentions,<br />
and mastering the analysis of all those billions of<br />
queries is where the money lies.<br />
The most obvious example of the commercial gold<br />
in search queries is contextual advertising, those text<br />
ads that turn up next to your search results that are<br />
related to your query. Still in its infancy, contextual<br />
advertising has revolutionised online advertising and<br />
had a huge knock-on effect on old media. The targeted<br />
nature of contextual ads – they only get served<br />
to someone who’s interested in that subject; the ad<br />
buyer only pays when someone clicks the link – has<br />
meant thousands of businesses that couldn’t afford to<br />
advertise can now do so and, crucially, get results of<br />
real money-in-the-bank business driven by those ads.<br />
Shoestring businesses have enjoyed massive sales<br />
boosts as a result of this approach, without having to<br />
spend vast sums on marketing. The joy here is that<br />
everyone wins – the customer finds what they want, the<br />
business gets business, and the search engine makes<br />
money for connecting the two together. Advertising<br />
becomes – shock, horror – useful and even valued,<br />
rather than an irritant. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway,<br />
and Battelle provides case studies showing both<br />
the up and potentially disastrous downside of relying<br />
BUY John Battelle books online from and<br />
on search engines to drive business your way.<br />
Contextual ads have not only helped advertisers but<br />
also website owners too. The net’s free culture has<br />
always meant that paying for content has been a thorny<br />
issue – surfers loathe registering for access to newspaper<br />
archives online, much less paying for it. Google’s<br />
Adsense program provided a way for sites to have<br />
relevant ads to their content appear on the page and<br />
in doing so, allowed site owners to earn some handy<br />
pocket change too. (Of course, I’m biased here: in the<br />
two years I’ve been running Google Adsense on <strong>Spike</strong>,<br />
its monthly revenue has steadily increased as Google<br />
tweak the system to display more relevant ads).<br />
As Battelle has pointed out on his Searchblog, now<br />
is a great time to be a publisher on the net, because<br />
there are more and more easy ways of earning cash<br />
from content. Blog networks like Weblogs, Inc which<br />
earn over $2,000 a day from Adsense, or probloggers<br />
like Darren Rowse who recently earned $15,000 in one<br />
month from Adsense, show that there’s real money to<br />
be made from providing top quality, regular content.<br />
Indeed, Battelle has recently launched Federated Media<br />
Publishing, which will be teaming up with selected<br />
sites to manage matching ads to their content. Battelle,<br />
a former editor of Wired and founder of the Industry<br />
Standard, is already ‘brand manager’ for leading blog<br />
BoingBoing, and has considerably increased that site’s<br />
revenues since coming aboard.<br />
063<br />
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As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a<br />
co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block<br />
in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s<br />
vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in<br />
the industry. There’s little of the usual business pomposity<br />
about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in<br />
a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his<br />
material but confident enough to not deluge the reader<br />
with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The<br />
Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free.<br />
The same can’t be said for the future of search engines.<br />
With the realisation that the potential of search has only<br />
just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership<br />
of personal information is the major concern, with some<br />
beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info<br />
provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online<br />
movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”<br />
moral code has also begun, with the company’s current<br />
leadership of the search field making it walk point for<br />
the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is<br />
also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam<br />
blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor<br />
quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat<br />
out to find ways to counter these emergent problems,<br />
and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set<br />
BUY John Battelle books online from and<br />
of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and mutability,<br />
it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be<br />
no clouds on the horizon.<br />
For now, though, search remains a huge success<br />
story – Google may well be about to have its own<br />
stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable<br />
and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by<br />
Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the<br />
contextual ad field, each looking to get the competitive<br />
edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use<br />
their particular system. Most importantly, all three are<br />
continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice<br />
the Database of Intentions to give you what you want<br />
quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still<br />
remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing<br />
business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the<br />
user experience first and working backwards. In the<br />
last five years, it has continually gone its own way and<br />
managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and<br />
MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never<br />
even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John<br />
Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration<br />
that within five years everything in the search world<br />
can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it<br />
probably will do again. �<br />
064<br />
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Review [published January 2000]<br />
John Baxter: George Lucas: A Biography<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Throughout his film-making career, George Lucas has<br />
continually pushed back the boundaries of technology<br />
in order to realise his ideas on the silver screen. John<br />
Baxter’s biography of the man is not only an account<br />
of Lucas’ personal history but also the transformative<br />
effect Lucas’ fascination with technology has had on<br />
the entire movie industry since the advent of Star Wars.<br />
While Baxter’s biography (published under the<br />
title Mythmaker in the States) is not authorised and<br />
he lacked any direct contact with the publicity-shy<br />
Lucas, his exhaustive research provides a balanced<br />
overview of Lucas’ career. Although Baxter doesn’t<br />
shy away from discussing the detrimental effect of<br />
Lucas’ driving ambition on both his marriage and<br />
many of his friendships, he prefers to concentrate<br />
on Lucas’ movie innovation and the building of the<br />
LucasFilm empire.<br />
What becomes most apparent in Baxter’s portrayal<br />
of Lucas is his fascination with technology’s ability<br />
to create filmic illusion on a grand scale, rather than<br />
a fascination with movies themselves. From his first<br />
experimental picture THX1138 through to Star Wars,<br />
BUY John Baxter books online from and<br />
Indiana Jones and The Phantom Menace, Lucas continually<br />
sought ever-grander ways to put the audience<br />
on the edge of their seats, rather than conveying a message<br />
or making social comment.<br />
In doing so, he inaugurated the age of the blockbuster,<br />
where spectacle took precedence over everything else.<br />
Lucas summed it up himself by saying “I’m a filmmaker,<br />
not a director. I like the physical part of making<br />
movies. I might be a toymaker if I wasn’t a film maker.”<br />
The strain on Lucas’ health making Star Wars meant<br />
that he avoided sitting in the director’s chair for another<br />
20 years until The Phantom Menace. Much of that<br />
strain was caused by the creation of Industrial Light<br />
And Magic to produce Star Wars’ special effects, most<br />
of which had to be created completely from scratch.<br />
Along the way, ILM created Photoshop, which is<br />
now the industry-standard computer graphics application,<br />
and later Pixar, who became a separate company<br />
and pioneered the digital animation of Toy Story and A<br />
Bug’s Life.<br />
It’s apparent that Lucas returned to directing with<br />
The Phantom Menace precisely because the technology<br />
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had finally caught up with his vision. Digital editing allowed<br />
him absolute control over the movie’s execution,<br />
rather than the fraught creation of Star Wars.<br />
Ultimately Baxter’s biography portrays Lucas as a<br />
maverick who refused to kowtow either to Hollywood<br />
or to accepted notions of what makes a movie picture.<br />
BUY John Baxter books online from and<br />
It’s an immensely readable account that will appeal to<br />
Star Wars aficionados and film fans alike. It also acts as<br />
a fascinating overview of the way the movie industry<br />
has changed over the last 25 years and how much Lucas’<br />
independence and interest in exploiting technology<br />
helped shape that change. �<br />
066<br />
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Feature [published December 1996]<br />
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography<br />
Despite two recent authoritative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
argues that Beckett remains an enigma<br />
It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our<br />
culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease<br />
the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment<br />
to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven<br />
years after his death, remains as distant as ever. He<br />
wouldn’t have had it any other way. His fame is due<br />
to a play which he said was “misunderstood”. For a<br />
great Modern writer to become well known it seems<br />
he or she requires a degree of similarity to popular<br />
fiction to tempt people into reading them. Kafka has<br />
horror, Proust nostalgia, Lawrence pornography, Woolf<br />
niceness. Beckett seems to lack this. Only Waiting For<br />
Godot approaches such familiarity: Morecambe &<br />
Wise in a mortuary perhaps. The rest of the work lurks<br />
behind it like a black hole ready to swallow up any<br />
cheerful soul wanting something less than an enigma.<br />
This suggests we need a biography to help us through<br />
the artifice. And these two new biographies certainly<br />
do something like that.<br />
After reading both Anthony Cronin’s The Last Modernist<br />
and James Knowlson’s Damned To Fame, one<br />
has a more rounded impression of the man, if not the<br />
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and<br />
writer. Reading the novels and plays one imagines a<br />
secular monk, yet the dominant impression from both<br />
of these biographies is of a drunken, womanizing,<br />
pretentious and self-pitying young man who was good<br />
at sport and languages. I say “young man” because the<br />
older, wiser Beckett is left relatively untouched. We<br />
never get very close to him. This is a pity if not also<br />
inevitable. The pre-war work is discussed at length as it<br />
tends to follow the details in the turmoil of his growth:<br />
a manic-depressive mother, psychosomatic illnesses,<br />
premature death of a genial father, archetypal Oedipal<br />
love/sex dichotomy, unchannelled talent, etc.<br />
The later works, however, do not lend themselves so<br />
readily to such links. And these, despite the protestations<br />
of the nosy, will be the ones he will be remembered<br />
for. They are passed over almost in silence. This is not<br />
because Knowlson and Cronin are hacks interested<br />
only in gossip and obvious life-work correlations, or<br />
because the later work is lifelessly abstract, but because<br />
they are both aware of the crassness of such an enterprise.<br />
The later work is the poetry of confinement, of<br />
disintegration and ending (that is, what comes before<br />
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death, which never comes). How can the biographer<br />
write about that if the man himself was so active?<br />
Beckett wrote about these things not so much because<br />
he experienced them, although he did, eventually, but<br />
because he observed and felt them impending all the<br />
time. A biographer can only try to understand why he<br />
felt this. In revising an apocryphal story, Knowlson<br />
gives us a hint. Krapp’s story of a Joycean epiphany on<br />
a storm-tossed shore in Krapp’s Last Tape was thought<br />
to be Beckett’s own experience. It turns out that an<br />
equivalent epiphany did occur but in his mother’s<br />
bedroom as he watched her suffer from Parkinson’s<br />
Disease. Krapp’s epiphany is traditionally romantic;<br />
the exaltations of nature provoking a grand idea in the<br />
individual. Beckett’s real one was less effusive.<br />
He saw how nature has ‘a calm, secret hostility’<br />
inflicting intense pain and suffering on loved ones<br />
with pause only for what we call life. It is nothing to<br />
be celebrated. The wordy flights of Beckett’s youthful<br />
writings (that is, before he reached 30) side-step<br />
this awareness in favour of familiar channels of<br />
talent: show-off shock tactics and autobiographical<br />
plundering. So, it is no surprise that Dream Of Fair<br />
To Middling Women, the novel Knowlson and Cronin<br />
mine most heavily for information, is only available<br />
because of the author’s death. He did not want it published<br />
during his lifetime because it was too clever<br />
and derivative. Cleverness tends to be derivative. As<br />
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and<br />
one critic said, Beckett “had a lot to unlearn”.<br />
However, such bad art enables Knowlson and Cronin<br />
to present convincing portraits of Beckett in young<br />
adulthood. This is where he had most in common with<br />
his contemporaries; he was “a young man with nothing<br />
to say and an itch to make”, as he said of himself.<br />
Cronin is particularly dismissive of a lot of Beckett’s<br />
early itching. He often ends quotations with “Whatever<br />
that might mean.” This is refreshing after the uncritical,<br />
if not also hagiographical tone taken by Knowlson,<br />
Beckett’s long time friend.<br />
One thing Cronin didn’t have that Knowlson did<br />
was access to Beckett’s diaries from his wander around<br />
Nazi Germany in the 30s. These provide an important<br />
revision of Deirdre Bair’s suggestion in her pioneering<br />
1978 biography that Beckett was ignorant of, or chose<br />
to ignore the effect of Nazi rule. The diaries reveal his<br />
awareness and disgust at their attitudes. Indeed, the<br />
people he meets are distinguished by their sympathies.<br />
And the war itself seems to have been the watershed in<br />
Beckett’s life. If he had gone home to Ireland instead<br />
of staying to help his French friends, he may have<br />
continued along familiar lines – following the trends<br />
of the times and fading as fast. However, the stoicism<br />
and near-starvation of the war years seems to have had<br />
a lasting effect. His only concern from then on was to<br />
write, be published, and write some more. Popularity<br />
was not a confirmation of importance, but pure chance.<br />
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He seems to have realized that what was important was<br />
the night sky of nothingness behind the pyrotechnics of<br />
culture (a phrase of his friend E.M. Cioran).<br />
Beckett started to write in French to rid himself of as<br />
much English cultural baggage as possible. His style<br />
became radically spare. He refused the big picture. Indeed,<br />
the claustrophobia of later plays and prose is not<br />
far removed from the details of war, or at least impending<br />
war: terror, boredom, despair, confusion, gallows<br />
humour, and imprisonment. Being alone in a room with<br />
only thoughts and memories is not lifelessly abstract.<br />
It is the experience of millions of people. To label it<br />
solipsistic or elitist, as many people have, is narrowminded<br />
in the extreme. To write from the perspective<br />
of ‘outside’, which many much-touted writers still do<br />
(Pat Barker, Irving Welsh et al), is far more abstract and<br />
non-empathetic. Even if these claim to be the voice of<br />
the lost, silenced or the underclass, their conservative<br />
attitude to language annexes the ground where these<br />
voices might speak. Their sympathy is the cruelty<br />
of the sentimental that Wilde spoke of. They silence<br />
everybody in their powerful cries from the trenches of<br />
literary tradition.<br />
Beckett is the writer par excellence of what it is to be<br />
totally alone, separate even from the self you thought<br />
you were. Inevitably, this leads to a different kind of<br />
language; neither formal nor colloquial. For Beckett,<br />
language is not so much the meadow where the self<br />
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and<br />
can frolic in freedom as a No Man’s Land where it<br />
is never safe. Beckett was not one of herd playing at<br />
freedom-loving in the tenches, but wandered the No<br />
Man’s Land like Dante in Hell. It was not a deliberate<br />
exercise. He was often surprised at what he wrote. It<br />
is not purely intellectual. It was not ‘self-expression’,<br />
more ‘unself-expression’. If it was merely the surface<br />
self, fiction would be only disguised autobiography and<br />
these biographies would be even more superfluous than<br />
they already are. Both Knowlson and Cronin are aware<br />
of this and do not try to pin Beckett’s devastating later<br />
work to what was happening in his life or his world. At<br />
least, not directly. They are aware of the acultural provenance<br />
of his inspiration. The biographies are works<br />
borne of our literary culture’s desire for short cuts, yet<br />
carry that restriction with honour.<br />
Beckett was aware of a saying in post-war literary<br />
French circles that if an Englishman were to write a<br />
book on a camel he would call it The Camel, while<br />
a Frenchman would call it The Camel And Love. A<br />
German, on the other hand, would call it The Absolute<br />
Camel. All the books, of course, would probably be the<br />
same. Both authors reviewed here are Irish, and perhaps<br />
it is inevitable they would think of something odd<br />
for the titles of their books. And they have. Damned<br />
To Fame, despite being a phrase from one of Beckett’s<br />
letters, is a peculiarly limited title, and Cronin’s The<br />
Last Modernist is absurd. This tempts the assumption<br />
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that Modernism is an historical event rather than a virus<br />
at the heart of culture. But this is unimportant; titles<br />
of books like these are for publicity purposes only.<br />
Beyond that, the books themselves help us filter our<br />
interests. If you want rollocking sub-Joycean romps,<br />
that is, Beckett and Love, read the early work. And in<br />
terms of these biographies, if you want encyclopaedic<br />
detail, read Knowlson’s, while if you want a less reverential<br />
and more speculative read, Cronin’s is for you. If<br />
you want the Absolute Beckett, read the novels; you’ll<br />
never get any closer. �<br />
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and<br />
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Review [published June 2000]<br />
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
“I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face.<br />
No one else on all this earth had such features. This was<br />
the most amazing thing in the life of the world.”<br />
These sentences come from the final page of Saul<br />
Bellow’s previous novel The Actual, which, I seem to<br />
remember, he said would be his last. Perhaps, instead,<br />
it should be classed as a novella; it ends after only<br />
104 pages. His latest novel Ravelstein, at 233 pages,<br />
safely reaches novel-length. Perhaps this is the last. But<br />
maybe not, because it doesn’t feel like a novel. There is<br />
a famous reason for this, and the reason is fame.<br />
Abe Ravelstein, the eponymous character, is the late<br />
Allan Bloom, political philosopher at the University<br />
of Chicago and close friend of the novelist. In 1987,<br />
Bloom published a book called The Closing Of The<br />
American Mind, a singular polemic against what he<br />
saw as the betrayal of American values in the realm of<br />
Higher Education. The book became a surprise bestseller<br />
and made Bloom millions of dollars. Saul Bellow<br />
contributed a foreword to the book, and, it turns out,<br />
was the one who suggested he write it in the first place.<br />
Bloom died young in 1992, but before he died asked<br />
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and<br />
Bellow to write about him ‘warts and all’. This novel<br />
is the result.<br />
So why doesn’t he call Ravelstein by his famous<br />
name? After all, Martin Amis, Bellow’s wrong-headed<br />
protégé, hasn’t changed the names in his recent autobiography<br />
Experience. In his book, Bellow can’t be<br />
hoping to deny the link. And he isn’t: he has been quite<br />
open about who Abe really is. That’s not the reason.<br />
The reason goes to the heart of the novel, and ‘the<br />
novel’ in general.<br />
The short explanation is Amy’s face, which Harry,<br />
the narrator of The Actual, sees, as if for the first time<br />
as the coffin containing her husband is lowered into<br />
its plot. Harry realises that Amy has always been ‘the<br />
one’ (that is, The Actual), and asks her to marry him.<br />
The novel ends before she answers, restraining the<br />
sentimentality inherent in such a scenario. Before she<br />
can say anything, the plot is lowered, as it were, into<br />
its coffin. But read his sentence again: he sees Amy’s<br />
actual face only in standing back from himself. We, the<br />
readers, don’t actually see her face but we sense the<br />
unique, mysterious, revelatory moment. Her distance<br />
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is necessary for it to happen. A straight memoir is<br />
more likely to evade this solitary instant with anecdote,<br />
psychologising or uncomprehending sentiment. Here,<br />
the distance of fiction opens to the uncanny singularity<br />
of experience rather than stuffing it into the requirements<br />
of genre.<br />
In Ravelstein, loving friendship has taken the place<br />
of romance. The six-times married Bellow is confident<br />
enough in his sexuality (and at 85, a father again) to<br />
make it clear he loved Bloom. By fictionalising his<br />
friend we get more than the ‘schmaltz’ of a tribute. It’s<br />
a familiar Bellow theme. His best novel Herzog is also<br />
about an academic seen in unfamiliar light. Bellow’s<br />
son Adam has since written of how it mirrored his<br />
father’s life at the time, and how Adam himself appears<br />
as Herzog’s young daughter. He says he can’t read the<br />
novel without unease as it portrays Herzog’s wife, by<br />
extension Adam’s mother, in a very poor light. Yet the<br />
novel also shows how terrible it must have been to be<br />
married to Herzog. He is manic, paranoid, distracted<br />
and dishevelled. He scrawls mad, half-finished letters<br />
to ‘the famous dead’ instead of writing his supposedly<br />
great academic treatise. Herzog blames his wife’s affair<br />
with his best friend for his condition, but he protests too<br />
much; and he knows it.<br />
Abe Ravelstein is a Herzog with more self-confidence,<br />
but we still take what he says with a pinch of<br />
salt. His best-seller advocates the clarity of ancient<br />
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and<br />
Greek rationality and condemns the Dionysian, valueless<br />
chaos of popular culture. Yet while he blames<br />
blaring Rock music for the degeneration of America,<br />
he plays kitschy Italian operas at the highest possible<br />
volume, annoying his neighbours. And while he knows<br />
Plato like a man holed up in an ivory tower, he is also a<br />
world-class consumer; he spends like there’s no tomorrow.<br />
In fact, he wrote the outline of his book only to get<br />
the small advance in order to placate his debtees.<br />
In the end, he wrote the whole thing and was able to<br />
indulge his Liberace-like taste in clothes, furniture and<br />
hotels. The novel is rich in the textures of $4,000 jackets<br />
and silk dressing gowns. Ravelstein is like Liberace<br />
in another sense too: he is gay; and recklessly so. He<br />
dies of an AIDS-related illness. Yet he pours scorn on<br />
what he calls “faggot behaviour”. Love and its relations<br />
has been a Bellow theme from the start, and his interest<br />
coincides with his friend’s. Ravelstein constantly refers<br />
to the human striving to find his or her other half, as<br />
discussed in Plato’s Symposium. Yet while Ravelstein<br />
shares his life with a young man called Nikki, he also<br />
trawls the Parisian nights for rough trade.<br />
While the narrator of the book, his friend Chick,<br />
recognises a contradiction, he doesn’t set it up as emblematic;<br />
he leaves it as a foible that all great men have.<br />
Chick’s professed innocence maybe a ruse of fiction,<br />
enabling avoidance. There are strong clues that Chick<br />
sees through him. Ravelstein encourages Chick to de-<br />
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velop his monograph on the economist Maynard Keynes<br />
by studying the minutiae of his letters home from<br />
a post-First World War reparations conference. Such<br />
minutiae, he suggests, reveal the larger truth. Chick<br />
seems to be trying to do the same with Ravelstein: we<br />
see the way he holds his mobile phone between his<br />
bare knees, and as his expensive Japanese kimono falls<br />
away it reveals “legs paler than milk … the shinbone<br />
long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness.”<br />
Once Ravelstein is dead, the novel becomes more<br />
complex as Chick describes how he stalled for a few<br />
years before writing the book. Clearly, the facts weren’t<br />
enough. Before Ravelstein dies, Chick divorces his<br />
self-regarding physicist wife and, soon after, marries<br />
one of Ravelstein’s pupils, the meeker, much younger<br />
Rosamund. On a tropical holiday, Chick eats a poisoned<br />
fish and becomes ill. Rosamund gets him home despite<br />
his unwillingness. It saves his life. Only after this neardeath<br />
experience is Chick able to write the memoir of<br />
his dead friend. This happened in reality too. Bellow<br />
says he was “nine-tenths gone”. Perhaps being on the<br />
edge of oblivion gave him the necessary insight, just as<br />
it gave an insight into Rosamund’s love.<br />
While Ravelstein’s hypocrisy is suggested, the<br />
bigger issue – of America – is barely mentioned.<br />
This is odd because it possessed Ravelstein and<br />
fuelled his best-seller. Perhaps Bellow could not<br />
step back from himself in this case. Bloom saw the<br />
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and<br />
60s as the beginning of the Fall of America. What<br />
led him to think this? The invasion of Cuba and<br />
South Vietnam? The subsequent three million native<br />
deaths and long-term chemical damage? No, it is<br />
the academic opposition. He says their questioning<br />
of long-accepted values, and subsequent pandering<br />
to the tastes of the permissive society equates with<br />
what the philosopher Heidegger did by supporting<br />
the Nazis from his University chair. One might argue<br />
the opposite, and say that US academics were in fact<br />
the true descendants of America’s founding fathers<br />
rebelling against unjust Imperial might. It is not even<br />
hinted at here despite Ravelstein’s fascination.<br />
He has many ex-pupils in high places in the US Administration.<br />
They are more like disciples. Ravelstein,<br />
we are told, sought out the best pupils and taught them<br />
to ‘forget their parents’. Ravelstein wanted each to<br />
be a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate onto which he could<br />
transfer his learning. Once in power, these disciples<br />
would call him up and tell him the latest inside news<br />
– such as Bush’s final decision to end the Gulf War.<br />
Chick is impressed. Ravelstein laps it up. There seems<br />
to be no irony intended as Bloom talks to one of his<br />
high-powered disciples, puffs away on a Cuban cigar –<br />
made illegal to punish a defiant nation – and dismisses<br />
the ‘foolish anti-Americanism’ of French intellectuals.<br />
This knee-jerk conflation of opposites is meant to be<br />
an example of Ravelstein’s common sense. One has<br />
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to remember that as Bloom/Ravelstein published his<br />
book, thousands of men, women and children were<br />
being killed and maimed by US-funded terrorists as<br />
they undermined or overturned elected governments<br />
uncongenial to US business interests. And the extreme<br />
Right-wing charitable foundations who paid Bloom/<br />
Ravelstein extravagant salaries were among the<br />
most active supporters of these mercenaries and their<br />
Washington paymasters. There is no mention of such<br />
minutiae in the novel, except for talk of America’s<br />
“higher need” in the world. Such are the real echoes<br />
from Heidegger’s time.<br />
My impatience with this omission could be dismissed<br />
as unfairly motivated. But I think it reveals<br />
the failure of the book to stand back enough. Essentially,<br />
Ravelstein’s philosophy emerges out of a need<br />
to deny one’s parents – that is, to repress whatever<br />
stands behind the façade of desire, intellect, money<br />
and status. The man exhibits such lust for life because<br />
he was always on the edge of an abyss created by an<br />
inherent contradiction in his life and politics. Chick<br />
often wonders about Abe’s working class past but,<br />
like his sexuality, it is taboo and is dropped each time.<br />
He is perhaps too in thrall to the rumbling tank of denial<br />
to see the victims buried in the tracks. As a result,<br />
Abe remains a two-dimensional figure and the novel<br />
doesn’t have any tension until he is dead.<br />
What redeems the book, for me, is the brief re-<br />
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emergence of Bellow’s lyrical intellectualism. There is<br />
a remarkable passage in the novel in which Chick talks<br />
of finding the way to “communicate certain ‘incommunicables’<br />
– your private metaphysics”; something<br />
Ravelstein refused to do. Chick explains:<br />
“To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult<br />
challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated<br />
reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal<br />
oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval<br />
of light between the darkness in which you awaited first<br />
birth and the darkness of death that would receive you,<br />
you must make what you could of reality, which was in<br />
a state of highly advanced development. I had waited<br />
millennia to see this.”<br />
He believes it can be done by returning to one’s earliest<br />
memories, untainted by ideology or habit. He recalls<br />
when, soon after he learned to walk, he went down onto<br />
the street and saw “huge utility-pole timbers that lined<br />
the street. They were beaver-coloured, soft and rotted.”<br />
Maybe it is because this appears in relative isolation,<br />
like the “limp silk fresh lilac drowning water” on page 73<br />
of Humboldt’s Gift, that these poles develop a presence<br />
like Amy’s face. The mystery is grasped, not dispersed.<br />
Early in the novel Chick mentions reading of the “poor<br />
convulsive” Samuel Johnson touching each lamppost<br />
on a street, and is fascinated, perhaps because it reminds<br />
him of his own experience. Ravelstein perhaps wanted<br />
Chick to be his Boswell, but it is Chick, Saul Bellow,<br />
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who will be remembered, though not for this novel in<br />
particular. Generally, it has the tone of valediction-butnot-quite.<br />
This could be because Rosamund is the real<br />
inspiration of this book, with Ravelstein as the unlikely<br />
bonding agent. Though she appears, like Amy’s face<br />
in The Actual, at the end of the book, she is about the<br />
present and future; death is gratefully postponed. In the<br />
process, it resurrects Ravelstein.<br />
In fact, the question of how the apparently dead past<br />
binds to the present weighs on the novel throughout.<br />
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Ravelstein and Chick are both unpious Jews, but they<br />
know the facts of history. One of Chick’s friends is a<br />
Romanian implicated in the Fascist Iron Guard of World<br />
War II. Ravelstein is appalled and tells Chick that if he<br />
is to meet the Romanian again to think of the Jews they<br />
hung on meat hooks: “we must not turn our backs on<br />
the millions who died” he says. Chick finds it difficult;<br />
he doesn’t want to think about it. Anyway, he is amused<br />
by the Romanian. By the end, we are familiar with this<br />
characteristic. �<br />
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Feature [published February 1999]<br />
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth<br />
anniversary of the writer’s death<br />
“Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence<br />
of a revelation which does not in fact occur.” (Borges)<br />
Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, playwright<br />
and poet, died young. At this end of the century,<br />
58 is young. He had been tubercular since his teens, so<br />
it was no great surprise. Indeed, we are to be grateful<br />
for his tendency to illness. It was TB, he tells us in his<br />
remarkable autobiography, that took him to writing.<br />
In a sanatorium – lungs drowning in sputum, aged 19<br />
and expected to die – he began to write. He believed<br />
it might have cured him too. I remember seeing an<br />
obituary following his death on 12th February, 1989. At<br />
that time I had not read any of his works. Just another<br />
novelist I assumed, and did not read the obituary. In<br />
the summer of the following year I found a copy of the<br />
novel Concrete in the magnificent Quartet Encounters<br />
imprint. I shall always associate that book with a park<br />
in an otherwise squalid English city. It is a short enough<br />
to be read in one place. And I have read it in many more<br />
places since. Certainly it has death written through<br />
it, but it cures too, almost. The rest of this will try to<br />
explain why.<br />
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Like Kafka’s, Bernhard’s writing is easily caricatured.<br />
This is one of the main problems in the reception<br />
of the best literature in this country. I have seen an<br />
advert for Czech beer labelling Kafka “the monarch<br />
of mirthlessness”, which told me that the copywriter<br />
knows nothing of Kafka, and probably not of beer<br />
also. Anyone who has read his work can testify there<br />
is something oddly funny about it; A Country Doctor<br />
will have you in stitches. Yet Kafka remains a byword<br />
for depressive reading. The French philosopher Gilles<br />
Deleuze, however, called him “a man of joy”. The<br />
thing is, you have to be patient; he’s not Bill Bryson.<br />
Though Bernhard has written comedically, notably in<br />
the helpfully sub-titled Old Masters: a comedy, he too<br />
is presented as one of those miserable Germans who<br />
can’t accept that life is actually wonderful. This is so<br />
wrong: he was Austrian.<br />
Generally, we British assume you have be one thing<br />
or the other. You’re either funny and disposable or<br />
serious and difficult. I guess it’s partly to do with the<br />
satanic rule of marketing strategies protecting niche<br />
identity and such like, but certainly the culture cannot<br />
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accept the way literature acts in us, rather than just upon<br />
us. We assume it to be a pleasant distraction against a<br />
pre-defined reality.<br />
In a way, this is inevitable. What goes on in our<br />
heads daily, hourly, minutely, gets into writing only<br />
through distancing. Writing something down provides<br />
a displacement from the anxiety, the boredom<br />
or the confusion of the moment. We want our minds<br />
like the thing written down. It is easy to have this<br />
done for you. Responding to a growing appetite for<br />
distraction, shorthand journalistic cliché has infested<br />
our inner lives. Generally, it means we are unable to<br />
have respect for uniqueness of experience because<br />
it is summed up, packaged, placed in a captionable<br />
context. Soon this context demands total obedience;<br />
nothing else is relevant.<br />
The private self is subsumed, and we assume we have<br />
to give unquestioning respect to the two-dimensional<br />
conceits of ‘ambitious’ fiction covering the ground of<br />
journalists and historians (Don Delillo and Tom Wolfe<br />
being the current examples). The alternative, where<br />
it is assumed the self gets full exposure without the<br />
interference of common language, tends to mean the<br />
stream-of-consciousness mode of writing. Take Harold<br />
Brodkey’s long-delayed, much-hyped novel The<br />
Runaway Soul; an 800 page Bildungsroman made up<br />
of dribbling ‘poetic’ language, supposedly reminiscent<br />
of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Proust’s great work<br />
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of intellect and intimacy. Being neither, it still came to<br />
the fore because it was the opposite of the other kind<br />
of Great American Novel. It suited the demand that<br />
you’re one thing or the other: inner or outer. Yet the<br />
technique of simulating intimacy reeked of that alone:<br />
technique. Luckily, this novel has now been sidelined<br />
as an embarrassment.<br />
Meanwhile, Realism, whether in historical sweep<br />
or intimate acquaintance with an individual, prefers<br />
that such excessive literary adventures are limited to<br />
unserious Postmodernists. No one should claim they<br />
challenge its intimacy with life. Raymond Carver<br />
exemplifies its naive arrogance in his essay on writing<br />
fiction, collected in Fires. One of his maxims, he announced,<br />
was “No tricks”. He had this printed on a piece<br />
of cardboard stuck above his writing desk. Yet Carver’s<br />
highly-influential ‘dirty realism’ is one big trick. This is<br />
elided by calling it a “craft”, but craftsmanship is also<br />
trickery institutionalised. His innocence of this is typical<br />
of working-class sentimentality. Perhaps he never<br />
completed a novel because such trickery revealed itself<br />
over greater length.<br />
His friend Richard Ford seems almost to be satirising<br />
Carver’s self-abnegatory posing in his touchinglyoverlong<br />
novel Independence Day; a terribly funny recital<br />
of how failure infects and becomes the wellspring<br />
of writing. Anyway, having a note above one’s writing<br />
desk reminding oneself of what to do is enough to indi-<br />
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cate a need to efface the workings of the imagination.<br />
This despite Carver’s fiction being renowned for its imaginative<br />
empathy. Rudolf, the narrator in Bernhard’s<br />
Concrete sees through the motives for appreciation of<br />
Carver’s work:<br />
‘People are always talking about it being their duty to<br />
find their way to their fellow men – to their neighbour,<br />
as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false<br />
sentiment – when in fact it is purely and simply a question<br />
of finding their way to themselves.’<br />
Carver’s achievement was special, but flawed. It is a<br />
literary equivalent of the self replicating its DNA with<br />
serial partners; never mind the consequences. When<br />
Larkin mordantly quipped “Don’t have any kids yourself”,<br />
it was as much to do with poems as with children.<br />
The problem is, what goes on in our heads is also<br />
literature, in the sense that consciousness is already<br />
distance. Any privileging of inside or outside means<br />
a fundamental distortion. It means there is no simple<br />
access through writing to what we want to write about.<br />
When know-nothings like the BBC’s arts guru Mark<br />
Lawson complains of writers writing about writers,<br />
he misses this fundamental issue. The so-called selfreflexive<br />
novel is more likely to get closer to the truth<br />
than those effacing the conceit. This is why dominant<br />
forms of fiction, and the journalistic definition of literature’s<br />
relation to the world, needs to be set aside in<br />
favour of a mediation between the world and the writer;<br />
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an infinite mediation. Like Bernhard’s.<br />
Ironically (as journalists are so keen to say in order<br />
to assert their distant control) Bernhard began his career<br />
as a journalist. After giving up his music studies<br />
because of illness, he wrote short, precise summaries<br />
of pending court cases for a local Socialist newspaper.<br />
He developed a talent, and an offshoot can be seen in<br />
the extremely odd book The Voice Imitator: 104 stories<br />
in 104 pages. The musical background continued in his<br />
early preference for poetry, but this soon merged with<br />
the prose to produce novels. The mixing of opposites<br />
might be seen as peculiar to Bernhard’s biographical<br />
details: harsh reality with musical polyphony. There are<br />
other details about his childhood even before the illness<br />
that are just to depressing to repeat. For these, see his<br />
autobiography collected as Gathering Evidence.<br />
Harsh reality with polyphony appear in abundance in<br />
the 1970 novel The Lime Works. It is about the death by<br />
gunshot of a crippled woman. Her husband, Konrad, is<br />
under arrest. The novel tells the story of the years leading<br />
up to the death in a collage of reported statements<br />
from local people. This is how it begins:<br />
“… when Konrad bought the lime works, about five<br />
and a half years ago, the first thing he moved in was a<br />
piano he set up in his room on the first floor, according<br />
to the gossip at the Laska tavern, not because of<br />
any artistic leanings, says Wieser, the manager of the<br />
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Mussner estate, but for relaxation, to ease the nervous<br />
strain caused by decades of unremitting brain work,<br />
says Fro, the man in charge of the Trattner estate,<br />
agreeing that Konrad’s piano playing had nothing to do<br />
with art, which Konrad hates, but was just improvisation,<br />
as Wieser says, for an hour first thing early in the<br />
morning and another late at night, every day, spent at<br />
the keyboard, with the metronome ticking away, the<br />
window open …” (trans. Sophie Wilkins)<br />
It goes on like this for 241 pages. You see how multiple<br />
perspectives are given, without any privileging of any<br />
one in particular. The manic behaviour of Konrad, as<br />
reported, is equalled by the persistence of the investigation.<br />
As it details Konrad’s perceived descent into<br />
madness and murder, it threatens the same for the<br />
investigator. Thus the distant narration is implicated<br />
in what it perceives. Objectivity, of course, is never<br />
immune. It can never reach its object directly. This is<br />
made clearer in Bernhard’s later novels because they<br />
tend to play with very few voices. Yet despite being<br />
powerfully subjective, they transcend mere egotism<br />
transferred to the page (go to the Realists for that).<br />
Realism’s need for the suspension of disbelief is not an<br />
issue here: we are swept along by the narcotic prose.<br />
Yet we are also displaced by what it tells us or what<br />
it doesn’t tell us. Escapism isn’t possible in the usual<br />
sense. It means there is always an uneasy edge to the<br />
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pleasure of reading.<br />
Bernhard’s definitive character is a Thinker overwhelmed<br />
by something infringing on his intellectual<br />
project; usually imminent death. There are scientists in<br />
Yes and The Cheap-Eaters, philosophers in Correction<br />
and The Loser. Rudolf, in Concrete, is a musicologist<br />
trying to write a monograph on the composer Mendelsson.<br />
However, he cannot get past the research stage.<br />
He blames his worldly sister: “She’s always destroyed<br />
whatever she’s touched, and all her life she’s tried to<br />
destroy me. At first unconsciously, then consciously,<br />
she’s set out to annihilate me. Right up to this day I’ve<br />
had to protect myself against my elder sister’s savage<br />
desire to annihilate, and I really don’t know how so far<br />
I’ve managed to escape her.” (trans. David McLintock)<br />
Rudolf’s monomania emerges in the very design of<br />
text we are reading: Bernhard’s famous book-length<br />
paragraphs. There are no natural spaces to stop and<br />
reflect. Again, this just begs the question about what<br />
is being avoided, left out, denied. The repetition of<br />
“annihilate” in this fairly typical passage shows how<br />
Bernhard’s language is literary, yet not to show how<br />
sensitive the writer is, but to bring forth the way experience<br />
is bound to literature, and vice versa. After<br />
all, the only access literature has to annihilation is<br />
the word itself, and perhaps is all we have also. In his<br />
last novel Extinction, this is made wonderfully clear<br />
in a favourite passage of mine, where the narrator,<br />
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an ex-patriot professor based in Rome, talks about<br />
the search for his childhood in an Austrian country<br />
estate, Wolfsegg:<br />
“In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell<br />
myself that I have only to go back there in order to<br />
rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to<br />
be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your<br />
parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your<br />
childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void.<br />
You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer<br />
exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the<br />
most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible.<br />
You have to accept this. All you see when you<br />
look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood,<br />
but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is<br />
why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand<br />
that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of selfprotection,<br />
I thought. Whenever you look back into the<br />
past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday<br />
is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed.”<br />
(trans. David McLintock)<br />
What Creative Writing manual would pass this<br />
excessive, uncompromising, monological prose? And<br />
there are another 334 and a half pages like this! One<br />
may ask what’s in it for the reader – I mean, you’re not<br />
going to learn anything about the world by reading this,<br />
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are you? Well, you might learn how much you need to<br />
fill your own gaping void by reading. Yet for all the<br />
impression of suffocation this gives, there is a clear<br />
musical rhythm to the prose. It does intoxicate; a popular<br />
form of escape, yes, but not abused by Bernhard.<br />
His form of prose weakens the need to choose between<br />
utilitarian language or lyric indulgence. Bernhard said<br />
that his prose rhythm owed a lot to music. Indeed, he<br />
uses the life of a musician for the overall theme of one<br />
of his best novels Der Untergeher. (Literally this translates<br />
as “The Undergoer”, but this is ridiculous and<br />
has been translated as The Loser. Unfortunately this<br />
loses the allusion to Nietzsche – “Have you suffered<br />
for knowledge’s sake?” – that is, gone under).<br />
The book reads like a prose version of Bach’s Goldberg<br />
Variations. And Bernhard uses the real figure of<br />
Bach’s greatest interpreter Glenn Gould – “the most<br />
important piano virtuoso of the century” – and the<br />
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (although neither is<br />
by any means identical to the real person) to illuminate<br />
the life of the writer; the Bernhardian kind of writer. In<br />
the story, the Canadian Gould is a friend of Wertheimer,<br />
the Wittgenstein figure, and the unnamed narrator. The<br />
latter two, we are told, were themselves exceptional<br />
pianists but after hearing Gould’s unearthly genius at<br />
work, they give up hope. They could never attain his<br />
“inhuman state”. In response, Wertheimer auctioned<br />
off his piano, took up the “human sciences” and then<br />
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gave up entirely. He committed suicide, leaving philosophical<br />
notes rather than a complete work. Gould is<br />
also dead, but naturally; of a lung disease (in reality, he<br />
died of a stroke).<br />
This leaves the narrator alone. He tries to write a<br />
monograph About Glenn Gould but instead writes what<br />
we’re reading. It is pointed out in the Afterword to the<br />
English edition that the three main characters can be<br />
summarised as a triple-separation of Bernhard himself:<br />
he is at once Gould the virtuoso artiste, Wertheimer the<br />
suicide, a self-styled failure gone under; and the unnamed<br />
narrator. In real life, Bernhard was a virtuoso, of<br />
course, and perhaps also a suicide. The last state, being<br />
unnamed is therefore appropriate. His living self mediates<br />
between the extremes of Gould and Wertheimer<br />
– inhumanity and death – both perhaps preferable. The<br />
unnamed one is unable to go under in art or suicide,<br />
forced to remain, like everyone else, in the usual human<br />
situation. Unless, that is, you count his default project,<br />
The Loser, as a virtuoso work of art – which I do. In<br />
which case, the unnamed one goes on, elsewhere, not<br />
in this book, unto death.<br />
But perhaps not quite alone. Before death, Bernhard<br />
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and<br />
achieved full expression because he wrote out of<br />
failure to go under. He understood the dangers of art<br />
for humanity, and showed respect for the limits of the<br />
imagination. Ironically (again), in accepting the limits,<br />
he transcended them: partly through the invention of a<br />
literary conceit, partly out of lyrical power, partly out<br />
of biographical necessity. Such a form of transcendence<br />
is why fiction can be more than just information<br />
or distraction. It can be where the true self emerges;<br />
one’s self with others. Saul Bellow, the American novelist,<br />
who shares Bernhard’s waterfall eloquence and<br />
complexity, has spoken of the experience of getting it<br />
right, and with Bernhardian relish:<br />
“[transcendence is] just a handle. It’s not the real<br />
thing. The real thing is an unquenchable need that never<br />
stops gnawing at you. And … you feel that you’re being<br />
transcendent in that lousy sense when you are fully<br />
expressive. That’s when it happens to you. Then you’re<br />
satisfied that you’ve done the right thing. Otherwise no.<br />
Otherwise you fall back on explanations and definitions<br />
and boring discourse. You might as well be a social<br />
scientist and write that sort of stuff.” �<br />
081<br />
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Review [published April 2002]<br />
Thomas Bernhard: Playing Dead<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore finds Thomas Bernhard to be elusive within<br />
two studies of the Austrian writer<br />
What if everything we can be depends on playing a<br />
role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it<br />
would mean that the public self, the one presented to<br />
the world, is not ‘a mask’ but the original; the thing<br />
itself. Behind the scenes, alone, we live the mystery<br />
of self-consciousness. We wonder who it is that wakes<br />
at four to soundless dark. Alone, we dream of another<br />
life; the one in the biography. Perhaps the oppressive<br />
climate of our culture – as seen in the triumphant exposés<br />
of the press and the prurience of Reality TV – is<br />
due to our frantic need to remove in others what we see<br />
as a façade in ourselves. And as art is seen as an adjunct<br />
of this removal (‘expressing the inner self’), so the<br />
inevitable disappointment in its resistant playfulness<br />
leads to a shift in preference to revelatory biography<br />
and memoir. Could this be stage fright on our part?<br />
Early on in Thomas Bernhard: The Making Of An<br />
Austrian, the first English biography of the Austrian<br />
novelist, playwright and poet, Gitta Honegger says<br />
the apparatus of the theatre is an “annoyingly overused<br />
existential paradigm”, and she’s right. I’ve only<br />
used it once and it’s annoying me already. However,<br />
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and<br />
it is clear that her subject is the paradigm’s essential<br />
figure. There seems to be no private Thomas Bernhard.<br />
As such, Honegger says he is a particularly Austrian<br />
phenomenon. The nation, she says, transplanted the<br />
baroque theatrics of the old Hapsburg Empire into its<br />
cultural life, notably the Salzburg Festival, the state<br />
run Burgtheatre, and one man: Thomas Bernhard. Each<br />
provided an arena for Austria to conjure its self image.<br />
In Bernhard’s case, it was invariably a negative image,<br />
as if Austria needed an impression of embattlement<br />
against a hostile world. For example, when Bernhard<br />
received a state prize and made critical remarks about<br />
the state in his acceptance speech, a Government minister<br />
stormed out and slammed a glass door so violently<br />
that it smashed. And just before his death in 1989, he<br />
was verbally attacked by the President (an ex-Nazi),<br />
and physically attacked on a bus by an old lady wielding<br />
an umbrella. Since his death, however, Bernhard<br />
has become a national treasure. His vitriol has been rebranded,<br />
Guy Fawkes-like, into a fireworks display. As<br />
a result, his description of Austria as a place with more<br />
Nazis in 1988 than in 1938 (the cause of the President’s<br />
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and the old lady’s wrath) is safely consigned to history.<br />
Like the ‘Anschluss’ and the President’s SS uniform, it<br />
is part of Austria’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps this is<br />
why, in his will, Bernhard refused to allow the publication<br />
or performance of his work within the Austrian<br />
state for the duration of the copyright; he foresaw his<br />
place in the state circus. (The lawyers have since got<br />
around this.)<br />
However, the important thing to remember is that it<br />
wasn’t Bernhard who said Austria was still full of Nazis,<br />
it was a character in his play Heldenplatz. And while<br />
everyone assumes Bernhard meant every word as his<br />
own, those words are part of a whole that, as J.J. Long<br />
explains in his book The Novels Of Thomas Bernhard:<br />
Form And Its Function, demands to be experienced not<br />
in isolation as preferred by the culture-vultures, but in<br />
real time. If this is done, irony leaks into the hyperbole<br />
and all attitudes become unstable, even irony. In effect,<br />
even after death, Bernhard still performs, refusing to<br />
become a museum piece. The man himself remains a<br />
mystery. So what, in fact, did Thomas Bernhard think?<br />
Who was he when alone, no longer dancing before the<br />
appalled Viennese bourgeoisie? These are questions for<br />
a biography.<br />
But don’t get your hopes up. As Honegger’s subtitle<br />
indicates, there is a plea of mitigation. She says<br />
her book is a “cultural biography”; as much about<br />
Austria as about Bernhard. While this is disappoint-<br />
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and<br />
ing, it is also understandable. Most correspondence is<br />
unavailable, and friends do not say anything particularly<br />
intimate. In fact, the one clear sexual revelation<br />
doesn’t alter the image of a performer: Bernhard<br />
liked to masturbate in front of a mirror! We’re told<br />
this on page 10, so it’s all over pretty quickly. Instead<br />
of a chronological narrative, we’re given themes in<br />
which Honegger makes frequent (and wearying)<br />
digressions into cultural history and their relevance<br />
to Bernhard, such as the notion of ‘Heimat’, and the<br />
significance of the theatre in Austria.<br />
In connection with the latter, Honegger rightly makes<br />
much of Bernhard’s staging of his experience. In his<br />
compelling memoirs (written in five short volumes but<br />
collected in English as Gathering Evidence), Bernhard<br />
recalls events through the eyes of his younger self while<br />
he (the younger self) is also observing or reflecting. He<br />
observes his younger self observing from a vantage<br />
point separate from the ‘action’. One observation point<br />
leads to another and then another. We might see this as<br />
a prime example of Chinese-box Postmodernism where<br />
all facts are as hollow as the next, but in Bernhard’s<br />
memoir the gnawing question of origin is always there.<br />
The facts are plain: Bernhard’s father abandoned his<br />
mother before Thomas was born, and died during the<br />
war years in mysterious circumstances; he either killed<br />
himself or was murdered. He never met his son. Bernhard<br />
was later punished by his bitter mother who saw<br />
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her humiliation in the inherited features of her boy. No<br />
amount of virtuoso storytelling and opinionating could<br />
prevent the author from being thrown toward the bitter<br />
facts of his birth, and its consequences, much as we<br />
wonder, whilst vomiting, what we had eaten to cause it.<br />
Bernhard’s early life was also blighted by the Nazi<br />
era. He saw at first hand the terror of Allied bombing<br />
raids on Salzburg. Barely a teenager, death closed in<br />
from all sides. And after the war, when he tried to make<br />
his way in the world as a trained singer, he was struck<br />
down with tuberculosis after working in freezing conditions<br />
in a grocery store. In hospital, with his lungs full<br />
of breathtaking sputum, he was given the Last Rites.<br />
Miraculously, he survived when all around were dying.<br />
Honegger says he wrote the memoir as a record of his<br />
victory over that death and the attempts at metaphorical<br />
suffocation by his upbringing in particular, and Austrian<br />
society in general. Victory was the result of a decision<br />
to become himself, to live despite all that suffocated<br />
him, even though it was futile. I say “futile” because<br />
all that suffocated him also provided the oxygen. It<br />
is no coincidence that, despite the oppressive details,<br />
there is a sense of freedom pulsing out of the pages<br />
of Gathering Evidence. Later, the existential energy<br />
of Bernhard’s neurasthenic narrators will also emerge<br />
from this outrageous, paradoxical act of will.<br />
Perhaps it because Bernhard provides the most useful<br />
guide to his life that Honegger does not attempt to<br />
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and<br />
take us through the minutiae of his daily existence. Yet<br />
while the analysis is very interesting, one longs for that<br />
minutiae. Recently, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on<br />
Bernhard revealed that his record collection consisted<br />
almost entirely of the 19th-century Romantic repertoire.<br />
One might have assumed this great Modernist<br />
would have preferred Schönberg and Webern, Bach<br />
and Haydn over Schubert and Brahms. Apparently not.<br />
(Curiously, this is similar to Beckett). I don’t recall<br />
Honegger mentioning anything like this. Nor does she<br />
mention the novel Bernhard had sketched out before<br />
his death. She prefers to skim over the surface, taking<br />
what is necessary for her themed coverage. When it<br />
comes to Bernhard’s sexuality, for example, there is an<br />
exhausting bout of Freudian analysis arising from his<br />
father’s absence and his mother’s maltreatment. It is<br />
unconvincing only because it is so persuasive. Actually<br />
the same is true of the opinions expressed by Bernhard’s<br />
narrators. Perhaps Honegger is having a laugh as our<br />
brows sweat over the complexities of Oedipal anxiety?<br />
I would like to think so. In the rest of the book, Freud<br />
gets barely a mention. It is very odd.<br />
It is also vague. We don’t get a definitive answer as<br />
to whether Bernhard was hetero-, bi- or homosexual.<br />
Honegger says he “came between couples”, which<br />
suggests one conclusion, but what she means is that<br />
both sexes were drawn into an ambiguous relationship<br />
with the writer. It’s a living example of Bernhard’s<br />
084<br />
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elusiveness, and proof of nothing else. Another is the<br />
one major relationship outside his family. It was with a<br />
woman 39 years older than himself. She was a widow<br />
who befriended Bernhard when he was a young writer.<br />
She provided a home and material support when he<br />
was struggling. He called her his “Lebensmench”<br />
(Lifeperson); a word he invented. Understandably,<br />
Honegger doesn’t have much to give us on the details<br />
of this partnership. All windows are opaque. The same<br />
is true, more or less, for other areas of his life. Indeed,<br />
Bernhard is a phantom in his own biography.<br />
J.J. Long takes a firmer route by concentrating on<br />
the novels. Bernhard, he says, was “a writer of considerable<br />
diversity, profoundly concerned with the<br />
problems and potential of storytelling.” Originally<br />
a doctoral thesis, The Novels of Thomas Bernhard:<br />
Form And Its Function uses the technical language of<br />
Narrative Theory to understand the unique qualities<br />
of Bernhard’s writing. Reading it requires a high level<br />
of patience and concentration. Moreover, it leaves<br />
the lengthy quotations in German untranslated. This<br />
is regrettable as those most likely to be drawn to the<br />
book – Germanless Bernhard fans – will be hampered.<br />
Presumably the costs involved are prohibitive. Still,<br />
even monolinguists can gain a good deal from what’s<br />
left. Whereas Honegger bizarrely accuses Bernhard of<br />
being a solipsist – someone for whom the world is<br />
merely a projection of their own mind – Long stresses<br />
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and<br />
the ‘narrative strategies’ and ‘hermeneutic sequences’<br />
employed to undermine such narrow interpretations<br />
of Bernhard’s monological prose.<br />
For example, he writes that the reflective form of<br />
the great, valedictory novel Extinction allows “an<br />
excavation of the past even as it moves forward into<br />
the future.” The novel’s narrator fires at familiar targets<br />
– particularly the repression of the Nazi past – even as<br />
he himself succumbs to the same temptation to repress<br />
the facts of his own life in order to resist the impending<br />
extinction of the title. Indeed, the targets are not only<br />
familiar but familial. Long shows how most of Bernhard’s<br />
novels – like his memoir – are concerned with<br />
“transgenerational transmission” (that is, inheritance).<br />
The narrator’s family consists of ex-Nazi parents, both<br />
sad and monstrous people, whom he loves and hates in<br />
equal measure, as well as grotesque siblings who have<br />
not resisted the legacy of repression. As the eldest, the<br />
narrator inherits the family’s country estate in darkest<br />
Austria when the parents are killed in a car crash. As he<br />
also feels that he has not got long to live, he decides he<br />
must return from his sunny life in Rome to redeem the<br />
legacy. We don’t get to find out how he does this until<br />
the final page. As he goes forward to do this, he reflects<br />
on why it is required.<br />
Yet the reason why the narrator’s predicament compels<br />
our attention, and gives us pleasure, is his spirited<br />
unwillingness to complete the task. He is forever delay-<br />
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ing the end in both the action as described (stalling outside<br />
the gates of the estate) and in the act of storytelling<br />
itself (spinning variations of anecdotes and opinions).<br />
Long says these delaying tactics are achieved through<br />
“embedded narratives” and “retarding elements”. As a<br />
successful doctoral candidate, ‘pleasure’ is not an issue<br />
for him, but for those of us who turn to Bernhard for<br />
this reason, it is interesting to note how these techniques<br />
create an experience similar to the reading of<br />
a thriller or detective novel. In those genres, pleasure<br />
comes from the growth of mystery and suspense before<br />
the inevitable denouement.<br />
Extinction is similar in that one reads to find out what<br />
happens next. However, the distinction is that the thriller<br />
cannot reproduce the same pleasure on re-reading.<br />
A new story is required every time. Extinction on the<br />
other hand positively demands to be re-read in order<br />
to enjoy that delay again and again. In fact it becomes<br />
more enjoyable as we join with the narrator repeating<br />
stories and opinions in order to delay our return to the<br />
mundane world. Unfortunately for him, the delay has<br />
more serious import for the narrator. For a time, we<br />
feel more alive even if our noses are ‘buried in a book’.<br />
This is the great problem and potential of storytelling.<br />
Long’s analysis, which is richer and more complex than<br />
I have space (or patience) to detail, manages to elucidate<br />
Bernhard’s method and highlight his remarkable<br />
technical achievement. One cannot go away from this<br />
BUY Thomas Bernhard books online from and<br />
book and still believe, as so many do, that Bernhard is<br />
merely a ranting egoist. Those who already know better<br />
will perhaps understand more clearly how Bernhard<br />
maintained his high-wire act, though we would still<br />
like to know more in physical detail.<br />
In one brief insight to his working process, Honegger<br />
quotes Bernhard as saying he wrote “with full commitment”;<br />
his entire body took part in the creative process.<br />
Perhaps this is why he preferred to call his novels<br />
“prose texts” as this suggests a script for performance.<br />
Indeed, Bernhard’s many plays are not greatly different<br />
from the novels. It seems Bernhard himself felt most<br />
alive when writing, like an actor on stage even at his<br />
writing desk. Honegger observes that each work was a<br />
reassertion of that early decision to live. Appropriately,<br />
some way into Extinction, the narrator reflects on the<br />
frustrated lives of those stuck in small-town provincial<br />
misery from which he, the narrator, had escaped. He<br />
says they fail to better themselves, to “get away from<br />
their real selves” because “they lack the intellectual<br />
energy, because they have not discovered the intellect<br />
– the intellect around them or the intellect within them<br />
– and have therefore not taken the first step, which is<br />
the precondition for taking the second.”<br />
So, we might assume that in writing, Bernhard got<br />
away from his real self. But “full commitment” means<br />
he did it with his mortal body as well as his intellect.<br />
Despite his early escape from death, Bernhard was al-<br />
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ways seriously ill. He expected to die before reaching<br />
50. His half-brother, a doctor, claims to have kept him<br />
alive for an extra ten years after that. Mortality was an<br />
over-riding theme and writing was at once the escape<br />
from death’s imminence and its enactment. Barthes’<br />
Death Of The Author was more than a concept to<br />
Bernhard. In fact, in a blessed piece of minutiae, Honegger<br />
tells us one of his favourite games was “playing<br />
dead”. It’s a nice idea to think of the novels as the<br />
place were Bernhard plays dead for us. Nowhere else<br />
is he more alive. �<br />
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Review [published June 2004]<br />
Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
Not half way through the year but already a book has<br />
come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it – the<br />
book of the year.<br />
I am aware that there is something desperate about<br />
such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty<br />
time with an evasive monument. That is the nature of<br />
monuments after all. The bigger the monument the<br />
more it evades – hence the respect given to a new 800<br />
page novel spanning generations, the collected works<br />
of a writer or a definitive biography of a tyrant. Yet the<br />
book I’m holding is a fragile 53 pages and is published<br />
by a small press in Sydney, Australia.<br />
Nowhere Without No is, ironically, a collection of 13<br />
memorials by translators, academics and poets (sometimes<br />
a combination of all three) in honour of Maurice<br />
Blanchot, the French novelist and philosopher, who<br />
died in February 2003, aged 95.<br />
The introduction by editor Kevin Hart explains the<br />
title. It comes from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy in which<br />
the poet writes of “a space that has been freed from<br />
ordinary time” as experienced by children, animals and<br />
the dead:<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
It is always world<br />
and never nowhere without no:<br />
that pureness, that unwatched, which one<br />
breathes and<br />
endlessly knows and never wants. But a child<br />
might lose himself inside the quiet and become<br />
shaken. Or someone dies and is.<br />
For near to death one sees that death no more<br />
and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge<br />
glance.<br />
Blanchot’s gift is to reveal to us how literature is also<br />
nowhere without no. His work pursues writing to where<br />
it disappears into this space, as it separates itself from<br />
the reader and writer. Hart reminds us that Blanchot<br />
wrote (in the third person) of his own experience of this<br />
separation as he faced a firing squad in 1944. Waiting<br />
to die, there was:<br />
“a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of<br />
beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation?<br />
[…] In this place, I will not try to analyse. He<br />
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was perhaps suddenly in invincible. Dead – immortal.<br />
Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for<br />
suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal<br />
or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death<br />
by a surreptitious friendship.” (from The Instant Of My<br />
Death, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg)<br />
The shots didn’t come; he was told to run and thereby<br />
regained a life where, from then on, he writes, “the<br />
instant of my death [was] henceforth always in abeyance”.<br />
Later, he discovered that a manuscript had been<br />
taken from his room by enemy officers believing it<br />
to contain military secrets. Instead of the death of the<br />
author, there was the death of the text.<br />
One might say: but this is written in the third person;<br />
it is either fiction or Blanchot is writing about another<br />
person – perhaps literature itself. That lost manuscript<br />
certainly has the convenience of fiction, standing for<br />
the agency and meaning as it withdraws. However,<br />
such a distinction is impossible. By writing in the third<br />
person, Blanchot emphasises the distance inherent to<br />
such reminiscence – itself already literature, already<br />
intimate with death.<br />
Ten years later, Blanchot’s The Space Of Literature is<br />
saturated with this experience:<br />
- to write is to break the bond that unites the<br />
word with myself.<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
- to write is to withdraw language from the<br />
world.<br />
- to write is to surrender to the fascination of<br />
time’s absence.<br />
- the writer never reads his work. It is, for him,<br />
a secret.<br />
- in the solitude of the work … we discover a<br />
more essential solitude.<br />
- art is the power by which night opens<br />
(trans. Ann Smock)<br />
Throughout this extraordinary book, Blanchot traces<br />
the impact of the night on the work of various authors –<br />
Rilke, Mallarmé and Kafka in particular. If, for Kafka,<br />
“there exists only the outside, the glistening flow of the<br />
eternal outside” what does that mean for his world of<br />
expression, of escape, of liberty that is writing? The<br />
question is part of the work itself. In this way, reading<br />
Blanchot is frustrating: there is at once the assertiveness<br />
of the phrases quoted above and a resistance to<br />
actually saying anything in the usual manner. His assertions<br />
serve to obscure what was previously clear.<br />
Rather than offering an alternative to, say, a Freudian or<br />
Marxist reading of ‘Metamorphosis’, Blanchot reveals<br />
how each reading has to make a leap over the abyss.<br />
For the reader, it is intoxicating, yet almost impossible<br />
to then put to use. Lydia Davis – pioneering translator of<br />
the récit Death Sentence – says she can follow the argu-<br />
089<br />
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ment line by line yet summary is resisted. “Somehow<br />
the experience of reading had to take place moment by<br />
moment”. This resistance, she finds, is experienced by<br />
most other readers. It is not a criticism.<br />
Charlotte Mandell – translator of The Work Of Fire<br />
and The Book To Come – recalls how she felt a need<br />
to write to Blanchot to thank him for the silence in his<br />
words – for the revelation of the space. Her gratitude<br />
then is not for the man himself but for his absence,<br />
such is the perversity of his gift. Mandell doesn’t say<br />
whether he replied – though others report replies of<br />
exceptional courtesy and concern. Only Jacques Derrida<br />
– in the address given at the cremation – tells of<br />
the man himself: brief meetings in a university office<br />
throughout which Blanchot wore a gentle smile, and<br />
then breathless on the phone toward the end. He seems<br />
ghostly even in life.<br />
One wonders how much this effacement contributes<br />
to the unique aura of his works? Not much, if the attempts<br />
to imitate him are any guide. The poet Jacques<br />
Dupin writes that in Blanchot’s fragmentary writing:<br />
“his speech yielded a conductive wire of an extreme<br />
delicacy in search of the ultimate meaning, that which<br />
was well beyond one’s grasp and which indicated<br />
from very high up how to pass over the precipices,<br />
how to master the turbulence and the proliferation,<br />
of the forces of dislocation that exhaust the text, that<br />
strangle the voice.”<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
While Blanchot’s prose can be said to be poetic –<br />
and Dupin is surely right to detect a “demanding poet”<br />
behind the prose – it is not flighty and impressionistic.<br />
The silence of the words is achieved by the extreme patience<br />
and attention to the weight of words – a patience<br />
frequently expressed in doubt. Blanchot’s disciples<br />
have a remarkable confidence to use key word and<br />
oxymorons that appear throughout Blanchot’s work<br />
– passivity, sovereign relation, forgetfulness without<br />
memory, the impossible real, motionless retreat, purposiveness<br />
without purpose – in the assumption that they<br />
automatically plumb the depths as they do in Blanchot.<br />
Curiously, they don’t. As Blanchot himself wrote: “Desire<br />
of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge,<br />
knowledge of desire. Let us not believe that we have<br />
said anything at all with these reversals.”<br />
The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so<br />
much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to<br />
say too much. Such is the silence brought by death<br />
perhaps. The latter also means the distance between<br />
the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the<br />
reader’s mind.<br />
Michael Holland emphasises the distance in a remarkable,<br />
two-page analysis of science fiction. The<br />
genre, he says, necessarily “hangs back from thinking<br />
the totality of what it projects – which is to say<br />
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total transcendence in the here and now”. He means it<br />
denies mortality. And that means such transcendence<br />
is pure violence: “Sci-fi is thus essentially nihilistic”<br />
because it cannot accommodate bodily death on the<br />
level of its narrative. He urges us to read and re-read<br />
Blanchot in order to hold off such nihilism. This is<br />
how we can learn from Blanchot. There is no need to<br />
adopt his style. Blanchot himself did exactly that in<br />
his own learning.<br />
Mark C. Taylor remarks on Blanchot’s neglected kinship<br />
with an earlier enigmatic philosopher-writer: “It<br />
was … Kierkegaard” he writes “who first realised that<br />
philosophy can be itself only by becoming literature;<br />
and it was Kierkegaard who insisted that the only way<br />
to be truly in the world is to withdraw from it.” Taylor<br />
asked for a meeting to discuss it but got a note saying:<br />
“Though I might wish it otherwise, the conditions of<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
my work make it impossible for us to meet”. Still, he<br />
confirmed to Taylor that Kierkegaard was indeed a secret<br />
sharer. He helped Blanchot find his own way. This<br />
collection, modest in size and character as it is, offers<br />
Blanchot as a guide to us, placing the emphasis firmly<br />
on the writing:<br />
“I have long thought that some things are so intimate<br />
that they can never be said but must be written. Writing<br />
does not merely create distance but also allows one<br />
to draw closer than any spoken word. This closeness<br />
must not be confused with presence. Writing brings<br />
the remote near by allowing presence to withdraw. The<br />
lasting lesson of Blanchot is that withdrawal opens<br />
up the space-time of desire whose absence is death.<br />
Though he has been taken from us, he will continue to<br />
give what is never ours to possess.” �<br />
091<br />
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Feature [published June 2002]<br />
Maurice Blanchot: The Absent Voice<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot<br />
There are many remarkable facts about the long life of<br />
the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.<br />
The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-<br />
War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis<br />
during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that<br />
is similar to, but more significant than, Pynchon’s and<br />
Salinger’s; his deep influence on more famous French<br />
thinkers (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). And,<br />
finally, in this list, his return to public life to oppose<br />
French colonialism in Algeria and then to support the<br />
May 1968 student uprising, during which he drafted<br />
pamphlets released by those opposing General de<br />
Gaulle’s autocracy.<br />
But to concentrate on these facts, relevant as they<br />
are, would be to ignore what Blanchot offers, which is<br />
a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That<br />
is, why do written words have so much power over us,<br />
yet also seem completely estranged from the world<br />
they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature<br />
takes us to ‘another world’, we say more than we might<br />
imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to<br />
us relentlessly. “There is an a-cultural aspect to art and<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly”<br />
he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of<br />
literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself,<br />
so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced<br />
even, Blanchot’s resistance makes him, in my opinion,<br />
one of the most important writers.<br />
In my opinion. What is that worth? The question of<br />
authority – mine, Blanchot’s or anybody else’s – is the<br />
invisible centre of our cultural ideology. We all know<br />
that Liberal Democracy is based on choice; each individual<br />
is free to choose and each individual’s choice is<br />
as good as any other’s. So, when I write in my opinion,<br />
I remove all weight from the judgement. The complete<br />
opposite is equally valid. Despite this, we still make<br />
definite choices in what to read, watch or listen to,<br />
as if hoping, despite everything, for something more<br />
than nothing. The act of choice itself speaks of a need:<br />
for nourishment, entertainment or distraction, or all<br />
three combined. But we have little guidance on what<br />
and why to choose. Perhaps the recent proliferation<br />
of award ceremonies and prize competitions for each<br />
art form is no coincidence: the award-winning novel,<br />
092<br />
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the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie.<br />
We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitigation<br />
of one’s apparently random choice. At the same<br />
time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is<br />
meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of<br />
Liberal Democracy.<br />
Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect.<br />
Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened<br />
too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition<br />
become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the<br />
scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather,<br />
he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offering<br />
in the process a startling revision of our understanding<br />
of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art<br />
and world be what makes it vital and important? In a<br />
short essay from 1953, published in a new translation<br />
by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to<br />
the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this<br />
possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates’<br />
preference for speech over writing.<br />
In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the<br />
guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One<br />
can ask questions and receive answers; there is always<br />
the movement of dialogue with those involved always<br />
mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible.<br />
On the other hand, written words can only maintain a<br />
solemn silence: “if you ask them what they mean by<br />
anything,” he says, “they simply return the same an-<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
swer over and over again.” The philosopher links this<br />
to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to “the<br />
sacred voice” emerging from a stone or the stump of a<br />
tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation<br />
with written words:<br />
“Like sacred language, what is written comes from<br />
no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and<br />
thereby always refers back to something more original<br />
than itself. Behind the words of the written work,<br />
nobody is present; but language gives voice to this<br />
absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the<br />
god himself is never present in his words, and it is the<br />
absence of god which then speaks.” (trans. Leslie Hill)<br />
If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the<br />
voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively<br />
indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the<br />
human project represented by Socrates. What can be<br />
done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet<br />
in literature, luring truth into “the abyss where there<br />
is neither truth nor meaning nor even error”? Blanchot<br />
reminds us what was done: “both Plato and Socrates<br />
are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime<br />
which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved<br />
for moments of leisure”. Of course, Socrates went on to<br />
pay with his life for his commitment to the more serious<br />
matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains<br />
093<br />
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emblematic of our notion of the freedom of speech, his<br />
dismissal of writing and art sounds very familiar, very<br />
now, particularly to anyone searching for truth in art.<br />
We can see the correlation between Postmodernism (no<br />
truth, no meaning), popular culture (no error), and the<br />
ancient philosophers’ dismissal of art. It is attractive as<br />
there is another correlation, perhaps the most important:<br />
both are also liberations. In each case, freedom is<br />
granted to those previously enslaved to truth. Writers<br />
can let their imagination run wild; there is no comeback.<br />
Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development,<br />
Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed<br />
in the written word. He wonders what it is that<br />
disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it<br />
is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants,<br />
to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social,<br />
psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer,<br />
he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher,<br />
pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of<br />
his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle<br />
“neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From<br />
this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the<br />
origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he<br />
clarifies the final word:<br />
“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it<br />
means that it does not base itself on something which<br />
already is … It points toward the future, because it does<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent<br />
that it is like a future language which is always ahead of<br />
itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it,<br />
which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.”<br />
(trans. Leslie Hill)<br />
It does not base itself on something which already<br />
is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind<br />
of literature that does not engage with current events<br />
or familiar social relations, and where the style,<br />
language and subject matter – or lack of it – resists<br />
the utility of common understanding. Is modern<br />
literature, then, prophetic?<br />
The nature of the question means the answer cannot<br />
be stated as such, only experienced. The moment it is<br />
answered, the language of the future is negated and<br />
drawn into Socrates’ dialogue of utility. However, this<br />
is not to distinguish experience and literature. Contrary<br />
to popular opinion, literature is intimate with daily experience.<br />
Blanchot puts it this way:<br />
“Upon the background noise constituted by our<br />
knowledge of the world’s daily course, which precedes,<br />
accompanies, and follows in us all knowledge,<br />
we cast forth, walking or sleeping, phrases that<br />
are punctuated by questions. Murmuring questions.<br />
What are they worth? What do they say? These are<br />
still more questions.” (trans. Susan Hanson)<br />
094<br />
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We don’t experience the world without this murmuring,<br />
a kind of voice-under codifying and animating<br />
an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of<br />
our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainmentdistraction,<br />
drugged socialising, or plausible theories<br />
of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot’s unique<br />
attunement to these murmuring questions – to what<br />
resists the Socratic demand – which distinguishes his<br />
work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it<br />
within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness<br />
of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking<br />
news of the moment, he asks certain questions that<br />
emerge from the experience of reading the book itself.<br />
This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel<br />
Beckett’s trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The<br />
Unnameable. Here is a book that has no justification.<br />
It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of<br />
polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming<br />
power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to efface<br />
the author with the usual means of the suspension<br />
of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal<br />
free fall. Blanchot asks, “Who speaks in Samuel<br />
Beckett’s books? … Who is the tireless ‘I’ who seems<br />
always to say the same thing?” At first, the answer<br />
is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this<br />
deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel’s<br />
terrible dynamic.<br />
Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent<br />
mother’s room. This is the usual displacement of the<br />
author’s own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in<br />
his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another narrator,<br />
Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own<br />
story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says<br />
this a “slightly disappointing” allegory of the author’s<br />
search for something more original than itself. Beckett<br />
is having fun with the conventions of the novel – which<br />
is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work.<br />
Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassuring<br />
presence like normal characters in a novel speaking<br />
through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us<br />
from what Blanchot calls “a greater threat”.<br />
That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone’s<br />
death would provoke the “ultimate disaster which is to<br />
have lost the right to say I”. Malone is bedridden, having<br />
only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables<br />
him to turn his room into “the infinite space of words<br />
and stories.” He tells stories – a simple pastime – to<br />
fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for<br />
farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism;<br />
everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:<br />
“All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand,<br />
to begin to understand, how such creatures<br />
are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding.<br />
Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less,<br />
095<br />
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mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies<br />
of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good.<br />
The last word is not yet said between me and – yes, the<br />
last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said<br />
again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.”<br />
And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies,<br />
we’re never quite sure, for how can death occur in<br />
a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins<br />
without his support for the stories. So really, it cannot<br />
continue.<br />
It continues anyway. And according to current<br />
understanding, this is where ‘the real’ author should<br />
reveal himself, the one ‘behind the scenes’. Again,<br />
it is no coincidence that when producers of ‘Reality<br />
TV’ proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless<br />
rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of<br />
‘what really went on’ – endless promises of a definitive<br />
intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn’t. In<br />
The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a consciousness<br />
stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to<br />
a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on<br />
without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot,<br />
this is the “malaise of one who has dropped out of reality<br />
and drifts forever in the gap between existence and<br />
nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being<br />
born.” As readers we undergo:<br />
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and<br />
“[an] experience experienced under the threat of<br />
impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a<br />
vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar,<br />
excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced<br />
because it is what is unceasing and interminable.”<br />
(trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)<br />
This is the language of the future. It is “a direct confrontation<br />
with the process from which all books derive”:<br />
language itself. By asking the simple question of<br />
who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how<br />
Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place<br />
where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading<br />
the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of<br />
communication, and thereby the limits of our power<br />
in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to<br />
the point where we are taken to another world (“transported”<br />
as so many naive readers put it, neglecting the<br />
recent history of the word). Beckett’s Trilogy exceeds<br />
this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the confines<br />
of novel. The author’s great achievement is to<br />
take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to<br />
stay this side. To declare his work ‘absurdist’ or that it<br />
‘mirrors the breakdown of religious belief’, as might<br />
be heard wherever Beckett’s books are discussed, is<br />
unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always<br />
in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Trilogy<br />
has never been accepted into our culture in the<br />
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same way as, say, Joyce’s Ulysses.<br />
[Note: Blanchot’s essay on Beckett, ‘Where now?<br />
Who now?’ can be found in The Sirens’ Song: Selected<br />
Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel<br />
Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in<br />
Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage in a translation<br />
by Richard Howard. However, both are long out<br />
of print.]<br />
Blanchot’s own novels, such as Thomas The Obscure,<br />
have a kinship with Beckett’s work; there is constant<br />
dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though,<br />
they are closer to Kafka’s; there are many mysterious<br />
landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both<br />
these authors’ humour. His narratives are often insipid.<br />
However, in the late 1950s, the critical writing and the<br />
fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new<br />
genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis<br />
developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive<br />
essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are<br />
occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed<br />
to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a<br />
novel appeared called L’attente l’oubli (Translated as<br />
Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative<br />
of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room.<br />
Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from<br />
the rest by a printed diamond or star. The spaces disrupt<br />
straightforward narrative progress.<br />
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“She was present, already her own image, and her<br />
image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself.<br />
When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten.<br />
“Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remembered,<br />
sometimes remembering the forgetting and<br />
forgetting everything in this remembrance.” (Trans.<br />
John Gregg)<br />
In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says<br />
that novels “show the possibility of what it is like to be<br />
someone else”. Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication<br />
to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through<br />
that someone else. As we begin to understand the person<br />
in front of us, the understanding takes his or her<br />
place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative.<br />
No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Perhaps<br />
significantly, McEwan’s latest novel Atonement is<br />
about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like<br />
language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning.<br />
In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists<br />
compulsive interest.<br />
Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than<br />
continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps<br />
he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes<br />
in on itself. When infected with another however, not<br />
only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature<br />
itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in<br />
The Law Of Genre – a close reading of Blanchot’s very<br />
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short novel The Madness Of The Day – this infection<br />
is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre<br />
is basically the effacement of that infection. As the<br />
dynamic of absence and presence that frequently drives<br />
Blanchot’s writing, the direction was necessary.<br />
In a remarkably condensed early essay, ‘How Is<br />
Literature Possible?’ this movement is prefigured. In<br />
it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan<br />
about the opposition of what we might call traditional<br />
and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing<br />
cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition)<br />
has dominated our conception of literature for 150<br />
years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo’s rejection of<br />
rhetoric, Verlaine’s denunciation of eloquence and<br />
Rimbaud’s abandonment of “old-hat” poetry. Sixty<br />
years on, it hasn’t changed that much. Think of Martin<br />
Amis’ famous “war against cliché”, J.G. Ballard’s<br />
expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of<br />
ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair<br />
with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett’s Trilogy could itself<br />
be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tradition.<br />
Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two<br />
camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense<br />
with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled<br />
auto-da-fé and so destroy the complacent world of<br />
bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to<br />
prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness<br />
can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular<br />
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richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does<br />
is to point out that in order to do either requires a<br />
scrupulous attention to language. “Whoever wants to<br />
be absent from words at every instant or to be present<br />
only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied<br />
with them so that, of all authors, those who most<br />
eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e.<br />
using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most<br />
exposed to this reproach.” Does this, then, destroy all<br />
hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according<br />
to those who do not consider themselves writers, because<br />
writing is a work of distance from the ‘ecstasies’<br />
of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot:<br />
“It is the same for those who through the marvels<br />
of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing<br />
themselves from all literature. For having wanted to<br />
rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to<br />
touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics<br />
that they meant to reveal, they finally contented<br />
themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics<br />
as they would conventions and forms that they<br />
complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the<br />
visible framework and the foundation of their works.<br />
[…] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics,<br />
religion, and emotions take the place of technique and<br />
language. They are a system of expression, a literary<br />
genre – in a word, literature.” (trans. Charlotte Mandell)<br />
098<br />
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The experience of these systems of expression,<br />
however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For<br />
readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase<br />
is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become<br />
‘monsters of ambiguity’ when we read. How are we, as<br />
readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is<br />
precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the<br />
oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense<br />
dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature<br />
is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of<br />
life to continue while the victims are all dependent on<br />
the vampire myth for their living. And the other way<br />
around. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short<br />
essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before:<br />
authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only<br />
in the inscrutability of their presence.<br />
If literature relies on comforting demarcations of<br />
genre to proceed, yet demands a naked openness to the<br />
world for the sake of authenticity, then the appearance<br />
of the printed star in Blanchot’s work is perhaps not just<br />
a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blanchot’s<br />
famous late work, The Writing Of The Disaster,<br />
a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments<br />
designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obsolete<br />
definition of the word disaster is “an unfavourable<br />
aspect of a star”. The star helps us to grasp the possibility<br />
of meaning, which we return to at the end of each<br />
section, while at the same time threatening break down.<br />
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The book is in part about how one deals with disaster,<br />
the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the<br />
disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the<br />
very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also<br />
about the disaster of language itself:<br />
“The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the<br />
very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing.<br />
This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which<br />
does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing,<br />
is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or<br />
extratextual.” (trans. Ann Smock)<br />
That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake<br />
of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself<br />
through opinion or style. Blanchot’s impersonal voice,<br />
so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster.<br />
To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to<br />
confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting<br />
yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation,<br />
and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.<br />
We are absent from one another as the disaster writes<br />
through communication. We are absent even from ourselves<br />
as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We<br />
saw this emerge in Beckett’s Trilogy. Yet it is precisely<br />
this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together.<br />
The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this<br />
absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is<br />
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central, remains the only medium for the possibility of<br />
a community, even if it is a community of those who<br />
have no community. The growth in sales of intimate<br />
self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public figures,<br />
and the pathological obsession with personalities<br />
and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal<br />
democracy functions by removing an effective public<br />
life. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Big Brother,<br />
or at least one’s biographer, is always watching. It is<br />
a political environment that has redefined politics into<br />
a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate<br />
oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the<br />
absent voice of a community denied by a misreading<br />
of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the<br />
apparent emptiness of art:<br />
“Reading is anguish, and this is because any text,<br />
however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe<br />
… is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to<br />
cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not<br />
comprehend.” (trans. Ann Smock)<br />
The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at<br />
the end of his essay on Beckett:<br />
“Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated<br />
to art, should become other, not another, not<br />
transformed from the human being he was into an artist<br />
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with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into<br />
nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons<br />
is heard.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)<br />
But how is this done? The fragmentary work, perhaps<br />
the apogee of 20th-century Modernist literature<br />
and philosophy, is Blanchot’s approach. Its refusal to<br />
insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well<br />
as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority,<br />
means both reader and writer are constantly moving<br />
toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet<br />
never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning<br />
even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot<br />
calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, “a<br />
combat of passivity – combat that reduces itself to<br />
naught”. Some might see this as needlessly equivocal<br />
or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent<br />
clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end,<br />
leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in<br />
his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot<br />
says that art’s summons might not have been lost<br />
on Socrates – the great emblematic thinker of positivistic<br />
Western culture. He might also have sensed<br />
the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole<br />
at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only<br />
guarantee for speech was the living presence of a<br />
human being, he also “went as far as to die in order<br />
to keep his word.” �<br />
100<br />
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Feature [published March 1997]<br />
Body Modification: Remake, Remodel<br />
Nick Clapson enters the strange world of body modification<br />
Tattoos. Piercing. Dreadlocks. Body Art. What is the<br />
world coming to?<br />
It would seem if we follow the lead of much of the<br />
popular press a minority of degenerates are corrupting<br />
our sensibilities, and so we are doomed. However, if<br />
you take the time to stop and look a little longer, it seems<br />
more likely that we actually want to be corrupted. And<br />
this desire is not new.<br />
There is currently an interest in utilising the body<br />
as a site on which we can extend our creative and<br />
psychic desires, and as such has found itself reflected<br />
in a growing literature of its own. One such book is<br />
Housk Randall and Ted Polhemus’ The Customised<br />
Body. As Polhemus and Randall make clear from<br />
the start, the impetus for this fashion in changing<br />
the body is the influence of ‘traditional peoples’.<br />
Other cultures, which have been traditionally termed<br />
primitive, have a history of altering their physical<br />
appearance for either religious and social purposes.<br />
And it is this that the later-day primitives of our culture<br />
are trying to tap into. Thus the piercing or the tattoos of<br />
these ‘modern primitives’ are legitimated through the<br />
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idea that they are some how more pure, honest and true,<br />
because they reflect the more positive aspects of these<br />
so-called ‘simpler’ societies. Attempts are also made<br />
to suggest a lineage for the use of such body art by<br />
the examination of early pre-Christian practices in the<br />
west. However, though this may provide a precedent<br />
for body art, it is more pertinent to question why such<br />
practices fell from fashion for several thousand years,<br />
and in turn, why they would have any pertinence now.<br />
Much is made in the literature that surrounds this<br />
particular subculture about the need for self-expression,<br />
and the desire to feel part of a community. The subtext<br />
of such an argument is that a certain sector of our society<br />
feel that they can not adequately express themselves<br />
through the more conventional means of visual expression,<br />
be it clothes or art. The notion that other cultures<br />
will provide us with a visual language that will release<br />
us from this impasse is, however, not new. In art alone it<br />
can be traced back through the major canon of western<br />
artist, through Jackson Pollock, Picasso, Gauguin, Van<br />
Gogh, and back into the depths of the 18th century at<br />
least. What is new is the transition from the canvas and<br />
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the gallery, to the body and the street. This phenomena,<br />
I feel, must be a result of the late 20th century, or dare<br />
I say it, Postmodern, belief in the breakdown of artist<br />
as unassailable god. Instead, the artist can be any man,<br />
and as a result of the comments of Duchamp and the<br />
whole Dada movement, art can be anything.<br />
Also written into the unspoken creed of this grouping<br />
is heart-felt belief that there is a direct correlation between<br />
the increase in the isolation in our post-industrial<br />
society and the desire for primitivism. It is almost as if<br />
that as God was once usurped by science and money,<br />
it too shall necessarily collapse, but his time under the<br />
force of this new godless mass who have found belief<br />
in some crypto-primitivism and a new hybrid culture.<br />
As such fashion, in all its manifestations, is the tool<br />
by which these new pioneers of culture seek to bind<br />
themselves: through self-expression one finds those<br />
who hold similar beliefs, those who have similar aims.<br />
However, there is also an ideological factor to be<br />
considered when we consider modes of dress or rituals<br />
of display. It can clearly be seen that the members of<br />
this ‘fashion’, or as Polhemus describes them, members<br />
of a “style tribe”, are generally of an underclass which<br />
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wishes to identify itself. If, then, the disenfranchised<br />
and the disheartened give up on conventional codes or<br />
symbols they are signalling to the dominant culture,<br />
and to those who have not yet made that step to identify<br />
themselves, that they are out there on the edge. And<br />
more importantly, if they are not happy to be there, as<br />
some surely are, they are issuing a rallying call to join<br />
them, as there is surely safety in numbers.<br />
The way the people who operate in this cultural<br />
space are in actuality, however, very different from<br />
the theory. The more you look at this phenomena<br />
the more you realise that there is no one answer, but<br />
instead we are able to perceive a set of answers that<br />
make up a larger question. That question I believe, is<br />
along the lines of this: we have a culture, one which<br />
is straining at its edges. The more diverse the world<br />
becomes, or we perceive it to become, the more it<br />
pulls at its seams. The more we question it and pry<br />
at its secrets the more the stitches loosen. What we<br />
really want to know is, where do we go from here?<br />
The answer I think is found in this new interest in<br />
primitivism, and especially in the ways in which we<br />
can combine it with ideas of the future. �<br />
102<br />
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Review [published June 2009]<br />
Jorge Luis Borges: The Book Of Imaginary Beings<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change<br />
your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones<br />
is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry<br />
in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like<br />
‘Funes the Memorious’, ‘The Library of Babel’ and<br />
‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Borges explores the<br />
concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge,<br />
a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging<br />
paths of reality which make possibility itself endless.<br />
In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps<br />
unique in literature – the master poet-in-prose of the<br />
infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes<br />
within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dreamlike<br />
and factual, making the fantastical real, and the<br />
prosaic extraordinary. In ‘Pierre Menard, Author of<br />
the Quixote’, he describes a man re-writing Cervantes’<br />
work, word for word, without reading the original, and<br />
makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable,<br />
and beautiful. In ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ another<br />
world – one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure<br />
thought – floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia<br />
to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us ac-<br />
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cept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The<br />
highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality<br />
and perception are rendered malleable and human, the<br />
arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe.<br />
In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which<br />
make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of penning<br />
a compendium of descriptions of fantastical beings<br />
– dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an<br />
obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably<br />
be seen as treading water at best in most other authors,<br />
– and in the case of most other authors the accusation<br />
would probably be accurate. You can’t readily imagine<br />
James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales<br />
for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What<br />
could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work<br />
from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista<br />
on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of “he could<br />
write about anything and make it wonderful” – the old<br />
“I’d listen to him sing the phone book” cliché – for<br />
Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the<br />
format of a scholarly researched compendium allows<br />
him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowl-<br />
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edge and learning which pepper his writing, while the<br />
subject of the fantastic complements completely the<br />
strange insights which inform his vision.<br />
The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the<br />
unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salamander.<br />
What Borges brings to his description of these<br />
creatures, which many readers may think themselves<br />
already familiar with, is the learning which marks much<br />
of his best work (‘research’ is somehow an inadequate<br />
word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly.<br />
European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient<br />
Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric<br />
Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually<br />
surface and recede as the moment demands.<br />
Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated<br />
with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of<br />
medicinal qualities: “Buddhists affirm that Dragons<br />
are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many<br />
concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred<br />
cipher exists to express their exact number.”<br />
The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient<br />
Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded<br />
to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they<br />
fixed the intervals of the fiery bird’s visits as once every<br />
1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity<br />
vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn’t just lie<br />
down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into<br />
Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches.<br />
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These witches were also known as Norns or Fates, grim<br />
augurs of the future the memory of which survives in<br />
the weird sisters of Macbeth.<br />
References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius,<br />
and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men<br />
of the day considered all these ‘imaginary beings’ as<br />
‘real’, believed in every bit as much we today accept<br />
the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on television<br />
screens. These beings informed the landscape<br />
of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of<br />
history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who<br />
shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches,<br />
their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather<br />
more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house,<br />
the Harpies, who we learn “wielded weapons of gold<br />
– lightning – and milked the clouds” , all these dwelt<br />
in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense<br />
than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked<br />
among them.<br />
While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and<br />
fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and<br />
show us far more of the subjects than we could have<br />
imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with<br />
narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is<br />
Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4,000<br />
eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on<br />
the back of the great fish Bahamut, “All the seas in the<br />
world placed in one of the fish’s nostrils would be like<br />
104<br />
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a mustard seed placed in the desert”. Under Bahamut is<br />
water, and under the water darkness, “and beyond this<br />
men’s knowledge does not reach”. The uncanniness of<br />
cosmology is brought to us with a quiet aplomb, as it<br />
is with the “Fauna of Mirrors” where we learn that the<br />
people of Canton believed another hostile world was<br />
behind every reflective surface, the people of whom are<br />
enslaved into copying our actions for now, but whose<br />
turn to rise will come, and whose uprising will be<br />
heralded by … a rogue yellow fish you may see in the<br />
mirror that shouldn’t be there. That such a potentially<br />
risible, laughable notion instead haunts the memory is<br />
further testimony to Borges’ mastery.<br />
Occasionally the book has guest spots from other<br />
authors – mainly Kafka and C.S. Lewis – which, good<br />
as they are, simply serve as contrast to the particular visions<br />
of the grand editor. Elsewhere in the bestiary we<br />
meet Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel and Aniel, a four headed<br />
creature surrounded by rings full of eyes, as envisioned<br />
by the prophet Ezekiel. One of its heads is that of an<br />
ox, one of man, one of lion, and one of eagle, “each<br />
one went in the direction of its face, so imaginable as<br />
to be uncanny.” Borges is adept at describing things,<br />
which, in terms of physical human description, cannot<br />
be described. When H.P. Lovecraft does this, he horrifies.<br />
When Borges does it, he simply entrances.<br />
With all this talk of mystique and wonder, you<br />
could be forgiven for thinking this book a po-faced<br />
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thing. Not at all. Borges is always aware the things<br />
he describes are as ridiculous as they are sublime,<br />
and a wryness sometimes peers through. Of the<br />
strange visionary Swedenbourg, who wrote with incredible<br />
vividness of the celestial beings he claimed<br />
to know – “as the English are not very talkative,<br />
he fell into the habit of conversing with angels and<br />
Devils.” When the allegorical nature of some of the<br />
creatures is a little too heavy handed for his tastes, he<br />
is not above mocking it. (The hippogriff is the combination<br />
of a griffin and a horse which denotes the<br />
impossible – Luis notes the Greek scholar Servius<br />
somewhat milked this by inventing the ‘fact’ that<br />
griffins must hate horses). Sillier creatures like the<br />
Squonk, (of Aboriginal folklore, which cries to itself<br />
until its body disintegrates) appear with a mordant<br />
dryness. The entire ‘Fauna of the United States’ are<br />
of a somewhat facetious nature, such as the axehandle<br />
hound – shaped like an axe, and which eats only<br />
axes. But what Borges never does is pour contempt<br />
on the fantastical – he knows its importance too well.<br />
Borges knew that while the religions may be wrong<br />
in their claim to give us morality, they and their myths<br />
have more far more valid claim in giving us a sense<br />
of wonder, helping the impossible peer in, making<br />
life, rather than existence, possible. It is in no way a<br />
betrayal of rationalism to find a sense of transcendent<br />
mystery and awe in the Moslem Jinn (people<br />
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of fire, as angels are of light and men of earth), the<br />
Jewish Golem, (a kind of ancient clay android), or the<br />
angelic hordes of in the Christian-informed visions<br />
of Swedenbourg. They don’t exist, never have, and<br />
countless crimes have been committed in the names of<br />
the theologies which conjured them up. But these are<br />
beings without which the world of the mind, the world<br />
BUY Jorge Luis Borges books online from and<br />
we inhabit, would not exist. Part of Borges’ very real<br />
genius is to illuminate these corners of what makes us<br />
human, with a wisdom so acute it meets itself round<br />
full circle so as to appear childlike, an endless loop of<br />
wild possibility.<br />
Not bad for a book about dragons, witches and<br />
gnomes eh? No, he’s not bad this Borges. �<br />
106<br />
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Review [published December 2001]<br />
Angela Bourke: The Burning Of Bridget Cleary<br />
Robin Askew<br />
Enjoyed The Blair Witch Project? Then immerse yourself<br />
in this engrossing and exhaustively researched true<br />
story from late 19th-century Ireland. The facts of the<br />
case are relatively straightforward: in 1895, 26-year-old<br />
Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary.<br />
Local rumour claimed that she had been taken<br />
by fairies to their fort of Kylenagranagh, from where<br />
she would eventually emerge riding a white horse. But<br />
when her badly burned body was recovered from a shallow<br />
grave a week later, her husband Michael, father,<br />
aunt and four cousins were arrested. The subsequent<br />
trial made headlines even in the London press.<br />
According to contemporary newspaper reports,<br />
it emerged in court at nearby Clonmel that Michael<br />
Cleary had believed his ailing wife was a witch. He<br />
gave her herbs from a local herb doctor and then, with<br />
the aid of other male members of the household, held<br />
her over the kitchen fire and called upon her to say, in<br />
the name of God, that she was not his wife. Finally,<br />
she was stripped of her clothing, knocked to the floor,<br />
covered in paraffin oil and allowed to burn to death<br />
while being watched by eight relatives – six men and<br />
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two women. Some of them remonstrated with the husband,<br />
who insisted that it was not his wife who was<br />
burning but a witch, whom he confidently expected to<br />
disappear up the chimney. When this didn’t happen, he<br />
wrapped a sheet around the charred body and buried it<br />
in a dyke near the family home.<br />
There is, of course, a great deal more to this tragic<br />
tale than these stark details convey. Dublin-based<br />
academic Angela Bourke brilliantly sets the case in its<br />
social and political context, revealing its significance<br />
at the cusp of change between an older world of folklore<br />
and fairy-belief and the new age of literacy and<br />
industry. While Bridget and her husband were childless<br />
and newly prosperous, their jealous peers were not, and<br />
the instigator of her unpleasant demise was a toothless,<br />
limping, increasingly isolated patriarch whose waning<br />
power over the fearful countryfolk derived from<br />
his ample knowledge of fairy-forts, ghosts, and other<br />
supernatural malarkey.<br />
Equally significant in the reporting of the Cleary<br />
case was the ongoing Home Rule movement. The<br />
Unionist press seized on this outbreak of ‘barbarism’<br />
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as evidence of the locals’ lawlessness and consequent<br />
unsuitability for independence; elsewhere, it<br />
simply fanned the flames of crude anti-Irish racism.<br />
Bourke’s exemplary scholarship teases out many<br />
such strands from this horrific case, evincing a<br />
powerful empathy for all involved. Occasionally,<br />
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you may need to remind yourself that these people<br />
burned a woman alive, or stood around and watched<br />
while it happened, but by the time you put the book<br />
down, you at least have a greater understanding of<br />
how this gruesome event came to pass and why it<br />
still reverberates to this day. �<br />
108<br />
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Review [published April 1997]<br />
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine<br />
Jason Weaver<br />
Before his passport read “novelist”, Michael Bracewell<br />
learnt his trade on the first rush of British style magazines.<br />
Much of Bracewell’s work from the mid-80s<br />
could be found in Arena, sibling to The Face but with<br />
a considerably higher brow. Sadly, the magazine got<br />
crushed in the publishing stampede that has instead<br />
brought respectability to top shelf reading. After the<br />
breakdown-and-prozac cocktail of his last novel Saint<br />
Rachel – a moving meditation on mental distress<br />
– Bracewell has resumed his former cultural commentary.<br />
This time the canvas is broader. England Is<br />
Mine purports to have a thesis but is more a collection<br />
of essays masquerading as a whole, short stories rather<br />
than a novel. His subject is pop. Does this mean pop<br />
as in popular, Pop as in Art, or pop as in Top Of The?<br />
Well, Bracewell would argue all three. I’m not sure<br />
he’s right.<br />
He claims that domestic art of the 20th century is always<br />
fighting for its own piece of England: “The rebels<br />
in England’s Arcady … are defending the Arcadian<br />
values that they love, passionately, from what they recognise<br />
as abuse at the hands of self-serving tyrants and<br />
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their occupying armies.” According to Bracewell, this<br />
Arcady satisfies the “need within the psyche of Englishness<br />
to look back to an idealized past…” Nostalgia<br />
is apparently intrinsic to our national culture.<br />
The title of the book comes, presumably, from a line<br />
in The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’. Bracewell’s cause finds a<br />
strong ally in Morrissey, who sang “A rush and a push<br />
and the land that we stand on is ours”. Morrissey is the<br />
conscience of lost Arcady: beleaguered, revolutionary,<br />
pastoral and drenched in the perfume of the past.<br />
England Is Mine, however, wants to plot the entire<br />
century through these tinted spectacles. The opening<br />
chapter deals with the Culture And Anarchy paranoia<br />
of the new century and, in doing so, attempts to lay<br />
foundations. We drop in on Wilde and Waugh and Forster<br />
to see if they think Old England is dying. We take<br />
in a movie, a War and hear a few poems and songs. It<br />
isn’t always clear where we are going. I mean, who<br />
invited Enid Blyton to this party? Bracewell might be<br />
excellent on the fine details but his sense of overall<br />
design is rickety. Whenever his theme comes up, it<br />
seems frankly incidental.<br />
109<br />
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Surprisingly, this hardly matters. The book becomes<br />
fascinating, at least to this reader, once it puts the<br />
Penguin Modern Classics back on the shelf and turns<br />
on the stereo. In fact, Bracewell writes in such a way<br />
to make Art seem a mere rehearsal for pop’s Great<br />
Performance. Bracewell gives both time and energy to<br />
what he clearly loves the best – his record collection.<br />
What is most engaging about England Is Mine is<br />
Bracewell’s insistence on treating pop music as an<br />
explosive and pensive form, often most thoughtful precisely<br />
at its most physical. By the time the Mods arrive,<br />
Bracewell is really guzzling the gas. He casts them as<br />
smart Modernists rather than the retro-obsessed, tentwearing,<br />
hairdrier-riders of public imagination. The<br />
Mods are asking what others are afraid to:<br />
“The question, in fact, was a massive: ‘Who am I?’<br />
The male sensibility in English pop, as it built its muscles<br />
through Mod, was both a reaction against adolescent<br />
(even teenage) conformity, and a belief that pop could<br />
be a spiritual quest through the boredom and hostility<br />
of modern English life in search of self-knowledge.”<br />
Bracewell is right in there with his subject.<br />
The gulf between academia and getting down with<br />
The Kids is a whole language apart, which is why ‘quality’<br />
journalism often lacks credibility. It requires deftness<br />
to pull the trick without the cards all falling from<br />
your sleeve. Bracewell manages it better than most.<br />
He rarely attempts to score points with the cred police,<br />
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nor does he bring his laptop to the disco. Reynolds,<br />
Hebdige and Marcus, on the other hand, those other<br />
professors of pop, make their appeal to the eggheads. It<br />
doesn’t often translate. When Bracewell’s taste and wit<br />
compound, the results can be dee-liteful. Of The Cure<br />
he says, “The soul is not so much bared as reduced to<br />
wandering around in its dressing gown.”<br />
By dealing with relatively unacknowledged areas<br />
of ‘prole art’, the book proposes a convincing alternative<br />
to the received canon, pop or otherwise. Mark E<br />
Smith’s output is seen as an oeuvre and reverence is<br />
paid to largely forgotten individuals like John Cooper<br />
Clarke. As such, the approach fresh and fruitful. The<br />
entirety doesn’t quite convince the jury, but the mixture<br />
of art forms does have the advantage of comparing pop<br />
with literature favourably, a rare admission.<br />
There are a few factual errors, the most ironic of<br />
which is accidentally renaming Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look<br />
Back In Anger’ as ‘Sally Can Wait’. Noel Gallagher’s<br />
tempering of the Angry Young Man could have become<br />
the lynch pin in a discussion of Britpop’s conservatism<br />
and the oversight is uncharacteristic of Bracewell’s<br />
normal attentiveness.<br />
Unfortunately, England Is Mine closes as weakly<br />
as it began. The 90s are telescoped into a single<br />
chapter. The passion that illuminates the finest parts<br />
of the book has withered. The verdict is that the<br />
needle has stuck, repeating the same phrase with<br />
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decreasing clarity. We exist in a kind of shopping<br />
Arcady in which Bracewell consigns the 90s as “an<br />
age of cultural sampling”, the victory of the past<br />
over the future: “there is a sense in our archival<br />
condition, as nostalgic consumers scavenging for<br />
bargain rarities of the past, that a car boot sale can<br />
double as a faculty of Cultural Studies.” This is a<br />
mistake; the future is created from the ruins of the<br />
past and every music that Bracewell celebrates has<br />
hastened that destruction. It is not nostalgia but the<br />
reverse, a hatred of the past that attempts to confine<br />
us. We want to break it into little pieces and build<br />
anew. This is as true for our decade as any other.<br />
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From The Who’s reworking of the Union Jack to<br />
The Chemical Brothers’ smash-and-grab approach<br />
to sonic material this has been pop’s prime attraction.<br />
At its best, pop (and Pop) has no reverence for<br />
the past and is hell-bent on the future. In this sense,<br />
pop will always be intrinsically Modernist.<br />
Michael Bracewell’s book reminds us that England<br />
really is ours for the taking and, for that, it is a stimulating<br />
read which does ample justice to its subject. It<br />
is possible for a book to fail utterly in its designs yet<br />
still be a thorough success. I found England Is Mine<br />
an inspiration. To demand anything more would just<br />
be greed. �<br />
111<br />
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Review [published March 2005]<br />
Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn<br />
Ben Granger<br />
I judge newspaper TV reviewers by a very high standard<br />
indeed. Why the hell shouldn’t I? Let’s face it, this<br />
is the dream job any human being can have. Sitting,<br />
scratching your mardy arse whilst staring out the flickers<br />
that would bombard your face anyway and getting<br />
paid for it. Jesus! They have to be very entertaining<br />
indeed to offset the sickening pang of envy I get while<br />
reading one. They rarely live up.<br />
For a few years Jim Shelley aka Tapehead in The<br />
Guardian Guide managed to fit the bill. He was witty,<br />
acerbic, mostly accurate, and excreted his metaphysical<br />
bile duct in a pleasingly over-the-top manner. When<br />
he left in 2000 I was deeply worried (what a dangerous<br />
existence I lead!) Which safe trendoid would cast their<br />
yawnsome ‘wry eye’ over events now? But thankfully<br />
they didn’t choose the safe option, they chose Charlie<br />
Brooker. And he made Shelley look like an amalgam of<br />
Dennis Norden and Jenny Bond.<br />
Put aside any justifiable lit-snobbery you may have in<br />
thinking that a collection of TV reviews cannot make a<br />
great book. In 99% of cases you’d be right, but not here.<br />
Brooker’s is a glorious, venomous vision which blasts<br />
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acidly over modern society with TV as its launch-pad.<br />
Brooker’s writing persona is self-deprecating,<br />
neurotic, unpretentious, and above all seriously pissed<br />
off at the televisual shite shovelled his way. He<br />
has a real genius for brief, cutting description which<br />
highlights its victim as expertly as it destroys them.<br />
In the main, his scatological, violent epigrams simply<br />
speak for themselves. Rarely as gut-churningly<br />
offensive as his XXX rated old web site TV Go Home<br />
they are probably more effective and hilarious for their<br />
relative subtlety (we’re talking very relative here.) Try<br />
these for size:<br />
– On The Generation Game: “Jim scampers onstage,<br />
winking and twitching like a man with a fish-hook<br />
stuck in his glans, and immediately launches into a<br />
comic pantomime of such awkward, ill-conceived<br />
clunkiness, you can’t help but wonder if its been<br />
scripted by a human with a laptop or a dog with a<br />
Fisher Price Activity Centre.”<br />
– On Davina McCall: “It’s like her brain’s been<br />
spooned out and replaced by a rotating glitter-ball.”<br />
– On a Steps TV special: “Ho ho ho, we all love Steps<br />
112<br />
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really don’t we? No. They’re not harmless fun; they’re<br />
slapdash trash. H is not a lovable scamp: he’s a blank<br />
eyed glove puppet with half the charisma of a discarded<br />
ping-pong bat rotating slowly in a pig trough full of<br />
rainwater. This represents untertainment at its finest<br />
and will be warmly welcome by anyone who regularly<br />
sits in front of the box with a loaded shotgun in their<br />
mouth, trying to pluck up the courage.”<br />
And, more obscurely, on finding a DVD boxed<br />
set of Planet Of The Apes with Charlton Heston disconsolate<br />
before the Statue of Liberty on the cover:<br />
“What next? A special edition of Seven in a commemorative<br />
case mocked up to resemble Gwynneth<br />
Paltrow’s severed head?”<br />
Childish? Yes. Hilarious? Well I think so. If it was all<br />
fantasy disembowelling of nob-ends in colourful language<br />
Brooker could be dismissed as a one-trick pony,<br />
even if that trick is astonishingly amusing. But there’s a<br />
real vision at work here; stinging, jaded eyes surveying<br />
a Boschean hellscape of demonic coke-crazed execs<br />
ladling poisonous gruel down the mouths of uncomplaining<br />
dribble-mouthed buffoons.<br />
And yet for all the apparent misanthropy there’s a<br />
cornered and bruised altruism at work here too. Brooker<br />
recently wrote Nathan Barley with the immortal<br />
Chris Morris (the best thing on telly despite what the<br />
nay-sayers nay-say) but while the latter is the greater<br />
comedic and satirical talent (not just of Brooker, but<br />
BUY Charlie Brooker books online from and<br />
of everyone) Brooker actually has a humanity about<br />
him seemingly absent in our latter-day Swift. For all<br />
his violent imagery, a longstanding vein in his work is a<br />
contempt for the kind of sniggering nihilists who watch<br />
genuine suffering for kicks. This can perhaps be seen<br />
best in his dissection of some feeble ‘comedy awards’<br />
programme door-stepping Les Dennis about his breakup<br />
with his wife:<br />
“Perhaps I’m a wuss but I think harassing the<br />
heartbroken for funnies is disgraceful. Clearly the<br />
producer, Dan Clapton, believes that human suffering<br />
equals big guffaws, so if anyone has any first-hand<br />
accounts of him having his heart broken, send me the<br />
juicy details and I’ll reprint them here so we can have<br />
a good hearty ho-ho together. After all, it’s just a bit of<br />
fun, right Dan? Right?”<br />
Of course it helps that I agree with most of what<br />
he says but even when describing his affection for<br />
David Dickinson (ugh!), Monarch Of The Glen (gah!)<br />
and, worst of all Friends (arrrggghhhhhhhhh!) he’s<br />
still funny. I dare say he’d have a few words to say<br />
about my soft spot for Judge John Deed too. We’re<br />
all entitled to like some shite in our lives. Indeed,<br />
it’s Brooker’s recognition of this, the simultaneous<br />
fascination and revulsion he has for the likes of Pop<br />
Idol and Big Brother that makes it very far from some<br />
highbrow denunciation of TV as a whole. This is a<br />
guy who loves the possibilities of what television has<br />
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to offer, and an enjoyment for even the more throwaway<br />
aspects of the medium. The Hulkish anger at so<br />
much of what he sees is akin to that of a neglected<br />
lover. How dare his great love try to fob him of with<br />
such crap, not well made crap but the likes of The<br />
Generation Game which “drops off the low end of the<br />
stupidity spectrum, to a point where the human brain<br />
is incapable of interpreting its signal”?<br />
I have only two criticisms of this excellent book.<br />
One: unlike the columns from which they are taken<br />
they are each headed by one of the most memorable<br />
BUY Charlie Brooker books online from and<br />
phrases from the piece; “A fascist chorus line”, “An aging<br />
thundercat”, “A pastel sketch of a lonely duckling”<br />
“Do spiders live alone?” This has the effect of spoiling<br />
the surprise within and is uncalled for, like trailers that<br />
spell out the plot of a film. Two: I’ve read all of them<br />
before and remember them all anyway. But unless<br />
you’re a sad bastard Guardian reader who has stored<br />
all your old Guides together in a handy binder; you<br />
should still get this to have the brilliance of the writing<br />
to hand. And if you’ve not read him before; just buy it;<br />
you’re missing out. �<br />
114<br />
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Review [published December 2006]<br />
Charles Bukowski: Born Into This<br />
Pedro Blas Gonzalez<br />
Charles Bukowski was a solitary man and a courageous<br />
writer. Without daddy’s money to deliver him into high<br />
places or the protective cloak of a godfather, Hank<br />
forged his way through the world with the sweat of his<br />
brow and the calluses on his hands.<br />
Perhaps the greatest compliment that his readers can<br />
afford him is that of being a self-made man. Publishing<br />
houses, literary magazines – or otherwise – and<br />
academic circles are all rife with opportunists, an<br />
unlimited supply of self-promoters, bigots and moral<br />
Lilliputians. These are all fine examples of the relative<br />
and selective relativism that defines the radicalism of<br />
late-modernity. Bukowski felt the wrath of all of these<br />
entities throughout his life. But he had talent, and the<br />
rest, as they say is history.<br />
Bukowski’s story is one of genuine sentiment, determination<br />
and a stubborn will that refused to become<br />
objectified by the resistance that the world offers all true<br />
visionaries. He went at it alone. An underground, cult<br />
writer who did not readily attain popular acclaim until<br />
the last decade of his life, Bukoswki’s body of work is a<br />
testament to the working man – not the straw one that is<br />
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and<br />
prostituted as a ‘theoretical’ entity – but rather one that<br />
like Eric Hoffer, actually worked for a living. He was<br />
born in Andernach, Germany in 1920.<br />
When asked when he realized he was a writer, he<br />
answered: “Nobody ever realizes they’re a writer. They<br />
only think they’re a writer.” He began writing when<br />
he was 13 years of age. He continues, “I just found a<br />
pencil and I started writing. And I filled this notebook<br />
full of words. This was the first time the mechanism<br />
exposed itself.”<br />
Bukowski: Born Into This is a documentary that<br />
follows the trajectory of the writer’s life until his<br />
death in 1994. Directed by John Dullaghan, what we<br />
encounter in this film is an unadulterated and edgy<br />
look at the writer of Post Office, Women, Factotum,<br />
and Hot Water Music.<br />
The film follows Bukowski through the 1940s as he<br />
travelled the country gathering life experiences, through<br />
his initial attempt at journalism in LA City College, his<br />
poetry readings at San Francisco’s City Lights Poets<br />
Theater, the women in his life and culminating with the<br />
final months of his life. We witness Bukowski reading<br />
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a poem that touches any sentient person’s nerves: “It’s<br />
not the large things that send a man to a madhouse.<br />
Death, he is ready for, or, murder, incest, robbery, fire,<br />
flood. No. It’s the continuing series of small tragedies<br />
that send a man to a madhouse…”<br />
Whatever we come to think of the man, he readily<br />
acknowledges that the best compliment he can receive<br />
is that he was “a good duker.” Taking the exigencies of<br />
life in the chin, he never backed down from adversity.<br />
In the end, we are reminded that, “What Matters Most<br />
is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.” This is the<br />
true-to-life wisdom of a man who lived out a very difficult<br />
dream, and one who never came close to benefiting<br />
from a silver spoon.<br />
The film takes the major events of Bukowski’s life<br />
and makes them bare. The viewer is treated to the<br />
story of his first published works in Harlequin <strong>Magazine</strong>,<br />
its editor, Barbara Fry later becoming his wife.<br />
We also witness the hard times, how he lived on one<br />
candy bar per day. We come upon Bukowski’s resolve<br />
never to quit even though he encountered rejection<br />
after rejection. Consider his wisdom as displayed in<br />
his poem ‘Oh, Yes’: “There are worse things than being<br />
alone but it often takes decades to realize this …<br />
and there’s nothing worse than too late.”<br />
We also laugh along with Bukowski’s stubborn<br />
refusal to be anything but his own man. His struggles<br />
with the now well-known US Post Office job that he<br />
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and<br />
took in 1952, his having to work evenings, and his<br />
will to write during the morning. Admirable too, is his<br />
relentless will – sending out poems daily and getting<br />
rejected – while he earned his living as a truck driver.<br />
Bukowski was rich in worldly knowledge. Consider<br />
his well-adjusted, don’t-tell-me-bedtime-stories<br />
understanding evident in the following lines: “There<br />
is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the<br />
average human being to supply any given army on<br />
any given day. And the best at murder are those who<br />
preach against it. And the best at hate are those who<br />
preach love. And the best at war – finally – are those<br />
who preach peace…”<br />
Bukowski had very little patience for laziness and<br />
people who do not meet the difficulties and demands<br />
of life head on. He disliked hippies because of their<br />
bourgeois, pampered refusal to get their hands soiled<br />
by work. His upbringing during the depression had<br />
given him a sound appreciation of the toil that people<br />
who do not cut corners undergo throughout their lives.<br />
Bukowski suffered a great deal from the resistance<br />
offered him by naysayers. His Notes Of A Dirty Old<br />
Man columns first appeared in a little magazine called<br />
Open City. When this folded in 1969, he continued his<br />
column in the LA Free Press.<br />
Finally achieving critical and financial success in<br />
the last decade of his life – his major break coming<br />
at the hands of John Martin, publisher of Black<br />
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Sparrow Press – we are privy to the life changes<br />
that the older writer underwent. No longer as tense<br />
and defensive as he once was, Bukowski now seems<br />
more introverted, the wisdom that he earned now<br />
being something that he kept to himself. At the end<br />
of the documentary we do not see the effects of his<br />
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alcohol-induced profanity any longer, as that persona<br />
is slowly put to rest. In the end we watch him dealing<br />
with leukaemia, which eventually took his life – an<br />
episode that his readers will easily recognize in the<br />
interplay that takes place between “lady death” and<br />
the protagonist in his last novel, Pulp. �<br />
117<br />
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Review [published December 2004]<br />
Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Julie Burchill: donchajusluver??!!<br />
Well, yes, actually. There once was a time when I<br />
agreed with all my Graun reading friends “that bigoted<br />
bitch” should be humanely shot, but it seems a very<br />
long while ago now. My obsession with her venomous<br />
vitriol went from fascinated horror to perverse admiration<br />
in the time it took to squeak “public hanging” in a<br />
Bristol accent. Every Saturday when I dutifully bought<br />
my Graun it was, without fail, to her page I turned<br />
first. Whilst my comrades sang “ding-dong the witch<br />
is dead” when she left last year, I felt Id lost a limb, an<br />
itchy, scabby limb perhaps but a part of me nonetheless.<br />
I wasn’t going to follow her to The Times though.<br />
Let’s not go nuts here.<br />
Now I’m not one to “admire the candour” of ‘politically<br />
incorrect’ columnists as a rule. Watching Richard<br />
Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Taki<br />
being sodomised by chimpanzees whilst devouring<br />
the bloated corpses of Paul Johnson and Simon Heffer<br />
at gunpoint would be my dream reality TV viewing.<br />
I’m an overpaid bigot, get me out of here! So why<br />
my weak-kneed ardour for a woman unafraid to sing<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
the praises of history’s greatest monsters (Thatcher<br />
and Stalin) whilst occasionally drawing the ire of the<br />
Commission for Racial Equality?<br />
The short answer is the sheer energy, insight and wit<br />
amongst all the shit.<br />
Reading one of Julie’s better columns is to ride the<br />
rapids. A violent tug of agreement here, a buffet sideways<br />
into the realms of entertaining irrelevance there,<br />
recoiling at the scathing extremism whilst simultaneously<br />
entranced at its vicious and shameless perversity.<br />
And along the way, just occasionally finding something<br />
you may agree with that you never thought of before.<br />
And yes, I do love a good wind-up merchant. Noone<br />
can match her for sheer vicious spite. When she’s<br />
massacring the vacuous world of celebrity it reminds<br />
me of the old Day Today headline “Crazed Wolves In<br />
Store A Bad Mistake Admits Mothercare.” And for<br />
all the knee-jerk reaction, I was amazed to find how<br />
frequently her targets deserved everything (or at least<br />
nearly everything) they got.<br />
The bourgeoisie, still dehumanising the workingclass,<br />
but cloaking their exploitation under a silky<br />
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Benneton-shroud of faux-progress. The ludicrous<br />
irritancy of pontificating film stars. The moral, hypocritical<br />
black hole of most journalism. The spineless<br />
and simpering betrayal of New Labour and the ‘post<br />
feminists’ (offering to remove their clitoris and voting<br />
rights if they found the new era of relative equality<br />
so awful.) She’d left most of her pro-Thatcher phase<br />
behind by the time she’d gone to the Graun; this was a<br />
brutal patriot-Commie bruiser. I found myself punching<br />
the air in agreement (metaphorically of course, I<br />
am a Graun reader after all), overjoyed that she’d hit<br />
the nail on the head with far greater accuracy than her<br />
more measured colleagues.<br />
Of course I still strongly disagreed with vast<br />
amounts of what she said; the death penalty, Israel,<br />
Ireland, invading Iraq, paedophiles and the talent of<br />
Gareth Gates springing most immediately to mind.<br />
But even then my perceptions were challenged and<br />
above all I was entertained. She could even ignorantly<br />
defame my idols George Orwell and Mike Leigh<br />
and I’d still lap it up. When she went into perversity<br />
overdrive, calling for public hanging, and claiming<br />
suicides should buck their bloody ideas up I just found<br />
the middle-class outrage of those taking the bait on<br />
the letters pages hilarious (bringing to mind one of her<br />
classic put-downs “now, before you get out your pink<br />
Forever Friends notepaper.”).<br />
Basically, violently agreeing with about 40% of what<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
she said and reeling at the rest was a damn sight more<br />
edifying than vaguely nodding at 60% of what Polly<br />
Toynbee puts out. I don’t read her Times columns,<br />
and by all accounts she’s gone into manic pro-war,<br />
extreme Zionist overdrive now, which even I might<br />
find too much. But when I hear about her typically<br />
savage dissection of the loathsome neo-snobbery of<br />
those sniffing at “chavs” I still think “that’s my Julie!”<br />
with a warm glow.<br />
When it comes to her books though, even a fan such<br />
as myself remains a sceptic. There was no way I was<br />
going to read her hagiographies of Princess Di and<br />
Beckham, no matter what clever class-conscious leaps<br />
she was doing to laud her unworthy heroes.<br />
And the fiction? I once read a chapter of Ambition<br />
and found it pretty awful, an unconvincing English<br />
take on Dallas and Dynasty, neither of which I liked in<br />
the first place. I actually picked up Sugar Rush, Julie’s<br />
lesbian-driven “first novel aimed at a teenage audience”<br />
as a kind of aversion therapy. This is a woman who<br />
now claims to support George Bush for God’s sake. I<br />
needed to quell my ongoing crush for her perversity.<br />
Surely this rubbish would put me off for good?<br />
Sugar Rush tells the tale of 15-year-old Kim, a<br />
middle-class girl at a private school, who is forced<br />
into the nearby rough-as-shite comprehensive due to<br />
the financial hardship of her stuffy dad who’s been left<br />
holding the kids by her feckless mother, herself still<br />
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trying to live her teens in her 40s.<br />
Left behind by her hard-nosed friend “Saint”, Kim<br />
falls under the thrall of the head hard-bitch at the new<br />
comp, Maria Sweet, aka “Sugar”. Sugar is rough as hell<br />
and live as wires, and drags the prissy yet uncomplaining<br />
Kim into her world of ecstasy, vodka, dance music<br />
and sarky-faced rebellion, offering her a tang of freedom<br />
she’s never tasted before. Doubt-ridden, fucked up<br />
Kim falls for her sexually as well as spiritually. Their<br />
relationship crashes up and down, side-to-side on the<br />
winds of teenage abandon. But can such a bliss-ridden<br />
union of opposites last?<br />
What strikes you while reading this is that Julie can<br />
only write one way, and that every word in Sugar Rush,<br />
no matter who’s speaking it, is very much her own.<br />
Indeed the three main characters are a split triumvirate<br />
of Jules herself, every bit as cute as the ones in the<br />
Catholicism and Freudianism she so loathes (actually I<br />
don’t know she hates Freud, I’m just guessing).<br />
Kim is the shy, intelligent, doubting, deep, wry<br />
side; Sugar the spirit of wild working class abandon<br />
that Julie so admires; while mum Stella is the shallow,<br />
formerly working-class but lavish spending strumpet<br />
who thinks of no-one but herself and has abandoned<br />
her kids, the very demonic caricature of Julie herself<br />
the Daily Mail laid on her. Believe me, I’m not playing<br />
slap-dash Raj Persaud here (that being a tautology<br />
anyway); it’s pretty damn plain.<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
All the familiar themes from her columns crop up,<br />
sometimes down to the same wording. The sanctimonious<br />
futility of well-meaning liberalism (the<br />
private school and the comp come together in farcical<br />
‘exchange’ sessions, a pseudy drama troupe resonant<br />
of the one from The League Of Gentleman displaying<br />
to braying teens the evils of homophobia); the sad<br />
atavism of ‘the family dinner-table’ and its depressing<br />
middle-class accoutrements (the means by which her<br />
sad dad tries to hold the family together); the hypocrisy<br />
of anti-racists who hate the poor (ex-best friend Saint<br />
is a bourgeois black who despises “white-trash” Sugar<br />
with a passion); the joys and contradictions of lesbianism,<br />
higher education being for losers, the fetish for<br />
Soviet-Army uniforms (an art project of Kim’s gone<br />
wrong) … Christ, she even manages to shoe-horn in<br />
her newfound passion for Lutheranism (don’t ask…)<br />
The result, is, I’m afraid to say, a lot of fun. Yes it’s<br />
tacky and obvious at times, and yes both the dialogue<br />
and thoughts in the book really do stretch credulity<br />
occasionally too, ringing pretty false as realism. This<br />
is Julie talking, and no-one talks like that, not even<br />
Julie in real life. The over-excitable metaphors are<br />
endearing and evocative at times, but sometimes they<br />
really make you cringe.<br />
But you know, much to my regret, I’m not a teenage<br />
girl; and that’s the audience for this book. And I really<br />
do think they’ll love it, like the young mum I saw<br />
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avidly reading it on the bus the other day (I’d better<br />
stop there, lest Julie lead a misguided anti-paedo lynch<br />
mob against me.) The thing about Julie’s voice is that<br />
it is indeed perennially adolescent, and this suits the<br />
book perfectly. She still seems to be a lost teen aching<br />
to shock the grown-ups.<br />
Much has been made of the “explicit content” of<br />
this book (not least by the cover), but in reality there’s<br />
very little muck to be had here (there is one scene of<br />
group sex, but nothing is described). But she brings the<br />
bitchiness, the longing, the loneliness, the SHOUTING<br />
to make your point that are all part of the teenage condition<br />
to life very well.<br />
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I won’t spoil the ending, but I must say I find it a<br />
pretty terrible cop-out by Julie’s standards. A triumph of<br />
middle-class safety against the working-class ‘other’.<br />
You traitor Julie! What would Uncle Joe say?! But it<br />
is I’m afraid to say … sweet, indeed Kim’s whole tale<br />
resonates a certain empathy which brings a warm glow<br />
to even to this jaded heart.<br />
So, once again, I’ve been won over. What can this<br />
evil woman, this “sociopath” and “moral cretin” (her<br />
words) do to finally put me off her? Defend the images<br />
of torture in Abu Ghraib? Oh dear, I’ve just heard she’s<br />
already done that. Time for more soul-searching you<br />
bad, bad boy. �<br />
121<br />
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Interview [published June 2005]<br />
Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie<br />
Ben Granger collides with Julie Burchill over several bottles of wine to seek<br />
out the dreadful truth on chavs, Stalin, Ariel Sharon and Morrissey<br />
“Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint”<br />
runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancastrian<br />
abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest<br />
shit-stirring iconic hack of our times, I wasn’t so much<br />
afraid of Julie Burchill not living up to her reputation as<br />
living up to it too much. Would she be gentle with me?<br />
If Julie needs an introduction, it’s tough knowing<br />
where to start. Running away from her working-class<br />
Bristol childhood at the age of 17 to scribble speeddriven<br />
venom for the NME at the height of punk,<br />
marrying and deserting Tony Parsons prior to queening<br />
it over the Groucho journo set, skipping gaily from<br />
highly paid column to spiky column in a variety of<br />
newspapers across the land. Enraging the Left with her<br />
hard-line anti-liberalism and some-time Thatcher worship,<br />
the Right with her brazen pro-Soviet Communism<br />
and hatred of the bourgeoisie, and everyone with her<br />
particular and peculiar blend of narcissism, iconoclasm<br />
and rudeness. Leaving second husband Cosmo Landesman<br />
for an affair with Charlotte Raven, subsequently<br />
shacking up with Charlotte’s younger brother to whom<br />
she is now married. Etcetera etcetera.<br />
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There’s no time for a biog here, but suffice to say<br />
my longstanding admiration for the deliriously violent<br />
punch of her writing, often despite myself, was why I<br />
found myself here on the day. No I don’t agree with a<br />
tonnes of what she says, but for me she has obtained<br />
“Benefit of Clergy”, a phrase Orwell used about Dalí<br />
(even though Julie hates Orwell too: worst offence in the<br />
world in my book). This basically means offensiveness<br />
is to some extent excused by how well it’s delivered,<br />
and what’s behind it. But mainly how it’s delivered. It’s<br />
what separates Jerry Sadowitz from Jim Davidson, and<br />
South Park from the Sunday Sport.<br />
Julie’s profile is higher now than for many a year after<br />
finally breaking into the previously shunned medium of<br />
TV. A Channel 4 adaptation of her lesbian teen-scream<br />
novel Sugar Rush will be screened later this year, whilst<br />
her typically pro-prole, contrary and acidly delivered<br />
defence of the much maligned phenomenon of Chavs<br />
on the eponymous Sky One documentary last February<br />
slung a Molotov cocktail amongst the dinner party set<br />
once again.<br />
The journey down South is made all the more<br />
122<br />
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surreal for me by being stuck on the last leg in the<br />
train from Euston to Brighton in the next carriage to<br />
our glorious leader Anthony Blair, a month before<br />
his phyrric election victory, who graciously smirks<br />
over when I take a snap of him. I can’t stand the guy<br />
but little plebby me feels like Alice In Famousland.<br />
Weird, weird. I get to wander for too short a time<br />
round the rather beautiful town of Brighton (never<br />
before visited) with its poignantly derelict pier, until<br />
finally getting the cab round to her spacious detached<br />
home on the Hove border. Quick fag, deep breath,<br />
down the huge garden into the valley of whatsits.<br />
Julie answers the door with an imperious handshake<br />
as she invites me to the lair. “You’re Ben? You must<br />
come in,” intones the famous high-pitched quickfire yet<br />
lilting Bristol burr. She’s half the size she was two years<br />
back and looks lovely in her black and white ensemble.<br />
I’d heard she was a nervy character around strangers,<br />
but whilst her initial demeanour is slightly distant, she<br />
is clearly at pains to put me at ease, even introducing me<br />
to her fellow guests with the unnervingly gallant “This<br />
is Ben Granger, the great writer from <strong>Spike</strong> <strong>Magazine</strong>.”<br />
(Fuckin ‘ell!)<br />
The guests are Gary Mulholland, music journalist<br />
and author of This Is Uncool, Zoe Williams from The<br />
Guardian (both in capacity of friends rather than interviewers),<br />
her teenage son Jack, and her cleaner (and<br />
bestest friend the world) Nadia. The Burchill abode<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
has a brash décor of pink walls and tiger skin couches<br />
which mirrors its owner exquisitely, as does the louche<br />
sprinkling of bottles, ash-trays and smoke. Oh yes, and<br />
the small Israeli flag atop the mantelpiece, given her<br />
oft-avowed Zionism. Whilst I get my MP3 recorder<br />
complete with my son’s kiddies mike together, I mention<br />
my fellow train traveller which gets the surprising<br />
response: “God, he’s sexy, innee? You’re a man, you<br />
wouldn’t understand.” I also mention how attractive<br />
I found Brighton’s bohemian Trafalgar Street. “God<br />
I never go there. Full of dossers.” I mention a couple<br />
of pubs I’ve stopped in (not mentioning I was there to<br />
steady my awe-struck nerves) “I don’t really go to pubs<br />
much to be honest with you. I don’t want to be the mad<br />
woman sitting in the corner!”<br />
Generous host to a fault, Julie even sends Zoe and<br />
Nadia to the offie when I mention I’d like red wine<br />
which isn’t on offer. When I finally fidgetilly set up she<br />
directs myself and Gary to the house gym- now disused<br />
and decorated by a large Cuban flag representing the<br />
other great love of her ideological life, Communism<br />
– to conduct the interview. Sitting cross legged on the<br />
floor we embark.<br />
So , how was writing for teenagers different from<br />
writing her novels for adults?<br />
“Well, I’ll be honest with you, the first novel I wrote<br />
for adults was very successful but the other two went<br />
right down the toilet. So it wasn’t like a choice to write<br />
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for young people, I just thought no-one’s sitting around<br />
waiting to hear from me in the adult world so let’s inflict<br />
it on some other poor …”<br />
Yes, but were you consciously writing in a different way?<br />
“Oh yeah, yeah! You don’t have to try so hard do<br />
you? There’s a certain reason why people who 20 years<br />
ago would have been writing literary novels, like Gary,<br />
like myself, aren’t doing it now. I think I’d fall at the<br />
first hurdle. But my immediacy, my lack of education<br />
which stop me from doing what Ian McEwan or [mutters<br />
scornfully] Martin Amis do is part of what we love<br />
about ourselves, and what suited a book like this … it<br />
was very pleasurable and it felt very normal to do.”<br />
Given your typically hard-line on paedophilia, did<br />
you ever feel there was a tension in writing a lesbian<br />
novel about 15-year-old girls? I’d heard there was more<br />
sex scenes in it initially before they were cut out?<br />
“Naaah there was never any real sex in it because<br />
I thought that would be unbearably pervy and a total<br />
contradiction of everything I stood for. Don’t go there.<br />
Though for the TV show apparently she’s older, like<br />
21 so they can make it a bit more hardcore. Is that a<br />
horrible thing to say? No if it was kids it would be horrible<br />
wouldn’t it? I’ve had no input whatsoever in the<br />
programme so far but next week I’m going on-set. And<br />
I’m looking forward to it.”<br />
The drama is still to come but the documentary has<br />
already been screened. Chavs was a classic Burchill<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
column brought to life; one-sided, contrary, mixing<br />
pop culture and high sociological comment with<br />
humour and venom. Its subject was the eponymous;<br />
the baseball capped, Burberry clad, gold jewellery<br />
bedecked folk devils that walk down every high street<br />
in Britain. The butt of every middle-class sneery joke.<br />
As per often Julie has bloody mindedly found a devilish<br />
cause to defend; a hate-figure for snooty Telegraph<br />
toffs, Mail paranoiac patio-sniffers and Guardian<br />
liberal snoots alike.<br />
Asked about why this issue was so close to her heart,<br />
the full ferocity of her anger really takes off. The turbo<br />
Bristol voice takes off, hard in vowels, soft in tone,<br />
ruthless in content.<br />
“Now, I’m a very idle person and I’m very relaxed,<br />
and my ideal dream is just to lie on the sofa all day<br />
eating chocolates. But when I do get agitated and when<br />
I do get a bee in my bonnet I DO go all the fucking<br />
way. When I was told about things like Chavscum [the<br />
website dedicated to promoting hatred of all things<br />
“chav”] which I hadn’t known about, and the abuse<br />
they were putting out, I’m afraid I saw red. It seemed<br />
to me that the kind of people who are doing things like<br />
Chavscum ten years ago would have been racists, and<br />
would have been that loathsome and that disgusting.<br />
Now they can’t be racists because of the CRE and certain<br />
laws that have been passed – quite rightly. But the<br />
white working class are now the only people you can<br />
124<br />
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fucking hate with impunity, and I felt I just had to raise<br />
my fucking voice.”<br />
It should be stressed there is no editorial trickery<br />
involved in Julie’s broadsides here. This is simply how<br />
she talks. Very, very fast too. The only other person I<br />
can think whose words race along as fast as they think<br />
is Patrick Moore.<br />
“It’s so tempting to be lured in by the defence of<br />
humour and irony. One of the worst things you can say<br />
to somebody is they’ve got no sense of humour. If you<br />
look at the personal columns, you’ll often see people<br />
admitting that they’re ugly or not bright or fat – no-one<br />
will ever admit to having no sense of humour. It’s the<br />
final insult, the final thing no-one will admit to. But I<br />
didn’t want to get the fucking joke. If there was a joke<br />
I didn’t want to get it, just like I didn’t want to get it<br />
when my parents were watching Love Thy Neighbour<br />
and thought it was funny to call someone “nig-nog.”<br />
Instinctively, I just thought it was disgusting. To me<br />
laughter and great humour comes from taking on people<br />
above you on the social scale.”<br />
The documentary featured an extremely ill-tempered<br />
spat with TV “personality” Vanessa Feltz, who<br />
opined that her very worthwhile existence should not<br />
be sullied by having to pay her taxes in supporting<br />
welfare payments to such dread creatures. Really<br />
though Julie, you were great friends after the cameras<br />
stopped weren’t you?<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
