3:AM Magazine » Criticism

Walking the Wild Side

stevefinbow — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:56:36 +0000

By Mikael Covey.

Tony O’Neill, Down and Out on Murder Mile, Harper Perennial, 2008

O’Neill has done it. All the young writers looking to score that knock ‘em dead bestseller, poetry with punch, words with wisdom. It’s all here…on murder mile. Not another one, you say; another sad tale of down and out junkies on the skids. But I’ve only read one like that, O’Neill’s Digging the Vein, which is great stuff. Power words, real, meaningful, truthful, honest and raw. Down and Out on Murder Mile is the sequel, or part of a trilogy, which includes the poetry of Songs From The Shooting Gallery.

I finished Down and Out on Murder Mile rather quickly, and thought, damn…this is even better than Digging the Vein, and that’s saying something. Even to dissociate the context, dying junkies, slip sliding away. There’s an honesty, a simple truth to narco-realism. Disengaged from all thoughts of the past, or the future, you are left absolutely clearly in the moment. Knowing that whatever you’re doing right now, is the only thing that has meaning.

The zen-calm realization that everything else is façade. The nine to five, the hustle, your life’s work. Doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t get you there. Is nothing more than your own personal Jesus.

In a society that’s falling apart while we watch, a planetary wasteland, or even a broken-down old human like me, we read Tony O’Neill and Dan Fante to understand ourselves. What we are all going through, individually, collectively; what we is. And where to go from here. That’s the main difference in Down and Out on Murder Mile and Digging the Vein. There’s a way out.

O’Neill always approaches this when he writes about family, but it’s very rare. There’s a powerful scene at the end of Digging the Vein where he compares his hands to those of his father. Very moving, very real. A longer passage in Down and Out on Murder Mile where he goes home, finds his parents, the life left behind, the hydrocodone in the kitchen cabinet.

But like Dan Fante’s book Mooch, there is a way out. And it’s there for all of us. Granted, it’s never enough; but when you know that, when you experience the all-pervading calm of understanding that, it’s like…you there. Thanks, Tony; more than you’ll ever know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mikael Covey is a devout citizen of the world with an irreverent attitude. His writing has appeared in a number of on-line and print magazines. He’s editor of Lit Up Magazine.

Mike Philbin’s Double Vision

stevefinbow — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:15:39 +0000

By Steve Finbow.

Philip Pullman meets Georges Bataille? Sounds unlikely, huh? Well, so do the happenings in Mike Philbin’s novel Planet of the Owls. Let’s think again – BDSM meets Christianity. Birds Deirdre Su-Ki Marcus or Birds Dali Spirituality Millenarianism. Giant birds have taken over the world, finches rule the air while crows play tug of war with babies as a gang of magpies pull a train on a bag lady who just might be the saviour of the world. Planet of the Owls is, mostly, a dual narrative told from the viewpoint of Marcus – a feckless Oxford-based falafel seller – and the highly precocious 14-year-old Su-Ki Chin from a village just outside Beijing (you don’t meet many Chinese teenagers who can opine about Cartesian theories of the underworld). The narrative is full-pelt and fun despite the shellacking of Christian motifs and Jesus-friendly symbolism. The imagery is at times shocking and at others lifted directly from the figurative Surrealists – René Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Max Ernst. Rooms are full of giant nests, there is avian rape, birdy incest, matricide, filicide, and messianism. Pandemonium is the word I’m looking for. As the narrative checks most postmodern boxes and slips into them some overwrought spirituality, so the writing becomes undone, similes veer into cliché, and sometimes Philbin loses control of his metaphors. Yet Planet of the Owls – if one is to hurry past the regurgitated owl pellets combining Surrealism and Christianity – is an enjoyable hybrid, as if Ernst’s king of the birds Loplop had swooped down on Lara’s Oxford and used a feathery dildo to pen a fantasy Revelations in which the owl, the finch, the magpie, the crow replace war, pestilence, famine, and death. Occasionally, Philbin’s vision is as gaudy and plastic as a cheap kaleidoscope but it is one that throws up the odd original splendour.

Mike Philbin assaults his readers with brutal and sexual imagery yet assuages them with thoughts of kittens and butterflies on a summer’s day. What the reader can never do is take for granted what is going to happen next. Bukkakeworld is a satirical novel in the line of Rabelais, Swift, and De Sade; an open attack on corporations and an analysis of vocational alienation shot through with a messy, spunked-up narrative. At times, I found it difficult to follow - and swallow - but what Philbin is basically arguing here (I think) is that we all live in a version of Bukkakeworld, we all spend our days covered in ejaculate matter issued from the other people around us – and we have to take it, whether it gets stuck in our hair, smears our glasses, or tickles our uvula – we are the slaves of corporate cum-monsters, the lackeys of an uncaring and godless world, the receptacles for all the world’s glutinous gobshites. But, hold on, if we’re ever so lucky, there is a form of salvation in this porno version of 1984 and it appears in the form of a kitten – not a pussy – a kitten that leads us to our Samaritan – Marianne Buckman – a non-corporeal, time/space-shifting Beatrice and Mata Hari rolled into one. Bad jokes litter the text, as do sex and death, eros and thanatos, and the ghostly forms of William S. Burroughs, George Orwell, and Lewis Carroll. And all this fused with a cum-tsunami of corporate terrorism, reflections on the soul, and a parallel world in which the Glimpsers (sort of spectral Gestapo) can arrive at any moment to recode your DNA, reinvent time, and fold space. I’m not sure if Bukkakaworld is dystopian sci-fi or an encoded investigation of selfhood, patricide, and deicide in a world in which we are consumed by the memories of whom we nearly were. Just one quibble: “bukkake” is not the object itself but the action, and so I hope Mike Philbin makes a loud “splash” with these novels.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Steve Finbow’s new novel Balzac of the Badlands is out October 2009.

fast food nation

Susan Tomaselli — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:05:17 +0000

By Alan K.

