Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

“I wanted it to be a gag-free book, more like psychological horror really. But then I couldn’t help myself and jokes crept in.” The Skinny interview Dan Rhodes

& Five Chapters are excerpting Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask

& Paul A. Toth on Airplane Novel

& Maud Newton on being intimidated by a favourite writer’s work

& Andrew Gallix on René Girard & Mimetic desire

& Franz Kafka, this month’s featured artist on A Piece of Monologue

& Rhys Tranter on Heidegger & the Nazism debate

& Irish Publishing News on publishing & self-publishing & where things stand in 2010

& book lovers never go to bed alone, a tumblr of bookshelves [via VOl. 1 Brooklyn]

[Image: Josef Schulz's Sign Out, a "commentary on the American dream, unfulfilled"]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

“[Trout Fishing in America] was our very own Alice in Wonderland. And Brautigan was our Lewis Carroll.” [via @ElectricLit]

& Masters of American literature

& Philip K Dick, part 1 of 2 from a rare French interview [via @MichelleRick]

& The Nervous Breakdown remember J.D. Salinger

& “Mark Twain loved it, Virginia Woolf despised it, Joe Orton [was] once arrested for it.”

& Alberto Manguel on why Bolaño isn’t the saviour of Spanish-language fiction

& Keeping going, Michael Kimball continues his guest lecture series at HTMLGIANT

& Fuck Yeah NYRB Classics, a tumblr set

& How to be a Retronaut [h/t @slovobooks]

& Pink Floyd visual timeline 1960-2000 [via @brainpicker]

[Image: Minimalist Star Wars travel posters / via Drawn!]

The Baader-Meinhof blog. * Thinking and drinking. * The neuroadvertising paradox. * Jenni Fagan’s new site. * The trailer for Marc-Edouard Nabe’s new book. * The music of Friedrich Nietzsche. * John Bulmer’s pictures of the north of England in the 60s and 70s. * Ben Marcus’s website. (Related: me on Notable American Women.) * Jason Mulgrew interviewed by Steve Almond. * Oil City Confidential. * Faber editor woos Morrissey. More here. * Tao Lin’s next book. * The Guardian’s zeitgeist experiment. * The Durutti Column live: “Someone is playing a trumpet and suddenly you are there in the zone, that zone that prime time Miles Davis created with Sketches Of Spain, but dragged backwards through a post punk hedge”. * Sam Jordison on the Lost Booker. * The great divide between writing for children and adults. * Venues the Pistols played in. * Check out the covers of Lee Rourke’s The Canal and Ben Myers’s Richard. * Extracts from Patti Smith’s Just Kids. * Phony young narrators. * Temple Grandin: “[I]f you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn’t have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social ‘yak yaks’.” * Best London novel. * A musical journey to the centre of Bret Easton Ellis. * The Foundry to be destroyed. * “The Boys Blue appear to have invented punk while people were still listening to Gerry and the Pacemakers.” * Best book blogs. * Big dicks. * The story behind Jah Wobble’s new video. * American Pop Lit. *

What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:

Fiction: ‘Fabled Streams’ by Daniel Hales

Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

Non-fiction Terry Southern is 3:AM’s Cult Hero, Stewart Home on BFI Flipside series, Will Stone on Elem Klimov’s Come and See:

The ordeal of filming and the difficult subject matter, placed a severe strain on all concerned with it, none more so than its lead actor the virgin performer Alexei Kravchenko, who was only thirteen years when filming began. One of the more notorious stories surrounding the film concerns the fact that Klimov employed methods of hypnosis on his lead actor in order to protect him from the considerable psychological demands of his role. There was a genuine fear that the boy might absorb so much horror he would be left permanently damaged by his experiences. Fortunately this did not happen and Kravchenko, whom Klimov praised for his nerve and composure on set, went on to lead a comparatively normal acting career. Given the scenes witnessed during the film, this is some achievement, especially since Klimov was at pains to make his sets as authentic as possible, even using live ammunition to achieve realism. However, Kravchenko later attested to the fact that in certain harrowing scenes such as the burning of the church he genuinely feared for his sanity.