“I just wanted to punch her fucking face in! Listen,<br />
I’ve got a friend who thinks al Quaeda have ‘got a<br />
point’, I can sit with him and listen to that shit, I can<br />
listen to taxi drivers being racist. But when I sit with<br />
a middle-class person going on, I don’t care if it is a<br />
kind of prejudice, I just wanna kill the fuckers and I<br />
think you’ve got no right to say a fucking word, you<br />
just don’t know fucking anything about anything. To<br />
me, it’s not about race, there’s the middle class and<br />
the working class; us against them. Well, there’s three<br />
groups really but that’s the upper class who don’t count<br />
cos they’re fucking retarded … but put a middle-class<br />
person in front of me, I don’t care if they’re left-wing or<br />
right-wing, talk to them for five minutes, and the filthy<br />
fucking snob in them will come out.”<br />
Even when angry she is increasingly at ease, and<br />
warm in her demeanour. She doesn’t laugh much but<br />
does grin mischievously from time to time. Possibly<br />
libellous comments about La Feltz follow. But what<br />
would you say to people who claim that chavs are only<br />
a part of the working-class, and that criticising the<br />
former is not criticising the latter?<br />
“People say that to me trying to be nice, I always<br />
say ‘Don’t do me any fucking favours!’ When someone<br />
tries to differentiate between the deserving and<br />
the undeserving working-class the black heart of me<br />
cleaves towards the undeserving ones. My father was<br />
a member of the deserving working-class, he ended<br />
125<br />
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up coughing his fucking lungs out for three years and<br />
dying of tumours because of it. The working-class in<br />
the old days kept their heads down, were so fucking<br />
decent and wonderful, and it got them jack shit. Chavs<br />
are there for a reason, because the decent way, the good<br />
way, didn’t fucking work. The idea that after the break<br />
up of the manufacturing industries and the disrespect<br />
poured on the heads of the trade unions and everything<br />
the working-class stood for that their would still,<br />
masochistically, be this class of noble men and women<br />
trudging on and on and on waving banners and singing<br />
wonderful songs – WHY?! We’d fucking had enough.<br />
We are what they made us! And they don’t like us being<br />
like that because they know we’re tougher than they are<br />
and they know we’ll win.”<br />
Julie has gone into an impressively ferocious, literally<br />
breast-beating oratory by this point, suddenly<br />
breaking off to grinningly state “What am I shouting<br />
at you two for, you didn’t fucking do it…!” She<br />
digresses once more, expressing here near eugenic<br />
belief in prole supremacy.<br />
“Did you know there’s this thing called ‘the indestructible<br />
nine percent’ in society? They’ve all got green<br />
or hazel eyes, they can drink the most amazing amount,<br />
and they’ve got this weird blood group called rhesus<br />
negative. I’ve got all these three things and they are ALL<br />
found amongst the labouring classes … listen would I<br />
make this shit up?! How fucking mad do I want to look?”<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
But in defending ‘chavs’ culturally, is this not a tacit<br />
acknowledgment that the political fight for the proletariat<br />
is lost?<br />
“Naaaah, the fight cannot be lost, the fight changes.”<br />
So to quote dear Lenin: “What is to be done” politically?<br />
“I’m hoping to find out. What Marx analysed was basically<br />
right, but it’s so rich and strange the way things<br />
mutate. Who ten years ago would have predicted the<br />
decline of McDonalds? Who 20 years ago would have<br />
seen the downfall of all I believe in, with the Soviet<br />
Union? But because of the strength and the numbers of<br />
the working-class, both in this country and globally, we<br />
will decide what happens in the end and it really won’t<br />
be that bad.”<br />
One of the main criticisms levelled at Julie is because<br />
her extremes of position are so contrary to ‘accepted’<br />
mainstream norms (pro-union yet pro-hanging, massively<br />
xenophobic about the Germans and French<br />
whilst showing a fierce anti-racism where black people<br />
are concerned, pro-Soviet yet pro-Israeli) that she is<br />
insincere and feigning them to shock. But while she<br />
unquestionably fires forth her beliefs in as provocative<br />
a manner as possible, hearing her talk about them<br />
there is no doubt whatsoever in her sincerity. She quite<br />
clearly really believes them. No doubt that makes it a lot<br />
worse for many! Her passion when talking about ‘the<br />
workers’ and socialism in particular is unquestionable.<br />
I suggest that the success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela<br />
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is a real international working-class triumph that is being<br />
unsung. Julie initially suggests he is corrupt from<br />
what she’s heard. I strongly disagree.<br />
“I don’t know enough about Venezuela; I dare say<br />
you’re right. But remember when whatsisname, Ortega?<br />
The Sandinista leader was accused of molesting<br />
his daughter, well ten years ago we’d have all cleaved<br />
together and said she was lying, but, thank God for<br />
feminism, how do we know that. I was brought up in a<br />
Communist household, when I moved to London I met<br />
Paul Foot and was briefly in the SWP, and the one thing<br />
my dad the working-class Stalinist and Paul Foot the<br />
middle-class Trotskyist had in common is they couldn’t<br />
fucking look at themselves, see the bad in their side.<br />
That’s what attracted me to people on the right for a<br />
while, like Alan Clark. What a fucking cool man!”<br />
She proceeds to launch into an entertaining and fairly<br />
accurate impression of Clark fantasising about Russian<br />
women in his infamously lecherous manner. Julie has<br />
latched onto the theme of the Left denying its own<br />
crimes now and, as ever, there’s no getting her off it.<br />
“My dad taught me that you hide your own sin and<br />
you don’t take yourselves apart; I’ve realised recently<br />
that we’ve got to criticise ourselves before we can<br />
start on anyone else. In that way lies strength. I love<br />
Mr Castro and the Cuban revolution, and it’s achieved<br />
so much; they can cure blindness there whereas they<br />
can’t in America, but you go there and see 12-year-old<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
prostitutes; it obviously wasn’t meant to be like this.<br />
And the things he did to gay people, though I dare say<br />
he had a good reason … But to turn away helps no-one.<br />
I really think the Left has to take itself apart before<br />
anyone else, because we can, because we’re stronger<br />
and more intelligent than the Right.”<br />
There we are then, to reverse Groucho’s old maxim,<br />
whether many on the Left want her or not – pro<br />
Bush and Blair on the war as she is – that’s the club<br />
she places herself in at heart. I can’t help but have<br />
a tentative go here; what about her wonderful 2002<br />
Guardian columns where she ripped “Princess Toni”<br />
to pieces on a weekly basis due to his betrayal of the<br />
Labour movement?<br />
“That’s simple, Blair is a great war-leader, like<br />
Churchill; useless in times of peace. Who would vote<br />
for the poor sod after that?”<br />
So you’re not taking away your criticisms of his domestic<br />
policies, privatisation, sucking up to the bosses?<br />
“I’ve never voted for Mr Blair and I don’t imagine I<br />
will. [This interview was conducted shortly before the<br />
2005 General Election] The last time I voted was for<br />
the Socialist Alliance locally, and UKIP nationally, or<br />
was it the other way round? I don’t even remember.<br />
I’ve got nothing to hide.”<br />
She repeats the highly entertaining story of how, on<br />
her father’s death bed she vowed to defend the name<br />
of his old hero Joe Stalin, only to be told by Bill “You<br />
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ain’t been saying mad stuff about him have you girl?<br />
He was a terrible man!”<br />
So who are her all time heroes really?<br />
“It sounds really mealy-mouthed, but the people who<br />
no-one knows the name of; they’re the heroes.”<br />
So your other heroes have disappointed you?<br />
“I don’t feel disappointed because I’ve grown up,<br />
very late in life, and I realise people fall short of things<br />
for a reason as we’re all human. Like all the bad things<br />
Mr Castro has done to gay people. The heroes are the<br />
people we never ever hear of and that is the essence of<br />
their heroicness. There’s a certain reason why people of<br />
real quality don’t rise to positions of power. People like<br />
my dad; who have nothing to prove. I’ve no element of<br />
self-loathing but I do realise that part of my success is<br />
just me showing off, and wanting to queen it over other<br />
people, to be frank with you. When you get people like<br />
Emma Thompson, Dawn French, Lenny Henry, the Red<br />
Nose lot – unless you tied the fuckers down and wired<br />
them up to a lie detector – and then you’d get it – you’d<br />
never get them to admit that there was any element in<br />
their desire to be famous other than them wanting to<br />
help people in Niger. To me it’s the glory of being a<br />
human being that we are a mixture of complete corruption<br />
and the most shimmering, mercury-like goodness.<br />
Of course there are some just purely evil people – like<br />
Dido – and just purely good people – like Jordan. But<br />
then there’s the glory and the black hearted corruption.<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
It just knocks you out sometimes if you think about it<br />
too much. That’s why I prefer not to think about it too<br />
much and watch Tricia instead. A great deal of my life<br />
is spent running away from … my brain.”<br />
In my review of Sugar Rush I presumptuously wrote<br />
of the characters: “No-one talks like that, not even Julie<br />
in real life”. I was in fact completely wrong. Friendlier<br />
(to me at least), and with lots more swearing, but she<br />
talks pretty much as she writes. I won’t let the Iraq war<br />
go though, I’m catching the argument bug off her.<br />
“Ben! Ben! What would you rather live under?!<br />
Listen I was brought up as a Soviet Empirist. My dad<br />
taught me to believe – literally – that American brains<br />
were one third less the size of ours. It’s been a very<br />
hard journey to lead me to support Mr Bush on this.<br />
But I do feel that a struggle of the dimensions my<br />
father saw, light against darkness, has emerged in the<br />
Middle East. The Arab people deserve everything we<br />
have. If that makes me a fucking racist then yeah. I<br />
won’t make any exceptions for these filthy rich people,<br />
the Saudi dynasty, or the Syrian Ba’athists who<br />
call themselves socialists.”<br />
But surely the idea that Bush is exporting democracy<br />
to the Middle East is rather undermined when he lets<br />
the CIA organise a coup against democratic Venezuela?<br />
“One thing at a time Ben! When a Hugo Chavez<br />
can emerge in the Arab world … I know about Allende.<br />
I’m not idealistic about America. It’s a dirty<br />
128<br />
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massive beast. Of course they’ll attack democracy in<br />
their own back yard. But – heavy the head that wears<br />
the crown – when they stay out of wars we call them<br />
filthy cowards – as my grandma used to say – if they<br />
get involved, they’re imperialists.”<br />
It’s nice arguing with Julie but I know I’ll never win,<br />
and she graciously changes the subject herself to the<br />
fact that her dad wanted to emigrate to Russia and her<br />
mum to South Africa, the former for idealism, the latter<br />
because “They got bungalows!” At heart Julie is a<br />
patriot, and emigration is not the done thing.<br />
“That phrase ‘whinging poms’ it comes from when<br />
English people were encouraged to emigrate to Australia<br />
for 20 pounds, and they came back, and they literally<br />
cried for three weeks in relief, because they missed the<br />
rain, and the dreariness. That’s the fucking greatness,<br />
and the perversity of the English people for me. Every<br />
perverse, dreary weird thing about our people.”<br />
Changing the subject myself, I remark that Julie often<br />
writes about Hollywood, and spends as much time<br />
praising the greats of the past as she does slagging off<br />
the stars of today. What’s the difference?<br />
“In 30 years time, will a drag queen dress up as<br />
Sandra Bullock? Don’t think so! Sorry; that’s facile …<br />
my mother had no politics but what made her in a way<br />
a feminist was watching Bette Davis films; seeing her<br />
in Jezebel saying ‘Ah wiiill wear mah red dress’: the<br />
idea of women behaving as they pleased, stroppily and<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
strongly. It was the only thing to watch back then and<br />
weirdly watching them on a rainy day is a real part of<br />
my Englishness. God I sound gay, I sound like Morrissey!<br />
But anyway you don’t get strong women on screen<br />
any more, a ‘tough character’ in films today is either<br />
tough cos she’s hiding her neediness, or she’s a psychopath<br />
… I don’t think I’m a ‘strong woman’, I hate that<br />
patronising phrase, I think I’m a ‘tough broad’, that’s<br />
what I used to see on screen which I never do anymore.<br />
They’re either needy weedy vulnerable wickle things<br />
waiting to be hugged – or total fucking looners.”<br />
As was often the case of her columns I find myself<br />
agreeing with something I hadn’t particularly dwelled<br />
on. It’s true that Hollywood seems to stand still while<br />
society moves on in a lot of respects.<br />
“There’s a great book by Molly Haskell called<br />
From Reverence To Rape and she shows how, just as<br />
women were starting to assert themselves in the real<br />
world in the 60s, that was exactly the time Hollywood<br />
started to make films like Easy Rider, One Flew Over<br />
the Cuckoos Nest, where women are literally either<br />
bitches, whores or rapees. Joan Collins played a missionary<br />
nun twice in the 50s! Not any more. Do you<br />
think I’m like Nurse Ratchett?”<br />
I get short shrift however when I suggest that Basic<br />
Instinct is the height of misogyny. “Oh no, that film just<br />
makes you want to go gay! Every girl likes that film<br />
for a reason, it’s the first time they showed a lesbian<br />
129<br />
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as really attractive.” But also an ice-pick wielding psychopath?<br />
“Yeah well, take the rough with the smooth.<br />
As I said earlier ‘no-one’s perfect’” My suggestion that<br />
Fatal Attraction is a misogynistic farrago is dismissed<br />
too “No, I don’t think Fatal Attraction means anything.<br />
The message is don’t fuck a woman who sits in a loft<br />
playing Madam Butterfly, and don’t fuck Michael<br />
Douglas!” Well, you can’t argue with that.<br />
We’re all very drunk now (well I am anyway), so<br />
I just bat random subjects up and let Julie take them.<br />
First up is Ariel Sharon (readers of a sensitive disposition<br />
may wish to skip the next paragraph).<br />
“To me he’s the God that failed. He could have been<br />
such a great man and he’s just a fucking pacifist now.<br />
No – don’t leave it! Israel is the only country I would<br />
fucking die for. He’s the enemy of the Jews. Chucking<br />
his own people off the Gaza; to me that’s disgusting.<br />
I’ve given you want you want; is that the ‘money shot’?<br />
He’s a good man but he’s got to learn to stand by his<br />
own people. ‘Cos no-one else will; Christ knows.” Julie<br />
certainly gets into her stride when I bring up the sordid<br />
subject of the Spectator sexual shenanigans which have<br />
so dominated the headlines of tabloids and broadsheets<br />
alike in recent months. (For the uninitiated, the proprietor,<br />
editor and half the staff of the fusty old Tory journal<br />
have been caught going at it hammer and tongues lately;<br />
the former with our former Home Secretary).<br />
“Well it all made me glad I live the life of a provin-<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
cial lady. Rod [Liddle]’s a great young man, he once<br />
told me he applied for my old job at the NME, but he<br />
was always known as a lothario. I know one woman,<br />
a great friend of mine who thought he was so sexy she<br />
waited for three hours in a Bournemouth Travelodge<br />
on just like a promise – but she didn’t get none. Thank<br />
God I’m not a woman so I don’t fall for him. Simon<br />
Hoggart? What a dirty old man! Its always the quiet<br />
ones isn’t it? When it comes to Kimberley Quinn … I’ll<br />
say this and it doesn’t show me in a very good light …<br />
I never thought I’d use the word ‘slag’ about anyone.<br />
Me and my friends, we know prostitutes, we don’t slag<br />
them off, but when it comes to her … we use it and God<br />
it feels good! Poor Mr Blunkett; fancy doing that to a<br />
blind man? Where was the dog? Must have been tied<br />
to summat. That’s what I can’t stand; it’s the animals<br />
that suffer in the end. But no, my friends have put it<br />
around, fucking like sailors and shit, but they’d never<br />
used that word before. But with Kimberley … It’s the<br />
creepy fertility relay race thing that did it I think. She<br />
just wanted to get knocked up. Desperate woman. She<br />
just wanted some sperm race. Like an egg and spoon<br />
race. Or a sack race. Or an egg and sack race – HA HA<br />
HA!! Put that in Ben right??”<br />
Didn’t you once write for The Spectator though?<br />
“I did some book reviews when my friend Dominic<br />
Lawson was editing. But then I’ll do anything for a Jew.”<br />
Julie’s whirl of conversation swings one way to the<br />
130<br />
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next. Very friendly and complimentary, highly libellous<br />
asides splatter the whole interview. Julie is no stranger<br />
to the libel courts, but some of her comments will not<br />
appear on <strong>Spike</strong> as none of us of course would like to<br />
see this fine site shut down. One borderline accusation<br />
about a satirist I adore leads to her virulent hatred of<br />
Catholics. When I mention that I’m a Catholic her generous<br />
gallantry storms through once more “No, you’re<br />
not! Fuck off! Do you practice birth control?!” No of<br />
course I’m a very very lapsed one Julie. “See I knew<br />
you were, listen, lapsed Catholics are the aristocracy of<br />
the earth. I never met a lapsed I didn’t like. But them<br />
that cleave to their faith. I’ll shoot the fuckers.”<br />
I ask about the time when one of my idols Morrissey<br />
walked through her door unannounced back in 1994 to<br />
a frosty reception…<br />
“God I’d forgotten about that! That was like a very,<br />
very bad marriage in three quarters of an hour: imagine<br />
the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf in the space of<br />
three quarters of an hour. It’s not your dream; you’re<br />
in love with someone for five years and they turn up<br />
and we start arguing about whether you should put milk<br />
in Earl Grey tea or not. I knew I had to get him out<br />
before he visited the bathroom; ‘Why do you squeeze<br />
the toothpaste from the bottom?’ Fuck off!”<br />
Julie wrote an acerbic piece about their encounter at<br />
the time. For “acerbic” read “hatchet job”. Incredibly,<br />
given Morrissey’s famed propensity for dropping peo-<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
ple who’ve offended him at the drop of a daff, they’ve<br />
restarted a friendly e-mail correspondence over the past<br />
few years. Clearly he couldn’t resist someone who’s<br />
even better at bitching about people than he is.<br />
“I adore the man. He seems to be very civilised now;<br />
he seems more happy. Isn’t it funny it took America to<br />
make him more relaxed? I said to him, ‘You’ve grown<br />
into your looks, you look like someone’s sexy uncle<br />
that you’d get off with at a wedding.’ And he said in his<br />
brilliantly witty way ‘Why do you think I go to so many<br />
weddings – known to me are not?’ What a wonderfully<br />
Morrissey thing to say. Would you sleep with Morrissey<br />
if he asked and you were gay? If he was straight<br />
and I was single I still think I wouldn’t do it. I’d just be<br />
thinking ‘Oh fuck its Morrissey!’ the whole time.”<br />
Well, I must confess since early teenhood I’d always<br />
thought he’s the one man who just might ‘turn my head’<br />
as it were…<br />
“You would?! But you’d have to slap him round a<br />
bit afterwards!! That’s what Madonna said about Billy<br />
Ray Cyrus. She said ‘I’d do him, but I’d have to slap<br />
him round a bit and make him cry afterwards because<br />
of ‘Achey Breaky Heart’’ and I’d have to do that to<br />
Morrissey because – what’s the crap thing he’s done?<br />
‘Bengali In Platforms’? Course he’s a genius, but you<br />
wouldn’t wanna live with him would you?”<br />
While her talk is littered with her trademark bile<br />
Julie assures me that she is far less keen to cause fuss in<br />
131<br />
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everyday life than she once was.<br />
“I’m much better than I was. Even by the time I<br />
was 17 at the NME I was well castrated by then. You<br />
should have seen me at 13, at the height of my venom!<br />
I stopped kissing my mother when I went to bed and<br />
when my dad asked why I said ‘What, is she a lesbian?’<br />
That’s what I was like!”<br />
And in fact she does seem more at ease with herself<br />
than I’ve heard she was, and very content with her life.<br />
“Brighton, for all its airs and graces, is a very provincial<br />
town, and I like it that way. I don’t want to be like a<br />
young bunny putting it around, I’m 45 years old, it was<br />
never my way anyway, I got married when I was 18 and<br />
24, even though I always admired girls that did. It was<br />
never the life for me, to be honest with you.”<br />
She seems content too with her role in the grand<br />
scheme of things. “You know that thing you wrote about<br />
me [the Sugar Rush review] was so unique, it treated<br />
me like a human being which was such a change. I love<br />
being round young writers, I like to think of writers as<br />
a community, as a race. I’m 45 years old , I’m not going<br />
to write ‘the great novel’ … a dead mother that’s what<br />
I’m going to be now, and that’s alright with me.”<br />
Already seriously sozzled before the interview<br />
ended (me,anyway) we break off to join her fellow<br />
guests – and proceed to drink a lot more. The ‘mists<br />
of Bacchus’ descend on my memory somewhat here<br />
though I do dimly remember us drivelling on about<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
many other subjects. Indulging in huge, shared,<br />
over-emphatic praise of Nye Bevan figured highly.<br />
(“Idiots always get him mixed up with Ernest Bevin,<br />
the anti-Semitic git.”) At one point Julie has a huge<br />
slanging match with Zoe and Gary about the merits<br />
of white immigration (Julie is against, she thinks the<br />
UK owes black and Asian people a huge debt which<br />
doesn’t apply to east Europeans). I recall also being<br />
a coward and slinking away during this, talking to<br />
Nadia instead. Nadia has clearly seen it a thousand<br />
times before, and its clear why Julie loves her so<br />
much. She’s fantastic, and clearly the calming, sensible<br />
one of the pair. “Don’t worry, she’ll calm down<br />
in a few minutes”, I think she said. And she did.<br />
At one point I harangue Julie for wasting her life attacking<br />
idiotic celebrities when she could be highlighting<br />
great social injustices as she did for a very brief<br />
period in her Guardian columns of 2002, campaigning<br />
on issues like the still-toothless corporate manslaughter<br />
law which allows negligent employers to get away with<br />
murder (literally, if not legally.)<br />
She explained she found writing such things too<br />
much of an emotional strain, and that it was too late to<br />
change now anyway. She was a nasty, witty old hack,<br />
pure and simple. And she liked it that way.<br />
And of course, that’s what makes her what she is.<br />
The world already has John Pilger. It’s precisely the<br />
fact she has “run away from her brain” as she herself<br />
132<br />
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puts it which makes her so entertaining. A sledgehammer<br />
cracking a nut; the spectres of Dorothy Parker and<br />
Marx ganging up on straw-celebs like Catherine Zeta<br />
Jones and Michael Douglas is sometimes just what you<br />
need. Can we really imagine a nice campaigning little<br />
Julie Burchill? Brrrr. I must have been even more pissed<br />
than I imagined.<br />
The day after our meet, amidst the industrial hangover,<br />
I reflect on the massive hatred Julie inspires. Two<br />
years back she managed to take the number 85 spot<br />
in the Channel 4’s most hated Britons poll. Not high<br />
enough in her view I’m sure. But why was she there?<br />
Because of her narcissism, arrogance and self-obsession?<br />
I’d hazard a guess she’s not the only columnist to<br />
suffer such flaws. She is however one of the very few to<br />
openly acknowledge it, sign-post it, flaunt it, and make<br />
a very good joke out of it.<br />
Because of extreme opinions, repeating her obsessions?<br />
Let’s think of these wonderful creatures we<br />
call “columnists”. Richard Littlejohn, Gary Bushell<br />
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and<br />
… straight-off bigots peddling the same old poison<br />
week after week, and always kicking the weak, never<br />
the strong, with far higher readerships too – not on<br />
the list. The late-now-but-not-then Lynda Lee-Potter,<br />
bitching hideously about celebs throughout her whole<br />
career, bigger readership again. Her name’s not down,<br />
she’s not coming in. A hundred odd male journalists<br />
with just as ‘messy’ private lives as Julie; they don’t<br />
get the spawn of Beelzebub treatment either. Could the<br />
fact that she can write each one of them into the dirt at<br />
least partially explain this bonfire of loathing? I rather<br />
think it could. Julie says people who write hatefully<br />
about chavs reveal more about themselves than they<br />
do of their targets. Perhaps there’s an element of selfidentification<br />
with that. And perhaps she’s right.<br />
Of course I’m hopelessly, and rather pathetically<br />
compromised (there, I’ve said it first) by spending<br />
sloshed out time in her charming and generous presence.<br />
But I wasn’t disappointed. And long may she rain<br />
bile over us. �<br />
133<br />
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Review [published February 2005]<br />
Jason Burke: Al Qaeda<br />
Ben Granger<br />
The most striking fact Jason Burke hammers through<br />
time and again in this meticulous and comprehensive<br />
study is that Al Qaeda does not exist. Or at least, ‘Al<br />
Qaeda’ the organised terrorist group, cohesive and complete<br />
we hear of in the media doesn’t. I like Spooks as<br />
much as anyone, but I fear we have been misinformed.<br />
What does exist is a series of interconnected yet<br />
disparate and competing forms of militant Islamism.<br />
Bin Laden’s faction, amorphous in itself and rarely<br />
termed “Al Qaeda” by its followers is only one part<br />
of this, yet it has become lazy shorthand for a massive<br />
phenomenon. Burke does not claim Islamist fundamentalism<br />
isn’t a large, violent and dangerous force,<br />
but does show that this one key misunderstanding is<br />
disastrous if you want to deal with it. For one example,<br />
the twin towers atrocity could be said to be the work of<br />
‘Al Qaeda’; the ones in Madrid and Bali cannot. And as<br />
another, al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug currently given<br />
to beheading aid-workers in Iraq has been described as<br />
an “Al Queda operative” and “bin Laden’s Lieutenant”<br />
in highly reputable papers despite the two having never<br />
met, and their groups being bitter rivals of one another.<br />
BUY Jason Burke books online from and<br />
Burke, who has spent the last ten years as The Observer’s<br />
Middle East correspondent, tells two separate<br />
yet interlinked stories; that of the formation of militant<br />
political Islamism, and that of the more specific violent<br />
groupings of which bin Laden became a leading figure.<br />
He traces the roots of modern political Sunni ‘Islamism’<br />
(as opposed to the Shia extremism of Khomeini)<br />
as comparatively recent, stemming from Wahaabism,<br />
a variant of Islam espoused in the 18th century by the<br />
ultra-orthodox renegade Abdul al Wahaab. This was<br />
developed into an all-encompassing political doctrine<br />
by an Egyptian, the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan<br />
Al-Banna in the 1920s and 30s. Explicitly rejecting<br />
all Western influence as degenerate, Al-Banna and his<br />
successor Syed Qutb, (another Egyptian campaigning<br />
in the 50s and 60s) sought to recreate the world according<br />
to the laws of Islam in the early post-Mohammed<br />
years as they interpreted it, an interpretation very<br />
obscure and unpopular at the time in the wider Islamic<br />
world (though, crucially, not in Saudi Arabia, where it<br />
gained credence amongst the ruling royal family who<br />
used it to re-inforce their legitimacy).<br />
134<br />
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The more specific story of the violent armed groups<br />
which emerged espousing this ideology is detailed too.<br />
Bin Laden, who cut his teeth as so many others did in<br />
the Soviet/Afghan conflict of the 80s, is shown as starting<br />
out as very much the junior partner of Islamic Jihad<br />
leader Aymar al-Zawahri. It is interesting to learn he had<br />
no direct contact (as is often reported) with America,<br />
though the close co-operation with the Pakistani secret<br />
services and the CIA who funded and supported his and<br />
other gangs makes this distinction rather academic.<br />
Bin Laden became seen as a ‘Godfather’ figure due<br />
to his genius for media manipulation, culminating of<br />
course with the calculated violent symbolism of September<br />
11th, also recounted in detail here. But Burke<br />
also shows the many other groups in action both before,<br />
during and after the New York attack, often with either<br />
limited or no contact with bin Laden. The GIA in Algeria<br />
are shown to far surpass bin Laden and followers in<br />
terms of violence against their own general population,<br />
who had stubbornly failed to give them mass support.<br />
The leadership of bin Laden’s faction has indeed been<br />
decapitated following the US invasion of Afghanistan,<br />
but the anger caused in the wider Muslim world and the<br />
subsequent assault on Iraq has let to a rapid increase in<br />
the sympathy for and potential recruits to such groups.<br />
The Madrid bombing is shown as the work of a cadre<br />
not only wholly disconnected from bin Laden, but not<br />
even working in his style any more; no symbolic target,<br />
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no suicides, and being the work of genuinely impoverished<br />
immigrants rather than the disaffected middleclass<br />
types chiefly at work in such atrocities previously.<br />
More than ever now, it is bin Laden and Al Qaeda as an<br />
idea and ideal that is the danger.<br />
One amazing fact, particularly farcical given the<br />
neo-con justification of the Iraqi invasion, is that in the<br />
first Gulf War bin Laden actually offered up his band of<br />
fighters to the House of Saud to fight against Saddam<br />
Hussein defending the home of Wahaabism against<br />
the secularist Iraqi infidel. It was only after this offer<br />
was turned down that bin Laden truly took against the<br />
Saudi royals, seeing them as weaklings who had to<br />
rely on ‘kufr’ American protection. The notion of bin<br />
Laden siding with Saddam as a ‘fellow Muslim’ could<br />
scarcely be further rooted in the realms of fantasy, and<br />
shows the true depths of the (deliberate?) neo-con misunderstanding<br />
of how their ideology works.<br />
The media-spawned over-simplification of the<br />
Islamist phenomenon is highlighted by the distinction<br />
Burke demonstrates between the Taliban government<br />
of Afghanistan and the gang of bin Laden’s that they<br />
housed. We all know Al Qaeda and the Taliban became<br />
firmly interwoven with each other some time after bin<br />
Laden and his followers first sought refuge in Afghanistan;<br />
what is less well known is the intense dislike the<br />
latter showed to the former, and how near they came<br />
to being thrown out, until it became a matter of local<br />
135<br />
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pan-Muslim pride to the Taliban that they could not<br />
be seen expel bin Laden due to US pressure. In yet<br />
another of the myriad intricacies detailed in the book,<br />
we see how different the Taliban were to Al Qaeda. The<br />
Taliban were extremist Wahabbi offshoots themselves,<br />
dedicated to fulfilling a similarly atavistic, repressive,<br />
misogynistic and unworkable arcadia, yet at the same<br />
time they were essentially parochial, rural tribalists totally<br />
uninterested in waging a jihad against the Western<br />
world. It was only bin Laden’s machinations and the<br />
US response they received which saw them entrenched<br />
into the fight against the West urged by the more sophisticated<br />
and cosmopolitan Al Qaeda.<br />
Burke shows with one illuminating example how the<br />
growth in popularity of this Wahaab cult is far from<br />
organic or inevitable. He spent time with members of<br />
the separatist Pershmaga fighters of the Kurdish Democratic<br />
Party in northern Iraq following the first gulf war.<br />
“[They] were aggressively secular. They had drunk,<br />
sworn, smoked and I had never seen them pray. Their<br />
slogans were all about liberation and self-determination,<br />
about rights and democracy … The idea of them<br />
mentioning a ‘jihad’ was almost risible. Though angry<br />
and resentful at what they felt, with some justification,<br />
were the West`s repeated betrayals, they were still vociferously<br />
pro-Western.”<br />
By 2001, many of these young men were turning<br />
from their seemingly failing secular resistance move-<br />
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ment towards militant Islamism. The same goes for<br />
the growth of Hammas and Islamic Jihad in Israel at<br />
the expense of the PLO. And also in many other areas,<br />
not least moderate and/or secular Turkey, Indonesia,<br />
and Checnya, not to mention the diaspora in Europe.<br />
This growth was neither natural nor inevitable, and was<br />
undoubtedly exacerbated not only by the dictatorship,<br />
stagnation and corruption of the governments of Muslim<br />
states, but also by the polarisation caused in part by<br />
the invasions of the West (and Russia).<br />
None of which is to say that the growth of Islamist<br />
movements are a progressive and legitimate movement<br />
of liberation as some on the left have come near<br />
to disastrously maintaining. On the contrary, though<br />
Burke never makes such an assertion himself, I find the<br />
description of its leading figures corresponds with an<br />
almost classically fascist movement.<br />
They are rooted firmly in a disenchanted middleclass,<br />
whether doctors like al-Zawarhi or rich businessmen<br />
like bin Laden himself. They are disenchanted<br />
chiefly due to a hurt sense of national (or pan-national/<br />
religious) decline. They are utterly hostile to religious<br />
tolerance, the Enlightenment, Jews, women or minority<br />
rights, and also to socialism and the labour movement<br />
at large. Indeed, al-Banna himself was an explicit<br />
admirer of Nazi Germany. As Burke shows, the hardcore<br />
of the real ‘terrorist cells’ taking action against<br />
the West are profoundly educated and middle-class<br />
136<br />
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themselves. That an increasing minority come from<br />
genuinely impoverished backgrounds in the last two<br />
years (as he also demonstrates) only goes to show the<br />
counter-productive effect Western activities have had.<br />
There is still a key difference however, on the whole, to<br />
the masses tacitly sympathising with atrocities through<br />
desperation and those carrying them out themselves.<br />
They attract a vast and increasing number of the<br />
desperate poor in their countries, often due to the<br />
crass stupidity and brutality of ‘infidel’ governments<br />
of all colours. But this no more legitimises radical<br />
Islamists than the unemployment caused by the neoliberal<br />
capitalist policies pursued by New Labour<br />
makes the BNP genuine champions of the working<br />
poor of England. No-one on the left should see them<br />
as anything other than what they are; evil bastards<br />
given false validation by the machinations of the<br />
more powerful. Cream off the followers, but don`t<br />
even think about trying to ‘engage’ with the leaders.<br />
Burke’s study is exemplary in its research, and<br />
explains its extremely complex tale with some clarity<br />
(the extensive indexes and glossaries help too).<br />
It is however an undeniably dry read, a mixture of<br />
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the academic and reportage journalese. I must say, at<br />
only 355 pages it still took me a very long time to get<br />
through it. That’s probably my problem though and –<br />
damned if you do and damned if you don’t – giving<br />
a more vibrant style to a subject like this leaves the<br />
author open to charges of sensationalism. It’s fair to<br />
say though that this book is probably not best for the<br />
completely uninitiated, or for someone not prepared<br />
to give the subject their full undivided attention.<br />
Part of this staid style comes from Burke’s admirable<br />
neutrality of tone, which has won plaudits from<br />
Chomsky to those much further to the right. He is<br />
not out to make a point, but simply to document an<br />
area he has reported on and studied for many years.<br />
It’s only in the final chapter that Burke’s views – still<br />
fairly cautious – are made clear. Namely, that only<br />
the continuing resistance of the wider world Muslim<br />
population to the minority teachings of zealots like<br />
bin Laden, Zarqawi and their forbears al-Banna and<br />
Qutb can possibly see them off. And that, whatever the<br />
intentions, arresting the rapid growth this fanaticism<br />
is seeing has been made much harder by the recent<br />
actions of the West. �<br />
137<br />
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Review [published February 1999]<br />
Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made<br />
international headlines as it lurched from one near<br />
disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts<br />
and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the<br />
two countries’ collaboration in the post-Soviet age. But<br />
even with the financing and expertise of NASA injected<br />
into the ailing Russian space program, Mir continued to<br />
remain dangerously unstable. Bryan Burrough’s book<br />
is a behind-the-scenes account of what was happening<br />
both in space and on the ground.<br />
Since 1992, NASA has sent its astronauts to train<br />
in Russia’s Star City in preparation for going aboard<br />
Mir. Burrough details the inevitable clash of cultures –<br />
while the Americans were used to rehearsing for every<br />
contingency on the Shuttle, the Russians adopted a<br />
improvisational approach, fuelled by the lack of funds<br />
for their space program. The cosmonauts were paid<br />
bonuses for the efficient running of the station, which<br />
led to American accusations of safety procedures being<br />
ignored in order to keep Mir operational.<br />
Burrough focuses on two NASA astronauts sent to<br />
Mir, Jerry Linenger and the British-born Mike Foale,<br />
BUY Bryan Burrough books online from and<br />
highlighting their very different attitudes towards the<br />
Russians. Linenger witnessed the outbreak of a fire<br />
and returned to Earth vocally condemning the space<br />
station as a deathtrap. Foale was on board when Mir’s<br />
hull was ruptured by a collision with the Progress supply<br />
vessel, giving the crew members less than seven<br />
minutes to seal off the module before losing all their<br />
oxygen. Instead of insisting on evacuation as safety<br />
procedure demanded, Foale helped cosmonauts Tsibliyev<br />
and Lazutkin block the breach.<br />
In both cases, Burrough reveals that the response of<br />
mission control was hampered by NASA’s pitiful lack<br />
of knowledge about Mir and the unwillingness of some<br />
Russian technicians to share their expertise. Veteran<br />
astronaut John Blaha returned from Mir suffering from<br />
exhaustion and depression, blaming both on NASA’s<br />
lack of ground support.<br />
Given the daily struggle of the undeniably brave<br />
crew members and the chaos in mission control, it’s<br />
difficult to read Dragonfly and remember that the<br />
story it tells is factually true rather than a science<br />
fiction thriller. However, Burrough doesn’t trivialise<br />
138<br />
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his subject – by narrating the events through a day<br />
by day approach, he reports the conversations of the<br />
astronauts and mission control verbatim, showing the<br />
depth of his research while keeping the unfolding tension<br />
of the story alive.<br />
Worryingly, Burrough indicates that these communi-<br />
BUY Bryan Burrough books online from and<br />
cation problems look set to continue on Mir’s replacement,<br />
the International Space Station. But Mir itself<br />
will not be anyone’s home again – the station will be<br />
programmed to enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn<br />
up later this year, plummeting into the Pacific Ocean<br />
several hundred miles off New Zealand. �<br />
139<br />
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Albert Camus:<br />
Solitaire et Solidaire 141<br />
Paul Celan:<br />
After The Disaster 147<br />
Bruce Chatwin:<br />
In Search Of The Miraculous 158<br />
Annabel Chong:<br />
Life Thru A Lens 162<br />
E.M. Cioran:<br />
To Infinity And Beyond 166<br />
Diablo Cody:<br />
Candy Girl 171<br />
C<br />
Douglas Coupland:<br />
From Fear To Eternity 175<br />
Douglas Coupland:<br />
Lara’s Book 181<br />
Douglas Coupland:<br />
The Gum Thief 183<br />
Quentin Crisp:<br />
An Englishman In New York 185<br />
140<br />
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Interview [published March 1997]<br />
Albert Camus: Solitaire et Solidaire<br />
Russell Wilkinson talks to Catherine Camus about Albert Camus’ The First Man<br />
In January 1960, the French writer and philosopher<br />
Albert Camus was killed in a car crash along with his<br />
friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Recovered<br />
from the wreckage of the crash was the unfinished<br />
manuscript of Camus’ latest novel, The First Man. In<br />
1957, Camus had been awarded the Nobel Prize for<br />
Literature in recognition of his most famous novels,<br />
The Outsider and The Plague.<br />
Fifty years after its original publication The Outsider<br />
is still France’s best-selling novel this century.<br />
In October 1995, The First Man was finally published<br />
in English, 35 years after Camus’ death. His daughter,<br />
Catherine Camus, elected to publish the manuscript unedited.<br />
Its drafts have been organised into the completed<br />
text of the novel and authorial notes which supplement<br />
its progression and development. As such, The First<br />
Man shows the rarely glimpsed process of a work in<br />
progress. The novel itself is a deeply autobiographical<br />
meditation upon Camus’ poverty-stricken childhood<br />
and fatherless family within Algeria at the turn of the<br />
century. While it remains unfinished, much of the text<br />
possesses Camus’ characteristic lucidity and sensuality,<br />
BUY Albert Camus books online from and<br />
clearly demonstrating that his best writing was yet to<br />
come before his tragic and untimely death at the age<br />
of 47.<br />
Catherine Camus and her partner Robert Gallimard<br />
visited London in October 1995. At the Basil Hotel,<br />
they discussed the implications of The First Man for our<br />
evaluation of Albert Camus as a writer and a political<br />
philosopher at the close of this century. The interview<br />
was conducted in French.<br />
RW: In your editor’s note for The First Man you suggest<br />
that now is a more suitable time for the reception of<br />
Camus’ work. Do you think Camus has been neglected<br />
in recent years?<br />
CC: He was never abandoned by his readers. Camus<br />
is enormously read. He’s the highest selling author in<br />
the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some<br />
years now. Sales haven’t ever stopped, so to talk about<br />
rediscovering him would suggest that he isn’t read anymore<br />
and that’s not true. It’s just that, in publishing The<br />
First Man I said to myself, ‘this is going to be awful,’<br />
but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I’m<br />
not afraid of Camus’ public. I’m afraid of what will be<br />
141<br />
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written in the papers.<br />
However, there are indications that today the intellectuals<br />
are coming back to Camus. History has given<br />
them reason to, with the fall of communism. In fact<br />
it was always the Communist problem which was<br />
responsible for the opposition to Camus. It was always<br />
and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.<br />
Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin’s trials.<br />
Today we can see that he was right. To say that there<br />
were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was<br />
blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today<br />
we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind,<br />
but before it just wasn’t allowed. Nobody was allowed<br />
to think that or say that if you were left-wing. Camus<br />
always insisted that historical criteria and historical<br />
reasoning were not the only things to take into account,<br />
and that they weren’t all powerful, that history could<br />
always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are<br />
starting to think.<br />
RW: Do you think that Camus’ work is becoming<br />
vindicated then, after this time of intellectual isolation?<br />
RG: It all depends on the period. Just after the war,<br />
the liberation of 1945, Camus was well known, well<br />
loved by Sartre and all the intellectuals of that generation.<br />
There is an interview given by Sartre in the USA<br />
where he is asked what the future of French literature<br />
is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future<br />
is Camus. And so time passes, and a much more politi-<br />
BUY Albert Camus books online from and<br />
cal rather than literary reasoning intervenes, and from<br />
the day that Camus wrote The Rebel, in 1955, there<br />
comes the rupture, and all, nearly all of the left wing<br />
intellectuals become hostile to him. Since he was already<br />
unfavourably viewed by the right-wing, he found<br />
himself entirely alone.<br />
Then, during the 80s, those you would call the young<br />
philosophers of France, such as Bernard and Gluxman,<br />
pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted<br />
to hear in the political arena. They said it was Camus<br />
who was right, not those who had slid under the influence<br />
of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion<br />
to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever<br />
since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to<br />
modify up until today. Intellectuals of Camus’ age who<br />
had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And<br />
at that point we come back to literature, and it’s agreed<br />
that he was always a great writer.<br />
RW: Which brings us specifically to the publication of<br />
The First Man. How will this book alter our perception<br />
of Camus’ work?<br />
CC: We must remember that Camus wrote not even<br />
a third of what he had wished to. The First Man is his<br />
posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it<br />
is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments,<br />
and of the whole way of writing as well. This<br />
mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for<br />
those not able to speak for themselves.<br />
142<br />
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RW: There are times in his letters to Jean Grenier<br />
[Camus’ philosophy professor in Algeria, published<br />
in the Selected Notebooks] when he sounds unhappy<br />
with his work on The First Man. After receiving his<br />
Nobel Prize, did he feel pressurised to produce his<br />
definitive work?<br />
CC: He wasn’t writing under the influence of the Nobel<br />
Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in<br />
him. The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it’s a social<br />
recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a<br />
true artist is driven by interior necessities. We can’t talk<br />
about the book he wanted to write because we have<br />
barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it,<br />
but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look<br />
at the style of The First Man it conforms much more<br />
to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely.<br />
RW: Will we get a clearer notion of his ideas through<br />
The First Man?<br />
CC: Perhaps not, because it’s in quite a crude state.<br />
But then, in this condition one sees more, without any<br />
of the artifices of art, without anything having been<br />
erased. It is, perhaps, at the same time, more truthful.<br />
I think he wanted to write something to explain<br />
who he was, and how he was different from the age<br />
that had been conferred upon him. He was viewed by<br />
many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football<br />
pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his ‘morality’.<br />
It’s something sensed, it won’t pass uniquely through<br />
BUY Albert Camus books online from and<br />
thought. It couldn’t possibly. He started thinking<br />
through sensation. He could never think with artefacts<br />
or with cultural models because there were none. So<br />
it’s true to say that his morality was extremely ‘lived’,<br />
made from very concrete things. It never passed by<br />
means of abstractions . It’s his own experience, his<br />
way of thinking. There are those who will find his notions<br />
about absurdity appealing, and others who will<br />
be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria,<br />
the heat and so on.<br />
RW: Since The First Man deals with Camus’ birth and<br />
childhood in Algeria, it seems strange that Camus’ deep<br />
personal involvement with the Algerian nationalist crisis<br />
tends to get overlooked in the traditional portrayal<br />
of him as a French writer. Do you think The First Man<br />
will re-emphasise the importance of Algeria in our<br />
consideration of Camus?<br />
CC: I hope so. Camus’ was born in Algeria of French<br />
nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony,<br />
although the French colonists rejected him absolutely<br />
because of his poverty. Politically, he was in favour<br />
of a federation, and effectively he considered that like<br />
South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there<br />
should be a mixed population with equal rights, the<br />
same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as<br />
well as all the other races living there.<br />
RW: Do you think he saw himself as the first member<br />
of a race of the uprooted, given the absence of his father<br />
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and the cultural duality of his upbringing?<br />
CC: Not on a political level. He is The First Man<br />
because he is poor, which has never been much to human<br />
beings. He really did know Algeria. He was an<br />
exile from his country, but still living in its language.<br />
Solitaire et solidaire. It’s not like those who are exiled<br />
to a country where the language is not theirs. He didn’t<br />
have much hope that things would work out, but he<br />
wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of<br />
violence that once such violence is created there’s no<br />
more room for reflection. And there’s no mediating position.<br />
If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians<br />
and Serbs, they’ve all created so much horror that one<br />
starts to wonder how these peoples can live together,<br />
after having done what they have. Already the violence<br />
has reached such a degree that everybody is living in<br />
hate, there’s no possibility of reflection, no mediating<br />
position. There’s no one who can say ‘this person is<br />
wrong there and right here’, and that ‘one is right about<br />
that and wrong about this’. This is what could allow<br />
populations, or even two human beings, to live together.<br />
We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and<br />
enrichment by, our differences.<br />
Albert Camus PLC<br />
RW: So Camus tried to live the paradox of being both<br />
“solitaire et solidaire”?<br />
CC: I think Camus felt very solitary. You can see it<br />
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in all his books. The Outsider isn’t Camus, but in The<br />
Outsider there are parts of Camus. There’s this impression<br />
of exile. But where he is in exile isn’t especially<br />
in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world,<br />
because of his origins. And that’s a complete exile. Just<br />
because of his way of sensing before thinking. He’s in<br />
a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any<br />
case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be<br />
rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary…<br />
RG: … And yet one thing that is evident is that Camus<br />
could never be a ‘neutral’ man. This is because he<br />
was committed; look at his real physical involvement<br />
in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat<br />
against Nazism. And he always held a profound<br />
commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all<br />
totalitarianism. For example, it’s often forgotten that<br />
Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the<br />
Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to<br />
travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO<br />
accepted Franco’s Spain and allowed it a discourse.<br />
Camus was completely intransigent, and that’s not at<br />
all a neutrality. It’s combat, it’s a man who involved<br />
himself, committed himself. Of course, he wasn’t an<br />
existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a<br />
man of combat. It wasn’t for nothing that he directed<br />
the Resistance journal called Combat.<br />
RW: What makes his commitment different from that<br />
of the existentialists?<br />
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CC & RG in unison: He was not an existentialist!<br />
RG: He always refused to be.<br />
RW: Another example of being solitaire et solidaire,<br />
of being great friends with Sartre but remaining apart<br />
from the existentialist credo?<br />
CC: Yes, today, we’re starting to see how it works.<br />
But usually it’s when you get smacked in the face with<br />
things that you start to understand them. Everyone has<br />
so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including<br />
Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings.<br />
Generosity had a place in people’s hopes. But<br />
Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass<br />
through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be<br />
improved. When Sartre was asked whether or not he<br />
would live under a communist regime he said, ‘No, for<br />
others it’s fine, but for me, no.’ He said it! So it’s hard<br />
to say just how intellectual his stance is. How can you<br />
think that never in your life would you go to live in a<br />
communist regime and still say it’s fine for everybody?<br />
A very difficult thing, that, but Sartre managed it.<br />
Camus didn’t; and today this is what we are confronted<br />
with, I mean what is pure ideology, which<br />
takes no account of the human context. In economics<br />
it’s the same. Economics wanted to take into account<br />
theory over and above human criteria, or the<br />
parameter ‘man’. And you end up beating your head<br />
against a wall again, it doesn’t work. Not if you make<br />
an abstraction of man. That’s why Camus is more à la<br />
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mode now, because he always says ‘yes, but there’s<br />
man. That’s the first thing, because myself, I’m a<br />
man.’ And that’s what solidarity is.<br />
RW: Is The First Man his ‘bridge’, then, between experience<br />
and philosophy?<br />
CC: What the articles which have been written about<br />
The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of<br />
these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death.<br />
The lie is death in Camus. That’s why in Camus’ play<br />
The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and<br />
his mother, because he lied. He never told them who<br />
he was. They killed him because they didn’t recognise<br />
him. But Camus also says that nothing is true which<br />
forces exclusion. From that, you’re obliged to accept<br />
contradictions if you don’t want to reject certain obvious<br />
things about life, certain evidences. If you create a<br />
system, and you say ‘here there is truth’, in that kind<br />
of pathway [chemin], then you’ll evacuate all the other<br />
pathways and you’ll kill life. It’s up to each individual.<br />
It wasn’t exactly the establishment he attacked. He<br />
said, “if it’s good, so much the better.” His aim was to<br />
help people to live. That’s the most important thing. I<br />
think for an artist what is most important is to touch as<br />
many hearts as possible.<br />
RW: Being written for his mother, do you think The<br />
First Man gives a clearer picture of his ideas on<br />
femininity?<br />
CC: It’s true that women appear very little in his other<br />
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works. They have a very marginal place. But femininity,<br />
yes, effectively there is more in The First Man,<br />
not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its<br />
elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love<br />
story in it, a childhood love story, Camus’ first. Meursault<br />
[protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were<br />
never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and<br />
others in his plays, but they aren’t so well known. I<br />
think for Camus his mother was more than just that.<br />
She’s love, absolute love. That’s why it’s written for<br />
her, dedicated to ‘you who will never be able to read<br />
this book’. And love is very important in The First<br />
Man, in that Camus loves these things he never chose,<br />
he loves his childhood experience in a very real way.<br />
Their poverty meant that there was nothing else they<br />
could think about but what they would eat, how they<br />
would clothe themselves. There’s just no room for<br />
other things in his family. It’s difficult for others to<br />
imagine the position in which he found himself. There<br />
is no imaginary existence in their lives.<br />
French intellectuals are mostly petit bourgeois, and<br />
it’s hard to say whether that makes Camus’ work more<br />
valuable. I’d rather say that it’s different. Necessarily.<br />
His positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectuals<br />
who don’t have that experience have difficulty in<br />
comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tolerant<br />
because he had already seen both sides of things<br />
when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine<br />
BUY Albert Camus books online from and<br />
poverty, but they don’t know what it is. In fact they’ve<br />
got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes.<br />
It’s the perspective they could never adopt, not in the<br />
way Sartre wants to, because they weren’t familiar<br />
with them. They could never address themselves to the<br />
working classes. They don’t know what it means, and<br />
that gives them a bad conscience about it. Camus has a<br />
greater proximity to those in poverty.<br />
RW: And does this proximity result from his humility,<br />
which can been seen in the letters at the end of The First<br />
Man to Monsieur Germain, his old schoolteacher?<br />
CC: It’s because his teacher in The First Man has a<br />
primary place. Camus shows us this teacher exactly how<br />
he was. The First Man is completely autobiographical.<br />
The mother he describes is the woman I knew, and she<br />
was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really<br />
existed. But it’s also to show that people attach so much<br />
importance to celebrity, and Camus writes his acceptance<br />
speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher.<br />
Recognition, gratefulness exist. It’s to show that this is<br />
what has come from what his teacher did for him. And<br />
also throughout the world there are Monsieur Germains<br />
everywhere. That’s why I published the letters, so that he<br />
could have a place in the work. But I couldn’t ever act<br />
or think on behalf of what my father would have said or<br />
done. He’s an artist, he considers himself an artist, and so<br />
he takes on the responsibility of speaking for those who<br />
are not given the means or the opportunity. �<br />
146<br />
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Feature [published September 2000]<br />
Paul Celan: After The Disaster<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan<br />
With a variable key<br />
you unlock the house in which<br />
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.<br />
Always what key you choose<br />
depends on the blood that spurts<br />
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.<br />
You vary the key, you vary the word<br />
that is free to drift with the flakes.<br />
What snowball will form round the word<br />
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.<br />
This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the<br />
German original by Michael Hamburger. The original<br />
was written in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line.<br />
We assume a translation is second-hand and only<br />
the original can provide definitive clarification. But<br />
clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity<br />
of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in<br />
Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and<br />
being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports.<br />
As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer<br />
BUY Paul Celan books online from and<br />
to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and<br />
there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a<br />
return journey to the poem.<br />
It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s<br />
key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself.<br />
Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a<br />
poem about poetry. It is clear, I think, that this is an<br />
insensitive reading. The metaphors are too close to<br />
experience to dismiss it as abstract. Indeed, can they<br />
get any closer?<br />
Celan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy,<br />
wrote: “I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did<br />
so that once, at least, words and what is might join”. He<br />
had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970,<br />
six months before his 50th birthday. What is Bonnefoy<br />
talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are<br />
as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his<br />
friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected<br />
his life and poetry. Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz,<br />
then part of Romania, now within Moldova.<br />
Its political geography meant many languages were<br />
spoken among its inhabitants. In the poet’s home, the<br />
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language was High German, while the wider community<br />
generally used the more latinate Romanian. There<br />
were many others in circulation, including Yiddish.<br />
The last is significant as Celan was part of a large<br />
Jewish community. There was anti-Semitism, for sure,<br />
but German culture was the pinnacle of Western civilisation.<br />
It promised something better than feudal sniping.<br />
Inspired by his mother’s deep love for it’s poetry,<br />
he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and<br />
Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable<br />
affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the<br />
contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements,<br />
and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote<br />
his poetry in German; his müttersprache.<br />
Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated<br />
from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported<br />
the city’s Jews. He never saw his parents again.<br />
They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His<br />
father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this,<br />
as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a<br />
writer in the language of his mother and of his mother’s<br />
murderers. He could not renounce the latter’s language<br />
without renouncing the former’s. Celan was robbed<br />
of his parents’ death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy<br />
implies the same goes for his müttersprache.<br />
“We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words<br />
did not recover his experience. The loss was felt,” he<br />
says, “like a discharge without origin or end.” And as<br />
BUY Paul Celan books online from and<br />
a result: “nothing real could authentically respond to<br />
this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent:<br />
only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (losing<br />
itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of<br />
so much absence.”<br />
So for Bonnefoy, an avowed Christian, another death<br />
becomes another metaphor of hope. If his explanation<br />
is exemplary, we remain in what Maurice Blanchot<br />
calls “the civilisation of the book”, where literature<br />
takes possession of everything – that is, submitting it<br />
to a pre-established unity symbolised by the enclosing<br />
covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy’s sensitive appraisal<br />
leaves too strong a trace of the dubious correlation<br />
of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the discomposing<br />
reality at a distance, within the inexorable<br />
logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most<br />
importantly, an end.<br />
This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too.<br />
Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surrounding<br />
Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as<br />
an expert witness to judging the case of her tormented<br />
life and suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss<br />
everything.<br />
Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by<br />
stating the potential of poetry:<br />
“the poet’s need [is] to get beyond ego in order to<br />
become the voice of more than autobiography. At<br />
the level of poetic speech, when this happens, sound<br />
148<br />
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and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry<br />
individual utterance away upon a current stronger and<br />
deeper that the individual could have anticipated.”<br />
(Note the pervasive river theme!)<br />
He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her<br />
poetry yet never moved beyond “the dominant theme<br />
of self-discovery and self-definition”. Nowadays, of<br />
course, that theme is enough to launch 10,000 poems<br />
beginning with “I”. But what does moving beyond<br />
this theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the<br />
least, about that rising tide out of language. Indeed,<br />
it caused him to lose trust in his most famous poem,<br />
‘Deathfugue’. This is how that poem ends; the subject,<br />
you will notice, is explicit:<br />
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night<br />
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany<br />
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we<br />
drink and we<br />
drink you<br />
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue<br />
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true<br />
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete<br />
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air<br />
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a<br />
master from<br />
Germany<br />
your golden hair Margarete<br />
your ashen hair Shulamith<br />
(trans. Michael Hamburger)<br />
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If any help is needed, the line “a grave in the air”<br />
can be read as the smoke rising from the camp chimneys;<br />
plain fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the<br />
poem emerged from reports of small Jewish orchestras<br />
playing tangos within concentration camp fences,<br />
often accompanying gravedigging and executions. The<br />
poem mimics the pace and rhythm of the dance that<br />
had captivated carefree Europe between the wars. Its<br />
first title was indeed ‘Death Tango’. In placing such<br />
lightness within the realm of such darkness, an entire<br />
culture is incriminated. The change to ‘Deathfugue’<br />
recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while “Margarete”<br />
alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe’s Faust, forgiven<br />
by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but telling<br />
fact that Goethe’s famous oak tree outside Weimar was<br />
protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration<br />
camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with<br />
Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the<br />
Song Of Solomon, who is not forgiven.<br />
In post-war Germany the poem became part of the<br />
curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous<br />
critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise<br />
tended to be for what was called the poem’s “mastery”<br />
of what had passed – the Holocaust; enabling a rec-<br />
149<br />
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onciliation of sorts. Germany wanted to move on. It<br />
welcomed the rising tide out of language as it bore guilt<br />
away. The worst was confirmed when schoolteachers<br />
discussed the use of the poem in class. They agreed it<br />
was excellent in teaching how poetry might follow a<br />
musical pattern like a fugue but, they felt, the teaching<br />
should not be side-tracked by talk of the Holocaust. Celan’s<br />
subsequent distress led him to refuse to perform<br />
readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt there<br />
was a tendency toward the dark romance of a ‘terrible<br />
beauty’ in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the<br />
progressive movement of the civilisation of the book,<br />
enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a<br />
Beethoven sonata.<br />
Where did go Celan after this? Does it matter? What<br />
does poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a<br />
means of reminding us of what has happened and what<br />
it means, then one wonders why the facts have not<br />
been enough. Perhaps that is the point: the facts have<br />
never been enough. Aharon Appelfeld, another writersurvivor,<br />
reminds us that “the numbers and the facts<br />
were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a<br />
number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”<br />
Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something<br />
else, something more than the facts. But, in general,<br />
that ‘something else’ remains under suspicion even<br />
more than the dehumanising facts because ‘something<br />
else’ seems to be only self-regarding gymnastics with a<br />
dictionary. Indeed <strong>Spike</strong> quite rightly announces itself<br />
to be “violently prejudiced” against poetry. What is the<br />
alternative? Celan’s poetry is an answer.<br />
A word – you know:<br />
a corpse.<br />
Let us wash it,<br />
let us comb it,<br />
let us turn its eye<br />
towards heaven.<br />
BUY Paul Celan books online from and<br />
This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of<br />
literature’s gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to<br />
most post-war poetry and prose, which sought practicality,<br />
matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted<br />
words come as a dark reflection at the end of the poem<br />
‘Nocturnally Pouting’, itself a dark reflection on a bus<br />
journey over an alpine road in Austria. The presence<br />
of those departed is perceived in the landscape: in the<br />
“greyed moss”, in the “crossed and folded shafts of<br />
the spruces” and in “the jackdaws roused to endless<br />
flight over the glacier”. All are keys to those who<br />
“stand apart in the world”, each one “surly, bareheaded,<br />
hoar-frosted”, each one discharging “the guilt<br />
that adhered to their origin . upon a word that wrongly<br />
subsists, like summer.”<br />
The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that<br />
reason perhaps begs the question: how does one turn<br />
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a word heavenward? Isn’t this a rhetorical gesture?<br />
Celan’s title for the collection in which the two quoted<br />
poems appear is From Threshold To Threshold, and this<br />
just about sums up the ‘failure’ of these two poems to<br />
cross the threshold to heaven. As readers we tend to<br />
grasp moments of manifesto-like clarity such as these;<br />
but assertion is not enough. Despite its practical matterof-factness,<br />
it betrays failure. This is not to criticise.<br />
Failure is central to the history of modern poetry, although<br />
such failure is now usually misunderstood.<br />
To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlightenment<br />
poets of the 18th century – the beginning of the<br />
modern age – was humanity’s relation to nature. We are<br />
familiar with this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the<br />
greater Europe, Hölderlin’s inspiration was also “To<br />
be one with all that lives, and to return in blessed selfforgetfulness<br />
into the All of Nature”. While he pursued<br />
it in poetry, others, such as his friend Hegel, turned to<br />
philosophy. But where philosophy feeds off distance,<br />
allowing the goal of the Absolute – which would be<br />
the end of philosophy, the end of history etc – to be<br />
preserved indefinitely as a self-aggrandising rhetorical<br />
device, poetry demands the end without delay: if poetry<br />
remains, distance remains. Where today’s celebration<br />
of nature uses language in an unironic slideshow of<br />
clichés (see any New Age CD, website or poetry book<br />
made of recycled paper) the Romantics recognised only<br />
failure: words, corpses.<br />
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Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated<br />
the manifold growth of science and technology that<br />
sought (and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than<br />
to respect it. The consequence of Enlightenment was<br />
at once to liberate us of the fetters of medieval society<br />
and to destroy the traditions by which society kept its<br />
body and soul together. The contradiction remains with<br />
us, and the agitation of modern culture can be summed<br />
up as the tension between accepting the wilderness and<br />
our instinctive rejection of its freedom. A Celan poem<br />
reflects the struggle:<br />
Should<br />
should a man<br />
should a man come into the world, today, with<br />
the shining beard of the<br />
patriarchs: he could,<br />
if he spoke of this<br />
time, he<br />
could<br />
only babble and babble<br />
over, over<br />
againagain<br />
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)<br />
He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia.<br />
How might a man speak of this time, this ‘destitute<br />
time’, as Hölderlin called it, without using destitute<br />
151<br />
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words? Celan renews the question.<br />
If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like<br />
Hegel, then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger.<br />
His analysis of the modern age had a profound influence<br />
on Celan’s work, offering a theoretical apparatus<br />
to his own poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought<br />
a new mode of thought to counteract the mechanistic<br />
tendency of the modern world. He believed that humanity<br />
had become separate from its harmony with the<br />
rest of nature, as he believed was in place in Homer’s<br />
Greece. This separation was due, he thought, to the rise<br />
of dualistic ways of thinking set in motion by Plato.<br />
Concentrating on the concept of ‘being’, Heidegger<br />
argues that ‘human being’ is not a thing like other things<br />
(objects in the world as we know it) but a clearing (a<br />
non-thing, a nothingness) in which those things are presented,<br />
where they actually become things. And rather<br />
than this being an argument for solipsism (the world<br />
as function of one’s mind), it means our knowledge of<br />
the world is not a product of boxed-in consciousness.<br />
Instead of minds making thoughts possible, it is the<br />
‘being’ preceding mind that makes it possible for us to<br />
regard ourselves as minds having thoughts distant from<br />
‘the real world’.<br />
This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition<br />
that has dominated Western thought for the last four<br />
centuries. But the clearing depends on a temporal and<br />
linguistic aspect. Things appear in the three dimen-<br />
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sions of time, enabling us to categorise it in language<br />
and so differentiate it from the rest of the world. Such<br />
categorisation, however, is restricted by our need for<br />
control, and so the thing disappears from view. We<br />
become blinded to the discourse of the world; to what<br />
is revealed. The world becomes an object. This is a<br />
necessary tendency but one that can and must be counteracted<br />
by the function of the clearing.<br />
Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by<br />
pointing toward the mood of anxiety that seems to<br />
characterise our everyday existence. We spend most<br />
of our time avoiding this mood, of course. He says<br />
we try to become totally absorbed in ‘the real world’,<br />
as defined by such dead language, in order to avoid<br />
facing up to our mortal nothingness as revealed in<br />
anxiety. So, rather than liberating us, the techologocally-advanced<br />
modern world opens a rift between<br />
the public self – the one in which we have in order<br />
to live without becoming paralysed by anxiety – and<br />
the ‘anxious’ self in the so-called clearing. Heidegger<br />
says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving up<br />
our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world<br />
in its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French<br />
existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme<br />
from Heidegger, although their ‘absurd’ freedom was<br />
foreign to him. A French philosopher more in tune<br />
with Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up<br />
the condition for the present era:<br />
152<br />
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“Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disappearing<br />
in the mire of a ‘globalised’ world. Nothing, not<br />
even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest,<br />
most wrenching love, can escape this era’s shadow: a<br />
cancer of the subject”.<br />
This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway<br />
part of our need to live in the world rather than be<br />
imprisoned by autism. Selflessness, of course, while<br />
admirable in most cases, can also descend into what<br />
we called inhumanity. One of the terrible ironies of this<br />
story is Heidegger’s own descent. In the early 1930s,<br />
he saw the Nazi party as a political movement capable<br />
of mediating the needs of the modernity with authentic<br />
existence, making Germany a modern-day equivalent<br />
of ancient Greece. In 1933, the Rector of Freiburg<br />
University, where Heidegger was a renowned young<br />
professor, resigned in protest at Hitler’s anti-Semitic<br />
laws. Heidegger took his place after an election among<br />
the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in disaffection<br />
but never revoked his party membership and referred<br />
to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Maurice<br />
Blanchot called “scandalously inadequate” fashion.<br />
Such facts make Celan’s interest in his work more<br />
compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent<br />
in the Romantic project. Another example would be<br />
the terror following the French Revolution. What does<br />
this mean for poetry? Well, in his isolated time after<br />
the war, during his denazification, Heidegger came to<br />
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believe poetry was the means to open up the world; it<br />
could rouse the revelation of things in the clearing. In<br />
fact, it was the revelation itself. His intense meditations<br />
on Hölderlin’s poetry is summarised by an essay title<br />
taken from a poem: “… poetically man dwells …”<br />
Elsewhere he wrote that “Language is the house of<br />
Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and<br />
those who create with words are the guardians of this<br />
home.” If that is the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then<br />
it means, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust,<br />
language would have to change in order to rebuild the<br />
tainted home.<br />
In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan<br />
as he was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor,<br />
physically and metaphorically exiled from his homes:<br />
Czernowitz, under Soviet rule, and German, under the<br />
weight of “murderous speech” as he called it. It was an<br />
imperative because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel<br />
Beckett put it: one writes not in order to be published,<br />
one writes in order to breathe. Celan could not breathe<br />
in the old language. The old language was saturated<br />
with the conditions by which an entire culture was able<br />
to produce the greatest art and thought in history and<br />
then produce death camps with the efficiency of a factory.<br />
No wonder Adorno said that to write lyric poetry<br />
after Auschwitz was itself barbaric.<br />
What Adorno didn’t say, and this has been ignored<br />
too often, is that poetry could still be written only not<br />
153<br />
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as we had known it. The new language, the new poetry,<br />
would be a way of turning us toward that which is<br />
absent in our everyday world, that which “stands apart<br />
in the world”. This formulation, like Heidegger’s clearing,<br />
betrays a religious sensibility. After Auschwitz,<br />
however, God was under radical question. The space<br />
left by Him, on the other hand, was not:<br />
Psalm<br />
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,<br />
no one conjures our dust.<br />
No one.<br />
Praised be your name, no one.<br />
For your sake<br />
we shall flower.<br />
Towards<br />
you.<br />
A nothing<br />
we were, are, shall<br />
remain, flowering:<br />
the nothing-, the no one’s rose.<br />
With<br />
our pistil soul-bright,<br />
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,<br />
our corolla red<br />
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with the crimson word which we sang<br />
over, O over<br />
the thorn.<br />
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)<br />
One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this<br />
poem, or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and<br />
an antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is palpable<br />
only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use<br />
Blanchot’s phrase. Celan’s biographer John Felstiner has<br />
brought out the allusions within ‘Psalm’ to Jewish and<br />
Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed<br />
here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communicates<br />
before any of these allusion are understood.<br />
It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a<br />
poem as ‘Psalm’ has a biographer (Heidegger says the<br />
author of every masterful poem is unimportant) and<br />
Felstiner’s book does indeed concentrate on the poems.<br />
Despite this, he uncovers the probable origin of the title<br />
of his 1959 collection Sprachgitter – Speech Grille.<br />
Celan’s mother-in-law retreated to a convent and<br />
when the family visited her, she would remain behind<br />
a grill. Such a barrier holds also for poetry’s revelation.<br />
One must accept the limit for it to work; the limit is<br />
part of the experience. Or non-experience. Lacoue-<br />
Labarthe’s brief and powerful book on Celan is actually<br />
called “Poetry as Experience”. It characterises<br />
the poem as something always returning to its source,<br />
154<br />
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approaching the inaccessible, and, necessarily, inaccessibility.<br />
The poem returns to the experience itself – the<br />
revelation in the clearing – not ‘the stuff of anecdotes’<br />
but the etymological origin of ‘experience’: a crossing<br />
through danger. It is a crossing resisted only in what the<br />
poem lets us consume as readers: “a poem has nothing<br />
to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is<br />
that from which it wrenches away as a poem.”<br />
So what, exactly, remains before and after this<br />
wrenching? Celan names it himself, in a speech upon<br />
receiving the prestigious Büchner Prize: “the poem has<br />
always hoped … to speak also on behalf of the strange<br />
– no, I can no longer use this word here – on behalf of<br />
the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.”<br />
(translated by Rosemary Waldrop)<br />
Perhaps the ‘strange’ can be used no longer because<br />
it is already too familiar, too homely. He had to seek<br />
another word or phrase: “the altogether other”. His<br />
speech, as much as his poetry, has to be attuned to the<br />
demands of experience. Celan also refers to the attempt<br />
to give each poem its own date, its own unique time, so<br />
that it speaks with supreme accuracy.<br />
Deep in Time’s crevasse<br />
by the alveolate ice waits,<br />
a crystal of breath,<br />
your irreversible witness<br />
(trans. Michael Hamburger)<br />
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The difficulty is that language depends on generality;<br />
the more specific a word the harder it is to reach across<br />
time; we will not connect to the “altogether other”<br />
trapped in time’s crevasse. In fact, it could not be language<br />
anymore. Yet if it can connect despite risking such<br />
isolation, it would be all the more richer. In this respect,<br />
Celan requires a certain amount of patience on behalf of<br />
his readers. For example, a late untitled poem in full:<br />
Illegibility of this world.<br />
All things twice over.<br />
The strong clocks justify the splitting hour<br />
hoarsely.<br />
You, clamped into your deepest part, climb out<br />
of yourself for ever.<br />
(trans. Michael Hamburger)<br />
This is puzzling, but such puzzlement does not matter<br />
much once one sets the need for facts or conclusive<br />
harmony aside. Less sympathetic critics dismiss his<br />
work as ‘hermetic’, sealed from approach. They say<br />
only the writer could know what such a poem is about.<br />
Why is the world illegible? What is a strong clock?<br />
I have no answers. Perhaps the lack of a title necessitates<br />
a certain blankness in the initial response. The<br />
moment one titles an experience the dangers lessen.<br />
Would a biography help us understand this? Probably<br />
not. Celan was adamant that his poetry was accessible:<br />
155<br />
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“As for my alleged encodings” he said “I’d rather say:<br />
undissembled ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness<br />
and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.” It seems<br />
odd that a poet so keen – perhaps even desperate – to<br />
reach across time, to provide us with such realism,<br />
should do so by writing wilfully unreadable poems.<br />
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it is the<br />
poetry’s problem.<br />
Professor John Carey of Oxford would disagree.<br />
He is Britain’s foremost opponent of difficulty. In his<br />
best-selling book The Intellectuals And The Masses,<br />
he argues that Modernism – the epitome of difficulty –<br />
was invented by intellectuals in order to alienate the socalled<br />
masses, who, newly emancipated from illiteracy,<br />
were seen as muddying the pure waters of literature.<br />
Celan indicates other reasons. In fact, the “enjoyment”<br />
Carey demands is really a means of retaining a dualistic<br />
attitude to literature; of “talking eyes into blindness”, to<br />
use Celan’s phrase. Of course, many Modernists were<br />
proto-fascists, yet this doesn’t mean difficulty equals<br />
Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a “crossing through<br />
danger” is not mere rhetoric. The dangers led Heidegger<br />
to his great error.<br />
It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the<br />
greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work,<br />
was a Nazi. One cannot even say ‘had been a Nazi’<br />
because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation.<br />
Late in life, Heidegger became interested in<br />
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Celan’s work. He recognised him as the only living equal<br />
of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the<br />
poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black<br />
Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was<br />
a significant move as Celan had developed an intense<br />
sensitivity (one might say ‘anxiety’) toward anti-Semitic<br />
tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated<br />
publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the<br />
Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary<br />
authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he<br />
regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investigation.<br />
Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate<br />
home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi<br />
indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the<br />
full extent of Heidegger’s culpability.<br />
Generally, not much is known about Celan’s reasons<br />
for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during<br />
the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called<br />
‘Todtnauberg’. The title reference is explicit; the place<br />
name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the<br />
first half:<br />
Arnica, eyebright,<br />
the draft from the well<br />
with the star-crowned die above it,<br />
In<br />
the hut,<br />
156<br />
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the line<br />
- whose name did the book<br />
register before mine? -,<br />
the line inscribed in that book about<br />
a hope, today,<br />
of a thinking man’s<br />
coming<br />
word<br />
in the heart,<br />
(trans. Michael Hamburger)<br />
As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis<br />
of the various translations of the poem, ‘Todtnauberg’<br />
is barely a poem than single sentence divided into eight<br />
stanzas. The first of the three above display Celan’s extraordinary<br />
eye for nature, as noted earlier in ‘Nocturnally<br />
Pouting’. Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted<br />
for their healing qualities, so right from the start there is<br />
the sense of what the meeting is all about. In the third,<br />
the poet signs the visitors book and makes plain his<br />
awareness of who might have signed it before – Germans<br />
being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology perhaps.<br />
He hopes for a word in the heart of the great man. Did<br />
the word reveal itself? The remaining five stanzas are:<br />
woodland sward, unlevelled,<br />
orchid and orchid, single,<br />
coarse stuff, later, clear<br />
in passing,<br />
he who drives us, the man,<br />
who listens in,<br />
the half- trodden fascine<br />
walks over the high moors<br />
dampness,<br />
much.<br />
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Almost certainly not. The two men walked across<br />
woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid.<br />
And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger<br />
was concerned. He displayed his special copy of the<br />
poem proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage,<br />
seemingly unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is<br />
enough to indicate the blindness of a man, even one<br />
with genius, rooted in his familiar landscape – brought<br />
out here in Hamburger’s translation of log-paths as<br />
“fascine”, a word so close to ‘fascist’, the etymological<br />
origin coming, as Joris says, from the Latin ‘fasces’ – a<br />
bundle of wooden rods – the symbol of fascism.<br />
‘Todtnauberg’, therefore, cannot be regarded as a<br />
coded accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness,<br />
or sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in<br />
contrast to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the<br />
very openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan<br />
once said: “Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes.”<br />
The lack of a second “itself” in this sentence exposes. �<br />
157<br />
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Feature [published August 1996]<br />
Bruce Chatwin: In Search Of The Miraculous<br />
Nick Clapson on the enduring enigma of Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing<br />
Bruce Chatwin was a truly singular voice in British travel<br />
writing, and whose silence is now all too apparent. Since<br />
his untimely death in 1989 of what was described at the<br />
time as a rare Chinese disease (but which was later admitted<br />
to be AIDS), several collections of his previously<br />
unpublished work have appeared. The latest of these is<br />
Anatomy of Restlessness: Uncollected Writings. This<br />
book, however, pays poor service to his name. Published<br />
under the auspices of a ‘sourcebook’ of uncollected<br />
work it draws together various pieces from magazines<br />
and journals. The result is a misshapen assemblage that<br />
hides gems amongst the weak and the substandard.<br />
Chatwin’s writing at its best is both thrilling and<br />
absorbing, capable of carrying the reader to untravelled<br />
lands, and Chatwin was always the best of companions.<br />
However, if Chatwin the writer was intriguing, Chatwin<br />
the man was so much more. His rich life, pushed and<br />
pulled by his demanding interests, was always present<br />
in his work. That is not say that he was example of<br />
that breed of traveller who batters you into submission<br />
with endless anecdote heaped upon anecdote. Rather,<br />
he introduces you to the sights of exotic lands, vast<br />
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and<br />
parties of characters, all set free to live an existence<br />
untrammelled by the author’s irrepressible ego.<br />
As the format of this new book suggests, Bruce<br />
Chatwin’s writing was divisible into distinct categories<br />
– whether it be art, his exploration of what he termed<br />
“the nomadic alternative”, or fiction, written in a style<br />
which was an assiduous blend of the real with the<br />
imaginary. The autobiographical piece which opens<br />
Anatomy Of Restlessness hints at some of the myths<br />
that surround this man. By all accounts Chatwin left<br />
his steady job writing for The Sunday Times with a<br />
telegram enigmatically stating “Have gone to Patagonia”.<br />
This, however, was not the first time that he had<br />
made such a dramatic break from security. Previously,<br />
he threw in his job as a director at Sotheby’s in order<br />
to live with and study nomadic tribes in the Sudan, offering<br />
the excuse that his doctor said that he needed to<br />
view distant horizons in order to correct an eye defect<br />
(a self-confessed psychosomatic illness). The product<br />
of his sudden trip to Patagonia was the aptly titled In<br />
Patagonia (1977).<br />
This first book was most probably the driest of all<br />
158<br />
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Chatwin’s output, but which has already been raised to<br />
near classic status. Chatwin weaves together curious<br />
observations with nuggets of historical information<br />
which manages to make this more than an account of<br />
a physical journey, and that, to me, is the essence of<br />
good travel writing. I don’t just want to know what a<br />
cracking guy the author is, and how he managed to get<br />
out of a scrape with an armadillo whilst travelling in<br />
the Amazon with just a piece of used dental floss and a<br />
very, very sharp stick. Nor do I want to be laden down<br />
with superfluous information on the economic argument<br />
for the downfall of the Ottoman Empire!<br />
What do I demand from a travel writer then? I want<br />
to be able to understand them as a person, and know<br />
why they have undertaken this particular journey. And<br />
that means being able to step inside their head and<br />
travel with them. Though this is nearly impossible,<br />
Bruce Chatwin was one of the few writers that I feel<br />
managed it.<br />
Chatwin was not, however, a straight forward kind of<br />
travel writer like Wilfred Thesiger or Norman Lewis.<br />
One of the most amazing qualities that sets Chatwin<br />
apart was his ability to mix fact and fiction in his ‘stories’.<br />
As he said himself, “The word story is intend to<br />
alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative<br />
may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at<br />
work.” This is idea is best held in mind when considering<br />
his best-selling book, The Songlines (1987).<br />
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and<br />
Though clearly a novel, it is also not a novel. Let<br />
me explain. The main character is a guy called Bruce<br />
who’s travelling around the Australian outback researching<br />
the nomadic culture of the Aboriginal, and<br />
their singing the world into existence through their<br />
travelling of the Songlines. This coincidence is further<br />
compounded by the fact that ‘Bruce’ records his notes<br />
in very same moleskin notebooks that Bruce Chatwin<br />
himself was famous for. This book, then, results in<br />
being so much more than just a travel book or a novel.<br />
It provides not only a combination of a portrait of an<br />
amazing culture and a damn fine read; it eventually<br />
draws the reader into questioning the very fabric of<br />
human culture and our Western preconceptions. Who<br />
could ask for more? An interesting aside: Salman<br />
Rushdie, who travelled with Chatwin in Australia<br />
whilst he was working on this book, provides an enlightening,<br />
though brief, glimpse of Chatwin at work<br />
in his book Imaginary Homelands (1991).<br />
An obvious thread that joins much of Chatwin’s<br />
work like The Songlines and Anatomy Of Restlessness<br />
is his passion for nomadic life. This interest is represented<br />
in both the opening section, ‘Horreur du domicile’,<br />
which draws together various short pieces on his<br />
own personal motivations to travel, and the chapter<br />
entitled ‘The Nomadic Alternative’. In this chapter<br />
the collection of pieces outline many of the arguments<br />
that comprised Chatwin’s own unpublished thesis on<br />
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nomadism. These pieces, though frequently dense, are<br />
some of the most rewarding, with Chatwin’s erudition<br />
shining through. Chatwin links many divergent<br />
nomadic cultures from around the world, highlighting<br />
several similarities of development, and in time puts<br />
forward a credible case for nomadism as equal to<br />
the sedentary life that has become a universal norm.<br />
If Chatwin is to be believed, civilisation just took a<br />
wrong turn somewhere, and chose to plump for the<br />
inferior option. This, he feels, also goes some way to<br />
explain the Western disease: wanderlust.<br />
When viewed in comparison to his own collection<br />
of incidental work, What Am I Doing Here (1989),<br />
Anatomy Of Restlessness pales. Chatwin amassed innumerable<br />
fabulous pieces in what must be considered<br />
the definitive compilation, and which really renders<br />
this new book superfluous. The pieces range through<br />
the intensely personal in ‘Your father’s eyes are blue<br />
again’, the dramatic with ‘A coup – a story’ (though<br />
Chatwin himself was caught up in the coup in Benin),<br />
and the entrancing ‘On the yeti’s tracks’. These short<br />
works, however, are just the tip of the iceberg, with this<br />
book containing so much more.<br />
Another remarkable quality of Chatwin’s writing<br />
was his ability to capture a personality, and What Am<br />
I Doing Here is filled with accounts of some the unusual<br />
characters he met over the years. We meet Maria<br />
Reiche, a gangly German mathematician who spends<br />
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and<br />
her days in the bleak environment of the Peruvian<br />
Pampas, standing on a step-ladder in order to chart<br />
the strange lines, often miles in length, carved into the<br />
floor of this desert. We travel with Chatwin to Ghana to<br />
see the film director Werner Herzog going mad (again)<br />
whilst filming Chatwin’s novel, The Viceroy Of Quidah<br />
(1980). We even get to trail around India with Bruce<br />
and the photographer Eve Arnold who followed Indira<br />
Gandhi’s election campaign shortly before her assassination<br />
in the late 70s.<br />
Another crucial aspect of Chatwin’s output addressed<br />
in Anatomy Of Restlessness is his unfailing interest in<br />
all forms of visual art. Chatwin’s aesthetic was that<br />
which championed the primitive and the simplistic,<br />
though, whilst at Sotheby’s he was employed as an ‘expert’<br />
on Impressionism. Whilst interested in the theory<br />
of art and collecting, he was also an artist of considerable<br />
aplomb himself with his work being published in<br />
the posthumous Photographs And Notebooks (1993),<br />
with a coinciding exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall,<br />
London. Here we are shown his remarkable eye for the<br />
abstract that exists in all things. Sparse and controlled,<br />
his photographs managed to trap the beauty that can<br />
be found in the common and everyday. He crops boats<br />
and walls in Mauritania, so releasing the power of their<br />
dazzling colours and geometric forms. The prayer flags<br />
of the Bodnath Stupa, Kathmandu, are framed so as to<br />
cut crazy patterns in the sky.<br />
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Chatwin’s photographs also demonstrate keen<br />
awareness of the decay inherent in all life, littered with<br />
images of crumbling buildings, and tatty ramshackle<br />
shacks, all breathing what looks to be their last breath.<br />
Maybe he liked feel that all sedentary life was on its<br />
last legs, and soon nomadism, the rightful king would<br />
come and claim back its lands. Or maybe he just found<br />
them beautiful.<br />
This brief excursion through the work of Bruce<br />
Chatwin has, I hope, served to demonstrate not only his<br />
uniqueness, but also convey some sense of the power<br />
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and<br />
of his writing. In doing so, it becomes glaringly apparent<br />
that Anatomy Of Restlessness is an unsatisfying<br />
epilogue to Chatwin’s oeuvre. Yes, it is put together in<br />
a good accessible form, and yes, it does aim to cover<br />
the main areas of his output. However, what is lacking<br />
is a sense of quality, and as a result much of this work<br />
falls short of being able to be considered ‘important’.<br />
However, if, like myself, you want one last chance to<br />
experience the joy of reading a new Chatwin book,<br />
then you won’t be disappointed. Bruce Chatwin does<br />
still exists in these pages. �<br />
161<br />
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Interview [published October 2000]<br />
Annabel Chong: Life Thru A Lens<br />
Robin Askew meets the star of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story<br />
“Oh my god – this couple just turned around and gave<br />
me a dirty look!” Annabel Chong giggles like a schoolgirl.<br />
“It’s like, no sex please we’re British.” Perhaps unwisely,<br />
she’d stepped outside her film company’s noisy<br />
office to do this interview in the street over her mobile<br />
phone, and had spent 20 minutes chatting chirpily about<br />
blow-jobs and erections. Strange that she should be so<br />
easily embarrassed, mind. Ms Chong’s claim to fame is<br />
that back in 1995 she set a new world record by having<br />
sex with 251 men in ten hours, the whole event being<br />
recorded on film and subsequently edited down to a<br />
brisk four hours to become a bestselling hardcore porn<br />
vid. Also on hand was a documentary crew making Sex:<br />
The Annabel Chong Story, which was the hottest ticket<br />
at the last year’s Sundance festival of independent film.<br />
She has always insisted the big gang-bang was a<br />
feminist statement, turning the tables on men to reduce<br />
them to a succession of cocks of varying degrees of<br />
tumescence. There’s a debate to be had about whether<br />
pornography degrades women, and whether the appropriate<br />
response is to degrade men right back again.<br />
But it’s a monumentally boring one. Everyone knows<br />
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and<br />
where they stand and if you really want it rehashed once<br />
again, leave <strong>Spike</strong> right now and turn to The Guardian<br />
women’s page, where they’re certain to oblige. Opportunities<br />
to interview porn icons, especially those as<br />
articulate and forthright as Annabel Chong, are few and<br />
far between, so I decided to seek answers to the questions<br />
people really want asked. After polling a handful<br />
of mates of both sexes, who may or may not be more<br />
sleazy than the average <strong>Spike</strong> reader (you decide), I<br />
found these boiled down to variations on four themes.<br />
Let’s get them out of the way before we go any further.<br />
So Annabel, did you come? “Sporadically, I did. But<br />
it’s very much like running a marathon. You go through<br />
stretches where it’s just incredibly boring, incredibly<br />
awful. And you get to certain stretches where you’re<br />
just running on air. That was where I really got into<br />
it and enjoyed it. I’ve always enjoyed extreme sexual<br />
situations, and this was certainly one of them. There<br />
are some people – they may not be Tom Cruise, let’s<br />
say – but they’re very comfortable with their bodies<br />
and their own sexuality. I find that ultimately more attractive<br />
than a stud who’s just neurotic about what he<br />
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looks like, posing in front of the camera and losing his<br />
hard-on. That’s just not very appealing, is it?”<br />
What proportion of the men failed to get it up, then?<br />
“About 66% were not able to perform. And between<br />
you and me, I would have to say that if I were a bloke<br />
I would have tremendous difficulty performing. I think<br />
I’d get this performance anxiety attack and just fail.<br />
And up to this day, I really wonder why a lot of the men<br />
decided to do it. It’s bad enough to fail but it’s even<br />
worse to fail on video, where their grandchildren could<br />
check it out: ‘Oh my god, grandpa’s such a loser. He<br />
couldn’t even get it up.’ Terribly embarrassing I would<br />
think.”<br />
Given that they were recruited through porn mags,<br />
weren’t you at all concerned that the men would turn<br />
out to be revolting, rancid weirdos? “Oh, they were<br />
rather revolting, some of them. But the whole point of<br />
the entire exercise was not to pick out 251 studs. It’s<br />
more like the idea of the UN.”<br />
I’m sorry? “You know, the United Nations. You get a<br />
little bit of everything. A little sampling of every single<br />
shape, size and, you know … colour, I guess.”<br />
Weren’t you terribly sore afterwards? “Well, in actual<br />
fact if you watch the four-hour gang bang tape itself,<br />
you will realise that a lot of the things were fudged in<br />
editing to make it look as though more sex took place.<br />
So it really wasn’t that many men.”<br />
Hang on. It says here that there were 251 of them.<br />
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and<br />
Have we been diddled? “But they just moved them<br />
along really quickly. There was some humping, but not<br />
quite that much. It’s actually less sex than if a woman is<br />
having sex with a man for 10 hours straight. Now that’s<br />
a lot of sex.”<br />
Sex is a fascinating and occasionally unsettling film,<br />
whose subject comes across as a complicated young<br />
woman, alternately assertive and thoughtful, damaged<br />
and deluded. The gang-bang itself is one of the least<br />
erotic things you’ll ever see. Silvery pony-tailed Brit<br />
director John Bowen, whose nom de porn is John T.<br />
Bone, also acts as cock wrangler, leading the leering<br />
fornicators in groups of five up onto a plinth where Ms<br />
Chong waits to receive them. We also meet her creepy<br />
middle-aged fan club organiser, some sneery rival porn<br />
stars at a convention (“I do film noirs (sic),” sniffs<br />
the star of Bitches of Hollywood), and watch Annabel<br />
playing up to a Jerry Springer audience and charming<br />
undergraduates at a Cambridge Union debate. But the<br />
story behind the documentary turns out to be even<br />
more fascinating. Nowhere is the viewer informed that<br />
the director, Gough Lewis, was shagging his subject.<br />
Now he’s apparently ‘gone AWOL’ and she’s agreed<br />
to publicise the film to put right what she claims are<br />
misrepresentations. What’s more, she’s now making<br />
her own film about what it’s like to be the subject of<br />
a documentary. “I get more self-reflective every day,”<br />
she quips.<br />
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Annabel Chong was born Grace Quek (pronounced<br />
“quake”) in Singapore, 1972. Her Christian parents<br />
(mum’s a piano teacher, dad’s a schoolteacher) sent her<br />
to convent school and encouraged her to study law but<br />
her “dwindling religious faith and burgeoning sexuality”<br />
were already causing problems. In a traumatic<br />
ritual, she was exorcised in a local church at the age<br />
of 17. In 1991, she moved to London to attend King’s<br />
College and thence to America and the University of<br />
Southern California, where she was so enraged by<br />
feminist theory that she took to porn as a kind of practical<br />
adjunct to her gender studies course.<br />
Although she still has a tendency to address each<br />
question as though it were one of her college essays, to<br />
be fielded with maximum cultural studies jargon, Annabel/Grace<br />
(“‘Who am I?’ is a question I constantly<br />
ask myself”) now seems a great deal more assured than<br />
she does in the film. “It’s rather mortifying to look back<br />
and think to myself, oh my god, was I that vulnerable?”<br />
she admits. “But maybe I was.”<br />
One of the more disturbing scenes shows Annabel<br />
cutting herself, the clear implication being that the<br />
porn industry has driven her to self-harm. In fact, she<br />
says, the sequence was shot on the day that she and<br />
the director split up, and both of them were doing it.<br />
“I don’t know what came over me. It’s not one of the<br />
prouder moments of my life, but when I saw the film I<br />
was really astonished to find that he didn’t include the<br />
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and<br />
entire context.”<br />
Even more worrying, we learn that not only has Bowen<br />
yet to pay her the $10,000 she was promised to take<br />
part in the gang bang, but the assurances she was given<br />
about the men being tested for HIV were untrue. “I was<br />
terribly disturbed by that. I felt extremely betrayed by<br />
the fact that they didn’t take the health precautions I<br />
thought they did,” she says angrily.<br />
Late in the film, it’s revealed that she was gang<br />
raped while in London in 1991. The viewer is invited<br />
to conclude that her penchant for group sex flicks (I<br />
Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team, All I Want For<br />
Christmas is a Gang Bang) is born of a desire to regain<br />
control over this part of her life. She thinks that’s too<br />
simplistic an explanation. “Nobody ever does anything<br />
for any single motivation. I felt that it was a cop out for<br />
Gough to say that A caused B, because there’s actually<br />
more of a story behind the entire rape event. The immediate<br />
outcome of it was that I was sent through the<br />
legal system and National Health Service counselling<br />
system, which was incredibly dehumanising. I felt that<br />
I was nothing but a statistic. Then I looked back on my<br />
entire life in Singapore and realised that all my life I<br />
had been processed. I led the perfect life. I went to all<br />
the right schools, I attended the right social functions,<br />
hung out in the country club, went to church, got the<br />
humanities scholarship. I was the perfect child, but<br />
none of it was really my choice. First thing I did was to<br />
164<br />
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quit law school and go to art school. It was a big issue.<br />
My relatives, bless them, actually called my parents to<br />
offer their condolences. ‘She’s going to starve. We feel<br />
so sorry for you.’ So it affected me in the sense that<br />
control became a huge issue in my life. I think what<br />
you see in the documentary is the process of regaining<br />
control, and it really is a work in progress. Even today,<br />
I’m asking myself whether I’m in control of situations.”<br />
These days she’s made up with her parents, who<br />
were unaware of their daughter’s novel career and a<br />
little baffled by her popularity when the documentary<br />
was being filmed. Partly as a result of her experiences<br />
of being exploited in front of the camera, she’s now<br />
decided to go behind it, producing her own porn. And<br />
she’s on a crusade. “What I’m trying to do is to target<br />
market my product towards a younger crowd, which no<br />
one is really addressing right now. Or at least to make<br />
it more contemporary. I mean what’s up with the big<br />
hair? It’s so over. So 80s.”<br />
Do you really think porn consumers look at the<br />
hairstyles though, Annabel? “Well, if I was a bloke,<br />
I wouldn’t want all that frizzy hair crackling all over<br />
my blow-job. It just seems rather intimidating. It’s<br />
like being blown by a hedgehog. I don’t think it’s very<br />
aesthetic. Men have to have jerk off somehow. They<br />
need to have a wank over some images of people getting<br />
it on. They’re just going to buy whatever’s out<br />
there. And if there’s product out there that’s done rather<br />
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and<br />
well – like the films from the 70s, which I really admire<br />
– the women actually do look like women, which is<br />
kind of nice. Because nowadays the women don’t look<br />
like women – they look like drag queens. And half the<br />
time I’m just sitting there thinking, they don’t look terribly<br />
female do they? As a female viewer that bothers<br />
me, because I want to be able to relate to the person<br />
onscreen when I’m doing my own private thing.<br />
“I may not know necessarily what good pornography<br />
is,” she concedes. “I know what I like, so I’m just going<br />
to make what I like and hopefully it will sell.”<br />
Of course, it won’t sell over here because we have<br />
some of the most draconian censorship laws in the<br />
world. “I thought about that when I was coming over<br />
here. I really believe that when you talk about banning<br />
porn because it’s exploitative of women or because it’s<br />
obscene, then it’s terribly fascist. A lot of people derive<br />
enjoyment from watching adult films. I certainly do.<br />
I have been a porn consumer for years, and proud to<br />
be one. I think a lot of things are more obscene than<br />
the average porn film. Like Patch Adams, the Robin<br />
Williams film. I think that’s incredibly obscene – it’s<br />
like total emotional pornography.”<br />
What with the porn and the documentary and her<br />
journalism and art exhibitions, there’s just one thing<br />
Annabel doesn’t have time for anymore. “Your average<br />
Brit probably has a better sex life than me,” she moans.<br />
And on that cheering note, I bid her farewell. �<br />
165<br />
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Feature [published November 1997]<br />
E.M. Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran<br />
refuses explanation<br />
“Nothing is more irritating than those works which<br />
‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has<br />
focused on just about everything except a system.”<br />
What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was<br />
born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox<br />
priest. In adolescence, he lost his childhood in the country<br />
and was moved to the city. He also lost his religion.<br />
For years he didn’t sleep – until he took up cycling. He<br />
passed sleepless nights wandering the dodgy streets of<br />
an obscure Romanian city. In 1937 he moved to Paris<br />
and wrote, producing what are generally classified as<br />
‘aphorisms’, collected together under such titles as The<br />
Temptation To Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The<br />
Trouble With Being Born. He knew Samuel Beckett,<br />
who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. Late<br />
in life he gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the<br />
universe” anymore, and died a few years later after an<br />
encounter with an over-excited dog.<br />
I hope none of this helps.<br />
Cioran’s sentences are of little or no help. That is<br />
their worth. Just think of the aphorisms; each sentence<br />
has the company of only one or two others. The gaps<br />
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and<br />
between groups of sentences appear like sands of the<br />
desert encroaching on an oasis. Or is it the other way<br />
around? That the answer is so unclear is the worth of<br />
Cioran’s sentences.<br />
His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois exponents<br />
of the 19th century. They open wounds. Still,<br />
Cioran is not studied. This is the academic orthodoxy.<br />
And that’s fine. Scholars read texts like drivers read<br />
diversion signs. La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Nietzsche<br />
40, Existentialism, forever. Alternatively, just<br />
read the sentences.<br />
“…lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity.”<br />
The end of a sentence in this case; a place of especial<br />
elation and despair. (The want of elation and despair<br />
generating their presence in the vertiginous lack which<br />
is the peculiarity of consciousness. Reading is like consciousness<br />
in that nothing happens. ) Cioran is lyrical.<br />
His style is a variant on song. At the same time he is a<br />
writer of solitude and subjectivity. This last word has<br />
gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin to solipsism,<br />
selfishness, ignorance, certainly ‘untruth’. But let us<br />
wrest it back for as long as we can. Subjectivity is the<br />
166<br />
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state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleepless.<br />
“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then<br />
this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for<br />
each minute. And why all this? Because I was born.<br />
It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the<br />
indictment of birth.”<br />
A special type of sleeplessness being where one is<br />
oneself forever and knows it. It is also an indictment of<br />
lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the suppression of subjectivity,<br />
the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’.<br />
Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz<br />
is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a<br />
revolution lyrical to its evil core. The Volk wanted to<br />
sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its<br />
anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Cioran’s<br />
physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt<br />
for those who craved such sleep. He needed it too, to<br />
stay alive. A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also<br />
his saving. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet<br />
it is melancholy that separates us from it.”<br />
When Cioran began to write in French he had, by<br />
then, conquered his insomnia. Exhausted by long<br />
bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing tries to abide<br />
in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse<br />
into the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran’s<br />
writing tends to disperse the ‘three in the morning’ in<br />
lyric expression. So, a bit of a disappointment, to say<br />
the least.<br />
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and<br />
“As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they<br />
know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon<br />
or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to<br />
proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The<br />
disabused man is different: for him, disappointment<br />
occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to<br />
await it, it is present.”<br />
To say again then, his disappointment with writing<br />
was inevitable. But this only drives one on, to divest<br />
words of their common usage and apply them to this<br />
moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his<br />
disillusionment with writing’s other products, particularly<br />
those where disappointment is not an issue:<br />
ideas, grand narratives, systems. “Philosophers are<br />
constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad<br />
sense.” Elsewhere: “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three<br />
enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is<br />
the system, in philosophy and in everything.” Yet how<br />
can one write without constructing some system, even<br />
if it is negative?<br />
“’Optimists write badly’ (Valery). But pessimists do<br />
not write.” [Maurice Blanchot]<br />
The violence of Cioran’s work, its verbosity and<br />
arrogance, results from a struggle with inevitable<br />
positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of this.<br />
It demands our opposition. The blank following the<br />
sentences rises up before us. Our exasperation leaves<br />
the same silent space hovering there. This is the place-<br />
167<br />
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less heaven or hell Cioran is always returning us to. It<br />
is pointless to oppose or argue – or explain. One can<br />
scan the biographical parabola that gives shape to a life,<br />
thereby explaining it and the work, but something is<br />
left behind; this place he takes us to. The facts of a life<br />
help inasmuch as noise masks silence. But something is<br />
left behind. Generally, it seems students study, reviewers<br />
review, writers write and readers read in the hope of<br />
avoiding this. It’s what the people want, after all.<br />
Cioran has also written essays. They demand the<br />
same kind of reading as the aphorisms. It just takes<br />
longer. In the landmark essays, the brilliance burns<br />
long and hard. Still, the tone remains more or less identical<br />
to the aphorisms. While the aphorisms give us the<br />
breathing space of a firebreak, the essays threaten suffocation.<br />
What is lost is the very sense of its inspiration,<br />
the surprise, the horror, the emptiness of the moment.<br />
Instead, Cioran has something to say. In ‘Beyond the<br />
Novel’, Cioran examines our self-conscious age with<br />
regard to what helped constitute it – the novel.<br />
The essay develops out of the idea that the novel<br />
grew out of metaphysical poverty. It allowed us to<br />
understand our history and our psychology in a world<br />
where the old certainties were decaying. Yet now that<br />
the decay has reached a zero point, producing the kind<br />
of works bereft even of the certainty of the self as subject.<br />
If you don’t know what novels these are, they’re<br />
the ones NOT written by journalists. Yet however<br />
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and<br />
repulsively anachronistic the journalistic novel is (and<br />
virtually every novel published is a journalistic novel),<br />
Cioran wonders what is the point of writing more than<br />
one novel of absence:<br />
“[the] implicit conception of this sort of art opposes to<br />
the erosion of being the inexhaustible reality of nothingness.<br />
Logically valueless, such a conception is nonetheless<br />
true affectively (to speak of nothingness in any other<br />
terms than affective one is a waste of time). It postulates<br />
a research without points of reference, an experiment<br />
pursued within an unfailing vacuity, a vacuity experienced<br />
through sensation, as well as a dialectic paradoxically<br />
frozen, motionless, a dynamism of monotony and<br />
emptiness. Is this not going around in circles? Ecstasy of<br />
non-meaning: the supreme impasse.”<br />
This passage – representative of the whole – jerks<br />
the steering wheel as if to herald an eternal roundabout.<br />
But this will be Cioran’s own journey. Instead<br />
of condemning the novelist, and thereby commending<br />
his own judgement, Cioran gives him the benefit of the<br />
doubt. “Is [the novel] really dead, or only dying? My<br />
incompetence keeps me from making up my mind … I<br />
leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise<br />
degree of its agony.”<br />
Instead of only railing against repetitious failure,<br />
Cioran gives us the guidelines to which potential<br />
writers must abide if they are to create an art for the<br />
wilderness. In Kafka’s words, this is the help going<br />
168<br />
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away without helping. ‘Beyond the Novel’ adds to the<br />
demands of genuine creation, and thus the unexpected<br />
joy of what has been and might be achieved. Instead<br />
of Postmodern cacophony – its sloppy apologia borne<br />
on positive negativism – we get to hear the silence<br />
behind the noise. One thinks of Beckett, of course, and<br />
the equally great Thomas Bernhard. To confirm this,<br />
Cioran pulls up in a lay-by and, in a passage one might<br />
describe as uncharacteristic, seems to hold back from<br />
hopelessness and bitter regret:<br />
“Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are<br />
sometimes fruitful … Let us salute it, then, even celebrate<br />
it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from<br />
one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last,<br />
we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions<br />
and our limits, the futility of having a life.”<br />
Well, not uncharacteristic after all. This is as near<br />
to abstract celebration as Cioran gets. He leaves it to<br />
others with ‘the courage of dilution’ to give us the<br />
succour using the ‘banalities’ necessary for the novel.<br />
His admiration for other writers is due precisely to<br />
their ability use the banal surface to reach the subterranean.<br />
Cioran’s rapid lyricism will not spread into a<br />
delta plain of banality to allow such an exploration.<br />
This is his limit.<br />
Despite this, he is able to prospect worth by refamiliarizing<br />
us with what is important. Perhaps his most<br />
worthwhile work apart from the aphorisms, we can<br />
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and<br />
find in his short pieces on other writers collected in<br />
Anathemas And Admirations. In particular, the essay on<br />
Scott Fitzgerald. Here is a writer one might otherwise<br />
ignore: sentimental claptrap elevated to art by a lazy<br />
world. Cioran lays this aside. What he concentrates on<br />
the time when Fitzgerald awoke from the American<br />
Dream into the intensity of lucid consciousness, something<br />
“that transcends contingencies and continents”.<br />
By this time, Fitzgerald’s famous books have been<br />
written, the American definition of success achieved:<br />
fame, money and even requited love. “Literally and<br />
figuratively, [Fitzgerald] had lived asleep. But then<br />
sleep left him.” Why? Returning to the his deepest<br />
theme, Cioran answers: “Insomnia sheds a light on us<br />
which we do not desire but to which, unconsciously,<br />
we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against<br />
ourselves.”<br />
Fitzgerald’s inner experience remained despite<br />
worldly success, indeed was heightened as a result. On<br />
the heights of his despair, Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Crack-<br />
Up’. Cioran’s commentary on this non-work – it was a<br />
series of fragments – is like most of Cioran’s commentaries,<br />
a commentary on his own procedure, also a series<br />
of fragments. ‘The Crack-Up’ represents for Cioran the<br />
direction Fitzgerald should have pursued rather than<br />
regarding it as an aberration. He tried to overcome it by<br />
going to Hollywood to write screenplays. Fitzgerald is<br />
rightly judged inferior to what he discovered, unlike a<br />
169<br />
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Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche.<br />
“Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded<br />
over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply<br />
upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary,<br />
deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that<br />
failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it.<br />
It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between<br />
literature and the real dark night of the soul.”<br />
In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure<br />
with sickness. The healthy, he says, keep a certain<br />
distance from our ‘contradictory and intense’ states,<br />
while to be sick is ‘to coincide totally with oneself’.<br />
The former allows us to act. But isn’t it precisely one’s<br />
distance from oneself a part of sickness; it is the part<br />
which can never act?<br />
“When you imagine you have reached a certain degree<br />
of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots<br />
… But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of<br />
its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of<br />
action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.”<br />
The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is<br />
left to the silent and invisible. ‘The Crack-Up’ is called<br />
the work of a sick man, yet its impressive lucidity is<br />
a histrionics of detachment, more or less identical to<br />
Cioran’s own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot<br />
achieve oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely<br />
human, hence our fascination with good and evil. Perhaps<br />
this sharp division between sickness and health is<br />
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and<br />
where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald<br />
was prone to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify<br />
the inherent hubris of writing and publishing. Aware of<br />
this, Cioran tells us not to worry about those who are<br />
excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity<br />
preserves reason.<br />
“This is not a paradox … for such brooding over our<br />
miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from<br />
our reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses<br />
an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation.”<br />
This helps answer a perennial question: why did<br />
Cioran live so long without killing himself? Sickness<br />
can increase self-pity, thereby reason, thereby selfpreservation.<br />
To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our<br />
purpose, we must use both sickness and health, selfpity<br />
and detachment, the desert and the oasis. To deny<br />
either is either fatal or contemptible. Cioran shows by<br />
example, how various the tension between opposites is<br />
manifested. His examples have one thing in common<br />
it seems: the admittance of lucidity, that which lies<br />
behind all stories, all systems, all action, all help.<br />
As academia eschews ambivalence and individualism,<br />
rewarding instead skills of memory and language,<br />
it might be worth stepping into the vanishing point<br />
Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the<br />
stagnant wounds of our lucidity.<br />
“The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should<br />
have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him”. �<br />
170<br />
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Interview [published February 2006]<br />
Diablo Cody: Candy Girl<br />
Emma Garman talks to the author of Candy Girl: A Year In The Life<br />
Of An Unlikely Stripper<br />
One night, 24-year-old recent Minnesota transplant<br />
Diablo Cody was walking home from her dull ad<br />
agency job when the words “Amateur Night” on a topless<br />
bar’s marquee beckoned irresistibly. Even though<br />
Cody had only once been inside a strip club – and, with<br />
her idyllic middle-class upbringing, devoted boyfriend<br />
and conspicuous lack of emotional scars, hardly fit the<br />
stereotype of a sex industry worker – one try-out as<br />
an amateur led to a year of professional hard graft as<br />
a stripper, lap dancer and peep-show performer. The<br />
equally hilarious, titillating and gruesome account of<br />
her exhausting adventure, Candy Girl: A Year In The<br />
Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, is far more than just another<br />
stripper memoir or dispatch from the dark side:<br />
Cody’s analysis of what she found within the walls of<br />
upscale men’s clubs and sleazy sex palaces, and within<br />
herself, is shot through with a laser-like wit and punk<br />
rock sensibility likely to influence all political shades of<br />
opinion on sex jobs and raunch culture. Cody – who’s<br />
now hung up her white platforms to work as a successful<br />
screenwriter and arts editor – talked to me on the<br />
phone from Minneapolis.<br />
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and<br />
Even jaded readers will be fascinated by some of<br />
the real-life characters in your book. Like the jizzlicking<br />
guy at the peep show.<br />
He’s the celebrity of the book! He would come<br />
crawling in and lick up as much as he could. The thing<br />
that was really fascinating about him was that he was<br />
so clean cut. He was the last guy you would ever think<br />
had a habit like that. I shudder to think about it.<br />
What else did you come across that fazed you?<br />
You know, people who just had really strange fetishes.<br />
Incest would come up a lot: People who would<br />
want you to masturbate as their sister, or their mother.<br />
That was something I was not comfortable with. I tried<br />
to be pretty game, but that really freaked me out. And,<br />
you know, a lot of cross dressers. There seemed to be a<br />
lot of men who wanted to come in and talk about gay<br />
sex. To me that was really surprising, that they though<br />
of the booth as a safe haven for their fantasies, even<br />
though it was obviously straight-oriented entertainment.<br />
That was weird.<br />
So you became a stripper as an experiment – were<br />
you surprised to find you became addicted? And<br />
171<br />
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was it the money or the attention?<br />
Honestly, I never made that much money compared<br />
with the people I worked with. So for me I think it was<br />
about the attention, but also sort of an external thing.<br />
I found it to be cathartic, a very weird, twisted form<br />
of self-expression. I think I got addicted to just how<br />
subversive and how fun it was compared to my every<br />
day life.<br />
And you didn’t derive any particular satisfaction<br />
from, say, when you got a promotion at the advertising<br />
agency where you worked.<br />
Right, I didn’t at all, and it surprised me, because if<br />
I got 20 toy shows at Sex World [the porn emporium<br />
where Cody worked as one of the ‘dolls’ who are displayed<br />
and selected for peep show performances] in a<br />
night I would feel proud.<br />
Is this something mainstream feminism has still<br />
failed to sufficiently acknowledge, how satisfying it<br />
can be to wield one’s sexual power in this way?<br />
It can. I think it’s something that third-wave feminism<br />
has recognized. On the other hand the one thing people<br />
have failed to recognize is just how unsatisfying and<br />
unfulfilling the corporate world can still be for women.<br />
Because no matter how much we’ve progressed, the<br />
glass ceiling is still so much in place. And I honestly<br />
felt kind of degraded in my day-to-day life, at the whitecollar<br />
jobs, because I was always being undersold.<br />
Whereas in the sex industry it was so straightforward.<br />
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and<br />
But which would you say is the more exploited<br />
group in a strip club: The girls who work, or the<br />
men who hand over the money?<br />
Some of the needier customers, the men who were<br />
looking for an emotionally connection, were really<br />
preyed upon. They were definitely manipulated and victims<br />
in that way. But most of the time, the women were<br />
disenfranchised. It’s the societal model for a woman to<br />
be revered and worshipped as a thing of beauty, and<br />
in a strip club, it’s actually the complete opposite. You<br />
have a roomful of beautiful women, trying desperately<br />
to woo these men.<br />
Competing with each other.<br />
Exactly. And it really turns the men into little emperors<br />
and the women into these sad, grovelling creatures.<br />
So that was the one aspect that disturbed the heck out<br />
of me. You know, I always thought that strip clubs<br />
would be the kind of places that celebrated beauty and<br />
femininity and it’s really not the case.<br />
How much do the men kid themselves that it’s<br />
anything other than a financial transaction?<br />
Funnily enough, a lot of them sexualize the financial<br />
aspect of it and find it a turn-on to be paying for a lap<br />
dance or for female companionship. There were others<br />
who were obviously in massive denial and seriously<br />
wanted to believe, “oh, this girl really cares about me,<br />
she told me her real name,” not knowing that the same<br />
girl was mocking them in the dressing room and had<br />
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given them a fake real name. Every dancer I knew had<br />
an onstage name and a fake real name for when she<br />
really wanted to sucker a guy. But he would actually<br />
believe that you shared that information with him because<br />
he was so chivalrous and truly respected women.<br />
You know, “I can earn her trust.” A lot of guys just want<br />
to be the white knight, that’s the persona they assume<br />
when they walk into the club. Like they’re going to find<br />
some poor little lost girl and save her.<br />
What do you think about what Ariel Levy has<br />
called “the rise of raunch culture”, and the argument<br />
that the phenomenon of women visiting strip<br />
clubs is regressive rather than empowering?<br />
I guess I’m emblematic of this raunch culture she<br />
talks about. I’m the foul-mouthed, trash-talking, salty<br />
sex worker who has a lot of fun with that stuff. And I<br />
guess I don’t read that deeply into it. I think that any<br />
time people get to reverse roles it’s empowering, and<br />
for women who get to objectify other women it’s a role<br />
reversal, it’s empowering and it feels good. There’s<br />
just no way around it. For me, from a purely hedonistic<br />
standpoint, I find women attractive, so it’s fun to go to<br />
strip clubs and it’s fun to watch porn.<br />
In the book you describe meeting a high school<br />
girl who’s working in a strip club, and for her it was<br />
a regular part-time job, no big deal. What does that<br />
say about American culture?<br />
I mean, just equating material things with sexuality<br />
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has become a totally mainstream concept. You hear it<br />
in the music … stripper culture is totally mainstream<br />
now, obviously. Now there’s stripper aerobics, t-shirts<br />
for girls that say “Porn Star”, all that kind of thing.<br />
And it’s not the world I come from. I came of age in<br />
the 90s, when we had Riot Grrl music and it was just<br />
a more feminist time. I know I’m being a hypocrite<br />
by saying that I don’t think a high school girl should<br />
be involved in the sex industry, but at least by the age<br />
of 24 or 25 I had lived enough to be able to make that<br />
decision for myself.<br />
What would you say to a woman who’s read your<br />
book, thinks it sounds like an interesting job and is<br />
going to try it?<br />
I would say try it, slowly. And make sure that you<br />
maintain control of yourself in the situation at all times.<br />
That includes maintaining some level of sobriety.<br />
Because honestly, the people who fall down the rabbit<br />
hole are the ones who get involved with drugs.<br />
And the ones who cross the line into prostitution?<br />
Exactly, yeah. You really have to know your boundaries.<br />
In a lot of cases I think that escort work and prostitution,<br />
to me that’s just another more extreme form<br />
of sex work. I don’t beat around the bush. I knew a<br />
lot of strippers who were really quick to point out the<br />
difference between them and prostitutes, but honestly<br />
I don’t see that big of a difference. It’s a controversial<br />
viewpoint, but I know that I was selling my body and<br />
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selling my sexuality and I’m not really sure how much<br />
bigger a step it would have been toward becoming an<br />
escort. It’s all so closely related that it struck me as<br />
funny when girls would get extremely offended by that<br />
comparison. I would think, you’re in a peep show with<br />
a dildo up your twat and you’re asking me to show you<br />
more respect!<br />
So do you have any regrets?<br />
There are times when I wish I had attempted to take<br />
it even a little more seriously than I did. Because it<br />
would have been interesting to see what it was like to<br />
get really entrenched in the lifestyle and be one of the<br />
upper echelon performers. Obviously I have a physical<br />
limitation in that regard because I don’t look like a ten.<br />
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And you don’t want to get big fake boobs?<br />
Exactly, I didn’t want to go that far. But at the same<br />
time part of me wondered what it would have been<br />
like if I had gotten big fake boobs and gone the whole<br />
nine yards, had that ambition that some of those girls<br />
have. Because then I really could have gained insight<br />
into what that life is like, from a purely anthropological<br />
standpoint.<br />
But you would never go back and do it now?<br />
Right – I think it was pretty obvious when I was doing<br />
it that I was kind of a dilettante. I probably wouldn’t<br />
go back and do it now, but I miss it. I still feel a little<br />
twinge when I pass a strip club, and sometimes consider<br />
going in. �<br />
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Interview [published December 1996]<br />
Douglas Coupland: From Fear To Eternity<br />
Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the<br />
problem with American chocolate<br />
Douglas Coupland is not your average novelist. Since<br />
the publication of Generation X in 1991, he has become<br />
one of this decade’s most important writers, thanks to<br />
his unerring ability to capture the zeitgeist of young<br />
middle class America in the post-industrial 1990s.<br />
Where Generation X and Shampoo Planet dealt with<br />
the existential confusion of America’s over-educated<br />
children, Microserfs documented the movement of<br />
technology into mainstream culture. Each book seemed<br />
impossibly of the moment at their time of publication –<br />
many said Microserfs must have been speed-written in<br />
order to cash in on the advent of multimedia, yet in fact<br />
it was the result of three years’ painstaking research.<br />
While Coupland is usually portrayed as a ‘spokesman<br />
for a generation’ and a technological evangelist (one<br />
of the short stories on Coupland’s website is entitled<br />
‘The Past Sucks’), most accounts of his work fail to<br />
recognise its inherent humour and humanity.<br />
Now nearly 35 and finally settled in his home town of<br />
Vancouver, Coupland’s new book, Polaroids From The<br />
Dead, does something to redress the balance. Billed<br />
as a collection of “photos from the kitchen drawer”,<br />
Polaroids is a set of personal essays about moments of<br />
life – attending a Grateful Dead concert, an obituary<br />
for Kurt Cobain, a homage to James Rosenquist’s F1-<br />
11. The book’s closing essay, ‘Brentwood Notebooks’,<br />
takes a fascinating and chilling look at the nature of<br />
fame in the wake of the OJ Simpson trial.<br />
With Polaroids From The Dead’s UK publication in<br />
November, <strong>Spike</strong> caught up with Doug via email. The<br />
following is the transcript of our conversation.<br />
Hi <strong>Spike</strong> (or is it Chris?)<br />
I received your three postings. I know it’s strange<br />
when you accidentally post the wrong draft. It’s the<br />
modern equivalent of leaving your letter of resignation<br />
under the Xerox machine lid.<br />
If your name is <strong>Spike</strong>, you’ll be the second one I<br />
know – which is statistically improbable. The other<br />
<strong>Spike</strong> is <strong>Spike</strong> Jonze, lately of MTV video fame, but<br />
before that of Dirt fame – a short-lived US magazine<br />
for 18-25s. He and the staff came up to Vancouver for<br />
a day and a half to visit me as part of their ‘Discover<br />
America – a month on the road’ issue. It was great fun,<br />
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and then a few weeks later I was doing a reading at<br />
the University of Iowa and they were driving through<br />
and heckled me from the back and it was great fun.<br />
They’d just done this chocolate rating system on Canadian<br />
chocolate bars (essentially identical to England’s<br />
– Kit Kat, Aero… ) and they gave the bars really low<br />
ratings, which sucked because have you ever tried<br />
US chocolate? Hork! They had just come back from<br />
Devil’s Tower monument (Close Encounters Of The<br />
Third Kind) where, after they finished a chocolate bar,<br />
they tossed it out to the prairie dogs. If the dogs ate it,<br />
the bar got an extra point. If they wouldn’t eat it, the bar<br />
lost a point.<br />
I decided that I had to defend my nation’s chocolate’s<br />
honour, so I bought about 12 US bars at the Circle-K<br />
Mart and then we went to my hotel room and had a<br />
Tasting Session. I’d take a bite of a bar, make comments,<br />
spit it out into a waste paper basket and take<br />
a drink of water and move on to the next bar. I described<br />
the Three Musketeers bar as having a definite<br />
log-in-the-toilet aspect. They printed this in the chart<br />
in their magazine and the company that makes Three<br />
Musketeers bars went ballistic and pulled their ads and<br />
the magazine folded shortly thereafter. Whew! What a<br />
long story. So, hi.<br />
Americans are obsessed with putting peanut butter<br />
in virtually every chocolate bar – why? It smells<br />
like dog doo.<br />
You have to watch it because Americans go nuts if<br />
you slander their chocolate. They really do. I guess it’s<br />
because it’s such a gratifying signal that goes in early<br />
and deep into the child’s mind.<br />
I wasn’t quite sure about this email interview<br />
business. I had this vision of you sitting there with<br />
stock answers ready to paste in…<br />
Not at all. That would be a fax interview (which this<br />
is not) or an interview with Duran Duran (or rather, their<br />
people). My large problem with interviews (and I do<br />
have many problems) is that my brain won’t allow me<br />
to do serial interviews. Once a question’s been asked,<br />
then my brain rebels against having to answer the same<br />
question again. This makes me appear grouchy. I’m<br />
hoping the WWW will allay some of this repetition.<br />
I’m always amazed at actors and how they can charmingly<br />
spew forth studio agendas. But then that’s what<br />
they do for a living – they’re actors.<br />
Did you travel a lot when younger?<br />
Probably too much. I lived in too many places in<br />
the 1980s (in no order: Vancouver, Toronto, Sapporo,<br />
Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles, Montreal, Stuttgart).Then<br />
in my 30s I visited too many cities with work but was<br />
frustrated because I’d ‘be’ in a city just aching to tour<br />
around, but instead I was stuck in a hotel room. I don’t<br />
know how sports teams don’t go mad travelling around<br />
as much as they do. I suppose it’s okay because they’ve<br />
plenty of company.<br />
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I’m 24…<br />
Oh, then you’re due for your mid-20s crisis any day<br />
now. Beware … nobody escapes. Your 20s are muck<br />
and shit and pain and loneliness and horror.<br />
I think I have a headline for this interview…<br />
Indeed! I wish somebody had warned me. I might<br />
have changed a few things. (like what, Doug?) I<br />
wouldn’t have worried so much. And I would have quit<br />
smoking at 20 instead of 26, for starters.<br />
Did you admire any writers at 24?<br />
I read many writers but I never really admired written<br />
craftsmanship until around 28 or 29. I admired visual<br />
artists (all of the Pop artists) and the usual assortment<br />
of 1980s New Order/OMD performers.<br />
And would you have wanted to have communicated<br />
with them?<br />
Actually, no. I learned rather quickly in art school<br />
that someone’s personality is often a million miles<br />
away from their work. I’ve been lucky over the past<br />
few years and have met many people I’ve wondered<br />
about and it’s been good fun. But it’s always been accidental–never<br />
seeking out. For what it’s worth, I was<br />
driving up the coast yesterday listening to Phillip Glass’<br />
Powaquaatsi, the sequel to Koyanisquaatsi … are you<br />
familiar with them? Wonderful movies both. I met the<br />
director by chance in New Mexico and I told him how<br />
much I liked them and he snarled at me, so now I try<br />
and look at the films and not think of him.<br />
Thanks to your art college training, you seem to<br />
enjoy messing around with the format of your books;<br />
the photos in Polaroids, the pages of repeated words<br />
in Microserfs, the comic strip panels in Generation<br />
X. Do you read any comic books?<br />
Not really. Some of the stuff out of Toronto is great:<br />
Palookaville and Yummy Fur spring to mind. And Tintin<br />
when I was younger. But I think I will be exploring<br />
more stuff in this direction.<br />
Did you do all of your website’s graphics etc?<br />
The horizontal panels, yes. They’re a homage to US<br />
Pop artist James Rosenquist. There are so many artists<br />
I admire. Warhol, Jenny Holzer (obviously), Damien<br />
Hirst (he’s cool), Lichtenstein, Barbara Hepworth,<br />
Isamu Noguchi … I could name dozens. It’s my big<br />
influence.<br />
What do you think of the impact of visual art on<br />
culture?<br />
Art in the 20th-century Modernist context is consumed<br />
by both design and by industry almost as quickly<br />
as it is made. There’s no lagtime any longer.<br />
Don’t you think the most exciting visual art isn’t<br />
found in the gallery any longer anyway?<br />
True.<br />
Damien Hirst brings organic things into the sterility<br />
of the gallery, like the shark and the sheep…<br />
Again, true, but I suspect there’s a bit more to it than<br />
just that one dimension.<br />
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… while artists such as Keith Haring, Bill Barker<br />
(The Schwa Corporation) or William Latham (the<br />
chap who does the beautiful organic screensavers)<br />
bypass it entirely.<br />
Agreed. Schwa is majorly cool and we’ve all been<br />
mesmerised by Latham’s screensavers. And Keith’s<br />
well … dead. I’ve actually been a keen fosterer of<br />
the idea that galleries are no longer the casinos of the<br />
shocking and the new. It’s finally sinking in. So many<br />
people have their whole lives invested in the perpetuation<br />
of that system, so expect much backlash accordingly.<br />
But it appears museums are getting the point, and<br />
if anything, a new Renaissance is looming.<br />
Do you think your books have an impact?<br />
This is something I really don’t think about, Chris. I<br />
do them and people read them and hopefully they see<br />
the world differently at the end. In whatever way.<br />
Do you have a sense of distance from your own<br />
work?<br />
Good question, and nobody’s ever asked that one, so<br />
you score ten points (ding ding ding ding.)<br />
The only way I obtain distance is to not read something<br />
and then slam into it with new eyes. With booksin-progress,<br />
it’s hard to give myself much distancing<br />
time. As for older books, I read bits every so often and<br />
wonder at the stuff that was going through my mind<br />
at that point. As for interviews or articles on myself, I<br />
can’t read them. I’m simply biologically unable to read<br />
them. I go berzerk (ask my friends) I ask people to read<br />
articles and reviews and give a synopsis, but it’s like<br />
having my skin peeled off to read them, good or bad.<br />
Microserfs, far more than Generation X, connected<br />
with a lot of my friends here, in the sense<br />
that Microserfs wasn’t American at all – it was the<br />
West’s machine in full swing and we were living it,<br />
loving it and loathing it simultaneously. A sort of<br />
triple ironic self-bluff.<br />
Good description.<br />
Do you think we’re moving towards a major<br />
paradigm shift?<br />
No. It’s business as usual.<br />
The way in which the subject of fame reoccurs<br />
through Polaroids, from Kurt to OJ, makes me ask<br />
an obvious question – is your own fame influencing<br />
your life? Or do you consider yourself unfamous?<br />
Personally, I tend to gauge real hardcore fame by<br />
whether my parents have heard of someone or not.<br />
It influences life only to a small degree, both for good<br />
and bad. Your theory about somebody being famous<br />
only if one’s parents have heard of them is an excellent<br />
description. And even then, there are 5.5 billion people<br />
out there and who knows who knows who?<br />
The eulogy to Kurt in Polaroids – it felt like you were<br />
unsure as to what to say about him. Caught between<br />
needing to say something and unable to fully say it…<br />
I was actually more affected by the overdose and the<br />
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eerie silence the month before he killed himself. I just<br />
knew something was badly fucked-up somewhere, but<br />
had no idea how badly. I wasn’t at all surprised when I<br />
heard the news. I’d prepared myself. It’s one of those<br />
deaths that you didn’t think would affect you much but<br />
does. Jim Henson was one. Dr Seuss was another. All<br />
three of the above have to do with youth and happy<br />
memories of youth followed by loss.<br />
The question of the essential hollowness of fame,<br />
money and material possessions which emerges<br />
from ‘Brentwood Notebook’ and the East Berlin<br />
postcards seems to lead to a certain melancholy.<br />
Yes.<br />
There’s a Godless but still wholly spiritual element<br />
which figures heavily in your work and tends to get<br />
ignored precisely because of all the PCs and Postmodernity<br />
which people – interviewers especially<br />
– prefer to favour. What’s even more interesting is<br />
that there’s no condemnatory tone to the quest for<br />
these things, only a realisation as to their inherent<br />
uselessness. In your work, there’s the day-to-day<br />
fun of life, the exhilaration and exasperation of information<br />
overload, but there’s also this meditative<br />
element that asks the eternal questions.<br />
The next book deals with these in a big way (I hope).<br />
I’ve come to believe that the only decisions that matter<br />
are those decisions made in the face of eternity. The<br />
future is not eternity. It’s an important distinction. I<br />
think PCs grouch at me because I don’t fall into and<br />
victim categories, and Postmodernists kind of like<br />
me only as long as what I do is construed to be of the<br />
hyper-moment, “more now than now.” Both seem to be<br />
short-term (to say the least!) views.<br />
FUN FACT: The next novel is called Girlfriend in a<br />
Coma (after The Smiths’ song.)<br />
Aargh! Doug – don’t do it! Not The Smiths – they<br />
almost ruined my adolescence!<br />
What IS your problem with The Smiths? They’re<br />
great. Almost all UK bands from the 1980s are great.<br />
Even Bonnie Tyler in her own weird way. BTW: where<br />
is she now? Harper’s magazine over here had a statistic<br />
once showing that people are most nostalgic in later<br />
years for the music that was current at the age of 23.<br />
I’d agree.<br />
Has Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh come to your<br />
attention?<br />
Yes. It’s extremely popular. I tried reading it, but it was<br />
so thick and Glaswegian. I’m glad the movie got made.<br />
Drugs and rave culture. What do you think?<br />
That’s so American! In a funny way. Anyway, I don’t<br />
know much about rave culture but I like the outfits. I’ve<br />
really never spent more than ten hours cumulatively in<br />
a nightclub all told. I’m more ‘pubby.’ (a publican? is<br />
there some other word?)<br />
As for drugs I really have to watch it. Even vitamins<br />
spazz me out for up to 48 hours. I grew up on the West<br />
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Coast in the 1970s, which is to say that life was steeped<br />
in bad pot and magic mushrooms for most of my high<br />
school years. I get paranoid on pot, so that was that.<br />
Mushrooms – well, they grow on the front lawns here,<br />
but I’m not sure. I’m really not.<br />
I’m somewhat suspicious of anything mind-altering.<br />
I avoid coke and acid and all sorts of stuff just because<br />
I don’t think we’d agree (or perhaps we’d agree too<br />
much). I know many people who’ve had their lives<br />
saved thanks to some of the newer meds like Prozac<br />
and Zoloft. I overreact to most pharmaceuticals and can<br />
only really tolerate old standbys like erythromycin or<br />
ativan when required. Someone wrote once that I don’t<br />
drink or anything, and this one article, wherever it appeared,<br />
has haunted me ever since. People always make<br />
goggle-eyes when I have a scotch. I see their reaction<br />
and I think, “Ahh, they’ve read THE ARTICLE.”<br />
Do you have any words of advice for young people?<br />
Yes. It’s pissing rain out. We’ve just had the rainiest<br />
October and November in recorded history. The X-Files<br />
studio is ten minutes away from where I live. People<br />
sometimes comment on the calculated use of rain on<br />
the set to create a supernatural effect. They wish! It’s<br />
because it never stops raining here. Now you know.<br />
Care to add anything else, you lovable harbinger<br />
of doom?<br />
I am not a doom harbinger (oh, it’s all in the eye of<br />
the beholder) but I’ll greedily accept the lovable bit.<br />
Bye, Chris.<br />
It’s been much fun. Post me a copy of how it all gels<br />
in the end.<br />
Yours here in Vancouver, Doug �<br />
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Review [published November 1998]<br />
Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb<br />
Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment<br />
in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give<br />
this tome some literary gravitas, Generation X author<br />
Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides<br />
thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story too.<br />
Lara’s Book feels like a mish-mash of various marketing<br />
ploys. There’s lots of new pictures of Lara herself to<br />
appeal to fevered adolescents, strategic walkthroughs<br />
of the various Tomb Raider games to help those who’ve<br />
got stuck somewhere along the line, interviews with the<br />
games’ developers about how Tomb Raider came into<br />
being, all topped off with Coupland’s prose to maintain<br />
Lara’s cool quotient with the lifestyle crowd.<br />
It’s easy to see why Coupland agreed to be involved<br />
with what is essentially another form of the Tomb<br />
Raider franchise. Lara Croft is the perfect representation<br />
of his love for pop culture and technology, with her<br />
movie-star status as a cultural icon throwing up various<br />
questions about the blurring of realities, both virtual<br />
and normal.<br />
Coupland’s disappointingly brief prose moves in the<br />
same territory as his novels, taking something as inconsequential<br />
as a videogame and expanding it into nothing<br />
less than a metaphor for life. His skill as a writer has<br />
always been in making such assertions seem strangely<br />
appropriate rather than asinine, but here Coupland’s<br />
meditations only serve to make the vacuity at the heart<br />
of the Tomb Raider phenomenon even more apparent.<br />
There’s a distinct sense that there’s actually precious<br />
little to say about Lara. This is indicated by the fact<br />
that far more space is given over to the game-solving<br />
tips than to Coupland’s writing, despite his name being<br />
flagged prominently on the front cover. Once you get<br />
past the idea she’s a female character in a video game<br />
that’s sold lots of copies, there’s not much left. Even<br />
the game developers can offer up little else beyond the<br />
observations that they wanted people to identify with<br />
Lara and for her to be “almost a fantasy object”, which<br />
is hardly the stuff of profundity.<br />
Among the book’s hyperactive layout there is a<br />
spread of various fan letters that have been sent to<br />
Tomb Raider’s creators Eidos. It’s virtually impossible<br />
to read what’s written in the letters, which is a pity, be-<br />
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cause the opinions of Lara’s fans would probably have<br />
shed some real light on her popularity.<br />
Instead, Lara’s Book is simply another addition to<br />
the Tomb Raider hype. Those trying to find out why<br />
Tomb Raider’s central character has caused such a fuss<br />
will be disappointed, because ultimately Lara Croft is a<br />
sphinx without a secret. �<br />
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Review [published December 2007]<br />
Douglas Coupland: The Gum Thief<br />
Dan Coxon<br />
In recent years Douglas Coupland has achieved a<br />
remarkably consistent output. It’s not that every novel<br />
he’s written has been a masterpiece – no writer manages<br />
that – but rather that his great novels have been<br />
regularly interspersed with his less satisfying ones. Microserfs,<br />
Miss Wyoming, Hey Nostradamus! and JPod<br />
all felt like significant contributions to an impressive<br />
body of work; in between, however, we were handed<br />
Girlfriend In A Coma, All Families Are Psychotic and<br />
Eleanor Rigby, all worthy in their own right but none<br />
of them causing much of a stir on the literary scene<br />
(maybe Mr Coupland should stop naming books after<br />
pop songs).<br />
This pattern suggests that The Gum Thief should be a<br />
disappointment, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one of<br />
his finest. Relating the relatively humdrum tale of two<br />
‘associates’ in a Staples stationary superstore, it often<br />
sounds like a soap opera rather than the latest offering<br />
from one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing<br />
voices. To dismiss it out of hand would be a mistake,<br />
however, as its relatively mundane surface hides an<br />
intriguing study of the epistolary form – and a com-<br />
mentary on the nature of the novel itself.<br />
The Gum Thief opens in typical epistolary-novel<br />
style, swapping back and forth between two characters:<br />
Bethany, a young, disillusioned Goth working in the<br />
Staples store; and Roger, a divorced, quiet loner who<br />
spends his days restocking the shelves and walking his<br />
dog. Beth discovers that Roger has been writing a diary<br />
from her point of view, and once the initial weirdness<br />
has passed she becomes intrigued by the fact that he’s<br />
imagined her so accurately.<br />
So far, so simple. Coupland then throws another element<br />
into the mix: Roger is writing a novel himself, the<br />
curiously-titled Glove Pond, and the letters between<br />
Roger and Bethany are interspersed with excerpts<br />
from his own novel. Glove Pond is a woefully shallow<br />
and amateurish attempt at the form, but something in<br />
it touches Bethany, and, like her, we feel compelled<br />
to read on. As the friendship between the co-workers<br />
develops, so the twists of Glove Pond begin to reflect<br />
their lives, albeit with an often-hilarious distortion.<br />
Just as we begin to get used to this format Coupland<br />
hurls another character’s voice into the fray, and he<br />
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continues to do this until the novel’s final pages: the<br />
traditional back-and-forth of the epistolary form gradually<br />
fractures into a whole chorus of voices, many of<br />
them pulling in opposite directions. We hear from<br />
Bethany’s mother DeeDee, who coincidentally went<br />
to school with Roger, and from Roger’s bitter ex-wife<br />
Joan – among others. There’s even a series of attempts<br />
to write a story from the point of view of a piece of<br />
toast, as Bethany flexes her own creative muscles.<br />
If this sounds rather messy and incoherent, then<br />
that’s because it often is. With so many different voices<br />
pulling us back and forth it sometimes becomes difficult<br />
to discern between them, and Coupland doesn’t<br />
always manage to conjure up a distinctive voice for<br />
every new character.<br />
It’s the novel-within-a-novel that gives us the key<br />
to this intricate web, however, and makes the most<br />
memorable contribution to The Gum Thief. Glove<br />
Pond shows us how the best fiction (and even some of<br />
the worst) draws upon the writer’s experiences in real<br />
life, twisting and morphing them to create something<br />
new. It shows us that any creative work, no matter<br />
how amateurish or muddled, has the potential to touch<br />
somebody, or even change a life. And most importantly,<br />
it never fails to entertain, as its characters stagger from<br />
one disaster to another, like the affairs of the American<br />
literati reinterpreted by the cast of Dynasty.<br />
Like Glove Pond, The Gum Thief is a flawed novel.<br />
It confuses as much as it illuminates, and Doug Coupland’s<br />
experiments with the epistolary form don’t<br />
always come off. In Bethany and Roger, however,<br />
he has created another pair of Coupland greats, two<br />
people muddling through modern life in any way they<br />
can – with the occasional epiphany thrown in along the<br />
way. The Gum Thief may not be perfect, but it’s still a<br />
damned good read. �<br />
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Interviews [published June 1996]<br />
Quentin Crisp: An Englishman In New York<br />
Chris Mitchell goes for lunch with Quentin Crisp<br />
This month sees the publication of Resident Alien,<br />
the selected diaries of Quentin Crisp. It is difficult to<br />
surmise whether this man needs an introduction or not,<br />
such is his longevity as a cult figure of quintessential<br />
Englishness, “a stately old homo of England”, to quote<br />
one of his most famous phrases. Quentin Crisp is, after<br />
all, the man who first personified the concept of ‘camp’.<br />
“If I have a talent for anything,” he states, “it is not for<br />
doing but for being.” It was not until the 1960s, when<br />
he already over 50 years old, that Quentin first rose to<br />
fame with the TV adaptation of his autobiography, The<br />
Naked Civil Servant. In it, Quentin documented his<br />
early, life-changing decision that “instead of hiding my<br />
sexuality, I would announce it.”<br />
With his henna’d hair, “gravity-defying” makeup and<br />
inch-long fingernails, the young Quentin Crisp cut a<br />
brave and audacious figure in 1930s London. Indeed, it<br />
is hard to imagine the outrage he must have provoked.<br />
As he notes in his book Manners From Heaven:<br />
“During my Edwardian youth and Georgian middleage<br />
the world (I mean Britain) stayed exactly where<br />
it was, aggressively conformist and conservative; I<br />
BUY Quentin Crisp books online from and<br />
stayed exactly where I was, a blithe spirit revelling in<br />
androgynous anarchy, and there was a battle.”<br />
This battle frequently became physical as well as<br />
psychological; Quentin’s accounts of the numerous<br />
attacks he endured on the streets of London lend a<br />
disturbing pathos to The Naked Civil Servant’s blend of<br />
