Spike Magazine

hris Abani Peter Ackroyd Douglas Adams Scott Adams Keith Altham Paul Au
om Baker J.G. Ballard Iain Banks John Battelle John Baxter Samuel Beckett
ellow Thomas Bernhard Maurice Blanchot Jorge Luis Borges Angela Bourke
ichael Bracewell Charlie Brooker Charles Bukowski Julie Burchill Jason Bur
ryan Burrough Albert Camus Paul Celan Bruce Chatwin Annabel Chong E.M
ioran Diablo Cody Douglas Coupland Quentin Crisp Mark Danielewski Don D
illo John C Diamond Stephen Dorril Patricia Duncker Nic Dunlop The Fall Ste
an Fatsis Tibor Fischer Mark Fisher Michael Foot Franz Ferdinand Athol Fuga
nna Funder Alex Garland Harry Gibson William Gibson Allen Ginsberg Grah
reene Peter Guralnick Half Man Half Biscuit Keith Haring Bill Hicks Tom Hod
inson Gert Hofmann Nick Hornby Michel Houellebecq Gary Indiana Derek Ja
an Linton Kwesi Johnson Ed Jones Gabriel Josipovici Kevin Kelly Naomi Kl
em Koolhaas Kruder And Dorfmeister Andrey Kurkov Emma Larkin Abby Le
yndham Lewis Jack London Leo Marks David Markson Gabriel Garcia Marq
ertie Marshall Cedric Mims Alan Moore Morrissey Patricia Morrisroe Cookie
ueller Ben Myers Jeff Noon Cees Nooteboom Angus Oblong Will Oldham P.J
’Rourke Lawrence O’Toole Chuck Palahniuk Tim Parks Arvo Pärt Ulf Poscha
15 Years of
ichard Powers Thomas Pynchon Matthew Robertson Bruce Robinson Jacqu
oubaud Robert Sabbag Peter Saville Alberto Sciamma WG Sebald Will Self
upac Shakur Mark Simpson Iain Sinclair Michael Marshall Smith Sonic Youth
alph Steadman Suicide Damo Suzuki Swans David Sylvian David Thomas (P
bu)Hunter S. Thompson Colm Tóibín Amos Tutuola Stuart Walton Alan Warn
velyn Waugh Belinda Webb Irvine Welsh The White Stripes Tony Wilson Chr
Books, Music, Art, Ideas

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Introduction
What Is Spike Magazine…
Chris Mitchell
… And What Is In This PDF?
Spike Magazine is a collection of interviews,
features and book reviews with and about various
authors, artists and musicians from 1995 to
2010. I originally set up the site to publish my
own reviews and interviews, and it snowballed
from there. Spike has had a small army of contributors
over the years, all of whom are listed
on the Spike Roll Of Honour. Thank you to each
and every one of you.
I had no set criteria about what should be in
Spike Magazine, except whether I found it personally
interesting. As such, it’s a glorious mess
of the high brow and low brow. Certain themes
kept coming up again and again – sex, drugs,
post-war French philosophy –and certain writers
kept reappearing too, notably J.G. Ballard, Will
Self, Douglas Coupland, Irvine Welsh, Jeff Noon
and Hunter S. Thompson.
Given Spike has been around for 15 years, and
given an actual real book anthology would be
financially cataclysmic, this snazzy PDF built
by my good friend and Spike contributor Jason
Weaver was the best way to showcase 150 of
Spike’s articles. There’s over 400 more interviews,
reviews and features on the website, so consider
this a sampler of Spike Magazine and a gateway
into exploring the rest of the website.
How This PDF Works
With 150 articles, it was decided that simply arranging
everything alphabetically by the author’s
surname was the easiest way to go. The tab down
the right hand edge lets you jump to any letter, and
there’s an overview of the articles in each letter’s
section waiting for you. Each of the articles are
hyperlinked from there. Work your way through
the PDF methodically, or make with the clicky
and see what happens.
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Introduction
How Spike Magazine Got Started
Chris Mitchell
I first had the idea for Spike while I was doing
my MA at the University Of Sussex in 1995. My
co-conspirator in helping me initially figure out
what Spike should be was Adam Baron, who has
subsequently gone on to write four bestselling
novels but perhaps still remains most lauded as
the author of The Man Whose Penis Made Him
Locally Famous.
I’m not sure why I called it Spike - the retrospective
explanation I came up with was because I was
fed up of getting my work spiked by magazines,
so I put it online. And it sounded sharp, as in razor
sharp criticism. But I think it had as much to do
with being a huge fan of Spike Milligan too.
Publishing online seemed a way to finally get my
writing actually out there, even though in 1995,
there weren’t that many people on the internet. I
had just discovered the web thanks to my friend
and mentor Dave Pearce, who had quickly latched
on to how revolutionary the web was going to be-
come and had invested in at-the-time outrageously
expensive ISDN lines so he could get something
approaching a speedy browsing connection. He
had created the still-burgeoning HedWeb.com
which proposed then-radical ideas about paradise
engineering. Heroically Dave allowed me to
come round his house and spend hours gazing at
his computer monitor in fascination at all these
webpages that were being created by people everywhere.
(Ok, mainly in the US. But it felt like
everywhere). He also taught me HTML (or at least
passed me a doorstop sized HTML manual with a
smile) and has hosted Spike on his own webserver
since its inception. Without Dave, Spike wouldn’t
have happened, and, given every job I’ve had since
1997 revolves around the internet, I think I owe
my career to him too. Thanks Dave.
I remember thinking there was very little about
books or literature on the web – it seemed like a
chance to get in at the beginning of something. I
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
was already a frustrated books and music journalist,
collecting my first rejection slips from UK
magazines. My break into writing for real came
in the form of the formidable Polly Marshall, who
ran the spectacular spoken word club Do Tongues,
which got in everyone from Ken Campbell to
Helen Zahavi to Will Self to Tony Benn. She also
was the Literary Editor for Brighton’s version of
Time Out, Punter magazine (now The Latest). I
started writing book reviews for Polly, and was
given the phone numbers of numerous book publicists
at the major publishing houses who I then
plagued for review copies and author interviews
for the next couple of years. Back then, explaining
the idea of a literary website was hard work, and I
thank every long-suffering publicist who took me
on faith and sent me books. Special thanks goes
to Karen Duffy, then at the now defunct Harper
Collins imprint Flamingo, who provided a lot of
encouragement and good humour.
Spike quickly gained momentum thanks to the
contributions, both written and pub-inspired, of other
friends in Brighton, especially Chris Hall, Nick
Clapson, Jason Weaver, and Stephen Mitchelmore.
Steve posted a lot to Spike’s blog Splinters and became
a bit of a mentor as well as he introduced me
to some of Europe’s most fascinating writers, particularly
Maurice Blanchot and Thomas Bernhard.
Perhaps most importantly he introduced me to The
Day Today. Steve continues to blog today at This
Space. As Spike grew, contributions came in from
scores of writers from all over the globe. Many of
them I have sadly still yet to meet in person, but
fond memories of seeing REM at Stirling Castle
with Spike contributor Gary Marshall and several
huge nights out in Melbourne with Antipodeanexiled
correspondent Jayne Margetts makes me
wish it happened more often.
In December 2002, I decided to leave the UK
and go travelling in Australia for six months.
Eight years later, I’m still travelling around Asia,
and I’m now based in Bangkok, Thailand. I write
mainly for scuba diving magazines, and run the
travel websites Travelhappy.info and Divehappy.
com. There’s a coffee table book on the way that
I’ve written with my friend and ace photographer
Jez Tryner called Thailand’s Underwater World.
If any Spike contributor makes it out here to
Bangkok, dinner and drinks are on me.
As I’ve become more involved with scuba diving
and traveling, whilst being virtually cut off
from the UK literary scene, I’ve spent less time
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
on Spike in recent years. However, the enthusiasm
of longtime contributors like Ben Granger, Greg
Lowe and Dan Coxon have kept my interest going,
and introduced me to writers I would otherwise
never heard of.
Meanwhile, numerous superb British literary
sites have joined Spike on the Web in recent years,
as showcased at BritLitBlogs.com. Steve Kelly
at the now archived Richmond Review, the UK’s
first online literary magazine, provided a lot of
good advice to me and led the way to the rest of us
becoming, if not respectable, then at least tolerated.
In the 15 years since SpikeMagazine.com first
appeared, the internet has fundamentally changed
the way that people access, understand and enjoy
great books. At its best, it has provided a significant
boost to authors whose work might otherwise
get lost, and a way for them to find their own audience.
Spike has been a small and erratic part of
that, propelled by the enthusiasm and passion of
its contributors, and much of what’s been written
on the site still stands up well years after it was
first published.
If you’ve read Spike before, I hope you enjoy
revisiting through this anthology – and if you’re
new to Spike, I hope you’ll stay in touch and see
what comes next.
Chris Mitchell
Bangkok, October 2010
chris@spikemagazine.com
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Chris Abani:
Becoming Abigail 007
Peter Ackroyd:
London: The Biography 012
Douglas Adams:
The Salmon Of Doubt 014
A
Scott Adams:
Dilbert: Seven Years of
Highly Defective People 016
Keith Altham:
No More Mr Nice Guy! 018
Paul Auster:
Oracle Night 020
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2008]
Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail
Jason Weaver
In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life
biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has
a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like
Please Daddy No and A Child Called It. The covers
usually feature black-and-white photos of sad-faced
kids and the titles are in a hand-scrawled font. I suspect
that the decline of the horror genre is connected to an
appetite for these altogether more real stories. It’s redolent
of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s
inhumanity to man … and then make a programme
about it.”
On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming
Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about
the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian
girl caught up in the skin trade. Except that it isn’t
just about sex trafficking. Nor should it be. Abani is
a thoughtful author who, through the style of his writing,
is at pains to avoid further exploitation of the topic
through prurient entertainment. During interviews,
Abani is both urgent and polemical about the issue,
stating that sex trafficking, after guns and drugs, is the
third largest growth industry in the world. The author is
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
well-researched and the facts of his story are plausible.
Yet he pointedly avoids the documentary approach the
subject might automatically warrant. Instead he offers
a poem.
In 34 short cantos, Becoming Abigail seems, at first,
to be bluntly indicative, short lines expressing fact:
“And Peter came every day. Twice a day. At dawn.
At dusk. To feed and water her. With rotting food. Rancid
water. Sometimes his piss. By the tenth day she no
longer cared. Couldn’t tell the difference.”
The truest thing about Becoming Abigail is a lack
of sentimentality. Though poetic, the narrative style
is measured, its emotional veracity spot on. Although
Abigail is a character with a palpable soul, the more
traumatic events are often rendered almost blandly,
as if cauterized by shock. As a small child, she is untouched
by grief over her mother’s death. It begins to
emerge later, through her games and behaviour. Abani
seems to be saying that we cannot process such drastic
experiences until we have developed the resources to
deal with them. So, trauma resides in us until we have
figured out the puzzle it has set us. This explains the
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numbness towards our own suffering and the time lag
until we truly begin to feel it. It grants us resilience,
protecting us. It might also suggest that sex trafficking
is a societal trauma which needs to develop a process to
deal with it. Books such as this might offer a way.
A relationship of time actually structures the novella,
which flips between chapters headed “Now” and
“Then”. Things begin with a charged description of her
mother’s funeral. Yet, Abigail notes, her mother died in
child birth, so she couldn’t have witnessed it herself.
But if the memory is factually false, it still has emotional
impact and influences the girl’s identity. In this
way, Becoming Abigail explores how memory and the
way we account for our experiences define who we are.
This sounds complex, yet Abani’s technique is works
on us without abstraction. Abigail speaks to us directly.
The intransitive word “becoming” is the key here.
The book is about the liminal state between things – the
gap between girl and woman, male and female, past
and present, Nigeria and England, the space where
things are undefined, as with a trauma which is yet to
be recognized. The book begins with the word “And”, a
broken conjunctive alerting us to the incomplete nature
of things here. In critic Melissa Reburiano’s words,
identity is “not product but process”. In this sense, we
are always in flux, always in a state of becoming. The
novel dramatizes the heroine’s attempts to navigate
these relationships in her struggle to ‘become Abigail’.
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
Simply put, this is a radical reworking of the comingof-age
novel.
The “becoming” of the title is encoded with ambiguity.
The girl is the spitting image of her dead mother,
also called Abigail, a ghost who haunts the book. The
child’s attempts to define herself against her parents is
complicated by the guilt she feels over her mother’s
death, creating a myth almost impossible to overcome.
The title dramatizes the push and pull of becoming
either the mother-Abigail others would like her to be or
an Abigail of her own choosing.
The title also functions as an adjective, raising the
question of what is ‘becoming’ or fitting for a girl like
Abigail. Her father sends her to London because he
thinks it will be good for her. The book is filled with
others’ expectations of how she should dress, behave
and so on. These struggles are further impacted by
the expectations of men who here define themselves
against women. Her father suffers great depression at
his wife’s death. She is portrayed as a kind of crutch
which propped him up, a role which passes to his
daughter. Through his daughter’s independence, the
father loses his wife again. This will have disastrous
consequences. In writing the book, Abani tried to
“evacuate” his masculinity, attempting to write from a
woman’s point of view rather than becoming yet another
male expectation of Abigail’s behaviour. In this
sense, the novel contextualizes sex trafficking within
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the confines placed on women’s existence by men.
Abigail is no fool. She knows at an early age what men
can be like. It is important to show that she is faced
with circumstances over which she can exercise little
personal defence and from which others have failed
to protect her. The boundaries of her life offer Abigail
little room to manoeuvre.
Aspects of Becoming Abigail remind me of Mrs
Dalloway. An interior consciousness creates a resonant
cluster of poetic images which acts as critique of patriarchal
control. Maps, poems, the body, needles, all
are densely interconnected and new relationships are
discovered on re-reading. The second time around,
for example, totally transforms the hiss of a cigarette
as it hits the Thames, imbued now with knowledge of
the decision that Abigail is trying to make. One of her
own favourite images is from a Chinese tea ceremony,
where a lotus flowers. It might stand for how the unexpected
developments in the story unfold layer after
layer. As with Woolf’s novel, an authoritarian doctor
fails to avert tragedy by rubbishing a character’s mental
distress. There is also the London location and the way
icons of government and empire are personalized and
subverted. On the Embankment, the phallic Cleopatra’s
Needle is gently ridiculed. The lions have been placed
the wrong way round and Queen Victoria won’t foot
the bill to have them put right. Abani does London very
well. At one point, Abigail stands on the International
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
Date Line at Greenwich, itself a symbol of colonial
over-mapping of the world, and marvels that such a
thin line can separate time. This is a literal symbol of
how time and place are fictionally mapped. “The line is
a lie,” Abigail often riffs. It is intriguing to see London
portrayed through the eyes of ‘the other’. Greenwich
Market is described in the exotic terms of a souk.
Abigail rides the tube when she first arrives in London,
noting with surprise the variety of white faces. At the
station, she hears the mantra “Mind the Gap”, almost a
slogan for the interstitial theme of the novel:
“Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they
were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility
of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against
either side. That was where the danger lay. What was
it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the
dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t
have told her anything.”
The Thames location also recalls Heart of Darkness,
although here the tide flows the opposite way and the
slave trade is given an ironic twist. The book is full of
subtle but awful ironies. The image of a dog peeing on
a statue, the building of a doghouse later proves to be
more brutal than it appeared and a joke about how the
French see Africans as animals to be tamed whereas the
English don’t see them at all resonates through the latter
part of the book. The worst irony of all is that British
social services thinks it knows what’s ‘becoming’ for
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Abigail and defines her as a victim. Her relationship
with her care worker, the only man with whom she
truly glimpses her own identity, is vilified and taken
away from her. The removal of this love is, it seems,
crueller to Abigail than the brutalities she has endured.
It is vital that the novel itself does equally reduce
Abigail to ‘victim’, the passive casualty of events.
Instead, Abani juxtaposes the blunt, indicative style of
writing with Abigail’s own subjunctive voice, aching
with imagination and wishes. Her passions are aroused
mainly by the experiences she longs for, those she desires
and craves to make her who she aspires to be. She
is never simply hostage to her experiences. Like all of
us, her behaviour is self-consciously modified. Abigail
is a character who muses on her own character, without
the Postmodern sleight of hand that might imply.
Telling stories is what we do, Abani seems to argue,
who we are. It is inevitable, inexorable, that Abigail
works herself out in this way. Even in the most meagre
circumstances, we cannot help but be human. Because
of this, there is always some anchor to the flux, some
kind of residual persona:
“These things just happen. Ije uwa, as the Igbos
would say. One’s walk in this life. Interesting that the
Igbo don’t believe the path to be fixed, or even problematic.
It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player,
not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality
always sways the outcome of the game.”
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
I find it hard to be critical of a book like this. Its poetic
density roots in the imagination and flowers, giving
it a perennial afterlife. You live with it and Abigail’s
memories mingle with your own. Which is, I think, the
very interplay between identity and the fictional process
that Abani is trying to achieve. Abigail’s character has
an emotional veracity for us in the same way that she
must deal with the processes of her own memory. Like
the ghost of her mother, Abigail begins to haunt our
imagination, which is a more effective way of dramatizing
the horror of sex trafficking than browbeating us
with atrocity and data. Our sense of loss is personal, our
empathy more deeply entwined and Abigail is retrieved
from a dehumanized roll call of names and numbers.
We might think here of efforts to replace statistics with
photographs and biographies of those who died in the
Holocaust. Hope lies in trying to unthink the unthinkable
rather than complying with a mathematics which
makes it possible. This poetic meditation on identity
is crucial to a deeper understanding of the full cost
of human trafficking, which has implications for our
tolerance for brutality disguised behind statistics.
Becoming Abigail is a tough book that wishes to
avoid false comfort to the reader. Yet in exploring the
dynamics of its character’s psyche, it insists on hope.
Towards the end of the book, Abigail reflects on her
experiences in light of her cultural background:
“Second chances are a fact of life for the Igbo. A
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person who lived poor and was buried poor can, when
a relative makes enough money, receive a second
burial. Full of the pomp and grandeur reserved for the
rich. So even in death, in Hades, the dead one can
get a chance to taste the wealth that eluded him in his
previous incarnation, perhaps sweetening the deal for
his next one.”
For Abigail, true wealth lies in a relationship of
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
equals, in being noticed as a person and not as a thing,
in wanting to give rather than being forced to take, in
becoming a human being against dehumanizing forces.
We are like the rich relatives who can, by paying attention
to the trafficking industry, eventually sweeten
the deal for the women to come. By writing this novel,
Chris Abani suggests how the Abigail’s of this world
can be given a second chance. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published February 2001]
Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography
Chris Hall
Those who have read Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and
The Limehouse Golem will recall that the word golem
comes from the medieval Jewish for an artificial human
being brought to life by supernatural means, a “thing
without form”. Ackroyd’s latest book, London: The
Biography, has itself managed to breathe life into a
seemingly formless city – a tangible sense of London
as a living organism permeates this remarkable work.
Indeed, even the endpapers show “seven phases in
the evolution of Old London Bridge, 1209-1831”, perhaps
a subtle reinforcement of his idea that London is
a living organism, that it has a “human shape”, echoing
the seven stages of man.
He has a strong faith in London as a palimpsest:
“London has always been an ugly city… It has always
been rebuilt, and demolished, and vandalised … one
of the characteristics of London planners and builders,
over the centuries, has been the recklessness with
which they have destroyed the city’s past.”
There is a fascination with London as a built environment
(after all, he does say that London is made
“half of stone half of flesh”), of what London does to its
BUY Peter Ackroyd books online from and
citizens. There is the novelist’s sensibility here, looking
for form: “The emphasis upon finance is sustained by
the enquiry of the late 20th-century prostitute, ‘Do you
want any business?’”
London: The Biography rings with the city’s peculiar
echoic quality which Ackroyd is always attuned to. He
writes that the London Eye has its precursor in the 17th
century at Bartholomew’s Fair, and that following the
GLC’s abolition in 1986 “in effect London resumed
its ancient life, with the separate boroughs affirming
distinct and different identities”.
For Ackroyd, it is this historical imperative that
shapes London. “Whenever the opportunity and location
are offered, it replicates its identity. It is a blind
force in that sense, not susceptible to the blandishments
of planners or politicians…”
Temporal simultaneity to Ackroyd is as real as the
Thames, flowing through time as well as space. He is
quick to point out that “contemporary theorists have
suggested that linear time is itself a figment of the
human imagination”. Indeed, his book itself moves
“quixotically through time” forming a labyrinth, and
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can be explored from a multitude of entry points.
The book is arranged into themes such as London
as theatre, crime and punishment, London as crowd,
London’s radicals, and for every main thoroughfare of
London: The Biography there are scores of delightful
or macabre side streets to wander down. Take the following
list of synonyms for prostitutes, which reads
like a bizarre incantation: “…smuts, cracks, mawkes,
trulls, trugmoldies, bunters, does, punchable nuns,
molls, Mother Midnights, blowzes, buttered buns,
squirrels…”
Within each theme we have Ackroyd’s compendious
learning tripping the switches between past and
present. He is no Eric Hobsbawm or Asa Briggs, he is
neither ideologue nor pedagogue, instead it is through
anecdote and vivid description that we are led through
labyrinthine London.
Of course, any thesis that London, as it were, imprints
itself on its citizens is going to occasionally sound
BUY Peter Ackroyd books online from and
overblown: “London drives some of its citizens mad. A
psychiatric survey in the 70s revealed that cases of depressive
illness were three times higher in the East End
than in the rest of the country”. But these criticisms,
like pointing out lacunae, miss the point, for in a very
real sense, as he himself says at one point, there are 7
million versions of London being written everyday.
This is very much the book that Ackroyd has been
building up to, or even the one that he was born to
write, prefiguring it in his biographies (Blake, Dickens)
and fiction (The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor).
London: The Biography doesn’t just have sources,
it has an essay on sources, and at over 800 pages you
might be forgiven for buying the audio version read by
Simon Callow (who is also, incidentally, appearing as
Dickens in Ackroyd’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens).
Ackroyd has put in a heroic amount of research, and it
would be churlish indeed to disabuse his book of its
definite article. �
013
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published October 2003]
Douglas Adams: The Salmon Of Doubt
Ian Hocking
When I was 12, I bought a text-adventure game called
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for my Amiga
500 computer. The box had “Don’t Panic!” written
in large, friendly letters on the front and showed a
green alien sticking its tongue out. Inside was a floppy
disk, planning permission for a hyperspace bypass
that would require the demolition of the Earth, some
pocket fluff, and Joo-Janta 500 Super-Chromatic
Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses (which become opaque
when the wearer gets scared). The game was written
by Douglas Adams. I decided to buy the BBC Radio
series on which the game was based. By the time I
was 14, I could recite – no joke – the entire six hours
of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Both radio
series, including the opening and closing credits. My
sound effects were particularly good.
The author of Hitchhiker is, of course, Douglas
Adams. Adams died suddenly on May 11th, 2001.
Within days his agent got hold of his hard drive, had
someone scan it for text documents, burn them to a
CD, and set this posthumous publication in motion:
The Salmon Of Doubt.
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This book has the potential to be excruciating. It
seems unfair on Adams because many of the fiction
vignettes, non-fiction pieces, emails, and transcribed
speeches were never intended for publication. But
this misses the point. We know Adams would not
have published them; we don’t expect another Hitchhiker’s
Guide (though a marketing wag has written
“Hitchhiking The Galaxy One Last Time” on the
cover where “Douglas is dead: Don’t Panic” would
be more appropriate). The result is a collection of
insights into a remarkable writer, one who suffered
from writer’s block, did not suffer from deadlines
(“The thing I most love about deadlines is the whooshing
sound they make as they go past”), and had a
passionate interest in saving endangered species.
The book’s title is taken from Adams’s unfinished
Dirk Gently detective novel. Dirk Gently appears in the
post-Hitchhiker works Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective
Agency and The Long Dark Teatime Of The Soul. Gently
is a typical Adams character: based on someone Adams
knew, but when Gently talks, Adams speaks. The
unfinished Gently novel is good, though it does contain
014
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a number of ‘placeholders’ to which Adams was no
doubt intending to return. Its characters are literally undernourished
but Gently is on form. However, reading
this unfinished novel is either an exercise is breaking
your heart (if you are a fan) or an unwanted look into
the writer’s world where the effortlessness of the final
manuscript is a lie based upon plot dead-ends, jokes
that don’t work, and a rhinoceros called Desmond.
Inside this book you will also find a letter from a
12-year-old Adams to the editors of The Eagle magazine,
an article about testing an artificial manta-ray off
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Australia, an email to the American producer of the
thus-far unproduced Hitchhiker film, an obituary by
Adams’s friend, Richard Dawkins, several interviews,
no planning permission for the destruction of the Earth,
and no peril-sensitive sunglasses of any description.
Reading this book is misery. With each eloquentlyphrased
and humorous comment, one begins to panic;
who is there to take the piss out of life now that Douglas
is dead? It is possible that other writers will continue to
write in the same manner, but, for me, there remains a
doubt; just a salmon of it. �
015
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 1998]
Scott Adams: Dilbert: Seven Years Of Highly Defective People
Chris Mitchell
Dilbert is rapidly becoming enough of a cartoon icon
to rival the fame of Disney’s most enduring creations.
Chronicling the trials of a hapless IT engineer
battling against the absurdities of corporate life, the
Dilbert comic strip appears in over 1500 newspapers
worldwide. Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is
creator Scott Adams’ guided tour of the evolution of
Dilbert from geek mascot to unlikely international idol.
The book assembles strips from all stages of Dilbert’s
genesis with comments scrawled in the margin by Adams
as to what was going through his mind at the time.
Each of the major characters, such as Dilbert’s megalomaniacal
canine companion Dogbert and the witless
Pointy-Haired Boss, get their own chapters with a brief
essay about how and why they appeared in the strip.
Thanks to this candid overview, it’s easy to see why
Dilbert wasn’t an overnight success when the strip first
appeared in 1989. Adams drew heavily on his eight
years at Pacific Bell as an applications engineer for
inspiration, with many of the jokes revolving around
Dilbert’s inherent nerdhood. It was a cult form of
humour for IT professionals which didn’t sit easily
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alongside the likes of Peanuts.
However, with the widespread infiltration of personal
computers into the workplace during the 90s, more and
more people began to find Dilbert’s daily dilemmas
strangely familiar, especially those which concerned
working for a manager who understood nothing about
technology. The most popular Dilbert strip ever features
his boss being given an Etch-A-Sketch in place of
a laptop and not noticing anything amiss.
Adams cannily gauges his audience’s reaction to
new threads in the Dilbert saga by including his email
address in the margin of each cartoon. As such, an avalanche
of Dilbertesque anecdotes arrives in his inbox
each morning from disgruntled employees all over
the globe. Adams freely admits in Seven Years … to
using many of these stories as the basis for his strips,
producing the peculiar circularity of Dilbert imitating
life imitating Dilbert. Adams has even gone as far as to
have the readers vote by e-mail as to whether Ratbert
should get pulverised with a hammer. (They thankfully
voted no).
The amount of feedback Adams receives from his
016
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readers seems due to Dilbert’s essentially subversive
nature. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than on
the burgeoning Dilbert web site, where there is an
ever-growing list of draconian companies who have
banned Dilbert cartoons from being displayed on
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cubicle walls because they’re considered “bad for
morale.” Seven Years Of Highly Defective People is
a concentrated dose of forbidden fun which deserves
to be kept in the bottom drawer of any self-respecting
office worker’s desk. �
017
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2001]
Keith Altham: No More Mr Nice Guy!
Robin Askew
At home with Sting. The in-no-way-narcissistic
rainforest dwellers’ friend and tantric sex enthusiast
is looking for a space in his sitting room to hang
a giant self-portrait. Unfortunately, it soon becomes
clear that this will not match the decor. Eventually,
Mrs Sting, Trudie Styler, suggests that it should go in
the bathroom in place of a print of the Salvador Dalí
painting titled The Great Masturbator. “After all,”
she reasons, “it will just be replacing one wanker
with another.”
For 25 years, Keith Altham was a “friend of the
stars”, as they say, first as a journalist on the NME and
then as PR man for many of the biggest names in rock,
from Rod Stewart to Van Morrison and Paul Weller to
Ray Davies. He regressed from representing to Rolling
Stones in the 60s to “Orville the bloody duck” in
the 90s, at which point he wisely decided to jack it all
in. Rather than writing an autobiography, he’s chosen
to spill the beans on his pop star chums in the rather
cheesy format of individual letters addressed to each of
his former clients. (To Van Morrison: “What can I say?
What a talent. What a singer. What a songwriter. What
BUY Keith Altham books online from and
a pain in the arse!”)
In many ways, this is a bloody awful book: poorly
written, littered with typos and spelling errors and reeking
of self-aggrandisement. But Altham really was at
the centre of it all during the 60s and 70s. It was he who
suggested to Jimi Hendrix the idea of setting a guitar
on fire. And in one of the great forgotten footnotes of
rock history, he once took Jim Morrison to see Status
Quo (“Tell them to turn down, give up and go home,”
sneered the Lizard King).
If you’re prepared to endure the leaden prose, there’s
a huge reservoir of great stories here. Altham particularly
admires Sting, despite Mr Sumner’s propensity
“to be such a humourless prat”, and seems to have preferred
the company of down-to-earth heavy metallers
like Saxon and Uriah Heep, although he loathed their
music. Fortunately, he doesn’t allow these personal
friendships to prevent him telling yarns that show them
in a considerably less than flattering light. Many of
these sail very close to the wind indeed. M’learned
friends may wish to examine his introduction for what
would appear to be a libellous statement about that
018
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nice, well-adjusted Michael Jackson.
Connoisseurs will already be familiar with the one
about a typically dishevelled Van Morrison turning
up late for a party (“Did anyone order a minicab?”
shouted the unfortunate who answered the door),
and the message Rod Stewart carved into a tabletop
when he learned that Sting was to be the next user of
the Lear jet he was travelling in (“Sting, how come
you ain’t go no sense of humour, you cunt?”). But
who’d have guessed that underneath his carefully
cultivated likeable exterior, Phil Collins seethes with
rage at being perceived as “the nice man of pop”?
Eventually, he snapped when an unchallenging interviewer
asked whether he was really as nice as he
seems: “Why don’t you ask my ex-wife?”
For celebrity bitchiness, look no further than Elton
John’s wedding present to Rod Stewart of a £10 gift
voucher with instructions to “buy something nice for
the home”. And for a real surprise, turn to the chapter
on the Moody Blues behaving badly, which features a
naked, comatose young woman wedged securely into a
washbasin by her arse while Graeme Edge fires arrows
at policemen who’ve been called out to investigate the
mild-mannered prog-rockers’ raucous partying.
BUY Keith Altham books online from and
Best stories? Well, there’s a great one about Marc
Bolan being evicted from the backstage area of a
Rolling Stones gig for sexually molesting Mick Jagger.
“Get him out of here,” bellowed the indignant
leathery Stone. “He just grabbed my balls.” “I didn’t
realise they were sacrosanct,” responded the Electric
Elf as he was marched away by burly security guards.
But by a whisker, the accolade has to go to Terence
Trent D’Arby, the “silly twisted boy” whose fall
from public favour was even more meteoric than his
rise. D’Arby seems to have crammed plenty of overindulgence
into his brief brush with fame, but one
episode proved too much for his female manager. She
resigned when he rang her late at night in her hotel room
demanding that she procure condoms for his latest female
acquaintance. It seems this sexually provocative
performer was too embarrassed to make the purchase
himself. But before leaving, the manager phoned down
to reception in their five-star hotel, whose staff were
made of sterner stuff. Without batting an eyelid, the
servile concierge entered the celeb’s bedchamber bearing
a silver platter on which a selection of small foil
packets were arranged tastefully and asked if madam
would care to make her selection. �
019
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2005]
Paul Auster: Oracle Night
Stephen Mitchelmore
Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read
since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every
book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely
readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability
to stop reading him once a book is begun.
However, in the end, with Leviathan, I felt this was
too much. I read it abnormally quickly, devouring each
page with less and less concern for what was written
on it than for getting beyond that page and to the next
page, and the next, to see what was there.
After the last page I was mentally exhausted, nursing
a headache. It seems significant that I have no memory
of the narrative except for the mental image of a forest
to which a character – perhaps the main character –
removes himself. The proliferation of anecdotes – or
stories within stories – means one can’t see the wood
for the trees.
The experience of reading Oracle Night is very similar.
It’s almost impossible to put the book down as there
are so many compelling stories, one after the other,
even though this is a relatively compact novel (240
pages). I’m sure I’ll forget most of the stories, but that
BUY Paul Auster books online from and
isn’t important. Nor is Auster’s distinctly unpretentious
prose style important. If you wince at clichés like back
in the swing of things and to all intents and purposes
that appear on the first half page alone, think of them as
stabilisers for the roller coaster ride ahead. (Elsewhere,
I read that Auster breaks through his writer’s block by
typing regardless of the banality of the prose.)
There are two central narratives in Oracle Night –
both told by Sidney Orr, a New York writer recovering
from an unnamed illness that was expected to kill him.
He hadn’t written anything in a year until discovering
a blue notebook in a small stationery shop (that isn’t
stationary at all in fact. It disappears overnight.) Anyway,
the new notebook somehow enables Orr to write
a story. Much of Oracle Night is that story.
I don’t want to summarise the plot here as it is
characteristically involved and would also detract from
the essential element of Auster’s novels. The essential
thing is something impossible to convey outside of the
narrative itself: the evocation of possibility. At each
step in the story – when Orr enters the stationery store
to discover the blue notebook, when he returns to his
020
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writing den, when he begins to write the story in the
blue notebook as if compelled by an occult power, and
when, in the story within the story, the character makes
a life-changing decision – there is a thrilling, uncanny
sense of freedom. I mean, for the reader. A freedom in
infinite possibility; innumerable futures present themselves.
I have not experienced this so acutely with any
other writer.
It’s there too in the opening lines of The Music Of
Chance: Jim Nashe driving away from his past after
a windfall of cash. After that, the story takes shape
and the sense diminishes. Until then, however, no
particular story is attached to the sense of freedom.
Anything can happen. We are free. The beginning of
the story is our windfall.
So why is do we feel an urge to continue reading
rather than to throw the book aside and live that
freedom? Probably because we prefer the illusion of
freedom, the possibility of freedom rather than the real
thing. We read to enjoy the specific story that replaces
the vertigo of infinite freedom. As with a horror movie,
we aren’t really horrified. Horror is only the playful
withdrawal of a guaranteed safety. And narrative is the
guarantee. With a novel, we know we have a circumscribed
adventure before us.
Yet that narrative also makes our freedom come true
for a moment, even if it is only an illusion. The open
future may contain infinite possibilities but it never
BUY Paul Auster books online from and
seems to happen for real. Consumed by habit, we lose
contact with our freedom. Reading, or watching a film,
reminds us of possibility even as it is removed. And in
that reminder, it comes true. The obscure attraction of
a book or a film might be, then, the pleasure of contact
with possibility and relief in its withdrawal.
But such pleasure has a double edge of course.
Indulgence in stories removes us from life; takes us
to the end of possibility. Auster’s narrative is, as I’ve
said, compelling. It is compelling but in the end doesn’t
satisfy the indulgent reader. Oracle Night could go on
for another thousand pages. Perhaps it does as Auster’s
complete oeuvre. Yet it does stop. Although, actually,
it doesn’t quite. The story within the story is not
concluded. It is shocking and frustrating for the reader.
One wants to know how the author Sidney Orr and the
author Paul Auster resolve a chilling situation. At the
end though Orr explains why it is left hanging and we
realise that it stops precisely for the reason we don’t
want it to stop. It is difficult to accept, yet not because
it is wrong.
This has angered and confused naive readers; those
untroubled by stories. For instance, Aaron Hughes asks
the right questions but asks them only of Oracle Night
rather than literature in general. What does it mean, for
example, to say that Oracle Night “is not a success”
when the nature of success in literary terms is fundamental
to the narrative itself? The answers present
021
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themselves in the novel under review. When you pick
up a novel you become a reader, not a consumer.
Orr describes burning the blue notebook in order
to escape its mysterious power; in order to flee the
nightmare of possibilities it summoned. Indeed, the
end of the novel seems overladen with terrible events.
Orr writes: “The true story started only then, after I
destroyed the blue notebook.”
We might compare this with something Auster – or
should we say Orrster? – wrote in The Invention Of
Solitude at the very beginning of his career following
after death of his father:
For the past two weeks, these lines from
Maurice Blanchot echoing in my head:
‘One thing must be understood: I have said
nothing extraordinary or even surprising.
What is extraordinary begins at the moment
BUY Paul Auster books online from and
I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of
it.’ [from Death Sentence]
To begin with death. To work my way
back into life, and then, finally, to return
to death.
In Oracle Night, we joined Sidney Orr working his
way back into life from the brink of death – working,
that is, by writing. Yet the main symptom of his unnamed
illness was dizziness, where the world became
blurred and incoherent: a world without form. Almost
as if language and meaning had been removed from
his life. It took the discovery of the blue notebook and
the writing of the new story to return him to both. But
that only returns threatens another death, the death of
possibility. It is Auster’s rare achievement to keep possibility
alive and kicking even as it suffers a death by a
thousand plots. �
022
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Tom Baker: Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? 024
J.G. Ballard 026
J.G. Ballard: Entertaining Violence 027
J.G. Ballard: Prophet With Honour 029
J.G. Ballard: Future Shock 032
J.G. Ballard: Not A Literary Man 035
J.G. Ballard: Flight And Imagination 039
J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights 048
J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphor 050
Iain M. Banks: Getting Used To Being God 054
Adam Baron: The Man Whose Penis
Made Him Locally Famous 059
John Battelle: The Search 062
John Baxter: George Lucas:
A Biography 065
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography 067
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein 071
B
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under 076
Thomas Bernhard: Playing Dead 082
Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No 088
Maurice Blanchot: The Absent Voice 092
Body Modification: Remake, Remodel 101
Jorge Luis Borges: The Book
Of Imaginary Beings 103
Angela Bourke: The Burning
Of Bridget Cleary 107
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine 109
Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn 112
Charles Bukowski: Born Into This 115
Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush 118
Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie 122
Jason Burke: Al Qaeda 134
Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly 138
023
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2000]
Tom Baker: Who On Earth Is Tom Baker?
Robin Askew
At the risk of turning into one of those dreadful
30-something nostalgia bores, the Tom Baker incarnation
of Dr Who has a special place in the hearts of
those of my generation. Forever fixed in my mind is
the time I queued for hours with hundreds of other
grubby pre-teens in a smalltown bookshop awaiting
the arrival of the great man to sign books he hadn’t
written. The cops sealed off the high street, which was
lined with kiddies wondering where the Tardis would
materialise to disgorge the tousle-haired timelord.
Suddenly he appeared, striding down the middle of
the road in full Who garb, dishing out jelly babies to
the gobsmacked hordes.
My illusions took a slight dent a few years back when
I saw one of those unbroadcastable out-take reels BBC
technicians compile to amuse one another at Christmas,
in which Baker was shown getting saucy with an assistant
and taking the piss out of K9. But that’s as nothing
compared to the revelations in this indiscreet autobiography.
It seems Baker’s worst enemy during his years
of national fame wasn’t the Daleks, the Cybermen, or
any of the other low-budget latex terrors, but the Shag-
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monster. And like all the best monsters, this one turned
out to be – gasp! – himself. “While we were on our
tours about the country to promote the programme, I
was often pulled by women who were keen fantasists,”
he confesses, introducing tales of hotel room bondage
sessions (“A good few of these women wanted to whip
or cane me”) and general pervery (a university don insisted
on wearing his costume, “and as she threw herself
wantonly on to the wide Holiday Inn bed she growled,
‘Come on, Doctor, let’s travel through space’”). Alas,
the man with the sonic screwdriver had no advanced
defence against venereal disease, and soon contracted
a dose of the clap.
Dr Who enthusiasts may initially be disappointed to
find that the programme doesn’t get its first mention
until page 189, but to skip the first 15 chapters would
be to miss a real treat since Baker seems determined
to show himself in the least flattering light imaginable,
as if to demonstrate the veracity of a remark he once
overheard: “He’s quite nice. But there’s something odd
about him, something slightly disgusting.” The book
opens in wartime Liverpool, where poverty-stricken
024
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young master Baker prayed for a bomb to drop on
his mother so he’d be orphaned and eligible for treats
from the Americans. By the age of nine he’d become a
thurible swinger and learned to fake tears at funerals to
get bigger tips. A year later, he discovered the joys of
solvent abuse (“I couldn’t walk past a tin of floor polish
without having a furtive snort”), which helped set him
on the path to a lifetime of misery and self-loathing,
abetted by National Service, the National Theatre and a
failed attempt to please his family by becoming a monk.
A recurring theme is that common actors’ lament, the
lack of any sense of identity, which isn’t helped by the
fact that he’s so frequently mistaken for Jon Pertwee,
Jonathan Miller and – bizarrely – Shirley Williams. But
although he’s understandably irked to be accosted by
strangers about the havoc he wreaked on the grammar
schools, Baker seems curiously flattered when people
remark, as they often do, that he reminds them of a
favourite aunt. Not that they want to be around him for
long. “I’m afraid I have no gift for friendship,” he writes
at one point. “I quickly get tired of people and off they
go. Only the other day I tried to think of a single friend
I had made in my life and drew a blank.”
But while Baker wallows in his own perversely appealing
creepiness, he doesn’t get anywhere near an
answer to the question posed by the book’s title. His
long-suffering wives, who might have been invited to
BUY Tom Baker books online from and
shed some light on this mystery, get the briefest of
walk-on parts – barely a paragraph in the case of Lalla
Ward, who buggered off to shack up with proselytising
Darwinist Richard Dawkins – when Baker wishes
to illustrate his talent for appalling misjudgement or
self-pity. He once even failed to recognise an ex-wife
at a party.
Nor does the story end, as one might expect, with
timelord totty excess, as Baker went on to enjoy several
Soho Boozing Years with the late Jeffrey Bernard,
Francis Bacon and chums, which provide a further rich
seam of anecdotes. These days he happily potters about
in his local graveyard polishing his own tombstone, enjoying
strange encounters with scary fans paying their
respects, and occasionally treats himself to lengthy
visits to the household goods department of John
Lewis. “I particularly enjoy the ironing-board section.
I find I can pass an hour or more admiring the various
ironing boards. The Brabantia is my favourite. I have a
very good model with a flowered cover, pretty though
fading slightly. It folds so smoothly that all fear flees.
It’s the folding action of good modern boards that has
removed the terror that so many men used to feel at the
prospect of opening or closing the old, temperamental
type of ironing board when naked.”
Call me a sick fuck if you must, but I closed the book
liking him even more. �
025
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J.G. Ballard
Biography
Most famous as the author of Empire Of The Sun and
Crash, J.G. Ballard was one of the most important
post war writers in the UK until his death in 2008.
His influence on the next generation of novelists –
including Will Self and Jeff Noon, also featured
heavily in Spike – cannot be overstated. While much
of the acclaim that surrounds Ballard stems from
his early disaster novels, some of his final books – in
particular, Super-Cannes – show him at the height of
his powers.
Chris Hall managed to interview Ballard several
times while freelancing for various publications, and
saved the fascinating, unabridged conversations for
Spike, and Marcos Moure kindly contributed a previously
published Ballard interview in which Ballard
gives a great, self-defining quote:
“I’m interested in science and medicine, the media
landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes
of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any
bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not
the world of literature.”
I also set up JGBallard.com in 1998, which was
a link page to other Ballard related material on the
web. This was made largely obsolete by the arrival
of Simon Sellars’ fantastic Ballardian.com which is a
superb and ongoing exploration of Ballard’s work.
Chris Mitchell �
Articles
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
Entertaining Violence
Interview by Chris Hall
Prophet With Honour
027
Feature by David B. Livingstone
Future Shock
029
Interview by Chris Hall
Not A Literary Man
032
Interview by Marcos Moure
Flight And Imagination
035
Interview by Chris Hall
Cocaine Nights
039
Review by David Livingstone
Extreme Metaphor
048
Feature by Chris Hall 050
026
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Interview [published January 2004]
J.G. Ballard: Entertaining Violence
Chris Hall talks to J.G. Ballard about Millennium People, the middle classes
and mail order Kalashnikovs
It’s been 70 years since H.G. Wells published The Shape
Of Things To Come but there has been a far more astute
chronicler of our contemporary reality living among us
in the suburbs for more than half a century. J.G. Ballard’s
gimlet eye for the psychopathology of everyday
life has never deserted him. Instead of characters with
emotions, a history and a moral compass, Ballard’s
fictional landscape is peopled with affectless casualties
of the nihilistic, over-mediated consumer landscape,
searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. This
is fiction as biopsy, and its results are devastating.
Millennium People is the last in a trilogy of detective
thrillers – along with Cocaine Nights and Super-
Cannes – to examine what might happen when all
we have left as an ideology is consumerism. “People
resent the fact that the most moral decision in their
lives is choosing what colour the next car will be,” he
says witheringly. “All we’ve got left is our own psychopathology.
It’s the only freedom we have – that’s a
dangerous state of affairs.”
I meet Jim Ballard at the Hilton International hotel
on Holland Park Avenue. “I used to come here a lot
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
because there was a Japanese restaurant called the Hiroku
for many years. It would be impossible to identify
your location,” he says approvingly, looking around
the virtually deserted lounge we’re sat in with its palm
trees and low-level skylight.
Despite reports, Ballard does not permanently reside
in the suburbs – he spends two or three days a week in
London visiting his girlfriend, Claire. “But living out in
Shepperton gives me a close-up view of the real England
– the M25, the world of business parks, industrial
estates and executive housing, sports clubs and marinas,
cineplexes, CCTV, car-rental forecourts … That’s
where boredom comes in – a paralysing conformity
and boredom that can only be relieved by some sort of
violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into
the nearest supermarket and letting rip.”
Millennium People begins with a bomb attack at Heathrow
airport, which kills three people. The proposition
of the novel is that “the middle-classes are the new proletariat”,
with the residents of Chelsea Marina, another
gated community of his, so sick of school fees, private
healthcare costs, stealth taxes and parking meters that
027
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they begin to dismantle the “self-imposed burdens” of
civic responsibility and consumer culture. They are led,
as is the psychologist narrator David Markham, by a
charismatic paediatrician, Richard Gould, into attacking
the shibboleths of the middle-class metropolis – the
National Film Theatre, the BBC, Tate Modern – and
then out into the suburbs.
But how seriously do these middle-class rebels take
their claims of oppression? At one point in the book,
there is the suggestion that the residents of Chelsea Marina
might change the street names to those of Japanese
film directors, but this is quickly scotched as it “might
damage property prices…”
It is full too of perverse inversions and unsettling
paradoxes – “Nothing brings out violence like a peaceful
demonstration’ or “If your target is the global money
system, you don’t attack a bank. You attack the Oxfam
shop next door.”
Millennium People describes in part a murder with
strong affinities to the Jill Dando case. “What all these
murders – Hungerford, Dunblane, Jill Dando – have
in common,” says Ballard, “is that they appear to be
meaningless. There are no motives. Dando wasn’t even
a celebrity. It may be that this is their great appeal.
“There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that
make up our national consciousness. I’ve tried to
nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may
embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched
resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called
psychopathology.”
Ballard continues to be endlessly engaged in what’s
happening now. And as he says himself, he’s bucked the
trend by becoming more left-wing as he’s got older. He
is particularly disturbed by the apparently motiveless
actions of our Prime Minister and has been following the
“great smokescreen” that is the Hutton Inquiry. “Blair
has this evangelical commitment to what he believes is
right, and he invents the truth when he can’t find it out
in front of him,’ he says incredulously. “I think we’re
living in dangerous times and most people aren’t really
aware of it. They’re worrying about asylum seekers or
abortion or paedophilia…”
Does it get harder the older he gets (he’s 73), to anticipate,
as he’s put it before, the next five minutes?
“I have no shortage of ideas and a peculiar kind of
compulsion to get them down. Not that it makes a damn
bit of difference…”
In what way?
“When you’re a young writer you want to change
the world in some small way, but when you get to
my age you realise that it doesn’t make any difference
whatsoever, but you still go on. It’s a strange way
to view the world. If I had my time again, I’d be a
journalist. Writing is too solitary. I think journalists
have more fun!” �
028
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Feature [published August 1999]
J.G. Ballard: Prophet With Honour
David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers
of the 20th century
“This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!”
It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G.
Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of
Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many
have since come to see as a visionary masterpiece.
Though perhaps the first, this unnamed editor was by
no means the last person to be discomfited by Ballard’s
nightmarish, frequently grotesque tale of a small
cadre of car-crash fetishists prone to getting their sexual
kicks by staging smashups which resulted in very-real
injuries and deaths. And given the impending release
of horror director David Cronenberg’s film adaptation,
it seems a certainty that the moral outrage is due for
an exponential increase; media mogul Ted Turner
and British cabinet minister Virginia Bottomley have
already registered their howls of righteous indignation.
Considering his being “beyond psychiatric help,”
the amiable, articulate, and consummately-logical
James Graham Ballard has managed pretty well: His
output to date consists of 15 novels, 17 collections of
stories and essays, and substantial critical work for
esteemed British newspapers such as The Guardian,
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
London Times, and The Independent. Moreover, Ballard
has come to be seen as one of science fiction’s
principal intellectual luminaries, and his work as perhaps
the best argument for the genre’s consideration
as ‘serious’ literature. The prophetic Crash, with its
prescient foreshadowing of western culture’s latterday
fixation upon violence as entertainment, attests to
the author’s acuity as a social critic.
While early works such as The Drowned World brought
Ballard fame, it was Crash that gained him infamy. The
novel’s relentless probing of the intertwined psychologies
of sex and violence, presented as a grandiose and
hyperbolic panorama of crushed metal and battered bodies,
immediately struck a chord of primal fear. “There are
many things that people don’t like to be reminded of,”
Ballard muses. “People are always surprised to discover
in themselves that they covet their neighbour’s wife, or
that they harbour small racist feelings; they automatically
think, oh my God, I’m not worthy of myself. And
they immediately turn away from it. But if you look at
the entertainment culture that people amuse themselves
with, it’s obvious that the car crash has a very powerful
029
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role to play in peoples’ imaginations …something is
happening in the imagination that tends to entangle the
elements of violence and sexuality, and it’s fed by this relentless
flow of appealingly-violent imagery that we get
in our movies. Crash is an attempt to follow these trends
off the edge of the graph paper to the point where they
meet. Basically the message is ‘So you think violence is
sexy? OK, this is where you’re going.’ I see the ultimate
effect of Crash as cautionary, as a warning against the
role of violence and sex in our entertainment culture and
the way the two can become intertwined.”
The concept for Crash germinated in the social
confusion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period
coloured by the Kennedy assassination, Manson, and
Vietnam. “Violence took the place of sex, I think, as
the most exciting subject available to writers and
filmmakers, and became sort of the key engine of the
entertainment culture. The car crash came into its own.
I remember writing in The Atrocity Exhibition about
the psychology involved, and people dismissed it out
of hand. They just refused to see.”
As a means of testing his hypotheses, Ballard presented
an art exhibition at a London gallery in April,
1970 where the ‘works’ on display were three wrecked
cars. “The behaviour of people who visited the gallery
absolutely convinced me that I was onto something.
At the opening, people got so drunk, and over the
course of the month they were on display the cars
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
were attacked, one of them was overturned. Nobody
would have noticed these cars in the street outside, but
because they were isolated beneath the white gallery
lighting they triggered enormous, confused emotions.
So I thought, this is the green light. And so I sat down
and began to write Crash.”
Provoking enormous, confused emotions has always
been a goal of Ballard’s work. The reasons for doing so
go well beyond simple sensationalism, however; Ballard’s
stated aim is honesty via the roundabout vehicle
of fiction, an honesty intended to provoke movement
towards the humane. “I see myself as a neutral observer;
I’m not trying to impose some kind of private or
personal vision on the world. All I’m doing is looking
out and seeing what’s going on in the street. And all
my fiction is a fiction of analysis, where I’ve tried to
identify certain ongoing trends that seem to be apparent,”
Ballard asserts. “I don’t think it took a great deal
of prophetic skill to guess what was going to happen as
the 60s and 70s unfolded; I could see all these social
trends, with an entertainment culture that thrived on
violence and sensation and a rootless urban and suburban
population with nothing to do other than play with
their own psychopathic fantasies. Modern technology,
whether in the form of a motor car or a motorway or
a high rise building, was empowering peoples’ worst
impulses … the technology involved pandered to and
facilitated the eruption of people’s worst natures.”
030
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Ballard’s heightened sensitivity to violence, as well as
the corollary themes of isolation and social chaos which
permeate much of his work, may well have its roots in
his childhood in wartime China. Born in Shanghai in
1930 to English parents, Ballard’s earliest years were
spent in an expatriate’s suburban idyll, a comfortable
enclave of large houses, swimming pools, and servants.
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937
and its subsequent metamorphosis into World War II,
the Ballard family were removed to internment camps,
and their colonial paradise was transformed into a
killing field; from these experiences, Ballard wrote
the semi-autobiographical Empire Of The Sun, which
was subsequently adapted to film by Steven Spielberg.
Ballard views his years in the camps as a painful education
in the barbarous capabilities of humankind. “I
don’t think you can go through the experience of war
without one’s perceptions of the world being forever
changed. The reassuring stage set that everyday reality
in the suburban west presents to us is torn down; you
see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth
beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience. The
war came, I spent three years in the camp, and I saw
adults under stress, some of them giving way to stress,
some recovering and showing steadfast courage. It was
a great education; when you see the truth about human
beings it’s beneficial, but very challenging, and those
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
lessons have stayed with me all my life.”
Now in his 60s, Ballard may be finally tempering his
apocalyptic vision. Recent works such as 1994’s Rushing
To Paradise, while retaining their author’s signature
dry wit and moral imperative, stop short of blooming
into nightmare worlds such as those of Crash, High
Rise and The Drowned World; since Empire Of The Sun,
his books have taken gradual steps in the direction of
humour, and even hope. Furthermore, having explored
the distant future and his own difficult past, Ballard’s
writing seems to be moving in ever-tighter concentric
circles around the present-day reality that most would
recognize, and his characters taking upon sympathetic
foibles belying an underlying humanity as well as their
external neurotic drive.
Appearances would indicate that Ballard is cautiously
closing in on a central, pivotal point, perhaps
the wellspring of his fertile imagination. Asked if he
knows what that point is likely to be when he finally
homes in on it, he demurs: “I wonder if I ever will.
Maybe that will be a mistake – sort of like going into
analysis and getting yourself cured; one needs the sort
of support system provided by the element of mystery
about oneself.” Cured or not, the sense of wonder and
mystery remains in his writing – indicating that, editors’
opinions aside, the Ballard method of shock therapy is
working just fine. �
031
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Interview [published November 1997]
J.G. Ballard: Future Shock
Chris Hall finds out why J.G. Ballard thinks Crash is
the first film of the 21st century
One week before David Cronenberg’s Crash opened
in the UK at the beginning of June, the normally
reclusive author J.G. Ballard appeared at a regional
press conference and pre-screening of the film in
Wardour Street, London. Cronenberg’s film is based
on Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same title, and the controversy
surrounding Crash has brought Ballard back
into the public eye to defend a film which he sees as
a hauntingly accurate depiction of the book he wrote
nearly a quarter-century ago.
It is a measure of the confusion surrounding the film
that it was felt necessary to show Crash to regional
newspaper editors and reviewers, as well as having both
Ballard and Crash’s co-executive producer Chris Auty
present, to try and dispel the sensationalist media myths
that had grown up around Crash since its premiere at
the Cannes film festival … Thanks to the London Standard’s
headline that Crash was “beyond the bounds of
depravity”, four local English councils banned Crash
from being shown within their regional jurisdiction on
the grounds that it is nihilistic, sado-masochistic and
graphic in its sexual and violent content.
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
Such hysteria has not been confined to this side of
the Atlantic – Crash has only just been released on
video in the US this month, having been delayed for
over a year due to the personal intervention of media
mogul Ted Turner. As the owner of Crash’s distributor
Fine Line Features, Turner attempted to block Crash
being released in the States at all, and only backed
down when the press caught wind of his behind-thescenes
manoeuvres.
Ballard for his part is bemused and outraged by the
double standards in operation against Crash and cannot
understand why the film has been singled out for such
outrage. What about films such as Martin Scorsese’s
Goodfellas and Casino, he asks. Both are “bloodthirsty
and horrific” and “practically a handbook to any yobbo
wanting to beat someone up.”
Ballard is particularly appalled at the film “coming
up against little England at its worst” and characterises
the British as “a strange, nervous nation” unable to
defend anything on the grounds of freedom of speech.
Indeed, it was Cronenberg who noticed that nobody
had defended the film on these grounds. The absurdly
032
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aptly-named British councillor John Bull said that in
the light of the Dunblane massacre, you’ve got to look
a lot more closely at the effect on the audience of films
like Crash. Ballard’s heart sank when he read those
comments: “For God’s sake, what can we do when
people jump to make connections like that?”
So why is it that people have got Crash all wrong?
Why do we find the idea that there might be a sexual
component to driving and crashing so abhorrent? You
could say that by this very response Ballard and Cronenberg
have tapped into something. There appears to
be a lot of denial going on. Ballard notes that “people
seem to be excited by car crashes or film-makers
wouldn’t film them. David [Cronenberg] said to me,
‘Jim – the problem with car crashes is that they’re
damn difficult to film!’ Film-makers wouldn’t make
all this effort if they didn’t think people were getting
a thrill from them’”
This is borne out by the experiences of Crash’s
stunt co-ordinator Ted Hanlon. “Usually with car
crashes, you just line up two cars and let them hit. The
more damage and the bigger the explosion, the better.
In this film, it’s the opposite. Cronenberg wanted
the crashes to be brutal, nasty, intense and quick,
as crashes are in real life, and without the attendant
explosions or clichéd slow motion tracking shots, in
order to convey the immediacy such events.”
That people should think, upon hearing what Crash is
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
about, that these usual Hollywood conventions would
apply to the film is hardly surprising and, further, that
they should find a realistic representation of crashes so
alien is testament to the domination of the Hollywood
blockbuster genre. A sarcastic Ballard complains that
“Bruce Willis can behave just as sadistically as the bad
guys, but because he’s working for the NYPD it’s OK
… Add a layer of sexual excitement and you’ve got
the film culture that dominates the planet. We all know
as drivers that there are young men who cannot bear
being overtaken by a woman driver. Young men feel
powerful sexual emotions – half of America used to be
conceived in cars. There is nothing revolutionary in the
idea that there is a sexual component to our idea of, our
excitement by, car crashes.”
How does he think that Crash differs from this?
“Crash is honest – it says we won’t put a reassuring
moral frame around it. We won’t pretend this is a
story with a happy ending, and all it’s ambiguities are
up on the screen. I think that’s what so original about
it.” The real problem, as Ballard sees it, is will Crash
encourage people to imitate the behaviour. “People
aren’t going to take this film literally,” he reasons, “it
doesn’t invite being taken literally. It’s a very cool,
almost glassy, rather eloquent, mysterious film …
it’s obviously something more than what you see on
the screen at any moment. There are no Buicks slomoing
through the air, crashing into buses; obviously
033
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something very strange is going on in the minds of the
characters. Vaughan is clearly mad.”
Chris Auty thinks that the British find the problem
problematic because the Protestant world has no
surrealist tradition within which to place or make
sense of it. “Poland, Argentina – these are deeply
religious catholic countries. They have no problem
at all with Crash. They think of it alongside Belle de
Jour, something like a Bunuel movie, which is how
we think of it. Personally, I see it as a ghost story …
it is as though the film’s protagonist James has died
and become a ghost and then tries to become human
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
again. Maybe I sound mad but I found the ending
immensely touching and romantic and full of hope
in a dehumanised world.”
Ballard is keen to make a comparison of Crash with
Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking Psycho: “I think
of Crash as the first film of the next century, if you
like. I think that the very influential role of Psycho
since 1962 will apply to Crash … Paul Schrader
[scriptwriter of Taxi Driver] said ‘Wonderful film – if
only I’d been so honest’, and I think it will impel a
new frankness and honesty that will reveal itself over
the next few years.” �
034
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Interview [published September 2001]
J.G. Ballard: Not A Literary Man
Marcos Moure’s 1995 interview with J.G. Ballard about
his novel Rushing To Paradise
Ballard is one of the best writers of speculative fiction
alive today. Whether exploring the innate sexuality of
automobile accidents, the power of dreams as reality,
or navigating through the rubble of modern civilization,
his often savage, apocalyptic work has influenced
artists and filmmakers alike. Ballard himself counts
among his influences the surrealist painters Dalí, Magritte,
and Ernst, as well as William Burroughs, whom
he considers to be one of the most important authors of
the 20th century.
Ballard first entered the literary world as a science
fiction writer, a genre he soon exhausted and has not
explored in years. His transition to the mainstream
was not entirely smooth, however. His 1970 anthology,
The Atrocity Exhibition, was deleted from the
Farrar, Straus and Giroux catalogue soon after its
US publication because of short stories like ‘Why
I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ and ‘Plan for the
Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. After reading
his classic 1972 novel, Crash, an editor wryly commented,
“The author is beyond psychiatric help.”
I found Mr Ballard to be quite sane – piercingly so,
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
in fact – as he talked to me recently from his home in
Shepperton, a suburb of London. Ballard is the author
of 16 novels, including Hello America, The Crystal
World, Empire of the Sun, The Terminal Beach, The
Unlimited Dream Company and The Disaster Area. His
newest novel, Rushing to Paradise, was just published
by Picador USA.
Ballard as seen by Ballard
MM: How do you see yourself as a writer and what do
you think is your niche in the literary world?
JGB: I can’t speak for the United States, but I suppose
some still refer to me as a science fiction writer.
But since Empire of the Sun came out ten years ago,
I think people have welcomed me to the mainstream.
Although I’m not so sure I want to be embraced by
the mainstream. I think I’m still what I always was, a
kind of fringe writer. I think I’m an imaginative writer
who began his career by writing science fiction, but I
haven’t written any, really, for a very long time. I don’t
even consider Crash to be a science fiction novel. I
don’t know whether you’ve read it or not.
035
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MM: Definitely. It seems to me that fantastically imaginative
fiction tends to be lumped in with the whole
science fiction genre.
JGB: Exactly. If you look at 20th-century novels, you
can see that there’s a sort of mainstream, or what I would
call realistic or naturalistic fiction. And then there are
the imaginative writers who often tend to be mavericks.
You know Genet, Céline, Burroughs, and so on. And I
like to think of myself as a maverick. I’m certainly not
a literary man, and this is an important point. I’ve met a
great number of writers, novelists rather, English ones
in particular, whose stock of references – their sort of
instant associations that come to mind when they create
and all that – all tend to come from the world of
literature. Mine do not.
I’m interested in science and medicine, the media
landscape, and so on. My reflexes are not the reflexes
of a literary man. I’m more of a magpie pecking at any
bright pieces of foil. I’m interested in the world, not the
world of literature.
Science Fiction
MM: So you wouldn’t file your work of the past 15 or
20 years under science fiction?
JGB: No, not anymore. Some of my work was, there’s
certainly no question about that. And I’m very proud
that I was a science fiction writer. As I’ve often said,
it’s the most authentic literature of the 20th century.
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
Sadly enough, most science fiction is being written
by the wrong people nowadays. The constraints of
a certain kind of commercial fiction have tended to
formularize the field over the last 50 years.
MM: Speaking from my own experience, I think
many people, especially as young readers, are drawn
to the newness, inventiveness, even classic adventure
elements of science fiction, but eventually outgrow
it. As you said, you find the repetition and formula
simply bore you. Especially when you realise there’s
so much more out there. Why limit yourself? Why be
just a science fiction writer or reader?
JGB: I agree with you. That’s true. And that’s why I
myself stopped writing. People within the science fiction
world never regarded me as one of them in the first
place. They saw me as the enemy. I was the one who
wanted to subvert everything they believed. I wanted to
kill outer space stone dead. I wanted to kill the far future
and focus on inner space and the next five minutes. And
sci-fiers to this day don’t regard me as one of them. I’m
some sort of virus who got aboard and penetrated the
virtue of science fiction and began to pervert its DNA.
Rushing to Paradise
MM: Your new novel deals with obsessive themes like
fanaticism, radicalism and militant feminism, all within
the frame of the extremist wing of the environmental
movement. It’s not only eerily timely, it also strikes a
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raw nerve, especially in view of the healthy wave of
anti-political correctness sweeping over the United
States at the moment.
JGB: Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The great talent
of the United States is to take things too far, so that
you have these huge pendulum swings of sorts. Always
correct and then reverse. And then correct and reverse
again. Here in England, I would say the extremist fringe
of the feminist movement is largely positive. I’ve got
two daughters as well as a son, and they’ve benefited
enormously from the feminist movement of the past
20 years. England is a very class-bound society, and
women, until recently, were practically an inferior
class. Most professions were closed to women 30 years
ago, except teaching and publishing. Nowadays they’re
all mostly open. So we do have a few extremists, but
nothing compared to the US, where you really do have
some very strange people.
Sex, Violence, Censorship, Reality
MM: You said in a recent interview that “Everything
should be done to encourage more sex and violence
on television”.
JGB: Yes, I did say that. And I think it’s true. I mean, I
live in the most censored nation in the Western world.
There’s no question about that. Many people have said
so. Film, TV, videos, and art are more heavily censored
here than anywhere in Western Europe or the US.
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
Censorship in England has a clear political role. It
represents the fear of the established order that given
any sort of imaginative freedom, or too much of it, the
power structure will collapse. If people see sex and
violence treated frankly, they may turn the same frank
eye upon their own political situation. And start climbing
up the base of the pyramid towards the apex. The
people in real control sanitise the view of the world for
us. Absolutely.
Best Work
MM: In his book, The 99 Best Novels Since 1939,
Anthony Burgess considers your novel The Unlimited
Dream Company to be your most important work to
date. Which do you consider your best?
JGB: My most original and probably best novel is
Crash. This is probably where I pushed my imagination
as far as it has gone. I’ve also got a soft spot for other
books of mine, most notably The Atrocity Exhibition.
The Atrocity Exhibition is practically incomprehensible
to most readers, whereas Crash is directly intelligible.
There’s no doubt at all about what the author’s getting
on about.
The Unavoidable Question
MM: Can we talk about Empire of the Sun? That is, if it
isn’t already an exhausted topic. What is your opinion
of Steven Spielberg’s film version of your novel?
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JGB: I was very impressed by it. I thought it was a
fine film. In fact, trying to remain as neutral as possible,
I think it’s a much better film than Schindler’s
List because it’s more imagined than Schindler’s List.
I think the film is a remarkable effort in many ways.
He extracted a wonderful performance from the boy.
He was very faithful to the spirit of the book. There are
always problems when Hollywood tackles a war film
because the conventions of the entertainment cinema
can’t really cope with the horrors of war. Still, I think it
was a remarkable film, and more and more people are
beginning to realize it.
Current Readings
MM: Have you read anything recently that impressed
you favourably?
JGB: Well, I don’t read much fiction nowadays, to be
honest. Writing the stuff all day means when I read I
tend to read nonfiction. It feeds my imagination. I read
a great deal, but I can’t really pick a landmark book off-
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
hand. Let’s see, well, I just finished The Moral Animal
by Richard Wright, a study of neo-Darwinism. That
was quite impressive. Actually the best novel I’ve read
in a while is by that Danish writer Peter Hoeg, Smilla’s
Sense of Snow. I thought it was a wonderful book. Far
more than a mere thriller. In fact, it’s a pity that it had
any thriller element to it at all. It was much more than
that. It was quite remarkable on all sorts of levels. I
hope it did well in the states. My girlfriend is reading
his new one (Borderliners) now
Current projects
MM: What are you working on now?
JGB: I’m halfway through another novel untitled as
of yet – another sort of cautionary tale. I’d rather not
discuss it in detail though.
MM: Any plans to come over to the States and promote
Rushing to Paradise?
JGB: Oh, probably not, I’m too engrossed in the
new book. �
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Interview [published November 2000]
J.G. Ballard: Flight And Imagination
Chris Hall talks about the dark side of capitalism and the deceptions
of reality with J.G. Ballard
Walking along Oxford Street the day after I finished
reading J.G. Ballard’s new novel, Super-Cannes, it
struck me, literally, the total acceptance of the substrate
of violence in consumer societies when it manifests
itself. A silent, monolithic crowd hurtled down
either side of the road as I walked from Centrepoint
to Oxford Circus. I counted the number of times that
I was physically forced to move out of the way or get
hit head on (five). I counted the number of times I was
pranged, bumped or rear-shunted (four). It’s said that
London traffic moves at an average speed of 11mph,
but pedestrian traffic can’t be far behind. Indeed, it’s
not too fanciful to see in these crowds how the car
has influenced our spatio-temporal perception. You
see overtaking manoeuvres, you see people checking
their rear views, as it were, with a glance behind before
moving out. There is the same frustration at slow
moving traffic: the same parameters of territoriality
are in operation.
My shopping trip reminded me of a passage from the
book in which Wilder Penrose, the resident psychologist
of the business park Eden-Olympia, says “Our
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latent psychopathy is the last nature reserve, a place of
refuge for the endangered mind. Of course, I’m talking
about a carefully metered violence, microdoses of
madness like the minute traces of strychnine in a nerve
tonic.” And that’s just what that experience felt like:
small, discrete moments of psychopathy.
It was with this in mind that I spoke to J.G. Ballard,
who’d granted me the last interview on the round
of publicity he’d been doing for Super-Cannes with
the nationals. Unlike most people who interview
Ballard, I wasn’t worried about whether he would
be cold and distant or abstract, but simply that there
wouldn’t be enough time with the Seer of Shepperton.
I was right not to worry about any of those
things. His voice has a rhythmic, musical quality,
and his laughter is warm and inclusive. He gives the
impression of an eccentric school master with, yes,
a slightly abstracted air; a patrician whose sentences
end with a heavy emphasis. Ballard is clearly used to
developing an idea without interruption.
“The main theme of Super-Cannes,” he says, “is
that in order to keep us happy and spending more
039
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as consumers then capitalism is going to have to tap
rather more darker strains in our characters, which is of
course what’s been happening for a while. If you look
at the way in which the more violent contact sports are
marketed – American Football, wrestling, boxing – and
of course the most violent entertainment culture of
all, the Hollywood film, all these have tapped into the
darker side of human nature in order to keep the juices
of appetites flowing. That is the risk.”
Or as Wilder Penrose says in Super-Cannes: “A
perverse sexual act can liberate the visionary self in
even the dullest soul. The consumer society hungers
for the deviant and unexpected. What else can drive
the bizarre shifts in the entertainment landscape that
will keep us ‘buying’? Psychopathy is the only engine
powerful enough to light our imaginations, to drive the
arts, sciences and industries of the world.”
Ballard makes the simile with politics – “Hitler
tapped into all kinds of psychopathic traits in the
German people, the race hatred in particular: Jews,
Gypsies, non-Germans, all ‘biological inferiors’. These
were very potent ideas that are probably carried in all
of us from our distant past when it made sense to fear
strangers because they were probably trying to steal
your cattle, kill you or rape your wife. Hitler tapped
those buried layers of psychopathy. It’s an example of
what could happen.”
With Super-Cannes we once again have all the cool
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clarity of a writer who has never flinched from his
subject matter for the last 40 years. As our narrator,
Paul Sinclair, drives south to the French coast with his
doctor wife Jane, towards Eden-Olympia, their new
home, “hundreds of blue ovals trembled like damaged
retinas in the Provençal sun”. Ballard writes of the
flare of swimming pools on the hillside: “Ten thousand
years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur
had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle
over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of
tritons and stylised fish, inexplicably hauled up the
mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of
a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers.”
Thus we are in familiar unfamiliar territory,
in a world we think we know but which is perhaps
meaningful only retroactively.
Once again there is the Ballardian theme of morality
reduced to aesthetics, or as Paul Sinclair has it “Civility
and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia. By the
end of the afternoon all this tolerance and good behaviour
left me feeling deeply bored.” Sinclair is in a world
in which “A moral calculus that took thousands of years
to develop starts to wither from neglect, an adolescent
world where you define yourself by the kind of trainers
you wear.”
Super-Cannes takes off as a ‘why-dunnit’ when Paul
Sinclair learns that he and his wife have been housed
in a villa whose previous occupant, David Greenwood,
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had apparently gone insane and killed seven very senior
executives. Sinclair says: “It occurred to me that three
of us would sleep together in this large and comfortable
bed, until I could persuade David to step out of my mind
and disappear for ever down the white staircase of this
dreaming villa.” As so often with Ballard’s fiction, a
fusion of inner and outer landscapes has already begun.
Sinclair is amazed to find that, as a psychologist,
Wilder Penrose is prescribing madness as a form of
therapy at Eden-Olympia, which Wilder clarifies for
him: “I mean a controlled and supervised madness.
Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has
been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations
in a vast therapeutic spasm. No drug has ever
been more potent.”
Even though to some extent Super-Cannes, like Cocaine
Nights, uses the conventions of a detective novel it
nonetheless contains few of the dead sentences a genre
novel would have. There are no characters crossing the
room to pour themselves a drink – instead they wonder
“how the Reverend Dodgson’s Alice would have coped
with Eden-Olympia. She would have grown up quickly
and married an elderly German banker, then become a
recluse in a mansion high above Super-Cannes, with a
fading facelift and a phobia about reflective surfaces.”
And yet there are passages that are almost parodic of
Ballard’s ‘concrete and glass’ period: “Her hip pressed
against the BMW, and the curvature of its door de-
BUY J.G. Ballard books online from and
flected the lines of her thigh, as if the car was a huge
orthopaedic device that expressed a voluptuous mix of
geometry and desire.”
Ballard has said elsewhere that whereas the 20th
century was mediated through the car, the 21st century
will be mediated through the home, and as far as
Super-Cannes goes home means work. “The dream of
a leisure society was the great 20th-century delusion,”
says Wilder Penrose. “Work is the new leisure. Talented
and ambitious people work harder than they have ever
done, and for longer hours. They find their only fulfilment
through work. The last thing they want is recreation.”
There are references to the flats and houses of
Eden-Olympia as service stations “where people sleep
and ablute”. The real home is now the office.
It’s not quite correct to say, as some have, that Super-
Cannes is a companion piece to Cocaine Nights though
both take place within gated communities of one kind or
another and both involve on a superficial level a naive
narrator trying to solve a mystery. It’s more that some
of the ideas in Super-Cannes are taken further than they
are in Cocaine Nights. Ballard is unapologetic about
this new employment of detective genre conventions
saying that if it’s good enough for Dostoevsky in The
Brothers Karamazov it’s good enough for him.
With his last two books one feels that he is reaching
a new, younger audience – one perhaps attracted by the
drug reference in the previous novel – and he obviously
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enjoys this as a professional writer, but as a knowing
extract from The Kindness Of Women shows, he has an
instinctive feel for his core readership. This is Ballard
describing the audience of an aversion therapy film at
the Rio film festival: “…they gazed at the screen with
the same steady eyes and unflinching expressions of
the men in the Soho porn theatres, or the fans of certain
kinds of apocalyptic science fiction.”
It seems that the “invisible literature” that he has
written about, and which acts as compost for the mind,
increasingly comes from the internet. Ballard doesn’t
have a PC himself but his girlfriend, he says, supplies
him with sites that might interest him: “She is a keen
net surfer, she’s constantly giving me fascinating stuff
that she’s printed off. Extraordinary articles. Some really
poetic, touching stuff. There’s one site that we first
visited a year ago. It’s by these people at a bird sanctuary
in Norfolk who have been tagging ospreys with
radio transmitters. They’ve been tracking their flights
to and from their winter ground, an island off Ghana or
somewhere, and they show maps of the routes taken by
each bird flying across Europe and the Mediterranean,
some of them detour for years before returning to this
bird sanctuary. Watching all this is deeply moving. It
lets another dimension into your life.”
Flight as a metaphor for transcendence occurs in Ballard's
work passim, and he has described in The Kindness
Of Women how his own obsession with flying,
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which had started in Shanghai, had lead him to become
an RAF trainee fighter pilot in Canada. “Flying is a
very strange experience, it’s very close to dreaming,”
he says. “The normal yardsticks, the parameters of
our movements through space, are suspended. You’re
travelling at 150mph, but if you’re 1,000ft up you’re
not moving at all. Likewise, you can be travelling quite
slowly coming in to land, yet you seem to be hurtling
along like a Grand Prix car. The problem with light
flying is that it’s very unstable and dangerous and also
very noisy, there’s hardly any time to think.”
So, it’s a transcendental experience for him? “Yes,
there’s no doubt about that. When I drive up to London,
I go by London Airport and I always get a strange kick
out of watching those big planes taking off and coming
in to land. An empty runway moves me enormously,
which obviously says something about my need to
escape I guess.”
If Ballard’s interest in this bird sanctuary website
seems apposite, then consider another of his favourites:
“There’s this group that got into a disused American
nuclear silo. It’s wonderful! You’re taken on a tour and
you can choose alternatives. ‘Would you like to look at
the missile control room?’, ‘Would you like to see the
sleeping quarters?’. It’s straight out of the stuff that I
was writing about all that time ago.
“Sites such as these feed the poetic and imaginative
strains in all of us who have been numbed by all the
042
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Bruce Willis films,” he says. “I’m waiting for the first
new religion on the internet. One that is unique to the
net and to the modern age. It’ll come.”
Although he reads across the board of popular science,
he says that he steers clear of cosmology books
because “they are a happy hunting ground for, frankly,
cranks. Multi-dimensional universes or strings and
black holes – all this stuff is totally hypothetical.”
His friend Martin Bax wrote that Ballard has this
amazing ability to know what’s going on in Cape
Canaveral or anywhere without ever seeming to
leave Shepperton, his home for the last 40 years. Sure
enough, he’s got the goods on Channel 4’s Big Brother,
although he claims not to have seen that much of it:
“My girlfriend has been absolutely glued to it, she
voted something like 30 times one evening! I think
we can therefore discount the huge voting figures,” he
says, with a warm, expansive laugh. “I’ve got a feeling
people are just pressing the redial button.”
He doesn’t believe the official 7.5 million viewing
figures (“that’s more than the number of votes that the
Tory party got at the last election”) but he likens the
interest in the programme to a Zen-like absorption: “If
you focus on anything, however blank, in the right way
then you become obsessed by it. It’s like those Andy
Warhol films of eight hours of the Empire State Building
or of somebody sleeping. Ordinary life viewed obsessively
enough becomes interesting in its own right
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by some sort of neurological process that I don’t hope
to understand.”
Is there not an echo of Big Brother in Super-Cannes
when Paul Sinclair is at the Croisette in Cannes? “Without
realising it, the crowds under the palm trees were
extras recruited to play their traditional roles, when
they stepped from their limos, like celebrity criminals
ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palais, a full-scale
cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the
atrocities they had helped to commit.”
Ballard disliked the self-consciousness of Big
Brother and would of liked to have seen more of a Truman
Show element where the participants don’t know
that they are being filmed. “It could be done. Candid
Camera approached that slightly. You could just take
people in a small holiday hotel on the Costa Brava and
film it.” I suggest that this, as with certain psychology
experiments proper, probably wouldn’t get past the
relevant ethics boards. “Yes, that is the problem,” he
says, as if it’s a minor but frustrating obstacle. “But
then, afterwards you could say ‘yes, we did it without
your permission but here’s a very large sum of money,
sign this release form and you’re all going to be stars!’
“ In fact, the very next issue of New Scientist magazine
that I picked up after speaking to Ballard had an article
about a psychology professor at Stanford University
who, frustrated at just those obstacles put in the way
of research by ethics boards, is now running his own
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reality experiments in a TV series called Human Zoo.
“Most television is low-grade pap, it’s so homogenised
it’s like mental toothpaste. But Big Brother as a
slice of reality – or what passes for reality. It was like
Tracey Emin’s Bed,” he says approvingly.
Ballard is worried that with all the interest in the
internet we are forgetting what’s really around the corner:
“The rapid development of the internet over recent
years has rather shut out all discussion on the news
about progress made on virtual reality. I assume that
the world’s big electronic corporations are developing
VR systems, which after all are going to take television
and movies into completely new dimensions that I
think potentially do represent a threat. When you enter
into a simulated environment that is more convincing
visually than the real world, the so-called real world,
which of course is itself generated by the central nervous
system,” he says, as if this is given a priori, “the
temptation may be to stay there. It may lead to my
phrase about playing with our own psychopathology as
a game coming true with a bang. I see huge dangers
there, but also huge possibilities. We might all learn
how to play God! There might be a program along the
lines of ‘Be a messiah. See what it’s like to be Jesus
Christ or Buddha!’”
So God isn’t dead, he’s a latent component in a VR
program? “Yes! Nietzsche was wrong!” he says triumphantly.
“This might engender strong social changes,
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because most people have far more imagination than
they realise, as their dreams make clear. Most people’s
imaginations are damped down by the needs of getting
on and making a living, generally coping with life and
the imagination tends to be rather repressed in order to
allow this flow.”
Surprisingly, for all his interest in film and an acknowledgement
that it’s far more powerful than when
it’s on TV, Ballard doesn’t go out to his local cineplex
but watches rented movies at home. He gives a surprisingly
prosaic reason for this: “There’s less rustling of
chocolate papers.” Given that he’s a fan of David Cronenberg,
and has generously praised his adaptation of
Crash, it is also surprising that he hasn’t seen eXistenZ
yet. “I hate all those VR pictures, especially the ones
where people’s faces start to drip on to their chest and
you realise,” he says with mock surprise, “My God,
we’re in a dream sequence and the VR system has
broken down! I hate that.”
For those of us desperate for more Ballard short
stories, the news isn’t good: “I can’t see myself writing
any for a while, partly because there’s nowhere to
publish them. When I began writing short stories for
sci-fi mags in the 1950s most of them were between
5,000 and 10,000 words. Now, magazines want 2,000
words or a 1,000 words – you can’t develop an idea.
It’s not just a matter of knocking off a short story, it’s
getting your mind into a writing phase where your
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imagination begins to think in terms of short stories
rather than novels.”
For a writer who responds very much to social change,
what does he feel will be the qualitative break between
the 20th and 21st centuries? “If the 21st century represents
a radical break with the 20th century then I don’t
think that we’d be able to spot it. It might be something
totally unexpected. It might be that our children and
grandchildren vigorously reject the 20th century and
everything it stood for. They may look back on it aghast
and say ‘Who were these people? They spent all their
time killing each other! Why?’ If consumer capitalism
gets a little out of hand, and there are signs of resistance
to the Americanisation of Europe, you might get
absolute idealism in the young.
“The big change I assume is that there will be no
more world wars, partly because no one will be able to
borrow enough money from the World Bank to finance
it. Now this changes the game enormously, it’s rather
like playing chess and the rules being changed by the
International Chess Federation ‘You don’t have to mate
the king anymore’. ‘God, what do we do now!?’ I think
the knock-on effect will be vast.” There is a certain glee
with which Ballard accepts these changes, a state of
grace that his protagonists strive towards.
“The decline of political ideology also changes
things. There’s no real ideological clash between Dubyah
and Gore for example. The decline of religion
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is also a factor. You do your triangulations and all we
have left is consumerism, what I call the ‘suburbanisation
of the soul’. That’s frightening. It may trigger all
sorts of unconscious reactions. As someone in Super-
Cannes says, in a totally sane society madness is the
only freedom.”
This line has come up before in Running Wild for
example? “Yes, I am tending to repeat myself in order
to get the damn message home!” he says with slow emphasis
before that gasping, generous laugh reverberates
down the line.
Consider the word “triangulation” that Ballard uses.
It’s a trope that almost uniquely marks out a Ballardian
sentence with its three seemingly unrelated objects
or events; as if he’s forcing the unconscious mind to
construct a narrative to explain them. Take an example
from Super-Cannes:
“Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I
tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the
book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot
Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in
his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick,
a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? [my italics]
The contingent world must have pressed against his
temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept
the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for
a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across
the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.”
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He says that he’s always been interested in content
over style, even though he’s arguably our best stylist.
“I don’t know if I am actually,” he says uncertainly,
before warming to his theme. “I just want to push the
message across. I don’t sloganise a political message
but the sort of images that have appealed to me over
the years – all the drained swimming pools, abandoned
hotels, the strange business parks, gated communities
and retirement complexes – these are what I want to
convey, the peculiar latent psychology waiting to
emerge into the daylight. That’s what I’m trying to do.
Look at the world and see its latent content. I treat the
external world as if it was a solidified dream.”
Ballard means this to apply to his life as well as his
fiction: “With all the blandishments of advertisers and
politicians, everyone is trying to sell you something.
What are they really selling? What is the fashion industry
really selling? Not just a new frock or a new pair of
trainers, it’s selling something more than that.”
Super-Cannes involves a world where work is play
and recreation doesn’t exist. Is writing, for Ballard,
more work than play? “It’s part and parcel of the way I
live. I mean, it’s not an extraneous activity. There’s no
sort of office where, as it were, I say ‘right! I’ll have a
cup of coffee and go through the day’s post’ It isn’t like
that anymore.”
Ballard continues to be seen as a writer’s writer, his
fiction a succès d’estime (Empire of the Sun notwith-
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standing), so it’s odd that at 70 Ballard still hasn’t had
much of anything in the way of gongs. Germaine Greer
has said that he is “a great writer who hasn’t written a
great novel”. There might be something to this, that it’s
his entire body of work that we should be assessing,
not the individual novels. One can imagine that for Ballard
it’s going to be like a great director or actor never
receiving an Oscar for an individual film, but getting
given one for lifetime achievement. How apposite that
it seems we will be only retroactively able to acclaim
his work in this way.
Of course, Ballard has always disdained or been uninterested
in ingratiating himself with any kind of literary
social scene. So maybe his lack of a public profile
is partly a function of this. Plus the fact that he chooses
to live in Shepperton (that locus of the twin Ballardian
obsessions of flight and imagination, with its proximity
to Heathrow and the film studios), out at the very
edge of west London. He’s unlikely, for example, to
be offered a South Bank Show after his comments last
year about Melvyn Bragg’s dumbing down of the arts.
And although he’s transcended the sci-fi genre in which
he started (and transformed it) it’s hard to imagine him
being particularly bothered about it. In this particular
phase of Western literature, one of autobiography, perhaps
a novelist of ideas, and rather outré ones at that, is
simply unpalatable.
It’s often said that Empire Of The Sun is his most
046
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nakedly autobiographical novel (along with its successor
The Kindness Of Women) and of course that’s
true. But all of his fiction is no less autobiographical,
even Crash, because of its exploration of inner space.
One senses that he’s tired of this literalism, which has
dogged him since he first started writing, and which
reached its apotheosis with Crash. For example, a lot of
people, he says, still think that he loves cars or that he’s
a car buff (he drives a Ford Granada for God’s sake!)
because of books such as Crash and Concrete Island, in
his guise as poet of the motorways. “I’m not interested
in cars at all. But I am interested in the psychology of
the car user, the car as a facilitator of latent psychopathy
or of the latent imagination for good. I think that
a lot of people do express their imaginations through
the cars they own. Imaginations they wouldn’t be able
to express in other ways. Cars are a hugely liberating
force in all kinds of ways.”
So he doesn’t agree with groups such as Reclaim the
Streets or the wider eco movement? “I don’t agree with
the Reclaim the Streets people at all. I think that the
recent petrol tanker blockades across the country illustrates
how silly it is to talk about the end of the car age.
It hasn’t ended: more of us have cars and drive further
in them than ever before.” Or as Paul Sinclair puts it
in Super-Cannes: “Fanatical Greens always veer off
course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus.”
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When the fuel crisis was at its worst there was the
very real possibility that there would be thousands and
thousands of abandoned cars on motorway flyovers and
cloverleaf intersections. And this recent prediction that
a giant tsunami is going to swallow the east coast of
America. All very Ballardian. “I know; I feel I’ve been
here before,” he says, as if his fiction was a parent and
reality was a child lagging behind. As usual he’s done
his triangulations.
Angela Carter once said that there is an element
of Glen Baxter’s humour about Ballard’s fiction, and
in a way that’s right, there is this possibility that it
might descend into the ludicrous at any moment. But
the point, surely, is that it never does. What humour
there is is really so black that it could never escape the
event horizon of laughter. No, a much better analogue
is to be found with Martin Parr’s collections of Boring
Postcards, especially his latest, Boring Postcards
USA. Here we find interchange complexes, vast turnpike
systems, interstates, thruways, empty hotel lobbies,
freeways, bus depots, office buildings, shopping
malls, trailer villages, in short all those images of our
waking, solidified dreams that most of us look at and
find ugly or brutal but which when viewed through
Ballard’s visionary protagonists in their dry, affectless
realms, are transformed into something meaningful
and life affirming. �
047
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Review [published August 1999]
J.G. Ballard: Cocaine Nights
David B. Livingstone
There’s something wrong with Estrella Del Mar, the
lazy, sun-drenched retirement haven on Spain’s Costa
Del Sol. Lately this sleepy hamlet, home to hordes
of well-heeled, well-fattened British and French
expatriates, has come alive with activity and culture;
the previously passive, isolated residents have begun
staging boat races, tennis competitions, revivals of
Harold Pinter plays, and lavish parties. At night the
once vacant streets are now teeming with activity, bars
and cafes packed with revellers, the sidewalks crowded
with people en route from one event to the next.
Outward appearances suggest the wholesale adoption
of a new ethos of high-spirited, well-controlled
collective exuberance. But there’s the matter of the fire:
The house and household of an aged, wealthy industrialist
has gone up in flames, claiming five lives, while
virtually the entire town stood and watched. There’s
the matter of the petty crime, the burglaries, muggings,
and auto thefts which have begun to nibble away at the
edges of Estrella Del Mar’s security despite the guardhouses
and surveillance cameras. There’s the matter of
the new, flourishing trade in drugs and pornography.
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And there’s the matter of Frank Prentice, who sits in
Marbella jail awaiting trial for arson and five counts of
murder, and who, despite being clearly innocent, has
happily confessed.
It is up to Charles Prentice, Frank’s brother, to peel
away the onionlike layers of denial and deceit which
hide the rather ugly truth about this seaside idyll, its
residents, and the horrific crime which brought him
here. But as is usually the case in a J.G. Ballard book, the
truth comes with a price tag attached, and likely without
any easing of discomfort for his principal characters.
Cocaine Nights marks a partial return on Ballard’s
part to the provocative, highly-successful mid-career
methodology employed in novels such as Crash and
High Rise: after establishing himself as a science
fiction guru in the 1960s, Ballard stylistically shifted
gears towards an unnerving, futuristic variant on social
realism in the 1970s. Both Crash and High Rise were
what-if novels, posing questions as to what the likely
results would be if our collective fascination with such
things as speed, violence, status, power, and sex were
carried just a little bit further: How insane, how brutal
048
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could our world become if we really cut loose?
Cocaine Nights asks a question better suited to
the 90s, the age of gated communities and infrared
home security systems: Does absolute security
guarantee isolation and cultural death? Conversely,
is a measure of crime an essential ingredient in a
vibrant, living, properly functioning social system?
Is it true, as a character asserts, that “Crime and
creativity go together, always have done,” and that
“total security is a disease of deprivation”? Suffice
it to say that the answers presented in Nights will
be anathema to moral absolutists; the world of Ballard’s
fiction, like life in the hyperkinetic, relativistic
1990s, abounds with uncomfortable grey areas.
On the surface, Cocaine Nights is a whodunit and a
race against time, but as it proceeds – and as preconceived
conceptions of good and evil begin to dissolve
– it evolves into a thoughtful, faintly frightening look
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at under-examined aspects of 1990s western society.
As is his wont, Ballard confronts his readers with some
faintly outlandish hypotheses unlikely to be embraced
by many, but which nonetheless serve to provoke both
thought and a bit of paranoia; it’s a method that Ballard
has developed and refined on his own, and as usual, it
propels his novel along marvellously.
Cocaine Nights doesn’t have either the broad sweep
or brute impact of the landmark Crash, but it retains
enough social relevance and low-key creepiness to
more than satisfy Ballardphiles. As is often the case
in Ballard’s alternate reality, it’s a given that his most
appealing, human characters turn out to be the most
twisted, and that even the most normal of events turn
out to be governed by a perverse, malformed logic;
that this logic turns out to be grounded in sound sociological
and psychological principles is its most
horrific feature. �
049
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Feature [published June 1997]
J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphor
Chris Hall gives a crash course in the fiction of J.G. Ballard
Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of
Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of J.G. Ballard’s
fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those
already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of
Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the
semi-autobiographical work Empire Of The Sun, will
find the rest of his work as resonant and thoughtprovoking
as these two novels. With the controversy
and critical acclaim that has surrounded David Cronenberg’s
film adaptation of Crash, it is about time that the
rest of Ballard’s work received a closer look.
I can clearly remember reading my very first Ballard
short story, ‘Track 12’, among a collection of science fiction
short stories from the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur
C. Clarke et al, all of whom were then part of the English
secondary school curriculum. What set Ballard’s story
immediately apart, besides its extreme brevity (3 pages –
an inspiration to all of us who lazily took up the creed of
quality over quantity), was the fusion and overlay of inner
and outer landscapes, the public and private colliding
and commingling. Here I first glimpsed the compressed
economy of Ballard’s writing, as if he were living in a
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world that would suddenly disappear or be destroyed.
Asimov once defined a short story as one in which if you
removed just one sentence then the entire story made no
sense. ‘Track 12’ is about as close as anyone will get to
adhering to Asimov’s dictum.
Ballard’s narratives would seem to represent a
warped inversion of reductio ad absurdum, in which
truth, not falsity, is shown through absurd logical
consequence. It’s always too late for going back in his
fiction; there is a kind of inexorable rush hat draws us
towards destruction or transcendence and often, both.
(For these reasons, Ballard avoids elliptical plots). The
moral ambivalence inherent to a lot of his work is best
illustrated in Crash, where Ballard’s own introduction
to the novel seems to be a disguised disclaimer. While
Ballard himself, off the page, stresses the cautionary
nature of his stories, his more apocalyptic novels (High
Rise, Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition) have
been continually read as showing nihilistic or pessimistic
obsession with decay, destruction and disaster.
Far from it. Ballard’s work shows a deep concern
with transcendence and the recognition of unconscious
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forces. As the critic Gregory Stephenson points out,
Ballard is subversive in the true sense of the word (“to
turn from beneath”) in that he deals with the unconscious
mind and its drive to manifest itself through our
waking ego-consciousness, in a sense to banish time
and space itself.
This resolutely amoral tone has certain biographical
and psychoanalytic roots in Ballard’s own history.
Ballard originally intended to be a psychiatrist before
abandoning his studies in medicine (it is no coincidence
that he shares the background with William Burroughs).
Moreover, by the time he was 13, he had witnessed
every kind of conceivable human horror from a childhood
spent interned in Lunghua, Japan. It is as if Ballard
has had this imprinted upon his mind, hardwired as the
template with which he views the world, filtered through
and fused with it. Perhaps for this reason his stories, especially
Crash, come across as someone trying to shock
themselves with their own fiction.
Martin Amis wrote that Empire Of The Sun “gives
shape to what shaped him”. Ballard bears this out:
“People brought up in the social democracies of Western
Europe have no idea of this kind of savagery.” By
the time he was repatriated to England from Japan, Ballard
was 15 and the culture shock is still with him. He
is always going to have an outsider’s perspective; one
that, for example, finds the London suburb of Shepperton
where he lives “lunar and abstract” in the summer.
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Perhaps making his fiction abstract and detached is one
way of dealing with such terror.
As a writer Ballard has always been more interested in
idea, vision, dream and nightmare than in character (or
at least character in the usual sense.) The viewpoint of
his fiction is a clinically neutral affair even in first person
narration, where it is usually a doctor or a psychologist.
Indeed, in this sense, Ballard’s fiction comes closer to
being psychoanalytic rather than science fiction. Some
of the techniques used in psychoanalysis were partly
designed to encourage the patients’ defence mechanisms
to emerge. Freud argued that therapists should impose
as little of their own personalities as possible by remaining
neutral and detached. Crash is like Dr Ballard passively
relaying our psychosexual nightmares, listening
to our defence mechanisms and checking for common
symptomology. Indeed, Crash seems more like an
extended short story, where the obsession is allowed to
play out in time; a temporally exploded idée fixe. This
obsessional quality is evident in a lot of Ballard’s other
work. The Drowned World ends with the hero heading
South, towards the heat and insanity of the rainforests.
The American publishers wanted the hero to head North,
because otherwise it was “too negative.” Ballard points
out: “But it’s a happy ending. South is where he wants to
go. Further. Deeper. South!”
Ballard’s surrealism has a great deal more affinity with
pictorial, rather than literary, surrealism. Paul Delvaux’s
051
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The Echo features in The Day Of Forever, for example,
and Salvador Dalí is something of a hero to Ballard, featuring
prominently in his books as well as on them. (Dalí’s
Nuclear Cross adorns my copy of Ballard’s The Terminal
Beach, his best collection of short stories.) Max Ernst’s
silent forests and swamplands, weathered scenery and
gnarled post-apocalyptic detritus are redolent of much of
Ballard’s early disaster fiction (The Drowned World, The
Drought, The Crystal World). Strikingly, there is also the
similarity with Yve Tanguy’s strange beaches. The point
is that along with these surrealists Ballard interested in
psychological landscapes, i.e. mindscapes. They are all
concerned with the externalisation of the mind’s ‘iconography’.
Even with Empire Of The Sun, or, more recently,
Cocaine Nights, his most realistic or naturalistic novels
are full of these signature images and recurrent themes.
Ballard’s work is also notable for its internal consistency;
the deep themes are recurrent but the details, settings,
plots ideas, – the surfaces as it were – are varied.
I find it curious that so much modern fiction has aped,
say, the style of Martin Amis, but not that of Ballard,
who, along with Amis, is the great stylist of postwar
English fiction. It would be almost too easy to make
a Ballard pastiche with its lexicon of drained pools,
disused aerodromes, terminal beaches and aeropsychic
time. I suspect the reason is because it works only within
an imaginative framework, rather than a parochially realistic
one merely concerned with relationships. Truly
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can we use the adjective Ballardian.
Ballard is none too interested in authorial intrusion
either – as he says, “The writer’s task is to invent the
reality” (or as Nietzsche put it: “No artist tolerates reality”
) and not the fiction which is all around us – mass
merchandising, advertising, politics as advertisement.
David Cronenberg, the Canadian director of Crash,
bears this out from his reading of the novel: “…it
provided you with fantasies you didn’t know you had
before. Once they were there, they were real. They
made sense.” Only Ballard can come up with a sentence
such as “What links the first flight of the Wright
Brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and
sexual philosophy of the ejector seat.”
The key to understanding Ballard’s work is in the
fusion or overlapping of internal and external worlds.
In 1962 he wrote an article for New Worlds magazine
entitled ‘Which Way To Inner Space?’ (collected in A
User’s Guide To The Millennium) in which, essentially,
he sets out his own manifesto. He despairs of the standard
SF ‘rocket and planet’ story and devices such as time
travel and telepathy which actually prevent the writer
from using his imagination at all. He criticises SF writers
for treating time like “a glorified scenic railway”and
would like to see it treated as one of the “perspectives of
the personality”. Ballard wants SF to become abstract,
and specifically, he’d like to see more psycholiterary
ideas of science. All in all then, a stylistic and thematic
052
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overhaul of SF. Most tellingly of all, he writes that “I
believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of
existing literature … (to) be forced to begin again …
all writers would find themselves inevitably producing
something very close to SF”. Further, that “no other
form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images
to deal with the present, let alone the future.”
Take the short story ‘Manhole 69’ for example, where
an experiment to eliminate sleep goes horribly wrong
and ends with the subjects suffering from catatonic
seizures. The central hypothesis of this short story is
that the mind cannot endure continual consciousness,
particularly self-consciousness, and reacts by shutting
down. They could “no longer contain the idea of their
own identity”. As in so much of Ballard’s work, we see
this inexorable battle between the unconscious and the
conscious, with the former characterised as the more
primeval and ‘real’ part of ourselves.
Where Crash literalised the term “auto-erotic”, Cocaine
Nights does the same for “guilt complex” (note
that these are both psychoanalytic terms). Cocaine
Nights, Ballard’s most recent novel, is something of a
departure; the first half of the book reads like a fairly
straightforward detective piece, with none of Ballard’s
trademark tampering with space-time or individual
psyches. Cocaine Nights’ plot centres on the Spanish
resort of Estrella de Mar, where a housefire kills five
people, and the subsequent involvement of Charles
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Prentice, an outsider whose brother Frank has been
arrested for murder. Like Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness
and indeed Crash, the book is under the spell of an
alluring and quite possibly insane visionary figure. In
its description if a society hellbent on leisure, Cocaine
Nights follows the line of the argument set out in Carol
Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime compares
the cuckoo clock art that came from the gentile Swiss
culture with the decadent and depraved reign of the
Borgias that produced da Vinci.
Perhaps the best place to begin with Ballard is his
essays – the recent collection A User’s Guide To The
Millennium amounts to a varied and imaginative reading
of 20th-century iconography: Mein Kampf, Coca-
Cola, Dalí, Burroughs, Elvis, TV, nuclear weapons.
A collection of Ballard’s journalism from the last 25
years, including book reviews, it points to the sheer
breadth of his interests and showcases many of the
ideas which drive his fiction. Ballard admits to being
an assimilator of the “invisible literature” of technical
manuals, company reports, journals, etc. Indeed, one
of his recommended books of the last five years is the
transcripts of black box flight recordings. For Ballard,
it’s a telling choice: over the last 40 years, his writing
has attempted to do the same – to record the moments
at which our lives are most at risk both from the world
outside and from within ourselves. May his own literature
become a little less invisible in the future. �
053
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Interview [published September 1996]
Iain M. Banks: Getting Used To Being God
Chris Mitchell meets the relentlessly imaginative Iain M. Banks
Twelve years and 14 books since the publication of
his debut novel The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks has
become one of Britain’s most prominent and prolific
writers. Whether writing mainstream novels as plain
“Iain Banks” or science fiction under his ubiquitous
“Iain M. Banks” nom-de-plume, Banks has mastered
the tricky art of attracting both bestseller status and
critical acclaim. Now 42, Banks’ most recent books,
the sci-fi epic Excession and the religious cult thriller
Whit, indicate that his ceaselessly inventive imagination
is in no danger of slowing down. Banks is first
and foremost a brilliant storyteller. He takes evident
joy in being able to push his plotlines as far as they
can go, sending the reader at breakneck speed through
unexpected plot twists, cliffhanger endings and, in his
sci-fi, mindbending technological possibilities. As he
says, “You’re very spoilt as a novelist. You get used to
being God, basically. No-one tells you what to do.”
Yet amongst the sex, death, drink and illegal substances
that peppers Banks’ writing, there lurks a distinct
moral probity. Whit tells the story of the fictional
Luddite Luskentyrian religious cult, as seen through
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the eyes of the cult’s 18-year-old “Elect Of God” Isis
Whit. Sent to London in pursuit of her errant cousin
Morag, Isis slowly comes to realise that all is not what
it seems either within the cult’s enclave or amongst the
Unsaved of the outside world. Banks describes Whit as
“a book about religion and culture written by a dedicated
evangelical atheist – I thought I was very kind to
them … Essentially, Isis makes the recognition that the
value of the Luskentyrian cult is in their community
values rather than their religious ones. She recognises
that efficiency isn’t everything, that people not profit
are what matters.”
So, are you on a mission? “People usually just ask
me ‘What are you on?’ You can’t be too prescriptive
about what a writer does, but it’s important to me to
get these ideas into the books, just for my own peace
of mind, so that I feel I’m not just doing this to make
money, I’m not just writing pageturners for people to
skim through, put aside and forget. Like anybody else,
I want to make the world a little more like the world
I’d like to live in, sad though that is. So I put forward
these ideas however subtly or cack-handedly to the
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extent that I can get away with it. The good thing about
writing is that you can do this in a non-invasive, nonpenetrative
way, you’re not telling people this is what
they should do, you’re just presenting ideas.”
Whit also differs from Banks’ previous novels
because it’s written through the eyes of its female
protagonist. It’s a common complaint about many
male novelists (Martin Amis springs to mind) that
their female characters always remain lifeless stereotypes.
Banks however ignores gender preconceptions
as some sort of prohibition to his imagination:
“I just think of the person in that situation, I don’t try
and think as a female character per se … In a sense
it’s easy to be blind to the sexism that’s still around
and somehow manage to ignore the other elements of
society that still are unequitable in terms of gender
or whatever,” Banks pauses and then laughs, “but it’s
only stupid or ignorant people who do that.”
“If you’re a writer you’re supposed to have some ability
to spot what’s going on and to empathise – it should
be relatively easy to write a female character because
you spend your time in the same society – I think I’d
find it hard to write from the point of view from someone
who was particularly gay – there’s a small element
of it in Complicity, but it’s very marginal, a childhood
dalliance sort of thing – and I think that’s because the
gay community is quite separate in many ways. To the
same extent writing about a black person or someone
BUY Iain Banks books online from and
in the Indian community would be difficult – so writing
about an 18-year-old female virgin is quite easy!”
Whit was a conscious attempt by Banks to write
something quieter and more reflective after the polemical
rage of his previous mainstream novel, Complicity.
Even though Banks has had a reputation for the macabre
ever since the gothic horror of The Wasp Factory,
Complicity’s graphic descriptions of corrupt politicians
being killed off in particularly inventive and horrible
ways reached new stomach-churning extremes.
Banks has no qualms about the violence in his writing:
“In principle, anything’s OK, as long as I’ve got
an excuse to put it in – which is a more honest way of
saying, ‘Is it artistically justified?’ You shouldn’t selfcensor
yourself just because you have a gut reaction
that an idea is too horrible. If there’s a reason for it, it
has to be done. There’s a moral point to that ghastliness,
pain and anguish. Which is why I would absolutely
defend Complicity’s extreme violence, because it was
supposed to be a metaphor for what the Tories have
done to this country.”
Banks rejects the idea that his science fiction writing
is a way for him to cut loose in contrast to the
tight stricture of his contemporary novels: “The scifi
isn’t really a way of letting off steam. In a sense,
Complicity was letting off steam, a way of getting out
all the anger and bitterness I felt about the 80s and the
Thatcher years. It kind of varies, there’s no set pat-
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tern – it’s not like the sci-fi is always playful and the
fiction is always disciplined -it’s just that I have more
fun in sci-fi more or less regardless because I enjoy
playing by my own rules.”
This is certainly apparent in Excession, Banks’ latest
Culture novel which charts the arrival of a mysterious
entity from another universe into that of the Culture’s.
Banks revels in the possibilities of technology. “Oh
yeah, I love the stuff, the more buttons it’s got the better,
when we get voice control it’s going to be so boring
because there won’t be any buttons. There’s another
moral point here as well. You can’t escape the fact that
humanity is a technological species, homo technophile
or whatever the Latin is. Technology is neither good or
bad, it’s up to the user. We can’t escape what we are,
which is a technological species. There’s no way back.”
In your recent interview with the English edition of
Wired (June 1996) you intimated that the only reason
the Culture works is that machines become so intelligent
they save us from ourselves … do you think that’s
the case? “Not entirely, no. I think the first point to
make about the Culture is,” Banks pauses again, sounding
like he’s about to deliver a profound insight, “I’m
just making it up as I go along. It doesn’t exist and I
don’t delude myself that it does. It’s just my take on it.
I’m not convinced that humanity is capable of becoming
the Culture because I think people in the Culture
are just too nice – altering their genetic inheritance to
BUY Iain Banks books online from and
make themselves relatively sane and rational and not
the genocidal, murdering bastards that we seem to be
half the time.”
“But I don’t think you have to have a society like
the Culture in order for people to live. The Culture is
a self-consciously stable and long-lived society that
wants to go on living for thousands of years. Lots of
other civilisations within the same universe hit the Culture’s
technological level and even the actuality of the
Culture’s utopia, but it doesn’t last very long – that’s
the difference.”
“The point is, humanity can find its own salvation. It
doesn’t necessarily have to rely on machines. It’ll be a
bit sad if we did, if it’s our only real form of progress.
Nevertheless, unless there’s some form of catastrophe,
we are going to use machines whether we like it or
not. This sort of stuff has been going on for decades
and mainstream society is beginning to catch up to the
implications of artificial intelligence.”
Despite Banks almost evangelical zeal concerning
technology, he’s avoided William Gibson and Bruce
Stirling’s embracing of the net. “I don’t have access
to the internet or email either. I’ve got two answering
machines which I never switch on. Communications
wise, I’ve got a fax and a letterbox and that’s about it.”
Banks still considers himself primarily a science fiction
author, due to his now long gone pre-publication
rites of passage: “I wrote five novels before The Wasp
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Factory, and the last three were science fiction, which
have all now been published in a much altered form.
The one just before The Wasp Factory, Walking On
Glass, almost got published before The Wasp Factory
in 1979. The Wasp Factory was written in 1981 and
published in 1984, by which time I’d already written
Consider Phlebas. So I thought of myself very much
as a science fiction writer as the three books I wrote
before The Wasp Factory were all sci-fi. The other two
never rose to the light of day because they weren’t
very good, frankly.”
“I go to a lot of SF conventions and the authors I
spend time with regularly are SF writers. I’m Scottish
and a writer so I’m a Scottish writer, but I don’t mix
with Scottish writers very much.” So he hasn’t been
keeping a fatherly eye on Irvine Welsh’s meteoric
success then? “I read and was incredibly impressed
by Trainspotting and The Acid House. I’m as interested
as anybody else in new writers but I don’t keep
either a jealous eye or a particularly helpful eye, for
that matter, on them. I’m not sending round people
to visit them in the early hours of the morning (slips
into impeccable Don Corleone voice), ‘Mr Banks.
He don’t feel you respect him. We’re gonna break off
your fingers this time.’”
One organisation that might be receiving a midnight
visit from Mr Banks is the film company who own
the rights to The Wasp Factory, which is currently
BUY Iain Banks books online from and
embroiled in litigation and which he’s unable to discuss
outside of the courtroom. More happily, the BBC
have just finished shooting a television adaptation of
Banks’ novel The Crow Road, although quite how they
intend to portray the exploding grandmother remains
to be seen. “It’s four one-hour episodes starting in
November, although BBC programming controllers
being a law unto themselves will probably change
that. Gavin Miller was the director, and there’s quite
a few recognisable Scottish actors involved in it: Bill
Patterson and Joseph McFadden, who was in the film
Small Faces McFadden is playing the central character
Prentice McHoan. Allegedly the BBC are pretty happy
with it, but that’s all I know. I didn’t have any involvement
with it and I didn’t want any involvement with it.
I think it’s very rare that writers can interfere in that sort
of thing and not just be a pain in the arse.”
Banks’ diffidence concerning moving into new areas
extends to the PC games industry – “Once you start
co-operating with someone else you have to make
compromises and take other people’s ideas on board.
I’m not a team player: that’s one of my limitations”
– and even writing in other genres: “There’s been flippant
remarks about doing pornography as Iain S. Banks
and Westerns as Iain Z. Banks … It’s not impossible
that I might wake up one morning and decide to do a
historical novel, but it would mean doing research – the
R word – so I can’t see it myself … I think it’s very un-
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likely, I think I’ve found my two niches. And anyway,
I’ve just signed another 4 book deal which specifically
states two mainstream and two science fiction novels,
so I don’t have to think about it – it’s going be ‘What
year is it? Oh it must be science fiction time…’”
As regards what those books will concern, Banks
remains quiet. Fin-de-siècle hysteria of the close of
the millennium, perhaps? “I’ve done it twice already
– Canal Dreams is set around the turn of the century,
BUY Iain Banks books online from and
when the canals are handed back from the US to the
Panamanians by the year 2000. I tried to achieve the
same sort of feel at the end of the deca-millennium in
Against A Dark Background. It’s science fiction so you
can make it bigger and better with the year 10,000 approaching
rather than the year 2000. So while everyone
else’s attention is diverted by the millennium, I’ll do
something else.”
Iain (M.) Banks – he’s out there – somewhere. �
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New Fiction [published July 1996]
Adam Baron: The Man Whose Penis Made Him Locally Famous
Adam Baron’s infamous, Penthouse-published tale of sex, feminism and chocolate-flavoured genitals
My penis made me locally famous. I didn’t find out
about it until I got to university. Before then my experience
of women was nonexistent. I’d been at a boys’
school and anyway I was pretty spotty. I couldn’t
believe when, all of a sudden, at the Fresher’s Ball, I
was snogging. I was even more amazed when we were
in her room. We were both wasted. I didn’t have a clue
how to behave, I was terrified, but she knew what to do
and in no time we were naked, in bed. She was kissing
my mouth. My neck. My chest, my stomach, my…!
She stopped.
My God! she said, incredulous. Your cock tastes just
like CHOCOLATE!
Melanie (her name) wasn’t a shy girl. She must have
told her friend Suzy. I realised this the next day when
a very attractive girl, with hip clothes and trainers, approached
me in the union bar and just started chatting.
This had NEVER happened to me before. She asked
me if I wanted to hear a new CD she’d bought and then
we were in her room. Halfway through the second track
we were naked. She’d hardly even kissed me before
her face disappeared under the duvet.
BUY Adam Baron books online from and
It does! she exclaimed suddenly. It bloody well does!!
Two weeks into university I was still a virgin. I had,
however, received 23 blowjobs from 12 different girls
and heard words such as “incredible”, “amazing”,
“Bournville”, “Swiss” and “Belgian” exclaimed by
mops of hair beneath my bedclothes. I had also been
requested to immerse myself in a glass of milk and
move vigorously to see if any of the flavour rubbed off.
It didn’t.
I went to the doctor. She didn’t believe me. Nor did
she try it out, which I thought shockingly unscientific.
But she did see the state I was in and give me a salve.
Okay, so I’ll admit it. For the first year it was great.
I could have loads of women, any time I wanted. I got
cunning and made them sleep with me first. I got fussy.
All the guys on campus were jealous. People who
didn’t know me looked wide eyed to see one or more
stunning girls on the arm of a spotty, pale youth, with
lank dark hair and glasses. What’s he got?, they seemed
to ask themselves.
But when the second year came I got really tired of it.
There was a whole new year of girls who wanted to try
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me out. I felt like an object. A specimen. And there was
something missing from my life, a yearning. I tried to
have conversations with girls, in the coffee bar say, but
all the time their eyes would be flicking to my crotch.
Their tongues would run over their lips, their eyes would
glaze over. I would make a hasty excuse and leave. It
was about this time I began to get really upset about it.
Everyone had started calling me Hob Nob.
I say everyone, it’s not quite true. Some people called
me Willy Wonka.
Hey, it is NOT funny! I was a person! I was more
than a sexual organ that just happened to be flavoured
like confectionery. Everyone stared at me. All the girls
laughed when they saw me. I overheard them talking
about me. About it! I think I had a bit of a breakdown, I
couldn’t take it. All through my third year I stayed in. I
saw no one. The only person I even said Hi to was Sally
Hughes, a pretty girl with breasts so huge she seemed to
look faintly embarrassed all the time. I had overheard
a guy bragging to his friend one day, in the sports hall,
about what he’d done to them the night before.
Did you shag her? the friend asked.
No, the guy said, but I didn’t care. They were the
best breasts I ever came across. Sally Hughes used to
smile at me softly whenever we passed each other in
the square.
I had given up on my little university world. Everyone
knew everything. Because I didn’t have anything to
BUY Adam Baron books online from and
do I studied all the time. I got a First and went to New
York, Columbia, for a Masters. I took a deep breath of
fresh air. Fantastic! It was great! Nobody knew me! If I
hadn’t been for the lousy beer it would have been perfect.
I met Laurie a few months later and we started to
go out. I’d seen her around in the cafeteria on campus,
but it was only when I heard her give a paper on radical
feminism that I really noticed her. She wrote about the
politics of oral sex. She stood at the lectern in black
jeans, white tee shirt, her hair tied back severely, her
little fists clenching to emphasise a point.
Oral sex, she concluded, is degrading. The worshipping
of the phallus only serves to enforce the enslavement
of women. No woman should ever do it, and I
certainly won’t do it ever again. Ever. Thankyou.
She stepped down from the platform to rapturous
applause from a room mainly filled by women. I was
enraptured, entranced. I had to get to know her.
Well, eventually we got it together. Having no chocolate
penis to rely on, I had to be myself and for a long
time she wasn’t interested. But then it all happened.
Nights discussing politics, poetry, walks in the park,
old Cocteau movies. Love, smooth and slow, calm as
an angel. About a year after we met, she was lying in
my bed, naked, her black hair blooming like an impossible
rose against my sheets, her flawless skin almost
as white as they were. I was so happy. I started to kiss
her, to cover her with kisses. I wanted to adore her, to
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make her feel better than anything; sighs escaped her
like wind from a wood across a wheat field…
No! she said.
She took me by the scruff of the neck. Not there!
I stopped.
Why not? I asked.
I knew it, she said firmly. I won’t do it to you. I
won’t. Not…
I know, I assured her. I want to do it to you. I don’t
want you to do it to me ever.
You will , she said, you will! I knew this would
happen…
BUY Adam Baron books online from and
I didn’t listen to her. I knew. There was no way I’d let
her even if she wanted to. Never. I covered the insides
of her thighs with my face and rested my hands on the
tops of her legs. I pushed them apart slightly. She resisted
a little but then she opened her legs wider and I…
I stopped. I lifted my head up.
Guinness, I said, Guinness!!
Author’s Note:
The author would like to point out that any similarity
between the character created in this story, and himself,
is purely factual. His email address is listed. �
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Review [published September 2005]
John Battelle: The Search
Chris Mitchell
John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted
history of Google, although that company looms large
throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes
stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars
between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of
online contextual advertising which has irrevocably
changed the nature of advertising itself. Battelle recognises
that the real story about the search engines is
actually outside the admittedly fascinating geek arms
race between the big players: what’s important is what
the very act of searching for information on the internet
means for business and consumer alike. The simple
act of keying in a phrase to a search engine is carried
out billions of times a day and in totality provides an
unprecedented map of human desires. The commercial
ramifications are obvious, but our culture and our access
to information are also being transformed by the nature
of search. Put it this way – once the net becomes a daily
part of your life, it’s hard to imagine doing without it.
It’s difficult not to sink into hyperbole when discussing
search engines, given the frankly insane stats
generated by Google’s meteoric rise (from zero to $1.3
BUY John Battelle books online from and
billion annual revenue in five years, biggest IPO in
Silicon Valley, shares at $300 a pop, trimester profits of
$300+ million, and so on). But Battelle points out in his
introduction that he didn’t want to write a straightforward
business biography of Google for the good reason
that business biographies don’t get read. There is a lot
of coverage in here about the rise and fall of different
search engines, to be sure, and Battelle has conducted
hundreds of interviews with every key player in the
industry to piece together an excellent overview of the
industry’s audacious growth. But Battelle is primarily
interested in the implications of what the massive leaps
in search engine indexing and intelligence mean for
the future. The Search, then, isn’t simply a business
book or a geek book, although it will be marketed as
such: it’s actually tackling one of the most profound but
almost invisible cultural influences on our daily lives:
how search engines organise and present information in
response to our queries. As more and more of our lives
moves to being managed through the net, the companies
who can correctly analyse what we are looking for
and give it to us in the most hassle free way are the
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ones who will prosper. And, as a by-product of that, the
more users they have, the more they can analyse what’s
been asked for before to anticipate what will be asked
for in the future. Battelle calls it the Database of Intentions,
and mastering the analysis of all those billions of
queries is where the money lies.
The most obvious example of the commercial gold
in search queries is contextual advertising, those text
ads that turn up next to your search results that are
related to your query. Still in its infancy, contextual
advertising has revolutionised online advertising and
had a huge knock-on effect on old media. The targeted
nature of contextual ads – they only get served
to someone who’s interested in that subject; the ad
buyer only pays when someone clicks the link – has
meant thousands of businesses that couldn’t afford to
advertise can now do so and, crucially, get results of
real money-in-the-bank business driven by those ads.
Shoestring businesses have enjoyed massive sales
boosts as a result of this approach, without having to
spend vast sums on marketing. The joy here is that
everyone wins – the customer finds what they want, the
business gets business, and the search engine makes
money for connecting the two together. Advertising
becomes – shock, horror – useful and even valued,
rather than an irritant. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway,
and Battelle provides case studies showing both
the up and potentially disastrous downside of relying
BUY John Battelle books online from and
on search engines to drive business your way.
Contextual ads have not only helped advertisers but
also website owners too. The net’s free culture has
always meant that paying for content has been a thorny
issue – surfers loathe registering for access to newspaper
archives online, much less paying for it. Google’s
Adsense program provided a way for sites to have
relevant ads to their content appear on the page and
in doing so, allowed site owners to earn some handy
pocket change too. (Of course, I’m biased here: in the
two years I’ve been running Google Adsense on Spike,
its monthly revenue has steadily increased as Google
tweak the system to display more relevant ads).
As Battelle has pointed out on his Searchblog, now
is a great time to be a publisher on the net, because
there are more and more easy ways of earning cash
from content. Blog networks like Weblogs, Inc which
earn over $2,000 a day from Adsense, or probloggers
like Darren Rowse who recently earned $15,000 in one
month from Adsense, show that there’s real money to
be made from providing top quality, regular content.
Indeed, Battelle has recently launched Federated Media
Publishing, which will be teaming up with selected
sites to manage matching ads to their content. Battelle,
a former editor of Wired and founder of the Industry
Standard, is already ‘brand manager’ for leading blog
BoingBoing, and has considerably increased that site’s
revenues since coming aboard.
063
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As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a
co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block
in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s
vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in
the industry. There’s little of the usual business pomposity
about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in
a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his
material but confident enough to not deluge the reader
with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The
Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free.
The same can’t be said for the future of search engines.
With the realisation that the potential of search has only
just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership
of personal information is the major concern, with some
beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info
provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online
movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”
moral code has also begun, with the company’s current
leadership of the search field making it walk point for
the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is
also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam
blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor
quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat
out to find ways to counter these emergent problems,
and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set
BUY John Battelle books online from and
of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and mutability,
it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be
no clouds on the horizon.
For now, though, search remains a huge success
story – Google may well be about to have its own
stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable
and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by
Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the
contextual ad field, each looking to get the competitive
edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use
their particular system. Most importantly, all three are
continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice
the Database of Intentions to give you what you want
quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still
remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing
business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the
user experience first and working backwards. In the
last five years, it has continually gone its own way and
managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and
MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never
even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John
Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration
that within five years everything in the search world
can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it
probably will do again. �
064
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published January 2000]
John Baxter: George Lucas: A Biography
Chris Mitchell
Throughout his film-making career, George Lucas has
continually pushed back the boundaries of technology
in order to realise his ideas on the silver screen. John
Baxter’s biography of the man is not only an account
of Lucas’ personal history but also the transformative
effect Lucas’ fascination with technology has had on
the entire movie industry since the advent of Star Wars.
While Baxter’s biography (published under the
title Mythmaker in the States) is not authorised and
he lacked any direct contact with the publicity-shy
Lucas, his exhaustive research provides a balanced
overview of Lucas’ career. Although Baxter doesn’t
shy away from discussing the detrimental effect of
Lucas’ driving ambition on both his marriage and
many of his friendships, he prefers to concentrate
on Lucas’ movie innovation and the building of the
LucasFilm empire.
What becomes most apparent in Baxter’s portrayal
of Lucas is his fascination with technology’s ability
to create filmic illusion on a grand scale, rather than
a fascination with movies themselves. From his first
experimental picture THX1138 through to Star Wars,
BUY John Baxter books online from and
Indiana Jones and The Phantom Menace, Lucas continually
sought ever-grander ways to put the audience
on the edge of their seats, rather than conveying a message
or making social comment.
In doing so, he inaugurated the age of the blockbuster,
where spectacle took precedence over everything else.
Lucas summed it up himself by saying “I’m a filmmaker,
not a director. I like the physical part of making
movies. I might be a toymaker if I wasn’t a film maker.”
The strain on Lucas’ health making Star Wars meant
that he avoided sitting in the director’s chair for another
20 years until The Phantom Menace. Much of that
strain was caused by the creation of Industrial Light
And Magic to produce Star Wars’ special effects, most
of which had to be created completely from scratch.
Along the way, ILM created Photoshop, which is
now the industry-standard computer graphics application,
and later Pixar, who became a separate company
and pioneered the digital animation of Toy Story and A
Bug’s Life.
It’s apparent that Lucas returned to directing with
The Phantom Menace precisely because the technology
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had finally caught up with his vision. Digital editing allowed
him absolute control over the movie’s execution,
rather than the fraught creation of Star Wars.
Ultimately Baxter’s biography portrays Lucas as a
maverick who refused to kowtow either to Hollywood
or to accepted notions of what makes a movie picture.
BUY John Baxter books online from and
It’s an immensely readable account that will appeal to
Star Wars aficionados and film fans alike. It also acts as
a fascinating overview of the way the movie industry
has changed over the last 25 years and how much Lucas’
independence and interest in exploiting technology
helped shape that change. �
066
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published December 1996]
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography
Despite two recent authoritative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore
argues that Beckett remains an enigma
It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our
culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease
the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment
to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven
years after his death, remains as distant as ever. He
wouldn’t have had it any other way. His fame is due
to a play which he said was “misunderstood”. For a
great Modern writer to become well known it seems
he or she requires a degree of similarity to popular
fiction to tempt people into reading them. Kafka has
horror, Proust nostalgia, Lawrence pornography, Woolf
niceness. Beckett seems to lack this. Only Waiting For
Godot approaches such familiarity: Morecambe &
Wise in a mortuary perhaps. The rest of the work lurks
behind it like a black hole ready to swallow up any
cheerful soul wanting something less than an enigma.
This suggests we need a biography to help us through
the artifice. And these two new biographies certainly
do something like that.
After reading both Anthony Cronin’s The Last Modernist
and James Knowlson’s Damned To Fame, one
has a more rounded impression of the man, if not the
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and
writer. Reading the novels and plays one imagines a
secular monk, yet the dominant impression from both
of these biographies is of a drunken, womanizing,
pretentious and self-pitying young man who was good
at sport and languages. I say “young man” because the
older, wiser Beckett is left relatively untouched. We
never get very close to him. This is a pity if not also
inevitable. The pre-war work is discussed at length as it
tends to follow the details in the turmoil of his growth:
a manic-depressive mother, psychosomatic illnesses,
premature death of a genial father, archetypal Oedipal
love/sex dichotomy, unchannelled talent, etc.
The later works, however, do not lend themselves so
readily to such links. And these, despite the protestations
of the nosy, will be the ones he will be remembered
for. They are passed over almost in silence. This is not
because Knowlson and Cronin are hacks interested
only in gossip and obvious life-work correlations, or
because the later work is lifelessly abstract, but because
they are both aware of the crassness of such an enterprise.
The later work is the poetry of confinement, of
disintegration and ending (that is, what comes before
067
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death, which never comes). How can the biographer
write about that if the man himself was so active?
Beckett wrote about these things not so much because
he experienced them, although he did, eventually, but
because he observed and felt them impending all the
time. A biographer can only try to understand why he
felt this. In revising an apocryphal story, Knowlson
gives us a hint. Krapp’s story of a Joycean epiphany on
a storm-tossed shore in Krapp’s Last Tape was thought
to be Beckett’s own experience. It turns out that an
equivalent epiphany did occur but in his mother’s
bedroom as he watched her suffer from Parkinson’s
Disease. Krapp’s epiphany is traditionally romantic;
the exaltations of nature provoking a grand idea in the
individual. Beckett’s real one was less effusive.
He saw how nature has ‘a calm, secret hostility’
inflicting intense pain and suffering on loved ones
with pause only for what we call life. It is nothing to
be celebrated. The wordy flights of Beckett’s youthful
writings (that is, before he reached 30) side-step
this awareness in favour of familiar channels of
talent: show-off shock tactics and autobiographical
plundering. So, it is no surprise that Dream Of Fair
To Middling Women, the novel Knowlson and Cronin
mine most heavily for information, is only available
because of the author’s death. He did not want it published
during his lifetime because it was too clever
and derivative. Cleverness tends to be derivative. As
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and
one critic said, Beckett “had a lot to unlearn”.
However, such bad art enables Knowlson and Cronin
to present convincing portraits of Beckett in young
adulthood. This is where he had most in common with
his contemporaries; he was “a young man with nothing
to say and an itch to make”, as he said of himself.
Cronin is particularly dismissive of a lot of Beckett’s
early itching. He often ends quotations with “Whatever
that might mean.” This is refreshing after the uncritical,
if not also hagiographical tone taken by Knowlson,
Beckett’s long time friend.
One thing Cronin didn’t have that Knowlson did
was access to Beckett’s diaries from his wander around
Nazi Germany in the 30s. These provide an important
revision of Deirdre Bair’s suggestion in her pioneering
1978 biography that Beckett was ignorant of, or chose
to ignore the effect of Nazi rule. The diaries reveal his
awareness and disgust at their attitudes. Indeed, the
people he meets are distinguished by their sympathies.
And the war itself seems to have been the watershed in
Beckett’s life. If he had gone home to Ireland instead
of staying to help his French friends, he may have
continued along familiar lines – following the trends
of the times and fading as fast. However, the stoicism
and near-starvation of the war years seems to have had
a lasting effect. His only concern from then on was to
write, be published, and write some more. Popularity
was not a confirmation of importance, but pure chance.
068
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He seems to have realized that what was important was
the night sky of nothingness behind the pyrotechnics of
culture (a phrase of his friend E.M. Cioran).
Beckett started to write in French to rid himself of as
much English cultural baggage as possible. His style
became radically spare. He refused the big picture. Indeed,
the claustrophobia of later plays and prose is not
far removed from the details of war, or at least impending
war: terror, boredom, despair, confusion, gallows
humour, and imprisonment. Being alone in a room with
only thoughts and memories is not lifelessly abstract.
It is the experience of millions of people. To label it
solipsistic or elitist, as many people have, is narrowminded
in the extreme. To write from the perspective
of ‘outside’, which many much-touted writers still do
(Pat Barker, Irving Welsh et al), is far more abstract and
non-empathetic. Even if these claim to be the voice of
the lost, silenced or the underclass, their conservative
attitude to language annexes the ground where these
voices might speak. Their sympathy is the cruelty
of the sentimental that Wilde spoke of. They silence
everybody in their powerful cries from the trenches of
literary tradition.
Beckett is the writer par excellence of what it is to be
totally alone, separate even from the self you thought
you were. Inevitably, this leads to a different kind of
language; neither formal nor colloquial. For Beckett,
language is not so much the meadow where the self
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and
can frolic in freedom as a No Man’s Land where it
is never safe. Beckett was not one of herd playing at
freedom-loving in the tenches, but wandered the No
Man’s Land like Dante in Hell. It was not a deliberate
exercise. He was often surprised at what he wrote. It
is not purely intellectual. It was not ‘self-expression’,
more ‘unself-expression’. If it was merely the surface
self, fiction would be only disguised autobiography and
these biographies would be even more superfluous than
they already are. Both Knowlson and Cronin are aware
of this and do not try to pin Beckett’s devastating later
work to what was happening in his life or his world. At
least, not directly. They are aware of the acultural provenance
of his inspiration. The biographies are works
borne of our literary culture’s desire for short cuts, yet
carry that restriction with honour.
Beckett was aware of a saying in post-war literary
French circles that if an Englishman were to write a
book on a camel he would call it The Camel, while
a Frenchman would call it The Camel And Love. A
German, on the other hand, would call it The Absolute
Camel. All the books, of course, would probably be the
same. Both authors reviewed here are Irish, and perhaps
it is inevitable they would think of something odd
for the titles of their books. And they have. Damned
To Fame, despite being a phrase from one of Beckett’s
letters, is a peculiarly limited title, and Cronin’s The
Last Modernist is absurd. This tempts the assumption
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that Modernism is an historical event rather than a virus
at the heart of culture. But this is unimportant; titles
of books like these are for publicity purposes only.
Beyond that, the books themselves help us filter our
interests. If you want rollocking sub-Joycean romps,
that is, Beckett and Love, read the early work. And in
terms of these biographies, if you want encyclopaedic
detail, read Knowlson’s, while if you want a less reverential
and more speculative read, Cronin’s is for you. If
you want the Absolute Beckett, read the novels; you’ll
never get any closer. �
BUY Samuel Beckett books online from and
070
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 2000]
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein
Stephen Mitchelmore
“I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face.
No one else on all this earth had such features. This was
the most amazing thing in the life of the world.”
These sentences come from the final page of Saul
Bellow’s previous novel The Actual, which, I seem to
remember, he said would be his last. Perhaps, instead,
it should be classed as a novella; it ends after only
104 pages. His latest novel Ravelstein, at 233 pages,
safely reaches novel-length. Perhaps this is the last. But
maybe not, because it doesn’t feel like a novel. There is
a famous reason for this, and the reason is fame.
Abe Ravelstein, the eponymous character, is the late
Allan Bloom, political philosopher at the University
of Chicago and close friend of the novelist. In 1987,
Bloom published a book called The Closing Of The
American Mind, a singular polemic against what he
saw as the betrayal of American values in the realm of
Higher Education. The book became a surprise bestseller
and made Bloom millions of dollars. Saul Bellow
contributed a foreword to the book, and, it turns out,
was the one who suggested he write it in the first place.
Bloom died young in 1992, but before he died asked
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
Bellow to write about him ‘warts and all’. This novel
is the result.
So why doesn’t he call Ravelstein by his famous
name? After all, Martin Amis, Bellow’s wrong-headed
protégé, hasn’t changed the names in his recent autobiography
Experience. In his book, Bellow can’t be
hoping to deny the link. And he isn’t: he has been quite
open about who Abe really is. That’s not the reason.
The reason goes to the heart of the novel, and ‘the
novel’ in general.
The short explanation is Amy’s face, which Harry,
the narrator of The Actual, sees, as if for the first time
as the coffin containing her husband is lowered into
its plot. Harry realises that Amy has always been ‘the
one’ (that is, The Actual), and asks her to marry him.
The novel ends before she answers, restraining the
sentimentality inherent in such a scenario. Before she
can say anything, the plot is lowered, as it were, into
its coffin. But read his sentence again: he sees Amy’s
actual face only in standing back from himself. We, the
readers, don’t actually see her face but we sense the
unique, mysterious, revelatory moment. Her distance
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is necessary for it to happen. A straight memoir is
more likely to evade this solitary instant with anecdote,
psychologising or uncomprehending sentiment. Here,
the distance of fiction opens to the uncanny singularity
of experience rather than stuffing it into the requirements
of genre.
In Ravelstein, loving friendship has taken the place
of romance. The six-times married Bellow is confident
enough in his sexuality (and at 85, a father again) to
make it clear he loved Bloom. By fictionalising his
friend we get more than the ‘schmaltz’ of a tribute. It’s
a familiar Bellow theme. His best novel Herzog is also
about an academic seen in unfamiliar light. Bellow’s
son Adam has since written of how it mirrored his
father’s life at the time, and how Adam himself appears
as Herzog’s young daughter. He says he can’t read the
novel without unease as it portrays Herzog’s wife, by
extension Adam’s mother, in a very poor light. Yet the
novel also shows how terrible it must have been to be
married to Herzog. He is manic, paranoid, distracted
and dishevelled. He scrawls mad, half-finished letters
to ‘the famous dead’ instead of writing his supposedly
great academic treatise. Herzog blames his wife’s affair
with his best friend for his condition, but he protests too
much; and he knows it.
Abe Ravelstein is a Herzog with more self-confidence,
but we still take what he says with a pinch of
salt. His best-seller advocates the clarity of ancient
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
Greek rationality and condemns the Dionysian, valueless
chaos of popular culture. Yet while he blames
blaring Rock music for the degeneration of America,
he plays kitschy Italian operas at the highest possible
volume, annoying his neighbours. And while he knows
Plato like a man holed up in an ivory tower, he is also a
world-class consumer; he spends like there’s no tomorrow.
In fact, he wrote the outline of his book only to get
the small advance in order to placate his debtees.
In the end, he wrote the whole thing and was able to
indulge his Liberace-like taste in clothes, furniture and
hotels. The novel is rich in the textures of $4,000 jackets
and silk dressing gowns. Ravelstein is like Liberace
in another sense too: he is gay; and recklessly so. He
dies of an AIDS-related illness. Yet he pours scorn on
what he calls “faggot behaviour”. Love and its relations
has been a Bellow theme from the start, and his interest
coincides with his friend’s. Ravelstein constantly refers
to the human striving to find his or her other half, as
discussed in Plato’s Symposium. Yet while Ravelstein
shares his life with a young man called Nikki, he also
trawls the Parisian nights for rough trade.
While the narrator of the book, his friend Chick,
recognises a contradiction, he doesn’t set it up as emblematic;
he leaves it as a foible that all great men have.
Chick’s professed innocence maybe a ruse of fiction,
enabling avoidance. There are strong clues that Chick
sees through him. Ravelstein encourages Chick to de-
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velop his monograph on the economist Maynard Keynes
by studying the minutiae of his letters home from
a post-First World War reparations conference. Such
minutiae, he suggests, reveal the larger truth. Chick
seems to be trying to do the same with Ravelstein: we
see the way he holds his mobile phone between his
bare knees, and as his expensive Japanese kimono falls
away it reveals “legs paler than milk … the shinbone
long and the calf muscle abrupt, without roundness.”
Once Ravelstein is dead, the novel becomes more
complex as Chick describes how he stalled for a few
years before writing the book. Clearly, the facts weren’t
enough. Before Ravelstein dies, Chick divorces his
self-regarding physicist wife and, soon after, marries
one of Ravelstein’s pupils, the meeker, much younger
Rosamund. On a tropical holiday, Chick eats a poisoned
fish and becomes ill. Rosamund gets him home despite
his unwillingness. It saves his life. Only after this neardeath
experience is Chick able to write the memoir of
his dead friend. This happened in reality too. Bellow
says he was “nine-tenths gone”. Perhaps being on the
edge of oblivion gave him the necessary insight, just as
it gave an insight into Rosamund’s love.
While Ravelstein’s hypocrisy is suggested, the
bigger issue – of America – is barely mentioned.
This is odd because it possessed Ravelstein and
fuelled his best-seller. Perhaps Bellow could not
step back from himself in this case. Bloom saw the
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
60s as the beginning of the Fall of America. What
led him to think this? The invasion of Cuba and
South Vietnam? The subsequent three million native
deaths and long-term chemical damage? No, it is
the academic opposition. He says their questioning
of long-accepted values, and subsequent pandering
to the tastes of the permissive society equates with
what the philosopher Heidegger did by supporting
the Nazis from his University chair. One might argue
the opposite, and say that US academics were in fact
the true descendants of America’s founding fathers
rebelling against unjust Imperial might. It is not even
hinted at here despite Ravelstein’s fascination.
He has many ex-pupils in high places in the US Administration.
They are more like disciples. Ravelstein,
we are told, sought out the best pupils and taught them
to ‘forget their parents’. Ravelstein wanted each to
be a ‘tabula rasa’, a blank slate onto which he could
transfer his learning. Once in power, these disciples
would call him up and tell him the latest inside news
– such as Bush’s final decision to end the Gulf War.
Chick is impressed. Ravelstein laps it up. There seems
to be no irony intended as Bloom talks to one of his
high-powered disciples, puffs away on a Cuban cigar –
made illegal to punish a defiant nation – and dismisses
the ‘foolish anti-Americanism’ of French intellectuals.
This knee-jerk conflation of opposites is meant to be
an example of Ravelstein’s common sense. One has
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to remember that as Bloom/Ravelstein published his
book, thousands of men, women and children were
being killed and maimed by US-funded terrorists as
they undermined or overturned elected governments
uncongenial to US business interests. And the extreme
Right-wing charitable foundations who paid Bloom/
Ravelstein extravagant salaries were among the
most active supporters of these mercenaries and their
Washington paymasters. There is no mention of such
minutiae in the novel, except for talk of America’s
“higher need” in the world. Such are the real echoes
from Heidegger’s time.