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Simon Crump asks, is it vanity to self-publish? [See The Great Underground Myth & Countering the Myth on 3:AM]

& Joanna Smith Rakoff’s adventures answering J.D. Salinger’s mail

& Is Shoplifting from American Apparel the new Catcher in the Rye? [via @largeheartedboy]

& Brandon Scott Gorrell answers 40 questions

& David Peace’s Book Notes for Occupied City

& Katherine Harris Bradley & Edith Emma Cooper, the Thelma & Louise of poetry

& You suck, and so does your writing, on literary envy [via @nfrankdaniels]

& Filmmaker Julien Temple interviewed

& Art as Manifesto, on the Bauhaus group

& The metamorphosis of Tintin

[Image: Carlo Farneti's illustrations for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1935)]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Tao Lin interviews Zachary German: “Jay McInerney writes a wine column for a famous magazine, but mostly feel aversion towards his career. I feel nothing but attraction towards Bret Easton Ellis’s career.”

& Zak Sally interviewed at Bookmunch

& Hilobrow on George A. Romero

& Postmodern picture books [via @ScottEsposito]

& Brian Eno on looking smart while being good

& Patti Smith reads from Just Kids [via @maudnewton]

& What is the best British novel since the war?

[Image: Editorial headings by Winsor McCay / via things magazine]

Hip godfather to the Beats (along with Gregory Corso he hustled William S. Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch into print) and purveyor of intelligent satire, Terry Southern is heralded as the inventor of New Journalism (both Tom Wolf and Hunter S. Thompson lined up to doff their caps).

When the The Magic Christian was published in 1959, Southern was already a fixture in Parisian literary scene and had appeared in the inaugural issue of George Plimpton’s Paris Review. The novel, about billionaire prankster Guy Grand who believes everyone has a price, is a series of outrageous escapades concocted by Grand to expose human greed, buying people off for his own amusement.

Filmed in 1969, and transposed to swinging London, The Magic Christian starred Peter Sellers and other future stars of British comedy, though it deviated from the book to cast Ringo Starr as Guy Grand’s adopted son. Southern’s brush with Sellers led him to scripting Dr. Strangelove for Kubrick, co-writing Easy Rider with Fonda and Hopper, touring America with the Rolling Stones in 1972 and writing for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s. But it was in the Sixties that Terry Southern’s flame burned brightest, propelled by the reception of The Magic Christian and immortalized on The Beatles‘ Sgt Pepper album cover, stood beside Dylan Thomas, the epitome of cool in his shades.

The Orphanage, a “celebration of the possibilities of recycling”, in which 3:AM’s Alan Kelly lends a hand:

One man’s tat is another man’s treasure. In that spirit, we bring you The Orphanage, a place where concepts like copyright and ownership have no meaning. Far away from the grown up world’s slavish adherence to shiny new products, this Neverland of freebies, object d’art and orphan films is made from 100% recycled materials; the decor is cobbled together from free trade pieces, dustbin contents and clutter from other people’s attics, the movies have been retrieved from darkest recesses. Come join us on our couch for a marathon of foundling films including the Brazilian remake of Star Wars, a Turkish Wizard of Oz, the North Korean Godzilla (made to order for Kim-Il Jong) and Plan 9 From Outer Space retold through the fine medium of Mexican wrestling.

This is an entirely free, interactive and democratic piece. Gawp through the window or take in Badi (the Turkish E.T.) from the comfort of our sofa. Films will screen all day, every day for the duration of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

The Orphanage,
18 - 28th February,
Cultivate, Temple Bar, Dublin

Tom McCarthy took part in a debate on Christian Boltanski’s links to OuLiPo at the Grand Palais in Paris on 29 January.

McCarthy has also published an essay on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. At times, it reads like a manifesto:

“For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be — so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. …Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

Born in 1957, Toussaint was out of the blocks quickly: by the age of 35 he’d published four novels. It’s the last of these, the so far untranslated La Réticence, which most blatantly betrays his generation’s haunting by its predecessor. …

…He’d made the addition of an element that Robbe-Grillet and Simon’s work, for all its greatness, almost entirely lacks: humour. The protagonists (all nameless) of the first three novels are essentially slapstick heroes in the Keaton-Chaplin mould. They amble through the modern urban landscape, amusing themselves by triggering and retriggering an automatic doorbell, flirting with a pretty secretary, or failing to observe the etiquette of a posh tennis club or dinner with the girlfriend’s parents, or to master the workings of cars or the rules of the Highway Code. The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no coincidence that so much slapstick involves cars: in Bergson’s terms, automobiles are automatically funny).