Tom Bradley, Lemur, Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2008

It is a truth, one that we don’t often admit to ourselves, but a truth nevertheless, that the characters we consort with do tend to rub off on one’s own quite insidiously. Such, of course, is not the case with Spencer Sproul, a fey, unworldly boy nurturing notions of mass murder while slogging his guts out in the clogged arteries of fast-food consumerist America. The scourge of capitalism and ravenous consumerism do, however, rub off on one’s character as Tom Bradley shows us with his Bizarro novella Lemur.

Bradley’s writing is minimalist whilst providing enough narrative nutrition to sink your teeth into. With Lemur Bradley offers up quite a menu of characters, a veritable stew of displaced oddities: Mahalia, an African-American sex-worker who plays kill-me games with Spencer; Raleigh Standish, a critic whose erotic triggers are a tad too widespread; and Spud, a festering bus-boy who catches the eye of the protagonist.

Spencer Sproul is not, could not, be an inherently evil person (if such a thing as inherent evil exists). Bradley has created a teenager who is so far removed from the world of tangible faces and things that he could not find his way back with even Anneka Rice on his arm. His attempts, and failures, at offing people are darkly comical, offensive and oddly touching.

It is when Spencer abducts an upper-class child musician wanting to do a John Wayne Gacy does the realisation dawn on him that perhaps there are other ways of inflicting pain on unsuspecting fat Americans i.e. embrace the beast he so desperately yearns to eschew.

Bradley’s prose is terse, his pace quick and chock-full of socio-political observations, cutting satirical switchblade swipes at how sex, marketing and murder are often, uncomfortably intrinsically linked: “he stares at reproductions of magazine ads in which images of people copulating and killing each other are subtly blended into the shiny bits of pop cans, SUVs, handguns etc…”

Only Tom Bradley would create a world where a malnourished, metal-faced meth-whore wearing little more than a Cow and Chicken t-shirt is crushed beneath a “tidal wave of cellulite” while attempting to rob a diner. A stampede of the dead-eyed alienation of contemporary American youth counter-culture by the machinations of monolithic marketing.

Tom Bradley’s Lemur can be read as social criticism; the novella raises far more questions than it answers, simply because Bradley gloriously shoves in our faces the cold hard facts of the material world.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Alan K. is from Dublin, Ireland. His work has previously featured in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Beat the Dust and one or two other places.

god is not great

Susan Tomaselli — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:12:18 +0000

By Andrew Fleming.

Tibor Fischer, Good to be God, Alma Books, 2008

“What galls me most about failure, is the amount of effort I’ve gone to achieve it”, muses the protagonist of Tibor Fischer’s new novel. Good to be God is itself ultimately a failure, but would that it failed through an excess of effort; instead, the book gently disappoints, failing to fully explore the potential of its initial premise. Fischer settles for a middling meander across well-worn ground, rather than making a bold foray into new terrain.

The narrative has a high quotient of vaguely laddish wackiness; the protagonist is middle-aged loser who tries to turn his life around by trying to make it as a deity in the United States, for instance. The vehicle for so doing – named, ho ho, “the Church of the Heavily-Armed Christ” – is but one example of a somewhat tired range of ‘crazy America’ tropes that populate the novel. Religious nuts and unpredictable cocaine runners, not to mention a deeply unfunny pair of bumbling criminals, are no longer intrinsically novel or amusing enough to sustain a story of this kind, if indeed they ever were. The central character taking this picaresque trip around a sub-Gonzo America further compounds the problem; he is the frustrated, mid-life everyman familiar from a hundred such lad-lit excursions. Unfortunately, to collide two such well-trodden subgenres makes neither more interesting.

What makes this all the more galling is that Fischer is undoubtedly a fine writer. Good to be God is kept ticking over with breezy, enjoyably laconic prose heavy on incidental observations: “It’s the buying of flowers that’s important, not the price.” One can’t help but think, however, that a more ambitious central idea would elevate such engaging writing to the platform it deserved; in this humdrum context, Fischer’s text veers dangerously towards mundane, that’s-the-thing-about-queues musing. Given the scope here for saying something genuinely funny or provocative about religion, or America, the author’s apparent willingness to generate merely a few wry smiles is unfortunate.

It is this literary reticence, the sense that Fischer is almost deliberately holding something more interesting back – right up to the deeply underwhelming ending – which ultimately undermines the novel. Good to be God certainly isn’t a bad book, but it is a disappointing one; the work’s potential isn’t dramatically squandered, but simply drifts away over the course of a fundamentally uninspired narrative. Fischer’s considerable talents would be far better spent exploring more ambitious territory than he does here.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrew Fleming is a recent graduate. He lives and works in London.

smells like peter bagge

Susan Tomaselli — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:20:14 +0000

comics introspective volume one: peter bagge / as told to christopher irving
TwoMorrows Publishing, 2007

“Every generation is defined by the pop culture left behind in the wake of getting older and passing the baton on to the next group,” writes Christopher Irving in his new interview series for TwoMorrows. “As for Generation X (of which this author stems from the tail end), we saw the birth and death of college rock, its death throes culminating in the Seattle-born and soon-to-be commericalized ‘grunge’ movement of the ’90s. Grunge brought a pissiness and skepticism to us slacking Gen X-ers—while early punk had denied authority, we denied having to work hard enough to gain authority. We had Nirvana; we had the Matt Dillon vehicle Singles, and we had the indy comic book Hate.”