pithy insight, amused self mockery and biting sarcasm.<br />
Indeed, the luminescence of Quentin’s prose soon won<br />
accolades which proclaimed him as a modern day Oscar<br />
Wilde, a comparison he has always refused. “When<br />
I was young, I thought Oscar Wilde was so noble. I<br />
thought he sacrificed everything for love. Then, when I<br />
became older, I realised this was complete nonsense. In<br />
the charnelhouses of London, Wilde only knew most of<br />
his lovers by Braille. It was utterly sordid.”<br />
Tired of England’s pernicious and parochial character,<br />
Quentin moved to New York in the early 1980s.<br />
By this time he was over 70 years old. After running<br />
various skirmishes with the US immigration authorities,<br />
Quentin succeeded in keeping his British passport<br />
and becoming a resident alien. “The English always<br />
say that the Americans are so false. But I don’t spend<br />
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my time wondering if the man in the deli really wishes<br />
me to ‘have a nice day.’ If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t<br />
say it, surely.” Quentin warms to his theme. “In New<br />
York, everyone is your instant friend. If you were to<br />
stand up in this diner now and shout, ‘I’m putting on<br />
a cabaret’, then everyone would gather round and ask,<br />
‘Where will it be?’, ‘What will it be about?’, ‘Who will<br />
you hire?’. If you did that in England, there would be<br />
absolute silence, everyone would stare into their soup<br />
and think, ‘How appallingly embarrassing.’”<br />
Quentin is now the most interesting octogenarian on<br />
earth, enjoying “growing old disgracefully” as he puts<br />
it, with his purple rinsed hair and layers of foundation<br />
still firmly in evidence. “The problem with England is<br />
that everyone is convinced that you can’t make a living<br />
doing nothing. However, in this I feel I have succeeded<br />
to some degree.” Quentin’s New York existence is<br />
made up of socialising, film reviewing and various appearances<br />
in movies, TV and the theatre. “I live quite<br />
comfortably on publicity champagne and peanuts. The<br />
last time I went to a launch I took a friend. He immediately<br />
dived for the champagne and I had to say, ‘No,<br />
no! Act more like a star!’”<br />
Quentin also entertains an endless stream of wellwishers<br />
from all over the world by the simple expedient<br />
of having his number listed in the New York phone<br />
directory. This leads to all manner of curious individuals<br />
contacting him. “A young lady once phoned me at<br />
BUY Quentin Crisp books online from and<br />
seven in the morning and asked how she could make<br />
sure that didn’t smudge her lipstick. I said, ‘Don’t drink<br />
anything, don’t eat anything and certainly don’t kiss<br />
anything.’ You’d think she could have worked it out for<br />
herself.” Despite his avid socialising, Quentin refuses<br />
to buy an answerphone. “To me it would be pure science<br />
fiction.”<br />
The only concession Quentin makes to his age is to<br />
spend two days a week “doing absolutely nothing” in<br />
his tiny bedsitting room on the Lower East Side. “I have<br />
to recharge my batteries. When you live in New York,<br />
as soon as you leave the house, you are under starter’s<br />
orders.” During these quiet moments, Quentin does<br />
crosswords – “they are the aerobics of the soul” – and,<br />
at the end of each month, writes his diary. Mentioning<br />
Resident Alien does not gain the normal authorial response<br />
concerning a new print baby: “Ah yes,” Quentin<br />
says, “I’ve just finished reading the proofs for that.”<br />
His eyes twinkle mischievously. “It’s absolute rubbish!<br />
They’ve taken out all of the dates, all of the places and<br />
all of the names for fear of causing offence.” He raises<br />
his eyes heavenward in mock resignation, knowing<br />
full well that it would be the most heinous breach of<br />
etiquette to say anything complimentary about his own<br />
new book.<br />
Sadly, even with the publication of Resident Alien,<br />
the chances of Quentin returning to these shores are<br />
slim. “My agent asked me if I would be willing to go<br />
186<br />
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to England to promote the book. I have not refused, because<br />
I never say no, but I have said I will be extremely<br />
reluctant. I am too old for aeroplane travel. Whenever I<br />
arrive, they say, ‘Oh, you must be so tired.’ But I sleep<br />
the whole way on the plane. They seem to expect the<br />
excitement of flying to last the entire journey. What am<br />
I supposed to do for five hours, sit there saying, ‘Oh<br />
hooray! I’m in the air!” However, when I mention my<br />
home town of Brighton, Quentin fondly remarks of his<br />
time there at the Pavilion Theatre, shortly before moving<br />
to the States. “Brighton is very nice, but I’m not<br />
sure about the sea. I think the sea is a mistake. I mean,<br />
what does it want, banging and crashing away on the<br />
shore like that all day?”<br />
The last time Quentin returned to the UK was a<br />
couple of years ago to play Queen Elizabeth the First<br />
in the film Orlando. “It’s the sort of film I wouldn’t<br />
watch myself in a hundred years.” Movies are much<br />
more to Quentin’s taste than books: “Books are for<br />
writing, not reading. But I am most definitely a fan of<br />
Mr Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are<br />
absolutely wonderful. The previous day he had seen<br />
<strong>Spike</strong> Lee’s new comedy flick, Girl 6. “It was a miserable<br />
film because of its subject matter. Who could find<br />
phone sex remotely interesting?” Quentin’s fascination<br />
with the silver screen recently led him to take part in a<br />
Calvin Klein advert. “I knew it was important because<br />
this enormous limousine purred up outside the house<br />
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to collect me. It was so big inside that the first time it<br />
turned a corner I fell off the seat. We drove to a huge<br />
warehouse and I thought, ‘How fabulous! We’re going<br />
to remake The Charge Of The Light Brigade!’ But then<br />
we were told to stand on a piece of paper about twice<br />
the size of this table while a half-naked man writhed<br />
between our legs. I looked at Mr Klein and I said, ‘But<br />
what does it all mean?’ And that was what they used in<br />
the advertisement…”<br />
Quentin has often asked himself the same question<br />
about gay militancy, a position which has caused him<br />
problems in the past. During a performance of his show<br />
An Evening With Quentin Crisp in California, Quentin<br />
relates how “several young men were very angry with<br />
me. When I asked why, they said, ‘You haven’t once<br />
directly asserted that you’re gay this evening.’” Quentin<br />
arches a neatly pencilled eyebrow. “You’d think to<br />
look at me would be enough. Obviously not. And that is<br />
why I do not march. I have realised I represent nothing<br />
grander than my own puny self. I am first and last an<br />
individual, not a spokesman for any group. I have lived<br />
my life with my sexuality clearly apparent. I cannot do<br />
any more.” The provocation of Quentin’s attire should<br />
not be underestimated, even in these supposed liberal<br />
times. With a mixture of incredulity and relish, Quentin<br />
relates a story from the Edinburgh festival several years<br />
ago: “A young man was performing a show where he<br />
impersonated me on stage, complete with clothes,<br />
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make-up and accent. When he walked out into the street<br />
still dressed as myself, he was physically attacked!”<br />
Thankfully Quentin’s days of being harassed on the<br />
street are long gone. He is a venerated celebrity on the<br />
Lower East Side. During our conversation, several people<br />
wave at him as they pass in the street, and a respectfully<br />
deferential young man who introduces himself as<br />
Winston comes in to ask Quentin for his autograph on<br />
a napkin. As I walk him back to his apartment, one of<br />
the bums hopefully shakes his cup and greets him with<br />
“Yo! Mr Crispy!” We pause at the street corner to say<br />
goodbye, and Quentin leaves me with one last anec-<br />
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dote. “When I returned to the States after completing<br />
Orlando, I was stopped by the passport officer because<br />
of my status as a resident alien. He was an enormous<br />
man with a shaved head – he looked like an absolute<br />
thug. I thought, ‘Poor me, my time has come!’ And then<br />
the officer leaned over the barrier, pressed the passport<br />
back into my hand and whispered, ‘It must feel good to<br />
be so utterly vindicated.’” Quentin looks directly at me.<br />
“And it does.” With that, he gracefully takes his leave,<br />
his small figure soon disappearing amongst the busy<br />
sidewalks of the Lower East Side. Quentin Crisp – the<br />
definitive Englishman in New York. �<br />
188<br />
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Mark Danielewski:<br />
House Of Leaves 190<br />
Don DeLillo:<br />
Underworld 192<br />
John Diamond:<br />
C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too 194<br />
Stephen Dorril:<br />
Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt 196<br />
Patricia Duncker:<br />
Insanity Clause 205<br />
Nic Dunlop:<br />
The Lost Executioner 207<br />
D-F<br />
The Fall:<br />
Fall Heads Roll 210<br />
Stefan Fatsis:<br />
Letter Better 213<br />
Tibor Fischer:<br />
The Fischer King 216<br />
Mark Fisher:<br />
Capitalist Realism 218<br />
Michael Foot:<br />
Uncollected Essays 222<br />
Franz Ferdinand:<br />
Franz Ferdinand 226<br />
Athol Fugard:<br />
Tsotsi 228<br />
Anna Funder:<br />
Stasiland 230<br />
189<br />
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Review [published June 2000]<br />
Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve<br />
seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of<br />
footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel<br />
has been described as a “literary Blair Witch Project’ –<br />
a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with.<br />
The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a barhopping<br />
low-life who is losing his grip on reality.<br />
When an old man – Zampano – dies, Truant grabs a<br />
manuscript from his apartment and takes it home to<br />
read it. This manuscript is an analysis of The Navidson<br />
Record, a collection of videotapes that record some<br />
spooky goings on in a suburban house. As Truant<br />
reads the manuscript, he reproduces it in full, sharing<br />
his observations with us and describing his own<br />
increasingly fragile mental state.<br />
There are three main stories in House Of Leaves:<br />
Truant’s reactions to the manuscript, Zampano’s analysis<br />
of The Navidson Record, and the contents of the<br />
videotapes themselves. As the novel continues, each<br />
story overlaps. Zampano adds extensive footnotes to<br />
his work and attempts to contact the famous people<br />
(Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Camille Paglia)<br />
mentioned in the tapes; Truant attempts to explain<br />
the more tortuous footnotes, adding explanations and<br />
analysis of his own, and unnamed ‘editors’ in turn comment<br />
on both Zampano’s and Truant’s comments. The<br />
Navidson Record would have made an excellent spinechiller<br />
in its own right, but the analysis and footnotes<br />
rack the creepiness up by a notch. In the early stages of<br />
the transcripts, we know that something scary’s going<br />
to happen: the footnotes tell us so.<br />
As if the layers of comment weren’t complicated<br />
enough, after a few dozen pages things go completely<br />
mental. The word house is printed throughout in blue,<br />
without explanation; footnotes become longer than the<br />
sections they’re commenting on, print is reversed or<br />
rotated<br />
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, entire sections are crossed out; some pages con-<br />
tain a single word or letter, while others are filled with<br />
lists of buildings or household amenities. All of these<br />
things are reproduced faithfully, resulting in pages where<br />
the only text is “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”,<br />
other pages with letters and words missing due to “fire<br />
damage” (the gaps are replaced by spaces and square<br />
brackets), still others with text at crazy angles or tiny<br />
190<br />
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font sizes. If you attempt to read this book in the bath,<br />
you’ll probably drown.<br />
The book’s ambition is also its downfall. The crazy<br />
typography and constant interjections from Truant (and<br />
others) make it difficult to follow parts of the story and,<br />
in the early sections especially, you’ll be sorely tempted<br />
to throw the book out of the window. Many of the tangents<br />
– psychological theories, local history, analysis<br />
of photographs, lists of camera equipment – overstay<br />
their welcome, and the ending is curiously flat, as if<br />
the writer suddenly ran out of ideas. Some scenes jar<br />
with the rest of the book; in particular, Truant’s description<br />
of his trip to a bar, where he talks to a band and<br />
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discovers they’ve read the book he’s still writing. This<br />
is either an unintentional error or – even worse – a hamfisted<br />
“it was all a dream” scenario lifted straight from<br />
an episode of Dallas.<br />
House Of Leaves is a brave attempt to do something<br />
different, updating Burroughs’ cut-up technique<br />
for a new generation of readers. At over 700 pages,<br />
however, the novel would have benefited from some<br />
judicious editing, and the overall impression is one<br />
of a writer too enamoured with typographical tricks.<br />
Nonetheless, House Of Leaves is an original and<br />
unique novel; for all its faults, it’s unlike anything else<br />
you’ll read this year. �<br />
191<br />
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Review [published December 1998]<br />
Don DeLillo: Underworld<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with<br />
the internet, Underworld is not a book for the fainthearted.<br />
Elegiac in tone and described variously as<br />
DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the<br />
Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty<br />
827 pages and zips back and forwards in time, moving<br />
in and out of the lives of a plethora of different<br />
characters.<br />
Following three main themes – the fate of a baseball<br />
from the winning game of the 1951 world series, the<br />
threat of atomic warfare and the mountains of garbage<br />
created by modern society – DeLillo moves forwards<br />
and backwards through the decades, introducing characters<br />
and situations and gradually showing the way<br />
their lives are interconnected.<br />
Reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web<br />
browser: the narrative focus moves from character to<br />
character almost as quickly as we are introduced to<br />
them, and the time frame regularly changes to show<br />
further connections between the key players. This device<br />
– literature as hypertext – is particularly effective<br />
in the early parts of the novel and the technique never<br />
BUY Don DeLillo books online from and<br />
intrudes on the story itself.<br />
The book focuses on Nick Shay, a former hoodlum<br />
who now works in the burgeoning waste management<br />
industry and owns the baseball from the 1951<br />
game, “the shot heard around the world”. In addition<br />
to Nick we hear from Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover,<br />
Lenny Bruce and the various people who move<br />
in and out of Nick’s life: lovers, family, friends and<br />
colleagues. Through these seemingly disconnected<br />
narratives DeLillo paints a picture of Cold War paranoia<br />
at its peak – the baseball game happened the<br />
same day as the USSR’s first nuclear test – and the<br />
changes affecting his characters as a microcosm of<br />
American society as a whole.<br />
Very few writers, however, can justify over 800<br />
densely-printed pages to tell a story and Underworld<br />
would have benefited greatly from judicious wielding<br />
of the blue pencil. Potentially intriguing plots which<br />
feature strongly in the earlier parts of the book – an intriguing<br />
serial killer subplot, the stories of each person<br />
who possesses the winning baseball – are abandoned<br />
halfway through the book in favour of overlong child-<br />
192<br />
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hood memories or the inane ponderings of a performance<br />
artist; other stories are neglected for over 400<br />
pages before reappearing at the end of the novel, causing<br />
an unwelcome jolt as the reader tries to remember<br />
the pertinent details.<br />
In this respect Underworld is a victim of its own<br />
ambition: by trying to cover such a wide range of<br />
characters and situations, DeLillo loses track of some<br />
of them and, in the latter parts of the novel in particular,<br />
the writing feels as if it is on autopilot while the author<br />
works out what to do next.<br />
There is still much to recommend in Underworld,<br />
BUY Don DeLillo books online from and<br />
however. Each vignette is lovingly crafted: DeLillo<br />
seems as comfortable writing from the perspective of<br />
a street missionary as he is inhabiting J. Edgar Hoover’s<br />
paranoia. The book employs vivid imagery, from<br />
painted angels on ghetto walls to the cityscape created<br />
by mountains of domestic waste, and the dialogue is<br />
usually well-observed and thoroughly believable<br />
although it does flag when describing Nick Shay’s<br />
hoodlum past. Despite its faults DeLillo has created an<br />
ambitious and powerful novel which, due to its size,<br />
can also be used to swat annoying children on trains.<br />
Highly recommended. �<br />
193<br />
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Review [published June 1999]<br />
John Diamond: C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
As far as John Diamond was concerned, cancer happens<br />
to other people. A columnist who is paid handsomely<br />
for spouting off each week about whatever is on his<br />
mind, he undergoes tests for the lump in his neck and,<br />
rather than panicking, sees it as a potentially interesting<br />
anecdote. “I imagined myself in a week or two’s<br />
time not as someone who had been diagnosed as having<br />
cancer but as someone who had had a close brush with<br />
cancer – who’d been through all the tests and then at the<br />
very last minute been given the all clear. If anything it<br />
sounded even more heroic than the real thing”. By this<br />
point Diamond had had cancer for more than a year.<br />
C is, of course, about cancer – what it is, what it feels<br />
like to receive the diagnosis one evening as you’re<br />
watching Eastenders, how it feels to lose four stone<br />
and most of your tongue. Subtitled “because cowards<br />
get cancer too”, the book makes no attempt to portray<br />
Diamond as some brave, heroic figure and describes<br />
his twisted pleasure as he uses his illness as a weapon at<br />
dinner parties, his frequent outbursts of impotent rage<br />
and the often appalling way he treats his wife during<br />
his convalescence.<br />
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This is no self-pitying, ‘poor me’ tale. Diamond describes<br />
how cancer works, clear-up rates, the different<br />
sorts of treatment and their chances of success. A savagely<br />
perceptive writer, he pours vitriol on new-agers<br />
and pro-smoking campaigners in equal measure. “By<br />
all means campaign for some phantom ‘right’ to smoke,<br />
but don’t believe that right derives from corrupting the<br />
statistics about what smoking does to you. Understand<br />
it for what it is: the right to play Russian roulette, as I<br />
did, with the immune system”. Diamond’s descriptions<br />
of his predicament are frequently hilarious – his inventory<br />
of his well-stocked medicine cabinet reads like P.J.<br />
O’Rourke, albeit P.J. writing about morphine instead<br />
of cocaine.<br />
Diamond reserves his most vicious criticism for those<br />
who believe surviving cancer is a matter of the correct<br />
mental attitude, as if those who die simply didn’t try<br />
hard enough. As he recounts his treatment through his<br />
weekly newspaper column he receives regular missives<br />
from the terminally stupid, “the ones who told me that<br />
as a journalist with a public platform it was my bounden<br />
duty to stop operating as a propagandising dupe for the<br />
194<br />
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evil medical establishment, to tell doctors that I wasn’t<br />
fooled by their fake radiotherapy statistics when everyone<br />
knows that radiation kills, and to put my faith<br />
in the Bessarabian radish, the desiccated root of which<br />
has been used for centuries by Tartar nomads to cure<br />
athlete’s foot, tennis elbow and cancer, as detailed in<br />
their book Why Your Doctor Hates You And Wants You<br />
To Die, review copy enclosed”.<br />
Currently cancer-free, Diamond would shy away<br />
from any suggestion that his illness has been in any<br />
way a positive experience. There is, however, a positive<br />
message to his story which is best illustrated by one of<br />
the book’s most poignant and telling scenes: Diamond<br />
is in his car, not long after the treatments that removed<br />
most of his tongue and destroyed his taste buds. Listening<br />
to a familiar show he hears a voice he can’t place,<br />
then realises that he’s listening to his own voice on a<br />
BUY John Diamond books online from and<br />
programme recorded a year previously. Diamond is<br />
struck by the difference between the man he is now<br />
and the man whose voice is broadcasting through the<br />
ether: “he was the one who didn’t realize what a boon<br />
an unimpaired voice was, who ate his food without<br />
stopping to think about its remarkable flavour, who was<br />
criminally profligate with words, who took his wife and<br />
children and friends for granted – in short who didn’t<br />
know he was living”.<br />
Rather than denying mortality, C suggests that it’s<br />
only when you understand the fragility of life that you<br />
can fully appreciate just how magical and wonderful<br />
day-to-day existence can be.<br />
Coda: John Diamond died on 2nd March, 2001. The<br />
Guardian obituary has the full details of his remarkable<br />
life. �<br />
195<br />
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Review [published December 2007]<br />
Stephen Dorril: Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley And<br />
British Fascism is an exhaustive re-examination of the<br />
man who, far from being a Hitler admiring crank, was<br />
inextricably bound up with British politics and upper<br />
class attitudes.<br />
Many may find the sheer weight of this tome<br />
wrongly flattering of its subject, regardless of content.<br />
Why should such a figure merit 700 pages? Surely this<br />
was, at best, a nearly-man in British politics? He may<br />
have risen to Cabinet level certainly, but then so did<br />
hundreds of others. The grimy pack of thugs he came<br />
to lead once his mainstream ambitions failed may have<br />
caused a splash as they bashed enemy heads in, but<br />
no-one voted for them. Surely, ultimately, they and he<br />
were an irrelevance? Dorril’s expertly researched account<br />
gives the lie to such a view and leaves no doubt<br />
that the story of Mosley is inexorably entwined with<br />
the story of 20th-century politics as a whole, mirroring<br />
the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machinations<br />
of high society to the violent desperation of the<br />
underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary<br />
player in between.<br />
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Sir Oswald “Tom” Mosley was a pure-grade scion<br />
from a northern branch of the old land-owning aristocracy<br />
(Mosley Street in Manchester takes its name from<br />
the clan), of the type still rolling in money but comparatively<br />
side-lined politically in the bourgeois 20th<br />
century. With a boorishly uncaring, neglectful father,<br />
and indulgent mother, his defining character traits were<br />
shown early on at boarding school and elsewhere. A<br />
narrow, directed charm, rampant ambition, intellectual<br />
laziness, sexual incontinence, untrustworthiness, and a<br />
tendency to brow-beat and bully. Above all, a narcissistic<br />
sense of self-adoration, belief in entitlement and<br />
complete lack of self-doubt, of the type so often found<br />
in his caste. But taken just that one degree further.<br />
After service in the air-force during the First World<br />
War, where he performed with distinction and enthusiasm,<br />
impetuous Tom managed to secure a position as<br />
a Conservative MP by the age of 22, the natural home<br />
for a man of his class and connections. He soon became<br />
renowned as a powerful orator in the Commons for his<br />
party. But this ‘man in a hurry’ was impatient with the<br />
old guard still running both party and country, those who<br />
196<br />
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had allowed the calamity of war to decimate the young<br />
men of the nation fighting abroad, and who allowed<br />
an untrammelled laissez-faire capitalism to terrorise<br />
them with poverty once they had returned. Dorril goes<br />
into expansive and exacting detail about the clashing<br />
political and economic trends amongst the elite of the<br />
time. This in itself provides an unfaultable Parliamentary<br />
political history of the period, a vivid picture of<br />
the flux at work, which formed the background of the<br />
contradictions which made up Mosley’s outlook. He at<br />
first identified wholesale with the ‘social imperialists’<br />
in the Tory Party as against its free trade faction. He<br />
supported those who, in wishing to save the existing<br />
social order, believed in economic protectionism to<br />
protect a relatively decent living standard for the British<br />
working-class, bolstered by the exploitation of Empire.<br />
Such a world-view was entrenched in a romantic conception<br />
of England, with the foreign (and, sometimes,<br />
Jewish) ‘other’ as its symbolic foe. This paternalistic<br />
ethos was the basic core of Mosley’s philosophy from<br />
thereon, but his contempt for the Empire Tories’ lack of<br />
innovation made him seek his cause, his following and<br />
followers, elsewhere.<br />
Mosley was as much a figure in ‘high society’ as in<br />
politics, very Tatler fodder. Those he ran with were rich,<br />
young, louche, promiscuous, glamorous and shallow, of<br />
the type Evelyn Waugh at once admired and despised.<br />
As Mosley married his first wife Cimmie, this “dash-<br />
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ing”, charismatic figure dazzled many. While gentle,<br />
warm Cimmie was liked by most who met her, quite<br />
as many people were as put-off by Mosley’s boundless<br />
self-importance as were taken in by his charm. While<br />
praise came from many, his Tory rival Stanley Baldwin<br />
spoke for many more by remarking “He is a cad and<br />
a wrong’un and they will find it out,” before he left<br />
the party. Cimmie’s delicate nature was in turn tested<br />
to immense distraction by her husband’s countless,<br />
remorseless affairs – including with her sisters.<br />
Mosley would never be content as anything less than<br />
the biggest fish in the pond. The Tories disappointed<br />
him so he joined Labour, seeing that as the party more<br />
capable of delivering the change -still amorphously<br />
defined- that he craved. For a while his ‘radicalism’,<br />
advocating wholesale economic reorganisation to<br />
achieve full employment led a few on the Left, even the<br />
great Bevan for a short time, to see him as a potential<br />
leader. Indeed, it is distinctly unnerving to see both the<br />
respect Mosley was shown by sections of both the Labour<br />
Party Left and the Independent Labour Party, and<br />
the seeming ease with which his rhetoric of renewal<br />
could blend with theirs.<br />
As Mosley made his way into the Cabinet of Ramsay<br />
McDonald’s doomed Labour government and<br />
expounded his economic programmes to tackle unemployment<br />
(Keynesianism with an authoritarian kick),<br />
their rejection by McDonald was due to the latter’s<br />
197<br />
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timidity rather than any genuine opposition to creeping<br />
dictatorship. Mosley was enraged as his proposals<br />
were ignored, and immediately split with the Labour<br />
leadership. As this schism occurred, it is a testimony to<br />
both the man’s demagogic charisma and his ideological<br />
vacuity that many in both main parties now saw him<br />
as a possible leader. The ambiguity was such that for<br />
a very brief time Churchill and Bevan alike were keen<br />
for him to lead their respective parties. But impatient<br />
Tom had his own ideas. He had taken his ball home. He<br />
would have his own party. The New Party.<br />
The New Party was formed in early 1931, it soon<br />
became clear just what its founder’s forever trumpeted<br />
radicalism amounted to. Fierce rhetoric about change<br />
and national renewal (and the clamour of a throng of<br />
restless, violent young men to drive this home) masked<br />
a dangerous and ringing hollow at the party’s ideological<br />
core. Its launch was a huge media event at the time,<br />
and figures of the stature of Bernard Shaw and H.G.<br />
Wells were initially sympathetic (both being Fabian<br />
socialists but with a disturbing penchant for Mosley’s<br />
coldly elitist, authoritarian and technocratic attitudes).<br />
The initial boost was short-lived however, and the New<br />
Party’s lack of clarity, together with a poor showing<br />
at their first by-election in Ashton-under-Lyne, saw it<br />
heading nowhere in electoral terms. By 1932, the New<br />
Party had already changed its name to the British Union<br />
of Fascists.<br />
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The BUF was never less than an unabashed personality<br />
cult from the beginning, the logical conclusion of<br />
the overweening toxic brew of narcissism and megalomania<br />
that animated its founder. Massively over- represented<br />
by ex military men like Mosley himself, he<br />
found it easy to run the movement as army rather than a<br />
party, dominating every aspect of members’ lives. They<br />
even had their own uniform, they were the Blackshirts,<br />
aping Mussolini’s crew before them. Ex-member Colin<br />
Cross recalled the faithful “Even saluted him when he<br />
went into the sea to bathe at the Movement’s summer<br />
camps at Selsey”, and “they whispered his name in<br />
religious awe … he was presented to the public as a<br />
superman. Criticism was taboo and humour nearly so.”<br />
At last the man had found the captive audience he had<br />
always craved. Now all he had to do was enlarge the<br />
audience to encompass the whole nation.<br />
The BUF was always clear in its violence, but it<br />
was far from ideologically coherent, even less so<br />
than the man himself. He took a fair-sized gang<br />
of old Labour comrades with him, but to the great<br />
majority of Labour and trade-union men and women,<br />
the Fascist movement was not just a mistake, but a<br />
sickening anathema. This was a party based on a<br />
movement that massacred their brothers and sisters<br />
in Italy, directly supported by the capitalist class<br />
in that country. They knew the enemy where they<br />
saw it. The organised working-class were forever,<br />
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fervently opposed. Many more members came from<br />
elsewhere, including preexisting smaller UK Fascist<br />
movements. Amongst them were the British Fascists,<br />
an old group of simplistic upper-middle-class<br />
reactionary blimps who had previously been active<br />
in trying to break the 1926 General Strike. Joining<br />
them were more recent and more vicious groups of<br />
Nazi cheerleaders, whose chief motivation was a<br />
pathological hatred of ‘Jewry’. Of equal importance<br />
and greater number were natural Tories driven to a<br />
new radical dynamism against the perceived socialist<br />
threat. This contingent was personified by Daily<br />
Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a friend of Mosley’s<br />
who threw his paper behind the new movement<br />
wholesale. Meanwhile, the movement was secretly,<br />
and illegally, receiving a large chunk of its funding<br />
direct from Fascist Italy, and, increasingly, (as the<br />
anti-Semitism increased) from Nazi Germany too.<br />
The degree of the extent of Mosley’s anti-Semitism<br />
is central to the conundrum of his character. It is interesting<br />
to contrast his personality with that of Hitler, the<br />
man he so desired to emulate, failing so spectacularly.<br />
There is no doubt that Mosley was not possessed of<br />
the overwhelming personal hatred of Jews that so<br />
engulfed Hitler. He had several Jewish friends prior<br />
to the BUF. His rival, the hysterically overwrought<br />
anti-Semite Arnold Leese, leader of the tiny, ultrafanatic<br />
Imperial Fascist League taunted Mosley as a<br />
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and<br />
“kosher Fascist” for this very reason. Amusingly, one<br />
of Mosley’s early New Party stalwarts was a Jewish<br />
East End boxer named Ted “Kid” Lewis, who exited<br />
the movement with a punch to Mosley’s nose when the<br />
latter confirmed that yes, he did intend his movement<br />
to be anti-Semitic. Furthermore, Oswald explicitly did<br />
not sign up to the facetious and insane pseudo-science<br />
the Nazis used to justify their race hatred, casually<br />
denouncing it as gibberish. He mocked the notorious<br />
forgeries the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion too.<br />
The very fact he could then lead a movement openly<br />
engaged in repeated violence against this scape-goated<br />
racial group shows the black-hearted, gangster opportunism<br />
at the core of his being. The hatred of the Jewish<br />
enemy was a galvanising myth to a movement which<br />
otherwise had little to tie it together, and he knew it.<br />
With characteristic dishonesty, Mosley dismally<br />
pleaded self defence in his campaign against the Jews,<br />
claiming “they started it.” Mosley came to advocate<br />
the expelling of all Jews from Britain who had shown<br />
‘disloyalty’. Where they were to go was unclear,<br />
Madagascar, or possibly Uganda (“very empty and a<br />
lovely climate” helpfully offered Mosley’s second wife<br />
Diana, formerly Guinness, formerly Mitford.) It is an<br />
interesting rumination of what constitutes a truer evil,<br />
the deep-felt fanaticism of a Hitler or the gutter-shallow<br />
opportunism of a Mosley. It is however, much easier to<br />
see which was more successful.<br />
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Adolf met Oswald on several occasions but was<br />
never fully convinced of him, doubting his commitment,<br />
sensing his lack of whole-hearted zealotry.<br />
Goebbels was even less impressed, dismissing him as<br />
“an outsider of small political significance.” Hitler was<br />
however genuinely taken with Mosley’s wife Diana.<br />
He was even more taken by her sister Unity, and the<br />
feeling was mutual. Mosley married Diana at a secret<br />
ceremony in Goebbels’ house, having already carried<br />
out a long affair with her. The contrast of kind-hearted<br />
if naive Cimmie with the coldly ruthless Diana was<br />
seen by some as emblematic of Mosley’s journey to the<br />
dark side. While her portrayal as a Lady Macbeth figure<br />
even more malignant than her husband may have a<br />
toe in misogynist myth, he had certainly met his match<br />
with her in amoral callousness. The Mitfords were the<br />
epitome of high society elan, and Hitler himself, for<br />
all his railing against “British decadence” was far from<br />
immune to the charms of this glamorous set. Diana and<br />
Unity, regular and welcome visitors to Hitler, acted as a<br />
conduit between Mosley and his new benefactor, while<br />
the intelligence services were more concerned with the<br />
Mitford pair than Mosley himself as a threat to the state.<br />
The BUF was to change its name to the BU at the end<br />
of 1934. Short for the British Union, though its full new<br />
title was the rather less innocuous British Union of Fascists<br />
and National Socialists, reflecting the increasing<br />
influence of the Fuhrer. The thuggishness was thrown<br />
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and<br />
into sharp relief at an infamous public gathering at<br />
Olympia in June 1934. The mass meeting was held in a<br />
theatrical, explicitly Nuremburg style, the movement’s<br />
new Lightning-in-a-Circle symbol (wittily dubbed “the<br />
flash in the pan” by opponents) dominating the hall just<br />
as the swastika did to the Nazi faithful in Germany. The<br />
Blackshirts deliberately attracted as many opponents<br />
as possible to this meeting, and then, with a variety of<br />
home-made weapons, pulped into bloody submission<br />
anyone who heckled The Leader. Many serious injuries<br />
resulted. Mosley was attempting to prove his control of<br />
“the street” once and for all, yet this one meeting probably<br />
did more than any other act to convince potential<br />
followers of his ruthless, sadistic nature. His unpredictable<br />
nature too – probably a greater anathema to the<br />
British business class.<br />
The BU suffered a severe propaganda blow with the<br />
Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when a massive crowd<br />
of local working-class youths, Jews, Communist and<br />
Labour activists violently prevented Mosley (resplendent<br />
in a new uniform explicitly modelled on that of the<br />
Nazi SS), from provocatively marching down the street<br />
in the heart of the Jewish East End. As the Blackshirts<br />
were protected by police, (many sympathetic to Mosley,<br />
or at least distinctly hostile to his leftist opponents),<br />
the fight was between demonstrators and police rather<br />
than the barricaded Blackshirts themselves. But the<br />
victory was real, They Did Not Pass. As Dorril shows,<br />
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in some areas of London, notably Hoxton and Stepney<br />
support from sections of the East End working-class<br />
was actually to rise afterward – but the psychological<br />
defeat struck deeply amongst its followers, and seemed<br />
emblematic of the movement’s wider failure. The<br />
early membership height of 50,000 had fallen to under<br />
10,000 by this point. The movement was losing money<br />
continually, despite being bankrolled by both the foreign<br />
Fascist powers and Mosley’s own landed estates.<br />
Uniforms, banners, headquarters and truncheons do not<br />
pay for themselves. Intellectually he was without capital<br />
too. The writers of the day were overwhelmingly Left.<br />
The strangely acidic Wyndham Lewis was one of the<br />
few artists who were taken in for a time by the movement,<br />
but even this support did not last the distance.<br />
Dorril recounts Lewis and Mosley met on several<br />
occasions in the late 30s, but the former was increasingly<br />
alarmed by the latter’s talk of the sad practical<br />
necessities of machine gunning the movement’s foes<br />
in the street “when push came to shove”. When Lewis<br />
came to write the ironically titled ‘The Jews – Are They<br />
Human?’ in 1937 he was sardonically repudiating his<br />
past Fascism. The only noted author to back Mosley<br />
by then was Henry Tarka The Otter” Williamson. With<br />
even his few intellectual allies now taking the piss, who<br />
would take Oswald seriously now?<br />
When Britain went to war with Mosley’s ideological<br />
masters in Germany and Italy, it was the cataclysmic<br />
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and<br />
close of any last lingering chance of a revival in his<br />
movement. Unity Mitford shot herself in the head,<br />
yet failed to succeed in suicide, dribbling on for years<br />
afterward. While Mosley and his wife claimed they<br />
were still loyal to Britain (whilst agitating for “negotiated<br />
peace”) the authorities had different views, and<br />
imprisoned the pair in Holloway Prison. Sympathy<br />
was not widespread. Nancy Mitford was one of those<br />
who denounced sister Diana and her infamous husband<br />
to the security services. Several BU members<br />
either fled to Germany or had moved shortly before<br />
war was declared, to fight for the Nazi cause. Some<br />
were propagandists like “Haw Haw” Joyce, others like<br />
John Amery joined Waffen SS divisions. In keeping<br />
with the stomach-wrenching nature of their treachery,<br />
none saw active combat against soldiers, yet several<br />
were active in murderous atrocities against unarmed<br />
Jewish civilians. By association, Mosley was seen, by<br />
the vast majority of British people, as the most venal<br />
kind of traitor.<br />
Churchill, one of many who once saw Mosley as<br />
a potential leader of his party and country, decided<br />
to release the man and wife in late 1943 in what he<br />
saw as a humane gesture in relation to the Blackshirt’s<br />
ill- health. The decision sparked mass popular protest<br />
and outrage. The working-classes in particular were<br />
prominent in street demonstrations demanding that<br />
the key should be thrown away, or the noose brought<br />
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in. The would-be Leader of Britain was really – truly<br />
– loathed the length and breadth of the land. Oswald<br />
and Diana seemed to bear this hatred with an attitude<br />
beyond the straightforward arrogance which was their<br />
defining nature, and into a whole other worldly netherrealm<br />
of bitter fantasy. It was the Jews who hated them,<br />
the establishment, the government – certainly not the<br />
good old British people. These demonstrations were<br />
the results of the Jewish cabal that had Britain in its<br />
grip … surely?<br />
His solipsism increased by incarceration, Mosley<br />
took to writing at greater length, honing his philosophy<br />
in ever more verbose terminology. He claimed to have<br />
now moved “beyond Fascism”, and propounded that<br />
he had found a unique “synthesis”, beyond the both<br />
capitalist and socialist ethic, fusing Christianity and<br />
the ideals of Nietzsche, combining dictatorship and<br />
democracy. But the schism between his feigning of<br />
esoteric high mindedness and the squalor of his day-today<br />
political activities became starker than ever when<br />
he began his new party in 1947 – the Union Movement.<br />
The same gang of dysfunctional Jew baiters were to<br />
continue their street fighting, to a mixture of disgust<br />
and indifference from the general populace (gaining for<br />
instance less than 2000 votes in the whole of London<br />
during local elections in 1949). The full extent of the<br />
Nazi horrors, the millions of innocent souls butchered<br />
in the camps, was now evident, discrediting Mosley’s<br />
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and<br />
mob as never before. Accordingly, the calibre of the<br />
UM member was even lower than that of the BU before<br />
them, a selection of gangsters, psychopaths and street<br />
thugs, with the odd loopy Lord thrown in.<br />
This sorry pack were eventually to find a new<br />
scapegoat, and a short-lived new lease of life with the<br />
‘coloured immigration’ of the 50s. As tensions grew in<br />
sections of the white population towards the novel new<br />
migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent,<br />
the UM had some success in actively encouraging<br />
race riots, in particular the Notting Hill riot of 1958.<br />
Their success in leading to smashed windows and<br />
broken bones did not translate into votes however, and<br />
the fetid nature of their street activity stood in starker<br />
contrast than ever from Mosley’s increasingly abstruse<br />
theorising. His new vision was of a United Europe, national<br />
boundaries broken down among the great White<br />
brotherhood, who would in turn go to plunder what<br />
they needed from Africa, using their superior colonial<br />
know-how. Ironic that a movement now recruiting on<br />
an anti-immigrant platform should have as its ultimate<br />
goal the large scale immigration of a white master class<br />
to the African continent. This was grotesque racism<br />
sure enough, but it was neither populist nor popular.<br />
Even amongst rising anti-immigration feeling, the UM<br />
could not truly take off.<br />
Ultimately it was to be Mosley’s intellectualism that<br />
was the final death knell of his movement. The issue of<br />
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race did indeed strike at the core of British political life<br />
by the late 60s, and immigration became a key electoral<br />
theme. But the UM’s abstract ideas of White European<br />
Unity did not accord with the xenophobic mood ignited<br />
by the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of the Conservative<br />
Enoch Powell. The sentiment he unearthed and tried to<br />
harness was as strongly anti-European as it was antiblack.<br />
Those who didn’t like the “niggers” and “pakis”<br />
didn’t tend to be too keen on “frogs” and “krauts” either.<br />
The Mosleys were livid that Enoch had succeeded on<br />
territory where they had failed. In an amusing glimpse<br />
of the couple’s snobbery and delusion, Oswald dubbed<br />
Powell a “middle-class Alf Garnett”, while Diana denounced<br />
him as “far-right” as opposed to their “hard<br />
centre”! A truly Fascist party was to gain from the racist<br />
rhetoric of Powell. This was not the Union Movement<br />
however. It was the National Front.<br />
The NF was inspired by the same Nazi and Fascist<br />
ideas that Mosley first fermented in the country. Its<br />
first chairman was A.K. Chesterton, formerly a leading<br />
figure within the BU and a close confidante of Oswald.<br />
But its simplistic, xenophobic approach was far<br />
more adept than the UM at tapping into the visceral,<br />
base hatred that keeps such a movement going. It was<br />
blacks and Asians who were getting the beatings and<br />
firebombed houses now, with the added advantage<br />
they were much easier to spot than Jews. The boot-<br />
boys of the NF were every inch the descendants of the<br />
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and<br />
Blackshirts before them, but they had moved on and<br />
left their spiritual grandpa and grandma Oswald and<br />
Diana behind. Bitterly jealous of the NF’s success,<br />
Mosley remarked to his private circle, in a statement<br />
beyond the parody of the most gifted satirist, that the<br />
Front was “funded by Jews.”<br />
The pair moved to France, and lingered on as bitter<br />
remnants, their reputation rotting in a pleasing reflection<br />
of their withered souls, cursing the cosmopolitan<br />
conspiracies that had kept them from greatness, never<br />
seeing the fault in themselves. No matter that most<br />
saw a malevolent opportunist, in his mind’s eye he<br />
would always be the great, lost, put-upon prophet.<br />
Mosley would periodically attempt to reappear with<br />
attempts at self-justification. Following one such<br />
appearance on The Frost Report in 1967 interviewer<br />
David Frost remarked, “He saw everything through<br />
the distorting mirror of his own fantasises, and was<br />
irretrievably consumed by them. He would never see<br />
himself as others saw him.”<br />
Oswald died in 1980, and the vaguely sympathetic<br />
obituaries he received in certain quarters such as The<br />
Times revealed for the last time that the solidarity of the<br />
ruling classes will out in the end.<br />
Dorril has produced the definitive Mosley biography,<br />
superseding the absurdly sympathetic softsoaping<br />
work of Robert Skidelsky, which centred on<br />
Mosley’s Parliamentary career and treated the BUF as<br />
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an epilogue (a bit like a biography of Fred West which<br />
focussed more on his earlier career as an ice cream<br />
salesman.) This is a fascinating story, both for anyone<br />
interested in British political history of the last century,<br />
and anyone intrigued by the tragic tale of a truly<br />
diabolical man. Dorril has done an unfaultable job on<br />
the research, and brings the narrative to life well with<br />
his grotesque menagerie of characters. There are flaws<br />
to the book. The author has a background as an analyst<br />
of the machinations of the intelligence services of<br />
Britain and abroad, and while this eye for detail has<br />
undoubtedly made this work the powerhouse of research<br />
it is, the endless recanting of certain details, the<br />
exact nature of how the BUF obtained its funding for<br />
example, can sometimes drag the story’s flow. More<br />
directly, he concentrates a little too much on the nature<br />
of MI5’s observation of the movement, when this is<br />
very much a side-show to the main narrative. This dry<br />
style can sometimes cloy over such a long length. Further,<br />
while Dorril is great on the detail, actual analysis<br />
is very thin on the ground. The one time Dorril does<br />
attempt an analytical overview, it is with some rather<br />
tenuous observations about Messianic leaders toward<br />
the end, claiming that one Tony Blair shares the traits<br />
of this style. Maybe so, but the point is made clumsily<br />
and without satisfactory justification.<br />
Ultimately however, Dorril’s stance in going for the<br />
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and<br />
research style, dispassionately observant, pays off into<br />
a great narrative by nature of the sheer dramatic scope<br />
of the story he so meticulously examines. Scene after<br />
scene and figure after grotesque figure linger on the<br />
psychic retina. The drawing room parties of the man<br />
playing host to every major political figure of the early<br />
part of the century, one by one falling away as he fell<br />
into disrepute. Mosley’s seaside frolics with his patrician<br />
pals, offset against the pogrom style excesses of<br />
his nastiest East End thugs, breaking into Jewish houses<br />
and attacking children within. Mosley’s relentless psychological<br />
torture of his first wife, the most poignant of<br />
his bullying victims. Diana fending off the accusations<br />
of sister Nancy that she had supported a movement that<br />
murdered six million Jews with the remark “But darling,<br />
it was the kindest way.” The London BUF headquarters<br />
that doubled up as a knocking-shop, underlying with<br />
grim humour the movement’s crossover with organised<br />
crime. The UM hijacking the teddy-boy youth cult just<br />
as the NF did with skinheads two decades later. The<br />
sheer gall and lack of self-awareness in Mosley’s latelife<br />
attempts to rehabilitate himself, attempting a ‘truce’<br />
with Jewish leaders without any pretence of apology.<br />
This is a grim tale that needs only clear explanation<br />
and examination to be one of fascination. This is a task<br />
Dorril has performed with enormous success with this<br />
eye-opening and exhaustive work. �<br />
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Interview [published September 2003]<br />
Patricia Duncker: Insanity Clause<br />
Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her<br />
novel Hallucinating Foucault<br />
“Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects<br />
that attract most of my attention.” So said the late<br />
French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the century’s<br />
most audacious intellectuals, who died of AIDS<br />
in 1984. Only Foucault’s books remain as a reminder<br />
of his existence – but, as Patricia Duncker’s stunning<br />
debut novel Hallucinating Foucault shows, the impact<br />
of reading on people’s lives can be both terrifying and<br />
self-transforming.<br />
Originally published by the independent Serpent’s<br />
Tail last year, Hallucinating Foucault proved such a<br />
success that Picador recently bought the rights to the<br />
novel and reissued it. Such success might seem strange,<br />
given that few people outside of ivory towers have even<br />
heard of Foucault, but Duncker’s novel isn’t some dry<br />
academic text that needs to be painstakingly deciphered.<br />
Hallucinating Foucault tells the story of Paul Michel,<br />
a celebrated French novelist who is so distraught at<br />
Foucault’s death that he becomes insane. The novel’s<br />
narrator is an English student studying Michel’s work<br />
who sets out to rescue the writer, so bringing the author’s<br />
words and the author’s world together in a dangerous<br />
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mixture of intimacy, madness and self-discovery.<br />
“I wanted it to be a love story,” Patricia Duncker<br />
reveals, “to explain the love between readers and<br />
writers. My life has been radically changed through<br />
the books I’ve read and I wanted to describe that.”<br />
However, Duncker was fully aware of the need to<br />
avoid alienating her audience. “I think your first duty<br />
as a writer is to your reader and you must keep them<br />
turning the page. What is the point otherwise?” As a<br />
result, Hallucinating Foucault has the feel of a cerebral<br />
thriller, combining the love story between Paul Michel<br />
and the narrator with the mystery of Paul Michel and<br />
Foucault’s relationship.<br />
In blending the fictional character of Paul Michel<br />
with the memory of the real-life Michel Foucault,<br />
Duncker has created a novel which refuses simply to<br />
remain a story. It crosses over into real life – so much<br />
so that for some people, Paul Michel is now more<br />
real than Foucault ever was: “Most of the people who<br />
have read Hallucinating Foucault have never heard<br />
of Foucault. Some of them thought Paul Michel was<br />
real – one or two even tried to get hold of his novels.<br />
205<br />
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One reviewer in Manchester said the book was all old<br />
hat to him because his mother had produced a thesis on<br />
Paul Michel!”<br />
Some of the novel’s most memorable and disturbing<br />
scenes centre around the narrator’s entry in the asylum<br />
to find Paul Michel. “I have a friend in France who’s<br />
worked with schizophrenics for the last 30 years,”<br />
Duncker says. “She’s seen the different ways that<br />
schizophrenia has been perceived during that time –<br />
because even now, no one really understands it, no one<br />
knows where it comes from. She holds an open clinic,<br />
so I visited her there with some trepidation and it was<br />
absolutely incredible. You always think that people<br />
who are off their heads are going to be just a little bit<br />
eccentric, but these people were absolutely mad – raving!<br />
But there was such a sense of community there; it<br />
was harrowing but quite beautiful, in a way.<br />
“Paul Michel knows he’s mad and that’s common –<br />
mad people are completely aware that they’re raving,<br />
that they slide between sanity and insanity. I wanted<br />
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the madness in Hallucinating Foucault to do justice<br />
to what I’d seen. It’s incredibly difficult to represent<br />
people who are living in a different time zone from you<br />
with respect and generosity – because you don’t want<br />
to present them as curiosities or freaks, which is what<br />
Foucault also strove to challenge in his work.”<br />
The love between reader and writer is evident<br />
from Duncker’s enthusiasm when she talks about the<br />
French philosopher: “Foucault once said, ‘I wrote all<br />
my books to make boys fall in love with me.’ And I<br />
think there’s an element to that in all writing – books<br />
are messages in bottles. There was something about<br />
Foucault – his vanity, his shaved head, his looming<br />
presence – that indicated that he desperately<br />
wanted to be a writer rather than a philosopher. So<br />
the character of Paul Michel is the embodiment of<br />
some of Foucault’s unfulfilled desires. It’s my present<br />
to Foucault, in a way. I made the character of Paul<br />
Michel as handsome as James Dean and in love with<br />
him – what more could he want?!” �<br />
206<br />
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Review [published December 2005]<br />
Nic Dunlop: The Lost Executioner<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my<br />
pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories:<br />
Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Teashop, The<br />
Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country<br />
that tries to understand its recent, disastrous politics.<br />
Where Secret Histories documents Burma’s slide into<br />
a real-life Orwellian nightmare, The Lost Executioner<br />
chronicles photographer Nic Dunlop’s obsessive hunt<br />
for Comrade Duch, the man who presided over the<br />
deaths of thousands as the commandant of Tuol Sleng,<br />
Cambodia’s notorious interrogation centre, during the<br />
genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge.<br />
Between 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power<br />
in Cambodia until 1979 when they were displaced by<br />
the invading Vietnamese, the ultra-leftist party instituted<br />
a Year Zero policy which was even more extreme<br />
than China’s Cultural Revolution and resulted in the<br />
murder of an estimated two million people – a quarter<br />
of the country’s population.<br />
Duch, like every other major figure in the Khmer<br />
Rouge regime, successfully disappeared into Cambodia’s<br />
jungles when the Vietnamese arrived and, like<br />
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the rest of the regime’s leaders, successfully avoided<br />
prosecution. To date, 25 years after Cambodia’s autogenocide,<br />
none of the key proponents have been brought<br />
to trial. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s leader, died of old<br />
age in 1998.<br />
For Dunlop, seeing a photo of Comrade Duch set<br />
something off inside him that made him want to find<br />
the former commandant. This search provides the<br />
engine for his book, fusing the detective work necessary<br />
to finding Duch with the travelogue of exploring<br />
modern day Cambodia. Dunlop interweaves details of<br />
Cambodia’s awful recent history within his journey,<br />
providing a powerful narrative that avoids the dryness<br />
of traditional historical analysis but does not hold back<br />
on dealing with the vast complexities of how the Khmer<br />
Rouge came to power and the fallout of their overthrow.<br />
Both John Pilger and David Chandler, Cambodia’s preeminent<br />
Western historian, are given major credit in<br />
the Acknowledgements for helping Dunlop refine the<br />
historical accuracy of his text and this, for me, is vital<br />
as a demonstration of Dunlop’s attempt to write more<br />
than a simple, observational travel book.<br />
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Instead, Dunlop gives an account of his own, personal<br />
journey, not just through the cities and countryside of<br />
Cambodia but through the country’s history and how<br />
his own history has intertwined with it. The reader,<br />
then, accompanies Dunlop as he tries to come to grips<br />
with understanding Cambodia as a foreigner, as his<br />
learning and perceptions of the country he is fascinated<br />
by shift and change over time – and as he questions his<br />
own opinions and perspectives about prosecuting the<br />
Khmer Rouge commanders, and the very nature of how<br />
justice can be achieved and carried out. Integral to this<br />
journey – and a vital part of this book – are the personal<br />
testimonies of those Dunlop meets who were both victim<br />
and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.<br />
It is these conversations that transform the historical<br />
narrative by placing those momentous events in the<br />
context of their impact on individuals, where they stop<br />
being lost in history, if only for a moment, and become<br />
real people again. For all the citing of numbers and<br />
statistics to measure and somehow quantify the vastness<br />
of Cambodia’s nightmare, reading these accounts<br />
are what provide the true expression of the murderous<br />
insanity that befell the country.<br />
The Lost Executioner, then, is a complex book, both<br />
in its attempt to avoid simplifying the recent history<br />
of Cambodia and in Dunlop’s own acknowledgement<br />
of the flux of his own thoughts about it. But, perhaps<br />
because Dunlop’s profession is as a photographer, there<br />
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is never a sense of getting lost within his narrative. His<br />
prose has a real composure to it – it’s extremely simple<br />
without being simplistic, and there is not one verbose<br />
word or overwrought sentence here. The understated<br />
tone of Dunlop’s journalism allows the appalling facts<br />
of his narrative to speak for themselves far more clearly.<br />
Without wanting to sound flippant, the search for<br />
Comrade Duch does also have a bit of Boy’s Own adventure<br />
to it – and, to be frank, a somewhat suicidal one<br />
too. Dunlop has worked in South East Asia for several<br />
years and is well versed in Asian protocol to be sure, but<br />
to decide to go looking for one of the Khmer Rouge’s<br />
key figures would seem to be asking for trouble. Cambodia<br />
is safe for tourists these days, but outside of the<br />
cities it is still easy for people to disappear. I’ll refrain<br />
from writing anymore about the outcome of his search<br />
for fear of creating a spoiler; I’ll only say that it is a<br />
truly remarkable story.<br />
A section in the middle of The Lost Executioner is the<br />
abiding – and troubling – memory I retain of reading it.<br />
Within the rarefied confines of New York’s Museum<br />
Of Modern Art, an exhibition of photos taken at Tuol<br />
Sleng was commissioned, with an accompanying coffee<br />
table book. The photos have become iconic – black and<br />
white, each individual in the black loose clothes of the<br />
Khmer Rouge against a white wall. They are the photos<br />
that were taken on admission at Tuol Sleng – and the<br />
taking of those photos were effectively the signing of<br />
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their death warrant. Only seven people survived their<br />
admission to Tuol Sleng.<br />
During its exhibition, MOMA provided no captions<br />
with the photographs, no names, no details of<br />
who each individual was, no mention of how or why<br />
they’d died. For MOMA’s purposes, these photos<br />
had stopped being individual records of genocide but<br />
had become mere portraiture. They were nice photos,<br />
nothing more. There were no indications that each of<br />
these people had died at the hands of torturers. There<br />
were no calls for justice.<br />
Dunlop writes movingly of his own frustration<br />
BUY Nic Dunlop books online from and<br />
with the limits of photography – that without words,<br />
images are lost without context, turned into disinterested<br />
aesthetic objects, mere decoration. The Lost<br />
Executioner is clearly the product of Dunlop’s frustration<br />
with his own profession, and photography’s<br />
loss is writing’s gain. In telling his story of going in<br />
search of Comrade Duch, Dunlop also tells the story<br />
of Cambodia going in search of answers to its own<br />
auto-genocide and the still-ongoing quest for some<br />
sort of justice. For all the grimness of its subject<br />
matter, The Lost Executioner is a vital book and one<br />
that deserves to reach a huge audience. �<br />
209<br />
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Review [published December 2005]<br />
The Fall: Fall Heads Roll<br />
Ben Granger<br />
It’s time again for the Seer of Salford to blast forth his<br />
enchanted bombast. With more albums now than anyone<br />
can count, and with its title surely a sly reference<br />
to the number of foot-soldiers fallen from his ranks in<br />
the grand Quixotic battle, a new Fall album stakes its<br />
claim. Those who care, care. Should you?<br />
The trouble with a talent this unique rattling out at<br />
the rate it does is that it gets taken for granted. Does<br />
this album stand out enough to win back those who’ve<br />
seen the band’s twisted charm in the past but who’ve<br />
got tired over the years?<br />
The patience of the part-timer is tested straight<br />
away with first track ‘Ride Away’, a cranky simplistic<br />
diatribe against someone who’s pissed the Great One<br />
off; literally one-note in all senses. And yet at this point<br />
the faithful (and yes, of course I’m one) will hear that<br />
Mark E Smith’s always ugly, tuneless voice has, in the<br />
end, taken on an incredible inner-poetry of its own. As<br />
I believe John Peel once said, it really would be beguiling<br />
reciting the Yellow Pages. And yet once Smith has<br />
frightened off the chaff with this lengthy dirge; The<br />
Fall are ready to thrill with some of their most defining<br />
BUY The Fall music online from and<br />
moments yet.<br />
The sound of Fall Heads Roll is very much riffheavy<br />
guitar based , with a decidedly minimalist<br />
primitive moog-synth backing, eschewing most of<br />
the dance effects which have appeared on Fall records<br />
in the past two decades. Not that there haven’t been<br />
great pure-dance Fall moments (‘Free Range’, et al)<br />
but this particular fan prefers the purer approach on<br />
balance. The brilliant minimalism of the early 80s<br />
period is evoked.<br />
And what riffs! ‘Pacifying Joint’ is an incredible second<br />
track, with a machine-gun snare that will instantly<br />
snag anyone who hears it. If they choose to rip themselves<br />
off the snag that’s up to them, but it’s as catchy as<br />
anything by Franz Ferdinand. And once again the “bla<br />
blah blah”’s of Smith’s voice attain a weird transcendent<br />
cohesion. By the next track more incredible hooks<br />
with age-old synths are underway. And by the time the<br />
pop kids are singing along to next track ‘What About<br />
Us?’, perhaps they’ll scarcely notice they’re chanting<br />
from the point of view of an East German rabbit (or is<br />
it a Rabbi?) indignantly demanding that Dr H. Shipman<br />
210<br />
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gives them morphine…<br />
Smith and his lyrics have generally grown more<br />
arcane and opaque with age. While this has entrenched<br />
the weird mystery, at times the scabrous social realism<br />
and satire of old has been somewhat lost in recent years.<br />
Here though, several themes of yore are re-examined to<br />
great effect, and while of course there’s still great dollops<br />
of the incomprehensibility that makes them what<br />
they are, a little bit more sense seeps in. Smith may be<br />
a fervent loather of all things nostalgic, this record is by<br />
no means a rehash in any sense, and yet somehow some<br />
of the best spirit of the old in The Fall is at work here.<br />
One track, ‘Assume’, goes back to the old legacy<br />
of fucking seriously with the English language, and<br />
applying strange new laws onto the commonplace<br />
populace that sound like they’ve been handed down<br />
from some Norse Deity gone schizoid. “If you assume,<br />
you are a Hu(l)me. If you half assume, you are a Hu(l)<br />
me. If you don’t assume, you are a cap-it-an!!”. That<br />
this damned and despised new category of humanity<br />
could take its name from either the philosopher David<br />
or the run-down district of Central Manchester (more<br />
probably both, or neither) just adds to the disturbed<br />
allure. Of equal importance – it’s aligned to a gigantic,<br />
siren guitar sound that flattens all in its wake. Even if<br />
Smith wasn’t around the band at all (and it can happen<br />
if you go see them live; take it from me) instrumentally<br />
alone this bludgeons the living crap out of any musical<br />
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opposition standing today.<br />
Elsewhere, the song ‘Blindness’ delves into the extended,<br />
grinding, inexorable Canny hypnotism they do<br />
so well. The repetition in the music is a brilliant backdrop<br />
to the meandering meditation on an unhealthy and<br />
paranoid hatred of the narrator’s surroundings “The flat<br />
is evil / and full of cavalry and Calvary”. At their best,<br />
and they are at their best here, no-one can produce a<br />
sound quite as menacing as The Fall. Unlike Slipknot<br />
or assorted goth-goons, Smith has always known that<br />
true horror ensues when emblazoned on and interwoven<br />
with a background of mundanity. In ‘Blindness’, as<br />
in ‘When The Moon Falls’, ‘City Hobgoblins’, ‘Hotel<br />
Bloedel’ and ‘Bremen Nacht’ before it, they sound like<br />
they’ve cracked open a scene of everyday life, and<br />
found something unfathomably terrifying seeping out.<br />
It’s unnerving and marvellous.<br />
The many supernatural themes from previous forays<br />
are also present in the deeply mysterious ‘Midnight<br />
In Aspen’, though this time the backing is The Fall in<br />
beautiful and subtle mode, and yes they can do that.<br />
A gentle plucked arrangement introduces a delirious<br />
description of what seems to be a man attempting to<br />
summon spirits in the Swiss Alps by firing a rifle at<br />
selected stars. For once, Smith’s periodic preoccupation<br />
with the occult seems less to do with Lovecraft and<br />
creeping terror, and more the benevolent engagement<br />
of a great mind with what may be beyond. And for once<br />
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thinking it may not be that bad.<br />
That’s not the only time on this record that the grouchiest<br />
sod recording today shows an uncharacteristically<br />
warm side. In ‘Breaking The Rules’, a wonderfully<br />
light uplifting backing carries a mockingly bemused<br />
tale of a man “who tried to break his mind breaking the<br />
rules”. Probably the closest Smith will ever come to a<br />
wry self-mocking acceptance of his popular image. A<br />
sign of the comfort-zone probably unthinkable just a<br />
few years ago, during the sorry days of on-stage punchups<br />
in New York. It seems his fourth (or is it fifth?)<br />
marriage, this time to keyboardist Eleni has brought<br />
forth something at least bordering on contentment.<br />
I’ve found most Fall albums in the past decade,<br />
however many gems in the first half, tend to run out<br />
of steam a bit on side two. Fall Heads Roll bucks this<br />
trend more than any other. Even the sillier ones like ‘Bo<br />
Demmick’ (a drum-based-track with a concentrated<br />
stream of abuse against one hapless individual – main<br />
refrain – ”Hey fat-eh!” while conceding “He was called<br />
BUY The Fall music online from and<br />
… a lot of things”) make you actually want to listen<br />
all the way through. The first track is the worst track,<br />
and there is not one silly piece of crap on the whole<br />
product. Lover that I am, that is rare. (Put it this way:<br />
would you like to listen to a compilation album consisting<br />
of ‘WMC Blob 59’, ‘Bug Day’, ‘And This Day’,<br />
‘Fireworks’, ‘Mollusc In Tyroll’? Half of the Levitate<br />
album? Well, not me.) There’s a fantastic sound going<br />
on all the way though here. I thought I’d forgotten it,<br />
but here it is again. That others may hear it for the first<br />
time is a minor miracle.<br />
If you wanted to turn a friend on to The Fall you’d be<br />
just as well playing this to them as the early rockapunkabilly<br />
days or the mid-80s Brix poppier rockier period.<br />
That in itself is an incredible achievement. Its not just<br />
that you couldn’t imagine another band being anything<br />
like The Fall ever again, you couldn’t really imagine<br />
anything being like The Fall ever again. The blooded<br />
moon goes on shining, and is no less respected, and nor<br />
should they be. �<br />
212<br />
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Interview [published April 2002]<br />
Stefan Fatsis: Letter Better<br />
Jonathan Kiefer discusses the torrid world of competitive Scrabble playing<br />
with Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis<br />
Sure, Stefan Fatsis is nice, but he’s also a freak. That<br />
is, a passionate aficionado – and an unusual specimen.<br />
Fatsis is a Scrabble expert. He has written a book about<br />
the game, and can speak authoritatively on its mechanics,<br />
history, and cultural significance. And he can play,<br />
better than most people in the world. But – and this<br />
is important – although his Scrabble skill is orders of<br />
magnitude greater than yours or mine may ever be,<br />
Fatsis is not likely to use the phrase “orders of magnitude,”<br />
in conversation or in print, without quotation<br />
marks. Nor to use words like “azido” and “oiticica” and<br />
certainly not “vogie,” because he understands that such<br />
words really aren’t usable, not even on standardized<br />
tests. In Scrabble, however, they’re gold.<br />
“You can argue that the process of getting good at<br />
Scrabble is the most inclusive use of language,” the<br />
clean-cut and bespectacled Fatsis said recently, enjoying<br />
the down time between a Reno, Nevada Scrabble<br />
tournament and a Berkeley, California bookstore appearance.<br />
“You’re using words that don’t get used. I<br />
love that!” Thus is Fatsis precisely the appropriate<br />
narrator for Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius<br />
BUY Stefan Fatsis books online from and<br />
And Obsession In The World Of Competitive Scrabble<br />
Players. He is also, of course, the main character.<br />
“It is sort of like Plimpton,” he offered, meaning<br />
George Plimpton, the journalist-cum-temporary,<br />
tongue-in-cheek Detroit Lions quarterback. “Except I<br />
got good.”<br />
Do not think it was easy for Fatsis, normally a mildmannered<br />
Wall Street Journal sportswriter, to become<br />
a Scrabble expert, especially in a mere couple of years,<br />
and especially while committed to writing a book about<br />
trying to become a Scrabble expert in a mere couple of<br />
years. He devotes many pages to self-flagellation for a<br />
stubbornly intermediate ability.<br />
“The hard part about it was wanting the narrative to<br />
turn out a certain way,” he said. “It did add to the pressure.<br />
I was fortunate that I was able to get good enough.<br />
Maybe it would have turned out differently otherwise.”<br />
After a moment, he added, “Or maybe I would have<br />
kept playing until I made it.”<br />
As you might deduce, Word Freak keeps its subtitle’s<br />
promise, and the gravitational constant in Scrabble’s<br />
universe is obsession. But, as Fatsis explains in<br />
213<br />
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the text, “I don’t consider Scrabble an obsession in<br />
a clinical sense: a disturbing preoccupation with an<br />
unreasonable idea.I think of it as an obsession in the<br />
colloquial sense, a compelling motivation.” In any<br />
case, what writer doesn’t hope for the paid encouragement<br />
of his obsessions?<br />
Now, in the interests of propriety, an undertaking<br />
of this sort must be considered a battle between the<br />
myopia of deep immersion and the insight of distanced<br />
perspective; Fatsis, admittedly unaccustomed to first<br />
person narration, deftly straddled that tension throughout<br />
his book.<br />
“I’m a pretty standard-issue, mainstream newspaper<br />
reporter,” he said. “The participatory thing always<br />
struck me as a little bit of a conceit.” Fatsis described<br />
his first book, Wild and Outside: How A Renegade<br />
Minor League Revived The Spirit Of Baseball In<br />
America’s Heartland, as a more traditional example of<br />
‘fly-on-the-wall’ reporting. He considered it dishonest<br />
to try that in Word Freak.<br />
“The deeper I got into this,” he explained, “the more<br />
it became about how I felt.” Fatsis wouldn’t like it if<br />
people consider Word Freak a memoir. It’s not, but<br />
here’s as close as he comes: “When I was nine, in 1972,<br />
I calculated how old I would turn in 2000 but couldn’t<br />
fathom that day arriving; it might not have seemed so<br />
terrifying had I known I’d be playing a board game<br />
full-time.” This disarming tone also happens to suit the<br />
BUY Stefan Fatsis books online from and<br />
author’s very thorough reporting, from the ‘Horatio<br />
Alger story’ of Scrabble’s inventor, Alfred Butts, to the<br />
fascinating variety of mnemonic systems by which the<br />
best players have used Butts’ creation as a laboratory<br />
for their mad science.<br />
So, were Fatsis to recuse himself, the book would<br />
lose a trustworthy guiding voice, not to mention a natural<br />
narrative throughline; its minutiae would become<br />
overwhelming, even boring; the subculture would<br />
seem not to contain universal elements but instead appear<br />
more rarified than before; and the whole enterprise<br />
might start to feel like a titanic William Safire essay,<br />
which, though enlightening, has begun to consume too<br />
much of an otherwise useful Sunday.<br />
Instead, Word Freak reads like an anticipated letter<br />
from a sharp and funny friend, one who takes the question<br />
“What’s new?” quite seriously, and always has a<br />
good and true answer. Really, what more should we<br />
expect from good nonfiction?<br />
Fatsis is as he seems in the book: disposed to enthusiasm<br />
(“I played UNILOBED!” he once interjected, recalling<br />
the Reno tournament), or, to put it another way,<br />
an especially sporting fellow. He even appreciates the<br />
aesthetics of Scrabble, wherein lies a kind of abstract<br />
expressionism – the non sequiturs, the shapes of words<br />
themselves, the improbable consonance of consonants.<br />
Could the meanings of “crwth” or “exergue” possibly<br />
be any more useful or satisfying than their sheer, weird<br />
214<br />
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beauty? I don’t think so. Look them up.<br />
Actually, Fatsis has staged a relative coup, winning<br />
the approval of his chosen subculture twice–first as a<br />
participant, then as a journalist. He has befriended the<br />
“characters, in both senses of the word,” with whom<br />
he traded tolerance, curiosity, annoyance, affection,<br />
and absurdly high-scoring Scrabble games. “They’ve<br />
read the book by now, and responded well,” Fatsis said.<br />
“One character was way weirder than I thought,” one<br />
friend told him. “You.”<br />
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“It’s not leaving my system,” he said. “I’m not planning<br />
to drop out.” Fatsis was referring to the way Scrabble<br />
has changed his life. He seemed less concerned with<br />
the way his life, a small portion of which is copiously<br />
documented in Word Freak, may have changed Scrabble.<br />
“I didn’t write it so that people would play more<br />
Scrabble,” he said. “I thought I had a good story to tell.<br />
If people start playing more games of the mind.” he<br />
shrugged, half-bashfully. “I’d be honoured with that<br />
sort of legacy.” �<br />
215<br />
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Interview [published March 1997]<br />
Tibor Fischer: The Fischer King<br />
Cliff Taylor gets a rare interview with the reclusive Tibor Fischer<br />
The scene: a typically wintry Wednesday afternoon.<br />
Upstairs at The Lift in Brighton’s Queen Road, some<br />
whey-faced literary types are gathered around a table<br />
for a seminar of sorts. Their rapt attention is focused<br />
upon The Writer in their midst, a slightly grizzled<br />
36-year-old phenomenon dressed in a less-than-chic<br />
brown leather jacket, clown T-shirt and black jeans. His<br />
name is Tibor Fischer.<br />
How To Get Ahead In The Writing Game. Lesson<br />
One: “Sleep with someone in publishing,” advises<br />
Fischer, sipping his tea. Failing this, his next tip is to<br />
stick to Lesson Two: never take no for an answer. “I’m<br />
an expert on rejection letters,” he imparts, referring to<br />
the 58 negative responses which almost buried alive his<br />
debut novel Under The Frog. “It’s a lottery,” he shrugs.<br />
It seems scarcely believable now that the professional<br />
readers of all those imprints could have been<br />
so uniformly myopic when presented with a work as<br />
blindingly brilliant as Under The Frog, which was<br />
shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and propelled<br />
Fischer into the contentious ranks of The Best Of Young<br />
British Novelists.<br />
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Which brings us to Lesson Three: “Most agents<br />
and publishers are shits.” The whey- faced literary<br />
types dutifully scribble “shits” on their notepads. But<br />
one can’t help thinking such tribulations must be past<br />
history for Fischer. After all, he is now the lionized litterateur<br />
invited down from London by Brighton’s Do<br />
Tongues spoken word club to read from his new novel<br />
The Thought Gang, which is currently leapfrogging<br />
into reprints and soon to be made into a film. These<br />
days Fischer gets advances and can afford to indulge<br />
in a little positive vengefulness against those faceless<br />
arbiters who are the hate figures of would-be authors.<br />
But what is the secret? demand the gathered<br />
would-be authors. How can we too hitch a ride to<br />
planet Picador? Fischer shrugs again, looking so<br />
frustratingly ordinary. (He wears brand new Nike<br />
sneakers. He was born in Stockport! His mother was<br />
captain of the Hungarian women’s basketball team,<br />
but there’s no genetic evidence of that either.) He<br />
doesn’t give interviews and he’s too modest to say it,<br />
but the secret is unsharable anyway, locked securely<br />
inside that slightly balding, slightly greying skull.<br />
216<br />
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The eclecticism and depth of Fischer’s interests<br />
shows through in the subject matter of his books.<br />
Under The Frog is an achingly funny account of the<br />
horrors of Soviet-era Hungary. The Thought Gang<br />
gatecrashes the screaming spires and ivory towers<br />
of academia with an irreverent pisstake on ‘the biz’<br />
of philosophy. Meanwhile, his forthcoming novel attempts<br />
to navigate through the history of art. Fischer<br />
is one of those rare writers who can grapple with<br />
huge agenda without trivialising it.<br />
“I like to give people a few mental lozenges to suck<br />
on, “ he says, half-jokingly. But Fischer’s comedy<br />
is often black and always honest. Under The Frog<br />
exposes Cold War insanity by drawing attention to<br />
its sheer absurdity. Absolute power turns some people<br />
into absolute pricks. Similarly, in The Thought<br />
Gang, he swipes at that other absurd god, Mammon.<br />
“Unquestionably, bank robbery is an illusion,” observes<br />
the bank robbing philosopher Eddie Coffin.<br />
“You take it out but where does it end up? In a bank.<br />
Like water, money is trapped in a cycle, it moves<br />
from bank to bank. We take it out for some fresh air.”<br />
So what is the genesis of this prodigious comic talent?<br />
That rich vein of traditional Hungarian stand-ups?<br />
BUY Tibor Fischer books online from and<br />
Fischer courts psychotic envy by claiming his humour<br />
comes quite naturally. He is effortlessly, flippantly hip.<br />
“The trouble with Nietzsche…” reflects the dissolute<br />
Coffin, “…is that you can never be sure when he’s doing<br />
some levity or not.”<br />
Apres seminar The Lift fleshes out as the regular Do<br />
Tonguers arrive for the evening show. Fischer reads first<br />
from Under The Frog, a poignantly hilarious scene in<br />
which a dying Hungarian peasant is hauled out of bed<br />
and propped against a gate for the purposes of a Soviet<br />
propaganda film. Next, a bank robbery and one-sided<br />
Russian roulette incident from The Thought Gang.<br />
It’s a passage pitched somewhere between Hunter<br />
S. Thompson and Quentin Tarantino, but couched in<br />
Fischer’s inimitable vernacular: “…the risk with going<br />
forward was the bloodshed and the feel of zephyrs in<br />
the gutshangar. It was getting close, armpit wettingly<br />
close to chamber-clearing time and letting the ballistics<br />
sort things out, when we heard sirens, the sonic harbinger<br />
of the filth.”<br />
Afterwards there is just time for the author to traffic<br />
a few thoughts. When asked what he’d be doing if that<br />
59th letter hadn’t been a “yes”, Fischer replies, “Probably<br />
journalism. Or working in a leper colony.” �<br />
217<br />
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Review [published August 2010]<br />
Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism<br />
Ben Granger<br />
The only game in town, and a rigged one at that. In what<br />
is swiftly becoming ‘living memory’, capitalism is now<br />
the only economic, social and political system deemed<br />
possible, the logic of its late incarnation invading every<br />
aspect of life, culture, even inner thought. So absolute<br />
is its mental grip that when international finance capitalism<br />
recently imploded in its own greed, devastating<br />
the world, its victims reacted by obediently, meekly,<br />
and pathetically recreating the whole shoddy system,<br />
and handing their public services the bill. Stockholm<br />
syndrome on a global scale.<br />
Capitalist Realism looks at how the logic of this<br />
social and spiritual stranglehold manifests itself in<br />
a myriad of ways. From the meaningless marketbureaucracy<br />
which infests public services, to the<br />
nihilist-materialism of gangster films and gangsta rap,<br />
from the faux-humanitarianism of Bill Gates and his<br />
fellow generous oligarchs, to the omnipresent PR of all<br />
business and government functions, now not just a tool<br />
but an end itself. All neo-liberal life is here.<br />
Mark Fisher writes at the fascinatingly digressive<br />
cultural website k-Punk, and here as elsewhere uses<br />
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contemporary cultural fiction as both reference and<br />
launchpad for his analysis. He begins with the suggestion<br />
that the film Children Of Men is the apocalyptic<br />
fantasy most appropriate to the capitalist age – a sterile<br />
populace representing a sterile culture, not openly totalitarian<br />
yet nonetheless brutal, completely atomised,<br />
all public space abandoned, and connecting with the<br />
suspicion that ‘the end has already come’. Most importantly,<br />
that there really does seem to be no alternative.<br />
As Fisher notes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the<br />
world than the end of capitalism.”<br />
The nature of this murky triumphalism is such that<br />
this ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism is a far more amorphous<br />
creature than that which appeared in the old ‘capitalist/<br />
worker’ duality that characterised the conflicts of old.<br />
The new capitalism asserts “we’re all in this together”<br />
(to quote our present regime), the system is everyone<br />
and everyone is the system – to question its logic is<br />
to question the logic of life itself, of your own sanity.<br />
As the class war is rejected the savage disparity inherent<br />
in the system has increasingly turned into internal<br />
conflicts, with mental illness spreading at an exponen-<br />
218<br />
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tial rate – schizophrenia at society’s margins, bi-polar<br />
disorder at is core.<br />
Capital is an eternally shape-shifting “un-nameable<br />
thing”, tainting everything with the logic of its own<br />
transactions. The brutal logic of the market creates its<br />
own kind of cultural ‘realism’, which Fisher shows<br />
as expressing itself in the fetishisation of the rugged<br />
individual in the vogue for gangsta rap and gangster<br />
films, reaching their asocial apotheosis in the Hobbesian<br />
fictional worlds of James Ellroy and Frank Miller,<br />
where no-one and nothing is to be trusted. Fisher uses<br />
gangster films to show the direction of travel capitalist<br />
organisation has taken. In The Godfather era of the 40s-<br />
60s, the Corleones were bound together with a ruthless<br />
and absolute loyalty, mirroring the big, hierarchical,<br />
often family-based corporations of old (where you may<br />
be exploited but you still have a job for life, ‘at least<br />
they looked after their own.’).<br />
By the time of Heat, De Niro’s character Neil McAuley<br />
shows himself a very modern gangster by his lack<br />
of any ties or loyalties whatsoever: “Don’t let yourself<br />
get too attached to anything that you are not willing<br />
to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat<br />
around the corner.” This in turn mirrors the atomisation<br />
of the brave new world of “de-centred” capitalism,<br />
whose lack of straightforward hierarchy only makes its<br />
exploitation more nebulous, casual labour in all areas<br />
of the economy shed in an instant as billionaires lightly<br />
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toss their casual carefree faces to the world, “shirtsleeves<br />
informality and quiet authoritarianism”.<br />
In a system where everyone is co-opted, no-one can<br />
be to blame. Witness, as Fisher notes, that “no-one was<br />
to blame” at Hillsborough and the Menezes shooting<br />
(you could add the Union Carbide explosion in India<br />
and BP oil spill in the US to that) – and literally speaking<br />
this is quite true. Capitalism claims its legitimacy<br />
in the name of the free, autonomous individual, yet this<br />
individual has long been lost in a Kafka-esque maze,<br />
his face used as a totem as his autonomy is secreted<br />
away, forgotten.<br />
Socialist Realism was the official name for the ersatz<br />
art churned out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hackneyed,<br />
servile and trite, the art of ‘actually existing socialism’<br />
had as much in common with the liberationist project<br />
of Marxism as the plastic Mary’s flogged near Lourdes<br />
have to do with the Sermon on the Mount. The reality<br />
of ‘actually existing capitalism’ is similarly dislocated<br />
from its projected self-image as that of the heroic, ruggedly<br />
free isolated individual.<br />
Using his own background in the education system<br />
as just one of many examples, Fisher shows that<br />
while modern capitalism presents itself as the enemy<br />
of bureaucracy, in fact it has proliferated meaningless<br />
layers of white collar wastage more than any system in<br />
history. As the system only functions in so far as how<br />
it’s appearance can keep its hold over the populace, “all<br />
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that is solid melts into PR”, and targets proliferate. A<br />
frantic scramble ensues for formless trinkets with no<br />
link to reality. Everyone knows this is meaningless, yet<br />
at an official level this cannot be admitted. When Gerald<br />
Ratner called his product “crap” he sinned against<br />
this unwritten rule – we all know it but it must not be<br />
admitted. This is an omnipresent facade, from which<br />
everyone seeks escape by any means necessary. The<br />
daydreams appropriate to this Janus-faced world are<br />
the paranoid fantasies of Paralax View or the Bourne<br />
films, or at a higher level in the nightmare schizoid<br />
dreamscapes of Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and David<br />
Cronenberg, “where agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric<br />
haze of psychic and physical intoxicants.”<br />
Writing with a mercurial set of cultural references,<br />
Fisher can shift gear from the ground level of reality<br />
TV shows like Supernanny to the heights of Baudrillard<br />
and Lacan without any sense of jarring incongruity.<br />
Unlike Slavoj Zizek, another social critic given to<br />
blending high and low cultural reference points, you<br />
never get the sense that they are being thrown in just to<br />
shock, or to highlight the author’s brilliance.<br />
Fisher shows the modern society as a sinister hall of<br />
mirrors, and illuminates each pained pane perfectly.<br />
So many themes throb within this tiny book (just 81<br />
pages!) as to take your breath away, and this review has<br />
only scraped the surface. Other panes – that revolution<br />
itself has been absorbed and commodified within the<br />
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neoliberal paradigm with ‘liberal communists’ such as<br />
the philanthropic elite of Gates and Soros giving out<br />
with one hand what they take away with another, that<br />
Kafka prefigured the current order better than Orwell or<br />
Huxley, (and uncannily predicted the call centre while<br />
he was at it), and that the ostensible ‘choice’ of the market<br />
has worked its way in ever diminishing returns into<br />
a zero common dominator, 999 channels of nothing.<br />
Deft at sociology, political theory and cultural analysis<br />
alike, Fisher is probably at his weakest with his own<br />
empirical examples of students at the college where he<br />
has worked. He claims that the listless sense of time,<br />
and inability to absorb abstract concepts, that he observes<br />
in his students, mirrors the blip-vert consumer<br />
mentality of modern market reality. Maybe true, but<br />
this also sounds suspiciously like the moaning of the<br />
teachers at their inattentive pupils over the ages. The<br />
piercing vividity of his other insights however more<br />
than make up for this.<br />
While by no means a ‘light’ read, and the odd excursion<br />
into Deleuze and other theorists did shoot slightly<br />
over my scalp, this is not a tome you need a degree<br />
in philosophy or cultural theory to comprehend – its<br />
ingenuity is an open book. And while Fisher’s style<br />
is more often academic in style than not, the forensic<br />
imagination and magnificently multifarious breadth of<br />
scope on display means this is anything but a dry read.<br />
Indeed, he brings to vivid life a somewhat deadening<br />
220<br />
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and depressing vision. “The most gothic description of<br />
capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract<br />
parasite, and insatiable vampire and zombie-maker, but<br />
the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and<br />
the zombies it makes are us.”<br />
This is a horror show in which we are all trapped. In<br />
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and<br />
Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher shows with terrifying<br />
insight just how completely it has enveloped us, but<br />
offers little glimpse of how we can break out. He does<br />
however disabuse us of any false hopes, and in demonstrating<br />
the enormity of the hold it has on us, shows<br />
the rank monster for what it is. Maybe that’s a start. �<br />
221<br />
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Review [published September 2009]<br />
Michael Foot: The Uncollected Essays<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Mention the name Michael Foot and listen out for<br />
the automatic sneer. A rolling of eyes at a “disastrous<br />
leader”, accompanied no doubt with devilishly cutting<br />
asides about donkey jackets, walking sticks or Worzel<br />
Gummidge, delete as appropriate. Gerald Kaufman’s<br />
deathless Wildeanism chiding Foot’s 1983 Labour<br />
Manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history” will<br />
be added by the more confident comedians, and much,<br />
much merriment will be had all round. Oh, the laughter!<br />
Let’s leave aside the fact the economic shit-storm<br />
the world currently finds itself in stems entirely from<br />
the Mephistophelian neo-liberal pact which this<br />
“suicide note” rejected, a pact wholeheartedly signed<br />
up to by the current ‘realist’ Labour administration,<br />
along with the rest of the world. Let’s ignore the fact<br />
that the 1983 result was that of a party caught between<br />
the SDP schism, an economic upsurge and Falklands<br />
wargasm euphoria. Let’s gloss over the fact that Soviet<br />
Communism and unregulated international capitalism<br />
have both been utterly, comprehensively discredited,<br />
while simple logic dictates the democratic socialist<br />
alternative Foot put forward has been vindicated. The<br />
BUY Michael Foot books online from and<br />
fact the man was basically right all along – we can<br />
delicately place that trifle to one-side for now. We<br />
can all still agree however that when it comes to the<br />
everyday devious machinations of leading a political<br />
party, and of creating an effective electoral machine<br />
and vibrant media image for the slick media age, Foot<br />
did not find his forte. What was? Writing. Journalism,<br />
ideas and writing.<br />
Foot began writing in the 30s for a variety of magazines<br />
and papers, broadly championing the underdog,<br />
and more specifically drumming up solidarity against<br />
the menace of Fascism. His 1940 book Who Are The<br />
Guilty Men?, denouncing as it did the Tory Chamberlain<br />
government’s appeasement of Hitler, did much<br />
to consolidate progressive support for the war effort,<br />
with the promise of a better society at home beyond.<br />
In the 40s he joined the Tribune newspaper along with,<br />
amongst others, his friend George Orwell, helping<br />
establish it as a voice for the Labour Left which stood<br />
solid against the hegemony of both US and USSR. On<br />
into the 60s, concurrent with acting as the conscience of<br />
the same Labour Left from the backbenches, he found<br />
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time to write the definitive biography of his mentor<br />
Nye Bevan, a similarly exhaustive tome on H.G. Wells<br />
was to follow later.<br />
It was the old rival Denis Healey who said that a politician<br />
needs a “hinterland”, outside cultural interests to<br />
keep them human. No-one could ever accuse Foot of<br />
not cultivating his own spiritual and mental landscape.<br />
The selection of essays here are a testament to the<br />
man’s mercurial mind, the breadth of his intellectual<br />
scope. Taken from over a half-century, only a small<br />
number touch on purely political ‘issues’ – nuclear<br />
weapons, the Soviet Union, Irish nationalism. Foot’s<br />
preferred form was to discuss the life, work and ideas<br />
of an individual man or woman, and a small majority<br />
here are portraits of political figures, usually taken from<br />
reviews of biographies or collections from their own<br />
work. It takes in leading figures from Labour history<br />
and earlier British socialism, from Bevan and Bevin<br />
to Robert Owen and William Morris, the still earlier<br />
radicalisms of Tom Paine and Charles James Fox. Irish<br />
and Indian independence are well represented with<br />
Indira Ghandi and Daniel O’Connell, as is feminism<br />
with Emilene Pankhurst and Brigid Brophy. Yet at the<br />
same time there are a great many portraits of writers<br />
and characters not best known for their politics – Oscar<br />
Wilde, James Joyce, Rebecca West, the Romantic poets<br />
and Heinrich Heine – not to mention Peggy Aschroft.<br />
That the politicians segue so well into the writers is<br />
BUY Michael Foot books online from and<br />
a testament to the well- rounded totality of Foot’s mind<br />
and vision. The struggle for truth and freedom are as<br />
important in the literary sphere as in the party political,<br />
maybe more so. Aesthetics, beauty, form and style are<br />
at the very least equal to politics in his thoughts and<br />
enthusiasms. In discussing Edmund Wilson’s biography<br />
of Rousseau, more reference is made to relevant<br />
quotations from Byron than to any theoretical road to<br />
Robespierre. Essays on the history of Hampstead common,<br />
and the infinite wonders of Venice, perhaps the<br />
least ‘political’ here, are probably the most beautifully<br />
written, with an evocation of time, space and place<br />
which is truly involving, even moving.<br />
Foot writes in a style both cultured and clear, mildly<br />
mischievous, totally lacking pomposity, and wearing<br />
its very evident learning lightly. A passion, quiet yet<br />
pronounced, reserved but unmistakable, is evident at<br />
all times. Personal recollections lightly pepper the essays<br />
on those he knows and knew, while the same easy,<br />
almost conversational style flows similarly into those<br />
from centuries past, creating the pleasing impression<br />
that Foot was on nodding terms with Coleridge and<br />
Morris just as he was with Richard Crossman and John<br />
Smith (which, in his life of the mind, he perhaps always<br />
has been).<br />
A clue there perhaps that it takes a duller man than<br />
this to succeed in the grubby world of leading a political<br />
party. The decency consistently evident in his prose<br />
223<br />
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also lays bare the absolute absence of the killer instinct<br />
needed for leadership. The venom of the zealot isn’t<br />
there either. Rare asides against Thatcher are dismissive<br />
rather than enraged, bereft of the rabidity she so easily<br />
inspired in so many. Figures such as Ernest Bevin<br />
and others on the Labour Right are appraised admiringly.<br />
Even a review of the autobiography of nemesis<br />
Healey is genuinely warm and salutary. Tom Driberg,<br />
the louche old eccentric (i.e. fantasist) and rogue (i.e.<br />
sociopath) is recalled with the affection of the friend<br />
that he was (though the bad points are laid bare too.)<br />
Anti-Thatcherite Tory and historian Ian Gilmour is<br />
praised, and there is even a short yet powerful defence<br />
of Churchill, paying robust tribute to the old reactionary<br />
against the modern fallacy held by revisionists on<br />
Left and Right alike that a deal could or should have<br />
been struck with Hitler.<br />
This lack of killer instinct means he lacks the final<br />
‘bite’ of the truly great writer too. Eloquent praise pours<br />
freely, but not once is there an effective literary slaying<br />
of a hated foe, not a shortfall that could be levelled at<br />
his friend Orwell.<br />
This politeness, this sheathed sword and profoundly<br />
English politeness can irritate. The kind words found<br />
for that other loveable rogue’, the Tory Kray-groupie<br />
Bob Boothby seem to be stretching the limits of tolerance<br />
past snapping point. And seeking and finding<br />
the good points even in that other arch Conservative<br />
BUY Michael Foot books online from and<br />
icon Edmund Burke; for instance, is hard to take from<br />
the more partisan. Even here though, he does well to<br />
convince. How many of the golf club bores, bigots<br />
and blimps who denounced the man as a “dangerous<br />
extremist” when he led Labour could demonstrate the<br />
barest fraction of his broad minded respect for and<br />
interest in competing points of view?<br />
Foot is a socialist in the truest sense, yet forever free<br />
of the dogma that dogs too many of his tribe. And free<br />
of the great sins too. Absolutely no apologia for the<br />
crimes of Communism from him – Stalin is condemned<br />
here in a brief article taken from the week of his death,<br />
written when the rest of the world were paying tribute.<br />
An unequivocal defence of Salman Rushdie taken from<br />
the time of the Satanic Verses furore, shows that he<br />
would have no part of the alliance with militant political<br />
Islamism which some on the Left have cynically seen<br />
fit to serve. His support for NATO’s bombing of Serbia<br />
is more contentious, though, whatever one may think<br />
of it, still presents him as someone true to a liberationist<br />
vision on his own terms, unaffected by the fact that<br />
such a position would not be popular amongst his own<br />
beloved wing of his own beloved party.<br />
Foot sees socialism as the rightful heir of earlier<br />
struggles for liberty and autonomy that distinguished<br />
the great rebels of the past. This is the socialism of<br />
liberation, not restriction, the vision of liberty which inspired<br />
the creed in the first place, expanding the vision<br />
224<br />
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of the free-born Englishman to include those without<br />
property. This doyenne of dissenters is one himself, and<br />
when he writes of, say, of the great early Parliamentary<br />
radical Fox, or the still greater radical writer and pamphleteer<br />
William Hazlitt , it is with the knowledge and<br />
passion of someone who has devoted their whole life to<br />
it, in both the intellectual and the practical sense. Foot<br />
feels a truly organic lineage to this tribe, a lineage he is<br />
more than entitled to.<br />
An impassioned portrait of Heinrich Heine, one of<br />
the longest essays here, is perhaps the best example of<br />
the Foot’s infectious enthusiasm, his quiet passion, his<br />
blending of the poetic and political. The personal too,<br />
as he describes how Heine came to be his “hero” after<br />
discovering her with a beautiful Yugoslavian girl with<br />
whom he was once in love, before coming to know him<br />
through what he saw as his modern day avatar, the cartoonist<br />
Vicky, who had “every Heinite feature, the same<br />
diminutive size, the same race, the same iconoclastic<br />
temperament with a comparable artistic gift. He too,<br />
like my Jewish girlfriend, knew Heine by heart, and<br />
would summon his hero to his side whenever the political<br />
battle was most ruthless or pitiless.” These personal<br />
asides are – springboards to a fine, enraptured paen. As<br />
someone who has never read Heine, I am inspired to do<br />
so, much sooner than later. “He could never make up<br />
his mind whether he was a poet or a politician”, says<br />
Foot of Heine, and the reason for his particular connec-<br />
BUY Michael Foot books online from and<br />
tion with this writer becomes that bit clearer.<br />
I have found myself slipping into the past tense in<br />
writing this review, and yet Michael Foot is happily<br />
still very much alive at the age of 96. When he does<br />
pass away however, an age of passion, principle and<br />
philosophy at the higher levels of politics will die with<br />
him. It is unthinkable, literally unthinkable that a book<br />
like this could appear today. The leaders of today’s<br />
party political machines – slick, shallow, technocratic,<br />
faux pragmatic and narrowly philistine – could not<br />
begin to produce anything of the like. You may as well<br />
expect Fearne Cotton to write an essay on the transgressive<br />
ambiguities of the Velvet Underground. You<br />
can just about see they ‘work in the same industry’,<br />
but nonetheless, a ‘category error’ has occurred. Does<br />
not compute.<br />
True, Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James<br />
Maxton back in the 80s, but it seems Brown was a different<br />
man then. On the Tory benches, Michael Gove<br />
makes an effort to engage with the cultural sphere, but<br />
this is a very limited exception to the greater picture.<br />
Ideas don’t matter. But they should, something that<br />
Foot never forgot. This book is a window to an age of<br />
wider political possibility, and of greater political imagination.<br />
It is also simply an immensely strong body<br />
of writing on its own terms. And finally it is the truest<br />
tribute possible to the man himself, a giant among<br />
pygmies. �<br />
225<br />
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Review [published June 2004]<br />
Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Just because every music critic in the land suddenly<br />
simultaneously drools like a sick puppy over some hot<br />
new things, it doesn’t mean said things are actually<br />
that good. The slavish adulation these uber-foppish<br />
young Glaswegians are getting across the board is<br />
off-putting because it has so many bad precedents.<br />
Music mags, broadsheets, tabloids and no doubt<br />
promotional in-house newsletters for the grommet<br />
manufacturing industry have been unanimous in their<br />
knicker-wetting praise. When the ‘with-it’ Guardian<br />
allowed the band to edit their own G2 supplement<br />
one was reminded of that dark era when university<br />
professors and vicars were (quite genuinely) invited<br />
on television to discuss the intricacies behind the<br />
lyrics to Oasis’ Be Here Now. Frankly, there’s just<br />
not enough vomit in the world.<br />
I put this album on therefore expecting an instant<br />
eye and earful of Emperor’s New Clothing. What I got<br />
was the opening song, ‘Jacqueline’, the most genuinely<br />
thrilling beginning to an album for many, many years.<br />
All the factors that make this record transcend the hype<br />
kick in with an exhilarating and magnetic burst. The<br />
BUY Franz Ferdinand music online from and<br />
thousand megawatt surge of the soaring guitar, the elastic<br />
funk of the swaggering bass, the strange voice that<br />
swings from the mannered to the primal. This opener<br />
is fucking sensational, and for once the whole mass of<br />
tawdry, silly hyperbole seems, if anything, understated.<br />
It would be impossible for a whole album to carry<br />
on as well as that, but they have a damn good try. Their<br />
sound has been described as part of the early 80s punkfunk<br />
revival, but this is a lot more fully realised than<br />
The Rapture were ever likely to be. There certainly<br />
is something almost eerily 80s about singer Alex Kapranos’<br />
affected tones. But perhaps a better comparison<br />
can be found with previous press darlings The Strokes.<br />
Both draw heavily from the art-punk of the late 70s,<br />
but whereas The Strokes are more Television and Iggy,<br />
Franz Ferdinand are more Blondie and Buzzcocks. And<br />
it’s the Scots’ songs that stay with you longer.<br />
Lyrically we’re in that hinterland between worldweary<br />
hedonism and humane misanthropy, where the<br />
smart are cool and the cool are smart. There’s some<br />
very nice touches. The comically self-obsessed student<br />
in ‘Dark Of The Matinee’ daydreaming of impressing<br />
226<br />
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his as-yet unrequited love by “Telling Terry Wogan<br />
how I made it / But what I ‘made’ is unclear now / But<br />
his deference is / And his laughter is”. ‘Michael’ is an<br />
impressively leery foray into the world of seedy boyon-boy<br />
glamour, following boldly in the footsteps of<br />
the genre’s forbears Ziggy, Iggy, Marc, Moz and Lou.<br />
But really its not the lyrics that make this record so<br />
memorable; it’s the fact that these must be some of<br />
the most danceable indie tunes EVER, be it the primal<br />
surge of ‘Jacqueline’, the imperious bounce of ‘Dark<br />
Of The Matinee’, the schizoid pogo of ‘Cheating On<br />
You’ or the wraith-like beauty of ‘Auf Asche’. The hit<br />
single ‘Take Me Out’ must be the first hit single since<br />
Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ to manage the tricky<br />
job of melding two completely different tunes together<br />
to make one classy song, even if the second part does<br />
bear a disturbing similarity to the old Genesis hit ‘That’s<br />
All’ (can I really be alone in noticing this blatant rip-off<br />
BUY Franz Ferdinand music online from and<br />
from Collins’ rightly maligned crew? I sense a cover up<br />
of Kennedyesque proportions…) There’s only one dud<br />
on the whole album, the insipid ‘This Fire’.<br />
I’ll temper my real enthusiasm here, and put my<br />
sourpuss head on the block by predicting that while<br />
this is a great record, Franz Ferdinand will not become<br />
one of the all time greats. Its not the music that will<br />
prevent immortality, but Alex’s delivery being just that<br />
too mannered, the enigmatic lyrics not quite grabbing<br />
you enough.<br />
I really do hope to be proved wrong about that, and<br />
that this album will prove a springboard to even higher<br />
zeniths for the fey young lads. Is this the future of rock?<br />
Maybe, maybe not. But in the meantime you really<br />
must accept that some things are true even though the<br />
NME and The Telegraph say they are, and lap up the<br />
most exciting band in aeons, tailor made like all the<br />
best for the young but old at heart. �<br />
227<br />
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Review [published March 2008]<br />
Athol Fugard: Tsotsi<br />
Greg Lowe<br />
South African author and playwright Athol Fugard’s<br />
recently-published novel Tsotsi, is a compelling and<br />
brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous<br />
protagonist. Set in Sophiatown – a black township<br />
in Johannesburg that was razed in the 1950s to<br />
make way for homes for the whites – Fugard uses the<br />
oppression of the apartheid regime that segregated the<br />
lives of the country’s black and white populations, as<br />
a backdrop for the novel’s main setting: deep-rooted<br />
racism, the abject poverty of the black community,<br />
brooding violence.<br />
The book was originally written in draft form in the<br />
early 60s, only to be resurrected and reedited some<br />
20 years later. The bulk of the story focuses on three<br />
transformational days in the life of Tsotsi, a stonecold<br />
killer who leads a gang comprising of Die Aap,<br />
nicknamed because of his slow brain and immense<br />
strength; Butcher, an expert at murdering people by<br />
skewering their heart with a sharpened bicycle spoke;<br />
and Boston, who is brainy but a coward. The word<br />
“tsotsi” itself means “gangster” or “thug”, and harks<br />
back to a time when many South African township<br />
BUY Athol Fugard books online from and<br />
streets were plagued by such ruthless killers who<br />
would kill for pennies or pleasure. Some say the word<br />
is derived from Zoot suit, the chosen apparel of the<br />
Hollywood hardmen of the day.<br />
Tsotsi the character is a man without memory, name<br />
or age – though one assumes he is in his early 20s. His<br />
name is simply a banner, an indicator of the guiding<br />
force behind his life and actions. Violence. Questions<br />
about his past are not tolerated, and often lead to more<br />
brutality being dispensed on the enquirer, as Boston<br />
finds out for himself.<br />
It is here that Fugard really works his magic. For<br />
Tsotsi does not have a hidden past that he is trying<br />
to cover up, or one that he is trying to remember: he<br />
literally has no recollection. He is an intensely primal<br />
character, for most parts practically devoid of selfreflection,<br />
but when he does look inwardly all he sees<br />
is “darkness”.<br />
The few flashbacks of memory he has act as lighting<br />
bolts that penetrate this darkness, a process that Tsotsi<br />
finds deeply disturbing. For him it is simpler to view<br />
life as ugliness and pain, and for those unlucky enough<br />
228<br />
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to come across the gang, increasingly short. Violence<br />
is a survival mechanism, not in terms purely of day to<br />
day physical survival, but rather as a means of stability<br />
and affirmation.<br />
Life is a straight line, for Tsotsi, with no memory or<br />
past, just the present, “one continuous moment carrying<br />
him forward without questions or regrets…” However,<br />
this changes when he finds a baby boy in a shoebox,<br />
though Fugard avoids making this dynamic overly trite<br />
or sugar-coated. He is not miraculously transformed by<br />
the heart-tugging power of the baby and its burbling, in<br />
fact he is troubled by the fact he doesn’t just kill the child.<br />
The turning point comes from the child’s vulnerability,<br />
and its lack of history. This catalyses a shower of<br />
fragments of memory from the past which pierce the<br />
cold, hermetically sealed darkness in which he resides,<br />
sending him into a psychological turmoil. Even though<br />
this turns his world upside down – as the past creeps<br />
into the present, and his backstory is filled in – his sociopathic<br />
tendencies are partially eroded. The flood of<br />
emotions, of sympathy and the ability to connect with<br />
other people, start to diminish his fatalistic nihilism. A<br />
world of new alternatives is born in its place.<br />
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With Tsotsi Fugard has crafted an intelligent and insightful<br />
novel. One which humanizes brutality, exposes<br />
the corruptability of humans, and conversely presents<br />
the possibilities for redemption, not in a biblical sense<br />
but in the more down-to-earth manner in which individuals<br />
can take an opportunity to change their life for<br />
the better. While the book reflects a particularly bloody<br />
time in South Africa’s history, it is not a gratuitous offering.<br />
Acts of sex and violence are not described in<br />
explicit detail, instead the writer zones in on the characters<br />
and causal factors.<br />
Perhaps this comes in part from Fugard’s work as<br />
a playwright – he has written some 30 odd plays and<br />
won numerous awards – an industry where special<br />
effects are sparse and context is ever present. At times<br />
Fugard is repetitive with his use of descriptions and<br />
metaphors, and some of the characters are a little twodimensional,<br />
shoring up aspects of the storyline, rather<br />
than emanating their own complexities. Nevertheless,<br />
none of this detracts from novel’s narrative power or<br />
emotional impact.<br />
The film adaptation of Tsotsi won the Best Foreign<br />
Language Film at this 2006 Oscars. �<br />
229<br />
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Review [published August 2004]<br />
Anna Funder: Stasiland<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty<br />
Four, 15 years after first reading it. Orwell’s future<br />
vision is an inherent part of our culture now, commoditised<br />
and trivialised, denied shock value or reconsideration<br />
due to its very familiarity. Re-reading the book<br />
and returning to Winston Smith’s world, however, is<br />
to feel a distinct unease. Nineteen Eighty Four is a<br />
book that has a potent physical effect on the reader<br />
(this reader anyway) – the claustrophobia of Winston<br />
Smith’s world, the subtle monstrous insanity of its rules<br />
and regulations and the ultimate futility of resistance<br />
produce a distinct sense of horror and helplessness<br />
within the reader, activating an involuntary empathy.<br />
Orwell’s prose is never better than here, and the shock<br />
of recognition at the similarities between elements of<br />
his fictional nightmare world and our own grow with<br />
each year. Nineteen Eighty Four is one of those truly<br />
great books that becomes greater with age.<br />
I write this by way of introduction to Anna Funder’s<br />
Stasiland because her book shares much of Orwell’s<br />
concerns and indeed, provides an excellent, if equally<br />
traumatic, real-life counterpoint to Nineteen Eighty<br />
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Four. Where Orwell was writing in reaction to the totalitarian<br />
regimes of Hitler and Stalin, Stasiland provides a<br />
collection of personal stories from the police state that<br />
was seemingly modelled on Big Brother – that of Cold<br />
War East Germany caught behind the Berlin Wall.<br />
East Germany’s secret police were known as the<br />
Stasi, and the absurd yet terrifying lengths they went to<br />
in order to meticulously survey and document the lives<br />
of millions of their citizens defies belief. Kafka’s worst<br />
nightmare does not even begin to match the reality of<br />
Stasiland. Some estimates reckon one in six people<br />
within East Germany was an informer. When the Berlin<br />
Wall finally fell, the Stasi headquarters were stormed by<br />
angry but peaceful mobs who found millions of pages<br />
shredded within each building, a last desperate attempt<br />
to destroy the evidence of the most perfect police state<br />
ever created.<br />
Funder describes how there is a team of people<br />
charged with the task of meticulously reassembling all<br />
these documents so that citizens can find out what was<br />
written about them in the Stasi’s files and what became<br />
of loved ones, friends and relatives. It is an absurd,<br />
230<br />
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Sisyphean task but one that desperately needs to be<br />
completed and of course, will never be completed. The<br />
truth for many people is hidden in those mountains of<br />
fragments of paper.<br />
In her approach to writing Stasiland, Funder also<br />
pieces together a portrait of life in the East German state<br />
from the personal stories of those who tried to escape it<br />
by crossing the Wall, those who fell victim to the secret<br />
police and those whose relatives never returned from<br />
the Stasi’s interrogation cells. These are not isolated<br />
anecdotes, Cold War stories, but recollections of how<br />
the Stasi years have impacted on individuals’ lives<br />
through to the present day. In each of those recollections,<br />
the fragility of humans is made bleakly apparent;<br />
the ease with which the Stasi could destroy lives not<br />
just through physical torture but by much more intangible<br />
mindgames. The state quite literally brutalised<br />
its citizens with its relentless untruths, its reshaping of<br />
reality through rhetoric and hermetically sealing East<br />
Germany off from the rest of the world; the psychological<br />
and psychiatric fallout of that brutalisation is still<br />
felt today, just as the eventual US exit from Iraq will be<br />
felt for years to come.<br />
The scope of the book widens with each passing<br />
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chapter, Funder feeling compelled to understand more<br />
about the mechanics of the Stasi’s repression and surveillance<br />
in order to do justice to the stories she has been<br />
entrusted with. This extends to interviewing ex-Stasi<br />
men about their previous jobs, which provides a critical<br />
counterpoint as Funder recounts East Germany’s brief<br />
history. The sense of Funder’s own widening interest<br />
and accumulation of knowledge carries the narrative<br />
forward effortlessly, whilst her prose is almost stark in<br />
its simplicity, as if to ensure that she does not interfere<br />
with the recounting of the stories she has been told.<br />
There is no luridness, melodrama or sentimentality<br />
here, and the compound effect of reading Stasiland is<br />
the same as Nineteen Eighty Four – one of rage and<br />
helplessness, that people’s lives should be so casually<br />
ruined for nothing.<br />
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, Stasiland<br />
is not a difficult or miserable read, thanks to the quiet<br />
bravery of the people whose stories this book documents.<br />
Powered by Funder’s precise prose, Stasiland<br />
is an essential insight into the totalitarian regime and,<br />
whether intended or not, is also a warning about the<br />
manipulation of truth, the erosion of civil liberties and<br />
the consequences of perpetual surveillance. �<br />
231<br />
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Alex Garland:<br />
Backpacker Blues 233<br />
William Gibson:<br />
Waiting For The Man 237<br />
Allen Ginsberg:<br />
Cosmopolitan Greetings 242<br />
The Godfather:<br />
Sex And Spaghetti 244<br />
Graham Greene / Evelyn Waugh:<br />
Literary And Political Catholicism 249<br />
Peter Guralnick: Careless Love:<br />
The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley 256<br />
G<br />
H<br />
Half Man Half Biscuit:<br />
Achtung Bono 258<br />
Half Man Half Biscuit:<br />
Trouble Over Bridgewater 262<br />
Keith Haring:<br />
Artist Or Radiant Baby? 263<br />
Bill Hicks:<br />
Bad Mood Rising 266<br />
Tom Hodgkinson:<br />
How To Be Idle 271<br />
Gert Hofmann:<br />
Parable Of The Blind 273<br />
Nick Hornby:<br />
Gender Trouble 276<br />
Michel Houllebecq:<br />
Atomised 279<br />
232<br />
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Interview [published May 1999]<br />
Alex Garland: Backpacker Blues<br />
Nancy Rawlinson finds out why The Beach author Alex Garland<br />
is still unsure of his writing success<br />
No matter where you go on this small planet of ours, you<br />
will encounter ‘Garland’s Law.’ That is, for every 10<br />
people under the age of 30 that you meet, approximately<br />
3.33 per cent of them will have read or be reading Alex<br />
Garland’s first novel, The Beach. Actually, I just made<br />
that up, and it already seems too conservative. I have<br />
recently been staying in two hostels in the States. In the<br />
first dorm room a Danish girl ripped through the book<br />
in about three days; her friend had just finished it. In<br />
the second, an Oxford University student was a quarter<br />
way through, and her travelling companion planned to<br />
read it next. On buses in India, on the subway in New<br />
York, in international departure lounges everywhere,<br />
the distinctive yellow spine of The Beach is truly ubiquitous.<br />
In case this is still not sounding familiar, a film<br />
adaptation of the book is currently in postproduction<br />
and due to hit our screens in spring 2000. It is directed<br />
by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame and it stars<br />
Leonardo Di Caprio. Honestly, could it be any hotter?<br />
In case you are one of the, oooh, seven people left<br />
in Britain who are not familiar with the plot, here is a<br />
brief summary for you. Richard, a 20-something Brit,<br />
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arrives on Thailand’s famous Khao San Road – the first<br />
stop on the well-trodden backpacker’s trail. On his first<br />
night, the man in the room next to him slits his wrists<br />
and leaves Richard with a map to a mysterious beach.<br />
Along with a French couple, Richard sets out to find<br />
this supposed paradise, where a select community are<br />
trying to create their own version of utopia. When they<br />
finally arrive, having survived a harrowing swim and<br />
some AK-47 toting marijuana farmers, the new visitors<br />
are welcomed rather uneasily. Tensions arise, not least<br />
within Richard’s psyche. You can guess the rest – the<br />
book has been described as What I Did On My Holidays<br />
meets Apocalypse Now meets Lord Of The Flies and<br />
those references are more than just a pat summery. The<br />
Beach is essentially a gripping tale of a journey into<br />
the heart of darkness, but one that is nicely wrapped<br />
up in knowing pop cultural references and located in<br />
a somewhat trendy travel destination. It is not hard to<br />
see why it was so swiftly optioned for a Hollywood<br />
blockbuster.<br />
So, you may be thinking, what of the author of this<br />
mega hit novel? And why, thus far into an interview<br />
233<br />
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write up, have I not mentioned his best selling follow<br />
up, The Tesseract? Why indeed. More of that later<br />
– for now, meet Alex Garland. Some biographical<br />
details: He was born in 1970, son of the well-known<br />
and respected political cartoonist, Nick Garland. With<br />
a resolutely middle-class and intellectual background,<br />
he graduated from Manchester University with a degree<br />
in History of Art, and was planning on following<br />
in a his fathers footsteps before he realized: “There<br />
aren’t many openings for a cartoonist.” Instead, he<br />
turned his attention to fiction, and started writing The<br />
Beach when he was just 23, drawing on his many<br />
experiences of travelling (he first went to India when<br />
he was 17, on a school trip, and he now makes several<br />
visits to South East Asia per year).<br />
The Beach was brought out in 1996, with no big promotional<br />
push from the publishers, yet within a year, it<br />
was a best seller. Rave reviews everywhere from The<br />
Mail On Sunday to Maxim magazine certainly did no<br />
harm, but predominantly it was word of mouth that<br />
made The Beach a success. Only three years after he<br />
first put pen to paper, Garland was being heralded as<br />
the new voice of ‘Generation X’ and making Vogue’s<br />
most eligible bachelors list. At such a young age, and<br />
on the back of a debut novel, this was a rather heavy<br />
weight to bear.<br />
Bearing this in mind, his media shy and somewhat<br />
guarded manner are understandable. Fortunately, in<br />
BUY Alex Garland books online from and<br />
keeping with the ultra-modernism of the book, Garland<br />
himself has a very low-key approach to his what he<br />
does. “Writing certainly wasn’t something I thought I<br />
wanted to do as a kid. It was something I chanced upon.<br />
And, in a way, I don’t think you could say I chose it as<br />
my profession. I gave it a try and it worked out, and<br />
I enjoy it and that’s it.” He is similarly down to earth<br />
about his situation. Despite being one of the most indemand<br />
authors this side of Nick Hornby, he harbours<br />
no illusions.<br />
“There is a business side to writing and if you don’t<br />
sell books then publishers won’t print them. You’re<br />
only as hot as your last novel. I think you can reach a<br />
point when you’re not as good as your last novel, you<br />
may have written one or even two bad books in a row,<br />
and the publishers will hang onto you. But you need<br />
to have proved yourself in a long term way before that<br />
and I certainly haven’t done that yet. I still feel like I’m<br />
doing an incredible bluffing trick and I’m going to get<br />
caught out.”<br />
There are those that would agree with this self-effacing<br />
appraisal. Reaction to Garland’s second book The Tesseract<br />
has been mixed. There were some scathing reviews.<br />
“A pointlessly elaborate portrait of disparate lives coming<br />
together” was one description. “Tedious, convoluted,<br />
pompous” was another. Yet others have heaped praise<br />
on the book (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times<br />
said it felt like “a Quentin Tarantino or John Woo movie<br />
234<br />
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seasoned with some Graham Greene.”)<br />
It is certainly a more mature and reflexive study than<br />
the fast and furious The Beach although personally I<br />
find myself in with one foot in both camps; I was not<br />
totally convinced by the characters in The Tesseract.<br />
The use of film references and American slang works<br />
perfectly in The Beach, when all the central characters<br />
are European, but somehow I can’t quite imagine the<br />
rural and local characters in The Tesseract coming out<br />
with lines like: “You’ll be brained by a coconut.”<br />
Set in the Philippines, the story interweaves three<br />
narratives. Sean, an Englishman, is on the run from<br />
two Filipino mafia henchmen. As they pursue him, he<br />
stumbles into the kitchen of Rosa, a Filipino village girl<br />
now living with her husband and children in Manila.<br />
Cente, a 13-year-old street child, witnesses the encounter.<br />
“Basically what you have in the book is a group<br />
of people who can’t make sense of everything that’s<br />
around them. And I think I use that as an anti-religious<br />
argument,” Garland explains. “It’s sort of theistic. It’s<br />
not even fate. The point is, sometimes things just happen<br />
to people and it’s not for any cosmic or religious<br />
reasons. Sometimes things just happen that way.”<br />
As the above quote indicates, Garland has a knack<br />
for seeing and expressing things in a very understandable<br />
was, and this is no doubt part of his appeal to a<br />
generation turned off by so called ‘classic’ yet impenetrable<br />
authors. “I know exactly what you mean,”<br />
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Garland says. “I think if you asked the average literary<br />
editor whether they thought my work was equitable<br />
with Salman Rushdie’s, they would say no. Well, that’s<br />
not something that bothers me very much and I doubt<br />
very much that it bothers Salman Rushdie.” Garland’s<br />
approach to the actual nuts and bolts of writing is similarly<br />
nontraditional.<br />
“For The Tesseract, I didn’t do any research,” he<br />
confesses. “I’ve spent more time in The Philippines<br />
than anywhere else so there was a certain kind of background<br />
detail that I didn’t really have to research. But<br />
in terms of putting yourself into the heads of different<br />
characters, I’m not really fazed by this culture thing.<br />
As long as people have enough money to live and<br />
they are not starving to death, then basically people’s<br />
preoccupations tend to be the same wherever you go.<br />
They are worried about their jobs; they are worried<br />
about whether their wife or husband is happy, or how<br />
their kids are doing. I think I approached The Tesseract<br />
thinking the culture is quite cosmetic.”<br />
This may seem like a strange attitude for a man who<br />
has made so much out of basing his work in exotic locations,<br />
yet there is a sense that Garland uses South East<br />
Asia as only as a backdrop. What he is really interested<br />
in is the human story, the development and exploration<br />
of different mental states. The way in which human beings<br />
make sense of the world.<br />
Having said this, there is no doubt that at least part of<br />
235<br />
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the reason for his success lies his depiction of Europeans<br />
abroad, which coincided perfectly with the explosion<br />
in the backpacking market. Locations like Thailand<br />
and The Philippines are now accessible and extremely<br />
desirable places to visit. Garland sums up this shift in<br />
global tourism when he recollects his first travelling<br />
experience. “My memory is basically that I had a good<br />
time, and the main thing that I learnt was how easy it<br />
is. If you get the money together and a ticket, you can<br />
pretty much go anywhere you want to go. I suppose I<br />
imagine that there was some sort of invisible barrier<br />
that stops you from going to these places, but the only<br />
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real thing that stops you is cash.”<br />
Considering his position, lack of money should be no<br />
impediment to future trips. But for now, Alex Garland is<br />
keeping his feet firmly on the ground. “My philosophy<br />
of life is just enjoying it, I think. I’ve started work on<br />
another book but at the moment I’m mostly working on<br />
a screenplay with a bunch of mates; we’re just trying to<br />
see if we can get it together. It’s half set in Chile and<br />
half in Russia and based around a story which links the<br />
two countries.” Now, who do you think will be playing<br />
the central role? You know it will happen. It’s just a<br />
matter of time. �<br />
236<br />
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Interview [published August 1999]<br />
William Gibson: Waiting For The Man<br />
Antony Johnston has a meeting of minds with the elusive William Gibson<br />
about his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties<br />
William Gibson needs no introduction. But he’s going<br />
to get one anyway.<br />
Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ visualising a<br />
worldwide communications net 11 years before the<br />
World Wide Web was born. His debut novel Neuromancer<br />
won all three major science fiction awards – the<br />
Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick – upon its release. He<br />
is the first name that comes to mind when the term ‘Cyberpunk’<br />
is mentioned, known and revered the world<br />
over by authors, artists, rock bands and more.<br />
Yet Gibson the man remains startlingly elusive. A<br />
professional novelist for 15 years, he has published only<br />
seven novels (one of which was co-written) and most<br />
of his reputation remains, somewhat unfairly, rooted in<br />
Neuromancer. He lives a quiet life with his wife and<br />
children in Canada. In a staggering display of irony,<br />
for many years Gibson refused to even have an internet<br />
connection, saying the last thing he wanted after a day<br />
staring at his word processor was to carry on using the<br />
computer. Even now, at the height of his success and in<br />
his mid-40s, he continues to quietly support innovative,<br />
street-level art.<br />
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But despite being trapped in a Leonard Nimoy-style<br />
cage of Neuromancer’s success, Gibson continues to<br />
innovate himself both in style and concept. He does not<br />
rest on his laurels, and looks set to burst forth into the<br />
popular mindset for a second time.<br />
His latest novel, All Tomorrow’s Parties, is released<br />
next month. He is continuing his work in television after<br />
the success of his X-Files episode ‘Killswitch’. And<br />
the highly-anticipated, oft-speculated film adaptation<br />
of Neuromancer is finally entering production. He even<br />
finally has an email address! What brought that on?<br />
“I’ve just been avoiding it,” says Gibson. “Having<br />
kids did it for me, I suppose. I couldn’t very well deny<br />
it to them, so eventually we had three or four different<br />
addresses in the house. It was difficult to avoid it, then.”<br />
So can we assume William Gibson is ‘back for<br />
good’? Like its two predecessors (Virtual Light and<br />
Idoru) All Tomorrow’s Parties has taken nearly three<br />
years to appear. Gibson admits he’s been somewhat<br />
slow: “In terms of the speed which I’d always assumed<br />
genre SF writers worked at, I felt I was hardly<br />
producing at all. I took a break. Hiatus, as they say in<br />
237<br />
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TV. But now I’m back.”<br />
And with an increased workload, most significantly<br />
the Neuromancer film. After countless rumours, director<br />
Chris Cunningham has finally been announced to<br />
helm the feature. Cunningham is a 20-something prodigy,<br />
best known for his dark, off-beat music videos for<br />
Bjork, Aphex Twin and Madonna. He’s also a student<br />
of the late Stanley Kubrick … but he’s never directed a<br />
Hollywood feature. So how on earth did he get this job?<br />
“He was brought to my attention by someone else.<br />
We were told, third-hand, that he was extremely chary<br />
of the Hollywood process, and wouldn’t return calls.<br />
But someone else told us that Neuromancer had been<br />
his Wind In The Willows, that he’d read it when he was<br />
12. I went to London and we met.”<br />
After the debacle that was Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson<br />
is understandably coy about the whole process. Johnny<br />
Mnemonic was also directed by a Hollywood novice,<br />
avant-garde artist Robert Longo. Gibson once told me<br />
that the film they made was “More like Blue Velvet.”<br />
Clearly not the same film that ended up on the silver<br />
screen, then. What makes him so sure this one will turn<br />
out right?<br />
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice,”<br />
he says firmly. “My only choice. The only person<br />
I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of<br />
doing it right.<br />
“I went back to see him in London just after he’d<br />
BUY William Gibson books online from and<br />
finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside<br />
this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing<br />
Aphex Twin’s head. We talked. And we’re still talking.”<br />
Unfortunately, that’s all he’ll say: “I’ve learned<br />
that discussing these projects doesn’t really help<br />
them to happen.”<br />
So let’s talk about technology. Despite the impact<br />
his work has had on real-world science, most of<br />
Gibson’s fiction is clearly about people and humanity<br />
rather than technology itself. Why does he write science<br />
fiction at all?<br />
“Because I believe that most social change is now<br />
technologically-driven, and that new technologies<br />
are very seldom – almost never, really – legislated<br />
into existence.”<br />
Interesting, because Gibson has also admitted many<br />
times that he simply “makes the technology up”. That<br />
was certainly the case with Neuromancer, where the<br />
worldwide virtual network was actually inspired by<br />
watching children become absorbed in arcade games.<br />
Does he still do that?<br />
“I do make it up, to a certain extent. But it isn’t the<br />
toys themselves, the specific tech bits, that I’m genuinely<br />
concerned with – rather the way in which new<br />
technologies impact the social animal in ways that the<br />
developers of these technologies never thought of.”<br />
Is the Gibson household swamped with subscriptions<br />
to New Scientist and Astrophysics Today, then?<br />
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“I don’t do ‘research’, I just walk around. This stuff’s<br />
in everyone’s face today. It’s more a matter of not ignoring<br />
it. Paying attention.<br />
“Laney’s node-spotter function [from Idoru] is some<br />
sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do.<br />
There are bits of the literal future right here, right now,<br />
if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell<br />
you how; it’s a non-rational process.”<br />
On a similar note, how does Gibson keep his famous<br />
‘edge’? He’s no spring chicken. Yet his characters,<br />
especially the younger ones, are remarkably consistent<br />
with current trends. How does he keep in touch with<br />
the ‘street’?<br />
“It’s the same non-rational process, really, but applied<br />
to culture. I think Brian Eno’s right in defining culture<br />
as everything we do that we don’t absolutely need to<br />
do. I just walk around. I look at what people are doing<br />
– particularly if they’re doing it passionately – that they<br />
don’t really need to do.”<br />
An image of Gibson wandering around South Central<br />
at two in the morning clutching a notebook springs to<br />
mind, but I decide not to voice it.<br />
“I’ve always been fascinated by expressions of individual<br />
style, particularly in the street sense. I suspect<br />
that that’s one of the oddest things about me, at least<br />
in terms of someone being marketed as some sort of<br />
science fiction writer.”<br />
But which sort, exactly? Gibson is known as the<br />
BUY William Gibson books online from and<br />
“Granddaddy of dystopian fiction”. Yet nearly all of his<br />
work has an underlying optimism, even what might be<br />
called happy endings.<br />
“I really don’t think I’m dystopian at all. No more<br />
than I’m utopian. The dichotomy is hopelessly oldfashioned,<br />
really. What we have today is a combination<br />
of the two, with all the knobs turned up to max.”<br />
So it doesn’t bother him?<br />
“No.”<br />
What does he read himself? Does he follow the rise<br />
of ‘upstarts’ such as Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson?<br />
“I read Iain Sinclair and Cormac McCarthy. But,” he<br />
smiles, “I’m always on the lookout for a good upstart.”<br />
Let’s move onto All Tomorrow’s Parties. Did Gibson<br />
always visualise Virtual Light as the beginning of a<br />
series?<br />
“No. I always back into the trilogy thing. It’s embarrassing,<br />
really. I swear I thought VL was going to be a<br />
one-off. It’s an organic process for me, rather than one<br />
of deliberation. The one text grows out of the other. It’s<br />
as though the previous book becomes compost for the<br />
next one.” Lovely image, cheers.<br />
“I don’t work to any rationale; it’s a seat-of-the-pants<br />
thing. And the extent to which I can feel that it’s not<br />
rational, is exactly the extent to which I’m convinced<br />
that I’m really doing my job.”<br />
In ATP, the Idoru finally becomes a physical entity.<br />
There’s surely a lot more he could do with that – will he?<br />
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“No. The world she’ll live in is on the other side of<br />
a technological singularity. There’s no way I can even<br />
imagine it.”<br />
No seat-of-the-pants fourth book, then. ATP is still a<br />
satisfying conclusion, but it could have gone anywhere.<br />
Many people were expecting a work on the Walled<br />
City from Idoru, for example, yet Gibson bypassed it<br />
to get straight to ATP, and the end of the world centred<br />
around – yet again – San Francisco.<br />
“The bridge was still more resonant, for me. More<br />
fun writing about a physical construct, somehow. And<br />
ATP seems to me to be about cyberspace everting itself<br />
into the physical; about the boundaries starting to blur<br />
from the other direction … Some of the most important<br />
boundaries, to me, being about genre: is this SF, a<br />
thriller, none of the above?<br />
“The San Francisco thing probably has something<br />
to do with it being on the West Coast but having the<br />
core paradigm of a European city. It makes sense in<br />
European terms; Los Angeles, for example, doesn’t.<br />
SF is a city stressed by Postmodernity, rather than an<br />
expression of Postmodernity such as LA.”<br />
Yet Postmodernism is essential to Gibson’s work.<br />
Throughout this series, for example, the media has<br />
been portrayed as ever more sensationalist. How close<br />
does he think we are to shows such as Slitscan actually<br />
coming into being?<br />
“In North America we’re well into tabloid TV, but<br />
BUY William Gibson books online from and<br />
our national print tabs are already way beyond that.<br />
Difficult, if not impossible, to parody.”<br />
But parodied they are, and ATP’s conclusion concerning<br />
information flow is a dichotomy; on the one<br />
hand, increased informational awareness will change<br />
everything, and on the other it will change nothing (for<br />
the majority of ‘ordinary’ people). Is this purposeful?<br />
“The resolution of a dichotomy usually lies in apparent<br />
paradox. But you’ve got your thumb on the book’s<br />
heart, I think, and I can’t really explicate that for you.<br />
Otherwise we’d be talking about a didactic fiction, and<br />
I hope ATP isn’t that.”<br />
Okay, time to stir up the nest. ATP essentially carries<br />
the same message as Mona Lisa Overdrive – that pure<br />
information (and artificial intelligence) will point the<br />
way to society and mankind’s next evolutionary step.<br />
Discuss.<br />
“We seem to be – through genetics, now, mainly<br />
– on the brink of taking ‘control’ of our own evolution.<br />
That’s a matter of ‘pure information’, I suppose.<br />
Though I seem to recall characters in an earlier book<br />
who used the term ‘pure information’ rather than ‘lies’.<br />
“But really I don’t see that as message so much as<br />
mimetic. A depiction of what’s happening now.”<br />
Perhaps inevitable, then, that the meme replicates<br />
from book to book. So let’s get more specific. Harwood,<br />
corporate ruler of the world and primary antagonist<br />
of ATP, declares that he wants to somehow survive<br />
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beyond the singularity of the book’s climax. Is he an<br />
analogy for man’s fear of the future?<br />
“Harwood is about human will, so, yes, I suppose he’s<br />
about fear. ‘You’re so spontaneous; don’t ever change.’<br />
All suffering is rooted in the desire for permanence.”<br />
Gibson smiles. “I heard someone say that in an Indian<br />
movie.”<br />
So is there a moral behind Harwood’s downfall being<br />
brought about by three principal characters who don’t<br />
manipulate information the way he does?<br />
“Well, there’s a satisfaction to it, for me. Morals are<br />
for fables.”<br />
We’re running out of time, but I have to ask: just<br />
who the hell is ATP’s ‘Tao man’? He’s an entirely new<br />
character, with no name, no background beyond a few<br />
vague flashbacks, and is completely amoral. Where the<br />
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hell did he come from?<br />
“I thought of him as literally being someone who<br />
wandered in from another book. He turned up one day.<br />
Wouldn’t go away. After the book was finished I wondered<br />
if he weren’t some sort of avatar connected to the<br />
late William Burroughs. An unconscious expression of<br />
Burroughsness. He’s a character Burroughs would’ve<br />
enjoyed, I’m pretty certain of that.”<br />
Sounds like something straight out of Mulder’s casebook.<br />
And speaking of which, Gibson’s future plans are<br />
good news for couch potatoes…<br />
“I’m working on a second X-Files episode with Tom<br />
Maddox; talking about doing some writing for Harsh<br />
Realm, the new Chris Carter series; and getting another<br />
book proposal ready. Plus there’s Neuromancer.”<br />
Welcome back, Your Highness. �<br />
241<br />
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Interview [published January 1998]<br />
Allen Ginsberg: Cosmopolitan Greetings<br />
Graham Duff meets Allen Ginsberg, the self styled “old auntie of the<br />
Beat Generation”<br />
Allen Ginsberg – poet, Jew, Buddhist and self styled<br />
“old auntie of the Beat Generation” – is 68 years of<br />
age. Forty years on from the publication of Ginsberg’s<br />
infamous ‘Howl’, his latest collection, Cosmopolitan<br />
Greetings: Writings from 1986-92, has just hit the<br />
bookshelves. Sipping tea and talking about his greatest<br />
influences William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos<br />
Williams and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg is friendly,<br />
assured and (naturally enough) beatific. But perhaps<br />
surprisingly, he’s almost as at ease talking about Sonic<br />
Youth and Gavin Friday as he is fellow beats William<br />
Burroughs and Gary Snyder.<br />
With lyrical incantations, dream notations. calypso<br />
rhythms and haiku, Cosmopolitan Greetings shows a<br />
writer moving in ever increasing circles, the subject<br />
matter ranging from the intensely personal to the passionately<br />
political. I ask if it’s difficult writing under<br />
the weight of his past work.<br />
“My mind is much too fragmented for the solidification<br />
of any single thought like that. Consciousness<br />
itself is discontinuous I think. As a Buddhist, that’s<br />
my take on it. Shakespeare at the end of The Tempest<br />
BUY Allen Ginsberg books online from and<br />
has Prospero say ‘Thence to Genoa where every third<br />
thought shall be my grave’. So every 244th thought:<br />
‘Oh I’m Allen Ginsberg and I have a history.’ The<br />
rest of the time [it’s] ‘there’s the tea, I got to go to the<br />
bathroom, how’s my diabetes? What’s this guy saying<br />
to me?’ So yes, there is the information of being around<br />
for 40 years writing poetry and knowing a lot of people<br />
but then every moment is completely blank and new.”<br />
Despite an enormous body of work which bristles<br />
with positivity, passion and affirmation, Ginsberg<br />
admits, “I got the reputation of being this negative<br />
nay-saying rebel. I don’t know why. But maybe the<br />
purpose is starting to come through now after all<br />
these years. People are beginning to read without the<br />
intervention of the media saying ‘these angry, wrathful,<br />
idiot people smoking dope in dirty flats covered<br />
in flies’. That was the official party line of the media<br />
back in the early 60s.”<br />
At this point Ginsberg goes off to take a phone call<br />
which turns out to be from Salman Rushdie. “I saw him<br />
when he came to New York. We did some meditation<br />
classes together – ’cause he’s got lots of time.”<br />
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In recent poems such as ‘Sphincter’ and ‘After Lalon’,<br />
Ginsberg details the ageing process with undiluted<br />
candour whilst in his more directly political poems he<br />
is still on a mission to report the unreported.<br />
“I’ve always been preoccupied with the intersection<br />
of repressive dope laws, dope dealing by French<br />
intelligence and American CIA, the expansion of killer<br />
drugs like tobacco and alcohol and political manipulation<br />
by cigarette and alcohol interests, the corruption<br />
of governments, police departments and so on. We are<br />
ruled by fantastic hypocrisy.<br />
“In America the theo-political right – the FCC and<br />
Jesse Helms – has seized control of the main market<br />
place of ideas: radio and television. So we don’t have<br />
a free market in ideas now. So the censorship that<br />
normally applied to books and print and film is now<br />
being applied to the electronic media and may be applied<br />
to internet before it’s all over. My own poetry<br />
has literally been ripped off the air during the day. My<br />
poems are studied in high schools and colleges, but in<br />
October 1988, Senator Helms – who is subsidised by<br />
huge tobacco interests – rushed through a law signed<br />
by Reagan which effectively means that ‘obscene<br />
BUY Allen Ginsberg books online from and<br />
language’ can only be broadcast between the hours of<br />
midnight and six am. This being to protect school kids<br />
who are reading my poems in class anyway.”<br />
A vivid conversationalist, the elder statesman of the<br />
counter culture is at his most animated when recalling<br />
the routines he used to improvise in his apartment with<br />
Burroughs and Kerouac in the 1950s.<br />
“After dinner, drinking coffee, smoking grass, we’d<br />
act this stuff out. We all had different characteristic<br />
roles: the well groomed Hungarian – that was me. The<br />
naive American in Paris with a straw hat – Kerouac.<br />
Bill dressed up as a shifty vicious governess. Bill would<br />
end up creased up laughing on the floor. I think the key<br />
to the Beat Generation was spiritual liberation. Then<br />
media liberation of the word; the battle with censorship,<br />
sexual liberation. It ricochets out, but it started<br />
with a spiritual liberation. I always thought that ‘Howl’<br />
was a very exuberant and positive and funny poem. But<br />
at the time it was taken to be the ravings of this angry,<br />
rebellious jerk.” These days things are a little different.<br />
“I’ve got a really good job. It’s called Distinguished<br />
Professor of English, which means I only have to go in<br />
one day a week.” �<br />
243<br />
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Feature [published September 1996]<br />
The Godfather: Sex And Spaghetti<br />
Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man,<br />
from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever<br />
With The Godfather recently re-released in a new<br />
print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our<br />
screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths,<br />
screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia<br />
families – all with excessive amounts of blood, plum<br />
tomatoes, swagger, sharp suits and great style. I love<br />
them all – I cry at Michael’s wedding, smile wryly<br />
at the Don’s death, wince at Connie’s bleating and<br />
thrill at Sonny’s explosions of sex and violence. But<br />
I also hate all that macho posturing, those strangling<br />
patriarchal systems, the supplication of wives, mothers,<br />
daughters to men’s ‘business’.<br />
I want to pay these godfathers due respect, but I<br />
also want to look beyond their dapper costuming and<br />
ask why these representations are so cherished in our<br />
culture. In doing so, I want to suggest that the most<br />
interesting thing about Robert De Niro, Al Pacino,<br />
Marlon Brando and their Latin brothers is the way<br />
in which their Italian-ness is defined through their<br />
sexuality. The phenomenon of ‘Italian-American’ as<br />
a sensibility and a particular set of narrative conventions<br />
has shifted over the years since The Godfather,<br />
but the core characteristics remain the same. Italian-<br />
Americans, according to screen law, are sexy, violent<br />
men struggling against the powers that be to protect<br />
their family honour. Their stories are full of the rituals<br />
of heterosexuality performed with glamour and passion<br />
(weddings, family feasts, straight sex). Their muscles<br />
flex to grapple with, and glory in, organised crime, the<br />
Catholic church and l’ordine della famiglia: a highly<br />
controlled and controlling hierarchical patriarchal family<br />
system.<br />
After Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was<br />
released in 1972, the screen image of Italian-American<br />
masculinity which it established became so popular<br />
that it entered the realms of social iconography, swiftly<br />
reinforced by the likes of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi<br />
Driver and John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever. Don<br />
Corleone’s “I make you an offer you can’t refuse”,<br />
Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me?”, car bumper stickers<br />
reading “Mafia Staff Car; Keepa Ya Hands Off” and<br />
endless parodies of John Travolta/Tony Manero doing<br />
that dance in that white suit – gestures which we think<br />
of as Italian-American have become part of our culture.<br />
BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and<br />
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Italian-American men have stepped out of the screen<br />
and into everyday life and language.<br />
What it means in screen terms to be an Italian-<br />
American man can tell us much about what it means<br />
to be a white man. It is crucial that white male heterosexuality<br />
is made visible, is put under the critical microscope,<br />
in this way because it has always maintained<br />
its dominance by virtue of its invisibility. As Richard<br />
Dyer has argued in his essay ‘White’: whiteness, like<br />
heterosexuality, secures power by appearing not to be<br />
anything in particular. It is simply there, transparent,<br />
the given and ‘natural’ way to be. ‘Italian-American’<br />
is one typification which whiteness has constructed of<br />
itself – a group of stereotypes which provide us with<br />
a starting point for understanding how whiteness sets<br />
itself up in a dominant position.<br />
In the 1970s, white American culture seemed to be<br />
in crisis. The Watergate fiasco, the war in Vietnam, the<br />
rise of black, gay and women’s liberation movements<br />
all meant that the hallowed American way lost its direction.<br />
Hollywood’s reaction was to look to ethnicity as a<br />
means of reinstating the white heterosexual males’ central<br />
position of power, returning him to his role as the<br />
Real Thing. We can admire and trust Don Corleone’s<br />
power because it does not appear to be compatible with<br />
WASP power. Italians were a way of getting back to<br />
basics through the depiction of a truly ‘American’ ethic<br />
of the struggle for survival in a land where nobodies can<br />
become somebodies – as in The Godfather, Rocky, and,<br />
rather differently, in Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon<br />
and Saturday Night Fever. In addition, Italian culture<br />
had the added attraction of l’ordine della famiglia to<br />
help (re)glorify patriarchy and put women back in their<br />
place: in the home, supporting their men from beneath.<br />
However, since the Italian American man’s ‘realness’<br />
is so often represented as physicality – we know he’s<br />
authentic because we can see his sweating body – the reality<br />
of his heterosexuality is considerably destabilised.<br />
The power and danger of the ‘Italian’ body on screen<br />
are heavily eroticised qualities. Male WASP heroes of<br />
the 70s, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, are<br />
invisible bodies who display little emotion, epitomising<br />
rigid stoicism and phallic control. In Dirty Harry<br />
(1971), Eastwood is always poker faced, never ruffled<br />
or sweating very much, his power coolly contained<br />
within his .44 Magnum pistol. The Italian man is often<br />
opposed to such straightness, flexing his muscles, getting<br />
all hot blooded and passionate, demonstrating his<br />
body as the signifier of his masculinity and ethnicity.<br />
The display of the male body as erotic object is a<br />
troublesome area: how do we make these bodies,<br />
which are supposed to be active, hard, non-malleable,<br />
into ‘passive’ objects of the cinema audience’s gaze – a<br />
role traditionally reserved for the female body? One<br />
way to do it is through sporting images – the excuse<br />
for looking at a man’s body being the admiration of<br />
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his strength in a culturally accepted ‘male’ activity.<br />
It is often more effectively done through homoerotic<br />
traditions of representation, since these are the most<br />
obvious ones available for such purposes. Unlike<br />
women, gay men have had the economic strength to<br />
market the male physique, from the Athletic Model’s<br />
Guild studio shots of the 1950s to the huge gay porn<br />
industry of today. In the screen representation of the<br />
Italian-American man there is a tension between the<br />
use of such homoeroticism (the spectator is invited to<br />
love these men) and the denial of homosexuality (the<br />
Italian is a virile, heterosexual family man).<br />
“I make you an offer you can’t refuse”<br />
The Godfather provides the models for Italian-<br />
American screen masculinity throughout the 70s.<br />
Within its family epic structure, The Godfather’s main<br />
concern is with how to be a man, and Coppola’s men<br />
rely heavily on nostalgia. The Don (Marlon Brando)<br />
is guardian and his business is family. The Donis/<br />
Brando’s image is constructed in opposition to Salazzo<br />
the Turk’s, his ‘business’ rival, a man who looks like<br />
the devil incarnate with his oily, flappy face and his<br />
swanky fur-collared coat. The Don, however, is clean<br />
cut; he benignly rejects Salazzo’s offer of a place in the<br />
drugs racket as a “dirty business”, choosing instead to<br />
talk about his “sentimental weakness” for his children.<br />
Salazzo has no family, no “honour” to cleanse him.<br />
The Don is Italian through and through, but he is also<br />
Americanised enough to remain a hero.<br />
Coppola has it both ways, then: whilst the Don is<br />
successful and all powerful, he is also aging and falling<br />
from his position, lending him a tragic poignancy and<br />
creating a nostalgia for the perfect Italian-American man<br />
he once was. He is even associated with an ‘American’<br />
innocence and abundance: he dies amongst the tomato<br />
plants, stumbling into the verdure whilst pretending to<br />
be a monster to amuse his grandson. It is as if the Don<br />
was only performing monstrousness all along so that he<br />
could keep order in his pastoral family garden, so that<br />
he could reap the harvest of America.<br />
The Godfather establishes a range of masculinities<br />
which line up to take their shot at filling the Don’s<br />
shoes. Sonny Corleone, as played by James Caan, is<br />
the sweating, sexy beefcake Latin of the film, swaggering<br />
about and exploding in sporadic bursts of violence.<br />
Coppola gives us many glimpses of Sonny’s/Caan’s<br />
body, usually clad in a tight white vest, showing off<br />
his muscled shoulders and his chest hair, which seems<br />
to be as uncontrollable as his libido. The white vest<br />
is an essential item of the screen Italian-American<br />
man’s wardrobe. Borrowed from Brando’s sexy ethnic<br />
proletarian in A Streetcar Named Desire, whose ‘true’<br />
feeling gushed forth from every orifice, it allows just<br />
enough of the upper body to be exhibited whilst still<br />
insisting upon a thoroughly masculine way of dressing<br />
for utility purposes only, suggestive as it is of the work-<br />
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ing man. Sonny actually does no work in his vest, but<br />
anxieties about the presentation of his body as an object<br />
of desire (for both male and female, gay and straight<br />
audiences) are dealt with through the heterosexualising,<br />
‘masculine’ violence of Sonny’s body.<br />
Sonny is the wild card philanderer, always mouthing<br />
off, complete with ‘Italian’ theatrical gestures. He<br />
is placed in opposition to Michael’s/Pacino’s strong<br />
silence. Sonny contains too much libido and ethnic<br />
crudeness to take the Don’s place; Michael broods<br />
smoulderingly, Sonny just explodes. However, whilst<br />
Coppola appears to reject Sonny’s passionate Italian-<br />
American machismo in narrative terms (he is killed<br />
off in the most explosive manner), he actually fills the<br />
screen with images of Sonny’s exuberance and impressive<br />
physicality.<br />
In fact, the eroticism involved in the film’s presentation<br />
of Sonny is negotiated through his screen climax:<br />
his death on the highway. Always the swaggering<br />
sex object, Sonny’s bodily excesses are ultimately<br />
displayed and punished by being blown to bits. This<br />
way, Coppola can save the virile ethnic masculinity he<br />
represents without actually endorsing it. Sonny is martyred<br />
by this gruesome death on a lonely highway; his<br />
masculinity has to be torn apart in order to be re-made<br />
in our imaginations, so that we can mourn the Don’s/<br />
Brando’s/our loss.<br />
His violent death also saves Sonny-as-sex-object<br />
from the too self-conscious passivity of another Italian<br />
‘godson’ swaggerer of the film, Johnny Fontaine.<br />
Like Sonny, Johnny is a ladies man, but his blatant<br />
narcissism places him perilously close to a cliché of<br />
queerness. Fontaine is an oily wop crooner, complete<br />
with greased hair, white suit and frilled blouse; he is<br />
a sop who has to be ordered by the Don to “act like<br />
a man”. It is interesting that, by the time of Saturday<br />
Night Fever, these opposed representations of Italian-<br />
American masculinity can become enmeshed (and<br />
can remain heroic) in the figure of Tony Manero/John<br />
Travolta, who can wear a frilly blouse and still “act<br />
like a man”.<br />
And so the burden of The Godfather’s position falls<br />
on Michael’s shoulders. Although Michael’s macho<br />
Godfather act is revealed as a sham which eats away<br />
his insides, this is less a matter of Coppola subverting<br />
gender roles by illustrating that they are a matter<br />
of social construction, than it is of him lamenting the<br />
passing of a time when such macho masculinities really<br />
existed. We may dislike Michael as Godfather because<br />
he is not the benign and noble Brando, and because he<br />
is not what the film shows he could have been in an<br />
earlier time and place – in Sicilian ‘history’, within an<br />
ethnic narrative. The Godfather locates its ideal masculinities<br />
in Sicily, in a fantasy narrative of nostalgia for<br />
the phallic wholeness of the homeland. Enter Pacino as<br />
Sicilian shepherd, walking back to his father’s home/<br />
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name (Corleone), accompanied by a version of the<br />
sweeping theme tune arranged for mandolin. This is a<br />
rural idyll where boy and girl can meet and fall in love<br />
without complications – all the conventional narratives<br />
of heterosexual romance are employed without a hint<br />
of irony.<br />
Coppola’s nostalgic glance at Italian-American<br />
masculinities makes it difficult to read any critique of<br />
conventional masculinities in the film. The main reason<br />
we love godfathers Brando and Pacino is that they are<br />
such perfect examples of gentlemanly tyranny: they are<br />
so powerful and yet so self-contained. However, the<br />
image of the eroticised male object is a prevalent one in<br />
The Godfather and other Italian-American screen narratives,<br />
and this image is potentially a disturbing one to<br />
conventional gender relations.<br />
Throughout the 1970s, the Italian-American screen<br />
male was increasingly represented as body, as an object<br />
of desire for all audiences. The Godfather always<br />
encourages us to love its men but insists that they<br />
remain solid men of action, their screen existence lived<br />
out with plenty of grand gestures. The thing about The<br />
Godfather is that it takes itself very seriously indeed;<br />
the key to its seduction lies in its epic feel, its supreme<br />
orderliness, its world in which everyone has their place.<br />
I’m seduced by this world, too, but I’m glad that other<br />
Italian-American screen men strutted their stuff and<br />
shook up its order: Pacino as bisexual Sonny in Dog<br />
Day Afternoon, in whom those exaggerated ‘Italian’<br />
gestures become slightly campy; Nicholas Cage in<br />
Moonstruck, giving a brilliantly over-the-top portrayal<br />
of a sweaty/swarthy/sensitive Italian beefcake; and, my<br />
personal favourite, John Travolta in Saturday Night<br />
Fever, whose excessive emotions are triggered not in<br />
response to his family honour but by the state of his<br />
hair: as his family squabbles over spaghetti, Tony worries<br />
about his coiffure (“will you just watch the hair?<br />
You know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it.<br />
He hits my hair”).<br />
Tony preens himself openly, posing in the mirror<br />
whilst wriggling to the Bee Gees. Like the men in The<br />
Godfather, he prepares his body for action, but he does<br />
so for dancing, not for fighting. His only possible phallic<br />
weapon is his professional-looking long-nozzled<br />
hairdrier, and his ‘killing’ arena is the 2001 Odyssey<br />
discotheque, where he slays them with his grooving.<br />
In a sense, The Godfather paved the way through<br />
the crowded night club for Tony; after the heights of<br />
Italian-American macho it reached, the only way to<br />
go was down the disco, the only thing to do with the<br />
display of those hard bodies was to choreograph their<br />
movements to music. Saturday Night Fever brought<br />
the nostalgic Corleone masculinities into the future<br />
of the 2001 Odyssey where Italian-American-ness<br />
finally had a chance to strut without leaving a trail of<br />
bodies in its wake. �<br />
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Feature [published May 2008]<br />
Graham Greene/Evelyn Waugh: Literary & Political Catholicism<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism<br />
in his writing, George Orwell could always be<br />
relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With<br />
the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in<br />
his mind, he was hardly without justification. Polemical<br />
righteousness brimming over, he rashly wrote in<br />
the 30s that the English novel was “practically a Protestant<br />
art form”, and that Catholic practitioners were<br />
thin on the ground both numerically and qualitatively.<br />
Practically as he put pen to paper however, two of the<br />