What this aesthetic shares with its uncomic nouveau roman forebears is an anti-naturalist, anti-humanist bent: we’re being given access not to a fully rounded, self-sufficient character’s intimate thoughts and feelings as he travels through a naturalistic world, emoting, developing and so on — but rather to an encounter with structure. In a wonderful sequence in Camera, Toussaint sets up a scene of dialogue in a restaurant and, having placed a bowl of olives on the table (as a naturalist writer would do to provide background verisimilitude), suppresses the scene’s dialogue entirely, and describes exclusively the movement of hands as they reach towards the bowl, the trajectory of fruit from hand to mouth, the ergonomics of pit-transfers from mouth to tablecloth and, most striking of all, the regularly spaced imprints made by the back of a fork’s tines across the skin of the lone olive the narrator toys with before stabbing it. We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.

In The Bathroom, this logic frames the entire book, which — prefaced by Pythagoras’ rule about the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides — assumes a triangular form, its three sections entitled ‘Paris’, ‘Hypotenuse’, ‘Paris’. When the hero, in a willed narrative refusal to go out into the world and make something happen, takes to his bathroom and decides to stay there, he luxuriates in the tub’s parallel sides and in the patterns formed by the towel-rails, as though space itself was like the olive, embossed with evenly spread lines. Watching his lover move round their flat, he discerns the ‘curves and spirals’ described by her arms. We exist and assume subjectivity to the extent that we occupy a spot on or traverse the grid: an implicit assertion that’s part Descartes, part Deleuze. Geometry is not just an aesthetic: it is, to borrow a term from Deleuze, our ‘habitus’. When the narrator finally leaves the bathroom and the flat whose passages he’s ‘stalked’ (shoes intercepting shafts of light, half-open doors on each side providing symmetry and rhythm), he travels in the cube of a train compartment to a Venetian hotel, there to install himself in a new bathroom, to stalk new hallways, all of which he describes in careful detail. His lover, joining him, tries to entice him out to see Renaissance works of art, but he’s not interested. Pictures can’t be inhabited, unlike the neutral, unanimated surfaces and planes of corridors and door-frames.

At one point The Bathroom’s hero even buys himself a dartboard, ‘sober-looking’ and ‘concentric’, and, drawing on a round table columns representing various countries, plays out a darts ‘world cup’ — alone, of course. There are echoes here of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, who abandons the countries of the world in favour of their simulacra. But Toussaint’s is a next generation decadent: where Des Esseintes’s creations convey the smells, sounds and colours of the landscapes they replace, Toussaint’s narrator has excised all mimesis. His world-in-absentia has been reduced to a shorthand cartography, the dartboard’s intersections and the circular chart: abstract globes made up of characterless vectors. And it’s here that The Bathroom’s single genuine ‘event’ takes place: as his lover stands beside the board nagging him once more to get up off his arse and visit Venice, the narrator, quite deliberately, throws a dart into her forehead, piercing it as though it were an olive’s skin. This, perhaps, is the nouveau roman’s greatest legacy: an understanding of what renders space meaningful. It’s an understanding that Greek tragedy (with its houses, cities and whole states founded on primal murders) also displays — and one which illustrates why Houellebecq is so wrong about Robbe-Grillet’s writing. In The Bathroom, as in The Voyeur, space is brought into its own, made present in the only true way possible: through acts of violence.…

…Another way in which the Eastern novels differ from their predecessors is in the priority they give to that bugbear of all things even vaguely avant-garde: relationships. For all their narrative refusal and machine-like logic, Toussaint’s first three novels also involved emotional encounters between men and women. They could even be seen as playful renditions of quite conventional romantic situations, but only if re-engineered through a certain kind of reading, much as some student guides to Ulysses try to persuade us that what’s ‘really’ going on in such and such a scene is Bloom pining for Molly, for example (‘No,’ I always want to shout out when I read accounts like these, ‘what’s really going on is tramlines vibrating, soap singing and language rioting, just like it says!’). But Making Love and Running Away are unabashedly ‘about’ the troubled love between the hero and his girlfriend. …

…Is this a crypto-reactionary step backwards towards humanism, sentimentalism, positivism and the whole gamut of bad isms that the vanguard 20th-century novel expended so much effort overcoming — and, moreover, a step backwards enabled by some of that vanguard’s own techniques? It’s hard to say. In La Patinoire (‘The Ice Rink’), a film Toussaint scripted and directed, the French director-character (it’s a film about the making of a film) tries to explain to his American star that he hides love stories behind elaborate formal exercises. Is that an inverse way of saying that, in order to get away with formal exercises, he uses love stories as a sweetener, a Trojan horse? Either way, the star, who doesn’t speak French, smiles back and says, ‘I don’t understand’; then, as the ice melts beneath the spotlights, and the geometrically scored skate-marks disappear, he goes off and screws the leading lady the director covets. It’s a brilliantly comic moment — and one that (again) replays, or becomes a snapshot, en abîme, of the complex cultural legacy Toussaint has inherited, and its relation to a dumb mainstream culture in a corner of whose soil it must somehow take root and grow. …”