My impatience with this omission could be dismissed
as unfairly motivated. But I think it reveals
the failure of the book to stand back enough. Essentially,
Ravelstein’s philosophy emerges out of a need
to deny one’s parents – that is, to repress whatever
stands behind the façade of desire, intellect, money
and status. The man exhibits such lust for life because
he was always on the edge of an abyss created by an
inherent contradiction in his life and politics. Chick
often wonders about Abe’s working class past but,
like his sexuality, it is taboo and is dropped each time.
He is perhaps too in thrall to the rumbling tank of denial
to see the victims buried in the tracks. As a result,
Abe remains a two-dimensional figure and the novel
doesn’t have any tension until he is dead.
What redeems the book, for me, is the brief re-
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
emergence of Bellow’s lyrical intellectualism. There is
a remarkable passage in the novel in which Chick talks
of finding the way to “communicate certain ‘incommunicables’
– your private metaphysics”; something
Ravelstein refused to do. Chick explains:
“To grasp this mystery, the world, was the occult
challenge. You came into a fully developed and articulated
reality from nowhere, from nonbeing or primal
oblivion. You had never seen life before. In the interval
of light between the darkness in which you awaited first
birth and the darkness of death that would receive you,
you must make what you could of reality, which was in
a state of highly advanced development. I had waited
millennia to see this.”
He believes it can be done by returning to one’s earliest
memories, untainted by ideology or habit. He recalls
when, soon after he learned to walk, he went down onto
the street and saw “huge utility-pole timbers that lined
the street. They were beaver-coloured, soft and rotted.”
Maybe it is because this appears in relative isolation,
like the “limp silk fresh lilac drowning water” on page 73
of Humboldt’s Gift, that these poles develop a presence
like Amy’s face. The mystery is grasped, not dispersed.
Early in the novel Chick mentions reading of the “poor
convulsive” Samuel Johnson touching each lamppost
on a street, and is fascinated, perhaps because it reminds
him of his own experience. Ravelstein perhaps wanted
Chick to be his Boswell, but it is Chick, Saul Bellow,
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who will be remembered, though not for this novel in
particular. Generally, it has the tone of valediction-butnot-quite.
This could be because Rosamund is the real
inspiration of this book, with Ravelstein as the unlikely
bonding agent. Though she appears, like Amy’s face
in The Actual, at the end of the book, she is about the
present and future; death is gratefully postponed. In the
process, it resurrects Ravelstein.
In fact, the question of how the apparently dead past
binds to the present weighs on the novel throughout.
BUY Saul Bellow books online from and
Ravelstein and Chick are both unpious Jews, but they
know the facts of history. One of Chick’s friends is a
Romanian implicated in the Fascist Iron Guard of World
War II. Ravelstein is appalled and tells Chick that if he
is to meet the Romanian again to think of the Jews they
hung on meat hooks: “we must not turn our backs on
the millions who died” he says. Chick finds it difficult;
he doesn’t want to think about it. Anyway, he is amused
by the Romanian. By the end, we are familiar with this
characteristic. �
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Feature [published February 1999]
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under
Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth
anniversary of the writer’s death
“Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence
of a revelation which does not in fact occur.” (Borges)
Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, playwright
and poet, died young. At this end of the century,
58 is young. He had been tubercular since his teens, so
it was no great surprise. Indeed, we are to be grateful
for his tendency to illness. It was TB, he tells us in his
remarkable autobiography, that took him to writing.
In a sanatorium – lungs drowning in sputum, aged 19
and expected to die – he began to write. He believed
it might have cured him too. I remember seeing an
obituary following his death on 12th February, 1989. At
that time I had not read any of his works. Just another
novelist I assumed, and did not read the obituary. In
the summer of the following year I found a copy of the
novel Concrete in the magnificent Quartet Encounters
imprint. I shall always associate that book with a park
in an otherwise squalid English city. It is a short enough
to be read in one place. And I have read it in many more
places since. Certainly it has death written through
it, but it cures too, almost. The rest of this will try to
explain why.
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Like Kafka’s, Bernhard’s writing is easily caricatured.
This is one of the main problems in the reception
of the best literature in this country. I have seen an
advert for Czech beer labelling Kafka “the monarch
of mirthlessness”, which told me that the copywriter
knows nothing of Kafka, and probably not of beer
also. Anyone who has read his work can testify there
is something oddly funny about it; A Country Doctor
will have you in stitches. Yet Kafka remains a byword
for depressive reading. The French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze, however, called him “a man of joy”. The
thing is, you have to be patient; he’s not Bill Bryson.
Though Bernhard has written comedically, notably in
the helpfully sub-titled Old Masters: a comedy, he too
is presented as one of those miserable Germans who
can’t accept that life is actually wonderful. This is so
wrong: he was Austrian.
Generally, we British assume you have be one thing
or the other. You’re either funny and disposable or
serious and difficult. I guess it’s partly to do with the
satanic rule of marketing strategies protecting niche
identity and such like, but certainly the culture cannot
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accept the way literature acts in us, rather than just upon
us. We assume it to be a pleasant distraction against a
pre-defined reality.
In a way, this is inevitable. What goes on in our
heads daily, hourly, minutely, gets into writing only
through distancing. Writing something down provides
a displacement from the anxiety, the boredom
or the confusion of the moment. We want our minds
like the thing written down. It is easy to have this
done for you. Responding to a growing appetite for
distraction, shorthand journalistic cliché has infested
our inner lives. Generally, it means we are unable to
have respect for uniqueness of experience because
it is summed up, packaged, placed in a captionable
context. Soon this context demands total obedience;
nothing else is relevant.
The private self is subsumed, and we assume we have
to give unquestioning respect to the two-dimensional
conceits of ‘ambitious’ fiction covering the ground of
journalists and historians (Don Delillo and Tom Wolfe
being the current examples). The alternative, where
it is assumed the self gets full exposure without the
interference of common language, tends to mean the
stream-of-consciousness mode of writing. Take Harold
Brodkey’s long-delayed, much-hyped novel The
Runaway Soul; an 800 page Bildungsroman made up
of dribbling ‘poetic’ language, supposedly reminiscent
of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Proust’s great work
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of intellect and intimacy. Being neither, it still came to
the fore because it was the opposite of the other kind
of Great American Novel. It suited the demand that
you’re one thing or the other: inner or outer. Yet the
technique of simulating intimacy reeked of that alone:
technique. Luckily, this novel has now been sidelined
as an embarrassment.
Meanwhile, Realism, whether in historical sweep
or intimate acquaintance with an individual, prefers
that such excessive literary adventures are limited to
unserious Postmodernists. No one should claim they
challenge its intimacy with life. Raymond Carver
exemplifies its naive arrogance in his essay on writing
fiction, collected in Fires. One of his maxims, he announced,
was “No tricks”. He had this printed on a piece
of cardboard stuck above his writing desk. Yet Carver’s
highly-influential ‘dirty realism’ is one big trick. This is
elided by calling it a “craft”, but craftsmanship is also
trickery institutionalised. His innocence of this is typical
of working-class sentimentality. Perhaps he never
completed a novel because such trickery revealed itself
over greater length.
His friend Richard Ford seems almost to be satirising
Carver’s self-abnegatory posing in his touchinglyoverlong
novel Independence Day; a terribly funny recital
of how failure infects and becomes the wellspring
of writing. Anyway, having a note above one’s writing
desk reminding oneself of what to do is enough to indi-
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cate a need to efface the workings of the imagination.
This despite Carver’s fiction being renowned for its imaginative
empathy. Rudolf, the narrator in Bernhard’s
Concrete sees through the motives for appreciation of
Carver’s work:
‘People are always talking about it being their duty to
find their way to their fellow men – to their neighbour,
as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false
sentiment – when in fact it is purely and simply a question
of finding their way to themselves.’
Carver’s achievement was special, but flawed. It is a
literary equivalent of the self replicating its DNA with
serial partners; never mind the consequences. When
Larkin mordantly quipped “Don’t have any kids yourself”,
it was as much to do with poems as with children.
The problem is, what goes on in our heads is also
literature, in the sense that consciousness is already
distance. Any privileging of inside or outside means
a fundamental distortion. It means there is no simple
access through writing to what we want to write about.
When know-nothings like the BBC’s arts guru Mark
Lawson complains of writers writing about writers,
he misses this fundamental issue. The so-called selfreflexive
novel is more likely to get closer to the truth
than those effacing the conceit. This is why dominant
forms of fiction, and the journalistic definition of literature’s
relation to the world, needs to be set aside in
favour of a mediation between the world and the writer;
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an infinite mediation. Like Bernhard’s.
Ironically (as journalists are so keen to say in order
to assert their distant control) Bernhard began his career
as a journalist. After giving up his music studies
because of illness, he wrote short, precise summaries
of pending court cases for a local Socialist newspaper.
He developed a talent, and an offshoot can be seen in
the extremely odd book The Voice Imitator: 104 stories
in 104 pages. The musical background continued in his
early preference for poetry, but this soon merged with
the prose to produce novels. The mixing of opposites
might be seen as peculiar to Bernhard’s biographical
details: harsh reality with musical polyphony. There are
other details about his childhood even before the illness
that are just to depressing to repeat. For these, see his
autobiography collected as Gathering Evidence.
Harsh reality with polyphony appear in abundance in
the 1970 novel The Lime Works. It is about the death by
gunshot of a crippled woman. Her husband, Konrad, is
under arrest. The novel tells the story of the years leading
up to the death in a collage of reported statements
from local people. This is how it begins:
“… when Konrad bought the lime works, about five
and a half years ago, the first thing he moved in was a
piano he set up in his room on the first floor, according
to the gossip at the Laska tavern, not because of
any artistic leanings, says Wieser, the manager of the
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Mussner estate, but for relaxation, to ease the nervous
strain caused by decades of unremitting brain work,
says Fro, the man in charge of the Trattner estate,
agreeing that Konrad’s piano playing had nothing to do
with art, which Konrad hates, but was just improvisation,
as Wieser says, for an hour first thing early in the
morning and another late at night, every day, spent at
the keyboard, with the metronome ticking away, the
window open …” (trans. Sophie Wilkins)
It goes on like this for 241 pages. You see how multiple
perspectives are given, without any privileging of any
one in particular. The manic behaviour of Konrad, as
reported, is equalled by the persistence of the investigation.
As it details Konrad’s perceived descent into
madness and murder, it threatens the same for the
investigator. Thus the distant narration is implicated
in what it perceives. Objectivity, of course, is never
immune. It can never reach its object directly. This is
made clearer in Bernhard’s later novels because they
tend to play with very few voices. Yet despite being
powerfully subjective, they transcend mere egotism
transferred to the page (go to the Realists for that).
Realism’s need for the suspension of disbelief is not an
issue here: we are swept along by the narcotic prose.
Yet we are also displaced by what it tells us or what
it doesn’t tell us. Escapism isn’t possible in the usual
sense. It means there is always an uneasy edge to the
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pleasure of reading.
Bernhard’s definitive character is a Thinker overwhelmed
by something infringing on his intellectual
project; usually imminent death. There are scientists in
Yes and The Cheap-Eaters, philosophers in Correction
and The Loser. Rudolf, in Concrete, is a musicologist
trying to write a monograph on the composer Mendelsson.
However, he cannot get past the research stage.
He blames his worldly sister: “She’s always destroyed
whatever she’s touched, and all her life she’s tried to
destroy me. At first unconsciously, then consciously,
she’s set out to annihilate me. Right up to this day I’ve
had to protect myself against my elder sister’s savage
desire to annihilate, and I really don’t know how so far
I’ve managed to escape her.” (trans. David McLintock)
Rudolf’s monomania emerges in the very design of
text we are reading: Bernhard’s famous book-length
paragraphs. There are no natural spaces to stop and
reflect. Again, this just begs the question about what
is being avoided, left out, denied. The repetition of
“annihilate” in this fairly typical passage shows how
Bernhard’s language is literary, yet not to show how
sensitive the writer is, but to bring forth the way experience
is bound to literature, and vice versa. After
all, the only access literature has to annihilation is
the word itself, and perhaps is all we have also. In his
last novel Extinction, this is made wonderfully clear
in a favourite passage of mine, where the narrator,
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an ex-patriot professor based in Rome, talks about
the search for his childhood in an Austrian country
estate, Wolfsegg:
“In Rome I sometimes think of Wolfsegg and tell
myself that I have only to go back there in order to
rediscover my childhood. This has always proved to
be a gross error, I thought. You’re going to see your
parents, I have often told myself, the parents of your
childhood, but all I’ve ever found is a gaping void.
You can’t revisit your childhood, because it no longer
exists, I told myself. The Children’s Villa affords the
most brutal evidence that childhood is no longer possible.
You have to accept this. All you see when you
look back is this gaping void. Not only your childhood,
but the whole of your past, is a gaping void. This is
why it’s best not to look back. You have to understand
that you mustn’t look back, if only for reasons of selfprotection,
I thought. Whenever you look back into the
past, you’re looking into a gaping void. Even yesterday
is a gaping void, even the moment that’s just passed.”
(trans. David McLintock)
What Creative Writing manual would pass this
excessive, uncompromising, monological prose? And
there are another 334 and a half pages like this! One
may ask what’s in it for the reader – I mean, you’re not
going to learn anything about the world by reading this,
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are you? Well, you might learn how much you need to
fill your own gaping void by reading. Yet for all the
impression of suffocation this gives, there is a clear
musical rhythm to the prose. It does intoxicate; a popular
form of escape, yes, but not abused by Bernhard.
His form of prose weakens the need to choose between
utilitarian language or lyric indulgence. Bernhard said
that his prose rhythm owed a lot to music. Indeed, he
uses the life of a musician for the overall theme of one
of his best novels Der Untergeher. (Literally this translates
as “The Undergoer”, but this is ridiculous and
has been translated as The Loser. Unfortunately this
loses the allusion to Nietzsche – “Have you suffered
for knowledge’s sake?” – that is, gone under).
The book reads like a prose version of Bach’s Goldberg
Variations. And Bernhard uses the real figure of
Bach’s greatest interpreter Glenn Gould – “the most
important piano virtuoso of the century” – and the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (although neither is
by any means identical to the real person) to illuminate
the life of the writer; the Bernhardian kind of writer. In
the story, the Canadian Gould is a friend of Wertheimer,
the Wittgenstein figure, and the unnamed narrator. The
latter two, we are told, were themselves exceptional
pianists but after hearing Gould’s unearthly genius at
work, they give up hope. They could never attain his
“inhuman state”. In response, Wertheimer auctioned
off his piano, took up the “human sciences” and then
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gave up entirely. He committed suicide, leaving philosophical
notes rather than a complete work. Gould is
also dead, but naturally; of a lung disease (in reality, he
died of a stroke).
This leaves the narrator alone. He tries to write a
monograph About Glenn Gould but instead writes what
we’re reading. It is pointed out in the Afterword to the
English edition that the three main characters can be
summarised as a triple-separation of Bernhard himself:
he is at once Gould the virtuoso artiste, Wertheimer the
suicide, a self-styled failure gone under; and the unnamed
narrator. In real life, Bernhard was a virtuoso, of
course, and perhaps also a suicide. The last state, being
unnamed is therefore appropriate. His living self mediates
between the extremes of Gould and Wertheimer
– inhumanity and death – both perhaps preferable. The
unnamed one is unable to go under in art or suicide,
forced to remain, like everyone else, in the usual human
situation. Unless, that is, you count his default project,
The Loser, as a virtuoso work of art – which I do. In
which case, the unnamed one goes on, elsewhere, not
in this book, unto death.
But perhaps not quite alone. Before death, Bernhard
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achieved full expression because he wrote out of
failure to go under. He understood the dangers of art
for humanity, and showed respect for the limits of the
imagination. Ironically (again), in accepting the limits,
he transcended them: partly through the invention of a
literary conceit, partly out of lyrical power, partly out
of biographical necessity. Such a form of transcendence
is why fiction can be more than just information
or distraction. It can be where the true self emerges;
one’s self with others. Saul Bellow, the American novelist,
who shares Bernhard’s waterfall eloquence and
complexity, has spoken of the experience of getting it
right, and with Bernhardian relish:
“[transcendence is] just a handle. It’s not the real
thing. The real thing is an unquenchable need that never
stops gnawing at you. And … you feel that you’re being
transcendent in that lousy sense when you are fully
expressive. That’s when it happens to you. Then you’re
satisfied that you’ve done the right thing. Otherwise no.
Otherwise you fall back on explanations and definitions
and boring discourse. You might as well be a social
scientist and write that sort of stuff.” �
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Review [published April 2002]
Thomas Bernhard: Playing Dead
Stephen Mitchelmore finds Thomas Bernhard to be elusive within
two studies of the Austrian writer
What if everything we can be depends on playing a
role? Where would that leave us? Well, first of all, it
would mean that the public self, the one presented to
the world, is not ‘a mask’ but the original; the thing
itself. Behind the scenes, alone, we live the mystery
of self-consciousness. We wonder who it is that wakes
at four to soundless dark. Alone, we dream of another
life; the one in the biography. Perhaps the oppressive
climate of our culture – as seen in the triumphant exposés
of the press and the prurience of Reality TV – is
due to our frantic need to remove in others what we see
as a façade in ourselves. And as art is seen as an adjunct
of this removal (‘expressing the inner self’), so the
inevitable disappointment in its resistant playfulness
leads to a shift in preference to revelatory biography
and memoir. Could this be stage fright on our part?
Early on in Thomas Bernhard: The Making Of An
Austrian, the first English biography of the Austrian
novelist, playwright and poet, Gitta Honegger says
the apparatus of the theatre is an “annoyingly overused
existential paradigm”, and she’s right. I’ve only
used it once and it’s annoying me already. However,
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it is clear that her subject is the paradigm’s essential
figure. There seems to be no private Thomas Bernhard.
As such, Honegger says he is a particularly Austrian
phenomenon. The nation, she says, transplanted the
baroque theatrics of the old Hapsburg Empire into its
cultural life, notably the Salzburg Festival, the state
run Burgtheatre, and one man: Thomas Bernhard. Each
provided an arena for Austria to conjure its self image.
In Bernhard’s case, it was invariably a negative image,
as if Austria needed an impression of embattlement
against a hostile world. For example, when Bernhard
received a state prize and made critical remarks about
the state in his acceptance speech, a Government minister
stormed out and slammed a glass door so violently
that it smashed. And just before his death in 1989, he
was verbally attacked by the President (an ex-Nazi),
and physically attacked on a bus by an old lady wielding
an umbrella. Since his death, however, Bernhard
has become a national treasure. His vitriol has been rebranded,
Guy Fawkes-like, into a fireworks display. As
a result, his description of Austria as a place with more
Nazis in 1988 than in 1938 (the cause of the President’s
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and the old lady’s wrath) is safely consigned to history.
Like the ‘Anschluss’ and the President’s SS uniform, it
is part of Austria’s rich cultural heritage. Perhaps this is
why, in his will, Bernhard refused to allow the publication
or performance of his work within the Austrian
state for the duration of the copyright; he foresaw his
place in the state circus. (The lawyers have since got
around this.)
However, the important thing to remember is that it
wasn’t Bernhard who said Austria was still full of Nazis,
it was a character in his play Heldenplatz. And while
everyone assumes Bernhard meant every word as his
own, those words are part of a whole that, as J.J. Long
explains in his book The Novels Of Thomas Bernhard:
Form And Its Function, demands to be experienced not
in isolation as preferred by the culture-vultures, but in
real time. If this is done, irony leaks into the hyperbole
and all attitudes become unstable, even irony. In effect,
even after death, Bernhard still performs, refusing to
become a museum piece. The man himself remains a
mystery. So what, in fact, did Thomas Bernhard think?
Who was he when alone, no longer dancing before the
appalled Viennese bourgeoisie? These are questions for
a biography.
But don’t get your hopes up. As Honegger’s subtitle
indicates, there is a plea of mitigation. She says
her book is a “cultural biography”; as much about
Austria as about Bernhard. While this is disappoint-
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ing, it is also understandable. Most correspondence is
unavailable, and friends do not say anything particularly
intimate. In fact, the one clear sexual revelation
doesn’t alter the image of a performer: Bernhard
liked to masturbate in front of a mirror! We’re told
this on page 10, so it’s all over pretty quickly. Instead
of a chronological narrative, we’re given themes in
which Honegger makes frequent (and wearying)
digressions into cultural history and their relevance
to Bernhard, such as the notion of ‘Heimat’, and the
significance of the theatre in Austria.
In connection with the latter, Honegger rightly makes
much of Bernhard’s staging of his experience. In his
compelling memoirs (written in five short volumes but
collected in English as Gathering Evidence), Bernhard
recalls events through the eyes of his younger self while
he (the younger self) is also observing or reflecting. He
observes his younger self observing from a vantage
point separate from the ‘action’. One observation point
leads to another and then another. We might see this as
a prime example of Chinese-box Postmodernism where
all facts are as hollow as the next, but in Bernhard’s
memoir the gnawing question of origin is always there.
The facts are plain: Bernhard’s father abandoned his
mother before Thomas was born, and died during the
war years in mysterious circumstances; he either killed
himself or was murdered. He never met his son. Bernhard
was later punished by his bitter mother who saw
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her humiliation in the inherited features of her boy. No
amount of virtuoso storytelling and opinionating could
prevent the author from being thrown toward the bitter
facts of his birth, and its consequences, much as we
wonder, whilst vomiting, what we had eaten to cause it.
Bernhard’s early life was also blighted by the Nazi
era. He saw at first hand the terror of Allied bombing
raids on Salzburg. Barely a teenager, death closed in
from all sides. And after the war, when he tried to make
his way in the world as a trained singer, he was struck
down with tuberculosis after working in freezing conditions
in a grocery store. In hospital, with his lungs full
of breathtaking sputum, he was given the Last Rites.
Miraculously, he survived when all around were dying.
Honegger says he wrote the memoir as a record of his
victory over that death and the attempts at metaphorical
suffocation by his upbringing in particular, and Austrian
society in general. Victory was the result of a decision
to become himself, to live despite all that suffocated
him, even though it was futile. I say “futile” because
all that suffocated him also provided the oxygen. It
is no coincidence that, despite the oppressive details,
there is a sense of freedom pulsing out of the pages
of Gathering Evidence. Later, the existential energy
of Bernhard’s neurasthenic narrators will also emerge
from this outrageous, paradoxical act of will.
Perhaps it because Bernhard provides the most useful
guide to his life that Honegger does not attempt to
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take us through the minutiae of his daily existence. Yet
while the analysis is very interesting, one longs for that
minutiae. Recently, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on
Bernhard revealed that his record collection consisted
almost entirely of the 19th-century Romantic repertoire.
One might have assumed this great Modernist
would have preferred Schönberg and Webern, Bach
and Haydn over Schubert and Brahms. Apparently not.
(Curiously, this is similar to Beckett). I don’t recall
Honegger mentioning anything like this. Nor does she
mention the novel Bernhard had sketched out before
his death. She prefers to skim over the surface, taking
what is necessary for her themed coverage. When it
comes to Bernhard’s sexuality, for example, there is an
exhausting bout of Freudian analysis arising from his
father’s absence and his mother’s maltreatment. It is
unconvincing only because it is so persuasive. Actually
the same is true of the opinions expressed by Bernhard’s
narrators. Perhaps Honegger is having a laugh as our
brows sweat over the complexities of Oedipal anxiety?
I would like to think so. In the rest of the book, Freud
gets barely a mention. It is very odd.
It is also vague. We don’t get a definitive answer as
to whether Bernhard was hetero-, bi- or homosexual.
Honegger says he “came between couples”, which
suggests one conclusion, but what she means is that
both sexes were drawn into an ambiguous relationship
with the writer. It’s a living example of Bernhard’s
084
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elusiveness, and proof of nothing else. Another is the
one major relationship outside his family. It was with a
woman 39 years older than himself. She was a widow
who befriended Bernhard when he was a young writer.
She provided a home and material support when he
was struggling. He called her his “Lebensmench”
(Lifeperson); a word he invented. Understandably,
Honegger doesn’t have much to give us on the details
of this partnership. All windows are opaque. The same
is true, more or less, for other areas of his life. Indeed,
Bernhard is a phantom in his own biography.
J.J. Long takes a firmer route by concentrating on
the novels. Bernhard, he says, was “a writer of considerable
diversity, profoundly concerned with the
problems and potential of storytelling.” Originally
a doctoral thesis, The Novels of Thomas Bernhard:
Form And Its Function uses the technical language of
Narrative Theory to understand the unique qualities
of Bernhard’s writing. Reading it requires a high level
of patience and concentration. Moreover, it leaves
the lengthy quotations in German untranslated. This
is regrettable as those most likely to be drawn to the
book – Germanless Bernhard fans – will be hampered.
Presumably the costs involved are prohibitive. Still,
even monolinguists can gain a good deal from what’s
left. Whereas Honegger bizarrely accuses Bernhard of
being a solipsist – someone for whom the world is
merely a projection of their own mind – Long stresses
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the ‘narrative strategies’ and ‘hermeneutic sequences’
employed to undermine such narrow interpretations
of Bernhard’s monological prose.
For example, he writes that the reflective form of
the great, valedictory novel Extinction allows “an
excavation of the past even as it moves forward into
the future.” The novel’s narrator fires at familiar targets
– particularly the repression of the Nazi past – even as
he himself succumbs to the same temptation to repress
the facts of his own life in order to resist the impending
extinction of the title. Indeed, the targets are not only
familiar but familial. Long shows how most of Bernhard’s
novels – like his memoir – are concerned with
“transgenerational transmission” (that is, inheritance).
The narrator’s family consists of ex-Nazi parents, both
sad and monstrous people, whom he loves and hates in
equal measure, as well as grotesque siblings who have
not resisted the legacy of repression. As the eldest, the
narrator inherits the family’s country estate in darkest
Austria when the parents are killed in a car crash. As he
also feels that he has not got long to live, he decides he
must return from his sunny life in Rome to redeem the
legacy. We don’t get to find out how he does this until
the final page. As he goes forward to do this, he reflects
on why it is required.
Yet the reason why the narrator’s predicament compels
our attention, and gives us pleasure, is his spirited
unwillingness to complete the task. He is forever delay-
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ing the end in both the action as described (stalling outside
the gates of the estate) and in the act of storytelling
itself (spinning variations of anecdotes and opinions).
Long says these delaying tactics are achieved through
“embedded narratives” and “retarding elements”. As a
successful doctoral candidate, ‘pleasure’ is not an issue
for him, but for those of us who turn to Bernhard for
this reason, it is interesting to note how these techniques
create an experience similar to the reading of
a thriller or detective novel. In those genres, pleasure
comes from the growth of mystery and suspense before
the inevitable denouement.
Extinction is similar in that one reads to find out what
happens next. However, the distinction is that the thriller
cannot reproduce the same pleasure on re-reading.
A new story is required every time. Extinction on the
other hand positively demands to be re-read in order
to enjoy that delay again and again. In fact it becomes
more enjoyable as we join with the narrator repeating
stories and opinions in order to delay our return to the
mundane world. Unfortunately for him, the delay has
more serious import for the narrator. For a time, we
feel more alive even if our noses are ‘buried in a book’.
This is the great problem and potential of storytelling.
Long’s analysis, which is richer and more complex than
I have space (or patience) to detail, manages to elucidate
Bernhard’s method and highlight his remarkable
technical achievement. One cannot go away from this
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book and still believe, as so many do, that Bernhard is
merely a ranting egoist. Those who already know better
will perhaps understand more clearly how Bernhard
maintained his high-wire act, though we would still
like to know more in physical detail.
In one brief insight to his working process, Honegger
quotes Bernhard as saying he wrote “with full commitment”;
his entire body took part in the creative process.
Perhaps this is why he preferred to call his novels
“prose texts” as this suggests a script for performance.
Indeed, Bernhard’s many plays are not greatly different
from the novels. It seems Bernhard himself felt most
alive when writing, like an actor on stage even at his
writing desk. Honegger observes that each work was a
reassertion of that early decision to live. Appropriately,
some way into Extinction, the narrator reflects on the
frustrated lives of those stuck in small-town provincial
misery from which he, the narrator, had escaped. He
says they fail to better themselves, to “get away from
their real selves” because “they lack the intellectual
energy, because they have not discovered the intellect
– the intellect around them or the intellect within them
– and have therefore not taken the first step, which is
the precondition for taking the second.”
So, we might assume that in writing, Bernhard got
away from his real self. But “full commitment” means
he did it with his mortal body as well as his intellect.
Despite his early escape from death, Bernhard was al-
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ways seriously ill. He expected to die before reaching
50. His half-brother, a doctor, claims to have kept him
alive for an extra ten years after that. Mortality was an
over-riding theme and writing was at once the escape
from death’s imminence and its enactment. Barthes’
Death Of The Author was more than a concept to
Bernhard. In fact, in a blessed piece of minutiae, Honegger
tells us one of his favourite games was “playing
dead”. It’s a nice idea to think of the novels as the
place were Bernhard plays dead for us. Nowhere else
is he more alive. �
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Review [published June 2004]
Maurice Blanchot: Nowhere Without No
Stephen Mitchelmore
Not half way through the year but already a book has
come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it – the
book of the year.
I am aware that there is something desperate about
such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty
time with an evasive monument. That is the nature of
monuments after all. The bigger the monument the
more it evades – hence the respect given to a new 800
page novel spanning generations, the collected works
of a writer or a definitive biography of a tyrant. Yet the
book I’m holding is a fragile 53 pages and is published
by a small press in Sydney, Australia.
Nowhere Without No is, ironically, a collection of 13
memorials by translators, academics and poets (sometimes
a combination of all three) in honour of Maurice
Blanchot, the French novelist and philosopher, who
died in February 2003, aged 95.
The introduction by editor Kevin Hart explains the
title. It comes from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy in which
the poet writes of “a space that has been freed from
ordinary time” as experienced by children, animals and
the dead:
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It is always world
and never nowhere without no:
that pureness, that unwatched, which one
breathes and
endlessly knows and never wants. But a child
might lose himself inside the quiet and become
shaken. Or someone dies and is.
For near to death one sees that death no more
and stares ahead, perhaps with a beast’s huge
glance.
Blanchot’s gift is to reveal to us how literature is also
nowhere without no. His work pursues writing to where
it disappears into this space, as it separates itself from
the reader and writer. Hart reminds us that Blanchot
wrote (in the third person) of his own experience of this
separation as he faced a firing squad in 1944. Waiting
to die, there was:
“a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of
beatitude (nothing happy, however) – sovereign elation?
[…] In this place, I will not try to analyse. He
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was perhaps suddenly in invincible. Dead – immortal.
Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for
suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal
or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death
by a surreptitious friendship.” (from The Instant Of My
Death, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg)
The shots didn’t come; he was told to run and thereby
regained a life where, from then on, he writes, “the
instant of my death [was] henceforth always in abeyance”.
Later, he discovered that a manuscript had been
taken from his room by enemy officers believing it
to contain military secrets. Instead of the death of the
author, there was the death of the text.
One might say: but this is written in the third person;
it is either fiction or Blanchot is writing about another
person – perhaps literature itself. That lost manuscript
certainly has the convenience of fiction, standing for
the agency and meaning as it withdraws. However,
such a distinction is impossible. By writing in the third
person, Blanchot emphasises the distance inherent to
such reminiscence – itself already literature, already
intimate with death.
Ten years later, Blanchot’s The Space Of Literature is
saturated with this experience:
- to write is to break the bond that unites the
word with myself.
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
- to write is to withdraw language from the
world.
- to write is to surrender to the fascination of
time’s absence.
- the writer never reads his work. It is, for him,
a secret.
- in the solitude of the work … we discover a
more essential solitude.
- art is the power by which night opens
(trans. Ann Smock)
Throughout this extraordinary book, Blanchot traces
the impact of the night on the work of various authors –
Rilke, Mallarmé and Kafka in particular. If, for Kafka,
“there exists only the outside, the glistening flow of the
eternal outside” what does that mean for his world of
expression, of escape, of liberty that is writing? The
question is part of the work itself. In this way, reading
Blanchot is frustrating: there is at once the assertiveness
of the phrases quoted above and a resistance to
actually saying anything in the usual manner. His assertions
serve to obscure what was previously clear.
Rather than offering an alternative to, say, a Freudian or
Marxist reading of ‘Metamorphosis’, Blanchot reveals
how each reading has to make a leap over the abyss.
For the reader, it is intoxicating, yet almost impossible
to then put to use. Lydia Davis – pioneering translator of
the récit Death Sentence – says she can follow the argu-
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ment line by line yet summary is resisted. “Somehow
the experience of reading had to take place moment by
moment”. This resistance, she finds, is experienced by
most other readers. It is not a criticism.
Charlotte Mandell – translator of The Work Of Fire
and The Book To Come – recalls how she felt a need
to write to Blanchot to thank him for the silence in his
words – for the revelation of the space. Her gratitude
then is not for the man himself but for his absence,
such is the perversity of his gift. Mandell doesn’t say
whether he replied – though others report replies of
exceptional courtesy and concern. Only Jacques Derrida
– in the address given at the cremation – tells of
the man himself: brief meetings in a university office
throughout which Blanchot wore a gentle smile, and
then breathless on the phone toward the end. He seems
ghostly even in life.
One wonders how much this effacement contributes
to the unique aura of his works? Not much, if the attempts
to imitate him are any guide. The poet Jacques
Dupin writes that in Blanchot’s fragmentary writing:
“his speech yielded a conductive wire of an extreme
delicacy in search of the ultimate meaning, that which
was well beyond one’s grasp and which indicated
from very high up how to pass over the precipices,
how to master the turbulence and the proliferation,
of the forces of dislocation that exhaust the text, that
strangle the voice.”
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While Blanchot’s prose can be said to be poetic –
and Dupin is surely right to detect a “demanding poet”
behind the prose – it is not flighty and impressionistic.
The silence of the words is achieved by the extreme patience
and attention to the weight of words – a patience
frequently expressed in doubt. Blanchot’s disciples
have a remarkable confidence to use key word and
oxymorons that appear throughout Blanchot’s work
– passivity, sovereign relation, forgetfulness without
memory, the impossible real, motionless retreat, purposiveness
without purpose – in the assumption that they
automatically plumb the depths as they do in Blanchot.
Curiously, they don’t. As Blanchot himself wrote: “Desire
of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge,
knowledge of desire. Let us not believe that we have
said anything at all with these reversals.”
The merit of Nowhere Without No is that, unlike so
much Blanchot-related material, it doesn’t strain to
say too much. Such is the silence brought by death
perhaps. The latter also means the distance between
the author and his work is foregrounded, if only in the
reader’s mind.
Michael Holland emphasises the distance in a remarkable,
two-page analysis of science fiction. The
genre, he says, necessarily “hangs back from thinking
the totality of what it projects – which is to say
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total transcendence in the here and now”. He means it
denies mortality. And that means such transcendence
is pure violence: “Sci-fi is thus essentially nihilistic”
because it cannot accommodate bodily death on the
level of its narrative. He urges us to read and re-read
Blanchot in order to hold off such nihilism. This is
how we can learn from Blanchot. There is no need to
adopt his style. Blanchot himself did exactly that in
his own learning.
Mark C. Taylor remarks on Blanchot’s neglected kinship
with an earlier enigmatic philosopher-writer: “It
was … Kierkegaard” he writes “who first realised that
philosophy can be itself only by becoming literature;
and it was Kierkegaard who insisted that the only way
to be truly in the world is to withdraw from it.” Taylor
asked for a meeting to discuss it but got a note saying:
“Though I might wish it otherwise, the conditions of
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my work make it impossible for us to meet”. Still, he
confirmed to Taylor that Kierkegaard was indeed a secret
sharer. He helped Blanchot find his own way. This
collection, modest in size and character as it is, offers
Blanchot as a guide to us, placing the emphasis firmly
on the writing:
“I have long thought that some things are so intimate
that they can never be said but must be written. Writing
does not merely create distance but also allows one
to draw closer than any spoken word. This closeness
must not be confused with presence. Writing brings
the remote near by allowing presence to withdraw. The
lasting lesson of Blanchot is that withdrawal opens
up the space-time of desire whose absence is death.
Though he has been taken from us, he will continue to
give what is never ours to possess.” �
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Feature [published June 2002]
Maurice Blanchot: The Absent Voice
Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot
There are many remarkable facts about the long life of
the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot.
The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-
War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis
during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that
is similar to, but more significant than, Pynchon’s and
Salinger’s; his deep influence on more famous French
thinkers (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze). And,
finally, in this list, his return to public life to oppose
French colonialism in Algeria and then to support the
May 1968 student uprising, during which he drafted
pamphlets released by those opposing General de
Gaulle’s autocracy.
But to concentrate on these facts, relevant as they
are, would be to ignore what Blanchot offers, which is
a return to the fundamental mystery of literature. That
is, why do written words have so much power over us,
yet also seem completely estranged from the world
they supposedly refers to? When we say that literature
takes us to ‘another world’, we say more than we might
imagine. It is an asymmetry that Blanchot presents to
us relentlessly. “There is an a-cultural aspect to art and
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literature which it is hard to accept wholeheartedly”
he says. In this age of shortcuts, in which the value of
literature is judged by how well literature effaces itself,
so that the asymmetry is denied, avoided, denounced
even, Blanchot’s resistance makes him, in my opinion,
one of the most important writers.
In my opinion. What is that worth? The question of
authority – mine, Blanchot’s or anybody else’s – is the
invisible centre of our cultural ideology. We all know
that Liberal Democracy is based on choice; each individual
is free to choose and each individual’s choice is
as good as any other’s. So, when I write in my opinion,
I remove all weight from the judgement. The complete
opposite is equally valid. Despite this, we still make
definite choices in what to read, watch or listen to,
as if hoping, despite everything, for something more
than nothing. The act of choice itself speaks of a need:
for nourishment, entertainment or distraction, or all
three combined. But we have little guidance on what
and why to choose. Perhaps the recent proliferation
of award ceremonies and prize competitions for each
art form is no coincidence: the award-winning novel,
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the platinum-selling album, the blockbuster movie.
We want a guarantee of value. Each offers a mitigation
of one’s apparently random choice. At the same
time, however, we know, like a General Election, it is
meaningless. Nothing changes. Such is the totality of
Liberal Democracy.
Worse still, the condition has a retrospective affect.
Nothing escapes its scything action. History is flattened
too, shorn of meaning. Even critiques of the condition
become just an opinion under the smiling curve of the
scythe. Blanchot does not propose an answer. Rather,
he looks at how this condition might have arisen, offering
in the process a startling revision of our understanding
of what literature is. Might the asymmetry of art
and world be what makes it vital and important? In a
short essay from 1953, published in a new translation
by the Oxford Literary Review, Blanchot goes back to
the beginnings of modern thought to investigate this
possibility, specifically to ancient Athens, and Socrates’
preference for speech over writing.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates says that speech has the
guarantee of the living presence of the speaker. One
can ask questions and receive answers; there is always
the movement of dialogue with those involved always
mindful of truth. In dialogue, progress is possible.
On the other hand, written words can only maintain a
solemn silence: “if you ask them what they mean by
anything,” he says, “they simply return the same an-
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swer over and over again.” The philosopher links this
to religious superstition, when Greeks listened to “the
sacred voice” emerging from a stone or the stump of a
tree. Blanchot compares this to the silent confrontation
with written words:
“Like sacred language, what is written comes from
no recognisable source, is without author or origin, and
thereby always refers back to something more original
than itself. Behind the words of the written work,
nobody is present; but language gives voice to this
absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the
god himself is never present in his words, and it is the
absence of god which then speaks.” (trans. Leslie Hill)
If, as Blanchot says, the voice of the divine and the
voice of literature are comparable, they are effectively
indistinguishable, thereby doubling the threat to the
human project represented by Socrates. What can be
done if the oracular voice develops an alternative outlet
in literature, luring truth into “the abyss where there
is neither truth nor meaning nor even error”? Blanchot
reminds us what was done: “both Plato and Socrates
are quick to declare writing, like art, a simple pastime
which does not jeopardise seriousness and is reserved
for moments of leisure”. Of course, Socrates went on to
pay with his life for his commitment to the more serious
matter of debate. And while his sacrifice remains
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emblematic of our notion of the freedom of speech, his
dismissal of writing and art sounds very familiar, very
now, particularly to anyone searching for truth in art.
We can see the correlation between Postmodernism (no
truth, no meaning), popular culture (no error), and the
ancient philosophers’ dismissal of art. It is attractive as
there is another correlation, perhaps the most important:
both are also liberations. In each case, freedom is
granted to those previously enslaved to truth. Writers
can let their imagination run wild; there is no comeback.
Instead of celebrating or lamenting this development,
Blanchot considers the silence of the gods revealed
in the written word. He wonders what it is that
disarms Plato and Socrates so much that they deny it
is even relevant, and compels us, their descendants,
to fill the empty space with reductive theories: social,
psychological, post-colonial. For a possible answer,
he turns to Heraclitus, the first poet-philosopher,
pre-dating Socrates, the first rationalist. In one of
his enigmatic fragments, Heraclitus says the oracle
“neither speaks out nor conceals, but points”. From
this Blanchot deduces that the “language in which the
origin speaks is essentially prophetic.” However, he
clarifies the final word:
“This does not mean that it dictates future events, it
means that it does not base itself on something which
already is … It points toward the future, because it does
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
not yet speak, and is language of the future to the extent
that it is like a future language which is always ahead of
itself, having its meaning and legitimacy only before it,
which is to say that it is fundamentally without justification.”
(trans. Leslie Hill)
It does not base itself on something which already
is. This could be the cry of the opponents of the kind
of literature that does not engage with current events
or familiar social relations, and where the style,
language and subject matter – or lack of it – resists
the utility of common understanding. Is modern
literature, then, prophetic?
The nature of the question means the answer cannot
be stated as such, only experienced. The moment it is
answered, the language of the future is negated and
drawn into Socrates’ dialogue of utility. However, this
is not to distinguish experience and literature. Contrary
to popular opinion, literature is intimate with daily experience.
Blanchot puts it this way:
“Upon the background noise constituted by our
knowledge of the world’s daily course, which precedes,
accompanies, and follows in us all knowledge,
we cast forth, walking or sleeping, phrases that
are punctuated by questions. Murmuring questions.
What are they worth? What do they say? These are
still more questions.” (trans. Susan Hanson)
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We don’t experience the world without this murmuring,
a kind of voice-under codifying and animating
an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of
our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainmentdistraction,
drugged socialising, or plausible theories
of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot’s unique
attunement to these murmuring questions – to what
resists the Socratic demand – which distinguishes his
work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it
within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness
of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking
news of the moment, he asks certain questions that
emerge from the experience of reading the book itself.
This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel
Beckett’s trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The
Unnameable. Here is a book that has no justification.
It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of
polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming
power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to efface
the author with the usual means of the suspension
of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal
free fall. Blanchot asks, “Who speaks in Samuel
Beckett’s books? … Who is the tireless ‘I’ who seems
always to say the same thing?” At first, the answer
is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this
deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel’s
terrible dynamic.
Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of
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cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent
mother’s room. This is the usual displacement of the
author’s own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in
his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another narrator,
Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own
story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says
this a “slightly disappointing” allegory of the author’s
search for something more original than itself. Beckett
is having fun with the conventions of the novel – which
is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work.
Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassuring
presence like normal characters in a novel speaking
through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us
from what Blanchot calls “a greater threat”.
That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone’s
death would provoke the “ultimate disaster which is to
have lost the right to say I”. Malone is bedridden, having
only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables
him to turn his room into “the infinite space of words
and stories.” He tells stories – a simple pastime – to
fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for
farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism;
everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:
“All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand,
to begin to understand, how such creatures
are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding.
Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less,
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mistakenly. Night, storm and sorrow, and the catalepsies
of the soul, this time I shall see that they are good.
The last word is not yet said between me and – yes, the
last word is said. Perhaps I simply want to hear it said
again. Just once again. No, I want nothing.”
And so on, until Malone dies. Well, almost dies,
we’re never quite sure, for how can death occur in
a first-person narrative? The Unnameable begins
without his support for the stories. So really, it cannot
continue.
It continues anyway. And according to current
understanding, this is where ‘the real’ author should
reveal himself, the one ‘behind the scenes’. Again,
it is no coincidence that when producers of ‘Reality
TV’ proclaim that nothing is hidden, they nonetheless
rely on spin-off books and DVDs promising details of
‘what really went on’ – endless promises of a definitive
intimacy. The Trilogy, on the other hand, doesn’t. In
The Unnameable phantoms and visions encircle a consciousness
stuck in an ornamental jar at the entrance to
a restaurant. Words circle on the page too, stumbling on
without even the relief of punctuation. For Blanchot,
this is the “malaise of one who has dropped out of reality
and drifts forever in the gap between existence and
nothingness, incapable of dying and incapable of being
born.” As readers we undergo:
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“[an] experience experienced under the threat of
impersonality, undifferentiated speech speaking in a
vacuum, passing through he who hears it, unfamiliar,
excluding the familiar, and which cannot be silenced
because it is what is unceasing and interminable.”
(trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)
This is the language of the future. It is “a direct confrontation
with the process from which all books derive”:
language itself. By asking the simple question of
who is speaking in the Trilogy, Blanchot reveals how
Beckett reveals language as a form of death, a place
where we meet the limits of subjectivity. In reading
the Trilogy, we confront the anonymity at the heart of
communication, and thereby the limits of our power
in the world. Liberal culture sees this as good up to
the point where we are taken to another world (“transported”
as so many naive readers put it, neglecting the
recent history of the word). Beckett’s Trilogy exceeds
this point. It exposes us to the infinite within the confines
of novel. The author’s great achievement is to
take us to the brink of complete breakdown and yet to
stay this side. To declare his work ‘absurdist’ or that it
‘mirrors the breakdown of religious belief’, as might
be heard wherever Beckett’s books are discussed, is
unwittingly re-inhabiting what is the novel is always
in the process of vacating. This suggests why the Trilogy
has never been accepted into our culture in the
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same way as, say, Joyce’s Ulysses.
[Note: Blanchot’s essay on Beckett, ‘Where now?
Who now?’ can be found in The Sirens’ Song: Selected
Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel
Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in
Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage in a translation
by Richard Howard. However, both are long out
of print.]
Blanchot’s own novels, such as Thomas The Obscure,
have a kinship with Beckett’s work; there is constant
dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though,
they are closer to Kafka’s; there are many mysterious
landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both
these authors’ humour. His narratives are often insipid.
However, in the late 1950s, the critical writing and the
fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new
genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis
developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive
essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are
occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed
to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a
novel appeared called L’attente l’oubli (Translated as
Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative
of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room.
Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from
the rest by a printed diamond or star. The spaces disrupt
straightforward narrative progress.
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“She was present, already her own image, and her
image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself.
When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten.
“Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remembered,
sometimes remembering the forgetting and
forgetting everything in this remembrance.” (Trans.
John Gregg)
In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says
that novels “show the possibility of what it is like to be
someone else”. Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication
to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through
that someone else. As we begin to understand the person
in front of us, the understanding takes his or her
place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative.
No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Perhaps
significantly, McEwan’s latest novel Atonement is
about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like
language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning.
In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists
compulsive interest.
Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than
continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps
he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes
in on itself. When infected with another however, not
only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature
itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in
The Law Of Genre – a close reading of Blanchot’s very
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short novel The Madness Of The Day – this infection
is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre
is basically the effacement of that infection. As the
dynamic of absence and presence that frequently drives
Blanchot’s writing, the direction was necessary.
In a remarkably condensed early essay, ‘How Is
Literature Possible?’ this movement is prefigured. In
it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan
about the opposition of what we might call traditional
and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing
cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition)
has dominated our conception of literature for 150
years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo’s rejection of
rhetoric, Verlaine’s denunciation of eloquence and
Rimbaud’s abandonment of “old-hat” poetry. Sixty
years on, it hasn’t changed that much. Think of Martin
Amis’ famous “war against cliché”, J.G. Ballard’s
expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of
ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair
with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett’s Trilogy could itself
be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tradition.
Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two
camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense
with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled
auto-da-fé and so destroy the complacent world of
bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to
prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness
can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular
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richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does
is to point out that in order to do either requires a
scrupulous attention to language. “Whoever wants to
be absent from words at every instant or to be present
only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied
with them so that, of all authors, those who most
eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e.
using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most
exposed to this reproach.” Does this, then, destroy all
hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according
to those who do not consider themselves writers, because
writing is a work of distance from the ‘ecstasies’
of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot:
“It is the same for those who through the marvels
of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing
themselves from all literature. For having wanted to
rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to
touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics
that they meant to reveal, they finally contented
themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics
as they would conventions and forms that they
complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the
visible framework and the foundation of their works.
[…] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics,
religion, and emotions take the place of technique and
language. They are a system of expression, a literary
genre – in a word, literature.” (trans. Charlotte Mandell)
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The experience of these systems of expression,
however, allow a chink in the armour of literature. For
readers, the opposition of cliché and a virgin phrase
is perhaps more troublesome; all phrases become
‘monsters of ambiguity’ when we read. How are we, as
readers, meant to know what an author intended? It is
precisely this ambiguity, the unremitting silence of the
oracle, Blanchot argues, that gives literature the tense
dynamic demanded by the rebels. In effect, literature
is a vampire rising in the dark to suck the blood of
life to continue while the victims are all dependent on
the vampire myth for their living. And the other way
around. Blanchot takes us a long way in this short
essay, yet leaves us more or less stranded as before:
authenticity and originality are present, it seems, only
in the inscrutability of their presence.
If literature relies on comforting demarcations of
genre to proceed, yet demands a naked openness to the
world for the sake of authenticity, then the appearance
of the printed star in Blanchot’s work is perhaps not just
a typographical convenience. It is used again in Blanchot’s
famous late work, The Writing Of The Disaster,
a book made up of fiction and philosophical fragments
designated by the same symbol. An appropriately obsolete
definition of the word disaster is “an unfavourable
aspect of a star”. The star helps us to grasp the possibility
of meaning, which we return to at the end of each
section, while at the same time threatening break down.
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The book is in part about how one deals with disaster,
the trauma of past disasters and the knowledge of the
disaster to come, specifically our own death, where the
very concept of ownership is meaningless. It is also
about the disaster of language itself:
“The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the
very possibility of experience – it is the limit of writing.
This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which
does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing,
is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or
extratextual.” (trans. Ann Smock)
That is, the disaster itself writes. To write is to partake
of the disaster, no matter how much one asserts oneself
through opinion or style. Blanchot’s impersonal voice,
so cold and yet so seductive, abides in the disaster.
To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to
confide in a guest – the other, the reader – entrusting
yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation,
and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.
We are absent from one another as the disaster writes
through communication. We are absent even from ourselves
as the I belongs not to itself but the disaster. We
saw this emerge in Beckett’s Trilogy. Yet it is precisely
this absence that Blanchot says can bring us together.
The paradox is essential: language gives voice to this
absence. And art, where the play of the paradox is
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central, remains the only medium for the possibility of
a community, even if it is a community of those who
have no community. The growth in sales of intimate
self-portraits and revelatory biographies of public figures,
and the pathological obsession with personalities
and gossip, masquerading as debate, betrays how liberal
democracy functions by removing an effective public
life. As in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, Big Brother,
or at least one’s biographer, is always watching. It is
a political environment that has redefined politics into
a means of how best to smooth the way for corporate
oligarchies to manage capital. We need art to raise the
absent voice of a community denied by a misreading
of absence. It requires the reader to trust, despite the
apparent emptiness of art:
“Reading is anguish, and this is because any text,
however important, or amusing, or interesting it maybe
… is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to
cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not
comprehend.” (trans. Ann Smock)
The artist faces a similar challenge. Blanchot says at
the end of his essay on Beckett:
“Art requires that he who practices it should be immolated
to art, should become other, not another, not
transformed from the human being he was into an artist
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with artistic duties, satisfactions and interests, but into
nobody, the empty, animated space where art’s summons
is heard.” (trans. Sacha Rabinovitch)
But how is this done? The fragmentary work, perhaps
the apogee of 20th-century Modernist literature
and philosophy, is Blanchot’s approach. Its refusal to
insist on narrative or theoretical completion, as well
as, in the process, weakening the voice of authority,
means both reader and writer are constantly moving
toward understanding, toward what is absent, yet
never assuming the nihilism of no truth, no meaning
even as it encroaches on each clearing. Blanchot
calls it, speaking of Kafka but also of himself, “a
combat of passivity – combat that reduces itself to
naught”. Some might see this as needlessly equivocal
or pretentious, preferring, instead, the apparent
clarity of rational progress, even if this, in the end,
leads to the bland relativism of modern culture. Yet in
his essay from 1953 with which we began, Blanchot
says that art’s summons might not have been lost
on Socrates – the great emblematic thinker of positivistic
Western culture. He might also have sensed
the empty, animated space pulling like a black hole
at the Light of Reason. While he accepted the only
guarantee for speech was the living presence of a
human being, he also “went as far as to die in order
to keep his word.” �
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Feature [published March 1997]
Body Modification: Remake, Remodel
Nick Clapson enters the strange world of body modification
Tattoos. Piercing. Dreadlocks. Body Art. What is the
world coming to?
It would seem if we follow the lead of much of the
popular press a minority of degenerates are corrupting
our sensibilities, and so we are doomed. However, if
you take the time to stop and look a little longer, it seems
more likely that we actually want to be corrupted. And
this desire is not new.
There is currently an interest in utilising the body
as a site on which we can extend our creative and
psychic desires, and as such has found itself reflected
in a growing literature of its own. One such book is
Housk Randall and Ted Polhemus’ The Customised
Body. As Polhemus and Randall make clear from
the start, the impetus for this fashion in changing
the body is the influence of ‘traditional peoples’.
Other cultures, which have been traditionally termed
primitive, have a history of altering their physical
appearance for either religious and social purposes.
And it is this that the later-day primitives of our culture
are trying to tap into. Thus the piercing or the tattoos of
these ‘modern primitives’ are legitimated through the
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idea that they are some how more pure, honest and true,
because they reflect the more positive aspects of these
so-called ‘simpler’ societies. Attempts are also made
to suggest a lineage for the use of such body art by
the examination of early pre-Christian practices in the
west. However, though this may provide a precedent
for body art, it is more pertinent to question why such
practices fell from fashion for several thousand years,
and in turn, why they would have any pertinence now.
Much is made in the literature that surrounds this
particular subculture about the need for self-expression,
and the desire to feel part of a community. The subtext
of such an argument is that a certain sector of our society
feel that they can not adequately express themselves
through the more conventional means of visual expression,
be it clothes or art. The notion that other cultures
will provide us with a visual language that will release
us from this impasse is, however, not new. In art alone it
can be traced back through the major canon of western
artist, through Jackson Pollock, Picasso, Gauguin, Van
Gogh, and back into the depths of the 18th century at
least. What is new is the transition from the canvas and
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the gallery, to the body and the street. This phenomena,
I feel, must be a result of the late 20th century, or dare
I say it, Postmodern, belief in the breakdown of artist
as unassailable god. Instead, the artist can be any man,
and as a result of the comments of Duchamp and the
whole Dada movement, art can be anything.
Also written into the unspoken creed of this grouping
is heart-felt belief that there is a direct correlation between
the increase in the isolation in our post-industrial
society and the desire for primitivism. It is almost as if
that as God was once usurped by science and money,
it too shall necessarily collapse, but his time under the
force of this new godless mass who have found belief
in some crypto-primitivism and a new hybrid culture.
As such fashion, in all its manifestations, is the tool
by which these new pioneers of culture seek to bind
themselves: through self-expression one finds those
who hold similar beliefs, those who have similar aims.
However, there is also an ideological factor to be
considered when we consider modes of dress or rituals
of display. It can clearly be seen that the members of
this ‘fashion’, or as Polhemus describes them, members
of a “style tribe”, are generally of an underclass which
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wishes to identify itself. If, then, the disenfranchised
and the disheartened give up on conventional codes or
symbols they are signalling to the dominant culture,
and to those who have not yet made that step to identify
themselves, that they are out there on the edge. And
more importantly, if they are not happy to be there, as
some surely are, they are issuing a rallying call to join
them, as there is surely safety in numbers.
The way the people who operate in this cultural
space are in actuality, however, very different from
the theory. The more you look at this phenomena
the more you realise that there is no one answer, but
instead we are able to perceive a set of answers that
make up a larger question. That question I believe, is
along the lines of this: we have a culture, one which
is straining at its edges. The more diverse the world
becomes, or we perceive it to become, the more it
pulls at its seams. The more we question it and pry
at its secrets the more the stitches loosen. What we
really want to know is, where do we go from here?
The answer I think is found in this new interest in
primitivism, and especially in the ways in which we
can combine it with ideas of the future. �
102
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Review [published June 2009]
Jorge Luis Borges: The Book Of Imaginary Beings
Ben Granger
Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change
your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones
is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry
in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like
‘Funes the Memorious’, ‘The Library of Babel’ and
‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, Borges explores the
concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge,
a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging
paths of reality which make possibility itself endless.
In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps
unique in literature – the master poet-in-prose of the
infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes
within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dreamlike
and factual, making the fantastical real, and the
prosaic extraordinary. In ‘Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote’, he describes a man re-writing Cervantes’
work, word for word, without reading the original, and
makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable,
and beautiful. In ‘Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ another
world – one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure
thought – floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia
to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us ac-
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cept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The
highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality
and perception are rendered malleable and human, the
arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe.
In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which
make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of penning
a compendium of descriptions of fantastical beings
– dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an
obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably
be seen as treading water at best in most other authors,
– and in the case of most other authors the accusation
would probably be accurate. You can’t readily imagine
James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales
for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What
could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work
from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista
on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of “he could
write about anything and make it wonderful” – the old
“I’d listen to him sing the phone book” cliché – for
Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the
format of a scholarly researched compendium allows
him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowl-
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edge and learning which pepper his writing, while the
subject of the fantastic complements completely the
strange insights which inform his vision.
The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the
unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salamander.
What Borges brings to his description of these
creatures, which many readers may think themselves
already familiar with, is the learning which marks much
of his best work (‘research’ is somehow an inadequate
word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly.
European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient
Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric
Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually
surface and recede as the moment demands.
Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated
with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of
medicinal qualities: “Buddhists affirm that Dragons
are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many
concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred
cipher exists to express their exact number.”
The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient
Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded
to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they
fixed the intervals of the fiery bird’s visits as once every
1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity
vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn’t just lie
down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into
Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches.
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These witches were also known as Norns or Fates, grim
augurs of the future the memory of which survives in
the weird sisters of Macbeth.
References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius,
and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men
of the day considered all these ‘imaginary beings’ as
‘real’, believed in every bit as much we today accept
the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on television
screens. These beings informed the landscape
of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of
history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who
shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches,
their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather
more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house,
the Harpies, who we learn “wielded weapons of gold
– lightning – and milked the clouds” , all these dwelt
in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense
than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked
among them.
While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and
fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and
show us far more of the subjects than we could have
imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with
narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is
Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4,000
eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on
the back of the great fish Bahamut, “All the seas in the
world placed in one of the fish’s nostrils would be like
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a mustard seed placed in the desert”. Under Bahamut is
water, and under the water darkness, “and beyond this
men’s knowledge does not reach”. The uncanniness of
cosmology is brought to us with a quiet aplomb, as it
is with the “Fauna of Mirrors” where we learn that the
people of Canton believed another hostile world was
behind every reflective surface, the people of whom are
enslaved into copying our actions for now, but whose
turn to rise will come, and whose uprising will be
heralded by … a rogue yellow fish you may see in the
mirror that shouldn’t be there. That such a potentially
risible, laughable notion instead haunts the memory is
further testimony to Borges’ mastery.
Occasionally the book has guest spots from other
authors – mainly Kafka and C.S. Lewis – which, good
as they are, simply serve as contrast to the particular visions
of the grand editor. Elsewhere in the bestiary we
meet Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel and Aniel, a four headed
creature surrounded by rings full of eyes, as envisioned
by the prophet Ezekiel. One of its heads is that of an
ox, one of man, one of lion, and one of eagle, “each
one went in the direction of its face, so imaginable as
to be uncanny.” Borges is adept at describing things,
which, in terms of physical human description, cannot
be described. When H.P. Lovecraft does this, he horrifies.
When Borges does it, he simply entrances.
With all this talk of mystique and wonder, you
could be forgiven for thinking this book a po-faced
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thing. Not at all. Borges is always aware the things
he describes are as ridiculous as they are sublime,
and a wryness sometimes peers through. Of the
strange visionary Swedenbourg, who wrote with incredible
vividness of the celestial beings he claimed
to know – “as the English are not very talkative,
he fell into the habit of conversing with angels and
Devils.” When the allegorical nature of some of the
creatures is a little too heavy handed for his tastes, he
is not above mocking it. (The hippogriff is the combination
of a griffin and a horse which denotes the
impossible – Luis notes the Greek scholar Servius
somewhat milked this by inventing the ‘fact’ that
griffins must hate horses). Sillier creatures like the
Squonk, (of Aboriginal folklore, which cries to itself
until its body disintegrates) appear with a mordant
dryness. The entire ‘Fauna of the United States’ are
of a somewhat facetious nature, such as the axehandle
hound – shaped like an axe, and which eats only
axes. But what Borges never does is pour contempt
on the fantastical – he knows its importance too well.
Borges knew that while the religions may be wrong
in their claim to give us morality, they and their myths
have more far more valid claim in giving us a sense
of wonder, helping the impossible peer in, making
life, rather than existence, possible. It is in no way a
betrayal of rationalism to find a sense of transcendent
mystery and awe in the Moslem Jinn (people
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of fire, as angels are of light and men of earth), the
Jewish Golem, (a kind of ancient clay android), or the
angelic hordes of in the Christian-informed visions
of Swedenbourg. They don’t exist, never have, and
countless crimes have been committed in the names of
the theologies which conjured them up. But these are
beings without which the world of the mind, the world
BUY Jorge Luis Borges books online from and
we inhabit, would not exist. Part of Borges’ very real
genius is to illuminate these corners of what makes us
human, with a wisdom so acute it meets itself round
full circle so as to appear childlike, an endless loop of
wild possibility.
Not bad for a book about dragons, witches and
gnomes eh? No, he’s not bad this Borges. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2001]
Angela Bourke: The Burning Of Bridget Cleary
Robin Askew
Enjoyed The Blair Witch Project? Then immerse yourself
in this engrossing and exhaustively researched true
story from late 19th-century Ireland. The facts of the
case are relatively straightforward: in 1895, 26-year-old
Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary.
Local rumour claimed that she had been taken
by fairies to their fort of Kylenagranagh, from where
she would eventually emerge riding a white horse. But
when her badly burned body was recovered from a shallow
grave a week later, her husband Michael, father,
aunt and four cousins were arrested. The subsequent
trial made headlines even in the London press.
According to contemporary newspaper reports,
it emerged in court at nearby Clonmel that Michael
Cleary had believed his ailing wife was a witch. He
gave her herbs from a local herb doctor and then, with
the aid of other male members of the household, held
her over the kitchen fire and called upon her to say, in
the name of God, that she was not his wife. Finally,
she was stripped of her clothing, knocked to the floor,
covered in paraffin oil and allowed to burn to death
while being watched by eight relatives – six men and
BUY Angela Bourke books online from and
two women. Some of them remonstrated with the husband,
who insisted that it was not his wife who was
burning but a witch, whom he confidently expected to
disappear up the chimney. When this didn’t happen, he
wrapped a sheet around the charred body and buried it
in a dyke near the family home.
There is, of course, a great deal more to this tragic
tale than these stark details convey. Dublin-based
academic Angela Bourke brilliantly sets the case in its
social and political context, revealing its significance
at the cusp of change between an older world of folklore
and fairy-belief and the new age of literacy and
industry. While Bridget and her husband were childless
and newly prosperous, their jealous peers were not, and
the instigator of her unpleasant demise was a toothless,
limping, increasingly isolated patriarch whose waning
power over the fearful countryfolk derived from
his ample knowledge of fairy-forts, ghosts, and other
supernatural malarkey.
Equally significant in the reporting of the Cleary
case was the ongoing Home Rule movement. The
Unionist press seized on this outbreak of ‘barbarism’
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as evidence of the locals’ lawlessness and consequent
unsuitability for independence; elsewhere, it
simply fanned the flames of crude anti-Irish racism.
Bourke’s exemplary scholarship teases out many
such strands from this horrific case, evincing a
powerful empathy for all involved. Occasionally,
BUY Angela Bourke books online from and
you may need to remind yourself that these people
burned a woman alive, or stood around and watched
while it happened, but by the time you put the book
down, you at least have a greater understanding of
how this gruesome event came to pass and why it
still reverberates to this day. �
108
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published April 1997]
Michael Bracewell: England Is Mine
Jason Weaver
Before his passport read “novelist”, Michael Bracewell
learnt his trade on the first rush of British style magazines.
Much of Bracewell’s work from the mid-80s
could be found in Arena, sibling to The Face but with
a considerably higher brow. Sadly, the magazine got
crushed in the publishing stampede that has instead
brought respectability to top shelf reading. After the
breakdown-and-prozac cocktail of his last novel Saint
Rachel – a moving meditation on mental distress
– Bracewell has resumed his former cultural commentary.
This time the canvas is broader. England Is
Mine purports to have a thesis but is more a collection
of essays masquerading as a whole, short stories rather
than a novel. His subject is pop. Does this mean pop
as in popular, Pop as in Art, or pop as in Top Of The?
Well, Bracewell would argue all three. I’m not sure
he’s right.
He claims that domestic art of the 20th century is always
fighting for its own piece of England: “The rebels
in England’s Arcady … are defending the Arcadian
values that they love, passionately, from what they recognise
as abuse at the hands of self-serving tyrants and
BUY Michael Bracewell books online from and
their occupying armies.” According to Bracewell, this
Arcady satisfies the “need within the psyche of Englishness
to look back to an idealized past…” Nostalgia
is apparently intrinsic to our national culture.
The title of the book comes, presumably, from a line
in The Smiths’ ‘Still Ill’. Bracewell’s cause finds a
strong ally in Morrissey, who sang “A rush and a push
and the land that we stand on is ours”. Morrissey is the
conscience of lost Arcady: beleaguered, revolutionary,
pastoral and drenched in the perfume of the past.
England Is Mine, however, wants to plot the entire
century through these tinted spectacles. The opening
chapter deals with the Culture And Anarchy paranoia
of the new century and, in doing so, attempts to lay
foundations. We drop in on Wilde and Waugh and Forster
to see if they think Old England is dying. We take
in a movie, a War and hear a few poems and songs. It
isn’t always clear where we are going. I mean, who
invited Enid Blyton to this party? Bracewell might be
excellent on the fine details but his sense of overall
design is rickety. Whenever his theme comes up, it
seems frankly incidental.
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Surprisingly, this hardly matters. The book becomes
fascinating, at least to this reader, once it puts the
Penguin Modern Classics back on the shelf and turns
on the stereo. In fact, Bracewell writes in such a way
to make Art seem a mere rehearsal for pop’s Great
Performance. Bracewell gives both time and energy to
what he clearly loves the best – his record collection.
What is most engaging about England Is Mine is
Bracewell’s insistence on treating pop music as an
explosive and pensive form, often most thoughtful precisely
at its most physical. By the time the Mods arrive,
Bracewell is really guzzling the gas. He casts them as
smart Modernists rather than the retro-obsessed, tentwearing,
hairdrier-riders of public imagination. The
Mods are asking what others are afraid to:
“The question, in fact, was a massive: ‘Who am I?’
The male sensibility in English pop, as it built its muscles
through Mod, was both a reaction against adolescent
(even teenage) conformity, and a belief that pop could
be a spiritual quest through the boredom and hostility
of modern English life in search of self-knowledge.”
Bracewell is right in there with his subject.
The gulf between academia and getting down with
The Kids is a whole language apart, which is why ‘quality’
journalism often lacks credibility. It requires deftness
to pull the trick without the cards all falling from
your sleeve. Bracewell manages it better than most.
He rarely attempts to score points with the cred police,
BUY Michael Bracewell books online from and
nor does he bring his laptop to the disco. Reynolds,
Hebdige and Marcus, on the other hand, those other
professors of pop, make their appeal to the eggheads. It
doesn’t often translate. When Bracewell’s taste and wit
compound, the results can be dee-liteful. Of The Cure
he says, “The soul is not so much bared as reduced to
wandering around in its dressing gown.”
By dealing with relatively unacknowledged areas
of ‘prole art’, the book proposes a convincing alternative
to the received canon, pop or otherwise. Mark E
Smith’s output is seen as an oeuvre and reverence is
paid to largely forgotten individuals like John Cooper
Clarke. As such, the approach fresh and fruitful. The
entirety doesn’t quite convince the jury, but the mixture
of art forms does have the advantage of comparing pop
with literature favourably, a rare admission.
There are a few factual errors, the most ironic of
which is accidentally renaming Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look
Back In Anger’ as ‘Sally Can Wait’. Noel Gallagher’s
tempering of the Angry Young Man could have become
the lynch pin in a discussion of Britpop’s conservatism
and the oversight is uncharacteristic of Bracewell’s
normal attentiveness.
Unfortunately, England Is Mine closes as weakly
as it began. The 90s are telescoped into a single
chapter. The passion that illuminates the finest parts
of the book has withered. The verdict is that the
needle has stuck, repeating the same phrase with
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decreasing clarity. We exist in a kind of shopping
Arcady in which Bracewell consigns the 90s as “an
age of cultural sampling”, the victory of the past
over the future: “there is a sense in our archival
condition, as nostalgic consumers scavenging for
bargain rarities of the past, that a car boot sale can
double as a faculty of Cultural Studies.” This is a
mistake; the future is created from the ruins of the
past and every music that Bracewell celebrates has
hastened that destruction. It is not nostalgia but the
reverse, a hatred of the past that attempts to confine
us. We want to break it into little pieces and build
anew. This is as true for our decade as any other.
BUY Michael Bracewell books online from and
From The Who’s reworking of the Union Jack to
The Chemical Brothers’ smash-and-grab approach
to sonic material this has been pop’s prime attraction.
At its best, pop (and Pop) has no reverence for
the past and is hell-bent on the future. In this sense,
pop will always be intrinsically Modernist.
Michael Bracewell’s book reminds us that England
really is ours for the taking and, for that, it is a stimulating
read which does ample justice to its subject. It
is possible for a book to fail utterly in its designs yet
still be a thorough success. I found England Is Mine
an inspiration. To demand anything more would just
be greed. �
111
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2005]
Charlie Brooker: Screen Burn
Ben Granger
I judge newspaper TV reviewers by a very high standard
indeed. Why the hell shouldn’t I? Let’s face it, this
is the dream job any human being can have. Sitting,
scratching your mardy arse whilst staring out the flickers
that would bombard your face anyway and getting
paid for it. Jesus! They have to be very entertaining
indeed to offset the sickening pang of envy I get while
reading one. They rarely live up.
For a few years Jim Shelley aka Tapehead in The
Guardian Guide managed to fit the bill. He was witty,
acerbic, mostly accurate, and excreted his metaphysical
bile duct in a pleasingly over-the-top manner. When
he left in 2000 I was deeply worried (what a dangerous
existence I lead!) Which safe trendoid would cast their
yawnsome ‘wry eye’ over events now? But thankfully
they didn’t choose the safe option, they chose Charlie
Brooker. And he made Shelley look like an amalgam of
Dennis Norden and Jenny Bond.
Put aside any justifiable lit-snobbery you may have in
thinking that a collection of TV reviews cannot make a
great book. In 99% of cases you’d be right, but not here.
Brooker’s is a glorious, venomous vision which blasts
BUY Charlie Brooker books online from and
acidly over modern society with TV as its launch-pad.
Brooker’s writing persona is self-deprecating,
neurotic, unpretentious, and above all seriously pissed
off at the televisual shite shovelled his way. He
has a real genius for brief, cutting description which
highlights its victim as expertly as it destroys them.
In the main, his scatological, violent epigrams simply
speak for themselves. Rarely as gut-churningly
offensive as his XXX rated old web site TV Go Home
they are probably more effective and hilarious for their
relative subtlety (we’re talking very relative here.) Try
these for size:
– On The Generation Game: “Jim scampers onstage,
winking and twitching like a man with a fish-hook
stuck in his glans, and immediately launches into a
comic pantomime of such awkward, ill-conceived
clunkiness, you can’t help but wonder if its been
scripted by a human with a laptop or a dog with a
Fisher Price Activity Centre.”
– On Davina McCall: “It’s like her brain’s been
spooned out and replaced by a rotating glitter-ball.”
– On a Steps TV special: “Ho ho ho, we all love Steps
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really don’t we? No. They’re not harmless fun; they’re
slapdash trash. H is not a lovable scamp: he’s a blank
eyed glove puppet with half the charisma of a discarded
ping-pong bat rotating slowly in a pig trough full of
rainwater. This represents untertainment at its finest
and will be warmly welcome by anyone who regularly
sits in front of the box with a loaded shotgun in their
mouth, trying to pluck up the courage.”
And, more obscurely, on finding a DVD boxed
set of Planet Of The Apes with Charlton Heston disconsolate
before the Statue of Liberty on the cover:
“What next? A special edition of Seven in a commemorative
case mocked up to resemble Gwynneth
Paltrow’s severed head?”
Childish? Yes. Hilarious? Well I think so. If it was all
fantasy disembowelling of nob-ends in colourful language
Brooker could be dismissed as a one-trick pony,
even if that trick is astonishingly amusing. But there’s a
real vision at work here; stinging, jaded eyes surveying
a Boschean hellscape of demonic coke-crazed execs
ladling poisonous gruel down the mouths of uncomplaining
dribble-mouthed buffoons.
And yet for all the apparent misanthropy there’s a
cornered and bruised altruism at work here too. Brooker
recently wrote Nathan Barley with the immortal
Chris Morris (the best thing on telly despite what the
nay-sayers nay-say) but while the latter is the greater
comedic and satirical talent (not just of Brooker, but
BUY Charlie Brooker books online from and
of everyone) Brooker actually has a humanity about
him seemingly absent in our latter-day Swift. For all
his violent imagery, a longstanding vein in his work is a
contempt for the kind of sniggering nihilists who watch
genuine suffering for kicks. This can perhaps be seen
best in his dissection of some feeble ‘comedy awards’
programme door-stepping Les Dennis about his breakup
with his wife:
“Perhaps I’m a wuss but I think harassing the
heartbroken for funnies is disgraceful. Clearly the
producer, Dan Clapton, believes that human suffering
equals big guffaws, so if anyone has any first-hand
accounts of him having his heart broken, send me the
juicy details and I’ll reprint them here so we can have
a good hearty ho-ho together. After all, it’s just a bit of
fun, right Dan? Right?”
Of course it helps that I agree with most of what
he says but even when describing his affection for
David Dickinson (ugh!), Monarch Of The Glen (gah!)
and, worst of all Friends (arrrggghhhhhhhhh!) he’s
still funny. I dare say he’d have a few words to say
about my soft spot for Judge John Deed too. We’re
all entitled to like some shite in our lives. Indeed,
it’s Brooker’s recognition of this, the simultaneous
fascination and revulsion he has for the likes of Pop
Idol and Big Brother that makes it very far from some
highbrow denunciation of TV as a whole. This is a
guy who loves the possibilities of what television has
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to offer, and an enjoyment for even the more throwaway
aspects of the medium. The Hulkish anger at so
much of what he sees is akin to that of a neglected
lover. How dare his great love try to fob him of with
such crap, not well made crap but the likes of The
Generation Game which “drops off the low end of the
stupidity spectrum, to a point where the human brain
is incapable of interpreting its signal”?
I have only two criticisms of this excellent book.
One: unlike the columns from which they are taken
they are each headed by one of the most memorable
BUY Charlie Brooker books online from and
phrases from the piece; “A fascist chorus line”, “An aging
thundercat”, “A pastel sketch of a lonely duckling”
“Do spiders live alone?” This has the effect of spoiling
the surprise within and is uncalled for, like trailers that
spell out the plot of a film. Two: I’ve read all of them
before and remember them all anyway. But unless
you’re a sad bastard Guardian reader who has stored
all your old Guides together in a handy binder; you
should still get this to have the brilliance of the writing
to hand. And if you’ve not read him before; just buy it;
you’re missing out. �
114
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2006]
Charles Bukowski: Born Into This
Pedro Blas Gonzalez
Charles Bukowski was a solitary man and a courageous
writer. Without daddy’s money to deliver him into high
places or the protective cloak of a godfather, Hank
forged his way through the world with the sweat of his
brow and the calluses on his hands.
Perhaps the greatest compliment that his readers can
afford him is that of being a self-made man. Publishing
houses, literary magazines – or otherwise – and
academic circles are all rife with opportunists, an
unlimited supply of self-promoters, bigots and moral
Lilliputians. These are all fine examples of the relative
and selective relativism that defines the radicalism of
late-modernity. Bukowski felt the wrath of all of these
entities throughout his life. But he had talent, and the
rest, as they say is history.
Bukowski’s story is one of genuine sentiment, determination
and a stubborn will that refused to become
objectified by the resistance that the world offers all true
visionaries. He went at it alone. An underground, cult
writer who did not readily attain popular acclaim until
the last decade of his life, Bukoswki’s body of work is a
testament to the working man – not the straw one that is
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and
prostituted as a ‘theoretical’ entity – but rather one that
like Eric Hoffer, actually worked for a living. He was
born in Andernach, Germany in 1920.
When asked when he realized he was a writer, he
answered: “Nobody ever realizes they’re a writer. They
only think they’re a writer.” He began writing when
he was 13 years of age. He continues, “I just found a
pencil and I started writing. And I filled this notebook
full of words. This was the first time the mechanism
exposed itself.”
Bukowski: Born Into This is a documentary that
follows the trajectory of the writer’s life until his
death in 1994. Directed by John Dullaghan, what we
encounter in this film is an unadulterated and edgy
look at the writer of Post Office, Women, Factotum,
and Hot Water Music.
The film follows Bukowski through the 1940s as he
travelled the country gathering life experiences, through
his initial attempt at journalism in LA City College, his
poetry readings at San Francisco’s City Lights Poets
Theater, the women in his life and culminating with the
final months of his life. We witness Bukowski reading
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a poem that touches any sentient person’s nerves: “It’s
not the large things that send a man to a madhouse.
Death, he is ready for, or, murder, incest, robbery, fire,
flood. No. It’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to a madhouse…”
Whatever we come to think of the man, he readily
acknowledges that the best compliment he can receive
is that he was “a good duker.” Taking the exigencies of
life in the chin, he never backed down from adversity.
In the end, we are reminded that, “What Matters Most
is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.” This is the
true-to-life wisdom of a man who lived out a very difficult
dream, and one who never came close to benefiting
from a silver spoon.
The film takes the major events of Bukowski’s life
and makes them bare. The viewer is treated to the
story of his first published works in Harlequin Magazine,
its editor, Barbara Fry later becoming his wife.
We also witness the hard times, how he lived on one
candy bar per day. We come upon Bukowski’s resolve
never to quit even though he encountered rejection
after rejection. Consider his wisdom as displayed in
his poem ‘Oh, Yes’: “There are worse things than being
alone but it often takes decades to realize this …
and there’s nothing worse than too late.”
We also laugh along with Bukowski’s stubborn
refusal to be anything but his own man. His struggles
with the now well-known US Post Office job that he
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and
took in 1952, his having to work evenings, and his
will to write during the morning. Admirable too, is his
relentless will – sending out poems daily and getting
rejected – while he earned his living as a truck driver.
Bukowski was rich in worldly knowledge. Consider
his well-adjusted, don’t-tell-me-bedtime-stories
understanding evident in the following lines: “There
is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the
average human being to supply any given army on
any given day. And the best at murder are those who
preach against it. And the best at hate are those who
preach love. And the best at war – finally – are those
who preach peace…”
Bukowski had very little patience for laziness and
people who do not meet the difficulties and demands
of life head on. He disliked hippies because of their
bourgeois, pampered refusal to get their hands soiled
by work. His upbringing during the depression had
given him a sound appreciation of the toil that people
who do not cut corners undergo throughout their lives.
Bukowski suffered a great deal from the resistance
offered him by naysayers. His Notes Of A Dirty Old
Man columns first appeared in a little magazine called
Open City. When this folded in 1969, he continued his
column in the LA Free Press.
Finally achieving critical and financial success in
the last decade of his life – his major break coming
at the hands of John Martin, publisher of Black
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Sparrow Press – we are privy to the life changes
that the older writer underwent. No longer as tense
and defensive as he once was, Bukowski now seems
more introverted, the wisdom that he earned now
being something that he kept to himself. At the end
of the documentary we do not see the effects of his
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and
alcohol-induced profanity any longer, as that persona
is slowly put to rest. In the end we watch him dealing
with leukaemia, which eventually took his life – an
episode that his readers will easily recognize in the
interplay that takes place between “lady death” and
the protagonist in his last novel, Pulp. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2004]
Julie Burchill: Sugar Rush
Ben Granger
Julie Burchill: donchajusluver??!!
Well, yes, actually. There once was a time when I
agreed with all my Graun reading friends “that bigoted
bitch” should be humanely shot, but it seems a very
long while ago now. My obsession with her venomous
vitriol went from fascinated horror to perverse admiration
in the time it took to squeak “public hanging” in a
Bristol accent. Every Saturday when I dutifully bought
my Graun it was, without fail, to her page I turned
first. Whilst my comrades sang “ding-dong the witch
is dead” when she left last year, I felt Id lost a limb, an
itchy, scabby limb perhaps but a part of me nonetheless.
I wasn’t going to follow her to The Times though.
Let’s not go nuts here.
Now I’m not one to “admire the candour” of ‘politically
incorrect’ columnists as a rule. Watching Richard
Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchens and Taki
being sodomised by chimpanzees whilst devouring
the bloated corpses of Paul Johnson and Simon Heffer
at gunpoint would be my dream reality TV viewing.
I’m an overpaid bigot, get me out of here! So why
my weak-kneed ardour for a woman unafraid to sing
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the praises of history’s greatest monsters (Thatcher
and Stalin) whilst occasionally drawing the ire of the
Commission for Racial Equality?
The short answer is the sheer energy, insight and wit
amongst all the shit.
Reading one of Julie’s better columns is to ride the
rapids. A violent tug of agreement here, a buffet sideways
into the realms of entertaining irrelevance there,
recoiling at the scathing extremism whilst simultaneously
entranced at its vicious and shameless perversity.
And along the way, just occasionally finding something
you may agree with that you never thought of before.
And yes, I do love a good wind-up merchant. Noone
can match her for sheer vicious spite. When she’s
massacring the vacuous world of celebrity it reminds
me of the old Day Today headline “Crazed Wolves In
Store A Bad Mistake Admits Mothercare.” And for
all the knee-jerk reaction, I was amazed to find how
frequently her targets deserved everything (or at least
nearly everything) they got.
The bourgeoisie, still dehumanising the workingclass,
but cloaking their exploitation under a silky
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Benneton-shroud of faux-progress. The ludicrous
irritancy of pontificating film stars. The moral, hypocritical
black hole of most journalism. The spineless
and simpering betrayal of New Labour and the ‘post
feminists’ (offering to remove their clitoris and voting
rights if they found the new era of relative equality
so awful.) She’d left most of her pro-Thatcher phase
behind by the time she’d gone to the Graun; this was a
brutal patriot-Commie bruiser. I found myself punching
the air in agreement (metaphorically of course, I
am a Graun reader after all), overjoyed that she’d hit
the nail on the head with far greater accuracy than her
more measured colleagues.
Of course I still strongly disagreed with vast
amounts of what she said; the death penalty, Israel,
Ireland, invading Iraq, paedophiles and the talent of
Gareth Gates springing most immediately to mind.
But even then my perceptions were challenged and
above all I was entertained. She could even ignorantly
defame my idols George Orwell and Mike Leigh
and I’d still lap it up. When she went into perversity
overdrive, calling for public hanging, and claiming
suicides should buck their bloody ideas up I just found
the middle-class outrage of those taking the bait on
the letters pages hilarious (bringing to mind one of her
classic put-downs “now, before you get out your pink
Forever Friends notepaper.”).
Basically, violently agreeing with about 40% of what
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she said and reeling at the rest was a damn sight more
edifying than vaguely nodding at 60% of what Polly
Toynbee puts out. I don’t read her Times columns,
and by all accounts she’s gone into manic pro-war,
extreme Zionist overdrive now, which even I might
find too much. But when I hear about her typically
savage dissection of the loathsome neo-snobbery of
those sniffing at “chavs” I still think “that’s my Julie!”
with a warm glow.
When it comes to her books though, even a fan such
as myself remains a sceptic. There was no way I was
going to read her hagiographies of Princess Di and
Beckham, no matter what clever class-conscious leaps
she was doing to laud her unworthy heroes.
And the fiction? I once read a chapter of Ambition
and found it pretty awful, an unconvincing English
take on Dallas and Dynasty, neither of which I liked in
the first place. I actually picked up Sugar Rush, Julie’s
lesbian-driven “first novel aimed at a teenage audience”
as a kind of aversion therapy. This is a woman who
now claims to support George Bush for God’s sake. I
needed to quell my ongoing crush for her perversity.
Surely this rubbish would put me off for good?
Sugar Rush tells the tale of 15-year-old Kim, a
middle-class girl at a private school, who is forced
into the nearby rough-as-shite comprehensive due to
the financial hardship of her stuffy dad who’s been left
holding the kids by her feckless mother, herself still
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trying to live her teens in her 40s.
Left behind by her hard-nosed friend “Saint”, Kim
falls under the thrall of the head hard-bitch at the new
comp, Maria Sweet, aka “Sugar”. Sugar is rough as hell
and live as wires, and drags the prissy yet uncomplaining
Kim into her world of ecstasy, vodka, dance music
and sarky-faced rebellion, offering her a tang of freedom
she’s never tasted before. Doubt-ridden, fucked up
Kim falls for her sexually as well as spiritually. Their
relationship crashes up and down, side-to-side on the
winds of teenage abandon. But can such a bliss-ridden
union of opposites last?
What strikes you while reading this is that Julie can
only write one way, and that every word in Sugar Rush,
no matter who’s speaking it, is very much her own.
Indeed the three main characters are a split triumvirate
of Jules herself, every bit as cute as the ones in the
Catholicism and Freudianism she so loathes (actually I
don’t know she hates Freud, I’m just guessing).
Kim is the shy, intelligent, doubting, deep, wry
side; Sugar the spirit of wild working class abandon
that Julie so admires; while mum Stella is the shallow,
formerly working-class but lavish spending strumpet
who thinks of no-one but herself and has abandoned
her kids, the very demonic caricature of Julie herself
the Daily Mail laid on her. Believe me, I’m not playing
slap-dash Raj Persaud here (that being a tautology
anyway); it’s pretty damn plain.
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All the familiar themes from her columns crop up,
sometimes down to the same wording. The sanctimonious
futility of well-meaning liberalism (the
private school and the comp come together in farcical
‘exchange’ sessions, a pseudy drama troupe resonant
of the one from The League Of Gentleman displaying
to braying teens the evils of homophobia); the sad
atavism of ‘the family dinner-table’ and its depressing
middle-class accoutrements (the means by which her
sad dad tries to hold the family together); the hypocrisy
of anti-racists who hate the poor (ex-best friend Saint
is a bourgeois black who despises “white-trash” Sugar
with a passion); the joys and contradictions of lesbianism,
higher education being for losers, the fetish for
Soviet-Army uniforms (an art project of Kim’s gone
wrong) … Christ, she even manages to shoe-horn in
her newfound passion for Lutheranism (don’t ask…)
The result, is, I’m afraid to say, a lot of fun. Yes it’s
tacky and obvious at times, and yes both the dialogue
and thoughts in the book really do stretch credulity
occasionally too, ringing pretty false as realism. This
is Julie talking, and no-one talks like that, not even
Julie in real life. The over-excitable metaphors are
endearing and evocative at times, but sometimes they
really make you cringe.
But you know, much to my regret, I’m not a teenage
girl; and that’s the audience for this book. And I really
do think they’ll love it, like the young mum I saw
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avidly reading it on the bus the other day (I’d better
stop there, lest Julie lead a misguided anti-paedo lynch
mob against me.) The thing about Julie’s voice is that
it is indeed perennially adolescent, and this suits the
book perfectly. She still seems to be a lost teen aching
to shock the grown-ups.
Much has been made of the “explicit content” of
this book (not least by the cover), but in reality there’s
very little muck to be had here (there is one scene of
group sex, but nothing is described). But she brings the
bitchiness, the longing, the loneliness, the SHOUTING
to make your point that are all part of the teenage condition
to life very well.
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I won’t spoil the ending, but I must say I find it a
pretty terrible cop-out by Julie’s standards. A triumph of
middle-class safety against the working-class ‘other’.
You traitor Julie! What would Uncle Joe say?! But it
is I’m afraid to say … sweet, indeed Kim’s whole tale
resonates a certain empathy which brings a warm glow
to even to this jaded heart.
So, once again, I’ve been won over. What can this
evil woman, this “sociopath” and “moral cretin” (her
words) do to finally put me off her? Defend the images
of torture in Abu Ghraib? Oh dear, I’ve just heard she’s
already done that. Time for more soul-searching you
bad, bad boy. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published June 2005]
Julie Burchill: Hurricane Julie
Ben Granger collides with Julie Burchill over several bottles of wine to seek
out the dreadful truth on chavs, Stalin, Ariel Sharon and Morrissey
“Never meet your heroes; they always disappoint”
runs the old saying. Invited from my humble Lancastrian
abode down to the Brighton realm of the greatest
shit-stirring iconic hack of our times, I wasn’t so much
afraid of Julie Burchill not living up to her reputation as
living up to it too much. Would she be gentle with me?
If Julie needs an introduction, it’s tough knowing
where to start. Running away from her working-class
Bristol childhood at the age of 17 to scribble speeddriven
venom for the NME at the height of punk,
marrying and deserting Tony Parsons prior to queening
it over the Groucho journo set, skipping gaily from
highly paid column to spiky column in a variety of
newspapers across the land. Enraging the Left with her
hard-line anti-liberalism and some-time Thatcher worship,
the Right with her brazen pro-Soviet Communism
and hatred of the bourgeoisie, and everyone with her
particular and peculiar blend of narcissism, iconoclasm
and rudeness. Leaving second husband Cosmo Landesman
for an affair with Charlotte Raven, subsequently
shacking up with Charlotte’s younger brother to whom
she is now married. Etcetera etcetera.
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There’s no time for a biog here, but suffice to say
my longstanding admiration for the deliriously violent
punch of her writing, often despite myself, was why I
found myself here on the day. No I don’t agree with a
tonnes of what she says, but for me she has obtained
“Benefit of Clergy”, a phrase Orwell used about Dalí
(even though Julie hates Orwell too: worst offence in the
world in my book). This basically means offensiveness
is to some extent excused by how well it’s delivered,
and what’s behind it. But mainly how it’s delivered. It’s
what separates Jerry Sadowitz from Jim Davidson, and
South Park from the Sunday Sport.
Julie’s profile is higher now than for many a year after
finally breaking into the previously shunned medium of
TV. A Channel 4 adaptation of her lesbian teen-scream
novel Sugar Rush will be screened later this year, whilst
her typically pro-prole, contrary and acidly delivered
defence of the much maligned phenomenon of Chavs
on the eponymous Sky One documentary last February
slung a Molotov cocktail amongst the dinner party set
once again.
The journey down South is made all the more
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surreal for me by being stuck on the last leg in the
train from Euston to Brighton in the next carriage to
our glorious leader Anthony Blair, a month before
his phyrric election victory, who graciously smirks
over when I take a snap of him. I can’t stand the guy
but little plebby me feels like Alice In Famousland.
Weird, weird. I get to wander for too short a time
round the rather beautiful town of Brighton (never
before visited) with its poignantly derelict pier, until
finally getting the cab round to her spacious detached
home on the Hove border. Quick fag, deep breath,
down the huge garden into the valley of whatsits.
Julie answers the door with an imperious handshake
as she invites me to the lair. “You’re Ben? You must
come in,” intones the famous high-pitched quickfire yet
lilting Bristol burr. She’s half the size she was two years
back and looks lovely in her black and white ensemble.
I’d heard she was a nervy character around strangers,
but whilst her initial demeanour is slightly distant, she
is clearly at pains to put me at ease, even introducing me
to her fellow guests with the unnervingly gallant “This
is Ben Granger, the great writer from Spike Magazine.”
(Fuckin ‘ell!)
The guests are Gary Mulholland, music journalist
and author of This Is Uncool, Zoe Williams from The
Guardian (both in capacity of friends rather than interviewers),
her teenage son Jack, and her cleaner (and
bestest friend the world) Nadia. The Burchill abode
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has a brash décor of pink walls and tiger skin couches
which mirrors its owner exquisitely, as does the louche
sprinkling of bottles, ash-trays and smoke. Oh yes, and
the small Israeli flag atop the mantelpiece, given her
oft-avowed Zionism. Whilst I get my MP3 recorder
complete with my son’s kiddies mike together, I mention
my fellow train traveller which gets the surprising
response: “God, he’s sexy, innee? You’re a man, you
wouldn’t understand.” I also mention how attractive
I found Brighton’s bohemian Trafalgar Street. “God
I never go there. Full of dossers.” I mention a couple
of pubs I’ve stopped in (not mentioning I was there to
steady my awe-struck nerves) “I don’t really go to pubs
much to be honest with you. I don’t want to be the mad
woman sitting in the corner!”
Generous host to a fault, Julie even sends Zoe and
Nadia to the offie when I mention I’d like red wine
which isn’t on offer. When I finally fidgetilly set up she
directs myself and Gary to the house gym- now disused
and decorated by a large Cuban flag representing the
other great love of her ideological life, Communism
– to conduct the interview. Sitting cross legged on the
floor we embark.
So , how was writing for teenagers different from
writing her novels for adults?
“Well, I’ll be honest with you, the first novel I wrote
for adults was very successful but the other two went
right down the toilet. So it wasn’t like a choice to write
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for young people, I just thought no-one’s sitting around
waiting to hear from me in the adult world so let’s inflict
it on some other poor …”
Yes, but were you consciously writing in a different way?
“Oh yeah, yeah! You don’t have to try so hard do
you? There’s a certain reason why people who 20 years
ago would have been writing literary novels, like Gary,
like myself, aren’t doing it now. I think I’d fall at the
first hurdle. But my immediacy, my lack of education
which stop me from doing what Ian McEwan or [mutters
scornfully] Martin Amis do is part of what we love
about ourselves, and what suited a book like this … it
was very pleasurable and it felt very normal to do.”
Given your typically hard-line on paedophilia, did
you ever feel there was a tension in writing a lesbian
novel about 15-year-old girls? I’d heard there was more
sex scenes in it initially before they were cut out?
“Naaah there was never any real sex in it because
I thought that would be unbearably pervy and a total
contradiction of everything I stood for. Don’t go there.
Though for the TV show apparently she’s older, like
21 so they can make it a bit more hardcore. Is that a
horrible thing to say? No if it was kids it would be horrible
wouldn’t it? I’ve had no input whatsoever in the
programme so far but next week I’m going on-set. And
I’m looking forward to it.”
The drama is still to come but the documentary has
already been screened. Chavs was a classic Burchill
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column brought to life; one-sided, contrary, mixing
pop culture and high sociological comment with
humour and venom. Its subject was the eponymous;
the baseball capped, Burberry clad, gold jewellery
bedecked folk devils that walk down every high street
in Britain. The butt of every middle-class sneery joke.
As per often Julie has bloody mindedly found a devilish
cause to defend; a hate-figure for snooty Telegraph
toffs, Mail paranoiac patio-sniffers and Guardian
liberal snoots alike.
Asked about why this issue was so close to her heart,
the full ferocity of her anger really takes off. The turbo
Bristol voice takes off, hard in vowels, soft in tone,
ruthless in content.
“Now, I’m a very idle person and I’m very relaxed,
and my ideal dream is just to lie on the sofa all day
eating chocolates. But when I do get agitated and when
I do get a bee in my bonnet I DO go all the fucking
way. When I was told about things like Chavscum [the
website dedicated to promoting hatred of all things
“chav”] which I hadn’t known about, and the abuse
they were putting out, I’m afraid I saw red. It seemed
to me that the kind of people who are doing things like
Chavscum ten years ago would have been racists, and
would have been that loathsome and that disgusting.
Now they can’t be racists because of the CRE and certain
laws that have been passed – quite rightly. But the
white working class are now the only people you can
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fucking hate with impunity, and I felt I just had to raise
my fucking voice.”
It should be stressed there is no editorial trickery
involved in Julie’s broadsides here. This is simply how
she talks. Very, very fast too. The only other person I
can think whose words race along as fast as they think
is Patrick Moore.
“It’s so tempting to be lured in by the defence of
humour and irony. One of the worst things you can say
to somebody is they’ve got no sense of humour. If you
look at the personal columns, you’ll often see people
admitting that they’re ugly or not bright or fat – no-one
will ever admit to having no sense of humour. It’s the
final insult, the final thing no-one will admit to. But I
didn’t want to get the fucking joke. If there was a joke
I didn’t want to get it, just like I didn’t want to get it
when my parents were watching Love Thy Neighbour
and thought it was funny to call someone “nig-nog.”
Instinctively, I just thought it was disgusting. To me
laughter and great humour comes from taking on people
above you on the social scale.”
The documentary featured an extremely ill-tempered
spat with TV “personality” Vanessa Feltz, who
opined that her very worthwhile existence should not
be sullied by having to pay her taxes in supporting
welfare payments to such dread creatures. Really
though Julie, you were great friends after the cameras
stopped weren’t you?
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“I just wanted to punch her fucking face in! Listen,
I’ve got a friend who thinks al Quaeda have ‘got a
point’, I can sit with him and listen to that shit, I can
listen to taxi drivers being racist. But when I sit with
a middle-class person going on, I don’t care if it is a
kind of prejudice, I just wanna kill the fuckers and I
think you’ve got no right to say a fucking word, you
just don’t know fucking anything about anything. To
me, it’s not about race, there’s the middle class and
the working class; us against them. Well, there’s three
groups really but that’s the upper class who don’t count
cos they’re fucking retarded … but put a middle-class
person in front of me, I don’t care if they’re left-wing or
right-wing, talk to them for five minutes, and the filthy
fucking snob in them will come out.”
Even when angry she is increasingly at ease, and
warm in her demeanour. She doesn’t laugh much but
does grin mischievously from time to time. Possibly
libellous comments about La Feltz follow. But what
would you say to people who claim that chavs are only
a part of the working-class, and that criticising the
former is not criticising the latter?
“People say that to me trying to be nice, I always
say ‘Don’t do me any fucking favours!’ When someone
tries to differentiate between the deserving and
the undeserving working-class the black heart of me
cleaves towards the undeserving ones. My father was
a member of the deserving working-class, he ended
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up coughing his fucking lungs out for three years and
dying of tumours because of it. The working-class in
the old days kept their heads down, were so fucking
decent and wonderful, and it got them jack shit. Chavs
are there for a reason, because the decent way, the good
way, didn’t fucking work. The idea that after the break
up of the manufacturing industries and the disrespect
poured on the heads of the trade unions and everything
the working-class stood for that their would still,
masochistically, be this class of noble men and women
trudging on and on and on waving banners and singing
wonderful songs – WHY?! We’d fucking had enough.
We are what they made us! And they don’t like us being
like that because they know we’re tougher than they are
and they know we’ll win.”
Julie has gone into an impressively ferocious, literally
breast-beating oratory by this point, suddenly
breaking off to grinningly state “What am I shouting
at you two for, you didn’t fucking do it…!” She
digresses once more, expressing here near eugenic
belief in prole supremacy.
“Did you know there’s this thing called ‘the indestructible
nine percent’ in society? They’ve all got green
or hazel eyes, they can drink the most amazing amount,
and they’ve got this weird blood group called rhesus
negative. I’ve got all these three things and they are ALL
found amongst the labouring classes … listen would I
make this shit up?! How fucking mad do I want to look?”
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But in defending ‘chavs’ culturally, is this not a tacit
acknowledgment that the political fight for the proletariat
is lost?
“Naaaah, the fight cannot be lost, the fight changes.”
So to quote dear Lenin: “What is to be done” politically?
“I’m hoping to find out. What Marx analysed was basically
right, but it’s so rich and strange the way things
mutate. Who ten years ago would have predicted the
decline of McDonalds? Who 20 years ago would have
seen the downfall of all I believe in, with the Soviet
Union? But because of the strength and the numbers of
the working-class, both in this country and globally, we
will decide what happens in the end and it really won’t
be that bad.”
One of the main criticisms levelled at Julie is because
her extremes of position are so contrary to ‘accepted’
mainstream norms (pro-union yet pro-hanging, massively
xenophobic about the Germans and French
whilst showing a fierce anti-racism where black people
are concerned, pro-Soviet yet pro-Israeli) that she is
insincere and feigning them to shock. But while she
unquestionably fires forth her beliefs in as provocative
a manner as possible, hearing her talk about them
there is no doubt whatsoever in her sincerity. She quite
clearly really believes them. No doubt that makes it a lot
worse for many! Her passion when talking about ‘the
workers’ and socialism in particular is unquestionable.
I suggest that the success of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
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is a real international working-class triumph that is being
unsung. Julie initially suggests he is corrupt from
what she’s heard. I strongly disagree.
“I don’t know enough about Venezuela; I dare say
you’re right. But remember when whatsisname, Ortega?
The Sandinista leader was accused of molesting
his daughter, well ten years ago we’d have all cleaved
together and said she was lying, but, thank God for
feminism, how do we know that. I was brought up in a
Communist household, when I moved to London I met
Paul Foot and was briefly in the SWP, and the one thing
my dad the working-class Stalinist and Paul Foot the
middle-class Trotskyist had in common is they couldn’t
fucking look at themselves, see the bad in their side.
That’s what attracted me to people on the right for a
while, like Alan Clark. What a fucking cool man!”
She proceeds to launch into an entertaining and fairly
accurate impression of Clark fantasising about Russian
women in his infamously lecherous manner. Julie has
latched onto the theme of the Left denying its own
crimes now and, as ever, there’s no getting her off it.
“My dad taught me that you hide your own sin and
you don’t take yourselves apart; I’ve realised recently
that we’ve got to criticise ourselves before we can
start on anyone else. In that way lies strength. I love
Mr Castro and the Cuban revolution, and it’s achieved
so much; they can cure blindness there whereas they
can’t in America, but you go there and see 12-year-old
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
prostitutes; it obviously wasn’t meant to be like this.
And the things he did to gay people, though I dare say
he had a good reason … But to turn away helps no-one.
I really think the Left has to take itself apart before
anyone else, because we can, because we’re stronger
and more intelligent than the Right.”
There we are then, to reverse Groucho’s old maxim,
whether many on the Left want her or not – pro
Bush and Blair on the war as she is – that’s the club
she places herself in at heart. I can’t help but have
a tentative go here; what about her wonderful 2002
Guardian columns where she ripped “Princess Toni”
to pieces on a weekly basis due to his betrayal of the
Labour movement?
“That’s simple, Blair is a great war-leader, like
Churchill; useless in times of peace. Who would vote
for the poor sod after that?”
So you’re not taking away your criticisms of his domestic
policies, privatisation, sucking up to the bosses?
“I’ve never voted for Mr Blair and I don’t imagine I
will. [This interview was conducted shortly before the
2005 General Election] The last time I voted was for
the Socialist Alliance locally, and UKIP nationally, or
was it the other way round? I don’t even remember.
I’ve got nothing to hide.”
She repeats the highly entertaining story of how, on
her father’s death bed she vowed to defend the name
of his old hero Joe Stalin, only to be told by Bill “You
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ain’t been saying mad stuff about him have you girl?
He was a terrible man!”
So who are her all time heroes really?
“It sounds really mealy-mouthed, but the people who
no-one knows the name of; they’re the heroes.”
So your other heroes have disappointed you?
“I don’t feel disappointed because I’ve grown up,
very late in life, and I realise people fall short of things
for a reason as we’re all human. Like all the bad things
Mr Castro has done to gay people. The heroes are the
people we never ever hear of and that is the essence of
their heroicness. There’s a certain reason why people of
real quality don’t rise to positions of power. People like
my dad; who have nothing to prove. I’ve no element of
self-loathing but I do realise that part of my success is
just me showing off, and wanting to queen it over other
people, to be frank with you. When you get people like
Emma Thompson, Dawn French, Lenny Henry, the Red
Nose lot – unless you tied the fuckers down and wired
them up to a lie detector – and then you’d get it – you’d
never get them to admit that there was any element in
their desire to be famous other than them wanting to
help people in Niger. To me it’s the glory of being a
human being that we are a mixture of complete corruption
and the most shimmering, mercury-like goodness.
Of course there are some just purely evil people – like
Dido – and just purely good people – like Jordan. But
then there’s the glory and the black hearted corruption.
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
It just knocks you out sometimes if you think about it
too much. That’s why I prefer not to think about it too
much and watch Tricia instead. A great deal of my life
is spent running away from … my brain.”
In my review of Sugar Rush I presumptuously wrote
of the characters: “No-one talks like that, not even Julie
in real life”. I was in fact completely wrong. Friendlier
(to me at least), and with lots more swearing, but she
talks pretty much as she writes. I won’t let the Iraq war
go though, I’m catching the argument bug off her.
“Ben! Ben! What would you rather live under?!
Listen I was brought up as a Soviet Empirist. My dad
taught me to believe – literally – that American brains
were one third less the size of ours. It’s been a very
hard journey to lead me to support Mr Bush on this.
But I do feel that a struggle of the dimensions my
father saw, light against darkness, has emerged in the
Middle East. The Arab people deserve everything we
have. If that makes me a fucking racist then yeah. I
won’t make any exceptions for these filthy rich people,
the Saudi dynasty, or the Syrian Ba’athists who
call themselves socialists.”
But surely the idea that Bush is exporting democracy
to the Middle East is rather undermined when he lets
the CIA organise a coup against democratic Venezuela?
“One thing at a time Ben! When a Hugo Chavez
can emerge in the Arab world … I know about Allende.
I’m not idealistic about America. It’s a dirty
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massive beast. Of course they’ll attack democracy in
their own back yard. But – heavy the head that wears
the crown – when they stay out of wars we call them
filthy cowards – as my grandma used to say – if they
get involved, they’re imperialists.”
It’s nice arguing with Julie but I know I’ll never win,
and she graciously changes the subject herself to the
fact that her dad wanted to emigrate to Russia and her
mum to South Africa, the former for idealism, the latter
because “They got bungalows!” At heart Julie is a
patriot, and emigration is not the done thing.
“That phrase ‘whinging poms’ it comes from when
English people were encouraged to emigrate to Australia
for 20 pounds, and they came back, and they literally
cried for three weeks in relief, because they missed the
rain, and the dreariness. That’s the fucking greatness,
and the perversity of the English people for me. Every
perverse, dreary weird thing about our people.”
Changing the subject myself, I remark that Julie often
writes about Hollywood, and spends as much time
praising the greats of the past as she does slagging off
the stars of today. What’s the difference?
“In 30 years time, will a drag queen dress up as
Sandra Bullock? Don’t think so! Sorry; that’s facile …
my mother had no politics but what made her in a way
a feminist was watching Bette Davis films; seeing her
in Jezebel saying ‘Ah wiiill wear mah red dress’: the
idea of women behaving as they pleased, stroppily and
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
strongly. It was the only thing to watch back then and
weirdly watching them on a rainy day is a real part of
my Englishness. God I sound gay, I sound like Morrissey!
But anyway you don’t get strong women on screen
any more, a ‘tough character’ in films today is either
tough cos she’s hiding her neediness, or she’s a psychopath
… I don’t think I’m a ‘strong woman’, I hate that
patronising phrase, I think I’m a ‘tough broad’, that’s
what I used to see on screen which I never do anymore.
They’re either needy weedy vulnerable wickle things
waiting to be hugged – or total fucking looners.”
As was often the case of her columns I find myself
agreeing with something I hadn’t particularly dwelled
on. It’s true that Hollywood seems to stand still while
society moves on in a lot of respects.
“There’s a great book by Molly Haskell called
From Reverence To Rape and she shows how, just as
women were starting to assert themselves in the real
world in the 60s, that was exactly the time Hollywood
started to make films like Easy Rider, One Flew Over
the Cuckoos Nest, where women are literally either
bitches, whores or rapees. Joan Collins played a missionary
nun twice in the 50s! Not any more. Do you
think I’m like Nurse Ratchett?”
I get short shrift however when I suggest that Basic
Instinct is the height of misogyny. “Oh no, that film just
makes you want to go gay! Every girl likes that film
for a reason, it’s the first time they showed a lesbian
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as really attractive.” But also an ice-pick wielding psychopath?
“Yeah well, take the rough with the smooth.
As I said earlier ‘no-one’s perfect’” My suggestion that
Fatal Attraction is a misogynistic farrago is dismissed
too “No, I don’t think Fatal Attraction means anything.
The message is don’t fuck a woman who sits in a loft
playing Madam Butterfly, and don’t fuck Michael
Douglas!” Well, you can’t argue with that.
We’re all very drunk now (well I am anyway), so
I just bat random subjects up and let Julie take them.
First up is Ariel Sharon (readers of a sensitive disposition
may wish to skip the next paragraph).
“To me he’s the God that failed. He could have been
such a great man and he’s just a fucking pacifist now.
No – don’t leave it! Israel is the only country I would
fucking die for. He’s the enemy of the Jews. Chucking
his own people off the Gaza; to me that’s disgusting.
I’ve given you want you want; is that the ‘money shot’?
He’s a good man but he’s got to learn to stand by his
own people. ‘Cos no-one else will; Christ knows.” Julie
certainly gets into her stride when I bring up the sordid
subject of the Spectator sexual shenanigans which have
so dominated the headlines of tabloids and broadsheets
alike in recent months. (For the uninitiated, the proprietor,
editor and half the staff of the fusty old Tory journal
have been caught going at it hammer and tongues lately;
the former with our former Home Secretary).
“Well it all made me glad I live the life of a provin-
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
cial lady. Rod [Liddle]’s a great young man, he once
told me he applied for my old job at the NME, but he
was always known as a lothario. I know one woman,
a great friend of mine who thought he was so sexy she
waited for three hours in a Bournemouth Travelodge
on just like a promise – but she didn’t get none. Thank
God I’m not a woman so I don’t fall for him. Simon
Hoggart? What a dirty old man! Its always the quiet
ones isn’t it? When it comes to Kimberley Quinn … I’ll
say this and it doesn’t show me in a very good light …
I never thought I’d use the word ‘slag’ about anyone.
Me and my friends, we know prostitutes, we don’t slag
them off, but when it comes to her … we use it and God
it feels good! Poor Mr Blunkett; fancy doing that to a
blind man? Where was the dog? Must have been tied
to summat. That’s what I can’t stand; it’s the animals
that suffer in the end. But no, my friends have put it
around, fucking like sailors and shit, but they’d never
used that word before. But with Kimberley … It’s the
creepy fertility relay race thing that did it I think. She
just wanted to get knocked up. Desperate woman. She
just wanted some sperm race. Like an egg and spoon
race. Or a sack race. Or an egg and sack race – HA HA
HA!! Put that in Ben right??”
Didn’t you once write for The Spectator though?
“I did some book reviews when my friend Dominic
Lawson was editing. But then I’ll do anything for a Jew.”
Julie’s whirl of conversation swings one way to the
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next. Very friendly and complimentary, highly libellous
asides splatter the whole interview. Julie is no stranger
to the libel courts, but some of her comments will not
appear on Spike as none of us of course would like to
see this fine site shut down. One borderline accusation
about a satirist I adore leads to her virulent hatred of
Catholics. When I mention that I’m a Catholic her generous
gallantry storms through once more “No, you’re
not! Fuck off! Do you practice birth control?!” No of
course I’m a very very lapsed one Julie. “See I knew
you were, listen, lapsed Catholics are the aristocracy of
the earth. I never met a lapsed I didn’t like. But them
that cleave to their faith. I’ll shoot the fuckers.”
I ask about the time when one of my idols Morrissey
walked through her door unannounced back in 1994 to
a frosty reception…
“God I’d forgotten about that! That was like a very,
very bad marriage in three quarters of an hour: imagine
the play Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf in the space of
three quarters of an hour. It’s not your dream; you’re
in love with someone for five years and they turn up
and we start arguing about whether you should put milk
in Earl Grey tea or not. I knew I had to get him out
before he visited the bathroom; ‘Why do you squeeze
the toothpaste from the bottom?’ Fuck off!”
Julie wrote an acerbic piece about their encounter at
the time. For “acerbic” read “hatchet job”. Incredibly,
given Morrissey’s famed propensity for dropping peo-
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
ple who’ve offended him at the drop of a daff, they’ve
restarted a friendly e-mail correspondence over the past
few years. Clearly he couldn’t resist someone who’s
even better at bitching about people than he is.
“I adore the man. He seems to be very civilised now;
he seems more happy. Isn’t it funny it took America to
make him more relaxed? I said to him, ‘You’ve grown
into your looks, you look like someone’s sexy uncle
that you’d get off with at a wedding.’ And he said in his
brilliantly witty way ‘Why do you think I go to so many
weddings – known to me are not?’ What a wonderfully
Morrissey thing to say. Would you sleep with Morrissey
if he asked and you were gay? If he was straight
and I was single I still think I wouldn’t do it. I’d just be
thinking ‘Oh fuck its Morrissey!’ the whole time.”
Well, I must confess since early teenhood I’d always
thought he’s the one man who just might ‘turn my head’
as it were…
“You would?! But you’d have to slap him round a
bit afterwards!! That’s what Madonna said about Billy
Ray Cyrus. She said ‘I’d do him, but I’d have to slap
him round a bit and make him cry afterwards because
of ‘Achey Breaky Heart’’ and I’d have to do that to
Morrissey because – what’s the crap thing he’s done?
‘Bengali In Platforms’? Course he’s a genius, but you
wouldn’t wanna live with him would you?”
While her talk is littered with her trademark bile
Julie assures me that she is far less keen to cause fuss in
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everyday life than she once was.
“I’m much better than I was. Even by the time I
was 17 at the NME I was well castrated by then. You
should have seen me at 13, at the height of my venom!
I stopped kissing my mother when I went to bed and
when my dad asked why I said ‘What, is she a lesbian?’
That’s what I was like!”
And in fact she does seem more at ease with herself
than I’ve heard she was, and very content with her life.
“Brighton, for all its airs and graces, is a very provincial
town, and I like it that way. I don’t want to be like a
young bunny putting it around, I’m 45 years old, it was
never my way anyway, I got married when I was 18 and
24, even though I always admired girls that did. It was
never the life for me, to be honest with you.”
She seems content too with her role in the grand
scheme of things. “You know that thing you wrote about
me [the Sugar Rush review] was so unique, it treated
me like a human being which was such a change. I love
being round young writers, I like to think of writers as
a community, as a race. I’m 45 years old , I’m not going
to write ‘the great novel’ … a dead mother that’s what
I’m going to be now, and that’s alright with me.”
Already seriously sozzled before the interview
ended (me,anyway) we break off to join her fellow
guests – and proceed to drink a lot more. The ‘mists
of Bacchus’ descend on my memory somewhat here
though I do dimly remember us drivelling on about
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
many other subjects. Indulging in huge, shared,
over-emphatic praise of Nye Bevan figured highly.
(“Idiots always get him mixed up with Ernest Bevin,
the anti-Semitic git.”) At one point Julie has a huge
slanging match with Zoe and Gary about the merits
of white immigration (Julie is against, she thinks the
UK owes black and Asian people a huge debt which
doesn’t apply to east Europeans). I recall also being
a coward and slinking away during this, talking to
Nadia instead. Nadia has clearly seen it a thousand
times before, and its clear why Julie loves her so
much. She’s fantastic, and clearly the calming, sensible
one of the pair. “Don’t worry, she’ll calm down
in a few minutes”, I think she said. And she did.
At one point I harangue Julie for wasting her life attacking
idiotic celebrities when she could be highlighting
great social injustices as she did for a very brief
period in her Guardian columns of 2002, campaigning
on issues like the still-toothless corporate manslaughter
law which allows negligent employers to get away with
murder (literally, if not legally.)
She explained she found writing such things too
much of an emotional strain, and that it was too late to
change now anyway. She was a nasty, witty old hack,
pure and simple. And she liked it that way.
And of course, that’s what makes her what she is.
The world already has John Pilger. It’s precisely the
fact she has “run away from her brain” as she herself
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puts it which makes her so entertaining. A sledgehammer
cracking a nut; the spectres of Dorothy Parker and
Marx ganging up on straw-celebs like Catherine Zeta
Jones and Michael Douglas is sometimes just what you
need. Can we really imagine a nice campaigning little
Julie Burchill? Brrrr. I must have been even more pissed
than I imagined.
The day after our meet, amidst the industrial hangover,
I reflect on the massive hatred Julie inspires. Two
years back she managed to take the number 85 spot
in the Channel 4’s most hated Britons poll. Not high
enough in her view I’m sure. But why was she there?
Because of her narcissism, arrogance and self-obsession?
I’d hazard a guess she’s not the only columnist to
suffer such flaws. She is however one of the very few to
openly acknowledge it, sign-post it, flaunt it, and make
a very good joke out of it.
Because of extreme opinions, repeating her obsessions?
Let’s think of these wonderful creatures we
call “columnists”. Richard Littlejohn, Gary Bushell
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
… straight-off bigots peddling the same old poison
week after week, and always kicking the weak, never
the strong, with far higher readerships too – not on
the list. The late-now-but-not-then Lynda Lee-Potter,
bitching hideously about celebs throughout her whole
career, bigger readership again. Her name’s not down,
she’s not coming in. A hundred odd male journalists
with just as ‘messy’ private lives as Julie; they don’t
get the spawn of Beelzebub treatment either. Could the
fact that she can write each one of them into the dirt at
least partially explain this bonfire of loathing? I rather
think it could. Julie says people who write hatefully
about chavs reveal more about themselves than they
do of their targets. Perhaps there’s an element of selfidentification
with that. And perhaps she’s right.
Of course I’m hopelessly, and rather pathetically
compromised (there, I’ve said it first) by spending
sloshed out time in her charming and generous presence.
But I wasn’t disappointed. And long may she rain
bile over us. �
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Review [published February 2005]
Jason Burke: Al Qaeda
Ben Granger
The most striking fact Jason Burke hammers through
time and again in this meticulous and comprehensive
study is that Al Qaeda does not exist. Or at least, ‘Al
Qaeda’ the organised terrorist group, cohesive and complete
we hear of in the media doesn’t. I like Spooks as
much as anyone, but I fear we have been misinformed.
What does exist is a series of interconnected yet
disparate and competing forms of militant Islamism.
Bin Laden’s faction, amorphous in itself and rarely
termed “Al Qaeda” by its followers is only one part
of this, yet it has become lazy shorthand for a massive
phenomenon. Burke does not claim Islamist fundamentalism
isn’t a large, violent and dangerous force,
but does show that this one key misunderstanding is
disastrous if you want to deal with it. For one example,
the twin towers atrocity could be said to be the work of
‘Al Qaeda’; the ones in Madrid and Bali cannot. And as
another, al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug currently given
to beheading aid-workers in Iraq has been described as
an “Al Queda operative” and “bin Laden’s Lieutenant”
in highly reputable papers despite the two having never
met, and their groups being bitter rivals of one another.
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
Burke, who has spent the last ten years as The Observer’s
Middle East correspondent, tells two separate
yet interlinked stories; that of the formation of militant
political Islamism, and that of the more specific violent
groupings of which bin Laden became a leading figure.
He traces the roots of modern political Sunni ‘Islamism’
(as opposed to the Shia extremism of Khomeini)
as comparatively recent, stemming from Wahaabism,
a variant of Islam espoused in the 18th century by the
ultra-orthodox renegade Abdul al Wahaab. This was
developed into an all-encompassing political doctrine
by an Egyptian, the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan
Al-Banna in the 1920s and 30s. Explicitly rejecting
all Western influence as degenerate, Al-Banna and his
successor Syed Qutb, (another Egyptian campaigning
in the 50s and 60s) sought to recreate the world according
to the laws of Islam in the early post-Mohammed
years as they interpreted it, an interpretation very
obscure and unpopular at the time in the wider Islamic
world (though, crucially, not in Saudi Arabia, where it
gained credence amongst the ruling royal family who
used it to re-inforce their legitimacy).
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The more specific story of the violent armed groups
which emerged espousing this ideology is detailed too.
Bin Laden, who cut his teeth as so many others did in
the Soviet/Afghan conflict of the 80s, is shown as starting
out as very much the junior partner of Islamic Jihad
leader Aymar al-Zawahri. It is interesting to learn he had
no direct contact (as is often reported) with America,
though the close co-operation with the Pakistani secret
services and the CIA who funded and supported his and
other gangs makes this distinction rather academic.
Bin Laden became seen as a ‘Godfather’ figure due
to his genius for media manipulation, culminating of
course with the calculated violent symbolism of September
11th, also recounted in detail here. But Burke
also shows the many other groups in action both before,
during and after the New York attack, often with either
limited or no contact with bin Laden. The GIA in Algeria
are shown to far surpass bin Laden and followers in
terms of violence against their own general population,
who had stubbornly failed to give them mass support.
The leadership of bin Laden’s faction has indeed been
decapitated following the US invasion of Afghanistan,
but the anger caused in the wider Muslim world and the
subsequent assault on Iraq has let to a rapid increase in
the sympathy for and potential recruits to such groups.
The Madrid bombing is shown as the work of a cadre
not only wholly disconnected from bin Laden, but not
even working in his style any more; no symbolic target,
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
no suicides, and being the work of genuinely impoverished
immigrants rather than the disaffected middleclass
types chiefly at work in such atrocities previously.
More than ever now, it is bin Laden and Al Qaeda as an
idea and ideal that is the danger.
One amazing fact, particularly farcical given the
neo-con justification of the Iraqi invasion, is that in the
first Gulf War bin Laden actually offered up his band of
fighters to the House of Saud to fight against Saddam
Hussein defending the home of Wahaabism against
the secularist Iraqi infidel. It was only after this offer
was turned down that bin Laden truly took against the
Saudi royals, seeing them as weaklings who had to
rely on ‘kufr’ American protection. The notion of bin
Laden siding with Saddam as a ‘fellow Muslim’ could
scarcely be further rooted in the realms of fantasy, and
shows the true depths of the (deliberate?) neo-con misunderstanding
of how their ideology works.
The media-spawned over-simplification of the
Islamist phenomenon is highlighted by the distinction
Burke demonstrates between the Taliban government
of Afghanistan and the gang of bin Laden’s that they
housed. We all know Al Qaeda and the Taliban became
firmly interwoven with each other some time after bin
Laden and his followers first sought refuge in Afghanistan;
what is less well known is the intense dislike the
latter showed to the former, and how near they came
to being thrown out, until it became a matter of local
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pan-Muslim pride to the Taliban that they could not
be seen expel bin Laden due to US pressure. In yet
another of the myriad intricacies detailed in the book,
we see how different the Taliban were to Al Qaeda. The
Taliban were extremist Wahabbi offshoots themselves,
dedicated to fulfilling a similarly atavistic, repressive,
misogynistic and unworkable arcadia, yet at the same
time they were essentially parochial, rural tribalists totally
uninterested in waging a jihad against the Western
world. It was only bin Laden’s machinations and the
US response they received which saw them entrenched
into the fight against the West urged by the more sophisticated
and cosmopolitan Al Qaeda.
Burke shows with one illuminating example how the
growth in popularity of this Wahaab cult is far from
organic or inevitable. He spent time with members of
the separatist Pershmaga fighters of the Kurdish Democratic
Party in northern Iraq following the first gulf war.
“[They] were aggressively secular. They had drunk,
sworn, smoked and I had never seen them pray. Their
slogans were all about liberation and self-determination,
about rights and democracy … The idea of them
mentioning a ‘jihad’ was almost risible. Though angry
and resentful at what they felt, with some justification,
were the West`s repeated betrayals, they were still vociferously
pro-Western.”
By 2001, many of these young men were turning
from their seemingly failing secular resistance move-
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
ment towards militant Islamism. The same goes for
the growth of Hammas and Islamic Jihad in Israel at
the expense of the PLO. And also in many other areas,
not least moderate and/or secular Turkey, Indonesia,
and Checnya, not to mention the diaspora in Europe.
This growth was neither natural nor inevitable, and was
undoubtedly exacerbated not only by the dictatorship,
stagnation and corruption of the governments of Muslim
states, but also by the polarisation caused in part by
the invasions of the West (and Russia).
None of which is to say that the growth of Islamist
movements are a progressive and legitimate movement
of liberation as some on the left have come near
to disastrously maintaining. On the contrary, though
Burke never makes such an assertion himself, I find the
description of its leading figures corresponds with an
almost classically fascist movement.
They are rooted firmly in a disenchanted middleclass,
whether doctors like al-Zawarhi or rich businessmen
like bin Laden himself. They are disenchanted
chiefly due to a hurt sense of national (or pan-national/
religious) decline. They are utterly hostile to religious
tolerance, the Enlightenment, Jews, women or minority
rights, and also to socialism and the labour movement
at large. Indeed, al-Banna himself was an explicit
admirer of Nazi Germany. As Burke shows, the hardcore
of the real ‘terrorist cells’ taking action against
the West are profoundly educated and middle-class
136
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themselves. That an increasing minority come from
genuinely impoverished backgrounds in the last two
years (as he also demonstrates) only goes to show the
counter-productive effect Western activities have had.
There is still a key difference however, on the whole, to
the masses tacitly sympathising with atrocities through
desperation and those carrying them out themselves.
They attract a vast and increasing number of the
desperate poor in their countries, often due to the
crass stupidity and brutality of ‘infidel’ governments
of all colours. But this no more legitimises radical
Islamists than the unemployment caused by the neoliberal
capitalist policies pursued by New Labour
makes the BNP genuine champions of the working
poor of England. No-one on the left should see them
as anything other than what they are; evil bastards
given false validation by the machinations of the
more powerful. Cream off the followers, but don`t
even think about trying to ‘engage’ with the leaders.
Burke’s study is exemplary in its research, and
explains its extremely complex tale with some clarity
(the extensive indexes and glossaries help too).
It is however an undeniably dry read, a mixture of
BUY Jason Burke books online from and
the academic and reportage journalese. I must say, at
only 355 pages it still took me a very long time to get
through it. That’s probably my problem though and –
damned if you do and damned if you don’t – giving
a more vibrant style to a subject like this leaves the
author open to charges of sensationalism. It’s fair to
say though that this book is probably not best for the
completely uninitiated, or for someone not prepared
to give the subject their full undivided attention.
Part of this staid style comes from Burke’s admirable
neutrality of tone, which has won plaudits from
Chomsky to those much further to the right. He is
not out to make a point, but simply to document an
area he has reported on and studied for many years.
It’s only in the final chapter that Burke’s views – still
fairly cautious – are made clear. Namely, that only
the continuing resistance of the wider world Muslim
population to the minority teachings of zealots like
bin Laden, Zarqawi and their forbears al-Banna and
Qutb can possibly see them off. And that, whatever the
intentions, arresting the rapid growth this fanaticism
is seeing has been made much harder by the recent
actions of the West. �
137
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Review [published February 1999]
Bryan Burrough: Dragonfly: NASA And The Crisis Aboard Mir
Chris Mitchell
Throughout 1997, the Russian space station Mir made
international headlines as it lurched from one near
disaster to another. Populated by Russian cosmonauts
and American astronauts, Mir became a symbol of the
two countries’ collaboration in the post-Soviet age. But
even with the financing and expertise of NASA injected
into the ailing Russian space program, Mir continued to
remain dangerously unstable. Bryan Burrough’s book
is a behind-the-scenes account of what was happening
both in space and on the ground.
Since 1992, NASA has sent its astronauts to train
in Russia’s Star City in preparation for going aboard
Mir. Burrough details the inevitable clash of cultures –
while the Americans were used to rehearsing for every
contingency on the Shuttle, the Russians adopted a
improvisational approach, fuelled by the lack of funds
for their space program. The cosmonauts were paid
bonuses for the efficient running of the station, which
led to American accusations of safety procedures being
ignored in order to keep Mir operational.
Burrough focuses on two NASA astronauts sent to
Mir, Jerry Linenger and the British-born Mike Foale,
BUY Bryan Burrough books online from and
highlighting their very different attitudes towards the
Russians. Linenger witnessed the outbreak of a fire
and returned to Earth vocally condemning the space
station as a deathtrap. Foale was on board when Mir’s
hull was ruptured by a collision with the Progress supply
vessel, giving the crew members less than seven
minutes to seal off the module before losing all their
oxygen. Instead of insisting on evacuation as safety
procedure demanded, Foale helped cosmonauts Tsibliyev
and Lazutkin block the breach.
In both cases, Burrough reveals that the response of
mission control was hampered by NASA’s pitiful lack
of knowledge about Mir and the unwillingness of some
Russian technicians to share their expertise. Veteran
astronaut John Blaha returned from Mir suffering from
exhaustion and depression, blaming both on NASA’s
lack of ground support.
Given the daily struggle of the undeniably brave
crew members and the chaos in mission control, it’s
difficult to read Dragonfly and remember that the
story it tells is factually true rather than a science
fiction thriller. However, Burrough doesn’t trivialise
138
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his subject – by narrating the events through a day
by day approach, he reports the conversations of the
astronauts and mission control verbatim, showing the
depth of his research while keeping the unfolding tension
of the story alive.
Worryingly, Burrough indicates that these communi-
BUY Bryan Burrough books online from and
cation problems look set to continue on Mir’s replacement,
the International Space Station. But Mir itself
will not be anyone’s home again – the station will be
programmed to enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn
up later this year, plummeting into the Pacific Ocean
several hundred miles off New Zealand. �
139
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Albert Camus:
Solitaire et Solidaire 141
Paul Celan:
After The Disaster 147
Bruce Chatwin:
In Search Of The Miraculous 158
Annabel Chong:
Life Thru A Lens 162
E.M. Cioran:
To Infinity And Beyond 166
Diablo Cody:
Candy Girl 171
C
Douglas Coupland:
From Fear To Eternity 175
Douglas Coupland:
Lara’s Book 181
Douglas Coupland:
The Gum Thief 183
Quentin Crisp:
An Englishman In New York 185
140
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Interview [published March 1997]
Albert Camus: Solitaire et Solidaire
Russell Wilkinson talks to Catherine Camus about Albert Camus’ The First Man
In January 1960, the French writer and philosopher
Albert Camus was killed in a car crash along with his
friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard. Recovered
from the wreckage of the crash was the unfinished
manuscript of Camus’ latest novel, The First Man. In
1957, Camus had been awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in recognition of his most famous novels,
The Outsider and The Plague.
Fifty years after its original publication The Outsider
is still France’s best-selling novel this century.
In October 1995, The First Man was finally published
in English, 35 years after Camus’ death. His daughter,
Catherine Camus, elected to publish the manuscript unedited.
Its drafts have been organised into the completed
text of the novel and authorial notes which supplement
its progression and development. As such, The First
Man shows the rarely glimpsed process of a work in
progress. The novel itself is a deeply autobiographical
meditation upon Camus’ poverty-stricken childhood
and fatherless family within Algeria at the turn of the
century. While it remains unfinished, much of the text
possesses Camus’ characteristic lucidity and sensuality,
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
clearly demonstrating that his best writing was yet to
come before his tragic and untimely death at the age
of 47.
Catherine Camus and her partner Robert Gallimard
visited London in October 1995. At the Basil Hotel,
they discussed the implications of The First Man for our
evaluation of Albert Camus as a writer and a political
philosopher at the close of this century. The interview
was conducted in French.
RW: In your editor’s note for The First Man you suggest
that now is a more suitable time for the reception of
Camus’ work. Do you think Camus has been neglected
in recent years?
CC: He was never abandoned by his readers. Camus
is enormously read. He’s the highest selling author in
the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some
years now. Sales haven’t ever stopped, so to talk about
rediscovering him would suggest that he isn’t read anymore
and that’s not true. It’s just that, in publishing The
First Man I said to myself, ‘this is going to be awful,’
but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I’m
not afraid of Camus’ public. I’m afraid of what will be
141
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written in the papers.
However, there are indications that today the intellectuals
are coming back to Camus. History has given
them reason to, with the fall of communism. In fact
it was always the Communist problem which was
responsible for the opposition to Camus. It was always
and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.
Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin’s trials.
Today we can see that he was right. To say that there
were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was
blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today
we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind,
but before it just wasn’t allowed. Nobody was allowed
to think that or say that if you were left-wing. Camus
always insisted that historical criteria and historical
reasoning were not the only things to take into account,
and that they weren’t all powerful, that history could
always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are
starting to think.
RW: Do you think that Camus’ work is becoming
vindicated then, after this time of intellectual isolation?
RG: It all depends on the period. Just after the war,
the liberation of 1945, Camus was well known, well
loved by Sartre and all the intellectuals of that generation.
There is an interview given by Sartre in the USA
where he is asked what the future of French literature
is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future
is Camus. And so time passes, and a much more politi-
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
cal rather than literary reasoning intervenes, and from
the day that Camus wrote The Rebel, in 1955, there
comes the rupture, and all, nearly all of the left wing
intellectuals become hostile to him. Since he was already
unfavourably viewed by the right-wing, he found
himself entirely alone.
Then, during the 80s, those you would call the young
philosophers of France, such as Bernard and Gluxman,
pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted
to hear in the political arena. They said it was Camus
who was right, not those who had slid under the influence
of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion
to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever
since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to
modify up until today. Intellectuals of Camus’ age who
had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And
at that point we come back to literature, and it’s agreed
that he was always a great writer.
RW: Which brings us specifically to the publication of
The First Man. How will this book alter our perception
of Camus’ work?
CC: We must remember that Camus wrote not even
a third of what he had wished to. The First Man is his
posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it
is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments,
and of the whole way of writing as well. This
mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for
those not able to speak for themselves.
142
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RW: There are times in his letters to Jean Grenier
[Camus’ philosophy professor in Algeria, published
in the Selected Notebooks] when he sounds unhappy
with his work on The First Man. After receiving his
Nobel Prize, did he feel pressurised to produce his
definitive work?
CC: He wasn’t writing under the influence of the Nobel
Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in
him. The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it’s a social
recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a
true artist is driven by interior necessities. We can’t talk
about the book he wanted to write because we have
barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it,
but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look
at the style of The First Man it conforms much more
to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely.
RW: Will we get a clearer notion of his ideas through
The First Man?
CC: Perhaps not, because it’s in quite a crude state.
But then, in this condition one sees more, without any
of the artifices of art, without anything having been
erased. It is, perhaps, at the same time, more truthful.
I think he wanted to write something to explain
who he was, and how he was different from the age
that had been conferred upon him. He was viewed by
many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football
pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his ‘morality’.
It’s something sensed, it won’t pass uniquely through
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
thought. It couldn’t possibly. He started thinking
through sensation. He could never think with artefacts
or with cultural models because there were none. So
it’s true to say that his morality was extremely ‘lived’,
made from very concrete things. It never passed by
means of abstractions . It’s his own experience, his
way of thinking. There are those who will find his notions
about absurdity appealing, and others who will
be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria,
the heat and so on.
RW: Since The First Man deals with Camus’ birth and
childhood in Algeria, it seems strange that Camus’ deep
personal involvement with the Algerian nationalist crisis
tends to get overlooked in the traditional portrayal
of him as a French writer. Do you think The First Man
will re-emphasise the importance of Algeria in our
consideration of Camus?
CC: I hope so. Camus’ was born in Algeria of French
nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony,
although the French colonists rejected him absolutely
because of his poverty. Politically, he was in favour
of a federation, and effectively he considered that like
South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there
should be a mixed population with equal rights, the
same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as
well as all the other races living there.
RW: Do you think he saw himself as the first member
of a race of the uprooted, given the absence of his father
143
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and the cultural duality of his upbringing?
CC: Not on a political level. He is The First Man
because he is poor, which has never been much to human
beings. He really did know Algeria. He was an
exile from his country, but still living in its language.
Solitaire et solidaire. It’s not like those who are exiled
to a country where the language is not theirs. He didn’t
have much hope that things would work out, but he
wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of
violence that once such violence is created there’s no
more room for reflection. And there’s no mediating position.
If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians
and Serbs, they’ve all created so much horror that one
starts to wonder how these peoples can live together,
after having done what they have. Already the violence
has reached such a degree that everybody is living in
hate, there’s no possibility of reflection, no mediating
position. There’s no one who can say ‘this person is
wrong there and right here’, and that ‘one is right about
that and wrong about this’. This is what could allow
populations, or even two human beings, to live together.
We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and
enrichment by, our differences.
Albert Camus PLC
RW: So Camus tried to live the paradox of being both
“solitaire et solidaire”?
CC: I think Camus felt very solitary. You can see it
BUY Albert Camus books online from and
in all his books. The Outsider isn’t Camus, but in The
Outsider there are parts of Camus. There’s this impression
of exile. But where he is in exile isn’t especially
in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world,
because of his origins. And that’s a complete exile. Just
because of his way of sensing before thinking. He’s in
a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any
case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be
rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary…
RG: … And yet one thing that is evident is that Camus
could never be a ‘neutral’ man. This is because he
was committed; look at his real physical involvement
in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat
against Nazism. And he always held a profound
commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all
totalitarianism. For example, it’s often forgotten that
Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the
Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to
travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO
accepted Franco’s Spain and allowed it a discourse.
Camus was completely intransigent, and that’s not at
all a neutrality. It’s combat, it’s a man who involved
himself, committed himself. Of course, he wasn’t an
existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a
man of combat. It wasn’t for nothing that he directed
the Resistance journal called Combat.
RW: What makes his commitment different from that
of the existentialists?
144
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CC & RG in unison: He was not an existentialist!
RG: He always refused to be.
RW: Another example of being solitaire et solidaire,
of being great friends with Sartre but remaining apart
from the existentialist credo?
CC: Yes, today, we’re starting to see how it works.
But usually it’s when you get smacked in the face with
things that you start to understand them. Everyone has
so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including
Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings.
Generosity had a place in people’s hopes. But
Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass
through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be
improved. When Sartre was asked whether or not he
would live under a communist regime he said, ‘No, for
others it’s fine, but for me, no.’ He said it! So it’s hard
to say just how intellectual his stance is. How can you
think that never in your life would you go to live in a
communist regime and still say it’s fine for everybody?
A very difficult thing, that, but Sartre managed it.
Camus didn’t; and today this is what we are confronted
with, I mean what is pure ideology, which
takes no account of the human context. In economics
it’s the same. Economics wanted to take into account
theory over and above human criteria, or the
parameter ‘man’. And you end up beating your head
against a wall again, it doesn’t work. Not if you make
an abstraction of man. That’s why Camus is more à la
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mode now, because he always says ‘yes, but there’s
man. That’s the first thing, because myself, I’m a
man.’ And that’s what solidarity is.
RW: Is The First Man his ‘bridge’, then, between experience
and philosophy?
CC: What the articles which have been written about
The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of
these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death.
The lie is death in Camus. That’s why in Camus’ play
The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and
his mother, because he lied. He never told them who
he was. They killed him because they didn’t recognise
him. But Camus also says that nothing is true which
forces exclusion. From that, you’re obliged to accept
contradictions if you don’t want to reject certain obvious
things about life, certain evidences. If you create a
system, and you say ‘here there is truth’, in that kind
of pathway [chemin], then you’ll evacuate all the other
pathways and you’ll kill life. It’s up to each individual.
It wasn’t exactly the establishment he attacked. He
said, “if it’s good, so much the better.” His aim was to
help people to live. That’s the most important thing. I
think for an artist what is most important is to touch as
many hearts as possible.