Starting out in the strip ‘Meet the Bradleys’—“just like the folks next door!”—Buddy Bradley was, at first, loosely based on a teenage Peter Bagge, the rest of the family, “very much like a sitcom family, except that it started, ‘Hey, here’s Dad! He’s drunk again and on a tirade again!’ As their creator says, “They were the Bagges—but being presented and sold as the Brady Bunch…I also didn’t intend to make Buddy a stand-in for myself as much as he became later on, but as time went by, Buddy was clearly the one I related to the most. I kept coming up with story ideas for him. All the Bradley family stories that were in Neat Stuff started focusing more and more on him.”

Drawn in Bagge’s trademark “pop-eyed and rubber-boned” style, Neat Stuff is remembered fondly by fellow comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco: “Pete’s Neat Stuff was the one I responded to the most viscerally. While bratty and punkish, his comic seemed aesthically related to the great hippie-undergrounds…To my eyes, no one was working since the old EC Mad comics drew as funny as Pete.”

Yet it is in Hate, the Neat Stuff Buddy Bradley spin-off where Bagge, and Buddy, flourished. With his flannel shirt and slacker lifestyle, anti-star Buddy Bradley was pure grunge. Working part-time in a secondhand bookshop, Buddy smoked and drank his way through the Seattle years, dating proto-Riot Girrrl Valerie.

Visually, Hate was heavily cross-hatched, a nod to the classic underground comics of the Sixties. Says Bagge, “By then, nobody seemed to be doing comics that looked like an old, underground comic, other than the few old undergrounders themselves who were still active. And by that, I meant the really cheap newsprint—and all the cross-hatchy stuff that Crumb and Gilbert Shelton always did. I wanted to have the look and feel of an old Fabulous Freak Brothers comic.”

Personally distanced from that Gen Xer lifestyle, Bagge found things that not used to be funny—“no longer living on fried rice, no longer renting, no longer putting up with roommates, no longer working crappy day jobs, no longer being coerced into going to crappy rock clubs”—now were. “It suddenly all seemed hilarious, so it was very easy for me to take all of it and turn it into stories. It all became grist for my mill.”

The result, according to Angry Youth Comix’s Johnny Ryan (though I’m not entirely convinced) are strips that outstrip there time: “It transcends that stigma that this is the comic from the ‘90s for people who listen to Nirvana and pierce their nose. Even more than Robert Crumb whose comics were about the ‘60s hippies, I think Pete’s writing is more accessible to anybody, more so than the stuff Crumb was writing about. I think that for any writer stuck in any particular time who does work that you can still read and enjoy…the Hate comics still have that aspect to them. Even though it’s about that time, it kind if transcends the datedness.”

Hate, like a ”dirtier Archie“, had its fair share of bumps along the way — a move to colour elicted accusations of selling out and Bagge’s decision to kill off the character of Stinky was met with perplexity from fans who never saw it coming – and after a 30-issue run, Bagge decided to call it a day. Better to burn out than fade away.

“I suppose I could have kept Hate going forever. But the sales started to dip, and I didn’t like that trend…One major problem with alternative comics is demographics. We like to think that we’re making comics for anyone and everyone to enjoy, but there still is a very core demographic who buy comics, which is people in their twenties who live in downtown urban areas or college towns. What eventually happens to these indy comic fans are what happened to me: marriage, family, mortages, career, etc… Also, with Buddy now being a family man, this core demographic who read alternative comics simply doesn’t relate. Hate’s all about old people now.”

Post-Hate Peter Bagge worked on developing The Bradleys for TV-animation, The Megalomaniacal Spider-Man for Marvel, but hit his stride with Reason magazine. His strips for libertarians -– documentations of Bagge attending everything from art galleries to political conventions to swinger conventions — work not only as solid journalism, but also as pretty decent political satire and commentary. Much in the vein of Hunter S Thompson, Bagge’s Reason strips are told in the first person, turning his eye on himself and his own beliefs, mocking and, like his earlier work, deriding and questioning authority.

Bagge tells Christopher Irving, “I’d love to be able to come up with something like Hate again, where it’d be some character or characters that I can always come up with story ideas for. The main thing is, can I do that and have it become something that would sell?”

Christopher Irving draws these kind of admissions out of Bagge with ease. His Comics Introspective, a mash-up of good comics journalism and thorough interviews (think ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ relocated to the pub), is a good series and, if this volume is anything to go by, will one to watch. With lots of original artwork, it should be on every fan’s wish-list.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Susan Tomaselli resides in Dublin.

Sticky Tunnel Vision

Andrew Gallix — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:32:10 +0000

by Steve Finbow.

Catherine Breillat, Pornocracy, Semiotext(e), 2008.

I was initially wary of this book — Chris Kraus’s introduction claims the narrative’s discourse to be “pure Sade, minus Sade’s irony” — and so, faced with reading as masochism, I gingerly tucked into Pornocracy. I found the translation by Paul Buck and Catherine Petit viscerally beautiful — poetic prose and detached almost scientific observation commingle in a formaldehyde of precision and imagination — like a rose and a kidney sharing the same embalming jar.

The plot — what there is of it — concerns a women who visits a gay club and picks up a man to accompany her home in order to have him observe her sex. But this is no Jilly Cooper novel — this is Catherine Breillat, auteur of notorious films such as Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl), Tapage nocturne (Nocturnal Uproar), 36 Fillette (Virgin) Sale comme un ange (Dirty Like an Angel), À ma sœur! (Fat Girl), Anatomie de l’enfer (Anatomy of Hell) and Une vieille maîtresse (The Last Mistress) — films that have been labelled erotic and pornographic, artistic and trashy.