greatest English authors of the mid-century – Henry<br />
Graham Greene and Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh –<br />
were surfacing to take the literary world by ferocious<br />
storm. And it’s fair to say the pair weren’t exactly short<br />
on Catholic sensitivities. A bad call from Mr Orwell on<br />
this one at least.<br />
In many respects the authors could scarcely be<br />
more different. Greene’s milieu was the forgotten<br />
corners and back alleys of life. The jittery street gang,<br />
the persecuted runaway, the jaded official in a fading<br />
Imperial outpost. Boozy landladies, failed accountants.<br />
Greene’s every fibre was tuned with sympathy for the<br />
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underdog, siding with the rebellious and the forgotten,<br />
his narrative home the sleazy underbelly of life. Not<br />
so Waugh. His territory was the landed estates of the<br />
southern counties and their intersection with the cold<br />
elites of London high society. While his misanthropic<br />
satire found endless and endlessly amusing reasons for<br />
his narrative contempt towards the dramatis personae<br />
of lower gentry and upper bourgeois who populated his<br />
books, there was no denying that, at heart, he identified<br />
with them. Indeed, his lampooning of the upper and<br />
upper middle classes hinged largely round the fact that<br />
they failed to live up to his reactionary ideal. Moving<br />
outside this caste, his attitude shifts from mere contempt<br />
to outright hatred.<br />
While both transcended both, Greene’s style skirted<br />
round the genre of the thriller, Waugh around that of<br />
the comedic farce. Greene’s narratives are littered with<br />
gangland intrigue, colonial corruption, the grimy and<br />
sweaty fear of pursuit. Action, in the purest sense, is<br />
central, as is plot. The characters are conveyed via a<br />
direct mental inner voice toward the reader, their dialogue,<br />
and interaction with each other being secondary<br />
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to this. Again, the contrast with Waugh could hardly<br />
be greater. His narratives are comedies of manners,<br />
black comedy but comedy nonetheless. His genius<br />
stems from the ironic nuance of the reciprocal voices<br />
on display, the interaction of their dialogue being vital.<br />
Unlike Greene, the plots of his novels are essentially<br />
secondary, framing devices against which the characters<br />
can ‘flourish’, were that not so inappropriate a word for<br />
the languishing on display. These are characters whose<br />
inner lives are implied rather than explored, conveyed<br />
in shadow.<br />
What they did have in common was an intense sense<br />
of inner desolation, an acidic looking within, and it<br />
was their Catholicism that both mirrored and embodied<br />
this. Read any novel by either author, and whichever of<br />
the myriad delights you my obtain from the experience,<br />
the lasting impression, the ‘aftertaste’, is a subtle yet<br />
distinct despair, an existential dislocation obtained via<br />
osmosis from the central characters. “Point me out the<br />
happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness,<br />
evil – or else an absolute ignorance,” declares<br />
Greene, with Waugh in full agreement.<br />
In the past a Catholic in Britain was, by definition, an<br />
outsider. Even today, Britain is officially a Protestant<br />
nation with a Protestant monarch, an identity forged<br />
in the fire of adversity to the Romanist other. These<br />
atavistic rivalries may have dwindled and mean little<br />
to the majority of people in the UK today, but in the<br />
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30s the rifts were still raw. It wasn’t too long before<br />
then that suspicion toward Catholics was much like<br />
that shown towards Muslims today. Worse in fact, with<br />
official sanctions barring the ‘other’ from office, and<br />
from voting. Most Catholics in the country are there<br />
by the apparent virtue of the Faith being handed down.<br />
In the main they come from immigrant backgrounds,<br />
chiefly from the Irish diaspora of the past two centuries.<br />
A disenfranchised, working class tribe, greatly<br />
over-represented in the industrial north of England,<br />
and in Scotland (this before we even begin to touch<br />
on Northern Ireland.) None of this, however, applied<br />
to either Greene and Waugh, bourgeois, upper middle<br />
purebred English southerners both. They were Catholics<br />
by choice, by their own conversion. Outsiders by<br />
choice too.<br />
Both seemed to want a Faith which underlined and<br />
justified the constant sense of separation they had<br />
always felt towards their peers. They also seemed to<br />
want to find as stark and unforgiving a theology to<br />
identify themselves with as possible. Greene converted<br />
to the Faith in 1926 at the age of 22, following a lonely<br />
and troubled youth savagely punctuated by suicide attempts.<br />
Suffering what is now termed bipolar disorder,<br />
Greene spent his whole life engaged in extremes of behaviour,<br />
not least in his prodigious sexual incontinence<br />
and proclivities. Greene stated he became a Catholic<br />
as something to “measure his evil against”. In later<br />
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years he adulterously fucked behind Italian altars for<br />
the thrill. There must be a suspicion Greene was playing<br />
with the Faith for his own sense of internal drama,<br />
much like Dalí, whose use of the religion was a prop to<br />
adorn his art with ever more outlandishly theological<br />
accoutrements. Catholicism is after all, a religion of the<br />
picturesquely ornate, of the dramatic. The stained glass<br />
and incense filled churches, the arcane blood and flesh<br />
fuelled doctrines of transubstantiation, the unflinchingly<br />
Manichean morality, the sheer ancient grim majesty<br />
of it all. This is truly the religion of the drama queen.<br />
You don’t get that with Methodism. For all this though,<br />
Greene was not merely playing with some theological<br />
dressing up box. There can be no doubting the sincerity<br />
of his conversion. His private letters show his Faith was<br />
central to his life.<br />
In both life and literature however, Greene was a poor<br />
advertisement for the familiar argument of religion being<br />
a solace in life, the “heart in a heartless world”. Two<br />
of his most celebrated central characters, the colonial<br />
administrator Scobie in The Heart Of The Matter, and<br />
the nameless whiskey priest of The Power And The<br />
Glory, are hopeless, tired and desperate shadows of<br />
men, whose Faith only serves to make them spiritual<br />
as well as emotional wrecks. Both live daily with the<br />
knowledge their actions, be they treacherous or adulterous,<br />
are condemning them, with absolute certainty,<br />
to eternal damnation. These are not truly bad men, but<br />
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by the standards of their own Faith they are beyond<br />
redemption, sealing their own personal tragedies. Then<br />
on the other hand, we have Pinkie, the psychopathic<br />
young gangster of Brighton Rock. Here is a truly bad<br />
man, and one whose certainty of his own damnation<br />
only serves to spur him on to ever greater evil. “He<br />
was damned already and there was nothing more to<br />
fear ever again.” In each case, the religion makes for<br />
a wonderfully powerful and evocative component of<br />
the novels, a character in itself, more than that even.<br />
Wonderful for the reader. But wonderful for Greene<br />
himself? Noel Coward met Greene when they both<br />
prowled in the same Hollywood circles, touting their<br />
works for adaptation on the silver screen. He came to<br />
remark on Greene’s “strange, tortured mind”. Whether<br />
his Faith served to salve or further inflame the wounds<br />
of this torture is open to conjecture.<br />
Waugh’s conversion was more clearly that of a man<br />
desperate to retreat into a mythical past. This was after<br />
all the man who proclaimed “the trouble with the Conservative<br />
Party is it has not turned back the clock one<br />
second.” There was a spate of conversions to the Faith<br />
in the 30s of men from the upper-middle-class, men<br />
trying to find a mooring, a sense of backward-looking<br />
solidity in a traumatic age. Once more however, there<br />
is something far deeper, and steeped in an ambivalence.<br />
Waugh came to prominence as a novelist in 1928<br />
with Decline And Fall, two years before his conversion<br />
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to Roman Catholicism. Famous and feted at the age of<br />
25, Waugh continued with the drunken hedonism he<br />
had begun in his Oxford years. He was indeed one of<br />
the feckless “bright young things” he wrote about. His<br />
growing horror at the spiritual emptiness he saw in this<br />
gadddabout life was what spurred him into the arms of<br />
the Church, which he saw as the most Eternal of institutions,<br />
a haven amongst the creeping chaos.<br />
In the views of Waugh, we see in sharp relief the<br />
antagonism between the heart of Conservatism, and the<br />
capitalism that it defends. Margaret Thatcher herself<br />
for instance, would have been personally shocked and<br />
repulsed if she spent any great time in the company<br />
of her shock troops, the coked up young yuppies of<br />
the 80s, as they lined it up on the toilet tops. Waugh’s<br />
contempt for the fly by night shallowness of the young<br />
rich sat ill at ease with his support for of the Tory Party<br />
without which their lives of philistine luxury would be<br />
unsustainable. Hence his impotent railing against clocks<br />
going forward. The real establishment of England was<br />
once Catholic of course, back in the 15th century, an<br />
age so long ago as to have lost all contemporary meaning.<br />
His Catholicism therefore was a very real sense<br />
of clinging to a past so elusive as to be nonexistent,<br />
grasping at a phantasm.<br />
In his novels, the Faith emerges as the still at the<br />
centre, the calm amongst the inferno. This can be seen<br />
most clearly in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s<br />
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agnosticism is set against the Faith of the Marchmain<br />
family, or in The Sword Of Honour trilogy, wherein the<br />
aristocratic Crouchback’s represent even more clearly<br />
the valiant rearguard action of the Church, and indeed<br />
old England itself, against all the forces of modernity.<br />
In other novels the Faith’s talismanic status is subtler.<br />
Tony Last, the cuckolded husband in A Handful Of<br />
Dust, is presented as belonging to the past, underlined<br />
by his church attendance, however vague minded that<br />
may be. His humiliation by non churchgoing wife<br />
Brenda and the vulgar (key word) social climber John<br />
Beaver shows once more the clash between the (virtuous)<br />
old and the (degenerate) new. It is a mythological<br />
battle between Old England, the rural, certainty, tradition<br />
and social cohesion, against the New World, the<br />
urban, capitalism, dynamism, change, hedonism, class<br />
conflict and progress. In Sword of Honour, Waugh sees<br />
Guy Crouchback, when he still thinks he is fighting<br />
against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany both, claims<br />
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful,<br />
all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms”.<br />
It’s an internal battle the Right will never resolve.<br />
That Catholicism is no longer the religion of the ‘establishment’<br />
serves Waugh well. As he sees the massed<br />
ranks of modernity triumph, as he surely knows they<br />
will, he can psychologically cast himself in the role<br />
of the king over the water, exiled valiant victim and<br />
patrician overseer simultaneously. Such was the source<br />
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of both his art, and the bilious, bitter anger that never<br />
left him.<br />
In Britain we have the paradox that Catholicism<br />
– in the wider world so very often the creed of the<br />
oppressor over the centuries – is the religion of the<br />
persecuted underdog. This has led to the most bizarre<br />
and schizophrenic political allegiances and alliances.<br />
In 30s Lancashire, unemployed Communist marchers<br />
would doff their caps when passing Catholic churches,<br />
at the same time as senior clerics were backing Franco.<br />
Orwell wrote of visiting workers’ houses with “the<br />
crucifix on the wall, and the Daily Worker on the table”.<br />
There has never been a shortage of left-wing British<br />
writers of Catholic background, but seems fair to say<br />
this has usually stemmed from their ‘outsider’ nature,<br />
their working class and/or Irish background, rather than<br />
the religion itself. With Anthony Burgess – in later life<br />
a bitter rival of Greene’s – we have a descendant of<br />
the Irish diaspora, his childhood in Manchester’s Moss<br />
Side influenced the Left perspective of his early writing,<br />
his Catholicism informing his later conservative slant.<br />
The upper and middle-class converts to the Faith<br />
of the 30s however, were far more often doing so for<br />
reasons which became reactionary by default, even if<br />
that was not the initial intention. In this sense Waugh<br />
was the more typical figure. In 1937, when Nancy<br />
Cunard sent a survey to leading novelists of the UK<br />
asking which side they took in the Spanish Civil war,<br />
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Waugh was one of the tiny minority who declared<br />
their support for the Falange. A minority view among<br />
authors, but not among the kind of dyspeptic saloon bar<br />
Tory he came more and more to exemplify and signify<br />
as both his age and drinking increased. The Blimpish<br />
caricature he succumbed to by the end was probably<br />
an extreme rather than a typical example however, and<br />
by a sublime irony was mirrored in the similar decline<br />
into self-parody of Kingsley Amis a generation later, a<br />
writer Waugh lambasted as “lower-middle-class scum”<br />
at the beginning of the latter’s career.<br />
Amongst the 30s converts, the Left-radicalism of<br />
Greene therefore must be seen as a great exception.<br />
Once again though, the tale is more complicated. Greene<br />
started out on the Right. Along with many youths of<br />
his class, he acted as a strike-breaker during the 1926<br />
General Strike. After his conversion, he wrote for the<br />
right-wing Spectator magazine and took the side of the<br />
put-upon Mexican clergy following the revolution in<br />
that country. His earlier novels contained numerous<br />
mildly anti-Semitic asides (excised on republishing at<br />
his behest). In many ways therefore, he seemed destined<br />
to trudge down a classic Conservative path.<br />
But Greene was one of those converts, a minority<br />
amongst the Blimps of his class, who heard the message<br />
of social justice ring louder than that of defence of<br />
hierarchical tradition in the call of the Faith. Greene’s<br />
vision of Catholicism stirred him to side with the<br />
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downtrodden in the world, and for him that meant the<br />
Left. He became an intractable and articulate foe of US<br />
imperialism, especially of its machinations in Southern<br />
and Central America. In 1955 he wrote The Quiet<br />
American, a novel which was to become a classic antiimperialist<br />
parable. In later years he was to meet and<br />
correspond with Fidel Castro, and while still critical of<br />
the curtailing of religious and intellectual freedom in<br />
the country, strongly supported Cuba’s struggle against<br />
US hegemony.<br />
In Latin America of course, the populace shared his<br />
Faith, yet he was conscious that the dominant reactionary<br />
elements within Catholicism had no interest at all<br />
in his anti-imperialist vision. When therefore, in the<br />
80s a new strain of Faith within the region came to<br />
prominence which shared his vision, he could scarcely<br />
contain his intellectual glee. Liberation Theology<br />
combined the apparently antagonistic Catholicism and<br />
socialism which had both so inspired Greene, uniting<br />
against the US backed juntas of the subcontinent. Oscar<br />
Romero in Salvador and Evaristo Arns in Brazil were<br />
just two of many to speak out the US sponsored repression<br />
and poverty which racked their nations. Greene<br />
came to personally befriend another such Liberation<br />
priest, Leopoldo Duran.<br />
That such movements were to fail, crushed by the<br />
Washington backed strong-men, Oscar Romero assassinated<br />
– Greene, eternal pessimist as he was, no doubt<br />
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anticipated. That they failed to receive the backing of<br />
the Vatican, that indeed that they were explicitly denounced<br />
by them, he may have found harder to reconcile.<br />
Perhaps this contributed to the weary irony of his<br />
statement to interviewer John Cornwell in 1989, that he<br />
was now a “Catholic agnostic”.<br />
Had he lived to see it however, he may well have<br />
been heartened to see the success of Hugo Chavez in<br />
Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, a new generation<br />
of leaders combining socialism with their Catholicism.<br />
The latest success of the left-leaning bishop Fernando<br />
Lugo becoming president in Paraguay would no doubt<br />
of gladdened him most of all. Who could doubt he<br />
would have seen some vindication here, and an answer<br />
both to the Catholic hierarchy who saw in the Left its<br />
great nemesis, and those on the Left who argued that<br />
believers could only ever be reactionary. Waugh, meanwhile,<br />
would have spun once more in his grave, a tomb<br />
already doubtless given to much rapid rotation.<br />
Greene and Waugh may have had diametrically<br />
opposed positions in their politics from their own<br />
interpretations of the Faith. But, transcending politics,<br />
what both seemed to take from the Faith in their writing<br />
was a sense of the complete fragility and frailty of the<br />
human condition, the essential unworthiness of people<br />
gained from Original Sin. In Greene this seemed to<br />
inspire a sense of poetic heroism amidst inevitable<br />
failure and desperation, in Waugh a very real contempt<br />
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not just for humanity as a whole in the abstract, but for<br />
all human beings individually. That sense of the tragic<br />
which under-writes and illuminates the drama in the<br />
one, the sharp satire in the other, a sense of the comedic<br />
and the sublime in both. It also served to solidify the<br />
bond which grew between the two. Melancholic heavy<br />
drinkers, red eyes unsatisfied, tilting at the cold Protestant<br />
world from different angles. For all their myriad<br />
differences, the two became firm friends, and remained<br />
so until Waugh’s death in 1966.<br />
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Larkin claimed “Deprivation is for me what daffodils<br />
were for Wordsworth”.<br />
With Greene and Waugh, the inspiration, the<br />
framework, the habitat, spark and realm of their work<br />
was neither harsh mental state nor delicate flower.<br />
Catholicism was the muse for them both. As a very<br />
lapsed member of the Faith myself, and distinctly<br />
sceptical as to any positive influence it may lend to<br />
the modern age, I can at least offer it gratitude for<br />
giving the work of both to the world. �<br />
255<br />
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Review [published June 1999]<br />
Peter Guralnick: Careless Love: The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
I was five years old when Elvis died and, like most<br />
of my generation, my knowledge of Elvis is derived<br />
largely from muck-raking biographies, shockingly bad<br />
films, sightings documented in supermarket tabloids<br />
and documentaries about brain-damaged Elvis impersonators.<br />
With the exception of U2’s embarrassing<br />
fandom no modern bands list Elvis as an influence and,<br />
for most people under 30, Elvis will forever be the<br />
pathetic figure stalking the stages of Vegas. Careless<br />
Love explains how Elvis got there.<br />
The follow-up to the extraordinary Last Train To<br />
Memphis, Peter Guralnick’s latest book documents<br />
Elvis’ life from his Army days to his death in a Gracelands<br />
bathroom. If anything the book is even better<br />
researched and more detailed than the first instalment<br />
– weighing in at over 600 pages, supplemented by<br />
detailed notes and explanations, Careless Love almost<br />
tells the story in real time.<br />
The unsavoury aspects of Elvis’ life have been<br />
detailed endlessly in biography after biography and,<br />
though Guralnick is no Albert Goldman, he doesn’t<br />
shy away from showing the darker side to his subject.<br />
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What makes Careless Love different is the writer’s<br />
agenda – Guralnick is first and foremost a fan, and the<br />
book is his attempt to show how Elvis’ talent was compromised<br />
by his own self-destructive tendencies and<br />
the ever-growing number of people who felt nothing<br />
but contempt for the man whilst eagerly awaiting the<br />
next hand-out. In this context Elvis’ well-documented<br />
penchant for young girls, his serial infidelity and his<br />
obsessive pill-popping are shown dispassionately, allowing<br />
the reader to develop the picture of a child-like<br />
and desperately insecure man who was encouraged to<br />
do as he wished without complaint or constraint. The<br />
ultimate result of this unbridled and self-destructive<br />
behaviour was a legend who, towards the end of his<br />
career, alternated between impotence and incontinence<br />
and who was frequently so medicated that he could<br />
barely function.<br />
The main achievement of Careless Love is the way<br />
in which it strips away more than 20 years of accumulated<br />
legend to show the man behind the cartoon image,<br />
a story told largely by the people who worked with him<br />
and who inhabited the inner circle of confidantes. The<br />
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deals struck by ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker which resulted<br />
in increasingly shoddy product and a punishing live<br />
schedule of up to three concerts per day are shown, not<br />
as the result of naked greed, but as the decisions of a<br />
man who understands money rather than artistic factors.<br />
In the context of Parker’s ever-growing gambling<br />
debts, some of the more bizarre management decisions<br />
are understandable if misguided.<br />
Reading Careless Love you’re left with the believable<br />
portrait of a man whose extraordinary vocal<br />
talent brought him unimagined success – success that<br />
prevented Elvis from maturing beyond adolescence.<br />
As recording sessions and live engagements become<br />
more and more farcical and Elvis’ drug use becomes<br />
increasingly problematic, Guralnick shows an artist out<br />
of control who drives away his closest friends, cheap-<br />
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ens his work and frequently rages at the very fans who<br />
love him unconditionally. Unlike other biographies,<br />
however, Guralnick presents a very real picture of a<br />
desperately unhappy man who falls into addiction and<br />
controlling behaviour to mask his own insecurities and<br />
inadequacies.<br />
Taken together, Last Train To Memphis and Careless<br />
Love make up the definitive biography of one of<br />
the 20th century’s key figures. In a sea of biographies<br />
that concentrate on the scandalous aspects of Elvis’<br />
life in order to sell copies, Guralnick’s books bring<br />
the man vividly to life, warts and all. The exhaustive<br />
research can make the book heavy going at times<br />
but, for anybody with even a passing interest in pop<br />
or rock music, Careless Love is illuminating and essential<br />
reading. �<br />
257<br />
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Review [published November 2005]<br />
Half Man Half Biscuit: Achtung Bono<br />
Ben Granger<br />
I may as well declare my stance at the outset: Half<br />
Man Half Biscuit are Britain’s most under-rated band,<br />
and their singer/writer Nigel Blackwell is not only one<br />
of the land’s finest humourists and satirists, but also<br />
a chronicler of the tawdriness of modern British life<br />
whose vision is shot through with true genius.<br />
Now, those of you who only know the band through<br />
dim recollections of a Scouse voice jokily swearing<br />
about minor sportsmen and celebrities in the mid-80s<br />
may consider sending this first paragraph into Pseud’s<br />
Corner. But you’d be wrong to do so. People from<br />
Birkenhead aren’t Scousers for a start.<br />
More importantly, in the nine albums the band have<br />
made since their (very) brief period of (relative) fame<br />
in 1986 with ‘Fucking ‘ell, It’s Fred Titmuss!’ and ‘I<br />
Hate Nerys Hughes (From the Heart)’, their vision<br />
has grown more witty, incisive, bleak, devastatingly<br />
accurate and straightforwardly brilliant than ever, even<br />
though the wise downbeat amalgam of realism and surrealism<br />
was there from the start. The hardcore whimsy<br />
of The Trumpton Riots has progressed to a more allencompassing<br />
patina on the minutiae of modern Eng-<br />
lish life; capturing the little things that generally fall<br />
of the scale of artistic perception. Nigel is one of those<br />
writers who show that the heavenly as well as the devil<br />
is in the detail.<br />
If anyone can show me a better melding of lovelorn<br />
loss allied to a sarcastic critique of the modern<br />
middle-class trendy twattery that threatens to consume<br />
us all than:<br />
She stayed with me until<br />
She moved to Notting Hill<br />
She said it was the place she needs to be<br />
Where the cocaine is Fair Trade<br />
And frequently displayed<br />
Is the Buena Vista Social Club CD<br />
(from ‘The Light at the End Of Tunnel’ from last album<br />
Cammel Laird Social Club) then please do show me it.<br />
And for that matter show me a more kick-ass jangleindie<br />
rock tune than that which accompanies ‘Performing<br />
Rights Society – Quick the Drawbridge’ from 1997’s<br />
Voyage To The Bottom Of the Road. Can’t can you?<br />
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258<br />
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Blackwell is a modest, unassuming Wirral man of<br />
upper-working-class origin, a Thomas Hardy fan with<br />
an outsized bullshit detector, and a turn of phrase few<br />
could dream of.<br />
In the new album, as per often, he blasts targets near<br />
and far, high and low, not just the obvious pop idle of<br />
celebrity culture, but also his more close-to-home contemporaries.<br />
Always in ‘indie’ but not ‘of’ it; in the past<br />
the alternative music scene has been the chief target of<br />
his ire, (see the immortal ‘Look Dad No Tunes’) but<br />
not so much on this album. As he gets older it seems<br />
to be the general populace around him, ossifying into<br />
idiocy and dullness in middle-age that horrifies him. He<br />
has a pathological hatred of those who’ve got the whole<br />
world in their house to see the new conservatory. This<br />
time he kicks against the pricks “with your Del-boy<br />
impressions and your CORGI-registered friends”.<br />
It’s a mark of Blackwell’s deftness of touch, that he<br />
can describe a professional couple in the Cotswolds<br />
playing pooh-sticks, sharing a tub of gelatine ice-cream,<br />
before skipping gaily off to watch Marianne Faithful at<br />
the Warwick Arts Centre, and, without any abuse, you<br />
know exactly why he hates them so much. It’s like Alan<br />
Bennett possessed by the spirit of Johnny Rotten.<br />
Other topics the album addresses include the sinister<br />
nature of signs advertising vegetable sales on remote<br />
rural roads in ‘Asparagus Next Left’ (“’Oooh rhubarb<br />
– let’s go!!’ / She’s still not been accounted for”) and<br />
an attack on The Libertines for their sloppy quoting of<br />
Scripture in ‘Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo’: (“If you’re going<br />
to quote from the Book of Revelation /Don’t go calling<br />
it the ‘Book of Revelations’ / there’s no ‘s’”).<br />
Musically, the album goes for the mid-paced folkier<br />
edge in general rather than their more rock-out numbers.<br />
As ever, the music is secondary to the words, but<br />
also, as ever, it fits and complements the lyrics perfectly<br />
in that its ramshackle exterior nature belies an expertly<br />
designed structure underneath.<br />
More than in any previous album, the prevailing<br />
themes are cynical disdain for modern societal trends<br />
combined with an apparently genuine affection for the<br />
ambience of small-town England, as in ‘We Built This<br />
Village On A Trad Arr. Tune’ and ‘For What is Chatteris?<br />
(if you’re not there)’:<br />
Car crime’s low<br />
Gun crime’s lower<br />
The town hall band’s CD – It’s a grower<br />
You never hear of folk getting knocked on<br />
the bonce<br />
Although there was a drive-by shouting once<br />
Yet that song also approaches the album’s other<br />
theme, often present but here more than ever; allusions<br />
to intense loss and depression. I do hope it’s not too<br />
autobiographical. The CD’s best track to my mind is<br />
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259<br />
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‘Depressed Beyond Tablets’, (nice BrassEye reference),<br />
which contains the wonderful lines:<br />
Your optimism strikes me<br />
like junk-mail addressed to the dead<br />
Depressed beyond tablets<br />
I’ve gone beyond pills<br />
The cloud-face is low on the Clwydian hills<br />
There is perhaps nothing on this album as instantly<br />
striking as some of their former tracks, no ‘Fred Titmuss’<br />
or ‘Life At The End Of The Tunnel’. And as<br />
ever there’s the odd miss on the way. ‘Joy Division<br />
Oven Gloves’ has an excellent title but meanders off<br />
into the pure silliness most people (who’ve heard of<br />
them) imagine they’re all about. ‘Restless Legs’ is an<br />
inconsequential observation of, er, someone with restless<br />
legs to the tune of George Formby’s ‘When I’m<br />
Cleaning Windows’ (also underrated in my view but …<br />
we’ll save that for another time…)<br />
‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ contains the “list of modern<br />
malaise” track which features on every album; and<br />
this isn’t one of the best of them, though it does have<br />
the highly saving grace of incorporating the ‘12 days<br />
of Christmas’ tune; and including (TV’s DIY SOS’s)<br />
“Nick FUCKING Knowles” instead of “five GOLD<br />
rings”. Yes, that makes up for it in fact.<br />
Yet despite weaker moments, what is present<br />
throughout is the incredibly wide-ranging wit and allusions<br />
of the song-writing that has been written of as<br />
‘novelty’ for far too long. Let’s get this straight. Half<br />
Man Half Biscuit are a ‘comedy band’ (Black Lace,<br />
Barron Knights, Fat Les, Electric Six, The Darkness)<br />
only in so much as The Bible is a self-help book.<br />
And yet, in the end, yes, I suppose you’d have to<br />
find some of their more obvious lines funny to appreciate<br />
their other qualities. Much is in the delivery and<br />
context, yet I suppose if you don’t find “Is your child<br />
hyperactive? / Or is he perhaps a twat?” or “It’s a cricketing<br />
farce / With a thickening plot / Act One – Scene<br />
One / Brenda Blethyn gets shot” amusing even in the<br />
abstract then the band as a whole is not likely to appeal.<br />
Your loss.<br />
Here’s perhaps my favourite off the album: “Gouranga<br />
Gouranga? / Yes I’ll ‘be happy’ / When you’ve<br />
been arrested for defacing the bridge”<br />
Part of the joy of the Biscuits is there’s so many<br />
references in the songs you can’t possibly know<br />
them all, but you can then seek them out (or look<br />
at this site to help you.) They should be on the<br />
national curriculum. For instance, the above lines<br />
makes perfect sense to me. If it doesn’t to you, you<br />
could or should embark on a journey examining the<br />
vandalised state of north British motorway bridges,<br />
which would then lead you to the propaganda tactics<br />
of the modern Hare Krishna movement. It also<br />
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shows how infectious Blackwell’s humour is. A<br />
good percentage of it is about sport for a start, and<br />
I can’t stand sport. I still find it funny, and can now<br />
follow a conversation about football without eyes<br />
glazing over and mouth drooling.<br />
This is probably not one of Half Man Half Biscuit’s<br />
best albums. And yet its still fantastic. You could learn<br />
more about life in modern Britain from this album than<br />
all those in the Gallup Top 50 combined. Easy.<br />
If Nigel ever reads this he will probably be most<br />
amused some pseud has chosen to over-analyse his<br />
lyrics. Well screw you Nige. You’re a poet even if you<br />
don’t know it. You’ll still be listened to in 200 years<br />
time. If I have my way. And by God sir, I will. �<br />
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Review [published June 2000]<br />
Half Man Half Biscuit: Trouble Over Bridgewater<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal<br />
to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit<br />
would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagaries<br />
of the music business mean that the band who brought<br />
us the immortal lyric “God, I could murder a Cadbury’s<br />
Flake, but then you wouldn’t let me into heaven / or<br />
maybe you would, ‘cause their adverts promote oral<br />
sex” (‘Dickie Davies’ Eyes’) are unlikely to become as<br />
big as Boyzone. It’s a shame because, as Trouble Over<br />
Bridgwater demonstrates, Half Man Half Biscuit are one<br />
of the funniest bands Britain has ever produced.<br />
Like every other HMHB record, the band’s millionth<br />
album (ok, eighth) sounds like it was recorded in a shed<br />
and misses its targets as often as it hits them; nevertheless,<br />
there are enough gems on the CD to make it an<br />
essential purchase. The usual mix of punky guitars and<br />
deadpan vocals is present and, to our ears, the standout<br />
track is ‘Irk The Purists’ (“Irk the purists, irk the purists,<br />
irk the purists, it’s a right good laugh”). The song uses the<br />
tune of ‘Agadoo’ to devastating effect: “Hüsker Dü-Dü-<br />
Dü, Captain Beefheart, ELO”. It’s a good indication of<br />
the rest of the album, too. If you think slagging off the<br />
whiny indier-than-thou brigade is a great way to spend an<br />
evening, Trouble Over Bridgwater will have you in tears.<br />
The band’s strength has always been their willingness<br />
to wring every last drop of humour from a stupid<br />
idea, and ‘The Ballad Of Climie Fisher’ is a classic<br />
example of this. Revealing the answer to the not very<br />
frequently-asked question, “whatever happened to 80s<br />
popsters Climie Fisher?”, the song recounts how the<br />
clean-cut stars went into the gravel business, with awful<br />
consequences. Similarly, ‘Used To Be In Evil Gazebo’<br />
takes gleeful aim at gloomy indie bands, with the genius<br />
chorus “I used to be in a mental hospital but I don’t<br />
like to talk about it”. Other songs are worthwhile just<br />
for their song titles: who can resist ‘Twenty Four Hour<br />
Garage People’ or ‘Look Dad No Tunes’?<br />
If your listening tastes are more Celine than Clinic,<br />
Madonna than Mogwai, you’ll find Trouble Over Bridgwater<br />
goes right over your head – even we found some<br />
of the pop culture references entirely baffling. If, on the<br />
other hand, you’ve an encyclopaedic knowledge of indie<br />
music and regularly trounce all-comers at the local pop<br />
quiz, this album is as essential as breathing. �<br />
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Feature [published November 1996]<br />
Keith Haring: Artist Or Radiant Baby?<br />
Nick Clapson looks at the man behind the spray can with the publication<br />
of Keith Haring’s journals<br />
At the close of the 20th century, trying to find a stable<br />
definition for the term ‘art’ has become increasingly<br />
difficult. The traditional notion of art as the privilege<br />
of the educated and wealthy, preserved within galleries<br />
and private collections, has continually come under attack<br />
by popular culture, from Dada and the Surrealists<br />
all the way through to Warhol.<br />
One of the few artists that actually acknowledged this<br />
new, precarious, nature of ‘the artist’ as it emerged was<br />
Keith Haring. Keith was born in Kutztown, Pennsylvania<br />
in 1958, and from an early age expressed an interest<br />
in art. After a period studying commercial art in Pittsburgh,<br />
Haring realised this was not the right direction<br />
for him. He left in 1976 and hitchhiked cross-country,<br />
before returning to sit in on classes at the University of<br />
Pittsburgh. It was here that central elements of his later<br />
style started to emerge. That style had a self-confessed<br />
similarity to the work of the French Modernist Leger,<br />
and the later work of Jean Dubuffet. However, no artist<br />
is just the sum the of their stylistic influences. By the<br />
time of his first one-man show at the Shafraz Gallery,<br />
New York in 1982, Haring’s individual approach to art<br />
BUY Keith Haring books online from and<br />
was fully developed.<br />
Haring’s recently published journals, first begun in<br />
1977, offer a great insight into his artistic development.<br />
These fragments of Haring’s life provide not only a<br />
glimpse of his private life, but also go some of the way<br />
to outlining Haring’s artistic manifesto. The density<br />
and complexity of his thoughts and aims act as a shocking<br />
foil to the apparent lightness of Haring’s iconic<br />
‘cartoony’ style. This was a man for whom art, though<br />
disposable by nature, was not to be underestimated in<br />
power. One of Haring’s major ambitions, which he<br />
stated at an early stage, was to return art to the public.<br />
This at first appears to be a simple task: however, as<br />
Haring was to later prove, it was somewhat more daring<br />
than first imagined. Haring did not want to produce<br />
art that was simply physically accessible, available<br />
from the street to the high street store, but art that was<br />
also freed from the delimiting vision of the traditional<br />
institutions, be it gallery or critic. It would seem, if we<br />
follow Haring’s lead, that an Art that is easy to read<br />
has far more power than an Art that is simply obtuse or<br />
high-brow.<br />
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The measured simplicity of Keith Haring’s work was<br />
the result of much close and detailed study. By reducing<br />
the visual elements of his work to what can best be<br />
described as icons, Haring managed to produce what<br />
amounted to keys which unlocked ideas. However, the<br />
impact of these images rests not only on this process.<br />
What increases their pertinence is their universality.<br />
Haring employed an imagery that seems to connect<br />
with everyone; the more cynical would liken it to<br />
the power of advertising. However, Haring was not<br />
interested in the empty sites of materialism per se. In<br />
place of the usual trite commercial messages, Haring<br />
invested personal introspection and concern into the<br />
public space of advertising, using the directness of the<br />
advertising medium against itself.<br />
Another invigorating aspect to Haring’s work was his<br />
willingness to address and acknowledge the importance<br />
of not only popular culture, but also it more shady son,<br />
subculture. Haring’s work would have been impossible<br />
without the previous impact on the popular conception<br />
of art by both Walt Disney and Andy Warhol. With<br />
Disney opening up the viewer to the joy and pleasure<br />
to be gained from the cartoon figure, not only as an<br />
entertainment, but also as an art form, it was surely<br />
only a matter of time before an artist managed to tap<br />
into this idea. However, to make that step from popular<br />
entertainment to Art, or High Art, would have surely<br />
been impossible without the ground-breaking work of<br />
BUY Keith Haring books online from and<br />
likes of Andy Warhol.<br />
Warhol managed to re-create the artist, to slap the<br />
art-world in the face and say that commerce has a place<br />
in art. With Warhol having broken the mould of what<br />
was acceptably defined as art and what wasn’t the next<br />
generation could now reach out an explore the culture<br />
that they found around them. So, by reflecting the<br />
subcultures that surrounded him, be it skate-boarding,<br />
hip-hop or homosexuality, Haring opened the door and<br />
allowed real, contemporary life into his art. With ‘the<br />
street’ in his work, Haring instantly made connections<br />
with the common viewer – as opposed to the educated<br />
viewer. Such accessibility was also furthered by his<br />
POP SHOP in SoHo, New York, and later in Japan,<br />
which sold pieces of his ‘commercial art’.<br />
Haring’s own sexuality also found a voice in his art,<br />
and hence many of his motifs have homoerotic connotations.<br />
However, to view his work as purely ‘queer’ art<br />
is nothing but limiting. The humour and impassioned<br />
politicking evident in many of his more sexual works<br />
surely increase their palatability to the straighter audience.<br />
As a result, works such as those produced for the<br />
AIDS awareness group ACT UP have now reached the<br />
level where they can almost be considered as classic<br />
images of the 80s.<br />
Another interesting aspect of these journals is the<br />
way in which Haring himself dealt with his fame. For<br />
a man who quickly rose to fame, collected by both<br />
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major galleries and celebrity collectors, such as Madonna,<br />
he remained surprisingly level-headed. Even<br />
though he was consistently displayed through Europe,<br />
he still had doubts to his own importance as an artist,<br />
and whether or not he was really cutting edge.<br />
Such modesty is truly a rare gift in the art-world, and<br />
especially significant, in the crazy New York culture<br />
of the celebrity artist. The publication of Haring’s<br />
journals offer the interested an opportunity to glimpse<br />
BUY Keith Haring books online from and<br />
some of the motivations of what clearly must be one<br />
of the key American artists of the late 20th century.<br />
However, they also offer us much more. They provide<br />
us with a chance to consider the concerns and fears<br />
of an ordinary man who suffered with the same problems<br />
as us all; self-doubt, love, and fears for our own<br />
mortality. If I were to attain half the compassion and<br />
understanding that this man achieved in his brief life I<br />
would I consider myself to be a happy man. �<br />
265<br />
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Feature [published May 2001]<br />
Bill Hicks: Bad Mood Rising<br />
Even though he’s been dead for seven years, the savage political satire of<br />
Bill Hicks makes more sense than ever. Chris Hall spreads the word<br />
If you mention to any intelligent individual under the<br />
age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live<br />
you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky<br />
bastard”. However, if you say that you saw Bill Hicks<br />
live, the reaction is qualitatively different. There is a<br />
crestfallen look. For those fans who have come to worship<br />
him from his albums and videos, it only reinforces<br />
the knowledge that they will never see this late and<br />
very great comedian for as long as they live. He died in<br />
February 1994 from pancreatic cancer at the pitifully<br />
young age of 32.<br />
I only saw Hicks play the once but the memory of<br />
that evening is as seared into the cerebral cortex as so<br />
much steak on a griddle. I still have the fading ticket:<br />
“Bill Hicks. Brighton Festival. Sun 10 May 1992. 8pm.<br />
Comp”. Complimentary because this was also my first<br />
review for the university magazine I wrote for. The expectancy<br />
of that evening was immense. There had been<br />
a Channel 4 programme on him and we had picked up<br />
snippets from time to time from the NME and Montreal<br />
Comedy Festival clips. Here was someone taking an<br />
interest in the outside world again, not ploughing a fur-<br />
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and<br />
row of flim-flam – Is It Me Or Is Airline Food Really<br />
Bad? For my friends and me, just on the evidence of<br />
that evening, Hicks was the greatest comedian there<br />
ever had been, or ever would be.<br />
For some, humourless PC types, his ‘goat-boy’<br />
persona threw them off track. It was the side of Hicks<br />
that mined personal, rather than political, obsessions<br />
(of course, not necessarily his own obsessions). It was<br />
difficult for some to square the Marxist, sub-Chomsky<br />
perspectives with a man who would talk about renting<br />
Clam Lappers and Anal Entry volume 500 from his<br />
local video store. Live, Hicks was more extreme in all<br />
directions. The time I saw him, people in the front row<br />
must have been deafened by his screams of admonition<br />
to boy pop bands of the day to “Play with your fucking<br />
heart!” (How perceptive I was in noting in my review,<br />
with what I obviously thought of as devastating understatement,<br />
that Hicks was “more Lenny Bruce than<br />
Lenny Bennett”). He also had a peculiar air of physical<br />
omniscience over the spatio-temporal coordinates of<br />
the room, where he cadged a Silk Cut from someone at<br />
the front of the audience and dropped it only to catch it<br />
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without looking at it and without his eyes straying from<br />
us to say nonchalantly “I doubt it…” before lighting it<br />
in one graceful movement.<br />
Even though the act was honed and down pat<br />
so that he could riff around it (“excuse me why I<br />
plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit<br />
one more time”) when I saw him at Brighton he was<br />
consummate in fielding questions from the audience<br />
(on subjects as diverse as the then recently launched<br />
Euro Disney in Paris to how Labour lost the 1992<br />
general election).<br />
I thought of Hicks as soon as Dubyah ‘won’ the US<br />
election. One could simply replay the Hicks material<br />
about George Bush from the time of the Gulf War<br />
and apply it to Bush II. History repeating itself first<br />
as farce and then as a Bill Hicks routine. Where was<br />
Hicks when we needed him during Clinton’s dreadful<br />
Presidency? The Lewinsky affair, the impeachment<br />
hearings, the Presidential pardons – you feel that he<br />
would of made such an incredible impact had he lived.<br />
Who knows, perhaps he would of given direction to the<br />
growing Western response of anti-capitalism? He was<br />
that inspirational.<br />
Hicks used comedy in a way that Lenny Bruce had<br />
used it in the 60s, as a consciousness-expanding one.<br />
The appeal was one of a manichaean righteousness that<br />
could of course slide into savage arrogance. There is a<br />
joke he tells about a waffle waitress who, seeing him<br />
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and<br />
reading a book, asks him “Why y’all reading for?” to<br />
which he replies, and it’s hard not to blanch from the<br />
savagery of it: “Well, I guess I read for a lot of reasons,<br />
the main one being so I don’t end up being a fucking<br />
waffle waitress.” So there we have it – comedy that<br />
comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, but<br />
which makes sure to afflict the afflicted as well.<br />
In the evolutionary sense, a subject he was particularly<br />
interested in, Hicks’s lines continue to be highly<br />
successful memes: “You’re not human till you’re in my<br />
phone book”, “Human beings are just a virus in shoes”,<br />
etc. I can’t of been the only one to notice in the dark<br />
poetry of Hicks’s faux heartfelt tribute to his dying<br />
Grandma who he wants to see used in stunts in a martial<br />
arts film, the intimation that here was potentially a<br />
great writer too: “Do you want your grandmother dying<br />
like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent<br />
skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its<br />
way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet<br />
Chuck Norris?”<br />
Hicks arrived, in mass media terms, at the tail end of<br />
those seemingly monolithic Republican and Conservative<br />
governments of the 1980s and early 1990s and<br />
what a fillip it was to have such a hardcore exorcism<br />
of our anxieties and anger. We loved the fact that here<br />
was someone you genuinely knew would never sell out<br />
(hear Hicks’s response on Rant In E-Minor to a British<br />
company that wanted him to advertise their ‘Orange<br />
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Drink’). For a while, my girlfriend and I kept our own<br />
‘Artistic Roll Call’ on the wall, where we would strike<br />
through the names of ‘artists’ who’d just appeared in<br />
an ad for family hatchbacks or a new online banking<br />
service (“Do an ad, and you’re off the artistic roll-call<br />
for ever.”). It was a depressing and shaming list.<br />
Part of the sadness at Hicks’s death was the sense<br />
that a powerful, not just a very funny, political critic<br />
had been lost, and one who was irreplaceable. He has<br />
cast a very long shadow for comedians since his death.<br />
Someone that unique is always going to bring out the<br />
imitators, the paraders of his feathers (the lamentable<br />
British film Human Traffic has a Hicks segment on<br />
drugs, and even has the gall to end the film with one of<br />
his lines).<br />
One doesn’t have to strain that hard to hear the tropes<br />
or cadences of Hicks in any number of present-day<br />
comedians. I saw Rich Hall, a Perrier Award winner no<br />
less, shamelessly adapt Hicks’s Jay Leno fantasy routine<br />
where Leno, the straw man who has the revelation<br />
“Oh my God! What have I done with my life?”, shoots<br />
himself and a spray of blood in the shape of the NBC<br />
peacock is produced (with the venomous pay-off: “A<br />
corporate man to the bitter end”). But righteous anger<br />
is not so easily commodified or corrupted, as Denis<br />
Leary must have realised by now. To my mind, Rob<br />
Newman is the only comedian to have come even close<br />
to Hicks’s level of insight and intensity.<br />
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and<br />
Mark Thomas said witheringly in interview, “If he<br />
couldn’t be angry when he had a few months to live,<br />
then there’s something wrong.” (Thomas told me rather<br />
laughably that he felt that “Hicks is the American Mark<br />
Thomas” and that Hicks was doing very similar material<br />
to him when Thomas went to see Hicks at Edinburgh.)<br />
What’s even more galling is the conflation in the<br />
minds of some people of Hicks with Leary. Yes, they<br />
both smoked a lot, yes, they both wore black. End of<br />
similarity. Leary is (or should I say was?) a one-trick<br />
hack, the one trick being No Cure For Cancer, who<br />
ended up taking ‘cameo’ roles in films like Judgement<br />
Night and Demolition Man while advertising pissweak<br />
beer (“Another corporate shill at the capitalist<br />
gang-bang”).<br />
The appetite among his fans for all things Hicks is<br />
partly a function of the lack of a biography – the Nick<br />
Doody biography has been due to be published for<br />
years – or much new material since the posthumously<br />
released Rant In E Minor and Arizona Bay. Given that<br />
Hicks was gigging from the age of 14 in Austin, Texas<br />
(incidentally where Jenna Bush, Dubyah’s 19-yearold<br />
daughter, was recently arrested for under-age<br />
drinking) right through to his death aged 32 there must<br />
be a lot of material that hasn’t been seen yet. Hicks’s<br />
friend Kevin Booth, who ran Sacred Cow Productions<br />
with him, runs an excellent website dedicated to Bill<br />
Hicks, which occasionally adds new audio and video<br />
268<br />
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clips of Hicks.<br />
In America, as far as I can gather, he was a genuinely<br />
marginalised figure, and continues to be. There<br />
was a sense, though, that, as in the case of that other<br />
great American maverick export Jimi Hendrix, it was<br />
maybe going to be a case of Hicks making it in Britain<br />
first. I met a journalist in San Francisco, Jack Boulware,<br />
who interviewed Hicks for Arena magazine in<br />
the States. He told me that the reason he thought Hicks<br />
was beyond the pale in America was simply that he<br />
seemed to be so anti-American. It’s often said, quite<br />
rightly, that Hicks was in essence a preacher (indeed<br />
he admitted it himself) and I’ve always thought of him<br />
as Robert Mitchum in Night Of The Hunter, choosing<br />
not self-aggrandisement but enlightenment, beating<br />
sense into comatose America with those fists marked<br />
love and hate.<br />
A fascinating Index on Censorship article from December<br />
2000 details the machinations that prevented<br />
Hicks’s segment from being broadcast on an edition<br />
of the David Letterman show (he’d appeared 11 times<br />
before on the same show). Hicks’s letter to the journalist<br />
John Lahr – his Dear John letter to life in some ways<br />
– is a cri de coeur: “Jokes, John: this is what America<br />
now fears – one man with a point of view, speaking out,<br />
unafraid of our vaunted institutions, or the loathsome<br />
superstitions the CBS hierarchy feels the masses (the<br />
herd) use as their religion.” One of the ‘hot points’ that<br />
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CBS highlights as “unsuitable for our audience” is the<br />
following ‘pro-life’ skit:<br />
Bill Hicks: You know who’s really bugging me these<br />
days. These pro-lifers … (Smattering of applause.) Bill:<br />
You ever look at their faces? ‘I’m pro-life!’ (Makes a<br />
pinched face of hate and fear, his lips are pursed as<br />
though he’s just sucked on a lemon.) ‘I’m pro-life!’<br />
Boy, they look it don’t they? They just exude joie de<br />
vivre. You just want to hang with them and play Trivial<br />
Pursuit all night long. (Audience chuckles.) Bill: You<br />
know what bugs me about them? If you’re so pro-life,<br />
do me a favour – don’t lock arms and block medical<br />
clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.<br />
(Audience laughs.) Bill: Let’s see how committed<br />
you are to this idea. (Bill mimes the pursed lipped<br />
pro-lifers locking arms.) Bill (as pro-lifer): ‘She can’t<br />
come in!’ (Audience laughs. Bill as confused member<br />
of funeral procession): ‘She was 98. She was hit by a<br />
bus!’ (Audience laughs.) Bill (as pro-lifer): ‘There’s<br />
options!’ (Audience laughs.) Bill (as confused member<br />
of funeral procession): ‘What else can we do? Have<br />
her stuffed?’ (Audience laughs.) Bill: I want to see prolifers<br />
with crowbars at funerals opening caskets – ‘get<br />
out!’ Then I’d be really impressed by their mission.<br />
(Audience laughs and applauds.)<br />
Hicks ends his letter to John Lahr with a passionate<br />
plea for sanity: “This is what I think CBS, the producers<br />
of the Letterman show, the networks and governments<br />
269<br />
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fear the most – that one man free, expressing his own<br />
thoughts and point of view, might somehow inspire<br />
others to think for themselves and listen to that voice<br />
of reason inside them, and then perhaps, one by one we<br />
will awaken from this dream of lies and illusions that<br />
the world, the governments and their propaganda arm,<br />
the mainstream media, feeds us continuously over 52<br />
channels, 24 hours a day.<br />
“What I realised was that they don’t want the people<br />
to be awake. The elite ruling class wants us asleep<br />
so we’ll remain a docile, apathetic herd of passive<br />
consumers and non-participants in the true agendas<br />
of our governments, which is to keep us separate and<br />
present an image of a world filled with unresolvable<br />
problems, that they, and only they, might somewhere,<br />
in the never-arriving future, may be able to solve. Just<br />
stay asleep, America. Keep watching television. Keep<br />
paying attention to the infinite witnesses of illusion we<br />
provide you over ‘Lucifer’s Dream Box’.”<br />
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For anyone doubting the veracity of Hicks’s analysis,<br />
a good recent example of news being managed in such<br />
a way that it keeps us “passive non-participants” is the<br />
virtual US press black out over the recent Kyoto protocol<br />
all under the guise, no doubt, of it being of no interest<br />
to the American public that the US has an appalling<br />
environmental record.<br />
Hicks has his revelation while watching the Letterman<br />
show the week after being pulled. The scales fall<br />
away from his eyes, and he’s looking at the real reason.<br />
He’s looking at a ‘pro-life’ commercial.<br />
Gore Vidal once gave a definition of real politics<br />
as “Who collects what money from whom to spend<br />
on whom for what” with the corollary that “no politician<br />
in the US dares address that subject for fear we’ll<br />
discover who bought him and for how much.” Follow<br />
the money, indeed. And what was one of the very first<br />
things that Dubyah did as President? It was to cancel<br />
the funding of abortion clinics abroad. �<br />
270<br />
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Interview [published February 2008]<br />
Tom Hodgkinson: How To Be Idle<br />
Greg Lowe<br />
It’s Friday afternoon, and after a particularly busy<br />
week, with only a few things to wrap up, I try and<br />
scratch off the last important thing on my list of things<br />
to do – interview author/journalist Tom Hodgkinson.<br />
First I try his London office a number of times, only<br />
to get the following answer-phone message: “This is<br />
the office of the Idler [the magazine of which Hodgkinson<br />
is the founder/editor], there’s no one in right now,<br />
we’re not in very often, so if you leave a message it<br />
might take a while for us to get back to you…”<br />
At 5:50pm Bangkok time (11:50am in England) I try<br />
my luck with his mobile number, which I was given “in<br />
case something goes wrong”.<br />
“Hi, this is Tom, I’ve left my mobile at home today,<br />
you can reach me at [the number for the Idler office].”<br />
It appears I am trapped in a Sisyphean cycle of messages<br />
left on answer-phones that lead to more messages<br />
on other answer-phones, all equally unlikely to be answered<br />
or to yield in the previously arranged interview.<br />
Normally this would be cause for concern, but today<br />
a smile born from a wonderful sense of irony spreads<br />
across my face.<br />
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You see, apart from editing the magazine, Hodgkinson<br />
is also the author of a curious little book, How To<br />
Be Idle. Broken down into hourly chapters, starting at<br />
8am and finishing at 7am, it wages a war on work while<br />
providing practical and philosophical loafing advice<br />
for every part of the day.<br />
Chapter three ‘10am Sleeping In’, begins as follows:<br />
“It’s 10am The successful idler, having avoided the<br />
guilt produced by 8am, the culturally determined hour<br />
of rising, and the guilt produced by 9am, the hour of<br />
work, may now be awake, and thinking of perhaps getting<br />
up. Don’t!”<br />
The fact that he was either not up, nor in the office<br />
to answer the phone, came as no great surprise. I fired<br />
off a bunch of questions via email, and left the office<br />
heading for the pub.<br />
Hodgkinson practices what he preaches in How To<br />
Be Idle. He takes the subject of doing nothing very<br />
seriously, and aims to inspire more than a quiet chuckle<br />
from readers. “Although the book is a good read, it is<br />
intended to be taken seriously. I really do believe that<br />
our system of things is anti-life,” he says.<br />
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That he takes idleness sincerely is demonstrated<br />
through his fastidious research, which draws on sources<br />
as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Lao Tzu, Dr<br />
Johnson, Albert Camus and Damien Hirst, who provide<br />
a 2,500-year-old legacy to loafing (there’s nine pages<br />
of further reading on the subject).<br />
It has to be said that the end result really is good.<br />
Not only is the book thoroughly entertaining, it should<br />
resonate with anyone – except the most puritanical<br />
workaholic bores – who has ever questioned how our<br />
lives have become to be dominated by work, time, and<br />
the need to be constantly doing something, or by feeling<br />
guilty for being inactive.<br />
Hodgkinson says that this angst-driven nine-to-five<br />
drudgery is only a fairly recent development in terms<br />
of human history. That it is the result of when, some<br />
250 years ago, we were ripped from our agrarian existence<br />
by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. This<br />
transformed our previous existence of spontaneous,<br />
task-oriented work, to one where we were shackled to<br />
the ruthless tyranny of the clock and wage labour.<br />
It has alienated us from our authentic lackadaisical<br />
state of nature, Hodgkinson adds, saying that the only<br />
purpose chirpy axioms – such as Benjamin Franklin’s<br />
1757 utterance, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a<br />
man, healthy, wealthy and wise”– serve are to fill us<br />
with guilt whenever we return to an authentic state of<br />
doing as we please.<br />
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“[If we were idle] we would become more alive.<br />
We would be less stressed out because we would be in<br />
control of our own lives. We would free ourselves from<br />
the master/slave dialectic and all the other imprisoning<br />
dualities that control us. Life and work would become<br />
the same thing. We would become whole people rather<br />
than fractured people.”<br />
But left to loafers like Hodgkinson, wouldn’t the<br />
world just go to the dogs?<br />
“I think the claim is self-evidently false. Idle people<br />
are creative and hard workers are uncreative. Is it better<br />
to trick people into buying crisps or to grow your own<br />
vegetables? Clearly the latter. It is generally better to<br />
do nothing than to do something. It creates less harm<br />
in the world.”<br />
When summing up whether How To Be Idle offers an<br />
intelligent critique of the alienating nature of the rate<br />
race, or just a self-indulgent lazy man’s guide to life,<br />
it’s worth considering the words of the British journalist,<br />
and celebrated alcoholic, Jeffrey Bernard (quoted<br />
in the book) on the matter how those who preach the<br />
benefits of working harder, are normally the people<br />
having a nice time, relaxing and getting rich on the<br />
backs of others.<br />
“As if there was something romantic and glamorous<br />
about hard work … if there was something glamorous<br />
about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his<br />
own fucking garden, wouldn’t he?” �<br />
272<br />
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Review [published September 2005]<br />
Gert Hofmann: Parable Of The Blind<br />
Edmund Hardy<br />
The Knocker knocks on the barn door and six men<br />
stumble around, trying to get up. The novel opens: “On<br />
the day when we’re to be painted – yet another new<br />
day! – a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our<br />
sleep. No, the knocking isn’t inside us, it’s outside,<br />
where the other people are.” The six men narrate as<br />
“we”, although one of them, Ripolus, is also guide, because<br />
he can reportedly see a little. “Ripolus, what can<br />
you see? Simply describe for us what you can see?”<br />
The answer is usually, “Not much.”<br />
The novel covers the day when these six men are<br />
to be painted by Pieter Breughel, “the Painter”, who<br />
wants them to follow each other and fall down into a<br />
ditch, the image familiar to us as ‘The Parable of the<br />
Blind’, a rural recreation of ‘Matthew XV’, 14: “If the<br />
Blind lead the Blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”<br />
In the painting, the blind men are about to fall. The<br />
painting is tense, as the eye follows the chain of men<br />
towards the ditch. What we see is about to collapse.<br />
Hofmann’s novel is also tense; not because the six<br />
narrators may collapse but because the novel as viable<br />
form may do so. It doesn’t.<br />
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The novel’s frame is this: the six men speak a strangely<br />
unified monologue, wandering around the village, on<br />
the green, in the woods, eating lunch. Each man has a<br />
story about how he came to be blind. As readers, we are<br />
never given more information than the six possess nor<br />
any hints with which to see out of the monologue; there<br />
are times when the six may be the subject of practical<br />
jokes – being told they are in a secluded toilet when<br />
they may be on the village green – but we don’t laugh,<br />
because we don’t know if it’s funny. We don’t see from<br />
the outside. We read thoughts and speech. We are blind<br />
because we’re stuck like narrative threads in the novel’s<br />
mass, just as the blind men seem trapped in the telling<br />
of their own story.<br />
This is why worries over the inaccurate presentation<br />
of blindness are beside the point. Do blind people feel<br />
themselves all over to work out who they are, first<br />
thing in the morning, as these do? No. But this is the<br />
Parable Of The Blind, and the parables are multiple.<br />
Imagine a page with six tiny figures stumbling around<br />
in it; they can’t see the perimeter of the page, and they<br />
can’t see out into the world. The page is a room, or a<br />
273<br />
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village, and we, the reader, are there too, wondering<br />
what room, what enclosed world we are in. The six<br />
men remember the past. They wonder where they are.<br />
They have banal conversations with strangers about<br />
food and the weather and which is the best way to<br />
go. They argue with each other and nearly fight. Hofmann’s<br />
prose is so concentrated and unrelenting that<br />
claustrophobia turns to terrible awareness. There is no<br />
need to explicate. No need for laboured, ‘author’s message’<br />
moments, because we begin to read everything<br />
into the parable; the leaner in description or the more a<br />
narrative moves in circles or repetition the greater the<br />
force accumulated. How does a book like this pierce<br />
through to us, when there was no vivid description of<br />
something we recognised, no witty or psychologically<br />
fascinating dialogue, no grand sweep of history, no<br />
denouement?<br />
One answer is that those very elements begin to seem<br />
ornamental to literature’s work, part of which (let’s be<br />
reductive!) is to wonder how communication in language<br />
might be possible and, if it isn’t, to fail instructively.<br />
How can six blind men stumbling around, speak<br />
to us? Do they speak for anyone else as well? They are<br />
six men in a painting, here made to fall into the ditch<br />
over and over for the Painter to make his sketches.<br />
Sight is most often the sense connected to knowledge,<br />
as in, “I see it”, “I can’t see round it”, “in this light”, and<br />
also the various distinctions between the visible and<br />
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invisible. Sight is also linked to reason; if we can see it<br />
properly, we can be rational about it. These traditions<br />
find their dissection in the contemporary philosophies<br />
of ‘the gaze’. In The Parable Of The Blind, it is hearing<br />
that relates the realistic details of interaction, that is,<br />
speech. Without sight, the most pushy of senses, one<br />
of the things the novel does is to bring sound and touch<br />
back to a narrative, to embody a world not predicated<br />
on the eyes, as Aristotle seemed to think was necessary<br />
when he wrote ‘On Sense And Sensible Objects’, “of<br />
those who have been deprived of one sense or the other<br />
from birth, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf<br />
and the dumb.” Hofmann’s novel is a joke on metaphor<br />
– which, classically, bridges the inward mental activity<br />
to the world of appearances, left in this novel as a swing<br />
bridge hanging over the water – making the parable, ‘in<br />
this light’, a parable of the parables.<br />
Standing before a painting, we may well ask a work<br />
to speak to us, and a number of novelists have taken up<br />
the extra-critical task of elaborating this speech or else<br />
making up a story – one thinks of a pearl earring – following<br />
the irritating trope that we might ‘walk inside’ a<br />
painting. Hofmann has taken this thought and actually<br />
pushed our faces so far into the oil and brush-strokes<br />
that we cannot see back out, and we cannot see within.<br />
The prose, inhabiting a world of sound and intuited objects,<br />
is spare and clear, like a radio transmission which<br />
has been tuned in after an interfering hiss.<br />
274<br />
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Christopher Middleton’s translation is excellent – by<br />
no means a given in translations from the German, see<br />
Michael Henry Heim’s ruination of Günter Grass’s<br />
My Century – in that he replicates this sparse quality<br />
in English without falling into a Beckett-ese, which it<br />
might have been easy to do. Middleton is a poet – recommended<br />
is his new and selected poems, The Word<br />
Pavilion as well as the extraordinary prose pieces in<br />
such volumes as Crypto-Topographia – and translator<br />
of Canetti (his letters), Robert Walser and Nietzsche.<br />
His is not a workman-like translation. Hofmann’s<br />
forward-drive is here, the unaccountable tension, the<br />
use of sentence on sentence like brick and timber.<br />
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The narrator (unusual for being six people and one<br />
person simultaneously) often says “probably”, probably<br />
we are here, probably there is a man with a stick, probably<br />
we are being painted by the Painter. Surface is not<br />
given to us for our delight, as in a Quiet novel (Edgar<br />
Allen Poe’s term for the mainstream, ‘official literary<br />
culture’ of his time, the work he hated and wanted to<br />
tear down), but is constantly in doubt – what would<br />
otherwise be a world is here only conjecture: “What’s<br />
going on? we call. And it’s hard to find the way back.<br />
We’re in a dream. Lying in a fresh furrow, in a boundless<br />
field, half on the surface, half below ground, clouds<br />
probably overhead.” �<br />
275<br />
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Interview [published May 2001]<br />
Nick Hornby: Gender Trouble<br />
Patrick McGuigan talks with Nick Hornby about the changing roles of<br />
men and women in his new novel How To Be Good<br />
Men stumble through life bewildered by relationships,<br />
terrified of responsibility and unable to articulate their<br />
feelings; or so you would think from the characters<br />
portrayed in Nick Hornby’s novels. Women are only<br />
used to make the men look worse. His new book, How<br />
To Be Good, deliberately sets out to challenge this<br />
stereotype. Hornby’s arrival at such a position has been<br />
a direct result of the success of his first three books,<br />
Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy.<br />
Hornby writes from a small flat two minutes from<br />
his beloved Highbury. It is equipped with a kitchen,<br />
bathroom and lounge, where framed posters of his<br />
books hang proudly on the walls. He obviously spends<br />
a lot of time here. Hornby is divorced and lives with his<br />
seven-year-old son in a house near to his office flat. He<br />
is friendly, assured, and smokes continually. He looks<br />
tired and his patchy baldness gives him a disconcerting,<br />
ravaged look.<br />
Born in 1957, he graduated from Cambridge with a<br />
2.2 in English Literature. He then worked as a teacher<br />
and a journalist before publishing Fever Pitch in 1992.<br />
It was an honest account of how his obsession with<br />
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Arsenal usually took precedence over his emotional<br />
life. His next two books, High Fidelity and About A<br />
Boy, explored similar ideas of how men struggle to<br />
come to terms with modern expectations of sensitivity<br />
and maturity. They are funny, touching and his male<br />
characters ring true.<br />
It is surprising for an author so concerned with masculinity<br />
that he hasn’t written much about fatherhood.<br />
All his main characters are, as he puts it: “childless,<br />
feckless males,” who don’t have strong paternal ties.<br />
About A Boy addressed the issue of fatherhood in a<br />
metaphorical way but he has never dealt with it directly.<br />
Part of the reason for this is that his son, Danny, is<br />
autistic. “My experience of fatherhood is going to take<br />
a long while to filter through to what I write. Being<br />
the father of a disabled child you have a lot to say, but<br />
it’s so unique you want to do it in a way that people<br />
understand.”<br />
His own father left the family home for another woman<br />
when Hornby was a young boy. He then moved abroad<br />
for ten years. Hornby says he has not really thought<br />
about what effect his father has had on his writing, but<br />
276<br />
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adds: “I had an absent father. Fathers haven’t played a<br />
big role in my books yet; maybe there’s a void where a<br />
father should be.” He laughs nervously, then moves the<br />
conversation on to how the media encroaches on topics<br />
formerly only tackled by writers.<br />
Hornby has said that he is tired of men being portrayed<br />
as morons by the media and wants to “redress<br />
the balance.” He argues: “The first two books couldn’t<br />
have been written 25 years ago. Men writing about how<br />
they feel would not have been tolerated.”<br />
He goes on to say that with the advent of feminism<br />
and changes in the workplace men and women have<br />
become more equal. “I don’t know any man who can’t<br />
change a nappy or cook.” When asked about women<br />
earning 20 per cent less than men he quickly points out<br />
that his books only cover domestic life and there is a<br />
long way to go. “Obviously society is still incredibly<br />
sexist. It’s difficult when you write about gender to talk<br />
about men and yet be sympathetic to feminism.”<br />
Hornby’s books are unbalanced because they only<br />
concentrate on men. Life is confusing for everyone,<br />
women included. He agrees: “The flaws in High Fidelity<br />
and Fever Pitch are that the women aren’t rounded<br />
characters. The whole process of writing books and<br />
reading women’s letters about them has made me completely<br />
rethink. I’ve now decided that the men/women<br />
stuff is a red herring.”<br />
He elaborates on his new position on gender: “There<br />
BUY Nick Hornby books online from and<br />
are two extremes – England hooligans with skinheads<br />
and women who are subservient to their husbands. Then<br />
there’s the middle where most of us are now. People of<br />
a certain generation don’t feel incredibly different to<br />
their partners.”<br />
When asked if it is simplistic to say we are all the<br />
same, he concedes that “differences do come from our<br />
experiences of being brought up a man or a woman.” He<br />
also acknowledges that men can find it hard to express<br />
themselves. “I’d rather not communicate whereas the<br />
women I know would prefer to talk.”<br />
This is an important change in direction for Nick<br />
Hornby, the beginnings of which can be seen in About A<br />
Boy. As well as touching on fatherhood it has a female<br />
character that tries to kill herself in a bout of depression.<br />
This is not a positive depiction of women but certainly<br />
more complex than in his proceeding books.<br />
His new novel, How To Be Good, is the first time<br />
Hornby’s main character is female. He explains: “It’s<br />
about a woman whose husband has a spiritual conversion<br />
that drives her nuts.” This could be a risky step for<br />
a writer so linked in the minds of the public with men<br />
and football.<br />
He claims he has not found it particularly difficult<br />
to write: “I wasn’t sitting there thinking ‘Oh my God,<br />
what would a woman say in this situation!’ “ He has<br />
also given it to female friends and taken out parts they<br />
did not think were appropriate.<br />
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Hornby’s books work because his male characters<br />
are so familiar. They have an authenticity that readers<br />
immediately relate to. If he can do the same in his<br />
next novel with a female character, it will be a major<br />
achievement. As he says: “If I’m going to progress as a<br />
writer I’ve got to stop worrying about gender and treat<br />
people as people, characters as characters.” �<br />
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278<br />
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Review [published November 2002]<br />
Michel Houllebecq: Atomised<br />
Kevin Walsh<br />
Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors who<br />
inspire hugely conflicting reactions. Some hail him<br />
as a literary giant in the European tradition, deftly<br />
weaving philosophy, history, and science into his<br />
bleak, challenging narratives, asking those questions<br />
that other more commercially-minded authors shy<br />
away from. Others think him hollow, pretentious,<br />
showily didactic and deeply disturbed – not to mention<br />
highly overrated.<br />
And controversial. Very controversial. In 2001, he<br />
gave an interview to the French literary magazine, Lire,<br />
in which he said “Islam is a dangerous religion, as has<br />
been since its beginnings […] I totally reject all monotheistic<br />
religions.” In September 2002 he appeared before<br />
a tribunal in Paris on charges of inciting religious<br />
hatred, and was asked to explain himself. “All I said<br />
is that their religion is stupid,” he said in his defence.<br />
“And that’s what you call promoting a book?” said the<br />
president of the tribunal. “Yes, that’s right,” answered<br />
Houellebecq, with his customary insouciance.<br />
Atomised (published in the US as The Elementary<br />
Particles) is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and<br />
Bruno (Houellebecq denies that his namesake is based<br />
on himself, but the parallels are striking). Sharing the<br />
same mother, they have both been abandoned by different<br />
fathers and brought up by relatives. Michel is a<br />
scientific researcher at the CNRS in Paris, a cold, unsympathetic<br />
and unhappy character. Bruno is equally<br />
unappealing, a misfit former teacher and part-time<br />
writer, divorced and sex-obsessed.<br />
Houellebecq has a rather disquieting habit of including<br />
large chunks of economic and social history as we<br />
plough through the decades of their childhood: the<br />
événements of 1968, the legalisation of abortion, the<br />
succès de scandale in the 70s of the film Emmanuelle<br />
and so on.<br />
But he doesn’t stop there: we are also treated to long<br />
disquisitions on science and philosophy, not to mention<br />
particle physics and DNA. Many chapters begin with<br />
long – and sometimes mystifyingly irrelevant – quotes.<br />
Houellebecq is undoubtedly very widely read. The<br />
trouble is, he wants us to know that he is. In an effort to<br />
demonstrate just what a polymath he is, he crosses the line<br />
into what the French call étalage – literally, a spreading<br />
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out of one’s wares; figuratively, just plain showing off.<br />
And he sometimes resorts to some very clumsy mechanisms<br />
to show the extent of his knowledge: at one point,<br />
Michel and Bruno have an in-depth conversation about<br />
Aldous Huxley, displaying a highly unlikely command<br />
of historical and biographical details.<br />
Perhaps it’s a sign of insecurity. Maybe he has more<br />
in common with his namesake than he would admit.<br />
The result of the name- and fact-dropping is a patchy<br />
story, where the narrative flow is repeatedly interrupted.<br />
The early part of the book follows the boys through<br />
their deeply unhappy childhood. These are unexceptional,<br />
rather dull and very mundane lives, and the characters<br />
fail to engage any real emotion on the reader’s<br />
part. The book swings wildly from lofty philosophical<br />
thoughts to very basic instincts.<br />
Later, large tracts of the book are taken up with<br />
Bruno’s sexual adventures. At a holiday camp – one<br />
of whose main activities seems to be cruising for<br />
casual sex – he encounters Christiane, a libertine who<br />
introduces him to the joys of the orgy circuit. And this<br />
points up a key distinction between the uptight Anglo-<br />
Saxon and relaxed French views towards sex (at the<br />
last count, there were over 400 sex clubs in France,<br />
catering for both échangistes – wife swappers – and the<br />
more adventurous mélangistes – orgy-goers).<br />
Sex sells, of course, which is why the UK version<br />
of Atomised features a naked woman on the cover,<br />
together with the promise from The Independent that<br />
it is “very moving, gloriously, extravagantly filthy, and<br />
very funny.”<br />
Tellingly, the French edition features a sepia photograph<br />
of a bored-looking Houellebecq smoking a rollup<br />
held between his third an fourth fingers (a trademark<br />
eccentricity) and a carrier bag draped over his left arm.<br />
In the end, though, the book fails to weave a compelling<br />
story. There are too many undigested chunks<br />
of science and politics, too many swerves from highbrow<br />
philosophy to lowbrow oral sex. And far too<br />
much étalage.<br />
But perhaps one of the most unnerving things about<br />
Houellebecq’s books is his propensity to kill off his female<br />
characters. And Atomised has a high body count:<br />
the brothers’ mother (of natural causes), and both their<br />
girlfriends (suicides). Which has, inevitably, led to<br />
accusations of misogyny – to add to the anti-Muslim,<br />
anti-Semite and anti-black charges that Houellebecq<br />
has clocked up during his turbulent career.<br />
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Houellebecq has<br />
chosen to retreat to an island off the coast of West Cork,<br />
from which he rarely emerges. He did venture forth to<br />
Dublin earlier this year, when Atomised won the Impac<br />
Literary Prize, the latest in a string of awards he’s<br />
bagged. And to Paris, to run rings round the tribunal.<br />
But then he’s very good a running rings round people.<br />
Perhaps too good. �<br />
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Gary Indiana:<br />
Resentment 282<br />
Derek Jarman:<br />
Preserving A Harlequin 284<br />
Linton Kwesi Johnson:<br />
Inglan Is A Bitch 288<br />
Ed Jones:<br />
This Is Pop 292<br />
Gabriel Josipovici:<br />
On Trust 294<br />
Kevin Kelly:<br />
New Rules For The New Economy 298<br />
Naomi Klein:<br />
Ad Nauseum 300<br />
I-L<br />
Rem Koolhaas:<br />
Content 305<br />
Kruder And Dorfmeister:<br />
The K&D Sessions 308<br />
Andrey Kurkov:<br />
Death And The Penguin 310<br />
Emma Larkin:<br />
Secret Histories 312<br />
Abby Lee:<br />
Girl With A One Track Mind 314<br />
Wyndham Lewis:<br />
Blast 319<br />
Jack London:<br />
The Iron Heel 324<br />
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Review [published September 1997]<br />
Gary Indiana: Resentment<br />
David B. Livingstone<br />
Historically, the turn of centuries and millenniums<br />
have marked periods of heightened popular anxiety,<br />
social unrest, collective madness, and religious mania.<br />
From the vantage point of 1997, a little less than twoand-a-half<br />
years from two-thousand-zero-zero, our<br />
own age seems little different: Heaven’s Gaters are<br />
hopping aboard Hale-Bopp, militia types are scanning<br />
the skies for black helicopters, and millions of people<br />
inexplicably watch Jenny Jones daily. It’s getting to be<br />
a pretty weird world.<br />
And it’s hard to imagine a more fertile breeding<br />
ground for modern insanity than the supercharged, chaotic<br />
maelstrom of greater Los Angeles, as intensified<br />
and re-imagined in Resentment. Equal parts courtroom<br />
drama, existential lament, and blacker-than-black<br />
comedy, author Gary Indiana’s latest offering might<br />
mark the first entry in a new genre: Post-Simpson Trial<br />
fiction, a realm where brutality transforms effortlessly<br />
into bland, mildly-diverting mass entertainment, and<br />
where honour, justice, and even reality are relative<br />
concepts easily inverted by a clever attorney.<br />
Resentment’s unifying thread is a trial: The teenaged<br />
BUY Gary Indiana books online from and<br />
Martinez brothers stand accused of murdering their<br />
wealthy parents in an ambush slaying, while around<br />
them swirl a discordant cast of characters possessed<br />
of varying degrees of spiritual and moral decay. Seth,<br />
the self-serving New York reporter in town to cover<br />
the trial; Jack, his taxi-driver ex-lover, slowly dying<br />
of AIDS; Frankie, the narcissistic, Cunanenesque<br />
hustler; Potter Phlegg, the manipulative, exploitative<br />
psychologist; Cassandra, the washed-up soap opera<br />
actress; JD, a vapid drive-time radio host – all abrade<br />
against each other, collide with one another in an<br />
exquisitely choreographed ballet of mutually-assured<br />
destruction performed to an accompaniment of lies<br />
and vacant smiles.<br />
While Resentment’s characters gradually grind one<br />
another into dust, the Martinez’ show/trial spirals to<br />
dizzying heights of absurdity as careerist attorneys and<br />
psychotic judges jockey for power, a struggle chronicled<br />
in chillingly-real torrents of self-negating legalese<br />
nonsense. Simultaneously, the violence of the brothers’<br />
crime compounds itself as Indiana’s circle of misfits<br />
begin, usually unconsciously, to act out the same be-<br />
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trayals and maledictions against each other, in a more<br />
subtle but no less destructive fashion. In a succession of<br />
careful, precise strokes, Indiana meticulously renders<br />
a portrait of a morally-malformed society whose governing<br />
principles are irrationality and amnesia, where<br />
justice is a commodity and ethical considerations an<br />
irrelevancy – a world whose denizens, poisoned by<br />
immersion in a toxic morass of glossy images, pseudoevents,<br />
and hyperkinetic impermanence, struggle to<br />
retain the vestiges of humanity. It’s hell, repainted in<br />
garish Disney colours.<br />
Wisely avoiding the temptation to proselytize, Indiana<br />
leaves it to the reader to connect the dots between Resentment’s<br />
fiction and real-life events. While purposelyglaring<br />
parallels with the Menendez and Simpson cases<br />
abound, additional layers of possible similarity between<br />
art and life, such as the details of individual characters’<br />
(psycho)pathologies and their role in governing human<br />
interaction, are left open to interpretation. It’s a tactic that<br />
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virtually mandates reader participation in the form of<br />
thoughtful interpretation and re-interpretation throughout<br />
the book, leading in a roundabout way to Indiana’s<br />
maintaining our rapt attention.<br />
Resentment is a fable of fin-de-siècle madness in its<br />
most acute stage, a premonitory snapshot of a moment<br />
when order and chaos, reason and insanity are locked<br />
in fights-to-the-death, the outcomes too close to call.<br />
Indiana has cleverly, cruelly drawn the blueprints for<br />
apocalypse-in-microcosm – the whimper, not the bang,<br />
which would signal that the end is near – and left it to<br />
his readers to deduce the degree to which art mirrors<br />
reality. Resentment is subtitled “a comedy”, but any<br />
laughter is only a buffer against tears and terror. The<br />
engine driving Resentment is Resentment, a bitterness<br />
at having arrived at an inescapable cul-de-sac en route<br />
to the American Dream – a frenetic, endless loop where<br />
we’re likely to claw each other to pieces, a Roach Motel<br />
for human souls. �<br />
283<br />
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Feature [published August 1996]<br />
Derek Jarman: Preserving A Harlequin<br />
Nick Clapson reflects on the work of England’s quintessential Renaissance man<br />
By the time you read this, Derek Jarman: A Retrospective<br />
will have closed at the Barbican Centre. However,<br />
the Barbican Centre’s comprehensive catalogue of the<br />
exhibition, which has been published by Thames And<br />
Hudson, gives a chance to re-evaluate the impact and<br />
splendour of Derek Jarman’s work. Though largely famous<br />
for his film-work, Jarman was also a prestigious<br />
artist and writer, with his artistic skills even pouring<br />
over into other diverse art-forms such as scenery design<br />
and gardening (yes, gardening).<br />
With a man whose output was so divergent, whose<br />
character so like quicksilver, it is hard to pin him down.<br />
And this is the beauty of Jarman. He was indefinable<br />
and unique, a British maverick comparable in importance<br />
to artists such as William Blake, and as such,<br />
should not allowed to drift to the side-lines of history,<br />
or to be pigeon-holed solely as a queer film-maker.<br />
I discovered Derek Jarman myself through his<br />
journals, published as Modern Nature (1991), and At<br />
Your Own Risk (1992). Written as direct result of his<br />
knowledge that he was HIV+ these books offer the<br />
reader a startling honesty. Nothing is hidden from us,<br />
BUY Derek Jarman books online from and<br />
and as such we enter into his world, and his everyday<br />
life, more as a friend than an observer – no brave face<br />
is put on for us, no politeness offered. Instead, Derek<br />
gives us truth and compassion, and at times pure, honest,<br />
anger. He leaps between the meditative contemplation<br />
of his garden and haranguing the British film<br />
industry for its complacency, between describing the<br />
omnipresence of the nuclear reactor behind his home<br />
at Dungeness and the evils of what he called “hetrosoc”.<br />
The result is a potent, valuable set of books<br />
pulsing with pure emotion.<br />
This truth and honesty is also a quality found in<br />
Jarman’s films; he eschewed the expense and contrivance<br />
of big-budget films for the simplicity of Super8<br />
stock. Even Jarman’s most expensive films were made<br />
at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest Hollywood<br />
film. His work was radically different, especially<br />
from the usual British attempts at generating some<br />
form of quirky pseudo-Hollywood style. However,<br />
this outsider position quite suited Jarman, and as he<br />
said, “I am the most fortunate film director of my generation:<br />
I’ve only ever done what I wanted”. People<br />
284<br />
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have said that they find his work hard, or just unintelligible,<br />
but that is part of their charm and power.<br />
Jarman frequently used the camera like a paintbrush,<br />
with the visual quotient of a scene carrying the charge<br />
normally left to the narrative: as it were, painting with<br />
light. However, such concepts are hard to conceive<br />
by a generation who goes to the cinema not to be<br />
challenged, but rather, have their eyes stuffed with<br />
Hollywood bubble-gum. That is not to say that such<br />
films don’t have their place; you just have to learn to<br />
look at films by the likes of Jarman with open eyes.<br />
His films were also frequently of a revisionist tone,<br />
with Jarman looking back at history and re-viewing it<br />
through his own 20th-century eyes, and turning it into<br />
something new, something pertinent. For example,<br />
in 1977 he released his film Jubilee, coinciding with<br />
the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, blending a time-travelling<br />
Elizabeth I and John Dee with oppressed and violent<br />
punks in sharp commentary on contemporary Britain.<br />
This concern for the state of the British nation is also<br />
reflected in his more complex, and yet more visually<br />
rewarding film The Last Of England.<br />
Moreover, Jarman was not afraid of re-evaluating the<br />
classics, and produced his own idiosyncratic revisions<br />
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the more successful<br />
version of Marlowe’s Edward II. This film, like many<br />
of his later films, utilised the strength of simplicity with<br />
it’s sparse ahistorical sets, and mixture of period and<br />
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contemporary costume. Again, Jarman looked to the<br />
past, especially to the hidden ramifications of a possible<br />
gay history, in order to comment on the situation today.<br />
That is to say, by re-examining men such as Edward II,<br />
Ludwig Wittgenstein or Caravaggio Jarman could shift<br />
the emphasis of traditional (read ‘straight’) history, and<br />
trace the previously hidden importance of a succession<br />
of homosexual men in key roles in Western intellectual<br />
culture. However, even though his films were often serious<br />
in tone, Jarman always seemed to have his tongue<br />
firmly lodged in his cheek, and concepts that could<br />
quite easily dissolve into pretentious drivel, frequently<br />
sparkle with irreverent wit.<br />
The paintings displayed at the Barbican are, like most<br />
retrospectives, a mixed bag. We travel from the cold<br />
controlled nature of his early abstract landscapes of his<br />
youth to the fiery anger of his compelling last works,<br />
and so can easily trace Jarman’s origins and subsequent<br />
progression. The curator has also had the chance to assemble<br />
some of the artist’s personal artefacts, and the<br />
fact that people stand in rapt attention looking at such<br />
things as Jarman’s fountain pen or diaries is testament<br />
to the lasting power of the man himself.<br />
The last section of the exhibition is the most striking,<br />
with the gloomy intensity of the pitch paintings and<br />
the dazzling outbursts that constitute the paintings that<br />
were first shown in the Evil Queen exhibition. These<br />
polemical works are Jarman at his most impassioned<br />
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and his anger and frustration seep through the canvas.<br />
Their uncompromising nature was matched by his last<br />
film Blue. This film, with the screen saturated with an<br />
unchanging blue, was his most lyrical. It would be foolhardy<br />
to try capture the power and poignancy of this<br />
film in words. With the eyes confounded with nothing<br />
but an infinite blue, you are left to the voice-over to<br />
lead you through Jarman’s imagination and your own<br />
in a way that has never been attempted before.<br />
Jarman’s home and garden at Prospect Cottage in<br />
Dungeness, Kent, figure frequently in his last works,<br />
be it writing or film, and some attempt to address this<br />
has been attempted at the Barbican. Outside the gallery<br />
local children have made their own gardens à la Jarman<br />
to quite good effect. However, nothing can recreate the<br />
sense of isolation and strange other-worldliness present<br />
at Dungeness. It is as if here everything, including time<br />
itself will dissolve at moment into the vast swathes<br />
of shingle. His home and the others around it stand<br />
stranded in this stark landscape, now dominated and<br />
threatened by the vast nuclear reactor behind them.<br />
A posthumous book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995),<br />
with splendid photographs by Howard Sooley, captures<br />
the beauty of the place that meant so much to Jarman.<br />
I personally had never considered that gardening could<br />
ever be considered an art form, but what Jarman created<br />
here is nothing but art, albeit more challenging to<br />
construct and maintain as it is an art that continually<br />
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changes and grows. Innumerable plants provide islands<br />
of colour that sit in the sea of shingle which flows<br />
through the garden. Driftwood and flotsam punctuate<br />
the garden in the form of sculpture and ultimately serve<br />
to unify it with the area surrounding it. The result is a<br />
bounty of visual delights, made more powerful by the<br />
improbability of their setting. It is characteristic that<br />
Jarman’s writing, even when discussing the creation of<br />
his garden in this book, soon breaks down, and becomes<br />
a discussion of so much more. Surely there is no better<br />
example than Derek Jarman of an artist whose work is<br />
entwined with their life.<br />
How, then, are we to remember this man? Should<br />
he be placed in the shrivelled canon of British 20thcentury<br />
art, filed under ‘minor artist’, or should he be<br />
cast in the limiting role of ‘queer director’, or just dismissed<br />
as loud, over-opinionated, English eccentric? It<br />
is symptomatic of artists who work in several media to<br />
be dismissed as a jack of all trades but master of none.<br />
However, this would clearly not be a worthy epitaph for<br />
a man who obviously excelled in nearly every art form<br />
he chose to turn his hand to. Jarman was also much<br />
more, being not only a very political man, but whose<br />
work also had a great feeling for the decline of all the<br />
positive elements of British culture that have been stifled<br />
and repressed since the start of the Thatcher years.<br />
Whatever his agenda, Jarman always made himself<br />
heard and it’s a voice that painful not to hear now. I feel,<br />
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then, that all us can claim a part of Derek Jarman – he<br />
was an important film-maker, and an undervalued and<br />
little discussed artist, and wrote books that will surely<br />
stand the test of time. And yes, he was a consummate<br />
gardener. To lose an artist at the height of their powers<br />
is hard to live with, but to neglect what they left us is<br />
criminal. What is important now is that no matter how<br />
fragmented he may become in our minds, this man of<br />
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rare vision must be preserved in a unified form in drafty<br />
corridors of history. Jarman, with all his divergent skill<br />
and charm, was surely more than just the sum of his<br />
parts, and that is how he should be remembered. Go<br />
and see this retrospective, watch one of the films, or<br />
even read the books, but do try and take the time to<br />
enter into Jarman’s world. I can assure you, it’s quite an<br />
amazing place to be. �<br />
287<br />
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Interview [published December 1998]<br />
Linton Kwesi Johnson: Inglan Is A Bitch<br />
Nancy Rawlinson finds legendary dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has<br />
not mellowed with age<br />
Twenty years ago, a landmark album was released<br />
in the UK. Dread Beat An’ Blood was Linton Kwesi<br />
Johnson’s debut recording, the first time his political<br />
poetry had been accompanied by the powerful beats of<br />
reggae. This new form of music, revolutionary in terms<br />
of language, content and style, came to be known as<br />
‘dub poetry’ and Johnson is still the foremost and most<br />
uncompromising practitioner of the art. Using the patois<br />
of Jamaican speech, Johnson articulates the Black<br />
British experience and uses the rhythms of reggae to<br />
get his message across.<br />
In the past, he has been called a prophet. “Yeah,<br />
yeah, I don’t take these things seriously. I just think it’s<br />
another media tag,” he says dismissively. “The music is<br />
compatible with the poetry in so far as I am writing out<br />
of the reggae tradition and some of the poems are written<br />
are within the perimeters of the reggae structure.<br />
And it’s oral poetry and oral poetry lends itself to the<br />
rhythms of music.”<br />
Considering his commitment and personal history,<br />
perhaps Johnson’s success is no great surprise. His<br />
whole life has been based around increasing political<br />
awareness, fighting racism, and music. Born in Chapletown,<br />
Jamaica, in 1952 he came to England at the<br />
age of 11 to live with his mother in Brixton. It was an<br />
traumatic experience, compounded by the hostility and<br />
racism of Britain in the early 60s. Before long he had<br />
joined The Black Panthers. “That’s where I learnt my<br />
politics and about my history and culture,” he has said.<br />
“That’s where I discovered black literature, particularly<br />
the work of W.E.B. DuBois, the Afro-American scholar<br />
who inspired me to write poetry.”<br />
Armed with this new political awareness, Johnson<br />
was laying the foundations of his future recording<br />
career while he was still at school, with the poetry and<br />
drumming group, Rasta Love. After graduating from<br />
Goldsmiths’ College, he began to write in earnest and<br />
his first collection of poetry was published in 1974.<br />
Since then he has released three more books and a total<br />
of 11 albums – but that’s not all. His achievements<br />
outside of the studio have also been considerable. He<br />
has edited the journal Race Today Review, made a radio<br />
series on Jamaican music for the BBC, reported for<br />
Channel Four’s race relation series The Bandung File<br />
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and helped found Creation For Liberation, the seminal<br />
Black Arts organisation of the 1980s.<br />
He has been involved with innumerable campaigns,<br />
set up his own record label and received honorary<br />
degrees and awards. His work is now taught in universities<br />
up and down the country. I could go on, but you<br />
get the picture. There is no doubt that Linton Kwesi<br />
Johnson is totally committed to improving and drawing<br />
attention to the Black British experience. Considering<br />
this, it seems almost sacrilegious to ask: Is his work as<br />
relevant now as it was 20 years ago?<br />
On this point, Johnson has no doubts. In the two<br />
decades that Linton Kwesi Johnson has been making<br />
music, his political stance has not shifted an inch. “I<br />
think Tony Blair is a natural born Tory. He’s a natural<br />
born Tory who would have been quite comfortable<br />
on the left of the Tory party with people like Kenneth<br />
Clark and Michael Heseltine.” he tells me. And what<br />
does he think the most pressing political issue of the<br />
day is? Without drawing breath, he gives an emphatic,<br />
two word answer. “The police.”<br />
His 1980 collection of poetry was entitled Inglan Is<br />
A Bitch. Despite the many battles that have been won,<br />
he stands by that statement. “When one looks at what<br />
happened to Stephen Lawrence, when one thinks of<br />
the fact that a black person is eight times more likely<br />
to be stopped and searched than a white person, that<br />
a black person is five times more likely to be given a<br />
custodial sentence than a white person, that the ACPO<br />
– the Association of Chief Police Officers – has come<br />
out and admitted that racism is institutionalised within<br />
the police force, that the black nurses within the health<br />
service for years have gotton a raw deal. When one<br />
thinks of all these things, yeah, Inglan is a Bitch. I still<br />
believe as passionately in the same things I did 20 years<br />
ago, and although we have made some head way, the<br />
struggle for social justice is still on.”<br />
As ever, that struggle is clearly articulated on his<br />
new album, More Time. Some are already saying that<br />
it is his best work yet, a work in which the political<br />
and musical sides of Linton Kwesi Johnson are more<br />
strongly interwoven than ever. Ultimately, the feel is a<br />
touch lighter than in the past; the mood seems that little<br />
bit more optimistic. Johnson seems to agree. “Well,<br />
some of the poems are optimistic, forward looking. I’m<br />
writing about the possibilities of life. I try to make the<br />
music suit the mood of each poem. Like on ‘Reggae<br />
Fi Bernard’, a poem about the death of my nephew, I<br />
tried to conjure up the music of the Jamaican marching<br />
bands, who would traditionally form part of the funeral<br />
procession. But to an extent, you know, it’s about the<br />
banishment of grief and the celebration of life, so in<br />
that sense the music might be brighter. It’s a poem<br />
about how we can benefit from life.”<br />
There are also hints that this album is perhaps the<br />
most personal Johnson has ever made. Two tracks,<br />
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‘Hurricane Blues’ (previously released without music<br />
in 1996 on the LKJ Acapella Live album) and ‘Seasons<br />
of the Heart’, are “poems in which I was trying to explore<br />
some inner landscapes.” And then there is the title<br />
track, ‘More Time’.<br />
Whilst clearly a statement about the working conditions<br />
and hours forced upon the poor and disenfranchised,<br />
I am left with the impression that it applies to<br />
Johnson himself. “There is no reason why we can’t<br />
work less hours and enjoy our lives more,” he tells<br />
me. “But if we do get more time, we have to organise<br />
ourselves to get some benefit from it. What is life if we<br />
cannot get some pleasure from friends and family, from<br />
relaxation and contemplation? Most people do not have<br />
an idea of what their human potential is, we are so used<br />
to not having time.”<br />
As you might expect, his own preferred forms of<br />
relaxation are far from extravagant. “I enjoy being with<br />
people. Socialising. The simple things, the simple things<br />
in life are the ones that give me pleasure. Going to the<br />
pub and having a pint, playing a game of dominoes or a<br />
game of pool. Being with my grandchild. Little things<br />
like that. Reading a good book. Eating a good meal.”<br />
Some may feel that although Johnson is progressive<br />
in his ideals, his music style bears no mark of the revolution<br />
in technology that has taken place since he started<br />
recording. “Well, I’m not a luddite in that respect,” he<br />
says, although he seems ambivalent about other more<br />
modern combinations of music and politics. “If it’s<br />
done well, it can be very entertaining and very fine –<br />
but it has to be done well. There is always a danger<br />
of the music dominating the words. You have to very<br />
careful about how you do that. But as for rap, when<br />
it’s done badly it’s just boring. The only rap record I<br />
used to have, or I still have, is Grandmaster Flash, ‘The<br />
Message’. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything that<br />
tops it. I never heard a rap tune that can better that.”<br />
What Johnson does is outside the vagaries of musical<br />
fashion and he is not a man to pander to trends. The<br />
message of the music is all important. “I do worry in a<br />
sense that people might forget that I’m a poet and just<br />
get off on the music but I always like to think of it in<br />
this way, that the music articulated in a good way, and<br />
also the views are plain and clear and articulated well.<br />
But I don’t want people to forget that I’m a poet.”<br />
So how does a man who’s political views have not<br />
changed for 20 years, and who’s musical style resists<br />
influences manage to sound so contemporary? And<br />
how does he manage to cross so many borders and<br />
reach so many people? Maybe it’s because the issues<br />
he writes about are still as relevant today as they were<br />
in 1978 and until they go away, Linton Kwesi Johnson<br />
will always be there, dragging them quite literally onto<br />
the centre stage.<br />
“In a sense, even though a lot of my poems are<br />
about the black experience, as well as other things,<br />
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I’m not a ghetto artist. My audience is not a black<br />
audience, my audience is a broad cross section of<br />
people, so I don’t think I’m preaching to the converted.”<br />
He has played all over the world, from<br />
Japan to Turkey, Iceland to Brazil, and with his new<br />
album, he looks set to attract a whole new audience.<br />
“I just make my records and write my poems and I’m<br />
just grateful that somebody bothers to listen to it,” he<br />
says. Somehow, I think it is the audiences and record<br />
buying public who should be grateful. �<br />
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Review [published January 2000]<br />
Ed Jones: This Is Pop<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
It wasn’t a rock gig, it was an event. Journalists from<br />
all the major music papers were there, and even the<br />
local newspaper had marked the event with a special<br />
supplement. Celebrities air-kissed backstage, and the<br />
band took the stage in front of thousands of people. For<br />
Wigan musician Ed Jones, the gig should have been a<br />
triumphant homecoming, a sign that the years of tours<br />
and recording had been worthwhile. Unfortunately,<br />
Jones was in the audience.<br />
The band was The Verve, and the gig was the nowlegendary<br />
show at Haigh Hall. Jones was the bassist in<br />
the Tansads and, a few years previously, had played to<br />
packed venues with The Verve as the band’s support<br />
act. While Richard Ashcroft and co went stellar, The<br />
Tansads stumbled from one disaster to another. Hating<br />
his former friends, Jones quit the band in disgust.<br />
Is Ed Jones bitter? You bet. Ostensibly the story of<br />
a band whose success never matched their ambition,<br />
This Is Pop is an extended v-sign to Jones’ former band<br />
members, record company and peers. Over the course<br />
of the book he paints a less than flattering picture of<br />
several indie heroes, from Jarvis Cocker throwing his<br />
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weight around in TV studios to thinly-disguised allegations<br />
about Cast. The only band spared Jones’ vitriol is<br />
Stiff Little Fingers, with singer Jake Burns portrayed<br />
as a decent bloke in an industry notorious for backstabbing<br />
and one-upmanship.<br />
Although Jones’ anger sometimes overpowers the<br />
story he’s trying to tell, This Is Pop is a fascinating insight<br />
into the realities of the record business. As Jones<br />
describes in detail, very few bands are actually making<br />
any money – even though they were appearing on Top<br />
Of The Pops, the seven members of the Tansads had a<br />
combined income of £25 per week. Touring is shown<br />
in its true colours, and the bickering over publishing<br />
royalties is depressingly familiar.<br />
It’s obvious from the text that Jones still believes that<br />
the Tansads could and should have been pop stars, although<br />
few non-fans are likely to agree. For most people,<br />
the Tansads were an uncomfortable cross between<br />
The Levellers and Half Man Half Biscuit, a moderately<br />
talented novelty band forever destined to play the bottom<br />
of the bill at festivals. Jones clearly doesn’t see<br />
it that way, although his occasional descriptions of the<br />
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band’s songs and lyrics do little to dispel the impression<br />
that the band’s lack of success might not just be due to<br />
the machinations of an evil record industry.<br />
One of the problems with This Is Pop is that the<br />
events described in the book are relatively recent, and as<br />
a result Jones lacks the self-awareness found in similar<br />
books such as Giles Smith’s Lost In Music. While no<br />
doubt important to Jones, the frequent tangents describing<br />
how he comes to terms with the death of his father<br />
sit uncomfortably with the rest of the story, and the constant<br />
bitterness frequently damages the credibility of his<br />
tale. In particular, the portrayal of Tansads singer John<br />
Kettle is so devoid of any redeeming qualities that you<br />
start to wonder how Jones could have worked with him<br />
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at all. Like most autobiographies, there’s a strong element<br />
of self-justification running throughout the book,<br />
and the few attempts at self-criticism are unconvincing.<br />
Had Jones waited a few years before committing pen<br />
to paper, however, This Is Pop would have lacked the<br />
splenetic outbursts that make it so compelling.<br />
For all its faults, This Is Pop is very enjoyable and<br />
Jones is an entertaining writer. The vitriol is balanced<br />
by some very funny moments and, if you have even a<br />
passing interest in the music business, you’ll find plenty<br />
to get your teeth into. If you’re an aspiring musician,<br />
This Is Pop is an essential read – if you reach the end of<br />
the book and still want to be a pop star, you’re probably<br />
insane enough to make it. �<br />
293<br />
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Review [published October 2000]<br />
Gabriel Josipovici: On Trust<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian,<br />
was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked<br />
what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to<br />
reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!”<br />
He didn’t elaborate. You wouldn’t expect him to. Actually,<br />
he repeated the phrase, perhaps impressed by the<br />
sudden acquisition of critical acuity: “Pure escapism!”<br />
His answer troubled me. What was being escaped, I<br />
wondered. As it was a chat show, answers weren’t on<br />
the agenda and the host carried on about something<br />
else. Of course, if he had pursued the issue, the ratings<br />
would have declined as the audience pursued “pure<br />
escapism” on another channel. With no answer for me,<br />
however, the problem remained on my mind.<br />
After reading this book, I realised why I was troubled:<br />
Tarbuck wants literature to escape words as<br />
well as the world. This had not occurred to me. The<br />
words allow him to suspend his bellowed belief in their<br />
unworldliness, allowing an escape into another world.<br />
But the possibility that words might construe his belief<br />
in the primacy of the real world, in the same way as it<br />
facilitates escape into the other, is not admitted. Indeed,<br />
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and<br />
it cannot be admitted without suggesting the possible<br />
interdependency of real and written worlds. The implications<br />
of such a possibility, resisted by Tarbuck, has<br />
led to what we might call the literature of suspicion,<br />
where doubt hinders every move toward plain truth<br />
(think of the daunting classics of modern philosophy) as<br />
well as to the literature of pure escape. This opposition<br />
is usually referred to as “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow”.<br />
However, because neither wants to contemplate any<br />
alternative, both positions are essentially the same.<br />
Gabriel Josipovici’s new critical work suggests as<br />
much. On Trust: Art And The Temptations Of Suspicion<br />
is an investigation into how admitting to the unworldliness<br />
of literature might yet still allow free range into<br />
truth. “The problem”, the author says, “is how to keep<br />
suspicion from turning into cynicism and trust from<br />
turning into facileness”. Initially, the suspicion of literature<br />
described in the book seems to be a problem<br />
of our century’s worst events rather than Tarbuck’s<br />
everyday psychology. After all, the mechanised slaughter<br />
of the First World War prompted the challenges of<br />
Modernism, and the atrocities of the Second prompted<br />
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Adorno’s infamous phrase that “to write lyric poetry<br />
after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But this book pursues<br />
suspicion of art deeper into the roots of our civilisation.<br />
Josipovici traces the turn away from trust as far back<br />
as Plato’s response to Homer and St Paul’s to the Bible.<br />
Plato turned the gaze of reason on The Iliad and found<br />
it wanting, while St Paul took strict moral lessons from<br />
Old Testament stories where, as Josipovici show us,<br />
there is only ambiguity. Both responses indicate a radical<br />
shift in consciousness, one that we are still mired<br />
in. The essay on Homer’s epics and Greek tragedy<br />
reminds us of what came before. Josipovici calls it “the<br />
double vision”: “a sense of life in all its goodness, happiness,<br />
abundance; and death as finality, which must<br />
be accepted as part of that abundance.” Despite our<br />
promisingly Godless age, this sense of life and death<br />
remains alien, probably because there is a space left<br />
by God’s departure. We would rather have this space<br />
for our purpose than be void of purpose, to rephrase<br />
Nietzsche. Josipovici says this is the legacy of Plato’s<br />
and St Paul’s removal of death as finality. Without the<br />
immortality of the soul, the real world of goodness,<br />
happiness and abundance comes under suspicion.<br />
Emphasis is then placed on the individual. He or<br />
she is subtly dislocated from the communal tradition.<br />
As a result ‘a whole new world of inwardness’ is<br />
opened. Hence the rise in Confessional literature (St.<br />
Augustine, Rousseau), something still mistaken for the<br />
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and<br />
deepest possible insight. Josipovici sums up this shift<br />
in a startlingly sweeping passage:<br />
“[the] denial of the dual vision … in the end entails<br />
a denial of the world we live in and, ultimately, of ourselves<br />
as embodied beings existing within that world.<br />
Yet such is the nature of suspicion that, once unleashed,<br />
it appears to produce a totally convincing and self-consistent<br />
world, not simply an alternative way of looking<br />
at things but the only way there can possibly be.”<br />
This is remarkable because it questions the cultural<br />
traditions of two millennia. Yet it is precisely tradition<br />
that Josipovici sees as the way to resist suspicion. For<br />
despite the internalisation of the shift inward, the legacy<br />
of the ancients remained enough to appear in the work<br />
of the most profound artists; Dante and Shakespeare<br />
in particular. They show how we can always turn to<br />
the past for help. These writers appear as pivotal in the<br />
history of Western literature, and so too in the story this<br />
book tells.<br />
In spite of working within a craft tradition, both writers<br />
managed to include in their work the sense of its<br />
breakdown. Dante’s troubled yet necessary move away<br />
from Latin into vernacular Italian was made with the<br />
help, literally and fictionally, of Virgil, and Shakespeare<br />
adapted stories of kings losing authority (Richard II and<br />
Lear being the examples here) to represent the ‘essence<br />
of a vanishing world’ – that is, the tradition of consensus<br />
turning into one of authority – although of course ‘au-<br />
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thority’ necessarily destroys tradition; authority asserts.<br />
Without consensus, the old forms were compromised,<br />
and there wasn’t any ready-made replacement.<br />
What fascinates Josipovici is the way Dante and<br />
Shakespeare renewed their respective arts without denying<br />
this change. They did not become sterile artists<br />
asserting dead formulas, nor did they lapse into silence.<br />
Their Romantic descendants, on the other hand, were<br />
plagued by both sterility and silence. Even those who<br />
did manage to create something found it was not what<br />
they expected. Wordsworth’s major work is only the<br />
prelude to a grander work that never got written, and<br />
Coleridge’s most powerful poems were about the loss of<br />
his poetic sensibility. The Great Work became increasingly<br />
difficult to conceive, not because everything had<br />
been done already, but because the limits provided by<br />
consensus had disappeared, and this is a double-edged<br />
freedom: having no limit is also a limit. It is a condition<br />
we are still with. Wordsworth and Coleridge managed<br />
to achieve something only in the questioning of their<br />
authority. Josipovici shows this was done as a response<br />
to the change, as Dante and Shakespeare had responded<br />
before them. Implicitly, it refutes Romantic notions of<br />
the centrality of individual psychology and biography.<br />
Still, however, our culture assumes personal authority<br />
to be the pinnacle of artistic achievement. So the<br />
popular awareness of the Romantics remains one of<br />
‘self-expression’ – the assertion of the self in response<br />
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and<br />
to some daffodils. That ‘self-expression’ is a limited<br />
anarchy may explain why contemporary art has lost the<br />
respect it once had. As art strives for the greater truth,<br />
it has to admit to its limits – words on a page – and<br />
thereby undermine its authority. Many budding artists,<br />
discouraged by this paradox and keen to appeal to the<br />
newly suspicious public, accept that writing is only a<br />
plaything, a place of escape, mitigated perhaps by social<br />
or historical relevance. The best thinkers turn instead to<br />
disciplines (the very word reveals its attraction) such as<br />
science, politics and philosophy, where the truth does<br />
not have to rely on words (so they assume). Literature<br />
gets Irvine Welsh.<br />
So, when Josipovici reaches the 20th century, the<br />
pressure is at its peak. Literature has lost much of<br />
its pre-eminence; it has been superseded by other<br />
forms. Yet perhaps those who claim that film is the<br />
most important art of the 20th century are right only<br />
in the way they are right if they say that Totalitarianism<br />
is its most important political system. Film, like<br />
a tyrannical regime, depends on appearances. It bears<br />
no reflexive commentary. Literature is different.<br />
Josipovici shows how three otherwise very dissimilar<br />
20th-century writers responded to their suspicion of<br />
art with reflexive commentary. Now this can often<br />
lead to a novel without narrative tension, it’s what<br />
gives ‘experimental’ art a bad name, but what makes<br />
Proust, Kafka and Beckett special is the tension within<br />
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their work. Josipovici argues that this is the tension<br />
between extreme suspicion and the miraculous trust<br />
of each writer in the act of writing.<br />
In the first essay, he makes this point in exhilarating<br />
fashion by showing how Paul de Man, a famed modern<br />
deconstructor of literary pretension, misread Proust to<br />
such an extent that Proust becomes the deconstructor<br />
of theoretical pretension to come. What De Man disapproves<br />
of is Proust’s openness to change, traced over<br />
the 3,000 pages of In Search Of Lost Time, when he<br />
should be demanding single, certain truth. De Man is,<br />
Josipovici persuades us, an unwitting Romantic who<br />
has mistaken disillusionment for truth. Proust, it seems,<br />
is the true realist, helping us to see the overall shape of<br />
life, where change and death are central, obscured only<br />
by our everyday abstractions of reality. “In our daily<br />
life, we are too busy, in too much of a hurry, to respond<br />
fully to people or places”, Josipovici writes. “It takes<br />
death to jolt us out of our abstractions, to make us realise<br />
what the person really was in the fullness of their being.<br />
Death or art.” This reminds us of his reading of Homer.<br />
But whereas in ancient times such jolting gravity came<br />
lightly, as it was internalised, with Proust and the other<br />
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and<br />
Modernists it had to be achieved, like a game already<br />
lost in advance; something we resist instinctively.<br />
The essays on Kafka and Beckett are equally illuminating.<br />
In each, Josipovici makes close readings to<br />
show how their work moves forward without lapsing<br />
into cynicism or facileness, or if it does, how each writer<br />
learns from it. It reiterates Joyce’s words about mistakes<br />
being the portals of discovery, at least to a genius.<br />
But perhaps they are geniuses because they learn. And<br />
perhaps true learning requires an element of trust, an element<br />
of self-sacrifice. This would complicate applications<br />
of, say, evolutionary psychology to the production<br />
of art. Still, one might see this term “trust” representing<br />
the author’s hesitation before commitment in that it is<br />
a nebulous term, and also Romantic. Plato and St Paul<br />
would then have good reason to be suspicious. Perhaps.<br />
But at least it follows its own logic in not prescribing<br />
a certain kind of art and instead leaves future artists to<br />
find their own way. In the meantime, On Trust helps us<br />
toward to the space where this rare art might emerge, a<br />
place that turns out to be not one of mystical revelation,<br />
but as ordinary as life and death itself, and perhaps all<br />
the more revelatory for that. �<br />
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Review [published January 2000]<br />
Kevin Kelly: New Rules For The New Economy<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Despite its dry title, Kevin Kelly’s book isn’t just<br />
another self-styled business bible for the information<br />
age. Instead, it’s an overview of what he terms the<br />
“network economy”, which is not only superseding<br />
the old paradigms of the industrial economy but transforming<br />
how we live.<br />
The network economy has been brought about by<br />
the ever-increasing connectivity between machines,<br />
most obviously demonstrated by the internet. But Kelly<br />
argues that such connectivity goes much deeper. The<br />
continually decreasing cost of silicon chips means that<br />
there will soon be one embedded in every object that<br />
we make, from computers to clothes to chocolate bars.<br />
These “dots of intelligence”, as Kelly terms them,<br />
bring about the connection of everything to everything<br />
and with it, the flow of information required for commerce<br />
to make ever more informed decisions about<br />
satisfying the demands of the consumer, wherever they<br />
are in the world. It’s those businesses which react fastest<br />
to the changing need of their customers who will<br />
prosper from the network economy.<br />
While one might expect visionary hyperbole from<br />
BUY Kevin Kelly books online from and<br />
the executive editor of Wired magazine, Kelly skilfully<br />
avoids falling into the trap of proclaiming technological<br />
utopia. He acknowledges that the idea of a silicon<br />
chip in every item may seem sinister to some and emphasises<br />
that technology is not a global panacea.<br />
But his arguments about the rise of the network<br />
economy are made all the more convincing by his<br />
continual reference to real-world examples, such as<br />
corporate behemoths General Motors and IBM struggling<br />
to adapt to new demands precisely because of<br />
their size. What was once their big advantage has now<br />
become a disadvantage. Kelly is not so much interested<br />
in speculation about the future as to what is happening<br />
at the moment.<br />
For the consumer in the street, this flow of information<br />
should mean that they increasingly get exactly what they<br />
want, as companies stop producing for mass markets and<br />
start catering for sizeable minority markets. This extends<br />
from tangible products to information itself. The way in<br />
which the net is beginning to overshadow television as a<br />
news source is one such example.<br />
The only subject which Kelly doesn’t address is the<br />
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glib use of the phase “global economy”, which in reality<br />
misses out most of Africa and Asia, where many<br />
have never made a phone call, let alone encountered a<br />
silicon chip.<br />
For a book which discusses the new opportunities<br />
that technology is bringing both to consumers and<br />
BUY Kevin Kelly books online from and<br />
businesses, it seems strange that a huge section of<br />
the world’s inhabitants appear to have been ignored.<br />
New Rules For The New Economy does an excellent<br />
job of articulating the realities of the network<br />
economy, but it also begs the question about those<br />
outside it. �<br />
299<br />
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Feature [published April 2000]<br />
Naomi Klein: Ad Nauseum<br />
Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo<br />
“If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself…<br />
there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s<br />
spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are<br />
fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves – it’s the<br />
only way to save your fucking soul.” – Bill Hicks<br />
After reading No Logo, you may feel that Bill Hicks<br />
was understating things a little: by the end of the first<br />
chapter you’ll be en route to the nearest McDonalds<br />
with a crate of Molotov cocktails.<br />
No Logo is a book about brands, which means it’s a<br />
book about popular culture – Golden Arches, the Nike<br />
‘swoosh’, Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks coffee.<br />
It’s about the television you watch and the newspapers<br />
you read, the theme parks you visit and the films<br />
you go to see. It’s about magazines and rock music,<br />
universities and the internet. In short, it’s a book about<br />
everyday reality – or, rather, what lies behind it.<br />
The connection between brands and corporate irresponsibility<br />
has been highlighted before – Nike’s links<br />
with third world exploitation are well documented – but<br />
No Logo digs much deeper. In an attempt to describe<br />
the rise of anti-corporatism and ‘culture jamming’,<br />
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and<br />
Klein covers issues as diverse as labour rights, censorship<br />
and education, and how the rise of the brands has<br />
affected them. The resulting book is likely to disturb<br />
even the most hardened of cynics.<br />
“When deep space exploitation ramps up, it will be<br />
corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar<br />
Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.”<br />
– Fight Club<br />
In the early chapters of the book, Klein describes<br />
the rise of the brands. Originally an importer of cheap<br />
Japanese clothing, Nike successfully reinvented itself<br />
as a “lifestyle company”, selling an ideal rather than<br />
any particular physical product. As Klein reports, the<br />
most successful brands don’t actually make anything<br />
– from Tommy Hilfiger to Nike, they outsource their<br />
manufacturing, and the companies themselves concentrate<br />
on the all-important brand ubiquity.<br />
Through advertising, the companies encourage people<br />
to buy products that act as advertisements for the<br />
brand itself, turning a nation into what one executive<br />
gleefully describes as “walking billboards”. Levi’s<br />
repaints an entire street to promote its Silver Tab jeans,<br />
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footwear companies become synonymous with sporting<br />
achievement, and beer companies co-opt music<br />
festivals to promote their products. Like the narrator<br />
in Fight Club, customers don’t choose products on the<br />
basis of price or effectiveness; instead, they ask themselves<br />
“what sort of dinner set defines me as a person?”<br />
Where No Logo surprises is when it describes the<br />
less obvious, and arguably less ethical, forms of brand<br />
promotion. According to Klein, companies such as<br />
Tommy Hilfiger use black ghettos as seedbeds for their<br />
brands, recognising the white middle-class fetish for<br />
black urban culture and employing local youths to ‘talk<br />
up’ products to their peers. A similar technique was<br />
used by the Daewoo car company, which paid students<br />
to drive its cars and enthuse about them at every opportunity<br />
in an all too real echo of The Truman Show.<br />
If you spend any time on the internet, you’ll see entertainment<br />
companies doing the same thing on message<br />
boards and newsgroups.<br />
Klein doesn’t need to lecture you about the increasing<br />
ubiquity of sales messages – she lets the facts speak<br />
for themselves as she describes universities where<br />
Coca-Cola is “the official soft drink”, schools where<br />
the mega-brands have their logos on textbooks and toilet<br />
cubicles, and university departments wholly reliant<br />
on corporate sponsorship.<br />
“No Logo demeans the causes it purports to celebrate<br />
by offering a narrow, fashion victim’s perspective on<br />
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and<br />
achievements that have undoubtedly helped to make<br />
the world a better place.” – Barry Delaney, creative<br />
partner at Delaney Fletcher Bozell, Management Today<br />
Where No Logo excels is in the chapters detailing the<br />
‘achievements’ that the above reviewer believes “have<br />
undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place”.<br />
Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands<br />
have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers,<br />
increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic<br />
wages, and the continual erosion of workers’ rights.<br />
One executive responds to calls for a “living wage” by<br />
saying, apparently without irony, “while the concept<br />
is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities<br />
and realities of our business environment”. When two<br />
McDonalds employees successfully win the right to<br />
union recognition – almost unheard of in the fast food<br />
industry – the company simply shuts down the branch.<br />
Klein argues that McDonalds has deliberately presented<br />
itself as a company that employs teenagers while<br />
they look for their first ‘real’ job. Despite a workforce<br />
that is considerably older and better educated than the<br />
pimply youths of repute, this successful image-making<br />
enables the company to keep hours and wages at levels<br />
which, in any other industry, would attract howls of<br />
protest. Klein also describes the conditions inside call<br />
centres, which have been described elsewhere as “the<br />
dark, satanic mills of the technological revolution”.<br />
In Britain, as in America, call centres are one of the<br />
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few growth industries, traditionally located in areas of<br />
high male unemployment and employing a workforce<br />
largely comprised of part-time, female – and low-paid<br />
– workers.<br />
One of the most disturbing parts of the book is<br />
when it focuses on the issue of censorship. As the<br />
book explains, the strategies of retailers such as Wal-<br />
Mart – essentially, bulldozing the competition out of<br />
business – means that, as one record company executive<br />
admits, “Wal-Mart is the only game in town”. It’s<br />
something the chain hasn’t been slow to realise, and<br />
the company’s pro-family stance means that it regularly<br />
practices censorship. <strong>Magazine</strong> covers have to<br />
be pre-vetted by the company; if they aren’t and Wal-<br />
Mart feels the cover is ‘inappropriate’, the publication<br />
will be de-listed – in other words, the retailer will<br />
never stock that publication again. Record companies<br />
regularly tone down releases to make them appropriate<br />
for Wal-Mart’s censors, and magazines know better<br />
than to feature anything less than wholesome. It’s<br />
a worrying trend as, through sheer economic muscle,<br />
Wal-Mart effectively controls what the public is allowed<br />
to read, watch or listen to.<br />
“Media concentration is high, and increasing. Furthermore,<br />
those who occupy managerial positions in<br />
the media … belong to the same privileged elites, and<br />
might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations,<br />
and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own<br />
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and<br />
class interests as well. Journalists entering the system<br />
are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to<br />
these ideological pressures” – Noam Chomsky<br />
One key area highlighted by No Logo is the increasingly<br />
incestuous corporate world, where the same<br />
companies own television stations, record companies<br />
and newspapers. British readers will be familiar with<br />
the Sun newspaper’s regular plugs for Sky TV and Fox<br />
Movies, all of whom share the same parent company,<br />
but the book describes how the links between companies<br />
can alter the news itself. An expose of theme<br />
parks by ABC was spiked after the reporters uncovered<br />
shocking events at Disney, ABC’s owners, and Klein<br />
describes a number of similar occurrences in other<br />
news media.<br />
This ‘corporate synergy’ has an effect on politics,<br />
too. Klein recounts how journalists are expected to<br />
give certain politicians an easy ride if those politicians<br />
are responsible for handing out valuable broadcasting<br />
licences to a newspaper’s parent company – a tradition<br />
that’s also well-established in the UK.<br />
Klein argues that corporate interference can also<br />
cost lives. The majority of American universities work<br />
in ‘partnership’ with brands, carrying out research or<br />
helping develop new designs for training shoes. Klein<br />
asks whether such links devalue the traditional independence<br />
of universities – almost every sponsorship<br />
contract, explains Klein, includes a ‘gagging clause’<br />
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that prevents any criticism of the corporate benefactor.<br />
The tale of the student expelled for wearing a Pepsi<br />
t-shirt to his college’s Coca-Cola day is amusing, but<br />
Klein quickly follows this by describing how corporatesponsored<br />
drug trials uncovered potentially fatal side<br />
effects in the sponsor’s products. When the researchers<br />
attempted to publish their findings in scientific journals,<br />
the universities were threatened with the termination of<br />
their lucrative sponsorship contracts, and the researchers<br />
were promptly sacked.<br />
On the face of it, sponsorship seems the ideal solution<br />
to the growing problem of funding for educational<br />
institutions, but many campaigners are worried about<br />
the growing presence of commercially funded learning<br />
materials in schools and colleges: as the Centre<br />
for Commercial-Free Schools notes, “when [the]<br />
Consumers Union collected and evaluated examples<br />
of these materials, it found that 80 percent contained<br />
biased or incomplete information, and promoted a<br />
viewpoint that favoured consumption of the sponsor’s<br />
product or service or otherwise favoured the company<br />
and its economic agenda”. In an article aimed<br />
at schoolchildren, activist magazine Adbusters argues<br />
that “companies profit by changing the way you think.<br />
Representatives of the drug Prozac will come to your<br />
school to ‘teach’ you about depression. Exxon has<br />
[an] ecology curriculum that shows how clean the<br />
environment of Alaska is”.<br />
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“Let’s remember November 30 and the days that<br />
followed as the launch of the Seattle Rebellion, the<br />
anti-corporate resistance that will reshape society in<br />
the next 10 years. It wasn’t a skirmish or an opening<br />
salvo, but a manifesto etched in the streets by tens of<br />
thousands of people.” – Adbusters<br />
The closing chapters of No Logo investigate the growing<br />
number of protests against globalisation, of which<br />
the Seattle Riots of late 1999 and the current anti-GM<br />
food campaigns have been the most visible. Although<br />
both events occurred after the book’s completion, they<br />
help to reinforce Klein’s conclusion that the rise of<br />
global brands and increasing consumer awareness is<br />
leading to a growing backlash.<br />
One of the most visible forms of anti-corporatism<br />
is ‘culture jamming’, espoused by groups such as<br />
Adbusters and the band Negativland. Culture jamming<br />
attempts to subvert the ubiquitous advertising<br />
messages by spoofing them or altering their meaning<br />
in Situationist-style pranks, and the Adbusters site in<br />
particular offers a ‘culture jammer’s toolkit’ together<br />
with a gallery of spoof adverts.<br />
Klein rightly questions the effectiveness of these<br />
tactics. While the proponents talk of their activities<br />
with missionary zeal, the corporations are hardly<br />
changing their policies as the result of a few spoof adverts.<br />
As Klein points out, culture jamming has been<br />
co-opted by the very advertisers it aims to subvert –<br />
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see the recent “image is nothing. Thirst is everything”<br />
campaign by Sprite, or MTV’s continual adoption<br />
of ‘underground’ imagery to reinforce its own brand<br />
identity. Even anti-corporatism has become a marketable<br />
commodity, as the success of major studio picture<br />
Fight Club demonstrates.<br />
Klein is more enamoured with activists such as<br />
the defendants in the McLibel trial, who successfully<br />
raised awareness of many of McDonalds’ activities,<br />
and the semi-political Reclaim the Streets movement.<br />
Rather than the outlandish hippies the media portrays<br />
them to be, Klein discovers that the people involved<br />
in the movement are attempting to make people think<br />
about the way in which every available part of civic<br />
space is saturated with advertising.<br />
It’s in this section of the book that No Logo falters.<br />
While Klein clearly believes that Reclaim The Streets<br />
is one of a number of groups that will define the politics<br />
of the future, the fact that most of the population believe<br />
the group’s members are all drug-crazed anti-car crusties<br />
shows the difficulties inherent in swimming against<br />
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the tide of globalisation and media concentration. The<br />
book rightly highlights the role of the internet in helping<br />
activists to organise and disseminate information,<br />
and the outcry over genetically modified foods demonstrates<br />
the effect that a well-organised, single-issue<br />
campaign can have. By comparison, the demonstrations<br />
against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle seemed<br />
to have no clear agenda and, by degenerating into riots,<br />
made it easy for the media to dismiss any legitimate<br />
protest as the work of subversives and ‘terrorists’. As<br />
Klein points out, Adbusters magazine is starting to<br />
resemble the very media companies it urges its readers<br />
to fight against, while she cheerfully admits the irony of<br />
massive global corporations publishing anti-corporate<br />
polemics such as No Logo, which are marketed just like<br />
any other product.<br />
No Logo is a powerful read – Chomsky without the<br />
paranoia – and, if you have even the slightest interest<br />
in popular culture, it’s an essential one. Unfortunately,<br />
while it’s easy to share Klein’s concerns, it’s much<br />
harder to share her optimism about the future. �<br />
304<br />
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Review [published November 2004]<br />
Rem Koolhaas: Content<br />
Edmund Hardy<br />
Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother<br />
and has come up with a new concept: Big Vermeer. I<br />
imagined contestants marooned in very detailed interiors.<br />
Actually, the connection is more an art-historical<br />
musing: we want to see people doing things indoors,<br />
and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas<br />
now it’s ‘A contestant in the diary room’. It is “an<br />
alchemy of transparency and daylight” which trades<br />
in intimacy. This is one of around 80 articles, features<br />
and graphic presentations rearranged into a book from<br />
their original place in Content, the magazine of Rem<br />
Koolhaas’ OMA-AMO firm.<br />
There’s something ineffably cool about Koolhaas,<br />
that wiry and opinionated architect who is utopian<br />
and Postmodern, who floats in “the amniotic fluid of<br />
global fashion” and who has designed many a dazzling<br />
project – see his in-construction fortune-cookie shaped,<br />
criss-cross silver design for China Central Television<br />
in Beijing. In his practice the idealism and breadth of a<br />
Mies van der Rohe or a Walter Gropius is fused with a<br />
political and social engagement with the world.<br />
OMA’s previous statement book was SMLXL, a big,<br />
BUY Rem Koolhaas books online from and<br />
heavy, brick-like publication. Content is paperback<br />
and flimsy, colourful and kaleidoscopic. “Dense,<br />
cheap, disposable” as the editor says on page 16. “It<br />
is almost out of date already. Content is dominated<br />
by a single theme, ‘Go East’. It is an attempt to illustrate<br />
the architect’s ambiguous relations with the<br />
forces of globalization, an account of seven years<br />
spent scouring the earth – not as business traveller<br />
or backpacker but as a vagabond – roving, searching<br />
for an opportunity to realise the visions that make<br />
staying at home torturous. Content is, beyond all,<br />
a tribute to OMA-AMA’s commitment to engaging<br />
the world by inviting itself to places where it has no<br />
authority, places where it doesn’t ‘belong.’” Koolhaas<br />
wants this book to be the equivalent of doing<br />
the splits in classical ballet: a moment, immobile,<br />
stretched between realization and speculation, as, I<br />
suspect, he believes architecture to be.<br />
This book is a compendium, a glossy cabinet of idea,<br />
observation, wit from Rem and his associates. It has<br />
politics but no single viewpoint. It arcs from the US west<br />
coast to Japan. It is various but always interesting like a<br />
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particularly high quality global magazine.<br />
It begins by cataloguing ‘urbicide’ – violence in urban<br />
environments – from the “subversion by mass transit”<br />
of Los Angeles to “cyclical construction, restriction,<br />
and destruction” in Jerusalem; West Bank and Gaza<br />
settlements. The articles here are urgent, sometimes<br />
playful, always serious. Koolhaas finds “the greatest<br />
concentration of Utopias ever known” in Moscow; the<br />
idea and practice of a museum is challenged in articles<br />
on LACMA (LA’s big all-round gallery) and the<br />
Hermitage in relation to the market influence; Prada is<br />
seen askance in ‘Prada Yada’ and other pieces. There’s<br />
a long and excited, er, presentation (full of maps and<br />
figures and ideas about the need to build a “Eurasian<br />
arc”) on the EU and its political possibilities. Koolhaas<br />
has designed a new flag which consists of all the EU<br />
national flags squashed into strips and presented from<br />
west to east: a kind of United Colors bar-code, a strong<br />
‘ID’ to stand next to the US Stars and Stripes and the<br />
blue and white of the UN. Britain’s tabloids got hold of<br />
that one and The Sun soon launched an attack: “nutty”,<br />
“batty”, they said while reporting how “expert opinion”<br />
had deemed the flag to be “a deckchair.”<br />
Elsewhere, we look forward to Expo 2010 in<br />
‘Shanghai Exponential’ and consider what makes<br />
a successful World Expo. London’s 1851 Great<br />
Exhibition showcased the advances of industrial<br />
revolution in all nations, and made a mark on popular<br />
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imagination as did New York’s World Fair of 1939<br />
and Osaka’s 1970 Expo: tying into Content’s theme<br />
of ‘going East’, the forthcoming Expo 2010 is seen<br />
as an opportunity to reorient the world’s idea of itself<br />
and its designs for the future. I particularly enjoyed<br />
a piece on libraries and the search for civic space –<br />
“The library represents, maybe with the prison, the<br />
last of the uncontested moral universes. The moral<br />
goodness of the library is intimately connected to the<br />
conceptual value of the book” – and the Koolhaas<br />
solution, in Seattle, is a large honeycombed building<br />
of huge spaces and screens showing the arrival and<br />
exit of books complete with a new “continuous ribbon”<br />
numbering system from 000 to 999 to replace<br />
the “much-compromised” Dewey Decimal.<br />
Whether one likes the idea of a central Mixing<br />
Chamber and a Book Spiral or not, the energy and<br />
scope of his plans and ideas are exhilarating. Every<br />
regular user of public libraries can relate to the search<br />
for biblio perfection. My personal favourites are the<br />
beautifully lit Berlin City library and the pod-interior<br />
at Peckham. Turn the page and Content moves on to<br />
plywood minimalism, perfume flasks to mix your own<br />
male-female smells while on the go, and a short history<br />
of post-Berlin wall world politics (‘The Second<br />
Empire’).<br />
That’s not to mention the 1km high Hyperbuilding<br />
or ‘Red Radio’, the story of how Communists in the<br />
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60s battled for Africa’s radio-waves in their belief that<br />
global revolution would start on the heart-shaped continent.<br />
And then the man who once wrote Delirious New<br />
York, writes about that city in decline, and instead gets<br />
delirious over Hanoi, Shanghai and Seoul.<br />
Rem Koolhaas is ever the iconoclast – against the<br />
grain, outspoken, inspired. In the tradition of architects<br />
BUY Rem Koolhaas books online from and<br />
who write idiosyncratic and visionary books – Le Corbusier’s<br />
Towards A New Architecture, Robert Venturi’s<br />
Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture – the<br />
contribution of Koolhaas’ latest is in its wide-ranging<br />
attack, its fearless engagement with the world – fearless<br />
in that it accepts its own ephemeral place at one<br />
particular moment. This, then, is Content. �<br />
307<br />
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Review [published November 1999]<br />
Kruder And Dorfmeister: The K&D Sessions<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Despite the rise of dance music in the 90s to the point<br />
where it’s arguably overtaken rock’n’roll as the defining<br />
sound of popular music, remixing is still something of<br />
a dirty word. It’s unsurprising given the way pedestrian<br />
remixes are continually used as filler on singles and<br />
even albums when an artist has run out of inspiration to<br />
produce anything new.<br />
That’s not to say that there aren’t remixes which beat<br />
the original track hands down – Fatboy Slim’s charttopping<br />
reworking of Cornershop’s ‘Brimful Of Asha’<br />
being a classic example – but they tend to be the sonic<br />
exception rather than the rule. Even when remixes are<br />
entrusted to other artists, there’s no guarantee of quality,<br />
as exemplified by the uniformly awful mixes of<br />
Underworld’s floorfilling anthem ‘King Of Snake’,<br />
murdered by the likes of Dave Clarke, Slam and, er,<br />
Fatboy Slim.<br />
The easy way out is to produce a track that sounds<br />
nothing like the original whatsoever. This may well<br />
produce something musically more rewarding, but it’s<br />
missing the real point of remixing – and that’s bringing<br />
something new to a track without destroying what’s<br />
there in the first place. Cue Kruder and Dorfmeister,<br />
two DJs from Vienna who’ve quietly produced some of<br />
the most stunning and startling remixes in the last five<br />
years and made it their trademark to leave the spirit of<br />
a track intact while twisting it into something utterly<br />
different. In fact they’ve been so quiet this album came<br />
out last year and I only heard it a month ago…<br />
The K&D Sessions is a double CD compilation of the<br />
best of those mixes – 140 minutes of music that takes in<br />
artists as far apart as Roni Size, Depeche Mode, Bomb<br />
The Bass and Bones Thugs ‘N Harmony. Citing names<br />
is a bit pointless though, because it would be wrong to<br />
think of The K&D Sessions as just a bunch of individual<br />
remixes, only listening to the tracks where you’re<br />
familiar with the original. Half the fun is that K&D<br />
take on tracks by folk you’ve never heard of – Rainer<br />
Trüby Trio, anyone? K&D revel in mixing all sorts of<br />
music, whether it’s rap, jazz, jungle or whatever other<br />
genre you care to name. As such, it’s an immaculately<br />
crafted, unclassifiable album to get lost in, where every<br />
track imperceptibly segues into the next so that you’re<br />
never quite sure where you are, but wherever you are is<br />
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308<br />
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worth hanging around.<br />
As you’d expect from a record on a label called G-<br />
Stoned, the overall atmosphere of The K&D Sessions<br />
is laid back – you won’t hear any screeching 303s<br />
or encounter superfast bpms here. Instead, there are<br />
beautifully precise drums and sublimely warm deep<br />
bass lines which create their own distinct sound without<br />
becoming repetitious. Add their ear for dropping<br />
just enough melody over the top to create a simple but<br />
opulent sound, and you have music that makes 3 in the<br />
morning a wonderful place to be. If you really want a<br />
half-arsed “sounds-a-bit-like” reference, then it would<br />
have to be David Holmes, but the comparison doesn’t<br />
do either parties justice.<br />
K&D are also refreshingly fond of keeping vocal<br />
tracks almost intact, rather than obliterating them completely.<br />
Nowhere does this stand out more than their<br />
sublimely moody mix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Useless’,<br />
where Dave Gahan’s weary voice is given centre stage<br />
over nothing besides pared down bass and is all the<br />
more powerful for it. Not that K&D are techno-angst<br />
merchants, producing beautiful but chilly soundscapes<br />
in their bedrooms – their sound is organic, elegant,<br />
eclectic and endlessly inventive.<br />
In short, then, The K&D Sessions is one of those<br />
albums that comes out of the blue, providing a whole<br />
bunch of surprises to make even the most jaded get<br />
excited about music again. It’s a bit like when a friend<br />
gives you a tape of bands you’ve never heard of and<br />
you wind up leaping round the living room listening<br />
to it. These are remixes which transcend their original<br />
incarnations to become K&D’s own and a whole new<br />
universe to explore with it. What more do you want for<br />
£12.99? �<br />
BUY Kruder And Dorfmeister music online from and<br />
309<br />
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Review [published November 2002]<br />
Andrey Kurkov: Death And The Penguin<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt<br />
plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality<br />
of the foreground subject matter to make one<br />
carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot<br />
is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared,<br />
that is, to the foreground.<br />
Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives in a tenement<br />
block in Kiev, capital of the relatively new nation of<br />
Ukraine (not The Ukraine). Like many of us in the Deregulated<br />
World, he doesn’t have a permanent job and<br />
relies instead on contacts to bag the odd journalistic<br />
assignment. There is a lot of time off. We join him as he<br />
tries to make use of his empty time by writing fiction,<br />
something he’s always dreamed of doing on a permanent<br />
basis. He wants to escape the teasing ghostliness<br />
of the short story and write what the real world thinks<br />
is the real thing: a novel. Instead, he sits at his kitchen<br />
table and writes another short story, later hawking it<br />
around a few newspapers.<br />
This might be the beginning of many other worthy,<br />
socially accurate novels portraying post-Soviet economic<br />
‘reform’. But Viktor has a saving grace for the<br />
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reader: his pet Misha, the penguin of the title. Misha<br />
came from an impoverished local zoo when they offered<br />
its animals as pets to anyone who could provide<br />
food for them. Viktor took the penguin because,<br />
abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had<br />
been feeling lonely: “But Misha brought his own kind<br />
of loneliness”, we’re told, “and the result was … two<br />
complementary lonelinesses”.<br />
Misha’s presence in the novel is glorious. Whatever<br />
Viktor does, Misha is somewhere in the background<br />
asking for attention by not asking. We always want to<br />
know what he’s doing, how he is, what he’s feeling.<br />
Whenever we read of Viktor’s exploits, and they are<br />
copious, we think of Misha standing somewhere in the<br />
background, his emotions, if he has any, concealed by<br />
his expressionless exterior. The only hint of an answer<br />
comes when Viktor runs him a cold bath and he flops<br />
into it happily, or when he is taken to a frozen lake during<br />
the winter months and he disappears into a fishing<br />
hole for ages, bewildering alcoholic fisherman when he<br />
pops out again.<br />
In my fictional experience, only Karenin in Kundera’s<br />
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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, and Balak in S.Y.<br />
Agnon’s Only Yesterday do pet animals (in this case<br />
both dogs) appear so accurately and memorably. However,<br />
Misha is a suffering penguin: he has depression.<br />
An elderly penguinologists, as he calls himself, tells<br />
Viktor that Misha is superheated under his two layers<br />
of fat, and nobody would be happy feeling like that,<br />
would they? Viktor feels sorry for his pet but doesn’t<br />
seem to make much effort to cheer him up except to ply<br />
him with lots of seafood.<br />
Misha remains in the background as most of the<br />
novel is taken up with Viktor’s life. He gets a job writing<br />
obituaries for the main Kiev newspaper. He makes<br />
a name for himself with the philosophical flourishes<br />
and elegiac, allusive nature of his obelisks, as he calls<br />
them. His editor pays him well in US dollars. The plot<br />
revolves around the behind-the-scenes ramifications of<br />
these obituaries. This is also why we turn the pages,<br />
though more in agitation than pleasure. We want to find<br />
out what is going on and how it all works out.<br />
In the meantime, and the meantime seems to last most<br />
of the entire 227 pages, we live in Viktor’s world, full of<br />
events suggesting something dark going on elsewhere,<br />
waiting to spring into his life with violence, yet also<br />
quite flat. A man, touchingly known to us as Misha-nonpenguin,<br />
leaves his young daughter Sonya with Viktor<br />
and then disappears. A man turns up and says he’s taking<br />
Sonya away with him, but he soon disappears too,<br />
BUY Andrey Kurkov books online from and<br />
and then Viktor is hired by a mobster to attend funerals<br />
with Misha at $1,000 a time. But nothing is revealed;<br />
Viktor worries, relaxes, worries again. Time passes,<br />
that’s all. A friendly militiaman offers Nina, his niece,<br />
as Sonya’s nanny, and she promptly becomes Viktor’s<br />
lover without, it seems, any passion passing between<br />
them (that “complementary loneliness” again). Life<br />
carries on as dully as usual and Viktor continues with<br />
his obelisks at his kitchen table.<br />
So what makes this such an amusing, affecting, readable<br />
novel? Well, if Misha the penguin is so attractive<br />
to us in his silence, mystery and apparent sadness, then<br />
the “death” of the title is his abstract equal – standing<br />
behind the action, waiting, inscrutable, not asking for<br />
anything, yet preying on one’s mind (in fact, I’m told<br />
that the Russian original means “Death of a Stranger”).<br />
The pleasure it affords us as we read is the same pleasure<br />
Viktor gets from his writing. It is an oddly comforting<br />
voyeurism on life in general, a life which is elsewhere,<br />
the subject of endless conjecture (the ‘plot’ we are all<br />
in search of). We watch it all from the perspective of a<br />
place where nothing happens – Viktor’s mind, the obituaries<br />
he writes, this novel in particular and literature<br />
in general. We watch it all with death and the penguin<br />
blinking impassively in the corner, and we are oddly<br />
moved. We don’t want it to end, no matter how plainly<br />
written or routinely translated it is. It complements our<br />
loneliness. �<br />
311<br />
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Review [published January 2005]<br />
Emma Larkin: Secret Histories<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly<br />
an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George<br />
Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories: Finding<br />
George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop is actually<br />
a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in<br />
the fate of pre- and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been<br />
published in the USA under the less lyrical title Finding<br />
George Orwell In Burma)<br />
Governed by one’s of the world’s longest serving<br />
military dictatorships, which has managed to wholly<br />
destroy the infrastructure and prosperity of arguably<br />
Asia’s most naturally wealthy country, Secret<br />
Histories provides a ground-level view of the perils<br />
of living in modern-day Myanmar. Emma Larkin, a<br />
British woman who speaks fluent Burmese (sadly her<br />
biographical sketch is, indeed, too sketchy to ascertain<br />
much else), follows the geographical path of Orwell’s<br />
five-year residency within Burma, revisiting the cities<br />
and outposts of one of the former British Empire’s<br />
most far-flung territories.<br />
Along the way she exposes quite how much Myanmar<br />
has become the living embodiment of Orwell’s Nine-<br />
BUY Emma Larkin books online from and<br />
teen Eighty Four. All politics, teaching and literature<br />
are ruthlessly policed and scrutinised, with imprisonment<br />
for the smallest misdemeanours regularly meted<br />
out. Torture and disappearance are the norm. Corruption<br />
and unemployment are rife, and Myanmar’s one<br />
sole beacon of hope, the activist Aung San Suu Kyi, is<br />
still under house arrest. (Larkin explains the reverence<br />
surrounding Suu Kyi is due to her being the daughter<br />
of Aung San, who is widely considered the hero-father<br />
of the nation who led Burma’s independence from<br />
the British; her continued refusal to be intimidated by<br />
the murderous tactics of the regime have led them to<br />
repeatedly smear her as a “foreign devil” thanks to her<br />
marriage to Englishman Michael Aris).<br />
Secret Histories, like Anna Funder’s Stasiland<br />
which describes life in the totalitarian communist state<br />
of East Germany, provides a personal perspective of<br />
a truly appalling regime that lets the reader begin to<br />
understand what it is like to live day to day under such<br />
an oppressive government. One thing that endeared me<br />
to the Burmans straight away was their love of reading,<br />
as described by Larkin: unsurprising due to the lack of<br />
312<br />
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real information which they receive, but also a national<br />
pastime and passion that has led numerous people to<br />
preserve secret libraries of books that have otherwise<br />
been banned by the authorities.<br />
Whilst everyday life is undeniable misery in Myanmar,<br />
the people who Larkin describes are still full of<br />
life, some how finding the will to live and live fully<br />
despite their most restrictive of circumstances and to<br />
try and make tiny but vital movements towards making<br />
their country become free again.<br />
This book is transformative – before I began reading<br />
it I knew virtually nothing about Burma – at the end of<br />
its 230 pages, I feel I’ve gained at least a valuable gloss<br />
on its modern history and, wholly secondary to that,<br />
BUY Emma Larkin books online from and<br />
an insight into what drove Orwell to write – it was on<br />
his return from Burma to England that he horrified his<br />
family by announcing his intention to resign from the<br />
colonial service and become a writer.<br />
Secret Histories is truly a vital book, and, with<br />
Stasiland, seems to be opening up a new genre (I’m<br />
hating myself for writing these words): female writers<br />
providing a personal perspective of political troubles;<br />
not personal as in their own perspectives, but in that<br />
they piece together the histories of the states they’re<br />
writing about through the stories of those who have<br />
lived within it. This strikes me as a vital counterbalance<br />
to our more traditional, and of course wholly necessary,<br />
overview histories. �<br />
313<br />
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Interview [published September 2006]<br />
Abby Lee: Girl With A One Track Mind<br />
An interview by Chris Mitchell<br />
[Ed note – this interview was conducted before Abby<br />
Lee’s real identity was revealed by a ‘quality’ Sunday<br />
newspaper days after the publication of GWAOTM.<br />
You can read about Abby being stalked by journalists<br />
and the subsequent fallout on her blog]<br />
Getting the book published must be a real buzz.<br />
Do you plan to keep going with the blog and write<br />
more books (i.e. go pro), or will working in film<br />
remain your priority?<br />
It has been a real buzz, yeah: I’m very excited about<br />
it all. I really hope the book will reach more people that<br />
would otherwise not have read the blog, and that will<br />
get them reading about sex too. It would be wonderful<br />
if a debate about sex could ensue – it’s about time<br />
we talked openly about it, I think. As for continuing<br />
the blog, well, I’ve been writing it for over two and<br />
a half years and I have no plans to stop yet: I enjoy it<br />
too much. I think as long as it gives me pleasure and I<br />
have the time, I will keep going with it. I am currently<br />
working on another couple of book ideas which I hope<br />
to develop further; it would be wonderful if I got to<br />
pursue even more of my writing now.<br />
BUY Abby Lee books online from and<br />
You get a lot of comments on your blog and you<br />
interact a lot with your readers. How much time<br />
does it take up? Do you generally like your readers<br />
– do you think they get where you’re coming from?<br />
I do try to reply to comments on the blog as best I<br />
can, because the interactivity between my readers and<br />
myself is an important part of the blogging experience.<br />
I don’t get a lot of time to do this though, so my input<br />
can be a bit sporadic at times. That doesn’t seem to<br />
matter though: often my readers will be having a debate<br />
with each other in the comments box and I really enjoy<br />
reading their opinions and views.<br />
Overall my readers are a pretty clued-up lot and I<br />
feel hugely complimented that they enjoy reading my<br />
words – and come back for more. Occasionally I get<br />
the odd troll – who really doesn’t get what I am about,<br />
or who feels they need to make a moral statement about<br />
women/sex/sexuality – but my regular readers will<br />
challenge their views and often, come to my defence<br />
too. When I started the blog, I never thought that complete<br />
strangers would be arguing my perspective on<br />
sex; I am honoured that they do.<br />
314<br />
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There also seems to be a burgeoning community<br />
of other sex bloggers (for want of a better phrase) –<br />
has that let you meet new friends online or off?<br />
I’ve met quite a few bloggers actually, both sex<br />
writers, and non-sex writers. I’m not sure if we’re a<br />
‘community’ as such, but there does seem to be a kind<br />
of ‘blogger’s code’ which we all uphold: respecting<br />
privacy and anonymity, regardless of the subject matter<br />
we write about. It has been very refreshing to meet<br />
other sex bloggers – to know that I am not alone in my<br />
thoughts – and I count a few of them as good friends.<br />
Ironically, the bloggers I’ve met are the only people<br />
that know ‘me’ as well as know my blogging persona;<br />
none of my offline friends know I write the blog.<br />
Can you talk as frankly to your real life friends<br />
about your feelings as you can write them down for<br />
the blog?<br />
Sadly, no. I am reasonably open with my friends<br />
generally, but the explicitness of my thoughts – both<br />
sexual and emotional – are hidden from them. I’d love<br />
to tell them all about the blog and book, but it would<br />
really be like them reading my personal diary, which is<br />
not something I want to happen!<br />
What’s your best / worst experiences to come<br />
out of writing the blog and being a minor net celeb<br />
(albeit anonymous)?<br />
The best thing to come out of writing the blog, is to<br />
know that I have, in some way, touched some people.<br />
BUY Abby Lee books online from and<br />
Receiving emails from both women and men telling me<br />
I have struck a chord with them, or that they empathise<br />
with me, or that they have learned from my experiences,<br />
makes what I do seem so worthwhile. I never thought<br />
that there would be so many people who connected to<br />
my writing; with the thousands of emails sent to me,<br />
saying exactly that, I guess I was wrong.<br />