RW: Being written for his mother, do you think The
First Man gives a clearer picture of his ideas on
femininity?
CC: It’s true that women appear very little in his other
145
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works. They have a very marginal place. But femininity,
yes, effectively there is more in The First Man,
not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its
elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love
story in it, a childhood love story, Camus’ first. Meursault
[protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were
never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and
others in his plays, but they aren’t so well known. I
think for Camus his mother was more than just that.
She’s love, absolute love. That’s why it’s written for
her, dedicated to ‘you who will never be able to read
this book’. And love is very important in The First
Man, in that Camus loves these things he never chose,
he loves his childhood experience in a very real way.
Their poverty meant that there was nothing else they
could think about but what they would eat, how they
would clothe themselves. There’s just no room for
other things in his family. It’s difficult for others to
imagine the position in which he found himself. There
is no imaginary existence in their lives.
French intellectuals are mostly petit bourgeois, and
it’s hard to say whether that makes Camus’ work more
valuable. I’d rather say that it’s different. Necessarily.
His positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectuals
who don’t have that experience have difficulty in
comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tolerant
because he had already seen both sides of things
when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine
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poverty, but they don’t know what it is. In fact they’ve
got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes.
It’s the perspective they could never adopt, not in the
way Sartre wants to, because they weren’t familiar
with them. They could never address themselves to the
working classes. They don’t know what it means, and
that gives them a bad conscience about it. Camus has a
greater proximity to those in poverty.
RW: And does this proximity result from his humility,
which can been seen in the letters at the end of The First
Man to Monsieur Germain, his old schoolteacher?
CC: It’s because his teacher in The First Man has a
primary place. Camus shows us this teacher exactly how
he was. The First Man is completely autobiographical.
The mother he describes is the woman I knew, and she
was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really
existed. But it’s also to show that people attach so much
importance to celebrity, and Camus writes his acceptance
speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher.
Recognition, gratefulness exist. It’s to show that this is
what has come from what his teacher did for him. And
also throughout the world there are Monsieur Germains
everywhere. That’s why I published the letters, so that he
could have a place in the work. But I couldn’t ever act
or think on behalf of what my father would have said or
done. He’s an artist, he considers himself an artist, and so
he takes on the responsibility of speaking for those who
are not given the means or the opportunity. �
146
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Feature [published September 2000]
Paul Celan: After The Disaster
Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan
With a variable key
you unlock the house in which
drifts the snow of that left unspoken.
Always what key you choose
depends on the blood that spurts
from your eye or your mouth or your ear.
You vary the key, you vary the word
that is free to drift with the flakes.
What snowball will form round the word
depends on the wind that rebuffs you.
This is a poem by Paul Celan translated from the
German original by Michael Hamburger. The original
was written in the early 1950s. Its title is the first line.
We assume a translation is second-hand and only
the original can provide definitive clarification. But
clarification of what? Isn’t our sense of the opacity
of translation also the sense of the rebuffing wind in
Celan’s poem? Searching for the key to this poem, and
being resisted, we sense the climate the poem reports.
As we watch the snow gathering, pursuing an answer
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to explain why Celan chose this particular key – and
there are grim details one can point to – prompts only a
return journey to the poem.
It is an uncomfortable fact that the bar to a poem’s
key – this poem’s key – is the key to the poem itself.
Some might dismiss this as tiresomely reflexive; a
poem about poetry. It is clear, I think, that this is an
insensitive reading. The metaphors are too close to
experience to dismiss it as abstract. Indeed, can they
get any closer?
Celan’s friend, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy,
wrote: “I believe that Paul Celan chose to die as he did
so that once, at least, words and what is might join”. He
had drowned himself in the Seine in late April 1970,
six months before his 50th birthday. What is Bonnefoy
talking about? Surely death by drowning and words are
as far apart as one can get? Bonnefoy is alluding to his
friend’s peculiar linguistic heritage and how it affected
his life and poetry. Celan was grew up in the city of Czernowitz,
then part of Romania, now within Moldova.
Its political geography meant many languages were
spoken among its inhabitants. In the poet’s home, the
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language was High German, while the wider community
generally used the more latinate Romanian. There
were many others in circulation, including Yiddish.
The last is significant as Celan was part of a large
Jewish community. There was anti-Semitism, for sure,
but German culture was the pinnacle of Western civilisation.
It promised something better than feudal sniping.
Inspired by his mother’s deep love for it’s poetry,
he wrote lyric poems in the tradition of Hölderlin and
Rilke. It is said that as a youth he had a remarkable
affinity for it too. His taste moved him toward the
contemporary symbolist and surrealist movements,
and despite his polylingual abilities, he always wrote
his poetry in German; his müttersprache.
Then war came. Celan was, by chance, separated
from his parents on the day the Nazis arrived and deported
the city’s Jews. He never saw his parents again.
They were taken to a Ukrainian labour camp. His
father died of disease; his mother was shot. After this,
as Hugo Gryn said, Celan was in the position of being a
writer in the language of his mother and of his mother’s
murderers. He could not renounce the latter’s language
without renouncing the former’s. Celan was robbed
of his parents’ death as well as their lives. Bonnefoy
implies the same goes for his müttersprache.
“We can say of Celan as of no other poet: his words
did not recover his experience. The loss was felt,” he
says, “like a discharge without origin or end.” And as
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a result: “nothing real could authentically respond to
this flux or be its equal, in the absolute, as referent:
only the river itself … seems to fold in on itself (losing
itself) like the only thing signified on the scale of
so much absence.”
So for Bonnefoy, an avowed Christian, another death
becomes another metaphor of hope. If his explanation
is exemplary, we remain in what Maurice Blanchot
calls “the civilisation of the book”, where literature
takes possession of everything – that is, submitting it
to a pre-established unity symbolised by the enclosing
covers of a book. Even Bonnefoy’s sensitive appraisal
leaves too strong a trace of the dubious correlation
of life and art. Its presence allow us to keep the discomposing
reality at a distance, within the inexorable
logic of a narrative with a beginning, middle and, most
importantly, an end.
This article on Celan will tend toward that logic too.
Perhaps it must. But whereas the industry surrounding
Sylvia Plath, for example, regards the poetry as
an expert witness to judging the case of her tormented
life and suicide, with Celan, this would be to miss
everything.
Seamus Heaney begins his essay on Sylvia Plath by
stating the potential of poetry:
“the poet’s need [is] to get beyond ego in order to
become the voice of more than autobiography. At
the level of poetic speech, when this happens, sound
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and meaning rise like a tide out of language to carry
individual utterance away upon a current stronger and
deeper that the individual could have anticipated.”
(Note the pervasive river theme!)
He then goes on to examine how Plath developed her
poetry yet never moved beyond “the dominant theme
of self-discovery and self-definition”. Nowadays, of
course, that theme is enough to launch 10,000 poems
beginning with “I”. But what does moving beyond
this theme mean? Celan was ambivalent, to say the
least, about that rising tide out of language. Indeed,
it caused him to lose trust in his most famous poem,
‘Deathfugue’. This is how that poem ends; the subject,
you will notice, is explicit:
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we
drink and we
drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a
master from
Germany
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith
(trans. Michael Hamburger)
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If any help is needed, the line “a grave in the air”
can be read as the smoke rising from the camp chimneys;
plain fact as much as metaphor. Overall, the
poem emerged from reports of small Jewish orchestras
playing tangos within concentration camp fences,
often accompanying gravedigging and executions. The
poem mimics the pace and rhythm of the dance that
had captivated carefree Europe between the wars. Its
first title was indeed ‘Death Tango’. In placing such
lightness within the realm of such darkness, an entire
culture is incriminated. The change to ‘Deathfugue’
recalls the divine lightness of Bach, while “Margarete”
alludes to the tragic heroine in Goethe’s Faust, forgiven
by God despite everything. (It is a bizarre but telling
fact that Goethe’s famous oak tree outside Weimar was
protected by the SS as the Buchenwald concentration
camp went up around it.) Margarete is contrasted with
Shulamith, the female symbol of Jewish hope in the
Song Of Solomon, who is not forgiven.
In post-war Germany the poem became part of the
curriculum for schools and was acclaimed by numerous
critics in the new Federal Republic. However, praise
tended to be for what was called the poem’s “mastery”
of what had passed – the Holocaust; enabling a rec-
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onciliation of sorts. Germany wanted to move on. It
welcomed the rising tide out of language as it bore guilt
away. The worst was confirmed when schoolteachers
discussed the use of the poem in class. They agreed it
was excellent in teaching how poetry might follow a
musical pattern like a fugue but, they felt, the teaching
should not be side-tracked by talk of the Holocaust. Celan’s
subsequent distress led him to refuse to perform
readings of the poem again. Perhaps he also felt there
was a tendency toward the dark romance of a ‘terrible
beauty’ in its aesthetic effects. Above all, it faced the
progressive movement of the civilisation of the book,
enveloping discordance like the resolving refrain of a
Beethoven sonata.
Where did go Celan after this? Does it matter? What
does poetry matter in our time anyway? If it is merely a
means of reminding us of what has happened and what
it means, then one wonders why the facts have not
been enough. Perhaps that is the point: the facts have
never been enough. Aharon Appelfeld, another writersurvivor,
reminds us that “the numbers and the facts
were the murderers’ own well-proven means. Man as a
number is one of the horrors of dehumanisation.”
Celan does not offer the facts. Poetry is something
else, something more than the facts. But, in general,
that ‘something else’ remains under suspicion even
more than the dehumanising facts because ‘something
else’ seems to be only self-regarding gymnastics with a
dictionary. Indeed Spike quite rightly announces itself
to be “violently prejudiced” against poetry. What is the
alternative? Celan’s poetry is an answer.
A word – you know:
a corpse.
Let us wash it,
let us comb it,
let us turn its eye
towards heaven.
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This, the end of a poem, advocates the inversion of
literature’s gaze. It moves in the opposite direction to
most post-war poetry and prose, which sought practicality,
matter-of-factness, accessibility. The quoted
words come as a dark reflection at the end of the poem
‘Nocturnally Pouting’, itself a dark reflection on a bus
journey over an alpine road in Austria. The presence
of those departed is perceived in the landscape: in the
“greyed moss”, in the “crossed and folded shafts of
the spruces” and in “the jackdaws roused to endless
flight over the glacier”. All are keys to those who
“stand apart in the world”, each one “surly, bareheaded,
hoar-frosted”, each one discharging “the guilt
that adhered to their origin . upon a word that wrongly
subsists, like summer.”
The polemic is striking and memorable, but for that
reason perhaps begs the question: how does one turn
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a word heavenward? Isn’t this a rhetorical gesture?
Celan’s title for the collection in which the two quoted
poems appear is From Threshold To Threshold, and this
just about sums up the ‘failure’ of these two poems to
cross the threshold to heaven. As readers we tend to
grasp moments of manifesto-like clarity such as these;
but assertion is not enough. Despite its practical matterof-factness,
it betrays failure. This is not to criticise.
Failure is central to the history of modern poetry, although
such failure is now usually misunderstood.
To simplify, the concern of the Romantic-Enlightenment
poets of the 18th century – the beginning of the
modern age – was humanity’s relation to nature. We are
familiar with this in Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the
greater Europe, Hölderlin’s inspiration was also “To
be one with all that lives, and to return in blessed selfforgetfulness
into the All of Nature”. While he pursued
it in poetry, others, such as his friend Hegel, turned to
philosophy. But where philosophy feeds off distance,
allowing the goal of the Absolute – which would be
the end of philosophy, the end of history etc – to be
preserved indefinitely as a self-aggrandising rhetorical
device, poetry demands the end without delay: if poetry
remains, distance remains. Where today’s celebration
of nature uses language in an unironic slideshow of
clichés (see any New Age CD, website or poetry book
made of recycled paper) the Romantics recognised only
failure: words, corpses.
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Worse, Enlightenment promises actually inaugurated
the manifold growth of science and technology that
sought (and still seeks) to conquer nature rather than
to respect it. The consequence of Enlightenment was
at once to liberate us of the fetters of medieval society
and to destroy the traditions by which society kept its
body and soul together. The contradiction remains with
us, and the agitation of modern culture can be summed
up as the tension between accepting the wilderness and
our instinctive rejection of its freedom. A Celan poem
reflects the struggle:
Should
should a man
should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could,
if he spoke of this
time, he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)
He speaks but only just. It is poetry with aphasia.
How might a man speak of this time, this ‘destitute
time’, as Hölderlin called it, without using destitute
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words? Celan renews the question.
If for every Hölderlin there is a philosopher like
Hegel, then for Celan there is Martin Heidegger.
His analysis of the modern age had a profound influence
on Celan’s work, offering a theoretical apparatus
to his own poetic one. Simplistically, Heidegger sought
a new mode of thought to counteract the mechanistic
tendency of the modern world. He believed that humanity
had become separate from its harmony with the
rest of nature, as he believed was in place in Homer’s
Greece. This separation was due, he thought, to the rise
of dualistic ways of thinking set in motion by Plato.
Concentrating on the concept of ‘being’, Heidegger
argues that ‘human being’ is not a thing like other things
(objects in the world as we know it) but a clearing (a
non-thing, a nothingness) in which those things are presented,
where they actually become things. And rather
than this being an argument for solipsism (the world
as function of one’s mind), it means our knowledge of
the world is not a product of boxed-in consciousness.
Instead of minds making thoughts possible, it is the
‘being’ preceding mind that makes it possible for us to
regard ourselves as minds having thoughts distant from
‘the real world’.
This is a major challenge to the Cartesian tradition
that has dominated Western thought for the last four
centuries. But the clearing depends on a temporal and
linguistic aspect. Things appear in the three dimen-
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sions of time, enabling us to categorise it in language
and so differentiate it from the rest of the world. Such
categorisation, however, is restricted by our need for
control, and so the thing disappears from view. We
become blinded to the discourse of the world; to what
is revealed. The world becomes an object. This is a
necessary tendency but one that can and must be counteracted
by the function of the clearing.
Heidegger argues for the truth of the clearing by
pointing toward the mood of anxiety that seems to
characterise our everyday existence. We spend most
of our time avoiding this mood, of course. He says
we try to become totally absorbed in ‘the real world’,
as defined by such dead language, in order to avoid
facing up to our mortal nothingness as revealed in
anxiety. So, rather than liberating us, the techologocally-advanced
modern world opens a rift between
the public self – the one in which we have in order
to live without becoming paralysed by anxiety – and
the ‘anxious’ self in the so-called clearing. Heidegger
says that opening ourselves to anxiety by giving up
our need for egoistic certainty will reveal the world
in its abundant nature. It will set one free. The French
existentialists of the post-war era adopted this theme
from Heidegger, although their ‘absurd’ freedom was
foreign to him. A French philosopher more in tune
with Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, sums up
the condition for the present era:
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“Today, everywhere … remaining reality is disappearing
in the mire of a ‘globalised’ world. Nothing, not
even the most obvious phenomena, not even the purest,
most wrenching love, can escape this era’s shadow: a
cancer of the subject”.
This is not a conspiracy of others but a runaway
part of our need to live in the world rather than be
imprisoned by autism. Selflessness, of course, while
admirable in most cases, can also descend into what
we called inhumanity. One of the terrible ironies of this
story is Heidegger’s own descent. In the early 1930s,
he saw the Nazi party as a political movement capable
of mediating the needs of the modernity with authentic
existence, making Germany a modern-day equivalent
of ancient Greece. In 1933, the Rector of Freiburg
University, where Heidegger was a renowned young
professor, resigned in protest at Hitler’s anti-Semitic
laws. Heidegger took his place after an election among
the Aryan lecturers. He soon resigned in disaffection
but never revoked his party membership and referred
to his regret for the Holocaust only in what Maurice
Blanchot called “scandalously inadequate” fashion.
Such facts make Celan’s interest in his work more
compelling. Heidegger represents the dangers inherent
in the Romantic project. Another example would be
the terror following the French Revolution. What does
this mean for poetry? Well, in his isolated time after
the war, during his denazification, Heidegger came to
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believe poetry was the means to open up the world; it
could rouse the revelation of things in the clearing. In
fact, it was the revelation itself. His intense meditations
on Hölderlin’s poetry is summarised by an essay title
taken from a poem: “… poetically man dwells …”
Elsewhere he wrote that “Language is the house of
Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and
those who create with words are the guardians of this
home.” If that is the case, and poets tend to feel it is, then
it means, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust,
language would have to change in order to rebuild the
tainted home.
In the post-war era, this was an imperative for Celan
as he was now living in Paris as a translator and tutor,
physically and metaphorically exiled from his homes:
Czernowitz, under Soviet rule, and German, under the
weight of “murderous speech” as he called it. It was an
imperative because, as his Paris contemporary Samuel
Beckett put it: one writes not in order to be published,
one writes in order to breathe. Celan could not breathe
in the old language. The old language was saturated
with the conditions by which an entire culture was able
to produce the greatest art and thought in history and
then produce death camps with the efficiency of a factory.
No wonder Adorno said that to write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz was itself barbaric.
What Adorno didn’t say, and this has been ignored
too often, is that poetry could still be written only not
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as we had known it. The new language, the new poetry,
would be a way of turning us toward that which is
absent in our everyday world, that which “stands apart
in the world”. This formulation, like Heidegger’s clearing,
betrays a religious sensibility. After Auschwitz,
however, God was under radical question. The space
left by Him, on the other hand, was not:
Psalm
No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,
no one conjures our dust.
No one.
Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.
A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the no one’s rose.
With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
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with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.
(Trans: Michael Hamburger)
One can draw neither comfort nor despair from this
poem, or rather, neither of them alone. It is a psalm and
an antipsalm; sacred and bitter. What stands apart is palpable
only in its absence; a void saturated by void, to use
Blanchot’s phrase. Celan’s biographer John Felstiner has
brought out the allusions within ‘Psalm’ to Jewish and
Christian mysticism, both of which has to be bypassed
here. But, to repeat Eliot on Dante, I think it communicates
before any of these allusion are understood.
It may seem paradoxical that the writer of such a
poem as ‘Psalm’ has a biographer (Heidegger says the
author of every masterful poem is unimportant) and
Felstiner’s book does indeed concentrate on the poems.
Despite this, he uncovers the probable origin of the title
of his 1959 collection Sprachgitter – Speech Grille.
Celan’s mother-in-law retreated to a convent and
when the family visited her, she would remain behind
a grill. Such a barrier holds also for poetry’s revelation.
One must accept the limit for it to work; the limit is
part of the experience. Or non-experience. Lacoue-
Labarthe’s brief and powerful book on Celan is actually
called “Poetry as Experience”. It characterises
the poem as something always returning to its source,
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approaching the inaccessible, and, necessarily, inaccessibility.
The poem returns to the experience itself – the
revelation in the clearing – not ‘the stuff of anecdotes’
but the etymological origin of ‘experience’: a crossing
through danger. It is a crossing resisted only in what the
poem lets us consume as readers: “a poem has nothing
to recount, nothing to say; what it recounts and says is
that from which it wrenches away as a poem.”
So what, exactly, remains before and after this
wrenching? Celan names it himself, in a speech upon
receiving the prestigious Büchner Prize: “the poem has
always hoped … to speak also on behalf of the strange
– no, I can no longer use this word here – on behalf of
the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.”
(translated by Rosemary Waldrop)
Perhaps the ‘strange’ can be used no longer because
it is already too familiar, too homely. He had to seek
another word or phrase: “the altogether other”. His
speech, as much as his poetry, has to be attuned to the
demands of experience. Celan also refers to the attempt
to give each poem its own date, its own unique time, so
that it speaks with supreme accuracy.
Deep in Time’s crevasse
by the alveolate ice waits,
a crystal of breath,
your irreversible witness
(trans. Michael Hamburger)
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The difficulty is that language depends on generality;
the more specific a word the harder it is to reach across
time; we will not connect to the “altogether other”
trapped in time’s crevasse. In fact, it could not be language
anymore. Yet if it can connect despite risking such
isolation, it would be all the more richer. In this respect,
Celan requires a certain amount of patience on behalf of
his readers. For example, a late untitled poem in full:
Illegibility of this world.
All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify the splitting hour
hoarsely.
You, clamped into your deepest part, climb out
of yourself for ever.
(trans. Michael Hamburger)
This is puzzling, but such puzzlement does not matter
much once one sets the need for facts or conclusive
harmony aside. Less sympathetic critics dismiss his
work as ‘hermetic’, sealed from approach. They say
only the writer could know what such a poem is about.
Why is the world illegible? What is a strong clock?
I have no answers. Perhaps the lack of a title necessitates
a certain blankness in the initial response. The
moment one titles an experience the dangers lessen.
Would a biography help us understand this? Probably
not. Celan was adamant that his poetry was accessible:
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“As for my alleged encodings” he said “I’d rather say:
undissembled ambiguity. I see my alleged abstractness
and actual ambiguity as moments of realism.” It seems
odd that a poet so keen – perhaps even desperate – to
reach across time, to provide us with such realism,
should do so by writing wilfully unreadable poems.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to assume it is the
poetry’s problem.
Professor John Carey of Oxford would disagree.
He is Britain’s foremost opponent of difficulty. In his
best-selling book The Intellectuals And The Masses,
he argues that Modernism – the epitome of difficulty –
was invented by intellectuals in order to alienate the socalled
masses, who, newly emancipated from illiteracy,
were seen as muddying the pure waters of literature.
Celan indicates other reasons. In fact, the “enjoyment”
Carey demands is really a means of retaining a dualistic
attitude to literature; of “talking eyes into blindness”, to
use Celan’s phrase. Of course, many Modernists were
proto-fascists, yet this doesn’t mean difficulty equals
Totalitarianism. It means, instead, a “crossing through
danger” is not mere rhetoric. The dangers led Heidegger
to his great error.
It troubled Celan that the man he saw as one of the
greatest of modern thinkers, so close to his own work,
was a Nazi. One cannot even say ‘had been a Nazi’
because he never said anything that amounted to a renunciation.
Late in life, Heidegger became interested in
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Celan’s work. He recognised him as the only living equal
of Hölderlin. He attended public readings given by the
poet, and in 1967 even invited him to his famous Black
Forest retreat at Todtnauberg. Celan accepted. This was
a significant move as Celan had developed an intense
sensitivity (one might say ‘anxiety’) toward anti-Semitic
tendencies in post-war Europe. When his dedicated
publishers re-issued the work of a poet popular in the
Nazi years, he left for another, and when German literary
authorities exonerated him over plagiarism charges, he
regarded it as a humiliation to be even under investigation.
Yet here he was meeting a man in his most intimate
home, a home in which, it is said, he had once run Nazi
indoctrination sessions. Perhaps Celan never knew the
full extent of Heidegger’s culpability.
Generally, not much is known about Celan’s reasons
for accepting the invitation, nor what happened during
the visit, but very soon after Celan wrote a poem called
‘Todtnauberg’. The title reference is explicit; the place
name is synonymous with the philosopher. This is the
first half:
Arnica, eyebright,
the draft from the well
with the star-crowned die above it,
In
the hut,
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the line
- whose name did the book
register before mine? -,
the line inscribed in that book about
a hope, today,
of a thinking man’s
coming
word
in the heart,
(trans. Michael Hamburger)
As Pierre Joris points out in his exceptional analysis
of the various translations of the poem, ‘Todtnauberg’
is barely a poem than single sentence divided into eight
stanzas. The first of the three above display Celan’s extraordinary
eye for nature, as noted earlier in ‘Nocturnally
Pouting’. Arnica and Eyebright are flowers noted
for their healing qualities, so right from the start there is
the sense of what the meeting is all about. In the third,
the poet signs the visitors book and makes plain his
awareness of who might have signed it before – Germans
being indoctrinated into Nazi ideology perhaps.
He hopes for a word in the heart of the great man. Did
the word reveal itself? The remaining five stanzas are:
woodland sward, unlevelled,
orchid and orchid, single,
coarse stuff, later, clear
in passing,
he who drives us, the man,
who listens in,
the half- trodden fascine
walks over the high moors
dampness,
much.
BUY Paul Celan books online from and
Almost certainly not. The two men walked across
woodland each in his isolation: an orchid and an orchid.
And the poem remained isolated as far as Heidegger
was concerned. He displayed his special copy of the
poem proudly to subsequent visitors to the cottage,
seemingly unaware of its implications. Perhaps this is
enough to indicate the blindness of a man, even one
with genius, rooted in his familiar landscape – brought
out here in Hamburger’s translation of log-paths as
“fascine”, a word so close to ‘fascist’, the etymological
origin coming, as Joris says, from the Latin ‘fasces’ – a
bundle of wooden rods – the symbol of fascism.
‘Todtnauberg’, therefore, cannot be regarded as a
coded accusation, or as a shy expression of bitterness,
or sentimental regret, or of pompous self-definition in
contrast to a supposed intellectual superior, but rather the
very openness Heidegger apparently lacked. As Celan
once said: “Poetry does not impose itself, it exposes.”
The lack of a second “itself” in this sentence exposes. �
157
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Feature [published August 1996]
Bruce Chatwin: In Search Of The Miraculous
Nick Clapson on the enduring enigma of Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing
Bruce Chatwin was a truly singular voice in British travel
writing, and whose silence is now all too apparent. Since
his untimely death in 1989 of what was described at the
time as a rare Chinese disease (but which was later admitted
to be AIDS), several collections of his previously
unpublished work have appeared. The latest of these is
Anatomy of Restlessness: Uncollected Writings. This
book, however, pays poor service to his name. Published
under the auspices of a ‘sourcebook’ of uncollected
work it draws together various pieces from magazines
and journals. The result is a misshapen assemblage that
hides gems amongst the weak and the substandard.
Chatwin’s writing at its best is both thrilling and
absorbing, capable of carrying the reader to untravelled
lands, and Chatwin was always the best of companions.
However, if Chatwin the writer was intriguing, Chatwin
the man was so much more. His rich life, pushed and
pulled by his demanding interests, was always present
in his work. That is not say that he was example of
that breed of traveller who batters you into submission
with endless anecdote heaped upon anecdote. Rather,
he introduces you to the sights of exotic lands, vast
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and
parties of characters, all set free to live an existence
untrammelled by the author’s irrepressible ego.
As the format of this new book suggests, Bruce
Chatwin’s writing was divisible into distinct categories
– whether it be art, his exploration of what he termed
“the nomadic alternative”, or fiction, written in a style
which was an assiduous blend of the real with the
imaginary. The autobiographical piece which opens
Anatomy Of Restlessness hints at some of the myths
that surround this man. By all accounts Chatwin left
his steady job writing for The Sunday Times with a
telegram enigmatically stating “Have gone to Patagonia”.
This, however, was not the first time that he had
made such a dramatic break from security. Previously,
he threw in his job as a director at Sotheby’s in order
to live with and study nomadic tribes in the Sudan, offering
the excuse that his doctor said that he needed to
view distant horizons in order to correct an eye defect
(a self-confessed psychosomatic illness). The product
of his sudden trip to Patagonia was the aptly titled In
Patagonia (1977).
This first book was most probably the driest of all
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Chatwin’s output, but which has already been raised to
near classic status. Chatwin weaves together curious
observations with nuggets of historical information
which manages to make this more than an account of
a physical journey, and that, to me, is the essence of
good travel writing. I don’t just want to know what a
cracking guy the author is, and how he managed to get
out of a scrape with an armadillo whilst travelling in
the Amazon with just a piece of used dental floss and a
very, very sharp stick. Nor do I want to be laden down
with superfluous information on the economic argument
for the downfall of the Ottoman Empire!
What do I demand from a travel writer then? I want
to be able to understand them as a person, and know
why they have undertaken this particular journey. And
that means being able to step inside their head and
travel with them. Though this is nearly impossible,
Bruce Chatwin was one of the few writers that I feel
managed it.
Chatwin was not, however, a straight forward kind of
travel writer like Wilfred Thesiger or Norman Lewis.
One of the most amazing qualities that sets Chatwin
apart was his ability to mix fact and fiction in his ‘stories’.
As he said himself, “The word story is intend to
alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative
may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at
work.” This is idea is best held in mind when considering
his best-selling book, The Songlines (1987).
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and
Though clearly a novel, it is also not a novel. Let
me explain. The main character is a guy called Bruce
who’s travelling around the Australian outback researching
the nomadic culture of the Aboriginal, and
their singing the world into existence through their
travelling of the Songlines. This coincidence is further
compounded by the fact that ‘Bruce’ records his notes
in very same moleskin notebooks that Bruce Chatwin
himself was famous for. This book, then, results in
being so much more than just a travel book or a novel.
It provides not only a combination of a portrait of an
amazing culture and a damn fine read; it eventually
draws the reader into questioning the very fabric of
human culture and our Western preconceptions. Who
could ask for more? An interesting aside: Salman
Rushdie, who travelled with Chatwin in Australia
whilst he was working on this book, provides an enlightening,
though brief, glimpse of Chatwin at work
in his book Imaginary Homelands (1991).
An obvious thread that joins much of Chatwin’s
work like The Songlines and Anatomy Of Restlessness
is his passion for nomadic life. This interest is represented
in both the opening section, ‘Horreur du domicile’,
which draws together various short pieces on his
own personal motivations to travel, and the chapter
entitled ‘The Nomadic Alternative’. In this chapter
the collection of pieces outline many of the arguments
that comprised Chatwin’s own unpublished thesis on
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nomadism. These pieces, though frequently dense, are
some of the most rewarding, with Chatwin’s erudition
shining through. Chatwin links many divergent
nomadic cultures from around the world, highlighting
several similarities of development, and in time puts
forward a credible case for nomadism as equal to
the sedentary life that has become a universal norm.
If Chatwin is to be believed, civilisation just took a
wrong turn somewhere, and chose to plump for the
inferior option. This, he feels, also goes some way to
explain the Western disease: wanderlust.
When viewed in comparison to his own collection
of incidental work, What Am I Doing Here (1989),
Anatomy Of Restlessness pales. Chatwin amassed innumerable
fabulous pieces in what must be considered
the definitive compilation, and which really renders
this new book superfluous. The pieces range through
the intensely personal in ‘Your father’s eyes are blue
again’, the dramatic with ‘A coup – a story’ (though
Chatwin himself was caught up in the coup in Benin),
and the entrancing ‘On the yeti’s tracks’. These short
works, however, are just the tip of the iceberg, with this
book containing so much more.
Another remarkable quality of Chatwin’s writing
was his ability to capture a personality, and What Am
I Doing Here is filled with accounts of some the unusual
characters he met over the years. We meet Maria
Reiche, a gangly German mathematician who spends
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and
her days in the bleak environment of the Peruvian
Pampas, standing on a step-ladder in order to chart
the strange lines, often miles in length, carved into the
floor of this desert. We travel with Chatwin to Ghana to
see the film director Werner Herzog going mad (again)
whilst filming Chatwin’s novel, The Viceroy Of Quidah
(1980). We even get to trail around India with Bruce
and the photographer Eve Arnold who followed Indira
Gandhi’s election campaign shortly before her assassination
in the late 70s.
Another crucial aspect of Chatwin’s output addressed
in Anatomy Of Restlessness is his unfailing interest in
all forms of visual art. Chatwin’s aesthetic was that
which championed the primitive and the simplistic,
though, whilst at Sotheby’s he was employed as an ‘expert’
on Impressionism. Whilst interested in the theory
of art and collecting, he was also an artist of considerable
aplomb himself with his work being published in
the posthumous Photographs And Notebooks (1993),
with a coinciding exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall,
London. Here we are shown his remarkable eye for the
abstract that exists in all things. Sparse and controlled,
his photographs managed to trap the beauty that can
be found in the common and everyday. He crops boats
and walls in Mauritania, so releasing the power of their
dazzling colours and geometric forms. The prayer flags
of the Bodnath Stupa, Kathmandu, are framed so as to
cut crazy patterns in the sky.
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Chatwin’s photographs also demonstrate keen
awareness of the decay inherent in all life, littered with
images of crumbling buildings, and tatty ramshackle
shacks, all breathing what looks to be their last breath.
Maybe he liked feel that all sedentary life was on its
last legs, and soon nomadism, the rightful king would
come and claim back its lands. Or maybe he just found
them beautiful.
This brief excursion through the work of Bruce
Chatwin has, I hope, served to demonstrate not only his
uniqueness, but also convey some sense of the power
BUY Bruce Chatwin books online from and
of his writing. In doing so, it becomes glaringly apparent
that Anatomy Of Restlessness is an unsatisfying
epilogue to Chatwin’s oeuvre. Yes, it is put together in
a good accessible form, and yes, it does aim to cover
the main areas of his output. However, what is lacking
is a sense of quality, and as a result much of this work
falls short of being able to be considered ‘important’.
However, if, like myself, you want one last chance to
experience the joy of reading a new Chatwin book,
then you won’t be disappointed. Bruce Chatwin does
still exists in these pages. �
161
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Interview [published October 2000]
Annabel Chong: Life Thru A Lens
Robin Askew meets the star of Sex: The Annabel Chong Story
“Oh my god – this couple just turned around and gave
me a dirty look!” Annabel Chong giggles like a schoolgirl.
“It’s like, no sex please we’re British.” Perhaps unwisely,
she’d stepped outside her film company’s noisy
office to do this interview in the street over her mobile
phone, and had spent 20 minutes chatting chirpily about
blow-jobs and erections. Strange that she should be so
easily embarrassed, mind. Ms Chong’s claim to fame is
that back in 1995 she set a new world record by having
sex with 251 men in ten hours, the whole event being
recorded on film and subsequently edited down to a
brisk four hours to become a bestselling hardcore porn
vid. Also on hand was a documentary crew making Sex:
The Annabel Chong Story, which was the hottest ticket
at the last year’s Sundance festival of independent film.
She has always insisted the big gang-bang was a
feminist statement, turning the tables on men to reduce
them to a succession of cocks of varying degrees of
tumescence. There’s a debate to be had about whether
pornography degrades women, and whether the appropriate
response is to degrade men right back again.
But it’s a monumentally boring one. Everyone knows
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and
where they stand and if you really want it rehashed once
again, leave Spike right now and turn to The Guardian
women’s page, where they’re certain to oblige. Opportunities
to interview porn icons, especially those as
articulate and forthright as Annabel Chong, are few and
far between, so I decided to seek answers to the questions
people really want asked. After polling a handful
of mates of both sexes, who may or may not be more
sleazy than the average Spike reader (you decide), I
found these boiled down to variations on four themes.
Let’s get them out of the way before we go any further.
So Annabel, did you come? “Sporadically, I did. But
it’s very much like running a marathon. You go through
stretches where it’s just incredibly boring, incredibly
awful. And you get to certain stretches where you’re
just running on air. That was where I really got into
it and enjoyed it. I’ve always enjoyed extreme sexual
situations, and this was certainly one of them. There
are some people – they may not be Tom Cruise, let’s
say – but they’re very comfortable with their bodies
and their own sexuality. I find that ultimately more attractive
than a stud who’s just neurotic about what he
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looks like, posing in front of the camera and losing his
hard-on. That’s just not very appealing, is it?”
What proportion of the men failed to get it up, then?
“About 66% were not able to perform. And between
you and me, I would have to say that if I were a bloke
I would have tremendous difficulty performing. I think
I’d get this performance anxiety attack and just fail.
And up to this day, I really wonder why a lot of the men
decided to do it. It’s bad enough to fail but it’s even
worse to fail on video, where their grandchildren could
check it out: ‘Oh my god, grandpa’s such a loser. He
couldn’t even get it up.’ Terribly embarrassing I would
think.”
Given that they were recruited through porn mags,
weren’t you at all concerned that the men would turn
out to be revolting, rancid weirdos? “Oh, they were
rather revolting, some of them. But the whole point of
the entire exercise was not to pick out 251 studs. It’s
more like the idea of the UN.”
I’m sorry? “You know, the United Nations. You get a
little bit of everything. A little sampling of every single
shape, size and, you know … colour, I guess.”
Weren’t you terribly sore afterwards? “Well, in actual
fact if you watch the four-hour gang bang tape itself,
you will realise that a lot of the things were fudged in
editing to make it look as though more sex took place.
So it really wasn’t that many men.”
Hang on. It says here that there were 251 of them.
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and
Have we been diddled? “But they just moved them
along really quickly. There was some humping, but not
quite that much. It’s actually less sex than if a woman is
having sex with a man for 10 hours straight. Now that’s
a lot of sex.”
Sex is a fascinating and occasionally unsettling film,
whose subject comes across as a complicated young
woman, alternately assertive and thoughtful, damaged
and deluded. The gang-bang itself is one of the least
erotic things you’ll ever see. Silvery pony-tailed Brit
director John Bowen, whose nom de porn is John T.
Bone, also acts as cock wrangler, leading the leering
fornicators in groups of five up onto a plinth where Ms
Chong waits to receive them. We also meet her creepy
middle-aged fan club organiser, some sneery rival porn
stars at a convention (“I do film noirs (sic),” sniffs
the star of Bitches of Hollywood), and watch Annabel
playing up to a Jerry Springer audience and charming
undergraduates at a Cambridge Union debate. But the
story behind the documentary turns out to be even
more fascinating. Nowhere is the viewer informed that
the director, Gough Lewis, was shagging his subject.
Now he’s apparently ‘gone AWOL’ and she’s agreed
to publicise the film to put right what she claims are
misrepresentations. What’s more, she’s now making
her own film about what it’s like to be the subject of
a documentary. “I get more self-reflective every day,”
she quips.
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Annabel Chong was born Grace Quek (pronounced
“quake”) in Singapore, 1972. Her Christian parents
(mum’s a piano teacher, dad’s a schoolteacher) sent her
to convent school and encouraged her to study law but
her “dwindling religious faith and burgeoning sexuality”
were already causing problems. In a traumatic
ritual, she was exorcised in a local church at the age
of 17. In 1991, she moved to London to attend King’s
College and thence to America and the University of
Southern California, where she was so enraged by
feminist theory that she took to porn as a kind of practical
adjunct to her gender studies course.
Although she still has a tendency to address each
question as though it were one of her college essays, to
be fielded with maximum cultural studies jargon, Annabel/Grace
(“‘Who am I?’ is a question I constantly
ask myself”) now seems a great deal more assured than
she does in the film. “It’s rather mortifying to look back
and think to myself, oh my god, was I that vulnerable?”
she admits. “But maybe I was.”
One of the more disturbing scenes shows Annabel
cutting herself, the clear implication being that the
porn industry has driven her to self-harm. In fact, she
says, the sequence was shot on the day that she and
the director split up, and both of them were doing it.
“I don’t know what came over me. It’s not one of the
prouder moments of my life, but when I saw the film I
was really astonished to find that he didn’t include the
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and
entire context.”
Even more worrying, we learn that not only has Bowen
yet to pay her the $10,000 she was promised to take
part in the gang bang, but the assurances she was given
about the men being tested for HIV were untrue. “I was
terribly disturbed by that. I felt extremely betrayed by
the fact that they didn’t take the health precautions I
thought they did,” she says angrily.
Late in the film, it’s revealed that she was gang
raped while in London in 1991. The viewer is invited
to conclude that her penchant for group sex flicks (I
Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team, All I Want For
Christmas is a Gang Bang) is born of a desire to regain
control over this part of her life. She thinks that’s too
simplistic an explanation. “Nobody ever does anything
for any single motivation. I felt that it was a cop out for
Gough to say that A caused B, because there’s actually
more of a story behind the entire rape event. The immediate
outcome of it was that I was sent through the
legal system and National Health Service counselling
system, which was incredibly dehumanising. I felt that
I was nothing but a statistic. Then I looked back on my
entire life in Singapore and realised that all my life I
had been processed. I led the perfect life. I went to all
the right schools, I attended the right social functions,
hung out in the country club, went to church, got the
humanities scholarship. I was the perfect child, but
none of it was really my choice. First thing I did was to
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quit law school and go to art school. It was a big issue.
My relatives, bless them, actually called my parents to
offer their condolences. ‘She’s going to starve. We feel
so sorry for you.’ So it affected me in the sense that
control became a huge issue in my life. I think what
you see in the documentary is the process of regaining
control, and it really is a work in progress. Even today,
I’m asking myself whether I’m in control of situations.”
These days she’s made up with her parents, who
were unaware of their daughter’s novel career and a
little baffled by her popularity when the documentary
was being filmed. Partly as a result of her experiences
of being exploited in front of the camera, she’s now
decided to go behind it, producing her own porn. And
she’s on a crusade. “What I’m trying to do is to target
market my product towards a younger crowd, which no
one is really addressing right now. Or at least to make
it more contemporary. I mean what’s up with the big
hair? It’s so over. So 80s.”
Do you really think porn consumers look at the
hairstyles though, Annabel? “Well, if I was a bloke,
I wouldn’t want all that frizzy hair crackling all over
my blow-job. It just seems rather intimidating. It’s
like being blown by a hedgehog. I don’t think it’s very
aesthetic. Men have to have jerk off somehow. They
need to have a wank over some images of people getting
it on. They’re just going to buy whatever’s out
there. And if there’s product out there that’s done rather
BUY Annabel Chong films online from and
well – like the films from the 70s, which I really admire
– the women actually do look like women, which is
kind of nice. Because nowadays the women don’t look
like women – they look like drag queens. And half the
time I’m just sitting there thinking, they don’t look terribly
female do they? As a female viewer that bothers
me, because I want to be able to relate to the person
onscreen when I’m doing my own private thing.
“I may not know necessarily what good pornography
is,” she concedes. “I know what I like, so I’m just going
to make what I like and hopefully it will sell.”
Of course, it won’t sell over here because we have
some of the most draconian censorship laws in the
world. “I thought about that when I was coming over
here. I really believe that when you talk about banning
porn because it’s exploitative of women or because it’s
obscene, then it’s terribly fascist. A lot of people derive
enjoyment from watching adult films. I certainly do.
I have been a porn consumer for years, and proud to
be one. I think a lot of things are more obscene than
the average porn film. Like Patch Adams, the Robin
Williams film. I think that’s incredibly obscene – it’s
like total emotional pornography.”
What with the porn and the documentary and her
journalism and art exhibitions, there’s just one thing
Annabel doesn’t have time for anymore. “Your average
Brit probably has a better sex life than me,” she moans.
And on that cheering note, I bid her farewell. �
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Feature [published November 1997]
E.M. Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond
Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran
refuses explanation
“Nothing is more irritating than those works which
‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has
focused on just about everything except a system.”
What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was
born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a Greek Orthodox
priest. In adolescence, he lost his childhood in the country
and was moved to the city. He also lost his religion.
For years he didn’t sleep – until he took up cycling. He
passed sleepless nights wandering the dodgy streets of
an obscure Romanian city. In 1937 he moved to Paris
and wrote, producing what are generally classified as
‘aphorisms’, collected together under such titles as The
Temptation To Exist, A Short History Of Decay and The
Trouble With Being Born. He knew Samuel Beckett,
who eventually lost sympathy with his pessimism. Late
in life he gave up writing, not wanting to “slander the
universe” anymore, and died a few years later after an
encounter with an over-excited dog.
I hope none of this helps.
Cioran’s sentences are of little or no help. That is
their worth. Just think of the aphorisms; each sentence
has the company of only one or two others. The gaps
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and
between groups of sentences appear like sands of the
desert encroaching on an oasis. Or is it the other way
around? That the answer is so unclear is the worth of
Cioran’s sentences.
His aphorisms are unlike the smug, bourgeois exponents
of the 19th century. They open wounds. Still,
Cioran is not studied. This is the academic orthodoxy.
And that’s fine. Scholars read texts like drivers read
diversion signs. La Rochefoucauld 20 miles, Nietzsche
40, Existentialism, forever. Alternatively, just
read the sentences.
“…lyricism represents a dispersal of subjectivity.”
The end of a sentence in this case; a place of especial
elation and despair. (The want of elation and despair
generating their presence in the vertiginous lack which
is the peculiarity of consciousness. Reading is like consciousness
in that nothing happens. ) Cioran is lyrical.
His style is a variant on song. At the same time he is a
writer of solitude and subjectivity. This last word has
gained a pejorative meaning lately, akin to solipsism,
selfishness, ignorance, certainly ‘untruth’. But let us
wrest it back for as long as we can. Subjectivity is the
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state of struggle of one who is alive, within time: sleepless.
“Three in the morning. I realize this second, then
this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for
each minute. And why all this? Because I was born.
It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the
indictment of birth.”
A special type of sleeplessness being where one is
oneself forever and knows it. It is also an indictment of
lyricism. Lyricism is sleep; the suppression of subjectivity,
the impossible denial of ‘three in the morning’.
Adorno’s call for an end to lyric poetry after Auschwitz
is a wish for the return of each subject destroyed by a
revolution lyrical to its evil core. The Volk wanted to
sleep. Then it was mass rallies at Nuremburg, now its
anything you care to name: popular culture indeed. Cioran’s
physical insomnia disallowed the easy contempt
for those who craved such sleep. He needed it too, to
stay alive. A familiar irony: Cioran’s tragedy was also
his saving. “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet
it is melancholy that separates us from it.”
When Cioran began to write in French he had, by
then, conquered his insomnia. Exhausted by long
bicycle rides, he slept. Still, the writing tries to abide
in the old white nights of insomnia, only to collapse
into the sleep toward which literature tends. Cioran’s
writing tends to disperse the ‘three in the morning’ in
lyric expression. So, a bit of a disappointment, to say
the least.
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“As a general rule, men expect disappointment: they
know they must not be impatient, that it will come soon
or later, that it will hold off long enough for them to
proceed with their undertakings of the moment. The
disabused man is different: for him, disappointment
occurs at the same time as the deed; he has no need to
await it, it is present.”
To say again then, his disappointment with writing
was inevitable. But this only drives one on, to divest
words of their common usage and apply them to this
moment. This one. In an interview, he tells of his
disillusionment with writing’s other products, particularly
those where disappointment is not an issue:
ideas, grand narratives, systems. “Philosophers are
constructors, positive men, positive, mind you, in a bad
sense.” Elsewhere: “Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three
enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is
the system, in philosophy and in everything.” Yet how
can one write without constructing some system, even
if it is negative?
“’Optimists write badly’ (Valery). But pessimists do
not write.” [Maurice Blanchot]
The violence of Cioran’s work, its verbosity and
arrogance, results from a struggle with inevitable
positivism. The use of aphorism is also borne of this.
It demands our opposition. The blank following the
sentences rises up before us. Our exasperation leaves
the same silent space hovering there. This is the place-
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less heaven or hell Cioran is always returning us to. It
is pointless to oppose or argue – or explain. One can
scan the biographical parabola that gives shape to a life,
thereby explaining it and the work, but something is
left behind; this place he takes us to. The facts of a life
help inasmuch as noise masks silence. But something is
left behind. Generally, it seems students study, reviewers
review, writers write and readers read in the hope of
avoiding this. It’s what the people want, after all.
Cioran has also written essays. They demand the
same kind of reading as the aphorisms. It just takes
longer. In the landmark essays, the brilliance burns
long and hard. Still, the tone remains more or less identical
to the aphorisms. While the aphorisms give us the
breathing space of a firebreak, the essays threaten suffocation.
What is lost is the very sense of its inspiration,
the surprise, the horror, the emptiness of the moment.
Instead, Cioran has something to say. In ‘Beyond the
Novel’, Cioran examines our self-conscious age with
regard to what helped constitute it – the novel.
The essay develops out of the idea that the novel
grew out of metaphysical poverty. It allowed us to
understand our history and our psychology in a world
where the old certainties were decaying. Yet now that
the decay has reached a zero point, producing the kind
of works bereft even of the certainty of the self as subject.
If you don’t know what novels these are, they’re
the ones NOT written by journalists. Yet however
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repulsively anachronistic the journalistic novel is (and
virtually every novel published is a journalistic novel),
Cioran wonders what is the point of writing more than
one novel of absence:
“[the] implicit conception of this sort of art opposes to
the erosion of being the inexhaustible reality of nothingness.
Logically valueless, such a conception is nonetheless
true affectively (to speak of nothingness in any other
terms than affective one is a waste of time). It postulates
a research without points of reference, an experiment
pursued within an unfailing vacuity, a vacuity experienced
through sensation, as well as a dialectic paradoxically
frozen, motionless, a dynamism of monotony and
emptiness. Is this not going around in circles? Ecstasy of
non-meaning: the supreme impasse.”
This passage – representative of the whole – jerks
the steering wheel as if to herald an eternal roundabout.
But this will be Cioran’s own journey. Instead
of condemning the novelist, and thereby commending
his own judgement, Cioran gives him the benefit of the
doubt. “Is [the novel] really dead, or only dying? My
incompetence keeps me from making up my mind … I
leave it to others, more expert, to establish the precise
degree of its agony.”
Instead of only railing against repetitious failure,
Cioran gives us the guidelines to which potential
writers must abide if they are to create an art for the
wilderness. In Kafka’s words, this is the help going
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away without helping. ‘Beyond the Novel’ adds to the
demands of genuine creation, and thus the unexpected
joy of what has been and might be achieved. Instead
of Postmodern cacophony – its sloppy apologia borne
on positive negativism – we get to hear the silence
behind the noise. One thinks of Beckett, of course, and
the equally great Thomas Bernhard. To confirm this,
Cioran pulls up in a lay-by and, in a passage one might
describe as uncharacteristic, seems to hold back from
hopelessness and bitter regret:
“Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are
sometimes fruitful … Let us salute it, then, even celebrate
it: our solitude will be reinforced, affirmed. Cut off from
one more channel of escape, up against ourselves at last,
we are in a better position to inquire as to our functions
and our limits, the futility of having a life.”
Well, not uncharacteristic after all. This is as near
to abstract celebration as Cioran gets. He leaves it to
others with ‘the courage of dilution’ to give us the
succour using the ‘banalities’ necessary for the novel.
His admiration for other writers is due precisely to
their ability use the banal surface to reach the subterranean.
Cioran’s rapid lyricism will not spread into a
delta plain of banality to allow such an exploration.
This is his limit.
Despite this, he is able to prospect worth by refamiliarizing
us with what is important. Perhaps his most
worthwhile work apart from the aphorisms, we can
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and
find in his short pieces on other writers collected in
Anathemas And Admirations. In particular, the essay on
Scott Fitzgerald. Here is a writer one might otherwise
ignore: sentimental claptrap elevated to art by a lazy
world. Cioran lays this aside. What he concentrates on
the time when Fitzgerald awoke from the American
Dream into the intensity of lucid consciousness, something
“that transcends contingencies and continents”.
By this time, Fitzgerald’s famous books have been
written, the American definition of success achieved:
fame, money and even requited love. “Literally and
figuratively, [Fitzgerald] had lived asleep. But then
sleep left him.” Why? Returning to the his deepest
theme, Cioran answers: “Insomnia sheds a light on us
which we do not desire but to which, unconsciously,
we tend. We demand it in spite of ourselves, against
ourselves.”
Fitzgerald’s inner experience remained despite
worldly success, indeed was heightened as a result. On
the heights of his despair, Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Crack-
Up’. Cioran’s commentary on this non-work – it was a
series of fragments – is like most of Cioran’s commentaries,
a commentary on his own procedure, also a series
of fragments. ‘The Crack-Up’ represents for Cioran the
direction Fitzgerald should have pursued rather than
regarding it as an aberration. He tried to overcome it by
going to Hollywood to write screenplays. Fitzgerald is
rightly judged inferior to what he discovered, unlike a
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Kierkegaard, a Dostoevsky or a Nietzsche.
“Fitzgerald admirers deplore the fact that he brooded
over his failure and, by dint of ruminating so deeply
upon it, spoiled his literary career. We, on the contrary,
deplore that he did not remain sufficiently loyal to that
failure, that he did not sufficiently explore or exploit it.
It is a second-order mind that cannot choose between
literature and the real dark night of the soul.”
In the same piece, Cioran equates loyalty to failure
with sickness. The healthy, he says, keep a certain
distance from our ‘contradictory and intense’ states,
while to be sick is ‘to coincide totally with oneself’.
The former allows us to act. But isn’t it precisely one’s
distance from oneself a part of sickness; it is the part
which can never act?
“When you imagine you have reached a certain degree
of detachment, you regard as histrionic all zealots
… But doesn’t detachment, too, have a histrionics of
its own? If actions are mummery, the very refusal of
action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.”
The interaction of conditions is inevitable. Nobility is
left to the silent and invisible. ‘The Crack-Up’ is called
the work of a sick man, yet its impressive lucidity is
a histrionics of detachment, more or less identical to
Cioran’s own work, sick only inasmuch as it cannot
achieve oneness with its subject. Oneness is barely
human, hence our fascination with good and evil. Perhaps
this sharp division between sickness and health is
BUY E.M. Cioran books online from and
where Cioran lapses into the sentimentality Fitzgerald
was prone to. It is a form of self-pity, trying to justify
the inherent hubris of writing and publishing. Aware of
this, Cioran tells us not to worry about those who are
excessively self-pitying because an excess of self-pity
preserves reason.
“This is not a paradox … for such brooding over our
miseries proceeds from an alarm in our vitality, from
our reaction of energy, at the same time that it expresses
an elegiac disguise of our instinct of self-preservation.”
This helps answer a perennial question: why did
Cioran live so long without killing himself? Sickness
can increase self-pity, thereby reason, thereby selfpreservation.
To cross the abyss that is life, if that is our
purpose, we must use both sickness and health, selfpity
and detachment, the desert and the oasis. To deny
either is either fatal or contemptible. Cioran shows by
example, how various the tension between opposites is
manifested. His examples have one thing in common
it seems: the admittance of lucidity, that which lies
behind all stories, all systems, all action, all help.
As academia eschews ambivalence and individualism,
rewarding instead skills of memory and language,
it might be worth stepping into the vanishing point
Cioran occupied so tenaciously, if only to re-open the
stagnant wounds of our lucidity.
“The ideally lucid, hence ideally normal, man should
have no recourse beyond the nothing that is in him”. �
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Interview [published February 2006]
Diablo Cody: Candy Girl
Emma Garman talks to the author of Candy Girl: A Year In The Life
Of An Unlikely Stripper
One night, 24-year-old recent Minnesota transplant
Diablo Cody was walking home from her dull ad
agency job when the words “Amateur Night” on a topless
bar’s marquee beckoned irresistibly. Even though
Cody had only once been inside a strip club – and, with
her idyllic middle-class upbringing, devoted boyfriend
and conspicuous lack of emotional scars, hardly fit the
stereotype of a sex industry worker – one try-out as
an amateur led to a year of professional hard graft as
a stripper, lap dancer and peep-show performer. The
equally hilarious, titillating and gruesome account of
her exhausting adventure, Candy Girl: A Year In The
Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, is far more than just another
stripper memoir or dispatch from the dark side:
Cody’s analysis of what she found within the walls of
upscale men’s clubs and sleazy sex palaces, and within
herself, is shot through with a laser-like wit and punk
rock sensibility likely to influence all political shades of
opinion on sex jobs and raunch culture. Cody – who’s
now hung up her white platforms to work as a successful
screenwriter and arts editor – talked to me on the
phone from Minneapolis.
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and
Even jaded readers will be fascinated by some of
the real-life characters in your book. Like the jizzlicking
guy at the peep show.
He’s the celebrity of the book! He would come
crawling in and lick up as much as he could. The thing
that was really fascinating about him was that he was
so clean cut. He was the last guy you would ever think
had a habit like that. I shudder to think about it.
What else did you come across that fazed you?
You know, people who just had really strange fetishes.
Incest would come up a lot: People who would
want you to masturbate as their sister, or their mother.
That was something I was not comfortable with. I tried
to be pretty game, but that really freaked me out. And,
you know, a lot of cross dressers. There seemed to be a
lot of men who wanted to come in and talk about gay
sex. To me that was really surprising, that they though
of the booth as a safe haven for their fantasies, even
though it was obviously straight-oriented entertainment.
That was weird.
So you became a stripper as an experiment – were
you surprised to find you became addicted? And
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was it the money or the attention?
Honestly, I never made that much money compared
with the people I worked with. So for me I think it was
about the attention, but also sort of an external thing.
I found it to be cathartic, a very weird, twisted form
of self-expression. I think I got addicted to just how
subversive and how fun it was compared to my every
day life.
And you didn’t derive any particular satisfaction
from, say, when you got a promotion at the advertising
agency where you worked.
Right, I didn’t at all, and it surprised me, because if
I got 20 toy shows at Sex World [the porn emporium
where Cody worked as one of the ‘dolls’ who are displayed
and selected for peep show performances] in a
night I would feel proud.
Is this something mainstream feminism has still
failed to sufficiently acknowledge, how satisfying it
can be to wield one’s sexual power in this way?
It can. I think it’s something that third-wave feminism
has recognized. On the other hand the one thing people
have failed to recognize is just how unsatisfying and
unfulfilling the corporate world can still be for women.
Because no matter how much we’ve progressed, the
glass ceiling is still so much in place. And I honestly
felt kind of degraded in my day-to-day life, at the whitecollar
jobs, because I was always being undersold.
Whereas in the sex industry it was so straightforward.
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and
But which would you say is the more exploited
group in a strip club: The girls who work, or the
men who hand over the money?
Some of the needier customers, the men who were
looking for an emotionally connection, were really
preyed upon. They were definitely manipulated and victims
in that way. But most of the time, the women were
disenfranchised. It’s the societal model for a woman to
be revered and worshipped as a thing of beauty, and
in a strip club, it’s actually the complete opposite. You
have a roomful of beautiful women, trying desperately
to woo these men.
Competing with each other.
Exactly. And it really turns the men into little emperors
and the women into these sad, grovelling creatures.
So that was the one aspect that disturbed the heck out
of me. You know, I always thought that strip clubs
would be the kind of places that celebrated beauty and
femininity and it’s really not the case.
How much do the men kid themselves that it’s
anything other than a financial transaction?
Funnily enough, a lot of them sexualize the financial
aspect of it and find it a turn-on to be paying for a lap
dance or for female companionship. There were others
who were obviously in massive denial and seriously
wanted to believe, “oh, this girl really cares about me,
she told me her real name,” not knowing that the same
girl was mocking them in the dressing room and had
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given them a fake real name. Every dancer I knew had
an onstage name and a fake real name for when she
really wanted to sucker a guy. But he would actually
believe that you shared that information with him because
he was so chivalrous and truly respected women.
You know, “I can earn her trust.” A lot of guys just want
to be the white knight, that’s the persona they assume
when they walk into the club. Like they’re going to find
some poor little lost girl and save her.
What do you think about what Ariel Levy has
called “the rise of raunch culture”, and the argument
that the phenomenon of women visiting strip
clubs is regressive rather than empowering?
I guess I’m emblematic of this raunch culture she
talks about. I’m the foul-mouthed, trash-talking, salty
sex worker who has a lot of fun with that stuff. And I
guess I don’t read that deeply into it. I think that any
time people get to reverse roles it’s empowering, and
for women who get to objectify other women it’s a role
reversal, it’s empowering and it feels good. There’s
just no way around it. For me, from a purely hedonistic
standpoint, I find women attractive, so it’s fun to go to
strip clubs and it’s fun to watch porn.
In the book you describe meeting a high school
girl who’s working in a strip club, and for her it was
a regular part-time job, no big deal. What does that
say about American culture?
I mean, just equating material things with sexuality
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and
has become a totally mainstream concept. You hear it
in the music … stripper culture is totally mainstream
now, obviously. Now there’s stripper aerobics, t-shirts
for girls that say “Porn Star”, all that kind of thing.
And it’s not the world I come from. I came of age in
the 90s, when we had Riot Grrl music and it was just
a more feminist time. I know I’m being a hypocrite
by saying that I don’t think a high school girl should
be involved in the sex industry, but at least by the age
of 24 or 25 I had lived enough to be able to make that
decision for myself.
What would you say to a woman who’s read your
book, thinks it sounds like an interesting job and is
going to try it?
I would say try it, slowly. And make sure that you
maintain control of yourself in the situation at all times.
That includes maintaining some level of sobriety.
Because honestly, the people who fall down the rabbit
hole are the ones who get involved with drugs.
And the ones who cross the line into prostitution?
Exactly, yeah. You really have to know your boundaries.
In a lot of cases I think that escort work and prostitution,
to me that’s just another more extreme form
of sex work. I don’t beat around the bush. I knew a
lot of strippers who were really quick to point out the
difference between them and prostitutes, but honestly
I don’t see that big of a difference. It’s a controversial
viewpoint, but I know that I was selling my body and
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selling my sexuality and I’m not really sure how much
bigger a step it would have been toward becoming an
escort. It’s all so closely related that it struck me as
funny when girls would get extremely offended by that
comparison. I would think, you’re in a peep show with
a dildo up your twat and you’re asking me to show you
more respect!
So do you have any regrets?
There are times when I wish I had attempted to take
it even a little more seriously than I did. Because it
would have been interesting to see what it was like to
get really entrenched in the lifestyle and be one of the
upper echelon performers. Obviously I have a physical
limitation in that regard because I don’t look like a ten.
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and
And you don’t want to get big fake boobs?
Exactly, I didn’t want to go that far. But at the same
time part of me wondered what it would have been
like if I had gotten big fake boobs and gone the whole
nine yards, had that ambition that some of those girls
have. Because then I really could have gained insight
into what that life is like, from a purely anthropological
standpoint.
But you would never go back and do it now?
Right – I think it was pretty obvious when I was doing
it that I was kind of a dilettante. I probably wouldn’t
go back and do it now, but I miss it. I still feel a little
twinge when I pass a strip club, and sometimes consider
going in. �
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Interview [published December 1996]
Douglas Coupland: From Fear To Eternity
Chris Mitchell emails Douglas Coupland about fame, the future and the
problem with American chocolate
Douglas Coupland is not your average novelist. Since
the publication of Generation X in 1991, he has become
one of this decade’s most important writers, thanks to
his unerring ability to capture the zeitgeist of young
middle class America in the post-industrial 1990s.
Where Generation X and Shampoo Planet dealt with
the existential confusion of America’s over-educated
children, Microserfs documented the movement of
technology into mainstream culture. Each book seemed
impossibly of the moment at their time of publication –
many said Microserfs must have been speed-written in
order to cash in on the advent of multimedia, yet in fact
it was the result of three years’ painstaking research.
While Coupland is usually portrayed as a ‘spokesman
for a generation’ and a technological evangelist (one
of the short stories on Coupland’s website is entitled
‘The Past Sucks’), most accounts of his work fail to
recognise its inherent humour and humanity.
Now nearly 35 and finally settled in his home town of
Vancouver, Coupland’s new book, Polaroids From The
Dead, does something to redress the balance. Billed
as a collection of “photos from the kitchen drawer”,
Polaroids is a set of personal essays about moments of
life – attending a Grateful Dead concert, an obituary
for Kurt Cobain, a homage to James Rosenquist’s F1-
11. The book’s closing essay, ‘Brentwood Notebooks’,
takes a fascinating and chilling look at the nature of
fame in the wake of the OJ Simpson trial.
With Polaroids From The Dead’s UK publication in
November, Spike caught up with Doug via email. The
following is the transcript of our conversation.
Hi Spike (or is it Chris?)
I received your three postings. I know it’s strange
when you accidentally post the wrong draft. It’s the
modern equivalent of leaving your letter of resignation
under the Xerox machine lid.
If your name is Spike, you’ll be the second one I
know – which is statistically improbable. The other
Spike is Spike Jonze, lately of MTV video fame, but
before that of Dirt fame – a short-lived US magazine
for 18-25s. He and the staff came up to Vancouver for
a day and a half to visit me as part of their ‘Discover
America – a month on the road’ issue. It was great fun,
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and then a few weeks later I was doing a reading at
the University of Iowa and they were driving through
and heckled me from the back and it was great fun.
They’d just done this chocolate rating system on Canadian
chocolate bars (essentially identical to England’s
– Kit Kat, Aero… ) and they gave the bars really low
ratings, which sucked because have you ever tried
US chocolate? Hork! They had just come back from
Devil’s Tower monument (Close Encounters Of The
Third Kind) where, after they finished a chocolate bar,
they tossed it out to the prairie dogs. If the dogs ate it,
the bar got an extra point. If they wouldn’t eat it, the bar
lost a point.
I decided that I had to defend my nation’s chocolate’s
honour, so I bought about 12 US bars at the Circle-K
Mart and then we went to my hotel room and had a
Tasting Session. I’d take a bite of a bar, make comments,
spit it out into a waste paper basket and take
a drink of water and move on to the next bar. I described
the Three Musketeers bar as having a definite
log-in-the-toilet aspect. They printed this in the chart
in their magazine and the company that makes Three
Musketeers bars went ballistic and pulled their ads and
the magazine folded shortly thereafter. Whew! What a
long story. So, hi.
Americans are obsessed with putting peanut butter
in virtually every chocolate bar – why? It smells
like dog doo.
You have to watch it because Americans go nuts if
you slander their chocolate. They really do. I guess it’s
because it’s such a gratifying signal that goes in early
and deep into the child’s mind.
I wasn’t quite sure about this email interview
business. I had this vision of you sitting there with
stock answers ready to paste in…
Not at all. That would be a fax interview (which this
is not) or an interview with Duran Duran (or rather, their
people). My large problem with interviews (and I do
have many problems) is that my brain won’t allow me
to do serial interviews. Once a question’s been asked,
then my brain rebels against having to answer the same
question again. This makes me appear grouchy. I’m
hoping the WWW will allay some of this repetition.
I’m always amazed at actors and how they can charmingly
spew forth studio agendas. But then that’s what
they do for a living – they’re actors.
Did you travel a lot when younger?
Probably too much. I lived in too many places in
the 1980s (in no order: Vancouver, Toronto, Sapporo,
Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles, Montreal, Stuttgart).Then
in my 30s I visited too many cities with work but was
frustrated because I’d ‘be’ in a city just aching to tour
around, but instead I was stuck in a hotel room. I don’t
know how sports teams don’t go mad travelling around
as much as they do. I suppose it’s okay because they’ve
plenty of company.
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I’m 24…
Oh, then you’re due for your mid-20s crisis any day
now. Beware … nobody escapes. Your 20s are muck
and shit and pain and loneliness and horror.
I think I have a headline for this interview…
Indeed! I wish somebody had warned me. I might
have changed a few things. (like what, Doug?) I
wouldn’t have worried so much. And I would have quit
smoking at 20 instead of 26, for starters.
Did you admire any writers at 24?
I read many writers but I never really admired written
craftsmanship until around 28 or 29. I admired visual
artists (all of the Pop artists) and the usual assortment
of 1980s New Order/OMD performers.
And would you have wanted to have communicated
with them?
Actually, no. I learned rather quickly in art school
that someone’s personality is often a million miles
away from their work. I’ve been lucky over the past
few years and have met many people I’ve wondered
about and it’s been good fun. But it’s always been accidental–never
seeking out. For what it’s worth, I was
driving up the coast yesterday listening to Phillip Glass’
Powaquaatsi, the sequel to Koyanisquaatsi … are you
familiar with them? Wonderful movies both. I met the
director by chance in New Mexico and I told him how
much I liked them and he snarled at me, so now I try
and look at the films and not think of him.
Thanks to your art college training, you seem to
enjoy messing around with the format of your books;
the photos in Polaroids, the pages of repeated words
in Microserfs, the comic strip panels in Generation
X. Do you read any comic books?
Not really. Some of the stuff out of Toronto is great:
Palookaville and Yummy Fur spring to mind. And Tintin
when I was younger. But I think I will be exploring
more stuff in this direction.
Did you do all of your website’s graphics etc?
The horizontal panels, yes. They’re a homage to US
Pop artist James Rosenquist. There are so many artists
I admire. Warhol, Jenny Holzer (obviously), Damien
Hirst (he’s cool), Lichtenstein, Barbara Hepworth,
Isamu Noguchi … I could name dozens. It’s my big
influence.
What do you think of the impact of visual art on
culture?
Art in the 20th-century Modernist context is consumed
by both design and by industry almost as quickly
as it is made. There’s no lagtime any longer.
Don’t you think the most exciting visual art isn’t
found in the gallery any longer anyway?
True.
Damien Hirst brings organic things into the sterility
of the gallery, like the shark and the sheep…
Again, true, but I suspect there’s a bit more to it than
just that one dimension.
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… while artists such as Keith Haring, Bill Barker
(The Schwa Corporation) or William Latham (the
chap who does the beautiful organic screensavers)
bypass it entirely.
Agreed. Schwa is majorly cool and we’ve all been
mesmerised by Latham’s screensavers. And Keith’s
well … dead. I’ve actually been a keen fosterer of
the idea that galleries are no longer the casinos of the
shocking and the new. It’s finally sinking in. So many
people have their whole lives invested in the perpetuation
of that system, so expect much backlash accordingly.
But it appears museums are getting the point, and
if anything, a new Renaissance is looming.
Do you think your books have an impact?
This is something I really don’t think about, Chris. I
do them and people read them and hopefully they see
the world differently at the end. In whatever way.
Do you have a sense of distance from your own
work?
Good question, and nobody’s ever asked that one, so
you score ten points (ding ding ding ding.)
The only way I obtain distance is to not read something
and then slam into it with new eyes. With booksin-progress,
it’s hard to give myself much distancing
time. As for older books, I read bits every so often and
wonder at the stuff that was going through my mind
at that point. As for interviews or articles on myself, I
can’t read them. I’m simply biologically unable to read
them. I go berzerk (ask my friends) I ask people to read
articles and reviews and give a synopsis, but it’s like
having my skin peeled off to read them, good or bad.
Microserfs, far more than Generation X, connected
with a lot of my friends here, in the sense
that Microserfs wasn’t American at all – it was the
West’s machine in full swing and we were living it,
loving it and loathing it simultaneously. A sort of
triple ironic self-bluff.
Good description.
Do you think we’re moving towards a major
paradigm shift?
No. It’s business as usual.
The way in which the subject of fame reoccurs
through Polaroids, from Kurt to OJ, makes me ask
an obvious question – is your own fame influencing
your life? Or do you consider yourself unfamous?
Personally, I tend to gauge real hardcore fame by
whether my parents have heard of someone or not.
It influences life only to a small degree, both for good
and bad. Your theory about somebody being famous
only if one’s parents have heard of them is an excellent
description. And even then, there are 5.5 billion people
out there and who knows who knows who?
The eulogy to Kurt in Polaroids – it felt like you were
unsure as to what to say about him. Caught between
needing to say something and unable to fully say it…
I was actually more affected by the overdose and the
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eerie silence the month before he killed himself. I just
knew something was badly fucked-up somewhere, but
had no idea how badly. I wasn’t at all surprised when I
heard the news. I’d prepared myself. It’s one of those
deaths that you didn’t think would affect you much but
does. Jim Henson was one. Dr Seuss was another. All
three of the above have to do with youth and happy
memories of youth followed by loss.
The question of the essential hollowness of fame,
money and material possessions which emerges
from ‘Brentwood Notebook’ and the East Berlin
postcards seems to lead to a certain melancholy.
Yes.
There’s a Godless but still wholly spiritual element
which figures heavily in your work and tends to get
ignored precisely because of all the PCs and Postmodernity
which people – interviewers especially
– prefer to favour. What’s even more interesting is
that there’s no condemnatory tone to the quest for
these things, only a realisation as to their inherent
uselessness. In your work, there’s the day-to-day
fun of life, the exhilaration and exasperation of information
overload, but there’s also this meditative
element that asks the eternal questions.
The next book deals with these in a big way (I hope).
I’ve come to believe that the only decisions that matter
are those decisions made in the face of eternity. The
future is not eternity. It’s an important distinction. I
think PCs grouch at me because I don’t fall into and
victim categories, and Postmodernists kind of like
me only as long as what I do is construed to be of the
hyper-moment, “more now than now.” Both seem to be
short-term (to say the least!) views.
FUN FACT: The next novel is called Girlfriend in a
Coma (after The Smiths’ song.)
Aargh! Doug – don’t do it! Not The Smiths – they
almost ruined my adolescence!
What IS your problem with The Smiths? They’re
great. Almost all UK bands from the 1980s are great.
Even Bonnie Tyler in her own weird way. BTW: where
is she now? Harper’s magazine over here had a statistic
once showing that people are most nostalgic in later
years for the music that was current at the age of 23.
I’d agree.
Has Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh come to your
attention?
Yes. It’s extremely popular. I tried reading it, but it was
so thick and Glaswegian. I’m glad the movie got made.
Drugs and rave culture. What do you think?
That’s so American! In a funny way. Anyway, I don’t
know much about rave culture but I like the outfits. I’ve
really never spent more than ten hours cumulatively in
a nightclub all told. I’m more ‘pubby.’ (a publican? is
there some other word?)
As for drugs I really have to watch it. Even vitamins
spazz me out for up to 48 hours. I grew up on the West
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Coast in the 1970s, which is to say that life was steeped
in bad pot and magic mushrooms for most of my high
school years. I get paranoid on pot, so that was that.
Mushrooms – well, they grow on the front lawns here,
but I’m not sure. I’m really not.
I’m somewhat suspicious of anything mind-altering.
I avoid coke and acid and all sorts of stuff just because
I don’t think we’d agree (or perhaps we’d agree too
much). I know many people who’ve had their lives
saved thanks to some of the newer meds like Prozac
and Zoloft. I overreact to most pharmaceuticals and can
only really tolerate old standbys like erythromycin or
ativan when required. Someone wrote once that I don’t
drink or anything, and this one article, wherever it appeared,
has haunted me ever since. People always make
goggle-eyes when I have a scotch. I see their reaction
and I think, “Ahh, they’ve read THE ARTICLE.”
Do you have any words of advice for young people?
Yes. It’s pissing rain out. We’ve just had the rainiest
October and November in recorded history. The X-Files
studio is ten minutes away from where I live. People
sometimes comment on the calculated use of rain on
the set to create a supernatural effect. They wish! It’s
because it never stops raining here. Now you know.
Care to add anything else, you lovable harbinger
of doom?
I am not a doom harbinger (oh, it’s all in the eye of
the beholder) but I’ll greedily accept the lovable bit.
Bye, Chris.
It’s been much fun. Post me a copy of how it all gels
in the end.
Yours here in Vancouver, Doug �
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Review [published November 1998]
Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book
Chris Mitchell
Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb
Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment
in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give
this tome some literary gravitas, Generation X author
Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides
thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story too.
Lara’s Book feels like a mish-mash of various marketing
ploys. There’s lots of new pictures of Lara herself to
appeal to fevered adolescents, strategic walkthroughs
of the various Tomb Raider games to help those who’ve
got stuck somewhere along the line, interviews with the
games’ developers about how Tomb Raider came into
being, all topped off with Coupland’s prose to maintain
Lara’s cool quotient with the lifestyle crowd.
It’s easy to see why Coupland agreed to be involved
with what is essentially another form of the Tomb
Raider franchise. Lara Croft is the perfect representation
of his love for pop culture and technology, with her
movie-star status as a cultural icon throwing up various
questions about the blurring of realities, both virtual
and normal.
Coupland’s disappointingly brief prose moves in the
same territory as his novels, taking something as inconsequential
as a videogame and expanding it into nothing
less than a metaphor for life. His skill as a writer has
always been in making such assertions seem strangely
appropriate rather than asinine, but here Coupland’s
meditations only serve to make the vacuity at the heart
of the Tomb Raider phenomenon even more apparent.
There’s a distinct sense that there’s actually precious
little to say about Lara. This is indicated by the fact
that far more space is given over to the game-solving
tips than to Coupland’s writing, despite his name being
flagged prominently on the front cover. Once you get
past the idea she’s a female character in a video game
that’s sold lots of copies, there’s not much left. Even
the game developers can offer up little else beyond the
observations that they wanted people to identify with
Lara and for her to be “almost a fantasy object”, which
is hardly the stuff of profundity.
Among the book’s hyperactive layout there is a
spread of various fan letters that have been sent to
Tomb Raider’s creators Eidos. It’s virtually impossible
to read what’s written in the letters, which is a pity, be-
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cause the opinions of Lara’s fans would probably have
shed some real light on her popularity.
Instead, Lara’s Book is simply another addition to
the Tomb Raider hype. Those trying to find out why
Tomb Raider’s central character has caused such a fuss
will be disappointed, because ultimately Lara Croft is a
sphinx without a secret. �
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Review [published December 2007]
Douglas Coupland: The Gum Thief
Dan Coxon
In recent years Douglas Coupland has achieved a
remarkably consistent output. It’s not that every novel
he’s written has been a masterpiece – no writer manages
that – but rather that his great novels have been
regularly interspersed with his less satisfying ones. Microserfs,
Miss Wyoming, Hey Nostradamus! and JPod
all felt like significant contributions to an impressive
body of work; in between, however, we were handed
Girlfriend In A Coma, All Families Are Psychotic and
Eleanor Rigby, all worthy in their own right but none
of them causing much of a stir on the literary scene
(maybe Mr Coupland should stop naming books after
pop songs).
This pattern suggests that The Gum Thief should be a
disappointment, and it certainly doesn’t feel like one of
his finest. Relating the relatively humdrum tale of two
‘associates’ in a Staples stationary superstore, it often
sounds like a soap opera rather than the latest offering
from one of contemporary literature’s most intriguing
voices. To dismiss it out of hand would be a mistake,
however, as its relatively mundane surface hides an
intriguing study of the epistolary form – and a com-
mentary on the nature of the novel itself.
The Gum Thief opens in typical epistolary-novel
style, swapping back and forth between two characters:
Bethany, a young, disillusioned Goth working in the
Staples store; and Roger, a divorced, quiet loner who
spends his days restocking the shelves and walking his
dog. Beth discovers that Roger has been writing a diary
from her point of view, and once the initial weirdness
has passed she becomes intrigued by the fact that he’s
imagined her so accurately.
So far, so simple. Coupland then throws another element
into the mix: Roger is writing a novel himself, the
curiously-titled Glove Pond, and the letters between
Roger and Bethany are interspersed with excerpts
from his own novel. Glove Pond is a woefully shallow
and amateurish attempt at the form, but something in
it touches Bethany, and, like her, we feel compelled
to read on. As the friendship between the co-workers
develops, so the twists of Glove Pond begin to reflect
their lives, albeit with an often-hilarious distortion.
Just as we begin to get used to this format Coupland
hurls another character’s voice into the fray, and he
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continues to do this until the novel’s final pages: the
traditional back-and-forth of the epistolary form gradually
fractures into a whole chorus of voices, many of
them pulling in opposite directions. We hear from
Bethany’s mother DeeDee, who coincidentally went
to school with Roger, and from Roger’s bitter ex-wife
Joan – among others. There’s even a series of attempts
to write a story from the point of view of a piece of
toast, as Bethany flexes her own creative muscles.
If this sounds rather messy and incoherent, then
that’s because it often is. With so many different voices
pulling us back and forth it sometimes becomes difficult
to discern between them, and Coupland doesn’t
always manage to conjure up a distinctive voice for
every new character.
It’s the novel-within-a-novel that gives us the key
to this intricate web, however, and makes the most
memorable contribution to The Gum Thief. Glove
Pond shows us how the best fiction (and even some of
the worst) draws upon the writer’s experiences in real
life, twisting and morphing them to create something
new. It shows us that any creative work, no matter
how amateurish or muddled, has the potential to touch
somebody, or even change a life. And most importantly,
it never fails to entertain, as its characters stagger from
one disaster to another, like the affairs of the American
literati reinterpreted by the cast of Dynasty.
Like Glove Pond, The Gum Thief is a flawed novel.
It confuses as much as it illuminates, and Doug Coupland’s
experiments with the epistolary form don’t
always come off. In Bethany and Roger, however,
he has created another pair of Coupland greats, two
people muddling through modern life in any way they
can – with the occasional epiphany thrown in along the
way. The Gum Thief may not be perfect, but it’s still a
damned good read. �
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Interviews [published June 1996]
Quentin Crisp: An Englishman In New York
Chris Mitchell goes for lunch with Quentin Crisp
This month sees the publication of Resident Alien,
the selected diaries of Quentin Crisp. It is difficult to
surmise whether this man needs an introduction or not,
such is his longevity as a cult figure of quintessential
Englishness, “a stately old homo of England”, to quote
one of his most famous phrases. Quentin Crisp is, after
all, the man who first personified the concept of ‘camp’.
“If I have a talent for anything,” he states, “it is not for
doing but for being.” It was not until the 1960s, when
he already over 50 years old, that Quentin first rose to
fame with the TV adaptation of his autobiography, The
Naked Civil Servant. In it, Quentin documented his
early, life-changing decision that “instead of hiding my
sexuality, I would announce it.”
With his henna’d hair, “gravity-defying” makeup and
inch-long fingernails, the young Quentin Crisp cut a
brave and audacious figure in 1930s London. Indeed, it
is hard to imagine the outrage he must have provoked.
As he notes in his book Manners From Heaven:
“During my Edwardian youth and Georgian middleage
the world (I mean Britain) stayed exactly where
it was, aggressively conformist and conservative; I
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stayed exactly where I was, a blithe spirit revelling in
androgynous anarchy, and there was a battle.”
This battle frequently became physical as well as
psychological; Quentin’s accounts of the numerous
attacks he endured on the streets of London lend a
disturbing pathos to The Naked Civil Servant’s blend of
pithy insight, amused self mockery and biting sarcasm.
Indeed, the luminescence of Quentin’s prose soon won
accolades which proclaimed him as a modern day Oscar
Wilde, a comparison he has always refused. “When
I was young, I thought Oscar Wilde was so noble. I
thought he sacrificed everything for love. Then, when I
became older, I realised this was complete nonsense. In
the charnelhouses of London, Wilde only knew most of
his lovers by Braille. It was utterly sordid.”
Tired of England’s pernicious and parochial character,
Quentin moved to New York in the early 1980s.
By this time he was over 70 years old. After running
various skirmishes with the US immigration authorities,
Quentin succeeded in keeping his British passport
and becoming a resident alien. “The English always
say that the Americans are so false. But I don’t spend
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my time wondering if the man in the deli really wishes
me to ‘have a nice day.’ If he didn’t, then he wouldn’t
say it, surely.” Quentin warms to his theme. “In New
York, everyone is your instant friend. If you were to
stand up in this diner now and shout, ‘I’m putting on
a cabaret’, then everyone would gather round and ask,
‘Where will it be?’, ‘What will it be about?’, ‘Who will
you hire?’. If you did that in England, there would be
absolute silence, everyone would stare into their soup
and think, ‘How appallingly embarrassing.’”
Quentin is now the most interesting octogenarian on
earth, enjoying “growing old disgracefully” as he puts
it, with his purple rinsed hair and layers of foundation
still firmly in evidence. “The problem with England is
that everyone is convinced that you can’t make a living
doing nothing. However, in this I feel I have succeeded
to some degree.” Quentin’s New York existence is
made up of socialising, film reviewing and various appearances
in movies, TV and the theatre. “I live quite
comfortably on publicity champagne and peanuts. The
last time I went to a launch I took a friend. He immediately
dived for the champagne and I had to say, ‘No,
no! Act more like a star!’”
Quentin also entertains an endless stream of wellwishers
from all over the world by the simple expedient
of having his number listed in the New York phone
directory. This leads to all manner of curious individuals
contacting him. “A young lady once phoned me at
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seven in the morning and asked how she could make
sure that didn’t smudge her lipstick. I said, ‘Don’t drink
anything, don’t eat anything and certainly don’t kiss
anything.’ You’d think she could have worked it out for
herself.” Despite his avid socialising, Quentin refuses
to buy an answerphone. “To me it would be pure science
fiction.”
The only concession Quentin makes to his age is to
spend two days a week “doing absolutely nothing” in
his tiny bedsitting room on the Lower East Side. “I have
to recharge my batteries. When you live in New York,
as soon as you leave the house, you are under starter’s
orders.” During these quiet moments, Quentin does
crosswords – “they are the aerobics of the soul” – and,
at the end of each month, writes his diary. Mentioning
Resident Alien does not gain the normal authorial response
concerning a new print baby: “Ah yes,” Quentin
says, “I’ve just finished reading the proofs for that.”
His eyes twinkle mischievously. “It’s absolute rubbish!
They’ve taken out all of the dates, all of the places and
all of the names for fear of causing offence.” He raises
his eyes heavenward in mock resignation, knowing
full well that it would be the most heinous breach of
etiquette to say anything complimentary about his own
new book.
Sadly, even with the publication of Resident Alien,
the chances of Quentin returning to these shores are
slim. “My agent asked me if I would be willing to go
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to England to promote the book. I have not refused, because
I never say no, but I have said I will be extremely
reluctant. I am too old for aeroplane travel. Whenever I
arrive, they say, ‘Oh, you must be so tired.’ But I sleep
the whole way on the plane. They seem to expect the
excitement of flying to last the entire journey. What am
I supposed to do for five hours, sit there saying, ‘Oh
hooray! I’m in the air!” However, when I mention my
home town of Brighton, Quentin fondly remarks of his
time there at the Pavilion Theatre, shortly before moving
to the States. “Brighton is very nice, but I’m not
sure about the sea. I think the sea is a mistake. I mean,
what does it want, banging and crashing away on the
shore like that all day?”
The last time Quentin returned to the UK was a
couple of years ago to play Queen Elizabeth the First
in the film Orlando. “It’s the sort of film I wouldn’t
watch myself in a hundred years.” Movies are much
more to Quentin’s taste than books: “Books are for
writing, not reading. But I am most definitely a fan of
Mr Tarantino. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are
absolutely wonderful. The previous day he had seen
Spike Lee’s new comedy flick, Girl 6. “It was a miserable
film because of its subject matter. Who could find
phone sex remotely interesting?” Quentin’s fascination
with the silver screen recently led him to take part in a
Calvin Klein advert. “I knew it was important because
this enormous limousine purred up outside the house
BUY Quentin Crisp books online from and
to collect me. It was so big inside that the first time it
turned a corner I fell off the seat. We drove to a huge
warehouse and I thought, ‘How fabulous! We’re going
to remake The Charge Of The Light Brigade!’ But then
we were told to stand on a piece of paper about twice
the size of this table while a half-naked man writhed
between our legs. I looked at Mr Klein and I said, ‘But
what does it all mean?’ And that was what they used in
the advertisement…”
Quentin has often asked himself the same question
about gay militancy, a position which has caused him
problems in the past. During a performance of his show
An Evening With Quentin Crisp in California, Quentin
relates how “several young men were very angry with
me. When I asked why, they said, ‘You haven’t once
directly asserted that you’re gay this evening.’” Quentin
arches a neatly pencilled eyebrow. “You’d think to
look at me would be enough. Obviously not. And that is
why I do not march. I have realised I represent nothing
grander than my own puny self. I am first and last an
individual, not a spokesman for any group. I have lived
my life with my sexuality clearly apparent. I cannot do
any more.” The provocation of Quentin’s attire should
not be underestimated, even in these supposed liberal
times. With a mixture of incredulity and relish, Quentin
relates a story from the Edinburgh festival several years
ago: “A young man was performing a show where he
impersonated me on stage, complete with clothes,
187
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make-up and accent. When he walked out into the street
still dressed as myself, he was physically attacked!”
Thankfully Quentin’s days of being harassed on the
street are long gone. He is a venerated celebrity on the
Lower East Side. During our conversation, several people
wave at him as they pass in the street, and a respectfully
deferential young man who introduces himself as
Winston comes in to ask Quentin for his autograph on
a napkin. As I walk him back to his apartment, one of
the bums hopefully shakes his cup and greets him with
“Yo! Mr Crispy!” We pause at the street corner to say
goodbye, and Quentin leaves me with one last anec-
BUY Quentin Crisp books online from and
dote. “When I returned to the States after completing
Orlando, I was stopped by the passport officer because
of my status as a resident alien. He was an enormous
man with a shaved head – he looked like an absolute
thug. I thought, ‘Poor me, my time has come!’ And then
the officer leaned over the barrier, pressed the passport
back into my hand and whispered, ‘It must feel good to
be so utterly vindicated.’” Quentin looks directly at me.
“And it does.” With that, he gracefully takes his leave,
his small figure soon disappearing amongst the busy
sidewalks of the Lower East Side. Quentin Crisp – the
definitive Englishman in New York. �
188
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Mark Danielewski:
House Of Leaves 190
Don DeLillo:
Underworld 192
John Diamond:
C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too 194
Stephen Dorril:
Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt 196
Patricia Duncker:
Insanity Clause 205
Nic Dunlop:
The Lost Executioner 207
D-F
The Fall:
Fall Heads Roll 210
Stefan Fatsis:
Letter Better 213
Tibor Fischer:
The Fischer King 216
Mark Fisher:
Capitalist Realism 218
Michael Foot:
Uncollected Essays 222
Franz Ferdinand:
Franz Ferdinand 226
Athol Fugard:
Tsotsi 228
Anna Funder:
Stasiland 230
189
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 2000]
Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves
Gary Marshall
House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve
seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of
footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel
has been described as a “literary Blair Witch Project’ –
a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with.
The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a barhopping
low-life who is losing his grip on reality.
When an old man – Zampano – dies, Truant grabs a
manuscript from his apartment and takes it home to
read it. This manuscript is an analysis of The Navidson
Record, a collection of videotapes that record some
spooky goings on in a suburban house. As Truant
reads the manuscript, he reproduces it in full, sharing
his observations with us and describing his own
increasingly fragile mental state.
There are three main stories in House Of Leaves:
Truant’s reactions to the manuscript, Zampano’s analysis
of The Navidson Record, and the contents of the
videotapes themselves. As the novel continues, each
story overlaps. Zampano adds extensive footnotes to
his work and attempts to contact the famous people
(Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Camille Paglia)
mentioned in the tapes; Truant attempts to explain
the more tortuous footnotes, adding explanations and
analysis of his own, and unnamed ‘editors’ in turn comment
on both Zampano’s and Truant’s comments. The
Navidson Record would have made an excellent spinechiller
in its own right, but the analysis and footnotes
rack the creepiness up by a notch. In the early stages of
the transcripts, we know that something scary’s going
to happen: the footnotes tell us so.
As if the layers of comment weren’t complicated
enough, after a few dozen pages things go completely
mental. The word house is printed throughout in blue,
without explanation; footnotes become longer than the
sections they’re commenting on, print is reversed or
rotated
BUY Mark Danielewski books online from and
, entire sections are crossed out; some pages con-
tain a single word or letter, while others are filled with
lists of buildings or household amenities. All of these
things are reproduced faithfully, resulting in pages where
the only text is “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”,
other pages with letters and words missing due to “fire
damage” (the gaps are replaced by spaces and square
brackets), still others with text at crazy angles or tiny
190
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font sizes. If you attempt to read this book in the bath,
you’ll probably drown.
The book’s ambition is also its downfall. The crazy
typography and constant interjections from Truant (and
others) make it difficult to follow parts of the story and,
in the early sections especially, you’ll be sorely tempted
to throw the book out of the window. Many of the tangents
– psychological theories, local history, analysis
of photographs, lists of camera equipment – overstay
their welcome, and the ending is curiously flat, as if
the writer suddenly ran out of ideas. Some scenes jar
with the rest of the book; in particular, Truant’s description
of his trip to a bar, where he talks to a band and
BUY Mark Danielewski books online from and
discovers they’ve read the book he’s still writing. This
is either an unintentional error or – even worse – a hamfisted
“it was all a dream” scenario lifted straight from
an episode of Dallas.
House Of Leaves is a brave attempt to do something
different, updating Burroughs’ cut-up technique
for a new generation of readers. At over 700 pages,
however, the novel would have benefited from some
judicious editing, and the overall impression is one
of a writer too enamoured with typographical tricks.
Nonetheless, House Of Leaves is an original and
unique novel; for all its faults, it’s unlike anything else
you’ll read this year. �
191
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 1998]
Don DeLillo: Underworld
Gary Marshall
Starting with a 1951 baseball game and ending with
the internet, Underworld is not a book for the fainthearted.
Elegiac in tone and described variously as
DeLillo’s Magnum Opus and his attempt to write the
Great American Novel, the book weighs in at a hefty
827 pages and zips back and forwards in time, moving
in and out of the lives of a plethora of different
characters.
Following three main themes – the fate of a baseball
from the winning game of the 1951 world series, the
threat of atomic warfare and the mountains of garbage
created by modern society – DeLillo moves forwards
and backwards through the decades, introducing characters
and situations and gradually showing the way
their lives are interconnected.
Reading the prose can be uncannily like using a web
browser: the narrative focus moves from character to
character almost as quickly as we are introduced to
them, and the time frame regularly changes to show
further connections between the key players. This device
– literature as hypertext – is particularly effective
in the early parts of the novel and the technique never
BUY Don DeLillo books online from and
intrudes on the story itself.
The book focuses on Nick Shay, a former hoodlum
who now works in the burgeoning waste management
industry and owns the baseball from the 1951
game, “the shot heard around the world”. In addition
to Nick we hear from Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover,
Lenny Bruce and the various people who move
in and out of Nick’s life: lovers, family, friends and
colleagues. Through these seemingly disconnected
narratives DeLillo paints a picture of Cold War paranoia
at its peak – the baseball game happened the
same day as the USSR’s first nuclear test – and the
changes affecting his characters as a microcosm of
American society as a whole.
Very few writers, however, can justify over 800
densely-printed pages to tell a story and Underworld
would have benefited greatly from judicious wielding
of the blue pencil. Potentially intriguing plots which
feature strongly in the earlier parts of the book – an intriguing
serial killer subplot, the stories of each person
who possesses the winning baseball – are abandoned
halfway through the book in favour of overlong child-
192
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hood memories or the inane ponderings of a performance
artist; other stories are neglected for over 400
pages before reappearing at the end of the novel, causing
an unwelcome jolt as the reader tries to remember
the pertinent details.
In this respect Underworld is a victim of its own
ambition: by trying to cover such a wide range of
characters and situations, DeLillo loses track of some
of them and, in the latter parts of the novel in particular,
the writing feels as if it is on autopilot while the author
works out what to do next.
There is still much to recommend in Underworld,
BUY Don DeLillo books online from and
however. Each vignette is lovingly crafted: DeLillo
seems as comfortable writing from the perspective of
a street missionary as he is inhabiting J. Edgar Hoover’s
paranoia. The book employs vivid imagery, from
painted angels on ghetto walls to the cityscape created
by mountains of domestic waste, and the dialogue is
usually well-observed and thoroughly believable
although it does flag when describing Nick Shay’s
hoodlum past. Despite its faults DeLillo has created an
ambitious and powerful novel which, due to its size,
can also be used to swat annoying children on trains.
Highly recommended. �
193
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 1999]
John Diamond: C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too
Gary Marshall
As far as John Diamond was concerned, cancer happens
to other people. A columnist who is paid handsomely
for spouting off each week about whatever is on his
mind, he undergoes tests for the lump in his neck and,
rather than panicking, sees it as a potentially interesting
anecdote. “I imagined myself in a week or two’s
time not as someone who had been diagnosed as having
cancer but as someone who had had a close brush with
cancer – who’d been through all the tests and then at the
very last minute been given the all clear. If anything it
sounded even more heroic than the real thing”. By this
point Diamond had had cancer for more than a year.
C is, of course, about cancer – what it is, what it feels
like to receive the diagnosis one evening as you’re
watching Eastenders, how it feels to lose four stone
and most of your tongue. Subtitled “because cowards
get cancer too”, the book makes no attempt to portray
Diamond as some brave, heroic figure and describes
his twisted pleasure as he uses his illness as a weapon at
dinner parties, his frequent outbursts of impotent rage
and the often appalling way he treats his wife during
his convalescence.
BUY John Diamond books online from and
This is no self-pitying, ‘poor me’ tale. Diamond describes
how cancer works, clear-up rates, the different
sorts of treatment and their chances of success. A savagely
perceptive writer, he pours vitriol on new-agers
and pro-smoking campaigners in equal measure. “By
all means campaign for some phantom ‘right’ to smoke,
but don’t believe that right derives from corrupting the
statistics about what smoking does to you. Understand
it for what it is: the right to play Russian roulette, as I
did, with the immune system”. Diamond’s descriptions
of his predicament are frequently hilarious – his inventory
of his well-stocked medicine cabinet reads like P.J.
O’Rourke, albeit P.J. writing about morphine instead
of cocaine.
Diamond reserves his most vicious criticism for those
who believe surviving cancer is a matter of the correct
mental attitude, as if those who die simply didn’t try
hard enough. As he recounts his treatment through his
weekly newspaper column he receives regular missives
from the terminally stupid, “the ones who told me that
as a journalist with a public platform it was my bounden
duty to stop operating as a propagandising dupe for the
194
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evil medical establishment, to tell doctors that I wasn’t
fooled by their fake radiotherapy statistics when everyone
knows that radiation kills, and to put my faith
in the Bessarabian radish, the desiccated root of which
has been used for centuries by Tartar nomads to cure
athlete’s foot, tennis elbow and cancer, as detailed in
their book Why Your Doctor Hates You And Wants You
To Die, review copy enclosed”.
Currently cancer-free, Diamond would shy away
from any suggestion that his illness has been in any
way a positive experience. There is, however, a positive
message to his story which is best illustrated by one of
the book’s most poignant and telling scenes: Diamond
is in his car, not long after the treatments that removed
most of his tongue and destroyed his taste buds. Listening
to a familiar show he hears a voice he can’t place,
then realises that he’s listening to his own voice on a
BUY John Diamond books online from and
programme recorded a year previously. Diamond is
struck by the difference between the man he is now
and the man whose voice is broadcasting through the
ether: “he was the one who didn’t realize what a boon
an unimpaired voice was, who ate his food without
stopping to think about its remarkable flavour, who was
criminally profligate with words, who took his wife and
children and friends for granted – in short who didn’t
know he was living”.
Rather than denying mortality, C suggests that it’s
only when you understand the fragility of life that you
can fully appreciate just how magical and wonderful
day-to-day existence can be.
Coda: John Diamond died on 2nd March, 2001. The
Guardian obituary has the full details of his remarkable
life. �
195
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2007]
Stephen Dorril: Sir Oswald Mosley: Blackshirt
Ben Granger
Stephen Dorril’s Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley And
British Fascism is an exhaustive re-examination of the
man who, far from being a Hitler admiring crank, was
inextricably bound up with British politics and upper
class attitudes.
Many may find the sheer weight of this tome
wrongly flattering of its subject, regardless of content.
Why should such a figure merit 700 pages? Surely this
was, at best, a nearly-man in British politics? He may
have risen to Cabinet level certainly, but then so did
hundreds of others. The grimy pack of thugs he came
to lead once his mainstream ambitions failed may have
caused a splash as they bashed enemy heads in, but
no-one voted for them. Surely, ultimately, they and he
were an irrelevance? Dorril’s expertly researched account
gives the lie to such a view and leaves no doubt
that the story of Mosley is inexorably entwined with
the story of 20th-century politics as a whole, mirroring
the highs and the lows, ricocheting from the machinations
of high society to the violent desperation of the
underclass, and taking in every major Parliamentary
player in between.
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Sir Oswald “Tom” Mosley was a pure-grade scion
from a northern branch of the old land-owning aristocracy
(Mosley Street in Manchester takes its name from
the clan), of the type still rolling in money but comparatively
side-lined politically in the bourgeois 20th
century. With a boorishly uncaring, neglectful father,
and indulgent mother, his defining character traits were
shown early on at boarding school and elsewhere. A
narrow, directed charm, rampant ambition, intellectual
laziness, sexual incontinence, untrustworthiness, and a
tendency to brow-beat and bully. Above all, a narcissistic
sense of self-adoration, belief in entitlement and
complete lack of self-doubt, of the type so often found
in his caste. But taken just that one degree further.
After service in the air-force during the First World
War, where he performed with distinction and enthusiasm,
impetuous Tom managed to secure a position as
a Conservative MP by the age of 22, the natural home
for a man of his class and connections. He soon became
renowned as a powerful orator in the Commons for his
party. But this ‘man in a hurry’ was impatient with the
old guard still running both party and country, those who
196
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had allowed the calamity of war to decimate the young
men of the nation fighting abroad, and who allowed
an untrammelled laissez-faire capitalism to terrorise
them with poverty once they had returned. Dorril goes
into expansive and exacting detail about the clashing
political and economic trends amongst the elite of the
time. This in itself provides an unfaultable Parliamentary
political history of the period, a vivid picture of
the flux at work, which formed the background of the
contradictions which made up Mosley’s outlook. He at
first identified wholesale with the ‘social imperialists’
in the Tory Party as against its free trade faction. He
supported those who, in wishing to save the existing
social order, believed in economic protectionism to
protect a relatively decent living standard for the British
working-class, bolstered by the exploitation of Empire.
Such a world-view was entrenched in a romantic conception
of England, with the foreign (and, sometimes,
Jewish) ‘other’ as its symbolic foe. This paternalistic
ethos was the basic core of Mosley’s philosophy from
thereon, but his contempt for the Empire Tories’ lack of
innovation made him seek his cause, his following and
followers, elsewhere.
Mosley was as much a figure in ‘high society’ as in
politics, very Tatler fodder. Those he ran with were rich,
young, louche, promiscuous, glamorous and shallow, of
the type Evelyn Waugh at once admired and despised.
As Mosley married his first wife Cimmie, this “dash-
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and
ing”, charismatic figure dazzled many. While gentle,
warm Cimmie was liked by most who met her, quite
as many people were as put-off by Mosley’s boundless
self-importance as were taken in by his charm. While
praise came from many, his Tory rival Stanley Baldwin
spoke for many more by remarking “He is a cad and
a wrong’un and they will find it out,” before he left
the party. Cimmie’s delicate nature was in turn tested
to immense distraction by her husband’s countless,
remorseless affairs – including with her sisters.
Mosley would never be content as anything less than
the biggest fish in the pond. The Tories disappointed
him so he joined Labour, seeing that as the party more
capable of delivering the change -still amorphously
defined- that he craved. For a while his ‘radicalism’,
advocating wholesale economic reorganisation to
achieve full employment led a few on the Left, even the
great Bevan for a short time, to see him as a potential
leader. Indeed, it is distinctly unnerving to see both the
respect Mosley was shown by sections of both the Labour
Party Left and the Independent Labour Party, and
the seeming ease with which his rhetoric of renewal
could blend with theirs.
As Mosley made his way into the Cabinet of Ramsay
McDonald’s doomed Labour government and
expounded his economic programmes to tackle unemployment
(Keynesianism with an authoritarian kick),
their rejection by McDonald was due to the latter’s
197
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timidity rather than any genuine opposition to creeping
dictatorship. Mosley was enraged as his proposals
were ignored, and immediately split with the Labour
leadership. As this schism occurred, it is a testimony to
both the man’s demagogic charisma and his ideological
vacuity that many in both main parties now saw him
as a possible leader. The ambiguity was such that for
a very brief time Churchill and Bevan alike were keen
for him to lead their respective parties. But impatient
Tom had his own ideas. He had taken his ball home. He
would have his own party. The New Party.
The New Party was formed in early 1931, it soon
became clear just what its founder’s forever trumpeted
radicalism amounted to. Fierce rhetoric about change
and national renewal (and the clamour of a throng of
restless, violent young men to drive this home) masked
a dangerous and ringing hollow at the party’s ideological
core. Its launch was a huge media event at the time,
and figures of the stature of Bernard Shaw and H.G.
Wells were initially sympathetic (both being Fabian
socialists but with a disturbing penchant for Mosley’s
coldly elitist, authoritarian and technocratic attitudes).
The initial boost was short-lived however, and the New
Party’s lack of clarity, together with a poor showing
at their first by-election in Ashton-under-Lyne, saw it
heading nowhere in electoral terms. By 1932, the New
Party had already changed its name to the British Union
of Fascists.
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and
The BUF was never less than an unabashed personality
cult from the beginning, the logical conclusion of
the overweening toxic brew of narcissism and megalomania
that animated its founder. Massively over- represented
by ex military men like Mosley himself, he
found it easy to run the movement as army rather than a
party, dominating every aspect of members’ lives. They
even had their own uniform, they were the Blackshirts,
aping Mussolini’s crew before them. Ex-member Colin
Cross recalled the faithful “Even saluted him when he
went into the sea to bathe at the Movement’s summer
camps at Selsey”, and “they whispered his name in
religious awe … he was presented to the public as a
superman. Criticism was taboo and humour nearly so.”
At last the man had found the captive audience he had
always craved. Now all he had to do was enlarge the
audience to encompass the whole nation.
The BUF was always clear in its violence, but it
was far from ideologically coherent, even less so
than the man himself. He took a fair-sized gang
of old Labour comrades with him, but to the great
majority of Labour and trade-union men and women,
the Fascist movement was not just a mistake, but a
sickening anathema. This was a party based on a
movement that massacred their brothers and sisters
in Italy, directly supported by the capitalist class
in that country. They knew the enemy where they
saw it. The organised working-class were forever,
198
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fervently opposed. Many more members came from
elsewhere, including preexisting smaller UK Fascist
movements. Amongst them were the British Fascists,
an old group of simplistic upper-middle-class
reactionary blimps who had previously been active
in trying to break the 1926 General Strike. Joining
them were more recent and more vicious groups of
Nazi cheerleaders, whose chief motivation was a
pathological hatred of ‘Jewry’. Of equal importance
and greater number were natural Tories driven to a
new radical dynamism against the perceived socialist
threat. This contingent was personified by Daily
Mail owner Lord Rothermere, a friend of Mosley’s
who threw his paper behind the new movement
wholesale. Meanwhile, the movement was secretly,
and illegally, receiving a large chunk of its funding
direct from Fascist Italy, and, increasingly, (as the
anti-Semitism increased) from Nazi Germany too.
The degree of the extent of Mosley’s anti-Semitism
is central to the conundrum of his character. It is interesting
to contrast his personality with that of Hitler, the
man he so desired to emulate, failing so spectacularly.
There is no doubt that Mosley was not possessed of
the overwhelming personal hatred of Jews that so
engulfed Hitler. He had several Jewish friends prior
to the BUF. His rival, the hysterically overwrought
anti-Semite Arnold Leese, leader of the tiny, ultrafanatic
Imperial Fascist League taunted Mosley as a
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“kosher Fascist” for this very reason. Amusingly, one
of Mosley’s early New Party stalwarts was a Jewish
East End boxer named Ted “Kid” Lewis, who exited
the movement with a punch to Mosley’s nose when the
latter confirmed that yes, he did intend his movement
to be anti-Semitic. Furthermore, Oswald explicitly did
not sign up to the facetious and insane pseudo-science
the Nazis used to justify their race hatred, casually
denouncing it as gibberish. He mocked the notorious
forgeries the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion too.
The very fact he could then lead a movement openly
engaged in repeated violence against this scape-goated
racial group shows the black-hearted, gangster opportunism
at the core of his being. The hatred of the Jewish
enemy was a galvanising myth to a movement which
otherwise had little to tie it together, and he knew it.
With characteristic dishonesty, Mosley dismally
pleaded self defence in his campaign against the Jews,
claiming “they started it.” Mosley came to advocate
the expelling of all Jews from Britain who had shown
‘disloyalty’. Where they were to go was unclear,
Madagascar, or possibly Uganda (“very empty and a
lovely climate” helpfully offered Mosley’s second wife
Diana, formerly Guinness, formerly Mitford.) It is an
interesting rumination of what constitutes a truer evil,
the deep-felt fanaticism of a Hitler or the gutter-shallow
opportunism of a Mosley. It is however, much easier to
see which was more successful.
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Adolf met Oswald on several occasions but was
never fully convinced of him, doubting his commitment,
sensing his lack of whole-hearted zealotry.
Goebbels was even less impressed, dismissing him as
“an outsider of small political significance.” Hitler was
however genuinely taken with Mosley’s wife Diana.
He was even more taken by her sister Unity, and the
feeling was mutual. Mosley married Diana at a secret
ceremony in Goebbels’ house, having already carried
out a long affair with her. The contrast of kind-hearted
if naive Cimmie with the coldly ruthless Diana was
seen by some as emblematic of Mosley’s journey to the
dark side. While her portrayal as a Lady Macbeth figure
even more malignant than her husband may have a
toe in misogynist myth, he had certainly met his match
with her in amoral callousness. The Mitfords were the
epitome of high society elan, and Hitler himself, for
all his railing against “British decadence” was far from
immune to the charms of this glamorous set. Diana and
Unity, regular and welcome visitors to Hitler, acted as a
conduit between Mosley and his new benefactor, while
the intelligence services were more concerned with the
Mitford pair than Mosley himself as a threat to the state.
The BUF was to change its name to the BU at the end
of 1934. Short for the British Union, though its full new
title was the rather less innocuous British Union of Fascists
and National Socialists, reflecting the increasing
influence of the Fuhrer. The thuggishness was thrown
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and
into sharp relief at an infamous public gathering at
Olympia in June 1934. The mass meeting was held in a
theatrical, explicitly Nuremburg style, the movement’s
new Lightning-in-a-Circle symbol (wittily dubbed “the
flash in the pan” by opponents) dominating the hall just
as the swastika did to the Nazi faithful in Germany. The
Blackshirts deliberately attracted as many opponents
as possible to this meeting, and then, with a variety of
home-made weapons, pulped into bloody submission
anyone who heckled The Leader. Many serious injuries
resulted. Mosley was attempting to prove his control of
“the street” once and for all, yet this one meeting probably
did more than any other act to convince potential
followers of his ruthless, sadistic nature. His unpredictable
nature too – probably a greater anathema to the
British business class.
The BU suffered a severe propaganda blow with the
Battle of Cable Street in 1936, when a massive crowd
of local working-class youths, Jews, Communist and
Labour activists violently prevented Mosley (resplendent
in a new uniform explicitly modelled on that of the
Nazi SS), from provocatively marching down the street
in the heart of the Jewish East End. As the Blackshirts
were protected by police, (many sympathetic to Mosley,
or at least distinctly hostile to his leftist opponents),
the fight was between demonstrators and police rather
than the barricaded Blackshirts themselves. But the
victory was real, They Did Not Pass. As Dorril shows,
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in some areas of London, notably Hoxton and Stepney
support from sections of the East End working-class
was actually to rise afterward – but the psychological
defeat struck deeply amongst its followers, and seemed
emblematic of the movement’s wider failure. The
early membership height of 50,000 had fallen to under
10,000 by this point. The movement was losing money
continually, despite being bankrolled by both the foreign
Fascist powers and Mosley’s own landed estates.
Uniforms, banners, headquarters and truncheons do not
pay for themselves. Intellectually he was without capital
too. The writers of the day were overwhelmingly Left.
The strangely acidic Wyndham Lewis was one of the
few artists who were taken in for a time by the movement,
but even this support did not last the distance.
Dorril recounts Lewis and Mosley met on several
occasions in the late 30s, but the former was increasingly
alarmed by the latter’s talk of the sad practical
necessities of machine gunning the movement’s foes
in the street “when push came to shove”. When Lewis
came to write the ironically titled ‘The Jews – Are They
Human?’ in 1937 he was sardonically repudiating his
past Fascism. The only noted author to back Mosley
by then was Henry Tarka The Otter” Williamson. With
even his few intellectual allies now taking the piss, who
would take Oswald seriously now?
When Britain went to war with Mosley’s ideological
masters in Germany and Italy, it was the cataclysmic
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close of any last lingering chance of a revival in his
movement. Unity Mitford shot herself in the head,
yet failed to succeed in suicide, dribbling on for years
afterward. While Mosley and his wife claimed they
were still loyal to Britain (whilst agitating for “negotiated
peace”) the authorities had different views, and
imprisoned the pair in Holloway Prison. Sympathy
was not widespread. Nancy Mitford was one of those
who denounced sister Diana and her infamous husband
to the security services. Several BU members
either fled to Germany or had moved shortly before
war was declared, to fight for the Nazi cause. Some
were propagandists like “Haw Haw” Joyce, others like
John Amery joined Waffen SS divisions. In keeping
with the stomach-wrenching nature of their treachery,
none saw active combat against soldiers, yet several
were active in murderous atrocities against unarmed
Jewish civilians. By association, Mosley was seen, by
the vast majority of British people, as the most venal
kind of traitor.
Churchill, one of many who once saw Mosley as
a potential leader of his party and country, decided
to release the man and wife in late 1943 in what he
saw as a humane gesture in relation to the Blackshirt’s
ill- health. The decision sparked mass popular protest
and outrage. The working-classes in particular were
prominent in street demonstrations demanding that
the key should be thrown away, or the noose brought
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in. The would-be Leader of Britain was really – truly
– loathed the length and breadth of the land. Oswald
and Diana seemed to bear this hatred with an attitude
beyond the straightforward arrogance which was their
defining nature, and into a whole other worldly netherrealm
of bitter fantasy. It was the Jews who hated them,
the establishment, the government – certainly not the
good old British people. These demonstrations were
the results of the Jewish cabal that had Britain in its
grip … surely?
His solipsism increased by incarceration, Mosley
took to writing at greater length, honing his philosophy
in ever more verbose terminology. He claimed to have
now moved “beyond Fascism”, and propounded that
he had found a unique “synthesis”, beyond the both
capitalist and socialist ethic, fusing Christianity and
the ideals of Nietzsche, combining dictatorship and
democracy. But the schism between his feigning of
esoteric high mindedness and the squalor of his day-today
political activities became starker than ever when
he began his new party in 1947 – the Union Movement.
The same gang of dysfunctional Jew baiters were to
continue their street fighting, to a mixture of disgust
and indifference from the general populace (gaining for
instance less than 2000 votes in the whole of London
during local elections in 1949). The full extent of the
Nazi horrors, the millions of innocent souls butchered
in the camps, was now evident, discrediting Mosley’s
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mob as never before. Accordingly, the calibre of the
UM member was even lower than that of the BU before
them, a selection of gangsters, psychopaths and street
thugs, with the odd loopy Lord thrown in.
This sorry pack were eventually to find a new
scapegoat, and a short-lived new lease of life with the
‘coloured immigration’ of the 50s. As tensions grew in
sections of the white population towards the novel new
migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent,
the UM had some success in actively encouraging
race riots, in particular the Notting Hill riot of 1958.
Their success in leading to smashed windows and
broken bones did not translate into votes however, and
the fetid nature of their street activity stood in starker
contrast than ever from Mosley’s increasingly abstruse
theorising. His new vision was of a United Europe, national
boundaries broken down among the great White
brotherhood, who would in turn go to plunder what
they needed from Africa, using their superior colonial
know-how. Ironic that a movement now recruiting on
an anti-immigrant platform should have as its ultimate
goal the large scale immigration of a white master class
to the African continent. This was grotesque racism
sure enough, but it was neither populist nor popular.
Even amongst rising anti-immigration feeling, the UM
could not truly take off.
Ultimately it was to be Mosley’s intellectualism that
was the final death knell of his movement. The issue of
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race did indeed strike at the core of British political life
by the late 60s, and immigration became a key electoral
theme. But the UM’s abstract ideas of White European
Unity did not accord with the xenophobic mood ignited
by the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of the Conservative
Enoch Powell. The sentiment he unearthed and tried to
harness was as strongly anti-European as it was antiblack.
Those who didn’t like the “niggers” and “pakis”
didn’t tend to be too keen on “frogs” and “krauts” either.
The Mosleys were livid that Enoch had succeeded on
territory where they had failed. In an amusing glimpse
of the couple’s snobbery and delusion, Oswald dubbed
Powell a “middle-class Alf Garnett”, while Diana denounced
him as “far-right” as opposed to their “hard
centre”! A truly Fascist party was to gain from the racist
rhetoric of Powell. This was not the Union Movement
however. It was the National Front.
The NF was inspired by the same Nazi and Fascist
ideas that Mosley first fermented in the country. Its
first chairman was A.K. Chesterton, formerly a leading
figure within the BU and a close confidante of Oswald.
But its simplistic, xenophobic approach was far
more adept than the UM at tapping into the visceral,
base hatred that keeps such a movement going. It was
blacks and Asians who were getting the beatings and
firebombed houses now, with the added advantage
they were much easier to spot than Jews. The boot-
boys of the NF were every inch the descendants of the
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Blackshirts before them, but they had moved on and
left their spiritual grandpa and grandma Oswald and
Diana behind. Bitterly jealous of the NF’s success,
Mosley remarked to his private circle, in a statement
beyond the parody of the most gifted satirist, that the
Front was “funded by Jews.”
The pair moved to France, and lingered on as bitter
remnants, their reputation rotting in a pleasing reflection
of their withered souls, cursing the cosmopolitan
conspiracies that had kept them from greatness, never
seeing the fault in themselves. No matter that most
saw a malevolent opportunist, in his mind’s eye he
would always be the great, lost, put-upon prophet.
Mosley would periodically attempt to reappear with
attempts at self-justification. Following one such
appearance on The Frost Report in 1967 interviewer
David Frost remarked, “He saw everything through
the distorting mirror of his own fantasises, and was
irretrievably consumed by them. He would never see
himself as others saw him.”
Oswald died in 1980, and the vaguely sympathetic
obituaries he received in certain quarters such as The
Times revealed for the last time that the solidarity of the
ruling classes will out in the end.
Dorril has produced the definitive Mosley biography,
superseding the absurdly sympathetic softsoaping
work of Robert Skidelsky, which centred on
Mosley’s Parliamentary career and treated the BUF as
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an epilogue (a bit like a biography of Fred West which
focussed more on his earlier career as an ice cream
salesman.) This is a fascinating story, both for anyone
interested in British political history of the last century,
and anyone intrigued by the tragic tale of a truly
diabolical man. Dorril has done an unfaultable job on
the research, and brings the narrative to life well with
his grotesque menagerie of characters. There are flaws
to the book. The author has a background as an analyst
of the machinations of the intelligence services of
Britain and abroad, and while this eye for detail has
undoubtedly made this work the powerhouse of research
it is, the endless recanting of certain details, the
exact nature of how the BUF obtained its funding for
example, can sometimes drag the story’s flow. More
directly, he concentrates a little too much on the nature
of MI5’s observation of the movement, when this is
very much a side-show to the main narrative. This dry
style can sometimes cloy over such a long length. Further,
while Dorril is great on the detail, actual analysis
is very thin on the ground. The one time Dorril does
attempt an analytical overview, it is with some rather
tenuous observations about Messianic leaders toward
the end, claiming that one Tony Blair shares the traits
of this style. Maybe so, but the point is made clumsily
and without satisfactory justification.
Ultimately however, Dorril’s stance in going for the
BUY Stephen Dorril books online from and
research style, dispassionately observant, pays off into
a great narrative by nature of the sheer dramatic scope
of the story he so meticulously examines. Scene after
scene and figure after grotesque figure linger on the
psychic retina. The drawing room parties of the man
playing host to every major political figure of the early
part of the century, one by one falling away as he fell
into disrepute. Mosley’s seaside frolics with his patrician
pals, offset against the pogrom style excesses of
his nastiest East End thugs, breaking into Jewish houses
and attacking children within. Mosley’s relentless psychological
torture of his first wife, the most poignant of
his bullying victims. Diana fending off the accusations
of sister Nancy that she had supported a movement that
murdered six million Jews with the remark “But darling,
it was the kindest way.” The London BUF headquarters
that doubled up as a knocking-shop, underlying with
grim humour the movement’s crossover with organised
crime. The UM hijacking the teddy-boy youth cult just
as the NF did with skinheads two decades later. The
sheer gall and lack of self-awareness in Mosley’s latelife
attempts to rehabilitate himself, attempting a ‘truce’
with Jewish leaders without any pretence of apology.
This is a grim tale that needs only clear explanation
and examination to be one of fascination. This is a task
Dorril has performed with enormous success with this
eye-opening and exhaustive work. �
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Interview [published September 2003]
Patricia Duncker: Insanity Clause
Chris Mitchell gets philosophical with Patricia Duncker about her
novel Hallucinating Foucault
“Madness, death, sexuality, crime; these are the subjects
that attract most of my attention.” So said the late
French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the century’s
most audacious intellectuals, who died of AIDS
in 1984. Only Foucault’s books remain as a reminder
of his existence – but, as Patricia Duncker’s stunning
debut novel Hallucinating Foucault shows, the impact
of reading on people’s lives can be both terrifying and
self-transforming.
Originally published by the independent Serpent’s
Tail last year, Hallucinating Foucault proved such a
success that Picador recently bought the rights to the
novel and reissued it. Such success might seem strange,
given that few people outside of ivory towers have even
heard of Foucault, but Duncker’s novel isn’t some dry
academic text that needs to be painstakingly deciphered.
Hallucinating Foucault tells the story of Paul Michel,
a celebrated French novelist who is so distraught at
Foucault’s death that he becomes insane. The novel’s
narrator is an English student studying Michel’s work
who sets out to rescue the writer, so bringing the author’s
words and the author’s world together in a dangerous
BUY Patricia Duncker books online from and
mixture of intimacy, madness and self-discovery.
“I wanted it to be a love story,” Patricia Duncker
reveals, “to explain the love between readers and
writers. My life has been radically changed through
the books I’ve read and I wanted to describe that.”
However, Duncker was fully aware of the need to
avoid alienating her audience. “I think your first duty
as a writer is to your reader and you must keep them
turning the page. What is the point otherwise?” As a
result, Hallucinating Foucault has the feel of a cerebral
thriller, combining the love story between Paul Michel
and the narrator with the mystery of Paul Michel and
Foucault’s relationship.
In blending the fictional character of Paul Michel
with the memory of the real-life Michel Foucault,
Duncker has created a novel which refuses simply to
remain a story. It crosses over into real life – so much
so that for some people, Paul Michel is now more
real than Foucault ever was: “Most of the people who
have read Hallucinating Foucault have never heard
of Foucault. Some of them thought Paul Michel was
real – one or two even tried to get hold of his novels.
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One reviewer in Manchester said the book was all old
hat to him because his mother had produced a thesis on
Paul Michel!”
Some of the novel’s most memorable and disturbing
scenes centre around the narrator’s entry in the asylum
to find Paul Michel. “I have a friend in France who’s
worked with schizophrenics for the last 30 years,”
Duncker says. “She’s seen the different ways that
schizophrenia has been perceived during that time –
because even now, no one really understands it, no one
knows where it comes from. She holds an open clinic,
so I visited her there with some trepidation and it was
absolutely incredible. You always think that people
who are off their heads are going to be just a little bit
eccentric, but these people were absolutely mad – raving!
But there was such a sense of community there; it
was harrowing but quite beautiful, in a way.
“Paul Michel knows he’s mad and that’s common –
mad people are completely aware that they’re raving,
that they slide between sanity and insanity. I wanted
BUY Patricia Duncker books online from and
the madness in Hallucinating Foucault to do justice
to what I’d seen. It’s incredibly difficult to represent
people who are living in a different time zone from you
with respect and generosity – because you don’t want
to present them as curiosities or freaks, which is what
Foucault also strove to challenge in his work.”
The love between reader and writer is evident
from Duncker’s enthusiasm when she talks about the
French philosopher: “Foucault once said, ‘I wrote all
my books to make boys fall in love with me.’ And I
think there’s an element to that in all writing – books
are messages in bottles. There was something about
Foucault – his vanity, his shaved head, his looming
presence – that indicated that he desperately
wanted to be a writer rather than a philosopher. So
the character of Paul Michel is the embodiment of
some of Foucault’s unfulfilled desires. It’s my present
to Foucault, in a way. I made the character of Paul
Michel as handsome as James Dean and in love with
him – what more could he want?!” �
206
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Review [published December 2005]
Nic Dunlop: The Lost Executioner
Chris Mitchell
The Lost Executioner is my Book of the Year. Like my
pick for last year, Emma Larkin’s Secret Histories:
Finding George Orwell In A Burmese Teashop, The
Lost Executioner is a personal travelogue into a country
that tries to understand its recent, disastrous politics.
Where Secret Histories documents Burma’s slide into
a real-life Orwellian nightmare, The Lost Executioner
chronicles photographer Nic Dunlop’s obsessive hunt
for Comrade Duch, the man who presided over the
deaths of thousands as the commandant of Tuol Sleng,
Cambodia’s notorious interrogation centre, during the
genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge.
Between 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came to power
in Cambodia until 1979 when they were displaced by
the invading Vietnamese, the ultra-leftist party instituted
a Year Zero policy which was even more extreme
than China’s Cultural Revolution and resulted in the
murder of an estimated two million people – a quarter
of the country’s population.
Duch, like every other major figure in the Khmer
Rouge regime, successfully disappeared into Cambodia’s
jungles when the Vietnamese arrived and, like
BUY Nic Dunlop books online from and
the rest of the regime’s leaders, successfully avoided
prosecution. To date, 25 years after Cambodia’s autogenocide,
none of the key proponents have been brought
to trial. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge’s leader, died of old
age in 1998.
For Dunlop, seeing a photo of Comrade Duch set
something off inside him that made him want to find
the former commandant. This search provides the
engine for his book, fusing the detective work necessary
to finding Duch with the travelogue of exploring
modern day Cambodia. Dunlop interweaves details of
Cambodia’s awful recent history within his journey,
providing a powerful narrative that avoids the dryness
of traditional historical analysis but does not hold back
on dealing with the vast complexities of how the Khmer
Rouge came to power and the fallout of their overthrow.
Both John Pilger and David Chandler, Cambodia’s preeminent
Western historian, are given major credit in
the Acknowledgements for helping Dunlop refine the
historical accuracy of his text and this, for me, is vital
as a demonstration of Dunlop’s attempt to write more
than a simple, observational travel book.
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Instead, Dunlop gives an account of his own, personal
journey, not just through the cities and countryside of
Cambodia but through the country’s history and how
his own history has intertwined with it. The reader,
then, accompanies Dunlop as he tries to come to grips
with understanding Cambodia as a foreigner, as his
learning and perceptions of the country he is fascinated
by shift and change over time – and as he questions his
own opinions and perspectives about prosecuting the
Khmer Rouge commanders, and the very nature of how
justice can be achieved and carried out. Integral to this
journey – and a vital part of this book – are the personal
testimonies of those Dunlop meets who were both victim
and perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities.
It is these conversations that transform the historical
narrative by placing those momentous events in the
context of their impact on individuals, where they stop
being lost in history, if only for a moment, and become
real people again. For all the citing of numbers and
statistics to measure and somehow quantify the vastness
of Cambodia’s nightmare, reading these accounts
are what provide the true expression of the murderous
insanity that befell the country.
The Lost Executioner, then, is a complex book, both
in its attempt to avoid simplifying the recent history
of Cambodia and in Dunlop’s own acknowledgement
of the flux of his own thoughts about it. But, perhaps
because Dunlop’s profession is as a photographer, there
BUY Nic Dunlop books online from and
is never a sense of getting lost within his narrative. His
prose has a real composure to it – it’s extremely simple
without being simplistic, and there is not one verbose
word or overwrought sentence here. The understated
tone of Dunlop’s journalism allows the appalling facts
of his narrative to speak for themselves far more clearly.
Without wanting to sound flippant, the search for
Comrade Duch does also have a bit of Boy’s Own adventure
to it – and, to be frank, a somewhat suicidal one
too. Dunlop has worked in South East Asia for several
years and is well versed in Asian protocol to be sure, but
to decide to go looking for one of the Khmer Rouge’s
key figures would seem to be asking for trouble. Cambodia
is safe for tourists these days, but outside of the
cities it is still easy for people to disappear. I’ll refrain
from writing anymore about the outcome of his search
for fear of creating a spoiler; I’ll only say that it is a
truly remarkable story.
A section in the middle of The Lost Executioner is the
abiding – and troubling – memory I retain of reading it.
Within the rarefied confines of New York’s Museum
Of Modern Art, an exhibition of photos taken at Tuol
Sleng was commissioned, with an accompanying coffee
table book. The photos have become iconic – black and
white, each individual in the black loose clothes of the
Khmer Rouge against a white wall. They are the photos
that were taken on admission at Tuol Sleng – and the
taking of those photos were effectively the signing of
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their death warrant. Only seven people survived their
admission to Tuol Sleng.
During its exhibition, MOMA provided no captions
with the photographs, no names, no details of
who each individual was, no mention of how or why
they’d died. For MOMA’s purposes, these photos
had stopped being individual records of genocide but
had become mere portraiture. They were nice photos,
nothing more. There were no indications that each of
these people had died at the hands of torturers. There
were no calls for justice.
Dunlop writes movingly of his own frustration
BUY Nic Dunlop books online from and
with the limits of photography – that without words,
images are lost without context, turned into disinterested
aesthetic objects, mere decoration. The Lost
Executioner is clearly the product of Dunlop’s frustration
with his own profession, and photography’s
loss is writing’s gain. In telling his story of going in
search of Comrade Duch, Dunlop also tells the story
of Cambodia going in search of answers to its own
auto-genocide and the still-ongoing quest for some
sort of justice. For all the grimness of its subject
matter, The Lost Executioner is a vital book and one
that deserves to reach a huge audience. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2005]
The Fall: Fall Heads Roll
Ben Granger
It’s time again for the Seer of Salford to blast forth his
enchanted bombast. With more albums now than anyone
can count, and with its title surely a sly reference
to the number of foot-soldiers fallen from his ranks in
the grand Quixotic battle, a new Fall album stakes its
claim. Those who care, care. Should you?
The trouble with a talent this unique rattling out at
the rate it does is that it gets taken for granted. Does
this album stand out enough to win back those who’ve
seen the band’s twisted charm in the past but who’ve
got tired over the years?
The patience of the part-timer is tested straight
away with first track ‘Ride Away’, a cranky simplistic
diatribe against someone who’s pissed the Great One
off; literally one-note in all senses. And yet at this point
the faithful (and yes, of course I’m one) will hear that
Mark E Smith’s always ugly, tuneless voice has, in the
end, taken on an incredible inner-poetry of its own. As
I believe John Peel once said, it really would be beguiling
reciting the Yellow Pages. And yet once Smith has
frightened off the chaff with this lengthy dirge; The
Fall are ready to thrill with some of their most defining
BUY The Fall music online from and
moments yet.
The sound of Fall Heads Roll is very much riffheavy
guitar based , with a decidedly minimalist
primitive moog-synth backing, eschewing most of
the dance effects which have appeared on Fall records
in the past two decades. Not that there haven’t been
great pure-dance Fall moments (‘Free Range’, et al)
but this particular fan prefers the purer approach on
balance. The brilliant minimalism of the early 80s
period is evoked.
And what riffs! ‘Pacifying Joint’ is an incredible second
track, with a machine-gun snare that will instantly
snag anyone who hears it. If they choose to rip themselves
off the snag that’s up to them, but it’s as catchy as
anything by Franz Ferdinand. And once again the “bla
blah blah”’s of Smith’s voice attain a weird transcendent
cohesion. By the next track more incredible hooks
with age-old synths are underway. And by the time the
pop kids are singing along to next track ‘What About
Us?’, perhaps they’ll scarcely notice they’re chanting
from the point of view of an East German rabbit (or is
it a Rabbi?) indignantly demanding that Dr H. Shipman
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gives them morphine…
Smith and his lyrics have generally grown more
arcane and opaque with age. While this has entrenched
the weird mystery, at times the scabrous social realism
and satire of old has been somewhat lost in recent years.
Here though, several themes of yore are re-examined to
great effect, and while of course there’s still great dollops
of the incomprehensibility that makes them what
they are, a little bit more sense seeps in. Smith may be
a fervent loather of all things nostalgic, this record is by
no means a rehash in any sense, and yet somehow some
of the best spirit of the old in The Fall is at work here.
One track, ‘Assume’, goes back to the old legacy
of fucking seriously with the English language, and
applying strange new laws onto the commonplace
populace that sound like they’ve been handed down
from some Norse Deity gone schizoid. “If you assume,
you are a Hu(l)me. If you half assume, you are a Hu(l)
me. If you don’t assume, you are a cap-it-an!!”. That
this damned and despised new category of humanity
could take its name from either the philosopher David
or the run-down district of Central Manchester (more
probably both, or neither) just adds to the disturbed
allure. Of equal importance – it’s aligned to a gigantic,
siren guitar sound that flattens all in its wake. Even if
Smith wasn’t around the band at all (and it can happen
if you go see them live; take it from me) instrumentally
alone this bludgeons the living crap out of any musical
BUY The Fall music online from and
opposition standing today.
Elsewhere, the song ‘Blindness’ delves into the extended,
grinding, inexorable Canny hypnotism they do
so well. The repetition in the music is a brilliant backdrop
to the meandering meditation on an unhealthy and
paranoid hatred of the narrator’s surroundings “The flat
is evil / and full of cavalry and Calvary”. At their best,
and they are at their best here, no-one can produce a
sound quite as menacing as The Fall. Unlike Slipknot
or assorted goth-goons, Smith has always known that
true horror ensues when emblazoned on and interwoven
with a background of mundanity. In ‘Blindness’, as
in ‘When The Moon Falls’, ‘City Hobgoblins’, ‘Hotel
Bloedel’ and ‘Bremen Nacht’ before it, they sound like
they’ve cracked open a scene of everyday life, and
found something unfathomably terrifying seeping out.
It’s unnerving and marvellous.
The many supernatural themes from previous forays
are also present in the deeply mysterious ‘Midnight
In Aspen’, though this time the backing is The Fall in
beautiful and subtle mode, and yes they can do that.
A gentle plucked arrangement introduces a delirious
description of what seems to be a man attempting to
summon spirits in the Swiss Alps by firing a rifle at
selected stars. For once, Smith’s periodic preoccupation
with the occult seems less to do with Lovecraft and
creeping terror, and more the benevolent engagement
of a great mind with what may be beyond. And for once
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thinking it may not be that bad.
That’s not the only time on this record that the grouchiest
sod recording today shows an uncharacteristically
warm side. In ‘Breaking The Rules’, a wonderfully
light uplifting backing carries a mockingly bemused
tale of a man “who tried to break his mind breaking the
rules”. Probably the closest Smith will ever come to a
wry self-mocking acceptance of his popular image. A
sign of the comfort-zone probably unthinkable just a
few years ago, during the sorry days of on-stage punchups
in New York. It seems his fourth (or is it fifth?)
marriage, this time to keyboardist Eleni has brought
forth something at least bordering on contentment.
I’ve found most Fall albums in the past decade,
however many gems in the first half, tend to run out
of steam a bit on side two. Fall Heads Roll bucks this
trend more than any other. Even the sillier ones like ‘Bo
Demmick’ (a drum-based-track with a concentrated
stream of abuse against one hapless individual – main
refrain – ”Hey fat-eh!” while conceding “He was called
BUY The Fall music online from and
… a lot of things”) make you actually want to listen
all the way through. The first track is the worst track,
and there is not one silly piece of crap on the whole
product. Lover that I am, that is rare. (Put it this way:
would you like to listen to a compilation album consisting
of ‘WMC Blob 59’, ‘Bug Day’, ‘And This Day’,
‘Fireworks’, ‘Mollusc In Tyroll’? Half of the Levitate
album? Well, not me.) There’s a fantastic sound going
on all the way though here. I thought I’d forgotten it,
but here it is again. That others may hear it for the first
time is a minor miracle.
If you wanted to turn a friend on to The Fall you’d be
just as well playing this to them as the early rockapunkabilly
days or the mid-80s Brix poppier rockier period.
That in itself is an incredible achievement. Its not just
that you couldn’t imagine another band being anything
like The Fall ever again, you couldn’t really imagine
anything being like The Fall ever again. The blooded
moon goes on shining, and is no less respected, and nor
should they be. �
212
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published April 2002]
Stefan Fatsis: Letter Better
Jonathan Kiefer discusses the torrid world of competitive Scrabble playing
with Word Freak author Stefan Fatsis
Sure, Stefan Fatsis is nice, but he’s also a freak. That
is, a passionate aficionado – and an unusual specimen.
Fatsis is a Scrabble expert. He has written a book about
the game, and can speak authoritatively on its mechanics,
history, and cultural significance. And he can play,
better than most people in the world. But – and this
is important – although his Scrabble skill is orders of
magnitude greater than yours or mine may ever be,
Fatsis is not likely to use the phrase “orders of magnitude,”
in conversation or in print, without quotation
marks. Nor to use words like “azido” and “oiticica” and
certainly not “vogie,” because he understands that such
words really aren’t usable, not even on standardized
tests. In Scrabble, however, they’re gold.
“You can argue that the process of getting good at
Scrabble is the most inclusive use of language,” the
clean-cut and bespectacled Fatsis said recently, enjoying
the down time between a Reno, Nevada Scrabble
tournament and a Berkeley, California bookstore appearance.
“You’re using words that don’t get used. I
love that!” Thus is Fatsis precisely the appropriate
narrator for Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius
BUY Stefan Fatsis books online from and
And Obsession In The World Of Competitive Scrabble
Players. He is also, of course, the main character.
“It is sort of like Plimpton,” he offered, meaning
George Plimpton, the journalist-cum-temporary,
tongue-in-cheek Detroit Lions quarterback. “Except I
got good.”
Do not think it was easy for Fatsis, normally a mildmannered
Wall Street Journal sportswriter, to become
a Scrabble expert, especially in a mere couple of years,
and especially while committed to writing a book about
trying to become a Scrabble expert in a mere couple of
years. He devotes many pages to self-flagellation for a
stubbornly intermediate ability.
“The hard part about it was wanting the narrative to
turn out a certain way,” he said. “It did add to the pressure.
I was fortunate that I was able to get good enough.
Maybe it would have turned out differently otherwise.”
After a moment, he added, “Or maybe I would have
kept playing until I made it.”
As you might deduce, Word Freak keeps its subtitle’s
promise, and the gravitational constant in Scrabble’s
universe is obsession. But, as Fatsis explains in
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the text, “I don’t consider Scrabble an obsession in
a clinical sense: a disturbing preoccupation with an
unreasonable idea.I think of it as an obsession in the
colloquial sense, a compelling motivation.” In any
case, what writer doesn’t hope for the paid encouragement
of his obsessions?
Now, in the interests of propriety, an undertaking
of this sort must be considered a battle between the
myopia of deep immersion and the insight of distanced
perspective; Fatsis, admittedly unaccustomed to first
person narration, deftly straddled that tension throughout
his book.
“I’m a pretty standard-issue, mainstream newspaper
reporter,” he said. “The participatory thing always
struck me as a little bit of a conceit.” Fatsis described
his first book, Wild and Outside: How A Renegade
Minor League Revived The Spirit Of Baseball In
America’s Heartland, as a more traditional example of
‘fly-on-the-wall’ reporting. He considered it dishonest
to try that in Word Freak.
“The deeper I got into this,” he explained, “the more
it became about how I felt.” Fatsis wouldn’t like it if
people consider Word Freak a memoir. It’s not, but
here’s as close as he comes: “When I was nine, in 1972,
I calculated how old I would turn in 2000 but couldn’t
fathom that day arriving; it might not have seemed so
terrifying had I known I’d be playing a board game
full-time.” This disarming tone also happens to suit the
BUY Stefan Fatsis books online from and
author’s very thorough reporting, from the ‘Horatio
Alger story’ of Scrabble’s inventor, Alfred Butts, to the
fascinating variety of mnemonic systems by which the
best players have used Butts’ creation as a laboratory
for their mad science.
So, were Fatsis to recuse himself, the book would
lose a trustworthy guiding voice, not to mention a natural
narrative throughline; its minutiae would become
overwhelming, even boring; the subculture would
seem not to contain universal elements but instead appear
more rarified than before; and the whole enterprise
might start to feel like a titanic William Safire essay,
which, though enlightening, has begun to consume too
much of an otherwise useful Sunday.
Instead, Word Freak reads like an anticipated letter
from a sharp and funny friend, one who takes the question
“What’s new?” quite seriously, and always has a
good and true answer. Really, what more should we
expect from good nonfiction?
Fatsis is as he seems in the book: disposed to enthusiasm
(“I played UNILOBED!” he once interjected, recalling
the Reno tournament), or, to put it another way,
an especially sporting fellow. He even appreciates the
aesthetics of Scrabble, wherein lies a kind of abstract
expressionism – the non sequiturs, the shapes of words
themselves, the improbable consonance of consonants.
Could the meanings of “crwth” or “exergue” possibly
be any more useful or satisfying than their sheer, weird
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beauty? I don’t think so. Look them up.
Actually, Fatsis has staged a relative coup, winning
the approval of his chosen subculture twice–first as a
participant, then as a journalist. He has befriended the
“characters, in both senses of the word,” with whom
he traded tolerance, curiosity, annoyance, affection,
and absurdly high-scoring Scrabble games. “They’ve
read the book by now, and responded well,” Fatsis said.