I could get all Lacanian here and talk about lack and the mirror stage or invoke Barthes’ discourse of desire but that would be moving toward the realm of the academic essay, whereas this is a book review — I’ve already fallen into the trap of playing with narrative voyeurism, textual masturbation, and critical narcissism. Did you notice? Do we really only see a text in reference to the other? I don’t want to write a dry, humourless analysis; I’ll try this as a straight review, shunning the help of structuralists, poststructuralists, and new historicists alike, and inject a hint of mirth, a sprinkling of the jocular. What you want to know is: is it any good? Let’s have a look.

The man the unnamed woman picks up in the bar is the most beautiful there, an ephebe. There is an interesting image of the men jostling for position like so many spermatozoa — the enclosed bar as the uterus, the woman as the egg. The men only recognize each other in the narcissism of similarity and difference — the woman (the egg layer) — is invisible, a means to an end: what the men are after is gemination not germination. The woman is absence incarnate — her female sex (the thing itself) infolding her like some gynaecological Möbius strip. The woman observes the men not observing her — and we have the omniscient narrator observing the first-person narrator observing the narrative. So far, so postmodern.

The dialogue reads like a conversation between students of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault with lines like, “It’s the result of the occlusion of masculine compliance” and “moved as you are by the play of menses on your dehiscent member,” not something you’re likely to find in an Elmore Leonard novel. The Borges quote from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is then invoked that “mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men” and Breillat forces the reader to look into her menstrual mirror — the man/reader who does not see the woman/narrative is the only one who can truly see her (the woman/author) as he (as reader) is the voyeuristic other. I can hear the chuckles building.

The woman asks the man to observe her sex — look don’t touch — because he is impartial (as a gay man). At this point, I guess you’re wondering how come this “review” reads like an essay when I said it wouldn’t. Pornocracy is so full of ideas that it is hard to analyze it without assuming the language of the text — almost as if the text worked on the principle of a mirror — a two-dimensional surface (fiction) reflecting a three-dimensional world (philosophy) – the text as auto-erotic and auto-critical. I’ll try again — plot, character, theme.

The man arrives and is taken to the bedroom, the bed has white sheets and there is a large armchair. The man complains about the travel, asks for more money, sits down. The woman begins to undress. The writing here is precise, methodical, as if the words have been layered onto the page with a scalpel; then, like small bombs forming theoretical, anti-Freudian craters, come “echoless lasciviousness” “split beings” “indecency of within”. This is followed by an anti-Aristotelian negation of either/or: “[F]or all expectation is by definition always deception” and do you know why all this is, dear reader? Because “[N]o member can hope to reach the size of the son it begets”. Be patient.

The woman’s sex is “abominably frizzy,” “pernicious,” “Mephitic,” the mons pubis like a “plucked chicken” its skin “like that of frogs” yet without the decency “to be green”. I must admit to getting confused when, after “swampy” and “secretions” I saw the words “demoniac seal” and then the analogy between a woman’s sex and a bird’s beak and maggots and sperm and God and Satan. What Catherine Breillat does here is unsettle the reader into observing theory not plot, ideas not action, analysis not character; what she also does is throw idea upon idea without linking them. Without deeper analysis, the narrative becomes the mirror of her thoughts, not their crucible.

After a long preamble about penises and sight, the woman and man have a drink of whisky. OK. This has to loosen things up a tad. But, no, the woman recollects playing doctors with local boys when she was a young girl and there is talk of a “whitish unutterable serosity” a “pruritis of a perpetual unction” (sounds like an order of nuns) and a “gluey cavern” — I’m not going to be able to watch Art Attack in the same way after that image. Their first night is concluded: “The horror of the Nothing which is the imprescriptible Everything” looms before them still. The sea equals feminine sex, the buildings equal masculine sex; the man draws on the woman’s genitals with lipstick and then “takes her” while she sleeps, discharging both semen and tears. Will they both be up at the crack of dawn?

The days pass and the couple have impartial and indifferent sex, and this is where the only real form of pornography enters the narrative. The rule is one of “inexpressive professionalism,” the look one sees on the faces of porn stars when not faking cries and groans. The narrative also has that feel, as if Breillat is pretending to write fiction while all the time riffing with theories, extemporizing half-digested philosophies.

I have to ask here who the “we” are who do not talk about female genitalia or pretend it’s not there? Is it the omniscient narrator, the reader, the woman, the man, women, men, you and I? I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with the implicit Catholic guilt of the text or its seemingly explicit conservatism — strange in an avant-garde, supposedly transgressive text, but then, like the Möbius strip I mentioned earlier, you go all the way round and end up on the reverse plane to where you began — see Communism and Fascism. Then follows a passage on bodily fluids that, though reading like something D.H. Lawrence might have hidden in his top drawer, would have surely made the Nottingham miner’s son blush and run a finger around the neck of his starched collar out of embarrassment. Disgusted, confused, or intrigued by the woman’s menses, the man goes to the garden, returns with a fork handle (no Two Ronnies jokes, please) and plunges the haft into the woman’s vagina.

The third day — after being crucified on the fork handle, we are told that “Women are in God’s image” and that men try to restrain women by imposing chastity and imprisoning them. Apparently, all men fear women’s periods, we are disgusted by them, we treat the vagina as a wound. And I didn’t know this but man devised the tampon and its applicator as a symbol of our hatred of all women. Breillat argues that man has inscribed onto woman a disgust of and for her own body. Touching her own genitals, or inserting objects into her vagina, is somehow anathema to our (man’s) ideas of the feminine, and so the tampon and its application creates a false impression (for men) of virginity. A cursory scan of certain adult websites will unveil pictures and videos of women masturbating and inserting bottles, courgettes, and baseball bats into their vaginas. False impressions? You can’t have it both ways. Well, you can, but to know what I mean, you’d have to spend more time on the aforementioned websites.