The worst thing to come out of writing the blog, is,<br />
I suppose, the fact that I – and my life – still have to<br />
remain so hidden, and that I can’t enjoy the success<br />
my writing has achieved. I’m in no rush to lose my<br />
anonymity – I really do need to uphold my, and others’<br />
privacy – but it’s frustrating that I can’t proudly state<br />
out in the open, that the blog and book are my doing.<br />
So, sadly, there’ll be no book signings, or meeting my<br />
readers, or anything like that. It’s a shame, but I’ve<br />
made this bed now, so to speak, so I’ll just have to lie<br />
in it…<br />
With the blog to book angle and the witty explicit<br />
sex discussions angle, there will be inevitable comparisons<br />
to Belle De Jour’s debut. Did you read and/<br />
or rate her book?<br />
I’ve been reading Belle’s blog since she began writing<br />
it; it was what inspired me to start my own. I haven’t<br />
read her book, so couldn’t comment, though I would<br />
say from her blog, that I think she’s a superb writer and<br />
although her writing is a bit emotionally distant, I love<br />
her style. I have no idea what she’s like as a person,<br />
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but I’d definitely meet up with her for a beer: I think<br />
we’d have a few laughs. And perhaps exchange some<br />
sex tips too.<br />
Do you think there’s more room for more women<br />
to write sex blogs? Is it good education for men to<br />
be reading this stuff so they can get more of a clue<br />
about what women are really after?<br />
I think there’s room for everyone to write sex blogs,<br />
not just women. I am overjoyed that there seem to be<br />
so many female voices out there though: it’s about time<br />
that a different – non-sexist, non-passive, progressive<br />
female – perspective on sexuality broke though into the<br />
mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better.<br />
As for men reading and learning, well, from the<br />
amount of emails I get from men, it does appear that<br />
this is the case; that they really DO want to know what<br />
women want, not just so they can please women, but<br />
so they can enjoy sex more themselves. If just one<br />
couple have better sex as a result of a guy reading my<br />
blog, then I think that’s an achievement and something<br />
to be applauded.<br />
If a girl wanted to start out writing her own thing<br />
or getting involved with talking to others on their<br />
own blog, what would you advise?<br />
Would it sound corny if I said “just do it”? Because<br />
really, that’s all she’d need to do: just start up a blog<br />
and write – that’s all I did. I wrote for myself, from<br />
the heart; I have always been honest and open about<br />
BUY Abby Lee books online from and<br />
my thoughts, and somehow, picked up readers along<br />
the way who wanted to read what I wrote about. And<br />
whilst doing it, I learned of others doing the same, and<br />
have made some good online friends as a result. It’s<br />
worth doing – if you have something to say, and the<br />
time and dedication to say it.<br />
Given your anonymity, how peculiar did it feel to<br />
meet up with Lex from Naked Loft Party when he’s<br />
already familiar with your entire sexual gamut?<br />
Is there something liberating about that? Does it<br />
create new taboos? Or does it just make everything<br />
exceedingly polite?<br />
It was brilliant fun meeting up with Lex from<br />
Naked Loft Party [NSFW, unsurprisingly]. It was a<br />
bit odd, with both of us having pseudonyms and not<br />
knowing what each other looked like – it felt like a<br />
blind date when we met – but it was wonderful to<br />
finally meet in the flesh, so to speak, the man whose<br />
writing I had admired.<br />
It wasn’t odd at all that he knew of my entire sexual<br />
history, because firstly, I also knew of his, and secondly,<br />
I knew from his writing that he was very open-minded<br />
person and would think nothing of any of my sexual<br />
escapades. So when we met, I felt relaxed in his presence;<br />
it was a meeting of minds – of like-minded minds<br />
– and the connection we had online, translated into a<br />
face-to-face one immediately.<br />
It actually did feel very liberating meeting him, be-<br />
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cause I could be myself completely and not maintain a<br />
facade – it felt like a huge weight was lifted from me,<br />
very refreshing.<br />
A lot of your posts recognise that women should<br />
be able to be wholly uninhibited in bed without being<br />
chastised for doing so by men, other women or<br />
society in general. Do you think things are getting<br />
better for women in that sense?<br />
I think, and hope, that we are moving in the right direction<br />
with this. I do, of course, support the view that<br />
women are not passive creatures who have sex ‘done’<br />
to them: we have wants and needs and desires, just as<br />
men do. However, I don’t want to preach that women<br />
‘should’ have to be some kind of ‘tiger’ in the bedroom,<br />
because I think that gives off the wrong message to<br />
young women and men: sex should be about equality,<br />
about two people sharing something, about having fun,<br />
not about one person fulfilling a fantasy representation<br />
of what their sexuality ‘should’ be.<br />
Saying that, whilst I do seriously question the view<br />
of female sexuality in the media (given that women<br />
are almost exclusively either ‘pure virginal’ types, or<br />
‘naughty slutty’ types), I also think that women do<br />
need to get more active in bed and take charge of their<br />
sexuality – regardless of how society views them. We<br />
need to move beyond the stereotypes and create a new<br />
version of our sexuality; one that will encompass our<br />
desires and wants – from our viewpoint.<br />
BUY Abby Lee books online from and<br />
Hopefully by doing this, more women will be able<br />
to state their needs; will be able to express their wants;<br />
will be able to take a more active role in their own<br />
enjoyment; and as a result, both women and men will<br />
have better sex. That’s what I reckon, anyway, and from<br />
the emails I’ve been sent, I suspect many others think<br />
this way too. My fingers are crossed that this happens:<br />
having a more open dialogue about sex can only be a<br />
good thing.<br />
And finally – do you have any words of advice for<br />
young people?<br />
First, have oral sex, and by this, I mean TALK about<br />
it. People need to be able to have an open dialogue<br />
about sex before doing it, then they’ll be able to discuss<br />
what they want and how they feel. And, as a bonus,<br />
talking about it can be like foreplay – it can be very<br />
erotic to discuss what you might like to do – so having<br />
a dialogue is an important part of the sex act.<br />
Second, I would always advise having safe sex. I<br />
always have condoms on me, and think anyone thinking<br />
of having sex, should do so too: there is no excuse.<br />
Boys need to practise putting them on when alone,<br />
so they become familiar with them; girls can practise<br />
putting them (with their hands or mouth) on a sex toy<br />
or even a cucumber, for that matter. The point is to get<br />
familiar with them, so it becomes part of the sex act:<br />
it can be very erotic doing so. If someone refuses to<br />
use a condom, then refuse to have sex with them: it’s<br />
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just not worth the risk – to either person. Saying ‘no’<br />
to sex should be just as acceptable as saying ‘yes’, in<br />
my opinion.<br />
Lastly, having an open mind, a willingness to learn,<br />
being giving, and being considerate, are much more<br />
important qualities to have in bed, than attempting to be<br />
the world’s greatest lover. Talking about what you want<br />
with your lover, expressing how you feel, being safe<br />
in what you do, will all contribute to a good time – so<br />
have fun! �<br />
BUY Abby Lee books online from and<br />
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Review [published April 2010]<br />
Wyndham Lewis: Blast<br />
Ben Granger<br />
First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just<br />
been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centuries,<br />
when the Great British reading public scanned the<br />
covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to<br />
the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were<br />
in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their<br />
thoughts on encountering this shock pink punch, this<br />
blinding black statement of intent, forcing the eye to<br />
flinch in its wake. Most would find it abhorrent, as people<br />
do with genuinely new ideas. But these ideas tend<br />
to find a way. This cover was an electric flash, heralding<br />
a storm threatening to engulf the formal pastoral of<br />
before. The aftershock of this storm still reverberates.<br />
What was Blast? Ostensibly, the first “journal of<br />
the Vorticist movement”, published in 1914, which<br />
only ever made it to issue two. In effect, the warped<br />
premature brain-child of one Percy Wyndham Lewis,<br />
a spiky spiteful self-styled Enemy of the Art establishment,<br />
and Vorticism (“of the Vortex”) was his vehicle<br />
for unleashing a crusade against them. Each word and<br />
image is heavy with the scent of his venom, slashing<br />
at those who wouldn’t accept his self-proclaimed<br />
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and<br />
genius. The one truly original British art movement of<br />
the first half of the 20th century was animated almost<br />
single-handedly by one man’s bile. But what was in<br />
it? Blast includes examples of Vorticist art by Lewis<br />
and his contemporaries, his own art and literary criticism,<br />
his unstage-ably extreme two man play Enemy<br />
Of The Stars, poetry by Ezra Pound, and short stories<br />
by Rebecca West and Ford Maddox Brown. Most<br />
notable however was its first section, and most unique<br />
construct, the Blast Manifesto.<br />
This manifesto is printed in the typography of contemporary<br />
posters, those advertising gaudy entertainments<br />
such as the circus or boxing match, and cascades forth<br />
in aphorism heavy bombast: ”We start from opposite<br />
statements of a chosen world / Set up violent structure<br />
of adolescent clearness between two extremes … We<br />
only want Tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like<br />
hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like<br />
a bomb…”<br />
Deliberately overwrought, powered by excess as<br />
if by rocket fuel, ready to declare war on art and the<br />
world, “BLASTing” and “BLESSing” the world as if<br />
319<br />
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from stance of some rogue Norse deity. English humour<br />
is first BLASTED “quack English drug for stupidity<br />
and sleepiness/ Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalising<br />
like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious<br />
chemistry of laughter” and then BLESSED “the great<br />
barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild<br />
MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the<br />
ancient fair of LIFE”. France is seen from both sides<br />
too, damned for “SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH”,<br />
praised for “Masterly pornography (great enemy of<br />
progress), depths of elegance, Great Flood of LIFE<br />
pouring out of wound of 1797.” Entrancing poetic pronouncements,<br />
mad with possible wisdom, spark with<br />
the force and rapidity of machine gun fire. “BLESS<br />
ALL SEAFARERS. They exchange not one LAND<br />
for another, but one ELEMENT for another. The more<br />
against the less ABSTRACT. BLESS the vast planetary<br />
abstraction of the OCEAN.”<br />
Here was an artform not seen before: writing, but<br />
writing which seeks to attain the form of visual art<br />
rather than literature, more precisely aiming to emulate<br />
the ever-shifting contours of the vortex from which the<br />
movement takes its name. (Lewis’ friend James Joyce<br />
was also beginning to cultivate this ‘writing as visual<br />
art’, but Ulysses was only started after Blast was first<br />
published, and would not be finished for a decade.)<br />
This is a writing which seeks to shake and unsettle the<br />
mind rather than cultivate or ‘improve’ it. The thoughts<br />
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and<br />
of the manifesto making up this vortex are therefore<br />
wildly and wilfully contradictory, at once revolutionary<br />
and reactionary. The contradiction is essential. Lewis<br />
states in the manifesto “We need the unconsciousness<br />
of humanity – their stupidity, animalism and dreams”<br />
also “Intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter and seer, not<br />
in the object or content.” The message is essentially the<br />
form itself, and so taken as a piece of writing, it lays<br />
itself open to charges of shallowness, meaninglessness.<br />
What is the use of a manifesto that spends equal time<br />
lauding and assailing the same targets?<br />
But there is no ‘use’, because this is art, all of which<br />
as Wilde said is “quite useless”. The thrill of the angular<br />
sentences, the unexpected words jutting forth like rogue<br />
corkscrews, produce a kinetic rush which is its own<br />
reward. Grammar, morality, congruity, indeed sense<br />
are all swept away by the vortex, an acidic word play<br />
which finds its apotheosis in an art of destruction, destruction<br />
of form and format, of meaning itself. And yet<br />
at the same time, one can find more truth and wisdom<br />
in its scattershot pronouncements than in a hundred<br />
more measured and erudite tomes, in the same way that<br />
Nietzsche is read far more than Kant. His conclusions<br />
may be wrong most of the time, but he has a far more<br />
interesting time getting there. Then again, this is not<br />
philosophy, but entertainment. Entertainment indeed,<br />
this is writing as art, but taken at its most base level, it<br />
is essentially humorous.<br />
320<br />
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The manifesto is a hilariously transgressive statement<br />
of intent, it’s sadistic screed sham utopian, in the<br />
style of Swift (one of its “BLESSED” writers.) This is<br />
a satirical cabaret as much as an exercise avant aesthetics.<br />
Taking apart England, France, “the years 1837 to<br />
1900 – abysmal inexcusable middle-class”, this stance<br />
of the grand nemesis, while its hatred may be genuine,<br />
is also a knockabout routine, and Lewis knows it. This<br />
stance of The Enemy is an anti-humanistic counter-pose<br />
to prevailing morality which presents the artist as an<br />
evil deity. Indeed, it presents the artist as a simultaneous<br />
Anti-Christ and anarchist – to quote a certain later<br />
descendant – and was every bit as much a cabaret act<br />
when his forbear performed it.<br />
Moving on into the pages of Blast – after the art of<br />
Wyndham Lewis’ words, the art of his images. Living in<br />
the aftershock, we may take it for granted, but this jagged,<br />
fissured assault on the figurative sensibility must<br />
have seemed terrifyingly alien at the time, inorganic, a<br />
re-scalpelling of the soul made possible by the machine<br />
age. They would be right, but this optical poetry creates<br />
the same psychic rush his writing achieves. Take the<br />
fractured curves of ‘Timon of Athens’, or ‘Slow Attack’.<br />
The angular menace, the sheer visceral abandon<br />
of these can still thrill today.<br />
The other contributors to Blast compliment the attack.<br />
Pound’s poetry is still in its infancy, but is still<br />
so unlike anything which has come before to add<br />
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and<br />
new currents to the storm. Rebecca West’s short story<br />
‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ is the most ‘conventional’<br />
narrative here (Lewis, ever contrary, said it was the<br />
only thing in the journal he enjoyed not written by<br />
himself) but its tale of a husband and wife bludgeoning<br />
each other in a lake combines an elegantly icy<br />
authorial surface voice with a savage energy beneath<br />
which add further prismatic whirls to the vortex. The<br />
art prints of Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth,<br />
Cuthbert Hamilton and Jacob Epstein take Lewis’<br />
style into still more redolent contours. But they don’t<br />
match the inhuman originality of the master. It is the<br />
painting and the prose of Wyndham Lewis that makes<br />
this vortex spin. Both the prints and the writing are<br />
a poetry of the sharp surface, a harsh, perverse carapace,<br />
unalloyed and unique. Lewis is the consummate<br />
elitist, untainted by the muck of mediocrity.<br />
The achievement of Blast is to create an aesthetic<br />
all of its own, a complete mental landscape every bit<br />
as unique as Impressionism or Cubism, feeding into<br />
the Dada and Surrealism that followed it. The merest<br />
fragment can find an image of the whole movement,<br />
perhaps the truest definition of ‘original’ art. Breton’s<br />
Surrealist Manifesto had a clear debt to the manifesto<br />
of Blast. Search on down the decades and the debt continues.<br />
From the whirling non-linear narratives of Burroughs<br />
and Atrocity Exhibition era J.G. Ballard, to the<br />
savage surreal satire of Chris Morris’ BrassEye, each<br />
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owe something to its serrated edge. In music, Mark E<br />
Smith of The Fall has made explicit the fact his savage<br />
jet-sprays of consciousness owe much to this original<br />
renegade. The late Malcolm McLaren was never so<br />
honest about the influence of Lewis on his own arch<br />
art prankery, but it was there all the same. Indeed the<br />
aesthetic of the whole avant-subversive-transgressive<br />
Pistols wing of 70s London punk (as opposed to the<br />
campaigning-idealist Clash wing) clearly took its cue<br />
from the inventively scabrous oppositionalism and<br />
fractured imagery of Vorticism, from the swastika-<br />
Marx-crucifix emblems on their shirts, to the blackmail<br />
lettering of Jamie Reid’s album cover attacking the<br />
eyes just as the journal’s cover did all those years before.<br />
McLaren and Vivienne Westwood even designed<br />
a ‘Which side of the bed’ t-shirt which homaged the<br />
“Blasted and Blessed” of the original manifesto, with<br />
new heroes (Eddie Cochran, Joe Orton, Ronnie Biggs<br />
and free radio stations) replacing the originals (Charlotte<br />
Corday, The Pope and James Joyce), and the new<br />
villains of (Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Max Bygraves,<br />
W.H. Smith and the Stock Exchange) replacing the old<br />
(the British Academy, the Post Office, Captain Cook<br />
and Sydney Webb.) The best of Blast’s descendants are<br />
magnificent. But when your stance is a fetishised oppositionalism,<br />
it is absolutely vital this is accompanied<br />
with absolute, dynamic ingenuity. Anything less, and<br />
the result is childish, boorish, worst of all plain boring.<br />
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and<br />
Its more degraded descendants could arguably include<br />
every pitiful spitting punk band, and the piss-poor<br />
amoral controversialism of Damien Hirst and Tracey<br />
Emin. But then you shouldn’t blame Graham Greene<br />
for Frederick Forsyth, nor Hogarth for ‘Mac’ of the<br />
Daily Mail.<br />
With Enemy Of The Stars, a two-handed play which<br />
sees claustrophobically entwined individuals existentially<br />
battling it out against an absurdist landscape, we<br />
see an often overlooked influence on Beckett, with the<br />
Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting For Godot descendants<br />
of Arghol and Hanp in their stylised rhetorical opposition.<br />
Lewis’ marred reputation means he very rarely<br />
gets the credit he deserves for this inspiration for some<br />
of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces of theatre.<br />
Yet of course Lewis’ reputation is eternally marred.<br />
The underside to this thrilling pose, from black-hearted<br />
nihilism, to the outright Fascism seen in the later career<br />
of the man, has been explored at great length elsewhere.<br />
The charge-sheet against this personally dislikable individual<br />
is neither light nor slight. Of course his barbed<br />
vision is open to abuse, abuse itself being its life-blood.<br />
Aesthetics translated into politics is very often a bad<br />
combination, as certain followers of that other great<br />
pugilistic aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche have amply and<br />
agonisingly shown. Nietzsche and Wyndham Lewis<br />
are like gunpowder, their explosions can both ignite<br />
beautiful displays, or lead to incalculable damage.<br />
322<br />
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W.H. Auden dubbed Lewis “that lonely old Volcano<br />
of the Right.” A lonely volcano maybe, but one whose<br />
diabolic lava solidified into the shapes which formed<br />
the cultural landscape we still live in. Out of print for<br />
decades, Blast is now finally available in a new print<br />
from Thames and Hudson. It’s worth a read, not least<br />
as this is a Blast from which we still live in the echo. �<br />
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and<br />
323<br />
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Review [published August 2006]<br />
Jack London: The Iron Heel<br />
Ben Granger on Jack London’s neglected dystopian novel that rivals<br />
Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World in its vision of the future<br />
When it comes to accolades for the most lauded<br />
prophetic dystopian satirical novels of the early<br />
20th century, there’s no doubting which are the big<br />
two. The hyper-Stalinist all-surveillance paranoid<br />
nightmare of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, and the<br />
distorted DNA-as-play-doh playground of Huxley’s<br />
Brave New World. Occasionally Yevgeny Zamyatin’s<br />
We gets a look-in as a curio, a minor precursor to both,<br />
appearing as it did in 1920, long before that of Huxley<br />
(1932) and Orwell (1949). There is one however which<br />
always gets passed over, despite being written before<br />
both the others, way back in 1908, and overlooked,<br />
despite being written by one of the most widely<br />
revered American authors of all time. That novel is<br />
Jack London’s The Iron Heel. In and out of print for<br />
decades, The Iron Heel has finally been republished in<br />
the last couple of months by Penguin UK.<br />
Orwell’s warning about the grotesque parody of socialism<br />
offered by Stalin and his acolytes which plagued<br />
the 20th century, and the grim auger from Huxley on<br />
the eugenic, anaesthetic aesthetic threatened by scientific<br />
consumerism which stalked both this century and<br />
BUY Jack London books online from and<br />
the last have been analysed, critiqued and celebrated to<br />
death. There is, however, a third more straightforward<br />
great evil of the modern age. The rich crushing the poor,<br />
the propensity of the forces of capital – when vicious<br />
push comes to deadly shove – to react with the most<br />
monstrous and tyrannical violence against the organised<br />
labour which seeks to grab more of its fair share<br />
from them. The evil that led to the bloody regimes of<br />
Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their tin-pot descendants.<br />
This was prophesied just as uncannily in Jack London’s<br />
long-neglected novel.<br />
The action of the book begins in the years immediately<br />
following when it was written. Labour relations<br />
in the USA are plunging as rapidly as the economy,<br />
while the thuggery of big-business against the unions<br />
increases in turn. Goons break limbs at picket-lines as<br />
families go hungry. No fiction there. Poverty spreads<br />
apace, and slower but just as surely does the Socialist<br />
movement of America (strange fantasy it may seem<br />
now, but as London wrote, the US Socialist Party, led<br />
by Eugene Debs, was growing rapidly, at one point<br />
gathering over a million votes even as its leaders were<br />
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being jailed.)<br />
The book is written as the memoir of Avis Everhard,<br />
wife of labour leader Ernest Everhard who comes to<br />
lead the workers’ insurrection. Avis is the daughter of a<br />
prominent US academic, and begins her account as the<br />
pampered intellectual circles her family frequents find<br />
it a delightful parlour game to invite Ernest for debates,<br />
much as panel games will have the token revolutionary<br />
on our TV screens today.<br />
Ernest, long-suffering, self-taught and assured union<br />
man has steely determination and razor intellect. He<br />
rips their arguments to pieces, and the smug smiles subside.<br />
In the final confrontation he manages to get one<br />
more forthright and honest plutocrat to admit the truth<br />
and discard the flannel. In the end their power over the<br />
worker has no moral basis and must be set in steel:<br />
“In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of<br />
machine-guns will our answer be couched.”<br />
“It is the only answer that can be given” replies Ernest.<br />
“Power. We know, and well we know by bitter experience,<br />
that no appeal for right, for justice, for humanity<br />
can ever touch you. Your hearts are as hard as your<br />
heels as they tread upon the faces of the poor.”<br />
Avis is entranced not only by the power of Ernest’s<br />
magnetic charisma, but also by the unpleasant but<br />
unassailable truth of the frightful poverty which, as he<br />
points out, props up her own classes wealth. She begins<br />
to notice the wretched poverty, only streets from where<br />
BUY Jack London books online from and<br />
she lives. The scenes of misery are jaggedly drawn,<br />
once again, without any need for exaggeration from<br />
what London saw daily with his own eyes.<br />
We see both the Everhards and the wider union<br />
movement as a whole as they’re wrenched to snapping<br />
point. As America’s oligarchs realise the conflagration<br />
to come is a fight to the death, they stealthily cast off<br />
the flimsy pretences of democracy. They organise into<br />
the great Dictatorship of the Iron Heel. The bloodiest<br />
repression seen in humanity’s history ensues.<br />
The novel’s narrative skilfully shifts focus from the<br />
small scale to the large and back again, the snapshots<br />
of poverty signifying the minutiae of the bigger vista.<br />
We see as the dictatorship takes hold it does so steadily,<br />
creepily. The insidious little signs -the silencing<br />
and ostracising of academics, the blackening of the<br />
names of campaigners, – are shown as Avis’s father<br />
is hounded from his job, and a reformed priest the<br />
family know is hounded into a mental institution. The<br />
icy paranoia of the witch hunts is evoked chillingly.<br />
With the thug gangs bought from the criminal caste by<br />
the ruling-class to pummel dissent – the wonderfully<br />
named “Black Hundreds” – the paramilitary paratroops<br />
of future Fascism are equally well predicted. He even<br />
got the colour right.<br />
The story continues to centre around the Everhards as<br />
the years go on and the Iron Heel kicks in. Congress is<br />
suspended, dissenters are machine-gunned. Scenes of<br />
325<br />
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conflict on a gargantuan scale ensue, interspersed with<br />
the individual intrigues within. The desperate hopes of<br />
the revolutionaries are evocatively told in between the<br />
details of their struggle. There is indeed no compromise<br />
up until an apocalyptic finale.<br />
As prediction, satire and warning, The Iron Heel is in<br />
many ways more prophetic than either Nineteen Eighty<br />
Four or Brave New World. Orwell merely exaggerated,<br />
exemplified and hypertrophied elements of a Stalinist<br />
dictatorship which had existed for decades, while the<br />
ruminations of Huxley set still further in the future<br />
remain something of an allegory. London was describing<br />
with exactitude a streamlined mechanised totalitarian<br />
dictatorship, backed by big business, specifically<br />
designed to crush the labour movement, when no-one<br />
dreamt of such a thing, and which would not actually<br />
be in place for decades.<br />
Of course his vision was vastly off the mark in<br />
many ways. America managed to crush a far weaker<br />
socialist presence by far less draconian methods, and<br />
real fascism arrived on another continent. But then<br />
we’re not currently living in a post-nuclear dictatorship<br />
with cameras in our living rooms, and no-one’s<br />
being bred in tanks yet either. He got a lot more right<br />
than he got wrong.<br />
In The Iron Heel London laid bare the whole machinery<br />
of a mechanised dictatorship, of the class-based<br />
mass murder to come, and did so during a pastoral,<br />
BUY Jack London books online from and<br />
pre-First World War era when the worst nightmare<br />
most Western audiences could imagine was a cavalrycharge.<br />
The novel was ridiculed at the time in popular<br />
reviews because of its bloodthirsty “sensationalism”.<br />
Even London himself may have intended the grotesque<br />
blood-bath he portrays in the novel’s later chapters – the<br />
full-scale warfare between the haves and the nots – as<br />
more hyperbolic warning than prophecy. These scenes<br />
do indeed curdle the blood and wrench the gut, and may<br />
have seemed like fantastical pornography at the time.<br />
But they’re no Somme, and they’re no Auschwitz. The<br />
grim reality dwarfed even his savage imagination.<br />
In other ways, it is not such a mystery why The Iron<br />
Heel has been passed over in favour of its rivals in dystopia.<br />
As a novel of ideas, as an imagining of intricacies<br />
into the minute grim possibility of the future it does<br />
not live up to them. There is no innovation to excite<br />
the troubled imagination as much as the telescreens,<br />
doublethink, Room 101 and Big Brother of Orwell, and<br />
the mandatory happiness, Soma and biological castesystem<br />
in Huxley. Being more narrowly political than<br />
either it does not lend itself to flights of speculative<br />
futuristic fancy. No-one is likely to base a reality TV<br />
show on one of its observations.<br />
Orwell himself noted that there was a strong streak<br />
of the Social Darwinist in London, a sadistic revelling<br />
in the cult of violence and the survival of the fittest.<br />
Given that London was sadly prone to the most vulgar<br />
326<br />
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white supremacist racism too, his failings could well<br />
have turned him to Fascism were it not for the strength<br />
of his commitment to the working-class cause. Race<br />
itself is almost absent from the novel altogether, a good<br />
thing given London’s proclivities, though an obvious<br />
and glaring blind-spot in a novel about an American<br />
class-war. A curious fear of “the mob” when pushed to<br />
its limits is in evidence too, the auto-snobbery against<br />
workers who don’t follow your cause:- the perennial<br />
flaw of theoretical socialists.<br />
Far more importantly though as a novel, by the test of<br />
plot, persona and prose it is not up with London’s best<br />
either, and in that sense too falls well short of Orwell<br />
or Huxley. The cult of personality London indulges<br />
in sadly undermines the characterisation of the hero<br />
Ernest Everard, who is ever-so-slightly too much of<br />
the Nietzchean superman to convince, even given his<br />
occasional endearing awkwardness. He veers too close<br />
to an icon in a Soviet mural. There is a slightly stilted<br />
characterisation in other main players too. In the grand<br />
epic of human destiny being described in book less<br />
than 300 pages long, people come can close to being<br />
ciphers, including the narrator Avis herself.<br />
There is no doubt that as a convincing and holistic<br />
piece of writing, The Call Of The Wild, that thrilling<br />
adventure story which also laid bare London’s Nietzchean<br />
sadism, is a better read, more deserving of its<br />
ubiquitous place on the world’s school curricula, and a<br />
BUY Jack London books online from and<br />
better example of London’s gift with the written word.<br />
The Iron Heel is a great deal more than an insightful<br />
piece of propaganda however. London always writes<br />
with a stern poetic vividness. Both stark and lurid,<br />
passage after passage in the book grasp so hard it’s<br />
impossible not to be drawn in. The narrative is charged<br />
with honest emotional energy, and it convinces as a<br />
blood-curdling thriller too. This is a short novel dealing<br />
with an enormous scope of ideas and events, essentially<br />
attempting to dramatise a Marxist analysis of US society.<br />
Yet there is never a dull moment. London has the<br />
gift of investing the forays into theory with the same<br />
excitement as exists in the scenes of bloody conflict.<br />
The “footnotes from the future” device tagged at<br />
the end of each chapter (in which we discover Avis’<br />
memoirs have supposedly been discovered in a future<br />
socialist age) give the novel a lighter satirical edge<br />
too, off-setting the book’s occasional slouch into<br />
portentousness.<br />
And while individual characters may stray near<br />
caricature, in the bigger picture London possesses a<br />
rather more nuanced insight into the psychology of<br />
those at both ends of the class conflict. The workers<br />
are the heroes of course, but London does not shirk on<br />
the corrupting and brutalising effect revolution inevitably<br />
has on its agents. And, even more importantly, he<br />
recognises that the ruling-class are not just crooks and<br />
thugs. They’d be a lot easier to deal with if they were.<br />
327<br />
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“They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained<br />
civilization. It was their belief that if they<br />
weakened, the great beast would engulf them, and<br />
everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good<br />
in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without<br />
them, anarchy would reign, and humanity would<br />
drop backward into the primitive night out of which<br />
it had so painfully emerged … This was the beast<br />
to be stamped on, and the highest duty of the aristocrat<br />
was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by<br />
unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak<br />
humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they be-<br />
lieved it, firmly believed it.”<br />
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Many is the Fascist and war criminal utterly convinced<br />
they have humanity’s interest at heart but<br />
scarcely has it been so well put.<br />
The Iron Heel then is a flawed but fascinating read,<br />
undeniably entertaining, and containing some of the<br />
most deadly insights of the last century. By one of<br />
America’s best known writers too. This book is a landmark,<br />
and has been ignored for too long. Here’s hoping<br />
its republication by Penguin will see it gain the wider<br />
readership it deserves. �<br />
328<br />
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Leo Marks:<br />
Between Silk And Cyanide 330<br />
David Markson:<br />
This Is Not A Novel 333<br />
Gabriel García Márquez:<br />
News Of A Kidnapping 336<br />
Bertie Marshall:<br />
Text Maniac 338<br />
Cedric Mims:<br />
When We Die 340<br />
The Modern Fantasy Diet 342<br />
M<br />
Alan Moore:<br />
Voice Of The Fire 347<br />
Patricia Morrisroe:<br />
Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography 349<br />
Morrissey:<br />
You Are The Quarry 351<br />
Cookie Mueller:<br />
Ask Dr Mueller 354<br />
Ben Myers:<br />
The Book Of Fuck 356<br />
329<br />
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Review [published March 2000]<br />
Leo Marks: Between Silk And Cyanide<br />
Eugene Byrne<br />
Leo Marks crops up in the oddest corners of the 20th<br />
century. The only son of doting Jewish parents, his<br />
father owned the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road,<br />
made famous by Helene Hanff’s book. Marks read his<br />
Freud (who once visited the shop), wrote a lot of stories<br />
and produced the brilliant/notorious script for Peeping<br />
Tom, the film about a disturbed young man who kills<br />
women with his camera and which virtually destroyed<br />
the career of its director Michael Powell in the early<br />
1960s. And look, here’s Marks again, providing the<br />
voice of Satan in Powell’s chum Martin Scorsese’s<br />
equally notorious film, The Last Temptation Of Christ.<br />
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you<br />
think you don’t want to read Yet Another book about<br />
secret codes in WW2, think again. To say that Between<br />
Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-45 is about<br />
just codes is like saying that programmes featuring<br />
Charlie Dimmock are just about gardening.<br />
“In January 1942 I was escorted to the war by my<br />
parents in case I couldn’t find it or met with an accident<br />
on the way,” begins Marks’ funny, angry, intriguing<br />
account of how, at a very tender age, he ended up<br />
BUY Leo Marks books online from and<br />
working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE),<br />
the cloak-and-dagger operation set up by Churchill to<br />
infiltrate agents into German-occupied countries and<br />
“set Europe ablaze”. The trouble was that all these<br />
agents had to communicate with England by wireless,<br />
but that the codes they were using, as Marks quickly<br />
figured out, were easy to break.<br />
By his own account, young Marks was an insufferable<br />
little smart-alec (he was compiling cryptic<br />
crosswords for The Times when still a schoolboy). If,<br />
he argued, he could easily break the SOE codes on his<br />
own, all based on poems, then all the resources of the<br />
German intelligence services wouldn’t find them much<br />
of a challenge either. Marks’s job, as head of codes for<br />
SOE, was essentially about devising new codes, then<br />
persuading the powers-that-be to accept them, then<br />
finding the personnel and resources (sheets of silk and<br />
labs to photograph the codes onto them – silk was easily<br />
sewn into an agent’s clothes and could withstand the<br />
most assiduous frisking by German security-checks) to<br />
produce them in the huge quantities required.<br />
Marks spent his war sitting at a desk; an anonymous<br />
330<br />
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neighbour, seeing him returning to his parents’ home<br />
each evening and leaving each morning laden with<br />
black market food by his Mama sent him a white<br />
feather. When he told his parents (who understood he<br />
was some manner of civil servant) that he was to be<br />
sent to Cairo for a week, his father left the room. “Now<br />
look what you’ve done,” said his mother. “He’s gone to<br />
get pissed.” But his father returned after an hour with a<br />
pith helmet, which both parents made him swear he’d<br />
wear at all times.<br />
In his Cairo hotel, he got talking with the Jewish<br />
American comedian Jack Benny, who persuaded him<br />
that being Jewish, he ought to start taking this war – a<br />
wonderful chance to fight the greatest anti-Semite of<br />
all time – a damn sight more seriously. Marks then told<br />
him a funny story about an uncle’s efforts to evade the<br />
call-up in WW1 and watched in astonishment as Benny<br />
re-told the story, giving a perfect impersonation of the<br />
uncle he had never met. “Thank you Jack Benny,” he<br />
says, “for giving me a month’s holiday in the hour we<br />
spent together … And thanks for not being ashamed of<br />
being proud of your race. I wish I had the courage to be<br />
one of the troops you’re here to entertain.”<br />
Marks’s war, though, was anything but a lark. It<br />
was part of his job to brief agents on their codes just<br />
before they were dropped into enemy territory. Their<br />
life-expectancy was pretty low, and their radio transmissions<br />
were usually the first thing that gave them<br />
away to the Gestapo. Marks carried this responsibility<br />
heavily and he remains angry, bitter even, to this day<br />
about the bungling and the bureaucratic in-fighting that<br />
resulted in so many astonishingly courageous men and<br />
women being captured, tortured and executed.<br />
These included his special hero ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Thomas,<br />
who was caught late on in the war and endured<br />
unbelievable torments because the Gestapo knew that<br />
he knew everything there was to know about resistance<br />
in France, but who nonetheless managed to escape. Or<br />
Noor Inayat Khan, the brilliant daughter of an Indian<br />
prince and religious leader; a capable enough wireless<br />
operator for the SOE in France, but because of her<br />
religion and upbringing she was incapable of telling a<br />
lie. Khan died in a concentration camp, as did the most<br />
famous SOE agent of all, Violette Szabo, subject of the<br />
postwar film, Carve Her Name With Pride. By late in<br />
the war, where agents had to use poem-codes, Marks<br />
had decreed that they should at least be originals, as<br />
well-known ones could be pieced together by the Germans<br />
and the codes broken more easily. Part at least of<br />
Szabo’s fame is due to the one he gave her to memorise:<br />
The life that I have<br />
Is all that I have<br />
And the life that I have<br />
Is yours<br />
The love that I have<br />
BUY Leo Marks books online from and<br />
331<br />
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Of the life that I have<br />
Is yours and yours and yours.<br />
A sleep I shall have<br />
A rest I shall have<br />
Yet death will be but a pause<br />
For the peace of my years<br />
In the long green grass<br />
Will be yours and yours and yours.<br />
Violette Szabo was shot in the back of the head in<br />
a concentration camp in 1945, holding the hands of<br />
two other SOE agents. More than half a century on,<br />
BUY Leo Marks books online from and<br />
Leo Marks still carries the burden of her fate and that<br />
of hundreds of others. For that reason alone, his book<br />
demands respectful attention, but there are plenty of<br />
others, too. It’s a valuable historical account (most of<br />
the official records of SOE have disappeared, probably<br />
because MI6 devoted a lot of its energies to destroying<br />
SOE rather than Nazism), but it’s also very funny, conveying<br />
perfectly the frantic 22-year-old always skating<br />
on thin ice and passing off his awesome responsibilities<br />
with wisecracks. There’s some interesting bits about<br />
codes in there as well, but you can easily skip them if<br />
you want. �<br />
332<br />
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Review [published June 2001]<br />
David Markson: This Is Not A Novel<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
There’s always someone telling us that the novel is<br />
dead. And that is how it should be. As well as offering<br />
us the chance to laugh at the fools who parrot this<br />
announcement, it makes us ask, for the umpteenth<br />
time: what is the novel for, exactly? The question<br />
should not be answered without referring to a novel in<br />
particular. Each novel is unique. Or should be. We’ll<br />
come to that later.<br />
One of the reasons why cultural commentators,<br />
such as the BBC’s Andrew Marr, proclaim the death<br />
of the novel is because novels have become irredeemably<br />
classifiable. Novels that break the rules seem to<br />
be so mannered, so distant from the world we call<br />
real, that they demand to be classified as frivolous<br />
and elitist. Most of them are. And they seem all the<br />
more mannered and distant because the classifiable<br />
novel has become so refined, so intimate with the<br />
deceit of language, that we do not see them for the<br />
very odd objects they really are. Instead, by effacing<br />
themselves in a whole raft of technique, they enable<br />
the reader-as-consumer to bypass any doubts and leap<br />
straight into what is desired: distraction.<br />
BUY David Markson books online from and<br />
The literary novel, on the other hand, is definitively<br />
unclassifiable. Or should be. Hence the regular asking<br />
of the question: “Why are detective stories/thrillers/<br />
horror novels/science fictions ignored when it comes to<br />
literary prizes?” The accusation that always follows is<br />
that these prizes are for highbrow snobs. In a recent radio<br />
interview, the question and accusation was repeated<br />
by horror novel writer (and TV presenter) Muriel Gray.<br />
As I listened in a departure lounge filled with airportnovel<br />
clutching passengers, I wanted to shout: THERE<br />
IS GOOD REASON! But I kept my dignity. Until now.<br />
The reason is because the novel has to reinvent itself,<br />
each and every time. When a reinvention is achieved,<br />
it deserves recognition. One cannot use the crutch of<br />
a genre, the alibi of a genre, and expect to receive an<br />
award specifically intended for a unique achievement.<br />
Muriel Gray’s horror novels have received critical acclaim<br />
by those who know about such things; Stephen<br />
King no less. Worth checking out then. But you can’t<br />
have it both ways Muriel.<br />
In the same interview Gray says she hates writing but<br />
loves having written. I suggest this maybe due to her<br />
333<br />
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self-imprisonment in genre. Real fiction is a form of<br />
exploring oneself and the world, perhaps finding oneself<br />
and the world, perhaps finding a passage through<br />
darkness (forgive the Romantic clichés). Maybe Muriel<br />
should try it sometime. She might even win the Booker<br />
Prize. Or maybe she should stick with horror. In recent<br />
years, the Booker has tried to appeal to a wider audience<br />
and so last year the shortlist was made up entirely<br />
of genre fiction. Or was it the year before? Who cares?<br />
David Markson’s novels will never be soiled by the<br />
attentions of the Booker Prize committee. He would be<br />
eliminated early on because of his reputation as an innovator.<br />
Anyway, as an American, he is ineligible. His<br />
earlier novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress is about the last<br />
person on Earth, although this is not apparent to the<br />
innocent reader. It consists of short paragraphs of statements<br />
and self-questioning by a lone woman. Actually,<br />
I haven’t read it, or any other of his novels. In fact, I’ve<br />
never seen any of them in a shop or a library. But I have<br />
now read This Is Not A Novel. It is a 190-page bricolage<br />
of quotations, anecdotes and opinions on artists, writers,<br />
composers, philosophers and various other high art<br />
types. Here is a random sample:<br />
“Timor mortis conturbat me.<br />
The fear of death distresses me.<br />
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without<br />
pictures or conversations?<br />
BUY David Markson books online from and<br />
There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt<br />
is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando.<br />
Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged<br />
heart.<br />
Pound died of a blocked intestine.”<br />
The final two entries here constitute the main bulk<br />
of the whole book: reports on how famous artists and<br />
thinkers died. Each page returns to this theme. As you<br />
might expect, it has a strong melancholy edge. I understand<br />
that Markson is elderly and unwell, so he has<br />
good reason to dwell on such matters. Yet to describe<br />
this book as a long lament about imminent demise is<br />
to miss the overall effect. It is something wholly other<br />
than melancholy.<br />
At the beginning, the narrator, called simply “Writer”,<br />
says he “is pretty much tempted to quit writing.<br />
Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.” So<br />
instead he presents this trance-like list. Some way<br />
into the book Writer intervenes to suggest it is a prose<br />
equivalent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. And for sure it<br />
is like that poem, or a piece of music, specifically a<br />
fugue (that is, “a polyphonic composition constructed<br />
on one or more short themes which are harmonised<br />
according to the laws of counterpoint” – OED). Very<br />
soon, the reader is unable to escape the special rhythm<br />
of anecdotes that at first seem to have absolutely nothing<br />
to do with literature. Yet in the end, and for the<br />
334<br />
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reason that it has nothing to do with literature, it becomes<br />
clear that it has everything to do with literature.<br />
After putting the book down, one is compelled to pick<br />
it up again, not to find out what happens next, but to<br />
re-enter the intoxicating rhythm.<br />
“Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.<br />
Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture. Jackson<br />
Pollock baked pies.<br />
William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.”<br />
It is significant that Markson tends to refer to highbrow<br />
artists. The contrast with their more famous<br />
achievements is relentlessly brought to the fore. We can<br />
read this sort of thing all the time about popular artistes<br />
on sites such as popbitch.com, but this contributes only<br />
to our enjoyment of pop culture. It doesn’t shock and<br />
resonate. In This Is Not A Novel, we can’t escape the<br />
fact that all great art is produced by people who die,<br />
while the work survives. A commonplace, of course,<br />
but a brute fact that modern artists confront on a daily<br />
basis. They ask, what is the point? It leads to frustration.<br />
It leads to despair. It leads to Gray’s contempt<br />
BUY David Markson books online from and<br />
for the modern novel. Some might think Markson is<br />
joining in with this contempt; ridiculing the pretension<br />
of high art. However, the endless unspoken contrast of<br />
absurdity and death with Writer’s evident fascination<br />
with the works of art referred to, only re-emphasises<br />
our uncertainty about what art is and what it does to us.<br />
One thing is for sure though: the artistic and intellectual<br />
achievements of the centuries did not come about<br />
by repeating what has gone before. Writer writes:<br />
“Writer has actually written some relatively traditional<br />
novels. Why is he spending his time doing this<br />
sort of thing? That’s why.”<br />
Essentially, if pretentiously, genre fiction denies<br />
death. The reader is cocooned from the world we call<br />
real by sticking to the conventions of character and plot,<br />
or at least by assuming that they constitute what we<br />
call “the novel”. Genre fiction does not question itself<br />
because it is the means to other ends. It may help us<br />
through the day, but not our lives. This Is Not A Novel<br />
is such for good reason. How Markson’s book helps is<br />
something I have been asking myself. And the answer,<br />
as I have just experienced, is in the asking. But maybe<br />
this is not an answer. �<br />
335<br />
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Review [published April 2004]<br />
Gabriel García Márquez: News Of A Kidnapping<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
“The men opened Maruja’s door and another two<br />
opened Beatriz’s. The fifth shot the driver in the head<br />
through the glass, and the silencer made it sound no<br />
louder than a sigh. Then he opened the door, pulled<br />
him out, and shot him three more times as he lay<br />
on the ground. It was another man’s destiny: Angel<br />
Maria Roa had been Maruja’s driver for only three<br />
days, and for the first time he was displaying his new<br />
dignity with the dark suit, starched shirt, and black<br />
tie worn by the chauffeurs who drove government<br />
ministers. His predecessor, who had retired the week<br />
before, had been the government agency’s regular<br />
driver for ten years.”<br />
This quote from the opening pages of News Of<br />
A Kidnapping has the unmistakable ring of Gabriel<br />
García Márquez’s world famous prose style – at once<br />
laden with pathos and yet tinged with black absurdity,<br />
it could easily have come from any of the Nobel Prize<br />
winner’s acclaimed novels. Yet News Of A Kidnapping<br />
is not fiction – in its documenting of cocaine baron<br />
Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror in Colombia, the book<br />
is solely concerned with the murderous realities of<br />
Colombian political life rather than the magic realism<br />
for which García Márquez is famed. These are realities<br />
which leave no-one untouched: García Márquez himself<br />
has recently become dangerously embroiled within<br />
the ongoing war between Colombia’s government and<br />
guerrillas, in a particularly twisted version of life imitating<br />
literature.<br />
News Of A Kidnapping is the culmination of three<br />
years research by Márquez, marking a return for the<br />
69-year-old author to his days as a young journalist<br />
within the Colombian capital of Bogota. He traces<br />
the stories of those relatives of Colombian politicians<br />
who were abducted in the winter of 1990 by Escobar’s<br />
Medellin cocaine cartel, an organisation so powerful<br />
that it systematically undermined all of Colombia’s<br />
civil institutions by murder, abduction and bribery.<br />
Given that Colombia produces 80 per cent of the<br />
world’s cocaine supply and that Escobar was the most<br />
ruthless of the country’s drug barons, it’s not difficult<br />
to understand why he wielded such influence and was<br />
wanted by both the Colombian and Americans governments.<br />
Escobar ordered the kidnappings in order to<br />
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give himself bargaining power with the then Colombian<br />
president Cesar Gaviria, who had embarked on<br />
a relentless manhunt for Escobar’s capture, with the<br />
added threat of supporting his extradition to stand trial<br />
in the United States.<br />
Based on conversations with the survivors of<br />
Escobar’s abduction campaign, who were mostly<br />
middle-aged women, News Of A Kidnapping presents<br />
an unflinching reportage of the lives of those held in<br />
captivity, documenting their despair, fear and hope. At<br />
the same time, García Márquez explores the struggle<br />
which continues to this day between the state and drug<br />
traffickers for the heart of Colombia.<br />
Even though Escobar is now dead, killed during a<br />
police shootout in 1993, his legacy of corruption and<br />
murder lives on. While García Márquez has attempted<br />
to bring his considerable influence as a world-renowned<br />
writer to bear on the political problems of his country,<br />
that selfsame influence has now caused him to be<br />
caught up in a fresh wave of terror to sweep Colombia.<br />
In April this year, a shadowy group calling itself Dignity<br />
For Colombia abducted the son of Cesar Gaviria,<br />
the former president who battled with Escobar.<br />
The guerrilla group have already established their<br />
political credentials with the assassination of a three<br />
time presidential candidate and a murder attempt on<br />
President Ernesto Samper’s lawyer last year. Their<br />
main demand following the kidnapping of Gaviria’s<br />
son was that García Márquez should take over the<br />
presidency from Samper, who has faced widespread<br />
calls for his resignation because of charges that his<br />
1994 election campaign was partly financed by drug<br />
traffickers. García Márquez has rejected the demand<br />
out of hand, saying that he was sure he would make<br />
“the worst president” in Colombia’s history.<br />
However, García Márquez has remained silent<br />
concerning the kidnappers more recent demands that<br />
he vouches for the absence of corruption during Gaviria’s<br />
presidency. Some have speculated that García<br />
Márquez has now been given the horrific power of life<br />
or death over Gaviria’s son, depending on his future<br />
co-operation with the guerrilla group. In a further twist<br />
to the story, the man in charge of securing the young<br />
Gaviria’s release is Alberto Villamizar, whose wife<br />
and sister’s abductions in 1990 were the impetus for<br />
García Márquez to write News Of A Kidnapping. “It’s<br />
unusual,” Villamizar has commented, “but everything<br />
that happens in Colombia is unusual”. �<br />
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Interview [published August 1997]<br />
Bertie Marshall: Text Maniac<br />
Chris Mitchell meets Bertie Marshall, the original psychoboy<br />
When does a debut underground experimental novel<br />
featuring a stomach-churning mix of depraved sex,<br />
hideous death, wanton coprophilia and insane genetic<br />
mutation gain critical praise from the mainstream likes<br />
of i-D, Time Out and The Big Issue?<br />
When it’s written by Brighton author Bertie Marshall.<br />
Psychoboys is his first literary outing and its kaleidoscopic<br />
narration about the story of Rez, a rent-boy<br />
surviving on the streets of Moscow and Berlin, has provoked<br />
accolades such as “unique” and “intense” from<br />
the likes of Grove Press’s Ira Silverberg and American<br />
psycho author Dennis Cooper.<br />
In the tradition of all great transgressive literature<br />
(think William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Kathy<br />
Acker), Psychoboys is not written simply to shock. “It’s<br />
about darkness and light, fantasy and reality, dreaming<br />
and being awake, death and being alive,” Marshall says.<br />
“It’s left up to the reader to decide what they make of it.<br />
There’s no absolutes.”<br />
Psychoboys portrays the extremities of human existence,<br />
but it does so in an exploration of how fantasy and<br />
reality collide, and the way Rez uses his imagination<br />
BUY Bertie Marshall books online from and<br />
to escape the sordidity of his existence. Underpinning<br />
the graphic depictions of depravity is a grand guignol<br />
humour, evinced by characters like Miss Thing – Rez’s<br />
transvestite sugar mummy – and Countess Handover, a<br />
bizarre transgender genetic engineer.<br />
Marshall’s novel avoids the problem of much avantgarde<br />
writing, where ‘experimental’ is a euphemism<br />
for ‘unreadable’ – Psychoboys is powered by punk-energised,<br />
page-turning prose. “Making sure Psychoboys<br />
was readable was something I really had in mind while<br />
I was writing the book,” Marshall confirms. “It was<br />
a reaction against the first book I wrote, which was a<br />
heavily fictionalised account of my punk days – and<br />
which nobody wanted to publish.”<br />
That Marshall’s first book was rejected is especially<br />
strange, given the amount of attention his exploits as<br />
part of the Bromley Contingent – the first group of Sex<br />
Pistols fans – has gained from the media, culminating<br />
in BBC2’s Arena documentary, Punk And The Pistols.<br />
The then 15-year-old Marshall changed his name to<br />
Berlin and hung out with the likes of Siouxsie Sioux<br />
before the term ‘punk’ had even gained widespread<br />
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understanding. “If someone had said to me that in 20<br />
years’ time, being a part of this group that goes to see a<br />
band is going to pass into popular mythology, I’d have<br />
said, ‘Um.’ Even stranger is the fact that a friend of mine<br />
has written a screenplay about the period and wants me<br />
to play myself 20 years ago. That’s a real trip.”<br />
Back in the present, Psychoboys’ pre-publication<br />
success has left Marshall bemused by some of the labels<br />
being used to try and describe his work. “It’s been<br />
called ‘queer science fiction’,” he says, “but what does<br />
BUY Bertie Marshall books online from and<br />
that mean? Why have labels at all?”<br />
This dissatisfaction with being pigeonholed extends<br />
to being classified as a gay writer. “I did this reading<br />
recently where all the gay literati were there – Alan<br />
Hollinghurst, Alan Mars-Jones, Patrick Gale – their<br />
readings were all very polite, ironic and slightly risqué<br />
and I just thought ‘Yuk!’ I don’t fit in with that at all – I<br />
couldn’t be further removed from them. Psychoboys is<br />
certainly not written for a gay market – it’s written for<br />
anyone who wants to read it.” �<br />
339<br />
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Review [published September 2000]<br />
Cedric Mims: When We Die<br />
Robin Askew<br />
The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach<br />
contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same<br />
time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets<br />
purple on the underside of the body where the blood<br />
accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal<br />
microbes gobble up the gut and take the opportunity to<br />
have a romp around those previously forbidden parts of<br />
the body. The pancreas digests itself. Green substances<br />
and gas are produced in the tissues, causing the skin<br />
to take on a bluish tinge and develop blisters, many<br />
of which expand into large sacs of fluid. After four to<br />
six days, the body starts to become really unpleasant.<br />
The tongue protrudes from between the teeth, the chest<br />
swells up, fluid from the lung trickles out of the mouth<br />
or nostrils and a ‘disagreeable odour’ develops.<br />
Cedric Mims, former Professor of Microbiology at<br />
Guy’s Hospital, spares no grisly detail in his self-styled<br />
“light-hearted but wide-ranging survey of death, the<br />
causes of death, and the disposal of corpses”. If it’s the<br />
Afterlife you want, he’s not much use. There’s a perfunctory<br />
trot through the beliefs that sustain the world’s major<br />
religions, but Mims’ heart isn’t really in it. When We Die<br />
BUY Cedric Mims books online from and<br />
is shot through with genial atheism, religion impinging<br />
only when it has shaped some of the more peculiar things<br />
human societies have done with bits and pieces of the<br />
deceased. But don’t mistake this for a lack of humility.<br />
In his introduction, Mims offers this fascinating statistic.<br />
Since the emergence of our species, 130,000 million humans<br />
have lived and died. You could comfortably pack<br />
every last one of us into a mass cubic coffin measuring<br />
three miles long on each side and dump it underground<br />
without making the slightest impact on the landscape.<br />
Mims contends that we have undergone a reversal<br />
in social attitudes since Victorian times. Then, death<br />
was a national obsession while sex remained taboo.<br />
These days, virtually anything goes on the sexual front<br />
but few of us ever see a corpse, since most people die<br />
in hospitals or institutions. Anyone who expresses an<br />
interest in the subject is routinely accused of “morbid<br />
curiosity”. While it’s difficult to sustain the claim<br />
that death is the last taboo, When We Die offers what<br />
might be described as a handy palliative. The anecdotal<br />
approach makes it ideal for dipping into, serving up<br />
themed funereal fun in bite-sized chunks of historical,<br />
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scientific and cultural information.<br />
Take the section on suicides, for example. Here we<br />
learn that in the 18th century the British were thought to<br />
have a lax attitude to topping oneself. The French philosopher<br />
Montesquieu argued that this was because of<br />
the dismal climate and our predisposition to gloominess,<br />
which in turn impaired the ability of the body machinery<br />
to filter nervous juices. But trustees of Bristol’s Clifton<br />
Suspension Bridge who fret over how to stop gloomy<br />
Brits hurling themselves to a watery doom from Brunel’s<br />
landmark should consider themselves lucky that we don’t<br />
share the Japanese enthusiasm for copycat suicides. In<br />
1933, a Japanese schoolgirl threw herself into the mouth<br />
of a volcano on the island of Oshima. Over the next two<br />
years, 1,208 people followed her. The authorities eventually<br />
responded by building a small fence and banning the<br />
sale of one-way tickets to the island.<br />
The past, as we know, is a different country. And they<br />
certainly did things differently when it came to death.<br />
Mims describes the process of classical mummification<br />
in all its colourful detail, beginning with the extraction<br />
of the brain through the nostrils using a pair of pliers, but<br />
also drolly reveals that economy class mummification<br />
was available to the Ancient Egyptian lower orders. This<br />
ignominious process consisted of pumping cedar oil into<br />
the anus and then plugging the hole. Before refrigeration,<br />
important folks dying overseas also presented a problem.<br />
When the Bishop of Hereford perished in Italy in 1282,<br />
BUY Cedric Mims books online from and<br />
his body was chopped into pieces and boiled in vinegar<br />
until the fat and flesh separated from the bones. The<br />
squidgy bits and bony bits were then sealed in separate<br />
leaden cases and shipped back to Blighty, where they<br />
received a suitably reverent Westminster funeral.<br />
Modern cultural differences are equally fascinating.<br />
Islam dictates that the corpse must not be violated by<br />
cremation or dissection, which presents something of<br />
a dilemma for medical students in Muslim countries.<br />
There is now a discreet but roaring trade in infidel stiffs,<br />
which are shipped out to Saudi Arabia en masse. Those<br />
peaceable Tibetan Buddhists have some interesting rituals<br />
too. On a mountain near the Ganden monastery in<br />
Llasa, a special bunch of holy folks called Body Breakers<br />
are employed to chop up corpses to make them more<br />
agreeable snacks for the local vulture population.<br />
Only one subject seems to gross out Prof Mims and<br />
that’s necrophilia, to which he devotes a single meagre<br />
paragraph. But it’s those peculiar little factoids that<br />
stay with you long after you’ve put down his entertaining<br />
tome. Did you know that Lenin gets a week-long<br />
bath and a new suit and tie every two years? Or that<br />
the British police have seven sniffer dogs trained to<br />
detect the gases of decomposition coming from bodies<br />
underwater? Or – and this is my favourite – that a<br />
company in Wales has just contributed to the sum of<br />
human inventiveness by designing a camel cremator<br />
for the Dubai government? �<br />
341<br />
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Feature [published October 2002]<br />
The Modern Fantasy Diet<br />
Seán Harnett argues that fantasy fiction has become a bloated,<br />
pretentious caricature of its own possibilities<br />
It’s like looking at Marlon Brando as he is today and remembering<br />
what he used to be: he used to be slim, man.<br />
He used to be dangerous. He used to mean something.<br />
Heroic fantasy used to be slim, once. Goddamn but<br />
it used to be lean and muscular, like the heroes and<br />
swordsmen it celebrated. It used to be dangerous. It<br />
used to tell us stories about ourselves that never appeared<br />
in the pages of respectable literary journals<br />
(with their stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet,<br />
stately dysfunction) but were nevertheless more truly a<br />
reflection of the times in which we lived, and the yearnings<br />
that impelled us.<br />
No longer: heroic fantasy has grown fat. Bloated.<br />
We’re not talking a few extra pound around the waist,<br />
here: we’re talking serious glandular problems, shopping<br />
at special stores for the larger individual. We’re<br />
talking about Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin<br />
and David Eddings, with their three or five or ten book<br />
series, each volume in the series containing seven or<br />
eight or 900 pages of plodding prose, dull exposition,<br />
unresolved plot threads and attempts to conjure up a<br />
sense of wonder so badly executed as to signal the final,<br />
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lingering demise of the genre. If we can’t get your daily<br />
requirement of wonder from fantasy then we might as<br />
well go back to reading those tales of quiet despair (or<br />
is it quiet tales of despair? Despairing tales of quietness?)<br />
for our fictional sustenance.<br />
It’s customary, of course, to blame J.R.R. Tolkien for<br />
this state of affairs. The Lord Of The Rings. What more<br />
does one need to say? The page count, they say; the<br />
cosily familiar setting, the bad prose, the dreary exposition:<br />
the family resemblance between Tolkien’s work<br />
and the substandard fiction that pads out the fantasy/<br />
science fiction section in your local bookstore is clear.<br />
So, yes, an obvious accusation, but a wrong-headed<br />
one. Tolkien is no more to blame for modern fantasy<br />
writing than Jane Austen is to blame for Mills and<br />
Boons novels.<br />
Consider the facts: Tolkien wrote just two books in<br />
his lifetime that could be classified as ‘fantasy’ a la<br />
the modern definition, and one of those, The Silmarillion,<br />
was released posthumously (The Hobbit should<br />
be classified, properly, as a children’s book). More<br />
importantly, Tolkien was not trying to write a novel<br />
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in the pulp tradition of fantasy: he was trying to write<br />
literature. However you might feel about the degree<br />
of his success, it’s hard to deny that there’s something<br />
rather appealing about his stubborn attempt to re-create<br />
something old when all around him were attempting to<br />
be ‘modern’.<br />
He did not really belong in the 20th century, did dear<br />
old Ronald Reuel. He was a man more comfortable<br />
with the past, and the forms of the past; he wrote his<br />
fiction at least partly as an exercise in creating a saga of<br />
an imaginary past that might live in the present century.<br />
And that’s the crucial difference: Tolkien’s models were<br />
the Kalevala and the Icelandic sagas. Although modern<br />
fantasy may tip the hat to ancient myths or medieval<br />
sagas, borrowing images here and situations there, its<br />
real antecedents lie in the pulp fictions of Fritz Leiber,<br />
Jack Vance, Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Howard:<br />
the masters. Whatever you may say about their prose<br />
(and it was often dull and frequently hilariously bad),<br />
these writers nevertheless told stories with leanness<br />
and bravado and imagination, qualities sadly lacking in<br />
most of today’s writers of fantasy.<br />
How did we get from there to here? How did we get<br />
from writers who could pack a punch in the space of<br />
ten pages, to writers who can’t seem to tell a story in<br />
ten books, let alone one? That’s a whole other story but,<br />
in the Reader’s Digest version, one writer stands out as<br />
having acted as the bridge between those pulp masters<br />
BUY fantasy books online from and<br />
and the current spate of fantasy writers. That writer is<br />
Michael Moorcock.<br />
There’s no denying that Moorcock has written some<br />
excellent heroic fantasy. The first few books in the Elric<br />
series, The First Chronicles Of Corum and Gloriana<br />
(especially Gloriana) are all magnificent novels. Yet<br />
side-by-side with those fine works one must set the<br />
substandard epics he has been churning out in parallel<br />
since the 1960s, in which character names and settings<br />
change but essentially the same story is told, over and<br />
over again.<br />
Given that he did invent Elric and Hawkmoon, it is<br />
regrettable that Moorcock’s career in heroic fantasy is<br />
strewn with such rubbish as The Second Chronicles<br />
Of Corum. Like so much of his later work, these three<br />
books each begin with an identical account of the callto-arms<br />
and kitting out of the hero, continue with a<br />
quest narrative that is remarkably similar in each book,<br />
and end with an identical climax and denouement. The<br />
series is the same story told three times. Moorcock<br />
tries to justify his cynical treatment of the reader on<br />
the grounds that the novels record the ceaseless struggle<br />
of the Eternal Champion, when really they are the<br />
efforts of a hack writer trying to pay the mortgage. In<br />
retrospect, such contemptuous treatment of the reader<br />
of fantasy has done as much to set the standard of<br />
contemporary mass-market fantasy as anything Tolkien<br />
ever did. Moorcock has convinced a generation of<br />
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writers that the key to success is to marry his rate of<br />
output with Tolkien’s bulk.<br />
Take, for instance, the case of Robert Jordan. He<br />
started his career writing pastiches of Conan and<br />
moved on, after writing a few military historical novels,<br />
to The Wheel Of Time series. At last count the series<br />
had reached book nine and had, according to a very<br />
reliable source (my brother) finally managed to inject<br />
some momentum into his story after four gratingly dull<br />
instalments. I wouldn’t know. I gave up reading the<br />
damn thing after chapter two of volume two. Jordan’s<br />
world simply held no interest for me. He may follow<br />
the Moorcock/Tolkien formula, but he possesses neither<br />
Moorcock’s cool anger and strapping disavowal<br />
of received wisdom, nor the lofty poetic impulses that<br />
drove Tolkien. Jordan’s ambitions in the field of subcreation<br />
far surpasses his ability to give them adequate<br />
expression, and the world and characters of The Wheel<br />
Of Time remain hopelessly one-dimensional.<br />
Now I understand that a man has to pay his bills and<br />
it’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, is making<br />
a living from doing what they love, but there has to<br />
be a better way. Tolkien published maybe 2,000 pages<br />
of fiction in his lifetime. Jordan churns that out every<br />
two years. The inverse ratio of quality and quantity has<br />
never been more starkly illustrated.<br />
For god’s sake, man, you’re not writing the Bible or<br />
the Mahabharata. You’re writing pulp fiction. And the<br />
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golden rule of pulp fiction, in whatever genre or whatever<br />
medium, is not to overstay your welcome. Tell<br />
your story, move the reader, and then get the hell out of<br />
there. Short, sharp shocks, that’s the stuff: in pulp the<br />
act of secondary creation doesn’t have to be profound<br />
or deep to conjure up in one’s mind images of strange,<br />
otherworldly realms. The trouble starts, however, when<br />
you stretch a story out. The creases and lacunae are<br />
easier to spot the longer you go on. In other words, to<br />
continue beyond a certain point you have to be really<br />
good at what you’re doing.<br />
Jordan is not very good at what he’s doing. But then,<br />
none of the best-selling writers of fantasy fiction are.<br />
The people writing decent fantasy, people like John<br />
Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Robert Holdstock and Jonathan<br />
Carroll, are doing so on the margins of the genre. The<br />
trouble is that they are marginal figures, and will remain<br />
so, unless someone can write a fantasy – in a mode other<br />
than the heroic – that has genuine mainstream appeal.<br />
If there was anyone who I thought could pull this off<br />
and be the saviour of fantasy writing, it would have been<br />
Neil Gaiman. If you recognise the name it’s because<br />
he wrote The Sandman, the most talked about comic<br />
books series of the last 15 years. They are a deceptively<br />
intoxicating distillation of Jungian archetypes, EC horror<br />
comics, Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis. Tasting as<br />
if they had been brewed in some age-rimed cauldron<br />
the quaint, knowing, disturbing, moving stories that<br />
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were bottled and passed around a fervent readership<br />
each month seemed to say all that could be said about a<br />
certain style of fantasy writing. Gaiman even managed<br />
to make Milton – that old puritan codger – seem sexy<br />
and that’s praise enough, right there.<br />
They were pulp fiction at its best.<br />
Recently, though, Gaiman has published American<br />
Gods, and I’m not so sure about him anymore. A<br />
breezeblock-sized novel that suffers from its excessive<br />
length, American Gods is basically just a re-write of<br />
The Sandman. We have another strangely passive male<br />
protagonist – called Shadow here, he might easily have<br />
been called Dream. There’s the same extended cast of<br />
squabbling gods, demons, sprites, faeries and spirits;<br />
the same coy might-be-real/might-not-be real jig<br />
around the maypole of mythology. There’s even a cute,<br />
quirky lesbian college student – all dressed in black,<br />
no doubt – whose only narrative purpose is to deliver<br />
a cute, quirky monologue that could just as easily have<br />
tripped off the tongue of Death.<br />
In other words, if you’ve read The Sandman you’ve<br />
read this novel. There’s nothing new in American Gods,<br />
and that’s the greatest disappointment from a writer<br />
previously so good at showing us old things with new<br />
eyes. I’m worried that Gaiman has no new stories in<br />
him, and that the remainder of his career will be haunted<br />
by the ghost of Sandman, just as surely as Arthur Conan<br />
Doyle’s was haunted by Sherlock Holmes.<br />
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But at least there’s a sense of conflict in American<br />
Gods, and that’s something to be grateful for. All writing<br />
is, of course, about conflict, and not just conflict<br />
within the story, but informing the story as well. What<br />
defines a genre is the nature of the conflict that lies at its<br />
heart. For me, all fantasy writing is specifically about<br />
one conflict, the conflict between the way we think the<br />
world is and the way we feel it ought to be. The best<br />
writers in the genre may not be consciously aware of<br />
this conflict, but they do embody it. In his public and<br />
private life, for instance, Tolkien was a devout Catholic,<br />
but when he wrote he was a pagan. His imagination<br />
inhabited the world of the Beowulf poet and mourned<br />
the passing of the old barbarian ethos, with its old gods<br />
and monsters, even as he professed the creed which had<br />
been responsible for that world’s passing away.<br />
Today’s fantasy writers seem to be mostly pagans,<br />
too – at least on this side of the Pond. And when I say pagan<br />
I mean that literally: in the sense that many modern<br />
authors of fantasy seem to be Wiccans, re-constructed<br />
druids, or neo-shamans, penning tales full of right-on<br />
pagan characters fighting the deadening influence of all<br />
those earth-destroying religions, and speaking in earnest<br />
thees and thous of the healing power of the Goddess.<br />
These writers believe whole-heartedly in what they<br />
are writing – and fair play to them – but it does mean<br />
that there is no animating tension to make their stories<br />
interesting. In the end, it becomes little more than new-<br />
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age propaganda and an extended advertisement for the<br />
local Renaissance Faire.<br />
Neil Gaiman has tension, however. From what I know<br />
of him I’d peg him as a pagan (if only in sentiment; he<br />
seems to really dig those old-time gods), yet he writes<br />
essentially Christian stories of sacrifice and redemption.<br />
He is also brave enough to show just what dark, bloody,<br />
vicious, vengeful energy hides in the old pagan stories.<br />
Yet, for all his tensions, Gaiman seems less like the<br />
purveyor of a new style of fantasy writing, and more like<br />
the culmination of an old style, a style I would term the<br />
‘Jungian.’ 20th-century English and American fantasy<br />
flourished in a world very much alive to the notion that<br />
wisdom could be found in those old pagan stories, and<br />
that was okay because everyone knew, after Jung, that<br />
those stories were conduits to the collective archetypes.<br />
Even C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, so notoriously dismissive<br />
of ‘Continental’ influences, read and admired Jung<br />
(though they always resolutely sniped at Freud). He<br />
seemed to provide a foundation for fantasy, his theories<br />
a sort of undeclared manifesto for – and justification of<br />
– the genre. They had much in common, Jung and the<br />
fantasy genre; in this one thing, if nothing else: they believed<br />
in the power of stories; they believed that stories<br />
could teach us something. The great fantasy writers of<br />
the 20th century believed that stories were either healing<br />
balms of the psyche or agents of unsettlement, chinks in<br />
the armour of our everyday assumptions.<br />
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I use the past tense because the work of Gaiman, and<br />
contemporaries such Holdstock, Carroll and Crowley,<br />
seems to have exhausted the possibilities of writing a<br />
‘Jungian’ fantasy. Appealing to the collective unconscious<br />
is becoming less tenable as a deus ex machina in<br />
a world where memetics and evolutionary psychology<br />
have replaced depth psychology as the essential means<br />
of understanding the self. It is difficult to see how the<br />
kind of fantasy written in the last century can be anything<br />
but a cliché in our brave new millennium.<br />
The question is this: can fantasy re-invigorate<br />
itself in the face of these new conceptions of the<br />
self? There is some slight hope that a new kind of<br />
fantasy writing could appear, instigated by writers<br />
such as Steve Aylett and China Mieville, who give<br />
the impression that they are ready to write ‘weird<br />
stories’ for a culture that no longer necessarily believes<br />
in the unity of the psyche, the mythic power<br />
of stories or the efficacy of any kind of healing balm<br />
that doesn’t come in the form of a pill. However, so<br />
long as such writers are squeezed out of bookstore<br />
shelves by the bloated works of Jordan, Eddings,<br />
Williams, et al, I’m afraid that we must conclude<br />
that fantasy will collapse under its own weight<br />
and metamorphose into a genre as rule-bound and<br />
derivative as the Mills and Boons romance.<br />
And that would be a triumph even Sauron could be<br />
content with. �<br />
346<br />
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Review [published March 1999]<br />
Alan Moore: Voice Of The Fire<br />
Antony Johnston<br />
Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel.<br />
But Moore has been writing for as long as this<br />
reviewer can remember. Starting with the odd Future<br />
Shock and Time Twister for 2000AD, his radically<br />
original subject matter and unashamedly emotional<br />
style soon led to serial commissions, the most famous<br />
being the award-winning Ballad Of Halo Jones. During<br />
this time Moore, like so many British creators, also<br />
began working for American comics where the wages,<br />
respect and contracts are more agreeable than here in<br />
the UK. He achieved cult fame with his reinvention of<br />
Swamp Thing, and his craft became ever more diverse<br />
and polished.<br />
Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel.<br />
In 1985, by now a writer for at least five years,<br />
Moore wrote Watchmen, a truly unique and original<br />
comic for its time. Unlike ‘proper’ comics which seek<br />
to continue their franchise for as long as economically<br />
possible, Watchmen was written as a limited, closedarc<br />
story. It was written in 12 chapters, it was published<br />
in 12 chapters – and was so popular it became the first<br />
full comic story to be rebound in book form. Moore<br />
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invented two things simultaneously, both by accident.<br />
‘The 80s Comics Renaissance’ and the ‘graphic novel’.<br />
Nevertheless, Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s<br />
debut novel – and what a novel it is. Spanning 5,000<br />
years but never straying from within a ten-mile radius<br />
around Moore’s home of Northampton, this novel has<br />
the author’s hallmarks all over it. Ostensibly it is a tale<br />
of witchcraft and magic; from the first ‘Hob-Men’,<br />
through Elizabethan court magicians, and finally ending<br />
with only myth, the oppressive 20th century having<br />
imprisoned and buried humanity’s esoteric vision.<br />
But there is far more to this book, hinted at during the<br />
retelling of Northampton legends and finally revealed<br />
in the last chapter, where Moore himself takes upon the<br />
role of narrator in a very real 1995 Northampton. Voice<br />
Of The Fire is a tale of lost myths, of history’s subjective<br />
nature. As history must always be written by survivors,<br />
is any man’s history more ‘real’ than another’s? Who<br />
is to say?<br />
Moore is also perturbed by humanity’s loss of vision,<br />
and implores us to dream again lest we be trapped forever<br />
in ever-decreasing circles of superficiality. From<br />
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the closing chapters it is clear Moore believes we have<br />
lost our way somewhere along the line in the name of<br />
popular science. But Moore is not anti-scientific per<br />
se; as he shrewdly points out, even scientists of this<br />
century have not discounted the theories of subjective<br />
realities. It is humanity’s blind faith and newfound passivity<br />
which endangers us.<br />
Moore questions what in our society has oppressed<br />
those visions and fancies we once had, where people<br />
centuries ago were pronounced dead by ‘Rising<br />
Lights’, ‘the Purples’ or ‘Planet Shock’, and man built<br />
grand follies to match his grand dreams. In Moore’s<br />
own words:<br />
“Everything grand we had, we tore it to bits. Our<br />
castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious<br />
poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fucking<br />
madhouse. Jesus Christ.”<br />
For these, and others, are the tales Moore recounts;<br />
a beggar-woman turned nun who was flogged to death<br />
for receiving visions from Wotan. A mad poet who<br />
wrote beautiful verse and harmed none yet died in an<br />
asylum, sentenced there by his frustrated wife and<br />
son. Two Imp-summoning witches whose practices<br />
were at once both reviled and sought after by the<br />
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same jealous, spiteful wives who eventually burned<br />
them. Moore does not profess to understand these<br />
self-destructive acts – can any of us? – but they are<br />
told with such emotion, and such naturalism, that one<br />
cannot help but feel sympathy for the narrators. Even<br />
the travelling salesman.<br />
Does he succeed? In a word, yes. In the manner of<br />
his contemporary Neil Gaiman, Moore has the skill<br />
to convey his passion and allow the reader to at least<br />
glimpse through his eyes. Only the most jaded and<br />
cold-hearted among men could read his account of<br />
the dying Wise-Man, or the two witches, and not feel<br />
sympathy, even outrage. Like so many good writers,<br />
Moore is especially good at reminding us of what we<br />
already know, but forget too easily in the onward rush<br />
of survival; that we all love, we all feel pain, and we all<br />
must die.<br />
Paradoxically, within this dark and melancholy book<br />
Moore inspires us to think again on the beauties of existence;<br />
of how precious is our time; and how, if we can<br />
just pause to remember the lessons we have learned and<br />
the bounties we possess, we may yet revive the eternal<br />
fires of history and learn from what they can tell us.<br />
Voice Of The Fire is a damn fine novel. For a debut. �<br />
348<br />
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Review [published June 1996]<br />
Patricia Morrisroe: Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography<br />
Nick Clapson<br />
Robert Mapplethorpe has long been a contentious figure<br />
in the art world, with much of this debate focusing<br />
on whether or not his erotic/homoerotic photographs<br />
trespass the boundaries of pornography. This is a matter<br />
which becomes especially prejudiced by the fact<br />
that they often deal with the difficult subject of gay<br />
sadomasochism. Much of his other work, however,<br />
deals with more innocuous subjects like portraiture and<br />
floral studies. Whatever his subject matter, though, his<br />
photographs constantly sought to elicit, and so control,<br />
the beauty present in all that he observed, be it Richard<br />
Gere or a lily.<br />
Patricia Morrisroe’s book manages to trace a wellbalanced<br />
path through Mapplethorpe’s career from<br />
suburban student to New York star, often pausing to<br />
illuminate pertinent links between his life and art. For<br />
example, Mapplethorpe’s personal calculating manner<br />
is presented as an obvious impetus for his highly controlled,<br />
almost classical style. By not shying away from<br />
Mapplethorpe’s ‘darker’ pursuits, Morrisoe generates a<br />
more exacting image of this frequently disturbing artist.<br />
She renders Mapplethorpe with a shocking honesty,<br />
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and as result he is frequently portrayed as being cold<br />
and detached. Indeed, if Morrisroe is to be believed,<br />
Mapplethorpe’s attitude towards unprotected sex after<br />
being infected with AIDS is nothing short of chilling.<br />
Mapplethorpe is shown to be a man obsessed by<br />
money and fame, pursuing both remorselessly throughout<br />
his brief life, using anyone he could to achieve his<br />
aims. Paradoxically, though, his objectionable traits<br />
were balanced by a charisma that constantly drew people<br />
towards him. By examining this milieu, Morrisroe<br />
has also explored the intimate details of his long-term<br />
relationships, particularly with singer/poet Patti Smith<br />
and collector Sam Wagstaff.<br />
Morrisroe has achieved a work of outstanding clarity.<br />
She provides not only an exhaustive, yet riveting,<br />
examination of a major artist’s life, but also manages<br />
to demythologise her subject along the way by careful<br />
avoidance of the usual clichés. Morrisroe presents<br />
Mapplethorpe – photographer or artist, pornographer<br />
or celebrity – stripped of his mask, his troubling face<br />
available for all to view in the harsh light of history. The<br />
only evident limitations to the overall success of this<br />
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biography are Morrisroe’s occasional clumsy handling<br />
of academic material, and a few stumbling conclusions.<br />
This book could also have been improved with less of<br />
today’s almost obligatory snaps of the artist as a baby,<br />
and more extensive examples of his work. However,<br />
the carefully controlled pathos of Mapplethorpe’s decline<br />
into AIDS easily outweighs a few off comments.<br />
Accessible yet engaging, this epitaph to a truly intriguing<br />
man is going to be hard to surpass. �<br />
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350<br />
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Review [published July 2004]<br />
Morrissey: You Are The Quarry<br />
Ben Granger<br />
And so to the comeback of the year. Seven years without<br />
a contract, self-exiled to LA, the avatar of the awkward<br />
fled his homeland after a bitter divorce with the UK<br />
music press, all the more sour because the ardour was<br />
once so strong. The eternal chronicler of the downtrodden<br />
seemed himself doomed to obscurity. Being a fan<br />
was virtually the love that dare not speak its name.<br />
But back in 2002, triumphant homecoming shows<br />
coupled with renewed support from young bands like<br />
The Libertines saw the climate change. If ever there<br />
was a chance to return, this was it. Courting the media<br />
like never before, he certainly knows there’s a lot riding<br />
on this. No wonder the album cover shows our more<br />
mature protagonist with a gun; this is the last chance<br />
saloon. Would we be the quarry or would he?<br />
The opener ‘America Is Not The World’ instantly<br />
upends expectations. This most famous detester of all<br />
things ‘dance’ is singing over a hip-hop/loungecore<br />
backbeat. And he’s attacking the ignorance and prejudice<br />
of Bush’s USA “where the President is never black,<br />
female or gay / until that day/ you’ve got nothing to say<br />
to me” (he’s since spelled that out recently for the slow<br />
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kids at the back by calling for Dubbya’s death onstage.)<br />
So much for the hoary old racism allegations, but does<br />
that mean he rejects his new home? As ever in Mozland<br />
nothing is quite so simple, after comparing Yanks to<br />
voracious fat pigs he croons with typically breathtaking<br />
arrogance “but haven’t you me with you now? / And I<br />
love you”. Its love/hate with the US just as it was with<br />
the UK. This track has been lambasted for the simplicity<br />
of its lyrics. The critics forget, as often, that the northern<br />
nihilist has always liked to take the piss, and this is a fine<br />
example. They overlook too the sumptuousness of the<br />
tune and vocals. This is a fine opener.<br />
‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ comes next, a short and<br />
powerful rocky number that crams in its two minutes<br />
a restatement of his pride in both his Englishness and<br />
Irishness, another scathing denunciation of those who<br />
accused him racism, and an attack on the Labour Party,<br />
the Conservative Party, Cromwell and the royal family.<br />
Not bad for his first Top 5 single! He’s back alright.<br />
The tempo slows right down for the next three songs.<br />
‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ sets the tone for half the album<br />
in showing that his voice is easily the finest it’s<br />
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ever been, but the tunes are often subtle, not “instant.”<br />
The following ‘Come Back To Camden’ shows that<br />
tendency at its optimum, a beautiful orchestral sweep<br />
with a near-operatic climax. It’s served with the best of<br />
Morrissey’s jaded brand of sepia nostalgia, singing of<br />
love lost under slate grey Victorian skies and disused<br />
dark brown stairwells. ‘I’m Not Sorry’ is its nadir; too<br />
sparse, dull, showing the voice can’t draw you in on<br />
its own even with the tantalising “the woman of my<br />
dreams? / there never was one” addition to the age old<br />
is he/isn’t he conundrum.<br />
Melody re-ignites with ‘The World Is Full Of Crashing<br />
Bores’, proving the man’s bitterness and sharp tongue<br />
haven’t mellowed with age. “Lock jawed pop stars<br />
thicker than pigshit” are among those lambasted here,<br />
easy targets sure, but great fun nonetheless, ending with<br />
a very pretty and atypical Beatle-esque bit of reverb.<br />
‘How Can Anybody Possibly Think They Know How<br />
I Feel’ gets down and dirty and quickens the pace a bit<br />
more, deepening the album’s abiding sense of paranoia.<br />
These songs have been criticised as mere moans about<br />
his notorious court cases, but it’s not only everyone in<br />
authority who is savaged, but anyone who has ever liked<br />
him too! “Their judgment is crazy” apparently. There really<br />
is no pleasing some people. “Fame fame fatal fame”,<br />
to quote an earlier number. But then batty misanthropy<br />
was always key to his twisted charm.<br />
The next track is the album’s centrepiece, and mas-<br />
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terpiece. ‘The First Of The Gang To Die’ is the only<br />
‘character’ song on the album, and the only example<br />
of Morrissey’s longstanding tradition of Orton-esque,<br />
Genet-ish paeans to bits of rough. This time it’s the<br />
Mexican gangsters of LA that get the leery treatment. It<br />
may sound unpromising. In fact it’s perfect.<br />
The crashing guitar backing, the Latino strings, the<br />
frighteningly catchy chorus, everything falls impeccably<br />
together. “You have never been in love / until<br />
you’ve seen the stars / reflect in the reservoirs” sets the<br />
tone of drama, undercut with wicked humour. “Such a<br />
silly boy,” he berates the song’s anti-hero, sending up<br />
the obvious incongruity of a camp Englishman hanging<br />
round with Hispanic gang-bangers. As always, he knows<br />
his obsession with sexy footpads is wrong; but all the<br />
more bedevilling for that. “He stole from the rich / and<br />
the poor / and the not very rich / and the very poor / and<br />
he stole all hearts away” he sings, as the word “away”<br />
floats to the ether in an achingly gorgeous falsetto which<br />
combines early Smiths yodellings with the power of his<br />
mature voice. It’s enough to make you weep with maudlin<br />
joy, and one of his very best songs ever, solo or not.<br />
With ‘Let Me Kiss You’ we’re back to more subtle<br />
and muted territory once more, but also the album’s<br />
biggest grower. Over a distinctly Marr-ish arrangement<br />
Morrissey once more does self-deprecating<br />
yearning like no-one else, craving attention while<br />
knowing he will be “physically despised”. Once<br />
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more, at least in song, age seems only to add to his<br />
beguiling neurosis. He may reside in California, but<br />
he still revels in doing that most un-American of<br />
things; celebrating life’s losers.<br />
The following ‘All The Lazy Dykes’ doesn’t quite<br />
doesn’t quite match up in the melody stakes but as with<br />
many songs here ends with a hugely moving finale. Its<br />
urge for a downtrodden housewife to find her freedom<br />
in Sapphic joy is oddly touching. “I’ve never felt so<br />
alive / in the WHOLE of my life” he sings, and as often<br />
in this album, one stunning inflection picks up an otherwise<br />
slight arrangement.<br />
Onto the penultimate track, ‘I Like You’. ‘America’<br />
apart, most of this album is basically guitar rock with<br />
a few atmospheric keyboard extras courtesy of new<br />
producer Jerry Finn; no huge departure really. But here<br />
we have a positively New Order-esque backbeat and an<br />
overdrive on the electronica. At its heart is a strident,<br />
killer chorus, where our protagonist seems utterly baffled<br />
by the alien feeling of actually finding someone he<br />
gets on with. “You’re not right in the head / and nor am<br />
I / and this is why…”, once again, breathing beauty into<br />
everyday English phraseology.<br />
With the climax, ‘You Know I Couldn’t Last’, what<br />
should be an arch crescendo to the set sadly ends up<br />
overdoing the bombast, with histrionic guitar crashes<br />
and the lyrics moaning just a bit too much this time.<br />
Throughout this disc, as throughout his career Morrissey<br />
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has portrayed a mindset which to quote Larkin is “rusted<br />
stiff / and will admit / only what will accuse or horrify /<br />
like slot machines only bent pennies fit.” Most times on<br />
Quarry he pulls that off with optimum wit and charm.<br />
Just this once, you are reminded he is a rich middle-aged<br />
pop star still griping about a court case almost a decade<br />
back. A slightly sour aftertaste to a fine brew.<br />
I was going to finish off by saying You Are The Quarry<br />
falls just short of greatness. But having listened to it repeatedly<br />
for nearly two months I think it may just reach<br />
that state after all. It’s the slang-dictionary definition<br />
of the word ‘grower’; even songs I dismissed outright<br />
on first, second and third listens are now warmed to. If<br />
you’re one of the haters who only ever saw Moz as a<br />
queasy mix of Kenneth Williams, Eddie Cochran and<br />
Eeyore the Donkey this album certainly won’t change<br />
your mind. But those who have seen worth in his guttereyed<br />
vision in the past may find much to treasure here if<br />
they only take the time.<br />
Pop’s prole-prince of the outsiders has returned in a<br />
more triumphant manner than we could have expected.<br />
I still feel it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Viva Hate,<br />
Vauxhall and I or Your Arsenal. But its unquestionably<br />
Leeds’ side-streets ahead of Kill Uncle, Southpaw<br />
Grammar and Maladjusted. And as for the tired old<br />
complaints that it’s “not as good as The Smiths”, one can<br />
only reply as Joseph Heller did when told each new book<br />
wasn’t as good as Catch 22. “No. But then, what is?” �<br />
353<br />
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Review [published April 1997]<br />
Cookie Mueller: Ask Dr Mueller<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
This is one book you can judge by the cover. It shows<br />
a home snapped portrait of Cookie Mueller laughing,<br />
her head thrown back and her hand out against the<br />
wall for support. Ask Dr Mueller is 300 pages of that<br />
laughter, gathered together from over 25 years worth<br />
of her writing about a life that was wild, weird but, so<br />
it would seem, frequently wonderful. Cookie is best<br />
known for her appearances alongside Divine in the<br />
films of maverick director John Waters. However, as<br />
Waters writes in his introduction, she had many sides:<br />
“a writer, a mother, an outlaw, a fashion designer, a<br />
go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all,<br />
a goddess.” Forever on the move, Cookie’s writings<br />
show her restless enthusiasm for everything from art<br />
criticism to travelling to being an agony aunt.<br />
Throughout her life, she stumbled into the most<br />
bizarre situations; everything from burning down<br />
a friend’s house by accident, being abducted on<br />
Highway 31 and fucking chickens for the sake of<br />
art. (If that doesn’t make you want to read the book,<br />
nothing will). Yet while she certainly led what most<br />
would consider a hellraising lifestyle, there’s no<br />
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self-obsessed myth making in Cookie’s writings.<br />
She discusses taking truckloads of drugs in 1960s<br />
Haight-Ashbury with the same humorous detachment<br />
that she catalogues a day of domestic disasters.<br />
The overwhelming impression is that Cookie lived<br />
life to the full and everything within it interested her.<br />
Most of all, she could equally convey those mad and<br />
mundane moments’ importance on the page, turning<br />
the deeply personal from mere autobiography into<br />
a kind of art. If a writer’s job is to look at what we<br />
all take for granted and bring back something of its<br />
magic, then Cookie deserved a huge payrise.<br />
Her death from AIDS in 1989, seven weeks after her<br />
husband died of the same cause, brought an abrupt halt<br />
to the stream of stories, reflections, advice and ideas<br />
collected here. Most books which feature collections<br />
of writers’ published and unpublished work are usually<br />
just picking over the dead bones of what’s left, like the<br />
posthumous Bruce Chatwin industry. Ask Dr Mueller,<br />
however, goes in the opposite direction – it brings together<br />
between two covers a hilarious and fascinating<br />
collage of one woman’s journey through life.<br />
354<br />
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This book is perhaps in danger of being passed over<br />
because it can’t really be categorised, which makes it<br />
unmarketable; moreover, Cookie’s fame is limited to<br />
devotees of relatively obscure films and the American<br />
underground. But this relative anonymity is exactly the<br />
book’s major strength. A reader can never be quite sure<br />
BUY Cookie Mueller books online from and<br />
what will happen next within Cookie’s writings – it’s<br />
one of those glorious collections that reflects the unpredictability<br />
and everyday insanity of life. It doesn’t<br />
matter whether you know who Cookie Mueller is; by<br />
the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll wish she was<br />
still around. �<br />
355<br />
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Review [published November 2004]<br />
Ben Myers: The Book Of Fuck<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book<br />
or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your<br />
name forever after. Just to make things more difficult,<br />
the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of<br />
Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about<br />
your criteria for choosing a book to read, but something<br />
written in seven days sounds to me like it will be<br />
a cramp-stomached vomit of speed-crazed gibberish,<br />
especially if the back cover states it’s “a buckled breakneck<br />
rant let loose at punk rock speed”.<br />
Thankfully, none of these things are true. The Book<br />
Of Fuck is a homage and a pisstake of the twilight<br />
world of music journalism, a first person reportage<br />
of a starving hack sent off in search of a death metal<br />
antichrist superstar called, to the joy of America’s<br />
Christian masses, the God Of Fuck. GoF is like Marilyn<br />
Manson, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and GG Allin all<br />
rolled into one – the bogeyman of popular culture. But<br />
GoF doesn’t get much of a look-in even though the<br />
search for him propels the plot – the pages are taken up<br />
with the internal monologue of our protagonist, a mix<br />
of furious punning, musical musing and starving artist<br />
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clichés twisted into new shapes, all set against his love<br />
of London’s squalid glamour. It’s a prose style that can<br />
certainly be called punk rock, but the tone of our hero<br />
is far more gentle and even genteel than even the most<br />
half-hearted sneer from Mr Rotten. He’s a Cat Stevens’<br />
fan, for Christ’s sake.<br />
That notwithstanding, there’s a touch of Hunter S.<br />
Thompson to the prose, which is a compliment not to<br />
be awarded likely because The Book Of Fuck echoes<br />
HST’s style without trying to ape it. It runs in parallel to<br />
rather than behind it, connecting a mordant intelligence<br />
with a sense of amused bewilderment at the predicaments<br />
in which the narrator continually finds himself.<br />
As someone who used to read the music papers religiously<br />
as a teenager, back in the golden era of Melody<br />
Maker at the end of the 80s, The Book Of Fuck has<br />
a lot of resonance with that time, before intelligent<br />
music journalism all but disappeared underneath the<br />
market forces of dad rock and prepubescent marketing<br />
exercises. (Can’t we ban The Beatles ever being<br />
featured on another magazine cover ever?). The Book<br />
Of Fuck doesn’t offer up anything particularly pro-<br />
356<br />
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found, but it does provide a superb black humoured<br />
roadtrip of the soul in search of profundity, which is<br />
possibly even better.<br />
And, as the work of a small UK publisher, Wrecking<br />
Ball Press, The Book Of Fuck has superb production<br />
values: from the size to the spacing to the use of fonts,<br />
this is a book that wants to be read. Sadly there are numerous<br />
typos scattered through it, but then, that’s very<br />
punk rock too so I guess I’ll have to live with it. �<br />
BUY Ben Myers books online from and<br />
357<br />
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Names And Their Significance In Fiction 359<br />
Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture 363<br />
Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day 377<br />
Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie 380<br />
Will Oldham:<br />
Songs Of The Human Animal 382<br />
P.J. O’Rourke:<br />
Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll 389<br />
Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty 392<br />
Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have<br />
Your Abortion” 394<br />
Tim Parks: Destiny 398<br />
N-R<br />
Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism 401<br />
Ulf Poschardt:<br />
DJ Culture 404<br />
Richard Powers:<br />
Plowing The Dark 406<br />
Richard Powers: Gain 408<br />
Thomas Pynchon:<br />
Mason & Dixon 410<br />
Matthew Robertson: Factory Records:<br />
The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461) 413<br />
Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memories<br />
Of Thomas Penman 415<br />
Jacques Roubaud:<br />
The Great Fire Of London 417<br />
358<br />
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Feature [published August 1996]<br />
Names And Their Significance In Fiction<br />
Chris Hall<br />
The importance of names in literature has nowhere<br />
been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down<br />
the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following<br />
that farrago you can be sure that the name “Godot” is<br />
missing from any parental Book Of Names (although<br />
I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around<br />
stroking their bellies and saying: “Yes, we’re waiting<br />
For Godot…”) One can imagine the bewildered child<br />
suffering an intolerable identity problem from having<br />
his peers forever arguing about what he ‘means.’<br />
To some, “Godot” has a kind of cosmic signifier in<br />
the duality ‘God/Eau’. Less Francophile readings have<br />
insisted it should scan as ‘Go.dot’, a reference to the<br />
mental and physical movement that must result from<br />
Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible suggestion,<br />
although the most interesting and curious, comes<br />
from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce’s<br />
Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or<br />
entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that<br />
a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot,<br />
rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part<br />
of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom<br />
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spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this<br />
has a further curious affinity with the ‘Go.dot’ reading<br />
and one of cheery Norman Tebbit’s maxims: on<br />
yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a<br />
hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of<br />
the Tory party?<br />
Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip<br />
with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is<br />
in this tradition that a lot of modern and Postmodern<br />
neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a<br />
name’s potential to succinctly allude to character and<br />
disposition, often spending months deliberating over<br />
the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a<br />
truly great fictional name belongs to the central character<br />
in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces:<br />
Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically onomatopoeic,<br />
suggesting indignation and outrage which,<br />
for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound<br />
like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about<br />
his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius<br />
loudly proclaims: “This is an abortion!”) There is also<br />
the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle<br />
359<br />
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initial that furthers our understanding of the character.<br />
Philip K. Dick’s obsession with duality (probably<br />
originating from the fact that his twin sister died when<br />
only a few months old) led him to invent some gloriously<br />
unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator<br />
(as with a lot of Dick’s novels, it is hard to tell) is called<br />
Horselover Fat. ‘Philip’ is Greek for ‘lover of horses’;<br />
‘Dick’ is German for ‘Fat’. Similarly, for close watchers<br />
of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick<br />
Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised<br />
suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from<br />
deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail & I.<br />
Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis<br />
Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to<br />
the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/<br />
BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified<br />
obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where<br />
Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who<br />
turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer.<br />
If there is one author who best exemplifies a predilection<br />
for names and games of the distinctly literary<br />
type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there<br />
is paronomasias (a “verbal plague” as Nabokov describes<br />
it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an<br />
anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by<br />
their very nature these “delicate markers” will bypass<br />
the inattentive reader and that “well-wishers will bring<br />
their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to<br />
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my little party” and concludes that in the end “it is only<br />
the author’s private satisfaction that counts.” It was this<br />
“wayside murmur” that pleased him the most when<br />
rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correction.<br />
etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee<br />
jump (especially first person narratives) where we may<br />
become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story<br />
that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov<br />
had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for<br />
kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on<br />
the ropes and shouting down, “You idiots!”<br />
James Wood, in comparing young American and<br />
English writing, recently argued for a fiction of unknowingness<br />
and against one of omniscient authorial<br />
intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov<br />
is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author<br />
manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from<br />
this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What<br />
varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds<br />
patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some<br />
people don’t like the pedagogical voice in modern<br />
fiction, don’t like being ‘lectured to’, and some don’t<br />
like being told they’re being ‘lectured to.’ Fine. But<br />
Woods, and even more recently, the children’s writer<br />
Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal,<br />
goes too far in implying that any type of Postmodern or<br />
self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they<br />
conceive as a ‘pure storytelling’ form.<br />
360<br />
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I can’t help but detect a very conservative sensibility<br />
here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of<br />
the ‘Back To Basics’ government campaign: a return to<br />
good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness,<br />
elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious<br />
cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly<br />
appearing in the run up to the Booker Prize or a General<br />
Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs’ reading<br />
habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer,<br />
which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative<br />
reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of<br />
course, who goes down for obvious political reasons<br />
(though it begs the question: who is it that ‘rated’ him<br />
in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt<br />
and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like<br />
a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated.<br />
Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average<br />
MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand.<br />
Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics<br />
hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it?<br />
The importance of a name to plot structure is nowhere<br />
more comically heightened than in Martin Amis’<br />
Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a<br />
financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shakers.<br />
It is the character’s very name that is the source<br />
of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs<br />
if you haven’t read the book). “John: is, I think, the<br />
perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the<br />
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giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms,<br />
everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else.<br />
(Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm<br />
bells ringing in itself).<br />
“Self” of course embodies the ultimate 80s Thatcherite<br />
‘ideas’ of individualism and survival. But the apposite<br />
brilliance of “John Self” is in making it the central<br />
twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of<br />
things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve<br />
the greed of the players around him. It transpires that<br />
Self has been signing company documents twice; once<br />
under co-signatory, once under “Self”: “It was your<br />
name.” This literary playfulness and close attention to<br />
detail can be traced from Nabokov through the American<br />
heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to<br />
Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis.<br />
The playfulness which employs hyperreal and<br />
ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best exemplified<br />
by Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Here the names<br />
are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous<br />
(viz. Pulp Fiction: “This is America: names don’t mean<br />
shit”). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and<br />
subversion in the name “Yossarian” (which is noted by<br />
one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also<br />
the double “Major Major” (which has recently been recycled<br />
as the title of Terry Major-Ball’s autobiography)<br />
and the sub-Dickensian “Chaplain Tapmann”. “Milo<br />
Minderbinder” is a personal favourite, conjuring up<br />
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an image of a kind of entrepreneurial mesmerist who<br />
also happens to be mentally ill. However, we also have<br />
Richard Ford’s “Frank Banscombe”, a name redolent<br />
of Updike’s great tragicomic figure Harry ‘Rabbit’<br />
Angstrom: thus a more naturalistic name could be said<br />
to suit the subtler pastiche and ironic métiers of Ford<br />
and Updike.<br />
Names become their strangest when the demarcations<br />
between fiction and reality begin to merge into<br />
one another . Umberto Eco is a case in point. His nonfictional<br />
name is almost too literary, too good, to be<br />
the real name of an author. One of Eco’s short stories<br />
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from Misreadings is entitled ‘Granita’ and is a twist<br />
upon Lolita, where the subject of desire is an old lady.<br />
In the Nabokovian version the central protagonist is, of<br />
course, Humbert Humbert, the name once again being<br />
indicative of a double or split image. The similarity<br />
of Umberto to Humbert is striking, and “Eco” sounds<br />
like an allusion to the fact that the first name is an echo<br />
of the first. Before knowing any better I found myself<br />
thinking that perhaps Will Self was a sly allusion to one<br />
of his mentors (and mates) Martin Amis. But that would<br />
be to confuse art with life. And we all know where that<br />
gets us… �<br />
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Interview [published August 2000]<br />
Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture<br />
Antony Johnston discusses cities, prose remixing and the death of Vurt<br />
I meet Jeff Noon in his now-native Brighton, stepping<br />
off the two o’clock from Victoria to greet a man surprisingly<br />
recognisable from his dustjacket photographs,<br />
casually dressed and affable.<br />
You heard me. Jeff Noon, the man who made Manchester<br />
live, breathe and kill over the course of five<br />
books, has moved to Brighton. And I’m not the only<br />
person curious as hell to know what that’s all about.<br />
But before we can settle down, Noon leads me out<br />
the station into Brighton proper, and casually asks if I<br />
know the city. I don’t; this is my first visit. So he offers<br />
a two-second whistlestop tour, in the process answering<br />
the question for me.<br />
“Look at that sky,” he says, gesturing upward. It’s a<br />
dry but dim day, nothing special to my eyes. “Even on<br />
a sunny day in Manchester, you wouldn’t get a sky like<br />
that. It’s always grey there.”<br />
As we walk in the direction of the North Laine area,<br />
he explains: “I’ve always loved Brighton, ever since<br />
I did my first one-man shows down here. They were<br />
always a great crowd. I could just tell they were up for<br />
it, laughing at every word.”<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
In contrast, he folds his arms and adopts an unnaturally<br />
grumpy face. “Manchester’s a much harder<br />
audience. ‘Go on then, impress us.’ Down here you<br />
don’t feel as if you have to prove yourself before they’ll<br />
listen to you.”<br />
He laughs, leading on, and it strikes me that he really<br />
does seem very relaxed. Not at all the intense, edgy<br />
character I was expecting. He outlines some of the appeal<br />
of Brighton, and it becomes apparent how much<br />
Noon’s obviously enjoying himself in his new home.<br />
“Brighton’s all about the individual. There’s a sense<br />
of youth, and a great artistic community. In Manchester,<br />
I felt isolated – here I’ve met more people, very<br />
quickly, and started working with other artists much<br />
more than I did in Manchester.”<br />
We turn down one street in particular which Noon<br />
presents as an example: “Look at this place; Green<br />
Street. It’s all young businesses, they flock here. Here,<br />
look at this.” He’s paused outside a small shop with<br />
wooden fixtures, old-style fittings, and… “Beads. They<br />
sell nothing but beads, for goodness’ sake.”<br />
He’s right. I peer in, and finally realise what he’s re-<br />
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ally pointing out; it’s quarter past two on a Wednesday<br />
afternoon. And the shop’s packed.<br />
“And it always is,” he says with a smile. “Now you<br />
try and open a shop like that in Manchester and, well…”<br />
Dead within a week?<br />
“Yeah. Dead within a week.”<br />
Down the end of the street is a small place called the<br />
TinTin Café. We step inside and take a table. Noon still<br />
hasn’t told me exactly why he moved from Manchester,<br />
his synonymous (perhaps even symbiotic) stomping<br />
ground. And it’s something which shocked a lot of<br />
people. Something I need to know.<br />
“People are shocked, and I think that’s quite interesting.<br />
I’ve been asked that question a lot, and the fact<br />
that I’ve been asked it … That tells me something. It’s<br />
to do with the fact that hardly anybody writes about<br />
Manchester, in any medium, in such an intimate way as<br />
I have. I reckon the only other person who’s been asked<br />
so many times is Morrissey, when he left the city.”<br />
He points out that despite the number of artists<br />
Manchester produces, nobody would think twice<br />
about Oasis leaving, “Because their work isn’t about<br />
Manchester. It could have been done anywhere, you<br />
know?” He laughs and shrugs.<br />
“It’s not my fault that I’m one of the few that’s actually<br />
taken the city and tried to do something with it. So<br />
I think that’s actually a question you need to ask the city<br />
of Manchester. Why are there so few people writing<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
about it in such an intimate way that when somebody<br />
who does do it leaves, people get upset?”<br />
The answer may be simply that putting Manchester<br />
into words is such a difficult task. It was no easy<br />
journey for Noon, and he all but brought about his<br />
situation himself.<br />
“I started to feel isolated. I’d been putting these books<br />
out, five books, all about Manchester, and I came to feel<br />
that … I wasn’t getting the kind of reaction that I would<br />
have hoped for. And it’s entirely my fault, because I<br />
kind of set out on a mission. It’s always dangerous<br />
when you do that.”<br />
Mission? What mission?<br />
“To put Manchester into the consciousness in terms<br />
of prose. To discover, and write in, a language that had<br />
come out of the city. And I think on my own terms, I’d<br />
succeeded in that. On my own personal terms. But it<br />
was definitely a mission.” He laughs, shaking his head.<br />
“And whenever you set out on a mission, you can only<br />
ever really be disappointed.”<br />
Over the last few years, Noon watched his city slowly<br />
disappear. Suffocated under a blanket of rejuvenation<br />
called New Manchester.<br />
“The poor place has been rejuvenated until it can<br />
hardly breathe. Which is great, but you have to be careful<br />
that you don’t rejuvenate into blandness. Increasingly,<br />
the city I’d been writing about started to vanish,<br />
and I have no interest in writing about yuppies living in<br />
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city centre flats. I’m not putting them down, but it’s just<br />
not an area I have an interest in as a fictional subject.<br />
They even knocked down Bottletown.”<br />
He’s referring to a location in Vurt, a planning hell of<br />
broken glass and towerblocks, a societal nightmare of<br />
accelerated residents with no concern for tomorrow. Is<br />
he saying Bottletown was real?<br />
“Yeah, ‘Bottletown’ is this place called Hulme.<br />
Hulme was an amazing place, and very typical of<br />
what’s happened in Manchester, in a sense. It’s this<br />
1960s council place: flats, ‘terraces in the sky.’ It didn’t<br />
work as a family place at all, so all the families moved<br />
out. And they began moving young single people in,<br />
students and so on. Short-term people.<br />
“So it all started to change, and that’s when I lived<br />
there. Hulme became this hotbed of activity; lots of<br />
bands started there. There were recording studios in the<br />
flats, totally illegal. And it was very close to Moss Side,<br />
the large black area, so there was a lot cross-fertilisation<br />
between the cultures going on. Just a mad place.<br />
“Eventually, they just knocked it down. They had to,<br />
it was very badly built and so on. But all that atmosphere,<br />
all that excitement, has dissipated. And they’ve<br />
built this new Hulme in its place, which is…” He<br />
pauses, choosing careful words. “I mean, I’m sure it’ll<br />
be interesting in 50 years, but at the moment it’s like a<br />
toytown. Not an ounce of atmosphere.”<br />
Aware of what may seem to be a nostalgia trip, he<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
adds, “Obviously, each generation has its own needs<br />
and desires. But for my personal generation, that place<br />
at that time represents the spirit of individuality, which<br />
is entirely what my work celebrates. Now it’s moved,<br />
and I don’t know where it’s gone. And I’m mostly too<br />
old to go looking for it any more.”<br />
Does he think someone else will find it? Was this it,<br />
the generation gap catching up perhaps?<br />
“Yeah, I think so. And one of the things which I hoped<br />
would have happened by now, was for my success to<br />
have dragged other writers up who would deal with the<br />
city in their own individualistic way. That didn’t really<br />
happen, and I think it should. I think it needs to happen.<br />
Manchester needs that voice, because it’s very hard to<br />
say anything against this New Manchester effort that’s<br />
building up. So the city needs that voice, the alternative<br />
voice. And it needs the alternative voice to be a success,<br />
to a good degree rather than just being underground.”<br />
This voice … does it have to be a native one? He’s a<br />
Mancunian, so were Morrissey and Ian Curtis: does he<br />
feel that sort of experience is necessary to capture the<br />
‘real’ Manchester?<br />
“No, no, not at all! I mean, a lot of students come<br />
into Manchester, from all over the place. It just needs<br />
people to talk about the city in a certain way. It’s time<br />
for someone younger than me to do that now, because<br />
my concerns are changing over the years, as they do.”<br />
I mentioned that because one of the things Noon<br />
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did inspire with books like Vurt was a sense that no<br />
matter who you were or where you lived, your town<br />
was as good a place as anywhere to tell a story. It’s<br />
very easy to get trapped into the feeling that interesting<br />
things only happen in ‘glamorous’ places, like London<br />
or New York…<br />
“Yeah, and the reason for that is quite simple, but<br />
a difficult truth for people to handle. It’s to do with<br />
stories, and the kind of environments that allow stories<br />
to happen. Obviously, with places like New York and<br />
certain areas of London, you have an environment that<br />
does very readily create stories; it’s to do with the way<br />
that people live their lives there. Once you get into the<br />
provinces, of England especially, you start to lose that<br />
melting-pot of ideas. There has to be a lot of work done.<br />
It’s much more difficult to write about Manchester than<br />
it is about Soho, for instance. But these are problems<br />
that writers in the future will have to face and sort out.”<br />
A matter of finding the stories?<br />
“Yeah. I think that in a place like Manchester there<br />
are a limited number of stories anyway. And a lot of the<br />
writers that have written about Manchester have tended<br />
to concentrate on these certain things.”<br />
Is this why Noon chose to make his work ostensibly<br />
science fiction? As a way of creating a Manchester<br />
where stories are created more readily?<br />
He pauses, contemplating his orange juice. “Difficult<br />
question, that.”<br />
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That’s the idea…<br />
“Certainly, I’ve been writing plays…” He pauses,<br />
considering. “I’ve been writing since 1984, doing<br />
one-man shows. And that stuff wasn’t really about<br />
Manchester as such. It tended to be quite experimental,<br />
just set nowhere. My only big success as a playwright<br />
was Woundings, and that’s set on the Falkland Islands!<br />
“So I didn’t really have that inkling to write about<br />
Manchester, and I think that was because nobody was.<br />
There wasn’t the heritage there which you get in, say,<br />
pop music. Pop’s been rooted in Manchester since<br />
1977, the idea that this is a place where you can do<br />
that. So young generations of people automatically<br />
fall into it.”<br />
But it seems the final impetus came from an unexpected<br />
turn of events. “I started writing a play called<br />
The Torture Garden, again set in a totally fictional<br />
environment. But the person I was writing the play for<br />
left the country for a job abroad, and I was left with this<br />
half-finished idea.”<br />
At that point, Noon was working in a Waterstone’s<br />
bookshop in Manchester. This is the point where everything<br />
happens; this is where it all turns around. Steve<br />
Powell, the man behind the fledgling Ringpull Press,<br />
was also working there. And he needed someone to<br />
write a novel for him…<br />
“I took the ideas of that play, and turned them into<br />
Vurt. And that’s the first time that I started to write about<br />
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Manchester. I wasn’t that conscious of even doing it;<br />
I was a quarter of the way through when I suddenly<br />
realised, ‘Hey this could be quite special, no-one’s really<br />
done this before, not in this way.’ And that’s when<br />
the mission set in…”<br />
Noon’s not the first writer to be halfway through a<br />
project before realising what the essence of the work<br />
actually is, and he agrees that it’s often the best way for<br />
a work to come about.<br />
“The more and more books you do, the more you<br />
think about what you’re doing. I’d always been interested<br />
in Ballard and Borges, people on the fringes<br />
of sci-fi, though; and the sci-fi thing happened almost<br />
accidentally, just came out of the ideas in The<br />
Torture Garden.”<br />
It almost sounds like one of Noon’s own fictions, the<br />
random remixing of concepts, words and spaces into<br />
something altogether different.<br />
“I’ve always been drawn to quite experimental art.<br />
But the idea of experimental art in Manchester at the<br />
time … It’s almost impossible to imagine what Manchester<br />
was like back then. It was so dark, and grimy,<br />
and grim. You just can’t imagine what it was like from<br />
here. So yeah, when you come to Vurt, you get this quite<br />
down and grimy place – a place of shadows – mixing<br />
with this phantasmagorical world.”<br />
Dark, but with a lot of energy, too.<br />
“Yeah, there was that. There’s always been that, and<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
that comes out of the punk thing.”<br />
It will surprise no-one to learn that yes, Noon was<br />
a punk. It was the only time in his life where he was<br />
part of a crowd, a movement – “I’m just not like that<br />
naturally” – and to him it signifies the real start of his<br />
adult life. He’s at pains to point out that his work is<br />
societal, not just cyberdrugs and urban grit.<br />
“If you actually examine Vurt, there are serious things<br />
going on in there which nobody ever talks about. It’s<br />
about escape, and facing up to the realities of what it<br />
is you’re trying to escape from. This is something that<br />
happens again and again in my work; it’s one of the<br />
themes that I pinpointed as being a typical Manchester<br />
story. The need to escape from your situation.”<br />
Certainly, many of Noon’s characters have an introverted<br />
quality, continually faced with the temptation to<br />
retreat into a secret, safe world. His stories are about<br />
finding the courage to face what you’re retreating from.<br />
“I think if you go back to Morrissey’s work with The<br />
Smiths, you’ll definitely key into that feeling there as<br />
well. Manchester in the 70s, when both Morrissey and<br />
I were growing up, was just not a place to be sensitive,<br />
or to be artistic or creative; it was beaten out of you. So<br />
you do get the sense of escape going on with people<br />
from our generation.”<br />
What about other, later generations? Are they escaping<br />
too?<br />
“It’s quite interesting to look at what’s been coming<br />
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out of Manchester since then, typified I suppose by<br />
Oasis and Happy Mondays. I mean, the escape that<br />
they’re on is just not the same at all. They’re escaping<br />
into stereotypes, for a start. There’s very little sense of<br />
exploration in their work. And it really does upset me<br />
that Manchester has become associated with that ‘laddist’<br />
image.”<br />
So who does he regard as closer to the spirit of the<br />
city? Joy Division, perhaps?<br />
He laughs quietly, like a private revelation. “I regard<br />
Joy Division as being the spirit of the city! If you look<br />
at The Smiths and Joy Division, you’ve got a light<br />
and dark thing going on there, a reflection of what<br />
was going on in the city at the time. Whereas, with the<br />
new Manchester thing, the ‘New Manchester’ people,<br />
they’re trying to pave over the darkness.”<br />
Not something Noon could ever be accused of; his<br />
Manchester is a place where tattooed addicts make<br />
love to shadows, dogs and humans carnally succumb<br />
to aphrodisiacs, where a young girl with a deadly kiss<br />
is the living embodiment of Mother Nature’s power to<br />
destroy. And the sirens never stop.<br />
Vurt was a watershed book; upon release it, and Noon,<br />
made a leap into the consciousness of underground<br />
literary subculture. Why does he feel the book had such<br />
a strong impact? And how does he view himself, no<br />
longer the underground writer he was?<br />
“Am I not?” He laughs. “I hope that my heart’s still<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
there. I mean, when Vurt initially came out it reached a<br />
certain number of people, and grew from there, but it’s<br />
been very slow. Even now, my sales aren’t what you’d<br />
call massive.”<br />
He emphasises the word. “Slow. I know that when<br />
I start complaining about this, my writer friends just<br />
say ‘Shut up, Jeff. I should have your problems!’” He<br />
laughs again. “But I’d really like to break through to<br />
another level. I’m really into reaching out to people,<br />
but in an interesting, experimental way. That’s what<br />
I’ve always tried to do. I have no desire to write books<br />
just for a few people to enjoy. That’s not really me.<br />
“But at the same time, I have this really strong streak<br />
of experimentalism [sic] that just kind of pushes things<br />
a certain way. I just hope that one day it will happen,<br />
you know? With the kind of age that we’re moving into<br />
now, we should be discovering new ways of telling<br />
stories. And I hope my work becomes part of that. But<br />
it’s a long journey.”<br />
Speaking of experimentation, new ages and cultures;<br />
what is it about club culture in general which appeals to<br />
Noon? Much of his work seems almost entrenched in<br />
club/dub fusion culture, the primacy of the DJ.<br />
“That goes back to punk again. The most important<br />
moment in popular history happened in 1977, when<br />
white kids discovered dub reggae. From that moment<br />
comes everything we now listen to. And it was a complete<br />
revelation to me. I was learning to play the bass,<br />
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but I’d never really listened to the bass on a record<br />
before. In pop music, it was always guitar and voice;<br />
we didn’t really know what a bassline was, because<br />
they were always turned down low.<br />
“But suddenly, with dub reggae … It doesn’t just turn<br />
it up, it actually says, ‘This is the centre of the music.’<br />
The bass and the drum; everything else is decoration.<br />
And I think you can follow that moment from there<br />
right into club culture. Hip-hop especially, but also<br />
house and techno, speed garage, whatever, discovering<br />
the bass and the drum and the beauty contained therein.<br />
“So with the post-punk scene happening as well,<br />
you started to get this really experimental thing going<br />
on with groups, especially bands like Pere Ubu and<br />
XTC. You get an interesting space in music, so that<br />
when you now get to a producer like Timbaland, you<br />
can see that his spatial imagination is immense, thinking<br />
about exactly where he’s gonna place this hi-hat<br />
sound, and so on.”<br />
Being a big experimental ambient fan myself, I<br />
couldn’t help but notice an acknowledgement to Autechre<br />
at the start of Needle In The Groove. Is it fair,<br />
then, to say he simply seeks out experimentation, no<br />
matter what the artform?<br />
“Yeah, absolutely. I love all the stuff that happens on<br />
the fringes of the dance scene. The stuff you can’t really<br />
dance to, but it’s still a part of the scene. I’m really<br />
into German music at the moment, Oval and Mouse On<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
Mars. Again, there’s just that interest in sound.<br />
“So the point about club culture is, it’s not so<br />
much the rave and Ibiza scene, but more the kind of<br />
manipulation of sound that’s going on, and the way<br />
that that feeds back into the way people live and view<br />
their lives these days. I know for a fact, for example,<br />
that those young kids over there –” He points at three<br />
young skaters across the street, “– have a very different<br />
mindset to the one I had at their age. And a lot<br />
of that is to do with the way they’re experiencing the<br />
world, the way they’re experiencing music, film, TV,<br />
the internet and so on. I’m really interested in that, and<br />
that’s mainly why I tend to write young characters.<br />
And these days, that experimentation with sound is<br />
fed into the work too.”<br />
They also have different drugs. Which is as good a<br />
way as any of bringing up the thorny subject. It’s become<br />
de rigeur to describe Noon’s work as “trippy.”<br />
Are, or were, drugs as big a part of his life as it seems?<br />
“No.” He laughs; I get the impression he’s asked<br />
this question a lot, too. “Tiny, tiny part. In my work,<br />
as something that I write about, it’s just a metaphor<br />
for change. It forces the character to change. If you<br />
look at Vurt, there are loads of ‘cheat modes’ going on<br />
in there, by me as a writer. Vaz is the ultimate cheat<br />
mode; Vaz will get anybody out of anything! But with<br />
the feathers it’s more a feeling of, ‘Okay, let’s push<br />
them onto the next level now.’ And it automatically<br />
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does it, for me as a writer.”<br />
So much for that popular myth, then. If drugs aren’t<br />
part of Noon’s inspiration, what is? Who does he read,<br />
for example?<br />
“I read and re-read Jorge Luis Borges, in fact I’m just<br />
re-reading his stuff at the moment. He’s one that I come<br />
back to all the time. The more I write, the more of his<br />
influence comes in there. And J G. Ballard meant a lot<br />
to me when I was in my 20s.”<br />
What about other media, besides music?<br />
“Painting.” He says it as if it’s the most natural thing<br />
in the world. “My first and natural talent is to paint.<br />
That’s what I was born to do. I trained in painting and<br />
visual arts at university. But I haven’t painted since<br />
1984, when I started seriously writing plays.<br />
“So really, there’s lots of stuff going on in my work.<br />
Lots of stuff coming from music, lots of stuff coming<br />
from visual arts, and the history of visual arts. And it all<br />
kind of gets mixed up in there.”<br />
Does this mean, then, that he doesn’t ‘do’ research<br />
as such? That it all comes from a big dub inphomix in<br />
his head?<br />
“Yeah, that’s just what it is. I pick it up, and it all kind<br />
of gets filtered through my imagination. I don’t do a lot<br />
of research, no.” He laughs quietly.<br />
“The thing is, my work’s changing at the moment.<br />
It’s becoming more real. The project I’m working on<br />
at the moment is to all intents and purposes historical,<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
so there’s a certain amount of research going into it.<br />
But I don’t get trapped by it … and I just exaggerate. I<br />
go over the top and see what happens. I do think those<br />
writers who are bound by the science…” Careful words<br />
again … “It produces a certain kind of work, which has<br />
a certain kind of appeal. But it never interests me, that<br />
hard science fiction.”<br />
Does this follow through into forethought? There’s<br />
a theory going round that Nymphomation, for example,<br />
was planned right from the start, back when he<br />
wrote Vurt.<br />
He laughs again, but loud this time as his ever-present<br />
half-smile finally splits into a wide grin.<br />
“No, not at all! Everything is retro-engineered.<br />
There’s no plan. The last sentence of Nymphomation<br />
actually came about by accident…<br />
“I was doing a reading, and somebody asked me what<br />
I was working on. So I said ‘I’m doing the first book<br />
in the Vurt sequence, set before Vurt.’ And this person<br />
asked – completely innocently – ‘What, you mean it<br />
ends with the first sentence of Vurt?’ And I just said,<br />
‘Yeeeaaah…’ But I did have in mind this four book<br />
sequence. Honest…”<br />
Will we see any more? Is there another Vurt book in<br />
the works?<br />
“No. Now that I’ve moved away from Manchester –<br />
and stated I’m also leaving sci-fi – the idea of another<br />
Vurt book becomes a bit … problematic. I might come<br />
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back, but at the moment I’ve got no interest.<br />
“What I will say is that to a certain and very important<br />
degree, Needle In The Groove is that last Vurt<br />
novel. Because all the books in the Vurt sequence<br />
have been about the same thing. Which has got nothing<br />
to do with feathers, nothing to do with anything<br />
‘science fictional’ at all. It’s to do with the search for<br />
a new family. The escape from a broken family, the<br />
setting up of a new, alternative family, and the search<br />
to repair a broken family.<br />
“Needle In The Groove and Vurt could almost be<br />
mirror-images of one another, in that sense. The difference<br />
being that at the end, Elliot manages something<br />
that Scribble from Vurt hasn’t got a chance in hell of<br />
sorting out; his relationship with his father. So if you<br />
take this sequence of books as being about that subject,<br />
which I do, then Needle finished it. Obviously, the<br />
hardcore Vurt fans are going to say I’m being daft with<br />
all this,” he laughs, “But you know, this is what I write<br />
about. This is my subject.”<br />
It does make sense; both Vurt and Needle are ostensibly<br />
about single protagonists, whereas Nymphomation<br />
and Pollen are ensemble pieces. There is indeed a<br />
mirror-image, even though each book in the sequence<br />
has gone further back into the past.<br />
“Yeah, and now I’m doing a historical novel! I just<br />
hope people are picking up on these elements in my<br />
work. I hope they’re not becoming so enamoured with<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
the superficial subject matter that they can’t see, I am<br />
on a journey here, and travelling a certain road I have<br />
to go down.<br />
“I liken my position at the moment very much to J.G.<br />
Ballard. Ballard built up a very rich series of techniques<br />
over 20 years or so while his work was ‘hidden’ in<br />
sci-fi. And then, with Empire Of The Sun, he started to<br />
write about things which were more real, using those<br />
techniques he’d built up. That’s quite interesting to me<br />
at the moment, with Needle In The Groove as the start of<br />
that. Using all these techniques to focus on something<br />
that’s quite real, quite emotional and to do with the way<br />
people live their lives now.”<br />
Certainly, no-one could accuse Noon of not developing<br />
his style. It’s one of the things which makes his work<br />
stand out from the crowd, a style which has become<br />
more fluid and, dare I say, “dubbed” as time goes on. In<br />
a sense, Noon’s work is more to do with the way stories<br />
are told than the stories themselves.<br />
“I’m glad you say that, actually. I’m a storyteller, and<br />
I love telling stories, but the way that I tell the stories is<br />
what really excites me. The writers I admire are those<br />
people of whom you can read two sentences and just<br />
know it’s them. Those are the people I like. It’s the<br />
same with music, everything.<br />
“I do think this whole kind of ‘dub fiction’ thing I’m<br />
on at the moment is exciting for me as a writer. I hope<br />
it’s exciting for the reader. You just don’t know what’s<br />
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going to come out of it. It just seems right and correct<br />
that it should be happening now, at this space in time.”<br />
Right here and right now being the end of the century,<br />
the nonexistent year double-zero. The year where trend<br />
itself is outdated, and there is no mode.<br />
“Yeah. In this whole kind of pro-Postmodern world<br />
we’re living in, I think it’s fruitful that people can<br />
discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live<br />
now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the<br />
prose equivalent of that is great.”<br />
And has he? Noon has another book due to be published<br />
in Autumn 2000, entitled Cobralingus. Is that his<br />
liquid fiction?<br />
“Cobralingus takes this whole idea of remix fiction<br />
and pushes it right to the extreme. It’s based on electronic<br />
music techniques, where I take sampled text and<br />
I push them through a series of gates. Each gate has a<br />
different effect upon the text, but it’s not done using<br />
computers. It’s all in my mind. And as it works its way<br />
through, each time it’s a remix of what’s gone before.<br />
“I’m also starting to write with another writer in<br />
Brighton here, and that extends the thought into other<br />
people – we’re remixing each other’s text. My work’s<br />
become very experimental at the moment, since coming<br />
to Brighton. Coming here was difficult, as you can<br />
imagine. Removing myself from the source of all those<br />
stories took me a long time to even start.”<br />
And Manchester meets liquid fiction – or at least, liq-<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
uid music – in Needle In The Groove. I have to admit,<br />
even to a ‘hardened’ Noon reader like myself, the first<br />
few pages of his latest novel were a shock, simply due<br />
to the extremely unconventional layout of the text and<br />
the way the narrative is presented.<br />
“Well, it’s no more unconventional than the way Patti<br />
Smith sets her poetry out, or Bob Dylan…”<br />
Maybe not, but for Noon it was a big step forward,<br />
and one he’s obviously happy with. Will we see more<br />
of that? Is his work going to continue, and develop, in<br />
that style?<br />
“Certainly in these separate projects I’m talking<br />
about, yeah. Cobralingus is the first of them, and it will<br />
become more liquid. But in my ‘mainstream’ novels,<br />
there’ll still be an overriding sense of story and narrative.<br />
I’m never going to lose that. I have no interest in<br />
presenting the reader with a kind of ‘destroyed’ narrative,<br />
unless it’s specifically in an experimental setting.<br />
But obviously, the experiments that I’m doing will feed<br />
into the narrative stuff as well.”<br />
This poses a question. If he’s committed to developing<br />
this style, and now that he’s crossed the threshold<br />
with Needle, will he feel comfortable ‘going back’ to<br />
conventional narrative?<br />
“I think it’s to do with being honest to the story you’re<br />
telling, that’s all. I have this idea that every story has its<br />
own particular language. A lot of writers don’t consider<br />
this at all; they’ve got their style and they do it. But for<br />
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me, easily the longest part of the process is discovering<br />
that language. Once I’ve done that, the book just goes.<br />
“Needle was actually written in conventional punctuation<br />
for a while, until I started to let the ideas of the<br />
subject dissolve into the way it was written, so that the<br />
two can’t be separated. You can’t separate the form<br />
from the content in Needle. And once that happened,<br />
the book just kind of flowed out.<br />
“So yeah, if get an idea for a more conventional story,<br />
I’ll set it in a more conventional style. It’s the language,<br />
you know? The book I’m writing at the moment has an<br />
invented language, but the punctuation is straight down<br />
the line, no messing about, because that suits the story.<br />
But the language itself is an invention.”<br />
Do I detect a bit of a Bauhaus thing going on here?<br />
Form follows function, and all that?<br />
“Oh, yeah. Form is function. All this comes from<br />
my painting background. And of course sometimes,<br />
form can go against function for a deliberate effect.<br />
For instance, you could write about a DJ mixing, but<br />
in the style of John Donne … and I have done that at<br />
times. There are moments of that in Needle, writing<br />
very elegantly and poetically about something which is<br />
very modern and chaotic. And it sets up a kind of mix,<br />
a clash of styles.”<br />
John Donne. An odd choice of example, but works<br />
like Needle are certainly approaching poetry. Is this<br />
what we can expect from him in the future, something<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
more akin to poetry?<br />
“No, no, I just have an intense interest in language.<br />
This is something that’s been growing since Nymphomation.<br />
That was a difficult book for me, definitely a<br />
watershed. But in terms of my progression it’s a very<br />
important book, because that’s when things started to<br />
dissolve for the first time.”<br />
Nymphomation also feels very self-analytical in<br />
places, almost as if Noon were looking back at this<br />
younger person who wrote Vurt, deconstructing his<br />
own text from a modern standpoint.<br />
“It is a self-conscious book, yeah. I think if anybody<br />
looked back at the progression of what I’ve done,<br />
Nymphomation is definitely where things started to<br />
change. Of course, once you do that you’re taking a<br />
pathway; and where that leads you just don’t know.<br />
I am writing a novel at the moment, but I don’t like<br />
talking about it. It’s going to shock people. It’s going<br />
to surprise people.”<br />
Is that ‘literary shock factor’ important?<br />
“Oh, yeah,” he laughs. “I’m totally and utterly into<br />
people who surprise you, that’s me. Sometimes in your<br />
life as an artist, you have to be quite brave about that.<br />
Especially if you have a fanbase, because not everybody<br />
manages to get one. But I think at some point in<br />
your career, you have to take account of that… and<br />
then move on.<br />
“I mean, look at somebody like Terry Pratchett …<br />
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You can imagine that Pratchett would love to move on.<br />
But can he? He’s gone so far down that road now. And,<br />
you know, I never want to go so far down that road that<br />
I can’t turn off it.”<br />
He pauses for a moment, considering what he’s just<br />
let slip, and laughs. “That’s either brilliant or something<br />
that should be in Women’s Own poetry corner!”<br />
So experimentation is very important to him, as an<br />
artist. If that’s the case, why did it take Noon so long to<br />
write an overtly ‘punk’ book?<br />
“Did it?”<br />
I certainly think so. His other works may have the<br />
sensibility, for sure. But Needle is the first novel which<br />
actually reads like punk, aside from the subject matter.<br />
“I suppose so. A lot of that comes out of me knowing<br />
it was time to leave Manchester. I think it’s fairly obvious<br />
Needle is my ‘Farewell to Manchester’ book. It’s<br />
me looking back at my life, and how music has affected<br />
it. Note that the furthest they get back on their musical<br />
trip is 1957; the year I was born. So it’s quite a conscious<br />
summing-up of that addiction to the Manchester<br />
music scene, and both the good and bad sides of that<br />
addiction.”<br />
Is this why we get the tour round the streets with<br />
Elliot, pointing out places like John Cooper Clarke Terraces,<br />
Joy Division Street, and so on?<br />
“That part actually started out as a kind of satire on<br />
New Manchester, and the ‘heritage industry’ they’re<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
building up there. But it turned into something quite<br />
poetic, almost a kind of prayer, especially on the CD.<br />
And it also ties into things that were in Pollen, the idea<br />
of maps in the mind, maps in reality, and how the two<br />
coincide. Again, that comes from Borges.”<br />
That’s definitely a theme of his; is it something he’s<br />
specifically interested in, the idea of mapping the mind<br />
and consciousness?<br />
“Well, mapping the city, yeah. I’m well into this<br />
psycho-geography stuff that goes on in London. I love<br />
that, the ‘labyrinth’ idea of a city, and how the human<br />
mind corresponds to that.”<br />
Pollen certainly seems to make that match – between<br />
the city and the person – with Columbus the Xcab<br />
King, whose mind is the city. And he’s another of the<br />
introverts, almost psychologically crippled because<br />
he’s become one with the city.<br />
“Well, there’s a large introspection in me, anyway.<br />
A lot of what I write about comes from my childhood,<br />
and knowing that I had this special thing – imagination<br />
– but not knowing how to communicate it.”<br />
Is there a danger in becoming too tied to a city?<br />
“Oh, yeah. Definitely. I don’t think that you should<br />
in any way become tied beyond a number of years,<br />
certainly these days. There’s just no need for it any<br />
more. My Mum and Dad were born, lived and died in<br />
the same area. And that shouldn’t happen any more. We<br />
have to move on. We have to explore.”<br />
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He mentioned the internet earlier, as being one of<br />
the elements which contribute to the modern youth’s<br />
differing mindset. Does he feel the global awareness it<br />
can bring is helping this aim, societally?<br />
“Yeah, it’s part of it. I do think we’re putting a lot of<br />
emphasis on the net beyond what it is. But it’s another<br />
part of Liquid Culture, like the DJ remix. The remix to<br />
me is the ultimate Postmodern artform, and the net is a<br />
symptom and a part of that.”<br />
Noon has finally started experimenting in the ‘DJ<br />
remix’ area himself. Alongside the novel of Needle<br />
In The Groove came an audio CD, executed by David<br />
Toop and released on Sulphur Records. It’s an ambient<br />
wordtrip; Noon reads passages from the novel while<br />
Toop cuts them to ribbons, adding an urban underlay of<br />
beats and soundforms. It’s certainly … different. And,<br />
on reflection, something which I’m surprised Noon<br />
hasn’t tried before. How did it come about?<br />
“It kind of grew out of some things the publisher said,<br />
about doing a few tracks for promotional purposes. Just<br />
to give out to bookshops, initially. And I’ve always<br />
loved Toop’s music, so I asked him and that was it. I<br />
didn’t know him before this. I’d met him maybe twice,<br />
three times before we actually recorded.”<br />
Did Noon have much ‘hands-on’ involvement with<br />
the production?<br />
“Well, I sent him the lyrics, and notes on the musical<br />
ideas I had in my mind. Working from that, he sent me<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
tapes, which I worked to. And then we went in and kind<br />
of co-produced it. It was amazing going in there, because<br />
I hadn’t been in a recording studio for years, and<br />
all this digital stuff they’ve got is just mind-boggling.”<br />
Noon’s voice rises a little as he becomes more<br />
animated. I get the distinct feeling we’re into a subject<br />
Noon wants to talk about a lot…<br />
“I mean, they can do anything, absolutely anything.<br />
They can manipulate the musical input, the signal, any<br />
way they like. And then coming home again, turning on<br />
the word processor … You just think, there’s something<br />
wrong here. There’s a massive difference between the<br />
way that I can manipulate text, and the way that David<br />
can manipulate the music on his screen. And I don’t<br />
know why that’s built up.<br />
“For instance, I’m often changing the sex of my<br />
characters. But there’s no button I can press that says,<br />
‘Change the sex of this character all the way through.’<br />
Ridiculous. There’s no button I can press that says,<br />
‘Turn this into the past tense.’ And there should be.”<br />
Not that technology’s shortcoming are going to stop<br />
him. “With Cobralingus, I’m doing a lot of random<br />
manipulation. But I have to do it all by hand, either on<br />
screen or on bits of paper. There isn’t a button I’ve got<br />
that can randomise it for me. Sure, there are random<br />
text generators and so on, but they’re seen as add-ons<br />
rather than part of the process of Liquid Culture. We<br />
need to allow words to become part of that. And to<br />
375<br />
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do it we need the tools, like they already have with<br />
music. At the moment, all I have is my mind and a cut<br />
and paste button!”<br />
Cobralingus is being produced through Codex<br />
Books, based here in Brighton. Is there any reason<br />
why Noon seems to favour smaller publishers? Even<br />
Anchor, his current publisher, is only a small imprint of<br />
TransWorld. Is it a control thing?<br />
“It’s just nice for me to have those two options, really.<br />
I mean, I do want to write books that reach people,<br />
but at the same time I also want to write these books<br />
that are just for me.<br />
“I don’t really get interfered with that much. I think<br />
TransWorld don’t really understand me that well,” he<br />
chuckles. “I’m the most leftfield writer they’ve got, so<br />
I’m just kind of left to get on with it. And with Codex,<br />
it’s nice to have that intimate relationship with a publisher.<br />
So it really is the best of both worlds.”<br />
We suddenly realise the café actually closed 15 minutes<br />
ago. There’s a big CLOSED sign on the door, and<br />
the chairs are up. The staff have been patiently waiting<br />
for us to finish, so as we make ready to set off I quickly<br />
ask the inevitable end-of-interview question: what’s<br />
next? I heard a rumour linking Noon with Hollywood…<br />
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and<br />
“Yeah, we’re working on something, but it’s taking<br />
ages. I can’t talk about it. I do want that sort of stuff to<br />
happen, though. We’ve just finished the Vurt play in<br />
Manchester, which I wrote about three years ago, and<br />
seeing it now … Well, if I wrote it now it’d be entirely<br />
different. So when I write the film, I definitely want it<br />
to come through my consciousness now. I don’t want to<br />
replicate what I was eight years ago, I can’t stand that.<br />
“So the film, if it does happen, will be interesting.<br />
It’ll be a bit of a surprise, I think, because compared<br />
to the novel and the play, it will be the most realistic<br />
of them all, with the least special effects.” He gives a<br />
broad smile, knowing full well that it’s the last thing<br />
people will expect of him.<br />
But that’s the point; Noon probably couldn’t stop reinventing<br />
himself if he tried. He’s all about the remix,<br />
the experiment; what happens if you take this word, or<br />
that phrase, and give them new meaning? What happens<br />
when strangers overhear one another’s thoughts in<br />
subjective languages? How do you use one text to tell<br />
a different story to every person, and every single one<br />
of them is right?<br />
And I realise, as I head back to the train station, that<br />
it’s catching. I’ve been injected with Liquid Culture. �<br />
376<br />
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Review [published October 2002]<br />
Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
“The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace<br />
more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way<br />
that ought to lead there.” – Maurice Blanchot<br />
How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common<br />
question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman<br />
and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel,<br />
asks it too. He thinks of some of the traumatic events<br />
of his time:<br />
“The woman who happened to be passing by when<br />
the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks<br />
whose throats were cut in Algiers, the 20 boys gunned<br />
down before their parents’ eyes in Colombia, the entire<br />
trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes<br />
in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury in Johannesburg,<br />
the 200 passengers on the plane that exploded above<br />
the sea, the two, three or 6,000 men and boys killed<br />
in Srebrenica, the hundreds of thousand of woman and<br />
children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola.”<br />
The list could go on and on. And that fact, Daane<br />
thinks, is perhaps the worst. “For one moment, a day, a<br />
week, they were front-page news, for several seconds<br />
they flowed through cables in every part of the globe,<br />
BUY Cees Nooteboom books online from and<br />
and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of<br />
oblivion.” Amnesia sets in “as if … humanity wasn’t<br />
interested in individual names, only the blind survival<br />
of the species.”<br />
Daane is, as you might have guessed, a melancholy<br />
soul. But his otherwise mundane ruminations have a<br />
traumatic resonance. Some time before the novel begins,<br />
his wife and child were killed in a place crash.<br />
Alone, in time between jobs, he wanders the streets of<br />
Berlin with his camera, recording quiet moments at<br />
dawn or dusk in a city full of ghosts. This is his way<br />
of resisting amnesia, and yet it is also his way of forgetting<br />
(“dealing with” one might say) the permanent<br />
absence of his family. The paradox is central to his melancholy<br />
and to this novel. How can he move on without<br />
obliterating their individual names? The temptation is<br />
to dive into work, into experience and other forms of<br />
forgetfulness, but to do that, he thinks, would, in turn,<br />
lead to the sleep of reason, thereby summoning up the<br />
nightmares already spoken of.<br />
In first half of the novel, we follow Arthur on his<br />
wandering. He visits friends in a bar, gets caught up<br />
377<br />
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with dying tramp on the snow-covered streets, visits a<br />
gallery with two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich<br />
that he is fascinated by, and a library that will, in the<br />
second half, change his life. Many reviewers have referred<br />
to this wandering with, at best, condescension. In<br />
particular, they disapprove of Arthur’s ‘intellectual posturing’,<br />
which seems to mean any mention of anything<br />
other than that which will take the story ‘forward’ into<br />
forgetfulness. This is a form of criticism that avoids the<br />
very issue addressed by the novel. Arthur is searching<br />
for an. He talks with his living friends, and listens to<br />
those who are dead, which take the form of memories,<br />
books, paintings, films, science and philosophy. It helps<br />
him. It helps his friends. But like all friends, they have<br />
their limits. And he knows it. They are useful only in<br />
their uselessness. This novel is a part of that scheme<br />
too. It has this wonderfully strange quality of enabling<br />
us to maintain contact with what is important to us, that<br />
which otherwise seems inaccessible, in that which takes<br />
us further away (i.e. ‘escapism’). Indeed, the All Souls’<br />
Day of the title is the Catholic holiday (November 2nd)<br />
commemorating the souls of the dead; another form of<br />
fiction in which one has to place one’s trust in order to<br />
cross the abyss.<br />
On a ferry crossing the Baltic, thinking of the 1994<br />
MV Estonia disaster, Arthur reflects that there is a thin<br />
membrane between him and chaos, as thin as the window<br />
he presses his face to, looking out to sea. The more<br />
BUY Cees Nooteboom books online from and<br />
ignorant of the reviewers (i.e. Julie Myerson of The<br />
Guardian) would rather we weren’t reminded of this<br />
and be allowed to plunge into forgetfulness, as if it were<br />
possible without denial. Nooteboom’s achievement<br />
is to open the abyss of history out of these everyday<br />
thoughts. He does this by showing how the rich heritage<br />
of speculation in the arts and sciences derives from<br />
the same confrontation with trauma as experienced by<br />
Arthur. This is seen as a failure by those, like Myerson,<br />
who can see learning only as a trophy to be displayed.<br />
Nooteboom wears his learning lightly but it seems one<br />
can’t escape the philistine thought-police of English<br />
literary criticism.<br />
In terms of the plot, Arthur contrives to meet a history<br />
research student beginning a project on an obscure<br />
Spanish queen of the 12th century. From what little<br />
is revealed, she appears, like Arthur, to be taking a<br />
roundabout route in resolving personal trauma. Despite<br />
this, both Arthur and readers of the novel seem to be on<br />
the brink of relief from endless speculation by falling<br />
into a love story. But the student, Elik, a fellow Dutch<br />
ex-patriot, remains mysteriously private despite their<br />
physical intimacy. Through her silence, she prompts<br />
even more fevered questioning. After a date, she disappears<br />
without warning and, when they meet again,<br />
refuses to reveal very much of herself. She prefers to<br />
argue about historiography with one of Arthur’s scholarly<br />
friends. The novelist doesn’t fill in the blanks for<br />
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us; she remains a figure in the shadows at the edge of the<br />
prose. We have to speculate as much as Arthur, another<br />
reason for lazy readers to complain. Indeed, this novel<br />
is, despite its conventional, conversational surface,<br />
packed full of implicit allusions to its own provisional<br />
status in relation to its own research. There’s Arthur’s<br />
private film project (that Myerson selfishly misreads as<br />
“solipsistic” when it is precisely the opposite); there’s<br />
Elik’s research project much-criticised by her supervisor;<br />
and there’s the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich<br />
quietly expressing a latent trauma much like that of<br />
Munch’s much noisier The Scream. However, the most<br />
obvious correlation is Arthur’s half-requited infatuation<br />
with Elik. While for Myerson all this is inadmissibly<br />
reflexive, it creates a stimulating vertigo for the reader.<br />
We’re not allowed to forget for very long that the novel,<br />
and so its reader, is subject to the same problems of<br />
knowledge and its refusal.<br />
This final point is emphasised by the occasional<br />
BUY Cees Nooteboom books online from and<br />
chapters in which a kind of Greek chorus intervenes<br />
in the narrative, looking down on the events with cool<br />
compassion. It’s unclear who is speaking. Perhaps it’s<br />