“One character was way weirder than I thought,” one
friend told him. “You.”
BUY Stefan Fatsis books online from and
“It’s not leaving my system,” he said. “I’m not planning
to drop out.” Fatsis was referring to the way Scrabble
has changed his life. He seemed less concerned with
the way his life, a small portion of which is copiously
documented in Word Freak, may have changed Scrabble.
“I didn’t write it so that people would play more
Scrabble,” he said. “I thought I had a good story to tell.
If people start playing more games of the mind.” he
shrugged, half-bashfully. “I’d be honoured with that
sort of legacy.” �
215
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published March 1997]
Tibor Fischer: The Fischer King
Cliff Taylor gets a rare interview with the reclusive Tibor Fischer
The scene: a typically wintry Wednesday afternoon.
Upstairs at The Lift in Brighton’s Queen Road, some
whey-faced literary types are gathered around a table
for a seminar of sorts. Their rapt attention is focused
upon The Writer in their midst, a slightly grizzled
36-year-old phenomenon dressed in a less-than-chic
brown leather jacket, clown T-shirt and black jeans. His
name is Tibor Fischer.
How To Get Ahead In The Writing Game. Lesson
One: “Sleep with someone in publishing,” advises
Fischer, sipping his tea. Failing this, his next tip is to
stick to Lesson Two: never take no for an answer. “I’m
an expert on rejection letters,” he imparts, referring to
the 58 negative responses which almost buried alive his
debut novel Under The Frog. “It’s a lottery,” he shrugs.
It seems scarcely believable now that the professional
readers of all those imprints could have been
so uniformly myopic when presented with a work as
blindingly brilliant as Under The Frog, which was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993 and propelled
Fischer into the contentious ranks of The Best Of Young
British Novelists.
BUY Tibor Fischer books online from and
Which brings us to Lesson Three: “Most agents
and publishers are shits.” The whey- faced literary
types dutifully scribble “shits” on their notepads. But
one can’t help thinking such tribulations must be past
history for Fischer. After all, he is now the lionized litterateur
invited down from London by Brighton’s Do
Tongues spoken word club to read from his new novel
The Thought Gang, which is currently leapfrogging
into reprints and soon to be made into a film. These
days Fischer gets advances and can afford to indulge
in a little positive vengefulness against those faceless
arbiters who are the hate figures of would-be authors.
But what is the secret? demand the gathered
would-be authors. How can we too hitch a ride to
planet Picador? Fischer shrugs again, looking so
frustratingly ordinary. (He wears brand new Nike
sneakers. He was born in Stockport! His mother was
captain of the Hungarian women’s basketball team,
but there’s no genetic evidence of that either.) He
doesn’t give interviews and he’s too modest to say it,
but the secret is unsharable anyway, locked securely
inside that slightly balding, slightly greying skull.
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The eclecticism and depth of Fischer’s interests
shows through in the subject matter of his books.
Under The Frog is an achingly funny account of the
horrors of Soviet-era Hungary. The Thought Gang
gatecrashes the screaming spires and ivory towers
of academia with an irreverent pisstake on ‘the biz’
of philosophy. Meanwhile, his forthcoming novel attempts
to navigate through the history of art. Fischer
is one of those rare writers who can grapple with
huge agenda without trivialising it.
“I like to give people a few mental lozenges to suck
on, “ he says, half-jokingly. But Fischer’s comedy
is often black and always honest. Under The Frog
exposes Cold War insanity by drawing attention to
its sheer absurdity. Absolute power turns some people
into absolute pricks. Similarly, in The Thought
Gang, he swipes at that other absurd god, Mammon.
“Unquestionably, bank robbery is an illusion,” observes
the bank robbing philosopher Eddie Coffin.
“You take it out but where does it end up? In a bank.
Like water, money is trapped in a cycle, it moves
from bank to bank. We take it out for some fresh air.”
So what is the genesis of this prodigious comic talent?
That rich vein of traditional Hungarian stand-ups?
BUY Tibor Fischer books online from and
Fischer courts psychotic envy by claiming his humour
comes quite naturally. He is effortlessly, flippantly hip.
“The trouble with Nietzsche…” reflects the dissolute
Coffin, “…is that you can never be sure when he’s doing
some levity or not.”
Apres seminar The Lift fleshes out as the regular Do
Tonguers arrive for the evening show. Fischer reads first
from Under The Frog, a poignantly hilarious scene in
which a dying Hungarian peasant is hauled out of bed
and propped against a gate for the purposes of a Soviet
propaganda film. Next, a bank robbery and one-sided
Russian roulette incident from The Thought Gang.
It’s a passage pitched somewhere between Hunter
S. Thompson and Quentin Tarantino, but couched in
Fischer’s inimitable vernacular: “…the risk with going
forward was the bloodshed and the feel of zephyrs in
the gutshangar. It was getting close, armpit wettingly
close to chamber-clearing time and letting the ballistics
sort things out, when we heard sirens, the sonic harbinger
of the filth.”
Afterwards there is just time for the author to traffic
a few thoughts. When asked what he’d be doing if that
59th letter hadn’t been a “yes”, Fischer replies, “Probably
journalism. Or working in a leper colony.” �
217
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Review [published August 2010]
Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism
Ben Granger
The only game in town, and a rigged one at that. In what
is swiftly becoming ‘living memory’, capitalism is now
the only economic, social and political system deemed
possible, the logic of its late incarnation invading every
aspect of life, culture, even inner thought. So absolute
is its mental grip that when international finance capitalism
recently imploded in its own greed, devastating
the world, its victims reacted by obediently, meekly,
and pathetically recreating the whole shoddy system,
and handing their public services the bill. Stockholm
syndrome on a global scale.
Capitalist Realism looks at how the logic of this
social and spiritual stranglehold manifests itself in
a myriad of ways. From the meaningless marketbureaucracy
which infests public services, to the
nihilist-materialism of gangster films and gangsta rap,
from the faux-humanitarianism of Bill Gates and his
fellow generous oligarchs, to the omnipresent PR of all
business and government functions, now not just a tool
but an end itself. All neo-liberal life is here.
Mark Fisher writes at the fascinatingly digressive
cultural website k-Punk, and here as elsewhere uses
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
contemporary cultural fiction as both reference and
launchpad for his analysis. He begins with the suggestion
that the film Children Of Men is the apocalyptic
fantasy most appropriate to the capitalist age – a sterile
populace representing a sterile culture, not openly totalitarian
yet nonetheless brutal, completely atomised,
all public space abandoned, and connecting with the
suspicion that ‘the end has already come’. Most importantly,
that there really does seem to be no alternative.
As Fisher notes, “It is easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism.”
The nature of this murky triumphalism is such that
this ‘post-Fordist’ capitalism is a far more amorphous
creature than that which appeared in the old ‘capitalist/
worker’ duality that characterised the conflicts of old.
The new capitalism asserts “we’re all in this together”
(to quote our present regime), the system is everyone
and everyone is the system – to question its logic is
to question the logic of life itself, of your own sanity.
As the class war is rejected the savage disparity inherent
in the system has increasingly turned into internal
conflicts, with mental illness spreading at an exponen-
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tial rate – schizophrenia at society’s margins, bi-polar
disorder at is core.
Capital is an eternally shape-shifting “un-nameable
thing”, tainting everything with the logic of its own
transactions. The brutal logic of the market creates its
own kind of cultural ‘realism’, which Fisher shows
as expressing itself in the fetishisation of the rugged
individual in the vogue for gangsta rap and gangster
films, reaching their asocial apotheosis in the Hobbesian
fictional worlds of James Ellroy and Frank Miller,
where no-one and nothing is to be trusted. Fisher uses
gangster films to show the direction of travel capitalist
organisation has taken. In The Godfather era of the 40s-
60s, the Corleones were bound together with a ruthless
and absolute loyalty, mirroring the big, hierarchical,
often family-based corporations of old (where you may
be exploited but you still have a job for life, ‘at least
they looked after their own.’).
By the time of Heat, De Niro’s character Neil McAuley
shows himself a very modern gangster by his lack
of any ties or loyalties whatsoever: “Don’t let yourself
get too attached to anything that you are not willing
to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat
around the corner.” This in turn mirrors the atomisation
of the brave new world of “de-centred” capitalism,
whose lack of straightforward hierarchy only makes its
exploitation more nebulous, casual labour in all areas
of the economy shed in an instant as billionaires lightly
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
toss their casual carefree faces to the world, “shirtsleeves
informality and quiet authoritarianism”.
In a system where everyone is co-opted, no-one can
be to blame. Witness, as Fisher notes, that “no-one was
to blame” at Hillsborough and the Menezes shooting
(you could add the Union Carbide explosion in India
and BP oil spill in the US to that) – and literally speaking
this is quite true. Capitalism claims its legitimacy
in the name of the free, autonomous individual, yet this
individual has long been lost in a Kafka-esque maze,
his face used as a totem as his autonomy is secreted
away, forgotten.
Socialist Realism was the official name for the ersatz
art churned out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hackneyed,
servile and trite, the art of ‘actually existing socialism’
had as much in common with the liberationist project
of Marxism as the plastic Mary’s flogged near Lourdes
have to do with the Sermon on the Mount. The reality
of ‘actually existing capitalism’ is similarly dislocated
from its projected self-image as that of the heroic, ruggedly
free isolated individual.
Using his own background in the education system
as just one of many examples, Fisher shows that
while modern capitalism presents itself as the enemy
of bureaucracy, in fact it has proliferated meaningless
layers of white collar wastage more than any system in
history. As the system only functions in so far as how
it’s appearance can keep its hold over the populace, “all
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that is solid melts into PR”, and targets proliferate. A
frantic scramble ensues for formless trinkets with no
link to reality. Everyone knows this is meaningless, yet
at an official level this cannot be admitted. When Gerald
Ratner called his product “crap” he sinned against
this unwritten rule – we all know it but it must not be
admitted. This is an omnipresent facade, from which
everyone seeks escape by any means necessary. The
daydreams appropriate to this Janus-faced world are
the paranoid fantasies of Paralax View or the Bourne
films, or at a higher level in the nightmare schizoid
dreamscapes of Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and David
Cronenberg, “where agency is dissolved in a phantasmagoric
haze of psychic and physical intoxicants.”
Writing with a mercurial set of cultural references,
Fisher can shift gear from the ground level of reality
TV shows like Supernanny to the heights of Baudrillard
and Lacan without any sense of jarring incongruity.
Unlike Slavoj Zizek, another social critic given to
blending high and low cultural reference points, you
never get the sense that they are being thrown in just to
shock, or to highlight the author’s brilliance.
Fisher shows the modern society as a sinister hall of
mirrors, and illuminates each pained pane perfectly.
So many themes throb within this tiny book (just 81
pages!) as to take your breath away, and this review has
only scraped the surface. Other panes – that revolution
itself has been absorbed and commodified within the
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
neoliberal paradigm with ‘liberal communists’ such as
the philanthropic elite of Gates and Soros giving out
with one hand what they take away with another, that
Kafka prefigured the current order better than Orwell or
Huxley, (and uncannily predicted the call centre while
he was at it), and that the ostensible ‘choice’ of the market
has worked its way in ever diminishing returns into
a zero common dominator, 999 channels of nothing.
Deft at sociology, political theory and cultural analysis
alike, Fisher is probably at his weakest with his own
empirical examples of students at the college where he
has worked. He claims that the listless sense of time,
and inability to absorb abstract concepts, that he observes
in his students, mirrors the blip-vert consumer
mentality of modern market reality. Maybe true, but
this also sounds suspiciously like the moaning of the
teachers at their inattentive pupils over the ages. The
piercing vividity of his other insights however more
than make up for this.
While by no means a ‘light’ read, and the odd excursion
into Deleuze and other theorists did shoot slightly
over my scalp, this is not a tome you need a degree
in philosophy or cultural theory to comprehend – its
ingenuity is an open book. And while Fisher’s style
is more often academic in style than not, the forensic
imagination and magnificently multifarious breadth of
scope on display means this is anything but a dry read.
Indeed, he brings to vivid life a somewhat deadening
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and depressing vision. “The most gothic description of
capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract
parasite, and insatiable vampire and zombie-maker, but
the living flesh it converts into dead labour is ours, and
the zombies it makes are us.”
This is a horror show in which we are all trapped. In
BUY Mark Fisher books online from and
Capitalist Realism Mark Fisher shows with terrifying
insight just how completely it has enveloped us, but
offers little glimpse of how we can break out. He does
however disabuse us of any false hopes, and in demonstrating
the enormity of the hold it has on us, shows
the rank monster for what it is. Maybe that’s a start. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 2009]
Michael Foot: The Uncollected Essays
Ben Granger
Mention the name Michael Foot and listen out for
the automatic sneer. A rolling of eyes at a “disastrous
leader”, accompanied no doubt with devilishly cutting
asides about donkey jackets, walking sticks or Worzel
Gummidge, delete as appropriate. Gerald Kaufman’s
deathless Wildeanism chiding Foot’s 1983 Labour
Manifesto as “the longest suicide note in history” will
be added by the more confident comedians, and much,
much merriment will be had all round. Oh, the laughter!
Let’s leave aside the fact the economic shit-storm
the world currently finds itself in stems entirely from
the Mephistophelian neo-liberal pact which this
“suicide note” rejected, a pact wholeheartedly signed
up to by the current ‘realist’ Labour administration,
along with the rest of the world. Let’s ignore the fact
that the 1983 result was that of a party caught between
the SDP schism, an economic upsurge and Falklands
wargasm euphoria. Let’s gloss over the fact that Soviet
Communism and unregulated international capitalism
have both been utterly, comprehensively discredited,
while simple logic dictates the democratic socialist
alternative Foot put forward has been vindicated. The
BUY Michael Foot books online from and
fact the man was basically right all along – we can
delicately place that trifle to one-side for now. We
can all still agree however that when it comes to the
everyday devious machinations of leading a political
party, and of creating an effective electoral machine
and vibrant media image for the slick media age, Foot
did not find his forte. What was? Writing. Journalism,
ideas and writing.
Foot began writing in the 30s for a variety of magazines
and papers, broadly championing the underdog,
and more specifically drumming up solidarity against
the menace of Fascism. His 1940 book Who Are The
Guilty Men?, denouncing as it did the Tory Chamberlain
government’s appeasement of Hitler, did much
to consolidate progressive support for the war effort,
with the promise of a better society at home beyond.
In the 40s he joined the Tribune newspaper along with,
amongst others, his friend George Orwell, helping
establish it as a voice for the Labour Left which stood
solid against the hegemony of both US and USSR. On
into the 60s, concurrent with acting as the conscience of
the same Labour Left from the backbenches, he found
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time to write the definitive biography of his mentor
Nye Bevan, a similarly exhaustive tome on H.G. Wells
was to follow later.
It was the old rival Denis Healey who said that a politician
needs a “hinterland”, outside cultural interests to
keep them human. No-one could ever accuse Foot of
not cultivating his own spiritual and mental landscape.
The selection of essays here are a testament to the
man’s mercurial mind, the breadth of his intellectual
scope. Taken from over a half-century, only a small
number touch on purely political ‘issues’ – nuclear
weapons, the Soviet Union, Irish nationalism. Foot’s
preferred form was to discuss the life, work and ideas
of an individual man or woman, and a small majority
here are portraits of political figures, usually taken from
reviews of biographies or collections from their own
work. It takes in leading figures from Labour history
and earlier British socialism, from Bevan and Bevin
to Robert Owen and William Morris, the still earlier
radicalisms of Tom Paine and Charles James Fox. Irish
and Indian independence are well represented with
Indira Ghandi and Daniel O’Connell, as is feminism
with Emilene Pankhurst and Brigid Brophy. Yet at the
same time there are a great many portraits of writers
and characters not best known for their politics – Oscar
Wilde, James Joyce, Rebecca West, the Romantic poets
and Heinrich Heine – not to mention Peggy Aschroft.
That the politicians segue so well into the writers is
BUY Michael Foot books online from and
a testament to the well- rounded totality of Foot’s mind
and vision. The struggle for truth and freedom are as
important in the literary sphere as in the party political,
maybe more so. Aesthetics, beauty, form and style are
at the very least equal to politics in his thoughts and
enthusiasms. In discussing Edmund Wilson’s biography
of Rousseau, more reference is made to relevant
quotations from Byron than to any theoretical road to
Robespierre. Essays on the history of Hampstead common,
and the infinite wonders of Venice, perhaps the
least ‘political’ here, are probably the most beautifully
written, with an evocation of time, space and place
which is truly involving, even moving.
Foot writes in a style both cultured and clear, mildly
mischievous, totally lacking pomposity, and wearing
its very evident learning lightly. A passion, quiet yet
pronounced, reserved but unmistakable, is evident at
all times. Personal recollections lightly pepper the essays
on those he knows and knew, while the same easy,
almost conversational style flows similarly into those
from centuries past, creating the pleasing impression
that Foot was on nodding terms with Coleridge and
Morris just as he was with Richard Crossman and John
Smith (which, in his life of the mind, he perhaps always
has been).
A clue there perhaps that it takes a duller man than
this to succeed in the grubby world of leading a political
party. The decency consistently evident in his prose
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also lays bare the absolute absence of the killer instinct
needed for leadership. The venom of the zealot isn’t
there either. Rare asides against Thatcher are dismissive
rather than enraged, bereft of the rabidity she so easily
inspired in so many. Figures such as Ernest Bevin
and others on the Labour Right are appraised admiringly.
Even a review of the autobiography of nemesis
Healey is genuinely warm and salutary. Tom Driberg,
the louche old eccentric (i.e. fantasist) and rogue (i.e.
sociopath) is recalled with the affection of the friend
that he was (though the bad points are laid bare too.)
Anti-Thatcherite Tory and historian Ian Gilmour is
praised, and there is even a short yet powerful defence
of Churchill, paying robust tribute to the old reactionary
against the modern fallacy held by revisionists on
Left and Right alike that a deal could or should have
been struck with Hitler.
This lack of killer instinct means he lacks the final
‘bite’ of the truly great writer too. Eloquent praise pours
freely, but not once is there an effective literary slaying
of a hated foe, not a shortfall that could be levelled at
his friend Orwell.
This politeness, this sheathed sword and profoundly
English politeness can irritate. The kind words found
for that other loveable rogue’, the Tory Kray-groupie
Bob Boothby seem to be stretching the limits of tolerance
past snapping point. And seeking and finding
the good points even in that other arch Conservative
BUY Michael Foot books online from and
icon Edmund Burke; for instance, is hard to take from
the more partisan. Even here though, he does well to
convince. How many of the golf club bores, bigots
and blimps who denounced the man as a “dangerous
extremist” when he led Labour could demonstrate the
barest fraction of his broad minded respect for and
interest in competing points of view?
Foot is a socialist in the truest sense, yet forever free
of the dogma that dogs too many of his tribe. And free
of the great sins too. Absolutely no apologia for the
crimes of Communism from him – Stalin is condemned
here in a brief article taken from the week of his death,
written when the rest of the world were paying tribute.
An unequivocal defence of Salman Rushdie taken from
the time of the Satanic Verses furore, shows that he
would have no part of the alliance with militant political
Islamism which some on the Left have cynically seen
fit to serve. His support for NATO’s bombing of Serbia
is more contentious, though, whatever one may think
of it, still presents him as someone true to a liberationist
vision on his own terms, unaffected by the fact that
such a position would not be popular amongst his own
beloved wing of his own beloved party.
Foot sees socialism as the rightful heir of earlier
struggles for liberty and autonomy that distinguished
the great rebels of the past. This is the socialism of
liberation, not restriction, the vision of liberty which inspired
the creed in the first place, expanding the vision
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of the free-born Englishman to include those without
property. This doyenne of dissenters is one himself, and
when he writes of, say, of the great early Parliamentary
radical Fox, or the still greater radical writer and pamphleteer
William Hazlitt , it is with the knowledge and
passion of someone who has devoted their whole life to
it, in both the intellectual and the practical sense. Foot
feels a truly organic lineage to this tribe, a lineage he is
more than entitled to.
An impassioned portrait of Heinrich Heine, one of
the longest essays here, is perhaps the best example of
the Foot’s infectious enthusiasm, his quiet passion, his
blending of the poetic and political. The personal too,
as he describes how Heine came to be his “hero” after
discovering her with a beautiful Yugoslavian girl with
whom he was once in love, before coming to know him
through what he saw as his modern day avatar, the cartoonist
Vicky, who had “every Heinite feature, the same
diminutive size, the same race, the same iconoclastic
temperament with a comparable artistic gift. He too,
like my Jewish girlfriend, knew Heine by heart, and
would summon his hero to his side whenever the political
battle was most ruthless or pitiless.” These personal
asides are – springboards to a fine, enraptured paen. As
someone who has never read Heine, I am inspired to do
so, much sooner than later. “He could never make up
his mind whether he was a poet or a politician”, says
Foot of Heine, and the reason for his particular connec-
BUY Michael Foot books online from and
tion with this writer becomes that bit clearer.
I have found myself slipping into the past tense in
writing this review, and yet Michael Foot is happily
still very much alive at the age of 96. When he does
pass away however, an age of passion, principle and
philosophy at the higher levels of politics will die with
him. It is unthinkable, literally unthinkable that a book
like this could appear today. The leaders of today’s
party political machines – slick, shallow, technocratic,
faux pragmatic and narrowly philistine – could not
begin to produce anything of the like. You may as well
expect Fearne Cotton to write an essay on the transgressive
ambiguities of the Velvet Underground. You
can just about see they ‘work in the same industry’,
but nonetheless, a ‘category error’ has occurred. Does
not compute.
True, Gordon Brown wrote a biography of James
Maxton back in the 80s, but it seems Brown was a different
man then. On the Tory benches, Michael Gove
makes an effort to engage with the cultural sphere, but
this is a very limited exception to the greater picture.
Ideas don’t matter. But they should, something that
Foot never forgot. This book is a window to an age of
wider political possibility, and of greater political imagination.
It is also simply an immensely strong body
of writing on its own terms. And finally it is the truest
tribute possible to the man himself, a giant among
pygmies. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 2004]
Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand
Ben Granger
Just because every music critic in the land suddenly
simultaneously drools like a sick puppy over some hot
new things, it doesn’t mean said things are actually
that good. The slavish adulation these uber-foppish
young Glaswegians are getting across the board is
off-putting because it has so many bad precedents.
Music mags, broadsheets, tabloids and no doubt
promotional in-house newsletters for the grommet
manufacturing industry have been unanimous in their
knicker-wetting praise. When the ‘with-it’ Guardian
allowed the band to edit their own G2 supplement
one was reminded of that dark era when university
professors and vicars were (quite genuinely) invited
on television to discuss the intricacies behind the
lyrics to Oasis’ Be Here Now. Frankly, there’s just
not enough vomit in the world.
I put this album on therefore expecting an instant
eye and earful of Emperor’s New Clothing. What I got
was the opening song, ‘Jacqueline’, the most genuinely
thrilling beginning to an album for many, many years.
All the factors that make this record transcend the hype
kick in with an exhilarating and magnetic burst. The
BUY Franz Ferdinand music online from and
thousand megawatt surge of the soaring guitar, the elastic
funk of the swaggering bass, the strange voice that
swings from the mannered to the primal. This opener
is fucking sensational, and for once the whole mass of
tawdry, silly hyperbole seems, if anything, understated.
It would be impossible for a whole album to carry
on as well as that, but they have a damn good try. Their
sound has been described as part of the early 80s punkfunk
revival, but this is a lot more fully realised than
The Rapture were ever likely to be. There certainly
is something almost eerily 80s about singer Alex Kapranos’
affected tones. But perhaps a better comparison
can be found with previous press darlings The Strokes.
Both draw heavily from the art-punk of the late 70s,
but whereas The Strokes are more Television and Iggy,
Franz Ferdinand are more Blondie and Buzzcocks. And
it’s the Scots’ songs that stay with you longer.
Lyrically we’re in that hinterland between worldweary
hedonism and humane misanthropy, where the
smart are cool and the cool are smart. There’s some
very nice touches. The comically self-obsessed student
in ‘Dark Of The Matinee’ daydreaming of impressing
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his as-yet unrequited love by “Telling Terry Wogan
how I made it / But what I ‘made’ is unclear now / But
his deference is / And his laughter is”. ‘Michael’ is an
impressively leery foray into the world of seedy boyon-boy
glamour, following boldly in the footsteps of
the genre’s forbears Ziggy, Iggy, Marc, Moz and Lou.
But really its not the lyrics that make this record so
memorable; it’s the fact that these must be some of
the most danceable indie tunes EVER, be it the primal
surge of ‘Jacqueline’, the imperious bounce of ‘Dark
Of The Matinee’, the schizoid pogo of ‘Cheating On
You’ or the wraith-like beauty of ‘Auf Asche’. The hit
single ‘Take Me Out’ must be the first hit single since
Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ to manage the tricky
job of melding two completely different tunes together
to make one classy song, even if the second part does
bear a disturbing similarity to the old Genesis hit ‘That’s
All’ (can I really be alone in noticing this blatant rip-off
BUY Franz Ferdinand music online from and
from Collins’ rightly maligned crew? I sense a cover up
of Kennedyesque proportions…) There’s only one dud
on the whole album, the insipid ‘This Fire’.
I’ll temper my real enthusiasm here, and put my
sourpuss head on the block by predicting that while
this is a great record, Franz Ferdinand will not become
one of the all time greats. Its not the music that will
prevent immortality, but Alex’s delivery being just that
too mannered, the enigmatic lyrics not quite grabbing
you enough.
I really do hope to be proved wrong about that, and
that this album will prove a springboard to even higher
zeniths for the fey young lads. Is this the future of rock?
Maybe, maybe not. But in the meantime you really
must accept that some things are true even though the
NME and The Telegraph say they are, and lap up the
most exciting band in aeons, tailor made like all the
best for the young but old at heart. �
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Review [published March 2008]
Athol Fugard: Tsotsi
Greg Lowe
South African author and playwright Athol Fugard’s
recently-published novel Tsotsi, is a compelling and
brutal tale that follows the life of the story’s eponymous
protagonist. Set in Sophiatown – a black township
in Johannesburg that was razed in the 1950s to
make way for homes for the whites – Fugard uses the
oppression of the apartheid regime that segregated the
lives of the country’s black and white populations, as
a backdrop for the novel’s main setting: deep-rooted
racism, the abject poverty of the black community,
brooding violence.
The book was originally written in draft form in the
early 60s, only to be resurrected and reedited some
20 years later. The bulk of the story focuses on three
transformational days in the life of Tsotsi, a stonecold
killer who leads a gang comprising of Die Aap,
nicknamed because of his slow brain and immense
strength; Butcher, an expert at murdering people by
skewering their heart with a sharpened bicycle spoke;
and Boston, who is brainy but a coward. The word
“tsotsi” itself means “gangster” or “thug”, and harks
back to a time when many South African township
BUY Athol Fugard books online from and
streets were plagued by such ruthless killers who
would kill for pennies or pleasure. Some say the word
is derived from Zoot suit, the chosen apparel of the
Hollywood hardmen of the day.
Tsotsi the character is a man without memory, name
or age – though one assumes he is in his early 20s. His
name is simply a banner, an indicator of the guiding
force behind his life and actions. Violence. Questions
about his past are not tolerated, and often lead to more
brutality being dispensed on the enquirer, as Boston
finds out for himself.
It is here that Fugard really works his magic. For
Tsotsi does not have a hidden past that he is trying
to cover up, or one that he is trying to remember: he
literally has no recollection. He is an intensely primal
character, for most parts practically devoid of selfreflection,
but when he does look inwardly all he sees
is “darkness”.
The few flashbacks of memory he has act as lighting
bolts that penetrate this darkness, a process that Tsotsi
finds deeply disturbing. For him it is simpler to view
life as ugliness and pain, and for those unlucky enough
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to come across the gang, increasingly short. Violence
is a survival mechanism, not in terms purely of day to
day physical survival, but rather as a means of stability
and affirmation.
Life is a straight line, for Tsotsi, with no memory or
past, just the present, “one continuous moment carrying
him forward without questions or regrets…” However,
this changes when he finds a baby boy in a shoebox,
though Fugard avoids making this dynamic overly trite
or sugar-coated. He is not miraculously transformed by
the heart-tugging power of the baby and its burbling, in
fact he is troubled by the fact he doesn’t just kill the child.
The turning point comes from the child’s vulnerability,
and its lack of history. This catalyses a shower of
fragments of memory from the past which pierce the
cold, hermetically sealed darkness in which he resides,
sending him into a psychological turmoil. Even though
this turns his world upside down – as the past creeps
into the present, and his backstory is filled in – his sociopathic
tendencies are partially eroded. The flood of
emotions, of sympathy and the ability to connect with
other people, start to diminish his fatalistic nihilism. A
world of new alternatives is born in its place.
BUY Athol Fugard books online from and
With Tsotsi Fugard has crafted an intelligent and insightful
novel. One which humanizes brutality, exposes
the corruptability of humans, and conversely presents
the possibilities for redemption, not in a biblical sense
but in the more down-to-earth manner in which individuals
can take an opportunity to change their life for
the better. While the book reflects a particularly bloody
time in South Africa’s history, it is not a gratuitous offering.
Acts of sex and violence are not described in
explicit detail, instead the writer zones in on the characters
and causal factors.
Perhaps this comes in part from Fugard’s work as
a playwright – he has written some 30 odd plays and
won numerous awards – an industry where special
effects are sparse and context is ever present. At times
Fugard is repetitive with his use of descriptions and
metaphors, and some of the characters are a little twodimensional,
shoring up aspects of the storyline, rather
than emanating their own complexities. Nevertheless,
none of this detracts from novel’s narrative power or
emotional impact.
The film adaptation of Tsotsi won the Best Foreign
Language Film at this 2006 Oscars. �
229
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Review [published August 2004]
Anna Funder: Stasiland
Chris Mitchell
Recently I re-read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty
Four, 15 years after first reading it. Orwell’s future
vision is an inherent part of our culture now, commoditised
and trivialised, denied shock value or reconsideration
due to its very familiarity. Re-reading the book
and returning to Winston Smith’s world, however, is
to feel a distinct unease. Nineteen Eighty Four is a
book that has a potent physical effect on the reader
(this reader anyway) – the claustrophobia of Winston
Smith’s world, the subtle monstrous insanity of its rules
and regulations and the ultimate futility of resistance
produce a distinct sense of horror and helplessness
within the reader, activating an involuntary empathy.
Orwell’s prose is never better than here, and the shock
of recognition at the similarities between elements of
his fictional nightmare world and our own grow with
each year. Nineteen Eighty Four is one of those truly
great books that becomes greater with age.
I write this by way of introduction to Anna Funder’s
Stasiland because her book shares much of Orwell’s
concerns and indeed, provides an excellent, if equally
traumatic, real-life counterpoint to Nineteen Eighty
BUY Anna Funder books online from and
Four. Where Orwell was writing in reaction to the totalitarian
regimes of Hitler and Stalin, Stasiland provides a
collection of personal stories from the police state that
was seemingly modelled on Big Brother – that of Cold
War East Germany caught behind the Berlin Wall.
East Germany’s secret police were known as the
Stasi, and the absurd yet terrifying lengths they went to
in order to meticulously survey and document the lives
of millions of their citizens defies belief. Kafka’s worst
nightmare does not even begin to match the reality of
Stasiland. Some estimates reckon one in six people
within East Germany was an informer. When the Berlin
Wall finally fell, the Stasi headquarters were stormed by
angry but peaceful mobs who found millions of pages
shredded within each building, a last desperate attempt
to destroy the evidence of the most perfect police state
ever created.
Funder describes how there is a team of people
charged with the task of meticulously reassembling all
these documents so that citizens can find out what was
written about them in the Stasi’s files and what became
of loved ones, friends and relatives. It is an absurd,
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Sisyphean task but one that desperately needs to be
completed and of course, will never be completed. The
truth for many people is hidden in those mountains of
fragments of paper.
In her approach to writing Stasiland, Funder also
pieces together a portrait of life in the East German state
from the personal stories of those who tried to escape it
by crossing the Wall, those who fell victim to the secret
police and those whose relatives never returned from
the Stasi’s interrogation cells. These are not isolated
anecdotes, Cold War stories, but recollections of how
the Stasi years have impacted on individuals’ lives
through to the present day. In each of those recollections,
the fragility of humans is made bleakly apparent;
the ease with which the Stasi could destroy lives not
just through physical torture but by much more intangible
mindgames. The state quite literally brutalised
its citizens with its relentless untruths, its reshaping of
reality through rhetoric and hermetically sealing East
Germany off from the rest of the world; the psychological
and psychiatric fallout of that brutalisation is still
felt today, just as the eventual US exit from Iraq will be
felt for years to come.
The scope of the book widens with each passing
BUY Anna Funder books online from and
chapter, Funder feeling compelled to understand more
about the mechanics of the Stasi’s repression and surveillance
in order to do justice to the stories she has been
entrusted with. This extends to interviewing ex-Stasi
men about their previous jobs, which provides a critical
counterpoint as Funder recounts East Germany’s brief
history. The sense of Funder’s own widening interest
and accumulation of knowledge carries the narrative
forward effortlessly, whilst her prose is almost stark in
its simplicity, as if to ensure that she does not interfere
with the recounting of the stories she has been told.
There is no luridness, melodrama or sentimentality
here, and the compound effect of reading Stasiland is
the same as Nineteen Eighty Four – one of rage and
helplessness, that people’s lives should be so casually
ruined for nothing.
For all the bleakness of its subject matter, Stasiland
is not a difficult or miserable read, thanks to the quiet
bravery of the people whose stories this book documents.
Powered by Funder’s precise prose, Stasiland
is an essential insight into the totalitarian regime and,
whether intended or not, is also a warning about the
manipulation of truth, the erosion of civil liberties and
the consequences of perpetual surveillance. �
231
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Alex Garland:
Backpacker Blues 233
William Gibson:
Waiting For The Man 237
Allen Ginsberg:
Cosmopolitan Greetings 242
The Godfather:
Sex And Spaghetti 244
Graham Greene / Evelyn Waugh:
Literary And Political Catholicism 249
Peter Guralnick: Careless Love:
The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley 256
G
H
Half Man Half Biscuit:
Achtung Bono 258
Half Man Half Biscuit:
Trouble Over Bridgewater 262
Keith Haring:
Artist Or Radiant Baby? 263
Bill Hicks:
Bad Mood Rising 266
Tom Hodgkinson:
How To Be Idle 271
Gert Hofmann:
Parable Of The Blind 273
Nick Hornby:
Gender Trouble 276
Michel Houllebecq:
Atomised 279
232
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Interview [published May 1999]
Alex Garland: Backpacker Blues
Nancy Rawlinson finds out why The Beach author Alex Garland
is still unsure of his writing success
No matter where you go on this small planet of ours, you
will encounter ‘Garland’s Law.’ That is, for every 10
people under the age of 30 that you meet, approximately
3.33 per cent of them will have read or be reading Alex
Garland’s first novel, The Beach. Actually, I just made
that up, and it already seems too conservative. I have
recently been staying in two hostels in the States. In the
first dorm room a Danish girl ripped through the book
in about three days; her friend had just finished it. In
the second, an Oxford University student was a quarter
way through, and her travelling companion planned to
read it next. On buses in India, on the subway in New
York, in international departure lounges everywhere,
the distinctive yellow spine of The Beach is truly ubiquitous.
In case this is still not sounding familiar, a film
adaptation of the book is currently in postproduction
and due to hit our screens in spring 2000. It is directed
by Danny Boyle of Trainspotting fame and it stars
Leonardo Di Caprio. Honestly, could it be any hotter?
In case you are one of the, oooh, seven people left
in Britain who are not familiar with the plot, here is a
brief summary for you. Richard, a 20-something Brit,
BUY Alex Garland books online from and
arrives on Thailand’s famous Khao San Road – the first
stop on the well-trodden backpacker’s trail. On his first
night, the man in the room next to him slits his wrists
and leaves Richard with a map to a mysterious beach.
Along with a French couple, Richard sets out to find
this supposed paradise, where a select community are
trying to create their own version of utopia. When they
finally arrive, having survived a harrowing swim and
some AK-47 toting marijuana farmers, the new visitors
are welcomed rather uneasily. Tensions arise, not least
within Richard’s psyche. You can guess the rest – the
book has been described as What I Did On My Holidays
meets Apocalypse Now meets Lord Of The Flies and
those references are more than just a pat summery. The
Beach is essentially a gripping tale of a journey into
the heart of darkness, but one that is nicely wrapped
up in knowing pop cultural references and located in
a somewhat trendy travel destination. It is not hard to
see why it was so swiftly optioned for a Hollywood
blockbuster.
So, you may be thinking, what of the author of this
mega hit novel? And why, thus far into an interview
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write up, have I not mentioned his best selling follow
up, The Tesseract? Why indeed. More of that later
– for now, meet Alex Garland. Some biographical
details: He was born in 1970, son of the well-known
and respected political cartoonist, Nick Garland. With
a resolutely middle-class and intellectual background,
he graduated from Manchester University with a degree
in History of Art, and was planning on following
in a his fathers footsteps before he realized: “There
aren’t many openings for a cartoonist.” Instead, he
turned his attention to fiction, and started writing The
Beach when he was just 23, drawing on his many
experiences of travelling (he first went to India when
he was 17, on a school trip, and he now makes several
visits to South East Asia per year).
The Beach was brought out in 1996, with no big promotional
push from the publishers, yet within a year, it
was a best seller. Rave reviews everywhere from The
Mail On Sunday to Maxim magazine certainly did no
harm, but predominantly it was word of mouth that
made The Beach a success. Only three years after he
first put pen to paper, Garland was being heralded as
the new voice of ‘Generation X’ and making Vogue’s
most eligible bachelors list. At such a young age, and
on the back of a debut novel, this was a rather heavy
weight to bear.
Bearing this in mind, his media shy and somewhat
guarded manner are understandable. Fortunately, in
BUY Alex Garland books online from and
keeping with the ultra-modernism of the book, Garland
himself has a very low-key approach to his what he
does. “Writing certainly wasn’t something I thought I
wanted to do as a kid. It was something I chanced upon.
And, in a way, I don’t think you could say I chose it as
my profession. I gave it a try and it worked out, and
I enjoy it and that’s it.” He is similarly down to earth
about his situation. Despite being one of the most indemand
authors this side of Nick Hornby, he harbours
no illusions.
“There is a business side to writing and if you don’t
sell books then publishers won’t print them. You’re
only as hot as your last novel. I think you can reach a
point when you’re not as good as your last novel, you
may have written one or even two bad books in a row,
and the publishers will hang onto you. But you need
to have proved yourself in a long term way before that
and I certainly haven’t done that yet. I still feel like I’m
doing an incredible bluffing trick and I’m going to get
caught out.”
There are those that would agree with this self-effacing
appraisal. Reaction to Garland’s second book The Tesseract
has been mixed. There were some scathing reviews.
“A pointlessly elaborate portrait of disparate lives coming
together” was one description. “Tedious, convoluted,
pompous” was another. Yet others have heaped praise
on the book (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times
said it felt like “a Quentin Tarantino or John Woo movie
234
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seasoned with some Graham Greene.”)
It is certainly a more mature and reflexive study than
the fast and furious The Beach although personally I
find myself in with one foot in both camps; I was not
totally convinced by the characters in The Tesseract.
The use of film references and American slang works
perfectly in The Beach, when all the central characters
are European, but somehow I can’t quite imagine the
rural and local characters in The Tesseract coming out
with lines like: “You’ll be brained by a coconut.”
Set in the Philippines, the story interweaves three
narratives. Sean, an Englishman, is on the run from
two Filipino mafia henchmen. As they pursue him, he
stumbles into the kitchen of Rosa, a Filipino village girl
now living with her husband and children in Manila.
Cente, a 13-year-old street child, witnesses the encounter.
“Basically what you have in the book is a group
of people who can’t make sense of everything that’s
around them. And I think I use that as an anti-religious
argument,” Garland explains. “It’s sort of theistic. It’s
not even fate. The point is, sometimes things just happen
to people and it’s not for any cosmic or religious
reasons. Sometimes things just happen that way.”
As the above quote indicates, Garland has a knack
for seeing and expressing things in a very understandable
was, and this is no doubt part of his appeal to a
generation turned off by so called ‘classic’ yet impenetrable
authors. “I know exactly what you mean,”
BUY Alex Garland books online from and
Garland says. “I think if you asked the average literary
editor whether they thought my work was equitable
with Salman Rushdie’s, they would say no. Well, that’s
not something that bothers me very much and I doubt
very much that it bothers Salman Rushdie.” Garland’s
approach to the actual nuts and bolts of writing is similarly
nontraditional.
“For The Tesseract, I didn’t do any research,” he
confesses. “I’ve spent more time in The Philippines
than anywhere else so there was a certain kind of background
detail that I didn’t really have to research. But
in terms of putting yourself into the heads of different
characters, I’m not really fazed by this culture thing.
As long as people have enough money to live and
they are not starving to death, then basically people’s
preoccupations tend to be the same wherever you go.
They are worried about their jobs; they are worried
about whether their wife or husband is happy, or how
their kids are doing. I think I approached The Tesseract
thinking the culture is quite cosmetic.”
This may seem like a strange attitude for a man who
has made so much out of basing his work in exotic locations,
yet there is a sense that Garland uses South East
Asia as only as a backdrop. What he is really interested
in is the human story, the development and exploration
of different mental states. The way in which human beings
make sense of the world.
Having said this, there is no doubt that at least part of
235
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the reason for his success lies his depiction of Europeans
abroad, which coincided perfectly with the explosion
in the backpacking market. Locations like Thailand
and The Philippines are now accessible and extremely
desirable places to visit. Garland sums up this shift in
global tourism when he recollects his first travelling
experience. “My memory is basically that I had a good
time, and the main thing that I learnt was how easy it
is. If you get the money together and a ticket, you can
pretty much go anywhere you want to go. I suppose I
imagine that there was some sort of invisible barrier
that stops you from going to these places, but the only
BUY Alex Garland books online from and
real thing that stops you is cash.”
Considering his position, lack of money should be no
impediment to future trips. But for now, Alex Garland is
keeping his feet firmly on the ground. “My philosophy
of life is just enjoying it, I think. I’ve started work on
another book but at the moment I’m mostly working on
a screenplay with a bunch of mates; we’re just trying to
see if we can get it together. It’s half set in Chile and
half in Russia and based around a story which links the
two countries.” Now, who do you think will be playing
the central role? You know it will happen. It’s just a
matter of time. �
236
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Interview [published August 1999]
William Gibson: Waiting For The Man
Antony Johnston has a meeting of minds with the elusive William Gibson
about his novel All Tomorrow’s Parties
William Gibson needs no introduction. But he’s going
to get one anyway.
Gibson coined the term ‘cyberspace,’ visualising a
worldwide communications net 11 years before the
World Wide Web was born. His debut novel Neuromancer
won all three major science fiction awards – the
Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick – upon its release. He
is the first name that comes to mind when the term ‘Cyberpunk’
is mentioned, known and revered the world
over by authors, artists, rock bands and more.
Yet Gibson the man remains startlingly elusive. A
professional novelist for 15 years, he has published only
seven novels (one of which was co-written) and most
of his reputation remains, somewhat unfairly, rooted in
Neuromancer. He lives a quiet life with his wife and
children in Canada. In a staggering display of irony,
for many years Gibson refused to even have an internet
connection, saying the last thing he wanted after a day
staring at his word processor was to carry on using the
computer. Even now, at the height of his success and in
his mid-40s, he continues to quietly support innovative,
street-level art.
BUY William Gibson books online from and
But despite being trapped in a Leonard Nimoy-style
cage of Neuromancer’s success, Gibson continues to
innovate himself both in style and concept. He does not
rest on his laurels, and looks set to burst forth into the
popular mindset for a second time.
His latest novel, All Tomorrow’s Parties, is released
next month. He is continuing his work in television after
the success of his X-Files episode ‘Killswitch’. And
the highly-anticipated, oft-speculated film adaptation
of Neuromancer is finally entering production. He even
finally has an email address! What brought that on?
“I’ve just been avoiding it,” says Gibson. “Having
kids did it for me, I suppose. I couldn’t very well deny
it to them, so eventually we had three or four different
addresses in the house. It was difficult to avoid it, then.”
So can we assume William Gibson is ‘back for
good’? Like its two predecessors (Virtual Light and
Idoru) All Tomorrow’s Parties has taken nearly three
years to appear. Gibson admits he’s been somewhat
slow: “In terms of the speed which I’d always assumed
genre SF writers worked at, I felt I was hardly
producing at all. I took a break. Hiatus, as they say in
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TV. But now I’m back.”
And with an increased workload, most significantly
the Neuromancer film. After countless rumours, director
Chris Cunningham has finally been announced to
helm the feature. Cunningham is a 20-something prodigy,
best known for his dark, off-beat music videos for
Bjork, Aphex Twin and Madonna. He’s also a student
of the late Stanley Kubrick … but he’s never directed a
Hollywood feature. So how on earth did he get this job?
“He was brought to my attention by someone else.
We were told, third-hand, that he was extremely chary
of the Hollywood process, and wouldn’t return calls.
But someone else told us that Neuromancer had been
his Wind In The Willows, that he’d read it when he was
12. I went to London and we met.”
After the debacle that was Johnny Mnemonic, Gibson
is understandably coy about the whole process. Johnny
Mnemonic was also directed by a Hollywood novice,
avant-garde artist Robert Longo. Gibson once told me
that the film they made was “More like Blue Velvet.”
Clearly not the same film that ended up on the silver
screen, then. What makes him so sure this one will turn
out right?
“Chris is my own 100 per cent personal choice,”
he says firmly. “My only choice. The only person
I’ve met who I thought might have a hope in hell of
doing it right.
“I went back to see him in London just after he’d
BUY William Gibson books online from and
finished the Bjork video, and I sat on a couch beside
this dead sex little Bjork robot, except it was wearing
Aphex Twin’s head. We talked. And we’re still talking.”
Unfortunately, that’s all he’ll say: “I’ve learned
that discussing these projects doesn’t really help
them to happen.”
So let’s talk about technology. Despite the impact
his work has had on real-world science, most of
Gibson’s fiction is clearly about people and humanity
rather than technology itself. Why does he write science
fiction at all?
“Because I believe that most social change is now
technologically-driven, and that new technologies
are very seldom – almost never, really – legislated
into existence.”
Interesting, because Gibson has also admitted many
times that he simply “makes the technology up”. That
was certainly the case with Neuromancer, where the
worldwide virtual network was actually inspired by
watching children become absorbed in arcade games.
Does he still do that?
“I do make it up, to a certain extent. But it isn’t the
toys themselves, the specific tech bits, that I’m genuinely
concerned with – rather the way in which new
technologies impact the social animal in ways that the
developers of these technologies never thought of.”
Is the Gibson household swamped with subscriptions
to New Scientist and Astrophysics Today, then?
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“I don’t do ‘research’, I just walk around. This stuff’s
in everyone’s face today. It’s more a matter of not ignoring
it. Paying attention.
“Laney’s node-spotter function [from Idoru] is some
sort of metaphor for whatever it is that I actually do.
There are bits of the literal future right here, right now,
if you know how to look for them. Although I can’t tell
you how; it’s a non-rational process.”
On a similar note, how does Gibson keep his famous
‘edge’? He’s no spring chicken. Yet his characters,
especially the younger ones, are remarkably consistent
with current trends. How does he keep in touch with
the ‘street’?
“It’s the same non-rational process, really, but applied
to culture. I think Brian Eno’s right in defining culture
as everything we do that we don’t absolutely need to
do. I just walk around. I look at what people are doing
– particularly if they’re doing it passionately – that they
don’t really need to do.”
An image of Gibson wandering around South Central
at two in the morning clutching a notebook springs to
mind, but I decide not to voice it.
“I’ve always been fascinated by expressions of individual
style, particularly in the street sense. I suspect
that that’s one of the oddest things about me, at least
in terms of someone being marketed as some sort of
science fiction writer.”
But which sort, exactly? Gibson is known as the
BUY William Gibson books online from and
“Granddaddy of dystopian fiction”. Yet nearly all of his
work has an underlying optimism, even what might be
called happy endings.
“I really don’t think I’m dystopian at all. No more
than I’m utopian. The dichotomy is hopelessly oldfashioned,
really. What we have today is a combination
of the two, with all the knobs turned up to max.”
So it doesn’t bother him?
“No.”
What does he read himself? Does he follow the rise
of ‘upstarts’ such as Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson?
“I read Iain Sinclair and Cormac McCarthy. But,” he
smiles, “I’m always on the lookout for a good upstart.”
Let’s move onto All Tomorrow’s Parties. Did Gibson
always visualise Virtual Light as the beginning of a
series?
“No. I always back into the trilogy thing. It’s embarrassing,
really. I swear I thought VL was going to be a
one-off. It’s an organic process for me, rather than one
of deliberation. The one text grows out of the other. It’s
as though the previous book becomes compost for the
next one.” Lovely image, cheers.
“I don’t work to any rationale; it’s a seat-of-the-pants
thing. And the extent to which I can feel that it’s not
rational, is exactly the extent to which I’m convinced
that I’m really doing my job.”
In ATP, the Idoru finally becomes a physical entity.
There’s surely a lot more he could do with that – will he?
239
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“No. The world she’ll live in is on the other side of
a technological singularity. There’s no way I can even
imagine it.”
No seat-of-the-pants fourth book, then. ATP is still a
satisfying conclusion, but it could have gone anywhere.
Many people were expecting a work on the Walled
City from Idoru, for example, yet Gibson bypassed it
to get straight to ATP, and the end of the world centred
around – yet again – San Francisco.
“The bridge was still more resonant, for me. More
fun writing about a physical construct, somehow. And
ATP seems to me to be about cyberspace everting itself
into the physical; about the boundaries starting to blur
from the other direction … Some of the most important
boundaries, to me, being about genre: is this SF, a
thriller, none of the above?
“The San Francisco thing probably has something
to do with it being on the West Coast but having the
core paradigm of a European city. It makes sense in
European terms; Los Angeles, for example, doesn’t.
SF is a city stressed by Postmodernity, rather than an
expression of Postmodernity such as LA.”
Yet Postmodernism is essential to Gibson’s work.
Throughout this series, for example, the media has
been portrayed as ever more sensationalist. How close
does he think we are to shows such as Slitscan actually
coming into being?
“In North America we’re well into tabloid TV, but
BUY William Gibson books online from and
our national print tabs are already way beyond that.
Difficult, if not impossible, to parody.”
But parodied they are, and ATP’s conclusion concerning
information flow is a dichotomy; on the one
hand, increased informational awareness will change
everything, and on the other it will change nothing (for
the majority of ‘ordinary’ people). Is this purposeful?
“The resolution of a dichotomy usually lies in apparent
paradox. But you’ve got your thumb on the book’s
heart, I think, and I can’t really explicate that for you.
Otherwise we’d be talking about a didactic fiction, and
I hope ATP isn’t that.”
Okay, time to stir up the nest. ATP essentially carries
the same message as Mona Lisa Overdrive – that pure
information (and artificial intelligence) will point the
way to society and mankind’s next evolutionary step.
Discuss.
“We seem to be – through genetics, now, mainly
– on the brink of taking ‘control’ of our own evolution.
That’s a matter of ‘pure information’, I suppose.
Though I seem to recall characters in an earlier book
who used the term ‘pure information’ rather than ‘lies’.
“But really I don’t see that as message so much as
mimetic. A depiction of what’s happening now.”
Perhaps inevitable, then, that the meme replicates
from book to book. So let’s get more specific. Harwood,
corporate ruler of the world and primary antagonist
of ATP, declares that he wants to somehow survive
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beyond the singularity of the book’s climax. Is he an
analogy for man’s fear of the future?
“Harwood is about human will, so, yes, I suppose he’s
about fear. ‘You’re so spontaneous; don’t ever change.’
All suffering is rooted in the desire for permanence.”
Gibson smiles. “I heard someone say that in an Indian
movie.”
So is there a moral behind Harwood’s downfall being
brought about by three principal characters who don’t
manipulate information the way he does?
“Well, there’s a satisfaction to it, for me. Morals are
for fables.”
We’re running out of time, but I have to ask: just
who the hell is ATP’s ‘Tao man’? He’s an entirely new
character, with no name, no background beyond a few
vague flashbacks, and is completely amoral. Where the
BUY William Gibson books online from and
hell did he come from?
“I thought of him as literally being someone who
wandered in from another book. He turned up one day.
Wouldn’t go away. After the book was finished I wondered
if he weren’t some sort of avatar connected to the
late William Burroughs. An unconscious expression of
Burroughsness. He’s a character Burroughs would’ve
enjoyed, I’m pretty certain of that.”
Sounds like something straight out of Mulder’s casebook.
And speaking of which, Gibson’s future plans are
good news for couch potatoes…
“I’m working on a second X-Files episode with Tom
Maddox; talking about doing some writing for Harsh
Realm, the new Chris Carter series; and getting another
book proposal ready. Plus there’s Neuromancer.”
Welcome back, Your Highness. �
241
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Interview [published January 1998]
Allen Ginsberg: Cosmopolitan Greetings
Graham Duff meets Allen Ginsberg, the self styled “old auntie of the
Beat Generation”
Allen Ginsberg – poet, Jew, Buddhist and self styled
“old auntie of the Beat Generation” – is 68 years of
age. Forty years on from the publication of Ginsberg’s
infamous ‘Howl’, his latest collection, Cosmopolitan
Greetings: Writings from 1986-92, has just hit the
bookshelves. Sipping tea and talking about his greatest
influences William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos
Williams and Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg is friendly,
assured and (naturally enough) beatific. But perhaps
surprisingly, he’s almost as at ease talking about Sonic
Youth and Gavin Friday as he is fellow beats William
Burroughs and Gary Snyder.
With lyrical incantations, dream notations. calypso
rhythms and haiku, Cosmopolitan Greetings shows a
writer moving in ever increasing circles, the subject
matter ranging from the intensely personal to the passionately
political. I ask if it’s difficult writing under
the weight of his past work.
“My mind is much too fragmented for the solidification
of any single thought like that. Consciousness
itself is discontinuous I think. As a Buddhist, that’s
my take on it. Shakespeare at the end of The Tempest
BUY Allen Ginsberg books online from and
has Prospero say ‘Thence to Genoa where every third
thought shall be my grave’. So every 244th thought:
‘Oh I’m Allen Ginsberg and I have a history.’ The
rest of the time [it’s] ‘there’s the tea, I got to go to the
bathroom, how’s my diabetes? What’s this guy saying
to me?’ So yes, there is the information of being around
for 40 years writing poetry and knowing a lot of people
but then every moment is completely blank and new.”
Despite an enormous body of work which bristles
with positivity, passion and affirmation, Ginsberg
admits, “I got the reputation of being this negative
nay-saying rebel. I don’t know why. But maybe the
purpose is starting to come through now after all
these years. People are beginning to read without the
intervention of the media saying ‘these angry, wrathful,
idiot people smoking dope in dirty flats covered
in flies’. That was the official party line of the media
back in the early 60s.”
At this point Ginsberg goes off to take a phone call
which turns out to be from Salman Rushdie. “I saw him
when he came to New York. We did some meditation
classes together – ’cause he’s got lots of time.”
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In recent poems such as ‘Sphincter’ and ‘After Lalon’,
Ginsberg details the ageing process with undiluted
candour whilst in his more directly political poems he
is still on a mission to report the unreported.
“I’ve always been preoccupied with the intersection
of repressive dope laws, dope dealing by French
intelligence and American CIA, the expansion of killer
drugs like tobacco and alcohol and political manipulation
by cigarette and alcohol interests, the corruption
of governments, police departments and so on. We are
ruled by fantastic hypocrisy.
“In America the theo-political right – the FCC and
Jesse Helms – has seized control of the main market
place of ideas: radio and television. So we don’t have
a free market in ideas now. So the censorship that
normally applied to books and print and film is now
being applied to the electronic media and may be applied
to internet before it’s all over. My own poetry
has literally been ripped off the air during the day. My
poems are studied in high schools and colleges, but in
October 1988, Senator Helms – who is subsidised by
huge tobacco interests – rushed through a law signed
by Reagan which effectively means that ‘obscene
BUY Allen Ginsberg books online from and
language’ can only be broadcast between the hours of
midnight and six am. This being to protect school kids
who are reading my poems in class anyway.”
A vivid conversationalist, the elder statesman of the
counter culture is at his most animated when recalling
the routines he used to improvise in his apartment with
Burroughs and Kerouac in the 1950s.
“After dinner, drinking coffee, smoking grass, we’d
act this stuff out. We all had different characteristic
roles: the well groomed Hungarian – that was me. The
naive American in Paris with a straw hat – Kerouac.
Bill dressed up as a shifty vicious governess. Bill would
end up creased up laughing on the floor. I think the key
to the Beat Generation was spiritual liberation. Then
media liberation of the word; the battle with censorship,
sexual liberation. It ricochets out, but it started
with a spiritual liberation. I always thought that ‘Howl’
was a very exuberant and positive and funny poem. But
at the time it was taken to be the ravings of this angry,
rebellious jerk.” These days things are a little different.
“I’ve got a really good job. It’s called Distinguished
Professor of English, which means I only have to go in
one day a week.” �
243
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published September 1996]
The Godfather: Sex And Spaghetti
Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man,
from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever
With The Godfather recently re-released in a new
print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our
screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths,
screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia
families – all with excessive amounts of blood, plum
tomatoes, swagger, sharp suits and great style. I love
them all – I cry at Michael’s wedding, smile wryly
at the Don’s death, wince at Connie’s bleating and
thrill at Sonny’s explosions of sex and violence. But
I also hate all that macho posturing, those strangling
patriarchal systems, the supplication of wives, mothers,
daughters to men’s ‘business’.
I want to pay these godfathers due respect, but I
also want to look beyond their dapper costuming and
ask why these representations are so cherished in our
culture. In doing so, I want to suggest that the most
interesting thing about Robert De Niro, Al Pacino,
Marlon Brando and their Latin brothers is the way
in which their Italian-ness is defined through their
sexuality. The phenomenon of ‘Italian-American’ as
a sensibility and a particular set of narrative conventions
has shifted over the years since The Godfather,
but the core characteristics remain the same. Italian-
Americans, according to screen law, are sexy, violent
men struggling against the powers that be to protect
their family honour. Their stories are full of the rituals
of heterosexuality performed with glamour and passion
(weddings, family feasts, straight sex). Their muscles
flex to grapple with, and glory in, organised crime, the
Catholic church and l’ordine della famiglia: a highly
controlled and controlling hierarchical patriarchal family
system.
After Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather was
released in 1972, the screen image of Italian-American
masculinity which it established became so popular
that it entered the realms of social iconography, swiftly
reinforced by the likes of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi
Driver and John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever. Don
Corleone’s “I make you an offer you can’t refuse”,
Travis Bickle’s “You talkin’ to me?”, car bumper stickers
reading “Mafia Staff Car; Keepa Ya Hands Off” and
endless parodies of John Travolta/Tony Manero doing
that dance in that white suit – gestures which we think
of as Italian-American have become part of our culture.
BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and
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Italian-American men have stepped out of the screen
and into everyday life and language.
What it means in screen terms to be an Italian-
American man can tell us much about what it means
to be a white man. It is crucial that white male heterosexuality
is made visible, is put under the critical microscope,
in this way because it has always maintained
its dominance by virtue of its invisibility. As Richard
Dyer has argued in his essay ‘White’: whiteness, like
heterosexuality, secures power by appearing not to be
anything in particular. It is simply there, transparent,
the given and ‘natural’ way to be. ‘Italian-American’
is one typification which whiteness has constructed of
itself – a group of stereotypes which provide us with
a starting point for understanding how whiteness sets
itself up in a dominant position.
In the 1970s, white American culture seemed to be
in crisis. The Watergate fiasco, the war in Vietnam, the
rise of black, gay and women’s liberation movements
all meant that the hallowed American way lost its direction.
Hollywood’s reaction was to look to ethnicity as a
means of reinstating the white heterosexual males’ central
position of power, returning him to his role as the
Real Thing. We can admire and trust Don Corleone’s
power because it does not appear to be compatible with
WASP power. Italians were a way of getting back to
basics through the depiction of a truly ‘American’ ethic
of the struggle for survival in a land where nobodies can
become somebodies – as in The Godfather, Rocky, and,
rather differently, in Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon
and Saturday Night Fever. In addition, Italian culture
had the added attraction of l’ordine della famiglia to
help (re)glorify patriarchy and put women back in their
place: in the home, supporting their men from beneath.
However, since the Italian American man’s ‘realness’
is so often represented as physicality – we know he’s
authentic because we can see his sweating body – the reality
of his heterosexuality is considerably destabilised.
The power and danger of the ‘Italian’ body on screen
are heavily eroticised qualities. Male WASP heroes of
the 70s, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, are
invisible bodies who display little emotion, epitomising
rigid stoicism and phallic control. In Dirty Harry
(1971), Eastwood is always poker faced, never ruffled
or sweating very much, his power coolly contained
within his .44 Magnum pistol. The Italian man is often
opposed to such straightness, flexing his muscles, getting
all hot blooded and passionate, demonstrating his
body as the signifier of his masculinity and ethnicity.
The display of the male body as erotic object is a
troublesome area: how do we make these bodies,
which are supposed to be active, hard, non-malleable,
into ‘passive’ objects of the cinema audience’s gaze – a
role traditionally reserved for the female body? One
way to do it is through sporting images – the excuse
for looking at a man’s body being the admiration of
BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and
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his strength in a culturally accepted ‘male’ activity.
It is often more effectively done through homoerotic
traditions of representation, since these are the most
obvious ones available for such purposes. Unlike
women, gay men have had the economic strength to
market the male physique, from the Athletic Model’s
Guild studio shots of the 1950s to the huge gay porn
industry of today. In the screen representation of the
Italian-American man there is a tension between the
use of such homoeroticism (the spectator is invited to
love these men) and the denial of homosexuality (the
Italian is a virile, heterosexual family man).
“I make you an offer you can’t refuse”
The Godfather provides the models for Italian-
American screen masculinity throughout the 70s.
Within its family epic structure, The Godfather’s main
concern is with how to be a man, and Coppola’s men
rely heavily on nostalgia. The Don (Marlon Brando)
is guardian and his business is family. The Donis/
Brando’s image is constructed in opposition to Salazzo
the Turk’s, his ‘business’ rival, a man who looks like
the devil incarnate with his oily, flappy face and his
swanky fur-collared coat. The Don, however, is clean
cut; he benignly rejects Salazzo’s offer of a place in the
drugs racket as a “dirty business”, choosing instead to
talk about his “sentimental weakness” for his children.
Salazzo has no family, no “honour” to cleanse him.
The Don is Italian through and through, but he is also
Americanised enough to remain a hero.
Coppola has it both ways, then: whilst the Don is
successful and all powerful, he is also aging and falling
from his position, lending him a tragic poignancy and
creating a nostalgia for the perfect Italian-American man
he once was. He is even associated with an ‘American’
innocence and abundance: he dies amongst the tomato
plants, stumbling into the verdure whilst pretending to
be a monster to amuse his grandson. It is as if the Don
was only performing monstrousness all along so that he
could keep order in his pastoral family garden, so that
he could reap the harvest of America.
The Godfather establishes a range of masculinities
which line up to take their shot at filling the Don’s
shoes. Sonny Corleone, as played by James Caan, is
the sweating, sexy beefcake Latin of the film, swaggering
about and exploding in sporadic bursts of violence.
Coppola gives us many glimpses of Sonny’s/Caan’s
body, usually clad in a tight white vest, showing off
his muscled shoulders and his chest hair, which seems
to be as uncontrollable as his libido. The white vest
is an essential item of the screen Italian-American
man’s wardrobe. Borrowed from Brando’s sexy ethnic
proletarian in A Streetcar Named Desire, whose ‘true’
feeling gushed forth from every orifice, it allows just
enough of the upper body to be exhibited whilst still
insisting upon a thoroughly masculine way of dressing
for utility purposes only, suggestive as it is of the work-
BUY Francis Ford Coppola films online from and
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ing man. Sonny actually does no work in his vest, but
anxieties about the presentation of his body as an object
of desire (for both male and female, gay and straight
audiences) are dealt with through the heterosexualising,
‘masculine’ violence of Sonny’s body.
Sonny is the wild card philanderer, always mouthing
off, complete with ‘Italian’ theatrical gestures. He
is placed in opposition to Michael’s/Pacino’s strong
silence. Sonny contains too much libido and ethnic
crudeness to take the Don’s place; Michael broods
smoulderingly, Sonny just explodes. However, whilst
Coppola appears to reject Sonny’s passionate Italian-
American machismo in narrative terms (he is killed
off in the most explosive manner), he actually fills the
screen with images of Sonny’s exuberance and impressive
physicality.
In fact, the eroticism involved in the film’s presentation
of Sonny is negotiated through his screen climax:
his death on the highway. Always the swaggering
sex object, Sonny’s bodily excesses are ultimately
displayed and punished by being blown to bits. This
way, Coppola can save the virile ethnic masculinity he
represents without actually endorsing it. Sonny is martyred
by this gruesome death on a lonely highway; his
masculinity has to be torn apart in order to be re-made
in our imaginations, so that we can mourn the Don’s/
Brando’s/our loss.
His violent death also saves Sonny-as-sex-object
from the too self-conscious passivity of another Italian
‘godson’ swaggerer of the film, Johnny Fontaine.
Like Sonny, Johnny is a ladies man, but his blatant
narcissism places him perilously close to a cliché of
queerness. Fontaine is an oily wop crooner, complete
with greased hair, white suit and frilled blouse; he is
a sop who has to be ordered by the Don to “act like
a man”. It is interesting that, by the time of Saturday
Night Fever, these opposed representations of Italian-
American masculinity can become enmeshed (and
can remain heroic) in the figure of Tony Manero/John
Travolta, who can wear a frilly blouse and still “act
like a man”.
And so the burden of The Godfather’s position falls
on Michael’s shoulders. Although Michael’s macho
Godfather act is revealed as a sham which eats away
his insides, this is less a matter of Coppola subverting
gender roles by illustrating that they are a matter
of social construction, than it is of him lamenting the
passing of a time when such macho masculinities really
existed. We may dislike Michael as Godfather because
he is not the benign and noble Brando, and because he
is not what the film shows he could have been in an
earlier time and place – in Sicilian ‘history’, within an
ethnic narrative. The Godfather locates its ideal masculinities
in Sicily, in a fantasy narrative of nostalgia for
the phallic wholeness of the homeland. Enter Pacino as
Sicilian shepherd, walking back to his father’s home/
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name (Corleone), accompanied by a version of the
sweeping theme tune arranged for mandolin. This is a
rural idyll where boy and girl can meet and fall in love
without complications – all the conventional narratives
of heterosexual romance are employed without a hint
of irony.
Coppola’s nostalgic glance at Italian-American
masculinities makes it difficult to read any critique of
conventional masculinities in the film. The main reason
we love godfathers Brando and Pacino is that they are
such perfect examples of gentlemanly tyranny: they are
so powerful and yet so self-contained. However, the
image of the eroticised male object is a prevalent one in
The Godfather and other Italian-American screen narratives,
and this image is potentially a disturbing one to
conventional gender relations.
Throughout the 1970s, the Italian-American screen
male was increasingly represented as body, as an object
of desire for all audiences. The Godfather always
encourages us to love its men but insists that they
remain solid men of action, their screen existence lived
out with plenty of grand gestures. The thing about The
Godfather is that it takes itself very seriously indeed;
the key to its seduction lies in its epic feel, its supreme
orderliness, its world in which everyone has their place.
I’m seduced by this world, too, but I’m glad that other
Italian-American screen men strutted their stuff and
shook up its order: Pacino as bisexual Sonny in Dog
Day Afternoon, in whom those exaggerated ‘Italian’
gestures become slightly campy; Nicholas Cage in
Moonstruck, giving a brilliantly over-the-top portrayal
of a sweaty/swarthy/sensitive Italian beefcake; and, my
personal favourite, John Travolta in Saturday Night
Fever, whose excessive emotions are triggered not in
response to his family honour but by the state of his
hair: as his family squabbles over spaghetti, Tony worries
about his coiffure (“will you just watch the hair?
You know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it.
He hits my hair”).
Tony preens himself openly, posing in the mirror
whilst wriggling to the Bee Gees. Like the men in The
Godfather, he prepares his body for action, but he does
so for dancing, not for fighting. His only possible phallic
weapon is his professional-looking long-nozzled
hairdrier, and his ‘killing’ arena is the 2001 Odyssey
discotheque, where he slays them with his grooving.
In a sense, The Godfather paved the way through
the crowded night club for Tony; after the heights of
Italian-American macho it reached, the only way to
go was down the disco, the only thing to do with the
display of those hard bodies was to choreograph their
movements to music. Saturday Night Fever brought
the nostalgic Corleone masculinities into the future
of the 2001 Odyssey where Italian-American-ness
finally had a chance to strut without leaving a trail of
bodies in its wake. �
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Feature [published May 2008]
Graham Greene/Evelyn Waugh: Literary & Political Catholicism
Ben Granger
Whenever there was a chance to have a shot at Catholicism
in his writing, George Orwell could always be
relied on to take aim and discharge both barrels. With
the grim vision of Vatican support for Franco fresh in
his mind, he was hardly without justification. Polemical
righteousness brimming over, he rashly wrote in
the 30s that the English novel was “practically a Protestant
art form”, and that Catholic practitioners were
thin on the ground both numerically and qualitatively.
Practically as he put pen to paper however, two of the
greatest English authors of the mid-century – Henry
Graham Greene and Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh –
were surfacing to take the literary world by ferocious
storm. And it’s fair to say the pair weren’t exactly short
on Catholic sensitivities. A bad call from Mr Orwell on
this one at least.
In many respects the authors could scarcely be
more different. Greene’s milieu was the forgotten
corners and back alleys of life. The jittery street gang,
the persecuted runaway, the jaded official in a fading
Imperial outpost. Boozy landladies, failed accountants.
Greene’s every fibre was tuned with sympathy for the
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
underdog, siding with the rebellious and the forgotten,
his narrative home the sleazy underbelly of life. Not
so Waugh. His territory was the landed estates of the
southern counties and their intersection with the cold
elites of London high society. While his misanthropic
satire found endless and endlessly amusing reasons for
his narrative contempt towards the dramatis personae
of lower gentry and upper bourgeois who populated his
books, there was no denying that, at heart, he identified
with them. Indeed, his lampooning of the upper and
upper middle classes hinged largely round the fact that
they failed to live up to his reactionary ideal. Moving
outside this caste, his attitude shifts from mere contempt
to outright hatred.
While both transcended both, Greene’s style skirted
round the genre of the thriller, Waugh around that of
the comedic farce. Greene’s narratives are littered with
gangland intrigue, colonial corruption, the grimy and
sweaty fear of pursuit. Action, in the purest sense, is
central, as is plot. The characters are conveyed via a
direct mental inner voice toward the reader, their dialogue,
and interaction with each other being secondary
249
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to this. Again, the contrast with Waugh could hardly
be greater. His narratives are comedies of manners,
black comedy but comedy nonetheless. His genius
stems from the ironic nuance of the reciprocal voices
on display, the interaction of their dialogue being vital.
Unlike Greene, the plots of his novels are essentially
secondary, framing devices against which the characters
can ‘flourish’, were that not so inappropriate a word for
the languishing on display. These are characters whose
inner lives are implied rather than explored, conveyed
in shadow.
What they did have in common was an intense sense
of inner desolation, an acidic looking within, and it
was their Catholicism that both mirrored and embodied
this. Read any novel by either author, and whichever of
the myriad delights you my obtain from the experience,
the lasting impression, the ‘aftertaste’, is a subtle yet
distinct despair, an existential dislocation obtained via
osmosis from the central characters. “Point me out the
happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness,
evil – or else an absolute ignorance,” declares
Greene, with Waugh in full agreement.
In the past a Catholic in Britain was, by definition, an
outsider. Even today, Britain is officially a Protestant
nation with a Protestant monarch, an identity forged
in the fire of adversity to the Romanist other. These
atavistic rivalries may have dwindled and mean little
to the majority of people in the UK today, but in the
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30s the rifts were still raw. It wasn’t too long before
then that suspicion toward Catholics was much like
that shown towards Muslims today. Worse in fact, with
official sanctions barring the ‘other’ from office, and
from voting. Most Catholics in the country are there
by the apparent virtue of the Faith being handed down.
In the main they come from immigrant backgrounds,
chiefly from the Irish diaspora of the past two centuries.
A disenfranchised, working class tribe, greatly
over-represented in the industrial north of England,
and in Scotland (this before we even begin to touch
on Northern Ireland.) None of this, however, applied
to either Greene and Waugh, bourgeois, upper middle
purebred English southerners both. They were Catholics
by choice, by their own conversion. Outsiders by
choice too.
Both seemed to want a Faith which underlined and
justified the constant sense of separation they had
always felt towards their peers. They also seemed to
want to find as stark and unforgiving a theology to
identify themselves with as possible. Greene converted
to the Faith in 1926 at the age of 22, following a lonely
and troubled youth savagely punctuated by suicide attempts.
Suffering what is now termed bipolar disorder,
Greene spent his whole life engaged in extremes of behaviour,
not least in his prodigious sexual incontinence
and proclivities. Greene stated he became a Catholic
as something to “measure his evil against”. In later
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years he adulterously fucked behind Italian altars for
the thrill. There must be a suspicion Greene was playing
with the Faith for his own sense of internal drama,
much like Dalí, whose use of the religion was a prop to
adorn his art with ever more outlandishly theological
accoutrements. Catholicism is after all, a religion of the
picturesquely ornate, of the dramatic. The stained glass
and incense filled churches, the arcane blood and flesh
fuelled doctrines of transubstantiation, the unflinchingly
Manichean morality, the sheer ancient grim majesty
of it all. This is truly the religion of the drama queen.
You don’t get that with Methodism. For all this though,
Greene was not merely playing with some theological
dressing up box. There can be no doubting the sincerity
of his conversion. His private letters show his Faith was
central to his life.
In both life and literature however, Greene was a poor
advertisement for the familiar argument of religion being
a solace in life, the “heart in a heartless world”. Two
of his most celebrated central characters, the colonial
administrator Scobie in The Heart Of The Matter, and
the nameless whiskey priest of The Power And The
Glory, are hopeless, tired and desperate shadows of
men, whose Faith only serves to make them spiritual
as well as emotional wrecks. Both live daily with the
knowledge their actions, be they treacherous or adulterous,
are condemning them, with absolute certainty,
to eternal damnation. These are not truly bad men, but
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by the standards of their own Faith they are beyond
redemption, sealing their own personal tragedies. Then
on the other hand, we have Pinkie, the psychopathic
young gangster of Brighton Rock. Here is a truly bad
man, and one whose certainty of his own damnation
only serves to spur him on to ever greater evil. “He
was damned already and there was nothing more to
fear ever again.” In each case, the religion makes for
a wonderfully powerful and evocative component of
the novels, a character in itself, more than that even.
Wonderful for the reader. But wonderful for Greene
himself? Noel Coward met Greene when they both
prowled in the same Hollywood circles, touting their
works for adaptation on the silver screen. He came to
remark on Greene’s “strange, tortured mind”. Whether
his Faith served to salve or further inflame the wounds
of this torture is open to conjecture.
Waugh’s conversion was more clearly that of a man
desperate to retreat into a mythical past. This was after
all the man who proclaimed “the trouble with the Conservative
Party is it has not turned back the clock one
second.” There was a spate of conversions to the Faith
in the 30s of men from the upper-middle-class, men
trying to find a mooring, a sense of backward-looking
solidity in a traumatic age. Once more however, there
is something far deeper, and steeped in an ambivalence.
Waugh came to prominence as a novelist in 1928
with Decline And Fall, two years before his conversion
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to Roman Catholicism. Famous and feted at the age of
25, Waugh continued with the drunken hedonism he
had begun in his Oxford years. He was indeed one of
the feckless “bright young things” he wrote about. His
growing horror at the spiritual emptiness he saw in this
gadddabout life was what spurred him into the arms of
the Church, which he saw as the most Eternal of institutions,
a haven amongst the creeping chaos.
In the views of Waugh, we see in sharp relief the
antagonism between the heart of Conservatism, and the
capitalism that it defends. Margaret Thatcher herself
for instance, would have been personally shocked and
repulsed if she spent any great time in the company
of her shock troops, the coked up young yuppies of
the 80s, as they lined it up on the toilet tops. Waugh’s
contempt for the fly by night shallowness of the young
rich sat ill at ease with his support for of the Tory Party
without which their lives of philistine luxury would be
unsustainable. Hence his impotent railing against clocks
going forward. The real establishment of England was
once Catholic of course, back in the 15th century, an
age so long ago as to have lost all contemporary meaning.
His Catholicism therefore was a very real sense
of clinging to a past so elusive as to be nonexistent,
grasping at a phantasm.
In his novels, the Faith emerges as the still at the
centre, the calm amongst the inferno. This can be seen
most clearly in Brideshead Revisited, Charles Ryder’s
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agnosticism is set against the Faith of the Marchmain
family, or in The Sword Of Honour trilogy, wherein the
aristocratic Crouchback’s represent even more clearly
the valiant rearguard action of the Church, and indeed
old England itself, against all the forces of modernity.
In other novels the Faith’s talismanic status is subtler.
Tony Last, the cuckolded husband in A Handful Of
Dust, is presented as belonging to the past, underlined
by his church attendance, however vague minded that
may be. His humiliation by non churchgoing wife
Brenda and the vulgar (key word) social climber John
Beaver shows once more the clash between the (virtuous)
old and the (degenerate) new. It is a mythological
battle between Old England, the rural, certainty, tradition
and social cohesion, against the New World, the
urban, capitalism, dynamism, change, hedonism, class
conflict and progress. In Sword of Honour, Waugh sees
Guy Crouchback, when he still thinks he is fighting
against Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany both, claims
“The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful,
all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms”.
It’s an internal battle the Right will never resolve.
That Catholicism is no longer the religion of the ‘establishment’
serves Waugh well. As he sees the massed
ranks of modernity triumph, as he surely knows they
will, he can psychologically cast himself in the role
of the king over the water, exiled valiant victim and
patrician overseer simultaneously. Such was the source
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of both his art, and the bilious, bitter anger that never
left him.
In Britain we have the paradox that Catholicism
– in the wider world so very often the creed of the
oppressor over the centuries – is the religion of the
persecuted underdog. This has led to the most bizarre
and schizophrenic political allegiances and alliances.
In 30s Lancashire, unemployed Communist marchers
would doff their caps when passing Catholic churches,
at the same time as senior clerics were backing Franco.
Orwell wrote of visiting workers’ houses with “the
crucifix on the wall, and the Daily Worker on the table”.
There has never been a shortage of left-wing British
writers of Catholic background, but seems fair to say
this has usually stemmed from their ‘outsider’ nature,
their working class and/or Irish background, rather than
the religion itself. With Anthony Burgess – in later life
a bitter rival of Greene’s – we have a descendant of
the Irish diaspora, his childhood in Manchester’s Moss
Side influenced the Left perspective of his early writing,
his Catholicism informing his later conservative slant.
The upper and middle-class converts to the Faith
of the 30s however, were far more often doing so for
reasons which became reactionary by default, even if
that was not the initial intention. In this sense Waugh
was the more typical figure. In 1937, when Nancy
Cunard sent a survey to leading novelists of the UK
asking which side they took in the Spanish Civil war,
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
Waugh was one of the tiny minority who declared
their support for the Falange. A minority view among
authors, but not among the kind of dyspeptic saloon bar
Tory he came more and more to exemplify and signify
as both his age and drinking increased. The Blimpish
caricature he succumbed to by the end was probably
an extreme rather than a typical example however, and
by a sublime irony was mirrored in the similar decline
into self-parody of Kingsley Amis a generation later, a
writer Waugh lambasted as “lower-middle-class scum”
at the beginning of the latter’s career.
Amongst the 30s converts, the Left-radicalism of
Greene therefore must be seen as a great exception.
Once again though, the tale is more complicated. Greene
started out on the Right. Along with many youths of
his class, he acted as a strike-breaker during the 1926
General Strike. After his conversion, he wrote for the
right-wing Spectator magazine and took the side of the
put-upon Mexican clergy following the revolution in
that country. His earlier novels contained numerous
mildly anti-Semitic asides (excised on republishing at
his behest). In many ways therefore, he seemed destined
to trudge down a classic Conservative path.
But Greene was one of those converts, a minority
amongst the Blimps of his class, who heard the message
of social justice ring louder than that of defence of
hierarchical tradition in the call of the Faith. Greene’s
vision of Catholicism stirred him to side with the
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downtrodden in the world, and for him that meant the
Left. He became an intractable and articulate foe of US
imperialism, especially of its machinations in Southern
and Central America. In 1955 he wrote The Quiet
American, a novel which was to become a classic antiimperialist
parable. In later years he was to meet and
correspond with Fidel Castro, and while still critical of
the curtailing of religious and intellectual freedom in
the country, strongly supported Cuba’s struggle against
US hegemony.
In Latin America of course, the populace shared his
Faith, yet he was conscious that the dominant reactionary
elements within Catholicism had no interest at all
in his anti-imperialist vision. When therefore, in the
80s a new strain of Faith within the region came to
prominence which shared his vision, he could scarcely
contain his intellectual glee. Liberation Theology
combined the apparently antagonistic Catholicism and
socialism which had both so inspired Greene, uniting
against the US backed juntas of the subcontinent. Oscar
Romero in Salvador and Evaristo Arns in Brazil were
just two of many to speak out the US sponsored repression
and poverty which racked their nations. Greene
came to personally befriend another such Liberation
priest, Leopoldo Duran.
That such movements were to fail, crushed by the
Washington backed strong-men, Oscar Romero assassinated
– Greene, eternal pessimist as he was, no doubt
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anticipated. That they failed to receive the backing of
the Vatican, that indeed that they were explicitly denounced
by them, he may have found harder to reconcile.
Perhaps this contributed to the weary irony of his
statement to interviewer John Cornwell in 1989, that he
was now a “Catholic agnostic”.
Had he lived to see it however, he may well have
been heartened to see the success of Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, a new generation
of leaders combining socialism with their Catholicism.
The latest success of the left-leaning bishop Fernando
Lugo becoming president in Paraguay would no doubt
of gladdened him most of all. Who could doubt he
would have seen some vindication here, and an answer
both to the Catholic hierarchy who saw in the Left its
great nemesis, and those on the Left who argued that
believers could only ever be reactionary. Waugh, meanwhile,
would have spun once more in his grave, a tomb
already doubtless given to much rapid rotation.
Greene and Waugh may have had diametrically
opposed positions in their politics from their own
interpretations of the Faith. But, transcending politics,
what both seemed to take from the Faith in their writing
was a sense of the complete fragility and frailty of the
human condition, the essential unworthiness of people
gained from Original Sin. In Greene this seemed to
inspire a sense of poetic heroism amidst inevitable
failure and desperation, in Waugh a very real contempt
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not just for humanity as a whole in the abstract, but for
all human beings individually. That sense of the tragic
which under-writes and illuminates the drama in the
one, the sharp satire in the other, a sense of the comedic
and the sublime in both. It also served to solidify the
bond which grew between the two. Melancholic heavy
drinkers, red eyes unsatisfied, tilting at the cold Protestant
world from different angles. For all their myriad
differences, the two became firm friends, and remained
so until Waugh’s death in 1966.
BUY Graham Greene books online from and
Larkin claimed “Deprivation is for me what daffodils
were for Wordsworth”.
With Greene and Waugh, the inspiration, the
framework, the habitat, spark and realm of their work
was neither harsh mental state nor delicate flower.
Catholicism was the muse for them both. As a very
lapsed member of the Faith myself, and distinctly
sceptical as to any positive influence it may lend to
the modern age, I can at least offer it gratitude for
giving the work of both to the world. �
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Review [published June 1999]
Peter Guralnick: Careless Love: The Unmaking Of Elvis Presley
Gary Marshall
I was five years old when Elvis died and, like most
of my generation, my knowledge of Elvis is derived
largely from muck-raking biographies, shockingly bad
films, sightings documented in supermarket tabloids
and documentaries about brain-damaged Elvis impersonators.
With the exception of U2’s embarrassing
fandom no modern bands list Elvis as an influence and,
for most people under 30, Elvis will forever be the
pathetic figure stalking the stages of Vegas. Careless
Love explains how Elvis got there.
The follow-up to the extraordinary Last Train To
Memphis, Peter Guralnick’s latest book documents
Elvis’ life from his Army days to his death in a Gracelands
bathroom. If anything the book is even better
researched and more detailed than the first instalment
– weighing in at over 600 pages, supplemented by
detailed notes and explanations, Careless Love almost
tells the story in real time.
The unsavoury aspects of Elvis’ life have been
detailed endlessly in biography after biography and,
though Guralnick is no Albert Goldman, he doesn’t
shy away from showing the darker side to his subject.
BUY Peter Guralnick books online from and
What makes Careless Love different is the writer’s
agenda – Guralnick is first and foremost a fan, and the
book is his attempt to show how Elvis’ talent was compromised
by his own self-destructive tendencies and
the ever-growing number of people who felt nothing
but contempt for the man whilst eagerly awaiting the
next hand-out. In this context Elvis’ well-documented
penchant for young girls, his serial infidelity and his
obsessive pill-popping are shown dispassionately, allowing
the reader to develop the picture of a child-like
and desperately insecure man who was encouraged to
do as he wished without complaint or constraint. The
ultimate result of this unbridled and self-destructive
behaviour was a legend who, towards the end of his
career, alternated between impotence and incontinence
and who was frequently so medicated that he could
barely function.
The main achievement of Careless Love is the way
in which it strips away more than 20 years of accumulated
legend to show the man behind the cartoon image,
a story told largely by the people who worked with him
and who inhabited the inner circle of confidantes. The
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deals struck by ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker which resulted
in increasingly shoddy product and a punishing live
schedule of up to three concerts per day are shown, not
as the result of naked greed, but as the decisions of a
man who understands money rather than artistic factors.
In the context of Parker’s ever-growing gambling
debts, some of the more bizarre management decisions
are understandable if misguided.
Reading Careless Love you’re left with the believable
portrait of a man whose extraordinary vocal
talent brought him unimagined success – success that
prevented Elvis from maturing beyond adolescence.
As recording sessions and live engagements become
more and more farcical and Elvis’ drug use becomes
increasingly problematic, Guralnick shows an artist out
of control who drives away his closest friends, cheap-
BUY Peter Guralnick books online from and
ens his work and frequently rages at the very fans who
love him unconditionally. Unlike other biographies,
however, Guralnick presents a very real picture of a
desperately unhappy man who falls into addiction and
controlling behaviour to mask his own insecurities and
inadequacies.
Taken together, Last Train To Memphis and Careless
Love make up the definitive biography of one of
the 20th century’s key figures. In a sea of biographies
that concentrate on the scandalous aspects of Elvis’
life in order to sell copies, Guralnick’s books bring
the man vividly to life, warts and all. The exhaustive
research can make the book heavy going at times
but, for anybody with even a passing interest in pop
or rock music, Careless Love is illuminating and essential
reading. �
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Review [published November 2005]
Half Man Half Biscuit: Achtung Bono
Ben Granger
I may as well declare my stance at the outset: Half
Man Half Biscuit are Britain’s most under-rated band,
and their singer/writer Nigel Blackwell is not only one
of the land’s finest humourists and satirists, but also
a chronicler of the tawdriness of modern British life
whose vision is shot through with true genius.
Now, those of you who only know the band through
dim recollections of a Scouse voice jokily swearing
about minor sportsmen and celebrities in the mid-80s
may consider sending this first paragraph into Pseud’s
Corner. But you’d be wrong to do so. People from
Birkenhead aren’t Scousers for a start.
More importantly, in the nine albums the band have
made since their (very) brief period of (relative) fame
in 1986 with ‘Fucking ‘ell, It’s Fred Titmuss!’ and ‘I
Hate Nerys Hughes (From the Heart)’, their vision
has grown more witty, incisive, bleak, devastatingly
accurate and straightforwardly brilliant than ever, even
though the wise downbeat amalgam of realism and surrealism
was there from the start. The hardcore whimsy
of The Trumpton Riots has progressed to a more allencompassing
patina on the minutiae of modern Eng-
lish life; capturing the little things that generally fall
of the scale of artistic perception. Nigel is one of those
writers who show that the heavenly as well as the devil
is in the detail.
If anyone can show me a better melding of lovelorn
loss allied to a sarcastic critique of the modern
middle-class trendy twattery that threatens to consume
us all than:
She stayed with me until
She moved to Notting Hill
She said it was the place she needs to be
Where the cocaine is Fair Trade
And frequently displayed
Is the Buena Vista Social Club CD
(from ‘The Light at the End Of Tunnel’ from last album
Cammel Laird Social Club) then please do show me it.
And for that matter show me a more kick-ass jangleindie
rock tune than that which accompanies ‘Performing
Rights Society – Quick the Drawbridge’ from 1997’s
Voyage To The Bottom Of the Road. Can’t can you?
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Blackwell is a modest, unassuming Wirral man of
upper-working-class origin, a Thomas Hardy fan with
an outsized bullshit detector, and a turn of phrase few
could dream of.
In the new album, as per often, he blasts targets near
and far, high and low, not just the obvious pop idle of
celebrity culture, but also his more close-to-home contemporaries.
Always in ‘indie’ but not ‘of’ it; in the past
the alternative music scene has been the chief target of
his ire, (see the immortal ‘Look Dad No Tunes’) but
not so much on this album. As he gets older it seems
to be the general populace around him, ossifying into
idiocy and dullness in middle-age that horrifies him. He
has a pathological hatred of those who’ve got the whole
world in their house to see the new conservatory. This
time he kicks against the pricks “with your Del-boy
impressions and your CORGI-registered friends”.
It’s a mark of Blackwell’s deftness of touch, that he
can describe a professional couple in the Cotswolds
playing pooh-sticks, sharing a tub of gelatine ice-cream,
before skipping gaily off to watch Marianne Faithful at
the Warwick Arts Centre, and, without any abuse, you
know exactly why he hates them so much. It’s like Alan
Bennett possessed by the spirit of Johnny Rotten.
Other topics the album addresses include the sinister
nature of signs advertising vegetable sales on remote
rural roads in ‘Asparagus Next Left’ (“’Oooh rhubarb
– let’s go!!’ / She’s still not been accounted for”) and
an attack on The Libertines for their sloppy quoting of
Scripture in ‘Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo’: (“If you’re going
to quote from the Book of Revelation /Don’t go calling
it the ‘Book of Revelations’ / there’s no ‘s’”).
Musically, the album goes for the mid-paced folkier
edge in general rather than their more rock-out numbers.
As ever, the music is secondary to the words, but
also, as ever, it fits and complements the lyrics perfectly
in that its ramshackle exterior nature belies an expertly
designed structure underneath.
More than in any previous album, the prevailing
themes are cynical disdain for modern societal trends
combined with an apparently genuine affection for the
ambience of small-town England, as in ‘We Built This
Village On A Trad Arr. Tune’ and ‘For What is Chatteris?
(if you’re not there)’:
Car crime’s low
Gun crime’s lower
The town hall band’s CD – It’s a grower
You never hear of folk getting knocked on
the bonce
Although there was a drive-by shouting once
Yet that song also approaches the album’s other
theme, often present but here more than ever; allusions
to intense loss and depression. I do hope it’s not too
autobiographical. The CD’s best track to my mind is
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‘Depressed Beyond Tablets’, (nice BrassEye reference),
which contains the wonderful lines:
Your optimism strikes me
like junk-mail addressed to the dead
Depressed beyond tablets
I’ve gone beyond pills
The cloud-face is low on the Clwydian hills
There is perhaps nothing on this album as instantly
striking as some of their former tracks, no ‘Fred Titmuss’
or ‘Life At The End Of The Tunnel’. And as
ever there’s the odd miss on the way. ‘Joy Division
Oven Gloves’ has an excellent title but meanders off
into the pure silliness most people (who’ve heard of
them) imagine they’re all about. ‘Restless Legs’ is an
inconsequential observation of, er, someone with restless
legs to the tune of George Formby’s ‘When I’m
Cleaning Windows’ (also underrated in my view but …
we’ll save that for another time…)
‘Upon Westminster Bridge’ contains the “list of modern
malaise” track which features on every album; and
this isn’t one of the best of them, though it does have
the highly saving grace of incorporating the ‘12 days
of Christmas’ tune; and including (TV’s DIY SOS’s)
“Nick FUCKING Knowles” instead of “five GOLD
rings”. Yes, that makes up for it in fact.
Yet despite weaker moments, what is present
throughout is the incredibly wide-ranging wit and allusions
of the song-writing that has been written of as
‘novelty’ for far too long. Let’s get this straight. Half
Man Half Biscuit are a ‘comedy band’ (Black Lace,
Barron Knights, Fat Les, Electric Six, The Darkness)
only in so much as The Bible is a self-help book.
And yet, in the end, yes, I suppose you’d have to
find some of their more obvious lines funny to appreciate
their other qualities. Much is in the delivery and
context, yet I suppose if you don’t find “Is your child
hyperactive? / Or is he perhaps a twat?” or “It’s a cricketing
farce / With a thickening plot / Act One – Scene
One / Brenda Blethyn gets shot” amusing even in the
abstract then the band as a whole is not likely to appeal.
Your loss.
Here’s perhaps my favourite off the album: “Gouranga
Gouranga? / Yes I’ll ‘be happy’ / When you’ve
been arrested for defacing the bridge”
Part of the joy of the Biscuits is there’s so many
references in the songs you can’t possibly know
them all, but you can then seek them out (or look
at this site to help you.) They should be on the
national curriculum. For instance, the above lines
makes perfect sense to me. If it doesn’t to you, you
could or should embark on a journey examining the
vandalised state of north British motorway bridges,
which would then lead you to the propaganda tactics
of the modern Hare Krishna movement. It also
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shows how infectious Blackwell’s humour is. A
good percentage of it is about sport for a start, and
I can’t stand sport. I still find it funny, and can now
follow a conversation about football without eyes
glazing over and mouth drooling.
This is probably not one of Half Man Half Biscuit’s
best albums. And yet its still fantastic. You could learn
more about life in modern Britain from this album than
all those in the Gallup Top 50 combined. Easy.
If Nigel ever reads this he will probably be most
amused some pseud has chosen to over-analyse his
lyrics. Well screw you Nige. You’re a poet even if you
don’t know it. You’ll still be listened to in 200 years
time. If I have my way. And by God sir, I will. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 2000]
Half Man Half Biscuit: Trouble Over Bridgewater
Gary Marshall
If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal
to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit
would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagaries
of the music business mean that the band who brought
us the immortal lyric “God, I could murder a Cadbury’s
Flake, but then you wouldn’t let me into heaven / or
maybe you would, ‘cause their adverts promote oral
sex” (‘Dickie Davies’ Eyes’) are unlikely to become as
big as Boyzone. It’s a shame because, as Trouble Over
Bridgwater demonstrates, Half Man Half Biscuit are one
of the funniest bands Britain has ever produced.
Like every other HMHB record, the band’s millionth
album (ok, eighth) sounds like it was recorded in a shed
and misses its targets as often as it hits them; nevertheless,
there are enough gems on the CD to make it an
essential purchase. The usual mix of punky guitars and
deadpan vocals is present and, to our ears, the standout
track is ‘Irk The Purists’ (“Irk the purists, irk the purists,
irk the purists, it’s a right good laugh”). The song uses the
tune of ‘Agadoo’ to devastating effect: “Hüsker Dü-Dü-
Dü, Captain Beefheart, ELO”. It’s a good indication of
the rest of the album, too. If you think slagging off the
whiny indier-than-thou brigade is a great way to spend an
evening, Trouble Over Bridgwater will have you in tears.
The band’s strength has always been their willingness
to wring every last drop of humour from a stupid
idea, and ‘The Ballad Of Climie Fisher’ is a classic
example of this. Revealing the answer to the not very
frequently-asked question, “whatever happened to 80s
popsters Climie Fisher?”, the song recounts how the
clean-cut stars went into the gravel business, with awful
consequences. Similarly, ‘Used To Be In Evil Gazebo’
takes gleeful aim at gloomy indie bands, with the genius
chorus “I used to be in a mental hospital but I don’t
like to talk about it”. Other songs are worthwhile just
for their song titles: who can resist ‘Twenty Four Hour
Garage People’ or ‘Look Dad No Tunes’?
If your listening tastes are more Celine than Clinic,
Madonna than Mogwai, you’ll find Trouble Over Bridgwater
goes right over your head – even we found some
of the pop culture references entirely baffling. If, on the
other hand, you’ve an encyclopaedic knowledge of indie
music and regularly trounce all-comers at the local pop
quiz, this album is as essential as breathing. �
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Feature [published November 1996]
Keith Haring: Artist Or Radiant Baby?
Nick Clapson looks at the man behind the spray can with the publication
of Keith Haring’s journals
At the close of the 20th century, trying to find a stable
definition for the term ‘art’ has become increasingly
difficult. The traditional notion of art as the privilege
of the educated and wealthy, preserved within galleries
and private collections, has continually come under attack
by popular culture, from Dada and the Surrealists
all the way through to Warhol.
One of the few artists that actually acknowledged this
new, precarious, nature of ‘the artist’ as it emerged was
Keith Haring. Keith was born in Kutztown, Pennsylvania
in 1958, and from an early age expressed an interest
in art. After a period studying commercial art in Pittsburgh,
Haring realised this was not the right direction
for him. He left in 1976 and hitchhiked cross-country,
before returning to sit in on classes at the University of
Pittsburgh. It was here that central elements of his later
style started to emerge. That style had a self-confessed
similarity to the work of the French Modernist Leger,
and the later work of Jean Dubuffet. However, no artist
is just the sum the of their stylistic influences. By the
time of his first one-man show at the Shafraz Gallery,
New York in 1982, Haring’s individual approach to art
BUY Keith Haring books online from and
was fully developed.
Haring’s recently published journals, first begun in
1977, offer a great insight into his artistic development.
These fragments of Haring’s life provide not only a
glimpse of his private life, but also go some of the way
to outlining Haring’s artistic manifesto. The density
and complexity of his thoughts and aims act as a shocking
foil to the apparent lightness of Haring’s iconic
‘cartoony’ style. This was a man for whom art, though
disposable by nature, was not to be underestimated in
power. One of Haring’s major ambitions, which he
stated at an early stage, was to return art to the public.
This at first appears to be a simple task: however, as
Haring was to later prove, it was somewhat more daring
than first imagined. Haring did not want to produce
art that was simply physically accessible, available
from the street to the high street store, but art that was
also freed from the delimiting vision of the traditional
institutions, be it gallery or critic. It would seem, if we
follow Haring’s lead, that an Art that is easy to read
has far more power than an Art that is simply obtuse or
high-brow.
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The measured simplicity of Keith Haring’s work was
the result of much close and detailed study. By reducing
the visual elements of his work to what can best be
described as icons, Haring managed to produce what
amounted to keys which unlocked ideas. However, the
impact of these images rests not only on this process.
What increases their pertinence is their universality.
Haring employed an imagery that seems to connect
with everyone; the more cynical would liken it to
the power of advertising. However, Haring was not
interested in the empty sites of materialism per se. In
place of the usual trite commercial messages, Haring
invested personal introspection and concern into the
public space of advertising, using the directness of the
advertising medium against itself.
Another invigorating aspect to Haring’s work was his
willingness to address and acknowledge the importance
of not only popular culture, but also it more shady son,
subculture. Haring’s work would have been impossible
without the previous impact on the popular conception
of art by both Walt Disney and Andy Warhol. With
Disney opening up the viewer to the joy and pleasure
to be gained from the cartoon figure, not only as an
entertainment, but also as an art form, it was surely
only a matter of time before an artist managed to tap
into this idea. However, to make that step from popular
entertainment to Art, or High Art, would have surely
been impossible without the ground-breaking work of
BUY Keith Haring books online from and
likes of Andy Warhol.
Warhol managed to re-create the artist, to slap the
art-world in the face and say that commerce has a place
in art. With Warhol having broken the mould of what
was acceptably defined as art and what wasn’t the next
generation could now reach out an explore the culture
that they found around them. So, by reflecting the
subcultures that surrounded him, be it skate-boarding,
hip-hop or homosexuality, Haring opened the door and
allowed real, contemporary life into his art. With ‘the
street’ in his work, Haring instantly made connections
with the common viewer – as opposed to the educated
viewer. Such accessibility was also furthered by his
POP SHOP in SoHo, New York, and later in Japan,
which sold pieces of his ‘commercial art’.
Haring’s own sexuality also found a voice in his art,
and hence many of his motifs have homoerotic connotations.
However, to view his work as purely ‘queer’ art
is nothing but limiting. The humour and impassioned
politicking evident in many of his more sexual works
surely increase their palatability to the straighter audience.
As a result, works such as those produced for the
AIDS awareness group ACT UP have now reached the
level where they can almost be considered as classic
images of the 80s.
Another interesting aspect of these journals is the
way in which Haring himself dealt with his fame. For
a man who quickly rose to fame, collected by both
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major galleries and celebrity collectors, such as Madonna,
he remained surprisingly level-headed. Even
though he was consistently displayed through Europe,
he still had doubts to his own importance as an artist,
and whether or not he was really cutting edge.
Such modesty is truly a rare gift in the art-world, and
especially significant, in the crazy New York culture
of the celebrity artist. The publication of Haring’s
journals offer the interested an opportunity to glimpse
BUY Keith Haring books online from and
some of the motivations of what clearly must be one
of the key American artists of the late 20th century.
However, they also offer us much more. They provide
us with a chance to consider the concerns and fears
of an ordinary man who suffered with the same problems
as us all; self-doubt, love, and fears for our own
mortality. If I were to attain half the compassion and
understanding that this man achieved in his brief life I
would I consider myself to be a happy man. �
265
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published May 2001]
Bill Hicks: Bad Mood Rising
Even though he’s been dead for seven years, the savage political satire of
Bill Hicks makes more sense than ever. Chris Hall spreads the word
If you mention to any intelligent individual under the
age of 25 that you saw Nirvana and The Pixies live
you’ll get a response along the lines of “you lucky
bastard”. However, if you say that you saw Bill Hicks
live, the reaction is qualitatively different. There is a
crestfallen look. For those fans who have come to worship
him from his albums and videos, it only reinforces
the knowledge that they will never see this late and
very great comedian for as long as they live. He died in
February 1994 from pancreatic cancer at the pitifully
young age of 32.
I only saw Hicks play the once but the memory of
that evening is as seared into the cerebral cortex as so
much steak on a griddle. I still have the fading ticket:
“Bill Hicks. Brighton Festival. Sun 10 May 1992. 8pm.
Comp”. Complimentary because this was also my first
review for the university magazine I wrote for. The expectancy
of that evening was immense. There had been
a Channel 4 programme on him and we had picked up
snippets from time to time from the NME and Montreal
Comedy Festival clips. Here was someone taking an
interest in the outside world again, not ploughing a fur-
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
row of flim-flam – Is It Me Or Is Airline Food Really
Bad? For my friends and me, just on the evidence of
that evening, Hicks was the greatest comedian there
ever had been, or ever would be.
For some, humourless PC types, his ‘goat-boy’
persona threw them off track. It was the side of Hicks
that mined personal, rather than political, obsessions
(of course, not necessarily his own obsessions). It was
difficult for some to square the Marxist, sub-Chomsky
perspectives with a man who would talk about renting
Clam Lappers and Anal Entry volume 500 from his
local video store. Live, Hicks was more extreme in all
directions. The time I saw him, people in the front row
must have been deafened by his screams of admonition
to boy pop bands of the day to “Play with your fucking
heart!” (How perceptive I was in noting in my review,
with what I obviously thought of as devastating understatement,
that Hicks was “more Lenny Bruce than
Lenny Bennett”). He also had a peculiar air of physical
omniscience over the spatio-temporal coordinates of
the room, where he cadged a Silk Cut from someone at
the front of the audience and dropped it only to catch it
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without looking at it and without his eyes straying from
us to say nonchalantly “I doubt it…” before lighting it
in one graceful movement.
Even though the act was honed and down pat
so that he could riff around it (“excuse me why I
plaster on a fake smile and plough through this shit
one more time”) when I saw him at Brighton he was
consummate in fielding questions from the audience
(on subjects as diverse as the then recently launched
Euro Disney in Paris to how Labour lost the 1992
general election).
I thought of Hicks as soon as Dubyah ‘won’ the US
election. One could simply replay the Hicks material
about George Bush from the time of the Gulf War
and apply it to Bush II. History repeating itself first
as farce and then as a Bill Hicks routine. Where was
Hicks when we needed him during Clinton’s dreadful
Presidency? The Lewinsky affair, the impeachment
hearings, the Presidential pardons – you feel that he
would of made such an incredible impact had he lived.
Who knows, perhaps he would of given direction to the
growing Western response of anti-capitalism? He was
that inspirational.
Hicks used comedy in a way that Lenny Bruce had
used it in the 60s, as a consciousness-expanding one.
The appeal was one of a manichaean righteousness that
could of course slide into savage arrogance. There is a
joke he tells about a waffle waitress who, seeing him
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
reading a book, asks him “Why y’all reading for?” to
which he replies, and it’s hard not to blanch from the
savagery of it: “Well, I guess I read for a lot of reasons,
the main one being so I don’t end up being a fucking
waffle waitress.” So there we have it – comedy that
comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, but
which makes sure to afflict the afflicted as well.
In the evolutionary sense, a subject he was particularly
interested in, Hicks’s lines continue to be highly
successful memes: “You’re not human till you’re in my
phone book”, “Human beings are just a virus in shoes”,
etc. I can’t of been the only one to notice in the dark
poetry of Hicks’s faux heartfelt tribute to his dying
Grandma who he wants to see used in stunts in a martial
arts film, the intimation that here was potentially a
great writer too: “Do you want your grandmother dying
like a little bird in some hospital room, her translucent
skin so thin you can see her last heartbeat work its
way down her blue veins? Or do you want her to meet
Chuck Norris?”
Hicks arrived, in mass media terms, at the tail end of
those seemingly monolithic Republican and Conservative
governments of the 1980s and early 1990s and
what a fillip it was to have such a hardcore exorcism
of our anxieties and anger. We loved the fact that here
was someone you genuinely knew would never sell out
(hear Hicks’s response on Rant In E-Minor to a British
company that wanted him to advertise their ‘Orange
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Drink’). For a while, my girlfriend and I kept our own
‘Artistic Roll Call’ on the wall, where we would strike
through the names of ‘artists’ who’d just appeared in
an ad for family hatchbacks or a new online banking
service (“Do an ad, and you’re off the artistic roll-call
for ever.”). It was a depressing and shaming list.
Part of the sadness at Hicks’s death was the sense
that a powerful, not just a very funny, political critic
had been lost, and one who was irreplaceable. He has
cast a very long shadow for comedians since his death.
Someone that unique is always going to bring out the
imitators, the paraders of his feathers (the lamentable
British film Human Traffic has a Hicks segment on
drugs, and even has the gall to end the film with one of
his lines).
One doesn’t have to strain that hard to hear the tropes
or cadences of Hicks in any number of present-day
comedians. I saw Rich Hall, a Perrier Award winner no
less, shamelessly adapt Hicks’s Jay Leno fantasy routine
where Leno, the straw man who has the revelation
“Oh my God! What have I done with my life?”, shoots
himself and a spray of blood in the shape of the NBC
peacock is produced (with the venomous pay-off: “A
corporate man to the bitter end”). But righteous anger
is not so easily commodified or corrupted, as Denis
Leary must have realised by now. To my mind, Rob
Newman is the only comedian to have come even close
to Hicks’s level of insight and intensity.
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
Mark Thomas said witheringly in interview, “If he
couldn’t be angry when he had a few months to live,
then there’s something wrong.” (Thomas told me rather
laughably that he felt that “Hicks is the American Mark
Thomas” and that Hicks was doing very similar material
to him when Thomas went to see Hicks at Edinburgh.)
What’s even more galling is the conflation in the
minds of some people of Hicks with Leary. Yes, they
both smoked a lot, yes, they both wore black. End of
similarity. Leary is (or should I say was?) a one-trick
hack, the one trick being No Cure For Cancer, who
ended up taking ‘cameo’ roles in films like Judgement
Night and Demolition Man while advertising pissweak
beer (“Another corporate shill at the capitalist
gang-bang”).
The appetite among his fans for all things Hicks is
partly a function of the lack of a biography – the Nick
Doody biography has been due to be published for
years – or much new material since the posthumously
released Rant In E Minor and Arizona Bay. Given that
Hicks was gigging from the age of 14 in Austin, Texas
(incidentally where Jenna Bush, Dubyah’s 19-yearold
daughter, was recently arrested for under-age
drinking) right through to his death aged 32 there must
be a lot of material that hasn’t been seen yet. Hicks’s
friend Kevin Booth, who ran Sacred Cow Productions
with him, runs an excellent website dedicated to Bill
Hicks, which occasionally adds new audio and video
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clips of Hicks.
In America, as far as I can gather, he was a genuinely
marginalised figure, and continues to be. There
was a sense, though, that, as in the case of that other
great American maverick export Jimi Hendrix, it was
maybe going to be a case of Hicks making it in Britain
first. I met a journalist in San Francisco, Jack Boulware,
who interviewed Hicks for Arena magazine in
the States. He told me that the reason he thought Hicks
was beyond the pale in America was simply that he
seemed to be so anti-American. It’s often said, quite
rightly, that Hicks was in essence a preacher (indeed
he admitted it himself) and I’ve always thought of him
as Robert Mitchum in Night Of The Hunter, choosing
not self-aggrandisement but enlightenment, beating
sense into comatose America with those fists marked
love and hate.
A fascinating Index on Censorship article from December
2000 details the machinations that prevented
Hicks’s segment from being broadcast on an edition
of the David Letterman show (he’d appeared 11 times
before on the same show). Hicks’s letter to the journalist
John Lahr – his Dear John letter to life in some ways
– is a cri de coeur: “Jokes, John: this is what America
now fears – one man with a point of view, speaking out,
unafraid of our vaunted institutions, or the loathsome
superstitions the CBS hierarchy feels the masses (the
herd) use as their religion.” One of the ‘hot points’ that
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
CBS highlights as “unsuitable for our audience” is the
following ‘pro-life’ skit:
Bill Hicks: You know who’s really bugging me these
days. These pro-lifers … (Smattering of applause.) Bill:
You ever look at their faces? ‘I’m pro-life!’ (Makes a
pinched face of hate and fear, his lips are pursed as
though he’s just sucked on a lemon.) ‘I’m pro-life!’
Boy, they look it don’t they? They just exude joie de
vivre. You just want to hang with them and play Trivial
Pursuit all night long. (Audience chuckles.) Bill: You
know what bugs me about them? If you’re so pro-life,
do me a favour – don’t lock arms and block medical
clinics. If you’re so pro-life, lock arms and block cemeteries.
(Audience laughs.) Bill: Let’s see how committed
you are to this idea. (Bill mimes the pursed lipped
pro-lifers locking arms.) Bill (as pro-lifer): ‘She can’t
come in!’ (Audience laughs. Bill as confused member
of funeral procession): ‘She was 98. She was hit by a
bus!’ (Audience laughs.) Bill (as pro-lifer): ‘There’s
options!’ (Audience laughs.) Bill (as confused member
of funeral procession): ‘What else can we do? Have
her stuffed?’ (Audience laughs.) Bill: I want to see prolifers
with crowbars at funerals opening caskets – ‘get
out!’ Then I’d be really impressed by their mission.
(Audience laughs and applauds.)
Hicks ends his letter to John Lahr with a passionate
plea for sanity: “This is what I think CBS, the producers
of the Letterman show, the networks and governments
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fear the most – that one man free, expressing his own
thoughts and point of view, might somehow inspire
others to think for themselves and listen to that voice
of reason inside them, and then perhaps, one by one we
will awaken from this dream of lies and illusions that
the world, the governments and their propaganda arm,
the mainstream media, feeds us continuously over 52
channels, 24 hours a day.
“What I realised was that they don’t want the people
to be awake. The elite ruling class wants us asleep
so we’ll remain a docile, apathetic herd of passive
consumers and non-participants in the true agendas
of our governments, which is to keep us separate and
present an image of a world filled with unresolvable
problems, that they, and only they, might somewhere,
in the never-arriving future, may be able to solve. Just
stay asleep, America. Keep watching television. Keep
paying attention to the infinite witnesses of illusion we
provide you over ‘Lucifer’s Dream Box’.”
BUY Bill Hicks books online from and
For anyone doubting the veracity of Hicks’s analysis,
a good recent example of news being managed in such
a way that it keeps us “passive non-participants” is the
virtual US press black out over the recent Kyoto protocol
all under the guise, no doubt, of it being of no interest
to the American public that the US has an appalling
environmental record.
Hicks has his revelation while watching the Letterman
show the week after being pulled. The scales fall
away from his eyes, and he’s looking at the real reason.
He’s looking at a ‘pro-life’ commercial.
Gore Vidal once gave a definition of real politics
as “Who collects what money from whom to spend
on whom for what” with the corollary that “no politician
in the US dares address that subject for fear we’ll
discover who bought him and for how much.” Follow
the money, indeed. And what was one of the very first
things that Dubyah did as President? It was to cancel
the funding of abortion clinics abroad. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published February 2008]
Tom Hodgkinson: How To Be Idle
Greg Lowe
It’s Friday afternoon, and after a particularly busy
week, with only a few things to wrap up, I try and
scratch off the last important thing on my list of things
to do – interview author/journalist Tom Hodgkinson.
First I try his London office a number of times, only
to get the following answer-phone message: “This is
the office of the Idler [the magazine of which Hodgkinson
is the founder/editor], there’s no one in right now,
we’re not in very often, so if you leave a message it
might take a while for us to get back to you…”
At 5:50pm Bangkok time (11:50am in England) I try
my luck with his mobile number, which I was given “in
case something goes wrong”.
“Hi, this is Tom, I’ve left my mobile at home today,
you can reach me at [the number for the Idler office].”
It appears I am trapped in a Sisyphean cycle of messages
left on answer-phones that lead to more messages
on other answer-phones, all equally unlikely to be answered
or to yield in the previously arranged interview.
Normally this would be cause for concern, but today
a smile born from a wonderful sense of irony spreads
across my face.
BUY Tom Hodgkinson books online from and
You see, apart from editing the magazine, Hodgkinson
is also the author of a curious little book, How To
Be Idle. Broken down into hourly chapters, starting at
8am and finishing at 7am, it wages a war on work while
providing practical and philosophical loafing advice
for every part of the day.
Chapter three ‘10am Sleeping In’, begins as follows:
“It’s 10am The successful idler, having avoided the
guilt produced by 8am, the culturally determined hour
of rising, and the guilt produced by 9am, the hour of
work, may now be awake, and thinking of perhaps getting
up. Don’t!”
The fact that he was either not up, nor in the office
to answer the phone, came as no great surprise. I fired
off a bunch of questions via email, and left the office
heading for the pub.
Hodgkinson practices what he preaches in How To
Be Idle. He takes the subject of doing nothing very
seriously, and aims to inspire more than a quiet chuckle
from readers. “Although the book is a good read, it is
intended to be taken seriously. I really do believe that
our system of things is anti-life,” he says.
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That he takes idleness sincerely is demonstrated
through his fastidious research, which draws on sources
as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Lao Tzu, Dr
Johnson, Albert Camus and Damien Hirst, who provide
a 2,500-year-old legacy to loafing (there’s nine pages
of further reading on the subject).
It has to be said that the end result really is good.
Not only is the book thoroughly entertaining, it should
resonate with anyone – except the most puritanical
workaholic bores – who has ever questioned how our
lives have become to be dominated by work, time, and
the need to be constantly doing something, or by feeling
guilty for being inactive.
Hodgkinson says that this angst-driven nine-to-five
drudgery is only a fairly recent development in terms
of human history. That it is the result of when, some
250 years ago, we were ripped from our agrarian existence
by the ravages of the Industrial Revolution. This
transformed our previous existence of spontaneous,
task-oriented work, to one where we were shackled to
the ruthless tyranny of the clock and wage labour.
It has alienated us from our authentic lackadaisical
state of nature, Hodgkinson adds, saying that the only
purpose chirpy axioms – such as Benjamin Franklin’s
1757 utterance, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a
man, healthy, wealthy and wise”– serve are to fill us
with guilt whenever we return to an authentic state of
doing as we please.
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“[If we were idle] we would become more alive.
We would be less stressed out because we would be in
control of our own lives. We would free ourselves from
the master/slave dialectic and all the other imprisoning
dualities that control us. Life and work would become
the same thing. We would become whole people rather
than fractured people.”
But left to loafers like Hodgkinson, wouldn’t the
world just go to the dogs?
“I think the claim is self-evidently false. Idle people
are creative and hard workers are uncreative. Is it better
to trick people into buying crisps or to grow your own
vegetables? Clearly the latter. It is generally better to
do nothing than to do something. It creates less harm
in the world.”
When summing up whether How To Be Idle offers an
intelligent critique of the alienating nature of the rate
race, or just a self-indulgent lazy man’s guide to life,
it’s worth considering the words of the British journalist,
and celebrated alcoholic, Jeffrey Bernard (quoted
in the book) on the matter how those who preach the
benefits of working harder, are normally the people
having a nice time, relaxing and getting rich on the
backs of others.
“As if there was something romantic and glamorous
about hard work … if there was something glamorous
about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his
own fucking garden, wouldn’t he?” �
272
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 2005]
Gert Hofmann: Parable Of The Blind
Edmund Hardy
The Knocker knocks on the barn door and six men
stumble around, trying to get up. The novel opens: “On
the day when we’re to be painted – yet another new
day! – a knocking on the barn door drags us out of our
sleep. No, the knocking isn’t inside us, it’s outside,
where the other people are.” The six men narrate as
“we”, although one of them, Ripolus, is also guide, because
he can reportedly see a little. “Ripolus, what can
you see? Simply describe for us what you can see?”
The answer is usually, “Not much.”
The novel covers the day when these six men are
to be painted by Pieter Breughel, “the Painter”, who
wants them to follow each other and fall down into a
ditch, the image familiar to us as ‘The Parable of the
Blind’, a rural recreation of ‘Matthew XV’, 14: “If the
Blind lead the Blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”
In the painting, the blind men are about to fall. The
painting is tense, as the eye follows the chain of men
towards the ditch. What we see is about to collapse.
Hofmann’s novel is also tense; not because the six
narrators may collapse but because the novel as viable
form may do so. It doesn’t.
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The novel’s frame is this: the six men speak a strangely
unified monologue, wandering around the village, on
the green, in the woods, eating lunch. Each man has a
story about how he came to be blind. As readers, we are
never given more information than the six possess nor
any hints with which to see out of the monologue; there
are times when the six may be the subject of practical
jokes – being told they are in a secluded toilet when
they may be on the village green – but we don’t laugh,
because we don’t know if it’s funny. We don’t see from
the outside. We read thoughts and speech. We are blind
because we’re stuck like narrative threads in the novel’s
mass, just as the blind men seem trapped in the telling
of their own story.
This is why worries over the inaccurate presentation
of blindness are beside the point. Do blind people feel
themselves all over to work out who they are, first
thing in the morning, as these do? No. But this is the
Parable Of The Blind, and the parables are multiple.
Imagine a page with six tiny figures stumbling around
in it; they can’t see the perimeter of the page, and they
can’t see out into the world. The page is a room, or a
273
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village, and we, the reader, are there too, wondering
what room, what enclosed world we are in. The six
men remember the past. They wonder where they are.
They have banal conversations with strangers about
food and the weather and which is the best way to
go. They argue with each other and nearly fight. Hofmann’s
prose is so concentrated and unrelenting that
claustrophobia turns to terrible awareness. There is no
need to explicate. No need for laboured, ‘author’s message’
moments, because we begin to read everything
into the parable; the leaner in description or the more a
narrative moves in circles or repetition the greater the
force accumulated. How does a book like this pierce
through to us, when there was no vivid description of
something we recognised, no witty or psychologically
fascinating dialogue, no grand sweep of history, no
denouement?
One answer is that those very elements begin to seem
ornamental to literature’s work, part of which (let’s be
reductive!) is to wonder how communication in language
might be possible and, if it isn’t, to fail instructively.
How can six blind men stumbling around, speak
to us? Do they speak for anyone else as well? They are
six men in a painting, here made to fall into the ditch
over and over for the Painter to make his sketches.
Sight is most often the sense connected to knowledge,
as in, “I see it”, “I can’t see round it”, “in this light”, and
also the various distinctions between the visible and
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invisible. Sight is also linked to reason; if we can see it
properly, we can be rational about it. These traditions
find their dissection in the contemporary philosophies
of ‘the gaze’. In The Parable Of The Blind, it is hearing
that relates the realistic details of interaction, that is,
speech. Without sight, the most pushy of senses, one
of the things the novel does is to bring sound and touch
back to a narrative, to embody a world not predicated
on the eyes, as Aristotle seemed to think was necessary
when he wrote ‘On Sense And Sensible Objects’, “of
those who have been deprived of one sense or the other
from birth, the blind are more intelligent than the deaf
and the dumb.” Hofmann’s novel is a joke on metaphor
– which, classically, bridges the inward mental activity
to the world of appearances, left in this novel as a swing
bridge hanging over the water – making the parable, ‘in
this light’, a parable of the parables.
Standing before a painting, we may well ask a work
to speak to us, and a number of novelists have taken up
the extra-critical task of elaborating this speech or else
making up a story – one thinks of a pearl earring – following
the irritating trope that we might ‘walk inside’ a
painting. Hofmann has taken this thought and actually
pushed our faces so far into the oil and brush-strokes
that we cannot see back out, and we cannot see within.
The prose, inhabiting a world of sound and intuited objects,
is spare and clear, like a radio transmission which
has been tuned in after an interfering hiss.
274
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Christopher Middleton’s translation is excellent – by
no means a given in translations from the German, see
Michael Henry Heim’s ruination of Günter Grass’s
My Century – in that he replicates this sparse quality
in English without falling into a Beckett-ese, which it
might have been easy to do. Middleton is a poet – recommended
is his new and selected poems, The Word
Pavilion as well as the extraordinary prose pieces in
such volumes as Crypto-Topographia – and translator
of Canetti (his letters), Robert Walser and Nietzsche.
His is not a workman-like translation. Hofmann’s
forward-drive is here, the unaccountable tension, the
use of sentence on sentence like brick and timber.
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The narrator (unusual for being six people and one
person simultaneously) often says “probably”, probably
we are here, probably there is a man with a stick, probably
we are being painted by the Painter. Surface is not
given to us for our delight, as in a Quiet novel (Edgar
Allen Poe’s term for the mainstream, ‘official literary
culture’ of his time, the work he hated and wanted to
tear down), but is constantly in doubt – what would
otherwise be a world is here only conjecture: “What’s
going on? we call. And it’s hard to find the way back.
We’re in a dream. Lying in a fresh furrow, in a boundless
field, half on the surface, half below ground, clouds
probably overhead.” �
275
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published May 2001]
Nick Hornby: Gender Trouble
Patrick McGuigan talks with Nick Hornby about the changing roles of
men and women in his new novel How To Be Good
Men stumble through life bewildered by relationships,
terrified of responsibility and unable to articulate their
feelings; or so you would think from the characters
portrayed in Nick Hornby’s novels. Women are only
used to make the men look worse. His new book, How
To Be Good, deliberately sets out to challenge this
stereotype. Hornby’s arrival at such a position has been
a direct result of the success of his first three books,
Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About A Boy.
Hornby writes from a small flat two minutes from
his beloved Highbury. It is equipped with a kitchen,
bathroom and lounge, where framed posters of his
books hang proudly on the walls. He obviously spends
a lot of time here. Hornby is divorced and lives with his
seven-year-old son in a house near to his office flat. He
is friendly, assured, and smokes continually. He looks
tired and his patchy baldness gives him a disconcerting,
ravaged look.
Born in 1957, he graduated from Cambridge with a
2.2 in English Literature. He then worked as a teacher
and a journalist before publishing Fever Pitch in 1992.
It was an honest account of how his obsession with
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Arsenal usually took precedence over his emotional
life. His next two books, High Fidelity and About A
Boy, explored similar ideas of how men struggle to
come to terms with modern expectations of sensitivity
and maturity. They are funny, touching and his male
characters ring true.
It is surprising for an author so concerned with masculinity
that he hasn’t written much about fatherhood.
All his main characters are, as he puts it: “childless,
feckless males,” who don’t have strong paternal ties.
About A Boy addressed the issue of fatherhood in a
metaphorical way but he has never dealt with it directly.
Part of the reason for this is that his son, Danny, is
autistic. “My experience of fatherhood is going to take
a long while to filter through to what I write. Being
the father of a disabled child you have a lot to say, but
it’s so unique you want to do it in a way that people
understand.”
His own father left the family home for another woman
when Hornby was a young boy. He then moved abroad
for ten years. Hornby says he has not really thought
about what effect his father has had on his writing, but
276
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adds: “I had an absent father. Fathers haven’t played a
big role in my books yet; maybe there’s a void where a
father should be.” He laughs nervously, then moves the
conversation on to how the media encroaches on topics
formerly only tackled by writers.
Hornby has said that he is tired of men being portrayed
as morons by the media and wants to “redress
the balance.” He argues: “The first two books couldn’t
have been written 25 years ago. Men writing about how
they feel would not have been tolerated.”
He goes on to say that with the advent of feminism
and changes in the workplace men and women have
become more equal. “I don’t know any man who can’t
change a nappy or cook.” When asked about women
earning 20 per cent less than men he quickly points out
that his books only cover domestic life and there is a
long way to go. “Obviously society is still incredibly
sexist. It’s difficult when you write about gender to talk
about men and yet be sympathetic to feminism.”
Hornby’s books are unbalanced because they only
concentrate on men. Life is confusing for everyone,
women included. He agrees: “The flaws in High Fidelity
and Fever Pitch are that the women aren’t rounded
characters. The whole process of writing books and
reading women’s letters about them has made me completely
rethink. I’ve now decided that the men/women
stuff is a red herring.”
He elaborates on his new position on gender: “There
BUY Nick Hornby books online from and
are two extremes – England hooligans with skinheads
and women who are subservient to their husbands. Then
there’s the middle where most of us are now. People of
a certain generation don’t feel incredibly different to
their partners.”
When asked if it is simplistic to say we are all the
same, he concedes that “differences do come from our
experiences of being brought up a man or a woman.” He
also acknowledges that men can find it hard to express
themselves. “I’d rather not communicate whereas the
women I know would prefer to talk.”
This is an important change in direction for Nick
Hornby, the beginnings of which can be seen in About A
Boy. As well as touching on fatherhood it has a female
character that tries to kill herself in a bout of depression.
This is not a positive depiction of women but certainly
more complex than in his proceeding books.
His new novel, How To Be Good, is the first time
Hornby’s main character is female. He explains: “It’s
about a woman whose husband has a spiritual conversion
that drives her nuts.” This could be a risky step for
a writer so linked in the minds of the public with men
and football.
He claims he has not found it particularly difficult
to write: “I wasn’t sitting there thinking ‘Oh my God,
what would a woman say in this situation!’ “ He has
also given it to female friends and taken out parts they
did not think were appropriate.
277
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Hornby’s books work because his male characters
are so familiar. They have an authenticity that readers
immediately relate to. If he can do the same in his
next novel with a female character, it will be a major
achievement. As he says: “If I’m going to progress as a
writer I’ve got to stop worrying about gender and treat
people as people, characters as characters.” �
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278
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 2002]
Michel Houllebecq: Atomised
Kevin Walsh
Michel Houellebecq is one of those authors who
inspire hugely conflicting reactions. Some hail him
as a literary giant in the European tradition, deftly
weaving philosophy, history, and science into his
bleak, challenging narratives, asking those questions
that other more commercially-minded authors shy
away from. Others think him hollow, pretentious,
showily didactic and deeply disturbed – not to mention
highly overrated.
And controversial. Very controversial. In 2001, he
gave an interview to the French literary magazine, Lire,
in which he said “Islam is a dangerous religion, as has
been since its beginnings […] I totally reject all monotheistic
religions.” In September 2002 he appeared before
a tribunal in Paris on charges of inciting religious
hatred, and was asked to explain himself. “All I said
is that their religion is stupid,” he said in his defence.
“And that’s what you call promoting a book?” said the
president of the tribunal. “Yes, that’s right,” answered
Houellebecq, with his customary insouciance.
Atomised (published in the US as The Elementary
Particles) is the story of two half-brothers, Michel and
Bruno (Houellebecq denies that his namesake is based
on himself, but the parallels are striking). Sharing the
same mother, they have both been abandoned by different
fathers and brought up by relatives. Michel is a
scientific researcher at the CNRS in Paris, a cold, unsympathetic
and unhappy character. Bruno is equally
unappealing, a misfit former teacher and part-time
writer, divorced and sex-obsessed.
Houellebecq has a rather disquieting habit of including
large chunks of economic and social history as we
plough through the decades of their childhood: the
événements of 1968, the legalisation of abortion, the
succès de scandale in the 70s of the film Emmanuelle
and so on.
But he doesn’t stop there: we are also treated to long
disquisitions on science and philosophy, not to mention
particle physics and DNA. Many chapters begin with
long – and sometimes mystifyingly irrelevant – quotes.
Houellebecq is undoubtedly very widely read. The
trouble is, he wants us to know that he is. In an effort to
demonstrate just what a polymath he is, he crosses the line
into what the French call étalage – literally, a spreading
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279
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out of one’s wares; figuratively, just plain showing off.
And he sometimes resorts to some very clumsy mechanisms
to show the extent of his knowledge: at one point,
Michel and Bruno have an in-depth conversation about
Aldous Huxley, displaying a highly unlikely command
of historical and biographical details.
Perhaps it’s a sign of insecurity. Maybe he has more
in common with his namesake than he would admit.
The result of the name- and fact-dropping is a patchy
story, where the narrative flow is repeatedly interrupted.
The early part of the book follows the boys through
their deeply unhappy childhood. These are unexceptional,
rather dull and very mundane lives, and the characters
fail to engage any real emotion on the reader’s
part. The book swings wildly from lofty philosophical
thoughts to very basic instincts.
Later, large tracts of the book are taken up with
Bruno’s sexual adventures. At a holiday camp – one
of whose main activities seems to be cruising for
casual sex – he encounters Christiane, a libertine who
introduces him to the joys of the orgy circuit. And this
points up a key distinction between the uptight Anglo-
Saxon and relaxed French views towards sex (at the
last count, there were over 400 sex clubs in France,
catering for both échangistes – wife swappers – and the
more adventurous mélangistes – orgy-goers).
Sex sells, of course, which is why the UK version
of Atomised features a naked woman on the cover,
together with the promise from The Independent that
it is “very moving, gloriously, extravagantly filthy, and
very funny.”
Tellingly, the French edition features a sepia photograph
of a bored-looking Houellebecq smoking a rollup
held between his third an fourth fingers (a trademark
eccentricity) and a carrier bag draped over his left arm.
In the end, though, the book fails to weave a compelling
story. There are too many undigested chunks
of science and politics, too many swerves from highbrow
philosophy to lowbrow oral sex. And far too
much étalage.
But perhaps one of the most unnerving things about
Houellebecq’s books is his propensity to kill off his female
characters. And Atomised has a high body count:
the brothers’ mother (of natural causes), and both their
girlfriends (suicides). Which has, inevitably, led to
accusations of misogyny – to add to the anti-Muslim,
anti-Semite and anti-black charges that Houellebecq
has clocked up during his turbulent career.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Houellebecq has
chosen to retreat to an island off the coast of West Cork,
from which he rarely emerges. He did venture forth to
Dublin earlier this year, when Atomised won the Impac
Literary Prize, the latest in a string of awards he’s
bagged. And to Paris, to run rings round the tribunal.
But then he’s very good a running rings round people.
Perhaps too good. �
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280
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Gary Indiana:
Resentment 282
Derek Jarman:
Preserving A Harlequin 284
Linton Kwesi Johnson:
Inglan Is A Bitch 288
Ed Jones:
This Is Pop 292
Gabriel Josipovici:
On Trust 294
Kevin Kelly:
New Rules For The New Economy 298
Naomi Klein:
Ad Nauseum 300
I-L
Rem Koolhaas:
Content 305
Kruder And Dorfmeister:
The K&D Sessions 308
Andrey Kurkov:
Death And The Penguin 310
Emma Larkin:
Secret Histories 312
Abby Lee:
Girl With A One Track Mind 314
Wyndham Lewis:
Blast 319
Jack London:
The Iron Heel 324
281
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 1997]
Gary Indiana: Resentment
David B. Livingstone
Historically, the turn of centuries and millenniums
have marked periods of heightened popular anxiety,
social unrest, collective madness, and religious mania.
From the vantage point of 1997, a little less than twoand-a-half
years from two-thousand-zero-zero, our
own age seems little different: Heaven’s Gaters are
hopping aboard Hale-Bopp, militia types are scanning
the skies for black helicopters, and millions of people
inexplicably watch Jenny Jones daily. It’s getting to be
a pretty weird world.
And it’s hard to imagine a more fertile breeding
ground for modern insanity than the supercharged, chaotic
maelstrom of greater Los Angeles, as intensified
and re-imagined in Resentment. Equal parts courtroom
drama, existential lament, and blacker-than-black
comedy, author Gary Indiana’s latest offering might
mark the first entry in a new genre: Post-Simpson Trial
fiction, a realm where brutality transforms effortlessly
into bland, mildly-diverting mass entertainment, and
where honour, justice, and even reality are relative
concepts easily inverted by a clever attorney.
Resentment’s unifying thread is a trial: The teenaged
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Martinez brothers stand accused of murdering their
wealthy parents in an ambush slaying, while around
them swirl a discordant cast of characters possessed
of varying degrees of spiritual and moral decay. Seth,
the self-serving New York reporter in town to cover
the trial; Jack, his taxi-driver ex-lover, slowly dying
of AIDS; Frankie, the narcissistic, Cunanenesque
hustler; Potter Phlegg, the manipulative, exploitative
psychologist; Cassandra, the washed-up soap opera
actress; JD, a vapid drive-time radio host – all abrade
against each other, collide with one another in an
exquisitely choreographed ballet of mutually-assured
destruction performed to an accompaniment of lies
and vacant smiles.
While Resentment’s characters gradually grind one
another into dust, the Martinez’ show/trial spirals to
dizzying heights of absurdity as careerist attorneys and
psychotic judges jockey for power, a struggle chronicled
in chillingly-real torrents of self-negating legalese
nonsense. Simultaneously, the violence of the brothers’
crime compounds itself as Indiana’s circle of misfits
begin, usually unconsciously, to act out the same be-
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trayals and maledictions against each other, in a more
subtle but no less destructive fashion. In a succession of
careful, precise strokes, Indiana meticulously renders
a portrait of a morally-malformed society whose governing
principles are irrationality and amnesia, where
justice is a commodity and ethical considerations an
irrelevancy – a world whose denizens, poisoned by
immersion in a toxic morass of glossy images, pseudoevents,
and hyperkinetic impermanence, struggle to
retain the vestiges of humanity. It’s hell, repainted in
garish Disney colours.
Wisely avoiding the temptation to proselytize, Indiana
leaves it to the reader to connect the dots between Resentment’s
fiction and real-life events. While purposelyglaring
parallels with the Menendez and Simpson cases
abound, additional layers of possible similarity between
art and life, such as the details of individual characters’
(psycho)pathologies and their role in governing human
interaction, are left open to interpretation. It’s a tactic that
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virtually mandates reader participation in the form of
thoughtful interpretation and re-interpretation throughout
the book, leading in a roundabout way to Indiana’s
maintaining our rapt attention.
Resentment is a fable of fin-de-siècle madness in its
most acute stage, a premonitory snapshot of a moment
when order and chaos, reason and insanity are locked
in fights-to-the-death, the outcomes too close to call.
Indiana has cleverly, cruelly drawn the blueprints for
apocalypse-in-microcosm – the whimper, not the bang,
which would signal that the end is near – and left it to
his readers to deduce the degree to which art mirrors
reality. Resentment is subtitled “a comedy”, but any
laughter is only a buffer against tears and terror. The
engine driving Resentment is Resentment, a bitterness
at having arrived at an inescapable cul-de-sac en route
to the American Dream – a frenetic, endless loop where
we’re likely to claw each other to pieces, a Roach Motel
for human souls. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published August 1996]
Derek Jarman: Preserving A Harlequin
Nick Clapson reflects on the work of England’s quintessential Renaissance man
By the time you read this, Derek Jarman: A Retrospective
will have closed at the Barbican Centre. However,
the Barbican Centre’s comprehensive catalogue of the
exhibition, which has been published by Thames And
Hudson, gives a chance to re-evaluate the impact and
splendour of Derek Jarman’s work. Though largely famous
for his film-work, Jarman was also a prestigious
artist and writer, with his artistic skills even pouring
over into other diverse art-forms such as scenery design
and gardening (yes, gardening).
With a man whose output was so divergent, whose
character so like quicksilver, it is hard to pin him down.
And this is the beauty of Jarman. He was indefinable
and unique, a British maverick comparable in importance
to artists such as William Blake, and as such,
should not allowed to drift to the side-lines of history,
or to be pigeon-holed solely as a queer film-maker.
I discovered Derek Jarman myself through his
journals, published as Modern Nature (1991), and At
Your Own Risk (1992). Written as direct result of his
knowledge that he was HIV+ these books offer the
reader a startling honesty. Nothing is hidden from us,
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and as such we enter into his world, and his everyday
life, more as a friend than an observer – no brave face
is put on for us, no politeness offered. Instead, Derek
gives us truth and compassion, and at times pure, honest,
anger. He leaps between the meditative contemplation
of his garden and haranguing the British film
industry for its complacency, between describing the
omnipresence of the nuclear reactor behind his home
at Dungeness and the evils of what he called “hetrosoc”.
The result is a potent, valuable set of books
pulsing with pure emotion.
This truth and honesty is also a quality found in
Jarman’s films; he eschewed the expense and contrivance
of big-budget films for the simplicity of Super8
stock. Even Jarman’s most expensive films were made
at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest Hollywood
film. His work was radically different, especially
from the usual British attempts at generating some
form of quirky pseudo-Hollywood style. However,
this outsider position quite suited Jarman, and as he
said, “I am the most fortunate film director of my generation:
I’ve only ever done what I wanted”. People
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have said that they find his work hard, or just unintelligible,
but that is part of their charm and power.
Jarman frequently used the camera like a paintbrush,
with the visual quotient of a scene carrying the charge
normally left to the narrative: as it were, painting with
light. However, such concepts are hard to conceive
by a generation who goes to the cinema not to be
challenged, but rather, have their eyes stuffed with
Hollywood bubble-gum. That is not to say that such
films don’t have their place; you just have to learn to
look at films by the likes of Jarman with open eyes.
His films were also frequently of a revisionist tone,
with Jarman looking back at history and re-viewing it
through his own 20th-century eyes, and turning it into
something new, something pertinent. For example,
in 1977 he released his film Jubilee, coinciding with
the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, blending a time-travelling
Elizabeth I and John Dee with oppressed and violent
punks in sharp commentary on contemporary Britain.
This concern for the state of the British nation is also
reflected in his more complex, and yet more visually
rewarding film The Last Of England.
Moreover, Jarman was not afraid of re-evaluating the
classics, and produced his own idiosyncratic revisions
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the more successful
version of Marlowe’s Edward II. This film, like many
of his later films, utilised the strength of simplicity with
it’s sparse ahistorical sets, and mixture of period and
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contemporary costume. Again, Jarman looked to the
past, especially to the hidden ramifications of a possible
gay history, in order to comment on the situation today.
That is to say, by re-examining men such as Edward II,
Ludwig Wittgenstein or Caravaggio Jarman could shift
the emphasis of traditional (read ‘straight’) history, and
trace the previously hidden importance of a succession
of homosexual men in key roles in Western intellectual
culture. However, even though his films were often serious
in tone, Jarman always seemed to have his tongue
firmly lodged in his cheek, and concepts that could
quite easily dissolve into pretentious drivel, frequently
sparkle with irreverent wit.