A black stone is expelled from the woman’s vagina – penetration is engulfment, man’s power is an illusion — but the man is powerless and needs to penetrate and he’s lucky because the woman is “keeping the opening exactly at ninety degrees” — I’d like to see Carol Vorderman try that. The man suffers from premature ejaculation while the woman is enjoying her own more relaxed orgasm. The man goes limp and the woman “expertly” helps him regain his erection (he’s not doing too badly seeing as he’s supposed to be gay and merely an observer). Then the woman utters the words guaranteed to make any grown man’s love lie limp, “work at becoming imbued with the grace of still movements” — well, I suppose it rivals “Fuck me! Fuck me harder!” as a(n) (a)rousing call. The woman then asks all women to “free [themselves] from the arrogance of the erect member”. David Cameron, take note. The sex moves into the spiritual. None of that smelly, sweaty humping — oh, no. The purpose of sex, it appears, is not to enjoy oneself and have an orgasm (sorry, “jouissance”), to collapse exhausted onto the (delete as necessary) bed, sofa, balcony, elevator floor, but so that “(Y]our carnal envelope won’t enclose you any longer in the narrowness of its gangue”. “Carnal envelope”? What’s wrong with manila?

So, what is pornocracy? Apparently, it is the “marvelous power” that, once he’s loved and been loved by a girl, a man no longer fears. So, it’s a cure for homosexuality: man’s orgasm with man meaning nothing against that of heterosexual jouissance? The couple have solved the “fetid secret of obscenity”… well, they’ve had sex during the woman’s period — I’m not sure that is obscene, in fact, I’m not sure anything is obscene. My Merriam-Webster tells me obscene means “disgusting to the senses” or “abhorrent to morality or virtue; specifically: designed to incite to lust or depravity”. I’m neither disgusted nor incited to depravity by these passages — this is sex, it may have been “obscene” in the late 19th century, but here in the 21st it’s quotidian. Pornocracy is rule or government by prostitutes, prostitution being the trading of sex for money. In this sense, the man of the narrative is the prostitute — he’s the one who gets paid — and at the end of the “novel’ we have a sort of reversed Pretty Woman. The man is crying, he doesn’t even know the woman’s name, he’s ready to die if he can’t find her, the money wasn’t important — he left that behind, he returns to search for her, the house is empty, devoid of furniture, he sees a bloody rag, and then… Oh, you’ll have to read it: delayed gratification and all that; the cock ring of narrative progression. Sod closure, go for the opening.

Catherine Breillat’s Pornocracy tries too hard to be an important work of theoretical fiction. It reads like a postmodern parable of sexuality, desire, violence, and the politics of the body. The translation works because its language reads like a mix of the texts of Henry Gray, the poetry of Christopher Dewdney, and the writing of Deleuze and Guattari. What the book lacks is a depth. Like flashbulbs reflected in the bloody puddles of a murder scene the words have a gory sparkle, yet all they seem to signify is — damn, I knew I couldn’t help myself — lack. Here’s a tip: if you like your women’s writing transgressive in its exploration of female sexuality try Kathy Acker or Hélène Cixous.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Finbow lives in London. Allen Ginsberg was once brave enough to employ him. His work appears in many forms and in many places: including McSweeney’s, The Guardian, The Beat, Beat the Dust, Dogmatika, and Stop Smiling. His short stories have been included in a number of anthologies, the most recent being See You Next Tuesday – The Second Coming.

The Pub Closes With A Crash

Andrew Stevens — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:28:04 +0000

By Paul Ewen.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, Selected Letters (ed. Paul Willetts), Black Spring Press, 2008

A story about Julian MacLaren-Ross that always sticks in my mind is the time he was locked in a room above a Charlotte Street pub (the Northumberland Arms, I think) and wasn’t let out until he had finished writing a book he had already taken an advance for. If my memory serves me, he was fed drinks upon completion of each chapter.

This story gained more significance as I attempted to complete this review, which as I write this, is now two months late. It was Sunday 29th June when Andrew Stevens at 3:AM first wrote to me asking if I would be interested in doing a piece on Julian MacLaren-Ross: Selected Letters. I know it was this date because I’ve just been reading through all the correspondence between us in relation to this review and other matters. The most recent letters from Andrew are rather pressing, firing rockets up my bottom and threatening to pull the review entirely [surely some mistake? — Ed] But our written exchanges, when compared with the correspondence in Julian MacLaren-Ross Selected Letters, have actually been rather tame.

Here is a MacLaren-Ross’ letter to Rupert Hart-Davis, director of the publishing firm Jonathan Cape:

to RUPERT HART-DAVIS

‘HQ’ Company/No 3 Infantry Depot/Southend-on-Sea/Essex

14-5-43

My Dear Rupert,

Please come at once. Saw the medical officer this morning and he wants to have me sent to a Mental Home. I want you to come and help. Please ring up Major Backus at Northfield Hospital and find out what he thinks. Try and get the address of my specialist, Major Ross, and contact him before he goes abroad. I’m sure that was not his intention and I’m not going to be railroaded like this, with a stigma of insanity. Please come immediately: if I don’t talk to someone I really should go mad!

