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09/09/10: ampere’s and
This week’s visuals:
& Victor Reinganum’s cover for Muriel Spark’s Ballad of Peckham Rye
& Jardin de la Conaissance, 40,000 discarded books as “a structural garden element of wall, bench and bed, but also as a growing medium”
& Western Motel, a 2009 exhibition on Edward Hopper’s influence on cinema & his view of architectural space [via]
& The top 10 typefaces of the past decade
& Booktwo on covers in the age of e-books
& Author photos are usually tucked away on a book’s inside sleeve, or found propping up the text on the back. It’s rare to have the author’s face staring out from a book’s front cover, and it’s pretty much unique to have that same cover discussed at length in the first chapter. Then again Trout Fishing in America is an atypical book
& Colophon flying likelihood reality check
[Image: "Une description du monstre," Canada's French pulp literature collection]
08/09/10: Novelistic form: Houellebecq & Lethem
“This is a skilled insult. Using a big word like plagiarism… always causes some damage. It will always do lasting damage, like accusations of racism. If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they haven’t got the first notion of what literature is. This is part of my method. This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors. I have been influenced especially by [Georges] Perec and [Jorge Luis] Borges… I hope that this contributes to the beauty of my books, using this kind of material.”
Jonathan Lethem (via @longformorg):
“Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time. When I was thirteen I purchased an anthology of Beat writing. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered one William S. Burroughs, author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance. Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing. Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the Forties and Fifties, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.”
07/09/10: Dredging Up Derrida
“I can’t look at a dredger without first thinking of Jacques Derrida. I don’t quite know what that says about me, but there you go”: Lee Rourke interviewed over at Bookslut.
Lee will be reading at Blackwell bookshop in Manchester on 11 September at 5.30pm.
[Pic by Matthew Coleman.]
06/09/10: C You There
Tom McCarthy’s US tour to promote the Booker-longlisted C kicks off next week:
Tues, Sept 14th:
7 pm Reading and signing at Bookcourt, 163 Court Street, Brooklyn
Weds Sept 15th:
Secret Event with Mystery Surprise Guest (Simon Critchley) in Brooklyn. Watch Cabinet and Triple Canopy websites for updates.
Thurs Sept 16th:
1.20 pm Live appearance on Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC-FM
7 pm Reading and signing McNally-Jackson, 52 Prince St, New York
Friday Sept 17th:
7 pm Reading and signing Books and Books, 927 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach
Sun Sept 19th:
4 pm Reading and conversation with Chris Kraus, Art Catalogues at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles
Tues Sept 21:
7 pm Reading and signing Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Ave, Seattle
Weds Sept 22:
1 pm Reading and signing Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista, Corte Madera, California
7.30 pm Reading and signing Books Inc, 1344 Park St., Alameda, California
05/09/10: The Missing Links
The Endpoint of all gravity is the grave: a Triple Canopy podcast on the activities of the INS. * “[L]et’s tear it all down, with our tongues in our cheeks”: the enduring appeal of Billy Liar. * Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die. * The art of punk. * Sex and the Situationists. * Underground Resistance is go! * First issue of Salon Futura, including Sam Jordison. * FragLit: a webzine devoted to “fragmentary writing” (via). * George Formby, first pop star. * Tom McCarthy reviews Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? More here. * Brazilian pulp fiction covers. * Sean O’Hagan on the late Corinne Day. * David Mitchell interviewed in The Rumpus: “Possibly novelists are all aliens among natives”. * Ping. * British Remains. * An interview with Blake Butler. * How to make a steampunk Mr Potato Head. * The best modern literary tours. * The strippers of Shoreditch. * Jenny Diski on Banksy’s Granny. * Will Self interviewed in the Telegraph. * The future is ours. * David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Bookworm talk (via). * Another Morrissey controversy, this time following Simon Armitage’s Guardian interview. * Janette Beckman. * Anglarchy: Ian Bone and Ray Roughler Jones interviewed by The Idler.
: 3:AM Reloaded
What you (may have) missed on 3:AM this week:
Fiction: ‘Just to Touch’ by Charlie Geoghegan-Clements; ‘Gaza Pressé’ by Benjamin Robinson
Flash fiction: ‘The Bee Keeper’ by a.m. baker
Poetry: In the 25th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Norwegian writer & musician Jenny Hval; ‘Two Poems’ by Jenny Hval; ‘Two Poems’ by Zoe Alexandra
Reviewed: Richard Marshall on Jarett Kobek’s HOE #999: Decennial Appreciation and Celebratory Analysis; Anna Aslanyan on DBC Pierre’s Lights Out in Wonderland
Interviewed: Tom Jenks interviews the poet Richard Barrett; Andrew Stevens talks clubs and vice with Sohemian chronicler Paul Willetts:
Right from an early age, when my mum used to take me round Soho, I was aware of the Raymond Revuebar, the famous strip-club run by Paul Raymond. Facing Brewer Street, it had a beautiful, very stylish giant neon sign that featured a can-can dancer lifting her skirt. With its 1950s typography and all sorts of fantastic embellishments, it looked like it belonged in Rat Pack-era Las Vegas. I can remember peering up at it as we threaded our way through the market stalls opposite. The sign’s still there, but it hasn’t been switched on for years. It was a great West End landmark, which should’ve been given listed status.