The paintings displayed at the Barbican are, like most
retrospectives, a mixed bag. We travel from the cold
controlled nature of his early abstract landscapes of his
youth to the fiery anger of his compelling last works,
and so can easily trace Jarman’s origins and subsequent
progression. The curator has also had the chance to assemble
some of the artist’s personal artefacts, and the
fact that people stand in rapt attention looking at such
things as Jarman’s fountain pen or diaries is testament
to the lasting power of the man himself.
The last section of the exhibition is the most striking,
with the gloomy intensity of the pitch paintings and
the dazzling outbursts that constitute the paintings that
were first shown in the Evil Queen exhibition. These
polemical works are Jarman at his most impassioned
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and his anger and frustration seep through the canvas.
Their uncompromising nature was matched by his last
film Blue. This film, with the screen saturated with an
unchanging blue, was his most lyrical. It would be foolhardy
to try capture the power and poignancy of this
film in words. With the eyes confounded with nothing
but an infinite blue, you are left to the voice-over to
lead you through Jarman’s imagination and your own
in a way that has never been attempted before.
Jarman’s home and garden at Prospect Cottage in
Dungeness, Kent, figure frequently in his last works,
be it writing or film, and some attempt to address this
has been attempted at the Barbican. Outside the gallery
local children have made their own gardens à la Jarman
to quite good effect. However, nothing can recreate the
sense of isolation and strange other-worldliness present
at Dungeness. It is as if here everything, including time
itself will dissolve at moment into the vast swathes
of shingle. His home and the others around it stand
stranded in this stark landscape, now dominated and
threatened by the vast nuclear reactor behind them.
A posthumous book, Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995),
with splendid photographs by Howard Sooley, captures
the beauty of the place that meant so much to Jarman.
I personally had never considered that gardening could
ever be considered an art form, but what Jarman created
here is nothing but art, albeit more challenging to
construct and maintain as it is an art that continually
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changes and grows. Innumerable plants provide islands
of colour that sit in the sea of shingle which flows
through the garden. Driftwood and flotsam punctuate
the garden in the form of sculpture and ultimately serve
to unify it with the area surrounding it. The result is a
bounty of visual delights, made more powerful by the
improbability of their setting. It is characteristic that
Jarman’s writing, even when discussing the creation of
his garden in this book, soon breaks down, and becomes
a discussion of so much more. Surely there is no better
example than Derek Jarman of an artist whose work is
entwined with their life.
How, then, are we to remember this man? Should
he be placed in the shrivelled canon of British 20thcentury
art, filed under ‘minor artist’, or should he be
cast in the limiting role of ‘queer director’, or just dismissed
as loud, over-opinionated, English eccentric? It
is symptomatic of artists who work in several media to
be dismissed as a jack of all trades but master of none.
However, this would clearly not be a worthy epitaph for
a man who obviously excelled in nearly every art form
he chose to turn his hand to. Jarman was also much
more, being not only a very political man, but whose
work also had a great feeling for the decline of all the
positive elements of British culture that have been stifled
and repressed since the start of the Thatcher years.
Whatever his agenda, Jarman always made himself
heard and it’s a voice that painful not to hear now. I feel,
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then, that all us can claim a part of Derek Jarman – he
was an important film-maker, and an undervalued and
little discussed artist, and wrote books that will surely
stand the test of time. And yes, he was a consummate
gardener. To lose an artist at the height of their powers
is hard to live with, but to neglect what they left us is
criminal. What is important now is that no matter how
fragmented he may become in our minds, this man of
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rare vision must be preserved in a unified form in drafty
corridors of history. Jarman, with all his divergent skill
and charm, was surely more than just the sum of his
parts, and that is how he should be remembered. Go
and see this retrospective, watch one of the films, or
even read the books, but do try and take the time to
enter into Jarman’s world. I can assure you, it’s quite an
amazing place to be. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published December 1998]
Linton Kwesi Johnson: Inglan Is A Bitch
Nancy Rawlinson finds legendary dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has
not mellowed with age
Twenty years ago, a landmark album was released
in the UK. Dread Beat An’ Blood was Linton Kwesi
Johnson’s debut recording, the first time his political
poetry had been accompanied by the powerful beats of
reggae. This new form of music, revolutionary in terms
of language, content and style, came to be known as
‘dub poetry’ and Johnson is still the foremost and most
uncompromising practitioner of the art. Using the patois
of Jamaican speech, Johnson articulates the Black
British experience and uses the rhythms of reggae to
get his message across.
In the past, he has been called a prophet. “Yeah,
yeah, I don’t take these things seriously. I just think it’s
another media tag,” he says dismissively. “The music is
compatible with the poetry in so far as I am writing out
of the reggae tradition and some of the poems are written
are within the perimeters of the reggae structure.
And it’s oral poetry and oral poetry lends itself to the
rhythms of music.”
Considering his commitment and personal history,
perhaps Johnson’s success is no great surprise. His
whole life has been based around increasing political
awareness, fighting racism, and music. Born in Chapletown,
Jamaica, in 1952 he came to England at the
age of 11 to live with his mother in Brixton. It was an
traumatic experience, compounded by the hostility and
racism of Britain in the early 60s. Before long he had
joined The Black Panthers. “That’s where I learnt my
politics and about my history and culture,” he has said.
“That’s where I discovered black literature, particularly
the work of W.E.B. DuBois, the Afro-American scholar
who inspired me to write poetry.”
Armed with this new political awareness, Johnson
was laying the foundations of his future recording
career while he was still at school, with the poetry and
drumming group, Rasta Love. After graduating from
Goldsmiths’ College, he began to write in earnest and
his first collection of poetry was published in 1974.
Since then he has released three more books and a total
of 11 albums – but that’s not all. His achievements
outside of the studio have also been considerable. He
has edited the journal Race Today Review, made a radio
series on Jamaican music for the BBC, reported for
Channel Four’s race relation series The Bandung File
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and helped found Creation For Liberation, the seminal
Black Arts organisation of the 1980s.
He has been involved with innumerable campaigns,
set up his own record label and received honorary
degrees and awards. His work is now taught in universities
up and down the country. I could go on, but you
get the picture. There is no doubt that Linton Kwesi
Johnson is totally committed to improving and drawing
attention to the Black British experience. Considering
this, it seems almost sacrilegious to ask: Is his work as
relevant now as it was 20 years ago?
On this point, Johnson has no doubts. In the two
decades that Linton Kwesi Johnson has been making
music, his political stance has not shifted an inch. “I
think Tony Blair is a natural born Tory. He’s a natural
born Tory who would have been quite comfortable
on the left of the Tory party with people like Kenneth
Clark and Michael Heseltine.” he tells me. And what
does he think the most pressing political issue of the
day is? Without drawing breath, he gives an emphatic,
two word answer. “The police.”
His 1980 collection of poetry was entitled Inglan Is
A Bitch. Despite the many battles that have been won,
he stands by that statement. “When one looks at what
happened to Stephen Lawrence, when one thinks of
the fact that a black person is eight times more likely
to be stopped and searched than a white person, that
a black person is five times more likely to be given a
custodial sentence than a white person, that the ACPO
– the Association of Chief Police Officers – has come
out and admitted that racism is institutionalised within
the police force, that the black nurses within the health
service for years have gotton a raw deal. When one
thinks of all these things, yeah, Inglan is a Bitch. I still
believe as passionately in the same things I did 20 years
ago, and although we have made some head way, the
struggle for social justice is still on.”
As ever, that struggle is clearly articulated on his
new album, More Time. Some are already saying that
it is his best work yet, a work in which the political
and musical sides of Linton Kwesi Johnson are more
strongly interwoven than ever. Ultimately, the feel is a
touch lighter than in the past; the mood seems that little
bit more optimistic. Johnson seems to agree. “Well,
some of the poems are optimistic, forward looking. I’m
writing about the possibilities of life. I try to make the
music suit the mood of each poem. Like on ‘Reggae
Fi Bernard’, a poem about the death of my nephew, I
tried to conjure up the music of the Jamaican marching
bands, who would traditionally form part of the funeral
procession. But to an extent, you know, it’s about the
banishment of grief and the celebration of life, so in
that sense the music might be brighter. It’s a poem
about how we can benefit from life.”
There are also hints that this album is perhaps the
most personal Johnson has ever made. Two tracks,
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‘Hurricane Blues’ (previously released without music
in 1996 on the LKJ Acapella Live album) and ‘Seasons
of the Heart’, are “poems in which I was trying to explore
some inner landscapes.” And then there is the title
track, ‘More Time’.
Whilst clearly a statement about the working conditions
and hours forced upon the poor and disenfranchised,
I am left with the impression that it applies to
Johnson himself. “There is no reason why we can’t
work less hours and enjoy our lives more,” he tells
me. “But if we do get more time, we have to organise
ourselves to get some benefit from it. What is life if we
cannot get some pleasure from friends and family, from
relaxation and contemplation? Most people do not have
an idea of what their human potential is, we are so used
to not having time.”
As you might expect, his own preferred forms of
relaxation are far from extravagant. “I enjoy being with
people. Socialising. The simple things, the simple things
in life are the ones that give me pleasure. Going to the
pub and having a pint, playing a game of dominoes or a
game of pool. Being with my grandchild. Little things
like that. Reading a good book. Eating a good meal.”
Some may feel that although Johnson is progressive
in his ideals, his music style bears no mark of the revolution
in technology that has taken place since he started
recording. “Well, I’m not a luddite in that respect,” he
says, although he seems ambivalent about other more
modern combinations of music and politics. “If it’s
done well, it can be very entertaining and very fine –
but it has to be done well. There is always a danger
of the music dominating the words. You have to very
careful about how you do that. But as for rap, when
it’s done badly it’s just boring. The only rap record I
used to have, or I still have, is Grandmaster Flash, ‘The
Message’. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything that
tops it. I never heard a rap tune that can better that.”
What Johnson does is outside the vagaries of musical
fashion and he is not a man to pander to trends. The
message of the music is all important. “I do worry in a
sense that people might forget that I’m a poet and just
get off on the music but I always like to think of it in
this way, that the music articulated in a good way, and
also the views are plain and clear and articulated well.
But I don’t want people to forget that I’m a poet.”
So how does a man who’s political views have not
changed for 20 years, and who’s musical style resists
influences manage to sound so contemporary? And
how does he manage to cross so many borders and
reach so many people? Maybe it’s because the issues
he writes about are still as relevant today as they were
in 1978 and until they go away, Linton Kwesi Johnson
will always be there, dragging them quite literally onto
the centre stage.
“In a sense, even though a lot of my poems are
about the black experience, as well as other things,
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I’m not a ghetto artist. My audience is not a black
audience, my audience is a broad cross section of
people, so I don’t think I’m preaching to the converted.”
He has played all over the world, from
Japan to Turkey, Iceland to Brazil, and with his new
album, he looks set to attract a whole new audience.
“I just make my records and write my poems and I’m
just grateful that somebody bothers to listen to it,” he
says. Somehow, I think it is the audiences and record
buying public who should be grateful. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published January 2000]
Ed Jones: This Is Pop
Gary Marshall
It wasn’t a rock gig, it was an event. Journalists from
all the major music papers were there, and even the
local newspaper had marked the event with a special
supplement. Celebrities air-kissed backstage, and the
band took the stage in front of thousands of people. For
Wigan musician Ed Jones, the gig should have been a
triumphant homecoming, a sign that the years of tours
and recording had been worthwhile. Unfortunately,
Jones was in the audience.
The band was The Verve, and the gig was the nowlegendary
show at Haigh Hall. Jones was the bassist in
the Tansads and, a few years previously, had played to
packed venues with The Verve as the band’s support
act. While Richard Ashcroft and co went stellar, The
Tansads stumbled from one disaster to another. Hating
his former friends, Jones quit the band in disgust.
Is Ed Jones bitter? You bet. Ostensibly the story of
a band whose success never matched their ambition,
This Is Pop is an extended v-sign to Jones’ former band
members, record company and peers. Over the course
of the book he paints a less than flattering picture of
several indie heroes, from Jarvis Cocker throwing his
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weight around in TV studios to thinly-disguised allegations
about Cast. The only band spared Jones’ vitriol is
Stiff Little Fingers, with singer Jake Burns portrayed
as a decent bloke in an industry notorious for backstabbing
and one-upmanship.
Although Jones’ anger sometimes overpowers the
story he’s trying to tell, This Is Pop is a fascinating insight
into the realities of the record business. As Jones
describes in detail, very few bands are actually making
any money – even though they were appearing on Top
Of The Pops, the seven members of the Tansads had a
combined income of £25 per week. Touring is shown
in its true colours, and the bickering over publishing
royalties is depressingly familiar.
It’s obvious from the text that Jones still believes that
the Tansads could and should have been pop stars, although
few non-fans are likely to agree. For most people,
the Tansads were an uncomfortable cross between
The Levellers and Half Man Half Biscuit, a moderately
talented novelty band forever destined to play the bottom
of the bill at festivals. Jones clearly doesn’t see
it that way, although his occasional descriptions of the
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band’s songs and lyrics do little to dispel the impression
that the band’s lack of success might not just be due to
the machinations of an evil record industry.
One of the problems with This Is Pop is that the
events described in the book are relatively recent, and as
a result Jones lacks the self-awareness found in similar
books such as Giles Smith’s Lost In Music. While no
doubt important to Jones, the frequent tangents describing
how he comes to terms with the death of his father
sit uncomfortably with the rest of the story, and the constant
bitterness frequently damages the credibility of his
tale. In particular, the portrayal of Tansads singer John
Kettle is so devoid of any redeeming qualities that you
start to wonder how Jones could have worked with him
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at all. Like most autobiographies, there’s a strong element
of self-justification running throughout the book,
and the few attempts at self-criticism are unconvincing.
Had Jones waited a few years before committing pen
to paper, however, This Is Pop would have lacked the
splenetic outbursts that make it so compelling.
For all its faults, This Is Pop is very enjoyable and
Jones is an entertaining writer. The vitriol is balanced
by some very funny moments and, if you have even a
passing interest in the music business, you’ll find plenty
to get your teeth into. If you’re an aspiring musician,
This Is Pop is an essential read – if you reach the end of
the book and still want to be a pop star, you’re probably
insane enough to make it. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published October 2000]
Gabriel Josipovici: On Trust
Stephen Mitchelmore
Jimmy Tarbuck, the no-nonsense Scouse comedian,
was on a chat show a few years ago and was asked
what kind of reading he preferred. Without pausing to
reflect he said, or rather bellowed, “Pure escapism!”
He didn’t elaborate. You wouldn’t expect him to. Actually,
he repeated the phrase, perhaps impressed by the
sudden acquisition of critical acuity: “Pure escapism!”
His answer troubled me. What was being escaped, I
wondered. As it was a chat show, answers weren’t on
the agenda and the host carried on about something
else. Of course, if he had pursued the issue, the ratings
would have declined as the audience pursued “pure
escapism” on another channel. With no answer for me,
however, the problem remained on my mind.
After reading this book, I realised why I was troubled:
Tarbuck wants literature to escape words as
well as the world. This had not occurred to me. The
words allow him to suspend his bellowed belief in their
unworldliness, allowing an escape into another world.
But the possibility that words might construe his belief
in the primacy of the real world, in the same way as it
facilitates escape into the other, is not admitted. Indeed,
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
it cannot be admitted without suggesting the possible
interdependency of real and written worlds. The implications
of such a possibility, resisted by Tarbuck, has
led to what we might call the literature of suspicion,
where doubt hinders every move toward plain truth
(think of the daunting classics of modern philosophy) as
well as to the literature of pure escape. This opposition
is usually referred to as “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow”.
However, because neither wants to contemplate any
alternative, both positions are essentially the same.
Gabriel Josipovici’s new critical work suggests as
much. On Trust: Art And The Temptations Of Suspicion
is an investigation into how admitting to the unworldliness
of literature might yet still allow free range into
truth. “The problem”, the author says, “is how to keep
suspicion from turning into cynicism and trust from
turning into facileness”. Initially, the suspicion of literature
described in the book seems to be a problem
of our century’s worst events rather than Tarbuck’s
everyday psychology. After all, the mechanised slaughter
of the First World War prompted the challenges of
Modernism, and the atrocities of the Second prompted
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Adorno’s infamous phrase that “to write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But this book pursues
suspicion of art deeper into the roots of our civilisation.
Josipovici traces the turn away from trust as far back
as Plato’s response to Homer and St Paul’s to the Bible.
Plato turned the gaze of reason on The Iliad and found
it wanting, while St Paul took strict moral lessons from
Old Testament stories where, as Josipovici show us,
there is only ambiguity. Both responses indicate a radical
shift in consciousness, one that we are still mired
in. The essay on Homer’s epics and Greek tragedy
reminds us of what came before. Josipovici calls it “the
double vision”: “a sense of life in all its goodness, happiness,
abundance; and death as finality, which must
be accepted as part of that abundance.” Despite our
promisingly Godless age, this sense of life and death
remains alien, probably because there is a space left
by God’s departure. We would rather have this space
for our purpose than be void of purpose, to rephrase
Nietzsche. Josipovici says this is the legacy of Plato’s
and St Paul’s removal of death as finality. Without the
immortality of the soul, the real world of goodness,
happiness and abundance comes under suspicion.
Emphasis is then placed on the individual. He or
she is subtly dislocated from the communal tradition.
As a result ‘a whole new world of inwardness’ is
opened. Hence the rise in Confessional literature (St.
Augustine, Rousseau), something still mistaken for the
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
deepest possible insight. Josipovici sums up this shift
in a startlingly sweeping passage:
“[the] denial of the dual vision … in the end entails
a denial of the world we live in and, ultimately, of ourselves
as embodied beings existing within that world.
Yet such is the nature of suspicion that, once unleashed,
it appears to produce a totally convincing and self-consistent
world, not simply an alternative way of looking
at things but the only way there can possibly be.”
This is remarkable because it questions the cultural
traditions of two millennia. Yet it is precisely tradition
that Josipovici sees as the way to resist suspicion. For
despite the internalisation of the shift inward, the legacy
of the ancients remained enough to appear in the work
of the most profound artists; Dante and Shakespeare
in particular. They show how we can always turn to
the past for help. These writers appear as pivotal in the
history of Western literature, and so too in the story this
book tells.
In spite of working within a craft tradition, both writers
managed to include in their work the sense of its
breakdown. Dante’s troubled yet necessary move away
from Latin into vernacular Italian was made with the
help, literally and fictionally, of Virgil, and Shakespeare
adapted stories of kings losing authority (Richard II and
Lear being the examples here) to represent the ‘essence
of a vanishing world’ – that is, the tradition of consensus
turning into one of authority – although of course ‘au-
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thority’ necessarily destroys tradition; authority asserts.
Without consensus, the old forms were compromised,
and there wasn’t any ready-made replacement.
What fascinates Josipovici is the way Dante and
Shakespeare renewed their respective arts without denying
this change. They did not become sterile artists
asserting dead formulas, nor did they lapse into silence.
Their Romantic descendants, on the other hand, were
plagued by both sterility and silence. Even those who
did manage to create something found it was not what
they expected. Wordsworth’s major work is only the
prelude to a grander work that never got written, and
Coleridge’s most powerful poems were about the loss of
his poetic sensibility. The Great Work became increasingly
difficult to conceive, not because everything had
been done already, but because the limits provided by
consensus had disappeared, and this is a double-edged
freedom: having no limit is also a limit. It is a condition
we are still with. Wordsworth and Coleridge managed
to achieve something only in the questioning of their
authority. Josipovici shows this was done as a response
to the change, as Dante and Shakespeare had responded
before them. Implicitly, it refutes Romantic notions of
the centrality of individual psychology and biography.
Still, however, our culture assumes personal authority
to be the pinnacle of artistic achievement. So the
popular awareness of the Romantics remains one of
‘self-expression’ – the assertion of the self in response
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
to some daffodils. That ‘self-expression’ is a limited
anarchy may explain why contemporary art has lost the
respect it once had. As art strives for the greater truth,
it has to admit to its limits – words on a page – and
thereby undermine its authority. Many budding artists,
discouraged by this paradox and keen to appeal to the
newly suspicious public, accept that writing is only a
plaything, a place of escape, mitigated perhaps by social
or historical relevance. The best thinkers turn instead to
disciplines (the very word reveals its attraction) such as
science, politics and philosophy, where the truth does
not have to rely on words (so they assume). Literature
gets Irvine Welsh.
So, when Josipovici reaches the 20th century, the
pressure is at its peak. Literature has lost much of
its pre-eminence; it has been superseded by other
forms. Yet perhaps those who claim that film is the
most important art of the 20th century are right only
in the way they are right if they say that Totalitarianism
is its most important political system. Film, like
a tyrannical regime, depends on appearances. It bears
no reflexive commentary. Literature is different.
Josipovici shows how three otherwise very dissimilar
20th-century writers responded to their suspicion of
art with reflexive commentary. Now this can often
lead to a novel without narrative tension, it’s what
gives ‘experimental’ art a bad name, but what makes
Proust, Kafka and Beckett special is the tension within
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their work. Josipovici argues that this is the tension
between extreme suspicion and the miraculous trust
of each writer in the act of writing.
In the first essay, he makes this point in exhilarating
fashion by showing how Paul de Man, a famed modern
deconstructor of literary pretension, misread Proust to
such an extent that Proust becomes the deconstructor
of theoretical pretension to come. What De Man disapproves
of is Proust’s openness to change, traced over
the 3,000 pages of In Search Of Lost Time, when he
should be demanding single, certain truth. De Man is,
Josipovici persuades us, an unwitting Romantic who
has mistaken disillusionment for truth. Proust, it seems,
is the true realist, helping us to see the overall shape of
life, where change and death are central, obscured only
by our everyday abstractions of reality. “In our daily
life, we are too busy, in too much of a hurry, to respond
fully to people or places”, Josipovici writes. “It takes
death to jolt us out of our abstractions, to make us realise
what the person really was in the fullness of their being.
Death or art.” This reminds us of his reading of Homer.
But whereas in ancient times such jolting gravity came
lightly, as it was internalised, with Proust and the other
BUY Gabriel Josipovici books online from and
Modernists it had to be achieved, like a game already
lost in advance; something we resist instinctively.
The essays on Kafka and Beckett are equally illuminating.
In each, Josipovici makes close readings to
show how their work moves forward without lapsing
into cynicism or facileness, or if it does, how each writer
learns from it. It reiterates Joyce’s words about mistakes
being the portals of discovery, at least to a genius.
But perhaps they are geniuses because they learn. And
perhaps true learning requires an element of trust, an element
of self-sacrifice. This would complicate applications
of, say, evolutionary psychology to the production
of art. Still, one might see this term “trust” representing
the author’s hesitation before commitment in that it is
a nebulous term, and also Romantic. Plato and St Paul
would then have good reason to be suspicious. Perhaps.
But at least it follows its own logic in not prescribing
a certain kind of art and instead leaves future artists to
find their own way. In the meantime, On Trust helps us
toward to the space where this rare art might emerge, a
place that turns out to be not one of mystical revelation,
but as ordinary as life and death itself, and perhaps all
the more revelatory for that. �
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Review [published January 2000]
Kevin Kelly: New Rules For The New Economy
Chris Mitchell
Despite its dry title, Kevin Kelly’s book isn’t just
another self-styled business bible for the information
age. Instead, it’s an overview of what he terms the
“network economy”, which is not only superseding
the old paradigms of the industrial economy but transforming
how we live.
The network economy has been brought about by
the ever-increasing connectivity between machines,
most obviously demonstrated by the internet. But Kelly
argues that such connectivity goes much deeper. The
continually decreasing cost of silicon chips means that
there will soon be one embedded in every object that
we make, from computers to clothes to chocolate bars.
These “dots of intelligence”, as Kelly terms them,
bring about the connection of everything to everything
and with it, the flow of information required for commerce
to make ever more informed decisions about
satisfying the demands of the consumer, wherever they
are in the world. It’s those businesses which react fastest
to the changing need of their customers who will
prosper from the network economy.
While one might expect visionary hyperbole from
BUY Kevin Kelly books online from and
the executive editor of Wired magazine, Kelly skilfully
avoids falling into the trap of proclaiming technological
utopia. He acknowledges that the idea of a silicon
chip in every item may seem sinister to some and emphasises
that technology is not a global panacea.
But his arguments about the rise of the network
economy are made all the more convincing by his
continual reference to real-world examples, such as
corporate behemoths General Motors and IBM struggling
to adapt to new demands precisely because of
their size. What was once their big advantage has now
become a disadvantage. Kelly is not so much interested
in speculation about the future as to what is happening
at the moment.
For the consumer in the street, this flow of information
should mean that they increasingly get exactly what they
want, as companies stop producing for mass markets and
start catering for sizeable minority markets. This extends
from tangible products to information itself. The way in
which the net is beginning to overshadow television as a
news source is one such example.
The only subject which Kelly doesn’t address is the
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glib use of the phase “global economy”, which in reality
misses out most of Africa and Asia, where many
have never made a phone call, let alone encountered a
silicon chip.
For a book which discusses the new opportunities
that technology is bringing both to consumers and
BUY Kevin Kelly books online from and
businesses, it seems strange that a huge section of
the world’s inhabitants appear to have been ignored.
New Rules For The New Economy does an excellent
job of articulating the realities of the network
economy, but it also begs the question about those
outside it. �
299
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Feature [published April 2000]
Naomi Klein: Ad Nauseum
Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo
“If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself…
there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s
spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are
fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves – it’s the
only way to save your fucking soul.” – Bill Hicks
After reading No Logo, you may feel that Bill Hicks
was understating things a little: by the end of the first
chapter you’ll be en route to the nearest McDonalds
with a crate of Molotov cocktails.
No Logo is a book about brands, which means it’s a
book about popular culture – Golden Arches, the Nike
‘swoosh’, Tommy Hilfiger jackets and Starbucks coffee.
It’s about the television you watch and the newspapers
you read, the theme parks you visit and the films
you go to see. It’s about magazines and rock music,
universities and the internet. In short, it’s a book about
everyday reality – or, rather, what lies behind it.
The connection between brands and corporate irresponsibility
has been highlighted before – Nike’s links
with third world exploitation are well documented – but
No Logo digs much deeper. In an attempt to describe
the rise of anti-corporatism and ‘culture jamming’,
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and
Klein covers issues as diverse as labour rights, censorship
and education, and how the rise of the brands has
affected them. The resulting book is likely to disturb
even the most hardened of cynics.
“When deep space exploitation ramps up, it will be
corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar
Sphere. The Philip Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.”
– Fight Club
In the early chapters of the book, Klein describes
the rise of the brands. Originally an importer of cheap
Japanese clothing, Nike successfully reinvented itself
as a “lifestyle company”, selling an ideal rather than
any particular physical product. As Klein reports, the
most successful brands don’t actually make anything
– from Tommy Hilfiger to Nike, they outsource their
manufacturing, and the companies themselves concentrate
on the all-important brand ubiquity.
Through advertising, the companies encourage people
to buy products that act as advertisements for the
brand itself, turning a nation into what one executive
gleefully describes as “walking billboards”. Levi’s
repaints an entire street to promote its Silver Tab jeans,
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footwear companies become synonymous with sporting
achievement, and beer companies co-opt music
festivals to promote their products. Like the narrator
in Fight Club, customers don’t choose products on the
basis of price or effectiveness; instead, they ask themselves
“what sort of dinner set defines me as a person?”
Where No Logo surprises is when it describes the
less obvious, and arguably less ethical, forms of brand
promotion. According to Klein, companies such as
Tommy Hilfiger use black ghettos as seedbeds for their
brands, recognising the white middle-class fetish for
black urban culture and employing local youths to ‘talk
up’ products to their peers. A similar technique was
used by the Daewoo car company, which paid students
to drive its cars and enthuse about them at every opportunity
in an all too real echo of The Truman Show.
If you spend any time on the internet, you’ll see entertainment
companies doing the same thing on message
boards and newsgroups.
Klein doesn’t need to lecture you about the increasing
ubiquity of sales messages – she lets the facts speak
for themselves as she describes universities where
Coca-Cola is “the official soft drink”, schools where
the mega-brands have their logos on textbooks and toilet
cubicles, and university departments wholly reliant
on corporate sponsorship.
“No Logo demeans the causes it purports to celebrate
by offering a narrow, fashion victim’s perspective on
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and
achievements that have undoubtedly helped to make
the world a better place.” – Barry Delaney, creative
partner at Delaney Fletcher Bozell, Management Today
Where No Logo excels is in the chapters detailing the
‘achievements’ that the above reviewer believes “have
undoubtedly helped to make the world a better place”.
Klein presents a powerful argument that global brands
have resulted in the exploitation of third world workers,
increased domestic unemployment, reduced domestic
wages, and the continual erosion of workers’ rights.
One executive responds to calls for a “living wage” by
saying, apparently without irony, “while the concept
is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities
and realities of our business environment”. When two
McDonalds employees successfully win the right to
union recognition – almost unheard of in the fast food
industry – the company simply shuts down the branch.
Klein argues that McDonalds has deliberately presented
itself as a company that employs teenagers while
they look for their first ‘real’ job. Despite a workforce
that is considerably older and better educated than the
pimply youths of repute, this successful image-making
enables the company to keep hours and wages at levels
which, in any other industry, would attract howls of
protest. Klein also describes the conditions inside call
centres, which have been described elsewhere as “the
dark, satanic mills of the technological revolution”.
In Britain, as in America, call centres are one of the
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few growth industries, traditionally located in areas of
high male unemployment and employing a workforce
largely comprised of part-time, female – and low-paid
– workers.
One of the most disturbing parts of the book is
when it focuses on the issue of censorship. As the
book explains, the strategies of retailers such as Wal-
Mart – essentially, bulldozing the competition out of
business – means that, as one record company executive
admits, “Wal-Mart is the only game in town”. It’s
something the chain hasn’t been slow to realise, and
the company’s pro-family stance means that it regularly
practices censorship. Magazine covers have to
be pre-vetted by the company; if they aren’t and Wal-
Mart feels the cover is ‘inappropriate’, the publication
will be de-listed – in other words, the retailer will
never stock that publication again. Record companies
regularly tone down releases to make them appropriate
for Wal-Mart’s censors, and magazines know better
than to feature anything less than wholesome. It’s
a worrying trend as, through sheer economic muscle,
Wal-Mart effectively controls what the public is allowed
to read, watch or listen to.
“Media concentration is high, and increasing. Furthermore,
those who occupy managerial positions in
the media … belong to the same privileged elites, and
might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations,
and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and
class interests as well. Journalists entering the system
are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to
these ideological pressures” – Noam Chomsky
One key area highlighted by No Logo is the increasingly
incestuous corporate world, where the same
companies own television stations, record companies
and newspapers. British readers will be familiar with
the Sun newspaper’s regular plugs for Sky TV and Fox
Movies, all of whom share the same parent company,
but the book describes how the links between companies
can alter the news itself. An expose of theme
parks by ABC was spiked after the reporters uncovered
shocking events at Disney, ABC’s owners, and Klein
describes a number of similar occurrences in other
news media.
This ‘corporate synergy’ has an effect on politics,
too. Klein recounts how journalists are expected to
give certain politicians an easy ride if those politicians
are responsible for handing out valuable broadcasting
licences to a newspaper’s parent company – a tradition
that’s also well-established in the UK.
Klein argues that corporate interference can also
cost lives. The majority of American universities work
in ‘partnership’ with brands, carrying out research or
helping develop new designs for training shoes. Klein
asks whether such links devalue the traditional independence
of universities – almost every sponsorship
contract, explains Klein, includes a ‘gagging clause’
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that prevents any criticism of the corporate benefactor.
The tale of the student expelled for wearing a Pepsi
t-shirt to his college’s Coca-Cola day is amusing, but
Klein quickly follows this by describing how corporatesponsored
drug trials uncovered potentially fatal side
effects in the sponsor’s products. When the researchers
attempted to publish their findings in scientific journals,
the universities were threatened with the termination of
their lucrative sponsorship contracts, and the researchers
were promptly sacked.
On the face of it, sponsorship seems the ideal solution
to the growing problem of funding for educational
institutions, but many campaigners are worried about
the growing presence of commercially funded learning
materials in schools and colleges: as the Centre
for Commercial-Free Schools notes, “when [the]
Consumers Union collected and evaluated examples
of these materials, it found that 80 percent contained
biased or incomplete information, and promoted a
viewpoint that favoured consumption of the sponsor’s
product or service or otherwise favoured the company
and its economic agenda”. In an article aimed
at schoolchildren, activist magazine Adbusters argues
that “companies profit by changing the way you think.
Representatives of the drug Prozac will come to your
school to ‘teach’ you about depression. Exxon has
[an] ecology curriculum that shows how clean the
environment of Alaska is”.
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and
“Let’s remember November 30 and the days that
followed as the launch of the Seattle Rebellion, the
anti-corporate resistance that will reshape society in
the next 10 years. It wasn’t a skirmish or an opening
salvo, but a manifesto etched in the streets by tens of
thousands of people.” – Adbusters
The closing chapters of No Logo investigate the growing
number of protests against globalisation, of which
the Seattle Riots of late 1999 and the current anti-GM
food campaigns have been the most visible. Although
both events occurred after the book’s completion, they
help to reinforce Klein’s conclusion that the rise of
global brands and increasing consumer awareness is
leading to a growing backlash.
One of the most visible forms of anti-corporatism
is ‘culture jamming’, espoused by groups such as
Adbusters and the band Negativland. Culture jamming
attempts to subvert the ubiquitous advertising
messages by spoofing them or altering their meaning
in Situationist-style pranks, and the Adbusters site in
particular offers a ‘culture jammer’s toolkit’ together
with a gallery of spoof adverts.
Klein rightly questions the effectiveness of these
tactics. While the proponents talk of their activities
with missionary zeal, the corporations are hardly
changing their policies as the result of a few spoof adverts.
As Klein points out, culture jamming has been
co-opted by the very advertisers it aims to subvert –
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see the recent “image is nothing. Thirst is everything”
campaign by Sprite, or MTV’s continual adoption
of ‘underground’ imagery to reinforce its own brand
identity. Even anti-corporatism has become a marketable
commodity, as the success of major studio picture
Fight Club demonstrates.
Klein is more enamoured with activists such as
the defendants in the McLibel trial, who successfully
raised awareness of many of McDonalds’ activities,
and the semi-political Reclaim the Streets movement.
Rather than the outlandish hippies the media portrays
them to be, Klein discovers that the people involved
in the movement are attempting to make people think
about the way in which every available part of civic
space is saturated with advertising.
It’s in this section of the book that No Logo falters.
While Klein clearly believes that Reclaim The Streets
is one of a number of groups that will define the politics
of the future, the fact that most of the population believe
the group’s members are all drug-crazed anti-car crusties
shows the difficulties inherent in swimming against
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and
the tide of globalisation and media concentration. The
book rightly highlights the role of the internet in helping
activists to organise and disseminate information,
and the outcry over genetically modified foods demonstrates
the effect that a well-organised, single-issue
campaign can have. By comparison, the demonstrations
against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle seemed
to have no clear agenda and, by degenerating into riots,
made it easy for the media to dismiss any legitimate
protest as the work of subversives and ‘terrorists’. As
Klein points out, Adbusters magazine is starting to
resemble the very media companies it urges its readers
to fight against, while she cheerfully admits the irony of
massive global corporations publishing anti-corporate
polemics such as No Logo, which are marketed just like
any other product.
No Logo is a powerful read – Chomsky without the
paranoia – and, if you have even the slightest interest
in popular culture, it’s an essential one. Unfortunately,
while it’s easy to share Klein’s concerns, it’s much
harder to share her optimism about the future. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 2004]
Rem Koolhaas: Content
Edmund Hardy
Rem Koolhaas has been thinking about Big Brother
and has come up with a new concept: Big Vermeer. I
imagined contestants marooned in very detailed interiors.
Actually, the connection is more an art-historical
musing: we want to see people doing things indoors,
and in 1667 it was ‘A woman writing a letter’ whereas
now it’s ‘A contestant in the diary room’. It is “an
alchemy of transparency and daylight” which trades
in intimacy. This is one of around 80 articles, features
and graphic presentations rearranged into a book from
their original place in Content, the magazine of Rem
Koolhaas’ OMA-AMO firm.
There’s something ineffably cool about Koolhaas,
that wiry and opinionated architect who is utopian
and Postmodern, who floats in “the amniotic fluid of
global fashion” and who has designed many a dazzling
project – see his in-construction fortune-cookie shaped,
criss-cross silver design for China Central Television
in Beijing. In his practice the idealism and breadth of a
Mies van der Rohe or a Walter Gropius is fused with a
political and social engagement with the world.
OMA’s previous statement book was SMLXL, a big,
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heavy, brick-like publication. Content is paperback
and flimsy, colourful and kaleidoscopic. “Dense,
cheap, disposable” as the editor says on page 16. “It
is almost out of date already. Content is dominated
by a single theme, ‘Go East’. It is an attempt to illustrate
the architect’s ambiguous relations with the
forces of globalization, an account of seven years
spent scouring the earth – not as business traveller
or backpacker but as a vagabond – roving, searching
for an opportunity to realise the visions that make
staying at home torturous. Content is, beyond all,
a tribute to OMA-AMA’s commitment to engaging
the world by inviting itself to places where it has no
authority, places where it doesn’t ‘belong.’” Koolhaas
wants this book to be the equivalent of doing
the splits in classical ballet: a moment, immobile,
stretched between realization and speculation, as, I
suspect, he believes architecture to be.
This book is a compendium, a glossy cabinet of idea,
observation, wit from Rem and his associates. It has
politics but no single viewpoint. It arcs from the US west
coast to Japan. It is various but always interesting like a
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particularly high quality global magazine.
It begins by cataloguing ‘urbicide’ – violence in urban
environments – from the “subversion by mass transit”
of Los Angeles to “cyclical construction, restriction,
and destruction” in Jerusalem; West Bank and Gaza
settlements. The articles here are urgent, sometimes
playful, always serious. Koolhaas finds “the greatest
concentration of Utopias ever known” in Moscow; the
idea and practice of a museum is challenged in articles
on LACMA (LA’s big all-round gallery) and the
Hermitage in relation to the market influence; Prada is
seen askance in ‘Prada Yada’ and other pieces. There’s
a long and excited, er, presentation (full of maps and
figures and ideas about the need to build a “Eurasian
arc”) on the EU and its political possibilities. Koolhaas
has designed a new flag which consists of all the EU
national flags squashed into strips and presented from
west to east: a kind of United Colors bar-code, a strong
‘ID’ to stand next to the US Stars and Stripes and the
blue and white of the UN. Britain’s tabloids got hold of
that one and The Sun soon launched an attack: “nutty”,
“batty”, they said while reporting how “expert opinion”
had deemed the flag to be “a deckchair.”
Elsewhere, we look forward to Expo 2010 in
‘Shanghai Exponential’ and consider what makes
a successful World Expo. London’s 1851 Great
Exhibition showcased the advances of industrial
revolution in all nations, and made a mark on popular
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imagination as did New York’s World Fair of 1939
and Osaka’s 1970 Expo: tying into Content’s theme
of ‘going East’, the forthcoming Expo 2010 is seen
as an opportunity to reorient the world’s idea of itself
and its designs for the future. I particularly enjoyed
a piece on libraries and the search for civic space –
“The library represents, maybe with the prison, the
last of the uncontested moral universes. The moral
goodness of the library is intimately connected to the
conceptual value of the book” – and the Koolhaas
solution, in Seattle, is a large honeycombed building
of huge spaces and screens showing the arrival and
exit of books complete with a new “continuous ribbon”
numbering system from 000 to 999 to replace
the “much-compromised” Dewey Decimal.
Whether one likes the idea of a central Mixing
Chamber and a Book Spiral or not, the energy and
scope of his plans and ideas are exhilarating. Every
regular user of public libraries can relate to the search
for biblio perfection. My personal favourites are the
beautifully lit Berlin City library and the pod-interior
at Peckham. Turn the page and Content moves on to
plywood minimalism, perfume flasks to mix your own
male-female smells while on the go, and a short history
of post-Berlin wall world politics (‘The Second
Empire’).
That’s not to mention the 1km high Hyperbuilding
or ‘Red Radio’, the story of how Communists in the
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60s battled for Africa’s radio-waves in their belief that
global revolution would start on the heart-shaped continent.
And then the man who once wrote Delirious New
York, writes about that city in decline, and instead gets
delirious over Hanoi, Shanghai and Seoul.
Rem Koolhaas is ever the iconoclast – against the
grain, outspoken, inspired. In the tradition of architects
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who write idiosyncratic and visionary books – Le Corbusier’s
Towards A New Architecture, Robert Venturi’s
Complexity And Contradiction In Architecture – the
contribution of Koolhaas’ latest is in its wide-ranging
attack, its fearless engagement with the world – fearless
in that it accepts its own ephemeral place at one
particular moment. This, then, is Content. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 1999]
Kruder And Dorfmeister: The K&D Sessions
Chris Mitchell
Despite the rise of dance music in the 90s to the point
where it’s arguably overtaken rock’n’roll as the defining
sound of popular music, remixing is still something of
a dirty word. It’s unsurprising given the way pedestrian
remixes are continually used as filler on singles and
even albums when an artist has run out of inspiration to
produce anything new.
That’s not to say that there aren’t remixes which beat
the original track hands down – Fatboy Slim’s charttopping
reworking of Cornershop’s ‘Brimful Of Asha’
being a classic example – but they tend to be the sonic
exception rather than the rule. Even when remixes are
entrusted to other artists, there’s no guarantee of quality,
as exemplified by the uniformly awful mixes of
Underworld’s floorfilling anthem ‘King Of Snake’,
murdered by the likes of Dave Clarke, Slam and, er,
Fatboy Slim.
The easy way out is to produce a track that sounds
nothing like the original whatsoever. This may well
produce something musically more rewarding, but it’s
missing the real point of remixing – and that’s bringing
something new to a track without destroying what’s
there in the first place. Cue Kruder and Dorfmeister,
two DJs from Vienna who’ve quietly produced some of
the most stunning and startling remixes in the last five
years and made it their trademark to leave the spirit of
a track intact while twisting it into something utterly
different. In fact they’ve been so quiet this album came
out last year and I only heard it a month ago…
The K&D Sessions is a double CD compilation of the
best of those mixes – 140 minutes of music that takes in
artists as far apart as Roni Size, Depeche Mode, Bomb
The Bass and Bones Thugs ‘N Harmony. Citing names
is a bit pointless though, because it would be wrong to
think of The K&D Sessions as just a bunch of individual
remixes, only listening to the tracks where you’re
familiar with the original. Half the fun is that K&D
take on tracks by folk you’ve never heard of – Rainer
Trüby Trio, anyone? K&D revel in mixing all sorts of
music, whether it’s rap, jazz, jungle or whatever other
genre you care to name. As such, it’s an immaculately
crafted, unclassifiable album to get lost in, where every
track imperceptibly segues into the next so that you’re
never quite sure where you are, but wherever you are is
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worth hanging around.
As you’d expect from a record on a label called G-
Stoned, the overall atmosphere of The K&D Sessions
is laid back – you won’t hear any screeching 303s
or encounter superfast bpms here. Instead, there are
beautifully precise drums and sublimely warm deep
bass lines which create their own distinct sound without
becoming repetitious. Add their ear for dropping
just enough melody over the top to create a simple but
opulent sound, and you have music that makes 3 in the
morning a wonderful place to be. If you really want a
half-arsed “sounds-a-bit-like” reference, then it would
have to be David Holmes, but the comparison doesn’t
do either parties justice.
K&D are also refreshingly fond of keeping vocal
tracks almost intact, rather than obliterating them completely.
Nowhere does this stand out more than their
sublimely moody mix of Depeche Mode’s ‘Useless’,
where Dave Gahan’s weary voice is given centre stage
over nothing besides pared down bass and is all the
more powerful for it. Not that K&D are techno-angst
merchants, producing beautiful but chilly soundscapes
in their bedrooms – their sound is organic, elegant,
eclectic and endlessly inventive.
In short, then, The K&D Sessions is one of those
albums that comes out of the blue, providing a whole
bunch of surprises to make even the most jaded get
excited about music again. It’s a bit like when a friend
gives you a tape of bands you’ve never heard of and
you wind up leaping round the living room listening
to it. These are remixes which transcend their original
incarnations to become K&D’s own and a whole new
universe to explore with it. What more do you want for
£12.99? �
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309
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 2002]
Andrey Kurkov: Death And The Penguin
Stephen Mitchelmore
This book is a page-turner. The simplicity and overt
plainness of the prose combine with the perverse congeniality
of the foreground subject matter to make one
carry on, ignoring worldly concerns. And while the plot
is complex it is also strangely unimportant, compared,
that is, to the foreground.
Viktor, a 39-year-old journalist, lives in a tenement
block in Kiev, capital of the relatively new nation of
Ukraine (not The Ukraine). Like many of us in the Deregulated
World, he doesn’t have a permanent job and
relies instead on contacts to bag the odd journalistic
assignment. There is a lot of time off. We join him as he
tries to make use of his empty time by writing fiction,
something he’s always dreamed of doing on a permanent
basis. He wants to escape the teasing ghostliness
of the short story and write what the real world thinks
is the real thing: a novel. Instead, he sits at his kitchen
table and writes another short story, later hawking it
around a few newspapers.
This might be the beginning of many other worthy,
socially accurate novels portraying post-Soviet economic
‘reform’. But Viktor has a saving grace for the
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reader: his pet Misha, the penguin of the title. Misha
came from an impoverished local zoo when they offered
its animals as pets to anyone who could provide
food for them. Viktor took the penguin because,
abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had
been feeling lonely: “But Misha brought his own kind
of loneliness”, we’re told, “and the result was … two
complementary lonelinesses”.
Misha’s presence in the novel is glorious. Whatever
Viktor does, Misha is somewhere in the background
asking for attention by not asking. We always want to
know what he’s doing, how he is, what he’s feeling.
Whenever we read of Viktor’s exploits, and they are
copious, we think of Misha standing somewhere in the
background, his emotions, if he has any, concealed by
his expressionless exterior. The only hint of an answer
comes when Viktor runs him a cold bath and he flops
into it happily, or when he is taken to a frozen lake during
the winter months and he disappears into a fishing
hole for ages, bewildering alcoholic fisherman when he
pops out again.
In my fictional experience, only Karenin in Kundera’s
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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, and Balak in S.Y.
Agnon’s Only Yesterday do pet animals (in this case
both dogs) appear so accurately and memorably. However,
Misha is a suffering penguin: he has depression.
An elderly penguinologists, as he calls himself, tells
Viktor that Misha is superheated under his two layers
of fat, and nobody would be happy feeling like that,
would they? Viktor feels sorry for his pet but doesn’t
seem to make much effort to cheer him up except to ply
him with lots of seafood.
Misha remains in the background as most of the
novel is taken up with Viktor’s life. He gets a job writing
obituaries for the main Kiev newspaper. He makes
a name for himself with the philosophical flourishes
and elegiac, allusive nature of his obelisks, as he calls
them. His editor pays him well in US dollars. The plot
revolves around the behind-the-scenes ramifications of
these obituaries. This is also why we turn the pages,
though more in agitation than pleasure. We want to find
out what is going on and how it all works out.
In the meantime, and the meantime seems to last most
of the entire 227 pages, we live in Viktor’s world, full of
events suggesting something dark going on elsewhere,
waiting to spring into his life with violence, yet also
quite flat. A man, touchingly known to us as Misha-nonpenguin,
leaves his young daughter Sonya with Viktor
and then disappears. A man turns up and says he’s taking
Sonya away with him, but he soon disappears too,
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and then Viktor is hired by a mobster to attend funerals
with Misha at $1,000 a time. But nothing is revealed;
Viktor worries, relaxes, worries again. Time passes,
that’s all. A friendly militiaman offers Nina, his niece,
as Sonya’s nanny, and she promptly becomes Viktor’s
lover without, it seems, any passion passing between
them (that “complementary loneliness” again). Life
carries on as dully as usual and Viktor continues with
his obelisks at his kitchen table.
So what makes this such an amusing, affecting, readable
novel? Well, if Misha the penguin is so attractive
to us in his silence, mystery and apparent sadness, then
the “death” of the title is his abstract equal – standing
behind the action, waiting, inscrutable, not asking for
anything, yet preying on one’s mind (in fact, I’m told
that the Russian original means “Death of a Stranger”).
The pleasure it affords us as we read is the same pleasure
Viktor gets from his writing. It is an oddly comforting
voyeurism on life in general, a life which is elsewhere,
the subject of endless conjecture (the ‘plot’ we are all
in search of). We watch it all from the perspective of a
place where nothing happens – Viktor’s mind, the obituaries
he writes, this novel in particular and literature
in general. We watch it all with death and the penguin
blinking impassively in the corner, and we are oddly
moved. We don’t want it to end, no matter how plainly
written or routinely translated it is. It complements our
loneliness. �
311
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published January 2005]
Emma Larkin: Secret Histories
Chris Mitchell
This could well be my book of the year. Ostensibly
an attempt to retrace the physical origins of George
Orwell’s novel Burmese Days, Secret Histories: Finding
George Orwell In A Burmese Tea Shop is actually
a superbly concise and deeply scary history lesson in
the fate of pre- and post-colonial Myanmar. (It’s been
published in the USA under the less lyrical title Finding
George Orwell In Burma)
Governed by one’s of the world’s longest serving
military dictatorships, which has managed to wholly
destroy the infrastructure and prosperity of arguably
Asia’s most naturally wealthy country, Secret
Histories provides a ground-level view of the perils
of living in modern-day Myanmar. Emma Larkin, a
British woman who speaks fluent Burmese (sadly her
biographical sketch is, indeed, too sketchy to ascertain
much else), follows the geographical path of Orwell’s
five-year residency within Burma, revisiting the cities
and outposts of one of the former British Empire’s
most far-flung territories.
Along the way she exposes quite how much Myanmar
has become the living embodiment of Orwell’s Nine-
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teen Eighty Four. All politics, teaching and literature
are ruthlessly policed and scrutinised, with imprisonment
for the smallest misdemeanours regularly meted
out. Torture and disappearance are the norm. Corruption
and unemployment are rife, and Myanmar’s one
sole beacon of hope, the activist Aung San Suu Kyi, is
still under house arrest. (Larkin explains the reverence
surrounding Suu Kyi is due to her being the daughter
of Aung San, who is widely considered the hero-father
of the nation who led Burma’s independence from
the British; her continued refusal to be intimidated by
the murderous tactics of the regime have led them to
repeatedly smear her as a “foreign devil” thanks to her
marriage to Englishman Michael Aris).
Secret Histories, like Anna Funder’s Stasiland
which describes life in the totalitarian communist state
of East Germany, provides a personal perspective of
a truly appalling regime that lets the reader begin to
understand what it is like to live day to day under such
an oppressive government. One thing that endeared me
to the Burmans straight away was their love of reading,
as described by Larkin: unsurprising due to the lack of
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real information which they receive, but also a national
pastime and passion that has led numerous people to
preserve secret libraries of books that have otherwise
been banned by the authorities.
Whilst everyday life is undeniable misery in Myanmar,
the people who Larkin describes are still full of
life, some how finding the will to live and live fully
despite their most restrictive of circumstances and to
try and make tiny but vital movements towards making
their country become free again.
This book is transformative – before I began reading
it I knew virtually nothing about Burma – at the end of
its 230 pages, I feel I’ve gained at least a valuable gloss
on its modern history and, wholly secondary to that,
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an insight into what drove Orwell to write – it was on
his return from Burma to England that he horrified his
family by announcing his intention to resign from the
colonial service and become a writer.
Secret Histories is truly a vital book, and, with
Stasiland, seems to be opening up a new genre (I’m
hating myself for writing these words): female writers
providing a personal perspective of political troubles;
not personal as in their own perspectives, but in that
they piece together the histories of the states they’re
writing about through the stories of those who have
lived within it. This strikes me as a vital counterbalance
to our more traditional, and of course wholly necessary,
overview histories. �
313
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published September 2006]
Abby Lee: Girl With A One Track Mind
An interview by Chris Mitchell
[Ed note – this interview was conducted before Abby
Lee’s real identity was revealed by a ‘quality’ Sunday
newspaper days after the publication of GWAOTM.
You can read about Abby being stalked by journalists
and the subsequent fallout on her blog]
Getting the book published must be a real buzz.
Do you plan to keep going with the blog and write
more books (i.e. go pro), or will working in film
remain your priority?
It has been a real buzz, yeah: I’m very excited about
it all. I really hope the book will reach more people that
would otherwise not have read the blog, and that will
get them reading about sex too. It would be wonderful
if a debate about sex could ensue – it’s about time
we talked openly about it, I think. As for continuing
the blog, well, I’ve been writing it for over two and
a half years and I have no plans to stop yet: I enjoy it
too much. I think as long as it gives me pleasure and I
have the time, I will keep going with it. I am currently
working on another couple of book ideas which I hope
to develop further; it would be wonderful if I got to
pursue even more of my writing now.
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You get a lot of comments on your blog and you
interact a lot with your readers. How much time
does it take up? Do you generally like your readers
– do you think they get where you’re coming from?
I do try to reply to comments on the blog as best I
can, because the interactivity between my readers and
myself is an important part of the blogging experience.
I don’t get a lot of time to do this though, so my input
can be a bit sporadic at times. That doesn’t seem to
matter though: often my readers will be having a debate
with each other in the comments box and I really enjoy
reading their opinions and views.
Overall my readers are a pretty clued-up lot and I
feel hugely complimented that they enjoy reading my
words – and come back for more. Occasionally I get
the odd troll – who really doesn’t get what I am about,
or who feels they need to make a moral statement about
women/sex/sexuality – but my regular readers will
challenge their views and often, come to my defence
too. When I started the blog, I never thought that complete
strangers would be arguing my perspective on
sex; I am honoured that they do.
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
There also seems to be a burgeoning community
of other sex bloggers (for want of a better phrase) –
has that let you meet new friends online or off?
I’ve met quite a few bloggers actually, both sex
writers, and non-sex writers. I’m not sure if we’re a
‘community’ as such, but there does seem to be a kind
of ‘blogger’s code’ which we all uphold: respecting
privacy and anonymity, regardless of the subject matter
we write about. It has been very refreshing to meet
other sex bloggers – to know that I am not alone in my
thoughts – and I count a few of them as good friends.
Ironically, the bloggers I’ve met are the only people
that know ‘me’ as well as know my blogging persona;
none of my offline friends know I write the blog.
Can you talk as frankly to your real life friends
about your feelings as you can write them down for
the blog?
Sadly, no. I am reasonably open with my friends
generally, but the explicitness of my thoughts – both
sexual and emotional – are hidden from them. I’d love
to tell them all about the blog and book, but it would
really be like them reading my personal diary, which is
not something I want to happen!
What’s your best / worst experiences to come
out of writing the blog and being a minor net celeb
(albeit anonymous)?
The best thing to come out of writing the blog, is to
know that I have, in some way, touched some people.
BUY Abby Lee books online from and
Receiving emails from both women and men telling me
I have struck a chord with them, or that they empathise
with me, or that they have learned from my experiences,
makes what I do seem so worthwhile. I never thought
that there would be so many people who connected to
my writing; with the thousands of emails sent to me,
saying exactly that, I guess I was wrong.
The worst thing to come out of writing the blog, is,
I suppose, the fact that I – and my life – still have to
remain so hidden, and that I can’t enjoy the success
my writing has achieved. I’m in no rush to lose my
anonymity – I really do need to uphold my, and others’
privacy – but it’s frustrating that I can’t proudly state
out in the open, that the blog and book are my doing.
So, sadly, there’ll be no book signings, or meeting my
readers, or anything like that. It’s a shame, but I’ve
made this bed now, so to speak, so I’ll just have to lie
in it…
With the blog to book angle and the witty explicit
sex discussions angle, there will be inevitable comparisons
to Belle De Jour’s debut. Did you read and/
or rate her book?
I’ve been reading Belle’s blog since she began writing
it; it was what inspired me to start my own. I haven’t
read her book, so couldn’t comment, though I would
say from her blog, that I think she’s a superb writer and
although her writing is a bit emotionally distant, I love
her style. I have no idea what she’s like as a person,
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but I’d definitely meet up with her for a beer: I think
we’d have a few laughs. And perhaps exchange some
sex tips too.
Do you think there’s more room for more women
to write sex blogs? Is it good education for men to
be reading this stuff so they can get more of a clue
about what women are really after?
I think there’s room for everyone to write sex blogs,
not just women. I am overjoyed that there seem to be
so many female voices out there though: it’s about time
that a different – non-sexist, non-passive, progressive
female – perspective on sexuality broke though into the
mainstream, so the more of us doing it, the better.
As for men reading and learning, well, from the
amount of emails I get from men, it does appear that
this is the case; that they really DO want to know what
women want, not just so they can please women, but
so they can enjoy sex more themselves. If just one
couple have better sex as a result of a guy reading my
blog, then I think that’s an achievement and something
to be applauded.
If a girl wanted to start out writing her own thing
or getting involved with talking to others on their
own blog, what would you advise?
Would it sound corny if I said “just do it”? Because
really, that’s all she’d need to do: just start up a blog
and write – that’s all I did. I wrote for myself, from
the heart; I have always been honest and open about
BUY Abby Lee books online from and
my thoughts, and somehow, picked up readers along
the way who wanted to read what I wrote about. And
whilst doing it, I learned of others doing the same, and
have made some good online friends as a result. It’s
worth doing – if you have something to say, and the
time and dedication to say it.
Given your anonymity, how peculiar did it feel to
meet up with Lex from Naked Loft Party when he’s
already familiar with your entire sexual gamut?
Is there something liberating about that? Does it
create new taboos? Or does it just make everything
exceedingly polite?
It was brilliant fun meeting up with Lex from
Naked Loft Party [NSFW, unsurprisingly]. It was a
bit odd, with both of us having pseudonyms and not
knowing what each other looked like – it felt like a
blind date when we met – but it was wonderful to
finally meet in the flesh, so to speak, the man whose
writing I had admired.
It wasn’t odd at all that he knew of my entire sexual
history, because firstly, I also knew of his, and secondly,
I knew from his writing that he was very open-minded
person and would think nothing of any of my sexual
escapades. So when we met, I felt relaxed in his presence;
it was a meeting of minds – of like-minded minds
– and the connection we had online, translated into a
face-to-face one immediately.
It actually did feel very liberating meeting him, be-
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cause I could be myself completely and not maintain a
facade – it felt like a huge weight was lifted from me,
very refreshing.
A lot of your posts recognise that women should
be able to be wholly uninhibited in bed without being
chastised for doing so by men, other women or
society in general. Do you think things are getting
better for women in that sense?
I think, and hope, that we are moving in the right direction
with this. I do, of course, support the view that
women are not passive creatures who have sex ‘done’
to them: we have wants and needs and desires, just as
men do. However, I don’t want to preach that women
‘should’ have to be some kind of ‘tiger’ in the bedroom,
because I think that gives off the wrong message to
young women and men: sex should be about equality,
about two people sharing something, about having fun,
not about one person fulfilling a fantasy representation
of what their sexuality ‘should’ be.
Saying that, whilst I do seriously question the view
of female sexuality in the media (given that women
are almost exclusively either ‘pure virginal’ types, or
‘naughty slutty’ types), I also think that women do
need to get more active in bed and take charge of their
sexuality – regardless of how society views them. We
need to move beyond the stereotypes and create a new
version of our sexuality; one that will encompass our
desires and wants – from our viewpoint.
BUY Abby Lee books online from and
Hopefully by doing this, more women will be able
to state their needs; will be able to express their wants;
will be able to take a more active role in their own
enjoyment; and as a result, both women and men will
have better sex. That’s what I reckon, anyway, and from
the emails I’ve been sent, I suspect many others think
this way too. My fingers are crossed that this happens:
having a more open dialogue about sex can only be a
good thing.
And finally – do you have any words of advice for
young people?
First, have oral sex, and by this, I mean TALK about
it. People need to be able to have an open dialogue
about sex before doing it, then they’ll be able to discuss
what they want and how they feel. And, as a bonus,
talking about it can be like foreplay – it can be very
erotic to discuss what you might like to do – so having
a dialogue is an important part of the sex act.
Second, I would always advise having safe sex. I
always have condoms on me, and think anyone thinking
of having sex, should do so too: there is no excuse.
Boys need to practise putting them on when alone,
so they become familiar with them; girls can practise
putting them (with their hands or mouth) on a sex toy
or even a cucumber, for that matter. The point is to get
familiar with them, so it becomes part of the sex act:
it can be very erotic doing so. If someone refuses to
use a condom, then refuse to have sex with them: it’s
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just not worth the risk – to either person. Saying ‘no’
to sex should be just as acceptable as saying ‘yes’, in
my opinion.
Lastly, having an open mind, a willingness to learn,
being giving, and being considerate, are much more
important qualities to have in bed, than attempting to be
the world’s greatest lover. Talking about what you want
with your lover, expressing how you feel, being safe
in what you do, will all contribute to a good time – so
have fun! �
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Review [published April 2010]
Wyndham Lewis: Blast
Ben Granger
First published in 1914, Wyndham Lewis’ Blast has just
been republished by Thames And Hudson. For centuries,
when the Great British reading public scanned the
covers of their journals, from Blackwoods through to
the Edinburgh Review , the only words they saw were
in Roman typeface, crowded and tiny. Imagine their
thoughts on encountering this shock pink punch, this
blinding black statement of intent, forcing the eye to
flinch in its wake. Most would find it abhorrent, as people
do with genuinely new ideas. But these ideas tend
to find a way. This cover was an electric flash, heralding
a storm threatening to engulf the formal pastoral of
before. The aftershock of this storm still reverberates.
What was Blast? Ostensibly, the first “journal of
the Vorticist movement”, published in 1914, which
only ever made it to issue two. In effect, the warped
premature brain-child of one Percy Wyndham Lewis,
a spiky spiteful self-styled Enemy of the Art establishment,
and Vorticism (“of the Vortex”) was his vehicle
for unleashing a crusade against them. Each word and
image is heavy with the scent of his venom, slashing
at those who wouldn’t accept his self-proclaimed
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genius. The one truly original British art movement of
the first half of the 20th century was animated almost
single-handedly by one man’s bile. But what was in
it? Blast includes examples of Vorticist art by Lewis
and his contemporaries, his own art and literary criticism,
his unstage-ably extreme two man play Enemy
Of The Stars, poetry by Ezra Pound, and short stories
by Rebecca West and Ford Maddox Brown. Most
notable however was its first section, and most unique
construct, the Blast Manifesto.
This manifesto is printed in the typography of contemporary
posters, those advertising gaudy entertainments
such as the circus or boxing match, and cascades forth
in aphorism heavy bombast: ”We start from opposite
statements of a chosen world / Set up violent structure
of adolescent clearness between two extremes … We
only want Tragedy if it can clench its side muscles like
hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like
a bomb…”
Deliberately overwrought, powered by excess as
if by rocket fuel, ready to declare war on art and the
world, “BLASTing” and “BLESSing” the world as if
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from stance of some rogue Norse deity. English humour
is first BLASTED “quack English drug for stupidity
and sleepiness/ Arch enemy of REAL, conventionalising
like gunshot, freezing supple REAL in ferocious
chemistry of laughter” and then BLESSED “the great
barbarous weapon of the genius among races. The wild
MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA to IDEA, in the
ancient fair of LIFE”. France is seen from both sides
too, damned for “SENTIMENTAL GALLIC GUSH”,
praised for “Masterly pornography (great enemy of
progress), depths of elegance, Great Flood of LIFE
pouring out of wound of 1797.” Entrancing poetic pronouncements,
mad with possible wisdom, spark with
the force and rapidity of machine gun fire. “BLESS
ALL SEAFARERS. They exchange not one LAND
for another, but one ELEMENT for another. The more
against the less ABSTRACT. BLESS the vast planetary
abstraction of the OCEAN.”
Here was an artform not seen before: writing, but
writing which seeks to attain the form of visual art
rather than literature, more precisely aiming to emulate
the ever-shifting contours of the vortex from which the
movement takes its name. (Lewis’ friend James Joyce
was also beginning to cultivate this ‘writing as visual
art’, but Ulysses was only started after Blast was first
published, and would not be finished for a decade.)
This is a writing which seeks to shake and unsettle the
mind rather than cultivate or ‘improve’ it. The thoughts
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
of the manifesto making up this vortex are therefore
wildly and wilfully contradictory, at once revolutionary
and reactionary. The contradiction is essential. Lewis
states in the manifesto “We need the unconsciousness
of humanity – their stupidity, animalism and dreams”
also “Intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter and seer, not
in the object or content.” The message is essentially the
form itself, and so taken as a piece of writing, it lays
itself open to charges of shallowness, meaninglessness.
What is the use of a manifesto that spends equal time
lauding and assailing the same targets?
But there is no ‘use’, because this is art, all of which
as Wilde said is “quite useless”. The thrill of the angular
sentences, the unexpected words jutting forth like rogue
corkscrews, produce a kinetic rush which is its own
reward. Grammar, morality, congruity, indeed sense
are all swept away by the vortex, an acidic word play
which finds its apotheosis in an art of destruction, destruction
of form and format, of meaning itself. And yet
at the same time, one can find more truth and wisdom
in its scattershot pronouncements than in a hundred
more measured and erudite tomes, in the same way that
Nietzsche is read far more than Kant. His conclusions
may be wrong most of the time, but he has a far more
interesting time getting there. Then again, this is not
philosophy, but entertainment. Entertainment indeed,
this is writing as art, but taken at its most base level, it
is essentially humorous.
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The manifesto is a hilariously transgressive statement
of intent, it’s sadistic screed sham utopian, in the
style of Swift (one of its “BLESSED” writers.) This is
a satirical cabaret as much as an exercise avant aesthetics.
Taking apart England, France, “the years 1837 to
1900 – abysmal inexcusable middle-class”, this stance
of the grand nemesis, while its hatred may be genuine,
is also a knockabout routine, and Lewis knows it. This
stance of The Enemy is an anti-humanistic counter-pose
to prevailing morality which presents the artist as an
evil deity. Indeed, it presents the artist as a simultaneous
Anti-Christ and anarchist – to quote a certain later
descendant – and was every bit as much a cabaret act
when his forbear performed it.
Moving on into the pages of Blast – after the art of
Wyndham Lewis’ words, the art of his images. Living in
the aftershock, we may take it for granted, but this jagged,
fissured assault on the figurative sensibility must
have seemed terrifyingly alien at the time, inorganic, a
re-scalpelling of the soul made possible by the machine
age. They would be right, but this optical poetry creates
the same psychic rush his writing achieves. Take the
fractured curves of ‘Timon of Athens’, or ‘Slow Attack’.
The angular menace, the sheer visceral abandon
of these can still thrill today.
The other contributors to Blast compliment the attack.
Pound’s poetry is still in its infancy, but is still
so unlike anything which has come before to add
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
new currents to the storm. Rebecca West’s short story
‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ is the most ‘conventional’
narrative here (Lewis, ever contrary, said it was the
only thing in the journal he enjoyed not written by
himself) but its tale of a husband and wife bludgeoning
each other in a lake combines an elegantly icy
authorial surface voice with a savage energy beneath
which add further prismatic whirls to the vortex. The
art prints of Frederick Etchells, Edward Wadsworth,
Cuthbert Hamilton and Jacob Epstein take Lewis’
style into still more redolent contours. But they don’t
match the inhuman originality of the master. It is the
painting and the prose of Wyndham Lewis that makes
this vortex spin. Both the prints and the writing are
a poetry of the sharp surface, a harsh, perverse carapace,
unalloyed and unique. Lewis is the consummate
elitist, untainted by the muck of mediocrity.
The achievement of Blast is to create an aesthetic
all of its own, a complete mental landscape every bit
as unique as Impressionism or Cubism, feeding into
the Dada and Surrealism that followed it. The merest
fragment can find an image of the whole movement,
perhaps the truest definition of ‘original’ art. Breton’s
Surrealist Manifesto had a clear debt to the manifesto
of Blast. Search on down the decades and the debt continues.
From the whirling non-linear narratives of Burroughs
and Atrocity Exhibition era J.G. Ballard, to the
savage surreal satire of Chris Morris’ BrassEye, each
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owe something to its serrated edge. In music, Mark E
Smith of The Fall has made explicit the fact his savage
jet-sprays of consciousness owe much to this original
renegade. The late Malcolm McLaren was never so
honest about the influence of Lewis on his own arch
art prankery, but it was there all the same. Indeed the
aesthetic of the whole avant-subversive-transgressive
Pistols wing of 70s London punk (as opposed to the
campaigning-idealist Clash wing) clearly took its cue
from the inventively scabrous oppositionalism and
fractured imagery of Vorticism, from the swastika-
Marx-crucifix emblems on their shirts, to the blackmail
lettering of Jamie Reid’s album cover attacking the
eyes just as the journal’s cover did all those years before.
McLaren and Vivienne Westwood even designed
a ‘Which side of the bed’ t-shirt which homaged the
“Blasted and Blessed” of the original manifesto, with
new heroes (Eddie Cochran, Joe Orton, Ronnie Biggs
and free radio stations) replacing the originals (Charlotte
Corday, The Pope and James Joyce), and the new
villains of (Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, Max Bygraves,
W.H. Smith and the Stock Exchange) replacing the old
(the British Academy, the Post Office, Captain Cook
and Sydney Webb.) The best of Blast’s descendants are
magnificent. But when your stance is a fetishised oppositionalism,
it is absolutely vital this is accompanied
with absolute, dynamic ingenuity. Anything less, and
the result is childish, boorish, worst of all plain boring.
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
Its more degraded descendants could arguably include
every pitiful spitting punk band, and the piss-poor
amoral controversialism of Damien Hirst and Tracey
Emin. But then you shouldn’t blame Graham Greene
for Frederick Forsyth, nor Hogarth for ‘Mac’ of the
Daily Mail.
With Enemy Of The Stars, a two-handed play which
sees claustrophobically entwined individuals existentially
battling it out against an absurdist landscape, we
see an often overlooked influence on Beckett, with the
Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting For Godot descendants
of Arghol and Hanp in their stylised rhetorical opposition.
Lewis’ marred reputation means he very rarely
gets the credit he deserves for this inspiration for some
of the 20th century’s greatest masterpieces of theatre.
Yet of course Lewis’ reputation is eternally marred.
The underside to this thrilling pose, from black-hearted
nihilism, to the outright Fascism seen in the later career
of the man, has been explored at great length elsewhere.
The charge-sheet against this personally dislikable individual
is neither light nor slight. Of course his barbed
vision is open to abuse, abuse itself being its life-blood.
Aesthetics translated into politics is very often a bad
combination, as certain followers of that other great
pugilistic aphorist Friedrich Nietzsche have amply and
agonisingly shown. Nietzsche and Wyndham Lewis
are like gunpowder, their explosions can both ignite
beautiful displays, or lead to incalculable damage.
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W.H. Auden dubbed Lewis “that lonely old Volcano
of the Right.” A lonely volcano maybe, but one whose
diabolic lava solidified into the shapes which formed
the cultural landscape we still live in. Out of print for
decades, Blast is now finally available in a new print
from Thames and Hudson. It’s worth a read, not least
as this is a Blast from which we still live in the echo. �
BUY Wyndham Lewis books online from and
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Review [published August 2006]
Jack London: The Iron Heel
Ben Granger on Jack London’s neglected dystopian novel that rivals
Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World in its vision of the future
When it comes to accolades for the most lauded
prophetic dystopian satirical novels of the early
20th century, there’s no doubting which are the big
two. The hyper-Stalinist all-surveillance paranoid
nightmare of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, and the
distorted DNA-as-play-doh playground of Huxley’s
Brave New World. Occasionally Yevgeny Zamyatin’s
We gets a look-in as a curio, a minor precursor to both,
appearing as it did in 1920, long before that of Huxley
(1932) and Orwell (1949). There is one however which
always gets passed over, despite being written before
both the others, way back in 1908, and overlooked,
despite being written by one of the most widely
revered American authors of all time. That novel is
Jack London’s The Iron Heel. In and out of print for
decades, The Iron Heel has finally been republished in
the last couple of months by Penguin UK.
Orwell’s warning about the grotesque parody of socialism
offered by Stalin and his acolytes which plagued
the 20th century, and the grim auger from Huxley on
the eugenic, anaesthetic aesthetic threatened by scientific
consumerism which stalked both this century and
BUY Jack London books online from and
the last have been analysed, critiqued and celebrated to
death. There is, however, a third more straightforward
great evil of the modern age. The rich crushing the poor,
the propensity of the forces of capital – when vicious
push comes to deadly shove – to react with the most
monstrous and tyrannical violence against the organised
labour which seeks to grab more of its fair share
from them. The evil that led to the bloody regimes of
Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their tin-pot descendants.
This was prophesied just as uncannily in Jack London’s
long-neglected novel.
The action of the book begins in the years immediately
following when it was written. Labour relations
in the USA are plunging as rapidly as the economy,
while the thuggery of big-business against the unions
increases in turn. Goons break limbs at picket-lines as
families go hungry. No fiction there. Poverty spreads
apace, and slower but just as surely does the Socialist
movement of America (strange fantasy it may seem
now, but as London wrote, the US Socialist Party, led
by Eugene Debs, was growing rapidly, at one point
gathering over a million votes even as its leaders were
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being jailed.)
The book is written as the memoir of Avis Everhard,
wife of labour leader Ernest Everhard who comes to
lead the workers’ insurrection. Avis is the daughter of a
prominent US academic, and begins her account as the
pampered intellectual circles her family frequents find
it a delightful parlour game to invite Ernest for debates,
much as panel games will have the token revolutionary
on our TV screens today.
Ernest, long-suffering, self-taught and assured union
man has steely determination and razor intellect. He
rips their arguments to pieces, and the smug smiles subside.
In the final confrontation he manages to get one
more forthright and honest plutocrat to admit the truth
and discard the flannel. In the end their power over the
worker has no moral basis and must be set in steel:
“In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of
machine-guns will our answer be couched.”
“It is the only answer that can be given” replies Ernest.
“Power. We know, and well we know by bitter experience,
that no appeal for right, for justice, for humanity
can ever touch you. Your hearts are as hard as your
heels as they tread upon the faces of the poor.”
Avis is entranced not only by the power of Ernest’s
magnetic charisma, but also by the unpleasant but
unassailable truth of the frightful poverty which, as he
points out, props up her own classes wealth. She begins
to notice the wretched poverty, only streets from where
BUY Jack London books online from and
she lives. The scenes of misery are jaggedly drawn,
once again, without any need for exaggeration from
what London saw daily with his own eyes.
We see both the Everhards and the wider union
movement as a whole as they’re wrenched to snapping
point. As America’s oligarchs realise the conflagration
to come is a fight to the death, they stealthily cast off
the flimsy pretences of democracy. They organise into
the great Dictatorship of the Iron Heel. The bloodiest
repression seen in humanity’s history ensues.
The novel’s narrative skilfully shifts focus from the
small scale to the large and back again, the snapshots
of poverty signifying the minutiae of the bigger vista.
We see as the dictatorship takes hold it does so steadily,
creepily. The insidious little signs -the silencing
and ostracising of academics, the blackening of the
names of campaigners, – are shown as Avis’s father
is hounded from his job, and a reformed priest the
family know is hounded into a mental institution. The
icy paranoia of the witch hunts is evoked chillingly.
With the thug gangs bought from the criminal caste by
the ruling-class to pummel dissent – the wonderfully
named “Black Hundreds” – the paramilitary paratroops
of future Fascism are equally well predicted. He even
got the colour right.
The story continues to centre around the Everhards as
the years go on and the Iron Heel kicks in. Congress is
suspended, dissenters are machine-gunned. Scenes of
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conflict on a gargantuan scale ensue, interspersed with
the individual intrigues within. The desperate hopes of
the revolutionaries are evocatively told in between the
details of their struggle. There is indeed no compromise
up until an apocalyptic finale.
As prediction, satire and warning, The Iron Heel is in
many ways more prophetic than either Nineteen Eighty
Four or Brave New World. Orwell merely exaggerated,
exemplified and hypertrophied elements of a Stalinist
dictatorship which had existed for decades, while the
ruminations of Huxley set still further in the future
remain something of an allegory. London was describing
with exactitude a streamlined mechanised totalitarian
dictatorship, backed by big business, specifically
designed to crush the labour movement, when no-one
dreamt of such a thing, and which would not actually
be in place for decades.
Of course his vision was vastly off the mark in
many ways. America managed to crush a far weaker
socialist presence by far less draconian methods, and
real fascism arrived on another continent. But then
we’re not currently living in a post-nuclear dictatorship
with cameras in our living rooms, and no-one’s
being bred in tanks yet either. He got a lot more right
than he got wrong.
In The Iron Heel London laid bare the whole machinery
of a mechanised dictatorship, of the class-based
mass murder to come, and did so during a pastoral,
BUY Jack London books online from and
pre-First World War era when the worst nightmare
most Western audiences could imagine was a cavalrycharge.
The novel was ridiculed at the time in popular
reviews because of its bloodthirsty “sensationalism”.
Even London himself may have intended the grotesque
blood-bath he portrays in the novel’s later chapters – the
full-scale warfare between the haves and the nots – as
more hyperbolic warning than prophecy. These scenes
do indeed curdle the blood and wrench the gut, and may
have seemed like fantastical pornography at the time.
But they’re no Somme, and they’re no Auschwitz. The
grim reality dwarfed even his savage imagination.
In other ways, it is not such a mystery why The Iron
Heel has been passed over in favour of its rivals in dystopia.
As a novel of ideas, as an imagining of intricacies
into the minute grim possibility of the future it does
not live up to them. There is no innovation to excite
the troubled imagination as much as the telescreens,
doublethink, Room 101 and Big Brother of Orwell, and
the mandatory happiness, Soma and biological castesystem
in Huxley. Being more narrowly political than
either it does not lend itself to flights of speculative
futuristic fancy. No-one is likely to base a reality TV
show on one of its observations.
Orwell himself noted that there was a strong streak
of the Social Darwinist in London, a sadistic revelling
in the cult of violence and the survival of the fittest.
Given that London was sadly prone to the most vulgar
326
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white supremacist racism too, his failings could well
have turned him to Fascism were it not for the strength
of his commitment to the working-class cause. Race
itself is almost absent from the novel altogether, a good
thing given London’s proclivities, though an obvious
and glaring blind-spot in a novel about an American
class-war. A curious fear of “the mob” when pushed to
its limits is in evidence too, the auto-snobbery against
workers who don’t follow your cause:- the perennial
flaw of theoretical socialists.
Far more importantly though as a novel, by the test of
plot, persona and prose it is not up with London’s best
either, and in that sense too falls well short of Orwell
or Huxley. The cult of personality London indulges
in sadly undermines the characterisation of the hero
Ernest Everard, who is ever-so-slightly too much of
the Nietzchean superman to convince, even given his
occasional endearing awkwardness. He veers too close
to an icon in a Soviet mural. There is a slightly stilted
characterisation in other main players too. In the grand
epic of human destiny being described in book less
than 300 pages long, people come can close to being
ciphers, including the narrator Avis herself.
There is no doubt that as a convincing and holistic
piece of writing, The Call Of The Wild, that thrilling
adventure story which also laid bare London’s Nietzchean
sadism, is a better read, more deserving of its
ubiquitous place on the world’s school curricula, and a
BUY Jack London books online from and
better example of London’s gift with the written word.
The Iron Heel is a great deal more than an insightful
piece of propaganda however. London always writes
with a stern poetic vividness. Both stark and lurid,
passage after passage in the book grasp so hard it’s
impossible not to be drawn in. The narrative is charged
with honest emotional energy, and it convinces as a
blood-curdling thriller too. This is a short novel dealing
with an enormous scope of ideas and events, essentially
attempting to dramatise a Marxist analysis of US society.
Yet there is never a dull moment. London has the
gift of investing the forays into theory with the same
excitement as exists in the scenes of bloody conflict.
The “footnotes from the future” device tagged at
the end of each chapter (in which we discover Avis’
memoirs have supposedly been discovered in a future
socialist age) give the novel a lighter satirical edge
too, off-setting the book’s occasional slouch into
portentousness.
And while individual characters may stray near
caricature, in the bigger picture London possesses a
rather more nuanced insight into the psychology of
those at both ends of the class conflict. The workers
are the heroes of course, but London does not shirk on
the corrupting and brutalising effect revolution inevitably
has on its agents. And, even more importantly, he
recognises that the ruling-class are not just crooks and
thugs. They’d be a lot easier to deal with if they were.
327
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“They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained
civilization. It was their belief that if they
weakened, the great beast would engulf them, and
everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good
in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without
them, anarchy would reign, and humanity would
drop backward into the primitive night out of which
it had so painfully emerged … This was the beast
to be stamped on, and the highest duty of the aristocrat
was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by
unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak
humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they be-
lieved it, firmly believed it.”
BUY Jack London books online from and
Many is the Fascist and war criminal utterly convinced
they have humanity’s interest at heart but
scarcely has it been so well put.
The Iron Heel then is a flawed but fascinating read,
undeniably entertaining, and containing some of the
most deadly insights of the last century. By one of
America’s best known writers too. This book is a landmark,
and has been ignored for too long. Here’s hoping
its republication by Penguin will see it gain the wider
readership it deserves. �
328
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Leo Marks:
Between Silk And Cyanide 330
David Markson:
This Is Not A Novel 333
Gabriel García Márquez:
News Of A Kidnapping 336
Bertie Marshall:
Text Maniac 338
Cedric Mims:
When We Die 340
The Modern Fantasy Diet 342
M
Alan Moore:
Voice Of The Fire 347
Patricia Morrisroe:
Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography 349
Morrissey:
You Are The Quarry 351
Cookie Mueller:
Ask Dr Mueller 354
Ben Myers:
The Book Of Fuck 356
329
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2000]
Leo Marks: Between Silk And Cyanide
Eugene Byrne
Leo Marks crops up in the oddest corners of the 20th
century. The only son of doting Jewish parents, his
father owned the bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road,
made famous by Helene Hanff’s book. Marks read his
Freud (who once visited the shop), wrote a lot of stories
and produced the brilliant/notorious script for Peeping
Tom, the film about a disturbed young man who kills
women with his camera and which virtually destroyed
the career of its director Michael Powell in the early
1960s. And look, here’s Marks again, providing the
voice of Satan in Powell’s chum Martin Scorsese’s
equally notorious film, The Last Temptation Of Christ.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you
think you don’t want to read Yet Another book about
secret codes in WW2, think again. To say that Between
Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War 1941-45 is about
just codes is like saying that programmes featuring
Charlie Dimmock are just about gardening.
“In January 1942 I was escorted to the war by my
parents in case I couldn’t find it or met with an accident
on the way,” begins Marks’ funny, angry, intriguing
account of how, at a very tender age, he ended up
BUY Leo Marks books online from and
working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE),
the cloak-and-dagger operation set up by Churchill to
infiltrate agents into German-occupied countries and
“set Europe ablaze”. The trouble was that all these
agents had to communicate with England by wireless,
but that the codes they were using, as Marks quickly
figured out, were easy to break.
By his own account, young Marks was an insufferable
little smart-alec (he was compiling cryptic
crosswords for The Times when still a schoolboy). If,
he argued, he could easily break the SOE codes on his
own, all based on poems, then all the resources of the
German intelligence services wouldn’t find them much
of a challenge either. Marks’s job, as head of codes for
SOE, was essentially about devising new codes, then
persuading the powers-that-be to accept them, then
finding the personnel and resources (sheets of silk and
labs to photograph the codes onto them – silk was easily
sewn into an agent’s clothes and could withstand the
most assiduous frisking by German security-checks) to
produce them in the huge quantities required.
Marks spent his war sitting at a desk; an anonymous
330
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neighbour, seeing him returning to his parents’ home
each evening and leaving each morning laden with
black market food by his Mama sent him a white
feather. When he told his parents (who understood he
was some manner of civil servant) that he was to be
sent to Cairo for a week, his father left the room. “Now
look what you’ve done,” said his mother. “He’s gone to
get pissed.” But his father returned after an hour with a
pith helmet, which both parents made him swear he’d
wear at all times.
In his Cairo hotel, he got talking with the Jewish
American comedian Jack Benny, who persuaded him
that being Jewish, he ought to start taking this war – a
wonderful chance to fight the greatest anti-Semite of
all time – a damn sight more seriously. Marks then told
him a funny story about an uncle’s efforts to evade the
call-up in WW1 and watched in astonishment as Benny
re-told the story, giving a perfect impersonation of the
uncle he had never met. “Thank you Jack Benny,” he
says, “for giving me a month’s holiday in the hour we
spent together … And thanks for not being ashamed of
being proud of your race. I wish I had the courage to be
one of the troops you’re here to entertain.”
Marks’s war, though, was anything but a lark. It
was part of his job to brief agents on their codes just
before they were dropped into enemy territory. Their
life-expectancy was pretty low, and their radio transmissions
were usually the first thing that gave them
away to the Gestapo. Marks carried this responsibility
heavily and he remains angry, bitter even, to this day
about the bungling and the bureaucratic in-fighting that
resulted in so many astonishingly courageous men and
women being captured, tortured and executed.
These included his special hero ‘Tommy’ Yeo-Thomas,
who was caught late on in the war and endured
unbelievable torments because the Gestapo knew that
he knew everything there was to know about resistance
in France, but who nonetheless managed to escape. Or
Noor Inayat Khan, the brilliant daughter of an Indian
prince and religious leader; a capable enough wireless
operator for the SOE in France, but because of her
religion and upbringing she was incapable of telling a
lie. Khan died in a concentration camp, as did the most
famous SOE agent of all, Violette Szabo, subject of the
postwar film, Carve Her Name With Pride. By late in
the war, where agents had to use poem-codes, Marks
had decreed that they should at least be originals, as
well-known ones could be pieced together by the Germans
and the codes broken more easily. Part at least of
Szabo’s fame is due to the one he gave her to memorise:
The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours
The love that I have
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331
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Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.
A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.
Violette Szabo was shot in the back of the head in
a concentration camp in 1945, holding the hands of
two other SOE agents. More than half a century on,
BUY Leo Marks books online from and
Leo Marks still carries the burden of her fate and that
of hundreds of others. For that reason alone, his book
demands respectful attention, but there are plenty of
others, too. It’s a valuable historical account (most of
the official records of SOE have disappeared, probably
because MI6 devoted a lot of its energies to destroying
SOE rather than Nazism), but it’s also very funny, conveying
perfectly the frantic 22-year-old always skating
on thin ice and passing off his awesome responsibilities
with wisecracks. There’s some interesting bits about
codes in there as well, but you can easily skip them if
you want. �
332
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 2001]
David Markson: This Is Not A Novel
Stephen Mitchelmore
There’s always someone telling us that the novel is
dead. And that is how it should be. As well as offering
us the chance to laugh at the fools who parrot this
announcement, it makes us ask, for the umpteenth
time: what is the novel for, exactly? The question
should not be answered without referring to a novel in
particular. Each novel is unique. Or should be. We’ll
come to that later.
One of the reasons why cultural commentators,
such as the BBC’s Andrew Marr, proclaim the death
of the novel is because novels have become irredeemably
classifiable. Novels that break the rules seem to
be so mannered, so distant from the world we call
real, that they demand to be classified as frivolous
and elitist. Most of them are. And they seem all the
more mannered and distant because the classifiable
novel has become so refined, so intimate with the
deceit of language, that we do not see them for the
very odd objects they really are. Instead, by effacing
themselves in a whole raft of technique, they enable
the reader-as-consumer to bypass any doubts and leap
straight into what is desired: distraction.
BUY David Markson books online from and
The literary novel, on the other hand, is definitively
unclassifiable. Or should be. Hence the regular asking
of the question: “Why are detective stories/thrillers/
horror novels/science fictions ignored when it comes to
literary prizes?” The accusation that always follows is
that these prizes are for highbrow snobs. In a recent radio
interview, the question and accusation was repeated
by horror novel writer (and TV presenter) Muriel Gray.
As I listened in a departure lounge filled with airportnovel
clutching passengers, I wanted to shout: THERE
IS GOOD REASON! But I kept my dignity. Until now.
The reason is because the novel has to reinvent itself,
each and every time. When a reinvention is achieved,
it deserves recognition. One cannot use the crutch of
a genre, the alibi of a genre, and expect to receive an
award specifically intended for a unique achievement.
Muriel Gray’s horror novels have received critical acclaim
by those who know about such things; Stephen
King no less. Worth checking out then. But you can’t
have it both ways Muriel.
In the same interview Gray says she hates writing but
loves having written. I suggest this maybe due to her
333
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self-imprisonment in genre. Real fiction is a form of
exploring oneself and the world, perhaps finding oneself
and the world, perhaps finding a passage through
darkness (forgive the Romantic clichés). Maybe Muriel
should try it sometime. She might even win the Booker
Prize. Or maybe she should stick with horror. In recent
years, the Booker has tried to appeal to a wider audience
and so last year the shortlist was made up entirely
of genre fiction. Or was it the year before? Who cares?
David Markson’s novels will never be soiled by the
attentions of the Booker Prize committee. He would be
eliminated early on because of his reputation as an innovator.
Anyway, as an American, he is ineligible. His
earlier novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress is about the last
person on Earth, although this is not apparent to the
innocent reader. It consists of short paragraphs of statements
and self-questioning by a lone woman. Actually,
I haven’t read it, or any other of his novels. In fact, I’ve
never seen any of them in a shop or a library. But I have
now read This Is Not A Novel. It is a 190-page bricolage
of quotations, anecdotes and opinions on artists, writers,
composers, philosophers and various other high art
types. Here is a random sample:
“Timor mortis conturbat me.
The fear of death distresses me.
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without
pictures or conversations?
BUY David Markson books online from and
There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt
is great. Mozart chamber music. Said Marlon Brando.
Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged
heart.
Pound died of a blocked intestine.”
The final two entries here constitute the main bulk
of the whole book: reports on how famous artists and
thinkers died. Each page returns to this theme. As you
might expect, it has a strong melancholy edge. I understand
that Markson is elderly and unwell, so he has
good reason to dwell on such matters. Yet to describe
this book as a long lament about imminent demise is
to miss the overall effect. It is something wholly other
than melancholy.
At the beginning, the narrator, called simply “Writer”,
says he “is pretty much tempted to quit writing.
Writer is weary unto death of making up stories.” So
instead he presents this trance-like list. Some way
into the book Writer intervenes to suggest it is a prose
equivalent of Eliot’s The Wasteland. And for sure it
is like that poem, or a piece of music, specifically a
fugue (that is, “a polyphonic composition constructed
on one or more short themes which are harmonised
according to the laws of counterpoint” – OED). Very
soon, the reader is unable to escape the special rhythm
of anecdotes that at first seem to have absolutely nothing
to do with literature. Yet in the end, and for the
334
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reason that it has nothing to do with literature, it becomes
clear that it has everything to do with literature.
After putting the book down, one is compelled to pick
it up again, not to find out what happens next, but to
re-enter the intoxicating rhythm.
“Frida Kahlo’s affair with Leon Trotsky.
Rilke was devoted to polishing furniture. Jackson
Pollock baked pies.
William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.”
It is significant that Markson tends to refer to highbrow
artists. The contrast with their more famous
achievements is relentlessly brought to the fore. We can
read this sort of thing all the time about popular artistes
on sites such as popbitch.com, but this contributes only
to our enjoyment of pop culture. It doesn’t shock and
resonate. In This Is Not A Novel, we can’t escape the
fact that all great art is produced by people who die,
while the work survives. A commonplace, of course,
but a brute fact that modern artists confront on a daily
basis. They ask, what is the point? It leads to frustration.
It leads to despair. It leads to Gray’s contempt
BUY David Markson books online from and
for the modern novel. Some might think Markson is
joining in with this contempt; ridiculing the pretension
of high art. However, the endless unspoken contrast of
absurdity and death with Writer’s evident fascination
with the works of art referred to, only re-emphasises
our uncertainty about what art is and what it does to us.
One thing is for sure though: the artistic and intellectual
achievements of the centuries did not come about
by repeating what has gone before. Writer writes:
“Writer has actually written some relatively traditional
novels. Why is he spending his time doing this
sort of thing? That’s why.”
Essentially, if pretentiously, genre fiction denies
death. The reader is cocooned from the world we call
real by sticking to the conventions of character and plot,
or at least by assuming that they constitute what we
call “the novel”. Genre fiction does not question itself
because it is the means to other ends. It may help us
through the day, but not our lives. This Is Not A Novel
is such for good reason. How Markson’s book helps is
something I have been asking myself. And the answer,
as I have just experienced, is in the asking. But maybe
this is not an answer. �
335
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published April 2004]
Gabriel García Márquez: News Of A Kidnapping
Chris Mitchell
“The men opened Maruja’s door and another two
opened Beatriz’s. The fifth shot the driver in the head
through the glass, and the silencer made it sound no
louder than a sigh. Then he opened the door, pulled
him out, and shot him three more times as he lay
on the ground. It was another man’s destiny: Angel
Maria Roa had been Maruja’s driver for only three
days, and for the first time he was displaying his new
dignity with the dark suit, starched shirt, and black
tie worn by the chauffeurs who drove government
ministers. His predecessor, who had retired the week
before, had been the government agency’s regular
driver for ten years.”
This quote from the opening pages of News Of
A Kidnapping has the unmistakable ring of Gabriel
García Márquez’s world famous prose style – at once
laden with pathos and yet tinged with black absurdity,
it could easily have come from any of the Nobel Prize
winner’s acclaimed novels. Yet News Of A Kidnapping
is not fiction – in its documenting of cocaine baron
Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror in Colombia, the book
is solely concerned with the murderous realities of
Colombian political life rather than the magic realism
for which García Márquez is famed. These are realities
which leave no-one untouched: García Márquez himself
has recently become dangerously embroiled within
the ongoing war between Colombia’s government and
guerrillas, in a particularly twisted version of life imitating
literature.
News Of A Kidnapping is the culmination of three
years research by Márquez, marking a return for the
69-year-old author to his days as a young journalist
within the Colombian capital of Bogota. He traces
the stories of those relatives of Colombian politicians
who were abducted in the winter of 1990 by Escobar’s
Medellin cocaine cartel, an organisation so powerful
that it systematically undermined all of Colombia’s
civil institutions by murder, abduction and bribery.
Given that Colombia produces 80 per cent of the
world’s cocaine supply and that Escobar was the most
ruthless of the country’s drug barons, it’s not difficult
to understand why he wielded such influence and was
wanted by both the Colombian and Americans governments.
Escobar ordered the kidnappings in order to
BUY Gabriel García Márquez books online from and
336
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give himself bargaining power with the then Colombian
president Cesar Gaviria, who had embarked on
a relentless manhunt for Escobar’s capture, with the
added threat of supporting his extradition to stand trial
in the United States.
Based on conversations with the survivors of
Escobar’s abduction campaign, who were mostly
middle-aged women, News Of A Kidnapping presents
an unflinching reportage of the lives of those held in
captivity, documenting their despair, fear and hope. At
the same time, García Márquez explores the struggle
which continues to this day between the state and drug
traffickers for the heart of Colombia.
Even though Escobar is now dead, killed during a
police shootout in 1993, his legacy of corruption and
murder lives on. While García Márquez has attempted
to bring his considerable influence as a world-renowned
writer to bear on the political problems of his country,
that selfsame influence has now caused him to be
caught up in a fresh wave of terror to sweep Colombia.
In April this year, a shadowy group calling itself Dignity
For Colombia abducted the son of Cesar Gaviria,
the former president who battled with Escobar.
The guerrilla group have already established their
political credentials with the assassination of a three
time presidential candidate and a murder attempt on
President Ernesto Samper’s lawyer last year. Their
main demand following the kidnapping of Gaviria’s
son was that García Márquez should take over the
presidency from Samper, who has faced widespread
calls for his resignation because of charges that his
1994 election campaign was partly financed by drug
traffickers. García Márquez has rejected the demand
out of hand, saying that he was sure he would make
“the worst president” in Colombia’s history.
However, García Márquez has remained silent
concerning the kidnappers more recent demands that
he vouches for the absence of corruption during Gaviria’s
presidency. Some have speculated that García
Márquez has now been given the horrific power of life
or death over Gaviria’s son, depending on his future
co-operation with the guerrilla group. In a further twist
to the story, the man in charge of securing the young
Gaviria’s release is Alberto Villamizar, whose wife
and sister’s abductions in 1990 were the impetus for
García Márquez to write News Of A Kidnapping. “It’s
unusual,” Villamizar has commented, “but everything
that happens in Colombia is unusual”. �
BUY Gabriel García Márquez books online from and
337
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published August 1997]
Bertie Marshall: Text Maniac
Chris Mitchell meets Bertie Marshall, the original psychoboy
When does a debut underground experimental novel
featuring a stomach-churning mix of depraved sex,
hideous death, wanton coprophilia and insane genetic
mutation gain critical praise from the mainstream likes
of i-D, Time Out and The Big Issue?
When it’s written by Brighton author Bertie Marshall.
Psychoboys is his first literary outing and its kaleidoscopic
narration about the story of Rez, a rent-boy
surviving on the streets of Moscow and Berlin, has provoked
accolades such as “unique” and “intense” from
the likes of Grove Press’s Ira Silverberg and American
psycho author Dennis Cooper.
In the tradition of all great transgressive literature
(think William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, Kathy
Acker), Psychoboys is not written simply to shock. “It’s
about darkness and light, fantasy and reality, dreaming
and being awake, death and being alive,” Marshall says.
“It’s left up to the reader to decide what they make of it.
There’s no absolutes.”
Psychoboys portrays the extremities of human existence,
but it does so in an exploration of how fantasy and
reality collide, and the way Rez uses his imagination
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to escape the sordidity of his existence. Underpinning
the graphic depictions of depravity is a grand guignol
humour, evinced by characters like Miss Thing – Rez’s
transvestite sugar mummy – and Countess Handover, a
bizarre transgender genetic engineer.
Marshall’s novel avoids the problem of much avantgarde
writing, where ‘experimental’ is a euphemism
for ‘unreadable’ – Psychoboys is powered by punk-energised,
page-turning prose. “Making sure Psychoboys
was readable was something I really had in mind while
I was writing the book,” Marshall confirms. “It was
a reaction against the first book I wrote, which was a
heavily fictionalised account of my punk days – and
which nobody wanted to publish.”
That Marshall’s first book was rejected is especially
strange, given the amount of attention his exploits as
part of the Bromley Contingent – the first group of Sex
Pistols fans – has gained from the media, culminating
in BBC2’s Arena documentary, Punk And The Pistols.
The then 15-year-old Marshall changed his name to
Berlin and hung out with the likes of Siouxsie Sioux
before the term ‘punk’ had even gained widespread
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understanding. “If someone had said to me that in 20
years’ time, being a part of this group that goes to see a
band is going to pass into popular mythology, I’d have
said, ‘Um.’ Even stranger is the fact that a friend of mine
has written a screenplay about the period and wants me
to play myself 20 years ago. That’s a real trip.”
Back in the present, Psychoboys’ pre-publication
success has left Marshall bemused by some of the labels
being used to try and describe his work. “It’s been
called ‘queer science fiction’,” he says, “but what does
BUY Bertie Marshall books online from and
that mean? Why have labels at all?”
This dissatisfaction with being pigeonholed extends
to being classified as a gay writer. “I did this reading
recently where all the gay literati were there – Alan
Hollinghurst, Alan Mars-Jones, Patrick Gale – their
readings were all very polite, ironic and slightly risqué
and I just thought ‘Yuk!’ I don’t fit in with that at all – I
couldn’t be further removed from them. Psychoboys is
certainly not written for a gay market – it’s written for
anyone who wants to read it.” �
339
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 2000]
Cedric Mims: When We Die
Robin Askew
The first thing to happen is regurgitation of the stomach
contents into the mouth or air passages. At the same
time, urine is passed and semen emitted. The skin gets
purple on the underside of the body where the blood
accumulates, rigor mortis sets in, and the intestinal
microbes gobble up the gut and take the opportunity to
have a romp around those previously forbidden parts of
the body. The pancreas digests itself. Green substances
and gas are produced in the tissues, causing the skin
to take on a bluish tinge and develop blisters, many
of which expand into large sacs of fluid. After four to
six days, the body starts to become really unpleasant.
The tongue protrudes from between the teeth, the chest
swells up, fluid from the lung trickles out of the mouth
or nostrils and a ‘disagreeable odour’ develops.
Cedric Mims, former Professor of Microbiology at
Guy’s Hospital, spares no grisly detail in his self-styled
“light-hearted but wide-ranging survey of death, the
causes of death, and the disposal of corpses”. If it’s the
Afterlife you want, he’s not much use. There’s a perfunctory
trot through the beliefs that sustain the world’s major
religions, but Mims’ heart isn’t really in it. When We Die
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is shot through with genial atheism, religion impinging
only when it has shaped some of the more peculiar things
human societies have done with bits and pieces of the
deceased. But don’t mistake this for a lack of humility.
In his introduction, Mims offers this fascinating statistic.
Since the emergence of our species, 130,000 million humans
have lived and died. You could comfortably pack
every last one of us into a mass cubic coffin measuring
three miles long on each side and dump it underground
without making the slightest impact on the landscape.
Mims contends that we have undergone a reversal
in social attitudes since Victorian times. Then, death
was a national obsession while sex remained taboo.
These days, virtually anything goes on the sexual front
but few of us ever see a corpse, since most people die
in hospitals or institutions. Anyone who expresses an
interest in the subject is routinely accused of “morbid
curiosity”. While it’s difficult to sustain the claim
that death is the last taboo, When We Die offers what
might be described as a handy palliative. The anecdotal
approach makes it ideal for dipping into, serving up
themed funereal fun in bite-sized chunks of historical,
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scientific and cultural information.
Take the section on suicides, for example. Here we
learn that in the 18th century the British were thought to
have a lax attitude to topping oneself. The French philosopher
Montesquieu argued that this was because of
the dismal climate and our predisposition to gloominess,
which in turn impaired the ability of the body machinery
to filter nervous juices. But trustees of Bristol’s Clifton
Suspension Bridge who fret over how to stop gloomy
Brits hurling themselves to a watery doom from Brunel’s
landmark should consider themselves lucky that we don’t
share the Japanese enthusiasm for copycat suicides. In
1933, a Japanese schoolgirl threw herself into the mouth
of a volcano on the island of Oshima. Over the next two
years, 1,208 people followed her. The authorities eventually
responded by building a small fence and banning the
sale of one-way tickets to the island.
The past, as we know, is a different country. And they
certainly did things differently when it came to death.
Mims describes the process of classical mummification
in all its colourful detail, beginning with the extraction
of the brain through the nostrils using a pair of pliers, but
also drolly reveals that economy class mummification
was available to the Ancient Egyptian lower orders. This
ignominious process consisted of pumping cedar oil into
the anus and then plugging the hole. Before refrigeration,
important folks dying overseas also presented a problem.
When the Bishop of Hereford perished in Italy in 1282,
BUY Cedric Mims books online from and
his body was chopped into pieces and boiled in vinegar
until the fat and flesh separated from the bones. The
squidgy bits and bony bits were then sealed in separate
leaden cases and shipped back to Blighty, where they
received a suitably reverent Westminster funeral.
Modern cultural differences are equally fascinating.
Islam dictates that the corpse must not be violated by
cremation or dissection, which presents something of
a dilemma for medical students in Muslim countries.
There is now a discreet but roaring trade in infidel stiffs,
which are shipped out to Saudi Arabia en masse. Those
peaceable Tibetan Buddhists have some interesting rituals
too. On a mountain near the Ganden monastery in
Llasa, a special bunch of holy folks called Body Breakers
are employed to chop up corpses to make them more
agreeable snacks for the local vulture population.
Only one subject seems to gross out Prof Mims and
that’s necrophilia, to which he devotes a single meagre
paragraph. But it’s those peculiar little factoids that
stay with you long after you’ve put down his entertaining
tome. Did you know that Lenin gets a week-long
bath and a new suit and tie every two years? Or that
the British police have seven sniffer dogs trained to
detect the gases of decomposition coming from bodies
underwater? Or – and this is my favourite – that a
company in Wales has just contributed to the sum of
human inventiveness by designing a camel cremator
for the Dubai government? �
341
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published October 2002]
The Modern Fantasy Diet
Seán Harnett argues that fantasy fiction has become a bloated,
pretentious caricature of its own possibilities
It’s like looking at Marlon Brando as he is today and remembering
what he used to be: he used to be slim, man.
He used to be dangerous. He used to mean something.
Heroic fantasy used to be slim, once. Goddamn but
it used to be lean and muscular, like the heroes and
swordsmen it celebrated. It used to be dangerous. It
used to tell us stories about ourselves that never appeared
in the pages of respectable literary journals
(with their stories of divorcees and martinis and quiet,
stately dysfunction) but were nevertheless more truly a
reflection of the times in which we lived, and the yearnings
that impelled us.
No longer: heroic fantasy has grown fat. Bloated.
We’re not talking a few extra pound around the waist,
here: we’re talking serious glandular problems, shopping
at special stores for the larger individual. We’re
talking about Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin
and David Eddings, with their three or five or ten book
series, each volume in the series containing seven or
eight or 900 pages of plodding prose, dull exposition,
unresolved plot threads and attempts to conjure up a
sense of wonder so badly executed as to signal the final,
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lingering demise of the genre. If we can’t get your daily
requirement of wonder from fantasy then we might as
well go back to reading those tales of quiet despair (or
is it quiet tales of despair? Despairing tales of quietness?)
for our fictional sustenance.
It’s customary, of course, to blame J.R.R. Tolkien for
this state of affairs. The Lord Of The Rings. What more
does one need to say? The page count, they say; the
cosily familiar setting, the bad prose, the dreary exposition:
the family resemblance between Tolkien’s work
and the substandard fiction that pads out the fantasy/
science fiction section in your local bookstore is clear.
So, yes, an obvious accusation, but a wrong-headed
one. Tolkien is no more to blame for modern fantasy
writing than Jane Austen is to blame for Mills and
Boons novels.
Consider the facts: Tolkien wrote just two books in
his lifetime that could be classified as ‘fantasy’ a la
the modern definition, and one of those, The Silmarillion,
was released posthumously (The Hobbit should
be classified, properly, as a children’s book). More
importantly, Tolkien was not trying to write a novel
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in the pulp tradition of fantasy: he was trying to write
literature. However you might feel about the degree
of his success, it’s hard to deny that there’s something
rather appealing about his stubborn attempt to re-create
something old when all around him were attempting to
be ‘modern’.
He did not really belong in the 20th century, did dear
old Ronald Reuel. He was a man more comfortable
with the past, and the forms of the past; he wrote his
fiction at least partly as an exercise in creating a saga of
an imaginary past that might live in the present century.
And that’s the crucial difference: Tolkien’s models were
the Kalevala and the Icelandic sagas. Although modern
fantasy may tip the hat to ancient myths or medieval
sagas, borrowing images here and situations there, its
real antecedents lie in the pulp fictions of Fritz Leiber,
Jack Vance, Clarke Aston Smith and Robert Howard:
the masters. Whatever you may say about their prose
(and it was often dull and frequently hilariously bad),
these writers nevertheless told stories with leanness
and bravado and imagination, qualities sadly lacking in
most of today’s writers of fantasy.
How did we get from there to here? How did we get
from writers who could pack a punch in the space of
ten pages, to writers who can’t seem to tell a story in
ten books, let alone one? That’s a whole other story but,
in the Reader’s Digest version, one writer stands out as
having acted as the bridge between those pulp masters
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and the current spate of fantasy writers. That writer is
Michael Moorcock.
There’s no denying that Moorcock has written some
excellent heroic fantasy. The first few books in the Elric
series, The First Chronicles Of Corum and Gloriana
(especially Gloriana) are all magnificent novels. Yet
side-by-side with those fine works one must set the
substandard epics he has been churning out in parallel
since the 1960s, in which character names and settings
change but essentially the same story is told, over and
over again.
Given that he did invent Elric and Hawkmoon, it is
regrettable that Moorcock’s career in heroic fantasy is
strewn with such rubbish as The Second Chronicles
Of Corum. Like so much of his later work, these three
books each begin with an identical account of the callto-arms
and kitting out of the hero, continue with a
quest narrative that is remarkably similar in each book,
and end with an identical climax and denouement. The
series is the same story told three times. Moorcock
tries to justify his cynical treatment of the reader on
the grounds that the novels record the ceaseless struggle
of the Eternal Champion, when really they are the
efforts of a hack writer trying to pay the mortgage. In
retrospect, such contemptuous treatment of the reader
of fantasy has done as much to set the standard of
contemporary mass-market fantasy as anything Tolkien
ever did. Moorcock has convinced a generation of
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writers that the key to success is to marry his rate of
output with Tolkien’s bulk.
Take, for instance, the case of Robert Jordan. He
started his career writing pastiches of Conan and
moved on, after writing a few military historical novels,
to The Wheel Of Time series. At last count the series
had reached book nine and had, according to a very
reliable source (my brother) finally managed to inject
some momentum into his story after four gratingly dull
instalments. I wouldn’t know. I gave up reading the
damn thing after chapter two of volume two. Jordan’s
world simply held no interest for me. He may follow
the Moorcock/Tolkien formula, but he possesses neither
Moorcock’s cool anger and strapping disavowal
of received wisdom, nor the lofty poetic impulses that
drove Tolkien. Jordan’s ambitions in the field of subcreation
far surpasses his ability to give them adequate
expression, and the world and characters of The Wheel
Of Time remain hopelessly one-dimensional.
Now I understand that a man has to pay his bills and
it’s nice to think that someone, somewhere, is making
a living from doing what they love, but there has to
be a better way. Tolkien published maybe 2,000 pages
of fiction in his lifetime. Jordan churns that out every
two years. The inverse ratio of quality and quantity has
never been more starkly illustrated.
For god’s sake, man, you’re not writing the Bible or
the Mahabharata. You’re writing pulp fiction. And the
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golden rule of pulp fiction, in whatever genre or whatever
medium, is not to overstay your welcome. Tell
your story, move the reader, and then get the hell out of
there. Short, sharp shocks, that’s the stuff: in pulp the
act of secondary creation doesn’t have to be profound
or deep to conjure up in one’s mind images of strange,
otherworldly realms. The trouble starts, however, when
you stretch a story out. The creases and lacunae are
easier to spot the longer you go on. In other words, to
continue beyond a certain point you have to be really
good at what you’re doing.
Jordan is not very good at what he’s doing. But then,
none of the best-selling writers of fantasy fiction are.
The people writing decent fantasy, people like John
Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Robert Holdstock and Jonathan
Carroll, are doing so on the margins of the genre. The
trouble is that they are marginal figures, and will remain
so, unless someone can write a fantasy – in a mode other
than the heroic – that has genuine mainstream appeal.
If there was anyone who I thought could pull this off
and be the saviour of fantasy writing, it would have been
Neil Gaiman. If you recognise the name it’s because
he wrote The Sandman, the most talked about comic
books series of the last 15 years. They are a deceptively
intoxicating distillation of Jungian archetypes, EC horror
comics, Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis. Tasting as
if they had been brewed in some age-rimed cauldron
the quaint, knowing, disturbing, moving stories that
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were bottled and passed around a fervent readership
each month seemed to say all that could be said about a
certain style of fantasy writing. Gaiman even managed
to make Milton – that old puritan codger – seem sexy
and that’s praise enough, right there.
They were pulp fiction at its best.
Recently, though, Gaiman has published American
Gods, and I’m not so sure about him anymore. A
breezeblock-sized novel that suffers from its excessive
length, American Gods is basically just a re-write of
The Sandman. We have another strangely passive male
protagonist – called Shadow here, he might easily have
been called Dream. There’s the same extended cast of
squabbling gods, demons, sprites, faeries and spirits;
the same coy might-be-real/might-not-be real jig
around the maypole of mythology. There’s even a cute,
quirky lesbian college student – all dressed in black,
no doubt – whose only narrative purpose is to deliver
a cute, quirky monologue that could just as easily have
tripped off the tongue of Death.
In other words, if you’ve read The Sandman you’ve
read this novel. There’s nothing new in American Gods,
and that’s the greatest disappointment from a writer
previously so good at showing us old things with new
eyes. I’m worried that Gaiman has no new stories in
him, and that the remainder of his career will be haunted
by the ghost of Sandman, just as surely as Arthur Conan
Doyle’s was haunted by Sherlock Holmes.
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But at least there’s a sense of conflict in American
Gods, and that’s something to be grateful for. All writing
is, of course, about conflict, and not just conflict
within the story, but informing the story as well. What
defines a genre is the nature of the conflict that lies at its
heart. For me, all fantasy writing is specifically about
one conflict, the conflict between the way we think the
world is and the way we feel it ought to be. The best
writers in the genre may not be consciously aware of
this conflict, but they do embody it. In his public and
private life, for instance, Tolkien was a devout Catholic,
but when he wrote he was a pagan. His imagination
inhabited the world of the Beowulf poet and mourned
the passing of the old barbarian ethos, with its old gods
and monsters, even as he professed the creed which had
been responsible for that world’s passing away.
Today’s fantasy writers seem to be mostly pagans,
too – at least on this side of the Pond. And when I say pagan
I mean that literally: in the sense that many modern
authors of fantasy seem to be Wiccans, re-constructed
druids, or neo-shamans, penning tales full of right-on
pagan characters fighting the deadening influence of all
those earth-destroying religions, and speaking in earnest
thees and thous of the healing power of the Goddess.
These writers believe whole-heartedly in what they
are writing – and fair play to them – but it does mean
that there is no animating tension to make their stories
interesting. In the end, it becomes little more than new-
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age propaganda and an extended advertisement for the
local Renaissance Faire.
Neil Gaiman has tension, however. From what I know
of him I’d peg him as a pagan (if only in sentiment; he
seems to really dig those old-time gods), yet he writes
essentially Christian stories of sacrifice and redemption.
He is also brave enough to show just what dark, bloody,
vicious, vengeful energy hides in the old pagan stories.
Yet, for all his tensions, Gaiman seems less like the
purveyor of a new style of fantasy writing, and more like
the culmination of an old style, a style I would term the
‘Jungian.’ 20th-century English and American fantasy
flourished in a world very much alive to the notion that
wisdom could be found in those old pagan stories, and
that was okay because everyone knew, after Jung, that
those stories were conduits to the collective archetypes.
Even C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, so notoriously dismissive
of ‘Continental’ influences, read and admired Jung
(though they always resolutely sniped at Freud). He
seemed to provide a foundation for fantasy, his theories
a sort of undeclared manifesto for – and justification of
– the genre. They had much in common, Jung and the
fantasy genre; in this one thing, if nothing else: they believed
in the power of stories; they believed that stories
could teach us something. The great fantasy writers of
the 20th century believed that stories were either healing
balms of the psyche or agents of unsettlement, chinks in
the armour of our everyday assumptions.
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I use the past tense because the work of Gaiman, and
contemporaries such Holdstock, Carroll and Crowley,
seems to have exhausted the possibilities of writing a
‘Jungian’ fantasy. Appealing to the collective unconscious
is becoming less tenable as a deus ex machina in
a world where memetics and evolutionary psychology
have replaced depth psychology as the essential means
of understanding the self. It is difficult to see how the
kind of fantasy written in the last century can be anything
but a cliché in our brave new millennium.
The question is this: can fantasy re-invigorate
itself in the face of these new conceptions of the
self? There is some slight hope that a new kind of
fantasy writing could appear, instigated by writers
such as Steve Aylett and China Mieville, who give
the impression that they are ready to write ‘weird
stories’ for a culture that no longer necessarily believes
in the unity of the psyche, the mythic power
of stories or the efficacy of any kind of healing balm
that doesn’t come in the form of a pill. However, so
long as such writers are squeezed out of bookstore
shelves by the bloated works of Jordan, Eddings,
Williams, et al, I’m afraid that we must conclude
that fantasy will collapse under its own weight
and metamorphose into a genre as rule-bound and
derivative as the Mills and Boons romance.
And that would be a triumph even Sauron could be
content with. �
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Review [published March 1999]
Alan Moore: Voice Of The Fire
Antony Johnston
Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel.
But Moore has been writing for as long as this
reviewer can remember. Starting with the odd Future
Shock and Time Twister for 2000AD, his radically
original subject matter and unashamedly emotional
style soon led to serial commissions, the most famous
being the award-winning Ballad Of Halo Jones. During
this time Moore, like so many British creators, also
began working for American comics where the wages,
respect and contracts are more agreeable than here in
the UK. He achieved cult fame with his reinvention of
Swamp Thing, and his craft became ever more diverse
and polished.
Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s debut novel.
In 1985, by now a writer for at least five years,
Moore wrote Watchmen, a truly unique and original
comic for its time. Unlike ‘proper’ comics which seek
to continue their franchise for as long as economically
possible, Watchmen was written as a limited, closedarc
story. It was written in 12 chapters, it was published
in 12 chapters – and was so popular it became the first
full comic story to be rebound in book form. Moore
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invented two things simultaneously, both by accident.
‘The 80s Comics Renaissance’ and the ‘graphic novel’.
Nevertheless, Voice Of The Fire is Alan Moore’s
debut novel – and what a novel it is. Spanning 5,000
years but never straying from within a ten-mile radius
around Moore’s home of Northampton, this novel has
the author’s hallmarks all over it. Ostensibly it is a tale
of witchcraft and magic; from the first ‘Hob-Men’,
through Elizabethan court magicians, and finally ending
with only myth, the oppressive 20th century having
imprisoned and buried humanity’s esoteric vision.
But there is far more to this book, hinted at during the
retelling of Northampton legends and finally revealed
in the last chapter, where Moore himself takes upon the
role of narrator in a very real 1995 Northampton. Voice
Of The Fire is a tale of lost myths, of history’s subjective
nature. As history must always be written by survivors,
is any man’s history more ‘real’ than another’s? Who
is to say?
Moore is also perturbed by humanity’s loss of vision,
and implores us to dream again lest we be trapped forever
in ever-decreasing circles of superficiality. From
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the closing chapters it is clear Moore believes we have
lost our way somewhere along the line in the name of
popular science. But Moore is not anti-scientific per
se; as he shrewdly points out, even scientists of this
century have not discounted the theories of subjective
realities. It is humanity’s blind faith and newfound passivity
which endangers us.
Moore questions what in our society has oppressed
those visions and fancies we once had, where people
centuries ago were pronounced dead by ‘Rising
Lights’, ‘the Purples’ or ‘Planet Shock’, and man built
grand follies to match his grand dreams. In Moore’s
own words:
“Everything grand we had, we tore it to bits. Our
castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious
poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fucking
madhouse. Jesus Christ.”
For these, and others, are the tales Moore recounts;
a beggar-woman turned nun who was flogged to death
for receiving visions from Wotan. A mad poet who
wrote beautiful verse and harmed none yet died in an
asylum, sentenced there by his frustrated wife and
son. Two Imp-summoning witches whose practices
were at once both reviled and sought after by the
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same jealous, spiteful wives who eventually burned
them. Moore does not profess to understand these
self-destructive acts – can any of us? – but they are
told with such emotion, and such naturalism, that one
cannot help but feel sympathy for the narrators. Even
the travelling salesman.
Does he succeed? In a word, yes. In the manner of
his contemporary Neil Gaiman, Moore has the skill
to convey his passion and allow the reader to at least
glimpse through his eyes. Only the most jaded and
cold-hearted among men could read his account of
the dying Wise-Man, or the two witches, and not feel
sympathy, even outrage. Like so many good writers,
Moore is especially good at reminding us of what we
already know, but forget too easily in the onward rush
of survival; that we all love, we all feel pain, and we all
must die.
Paradoxically, within this dark and melancholy book
Moore inspires us to think again on the beauties of existence;
of how precious is our time; and how, if we can
just pause to remember the lessons we have learned and
the bounties we possess, we may yet revive the eternal
fires of history and learn from what they can tell us.
Voice Of The Fire is a damn fine novel. For a debut. �
348
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 1996]
Patricia Morrisroe: Robert Mapplethorpe: A Biography
Nick Clapson
Robert Mapplethorpe has long been a contentious figure
in the art world, with much of this debate focusing
on whether or not his erotic/homoerotic photographs
trespass the boundaries of pornography. This is a matter
which becomes especially prejudiced by the fact
that they often deal with the difficult subject of gay
sadomasochism. Much of his other work, however,
deals with more innocuous subjects like portraiture and
floral studies. Whatever his subject matter, though, his
photographs constantly sought to elicit, and so control,
the beauty present in all that he observed, be it Richard
Gere or a lily.
Patricia Morrisroe’s book manages to trace a wellbalanced
path through Mapplethorpe’s career from
suburban student to New York star, often pausing to
illuminate pertinent links between his life and art. For
example, Mapplethorpe’s personal calculating manner
is presented as an obvious impetus for his highly controlled,
almost classical style. By not shying away from
Mapplethorpe’s ‘darker’ pursuits, Morrisoe generates a
more exacting image of this frequently disturbing artist.
She renders Mapplethorpe with a shocking honesty,
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and as result he is frequently portrayed as being cold
and detached. Indeed, if Morrisroe is to be believed,
Mapplethorpe’s attitude towards unprotected sex after
being infected with AIDS is nothing short of chilling.
Mapplethorpe is shown to be a man obsessed by
money and fame, pursuing both remorselessly throughout
his brief life, using anyone he could to achieve his
aims. Paradoxically, though, his objectionable traits
were balanced by a charisma that constantly drew people
towards him. By examining this milieu, Morrisroe
has also explored the intimate details of his long-term
relationships, particularly with singer/poet Patti Smith
and collector Sam Wagstaff.
Morrisroe has achieved a work of outstanding clarity.
She provides not only an exhaustive, yet riveting,
examination of a major artist’s life, but also manages
to demythologise her subject along the way by careful
avoidance of the usual clichés. Morrisroe presents
Mapplethorpe – photographer or artist, pornographer
or celebrity – stripped of his mask, his troubling face
available for all to view in the harsh light of history. The
only evident limitations to the overall success of this
349
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biography are Morrisroe’s occasional clumsy handling
of academic material, and a few stumbling conclusions.
This book could also have been improved with less of
today’s almost obligatory snaps of the artist as a baby,
and more extensive examples of his work. However,
the carefully controlled pathos of Mapplethorpe’s decline
into AIDS easily outweighs a few off comments.
Accessible yet engaging, this epitaph to a truly intriguing
man is going to be hard to surpass. �
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350
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published July 2004]
Morrissey: You Are The Quarry
Ben Granger
And so to the comeback of the year. Seven years without
a contract, self-exiled to LA, the avatar of the awkward
fled his homeland after a bitter divorce with the UK
music press, all the more sour because the ardour was
once so strong. The eternal chronicler of the downtrodden
seemed himself doomed to obscurity. Being a fan
was virtually the love that dare not speak its name.
But back in 2002, triumphant homecoming shows
coupled with renewed support from young bands like
The Libertines saw the climate change. If ever there
was a chance to return, this was it. Courting the media
like never before, he certainly knows there’s a lot riding
on this. No wonder the album cover shows our more
mature protagonist with a gun; this is the last chance
saloon. Would we be the quarry or would he?
The opener ‘America Is Not The World’ instantly
upends expectations. This most famous detester of all
things ‘dance’ is singing over a hip-hop/loungecore
backbeat. And he’s attacking the ignorance and prejudice
of Bush’s USA “where the President is never black,
female or gay / until that day/ you’ve got nothing to say
to me” (he’s since spelled that out recently for the slow
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kids at the back by calling for Dubbya’s death onstage.)
So much for the hoary old racism allegations, but does
that mean he rejects his new home? As ever in Mozland
nothing is quite so simple, after comparing Yanks to
voracious fat pigs he croons with typically breathtaking
arrogance “but haven’t you me with you now? / And I
love you”. Its love/hate with the US just as it was with
the UK. This track has been lambasted for the simplicity
of its lyrics. The critics forget, as often, that the northern
nihilist has always liked to take the piss, and this is a fine
example. They overlook too the sumptuousness of the
tune and vocals. This is a fine opener.
‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ comes next, a short and
powerful rocky number that crams in its two minutes
a restatement of his pride in both his Englishness and
Irishness, another scathing denunciation of those who
accused him racism, and an attack on the Labour Party,
the Conservative Party, Cromwell and the royal family.
Not bad for his first Top 5 single! He’s back alright.
The tempo slows right down for the next three songs.
‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ sets the tone for half the album
in showing that his voice is easily the finest it’s
351
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ever been, but the tunes are often subtle, not “instant.”
The following ‘Come Back To Camden’ shows that
tendency at its optimum, a beautiful orchestral sweep
with a near-operatic climax. It’s served with the best of
Morrissey’s jaded brand of sepia nostalgia, singing of
love lost under slate grey Victorian skies and disused
dark brown stairwells. ‘I’m Not Sorry’ is its nadir; too
sparse, dull, showing the voice can’t draw you in on
its own even with the tantalising “the woman of my
dreams? / there never was one” addition to the age old
is he/isn’t he conundrum.
Melody re-ignites with ‘The World Is Full Of Crashing
Bores’, proving the man’s bitterness and sharp tongue
haven’t mellowed with age. “Lock jawed pop stars
thicker than pigshit” are among those lambasted here,
easy targets sure, but great fun nonetheless, ending with
a very pretty and atypical Beatle-esque bit of reverb.
‘How Can Anybody Possibly Think They Know How
I Feel’ gets down and dirty and quickens the pace a bit
more, deepening the album’s abiding sense of paranoia.
These songs have been criticised as mere moans about
his notorious court cases, but it’s not only everyone in
authority who is savaged, but anyone who has ever liked
him too! “Their judgment is crazy” apparently. There really
is no pleasing some people. “Fame fame fatal fame”,
to quote an earlier number. But then batty misanthropy
was always key to his twisted charm.
The next track is the album’s centrepiece, and mas-
BUY Morrissey music online from and
terpiece. ‘The First Of The Gang To Die’ is the only
‘character’ song on the album, and the only example
of Morrissey’s longstanding tradition of Orton-esque,
Genet-ish paeans to bits of rough. This time it’s the
Mexican gangsters of LA that get the leery treatment. It
may sound unpromising. In fact it’s perfect.
The crashing guitar backing, the Latino strings, the
frighteningly catchy chorus, everything falls impeccably
together. “You have never been in love / until
you’ve seen the stars / reflect in the reservoirs” sets the
tone of drama, undercut with wicked humour. “Such a
silly boy,” he berates the song’s anti-hero, sending up
the obvious incongruity of a camp Englishman hanging
round with Hispanic gang-bangers. As always, he knows
his obsession with sexy footpads is wrong; but all the
more bedevilling for that. “He stole from the rich / and
the poor / and the not very rich / and the very poor / and
he stole all hearts away” he sings, as the word “away”
floats to the ether in an achingly gorgeous falsetto which
combines early Smiths yodellings with the power of his
mature voice. It’s enough to make you weep with maudlin
joy, and one of his very best songs ever, solo or not.
With ‘Let Me Kiss You’ we’re back to more subtle
and muted territory once more, but also the album’s
biggest grower. Over a distinctly Marr-ish arrangement
Morrissey once more does self-deprecating
yearning like no-one else, craving attention while
knowing he will be “physically despised”. Once
352
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more, at least in song, age seems only to add to his
beguiling neurosis. He may reside in California, but
he still revels in doing that most un-American of
things; celebrating life’s losers.
The following ‘All The Lazy Dykes’ doesn’t quite
doesn’t quite match up in the melody stakes but as with
many songs here ends with a hugely moving finale. Its
urge for a downtrodden housewife to find her freedom
in Sapphic joy is oddly touching. “I’ve never felt so
alive / in the WHOLE of my life” he sings, and as often
in this album, one stunning inflection picks up an otherwise
slight arrangement.
Onto the penultimate track, ‘I Like You’. ‘America’
apart, most of this album is basically guitar rock with
a few atmospheric keyboard extras courtesy of new
producer Jerry Finn; no huge departure really. But here
we have a positively New Order-esque backbeat and an
overdrive on the electronica. At its heart is a strident,
killer chorus, where our protagonist seems utterly baffled
by the alien feeling of actually finding someone he
gets on with. “You’re not right in the head / and nor am
I / and this is why…”, once again, breathing beauty into
everyday English phraseology.
With the climax, ‘You Know I Couldn’t Last’, what
should be an arch crescendo to the set sadly ends up
overdoing the bombast, with histrionic guitar crashes
and the lyrics moaning just a bit too much this time.
Throughout this disc, as throughout his career Morrissey
BUY Morrissey music online from and
has portrayed a mindset which to quote Larkin is “rusted
stiff / and will admit / only what will accuse or horrify /
like slot machines only bent pennies fit.” Most times on
Quarry he pulls that off with optimum wit and charm.
Just this once, you are reminded he is a rich middle-aged
pop star still griping about a court case almost a decade
back. A slightly sour aftertaste to a fine brew.
I was going to finish off by saying You Are The Quarry
falls just short of greatness. But having listened to it repeatedly
for nearly two months I think it may just reach
that state after all. It’s the slang-dictionary definition
of the word ‘grower’; even songs I dismissed outright
on first, second and third listens are now warmed to. If
you’re one of the haters who only ever saw Moz as a
queasy mix of Kenneth Williams, Eddie Cochran and
Eeyore the Donkey this album certainly won’t change
your mind. But those who have seen worth in his guttereyed
vision in the past may find much to treasure here if
they only take the time.
Pop’s prole-prince of the outsiders has returned in a
more triumphant manner than we could have expected.
I still feel it doesn’t quite reach the heights of Viva Hate,
Vauxhall and I or Your Arsenal. But its unquestionably
Leeds’ side-streets ahead of Kill Uncle, Southpaw
Grammar and Maladjusted. And as for the tired old
complaints that it’s “not as good as The Smiths”, one can
only reply as Joseph Heller did when told each new book
wasn’t as good as Catch 22. “No. But then, what is?” �
353
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published April 1997]
Cookie Mueller: Ask Dr Mueller
Chris Mitchell
This is one book you can judge by the cover. It shows
a home snapped portrait of Cookie Mueller laughing,
her head thrown back and her hand out against the
wall for support. Ask Dr Mueller is 300 pages of that
laughter, gathered together from over 25 years worth
of her writing about a life that was wild, weird but, so
it would seem, frequently wonderful. Cookie is best
known for her appearances alongside Divine in the
films of maverick director John Waters. However, as
Waters writes in his introduction, she had many sides:
“a writer, a mother, an outlaw, a fashion designer, a
go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all,
a goddess.” Forever on the move, Cookie’s writings
show her restless enthusiasm for everything from art
criticism to travelling to being an agony aunt.
Throughout her life, she stumbled into the most
bizarre situations; everything from burning down
a friend’s house by accident, being abducted on
Highway 31 and fucking chickens for the sake of
art. (If that doesn’t make you want to read the book,
nothing will). Yet while she certainly led what most
would consider a hellraising lifestyle, there’s no
BUY Cookie Mueller books online from and
self-obsessed myth making in Cookie’s writings.
She discusses taking truckloads of drugs in 1960s
Haight-Ashbury with the same humorous detachment
that she catalogues a day of domestic disasters.
The overwhelming impression is that Cookie lived
life to the full and everything within it interested her.
Most of all, she could equally convey those mad and
mundane moments’ importance on the page, turning
the deeply personal from mere autobiography into
a kind of art. If a writer’s job is to look at what we
all take for granted and bring back something of its
magic, then Cookie deserved a huge payrise.
Her death from AIDS in 1989, seven weeks after her
husband died of the same cause, brought an abrupt halt
to the stream of stories, reflections, advice and ideas
collected here. Most books which feature collections
of writers’ published and unpublished work are usually
just picking over the dead bones of what’s left, like the
posthumous Bruce Chatwin industry. Ask Dr Mueller,
however, goes in the opposite direction – it brings together
between two covers a hilarious and fascinating
collage of one woman’s journey through life.
354
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This book is perhaps in danger of being passed over
because it can’t really be categorised, which makes it
unmarketable; moreover, Cookie’s fame is limited to
devotees of relatively obscure films and the American
underground. But this relative anonymity is exactly the
book’s major strength. A reader can never be quite sure
BUY Cookie Mueller books online from and
what will happen next within Cookie’s writings – it’s
one of those glorious collections that reflects the unpredictability
and everyday insanity of life. It doesn’t
matter whether you know who Cookie Mueller is; by
the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll wish she was
still around. �
355
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 2004]
Ben Myers: The Book Of Fuck
Chris Mitchell
With a title like that, you’ve got to write a good book
or have the word “wanker” silently appended to your
name forever after. Just to make things more difficult,
the press release trumpets the fact that The Book Of
Fuck was written in seven days. I don’t know about
your criteria for choosing a book to read, but something
written in seven days sounds to me like it will be
a cramp-stomached vomit of speed-crazed gibberish,
especially if the back cover states it’s “a buckled breakneck
rant let loose at punk rock speed”.
Thankfully, none of these things are true. The Book
Of Fuck is a homage and a pisstake of the twilight
world of music journalism, a first person reportage
of a starving hack sent off in search of a death metal
antichrist superstar called, to the joy of America’s
Christian masses, the God Of Fuck. GoF is like Marilyn
Manson, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and GG Allin all
rolled into one – the bogeyman of popular culture. But
GoF doesn’t get much of a look-in even though the
search for him propels the plot – the pages are taken up
with the internal monologue of our protagonist, a mix
of furious punning, musical musing and starving artist
BUY Ben Myers books online from and
clichés twisted into new shapes, all set against his love
of London’s squalid glamour. It’s a prose style that can
certainly be called punk rock, but the tone of our hero
is far more gentle and even genteel than even the most
half-hearted sneer from Mr Rotten. He’s a Cat Stevens’
fan, for Christ’s sake.
That notwithstanding, there’s a touch of Hunter S.
Thompson to the prose, which is a compliment not to
be awarded likely because The Book Of Fuck echoes
HST’s style without trying to ape it. It runs in parallel to
rather than behind it, connecting a mordant intelligence
with a sense of amused bewilderment at the predicaments
in which the narrator continually finds himself.
As someone who used to read the music papers religiously
as a teenager, back in the golden era of Melody
Maker at the end of the 80s, The Book Of Fuck has
a lot of resonance with that time, before intelligent
music journalism all but disappeared underneath the
market forces of dad rock and prepubescent marketing
exercises. (Can’t we ban The Beatles ever being
featured on another magazine cover ever?). The Book
Of Fuck doesn’t offer up anything particularly pro-
356
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found, but it does provide a superb black humoured
roadtrip of the soul in search of profundity, which is
possibly even better.
And, as the work of a small UK publisher, Wrecking
Ball Press, The Book Of Fuck has superb production
values: from the size to the spacing to the use of fonts,
this is a book that wants to be read. Sadly there are numerous
typos scattered through it, but then, that’s very
punk rock too so I guess I’ll have to live with it. �
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357
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Names And Their Significance In Fiction 359
Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture 363
Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day 377
Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie 380
Will Oldham:
Songs Of The Human Animal 382
P.J. O’Rourke:
Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll 389
Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty 392
Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have
Your Abortion” 394
Tim Parks: Destiny 398
N-R
Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism 401
Ulf Poschardt:
DJ Culture 404
Richard Powers:
Plowing The Dark 406
Richard Powers: Gain 408
Thomas Pynchon:
Mason & Dixon 410
Matthew Robertson: Factory Records:
The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461) 413
Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memories
Of Thomas Penman 415
Jacques Roubaud:
The Great Fire Of London 417
358
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published August 1996]
Names And Their Significance In Fiction
Chris Hall
The importance of names in literature has nowhere
been more typified than in recent attempts to pin down
the elusive etymology of Beckett’s Godot. Following
that farrago you can be sure that the name “Godot” is
missing from any parental Book Of Names (although
I quite like the idea of pregnant women going around
stroking their bellies and saying: “Yes, we’re waiting
For Godot…”) One can imagine the bewildered child
suffering an intolerable identity problem from having
his peers forever arguing about what he ‘means.’
To some, “Godot” has a kind of cosmic signifier in
the duality ‘God/Eau’. Less Francophile readings have
insisted it should scan as ‘Go.dot’, a reference to the
mental and physical movement that must result from
Existential inertia. Perhaps the least credible suggestion,
although the most interesting and curious, comes
from a bizarre triangular link between James Joyce’s
Ulysses and the Tour de France. Some painstaking (or
entirely serendipitous) research has discovered that
a French cyclist by the name of, wait for it, Godot,
rode through Dublin on the 16th June in the early part
of this century, the exact day which Leopold Bloom
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spends milling around Dublin in Ulysses. To me this
has a further curious affinity with the ‘Go.dot’ reading
and one of cheery Norman Tebbit’s maxims: on
yer bike! Evidence perhaps that Beckett really was a
hilarious wag or, simply, a precognitive member of
the Tory party?
Charles Dickens was one of the first to really let rip
with overblown allusional comic sobriquets and it is
in this tradition that a lot of modern and Postmodern
neologising is entrenched. Writers have always liked a
name’s potential to succinctly allude to character and
disposition, often spending months deliberating over
the final choice. For me, one of the best examples of a
truly great fictional name belongs to the central character
in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Of Dunces:
Ignatius J. Reilly. The christian name is practically onomatopoeic,
suggesting indignation and outrage which,
for anyone who has read the book, will almost sound
like a definition of our Rabelaisian hero going about
his hatred of anything modern. (In a cinema Ignatius
loudly proclaims: “This is an abortion!”) There is also
the subtle use of the pompous, self-important middle
359
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initial that furthers our understanding of the character.
Philip K. Dick’s obsession with duality (probably
originating from the fact that his twin sister died when
only a few months old) led him to invent some gloriously
unlikely names. In Valis one-half of the narrator
(as with a lot of Dick’s novels, it is hard to tell) is called
Horselover Fat. ‘Philip’ is Greek for ‘lover of horses’;
‘Dick’ is German for ‘Fat’. Similarly, for close watchers
of Karaoke by Dennis Potter, the character of Nick
Balmer, played by Richard E. Grant, immediately raised
suspicion: N. Balmer = Enbalmer, a famous line from
deranged Danny the headhunter in the film Withnail & I.
Incidentally, this provides further evidence that Dennis
Potter (or Pennis Dotter, as A.A. Gill waggish refers to
the playwright) was taking the piss with his Channel 4/
BBC 2 collaboration. A less subtle form of this codified
obscurantism appears in the film Angel Heart, where
Robert De Niro plays the character Louis Cyphre, who
turn out to be, surprise surprise, Lucifer.
If there is one author who best exemplifies a predilection
for names and games of the distinctly literary
type it is Vladimir Nabokov. In Bend Sinister there
is paronomasias (a “verbal plague” as Nabokov describes
it) in Padukgrad where everybody is merely an
anagram of everybody else. Nabokov concedes that by
their very nature these “delicate markers” will bypass
the inattentive reader and that “well-wishers will bring
their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to
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my little party” and concludes that in the end “it is only
the author’s private satisfaction that counts.” It was this
“wayside murmur” that pleased him the most when
rereading his own fiction for the purposes of correction.
etc. Nabokov reminds us that reading is a bungee
jump (especially first person narratives) where we may
become so engrossed in the rush and thrill of the story
that we forget we are tethered to the author. Nabokov
had a kind of withering, yet paternalistic, disregard for
kidding ourselves: he had a fondness for snapping on
the ropes and shouting down, “You idiots!”
James Wood, in comparing young American and
English writing, recently argued for a fiction of unknowingness
and against one of omniscient authorial
intrusion. But surely this is just the point that Nabokov
is making: fiction is a conscious game where the author
manipulates the proceedings. There is little escape from
this fact (and why should we want to escape it?) What
varies is authorial acknowledgement which sounds
patronising or exhilarating, according to taste. Some
people don’t like the pedagogical voice in modern
fiction, don’t like being ‘lectured to’, and some don’t
like being told they’re being ‘lectured to.’ Fine. But
Woods, and even more recently, the children’s writer
Philip Pullman, recent winner of the Carnegie Medal,
goes too far in implying that any type of Postmodern or
self-conscious position cannot co-exist with what they
conceive as a ‘pure storytelling’ form.