Awaiting you,

Yours ever,

Julian

And here he makes mention of his perceived split personality, where he doubles as the Hooded Terror:

to Winnie Devlin

4-2-56

…I have the conviction that if we could meet face to face, all this nonsense could be tidied up in a moment: though not if she meets me late at night, when the personality of the Terror tends of recent weeks to take over and is apt even to break out in violence if provoked – as when I suddenly took hold of a rude man in a club and half-throttled him with his own scarf: also stamping several times at intervals on the ankle of an outrageous scrounger….

Love to all,

From

Julian

Ironically, Julian MacLaren-Ross also wrote book reviews, but if his letters are anything to go by, it seems he was actually rather punctual in this respect, often working through the night, and occasionally writing for days without food or sleep. It was through the writing of these book reviews, TV & film adaptations, French fiction translations, radio plays and numerous articles and criticism that he was able to earn money to survive, selling the review books after each commission to help pay for his drinks and amphetamines (and occasionally his rent). However, the returns from these smaller, lowly paid jobs were all to quickly absorbed into a lifestyle he could not afford to maintain, despite believing it one that he rightly deserved. More tellingly, it was this need to earn money in the short-term that greatly stalled his larger writing projects, with the tragic result being that many of his own fictional projects were never realised, and in some cases, never left the ground at all.

New Zealander Dan Davin, along with his wife Winnie, were two of JMR’s closest friends, and as a result, were long-sufferers to his bouts of desperation and need. Here, in the introduction to his book Closing Times, a set of recollections about seven of his recently deceased writer friends, including MacLaren-Ross, Dan Davin offers a rather painful summation of his extroverted friend:

“… unable to believe that society did not recognise it owed a living to its writers, and a good living at that; still more unwilling to accept that, instead, society expected its writers to pay taxes as if they were ordinary men. A man who burnt up money and burnt out himself in the pursuit of the opulence he thought he needed…He wanted to have both his pride and drink it but, because his real gifts were those of a solitary, he could not earn a living at anything that involved being a member of a team or conforming to an office routine. So he was unable to use the BBC as a way of living, still less as a way of life. And the immense strain he put upon his own physique and fortitude, remarkable both, carried him off before the turning of luck which he always counted could be put to the test.”

As a New Zealander myself, it was through the writings of Dan Davin that I first came into contact with the life of Julian MacLaren-Ross. When I arrived in London, I duly headed straight for the Wheatsheaf pub in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia, the drinking spot of choice for both JMR and Davin, and the place they had originally met.

But it was actually Paul Willett’s exceptional biography of JMR, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, published in 2003, which encouraged me to take up the fiction of MacLaren-Ross himself. In the past six years, JMR and his work have thankfully had a resurgence of interest, thanks in no small part to Paul Willetts, who has also edited these Selected Letters, the Collected Memoirs, the Selected Stories, and JMR’s collection Bitten By The Tarantula & Other Writing. A couple of years back, I attended a fundraiser evening at the Wheatsheaf pub, where a gathering of JMR supporters (including his son) had come out to raise money for a headstone for his unmarked north London grave, offering further proof that he has garnered a whole new generation of admirers. (Despite this, MacLaren-Ross still doesn’t get a mention on the walls of the Wheatsheaf pub today, where photos, articles and book passages pertaining to some of the pub’s other literary names (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and Anthony Powell) are prominently on display.)

Julian MacLaren Ross: Selected Letters begins in 1938, shortly before he was conscripted into the army to undergo infantry training. Despite the many bleak letters that were written until his release in 1943, he used his time in the army to produce a much lauded collection of short stories that were published in the leading literary magazines of the day, earning him a reputation as one of England’s most promising writers.

After being discharged and civilianised, he quickly established himself amongst bohemian London, basing himself around the pubs and drinking clubs of Fitzrovia and Soho. “Even among his more flamboyant contemporaries, he stood out, thanks to his gangsterish dress sense as well as his habit of wearing dark glasses and clutching a cane.”

His address details varied regularly, depending on how flushed he was. On the 17th of May, 1945, he was staying at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, which boasted “a Turkish bath, a winter garden, a restaurant and dancehall.” At other times he would be camped in bedsits, often months in arrears with rental payments, and later, he would even be forced into sleeping on benches in train stations.

Gathering a reputation as a difficult writer amongst many potentially influential sources, Julian MacLaren-Ross was uncompromising to say the least, and was quick to set out his own terms with prospective employers. While his manner may have appeared to be rude and rather tiresome, on closer inspection it is possible to see that he was exceptionally passionate about what he wrote, and would protect his carefully considered work from slap-dashers at all costs. In his reviews and articles, he was also quick to praise others he deemed worthy, while not being afraid to voice his criticisms at those he did not.

Julian MacLaren-Ross: Selected Letters is a wonderful book, and also a rather telling one. The insights it gives to the struggling writer, determined to work for themselves, not the market, reminded me of George Gissing’s New Grub Street, written about fifty years before these letters and set just around the corner from Fitzrovia. Both are invaluable guides for the aspiring writer today.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Paul Ewen is the author of London Pub Reviews.

Disney Matters

Andrew Stevens — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:40:49 +0000

By Lee Rourke.

Irvine Welsh, Crime, Jonathan Cape, 2008

I found something quite disturbing in Irvine Welsh’s latest novel Crime. Don’t worry, I shan’t be giving anything away in regards to plot and characterization during this worrying revelation as – for those of you who, unlike me, care for plot and characterization – Crime is pretty standard stuff. It happens, this frightful thing, right at the end of the book, in the ‘acknowledgements’. About halfway through Irvine Welsh writes:

“Big thanks again to Robin, Katherine, Sue, Laura and everybody else at my publishers for their (apparently endless, but I won’t push it) indulgence of me.”