the voice of all that which cannot be included in what<br />
is, necessarily, a circumscribed narrative. Perhaps it’s<br />
Arthur’s late wife keeping a concerned eye on her<br />
husband. But most likely it is the voice from 500 years<br />
from now, when the past-as-tragedy has become the<br />
past-as-absurdist-comedy, just as the life of the Spanish<br />
queen seems to us now. Elik’s project was to rescue<br />
the queen from such a fate. Her supervisor warns her<br />
it might take a decade and be, in the end, futile; no one<br />
is likely to read the results. But she continues anyway,<br />
perhaps because of that, just as Arthur will continue<br />
to pursue Elik. For many, this novel will be similarly<br />
futile, slow-moving, overlong and provisional, but I’m<br />
very grateful that Cees Nooteboom has taken the long<br />
way round and rescued something precious from the<br />
traumatic inferno. �<br />
379<br />
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Review [published September 2003]<br />
Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie<br />
Jayne Margetts<br />
The first time I laid eyes upon the troubled cast of<br />
Royston Vasey’s The League Of Gentlemen I almost<br />
vomited. Such grotesque, pantomime-scarred characters,<br />
which could turn the stomach with a flutter of the<br />
eyelash, stirred the strings of disturbance with all and<br />
sundry. A BAFTA Award (2000 for Production) confirmed<br />
that comedy had found a new avenue, and that<br />
it was okay to satirise all that was politically incorrect.<br />
So when a copy of Angus Oblong’s Creepy Suzie And<br />
13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children landed<br />
on the doorstep the odds were tipped in its favour.<br />
Dysfunctionalism rocks!<br />
P.T. Barnum was a rock god! He was an opportunist.<br />
He was an entrepreneurial voyeurist. And by trailing<br />
his carnival freaks across the backbone of mid-America<br />
circa late-1800s, this vaudevillian parasite put the fun<br />
back into fantasy, the sacred and profane.<br />
We’ve had a host of wannabes since then; Jim<br />
Rose’s Circus Sideshow is possibly the heir apparent,<br />
and in TV terms Todd Browning’s unfortunate band<br />
of merry Freaks, and then suddenly, whoosh, out of<br />
the fictional toxic backwaters of Sacramento comes<br />
BUY Angus Oblong books online from and<br />
a new satirist of the grotesque with a posse who are<br />
anything but Ivy League.<br />
Meet Angus Oblong; 27-year-old modern day Frankenstein<br />
with a deformity fixation and sperm donor to<br />
the craziest family of contemporary abominations outside<br />
of the test tube. His (first major book deal) Creepy<br />
Suzie And 13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children<br />
salutes them for their warts-and-all-mutation-of-toxicgenetics-meets-psychotic-hearted<br />
compassion. There’s<br />
grotesque mutant babies, midget albino crossdressers,<br />
siamese quadruplets, narcoleptic dogs, stupid vampires<br />
and fun, fun, fun doses of electroshock therapy galore!<br />
The fun figures that inhabit Creepy Suzie’s landscape<br />
enjoy the benefits of a contaminated environment and<br />
lifestyle. This is no Sorority House picnic peppered<br />
with sunny Californian hormones and bleached silicon<br />
smiles. The inhabitants of this bleak, black-and-white<br />
cul-de-sac have flaws galore. ‘Emily Amputee’ is a<br />
prime example: “Emily went to her doctor for her annual<br />
checkup. Some paperwork got mixed up and they<br />
amputated one of her legs.” Or if you favour a tale on<br />
the homicidal side there’s always ‘Mary Had A Little<br />
380<br />
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Chainsaw’. One of my personal favourites, ‘Jenny,<br />
Jenny Jenny & Babette The Siamese Quadruplets’ puts<br />
a new spin on the impetuousness of droll humour.<br />
Peer group pressure (aka ‘The Debbies’), ‘Sibling<br />
Rivalry And Happy, Happy, Happy Sammy’ examines<br />
universes populated by hormones, pathological urges<br />
and by childhood optimism that has to be stamped<br />
out at all costs. It’s one big, happy, alienated family in<br />
Oblong Town.<br />
This is a marriage between Edgar Allan Poe and<br />
David Lynch. A tango through the bizarre. And to think<br />
that Oblong spent a slab of his youth languishing away<br />
behind the grinding machine at the Royal Ground<br />
Coffee Shop at Polk and Vallejo while pumping out<br />
underground comics on the side. His personal bio states<br />
that he then “ended up in California after five years of<br />
living on the streets and taking it in the butt by ugly old<br />
men for heroin money”. A stint as a clown for a fastfood<br />
restaurant quickly alerted him to his true calling.<br />
Oblong is a mysterious creature whose art screams<br />
“This is Vaudeville”. He idolises his cartoon children<br />
and just as his book showcased the talents of ‘Cross-<br />
Dressing Charles’, ‘Janet’s Butt’ and ‘Carl & The<br />
Crippled Black Kid With An Eye Patch’, his sitcom<br />
debut, The Oblongs, continues the theme by choosing<br />
to both empathise and poke fun at the ‘physically<br />
challenged’ (or if you prefer, mutant children). As<br />
Oblong confessed to the Sacramento Bee’s David<br />
BUY Angus Oblong books online from and<br />
Barton, “I always had a fascination with deformities.<br />
The Oblongs was a show about the kids, it was based<br />
around Milo’s clubhouse and all the ugly deformed<br />
kids who can’t otherwise get friends.”<br />
This book is original. It’s horrifying. It’s morbid.<br />
It’s Halloween for 365 days a year. In a world where<br />
animation is gradually eating into the psyche of<br />
public consumption and where cartoon-strip-style<br />
graffiti is hot, Oblong has carved a beautiful niche.<br />
So what if he fantasised that his father “were a sword<br />
swallower and mother a prostitute”. And so what if<br />
his humour is gallows all the way. It’s time to stop<br />
being prejudiced about first impressions folks; it’s<br />
time to let the freaks in, to celebrate them and their<br />
own unique Olongesque charm.<br />
If you are looking for criticism then you won’t find<br />
any here. I’ve tried. God knows. I hang my head in<br />
shame at the thought that humour can be so sacrilegious.<br />
Look – if American giant NBC can swallow Oblong’s<br />
appeal (and secure his creative vision for cable) – then<br />
so can we. Okay, so home may be the local toxic waste<br />
dump but let’s be fair, these kids are partially human<br />
after all, and as such, deserve our support…<br />
A mock children’s book called Mommy Is Going To<br />
Die is apparently in the test tube. It’s possible that that<br />
small and assorted clubhouse of human oddities will be<br />
raising its semi-amputated arms with empathy and joy<br />
at the mention of more siblings … Freaks rule! �<br />
381<br />
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Feature [published March 1999]<br />
Will Oldham: Songs Of The Human Animal<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
Who is Will Oldham? Well, maybe he’d like to know<br />
first of all. As if in search of the proper one, he’s<br />
released LPs under several different names. Made<br />
famous by the Palace name (Palace Brothers, Palace<br />
Songs, Palace Music), he then reverted to plain Will<br />
Oldham for one record, and now he’s Bonnie ‘Prince’<br />
Billy. He dismisses any deep meaning behind this fluidity<br />
of brand name, but such unwillingness to explain<br />
is a symptom of the same thing. It’s an unwillingness to<br />
secure a ground and remain. Even so, we can be secure<br />
in saying he is without doubt the best writer in music<br />
today. Not only a remarkable songwriter – The Sunday<br />
Times says “Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen already<br />
suffer by comparison” – but also a remarkable writer<br />
full stop. He’s 29, from Louisville, Kentucky, and his<br />
latest LP is called I See A Darkness.<br />
Seeing a darkness? Seeing needs light, so there’s<br />
something odd about the title. On the surface it appeals<br />
to Goth self-dramatising; one can imagine Nick Cave<br />
giving a record that title. Yet the implications of this<br />
inherent contradiction seep in. Listening increases uncertainty.<br />
There’s the song ‘Death To Everyone’ that’s<br />
either uplifting or upsetting. I can’t decide.<br />
every terrible thing<br />
is a relief<br />
even months on end<br />
buried in grief<br />
are easy light times<br />
which have to end<br />
with the coming<br />
of your death friend.<br />
(chorus) death to everyone<br />
is gonna come<br />
and it make hosing<br />
much more fun la la la<br />
la la la<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
It’s both. The pained irony in the drawled chorus is<br />
absent in the verse. I first heard Will Oldham on the<br />
BBC’s John Peel show singing the equally ambiguous<br />
refrain: “When you have no-one, no-one can hurt you”,<br />
from ‘Days In The Wake’ (1994). At first I heard it as a<br />
self-pitying lament for a lost love – which is pleasantly<br />
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indulgent, but no more than that. Then I heard it as an<br />
implicit condemnation of someone protecting a solitude<br />
so pain can’t get in. And finally I heard it as someone<br />
completely alone who is hurt by the very fact of “noone”.<br />
Songwriting, in my experience, is rarely this<br />
disconcerting. And it’s not a one-off. The next song on<br />
the LP has the repetition, building to a minor crescendo:<br />
“God is the answer … God is the answer … God is<br />
the answer!” All of which projects outward: there’s the<br />
answer, out there, look, follow me. But is soon followed<br />
by the softly sung line “God lies within”. Not, as one<br />
might expect, the assertion of faith or the bathos of condescension,<br />
but the deepening of the question. Where<br />
within? Usually in popular music such ambiguity is an<br />
issue only until it can be set aside. (Perhaps music is<br />
ambiguity set aside). George Steiner claims that music<br />
actually defines us as human. He expresses wonder at<br />
the profound reverie even the most banal of tunes can<br />
set in motion. We “pass beyond ourselves” he says,<br />
and we become aware of “unfathomable depths”. This<br />
seems familiar enough, and intellectual resistance would<br />
certainly prevent this. Music demands an extra degree of<br />
trust to let go and be open to the sounds. Yet I would say<br />
our resistance to music is just as important and cannot be<br />
dispensed with. It too defines us as human. Criticism, let<br />
us say reflection, is as inevitable as breathing. Actually,<br />
Steiner says as much; music also “takes us home in an<br />
unexplained déjà vu”. I would explain all this by saying<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
the experience of reverie is really its imminence making<br />
itself felt, rather than actually occurring. In effect, we are<br />
experiencing the nostalgia for an impossible experience.<br />
Our continued desire for music is a result of unrequitable<br />
hope. Our humanity rests in acknowledging this. Go on,<br />
work that one out.<br />
Steiner also says that a world without music would<br />
be “fundamentally non-human”, which makes one<br />
wonder about the humanity of the deaf. For the living,<br />
however, silence and what comes with it is inseparable<br />
from the experience of music. This tends to move<br />
against the will. The part of us that wants music would<br />
rather disappear into the ecstatic oblivion of another<br />
life, palpable in the musical experience; I know my<br />
part does. Indeed, music tends to be judged according<br />
to depth of oblivion it reaches – on the dancefloor, in<br />
the car, the bedsit, the head. So when the song hinders<br />
this disappearance, we resist and say we ‘don’t like’<br />
the music. Nowadays, we are encouraged to condemn<br />
the artist for being cerebral, solipsistic and indulgent<br />
if oblivion isn’t forthcoming. The irony, of course, is<br />
that our resistance is a result of our unique freedom:<br />
our individuality. By celebrating this ignorance popular<br />
culture is a moronic inferno of denial and aggression –<br />
nothing to do with democracy or empowerment.<br />
The unique thing about Will Oldham’s songs is that<br />
they emerge from this very paradox. Remaining inside<br />
it explains why his work has got better rather than<br />
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descended into attempts at false completion: “This is<br />
what makes a thing last / Want to make what didn’t<br />
happen go…” (‘The Brute Choir’)<br />
The music itself is difficult to describe. I don’t know<br />
much about these things, and I could fall back on<br />
phrases others have used – “post-country blues” and<br />
“melancountry” being two of the best. But none of them<br />
work really. As for the lyrics, many reviewers, tied by<br />
word limits, sum it up as “Americana mixed with Old<br />
Testament language”. Again, this seems accurate, but<br />
why would this mixture appeal to a Eurocentric Englishman<br />
who says that to believe in nothing is already<br />
to believe in too much? Me, for instance.<br />
I think it’s not the allusive quality of the language<br />
that’s important but the way it fails. For example,<br />
when Nick Cave “hails the Pentecostal morn”, it alludes<br />
to the given depth and weight of the Western<br />
tradition, which is incidentally why his Goth fans are<br />
so unwittingly conservative. Cave’s elegantly crafted<br />
songs cling to the horror of God’s tragic justice,<br />
clothed in cosy Victorian melodrama. Goths like to<br />
think it’s deeply cultured, and in assuming so appear<br />
like Boyzone fans pointing to the violins playing in<br />
the background on Top Of The Pops saying “Look<br />
Mum, it’s classical music!” We all know it’s only a<br />
distraction not an engagement; only a weekend relief<br />
from good jobs and babies dressed in black.<br />
However, when Oldham sings songs like ‘Arise,<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
Therefore’ from the LP of the same name, the gloriously<br />
clunky Maya Tone drum-machine infects it with<br />
anachronism. Consumers previously happy to enjoy<br />
the wittily named sub-genre “melancountry” saw<br />
this as ‘deconstructing’ the tradition. Even Oldham’s<br />
Sunday Times admirer called this breath-taking LP a<br />
woeful mistake. Clearly, they didn’t like his wrenching<br />
of the form. Instead, this actually makes Arise,<br />
Therefore Oldham’s landmark achievement. Within<br />
it, the cosmic is infected with the mundane, and vice<br />
versa. Or something like that. Perhaps it creates a<br />
genre all its own: Blucolic?<br />
One must hesitate to analyse the lyrics, for the moment<br />
the sheet is read, the grammatical nonsenses<br />
and apparent meaninglessness confound the listening<br />
experience. Despite this, I still want to. The opening<br />
track ‘Stablemate’, which was also the opening song of<br />
his set on the recent European tour, is a scene-setting<br />
distillation of dustbowl starkness:<br />
how could one ever think anything’s<br />
permanent<br />
how can you sleep when I’m going away<br />
I haven’t a reason left in my head<br />
to not go away<br />
A heavy bass underscores the brooding quality of the<br />
song, and it’s no coincidence that the LP was produced<br />
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by Steve Albini, ex of Big Black. The words have a<br />
power because they’re both rhetorical and immediate;<br />
the lack of a question mark above makes that clear.<br />
The fourth track is perhaps the most remarkable. It<br />
has the never-to-be-forgotten title ‘You have cum in<br />
the your hair and your dick is hanging out’. Indeed.<br />
The excessiveness of the title is in clear contrast to the<br />
song’s extreme desolateness. On first listen, it is a delicate<br />
broken-hearted love song (it reminds me of Philip<br />
Larkin’s late poem ‘Love Again’). The drum-machine<br />
adds a beat every three seconds, confirming the atmosphere.<br />
Here’s it is in full (and the words haven’t been<br />
mis-typed either):<br />
Head start on the frog<br />
on the deer and the dog<br />
the things we true were taught<br />
loyal torn from our hearts;<br />
it’s now so soft underfoot<br />
we sleep more than we sleep<br />
if god could make me cry<br />
I’d run along the water<br />
she won’t come; I’ll be gone<br />
she won’t come; I’ll be gone<br />
play with it while you have hands<br />
a desperate lack of demands<br />
I can’t offer a thing<br />
better than dying, so take it!<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
scrap the outfit<br />
and hand me the keys to your car<br />
if I leave before it is light<br />
I’ll be around when you are<br />
she won’t come; I’ll be gone<br />
she won’t come; I’ll be gone<br />
It is perhaps bad form to wonder for too long about<br />
what it all means. Like all songs, a lot has to do with<br />
how it’s sung and against what music. But what is clear<br />
is the presence of the stillness of midnight; as if you’re<br />
listening to the desperate words of a troubled, not to<br />
say sticky insomniac. This leads many admirers to talk<br />
about Oldham’s empathetic imagination. One writes<br />
“you’re not just listening to words and a guitar, you’re<br />
experiencing [his] honest feelings.” Yet ‘honesty’<br />
doesn’t seem right. It’s not “this is the real me” honesty<br />
of the cringeworthy ‘confessional’ singer-songwriter.<br />
The words from “You have cum…” maybe deeply<br />
felt but they are also impersonal. There are three “we”s<br />
before a “me” appears. Is this the tyrannical darkness of<br />
the collective unconscious pressing on the existential<br />
loneliness of the one with cum in his hair? Probably.<br />
Cum is, after all, where the male is exposed to evolutionary<br />
time. It’s where the animal emerges, subject to<br />
special history. Despite this, we know we have “a headstart<br />
on the frog”. Our head gives us a start. The song’s<br />
desolateness, therefore, is not about the sufferings of<br />
385<br />
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an individual as himself, so much as his difficulty in<br />
being at all. The “I” of the song is only a possibility set<br />
against harsh reality. Will Oldham’s ‘honesty’ then is<br />
the clarity of his exile. The various names he adopts is<br />
a natural off-shoot of this.<br />
In this respect, it’s appropriate that Oldham first<br />
became well-known by acting in films, most notably<br />
co-starring in John Sayles’ trade union drama Matewan<br />
(1987). His performance as a teenager caught up in the<br />
brutal repression of a mining union in 1930s America<br />
is startlingly good. Yet no matter how connected his<br />
songs and his acting are, the displacement of identity<br />
central to the actor’s existence is perhaps too limited.<br />
In my experience, actors are less interested in others as<br />
being others full stop. They tend to be indiscriminate,<br />
mercenary and heartless. The self is willingly exiled. It<br />
is not the most appropriate medium for an artist concerned<br />
with the play of self and its exposures, ellipses<br />
and effacements. While Oldham is certainly stagy, it’s<br />
a stage with the trapdoor fully in view.<br />
In a rare interview, Oldham is clear that the movement<br />
between the self and its productions plays a major<br />
part in his writing. Asked if there is anything he does<br />
consciously when writing songs he says<br />
“Doing and not doing. But it’s not that hard cause<br />
that’s mostly the nature of what’s going on, or that’s the<br />
reason for these things to be there. That is the answer<br />
to what makes them occur. The answer is that they<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
are that way. The reason that they become is because<br />
they become what they are. The listening is begun at<br />
the very beginning, at the writing, then it’s continued<br />
in the performing and recording, and then is continued<br />
with whoever listens to it but it isn’t completed … it’s<br />
something that’s never completed.”<br />
“Doing and not doing”: this is basically what it is to<br />
be a human animal. We hold against the “not doing”<br />
because it leads to boredom and melancholy. We half<br />
envy the animal who just lives; who just does. But it’s<br />
still us as not-doing individuals that desires it. One of<br />
the great analysts of modern human nature, Friedrich<br />
Nietzsche spoke of this in 1874:<br />
“Consider the herd grazing before you. These<br />
animals do not know what yesterday and today are<br />
but leap about, eat, rest, digest and leap again: and<br />
so from morning to night and from day to day, only<br />
briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure,<br />
enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither<br />
melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this,<br />
for he is proud of being human and not an animal and<br />
yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants<br />
nothing other than to live like the animal, neither<br />
bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does<br />
not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the<br />
animal: why do you not speak of me of your happiness<br />
but only look at me? The animal does want to<br />
answer and say: because I always immediately forget<br />
386<br />
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what I wanted to say – but then it already forgot this<br />
answer and remained silent: so that man could only<br />
wonder. But he also wondered about himself, that he<br />
cannot learn to forget but always remains attached to<br />
the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs<br />
with him.” (translated by Peter Preuss)<br />
It’s a neat coincidence that the opening verses of the<br />
great song ‘The Brute Choir’ presents a similar situation:<br />
Cow-call, and they were all calling<br />
together<br />
describing the way to go<br />
I never hurt someone so young<br />
and I never held someone so sweet<br />
Makes me want to holler with them<br />
All the way down<br />
All the way down<br />
their voices show the way<br />
how to hold it back<br />
see the end of the day<br />
shut their mouths, shut their mouths<br />
and rip the pictures down<br />
withdraw, withdraw, you live so far<br />
from town<br />
Confirming the tension, two of Will Oldham’s LPs<br />
feature cover designs of animals on the way to being<br />
human, or the other way round: a compelling portrait of<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
a broad-shouldered leopard on Viva Last Blues (1995),<br />
from which the above song is taken, and a goat performing<br />
on its hindlegs on Joya (1997). On a sublime<br />
recent EP, the subject is even more explicit.<br />
‘One With The Birds’ is a love song sort-of, to birds I<br />
guess (“Juan with the birds” he joked at his Water Rats<br />
Theatre gig in London). The song seems to be again<br />
about human infatuation with animal freedom. Oldham<br />
fits in as many bird names as possible:<br />
a purple martin in my house,<br />
she hollers at me.<br />
why be inhuman, why be like me?<br />
like so many robins, like so many doves,<br />
like so many lovebirds, with so<br />
many loves,<br />
like the songs of the bobwhite<br />
without any words<br />
when we are inhuman,<br />
we’re one with the birds.<br />
(An anorak’s aside: I wonder if with this song Oldham<br />
is paying a discreet homage to Dick Gaughen’s song<br />
‘Now Westlin Winds’ – a setting of a poem by Robert<br />
Burns? On Joya, there’s a song based on another of<br />
Gaughen’s from the same LP, his 1981 masterpiece A<br />
Handful Of Earth. Burns’ poem is equally resourceful<br />
in mentioning the birds of Scotland: the moorcock, the<br />
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plover and the linnet among others. It’s also a love song<br />
of sorts. Who knows: influence tends to be unconscious.<br />
He’s already acknowledged the tune’s similarity with<br />
Gram Parson’s ‘Hickory Wind’.)<br />
‘One with the birds’ is a song that wouldn’t offend<br />
an easy listening audience. Again, however, there’s<br />
the real oddness of the refrain: “When we are inhuman,<br />
we’re one with the birds”. One can sing along<br />
merrily without wondering what it all might mean.<br />
Though singing along merrily is, in a way, flying<br />
away. In other words, the listener cannot demand an<br />
BUY Will Oldham music online from and<br />
exclusion of a cerebral response without compromising<br />
his or her humanity. So, without force, the listener<br />
is presented with a paradox that never quite lets you<br />
forget where you are and what you’re doing, even if<br />
it at the same time seduces in every musical sense. As<br />
our culture ignores what is left over from such failed<br />
transcendence, we are prompted to feel individual<br />
consciousness is a problem to be solved. I don’t think<br />
it needs to be. In fact, it is likely that this failure to fly<br />
away is precisely what gives us the richness of life.<br />
Along with Will Oldham’s music. �<br />
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Interview [published March 1997]<br />
P.J. O’Rourke: Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll<br />
Chris Mitchell encounters the age and guile of political satirist P.J. O’Rourke<br />
The American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke recently<br />
published Age And Guile, which gathers together<br />
previously uncollected material spanning his 25 years<br />
of journalism. P.J. has built his merciless literary<br />
reputation on three things: irritating American liberals,<br />
abusing chemicals and visiting every warzone in the<br />
world. Usually all at the same time. As he puts it, “I<br />
deal with curses of Western society of the past 200<br />
years starting with the French Revolution. I don’t start<br />
with the American Revolution for the simple reason it<br />
wasn’t a revolution. It was some form of parliamentary<br />
disagreement, who’s in charge here, sort of thing.”<br />
Meeting P.J. O’Rourke in real life, however, is somewhat<br />
different. Impeccably courteous and good humoured,<br />
the only vice he displayed in my presence was<br />
smoking an enormous Havana cigar. I asked him what<br />
he thought of this difference between the public and the<br />
private P.J. “I’m 48 years old. I even had a middle-aged<br />
dream last night. I dreamt I had a 15-year-old mistress.<br />
No sex, not even touching. She was just my mistress.<br />
And I knew I was middle aged because when I woke<br />
up, I was almost glad it was just a dream … I’ve always<br />
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exaggerated that boyo stuff a little bit, just because it’s<br />
fun. I’ve always thought it very important to have a<br />
fool in your writing, and here’s one that’s always handy<br />
and never sues. I once lived harder than I do now. I<br />
was blessed with a self-limiting body. Drink too much,<br />
stay up too late, take too many drugs, scramble after<br />
too many 16-year-old girls – I get ill. And the people<br />
who didn’t get ill – are dead…”<br />
So you’ve never tried to keep pace pharmaceutically<br />
with Hunter S. Thompson, your long-time friend and<br />
political sparring partner? Medical textbooks are being<br />
written about that man’s constitution… “Hunter’s very<br />
shy. People don’t really understand that. He has to get<br />
loaded to deal with strangers, he can’t do it otherwise.<br />
He takes on that gonzoid persona as a kind of armour<br />
against the world. I watch other people gonzoing<br />
around, I don’t so much do it myself. Hunter’s very<br />
funny if you know him, because after he’s done all<br />
those appalling things, wrecking all the furniture and<br />
scaring everyone out of the room and terrorising the<br />
place, he turns round and says, ‘Do you think they were<br />
upset? Did I embarrass anyone?’ ‘No, you just set fire<br />
389<br />
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to the rug…’”<br />
Hunter still seems to believe in the ideal of the American<br />
dream, as evinced by his last book, Better Than Sex,<br />
which charts Clinton’s inexorable presidential campaign.<br />
You seem to take a distinct relish in propagating<br />
the image of yourself as a son-of-a-bitch Republican.<br />
Yet much of your writing is distinctly humanitarian in<br />
places… “Well, both of those things are true. People<br />
on this side of the Atlantic get confused about political<br />
conservatism. It is not an excuse for selfishness. I don’t<br />
think that a person is left wing or right wing according<br />
to whether or not they are compassionate. A lot of<br />
people on the left, especially the more po-faced ones,<br />
have worked that angle. Lots of people are right wing<br />
because they’re selfish, there’s no doubt about that – I<br />
can’t defend that, I can only point out lots of people<br />
are left-wing because they’re selfish too. The Hilary<br />
Clinton world-view is bossing people around on the<br />
basis of a supposed virtuousness – ‘I care more than<br />
you care – therefore I’m going to boss you around.’ If<br />
they couldn’t operate that system, then no other system<br />
would suit.”<br />
Your concern about American politics is evident<br />
from the most recent pieces collected in Age And Guile.<br />
Does this mean your interest in globetrotting is waning?<br />
“I am a little tired of the Third World travel, part<br />
of it’s just age, it’s tough on the system, tough on the<br />
gastro-intestinal tract. A little bit of it is facing different<br />
BUY P.J. O’Rourke books online from and<br />
kinds of suffering that I really don’t know what it is I<br />
could do about it. I’ve written about it to the best of<br />
my ability. I don’t think the causes of it are too mysterious.<br />
Particularly the sort caused by human folly.<br />
After finishing All The Trouble In The World, I took<br />
some time off from my commitments to Rolling Stone.<br />
I knew I’d had a good summer because I had tanned<br />
feet. It’s always a good indication of having done fuck<br />
all. The next thing I want to do is about economics,<br />
which also involves travelling, but it should be slightly<br />
more pleasant. At least here I’m dealing with human<br />
endeavour to better oneself and one’s time, rather than<br />
the human endeavour to whack each other over the<br />
head. It should be a bit more optimistic. I’ve never read<br />
an actual explanation of economics that was fun to read<br />
So I’m going to pick out different economies around<br />
the world that represent different attempts to organise<br />
socially: socialism that works, socialism that doesn’t<br />
work, adaptation to a market economy that’s successful,<br />
adaptation to a market economy that’s troubled.<br />
There’ll be a Holidays In Hell aspect to it, but at least<br />
people won’t be shooting at each other – much.”<br />
Do you think your writing has any tangible impact<br />
on its readers? For example, the ecological chapters in<br />
All The Trouble In The World (lovingly titled ‘We’re<br />
All Going To Die’ and ‘We’re All Going To Die Anyway’)<br />
provide an excellent retort to eco- hysterics – it<br />
might change a few minds… “I just don’t know. So few<br />
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people read books. America is an ill-educated country.<br />
It’s sad what it takes to get on the best-seller list; for<br />
a hard-cover non-fiction book published in the Spring,<br />
which is the weaker period, selling as few as 30,000<br />
copies will get you on the list. Isn’t that shocking for<br />
a product that costs $20-$25 in a nation of 250 million<br />
people. More usually it’s 50,000 or 100,000, but still,<br />
it’s so few. I can’t begin to tell you if it has any effect.”<br />
After 25 years of writing, and nearly a half-century<br />
on the planet, do you have any words of advice for<br />
young people? “No, I can’t figure out where I went<br />
right. I love to count it up to my fabulous skill and my<br />
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insights and stuff like that, but I think it’s just because<br />
I stuck to it. There’s a Woody Allen line about how it’s<br />
remarkable how much of life has to do with just showing<br />
up. And I think about all the people I was working<br />
with 25 years ago, many of them much more talented<br />
than I was. Well, I remembered not to die from drug<br />
overdose. ‘To do: Don’t die from drug abuse’. Mostly I<br />
just stuck to it, and a lot of them didn’t. I just kept plugging<br />
away, probably out of inertia more than anything<br />
else. And I think if you do keep doing something for a<br />
while, you do learn how to do it. You learn how to work<br />
around areas of huge inability.” �<br />
391<br />
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Interview [published October 2000]<br />
Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty<br />
Chris Mitchell meets Lawrence O’Toole, author of Pornocopia:<br />
Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire<br />
It’s a well-worn joke that any dinner-party discussion<br />
of the internet will inevitably include a mention of finding<br />
pornography while on- line. As Lawrence O’Toole<br />
points out in his book, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology<br />
And Desire, the internet has been the biggest<br />
leap forward for the distribution of pornography since<br />
the advent of video. For people in countries such as the<br />
UK, which has much stricter pornography laws than<br />
the US and Europe, the net has opened the floodgates<br />
for what was previously considered taboo and banned.<br />
“New technologies have always come into the<br />
country bringing the idea that our restrictive conditions<br />
can be cast out,” explains O’Toole. “But it rarely turns<br />
out to be the case. Look at video, which was meant<br />
to herald the end of the censor – it’s actually become<br />
a great tool for the censor. But censorship is always<br />
thought of in absolutes. You cannot restrict access to<br />
illegal materials – you can only make it very difficult to<br />
get hold of them.”<br />
“I’m certainly not an advocate of unrestricted access<br />
to porn,” O’Toole stresses, “but teenagers will<br />
get hold of this material.” Certainly the net has made<br />
BUY Lawrence O’Toole books online from and<br />
that access easier, but in doing so, not only has it<br />
begun to change attitudes toward porn but the very<br />
nature of the net itself.<br />
“The internet has certainly helped make porn become<br />
more mainstream,” says O’Toole. “We’ve now had a<br />
pornographic presidency – oral sex in the White House<br />
and Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress broadcast<br />
continually on the news. Or, as another example,<br />
George Michael on Parkinson talking about having sex<br />
in public toilets. Once all that has been brought out into<br />
the public, there’s no way back.”<br />
Inspired by the passionate debates about porn taking<br />
place in Usenet newsgroups such as rec.arts.erotica,<br />
Pornocopia is part history and part analysis of the<br />
ways and methods by which porn has emerged from<br />
the shadows in the last couple of decades and become<br />
ever more accepted within conventional society.<br />
“The general reaction to the book has been very<br />
healthy and positive,” O’Toole claims, “which shows<br />
that people are less concerned about porn and I think<br />
the internet has partly contributed to that. People are<br />
beginning to realise you can look at hardcore imagery<br />
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and not go mad or blind or whatever.”<br />
“Hardcore is a very nasty term,” he continues,<br />
“when all it means is pictures of adults having sex. Fair<br />
enough, a lot of people are revolted when they see their<br />
first hardcore imagery, but I think that comes from their<br />
own sexual insecurities, which are then transferred<br />
back on to the pictures. I don’t think there’s anything<br />
intrinsically revolting about people having sex or seeing<br />
pictures of it.”<br />
Even if you strongly disagree with O’Toole about the<br />
moral implications of people having access to pornography,<br />
it’s hard to deny that porn has irrevocably changed<br />
the net: because of the huge revenues involved, porn<br />
has always been a catalyst for technology.<br />
As Pornocopia reveals, porn singlehandedly established<br />
video as a commercially viable product and is<br />
now doing the same for DVD and, of course, the net.<br />
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Secure credit card transactions, password encryption,<br />
and streaming sound and video are just some of the<br />
web technologies that have been pioneered by porn,<br />
and the industry is at the forefront of demanding bigger<br />
net bandwidth for all. Whether you like it or not, the<br />
future experience of the web is being built on the back<br />
of the on-line porn industry.<br />
However, O’Toole is sceptical that the ever growing<br />
popularity of the net in the UK will bring about a change<br />
in our obscene publication laws soon. “Where we differ<br />
from America and Europe is the attitude of the British<br />
establishment, which maintains that they know what’s<br />
best for people,” he argues. “Attitudes won’t change<br />
until the intelligentsia change their mindset, which<br />
will creep in eventually from the ground level. But the<br />
internet does let people see that there are other attitudes<br />
towards pornography.” �<br />
393<br />
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Feature [published November 2002]<br />
Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have Your Abortion”<br />
Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk<br />
When Brett Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American<br />
Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid,<br />
Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. Ellis’<br />
literary missile was unlike anything written before.<br />
Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking attention<br />
to detail as a Guide Book On How To Become<br />
A Serial Killer could only have come from the author<br />
pawing over endless (and actual) FBI case files – even<br />
if his obsession with detailing designer outfits drove me<br />
to insanity. But this man captured the 80s generation<br />
with its greed, Darwinian Manifesto and scent of Wall<br />
Street’s cold-hearted brutality.<br />
Irvine Welsh carved a new language into our consciousness<br />
with his ode to heroin, bleak council estates<br />
and a dash of nihilism in 1993 with Trainspotting.<br />
Clawing through those initial pages with their illegible<br />
scrawl and phonetically terrestrial sounds required the<br />
tenacity of a saint.<br />
Then there was sci-fi maverick, Jeff Noon, much less<br />
the enfant terrible than his Scottish cousin. Sci-fi had<br />
suddenly become cool again and it was less attributable<br />
to the Asimov school-of-thought than a quote concocted<br />
BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and<br />
within The Mail On Sunday laboratory: “Jeff Noon is<br />
the Philip K. Dick for the 90s”, it roared.<br />
Noon’s third novel, Automated Alice, was as much<br />
a tribute to Lewis Carroll’s original, opiated Alice In<br />
Wonderland dream, as it was a journey into Cyberpunk<br />
psychedelia gone haywire in contemporary Manchester.<br />
Nymphomation (released a year later) polluted the<br />
reader’s waking hours with the notion of burbflies,<br />
automated advertisements chanting their slogans and a<br />
slow, synthetic, evolutionary genocide.<br />
The aforementioned authors have all created a new<br />
language, so to speak. Sprouted buzzwords like the<br />
historians of old and chronicled the social decay of<br />
humanity along the way. Ellis paired savage with<br />
savvy; Welsh, lower-class narcissism with narcotic<br />
decay; and Noon, corporatisation with soulless human<br />
existence. They all hacked into the literary, global cog,<br />
shunned the sweet smelling pungency of sentimental<br />
verse and offered up their own versions of the darker<br />
edge of the sword.<br />
And then there’s Chuck Palahniuk.<br />
Critic Roger Ebert crowned him the godfather of<br />
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“Macho Porn”, while New York Newsday gushed that<br />
Palahniuk’s voice “rearranged Vonnegut’s sly humour,<br />
DeLillo’s mordant social analysis with Pynchon’s antic<br />
surrealism”. In short, the new kid on the block with<br />
his swag of arrogance titled Fight Club (1995) struck<br />
a subliminal chord. This was an author who was much<br />
less concerned with sprouting flowery prose and more<br />
preoccupied with stark revelations.<br />
Fight Club painted a portrait of humanity drained of<br />
colour. It was gritty and hard-boiled, bleak but overflowing<br />
with wisdom. Tyler Durden, his protagonist,<br />
was a one-man army. He was the insomnia inside us<br />
all. The dull, dull thud of an eternal techno beat. A jackhammer<br />
spraying cynicism like a sniper on the loose.<br />
Out of control!<br />
Fight Club finally found its way onto the big-screen<br />
(like Ellis’ American Psycho) in 1999, and was directed<br />
by the controversial David Fincher (Alien 3, The Game,<br />
Seven), and starred Ed Norton and Brad Pitt. The film<br />
delivered a fatal blow to the solar plexus. With a deadpan<br />
sneer and caustic ambience it hit a raw nerve. Its<br />
message? WE HAD ALL BECOME AUTOMATED<br />
ZOMBIES. We were now indistinguishable from the<br />
dead. ‘Hey, the living dead are populating an Ikea furnished<br />
Metropolis.’ Albert Camus had suddenly found<br />
a worthy successor.<br />
The shock value of Fight Club gave an insight into<br />
the deviant corners of Palahniuk’s mind. He would<br />
BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and<br />
continue to shock a readership by churning out a novel<br />
every couple of years. Furthermore, if characters getting<br />
their kicks by frequenting the local Testicular Cancer<br />
Survivors group wasn’t enough to shock a readership<br />
ill-prepared for such irreverence, then his next evangelical<br />
novel, Survivor (1999) would.<br />
Admittedly, his second novel was less punchy, less<br />
guttural than the first, but it was truly original in its<br />
storyline. So here was yet another misfit, about to hold<br />
society to ransom again. Meet Tender Branson, surviving<br />
member of a Death Cult hijacking an empty Boeing<br />
747 for the purpose of recording his sordid tale into<br />
the jumbo’s black box recorder. This was Reverend Jim<br />
Jones on ecstasy with a global score to settle. This was<br />
a day-trip into the darker corners of immortality and<br />
isolation with a slab of comic humour to boot.<br />
Male testosterone took a back seat in 2000 when<br />
Palahniuk released Invisible Monsters. It was a grand<br />
departure from his previous novels in that it had a<br />
female (a severely dysfunctional one, naturally) at its<br />
helm. Brandy Alexander was the Catwalk Queen. She<br />
had it all. A face that could launch a thousand ships and<br />
adored by everyone. But a horrendous car ‘accident’<br />
changes all of that. From beauty queen to hideously<br />
disfigured freak, Brandy personifies our preoccupation<br />
with skin-deep vanity and proves that hell hath no fury<br />
like a woman’s scorn.<br />
The majority of Palahniuk’s protagonists are mad-<br />
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men and reincarnations of Jesus Christ: picture their<br />
creator as a modern-day Dr Frankenstein if you will,<br />
grabbing DNA strands from the Shroud of Turin, a dash<br />
of homicidal vigour, the conceit of a Ronnie Biggs and<br />
smearing them through a contemporary narrative.<br />
Choke (2000), his fourth novel, was a screaming<br />
page-turner, his narrator, Victor Mancini, one of the<br />
greatest scam artists of all time. While his mother (God<br />
bless her) languished in the local hospital, he devised a<br />
new occupation and a great way to make bucks.<br />
Go to a restaurant, (make sure it’s full, of course),<br />
choke on a piece of food, wait for a good samaritan to<br />
come and save you, and knowing humanity the way it<br />
is, you can be sure that the hero who ‘saves you’ will<br />
feel indebted to you for the rest of their natural lives.<br />
Money of course won’t be a problem again. If they’ve<br />
saved you once, you can damn well expect they will do<br />
it a thousand times! Add into the equation a few shifts at<br />
the local theme park and the occasional night out at an<br />
intimate, little sex addiction group (one of Palahniuk’s<br />
favourite haunts), and you’ve got a very fulfilling life.<br />
Brett Easton Ellis pondered the question: ‘Has our<br />
generation finally found its Don DeLillo?’ The New York<br />
Times bestseller list confirms Palahniuk as an author of<br />
importance, yet regardless of platitudes, this Portland<br />
native retains a low key. His latest novel, Lullaby (2002)<br />
hit bookshelves in the quietest of fashions, and, again,<br />
deals with the darker underbelly of American life. This<br />
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time around the microscope falls upon two topics – a<br />
serial killer and ‘psychic infection’. “Imagine a plague<br />
you catch through your ears … Imagine an idea that<br />
occupies your mind like a city…”<br />
It’s too good an offer to refuse…<br />
On the eve of Fight Club’s release in 1995, Palahniuk<br />
and I chatted. He was an easy and natural conversationalist.<br />
He spoke of working as a glorified technical writer<br />
at the city’s Freight Terminal and of how he churned<br />
out manuals on trucks, service and cars in the industrial<br />
heartland of blue-collar America. He also spoke<br />
of cruising along the Portland Freeway one morning<br />
when a car pulled up alongside him. “A freeway sniper<br />
pointed a gun directly at my head,” he remembered.<br />
Palahniuk’s writing is a backlash. It’s about embracing<br />
disaster and using it as a platform from which to<br />
mirror society back upon itself. In Palahniuk’s own<br />
words: “I figure if you can play on the basis of something<br />
that really scares people like fights or terminal<br />
illness. If you go right up to it and laugh at it, and have<br />
fun around it, and really disempower it by doing that,<br />
then that’s the greatest thing you can do. I can make<br />
people laugh about death, laugh about fights, laugh<br />
about pain, then I’ve done my little thing for the world.<br />
I finally feel complete and liberated.”<br />
Chuck Palahniuk is a product of his environment, but<br />
more importantly, he is THE product of his generation.<br />
He is the coroner of the millennium. If there is a ‘self-<br />
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help’ group gathered in the dark of night, Palahniuk is<br />
sure to be there playing the ‘tourist’. His voice is one<br />
that refuses to be tempered. It is devoid of diplomacy<br />
and rife with a quiet anger.<br />
Palahniuk’s voice is a shrill scream trumpeting for<br />
the revolt against order and conformity, but it is also<br />
filled with pain and satire. When two of Fight Club’s<br />
main characters meet it all becomes abundantly clear<br />
why its author has already made his notch in society’s<br />
belt: “I want to have your abortion,” Marla drawls.<br />
Suddenly everything sacred between men and women<br />
tumbles into a psychotic heap.<br />
It’s a challenging and confrontational statement.<br />
A little on the bolshie side, sure, but necessary. If the<br />
world is in the process of undergoing a ‘collective<br />
identity crisis’ then Palahniuk is writing a thesis on how<br />
to bring it on. His characters travel the dark road from<br />
isolation back out into the arms of communal existence.<br />
BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and<br />
They are battle-worn and scarred and their trajectory<br />
crude and uncompromising.<br />
Both the characters and their creator shy away from<br />
compromise. It is as alien to them as subtlety is to<br />
Anna Nicole Smith. They are holding up a mirror to<br />
each and every one of us and reflecting back something<br />
both ugly and desperate. It’s daring. It’s sexy. And it<br />
sneers at redemption. This is what sets Palahniuk aside.<br />
He’s prepared to play the messenger and the Devil’s<br />
Advocate, simultaneously, regardless of the price…<br />
Yes, our generation has found its Don DeLillo and<br />
he comes armed with a scalpel. His literary instrument<br />
hacks deep into the malignancy eating away at our<br />
society, but still the tumour continues to grow, feeding<br />
on pessimism, fatality and dark, dark satire. This is all<br />
Chuck Palahniuk needs to continue. It was all he ever<br />
needed, and if the hunger pains should start to growl he<br />
only needs to look to the news 24/7… �<br />
397<br />
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Review [published August 2000]<br />
Tim Parks: Destiny<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of<br />
adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what<br />
happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth,<br />
or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find<br />
the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply<br />
frustrating. The credits run and immediately I feel the<br />
need to inhabit the silence and apparent serenity of the<br />
surviving characters. Even in a poor film. Instinctively,<br />
I ask: what are the characters thinking now? How will<br />
the events affect the rest of their lives? How will they<br />
‘come to terms’ with what has happened? How will they<br />
tell the story to their friends? Despite the insistence of<br />
these questions – does anybody else ask them? – we<br />
don’t seem to want to know the answers. I mean, we<br />
never see films about them. We want only action.<br />
Such indifference suggests a deep-seated pathological<br />
fear at the heart of popular culture. It’s not like we<br />
are all Odysseus, shedding experience like some<br />
fancy-dress outfit. Experience makes us who we are.<br />
We are stuck with responses, memories and responses<br />
to memories. I suppose we watch films like Event Horizon<br />
to displace them for a while.<br />
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When that film began, I knew my questions would<br />
not be answered. At that point, the roller coaster profile<br />
of the usual Hollywood movie prompted only weariness,<br />
not anticipation. Nevertheless, it was watched<br />
and time was passed pleasurably. Of course, its predictability<br />
was part of the pleasure. The thing is, I wanted<br />
that predictability to be taken to the absolute limit. But<br />
what does this mean in practice? Maybe it’s where time<br />
stands still and the whole picture appears, as in the<br />
uncanny vertigo you feel when you catch your own eye<br />
looking at itself in the mirror. You know you are looking<br />
at yourself – what could be more familiar? – yet<br />
there is also a sense of something alien. It disappears as<br />
soon as you notice it. The absolute limit, then, would be<br />
the noticing and the disappearance combined. So what<br />
would that be like? Well, Tim Parks’ novel Destiny is<br />
a good start. It is an exhilarating experience of vertigo.<br />
The novel begins with the narrator, Chris Burton, a<br />
veteran journalist based in Italy, getting a phone call to<br />
say his son, a patient in a psychiatric hospital, has killed<br />
himself. He tells us this, and many other things, in the<br />
first sentence. It is ten-lines long, and full of clauses<br />
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and clarifications about things apparently unconnected<br />
with the death. Right away, despite the appalling news,<br />
he is comparing it with the latest developments in his<br />
marriage and career. Such is the nature of literary grief,<br />
we might think; that’s not how it really is.<br />
But rather than being just an example of callousness<br />
on the part of the narrator, or an indifference to dramatic<br />
incident on the part of the author, it is actually a truer<br />
reflection of how one experiences grief. Remember,<br />
Burton receives the news over the telephone. How can<br />
such news be close to him when it is comes in the form<br />
of electronic noise? The news makes itself felt in the<br />
play of the distances between the plain fact and his imagination.<br />
Burton becomes, at this point if not before, a<br />
reader of his life. All action is kindled in the mind. For<br />
us, rather than being insulated from the impact of the<br />
news, as we would be in the usual novel, we become<br />
Burton’s fellow readers, living in his uncertain present,<br />
trying to understand what it all means. The style of<br />
the narration is repetitious and associative. This could<br />
descend into an annoying tic, but works here because<br />
each sentence is necessary to the narrative.<br />
There is a powerful section where Burton thinks<br />
about the visit to the mortuary with his wife, as he<br />
struggles, late at night, to urinate in the house of his<br />
adopted daughter. This one part of a long paragraph:<br />
“Remembering and forgetting amount to very little,<br />
I reflect, remembering my wife remembering the<br />
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miracle of her son’s birth, on our way to the mortuary.<br />
It doesn’t amount to much. Not when it comes to<br />
understanding. As if by parthenogenesis, I would tell<br />
people, to make light of it, to turn it into a joke. My<br />
wife would be boasting at one of her dinner parties<br />
about how different her son was from his father. A<br />
son in every way different from his father, she said.<br />
It was my first thought upon waking. His birth was a<br />
miracle, she claimed. You had nothing to do with your<br />
son, she shouted outside the mortuary.”<br />
The style, like Burton’s state of mind, is both<br />
manic and extremely controlled. This is not streamof-consciousness.<br />
It is not as random as that phrase<br />
suggests. Troubling memories from various times<br />
coalesce with the current event – struggling to piss –<br />
as if, in all this distress, the divination of all troubles<br />
is about to be revealed. Hence the title and subject of<br />
the book: Destiny.<br />
Appropriately, Burton hears the terrible news as he<br />
tries to finish a book on Italian national characteristics<br />
and how they determine Italian behaviour. All it needs,<br />
he thinks, is an interview with the elusive elderly<br />
politician Guilio Andreotti (who is, incidentally, a real<br />
person). He thinks it will be the culmination, and mitigation,<br />
of a career in journalism, which he now rejects<br />
as “the endless description of hell”. The reference to<br />
Dante’s Inferno (Hell) comes during a meditation in a<br />
café named after the great Italian poet.<br />
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This is perhaps too convenient, but it is certainly in<br />
tune with the question of Destiny. Perhaps it prompted<br />
the direction of his thoughts about journalism? Burton<br />
says Inferno is a great piece of journalism but that Purgatory<br />
and Paradise, the other two parts of The Divine<br />
Comedy, are parts of a pilgrimage to perfection. This<br />
is something journalism cannot achieve. His book on<br />
national characteristics is, therefore, an attempt to get<br />
beyond journalism. However, he seems to have been<br />
pre-empted by another famous English journalist who<br />
has churned out a book claiming to do the same. He also<br />
happens to be Mrs Burton’s lover. Burton doesn’t know<br />
what the situation is between them. Her vicious attacks<br />
on him in the mortuary seem to indicate a conclusive<br />
dissatisfaction, an indication of an imminent split. But<br />
they could just be uncontrolled outpourings of grief.<br />
How is he to know? He is trying to understand.<br />
From the beginning, Burton seems destined for<br />
doom and gloom. Despite this impression, there is rich<br />
comedy in his various encounters along the way. The<br />
nature of the book means that the crescendo Burton<br />
leads us to expect is only ever going to be a fiction of<br />
his imagination. All the set pieces, like the visit to the<br />
mortuary, appear to us as fragments pieced together in<br />
the spaces between other set pieces, like his struggle<br />
above the toilet, which itself is fragmented by thoughts<br />
of the visit to the mortuary. Instead, there is a quiet,<br />
optimistic conclusion – which is also a beginning – as<br />
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Mrs Burton behaves out of character. That is, out of<br />
the character that her husband has imagined. One can<br />
thereby understand the novel as the refutation of Burton’s<br />
thesis – that human behaviour can be explained<br />
before the event. And yet, there is, in the form of his<br />
narrative, an achievement beyond journalism! It makes<br />
it one of the most satisfying and memorable novels,<br />
written in English, for quite some time.<br />
But one last thing. I said that this novel opens with<br />
a ten-line sentence. The most striking thing about this<br />
sentence is that it is almost identical in form and content<br />
to the opening sentence of Thomas Bernhard’s<br />
final novel Extinction (1986). Indeed, the whole novel<br />
is deeply informed by Bernhard’s masterpiece. Does<br />
this diminish Parks’ achievement? No, it doesn’t.<br />
Technical brilliance does not swamp its emotional<br />
resonance. That can’t be borrowed. When Chris Burton<br />
is with his son’s body in a room near the mortuary,<br />
he notices three heavy pieces of dark wooden furniture<br />
and a Sacred Heart on the wall. It is there to console<br />
the relatives of the deceased. Burton dismisses it is a<br />
“public space that apes the private.” As a result of its<br />
aping, it is drained of consoling authority. This is an<br />
appropriate definition of most novels: a public space<br />
that apes the private. This novel, on the other hand,<br />
like Bernhard’s novels, mediates between public and<br />
private space, showing us how intimately one influences<br />
the other. A wonderful book. �<br />
400<br />
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Interview [published June 2000]<br />
Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism<br />
Lewis Owens meets composer Arvo Pärt<br />
A few months ago, I contacted the composer Arvo Pärt<br />
through his publisher in Vienna. I informed Mr Pärt<br />
that I was interested in writing a book on his life and<br />
music. After reading my proposal, Mr Pärt suggested<br />
that we met to discuss things further. The first meeting<br />
took place on Wednesday March 29 at the Royal Academy<br />
of Music, where there was a three day festival in<br />
honour of his music. The second meeting was at his<br />
house in Essex, which was followed by a visit to the<br />
nearby Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist.<br />
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, south-east of Tallinn,<br />
Estonia, on 11 September 1935. He entered the Tallinn<br />
Conservatory in the autumn of 1957 and was later a<br />
winner of the All-Union Survey of the Creative Work<br />
of Young Composers held in Moscow for composers<br />
throughout the USSR under the age of 35. Although his<br />
musical ability was clearly evident, its religious content<br />
led to various confrontations with the Soviet authorities<br />
(his work Credo was banned for over decade) and he<br />
applied to leave the Soviet Union (and hence relinquish<br />
Soviet citizenship) in 1979 with his Jewish wife, Nora.<br />
On January 18, 1980 they left Tallinn for Vienna where<br />
BUY Arvo Pärt music online from and<br />
they acquired Austrian citizenship. They now live primarily<br />
in Berlin.<br />
Pärt’s minimalist music is rapidly increasing in popularity,<br />
and his attempt to re-establish the sacred roots of<br />
music has a growing appeal. Yet it seems to me that<br />
without understanding or appreciating the reasons or<br />
‘philosophy’ (in a nonacademic sense) behind his often<br />
repetitive tonal compositions, Pärt’s music may seem<br />
rather banal and somewhat unimaginative. Therefore,<br />
my interest was primarily to understand in greater<br />
depth the ‘philosophy’ that drives his music.<br />
Eschewing in large part the conflicting tension<br />
of opposing forces that constitutes the dynamics of<br />
change found in, for example, the later symphonies of<br />
Tchaikovsky, Pärt’s harmonies suggest an understanding<br />
and experience of ‘time’ that is nonlinear and nonteleological<br />
(that is, it appears to reach no climax or<br />
‘goal’); moreover, as it lies outside a linear, teleological<br />
paradigm, it is immune from accusations of stasis.<br />
Indeed, Pärt’s work has an underlying dynamic and<br />
organic unity, which seems to require an intuitive mode<br />
of perception to be experienced fully. This includes an<br />
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experience and perception of silence that, much like the<br />
apophatic mystical tradition of the Eastern Orthodox<br />
Church that Pärt embraces, seeks to overcome chaotic<br />
multiplicity and establish contact with a true and<br />
authentic unifying essence. Pärt has coined the word<br />
‘tintinnabulation’ to describes this style of his work<br />
which dates from the early 70s:<br />
“Tintinnabulation is the area I sometimes wander<br />
into when I am searching for answers – in my life,<br />
in my music, in my work … the complex and manyfaceted<br />
only confuses me and I must search for unity<br />
… everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation<br />
is like this. Here I am alone with silence.<br />
I have discovered that it is enough when a single note<br />
is beautifully played. This note, or a silent beat, or a<br />
moment of silence comfort me.”<br />
Before our first meeting at the Royal Academy of<br />
Music, I attended a rehearsal of Pärt’s Miserere, during<br />
which the composer crept stealthily from every corner<br />
of the room, from instrument to instrument, bass to soprano,<br />
listening, suggesting and often wincing when the<br />
instruments and vocals did not harmonise “like Romeo<br />
and Juliet. My work is like a puzzle or a mosaic,” he<br />
claimed, “if one piece is lost or out of place, then the<br />
whole work cannot function properly: the machine cannot<br />
turn back once it has begun.”<br />
After the rehearsal I was able to spend some time<br />
with Arvo and Nora Pärt. Pärt himself is as ‘present’<br />
BUY Arvo Pärt music online from and<br />
as his music; his deep, dark Slavonic eyes pierce you<br />
as sharply as any of his religious works. We discussed<br />
my intentions to write about the ‘philosophy’ behind<br />
his music. “‘Philosophy’? He has none”, his wife cut in<br />
sharply in broken English, “he learns everything from<br />
the old Church Fathers.” To really understand his music,<br />
she continued, you must first understand how this<br />
religious tradition (Eastern Orthodoxy) flows through<br />
him. Her husband agreed: I was therefore invited to<br />
spend a day with the Pärt’s at the Stavropegic Monastery<br />
of St. John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, Essex<br />
the following week.<br />
Mr Pärt met me from the station, and we spoke of<br />
my work on Nikos Kazantzakis (whom Pärt clearly<br />
disliked for being too ‘unorthodox’) whilst we drove<br />
to his house in Essex. For the first couple of hours<br />
we discussed my proposed book, eating strawberries<br />
and drinking tea whilst being watched closely by<br />
the numerous severe-looking icons that decorate his<br />
sitting-room.<br />
Despite the obvious language barrier (I do not speak<br />
Estonian; Mr Pärt’s English is commendable but limited),<br />
it was also apparent that there were further barriers<br />
to overcome if my project was to be given the green<br />
light. We talked philosophy, theology and music, but Mr<br />
Pärt was visibly uncomfortable and nervous. Any book<br />
about him, he claimed, must begin with the substance<br />
of music itself – the arrangement of the notes. It is from<br />
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this musical epicentre that everything else must radiate.<br />
“If anybody wishes to understand me”, he continued,<br />
“they must listen to my music; if anybody wishes to<br />
know my ‘philosophy’ then they can read any of the<br />
Church Fathers; if anybody wishes to know about my<br />
life, then there are things that I wish to keep closed …<br />
unlike our friend John [Taverner]!” It was clear that my<br />
proposed project was running into difficulties before he<br />
suggested that we headed for the monastery.<br />
The Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist<br />
is home to around 25 monks and nuns. It was established<br />
under the spiritual guidance of Archimandrite<br />
Sophrony, who died in 1993. Sophrony had arrived on<br />
Mount Athos in 1925 and entered the Russian Monastery<br />
of St. Panteimon where he began scribbling down<br />
the teachings of his elder St. Siluoan. Many of his<br />
works are to be found in the monastery bookshop. The<br />
monastery itself is a mixture of richly ornate old timber<br />
buildings that blend beautifully with newer, more<br />
modern constructions. The monks and nuns spend their<br />
day in prayer, icon-painting, and in the general upkeep<br />
of the monastery. A large section of land enables them<br />
to grow various fruits and vegetables, and thus remain<br />
largely self-sufficient.<br />
When showing me around the monastery, Pärt’s<br />
demeanour visibly changed. He came to life again,<br />
BUY Arvo Pärt music online from and<br />
like he was during the rehearsal of Miserere, prowling<br />
cat-like from one icon to the next as he explained to<br />
me their origin and symbolism. He was clearly relieved<br />
to have left the ‘intellectual’ atmosphere that we had<br />
created earlier, and to breath instead a more ‘spiritual’<br />
and aesthetic air. I was even treated to a duet by Pärt<br />
and his wife in one of the Churches.<br />
At 5pm, the bells called all the monks and nuns to eat<br />
(as it was Lent, this was their only meal of the day). After<br />
a monkish chant that seemed to be taken straight from<br />
one of Pärt’s works, we ate our simple meal of olives<br />
and pulses in silence, listening to a reading from the<br />
teaching of Johannes Climacus. Humbleness prevailed.<br />
Soon afterwards Arvo and Nora Pärt presented me with<br />
a gift: Archimandrite Sophrony’s spiritual biography of<br />
‘Saint Siluoan the Athonite’. We talked no more of my<br />
own proposed book; it just didn’t seem appropriate in<br />
the surroundings.<br />
As I left the monastery and made my way slowly<br />
home, I recalled Pärt’s words and decided to put my<br />
book project on hold for the time being: “If anybody<br />
wishes to understand me, they must listen to my music;<br />
if anybody wishes to know my ‘philosophy’, then they<br />
can read any of the Church Fathers; if anybody wishes<br />
to know about my private life, there are things that I<br />
wish to keep closed.” �<br />
403<br />
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Review [published February 1999]<br />
Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
In the last 30 years, the role of the DJ has transformed<br />
from being a mere purveyor of pop music to being the<br />
creator of pop music. This transformation is due almost<br />
solely to the humble analogue technology of the record<br />
turntable, which still thrives in the midst of this supposedly<br />
digital decade. In DJ Culture, Ulf Poschardt, editor<br />
in chief of Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin,<br />
has attempted to trace the evolution of the DJ and his<br />
impact on musical culture.<br />
However, Poschardt is not interested in simply<br />
discussing fashionable modern DJs who create their<br />
own records. He spends the first third of DJ Culture<br />
discussing the prehistory of today’s DJs, the record<br />
spinners who arrived with the advent of radio. There<br />
are not many histories which can pinpoint an exact date<br />
and time for their origin, but Poschardt maintains the<br />
DJ came into being in 1906, when electrical engineer<br />
Reginald A. Fessenden played a record of Handel’s<br />
Largo in the world’s first radio broadcast.<br />
DJ Culture details the social influence of this powerful<br />
new mixture of recorded and transmittable sound,<br />
along with the DJs’ subtly subversive light entertain-<br />
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ment programming. While 1940s disc jockey legend<br />
Alan Freed never scratch his own tunes together, he<br />
introduced a whole post-war white generation to the<br />
black music of jazz and rhythm and blues, flying in the<br />
face of McCarthy-era conservatism.<br />
Just as the DJ was created by technology, so DJs<br />
began to exploit that technology to take control of the<br />
sound of the records they played. With the beginning<br />
of house and disco clubs in the early 70s, DJs sought<br />
ways to extend their audiences’ favourite sections of<br />
particular tracks, which led to using two turntables and<br />
repeating the same segment.<br />
From the sonic DIY experiments of Grandmaster<br />
Flash, Kool J Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Culture<br />
meticulously traces the roots of the modern DJ and the<br />
birth of the record as technological collage, concluding<br />
with the emergence of drum’n’bass and the seemingly<br />
infinite possibilities of computerised music.<br />
Poschardt manages to write about DJ culture in a<br />
scholarly but informal style, interweaving quotes from<br />
DJs with citations of numerous critical theorists. In<br />
the hands of a less thoughtful writer, this could have<br />
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resulted in clumsy prose, but Poschardt uses nuggets of<br />
academic theory to persuasively emphasise the radical<br />
shift during this century that has happened to music,<br />
DJs and society itself because of technology.<br />
Most importantly, Poschardt reveals the significance<br />
of something which is seemingly so insignificant – pop<br />
music – and yet manages to keep a tone of infectious,<br />
subjective enthusiasm about it. In doing so, he has written<br />
a near-definitive secret history of the DJ. �<br />
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405<br />
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Review [published October 2003]<br />
Richard Powers: Plowing The Dark<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Plowing The Dark is nothing if not a novel of ideas. Set<br />
in the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Powers’ novel juxtaposes<br />
two parallel narratives – one concerning the rise<br />
of virtual reality, computer generated simulation that<br />
reached to become indistinguishable from reality – and<br />
the other concerning Taipur Martin, an American taken<br />
hostage and held in the Lebanon. These narratives may<br />
seem incongruous at first, but both concern the same<br />
thing – the nature of reality.<br />
For Adie Karpol, the technophobe artist called on to<br />
give visual shape to the computer realities generated<br />
by the immersive environment known as The Cavern,<br />
fooling her own senses into believing the simulation in<br />
front of her is real becomes her daily quest. For Taipur<br />
Martin, the American teacher held hostage in solitary<br />
confinement for a length of time so long he cannot<br />
even measure it, trying to stay sane amongst almost<br />
total sensory deprivation becomes a contest of wills<br />
with himself. Flickering behind these two narratives<br />
are the epoch-changing events which dominated and<br />
dictated the last two decades’ world history – Tianamen<br />
Square, the collapse of communism and the first Gulf<br />
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War. Plowing The Dark is the sort of novel you soon<br />
realise will repay a second reading even before you’ve<br />
finished the first.<br />
Karpol’s grappling with the hideous complexities<br />
of computer code that live under the bonnet of virtual<br />
reality gives Powers the perfect device to trace the arcane<br />
history of its geek genesis, which in turn brings<br />
in discussions of mathematics, economics and, well,<br />
the structure of the universe itself. In a similar way<br />
to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Powers takes the<br />
computer as the single most important artefact of the<br />
last two decades and examines its impact upon our<br />
reality as much as our creation of new realities using it.<br />
Traditionally art has fulfilled the function of creating<br />
new realities, and Powers name drops a vast array of<br />
classical artists in conversations describing the nature<br />
of art and its irreducibility to a binary sequence. Powers’<br />
peripheral characters are clearly ciphers to embody<br />
certain viewpoints, while the central characters in both<br />
narratives grapple with a tsunami of thought of which<br />
they can never fully gain control. Indeed, the novel has<br />
this effect on the reader as well as its protagonists –<br />
406<br />
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Powers’ prose is easy to read, but the density of ideas<br />
packed into each page demands frequent pauses to<br />
digest what is being said. Whereas most novels take<br />
a central premise and string it out over a couple of<br />
hundred pages, it feels as if Plowing The Dark only just<br />
keeps the lid on its own complexity.<br />
Like Pynchon and Delillo who are namechecked<br />
as Powers’ peers by several reviewers on Plowing’s<br />
book covers, Powers’ prose has a certain cool authorial,<br />
distinctly American, detachment to it. This in turn<br />
gives the effect of looking at his characters through a<br />
microscope rather than moving amongst them – even<br />
the Taipur Martin narrative, which uses the second<br />
person throughout, seems strangely removed even as it<br />
provides an exhausting empathy with the horror of being<br />
held hostage. This detachment also provides a more<br />
subtle sadness for Adie Karpol, where life is nothing<br />
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but work and making love is without real thought for<br />
one’s lover. Some of Powers’ sentences on the emotional<br />
lives of Karpol and her friends seem almost like<br />
asides and yet always hint at a melancholy for those<br />
characters, a fundamental loneliness and an absence of<br />
happiness with no idea of where to look for it. These<br />
moments in the book are perhaps all the more noticeable<br />
for being moments of emotional vulnerability or<br />
longing amongst so much intellectual abstraction.<br />
Plowing The Dark, then, is unashamedly intellectual<br />
and decidedly demanding of its reader, a near riot of<br />
ideas and imagination that crackles with the electricity<br />
of new thoughts emerging from the old. It feels like<br />
a third millennium novel – synthesising and distilling<br />
histories of events, of ideas and of people, reshaping<br />
and retracing new threads through them, cutting its<br />
own furlong for what a novel should do. �<br />
407<br />
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Review [published December 1998]<br />
Richard Powers: Gain<br />
David B. Livingstone<br />
Nobody talks much about the quest for “great American<br />
novel” anymore; the phrase, once a sneering European<br />
attempt at an oxymoron, was long ago answered by<br />
Faulkner, Hemingway, and Miller. To the surprise of<br />
some, even America – first, the motley amalgam of immigrant<br />
trappers and farmers; later, the citadel of capitalism<br />
and the mecca of disposable pop culture – proved<br />
capable of cultivating its own strong literary tradition.<br />
With Gain, Richard Powers launches his own strong<br />
bid for entry into the canon of America’s best novelists,<br />
delivering a work both epic in scope and universal in<br />
emotional resonance, a contemporary book drawing<br />
upon timeless, and often uniquely American, themes.<br />
Mining the same rich, long-neglected vein of sociallyaware<br />
fiction once plumbed by Upton Sinclair, John<br />
Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis, Powers creates a subtle,<br />
quietly horrifying mirror reflecting the seldom-noticed,<br />
tragic consequences to life in a modern consumer society.<br />
Like a Sinclair or Dos Passos, Powers successfully<br />
apprehends and elucidates both the expansive sweep<br />
and intricate workings of corporate power; like Lewis,<br />
he succeeds in translating these into human terms, and<br />
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human stories. And like Faulkner or Steinbeck, he arms<br />
his tale with an unrelenting, sometimes unforgiving,<br />
emotional grip.<br />
The first of Gain’s two interwoven plotlines concerns<br />
the birth, growth, and ultimate decline of the Clare Corporation,<br />
a soap and chemical manufacturing concern;<br />
the second, the story of the Bodey family, residents of<br />
the fictional Lacewood, Indiana – a quiet, comfortable<br />
midwestern company town, home to Clare’s massive<br />
agricultural operations. Aside from geographic<br />
location, there would seem to be little commonality<br />
between the Bodeys and their corporate neighbour, but<br />
it soon emerges that the destinies of the Bodeys and<br />
Clare are destined to meet and collide, and likely with<br />
cataclysmic results.<br />
Gain begins with the birth of Clare in the 1830s as<br />
Jephthah Clare’s Sons transform their family’s struggling<br />
shipping and trading business into a soap manufactory.<br />
Samuel, Benjamin, and Resolve Clare, through<br />
hard work, faith, and assimilation of the new country’s<br />
ideas and ideals – the land is to be conquered, God is to<br />
be worshipped, industry is the Lord’s Work and profit<br />
408<br />
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is a sacrament – gradually transform their enterprise<br />
into an edifice, a being with a life of its own that will<br />
thrive and survive beyond their lifetimes. Clare’s Sons<br />
becomes Clare, then Clare Incorporated, its interests<br />
and influence spreading across the land and around<br />
the globe like the Gospel, like a prairie fire, like a fastgrowing<br />
weed, like a cancer – or like all at once.<br />
Meanwhile, in the 1990s, Laura Bodey is a divorced<br />
mother and a successful real estate agent, an American<br />
Everywoman whose daily concerns revolve around her<br />
work and family: Is her son spending too much time<br />
playing computer games? Is her daughter smoking pot?<br />
How can she manage the uneasy truce with their father?<br />
Will she make receive a Top Performers award again<br />
this year? Though the days and years have flown by in a<br />
blur of work, parenting, consumption, and more work,<br />
with little time for Laura to realize her own dreams, the<br />
Bodeys seem to have settled into a suburban idyll: Life<br />
is comfortable if not perfect, and the future, although<br />
unwritten, seems to promise more of the same. The<br />
multiheaded hydra that Clare has become, however,<br />
will change all that.<br />
Where was the point where Clare’s Sons’ noble<br />
enterprise became a destroyer of worlds, where the<br />
company dedicated to cleanliness, quality, and purity<br />
became a monster? The growth of Clare is an allegory<br />
of the loss of innocence of a country and its people,<br />
the story of the alchemical transformation of ideals into<br />
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avarice, of solemn vows into hollow public relations<br />
pronouncements, of physical reality into vacant and<br />
ephemeral imagery.<br />
Gain is the story of the decline and fall of a company,<br />
a family, and a nation rendered in quiet symbolism<br />
and graceful, elegant prose. In lesser hands, the raw<br />
materials of Gain could have easily been transmuted<br />
into a soap opera or a shrill anti-corporate rant; instead,<br />
Powers’ careful craftsmanship and almost obsessive attention<br />
to linguistic nuance, to period detail, and to the<br />
tiny but telling words, phrases, actions, and rituals that<br />
make up the stuff of existence in 90s America render<br />
Clare, the Bodeys, and their world in photorealistic<br />
detail, giving Gain the feel of real life.<br />
In the end, Gain is about losses, fiscal, physical and<br />
spiritual: A woman who loses her health, a corporation<br />
that loses its soul, and an emerging democracy<br />
that loses its way en route to the promised land. Gain<br />
is a modern American tragedy, and like all classic<br />
examples of the form, its tragic heroes’ undoing occurs<br />
as the result of a catalytic reaction between the<br />
characters’ own hidden vulnerabilities and immense,<br />
unseen forces greater than themselves; that these<br />
are invariably ultimately recognized, once past the<br />
point of salvation, is the classicist masterstroke that<br />
imbues Gain, like a modern Richard III or Medea,<br />
with monumental, timeless power. Is Gain really this<br />
good? Yes. Yes. Yes. �<br />
409<br />
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Review [published September 1997]<br />
Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon<br />
David B. Livingstone<br />
Brevity, the aphorism has it, is the soul of wit. So<br />
where does that leave Thomas Pynchon, whose current<br />
offering Mason & Dixon weighs in at close to<br />
800 pages – and of often-impenetrable stylized ‘Old<br />
English’ text, no less?<br />
The real Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,<br />
America’s original sub-dividers, took upon themselves<br />
the promethean task of imposing the first trace of order<br />
upon the wilderness that was the new world, drawing<br />
their famous line demarcating north and south. With<br />
his fanciful re-imagining of Messrs Mason and Dixon,<br />
Pynchon has created a veritable universe, similarly bewildering<br />
and untamed, for readers to divide and conquer<br />
if they can. Mason & Dixon is a sprawling muddle<br />
of historical fact, surreal fancy, fable, fantasy, and occasional<br />
silliness, underpinned by the quiet insistence –<br />
supported, at times, more by faith than evidence – that<br />
somehow it all can make sense; that somehow, given<br />
enough courage, dogged determination, or blind luck,<br />
order can be either alchemically divined from chaos or<br />
forced upon it. Like American civilization, both past<br />
and present.<br />
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Pynchon’s always been the poster boy for literate<br />
obsessive-compulsives; to have successfully navigated<br />
his Gravity’s Rainbow, with its (literally!) hundreds<br />
of characters and multiple opaque, labyrinthine approximations<br />
of plot, has long been considered a badge<br />
of honour in college English departments, as tons of<br />
well-thumbed paperback copies littering coffeehouses<br />
and the ‘used’ shelves of college bookstores attest to.<br />
To read Pynchon is considered in some quarters akin<br />
to membership in an elite, semi-secret society of codebreakers<br />
or decipherers of hieroglyphics, a courageous<br />
and maybe half-mad cult obsessed with ‘getting it’.<br />
Their patron Saint Thomas has never made it easy;<br />
the enigmatic, likely pseudonymous author remains as<br />
much a mystery as his books, having refused all interviews,<br />
rebutted all requests for biographical information,<br />
and successfully eluded the most dogged attempts<br />
at unearthing his true identity ever since his 50s debut.<br />
Evidently in agreement with Humphrey Bogart that all<br />
he owes his audience is a good performance, the ephemeral<br />
Tom will periodically emerge from the shadows in<br />
the form of another cryptic tome to dazzle with verbal<br />
410<br />
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sleight-of-hand, infuriate with quick-change artistry,<br />
and befuddle with another disappearing act, leaving the<br />
faithful to scramble for morsels of meaning or genius<br />
until his next earthly manifestation.<br />
One critic, in the Village Voice, has already likened<br />
reviewing Mason & Dixon to “reviewing the Atlantic<br />
ocean.” With its wilful opacity and encyclopedic<br />
breadth of themes and subjects, distilling the novel to<br />
a succinct summary while doing it justice is a pretty<br />
daunting prospect. Mason & Dixon stands as a paradigm<br />
of The Novel As Jigsaw Puzzle; here, you’re<br />
expected to somehow connect the dots between such<br />
elements as a talking dog (“the learn’d English dog,”<br />
to be precise), a smiling electric eel used as a compass,<br />
the evils of Indian massacres and the slave trade, the<br />
first British pizza, the world’s largest cheese (the “octuple<br />
Gloucester”, a “cheese malevolent”), an invisible,<br />
lovelorn mechanical duck which chases a French chef<br />
around the world (“la bec de la mort” – the beak of<br />
death), the intricacies of astronomy and geometry, the<br />
dualistic characters of Mason and Dixon, and the omnipresent<br />
backdrop of collected American, European,<br />
religious, and human history into a distinct impression,<br />
a coherent whole. No mean feat.<br />
Distinct themes, however, do ultimately emerge.<br />
Mason & Dixon is about lines – not only the literal lines<br />
of surveyors and mapmakers, but about boundaries in<br />
the larger sense: Lines between good and evil, known<br />
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and unknown, fantasy and fact, science and superstition,<br />
past, present, and future; it is about the drawing<br />
of these lines, the crossing of these lines, the blurring<br />
and erasure of these lines, and the consequences of<br />
doing so. Mason & Dixon’s task, to define the physical<br />
parameters of America, stands as a metaphor for<br />
the definition and creation of the country itself, as<br />
performed by the supposedly enlightened and rational<br />
explorers, colonists, founding fathers, kings, generals,<br />
venture capitalists, and adventurers who did so. The<br />
end result – the divided and sub-divided nation of ethnic<br />
hatreds and strip malls, of class envy and suburban<br />
sprawl, of glittering triumphs and monumental failures<br />
– is the measure of their efforts, and the subtly-invoked<br />
backdrop of Mason & Dixon.<br />
In large measure, Mason & Dixon is ultimately a<br />
lament for the failure of individuals and nations relative<br />
to their dreams and their potential, as well as for<br />
vanished frontiers – those of the physical world (the<br />
conquest of nature and the wilderness) as well as the<br />
spiritual (the waning power of religion and its corollary<br />
elements, faith and imagination, at the hands of science<br />
and commerce):<br />
“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? And is<br />
America her dream? – in which all that cannot pass<br />
in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression<br />
away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces,<br />
and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp’d, nor<br />
411<br />
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written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind,<br />
seen – serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive<br />
Hopes, for all that may yet be true – Earthly Paradise,<br />
Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s<br />
Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe until the next<br />
Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d<br />
and tied in, back into the Net-Work of points already<br />
known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent,<br />
changing all from subjunctive to declarative,<br />
reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the<br />
ends of Governments, – winning away from the realm<br />
of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming<br />
them unto the bare mortal World that is our home,<br />
and our Despair.”<br />
And with only a slightly greater synaptic leap, Mason<br />
& Dixon can be read as a rueful acknowledgement of<br />
the fragmentation of the American dream – the disappearance<br />
of a collective sense of direction and purpose,<br />
as well as possibly morality – a relief portrait of a<br />
country and people adrift:<br />
Mason to Dixon: “Acts have consequences, Dixon,<br />
they must. These Louts believe all’s right now, – that<br />
they are free to get on with Lives that are to them no<br />
doubt important, – with no Glimmer at all of the Debt<br />
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they have taken on. That is what I smell’d – Lethe-water.<br />
One of the things the newly born forget, is how terrible<br />
its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to<br />
forget ev’rything. Be willing to wait but a little, and ye<br />
may gull them again and again, however ye wish, – even<br />
unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend,<br />
Time is the true river that runs round Hell.”<br />
Lethe, the river of ignorance in Greek mythology, is<br />
evidently the creek we’re stuck on without a paddle,<br />
drifting ever away from “the realm of the sacred.” Not<br />
altogether a very cheery prospect.<br />
Mason & Dixon, despite frequent humour, makes<br />
for pretty lousy light reading; if the continual digressions,<br />
daunting thematic content, odd symbolism, or<br />
structural oddities don’t get to you, the period narrative<br />
style certainly will. Maintaining the necessary mental<br />
inventory of preceding events is a difficulty even early<br />
on, and later, a virtual impossibility. Concentration,<br />
and lots of it, is necessary for a successful foray into<br />
Pynchon’s New World, where brevity is the only thing<br />
in short supply. But for those who dare to attempt the<br />
challenge, armed with the requisite patience and attention<br />
span, Mason & Dixon offers abundant wit, as well<br />
as considerable wisdom. �<br />
412<br />
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Review [published August 2006]<br />
Matthew Robertson: FAC 461<br />
Chris Hall on Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461)<br />
In the late 70s, the mysterious, topographical radio<br />
waves of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures appeared<br />
like a burst of energy in an empty void, signifying the<br />
arrival not only of one of the best bands this country has<br />
produced but also its finest independent record label,<br />
Factory. It’s not too strong to say that Peter Saville’s<br />
sleeves for Unknown Pleasures and New Order’s ‘Blue<br />
Monday’ are up there with Peter Blake’s Sgt. Pepper’s<br />
Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and<br />
Vaughan Oliver’s 4AD covers. The design mostly<br />
matched up to the quality of the music.<br />
The chaotic, quixotic Factory Records existed from<br />
1978 to 1992, from post-punk to rave, and continues to<br />
influence those making music now, not only in nostalgic<br />
terms but because they were essentially purely about<br />
the music – and the design was all about enhancing the<br />
music. Ironically, it was on the very front that Factory<br />
couldn’t compete that it ended up competing on – design.<br />
This is the label whose die-cut ‘Blue Monday’ single by<br />
New Order, the best-selling 12 inch of all time, cost them<br />
money every time someone bought the record.<br />
Of course, Factory is most closely associated with the<br />
graphic designer Peter Saville. In the summer of 2003<br />
there was a big Saville retrospective at the Design Museum<br />
and a book which of course featured a lot of his work<br />
for Factory. Saville’s book presented his art work and<br />
other writers put it into context with long, considered essays;<br />
what this book does instead is simply catalogue the<br />
work and provide minimal expositionary notes. Unlike<br />
the Saville book, it highlights the work of other people<br />
involved in the Factory story and shows how it evolved<br />
beyond the visually literate aesthetic of Saville.<br />
The shadow background of the artwork in FAC 461<br />
reinforces the idea that these are objects, artefacts, photographed<br />
as if from above on mini-plinths. Ironically,<br />
a lot of the artwork published here that we are forever<br />
told works best as a 12” vinyl or 33rpm sleeve is shown<br />
at pretty much the exact dimensions of a compact disc.<br />
There is a fantastically pretentious but sublime introduction<br />
from Factory co-founder and twat-about-town<br />
Tony Wilson whose register and sentence construction<br />
is unique. How about this, with its brilliantly ambivalent<br />
“or”: “It all began after a very, very bad Patti Smith<br />
gig in late 77 or early 78…”; or this, explaining the<br />
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413<br />
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Factory design rationale, the pick of the crop: “Does<br />
the Catholic Church pour its wine into mouldy earthenware<br />
pots? I think not.” How can one not love this man<br />
(other than by meeting him perhaps)?<br />
However, Wilson’s got a gimlet eye for the design<br />
success of the Happy Mondays album Bummed, writing<br />
about its controversial inside sleeve: “It wasn’t the fact<br />
that the woman was middle-aged, it wasn’t the shaved<br />
pubes, it was the colour quality which made the viewer<br />
feel dirty. Sheer genius, that.”<br />
The Durutti Column album The Return of the Durutti<br />
Column (1979) designed by Dave Rowbotham is composed<br />
entirely of sandpaper and was inspired by the<br />
Situationist Guy Debord’s Memoires, “a book bound<br />
in raw sandpaper designed to damage all other publications<br />
around it” – perfect for punk.<br />
Of course, Factory didn’t just operate in two dimensions<br />
– as Tony Wilson might have said – there was Ben<br />
Kelly’s Hacienda nightclub, for a while the most famous<br />
club in the world, with its chevrons, bollards and cats<br />
eyes – a kind of theatrical industrial space, which included<br />
the Gay Traitor bar, with its spot lights and furtive air<br />
of treachery. (Saville said astutely that “Instead of being<br />
a monument to the 80s, the Hacienda is the birthplace of<br />
the 90s”.) Then there was Factory HQ on Charles Street,<br />
a disused textile warehouse (since the 70s they had operated<br />
from Alan Erasmus’s one-bed flat) – “a mausoleum<br />
to the corporate brand that the label could never be”, plus<br />
the Dry bar, a continental-style bar, one of the first of its<br />
kind in England, all in Manchester.<br />
There’s even info here that’s new to a Factory nut like<br />
me (and I made sure my son’s initial allowed me to have<br />
a FAC family code, though perhaps that’s a retrospective<br />
justification), such as the f-hole logo which I’d always<br />
taken to be f for Factory but it’s actually f for Fractured<br />
Music, Joy Division’s company (fascinating eh?). Also<br />
that there was a cigarette pack design for the Joy Division<br />
video Here Are The Young Men, got up like 20 John<br />
Player Special’s – I want to trade my VHS copy now!<br />
There’s even plenty to drool over in corporate terms<br />
such as the stationery and the Factory Christmas cards,<br />
especially the one from 1987 designed by Johnson Panas<br />
(they were of course commissioned and absurdly lavish),<br />
a cardboard model kit of the Hacienda.<br />
While Saville continued his “grand tour for the masses”,<br />
with the New Order covers taking in De Chirico for<br />
‘Thieves Like Us’, Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Dynamo<br />
(1927) for Procession (1981) and appropriating Jan<br />
Tschichold typography, there is a sense of a dead end.<br />
Luckily, the Happy Mondays covers rescued Saville’s<br />
anally retentive control freakery and let rip: they were<br />
garish, often unreadable and trippy. Happy Mondays’<br />
‘Lazyitis’ single by Central Station Design looks as if<br />
they can’t be bothered, which is perfect of course, the<br />
bloated lettering slurring its way across the sleeve – you<br />
half expect the cover to belch in your face. �<br />
BUY Matthew Robertson books online from and<br />
414<br />
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Review [published June 1999]<br />
Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
In one of his routines, Eddie Izzard explains why supermarkets<br />
don’t have toilet rolls on display near the entrance<br />
in case you think “this is a poo shop! Everything<br />
in here is poo!”. Your first impression of The Peculiar<br />
Memories Of Thomas Penman may well be similar, as<br />
the first chapter revels in the scatological detail of the<br />
eponymous Penman’s difficulties at school. Blackly<br />
funny and completely offensive, the opening chapter<br />
sets the tone for the rest of the book.<br />
You could be forgiven for thinking this is indeed a<br />
‘poo’ book. Defecation is everywhere, from Penman’s<br />
emergencies in the classroom to the war of attrition –<br />
expressed through the medium of dog shit – waged by<br />
his uncommunicative parents. This is definitely not a<br />
book for the easily offended, encompassing Thomas’<br />
Grandfather’s secret stash of pornography (including<br />
photographs of “a woman with a duck up her arse”),<br />
teenage opinions of sex and general unpleasantness.<br />
Robinson, however, manages to stay the right side of<br />
offensiveness and his novel is highly amusing whilst<br />
packing a hefty moral punch.<br />
The novel is essentially a rites-of-passage story,<br />
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covering Penman’s first love and first experience of<br />
mortality, although the unpleasantness of the subject<br />
matter makes The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas<br />
Penman considerably funnier than the typical tale of<br />
growing up. Penman’s infatuation for the far-fromperfect<br />
Gwen cures him of his obsession with his own<br />
bodily functions, and we follow his predicament as his<br />
home life becomes increasingly demented. Robinson<br />
has a deceptively light touch and manages to create as<br />
many uncomfortable laughs of recognition as he does<br />
belly-laughs, particularly when Thomas describes his<br />
feelings for the love of his life or deals with the first<br />
fumblings of teenage sex. Similarly the parental discord<br />
of Thomas’ dysfunctional family is exaggerated to<br />
the point of parody without losing its horror.<br />
The dialogue is bang-on for most of the book and<br />
both Thomas’ secretive relationship with his Grandfather<br />
and his attempts to discover the man’s dark secret<br />
are simultaneously funny and touching. It’s the details,<br />
however, which will have you squirming – from Thomas’<br />
Grandfather’s recollections of the Great War to<br />
conversations about sex where the girl “would have<br />
415<br />
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done it” if the boy had been able to produce a more<br />
appropriate form of protection than a three-foot condom<br />
found washed up on the beach. The ill-informed<br />
bravado of teenage boys is particularly well-drawn and<br />
the scenes where Thomas attempts to smoke cigarettes<br />
or discuss sex with his best friend are painfully funny.<br />
Bruce Robinson has been lauded primarily for writing<br />
and directing the cult hit Withnail & I, although<br />
his credits also include the screenplay for The Killing<br />
BUY Bruce Robinson books online from and<br />
Fields. He’s clearly a very talented writer and, in …<br />
Penman, manages the difficult task of balancing manic<br />
humour and pathos. The war scenes in particular are<br />
graphic and powerful, and the scenes where Thomas<br />
speaks with his Grandfather on his death-bed are especially<br />
poignant. Reading this book you’re left with the<br />
distinct impression that Bruce Robinson can turn his<br />
hand to manic comedy and serious story-telling with<br />
equal ease. �<br />
416<br />
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Review [published August 2003]<br />
Jacques Roubaud: The Great Fire Of London<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel<br />
The Great Fire Of London many times.<br />
No, that’s not true. I have not written anything.<br />
Rather, I have felt many times the need to write about<br />
The Great Fire Of London.<br />
But that’s not true either. I have felt the need to remove<br />
this need; that’s all.<br />
I have assumed that writing would remove the need.<br />
There seems to be no other way. But what is there to<br />
write? The Great Fire Of London is a fearfully complex<br />
book. There are pages betraying the influence of Roubaud’s<br />
academic career as a mathematician. I cannot<br />
understand a great deal of it. But maybe that is a good<br />
thing. If I wrote about the novel by trying to unravel<br />
its fearful complexity, I might ruin what makes it so<br />
persistently memorable, which isn’t a result of its fearful<br />
complexity. It is something to do with its underlying<br />
simplicity and intimacy. But such a statement is itself<br />
too simplistic. Either way, it is deeply moving and<br />
inspiring book.<br />
Not that I would unequivocally recommend rushing<br />
out to get a copy. It is not an easy read. The subject<br />
BUY Jacques Roubaud books online from and<br />
matter is frequently incomprehensible, occasionally<br />
boring and evasive. All these aspects, however, seem<br />
fundamental to it; that is, not errors of art and craft.<br />
So, to look beyond these, to direct one’s steady gaze<br />
at the essence of the novel might be to repeat Orpheus’<br />
error when retrieving his wife Eurydice from<br />
the underworld. He looked back as he led her from<br />
the darkness, so breaking his vow to the God of the<br />
underworld. He was not meant to look. She was then<br />
condemned to remain in the dark and he was ripped<br />
apart. Orpheus’ dismembered head sings of his loss<br />
as it floats down a river. Similarly, perhaps, if one<br />
attempts to retrieve art from the darkness of its bookloneliness<br />
by bringing it into the brightness of public<br />
discourse, its essence might well get left behind too.<br />
What’s left would be the beauty of its dissembling<br />
architecture; the words of Orpheus’ song. This is not<br />
what makes it beautiful.<br />
So what is it? One helpful aspect of The Great Fire<br />
Of London is that Roubaud’s narrator also assumes that<br />
writing is his only recourse. Perhaps there is something<br />
to learn about this impulse, or at least how might affect<br />
417<br />
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what is written.<br />
In the opening chapter, the narrator – who is Roubaud<br />
himself, more or less, although more or less is<br />
perhaps an infinity I can only hope to overlook here – is<br />
at his desk at five in the morning, drinking coffee. He<br />
listens to the running motor of a delivery truck in the<br />
street below. Immediately, we are with him in the cool<br />
solitude of dawn. We reflect in isolation from the world<br />
in motion; it becomes five o’clock in the morning for<br />
us too. (Scott Fitzgerald says “In the real dark night of<br />
the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day<br />
after day”; at five o’clock, one begins to write about it).<br />
The narrator tells us that he writes:<br />
“in minute, close-packed letters, without deletions,<br />
regrets, reflection, imagination, impatience” and that<br />
he is writing “only in order to keep on going, to elude<br />
BUY Jacques Roubaud books online from and<br />
the anguish awaiting me once I break off.”<br />
His anguish is inevitable, for a reason that soon<br />
becomes clear. Writing holds anguish at bay. Reading<br />
and sleep help too, he says. They provide the local<br />
palliative of ‘escapism’. What we read, though, is not<br />
in the form of traditional writerly escapism; a crime<br />
thriller, perhaps, or maybe a philosophical abstraction<br />
cast from an ivory tower, or even the ‘talking cure’ of<br />
confessional memoir. It’s difficult to say what kind of<br />
book it is. Yes, it is a novel, even if I found my copy<br />
in the History section of a remaindered bookshop. Yet<br />
while it partakes of the liberating playfulness of fiction,<br />
it also looks back – ever so obliquely, yet ever so insistently<br />
– into his pool of anguish: the sudden, premature<br />
death of Alix, his wife. And this really happened. It’s<br />
no fiction. �<br />
418<br />
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Robert Sabbag: Snowblind 420<br />
Peter Saville: Graphic Sex 422<br />
Alberto Sciamma: Suck It And See 428<br />
W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away 431<br />
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz 446<br />
Will Self 450<br />
Will Self: Biting The Hand That Feeds 451<br />
Will Self: Self Destruction 460<br />
Will Self: Dead Man Talking 464<br />
Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension 467<br />
S<br />
Tupac Shakur: Murder Was The Case 472<br />
Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey 475<br />
Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle 479<br />
Michael Marshall Smith: Spares 482<br />
Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us 484<br />
Sonic Youth: Sonic Spice 486<br />
Ralph Steadman: Gonzo: The Art 490<br />
Suicide: David Nobakht: No Compromise 499<br />
Damo Suzuki: I Am Damo Suzuki 502<br />
Swans: Swans’ Song 506<br />
David Sylvian: The Good Son Vs.<br />
The Only Daughter 510<br />
419<br />
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Review [published December 2001]<br />
Robert Sabbag: Snowblind<br />
Robin Askew<br />
If Howard Marks is Mr Nice – a lovable, educated<br />
former cannabis smuggler who didn’t touch anything<br />
harder on principle – then Zachary Swan was<br />
Mr Somewhat-Less-Nice. A harder sell to the liberal<br />
middle-classes than Marks’s entertaining raconteur,<br />
Swan was an American cocaine smuggler whose meticulous<br />
scams became the stuff of legend in the 70s.<br />
One of the true classics of drug literature, Snowblind<br />
has been in and out of print many times since it first<br />
appeared in 1976. This welcome new edition from<br />
Scottish counter-culture specialists Rebel Inc boasts<br />
a rambling, adulatory introduction from Marks (“…<br />
the world of international dope dealing is fun,” he<br />
vouchsafes once again, adding, perhaps unnecessarily,<br />
“It’s fucking great!”) and an afterword (actually<br />
written ten years ago) by Robert Sabbag, recalling<br />
how, as a young and ambitious newspaper hack,<br />
he was reluctantly persuaded to write the book that<br />
made his name.<br />
Too old to be a hippy and Republican by inclination,<br />
Swan was a smuggler of the old-school, motivated<br />
more by greed than the politico-chemical fervour<br />
BUY Robert Sabbag books online from and<br />
of the times. His swift transition from dope to coke<br />
resulted from a calculation of the vastly increased<br />
profits to be made from Colombian nose candy. (In<br />
an amusing digression, Sabbag reminds us that we<br />
should never underestimate the contribution made<br />
by illegal drug dealing to his nation’s numeracy:<br />
“The United States of America effectively converted<br />
to the metric system in, or around, 1965 – by 1970<br />
there was not a college sophomore worth his government<br />
grant who didn’t know how much a gram of<br />
hash weighed.”)<br />
These being comparatively more innocent, prefreebase<br />
times, Swan didn’t carry a gun until late in his<br />
brief career and never shot anyone, had a moderately<br />
enlightened attitude towards women by the antediluvian<br />
standards of the time, and – unusually – devised<br />
each of his cunning scams with a loophole that allowed<br />
his often unwitting ‘mules’ to walk away, much to the<br />
frustration of the Feds.<br />
It’s the mechanics of these ingenious smuggling<br />
schemes that provide the most pleasure. Increased<br />
security measures mean that many of them couldn’t<br />
420<br />
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be employed today, though some remain infallible.<br />
For one brilliantly executed scam, Swan spent days<br />
perfecting a technique for imperceptibly removing and<br />
replacing the seals on jars of coffee. Finally satisfied,<br />
he deposited a leaflet in a sealed jar, sneaked it back<br />
into a store and waited. Days later, he received a call on<br />
a phone that couldn’t be traced to him from an elderly<br />
couple who’d found that they’d just won a free trip to<br />
Colombia courtesy of the coffee company.<br />
Posing as executives from the company, a heavily<br />
disguised Swan and his sidekicks dispatched the couple<br />
from the airport having extracted an agreement that<br />
they would be photographed on their return with the<br />
gifts they’d been given. Down south, still-disguised<br />
Swan made a great show of handing over the souvenirs,<br />
which were, needless to say, stuffed with the<br />
finest toot. Abundant witnesses and the couple’s bogus<br />
signed agreement – not to mention their genuine innocence<br />
– meant they stood no chance of being convicted<br />
if caught. Back home, the souvenirs were discreetly<br />
swapped for identical if somewhat less valuable ones<br />
during the photographic session and the contented<br />
oldsters went on their way none the wiser.<br />
BUY Robert Sabbag books online from and<br />
Should you be naughty enough to read it as a handbook,<br />
Snowblind boasts plenty of hints and tips for the<br />
aspiring drug smuggler. (If you’re going to conceal your<br />
stash inside that old favourite the hollowed-out ethnic<br />
wooden ornament, choose something like medeira<br />
wood, which has a high specific gravity.) But armchair<br />
adventurers who’d prefer not to risk spending the rest<br />
of their lives being sodomised by large South American<br />
gentlemen in third world jails will enjoy it just as much<br />
for the racy prose, period charm – the description of the<br />
drug scene in 70s Harlem reads like the script for one of<br />
those big-Afro Blaxploitation flicks – and terrific cast<br />
of characters.<br />
Sabbag’s rich turn of phrase brings brilliantly to<br />
life such dramatis personae as the psychopathic Jago<br />
(“There was always a look in his eye which seemed<br />
to indicate that his body was metabolising raw flesh”),<br />
Michel Bernier (who “embodied all those individual<br />
characteristics that Americans find distasteful in a<br />
man – he was French”), and the aptly named Billy Bad<br />
Breaks, who was so inept that he achieved the singular<br />
distinction of being jailed for attempting to smuggle a<br />
joint into Mexico. �<br />
421<br />
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Interview [published September 2003]<br />
Peter Saville: Graphic Sex<br />
Chris Hall meets legendary designer Peter Saville<br />
“Peter Saville drives a Skoda”. The appalling idea<br />
scared him off of renting one when it was offered in<br />
place of the VW Polo that he’d ordered. “I know everyone<br />
says they’re really good cars now, but I’m not<br />
gonna be in a test group for them. It’s still a Skoda,”<br />
he says, terrified that people would think he drove one.<br />
Instead, Saville pulls up at his studios near Old Street,<br />
East London in a rented Fiat Stilo, The Doors still playing<br />
on the stereo. His own car, a 16-year-old BMW 3<br />
Series, is in the garage and he hasn’t quite got used to<br />
the replacement, checking and double-checking that<br />
he’s properly locked it. He’s worried about how much<br />
the repair bill is going to be when he collects the BMW.<br />
In fact, he’s worried about bills full stop.<br />
He has a big tax bill to pay this month, which he<br />
says he can’t afford. The bailiffs have been round, who<br />
he fended off by lying to them, and the phones have<br />
been cut off. Plus his own financial involvement in<br />
The Peter Saville Show which opened in May at the<br />
Design Museum in London, and a book published by<br />
Frieze, has meant that he’s on the verge of personal<br />
bankruptcy. Oh, and he’s just about to be kicked out of<br />
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the house he’s been staying at in West London for the<br />
past two years and might have to move in to his studio<br />
which hasn’t got a toilet. Or blinds. Or a bed.<br />
You wouldn’t think that this was the same Peter<br />
Saville who’s designed some of the most original and<br />
iconic album covers ever with Joy Division, New<br />
Order, Suede and Pulp; who’s worked for Christian<br />
Dior, Givenchy, the Pompidou Centre, EMI and<br />
Selfridges, among many, many others; whose seminal<br />
work for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has<br />
influenced a decade of “anti-advertising” advertising,<br />
and who’s been recently voted the “most admired<br />
individual working within the creative industries”<br />
in Creative Review. The Peter Saville who’s been<br />
quietly amassing an impressive body of work as a<br />
graphic artist over the last 25 years, who at the age of<br />
47 is being officially recognised by the mainstream.<br />
It’s the weekend, which means he’s working, and<br />
he’s arranged to do some quick picture editing with<br />
one of his colleagues, Sascha Behrendt, just before he<br />
meets me. But he’s running late, so they have to look<br />
at the prints of a shoot he did a few days earlier for<br />
422<br />
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Stella McCartney while I’m there. He’s dressed in his<br />
trademark white Helmut Lang jeans, a black T-shirt and<br />
some tan leather shoes (no socks). He speaks in a soft<br />
Mancunian accent deepened by nicotine, and has a distinctive<br />
sustain when pronouncing his Rs. Saville puts<br />
on his black-framed glasses and goes over to the table<br />
to look at large-format Polaroids of Kate Moss in kneehigh<br />
leather boots. “The professional situations I have<br />
at the moment are really quite abusive,” he says matter<br />
of factly. “It’s not a straight, commercial relationship I<br />
have with my clients. They come to me for something<br />
special, and yet for the most part they know that they<br />
can get it cheaply and they do, and that offends me. But<br />
I have to take what’s on offer.”<br />
He has his lunch at 5pm; a solitary sausage roll,<br />
which he’s eating from a large white plate with a knife<br />
and fork. What about all these flash restaurants he’s<br />
supposed to go to all the time I thought it’d be a takeout<br />
from Claridges or something? “I go to the Ivy about<br />
once every two months, despite what’s been written,”<br />
he laughs. “I spend about £20 on a meal.” He goes off to<br />
the kitchen area of his white-floored and white-walled<br />
studio space every so often to make himself an espresso<br />
in his Richard Sapper stove-top, making sure that everything<br />
is left clean and tidy. He mentions that he is going<br />
to watch the Monaco grand prix the following day<br />
and has been following the qualifying sessions. With<br />
his understated elegance and slightly egotistical charm,<br />
BUY Peter Saville books online from and<br />
he could be a poor man’s James Hunt. “Yes, there is<br />
some of that going on,” he admits, a little embarrassed<br />
by this particular reputation, but he’s more interested<br />
in moving from talk of playboy to Playboy: “I’d like<br />
to redo Playboy magazine. I find it lamentable that<br />
there isn’t an intelligent, erotic magazine. There isn’t<br />
a magazine that was like Playboy was 30 years ago,<br />
and I find that’s dumb. Why isn’t there any intelligent,<br />
abstract eroticism? I can find the artist Lucio Fontana’s<br />
colour fields incredibly erotic juxtaposed against a bit<br />
of Rocco Siffredi [a porn star].”<br />
From 1978 to 1991 when he was art director at Factory<br />
Records in Manchester (which he co-founded with<br />
Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) he had carte blanche<br />
creatively. He designed the posters for the legendary<br />
Hacienda nightclub in the city, the album covers for the<br />
Factory bands (Joy Division, New Order, OMD, etc) all<br />
seemingly quixotically free of financial considerations.<br />
His artwork for the cover of New Order’s Blue Monday<br />
12 inch in 1983 was die-cut to make it resemble a<br />
floppy disc, and, depending on whose version of events<br />
you believe, cost the record company anywhere from<br />
2p to 75p everytime a copy was bought. Which perhaps<br />
would have been fine had it been a limited edition, but<br />
it just happened to become the biggest selling 12 inch<br />
record ever. “What I did in my local zone was how I<br />
wanted everything to be,” says Saville. “I was spoilt in<br />
the beginning by being given a big playground to play<br />
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in and remarkable freedom.”<br />
The very first poster that he designed for Factory with<br />
its “Use hearing protection” strapline, along with the<br />
architect Ben Kelly’s design for the Hacienda (which<br />
Saville collaborated on), foreshadowed the industrial<br />
warehouse chic that would come to dominate interior<br />
design in the following couple of decades. (After noticing<br />
recently that the originals were fetching £1,500 on<br />
eBay, Saville decided to produce 500 re-editions of the<br />
FAC1 poster which will cost £100 each. But how much<br />
this is motivated by the horror that it’s out of the reach<br />
of the masses, and how much by what must be a fairly<br />
easy income generator, is hard to say.)<br />
With Blue Monday and the earlier New Order album<br />
Power, Corruption & Lies there was an interest<br />
in coding the work, so that the titles were spelt out in<br />
colour. He pushed this idea further with later albums.<br />
With New Order’s Brotherhood (1986) and Technique<br />
(1989), it was clear whose work it was from the enigmatic,<br />
restrained and visually innovative sleeve design,<br />
respectively a sheet of Titaanzink metal and a Warholian<br />
cherub. One of the persistent legends that attaches<br />
to Saville, is that, like the author Douglas Adams, he<br />
loves the sound of deadlines whooshing past. Stephen<br />
Morris, the drummer of New Order, confirms this,<br />
recalling Saville’s most infamous late delivery. “It was<br />
the programme he did for us on an American tour that<br />
turned up on the last gig, and we’ve still got 1,000s<br />
BUY Peter Saville books online from and<br />
rotting away in a warehouse somewhere that we can’t<br />
get rid of.”<br />
But Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Suede,<br />
forgives Saville’s tardiness. Anderson is a friend of<br />
Saville’s and worked with him very closely on their<br />
albums Coming Up and Head Music. “A lot of it was<br />
done sitting and chatting and drinking coffee. It’s a real<br />
exchange and a discussion. It’s all part of his charm.<br />
What you miss with deadline efficiency is made up for<br />
by the incredible level of personal care he takes in the<br />
work. He really immersed himself in the music. He’s<br />
not driven by money or fame, just a genuine quest for<br />
aesthetic beauty.” Saville is currently working with the<br />
photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on Suede’s greatest<br />
hits cover, due for release in September.<br />
Because of his concerns to get a job done right, Peter<br />
Saville and business have long had an uneasy relationship.<br />
“There’s no notion in any industry that they will<br />
wait for graphic design. They will not wait. They’ll<br />
spend longer negotiating your work-for-hire contract<br />
than giving you to do the job!” he says with rising incredulity.<br />
“It’s just the finishing, but it’s in the finishing<br />
that you make it or break it.”<br />
Does he think that his deadlines are unrealistic? “They<br />
are if you want something resolved or of any quality,”<br />
he says. “My problem comes when it’s my work. I<br />
become territorial, and self-indulgent and maybe arrogant.<br />
If it takes till next Friday, it’s gonna take till next<br />
424<br />
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Friday. You know, I had this mistaken understanding<br />
of professional when I was younger that it meant being<br />
really good.” He laughs in cynical astonishment. “But<br />
it’s actually about doing what has to be done within the<br />
circumstances within which you are allowed to do it.”<br />
The way Saville tells it, his designs have actually influenced<br />
the music. He claims that the musical direction<br />
of what was to be Joy Division’s final album, Closer,<br />
was guided by its funereal sleeve photograph by Bernard<br />
Pierre Wolff (the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself<br />
shortly before its release). But Morris, who’s currently<br />
in the studio writing songs for New Order’s next album<br />
where they recorded the ambient music for the Design<br />
Museum retrospective, is having none of it. “I think<br />
that’s too strong, but not for Peter,” he says, laughing<br />
fondly at such hubris. “I remember him and Rob Gretton<br />
[New Order’s former manager] having a discussion and<br />
the upshot was that Peter said people bought the records<br />
for his sleeves, not for the music.”<br />
“I come to every new job as if it’s Everest to climb<br />
again,” says Saville, lighting up the next of many, many<br />
Gauloises. “I foolishly approach everything as if it’s<br />
really important and that it has to be done, in some tiny<br />
way perhaps, in a way that it hasn’t been done before.<br />
I won’t just repeat myself. I don’t know why I do it.<br />
Partly it’s about anxiety and fear. Partly it’s about the<br />
music business where people would want something<br />
completely different.”<br />
BUY Peter Saville books online from and<br />
He comes across as a perfectionist, utterly disillusioned<br />
with big business, confused by his being in a<br />
grey area where art meets design and wanting to break<br />
free of his financial bonds and take a new direction.<br />
One can’t help but feel that with the kind of reckless<br />
candour with which he talks about the shortcomings<br />
of just about every client he’s ever worked for he’s<br />
trying to talk himself away from commercial art<br />
through autosuggestion. Icon’s photographer, Jamie,<br />
met Saville a few days earlier and was taken aback:<br />
“He was unable to resist art directing himself in the<br />
local playgrounds and parks. And I was amazed at<br />
how open and warm he was.”<br />
Saville clearly has a lot of steam to let off. “Absolutely<br />
everything except the creative act is stretched out<br />
as long as is needed and there’s this notion that you can<br />
resolve the creative issues and problems [clicks his fingers]<br />
like that’s the bigger the budget the more people<br />
sign-off, the more bland and generic it will be. No one<br />
wants to take a chance. I mean, what is happening in car<br />
design? It’s either hideously bland or really quite perverse.”<br />
The record industry was only ever going to be<br />
a professional cul-de-sac for someone fast-approaching<br />
30, and Saville seems more savvy than Machiavellian<br />
when he says that he “learnt quickly how to manipulate<br />
the record industry to my own ends. I took a selfish,<br />
bloody-minded approach to the work and I made life<br />
hell for the people who were paying for it. To me the<br />
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work was going to be my passport out of it.”<br />
With Peter Saville Associates in financial crisis and<br />
Factory Records on the verge of collapse, he finally hit<br />
commercial reality in 1990 and joined the Pentagram<br />
group in LA as a partner. With Saville’s odd working<br />
hours he rarely gets up before the afternoon and works<br />
until midnight and his antipathy, not to say hostility,<br />
towards corporate till-ringing, the relationship was<br />
doomed from the start. “I just will not make this analogy<br />
between what I’m being paid and how much time<br />
we spend on it. It gets as much time as it needs.”<br />
The current interest in Saville has a lot to do with<br />
the demographics of the creative industries. There is a<br />
whole generation who grew up as fans of, in particular,<br />
Roxy Music, Joy Division and New Order, who are<br />
now making the decisions. “When I first met the president<br />
of Givenchy Parfum,” says Saville, “he said ‘Oh,<br />
Monsieur Saville, I am a fan of Joy Division, I am a fan<br />
of Peter Saville.’ I was 45 and he was 39.”<br />
And it wasn’t just with couture fashion. “Throughout<br />
the 80s I saw the High Street convert. At Next, I saw<br />
so much of what I’d done for Ultravox. It was everywhere.”<br />
He explains: “At the design firms, the grownups<br />
weren’t hands-on anymore and the work was left<br />
to the kids.”<br />
At the Design Museum retrospective (designed by<br />
the architect Lindi Roy), Saville’s work is arranged<br />
chronologically. The middle section is very dark, and<br />
BUY Peter Saville books online from and<br />
shows his catalogue and advertising work for the fashion<br />
designer Yohji Yamamoto. The Game Over series<br />
of photo library stock images from 1991 for Yamamoto<br />
captures the sense of consumerist exhaustion and<br />
overkill amid an impending recession, which has been<br />
much copied in terms of its abstraction and typography.<br />
A Guide To Never-Never Land adumbrates the future<br />
of advertising in the 1990s, where the product is so far<br />
off the page that it almost becomes anti-advertising<br />
advertising. A car production line, all flashbulbs and<br />
gleaming surfaces, stretches off into an infinite hell of<br />
consumerism, as much a break with reality as Saville’s<br />
image is from Yamamoto’s clothing.<br />
When he’s talking about the retrospective, it seems<br />
as if Saville’s incapable of letting go and trusting his<br />
work to others. “I’m unhappy towards the people who I<br />
do the work for,” he says. “That’s my mood right now,<br />
which is kind of ironic after what would appear to be<br />
a successful show and book. It’s not what you would<br />
imagine. No one has gathered a comprehensive review<br />
of the work done by Peter Saville Studios over 25 years<br />
and looked at it in order to write about it or curate a<br />
proper show for a museum. Nobody. Has. Looked. At.<br />
The Work.” He says that the Design Museum exhibition<br />
lacks context, that there is nothing explaining why<br />
the work is important. And when he says that the show<br />
is his “greatest hits”, he means it pejoratively.<br />
Although he sounds exhausted by the demands<br />
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of running his business, he talks hopefully about the<br />
future. There is the Pirelli calendar that he’s working<br />
on with the photographer Nick Knight, a long-time<br />
collaborator, and which, despite being “a bit cheesy”,<br />
has kept his interest. A project he’s working on for the<br />
software company Adobe and its Photoshop packaging<br />
neatly ties in his attraction to recycling and to reflecting<br />
contemporary ways of living. In 1998, he started to experiment<br />
with the Wave filter on Photoshop and found<br />
that he could produce stunning digital paintings with<br />
all kinds of imagery, starting with New Order covers.<br />
“What’s interesting when we make the Waste Paintings<br />
is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s<br />
fascinating. We did one last week and it was mindboggling.<br />
We did it for the Adobe project. If I could work a<br />
computer, I’d show it to you! It’s beautiful. Print it out<br />
it’s done.”<br />
Saville has spent years agonising over a context or<br />
concept in which to place his many boxes of notebooks<br />
full of thoughts, sketches and ideas. “I was interested in<br />
the industrial estate, the country estate different ways<br />
BUY Peter Saville books online from and<br />
of understanding the word estate. It led me to ‘Estate<br />
of’. I though, shit, if I retire or die what will someone<br />
do with all of this stuff that I haven’t been able to work<br />
out? They’ll put it all together and they’ll catalogue it,<br />
and flog it. I thought, well why don’t I?”<br />
It would appear to have opened up possibilities for<br />
the graphic designer to move forward with his work<br />
and at last untie himself from those abusive client<br />
relationships. “A few years ago I was giving myself a<br />
hard time about not being an artist because what is it<br />
that I do regardless of other things? And then I realised<br />
oh, I do this [the notebooks]. I’d done the work. I’d<br />
been filling notebooks for 10 years about the things I<br />
ought to do preparatory notes. I’d done the work, but<br />
I’d never thought about it as writing it.”<br />
This is the big project, after all the hassle with clients<br />
and the financial frustrations and worries of his<br />
studio work, that he wants to do next, with himself<br />
as client: “I’ve learnt not to leave this kind of thing<br />
to chance.”<br />
[This article previously appeared in Icon magazine] �<br />
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Feature [published July 1996]<br />
Alberto Sciamma: Suck It And See<br />
Chris Mitchell gets a sneak preview of the outrageous film, The Killer Tongue<br />
This year’s Cannes Festival witnessed an explosion<br />
of tongues, transvestites and the tightest costumes<br />
ever devised with the premier screening of The Killer<br />
Tongue, the debut film from the Brighton-based production<br />
company Spice Factory. Starring Robert (‘Freddie<br />
Krueger’) Englund and Doug (‘Pinhead’) Bradley, The<br />
Killer Tongue looks like a collision between Priscilla:<br />
Queen Of The Desert and The Evil Dead, with a distinct<br />
tip of the hat to The Rocky Horror Picture Show for<br />
good measure.<br />
The Killer Tongue’s plot is as gloriously camp as its<br />
costumes. The debris from a meteorite slamming into<br />
the Tex-Mex desert winds up in the soup of Candy<br />
(Melinda Clarke: Critic’s Choice, Return of The Living<br />
Dead III), a former doublecrossing underworld<br />
desperado currently lying low in a convent. Once said<br />
soup is imbibed, Candy becomes host to the aforementioned<br />
alien mutant Killer Tongue, complete with<br />
talking Alien-esque mini-maw. Just for that finishing<br />
touch, Candy’s pet poodles metamorphose into the drag<br />
queens Loco, Coco and Rudolph. With her underworld<br />
enemies in hot pursuit, Candy flees into the desert,<br />
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and<br />
transvestites and tongue in tow.<br />
Meanwhile, her former crime partner Johnny (Jason<br />
Durr: Young Soul Rebels, Between Two Worlds) is serving<br />
time in a chaingang under the sadistic Chief Guard<br />
(Robert Englund). Amongst Johnny’s fellow convicts<br />
lurks Doug Bradley. Hearing of Candy’s plight, Johnny<br />
escapes the gang, teams up with Rita, a nun still convinced<br />
of Candy’s convent credentials despite the fact<br />
the tongue has already eaten half of her heavenly choir,<br />
and also sets off in pursuit. Volkert Struyken, one of<br />
the executive producers along with Jason Piette and<br />
Michael Cowan of the Spice Factory, comments: “It’s a<br />
psychotic comedy, but there’s very little gore, no flying<br />
heads. One thing you can guarantee, it’s going to be<br />
one of the most memorable films of 1996,” he states,<br />
before dissolving into laughter.<br />
What we have here is a comedy horror transvestite<br />
road movie of the first order. As Robert Englund<br />
remarks, “When I got the script, it was very different<br />
to anything I had read. There was something about<br />
the snowballing visual images which made sense<br />
to me. I realised that it must have been something<br />
428<br />
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like reading a David Lynch script before we all used<br />
‘David Lynch’ as an adjective. It reminded me a<br />
bit of El Hobo, Dust Devil by Richard Stanley and<br />
also the Coen Brothers; it has that almost cartoon,<br />
story-board aspect to it. It is very strange in its weird<br />
kind of juxtapositions – I’ve been calling it a visual<br />
non-sequitur.”<br />
This sort of comment is all the more remarkable<br />
seeing it’s concerned with a British film. If Four<br />
Weddings, Sense And Sensibility and Trainspotting<br />
have all recently played on their quintessential forms<br />
of Britishness as their main selling point, The Killer<br />
Tongue takes great glee in being a complete hybrid of<br />
trash Americana and spaghetti westerns. As Michael<br />
Cowan of Brighton’s Spice Factory who co-wrote,<br />
produced and organised the financing for the film<br />
comments: “Spice Factory really doesn’t give a fuck<br />
about Channel 4 or any of those people because they<br />
really aren’t interested in the type of movies that we<br />
want to make. The world’s becoming a much smaller<br />
place. People want to be entertained, not go and watch<br />
My Beautiful Launderette which has only 50 screens,<br />
all made in the UK, costs £1 million and takes 5 years<br />
to produce because everyone’s trying to make money<br />
out of Channel 4. Our philosophy’s really different<br />
because it’s grown up from the video age. I think a lot<br />
of kids from that era who have grown up knowing a<br />
lot about all sorts of different films and music want to<br />
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and<br />
see that same diversity in the cinema.”<br />
This is reflected by the other key figure in The Killer<br />
Tongue’s genesis, the 34-year-old Spanish writer-director,<br />
Alberto Sciamma. Like David Fincher’s rite of passage<br />
before his directing debut on Alien 3, The Killer<br />
Tongue is Sciamma’s first feature film after directing<br />
a host of critically acclaimed music videos. That experience<br />
shows in the fact that shooting for the film<br />
wrapped up after eight weeks in Almeria and Madrid,<br />
holding to its $6 million budget.<br />
Acquiring the money for such a relatively modest<br />
film budget is still a difficult process, as Cowan attests:<br />
“It took us nearly 18 months to get it financed. Alberto<br />
Sciamma had suffered total rejection when he was touting<br />
the original script for The Killer Tongue. But after<br />
we got involved and Jason [Piette, the other co-director<br />
of Spice Factory] did some extensive rewriting, we<br />
were ready to go. We used a front guy as a producer<br />
called Christopher Figg who produced the Hellraiser<br />
movies ‘cos otherwise people would have said, ‘Unknown<br />
director, unknown producers, who the fuck are<br />
they?’. We used him as the front and then put all the<br />
deals together to make it work. During that process we<br />
got a lot of rejections from a lot of people, Polygram et<br />
al, who couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t<br />
get it. But we did it.”<br />
The Killer Tongue has eventually emerged as a coproduction<br />
between Spice Factory and Spain’s Lola<br />
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Films, with backing from the UK’s European Co-production<br />
Fund and the giant Spanish publishing corporation<br />
Prisa’s entertainment division, Sogetel. Cowan<br />
makes a telling analogy to this complex process: “The<br />
film business is something like the futures market – all<br />
you’re doing is selling names and bits of paper That’s<br />
the bottom line, which is pretty shocking when you’ve<br />
spent so much time trying to create something!”<br />
Spice Factory are themselves part of a bigger<br />
company, Brighton’s Epic Multimedia Group, itself<br />
the largest independent multimedia company within<br />
Europe. This gives Spice Factory an added edge as<br />
Jason Piette points out: “We’re the only production<br />
company in the world that makes both computer<br />
games and films.” This is demonstrated by The Killer<br />
Tongue game tie-in, Point and Lick, due out later<br />
in the year, and Spice Factory’s development of the<br />
game to accompany the $25 million film Space Truckers,<br />
featuring Dennis Hopper. From their dealings<br />
over Space Truckers, Spice Factory have managed to<br />
persuade Goldcrest to finance their next film Crush<br />
Hour to the tune of $14 million.<br />
Cowan, a graduate of the National Film School, indicates<br />
the great strength of Spice Factory is precisely this<br />
diversity: “We’re not just film producers: we actually<br />
originate product – we’re creative writers and we work<br />
with other creators. And we also understand the business<br />
side.” Far from spreading themselves too thinly,<br />
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Spice Factory reckon they’ve hit a unique formula<br />
to fund production of future films without having to<br />
continually compromise over financing. Spice Factory<br />
are already commanding respect within the British film<br />
industry: “In the beginning we spent a lot of time travelling<br />
up to London to meet a lot of people – now the<br />
likes of Channel 4 and British Screen are coming down<br />
to Brighton and see us. We’re not trying to be cocky,<br />
like we’re going to be a great success, it’s a business<br />
like anything else.”<br />
“But what we like about the film business is that it’s<br />
unpredictable, it doesn’t matter how great a script or<br />
how much money you have, it’s whether people are<br />
going to go and watch it. I think last year especially<br />
proved that. A lot of the major studios have produced<br />
big name movies which haven’t performed in any way<br />
whereas a lot of the smaller movies like Clerks, Clueless<br />
and The Usual Suspects have worked. I don’t think<br />
people go to a movie anymore just because there’s a<br />
big star in it. I think it’s all to do with what the story<br />
is and what they want. And I think they’re looking for<br />
something different, because over the last 4 years it’s<br />
been so repetitive with sequels etc. Which is where The<br />
Killer Tongue comes in – it’s wild, wacky and it’s inyer-face.”<br />
And, indeed, in yer mouth. Scheduled for a<br />
September / October release in the UK, Spice Factory<br />
are hoping for a 15 certificate once The Killer Tongue<br />
gets licked by the BBFC. �<br />
430<br />
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Feature [published November 2004]<br />
W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald<br />
Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when<br />
the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster,<br />
sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascination<br />
and regularity verging on Schadenfreude – are the<br />
events themselves always placed at a distance, always<br />
prior to the narrator’s present, as if only ever to be<br />
experienced second-hand, as stories?<br />
The first part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s<br />
novels to be published in English, is exemplary.<br />
It begins with a photograph of a graveyard. Below<br />
it is a date and, below that, a description of a journey<br />
to a large house situated in a village in East Anglia.<br />
The narrator and his partner are to view accommodation<br />
there. There is little or no tension. It could be<br />
mistaken for a straight memoir, particularly as there<br />
are so many photographs accompanying the words.<br />
Without pleasure or discomfort, the reader can follow<br />
the litany of precise natural details provided by the<br />
narrator – oak trees, Scots pines, a grassy graveyard,<br />
a thick shrubbery of hollies, Portuguese laurels, dry,<br />
rustling leaves. One expects it to lead somewhere,<br />
and a story of sorts does get told eventually. Howev-<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
er, once it is, these details seem excessive. In the end<br />
all we are told is of the narrator’s brief acquaintance<br />
with the melancholy Lithuanian emigrant Dr Henry<br />
Selwyn, and the curious coincidence that emerged<br />
later. In summary (though this is barely any shorter<br />
than the original) Selwyn lost his Swiss mountain<br />
guide in the early years of the century; he went missing<br />
on the Aare glacier. Selwyn, we’re told, remarked<br />
on how deeply this loss affected him, even more than<br />
separation from his wife. The fact doesn’t take up<br />
much space in the book. But 70 years after the loss,<br />
when visiting Switzerland, the narrator sees a news<br />
report of a body being given up by a glacier. It turns<br />
out to the same mountain guide. Selwyn could not<br />
be told of the discovery because, by then, he had<br />
killed himself with a hunting rifle. In fact, his suicide<br />
is a footnote. It is not presented as a great tragedy.<br />
There is no speculation on what he was thinking as<br />
he prepared to pull the trigger, or even why he chose<br />
to end his life. The narrator’s journey to Switzerland<br />
isn’t detailed either. It’s tacked on the end without<br />
the precise details provided at the beginning, while<br />
431<br />
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the chapter itself ends with these lines:<br />
“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At<br />
times they come back from the ice more than seven<br />
decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine,<br />
a few polished bones and a pair hobnailed boots.”<br />
It’s an oddly glib reflection; a flat reiteration of a<br />
Proustian epiphany that doesn’t, in fact, happen. There<br />
is no richness, no sense of revelation. The presence<br />
of the past is down to its bare bones. Another writer,<br />
perhaps with an eye for the main chance, might have<br />
expanded this into an ambitious tale across the dark<br />
decades of the 20th century, involving mountaineering,<br />
forbidden love, religious persecution, exile and war, all<br />
framed by the giant sky of the East Anglian countryside.<br />
But not Sebald. One might say that in this story not<br />
only is there no violence, there is nothing much at all.<br />
The presence of the dead is always at one step remove,<br />
never quite a full presence in the narration, and though<br />
his later work does go into more detail, giving a chance<br />
for that lost time to re-emerge, the flatness continues.<br />
Jacques Austerlitz, for example, is said to have grown<br />
up in Wales, but there is no rising inflection in his<br />
words, no lilt; just Sebald’s familiar, formal prose. At<br />
best this can be described as uncanny. Otherwise, there<br />
isn’t much for reader to indulge in. The fiction vacates<br />
rather than fills the space of literature.<br />
So why has Sebald been hailed – by Susan Sontag<br />
among others – as a literary great? Well, Sontag points<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
to the “passionate bleakness” of “a restless, chronically<br />
dissatisfied mind” that offers us “moral fervency and<br />
gifts of compassion”. But this doesn’t tell us much really.<br />
She also says that the accompanying photographs<br />
provide “an exquisite index of the pastness of the past.”<br />
Again, so how does that make Sebald great? Pastness is<br />
a great attraction to a culture that fetishises old objects.<br />
Indeed, Sebald’s style is called “Antiquarianism” by<br />
Daniel Johnson in the TLS: deriving from, he says, “a<br />
peculiar synthesis of English eclecticism and German<br />
perfectionism” where “the past has a more powerful<br />
presence than the present”. That presence is precisely<br />
its pastness, which is present only as an index of what’s<br />
not actually there. A curious paradox – one that would<br />
probably leave the experts of Antiques Roadshow nonplussed.<br />
Like their punters, they would probably prefer<br />
just to accumulate more and more of it. Hence perhaps<br />
why much is made of the variety of subject matter in<br />
Sebald’s novels, like a lumber room in a rundown mansion<br />
ready for an enthusiast’s rummage.<br />
It is also likely that the popularity of Sebald’s fiction is<br />
due to a nostalgia for works that deal seriously with the<br />
most serious of subjects – all four Sebald novels might<br />
be misconstrued as Holocaust Literature. Certainly,<br />
Sontag desires something to counter “the ascendancy<br />
of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative<br />
fictional subjects”. A nostalgia, too, perhaps, for<br />
black and white distinctions: Nazis evil, victims good.<br />
432<br />
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When we listen to the story of a Jewish refugee, such<br />
as Max Ferber in The Emigrants, who lost his parents<br />
in the camps, the obscure hurt has to be acknowledged<br />
even if it remains beyond us. In comparison to the<br />
moral confusion of the present, it is much easier for<br />
the reader to feel something. However, Sontag herself<br />
doesn’t see things as so clear cut. She ends her review<br />
of Vertigo with Sebald’s own curiosity with “the mysterious<br />
survival of the written word”; the dead, as it were,<br />
returning to us here too, again and again.<br />
The question of whether this is a good thing is left,<br />
as it is in Sebald’s novels, unanswered. Yet could the<br />
flatness be a means of trying to mitigate that survival?<br />
2.<br />
Sebald himself is survived by four novels for which<br />
we can be thankful. The Rings of Saturn followed<br />
The Emigrants, then came Vertigo, written before the<br />
other two, and finally, Austerlitz. The first and last<br />
in this sequence can crudely be called a pair: both<br />
contain stories framed by the narrator’s relation to<br />
individuals exiled from their origins. The middle two<br />
novels are framed by the narrator’s own wanderings,<br />
although they too involve telling others’ stories, usually<br />
an historical figure like Stendhal or Casanova.<br />
The trajectory is unsatisfactory. As I suggested in a<br />
review of Austerlitz, the author seemed to be painting<br />
himself into a corner. A new path is required.<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
We can only imagine what that path might have been.<br />
Yet that sense of loss and lack of development is oddly<br />
in keeping with the fiction. It’s as if the novels exist to<br />
deal with the inadequacy of resolutions. What I mean is<br />
described at the end of Vertigo.<br />
The narrator returns to the German village that he left<br />
as a youth. This is his first visit for 30 years. It gives<br />
him the chance to talk about all the goings-on, all the<br />
characters and intrigues that make up childhood memories<br />
with which he seems to be preoccupied. He meets<br />
friends from that time, now suddenly aged. One takes<br />
him to an attic room packed high with antiques and curios.<br />
Amongst the junk is an old tailor’s dummy dressed<br />
in a 17th-century soldier’s uniform. The narrator recognises<br />
it as the origin of a terrible threat that awaited him<br />
should he enter a forbidden room of his childhood. As<br />
he used to dream of this ghostly figure, his curiosity<br />
is stirred and he reaches out to touch the cloth, as if to<br />
make some kind of contact with that nightmare. The<br />
cloth crumbles away into dust. In subsequent dreams,<br />
he also reaches out and touches the soldier: “And every<br />
time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand,<br />
dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the<br />
token of some great woe that nothing in the world will<br />
ever put right.”<br />
While the dream takes the place of that childhood<br />
nightmare, perhaps offering the end of years of unconscious<br />
terror of the unknown, what replaces it is itself<br />
433<br />
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a troublesome lack. One dark thing dissimulates into<br />
another. Knowledge is gained yet, while this is apparently<br />
a progress, it buries the expected dissolution of<br />
the child’s fear in another darkness. Sebald’s writing is<br />
precisely this progress; a token of some great woe that<br />
is present only in the trace of its absence. Not progress<br />
enough perhaps. The “restless, dissatisfied mind” of<br />
the writer becomes our own experience of reading. We<br />
look for some concluding knowledge to get us beyond<br />
this apparent impasse, and we continue reading as the<br />
narrators continue on their wanderings, from one place<br />
to the next, from one book to the next. They are always<br />
getting over some undescribed illness or having just<br />
gone through “a particularly difficult period” or are<br />
feeling just plain empty. It is a neurasthenic condition<br />
familiar to other distinguished quasi- autobiographical<br />
writers: Proust and Kafka. Like Sebald, they sensed a<br />
world beyond their own restless, dissatisfied minds.<br />
Kafka first:<br />
“It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever<br />
lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness,<br />
but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It<br />
is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If<br />
you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it<br />
will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not<br />
create but summons.” (Diaries 18 October 1921)<br />
And Proust:<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
“What the intellect gives us back under the name of<br />
the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of<br />
the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of<br />
our lives, as soon as it is dead, embodies and conceals<br />
itself in some material object. Unless we meet with that<br />
object it remains captive there, captive for ever. We<br />
recognise it through the object, we summon it, and it is<br />
released.” (Against Sainte-Beuve)<br />
Both continued writing, as if this would bring life’s<br />
splendour. But if the right words summons what was<br />
hidden, wouldn’t the means of seeking it also be a<br />
means of missing the time where its advantage could be<br />
lived? Both writers’ unhappy, hypochondriac real lives<br />
suggest as much. Or perhaps their manner of seeking<br />
itself was at fault; Kafka certainly felt that way. How<br />
can one tell though? When can one know if the manner<br />
is correct until life’s splendour has passed and has<br />
become words only, mere history?<br />
Perhaps, though, that is the advantage.<br />
There’s a famous scene in Proust’s In Search Of Lost<br />
Time when Marcel returns to the Grand Hotel in the<br />
northern seaside resort of Balbec (locations familiar to<br />
readers of Vertigo). He bends down slowly to remove<br />
his boots and suddenly, he says, undergoes “a convulsion<br />
of my entire being”. His chest is filled by “an<br />
434<br />
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unknown, divine presence” which shakes him to tears.<br />
It turns out to be the sudden return in his memory of his<br />
late, beloved grandmother; “a complete and involuntary<br />
memory”. It is only as her presence fills him like this<br />
does he realise that she is really gone. Nothing in fact<br />
really happens but it is an exquisite moment for Marcel.<br />
At last, his mourning can take its course. The novel has<br />
many such incidents, spread across seven volumes as if<br />
to ensure that each appears with an appropriate intensity<br />
to the reader, and so, in the same way, to the writer. In<br />
both cases, they exist as a passionate report; moments<br />
of felt distance. It is only in this way that movement<br />
forward is possible. The same is true in Kafka’s most<br />
powerful stories, where the death of the protagonist, in<br />
for example ‘The Judgement’ or ‘Metamorphosis’, is<br />
the means of returning writing to life. The paradox, of<br />
course, is that this can happen only in writing – a space<br />
that is neither fully alive nor fully dead – a condition<br />
actually embodied (or disembodied) in Kafka’s great<br />
story ‘The Hunter Gracchus’.<br />
While Kafka’s stories and Marcel’s epiphany are in<br />
stark stylistic contrast to each other, and both to the<br />
Henry Selwyn chapter of The Emigrants, there is the<br />
same toward into life that requires a movement closer<br />
to death. How can we make sense of this?<br />
3.<br />
In 1874, Nietzsche published a long essay ‘On The<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life’ in<br />
which he argued against the obsession with history. He<br />
recognised that there is something pathological in the<br />
pursuance of the past for its own sake.<br />
Instead, Nietzsche says, forgetting is necessary, at<br />
least for a time. Otherwise we cannot let go; we cannot<br />
sleep.<br />
He divided historical explanations into three types:<br />
monumental, antiquarian and critical. While all served<br />
life, both history and life suffer if they are abused,<br />
“Monumental history” he writes “deceives with analogies:<br />
with tempting similarities the courageous are<br />
enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism”. It’s<br />
the kind of history where the phrase “Never forget” is<br />
cried out and becomes itself a monument obscuring<br />
what needs to be remembered. Antiquarianism, on<br />
the other hand, cherishes every little detail of the past<br />
rather than the big picture. But this means it is unable to<br />
distinguish between what is and what is not important.<br />
The result is the utter veneration of the old because it<br />
is old, and the rejection of anything new. Meanwhile,<br />
critical history is used to deal with both: “to shatter and<br />
dissolve something to enable [life]”. While critical history<br />
is useful to enable movement forward, it can also<br />
be a means of avoiding its lessons: but in both forms it<br />
is a means of moving on.<br />
Applying this to Sebald, one could say he takes the<br />
monument of the disasters of civilisation and exposes<br />
435<br />
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them to the gaze of Antiquarianism. Yet while the<br />
latter is present in the fiction in what Sontag calls the<br />
“spaciousness and acuity of the details”, they refuse<br />
the harmlessness of antiques. In fact, they have that<br />
potential to summons described by Kafka and Proust<br />
(perhaps what Sontag means by “spaciousness”).<br />
This does not seem to lend itself to moving on.<br />
Each detail in the story of Henry Selwyn begins to<br />
speak to its narrator: the grassy graveyard, the thick<br />
shrubbery of hollies, the Portuguese laurels, the dry,<br />
rustling leaves. As they build, there is a sense of<br />
some great woe that nothing in the world will ever<br />
put right. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it be?<br />
Forty years after Nietzsche, Freud offered an understanding<br />
of the process of dealing with the weight of<br />
history that might explain. In Mourning & Melancholia<br />
there is an uncanny outline of Sebald’s apparent fictional<br />
procedure. As Tammy Clewell summarises:<br />
“The work of mourning entails a kind of hyperremembering,<br />
a process of obsessive recollection during<br />
which the survivor resuscitates the existence of the lost<br />
other in the space of the psyche, replacing an actual<br />
absence with an imaginary presence. This magical restoration<br />
of the lost object enables the mourner to assess<br />
the value of the relationship and comprehend what he<br />
or she has lost in losing the other.”<br />
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In Sebald’s case, the space is writing and not the psyche,<br />
replacing an actual presence with a fictional one.<br />
Still, Freudian psychoanalysis would accommodate this<br />
as a cathartic process, whereby the gift of writing is the<br />
freedom from loss. The melancholic energy demanded<br />
of the work itself enables the ego’s release.<br />
However, in both Nietzsche and Freud, the problem<br />
of discussing these issues is not itself an issue. Yet if<br />
one is to move on, then how much work is involved and<br />
how much is that work responsible for the need itself?<br />
To clarify, Clewell points out that Freud’s original<br />
theory was in the same vein as his earlier essay ‘On<br />
Narcissism’, and she detects “something self-serving<br />
about [Freud’s] description of mourning as a process<br />
of detachment and consoling substitution”. There is a<br />
sense of that self- serving element in Sebald’s relentless<br />
pursuit of stories of others’ lives and suffering,<br />
particularly the suffering. It’s as if the more stories the<br />
narrator is able to tell, the freer he becomes, yet also the<br />
more he needs the stories for that freedom. The written<br />
word mysteriously survives in the lives of the writer,<br />
and reader also. Everything becomes imbued with the<br />
spaciousness that we have to escape.<br />
The danger of such “referential mania” is embodied<br />
in a story by another great modern stylist, Vladimir<br />
Nabokov in the story ‘Signs & Symbols’. For the institutionalised<br />
son of the elderly parents:<br />
436<br />
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“everything happening around him is a veiled reference<br />
to his personality and existence. […] Phenomenal<br />
nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the<br />
staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow<br />
signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.<br />
His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual<br />
alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains<br />
or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful<br />
way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a<br />
cipher and of everything he is the theme.”<br />
While such extremes of paranoia are not present in<br />
Sebald’s novels, his work does share this story’s unease<br />
with its expressive self: that is, how much is the writing<br />
implicated in creating the problems it seeks to solve<br />
or escape? ‘Signs & Symbols’’ power comes not only<br />
in what it tells us – of mental illness and the ravage of<br />
the parents – but the way in which fear and anxiety is<br />
evoked in each step into the story; not in what is explicitly<br />
said but in what words portend. Nabokov’s florid<br />
sentences evoke forces bearing on all our lives – forces<br />
that can move us to aesthetic pleasure as a reader, and<br />
that make the son go mad. It is a dangerous confrontation,<br />
one that Proust, Kafka and Sebald make in their<br />
different ways too.<br />
Incidentally, Nabokov appears, another sign of<br />
something, as a butterfly catcher in The Emigrants.<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
4.<br />
With the publication – now in paperback – of a collection<br />
of lectures under the title On The Natural History<br />
Of Destruction we can now begin to appreciate even<br />
more that Sebald’s project was beyond melancholy<br />
reflection. And far from being yet more Holocaust literature,<br />
work seeking to recover history for the present<br />
and future, it is fiction as a search for an end, of having<br />
done with ghosts at last.<br />
The collection’s title itself, while at first appearing<br />
to be the loose pretence of a marketing department<br />
unchecked after the death of the author, directs us to the<br />
biological sciences where natural history is the precise<br />
eyewitness description of empirical data and events<br />
(an incipient Antiquarianism). The specific destruction<br />
under examination here is, according to Sebald, underdescribed:<br />
the carpet bombings of 131 German cities<br />
and towns, such as on Hamburg on 27 July 1943 in<br />
which at least 50,000 civilians died.<br />
Sebald sketches the natural history of the firestorm.<br />
What happened that night is summarised by the unnamed<br />
reviewer at the Complete Review as “(huge<br />
numbers of dead, enormous amounts of bombs, rubble,<br />
etc)”. The parentheses are symptomatic. Sebald does<br />
not try to wrench human detail from these, as it were,<br />
a priori euphemisms but to analyse the response with a<br />
view to opening debate about the subject. The lectures<br />
are surprisingly provisional, and wouldn’t amount more<br />
437<br />
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than notes if it wasn’t for Sebald extraordinary ability,<br />
as seen in his fiction, to embed the deepest themes in<br />
the apparently superficial.<br />
The title places the clarifying words ‘On The’ in<br />
front of ‘Natural History’ so that the subject becomes<br />
the attempt at recording and, implicitly, the attempt at<br />
forgetting. The latter is inevitable, hence the need for<br />
history. But what kind? How can we remove others’<br />
experiences from its bracketed containment without<br />
crippling ourselves – in Nietzsche’s sense – in the process?<br />
For sure, Sebald finds the attempts to approach the<br />
air war unsatisfactory, almost without exception. Not<br />
that there were many attempts in the first place. We can<br />
assume two main reasons for their rarity and unsatisfactory<br />
manner: the eyewitnesses who weren’t killed<br />
had to use all their energy to survive their survival. For<br />
example (my example), Jorge Semprun’s account of his<br />
own survival of the concentration camp at Buchenwald<br />
is called Literature or Life; he had to choose the latter<br />
in order to be able to write this very book much later.<br />
The second comes in Sebald’s reference to Lord<br />
Zuckerman’s abandonment of his plan to write an<br />
article for a British journal following his visit to Köln,<br />
another firebombed city. Simply, he couldn’t find the<br />
words: “All that remained in [Zuckerman’s] mind” Sebald<br />
tells us “was the image of the blackened cathedral<br />
rising from the stony desert around it, and the memory<br />
of a severed finger that he had found on a heap of rub-<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
ble.” The experience was incomparable, and so words,<br />
the very means of communication through the tacit<br />
repetition of comparisons, fail too.<br />
Zuckerman’s remaining memory is significant for<br />
Sebald’s project. One might assume that if there was a<br />
photograph of the finger, he would have placed it on the<br />
page. But not out of prurience. James Wood, in his perceptive<br />
essay on Sebald’s novels, refers to the tragedy of<br />
fact evoked by the captionless images placed throughout<br />
his books. They are not supplementary to the words<br />
but confirmation of mutual inadequacy. However, it is<br />
an inadequacy that contains much referential potential.<br />
The single memory is an equivalence; it orientates us<br />
toward the traumatic impact of experience even if we<br />
can have no real appreciation of what it means. Indeed,<br />
the impact exceeds experience. Zuckerman was only<br />
passing through and what remained for him was only an<br />
image. For the survivors, the ravage seems to have gone<br />
much deeper. Accounts following the raid on Hamburg<br />
tell of the majority of the surviving population – over<br />
a million – wandering through the country, without<br />
any apparent destination. They were seen everywhere,<br />
aimless and torpid. Sebald tells the apocryphal story of<br />
a woman waiting at railway station whose suitcase fell<br />
open depositing its contents on the platform, including<br />
the charred corpse of a baby.<br />
Many millions went through this and it is more or less<br />
absent from post-war German novels and non-fiction.<br />
438<br />
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It was also absent from acknowledgement in everyday<br />
life. As he grew up, Sebald felt that something was<br />
being kept from him: “at home, at school and by the<br />
German writers whose books I read hoping to glean<br />
more information”. He says it hung over his life like<br />
a dark cloud. The silence had its advantages of course:<br />
‘the economic miracle’ of Germany after the war “has<br />
its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built<br />
into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all<br />
Germans together in the post-war years”.<br />
Undoubtedly, the reconstruction required a focus<br />
on the future rather than the past and, inevitably,<br />
literature would reflect this. While those in charge<br />
were removed, the mindset of nation remained: they<br />
continued to work hard without questioning, and the<br />
companies that supplied gas to the death camps continued<br />
their capitalist success stories. German industry<br />
became a byword for efficiency (precisely what<br />
prompted the invention of the death camps). However,<br />
on the cultural front, German literature faded<br />
behind the fresh new talents of North America. One<br />
must assume that forgetting is incompatible with great<br />
literature. Appropriate recognition of the genocide of<br />
the Jews was delayed. The same happened to their<br />
own experience of the air war. For this reason, Sebald<br />
accuses modern Germany of being “strikingly blind<br />
to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel” he<br />
writes “any passionate interest in our earlier way of<br />
life and the specific features of our own civilisation,<br />
of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in<br />
the culture of the British Isles. And when we turn to<br />
take a backward view, particularly of the years 1930<br />
to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at<br />
the same time.”<br />
He makes this movement clear in this analysis of the<br />
few accounts of the raids themselves by listing the kind<br />
of phrases used throughout:<br />
“On that dreadful day when our beautiful city was<br />
razed to the ground”<br />
“a prey to the flames”<br />
“that fateful night”<br />
“all hell was let loose”<br />
“we were staring into the inferno”<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
“the dreadful fate of the cities of Germany”<br />
In other words, endless cliché. Sebald says they are<br />
no more than gestures “sketched to banish memory”.<br />
The words slide by without gaining any purchase on<br />
the past. The truth has not been hidden, but it hasn’t<br />
exactly been registered. But should this be regretted?<br />
Well, when the lecture was first delivered, in 1997,<br />
Sebald felt it was appropriate to remind Germans<br />
439<br />
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that this forgetting remained part of:<br />
“the project of creating a greater Europe, a project<br />
that has already failed twice [and] is entering a new<br />
phase, and the sphere of the Deutschmark – history<br />
has a way of repeating itself – seems to extend almost<br />
precisely to the confines of the area occupied by the<br />
Wehrmacht in the year 1941”.<br />
He claims that the “psychic energy” of this project<br />
remains in the nation. If it is not brought into the open,<br />
it will carry on into the future. And that is certainly<br />
something to be regretted.<br />
This is not to say there was complete silence about<br />
the air war. In the post-war years, fiction did try to<br />
approach what had happened. Sebald refers us to<br />
three writers who wrote about the destruction and<br />
were published. While he finds the novels superficially<br />
admirable for at least broaching the subject, he<br />
is disturbed by their form and content. For example,<br />
Hermann Kasack’s novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom<br />
(The City Beyond The River) envelops the bombing<br />
raids and death camps into part of one big expressionist<br />
allegory. Sebald’s literary analysis is objective but<br />
his appalled disdain is also clear, particularly as, at the<br />
time of the novel’s publication, it was considered of<br />
“epoch-making significance”. Sebald suspects it was<br />
judged so because it appealed to the pre-war obsession<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
with grand, utopian visions. In this way, they look away<br />
just like the clichéd reportage. But worse than that, in<br />
repeating pre-war fantasies of mysterious metaphysical<br />
worlds possessing transcendent truth, all these novels<br />
display “a profound ideological inflexibility”. Sebald<br />
says that the culture was still “in the midst of that pedagogic<br />
province which, in the German tradition, extends<br />
from Goethe … through Stefan George … and on to<br />
Stauffenberg and Himmler”.<br />
So of what, one wonders, does he approve? Well,<br />
he welcomes Hubert Fichte’s novel Detlev’s Imitations,<br />
set in 1968, because it is “not too abstract in<br />
character” and includes “concrete and documentary”<br />
investigations into the raid on Hamburg. Specifically,<br />
the novel has genuine medical reports by a<br />
pathologist into the victims of the raids. They are<br />
straightforward autopsies of mummified corpses. All<br />
fiction pales before such documents. The gruesome<br />
facts make any imaginative effort seem evasive and<br />
pretentious. Stories become only a means of sustaining<br />
value where there is only flesh and bone. As it is,<br />
only clinical objectivity has the words for the calamity.<br />
Sebald, of course, doesn’t accept this. While he<br />
concedes that the reports were written in the interests<br />
of science, he does say that, within the narrow focus<br />
of its specialist language, the report “opens up<br />
a view into the abyss of a mind armed against all<br />
contingencies”. In the end, it is only another exam-<br />
440<br />
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ple of avoidance masquerading as proximity. He sets<br />
scientific analysis alongside the journalistic clichés<br />
and novelists’ fantasies. The pathologist’s rationality<br />
clings to a tradition in order to pass through the<br />
catastrophe untouched.<br />
In order to bring out how the catastrophe made its<br />
mark on his own work, Sebald quotes extensively<br />
from his own. But that was in the German edition. It<br />
is excised from the English. This is a perverse decision.<br />
Sebald’s excuse is that the original subject of<br />
the lectures was poetics and it would inappropriate<br />
to repeat them now that the subject is the air war. I<br />
don’t see why these lectures don’t count as poetics<br />
still. Each of Sebald’s stories continues that sense of<br />
being kept from something, of the observer’s isolation,<br />
which is precisely the relation to the air war.<br />
The reticence of the narratives is really a patience.<br />
There is no aggressive push to imagine beyond what<br />
the narrator can see and what he hears at secondhand.<br />
Words and pictures remain orientated toward.<br />
It continues in us too, his readers. Perhaps, though,<br />
this isn’t enough. When we bandy around phrases<br />
like “literary greatness”, we contain past greatness,<br />