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I can’t help but detect a very conservative sensibility
here that has an analogue with the political rhetoric of
the ‘Back To Basics’ government campaign: a return to
good honest readability, out with this leftie cleverness,
elliptical narrative on yer bike! Note also the tedious
cyclical nature inherent to both arguments, roughly
appearing in the run up to the Booker Prize or a General
Election. A recent Dillons survey of MPs’ reading
habits (a thinly veiled attempt to annoy Jeffrey Archer,
which is fine by me) reveals similarly conservative
reading values. Most overrated novelist? Archer, of
course, who goes down for obvious political reasons
(though it begs the question: who is it that ‘rated’ him
in the first place?) Next came Martin Amis, A.S. Byatt
and Salman Rushdie, which sounds suspiciously like
a list of people you are supposed to say are overrated.
Either that or, dare I say it, a list of authors your average
MP is a little too sentence-challenged to understand.
Well, think about it: all those years of soundbite politics
hardly indicates a love of Proust or Joyce, does it?
The importance of a name to plot structure is nowhere
more comically heightened than in Martin Amis’
Money, where John Self finds himself the patsy in a
financial conspiracy of moviemakers and money shakers.
It is the character’s very name that is the source
of his downfall. (Skip the next couple of paragraphs
if you haven’t read the book). “John: is, I think, the
perfect name for invoking the bland anonymity of the
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giant financial institutions where, in Nabokovian terms,
everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else.
(Viz. Nick Leeson: a name that should have set alarm
bells ringing in itself).
“Self” of course embodies the ultimate 80s Thatcherite
‘ideas’ of individualism and survival. But the apposite
brilliance of “John Self” is in making it the central
twist. Amis has subservient to the greater scheme of
things (the plot), just as his character is made to serve
the greed of the players around him. It transpires that
Self has been signing company documents twice; once
under co-signatory, once under “Self”: “It was your
name.” This literary playfulness and close attention to
detail can be traced from Nabokov through the American
heavyweights Saul Bellow and John Updike to
Anthony Burgess and most recently Amis.
The playfulness which employs hyperreal and
ciphered names runs riot in the comic novel, best exemplified
by Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Here the names
are neither naturalistic or ciphered but faintly ludicrous
(viz. Pulp Fiction: “This is America: names don’t mean
shit”). There is a phonetic suggestibility of sedition and
subversion in the name “Yossarian” (which is noted by
one of his paranoid superiors in the book). There is also
the double “Major Major” (which has recently been recycled
as the title of Terry Major-Ball’s autobiography)
and the sub-Dickensian “Chaplain Tapmann”. “Milo
Minderbinder” is a personal favourite, conjuring up
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an image of a kind of entrepreneurial mesmerist who
also happens to be mentally ill. However, we also have
Richard Ford’s “Frank Banscombe”, a name redolent
of Updike’s great tragicomic figure Harry ‘Rabbit’
Angstrom: thus a more naturalistic name could be said
to suit the subtler pastiche and ironic métiers of Ford
and Updike.
Names become their strangest when the demarcations
between fiction and reality begin to merge into
one another . Umberto Eco is a case in point. His nonfictional
name is almost too literary, too good, to be
the real name of an author. One of Eco’s short stories
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from Misreadings is entitled ‘Granita’ and is a twist
upon Lolita, where the subject of desire is an old lady.
In the Nabokovian version the central protagonist is, of
course, Humbert Humbert, the name once again being
indicative of a double or split image. The similarity
of Umberto to Humbert is striking, and “Eco” sounds
like an allusion to the fact that the first name is an echo
of the first. Before knowing any better I found myself
thinking that perhaps Will Self was a sly allusion to one
of his mentors (and mates) Martin Amis. But that would
be to confuse art with life. And we all know where that
gets us… �
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Interview [published August 2000]
Jeff Noon: Liquid Culture
Antony Johnston discusses cities, prose remixing and the death of Vurt
I meet Jeff Noon in his now-native Brighton, stepping
off the two o’clock from Victoria to greet a man surprisingly
recognisable from his dustjacket photographs,
casually dressed and affable.
You heard me. Jeff Noon, the man who made Manchester
live, breathe and kill over the course of five
books, has moved to Brighton. And I’m not the only
person curious as hell to know what that’s all about.
But before we can settle down, Noon leads me out
the station into Brighton proper, and casually asks if I
know the city. I don’t; this is my first visit. So he offers
a two-second whistlestop tour, in the process answering
the question for me.
“Look at that sky,” he says, gesturing upward. It’s a
dry but dim day, nothing special to my eyes. “Even on
a sunny day in Manchester, you wouldn’t get a sky like
that. It’s always grey there.”
As we walk in the direction of the North Laine area,
he explains: “I’ve always loved Brighton, ever since
I did my first one-man shows down here. They were
always a great crowd. I could just tell they were up for
it, laughing at every word.”
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In contrast, he folds his arms and adopts an unnaturally
grumpy face. “Manchester’s a much harder
audience. ‘Go on then, impress us.’ Down here you
don’t feel as if you have to prove yourself before they’ll
listen to you.”
He laughs, leading on, and it strikes me that he really
does seem very relaxed. Not at all the intense, edgy
character I was expecting. He outlines some of the appeal
of Brighton, and it becomes apparent how much
Noon’s obviously enjoying himself in his new home.
“Brighton’s all about the individual. There’s a sense
of youth, and a great artistic community. In Manchester,
I felt isolated – here I’ve met more people, very
quickly, and started working with other artists much
more than I did in Manchester.”
We turn down one street in particular which Noon
presents as an example: “Look at this place; Green
Street. It’s all young businesses, they flock here. Here,
look at this.” He’s paused outside a small shop with
wooden fixtures, old-style fittings, and… “Beads. They
sell nothing but beads, for goodness’ sake.”
He’s right. I peer in, and finally realise what he’s re-
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ally pointing out; it’s quarter past two on a Wednesday
afternoon. And the shop’s packed.
“And it always is,” he says with a smile. “Now you
try and open a shop like that in Manchester and, well…”
Dead within a week?
“Yeah. Dead within a week.”
Down the end of the street is a small place called the
TinTin Café. We step inside and take a table. Noon still
hasn’t told me exactly why he moved from Manchester,
his synonymous (perhaps even symbiotic) stomping
ground. And it’s something which shocked a lot of
people. Something I need to know.
“People are shocked, and I think that’s quite interesting.
I’ve been asked that question a lot, and the fact
that I’ve been asked it … That tells me something. It’s
to do with the fact that hardly anybody writes about
Manchester, in any medium, in such an intimate way as
I have. I reckon the only other person who’s been asked
so many times is Morrissey, when he left the city.”
He points out that despite the number of artists
Manchester produces, nobody would think twice
about Oasis leaving, “Because their work isn’t about
Manchester. It could have been done anywhere, you
know?” He laughs and shrugs.
“It’s not my fault that I’m one of the few that’s actually
taken the city and tried to do something with it. So
I think that’s actually a question you need to ask the city
of Manchester. Why are there so few people writing
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
about it in such an intimate way that when somebody
who does do it leaves, people get upset?”
The answer may be simply that putting Manchester
into words is such a difficult task. It was no easy
journey for Noon, and he all but brought about his
situation himself.
“I started to feel isolated. I’d been putting these books
out, five books, all about Manchester, and I came to feel
that … I wasn’t getting the kind of reaction that I would
have hoped for. And it’s entirely my fault, because I
kind of set out on a mission. It’s always dangerous
when you do that.”
Mission? What mission?
“To put Manchester into the consciousness in terms
of prose. To discover, and write in, a language that had
come out of the city. And I think on my own terms, I’d
succeeded in that. On my own personal terms. But it
was definitely a mission.” He laughs, shaking his head.
“And whenever you set out on a mission, you can only
ever really be disappointed.”
Over the last few years, Noon watched his city slowly
disappear. Suffocated under a blanket of rejuvenation
called New Manchester.
“The poor place has been rejuvenated until it can
hardly breathe. Which is great, but you have to be careful
that you don’t rejuvenate into blandness. Increasingly,
the city I’d been writing about started to vanish,
and I have no interest in writing about yuppies living in
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city centre flats. I’m not putting them down, but it’s just
not an area I have an interest in as a fictional subject.
They even knocked down Bottletown.”
He’s referring to a location in Vurt, a planning hell of
broken glass and towerblocks, a societal nightmare of
accelerated residents with no concern for tomorrow. Is
he saying Bottletown was real?
“Yeah, ‘Bottletown’ is this place called Hulme.
Hulme was an amazing place, and very typical of
what’s happened in Manchester, in a sense. It’s this
1960s council place: flats, ‘terraces in the sky.’ It didn’t
work as a family place at all, so all the families moved
out. And they began moving young single people in,
students and so on. Short-term people.
“So it all started to change, and that’s when I lived
there. Hulme became this hotbed of activity; lots of
bands started there. There were recording studios in the
flats, totally illegal. And it was very close to Moss Side,
the large black area, so there was a lot cross-fertilisation
between the cultures going on. Just a mad place.
“Eventually, they just knocked it down. They had to,
it was very badly built and so on. But all that atmosphere,
all that excitement, has dissipated. And they’ve
built this new Hulme in its place, which is…” He
pauses, choosing careful words. “I mean, I’m sure it’ll
be interesting in 50 years, but at the moment it’s like a
toytown. Not an ounce of atmosphere.”
Aware of what may seem to be a nostalgia trip, he
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
adds, “Obviously, each generation has its own needs
and desires. But for my personal generation, that place
at that time represents the spirit of individuality, which
is entirely what my work celebrates. Now it’s moved,
and I don’t know where it’s gone. And I’m mostly too
old to go looking for it any more.”
Does he think someone else will find it? Was this it,
the generation gap catching up perhaps?
“Yeah, I think so. And one of the things which I hoped
would have happened by now, was for my success to
have dragged other writers up who would deal with the
city in their own individualistic way. That didn’t really
happen, and I think it should. I think it needs to happen.
Manchester needs that voice, because it’s very hard to
say anything against this New Manchester effort that’s
building up. So the city needs that voice, the alternative
voice. And it needs the alternative voice to be a success,
to a good degree rather than just being underground.”
This voice … does it have to be a native one? He’s a
Mancunian, so were Morrissey and Ian Curtis: does he
feel that sort of experience is necessary to capture the
‘real’ Manchester?
“No, no, not at all! I mean, a lot of students come
into Manchester, from all over the place. It just needs
people to talk about the city in a certain way. It’s time
for someone younger than me to do that now, because
my concerns are changing over the years, as they do.”
I mentioned that because one of the things Noon
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did inspire with books like Vurt was a sense that no
matter who you were or where you lived, your town
was as good a place as anywhere to tell a story. It’s
very easy to get trapped into the feeling that interesting
things only happen in ‘glamorous’ places, like London
or New York…
“Yeah, and the reason for that is quite simple, but
a difficult truth for people to handle. It’s to do with
stories, and the kind of environments that allow stories
to happen. Obviously, with places like New York and
certain areas of London, you have an environment that
does very readily create stories; it’s to do with the way
that people live their lives there. Once you get into the
provinces, of England especially, you start to lose that
melting-pot of ideas. There has to be a lot of work done.
It’s much more difficult to write about Manchester than
it is about Soho, for instance. But these are problems
that writers in the future will have to face and sort out.”
A matter of finding the stories?
“Yeah. I think that in a place like Manchester there
are a limited number of stories anyway. And a lot of the
writers that have written about Manchester have tended
to concentrate on these certain things.”
Is this why Noon chose to make his work ostensibly
science fiction? As a way of creating a Manchester
where stories are created more readily?
He pauses, contemplating his orange juice. “Difficult
question, that.”
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That’s the idea…
“Certainly, I’ve been writing plays…” He pauses,
considering. “I’ve been writing since 1984, doing
one-man shows. And that stuff wasn’t really about
Manchester as such. It tended to be quite experimental,
just set nowhere. My only big success as a playwright
was Woundings, and that’s set on the Falkland Islands!
“So I didn’t really have that inkling to write about
Manchester, and I think that was because nobody was.
There wasn’t the heritage there which you get in, say,
pop music. Pop’s been rooted in Manchester since
1977, the idea that this is a place where you can do
that. So young generations of people automatically
fall into it.”
But it seems the final impetus came from an unexpected
turn of events. “I started writing a play called
The Torture Garden, again set in a totally fictional
environment. But the person I was writing the play for
left the country for a job abroad, and I was left with this
half-finished idea.”
At that point, Noon was working in a Waterstone’s
bookshop in Manchester. This is the point where everything
happens; this is where it all turns around. Steve
Powell, the man behind the fledgling Ringpull Press,
was also working there. And he needed someone to
write a novel for him…
“I took the ideas of that play, and turned them into
Vurt. And that’s the first time that I started to write about
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Manchester. I wasn’t that conscious of even doing it;
I was a quarter of the way through when I suddenly
realised, ‘Hey this could be quite special, no-one’s really
done this before, not in this way.’ And that’s when
the mission set in…”
Noon’s not the first writer to be halfway through a
project before realising what the essence of the work
actually is, and he agrees that it’s often the best way for
a work to come about.
“The more and more books you do, the more you
think about what you’re doing. I’d always been interested
in Ballard and Borges, people on the fringes
of sci-fi, though; and the sci-fi thing happened almost
accidentally, just came out of the ideas in The
Torture Garden.”
It almost sounds like one of Noon’s own fictions, the
random remixing of concepts, words and spaces into
something altogether different.
“I’ve always been drawn to quite experimental art.
But the idea of experimental art in Manchester at the
time … It’s almost impossible to imagine what Manchester
was like back then. It was so dark, and grimy,
and grim. You just can’t imagine what it was like from
here. So yeah, when you come to Vurt, you get this quite
down and grimy place – a place of shadows – mixing
with this phantasmagorical world.”
Dark, but with a lot of energy, too.
“Yeah, there was that. There’s always been that, and
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that comes out of the punk thing.”
It will surprise no-one to learn that yes, Noon was
a punk. It was the only time in his life where he was
part of a crowd, a movement – “I’m just not like that
naturally” – and to him it signifies the real start of his
adult life. He’s at pains to point out that his work is
societal, not just cyberdrugs and urban grit.
“If you actually examine Vurt, there are serious things
going on in there which nobody ever talks about. It’s
about escape, and facing up to the realities of what it
is you’re trying to escape from. This is something that
happens again and again in my work; it’s one of the
themes that I pinpointed as being a typical Manchester
story. The need to escape from your situation.”
Certainly, many of Noon’s characters have an introverted
quality, continually faced with the temptation to
retreat into a secret, safe world. His stories are about
finding the courage to face what you’re retreating from.
“I think if you go back to Morrissey’s work with The
Smiths, you’ll definitely key into that feeling there as
well. Manchester in the 70s, when both Morrissey and
I were growing up, was just not a place to be sensitive,
or to be artistic or creative; it was beaten out of you. So
you do get the sense of escape going on with people
from our generation.”
What about other, later generations? Are they escaping
too?
“It’s quite interesting to look at what’s been coming
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out of Manchester since then, typified I suppose by
Oasis and Happy Mondays. I mean, the escape that
they’re on is just not the same at all. They’re escaping
into stereotypes, for a start. There’s very little sense of
exploration in their work. And it really does upset me
that Manchester has become associated with that ‘laddist’
image.”
So who does he regard as closer to the spirit of the
city? Joy Division, perhaps?
He laughs quietly, like a private revelation. “I regard
Joy Division as being the spirit of the city! If you look
at The Smiths and Joy Division, you’ve got a light
and dark thing going on there, a reflection of what
was going on in the city at the time. Whereas, with the
new Manchester thing, the ‘New Manchester’ people,
they’re trying to pave over the darkness.”
Not something Noon could ever be accused of; his
Manchester is a place where tattooed addicts make
love to shadows, dogs and humans carnally succumb
to aphrodisiacs, where a young girl with a deadly kiss
is the living embodiment of Mother Nature’s power to
destroy. And the sirens never stop.
Vurt was a watershed book; upon release it, and Noon,
made a leap into the consciousness of underground
literary subculture. Why does he feel the book had such
a strong impact? And how does he view himself, no
longer the underground writer he was?
“Am I not?” He laughs. “I hope that my heart’s still
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
there. I mean, when Vurt initially came out it reached a
certain number of people, and grew from there, but it’s
been very slow. Even now, my sales aren’t what you’d
call massive.”
He emphasises the word. “Slow. I know that when
I start complaining about this, my writer friends just
say ‘Shut up, Jeff. I should have your problems!’” He
laughs again. “But I’d really like to break through to
another level. I’m really into reaching out to people,
but in an interesting, experimental way. That’s what
I’ve always tried to do. I have no desire to write books
just for a few people to enjoy. That’s not really me.
“But at the same time, I have this really strong streak
of experimentalism [sic] that just kind of pushes things
a certain way. I just hope that one day it will happen,
you know? With the kind of age that we’re moving into
now, we should be discovering new ways of telling
stories. And I hope my work becomes part of that. But
it’s a long journey.”
Speaking of experimentation, new ages and cultures;
what is it about club culture in general which appeals to
Noon? Much of his work seems almost entrenched in
club/dub fusion culture, the primacy of the DJ.
“That goes back to punk again. The most important
moment in popular history happened in 1977, when
white kids discovered dub reggae. From that moment
comes everything we now listen to. And it was a complete
revelation to me. I was learning to play the bass,
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but I’d never really listened to the bass on a record
before. In pop music, it was always guitar and voice;
we didn’t really know what a bassline was, because
they were always turned down low.
“But suddenly, with dub reggae … It doesn’t just turn
it up, it actually says, ‘This is the centre of the music.’
The bass and the drum; everything else is decoration.
And I think you can follow that moment from there
right into club culture. Hip-hop especially, but also
house and techno, speed garage, whatever, discovering
the bass and the drum and the beauty contained therein.
“So with the post-punk scene happening as well,
you started to get this really experimental thing going
on with groups, especially bands like Pere Ubu and
XTC. You get an interesting space in music, so that
when you now get to a producer like Timbaland, you
can see that his spatial imagination is immense, thinking
about exactly where he’s gonna place this hi-hat
sound, and so on.”
Being a big experimental ambient fan myself, I
couldn’t help but notice an acknowledgement to Autechre
at the start of Needle In The Groove. Is it fair,
then, to say he simply seeks out experimentation, no
matter what the artform?
“Yeah, absolutely. I love all the stuff that happens on
the fringes of the dance scene. The stuff you can’t really
dance to, but it’s still a part of the scene. I’m really
into German music at the moment, Oval and Mouse On
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
Mars. Again, there’s just that interest in sound.
“So the point about club culture is, it’s not so
much the rave and Ibiza scene, but more the kind of
manipulation of sound that’s going on, and the way
that that feeds back into the way people live and view
their lives these days. I know for a fact, for example,
that those young kids over there –” He points at three
young skaters across the street, “– have a very different
mindset to the one I had at their age. And a lot
of that is to do with the way they’re experiencing the
world, the way they’re experiencing music, film, TV,
the internet and so on. I’m really interested in that, and
that’s mainly why I tend to write young characters.
And these days, that experimentation with sound is
fed into the work too.”
They also have different drugs. Which is as good a
way as any of bringing up the thorny subject. It’s become
de rigeur to describe Noon’s work as “trippy.”
Are, or were, drugs as big a part of his life as it seems?
“No.” He laughs; I get the impression he’s asked
this question a lot, too. “Tiny, tiny part. In my work,
as something that I write about, it’s just a metaphor
for change. It forces the character to change. If you
look at Vurt, there are loads of ‘cheat modes’ going on
in there, by me as a writer. Vaz is the ultimate cheat
mode; Vaz will get anybody out of anything! But with
the feathers it’s more a feeling of, ‘Okay, let’s push
them onto the next level now.’ And it automatically
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does it, for me as a writer.”
So much for that popular myth, then. If drugs aren’t
part of Noon’s inspiration, what is? Who does he read,
for example?
“I read and re-read Jorge Luis Borges, in fact I’m just
re-reading his stuff at the moment. He’s one that I come
back to all the time. The more I write, the more of his
influence comes in there. And J G. Ballard meant a lot
to me when I was in my 20s.”
What about other media, besides music?
“Painting.” He says it as if it’s the most natural thing
in the world. “My first and natural talent is to paint.
That’s what I was born to do. I trained in painting and
visual arts at university. But I haven’t painted since
1984, when I started seriously writing plays.
“So really, there’s lots of stuff going on in my work.
Lots of stuff coming from music, lots of stuff coming
from visual arts, and the history of visual arts. And it all
kind of gets mixed up in there.”
Does this mean, then, that he doesn’t ‘do’ research
as such? That it all comes from a big dub inphomix in
his head?
“Yeah, that’s just what it is. I pick it up, and it all kind
of gets filtered through my imagination. I don’t do a lot
of research, no.” He laughs quietly.
“The thing is, my work’s changing at the moment.
It’s becoming more real. The project I’m working on
at the moment is to all intents and purposes historical,
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
so there’s a certain amount of research going into it.
But I don’t get trapped by it … and I just exaggerate. I
go over the top and see what happens. I do think those
writers who are bound by the science…” Careful words
again … “It produces a certain kind of work, which has
a certain kind of appeal. But it never interests me, that
hard science fiction.”
Does this follow through into forethought? There’s
a theory going round that Nymphomation, for example,
was planned right from the start, back when he
wrote Vurt.
He laughs again, but loud this time as his ever-present
half-smile finally splits into a wide grin.
“No, not at all! Everything is retro-engineered.
There’s no plan. The last sentence of Nymphomation
actually came about by accident…
“I was doing a reading, and somebody asked me what
I was working on. So I said ‘I’m doing the first book
in the Vurt sequence, set before Vurt.’ And this person
asked – completely innocently – ‘What, you mean it
ends with the first sentence of Vurt?’ And I just said,
‘Yeeeaaah…’ But I did have in mind this four book
sequence. Honest…”
Will we see any more? Is there another Vurt book in
the works?
“No. Now that I’ve moved away from Manchester –
and stated I’m also leaving sci-fi – the idea of another
Vurt book becomes a bit … problematic. I might come
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back, but at the moment I’ve got no interest.
“What I will say is that to a certain and very important
degree, Needle In The Groove is that last Vurt
novel. Because all the books in the Vurt sequence
have been about the same thing. Which has got nothing
to do with feathers, nothing to do with anything
‘science fictional’ at all. It’s to do with the search for
a new family. The escape from a broken family, the
setting up of a new, alternative family, and the search
to repair a broken family.
“Needle In The Groove and Vurt could almost be
mirror-images of one another, in that sense. The difference
being that at the end, Elliot manages something
that Scribble from Vurt hasn’t got a chance in hell of
sorting out; his relationship with his father. So if you
take this sequence of books as being about that subject,
which I do, then Needle finished it. Obviously, the
hardcore Vurt fans are going to say I’m being daft with
all this,” he laughs, “But you know, this is what I write
about. This is my subject.”
It does make sense; both Vurt and Needle are ostensibly
about single protagonists, whereas Nymphomation
and Pollen are ensemble pieces. There is indeed a
mirror-image, even though each book in the sequence
has gone further back into the past.
“Yeah, and now I’m doing a historical novel! I just
hope people are picking up on these elements in my
work. I hope they’re not becoming so enamoured with
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
the superficial subject matter that they can’t see, I am
on a journey here, and travelling a certain road I have
to go down.
“I liken my position at the moment very much to J.G.
Ballard. Ballard built up a very rich series of techniques
over 20 years or so while his work was ‘hidden’ in
sci-fi. And then, with Empire Of The Sun, he started to
write about things which were more real, using those
techniques he’d built up. That’s quite interesting to me
at the moment, with Needle In The Groove as the start of
that. Using all these techniques to focus on something
that’s quite real, quite emotional and to do with the way
people live their lives now.”
Certainly, no-one could accuse Noon of not developing
his style. It’s one of the things which makes his work
stand out from the crowd, a style which has become
more fluid and, dare I say, “dubbed” as time goes on. In
a sense, Noon’s work is more to do with the way stories
are told than the stories themselves.
“I’m glad you say that, actually. I’m a storyteller, and
I love telling stories, but the way that I tell the stories is
what really excites me. The writers I admire are those
people of whom you can read two sentences and just
know it’s them. Those are the people I like. It’s the
same with music, everything.
“I do think this whole kind of ‘dub fiction’ thing I’m
on at the moment is exciting for me as a writer. I hope
it’s exciting for the reader. You just don’t know what’s
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going to come out of it. It just seems right and correct
that it should be happening now, at this space in time.”
Right here and right now being the end of the century,
the nonexistent year double-zero. The year where trend
itself is outdated, and there is no mode.
“Yeah. In this whole kind of pro-Postmodern world
we’re living in, I think it’s fruitful that people can
discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live
now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the
prose equivalent of that is great.”
And has he? Noon has another book due to be published
in Autumn 2000, entitled Cobralingus. Is that his
liquid fiction?
“Cobralingus takes this whole idea of remix fiction
and pushes it right to the extreme. It’s based on electronic
music techniques, where I take sampled text and
I push them through a series of gates. Each gate has a
different effect upon the text, but it’s not done using
computers. It’s all in my mind. And as it works its way
through, each time it’s a remix of what’s gone before.
“I’m also starting to write with another writer in
Brighton here, and that extends the thought into other
people – we’re remixing each other’s text. My work’s
become very experimental at the moment, since coming
to Brighton. Coming here was difficult, as you can
imagine. Removing myself from the source of all those
stories took me a long time to even start.”
And Manchester meets liquid fiction – or at least, liq-
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
uid music – in Needle In The Groove. I have to admit,
even to a ‘hardened’ Noon reader like myself, the first
few pages of his latest novel were a shock, simply due
to the extremely unconventional layout of the text and
the way the narrative is presented.
“Well, it’s no more unconventional than the way Patti
Smith sets her poetry out, or Bob Dylan…”
Maybe not, but for Noon it was a big step forward,
and one he’s obviously happy with. Will we see more
of that? Is his work going to continue, and develop, in
that style?
“Certainly in these separate projects I’m talking
about, yeah. Cobralingus is the first of them, and it will
become more liquid. But in my ‘mainstream’ novels,
there’ll still be an overriding sense of story and narrative.
I’m never going to lose that. I have no interest in
presenting the reader with a kind of ‘destroyed’ narrative,
unless it’s specifically in an experimental setting.
But obviously, the experiments that I’m doing will feed
into the narrative stuff as well.”
This poses a question. If he’s committed to developing
this style, and now that he’s crossed the threshold
with Needle, will he feel comfortable ‘going back’ to
conventional narrative?
“I think it’s to do with being honest to the story you’re
telling, that’s all. I have this idea that every story has its
own particular language. A lot of writers don’t consider
this at all; they’ve got their style and they do it. But for
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me, easily the longest part of the process is discovering
that language. Once I’ve done that, the book just goes.
“Needle was actually written in conventional punctuation
for a while, until I started to let the ideas of the
subject dissolve into the way it was written, so that the
two can’t be separated. You can’t separate the form
from the content in Needle. And once that happened,
the book just kind of flowed out.
“So yeah, if get an idea for a more conventional story,
I’ll set it in a more conventional style. It’s the language,
you know? The book I’m writing at the moment has an
invented language, but the punctuation is straight down
the line, no messing about, because that suits the story.
But the language itself is an invention.”
Do I detect a bit of a Bauhaus thing going on here?
Form follows function, and all that?
“Oh, yeah. Form is function. All this comes from
my painting background. And of course sometimes,
form can go against function for a deliberate effect.
For instance, you could write about a DJ mixing, but
in the style of John Donne … and I have done that at
times. There are moments of that in Needle, writing
very elegantly and poetically about something which is
very modern and chaotic. And it sets up a kind of mix,
a clash of styles.”
John Donne. An odd choice of example, but works
like Needle are certainly approaching poetry. Is this
what we can expect from him in the future, something
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
more akin to poetry?
“No, no, I just have an intense interest in language.
This is something that’s been growing since Nymphomation.
That was a difficult book for me, definitely a
watershed. But in terms of my progression it’s a very
important book, because that’s when things started to
dissolve for the first time.”
Nymphomation also feels very self-analytical in
places, almost as if Noon were looking back at this
younger person who wrote Vurt, deconstructing his
own text from a modern standpoint.
“It is a self-conscious book, yeah. I think if anybody
looked back at the progression of what I’ve done,
Nymphomation is definitely where things started to
change. Of course, once you do that you’re taking a
pathway; and where that leads you just don’t know.
I am writing a novel at the moment, but I don’t like
talking about it. It’s going to shock people. It’s going
to surprise people.”
Is that ‘literary shock factor’ important?
“Oh, yeah,” he laughs. “I’m totally and utterly into
people who surprise you, that’s me. Sometimes in your
life as an artist, you have to be quite brave about that.
Especially if you have a fanbase, because not everybody
manages to get one. But I think at some point in
your career, you have to take account of that… and
then move on.
“I mean, look at somebody like Terry Pratchett …
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You can imagine that Pratchett would love to move on.
But can he? He’s gone so far down that road now. And,
you know, I never want to go so far down that road that
I can’t turn off it.”
He pauses for a moment, considering what he’s just
let slip, and laughs. “That’s either brilliant or something
that should be in Women’s Own poetry corner!”
So experimentation is very important to him, as an
artist. If that’s the case, why did it take Noon so long to
write an overtly ‘punk’ book?
“Did it?”
I certainly think so. His other works may have the
sensibility, for sure. But Needle is the first novel which
actually reads like punk, aside from the subject matter.
“I suppose so. A lot of that comes out of me knowing
it was time to leave Manchester. I think it’s fairly obvious
Needle is my ‘Farewell to Manchester’ book. It’s
me looking back at my life, and how music has affected
it. Note that the furthest they get back on their musical
trip is 1957; the year I was born. So it’s quite a conscious
summing-up of that addiction to the Manchester
music scene, and both the good and bad sides of that
addiction.”
Is this why we get the tour round the streets with
Elliot, pointing out places like John Cooper Clarke Terraces,
Joy Division Street, and so on?
“That part actually started out as a kind of satire on
New Manchester, and the ‘heritage industry’ they’re
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
building up there. But it turned into something quite
poetic, almost a kind of prayer, especially on the CD.
And it also ties into things that were in Pollen, the idea
of maps in the mind, maps in reality, and how the two
coincide. Again, that comes from Borges.”
That’s definitely a theme of his; is it something he’s
specifically interested in, the idea of mapping the mind
and consciousness?
“Well, mapping the city, yeah. I’m well into this
psycho-geography stuff that goes on in London. I love
that, the ‘labyrinth’ idea of a city, and how the human
mind corresponds to that.”
Pollen certainly seems to make that match – between
the city and the person – with Columbus the Xcab
King, whose mind is the city. And he’s another of the
introverts, almost psychologically crippled because
he’s become one with the city.
“Well, there’s a large introspection in me, anyway.
A lot of what I write about comes from my childhood,
and knowing that I had this special thing – imagination
– but not knowing how to communicate it.”
Is there a danger in becoming too tied to a city?
“Oh, yeah. Definitely. I don’t think that you should
in any way become tied beyond a number of years,
certainly these days. There’s just no need for it any
more. My Mum and Dad were born, lived and died in
the same area. And that shouldn’t happen any more. We
have to move on. We have to explore.”
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He mentioned the internet earlier, as being one of
the elements which contribute to the modern youth’s
differing mindset. Does he feel the global awareness it
can bring is helping this aim, societally?
“Yeah, it’s part of it. I do think we’re putting a lot of
emphasis on the net beyond what it is. But it’s another
part of Liquid Culture, like the DJ remix. The remix to
me is the ultimate Postmodern artform, and the net is a
symptom and a part of that.”
Noon has finally started experimenting in the ‘DJ
remix’ area himself. Alongside the novel of Needle
In The Groove came an audio CD, executed by David
Toop and released on Sulphur Records. It’s an ambient
wordtrip; Noon reads passages from the novel while
Toop cuts them to ribbons, adding an urban underlay of
beats and soundforms. It’s certainly … different. And,
on reflection, something which I’m surprised Noon
hasn’t tried before. How did it come about?
“It kind of grew out of some things the publisher said,
about doing a few tracks for promotional purposes. Just
to give out to bookshops, initially. And I’ve always
loved Toop’s music, so I asked him and that was it. I
didn’t know him before this. I’d met him maybe twice,
three times before we actually recorded.”
Did Noon have much ‘hands-on’ involvement with
the production?
“Well, I sent him the lyrics, and notes on the musical
ideas I had in my mind. Working from that, he sent me
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
tapes, which I worked to. And then we went in and kind
of co-produced it. It was amazing going in there, because
I hadn’t been in a recording studio for years, and
all this digital stuff they’ve got is just mind-boggling.”
Noon’s voice rises a little as he becomes more
animated. I get the distinct feeling we’re into a subject
Noon wants to talk about a lot…
“I mean, they can do anything, absolutely anything.
They can manipulate the musical input, the signal, any
way they like. And then coming home again, turning on
the word processor … You just think, there’s something
wrong here. There’s a massive difference between the
way that I can manipulate text, and the way that David
can manipulate the music on his screen. And I don’t
know why that’s built up.
“For instance, I’m often changing the sex of my
characters. But there’s no button I can press that says,
‘Change the sex of this character all the way through.’
Ridiculous. There’s no button I can press that says,
‘Turn this into the past tense.’ And there should be.”
Not that technology’s shortcoming are going to stop
him. “With Cobralingus, I’m doing a lot of random
manipulation. But I have to do it all by hand, either on
screen or on bits of paper. There isn’t a button I’ve got
that can randomise it for me. Sure, there are random
text generators and so on, but they’re seen as add-ons
rather than part of the process of Liquid Culture. We
need to allow words to become part of that. And to
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do it we need the tools, like they already have with
music. At the moment, all I have is my mind and a cut
and paste button!”
Cobralingus is being produced through Codex
Books, based here in Brighton. Is there any reason
why Noon seems to favour smaller publishers? Even
Anchor, his current publisher, is only a small imprint of
TransWorld. Is it a control thing?
“It’s just nice for me to have those two options, really.
I mean, I do want to write books that reach people,
but at the same time I also want to write these books
that are just for me.
“I don’t really get interfered with that much. I think
TransWorld don’t really understand me that well,” he
chuckles. “I’m the most leftfield writer they’ve got, so
I’m just kind of left to get on with it. And with Codex,
it’s nice to have that intimate relationship with a publisher.
So it really is the best of both worlds.”
We suddenly realise the café actually closed 15 minutes
ago. There’s a big CLOSED sign on the door, and
the chairs are up. The staff have been patiently waiting
for us to finish, so as we make ready to set off I quickly
ask the inevitable end-of-interview question: what’s
next? I heard a rumour linking Noon with Hollywood…
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
“Yeah, we’re working on something, but it’s taking
ages. I can’t talk about it. I do want that sort of stuff to
happen, though. We’ve just finished the Vurt play in
Manchester, which I wrote about three years ago, and
seeing it now … Well, if I wrote it now it’d be entirely
different. So when I write the film, I definitely want it
to come through my consciousness now. I don’t want to
replicate what I was eight years ago, I can’t stand that.
“So the film, if it does happen, will be interesting.
It’ll be a bit of a surprise, I think, because compared
to the novel and the play, it will be the most realistic
of them all, with the least special effects.” He gives a
broad smile, knowing full well that it’s the last thing
people will expect of him.
But that’s the point; Noon probably couldn’t stop reinventing
himself if he tried. He’s all about the remix,
the experiment; what happens if you take this word, or
that phrase, and give them new meaning? What happens
when strangers overhear one another’s thoughts in
subjective languages? How do you use one text to tell
a different story to every person, and every single one
of them is right?
And I realise, as I head back to the train station, that
it’s catching. I’ve been injected with Liquid Culture. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published October 2002]
Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day
Stephen Mitchelmore
“The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace
more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way
that ought to lead there.” – Maurice Blanchot
How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common
question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman
and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel,
asks it too. He thinks of some of the traumatic events
of his time:
“The woman who happened to be passing by when
the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks
whose throats were cut in Algiers, the 20 boys gunned
down before their parents’ eyes in Colombia, the entire
trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes
in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury in Johannesburg,
the 200 passengers on the plane that exploded above
the sea, the two, three or 6,000 men and boys killed
in Srebrenica, the hundreds of thousand of woman and
children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola.”
The list could go on and on. And that fact, Daane
thinks, is perhaps the worst. “For one moment, a day, a
week, they were front-page news, for several seconds
they flowed through cables in every part of the globe,
BUY Cees Nooteboom books online from and
and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of
oblivion.” Amnesia sets in “as if … humanity wasn’t
interested in individual names, only the blind survival
of the species.”
Daane is, as you might have guessed, a melancholy
soul. But his otherwise mundane ruminations have a
traumatic resonance. Some time before the novel begins,
his wife and child were killed in a place crash.
Alone, in time between jobs, he wanders the streets of
Berlin with his camera, recording quiet moments at
dawn or dusk in a city full of ghosts. This is his way
of resisting amnesia, and yet it is also his way of forgetting
(“dealing with” one might say) the permanent
absence of his family. The paradox is central to his melancholy
and to this novel. How can he move on without
obliterating their individual names? The temptation is
to dive into work, into experience and other forms of
forgetfulness, but to do that, he thinks, would, in turn,
lead to the sleep of reason, thereby summoning up the
nightmares already spoken of.
In first half of the novel, we follow Arthur on his
wandering. He visits friends in a bar, gets caught up
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with dying tramp on the snow-covered streets, visits a
gallery with two paintings by Caspar David Friedrich
that he is fascinated by, and a library that will, in the
second half, change his life. Many reviewers have referred
to this wandering with, at best, condescension. In
particular, they disapprove of Arthur’s ‘intellectual posturing’,
which seems to mean any mention of anything
other than that which will take the story ‘forward’ into
forgetfulness. This is a form of criticism that avoids the
very issue addressed by the novel. Arthur is searching
for an. He talks with his living friends, and listens to
those who are dead, which take the form of memories,
books, paintings, films, science and philosophy. It helps
him. It helps his friends. But like all friends, they have
their limits. And he knows it. They are useful only in
their uselessness. This novel is a part of that scheme
too. It has this wonderfully strange quality of enabling
us to maintain contact with what is important to us, that
which otherwise seems inaccessible, in that which takes
us further away (i.e. ‘escapism’). Indeed, the All Souls’
Day of the title is the Catholic holiday (November 2nd)
commemorating the souls of the dead; another form of
fiction in which one has to place one’s trust in order to
cross the abyss.
On a ferry crossing the Baltic, thinking of the 1994
MV Estonia disaster, Arthur reflects that there is a thin
membrane between him and chaos, as thin as the window
he presses his face to, looking out to sea. The more
BUY Cees Nooteboom books online from and
ignorant of the reviewers (i.e. Julie Myerson of The
Guardian) would rather we weren’t reminded of this
and be allowed to plunge into forgetfulness, as if it were
possible without denial. Nooteboom’s achievement
is to open the abyss of history out of these everyday
thoughts. He does this by showing how the rich heritage
of speculation in the arts and sciences derives from
the same confrontation with trauma as experienced by
Arthur. This is seen as a failure by those, like Myerson,
who can see learning only as a trophy to be displayed.
Nooteboom wears his learning lightly but it seems one
can’t escape the philistine thought-police of English
literary criticism.
In terms of the plot, Arthur contrives to meet a history
research student beginning a project on an obscure
Spanish queen of the 12th century. From what little
is revealed, she appears, like Arthur, to be taking a
roundabout route in resolving personal trauma. Despite
this, both Arthur and readers of the novel seem to be on
the brink of relief from endless speculation by falling
into a love story. But the student, Elik, a fellow Dutch
ex-patriot, remains mysteriously private despite their
physical intimacy. Through her silence, she prompts
even more fevered questioning. After a date, she disappears
without warning and, when they meet again,
refuses to reveal very much of herself. She prefers to
argue about historiography with one of Arthur’s scholarly
friends. The novelist doesn’t fill in the blanks for
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us; she remains a figure in the shadows at the edge of the
prose. We have to speculate as much as Arthur, another
reason for lazy readers to complain. Indeed, this novel
is, despite its conventional, conversational surface,
packed full of implicit allusions to its own provisional
status in relation to its own research. There’s Arthur’s
private film project (that Myerson selfishly misreads as
“solipsistic” when it is precisely the opposite); there’s
Elik’s research project much-criticised by her supervisor;
and there’s the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich
quietly expressing a latent trauma much like that of
Munch’s much noisier The Scream. However, the most
obvious correlation is Arthur’s half-requited infatuation
with Elik. While for Myerson all this is inadmissibly
reflexive, it creates a stimulating vertigo for the reader.
We’re not allowed to forget for very long that the novel,
and so its reader, is subject to the same problems of
knowledge and its refusal.
This final point is emphasised by the occasional
BUY Cees Nooteboom books online from and
chapters in which a kind of Greek chorus intervenes
in the narrative, looking down on the events with cool
compassion. It’s unclear who is speaking. Perhaps it’s
the voice of all that which cannot be included in what
is, necessarily, a circumscribed narrative. Perhaps it’s
Arthur’s late wife keeping a concerned eye on her
husband. But most likely it is the voice from 500 years
from now, when the past-as-tragedy has become the
past-as-absurdist-comedy, just as the life of the Spanish
queen seems to us now. Elik’s project was to rescue
the queen from such a fate. Her supervisor warns her
it might take a decade and be, in the end, futile; no one
is likely to read the results. But she continues anyway,
perhaps because of that, just as Arthur will continue
to pursue Elik. For many, this novel will be similarly
futile, slow-moving, overlong and provisional, but I’m
very grateful that Cees Nooteboom has taken the long
way round and rescued something precious from the
traumatic inferno. �
379
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 2003]
Angus Oblong: Creepy Suzie
Jayne Margetts
The first time I laid eyes upon the troubled cast of
Royston Vasey’s The League Of Gentlemen I almost
vomited. Such grotesque, pantomime-scarred characters,
which could turn the stomach with a flutter of the
eyelash, stirred the strings of disturbance with all and
sundry. A BAFTA Award (2000 for Production) confirmed
that comedy had found a new avenue, and that
it was okay to satirise all that was politically incorrect.
So when a copy of Angus Oblong’s Creepy Suzie And
13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children landed
on the doorstep the odds were tipped in its favour.
Dysfunctionalism rocks!
P.T. Barnum was a rock god! He was an opportunist.
He was an entrepreneurial voyeurist. And by trailing
his carnival freaks across the backbone of mid-America
circa late-1800s, this vaudevillian parasite put the fun
back into fantasy, the sacred and profane.
We’ve had a host of wannabes since then; Jim
Rose’s Circus Sideshow is possibly the heir apparent,
and in TV terms Todd Browning’s unfortunate band
of merry Freaks, and then suddenly, whoosh, out of
the fictional toxic backwaters of Sacramento comes
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a new satirist of the grotesque with a posse who are
anything but Ivy League.
Meet Angus Oblong; 27-year-old modern day Frankenstein
with a deformity fixation and sperm donor to
the craziest family of contemporary abominations outside
of the test tube. His (first major book deal) Creepy
Suzie And 13 Other Tragic Tales For Troubled Children
salutes them for their warts-and-all-mutation-of-toxicgenetics-meets-psychotic-hearted
compassion. There’s
grotesque mutant babies, midget albino crossdressers,
siamese quadruplets, narcoleptic dogs, stupid vampires
and fun, fun, fun doses of electroshock therapy galore!
The fun figures that inhabit Creepy Suzie’s landscape
enjoy the benefits of a contaminated environment and
lifestyle. This is no Sorority House picnic peppered
with sunny Californian hormones and bleached silicon
smiles. The inhabitants of this bleak, black-and-white
cul-de-sac have flaws galore. ‘Emily Amputee’ is a
prime example: “Emily went to her doctor for her annual
checkup. Some paperwork got mixed up and they
amputated one of her legs.” Or if you favour a tale on
the homicidal side there’s always ‘Mary Had A Little
380
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Chainsaw’. One of my personal favourites, ‘Jenny,
Jenny Jenny & Babette The Siamese Quadruplets’ puts
a new spin on the impetuousness of droll humour.
Peer group pressure (aka ‘The Debbies’), ‘Sibling
Rivalry And Happy, Happy, Happy Sammy’ examines
universes populated by hormones, pathological urges
and by childhood optimism that has to be stamped
out at all costs. It’s one big, happy, alienated family in
Oblong Town.
This is a marriage between Edgar Allan Poe and
David Lynch. A tango through the bizarre. And to think
that Oblong spent a slab of his youth languishing away
behind the grinding machine at the Royal Ground
Coffee Shop at Polk and Vallejo while pumping out
underground comics on the side. His personal bio states
that he then “ended up in California after five years of
living on the streets and taking it in the butt by ugly old
men for heroin money”. A stint as a clown for a fastfood
restaurant quickly alerted him to his true calling.
Oblong is a mysterious creature whose art screams
“This is Vaudeville”. He idolises his cartoon children
and just as his book showcased the talents of ‘Cross-
Dressing Charles’, ‘Janet’s Butt’ and ‘Carl & The
Crippled Black Kid With An Eye Patch’, his sitcom
debut, The Oblongs, continues the theme by choosing
to both empathise and poke fun at the ‘physically
challenged’ (or if you prefer, mutant children). As
Oblong confessed to the Sacramento Bee’s David
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Barton, “I always had a fascination with deformities.
The Oblongs was a show about the kids, it was based
around Milo’s clubhouse and all the ugly deformed
kids who can’t otherwise get friends.”
This book is original. It’s horrifying. It’s morbid.
It’s Halloween for 365 days a year. In a world where
animation is gradually eating into the psyche of
public consumption and where cartoon-strip-style
graffiti is hot, Oblong has carved a beautiful niche.
So what if he fantasised that his father “were a sword
swallower and mother a prostitute”. And so what if
his humour is gallows all the way. It’s time to stop
being prejudiced about first impressions folks; it’s
time to let the freaks in, to celebrate them and their
own unique Olongesque charm.
If you are looking for criticism then you won’t find
any here. I’ve tried. God knows. I hang my head in
shame at the thought that humour can be so sacrilegious.
Look – if American giant NBC can swallow Oblong’s
appeal (and secure his creative vision for cable) – then
so can we. Okay, so home may be the local toxic waste
dump but let’s be fair, these kids are partially human
after all, and as such, deserve our support…
A mock children’s book called Mommy Is Going To
Die is apparently in the test tube. It’s possible that that
small and assorted clubhouse of human oddities will be
raising its semi-amputated arms with empathy and joy
at the mention of more siblings … Freaks rule! �
381
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published March 1999]
Will Oldham: Songs Of The Human Animal
Stephen Mitchelmore
Who is Will Oldham? Well, maybe he’d like to know
first of all. As if in search of the proper one, he’s
released LPs under several different names. Made
famous by the Palace name (Palace Brothers, Palace
Songs, Palace Music), he then reverted to plain Will
Oldham for one record, and now he’s Bonnie ‘Prince’
Billy. He dismisses any deep meaning behind this fluidity
of brand name, but such unwillingness to explain
is a symptom of the same thing. It’s an unwillingness to
secure a ground and remain. Even so, we can be secure
in saying he is without doubt the best writer in music
today. Not only a remarkable songwriter – The Sunday
Times says “Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen already
suffer by comparison” – but also a remarkable writer
full stop. He’s 29, from Louisville, Kentucky, and his
latest LP is called I See A Darkness.
Seeing a darkness? Seeing needs light, so there’s
something odd about the title. On the surface it appeals
to Goth self-dramatising; one can imagine Nick Cave
giving a record that title. Yet the implications of this
inherent contradiction seep in. Listening increases uncertainty.
There’s the song ‘Death To Everyone’ that’s
either uplifting or upsetting. I can’t decide.
every terrible thing
is a relief
even months on end
buried in grief
are easy light times
which have to end
with the coming
of your death friend.
(chorus) death to everyone
is gonna come
and it make hosing
much more fun la la la
la la la
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
It’s both. The pained irony in the drawled chorus is
absent in the verse. I first heard Will Oldham on the
BBC’s John Peel show singing the equally ambiguous
refrain: “When you have no-one, no-one can hurt you”,
from ‘Days In The Wake’ (1994). At first I heard it as a
self-pitying lament for a lost love – which is pleasantly
382
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indulgent, but no more than that. Then I heard it as an
implicit condemnation of someone protecting a solitude
so pain can’t get in. And finally I heard it as someone
completely alone who is hurt by the very fact of “noone”.
Songwriting, in my experience, is rarely this
disconcerting. And it’s not a one-off. The next song on
the LP has the repetition, building to a minor crescendo:
“God is the answer … God is the answer … God is
the answer!” All of which projects outward: there’s the
answer, out there, look, follow me. But is soon followed
by the softly sung line “God lies within”. Not, as one
might expect, the assertion of faith or the bathos of condescension,
but the deepening of the question. Where
within? Usually in popular music such ambiguity is an
issue only until it can be set aside. (Perhaps music is
ambiguity set aside). George Steiner claims that music
actually defines us as human. He expresses wonder at
the profound reverie even the most banal of tunes can
set in motion. We “pass beyond ourselves” he says,
and we become aware of “unfathomable depths”. This
seems familiar enough, and intellectual resistance would
certainly prevent this. Music demands an extra degree of
trust to let go and be open to the sounds. Yet I would say
our resistance to music is just as important and cannot be
dispensed with. It too defines us as human. Criticism, let
us say reflection, is as inevitable as breathing. Actually,
Steiner says as much; music also “takes us home in an
unexplained déjà vu”. I would explain all this by saying
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
the experience of reverie is really its imminence making
itself felt, rather than actually occurring. In effect, we are
experiencing the nostalgia for an impossible experience.
Our continued desire for music is a result of unrequitable
hope. Our humanity rests in acknowledging this. Go on,
work that one out.
Steiner also says that a world without music would
be “fundamentally non-human”, which makes one
wonder about the humanity of the deaf. For the living,
however, silence and what comes with it is inseparable
from the experience of music. This tends to move
against the will. The part of us that wants music would
rather disappear into the ecstatic oblivion of another
life, palpable in the musical experience; I know my
part does. Indeed, music tends to be judged according
to depth of oblivion it reaches – on the dancefloor, in
the car, the bedsit, the head. So when the song hinders
this disappearance, we resist and say we ‘don’t like’
the music. Nowadays, we are encouraged to condemn
the artist for being cerebral, solipsistic and indulgent
if oblivion isn’t forthcoming. The irony, of course, is
that our resistance is a result of our unique freedom:
our individuality. By celebrating this ignorance popular
culture is a moronic inferno of denial and aggression –
nothing to do with democracy or empowerment.
The unique thing about Will Oldham’s songs is that
they emerge from this very paradox. Remaining inside
it explains why his work has got better rather than
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descended into attempts at false completion: “This is
what makes a thing last / Want to make what didn’t
happen go…” (‘The Brute Choir’)
The music itself is difficult to describe. I don’t know
much about these things, and I could fall back on
phrases others have used – “post-country blues” and
“melancountry” being two of the best. But none of them
work really. As for the lyrics, many reviewers, tied by
word limits, sum it up as “Americana mixed with Old
Testament language”. Again, this seems accurate, but
why would this mixture appeal to a Eurocentric Englishman
who says that to believe in nothing is already
to believe in too much? Me, for instance.
I think it’s not the allusive quality of the language
that’s important but the way it fails. For example,
when Nick Cave “hails the Pentecostal morn”, it alludes
to the given depth and weight of the Western
tradition, which is incidentally why his Goth fans are
so unwittingly conservative. Cave’s elegantly crafted
songs cling to the horror of God’s tragic justice,
clothed in cosy Victorian melodrama. Goths like to
think it’s deeply cultured, and in assuming so appear
like Boyzone fans pointing to the violins playing in
the background on Top Of The Pops saying “Look
Mum, it’s classical music!” We all know it’s only a
distraction not an engagement; only a weekend relief
from good jobs and babies dressed in black.
However, when Oldham sings songs like ‘Arise,
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
Therefore’ from the LP of the same name, the gloriously
clunky Maya Tone drum-machine infects it with
anachronism. Consumers previously happy to enjoy
the wittily named sub-genre “melancountry” saw
this as ‘deconstructing’ the tradition. Even Oldham’s
Sunday Times admirer called this breath-taking LP a
woeful mistake. Clearly, they didn’t like his wrenching
of the form. Instead, this actually makes Arise,
Therefore Oldham’s landmark achievement. Within
it, the cosmic is infected with the mundane, and vice
versa. Or something like that. Perhaps it creates a
genre all its own: Blucolic?
One must hesitate to analyse the lyrics, for the moment
the sheet is read, the grammatical nonsenses
and apparent meaninglessness confound the listening
experience. Despite this, I still want to. The opening
track ‘Stablemate’, which was also the opening song of
his set on the recent European tour, is a scene-setting
distillation of dustbowl starkness:
how could one ever think anything’s
permanent
how can you sleep when I’m going away
I haven’t a reason left in my head
to not go away
A heavy bass underscores the brooding quality of the
song, and it’s no coincidence that the LP was produced
384
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by Steve Albini, ex of Big Black. The words have a
power because they’re both rhetorical and immediate;
the lack of a question mark above makes that clear.
The fourth track is perhaps the most remarkable. It
has the never-to-be-forgotten title ‘You have cum in
the your hair and your dick is hanging out’. Indeed.
The excessiveness of the title is in clear contrast to the
song’s extreme desolateness. On first listen, it is a delicate
broken-hearted love song (it reminds me of Philip
Larkin’s late poem ‘Love Again’). The drum-machine
adds a beat every three seconds, confirming the atmosphere.
Here’s it is in full (and the words haven’t been
mis-typed either):
Head start on the frog
on the deer and the dog
the things we true were taught
loyal torn from our hearts;
it’s now so soft underfoot
we sleep more than we sleep
if god could make me cry
I’d run along the water
she won’t come; I’ll be gone
she won’t come; I’ll be gone
play with it while you have hands
a desperate lack of demands
I can’t offer a thing
better than dying, so take it!
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
scrap the outfit
and hand me the keys to your car
if I leave before it is light
I’ll be around when you are
she won’t come; I’ll be gone
she won’t come; I’ll be gone
It is perhaps bad form to wonder for too long about
what it all means. Like all songs, a lot has to do with
how it’s sung and against what music. But what is clear
is the presence of the stillness of midnight; as if you’re
listening to the desperate words of a troubled, not to
say sticky insomniac. This leads many admirers to talk
about Oldham’s empathetic imagination. One writes
“you’re not just listening to words and a guitar, you’re
experiencing [his] honest feelings.” Yet ‘honesty’
doesn’t seem right. It’s not “this is the real me” honesty
of the cringeworthy ‘confessional’ singer-songwriter.
The words from “You have cum…” maybe deeply
felt but they are also impersonal. There are three “we”s
before a “me” appears. Is this the tyrannical darkness of
the collective unconscious pressing on the existential
loneliness of the one with cum in his hair? Probably.
Cum is, after all, where the male is exposed to evolutionary
time. It’s where the animal emerges, subject to
special history. Despite this, we know we have “a headstart
on the frog”. Our head gives us a start. The song’s
desolateness, therefore, is not about the sufferings of
385
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an individual as himself, so much as his difficulty in
being at all. The “I” of the song is only a possibility set
against harsh reality. Will Oldham’s ‘honesty’ then is
the clarity of his exile. The various names he adopts is
a natural off-shoot of this.
In this respect, it’s appropriate that Oldham first
became well-known by acting in films, most notably
co-starring in John Sayles’ trade union drama Matewan
(1987). His performance as a teenager caught up in the
brutal repression of a mining union in 1930s America
is startlingly good. Yet no matter how connected his
songs and his acting are, the displacement of identity
central to the actor’s existence is perhaps too limited.
In my experience, actors are less interested in others as
being others full stop. They tend to be indiscriminate,
mercenary and heartless. The self is willingly exiled. It
is not the most appropriate medium for an artist concerned
with the play of self and its exposures, ellipses
and effacements. While Oldham is certainly stagy, it’s
a stage with the trapdoor fully in view.
In a rare interview, Oldham is clear that the movement
between the self and its productions plays a major
part in his writing. Asked if there is anything he does
consciously when writing songs he says
“Doing and not doing. But it’s not that hard cause
that’s mostly the nature of what’s going on, or that’s the
reason for these things to be there. That is the answer
to what makes them occur. The answer is that they
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
are that way. The reason that they become is because
they become what they are. The listening is begun at
the very beginning, at the writing, then it’s continued
in the performing and recording, and then is continued
with whoever listens to it but it isn’t completed … it’s
something that’s never completed.”
“Doing and not doing”: this is basically what it is to
be a human animal. We hold against the “not doing”
because it leads to boredom and melancholy. We half
envy the animal who just lives; who just does. But it’s
still us as not-doing individuals that desires it. One of
the great analysts of modern human nature, Friedrich
Nietzsche spoke of this in 1874:
“Consider the herd grazing before you. These
animals do not know what yesterday and today are
but leap about, eat, rest, digest and leap again: and
so from morning to night and from day to day, only
briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure,
enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither
melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this,
for he is proud of being human and not an animal and
yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants
nothing other than to live like the animal, neither
bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does
not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the
animal: why do you not speak of me of your happiness
but only look at me? The animal does want to
answer and say: because I always immediately forget
386
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what I wanted to say – but then it already forgot this
answer and remained silent: so that man could only
wonder. But he also wondered about himself, that he
cannot learn to forget but always remains attached to
the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs
with him.” (translated by Peter Preuss)
It’s a neat coincidence that the opening verses of the
great song ‘The Brute Choir’ presents a similar situation:
Cow-call, and they were all calling
together
describing the way to go
I never hurt someone so young
and I never held someone so sweet
Makes me want to holler with them
All the way down
All the way down
their voices show the way
how to hold it back
see the end of the day
shut their mouths, shut their mouths
and rip the pictures down
withdraw, withdraw, you live so far
from town
Confirming the tension, two of Will Oldham’s LPs
feature cover designs of animals on the way to being
human, or the other way round: a compelling portrait of
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
a broad-shouldered leopard on Viva Last Blues (1995),
from which the above song is taken, and a goat performing
on its hindlegs on Joya (1997). On a sublime
recent EP, the subject is even more explicit.
‘One With The Birds’ is a love song sort-of, to birds I
guess (“Juan with the birds” he joked at his Water Rats
Theatre gig in London). The song seems to be again
about human infatuation with animal freedom. Oldham
fits in as many bird names as possible:
a purple martin in my house,
she hollers at me.
why be inhuman, why be like me?
like so many robins, like so many doves,
like so many lovebirds, with so
many loves,
like the songs of the bobwhite
without any words
when we are inhuman,
we’re one with the birds.
(An anorak’s aside: I wonder if with this song Oldham
is paying a discreet homage to Dick Gaughen’s song
‘Now Westlin Winds’ – a setting of a poem by Robert
Burns? On Joya, there’s a song based on another of
Gaughen’s from the same LP, his 1981 masterpiece A
Handful Of Earth. Burns’ poem is equally resourceful
in mentioning the birds of Scotland: the moorcock, the
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plover and the linnet among others. It’s also a love song
of sorts. Who knows: influence tends to be unconscious.
He’s already acknowledged the tune’s similarity with
Gram Parson’s ‘Hickory Wind’.)
‘One with the birds’ is a song that wouldn’t offend
an easy listening audience. Again, however, there’s
the real oddness of the refrain: “When we are inhuman,
we’re one with the birds”. One can sing along
merrily without wondering what it all might mean.
Though singing along merrily is, in a way, flying
away. In other words, the listener cannot demand an
BUY Will Oldham music online from and
exclusion of a cerebral response without compromising
his or her humanity. So, without force, the listener
is presented with a paradox that never quite lets you
forget where you are and what you’re doing, even if
it at the same time seduces in every musical sense. As
our culture ignores what is left over from such failed
transcendence, we are prompted to feel individual
consciousness is a problem to be solved. I don’t think
it needs to be. In fact, it is likely that this failure to fly
away is precisely what gives us the richness of life.
Along with Will Oldham’s music. �
388
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published March 1997]
P.J. O’Rourke: Sex, Drugs, O’Rourke And Roll
Chris Mitchell encounters the age and guile of political satirist P.J. O’Rourke
The American political satirist P.J. O’Rourke recently
published Age And Guile, which gathers together
previously uncollected material spanning his 25 years
of journalism. P.J. has built his merciless literary
reputation on three things: irritating American liberals,
abusing chemicals and visiting every warzone in the
world. Usually all at the same time. As he puts it, “I
deal with curses of Western society of the past 200
years starting with the French Revolution. I don’t start
with the American Revolution for the simple reason it
wasn’t a revolution. It was some form of parliamentary
disagreement, who’s in charge here, sort of thing.”
Meeting P.J. O’Rourke in real life, however, is somewhat
different. Impeccably courteous and good humoured,
the only vice he displayed in my presence was
smoking an enormous Havana cigar. I asked him what
he thought of this difference between the public and the
private P.J. “I’m 48 years old. I even had a middle-aged
dream last night. I dreamt I had a 15-year-old mistress.
No sex, not even touching. She was just my mistress.
And I knew I was middle aged because when I woke
up, I was almost glad it was just a dream … I’ve always
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exaggerated that boyo stuff a little bit, just because it’s
fun. I’ve always thought it very important to have a
fool in your writing, and here’s one that’s always handy
and never sues. I once lived harder than I do now. I
was blessed with a self-limiting body. Drink too much,
stay up too late, take too many drugs, scramble after
too many 16-year-old girls – I get ill. And the people
who didn’t get ill – are dead…”
So you’ve never tried to keep pace pharmaceutically
with Hunter S. Thompson, your long-time friend and
political sparring partner? Medical textbooks are being
written about that man’s constitution… “Hunter’s very
shy. People don’t really understand that. He has to get
loaded to deal with strangers, he can’t do it otherwise.
He takes on that gonzoid persona as a kind of armour
against the world. I watch other people gonzoing
around, I don’t so much do it myself. Hunter’s very
funny if you know him, because after he’s done all
those appalling things, wrecking all the furniture and
scaring everyone out of the room and terrorising the
place, he turns round and says, ‘Do you think they were
upset? Did I embarrass anyone?’ ‘No, you just set fire
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to the rug…’”
Hunter still seems to believe in the ideal of the American
dream, as evinced by his last book, Better Than Sex,
which charts Clinton’s inexorable presidential campaign.
You seem to take a distinct relish in propagating
the image of yourself as a son-of-a-bitch Republican.
Yet much of your writing is distinctly humanitarian in
places… “Well, both of those things are true. People
on this side of the Atlantic get confused about political
conservatism. It is not an excuse for selfishness. I don’t
think that a person is left wing or right wing according
to whether or not they are compassionate. A lot of
people on the left, especially the more po-faced ones,
have worked that angle. Lots of people are right wing
because they’re selfish, there’s no doubt about that – I
can’t defend that, I can only point out lots of people
are left-wing because they’re selfish too. The Hilary
Clinton world-view is bossing people around on the
basis of a supposed virtuousness – ‘I care more than
you care – therefore I’m going to boss you around.’ If
they couldn’t operate that system, then no other system
would suit.”
Your concern about American politics is evident
from the most recent pieces collected in Age And Guile.
Does this mean your interest in globetrotting is waning?
“I am a little tired of the Third World travel, part
of it’s just age, it’s tough on the system, tough on the
gastro-intestinal tract. A little bit of it is facing different
BUY P.J. O’Rourke books online from and
kinds of suffering that I really don’t know what it is I
could do about it. I’ve written about it to the best of
my ability. I don’t think the causes of it are too mysterious.
Particularly the sort caused by human folly.
After finishing All The Trouble In The World, I took
some time off from my commitments to Rolling Stone.
I knew I’d had a good summer because I had tanned
feet. It’s always a good indication of having done fuck
all. The next thing I want to do is about economics,
which also involves travelling, but it should be slightly
more pleasant. At least here I’m dealing with human
endeavour to better oneself and one’s time, rather than
the human endeavour to whack each other over the
head. It should be a bit more optimistic. I’ve never read
an actual explanation of economics that was fun to read
So I’m going to pick out different economies around
the world that represent different attempts to organise
socially: socialism that works, socialism that doesn’t
work, adaptation to a market economy that’s successful,
adaptation to a market economy that’s troubled.
There’ll be a Holidays In Hell aspect to it, but at least
people won’t be shooting at each other – much.”
Do you think your writing has any tangible impact
on its readers? For example, the ecological chapters in
All The Trouble In The World (lovingly titled ‘We’re
All Going To Die’ and ‘We’re All Going To Die Anyway’)
provide an excellent retort to eco- hysterics – it
might change a few minds… “I just don’t know. So few
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people read books. America is an ill-educated country.
It’s sad what it takes to get on the best-seller list; for
a hard-cover non-fiction book published in the Spring,
which is the weaker period, selling as few as 30,000
copies will get you on the list. Isn’t that shocking for
a product that costs $20-$25 in a nation of 250 million
people. More usually it’s 50,000 or 100,000, but still,
it’s so few. I can’t begin to tell you if it has any effect.”
After 25 years of writing, and nearly a half-century
on the planet, do you have any words of advice for
young people? “No, I can’t figure out where I went
right. I love to count it up to my fabulous skill and my
BUY P.J. O’Rourke books online from and
insights and stuff like that, but I think it’s just because
I stuck to it. There’s a Woody Allen line about how it’s
remarkable how much of life has to do with just showing
up. And I think about all the people I was working
with 25 years ago, many of them much more talented
than I was. Well, I remembered not to die from drug
overdose. ‘To do: Don’t die from drug abuse’. Mostly I
just stuck to it, and a lot of them didn’t. I just kept plugging
away, probably out of inertia more than anything
else. And I think if you do keep doing something for a
while, you do learn how to do it. You learn how to work
around areas of huge inability.” �
391
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published October 2000]
Lawrence O’Toole: Talking Dirty
Chris Mitchell meets Lawrence O’Toole, author of Pornocopia:
Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire
It’s a well-worn joke that any dinner-party discussion
of the internet will inevitably include a mention of finding
pornography while on- line. As Lawrence O’Toole
points out in his book, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology
And Desire, the internet has been the biggest
leap forward for the distribution of pornography since
the advent of video. For people in countries such as the
UK, which has much stricter pornography laws than
the US and Europe, the net has opened the floodgates
for what was previously considered taboo and banned.
“New technologies have always come into the
country bringing the idea that our restrictive conditions
can be cast out,” explains O’Toole. “But it rarely turns
out to be the case. Look at video, which was meant
to herald the end of the censor – it’s actually become
a great tool for the censor. But censorship is always
thought of in absolutes. You cannot restrict access to
illegal materials – you can only make it very difficult to
get hold of them.”
“I’m certainly not an advocate of unrestricted access
to porn,” O’Toole stresses, “but teenagers will
get hold of this material.” Certainly the net has made
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that access easier, but in doing so, not only has it
begun to change attitudes toward porn but the very
nature of the net itself.
“The internet has certainly helped make porn become
more mainstream,” says O’Toole. “We’ve now had a
pornographic presidency – oral sex in the White House
and Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress broadcast
continually on the news. Or, as another example,
George Michael on Parkinson talking about having sex
in public toilets. Once all that has been brought out into
the public, there’s no way back.”
Inspired by the passionate debates about porn taking
place in Usenet newsgroups such as rec.arts.erotica,
Pornocopia is part history and part analysis of the
ways and methods by which porn has emerged from
the shadows in the last couple of decades and become
ever more accepted within conventional society.
“The general reaction to the book has been very
healthy and positive,” O’Toole claims, “which shows
that people are less concerned about porn and I think
the internet has partly contributed to that. People are
beginning to realise you can look at hardcore imagery
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and not go mad or blind or whatever.”
“Hardcore is a very nasty term,” he continues,
“when all it means is pictures of adults having sex. Fair
enough, a lot of people are revolted when they see their
first hardcore imagery, but I think that comes from their
own sexual insecurities, which are then transferred
back on to the pictures. I don’t think there’s anything
intrinsically revolting about people having sex or seeing
pictures of it.”
Even if you strongly disagree with O’Toole about the
moral implications of people having access to pornography,
it’s hard to deny that porn has irrevocably changed
the net: because of the huge revenues involved, porn
has always been a catalyst for technology.
As Pornocopia reveals, porn singlehandedly established
video as a commercially viable product and is
now doing the same for DVD and, of course, the net.
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Secure credit card transactions, password encryption,
and streaming sound and video are just some of the
web technologies that have been pioneered by porn,
and the industry is at the forefront of demanding bigger
net bandwidth for all. Whether you like it or not, the
future experience of the web is being built on the back
of the on-line porn industry.
However, O’Toole is sceptical that the ever growing
popularity of the net in the UK will bring about a change
in our obscene publication laws soon. “Where we differ
from America and Europe is the attitude of the British
establishment, which maintains that they know what’s
best for people,” he argues. “Attitudes won’t change
until the intelligentsia change their mindset, which
will creep in eventually from the ground level. But the
internet does let people see that there are other attitudes
towards pornography.” �
393
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published November 2002]
Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have Your Abortion”
Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk
When Brett Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American
Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid,
Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. Ellis’
literary missile was unlike anything written before.
Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking attention
to detail as a Guide Book On How To Become
A Serial Killer could only have come from the author
pawing over endless (and actual) FBI case files – even
if his obsession with detailing designer outfits drove me
to insanity. But this man captured the 80s generation
with its greed, Darwinian Manifesto and scent of Wall
Street’s cold-hearted brutality.
Irvine Welsh carved a new language into our consciousness
with his ode to heroin, bleak council estates
and a dash of nihilism in 1993 with Trainspotting.
Clawing through those initial pages with their illegible
scrawl and phonetically terrestrial sounds required the
tenacity of a saint.
Then there was sci-fi maverick, Jeff Noon, much less
the enfant terrible than his Scottish cousin. Sci-fi had
suddenly become cool again and it was less attributable
to the Asimov school-of-thought than a quote concocted
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within The Mail On Sunday laboratory: “Jeff Noon is
the Philip K. Dick for the 90s”, it roared.
Noon’s third novel, Automated Alice, was as much
a tribute to Lewis Carroll’s original, opiated Alice In
Wonderland dream, as it was a journey into Cyberpunk
psychedelia gone haywire in contemporary Manchester.
Nymphomation (released a year later) polluted the
reader’s waking hours with the notion of burbflies,
automated advertisements chanting their slogans and a
slow, synthetic, evolutionary genocide.
The aforementioned authors have all created a new
language, so to speak. Sprouted buzzwords like the
historians of old and chronicled the social decay of
humanity along the way. Ellis paired savage with
savvy; Welsh, lower-class narcissism with narcotic
decay; and Noon, corporatisation with soulless human
existence. They all hacked into the literary, global cog,
shunned the sweet smelling pungency of sentimental
verse and offered up their own versions of the darker
edge of the sword.
And then there’s Chuck Palahniuk.
Critic Roger Ebert crowned him the godfather of
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“Macho Porn”, while New York Newsday gushed that
Palahniuk’s voice “rearranged Vonnegut’s sly humour,
DeLillo’s mordant social analysis with Pynchon’s antic
surrealism”. In short, the new kid on the block with
his swag of arrogance titled Fight Club (1995) struck
a subliminal chord. This was an author who was much
less concerned with sprouting flowery prose and more
preoccupied with stark revelations.
Fight Club painted a portrait of humanity drained of
colour. It was gritty and hard-boiled, bleak but overflowing
with wisdom. Tyler Durden, his protagonist,
was a one-man army. He was the insomnia inside us
all. The dull, dull thud of an eternal techno beat. A jackhammer
spraying cynicism like a sniper on the loose.
Out of control!
Fight Club finally found its way onto the big-screen
(like Ellis’ American Psycho) in 1999, and was directed
by the controversial David Fincher (Alien 3, The Game,
Seven), and starred Ed Norton and Brad Pitt. The film
delivered a fatal blow to the solar plexus. With a deadpan
sneer and caustic ambience it hit a raw nerve. Its
message? WE HAD ALL BECOME AUTOMATED
ZOMBIES. We were now indistinguishable from the
dead. ‘Hey, the living dead are populating an Ikea furnished
Metropolis.’ Albert Camus had suddenly found
a worthy successor.
The shock value of Fight Club gave an insight into
the deviant corners of Palahniuk’s mind. He would
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continue to shock a readership by churning out a novel
every couple of years. Furthermore, if characters getting
their kicks by frequenting the local Testicular Cancer
Survivors group wasn’t enough to shock a readership
ill-prepared for such irreverence, then his next evangelical
novel, Survivor (1999) would.
Admittedly, his second novel was less punchy, less
guttural than the first, but it was truly original in its
storyline. So here was yet another misfit, about to hold
society to ransom again. Meet Tender Branson, surviving
member of a Death Cult hijacking an empty Boeing
747 for the purpose of recording his sordid tale into
the jumbo’s black box recorder. This was Reverend Jim
Jones on ecstasy with a global score to settle. This was
a day-trip into the darker corners of immortality and
isolation with a slab of comic humour to boot.
Male testosterone took a back seat in 2000 when
Palahniuk released Invisible Monsters. It was a grand
departure from his previous novels in that it had a
female (a severely dysfunctional one, naturally) at its
helm. Brandy Alexander was the Catwalk Queen. She
had it all. A face that could launch a thousand ships and
adored by everyone. But a horrendous car ‘accident’
changes all of that. From beauty queen to hideously
disfigured freak, Brandy personifies our preoccupation
with skin-deep vanity and proves that hell hath no fury
like a woman’s scorn.
The majority of Palahniuk’s protagonists are mad-
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men and reincarnations of Jesus Christ: picture their
creator as a modern-day Dr Frankenstein if you will,
grabbing DNA strands from the Shroud of Turin, a dash
of homicidal vigour, the conceit of a Ronnie Biggs and
smearing them through a contemporary narrative.
Choke (2000), his fourth novel, was a screaming
page-turner, his narrator, Victor Mancini, one of the
greatest scam artists of all time. While his mother (God
bless her) languished in the local hospital, he devised a
new occupation and a great way to make bucks.
Go to a restaurant, (make sure it’s full, of course),
choke on a piece of food, wait for a good samaritan to
come and save you, and knowing humanity the way it
is, you can be sure that the hero who ‘saves you’ will
feel indebted to you for the rest of their natural lives.
Money of course won’t be a problem again. If they’ve
saved you once, you can damn well expect they will do
it a thousand times! Add into the equation a few shifts at
the local theme park and the occasional night out at an
intimate, little sex addiction group (one of Palahniuk’s
favourite haunts), and you’ve got a very fulfilling life.
Brett Easton Ellis pondered the question: ‘Has our
generation finally found its Don DeLillo?’ The New York
Times bestseller list confirms Palahniuk as an author of
importance, yet regardless of platitudes, this Portland
native retains a low key. His latest novel, Lullaby (2002)
hit bookshelves in the quietest of fashions, and, again,
deals with the darker underbelly of American life. This
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time around the microscope falls upon two topics – a
serial killer and ‘psychic infection’. “Imagine a plague
you catch through your ears … Imagine an idea that
occupies your mind like a city…”
It’s too good an offer to refuse…
On the eve of Fight Club’s release in 1995, Palahniuk
and I chatted. He was an easy and natural conversationalist.
He spoke of working as a glorified technical writer
at the city’s Freight Terminal and of how he churned
out manuals on trucks, service and cars in the industrial
heartland of blue-collar America. He also spoke
of cruising along the Portland Freeway one morning
when a car pulled up alongside him. “A freeway sniper
pointed a gun directly at my head,” he remembered.
Palahniuk’s writing is a backlash. It’s about embracing
disaster and using it as a platform from which to
mirror society back upon itself. In Palahniuk’s own
words: “I figure if you can play on the basis of something
that really scares people like fights or terminal
illness. If you go right up to it and laugh at it, and have
fun around it, and really disempower it by doing that,
then that’s the greatest thing you can do. I can make
people laugh about death, laugh about fights, laugh
about pain, then I’ve done my little thing for the world.
I finally feel complete and liberated.”
Chuck Palahniuk is a product of his environment, but
more importantly, he is THE product of his generation.
He is the coroner of the millennium. If there is a ‘self-
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help’ group gathered in the dark of night, Palahniuk is
sure to be there playing the ‘tourist’. His voice is one
that refuses to be tempered. It is devoid of diplomacy
and rife with a quiet anger.
Palahniuk’s voice is a shrill scream trumpeting for
the revolt against order and conformity, but it is also
filled with pain and satire. When two of Fight Club’s
main characters meet it all becomes abundantly clear
why its author has already made his notch in society’s
belt: “I want to have your abortion,” Marla drawls.
Suddenly everything sacred between men and women
tumbles into a psychotic heap.
It’s a challenging and confrontational statement.
A little on the bolshie side, sure, but necessary. If the
world is in the process of undergoing a ‘collective
identity crisis’ then Palahniuk is writing a thesis on how
to bring it on. His characters travel the dark road from
isolation back out into the arms of communal existence.
BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and
They are battle-worn and scarred and their trajectory
crude and uncompromising.
Both the characters and their creator shy away from
compromise. It is as alien to them as subtlety is to
Anna Nicole Smith. They are holding up a mirror to
each and every one of us and reflecting back something
both ugly and desperate. It’s daring. It’s sexy. And it
sneers at redemption. This is what sets Palahniuk aside.
He’s prepared to play the messenger and the Devil’s
Advocate, simultaneously, regardless of the price…
Yes, our generation has found its Don DeLillo and
he comes armed with a scalpel. His literary instrument
hacks deep into the malignancy eating away at our
society, but still the tumour continues to grow, feeding
on pessimism, fatality and dark, dark satire. This is all
Chuck Palahniuk needs to continue. It was all he ever
needed, and if the hunger pains should start to growl he
only needs to look to the news 24/7… �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published August 2000]
Tim Parks: Destiny
Stephen Mitchelmore
I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of
adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what
happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth,
or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find
the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply
frustrating. The credits run and immediately I feel the
need to inhabit the silence and apparent serenity of the
surviving characters. Even in a poor film. Instinctively,
I ask: what are the characters thinking now? How will
the events affect the rest of their lives? How will they
‘come to terms’ with what has happened? How will they
tell the story to their friends? Despite the insistence of
these questions – does anybody else ask them? – we
don’t seem to want to know the answers. I mean, we
never see films about them. We want only action.
Such indifference suggests a deep-seated pathological
fear at the heart of popular culture. It’s not like we
are all Odysseus, shedding experience like some
fancy-dress outfit. Experience makes us who we are.
We are stuck with responses, memories and responses
to memories. I suppose we watch films like Event Horizon
to displace them for a while.
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When that film began, I knew my questions would
not be answered. At that point, the roller coaster profile
of the usual Hollywood movie prompted only weariness,
not anticipation. Nevertheless, it was watched
and time was passed pleasurably. Of course, its predictability
was part of the pleasure. The thing is, I wanted
that predictability to be taken to the absolute limit. But
what does this mean in practice? Maybe it’s where time
stands still and the whole picture appears, as in the
uncanny vertigo you feel when you catch your own eye
looking at itself in the mirror. You know you are looking
at yourself – what could be more familiar? – yet
there is also a sense of something alien. It disappears as
soon as you notice it. The absolute limit, then, would be
the noticing and the disappearance combined. So what
would that be like? Well, Tim Parks’ novel Destiny is
a good start. It is an exhilarating experience of vertigo.
The novel begins with the narrator, Chris Burton, a
veteran journalist based in Italy, getting a phone call to
say his son, a patient in a psychiatric hospital, has killed
himself. He tells us this, and many other things, in the
first sentence. It is ten-lines long, and full of clauses
398
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and clarifications about things apparently unconnected
with the death. Right away, despite the appalling news,
he is comparing it with the latest developments in his
marriage and career. Such is the nature of literary grief,
we might think; that’s not how it really is.
But rather than being just an example of callousness
on the part of the narrator, or an indifference to dramatic
incident on the part of the author, it is actually a truer
reflection of how one experiences grief. Remember,
Burton receives the news over the telephone. How can
such news be close to him when it is comes in the form
of electronic noise? The news makes itself felt in the
play of the distances between the plain fact and his imagination.
Burton becomes, at this point if not before, a
reader of his life. All action is kindled in the mind. For
us, rather than being insulated from the impact of the
news, as we would be in the usual novel, we become
Burton’s fellow readers, living in his uncertain present,
trying to understand what it all means. The style of
the narration is repetitious and associative. This could
descend into an annoying tic, but works here because
each sentence is necessary to the narrative.
There is a powerful section where Burton thinks
about the visit to the mortuary with his wife, as he
struggles, late at night, to urinate in the house of his
adopted daughter. This one part of a long paragraph:
“Remembering and forgetting amount to very little,
I reflect, remembering my wife remembering the
BUY Tim Parks books online from and
miracle of her son’s birth, on our way to the mortuary.
It doesn’t amount to much. Not when it comes to
understanding. As if by parthenogenesis, I would tell
people, to make light of it, to turn it into a joke. My
wife would be boasting at one of her dinner parties
about how different her son was from his father. A
son in every way different from his father, she said.
It was my first thought upon waking. His birth was a
miracle, she claimed. You had nothing to do with your
son, she shouted outside the mortuary.”
The style, like Burton’s state of mind, is both
manic and extremely controlled. This is not streamof-consciousness.
It is not as random as that phrase
suggests. Troubling memories from various times
coalesce with the current event – struggling to piss –
as if, in all this distress, the divination of all troubles
is about to be revealed. Hence the title and subject of
the book: Destiny.
Appropriately, Burton hears the terrible news as he
tries to finish a book on Italian national characteristics
and how they determine Italian behaviour. All it needs,
he thinks, is an interview with the elusive elderly
politician Guilio Andreotti (who is, incidentally, a real
person). He thinks it will be the culmination, and mitigation,
of a career in journalism, which he now rejects
as “the endless description of hell”. The reference to
Dante’s Inferno (Hell) comes during a meditation in a
café named after the great Italian poet.
399
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This is perhaps too convenient, but it is certainly in
tune with the question of Destiny. Perhaps it prompted
the direction of his thoughts about journalism? Burton
says Inferno is a great piece of journalism but that Purgatory
and Paradise, the other two parts of The Divine
Comedy, are parts of a pilgrimage to perfection. This
is something journalism cannot achieve. His book on
national characteristics is, therefore, an attempt to get
beyond journalism. However, he seems to have been
pre-empted by another famous English journalist who
has churned out a book claiming to do the same. He also
happens to be Mrs Burton’s lover. Burton doesn’t know
what the situation is between them. Her vicious attacks
on him in the mortuary seem to indicate a conclusive
dissatisfaction, an indication of an imminent split. But
they could just be uncontrolled outpourings of grief.
How is he to know? He is trying to understand.
From the beginning, Burton seems destined for
doom and gloom. Despite this impression, there is rich
comedy in his various encounters along the way. The
nature of the book means that the crescendo Burton
leads us to expect is only ever going to be a fiction of
his imagination. All the set pieces, like the visit to the
mortuary, appear to us as fragments pieced together in
the spaces between other set pieces, like his struggle
above the toilet, which itself is fragmented by thoughts
of the visit to the mortuary. Instead, there is a quiet,
optimistic conclusion – which is also a beginning – as
BUY Tim Parks books online from and
Mrs Burton behaves out of character. That is, out of
the character that her husband has imagined. One can
thereby understand the novel as the refutation of Burton’s
thesis – that human behaviour can be explained
before the event. And yet, there is, in the form of his
narrative, an achievement beyond journalism! It makes
it one of the most satisfying and memorable novels,
written in English, for quite some time.
But one last thing. I said that this novel opens with
a ten-line sentence. The most striking thing about this
sentence is that it is almost identical in form and content
to the opening sentence of Thomas Bernhard’s
final novel Extinction (1986). Indeed, the whole novel
is deeply informed by Bernhard’s masterpiece. Does
this diminish Parks’ achievement? No, it doesn’t.
Technical brilliance does not swamp its emotional
resonance. That can’t be borrowed. When Chris Burton
is with his son’s body in a room near the mortuary,
he notices three heavy pieces of dark wooden furniture
and a Sacred Heart on the wall. It is there to console
the relatives of the deceased. Burton dismisses it is a
“public space that apes the private.” As a result of its
aping, it is drained of consoling authority. This is an
appropriate definition of most novels: a public space
that apes the private. This novel, on the other hand,
like Bernhard’s novels, mediates between public and
private space, showing us how intimately one influences
the other. A wonderful book. �
400
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published June 2000]
Arvo Pärt: Miserere And Minimalism
Lewis Owens meets composer Arvo Pärt
A few months ago, I contacted the composer Arvo Pärt
through his publisher in Vienna. I informed Mr Pärt
that I was interested in writing a book on his life and
music. After reading my proposal, Mr Pärt suggested
that we met to discuss things further. The first meeting
took place on Wednesday March 29 at the Royal Academy
of Music, where there was a three day festival in
honour of his music. The second meeting was at his
house in Essex, which was followed by a visit to the
nearby Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist.
Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, south-east of Tallinn,
Estonia, on 11 September 1935. He entered the Tallinn
Conservatory in the autumn of 1957 and was later a
winner of the All-Union Survey of the Creative Work
of Young Composers held in Moscow for composers
throughout the USSR under the age of 35. Although his
musical ability was clearly evident, its religious content
led to various confrontations with the Soviet authorities
(his work Credo was banned for over decade) and he
applied to leave the Soviet Union (and hence relinquish
Soviet citizenship) in 1979 with his Jewish wife, Nora.
On January 18, 1980 they left Tallinn for Vienna where
BUY Arvo Pärt music online from and
they acquired Austrian citizenship. They now live primarily
in Berlin.
Pärt’s minimalist music is rapidly increasing in popularity,
and his attempt to re-establish the sacred roots of
music has a growing appeal. Yet it seems to me that
without understanding or appreciating the reasons or
‘philosophy’ (in a nonacademic sense) behind his often
repetitive tonal compositions, Pärt’s music may seem
rather banal and somewhat unimaginative. Therefore,
my interest was primarily to understand in greater
depth the ‘philosophy’ that drives his music.
Eschewing in large part the conflicting tension
of opposing forces that constitutes the dynamics of
change found in, for example, the later symphonies of
Tchaikovsky, Pärt’s harmonies suggest an understanding
and experience of ‘time’ that is nonlinear and nonteleological
(that is, it appears to reach no climax or
‘goal’); moreover, as it lies outside a linear, teleological
paradigm, it is immune from accusations of stasis.
Indeed, Pärt’s work has an underlying dynamic and
organic unity, which seems to require an intuitive mode
of perception to be experienced fully. This includes an
401
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experience and perception of silence that, much like the
apophatic mystical tradition of the Eastern Orthodox
Church that Pärt embraces, seeks to overcome chaotic
multiplicity and establish contact with a true and
authentic unifying essence. Pärt has coined the word
‘tintinnabulation’ to describes this style of his work
which dates from the early 70s:
“Tintinnabulation is the area I sometimes wander
into when I am searching for answers – in my life,
in my music, in my work … the complex and manyfaceted
only confuses me and I must search for unity
… everything that is unimportant falls away. Tintinnabulation
is like this. Here I am alone with silence.
I have discovered that it is enough when a single note
is beautifully played. This note, or a silent beat, or a
moment of silence comfort me.”
Before our first meeting at the Royal Academy of
Music, I attended a rehearsal of Pärt’s Miserere, during
which the composer crept stealthily from every corner
of the room, from instrument to instrument, bass to soprano,
listening, suggesting and often wincing when the
instruments and vocals did not harmonise “like Romeo
and Juliet. My work is like a puzzle or a mosaic,” he
claimed, “if one piece is lost or out of place, then the
whole work cannot function properly: the machine cannot
turn back once it has begun.”
After the rehearsal I was able to spend some time
with Arvo and Nora Pärt. Pärt himself is as ‘present’
BUY Arvo Pärt music online from and
as his music; his deep, dark Slavonic eyes pierce you
as sharply as any of his religious works. We discussed
my intentions to write about the ‘philosophy’ behind
his music. “‘Philosophy’? He has none”, his wife cut in
sharply in broken English, “he learns everything from
the old Church Fathers.” To really understand his music,
she continued, you must first understand how this
religious tradition (Eastern Orthodoxy) flows through
him. Her husband agreed: I was therefore invited to
spend a day with the Pärt’s at the Stavropegic Monastery
of St. John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, Essex
the following week.
Mr Pärt met me from the station, and we spoke of
my work on Nikos Kazantzakis (whom Pärt clearly
disliked for being too ‘unorthodox’) whilst we drove
to his house in Essex. For the first couple of hours
we discussed my proposed book, eating strawberries
and drinking tea whilst being watched closely by
the numerous severe-looking icons that decorate his
sitting-room.
Despite the obvious language barrier (I do not speak
Estonian; Mr Pärt’s English is commendable but limited),
it was also apparent that there were further barriers
to overcome if my project was to be given the green
light. We talked philosophy, theology and music, but Mr
Pärt was visibly uncomfortable and nervous. Any book
about him, he claimed, must begin with the substance
of music itself – the arrangement of the notes. It is from
402
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this musical epicentre that everything else must radiate.
“If anybody wishes to understand me”, he continued,
“they must listen to my music; if anybody wishes to
know my ‘philosophy’ then they can read any of the
Church Fathers; if anybody wishes to know about my
life, then there are things that I wish to keep closed …
unlike our friend John [Taverner]!” It was clear that my
proposed project was running into difficulties before he
suggested that we headed for the monastery.
The Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist
is home to around 25 monks and nuns. It was established
under the spiritual guidance of Archimandrite
Sophrony, who died in 1993. Sophrony had arrived on
Mount Athos in 1925 and entered the Russian Monastery
of St. Panteimon where he began scribbling down
the teachings of his elder St. Siluoan. Many of his
works are to be found in the monastery bookshop. The
monastery itself is a mixture of richly ornate old timber
buildings that blend beautifully with newer, more
modern constructions. The monks and nuns spend their
day in prayer, icon-painting, and in the general upkeep
of the monastery. A large section of land enables them
to grow various fruits and vegetables, and thus remain
largely self-sufficient.
When showing me around the monastery, Pärt’s
demeanour visibly changed. He came to life again,
BUY Arvo Pärt music online from and
like he was during the rehearsal of Miserere, prowling
cat-like from one icon to the next as he explained to
me their origin and symbolism. He was clearly relieved
to have left the ‘intellectual’ atmosphere that we had
created earlier, and to breath instead a more ‘spiritual’
and aesthetic air. I was even treated to a duet by Pärt
and his wife in one of the Churches.
At 5pm, the bells called all the monks and nuns to eat
(as it was Lent, this was their only meal of the day). After
a monkish chant that seemed to be taken straight from
one of Pärt’s works, we ate our simple meal of olives
and pulses in silence, listening to a reading from the
teaching of Johannes Climacus. Humbleness prevailed.
Soon afterwards Arvo and Nora Pärt presented me with
a gift: Archimandrite Sophrony’s spiritual biography of
‘Saint Siluoan the Athonite’. We talked no more of my
own proposed book; it just didn’t seem appropriate in
the surroundings.
As I left the monastery and made my way slowly
home, I recalled Pärt’s words and decided to put my
book project on hold for the time being: “If anybody
wishes to understand me, they must listen to my music;
if anybody wishes to know my ‘philosophy’, then they
can read any of the Church Fathers; if anybody wishes
to know about my private life, there are things that I
wish to keep closed.” �
403
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published February 1999]
Ulf Poschardt: DJ Culture
Chris Mitchell
In the last 30 years, the role of the DJ has transformed
from being a mere purveyor of pop music to being the
creator of pop music. This transformation is due almost
solely to the humble analogue technology of the record
turntable, which still thrives in the midst of this supposedly
digital decade. In DJ Culture, Ulf Poschardt, editor
in chief of Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin,
has attempted to trace the evolution of the DJ and his
impact on musical culture.
However, Poschardt is not interested in simply
discussing fashionable modern DJs who create their
own records. He spends the first third of DJ Culture
discussing the prehistory of today’s DJs, the record
spinners who arrived with the advent of radio. There
are not many histories which can pinpoint an exact date
and time for their origin, but Poschardt maintains the
DJ came into being in 1906, when electrical engineer
Reginald A. Fessenden played a record of Handel’s
Largo in the world’s first radio broadcast.
DJ Culture details the social influence of this powerful
new mixture of recorded and transmittable sound,
along with the DJs’ subtly subversive light entertain-
BUY Ulf Poschardt books online from and
ment programming. While 1940s disc jockey legend
Alan Freed never scratch his own tunes together, he
introduced a whole post-war white generation to the
black music of jazz and rhythm and blues, flying in the
face of McCarthy-era conservatism.
Just as the DJ was created by technology, so DJs
began to exploit that technology to take control of the
sound of the records they played. With the beginning
of house and disco clubs in the early 70s, DJs sought
ways to extend their audiences’ favourite sections of
particular tracks, which led to using two turntables and
repeating the same segment.
From the sonic DIY experiments of Grandmaster
Flash, Kool J Herc and Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Culture
meticulously traces the roots of the modern DJ and the
birth of the record as technological collage, concluding
with the emergence of drum’n’bass and the seemingly
infinite possibilities of computerised music.
Poschardt manages to write about DJ culture in a
scholarly but informal style, interweaving quotes from
DJs with citations of numerous critical theorists. In
the hands of a less thoughtful writer, this could have
404
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resulted in clumsy prose, but Poschardt uses nuggets of
academic theory to persuasively emphasise the radical
shift during this century that has happened to music,
DJs and society itself because of technology.
Most importantly, Poschardt reveals the significance
of something which is seemingly so insignificant – pop
music – and yet manages to keep a tone of infectious,
subjective enthusiasm about it. In doing so, he has written
a near-definitive secret history of the DJ. �
BUY Ulf Poschardt books online from and
405
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published October 2003]
Richard Powers: Plowing The Dark
Chris Mitchell
Plowing The Dark is nothing if not a novel of ideas. Set
in the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Powers’ novel juxtaposes
two parallel narratives – one concerning the rise
of virtual reality, computer generated simulation that
reached to become indistinguishable from reality – and
the other concerning Taipur Martin, an American taken
hostage and held in the Lebanon. These narratives may
seem incongruous at first, but both concern the same
thing – the nature of reality.
For Adie Karpol, the technophobe artist called on to
give visual shape to the computer realities generated
by the immersive environment known as The Cavern,
fooling her own senses into believing the simulation in
front of her is real becomes her daily quest. For Taipur
Martin, the American teacher held hostage in solitary
confinement for a length of time so long he cannot
even measure it, trying to stay sane amongst almost
total sensory deprivation becomes a contest of wills
with himself. Flickering behind these two narratives
are the epoch-changing events which dominated and
dictated the last two decades’ world history – Tianamen
Square, the collapse of communism and the first Gulf
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
War. Plowing The Dark is the sort of novel you soon
realise will repay a second reading even before you’ve
finished the first.
Karpol’s grappling with the hideous complexities
of computer code that live under the bonnet of virtual
reality gives Powers the perfect device to trace the arcane
history of its geek genesis, which in turn brings
in discussions of mathematics, economics and, well,
the structure of the universe itself. In a similar way
to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Powers takes the
computer as the single most important artefact of the
last two decades and examines its impact upon our
reality as much as our creation of new realities using it.
Traditionally art has fulfilled the function of creating
new realities, and Powers name drops a vast array of
classical artists in conversations describing the nature
of art and its irreducibility to a binary sequence. Powers’
peripheral characters are clearly ciphers to embody
certain viewpoints, while the central characters in both
narratives grapple with a tsunami of thought of which
they can never fully gain control. Indeed, the novel has
this effect on the reader as well as its protagonists –
406
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Powers’ prose is easy to read, but the density of ideas
packed into each page demands frequent pauses to
digest what is being said. Whereas most novels take
a central premise and string it out over a couple of
hundred pages, it feels as if Plowing The Dark only just
keeps the lid on its own complexity.
Like Pynchon and Delillo who are namechecked
as Powers’ peers by several reviewers on Plowing’s
book covers, Powers’ prose has a certain cool authorial,
distinctly American, detachment to it. This in turn
gives the effect of looking at his characters through a
microscope rather than moving amongst them – even
the Taipur Martin narrative, which uses the second
person throughout, seems strangely removed even as it
provides an exhausting empathy with the horror of being
held hostage. This detachment also provides a more
subtle sadness for Adie Karpol, where life is nothing
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
but work and making love is without real thought for
one’s lover. Some of Powers’ sentences on the emotional
lives of Karpol and her friends seem almost like
asides and yet always hint at a melancholy for those
characters, a fundamental loneliness and an absence of
happiness with no idea of where to look for it. These
moments in the book are perhaps all the more noticeable
for being moments of emotional vulnerability or
longing amongst so much intellectual abstraction.
Plowing The Dark, then, is unashamedly intellectual
and decidedly demanding of its reader, a near riot of
ideas and imagination that crackles with the electricity
of new thoughts emerging from the old. It feels like
a third millennium novel – synthesising and distilling
histories of events, of ideas and of people, reshaping
and retracing new threads through them, cutting its
own furlong for what a novel should do. �
407
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 1998]
Richard Powers: Gain
David B. Livingstone
Nobody talks much about the quest for “great American
novel” anymore; the phrase, once a sneering European
attempt at an oxymoron, was long ago answered by
Faulkner, Hemingway, and Miller. To the surprise of
some, even America – first, the motley amalgam of immigrant
trappers and farmers; later, the citadel of capitalism
and the mecca of disposable pop culture – proved
capable of cultivating its own strong literary tradition.
With Gain, Richard Powers launches his own strong
bid for entry into the canon of America’s best novelists,
delivering a work both epic in scope and universal in
emotional resonance, a contemporary book drawing
upon timeless, and often uniquely American, themes.
Mining the same rich, long-neglected vein of sociallyaware
fiction once plumbed by Upton Sinclair, John
Dos Passos, and Sinclair Lewis, Powers creates a subtle,
quietly horrifying mirror reflecting the seldom-noticed,
tragic consequences to life in a modern consumer society.
Like a Sinclair or Dos Passos, Powers successfully
apprehends and elucidates both the expansive sweep
and intricate workings of corporate power; like Lewis,
he succeeds in translating these into human terms, and
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
human stories. And like Faulkner or Steinbeck, he arms
his tale with an unrelenting, sometimes unforgiving,
emotional grip.
The first of Gain’s two interwoven plotlines concerns
the birth, growth, and ultimate decline of the Clare Corporation,
a soap and chemical manufacturing concern;
the second, the story of the Bodey family, residents of
the fictional Lacewood, Indiana – a quiet, comfortable
midwestern company town, home to Clare’s massive
agricultural operations. Aside from geographic
location, there would seem to be little commonality
between the Bodeys and their corporate neighbour, but
it soon emerges that the destinies of the Bodeys and
Clare are destined to meet and collide, and likely with
cataclysmic results.
Gain begins with the birth of Clare in the 1830s as
Jephthah Clare’s Sons transform their family’s struggling
shipping and trading business into a soap manufactory.
Samuel, Benjamin, and Resolve Clare, through
hard work, faith, and assimilation of the new country’s
ideas and ideals – the land is to be conquered, God is to
be worshipped, industry is the Lord’s Work and profit
408
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is a sacrament – gradually transform their enterprise
into an edifice, a being with a life of its own that will
thrive and survive beyond their lifetimes. Clare’s Sons
becomes Clare, then Clare Incorporated, its interests
and influence spreading across the land and around
the globe like the Gospel, like a prairie fire, like a fastgrowing
weed, like a cancer – or like all at once.
Meanwhile, in the 1990s, Laura Bodey is a divorced
mother and a successful real estate agent, an American
Everywoman whose daily concerns revolve around her
work and family: Is her son spending too much time
playing computer games? Is her daughter smoking pot?
How can she manage the uneasy truce with their father?
Will she make receive a Top Performers award again
this year? Though the days and years have flown by in a
blur of work, parenting, consumption, and more work,
with little time for Laura to realize her own dreams, the
Bodeys seem to have settled into a suburban idyll: Life
is comfortable if not perfect, and the future, although
unwritten, seems to promise more of the same. The
multiheaded hydra that Clare has become, however,
will change all that.
Where was the point where Clare’s Sons’ noble
enterprise became a destroyer of worlds, where the
company dedicated to cleanliness, quality, and purity
became a monster? The growth of Clare is an allegory
of the loss of innocence of a country and its people,
the story of the alchemical transformation of ideals into
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
avarice, of solemn vows into hollow public relations
pronouncements, of physical reality into vacant and
ephemeral imagery.
Gain is the story of the decline and fall of a company,
a family, and a nation rendered in quiet symbolism
and graceful, elegant prose. In lesser hands, the raw
materials of Gain could have easily been transmuted
into a soap opera or a shrill anti-corporate rant; instead,
Powers’ careful craftsmanship and almost obsessive attention
to linguistic nuance, to period detail, and to the
tiny but telling words, phrases, actions, and rituals that
make up the stuff of existence in 90s America render
Clare, the Bodeys, and their world in photorealistic
detail, giving Gain the feel of real life.
In the end, Gain is about losses, fiscal, physical and
spiritual: A woman who loses her health, a corporation
that loses its soul, and an emerging democracy
that loses its way en route to the promised land. Gain
is a modern American tragedy, and like all classic
examples of the form, its tragic heroes’ undoing occurs
as the result of a catalytic reaction between the
characters’ own hidden vulnerabilities and immense,
unseen forces greater than themselves; that these
are invariably ultimately recognized, once past the
point of salvation, is the classicist masterstroke that
imbues Gain, like a modern Richard III or Medea,
with monumental, timeless power. Is Gain really this
good? Yes. Yes. Yes. �
409
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published September 1997]
Thomas Pynchon: Mason & Dixon
David B. Livingstone
Brevity, the aphorism has it, is the soul of wit. So
where does that leave Thomas Pynchon, whose current
offering Mason & Dixon weighs in at close to
800 pages – and of often-impenetrable stylized ‘Old
English’ text, no less?
The real Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon,
America’s original sub-dividers, took upon themselves
the promethean task of imposing the first trace of order
upon the wilderness that was the new world, drawing
their famous line demarcating north and south. With
his fanciful re-imagining of Messrs Mason and Dixon,
Pynchon has created a veritable universe, similarly bewildering
and untamed, for readers to divide and conquer
if they can. Mason & Dixon is a sprawling muddle
of historical fact, surreal fancy, fable, fantasy, and occasional
silliness, underpinned by the quiet insistence –
supported, at times, more by faith than evidence – that
somehow it all can make sense; that somehow, given
enough courage, dogged determination, or blind luck,
order can be either alchemically divined from chaos or
forced upon it. Like American civilization, both past
and present.
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Pynchon’s always been the poster boy for literate
obsessive-compulsives; to have successfully navigated
his Gravity’s Rainbow, with its (literally!) hundreds
of characters and multiple opaque, labyrinthine approximations
of plot, has long been considered a badge
of honour in college English departments, as tons of
well-thumbed paperback copies littering coffeehouses
and the ‘used’ shelves of college bookstores attest to.
To read Pynchon is considered in some quarters akin
to membership in an elite, semi-secret society of codebreakers
or decipherers of hieroglyphics, a courageous
and maybe half-mad cult obsessed with ‘getting it’.
Their patron Saint Thomas has never made it easy;
the enigmatic, likely pseudonymous author remains as
much a mystery as his books, having refused all interviews,
rebutted all requests for biographical information,
and successfully eluded the most dogged attempts
at unearthing his true identity ever since his 50s debut.
Evidently in agreement with Humphrey Bogart that all
he owes his audience is a good performance, the ephemeral
Tom will periodically emerge from the shadows in
the form of another cryptic tome to dazzle with verbal
410
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sleight-of-hand, infuriate with quick-change artistry,
and befuddle with another disappearing act, leaving the
faithful to scramble for morsels of meaning or genius
until his next earthly manifestation.
One critic, in the Village Voice, has already likened
reviewing Mason & Dixon to “reviewing the Atlantic
ocean.” With its wilful opacity and encyclopedic
breadth of themes and subjects, distilling the novel to
a succinct summary while doing it justice is a pretty
daunting prospect. Mason & Dixon stands as a paradigm
of The Novel As Jigsaw Puzzle; here, you’re
expected to somehow connect the dots between such
elements as a talking dog (“the learn’d English dog,”
to be precise), a smiling electric eel used as a compass,
the evils of Indian massacres and the slave trade, the
first British pizza, the world’s largest cheese (the “octuple
Gloucester”, a “cheese malevolent”), an invisible,
lovelorn mechanical duck which chases a French chef
around the world (“la bec de la mort” – the beak of
death), the intricacies of astronomy and geometry, the
dualistic characters of Mason and Dixon, and the omnipresent
backdrop of collected American, European,
religious, and human history into a distinct impression,
a coherent whole. No mean feat.
Distinct themes, however, do ultimately emerge.
Mason & Dixon is about lines – not only the literal lines
of surveyors and mapmakers, but about boundaries in
the larger sense: Lines between good and evil, known
BUY Thomas Pynchon books online from and
and unknown, fantasy and fact, science and superstition,
past, present, and future; it is about the drawing
of these lines, the crossing of these lines, the blurring
and erasure of these lines, and the consequences of
doing so. Mason & Dixon’s task, to define the physical
parameters of America, stands as a metaphor for
the definition and creation of the country itself, as
performed by the supposedly enlightened and rational
explorers, colonists, founding fathers, kings, generals,
venture capitalists, and adventurers who did so. The
end result – the divided and sub-divided nation of ethnic
hatreds and strip malls, of class envy and suburban
sprawl, of glittering triumphs and monumental failures
– is the measure of their efforts, and the subtly-invoked
backdrop of Mason & Dixon.
In large measure, Mason & Dixon is ultimately a
lament for the failure of individuals and nations relative
to their dreams and their potential, as well as for
vanished frontiers – those of the physical world (the
conquest of nature and the wilderness) as well as the
spiritual (the waning power of religion and its corollary
elements, faith and imagination, at the hands of science
and commerce):
“Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? And is
America her dream? – in which all that cannot pass
in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression
away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces,
and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp’d, nor
411
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written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind,
seen – serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive
Hopes, for all that may yet be true – Earthly Paradise,
Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s
Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe until the next
Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d
and tied in, back into the Net-Work of points already
known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent,
changing all from subjunctive to declarative,
reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the
ends of Governments, – winning away from the realm
of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming
them unto the bare mortal World that is our home,
and our Despair.”
And with only a slightly greater synaptic leap, Mason
& Dixon can be read as a rueful acknowledgement of
the fragmentation of the American dream – the disappearance
of a collective sense of direction and purpose,
as well as possibly morality – a relief portrait of a
country and people adrift:
Mason to Dixon: “Acts have consequences, Dixon,
they must. These Louts believe all’s right now, – that
they are free to get on with Lives that are to them no
doubt important, – with no Glimmer at all of the Debt
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they have taken on. That is what I smell’d – Lethe-water.
One of the things the newly born forget, is how terrible
its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to
forget ev’rything. Be willing to wait but a little, and ye
may gull them again and again, however ye wish, – even
unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend,
Time is the true river that runs round Hell.”
Lethe, the river of ignorance in Greek mythology, is
evidently the creek we’re stuck on without a paddle,
drifting ever away from “the realm of the sacred.” Not
altogether a very cheery prospect.
Mason & Dixon, despite frequent humour, makes
for pretty lousy light reading; if the continual digressions,
daunting thematic content, odd symbolism, or
structural oddities don’t get to you, the period narrative
style certainly will. Maintaining the necessary mental
inventory of preceding events is a difficulty even early
on, and later, a virtual impossibility. Concentration,
and lots of it, is necessary for a successful foray into
Pynchon’s New World, where brevity is the only thing
in short supply. But for those who dare to attempt the
challenge, armed with the requisite patience and attention
span, Mason & Dixon offers abundant wit, as well
as considerable wisdom. �
412
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published August 2006]
Matthew Robertson: FAC 461
Chris Hall on Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album (FAC 461)
In the late 70s, the mysterious, topographical radio
waves of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures appeared
like a burst of energy in an empty void, signifying the
arrival not only of one of the best bands this country has
produced but also its finest independent record label,
Factory. It’s not too strong to say that Peter Saville’s
sleeves for Unknown Pleasures and New Order’s ‘Blue
Monday’ are up there with Peter Blake’s Sgt. Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and
Vaughan Oliver’s 4AD covers. The design mostly
matched up to the quality of the music.
The chaotic, quixotic Factory Records existed from
1978 to 1992, from post-punk to rave, and continues to
influence those making music now, not only in nostalgic
terms but because they were essentially purely about
the music – and the design was all about enhancing the
music. Ironically, it was on the very front that Factory
couldn’t compete that it ended up competing on – design.
This is the label whose die-cut ‘Blue Monday’ single by
New Order, the best-selling 12 inch of all time, cost them
money every time someone bought the record.
Of course, Factory is most closely associated with the
graphic designer Peter Saville. In the summer of 2003
there was a big Saville retrospective at the Design Museum
and a book which of course featured a lot of his work
for Factory. Saville’s book presented his art work and
other writers put it into context with long, considered essays;
what this book does instead is simply catalogue the
work and provide minimal expositionary notes. Unlike
the Saville book, it highlights the work of other people
involved in the Factory story and shows how it evolved
beyond the visually literate aesthetic of Saville.
The shadow background of the artwork in FAC 461
reinforces the idea that these are objects, artefacts, photographed
as if from above on mini-plinths. Ironically,
a lot of the artwork published here that we are forever
told works best as a 12” vinyl or 33rpm sleeve is shown
at pretty much the exact dimensions of a compact disc.
There is a fantastically pretentious but sublime introduction
from Factory co-founder and twat-about-town
Tony Wilson whose register and sentence construction
is unique. How about this, with its brilliantly ambivalent
“or”: “It all began after a very, very bad Patti Smith
gig in late 77 or early 78…”; or this, explaining the
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413
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Factory design rationale, the pick of the crop: “Does
the Catholic Church pour its wine into mouldy earthenware
pots? I think not.” How can one not love this man
(other than by meeting him perhaps)?
However, Wilson’s got a gimlet eye for the design
success of the Happy Mondays album Bummed, writing
about its controversial inside sleeve: “It wasn’t the fact
that the woman was middle-aged, it wasn’t the shaved
pubes, it was the colour quality which made the viewer
feel dirty. Sheer genius, that.”
The Durutti Column album The Return of the Durutti
Column (1979) designed by Dave Rowbotham is composed
entirely of sandpaper and was inspired by the
Situationist Guy Debord’s Memoires, “a book bound
in raw sandpaper designed to damage all other publications
around it” – perfect for punk.
Of course, Factory didn’t just operate in two dimensions
– as Tony Wilson might have said – there was Ben
Kelly’s Hacienda nightclub, for a while the most famous
club in the world, with its chevrons, bollards and cats
eyes – a kind of theatrical industrial space, which included
the Gay Traitor bar, with its spot lights and furtive air
of treachery. (Saville said astutely that “Instead of being
a monument to the 80s, the Hacienda is the birthplace of
the 90s”.) Then there was Factory HQ on Charles Street,
a disused textile warehouse (since the 70s they had operated
from Alan Erasmus’s one-bed flat) – “a mausoleum
to the corporate brand that the label could never be”, plus
the Dry bar, a continental-style bar, one of the first of its
kind in England, all in Manchester.
There’s even info here that’s new to a Factory nut like
me (and I made sure my son’s initial allowed me to have
a FAC family code, though perhaps that’s a retrospective
justification), such as the f-hole logo which I’d always
taken to be f for Factory but it’s actually f for Fractured
Music, Joy Division’s company (fascinating eh?). Also
that there was a cigarette pack design for the Joy Division
video Here Are The Young Men, got up like 20 John
Player Special’s – I want to trade my VHS copy now!
There’s even plenty to drool over in corporate terms
such as the stationery and the Factory Christmas cards,
especially the one from 1987 designed by Johnson Panas
(they were of course commissioned and absurdly lavish),
a cardboard model kit of the Hacienda.
While Saville continued his “grand tour for the masses”,
with the New Order covers taking in De Chirico for
‘Thieves Like Us’, Futurist Fortunato Depero’s Dynamo
(1927) for Procession (1981) and appropriating Jan
Tschichold typography, there is a sense of a dead end.
Luckily, the Happy Mondays covers rescued Saville’s
anally retentive control freakery and let rip: they were
garish, often unreadable and trippy. Happy Mondays’
‘Lazyitis’ single by Central Station Design looks as if
they can’t be bothered, which is perfect of course, the
bloated lettering slurring its way across the sleeve – you
half expect the cover to belch in your face. �
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414
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published June 1999]
Bruce Robinson: The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas Penman
Gary Marshall
In one of his routines, Eddie Izzard explains why supermarkets
don’t have toilet rolls on display near the entrance
in case you think “this is a poo shop! Everything
in here is poo!”. Your first impression of The Peculiar
Memories Of Thomas Penman may well be similar, as
the first chapter revels in the scatological detail of the
eponymous Penman’s difficulties at school. Blackly
funny and completely offensive, the opening chapter
sets the tone for the rest of the book.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is indeed a
‘poo’ book. Defecation is everywhere, from Penman’s
emergencies in the classroom to the war of attrition –
expressed through the medium of dog shit – waged by
his uncommunicative parents. This is definitely not a
book for the easily offended, encompassing Thomas’
Grandfather’s secret stash of pornography (including
photographs of “a woman with a duck up her arse”),
teenage opinions of sex and general unpleasantness.
Robinson, however, manages to stay the right side of
offensiveness and his novel is highly amusing whilst
packing a hefty moral punch.
The novel is essentially a rites-of-passage story,
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covering Penman’s first love and first experience of
mortality, although the unpleasantness of the subject
matter makes The Peculiar Memories Of Thomas
Penman considerably funnier than the typical tale of
growing up. Penman’s infatuation for the far-fromperfect
Gwen cures him of his obsession with his own
bodily functions, and we follow his predicament as his
home life becomes increasingly demented. Robinson
has a deceptively light touch and manages to create as
many uncomfortable laughs of recognition as he does
belly-laughs, particularly when Thomas describes his
feelings for the love of his life or deals with the first
fumblings of teenage sex. Similarly the parental discord
of Thomas’ dysfunctional family is exaggerated to
the point of parody without losing its horror.
The dialogue is bang-on for most of the book and
both Thomas’ secretive relationship with his Grandfather
and his attempts to discover the man’s dark secret
are simultaneously funny and touching. It’s the details,
however, which will have you squirming – from Thomas’
Grandfather’s recollections of the Great War to
conversations about sex where the girl “would have
415
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done it” if the boy had been able to produce a more
appropriate form of protection than a three-foot condom
found washed up on the beach. The ill-informed
bravado of teenage boys is particularly well-drawn and
the scenes where Thomas attempts to smoke cigarettes
or discuss sex with his best friend are painfully funny.
Bruce Robinson has been lauded primarily for writing
and directing the cult hit Withnail & I, although
his credits also include the screenplay for The Killing
BUY Bruce Robinson books online from and
Fields. He’s clearly a very talented writer and, in …
Penman, manages the difficult task of balancing manic
humour and pathos. The war scenes in particular are
graphic and powerful, and the scenes where Thomas
speaks with his Grandfather on his death-bed are especially
poignant. Reading this book you’re left with the
distinct impression that Bruce Robinson can turn his
hand to manic comedy and serious story-telling with
equal ease. �
416
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published August 2003]
Jacques Roubaud: The Great Fire Of London
Stephen Mitchelmore
I have tried to write about Jacques Roubaud’s novel
The Great Fire Of London many times.
No, that’s not true. I have not written anything.
Rather, I have felt many times the need to write about
The Great Fire Of London.
But that’s not true either. I have felt the need to remove
this need; that’s all.
I have assumed that writing would remove the need.
There seems to be no other way. But what is there to
write? The Great Fire Of London is a fearfully complex
book. There are pages betraying the influence of Roubaud’s
academic career as a mathematician. I cannot
understand a great deal of it. But maybe that is a good
thing. If I wrote about the novel by trying to unravel
its fearful complexity, I might ruin what makes it so
persistently memorable, which isn’t a result of its fearful
complexity. It is something to do with its underlying
simplicity and intimacy. But such a statement is itself
too simplistic. Either way, it is deeply moving and
inspiring book.
Not that I would unequivocally recommend rushing
out to get a copy. It is not an easy read. The subject
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matter is frequently incomprehensible, occasionally
boring and evasive. All these aspects, however, seem
fundamental to it; that is, not errors of art and craft.
So, to look beyond these, to direct one’s steady gaze
at the essence of the novel might be to repeat Orpheus’
error when retrieving his wife Eurydice from
the underworld. He looked back as he led her from
the darkness, so breaking his vow to the God of the
underworld. He was not meant to look. She was then
condemned to remain in the dark and he was ripped
apart. Orpheus’ dismembered head sings of his loss
as it floats down a river. Similarly, perhaps, if one
attempts to retrieve art from the darkness of its bookloneliness
by bringing it into the brightness of public
discourse, its essence might well get left behind too.
What’s left would be the beauty of its dissembling
architecture; the words of Orpheus’ song. This is not
what makes it beautiful.
So what is it? One helpful aspect of The Great Fire
Of London is that Roubaud’s narrator also assumes that
writing is his only recourse. Perhaps there is something
to learn about this impulse, or at least how might affect
417
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what is written.
In the opening chapter, the narrator – who is Roubaud
himself, more or less, although more or less is
perhaps an infinity I can only hope to overlook here – is
at his desk at five in the morning, drinking coffee. He
listens to the running motor of a delivery truck in the
street below. Immediately, we are with him in the cool
solitude of dawn. We reflect in isolation from the world
in motion; it becomes five o’clock in the morning for
us too. (Scott Fitzgerald says “In the real dark night of
the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day
after day”; at five o’clock, one begins to write about it).
The narrator tells us that he writes:
“in minute, close-packed letters, without deletions,
regrets, reflection, imagination, impatience” and that
he is writing “only in order to keep on going, to elude
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the anguish awaiting me once I break off.”
His anguish is inevitable, for a reason that soon
becomes clear. Writing holds anguish at bay. Reading
and sleep help too, he says. They provide the local
palliative of ‘escapism’. What we read, though, is not
in the form of traditional writerly escapism; a crime
thriller, perhaps, or maybe a philosophical abstraction
cast from an ivory tower, or even the ‘talking cure’ of
confessional memoir. It’s difficult to say what kind of
book it is. Yes, it is a novel, even if I found my copy
in the History section of a remaindered bookshop. Yet
while it partakes of the liberating playfulness of fiction,
it also looks back – ever so obliquely, yet ever so insistently
– into his pool of anguish: the sudden, premature
death of Alix, his wife. And this really happened. It’s
no fiction. �
418
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Robert Sabbag: Snowblind 420
Peter Saville: Graphic Sex 422
Alberto Sciamma: Suck It And See 428
W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away 431
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz 446
Will Self 450
Will Self: Biting The Hand That Feeds 451
Will Self: Self Destruction 460
Will Self: Dead Man Talking 464
Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension 467
S
Tupac Shakur: Murder Was The Case 472
Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey 475
Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle 479
Michael Marshall Smith: Spares 482
Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us 484
Sonic Youth: Sonic Spice 486
Ralph Steadman: Gonzo: The Art 490
Suicide: David Nobakht: No Compromise 499
Damo Suzuki: I Am Damo Suzuki 502
Swans: Swans’ Song 506
David Sylvian: The Good Son Vs.
The Only Daughter 510
419
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published December 2001]
Robert Sabbag: Snowblind
Robin Askew
If Howard Marks is Mr Nice – a lovable, educated
former cannabis smuggler who didn’t touch anything
harder on principle – then Zachary Swan was
Mr Somewhat-Less-Nice. A harder sell to the liberal
middle-classes than Marks’s entertaining raconteur,
Swan was an American cocaine smuggler whose meticulous
scams became the stuff of legend in the 70s.
One of the true classics of drug literature, Snowblind
has been in and out of print many times since it first
appeared in 1976. This welcome new edition from
Scottish counter-culture specialists Rebel Inc boasts
a rambling, adulatory introduction from Marks (“…
the world of international dope dealing is fun,” he
vouchsafes once again, adding, perhaps unnecessarily,
“It’s fucking great!”) and an afterword (actually
written ten years ago) by Robert Sabbag, recalling
how, as a young and ambitious newspaper hack,
he was reluctantly persuaded to write the book that
made his name.
Too old to be a hippy and Republican by inclination,
Swan was a smuggler of the old-school, motivated
more by greed than the politico-chemical fervour
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of the times. His swift transition from dope to coke
resulted from a calculation of the vastly increased
profits to be made from Colombian nose candy. (In
an amusing digression, Sabbag reminds us that we
should never underestimate the contribution made
by illegal drug dealing to his nation’s numeracy:
“The United States of America effectively converted
to the metric system in, or around, 1965 – by 1970
there was not a college sophomore worth his government
grant who didn’t know how much a gram of
hash weighed.”)
These being comparatively more innocent, prefreebase
times, Swan didn’t carry a gun until late in his
brief career and never shot anyone, had a moderately
enlightened attitude towards women by the antediluvian
standards of the time, and – unusually – devised
each of his cunning scams with a loophole that allowed
his often unwitting ‘mules’ to walk away, much to the
frustration of the Feds.
It’s the mechanics of these ingenious smuggling
schemes that provide the most pleasure. Increased
security measures mean that many of them couldn’t
420
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be employed today, though some remain infallible.
For one brilliantly executed scam, Swan spent days
perfecting a technique for imperceptibly removing and
replacing the seals on jars of coffee. Finally satisfied,
he deposited a leaflet in a sealed jar, sneaked it back
into a store and waited. Days later, he received a call on
a phone that couldn’t be traced to him from an elderly
couple who’d found that they’d just won a free trip to
Colombia courtesy of the coffee company.
Posing as executives from the company, a heavily
disguised Swan and his sidekicks dispatched the couple
from the airport having extracted an agreement that
they would be photographed on their return with the
gifts they’d been given. Down south, still-disguised
Swan made a great show of handing over the souvenirs,
which were, needless to say, stuffed with the
finest toot. Abundant witnesses and the couple’s bogus
signed agreement – not to mention their genuine innocence
– meant they stood no chance of being convicted
if caught. Back home, the souvenirs were discreetly
swapped for identical if somewhat less valuable ones
during the photographic session and the contented
oldsters went on their way none the wiser.
BUY Robert Sabbag books online from and
Should you be naughty enough to read it as a handbook,
Snowblind boasts plenty of hints and tips for the
aspiring drug smuggler. (If you’re going to conceal your
stash inside that old favourite the hollowed-out ethnic
wooden ornament, choose something like medeira
wood, which has a high specific gravity.) But armchair
adventurers who’d prefer not to risk spending the rest
of their lives being sodomised by large South American
gentlemen in third world jails will enjoy it just as much
for the racy prose, period charm – the description of the
drug scene in 70s Harlem reads like the script for one of
those big-Afro Blaxploitation flicks – and terrific cast
of characters.
Sabbag’s rich turn of phrase brings brilliantly to
life such dramatis personae as the psychopathic Jago
(“There was always a look in his eye which seemed
to indicate that his body was metabolising raw flesh”),
Michel Bernier (who “embodied all those individual
characteristics that Americans find distasteful in a
man – he was French”), and the aptly named Billy Bad
Breaks, who was so inept that he achieved the singular
distinction of being jailed for attempting to smuggle a
joint into Mexico. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published September 2003]
Peter Saville: Graphic Sex
Chris Hall meets legendary designer Peter Saville
“Peter Saville drives a Skoda”. The appalling idea
scared him off of renting one when it was offered in
place of the VW Polo that he’d ordered. “I know everyone
says they’re really good cars now, but I’m not
gonna be in a test group for them. It’s still a Skoda,”
he says, terrified that people would think he drove one.
Instead, Saville pulls up at his studios near Old Street,
East London in a rented Fiat Stilo, The Doors still playing
on the stereo. His own car, a 16-year-old BMW 3
Series, is in the garage and he hasn’t quite got used to
the replacement, checking and double-checking that
he’s properly locked it. He’s worried about how much
the repair bill is going to be when he collects the BMW.
In fact, he’s worried about bills full stop.
He has a big tax bill to pay this month, which he
says he can’t afford. The bailiffs have been round, who
he fended off by lying to them, and the phones have
been cut off. Plus his own financial involvement in
The Peter Saville Show which opened in May at the
Design Museum in London, and a book published by
Frieze, has meant that he’s on the verge of personal
bankruptcy. Oh, and he’s just about to be kicked out of
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
the house he’s been staying at in West London for the
past two years and might have to move in to his studio
which hasn’t got a toilet. Or blinds. Or a bed.
You wouldn’t think that this was the same Peter
Saville who’s designed some of the most original and
iconic album covers ever with Joy Division, New
Order, Suede and Pulp; who’s worked for Christian
Dior, Givenchy, the Pompidou Centre, EMI and
Selfridges, among many, many others; whose seminal
work for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto has
influenced a decade of “anti-advertising” advertising,
and who’s been recently voted the “most admired
individual working within the creative industries”
in Creative Review. The Peter Saville who’s been
quietly amassing an impressive body of work as a
graphic artist over the last 25 years, who at the age of
47 is being officially recognised by the mainstream.
It’s the weekend, which means he’s working, and
he’s arranged to do some quick picture editing with
one of his colleagues, Sascha Behrendt, just before he
meets me. But he’s running late, so they have to look
at the prints of a shoot he did a few days earlier for
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Stella McCartney while I’m there. He’s dressed in his
trademark white Helmut Lang jeans, a black T-shirt and
some tan leather shoes (no socks). He speaks in a soft
Mancunian accent deepened by nicotine, and has a distinctive
sustain when pronouncing his Rs. Saville puts
on his black-framed glasses and goes over to the table
to look at large-format Polaroids of Kate Moss in kneehigh
leather boots. “The professional situations I have
at the moment are really quite abusive,” he says matter
of factly. “It’s not a straight, commercial relationship I
have with my clients. They come to me for something
special, and yet for the most part they know that they
can get it cheaply and they do, and that offends me. But
I have to take what’s on offer.”
He has his lunch at 5pm; a solitary sausage roll,
which he’s eating from a large white plate with a knife
and fork. What about all these flash restaurants he’s
supposed to go to all the time I thought it’d be a takeout
from Claridges or something? “I go to the Ivy about
once every two months, despite what’s been written,”
he laughs. “I spend about £20 on a meal.” He goes off to
the kitchen area of his white-floored and white-walled
studio space every so often to make himself an espresso
in his Richard Sapper stove-top, making sure that everything
is left clean and tidy. He mentions that he is going
to watch the Monaco grand prix the following day
and has been following the qualifying sessions. With
his understated elegance and slightly egotistical charm,
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
he could be a poor man’s James Hunt. “Yes, there is
some of that going on,” he admits, a little embarrassed
by this particular reputation, but he’s more interested
in moving from talk of playboy to Playboy: “I’d like
to redo Playboy magazine. I find it lamentable that
there isn’t an intelligent, erotic magazine. There isn’t
a magazine that was like Playboy was 30 years ago,
and I find that’s dumb. Why isn’t there any intelligent,
abstract eroticism? I can find the artist Lucio Fontana’s
colour fields incredibly erotic juxtaposed against a bit
of Rocco Siffredi [a porn star].”
From 1978 to 1991 when he was art director at Factory
Records in Manchester (which he co-founded with
Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus) he had carte blanche
creatively. He designed the posters for the legendary
Hacienda nightclub in the city, the album covers for the
Factory bands (Joy Division, New Order, OMD, etc) all
seemingly quixotically free of financial considerations.
His artwork for the cover of New Order’s Blue Monday
12 inch in 1983 was die-cut to make it resemble a
floppy disc, and, depending on whose version of events
you believe, cost the record company anywhere from
2p to 75p everytime a copy was bought. Which perhaps
would have been fine had it been a limited edition, but
it just happened to become the biggest selling 12 inch
record ever. “What I did in my local zone was how I
wanted everything to be,” says Saville. “I was spoilt in
the beginning by being given a big playground to play
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in and remarkable freedom.”
The very first poster that he designed for Factory with
its “Use hearing protection” strapline, along with the
architect Ben Kelly’s design for the Hacienda (which
Saville collaborated on), foreshadowed the industrial
warehouse chic that would come to dominate interior
design in the following couple of decades. (After noticing
recently that the originals were fetching £1,500 on
eBay, Saville decided to produce 500 re-editions of the
FAC1 poster which will cost £100 each. But how much
this is motivated by the horror that it’s out of the reach
of the masses, and how much by what must be a fairly
easy income generator, is hard to say.)
With Blue Monday and the earlier New Order album
Power, Corruption & Lies there was an interest
in coding the work, so that the titles were spelt out in
colour. He pushed this idea further with later albums.
With New Order’s Brotherhood (1986) and Technique
(1989), it was clear whose work it was from the enigmatic,
restrained and visually innovative sleeve design,
respectively a sheet of Titaanzink metal and a Warholian
cherub. One of the persistent legends that attaches
to Saville, is that, like the author Douglas Adams, he
loves the sound of deadlines whooshing past. Stephen
Morris, the drummer of New Order, confirms this,
recalling Saville’s most infamous late delivery. “It was
the programme he did for us on an American tour that
turned up on the last gig, and we’ve still got 1,000s
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
rotting away in a warehouse somewhere that we can’t
get rid of.”
But Brett Anderson, the lead singer of Suede,
forgives Saville’s tardiness. Anderson is a friend of
Saville’s and worked with him very closely on their
albums Coming Up and Head Music. “A lot of it was
done sitting and chatting and drinking coffee. It’s a real
exchange and a discussion. It’s all part of his charm.
What you miss with deadline efficiency is made up for
by the incredible level of personal care he takes in the
work. He really immersed himself in the music. He’s
not driven by money or fame, just a genuine quest for
aesthetic beauty.” Saville is currently working with the
photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on Suede’s greatest
hits cover, due for release in September.
Because of his concerns to get a job done right, Peter
Saville and business have long had an uneasy relationship.
“There’s no notion in any industry that they will
wait for graphic design. They will not wait. They’ll
spend longer negotiating your work-for-hire contract
than giving you to do the job!” he says with rising incredulity.
“It’s just the finishing, but it’s in the finishing
that you make it or break it.”
Does he think that his deadlines are unrealistic? “They
are if you want something resolved or of any quality,”
he says. “My problem comes when it’s my work. I
become territorial, and self-indulgent and maybe arrogant.
If it takes till next Friday, it’s gonna take till next
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Friday. You know, I had this mistaken understanding
of professional when I was younger that it meant being
really good.” He laughs in cynical astonishment. “But
it’s actually about doing what has to be done within the
circumstances within which you are allowed to do it.”
The way Saville tells it, his designs have actually influenced
the music. He claims that the musical direction
of what was to be Joy Division’s final album, Closer,
was guided by its funereal sleeve photograph by Bernard
Pierre Wolff (the lead singer, Ian Curtis, hanged himself
shortly before its release). But Morris, who’s currently
in the studio writing songs for New Order’s next album
where they recorded the ambient music for the Design
Museum retrospective, is having none of it. “I think
that’s too strong, but not for Peter,” he says, laughing
fondly at such hubris. “I remember him and Rob Gretton
[New Order’s former manager] having a discussion and
the upshot was that Peter said people bought the records
for his sleeves, not for the music.”
“I come to every new job as if it’s Everest to climb
again,” says Saville, lighting up the next of many, many
Gauloises. “I foolishly approach everything as if it’s
really important and that it has to be done, in some tiny
way perhaps, in a way that it hasn’t been done before.
I won’t just repeat myself. I don’t know why I do it.
Partly it’s about anxiety and fear. Partly it’s about the
music business where people would want something
completely different.”
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
He comes across as a perfectionist, utterly disillusioned
with big business, confused by his being in a
grey area where art meets design and wanting to break
free of his financial bonds and take a new direction.
One can’t help but feel that with the kind of reckless
candour with which he talks about the shortcomings
of just about every client he’s ever worked for he’s
trying to talk himself away from commercial art
through autosuggestion. Icon’s photographer, Jamie,
met Saville a few days earlier and was taken aback:
“He was unable to resist art directing himself in the
local playgrounds and parks. And I was amazed at
how open and warm he was.”
Saville clearly has a lot of steam to let off. “Absolutely
everything except the creative act is stretched out
as long as is needed and there’s this notion that you can
resolve the creative issues and problems [clicks his fingers]
like that’s the bigger the budget the more people
sign-off, the more bland and generic it will be. No one
wants to take a chance. I mean, what is happening in car
design? It’s either hideously bland or really quite perverse.”
The record industry was only ever going to be
a professional cul-de-sac for someone fast-approaching
30, and Saville seems more savvy than Machiavellian
when he says that he “learnt quickly how to manipulate
the record industry to my own ends. I took a selfish,
bloody-minded approach to the work and I made life
hell for the people who were paying for it. To me the
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work was going to be my passport out of it.”
With Peter Saville Associates in financial crisis and
Factory Records on the verge of collapse, he finally hit
commercial reality in 1990 and joined the Pentagram
group in LA as a partner. With Saville’s odd working
hours he rarely gets up before the afternoon and works
until midnight and his antipathy, not to say hostility,
towards corporate till-ringing, the relationship was
doomed from the start. “I just will not make this analogy
between what I’m being paid and how much time
we spend on it. It gets as much time as it needs.”
The current interest in Saville has a lot to do with
the demographics of the creative industries. There is a
whole generation who grew up as fans of, in particular,
Roxy Music, Joy Division and New Order, who are
now making the decisions. “When I first met the president
of Givenchy Parfum,” says Saville, “he said ‘Oh,
Monsieur Saville, I am a fan of Joy Division, I am a fan
of Peter Saville.’ I was 45 and he was 39.”
And it wasn’t just with couture fashion. “Throughout
the 80s I saw the High Street convert. At Next, I saw
so much of what I’d done for Ultravox. It was everywhere.”
He explains: “At the design firms, the grownups
weren’t hands-on anymore and the work was left
to the kids.”
At the Design Museum retrospective (designed by
the architect Lindi Roy), Saville’s work is arranged
chronologically. The middle section is very dark, and
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
shows his catalogue and advertising work for the fashion
designer Yohji Yamamoto. The Game Over series
of photo library stock images from 1991 for Yamamoto
captures the sense of consumerist exhaustion and
overkill amid an impending recession, which has been
much copied in terms of its abstraction and typography.
A Guide To Never-Never Land adumbrates the future
of advertising in the 1990s, where the product is so far
off the page that it almost becomes anti-advertising
advertising. A car production line, all flashbulbs and
gleaming surfaces, stretches off into an infinite hell of
consumerism, as much a break with reality as Saville’s
image is from Yamamoto’s clothing.
When he’s talking about the retrospective, it seems
as if Saville’s incapable of letting go and trusting his
work to others. “I’m unhappy towards the people who I
do the work for,” he says. “That’s my mood right now,
which is kind of ironic after what would appear to be
a successful show and book. It’s not what you would
imagine. No one has gathered a comprehensive review
of the work done by Peter Saville Studios over 25 years
and looked at it in order to write about it or curate a
proper show for a museum. Nobody. Has. Looked. At.
The Work.” He says that the Design Museum exhibition
lacks context, that there is nothing explaining why
the work is important. And when he says that the show
is his “greatest hits”, he means it pejoratively.
Although he sounds exhausted by the demands
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of running his business, he talks hopefully about the
future. There is the Pirelli calendar that he’s working
on with the photographer Nick Knight, a long-time
collaborator, and which, despite being “a bit cheesy”,
has kept his interest. A project he’s working on for the
software company Adobe and its Photoshop packaging
neatly ties in his attraction to recycling and to reflecting
contemporary ways of living. In 1998, he started to experiment
with the Wave filter on Photoshop and found
that he could produce stunning digital paintings with
all kinds of imagery, starting with New Order covers.
“What’s interesting when we make the Waste Paintings
is that we don’t know what’s going to happen, and that’s
fascinating. We did one last week and it was mindboggling.
We did it for the Adobe project. If I could work a
computer, I’d show it to you! It’s beautiful. Print it out
it’s done.”
Saville has spent years agonising over a context or
concept in which to place his many boxes of notebooks
full of thoughts, sketches and ideas. “I was interested in
the industrial estate, the country estate different ways
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
of understanding the word estate. It led me to ‘Estate
of’. I though, shit, if I retire or die what will someone
do with all of this stuff that I haven’t been able to work
out? They’ll put it all together and they’ll catalogue it,
and flog it. I thought, well why don’t I?”
It would appear to have opened up possibilities for
the graphic designer to move forward with his work
and at last untie himself from those abusive client
relationships. “A few years ago I was giving myself a
hard time about not being an artist because what is it
that I do regardless of other things? And then I realised
oh, I do this [the notebooks]. I’d done the work. I’d
been filling notebooks for 10 years about the things I
ought to do preparatory notes. I’d done the work, but
I’d never thought about it as writing it.”
This is the big project, after all the hassle with clients
and the financial frustrations and worries of his
studio work, that he wants to do next, with himself
as client: “I’ve learnt not to leave this kind of thing
to chance.”
[This article previously appeared in Icon magazine] �
427
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published July 1996]
Alberto Sciamma: Suck It And See
Chris Mitchell gets a sneak preview of the outrageous film, The Killer Tongue
This year’s Cannes Festival witnessed an explosion
of tongues, transvestites and the tightest costumes
ever devised with the premier screening of The Killer
Tongue, the debut film from the Brighton-based production
company Spice Factory. Starring Robert (‘Freddie
Krueger’) Englund and Doug (‘Pinhead’) Bradley, The
Killer Tongue looks like a collision between Priscilla:
Queen Of The Desert and The Evil Dead, with a distinct
tip of the hat to The Rocky Horror Picture Show for
good measure.
The Killer Tongue’s plot is as gloriously camp as its
costumes. The debris from a meteorite slamming into
the Tex-Mex desert winds up in the soup of Candy
(Melinda Clarke: Critic’s Choice, Return of The Living
Dead III), a former doublecrossing underworld
desperado currently lying low in a convent. Once said
soup is imbibed, Candy becomes host to the aforementioned
alien mutant Killer Tongue, complete with
talking Alien-esque mini-maw. Just for that finishing
touch, Candy’s pet poodles metamorphose into the drag
queens Loco, Coco and Rudolph. With her underworld
enemies in hot pursuit, Candy flees into the desert,
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and
transvestites and tongue in tow.
Meanwhile, her former crime partner Johnny (Jason
Durr: Young Soul Rebels, Between Two Worlds) is serving
time in a chaingang under the sadistic Chief Guard
(Robert Englund). Amongst Johnny’s fellow convicts
lurks Doug Bradley. Hearing of Candy’s plight, Johnny
escapes the gang, teams up with Rita, a nun still convinced
of Candy’s convent credentials despite the fact
the tongue has already eaten half of her heavenly choir,
and also sets off in pursuit. Volkert Struyken, one of
the executive producers along with Jason Piette and
Michael Cowan of the Spice Factory, comments: “It’s a
psychotic comedy, but there’s very little gore, no flying
heads. One thing you can guarantee, it’s going to be
one of the most memorable films of 1996,” he states,
before dissolving into laughter.
What we have here is a comedy horror transvestite
road movie of the first order. As Robert Englund
remarks, “When I got the script, it was very different
to anything I had read. There was something about
the snowballing visual images which made sense
to me. I realised that it must have been something
428
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like reading a David Lynch script before we all used
‘David Lynch’ as an adjective. It reminded me a
bit of El Hobo, Dust Devil by Richard Stanley and
also the Coen Brothers; it has that almost cartoon,
story-board aspect to it. It is very strange in its weird
kind of juxtapositions – I’ve been calling it a visual
non-sequitur.”