I gave this a double take when I first read it, and at first I wasn’t sure what had shocked me to the extent that I had to literally put the book back down for some time in the other room away from me. Why the hell is he thanking those responsible for practically sucking any credibility he had left within him? Then it occurred to me: Irvine Welsh is the new Patricia Cornwell (okay, that’s a bit harsh, I know). He might not agree with this himself; I should hope he vehemently disagrees… he can’t agree? Can he? But I would put my last penny on the fact that not one person in the marketing/design/sales team responsible for the production of this clumsy book would disagree. In fact, they’ve probably played a part in subliminally making me think/write this myself. It doesn’t take a genius to figure the market that Welsh’s publishers are now aiming for. For a start, just look at the cover.

Look at it again, please, yes, it really is that horrendous. Crime is Welsh’s seventh novel. For a work of genre fiction – because that’s what it is – it’s pretty good. And as a work of mainstream, airport fiction it excels: Irvine Welsh will be laughing all the way to the bank – who can blame him. But, you know, literature shouldn’t be as overtly capitalist as this novel is, and novelists shouldn’t be indulged to such an alarming extent as Irvine Welsh seems to have been.

Trainspotting (1993) was an exciting, brilliant, mesmerizing work of fiction – it possessed that kernel of truth all great works of literature hold: voice. But that was such a long, long time ago now. On finally reading Crime I was reminded of Welsh’s past brilliance many times, I mumbled to myself on many occasions, demanding that his voice return, lamenting the fact that a writer could so mercilessly turn his back on everything that forced us to read his work in the first place: originality. There is nothing of any interest in Crime whatsoever. It is flat and formulaic. It is a process of titillation and taboo. Crime is an ordinary work of shocking, modern, mainstream entertainment. At best it’s thoughtful – but, you know, it had to be.

So, in Crime we are treated to a return of one of Welsh’s previous bit-part players from his visceral novel Filth (1998), Detective Inspector Ray Lennox, a 35 year old coke addict and alcoholic recovering from a rather nasty mental break-down after working on a child rape and murder case. The action takes us to Florida, where Welsh has lots of fun writing a rather – interesting at times – sun-soaked American noir. We are also treated to a rather well written second person Edinburgh flash-back that intersperses itself through the book seamlessly. Then we have some plot – a mother and daughter set-up, some paedophiles, some dodgy moralising and dilemmas where Welsh is probably wanting us to concentrate our mental energies. It is here that Welsh tries, wanting to subvert structure, narratives and moral codes, but he fails, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And that’s about it; a big fuss over nothing.

Later, back in those ‘acknowledgements’ Welsh states:

“Organised underground sex-abuse groups and cults, while disturbing and headline-grabbing, are not a widespread problem in modern society. This book, as a work of fiction, does not mean to imply that they are.”

Is that so? Yet it’s still okay for you write a book that is unashamedly designed to cash-in on such groups and the collective hysteria they are responsible for? Now that’s indulgence and such temerity is all rather dubious if you ask me. If anything, Irvine Welsh’s Crime is proof enough that all books should be judged by their cover. Please, in all seriousness, someone tell me when that Trainspotting prequel is scheduled to be published?

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lee Rourke is the author of Everyday and the forthcoming The Canal.

Chameleon Of The Counterculture

Andrew Gallix — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:27:43 +0000

By Steve Finbow.

John L. Williams, Michael X – A Life In Black & White, Century, 2008

From Michael De Freitas to Michael X to Michael Abdul Malik, John Williams’s lively book is much more than a cut-and-paste biography of a once-famous, now mostly forgotten figure in the history of British Black culture. The best biographies – and this is certainly among them – are social documentaries, charting the biographical subject’s relation to cultural, political and social signifiers within the era in which s/he lived – think Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde or Peter Ackroyd’s Blake.

Williams grapples with the chameleon-like character of Michael X, neither entranced by his subject nor appalled by him. Michael is at once pimp, revolutionary, black man, white man, Muslim, Christian, Jew, gangster, prayer leader, poet, and enforcer. Williams sees all sides of him, never straying into condemnation or applause. With impressive research and compulsive prose, Williams fleshes out a character who is equally beguiling, repulsive, scary, and ridiculous.

Born to a Trinidadian mother and a Portuguese father, Michael De Freitas grew up to be a scaled-down British version of Malcolm X. If he were alive today, the Daily Mail would be lambasting him as a potential terrorist. A convert to Islam, Michael once claimed his RAAS (Racial Adjustment Action Society [Raas – West Indian slang for arse cloth/sanitary towel]) had over 60,000 members. This is no dry, academic unravelling of the facts, but a fascinating and humorous biography of a man who struggled to find his own identity, who fought to escape the confusion of his roots, and strove to find a place for himself in a society that had not come to terms with its own embedded racism.

A list of Michael X’s friends and acquaintances reads like a countercultural roll call: Alexander Trocchi, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, R.D. Laing, Mick Farren, Barry Miles, and Jeff Nuttall. Michael’s political associates included Stokely Carmichael, Darcus Howe, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. Michael had sport and showbiz connections in Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr., Dick Gregory, Vanessa Redgrave, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Michael was either directly involved in or had close ties with the Wholly Communion, the Congress of the Dialectics of Liberation, International Times, OZ, the London Free School, the origins of the Notting Hill Carnival, the Notting Hill Riots, The Black Panthers, Rachman’s real-estate empire. He was a denizen of shebeens and gambling dens, an attendee of readings and protests; a pimp and a bouncer; a poet and revolutionary; an exponent of Obeah and sigma; and on the periphery of the Profumo scandal. A man who could navigate with ease the treacherous waters of the British class system, who felt at home with black and white, rich and poor, artist and villain, yet could never keep hold of who he really was and what it was he wanted to do. Was he jailbird or messiah? Conman or superstar? Pious man or murderer?