everything we understand to be great: the expansiveness<br />
of epic, the microcosm of theatre, the languagemaking<br />
power of poetry, the encyclopaedia of<br />
narrative fiction. Sebald cannot be included here. At<br />
least, not on those terms. If Sebald is great, it is in<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
his refusal of such supremacy. The word greatness is<br />
changed if he is indeed great.<br />
Sebald’s success, however, beyond such chatter, is in<br />
finding a form appropriate that investigates his deepest<br />
concerns in the most appropriate way. This is perhaps a<br />
mark of greatness.<br />
5.<br />
It is curious then that not one of Sebald’s fictional works<br />
approaches the air war. Not one character is a survivor of<br />
those events. As I noted, the fiction is generally misconstrued<br />
as Holocaust Literature, perhaps gaining more<br />
attention as a result. Austerlitz, for example, features<br />
a visit to the remains of Theresienstadt concentration<br />
camp in the Czech Republic. The tragedy is once again<br />
illuminated. This has a fine and necessary tradition.<br />
Aharon Appelfeld – himself a survivor – approves of<br />
fictional representation of the Holocaust because “the<br />
numbers and the facts were the murderers’ own wellproven<br />
means. Man as a number is one of the horrors<br />
of dehumanisation.”<br />
One wonders what the response would have been<br />
if a novel had focussed entirely on individual survivors<br />
of Hamburg or Dresden? We might wonder<br />
again because as Sebald’s book appeared in paperback,<br />
so did Frederick Taylor’s study of the most<br />
infamous raid: Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February. It<br />
has been received with acclaim in the British press.<br />
441<br />
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In the Daily Telegraph, James Holland writes “with<br />
this fine, highly readable and scholarly work, we can<br />
finally view the terrible destruction of Dresden with<br />
renewed objectivity”, while David Cesarani in The<br />
Independent, after highlighting Sebald’s implicit<br />
comparison of the bombings to Nazi mass murder,<br />
calls Taylor’s an “authoritative and moving account”<br />
that “provides a truer, more fitting memorial” to those<br />
who died. Authority, objectivity and memorials is<br />
perhaps most welcome to those who were not on the<br />
receiving end. But how would it appear fictionally?<br />
It wasn’t until 20 or more years after the war that Germany<br />
began to acknowledge the effect of its “psychic<br />
energy”. Certainly, one cannot claim that national awareness<br />
of the Holocaust is repressed. Indeed it has become<br />
commonplace in our idea of modern Germany: think of<br />
Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, or Harry<br />
Enfield’s contrite yet overbearing comic stereotype<br />
Jürgen the German, apologising for the war at every opportunity.<br />
The latter is not a figure that would have been<br />
possible when Primo Levi or Jean Améry began writing.<br />
Améry is the subject of one of three essay appended to<br />
the main lecture. He was a resistance fighter tortured<br />
by the Nazis. After the war, he concentrated on his paid<br />
work without attempting to write (for the same reason<br />
as Semprun). It was only in the 1960s that he published<br />
autobiographical essays reflecting on his terrible experience.<br />
What interests Sebald particularly is that he found<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
a form to orientate the reader toward, to look but not look<br />
away at the same time. Where Sebald used a restrained<br />
style, Améry is more personal and polemical; he writes<br />
with “an implacable resentment”. Sebald is impressed<br />
that his work manages to “dispense with any kind of<br />
literary stylisation which might encourage a sense of<br />
complicity between writer and his readers.” Cliché and<br />
ingratiation are not present. Sebald compares Améry to<br />
the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard who, as a<br />
teenager, witnessed the bombing of Salzburg and later<br />
wrote with ferocious contempt for the institutionalised<br />
forgetfulness in his country.<br />
(NB: it is a shame Sebald’s essays on Bernhard are<br />
not already translated – an edition is required).<br />
Such a comparison indicates that Sebald is not, as<br />
The Complete Review accuse him, contemptuous of the<br />
imagination; entirely the opposite. He is keen only to<br />
find a form that conveys the process by which the imagination<br />
dispenses with contact with its environment,<br />
as in Kasack’s highly imaginative novel. The task is<br />
more complex than the crude opposition between imagination<br />
and reality. Améry’s description of his shoulders<br />
being dislocated under torture is written without<br />
ornament. He does not try to convey the pain with the<br />
force of adjectives. Above all, his aim is to show that,<br />
as Sebald writes: “the practice of persecuting, torturing<br />
and exterminating an arbitrarily chosen adversary [is]<br />
not as a lamentable but incidental feature of totalitarian<br />
442<br />
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rule but, unreservedly, […] its essential expression.”<br />
One cannot read Améry’s essays without confronting<br />
the possibility of wider implication of the events of his<br />
life. They cannot be read for the find out what happened<br />
only. In this way, autobiography becomes a means for<br />
furthering life.<br />
For Sebald, Améry remains “the only one who<br />
denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and socially<br />
deformed society, and the outrage of supposing<br />
that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost<br />
undisturbed.” Indeed, he was so angry that he criticised<br />
Primo Levi for being too forgiving. It is Sebald’s thesis<br />
that the air war is as much part of that deformation as<br />
anything. It too has to be worked through: repression<br />
is not a healthy option. Sebald’s fiction demonstrates<br />
the need for patience required for Germany’s “coming<br />
to terms” with the Nazi era; how it had to empathise<br />
with the victims of its crimes from a distance. The same<br />
can be said for victims of the air war. Imagination is<br />
required rather than objectivity.<br />
6.<br />
After delivering the lectures Sebald and receiving press<br />
attention, he received many letters from distressed<br />
Germans, children at the time of the raids, whose traumatic<br />
memories have had no place to go. One can only<br />
imagine the scale of the trauma. However, seven years<br />
on from the lectures, there has been a more sustained<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
attempt to bring this into public discourse. It reached a<br />
peak with the publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s<br />
Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945,<br />
a book of several hundred pages describing the raids in<br />
relentless detail. It prompted an outpouring of blocked<br />
memories across Germany, becoming part of a nation<br />
debate about the subject. There was also a lot of anger,<br />
resentment and claims that the raids were war crimes.<br />
Sebald received letters from a middle-class neo-Nazis<br />
proclaiming Germany as the self-defensive victim, not<br />
the aggressor. Sebald is contemptuous. The process, he<br />
accepts, has to confront such danger. In this way, the responses<br />
to Sebald’s book become part of the literature.<br />
It is a terribly instructive coincidence that many reviewers<br />
were writing in the lead-up to the invasion of<br />
Iraq in March 2003. In the Boston Review, Susie Linfield<br />
tells of demonstrators equating the bombing of Dresden<br />
with the forthcoming Shock & Awe campaign on Baghdad.<br />
“I can think of few worse analogies” she writes.<br />
“The propagators of such analogies would say they<br />
are using historic knowledge to heighten moral awareness<br />
and thus prevent the commission of present and<br />
future horrors. But I fear that the opposite is true: The<br />
reliance on historic analogies is an evasion of the particular,<br />
indeed novel, political complexities that face us<br />
now, complexities that have emerged since (but are not<br />
solely the result of) September 11th. Like photographs<br />
of starving children or grieving mothers or blasted<br />
443<br />
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buildings, such analogies create instant, Pavlovian<br />
moral equivalencies. They shut down critical thought<br />
and ultimately, therefore, stifle moral acuity.”<br />
This is certainly true. It is why Sebald’s complained<br />
about the clichés of the accounts of the raids. They<br />
were a careless means of expression and abuse history.<br />
However, Linfield doesn’t offer an alternative, except<br />
by telling us to use “critical thought” and “moral acuity”.<br />
Maybe these elegant phrases tell us more than the<br />
protestors’ banners, though I’m not sure what. They<br />
too seem like gestures to banish unpleasant thoughts.<br />
With what Susie Linfield would compare the imminent<br />
bombing, I wonder? How would she demonstrate her<br />
feelings about it?<br />
Meanwhile, Daniel Johnson, reviewing Friedrich’s<br />
Der Brand alongside Sebald, expresses his opinions<br />
about the demonstrators’ comparisons more forcefully.<br />
He calls it “moral cowardice” and blames Friedrich for<br />
aiming “his bombshell of a book at the ageing edifice of<br />
the Atlantic Alliance”. He says the book it enabled the<br />
German government to exploit “anti-Americanism”.<br />
While he accepts that the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust<br />
to the air war is “never spelt out” by Friedrich and<br />
Sebald – he does say that the “impassive accumulation<br />
of gruesome detail serves a rhetorical purpose: to demonstrate<br />
the utter inhumanity of the air war.” (If there<br />
was a humanity in the air war, Johnson doesn’t spell<br />
it out.) It all means that the Germans “might still be<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
capable of repeating the mistakes of the past”, and he<br />
explicitly means the opposition to the invasion.<br />
Christopher Hitchens also uses his review to support<br />
the invasion. He is suspicious of the language<br />
used by those recovering the air war, such as Sebald’s<br />
“weak qualifier” in the reference to the German<br />
population’s “vague feelings of shared guilt” about<br />
the Holocaust. “Vague?” he says “Remember what<br />
we are talking about”. Indeed. But perhaps “vague”<br />
means unspoken and unformed – which is certainly<br />
plausible. In conclusion, Hitchens himself refers to<br />
Iraqi exiles’ “infinite pain” in supporting the invasion<br />
when it is obvious they would not be running<br />
the gauntlet of US cluster bombs, or their children to<br />
endure the legacy of depleted uranium. So much for<br />
remembering what is being talked about.<br />
While the majority of the reviewers referred to<br />
here use the air war to support or to excuse the Shock<br />
& Awe blitzkrieg, and all remain suspicious of Sebald’s<br />
project of imaginative empathy, they have<br />
nothing but admiration for his fiction. Hitchens says<br />
Sebald’s early death is “mourned by all who love<br />
writing for its own sake” (whatever that means) and<br />
Daniel Johnson says that had Sebald lived, he would<br />
“hardly have been able to avoid the attentions of the<br />
Swedish academicians”, though exactly why isn’t<br />
explained. In fact, they write next to nothing about<br />
the fiction. It’s as if they do not know what it is so<br />
444<br />
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prefer to keep it in the safe enclave of entertainment<br />
or salutary token of “some great woe that nothing<br />
in the world will ever put right” (so long as it’s the<br />
right kind of wrong). Remember it is Johnson who<br />
used the convenient half-truth of describing Sebald’s<br />
work as “a highly literary form of antiquarianism”.<br />
Perhaps it is fairly explained by the fact that they<br />
are reviewing a work of non-fiction. But, as I hope<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
to have made clear here, On The Natural History<br />
Of Destruction is a coda to Sebald’s extraordinary<br />
fiction, and for such prominent and serious critics<br />
to overlook this is curious indeed. But I would go<br />
further. These reviewers, mere literary critics, have<br />
used book reviews to become accessories to the<br />
crime of killing innocent people, and their fingers<br />
are stained not black, but red. �<br />
445<br />
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Review [published December 2001]<br />
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
(Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of<br />
weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car<br />
crash on 14th December, 2001).<br />
In its official press release, the committee for the<br />
Nobel Prize for Literature praised V.S. Naipaul, the<br />
2001 recipient, for “works that compel us to see the<br />
presence of suppressed histories”. Presumably this is<br />
the committee’s mitigation of Naipaul’s notoriously<br />
incorrect opinions. Whatever, the statement is curiously<br />
ambiguous. On the one hand, it could mean –<br />
and probably does mean in this case – the particular<br />
stories of Indian and African characters previously<br />
ignored in mainstream literature. But it could also<br />
mean exactly as it says: “the presence of suppressed<br />
histories”. Not the histories themselves, only their<br />
remnant haunting the language of the victorious.<br />
Suppression is part of the history, and Naipaul’s<br />
restrained prose – more English than the English – is<br />
paradoxically appropriate: ghosts haunt aged structures.<br />
The conservative literary establishment admire<br />
the style out of nostalgia, while younger writers like<br />
Salman Rushdie reject it out of concern for the future.<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
The latter’s champions will insist that Naipaul’s Nobel<br />
elevation signals that we have passed the literary, if not<br />
the political, affects of suppression. The only reason to<br />
use the inert language of the past is to resist change.<br />
Literature is now a pluralism, open to anyone to flood<br />
the dark corners of experience with the bright lights of<br />
an unfettered imagination. Today, the task of the writer<br />
is to keep the shining the lights. Martin Amis calls it<br />
“the war against cliché”.<br />
On first impression, W.G. Sebald would seem to be<br />
very much inside Naipaul’s encampment. In one long<br />
sentence on page four of his new novel Austerlitz, the<br />
narrator tries to “conjure up” an image but something<br />
else “springs to mind”. Hardly the language of the<br />
avant-garde. And like Naipaul’s recent novels, there<br />
is a tendency toward autobiography and essay, as if<br />
resisting the possibilities of the poetic imagination.<br />
On page 18, the history of fortress-building around<br />
17th-century Antwerp is summarised: the placenames,<br />
the design theorists, the theories themselves<br />
and the futility of the enterprise. We even get a plan<br />
of one of the flower-like buildings. No matter how<br />
446<br />
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large the fortifications became, we’re told, they drew<br />
attention to their weakest point and so invited attack.<br />
A metaphor, probably, for this kind of reticent novel.<br />
As the story continues through ever new digressions,<br />
the weakest point is always its own purpose. Aren’t<br />
we missing something? we ask.<br />
No reader of the book can be unaware that the narrator<br />
of Austerlitz has a similar background to the author<br />
himself. Indeed, in Sebald’s three previous novels, the<br />
narrator is much the same sensitive yet dour person.<br />
Sebald is a 57-year-old Bavarian long established as<br />
a professor of German literature in East Anglia, and<br />
the unnamed narrator is an academic who travels<br />
throughout Europe on research. He admits there are<br />
other reasons for his travelling but, he says, they are<br />
“never entirely clear” to him. On a visit to Antwerp, he<br />
visits one of the forts used by the Nazis as a detention<br />
centre for Resistance fighters during the occupation.<br />
As he walks slowly down its sinister tunnels, he recalls<br />
tortures described by two actual writers, Jean Améry<br />
and Claude Simon, the former having been tortured<br />
in the very same fort, the latter having written about a<br />
fictional character who suffered like Améry. Again one<br />
is tempted to understand this as an indirect reference<br />
to what is going on, particularly once the eponymous<br />
character of Austerlitz appears.<br />
Jacques Austerlitz is a fellow academic met on<br />
one of the narrator’s travels. He was a five-year-old<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
refugee during the Second World War. His parents<br />
sent him to Britain as the Nazis closed in on Prague.<br />
They didn’t escape. He ended up in provincial Wales,<br />
living in a vicarage as Dafydd Elias. It wasn’t until<br />
his school days, just before he took some exams, that<br />
he was told his real name and origin. Although the<br />
narrator is also an exile, he seems to need Austerlitz<br />
to act as a conduit for his own search, like a novelist<br />
would use a character. Most of the words in the<br />
novel are Austerlitz’s, with the narrator adding the<br />
occasional “said Austerlitz” to remind us. For the rest<br />
of the novel, Austerlitz tells his story, which means<br />
the story of his search for the story of his life: “I have<br />
never known who I really was” he says.<br />
He tells the narrator that it wasn’t until he had met<br />
him that he was able to approach his past. Before then,<br />
he says, “an agency greater than or superior to my own<br />
capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations<br />
somewhere in my brain, had always preserved<br />
me from my own secret”. With the narrator there to<br />
listen, the brain’s mechanism is disabled and Austerlitz<br />
is finally able to confront the fate of his parents. Mutual<br />
need arises out of shared interests. And as a result, there<br />
seems to be little difference between Austerlitz and the<br />
narrator. In recalling the novel, it is easy to conflate the<br />
two. Although this is a common enough thing in reading<br />
novels, here the suspension of disbelief is slackened<br />
because one is not convinced of the distinction.<br />
447<br />
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Both the narrator and Austerlitz spend time describing<br />
events in their lives in which, with curious regularity,<br />
they “lose themselves” in reveries of engagement or<br />
nauseous confusion. Indeed, it happens in all Sebald’s<br />
novels; the first is even titled after such an episode:<br />
Vertigo. It’s as if these moments stand in place of the<br />
revelations the characters are seeking. For example,<br />
Austerlitz loses himself in the small print of works he<br />
is reading in a Paris library as he seeks references to<br />
his father. He doesn’t find any details but discovers,<br />
instead, “the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications”<br />
as he calls it. Rather than finding conclusions,<br />
the possibilities become almost infinite. He is released,<br />
albeit briefly, from his obscure torment. Perhaps this<br />
is why the narrator and his friend are so similar: they<br />
need just a glimmer of otherness to illuminate their<br />
individual darknesses.<br />
We too experience this in the otherwise inexplicable<br />
use of photographs and drawings throughout Sebald’s<br />
novels. In the many reviews of the novel, very little<br />
has been made of them, perhaps it is assumed they<br />
are merely illustrative. Yet as they are uncaptioned,<br />
the reader instinctively wonders what the connection<br />
is between them and the words. It creates one’s own<br />
moment of vertigo. This had a tremendous effect in The<br />
Emigrants, Sebald’s second novel (though the first to<br />
be published). For those new to his work, it will probably<br />
have the same affect. However, by this, the fourth<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
time, the power is diminished. Wonder becomes indifference.<br />
The same goes for the character of Austerlitz<br />
himself. His similarity to the reticent narrator means he<br />
is similarly opaque despite speaking for the most of the<br />
418 unparagraphed pages.<br />
Yes, you read correctly. There are 418 pages without<br />
a paragraph break. This a famous aspect of the work of<br />
the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, for whom<br />
Sebald has professed great admiration. Bernhard,<br />
however, created unforgettable characters even if<br />
they seem indistinguishable from the morose author.<br />
Perhaps it is significant that not one of Bernhard’s novels<br />
are named after the main character (that is, if one<br />
understands Wittgenstein’s Nephew as autobiography).<br />
It suggests that Sebald’s concern in Austerlitz is for the<br />
mystery of suppressed histories, not for attacking the<br />
suppression with vituperative glee, like Bernhard. In<br />
both uses of unrelenting monologue, the question of<br />
what’s being left out is begged. In Bernhard this has<br />
a painfully comic affect, while here it is more tragic.<br />
Sebald’s empathy is thwarted as a result because, like<br />
Austerlitz’s own attempt to get closer to what remains<br />
unclear to him, it always produces “varied and impenetrable<br />
ramifications”. That Austerlitz is an imagined<br />
character reasserts the fact, and indicates that the novel<br />
as an art form suppresses as much as it illuminates, no<br />
matter how much light is beamed into the darkness.<br />
The “war against cliché” like the other war it alludes<br />
448<br />
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to, is a fighting on the wrong front. Austerlitz’s opacity,<br />
then, is perhaps artistically necessary. If this is the case,<br />
it makes this novel at once a success – at least on its<br />
own terms – and a prelude to an impasse.<br />
With Austerlitz, Sebald has continued a remarkable<br />
run. He has produced four fascinating, often<br />
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and<br />
mesmerising, novels in almost as many years. They<br />
are all far more interesting than those on this year’s<br />
Booker Prize shortlist. Yet one wonders how he will<br />
continue to dramatise the confrontation with what<br />
always resists direct approach without becoming<br />
boring and predictable. �<br />
449<br />
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Will Self<br />
Biography<br />
Will Self is one of those writers who seemed on the<br />
edge of self-imploding when I first interviewed him<br />
in 1997 (just after the infamous ‘getting sacked for<br />
snorting cocaine on the Prime Minister’s private plane’<br />
incident). Having cleaned up and become a father<br />
twice over since then, Self has achieved a remarkable<br />
body of work both in his novels and journalism,<br />
and his output remains both prolific and undiluted.<br />
Chris Hall and Robert Clarke’s subsequent interviews<br />
capture well Self’s continual grappling with the canon<br />
and trying to create something different from it.<br />
I set up a separate Will Self site as a link directory to<br />
Self related stuff on the web – this has subsequently<br />
become www.will-self.com which is now Will Self’s<br />
official site and is managed by Chris Hall and myself.<br />
Chris Mitchell �<br />
Articles<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
Biting The Hand That Feeds<br />
Interview by Chris Hall<br />
Self Destruction<br />
451<br />
Interview by Chris Mitchell<br />
Dead Man Talking<br />
460<br />
A conversation with Chris Hall<br />
Pre-Millennium Tension<br />
464<br />
Interview by Robert Clarke 467<br />
450<br />
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Interview [published January 2002]<br />
Will Self: Biting The Hand That Feeds<br />
Chris Hall serves up a slice of Will Self with the publication of his second<br />
collection of journalism, Feeding Frenzy<br />
Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of<br />
your new son, Luther.<br />
Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on<br />
August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now.<br />
CH: So I suppose you’ve had people pointing out the<br />
Superman connection with your other son Alexis (i.e.<br />
Lex Luther)?<br />
WS: Yes … It just arose. In my experience with names,<br />
they just arise. I was always quite keen on Dmitri because<br />
Alexis and Ivan so with the third one you could<br />
have the Brothers Karamazov. But Deborah didn’t<br />
think that was funny.<br />
CH: So how do you find the time for all this writing?<br />
WS: Well, I have cycled back quite a lot this year in<br />
that I resigned from The Independent before Luther<br />
was born, so it’s the first time in more or less 10 years<br />
when I haven’t had an ongoing newspaper contract. So,<br />
I took fairly extensive paternity leave. But, you know<br />
now it’s building back up again.<br />
CH: No plans for a regular column again?<br />
WS: I don’t think I’m going to take another weekly<br />
contract of any kind in the foreseeable future. I’ve got<br />
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this floating series of interviews with women that I was<br />
doing for the Sindie [Independent on Sunday], none of<br />
which are in Feeding Frenzy but which will get a book<br />
of their own. I must of done 20 to 25 women over the<br />
last two to three years but I wanna do about another ten<br />
before I pick my best women to put in the book. But, I<br />
haven’t found a home for my women yet. I mean, The<br />
Independent were happy for me to do them freelance<br />
but to be frank I just wasn’t interested.<br />
CH: Why did you only interview women?<br />
WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!<br />
CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment,<br />
didn’t you?<br />
WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always<br />
regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real<br />
sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that<br />
morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in<br />
to interview someone and you’re constipated and you<br />
think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go<br />
in to see them another day when your stomach is full of<br />
gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best<br />
thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an<br />
451<br />
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interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same<br />
time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive<br />
in the other person you just let rip. The problem with<br />
interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that<br />
there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless.<br />
It’s almost incumbent upon an interviewer to allow<br />
themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle.<br />
CH: And Tracey Emin, who you said was a termagant?<br />
WS: Yeah … you know I kind of resent it when people<br />
interview me and assume that, because I’ve been wellknown<br />
for a fair amount of time, that it’s kind of open<br />
season, but the truth of the matter is that Tracey really<br />
liked that piece. You have to ask yourself why is that<br />
and quite frankly when it comes to Tracey, although<br />
one or two of her pieces have a certain odd, jejune quality,<br />
her art work is essentially a peg on which she hangs<br />
her media persona which is her main work.<br />
So she didn’t mind that piece and I think that that’s<br />
what you’re up against with a certain kind of interview<br />
subject. Now with Beckett I’m perfectly confident<br />
that she really hated and was upset by that piece and I<br />
noticed that after it she started to make some very sour<br />
comments on the media publicly for quite a while. But<br />
you know, she’s a politician, you have to reckon that<br />
someone’s going to take down verbatim what you’re<br />
saying. Why wouldn’t they?<br />
CH: Do you normally use a tape machine?<br />
WS: Well, I think that’s why the Beckett interview was<br />
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such a devastating piece because I just transcribed answers<br />
to questions. Because she talked such complete<br />
bollocks. You know, why bother?<br />
CH: Is one of the attractions to journalism the lack of<br />
needing to suspend your disbelief so much?<br />
WS: I think it’s an opportunity to get you out and<br />
about. It gets you interacting with the world in all sorts<br />
of different ways. It also gives you the opportunity, funnily<br />
enough, to suspend disbelief more readily because<br />
you’re presented with an area of fact that you can then<br />
instantly turn into an area of fiction or at any rate embellish<br />
in some way. I’m not making great claims for<br />
my journalism but I think that what I do that gives me<br />
cachet and makes editors want to employ me is really<br />
colour writing, it’s really lifting what otherwise might<br />
be fairly dry into something that is quite outlandish<br />
sometimes. I suppose I am in some ways a practitioner<br />
of gonzo/new journalism in that I am prepared to inject<br />
my own warped sensibilities into a piece.<br />
CH: You say that you read very little fiction now, a<br />
problem with suspension of disbelief, but do you just<br />
mean new fiction or do you not read the classics?<br />
WS: No, I don’t read classic fiction either.<br />
CH: I was thinking of the Amis line about disparaging<br />
your youngers but exalting your elders…<br />
WS: What you mean so you don’t see us nipping at<br />
your heels? No, I don’t think that’s the way I think<br />
about it, but unlike Martin, I’ve never been a sort<br />
452<br />
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of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual<br />
competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely<br />
convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t<br />
think that literary art is a competition of any sort.<br />
CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other<br />
day then?<br />
WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart<br />
from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephemeral<br />
applause of certain kinds?<br />
CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to<br />
a wider audience…<br />
WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giving<br />
and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based establishment<br />
represents a kind of infotainment service<br />
for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point<br />
it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t<br />
really change someone’s life or supply that missing<br />
X factor that makes them exponentially increase<br />
their involvement with the world or with literature.<br />
Those things are not what make a work last. The<br />
only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And<br />
that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless<br />
examples of that, of books that have lasted that you<br />
wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting.<br />
I’ve just finished writing a long introductory<br />
essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky.<br />
I mean who would have thought that Junky, published<br />
back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to<br />
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back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for<br />
35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become<br />
probably the greatest confessional novel about<br />
heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I<br />
think undoubtedly so.<br />
CH: That must have something to do with his subsequent<br />
notoriety though.<br />
WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing<br />
else it would still stand.<br />
CH: Junky’s very hard-boiled isn’t it?<br />
WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it.<br />
CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he?<br />
WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts<br />
towards later theories and fictional methods that he then<br />
took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but<br />
actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in<br />
my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels,<br />
that it’s on a par with Nausea or The Fall.<br />
War and pacifism<br />
CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay<br />
that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They<br />
wanted to know why this position is marginalised by<br />
the media?<br />
WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of<br />
armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion<br />
at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t<br />
had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think<br />
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the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the<br />
kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To<br />
paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against<br />
us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to<br />
be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t<br />
even be conscious, there will be people who simply<br />
cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical<br />
to their idea of state authority.<br />
I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I<br />
think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve<br />
got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because<br />
what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer<br />
to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would<br />
you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And<br />
as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that<br />
difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which<br />
makes it so wrong in so many different ways is that it<br />
exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious<br />
argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption<br />
i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered<br />
with a similar kind of conditional question: “But hang<br />
on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914<br />
then the Nazis would never have come to power”.<br />
So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be<br />
pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response<br />
to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get<br />
really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken<br />
to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big<br />
guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to<br />
rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them<br />
to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me<br />
that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in<br />
society where you decide that violence is not the solution<br />
to car incidents so there can be the same kind of<br />
decision at a macro level.<br />
CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not<br />
claiming to not have those thoughts?<br />
WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even<br />
think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I<br />
think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live that<br />
there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and<br />
there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist<br />
born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the<br />
impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is<br />
a dangerous thing.<br />
CH: What would you do with the World Trade<br />
Centre site?<br />
WS: Mmm … I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on<br />
that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of<br />
Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the<br />
snuffing out of that many lives in one place … it also<br />
seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivocation<br />
between civic pride and something to do with<br />
the symbolism of what has occurred.<br />
CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shoot-<br />
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ing Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer?<br />
WS: Yes, that is true. I’ve replaced Mark Lamarr.<br />
CH: Given that Lamarr became the greasy 50s throwback,<br />
what have they got in store for you?<br />
WS: I can assure people that that has not been my fate.<br />
In fact, au contraire, I have become a sinister kind of<br />
John Dee-type figure who controls Vic’s mind by use<br />
of instantiated eye beams which fiddle with his mind.<br />
CH: This just developed organically?<br />
WS: Yes, it developed organically over the show that<br />
Vic, Jim Moir, became convinced that I was controlling<br />
his mind. I think I’ve claimed the upper hand there<br />
actually… It was a fun show to do not least because<br />
it’s pretty good not to take yourself too seriously, and<br />
to get paid well for not taking yourself too seriously is<br />
a real bonus. I’m not sure how good I’m going to be<br />
on it because it’s not quite my humour, it’s not verbally<br />
based, it’s very visual humour – they are rubber-legged<br />
funny men. I hope it works for their sake, after all it’s<br />
not my main gig but it is theirs.<br />
Water, water everywhere<br />
CH: You’ve written of the benefits to the imagination<br />
of living near a large body of water. Could this be why<br />
you live so close to the Thames, albeit unconsciously?<br />
WS: Mmm, I think with the Thames … Mmm, yeah I<br />
suppose that it does help. I hadn’t really considered that<br />
aspect of it: it is tidal, it does move. With the Thames I<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
always think that because it’s such a conspicuous piece<br />
of physical geography going right through the heart of<br />
something that is oppressively human in that way that<br />
it annuls or at any rate vitiates the oppressive sense of<br />
human geography and provides you with a sense of<br />
topography really, because you know you’re next to<br />
a river, you know you’re in a river valley, you know<br />
you’re on a planet that has natural features whereas if<br />
you’re just in the middle of Acton then it’s rather difficult<br />
to hang on to…<br />
CH: You’ve got it in for Acton haven’t you?<br />
WS: I’m thinking of moving to Acton actually. That’s<br />
why it comes to mind. I concede that the river may<br />
have been why I chose to live in Vauxhall. In fact, I<br />
was looking at renting as an office, a very unusual<br />
house-boaty thing that’s down by Cringle Dock waste<br />
disposal station in the lea of Battersea Power Station,<br />
which is this weird thing on two great pontoons built<br />
by a load of Finnish architectural students. But I just<br />
wouldn’t spend enough time on it to make it practical,<br />
but the idea of writing on top of a body of water was<br />
enormously appealing.<br />
Schzoid sensitivity<br />
CH: On the South Bank Show a few years back you<br />
said that a psychologist had put “schizoid personality”<br />
on your case notes. Now, this might sound like a<br />
conceit from your own fiction, but I got the impression<br />
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that you might have interpreted this as meaning that<br />
you were schizophrenic, but diagnostically it means a<br />
personality disorder characterised by “extreme shyness<br />
and oversensitivity to others”.<br />
WS: I did know that, but the same diagnosis had borderline<br />
personality written down as well which would<br />
be another form of that. But, increasingly I’ve come to<br />
view addiction itself as a mimetic illness in that way – it<br />
mimics other psychopathologies. People who essentially<br />
have addictive personalities are diagnosed as manic<br />
depressive or schizophrenic or certainly depressive.<br />
What they really are is addicts. The addiction decides,<br />
if you think of it as an autonomous thing, to pretends<br />
to be another pathology because the addict finds it<br />
bizarrely more comfortable to think of themselves as<br />
schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever, rather<br />
than confront the fact that they are an addict which of<br />
course means that they’re going to have to stop doing<br />
what they want to do above all.<br />
CH: So are you shy and sensitive?<br />
WS: I think I am still quite shy. A lot of the extroversion<br />
or flamboyance is always a compensation. It’s better to<br />
tough it out rather than sit there cowering.<br />
CH: Did you retreat from the limelight after being<br />
found snorting heroin aboard John Major’s plane during<br />
the 1997 election?<br />
WS: No, not at all. Two things happened on that front.<br />
One was that I didn’t go to ground which was useful.<br />
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In fact, I counter-attacked. I rolled with the punch in<br />
the initial aftermath. Doing Have I Got News For You<br />
was quite frankly a calculated thing to defuse criticism.<br />
I think that there’s a certain level at which English or<br />
British society operates as a kind of particularly beastly<br />
lower sixth form common room. If I’d gone to ground<br />
at that point I think I would have been in trouble. And<br />
it did serve to defuse interest in it.<br />
The other thing is cleaning up from drugs. It made me<br />
less interesting to people in that kind of prurient way.<br />
And there’s always that level in the media and society<br />
as a whole just as the papers are full of stories about<br />
illicit drugs and strange sexual practices so that was<br />
the basic voyeuristic level of interest in me as someone<br />
who got completely fucked up on drugs and booze.<br />
And if you’re not doing that anymore then you’re not<br />
vulnerable in that way.<br />
CH: Have you read your brother Jonathan’s book, Self<br />
Abuse, which is partly about growing up in what he<br />
sees as a dysfunctional family. Can you comment?<br />
WS: Well, I can’t. I have read it, but I made a pact<br />
with myself not to comment on it publicly because<br />
I just don’t do that stuff. What I can say in answer<br />
to the question is that there are a lot of factual inaccuracies<br />
in it.<br />
CH: The introduction to Feeding Frenzy refers to a<br />
cabal of restaurateurs who wanted shot of you saying<br />
you’d tried to buy drugs off the doorman of his<br />
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restaurant…<br />
WS: That was before [the Major incident] of course.<br />
That was actually a malevolent restaurateur rather than<br />
the tabloids themselves. He was someone who didn’t<br />
like the reviews I’d been giving his restaurants.<br />
CH: So there genuinely was this plan to get rid of you?<br />
WS: Oh yeah, that’s true.<br />
CH: A cabal?<br />
WS: Yeah, as far as I know is true as well. That’s not<br />
just rhetorical rubbish.<br />
CH: That’s a bit weird isn’t it?<br />
WS: No, it’s not weird. I mean I don’t think it was<br />
said with any great seriousness. What I think is, you<br />
know what these guys are like, they all sit around getting<br />
drunk and think “Wouldn’t it be great if we could<br />
bump off Will Self?” I don’t think they were serious<br />
but it does show you the level of naffness and the<br />
extent to which criticism can bite. I remember Deborah<br />
pointed out when I said “I don’t know why these<br />
fucking celebrity egg flippers get so upset about these<br />
reviews, you know they go on parcelling up three bits<br />
of radicchio for £45, why are they bothered?” and she<br />
said “Well, some of them really do regard what they<br />
do as an art form”.<br />
CH: You often just criticised the interior design of the<br />
restaurant rather than the food…<br />
WS: Well, these guys, and I do know some of them,<br />
aren’t stupid, what they realise is that by concentrating<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
on the restaurant you’re completely dissing the food and<br />
the whole culture that they represent in which it’s really<br />
important to drizzle olive oil in a particular way. You’re<br />
saying that “Hang on, this isn’t important”. Not only is<br />
it not important it’s a kind of grotesque moral singularity:<br />
You’re sitting around thinking about adding huge<br />
amounts of monetary value to ingredients that would<br />
barely keep a starving Somalian alive for a day. If you<br />
start criticising the food you start to take it on its own<br />
terms. You can’t allow it that much credence. You’ve<br />
suspended disbelief in what’s being done. Whereas my<br />
approach was to say ‘I just don’t buy any of this shit’<br />
you know.<br />
Novel uses<br />
CH: I liked the long ‘travel’ piece you wrote in Australia.<br />
You’re very much a spiritual person aren’t you?<br />
WS: Yes, when I went to see the whirling dervishes.<br />
Yes, I think so. Middle-age tends to afflict us in this<br />
way doesn’t it? And I think that cleaning up from drugs<br />
necessarily entails a revaluation of the spiritual facet of<br />
yourself. In order to shut off an entirely self-destructive<br />
way of life you have to look for a positive direction.<br />
But I think for people viewing my fictional work it’s<br />
always been there. I think that, this is a broad brush,<br />
but people tend to mistake me for a nihilist but I’m not<br />
really like this at all.<br />
CH: Ballard gets misunderstood in that way too.<br />
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WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to<br />
in that respect. I think people who do understand, really<br />
understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t<br />
understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am<br />
more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at<br />
writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment.<br />
CH: What about the other novel you were writing on<br />
‘land use’?<br />
WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth.<br />
No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a<br />
rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on<br />
revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m<br />
engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going<br />
to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writing<br />
for about three years back into a novel.<br />
So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde,<br />
which is something I would have never done off my<br />
own back, but having been commissioned to write a<br />
screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that<br />
it will never get made, I wanted to make something out<br />
of the material I already had.<br />
I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s<br />
and 90s, into the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic and<br />
I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make<br />
an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next<br />
fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is<br />
that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for<br />
this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an<br />
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incredibly powerful cultural idea.<br />
Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to<br />
time, so the text itself has been impervious to time because<br />
in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you<br />
know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able<br />
to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold<br />
the probable shape of a kind of aggressively ‘out’ gay<br />
culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fascinating<br />
about Dorian and the way in which gay culture<br />
in the late 20th century has become a synecdoche of the<br />
narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a<br />
novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today.<br />
CH: So it’s nearing completion?<br />
WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some<br />
time next year, but when I really get my teeth into<br />
something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It<br />
just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich<br />
Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into<br />
prose and I’ve got a book hopefully.<br />
CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers<br />
regarding adaptations of your stories?<br />
WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And<br />
Bull, which he wanted to push commercially, but after<br />
seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth,<br />
I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go<br />
ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already<br />
having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has<br />
also been optioned for film twice by the producer Chris-<br />
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tine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry) but nothing has come of<br />
it, despite my seeing one excellent screenplay written by<br />
a guy called Nix (I kid you not). Otherwise, not a single<br />
one of the other narratives has been optioned.<br />
CH: Would you be amenable to films made of your<br />
work, or do think it might be disastrous?<br />
WS: I think for a writer it’s an almost always an artistic<br />
lose-lose scenario. Either you take the money and abrogate<br />
all responsibility for the finished article (which<br />
then, in all likelihood, ill serves the original), or else<br />
you take less money and become creatively involved (if<br />
they’ll have you), in which case, in all probability, your<br />
participation will be vitiated to the point where it makes<br />
no difference anyway. I know several of my peers who<br />
have spent years working on film adaptations of their<br />
work, only for them either to come out badly, or else<br />
not come out at all. Martin Amis has it about right when<br />
he says: “Don’t believe they’ve made a movie of your<br />
book until you rent the video.” In part, I feel obscurely<br />
satisfied that there have been no film adaptations. To<br />
my mind it proves that I’m doing something which can<br />
only be done in the form of prose fiction. Mind you, the<br />
bank manager might well have a different take on this.<br />
CH: Which stories would you be interested in seeing<br />
adapted?<br />
WS: I’ve always felt that ‘Tough Tough Toys For Tough<br />
Tough Boys’ (the story) would make a great British road<br />
movie. The problem with road movies in Britain is that<br />
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there isn’t usually enough road, but by starting in Caithness,<br />
on the north coast of Scotland, and having scenes<br />
the entire way to London, I think this story avoids the<br />
usual pitfalls. I’ve even gone so far as to rough out a<br />
scene plan for it, but because of all the problems mentioned<br />
above, I’ve never gone any further. I also think<br />
‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’ together with<br />
its sequel ‘The Nonce Prize’ would make a good movie.<br />
As for the novels, well, Cock would be good (no sight of<br />
the genitals – just reaction shots); and Great Apes, I feel,<br />
could be made quite easily and effectively, by simply<br />
having humans play chimpanzees, without any makeup,<br />
just half-naked, copulating freely, grooming etc … And<br />
with subtitles (they would sign as in the book).<br />
CH: Any filmmakers you’d trust with your work?<br />
WS: Completely trust? Well, Cronenberg for Cock,<br />
Gilliam for My Idea Of Fun or How The Dead Live.<br />
CH: And finally, what question would you ask yourself?<br />
WS: Erm, I think the question I ask myself most is, and<br />
this comes up particularly in relation to this anti-war<br />
stuff which is the first public political thing that I’ve put<br />
my head above the parapet for kind of ever. So I’d be<br />
inclined to ask myself: do you really believe that your<br />
work as a writer represents a significant or a meaningful<br />
contribution to political and social debate or do you<br />
think there’s something more you should be doing? So<br />
that’s the kind of question I tend to ask myself most.<br />
Fin �<br />
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Interview [published May 1997]<br />
Will Self: Self Destruction<br />
Chris Mitchell finds out why Will Self doesn’t give a monkeys<br />
Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning<br />
to the phrase ‘mile high club’. Unless you were in a<br />
apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general<br />
election (or living in another country), you can’t have<br />
failed to have seen Self’s face plastered over the front<br />
page of every newspaper thanks to the fact that he<br />
snorted heroin on John Major’s election jet. Self was<br />
promptly sacked from his position at The Observer,<br />
was refused to be allowed anywhere near Tony Blair<br />
and became the subject of frothing tabloid editorials for<br />
days afterwards..<br />
This episode ties in neatly with Self’s already wellhoned<br />
media persona – a former heroin addict, enfant<br />
terrible of the London literary scene, the English successor<br />
to American Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson,<br />
as well as being an acclaimed novelist obsessed<br />
with sexual perversity, gratuitous violence and lashings<br />
of Class A drugs, author of such works as My Idea Of<br />
Fun and The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis. It’s easy to see<br />
why Self got the coverage he did: his CV is copy which<br />
virtually writes itself.<br />
However, being catapulted from cult fame to tabloid<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
shame is not something Self either desired or required.<br />
While it may lend an extra edge to the publication of his<br />
new novel Great Apes, there’s no room for accusations<br />
of the election jet episode being a calculated publicity<br />
stunt; with two children to support and a third on the<br />
way, chucking away a £40,000 a year job in the hope of<br />
a few more book sales is not an option. However much<br />
the press want Self to be the new King Of Gonzo, he’s<br />
not accepting the coke-encrusted crown. Self took the<br />
heroin because he needed it, like a diabetic needs insulin.<br />
It was for medicinal rather than media purposes.<br />
Talking on the eve of the general election which saw<br />
a Labour landslide, Self confesses to being “pretty depressed<br />
about losing my job – I have a very strong work<br />
ethic and journalism gives me a hit of being a working<br />
Joe. It’s a good way for me to feel ordinary – you get up<br />
and engage with the world, you work with people. Unfortunately,<br />
I’ve had that rather taken out of my hands,”<br />
he says, referring obliquely to recent events. “There is<br />
a temptation after something like this to say ‘Well, fuck<br />
you, you fuckers’ and to keep churning it out.”<br />
Self’s need to remain a working journalist stems<br />
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from the intensity of his fictional writing; like his<br />
two great influences William Burroughs and J.G.<br />
Ballard, it involves immersing himself within a<br />
completely self-constructed world. “It doesn’t matter<br />
how committed you are to your fictional work, it<br />
really does do strange things to your head if you’re<br />
just concentrating on fiction,” Self maintains. “Ultimately<br />
it makes people very arrogant even if they are<br />
successful at it because it’s so divorced from the real<br />
world. It fills your head in that way – you’re sitting<br />
there thinking ‘How do I resolve a plot problem and<br />
thematically embrace all of western culture’, and<br />
someone else is talking about how they couldn’t get<br />
the widget off the production line that morning. You<br />
can’t link those two worlds.”<br />
It’s Self’s acute connection to reality that allows him<br />
to parody it so mercilessly in his writing. Great Apes<br />
functions on the premise that its protagonist Simon<br />
Dykes awakes one morning to find the world has irretrievably<br />
changed; everyone, from his girlfriend to<br />
his psychiatrist, has transmogrified into a chimpanzee.<br />
Unsurprisingly, Dykes goes humanshit (groan) and Self<br />
follows through the ramifications of his story with masterful<br />
chimpunity (groan again). Self squarely classifies<br />
himself as a satirist, feeding off the tradition of Jonathan<br />
Swift – who he considers “the satirist’s Shakespeare” –<br />
and the Enlightenment’s fascination with the arrival of<br />
the first chimpanzees in Europe in 1699.<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
“People understood intuitively at that point that to have<br />
an animal that was close to human but not human threw<br />
into turmoil a whole set of categories about cosmology<br />
and the Chain of Being,” he explains. “Swift was the first<br />
of a long line of satirists in the 18th century to have ape<br />
fantasies and construct ape worlds; there’s a Dutch version<br />
of it, a German version – it became a very enduring<br />
theme. So I’m not so much writing in the tradition of<br />
Swift as standing this long tradition of ape fantasies on<br />
its head.”<br />
Self’s self-awareness of his own intellectual history<br />
and the writers to who have shaped his own work<br />
has been intensified by his dual role as both novelist<br />
and journalist, putting him in the strange position of<br />
regularly coming face to face with his own literary<br />
heroes. But he’s ambivalent about the value of such<br />
encounters: “Without being blasé it’s not something<br />
that appeals to me particularly. I went to interview<br />
Ballard for a 1,000 word piece for the Standard and<br />
wound up talking to him for 4 hours. I really admire<br />
his work and had the fantastic, incredible bonus of<br />
finding out that he really liked my work too. But that<br />
was that. I don’t think we felt the need to meet each<br />
other ever again for the rest of our lives, although Ballard<br />
said, ‘If people like you had been around in the<br />
60s, I would have got out more, but now it’s too late!’<br />
which I thought was sweet.<br />
“There’s not a lot of point in chasing these person-<br />
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alities,” Self continues, “because what you really love<br />
about them is their work – in your teens, when you really<br />
are taken by books. Milan Kundera says books are like<br />
love affairs and you’ve only got space for about eight<br />
major love affairs in your life. I think you’re not likely<br />
to be disappointed when you meet your heroes but, by<br />
the same token, it’s unlikely to be a great experience.”<br />
Even so, Self concedes that his being commissioned<br />
to interview Hunter S. Thompson would probably<br />
produce interesting results, and there is still a glimmer<br />
of excitement to his voice when he mentions that he<br />
might be visiting Burroughs later in the year, having<br />
finally received a personal invitation to the author’s<br />
home in Lawrence, Kansas. “I’m going to try and go<br />
over in August, if he’s still alive. I was quite upset when<br />
Ginsberg died. I don’t want to be disrespectful of the<br />
dead – mind you, Allen probably thinks he’s still alive<br />
– but I was never a great fan of his poetry. But the Beat<br />
movement are who I grew up reading about, reading<br />
about their lives quite intensively. So it was quite weird<br />
hearing he’d died.”<br />
One writer with whom Self does regularly associate<br />
is Martin Amis, possibly England’s most celebrated<br />
living novelist. Self’s attempt at an interview with<br />
Amis (reproduced in Junk Mail) turned into something<br />
nearer to an open discussion of each other’s work as<br />
writers both documenting the state of England at the<br />
close of the century. With Amis having already passed<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
through the unasked for role of enfant terrible that<br />
Self is now encountering, there is something to the<br />
idea that Amis has mapped out some of the territory<br />
that Self is now exploring.<br />
“I was thinking about Martin last night,” admits<br />
Self, “about the way that our careers run quite parallel<br />
in some ways. Money was published in 1984, when<br />
Martin was the same age that I am now, maybe a bit<br />
younger – and that was his breakthrough novel in a<br />
way. He’s always seemed to me to be a writer who’s<br />
much more interested in writing than I am. Although<br />
my actual prose is heavily larded with intertextual<br />
references, I’m somebody who writes without being<br />
concerned with the internal mechanics of writing per se<br />
– I want to write about philosophy or anthropology or<br />
animals, I’m more interested in aiming out and I guess<br />
that’s reflected in my journalism.<br />
“Martin on the other hand is a bit more weighty<br />
and serious and academic than I would wish to be or<br />
could ever be. As regards mixing the mandarin and the<br />
demotic, I think there is a similarity between our work,<br />
but I think Martin has a slightly embattled view of the<br />
Great Unwashed which I don’t really tend to have. I<br />
don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here but they’re a<br />
scary presence in Martin’s books and I don’t feel they<br />
are in mine.”<br />
So does Self feel like he’s a particularly English<br />
writer? “I feel more like a English novelist than I did a<br />
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few years ago.” he states. “Because I’m half American,<br />
when I started publishing I felt more on the cusp, an<br />
internationalist. I write with a lot of specific cultural<br />
references. Politically and culturally I regard myself as<br />
European, but Europe is influenced by America. I align<br />
myself with the utopian socialist libertarian tradition of<br />
English thought. I am fiercely anti-establishment…”<br />
Self pauses and then wryly adds, “as you no doubt<br />
know. I regard myself as culturally English but politically<br />
completely disaffected.”<br />
It’s this disaffection that leads Self to wield satire as a<br />
scalpel against contemporary politics, just as Swift did.<br />
Asked what’ll he’ll be doing on election night, his tone<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
of voice becomes distinctly ominous: “There are no<br />
words to describe my contempt for Tony Blair and what<br />
he represents,” he blasts. “Obviously, my personal travails<br />
have made things a lot, lot worse, but even before<br />
all of this shit started happening, I was incandescent<br />
with anger about what was happening in the election.<br />
I’ve even been considering voting Tory – that’s how<br />
mad I am, just so when things start fucking up in a year<br />
or two I can turn to people when they’re drunk and<br />
say, “Yes, I voted Conservative” and watch their faces<br />
crumple up.” Self pauses and then grins. “There are a<br />
lot of good parties on in town and I think I might just<br />
go out and get rat-arsed.” �<br />
463<br />
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Interview [published October 2000]<br />
Will Self: Dead Man Talking<br />
Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self<br />
Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and<br />
he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction”<br />
ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his<br />
prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will become<br />
flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his new<br />
novel How The Dead Live is divided up into sections<br />
of ‘Dying’, ‘Dead’ and ‘Deader’, Self has if anything<br />
attacked the page with even more vigour and purpose<br />
than before.<br />
So it’s rather reassuring to see Self looking very<br />
healthy, tanned as he is from a holiday in the Canaries,<br />
reassuring also that the Coke he orders comes<br />
in a glass with ice. We meet at the Groucho Club in<br />
Soho, London, one of Self’s former haunts but which<br />
he says he hardly ever visits anymore. Outside he<br />
crouches down to chain his 22cc Go-Ped Bigfoot –<br />
a small motorised scooter – and strides into the bar<br />
wearing a black leather jacket, crisp white shirt and a<br />
pair of well-worn brown Chelsea boots to go with his<br />
new cropped haircut.<br />
How The Dead Live is a mordant and disturbing<br />
allegory of life after death and death in life, which<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
derives some of its structure from The Tibetan Book<br />
Of The Dead. Of course, Self has used that particular<br />
book in his fiction before: ‘The North London Book<br />
Of The Dead’ from The Quantity Theory Of Insanity<br />
and a chapter in My Idea Of Fun. But whereas ‘The<br />
North London Book Of The Dead’ was about the failure<br />
of a young man to come to terms with the death<br />
of his mother, How The Dead Live is very much an<br />
objective description of what happens to someone in<br />
the after-death plane. That someone is Lily Bloom<br />
(an evocative name, encoding notions of life and<br />
death), a 65-year-old American anti-semitic Jewish<br />
wiseacre who at the beginning of the novel lies dying<br />
of cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in London.<br />
It is a Self-like irony that it’s a stiff who provides<br />
him with one of his most fully realised characters,<br />
especially given that he has been dismissive of the<br />
very notion of character in the past.<br />
Self wanted to call the book Deader, but his French<br />
translator persuaded him not to, and instead suggested<br />
the eventual title, which is also the title of a French<br />
film from 1999. When Self was sitting in his study<br />
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one afternoon mulling this all over, the title of a Derek<br />
Raymond book (aka thriller writer Robin Cook) swam<br />
out at him, and then, he says, he really did have some<br />
agonising over it. “How The Dead Live isn’t perfect for<br />
the book,” he admits, and says that initially he wrote<br />
an exculpatory forward explaining why he’d chosen<br />
the title. “But then, I very much wanted to take my<br />
voice out of this book. I wanted How The Dead Live to<br />
just happen in the reader’s mind, decoupled from any<br />
presuppositions about any framing of the text in that<br />
way.” Once again, it’s a novel where the moral fulcrum<br />
is someway off the page.<br />
Although Martin Rowson’s endpaper maps attempt<br />
to locate the fictional topography of How The<br />
Dead Live the world it describes is very much filtered<br />
through Lily. In other words, as the preface from The<br />
Tibetan Book Of The Dead says, it takes place on Lily’s<br />
“mind stage”. Lily’s venom and disgust, her vitriolic<br />
wit and bile is well sustained over the 400 pages, but<br />
the ultimate effect is one of poignancy, of playing to the<br />
empty gallery as she clings to her personality. With his<br />
latest novel, Self has gone to the core of the belief that<br />
the essence of the self is the personality.<br />
So does he have semi-mystical beliefs about death<br />
himself? “I have completely mystical beliefs in that<br />
area. I’m off with the fucking fairies,” he says, laughing.<br />
“I always have been. I’ve never been a materialist<br />
particularly, I’ve always been a transcendental ideal-<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
ist.” So why the obsession with The Tibetan Book Of<br />
The Dead? “I’ve had this preoccupation with it from<br />
when we were sitting around rolling joints on it in the<br />
late 70s, and it’s perennial in my work. The point is<br />
that when you push materialism as far as it can go<br />
then it really shows itself up. People who say they<br />
are materialists, they’re hoisted by their own petard.<br />
I don’t want to sound like a character in Ab Fab who<br />
wants to give it all up and bang tambourines with<br />
a bandeau, but that’s pretty much how I feel at the<br />
moment. People aren’t really materialists, they don’t<br />
really want the car, the house, the Phillipe Starck<br />
juicer, they actually want the cachet, the status and<br />
the culture that go with those things.”<br />
Self is keen to stress that the novel is what it appears<br />
to be: “It really is a book about death. It’s a Buddhist<br />
allegory,” he says, allowing that of course there are<br />
satirical elements. When Lily Bloom, newly dead, is<br />
taken away in a mini cab to a suburb of London called<br />
Dulston – really a disintegrating part of Lily Bloom’s<br />
own psyche of course – she goes to a meeting of the<br />
Personally Dead, where they have a 12-step programme<br />
for those who can’t or won’t come to terms with being<br />
dead.”Why didn’t it even occur to me that there was<br />
only one person who could’ve arranged these particular<br />
elements of my own experience, and cobbled them<br />
together into this dreary scene?” At one of the meetings<br />
someone speaks on the topic of “Why Are We Dead?”,<br />
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about “how disturbing it was to realise that style was<br />
personalty, and that our sense of self was nothing but<br />
mannerisms and negative emotions.”<br />
Lily gets a job at Baskin’s Public Relations when she<br />
is dead, “typing up still more releases on fresh kitchenware,<br />
country club launches, innovatory thermal socks<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
– whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever<br />
widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation.”<br />
(There is a great A.J. Ayer joke, in that “death hadn’t<br />
thawed his notoriously glacial logic”, and “only such a<br />
relentless rationalist could gain any succour from these,<br />
the nervous tics of the afterlife.”) �<br />
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Interview [published April 1998]<br />
Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension<br />
Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist<br />
No other author in recent years has divided the critics<br />
with such relish as Will Self. With three novellas and<br />
two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of<br />
short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys,<br />
he has established himself as one of this country’s most<br />
inventive and original prose writers.<br />
However, far from accepting suggestions that after<br />
being portrayed as the enfant terrible of fictional satire,<br />
he now seeks the reward of critical respectability, Self<br />
remains as defiant as ever. “My work is intentionally<br />
divisive. In a way I have failed if I even get to that<br />
point. For a satirist to think in those terms would be<br />
absolutely ridiculous.” Certainly, while Self is the main<br />
contender to the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes<br />
and Graham Swift, he refuses to think of his writing as<br />
aimed at any notion of inclusion, however redundant,<br />
within critical tradition of the English literary canon.<br />
“The role of critics in terms of re-interpreting the novel<br />
for subsequent generations, as a blueprint, as an analogue<br />
of the culture itself is a legitimate view. Yet at the<br />
same time writers, like any other artist can fall victim to<br />
all forms of vanity in consideration of their own gifts,<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
and one of the chief sources of vanity interestingly is<br />
any notion of posterity.”<br />
Clearly Self is walking a tight-rope between his role<br />
as writer and literary mediator, between reporter and<br />
involved spectator. However, what sets him apart from<br />
his contemporaries is the unique perspective his work<br />
offers of the pre-millennial era, the (post)modern fin de<br />
siècle. His is a fictional world of serial killers, pederasts,<br />
and petty bourgeois angst, a mixture of high art and<br />
low life which reflects the mundanity and artifice of the<br />
contemporary zeitgeist. “If you can get a contemporary<br />
cultural reference into the book, get away with quoting<br />
Richard and Judy and you are confident it is going to<br />
stand, then you have done your job, you have translated<br />
the contemporary into the timeless.”<br />
It is Self’s willingness to acknowledge his literary inheritance,<br />
along with his reference to popular culture as<br />
a source of inspiration and ‘immutable intertextuality’,<br />
that distances him from the more incestuous and anachronistic<br />
impulses of contemporary fiction. Inspired<br />
by the likes of Céline, Nietzsche and Dostevesky, he<br />
shares with them a rage and revulsion, at what Sartre<br />
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called society’s “self enclosed humanism” and admits<br />
that “I was fascinated by the nihilists and consciously<br />
styled myself in that way as a destructive intellectual<br />
force, in so far as I saw my writing as an extension<br />
of that role”. Like all great authors , Self writes with<br />
an overriding sense of his own omnipotence within the<br />
realm of his own imagination. Egotistical, maybe, but<br />
vain? No. If, as Self admits that “as you publish more,<br />
the more peculiarly arrogant you become,” he is also<br />
modestly aware of his own limitations.<br />
One of the major criticisms of his work is the way in<br />
which he is concerned more with the use of elaborate<br />
imagery and excessive metaphor, at the expense of<br />
characterisation and plot. Yet it is something that Self<br />
is willing to admit to. “I think the real problem with<br />
my books is the lack of structure. I have great difficulty<br />
with plot and I have never got on with character, and<br />
have always found them very artificial, and essentially<br />
romantic in that way, but I have largely written about<br />
ideas, and I view descriptive prose, the metaphorical<br />
aspects of the work as part and parcel of the ideas.”<br />
Although some of the stories in the new book, such<br />
as ‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’, ‘Dave<br />
Too’ and ‘A Story For Europe’ have been published<br />
previously in The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis, his style of<br />
composition remains consistent – writing very quickly<br />
and spontaneously – a technique he developed from his<br />
journalism. “I don’t think of myself much, or what I am<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
saying, and I am often very surprised by the result.” It<br />
is this immediacy and unpredictability that has become<br />
a hallmark of his work. :My aim is to write con brio. I<br />
have always thought that you can only write one version<br />
of a book, and I think that is what hamstrings a<br />
lot of people’s approach to the notion of writing as a<br />
search for meaning, a pursuit of perfection. But I really<br />
suffer with a sense of dissatisfaction with my work. I<br />
am not sure if it would help if they were crafted better,<br />
I would be a different writer. I am content to remain<br />
ragged in that way.”<br />
If critics have pointed to his apparent irreverence<br />
and lack of emotional engagement towards the act of<br />
writing, he is keen to suggest that “I am fairly mystical<br />
about the relationship with the text … a posture of humility<br />
in relation to your own muse is quite important<br />
and my personal feelings I try to keep away from that.”<br />
Unlike what he agrees has become the life blood of<br />
contemporary literary discourse: “Self-confession as I<br />
see it a really decadent syndrome … a crisis of imagination<br />
and very depressing.” While his work is “nakedly<br />
personal”, he opposes any literalist interpretation of his<br />
work, and is intent in distancing himself from the idea<br />
that fiction should pandering to the essentially regressive<br />
or escapist tendencies of the book reading public.<br />
“To think that would be insane, I might as well write<br />
Mills and Boon. Every text contains within itself the<br />
idea of an objective reading … those who think there<br />
468<br />
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is a subjective reader are full of shit. Just as I am trying<br />
to break down my resistance to writing books, so<br />
I suppose at the same time, I am trying to break down<br />
peoples resistance to reading them. Book’s aren’t life,<br />
they are just books.”<br />
Somewhat ironically however, Self is a believer in<br />
the text as a non-factual body of words which stems<br />
from his early attempts at writing. “I had a great deal<br />
of difficulty with the feeling that I didn’t have anything<br />
to say, that everything had been written already and<br />
which really bedevilled me.” As a result Self has go<br />
on to essentially redefine his role as an author. “I think<br />
of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building<br />
things. You are removing things, chipping away at<br />
language to reveal a living form, I think I am merely<br />
the midwife in that sense.”<br />
True when you consider that he has delivered some of<br />
the most provocative fiction of the last ten years. Self’s<br />
stories are “a fundamental assault”, not just on the over<br />
indulgent and emotional realism of contemporary fiction,<br />
but on “the antinomies of organised social living”.<br />
“People always say that they are full of sex, and drugs<br />
and violence … I am not writing Jane Austen, but they<br />
are only full of those things in so far as it is necessary<br />
for them to mirror what I am trying to describe.” Believing<br />
that a writer should have the courage of his own<br />
perversions, Self sees his work as “perverse only in the<br />
sense of the willingness to look upon the things that<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
other people regard as serious. I regard myself as quite<br />
a puritan. I am quite a prudish person”.<br />
The scene however in the concluding story of the<br />
new collection, ‘The Nonce Prize’ of a murdered<br />
child , the victim of a pederasts, whose dismembered<br />
body, dressed only in a Toy Story T-shirt, is bound<br />
to attract criticism. Yet for Self, “an image like that<br />
has a total necessity, the mixing of the mundane with<br />
the extremely horrible. Of course it is deliberately<br />
shocking”, but what he plays on is our sense of simultaneous<br />
aversion and innate attraction to the dark<br />
of human nature; the necessity to explore the depths<br />
of human potentiality. In a period in which politicians,<br />
priests and the press are agonising about how<br />
to find a basis for morality, Self’s ideas, lubricious as<br />
they seem, are in fact profoundly principled. For the<br />
author they represent “a chronic jouissance” which<br />
reflects how people are increasingly finding consummate<br />
enjoyment within signs of guilt, despair,<br />
violence and death. “I am alluding to possibilities<br />
that we know are actualities. Just as sex and drugs<br />
continue to have their own pornography, the focusing<br />
of sexual relief into ritualised posture, the need<br />
to engage in a constructive relationship with power<br />
or with society, with having children or the meaning<br />
of generations. All these things seem to be subjected<br />
to their own pornography. I hate that about modern<br />
society, it is revolting.”<br />
469<br />
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It is motifs such as these that provide the basis to<br />
many of the new stories; most readily in the grotesquely<br />
implausible ‘Flytopia’ and ‘Caring Sharing.’<br />
Similarly, in the wonderfully conceived ‘Design Faults<br />
In The Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual’, he welcomes us<br />
the “terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer”<br />
as throughout his work, Self continues to explore the<br />
exigencies that modern mass urban living places on the<br />
human psyche and the human body. The city in general,<br />
and London in particular, represents a new surface, a<br />
new hallucinatory experience, a sublime reincarnation<br />
of the horror and wonder at the rapidly shifting nature<br />
of the identities and anxieties of his characters and<br />
the inconstant historical realities they represent. “The<br />
idea of the modern urban scape is destructive at a very<br />
fundamental level the notion of scale. People’s idea of<br />
the city that they are living in is so grossly different<br />
from the physical reality that you are actually witnessing.<br />
There is a marvellous disparity between what is<br />
perceived and what it actually is.”<br />
One of the strength of Self’s work is it’s “internally<br />
referential” nature, and in Tough Tough Toys … the<br />
same characters often appear in corresponding stories.<br />
In doing so Self reinforces the common theme in the<br />
collection, “what it is to be an adult, about concepts<br />
and absences of maturity”. It is a theme which is echoed<br />
in his style, as he plays with different modes, with<br />
elements of pastiche and with character for example,<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
while at the same time being meta-critical, commenting<br />
on that tendency in his work.<br />
Often surreal, frequently absurd, and always written<br />
with a recognisably dark sense of humour, Self’s stories<br />
are satiric rather than simply sarcastic. However Self<br />
is reluctant to think of himself as a true satirist. “The<br />
thing I coined in my own mind is that to be an effective<br />
satirists is an act of factitiousness, and that includes<br />
not talking sensibly about my own work.” While Self<br />
takes his work very seriously, it remains deliberately<br />
ambiguous. “Taking the world seriously is not given …<br />
and that is what I am continually trying to get the reader<br />
to address … but the problem you have got to face is<br />
how to suspend disbelief, you have to suspend disbelief<br />
in your own work, you have almost got to believe it is<br />
true in order to carry it off.”<br />
Since the publication of his first book, The Quantity<br />
Theory Of Insanity in 1991, Will Self continues to be<br />
portrayed as very much the archetypal outsider. His<br />
admittedly “muddled and provisional childhood”,<br />
and his former addiction to heroin for example are<br />
well documented, yet with the concept of the avant<br />
garde as redundant as any notion of a central literary<br />
tradition he feels more at home within the mainstream<br />
cultural sphere. But does being white, middle class and<br />
heterosexual leave him creatively isolated, limited in<br />
comparison to more recognisably racial and gender<br />
specific literary genres? “I have never seen myself as<br />
470<br />
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a traditional bohemian anyway so I find the notion of<br />
being part of an avant garde very hard to imagine, but<br />
the great virtue of being middle class in this country is<br />
that you are bizarrely anonymous. Your experience is<br />
quite commonplace, you become null in that way and<br />
in some ways I find myself curiously liberated by it. If<br />
I was gay, or black or more Jewish than I am, then it<br />
might ghettoise me.”<br />
It is this sense of creative freedom that has allowed<br />
Self throughout his career to explore different characters<br />
and indulge his passion for different accents and<br />
rhythms that make up the modern English language,<br />
the health of which he is quick to disassociate from<br />
what he sees as the generally parlous condition of the<br />
English novel. “One of the great sources of solace in my<br />
career is that I no longer have to read fiction … think<br />
it is a great help.” While “blissfully unaware” of his<br />
contemporaries, he is conscious of the “warp and weft”<br />
of the publishing business and the effect this is having<br />
on writers “This year’s best seller is next year’s out of<br />
print writer. But you write a good book now and it will<br />
be published. There are so many bad books published<br />
that it has to be true!”<br />
Will his next book would be a novel? “I could go<br />
BUY Will Self books online from and<br />
on writing the books I have been writing. There are<br />
enough books to be written like that. Certainly I am<br />
not short of fiction. I have enough to last me into the<br />
next millennium already sketched out, but I am fed up<br />
with these psycho-analysts and artists. I want to write<br />
a book about someone who isn’t an intellectual.” As<br />
for philosophy: “At best it is sublime, at worst it is<br />
opera”. Equally, Self relies less on the interface of<br />
drugs and literature as a source of either personal or<br />
thematic motivation. “I remain interested in them as<br />
a perspective, the capacity for drugs themselves to<br />
enhance or mediate, to colour creativity, but I am so<br />
conservative in so many other ways it strikes me as<br />
faintly absurd.”<br />
Is Will Self mellowing with age. Not a chance. He<br />
and his work remain as unpredictable and elusive as<br />
ever. For all his honesty and willingness to talk about<br />
his work seriously there is a sense that he is reluctant<br />
to reveal what he calls ‘the back of the theatre.’ As the<br />
curtain rises on his latest production, and critics prepare<br />
once more to answer the question of Will Self’s literary<br />
importance with customary shouts of “Oh yes he is!”,<br />
or “Oh no he isn’t!”, perhaps a more suitable retort<br />
would be “He’s behind you!” �<br />
471<br />
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Review [published March 2000]<br />
Tupac Shakur: Murder Was The Case<br />
Gary Marshall on the history of gangsta rap as documented in Tupac Shakur:<br />
Rebel For The Hell Of It and Have Gun Will Travel<br />
Under the guidance of its founder Marion ‘Suge’<br />
Knight, Death Row Records became one of the most<br />
successful and most talked-about record labels of the<br />
1990s. Home to Dr Dre, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy<br />
Dogg and many others, the label’s roster read like a<br />
‘who’s who’ of the rap industry and the ‘gangsta’ genre<br />
in particular. Straddling the line between entertainment<br />
and violent reality, the label developed a reputation for<br />
gangsterism and intimidation while its artists seemed<br />
to lead the same violent and misogynistic lives they<br />
rapped about.<br />
Armond White attempts to tell the story of Tupac<br />
Shakur, Death Row’s most famous recording artist,<br />
and place him firmly in the context of Black culture<br />
and society. The son of former Black Panther and crack<br />
addict Afeni Shakur, Tupac attended drama school and<br />
was a gifted musician and actor; his death in a driveby<br />
and the resulting tit-for-tat killing of Biggie Smalls<br />
(aka Notorious B.I.G.) were generally believed to be<br />
part of the escalating rivalry between East Coast and<br />
West Coast gangs. Rebel For The Hell Of It attempts<br />
to explain the cultural issues that shaped Tupac and his<br />
BUY Tupac Shakur music online from and<br />
generation, presenting a damning picture of corrupt<br />
police, institutionalised racism and the greed of the<br />
recording industry.<br />
While White presents a powerful and convincing<br />
argument, at times he’s too eager to play the race<br />
card. A journalist who describes Tupac as “shockingly<br />
handsome” is denounced as racist on the evidence<br />
of those two words, and White regularly uses<br />
magazine cuttings as examples of what he perceives<br />
as a subconsciously racist approach to the entire rap<br />
industry. While there is some truth to his arguments,<br />
in many cases he heaps derision on journalists who<br />
may be guilty of cliché or lazy thinking but who demonstrate<br />
considerably more affection for his subject<br />
than he does. While detailing rape allegations, court<br />
proceedings and lyrical content he seems curiously<br />
distant from the subject, showing little sign that he<br />
finds anything to like or respect about Tupac. It is only<br />
when the narrative turns to Tupac’s filmic ambitions –<br />
White’s speciality is in film and cultural studies – that<br />
any sense of empathy shines through.<br />
Ultimately White believes rap – and gangsta rap in<br />
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particular – has betrayed the ideals of politicised 70s<br />
and 80s black music from protest songs to Public Enemy,<br />
and Rebel For The Hell Of It cleverly analyses<br />
and contrasts the expression of Black culture in popular<br />
music over several decades like an angry Greil Marcus.<br />
Clearly appalled at the waste of talent and ambition<br />
which gangsta rap embodies, White’s novel is wellargued<br />
but its academic tone ultimately lacks emotion.<br />
Have Gun Will Travel is certainly full of emotion –<br />
most of it negative. Journalist and former rapper Ronin<br />
Ro provides an insight into the workings of the Death<br />
Row label and clearly differentiates fact from rumour<br />
and legend. Ro demonstrates beyond any doubt that,<br />
preying on the ambition and gullibility of his artists,<br />
Suge Knight made a great deal of money while his artists<br />
received little or nothing. Few artists had recording<br />
contracts and many worked for free on some of the<br />
1990s biggest-selling albums (Dr Dre’s The Chronic<br />
and Snoop’s Doggystyle) while Suge received 100% of<br />
the publishing royalties.<br />
Although many of his sources are understandably<br />
anonymous, Ro tells a compelling if frightening story<br />
of associates forced to drink urine at gunpoint, business<br />
rivals being sodomised, publicists being savagely<br />
beaten, journalists held over piranha tanks and the<br />
increasingly deranged and uncontrollable behaviour of<br />
Knight. Obsessed with movies like Scorcese’s Casino<br />
(to the point of buying one of the houses used in the<br />
BUY Tupac Shakur music online from and<br />
film) and De Palma’s Scarface, Knight surrounded<br />
himself with gang members and actively encouraged<br />
the burgeoning rivalry between East Coast and West<br />
Coast artists and fans.<br />
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for the gangsta<br />
rappers portrayed in these books, the quiet and<br />
determined Biggie Smalls excepted. Tupac is vain<br />
and hot-headed, drawn to Death Row after yet another<br />
period of jail time for serious assault. Dr Dre is<br />
shown as an egotistical, self-obsessed control freak,<br />
while other rappers – Snoop included – seem to have<br />
a curious ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ attitude when<br />
given a choice between advancing their careers and<br />
basic human decency. Ro, like White, highlights the<br />
mainstream record industry as an amoral and cowardly<br />
business which chose to ignore the activities<br />
of Death Row for as long as record sales remained<br />
high. It’s an argument given extra weight by the rash<br />
of legal action and the mass evacuation from Death<br />
Row following Knight’s incarceration.<br />
Despite the titillating content, Have Gun Will<br />
Travel is no hastily-scribbled collection of rumours.<br />
Death Row’s reputation for violence and intimidation<br />
was well-deserved and Ro tracks down a sufficient<br />
number of eyewitness accounts to corroborate<br />
his story. The label’s finances and criminal backing<br />
are exhaustively researched, and the result is a<br />
comprehensive history of one of the most successful<br />
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and controversial labels of the 1990s. Free from the<br />
political baggage which frequently makes White’s<br />
book heavy going, Ro is damning of the violence<br />
enveloping the Death Row clique but he’s equally<br />
critical of the publicity-seeking moral guardians<br />
and the political indifference which created the very<br />
environment the gangsta rappers glamorised.<br />
The stock response to criticism of gangsta rap is<br />
that it’s just entertainment, exaggerated story-telling<br />
of ghetto life which sells bucketloads to middle-class<br />
white teenagers. The problem with Death Row was<br />
that the line between entertainment and reality became<br />
increasingly blurred. According to Ro’s account, as<br />
Knight became more and more like the movie gangsters<br />
he idolised he surrounded himself with members of the<br />
BUY Tupac Shakur music online from and<br />
notorious Bloods gang and transformed the traditional<br />
one-upmanship of rap into a Bloods vs. Crips, East vs.<br />
West contest – a rivalry which was actively encouraged<br />
by many sections of the rap media. Ro and White both<br />
point accusing fingers at journalists who were full of<br />
remorse after the high-profile deaths of Tupac and Biggie<br />
Smalls but who actively encouraged the rivalry and<br />
violence which caused them.<br />
What both Ro and White’s books demonstrate is<br />
that the rappers’ deaths were only a small part of a<br />
bigger picture. The true tragedy is that, by embracing<br />
the clichés of gangsta rap, many talented Black artists<br />
glamorised rather than challenged the stereotype of<br />
violent Black American youth and simply swapped one<br />
form of oppression for another. �<br />
474<br />
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Review [published April 2004]<br />
Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey<br />
Ben Granger<br />
This book is not for people who’ve never, even briefly,<br />
fallen under Morrissey’s spell. Don’t bother; it’ll only<br />
convince you further of the psycho-obsessive nature of<br />
Morrissey fans in general and the author in particular.<br />
Don’t bother either if you’re looking for new facts<br />
about The Smiths or Morrissey, anything to do with<br />
music rather than image or lyrics. It’s Johnny Rogan’s<br />
Severed Alliance or Simon Goddard’s more recent<br />
Songs That Saved Your Life you’re after, both of which<br />
spell out in dry but meticulous detail most of what you<br />
might want to know. And don’t bother if you’re looking<br />
for objectivity, or if you’re turned off by riotously<br />
over the top prose that out-does even Julie Burchill in<br />
the school of forging constant rapid, rabid, contentious<br />
assertions from very few base facts. Anyone left? Then,<br />
like me, you’ll love it.<br />
Simpson is a True Apostle of the cult of Moz, and<br />
like all his ilk found this warped love during a troubled<br />
adolescence, described with lively self mockery<br />
in a chapter here. The Smiths landed like a chemical<br />
warhead upon bored teenagers growing up in the most<br />
soulless decade of the 20th century. Here was the ni-<br />
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and<br />
hilism of punk for an even more genuinely despairing<br />
generation, with added literacy, sensitivity, wit, and<br />
tunes. It was something they would never forget.<br />
Detractors say Morrissey appeals to “the teenager”<br />
because both he and they are contrary and self-pitying.<br />
This is of course true. But there are better qualities<br />
also at a premium in the best of the uppity adolescent<br />
and the everyday work of the Moz. A breathtakingly<br />
arrogant precociousness, a visceral impatience with the<br />
banal, the solipsistic knowing you’re not like anyone<br />
else, and the vicious world-weary wit of the damned.<br />
All satirised brilliantly in his own song ‘Nobody Loves<br />
Us’ casting both himself and his fans in the role of spoilt<br />
children (“tuck us in / make us our favourite jam”).<br />
As Simpson notes; “Sickness never sounded or felt<br />
so good … I may have felt unloved or unlovable but<br />
I also derived an exquisite, narcotic satisfaction from<br />
the knowing of these things and to laugh under my<br />
breath at the perversity of this knowledge.” Laugh<br />
indeed, the faithful know there’s more laugh-outloud<br />
humour in Smiths and Morrissey songs than in<br />
almost any of the swill lapped up by the “oh he’s<br />
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sooo depressing” dimwits.<br />
Simpson shows that bright teenagers know long<br />
after they’ve packed away their last Dr Martens’ that<br />
Morrissey’s self obsession is anything but depressing;<br />
it’s a life-affirming blood-pact of strength against the<br />
stupidity of the world;<br />
“In assaulting pop’s nostrums and clichés in his own<br />
image, Morrissey made it about the one thing both<br />
parents and pop music had been united against: intelligence.<br />
Forget drugs, forget promiscuity. Thinking<br />
Too Much was undoubtedly the most degenerate, most<br />
anti-social habit any teenager ever picked up.”<br />
With the added get-out clause in the grand tradition<br />
of having your cake and eating it that, while<br />
you were vicariously living through the man’s emotions,<br />
you were never really as depressed as he quite<br />
genuinely seemed to be, even through all the wit and<br />
charm. He was doing it for you in Christlike fashion<br />
(although this particular Messiah was Mancunian,<br />
camp, quiffed, flower fixated and more inclined to<br />
call for people’s deaths than turn other cheek). Lured<br />
pied-piper-like by the first incandescent chimes of<br />
‘This Charming Man’, this is an adolescent antifantasy<br />
world which still has enough acolytes of all<br />
ages to sell out the Manchester Evening News Arena<br />
this May in less than an hour.<br />
Simpson shows with aplomb the disparate influences<br />
that made the mental make-up of “this alarming man”.<br />
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and<br />
Pop, punk and glam rock (which “called for and for<br />
a brief moment seemed to actually offer escape from<br />
the humdrum by becoming your own glamorous creation”).<br />
The feminine-centred northern drama of the 60s<br />
which at once embraced and damned the working-class<br />
background he came from, and its lighter modern day<br />
offshoots like the comedy of Alan Bennett and Victoria<br />
Wood: (“Morrissey’s ‘voice’ is that of the Northern<br />
Woman, a certain intensity mixed with a certain breeziness,<br />
a certain desperation mixed with a lot of self irony<br />
…strong, but touchingly vulnerable … a queer fish.”)<br />
Morrissey’s two greatest idols were Oscar Wilde<br />
and James Dean. Wilde for his wit and, in the proper<br />
sense of the word, perversity: “an idealist, yet the<br />
Queen of Cynics, he was a romantic, but was frighteningly<br />
realistic; he was a moralist yet completely<br />
dissolute, Morrissey of course is an immoralist who is<br />
scandalously virtuous.” James Dean for personifying<br />
adolescent rebellion: “Jimmy reflected back as Morrissey<br />
would like to see himself: a creature who may<br />
have been tortured and full of self doubt but always<br />
managed to look comfortable in his own skin and to<br />
radiate an animal magnetism.” And both, of course, for<br />
the romantic doom of their exit from this world.<br />
Simpson goes a bit more out on a limb in proclaiming<br />
his parents break-up was the biggest influence on<br />
his world outlook, totally siding with his book librarian<br />
mum against his porter dad with all the Oedipus conno-<br />
476<br />
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tations that implies. Speculation it may be, but it does<br />
convince. He’s insightful too on Morrissey’s famously<br />
enigmatic sexuality, rightly stating the unique mixture<br />
of the masculine and feminine, the fleshy exhibitionism<br />
(“A Morrissey gig is an extraordinary, epic, religious<br />
prick-tease”) entwined with the lovelorn celibacy is<br />
central to his unique appeal, particularly in bringing<br />
out the homosexual side to otherwise heterosexual<br />
men. Simpson is gay himself but happily does not try to<br />
claim him for ‘the cause’ and is rightly contemptuous of<br />
those desperate to pigeonhole: “What these very helpful,<br />
very kind people forgot was that the law ‘what’s<br />
not one thing must be t’other’, absolutely correct and<br />
inviolable as it is, is a law which only applies to stupid<br />
people. And to journalists.”<br />
The title of Simpson’s book is a play on Sartre’s<br />
essay ‘Saint Genet’, and he rightly makes the observation<br />
that Mozza has a lot in common with Jean G.<br />
Granted, Genet was a tremendously promiscuous homosexual<br />
and Morrissey a celibate introvert, but both<br />
were initially feted then rejected by liberals who found<br />
them a little too complex for their liking, both found<br />
a transcendent Rousseau-like glory in the seedier side<br />
of lumpen-proletarian life, and both glorify thugs and<br />
‘rough lads’.<br />
Many people find this both the strangest and the most<br />
distasteful side to Morrissey, (“but he seemed like such<br />
a nice boy!!”) appealing to sensitive little flowers yet<br />
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and<br />
celebrating criminality in a far more unnerving way<br />
than half-wits like Guy Ritchie. Yet this too is central to<br />
his allure, glorying like his hero Wilde in paradox and<br />
contradiction, squaring a circle, dancing outrageously<br />
on a tightrope of sensitivities in idiosyncratic celebration<br />
of the outsider.<br />
And to the minds of the faithful, not falling off that<br />
tightrope. Simpson rightly dissects the fatuous music<br />
press chorus that damned Morrissey as a racist in the<br />
early 90s for singing his mockingly wry song ‘The<br />
National Front Disco’ at the same time as genuinely<br />
flaunting the Union Jack and celebrating proper skinhead<br />
culture; “some might argue that this subtlety is<br />
dangerous because it is too artistic and not didactic<br />
(i.e. patronising) enough”. Simpson argues brilliantly,<br />
though he could perhaps have snidely remarked in an<br />
aside the never mentioned fact that if the NME’s witchhunt<br />
charges were true this must have been the first<br />
Nazi sympathiser in history to be a supporter of Red<br />
Wedge, Anti-Apartheid, Amnesty International, CND,<br />
feminism, gay rights…<br />
The final self-centred joy of Morrissey Simpson<br />
celebrates is his refusal to play the celebrity game; in<br />
an age where even Johnny Rotten parades his wares on<br />
reality TV shows, Mozza remains gloriously aloof, last<br />
year’s curious Channel 4 TV doc not withstanding. As<br />
Simpson puts with typical restraint “A churlish refusal<br />
to suck Satan’s cock.”<br />
477<br />
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The hyperbole of the book can grate when running<br />
totally counter to your own thoughts. The pronouncement<br />
that the young Steven must have found Myra<br />
Hindley a “bad mother to offset his good mother”<br />
takes his speculation to offensively glib depths, and I<br />
for one can do without anyone talking up the dreadful<br />
Freud – as he does – even in passing. But then someone<br />
with Simpson’s provocative style is bound to piss off<br />
everyone at least once during a whole book, and quite<br />
rightly so.<br />
The book’s best achievement is it mirrors its subject<br />
in being pretentious without being pompous, and taking<br />
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and<br />
things very very seriously while at the same time relishing<br />
its own absurdity with a constant self-lacerating<br />
wit. It is under no illusions its subject is a spiteful, dishonest,<br />
difficult sod but loves him more, not less for it.<br />
As the man finally returns with a new album after<br />
seven long years, all those nervous fanatics praying for<br />
a new Vauxhall And I (rather than a Kill Uncle) would<br />
be well advised to have a copy of this book by your<br />
bedside to remind you of the childish stupidity and<br />
effortless brilliance of your obsession. It will prove<br />
you’re not mad after all; or if you are at least you’re in<br />
entertaining company. �<br />
478<br />
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Interview [published October 2002]<br />
Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle<br />
Iain Sinclair walked the length of the M25 motorway to research his book<br />
London Orbital. Chris Hall hears why<br />
Listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme recently<br />
voted London’s M25 the worst of the Seven Horrors of<br />
Britain in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their<br />
experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done<br />
what the novelist, poet and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain<br />
Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have<br />
thought differently. For this was his unique project – to<br />
walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas<br />
that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the<br />
huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded<br />
by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so,<br />
comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce<br />
in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible<br />
landscape disappear.<br />
Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millennial<br />
year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people<br />
would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating<br />
the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting?<br />
“Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly<br />
exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what<br />
you were going to find. Getting up really early in this<br />
weird landscape. You might as well have been in some<br />
BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and<br />
totally remote country.”<br />
It is the disconnection between our apprehension of<br />
London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes<br />
about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in<br />
London, they live in the tube map of London). London<br />
Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore<br />
the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island<br />
Village, described as “an exciting new village community”,<br />
of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t<br />
new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new.<br />
What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the<br />
social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is<br />
suddenly ‘stylish’.”<br />
So what does he think about the housing forecasts for<br />
the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task<br />
Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield<br />
renewal that is necessary in and around the capital?<br />
“These seem to be projections made from a very privileged<br />
metropolitan standpoint about something that’s<br />
going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge<br />
of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion<br />
of decanting swathes of the populace into these amor-<br />
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phous nowheres, these liminal territories at the edge of<br />
the city is, I think, a nightmare prospect.”<br />
This, as London Orbital makes clear, is precisely<br />
what the city has always done with its undesirables<br />
and madmen. Sinclair – an altogether different kind of<br />
asylum seeker, but nonetheless wandering around, not<br />
knowing entirely where he is – says that he was amazed<br />
to find the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s<br />
hypothesis about the optimum distance that asylums<br />
should be placed away from the city – 20 miles – so<br />
palpably confirmed.<br />
“I was dazzled by the Holloway Sanitarium [now<br />
Virginia Park] – the ultimate heritage- asylum conversion,”<br />
he tells me. “The thing that disturbed me [about<br />
other asylum conversions] was the absence of memory<br />
– all traces of what had been there before had been cannily<br />
erased, including the name.”<br />
So should architects be learning more about the<br />
history of a site? “They should be made to go into the<br />
landscape to the site and then move outwards from it<br />
for a considerable distance and then to come in on it.<br />
Especially the big-name architects who are the worse<br />
perpetrators,” he says with a little glee. “They shouldn’t<br />
just place something that is simply site-specific to the<br />
person commissioning the building.”<br />
As you might expect of Sinclair, he’s unearthed some<br />
pretty fascinating nuggets. For example, the story of<br />
how the War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval<br />
BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and<br />
for Heathrow airport: “Emergency wartime powers<br />
were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial<br />
deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles<br />
from the centre of London.” And finding the grave of<br />
Hawksmoor in a field just off the motorway was, he<br />
says, “quite a shock – this sense of the centre drifting<br />
out as it becomes forgotten”.<br />
Were there any new buildings that he particularly<br />
admired? “I was very struck by the Siebel building by<br />
Runnymede Bridge in Egham. It just appeared out of<br />
nowhere between visits. It didn’t bristle with surveillance<br />
– most buildings were incredibly paranoid. It<br />
seemed transcendently strange – there was nobody<br />
around. It was sinisterly benign.”<br />
Sinclair’s poetic retains that characteristic samizdat<br />
quality of goods smuggled past the PR checkpoints,<br />
his prose always crackling with connectivity. Here<br />
he is on the Xerox building: “Uxbridge is made from<br />
Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with<br />
barbed wire.”<br />
One of the many treats of Sinclair’s excellent Lights<br />
Out For The Territory (of which London Orbital is<br />
a kind of sequel), is his visit to Jeffrey Archer and<br />
his penthouse at Alembic House. I wondered if he’d<br />
thought of returning to him at his new residence in<br />
Belmarsh prison in Thamesmead, south-east London?<br />
He laughs at the idea, but admits slightly wearily that<br />
“perhaps we’ve had a little too much of him already”.<br />
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As for these liminal areas, he’s already looking<br />
ahead. “One day, when the research and development<br />
has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be<br />
turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature … will<br />
be promoted and paraded.” How apt this convergence<br />
of Sinclair’s journey with London – to have returned to<br />
the beginning.<br />
[This article was originally written for the UK architectural<br />
magazine Building Design] �<br />
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Review [published January 2000]<br />
Michael Marshall Smith: Spares<br />
Antony Johnston<br />
They say never judge a book by its cover, but the sheer<br />
ubiquitousness of Spares (with its oh-so-cool spotvarnished,<br />
blurry-type cover) inclined me to think it<br />
was the sort of bestselling ‘new fiction’ which generally<br />
leaves me cold. Fortunately for me, a friend had<br />
already read it and liked it so much that she bought<br />
everyone a copy for Christmas. Am I glad she did.<br />
Jack Randall is an ex-soldier. Recovering from a<br />
military experiment which went horribly wrong (but is<br />
not detailed until the closing stages of the book, and<br />
even then not fully), Jack took a mundane police job<br />
in New Richmond, a grounded MegaMall – picture<br />
a flying cuboid city, five miles square. His wife and<br />
child are subsequently horribly murdered. This sends<br />
Jack into a paranoid psychotic episode which sees him<br />
eventually working as a maintenance man on a Spares<br />
Farm with only the local droid for company.<br />
Spares themselves are a logical but hideous concept –<br />
clones of those wealthy enough to afford them (the trend<br />
is for having your children cloned as ‘insurance’), grown<br />
and kept as very literal spare parts, to be hacked up and<br />
used as donors when said offspring has an accident.<br />
The moral quandary which Smith highlights, quite<br />
apart from the issue of whether or not the Spares should<br />
have rights as human beings, is the inherent lack of<br />
responsibility that comes with such a safety net. The<br />
rich kids are almost incapable of learning from their<br />
mistakes, as the consequences are never drastic. Lost<br />
both legs in a car accident? Hey, no praahblem – just<br />
chainsaw a couple off of one of your Spares (no anaesthetic<br />
required), stitch ‘em on, and within a week you’ll<br />
be zipping round at 200kph again.<br />
All of this is background – the book starts after all<br />
this, including Jack’s subsequent breakout from the<br />
Farm, has occurred. Luckily, with such a wealth of<br />
background plot to cover, Smith’s exposition is understated<br />
and conversational, a personal preference of<br />
mine. Rather than ham-fistedly inserting great wads of<br />
flashback and explanation, Smith only elaborates on<br />
background when relevant, and then in a fairly offhand,<br />
matter-of-fact manner. This is not an author who underestimates<br />
his audience’s ability to piece a story together<br />
from fragments, and this can only be a Good Thing.<br />
In addition to the problems encountered during his es-<br />
BUY Michael Marshall Smith books online from and<br />
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cape from the Farm, Jack also has demons from his military<br />
and police pasts to deal with. As the book progresses<br />
it becomes apparent the three issues are linked in some<br />
fashion, but the reasons are well-concealed and tension<br />
is maintained right to the bitter end. Just when you think<br />
you’ve been given the key to unlock the whole book,<br />
Smith reminds you of something else that still doesn’t fit<br />
and you find yourself back on the edge of your seat.<br />
Smith’s style owes a debt, I feel, to Jeff Noon, and<br />
I freely admit this is one of the reasons I enjoyed this<br />
book so much. It is of course possible the two have<br />
never met or even read one another, their styles simply<br />
developing independently along similar lines. But judging<br />
by the tone of Smith’s first novel Only Forward<br />
(an altogether more upbeat and ‘trad’ novel) my guess<br />
is that he picked up some Noon and realised what his<br />
style was missing – some Modern British Edge (no, I<br />
can’t believe I just said that either).<br />
Despite Spares’ unstated geographical location, it has<br />
a very American feel – told with a very British tone of<br />
voice. I suspect Smith was trying (and perhaps a little<br />
too hard) to make sure the book would be received well<br />
on both sides of the Atlantic. Brits are used to plots set<br />
in America anyway, and the American sense of hubris<br />
remains intact. This doesn’t do any harm, but it would<br />
have been nice to see another young British author<br />
actually setting the scene here in the UK.<br />
The only part of this book that disappoints is the end-<br />
ing. It’s just too damn happy, and not a little forced. A<br />
tragic ending – which the rest of the book certainly leads<br />
one to expect – would not only have made more sense,<br />
but also would have read better. The epilogue is short,<br />
and doesn’t completely ruin the book, but it is extremely<br />
hard to swallow given all that has gone before. To me<br />
it smacked a little of either editorial draconianism or<br />
authorly cowardice. Still, only a small niggle.<br />
So – $64,000 question – is it Cyberpunk? As always,<br />
that depends on your definition of the genre, and is<br />
another reason I compare Smith with Noon. There’s<br />
no actual common-or-garden ‘cyber’ as such, although<br />
there is plenty of NuTech, especially of a biomedical<br />
nature. There’s also a fair amount of horror, both<br />
body and psychological. Although there was only one<br />
passage which actually made me wince, it was such a<br />
blinding combination of these two ‘horror-types’ that<br />
I really don’t care if I never read it again. It’s etched<br />
firmly enough in my brain to not have to.<br />
But it’s the attitude that comes across most here, and<br />
Smith has a good handle on both the street-level, amoral<br />
survivalism of Cyberpunk and the art of telling a damn<br />
good story that makes the genre so inherently indefinable.<br />
So for what it’s worth, yes, it’s Cyberpunk. But<br />
that’s not important here. What is important is that this<br />
topical, headlong outburst is only Smith’s second novel.<br />
If by that we can assume he’s just getting started, I truly<br />
believe we have a great author in the clone vats. �<br />
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Review [published November 1999]<br />
Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us<br />
Antony Johnston<br />
One of Us. A powerful phrase – belonging, kinship,<br />
camaraderie. Familiar concepts, though this book deals<br />
with them in ways you may not expect.<br />
Initially our protagonist, Hap Thompson, seems anything<br />
but ‘One of Us’. An outsider, a loner with no life,<br />
an ex-wife, forced to live in exile from his hometown.<br />
The reader begins to think that perhaps Smith means<br />
‘Us’ in the more intimate, author-reader sense. Everyone<br />
can identify with the character who feels his life<br />
has been wasted, his best years are behind him and he<br />
will never again live as fully as he once did.<br />
Hap is a REMTemp, an occupation whose legalities<br />
are still being wrangled out in court. He receives other<br />
people’s dreams, so that they may sleep untroubled.<br />
The process leaves him tired but wealthy, though the<br />
grey legal aspect means he must move from town to<br />
town, trusting no-one. Nevertheless, Hap has little<br />
reason to complain. He knows he screwed his own<br />
life up, and this is the best-paying job he’s ever had.<br />
Mustn’t grumble.<br />
Until, that is, his boss ‘persuades’ him to move into<br />
another, even more dubious area – memory receival.<br />
And one particular memory contains a murder, committed<br />
by a woman who has now disappeared. The<br />
murder of a police lieutenant.<br />
The book starts, like all good thrillers, in the middle.<br />
It is only through lengthy but natural exposition that<br />
we realise what has befallen Hap, about a quarter of<br />
the way through the book. Though by that time, after<br />
having discovered he is also being pursued by what<br />
can best be described as Men In Black for reasons<br />
unknown, we are so snowed under with questions,<br />
concepts and plot twists that we have far more on our<br />
plate to worry about.<br />
Spares, Smith’s previous novel, was a similar ‘one<br />
man’s quest to find the truth’ affair, but to compare<br />
further would be unfair. What we have here is an altogether<br />
more mature work, with less desire to shock<br />
and more emphasis on keeping the reader turning the<br />
pages, which Smith does admirably. His previously<br />
shown talent for a good plot and deft character is<br />
shown to full potential here in a story that contains<br />
more twists than any given John Grisham novel has<br />
in its little finger. Metaphorically speaking.<br />
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Characters are equally well-handled. Hap is an eminently<br />
sympathetic man who we cannot help but feel for.<br />
Many of his internal dialogues and emotional outbursts<br />
will bring on sage nods and murmurs of “Yep. Know<br />
that feeling”. The supporting characters are crafted with<br />
similar skill, never crossing the line from archetype to<br />
stereotype. Not even the Amoral Head of an Evil Corp.<br />
So who is this for? In an effort to help Smith’s<br />
work reach the audience it deserves, One Of Us is<br />
very carefully described as a thriller, with barely any<br />
mention of the speculative elements. Even the jacket<br />
design is deliberately modern without appearing too<br />
‘niche’. For once, though, this isn’t unfair – speculative<br />
technology is there to benefit the plot, not viceversa.<br />
And to reach the (literal) revelation of the Men<br />
In Black’s real identity, such a massive and entirely<br />
different suspension of disbelief is necessary that the<br />
science fiction becomes almost ancillary. Yet another<br />
young British writer appears to have found a love for<br />
simply telling a cracking story instead of trying too<br />
hard to be clever. No bad thing.<br />
Will it work? It appears to have already done<br />
so – Smith has moved beyond the hard-core neo-<br />
Cyberpunk audience he initially attracted, and is now<br />
seen as a mainstream writer. It’s very hard to pin<br />
down exactly who will like this book besides a glib,<br />
‘Anyone who likes a good thriller,’ though that’s as<br />
much as I’ll commit to. Fans, if they can live with the<br />
shift of emphasis from speculation, will enjoy One Of<br />
Us for Smith’s impressive skills of character and plot<br />
twisting. Newcomers will simply enjoy it for what it<br />
is – a cracking read.<br />
And the ‘Us’ in question? It’s not who you think. I<br />
promise you that. �<br />
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Interview [published June 2000]<br />
Sonic Youth: Sonic Spice<br />
Andrew McCutchen meets Sonic Youth mainman and guitar torturer<br />
extraordinaire Thurston Moore<br />
“I moved to New York to fuck Patti Smith” writes<br />
Thurston Moore, going back, going way back to an<br />
epoch of rock history when Sid Vicious was at his<br />
most vicious, prowling the Village’s streets after<br />
Nancy’s brutal murder, when Lydia Lunch was just<br />
a “girl on the corner with a nose ring”, and when<br />
Kim Gordon was a pretty blond he hadn’t met yet.<br />
These, and other tasty details of the late 70s New York<br />
scene, are exposed by Moore in an endearingly naff<br />
little short story found on the internet titled ‘On the<br />
Loose’, which ends (gag) with the words; “…and that<br />
was when I first kissed Kim”.<br />
Adolescent prose aside, this brief fusion of flesh<br />
meant more than just two badly dressed kids getting it<br />
on in a seedy loft apartment. It meant that Moore would<br />
soon tattoo his upper left arm with the prophetic words,<br />
‘Sonic Life’, and the band we all know, and mostly<br />
love would soon follow. Neither Moore (thank god)<br />
nor I, however, have a Sonic Youth history lesson on<br />
the cards today, and we move quickly over the details<br />
to greener pastures.<br />
In short, Moore summarises for the record, they<br />
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and<br />
wrote a bunch of albums, most good, signed to a major,<br />
became a ‘brand name’, were slated as much as<br />
celebrated, but they survived, and they can still shake<br />
it, as demonstrated by their latest album NYC Ghosts<br />
And Flowers. And they’re really, really nice. Even<br />
Moore, who could understandably have an ill tempered<br />
stoat down his trousers about the way he’s been written<br />
up over the years, (NME described his Root tribute<br />
album as “…a snowman celebrating warm weather by<br />
commissioning a statue of himself made out of more<br />
snow”. Ouch!) is expectant of demeanour rather than<br />
defensive, gentle of temperament, rather than bitter and<br />
quietly erudite in a non-threatening, non-Radiohead<br />
kind of way. Would a true beret owning, deconstructarock<br />
svengali admit to loving the Spice Girls? You’ll<br />
find out. But let’s first take it back to the genesis.<br />
On a fundamental level, I challenge Moore, little has<br />
changed in Sonic Youth land over the last 20 years. He<br />
nods, and smiles.<br />
You still write songs about Patti Smith; “Yep”.<br />
(Check out the dissonant-licious ‘Patti Smith Math<br />
Scratch’ on Moore’s last solo album Psychic Hearts.)<br />
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You still aim to transcend the ‘usual’ with your standard<br />
rock format; “uh-huh”, and a guitar is still not just<br />
a guitar right? “Of course”.<br />
So, I push on encouraged by such a wonderful, and<br />
compliant beginning to the ‘difficult Thurston Moore<br />
interview’, overlooking Moore’s cruelly un-ironic<br />
streak: …and what has been your greatest ‘rock’n’roll<br />
moment’ of recent times?<br />
“Well, I was watching the Spice Girls movie” Moore<br />
recalls, turning unpredictable all of a sudden “and when<br />
they cover Gary Glitter’s ‘You Wanna Be In My Gang”<br />
I got goose-bumps. It was chilling. When they came<br />
out in those costumes with all the dancers I thought to<br />
myself, this is as great as the first time I saw Blondie at<br />
Max’s. This is as exciting as sitting behind Sid Vicious<br />
at CBGB’s right after he lost his mind. I could just see<br />
being an eight-year-old girl, and wanting to be that.”<br />
“At the same time, there was something freakish<br />
about it, and it struck me as this completely total rock<br />
thing. God bless them all, that’s what I say.<br />
You’ve often exalted music as a ‘magic’ medium of<br />
information, one which is often more than just the sum<br />
of it’s parts, does that apply to what happened between<br />
you and the Spice Girls, in that plane somewhere over<br />
the Atlantic?<br />
“Hmmm, yeah, it kind of relates to my attitude to<br />
music other people call ‘clichéd’ or ‘recycled’. In my<br />
eyes you don’t need to be so spiritually involved with<br />
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and<br />
music to be considered a valid musician in my eyes.<br />
Some of the most wonderful moments for me musically<br />
were machine made and plastic.”<br />
“You ask me about Matchbox 20, and bands like that,<br />
and I say what about Matchbox 20? I don’t know much<br />
about them, but they seem to me to exemplify a group<br />
of people getting off on the sudden rush of making<br />
rock’n’roll music, and I think that’s wonderful. Maybe<br />
I’m wrong, maybe they are something put together by<br />
a machine and then plugged in, I don’t know, but they<br />
don’t offend me.”<br />
Surely corporate punk bands like the Offspring who<br />
resort to plagiarising themselves to make hits must offend<br />
you…<br />
“It does, they do, and you know what? Forget the<br />
Spice Girls, it’s American Alternative radio stations,<br />
not mainstream rock and pop stations that bug me.<br />
We’re considered, in a broader sense, ‘Alternative’,<br />
but don’t expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and<br />
Offspring. Those bands cater to people their age, and<br />
we’re hardly of that generation. We’re parent rock in<br />
a way. Musically we’re a lot more extreme and radical<br />
than a lot of those bands that seem to cater to the safest<br />
aspect of Nirvana the verse/chorus/verse thing, which I<br />
always found kind of disappointing.”<br />
“That was an aspect of Nirvana’s music that Kurt told<br />
me he wanted to get away from. So I find it discouraging<br />
to see all these bands taking this really simplistic<br />
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element from Nirvana and employing it to their own<br />
success. I don’t really care. I’m not bitter about it,” he<br />
laughs sensing the heat of his own diatribe, “but it’s<br />
not very interesting to me. That’s what they’re calling<br />
punk rock, but to me it’s as prevalent and as annoying<br />
as disco was in the 70s. There’s this whole underground<br />
of lo-fi cassette-label musicians who are really good.<br />
So I like that stuff, but those kids think of us as being<br />
totally over the hill.”<br />
And also, while Offspring rant about “flys” and<br />
“white guys”, Sonic Youth are singing free-style lyrics<br />
in a stream of consciousness winding well away from<br />
the mainstream. Is it true that, when you’re working<br />
with an ambiguous message and the masses, you gotta<br />
keep ‘em separated?<br />
“Not always. Our ‘big hit singles’ gave nothing<br />
away, but their popularity probably had more to do<br />
with the music, and the fact that they were ‘weird’<br />
sounding by contrast. Every now and again, the<br />
‘alternative culture’, by way of momentum swing, is<br />
cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than<br />
how it should be like the mainstream popular music.”<br />
“Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic<br />
Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all<br />
had a lot of interest and involvement with expression<br />
through words, or poetry or whatever. I hardly think<br />
we’re the only people writing lyrics with that frame of<br />
reference or that frame of mind, but our fusion of styles<br />
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and<br />
in this framework is interesting.<br />
“Most people can’t tell now who wrote what, and to<br />
make it more confusing, I wrote some lyrics that Kim<br />
sings, and vice versa. I like that blurring of identities<br />
within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that<br />
can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.”<br />
How do you respond to detractors when they criticize<br />
your lyrics as “staggeringly pretentious, and meaningless<br />
psycho-babble” (NME)?<br />
“A lot of the lyrical ideas [that run] through Sonic<br />
Youth and my solo record [Psychic Hearts] do have<br />
a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat<br />
abstracted,” Moore says, unfazed by the quote. “Especially<br />
when you’re writing them. They’re written<br />
down with just the poetic sense. They have some kind<br />
of meaning to you because it’s emotional, so it’s like<br />
trying to translate that emotion literally beyond the<br />
poetic sense of the words. You don’t want to analyze it<br />
so much because I just like the abstract nature of it, that<br />
it can take on any shape that you might feel it should<br />
take on.”<br />
You speak a great deal of poetry and it’s place in<br />
music, I’ve often wondered to myself if Sonic Youth’s<br />
album title, A Thousand Leaves isn’t a coy play on<br />
Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass?<br />
“You know, you’re right, and the first person to<br />
pick that up. (<strong>Spike</strong> blushes) I didn’t want to draw<br />
attention myself to the reference, but yes, that indi-<br />
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visible notion of art and nature is what I was getting<br />
at. It makes me happy when the slightest intentions<br />
can be picked up. Whitman is so amazing don’t you<br />
think? (<strong>Spike</strong> nods) There’s a lot of his ‘New England<br />
Mysticism’ that we aspire to. The way his words<br />
seem to breathe, and have colour, and shape, and<br />
texture. As a member of Sonic Youth, and as a solo<br />
performer I’m also playing with the same type of<br />
evocation. The same way he improvises with images<br />
and words, we improvise with sounds and notes.”<br />
I’ve heard, and seen you spiral upwards, towards<br />
these trance like improvisational jams live the<br />
last couple of times, is that Whitman inspiration<br />
pushing you closer to this almost structure-less musical<br />
energy?<br />
“What I’m aiming for all the time when we play live<br />
is a balance between the high energy of loud music,<br />
and a calm meditational energy you sometimes find at<br />
its core. Recording tends to restrict too much experimentation,<br />
‘cause when you’re making a record it’s a<br />
part of you, for that time it’s your whole fabric. But<br />
when we tour the songs, they tend to get more and more<br />
expansive, and actually evolve over time until they are<br />
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and<br />
something quite different. For this reason I never go<br />
back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill,<br />
instead of listening to our CDs, comes when the balance<br />
I was talking about can be attained. Everyone in<br />
the room can have a shared, communal rock experience.<br />
I’m only too happy to be the conduit of it, after all<br />
rock’n’roll saved my soul.”<br />
Thurston’s ‘Throbbing’ 13:<br />
Funhouse – Stooges<br />
White Light / White Heat – Velvet Underground<br />
Marquee Moon – Television<br />
Blank Generation – Richard Hell & the Voidoids<br />
Ramones – Ramones<br />
Radio Ethiopia – Patti Smith<br />
Damaged – Black Flag<br />
Bug – Dinosaur Jr<br />
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back –<br />
Public Enemy<br />
Impressions – John Coltrane<br />
Ege Bamyasi – Can<br />
Bleach – Nirvana<br />
Killer – Alice Cooper �<br />
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Interview [published September 2005]<br />
Ralph Steadman: Gonzo: The Art<br />
Craig Johnson talks to Ralph Steadman about the death of Hunter S. Thompson,<br />
paranoid flashes and the “terrible betrayal” of modern politics<br />
“One of the reasons he’s fun to work with – he has a<br />
really fine, raw sense of horror. By way of exaggeration<br />
and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is<br />
not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very<br />
darkly.” – Dr Hunter S. Thompson, June 1974<br />
One of the many facets that sets Hunter S. Thompson’s<br />
70s works apart from other forms of classic<br />
American literature are the growling, snarling, punchbetween-the-eyeballs<br />
illustrations of Ralph Steadman.<br />
Roaring from the pages, his pictures visualise the horrors<br />
of corporate America, ripping the surface to reveal<br />
the political greed and other grotesqueries that contort<br />
and degrade the human forms within his pictures. With<br />
his method of isolating and focusing on a physical idiosyncrasy,<br />
he explodes his subjects, capturing a hidden<br />
truth that was hitherto unseen; it’s as if Steadman sees<br />
with the naked eye of a schizophrenic.<br />
Bloodsucking business men, venal politicians, dollar<br />
drugged gamblers, archetypal beholders of negation<br />
and power transmogrified into grinning reptilia,<br />
squarking sharp-beaked birds, gorgons of sheer inhuman<br />
greed. In the ferocious stroke of a few simple lines<br />
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he trans-atlantically expresses all the negative facets of<br />
the human condition to a terrifyingly hilarious degree.<br />
If we think of the old metaphor of the artist’s pen being<br />
a sword, then Steadman’s scribe is nuclear.<br />
Below is an almost verbatim conversation I conducted<br />
with Mr Steadman via a phonebox on Kings<br />
Street in Manchester city centre. His rumbling Welsh<br />
accent was full of charisma, his personality very accommodating,<br />
meditatory, thoughtful and warm. When<br />
talking about the death of Hunter S. Thompson a real<br />
sense of bereavement -the only sort that can be when<br />
a real friend passes by- was prevalent in the tone in<br />
which he talked about him. Amidst rush hour traffic<br />
and passing packets of suit-encased, office imprisoned<br />
flesh, the conversation went thus…<br />
You must have been gutted when Hunter S.<br />
Thopmson committed suicide.<br />
I always knew he’d do it, but I didn’t know when.<br />
It was always the case of I always knew that one day<br />
I would take this journey but I did not know yesterday<br />
that it would be today. That’s how it felt and it was<br />
way too soon. So upset about it. And I knew he’d do<br />
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it but I wished he’d just shot his dick off. Something<br />
that would give him pain but have him talk about it,<br />
because instead of shooting away the one exceptionally<br />
wonderful piece of machinery in his body: his brain!<br />
The centre of all his being. The centre of his genius<br />
really. And he is a genius, no doubt about it as for going<br />
down as a great, great journalist writer. He didn’t write<br />
novels, he took William Faulkner’s advice about fact<br />
being far more stranger than fiction.<br />
I mean I just wonder why he did it? You know if only<br />
I could have talked to him. Once! Just to say ‘What the<br />
fuck! Don’t be daft, Hunter, for fuck’s sake!’ That’s why<br />
I thought if he’d shot himself in the foot or something<br />
… But, you see, if you can imagine: in a wheelchair, a<br />
man of action, a man who always done exactly what<br />
he wanted to do, suddenly realising he has no control<br />
anymore and he’s gonna end up in a home with a lot of<br />
old people scared him. It’s that thing: ‘In the end it was<br />
no use, he died on his knees in a barnyard with all the<br />
others watching.’ It’s that indignity he couldn’t stand<br />
the idea of.<br />
What was he like as a character?<br />
He could be mean. He didn’t like sloppy drunks,<br />
even though he imbibed so much stuff he was just on<br />
another sort of level I suppose. I don’t know how he<br />
carried on like he did. Like he said: ‘I hate to advocate<br />
drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but<br />
they’ve always worked for me.’ That’s the well known<br />
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phrase. He wasn’t no pusher. But he couldn’t stand<br />
sloppy drunks and he wasn’t a sloppy drunk cos he<br />
never seemed drunk.<br />
Did he ever frighten you?<br />
Yes, many times in the car. I wrote a song with him<br />
once called ‘Weird And Twisted Nights.’ One of the<br />
lines is “Drive your stake through a darkened heart /<br />
In a red Mercedes Benz / The blackness hides a speeding<br />
trap / The savage beast pretends.” We’d driven …<br />
And this was another one of his tricks, he used to like<br />
to drive at night with his lights out because the police<br />
wouldn’t see him, a starlit night – “The scar heals<br />
black…” There’s a record of it you can get from EMI,<br />
it’s called I Like It (1999).<br />
What is Gonzo, Ralph?<br />
Gonzo is a strange manifestation of one’s intentions<br />
to go somewhere to cover it (the story) euphemistically<br />
as a journalist and yet end up being part of the story,<br />
not part of the story but become the story. You make<br />
one, you have to generate some sort of tension, some<br />
oddness, some unexpected freaky thing that makes it<br />
go, ‘Yes that’s it!’<br />
The other thing is there is no accreditation for gonzo<br />
journalists, so you go there as an outsider. Like we<br />
went to the Miami Convention in the 70s and we had<br />
to get inside without accreditation, that was part of<br />
the target. It’s to be a rock’n’roll journalist. What’s a<br />
gonzotic frenzy? Well it’s me in the throes of an ink<br />
491<br />
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splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that<br />
particular time.<br />
I like the gonzo logo that HST used for his Sheriff<br />
of Aspen campaign.<br />
That red fist – by the way it’s got 2 thumbs and 4<br />
fingers. Have you noticed? Hunter always said to me<br />
‘2 thumbs Ralph, don’t forget 2 thumbs!’ It’s the idea<br />
of a freak isn’t it? Anyone with 2 thumbs is obviously<br />
a freak or a monkey of some kind, a gorilla. And the<br />
flower in the middle of the palm, the green flower is a<br />
peyote drug plant.<br />
Have you taken much peyote in your time?<br />
No. Hunter was the one who enjoyed all that shit.<br />
I’ve taken coca leaves, I’m very fond of coca leaves<br />
but I can’t get them in England. I tried them in Peru,<br />
between Cusco and Machu Picchu is a little stop off on<br />
the train called Olan Taytambo, and there they sell it<br />
to you with wood ash and you roll the leaf around the<br />
wood ash like rolling a joint or a cigarette. You put it<br />
down the side of your gums and just leave it there and<br />
you don’t suffer from mountain sickness, anxiety or<br />
anything at such a height which is 13-15,000 feet above<br />
sea level. I’ve got a wonderful book which is probably<br />
100 years old called The Divine Plant of the Inca (W.<br />
Golden Mortimer, 1901) and it’s all about the coca leaf.<br />
Tell me about when you ended up screwed and<br />
shoeless in New York City on one of your first assignments<br />
with HST…<br />
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and<br />
‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved’<br />
was how it all started, the meeting with Hunter for the<br />
first time … There’s innocence and experience meeting<br />
for the first time! The shoeless episode was the second<br />
trip where we went to Rhode Island to cover the Americas<br />
Cup and I was shoeless and luckily I’d kept my<br />
ticket and passport home.<br />
I had my ticket back to New York from Rhode Island<br />
(Boston Airport) and then I got a cab and got to 42nd<br />
Street where the bar was thankfully still open, the<br />
magazine (Scanlan’s Monthly) had closed and I was in<br />
a terrible state and coming down from psilocybin. A<br />
drug trip, which was the one and only trip I ever had<br />
and that was when I said, ‘Right, drugs are out entirely.’<br />
I enjoy a drink. And I was palpitating, so I borrowed a<br />
quarter from the Irish barman, cos I had no money in<br />
New York, nothing in a hell of a city! I phoned a lady<br />
friend called Vendetoce who I knew from the Bologna<br />
Bookfair. I made the call and she said “I’m just going<br />
out.’ I said ‘Please, don’t go out, stay there till I get<br />
there, please!’ She could tell I was losing my voice and<br />
she did stay in.<br />
When I arrived I was purple with palpitations and<br />
she got a doctor right away and he gave me a librium<br />
injection that put me out for about 24 hours. The irony<br />
of all this was that before this happened I put her in<br />
hospital with a fracture in Italy when we went into a<br />
ditch via my car. Imagine how mad she was to speak<br />
492<br />
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to me again! Bless her heart. Anyway that proves there<br />
are good people in the world…<br />
HST once described you as having a paranoid<br />
flash within your character. What did he mean?<br />
A sudden desperate fear that everything something<br />
terrible is about to happen. Because I always thought<br />
that my heart would stop beating just like that. Bang!<br />
Why? My question was: ‘Why should it keep beating?’<br />
It’s an odd question but at the same time that’s a paranoid<br />
flash. Why take it all for granted for Christ’s sake?<br />
So I never did, and then of course I kept thinking about<br />
the fucking thing all the time you know and now I’ve<br />
come to terms with it. Touch wood and touch wood<br />
now even. He (HST) gave me a lovely head, which<br />
I’ve got on a cord around my neck. Sort of a strange<br />
primitive face and a long thin piece of what looks like<br />
clay or stone. He said: ‘Wear this Ralph, it’ll ward off<br />
evil spirits.’<br />
Do you see an essential beauty or aesthetic in the<br />
grotesque?<br />
There’s an aesthetic even in watching an operation,<br />
there’s an aesthetic in putrefaction. I mean to watch<br />
how things breakdown and there’s a kind of aesthetic<br />
beauty in that. But it doesn’t mean to say you’re being<br />
sick, you do see that but you’d rather not watch<br />
it. It’s not ugliness, it’s just a rather unpleasant beauty,<br />
because there’s nothing ugly in nature … I’d love to<br />
be a fly on the wall or to be a fly on their piece of shit!<br />
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Hahahaha!!!!<br />
How do you get those ideas when you transform<br />
people in such frightening animal forms?<br />
I see if I can make human beings look like reptiles. I<br />
see if I can make them look like hideous creatures that<br />
would not come out of anything but perhaps … turn<br />
a human inside out … take a human being, supposing<br />
you can sort of like a rubber glove, turn him inside<br />
out and then look at it. That’s how it’s really like.<br />
When I’ve done a drawing like that and I’ve done a<br />
few, I tried to make the person look as though they’re<br />
completely turned inside out and I called him ‘The<br />
Perfect Gentleman.’<br />
What’s your idea of a living hell?<br />
Not really being the slightest bit interested in what<br />
it is I’ve done all my life. Not wanting to do it and<br />
then not knowing what to do next. That would be a<br />
living hell. I must have a feeling that: ‘Oooh I’m really<br />
excited about this!’ The most depressed times I<br />
have is when I just don’t wanna do anything. A living<br />
hell is not being creative, being utterly devoid of any<br />
creative impulse whatsoever.<br />
Does the new political scene make you shudder<br />
more than it ever did?<br />
I can’t be very interested in what are no more than<br />
PR men. That’s all they are – PR men for a policy, or<br />
a new sort of: ‘Oh why don’t we try it this way?’ As<br />
Hunter said of George Bush: he was a message boy for<br />
493<br />
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the big boys, the corporate interests in America. That’s<br />
all he is. And that’s what’s happening over here, we’ve<br />
got spin doctors, people that manipulate everything and<br />
everything is manipulation. It’s not winning through a<br />
feeling one has about a person. ‘Wow! I wanna follow<br />
that person. I’d vote for him.’ Not because you’ve<br />
heard something spun about him, but because he feels<br />
something. Like you do about Nelson Mandela, you<br />
can’t help feeling the guy’s a good man. It’s passion,<br />
yeah! Something wonderful. Maybe Tony Blair started<br />
out like that, when we suddenly thought: ‘Wow at last,<br />
a fresh air politician!’ The man was clean and then he<br />
had his dour man, but nevertheless honest dour Scotsman,<br />
Gordon Brown.<br />
What are the elements in society that piss you<br />
right off?<br />
I’m afraid of the ethos of reality TV which pisses me<br />
off. It’s not reality television, it’s completely phoney,<br />
things that are made up, phoney! It’s not even fiction,<br />
it’s contrived bullshit! And celebs that have done nothing<br />
and they have to be celebs and they have to go on<br />
television. It’s a terribly sad culture to develop or to<br />
pursue and take it further and all in the name of the<br />
god Mammon. There’s nothing else in it and I just wish<br />
there were. And I wish that kids weren’t being fed it<br />
all the time. The kids are not brought up to have minds<br />
of their own as individuals. Some do, some break out.<br />
Maybe it’s always been like that but in a different form?<br />
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and<br />
We’ll probably get by you know, but I think we might<br />
not be able to overcome what which is we’re doing to<br />
the planet. You see, nature will do exactly what it must,<br />
and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even<br />
its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a<br />
way, we will go. No doubt about it. We seem to think<br />
we have some control over this planet. I once saw a<br />
lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving<br />
south, which of course will affect the atmosphere<br />
and us generally, and it’ll happen more and more. And<br />
as the South Pole starts to melt! We were down in<br />
Patagonia in December and it was such a wonderful<br />
wilderness, just across the water was the Antarctica<br />
and I felt: ‘What an extraordinary thing and what puny<br />
pieces of nothing we are!’ I’ve just been doing a series<br />
of paintings of that area. Look, all in all I’m trying to<br />
be an artist, the fact that I was a gonzo journalist-artist<br />
of a type, met Hunter Thompson and went that way.<br />
That happened. I can’t do anything about that, I’m glad<br />
it happened. It was like hitting a bullseye first time in<br />
America. But I wonder what I’d have done if I hadn’t<br />
met him?<br />
Was is you that did that famous caricature of<br />
Mick Jagger with those over inflated lips or was that<br />
Gerald Scarfe?<br />
Mind you don’t get me mixed up with Gerald Scarfe!<br />
I’ve done the Rolling Stones eating each other. Don’t<br />
worry, because people always say: ‘Ooh I love your<br />
494<br />
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Pink Floyd.’ No I didn’t do that! Gerry came up to me<br />
and said: ‘Can you help me? I like your line.’ And so<br />
I said: ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my art teacher?<br />
Leslie Richardson.’ Whose daughter Lucy by the way,<br />
is Lucy from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. They<br />
lived in Weybridge and that’s where John Lennon used<br />
to go into their antique shop with Julian. And John used<br />
to come in there and Lucy was always playing with<br />
lovely old bits of antique jewellery, they were sparkling<br />
things and Julian liked them. And that’s when he<br />
thought ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, that lovely<br />
song. It doesn’t detract that LSD became part of it.<br />
She was only 47 and I went to her funeral about four<br />
months ago because she died, and her mother Lesley<br />
said a really nice positive thing to say: ‘She had a good<br />
life. I couldn’t stop her dying…’ You know but … She<br />
was in film, she worked on all sorts of things, on Lord<br />
Of The Rings and was doing very well. A lovely lady.<br />
And everyone had to drink pink champagne at her<br />
funeral. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was played<br />
in the church, it was lovely.<br />
What sort of music have you been into?<br />
The Grateful Dead of course. I loved Eric Clapton.<br />
And Chet Baker the trumpet player. And I loved<br />
Dvorak and loved listening to William Burroughs and<br />
Allen Ginsberg reading to music. And I’ll even listen<br />
to Gyorgy Legeti. I’ll tell you what he wrote was the<br />
theme for 2001. He was a modern composer who then<br />
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and<br />
just went off into all sorts of weird stuff.<br />
I was thinking of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrustra’ but<br />
that was Strauss. You like Nietzsche don’t you?<br />
Yeah I do. There’s another guy called Max Stirner<br />
who wrote some very radical things about politics.<br />
He wrote a book called The Ego And Its Own. I don’t<br />
know whether I can find it here … [Sounds of shuffling<br />
through papers] … Yes he’s German. The Ego And Its<br />
Own, Max Stirner:<br />
Question: What does man believe in?<br />
Answer: I believe in myself, the answer of the common<br />
soldier.<br />
Question: What is the principal of the self-concious<br />
egotist?<br />
Answer: Change the question to who instead of what<br />
and name the individual. Man is the horizon or zero of<br />
my existence as an individual. Over that I rise as I can,<br />
at least I am something more than man in general. A<br />
somebody rather than a nobody.<br />
Stirner dispels morbid subjection and recognise each<br />
one who knows and feels himself as his own property,<br />
to be neither humble nor be fobbed but henceforth sure<br />
footed and level headed. A mist of this body who has a<br />
character and good pleasure of his/her own, just as he<br />
has of his/her own.<br />
This is not transcendental generality. This is the<br />
transitory ego of flesh and blood. You and I cannot be<br />
495<br />
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reasoned into one, we are separate beings, two separate<br />
egos. It is important to be a self-concious ego in a self-<br />
conscious self-willed person. This is not self-obsession.<br />
Those who pretend selflessness are constantly acting<br />
from self-interested motives but clothing them in various<br />
guises. Watch those people closely in the light of<br />
Stirner’s teaching and they appear to be hypocrites, full<br />
of good moral and religious plans of which self-interest<br />
is at the end and the bottom, but they are not aware of<br />
this. That this is more than coincidence. In Stirner we<br />
have the political development of egotism, to the dissolution<br />
of the state. The union of free men is clear and<br />
pronounced…<br />
Is that boring the shit out of you? Hahahahaha!!!!!<br />
Just that whole thing gets to me because it is about<br />
self and yet you’re not being selfish. You care about<br />
people. But you want people to be straightforward<br />
and honest in reply, if they can help you or you can<br />
help them. Surely that’s better! That’s community,<br />
that what we’re afraid of doing and we’re killing it.<br />
You know, we’re really destroying ourselves because<br />
we’re really making the motivating force of anything<br />
we do selfish. Really acquisitive in a way that’s really<br />
not the point of it.<br />
If there was one book that you could now illustrate,<br />
what would it be?<br />
I think it’s gotta be Rabelais’ Gargantua And Pan-<br />
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and<br />
degruel, about the big baby creature. It’s a tough one.<br />
I tell you what I’ve just illustrated: Fahrenheit 451,<br />
which is the temperature at which books burn, and Ray<br />
Bradbury wrote the book 50 years ago, (he’s still alive),<br />
and together that’s what I illustrated for him. When I’d<br />
done it, he said: ‘You’ve brought my book into the 21st<br />
century. Thank you’. Which is the nicest thing to say.<br />
The book is as important as Nineteen Eighty Four<br />
and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment,<br />
because it’s about a fire brigade burning books. So that<br />
they try and stamp out ideas and a group of people get<br />
together and each of them take it upon themselves to<br />
learn by heart one book before they get burnt. It’s really<br />
worth a read. I’d say get the book but you can’t at<br />
the moment because there’s only 451 copies, a limited<br />
edition. But I’m sure Simon & Schuster or someone’ll<br />
do it. He wrote another wonderful book called The Illustrated<br />
Man. To write Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury<br />
hired a typewriter and a room for 38 cents a day and<br />
he wrote it in 9 days. Try and read the book cos it’s<br />
kinda interesting, a definite must to read because of the<br />
implications of burning every book in the world.<br />
You worked on Private Eye didn’t you?<br />
I did in the 1960s. That was when I got involved<br />
firstly with Punch, but they weren’t really interested in<br />
social comment, they wanted jokes. And I went to Private<br />
Eye with a joke called ‘Plastic People’ and Private<br />
Eye bought it for 5 pounds and said: ‘More power to<br />
496<br />
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your elbow!’ And they published it with a double-page<br />
spread in issue number 11. That was when Willie Rushden<br />
was there, Paul Foot, all those sort of people. Do<br />
you know I’m frightened that most of them are dead.<br />
Willie’s dead, Paul Foot died. I think it’s something to<br />
do with dying, I don’t know what it is? [Goes introspective<br />
and semi-silent for a second or two] He was a good<br />
journalist Paul Foot, very strong left-wing old Labour<br />
guy. But never mind, there’s nothing wrong with that,<br />
he believed in something!<br />
That’s what’s wrong with them today, they don’t<br />
really believe in anything, they’re paying lip service<br />
to something. And that’s not belief but something<br />
entirely different. Ad-men is what they are absolutely,<br />
advertising a product. ‘We’re selling you this, it’s<br />
called New Labour!’ Or bright new Conservatives<br />
[chuckles], I don’t know what they are. People I don’t<br />
know hahahaha!!!<br />
Didn’t that style over substance politics start in<br />
Nixon’s time or even Kennedy’s?<br />
The thing about Nixon was that he really believed<br />
… He was just venal. He didn’t realise how evil he<br />
was. I think he was a genuine politician but with<br />
a remit of his own. A huge, deep belief in his own<br />
fabulous qualities. His dark scowling face made him<br />
a bogeyman. For a caricaturist he’s a … a gift! I was<br />
able to do all sorts of things with him. The light at<br />
the end of the tunnel. Offering cyanide pills to Spiro<br />
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and<br />
Agnew his Vice-President, and his was in the stocks<br />
being offered pills by Nixon. Who was always<br />
dressed in black. He was wonderful to draw. That’s<br />
when I had my best times in political cartooning.<br />
It became something when we all suddenly felt: ‘This<br />
isn’t about domestic things, this is about life and death!<br />
Our lives are being fucked around!’ Used to anyone’s<br />
ends, particularly corporate power with Enron and the<br />
rest. It was the ‘respectable’ companies in Nixon’s time,<br />
who became monsters as time went by, and they ran<br />
politics and they still do and Bush is merely the bagman,<br />
the messenger boy for the dark players. I’m not into<br />
conspiracy theories, but I think they went into Baghdad<br />
for all sorts of reasons which are not made clear. And<br />
the way they use the word: ‘Terrorist … Terrorist …<br />
Terrorist!’ That’s become a mantra or even a trigger for<br />
fear. Mention the word ‘Terrorist!’ in George Bush’s<br />
voice and it’s something else. We can see through it but<br />
we can’t do anything about it!<br />
You see that’s what I think is such a terrible, terrible<br />
betrayal, the trust that people have in government.<br />
The betrayal of people’s good will, good trust that<br />
things are being done for the best and they actually<br />
ARE being done for the best. Perhaps. But people<br />
betray that and let people down and cheat them. To me<br />
that almost fits into the same category as crime and<br />
torture. One of those unforgivable crimes that torture<br />
is for me…”<br />
497<br />
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The sound of exasperation and anger in Ralph’s<br />
voice was genuine, a real rage about the dubious world<br />
order of our times. Whatever his age, this guy still has<br />
the growling edge and essential punch that makes him<br />
the greatest caricaturist of the modern era. We tied up<br />
our conversation with talks about wine, the fact that<br />
the British government wanted to eradicate the use<br />
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of the Welsh language, polite regrets that we hadn’t<br />
conversed over a pint and an imploration that I follow<br />
and woo a woman who had mistakenly opened the<br />
door to the phone-box; sagacious sounds drowned out<br />
by passing road sweeps tidying the days litter from<br />
the floor of Manchester’s premier street of designer<br />
shops and parasitical employment agencies. �<br />
498<br />
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Review [published April 2006]<br />
Suicide: David Nobakht: No Compromise<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David<br />
Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide.<br />
I would have loved to have written this book. Very<br />
much a band biography rather than a personal history<br />
of Suicide’s two members, Alan Vega and Martin Rev,<br />
Nobakht assembles a wealth of material that traces<br />
Suicide’s genesis. From the first tinkerings with primitive<br />
electronics in the early 1970s, endless confrontational,<br />
blood-smeared gigs, through to the release of<br />
their seminal self-titled debut album – “up there with<br />
the first Stooges or Velvet Underground album” – the<br />
extreme reaction they provoked touring with The Clash<br />
at the height of punk in the UK (one night someone<br />
threw an axe at the stage. A fucking axe!), the involvement<br />
of Ric Osacek from The Cars who spent a good<br />
chunk of his own popstar earnings on them, through<br />
to their gradual acceptance during the 1990s and their<br />
triumphant string of gigs that they’ve been playing<br />
since 1997 to an increasingly enamoured audience –<br />
Nobakht covers it all, and it’s one of the strangest and<br />
most fascinating pop history stories I’ve read.<br />
Over 30 years, Suicide have not simply survived,<br />
BUY Suicide music online from and<br />
they’ve thrived, and now they are getting as much acclaim<br />
as they used to get abuse. It’s just as well, given<br />
that both Rev and Vega must be getting on towards 60<br />
now – and having seen them live twice at London’s<br />
Garage, it’s evident that age won’t stop them from<br />
generating some of the most beautiful and vicious<br />
noise you can ever hope to hear. For all their supposed<br />
influence on industrial music, Suicide have an intense<br />
warmth and humanity to their music – even when<br />
they’re sonically scaring the crap out of you – which<br />
is wholly absent from the more po-faced knobtwiddlers<br />
that came after them. Suicide are still as vital<br />
as ever within an increasingly moribund music scene,<br />
still outside it even as they become accepted and assimilated<br />
into it.<br />
What’s interesting from Nobakht’s book is how<br />
aware of their own position in pop history Vega and<br />
Rev are – much of the book is written in their own<br />
words, and they are reluctant rock stars. Clearly they’re<br />
quite thrilled at finally getting some recognition and<br />
earning some money to support themselves – because<br />
despite being hugely influential, no one actually bought<br />
499<br />
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their records – but equally, after 30 years of scraping<br />
together enough money to get on to the next album,<br />
their new success only comes from doggedly sticking<br />
to what they wanted to do. At one point, Vega talks<br />
quite poignantly about his 1980s solo career, where he<br />
became huge in France of all places, had a major label<br />
deal with Elektra – and then suddenly got dropped. He<br />
admits it felt really painful to be kicked off the label<br />
after struggling so long to get paid anything for making<br />
music – but also reckons it was for the best. It’s not<br />
often you hear a musician openly admit he misses the<br />
money that a major label brings.<br />
Nobakht does a sterling job of chronicling Suicide’s<br />
rise over 30 years with a cast of thousands describing<br />
what a huge impact listening to or seeing the band had<br />
on them – Marc Almond, Henry Rollins, Moby, Michael<br />
Stipe, Bono (eh?) – among many others. You’re left in<br />
no doubt about the huge impact they had. There’s the<br />
received wisdom that the first Velvets album sold very<br />
badly, but that everyone who bought a copy started a<br />
band – and Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain<br />
says as much about the first Suicide album. People<br />
like Marc Almond say it was the second, more heavily<br />
produced and disco-tinged Suicide album that actually<br />
laid the blueprint for many of the one keyboardist, one<br />
singer synth bands that were to follow – either way,<br />
neither album had much success at the time of their<br />
release. Either way, while Suicide’s records are great,<br />
BUY Suicide music online from and<br />
they simply don’t capture the sheer euphoria of what<br />
they do live.<br />
Beyond Suicide themselves, No Compromise provides<br />
an evocative description of decaying 70s New<br />
York and the emerging punk scene around Max’s and<br />
CBGB’s, mixed up with the artist lofts where Vega and<br />
Rev first hung out and played their first tentative gigs<br />
alongside the likes of the New York Dolls. If Vega and<br />
Rev seem like New York clichés at times – summoning<br />
up death, darkness, lust and disgust, all the usual motifs<br />
of that city’s music – it’s because they were the ones<br />
helping create that now-overused vocabulary to begin<br />
with. And, as several people point out in the course<br />
of the book, others may throw the same shapes or try<br />
to adopt the same postures, but very few get near the<br />
intelligence that radiates from Suicide’s own sardonic,<br />
sonic howl.<br />
Nobakht himself stays pretty much out of the text<br />
– he doesn’t really talk about Suicide’s own impact<br />
on his own life or the process of writing the book – it<br />
would have been interesting to see a more personal<br />
slant at times and some ‘behind the scenes’ comments<br />
on talking to so many pop stars about Suicide’s influence<br />
on themselves. Likewise, the personal lives of<br />
Alan Vega and Martin Rev remain firmly out of the<br />
spotlight, which is both good and bad – reading the<br />
book, you do develop a certain affection for them both<br />
and it naturally leads you to want to know more of their<br />
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traditional biographical details. On the other hand,<br />
maybe it’s just better to preserve the mystique. On a<br />
pedantic note, I bristled at the one word mention of The<br />
Sisterhood, a side project from The Sisters Of Mercy<br />
on which Vega guested, as I would have loved to have<br />
heard more about how that was recorded. The Sisters<br />
were huge fans of Suicide, regularly covering ‘Ghost<br />
Rider’ as a set closer when they played live.<br />
Nobakht’s book is definitely an essential for<br />
Suicide fans – it’s perhaps a little too reverential,<br />
but then, Suicide deserve a bit of reverence after all<br />
the shit they’ve been through. (Although there is a<br />
hilarious moment when one person describes seeing<br />
Suicide as “One guy playing a crappy Farfisa badly<br />
and another guy hitting himself with a microphone<br />
and falling down a lot”). Vega and Rev prove to be<br />
fascinating interviewees, unafraid to try and grasp<br />
for the big ideas when talking about their sound but<br />
not taking themselves too seriously either. Their<br />
self-awareness of their place in musical history, and<br />
BUY Suicide music online from and<br />
their depictions of what came before them and after<br />
them, makes for a unique perspective on how music<br />
has changed from doo-wop to rock’n’roll to punk.<br />
More importantly, though, No Compromise is not<br />
an eulogy for a band that was great once but is now<br />
just playing the circuit cashing in on their reputation<br />
– what’s life affirming about Suicide is that they are a<br />
band who are still going strong, still experimenting, still<br />
playing. (See a Suicide gig and the only time you might<br />
actually recognise a song is during the encore). While<br />
the audience has changed and become a lot less hostile,<br />
Suicide themselves continue doing just what they want.<br />
True, they still don’t sell many albums, but royalties for<br />
covers of their songs appearing on soundtracks for The<br />
Crow and The Sopranos have apparently earned them<br />
more cash than their entire 30-year career of record<br />
sales. That such unexpected luck should befall Suicide<br />
is a skewed vindication of both their influence and their<br />
sound – 30 years old, rooted in the past, playing in the<br />
present, still sounding like the future. �<br />
501<br />
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Interview [published February 2005]<br />
Damo Suzuki: I Am Damo Suzuki<br />
Craig Johnson meets the legendary member of Can who’s too busy<br />
looking into the future to care much about the past<br />
Does anybody ever go out on a Sunday night? I’m<br />
always too knackered to bother most weeks, but this<br />
particular night was an unmissable opportunity to see<br />
an unmissable psychedelic brain feast. I was out to see<br />
a space-man from another age, to see the whites of<br />
his eyes connect into the stratosphere. This man was<br />
Damo Suzuki. This space was about one foot when he<br />
strolled on sagely by after a blazing, intense, intimate<br />
and triumphant performance that came from heart of<br />
what made Can when fronted by Damo, one of the best<br />
bands of the 1970s. His current band is a world wide<br />
collective called Damo Suzuki’s Network. Musicians<br />
that Damo has spontaneously hooked up with on his<br />
vocal journey around planet earth. I didn’t say shit to<br />
Damo that night. Too wasted to greet the only man that<br />
can say “I am Damo Suzuki” and not be bullshitting.<br />
The legend himself was in the vicinity. In the words<br />
of the Quiet One: It was all too much. It was all too<br />
fuckin’ much.<br />
The man who had just walked-on-by was one of those<br />
genius-like men that we discover when we traverse the<br />
works of Beatles/Pistols/Nirvana to unearth the deeper<br />
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and<br />
jewels of rock music’s cavernous domain and discover<br />
sounds that truly put character into our souls. It’s then<br />
we arrive upon people like Suzuki. A longhaired Japanese<br />
man born in 1950, with a black wispy moustache<br />
and wisdom resonating from his eyes, Damo Suzuki<br />
was the singer in the German avant-rock band Can<br />
from 1971 to 1973. His sometimes serene, other times<br />
terrifying spontaneous vocal delivery and the drugged<br />
funk, space-age gothic repetition of the band carved a<br />
significant notch onto the draft of modern music.<br />
Bands from The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, The<br />
Coral have all embezzled from the Can archive to inspired<br />
effect. Think ‘Fools Gold’ or Metal Box. Shaun<br />
William Ryder even managed to ram-raid Damo’s<br />
stoned beat style on the Mondays’ early cuts. And<br />
lest we forget The Fall’s classic pageant to all things<br />
wonderful with ‘I Am Damo Suzuki’. And if you didn’t<br />
know, it’s even been expressed that Can’s underbelly<br />
of repetitive drum, bass and glacial synth sound laid<br />
the groundwork for Detroit artists like Juan Atkins to<br />
invent techno in the 1980s. The influence, importance<br />
and the sheer funked-out bliss of the band Can should<br />
502<br />
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never be underestimated.<br />
I eventually reassembled the means and energy to<br />
speak to Damo Suzuki. It took nearly 12 months and<br />
to have the world yet a computer between us, but<br />
eventually we conversed. Manchester – The Wires –<br />
Melbourne – And Back.<br />
What situations led you into singing music? And<br />
how did you develop that unique style?<br />
All creative things begin with Zero. Situation of no<br />
information. If you are free, actually you can find many<br />
ways to express your feeling … It’s much more natural<br />
and no repetition. This is the moment we are together<br />
with audience in trance. I don’t think it’s unique … we’re<br />
doing what all we can in the moment … TOGETHER.<br />
What sort of music do you listen to? Any new<br />
bands out there that have sparked your interest?<br />
I listen to almost no music deeply. I don’t need much<br />
information. Before I heard Russian classical music of<br />