This sort of comment is all the more remarkable
seeing it’s concerned with a British film. If Four
Weddings, Sense And Sensibility and Trainspotting
have all recently played on their quintessential forms
of Britishness as their main selling point, The Killer
Tongue takes great glee in being a complete hybrid of
trash Americana and spaghetti westerns. As Michael
Cowan of Brighton’s Spice Factory who co-wrote,
produced and organised the financing for the film
comments: “Spice Factory really doesn’t give a fuck
about Channel 4 or any of those people because they
really aren’t interested in the type of movies that we
want to make. The world’s becoming a much smaller
place. People want to be entertained, not go and watch
My Beautiful Launderette which has only 50 screens,
all made in the UK, costs £1 million and takes 5 years
to produce because everyone’s trying to make money
out of Channel 4. Our philosophy’s really different
because it’s grown up from the video age. I think a lot
of kids from that era who have grown up knowing a
lot about all sorts of different films and music want to
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and
see that same diversity in the cinema.”
This is reflected by the other key figure in The Killer
Tongue’s genesis, the 34-year-old Spanish writer-director,
Alberto Sciamma. Like David Fincher’s rite of passage
before his directing debut on Alien 3, The Killer
Tongue is Sciamma’s first feature film after directing
a host of critically acclaimed music videos. That experience
shows in the fact that shooting for the film
wrapped up after eight weeks in Almeria and Madrid,
holding to its $6 million budget.
Acquiring the money for such a relatively modest
film budget is still a difficult process, as Cowan attests:
“It took us nearly 18 months to get it financed. Alberto
Sciamma had suffered total rejection when he was touting
the original script for The Killer Tongue. But after
we got involved and Jason [Piette, the other co-director
of Spice Factory] did some extensive rewriting, we
were ready to go. We used a front guy as a producer
called Christopher Figg who produced the Hellraiser
movies ‘cos otherwise people would have said, ‘Unknown
director, unknown producers, who the fuck are
they?’. We used him as the front and then put all the
deals together to make it work. During that process we
got a lot of rejections from a lot of people, Polygram et
al, who couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand it, couldn’t
get it. But we did it.”
The Killer Tongue has eventually emerged as a coproduction
between Spice Factory and Spain’s Lola
429
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Films, with backing from the UK’s European Co-production
Fund and the giant Spanish publishing corporation
Prisa’s entertainment division, Sogetel. Cowan
makes a telling analogy to this complex process: “The
film business is something like the futures market – all
you’re doing is selling names and bits of paper That’s
the bottom line, which is pretty shocking when you’ve
spent so much time trying to create something!”
Spice Factory are themselves part of a bigger
company, Brighton’s Epic Multimedia Group, itself
the largest independent multimedia company within
Europe. This gives Spice Factory an added edge as
Jason Piette points out: “We’re the only production
company in the world that makes both computer
games and films.” This is demonstrated by The Killer
Tongue game tie-in, Point and Lick, due out later
in the year, and Spice Factory’s development of the
game to accompany the $25 million film Space Truckers,
featuring Dennis Hopper. From their dealings
over Space Truckers, Spice Factory have managed to
persuade Goldcrest to finance their next film Crush
Hour to the tune of $14 million.
Cowan, a graduate of the National Film School, indicates
the great strength of Spice Factory is precisely this
diversity: “We’re not just film producers: we actually
originate product – we’re creative writers and we work
with other creators. And we also understand the business
side.” Far from spreading themselves too thinly,
BUY Alberto Sciamma films online from and
Spice Factory reckon they’ve hit a unique formula
to fund production of future films without having to
continually compromise over financing. Spice Factory
are already commanding respect within the British film
industry: “In the beginning we spent a lot of time travelling
up to London to meet a lot of people – now the
likes of Channel 4 and British Screen are coming down
to Brighton and see us. We’re not trying to be cocky,
like we’re going to be a great success, it’s a business
like anything else.”
“But what we like about the film business is that it’s
unpredictable, it doesn’t matter how great a script or
how much money you have, it’s whether people are
going to go and watch it. I think last year especially
proved that. A lot of the major studios have produced
big name movies which haven’t performed in any way
whereas a lot of the smaller movies like Clerks, Clueless
and The Usual Suspects have worked. I don’t think
people go to a movie anymore just because there’s a
big star in it. I think it’s all to do with what the story
is and what they want. And I think they’re looking for
something different, because over the last 4 years it’s
been so repetitive with sequels etc. Which is where The
Killer Tongue comes in – it’s wild, wacky and it’s inyer-face.”
And, indeed, in yer mouth. Scheduled for a
September / October release in the UK, Spice Factory
are hoping for a 15 certificate once The Killer Tongue
gets licked by the BBFC. �
430
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Feature [published November 2004]
W.G. Sebald: Looking And Looking Away
Stephen Mitchelmore on the novels of W.G. Sebald
Why are W.G. Sebald’s novels so flat? Why – when
the books refer to events of utmost horror and disaster,
sometimes dwelling on pain and death with a fascination
and regularity verging on Schadenfreude – are the
events themselves always placed at a distance, always
prior to the narrator’s present, as if only ever to be
experienced second-hand, as stories?
The first part of The Emigrants, the first of Sebald’s
novels to be published in English, is exemplary.
It begins with a photograph of a graveyard. Below
it is a date and, below that, a description of a journey
to a large house situated in a village in East Anglia.
The narrator and his partner are to view accommodation
there. There is little or no tension. It could be
mistaken for a straight memoir, particularly as there
are so many photographs accompanying the words.
Without pleasure or discomfort, the reader can follow
the litany of precise natural details provided by the
narrator – oak trees, Scots pines, a grassy graveyard,
a thick shrubbery of hollies, Portuguese laurels, dry,
rustling leaves. One expects it to lead somewhere,
and a story of sorts does get told eventually. Howev-
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er, once it is, these details seem excessive. In the end
all we are told is of the narrator’s brief acquaintance
with the melancholy Lithuanian emigrant Dr Henry
Selwyn, and the curious coincidence that emerged
later. In summary (though this is barely any shorter
than the original) Selwyn lost his Swiss mountain
guide in the early years of the century; he went missing
on the Aare glacier. Selwyn, we’re told, remarked
on how deeply this loss affected him, even more than
separation from his wife. The fact doesn’t take up
much space in the book. But 70 years after the loss,
when visiting Switzerland, the narrator sees a news
report of a body being given up by a glacier. It turns
out to the same mountain guide. Selwyn could not
be told of the discovery because, by then, he had
killed himself with a hunting rifle. In fact, his suicide
is a footnote. It is not presented as a great tragedy.
There is no speculation on what he was thinking as
he prepared to pull the trigger, or even why he chose
to end his life. The narrator’s journey to Switzerland
isn’t detailed either. It’s tacked on the end without
the precise details provided at the beginning, while
431
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the chapter itself ends with these lines:
“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At
times they come back from the ice more than seven
decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine,
a few polished bones and a pair hobnailed boots.”
It’s an oddly glib reflection; a flat reiteration of a
Proustian epiphany that doesn’t, in fact, happen. There
is no richness, no sense of revelation. The presence
of the past is down to its bare bones. Another writer,
perhaps with an eye for the main chance, might have
expanded this into an ambitious tale across the dark
decades of the 20th century, involving mountaineering,
forbidden love, religious persecution, exile and war, all
framed by the giant sky of the East Anglian countryside.
But not Sebald. One might say that in this story not
only is there no violence, there is nothing much at all.
The presence of the dead is always at one step remove,
never quite a full presence in the narration, and though
his later work does go into more detail, giving a chance
for that lost time to re-emerge, the flatness continues.
Jacques Austerlitz, for example, is said to have grown
up in Wales, but there is no rising inflection in his
words, no lilt; just Sebald’s familiar, formal prose. At
best this can be described as uncanny. Otherwise, there
isn’t much for reader to indulge in. The fiction vacates
rather than fills the space of literature.
So why has Sebald been hailed – by Susan Sontag
among others – as a literary great? Well, Sontag points
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to the “passionate bleakness” of “a restless, chronically
dissatisfied mind” that offers us “moral fervency and
gifts of compassion”. But this doesn’t tell us much really.
She also says that the accompanying photographs
provide “an exquisite index of the pastness of the past.”
Again, so how does that make Sebald great? Pastness is
a great attraction to a culture that fetishises old objects.
Indeed, Sebald’s style is called “Antiquarianism” by
Daniel Johnson in the TLS: deriving from, he says, “a
peculiar synthesis of English eclecticism and German
perfectionism” where “the past has a more powerful
presence than the present”. That presence is precisely
its pastness, which is present only as an index of what’s
not actually there. A curious paradox – one that would
probably leave the experts of Antiques Roadshow nonplussed.
Like their punters, they would probably prefer
just to accumulate more and more of it. Hence perhaps
why much is made of the variety of subject matter in
Sebald’s novels, like a lumber room in a rundown mansion
ready for an enthusiast’s rummage.
It is also likely that the popularity of Sebald’s fiction is
due to a nostalgia for works that deal seriously with the
most serious of subjects – all four Sebald novels might
be misconstrued as Holocaust Literature. Certainly,
Sontag desires something to counter “the ascendancy
of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative
fictional subjects”. A nostalgia, too, perhaps, for
black and white distinctions: Nazis evil, victims good.
432
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When we listen to the story of a Jewish refugee, such
as Max Ferber in The Emigrants, who lost his parents
in the camps, the obscure hurt has to be acknowledged
even if it remains beyond us. In comparison to the
moral confusion of the present, it is much easier for
the reader to feel something. However, Sontag herself
doesn’t see things as so clear cut. She ends her review
of Vertigo with Sebald’s own curiosity with “the mysterious
survival of the written word”; the dead, as it were,
returning to us here too, again and again.
The question of whether this is a good thing is left,
as it is in Sebald’s novels, unanswered. Yet could the
flatness be a means of trying to mitigate that survival?
2.
Sebald himself is survived by four novels for which
we can be thankful. The Rings of Saturn followed
The Emigrants, then came Vertigo, written before the
other two, and finally, Austerlitz. The first and last
in this sequence can crudely be called a pair: both
contain stories framed by the narrator’s relation to
individuals exiled from their origins. The middle two
novels are framed by the narrator’s own wanderings,
although they too involve telling others’ stories, usually
an historical figure like Stendhal or Casanova.
The trajectory is unsatisfactory. As I suggested in a
review of Austerlitz, the author seemed to be painting
himself into a corner. A new path is required.
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
We can only imagine what that path might have been.
Yet that sense of loss and lack of development is oddly
in keeping with the fiction. It’s as if the novels exist to
deal with the inadequacy of resolutions. What I mean is
described at the end of Vertigo.
The narrator returns to the German village that he left
as a youth. This is his first visit for 30 years. It gives
him the chance to talk about all the goings-on, all the
characters and intrigues that make up childhood memories
with which he seems to be preoccupied. He meets
friends from that time, now suddenly aged. One takes
him to an attic room packed high with antiques and curios.
Amongst the junk is an old tailor’s dummy dressed
in a 17th-century soldier’s uniform. The narrator recognises
it as the origin of a terrible threat that awaited him
should he enter a forbidden room of his childhood. As
he used to dream of this ghostly figure, his curiosity
is stirred and he reaches out to touch the cloth, as if to
make some kind of contact with that nightmare. The
cloth crumbles away into dust. In subsequent dreams,
he also reaches out and touches the soldier: “And every
time, I then see before me the fingers of my right hand,
dusty and even blackened from that one touch, like the
token of some great woe that nothing in the world will
ever put right.”
While the dream takes the place of that childhood
nightmare, perhaps offering the end of years of unconscious
terror of the unknown, what replaces it is itself
433
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a troublesome lack. One dark thing dissimulates into
another. Knowledge is gained yet, while this is apparently
a progress, it buries the expected dissolution of
the child’s fear in another darkness. Sebald’s writing is
precisely this progress; a token of some great woe that
is present only in the trace of its absence. Not progress
enough perhaps. The “restless, dissatisfied mind” of
the writer becomes our own experience of reading. We
look for some concluding knowledge to get us beyond
this apparent impasse, and we continue reading as the
narrators continue on their wanderings, from one place
to the next, from one book to the next. They are always
getting over some undescribed illness or having just
gone through “a particularly difficult period” or are
feeling just plain empty. It is a neurasthenic condition
familiar to other distinguished quasi- autobiographical
writers: Proust and Kafka. Like Sebald, they sensed a
world beyond their own restless, dissatisfied minds.
Kafka first:
“It is entirely conceivable that life’s splendour forever
lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness,
but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It
is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If
you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it
will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not
create but summons.” (Diaries 18 October 1921)
And Proust:
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“What the intellect gives us back under the name of
the past is not it. In reality, as happens with the souls of
the departed in certain popular legends, each hour of
our lives, as soon as it is dead, embodies and conceals
itself in some material object. Unless we meet with that
object it remains captive there, captive for ever. We
recognise it through the object, we summon it, and it is
released.” (Against Sainte-Beuve)
Both continued writing, as if this would bring life’s
splendour. But if the right words summons what was
hidden, wouldn’t the means of seeking it also be a
means of missing the time where its advantage could be
lived? Both writers’ unhappy, hypochondriac real lives
suggest as much. Or perhaps their manner of seeking
itself was at fault; Kafka certainly felt that way. How
can one tell though? When can one know if the manner
is correct until life’s splendour has passed and has
become words only, mere history?
Perhaps, though, that is the advantage.
There’s a famous scene in Proust’s In Search Of Lost
Time when Marcel returns to the Grand Hotel in the
northern seaside resort of Balbec (locations familiar to
readers of Vertigo). He bends down slowly to remove
his boots and suddenly, he says, undergoes “a convulsion
of my entire being”. His chest is filled by “an
434
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unknown, divine presence” which shakes him to tears.
It turns out to be the sudden return in his memory of his
late, beloved grandmother; “a complete and involuntary
memory”. It is only as her presence fills him like this
does he realise that she is really gone. Nothing in fact
really happens but it is an exquisite moment for Marcel.
At last, his mourning can take its course. The novel has
many such incidents, spread across seven volumes as if
to ensure that each appears with an appropriate intensity
to the reader, and so, in the same way, to the writer. In
both cases, they exist as a passionate report; moments
of felt distance. It is only in this way that movement
forward is possible. The same is true in Kafka’s most
powerful stories, where the death of the protagonist, in
for example ‘The Judgement’ or ‘Metamorphosis’, is
the means of returning writing to life. The paradox, of
course, is that this can happen only in writing – a space
that is neither fully alive nor fully dead – a condition
actually embodied (or disembodied) in Kafka’s great
story ‘The Hunter Gracchus’.
While Kafka’s stories and Marcel’s epiphany are in
stark stylistic contrast to each other, and both to the
Henry Selwyn chapter of The Emigrants, there is the
same toward into life that requires a movement closer
to death. How can we make sense of this?
3.
In 1874, Nietzsche published a long essay ‘On The
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Advantage And Disadvantage Of History For Life’ in
which he argued against the obsession with history. He
recognised that there is something pathological in the
pursuance of the past for its own sake.
Instead, Nietzsche says, forgetting is necessary, at
least for a time. Otherwise we cannot let go; we cannot
sleep.
He divided historical explanations into three types:
monumental, antiquarian and critical. While all served
life, both history and life suffer if they are abused,
“Monumental history” he writes “deceives with analogies:
with tempting similarities the courageous are
enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism”. It’s
the kind of history where the phrase “Never forget” is
cried out and becomes itself a monument obscuring
what needs to be remembered. Antiquarianism, on
the other hand, cherishes every little detail of the past
rather than the big picture. But this means it is unable to
distinguish between what is and what is not important.
The result is the utter veneration of the old because it
is old, and the rejection of anything new. Meanwhile,
critical history is used to deal with both: “to shatter and
dissolve something to enable [life]”. While critical history
is useful to enable movement forward, it can also
be a means of avoiding its lessons: but in both forms it
is a means of moving on.
Applying this to Sebald, one could say he takes the
monument of the disasters of civilisation and exposes
435
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them to the gaze of Antiquarianism. Yet while the
latter is present in the fiction in what Sontag calls the
“spaciousness and acuity of the details”, they refuse
the harmlessness of antiques. In fact, they have that
potential to summons described by Kafka and Proust
(perhaps what Sontag means by “spaciousness”).
This does not seem to lend itself to moving on.
Each detail in the story of Henry Selwyn begins to
speak to its narrator: the grassy graveyard, the thick
shrubbery of hollies, the Portuguese laurels, the dry,
rustling leaves. As they build, there is a sense of
some great woe that nothing in the world will ever
put right. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it be?
Forty years after Nietzsche, Freud offered an understanding
of the process of dealing with the weight of
history that might explain. In Mourning & Melancholia
there is an uncanny outline of Sebald’s apparent fictional
procedure. As Tammy Clewell summarises:
“The work of mourning entails a kind of hyperremembering,
a process of obsessive recollection during
which the survivor resuscitates the existence of the lost
other in the space of the psyche, replacing an actual
absence with an imaginary presence. This magical restoration
of the lost object enables the mourner to assess
the value of the relationship and comprehend what he
or she has lost in losing the other.”
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In Sebald’s case, the space is writing and not the psyche,
replacing an actual presence with a fictional one.
Still, Freudian psychoanalysis would accommodate this
as a cathartic process, whereby the gift of writing is the
freedom from loss. The melancholic energy demanded
of the work itself enables the ego’s release.
However, in both Nietzsche and Freud, the problem
of discussing these issues is not itself an issue. Yet if
one is to move on, then how much work is involved and
how much is that work responsible for the need itself?
To clarify, Clewell points out that Freud’s original
theory was in the same vein as his earlier essay ‘On
Narcissism’, and she detects “something self-serving
about [Freud’s] description of mourning as a process
of detachment and consoling substitution”. There is a
sense of that self- serving element in Sebald’s relentless
pursuit of stories of others’ lives and suffering,
particularly the suffering. It’s as if the more stories the
narrator is able to tell, the freer he becomes, yet also the
more he needs the stories for that freedom. The written
word mysteriously survives in the lives of the writer,
and reader also. Everything becomes imbued with the
spaciousness that we have to escape.
The danger of such “referential mania” is embodied
in a story by another great modern stylist, Vladimir
Nabokov in the story ‘Signs & Symbols’. For the institutionalised
son of the elderly parents:
436
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“everything happening around him is a veiled reference
to his personality and existence. […] Phenomenal
nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the
staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow
signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him.
His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual
alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains
or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful
way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a
cipher and of everything he is the theme.”
While such extremes of paranoia are not present in
Sebald’s novels, his work does share this story’s unease
with its expressive self: that is, how much is the writing
implicated in creating the problems it seeks to solve
or escape? ‘Signs & Symbols’’ power comes not only
in what it tells us – of mental illness and the ravage of
the parents – but the way in which fear and anxiety is
evoked in each step into the story; not in what is explicitly
said but in what words portend. Nabokov’s florid
sentences evoke forces bearing on all our lives – forces
that can move us to aesthetic pleasure as a reader, and
that make the son go mad. It is a dangerous confrontation,
one that Proust, Kafka and Sebald make in their
different ways too.
Incidentally, Nabokov appears, another sign of
something, as a butterfly catcher in The Emigrants.
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4.
With the publication – now in paperback – of a collection
of lectures under the title On The Natural History
Of Destruction we can now begin to appreciate even
more that Sebald’s project was beyond melancholy
reflection. And far from being yet more Holocaust literature,
work seeking to recover history for the present
and future, it is fiction as a search for an end, of having
done with ghosts at last.
The collection’s title itself, while at first appearing
to be the loose pretence of a marketing department
unchecked after the death of the author, directs us to the
biological sciences where natural history is the precise
eyewitness description of empirical data and events
(an incipient Antiquarianism). The specific destruction
under examination here is, according to Sebald, underdescribed:
the carpet bombings of 131 German cities
and towns, such as on Hamburg on 27 July 1943 in
which at least 50,000 civilians died.
Sebald sketches the natural history of the firestorm.
What happened that night is summarised by the unnamed
reviewer at the Complete Review as “(huge
numbers of dead, enormous amounts of bombs, rubble,
etc)”. The parentheses are symptomatic. Sebald does
not try to wrench human detail from these, as it were,
a priori euphemisms but to analyse the response with a
view to opening debate about the subject. The lectures
are surprisingly provisional, and wouldn’t amount more
437
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than notes if it wasn’t for Sebald extraordinary ability,
as seen in his fiction, to embed the deepest themes in
the apparently superficial.
The title places the clarifying words ‘On The’ in
front of ‘Natural History’ so that the subject becomes
the attempt at recording and, implicitly, the attempt at
forgetting. The latter is inevitable, hence the need for
history. But what kind? How can we remove others’
experiences from its bracketed containment without
crippling ourselves – in Nietzsche’s sense – in the process?
For sure, Sebald finds the attempts to approach the
air war unsatisfactory, almost without exception. Not
that there were many attempts in the first place. We can
assume two main reasons for their rarity and unsatisfactory
manner: the eyewitnesses who weren’t killed
had to use all their energy to survive their survival. For
example (my example), Jorge Semprun’s account of his
own survival of the concentration camp at Buchenwald
is called Literature or Life; he had to choose the latter
in order to be able to write this very book much later.
The second comes in Sebald’s reference to Lord
Zuckerman’s abandonment of his plan to write an
article for a British journal following his visit to Köln,
another firebombed city. Simply, he couldn’t find the
words: “All that remained in [Zuckerman’s] mind” Sebald
tells us “was the image of the blackened cathedral
rising from the stony desert around it, and the memory
of a severed finger that he had found on a heap of rub-
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ble.” The experience was incomparable, and so words,
the very means of communication through the tacit
repetition of comparisons, fail too.
Zuckerman’s remaining memory is significant for
Sebald’s project. One might assume that if there was a
photograph of the finger, he would have placed it on the
page. But not out of prurience. James Wood, in his perceptive
essay on Sebald’s novels, refers to the tragedy of
fact evoked by the captionless images placed throughout
his books. They are not supplementary to the words
but confirmation of mutual inadequacy. However, it is
an inadequacy that contains much referential potential.
The single memory is an equivalence; it orientates us
toward the traumatic impact of experience even if we
can have no real appreciation of what it means. Indeed,
the impact exceeds experience. Zuckerman was only
passing through and what remained for him was only an
image. For the survivors, the ravage seems to have gone
much deeper. Accounts following the raid on Hamburg
tell of the majority of the surviving population – over
a million – wandering through the country, without
any apparent destination. They were seen everywhere,
aimless and torpid. Sebald tells the apocryphal story of
a woman waiting at railway station whose suitcase fell
open depositing its contents on the platform, including
the charred corpse of a baby.
Many millions went through this and it is more or less
absent from post-war German novels and non-fiction.
438
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It was also absent from acknowledgement in everyday
life. As he grew up, Sebald felt that something was
being kept from him: “at home, at school and by the
German writers whose books I read hoping to glean
more information”. He says it hung over his life like
a dark cloud. The silence had its advantages of course:
‘the economic miracle’ of Germany after the war “has
its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built
into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all
Germans together in the post-war years”.
Undoubtedly, the reconstruction required a focus
on the future rather than the past and, inevitably,
literature would reflect this. While those in charge
were removed, the mindset of nation remained: they
continued to work hard without questioning, and the
companies that supplied gas to the death camps continued
their capitalist success stories. German industry
became a byword for efficiency (precisely what
prompted the invention of the death camps). However,
on the cultural front, German literature faded
behind the fresh new talents of North America. One
must assume that forgetting is incompatible with great
literature. Appropriate recognition of the genocide of
the Jews was delayed. The same happened to their
own experience of the air war. For this reason, Sebald
accuses modern Germany of being “strikingly blind
to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel” he
writes “any passionate interest in our earlier way of
life and the specific features of our own civilisation,
of the kind universally perceptible, for instance, in
the culture of the British Isles. And when we turn to
take a backward view, particularly of the years 1930
to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at
the same time.”
He makes this movement clear in this analysis of the
few accounts of the raids themselves by listing the kind
of phrases used throughout:
“On that dreadful day when our beautiful city was
razed to the ground”
“a prey to the flames”
“that fateful night”
“all hell was let loose”
“we were staring into the inferno”
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“the dreadful fate of the cities of Germany”
In other words, endless cliché. Sebald says they are
no more than gestures “sketched to banish memory”.
The words slide by without gaining any purchase on
the past. The truth has not been hidden, but it hasn’t
exactly been registered. But should this be regretted?
Well, when the lecture was first delivered, in 1997,
Sebald felt it was appropriate to remind Germans
439
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that this forgetting remained part of:
“the project of creating a greater Europe, a project
that has already failed twice [and] is entering a new
phase, and the sphere of the Deutschmark – history
has a way of repeating itself – seems to extend almost
precisely to the confines of the area occupied by the
Wehrmacht in the year 1941”.
He claims that the “psychic energy” of this project
remains in the nation. If it is not brought into the open,
it will carry on into the future. And that is certainly
something to be regretted.
This is not to say there was complete silence about
the air war. In the post-war years, fiction did try to
approach what had happened. Sebald refers us to
three writers who wrote about the destruction and
were published. While he finds the novels superficially
admirable for at least broaching the subject, he
is disturbed by their form and content. For example,
Hermann Kasack’s novel Die Stadt hinter dem Strom
(The City Beyond The River) envelops the bombing
raids and death camps into part of one big expressionist
allegory. Sebald’s literary analysis is objective but
his appalled disdain is also clear, particularly as, at the
time of the novel’s publication, it was considered of
“epoch-making significance”. Sebald suspects it was
judged so because it appealed to the pre-war obsession
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with grand, utopian visions. In this way, they look away
just like the clichéd reportage. But worse than that, in
repeating pre-war fantasies of mysterious metaphysical
worlds possessing transcendent truth, all these novels
display “a profound ideological inflexibility”. Sebald
says that the culture was still “in the midst of that pedagogic
province which, in the German tradition, extends
from Goethe … through Stefan George … and on to
Stauffenberg and Himmler”.
So of what, one wonders, does he approve? Well,
he welcomes Hubert Fichte’s novel Detlev’s Imitations,
set in 1968, because it is “not too abstract in
character” and includes “concrete and documentary”
investigations into the raid on Hamburg. Specifically,
the novel has genuine medical reports by a
pathologist into the victims of the raids. They are
straightforward autopsies of mummified corpses. All
fiction pales before such documents. The gruesome
facts make any imaginative effort seem evasive and
pretentious. Stories become only a means of sustaining
value where there is only flesh and bone. As it is,
only clinical objectivity has the words for the calamity.
Sebald, of course, doesn’t accept this. While he
concedes that the reports were written in the interests
of science, he does say that, within the narrow focus
of its specialist language, the report “opens up
a view into the abyss of a mind armed against all
contingencies”. In the end, it is only another exam-
440
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ple of avoidance masquerading as proximity. He sets
scientific analysis alongside the journalistic clichés
and novelists’ fantasies. The pathologist’s rationality
clings to a tradition in order to pass through the
catastrophe untouched.
In order to bring out how the catastrophe made its
mark on his own work, Sebald quotes extensively
from his own. But that was in the German edition. It
is excised from the English. This is a perverse decision.
Sebald’s excuse is that the original subject of
the lectures was poetics and it would inappropriate
to repeat them now that the subject is the air war. I
don’t see why these lectures don’t count as poetics
still. Each of Sebald’s stories continues that sense of
being kept from something, of the observer’s isolation,
which is precisely the relation to the air war.
The reticence of the narratives is really a patience.
There is no aggressive push to imagine beyond what
the narrator can see and what he hears at secondhand.
Words and pictures remain orientated toward.
It continues in us too, his readers. Perhaps, though,
this isn’t enough. When we bandy around phrases
like “literary greatness”, we contain past greatness,
everything we understand to be great: the expansiveness
of epic, the microcosm of theatre, the languagemaking
power of poetry, the encyclopaedia of
narrative fiction. Sebald cannot be included here. At
least, not on those terms. If Sebald is great, it is in
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
his refusal of such supremacy. The word greatness is
changed if he is indeed great.
Sebald’s success, however, beyond such chatter, is in
finding a form appropriate that investigates his deepest
concerns in the most appropriate way. This is perhaps a
mark of greatness.
5.
It is curious then that not one of Sebald’s fictional works
approaches the air war. Not one character is a survivor of
those events. As I noted, the fiction is generally misconstrued
as Holocaust Literature, perhaps gaining more
attention as a result. Austerlitz, for example, features
a visit to the remains of Theresienstadt concentration
camp in the Czech Republic. The tragedy is once again
illuminated. This has a fine and necessary tradition.
Aharon Appelfeld – himself a survivor – approves of
fictional representation of the Holocaust because “the
numbers and the facts were the murderers’ own wellproven
means. Man as a number is one of the horrors
of dehumanisation.”
One wonders what the response would have been
if a novel had focussed entirely on individual survivors
of Hamburg or Dresden? We might wonder
again because as Sebald’s book appeared in paperback,
so did Frederick Taylor’s study of the most
infamous raid: Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February. It
has been received with acclaim in the British press.
441
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In the Daily Telegraph, James Holland writes “with
this fine, highly readable and scholarly work, we can
finally view the terrible destruction of Dresden with
renewed objectivity”, while David Cesarani in The
Independent, after highlighting Sebald’s implicit
comparison of the bombings to Nazi mass murder,
calls Taylor’s an “authoritative and moving account”
that “provides a truer, more fitting memorial” to those
who died. Authority, objectivity and memorials is
perhaps most welcome to those who were not on the
receiving end. But how would it appear fictionally?
It wasn’t until 20 or more years after the war that Germany
began to acknowledge the effect of its “psychic
energy”. Certainly, one cannot claim that national awareness
of the Holocaust is repressed. Indeed it has become
commonplace in our idea of modern Germany: think of
Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, or Harry
Enfield’s contrite yet overbearing comic stereotype
Jürgen the German, apologising for the war at every opportunity.
The latter is not a figure that would have been
possible when Primo Levi or Jean Améry began writing.
Améry is the subject of one of three essay appended to
the main lecture. He was a resistance fighter tortured
by the Nazis. After the war, he concentrated on his paid
work without attempting to write (for the same reason
as Semprun). It was only in the 1960s that he published
autobiographical essays reflecting on his terrible experience.
What interests Sebald particularly is that he found
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
a form to orientate the reader toward, to look but not look
away at the same time. Where Sebald used a restrained
style, Améry is more personal and polemical; he writes
with “an implacable resentment”. Sebald is impressed
that his work manages to “dispense with any kind of
literary stylisation which might encourage a sense of
complicity between writer and his readers.” Cliché and
ingratiation are not present. Sebald compares Améry to
the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard who, as a
teenager, witnessed the bombing of Salzburg and later
wrote with ferocious contempt for the institutionalised
forgetfulness in his country.
(NB: it is a shame Sebald’s essays on Bernhard are
not already translated – an edition is required).
Such a comparison indicates that Sebald is not, as
The Complete Review accuse him, contemptuous of the
imagination; entirely the opposite. He is keen only to
find a form that conveys the process by which the imagination
dispenses with contact with its environment,
as in Kasack’s highly imaginative novel. The task is
more complex than the crude opposition between imagination
and reality. Améry’s description of his shoulders
being dislocated under torture is written without
ornament. He does not try to convey the pain with the
force of adjectives. Above all, his aim is to show that,
as Sebald writes: “the practice of persecuting, torturing
and exterminating an arbitrarily chosen adversary [is]
not as a lamentable but incidental feature of totalitarian
442
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rule but, unreservedly, […] its essential expression.”
One cannot read Améry’s essays without confronting
the possibility of wider implication of the events of his
life. They cannot be read for the find out what happened
only. In this way, autobiography becomes a means for
furthering life.
For Sebald, Améry remains “the only one who
denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and socially
deformed society, and the outrage of supposing
that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost
undisturbed.” Indeed, he was so angry that he criticised
Primo Levi for being too forgiving. It is Sebald’s thesis
that the air war is as much part of that deformation as
anything. It too has to be worked through: repression
is not a healthy option. Sebald’s fiction demonstrates
the need for patience required for Germany’s “coming
to terms” with the Nazi era; how it had to empathise
with the victims of its crimes from a distance. The same
can be said for victims of the air war. Imagination is
required rather than objectivity.
6.
After delivering the lectures Sebald and receiving press
attention, he received many letters from distressed
Germans, children at the time of the raids, whose traumatic
memories have had no place to go. One can only
imagine the scale of the trauma. However, seven years
on from the lectures, there has been a more sustained
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attempt to bring this into public discourse. It reached a
peak with the publication in 2002 of Jörg Friedrich’s
Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945,
a book of several hundred pages describing the raids in
relentless detail. It prompted an outpouring of blocked
memories across Germany, becoming part of a nation
debate about the subject. There was also a lot of anger,
resentment and claims that the raids were war crimes.
Sebald received letters from a middle-class neo-Nazis
proclaiming Germany as the self-defensive victim, not
the aggressor. Sebald is contemptuous. The process, he
accepts, has to confront such danger. In this way, the responses
to Sebald’s book become part of the literature.
It is a terribly instructive coincidence that many reviewers
were writing in the lead-up to the invasion of
Iraq in March 2003. In the Boston Review, Susie Linfield
tells of demonstrators equating the bombing of Dresden
with the forthcoming Shock & Awe campaign on Baghdad.
“I can think of few worse analogies” she writes.
“The propagators of such analogies would say they
are using historic knowledge to heighten moral awareness
and thus prevent the commission of present and
future horrors. But I fear that the opposite is true: The
reliance on historic analogies is an evasion of the particular,
indeed novel, political complexities that face us
now, complexities that have emerged since (but are not
solely the result of) September 11th. Like photographs
of starving children or grieving mothers or blasted
443
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buildings, such analogies create instant, Pavlovian
moral equivalencies. They shut down critical thought
and ultimately, therefore, stifle moral acuity.”
This is certainly true. It is why Sebald’s complained
about the clichés of the accounts of the raids. They
were a careless means of expression and abuse history.
However, Linfield doesn’t offer an alternative, except
by telling us to use “critical thought” and “moral acuity”.
Maybe these elegant phrases tell us more than the
protestors’ banners, though I’m not sure what. They
too seem like gestures to banish unpleasant thoughts.
With what Susie Linfield would compare the imminent
bombing, I wonder? How would she demonstrate her
feelings about it?
Meanwhile, Daniel Johnson, reviewing Friedrich’s
Der Brand alongside Sebald, expresses his opinions
about the demonstrators’ comparisons more forcefully.
He calls it “moral cowardice” and blames Friedrich for
aiming “his bombshell of a book at the ageing edifice of
the Atlantic Alliance”. He says the book it enabled the
German government to exploit “anti-Americanism”.
While he accepts that the comparison of the Nazi Holocaust
to the air war is “never spelt out” by Friedrich and
Sebald – he does say that the “impassive accumulation
of gruesome detail serves a rhetorical purpose: to demonstrate
the utter inhumanity of the air war.” (If there
was a humanity in the air war, Johnson doesn’t spell
it out.) It all means that the Germans “might still be
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
capable of repeating the mistakes of the past”, and he
explicitly means the opposition to the invasion.
Christopher Hitchens also uses his review to support
the invasion. He is suspicious of the language
used by those recovering the air war, such as Sebald’s
“weak qualifier” in the reference to the German
population’s “vague feelings of shared guilt” about
the Holocaust. “Vague?” he says “Remember what
we are talking about”. Indeed. But perhaps “vague”
means unspoken and unformed – which is certainly
plausible. In conclusion, Hitchens himself refers to
Iraqi exiles’ “infinite pain” in supporting the invasion
when it is obvious they would not be running
the gauntlet of US cluster bombs, or their children to
endure the legacy of depleted uranium. So much for
remembering what is being talked about.
While the majority of the reviewers referred to
here use the air war to support or to excuse the Shock
& Awe blitzkrieg, and all remain suspicious of Sebald’s
project of imaginative empathy, they have
nothing but admiration for his fiction. Hitchens says
Sebald’s early death is “mourned by all who love
writing for its own sake” (whatever that means) and
Daniel Johnson says that had Sebald lived, he would
“hardly have been able to avoid the attentions of the
Swedish academicians”, though exactly why isn’t
explained. In fact, they write next to nothing about
the fiction. It’s as if they do not know what it is so
444
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prefer to keep it in the safe enclave of entertainment
or salutary token of “some great woe that nothing
in the world will ever put right” (so long as it’s the
right kind of wrong). Remember it is Johnson who
used the convenient half-truth of describing Sebald’s
work as “a highly literary form of antiquarianism”.
Perhaps it is fairly explained by the fact that they
are reviewing a work of non-fiction. But, as I hope
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
to have made clear here, On The Natural History
Of Destruction is a coda to Sebald’s extraordinary
fiction, and for such prominent and serious critics
to overlook this is curious indeed. But I would go
further. These reviewers, mere literary critics, have
used book reviews to become accessories to the
crime of killing innocent people, and their fingers
are stained not black, but red. �
445
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Review [published December 2001]
W.G. Sebald: Austerlitz
Stephen Mitchelmore
(Editor’s note: this review was written a couple of
weeks prior to W.G. Sebald’s untimely death in a car
crash on 14th December, 2001).
In its official press release, the committee for the
Nobel Prize for Literature praised V.S. Naipaul, the
2001 recipient, for “works that compel us to see the
presence of suppressed histories”. Presumably this is
the committee’s mitigation of Naipaul’s notoriously
incorrect opinions. Whatever, the statement is curiously
ambiguous. On the one hand, it could mean –
and probably does mean in this case – the particular
stories of Indian and African characters previously
ignored in mainstream literature. But it could also
mean exactly as it says: “the presence of suppressed
histories”. Not the histories themselves, only their
remnant haunting the language of the victorious.
Suppression is part of the history, and Naipaul’s
restrained prose – more English than the English – is
paradoxically appropriate: ghosts haunt aged structures.
The conservative literary establishment admire
the style out of nostalgia, while younger writers like
Salman Rushdie reject it out of concern for the future.
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The latter’s champions will insist that Naipaul’s Nobel
elevation signals that we have passed the literary, if not
the political, affects of suppression. The only reason to
use the inert language of the past is to resist change.
Literature is now a pluralism, open to anyone to flood
the dark corners of experience with the bright lights of
an unfettered imagination. Today, the task of the writer
is to keep the shining the lights. Martin Amis calls it
“the war against cliché”.
On first impression, W.G. Sebald would seem to be
very much inside Naipaul’s encampment. In one long
sentence on page four of his new novel Austerlitz, the
narrator tries to “conjure up” an image but something
else “springs to mind”. Hardly the language of the
avant-garde. And like Naipaul’s recent novels, there
is a tendency toward autobiography and essay, as if
resisting the possibilities of the poetic imagination.
On page 18, the history of fortress-building around
17th-century Antwerp is summarised: the placenames,
the design theorists, the theories themselves
and the futility of the enterprise. We even get a plan
of one of the flower-like buildings. No matter how
446
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large the fortifications became, we’re told, they drew
attention to their weakest point and so invited attack.
A metaphor, probably, for this kind of reticent novel.
As the story continues through ever new digressions,
the weakest point is always its own purpose. Aren’t
we missing something? we ask.
No reader of the book can be unaware that the narrator
of Austerlitz has a similar background to the author
himself. Indeed, in Sebald’s three previous novels, the
narrator is much the same sensitive yet dour person.
Sebald is a 57-year-old Bavarian long established as
a professor of German literature in East Anglia, and
the unnamed narrator is an academic who travels
throughout Europe on research. He admits there are
other reasons for his travelling but, he says, they are
“never entirely clear” to him. On a visit to Antwerp, he
visits one of the forts used by the Nazis as a detention
centre for Resistance fighters during the occupation.
As he walks slowly down its sinister tunnels, he recalls
tortures described by two actual writers, Jean Améry
and Claude Simon, the former having been tortured
in the very same fort, the latter having written about a
fictional character who suffered like Améry. Again one
is tempted to understand this as an indirect reference
to what is going on, particularly once the eponymous
character of Austerlitz appears.
Jacques Austerlitz is a fellow academic met on
one of the narrator’s travels. He was a five-year-old
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refugee during the Second World War. His parents
sent him to Britain as the Nazis closed in on Prague.
They didn’t escape. He ended up in provincial Wales,
living in a vicarage as Dafydd Elias. It wasn’t until
his school days, just before he took some exams, that
he was told his real name and origin. Although the
narrator is also an exile, he seems to need Austerlitz
to act as a conduit for his own search, like a novelist
would use a character. Most of the words in the
novel are Austerlitz’s, with the narrator adding the
occasional “said Austerlitz” to remind us. For the rest
of the novel, Austerlitz tells his story, which means
the story of his search for the story of his life: “I have
never known who I really was” he says.
He tells the narrator that it wasn’t until he had met
him that he was able to approach his past. Before then,
he says, “an agency greater than or superior to my own
capacity for thought, which circumspectly directs operations
somewhere in my brain, had always preserved
me from my own secret”. With the narrator there to
listen, the brain’s mechanism is disabled and Austerlitz
is finally able to confront the fate of his parents. Mutual
need arises out of shared interests. And as a result, there
seems to be little difference between Austerlitz and the
narrator. In recalling the novel, it is easy to conflate the
two. Although this is a common enough thing in reading
novels, here the suspension of disbelief is slackened
because one is not convinced of the distinction.
447
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Both the narrator and Austerlitz spend time describing
events in their lives in which, with curious regularity,
they “lose themselves” in reveries of engagement or
nauseous confusion. Indeed, it happens in all Sebald’s
novels; the first is even titled after such an episode:
Vertigo. It’s as if these moments stand in place of the
revelations the characters are seeking. For example,
Austerlitz loses himself in the small print of works he
is reading in a Paris library as he seeks references to
his father. He doesn’t find any details but discovers,
instead, “the most varied and impenetrable of ramifications”
as he calls it. Rather than finding conclusions,
the possibilities become almost infinite. He is released,
albeit briefly, from his obscure torment. Perhaps this
is why the narrator and his friend are so similar: they
need just a glimmer of otherness to illuminate their
individual darknesses.
We too experience this in the otherwise inexplicable
use of photographs and drawings throughout Sebald’s
novels. In the many reviews of the novel, very little
has been made of them, perhaps it is assumed they
are merely illustrative. Yet as they are uncaptioned,
the reader instinctively wonders what the connection
is between them and the words. It creates one’s own
moment of vertigo. This had a tremendous effect in The
Emigrants, Sebald’s second novel (though the first to
be published). For those new to his work, it will probably
have the same affect. However, by this, the fourth
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
time, the power is diminished. Wonder becomes indifference.
The same goes for the character of Austerlitz
himself. His similarity to the reticent narrator means he
is similarly opaque despite speaking for the most of the
418 unparagraphed pages.
Yes, you read correctly. There are 418 pages without
a paragraph break. This a famous aspect of the work of
the late Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, for whom
Sebald has professed great admiration. Bernhard,
however, created unforgettable characters even if
they seem indistinguishable from the morose author.
Perhaps it is significant that not one of Bernhard’s novels
are named after the main character (that is, if one
understands Wittgenstein’s Nephew as autobiography).
It suggests that Sebald’s concern in Austerlitz is for the
mystery of suppressed histories, not for attacking the
suppression with vituperative glee, like Bernhard. In
both uses of unrelenting monologue, the question of
what’s being left out is begged. In Bernhard this has
a painfully comic affect, while here it is more tragic.
Sebald’s empathy is thwarted as a result because, like
Austerlitz’s own attempt to get closer to what remains
unclear to him, it always produces “varied and impenetrable
ramifications”. That Austerlitz is an imagined
character reasserts the fact, and indicates that the novel
as an art form suppresses as much as it illuminates, no
matter how much light is beamed into the darkness.
The “war against cliché” like the other war it alludes
448
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to, is a fighting on the wrong front. Austerlitz’s opacity,
then, is perhaps artistically necessary. If this is the case,
it makes this novel at once a success – at least on its
own terms – and a prelude to an impasse.
With Austerlitz, Sebald has continued a remarkable
run. He has produced four fascinating, often
BUY W.G. Sebald books online from and
mesmerising, novels in almost as many years. They
are all far more interesting than those on this year’s
Booker Prize shortlist. Yet one wonders how he will
continue to dramatise the confrontation with what
always resists direct approach without becoming
boring and predictable. �
449
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Will Self
Biography
Will Self is one of those writers who seemed on the
edge of self-imploding when I first interviewed him
in 1997 (just after the infamous ‘getting sacked for
snorting cocaine on the Prime Minister’s private plane’
incident). Having cleaned up and become a father
twice over since then, Self has achieved a remarkable
body of work both in his novels and journalism,
and his output remains both prolific and undiluted.
Chris Hall and Robert Clarke’s subsequent interviews
capture well Self’s continual grappling with the canon
and trying to create something different from it.
I set up a separate Will Self site as a link directory to
Self related stuff on the web – this has subsequently
become www.will-self.com which is now Will Self’s
official site and is managed by Chris Hall and myself.
Chris Mitchell �
Articles
BUY Will Self books online from and
Biting The Hand That Feeds
Interview by Chris Hall
Self Destruction
451
Interview by Chris Mitchell
Dead Man Talking
460
A conversation with Chris Hall
Pre-Millennium Tension
464
Interview by Robert Clarke 467
450
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Interview [published January 2002]
Will Self: Biting The Hand That Feeds
Chris Hall serves up a slice of Will Self with the publication of his second
collection of journalism, Feeding Frenzy
Chris Hall: First off, congratulations on the birth of
your new son, Luther.
Will Self: Yeah, little baby Luther. He was born on
August 8, so he’s a couple of months old now.
CH: So I suppose you’ve had people pointing out the
Superman connection with your other son Alexis (i.e.
Lex Luther)?
WS: Yes … It just arose. In my experience with names,
they just arise. I was always quite keen on Dmitri because
Alexis and Ivan so with the third one you could
have the Brothers Karamazov. But Deborah didn’t
think that was funny.
CH: So how do you find the time for all this writing?
WS: Well, I have cycled back quite a lot this year in
that I resigned from The Independent before Luther
was born, so it’s the first time in more or less 10 years
when I haven’t had an ongoing newspaper contract. So,
I took fairly extensive paternity leave. But, you know
now it’s building back up again.
CH: No plans for a regular column again?
WS: I don’t think I’m going to take another weekly
contract of any kind in the foreseeable future. I’ve got
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this floating series of interviews with women that I was
doing for the Sindie [Independent on Sunday], none of
which are in Feeding Frenzy but which will get a book
of their own. I must of done 20 to 25 women over the
last two to three years but I wanna do about another ten
before I pick my best women to put in the book. But, I
haven’t found a home for my women yet. I mean, The
Independent were happy for me to do them freelance
but to be frank I just wasn’t interested.
CH: Why did you only interview women?
WS: I like women! Dammit, I like women!
CH: You gave Margaret Beckett the full treatment,
didn’t you?
WS: I was very mean to her. And of course you always
regret it because I think in interviewing there’s a real
sense of ‘did I have a successful bowel movement that
morning’ kind of feeling about it isn’t there? You go in
to interview someone and you’re constipated and you
think they’re the worst person you’ve met and you go
in to see them another day when your stomach is full of
gaily coloured butterflies and you think they’re the best
thing since sliced bread so you grow weary of that as an
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interviewer if you’ve got any wisdom – but at the same
time if dyspepsia collides with something you perceive
in the other person you just let rip. The problem with
interviewing, which is an aspect of our culture, is that
there seems to be a licence to be psychically ruthless.
It’s almost incumbent upon an interviewer to allow
themselves the full traverse of the psychic rifle.
CH: And Tracey Emin, who you said was a termagant?
WS: Yeah … you know I kind of resent it when people
interview me and assume that, because I’ve been wellknown
for a fair amount of time, that it’s kind of open
season, but the truth of the matter is that Tracey really
liked that piece. You have to ask yourself why is that
and quite frankly when it comes to Tracey, although
one or two of her pieces have a certain odd, jejune quality,
her art work is essentially a peg on which she hangs
her media persona which is her main work.
So she didn’t mind that piece and I think that that’s
what you’re up against with a certain kind of interview
subject. Now with Beckett I’m perfectly confident
that she really hated and was upset by that piece and I
noticed that after it she started to make some very sour
comments on the media publicly for quite a while. But
you know, she’s a politician, you have to reckon that
someone’s going to take down verbatim what you’re
saying. Why wouldn’t they?
CH: Do you normally use a tape machine?
WS: Well, I think that’s why the Beckett interview was
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such a devastating piece because I just transcribed answers
to questions. Because she talked such complete
bollocks. You know, why bother?
CH: Is one of the attractions to journalism the lack of
needing to suspend your disbelief so much?
WS: I think it’s an opportunity to get you out and
about. It gets you interacting with the world in all sorts
of different ways. It also gives you the opportunity, funnily
enough, to suspend disbelief more readily because
you’re presented with an area of fact that you can then
instantly turn into an area of fiction or at any rate embellish
in some way. I’m not making great claims for
my journalism but I think that what I do that gives me
cachet and makes editors want to employ me is really
colour writing, it’s really lifting what otherwise might
be fairly dry into something that is quite outlandish
sometimes. I suppose I am in some ways a practitioner
of gonzo/new journalism in that I am prepared to inject
my own warped sensibilities into a piece.
CH: You say that you read very little fiction now, a
problem with suspension of disbelief, but do you just
mean new fiction or do you not read the classics?
WS: No, I don’t read classic fiction either.
CH: I was thinking of the Amis line about disparaging
your youngers but exalting your elders…
WS: What you mean so you don’t see us nipping at
your heels? No, I don’t think that’s the way I think
about it, but unlike Martin, I’ve never been a sort
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of fiction-open person. Martin exists in a perpetual
competition of some sort, whereas I’m absolutely
convinced that only pets win prizes and I don’t
think that literary art is a competition of any sort.
CH: Don’t suppose you saw the Booker prize the other
day then?
WS: No. I mean what could you possibly win, apart
from cash and the kind of frankly transitory and ephemeral
applause of certain kinds?
CH: I suppose there is the argument of reaching out to
a wider audience…
WS: You could say that the whole kind of prize giving
and the whole Lit Crit newspaper based establishment
represents a kind of infotainment service
for fiction in that way, and beyond a certain point
it doesn’t make a work a great work – it doesn’t
really change someone’s life or supply that missing
X factor that makes them exponentially increase
their involvement with the world or with literature.
Those things are not what make a work last. The
only thing that makes a work last is lasting. And
that again you cannot tell. You can look at countless
examples of that, of books that have lasted that you
wouldn’t have reckoned on lasting.
I’ve just finished writing a long introductory
essay for the Penguin Modern Classics of Junky.
I mean who would have thought that Junky, published
back in 1953 as a paperback bound back to
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back with Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent for
35 cents, a penny dreadful shocker, would become
probably the greatest confessional novel about
heroin addiction written in the 20th century – and I
think undoubtedly so.
CH: That must have something to do with his subsequent
notoriety though.
WS: Oh no, I think that even if he’d written nothing
else it would still stand.
CH: Junky’s very hard-boiled isn’t it?
WS: It is, in fact he took Hammett as his model for it.
CH: He wrote that as William Lee didn’t he?
WS: Yes, for a Burroughsian it’s got a lot of sign posts
towards later theories and fictional methods that he then
took up and practiced through Naked Lunch, etc, but
actually it’s a really good book. I make the argument in
my essay that it’s one of the great existentialist novels,
that it’s on a par with Nausea or The Fall.
War and pacifism
CH: Someone was interested in a recent Today essay
that defined the boundaries of your pacifism. They
wanted to know why this position is marginalised by
the media?
WS: Well, I think States depend upon a component of
armed force – they depend upon the notion of coercion
at some level and it’s very hard to find a state that hasn’t
had a standing army or militia of some kind. So I think
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the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the
kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To
paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against
us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to
be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t
even be conscious, there will be people who simply
cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical
to their idea of state authority.
I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I
think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve
got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because
what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer
to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would
you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And
as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that
difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which
makes it so wrong in so many different ways is that it
exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious
argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption
i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered
with a similar kind of conditional question: “But hang
on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914
then the Nazis would never have come to power”.
So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be
pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response
to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get
really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken
to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get
BUY Will Self books online from and
absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big
guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to
rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them
to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me
that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in
society where you decide that violence is not the solution
to car incidents so there can be the same kind of
decision at a macro level.
CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not
claiming to not have those thoughts?
WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even
think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I
think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live that
there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and
there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist
born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the
impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is
a dangerous thing.
CH: What would you do with the World Trade
Centre site?
WS: Mmm … I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on
that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of
Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the
snuffing out of that many lives in one place … it also
seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivocation
between civic pride and something to do with
the symbolism of what has occurred.
CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shoot-
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ing Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer?
WS: Yes, that is true. I’ve replaced Mark Lamarr.
CH: Given that Lamarr became the greasy 50s throwback,
what have they got in store for you?
WS: I can assure people that that has not been my fate.
In fact, au contraire, I have become a sinister kind of
John Dee-type figure who controls Vic’s mind by use
of instantiated eye beams which fiddle with his mind.
CH: This just developed organically?
WS: Yes, it developed organically over the show that
Vic, Jim Moir, became convinced that I was controlling
his mind. I think I’ve claimed the upper hand there
actually… It was a fun show to do not least because
it’s pretty good not to take yourself too seriously, and
to get paid well for not taking yourself too seriously is
a real bonus. I’m not sure how good I’m going to be
on it because it’s not quite my humour, it’s not verbally
based, it’s very visual humour – they are rubber-legged
funny men. I hope it works for their sake, after all it’s
not my main gig but it is theirs.
Water, water everywhere
CH: You’ve written of the benefits to the imagination
of living near a large body of water. Could this be why
you live so close to the Thames, albeit unconsciously?
WS: Mmm, I think with the Thames … Mmm, yeah I
suppose that it does help. I hadn’t really considered that
aspect of it: it is tidal, it does move. With the Thames I
BUY Will Self books online from and
always think that because it’s such a conspicuous piece
of physical geography going right through the heart of
something that is oppressively human in that way that
it annuls or at any rate vitiates the oppressive sense of
human geography and provides you with a sense of
topography really, because you know you’re next to
a river, you know you’re in a river valley, you know
you’re on a planet that has natural features whereas if
you’re just in the middle of Acton then it’s rather difficult
to hang on to…
CH: You’ve got it in for Acton haven’t you?
WS: I’m thinking of moving to Acton actually. That’s
why it comes to mind. I concede that the river may
have been why I chose to live in Vauxhall. In fact, I
was looking at renting as an office, a very unusual
house-boaty thing that’s down by Cringle Dock waste
disposal station in the lea of Battersea Power Station,
which is this weird thing on two great pontoons built
by a load of Finnish architectural students. But I just
wouldn’t spend enough time on it to make it practical,
but the idea of writing on top of a body of water was
enormously appealing.
Schzoid sensitivity
CH: On the South Bank Show a few years back you
said that a psychologist had put “schizoid personality”
on your case notes. Now, this might sound like a
conceit from your own fiction, but I got the impression
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that you might have interpreted this as meaning that
you were schizophrenic, but diagnostically it means a
personality disorder characterised by “extreme shyness
and oversensitivity to others”.
WS: I did know that, but the same diagnosis had borderline
personality written down as well which would
be another form of that. But, increasingly I’ve come to
view addiction itself as a mimetic illness in that way – it
mimics other psychopathologies. People who essentially
have addictive personalities are diagnosed as manic
depressive or schizophrenic or certainly depressive.
What they really are is addicts. The addiction decides,
if you think of it as an autonomous thing, to pretends
to be another pathology because the addict finds it
bizarrely more comfortable to think of themselves as
schizophrenic or manic depressive or whatever, rather
than confront the fact that they are an addict which of
course means that they’re going to have to stop doing
what they want to do above all.
CH: So are you shy and sensitive?
WS: I think I am still quite shy. A lot of the extroversion
or flamboyance is always a compensation. It’s better to
tough it out rather than sit there cowering.
CH: Did you retreat from the limelight after being
found snorting heroin aboard John Major’s plane during
the 1997 election?
WS: No, not at all. Two things happened on that front.
One was that I didn’t go to ground which was useful.
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In fact, I counter-attacked. I rolled with the punch in
the initial aftermath. Doing Have I Got News For You
was quite frankly a calculated thing to defuse criticism.
I think that there’s a certain level at which English or
British society operates as a kind of particularly beastly
lower sixth form common room. If I’d gone to ground
at that point I think I would have been in trouble. And
it did serve to defuse interest in it.
The other thing is cleaning up from drugs. It made me
less interesting to people in that kind of prurient way.
And there’s always that level in the media and society
as a whole just as the papers are full of stories about
illicit drugs and strange sexual practices so that was
the basic voyeuristic level of interest in me as someone
who got completely fucked up on drugs and booze.
And if you’re not doing that anymore then you’re not
vulnerable in that way.
CH: Have you read your brother Jonathan’s book, Self
Abuse, which is partly about growing up in what he
sees as a dysfunctional family. Can you comment?
WS: Well, I can’t. I have read it, but I made a pact
with myself not to comment on it publicly because
I just don’t do that stuff. What I can say in answer
to the question is that there are a lot of factual inaccuracies
in it.
CH: The introduction to Feeding Frenzy refers to a
cabal of restaurateurs who wanted shot of you saying
you’d tried to buy drugs off the doorman of his
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restaurant…
WS: That was before [the Major incident] of course.
That was actually a malevolent restaurateur rather than
the tabloids themselves. He was someone who didn’t
like the reviews I’d been giving his restaurants.
CH: So there genuinely was this plan to get rid of you?
WS: Oh yeah, that’s true.
CH: A cabal?
WS: Yeah, as far as I know is true as well. That’s not
just rhetorical rubbish.
CH: That’s a bit weird isn’t it?
WS: No, it’s not weird. I mean I don’t think it was
said with any great seriousness. What I think is, you
know what these guys are like, they all sit around getting
drunk and think “Wouldn’t it be great if we could
bump off Will Self?” I don’t think they were serious
but it does show you the level of naffness and the
extent to which criticism can bite. I remember Deborah
pointed out when I said “I don’t know why these
fucking celebrity egg flippers get so upset about these
reviews, you know they go on parcelling up three bits
of radicchio for £45, why are they bothered?” and she
said “Well, some of them really do regard what they
do as an art form”.
CH: You often just criticised the interior design of the
restaurant rather than the food…
WS: Well, these guys, and I do know some of them,
aren’t stupid, what they realise is that by concentrating
BUY Will Self books online from and
on the restaurant you’re completely dissing the food and
the whole culture that they represent in which it’s really
important to drizzle olive oil in a particular way. You’re
saying that “Hang on, this isn’t important”. Not only is
it not important it’s a kind of grotesque moral singularity:
You’re sitting around thinking about adding huge
amounts of monetary value to ingredients that would
barely keep a starving Somalian alive for a day. If you
start criticising the food you start to take it on its own
terms. You can’t allow it that much credence. You’ve
suspended disbelief in what’s being done. Whereas my
approach was to say ‘I just don’t buy any of this shit’
you know.
Novel uses
CH: I liked the long ‘travel’ piece you wrote in Australia.
You’re very much a spiritual person aren’t you?
WS: Yes, when I went to see the whirling dervishes.
Yes, I think so. Middle-age tends to afflict us in this
way doesn’t it? And I think that cleaning up from drugs
necessarily entails a revaluation of the spiritual facet of
yourself. In order to shut off an entirely self-destructive
way of life you have to look for a positive direction.
But I think for people viewing my fictional work it’s
always been there. I think that, this is a broad brush,
but people tend to mistake me for a nihilist but I’m not
really like this at all.
CH: Ballard gets misunderstood in that way too.
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WS: Yes, I don’t think people really get what he’s up to
in that respect. I think people who do understand, really
understand, and people who don’t understand just don’t
understand it. I’m unashamed of saying that: that I am
more interested in spiritual questions. I’m looking at
writing a novel about revealed religion at the moment.
CH: What about the other novel you were writing on
‘land use’?
WS: Yeah, if only I’d written it before foot and mouth.
No, I mean what I wanted to do was set something in a
rural context and that’s what I will do with this book on
revealed religion. It’s not about the farm industry. I’m
engaged in rather an odd thing which is that I’m going
to turn a screenplay of Dorian Gray that I’ve been writing
for about three years back into a novel.
So, I’m basically going to rewrite Oscar Wilde,
which is something I would have never done off my
own back, but having been commissioned to write a
screenplay and realising the very strong likelihood that
it will never get made, I wanted to make something out
of the material I already had.
I’ve transposed Dorian to the gay scene of the 1980s
and 90s, into the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic and
I think it’s an interesting treatment of it and it’ll make
an interesting novella. So that’s going to be the next
fictional project. The fascinating thing about Dorian is
that – I’ll probably get hung, drawn and quartered for
this – it’s not actually that great a novel. What it is is an
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incredibly powerful cultural idea.
Just like the idea that Dorian himself is impervious to
time, so the text itself has been impervious to time because
in many ways it, rather like a Ballard book – you
know he’s one of the very few writers to have been able
to foretell the cultural future in that way. Wilde foretold
the probable shape of a kind of aggressively ‘out’ gay
culture in the 20th century. I think that’s what’s fascinating
about Dorian and the way in which gay culture
in the late 20th century has become a synecdoche of the
narcissism, and media obsession of western culture as a
novel, and that’s where I pick up on it today.
CH: So it’s nearing completion?
WS: Err, no. But I would like it to be published some
time next year, but when I really get my teeth into
something it comes fairly quickly, and it is all there. It
just says “Interior. Night. Scene 82. A bar in Greenwich
Village.” I have to knock all those out and put it into
prose and I’ve got a book hopefully.
CH: Have you been approached by any filmmakers
regarding adaptations of your stories?
WS: An amateur made an amateur film of Cock And
Bull, which he wanted to push commercially, but after
seeing it I confess I denied permission for this. In truth,
I never would’ve allowed the amateur production to go
ahead had he not come on with a sad story about already
having spent aeons working on the screenplay. Cock has
also been optioned for film twice by the producer Chris-
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tine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry) but nothing has come of
it, despite my seeing one excellent screenplay written by
a guy called Nix (I kid you not). Otherwise, not a single
one of the other narratives has been optioned.
CH: Would you be amenable to films made of your
work, or do think it might be disastrous?
WS: I think for a writer it’s an almost always an artistic
lose-lose scenario. Either you take the money and abrogate
all responsibility for the finished article (which
then, in all likelihood, ill serves the original), or else
you take less money and become creatively involved (if
they’ll have you), in which case, in all probability, your
participation will be vitiated to the point where it makes
no difference anyway. I know several of my peers who
have spent years working on film adaptations of their
work, only for them either to come out badly, or else
not come out at all. Martin Amis has it about right when
he says: “Don’t believe they’ve made a movie of your
book until you rent the video.” In part, I feel obscurely
satisfied that there have been no film adaptations. To
my mind it proves that I’m doing something which can
only be done in the form of prose fiction. Mind you, the
bank manager might well have a different take on this.
CH: Which stories would you be interested in seeing
adapted?
WS: I’ve always felt that ‘Tough Tough Toys For Tough
Tough Boys’ (the story) would make a great British road
movie. The problem with road movies in Britain is that
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there isn’t usually enough road, but by starting in Caithness,
on the north coast of Scotland, and having scenes
the entire way to London, I think this story avoids the
usual pitfalls. I’ve even gone so far as to rough out a
scene plan for it, but because of all the problems mentioned
above, I’ve never gone any further. I also think
‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’ together with
its sequel ‘The Nonce Prize’ would make a good movie.
As for the novels, well, Cock would be good (no sight of
the genitals – just reaction shots); and Great Apes, I feel,
could be made quite easily and effectively, by simply
having humans play chimpanzees, without any makeup,
just half-naked, copulating freely, grooming etc … And
with subtitles (they would sign as in the book).
CH: Any filmmakers you’d trust with your work?
WS: Completely trust? Well, Cronenberg for Cock,
Gilliam for My Idea Of Fun or How The Dead Live.
CH: And finally, what question would you ask yourself?
WS: Erm, I think the question I ask myself most is, and
this comes up particularly in relation to this anti-war
stuff which is the first public political thing that I’ve put
my head above the parapet for kind of ever. So I’d be
inclined to ask myself: do you really believe that your
work as a writer represents a significant or a meaningful
contribution to political and social debate or do you
think there’s something more you should be doing? So
that’s the kind of question I tend to ask myself most.
Fin �
459
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Interview [published May 1997]
Will Self: Self Destruction
Chris Mitchell finds out why Will Self doesn’t give a monkeys
Will Self is the man who brought a whole new meaning
to the phrase ‘mile high club’. Unless you were in a
apathy-induced coma during the run-up to the general
election (or living in another country), you can’t have
failed to have seen Self’s face plastered over the front
page of every newspaper thanks to the fact that he
snorted heroin on John Major’s election jet. Self was
promptly sacked from his position at The Observer,
was refused to be allowed anywhere near Tony Blair
and became the subject of frothing tabloid editorials for
days afterwards..
This episode ties in neatly with Self’s already wellhoned
media persona – a former heroin addict, enfant
terrible of the London literary scene, the English successor
to American Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson,
as well as being an acclaimed novelist obsessed
with sexual perversity, gratuitous violence and lashings
of Class A drugs, author of such works as My Idea Of
Fun and The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis. It’s easy to see
why Self got the coverage he did: his CV is copy which
virtually writes itself.
However, being catapulted from cult fame to tabloid
BUY Will Self books online from and
shame is not something Self either desired or required.
While it may lend an extra edge to the publication of his
new novel Great Apes, there’s no room for accusations
of the election jet episode being a calculated publicity
stunt; with two children to support and a third on the
way, chucking away a £40,000 a year job in the hope of
a few more book sales is not an option. However much
the press want Self to be the new King Of Gonzo, he’s
not accepting the coke-encrusted crown. Self took the
heroin because he needed it, like a diabetic needs insulin.
It was for medicinal rather than media purposes.
Talking on the eve of the general election which saw
a Labour landslide, Self confesses to being “pretty depressed
about losing my job – I have a very strong work
ethic and journalism gives me a hit of being a working
Joe. It’s a good way for me to feel ordinary – you get up
and engage with the world, you work with people. Unfortunately,
I’ve had that rather taken out of my hands,”
he says, referring obliquely to recent events. “There is
a temptation after something like this to say ‘Well, fuck
you, you fuckers’ and to keep churning it out.”
Self’s need to remain a working journalist stems
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from the intensity of his fictional writing; like his
two great influences William Burroughs and J.G.
Ballard, it involves immersing himself within a
completely self-constructed world. “It doesn’t matter
how committed you are to your fictional work, it
really does do strange things to your head if you’re
just concentrating on fiction,” Self maintains. “Ultimately
it makes people very arrogant even if they are
successful at it because it’s so divorced from the real
world. It fills your head in that way – you’re sitting
there thinking ‘How do I resolve a plot problem and
thematically embrace all of western culture’, and
someone else is talking about how they couldn’t get
the widget off the production line that morning. You
can’t link those two worlds.”
It’s Self’s acute connection to reality that allows him
to parody it so mercilessly in his writing. Great Apes
functions on the premise that its protagonist Simon
Dykes awakes one morning to find the world has irretrievably
changed; everyone, from his girlfriend to
his psychiatrist, has transmogrified into a chimpanzee.
Unsurprisingly, Dykes goes humanshit (groan) and Self
follows through the ramifications of his story with masterful
chimpunity (groan again). Self squarely classifies
himself as a satirist, feeding off the tradition of Jonathan
Swift – who he considers “the satirist’s Shakespeare” –
and the Enlightenment’s fascination with the arrival of
the first chimpanzees in Europe in 1699.
BUY Will Self books online from and
“People understood intuitively at that point that to have
an animal that was close to human but not human threw
into turmoil a whole set of categories about cosmology
and the Chain of Being,” he explains. “Swift was the first
of a long line of satirists in the 18th century to have ape
fantasies and construct ape worlds; there’s a Dutch version
of it, a German version – it became a very enduring
theme. So I’m not so much writing in the tradition of
Swift as standing this long tradition of ape fantasies on
its head.”
Self’s self-awareness of his own intellectual history
and the writers to who have shaped his own work
has been intensified by his dual role as both novelist
and journalist, putting him in the strange position of
regularly coming face to face with his own literary
heroes. But he’s ambivalent about the value of such
encounters: “Without being blasé it’s not something
that appeals to me particularly. I went to interview
Ballard for a 1,000 word piece for the Standard and
wound up talking to him for 4 hours. I really admire
his work and had the fantastic, incredible bonus of
finding out that he really liked my work too. But that
was that. I don’t think we felt the need to meet each
other ever again for the rest of our lives, although Ballard
said, ‘If people like you had been around in the
60s, I would have got out more, but now it’s too late!’
which I thought was sweet.
“There’s not a lot of point in chasing these person-
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alities,” Self continues, “because what you really love
about them is their work – in your teens, when you really
are taken by books. Milan Kundera says books are like
love affairs and you’ve only got space for about eight
major love affairs in your life. I think you’re not likely
to be disappointed when you meet your heroes but, by
the same token, it’s unlikely to be a great experience.”
Even so, Self concedes that his being commissioned
to interview Hunter S. Thompson would probably
produce interesting results, and there is still a glimmer
of excitement to his voice when he mentions that he
might be visiting Burroughs later in the year, having
finally received a personal invitation to the author’s
home in Lawrence, Kansas. “I’m going to try and go
over in August, if he’s still alive. I was quite upset when
Ginsberg died. I don’t want to be disrespectful of the
dead – mind you, Allen probably thinks he’s still alive
– but I was never a great fan of his poetry. But the Beat
movement are who I grew up reading about, reading
about their lives quite intensively. So it was quite weird
hearing he’d died.”
One writer with whom Self does regularly associate
is Martin Amis, possibly England’s most celebrated
living novelist. Self’s attempt at an interview with
Amis (reproduced in Junk Mail) turned into something
nearer to an open discussion of each other’s work as
writers both documenting the state of England at the
close of the century. With Amis having already passed
BUY Will Self books online from and
through the unasked for role of enfant terrible that
Self is now encountering, there is something to the
idea that Amis has mapped out some of the territory
that Self is now exploring.
“I was thinking about Martin last night,” admits
Self, “about the way that our careers run quite parallel
in some ways. Money was published in 1984, when
Martin was the same age that I am now, maybe a bit
younger – and that was his breakthrough novel in a
way. He’s always seemed to me to be a writer who’s
much more interested in writing than I am. Although
my actual prose is heavily larded with intertextual
references, I’m somebody who writes without being
concerned with the internal mechanics of writing per se
– I want to write about philosophy or anthropology or
animals, I’m more interested in aiming out and I guess
that’s reflected in my journalism.
“Martin on the other hand is a bit more weighty
and serious and academic than I would wish to be or
could ever be. As regards mixing the mandarin and the
demotic, I think there is a similarity between our work,
but I think Martin has a slightly embattled view of the
Great Unwashed which I don’t really tend to have. I
don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here but they’re a
scary presence in Martin’s books and I don’t feel they
are in mine.”
So does Self feel like he’s a particularly English
writer? “I feel more like a English novelist than I did a
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few years ago.” he states. “Because I’m half American,
when I started publishing I felt more on the cusp, an
internationalist. I write with a lot of specific cultural
references. Politically and culturally I regard myself as
European, but Europe is influenced by America. I align
myself with the utopian socialist libertarian tradition of
English thought. I am fiercely anti-establishment…”
Self pauses and then wryly adds, “as you no doubt
know. I regard myself as culturally English but politically
completely disaffected.”
It’s this disaffection that leads Self to wield satire as a
scalpel against contemporary politics, just as Swift did.
Asked what’ll he’ll be doing on election night, his tone
BUY Will Self books online from and
of voice becomes distinctly ominous: “There are no
words to describe my contempt for Tony Blair and what
he represents,” he blasts. “Obviously, my personal travails
have made things a lot, lot worse, but even before
all of this shit started happening, I was incandescent
with anger about what was happening in the election.
I’ve even been considering voting Tory – that’s how
mad I am, just so when things start fucking up in a year
or two I can turn to people when they’re drunk and
say, “Yes, I voted Conservative” and watch their faces
crumple up.” Self pauses and then grins. “There are a
lot of good parties on in town and I think I might just
go out and get rat-arsed.” �
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Interview [published October 2000]
Will Self: Dead Man Talking
Chris Hall has a lively conversation with Will Self
Although, at 39, Will Self is approaching mid-life and
he can see the “lowering storm of age and extinction”
ahead of him, there is still certainly nothing in his
prose or his physiognomy to suggest that he will become
flabby or paunchy. Indeed, even though his new
novel How The Dead Live is divided up into sections
of ‘Dying’, ‘Dead’ and ‘Deader’, Self has if anything
attacked the page with even more vigour and purpose
than before.
So it’s rather reassuring to see Self looking very
healthy, tanned as he is from a holiday in the Canaries,
reassuring also that the Coke he orders comes
in a glass with ice. We meet at the Groucho Club in
Soho, London, one of Self’s former haunts but which
he says he hardly ever visits anymore. Outside he
crouches down to chain his 22cc Go-Ped Bigfoot –
a small motorised scooter – and strides into the bar
wearing a black leather jacket, crisp white shirt and a
pair of well-worn brown Chelsea boots to go with his
new cropped haircut.
How The Dead Live is a mordant and disturbing
allegory of life after death and death in life, which
BUY Will Self books online from and
derives some of its structure from The Tibetan Book
Of The Dead. Of course, Self has used that particular
book in his fiction before: ‘The North London Book
Of The Dead’ from The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
and a chapter in My Idea Of Fun. But whereas ‘The
North London Book Of The Dead’ was about the failure
of a young man to come to terms with the death
of his mother, How The Dead Live is very much an
objective description of what happens to someone in
the after-death plane. That someone is Lily Bloom
(an evocative name, encoding notions of life and
death), a 65-year-old American anti-semitic Jewish
wiseacre who at the beginning of the novel lies dying
of cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in London.
It is a Self-like irony that it’s a stiff who provides
him with one of his most fully realised characters,
especially given that he has been dismissive of the
very notion of character in the past.
Self wanted to call the book Deader, but his French
translator persuaded him not to, and instead suggested
the eventual title, which is also the title of a French
film from 1999. When Self was sitting in his study
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one afternoon mulling this all over, the title of a Derek
Raymond book (aka thriller writer Robin Cook) swam
out at him, and then, he says, he really did have some
agonising over it. “How The Dead Live isn’t perfect for
the book,” he admits, and says that initially he wrote
an exculpatory forward explaining why he’d chosen
the title. “But then, I very much wanted to take my
voice out of this book. I wanted How The Dead Live to
just happen in the reader’s mind, decoupled from any
presuppositions about any framing of the text in that
way.” Once again, it’s a novel where the moral fulcrum
is someway off the page.
Although Martin Rowson’s endpaper maps attempt
to locate the fictional topography of How The
Dead Live the world it describes is very much filtered
through Lily. In other words, as the preface from The
Tibetan Book Of The Dead says, it takes place on Lily’s
“mind stage”. Lily’s venom and disgust, her vitriolic
wit and bile is well sustained over the 400 pages, but
the ultimate effect is one of poignancy, of playing to the
empty gallery as she clings to her personality. With his
latest novel, Self has gone to the core of the belief that
the essence of the self is the personality.
So does he have semi-mystical beliefs about death
himself? “I have completely mystical beliefs in that
area. I’m off with the fucking fairies,” he says, laughing.
“I always have been. I’ve never been a materialist
particularly, I’ve always been a transcendental ideal-
BUY Will Self books online from and
ist.” So why the obsession with The Tibetan Book Of
The Dead? “I’ve had this preoccupation with it from
when we were sitting around rolling joints on it in the
late 70s, and it’s perennial in my work. The point is
that when you push materialism as far as it can go
then it really shows itself up. People who say they
are materialists, they’re hoisted by their own petard.
I don’t want to sound like a character in Ab Fab who
wants to give it all up and bang tambourines with
a bandeau, but that’s pretty much how I feel at the
moment. People aren’t really materialists, they don’t
really want the car, the house, the Phillipe Starck
juicer, they actually want the cachet, the status and
the culture that go with those things.”
Self is keen to stress that the novel is what it appears
to be: “It really is a book about death. It’s a Buddhist
allegory,” he says, allowing that of course there are
satirical elements. When Lily Bloom, newly dead, is
taken away in a mini cab to a suburb of London called
Dulston – really a disintegrating part of Lily Bloom’s
own psyche of course – she goes to a meeting of the
Personally Dead, where they have a 12-step programme
for those who can’t or won’t come to terms with being
dead.”Why didn’t it even occur to me that there was
only one person who could’ve arranged these particular
elements of my own experience, and cobbled them
together into this dreary scene?” At one of the meetings
someone speaks on the topic of “Why Are We Dead?”,
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about “how disturbing it was to realise that style was
personalty, and that our sense of self was nothing but
mannerisms and negative emotions.”
Lily gets a job at Baskin’s Public Relations when she
is dead, “typing up still more releases on fresh kitchenware,
country club launches, innovatory thermal socks
BUY Will Self books online from and
– whatever new effluvia were next to join the ever
widening torrent of increasingly trivial innovation.”
(There is a great A.J. Ayer joke, in that “death hadn’t
thawed his notoriously glacial logic”, and “only such a
relentless rationalist could gain any succour from these,
the nervous tics of the afterlife.”) �
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Interview [published April 1998]
Will Self: Pre-Millennium Tension
Robert Clarke hears why Will Self has become an uncertain satirist
No other author in recent years has divided the critics
with such relish as Will Self. With three novellas and
two novels to his credit, and now a third collection of
short stories, Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys,
he has established himself as one of this country’s most
inventive and original prose writers.
However, far from accepting suggestions that after
being portrayed as the enfant terrible of fictional satire,
he now seeks the reward of critical respectability, Self
remains as defiant as ever. “My work is intentionally
divisive. In a way I have failed if I even get to that
point. For a satirist to think in those terms would be
absolutely ridiculous.” Certainly, while Self is the main
contender to the likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes
and Graham Swift, he refuses to think of his writing as
aimed at any notion of inclusion, however redundant,
within critical tradition of the English literary canon.
“The role of critics in terms of re-interpreting the novel
for subsequent generations, as a blueprint, as an analogue
of the culture itself is a legitimate view. Yet at the
same time writers, like any other artist can fall victim to
all forms of vanity in consideration of their own gifts,
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and one of the chief sources of vanity interestingly is
any notion of posterity.”
Clearly Self is walking a tight-rope between his role
as writer and literary mediator, between reporter and
involved spectator. However, what sets him apart from
his contemporaries is the unique perspective his work
offers of the pre-millennial era, the (post)modern fin de
siècle. His is a fictional world of serial killers, pederasts,
and petty bourgeois angst, a mixture of high art and
low life which reflects the mundanity and artifice of the
contemporary zeitgeist. “If you can get a contemporary
cultural reference into the book, get away with quoting
Richard and Judy and you are confident it is going to
stand, then you have done your job, you have translated
the contemporary into the timeless.”
It is Self’s willingness to acknowledge his literary inheritance,
along with his reference to popular culture as
a source of inspiration and ‘immutable intertextuality’,
that distances him from the more incestuous and anachronistic
impulses of contemporary fiction. Inspired
by the likes of Céline, Nietzsche and Dostevesky, he
shares with them a rage and revulsion, at what Sartre
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called society’s “self enclosed humanism” and admits
that “I was fascinated by the nihilists and consciously
styled myself in that way as a destructive intellectual
force, in so far as I saw my writing as an extension
of that role”. Like all great authors , Self writes with
an overriding sense of his own omnipotence within the
realm of his own imagination. Egotistical, maybe, but
vain? No. If, as Self admits that “as you publish more,
the more peculiarly arrogant you become,” he is also
modestly aware of his own limitations.
One of the major criticisms of his work is the way in
which he is concerned more with the use of elaborate
imagery and excessive metaphor, at the expense of
characterisation and plot. Yet it is something that Self
is willing to admit to. “I think the real problem with
my books is the lack of structure. I have great difficulty
with plot and I have never got on with character, and
have always found them very artificial, and essentially
romantic in that way, but I have largely written about
ideas, and I view descriptive prose, the metaphorical
aspects of the work as part and parcel of the ideas.”
Although some of the stories in the new book, such
as ‘The Rock Of Crack As Big As The Ritz’, ‘Dave
Too’ and ‘A Story For Europe’ have been published
previously in The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis, his style of
composition remains consistent – writing very quickly
and spontaneously – a technique he developed from his
journalism. “I don’t think of myself much, or what I am
BUY Will Self books online from and
saying, and I am often very surprised by the result.” It
is this immediacy and unpredictability that has become
a hallmark of his work. :My aim is to write con brio. I
have always thought that you can only write one version
of a book, and I think that is what hamstrings a
lot of people’s approach to the notion of writing as a
search for meaning, a pursuit of perfection. But I really
suffer with a sense of dissatisfaction with my work. I
am not sure if it would help if they were crafted better,
I would be a different writer. I am content to remain
ragged in that way.”
If critics have pointed to his apparent irreverence
and lack of emotional engagement towards the act of
writing, he is keen to suggest that “I am fairly mystical
about the relationship with the text … a posture of humility
in relation to your own muse is quite important
and my personal feelings I try to keep away from that.”
Unlike what he agrees has become the life blood of
contemporary literary discourse: “Self-confession as I
see it a really decadent syndrome … a crisis of imagination
and very depressing.” While his work is “nakedly
personal”, he opposes any literalist interpretation of his
work, and is intent in distancing himself from the idea
that fiction should pandering to the essentially regressive
or escapist tendencies of the book reading public.
“To think that would be insane, I might as well write
Mills and Boon. Every text contains within itself the
idea of an objective reading … those who think there
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is a subjective reader are full of shit. Just as I am trying
to break down my resistance to writing books, so
I suppose at the same time, I am trying to break down
peoples resistance to reading them. Book’s aren’t life,
they are just books.”
Somewhat ironically however, Self is a believer in
the text as a non-factual body of words which stems
from his early attempts at writing. “I had a great deal
of difficulty with the feeling that I didn’t have anything
to say, that everything had been written already and
which really bedevilled me.” As a result Self has go
on to essentially redefine his role as an author. “I think
of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building
things. You are removing things, chipping away at
language to reveal a living form, I think I am merely
the midwife in that sense.”
True when you consider that he has delivered some of
the most provocative fiction of the last ten years. Self’s
stories are “a fundamental assault”, not just on the over
indulgent and emotional realism of contemporary fiction,
but on “the antinomies of organised social living”.
“People always say that they are full of sex, and drugs
and violence … I am not writing Jane Austen, but they
are only full of those things in so far as it is necessary
for them to mirror what I am trying to describe.” Believing
that a writer should have the courage of his own
perversions, Self sees his work as “perverse only in the
sense of the willingness to look upon the things that
BUY Will Self books online from and
other people regard as serious. I regard myself as quite
a puritan. I am quite a prudish person”.
The scene however in the concluding story of the
new collection, ‘The Nonce Prize’ of a murdered
child , the victim of a pederasts, whose dismembered
body, dressed only in a Toy Story T-shirt, is bound
to attract criticism. Yet for Self, “an image like that
has a total necessity, the mixing of the mundane with
the extremely horrible. Of course it is deliberately
shocking”, but what he plays on is our sense of simultaneous
aversion and innate attraction to the dark
of human nature; the necessity to explore the depths
of human potentiality. In a period in which politicians,
priests and the press are agonising about how
to find a basis for morality, Self’s ideas, lubricious as
they seem, are in fact profoundly principled. For the
author they represent “a chronic jouissance” which
reflects how people are increasingly finding consummate
enjoyment within signs of guilt, despair,
violence and death. “I am alluding to possibilities
that we know are actualities. Just as sex and drugs
continue to have their own pornography, the focusing
of sexual relief into ritualised posture, the need
to engage in a constructive relationship with power
or with society, with having children or the meaning
of generations. All these things seem to be subjected
to their own pornography. I hate that about modern
society, it is revolting.”
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It is motifs such as these that provide the basis to
many of the new stories; most readily in the grotesquely
implausible ‘Flytopia’ and ‘Caring Sharing.’
Similarly, in the wonderfully conceived ‘Design Faults
In The Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual’, he welcomes us
the “terrifyingly tiny world of the urban adulterer”
as throughout his work, Self continues to explore the
exigencies that modern mass urban living places on the
human psyche and the human body. The city in general,
and London in particular, represents a new surface, a
new hallucinatory experience, a sublime reincarnation
of the horror and wonder at the rapidly shifting nature
of the identities and anxieties of his characters and
the inconstant historical realities they represent. “The
idea of the modern urban scape is destructive at a very
fundamental level the notion of scale. People’s idea of
the city that they are living in is so grossly different
from the physical reality that you are actually witnessing.
There is a marvellous disparity between what is
perceived and what it actually is.”
One of the strength of Self’s work is it’s “internally
referential” nature, and in Tough Tough Toys … the
same characters often appear in corresponding stories.
In doing so Self reinforces the common theme in the
collection, “what it is to be an adult, about concepts
and absences of maturity”. It is a theme which is echoed
in his style, as he plays with different modes, with
elements of pastiche and with character for example,
BUY Will Self books online from and
while at the same time being meta-critical, commenting
on that tendency in his work.
Often surreal, frequently absurd, and always written
with a recognisably dark sense of humour, Self’s stories
are satiric rather than simply sarcastic. However Self
is reluctant to think of himself as a true satirist. “The
thing I coined in my own mind is that to be an effective
satirists is an act of factitiousness, and that includes
not talking sensibly about my own work.” While Self
takes his work very seriously, it remains deliberately
ambiguous. “Taking the world seriously is not given …
and that is what I am continually trying to get the reader
to address … but the problem you have got to face is
how to suspend disbelief, you have to suspend disbelief
in your own work, you have almost got to believe it is
true in order to carry it off.”
Since the publication of his first book, The Quantity
Theory Of Insanity in 1991, Will Self continues to be
portrayed as very much the archetypal outsider. His
admittedly “muddled and provisional childhood”,
and his former addiction to heroin for example are
well documented, yet with the concept of the avant
garde as redundant as any notion of a central literary
tradition he feels more at home within the mainstream
cultural sphere. But does being white, middle class and
heterosexual leave him creatively isolated, limited in
comparison to more recognisably racial and gender
specific literary genres? “I have never seen myself as
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a traditional bohemian anyway so I find the notion of
being part of an avant garde very hard to imagine, but
the great virtue of being middle class in this country is
that you are bizarrely anonymous. Your experience is
quite commonplace, you become null in that way and
in some ways I find myself curiously liberated by it. If
I was gay, or black or more Jewish than I am, then it
might ghettoise me.”
It is this sense of creative freedom that has allowed
Self throughout his career to explore different characters
and indulge his passion for different accents and
rhythms that make up the modern English language,
the health of which he is quick to disassociate from
what he sees as the generally parlous condition of the
English novel. “One of the great sources of solace in my
career is that I no longer have to read fiction … think
it is a great help.” While “blissfully unaware” of his
contemporaries, he is conscious of the “warp and weft”
of the publishing business and the effect this is having
on writers “This year’s best seller is next year’s out of
print writer. But you write a good book now and it will
be published. There are so many bad books published
that it has to be true!”
Will his next book would be a novel? “I could go
BUY Will Self books online from and
on writing the books I have been writing. There are
enough books to be written like that. Certainly I am
not short of fiction. I have enough to last me into the
next millennium already sketched out, but I am fed up
with these psycho-analysts and artists. I want to write
a book about someone who isn’t an intellectual.” As
for philosophy: “At best it is sublime, at worst it is
opera”. Equally, Self relies less on the interface of
drugs and literature as a source of either personal or
thematic motivation. “I remain interested in them as
a perspective, the capacity for drugs themselves to
enhance or mediate, to colour creativity, but I am so
conservative in so many other ways it strikes me as
faintly absurd.”
Is Will Self mellowing with age. Not a chance. He
and his work remain as unpredictable and elusive as
ever. For all his honesty and willingness to talk about
his work seriously there is a sense that he is reluctant
to reveal what he calls ‘the back of the theatre.’ As the
curtain rises on his latest production, and critics prepare
once more to answer the question of Will Self’s literary
importance with customary shouts of “Oh yes he is!”,
or “Oh no he isn’t!”, perhaps a more suitable retort
would be “He’s behind you!” �
471
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2000]
Tupac Shakur: Murder Was The Case
Gary Marshall on the history of gangsta rap as documented in Tupac Shakur:
Rebel For The Hell Of It and Have Gun Will Travel
Under the guidance of its founder Marion ‘Suge’
Knight, Death Row Records became one of the most
successful and most talked-about record labels of the
1990s. Home to Dr Dre, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy
Dogg and many others, the label’s roster read like a
‘who’s who’ of the rap industry and the ‘gangsta’ genre
in particular. Straddling the line between entertainment
and violent reality, the label developed a reputation for
gangsterism and intimidation while its artists seemed
to lead the same violent and misogynistic lives they
rapped about.
Armond White attempts to tell the story of Tupac
Shakur, Death Row’s most famous recording artist,
and place him firmly in the context of Black culture
and society. The son of former Black Panther and crack
addict Afeni Shakur, Tupac attended drama school and
was a gifted musician and actor; his death in a driveby
and the resulting tit-for-tat killing of Biggie Smalls
(aka Notorious B.I.G.) were generally believed to be
part of the escalating rivalry between East Coast and
West Coast gangs. Rebel For The Hell Of It attempts
to explain the cultural issues that shaped Tupac and his
BUY Tupac Shakur music online from and
generation, presenting a damning picture of corrupt
police, institutionalised racism and the greed of the
recording industry.
While White presents a powerful and convincing
argument, at times he’s too eager to play the race
card. A journalist who describes Tupac as “shockingly
handsome” is denounced as racist on the evidence
of those two words, and White regularly uses
magazine cuttings as examples of what he perceives
as a subconsciously racist approach to the entire rap
industry. While there is some truth to his arguments,
in many cases he heaps derision on journalists who
may be guilty of cliché or lazy thinking but who demonstrate
considerably more affection for his subject
than he does. While detailing rape allegations, court
proceedings and lyrical content he seems curiously
distant from the subject, showing little sign that he
finds anything to like or respect about Tupac. It is only
when the narrative turns to Tupac’s filmic ambitions –
White’s speciality is in film and cultural studies – that
any sense of empathy shines through.
Ultimately White believes rap – and gangsta rap in
472
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particular – has betrayed the ideals of politicised 70s
and 80s black music from protest songs to Public Enemy,
and Rebel For The Hell Of It cleverly analyses
and contrasts the expression of Black culture in popular
music over several decades like an angry Greil Marcus.
Clearly appalled at the waste of talent and ambition
which gangsta rap embodies, White’s novel is wellargued
but its academic tone ultimately lacks emotion.
Have Gun Will Travel is certainly full of emotion –
most of it negative. Journalist and former rapper Ronin
Ro provides an insight into the workings of the Death
Row label and clearly differentiates fact from rumour
and legend. Ro demonstrates beyond any doubt that,
preying on the ambition and gullibility of his artists,
Suge Knight made a great deal of money while his artists
received little or nothing. Few artists had recording
contracts and many worked for free on some of the
1990s biggest-selling albums (Dr Dre’s The Chronic
and Snoop’s Doggystyle) while Suge received 100% of
the publishing royalties.
Although many of his sources are understandably
anonymous, Ro tells a compelling if frightening story
of associates forced to drink urine at gunpoint, business
rivals being sodomised, publicists being savagely
beaten, journalists held over piranha tanks and the
increasingly deranged and uncontrollable behaviour of
Knight. Obsessed with movies like Scorcese’s Casino
(to the point of buying one of the houses used in the
BUY Tupac Shakur music online from and
film) and De Palma’s Scarface, Knight surrounded
himself with gang members and actively encouraged
the burgeoning rivalry between East Coast and West
Coast artists and fans.
It’s hard to feel any sympathy for the gangsta
rappers portrayed in these books, the quiet and
determined Biggie Smalls excepted. Tupac is vain
and hot-headed, drawn to Death Row after yet another
period of jail time for serious assault. Dr Dre is
shown as an egotistical, self-obsessed control freak,
while other rappers – Snoop included – seem to have
a curious ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ attitude when
given a choice between advancing their careers and
basic human decency. Ro, like White, highlights the
mainstream record industry as an amoral and cowardly
business which chose to ignore the activities
of Death Row for as long as record sales remained
high. It’s an argument given extra weight by the rash
of legal action and the mass evacuation from Death
Row following Knight’s incarceration.
Despite the titillating content, Have Gun Will
Travel is no hastily-scribbled collection of rumours.
Death Row’s reputation for violence and intimidation
was well-deserved and Ro tracks down a sufficient
number of eyewitness accounts to corroborate
his story. The label’s finances and criminal backing
are exhaustively researched, and the result is a
comprehensive history of one of the most successful
473
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and controversial labels of the 1990s. Free from the
political baggage which frequently makes White’s
book heavy going, Ro is damning of the violence
enveloping the Death Row clique but he’s equally
critical of the publicity-seeking moral guardians
and the political indifference which created the very
environment the gangsta rappers glamorised.
The stock response to criticism of gangsta rap is
that it’s just entertainment, exaggerated story-telling
of ghetto life which sells bucketloads to middle-class
white teenagers. The problem with Death Row was
that the line between entertainment and reality became
increasingly blurred. According to Ro’s account, as
Knight became more and more like the movie gangsters
he idolised he surrounded himself with members of the
BUY Tupac Shakur music online from and
notorious Bloods gang and transformed the traditional
one-upmanship of rap into a Bloods vs. Crips, East vs.
West contest – a rivalry which was actively encouraged
by many sections of the rap media. Ro and White both
point accusing fingers at journalists who were full of
remorse after the high-profile deaths of Tupac and Biggie
Smalls but who actively encouraged the rivalry and
violence which caused them.
What both Ro and White’s books demonstrate is
that the rappers’ deaths were only a small part of a
bigger picture. The true tragedy is that, by embracing
the clichés of gangsta rap, many talented Black artists
glamorised rather than challenged the stereotype of
violent Black American youth and simply swapped one
form of oppression for another. �
474
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Review [published April 2004]
Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey
Ben Granger
This book is not for people who’ve never, even briefly,
fallen under Morrissey’s spell. Don’t bother; it’ll only
convince you further of the psycho-obsessive nature of
Morrissey fans in general and the author in particular.
Don’t bother either if you’re looking for new facts
about The Smiths or Morrissey, anything to do with
music rather than image or lyrics. It’s Johnny Rogan’s
Severed Alliance or Simon Goddard’s more recent
Songs That Saved Your Life you’re after, both of which
spell out in dry but meticulous detail most of what you
might want to know. And don’t bother if you’re looking
for objectivity, or if you’re turned off by riotously
over the top prose that out-does even Julie Burchill in
the school of forging constant rapid, rabid, contentious
assertions from very few base facts. Anyone left? Then,
like me, you’ll love it.
Simpson is a True Apostle of the cult of Moz, and
like all his ilk found this warped love during a troubled
adolescence, described with lively self mockery
in a chapter here. The Smiths landed like a chemical
warhead upon bored teenagers growing up in the most
soulless decade of the 20th century. Here was the ni-
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and
hilism of punk for an even more genuinely despairing
generation, with added literacy, sensitivity, wit, and
tunes. It was something they would never forget.
Detractors say Morrissey appeals to “the teenager”
because both he and they are contrary and self-pitying.
This is of course true. But there are better qualities
also at a premium in the best of the uppity adolescent
and the everyday work of the Moz. A breathtakingly
arrogant precociousness, a visceral impatience with the
banal, the solipsistic knowing you’re not like anyone
else, and the vicious world-weary wit of the damned.
All satirised brilliantly in his own song ‘Nobody Loves
Us’ casting both himself and his fans in the role of spoilt
children (“tuck us in / make us our favourite jam”).
As Simpson notes; “Sickness never sounded or felt
so good … I may have felt unloved or unlovable but
I also derived an exquisite, narcotic satisfaction from
the knowing of these things and to laugh under my
breath at the perversity of this knowledge.” Laugh
indeed, the faithful know there’s more laugh-outloud
humour in Smiths and Morrissey songs than in
almost any of the swill lapped up by the “oh he’s
475
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sooo depressing” dimwits.
Simpson shows that bright teenagers know long
after they’ve packed away their last Dr Martens’ that
Morrissey’s self obsession is anything but depressing;
it’s a life-affirming blood-pact of strength against the
stupidity of the world;
“In assaulting pop’s nostrums and clichés in his own
image, Morrissey made it about the one thing both
parents and pop music had been united against: intelligence.
Forget drugs, forget promiscuity. Thinking
Too Much was undoubtedly the most degenerate, most
anti-social habit any teenager ever picked up.”
With the added get-out clause in the grand tradition
of having your cake and eating it that, while
you were vicariously living through the man’s emotions,
you were never really as depressed as he quite
genuinely seemed to be, even through all the wit and
charm. He was doing it for you in Christlike fashion
(although this particular Messiah was Mancunian,
camp, quiffed, flower fixated and more inclined to
call for people’s deaths than turn other cheek). Lured
pied-piper-like by the first incandescent chimes of
‘This Charming Man’, this is an adolescent antifantasy
world which still has enough acolytes of all
ages to sell out the Manchester Evening News Arena
this May in less than an hour.
Simpson shows with aplomb the disparate influences
that made the mental make-up of “this alarming man”.
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and
Pop, punk and glam rock (which “called for and for
a brief moment seemed to actually offer escape from
the humdrum by becoming your own glamorous creation”).
The feminine-centred northern drama of the 60s
which at once embraced and damned the working-class
background he came from, and its lighter modern day
offshoots like the comedy of Alan Bennett and Victoria
Wood: (“Morrissey’s ‘voice’ is that of the Northern
Woman, a certain intensity mixed with a certain breeziness,
a certain desperation mixed with a lot of self irony
…strong, but touchingly vulnerable … a queer fish.”)
Morrissey’s two greatest idols were Oscar Wilde
and James Dean. Wilde for his wit and, in the proper
sense of the word, perversity: “an idealist, yet the
Queen of Cynics, he was a romantic, but was frighteningly
realistic; he was a moralist yet completely
dissolute, Morrissey of course is an immoralist who is
scandalously virtuous.” James Dean for personifying
adolescent rebellion: “Jimmy reflected back as Morrissey
would like to see himself: a creature who may
have been tortured and full of self doubt but always
managed to look comfortable in his own skin and to
radiate an animal magnetism.” And both, of course, for
the romantic doom of their exit from this world.
Simpson goes a bit more out on a limb in proclaiming
his parents break-up was the biggest influence on
his world outlook, totally siding with his book librarian
mum against his porter dad with all the Oedipus conno-
476
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tations that implies. Speculation it may be, but it does
convince. He’s insightful too on Morrissey’s famously
enigmatic sexuality, rightly stating the unique mixture
of the masculine and feminine, the fleshy exhibitionism
(“A Morrissey gig is an extraordinary, epic, religious
prick-tease”) entwined with the lovelorn celibacy is
central to his unique appeal, particularly in bringing
out the homosexual side to otherwise heterosexual
men. Simpson is gay himself but happily does not try to
claim him for ‘the cause’ and is rightly contemptuous of
those desperate to pigeonhole: “What these very helpful,
very kind people forgot was that the law ‘what’s
not one thing must be t’other’, absolutely correct and
inviolable as it is, is a law which only applies to stupid
people. And to journalists.”
The title of Simpson’s book is a play on Sartre’s
essay ‘Saint Genet’, and he rightly makes the observation
that Mozza has a lot in common with Jean G.
Granted, Genet was a tremendously promiscuous homosexual
and Morrissey a celibate introvert, but both
were initially feted then rejected by liberals who found
them a little too complex for their liking, both found
a transcendent Rousseau-like glory in the seedier side
of lumpen-proletarian life, and both glorify thugs and
‘rough lads’.
Many people find this both the strangest and the most
distasteful side to Morrissey, (“but he seemed like such
a nice boy!!”) appealing to sensitive little flowers yet
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and
celebrating criminality in a far more unnerving way
than half-wits like Guy Ritchie. Yet this too is central to
his allure, glorying like his hero Wilde in paradox and
contradiction, squaring a circle, dancing outrageously
on a tightrope of sensitivities in idiosyncratic celebration
of the outsider.
And to the minds of the faithful, not falling off that
tightrope. Simpson rightly dissects the fatuous music
press chorus that damned Morrissey as a racist in the
early 90s for singing his mockingly wry song ‘The
National Front Disco’ at the same time as genuinely
flaunting the Union Jack and celebrating proper skinhead
culture; “some might argue that this subtlety is
dangerous because it is too artistic and not didactic
(i.e. patronising) enough”. Simpson argues brilliantly,
though he could perhaps have snidely remarked in an
aside the never mentioned fact that if the NME’s witchhunt
charges were true this must have been the first
Nazi sympathiser in history to be a supporter of Red
Wedge, Anti-Apartheid, Amnesty International, CND,
feminism, gay rights…
The final self-centred joy of Morrissey Simpson
celebrates is his refusal to play the celebrity game; in
an age where even Johnny Rotten parades his wares on
reality TV shows, Mozza remains gloriously aloof, last
year’s curious Channel 4 TV doc not withstanding. As
Simpson puts with typical restraint “A churlish refusal
to suck Satan’s cock.”
477
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The hyperbole of the book can grate when running
totally counter to your own thoughts. The pronouncement
that the young Steven must have found Myra
Hindley a “bad mother to offset his good mother”
takes his speculation to offensively glib depths, and I
for one can do without anyone talking up the dreadful
Freud – as he does – even in passing. But then someone
with Simpson’s provocative style is bound to piss off
everyone at least once during a whole book, and quite
rightly so.
The book’s best achievement is it mirrors its subject
in being pretentious without being pompous, and taking
BUY Mark Simpson books online from and
things very very seriously while at the same time relishing
its own absurdity with a constant self-lacerating
wit. It is under no illusions its subject is a spiteful, dishonest,
difficult sod but loves him more, not less for it.
As the man finally returns with a new album after
seven long years, all those nervous fanatics praying for
a new Vauxhall And I (rather than a Kill Uncle) would
be well advised to have a copy of this book by your
bedside to remind you of the childish stupidity and
effortless brilliance of your obsession. It will prove
you’re not mad after all; or if you are at least you’re in
entertaining company. �
478
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published October 2002]
Iain Sinclair: Width Of A Circle
Iain Sinclair walked the length of the M25 motorway to research his book
London Orbital. Chris Hall hears why
Listeners of Radio 4’s Today programme recently
voted London’s M25 the worst of the Seven Horrors of
Britain in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their
experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they’d done
what the novelist, poet and ‘psychogeographer’ Iain
Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they’d have
thought differently. For this was his unique project – to
walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas
that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the
huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded
by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so,
comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce
in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible
landscape disappear.
Sinclair describes the journey – taken in the millennial
year – in his new book London Orbital. Most people
would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating
the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting?
“Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly
exhilarating,” says Sinclair. “You didn’t know what
you were going to find. Getting up really early in this
weird landscape. You might as well have been in some
BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and
totally remote country.”
It is the disconnection between our apprehension of
London and its actual topography that Sinclair writes
about. (As Will Self puts it: Londoners don’t live in
London, they live in the tube map of London). London
Orbital is full of developments that airbrush or ignore
the history of their sites. Places like Enfield Island
Village, described as “an exciting new village community”,
of which Sinclair writes: “The village isn’t
new, the community isn’t new, the island isn’t new.
What’s new is the tariff, the mortgage, the terms of the
social contract. What’s new is that industrial debris is
suddenly ‘stylish’.”
So what does he think about the housing forecasts for
the South East, the recommendations of the Urban Task
Force report, and the colossal amount of brownfield
renewal that is necessary in and around the capital?
“These seem to be projections made from a very privileged
metropolitan standpoint about something that’s
going to happen ‘out there’, without true knowledge
of just what actually is out there,” he says. “The notion
of decanting swathes of the populace into these amor-
479
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phous nowheres, these liminal territories at the edge of
the city is, I think, a nightmare prospect.”
This, as London Orbital makes clear, is precisely
what the city has always done with its undesirables
and madmen. Sinclair – an altogether different kind of
asylum seeker, but nonetheless wandering around, not
knowing entirely where he is – says that he was amazed
to find the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s
hypothesis about the optimum distance that asylums
should be placed away from the city – 20 miles – so
palpably confirmed.
“I was dazzled by the Holloway Sanitarium [now
Virginia Park] – the ultimate heritage- asylum conversion,”
he tells me. “The thing that disturbed me [about
other asylum conversions] was the absence of memory
– all traces of what had been there before had been cannily
erased, including the name.”
So should architects be learning more about the
history of a site? “They should be made to go into the
landscape to the site and then move outwards from it
for a considerable distance and then to come in on it.
Especially the big-name architects who are the worse
perpetrators,” he says with a little glee. “They shouldn’t
just place something that is simply site-specific to the
person commissioning the building.”
As you might expect of Sinclair, he’s unearthed some
pretty fascinating nuggets. For example, the story of
how the War Cabinet was deceived into giving approval
BUY Iain Sinclair books online from and
for Heathrow airport: “Emergency wartime powers
were used to establish, by a network of dubious commercial
deals, a major airport that was only 15 miles
from the centre of London.” And finding the grave of
Hawksmoor in a field just off the motorway was, he
says, “quite a shock – this sense of the centre drifting
out as it becomes forgotten”.
Were there any new buildings that he particularly
admired? “I was very struck by the Siebel building by
Runnymede Bridge in Egham. It just appeared out of
nowhere between visits. It didn’t bristle with surveillance
– most buildings were incredibly paranoid. It
seemed transcendently strange – there was nobody
around. It was sinisterly benign.”
Sinclair’s poetic retains that characteristic samizdat
quality of goods smuggled past the PR checkpoints,
his prose always crackling with connectivity. Here
he is on the Xerox building: “Uxbridge is made from
Xs. Lines of cancelled typescript. Fields planted with
barbed wire.”
One of the many treats of Sinclair’s excellent Lights
Out For The Territory (of which London Orbital is
a kind of sequel), is his visit to Jeffrey Archer and
his penthouse at Alembic House. I wondered if he’d
thought of returning to him at his new residence in
Belmarsh prison in Thamesmead, south-east London?
He laughs at the idea, but admits slightly wearily that
“perhaps we’ve had a little too much of him already”.
480
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As for these liminal areas, he’s already looking
ahead. “One day, when the research and development
has moved elsewhere, the abandoned colony will be
turned over to the heritage industry. Wild nature … will
be promoted and paraded.” How apt this convergence
of Sinclair’s journey with London – to have returned to
the beginning.
[This article was originally written for the UK architectural
magazine Building Design] �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published January 2000]
Michael Marshall Smith: Spares
Antony Johnston
They say never judge a book by its cover, but the sheer
ubiquitousness of Spares (with its oh-so-cool spotvarnished,
blurry-type cover) inclined me to think it
was the sort of bestselling ‘new fiction’ which generally
leaves me cold. Fortunately for me, a friend had
already read it and liked it so much that she bought
everyone a copy for Christmas. Am I glad she did.
Jack Randall is an ex-soldier. Recovering from a
military experiment which went horribly wrong (but is
not detailed until the closing stages of the book, and
even then not fully), Jack took a mundane police job
in New Richmond, a grounded MegaMall – picture
a flying cuboid city, five miles square. His wife and
child are subsequently horribly murdered. This sends
Jack into a paranoid psychotic episode which sees him
eventually working as a maintenance man on a Spares
Farm with only the local droid for company.
Spares themselves are a logical but hideous concept –
clones of those wealthy enough to afford them (the trend
is for having your children cloned as ‘insurance’), grown
and kept as very literal spare parts, to be hacked up and
used as donors when said offspring has an accident.
The moral quandary which Smith highlights, quite
apart from the issue of whether or not the Spares should
have rights as human beings, is the inherent lack of
responsibility that comes with such a safety net. The
rich kids are almost incapable of learning from their
mistakes, as the consequences are never drastic. Lost
both legs in a car accident? Hey, no praahblem – just
chainsaw a couple off of one of your Spares (no anaesthetic
required), stitch ‘em on, and within a week you’ll
be zipping round at 200kph again.
All of this is background – the book starts after all
this, including Jack’s subsequent breakout from the
Farm, has occurred. Luckily, with such a wealth of
background plot to cover, Smith’s exposition is understated
and conversational, a personal preference of
mine. Rather than ham-fistedly inserting great wads of
flashback and explanation, Smith only elaborates on
background when relevant, and then in a fairly offhand,
matter-of-fact manner. This is not an author who underestimates
his audience’s ability to piece a story together
from fragments, and this can only be a Good Thing.
In addition to the problems encountered during his es-
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cape from the Farm, Jack also has demons from his military
and police pasts to deal with. As the book progresses
it becomes apparent the three issues are linked in some
fashion, but the reasons are well-concealed and tension
is maintained right to the bitter end. Just when you think
you’ve been given the key to unlock the whole book,
Smith reminds you of something else that still doesn’t fit
and you find yourself back on the edge of your seat.
Smith’s style owes a debt, I feel, to Jeff Noon, and
I freely admit this is one of the reasons I enjoyed this
book so much. It is of course possible the two have
never met or even read one another, their styles simply
developing independently along similar lines. But judging
by the tone of Smith’s first novel Only Forward
(an altogether more upbeat and ‘trad’ novel) my guess
is that he picked up some Noon and realised what his
style was missing – some Modern British Edge (no, I
can’t believe I just said that either).
Despite Spares’ unstated geographical location, it has
a very American feel – told with a very British tone of
voice. I suspect Smith was trying (and perhaps a little
too hard) to make sure the book would be received well
on both sides of the Atlantic. Brits are used to plots set
in America anyway, and the American sense of hubris
remains intact. This doesn’t do any harm, but it would
have been nice to see another young British author
actually setting the scene here in the UK.
The only part of this book that disappoints is the end-
ing. It’s just too damn happy, and not a little forced. A
tragic ending – which the rest of the book certainly leads
one to expect – would not only have made more sense,
but also would have read better. The epilogue is short,
and doesn’t completely ruin the book, but it is extremely
hard to swallow given all that has gone before. To me
it smacked a little of either editorial draconianism or
authorly cowardice. Still, only a small niggle.
So – $64,000 question – is it Cyberpunk? As always,
that depends on your definition of the genre, and is
another reason I compare Smith with Noon. There’s
no actual common-or-garden ‘cyber’ as such, although
there is plenty of NuTech, especially of a biomedical
nature. There’s also a fair amount of horror, both
body and psychological. Although there was only one
passage which actually made me wince, it was such a
blinding combination of these two ‘horror-types’ that
I really don’t care if I never read it again. It’s etched
firmly enough in my brain to not have to.
But it’s the attitude that comes across most here, and
Smith has a good handle on both the street-level, amoral
survivalism of Cyberpunk and the art of telling a damn
good story that makes the genre so inherently indefinable.
So for what it’s worth, yes, it’s Cyberpunk. But
that’s not important here. What is important is that this
topical, headlong outburst is only Smith’s second novel.
If by that we can assume he’s just getting started, I truly
believe we have a great author in the clone vats. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published November 1999]
Michael Marshall Smith: One Of Us
Antony Johnston
One of Us. A powerful phrase – belonging, kinship,
camaraderie. Familiar concepts, though this book deals
with them in ways you may not expect.
Initially our protagonist, Hap Thompson, seems anything
but ‘One of Us’. An outsider, a loner with no life,
an ex-wife, forced to live in exile from his hometown.
The reader begins to think that perhaps Smith means
‘Us’ in the more intimate, author-reader sense. Everyone
can identify with the character who feels his life
has been wasted, his best years are behind him and he
will never again live as fully as he once did.
Hap is a REMTemp, an occupation whose legalities
are still being wrangled out in court. He receives other
people’s dreams, so that they may sleep untroubled.
The process leaves him tired but wealthy, though the
grey legal aspect means he must move from town to
town, trusting no-one. Nevertheless, Hap has little
reason to complain. He knows he screwed his own
life up, and this is the best-paying job he’s ever had.
Mustn’t grumble.
Until, that is, his boss ‘persuades’ him to move into
another, even more dubious area – memory receival.
And one particular memory contains a murder, committed
by a woman who has now disappeared. The
murder of a police lieutenant.
The book starts, like all good thrillers, in the middle.
It is only through lengthy but natural exposition that
we realise what has befallen Hap, about a quarter of
the way through the book. Though by that time, after
having discovered he is also being pursued by what
can best be described as Men In Black for reasons
unknown, we are so snowed under with questions,
concepts and plot twists that we have far more on our
plate to worry about.
Spares, Smith’s previous novel, was a similar ‘one
man’s quest to find the truth’ affair, but to compare
further would be unfair. What we have here is an altogether
more mature work, with less desire to shock
and more emphasis on keeping the reader turning the
pages, which Smith does admirably. His previously
shown talent for a good plot and deft character is
shown to full potential here in a story that contains
more twists than any given John Grisham novel has
in its little finger. Metaphorically speaking.
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Characters are equally well-handled. Hap is an eminently
sympathetic man who we cannot help but feel for.
Many of his internal dialogues and emotional outbursts
will bring on sage nods and murmurs of “Yep. Know
that feeling”. The supporting characters are crafted with
similar skill, never crossing the line from archetype to
stereotype. Not even the Amoral Head of an Evil Corp.
So who is this for? In an effort to help Smith’s
work reach the audience it deserves, One Of Us is
very carefully described as a thriller, with barely any
mention of the speculative elements. Even the jacket
design is deliberately modern without appearing too
‘niche’. For once, though, this isn’t unfair – speculative
technology is there to benefit the plot, not viceversa.
And to reach the (literal) revelation of the Men
In Black’s real identity, such a massive and entirely
different suspension of disbelief is necessary that the
science fiction becomes almost ancillary. Yet another
young British writer appears to have found a love for
simply telling a cracking story instead of trying too
hard to be clever. No bad thing.
Will it work? It appears to have already done
so – Smith has moved beyond the hard-core neo-
Cyberpunk audience he initially attracted, and is now
seen as a mainstream writer. It’s very hard to pin
down exactly who will like this book besides a glib,
‘Anyone who likes a good thriller,’ though that’s as
much as I’ll commit to. Fans, if they can live with the
shift of emphasis from speculation, will enjoy One Of
Us for Smith’s impressive skills of character and plot
twisting. Newcomers will simply enjoy it for what it
is – a cracking read.
And the ‘Us’ in question? It’s not who you think. I
promise you that. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published June 2000]
Sonic Youth: Sonic Spice
Andrew McCutchen meets Sonic Youth mainman and guitar torturer
extraordinaire Thurston Moore
“I moved to New York to fuck Patti Smith” writes
Thurston Moore, going back, going way back to an
epoch of rock history when Sid Vicious was at his
most vicious, prowling the Village’s streets after
Nancy’s brutal murder, when Lydia Lunch was just
a “girl on the corner with a nose ring”, and when
Kim Gordon was a pretty blond he hadn’t met yet.
These, and other tasty details of the late 70s New York
scene, are exposed by Moore in an endearingly naff
little short story found on the internet titled ‘On the
Loose’, which ends (gag) with the words; “…and that
was when I first kissed Kim”.
Adolescent prose aside, this brief fusion of flesh
meant more than just two badly dressed kids getting it
on in a seedy loft apartment. It meant that Moore would
soon tattoo his upper left arm with the prophetic words,
‘Sonic Life’, and the band we all know, and mostly
love would soon follow. Neither Moore (thank god)
nor I, however, have a Sonic Youth history lesson on
the cards today, and we move quickly over the details
to greener pastures.
In short, Moore summarises for the record, they
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wrote a bunch of albums, most good, signed to a major,
became a ‘brand name’, were slated as much as
celebrated, but they survived, and they can still shake
it, as demonstrated by their latest album NYC Ghosts
And Flowers. And they’re really, really nice. Even
Moore, who could understandably have an ill tempered
stoat down his trousers about the way he’s been written
up over the years, (NME described his Root tribute
album as “…a snowman celebrating warm weather by
commissioning a statue of himself made out of more
snow”. Ouch!) is expectant of demeanour rather than
defensive, gentle of temperament, rather than bitter and
quietly erudite in a non-threatening, non-Radiohead
kind of way. Would a true beret owning, deconstructarock
svengali admit to loving the Spice Girls? You’ll
find out. But let’s first take it back to the genesis.
On a fundamental level, I challenge Moore, little has
changed in Sonic Youth land over the last 20 years. He
nods, and smiles.
You still write songs about Patti Smith; “Yep”.
(Check out the dissonant-licious ‘Patti Smith Math
Scratch’ on Moore’s last solo album Psychic Hearts.)
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You still aim to transcend the ‘usual’ with your standard
rock format; “uh-huh”, and a guitar is still not just
a guitar right? “Of course”.
So, I push on encouraged by such a wonderful, and
compliant beginning to the ‘difficult Thurston Moore
interview’, overlooking Moore’s cruelly un-ironic
streak: …and what has been your greatest ‘rock’n’roll
moment’ of recent times?
“Well, I was watching the Spice Girls movie” Moore
recalls, turning unpredictable all of a sudden “and when
they cover Gary Glitter’s ‘You Wanna Be In My Gang”
I got goose-bumps. It was chilling. When they came
out in those costumes with all the dancers I thought to
myself, this is as great as the first time I saw Blondie at
Max’s. This is as exciting as sitting behind Sid Vicious
at CBGB’s right after he lost his mind. I could just see
being an eight-year-old girl, and wanting to be that.”
“At the same time, there was something freakish
about it, and it struck me as this completely total rock
thing. God bless them all, that’s what I say.
You’ve often exalted music as a ‘magic’ medium of
information, one which is often more than just the sum
of it’s parts, does that apply to what happened between
you and the Spice Girls, in that plane somewhere over
the Atlantic?
“Hmmm, yeah, it kind of relates to my attitude to
music other people call ‘clichéd’ or ‘recycled’. In my
eyes you don’t need to be so spiritually involved with
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music to be considered a valid musician in my eyes.
Some of the most wonderful moments for me musically
were machine made and plastic.”
“You ask me about Matchbox 20, and bands like that,
and I say what about Matchbox 20? I don’t know much
about them, but they seem to me to exemplify a group
of people getting off on the sudden rush of making
rock’n’roll music, and I think that’s wonderful. Maybe
I’m wrong, maybe they are something put together by
a machine and then plugged in, I don’t know, but they
don’t offend me.”
Surely corporate punk bands like the Offspring who
resort to plagiarising themselves to make hits must offend
you…
“It does, they do, and you know what? Forget the
Spice Girls, it’s American Alternative radio stations,
not mainstream rock and pop stations that bug me.
We’re considered, in a broader sense, ‘Alternative’,
but don’t expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and
Offspring. Those bands cater to people their age, and
we’re hardly of that generation. We’re parent rock in
a way. Musically we’re a lot more extreme and radical
than a lot of those bands that seem to cater to the safest
aspect of Nirvana the verse/chorus/verse thing, which I
always found kind of disappointing.”
“That was an aspect of Nirvana’s music that Kurt told
me he wanted to get away from. So I find it discouraging
to see all these bands taking this really simplistic
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element from Nirvana and employing it to their own
success. I don’t really care. I’m not bitter about it,” he
laughs sensing the heat of his own diatribe, “but it’s
not very interesting to me. That’s what they’re calling
punk rock, but to me it’s as prevalent and as annoying
as disco was in the 70s. There’s this whole underground
of lo-fi cassette-label musicians who are really good.
So I like that stuff, but those kids think of us as being
totally over the hill.”
And also, while Offspring rant about “flys” and
“white guys”, Sonic Youth are singing free-style lyrics
in a stream of consciousness winding well away from
the mainstream. Is it true that, when you’re working
with an ambiguous message and the masses, you gotta
keep ‘em separated?
“Not always. Our ‘big hit singles’ gave nothing
away, but their popularity probably had more to do
with the music, and the fact that they were ‘weird’
sounding by contrast. Every now and again, the
‘alternative culture’, by way of momentum swing, is
cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than
how it should be like the mainstream popular music.”
“Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic
Youth. There’s three people writing now, and we’ve all
had a lot of interest and involvement with expression
through words, or poetry or whatever. I hardly think
we’re the only people writing lyrics with that frame of
reference or that frame of mind, but our fusion of styles
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and
in this framework is interesting.
“Most people can’t tell now who wrote what, and to
make it more confusing, I wrote some lyrics that Kim
sings, and vice versa. I like that blurring of identities
within the band, because it becomes a unified thing that
can’t be related to other forms of historical poetry.”
How do you respond to detractors when they criticize
your lyrics as “staggeringly pretentious, and meaningless
psycho-babble” (NME)?
“A lot of the lyrical ideas [that run] through Sonic
Youth and my solo record [Psychic Hearts] do have
a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat
abstracted,” Moore says, unfazed by the quote. “Especially
when you’re writing them. They’re written
down with just the poetic sense. They have some kind
of meaning to you because it’s emotional, so it’s like
trying to translate that emotion literally beyond the
poetic sense of the words. You don’t want to analyze it
so much because I just like the abstract nature of it, that
it can take on any shape that you might feel it should
take on.”
You speak a great deal of poetry and it’s place in
music, I’ve often wondered to myself if Sonic Youth’s
album title, A Thousand Leaves isn’t a coy play on
Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass?
“You know, you’re right, and the first person to
pick that up. (Spike blushes) I didn’t want to draw
attention myself to the reference, but yes, that indi-
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visible notion of art and nature is what I was getting
at. It makes me happy when the slightest intentions
can be picked up. Whitman is so amazing don’t you
think? (Spike nods) There’s a lot of his ‘New England
Mysticism’ that we aspire to. The way his words
seem to breathe, and have colour, and shape, and
texture. As a member of Sonic Youth, and as a solo
performer I’m also playing with the same type of
evocation. The same way he improvises with images
and words, we improvise with sounds and notes.”
I’ve heard, and seen you spiral upwards, towards
these trance like improvisational jams live the
last couple of times, is that Whitman inspiration
pushing you closer to this almost structure-less musical
energy?
“What I’m aiming for all the time when we play live
is a balance between the high energy of loud music,
and a calm meditational energy you sometimes find at
its core. Recording tends to restrict too much experimentation,
‘cause when you’re making a record it’s a
part of you, for that time it’s your whole fabric. But
when we tour the songs, they tend to get more and more
expansive, and actually evolve over time until they are
BUY Sonic Youth music online from and
something quite different. For this reason I never go
back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill,
instead of listening to our CDs, comes when the balance
I was talking about can be attained. Everyone in
the room can have a shared, communal rock experience.
I’m only too happy to be the conduit of it, after all
rock’n’roll saved my soul.”
Thurston’s ‘Throbbing’ 13:
Funhouse – Stooges
White Light / White Heat – Velvet Underground
Marquee Moon – Television
Blank Generation – Richard Hell & the Voidoids
Ramones – Ramones
Radio Ethiopia – Patti Smith
Damaged – Black Flag
Bug – Dinosaur Jr
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back –
Public Enemy
Impressions – John Coltrane
Ege Bamyasi – Can
Bleach – Nirvana
Killer – Alice Cooper �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published September 2005]
Ralph Steadman: Gonzo: The Art
Craig Johnson talks to Ralph Steadman about the death of Hunter S. Thompson,
paranoid flashes and the “terrible betrayal” of modern politics
“One of the reasons he’s fun to work with – he has a
really fine, raw sense of horror. By way of exaggeration
and selective grotesquery. His view of reality is
not entirely normal. Ralph sees through the glass very
darkly.” – Dr Hunter S. Thompson, June 1974
One of the many facets that sets Hunter S. Thompson’s
70s works apart from other forms of classic
American literature are the growling, snarling, punchbetween-the-eyeballs
illustrations of Ralph Steadman.
Roaring from the pages, his pictures visualise the horrors
of corporate America, ripping the surface to reveal
the political greed and other grotesqueries that contort
and degrade the human forms within his pictures. With
his method of isolating and focusing on a physical idiosyncrasy,
he explodes his subjects, capturing a hidden
truth that was hitherto unseen; it’s as if Steadman sees
with the naked eye of a schizophrenic.
Bloodsucking business men, venal politicians, dollar
drugged gamblers, archetypal beholders of negation
and power transmogrified into grinning reptilia,
squarking sharp-beaked birds, gorgons of sheer inhuman
greed. In the ferocious stroke of a few simple lines
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he trans-atlantically expresses all the negative facets of
the human condition to a terrifyingly hilarious degree.
If we think of the old metaphor of the artist’s pen being
a sword, then Steadman’s scribe is nuclear.
Below is an almost verbatim conversation I conducted
with Mr Steadman via a phonebox on Kings
Street in Manchester city centre. His rumbling Welsh
accent was full of charisma, his personality very accommodating,
meditatory, thoughtful and warm. When
talking about the death of Hunter S. Thompson a real
sense of bereavement -the only sort that can be when
a real friend passes by- was prevalent in the tone in
which he talked about him. Amidst rush hour traffic
and passing packets of suit-encased, office imprisoned
flesh, the conversation went thus…
You must have been gutted when Hunter S.
Thopmson committed suicide.
I always knew he’d do it, but I didn’t know when.
It was always the case of I always knew that one day
I would take this journey but I did not know yesterday
that it would be today. That’s how it felt and it was
way too soon. So upset about it. And I knew he’d do
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it but I wished he’d just shot his dick off. Something
that would give him pain but have him talk about it,
because instead of shooting away the one exceptionally
wonderful piece of machinery in his body: his brain!
The centre of all his being. The centre of his genius
really. And he is a genius, no doubt about it as for going
down as a great, great journalist writer. He didn’t write
novels, he took William Faulkner’s advice about fact
being far more stranger than fiction.
I mean I just wonder why he did it? You know if only
I could have talked to him. Once! Just to say ‘What the
fuck! Don’t be daft, Hunter, for fuck’s sake!’ That’s why
I thought if he’d shot himself in the foot or something
… But, you see, if you can imagine: in a wheelchair, a
man of action, a man who always done exactly what
he wanted to do, suddenly realising he has no control
anymore and he’s gonna end up in a home with a lot of
old people scared him. It’s that thing: ‘In the end it was
no use, he died on his knees in a barnyard with all the
others watching.’ It’s that indignity he couldn’t stand
the idea of.
What was he like as a character?
He could be mean. He didn’t like sloppy drunks,
even though he imbibed so much stuff he was just on
another sort of level I suppose. I don’t know how he
carried on like he did. Like he said: ‘I hate to advocate
drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but
they’ve always worked for me.’ That’s the well known
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
phrase. He wasn’t no pusher. But he couldn’t stand
sloppy drunks and he wasn’t a sloppy drunk cos he
never seemed drunk.
Did he ever frighten you?
Yes, many times in the car. I wrote a song with him
once called ‘Weird And Twisted Nights.’ One of the
lines is “Drive your stake through a darkened heart /
In a red Mercedes Benz / The blackness hides a speeding
trap / The savage beast pretends.” We’d driven …
And this was another one of his tricks, he used to like
to drive at night with his lights out because the police
wouldn’t see him, a starlit night – “The scar heals
black…” There’s a record of it you can get from EMI,
it’s called I Like It (1999).
What is Gonzo, Ralph?
Gonzo is a strange manifestation of one’s intentions
to go somewhere to cover it (the story) euphemistically
as a journalist and yet end up being part of the story,
not part of the story but become the story. You make
one, you have to generate some sort of tension, some
oddness, some unexpected freaky thing that makes it
go, ‘Yes that’s it!’
The other thing is there is no accreditation for gonzo
journalists, so you go there as an outsider. Like we
went to the Miami Convention in the 70s and we had
to get inside without accreditation, that was part of
the target. It’s to be a rock’n’roll journalist. What’s a
gonzotic frenzy? Well it’s me in the throes of an ink
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splattering attempt to capture the feeling I have at that
particular time.
I like the gonzo logo that HST used for his Sheriff
of Aspen campaign.
That red fist – by the way it’s got 2 thumbs and 4
fingers. Have you noticed? Hunter always said to me
‘2 thumbs Ralph, don’t forget 2 thumbs!’ It’s the idea
of a freak isn’t it? Anyone with 2 thumbs is obviously
a freak or a monkey of some kind, a gorilla. And the
flower in the middle of the palm, the green flower is a
peyote drug plant.
Have you taken much peyote in your time?
No. Hunter was the one who enjoyed all that shit.
I’ve taken coca leaves, I’m very fond of coca leaves
but I can’t get them in England. I tried them in Peru,
between Cusco and Machu Picchu is a little stop off on
the train called Olan Taytambo, and there they sell it
to you with wood ash and you roll the leaf around the
wood ash like rolling a joint or a cigarette. You put it
down the side of your gums and just leave it there and
you don’t suffer from mountain sickness, anxiety or
anything at such a height which is 13-15,000 feet above
sea level. I’ve got a wonderful book which is probably
100 years old called The Divine Plant of the Inca (W.
Golden Mortimer, 1901) and it’s all about the coca leaf.
Tell me about when you ended up screwed and
shoeless in New York City on one of your first assignments
with HST…
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
‘The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved’
was how it all started, the meeting with Hunter for the
first time … There’s innocence and experience meeting
for the first time! The shoeless episode was the second
trip where we went to Rhode Island to cover the Americas
Cup and I was shoeless and luckily I’d kept my
ticket and passport home.
I had my ticket back to New York from Rhode Island
(Boston Airport) and then I got a cab and got to 42nd
Street where the bar was thankfully still open, the
magazine (Scanlan’s Monthly) had closed and I was in
a terrible state and coming down from psilocybin. A
drug trip, which was the one and only trip I ever had
and that was when I said, ‘Right, drugs are out entirely.’
I enjoy a drink. And I was palpitating, so I borrowed a
quarter from the Irish barman, cos I had no money in
New York, nothing in a hell of a city! I phoned a lady
friend called Vendetoce who I knew from the Bologna
Bookfair. I made the call and she said “I’m just going
out.’ I said ‘Please, don’t go out, stay there till I get
there, please!’ She could tell I was losing my voice and
she did stay in.
When I arrived I was purple with palpitations and
she got a doctor right away and he gave me a librium
injection that put me out for about 24 hours. The irony
of all this was that before this happened I put her in
hospital with a fracture in Italy when we went into a
ditch via my car. Imagine how mad she was to speak
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to me again! Bless her heart. Anyway that proves there
are good people in the world…
HST once described you as having a paranoid
flash within your character. What did he mean?
A sudden desperate fear that everything something
terrible is about to happen. Because I always thought
that my heart would stop beating just like that. Bang!
Why? My question was: ‘Why should it keep beating?’
It’s an odd question but at the same time that’s a paranoid
flash. Why take it all for granted for Christ’s sake?
So I never did, and then of course I kept thinking about
the fucking thing all the time you know and now I’ve
come to terms with it. Touch wood and touch wood
now even. He (HST) gave me a lovely head, which
I’ve got on a cord around my neck. Sort of a strange
primitive face and a long thin piece of what looks like
clay or stone. He said: ‘Wear this Ralph, it’ll ward off
evil spirits.’
Do you see an essential beauty or aesthetic in the
grotesque?
There’s an aesthetic even in watching an operation,
there’s an aesthetic in putrefaction. I mean to watch
how things breakdown and there’s a kind of aesthetic
beauty in that. But it doesn’t mean to say you’re being
sick, you do see that but you’d rather not watch
it. It’s not ugliness, it’s just a rather unpleasant beauty,
because there’s nothing ugly in nature … I’d love to
be a fly on the wall or to be a fly on their piece of shit!
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
Hahahaha!!!!
How do you get those ideas when you transform
people in such frightening animal forms?
I see if I can make human beings look like reptiles. I
see if I can make them look like hideous creatures that
would not come out of anything but perhaps … turn
a human inside out … take a human being, supposing
you can sort of like a rubber glove, turn him inside
out and then look at it. That’s how it’s really like.
When I’ve done a drawing like that and I’ve done a
few, I tried to make the person look as though they’re
completely turned inside out and I called him ‘The
Perfect Gentleman.’
What’s your idea of a living hell?
Not really being the slightest bit interested in what
it is I’ve done all my life. Not wanting to do it and
then not knowing what to do next. That would be a
living hell. I must have a feeling that: ‘Oooh I’m really
excited about this!’ The most depressed times I
have is when I just don’t wanna do anything. A living
hell is not being creative, being utterly devoid of any
creative impulse whatsoever.
Does the new political scene make you shudder
more than it ever did?
I can’t be very interested in what are no more than
PR men. That’s all they are – PR men for a policy, or
a new sort of: ‘Oh why don’t we try it this way?’ As
Hunter said of George Bush: he was a message boy for
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the big boys, the corporate interests in America. That’s
all he is. And that’s what’s happening over here, we’ve
got spin doctors, people that manipulate everything and
everything is manipulation. It’s not winning through a
feeling one has about a person. ‘Wow! I wanna follow
that person. I’d vote for him.’ Not because you’ve
heard something spun about him, but because he feels
something. Like you do about Nelson Mandela, you
can’t help feeling the guy’s a good man. It’s passion,
yeah! Something wonderful. Maybe Tony Blair started
out like that, when we suddenly thought: ‘Wow at last,
a fresh air politician!’ The man was clean and then he
had his dour man, but nevertheless honest dour Scotsman,
Gordon Brown.
What are the elements in society that piss you
right off?
I’m afraid of the ethos of reality TV which pisses me
off. It’s not reality television, it’s completely phoney,
things that are made up, phoney! It’s not even fiction,
it’s contrived bullshit! And celebs that have done nothing
and they have to be celebs and they have to go on
television. It’s a terribly sad culture to develop or to
pursue and take it further and all in the name of the
god Mammon. There’s nothing else in it and I just wish
there were. And I wish that kids weren’t being fed it
all the time. The kids are not brought up to have minds
of their own as individuals. Some do, some break out.
Maybe it’s always been like that but in a different form?
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
We’ll probably get by you know, but I think we might
not be able to overcome what which is we’re doing to
the planet. You see, nature will do exactly what it must,
and if we are a hindrance to its development, to even
its destructive powers to reform itself and we are in a
way, we will go. No doubt about it. We seem to think
we have some control over this planet. I once saw a
lump of Greenland breaking off into the sea and moving
south, which of course will affect the atmosphere
and us generally, and it’ll happen more and more. And
as the South Pole starts to melt! We were down in
Patagonia in December and it was such a wonderful
wilderness, just across the water was the Antarctica
and I felt: ‘What an extraordinary thing and what puny
pieces of nothing we are!’ I’ve just been doing a series
of paintings of that area. Look, all in all I’m trying to
be an artist, the fact that I was a gonzo journalist-artist
of a type, met Hunter Thompson and went that way.
That happened. I can’t do anything about that, I’m glad
it happened. It was like hitting a bullseye first time in
America. But I wonder what I’d have done if I hadn’t
met him?
Was is you that did that famous caricature of
Mick Jagger with those over inflated lips or was that
Gerald Scarfe?
Mind you don’t get me mixed up with Gerald Scarfe!
I’ve done the Rolling Stones eating each other. Don’t
worry, because people always say: ‘Ooh I love your
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Pink Floyd.’ No I didn’t do that! Gerry came up to me
and said: ‘Can you help me? I like your line.’ And so
I said: ‘Why don’t I introduce you to my art teacher?
Leslie Richardson.’ Whose daughter Lucy by the way,
is Lucy from ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. They
lived in Weybridge and that’s where John Lennon used
to go into their antique shop with Julian. And John used
to come in there and Lucy was always playing with
lovely old bits of antique jewellery, they were sparkling
things and Julian liked them. And that’s when he
thought ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, that lovely
song. It doesn’t detract that LSD became part of it.
She was only 47 and I went to her funeral about four
months ago because she died, and her mother Lesley
said a really nice positive thing to say: ‘She had a good
life. I couldn’t stop her dying…’ You know but … She
was in film, she worked on all sorts of things, on Lord
Of The Rings and was doing very well. A lovely lady.
And everyone had to drink pink champagne at her
funeral. ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ was played
in the church, it was lovely.
What sort of music have you been into?
The Grateful Dead of course. I loved Eric Clapton.
And Chet Baker the trumpet player. And I loved
Dvorak and loved listening to William Burroughs and
Allen Ginsberg reading to music. And I’ll even listen
to Gyorgy Legeti. I’ll tell you what he wrote was the
theme for 2001. He was a modern composer who then
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
just went off into all sorts of weird stuff.
I was thinking of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathrustra’ but
that was Strauss. You like Nietzsche don’t you?
Yeah I do. There’s another guy called Max Stirner
who wrote some very radical things about politics.
He wrote a book called The Ego And Its Own. I don’t
know whether I can find it here … [Sounds of shuffling
through papers] … Yes he’s German. The Ego And Its
Own, Max Stirner:
Question: What does man believe in?
Answer: I believe in myself, the answer of the common
soldier.
Question: What is the principal of the self-concious
egotist?
Answer: Change the question to who instead of what
and name the individual. Man is the horizon or zero of
my existence as an individual. Over that I rise as I can,
at least I am something more than man in general. A
somebody rather than a nobody.
Stirner dispels morbid subjection and recognise each
one who knows and feels himself as his own property,
to be neither humble nor be fobbed but henceforth sure
footed and level headed. A mist of this body who has a
character and good pleasure of his/her own, just as he
has of his/her own.
This is not transcendental generality. This is the
transitory ego of flesh and blood. You and I cannot be
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reasoned into one, we are separate beings, two separate
egos. It is important to be a self-concious ego in a self-
conscious self-willed person. This is not self-obsession.
Those who pretend selflessness are constantly acting
from self-interested motives but clothing them in various
guises. Watch those people closely in the light of
Stirner’s teaching and they appear to be hypocrites, full
of good moral and religious plans of which self-interest
is at the end and the bottom, but they are not aware of
this. That this is more than coincidence. In Stirner we
have the political development of egotism, to the dissolution
of the state. The union of free men is clear and
pronounced…
Is that boring the shit out of you? Hahahahaha!!!!!
Just that whole thing gets to me because it is about
self and yet you’re not being selfish. You care about
people. But you want people to be straightforward
and honest in reply, if they can help you or you can
help them. Surely that’s better! That’s community,
that what we’re afraid of doing and we’re killing it.
You know, we’re really destroying ourselves because
we’re really making the motivating force of anything
we do selfish. Really acquisitive in a way that’s really
not the point of it.
If there was one book that you could now illustrate,
what would it be?
I think it’s gotta be Rabelais’ Gargantua And Pan-
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
degruel, about the big baby creature. It’s a tough one.
I tell you what I’ve just illustrated: Fahrenheit 451,
which is the temperature at which books burn, and Ray
Bradbury wrote the book 50 years ago, (he’s still alive),
and together that’s what I illustrated for him. When I’d
done it, he said: ‘You’ve brought my book into the 21st
century. Thank you’. Which is the nicest thing to say.
The book is as important as Nineteen Eighty Four
and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment,
because it’s about a fire brigade burning books. So that
they try and stamp out ideas and a group of people get
together and each of them take it upon themselves to
learn by heart one book before they get burnt. It’s really
worth a read. I’d say get the book but you can’t at
the moment because there’s only 451 copies, a limited
edition. But I’m sure Simon & Schuster or someone’ll
do it. He wrote another wonderful book called The Illustrated
Man. To write Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
hired a typewriter and a room for 38 cents a day and
he wrote it in 9 days. Try and read the book cos it’s
kinda interesting, a definite must to read because of the
implications of burning every book in the world.
You worked on Private Eye didn’t you?
I did in the 1960s. That was when I got involved
firstly with Punch, but they weren’t really interested in
social comment, they wanted jokes. And I went to Private
Eye with a joke called ‘Plastic People’ and Private
Eye bought it for 5 pounds and said: ‘More power to
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your elbow!’ And they published it with a double-page
spread in issue number 11. That was when Willie Rushden
was there, Paul Foot, all those sort of people. Do
you know I’m frightened that most of them are dead.
Willie’s dead, Paul Foot died. I think it’s something to
do with dying, I don’t know what it is? [Goes introspective
and semi-silent for a second or two] He was a good
journalist Paul Foot, very strong left-wing old Labour
guy. But never mind, there’s nothing wrong with that,
he believed in something!
That’s what’s wrong with them today, they don’t
really believe in anything, they’re paying lip service
to something. And that’s not belief but something
entirely different. Ad-men is what they are absolutely,
advertising a product. ‘We’re selling you this, it’s
called New Labour!’ Or bright new Conservatives
[chuckles], I don’t know what they are. People I don’t
know hahahaha!!!