[Pix by Andrew Gallix.]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Why Leadbelly was as great a poet as Whitman, Dickinson or Blake [via Vol. 1 Brooklyn]

& Great moments in jazz: Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan’s pianoless quartet

& American Psycho, the musical [via @flavorpill]

& The secret key to becoming a good writer? A lousy spouse [via @litdrift]

& The literary pursuit of happiness [via @JanuaryMagazine]

& The most adapted pulp author of all time [via @maudnewton]

[Image: Women, Snakes & Stalkers, a gallery of South Asian book covers]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

Bob Dylan has written a children’s book

& Bill Watterson speaks! [via @drawn]

& The Broad Set Writing Collective interview Shane Jones

& In search of Stieg Larsson

& Ten books about drink

& Catherine Gregg on Le Corbusier’s printed works

& Notable Novelists of the 20th Century card game [& illustrator Andy Ward's sketches for them / via @largeheartedboy]

& A Is For Atom, vintage atomic film [via @MichaelKaiser]

[Image: Coming soon: Picture Book Report / via @nyrbclassics]

Stewart Home joins Iain Sinclair later this month at the ICA for London, Restless City, a talk on “London as an ever-changing environment.”

They will be exploring the architecture and cultural make-up of our capital in relation to a city that is essentially restless and continually evolving. Sinclair’s writing has often focused on London; his latest book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, is a personal record of the area he has lived in for the past 40 years.

Institute of Contemporary Arts,
Thursday 18 February
[Note: Event Sold Out, returns only]

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

A conversation with critic Warren Motte on Oulipo, Perec & “the will toward literary innovation” [via @EliseBlackwell]

& Sylvia & Co., American expatriates in Paris under Nazi occupation [via @millerwalks]

& What Don DeLillo’s books tell him

& Aleksandar Hemon on DeLillo’s Point Omega

& Those remaining literary recluses (read: not publicity whores, plus where’s Patrick Suskind?)

& February’s issue of The Believer includes an interview with Trent Reznor & an essay on William T. Vollmann

& > kill author issue 5: Octavia Paz

& The heirs to Holden Caulfield

& “Lost” 1970 Booker Prize longlist announced

[Image: Matt Kindt's Franny print]

What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:

Fiction: ‘The Reading’ by Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss

Non-fiction: In Japanamerica Roland Kelts wonders if this is the year Japan jumps the shark, Graham Bendel on Proxy Music (includes the definitive list of tribute band names), Alexander Trocchi is 3:AM’s Cult Hero, what’s on Julian Gough’s iPod?

Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind & David Shield’s Reality Hunger

Poetry: ‘a poem is a city’, ‘the young man on the bus stop bench’ & ‘advice for some young man in the year 2064 A.D.’ by Charles Bukowski:

a poem is a city, a poem is a nation,
a poem is the world…

and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor’s scrutiny,
and night is elsewhere
and faint gray ladies stand in line,
dog follows dog to estuary,
the trumpets bring on the gallows
as small men rant at things
they cannot do.

RIP J.D. Salinger, January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010