20th. Jazz before the 70s, and folk music from around<br />
the globe. I’m thankful for all those sound carriers who<br />
joined NEVER ENDING TOUR project. I get inspiration<br />
from them in this music cosmos, which we are<br />
creating. All those young bands/artist who are finding<br />
their roots and creating united energy together.<br />
You were a street artist in late 1960’s Cologne What<br />
was life like? Did you find wisdom on the streets?<br />
I was street artist not only in Cologne. I performed<br />
in European continent at that time. It was hippy time.<br />
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and<br />
I just liked to travel and meet other people For that I<br />
didn’t have money, I made money on the street when<br />
I have nothing in my pocket to go next place. Street<br />
is where you meet people, just any kind of people.<br />
I was not only playing guitar and singing. I had no<br />
plan. I made some time happening, kind of one man<br />
theatre or painting on the street as well.<br />
Could you explain how you clicked so perfectly<br />
into the Can sound? How did that perfect transition<br />
and that naturalness between yourselves happen?<br />
I don’t know if I was flexible enough or them. But<br />
things were sure that we hated any information, we<br />
didn’t like to create music like everybody else. We’re<br />
anarchist. So, for everybody it was easy to create something.<br />
When we create sound we started from zero. So,<br />
it’s easy thing. Nobody should not be corrected from<br />
someone. We’re all in same space.<br />
What were the Can years like for you on a personal<br />
level?<br />
It’s almost like school days. Some times you see them<br />
on a photo and I remember I was together with them.<br />
He was good in French and he was trying to be good in<br />
mathematics. He was always clothed in short pants. To<br />
look back is a waste of time. I’m 55, already I have to<br />
see much more in front. My time is not tick tacking my<br />
time. I’m the pig man. I can’t turn my neck to see back.<br />
What was the story or reason for your departure<br />
with Can?<br />
503<br />
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I left Can after being there for 3 years. It was enough<br />
for me to leave after Future Days. We’re getting well<br />
known band, TV’s there, interviews here. I was only<br />
23 years old and much more curious about another life.<br />
Are there any new musical releases this year?<br />
Very soon comes a double CD called HollyAris … I<br />
mean I’m going to release only doubles in future, except<br />
one CD I edited already. It’s nice to have more than<br />
two hours of pure instant composed music which will<br />
never be performed again. HollyAris has two location<br />
recorded live. One is in Hollywood another is Paris. As<br />
I perform with local sound carriers. CD 1 called ‘Hollywood’<br />
is performed by sound carriers from Los Angeles<br />
and Japanese guitarist Mandog. CD 2 called ‘Paris’ is<br />
performed by sound carriers from France. After they<br />
formed a band called FRENCH DOCTORS as they<br />
found chemistry between them. And they are recording<br />
their first record. After this next one is also waiting<br />
to hit … which comes about a couple of months later.<br />
This is named SUOMI. This is completely different…<br />
’Hollywood’ brings you a much more Californian air.<br />
‘Paris’ brings you male perfume. But this is hard rock<br />
in Sauna. Suomi means Finland. This double CD is one<br />
is recorded at Turku, I guess the second large city in<br />
Finland. And an another recorded in Helsinki. Sound<br />
Carriers are two German, an American, a Ukrainian<br />
and a Japanese (me!!!)<br />
You bring together many musicians via your Net-<br />
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and<br />
work. It must be a huge worldwide collective? How<br />
do you find that experience?<br />
Yes, the list of sound carriers are getting long. Some<br />
big cities like London or New York … is really long list<br />
that I have to perform there for every month some years<br />
long. And sound carriers who performed once, they like<br />
to make it again … I’m crying for happiness. No matter<br />
which musical field they belongs to. Ages, male or<br />
female, Nationality whatsoever. Or long experience as<br />
a professional or who’ve never played since 20 years.<br />
For sound making is not that important all those information<br />
you are carrying … .most important is ambition<br />
which brings positive energy. And we become one unit.<br />
Then we can create time and space of the moment.<br />
Do you write lyrics, do you map out ideas or is it<br />
all pure spontaneity?<br />
All is spontaneity.<br />
What are the many languages in your music?<br />
Words has no meaning in sound making. I don’t like<br />
to sing messages while WE are creating together. I’m<br />
not leader of the moment creating. Everybody in that<br />
room is involved and everybody have own function,<br />
that I don’t have to force their creativity with my words.<br />
All music instruments has own words, why vocal must<br />
be middle of all? I use my own language mostly …<br />
which is non-documented language. My word of the<br />
moment which is used as music instruments.<br />
What channels do you take to get to the place you<br />
504<br />
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reach inside when you create your music?<br />
When sound carriers are on the stage, there works a<br />
magnet field between us and we get chemistry and it<br />
works. Sound creating is limitless world of time and<br />
space. You can go to any direction as we find information<br />
at the moment … one can make one music, two<br />
can make three music. I mean. It’s our conversation<br />
and understanding.<br />
Are you aware of the huge influence you’ve had<br />
on bands like The Fall in the UK? Do you get much<br />
contact from any UK bands?<br />
I say it’s not bad they found something about us, they<br />
had good tastes. I have many contact with UK bands<br />
as I perform every time with different sound carriers in<br />
different cities. Mostly young unknown but ambitious<br />
bands. To make contact is easy today with internet access.<br />
Internet is the greatest development for years.<br />
In May you are playing major UK cities. How do<br />
you find the UK?<br />
UK is something special. It works well with instant<br />
composing. Even small places there’s always carriers<br />
who like to perform with me and their quality of play-<br />
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and<br />
ing is high. Audience is honestly … if they like it they<br />
like it. They are not shy to travel for long distances<br />
to visit and be in our event. Sound carriers who performed<br />
with me mail me to perform with them again<br />
and some of them organise shows with themselves.<br />
Fancy witnessing a musical legend in close motion<br />
then? An icon of the psychedelic-punk age?<br />
The man who taught most of our musical masters to<br />
sing? To be able to see the whites of his wise eyes<br />
sing out sweet and formidable odes. “This is the<br />
moment” says Damo, “we are together with audience<br />
in trance.” We’re not talking Phil Collins here.<br />
The venue’s Damo and his Network will be playing<br />
are intimate in size, and should capture a certain<br />
incomparable atmosphere if you’ve never seen his<br />
performance before. Don’t exactly walk on glass to<br />
see this one-off underground superstar, but you could<br />
try crawling. It might be worth it. And if you wanna<br />
join him for a psychedelic freakout session then you<br />
can always have a word with this guy. He’s cool. He’s<br />
approachable.<br />
He’s Damo Suzuki. �<br />
505<br />
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Feature [published September 2003]<br />
Swans: Swans’ Song<br />
Chris Mitchell on the end of Michael Gira’s intense, undefinable and<br />
deafeningly loud musical outfit Swans<br />
The history of music is littered with the debris of those<br />
who paid dearly for being different. From the Stooges<br />
through to Suicide and the Birthday Party, there are<br />
countless individuals and outfits who have, in retrospect,<br />
redefined the shape of music and yet been critically<br />
reviled or simply ignored during their own time.<br />
It’s a classic storyline, part of the mythos of rock’n’roll<br />
– that the culture vultures have to wait until such explosions<br />
of creative rage and violent self-expression have<br />
self-immolated themselves before they dare go near the<br />
still-smouldering corpse. Only death makes such music<br />
safe for consumption.<br />
On March 15 this year at London’s tiny LA2 venue,<br />
such a death occurred. Michael Gira, for 15 years a<br />
self confessed dictator over an ever changing line-up<br />
of musicians, finally brought about the end of Swans.<br />
Ironically, the spectre of death which hung over the<br />
Swans’ final, funereal tour as it crossed from America<br />
to Europe drew huge audiences, even as Gira spoke in<br />
interviews of the indifference his music had faced during<br />
the last decade and a half. As is usual, only when we<br />
realise what we’re losing do we understand its value.<br />
BUY Swans music online from and<br />
Gira is not a defeated, bitter individual, however.<br />
The death of Swans has been for him something of a<br />
relief – the shedding of 15 years of misconceptions and<br />
wornout reputations. Like all great bands, Gira hates<br />
Swans being categorised, not so much out of petulance<br />
as frustration with the refusal of critics to understand<br />
that a band can be more than one-dimensional.<br />
Ever since Swans emerged from New York in the<br />
early 80s, they defied description. Albums like Cop<br />
and Filth were works of unremitting cerebral and sonic<br />
violence which still remain unparalleled, combining<br />
the incessant industrial harshness of drum machines<br />
with stomach churning bass and howled vocals.<br />
Managing to make it from beginning to end of one of<br />
these early records is a voyage you won’t easily forget.<br />
Bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails wouldn’t even<br />
feature on the early Swans’ Richter scale. The track<br />
titles alone – ‘Time Is Money (Bastard)’, ‘Greed’, ‘A<br />
Screw’ – reflect Gira’s state of mind at the time. “I was<br />
a hard-assed, people-hating motherfucker in the early<br />
days,” he said recently in an interview with Silencer. “I<br />
mean I was a pretty violent and aggressive, disturbed<br />
506<br />
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person, so I guess I made music reflected that, but also<br />
what I wanted from the experience of music was much<br />
more extreme. I wanted the music to destroy my body.”<br />
That intensity of thought is what has always separated<br />
Swans from the rest of the record-producing world.<br />
Given the depths of emotional extremes which their<br />
early records explored not just lyrically but physically,<br />
it seems utterly fatuous to call Swans a rock’n’roll<br />
band. Rock’n’roll is traditionally feel-good music,<br />
whereas for a time Swans were the ultimate feel-bad<br />
experience. Attending their live performances was a<br />
health risk, threatening broken limbs and burst ear<br />
drums, and causing various cities’ police across the<br />
globe to literally pull the plug on them, such was their<br />
decibel measurement. Swans live were the ultimate<br />
catharsis, where the audience would enjoy being sonically<br />
pummelled into a bloody daze and pay for the<br />
pleasure too.<br />
While this all made good copy for journalists, Gira’s<br />
reasons for producing such music often went un-noticed,<br />
lost in the on stage spectacle of abasement. As if<br />
aware that his voice was being lost amongst the noise,<br />
Gira effected a massive shift in the Swans musical direction<br />
with the 1987 album Children Of God. With the<br />
arrival of his new partner and collaborator Jarboe, Gira<br />
had finally met someone of his own strength who made<br />
Swans spread their wings, albeit schizophrenically. The<br />
whole album is drenched in religious iconography, in-<br />
BUY Swans music online from and<br />
spired by Gira watching American TV evangelists like<br />
Jimmy Swaggert who he considered “great rock’n’roll<br />
performers”. But while thematically Gira’s concerns<br />
remained the same – death, love, God, sex, shame, lust,<br />
pain – sonically Children Of God combined the noise<br />
terror of tracks like ‘Beautiful Child’ with Jarboe’s<br />
haunting oboe-backed ballads ‘In My Garden’ and<br />
‘Blackmail’. The result was a uniquely unsettling album<br />
which went against the grain of everything Swans<br />
fans had come to expect.<br />
That a radical change was happening to Swans was<br />
acknowledged at the end of their live album Feel Good<br />
Now, recorded during the Children Of God tour. After<br />
the final track has played out, you hear Gira’s voice<br />
saying “This is a record of a time now gone. Good bye<br />
and good luck”. It’s a strange and touching inclusion, as<br />
if Gira was mindful that many Swans devotees would<br />
neither understand or enjoy the band’s new direction<br />
and that this was the parting of the ways.<br />
Before the emergence of the next Swans album The<br />
Burning World, Gira and Jarboe produced two albums<br />
under the name Skin. Blood, Women, Roses featured<br />
Jarboe’s voice scattered over a collection of diseased<br />
torch songs, while Shame, Humility Revenge saw Gira<br />
move towards narrative lyric writing for the first time,<br />
instead of his previous collage approach inspired by<br />
the brute power of advertising slogans. Both albums<br />
reflect Gira and Jarboe at the height of their powers,<br />
507<br />
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generating an otherworldly atmosphere through sound<br />
textures and patterns where their voices and their stark<br />
yet beautiful words could finally be heard. Both were<br />
classic 3am-on-your-own albums – songs which made<br />
the world feel a little less cold.<br />
By comparison, the Swans next album was a positive<br />
riot of colour. The Burning World saw Gira and Jarboe<br />
completely embrace acoustic guitars and even a cover<br />
version of Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’.<br />
The fact that it was their own release on a major label<br />
(MCA) caused cries of “sell-out” and Gira has recently<br />
admitted to feeling ambivalent about this period, although<br />
after hearing tracks like ‘God Damn The Sun’<br />
it’s difficult to see how anyone thought Swans were<br />
somehow making a deliberate bid for heavy rotation on<br />
MTV. Now that all rights to the music have reverted to<br />
his ownership, Gira plans to reissue an edited version<br />
of The Burning World along with numerous tracks that<br />
weren’t allowed onto the original album.<br />
But it was from this point that Swans became impossible<br />
to define. Already thrown by their transformation<br />
from sonic terrorists to subversive acoustic tunesmiths,<br />
many people didn’t know what to expect next. Instead<br />
of building a fanbase, Gira had seemingly wilfully destroyed<br />
it with his restless experimentation. Reviewers<br />
continually harked back to their early days in order to<br />
find something about the band they could understand.<br />
Meanwhile, Swans continued to produce masterworks<br />
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on the same epic scale as Children Of God into the 90s,<br />
refining and redefining their sound each time. Love<br />
Of Life, White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity, The<br />
Great Annihilator – with each album Swans became<br />
more isolated from everybody else, pursuing their own<br />
unique vision. The final Swans album, Soundtracks For<br />
The Blind, almost entirely eschewed song structures in<br />
favour of sprawling ambient montages of voices and<br />
music. Assembled mainly on computer, it’s as if the<br />
technology has finally caught up with the vision of what<br />
Gira and Jarboe wanted to do with the Skin project 10<br />
years ago, generating an atmosphere and a space for<br />
their words rather than being tied into The Song.<br />
It’s easy to see why Gira considers the Swans<br />
moniker an albatross around his neck – during their<br />
15 years of recording, the name Swans seemed to<br />
define nothing except who Swans *were* rather<br />
than what they had become – it’s a virtually useless<br />
term of reference. Seeing as Gira is only interested<br />
in producing what he considers worthwhile – to the<br />
point of physical collapse and financial ruin – using<br />
the same name to try and embrace his wildly differing<br />
output makes little sense anymore. Already he<br />
is at work under a new name The Pleasure Seekers,<br />
which promises an all-acoustic intimacy reminiscent<br />
of Vic Chesnutt, while there is also the Body Lovers<br />
project which will generate CD length ambient<br />
tracks. Hearing Gira discuss his current listening<br />
508<br />
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choices indicates his restless eclecticism: “Everything<br />
from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, John Lennon,<br />
Pink Floyd and Nico to more recent stuff like Low,<br />
Lambchop, Panasonic, Gastr del Sol … I tend to like<br />
stuff that’s sonically interesting but has some kind of<br />
emotional intensity to it. In the van I’ll listen to Hank<br />
Williams … Howlin’ Wolf is a constant favourite of<br />
mine. Big influence on early Swans. I’ve also been<br />
listening to a lot of stuff from Table of the Elements,<br />
this experimental label that’s been releasing stuff by<br />
Tony Conrad, Faust, Keiji Haino … and that new Vic<br />
BUY Swans music online from and<br />
Chestnutt album is pretty great, too.”<br />
Despite his unhidden joy at their demise, Gira is<br />
undoubtedly proud of Swans. Their website carries<br />
detailed information about the series of re-releases<br />
currently planned of Swans material, which he is intending<br />
to edit and add to. Even in death, Gira doesn’t<br />
play by the rules – while Swans may be gone, he<br />
refuses to merely reissue each album untouched. They<br />
remain in flux, perpetually changing – a fitting testament<br />
to a band which always took the risk of refusing<br />
to remain static. �<br />
509<br />
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Review [published June 2005]<br />
David Sylvian: The Good Son Vs. The Only Daughter<br />
Ismo Santala<br />
An album of remixes, the nine tracks of The Good<br />
Son Vs. The Only Daughter were made by musicians<br />
handpicked by David Sylvian to shake up the subdued<br />
sonic architecture of Blemish (2003). Because most of<br />
the names of the remixers are not familiar to me, I can<br />
only go by what I hear. And what I hear is, by and large,<br />
impressive. Most of the new songs make good use of<br />
the spareness of the original material, using Sylvian’s<br />
lyrical richness and strong delivery as the basis for<br />
adventurous reworkings.<br />
When he described Blemish as an “impromptu suite<br />
of songs for guitar, electronics and voice”, Sylvian<br />
offered his listeners both a caveat and a challenge.<br />
Because despite of the appearance of guitarist Derek<br />
Bailey on a number of tracks, the overall sound of<br />
Blemish is more stripped-down and unpolished than<br />
Sylvian’s earlier solo albums such as 1999’s Dead<br />
Bees On A Cake. The nearly 14-minute title track opens<br />
the album and maps out the emotional territory of the<br />
later compositions. Shimmers and quivers of electronic<br />
ambience are broken by bursts of anxious words: “And<br />
mine is an empty bed / I think she’s forgotten”.<br />
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The lyrics tell of betrayals, jealousies and break-ups<br />
in the family, but seem to give only bits and pieces of<br />
the whole story. On the cusp of transformation, each<br />
of the personas is unable to accept the past while at the<br />
same time remaining ambivalent about the future, to<br />
the point where even favourable change is expressed in<br />
wholly negative terms: “There’s a world of disappointment<br />
to be lost”. The hesitancy to face up to the reality<br />
of the situation (“Place a dummy on the roof / Stitch<br />
him a tongue / Give him proof”) ends in failure, as it<br />
must: “Like blemishes upon the skin / Truth sets in”.<br />
Even if the remix artists allow Sylvian’s voice to stay<br />
prominent and undisrupted, many of them play freely<br />
with the lyrical content. When he cuts and reshuffles the<br />
words of ‘Blemish’, Burnt Friedman produces a version<br />
that is considerably more affirmative and upbeat<br />
than the original. In contrast, he overdoes ‘Late Night<br />
Shopping’, the source album’s most playful track, with<br />
the inclusion of a sickly-sweet chorus.<br />
Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s rearrangement of the vocal<br />
parts of ‘The Heart Knows Better’ not only uplifts<br />
the mood of the piece, but the new place of emphasis<br />
510<br />
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allows for consecutive layers of aural textures to be<br />
introduced easily into the mix. ‘How Little We Need<br />
To Be Happy’ by Tatsuhiko Asano reveals the pop song<br />
well hidden in the caustic original. The remixer hasn’t<br />
needed to rethink the lyrics, but instead has built the<br />
celebratory orchestration around the voice. The result<br />
is a revelation, as if the Blemish version were only a<br />
rough draft waiting for Asano’s input.<br />
Yoshihiro Hanno’s ‘The Good Son’ tops the original<br />
by placing the rank lyricism within a less tense musical<br />
structure, while still leaving much of Bailey’s guitar<br />
work intact. In addition to the intro and outro atmospherics,<br />
Akira Rabelais applies numerous subtle touches on<br />
his rendering of ‘Blemish’. The two variations of ‘The<br />
Only Daughter’, on the other hand, are solid rather than<br />
mesmerizing. In Ryoji Ikeda’s piano-driven piece, the<br />
voice and music seem to flutter at a distance from one<br />
another, whereas the second variant by Jan Bang and<br />
Erik Honoré sets them in the same groove.<br />
The remix of ‘Fire in the Forest’ by Readymade<br />
FC, like Friedman’s ‘Blemish’ and Asano’s ‘How<br />
Little We Need To Be Happy’, brings the lightness<br />
and hopefulness of the song to the foreground. It is<br />
not the case that these qualities are something Sylvian<br />
attempts to deliberately obscure; rather, he reserves<br />
the sudden brightness until the moment its impact<br />
can be greatest. In the image of an immense forest<br />
which suffers the loss of single trees, Sylvian has<br />
hit upon a fittingly spacious metaphor for emotional<br />
unrest:<br />
There’s a fire in the forest<br />
It’s taking down some trees<br />
When things are overwhelming<br />
I let them be<br />
BUY David Sylvian music online from and<br />
A measure of The Only Daughter’s success is that the<br />
album allows the listener to return to the source with<br />
fresh ears. The pulsating electronics and erratic guitar<br />
plucks of Blemish become the crackle and crumple of<br />
burning leaves. In turn, the energetic overabundance of<br />
The Only Daughter sounds like new vegetation pushing<br />
itself overground from the ashen soil. �<br />
511<br />
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David Thomas [Pere Ubu]:<br />
“I never volunteer information” 513<br />
Hunter S. Thompson:<br />
A Real American Patriot 517<br />
Hunter S. Thompson:<br />
Fear And Loathing 519<br />
Colm Tóibín:<br />
The Story Of The Night 523<br />
Amos Tutuola:<br />
The Palm-Wine Drinkard 525<br />
T-Z<br />
Stuart Walton: Out Of It 529<br />
Alan Warner: Existential Ecstasy 531<br />
Belinda Webb: Justified Anger 535<br />
Irvine Welsh 538<br />
Irvine Welsh / Harry Gibson:<br />
Expletives Deleted 539<br />
Irvine Welsh:<br />
You’ll Have Had Your Theatre 541<br />
Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner:<br />
Queerspotting 545<br />
Irvine Welsh: Filth 554<br />
The White Stripes: Elephant 556<br />
Tony Wilson: Fourth Time Lucky 558<br />
512<br />
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Interview [published March 2005]<br />
David Thomas [Pere Ubu]: “I Never Volunteer Information”<br />
Craig Johnson talks to Pere Ubu’s David Thomas<br />
Think of alternative rock in the 1970s and we immediately<br />
think of The Ramones, Talking Heads,<br />
Television as the major musical forces in those heady<br />
times. An under-rated band of that much pillaged and<br />
productive scene were underground rockers Pere Ubu<br />
– subterranean innovators of the new-wave/post-punk<br />
elementary division.<br />
Along with new-wave band Devo, Pere Ubu had<br />
thrashed on the fringes of Cleveland, Ohio’s music<br />
circuit for a few years in the guise of Rocket From<br />
The Tombs. Lead singer David Thomas had formed<br />
RFTT in 1974 with guitarist Peter Laughner, who<br />
died of acute pancreatitis or the plain ravages of<br />
rock’n’roll in 1977. After a few years of finely tutoring<br />
their school of garage nihilism via Stooges covers,<br />
RFTT had distanced themselves from the usual<br />
industry career path. With the addition of bass player<br />
Tom Herman, drummer Scott Krauss and keyboardist<br />
Allen Ravenstine, RFTT metamorphosed into<br />
Pere Ubu.<br />
Something sets Pere Ubu apart from other bands.<br />
For a start how many bands name themselves after a<br />
BUY Pere Ubu music online from and<br />
character created by 19th-century French playwright<br />
Alfred Jarry? How many bands before them insisted<br />
on having no group photos on their record sleeves?<br />
And however unshocking, an early Rocket From The<br />
Tombs tune mouthed the word “cunt” on ‘Ain’t It Fun’.<br />
Not many bands did that in 1974. But it’s something<br />
other that sets Pere Ubu apart; something alien, almost<br />
dangerous, ironic and fascinating that lurks within their<br />
out-of-shape yet tight as metal song structures; those<br />
purely dynamic slabs of fury that present apocalyptic<br />
landscapes, stellar production and emotions of insanity<br />
that burn your ears out. They dealt in human extremes<br />
but were never unlistenable. Singles ‘30 Seconds Over<br />
Tokyo’ (1975) and ‘Final Solution’ (1976) are songs<br />
years ahead of their time with an inventive attitude<br />
that current heavyweights like Radiohead and Franz<br />
Ferdinand have just about caught up with a quarter of<br />
a century later. First album The Modern Dance (1978)<br />
now stands as a landmark album in that the dubby,<br />
droned out bass-lines and off-kilter sounds were unlike<br />
anything hitherto produced. (Well, except perhaps<br />
Captain Beefheart.)<br />
513<br />
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An opening song being called ‘Nonalignment Pact’,<br />
and, as Julian Cope described it, “a classic ‘girl’ song<br />
with the most Stooged-out riff”, just says it all. Thomas’s<br />
voice could shriek and whisper, the bursting<br />
guitars sounded like M16 gunfire and the cover looked<br />
like utopian propaganda created in Lenin’s Russia.<br />
Follow up album, the just as inventive Dub Housing<br />
(1978), loosened up the extremes, slowed down the delivery;<br />
but equally sounded as though recorded between<br />
Cleveland’s skidrow and the volcanoes of Java and is<br />
widely regarded as their masterpiece. They continued<br />
in the following decades to release challenging records,<br />
all soaked in that American underground experience<br />
that makes them a great, almost undiscovered band<br />
and a perfect medicine against the corporate crap of<br />
mainstream music.<br />
David Thomas is still lead singer in Pere Ubu, and in<br />
recent times he’s additionally created three albums and<br />
plays live with a band he calls David Thomas and Two<br />
Pale Boys. Still crossing boundaries and staying true to<br />
his art with the stance that originally set the band apart,<br />
I managed to ask him a few questions that I’ve always<br />
wanted to find answers for. Important things, trivial<br />
things. Here’s what I found out about his work, his attitude<br />
and other stimulating or meaningless details.<br />
I’ve been reading the Pere Ubu manifesto which<br />
I find interesting. Things like ‘Don’t seek success’.<br />
What’s the idea behind messages like that?<br />
BUY Pere Ubu music online from and<br />
We have always concentrated on making good music.<br />
If you make good music people will search you<br />
out. Maybe not lots of them. But some. As well we<br />
have always been laissez-faire perfectionists. Seeking<br />
success distracts from the principal function of a musical<br />
group. It offers up temptations to deviate from<br />
a proper course. I have nothing against ‘success’ – I<br />
love the process of the market in fact – but not at the<br />
cost of vision.<br />
You’re playing in London with members of Sun<br />
Ra Arkestra and Wayne Kramer. What’s your involvement<br />
with the event?<br />
Wayne is a friend and played a show as a member of<br />
Pere Ubu a few years ago. I suppose he is ‘repaying’ the<br />
compliment. He asked me to guest with the MC5 and<br />
Arkestra. I am doing ‘Starship. It’s a great honour and<br />
I am excited to do it.<br />
Why the transition from Rocket From The Tombs<br />
to Pere Ubu?<br />
Because RFTT flew apart and I had ideas I wanted<br />
to pursue.<br />
When I hear 60s garage hits, I hear some kinda<br />
semblance of the Ubu style. What US punk bands of<br />
the 60s were you inspired by?<br />
We were always into the American garage punk of<br />
the 60s. You have to remember we grew up listening<br />
to all that stuff on the radio. That was what was on<br />
the radio. All that stuff was hits. Very big influence<br />
514<br />
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on Pere Ubu along with Velvets, Stooges and MC5.<br />
Our first engineer and father of our current engineer,<br />
Ken Hamann, was the engineer for songs like ‘Nobody<br />
But Me’, ‘Time Won’t Let Me’, ‘Green Tambourine’,<br />
all the early Terry Knight stuff, Bloodrock,<br />
James Gang, etc.<br />
Any British bands that have had a profound effect<br />
upon you?<br />
Profound? Probably not. Richard Thompson was<br />
a big influence on the early 70s scene as were Soft<br />
Machine, Pink Floyd (early), Incredible String Band.<br />
Some guys were really into Kinks and Pretty Things.<br />
Eno, of course. Kevin Ayres. John Cale.<br />
The track ‘30 Seconds Over Tokyo’ seems prophetic<br />
in its resonance. What were you trying to<br />
express in that song?<br />
It was a dramatic story of heroism and a book<br />
that EVERY school boy read – Doolittle’s suicide<br />
raid on Tokyo in 1942 just 2 months after Pearl<br />
Harbor. A good choice for our cinematic approach.<br />
Brief synopsis. US needed to strike a propaganda<br />
blow against Japan right after Pearl Harbor and to<br />
suggest to Japanese leaders that they were not safe<br />
from retribution. Stripped down a flight of B-25s<br />
of everything but a few bombs and launched them<br />
off a carrier which they’d never be able to return to<br />
(fuel) or land on (size). The plan was to drop bombs<br />
on Tokyo harbour sites and crash land in China if<br />
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they could make it, and then somehow get back to<br />
America from the other side of the world. Most died.<br />
It must take a lot of balls to sing in such unique<br />
style. Where has it all come from?<br />
It comes from not having a good voice, being tonedeaf<br />
and not knowing what I was supposed to do. I<br />
became the singer because the guitar I bought in order<br />
to become the guitarist hurt my fingers. So I decided<br />
to be the singer. I had NEVER sung and I couldn’t hit<br />
any notes – I really am tone-deaf. So I had to figure<br />
it out. What I figured out was that music also existed<br />
as a spatial and temporal complex so I worked out<br />
how to use those elements to communicate a story in a<br />
musical way that had a semblance of melody. I create<br />
a phrasing that makes use of those elements, engages<br />
the instrumental elements, and it all somehow comes<br />
out okay. At least after a couple initial years of trial<br />
and error. That was part of my frustration of singing in<br />
RFTT – I didn’t know how to handle not being able to<br />
hear myself. Also in RFTT I sang other people’s songs<br />
which I didn’t really understand so I didn’t know how<br />
to construct them according to my methods and I knew<br />
I sounded bad. As well I have no method to remember<br />
what I sing, i.e. a melody. That’s why every time I sing<br />
a song it varies to a greater or lesser extent. That’s why I<br />
mostly only do material I write with musicians I know.<br />
The artwork you’ve used on record sleeves is a<br />
fantastic portfolio. What’s behind that?<br />
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Almost all our artwork has been designed by my best<br />
friend, John Thompson. A lot of the pictures were by<br />
Mik Meilon – friend from the Plaza. I discuss some<br />
ideas with John and give him the title. He comes up with<br />
an idea and we bounce it around a little. The idea was to<br />
do artwork that was more than a self-aggrandizing ego<br />
thing – note we never put our pictures on the albums<br />
except for Tenement Year which we only did because<br />
we had never done it. We break even our own rules.<br />
The artwork needs to set a mood that cooperates with<br />
the intentions of the music.<br />
What new records do you have in the pipeline?<br />
About to start writing a new Ubu. Writing with<br />
Cheetah for possible RFTT album. Working on a 2 Pale<br />
Boys live album. Compiling Director’s Cut editions of<br />
RGS and PA. More movie soundtracks for ICFOS and<br />
X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Compiling 18 Monkeys<br />
– The Film soundtrack.<br />
What writers do you like?<br />
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Raymond Chandler.<br />
Any final nuggets of wisdom that you’d like to offer?<br />
I never volunteer information.<br />
All the greats have an edge, a certain intelligence<br />
and David Thomas seems to be one your more cerebral<br />
rock’n’roll musicians; so you can get away with asking<br />
questions like that. And the line ‘If you make good music<br />
people will search you out’, seems to be more than<br />
enough wise advice that you usually hear from your<br />
average rocker. Ubu fit into that cult category of being<br />
a band that made people want form their own bands.<br />
They were dangerous. Scuzzed out. Angular. Violent.<br />
Everybody in a rock band should listen to them. All<br />
the best ones already do. Any UK gigs would sell out<br />
in instant, although no future dates are confirmed; but<br />
with an Ubu record in the making, the live experience<br />
is on some distant horizon. The meantime can offer<br />
the opportunity to look for new bands that dare stretch<br />
those anarchic, outward boundaries set by Pere Ubu. �<br />
516<br />
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Feature [published March 2005]<br />
Hunter S. Thompson: A Real American Patriot<br />
Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters<br />
I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log<br />
in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter<br />
S. Thompson is dead.<br />
Distraught isn’t the word.<br />
Thompson was forever sidelined as a caricature in<br />
the last couple of decades, a victim of his own mythmaking,<br />
the crazy old bastard on the hill permanently<br />
altered, packing guns and delivering apocalyptic pronouncements<br />
on the rare occasions he could bring<br />
himself to look at a typewriter. Loaded magazine got<br />
to the point where they were interviewing him every<br />
six months, just so another bunch of wannabe fanboy<br />
journalists could make the pilgrimage to Woody Creek<br />
in Aspen, Colorado and meet the man.<br />
I periodically had a silly little fantasy of making<br />
that pilgrimage myself one day and spending some<br />
time shooting guns with the good Doctor. Yes, it’s<br />
embarrassing to admit and possibly even more so to<br />
read, but the point is, Hunter S. Thompson was one<br />
of those writers who changed your perception of the<br />
world. Irrevocably. So much so that you’d want to<br />
meet him just to check he was real and shake his hand.<br />
Because Hunter S. Thompson Got It.<br />
He saw the world as it truly is, and the drugs and<br />
guns and women were just a way to temporarily escape<br />
that. (Hence the famous Samuel Johnson quotation that<br />
prefaces Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – “he who<br />
makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being<br />
a man”). Similarly, they are incidental to his work, not<br />
the core of it. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas may<br />
be a depiction of a drug-crazed doomed sojourn in Sin<br />
City, but it is also what it says on the cover: “A savage<br />
journey into the heart of the American Dream”.<br />
That was what Thompson chronicled for four decades.<br />
He was first and foremost a political journalist of<br />
the highest calibre. Read the first journalism collection<br />
The Great Shark Hunt or his penultimate, Kingdom Of<br />
Fear – Thompson sees America through unmasked<br />
eyes, and as a true American patriot, he despairs of<br />
what he sees. And he has the guts to say so. Calling<br />
President Bush a “whorebeast” in print was funny, but<br />
Thompson meant it with deadly sincerity. He considered<br />
Bush worse that Nixon. There was no worse accolade<br />
he could award. There’s no irony involved with<br />
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Thompson – there’s buckets loads of bleak and twisted<br />
humour which certainly makes him the funniest writer<br />
of the 20th century in my opinion, but Thompson meant<br />
all of it.<br />
And this is what it comes down to. Hunter S. Thompson<br />
was a consummate hellraiser and we loved him for<br />
it. But that’s not what made him such an enduring, important<br />
figure in American letters. His perception of the<br />
collapse of America’s moral values both at home and<br />
in its projection into the world through foreign policy<br />
and intervention – or the lack of it – is what fuelled all<br />
of his work throughout his writing career. He wanted to<br />
be proud of America and for America to truly live up to<br />
the ideals it has ascribed itself. For all the perception of<br />
Thompson’s “outlaw” status and frequent brushes with<br />
the law, Thompson was a deeply moral man, concerned<br />
only with the destruction of his own country by greed<br />
and avarice.<br />
Farewell then, HST. Your passing means one less<br />
strong voice of sanity in these Satanic times. �<br />
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Feature [published February 2001]<br />
Hunter S. Thompson: Fear And Loathing<br />
Nathan Cain reflects on the journalistic legacy of an elderly dope fiend<br />
I found Hunter S. Thompson by accident. I was looking<br />
through the stacks at my local public library, searching<br />
for something, I don’t remember what, when I read the<br />
title Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on the spine of an<br />
orange paperback. It sounded vaguely familiar, so I took<br />
it off the shelf. The cover featured a cartoonish drawing<br />
of a man in a Hawaiian shirt with a long cigarette holder<br />
and a suitcase, looking very guilty about something. A<br />
jacket blurb by Tom Wolfe called the work I held in my<br />
hand a “scorching epochal sensation.” (Which is, in my<br />
opinion, the finest jacket blurb in the history of jacket<br />
blurbs. Congratulations Mr Wolfe.) I was intrigued, so<br />
I opened the book and read the infamous first sentence,<br />
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of<br />
the desert when the drugs began to take hold…” I had<br />
found exactly what I had been searching for.<br />
I was a 17-year-old high school student at the time<br />
(an appellation which held the same appeal for me as<br />
terminal cancer patient) and the tale of a sportswriter<br />
and his crazed 300lb. Samoan attorney on a drug binge<br />
so foul and extreme that it would have turned the most<br />
dedicated libertine into a card carrying member of the<br />
Prohibition Party was one of the most scabrously funny<br />
pieces of work I had ever read. It was a wonderful tale<br />
of possibility gone horribly awry, and by the time I was<br />
finished with it I had a lot of questions.<br />
Who was this lunatic Thompson? Why hadn’t I heard<br />
of him before? Why was this book classified as nonfiction?<br />
Was it humanly possible to behave that badly and<br />
live to tell about it?<br />
Thompson was in the right place at the right time<br />
and he did the right thing, clamping down on a raw<br />
nerve in the American psyche like a cranked crazed<br />
Gila monster, suffusing the collective consciousness<br />
with his own particular brand of poison. In the process<br />
he became the most celebrated, or at least most<br />
notorious, journalist of his era. Thompson’s poison<br />
still runs through the veins of America, and by extension<br />
the rest of the world, whose different regions, in<br />
varying degrees, are subject to regular transfusions<br />
of American culture. Thompson’s trademark phrase<br />
“Fear and Loathing” and its various permutations<br />
(fear and losing, fear and loaning, fear and loading…)<br />
have become clichés. He inspired Gary Trudeau to<br />
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create his famous ‘Uncle Duke’ character in Doonesbury,<br />
and Spider Jerusalem, the main character of<br />
Warren Ellis’ fine comic book Transmetropolitan, is<br />
obviously inspired by the good Doctor.<br />
Back in the early 70s when his fangs were still sharp<br />
no one could draw blood like Thompson. There is no<br />
reason for me to write that Vegas and Fear And Loathing<br />
On The Campaign Trail ‘72 are seminal works,<br />
many people have said it many times and there is no<br />
point in dwelling on it now.<br />
Thompson was a creature of his times. He thrived and<br />
grew on the possibilities of the 60s and turned viscous<br />
when cornered by the reality of the 70s. He rose and fell<br />
with Nixon, running out of steam when his favourite<br />
villain was finally run out of town. Thompson’s own<br />
description of Nixon’s ignominious departure after his<br />
resignation, which can be found in his article ‘Fear and<br />
Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises,’ reprinted in<br />
The Great Shark Hunt, is surprisingly joyless. Thompson<br />
writes:<br />
“The end came so suddenly and with so little warning<br />
that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White<br />
House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that<br />
the scumbag has been passed to what will pose for now<br />
as another generation. The main reaction to Richard<br />
Nixon’s passing – especially among journalists who<br />
had been on the Deathwatch for two years – was a wild<br />
and wordless orgasm of long awaited relief that tailed<br />
off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression<br />
that still endures.”<br />
Indeed, it is worth noting that The Great Shark<br />
Hunt is dedicated to none other than Richard Milhous<br />
Nixon and that in the introduction he writes, “I feel like<br />
I might as well be up here carving the words for my<br />
own tombstone … and when I finish, the only fitting<br />
exit will be straight off this fucking terrace and into the<br />
Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in<br />
the air and across Fifth Avenue. No one could follow<br />
that act.”<br />
One of the great literary ironies of the century that<br />
just ended may be that Thompson has lived long<br />
enough to fade away and not met the sort of spectacular<br />
end which he imagined for himself. Thompson himself<br />
has publicly recognized the awkwardness of his situation<br />
in the introduction to his first volume of letters,<br />
The Proud Highway, when he writes of pretending to<br />
be dead while his old correspondence was brought to<br />
light, and again imagines a spectacular end for himself,<br />
this time a high speed motorcycle wreck.<br />
With the publication of his first volume of letters,<br />
and the subsequent publication of The Rum Diary,<br />
which was billed as “The Long Lost Novel,” but was<br />
none of those things Thompson seemed to prove that<br />
he is content to sit back and watch as the sort of works<br />
that generally get published after an author’s death hit<br />
the market.<br />
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In the last month two new Thompson titles have<br />
hit shelves. The first, Screwjack, isn’t even really a<br />
book, coming in at 59 pages, with rather large print.<br />
It begins with a piece written during Thompson’s<br />
first encounter with mescaline (‘Mescalito’ is also<br />
reprinted in Songs Of The Doomed) , which would<br />
become his drug of choice, and it only gets less understandable<br />
from there. The second piece is the tale<br />
of a doomed gambler, and the third, the infamous title<br />
piece, is almost too bizarre for words, dealing with<br />
a love affair between Raoul Duke and Screwjack the<br />
cat. Interesting, but probably not worth 15 dollars,<br />
unless you are the type of person who simply must<br />
have this sort of literary curio.<br />
The second book, Fear And Loathing In America,<br />
Thompson’s second volume of letters, is, unlike<br />
Screwjack, a must read. This book, the penultimate<br />
volume of a projected three volume set is, if you are<br />
going to buy one, the one to buy. Fear And Loathing<br />
In America reprints Thompson’s correspondence from<br />
1968, after the publication of his first book, Hell’s<br />
Angels, through 1976, when the Great Gonzo Legend<br />
had become fully established.<br />
The letters themselves aren’t as interesting as the ones<br />
found in The Proud Highway, but that is to be expected.<br />
During the years covered in Thompson’s first volume of<br />
letters he was, for the most part, unemployed, and had<br />
more time to dedicate to his personal correspondence.<br />
The beginning of America finds Thompson in a post<br />
Hell’s Angels funk that lasts for over 300 pages. During<br />
that time the Doctor wrestles with unfinished articles,<br />
a book contract, and attempts to find a new direction to<br />
take in the New Journalism.<br />
At times, especially during its first third, is tedious.<br />
No one, especially someone who writes, wants<br />
to read about another writer’s lack of direction, no<br />
matter how much he or she respects that particular<br />
writer. Thompson spends a lot of time agonizing over<br />
a book he is supposed to write about “The Death of<br />
the American Dream,” As it turns out, Thompson<br />
considers Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas a side<br />
project, and not his American Dream book, which<br />
posterity has shown it to be.<br />
As the book progresses, however, it becomes more<br />
interesting, showing Thompson’s creation of his public<br />
persona, the character on the front of the paperback edition<br />
of Vegas trying to sneak out of a hotel with a suitcase<br />
full of drugs and some serious unpaid bills, and the<br />
subsequent discomfort that Thompson suffered when<br />
he became forever confused with one of Ralph Steadman’s<br />
drawings. F&L in America shows Thompson for<br />
what he really was, a workaholic writer with a brutal<br />
sense of humour who has an affinity for recreational<br />
drug use, and not a full-time addict who occasionally<br />
became lucid enough to write articles.<br />
The most interesting disclosure in the book is the fact<br />
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that Thompson was not on drugs when he sat down to<br />
write Vegas. In a letter to his Random House editor Jim<br />
Silberman, who stated that he did not think Thompson<br />
was on drugs, Thompson casually admits to being sober,<br />
but asks Silberman to hold his piece on the matter<br />
because the people at Rolling Stone (where Vegas was<br />
first published) were absolutely convinced that he had<br />
engaged in “a ranking freakout.”<br />
A couple of years later Thompson feels quite differently<br />
about the image he put out there in Vegas,<br />
complaining bitterly when he is misquoted in Esquire<br />
as saying that “at least” 45 percent of what he writes<br />
is true, and becoming incensed when Gary Trudeau<br />
debuts his ‘Uncle Duke’ character in Doonesbury.<br />
Reading this collection, one can’t help but get the<br />
impression that Thompson was feeling pressure to<br />
keep up an act that no one could follow, and that the<br />
publication of his letters is a way to once and for<br />
all to answer any questions anyone might still have<br />
about the ‘real’ Hunter S. Thompson so that he can<br />
live out the rest of his life free from the compulsion<br />
to do himself in a suitably dramatic manner. �<br />
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Review [published January 2005]<br />
Colm Tóibín: The Story Of The Night<br />
Peter Robertson<br />
Short-listed once again for the Booker Prize, this year<br />
for The Master, about the life of closet-gay novelist<br />
Henry James, Tóibín has become even more of a name<br />
in Britain. But his hopes were dashed a second time –<br />
in October that country’s most coveted literary prize<br />
was awarded to rival gay writer, Alan Hollinghurst, for<br />
his novel, The Line Of Beauty.<br />
While Hollinghurst specializes in evocations of the<br />
effete English aristocracy, Tóibín’s trademark is gloom.<br />
This tendency is showcased in his novel, The Story Of<br />
The Night, inspired by his experiences in Argentina. As<br />
a journalist, Tóibín visited Buenos Aires to cover the<br />
trials of the Generals who had ‘disappeared’ thousands<br />
of civilians in the early 1980s; but on humid summer<br />
nights, crazed with desire, he cruised a cityscape<br />
charged with sexual expectation.<br />
Tóibín was exposed mercilessly to the self-denial<br />
of ‘machismo’ – the gay men he met, married or with<br />
girlfriends, boasted that no one would ever know their<br />
real orientation. This is not the case with the novel’s<br />
protagonist, Richard Garay, who comes out to his<br />
mother – she expresses “utter contempt”. The narrative<br />
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of The Story Of The Night spans the genocide waged by<br />
the military junta, the gung-ho nationalism of the Falklands<br />
war and Argentina’s phoenix-like regeneration<br />
after wholesale privatization. In spare and fluid prose,<br />
Tóibín explores Garay’s cultural duality (Argentine but<br />
of English descent) and charts his meteoric rise from<br />
jaded English teacher to full-fledged yuppie. Befriended<br />
by undercover CIA agents, Susan and David Ford, and<br />
bedecked in Italian designer suits, he even gets the man<br />
he desires – the handsome son of a wealthy senator –<br />
who leaves home to live with him in a dream penthouse<br />
down by the river. Garay has everything he has ever<br />
wanted, so why not leave it there?<br />
True, he later goes haywire during a trip to New<br />
York where he snorts cocaine and ends up as the sexual<br />
plaything of a seedy public relations executive. Tóibín<br />
could have glossed over such aberrations but is determined<br />
that these should be milestones on the road to a<br />
pitiless nemesis. Even worse, by the end of the novel,<br />
the novel’s four most important gay characters (Garay<br />
and his boyfriend included) have been poleaxed by<br />
AIDS. In an image that will delight many homophobes,<br />
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any prospect of happiness is bequeathed to two young,<br />
sturdy and heterosexual youths glimpsed raising the<br />
sails of a boat by the ailing lovers.<br />
Stating that his priority as a writer is to “hold the mirror<br />
up to nature”, Tóibín has compared himself with the<br />
artist Vermeer. But far from being a faithful chronicler,<br />
Tóibín is a gloom-monger. Belying the novel’s message,<br />
most gay men do not die of AIDS and these days the<br />
claim of a critic like Joseph Epstein, made as recently<br />
as 1970, that gay lives are “part of the pain of the earth”<br />
is absurd. The distinguished Cambridge novelist E.M.<br />
Forster was determined that his novel Maurice should<br />
end on a note of affirmation.<br />
In a recent review, Tóibín wrote: “There is something<br />
heroic about Forster´s refusal in Maurice to insist that<br />
BUY Colm Tóibín books online from and<br />
Scudder does not get arrested, or hang himself, or go to<br />
Buenos Aires”; but adds that he finds the ending unsatisfactory,<br />
admitting that he feels compelled to represent<br />
gay lives as tragic. Here Tóibín has bedfellows as<br />
distinguished as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin who in<br />
The City And The Pillar (1948) and Giovanni’s Room<br />
(1956) produced novels of gay self-loathing which<br />
end in murder and self-destruction; but both writers<br />
produced these works pre-Stonewall. Tóibín – who has<br />
erupted onto the literary scene at a more enlightened<br />
moment – has fewer excuses to peddle such misery.<br />
So any chance of this latter-day Jeremiah trading in his<br />
gloom? Not if an interview he gave to LIT is anything<br />
to go by: “You want loss and longing? You’ll get loss<br />
and longing. I’ve only just started”. �<br />
524<br />
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Review [published March 2008]<br />
Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard<br />
Jason Weaver<br />
Aside from the transmogrified strangeness of folk and<br />
fairy tales, Amos Tutuola’s 1952 novel The Palm-Wine<br />
Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebulous<br />
comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Metamorphoses,<br />
Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice In<br />
Wonderland, but things behave very differently from<br />
even these European gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight<br />
world. I know nothing about the author’s own relationship<br />
to Nigerian culture. I would rather meet him as a<br />
stranger on the road, enchanting and a little spooky.<br />
What everyone knows is that David Byrne and Brian<br />
Eno named their album of bricolage and technological<br />
tribalism after Tutuola’s second novel My Life In The<br />
Bush Of Ghosts. Both claimed they had never actually<br />
read the book, but it would have been a wholly appropriate<br />
influence on Byrne’s ‘stop making sense’ lyrics<br />
and the circuit- breaking Eno.<br />
Every novel simulates a compact universe. It sets the<br />
rules by which that existence operates and, to be successful<br />
on its own terms, it must adhere to these tacit<br />
laws. As an exception, Thomas Pynchon’s V exploits<br />
this by setting two wholly incompatible universes<br />
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against one another, disrupting the coherence of narrative<br />
singularity through which most novels stage<br />
their rhetorical arguments. Fantasy stories, on the<br />
other hand, often unwittingly flout their own narrative<br />
coherence. The Lord Of The Rings wants it both ways.<br />
We are expected to surrender to the dramatic tension<br />
of classic narrative logic, where everything is at stake,<br />
where every act is terminal and can never be undone.<br />
The logic of Oedipus Rex is inexorable, the “infernal<br />
machine” as Cocteau called it. But when Frodo lies<br />
dying in The Lord Of The Rings or as the Hobbits are<br />
surrounded by malevolence, the emotional charge is<br />
defused. A spell is invoked, time is reversed, the slate<br />
is wiped clean. This is as incompatible with relentless<br />
narrative as Pynchon’s and the fantasy story fails on<br />
both counts.<br />
What is so vital about The Palm-Wine Drinkard is<br />
Tutuola’s absolute dedication to the fantastic. All laws<br />
of the probable are flouted and everything is elastic.<br />
Details are hasty and sketched and sentences often end<br />
with a blunt “etc”. Things are most often described by<br />
the elements that mark them out, make them what they<br />
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are. For brevity, places and things are named by their<br />
description: “The Red-People in the Red Town” or,<br />
rather wonderfully, “The Skull as a Complete Gentleman”.<br />
The latter is a bare cranium that hires body parts<br />
and a nice suit and poses in the market place as a kind<br />
of Bryan Ferry in order to lure pretty young women.<br />
Events are compressed, time collapses, a decade passes<br />
in a sentence. It is, appropriately, a drunken logic.<br />
The plot, such as it is, follows the eldest of eight children.<br />
His “work”, as he puts it, is to drink palm-wine.<br />
He is an expert and drinks 225 kegs of it a day. He<br />
cannot even drink plain water any more. The drinkard<br />
is supplied by a tapster who falls fatally from a tree and,<br />
because nobody can tap palm-wine as well as this character,<br />
the narrator sets off for Deads’ Town to find his<br />
posthumous incarnation. On the way, the drinkard finds<br />
up a wife, uses all kinds of juju and meets incredible<br />
characters such as “The Invisible-Pawn”, “The Hungry-<br />
Creature”and “The Faithful-Mother in the White Tree”.<br />
Inside the White Tree is a kind of hotel-cum-hospital<br />
with a great ballroom. Scale is immaterial in the bush.<br />
It is like a mutilated episode of In The Night Garden or<br />
an adventure from The Mighty Boosh.<br />
The transmission of folk tales follows evolutionary<br />
principles. Oral traditions enforce that each retelling of<br />
a story will mutate it according to personal and local<br />
bias and that the most mnemonic elements will carry<br />
from one teller to the next. Fantastic and grotesque de-<br />
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and<br />
tails are the organizing DNA rather than psychological<br />
depth or moral reckoning. What is the ‘use’ of a fairy<br />
tale? The briefest glance through the Brothers Grimm<br />
or Calvino’s collection of Italian stories will demonstrate<br />
that ‘happy ever after’ is only one strand of many<br />
different outcomes. Often stories will take delight in<br />
punishing the hero. These seem to be stories told for the<br />
sake of telling, for the sake of variation, imagination<br />
and invention. Like turn of the evolutionary dice, folk<br />
tales are always tweaking the seeds.<br />
Tutuola’s writing seems inherited from an oral background.<br />
It shares the same splashy colour, the incredible<br />
and the memorable. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is an intensely<br />
visual story, a vivid engagement with the imagination.<br />
One impossible to convey in any other medium,<br />
even anime. The sparseness of descriptive detail works<br />
on the reader, like a parasite working on the cortex to<br />
produce vivid hallucinations. One imagines Burroughs<br />
enjoying Tutuola’s magic. All other art forms would be<br />
too literal, filling in the spaces that Tutuola is able to<br />
exploit. How would cinema, for example, deal with the<br />
great and elusive time span of this novel, expanding<br />
and contracting as it does?<br />
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is mischievous. That the<br />
journey fails in its original purpose is barely given<br />
consideration and there is little in the way of moral<br />
resolution at the book’s abrupt ending. At one point<br />
the narrator must act as a court judge on the hilarious<br />
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and inspired case of a man who borrows money for a<br />
living. He puts great pride into his work. When a debt<br />
collector comes to claim a pound back off him, the borrower<br />
kills himself rather than fail in his occupation.<br />
The collector himself has great pride and kills himself<br />
to follow the debt into heaven. A curious bystander,<br />
who has witnessed this great contest of wills, also stabs<br />
himself in order to see the final outcome. On the cases<br />
he presides over, the narrator defers judgement as long<br />
as he can, offering an appeal to the reader:<br />
“so I shall be very much grateful if anyone who<br />
reads this story-book can judge one or both cases and<br />
send the judgement to me as early as possible, because<br />
the whole people in the ‘mixed town’ want me very<br />
urgently to come and judge the two cases”.<br />
Towards the end of the story, the narrator is able to<br />
avert a great famine through the use of a magic egg.<br />
However, the crowds this miraculous act brings to his<br />
house are keeping him awake and the grumpy saviour<br />
decides he’s done enough good work. In this way, Tutuola<br />
wickedly sidesteps good behaviour.<br />
Despite its comparisons with other oral traditions,<br />
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a text, very much a work<br />
of printed fiction, rather than transcription. The book<br />
makes great use of parenthesis, abbreviation, appeals<br />
to the reader and a series of charming and sometimes<br />
baffling banner headlines (“WHO WILL TAKE THE<br />
MOUSE?” and “AFRAID OF TOUCHING TER-<br />
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and<br />
RIBLE CREATURES IN BAG”). These stylistic tics<br />
give the novel an even greater personality and (to this<br />
reader) more mystery and vitality. The recognized<br />
elements of the western novel – narrative resolution,<br />
ethical dialectics and psychological mapping – are<br />
not considerations of such writing. Unlike The Lord<br />
Of The Rings, there are no appeals to sentiment or<br />
emotional identification. Therefore, no agenda of<br />
good and evil. Similarly, literary decorum is absent.<br />
Tutuola’s style is both loose and terse and reads as<br />
spontaneous. This is both exciting and somewhat<br />
disorientating, which befits a picaresque journey<br />
through strange, strange territory. Tutuola’s bush land<br />
is a place of magic, where all the roads have ended.<br />
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is our guide.<br />
Post-script: Having written out of ignorance, I did<br />
some research. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was originally<br />
composed in 1946 – quickly, almost on a whim – by the<br />
semi-itinerant, basically educated Tutuola. It had an interesting,<br />
meandering path to publication six years later<br />
and was quickly praised (by white readers) and damned<br />
(by Nigerian authors and academics). Ironically, both<br />
viewpoints seem to stem from the rusty old issue of<br />
authenticity; the novel apparently conforming to Western<br />
stereotypes of the primitive to Euro-American eyes<br />
whilst failing in its faithfulness to Yoruban storytelling<br />
traditions to African ears. Oyekan Owomoyela is the<br />
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most vocally hostile, accusing Tutuola of being intellectually<br />
colonized by north-western consumerism, failing<br />
to oppose the colonial mindset in any way and failing<br />
to demonstrate an authentic Yoruban voice on virtually<br />
any count. Ironically, Byrne and Eno faced analogous<br />
calls of cultural imperialism on their musical safari.<br />
Tutuola’s disinclination to honour his sources also sees<br />
him branded as a plagiarist. Other critics were peeved<br />
at the rough nature of the author’s writing style, afraid<br />
that it would indeed stereotype Africans as intellectual<br />
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and<br />
primitives. In recent years, some Nigerians such as the<br />
author Ben Okri have reclaimed Tutuola as a heavy<br />
influence and some academics, such as David Whittaker<br />
have attempted to place his work beyond a strictly<br />
post-colonial framework. Actually, it is precisely a lack<br />
of authenticity that makes The Palm-Wine Drinkard<br />
such a thrilling novel to me. It is folk culture’s erratic<br />
evolution – a kind of Chinese whispers – that makes<br />
it so resistant to the authenticity that so many seem to<br />
want it to represent. �<br />
528<br />
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Review [published July 2003]<br />
Stuart Walton: Out Of It<br />
Chris Mitchell<br />
Given the jacket cover emblazoned with dayglo euphemisms<br />
for getting altered and the obligatory chortling<br />
review quotes from numerous lad mags, you’d be forgiven<br />
for wondering at first glance if Stuart Walton’s<br />
book is a paragon of research sobriety. But rather than<br />
being another cheap cash-in on the still-burgeoning UK<br />
drug scene, Out Of It proves to be a radical and challenging<br />
rethink to current day perceptions about drugs<br />
and their usage, whether legal or not.<br />
Instead of making any sort of pretence towards argumentative<br />
objectivity, Walton firmly states his case<br />
early on by declaring his own experience and interest<br />
in taking drugs and his contention that becoming intoxicated<br />
is a fundamental human drive rather than an<br />
optional experience, as strong as the primal needs for<br />
food, water and sex. Indeed, Out Of It is partly written<br />
in reaction to the censure from government and medical<br />
establishments which continually attempt to restrict<br />
the populace’s intake of anything which might bring<br />
them pleasure.<br />
This is a refreshingly honest approach to a subject<br />
about which most writers have pretended they have no<br />
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first hand knowledge, and Walton’s narrative feels similarly<br />
unfettered. There is a distinct academic rigour at<br />
work in the structure of the book, but Out Of It remains<br />
eminently readable whilst drawing on a huge range<br />
of sources, both historical and contemporary, for and<br />
against, to indicate the lengths (and depths) to which<br />
humans have always been impelled to find ways to<br />
change their reality and the fallout of doing so. Indeed,<br />
it becomes difficult to argue with Walton’s thesis that<br />
we are impelled towards intoxication, however much<br />
society might attempt to stop us. Or maybe that’s just<br />
the predilections of this particular writer.<br />
The numerous political and practical arguments concerning<br />
the hypocrisy and ultimate failure of the War<br />
On Drugs are well-rehearsed and well-rehearsed here,<br />
but the half-baked theories of drug culture luminaries<br />
such as Terence McKenna and Aldous Huxley do not<br />
get an easy ride either. While being convinced of the<br />
intoxication imperative is one thing, whether the reader<br />
will go along with Walton’s advocacy of legalisation<br />
for all drugs is a different matter, because the fallout of<br />
doing so is so difficult to predict.<br />
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From the literary point of view, Walton delivers a<br />
fascinating chapter discussing the hoary old argument<br />
that drugs increase creativity, taking in Coleridge, De<br />
Quincey, the Beats and an excellent analysis of Malcolm<br />
Lowry’s Under The Volcano.<br />
In short, Out Of It is something of a vital contribu-<br />
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tion to the literature both of and about drugs – it makes<br />
its points effectively without becoming polemical and<br />
shows up many drug-related arguments, both for and<br />
against, to be simply vacuous. Out Of It does a neat job<br />
of clearing a path to let a real debate about intoxicants<br />
and their place in society begin. �<br />
530<br />
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Interview [published March 2000]<br />
Alan Warner: Existential Ecstasy<br />
Zoe Strachan talks to Alan Warner about French intellectuals<br />
and the chemical generation genre<br />
ZS: Your story ‘After the Vision’ was in my opinion<br />
the best in the Children Of Albion Rovers anthology<br />
produced by Rebel Inc. It says it was taken from something<br />
called The Far Places. Was this a novel? It seems<br />
to have similarities to These Demented Lands.<br />
AW: Yes, a section of a novel and parts of a linked<br />
series of short stories called, believe it or not, Trend<br />
Fault Team 2, about Highland kids who were into rap<br />
music. I might rework some of these stories sometime.<br />
These Demented Lands came from some other area of<br />
my storm tossed imagination.<br />
ZS: These Demented Lands was a little bit different<br />
from your other novels, it was more surreal and included<br />
illustrations. Did you think of it as a chance to<br />
be more experimental with your text?<br />
AW: Well, the illustrations you mention are already in<br />
Morvern Callar, the map Red Hannah draws for Lanna,<br />
for example, or the road sign. I enjoy breaking up the<br />
language that way and it sort of takes the reader out of<br />
the delusion of the text into another delusion!<br />
ZS: Morvern Callar attracted lots of “Highland rave”<br />
type comments. Do you think there is a point these days<br />
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in distinguishing between Scottish and other writing?<br />
AW: It’s like Duke Ellington said about music … there<br />
is good writing and bad writing and those are the only<br />
two types.<br />
ZS: And do you think that the chemical generation<br />
genre has run it’s course now? Were you pleased at<br />
being included in that whole thing?<br />
AW: That was something invented by an editor called<br />
Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the<br />
1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short<br />
story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think<br />
you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t<br />
think you can base a whole literary movement on writing<br />
about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered<br />
me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers<br />
than the writing, there was something egotistical and<br />
silly about it, ‘Look, we go to nightclubs but we are<br />
writers,’ so fucking what. I’m interested in great books<br />
not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used<br />
to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much<br />
better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls,<br />
colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar<br />
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there. No bouncers either, just kangaroos.<br />
ZS: You’re currently working on a novel called At A<br />
Fair Old Rate Of Knots. How would you describe it<br />
and when do you think it might be published?<br />
AW: (First answer) SORR M COMPUTR HAS RE-<br />
ALL ROKE DOW<br />
(Later) Travelogue from the point of view of a homeless<br />
guy who has no choice but to travel, and a critique<br />
of past Highland/literary/historical landmarks. It could<br />
end up with a shootout at Culloden battlefield! The title<br />
is now The Man Who Walks. I don’t have a clue when<br />
it’ll be published.<br />
ZS: You’ve said that you really got into reading with<br />
authors like Alan Paton and Andre Gide. Who or what<br />
else inspired you to start writing, and who’s work really<br />
excites you (intellectually or otherwise) at the moment?<br />
AW: I’M SERIOUS THE KEOARD IS FUCKED<br />
Then: Camus (see below), Sartre (ditto), Michael<br />
Moorcock, Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, J.G. Ballard,<br />
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, the music of<br />
Holger Czukay.<br />
Now: Same writers and Mark Richard, Annie Proulx,<br />
Juan Carlos Onetti and the music of Holger Czukay.<br />
ZS: Morvern Callar sometimes reminds me a little<br />
of Camus’ Mersault or even Sartre’s Roquentin, particularly<br />
in terms of her connections with other people.<br />
Were you self-consciously trying to explore existential<br />
concepts or styles of narration?<br />
BUY Alan Warner books online from and<br />
AW: IT IS EITEITAIL E<br />
You’re spot on, Nausea, The Roads To Freedom trilogy<br />
and Camus’ work were awful important to me, especially<br />
Nausea and The Outsider. I think Morvern Callar<br />
is an existential novel … and one that taps into the<br />
absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern<br />
is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to<br />
jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she<br />
suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man<br />
she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former)<br />
domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get<br />
dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it<br />
metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it<br />
so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past<br />
the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of<br />
death, in that way she’s heroic I think.<br />
ZS: There’s quite a few university courses now on<br />
creative writing as a discipline. Do you think that this<br />
is a good thing or does it run the risk of reversing some<br />
of the democratization of literature which has occurred<br />
recently (perhaps particularly in Scotland with Canongate<br />
and Rebel Inc), and putting literature back into an<br />
academic context?<br />
AW: SORR I’M REAKIG UP HERE<br />
Well I feel guilty about my suspicions because many<br />
good writers have come out of those workshops, especially<br />
in the US where there seem to be millions of<br />
them. But I’m secretly appalled by the concept, I think<br />
532<br />
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writing is so intensely time consuming and private an<br />
activity there shouldn’t be much time for gurus and<br />
classes to attend in universities. I don’t think writing<br />
can be taught … you can be given pointers … be told<br />
to read certain books etc. but the only discoveries the<br />
writer makes are going to be solitary ones on the page.<br />
I see writing as an existential act, an axis between how<br />
you live your life and literature, the idea that you can<br />
institutionalise that scares me. It’s also a matter of time,<br />
it might take you ten years to find your style, the idea<br />
that a uni professor of creative writing can bring out the<br />
old stylistic KY jelly doesn’t convince me.<br />
ZS: Do you think writers have a specific role in society<br />
to educate or agitate or produce art, or are they just doing<br />
a job like anyone else?<br />
AW: FI COMPUTER<br />
I think intelligence should be legalised, I think, as the<br />
poet Robin Robertson says, writers write for the void.<br />
I feel I make lonely cries and sometimes someone<br />
hears me, a writer can only follow the needs of the<br />
creatures of their imagination; if writers are going to<br />
write to formulas, be it the 19th-century English novel<br />
or Soviet socialist realism (or Chinese) they will be<br />
doomed to artistic failure though they might flourish<br />
with royalties.<br />
ZS: A.L. Kennedy recently brought out a book of<br />
poetry, and Irvine Welsh made that record. Have you<br />
considered forms other than prose with your writing, or<br />
BUY Alan Warner books online from and<br />
been tempted to a complete change of medium?<br />
AW: Well I mess around with oil and acrylic painting on<br />
large canvas. Abstract stuff. I’ve done a few on empty<br />
cigar tubes and I collect out of date credit cards so I’m<br />
going to paint on top of them. I’m doing one on top<br />
of Airfix models I’ve stuck to the canvas, I melted all<br />
the Airfix models into eerie shapes with a blow torch.<br />
I reckon they should sell for millions. I’m interested<br />
in other forms of writing. I’m working on an original<br />
screenplay and I publish the odd poem.<br />
ZS: Do you think that in the future people will have<br />
stopped reading books, that attention spans will have<br />
decreased so much that everything has to be in visual<br />
and auditory fragments? Or that everything will be<br />
virtual and interactive?<br />
AW: I HOPE COMPUTER HAVE ZERO ROLE I THE<br />
FUTURE SORRI THIS LAP TOP HAS REALLQUIT<br />
ALL THE KEOARD IS SEIZED TR TO SED THIS<br />
MADA MADA DO SED OUT A SEARCH PARTY<br />
Nah, you don’t have to switch books on or log on,<br />
the tactile immediacy of a book in your greasy palm<br />
will never die. That doesn’t mean people will read<br />
good quality literature though. I don’t think the book<br />
is under serious threat, but literature is. People have<br />
been sounding the death of the book for too long, when<br />
cinema became huge in the 1950’s people predicted<br />
the end of the novel but movies actually lead to more<br />
novel reading. I think the “dumbing down” in culture<br />
533<br />
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is worrying … the appeal of channel 5 and all these tits<br />
and canned laugh game, the idea that ‘art’ is just for<br />
pretentious wanks etc. etc … All that worries me. But<br />
virile art forms survive all kinds of upheavals. Even<br />
with a dying readership people would still write novels<br />
and some of them, great ones.<br />
ZS: And are you working on the script for the film of<br />
Morvern Callar, and do you think it’ll translate well to<br />
a visual medium?<br />
AW: I think Lynne Ramsay and Michael Caton Jones<br />
are the most exciting filmmakers to come out of Scotland<br />
since Bill Douglas so I’m over the moon they’re<br />
each adapting one of my novels. Lynne is still working<br />
BUY Alan Warner books online from and<br />
on her screenplay of Morvern Callar in between her<br />
busyness with the international success of Ratcatcher<br />
which is surely one of the greatest films ever made in<br />
Scotland. Alan Sharp, the Scottish novelist and Hollywood<br />
screenwriter (Rob Roy, Night Moves, Ulzana’s<br />
Raid) is working on The Sopranos for Michael. Lynne<br />
and I will probably do a bit of work together on the final<br />
screenplay, dialect and that, but I really Lynne’s vision,<br />
she’s a real artist and I just want to go with her vision<br />
of the film not mine. She’s even said she’ll let me in on<br />
the editing so it should be exciting but with someone of<br />
Lynne’s integrity you’ve just got to let them make the<br />
movie they want. �<br />
534<br />
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Interview [published September 2009]<br />
Belinda Webb: Justified Anger<br />
Ben Granger interviews Belinda Webb<br />
BG: Many people first read A Clockwork Orange when<br />
they’re very young, and fall in love with it. When did<br />
you first read it, and what was your reaction?<br />
BW: Actually I came to it fairly late, I read it just a<br />
few years ago, I was in my 20s. I didn’t want to read<br />
it before, I thought it was a boy’s book – a book about<br />
boys who were violent for no reason, which had nothing<br />
to say to me. Talk about judging a book by its<br />
cover! When I did finally read it, from the first page,<br />
the language just amazed me.<br />
BG: The book seems to take a fairly even inspiration<br />
from both Orange and Manchester itself. Which inspired<br />
you more?<br />
BW: Moss Side is the stronger influence. Moss Side,<br />
Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock, these areas around<br />
Oxford Road, not far from where we’re sitting. Poor<br />
areas right next to a massive student population. Populations<br />
which may as well come from different worlds.<br />
BG: The lively contempt Alex shows for the ‘Blytons’<br />
[her slang word for the respectably and middle-class]<br />
was presumably inspired by this.<br />
BW: Yes, that and the novels of Enid Blyton herself.<br />
BUY Belinda Webb books online from and<br />
Growing up reading books like Mallory Towers, about<br />
all these girls playing hockey in boarding school … in<br />
a way it just served to remind me this is the kind of<br />
education I would never have, it made you feel worse<br />
in a way. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but the<br />
contrast was so massive.<br />
BG: Your Alex is violent, but not nearly as violent as<br />
the Alex of Burgess, which makes for a very different<br />
dynamic to the book which inspired it.<br />
BW: Yes, her violence is much more just about expressing<br />
anger, justified anger. The Alex of Clockwork<br />
Orange is much more sadistic. That suited Burgess<br />
who was posing questions about the nature of choice,<br />
about choosing between two evils. My Alex comes<br />
more from my own experience. The choices she makes<br />
I see as positive.<br />
BG: How much of you is there in Apple’s Alex?<br />
BW: Well, I was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but at<br />
the same time I was the oldest girl in a family of seven<br />
trying to keep it together. Like her, I was angry rather<br />
than rebellious, rebelling implies you’ve got something<br />
constructive to rebel against. I didn’t go around beating<br />
535<br />
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people up, and I wore Dr Martens rather than ballet<br />
shoes! But like her, I was an autodidact, always looking<br />
for something new.<br />
BG: Whereas Clockwork Orange has the fictional<br />
behaviour-control of the ludovico technique, the Bill<br />
and Bob technique of your book is a direct attack on the<br />
very real techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous and the<br />
self help industry in general.<br />
BW: My book isn’t a prediction, but looking at how<br />
things could go if we follow America in this way, as<br />
we do in so many other ways. The addiction ‘industry’<br />
is massive in America, whole communities are leaving<br />
this sober, denying life. It preaches that nothing is about<br />
social conditions, it just says you’re morally defective<br />
in some way.<br />
BG: Your Alex is a symbol of autonomy against this<br />
deterministic outlook?<br />
BW: It’s about more than autonomy. It’s been said the<br />
characters of the Scottish writers Kelman and Welsh<br />
are informed a great deal by existentialism, determining<br />
your own way no matter what the consequences, and no<br />
matter what structures are in place. That’s true of Alex<br />
certainly, she’s in tune with her inner existentialist!<br />
BG: The invention at work in the language is probably<br />
the books biggest achievement. Have you always been<br />
into playing with language in this way?<br />
BW: On one level it’s a really juvenile thing, playing<br />
with words like toys. Its like a puzzle thing, playing<br />
BUY Belinda Webb books online from and<br />
with puzzles. But on another, language is so vital, so<br />
important. Noam Chomsky talks about how language<br />
informs power structures, how the words you use both<br />
signify and inform your politics, where you’re coming<br />
from. It all comes together in the book.<br />
BG: Your language is inspired by Burgess’ ‘nadsat’,<br />
but at the same time is very different to it. Once again,<br />
its nothing like a pastiche.<br />
BW: Burgess was a very intelligent man, and a linguist,<br />
he was drawing from other languages, Russian, Spanish,<br />
Italian. I know English and that’s all I know – I<br />
think that’s enough to be getting on with! I looked at<br />
English words which we no longer use for whatever<br />
reason. Latin too, which has long been the preserve of<br />
the elite. Once again, as with her intellectual passion, I<br />
wanted Alex to reclaim these things for normal people.<br />
BG: The Mancunian dystopia you explore is female<br />
dominated, with males largely obsolete. Is female<br />
domination a bad thing, or is this one positive aspect of<br />
an otherwise grim future?<br />
BW: Not it’s not positive. The perspective of the book<br />
is I’d say humanist rather than feminist, and the fact<br />
men are on the way out is drawing on the marginalisation<br />
of men today in working class communities<br />
like Moss Side. Male lives are wasted and that’s not a<br />
good thing.<br />
BG: Some readers might be surprised to see a book set<br />
in Moss Side with little mention made of race, and the<br />
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characters would seem to be white.<br />
BW: Moss Side has become synonymous with black<br />
people but there is a large white working-class population<br />
as well, which gets overlooked I think. There<br />
are other immigrant descendants, like the Irish, my<br />
ancestors, too. I was writing drawing from my own<br />
background, race wasn’t really an issue I was dealing<br />
with. Class on the other hand is.<br />
BG: Is there a straightforward political message in<br />
the book?<br />
BW: Yes, again, class. Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that<br />
we’re all middle-class now, he clearly never visited<br />
Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over<br />
clear. Alex here is a voice that is otherwise not heard.<br />
BUY Belinda Webb books online from and<br />
BG: You’ve been involved in creative writing<br />
projects with teenagers in both Moss Side and<br />
Brixton. What’s the main advice you would give to<br />
young writers?<br />
BW: I think the fact the way I write is not in a mainstream<br />
voice is the main thing, and I hope this encourages<br />
young people. People should write in their own<br />
voice and not be deflated. My sister went on a creative<br />
writing course and it was – you must write in this way<br />
and that way. If you’re going to write in that way you<br />
may as well be in a factory, dryly sticking different bits<br />
of formulae together. It may sound like a platitude or a<br />
cliché but staying true to your own voice really is the<br />
most important thing in writing. �<br />
537<br />
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Irvine Welsh<br />
Biography<br />
Given the level of his fame these days, it’s easy to<br />
forget that Irvine Welsh spent a long time in relative<br />
obscurity during the 1990s, and even after the critically<br />
acclaimed publication of Trainspotting, didn’t<br />
really arrive in the mainstream until the advent of<br />
the movie. Trainspotting (the book, the movie, the<br />
play) is one of the cultural landmarks of 90s Britain<br />
and continues to hold a strange fascination on successive<br />
generations of readers. Harry Gibson’s stage<br />
adaptation in particular has introduced theatre to a<br />
whole new audience who would otherwise never go<br />
to see a play.<br />
Welsh’s subsequent output has been interesting<br />
and uneven - as evinced by Gary Marshall’s scathing<br />
review of Filth, which gets plenty of hate mail from<br />
Welsh fanboys - and his transformation into a pillar<br />
of the UK’s literary establishment within the space of<br />
a decade is nothing short of bizarre.<br />
I set up IrvineWelsh.com as a link directory to<br />
Welsh related material on the Net, while Welsh’s own<br />
official site is at IrvineWelsh.net.<br />
Chris Mitchell �<br />
Articles<br />
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Expletives Repeated<br />
Interview with Harry Gibson by Chris Mitchell 539<br />
You’ll Have Had Your Theatre<br />
Feature by Dr Willy Maley<br />
Queerspotting<br />
541<br />
Zoe Strachan’s feature on Irvine Welsh<br />
and Alan Warner<br />
Filth<br />
545<br />
Review by Gary Marshall 554<br />
538<br />
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Interview [published September 1997]<br />
Irvine Welsh / Harry Gibson: Expletives Repeated<br />
Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting has taken the theatre world by storm. Chris<br />
Mitchell discusses censorship, sincerity and swearing with the director<br />
Trainspotting has been the cultural phenomenon of<br />
1996. Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh-based tale of drugs,<br />
dole and self-destruction has sold over 400,000 copies,<br />
the film has won critical acclaim across England, Europe<br />
and America, while the stage version has played<br />
to packed houses throughout the country. The stage<br />
versions of four of Welsh’s plays have subsequently<br />
been collected in the book 4Play.<br />
It’s arguable that the play has been the most extreme<br />
of Trainspotting’s three incarnations, its profanity<br />
and violence sending shockwaves through the theatre<br />
circuit. The Times reviewed Trainspotting’s debut last<br />
December under the headline “West End gets smack in<br />
the face”. This month the show steams into Brighton’s<br />
Gardner Arts Centre to conclude its seventh production<br />
within a year. The cast of four has gone through 23<br />
different line-ups in that time, testament to the psychological<br />
toll of enacting Welsh’s narcotic nightmares.<br />
Trainspotting’s director Harry Gibson first started work<br />
on adapting the novel three years ago. Asked if Welsh<br />
had any direct input on the stage script, Gibson laughs,<br />
“Oh no, he thinks theatre is bourgeois shite. Which is,<br />
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and<br />
of course, completely true. But now I’ve converted him<br />
and he thinks most theatre is bourgeois shite. The sign of<br />
a true genius and professional is that they let you get on<br />
with it without peering over your shoulder.”<br />
Gibson is already well familiar with the intricacies<br />
of censorship, thanks to the problems Trainspotting’s<br />
language has encountered: “BBC Radio asked me ages<br />
ago to do an adaptation of Trainspotting. Then they<br />
looked at it. When they realised that landing on ‘Planet<br />
Trainspotting’ means you can’t walk for two lines without<br />
bumping into a cunt, they bottled.”<br />
It’s precisely this sort of restriction that makes Gibson<br />
passionate about the stage: “Theatre is a far more<br />
explicit medium. I’d hesitantly say that gives it the<br />
edge over the film version of Trainspotting. But then,<br />
the film version was trying to do something completely<br />
different. It’s The Likely Lads on acid. It’s also a miracle<br />
of marketing.<br />
“But you don’t need that in the theatre because you<br />
know it’s bourgeois shite and no one’s going to come<br />
and see it unless you put on something really unusual.<br />
So you just concentrate on being as faithful to the origi-<br />
539<br />
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nal as possible. And you’ve got the freedom to do that<br />
because theatre is the exception to the rule. It hasn’t<br />
suffered much censorship since the 1950s. The theatre<br />
is very much a middle class medium and therefore it’s<br />
considered quite all right to have arseshagging and all<br />
that sort of thing going on because it won’t be a bad<br />
influence on the proles because they won’t see it. It’s<br />
the telly you’ve got to control because it’ll get through<br />
to the working class and probably pervert the children.<br />
So ordinary people have to put up with tons of censorship<br />
all the time on the telly, whereas when they go to<br />
the theatre they get to hear it like it really is.”<br />
This freedom of portrayal has been tested to further<br />
extremes with Gibson’s adaptation of Welsh’s second<br />
novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares. Nightmares makes<br />
Trainspotting look like Ivor The Engine, with the<br />
story centring around rapist and football hooligan, Roy<br />
Strang. Gibson’s commitment to faithfully representing<br />
the text doesn’t shy away from the novel’s most appalling<br />
moments. “If you have to cry or turn away from<br />
particular scenes, then you do. But the scenes stay in.<br />
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and<br />
It’s necessary that they are there. It’s great to be doing<br />
this kind of stuff because it’s in people’s bloodstreams,<br />
it’s not classic, it’s not old, it’s not trying to teach you<br />
something, it’s not trying to tell you to live better lives,<br />
it’s just there like the smell of your own sweat. I really<br />
wish theatre could keep on being like that and not keep<br />
slipping back into being a snobby, musty medium.”<br />
Despite Nightmares’ success, the chances of it following<br />
Trainspotting around the country are distinctly<br />
limited. “It’s filthy expensive because it’s an epic panto<br />
from hell. I might do a small version of it in which a<br />
small group of naked people savage each other in a<br />
cage. I’m completely serious about that. I’m very into<br />
sensationalism, I’m a shocking sensationalist.”<br />
Even after being immersed within Irvine Welsh’s<br />
violent realities for the last three years, Gibson’s next<br />
major project sounds like a major challenge: “I’m going<br />
to do something rather delightful next. I have the<br />
rights to do a stage version of A.A, Milne’s When We<br />
Were Very Young. It’ll be set in 1924 which will be very<br />
lovely and no one will say ‘cunt’ at all.” �<br />
540<br />
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Feature [published January 1999]<br />
Irvine Welsh: You’ll Have Had Your Theatre<br />
Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play<br />
You’ll Have Had Your Hole<br />
Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind<br />
of people who attended football matches at his plays.<br />
Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record<br />
in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with<br />
writers who can play in any position, it has begun to<br />
enjoy success on another stage. The country has gone<br />
from Celtic fringe to cultish frontier. Where it hitherto<br />
proved fertile ground for English and European theatre,<br />
Scotland is now growing its own, and exporting it too.<br />
One of the advantages of being a colonized culture is<br />
that you can break more easily with established forms<br />
and norms.<br />
In Scotland the traditional divide between two kinds<br />
of theatre, high brow and low-brow, was crossed by<br />
7:84 (Scotland) and a new theatre of commitment. This<br />
shift was reflected in the founding of Mayfest in the<br />
early 1980s, a Glasgow arts festival backed by the trade<br />
unions whose mission was to ‘celebrate not only May<br />
Day but also Scottish working class theatre and popular<br />
political theatre from other countries’. A key player in<br />
successive Mayfests and in touring community venues<br />
was Wildcat Theatre Company. Today, with Mayfest<br />
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on ice and Wildcat’s claws pared by cuts in funding,<br />
polemical theatre has reached an impasse. On one level<br />
this can be read alongside the failure of traditional institutions<br />
such as political parties and trade unions to<br />
effect change. With subsidised theatre on its uppers and<br />
old-style political theatre on a downer, the time was<br />
ripe for the kind of high jinks among low lives offered<br />
by Irvine Welsh and others.<br />
Between the formal experimentation of the Citizens’<br />
and the radical commitment of 7:84, something was<br />
lost. If the working classes were absent from one then<br />
they were straightened out and made presentable in<br />
the other. Neither avant-garde theatre nor agitprop<br />
were sufficient in themselves to do justice to those<br />
excluded from official culture, an exclusion that was<br />
literally obscene. Established theatres were slow to<br />
respond to the dynamism of popular culture, and to the<br />
explosion in fiction and poetry that was transforming<br />
the Scottish literary map. With Glasgow experiencing<br />
a crisis of identity as the workers city was repackaged<br />
as City of Culture, the East Coast stirred. If Glasgow’s<br />
tea was out, then Edinburgh’s was in the making. The<br />
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Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh acted as a shaping force<br />
in promoting new writing and showcasing innovative<br />
productions.<br />
Suburban sermons yielded to urban hymns, as mainstream<br />
political themes gave way to a slipstream of<br />
more subtle and nuanced engagements with politics and<br />
culture. Where John McGrath used folk forms like the<br />
ceilidh as a sounding-board, Welsh’s touchstone is the<br />
rave culture he knows so well. This new Scottish drama<br />
is arguably less a breach with previous political theatre<br />
than a fruitful branching out, but it would be wrong to<br />
ignore fundamental shifts of emphasis. Welsh’s characters<br />
are not the educated, respectable, law-abiding<br />
working class figures found in much traditional fiction<br />
and drama, nor are his communities unified in their opposition<br />
to some faceless authority.<br />
Contemporary Scottish theatre is tuned into popular<br />
culture. It has passed from music hall to club land by<br />
way of cinema, dance, drugs, football fanzines, journalism,<br />
rap, stand-up comedy and television. Where the<br />
content went before the phrase, the phrase now goes<br />
before the content. It is significant that You’ll Have Had<br />
Your Hole is set in a recording studio. Welsh draws on<br />
club culture, mixing and sampling a variety of sounds.<br />
The devil is in the detail, and the verve and vitality of<br />
local idioms, but there are large themes too – cruelty,<br />
revenge, cycles of violence, crime and punishment,<br />
responsibility, guilt. The language of violence and the<br />
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and<br />
violence of language come together in an art of suffering,<br />
but not in silence.<br />
Which brings us to the title of Welsh’s new play. Uttered<br />
in posh Edinburgh parlance, the phrase “You’ll<br />
have had your tea” has a hidden meaning. It implies a<br />
poverty of spirit in a host’s attitude to a guest. It says:<br />
“I’m presuming you’ve eaten and that means you’re<br />
getting nothing from me”. This rhetorical question is<br />
usually attributed to a middle class woman. By contrast,<br />
getting your hole is a working class masculine term for<br />
sexual fulfilment. Put the two together and you get the<br />
kind of hybrid interplay characteristic of contemporary<br />
Scottish culture.<br />
The reason Scottish novelists are turning increasingly<br />
to the theatre, or opting to have their work adapted for<br />
the stage, is that they recognise a medium that crosses<br />
borders and breaks down barriers much more readily<br />
than film, which has lost its ability to challenge audiences.<br />
One thinks here of Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is<br />
To Keep Breathing (1995), James Kelman’s One, Two,<br />
Hey! (1994) and Duncan McLean’s Julie Allardyce<br />
(1993), and of course Irvine Welsh’s Headstate, not to<br />
mention Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares.<br />
It’s not so much a question of choosing between fiction<br />
or film or theatre, as a renewed confidence in their own<br />
voices that sees Scottish writers flitting effortlessly<br />
between forms.<br />
With theatre, there is always an element of risk,<br />
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and a unique opportunity to engage with an audience<br />
in real time. With film, reality is screened, the<br />
inevitable happy ending undercutting any edge.<br />
While bodies like the British Board of Film Censors<br />
maintain standards of hygiene, theatre is completely<br />
uncensored, blissfully free from the editorialising<br />
and moralising of the powers that ban. Theatre has<br />
survived repeated attempts to stifle it and has in the<br />
process emerged as a resilient and versatile space<br />
where nothing is unspeakable, where you can in<br />
principle say anything, a platform for free speech,<br />
a place of absolute freedom and a place of no<br />
mercy. The only cultural form to have been banned<br />
wholesale, prosecuted and hounded by censors for<br />
400 years, theatre has built up immunity to attack<br />
from the guardians of decency. Thirty years after the<br />
scrapping of the office of the Lord Chamberlain, the<br />
stage remains resistant to most strains of censorship,<br />
even the most virulent.<br />
Scotland has not always been at the forefront, but it<br />
is adapting to change. The move from page to stage is<br />
all the rage for angry young writers north of the border.<br />
The accent is on voice. Duncan McLean insists<br />
on “a commitment to the voice as the basis of literary<br />
art, rather than some supposed canonical ‘Officially<br />
approved’ language”. The soul of Scottish theatre no<br />
longer frets in the shadow of the English language. In<br />
the interval between the curtains closing on didactic<br />
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political theatre and a slow drawing down of blinds<br />
for drawing-room drama a new hybrid form entered<br />
stage left – absurd, enraged and intense, a theatre of<br />
cruelty and hate that is at once tender and torn, cool<br />
and comical, with a pen dipped in rebel ink, stylish<br />
but possessed of a certain substance.<br />
The social realist tradition was not merely on the side<br />
of the working class, but stood in their way, portraying<br />
them, representing them, speaking for them. The social<br />
surrealism or hyper realism of Welsh’s writing aches<br />
with authenticity, touching sore points with a persistent<br />
probing that leaves you trembling. When working with<br />
Boilerhouse on Headstate Welsh spoke of ram-raiding<br />
the set. He meant this literally, no doubt, but it is in the<br />
area of metaphor and speech that Welsh excels, rather<br />
than in any accepted notion of stagecraft. Welsh is not<br />
tongue-tied by authority or ham-strung by convention<br />
or classical training. If his plays, angry and experimental,<br />
are like movies, then they are less drive-in than<br />
drive-by, marked by a casual violence and a language<br />
that fairly crackles with cruelty. He has taken the pulse<br />
of Scottish theatre, and given it a much-needed smack<br />
in the face. Much has been said of Welsh’s articulation<br />
of drug culture, but under the influence of film – Mamet<br />
and Tarantino spring to mind – Welsh is pushing theatre,<br />
a Class A drug if ever there was one, and giving<br />
audiences a welcome shot in the arm.<br />
Not that pride or patriotism are called for. Welsh’s<br />
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references to “shitey Scotland” capture a growing<br />
scepticism about modern manifestations of nationalism.<br />
Looking at life through schemie windows,<br />
with 20 storey vision, Welsh sees the world with a<br />
colder eye than the old Scottish school of radicals,<br />
and he manages to be dispassionate, even as his<br />
characters burn with a fierce indignation. Prolific<br />
and provocative, Irvine Welsh has left his imprint on<br />
the Postmodern Scottish psyche. He has been called<br />
“the poet laureate of the chemical generation”, but<br />
Welsh’s appeal is much wider than the popular youth<br />
culture he so eloquently represents.<br />
As the margins fold back to infringe on the metropolis,<br />
it is appropriate that a new play by Irvine Welsh is<br />
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and<br />
opening in Leeds. Mercurial and mobile, Scottish theatre<br />
cannot be reduced to a single company or venue, nor<br />
should it be categorised as a movement. Movements,<br />
like parties and trade unions, may have had their day,<br />
not to mention their hole. Instead, we should imagine<br />
something more akin to a carnival – vibrant, vivid and<br />
vigorous, the stuff of life and the stuff of theatre. Why<br />
have a slice when you can have the whole cake, and a<br />
language sandwich to boot? It’s high time you had your<br />
high tea. You’ll have had your theatre.<br />
Dr Willy Maley is a lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s<br />
Department of English Literature. This essay<br />
first appeared in the programme notes to the original<br />
production of You’ll Have Had Your Hole. �<br />
544<br />
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Feature [published May 1999]<br />
Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner: Queerspotting<br />
Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of<br />
the closet…<br />
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a<br />
family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing<br />
machines, cars, compact disc players and electric<br />
tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck<br />
you are on a Sunday morning. But whatever you do,<br />
don’t choose homosexuality.<br />
Traditionally, this has been the general feeling in<br />
Scottish fiction over the years. More recently, we have<br />
become familiar with the dull, thudding masculinity of<br />
Kelman, Sharp, McIlvanney, Gunn. Even these days,<br />
as Chris Whyte has highlighted, “to be gay and to be<br />
Scottish, it would seem, are still mutually exclusive conditions.”<br />
(Whyte, Gendering The Nation, 1995). Now,<br />
at the end of the millennium, we have hopefully moved<br />
on from our national literary stereotype of the tortured,<br />
lonely (heterosexual, probably homophobic) anti-hero.<br />
(Think Cuffee, Laidlaw, Finn, Doyle and so forth). We<br />
have left behind the good old days when women stayed<br />
in the kitchen, entrapping men then withholding their<br />
love, and potential queers were suitably pathetic, warped<br />
and unhappy. Yet still we cannot readily disagree with<br />
Berthold Schoene that, “Scotland is still waiting for the<br />
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emergence and subsequent ‘coming out’ of a generation<br />
of angry young men who, unafraid of their own feelings,<br />
would dare contest the misogynous and homophobic<br />
rules of the ‘Emotional Establishment’ inside” (Schoene,<br />
‘Angry Young Masculinity’, in Whyte ed., 1995). Yes,<br />
there are (finally) many female authors at the very forefront<br />
of Scottish literature. Yes, Scottish poetry boasts<br />
some of the best lesbian and gay writers. So how long<br />
must we wait for this heralded new breed of angry young<br />
man? And might there also be an angry young woman?<br />
Perhaps we need not wait that long. Perhaps the picture<br />
is not as bleak as an unreconstructed (or should that<br />
be undeconstructed?) kailyard in winter. At the end of<br />
the 19th century the ‘kailyard’ (literally, cabbage patch)<br />
was all the rage amongst Scottish writers such as J.M.<br />
Barrie, F.R. Crockett and Ian MacLaren. Kailyard literature<br />
painted a sentimental, highly romanticised picture<br />
of rural and small town life in Scotland, full of the local<br />
colour of the Scots tongue. The only problem was, it<br />
bore little resemblance to the often harsh reality of the<br />
time. The realisation that all in the garden wasn’t quite so<br />
lovely didn’t come until 1901, and the publication of The<br />
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House With The Green Shutters by G. Douglas.<br />
This time round however, the fin de siècle has seen<br />
the emergence of another new genre, one that seems<br />
set to catapult us into the next millennium with rather<br />
more truth, not to mention style – the ‘satanic kailyard’<br />
(the name comes from a forthcoming essay by Christopher<br />
Harvie entitled ‘Kelman, the Canon, and the<br />
Satanic Kailyard’). This wonderfully appropriate term<br />
describes contemporary texts by Scottish authors such<br />
as Welsh, Warner, Hird, Legge and so on; that is to say<br />
the new generation of Scottish authors writing about<br />
Scottish urban working class youth in all its dubious,<br />
depraved, or just plain deranged, glory. The old cabbage<br />
patch has become the new housing scheme. The<br />
characters are more likely to work the benefit system<br />
than the land, and would generally rather settle down to<br />
heroin and Temazepam than neeps and tatties. However,<br />
has there been an equivalent revolution in sexuality?<br />
The satanic kailyard texts that will be considered here<br />
are Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House and Alan Warner’s<br />
The Sopranos, although reference will also be made to<br />
their debut novels, Trainspotting and Morvern Callar<br />
respectively. In the light of these texts then, the question<br />
which springs to mind is: in contemporary Scottish<br />
literature, why is it suddenly cool to be queer?<br />
One of the primary aspects of satanic kailyard in general<br />
which is important in this context is its relation to<br />
popular culture, something which hasn’t always been de<br />
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rigeur in Scottish fiction to date. It is perhaps due to the<br />
relative youth of the authors themselves that the details of<br />
their characters tend to be just right – they wear the right<br />
clothes, listen to the right music, go to the right clubs,<br />
take the right drugs, and so on – for people in their situations.<br />
Therefore it is reasonable to extrapolate that they<br />
will also have the right attitudes, and, “homosexuality<br />
has become acceptably familiar, if not yet unremarkable,<br />
for a growing generation.” (Andy Medhurst, ‘Wish You<br />
Were Queer?’, The Face, Jan 1999). With this in mind,<br />
let us proceed to examine the texts in question, and their<br />
portrayal of homosexuality, in depth.<br />
Out of the collection of stories which make up The<br />
Acid House it is undoubtedly the novella, ‘A Smart<br />
Cunt’ which is the most interesting as regards homosexuality.<br />
Brian, the central character, is straight in the<br />
sense of being heterosexual. However, there is another,<br />
far more important sense of the word in which he tends<br />
to be far from ‘straight’ – that pertaining to drug use. In<br />
any narrative by Welsh, this is how we must understand<br />
the term. Brian’s friend Denise, on the other hand, is<br />
gay, as it seems is Penman. In many respects Denise<br />
is stereotypically camp; he “pouts with a saucy wink,”<br />
‘squeals excitedly” and “minces smartly.” Needless to<br />
say, these activities are never performed by a heterosexual<br />
male character. Despite his apparent effeminacy<br />
though, Denise is easily capable of the aggression typical<br />
of most other characters in Welsh. When one of his<br />
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“young queens” annoys him his reaction is instant,<br />
“BATTER YIR FUCKIN CUNT IN, SON!” He is in<br />
no way ineffectual.<br />
Denise and Brian grew up together on the same<br />
housing scheme, a place to which Denise says he<br />
will never return. With the additional knowledge of<br />
narrator, Brian explains, “Denise never really fitted<br />
in back there. Too camp; too much of a superiority<br />
complex.” Obviously, Denise did not fit in primarily<br />
because he was gay, but it is interesting that the narrator<br />
doesn’t exactly say that. Instead, he gives us<br />
other options to add to our unspoken assumption<br />
of prejudice. This is borne out by the fact that even<br />
when Denise moved away from the scheme into<br />
the gay scene of central Edinburgh he did not find<br />
acceptance: “Gay punters that hang around Chapps,<br />
The Blue Moon and The Duck hate Denise. His<br />
stereotypical queen stuff embarrasses most homosexuals.”<br />
So in effect Denise is a double outsider<br />
– rejected both by scheme and scene alike. This is<br />
not as bleak as it may at first seem though; we learn<br />
that Denise “loves to be hated”. Although he actively<br />
chooses to be disliked he manages to retain a wide<br />
circle of loyal (and often heterosexual) friends.<br />
Denise is not the only character with a penchant for<br />
camp; Brian himself engages in camp banter with his<br />
heterosexual friends, “Raymie sighs … then puts his<br />
tongue in my ear. I peck him on the cheek and pat his<br />
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arse – You’re raw sex, Raymie, raw fuckin sex man, I<br />
tell him.” The emphasis on camp throughout ‘A Smart<br />
Cunt’ may have a significant function in the text, apart<br />
from providing humour. Marty Roth quotes Andrew<br />
Britton as saying that the over-the-top performance<br />
of camp requires a ‘sense of perversity in relation to<br />
bourgeois norms” as well as resulting in “the frisson<br />
of transgression” (Roth, ‘Homosexual Expression and<br />
Homophobic Censorship: The Situation of the Text,’ in<br />
Bergman ed., Camp Grounds, 1993). These two qualities<br />
tend to be possessed both by Welsh’s writing and<br />
by his characters; in this case the use of camp helps to<br />
create this sense of transgression.<br />
The key point about ‘A Smart Cunt’ in this context<br />
is found in the narrator’s attitude to his gay associates,<br />
Denise and Penman. They are his friends, their<br />
sexuality is not an issue for him, or indeed for others<br />
in the group such as Veitchy, Raymie and Spud. Brain<br />
has a sound knowledge of the gay scene and the gay<br />
lexicon. For example, he recognises when Denise is<br />
choosing to act like a stereotype, and he appreciates<br />
who is a queen and that the term does not apply to all<br />
homosexuals. This very aware attitude is thrown into<br />
relief by his diatribe against the crème de la crème of<br />
Scottish masculinity, the Hardman (actually a “big sensitive<br />
blouse”), “the Scottish Hardman chips a nail, so<br />
he head-butts some poor fucker.” In Brian’s schema it<br />
is the Hardman, not the homosexual, that is the ‘other’.<br />
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The reverse tends to be true in his society; at one point<br />
he is beaten up merely for his association with Denise.<br />
This fits in with Jonathan Dollimore’s suggestion that,<br />
“homosexuality is so strangely integral to the selfsame<br />
heterosexual cultures which denounce it” (Dollimore,<br />
Sexual Dissidence, 1991). After all, where would the<br />
Hardman be without the gay man? In much of Scottish<br />
society, as in Scottish literature, the Hardman, or even<br />
just the heterosexual man, feels constantly obliged to<br />
strive against being mistaken for a poof.<br />
It is a woman, Olly, who actually vocalises homophobic<br />
sentiments. To her, Denise is a “fuckin sick queer,”<br />
or a ‘sick poof.” Unlike Brian, she fears being damned<br />
by association, “I’m no fuckin fag hag.” Naturally,<br />
Brian springs to Denise’s defence, “he’s my friend …<br />
stop aw this homophobic shite: it’s a total drag.” This<br />
is rather ironic given Brian’s attitude to women, for<br />
example, “the main reason I was here was that it was<br />
full of fanny and I hadn’t had a shag in five months.”<br />
One final positive characteristic of Brian, rare in<br />
Scottish literary males, is his ability to indulge in homosocial<br />
activity without the traditional angst. Schoene<br />
has commented on the phenomenon displayed by, but<br />
by no means limited to, Alan Sharp’s male characters:<br />
“The fear of being mistaken for a ‘queer’ is so great<br />
that the manly courage of angry young men dwindles<br />
drastically when they come to realise the ‘dubious’<br />
intensity of their own emotional attachment to other<br />
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men … natural enthusiasm for homosocial contacts …<br />
might be interpreted as the expression of a latent …<br />
homosexual desire.” (Schoene in Whyte ed., 1995)<br />
Brian does not suffer from such insecurities about<br />
his own sexuality. On a night out with Penman, apparently<br />
a gay man, he explains, “I’d never felt so close<br />
to anyone, well, not another man, as I did to Penman<br />
that night. It was a lovers-without-the-shagging type<br />
scene.” Then, after meeting ex-lover Olly, “I went<br />
over and held Penman in my arms for a long time.”<br />
However, just as we become excited and let ourselves<br />
believe that Brian might be about to jump out of the<br />
closet we remember that he is, at this time, under the<br />
influence of ecstasy. It seems that in a drug altered state<br />
intimate male bonding is more acceptable, and feelings<br />
can be acknowledged more readily.<br />
Mark Renton in Trainspotting, perhaps Welsh’s most<br />
(in)famous creation, is not dissimilar in attitude to Brian,<br />
as is particularly apparent in the ‘London Crawling’<br />
section of the book. Chris Whyte says of this novel, “in<br />
a faithfulness to older paradigms which verges on the<br />
touching, Welsh’s only acknowledged gay character is<br />
a double outsider, an Italian immigrant encountered in<br />
London.” This is undeniable (with the exception of two<br />
lesbians who are introduced in ‘Feeling Free’), but again<br />
we can argue that it is Renton’s attitude towards Giovanni<br />
which is revealing. In fact, he is surprisingly benign –<br />
given that Giovanni first of all makes a pass at him in<br />
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a dodgy cinema, and then abuses him as he sleeps (in a<br />
particularly unpleasant way!). Certainly, Renton is angry<br />
at first, but he soon ends up comforting and hugging the<br />
older man, feeling genuine sympathy for him, and in the<br />
end takes him to a party. Very charitable indeed. At the<br />
end of the night he muses, “ah might end up whappin it<br />
up the wee cunt’s choc-box yit.” Whyte quotes this as<br />
an especially damning comment, showing just how little<br />
Welsh has diverged from older paradigms. However, another<br />
reading might say that within the social and sexual<br />
register of Welsh it is a perfectly acceptable comment;<br />
considering the manner in which characters talk about<br />
women they fancy, or indeed love.<br />
Besides, how often in Scottish literature do we find<br />
the ‘male lead’ admitting to picking up a “gorgeous<br />
young queen” and taking him home for a bit of oral<br />
sex? Renton recalls this incident rather fondly – perhaps<br />
with amusement – but definitely without shame.<br />
Despite this event, Renton isn’t even bisexual, never<br />
mind gay. He did it because in London normal conventions<br />
don’t apply, “Ye can be freer here, no because it’s<br />
London, but because it isnae Leith.” It seems that being<br />
in London is a more potent, more liberating, altered<br />
state than being on Ecstasy is for Brian. The encounter<br />
with Giovanni also provokes Renton to consider his<br />
own sexuality again, “How the fuck dae ah ken ah’m<br />
no a homosexual if ah’ve nivir been wi another guy?.”<br />
Obviously for Renton gay sex must include anal sex<br />
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to be ‘proper’ – the “gorgeous young queen” doesn’t<br />
quite count. This is disappointing, after all, in the real<br />
world no such condition applies for gay men. Perhaps<br />
it is because anal sex is virtually essential in heterosexual<br />
relationships in Welsh’s writing that it is seen<br />
as absolutely essential in homosexual ones. Unsurprisingly,<br />
in the end Renton concludes that he is only really<br />
attracted to women, but comments, “It’s aw aboot<br />
aesthetics, fuck all tae dae with morality.” Mark Renton<br />
is no homophobe, and goes through a very normal and<br />
rational questioning of his own sexual preference. In<br />
comparison to someone like Begbie, for instance, he is<br />
positively enlightened.<br />
Thus far we have only considered male homosexuality.<br />
What of lesbianism? It is true that we seem to be<br />
experiencing something of a backlash in the wake of<br />
the ‘lesbian chic’ of the past couple of years. As Medhurst<br />
puts it in The Face, “dykes are yesterday’s news.”<br />
Not so for Alan Warner, especially in his latest novel,<br />
The Sopranos. The first clue we are given as to what the<br />
future holds for Fionnula (“the Cooler”) comes when<br />
her friend Chell notes, “she’s been queerer and queerer<br />
lately, the crazy chick.” No author can seriously believe<br />
that readers these days will only take ‘queer’ to mean<br />
strange or odd, so we instantly wonder just how queer<br />
Fionnula is going to become.<br />
At first, she seems to have the same concerns as the<br />
other Sopranos – clothes, make up, drinking, and, of<br />
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course, sailors. However, when she reaches the big city,<br />
Edinburgh, she experiences some of the slackening of<br />
normal constraints which Renton noticed in London.<br />
Initially, she considers her relationship with her best<br />
friend, Manda, “she just does all these really funny<br />
things that make me smile and smile, och, those sort of<br />
things make ya almost fall in love wi someone.” There<br />
are echoes of Brian in ‘A Smart Cunt’ and his closeness<br />
to Penman, but in this case the examination of same<br />
sex friendship marks Fionnula’s first tentative step<br />
towards identifying her developing sexuality. Later on,<br />
she comments, “ah’ve always known, soon as I’m out<br />
of Our Lady’s am away fro the Port an down here in a<br />
jiffy.” One wonders if Fionnula, in her Wonderbra and<br />
high heels, would find any more acceptance in the gay<br />
scene than Denise.<br />
The crucial moment for Fionnula comes when she<br />
discovers that Kay has had a lesbian experience; that<br />
she is not alone in her attraction to other women. However,<br />
Kay’s experience was not entirely homosexual, in<br />
that she ended up in menage à trois with a man and a<br />
woman, and indeed became pregnant as a result of it.<br />
On the one hand this is interesting as it acknowledges<br />
that sexuality isn’t necessarily clear cut; both Kay and<br />
Catriona could be described as bisexual. However, it<br />
also serves to blunt the impact of what Kay has done.<br />
The fact that a man was involved at all makes it less<br />
radical (perhaps for a predominantly heterosexual read-<br />
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ership) than if she and Catriona had been alone together.<br />
Kay herself says immediately, “Catriona isn’t lesbian!<br />
Just that bit bi.” When Fionnula asks her how she feels<br />
about it she isn’t terribly enthusiastic: “I was really<br />
drunk that night and it just happened” and “It’s really<br />
good, Kay says in a way that sounded to Fionnula as if<br />
she might be talking about a bowl of soup or a drink.”<br />
Nevertheless this perhaps does not reflect her attitude<br />
so much as her narrative function at this stage – she is<br />
there to provide an ‘out’ for Fionnula’s sexuality – and<br />
she does at least treat it as a very normal activity.<br />
The implication which is made by both Fionnula and<br />
the narrator is that Kay can afford to experiment; she<br />
lives outside the Port, she is middle class, she is not<br />
a Soprano. Fionnula says, “you have a bit of space an<br />
got away wi that scot-free but someone would be sure<br />
an clipe on me.” She is painfully aware of the social<br />
reaction she is likely to get. However this also results<br />
in a pleasing irony; if anything Kay is a triple outsider,<br />
and her friendship with Fionnula is the only reason she<br />
is accepted by the Sopranos in the first place.<br />
Fionnula’s reaction to Kay’s news is not simply one<br />
of interest or relief that she is not alone. Already attracted<br />
to Kay, it provokes strong sexual excitement,<br />
“downwards Fionnula’s stomach dived and simultaneous<br />
a jellyfish sting, right in her fanny, and up, in an<br />
awful wonder came it’s warm spreadingness.” Warner<br />
tends to acknowledge and depict female desire very ef-<br />
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fectively, but this does make us ask why this is an awful<br />
wonder; because it is new to Fionnula or because it is<br />
homosexual in nature? In the end, Fionnula’s coming<br />
out is scarcely a coming out at all as such, “It’s just.<br />
Fionnula shook her head, Ah think ah like girls as much<br />
as boys. She paused a long time, Maybe more.” Fionnula<br />
at no point refers to herself as lesbian, even in a<br />
hypothetical sense. This could be an example of the<br />
trend towards “sex without labels” which Andy Medhurst<br />
envisages, or, “the arbitrary nature of sexual definition,<br />
the extent to which our sexualities are shaped by<br />
the larger social discourse” (Martin, ‘Roland Barthes:<br />
Toward An Ecriture Gaie’, in Bergman ed., 1993). Or,<br />
in Warner’s narrative, as in the Port, lesbianism might<br />
really be the Love that dare not speak its name.<br />
The Port for Fionnula is similar to Leith for Renton,<br />
or the scheme for Denise, in that it is a place where<br />
the taboo on homosexuality remains firmly in place. As<br />
Andy Medhurst notes, “the ‘normalisation’ of homosexuality<br />
is a very recent development …there are still<br />
plenty of places where queers have to operate in virtually<br />
pre-War secrecy.” As we have seen, these places<br />
are often the very places that Warner and Welsh set<br />
their narratives, small towns and the housing schemes<br />
which surround big cities (effectively small towns in<br />
themselves). Given these settings it would be unrealistic<br />
to expect an ‘out and proud’ attitude from all the<br />
characters. This does not, on the other hand, mean that<br />
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Scottish fiction as a whole must behave as a small town<br />
where homosexuality is concerned.<br />
However, in The Sopranos Fionnula and Kay ultimately<br />
present a challenge to everyone who is gathered<br />
for the finale in the Mantrap, or “the Night Fionnula<br />
McConnel Slow danced Wi Kay Clarke” – unfortunately<br />
to the rather twee accompaniment of ‘There Are<br />
Worse Things I Could Do’. At first they aren’t ‘star<br />
attraction” as “Kylah spun onto the floor doing a pretty<br />
good waltz, with her arms wrapped passionately round<br />
the sanny bin.” If that had been how things had stayed<br />
then a sense of perspective on the situation would have<br />
been retained. In the Mantrap, however, the act of two<br />
girls dancing together is a very big deal indeed. Although<br />
their friends are watching, the main audience is<br />
of men, who move nearer to get a better look. Indeed, in<br />
one sense Fionnula and Kay embody an exceptionally<br />
clichéd male fantasy – not only lesbian, but Catholic,<br />
and schoolgirls as well! Hence it is quite a relief that<br />
when they do actually have sex Warner does not dwell<br />
too much upon the scene, and emphasises the fact that<br />
Fionnula feels as if she’s falling in love.<br />
This marks quite a departure from Morvern Callar,<br />
where the strong homoerotic subtext between Morvern<br />
and her best friend Lanna is played out in a series of<br />
rather exploitative scenes. In some cases a male character<br />
is present to assume the role of voyeur, at other<br />
times it is left up to the reader to do so. For example,<br />
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Lanna tends to help Morvern to get changed, always<br />
“biting her lip,” apparently an indication of scarcely<br />
concealed lust. When Morvern puts on her supermarket<br />
uniform, Lanna, “smoothed the nylon onto me with her<br />
palms.” Lanna also fastens Morvern’s suspenders before<br />
a night out, then later on unrolls Morvern’s stockings to<br />
reveal her glittery knee to the men in the pub. “Everyone<br />
was watching,” and some men whistle at her exposed<br />
thigh. When they finally end up at a party, they decide,<br />
somewhat bizarrely, to have a shower together, “as per<br />
usual … to save time.” This (naturally) allows plenty of<br />
opportunity for soaping each other and so on. It is hardly<br />
a surprise when at the end of the night a game of strip<br />
poker turns into a menage à quatre. At first Morvern just<br />
watches, but soon she joins in as well, “I let them do<br />
anything to me and tried to make each as satisfied as I<br />
could.” Although Morvern Callar is unusual and progressive<br />
(for Scottish fiction) in that it has a first person<br />
female narrator yet is written by a man, Warner goes<br />
even further with The Sopranos; moving from subtext<br />
to actually encompassing homosexuality within the plot.<br />
Although any action between Morvern and Lanna is<br />
heavily veiled, Fionnula and Kay first kiss in full view<br />
of everyone in the Mantrap, in “clear and vivid” light.<br />
Kylah gives Fionnula a chance to pretend nothing has<br />
happened, “when yur wasted enough , you’ll snog,<br />
that’s the way it goes, I’ve near snogged ma brother<br />
out of boredom when ah’ve been pissed enough,” the<br />
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implication being that a same sex kiss is along the same<br />
lines as an incestuous kiss. “If Fionnula and Kay had<br />
been willin to leave it at that, they might of had the<br />
whole thing forgot, an put down to another drunken<br />
night,” but it isn’t just another drunken night, it is a huge<br />
stepping stone on Fionnula’s path to self-discovery.<br />
She decides, “If You’re gonna burn your bridges burn<br />
them,” and goes home with Kay.<br />
Fionnula’s best friend Manda is the only one who<br />
reacts badly to the situation, “Fionnula, ya can’t go<br />
around doin that, people’ll think you were lezzie,” also<br />
trying to deal with the information about Catriona, “ma<br />
oh-so-fantastic sister is a pervy lesbian.” The next day,<br />
Orla suggests that Manda is, “just jealous” and even<br />
says to Fionnula, “telling you, she would go for it with<br />
you now.” Then the other sopranos turn up and Fionnula’s<br />
news is soon lost amid all the other things that<br />
have happened; Orla losing her virginity and getting ill<br />
again, Manda and the bouncer, the reprieve on being<br />
expelled. Even Manda now behaves as though nothing<br />
untoward has happened; her initial homophobia appears<br />
to have been conquered.<br />
So, in these examples of ‘satanic kailyard’ we<br />
have seen a gay man with a female name and a<br />
violent streak, a male central character with lots<br />
of gay friends, another who has had a homosexual<br />
experience, a female main character coming out and<br />
several women with blurred sexual identities. These<br />
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are the new angry young men and women. Not bad<br />
for Scottish fiction. None of these are anywhere near<br />
being homosexual texts, after all, “A text is not homosexual<br />
because there are homosexual characters,<br />
even less because two boys get married at the end:<br />
such texts are only the transposition of traditional<br />
heterosexual narration” (Martin, in Bergman ed.,<br />
1993). Warner and Welsh may be cult reading, but a<br />
Scottish Dennis Cooper has not yet appeared on the<br />
literary scene. These texts do however go some way<br />
towards normalising homosexuality, by acknowledging<br />
that it has a place in mainstream texts as well as<br />
in exclusively gay literature.<br />
Earlier on we asked why this normalisation of homosexuality<br />
was becoming apparent in these texts,<br />
and concluded that it was a necessary reflection of<br />
changed attitudes within the society which they depict<br />
(which of course includes the readers who buy these<br />
books). This is certainly true. There is however another<br />
important function of this phenomenon – subversion.<br />
In Scottish fiction it is apparent that, as Schoene says,<br />
“heterosexual masculinity is still commonly regarded<br />
as ‘the normative gender’ and heterosexual men are still<br />
widely believed to be the only adequate representatives<br />
of our species …straight masculinity is a given that has<br />
hitherto remained undefined.” Warner blatantly rejects<br />
this ridiculous, yet tenacious, notion by having a female<br />
narrator in Morvern Callar, and an almost exclusively<br />
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female cast of characters, including a lesbian central<br />
character, in The Sopranos. Welsh subverts it more<br />
subtly. At first glance, Renton and Brian might seem<br />
to follow the norm of heterosexual masculinity. On<br />
closer inspection, as we have seen, this is not the case.<br />
By giving Brian gay friends, or by allowing Renton a<br />
homosexual encounter, Welsh is in fact undermining<br />
this traditional notion of undefined straight masculinity.<br />
Both authors have therefore challenged the heterosexual<br />
male stereotype so beloved of Scottish writing.<br />
This is part of the reason why these texts are so<br />
important. They do not nod towards any politicised<br />
notion of homosexuality because they have their roots<br />
in a society where people recognise their unequivocal<br />
right to be gay, or to not bother defining their sexuality<br />
at all. Many Scottish authors remain rooted in a time or<br />
place where homosexuality is somehow unacceptable.<br />
That time is over, that place has almost disappeared,<br />
but for the most part Scottish fiction has not caught<br />
up. This is 1999, and, according to Andy Medhurst,<br />
“the days of homosexuality-as-issue are drawing to a<br />
close,” and about time too. In Scottish poetry, this is old<br />
news, as poets such as Jackie Kay and David Kinloch<br />
have proved. Is the prose world waiting for an Edwin<br />
Morgan of its own to hammer home the point that it’s<br />
okay to be gay, even in Scotland?<br />
It’s time for Scottish fiction to get a grip. Come out of<br />
the closet. Choose the future. �<br />
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Review [published March 1999]<br />
Irvine Welsh: Filth<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground<br />
publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked<br />
cultural event, Irvine Welsh was<br />
described as a spokesman for a generation and the most<br />
exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language<br />
and setting was something of a novelty first time round,<br />
Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits the same ground<br />
as everything else he’s ever written. We have deviant<br />
sex from The Acid House, Tarantinoesque musings on<br />
rock records from Trainspotting, half-arsed attempts at<br />
psychology and social comment from Marabou Stork<br />
Nightmares and, of course, lots of swearing. As with<br />
most recent Welsh product, it’s also a shambolic and<br />
incoherent mess.<br />
Filth tells the story of Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh<br />
policeman whose life resembles Harvey Keitel’s in<br />
Bad Lieutenant. Racist, misogynist, homophobic and<br />
psychotic, Robertson devours hard-core pornography<br />
whilst mentally and physically abusing himself and<br />
everybody around him. Despite his appalling personal<br />
hygiene supplemented by a genital rash and an attack<br />
of tapeworms (more of this later), he nonetheless man-<br />
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ages to have sex with almost every female he meets,<br />
in between setting up colleagues for queer-bashing or<br />
driving others to the brink of suicide.<br />
Robertson isn’t really a bad person, though. As his<br />
tapeworm explains in the latter chapters of the book –<br />
yes, the narrator is quite literally talking out of his arse –<br />
Robertson has had a tough time. He came into the world<br />
as the result of a violent rape, his adoptive stepfather<br />
made him eat coal, and the first love of his life died. The<br />
section describing the death of his first girlfriend is the<br />
only funny part of the book as Welsh goes massively<br />
over the top, piling on the pathos as he recounts how<br />
the poor crippled girl is struck by lightning in a scene<br />
that could have come straight out of an Airplane movie.<br />
Unfortunately this bit is supposed to be serious.<br />
The book runs to about 400 pages and fully 300 of<br />
them repeat the same endless catalogue of sex, violence<br />
and hatred with little in the way of variation. Some of<br />
the scenes are evidently supposed to be funny, such as<br />
the set-piece where Robertson attempts to make a video<br />
of a prostitute being penetrated by a dog or when he<br />
sleeps with a colleague’s wife after framing her husband<br />
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for making obscene phone calls. Conspicuous by their<br />
absence are the wit and invention that characterised<br />
Welsh’s earlier novels, like the foul-mouthed baby in<br />
The Acid House or Sick Boy and Spud in Trainspotting.<br />
Weighed down by the expectations of his audience,<br />
Welsh has produced a book that fails on every single<br />
level: a comedy that isn’t funny, a police procedural<br />
that can’t be bothered with the details, a tale of redemption<br />
without any trace of warmth or sympathy for any<br />
of the characters and a closing plot twist that’s visible<br />
from the first chapter.<br />
There’s a tradition in reviewing where you make<br />
sure you don’t give away the ending of a novel for<br />
fear it will prevent people from reading it. Hopefully,<br />
then, the news that Robertson committed the brutal<br />
murder he’s supposed to be investigating throughout<br />
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and<br />
the book and then kills himself at the end should prevent<br />
people from wasting their hard-earned cash on<br />
this pathetic attempt at a thriller. Maybe then Welsh<br />
will stop recycling past novels and will attempt to<br />
write something that’s actually worth reading. To<br />
describe Welsh as the greatest writer in Scotland<br />
is a huge insult to talented writers such as Jeff Torrington,<br />
William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Iain<br />
Banks and Janice Galloway who produce novels<br />
which combine well-drawn characters with empathy<br />
and social conscience.<br />
Although the title works on several levels – Filth as<br />
slang for policemen, or as a description of the world<br />
in which Bruce Robertson lives – the publisher was<br />
too restrained. A more fitting title for this shambolic,<br />
scatalogical mess of a book would have been Shite. �<br />
555<br />
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Review [published March 2003]<br />
The White Stripes: Elephant<br />
Peter Wild<br />
Ryan Adams has already said that Elephant is the<br />
greatest rock’n’roll album ever recorded (laying to rest,<br />
once and for all, his spat with ‘cissy boy’ Jack White).<br />
Jack White himself – well, Jack White thinks this is<br />
where The White Stripes get off. Nobody is going to<br />
buy Elephant. Or rather: the hordes that bought White<br />
Blood Cells – Jack White thinks they’ll stay home this<br />
time. Or so he says.<br />
Elephant kickstarts with a pristine bass sound. ‘7<br />
Nation Army’. The first single to be. Whatever you say,<br />
however you approach this, you don’t expect bass. The<br />
White Stripes are guitars and drums. Guitars and drums<br />
and occasional piano. They make a primal noise. That<br />
is what they do. The bass is just foolin’, though (it’s<br />
not bass at all – it’s just an effect – it’s just gee-tar).<br />
Jack White is here with a voice fizzing like magnesium<br />
in water: “Everybody knows about it from the Queen<br />
of England to the hounds of hell”. Oh yeah. This is<br />
rock’n’roll, pure and simple, all you need to know.<br />
When that boy White sings “I’m going to Wichita…”<br />
you sure as shit want to be on the same train … He<br />
whistles and he whines and he roars and he spits – he is<br />
BUY White Stripes music online from and<br />
everything Black Francis was back in the day.<br />
Next up is ‘Black Math’ – you follow the Pixies’<br />
thinking and ‘Black Math’ is Elephant’s ‘Tame’. Fierce<br />
fierce rock with a screaming vocal about mothers and<br />
breaking backs against all-out reverb and noise. Plus<br />
you get Jack saying “ah-ah-ah-ah-ha” (the first of many<br />
such sounds drawn from a huge pantheon of rock’n’roll<br />
staples that look stupid written down and cool as all-<br />
Hell when sung – later you get “ow a-ha ow ow ow”<br />
in ‘Little Acorns’, “do-do-dodoobiedo” in ‘Air Near<br />
My Fingers’ and “Whoo!” – a great barbaric yawp of<br />
primordial garage “Whoo!” – in ‘Girl You Have No<br />
Faith In Medicine’ – all stupid written down, all cooler<br />
than Clint when sung by your man Jack White).<br />
A nod to another Queen (Freddie Mercury) comes<br />
next – multipart vocals cluster about the cruellest chorus<br />
(“There’s no home for you here, girl, go away…”)<br />
while – and I shit you not – guitars and theremins all but<br />
haemorrhage. There is relief (albeit short-lived relief)<br />
in the familiar lilt of a cover – Bacharach and David’s ‘I<br />
Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.’ This isn’t<br />
Pop Idol though, and Jack White is no Gareth. When<br />
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he wails “I need your sweet love…” – he means it (he’s<br />
camped outside your house with a sharp knife and a<br />
cold sweat). Meg’s vocal on ‘In The Cold Cold Night’<br />
seems to respond – yeah, she’s saying, you’re crazy as<br />
a cuckoo but … you know … I like it. Sounding like<br />
Sandie Shaw (“you make me feel a little older, like a<br />
full grown woman might…”), Meg says “I know that<br />
you feel it too / when my skin turns into glue…” Okay<br />
Meg, you say, taking one slow step after another toward<br />
the door …<br />
Kitty Empire has already said (in The Observer)<br />
that the thing about Elephant (one of the things about<br />
Elephant) is Jack White has this ability (in the course<br />
of a line, of a song, of an album) to hit every button<br />
you could ever want, and many buttons you could<br />
hardly imagine and a few you’re willing to ignore. ‘I<br />
Want To Be The Boy’ finds Jack getting maudlin over<br />
a girl: “What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull…<br />
/ I’m inclined to go finish high school just to make<br />
notice that I’m around…”); ‘Ball & Biscuit’ finds Jack<br />
redefining sex and rock’n’roll (in a way that just hasn’t<br />
been done since Prince sang ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’<br />
– the only difference is that Jack doesn’t want to be<br />
your girlfriend…): “It’s quite possible that I’m your<br />
BUY White Stripes music online from and<br />
third man, girl, but it’s a fact that I’m a seventh son…”<br />
he slurs lasciviously. “Let’s have a ball and a biscuit<br />
sugar and take our sweet time about it…” Oh yeah. On<br />
‘Little Acorns’, he doesn’t give a shit (“Take all your<br />
problems, baby, and rip ‘em apart…“), on ‘Hypnotise’<br />
(the closest thing here to a retread of ‘Fell in Love with<br />
a Girl’ – but, man, what a retread) he’s intent, driven: “I<br />
want to hypnotise you baby on the telephone…”<br />
The White Stripes are legend, already. They are<br />
legend and they know it – they nod to the past (‘Girl<br />
You Have No Faith in Medicine’ is like The Rolling<br />
Stones by way of Jonathan Fire Eater) but this is<br />
not The Strokes (despite the fact that Elephant was<br />
recorded using equipment that predates 1963). This<br />
is – to coin an overused phrase – now. The White<br />
Stripes are having the time of their life (listen to the<br />
last track, ‘It’s True That We Love Each Other’, a<br />
throwaway duet between Jack and Meg and Holly<br />
GoLightly: “I love Jack White like a little brother…”<br />
/ “Well, Holly I love you too / but there’s just so<br />
much I don’t know about you…”) – they’re enjoying<br />
every second. The greatest rock’n’roll album<br />
ever recorded. C’mon. You can keep the hyperbole,<br />
Adams. But it’s pretty damn great all the same. �<br />
557<br />
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Interview [published May 2005]<br />
Tony Wilson: Fourth Time Lucky<br />
Craig Johnson hears the Factory Records supremo on the rebirth of his label,<br />
the Joy Division film, and accidentally creating Frankie Goes To Hollywood<br />
‘Wilson ya wanker!’ is a statement that has been<br />
bandied around Northern England for 30 years now.<br />
The Wilson in question, the original media facilitator<br />
Anthony H. Wilson, is a self-proclaimed wanker, but<br />
he don’t care. One of the most important record label<br />
bosses to grace the history of rock’n’roll, his story has<br />
been told on countless occasions. From regional television<br />
news presenter where he sported a punk-green<br />
streaked barnet , via his discovery of Joy Division, the<br />
Hacienda nightclub, New Order through to acid house<br />
and Happy Mondays, Wilson’s been a powerful catalyst<br />
within many great pop-cultural moments in the last 25<br />
years. He’s been part of a story that’s involved the birth<br />
of post-punk, suicide, insanity, liquidation, narcotic<br />
excess and converting football thugs to the rebellious<br />
French thought of Situationism and dancing. By creating<br />
Factory records on Palatine Road, Manchester in<br />
the late 1970s, signing bands he saw and thought were<br />
important to the progress of rock’n’roll, he’s always<br />
promoted an unequalled passion and energy for music,<br />
culture, the dynamic city of Manchester and British<br />
youth culture. He may be a bit of a wanker, but he’s<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
also played a part in changing modern music forever.<br />
Way back in 1978 at the Russell Club in Moss Side,<br />
Wilson organised a spectacle where Joy Division and<br />
Cabaret Voltaire shaped the sound of post-punk. Ever<br />
since he’s been a magnet for creative expression, with<br />
a truly survivalist instinct, gusto and resolute desire to<br />
find the next important thing. Fast forward nearly 30<br />
years and a new band have been found with an even<br />
newer sound of British hip-hop in the form of Raw-T.<br />
Signed to the latest instalment of his mythical record<br />
label Factory Records, now entitled F4, the Mancunian<br />
collective have the element of danger and experimentation<br />
that has always attracted Wilson. Listening to their<br />
debut album one is confronted by deep digital shuffles,<br />
slick raps that talk of a British urban way of life that is<br />
sometimes tragic, always real and other times amusing.<br />
The point is that Wilson has found another gem and he’s<br />
not resting on the laurels of his glory years; the man of<br />
passion is still searching and using his media clout to<br />
highlight what he feels to be important to music and<br />
life. Great rock and fucking roll kids!<br />
Asking Tony Wilson a question is easy, extracting<br />
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information even easier. Ask him something as simple<br />
as the time and you’d receive a cultural pontification<br />
about the lines of the Meridian and the way it effects<br />
the Northern psyche. Respectively finding himself<br />
lost in Swindon and taking his nutcase New Order<br />
dog for a walk on the two occasions we spoke, he was<br />
distracted many times during the conversation. But due<br />
to the sharp thinking of the man, he managed to keep<br />
a solid thread through out and spouted long, detailed<br />
soliloquies about his iconic past, his hip-hop present<br />
and things that’ll kick off in the future.<br />
What do you say to people that shout “Wilson you<br />
wanker!”?<br />
I just keep walking and have always ignored it.<br />
Funnily enough I’ve got to go to Chorlton in about an<br />
hour, because Harry Goodwin the original rock’n’roll<br />
photographer of the 60s has a show which he asked me<br />
to go to. But Chorlton I despise with a passion. I come<br />
from Salford, then lived in Marple, went to school in<br />
Salford, went to university when I was 18, went to<br />
London when I was 21 and aged 23 came back home.<br />
I’m on television as a local reporter and putting music<br />
on television, just soundtracks really. I thought my<br />
generation will love this, we children of the 60s, but<br />
who in the early 70s were all solicitors, young teachers<br />
and trainee accountants in Chorlton and it turned out<br />
they utterly despised me. Just like all those people who<br />
shout ‘wanker’.<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
I remember going to a Rory Gallagher gig in 1975<br />
at the Free Trade Hall and there was 2,000 people and<br />
1,199 people fucking hated me. And I just thought<br />
‘What the fuck have I done to these fuckin’ people?<br />
What shits they are.’ And then about a year and a half<br />
later along came punk and suddenly I’m at The Circus<br />
and all these kids are like ‘Hey Tone, thanks for putting<br />
Costello on, thanks for putting Iggy Pop on.’ I realised<br />
I found my generation and they weren’t my fucking<br />
generation. So people shouting abuse has happened<br />
for a very long time and I find it kind of amusing and<br />
irrelevant.<br />
What sort of bands are you looking for to add to<br />
the F4 roster?<br />
A band that’s going to sell a lot of records because<br />
they’re important. The most innovative is always the<br />
most commercial at the end. The Mondays did sell a lot<br />
of albums, they sold a couple of million albums which<br />
I think is reasonably good, but if they hadn’t had the<br />
self-destruction they might of sold some more.<br />
What made you want to start a new label?<br />
I’d never really stopped I suppose. I had a two year<br />
layoff between the bankruptcy which led to London<br />
Records buying Factory, that awful period of Factory<br />
Too ended and I had to walk away, and when I finally<br />
got tired of the Space Monkeys we stopped again. It was<br />
always a question of the next time we sign a good band<br />
we’ll start again. We started again with King Rib and<br />
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they found a wonderful lead singer, but they became<br />
Simian which are not my cup of tea. I went to see The<br />
Music in Leeds: I was taken out by their manager and<br />
fell in love with them and I spent six months arranging<br />
the new label around The Music, and at the last minute<br />
their two managers who were friends of mine brought<br />
a third manager in who was a complete twat, he wanted<br />
a bidding war and in the end signed for lots of money<br />
to Hut. It was very depressing and I was outraged for<br />
about two years.<br />
The Music weren’t that good though Tony.<br />
No, The Music were that good and they had that<br />
potential, but the way their managers took them was<br />
completely fucking wrong and ended up taking them<br />
nowhere. If we’d have put them in the right environment<br />
then they’d have created a far more important<br />
second album. So the wrong environment has just<br />
fucked them. In fact I heard someone within their camp<br />
say that to some one the other week, so yes that’s what<br />
I think about them.<br />
And as I say it’s never stopped, it’s always if I ever<br />
see a great band. When I saw Raw-T live at In The<br />
City I was blown away, there were several major labels<br />
there who were also blown away. I presumed that<br />
my job with Raw-T would be to bash them around<br />
the head when they started behaving like twats, and<br />
instead the majors all offered them crap singles deals,<br />
no one offered them a real album deal and suddenly<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
the rest is history.<br />
Who’s designing the imagery for F4?<br />
I have a graphic designer who I’m very fond of<br />
called Jason Nichols who does In The City’s stuff<br />
and in it’s great having him move on from that to<br />
do the record sleeves. He did the F4 thing and I’m<br />
very happy with that. We were originally going to<br />
be called Red Cellars and there was a very clever<br />
designer called John Walsh designed a Red Cellars<br />
logo and was doing the whole thing. I took him to<br />
meet Raw-T and he met them and experienced them<br />
and got a logo from one of their boys, took it away<br />
to work on and a month later had been too busy to<br />
do it because he had more important work on. To<br />
which after a few days I exploded in a very unpleasant<br />
manner and said, ‘Fine, the most important thing<br />
in the fucking world is Raw-T so you can fuck off!’<br />
Strangely the reason it’s not called Red Cellars is<br />
not just that my partner thinks it’s a good idea cos it<br />
relates to Factory and it avoids a 15-minute explanation<br />
of why it’s called Red Cellars. But it was when I was<br />
lying in my bunk in the Amazon rainforest doing drugs,<br />
the very night Raw-T’s first single had to go to press,<br />
and I thought if I call it Red Cellars I’m going to have<br />
to use John’s logo and I’m so angry at John for being<br />
too busy to do Raw-T, and so utterly outraged I refused<br />
to use his logo. So I needed to think up a new name,<br />
and finally thought F4. That was out of a fit of anger<br />
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at one of Manchester’s best designers for having been<br />
too busy to do Raw-T. I always say to people that the<br />
portrayal of me by Coogan as an affable fool is very<br />
sweet but in fact my daughter who is next to me will<br />
testify, I’m a truly horrible person. And you have to be<br />
to get things done.<br />
Would you ever start a new nightclub again?<br />
Yes I would but it’d be very difficult. I’d love to have<br />
somewhere like The Castle in Oldham where Raw-T<br />
go and play, it’s like a cross between an Oldham pub<br />
and 8Mile by Eminem. I’d love something like that,<br />
but then again that’s a fucking nightmare anyway, so<br />
maybe not. I’d love to do that personally but I can’t<br />
imagine it happening, I now have so many other little<br />
jobs in my life and it gets complicated but who knows<br />
maybe one day.<br />
What band in musical history do you wish you<br />
could have signed?<br />
Everyone wishes they could have signed their own<br />
Velvet Underground; that’s the history of the interesting<br />
side of rock’n’roll. We all would have liked to have<br />
our own Velvet Underground and that’s about it really.<br />
I got Joy Division, I got the Mondays and now I’ve got<br />
Raw-T and I wouldn’t complain for one moment.<br />
What were you talking about when you mentioned<br />
that music culture was based around 13 year<br />
revolutionary cycles?<br />
I used to think that there was a 13 year cycle, but<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
then the revolution I expected in 2002 didn’t happen.<br />
I always think that what happens is that English kids<br />
absorb American rock’n’roll and regurgitate it with<br />
English irony and sell it back to them. But this time it<br />
didn’t happen, it was Welsh kids, one could argue that<br />
Lost Prophets and Funeral For A Friend were in some<br />
way that kinda thing I was hoping for, but it didn’t happen<br />
so I’m quite happy to accept that.<br />
But at the moment I’m very lucky to be involved with<br />
Raw-T who are following in the footsteps of Dizzee<br />
Rascal, Wylie and Mike Skinner, in that British hiphop<br />
has found its own voice which is a pretty peculiar<br />
thing to happen. I got accused on The Culture Show of<br />
jumping on a band wagon that was already happening,<br />
this was from Q magazine or NME. Whereas the guy<br />
from Hip-Hop Connection was fantastic, as in someone<br />
who actually knew what he was talking about. It hasn’t<br />
really happened yet, it’s just beginning I think.<br />
How important has Situationism been to you?<br />
I was just a fan having been introduced to it by my<br />
acid dealer who happened to be the main translator of<br />
The Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem<br />
in Britain. I was a fan and therefore referred to it a lot<br />
in terms of naming things and various bits and pieces.<br />
Although when you look back on it in the end I think the<br />
way we did it, by, as Peter Saville once said, in the entire<br />
14 years of Factory not one decision was ever taken,<br />
EVER with an eye to profit. And that was entirely true<br />
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actually! So in some way we behaved properly. There<br />
was a contract and the contract said we own nothing,<br />
the musicians own everything, That was a mistake, but<br />
it was very nice at the time and very idealistic, but looking<br />
back on it fuck the musicians I say.<br />
We actually I’d say, were responsible for removing<br />
the world’s greatest rock’n’roll writer for about 15<br />
years, which is Greil Marcus, from rock’n’roll. He got<br />
a copy of our first record and stuck a Durutti Column<br />
sticker on his deck and looked at it for two years thinking<br />
‘What the fuck is this?’, and finally discovered it<br />
was a Strasbourg (Andre Bertrand) political cartoon at<br />
the end of which he got completely involved in it and<br />
became buried in it and became the world expert on<br />
Situationism. Which is bit of a shame because it took<br />
him away from writing until he wrote his Elvis Presley/<br />
Bill Clinton book which I adore that he really came<br />
back to the fold. The greatest book on rock’n’roll is<br />
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus by a million miles.<br />
What’s your involvement in the upcoming Joy<br />
Division film?<br />
I’m a producer on the movie and in a way I think<br />
that’s because it makes it more official having me involved,<br />
(stupidly) and it does reflect to a degree what<br />
was their concern about the rival film. The rival film<br />
has now completely fucking gone, thank god. There’s<br />
always only been one project, the film which is based<br />
on Debbie Curtis’s book (Touching From A Distance)<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
and that always been how it’s approached. The people<br />
making the film are two American guys; there was an<br />
American man and woman from New York that were<br />
making the film called Double A Films, however they<br />
fell out and also the woman fell out with Debbie Curtis.<br />
An option on a book has to be renewed, and they didn’t<br />
renew the option otherwise they’d be still be making<br />
the film, but I presume they kept promising Debbie they<br />
were renewing it. Some of these Americans have so<br />
much money they don’t know what it’s like for us over<br />
here. No money was paid, the option ceased at which<br />
point these two guys Todd Eckert and Orian Williams,<br />
who had been friends from school years decided to step<br />
in and take up the option. Todd is a Pittsburgh guy, and<br />
Orian works out of Los Angeles, so it’s a Pittsburgh/Los<br />
Angeles pairing that are doing this. They had actually<br />
talked to Sophia Coppola who is a Joy Division fan,<br />
there was interest from her, but in the end they chose<br />
Anton Corbijn which I think is a great idea.<br />
So their choice of Anton mirrored my own choice<br />
because I realised that when I had to make a video<br />
for ‘Atmosphere’ in 1988 I would have to use the old<br />
photographs, and therefore it seemed logical to use<br />
either Kevin Cummins or Anton. There was only two<br />
photographers who took the great photographs of Ian<br />
and for whatever reason I chose Anton even though<br />
I’ve just recently done a photo shoot with the beloved<br />
Mr Cummins, who moaned at me. He said ‘If I do a<br />
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photoshoot for you, will you stop bad mouthing me? At<br />
the press conference for the Ian Curtis film you were<br />
bad mouthing me.’ I said ‘I wasn’t bad mouthing you.<br />
I said you’re a miserable twat Kevin. You are a miserable<br />
fuckin’ twat.’ To which he laughed and accepted it,<br />
because he is totally a miserable twat.<br />
Anton’s lovely, and I’ve met Anton a few times<br />
and obviously he did that video, and the strange thing<br />
about that video is, Gretton hated it and told me the<br />
whole fucking group hated it. For 15 years I was under<br />
the impression that the group hated it, but it turned<br />
out the group loved it, only Rob fuckin’ hated it. So if<br />
they hadn’t have brought Anton in to do this I’d have<br />
never have found that out. It’s my double revenge<br />
on Rob really. ‘Atmosphere’ is a perfect video, but<br />
you can see where Rob comes from, who though it<br />
was over-egging the legend of blah-blah-blah. Fuck<br />
that anyway, to me anyone else touching it who<br />
wasn’t there at the time, it would have been immoral.<br />
Whereas because Anton had taken the photographs,<br />
he was fucking around with his own pictures and to<br />
me there was always going to be integrity. So now<br />
choosing Anton for the film is a great, great move.<br />
And secondly choosing writer Matt Greenhalgh (Burn<br />
It) who is number three in the Red Productions school<br />
of rock’n’roll, the top TV drama company in Britain.<br />
Its number one writer is Russell T. Davies (Dr Who),<br />
number two writer is Paul Abbot (Shameless), number<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
three writer is Matt Greenhalgh. So as far as I’m concerned<br />
at the moment these two American boys have<br />
done a fantastic job of choosing the right director and<br />
writer. Obviously the casting will be something of an<br />
issue, but I have nothing to do with it.<br />
I did recommend one actor who could play the part<br />
he played in 24 Hour Party People, he could play<br />
me, he could play Ian, he could play Martin, he could<br />
play anybody in this film and I was with him the other<br />
night when he won best actor at The Empire Awards.<br />
He’s Britain’s best actor he’s called Paddy Considine<br />
who played Rob in the film. I kept going to London<br />
going ‘Fuckin’ hell man, there’s a guy playing Rob!’,<br />
and they’d go ‘Didn’t you know that John Simm is the<br />
second best young actor in Britain?’ As in everybody<br />
who works in movies knows that Paddy Considine is<br />
the best actor in Britain. His first film that made him<br />
famous was Romeo Brass, obviously he was amazing<br />
as Gretton. My only input on actors is that Paddy could<br />
play anybody.<br />
Martin Hannett; tell me about his genius.<br />
I could talk about Martin Hannett for days so don’t<br />
start me. What’s very strange I think is that most great<br />
producers go mad because they only ever find one<br />
sound. Whereas groups can find two or three sounds in<br />
their career and go through various changes. William!<br />
Sorry beg your pardon. William!<br />
[Interlude of Tony sorting out his puppy that is try-<br />
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ing to play with another dog. Sounds of apologies to<br />
another dog owner]<br />
Every interview I do these days is interspersed with<br />
this. You stupid dog!! He’s a ‘Blue Monday’ dog. The<br />
dog from the New Order video. I have no time for dogs<br />
whatsoever, but my partner knew that many years ago<br />
I worked with Bill Wegman on the ‘Blue Monday ‘88’<br />
video and fell in love with Wegman and his Weimaraner<br />
dog.<br />
Last November my partner said two things: Number<br />
one you should sign Raw-T, number two I’m buying<br />
you a dog for Christmas. They are obviously the most<br />
beautiful dogs in the world, but no one told me that<br />
in the dog world they are famous for being the most<br />
loopy, fucking stupid off-their-head nutcases, so I’ve<br />
got this complete idiot dog now! He’s actually had the<br />
snip but that would never calm him down, and has got<br />
me in a lot of trouble with Peter Saville because his<br />
girlfriend used to think she was a wolf when she was a<br />
teenager, loves dogs and wolves, and I got into a lot of<br />
trouble from Peter for having giving William the snip<br />
and it’s made no fucking difference whatsoever.<br />
Back to Hannett. All producers go mad because they<br />
normally only find one sound in their life. In fact Martin<br />
Hannett found two sounds, and he even came back<br />
a third time when he was just having a laugh with the<br />
Mondays, so I think he did pretty fucking well. If you<br />
want to go through the history of Martin very simply.<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
The early phase where he was learning about the studio<br />
with Manchester Animation company, which he did<br />
the soundtrack for. Then he pioneered punk with Spiral<br />
Scratch and ‘Cranked Up Really High’ [Buzzcocks].<br />
Then unbeknown to me until I found out years later, he<br />
goes and meets these guys in a carpark on the moors<br />
above Burnley and tells them the sound he’s imagining<br />
in his head, off his head on fucking drugs and he drives<br />
back to Manchester at midnight, they drive back to their<br />
shed in Burnley and they build the world’s first digital<br />
delay machine, the AMF digital delay which is the most<br />
important outboard equipment of the last 50 years. And<br />
it was 15 years later when some guy stopped me and<br />
said, ‘I want to thank you, one of your partners changed<br />
my life.’ When I realised it was AMF I went ‘No, you<br />
changed his life by giving him that equipment.’ He<br />
said, ‘Don’t you know where it came from?’ And I had<br />
no idea it came out of Martin’s head. The first time he<br />
ever worked with that digital delay machine was on the<br />
song Digital. And that was on the Factory Sample, his<br />
first day with Joy Division. And then of course he used<br />
it on Unknown Pleasures and it changed the way drums<br />
sound forever, he used it on ESG and everything else.<br />
So the first thing is he changed the drum sound of the<br />
world forever by the digital delay.<br />
But then what he’s not given credit for, because<br />
‘Blue Monday’ is given the credit for being the first<br />
great modern music track which uses computers. In fact<br />
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although I would never try and cross Bernard because<br />
he’s extremely clever, (well New Order got the credit),<br />
but if you look at Bernard’s production of Marcel King<br />
at the same time, and the 52nd Street band, Section<br />
25 then it’s obviously Bernard who was doing that.<br />
But Bernard learnt it all by watching Martin. In fact<br />
the most important track of all is ‘Everything’s Gone<br />
Green’. If you listen to it, is the beginning of modern<br />
music, and ‘Temptation’ takes it one stage further. And<br />
then Martin and New Order break up and they go off to<br />
do ‘Blue Monday’ as the next record, that’s the one that<br />
quiet rightly is seen as this incredible break through,<br />
but nevertheless the important song is ‘Everything’s<br />
Gone Green’.<br />
So Martin created that music and then were it not<br />
for the utter stupidity of Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton<br />
and Tony Wilson he would have created the next music<br />
because he was desperate to get a Fairlight. It was a<br />
synthesiser computer keyboard, and basically what<br />
Martin, Stephen and Bernard were doing with soldering<br />
irons in 1980, suddenly by 1983 there was a machine<br />
that did it called a Fairlight. We had no idea what one<br />
was, what we knew was that it cost 30 fuckin’ grand<br />
and we were running the Hacienda and you could fuck<br />
off. So we used to row about this all the time. ‘I want a<br />
Fairlight. You can’t have a Fairlight. What’s this piece<br />
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and<br />
of shit you’re building? Where’s my Fairlight?’ He<br />
never got a Fairlight, Trevor Horn got a Fairlight and<br />
the rest is Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the rest is<br />
history. I’ve very recently begun to claim that we created<br />
Trevor Horn, by stopping Martin getting a fucking<br />
Fairlight. And then the big fight and they go and fall<br />
out with each other and it’s the lawsuit and stuff, and<br />
suddenly the genius of Erasmus and Nathan, the Mondays<br />
manager, getting him to produce the Mondays’<br />
Bummed album which was fantastic.”<br />
And yes, Bummed is a fucking fantastic album. Along<br />
with Unknown Pleasures, Technique, the first singles<br />
from New York’s early 1980s all sister rap band ESG<br />
and other great works of A.H. Wilson Associated. It<br />
could be said that Mr Wilson likes the sound of his own<br />
voice. It could be said he’s arrogant. It has been said<br />
he’s a twat. And he probably is. Who gives a fuck? The<br />
point to Wilson apart from the usual record mogul/twat<br />
tag is that he’s added spice and swaggering art to the<br />
British music scene, he’s that way because of that drive<br />
to spread his gospel on what he likes about music and<br />
culture. A question I forgot to ask him was: has it all<br />
been down to luck? What has been his secret, if there<br />
has been any? It will be interesting to see where Raw-T<br />
and his record label F4 end up in the grand scheme of<br />
musical things. �<br />
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<strong>Spike</strong> Contributors Roll Of Honour<br />
Personal websites listed where known. Otherwise, search Facebook or LinkedIn to get in contact<br />
Robin Askew<br />
Adam Baron<br />
Thierry Brunet<br />
Budge Burgess<br />
Eugene Byrne<br />
Nathan Cain<br />
Nick Clapson<br />
Robert Clarke<br />
Dan Coxon<br />
Dr Jerome Deg<br />
Naomi Delap<br />
Alice Duberry<br />
Graham Duff<br />
Dan Epstein<br />
Adrian Gargett PhD<br />
Emma Garman<br />
Pedro Blas Gonzalez<br />
Ben Granger<br />
Katrina Gulliver<br />
John Edwards Gunn<br />
Chris Hall<br />
Edmund Hardy<br />
Stephen Harper<br />
Seán Harnett<br />
Ian Hocking<br />
O.J. Irish<br />
Antony Johnston<br />
Craig Johnson<br />
Dorothy Johnson<br />
Jonathan Kiefer<br />
Simon Kirrane<br />
David B. Livingstone<br />
Thomas Handy Loon<br />
Greg Lowe<br />
Dr Willy Maley<br />
Jayne Margetts<br />
Gary Marshall<br />
James McConalogue<br />
Elizabeth McCullough<br />
Andrew McCutchen<br />
Patrick McGuigan<br />
Darren J.N. Middleton<br />
Chris Mitchell:<br />
travelhappy<br />
divehappy<br />
Nick Mitchell<br />
Stephen Mitchelmore<br />
Michael Morrissey<br />
Marcos Moure<br />
Mark Ostrowski<br />
Lewis Owens<br />
Tim Parks<br />
Nancy Rawlinson<br />
David Remy<br />
Mark Richardson<br />
Bethan Roberts<br />
Peter Robertson<br />
Chris Rose<br />
Suhayl Saadi<br />
Ismo Santala<br />
Reverend Osagyefo<br />
Sekou<br />
Jeffrey Sharlet<br />
Harpreet Singh Soorae<br />
Qurat ul ain Siddiqui<br />
Sally-Ann Spencer<br />
Zoe Strachan<br />
Cliff Taylor<br />
Kenn Taylor<br />
Mark Valentine<br />
Kevin Walsh<br />
Jason Weaver<br />
Peter Wild<br />
Chris Wiegand<br />
Russell Wilkinson<br />
Bjorn Wiman<br />
Brendan Wolfe<br />
C.J. Wood<br />
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This is, officially, the end.<br />
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PDF, please visit <strong>Spike</strong><strong>Magazine</strong>.com for even<br />
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who made this possible.<br />
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Chris Mitchell<br />
chris@spikemagazine.com<br />
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15 Years of<br />
Books, Music, Art, Ideas