Didn’t that style over substance politics start in
Nixon’s time or even Kennedy’s?
The thing about Nixon was that he really believed
… He was just venal. He didn’t realise how evil he
was. I think he was a genuine politician but with
a remit of his own. A huge, deep belief in his own
fabulous qualities. His dark scowling face made him
a bogeyman. For a caricaturist he’s a … a gift! I was
able to do all sorts of things with him. The light at
the end of the tunnel. Offering cyanide pills to Spiro
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
Agnew his Vice-President, and his was in the stocks
being offered pills by Nixon. Who was always
dressed in black. He was wonderful to draw. That’s
when I had my best times in political cartooning.
It became something when we all suddenly felt: ‘This
isn’t about domestic things, this is about life and death!
Our lives are being fucked around!’ Used to anyone’s
ends, particularly corporate power with Enron and the
rest. It was the ‘respectable’ companies in Nixon’s time,
who became monsters as time went by, and they ran
politics and they still do and Bush is merely the bagman,
the messenger boy for the dark players. I’m not into
conspiracy theories, but I think they went into Baghdad
for all sorts of reasons which are not made clear. And
the way they use the word: ‘Terrorist … Terrorist …
Terrorist!’ That’s become a mantra or even a trigger for
fear. Mention the word ‘Terrorist!’ in George Bush’s
voice and it’s something else. We can see through it but
we can’t do anything about it!
You see that’s what I think is such a terrible, terrible
betrayal, the trust that people have in government.
The betrayal of people’s good will, good trust that
things are being done for the best and they actually
ARE being done for the best. Perhaps. But people
betray that and let people down and cheat them. To me
that almost fits into the same category as crime and
torture. One of those unforgivable crimes that torture
is for me…”
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The sound of exasperation and anger in Ralph’s
voice was genuine, a real rage about the dubious world
order of our times. Whatever his age, this guy still has
the growling edge and essential punch that makes him
the greatest caricaturist of the modern era. We tied up
our conversation with talks about wine, the fact that
the British government wanted to eradicate the use
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
of the Welsh language, polite regrets that we hadn’t
conversed over a pint and an imploration that I follow
and woo a woman who had mistakenly opened the
door to the phone-box; sagacious sounds drowned out
by passing road sweeps tidying the days litter from
the floor of Manchester’s premier street of designer
shops and parasitical employment agencies. �
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Review [published April 2006]
Suicide: David Nobakht: No Compromise
Chris Mitchell
Just finished the top notch hardback edition of David
Nobakht’s biography of synth-rock pioneers Suicide.
I would have loved to have written this book. Very
much a band biography rather than a personal history
of Suicide’s two members, Alan Vega and Martin Rev,
Nobakht assembles a wealth of material that traces
Suicide’s genesis. From the first tinkerings with primitive
electronics in the early 1970s, endless confrontational,
blood-smeared gigs, through to the release of
their seminal self-titled debut album – “up there with
the first Stooges or Velvet Underground album” – the
extreme reaction they provoked touring with The Clash
at the height of punk in the UK (one night someone
threw an axe at the stage. A fucking axe!), the involvement
of Ric Osacek from The Cars who spent a good
chunk of his own popstar earnings on them, through
to their gradual acceptance during the 1990s and their
triumphant string of gigs that they’ve been playing
since 1997 to an increasingly enamoured audience –
Nobakht covers it all, and it’s one of the strangest and
most fascinating pop history stories I’ve read.
Over 30 years, Suicide have not simply survived,
BUY Suicide music online from and
they’ve thrived, and now they are getting as much acclaim
as they used to get abuse. It’s just as well, given
that both Rev and Vega must be getting on towards 60
now – and having seen them live twice at London’s
Garage, it’s evident that age won’t stop them from
generating some of the most beautiful and vicious
noise you can ever hope to hear. For all their supposed
influence on industrial music, Suicide have an intense
warmth and humanity to their music – even when
they’re sonically scaring the crap out of you – which
is wholly absent from the more po-faced knobtwiddlers
that came after them. Suicide are still as vital
as ever within an increasingly moribund music scene,
still outside it even as they become accepted and assimilated
into it.
What’s interesting from Nobakht’s book is how
aware of their own position in pop history Vega and
Rev are – much of the book is written in their own
words, and they are reluctant rock stars. Clearly they’re
quite thrilled at finally getting some recognition and
earning some money to support themselves – because
despite being hugely influential, no one actually bought
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their records – but equally, after 30 years of scraping
together enough money to get on to the next album,
their new success only comes from doggedly sticking
to what they wanted to do. At one point, Vega talks
quite poignantly about his 1980s solo career, where he
became huge in France of all places, had a major label
deal with Elektra – and then suddenly got dropped. He
admits it felt really painful to be kicked off the label
after struggling so long to get paid anything for making
music – but also reckons it was for the best. It’s not
often you hear a musician openly admit he misses the
money that a major label brings.
Nobakht does a sterling job of chronicling Suicide’s
rise over 30 years with a cast of thousands describing
what a huge impact listening to or seeing the band had
on them – Marc Almond, Henry Rollins, Moby, Michael
Stipe, Bono (eh?) – among many others. You’re left in
no doubt about the huge impact they had. There’s the
received wisdom that the first Velvets album sold very
badly, but that everyone who bought a copy started a
band – and Jim Reid from The Jesus And Mary Chain
says as much about the first Suicide album. People
like Marc Almond say it was the second, more heavily
produced and disco-tinged Suicide album that actually
laid the blueprint for many of the one keyboardist, one
singer synth bands that were to follow – either way,
neither album had much success at the time of their
release. Either way, while Suicide’s records are great,
BUY Suicide music online from and
they simply don’t capture the sheer euphoria of what
they do live.
Beyond Suicide themselves, No Compromise provides
an evocative description of decaying 70s New
York and the emerging punk scene around Max’s and
CBGB’s, mixed up with the artist lofts where Vega and
Rev first hung out and played their first tentative gigs
alongside the likes of the New York Dolls. If Vega and
Rev seem like New York clichés at times – summoning
up death, darkness, lust and disgust, all the usual motifs
of that city’s music – it’s because they were the ones
helping create that now-overused vocabulary to begin
with. And, as several people point out in the course
of the book, others may throw the same shapes or try
to adopt the same postures, but very few get near the
intelligence that radiates from Suicide’s own sardonic,
sonic howl.
Nobakht himself stays pretty much out of the text
– he doesn’t really talk about Suicide’s own impact
on his own life or the process of writing the book – it
would have been interesting to see a more personal
slant at times and some ‘behind the scenes’ comments
on talking to so many pop stars about Suicide’s influence
on themselves. Likewise, the personal lives of
Alan Vega and Martin Rev remain firmly out of the
spotlight, which is both good and bad – reading the
book, you do develop a certain affection for them both
and it naturally leads you to want to know more of their
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traditional biographical details. On the other hand,
maybe it’s just better to preserve the mystique. On a
pedantic note, I bristled at the one word mention of The
Sisterhood, a side project from The Sisters Of Mercy
on which Vega guested, as I would have loved to have
heard more about how that was recorded. The Sisters
were huge fans of Suicide, regularly covering ‘Ghost
Rider’ as a set closer when they played live.
Nobakht’s book is definitely an essential for
Suicide fans – it’s perhaps a little too reverential,
but then, Suicide deserve a bit of reverence after all
the shit they’ve been through. (Although there is a
hilarious moment when one person describes seeing
Suicide as “One guy playing a crappy Farfisa badly
and another guy hitting himself with a microphone
and falling down a lot”). Vega and Rev prove to be
fascinating interviewees, unafraid to try and grasp
for the big ideas when talking about their sound but
not taking themselves too seriously either. Their
self-awareness of their place in musical history, and
BUY Suicide music online from and
their depictions of what came before them and after
them, makes for a unique perspective on how music
has changed from doo-wop to rock’n’roll to punk.
More importantly, though, No Compromise is not
an eulogy for a band that was great once but is now
just playing the circuit cashing in on their reputation
– what’s life affirming about Suicide is that they are a
band who are still going strong, still experimenting, still
playing. (See a Suicide gig and the only time you might
actually recognise a song is during the encore). While
the audience has changed and become a lot less hostile,
Suicide themselves continue doing just what they want.
True, they still don’t sell many albums, but royalties for
covers of their songs appearing on soundtracks for The
Crow and The Sopranos have apparently earned them
more cash than their entire 30-year career of record
sales. That such unexpected luck should befall Suicide
is a skewed vindication of both their influence and their
sound – 30 years old, rooted in the past, playing in the
present, still sounding like the future. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published February 2005]
Damo Suzuki: I Am Damo Suzuki
Craig Johnson meets the legendary member of Can who’s too busy
looking into the future to care much about the past
Does anybody ever go out on a Sunday night? I’m
always too knackered to bother most weeks, but this
particular night was an unmissable opportunity to see
an unmissable psychedelic brain feast. I was out to see
a space-man from another age, to see the whites of
his eyes connect into the stratosphere. This man was
Damo Suzuki. This space was about one foot when he
strolled on sagely by after a blazing, intense, intimate
and triumphant performance that came from heart of
what made Can when fronted by Damo, one of the best
bands of the 1970s. His current band is a world wide
collective called Damo Suzuki’s Network. Musicians
that Damo has spontaneously hooked up with on his
vocal journey around planet earth. I didn’t say shit to
Damo that night. Too wasted to greet the only man that
can say “I am Damo Suzuki” and not be bullshitting.
The legend himself was in the vicinity. In the words
of the Quiet One: It was all too much. It was all too
fuckin’ much.
The man who had just walked-on-by was one of those
genius-like men that we discover when we traverse the
works of Beatles/Pistols/Nirvana to unearth the deeper
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and
jewels of rock music’s cavernous domain and discover
sounds that truly put character into our souls. It’s then
we arrive upon people like Suzuki. A longhaired Japanese
man born in 1950, with a black wispy moustache
and wisdom resonating from his eyes, Damo Suzuki
was the singer in the German avant-rock band Can
from 1971 to 1973. His sometimes serene, other times
terrifying spontaneous vocal delivery and the drugged
funk, space-age gothic repetition of the band carved a
significant notch onto the draft of modern music.
Bands from The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, The
Coral have all embezzled from the Can archive to inspired
effect. Think ‘Fools Gold’ or Metal Box. Shaun
William Ryder even managed to ram-raid Damo’s
stoned beat style on the Mondays’ early cuts. And
lest we forget The Fall’s classic pageant to all things
wonderful with ‘I Am Damo Suzuki’. And if you didn’t
know, it’s even been expressed that Can’s underbelly
of repetitive drum, bass and glacial synth sound laid
the groundwork for Detroit artists like Juan Atkins to
invent techno in the 1980s. The influence, importance
and the sheer funked-out bliss of the band Can should
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never be underestimated.
I eventually reassembled the means and energy to
speak to Damo Suzuki. It took nearly 12 months and
to have the world yet a computer between us, but
eventually we conversed. Manchester – The Wires –
Melbourne – And Back.
What situations led you into singing music? And
how did you develop that unique style?
All creative things begin with Zero. Situation of no
information. If you are free, actually you can find many
ways to express your feeling … It’s much more natural
and no repetition. This is the moment we are together
with audience in trance. I don’t think it’s unique … we’re
doing what all we can in the moment … TOGETHER.
What sort of music do you listen to? Any new
bands out there that have sparked your interest?
I listen to almost no music deeply. I don’t need much
information. Before I heard Russian classical music of
20th. Jazz before the 70s, and folk music from around
the globe. I’m thankful for all those sound carriers who
joined NEVER ENDING TOUR project. I get inspiration
from them in this music cosmos, which we are
creating. All those young bands/artist who are finding
their roots and creating united energy together.
You were a street artist in late 1960’s Cologne What
was life like? Did you find wisdom on the streets?
I was street artist not only in Cologne. I performed
in European continent at that time. It was hippy time.
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and
I just liked to travel and meet other people For that I
didn’t have money, I made money on the street when
I have nothing in my pocket to go next place. Street
is where you meet people, just any kind of people.
I was not only playing guitar and singing. I had no
plan. I made some time happening, kind of one man
theatre or painting on the street as well.
Could you explain how you clicked so perfectly
into the Can sound? How did that perfect transition
and that naturalness between yourselves happen?
I don’t know if I was flexible enough or them. But
things were sure that we hated any information, we
didn’t like to create music like everybody else. We’re
anarchist. So, for everybody it was easy to create something.
When we create sound we started from zero. So,
it’s easy thing. Nobody should not be corrected from
someone. We’re all in same space.
What were the Can years like for you on a personal
level?
It’s almost like school days. Some times you see them
on a photo and I remember I was together with them.
He was good in French and he was trying to be good in
mathematics. He was always clothed in short pants. To
look back is a waste of time. I’m 55, already I have to
see much more in front. My time is not tick tacking my
time. I’m the pig man. I can’t turn my neck to see back.
What was the story or reason for your departure
with Can?
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I left Can after being there for 3 years. It was enough
for me to leave after Future Days. We’re getting well
known band, TV’s there, interviews here. I was only
23 years old and much more curious about another life.
Are there any new musical releases this year?
Very soon comes a double CD called HollyAris … I
mean I’m going to release only doubles in future, except
one CD I edited already. It’s nice to have more than
two hours of pure instant composed music which will
never be performed again. HollyAris has two location
recorded live. One is in Hollywood another is Paris. As
I perform with local sound carriers. CD 1 called ‘Hollywood’
is performed by sound carriers from Los Angeles
and Japanese guitarist Mandog. CD 2 called ‘Paris’ is
performed by sound carriers from France. After they
formed a band called FRENCH DOCTORS as they
found chemistry between them. And they are recording
their first record. After this next one is also waiting
to hit … which comes about a couple of months later.
This is named SUOMI. This is completely different…
’Hollywood’ brings you a much more Californian air.
‘Paris’ brings you male perfume. But this is hard rock
in Sauna. Suomi means Finland. This double CD is one
is recorded at Turku, I guess the second large city in
Finland. And an another recorded in Helsinki. Sound
Carriers are two German, an American, a Ukrainian
and a Japanese (me!!!)
You bring together many musicians via your Net-
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and
work. It must be a huge worldwide collective? How
do you find that experience?
Yes, the list of sound carriers are getting long. Some
big cities like London or New York … is really long list
that I have to perform there for every month some years
long. And sound carriers who performed once, they like
to make it again … I’m crying for happiness. No matter
which musical field they belongs to. Ages, male or
female, Nationality whatsoever. Or long experience as
a professional or who’ve never played since 20 years.
For sound making is not that important all those information
you are carrying … .most important is ambition
which brings positive energy. And we become one unit.
Then we can create time and space of the moment.
Do you write lyrics, do you map out ideas or is it
all pure spontaneity?
All is spontaneity.
What are the many languages in your music?
Words has no meaning in sound making. I don’t like
to sing messages while WE are creating together. I’m
not leader of the moment creating. Everybody in that
room is involved and everybody have own function,
that I don’t have to force their creativity with my words.
All music instruments has own words, why vocal must
be middle of all? I use my own language mostly …
which is non-documented language. My word of the
moment which is used as music instruments.
What channels do you take to get to the place you
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reach inside when you create your music?
When sound carriers are on the stage, there works a
magnet field between us and we get chemistry and it
works. Sound creating is limitless world of time and
space. You can go to any direction as we find information
at the moment … one can make one music, two
can make three music. I mean. It’s our conversation
and understanding.
Are you aware of the huge influence you’ve had
on bands like The Fall in the UK? Do you get much
contact from any UK bands?
I say it’s not bad they found something about us, they
had good tastes. I have many contact with UK bands
as I perform every time with different sound carriers in
different cities. Mostly young unknown but ambitious
bands. To make contact is easy today with internet access.
Internet is the greatest development for years.
In May you are playing major UK cities. How do
you find the UK?
UK is something special. It works well with instant
composing. Even small places there’s always carriers
who like to perform with me and their quality of play-
BUY Damo Suzuki music online from and
ing is high. Audience is honestly … if they like it they
like it. They are not shy to travel for long distances
to visit and be in our event. Sound carriers who performed
with me mail me to perform with them again
and some of them organise shows with themselves.
Fancy witnessing a musical legend in close motion
then? An icon of the psychedelic-punk age?
The man who taught most of our musical masters to
sing? To be able to see the whites of his wise eyes
sing out sweet and formidable odes. “This is the
moment” says Damo, “we are together with audience
in trance.” We’re not talking Phil Collins here.
The venue’s Damo and his Network will be playing
are intimate in size, and should capture a certain
incomparable atmosphere if you’ve never seen his
performance before. Don’t exactly walk on glass to
see this one-off underground superstar, but you could
try crawling. It might be worth it. And if you wanna
join him for a psychedelic freakout session then you
can always have a word with this guy. He’s cool. He’s
approachable.
He’s Damo Suzuki. �
505
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published September 2003]
Swans: Swans’ Song
Chris Mitchell on the end of Michael Gira’s intense, undefinable and
deafeningly loud musical outfit Swans
The history of music is littered with the debris of those
who paid dearly for being different. From the Stooges
through to Suicide and the Birthday Party, there are
countless individuals and outfits who have, in retrospect,
redefined the shape of music and yet been critically
reviled or simply ignored during their own time.
It’s a classic storyline, part of the mythos of rock’n’roll
– that the culture vultures have to wait until such explosions
of creative rage and violent self-expression have
self-immolated themselves before they dare go near the
still-smouldering corpse. Only death makes such music
safe for consumption.
On March 15 this year at London’s tiny LA2 venue,
such a death occurred. Michael Gira, for 15 years a
self confessed dictator over an ever changing line-up
of musicians, finally brought about the end of Swans.
Ironically, the spectre of death which hung over the
Swans’ final, funereal tour as it crossed from America
to Europe drew huge audiences, even as Gira spoke in
interviews of the indifference his music had faced during
the last decade and a half. As is usual, only when we
realise what we’re losing do we understand its value.
BUY Swans music online from and
Gira is not a defeated, bitter individual, however.
The death of Swans has been for him something of a
relief – the shedding of 15 years of misconceptions and
wornout reputations. Like all great bands, Gira hates
Swans being categorised, not so much out of petulance
as frustration with the refusal of critics to understand
that a band can be more than one-dimensional.
Ever since Swans emerged from New York in the
early 80s, they defied description. Albums like Cop
and Filth were works of unremitting cerebral and sonic
violence which still remain unparalleled, combining
the incessant industrial harshness of drum machines
with stomach churning bass and howled vocals.
Managing to make it from beginning to end of one of
these early records is a voyage you won’t easily forget.
Bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails wouldn’t even
feature on the early Swans’ Richter scale. The track
titles alone – ‘Time Is Money (Bastard)’, ‘Greed’, ‘A
Screw’ – reflect Gira’s state of mind at the time. “I was
a hard-assed, people-hating motherfucker in the early
days,” he said recently in an interview with Silencer. “I
mean I was a pretty violent and aggressive, disturbed
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person, so I guess I made music reflected that, but also
what I wanted from the experience of music was much
more extreme. I wanted the music to destroy my body.”
That intensity of thought is what has always separated
Swans from the rest of the record-producing world.
Given the depths of emotional extremes which their
early records explored not just lyrically but physically,
it seems utterly fatuous to call Swans a rock’n’roll
band. Rock’n’roll is traditionally feel-good music,
whereas for a time Swans were the ultimate feel-bad
experience. Attending their live performances was a
health risk, threatening broken limbs and burst ear
drums, and causing various cities’ police across the
globe to literally pull the plug on them, such was their
decibel measurement. Swans live were the ultimate
catharsis, where the audience would enjoy being sonically
pummelled into a bloody daze and pay for the
pleasure too.
While this all made good copy for journalists, Gira’s
reasons for producing such music often went un-noticed,
lost in the on stage spectacle of abasement. As if
aware that his voice was being lost amongst the noise,
Gira effected a massive shift in the Swans musical direction
with the 1987 album Children Of God. With the
arrival of his new partner and collaborator Jarboe, Gira
had finally met someone of his own strength who made
Swans spread their wings, albeit schizophrenically. The
whole album is drenched in religious iconography, in-
BUY Swans music online from and
spired by Gira watching American TV evangelists like
Jimmy Swaggert who he considered “great rock’n’roll
performers”. But while thematically Gira’s concerns
remained the same – death, love, God, sex, shame, lust,
pain – sonically Children Of God combined the noise
terror of tracks like ‘Beautiful Child’ with Jarboe’s
haunting oboe-backed ballads ‘In My Garden’ and
‘Blackmail’. The result was a uniquely unsettling album
which went against the grain of everything Swans
fans had come to expect.
That a radical change was happening to Swans was
acknowledged at the end of their live album Feel Good
Now, recorded during the Children Of God tour. After
the final track has played out, you hear Gira’s voice
saying “This is a record of a time now gone. Good bye
and good luck”. It’s a strange and touching inclusion, as
if Gira was mindful that many Swans devotees would
neither understand or enjoy the band’s new direction
and that this was the parting of the ways.
Before the emergence of the next Swans album The
Burning World, Gira and Jarboe produced two albums
under the name Skin. Blood, Women, Roses featured
Jarboe’s voice scattered over a collection of diseased
torch songs, while Shame, Humility Revenge saw Gira
move towards narrative lyric writing for the first time,
instead of his previous collage approach inspired by
the brute power of advertising slogans. Both albums
reflect Gira and Jarboe at the height of their powers,
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generating an otherworldly atmosphere through sound
textures and patterns where their voices and their stark
yet beautiful words could finally be heard. Both were
classic 3am-on-your-own albums – songs which made
the world feel a little less cold.
By comparison, the Swans next album was a positive
riot of colour. The Burning World saw Gira and Jarboe
completely embrace acoustic guitars and even a cover
version of Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’.
The fact that it was their own release on a major label
(MCA) caused cries of “sell-out” and Gira has recently
admitted to feeling ambivalent about this period, although
after hearing tracks like ‘God Damn The Sun’
it’s difficult to see how anyone thought Swans were
somehow making a deliberate bid for heavy rotation on
MTV. Now that all rights to the music have reverted to
his ownership, Gira plans to reissue an edited version
of The Burning World along with numerous tracks that
weren’t allowed onto the original album.
But it was from this point that Swans became impossible
to define. Already thrown by their transformation
from sonic terrorists to subversive acoustic tunesmiths,
many people didn’t know what to expect next. Instead
of building a fanbase, Gira had seemingly wilfully destroyed
it with his restless experimentation. Reviewers
continually harked back to their early days in order to
find something about the band they could understand.
Meanwhile, Swans continued to produce masterworks
BUY Swans music online from and
on the same epic scale as Children Of God into the 90s,
refining and redefining their sound each time. Love
Of Life, White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity, The
Great Annihilator – with each album Swans became
more isolated from everybody else, pursuing their own
unique vision. The final Swans album, Soundtracks For
The Blind, almost entirely eschewed song structures in
favour of sprawling ambient montages of voices and
music. Assembled mainly on computer, it’s as if the
technology has finally caught up with the vision of what
Gira and Jarboe wanted to do with the Skin project 10
years ago, generating an atmosphere and a space for
their words rather than being tied into The Song.
It’s easy to see why Gira considers the Swans
moniker an albatross around his neck – during their
15 years of recording, the name Swans seemed to
define nothing except who Swans *were* rather
than what they had become – it’s a virtually useless
term of reference. Seeing as Gira is only interested
in producing what he considers worthwhile – to the
point of physical collapse and financial ruin – using
the same name to try and embrace his wildly differing
output makes little sense anymore. Already he
is at work under a new name The Pleasure Seekers,
which promises an all-acoustic intimacy reminiscent
of Vic Chesnutt, while there is also the Body Lovers
project which will generate CD length ambient
tracks. Hearing Gira discuss his current listening
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choices indicates his restless eclecticism: “Everything
from Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, John Lennon,
Pink Floyd and Nico to more recent stuff like Low,
Lambchop, Panasonic, Gastr del Sol … I tend to like
stuff that’s sonically interesting but has some kind of
emotional intensity to it. In the van I’ll listen to Hank
Williams … Howlin’ Wolf is a constant favourite of
mine. Big influence on early Swans. I’ve also been
listening to a lot of stuff from Table of the Elements,
this experimental label that’s been releasing stuff by
Tony Conrad, Faust, Keiji Haino … and that new Vic
BUY Swans music online from and
Chestnutt album is pretty great, too.”
Despite his unhidden joy at their demise, Gira is
undoubtedly proud of Swans. Their website carries
detailed information about the series of re-releases
currently planned of Swans material, which he is intending
to edit and add to. Even in death, Gira doesn’t
play by the rules – while Swans may be gone, he
refuses to merely reissue each album untouched. They
remain in flux, perpetually changing – a fitting testament
to a band which always took the risk of refusing
to remain static. �
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Review [published June 2005]
David Sylvian: The Good Son Vs. The Only Daughter
Ismo Santala
An album of remixes, the nine tracks of The Good
Son Vs. The Only Daughter were made by musicians
handpicked by David Sylvian to shake up the subdued
sonic architecture of Blemish (2003). Because most of
the names of the remixers are not familiar to me, I can
only go by what I hear. And what I hear is, by and large,
impressive. Most of the new songs make good use of
the spareness of the original material, using Sylvian’s
lyrical richness and strong delivery as the basis for
adventurous reworkings.
When he described Blemish as an “impromptu suite
of songs for guitar, electronics and voice”, Sylvian
offered his listeners both a caveat and a challenge.
Because despite of the appearance of guitarist Derek
Bailey on a number of tracks, the overall sound of
Blemish is more stripped-down and unpolished than
Sylvian’s earlier solo albums such as 1999’s Dead
Bees On A Cake. The nearly 14-minute title track opens
the album and maps out the emotional territory of the
later compositions. Shimmers and quivers of electronic
ambience are broken by bursts of anxious words: “And
mine is an empty bed / I think she’s forgotten”.
BUY David Sylvian music online from and
The lyrics tell of betrayals, jealousies and break-ups
in the family, but seem to give only bits and pieces of
the whole story. On the cusp of transformation, each
of the personas is unable to accept the past while at the
same time remaining ambivalent about the future, to
the point where even favourable change is expressed in
wholly negative terms: “There’s a world of disappointment
to be lost”. The hesitancy to face up to the reality
of the situation (“Place a dummy on the roof / Stitch
him a tongue / Give him proof”) ends in failure, as it
must: “Like blemishes upon the skin / Truth sets in”.
Even if the remix artists allow Sylvian’s voice to stay
prominent and undisrupted, many of them play freely
with the lyrical content. When he cuts and reshuffles the
words of ‘Blemish’, Burnt Friedman produces a version
that is considerably more affirmative and upbeat
than the original. In contrast, he overdoes ‘Late Night
Shopping’, the source album’s most playful track, with
the inclusion of a sickly-sweet chorus.
Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s rearrangement of the vocal
parts of ‘The Heart Knows Better’ not only uplifts
the mood of the piece, but the new place of emphasis
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allows for consecutive layers of aural textures to be
introduced easily into the mix. ‘How Little We Need
To Be Happy’ by Tatsuhiko Asano reveals the pop song
well hidden in the caustic original. The remixer hasn’t
needed to rethink the lyrics, but instead has built the
celebratory orchestration around the voice. The result
is a revelation, as if the Blemish version were only a
rough draft waiting for Asano’s input.
Yoshihiro Hanno’s ‘The Good Son’ tops the original
by placing the rank lyricism within a less tense musical
structure, while still leaving much of Bailey’s guitar
work intact. In addition to the intro and outro atmospherics,
Akira Rabelais applies numerous subtle touches on
his rendering of ‘Blemish’. The two variations of ‘The
Only Daughter’, on the other hand, are solid rather than
mesmerizing. In Ryoji Ikeda’s piano-driven piece, the
voice and music seem to flutter at a distance from one
another, whereas the second variant by Jan Bang and
Erik Honoré sets them in the same groove.
The remix of ‘Fire in the Forest’ by Readymade
FC, like Friedman’s ‘Blemish’ and Asano’s ‘How
Little We Need To Be Happy’, brings the lightness
and hopefulness of the song to the foreground. It is
not the case that these qualities are something Sylvian
attempts to deliberately obscure; rather, he reserves
the sudden brightness until the moment its impact
can be greatest. In the image of an immense forest
which suffers the loss of single trees, Sylvian has
hit upon a fittingly spacious metaphor for emotional
unrest:
There’s a fire in the forest
It’s taking down some trees
When things are overwhelming
I let them be
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A measure of The Only Daughter’s success is that the
album allows the listener to return to the source with
fresh ears. The pulsating electronics and erratic guitar
plucks of Blemish become the crackle and crumple of
burning leaves. In turn, the energetic overabundance of
The Only Daughter sounds like new vegetation pushing
itself overground from the ashen soil. �
511
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David Thomas [Pere Ubu]:
“I never volunteer information” 513
Hunter S. Thompson:
A Real American Patriot 517
Hunter S. Thompson:
Fear And Loathing 519
Colm Tóibín:
The Story Of The Night 523
Amos Tutuola:
The Palm-Wine Drinkard 525
T-Z
Stuart Walton: Out Of It 529
Alan Warner: Existential Ecstasy 531
Belinda Webb: Justified Anger 535
Irvine Welsh 538
Irvine Welsh / Harry Gibson:
Expletives Deleted 539
Irvine Welsh:
You’ll Have Had Your Theatre 541
Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner:
Queerspotting 545
Irvine Welsh: Filth 554
The White Stripes: Elephant 556
Tony Wilson: Fourth Time Lucky 558
512
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published March 2005]
David Thomas [Pere Ubu]: “I Never Volunteer Information”
Craig Johnson talks to Pere Ubu’s David Thomas
Think of alternative rock in the 1970s and we immediately
think of The Ramones, Talking Heads,
Television as the major musical forces in those heady
times. An under-rated band of that much pillaged and
productive scene were underground rockers Pere Ubu
– subterranean innovators of the new-wave/post-punk
elementary division.
Along with new-wave band Devo, Pere Ubu had
thrashed on the fringes of Cleveland, Ohio’s music
circuit for a few years in the guise of Rocket From
The Tombs. Lead singer David Thomas had formed
RFTT in 1974 with guitarist Peter Laughner, who
died of acute pancreatitis or the plain ravages of
rock’n’roll in 1977. After a few years of finely tutoring
their school of garage nihilism via Stooges covers,
RFTT had distanced themselves from the usual
industry career path. With the addition of bass player
Tom Herman, drummer Scott Krauss and keyboardist
Allen Ravenstine, RFTT metamorphosed into
Pere Ubu.
Something sets Pere Ubu apart from other bands.
For a start how many bands name themselves after a
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character created by 19th-century French playwright
Alfred Jarry? How many bands before them insisted
on having no group photos on their record sleeves?
And however unshocking, an early Rocket From The
Tombs tune mouthed the word “cunt” on ‘Ain’t It Fun’.
Not many bands did that in 1974. But it’s something
other that sets Pere Ubu apart; something alien, almost
dangerous, ironic and fascinating that lurks within their
out-of-shape yet tight as metal song structures; those
purely dynamic slabs of fury that present apocalyptic
landscapes, stellar production and emotions of insanity
that burn your ears out. They dealt in human extremes
but were never unlistenable. Singles ‘30 Seconds Over
Tokyo’ (1975) and ‘Final Solution’ (1976) are songs
years ahead of their time with an inventive attitude
that current heavyweights like Radiohead and Franz
Ferdinand have just about caught up with a quarter of
a century later. First album The Modern Dance (1978)
now stands as a landmark album in that the dubby,
droned out bass-lines and off-kilter sounds were unlike
anything hitherto produced. (Well, except perhaps
Captain Beefheart.)
513
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An opening song being called ‘Nonalignment Pact’,
and, as Julian Cope described it, “a classic ‘girl’ song
with the most Stooged-out riff”, just says it all. Thomas’s
voice could shriek and whisper, the bursting
guitars sounded like M16 gunfire and the cover looked
like utopian propaganda created in Lenin’s Russia.
Follow up album, the just as inventive Dub Housing
(1978), loosened up the extremes, slowed down the delivery;
but equally sounded as though recorded between
Cleveland’s skidrow and the volcanoes of Java and is
widely regarded as their masterpiece. They continued
in the following decades to release challenging records,
all soaked in that American underground experience
that makes them a great, almost undiscovered band
and a perfect medicine against the corporate crap of
mainstream music.
David Thomas is still lead singer in Pere Ubu, and in
recent times he’s additionally created three albums and
plays live with a band he calls David Thomas and Two
Pale Boys. Still crossing boundaries and staying true to
his art with the stance that originally set the band apart,
I managed to ask him a few questions that I’ve always
wanted to find answers for. Important things, trivial
things. Here’s what I found out about his work, his attitude
and other stimulating or meaningless details.
I’ve been reading the Pere Ubu manifesto which
I find interesting. Things like ‘Don’t seek success’.
What’s the idea behind messages like that?
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We have always concentrated on making good music.
If you make good music people will search you
out. Maybe not lots of them. But some. As well we
have always been laissez-faire perfectionists. Seeking
success distracts from the principal function of a musical
group. It offers up temptations to deviate from
a proper course. I have nothing against ‘success’ – I
love the process of the market in fact – but not at the
cost of vision.
You’re playing in London with members of Sun
Ra Arkestra and Wayne Kramer. What’s your involvement
with the event?
Wayne is a friend and played a show as a member of
Pere Ubu a few years ago. I suppose he is ‘repaying’ the
compliment. He asked me to guest with the MC5 and
Arkestra. I am doing ‘Starship. It’s a great honour and
I am excited to do it.
Why the transition from Rocket From The Tombs
to Pere Ubu?
Because RFTT flew apart and I had ideas I wanted
to pursue.
When I hear 60s garage hits, I hear some kinda
semblance of the Ubu style. What US punk bands of
the 60s were you inspired by?
We were always into the American garage punk of
the 60s. You have to remember we grew up listening
to all that stuff on the radio. That was what was on
the radio. All that stuff was hits. Very big influence
514
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on Pere Ubu along with Velvets, Stooges and MC5.
Our first engineer and father of our current engineer,
Ken Hamann, was the engineer for songs like ‘Nobody
But Me’, ‘Time Won’t Let Me’, ‘Green Tambourine’,
all the early Terry Knight stuff, Bloodrock,
James Gang, etc.
Any British bands that have had a profound effect
upon you?
Profound? Probably not. Richard Thompson was
a big influence on the early 70s scene as were Soft
Machine, Pink Floyd (early), Incredible String Band.
Some guys were really into Kinks and Pretty Things.
Eno, of course. Kevin Ayres. John Cale.
The track ‘30 Seconds Over Tokyo’ seems prophetic
in its resonance. What were you trying to
express in that song?
It was a dramatic story of heroism and a book
that EVERY school boy read – Doolittle’s suicide
raid on Tokyo in 1942 just 2 months after Pearl
Harbor. A good choice for our cinematic approach.
Brief synopsis. US needed to strike a propaganda
blow against Japan right after Pearl Harbor and to
suggest to Japanese leaders that they were not safe
from retribution. Stripped down a flight of B-25s
of everything but a few bombs and launched them
off a carrier which they’d never be able to return to
(fuel) or land on (size). The plan was to drop bombs
on Tokyo harbour sites and crash land in China if
BUY Pere Ubu music online from and
they could make it, and then somehow get back to
America from the other side of the world. Most died.
It must take a lot of balls to sing in such unique
style. Where has it all come from?
It comes from not having a good voice, being tonedeaf
and not knowing what I was supposed to do. I
became the singer because the guitar I bought in order
to become the guitarist hurt my fingers. So I decided
to be the singer. I had NEVER sung and I couldn’t hit
any notes – I really am tone-deaf. So I had to figure
it out. What I figured out was that music also existed
as a spatial and temporal complex so I worked out
how to use those elements to communicate a story in a
musical way that had a semblance of melody. I create
a phrasing that makes use of those elements, engages
the instrumental elements, and it all somehow comes
out okay. At least after a couple initial years of trial
and error. That was part of my frustration of singing in
RFTT – I didn’t know how to handle not being able to
hear myself. Also in RFTT I sang other people’s songs
which I didn’t really understand so I didn’t know how
to construct them according to my methods and I knew
I sounded bad. As well I have no method to remember
what I sing, i.e. a melody. That’s why every time I sing
a song it varies to a greater or lesser extent. That’s why I
mostly only do material I write with musicians I know.
The artwork you’ve used on record sleeves is a
fantastic portfolio. What’s behind that?
515
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Almost all our artwork has been designed by my best
friend, John Thompson. A lot of the pictures were by
Mik Meilon – friend from the Plaza. I discuss some
ideas with John and give him the title. He comes up with
an idea and we bounce it around a little. The idea was to
do artwork that was more than a self-aggrandizing ego
thing – note we never put our pictures on the albums
except for Tenement Year which we only did because
we had never done it. We break even our own rules.
The artwork needs to set a mood that cooperates with
the intentions of the music.
What new records do you have in the pipeline?
About to start writing a new Ubu. Writing with
Cheetah for possible RFTT album. Working on a 2 Pale
Boys live album. Compiling Director’s Cut editions of
RGS and PA. More movie soundtracks for ICFOS and
X, The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Compiling 18 Monkeys
– The Film soundtrack.
What writers do you like?
BUY Pere Ubu music online from and
Raymond Chandler.
Any final nuggets of wisdom that you’d like to offer?
I never volunteer information.
All the greats have an edge, a certain intelligence
and David Thomas seems to be one your more cerebral
rock’n’roll musicians; so you can get away with asking
questions like that. And the line ‘If you make good music
people will search you out’, seems to be more than
enough wise advice that you usually hear from your
average rocker. Ubu fit into that cult category of being
a band that made people want form their own bands.
They were dangerous. Scuzzed out. Angular. Violent.
Everybody in a rock band should listen to them. All
the best ones already do. Any UK gigs would sell out
in instant, although no future dates are confirmed; but
with an Ubu record in the making, the live experience
is on some distant horizon. The meantime can offer
the opportunity to look for new bands that dare stretch
those anarchic, outward boundaries set by Pere Ubu. �
516
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published March 2005]
Hunter S. Thompson: A Real American Patriot
Chris Mitchell on why Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most important figures in American letters
I love my friends. Away from email for a few days, log
in this morning to 5 different people telling me Hunter
S. Thompson is dead.
Distraught isn’t the word.
Thompson was forever sidelined as a caricature in
the last couple of decades, a victim of his own mythmaking,
the crazy old bastard on the hill permanently
altered, packing guns and delivering apocalyptic pronouncements
on the rare occasions he could bring
himself to look at a typewriter. Loaded magazine got
to the point where they were interviewing him every
six months, just so another bunch of wannabe fanboy
journalists could make the pilgrimage to Woody Creek
in Aspen, Colorado and meet the man.
I periodically had a silly little fantasy of making
that pilgrimage myself one day and spending some
time shooting guns with the good Doctor. Yes, it’s
embarrassing to admit and possibly even more so to
read, but the point is, Hunter S. Thompson was one
of those writers who changed your perception of the
world. Irrevocably. So much so that you’d want to
meet him just to check he was real and shake his hand.
Because Hunter S. Thompson Got It.
He saw the world as it truly is, and the drugs and
guns and women were just a way to temporarily escape
that. (Hence the famous Samuel Johnson quotation that
prefaces Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – “he who
makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being
a man”). Similarly, they are incidental to his work, not
the core of it. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas may
be a depiction of a drug-crazed doomed sojourn in Sin
City, but it is also what it says on the cover: “A savage
journey into the heart of the American Dream”.
That was what Thompson chronicled for four decades.
He was first and foremost a political journalist of
the highest calibre. Read the first journalism collection
The Great Shark Hunt or his penultimate, Kingdom Of
Fear – Thompson sees America through unmasked
eyes, and as a true American patriot, he despairs of
what he sees. And he has the guts to say so. Calling
President Bush a “whorebeast” in print was funny, but
Thompson meant it with deadly sincerity. He considered
Bush worse that Nixon. There was no worse accolade
he could award. There’s no irony involved with
BUY Hunter S. Thompson books online from and
517
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Thompson – there’s buckets loads of bleak and twisted
humour which certainly makes him the funniest writer
of the 20th century in my opinion, but Thompson meant
all of it.
And this is what it comes down to. Hunter S. Thompson
was a consummate hellraiser and we loved him for
it. But that’s not what made him such an enduring, important
figure in American letters. His perception of the
collapse of America’s moral values both at home and
in its projection into the world through foreign policy
and intervention – or the lack of it – is what fuelled all
of his work throughout his writing career. He wanted to
be proud of America and for America to truly live up to
the ideals it has ascribed itself. For all the perception of
Thompson’s “outlaw” status and frequent brushes with
the law, Thompson was a deeply moral man, concerned
only with the destruction of his own country by greed
and avarice.
Farewell then, HST. Your passing means one less
strong voice of sanity in these Satanic times. �
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518
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published February 2001]
Hunter S. Thompson: Fear And Loathing
Nathan Cain reflects on the journalistic legacy of an elderly dope fiend
I found Hunter S. Thompson by accident. I was looking
through the stacks at my local public library, searching
for something, I don’t remember what, when I read the
title Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on the spine of an
orange paperback. It sounded vaguely familiar, so I took
it off the shelf. The cover featured a cartoonish drawing
of a man in a Hawaiian shirt with a long cigarette holder
and a suitcase, looking very guilty about something. A
jacket blurb by Tom Wolfe called the work I held in my
hand a “scorching epochal sensation.” (Which is, in my
opinion, the finest jacket blurb in the history of jacket
blurbs. Congratulations Mr Wolfe.) I was intrigued, so
I opened the book and read the infamous first sentence,
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of
the desert when the drugs began to take hold…” I had
found exactly what I had been searching for.
I was a 17-year-old high school student at the time
(an appellation which held the same appeal for me as
terminal cancer patient) and the tale of a sportswriter
and his crazed 300lb. Samoan attorney on a drug binge
so foul and extreme that it would have turned the most
dedicated libertine into a card carrying member of the
Prohibition Party was one of the most scabrously funny
pieces of work I had ever read. It was a wonderful tale
of possibility gone horribly awry, and by the time I was
finished with it I had a lot of questions.
Who was this lunatic Thompson? Why hadn’t I heard
of him before? Why was this book classified as nonfiction?
Was it humanly possible to behave that badly and
live to tell about it?
Thompson was in the right place at the right time
and he did the right thing, clamping down on a raw
nerve in the American psyche like a cranked crazed
Gila monster, suffusing the collective consciousness
with his own particular brand of poison. In the process
he became the most celebrated, or at least most
notorious, journalist of his era. Thompson’s poison
still runs through the veins of America, and by extension
the rest of the world, whose different regions, in
varying degrees, are subject to regular transfusions
of American culture. Thompson’s trademark phrase
“Fear and Loathing” and its various permutations
(fear and losing, fear and loaning, fear and loading…)
have become clichés. He inspired Gary Trudeau to
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519
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create his famous ‘Uncle Duke’ character in Doonesbury,
and Spider Jerusalem, the main character of
Warren Ellis’ fine comic book Transmetropolitan, is
obviously inspired by the good Doctor.
Back in the early 70s when his fangs were still sharp
no one could draw blood like Thompson. There is no
reason for me to write that Vegas and Fear And Loathing
On The Campaign Trail ‘72 are seminal works,
many people have said it many times and there is no
point in dwelling on it now.
Thompson was a creature of his times. He thrived and
grew on the possibilities of the 60s and turned viscous
when cornered by the reality of the 70s. He rose and fell
with Nixon, running out of steam when his favourite
villain was finally run out of town. Thompson’s own
description of Nixon’s ignominious departure after his
resignation, which can be found in his article ‘Fear and
Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises,’ reprinted in
The Great Shark Hunt, is surprisingly joyless. Thompson
writes:
“The end came so suddenly and with so little warning
that it was almost as if a muffled explosion in the White
House had sent up a mushroom cloud to announce that
the scumbag has been passed to what will pose for now
as another generation. The main reaction to Richard
Nixon’s passing – especially among journalists who
had been on the Deathwatch for two years – was a wild
and wordless orgasm of long awaited relief that tailed
off almost instantly to a dull, post-coital sort of depression
that still endures.”
Indeed, it is worth noting that The Great Shark
Hunt is dedicated to none other than Richard Milhous
Nixon and that in the introduction he writes, “I feel like
I might as well be up here carving the words for my
own tombstone … and when I finish, the only fitting
exit will be straight off this fucking terrace and into the
Fountain, 28 stories below and at least 200 yards out in
the air and across Fifth Avenue. No one could follow
that act.”
One of the great literary ironies of the century that
just ended may be that Thompson has lived long
enough to fade away and not met the sort of spectacular
end which he imagined for himself. Thompson himself
has publicly recognized the awkwardness of his situation
in the introduction to his first volume of letters,
The Proud Highway, when he writes of pretending to
be dead while his old correspondence was brought to
light, and again imagines a spectacular end for himself,
this time a high speed motorcycle wreck.
With the publication of his first volume of letters,
and the subsequent publication of The Rum Diary,
which was billed as “The Long Lost Novel,” but was
none of those things Thompson seemed to prove that
he is content to sit back and watch as the sort of works
that generally get published after an author’s death hit
the market.
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520
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In the last month two new Thompson titles have
hit shelves. The first, Screwjack, isn’t even really a
book, coming in at 59 pages, with rather large print.
It begins with a piece written during Thompson’s
first encounter with mescaline (‘Mescalito’ is also
reprinted in Songs Of The Doomed) , which would
become his drug of choice, and it only gets less understandable
from there. The second piece is the tale
of a doomed gambler, and the third, the infamous title
piece, is almost too bizarre for words, dealing with
a love affair between Raoul Duke and Screwjack the
cat. Interesting, but probably not worth 15 dollars,
unless you are the type of person who simply must
have this sort of literary curio.
The second book, Fear And Loathing In America,
Thompson’s second volume of letters, is, unlike
Screwjack, a must read. This book, the penultimate
volume of a projected three volume set is, if you are
going to buy one, the one to buy. Fear And Loathing
In America reprints Thompson’s correspondence from
1968, after the publication of his first book, Hell’s
Angels, through 1976, when the Great Gonzo Legend
had become fully established.
The letters themselves aren’t as interesting as the ones
found in The Proud Highway, but that is to be expected.
During the years covered in Thompson’s first volume of
letters he was, for the most part, unemployed, and had
more time to dedicate to his personal correspondence.
The beginning of America finds Thompson in a post
Hell’s Angels funk that lasts for over 300 pages. During
that time the Doctor wrestles with unfinished articles,
a book contract, and attempts to find a new direction to
take in the New Journalism.
At times, especially during its first third, is tedious.
No one, especially someone who writes, wants
to read about another writer’s lack of direction, no
matter how much he or she respects that particular
writer. Thompson spends a lot of time agonizing over
a book he is supposed to write about “The Death of
the American Dream,” As it turns out, Thompson
considers Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas a side
project, and not his American Dream book, which
posterity has shown it to be.
As the book progresses, however, it becomes more
interesting, showing Thompson’s creation of his public
persona, the character on the front of the paperback edition
of Vegas trying to sneak out of a hotel with a suitcase
full of drugs and some serious unpaid bills, and the
subsequent discomfort that Thompson suffered when
he became forever confused with one of Ralph Steadman’s
drawings. F&L in America shows Thompson for
what he really was, a workaholic writer with a brutal
sense of humour who has an affinity for recreational
drug use, and not a full-time addict who occasionally
became lucid enough to write articles.
The most interesting disclosure in the book is the fact
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that Thompson was not on drugs when he sat down to
write Vegas. In a letter to his Random House editor Jim
Silberman, who stated that he did not think Thompson
was on drugs, Thompson casually admits to being sober,
but asks Silberman to hold his piece on the matter
because the people at Rolling Stone (where Vegas was
first published) were absolutely convinced that he had
engaged in “a ranking freakout.”
A couple of years later Thompson feels quite differently
about the image he put out there in Vegas,
complaining bitterly when he is misquoted in Esquire
as saying that “at least” 45 percent of what he writes
is true, and becoming incensed when Gary Trudeau
debuts his ‘Uncle Duke’ character in Doonesbury.
Reading this collection, one can’t help but get the
impression that Thompson was feeling pressure to
keep up an act that no one could follow, and that the
publication of his letters is a way to once and for
all to answer any questions anyone might still have
about the ‘real’ Hunter S. Thompson so that he can
live out the rest of his life free from the compulsion
to do himself in a suitably dramatic manner. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published January 2005]
Colm Tóibín: The Story Of The Night
Peter Robertson
Short-listed once again for the Booker Prize, this year
for The Master, about the life of closet-gay novelist
Henry James, Tóibín has become even more of a name
in Britain. But his hopes were dashed a second time –
in October that country’s most coveted literary prize
was awarded to rival gay writer, Alan Hollinghurst, for
his novel, The Line Of Beauty.
While Hollinghurst specializes in evocations of the
effete English aristocracy, Tóibín’s trademark is gloom.
This tendency is showcased in his novel, The Story Of
The Night, inspired by his experiences in Argentina. As
a journalist, Tóibín visited Buenos Aires to cover the
trials of the Generals who had ‘disappeared’ thousands
of civilians in the early 1980s; but on humid summer
nights, crazed with desire, he cruised a cityscape
charged with sexual expectation.
Tóibín was exposed mercilessly to the self-denial
of ‘machismo’ – the gay men he met, married or with
girlfriends, boasted that no one would ever know their
real orientation. This is not the case with the novel’s
protagonist, Richard Garay, who comes out to his
mother – she expresses “utter contempt”. The narrative
BUY Colm Tóibín books online from and
of The Story Of The Night spans the genocide waged by
the military junta, the gung-ho nationalism of the Falklands
war and Argentina’s phoenix-like regeneration
after wholesale privatization. In spare and fluid prose,
Tóibín explores Garay’s cultural duality (Argentine but
of English descent) and charts his meteoric rise from
jaded English teacher to full-fledged yuppie. Befriended
by undercover CIA agents, Susan and David Ford, and
bedecked in Italian designer suits, he even gets the man
he desires – the handsome son of a wealthy senator –
who leaves home to live with him in a dream penthouse
down by the river. Garay has everything he has ever
wanted, so why not leave it there?
True, he later goes haywire during a trip to New
York where he snorts cocaine and ends up as the sexual
plaything of a seedy public relations executive. Tóibín
could have glossed over such aberrations but is determined
that these should be milestones on the road to a
pitiless nemesis. Even worse, by the end of the novel,
the novel’s four most important gay characters (Garay
and his boyfriend included) have been poleaxed by
AIDS. In an image that will delight many homophobes,
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any prospect of happiness is bequeathed to two young,
sturdy and heterosexual youths glimpsed raising the
sails of a boat by the ailing lovers.
Stating that his priority as a writer is to “hold the mirror
up to nature”, Tóibín has compared himself with the
artist Vermeer. But far from being a faithful chronicler,
Tóibín is a gloom-monger. Belying the novel’s message,
most gay men do not die of AIDS and these days the
claim of a critic like Joseph Epstein, made as recently
as 1970, that gay lives are “part of the pain of the earth”
is absurd. The distinguished Cambridge novelist E.M.
Forster was determined that his novel Maurice should
end on a note of affirmation.
In a recent review, Tóibín wrote: “There is something
heroic about Forster´s refusal in Maurice to insist that
BUY Colm Tóibín books online from and
Scudder does not get arrested, or hang himself, or go to
Buenos Aires”; but adds that he finds the ending unsatisfactory,
admitting that he feels compelled to represent
gay lives as tragic. Here Tóibín has bedfellows as
distinguished as Gore Vidal and James Baldwin who in
The City And The Pillar (1948) and Giovanni’s Room
(1956) produced novels of gay self-loathing which
end in murder and self-destruction; but both writers
produced these works pre-Stonewall. Tóibín – who has
erupted onto the literary scene at a more enlightened
moment – has fewer excuses to peddle such misery.
So any chance of this latter-day Jeremiah trading in his
gloom? Not if an interview he gave to LIT is anything
to go by: “You want loss and longing? You’ll get loss
and longing. I’ve only just started”. �
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Review [published March 2008]
Amos Tutuola: The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Jason Weaver
Aside from the transmogrified strangeness of folk and
fairy tales, Amos Tutuola’s 1952 novel The Palm-Wine
Drinkard is unlike almost anything else in print. Nebulous
comparisons might be made with Ovid’s Metamorphoses,
Kafka’s inconclusive parables or Alice In
Wonderland, but things behave very differently from
even these European gargoyles in Tutuola’s twilight
world. I know nothing about the author’s own relationship
to Nigerian culture. I would rather meet him as a
stranger on the road, enchanting and a little spooky.
What everyone knows is that David Byrne and Brian
Eno named their album of bricolage and technological
tribalism after Tutuola’s second novel My Life In The
Bush Of Ghosts. Both claimed they had never actually
read the book, but it would have been a wholly appropriate
influence on Byrne’s ‘stop making sense’ lyrics
and the circuit- breaking Eno.
Every novel simulates a compact universe. It sets the
rules by which that existence operates and, to be successful
on its own terms, it must adhere to these tacit
laws. As an exception, Thomas Pynchon’s V exploits
this by setting two wholly incompatible universes
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
against one another, disrupting the coherence of narrative
singularity through which most novels stage
their rhetorical arguments. Fantasy stories, on the
other hand, often unwittingly flout their own narrative
coherence. The Lord Of The Rings wants it both ways.
We are expected to surrender to the dramatic tension
of classic narrative logic, where everything is at stake,
where every act is terminal and can never be undone.
The logic of Oedipus Rex is inexorable, the “infernal
machine” as Cocteau called it. But when Frodo lies
dying in The Lord Of The Rings or as the Hobbits are
surrounded by malevolence, the emotional charge is
defused. A spell is invoked, time is reversed, the slate
is wiped clean. This is as incompatible with relentless
narrative as Pynchon’s and the fantasy story fails on
both counts.
What is so vital about The Palm-Wine Drinkard is
Tutuola’s absolute dedication to the fantastic. All laws
of the probable are flouted and everything is elastic.
Details are hasty and sketched and sentences often end
with a blunt “etc”. Things are most often described by
the elements that mark them out, make them what they
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are. For brevity, places and things are named by their
description: “The Red-People in the Red Town” or,
rather wonderfully, “The Skull as a Complete Gentleman”.
The latter is a bare cranium that hires body parts
and a nice suit and poses in the market place as a kind
of Bryan Ferry in order to lure pretty young women.
Events are compressed, time collapses, a decade passes
in a sentence. It is, appropriately, a drunken logic.
The plot, such as it is, follows the eldest of eight children.
His “work”, as he puts it, is to drink palm-wine.
He is an expert and drinks 225 kegs of it a day. He
cannot even drink plain water any more. The drinkard
is supplied by a tapster who falls fatally from a tree and,
because nobody can tap palm-wine as well as this character,
the narrator sets off for Deads’ Town to find his
posthumous incarnation. On the way, the drinkard finds
up a wife, uses all kinds of juju and meets incredible
characters such as “The Invisible-Pawn”, “The Hungry-
Creature”and “The Faithful-Mother in the White Tree”.
Inside the White Tree is a kind of hotel-cum-hospital
with a great ballroom. Scale is immaterial in the bush.
It is like a mutilated episode of In The Night Garden or
an adventure from The Mighty Boosh.
The transmission of folk tales follows evolutionary
principles. Oral traditions enforce that each retelling of
a story will mutate it according to personal and local
bias and that the most mnemonic elements will carry
from one teller to the next. Fantastic and grotesque de-
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
tails are the organizing DNA rather than psychological
depth or moral reckoning. What is the ‘use’ of a fairy
tale? The briefest glance through the Brothers Grimm
or Calvino’s collection of Italian stories will demonstrate
that ‘happy ever after’ is only one strand of many
different outcomes. Often stories will take delight in
punishing the hero. These seem to be stories told for the
sake of telling, for the sake of variation, imagination
and invention. Like turn of the evolutionary dice, folk
tales are always tweaking the seeds.
Tutuola’s writing seems inherited from an oral background.
It shares the same splashy colour, the incredible
and the memorable. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is an intensely
visual story, a vivid engagement with the imagination.
One impossible to convey in any other medium,
even anime. The sparseness of descriptive detail works
on the reader, like a parasite working on the cortex to
produce vivid hallucinations. One imagines Burroughs
enjoying Tutuola’s magic. All other art forms would be
too literal, filling in the spaces that Tutuola is able to
exploit. How would cinema, for example, deal with the
great and elusive time span of this novel, expanding
and contracting as it does?
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is mischievous. That the
journey fails in its original purpose is barely given
consideration and there is little in the way of moral
resolution at the book’s abrupt ending. At one point
the narrator must act as a court judge on the hilarious
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and inspired case of a man who borrows money for a
living. He puts great pride into his work. When a debt
collector comes to claim a pound back off him, the borrower
kills himself rather than fail in his occupation.
The collector himself has great pride and kills himself
to follow the debt into heaven. A curious bystander,
who has witnessed this great contest of wills, also stabs
himself in order to see the final outcome. On the cases
he presides over, the narrator defers judgement as long
as he can, offering an appeal to the reader:
“so I shall be very much grateful if anyone who
reads this story-book can judge one or both cases and
send the judgement to me as early as possible, because
the whole people in the ‘mixed town’ want me very
urgently to come and judge the two cases”.
Towards the end of the story, the narrator is able to
avert a great famine through the use of a magic egg.
However, the crowds this miraculous act brings to his
house are keeping him awake and the grumpy saviour
decides he’s done enough good work. In this way, Tutuola
wickedly sidesteps good behaviour.
Despite its comparisons with other oral traditions,
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is a text, very much a work
of printed fiction, rather than transcription. The book
makes great use of parenthesis, abbreviation, appeals
to the reader and a series of charming and sometimes
baffling banner headlines (“WHO WILL TAKE THE
MOUSE?” and “AFRAID OF TOUCHING TER-
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
RIBLE CREATURES IN BAG”). These stylistic tics
give the novel an even greater personality and (to this
reader) more mystery and vitality. The recognized
elements of the western novel – narrative resolution,
ethical dialectics and psychological mapping – are
not considerations of such writing. Unlike The Lord
Of The Rings, there are no appeals to sentiment or
emotional identification. Therefore, no agenda of
good and evil. Similarly, literary decorum is absent.
Tutuola’s style is both loose and terse and reads as
spontaneous. This is both exciting and somewhat
disorientating, which befits a picaresque journey
through strange, strange territory. Tutuola’s bush land
is a place of magic, where all the roads have ended.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard is our guide.
Post-script: Having written out of ignorance, I did
some research. The Palm-Wine Drinkard was originally
composed in 1946 – quickly, almost on a whim – by the
semi-itinerant, basically educated Tutuola. It had an interesting,
meandering path to publication six years later
and was quickly praised (by white readers) and damned
(by Nigerian authors and academics). Ironically, both
viewpoints seem to stem from the rusty old issue of
authenticity; the novel apparently conforming to Western
stereotypes of the primitive to Euro-American eyes
whilst failing in its faithfulness to Yoruban storytelling
traditions to African ears. Oyekan Owomoyela is the
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most vocally hostile, accusing Tutuola of being intellectually
colonized by north-western consumerism, failing
to oppose the colonial mindset in any way and failing
to demonstrate an authentic Yoruban voice on virtually
any count. Ironically, Byrne and Eno faced analogous
calls of cultural imperialism on their musical safari.
Tutuola’s disinclination to honour his sources also sees
him branded as a plagiarist. Other critics were peeved
at the rough nature of the author’s writing style, afraid
that it would indeed stereotype Africans as intellectual
BUY Amos Tutuola books online from and
primitives. In recent years, some Nigerians such as the
author Ben Okri have reclaimed Tutuola as a heavy
influence and some academics, such as David Whittaker
have attempted to place his work beyond a strictly
post-colonial framework. Actually, it is precisely a lack
of authenticity that makes The Palm-Wine Drinkard
such a thrilling novel to me. It is folk culture’s erratic
evolution – a kind of Chinese whispers – that makes
it so resistant to the authenticity that so many seem to
want it to represent. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published July 2003]
Stuart Walton: Out Of It
Chris Mitchell
Given the jacket cover emblazoned with dayglo euphemisms
for getting altered and the obligatory chortling
review quotes from numerous lad mags, you’d be forgiven
for wondering at first glance if Stuart Walton’s
book is a paragon of research sobriety. But rather than
being another cheap cash-in on the still-burgeoning UK
drug scene, Out Of It proves to be a radical and challenging
rethink to current day perceptions about drugs
and their usage, whether legal or not.
Instead of making any sort of pretence towards argumentative
objectivity, Walton firmly states his case
early on by declaring his own experience and interest
in taking drugs and his contention that becoming intoxicated
is a fundamental human drive rather than an
optional experience, as strong as the primal needs for
food, water and sex. Indeed, Out Of It is partly written
in reaction to the censure from government and medical
establishments which continually attempt to restrict
the populace’s intake of anything which might bring
them pleasure.
This is a refreshingly honest approach to a subject
about which most writers have pretended they have no
BUY Stuart Walton books online from and
first hand knowledge, and Walton’s narrative feels similarly
unfettered. There is a distinct academic rigour at
work in the structure of the book, but Out Of It remains
eminently readable whilst drawing on a huge range
of sources, both historical and contemporary, for and
against, to indicate the lengths (and depths) to which
humans have always been impelled to find ways to
change their reality and the fallout of doing so. Indeed,
it becomes difficult to argue with Walton’s thesis that
we are impelled towards intoxication, however much
society might attempt to stop us. Or maybe that’s just
the predilections of this particular writer.
The numerous political and practical arguments concerning
the hypocrisy and ultimate failure of the War
On Drugs are well-rehearsed and well-rehearsed here,
but the half-baked theories of drug culture luminaries
such as Terence McKenna and Aldous Huxley do not
get an easy ride either. While being convinced of the
intoxication imperative is one thing, whether the reader
will go along with Walton’s advocacy of legalisation
for all drugs is a different matter, because the fallout of
doing so is so difficult to predict.
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From the literary point of view, Walton delivers a
fascinating chapter discussing the hoary old argument
that drugs increase creativity, taking in Coleridge, De
Quincey, the Beats and an excellent analysis of Malcolm
Lowry’s Under The Volcano.
In short, Out Of It is something of a vital contribu-
BUY Stuart Walton books online from and
tion to the literature both of and about drugs – it makes
its points effectively without becoming polemical and
shows up many drug-related arguments, both for and
against, to be simply vacuous. Out Of It does a neat job
of clearing a path to let a real debate about intoxicants
and their place in society begin. �
530
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published March 2000]
Alan Warner: Existential Ecstasy
Zoe Strachan talks to Alan Warner about French intellectuals
and the chemical generation genre
ZS: Your story ‘After the Vision’ was in my opinion
the best in the Children Of Albion Rovers anthology
produced by Rebel Inc. It says it was taken from something
called The Far Places. Was this a novel? It seems
to have similarities to These Demented Lands.
AW: Yes, a section of a novel and parts of a linked
series of short stories called, believe it or not, Trend
Fault Team 2, about Highland kids who were into rap
music. I might rework some of these stories sometime.
These Demented Lands came from some other area of
my storm tossed imagination.
ZS: These Demented Lands was a little bit different
from your other novels, it was more surreal and included
illustrations. Did you think of it as a chance to
be more experimental with your text?
AW: Well, the illustrations you mention are already in
Morvern Callar, the map Red Hannah draws for Lanna,
for example, or the road sign. I enjoy breaking up the
language that way and it sort of takes the reader out of
the delusion of the text into another delusion!
ZS: Morvern Callar attracted lots of “Highland rave”
type comments. Do you think there is a point these days
BUY Alan Warner books online from and
in distinguishing between Scottish and other writing?
AW: It’s like Duke Ellington said about music … there
is good writing and bad writing and those are the only
two types.
ZS: And do you think that the chemical generation
genre has run it’s course now? Were you pleased at
being included in that whole thing?
AW: That was something invented by an editor called
Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the
1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short
story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think
you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t
think you can base a whole literary movement on writing
about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered
me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers
than the writing, there was something egotistical and
silly about it, ‘Look, we go to nightclubs but we are
writers,’ so fucking what. I’m interested in great books
not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used
to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much
better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls,
colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar
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there. No bouncers either, just kangaroos.
ZS: You’re currently working on a novel called At A
Fair Old Rate Of Knots. How would you describe it
and when do you think it might be published?
AW: (First answer) SORR M COMPUTR HAS RE-
ALL ROKE DOW
(Later) Travelogue from the point of view of a homeless
guy who has no choice but to travel, and a critique
of past Highland/literary/historical landmarks. It could
end up with a shootout at Culloden battlefield! The title
is now The Man Who Walks. I don’t have a clue when
it’ll be published.
ZS: You’ve said that you really got into reading with
authors like Alan Paton and Andre Gide. Who or what
else inspired you to start writing, and who’s work really
excites you (intellectually or otherwise) at the moment?
AW: I’M SERIOUS THE KEOARD IS FUCKED
Then: Camus (see below), Sartre (ditto), Michael
Moorcock, Nietzsche, Herman Hesse, J.G. Ballard,
Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, the music of
Holger Czukay.
Now: Same writers and Mark Richard, Annie Proulx,
Juan Carlos Onetti and the music of Holger Czukay.
ZS: Morvern Callar sometimes reminds me a little
of Camus’ Mersault or even Sartre’s Roquentin, particularly
in terms of her connections with other people.
Were you self-consciously trying to explore existential
concepts or styles of narration?
BUY Alan Warner books online from and
AW: IT IS EITEITAIL E
You’re spot on, Nausea, The Roads To Freedom trilogy
and Camus’ work were awful important to me, especially
Nausea and The Outsider. I think Morvern Callar
is an existential novel … and one that taps into the
absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern
is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to
jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she
suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man
she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former)
domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get
dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it
metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it
so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past
the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of
death, in that way she’s heroic I think.
ZS: There’s quite a few university courses now on
creative writing as a discipline. Do you think that this
is a good thing or does it run the risk of reversing some
of the democratization of literature which has occurred
recently (perhaps particularly in Scotland with Canongate
and Rebel Inc), and putting literature back into an
academic context?
AW: SORR I’M REAKIG UP HERE
Well I feel guilty about my suspicions because many
good writers have come out of those workshops, especially
in the US where there seem to be millions of
them. But I’m secretly appalled by the concept, I think
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writing is so intensely time consuming and private an
activity there shouldn’t be much time for gurus and
classes to attend in universities. I don’t think writing
can be taught … you can be given pointers … be told
to read certain books etc. but the only discoveries the
writer makes are going to be solitary ones on the page.
I see writing as an existential act, an axis between how
you live your life and literature, the idea that you can
institutionalise that scares me. It’s also a matter of time,
it might take you ten years to find your style, the idea
that a uni professor of creative writing can bring out the
old stylistic KY jelly doesn’t convince me.
ZS: Do you think writers have a specific role in society
to educate or agitate or produce art, or are they just doing
a job like anyone else?
AW: FI COMPUTER
I think intelligence should be legalised, I think, as the
poet Robin Robertson says, writers write for the void.
I feel I make lonely cries and sometimes someone
hears me, a writer can only follow the needs of the
creatures of their imagination; if writers are going to
write to formulas, be it the 19th-century English novel
or Soviet socialist realism (or Chinese) they will be
doomed to artistic failure though they might flourish
with royalties.
ZS: A.L. Kennedy recently brought out a book of
poetry, and Irvine Welsh made that record. Have you
considered forms other than prose with your writing, or
BUY Alan Warner books online from and
been tempted to a complete change of medium?
AW: Well I mess around with oil and acrylic painting on
large canvas. Abstract stuff. I’ve done a few on empty
cigar tubes and I collect out of date credit cards so I’m
going to paint on top of them. I’m doing one on top
of Airfix models I’ve stuck to the canvas, I melted all
the Airfix models into eerie shapes with a blow torch.
I reckon they should sell for millions. I’m interested
in other forms of writing. I’m working on an original
screenplay and I publish the odd poem.
ZS: Do you think that in the future people will have
stopped reading books, that attention spans will have
decreased so much that everything has to be in visual
and auditory fragments? Or that everything will be
virtual and interactive?
AW: I HOPE COMPUTER HAVE ZERO ROLE I THE
FUTURE SORRI THIS LAP TOP HAS REALLQUIT
ALL THE KEOARD IS SEIZED TR TO SED THIS
MADA MADA DO SED OUT A SEARCH PARTY
Nah, you don’t have to switch books on or log on,
the tactile immediacy of a book in your greasy palm
will never die. That doesn’t mean people will read
good quality literature though. I don’t think the book
is under serious threat, but literature is. People have
been sounding the death of the book for too long, when
cinema became huge in the 1950’s people predicted
the end of the novel but movies actually lead to more
novel reading. I think the “dumbing down” in culture
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is worrying … the appeal of channel 5 and all these tits
and canned laugh game, the idea that ‘art’ is just for
pretentious wanks etc. etc … All that worries me. But
virile art forms survive all kinds of upheavals. Even
with a dying readership people would still write novels
and some of them, great ones.
ZS: And are you working on the script for the film of
Morvern Callar, and do you think it’ll translate well to
a visual medium?
AW: I think Lynne Ramsay and Michael Caton Jones
are the most exciting filmmakers to come out of Scotland
since Bill Douglas so I’m over the moon they’re
each adapting one of my novels. Lynne is still working
BUY Alan Warner books online from and
on her screenplay of Morvern Callar in between her
busyness with the international success of Ratcatcher
which is surely one of the greatest films ever made in
Scotland. Alan Sharp, the Scottish novelist and Hollywood
screenwriter (Rob Roy, Night Moves, Ulzana’s
Raid) is working on The Sopranos for Michael. Lynne
and I will probably do a bit of work together on the final
screenplay, dialect and that, but I really Lynne’s vision,
she’s a real artist and I just want to go with her vision
of the film not mine. She’s even said she’ll let me in on
the editing so it should be exciting but with someone of
Lynne’s integrity you’ve just got to let them make the
movie they want. �
534
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Interview [published September 2009]
Belinda Webb: Justified Anger
Ben Granger interviews Belinda Webb
BG: Many people first read A Clockwork Orange when
they’re very young, and fall in love with it. When did
you first read it, and what was your reaction?
BW: Actually I came to it fairly late, I read it just a
few years ago, I was in my 20s. I didn’t want to read
it before, I thought it was a boy’s book – a book about
boys who were violent for no reason, which had nothing
to say to me. Talk about judging a book by its
cover! When I did finally read it, from the first page,
the language just amazed me.
BG: The book seems to take a fairly even inspiration
from both Orange and Manchester itself. Which inspired
you more?
BW: Moss Side is the stronger influence. Moss Side,
Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock, these areas around
Oxford Road, not far from where we’re sitting. Poor
areas right next to a massive student population. Populations
which may as well come from different worlds.
BG: The lively contempt Alex shows for the ‘Blytons’
[her slang word for the respectably and middle-class]
was presumably inspired by this.
BW: Yes, that and the novels of Enid Blyton herself.
BUY Belinda Webb books online from and
Growing up reading books like Mallory Towers, about
all these girls playing hockey in boarding school … in
a way it just served to remind me this is the kind of
education I would never have, it made you feel worse
in a way. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but the
contrast was so massive.
BG: Your Alex is violent, but not nearly as violent as
the Alex of Burgess, which makes for a very different
dynamic to the book which inspired it.
BW: Yes, her violence is much more just about expressing
anger, justified anger. The Alex of Clockwork
Orange is much more sadistic. That suited Burgess
who was posing questions about the nature of choice,
about choosing between two evils. My Alex comes
more from my own experience. The choices she makes
I see as positive.
BG: How much of you is there in Apple’s Alex?
BW: Well, I was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but at
the same time I was the oldest girl in a family of seven
trying to keep it together. Like her, I was angry rather
than rebellious, rebelling implies you’ve got something
constructive to rebel against. I didn’t go around beating
535
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people up, and I wore Dr Martens rather than ballet
shoes! But like her, I was an autodidact, always looking
for something new.
BG: Whereas Clockwork Orange has the fictional
behaviour-control of the ludovico technique, the Bill
and Bob technique of your book is a direct attack on the
very real techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous and the
self help industry in general.
BW: My book isn’t a prediction, but looking at how
things could go if we follow America in this way, as
we do in so many other ways. The addiction ‘industry’
is massive in America, whole communities are leaving
this sober, denying life. It preaches that nothing is about
social conditions, it just says you’re morally defective
in some way.
BG: Your Alex is a symbol of autonomy against this
deterministic outlook?
BW: It’s about more than autonomy. It’s been said the
characters of the Scottish writers Kelman and Welsh
are informed a great deal by existentialism, determining
your own way no matter what the consequences, and no
matter what structures are in place. That’s true of Alex
certainly, she’s in tune with her inner existentialist!
BG: The invention at work in the language is probably
the books biggest achievement. Have you always been
into playing with language in this way?
BW: On one level it’s a really juvenile thing, playing
with words like toys. Its like a puzzle thing, playing
BUY Belinda Webb books online from and
with puzzles. But on another, language is so vital, so
important. Noam Chomsky talks about how language
informs power structures, how the words you use both
signify and inform your politics, where you’re coming
from. It all comes together in the book.
BG: Your language is inspired by Burgess’ ‘nadsat’,
but at the same time is very different to it. Once again,
its nothing like a pastiche.
BW: Burgess was a very intelligent man, and a linguist,
he was drawing from other languages, Russian, Spanish,
Italian. I know English and that’s all I know – I
think that’s enough to be getting on with! I looked at
English words which we no longer use for whatever
reason. Latin too, which has long been the preserve of
the elite. Once again, as with her intellectual passion, I
wanted Alex to reclaim these things for normal people.
BG: The Mancunian dystopia you explore is female
dominated, with males largely obsolete. Is female
domination a bad thing, or is this one positive aspect of
an otherwise grim future?
BW: Not it’s not positive. The perspective of the book
is I’d say humanist rather than feminist, and the fact
men are on the way out is drawing on the marginalisation
of men today in working class communities
like Moss Side. Male lives are wasted and that’s not a
good thing.
BG: Some readers might be surprised to see a book set
in Moss Side with little mention made of race, and the
536
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characters would seem to be white.
BW: Moss Side has become synonymous with black
people but there is a large white working-class population
as well, which gets overlooked I think. There
are other immigrant descendants, like the Irish, my
ancestors, too. I was writing drawing from my own
background, race wasn’t really an issue I was dealing
with. Class on the other hand is.
BG: Is there a straightforward political message in
the book?
BW: Yes, again, class. Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that
we’re all middle-class now, he clearly never visited
Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over
clear. Alex here is a voice that is otherwise not heard.
BUY Belinda Webb books online from and
BG: You’ve been involved in creative writing
projects with teenagers in both Moss Side and
Brixton. What’s the main advice you would give to
young writers?
BW: I think the fact the way I write is not in a mainstream
voice is the main thing, and I hope this encourages
young people. People should write in their own
voice and not be deflated. My sister went on a creative
writing course and it was – you must write in this way
and that way. If you’re going to write in that way you
may as well be in a factory, dryly sticking different bits
of formulae together. It may sound like a platitude or a
cliché but staying true to your own voice really is the
most important thing in writing. �
537
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Irvine Welsh
Biography
Given the level of his fame these days, it’s easy to
forget that Irvine Welsh spent a long time in relative
obscurity during the 1990s, and even after the critically
acclaimed publication of Trainspotting, didn’t
really arrive in the mainstream until the advent of
the movie. Trainspotting (the book, the movie, the
play) is one of the cultural landmarks of 90s Britain
and continues to hold a strange fascination on successive
generations of readers. Harry Gibson’s stage
adaptation in particular has introduced theatre to a
whole new audience who would otherwise never go
to see a play.
Welsh’s subsequent output has been interesting
and uneven - as evinced by Gary Marshall’s scathing
review of Filth, which gets plenty of hate mail from
Welsh fanboys - and his transformation into a pillar
of the UK’s literary establishment within the space of
a decade is nothing short of bizarre.
I set up IrvineWelsh.com as a link directory to
Welsh related material on the Net, while Welsh’s own
official site is at IrvineWelsh.net.
Chris Mitchell �
Articles
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
Expletives Repeated
Interview with Harry Gibson by Chris Mitchell 539
You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Feature by Dr Willy Maley
Queerspotting
541
Zoe Strachan’s feature on Irvine Welsh
and Alan Warner
Filth
545
Review by Gary Marshall 554
538
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Interview [published September 1997]
Irvine Welsh / Harry Gibson: Expletives Repeated
Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting has taken the theatre world by storm. Chris
Mitchell discusses censorship, sincerity and swearing with the director
Trainspotting has been the cultural phenomenon of
1996. Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh-based tale of drugs,
dole and self-destruction has sold over 400,000 copies,
the film has won critical acclaim across England, Europe
and America, while the stage version has played
to packed houses throughout the country. The stage
versions of four of Welsh’s plays have subsequently
been collected in the book 4Play.
It’s arguable that the play has been the most extreme
of Trainspotting’s three incarnations, its profanity
and violence sending shockwaves through the theatre
circuit. The Times reviewed Trainspotting’s debut last
December under the headline “West End gets smack in
the face”. This month the show steams into Brighton’s
Gardner Arts Centre to conclude its seventh production
within a year. The cast of four has gone through 23
different line-ups in that time, testament to the psychological
toll of enacting Welsh’s narcotic nightmares.
Trainspotting’s director Harry Gibson first started work
on adapting the novel three years ago. Asked if Welsh
had any direct input on the stage script, Gibson laughs,
“Oh no, he thinks theatre is bourgeois shite. Which is,
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
of course, completely true. But now I’ve converted him
and he thinks most theatre is bourgeois shite. The sign of
a true genius and professional is that they let you get on
with it without peering over your shoulder.”
Gibson is already well familiar with the intricacies
of censorship, thanks to the problems Trainspotting’s
language has encountered: “BBC Radio asked me ages
ago to do an adaptation of Trainspotting. Then they
looked at it. When they realised that landing on ‘Planet
Trainspotting’ means you can’t walk for two lines without
bumping into a cunt, they bottled.”
It’s precisely this sort of restriction that makes Gibson
passionate about the stage: “Theatre is a far more
explicit medium. I’d hesitantly say that gives it the
edge over the film version of Trainspotting. But then,
the film version was trying to do something completely
different. It’s The Likely Lads on acid. It’s also a miracle
of marketing.
“But you don’t need that in the theatre because you
know it’s bourgeois shite and no one’s going to come
and see it unless you put on something really unusual.
So you just concentrate on being as faithful to the origi-
539
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nal as possible. And you’ve got the freedom to do that
because theatre is the exception to the rule. It hasn’t
suffered much censorship since the 1950s. The theatre
is very much a middle class medium and therefore it’s
considered quite all right to have arseshagging and all
that sort of thing going on because it won’t be a bad
influence on the proles because they won’t see it. It’s
the telly you’ve got to control because it’ll get through
to the working class and probably pervert the children.
So ordinary people have to put up with tons of censorship
all the time on the telly, whereas when they go to
the theatre they get to hear it like it really is.”
This freedom of portrayal has been tested to further
extremes with Gibson’s adaptation of Welsh’s second
novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares. Nightmares makes
Trainspotting look like Ivor The Engine, with the
story centring around rapist and football hooligan, Roy
Strang. Gibson’s commitment to faithfully representing
the text doesn’t shy away from the novel’s most appalling
moments. “If you have to cry or turn away from
particular scenes, then you do. But the scenes stay in.
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
It’s necessary that they are there. It’s great to be doing
this kind of stuff because it’s in people’s bloodstreams,
it’s not classic, it’s not old, it’s not trying to teach you
something, it’s not trying to tell you to live better lives,
it’s just there like the smell of your own sweat. I really
wish theatre could keep on being like that and not keep
slipping back into being a snobby, musty medium.”
Despite Nightmares’ success, the chances of it following
Trainspotting around the country are distinctly
limited. “It’s filthy expensive because it’s an epic panto
from hell. I might do a small version of it in which a
small group of naked people savage each other in a
cage. I’m completely serious about that. I’m very into
sensationalism, I’m a shocking sensationalist.”
Even after being immersed within Irvine Welsh’s
violent realities for the last three years, Gibson’s next
major project sounds like a major challenge: “I’m going
to do something rather delightful next. I have the
rights to do a stage version of A.A, Milne’s When We
Were Very Young. It’ll be set in 1924 which will be very
lovely and no one will say ‘cunt’ at all.” �
540
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published January 1999]
Irvine Welsh: You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play
You’ll Have Had Your Hole
Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind
of people who attended football matches at his plays.
Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record
in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with
writers who can play in any position, it has begun to
enjoy success on another stage. The country has gone
from Celtic fringe to cultish frontier. Where it hitherto
proved fertile ground for English and European theatre,
Scotland is now growing its own, and exporting it too.
One of the advantages of being a colonized culture is
that you can break more easily with established forms
and norms.
In Scotland the traditional divide between two kinds
of theatre, high brow and low-brow, was crossed by
7:84 (Scotland) and a new theatre of commitment. This
shift was reflected in the founding of Mayfest in the
early 1980s, a Glasgow arts festival backed by the trade
unions whose mission was to ‘celebrate not only May
Day but also Scottish working class theatre and popular
political theatre from other countries’. A key player in
successive Mayfests and in touring community venues
was Wildcat Theatre Company. Today, with Mayfest
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
on ice and Wildcat’s claws pared by cuts in funding,
polemical theatre has reached an impasse. On one level
this can be read alongside the failure of traditional institutions
such as political parties and trade unions to
effect change. With subsidised theatre on its uppers and
old-style political theatre on a downer, the time was
ripe for the kind of high jinks among low lives offered
by Irvine Welsh and others.
Between the formal experimentation of the Citizens’
and the radical commitment of 7:84, something was
lost. If the working classes were absent from one then
they were straightened out and made presentable in
the other. Neither avant-garde theatre nor agitprop
were sufficient in themselves to do justice to those
excluded from official culture, an exclusion that was
literally obscene. Established theatres were slow to
respond to the dynamism of popular culture, and to the
explosion in fiction and poetry that was transforming
the Scottish literary map. With Glasgow experiencing
a crisis of identity as the workers city was repackaged
as City of Culture, the East Coast stirred. If Glasgow’s
tea was out, then Edinburgh’s was in the making. The
541
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Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh acted as a shaping force
in promoting new writing and showcasing innovative
productions.
Suburban sermons yielded to urban hymns, as mainstream
political themes gave way to a slipstream of
more subtle and nuanced engagements with politics and
culture. Where John McGrath used folk forms like the
ceilidh as a sounding-board, Welsh’s touchstone is the
rave culture he knows so well. This new Scottish drama
is arguably less a breach with previous political theatre
than a fruitful branching out, but it would be wrong to
ignore fundamental shifts of emphasis. Welsh’s characters
are not the educated, respectable, law-abiding
working class figures found in much traditional fiction
and drama, nor are his communities unified in their opposition
to some faceless authority.
Contemporary Scottish theatre is tuned into popular
culture. It has passed from music hall to club land by
way of cinema, dance, drugs, football fanzines, journalism,
rap, stand-up comedy and television. Where the
content went before the phrase, the phrase now goes
before the content. It is significant that You’ll Have Had
Your Hole is set in a recording studio. Welsh draws on
club culture, mixing and sampling a variety of sounds.
The devil is in the detail, and the verve and vitality of
local idioms, but there are large themes too – cruelty,
revenge, cycles of violence, crime and punishment,
responsibility, guilt. The language of violence and the
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
violence of language come together in an art of suffering,
but not in silence.
Which brings us to the title of Welsh’s new play. Uttered
in posh Edinburgh parlance, the phrase “You’ll
have had your tea” has a hidden meaning. It implies a
poverty of spirit in a host’s attitude to a guest. It says:
“I’m presuming you’ve eaten and that means you’re
getting nothing from me”. This rhetorical question is
usually attributed to a middle class woman. By contrast,
getting your hole is a working class masculine term for
sexual fulfilment. Put the two together and you get the
kind of hybrid interplay characteristic of contemporary
Scottish culture.
The reason Scottish novelists are turning increasingly
to the theatre, or opting to have their work adapted for
the stage, is that they recognise a medium that crosses
borders and breaks down barriers much more readily
than film, which has lost its ability to challenge audiences.
One thinks here of Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is
To Keep Breathing (1995), James Kelman’s One, Two,
Hey! (1994) and Duncan McLean’s Julie Allardyce
(1993), and of course Irvine Welsh’s Headstate, not to
mention Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nightmares.
It’s not so much a question of choosing between fiction
or film or theatre, as a renewed confidence in their own
voices that sees Scottish writers flitting effortlessly
between forms.
With theatre, there is always an element of risk,
542
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and a unique opportunity to engage with an audience
in real time. With film, reality is screened, the
inevitable happy ending undercutting any edge.
While bodies like the British Board of Film Censors
maintain standards of hygiene, theatre is completely
uncensored, blissfully free from the editorialising
and moralising of the powers that ban. Theatre has
survived repeated attempts to stifle it and has in the
process emerged as a resilient and versatile space
where nothing is unspeakable, where you can in
principle say anything, a platform for free speech,
a place of absolute freedom and a place of no
mercy. The only cultural form to have been banned
wholesale, prosecuted and hounded by censors for
400 years, theatre has built up immunity to attack
from the guardians of decency. Thirty years after the
scrapping of the office of the Lord Chamberlain, the
stage remains resistant to most strains of censorship,
even the most virulent.
Scotland has not always been at the forefront, but it
is adapting to change. The move from page to stage is
all the rage for angry young writers north of the border.
The accent is on voice. Duncan McLean insists
on “a commitment to the voice as the basis of literary
art, rather than some supposed canonical ‘Officially
approved’ language”. The soul of Scottish theatre no
longer frets in the shadow of the English language. In
the interval between the curtains closing on didactic
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
political theatre and a slow drawing down of blinds
for drawing-room drama a new hybrid form entered
stage left – absurd, enraged and intense, a theatre of
cruelty and hate that is at once tender and torn, cool
and comical, with a pen dipped in rebel ink, stylish
but possessed of a certain substance.
The social realist tradition was not merely on the side
of the working class, but stood in their way, portraying
them, representing them, speaking for them. The social
surrealism or hyper realism of Welsh’s writing aches
with authenticity, touching sore points with a persistent
probing that leaves you trembling. When working with
Boilerhouse on Headstate Welsh spoke of ram-raiding
the set. He meant this literally, no doubt, but it is in the
area of metaphor and speech that Welsh excels, rather
than in any accepted notion of stagecraft. Welsh is not
tongue-tied by authority or ham-strung by convention
or classical training. If his plays, angry and experimental,
are like movies, then they are less drive-in than
drive-by, marked by a casual violence and a language
that fairly crackles with cruelty. He has taken the pulse
of Scottish theatre, and given it a much-needed smack
in the face. Much has been said of Welsh’s articulation
of drug culture, but under the influence of film – Mamet
and Tarantino spring to mind – Welsh is pushing theatre,
a Class A drug if ever there was one, and giving
audiences a welcome shot in the arm.
Not that pride or patriotism are called for. Welsh’s
543
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references to “shitey Scotland” capture a growing
scepticism about modern manifestations of nationalism.
Looking at life through schemie windows,
with 20 storey vision, Welsh sees the world with a
colder eye than the old Scottish school of radicals,
and he manages to be dispassionate, even as his
characters burn with a fierce indignation. Prolific
and provocative, Irvine Welsh has left his imprint on
the Postmodern Scottish psyche. He has been called
“the poet laureate of the chemical generation”, but
Welsh’s appeal is much wider than the popular youth
culture he so eloquently represents.
As the margins fold back to infringe on the metropolis,
it is appropriate that a new play by Irvine Welsh is
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
opening in Leeds. Mercurial and mobile, Scottish theatre
cannot be reduced to a single company or venue, nor
should it be categorised as a movement. Movements,
like parties and trade unions, may have had their day,
not to mention their hole. Instead, we should imagine
something more akin to a carnival – vibrant, vivid and
vigorous, the stuff of life and the stuff of theatre. Why
have a slice when you can have the whole cake, and a
language sandwich to boot? It’s high time you had your
high tea. You’ll have had your theatre.
Dr Willy Maley is a lecturer at the University of Glasgow’s
Department of English Literature. This essay
first appeared in the programme notes to the original
production of You’ll Have Had Your Hole. �
544
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Feature [published May 1999]
Irvine Welsh / Alan Warner: Queerspotting
Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of
the closet…
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a
family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing
machines, cars, compact disc players and electric
tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck
you are on a Sunday morning. But whatever you do,
don’t choose homosexuality.
Traditionally, this has been the general feeling in
Scottish fiction over the years. More recently, we have
become familiar with the dull, thudding masculinity of
Kelman, Sharp, McIlvanney, Gunn. Even these days,
as Chris Whyte has highlighted, “to be gay and to be
Scottish, it would seem, are still mutually exclusive conditions.”
(Whyte, Gendering The Nation, 1995). Now,
at the end of the millennium, we have hopefully moved
on from our national literary stereotype of the tortured,
lonely (heterosexual, probably homophobic) anti-hero.
(Think Cuffee, Laidlaw, Finn, Doyle and so forth). We
have left behind the good old days when women stayed
in the kitchen, entrapping men then withholding their
love, and potential queers were suitably pathetic, warped
and unhappy. Yet still we cannot readily disagree with
Berthold Schoene that, “Scotland is still waiting for the
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
emergence and subsequent ‘coming out’ of a generation
of angry young men who, unafraid of their own feelings,
would dare contest the misogynous and homophobic
rules of the ‘Emotional Establishment’ inside” (Schoene,
‘Angry Young Masculinity’, in Whyte ed., 1995). Yes,
there are (finally) many female authors at the very forefront
of Scottish literature. Yes, Scottish poetry boasts
some of the best lesbian and gay writers. So how long
must we wait for this heralded new breed of angry young
man? And might there also be an angry young woman?
Perhaps we need not wait that long. Perhaps the picture
is not as bleak as an unreconstructed (or should that
be undeconstructed?) kailyard in winter. At the end of
the 19th century the ‘kailyard’ (literally, cabbage patch)
was all the rage amongst Scottish writers such as J.M.
Barrie, F.R. Crockett and Ian MacLaren. Kailyard literature
painted a sentimental, highly romanticised picture
of rural and small town life in Scotland, full of the local
colour of the Scots tongue. The only problem was, it
bore little resemblance to the often harsh reality of the
time. The realisation that all in the garden wasn’t quite so
lovely didn’t come until 1901, and the publication of The
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House With The Green Shutters by G. Douglas.
This time round however, the fin de siècle has seen
the emergence of another new genre, one that seems
set to catapult us into the next millennium with rather
more truth, not to mention style – the ‘satanic kailyard’
(the name comes from a forthcoming essay by Christopher
Harvie entitled ‘Kelman, the Canon, and the
Satanic Kailyard’). This wonderfully appropriate term
describes contemporary texts by Scottish authors such
as Welsh, Warner, Hird, Legge and so on; that is to say
the new generation of Scottish authors writing about
Scottish urban working class youth in all its dubious,
depraved, or just plain deranged, glory. The old cabbage
patch has become the new housing scheme. The
characters are more likely to work the benefit system
than the land, and would generally rather settle down to
heroin and Temazepam than neeps and tatties. However,
has there been an equivalent revolution in sexuality?
The satanic kailyard texts that will be considered here
are Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House and Alan Warner’s
The Sopranos, although reference will also be made to
their debut novels, Trainspotting and Morvern Callar
respectively. In the light of these texts then, the question
which springs to mind is: in contemporary Scottish
literature, why is it suddenly cool to be queer?
One of the primary aspects of satanic kailyard in general
which is important in this context is its relation to
popular culture, something which hasn’t always been de
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rigeur in Scottish fiction to date. It is perhaps due to the
relative youth of the authors themselves that the details of
their characters tend to be just right – they wear the right
clothes, listen to the right music, go to the right clubs,
take the right drugs, and so on – for people in their situations.
Therefore it is reasonable to extrapolate that they
will also have the right attitudes, and, “homosexuality
has become acceptably familiar, if not yet unremarkable,
for a growing generation.” (Andy Medhurst, ‘Wish You
Were Queer?’, The Face, Jan 1999). With this in mind,
let us proceed to examine the texts in question, and their
portrayal of homosexuality, in depth.
Out of the collection of stories which make up The
Acid House it is undoubtedly the novella, ‘A Smart
Cunt’ which is the most interesting as regards homosexuality.
Brian, the central character, is straight in the
sense of being heterosexual. However, there is another,
far more important sense of the word in which he tends
to be far from ‘straight’ – that pertaining to drug use. In
any narrative by Welsh, this is how we must understand
the term. Brian’s friend Denise, on the other hand, is
gay, as it seems is Penman. In many respects Denise
is stereotypically camp; he “pouts with a saucy wink,”
‘squeals excitedly” and “minces smartly.” Needless to
say, these activities are never performed by a heterosexual
male character. Despite his apparent effeminacy
though, Denise is easily capable of the aggression typical
of most other characters in Welsh. When one of his
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“young queens” annoys him his reaction is instant,
“BATTER YIR FUCKIN CUNT IN, SON!” He is in
no way ineffectual.
Denise and Brian grew up together on the same
housing scheme, a place to which Denise says he
will never return. With the additional knowledge of
narrator, Brian explains, “Denise never really fitted
in back there. Too camp; too much of a superiority
complex.” Obviously, Denise did not fit in primarily
because he was gay, but it is interesting that the narrator
doesn’t exactly say that. Instead, he gives us
other options to add to our unspoken assumption
of prejudice. This is borne out by the fact that even
when Denise moved away from the scheme into
the gay scene of central Edinburgh he did not find
acceptance: “Gay punters that hang around Chapps,
The Blue Moon and The Duck hate Denise. His
stereotypical queen stuff embarrasses most homosexuals.”
So in effect Denise is a double outsider
– rejected both by scheme and scene alike. This is
not as bleak as it may at first seem though; we learn
that Denise “loves to be hated”. Although he actively
chooses to be disliked he manages to retain a wide
circle of loyal (and often heterosexual) friends.
Denise is not the only character with a penchant for
camp; Brian himself engages in camp banter with his
heterosexual friends, “Raymie sighs … then puts his
tongue in my ear. I peck him on the cheek and pat his
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arse – You’re raw sex, Raymie, raw fuckin sex man, I
tell him.” The emphasis on camp throughout ‘A Smart
Cunt’ may have a significant function in the text, apart
from providing humour. Marty Roth quotes Andrew
Britton as saying that the over-the-top performance
of camp requires a ‘sense of perversity in relation to
bourgeois norms” as well as resulting in “the frisson
of transgression” (Roth, ‘Homosexual Expression and
Homophobic Censorship: The Situation of the Text,’ in
Bergman ed., Camp Grounds, 1993). These two qualities
tend to be possessed both by Welsh’s writing and
by his characters; in this case the use of camp helps to
create this sense of transgression.
The key point about ‘A Smart Cunt’ in this context
is found in the narrator’s attitude to his gay associates,
Denise and Penman. They are his friends, their
sexuality is not an issue for him, or indeed for others
in the group such as Veitchy, Raymie and Spud. Brain
has a sound knowledge of the gay scene and the gay
lexicon. For example, he recognises when Denise is
choosing to act like a stereotype, and he appreciates
who is a queen and that the term does not apply to all
homosexuals. This very aware attitude is thrown into
relief by his diatribe against the crème de la crème of
Scottish masculinity, the Hardman (actually a “big sensitive
blouse”), “the Scottish Hardman chips a nail, so
he head-butts some poor fucker.” In Brian’s schema it
is the Hardman, not the homosexual, that is the ‘other’.
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The reverse tends to be true in his society; at one point
he is beaten up merely for his association with Denise.
This fits in with Jonathan Dollimore’s suggestion that,
“homosexuality is so strangely integral to the selfsame
heterosexual cultures which denounce it” (Dollimore,
Sexual Dissidence, 1991). After all, where would the
Hardman be without the gay man? In much of Scottish
society, as in Scottish literature, the Hardman, or even
just the heterosexual man, feels constantly obliged to
strive against being mistaken for a poof.
It is a woman, Olly, who actually vocalises homophobic
sentiments. To her, Denise is a “fuckin sick queer,”
or a ‘sick poof.” Unlike Brian, she fears being damned
by association, “I’m no fuckin fag hag.” Naturally,
Brian springs to Denise’s defence, “he’s my friend …
stop aw this homophobic shite: it’s a total drag.” This
is rather ironic given Brian’s attitude to women, for
example, “the main reason I was here was that it was
full of fanny and I hadn’t had a shag in five months.”
One final positive characteristic of Brian, rare in
Scottish literary males, is his ability to indulge in homosocial
activity without the traditional angst. Schoene
has commented on the phenomenon displayed by, but
by no means limited to, Alan Sharp’s male characters:
“The fear of being mistaken for a ‘queer’ is so great
that the manly courage of angry young men dwindles
drastically when they come to realise the ‘dubious’
intensity of their own emotional attachment to other
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
men … natural enthusiasm for homosocial contacts …
might be interpreted as the expression of a latent …
homosexual desire.” (Schoene in Whyte ed., 1995)
Brian does not suffer from such insecurities about
his own sexuality. On a night out with Penman, apparently
a gay man, he explains, “I’d never felt so close
to anyone, well, not another man, as I did to Penman
that night. It was a lovers-without-the-shagging type
scene.” Then, after meeting ex-lover Olly, “I went
over and held Penman in my arms for a long time.”
However, just as we become excited and let ourselves
believe that Brian might be about to jump out of the
closet we remember that he is, at this time, under the
influence of ecstasy. It seems that in a drug altered state
intimate male bonding is more acceptable, and feelings
can be acknowledged more readily.
Mark Renton in Trainspotting, perhaps Welsh’s most
(in)famous creation, is not dissimilar in attitude to Brian,
as is particularly apparent in the ‘London Crawling’
section of the book. Chris Whyte says of this novel, “in
a faithfulness to older paradigms which verges on the
touching, Welsh’s only acknowledged gay character is
a double outsider, an Italian immigrant encountered in
London.” This is undeniable (with the exception of two
lesbians who are introduced in ‘Feeling Free’), but again
we can argue that it is Renton’s attitude towards Giovanni
which is revealing. In fact, he is surprisingly benign –
given that Giovanni first of all makes a pass at him in
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a dodgy cinema, and then abuses him as he sleeps (in a
particularly unpleasant way!). Certainly, Renton is angry
at first, but he soon ends up comforting and hugging the
older man, feeling genuine sympathy for him, and in the
end takes him to a party. Very charitable indeed. At the
end of the night he muses, “ah might end up whappin it
up the wee cunt’s choc-box yit.” Whyte quotes this as
an especially damning comment, showing just how little
Welsh has diverged from older paradigms. However, another
reading might say that within the social and sexual
register of Welsh it is a perfectly acceptable comment;
considering the manner in which characters talk about
women they fancy, or indeed love.
Besides, how often in Scottish literature do we find
the ‘male lead’ admitting to picking up a “gorgeous
young queen” and taking him home for a bit of oral
sex? Renton recalls this incident rather fondly – perhaps
with amusement – but definitely without shame.
Despite this event, Renton isn’t even bisexual, never
mind gay. He did it because in London normal conventions
don’t apply, “Ye can be freer here, no because it’s
London, but because it isnae Leith.” It seems that being
in London is a more potent, more liberating, altered
state than being on Ecstasy is for Brian. The encounter
with Giovanni also provokes Renton to consider his
own sexuality again, “How the fuck dae ah ken ah’m
no a homosexual if ah’ve nivir been wi another guy?.”
Obviously for Renton gay sex must include anal sex
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
to be ‘proper’ – the “gorgeous young queen” doesn’t
quite count. This is disappointing, after all, in the real
world no such condition applies for gay men. Perhaps
it is because anal sex is virtually essential in heterosexual
relationships in Welsh’s writing that it is seen
as absolutely essential in homosexual ones. Unsurprisingly,
in the end Renton concludes that he is only really
attracted to women, but comments, “It’s aw aboot
aesthetics, fuck all tae dae with morality.” Mark Renton
is no homophobe, and goes through a very normal and
rational questioning of his own sexual preference. In
comparison to someone like Begbie, for instance, he is
positively enlightened.
Thus far we have only considered male homosexuality.
What of lesbianism? It is true that we seem to be
experiencing something of a backlash in the wake of
the ‘lesbian chic’ of the past couple of years. As Medhurst
puts it in The Face, “dykes are yesterday’s news.”
Not so for Alan Warner, especially in his latest novel,
The Sopranos. The first clue we are given as to what the
future holds for Fionnula (“the Cooler”) comes when
her friend Chell notes, “she’s been queerer and queerer
lately, the crazy chick.” No author can seriously believe
that readers these days will only take ‘queer’ to mean
strange or odd, so we instantly wonder just how queer
Fionnula is going to become.
At first, she seems to have the same concerns as the
other Sopranos – clothes, make up, drinking, and, of
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course, sailors. However, when she reaches the big city,
Edinburgh, she experiences some of the slackening of
normal constraints which Renton noticed in London.
Initially, she considers her relationship with her best
friend, Manda, “she just does all these really funny
things that make me smile and smile, och, those sort of
things make ya almost fall in love wi someone.” There
are echoes of Brian in ‘A Smart Cunt’ and his closeness
to Penman, but in this case the examination of same
sex friendship marks Fionnula’s first tentative step
towards identifying her developing sexuality. Later on,
she comments, “ah’ve always known, soon as I’m out
of Our Lady’s am away fro the Port an down here in a
jiffy.” One wonders if Fionnula, in her Wonderbra and
high heels, would find any more acceptance in the gay
scene than Denise.
The crucial moment for Fionnula comes when she
discovers that Kay has had a lesbian experience; that
she is not alone in her attraction to other women. However,
Kay’s experience was not entirely homosexual, in
that she ended up in menage à trois with a man and a
woman, and indeed became pregnant as a result of it.
On the one hand this is interesting as it acknowledges
that sexuality isn’t necessarily clear cut; both Kay and
Catriona could be described as bisexual. However, it
also serves to blunt the impact of what Kay has done.
The fact that a man was involved at all makes it less
radical (perhaps for a predominantly heterosexual read-
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ership) than if she and Catriona had been alone together.
Kay herself says immediately, “Catriona isn’t lesbian!
Just that bit bi.” When Fionnula asks her how she feels
about it she isn’t terribly enthusiastic: “I was really
drunk that night and it just happened” and “It’s really
good, Kay says in a way that sounded to Fionnula as if
she might be talking about a bowl of soup or a drink.”
Nevertheless this perhaps does not reflect her attitude
so much as her narrative function at this stage – she is
there to provide an ‘out’ for Fionnula’s sexuality – and
she does at least treat it as a very normal activity.
The implication which is made by both Fionnula and
the narrator is that Kay can afford to experiment; she
lives outside the Port, she is middle class, she is not
a Soprano. Fionnula says, “you have a bit of space an
got away wi that scot-free but someone would be sure
an clipe on me.” She is painfully aware of the social
reaction she is likely to get. However this also results
in a pleasing irony; if anything Kay is a triple outsider,
and her friendship with Fionnula is the only reason she
is accepted by the Sopranos in the first place.
Fionnula’s reaction to Kay’s news is not simply one
of interest or relief that she is not alone. Already attracted
to Kay, it provokes strong sexual excitement,
“downwards Fionnula’s stomach dived and simultaneous
a jellyfish sting, right in her fanny, and up, in an
awful wonder came it’s warm spreadingness.” Warner
tends to acknowledge and depict female desire very ef-
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fectively, but this does make us ask why this is an awful
wonder; because it is new to Fionnula or because it is
homosexual in nature? In the end, Fionnula’s coming
out is scarcely a coming out at all as such, “It’s just.
Fionnula shook her head, Ah think ah like girls as much
as boys. She paused a long time, Maybe more.” Fionnula
at no point refers to herself as lesbian, even in a
hypothetical sense. This could be an example of the
trend towards “sex without labels” which Andy Medhurst
envisages, or, “the arbitrary nature of sexual definition,
the extent to which our sexualities are shaped by
the larger social discourse” (Martin, ‘Roland Barthes:
Toward An Ecriture Gaie’, in Bergman ed., 1993). Or,
in Warner’s narrative, as in the Port, lesbianism might
really be the Love that dare not speak its name.
The Port for Fionnula is similar to Leith for Renton,
or the scheme for Denise, in that it is a place where
the taboo on homosexuality remains firmly in place. As
Andy Medhurst notes, “the ‘normalisation’ of homosexuality
is a very recent development …there are still
plenty of places where queers have to operate in virtually
pre-War secrecy.” As we have seen, these places
are often the very places that Warner and Welsh set
their narratives, small towns and the housing schemes
which surround big cities (effectively small towns in
themselves). Given these settings it would be unrealistic
to expect an ‘out and proud’ attitude from all the
characters. This does not, on the other hand, mean that
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Scottish fiction as a whole must behave as a small town
where homosexuality is concerned.
However, in The Sopranos Fionnula and Kay ultimately
present a challenge to everyone who is gathered
for the finale in the Mantrap, or “the Night Fionnula
McConnel Slow danced Wi Kay Clarke” – unfortunately
to the rather twee accompaniment of ‘There Are
Worse Things I Could Do’. At first they aren’t ‘star
attraction” as “Kylah spun onto the floor doing a pretty
good waltz, with her arms wrapped passionately round
the sanny bin.” If that had been how things had stayed
then a sense of perspective on the situation would have
been retained. In the Mantrap, however, the act of two
girls dancing together is a very big deal indeed. Although
their friends are watching, the main audience is
of men, who move nearer to get a better look. Indeed, in
one sense Fionnula and Kay embody an exceptionally
clichéd male fantasy – not only lesbian, but Catholic,
and schoolgirls as well! Hence it is quite a relief that
when they do actually have sex Warner does not dwell
too much upon the scene, and emphasises the fact that
Fionnula feels as if she’s falling in love.
This marks quite a departure from Morvern Callar,
where the strong homoerotic subtext between Morvern
and her best friend Lanna is played out in a series of
rather exploitative scenes. In some cases a male character
is present to assume the role of voyeur, at other
times it is left up to the reader to do so. For example,
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Lanna tends to help Morvern to get changed, always
“biting her lip,” apparently an indication of scarcely
concealed lust. When Morvern puts on her supermarket
uniform, Lanna, “smoothed the nylon onto me with her
palms.” Lanna also fastens Morvern’s suspenders before
a night out, then later on unrolls Morvern’s stockings to
reveal her glittery knee to the men in the pub. “Everyone
was watching,” and some men whistle at her exposed
thigh. When they finally end up at a party, they decide,
somewhat bizarrely, to have a shower together, “as per
usual … to save time.” This (naturally) allows plenty of
opportunity for soaping each other and so on. It is hardly
a surprise when at the end of the night a game of strip
poker turns into a menage à quatre. At first Morvern just
watches, but soon she joins in as well, “I let them do
anything to me and tried to make each as satisfied as I
could.” Although Morvern Callar is unusual and progressive
(for Scottish fiction) in that it has a first person
female narrator yet is written by a man, Warner goes
even further with The Sopranos; moving from subtext
to actually encompassing homosexuality within the plot.
Although any action between Morvern and Lanna is
heavily veiled, Fionnula and Kay first kiss in full view
of everyone in the Mantrap, in “clear and vivid” light.
Kylah gives Fionnula a chance to pretend nothing has
happened, “when yur wasted enough , you’ll snog,
that’s the way it goes, I’ve near snogged ma brother
out of boredom when ah’ve been pissed enough,” the
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implication being that a same sex kiss is along the same
lines as an incestuous kiss. “If Fionnula and Kay had
been willin to leave it at that, they might of had the
whole thing forgot, an put down to another drunken
night,” but it isn’t just another drunken night, it is a huge
stepping stone on Fionnula’s path to self-discovery.
She decides, “If You’re gonna burn your bridges burn
them,” and goes home with Kay.
Fionnula’s best friend Manda is the only one who
reacts badly to the situation, “Fionnula, ya can’t go
around doin that, people’ll think you were lezzie,” also
trying to deal with the information about Catriona, “ma
oh-so-fantastic sister is a pervy lesbian.” The next day,
Orla suggests that Manda is, “just jealous” and even
says to Fionnula, “telling you, she would go for it with
you now.” Then the other sopranos turn up and Fionnula’s
news is soon lost amid all the other things that
have happened; Orla losing her virginity and getting ill
again, Manda and the bouncer, the reprieve on being
expelled. Even Manda now behaves as though nothing
untoward has happened; her initial homophobia appears
to have been conquered.
So, in these examples of ‘satanic kailyard’ we
have seen a gay man with a female name and a
violent streak, a male central character with lots
of gay friends, another who has had a homosexual
experience, a female main character coming out and
several women with blurred sexual identities. These
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are the new angry young men and women. Not bad
for Scottish fiction. None of these are anywhere near
being homosexual texts, after all, “A text is not homosexual
because there are homosexual characters,
even less because two boys get married at the end:
such texts are only the transposition of traditional
heterosexual narration” (Martin, in Bergman ed.,
1993). Warner and Welsh may be cult reading, but a
Scottish Dennis Cooper has not yet appeared on the
literary scene. These texts do however go some way
towards normalising homosexuality, by acknowledging
that it has a place in mainstream texts as well as
in exclusively gay literature.
Earlier on we asked why this normalisation of homosexuality
was becoming apparent in these texts,
and concluded that it was a necessary reflection of
changed attitudes within the society which they depict
(which of course includes the readers who buy these
books). This is certainly true. There is however another
important function of this phenomenon – subversion.
In Scottish fiction it is apparent that, as Schoene says,
“heterosexual masculinity is still commonly regarded
as ‘the normative gender’ and heterosexual men are still
widely believed to be the only adequate representatives
of our species …straight masculinity is a given that has
hitherto remained undefined.” Warner blatantly rejects
this ridiculous, yet tenacious, notion by having a female
narrator in Morvern Callar, and an almost exclusively
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female cast of characters, including a lesbian central
character, in The Sopranos. Welsh subverts it more
subtly. At first glance, Renton and Brian might seem
to follow the norm of heterosexual masculinity. On
closer inspection, as we have seen, this is not the case.
By giving Brian gay friends, or by allowing Renton a
homosexual encounter, Welsh is in fact undermining
this traditional notion of undefined straight masculinity.
Both authors have therefore challenged the heterosexual
male stereotype so beloved of Scottish writing.
This is part of the reason why these texts are so
important. They do not nod towards any politicised
notion of homosexuality because they have their roots
in a society where people recognise their unequivocal
right to be gay, or to not bother defining their sexuality
at all. Many Scottish authors remain rooted in a time or
place where homosexuality is somehow unacceptable.
That time is over, that place has almost disappeared,
but for the most part Scottish fiction has not caught
up. This is 1999, and, according to Andy Medhurst,
“the days of homosexuality-as-issue are drawing to a
close,” and about time too. In Scottish poetry, this is old
news, as poets such as Jackie Kay and David Kinloch
have proved. Is the prose world waiting for an Edwin
Morgan of its own to hammer home the point that it’s
okay to be gay, even in Scotland?
It’s time for Scottish fiction to get a grip. Come out of
the closet. Choose the future. �
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Review [published March 1999]
Irvine Welsh: Filth
Gary Marshall
When Trainspotting rapidly grew from underground
publishing success story to zeitgeist-surfing, underworld-soundtracked
cultural event, Irvine Welsh was
described as a spokesman for a generation and the most
exciting writer in Scotland. While the use of language
and setting was something of a novelty first time round,
Filth is Welsh’s fifth novel and revisits the same ground
as everything else he’s ever written. We have deviant
sex from The Acid House, Tarantinoesque musings on
rock records from Trainspotting, half-arsed attempts at
psychology and social comment from Marabou Stork
Nightmares and, of course, lots of swearing. As with
most recent Welsh product, it’s also a shambolic and
incoherent mess.
Filth tells the story of Bruce Robertson, an Edinburgh
policeman whose life resembles Harvey Keitel’s in
Bad Lieutenant. Racist, misogynist, homophobic and
psychotic, Robertson devours hard-core pornography
whilst mentally and physically abusing himself and
everybody around him. Despite his appalling personal
hygiene supplemented by a genital rash and an attack
of tapeworms (more of this later), he nonetheless man-
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
ages to have sex with almost every female he meets,
in between setting up colleagues for queer-bashing or
driving others to the brink of suicide.
Robertson isn’t really a bad person, though. As his
tapeworm explains in the latter chapters of the book –
yes, the narrator is quite literally talking out of his arse –
Robertson has had a tough time. He came into the world
as the result of a violent rape, his adoptive stepfather
made him eat coal, and the first love of his life died. The
section describing the death of his first girlfriend is the
only funny part of the book as Welsh goes massively
over the top, piling on the pathos as he recounts how
the poor crippled girl is struck by lightning in a scene
that could have come straight out of an Airplane movie.
Unfortunately this bit is supposed to be serious.
The book runs to about 400 pages and fully 300 of
them repeat the same endless catalogue of sex, violence
and hatred with little in the way of variation. Some of
the scenes are evidently supposed to be funny, such as
the set-piece where Robertson attempts to make a video
of a prostitute being penetrated by a dog or when he
sleeps with a colleague’s wife after framing her husband
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for making obscene phone calls. Conspicuous by their
absence are the wit and invention that characterised
Welsh’s earlier novels, like the foul-mouthed baby in
The Acid House or Sick Boy and Spud in Trainspotting.
Weighed down by the expectations of his audience,
Welsh has produced a book that fails on every single
level: a comedy that isn’t funny, a police procedural
that can’t be bothered with the details, a tale of redemption
without any trace of warmth or sympathy for any
of the characters and a closing plot twist that’s visible
from the first chapter.
There’s a tradition in reviewing where you make
sure you don’t give away the ending of a novel for
fear it will prevent people from reading it. Hopefully,
then, the news that Robertson committed the brutal
murder he’s supposed to be investigating throughout
BUY Irvine Welsh books online from and
the book and then kills himself at the end should prevent
people from wasting their hard-earned cash on
this pathetic attempt at a thriller. Maybe then Welsh
will stop recycling past novels and will attempt to
write something that’s actually worth reading. To
describe Welsh as the greatest writer in Scotland
is a huge insult to talented writers such as Jeff Torrington,
William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Iain
Banks and Janice Galloway who produce novels
which combine well-drawn characters with empathy
and social conscience.
Although the title works on several levels – Filth as
slang for policemen, or as a description of the world
in which Bruce Robertson lives – the publisher was
too restrained. A more fitting title for this shambolic,
scatalogical mess of a book would have been Shite. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Review [published March 2003]
The White Stripes: Elephant
Peter Wild
Ryan Adams has already said that Elephant is the
greatest rock’n’roll album ever recorded (laying to rest,
once and for all, his spat with ‘cissy boy’ Jack White).
Jack White himself – well, Jack White thinks this is
where The White Stripes get off. Nobody is going to
buy Elephant. Or rather: the hordes that bought White
Blood Cells – Jack White thinks they’ll stay home this
time. Or so he says.
Elephant kickstarts with a pristine bass sound. ‘7
Nation Army’. The first single to be. Whatever you say,
however you approach this, you don’t expect bass. The
White Stripes are guitars and drums. Guitars and drums
and occasional piano. They make a primal noise. That
is what they do. The bass is just foolin’, though (it’s
not bass at all – it’s just an effect – it’s just gee-tar).
Jack White is here with a voice fizzing like magnesium
in water: “Everybody knows about it from the Queen
of England to the hounds of hell”. Oh yeah. This is
rock’n’roll, pure and simple, all you need to know.
When that boy White sings “I’m going to Wichita…”
you sure as shit want to be on the same train … He
whistles and he whines and he roars and he spits – he is
BUY White Stripes music online from and
everything Black Francis was back in the day.
Next up is ‘Black Math’ – you follow the Pixies’
thinking and ‘Black Math’ is Elephant’s ‘Tame’. Fierce
fierce rock with a screaming vocal about mothers and
breaking backs against all-out reverb and noise. Plus
you get Jack saying “ah-ah-ah-ah-ha” (the first of many
such sounds drawn from a huge pantheon of rock’n’roll
staples that look stupid written down and cool as all-
Hell when sung – later you get “ow a-ha ow ow ow”
in ‘Little Acorns’, “do-do-dodoobiedo” in ‘Air Near
My Fingers’ and “Whoo!” – a great barbaric yawp of
primordial garage “Whoo!” – in ‘Girl You Have No
Faith In Medicine’ – all stupid written down, all cooler
than Clint when sung by your man Jack White).
A nod to another Queen (Freddie Mercury) comes
next – multipart vocals cluster about the cruellest chorus
(“There’s no home for you here, girl, go away…”)
while – and I shit you not – guitars and theremins all but
haemorrhage. There is relief (albeit short-lived relief)
in the familiar lilt of a cover – Bacharach and David’s ‘I
Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself.’ This isn’t
Pop Idol though, and Jack White is no Gareth. When
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he wails “I need your sweet love…” – he means it (he’s
camped outside your house with a sharp knife and a
cold sweat). Meg’s vocal on ‘In The Cold Cold Night’
seems to respond – yeah, she’s saying, you’re crazy as
a cuckoo but … you know … I like it. Sounding like
Sandie Shaw (“you make me feel a little older, like a
full grown woman might…”), Meg says “I know that
you feel it too / when my skin turns into glue…” Okay
Meg, you say, taking one slow step after another toward
the door …
Kitty Empire has already said (in The Observer)
that the thing about Elephant (one of the things about
Elephant) is Jack White has this ability (in the course
of a line, of a song, of an album) to hit every button
you could ever want, and many buttons you could
hardly imagine and a few you’re willing to ignore. ‘I
Want To Be The Boy’ finds Jack getting maudlin over
a girl: “What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull…
/ I’m inclined to go finish high school just to make
notice that I’m around…”); ‘Ball & Biscuit’ finds Jack
redefining sex and rock’n’roll (in a way that just hasn’t
been done since Prince sang ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’
– the only difference is that Jack doesn’t want to be
your girlfriend…): “It’s quite possible that I’m your
BUY White Stripes music online from and
third man, girl, but it’s a fact that I’m a seventh son…”
he slurs lasciviously. “Let’s have a ball and a biscuit
sugar and take our sweet time about it…” Oh yeah. On
‘Little Acorns’, he doesn’t give a shit (“Take all your
problems, baby, and rip ‘em apart…“), on ‘Hypnotise’
(the closest thing here to a retread of ‘Fell in Love with
a Girl’ – but, man, what a retread) he’s intent, driven: “I
want to hypnotise you baby on the telephone…”
The White Stripes are legend, already. They are
legend and they know it – they nod to the past (‘Girl
You Have No Faith in Medicine’ is like The Rolling
Stones by way of Jonathan Fire Eater) but this is
not The Strokes (despite the fact that Elephant was
recorded using equipment that predates 1963). This
is – to coin an overused phrase – now. The White
Stripes are having the time of their life (listen to the
last track, ‘It’s True That We Love Each Other’, a
throwaway duet between Jack and Meg and Holly
GoLightly: “I love Jack White like a little brother…”
/ “Well, Holly I love you too / but there’s just so
much I don’t know about you…”) – they’re enjoying
every second. The greatest rock’n’roll album
ever recorded. C’mon. You can keep the hyperbole,
Adams. But it’s pretty damn great all the same. �
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
Interview [published May 2005]
Tony Wilson: Fourth Time Lucky
Craig Johnson hears the Factory Records supremo on the rebirth of his label,
the Joy Division film, and accidentally creating Frankie Goes To Hollywood
‘Wilson ya wanker!’ is a statement that has been
bandied around Northern England for 30 years now.
The Wilson in question, the original media facilitator
Anthony H. Wilson, is a self-proclaimed wanker, but
he don’t care. One of the most important record label
bosses to grace the history of rock’n’roll, his story has
been told on countless occasions. From regional television
news presenter where he sported a punk-green
streaked barnet , via his discovery of Joy Division, the
Hacienda nightclub, New Order through to acid house
and Happy Mondays, Wilson’s been a powerful catalyst
within many great pop-cultural moments in the last 25
years. He’s been part of a story that’s involved the birth
of post-punk, suicide, insanity, liquidation, narcotic
excess and converting football thugs to the rebellious
French thought of Situationism and dancing. By creating
Factory records on Palatine Road, Manchester in
the late 1970s, signing bands he saw and thought were
important to the progress of rock’n’roll, he’s always
promoted an unequalled passion and energy for music,
culture, the dynamic city of Manchester and British
youth culture. He may be a bit of a wanker, but he’s
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
also played a part in changing modern music forever.
Way back in 1978 at the Russell Club in Moss Side,
Wilson organised a spectacle where Joy Division and
Cabaret Voltaire shaped the sound of post-punk. Ever
since he’s been a magnet for creative expression, with
a truly survivalist instinct, gusto and resolute desire to
find the next important thing. Fast forward nearly 30
years and a new band have been found with an even
newer sound of British hip-hop in the form of Raw-T.
Signed to the latest instalment of his mythical record
label Factory Records, now entitled F4, the Mancunian
collective have the element of danger and experimentation
that has always attracted Wilson. Listening to their
debut album one is confronted by deep digital shuffles,
slick raps that talk of a British urban way of life that is
sometimes tragic, always real and other times amusing.
The point is that Wilson has found another gem and he’s
not resting on the laurels of his glory years; the man of
passion is still searching and using his media clout to
highlight what he feels to be important to music and
life. Great rock and fucking roll kids!
Asking Tony Wilson a question is easy, extracting
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information even easier. Ask him something as simple
as the time and you’d receive a cultural pontification
about the lines of the Meridian and the way it effects
the Northern psyche. Respectively finding himself
lost in Swindon and taking his nutcase New Order
dog for a walk on the two occasions we spoke, he was
distracted many times during the conversation. But due
to the sharp thinking of the man, he managed to keep
a solid thread through out and spouted long, detailed
soliloquies about his iconic past, his hip-hop present
and things that’ll kick off in the future.
What do you say to people that shout “Wilson you
wanker!”?
I just keep walking and have always ignored it.
Funnily enough I’ve got to go to Chorlton in about an
hour, because Harry Goodwin the original rock’n’roll
photographer of the 60s has a show which he asked me
to go to. But Chorlton I despise with a passion. I come
from Salford, then lived in Marple, went to school in
Salford, went to university when I was 18, went to
London when I was 21 and aged 23 came back home.
I’m on television as a local reporter and putting music
on television, just soundtracks really. I thought my
generation will love this, we children of the 60s, but
who in the early 70s were all solicitors, young teachers
and trainee accountants in Chorlton and it turned out
they utterly despised me. Just like all those people who
shout ‘wanker’.
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
I remember going to a Rory Gallagher gig in 1975
at the Free Trade Hall and there was 2,000 people and
1,199 people fucking hated me. And I just thought
‘What the fuck have I done to these fuckin’ people?
What shits they are.’ And then about a year and a half
later along came punk and suddenly I’m at The Circus
and all these kids are like ‘Hey Tone, thanks for putting
Costello on, thanks for putting Iggy Pop on.’ I realised
I found my generation and they weren’t my fucking
generation. So people shouting abuse has happened
for a very long time and I find it kind of amusing and
irrelevant.
What sort of bands are you looking for to add to
the F4 roster?
A band that’s going to sell a lot of records because
they’re important. The most innovative is always the
most commercial at the end. The Mondays did sell a lot
of albums, they sold a couple of million albums which
I think is reasonably good, but if they hadn’t had the
self-destruction they might of sold some more.
What made you want to start a new label?
I’d never really stopped I suppose. I had a two year
layoff between the bankruptcy which led to London
Records buying Factory, that awful period of Factory
Too ended and I had to walk away, and when I finally
got tired of the Space Monkeys we stopped again. It was
always a question of the next time we sign a good band
we’ll start again. We started again with King Rib and
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they found a wonderful lead singer, but they became
Simian which are not my cup of tea. I went to see The
Music in Leeds: I was taken out by their manager and
fell in love with them and I spent six months arranging
the new label around The Music, and at the last minute
their two managers who were friends of mine brought
a third manager in who was a complete twat, he wanted
a bidding war and in the end signed for lots of money
to Hut. It was very depressing and I was outraged for
about two years.
The Music weren’t that good though Tony.
No, The Music were that good and they had that
potential, but the way their managers took them was
completely fucking wrong and ended up taking them
nowhere. If we’d have put them in the right environment
then they’d have created a far more important
second album. So the wrong environment has just
fucked them. In fact I heard someone within their camp
say that to some one the other week, so yes that’s what
I think about them.
And as I say it’s never stopped, it’s always if I ever
see a great band. When I saw Raw-T live at In The
City I was blown away, there were several major labels
there who were also blown away. I presumed that
my job with Raw-T would be to bash them around
the head when they started behaving like twats, and
instead the majors all offered them crap singles deals,
no one offered them a real album deal and suddenly
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
the rest is history.
Who’s designing the imagery for F4?
I have a graphic designer who I’m very fond of
called Jason Nichols who does In The City’s stuff
and in it’s great having him move on from that to
do the record sleeves. He did the F4 thing and I’m
very happy with that. We were originally going to
be called Red Cellars and there was a very clever
designer called John Walsh designed a Red Cellars
logo and was doing the whole thing. I took him to
meet Raw-T and he met them and experienced them
and got a logo from one of their boys, took it away
to work on and a month later had been too busy to
do it because he had more important work on. To
which after a few days I exploded in a very unpleasant
manner and said, ‘Fine, the most important thing
in the fucking world is Raw-T so you can fuck off!’
Strangely the reason it’s not called Red Cellars is
not just that my partner thinks it’s a good idea cos it
relates to Factory and it avoids a 15-minute explanation
of why it’s called Red Cellars. But it was when I was
lying in my bunk in the Amazon rainforest doing drugs,
the very night Raw-T’s first single had to go to press,
and I thought if I call it Red Cellars I’m going to have
to use John’s logo and I’m so angry at John for being
too busy to do Raw-T, and so utterly outraged I refused
to use his logo. So I needed to think up a new name,
and finally thought F4. That was out of a fit of anger
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at one of Manchester’s best designers for having been
too busy to do Raw-T. I always say to people that the
portrayal of me by Coogan as an affable fool is very
sweet but in fact my daughter who is next to me will
testify, I’m a truly horrible person. And you have to be
to get things done.
Would you ever start a new nightclub again?
Yes I would but it’d be very difficult. I’d love to have
somewhere like The Castle in Oldham where Raw-T
go and play, it’s like a cross between an Oldham pub
and 8Mile by Eminem. I’d love something like that,
but then again that’s a fucking nightmare anyway, so
maybe not. I’d love to do that personally but I can’t
imagine it happening, I now have so many other little
jobs in my life and it gets complicated but who knows
maybe one day.
What band in musical history do you wish you
could have signed?
Everyone wishes they could have signed their own
Velvet Underground; that’s the history of the interesting
side of rock’n’roll. We all would have liked to have
our own Velvet Underground and that’s about it really.
I got Joy Division, I got the Mondays and now I’ve got
Raw-T and I wouldn’t complain for one moment.
What were you talking about when you mentioned
that music culture was based around 13 year
revolutionary cycles?
I used to think that there was a 13 year cycle, but
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
then the revolution I expected in 2002 didn’t happen.
I always think that what happens is that English kids
absorb American rock’n’roll and regurgitate it with
English irony and sell it back to them. But this time it
didn’t happen, it was Welsh kids, one could argue that
Lost Prophets and Funeral For A Friend were in some
way that kinda thing I was hoping for, but it didn’t happen
so I’m quite happy to accept that.
But at the moment I’m very lucky to be involved with
Raw-T who are following in the footsteps of Dizzee
Rascal, Wylie and Mike Skinner, in that British hiphop
has found its own voice which is a pretty peculiar
thing to happen. I got accused on The Culture Show of
jumping on a band wagon that was already happening,
this was from Q magazine or NME. Whereas the guy
from Hip-Hop Connection was fantastic, as in someone
who actually knew what he was talking about. It hasn’t
really happened yet, it’s just beginning I think.
How important has Situationism been to you?
I was just a fan having been introduced to it by my
acid dealer who happened to be the main translator of
The Revolution Of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem
in Britain. I was a fan and therefore referred to it a lot
in terms of naming things and various bits and pieces.
Although when you look back on it in the end I think the
way we did it, by, as Peter Saville once said, in the entire
14 years of Factory not one decision was ever taken,
EVER with an eye to profit. And that was entirely true
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actually! So in some way we behaved properly. There
was a contract and the contract said we own nothing,
the musicians own everything, That was a mistake, but
it was very nice at the time and very idealistic, but looking
back on it fuck the musicians I say.
We actually I’d say, were responsible for removing
the world’s greatest rock’n’roll writer for about 15
years, which is Greil Marcus, from rock’n’roll. He got
a copy of our first record and stuck a Durutti Column
sticker on his deck and looked at it for two years thinking
‘What the fuck is this?’, and finally discovered it
was a Strasbourg (Andre Bertrand) political cartoon at
the end of which he got completely involved in it and
became buried in it and became the world expert on
Situationism. Which is bit of a shame because it took
him away from writing until he wrote his Elvis Presley/
Bill Clinton book which I adore that he really came
back to the fold. The greatest book on rock’n’roll is
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus by a million miles.
What’s your involvement in the upcoming Joy
Division film?
I’m a producer on the movie and in a way I think
that’s because it makes it more official having me involved,
(stupidly) and it does reflect to a degree what
was their concern about the rival film. The rival film
has now completely fucking gone, thank god. There’s
always only been one project, the film which is based
on Debbie Curtis’s book (Touching From A Distance)
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
and that always been how it’s approached. The people
making the film are two American guys; there was an
American man and woman from New York that were
making the film called Double A Films, however they
fell out and also the woman fell out with Debbie Curtis.
An option on a book has to be renewed, and they didn’t
renew the option otherwise they’d be still be making
the film, but I presume they kept promising Debbie they
were renewing it. Some of these Americans have so
much money they don’t know what it’s like for us over
here. No money was paid, the option ceased at which
point these two guys Todd Eckert and Orian Williams,
who had been friends from school years decided to step
in and take up the option. Todd is a Pittsburgh guy, and
Orian works out of Los Angeles, so it’s a Pittsburgh/Los
Angeles pairing that are doing this. They had actually
talked to Sophia Coppola who is a Joy Division fan,
there was interest from her, but in the end they chose
Anton Corbijn which I think is a great idea.
So their choice of Anton mirrored my own choice
because I realised that when I had to make a video
for ‘Atmosphere’ in 1988 I would have to use the old
photographs, and therefore it seemed logical to use
either Kevin Cummins or Anton. There was only two
photographers who took the great photographs of Ian
and for whatever reason I chose Anton even though
I’ve just recently done a photo shoot with the beloved
Mr Cummins, who moaned at me. He said ‘If I do a
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photoshoot for you, will you stop bad mouthing me? At
the press conference for the Ian Curtis film you were
bad mouthing me.’ I said ‘I wasn’t bad mouthing you.
I said you’re a miserable twat Kevin. You are a miserable
fuckin’ twat.’ To which he laughed and accepted it,
because he is totally a miserable twat.
Anton’s lovely, and I’ve met Anton a few times
and obviously he did that video, and the strange thing
about that video is, Gretton hated it and told me the
whole fucking group hated it. For 15 years I was under
the impression that the group hated it, but it turned
out the group loved it, only Rob fuckin’ hated it. So if
they hadn’t have brought Anton in to do this I’d have
never have found that out. It’s my double revenge
on Rob really. ‘Atmosphere’ is a perfect video, but
you can see where Rob comes from, who though it
was over-egging the legend of blah-blah-blah. Fuck
that anyway, to me anyone else touching it who
wasn’t there at the time, it would have been immoral.
Whereas because Anton had taken the photographs,
he was fucking around with his own pictures and to
me there was always going to be integrity. So now
choosing Anton for the film is a great, great move.
And secondly choosing writer Matt Greenhalgh (Burn
It) who is number three in the Red Productions school
of rock’n’roll, the top TV drama company in Britain.
Its number one writer is Russell T. Davies (Dr Who),
number two writer is Paul Abbot (Shameless), number
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
three writer is Matt Greenhalgh. So as far as I’m concerned
at the moment these two American boys have
done a fantastic job of choosing the right director and
writer. Obviously the casting will be something of an
issue, but I have nothing to do with it.
I did recommend one actor who could play the part
he played in 24 Hour Party People, he could play
me, he could play Ian, he could play Martin, he could
play anybody in this film and I was with him the other
night when he won best actor at The Empire Awards.
He’s Britain’s best actor he’s called Paddy Considine
who played Rob in the film. I kept going to London
going ‘Fuckin’ hell man, there’s a guy playing Rob!’,
and they’d go ‘Didn’t you know that John Simm is the
second best young actor in Britain?’ As in everybody
who works in movies knows that Paddy Considine is
the best actor in Britain. His first film that made him
famous was Romeo Brass, obviously he was amazing
as Gretton. My only input on actors is that Paddy could
play anybody.
Martin Hannett; tell me about his genius.
I could talk about Martin Hannett for days so don’t
start me. What’s very strange I think is that most great
producers go mad because they only ever find one
sound. Whereas groups can find two or three sounds in
their career and go through various changes. William!
Sorry beg your pardon. William!
[Interlude of Tony sorting out his puppy that is try-
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ing to play with another dog. Sounds of apologies to
another dog owner]
Every interview I do these days is interspersed with
this. You stupid dog!! He’s a ‘Blue Monday’ dog. The
dog from the New Order video. I have no time for dogs
whatsoever, but my partner knew that many years ago
I worked with Bill Wegman on the ‘Blue Monday ‘88’
video and fell in love with Wegman and his Weimaraner
dog.
Last November my partner said two things: Number
one you should sign Raw-T, number two I’m buying
you a dog for Christmas. They are obviously the most
beautiful dogs in the world, but no one told me that
in the dog world they are famous for being the most
loopy, fucking stupid off-their-head nutcases, so I’ve
got this complete idiot dog now! He’s actually had the
snip but that would never calm him down, and has got
me in a lot of trouble with Peter Saville because his
girlfriend used to think she was a wolf when she was a
teenager, loves dogs and wolves, and I got into a lot of
trouble from Peter for having giving William the snip
and it’s made no fucking difference whatsoever.
Back to Hannett. All producers go mad because they
normally only find one sound in their life. In fact Martin
Hannett found two sounds, and he even came back
a third time when he was just having a laugh with the
Mondays, so I think he did pretty fucking well. If you
want to go through the history of Martin very simply.
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
The early phase where he was learning about the studio
with Manchester Animation company, which he did
the soundtrack for. Then he pioneered punk with Spiral
Scratch and ‘Cranked Up Really High’ [Buzzcocks].
Then unbeknown to me until I found out years later, he
goes and meets these guys in a carpark on the moors
above Burnley and tells them the sound he’s imagining
in his head, off his head on fucking drugs and he drives
back to Manchester at midnight, they drive back to their
shed in Burnley and they build the world’s first digital
delay machine, the AMF digital delay which is the most
important outboard equipment of the last 50 years. And
it was 15 years later when some guy stopped me and
said, ‘I want to thank you, one of your partners changed
my life.’ When I realised it was AMF I went ‘No, you
changed his life by giving him that equipment.’ He
said, ‘Don’t you know where it came from?’ And I had
no idea it came out of Martin’s head. The first time he
ever worked with that digital delay machine was on the
song Digital. And that was on the Factory Sample, his
first day with Joy Division. And then of course he used
it on Unknown Pleasures and it changed the way drums
sound forever, he used it on ESG and everything else.
So the first thing is he changed the drum sound of the
world forever by the digital delay.
But then what he’s not given credit for, because
‘Blue Monday’ is given the credit for being the first
great modern music track which uses computers. In fact
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although I would never try and cross Bernard because
he’s extremely clever, (well New Order got the credit),
but if you look at Bernard’s production of Marcel King
at the same time, and the 52nd Street band, Section
25 then it’s obviously Bernard who was doing that.
But Bernard learnt it all by watching Martin. In fact
the most important track of all is ‘Everything’s Gone
Green’. If you listen to it, is the beginning of modern
music, and ‘Temptation’ takes it one stage further. And
then Martin and New Order break up and they go off to
do ‘Blue Monday’ as the next record, that’s the one that
quiet rightly is seen as this incredible break through,
but nevertheless the important song is ‘Everything’s
Gone Green’.
So Martin created that music and then were it not
for the utter stupidity of Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton
and Tony Wilson he would have created the next music
because he was desperate to get a Fairlight. It was a
synthesiser computer keyboard, and basically what
Martin, Stephen and Bernard were doing with soldering
irons in 1980, suddenly by 1983 there was a machine
that did it called a Fairlight. We had no idea what one
was, what we knew was that it cost 30 fuckin’ grand
and we were running the Hacienda and you could fuck
off. So we used to row about this all the time. ‘I want a
Fairlight. You can’t have a Fairlight. What’s this piece
BUY Tony Wilson books online from and
of shit you’re building? Where’s my Fairlight?’ He
never got a Fairlight, Trevor Horn got a Fairlight and
the rest is Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the rest is
history. I’ve very recently begun to claim that we created
Trevor Horn, by stopping Martin getting a fucking
Fairlight. And then the big fight and they go and fall
out with each other and it’s the lawsuit and stuff, and
suddenly the genius of Erasmus and Nathan, the Mondays
manager, getting him to produce the Mondays’
Bummed album which was fantastic.”
And yes, Bummed is a fucking fantastic album. Along
with Unknown Pleasures, Technique, the first singles
from New York’s early 1980s all sister rap band ESG
and other great works of A.H. Wilson Associated. It
could be said that Mr Wilson likes the sound of his own
voice. It could be said he’s arrogant. It has been said
he’s a twat. And he probably is. Who gives a fuck? The
point to Wilson apart from the usual record mogul/twat
tag is that he’s added spice and swaggering art to the
British music scene, he’s that way because of that drive
to spread his gospel on what he likes about music and
culture. A question I forgot to ask him was: has it all
been down to luck? What has been his secret, if there
has been any? It will be interesting to see where Raw-T
and his record label F4 end up in the grand scheme of
musical things. �
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Spike Contributors Roll Of Honour
Personal websites listed where known. Otherwise, search Facebook or LinkedIn to get in contact
Robin Askew
Adam Baron
Thierry Brunet
Budge Burgess
Eugene Byrne
Nathan Cain
Nick Clapson
Robert Clarke
Dan Coxon
Dr Jerome Deg
Naomi Delap
Alice Duberry
Graham Duff
Dan Epstein
Adrian Gargett PhD
Emma Garman
Pedro Blas Gonzalez
Ben Granger
Katrina Gulliver
John Edwards Gunn
Chris Hall
Edmund Hardy
Stephen Harper
Seán Harnett
Ian Hocking
O.J. Irish
Antony Johnston
Craig Johnson
Dorothy Johnson
Jonathan Kiefer
Simon Kirrane
David B. Livingstone
Thomas Handy Loon
Greg Lowe
Dr Willy Maley
Jayne Margetts
Gary Marshall
James McConalogue
Elizabeth McCullough
Andrew McCutchen
Patrick McGuigan
Darren J.N. Middleton
Chris Mitchell:
travelhappy
divehappy
Nick Mitchell
Stephen Mitchelmore
Michael Morrissey
Marcos Moure
Mark Ostrowski
Lewis Owens
Tim Parks
Nancy Rawlinson
David Remy
Mark Richardson
Bethan Roberts
Peter Robertson
Chris Rose
Suhayl Saadi
Ismo Santala
Reverend Osagyefo
Sekou
Jeffrey Sharlet
Harpreet Singh Soorae
Qurat ul ain Siddiqui
Sally-Ann Spencer
Zoe Strachan
Cliff Taylor
Kenn Taylor
Mark Valentine
Kevin Walsh
Jason Weaver
Peter Wild
Chris Wiegand
Russell Wilkinson
Bjorn Wiman
Brendan Wolfe
C.J. Wood
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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
This is, officially, the end.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this Spike Magazine
PDF, please visit SpikeMagazine.com for even
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Thank you again to all the Spike contributors
who made this possible.
Cheers
Chris Mitchell
chris@spikemagazine.com
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15 Years of
Books, Music, Art, Ideas