[..]
I suppose my biggest discovery, though, centres on a period in Raymond’s life that’s akin to something out of a Hollywood thriller. I can’t help thinking this aspect of the Raymond story would make a great framework for one of the mooted biopics about him. He showed immense courage to survive the experience. I ended up feeling a sneaking admiration for the old rogue.
Other surprising revelations also arose from my research. Foremost among these was Raymond’s status as a culturally important figure whose battles against censorship shaped the society we live in now. That probably makes the book seem a bit po-faced. I don’t think it is. Lots of the material is intrinsically amusing and absurd, not least some of the variety acts Raymond staged, acts such as ‘The Nudes in the Lions’ Den’. There was even a show co-starring a white horse named Beauty, who was trained to remove a woman’s bra with his teeth. The training routine involved sewing sugar-lumps into the bra. Ultimately, the horse was so conditioned that he’d pull off the bra without the sugary reward. Who says biographies aren’t educational? For sheer strangeness, I’m convinced that the Raymond story trumps Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, my biography of Maclaren-Ross.
[Image]
04/09/10: Saturday Night at the Movies
By Alan Kelly
Ed Wood’s seminal disasterpiece Plan 9 from Outer Space is widely held as possibly the WORST film ever made.That accolade has yet to be usurped, though I’m excluding the 80s creative outlets (or lack thereof). Based on a story by Ray Bradbury - oh no wait, that’s ‘It Came from Outer Space’ - starring Elvira’s mortal enemy Maila Nurmi (R.I.P. doll) and Bela Lugosi (R.I.P. cock), and directed by the irreverent cross-dresser Ed Wood, Plan 9 has provided the template for numerous invasion movies. It’s the film that launched a thousand cigar shaped UFOs. And one I love dearly.
As a kid, when I wasn’t prowling for predatory older men to sodomize me, I was absorbed by fantasies of murdering my class-mates, distracted by my mother’s alcoholism and dragging-up with fur coats and sequined frocks I stole off my aunt Margaret – oh and watching everything from Faces of Death to Melrose Place obsessively. I’m digressing, so sue me.
I was handed the baton to write about cult trashy films so I’ll keep this brief (I have birds to feed): basically the plot is about intergalactic grave-robbers and I can’t remember the rest. I think I heard something about a remake (hardly surprising really, Americans are obsessed with remakes (and won’t watch anything European because the subtitles are too much for them and refuse to watch anything else unless everything is computer generated, like fish eating Kelly Brook)) and that made me chuckle.
Elvira told me recently that she walked off a plane when she was forced to watch this (or thought about it anyway) and the film moves through so many pop channels that it’s harder to pin down than a butterfly. Anyway, I have nothing more to add. Watch the film.
03/09/10: 3:AM Asia Screening
Prince Charles Cinema, Leicester Place
Friday 17th September 8.30pm doors open
Tickets £6.50 / £4.00
The first UK screening of Takao Nakano’s camp horror Big Tits Zombie in 3D (glasses provided.) Free entry to those dressed as big titted zombies (make an effort, mask is not enough, manager’s decision final.) After party at Sushi Gaga on Lisle St.
: Novelistic form: Roth vs. Auster
“I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.”
“Philip has been talking like this for decades now and the fact is, he keeps writing books and people keep reading them. And I just, I disagree strenuously. Human beings need stories and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places, whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories. Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality and I think human beings wouldn’t be human without narrative fiction.
Okay. Perhaps, you know, the market, the way things are moving, fewer people are reading novels than previously. But still, if you walk into a bookstore, there are thousands upon thousands of them there. And they wouldn’t be in print unless somebody was buying them. Libraries are crammed with novels as well, and people are reading them. And I don’t think it’s ever going to dry up because two, the novel is such a flexible form. It’s not like a sonnet, it’s not fixed. You can do anything you want with it. It’s just a story that you tell within the covers of the book. But all bets are off, there are no rules. And that’s why I think the novel is constantly reinventing itself. And society continues to reinvent itself. Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it. So much as I admire Philip Roth, I just think he’s wrong about this.”
: 3:AM Maintenant Reading Series
September Friday 24th: Reading with four Norwegian poets and four English poets to release a collaborative chapbook of their poetry, curated by Maintenant and published by Kinves Forks & Spoons Press, Manchester. The interchanges are between Sean Bonney / Paal Bjelke Andersen, Jeff Hilson / Audun Mortensen, Agnes Lehoczky / Jenny Hval and Sam Riviere.
September Saturday 25th: Ny Poesi: New Norwegian Poetry at the Rich Mix (35 - 47 Bethnal Green Road, London. E1 6LA). Entrance free to all. Jenny Hval / Endre Ruset / Paal Bjelke Andersen / Audun Mortensen
November Friday 26th: At the Icelandic Embassy in Knightsbridge a reading with four Icelandic poets and four English poets to release a collaborative chapbook of their poetry curated by Maintenant and published by Knives Forks & Spoons Press. The interchanges are between Iain Sinclair / Ragnhildur Johanns, Stewart Home / Eirikur Orn Norddahl, Tom Jenks / tba, and Scott Thurston / tba
November Saturday 27th: Presenting New Icelandic Poetry at the Rich Mix. Entrance free to all. Ragnhildur Johanns, Eirikur Orn Norddahl, tba
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