Stephen Fry on the iPad. * David Lynch & Frank Herbert talk Dune. * Richard Milward continues his “series of literary, rock’n'roll hijinks” in The Guardian (read 3:AM’s interview with Milward here) * Alan Kelly reviews Steve Finbow’s Balzac of the Badlands. * Did you read Nick Flynn guest blogging on Powell’s? * The Ulitmate Graphic Novel (in six panels) by David Lasky (via HTMLGIANT) * Michael Kimball is doing a series of guest lectures on the novel at HTMLGIANT. * Steve Almond’s self-publishing adventure. * Are self-publishing companies “monetizing the slush pile?” * A book by its Gorey cover (via @RonHogan) * A gallery of 650 Philip K Dick book covers (via Design Observer) * The Catcher in the Rye , the book (cover) that changed Michael Bierut’s life. * The books in Salinger’s safe. * Secret Salinger documentary revealed (via Maud Newton) * Salon’s slideshow of jackets of J.D. Salinger’s most famous book. * A sneak peek of John Squire’s covers for Penguin. * Vulgar Picture, an illustrated discography of The Smiths & Morrissey (via @doorsixteen) * An open letter to Morrissey. * “Wee label with great chemistry”, Chemikal Underground records profiled (via Largehearted Boy) * The literary manboys of NYC. * Unhappy Hipsters, “it’s lonely in the modern world” (h/t Andrew Stevens) * Lee Rourke indulges in a little shelf love. * Robert Birnbaum on “an original’s original” Nick Tosches. * Gavin James Bower: “Self-publicity is like being f***ed by a relentless and indefatigable mistress – with a strap-on black mamba. It’s constant, repetitive and surprisingly pleasurable, but only in the way that you can’t comfortably admit. “ * Jacques Tati fashion. * Paris by Izis. * Dash Snow’s polaroids. * Polaroid of the Day (via @CreativeReview) * Tiffany Murray’s top 10 rock’n'roll novels. * John Coulthart on William S. Burroughs: A Man Within. * Archive of Burroughs & Ginsberg lectures at Naropa Online. * Will Self’s introduction to the Book of Revelation (via @RhysTranter) * Jewcy interview Gary Shteyngart: “My immigrant humor is most definitely ill-advised.” (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn). * A 1957 recording of Alain Robbe-Grillet reading from Jealousy (via @davidbmetcalfe). * What is the best London Novel?. * The LSE literature festival. * RIBA’s Forgotten Spaces. * People Sleeping in Libraries, a Flickr group (via @josswinn) * In praise of phonebooks (and Philip Roth) by Joshua Cohen. * Dennis Cooper on Zachary German. * The state of the nation novel. * Magazine fiction’s golden age can never be repeated.

Today’s Salinger links from around the web:

Writers respond on Twitter to J.D. Salinger’s death

& Bunch of phonies mourn J.D. Salinger

& Salinger’s best story

& Walking Salinger’s New York

& Holden’s history of the United States

Some more reactions to the news that Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger has died:

Xan Brooks wonders how does one go about organising a wake for the great literary hermit of American folklore?

Tom Leonard recalls visiting Salinger in New Hampshire last year

Ed Champion has recorded a reading of ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ as a tribute

The New Yorker on the cultural reach of Salinger

Bret Easton Ellis: “Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!”

[Image: Hey, Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time!]

“It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.”

Sad to hear that J.D. Salinger, legendary writer and recluse, passed away yesterday at his New Hampshire home. He was 91.

More: New York Times obituary / Guardian obituaries / Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted / Sonny / Raise High the Bookshelves, Censors! / Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly / J. D. Salinger’s Women / When books kill / Dead Caulfields

Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web:

RIP Howard Zinn

& Is the iPad the publishing industry’s saviour?

& Where a writer is from is neither here nor there, Stuart Evers on BEF2010

& Crash: Homage to JG Ballard exhibition at the Gagosian gallery [via @ballardian]

& Bob Dylan at the White House, how much have the times changed?

& Peter Blake’s 1950s Penguins

[Image: Kubrick, Rare Pictures of Famous People / via @brainpicker]

Tom McCarthy on Trocchi:

If Paris was a moveable feast for Hemingway, junk, for Trocchi, is a moveable void: taking that void around the city with him, in him, he ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it’s also the way his whole perception system works at its most basic level (the two are the same). I can’t stress enough how utterly negative Trocchi’s negative space is. It’s negative in the strict chemical or photographic sense of the word.

[..]

Trocchi is important, more so now than ever. We’re living in a time when the very ‘uncreative work’ against which he permanently struck is dominating culture, especially in the field of publishing. All too often, pliant authors are content to serve as little more than copywriters advertising neoliberal concerns, churning out middle-market copy for conglomerates, and all too often broadsheets who rely on these conglomerates for revenue try to persuade us that this copy is literature. Well it’s not; and Cain’s Book is. It’s a book in which the very possibility of literature booms and resonates, or (to use another metaphor) rushes and gurgles like so much black water under a hull two miles from land: literature’s possibility and, of course, its impossibility.

More: Scots Alec, an Trocchi resource / Andrew Stevens interviews Denis Browne, Trocchi’s literary assistant / Lord of Junk Himself, Denis Browne’s talk on Trocchi / Stewart Home’s introduction to White Thighs / ‘Between the glittering mirage and the dust of reality,’ an appreciation of Young Adam / Oneworld Classics‘ page for Trocchi