Williams takes us calmly and assuredly through Michael’s Trinidadian upbringing, his life at sea, his move to England, his years as a pimp and dealer, his revolutionary politics, his marriage, family, his affairs, his move back to Trinidad, his subsequent trial for murder and his execution. Williams guides us expertly through the intricacies of the murder trial, the numerous conspiracy theories – Michael was set up by (take your pick) the Trinidad government, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the FBI, and/or his own followers.

This biography has everything – it is a cultural essay on race, sex, class and culture, it is a social document on race relations in British society, it is a cracking read involving drugs, guns, sex, and politics. Mostly, it is a very fine example of biography, taking the reader into the life and times of a man who, although an integral part of recent British history, had become more Wolfie Smith than Che Guevara. John Williams’s Michael X – A Life In Black & White manages that rare fusion of research, detachment, and good writing, as it charts the interconnectivity of art, politics, and race in the UK during the period, the history of British Black culture and the alternative-lifestyle theories of the UK Underground. If Michael X were alive today then his many-faceted personality, the thrice-named “Michael,” may have had a chance to recognize his true self.

What’re They Building In There?

darrananderson — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:04:05 +0000

By Darran Anderson.

August is the month of agoraphobia. Mobbed by roaming bands of mime artists and amateur thespians, Edinburgh abandons its usual wintry Calvinist spirit and transforms into Babel. With everyone promoting their shows (several thousand in all) at high volume, it’s nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. A runaway juggernaut heading at high speed down the performance art-infested Royal Mile might clear matters up a bit but alas…

With the black cabaret heart of the festival downsizing somewhat compared to previous years, the hunt for quality has been further driven to the margins and for every stunning show discovered (the enchanting Camille – The Dark Angel), there’s at least one diabolically poor counterpart (the sad fall of Jim Rose Circus). Under the main thoroughfare of North Bridge, beneath the bustle of the city and within earshot of the hiss of the passing trains is a place of sheer magic, a quality all too rare in the modern world. In its rooms, there’s a house built from books, a mechanized torture contraption and several journeys into the mind of a bedlamite or visionary.

Let’s be clear first of all, art criticism is nothing more than a necessary evil. At worst, it’s a gnat on the hindquarters of creatures much further up the evolutionary chain, at best it occupies a role similar to that of Statler and Waldorf on The Muppet Show. Criticism, even in the positive sense, inevitably diminishes what it describes. When you start to analyse, you’re depleting the magic . Consider this then, not criticism but a shout over the inane clamour of a thousand comics and amateur dramatists, in favour of the highlight of the festival - Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s stunning and much-overlooked exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery.

It begins with a deceptively playful even throwaway sculpture of sorts - The House of Books Has No Windows (2008). Built solely from second-hand tomes, it’s the scale that initially makes an impression, being large enough to crawl inside. As the books are locked in and incapable of being read, it forms a playhouse and a tomb at the same time. Dislocated from their intended purpose, the books are invested with another quality - the titles sending the mind off on tangents - English Cathedral Music, Recollections of a Northumbrian Lady, How Lost was My Weekend? The Wild Boy of Aveyron. They’re no longer simply the titles of novels but a kind of accidental poetry.

You get the sense though that Cardiff and Bures Miller are easing you gently into their mission – which seems to be focused on expanding art beyond the confines of two-dimensions , an escape from art that is flat and solely to be experienced visually. You are not just some spectator posing in hushed reverence before a canvas or some pretentious conceptual abstraction, rather this is art that you are completely swallowed up in, in which your senses are assailed, art that is in the business of creating other worlds.

In this vein, Opera for a Small Room (2005) is simply a masterpiece. You enter through a padded tunnel, your pupils expanding to let in as much light from the pitched darkness as possible. Gradually you make out a wooden hut in the centre of the room. The lights brighten then dim inside and a voice begins to speak in a slow drawl, evoking some lonesome highway cautionary tale. “She was walking down the road…” The room itself looks like a cabin perched at the edge of the world or a lunatic’s basement lost in the belly of a city. A multitude of LPs are scattered around the floor and shelves (Gounod’s Faust, Puccini’s Tosca, old barbershop albums etc– hundreds of them purchased from a recluse in the backwoods of Canada by all accounts), a paint tin is suspended from the roof like a pulley holding up a chandelier, pipes crisscross the roof. Though there’s no figure present, a shadow moves backwards and forwards turning on and off a series of turntables in succession.

The voice slowly begins with a series of broken vignettes, a girl running down a midnight road holding her shoes, mice inside the walls chewing the electrical wires and warning if they start on the records he’ll have to poison them. The records click on and off forming a collage that comes in waves, a snippet of “When a Man loves a Woman,” a hypnotist’s voice “yoooooouuuuuuuu arrrre feeeeling sleepy” and gradually more and more arias until it’s a swirling operatic crescendo of voices and strings. The combination is inexplicable; you’re both shaken up and lulled into a reverie. The music dissipates and the voice continues. He talks of the rain and the sound of a deluge bursts from the speakers until it sounds like its really beating on the roof. A distant bell grows louder as he talks of walking along the railway tracks and with it comes roaring a train so loud that even though you know it’s impossible you turn instinctively towards it as if it’s there. The chandelier shakes and dims as it passes and as it disappears into the distance thousands of crickets stir into life. The voice continues.

When you finally emerge, you’ve forgotten it’s daylight outside and struggle to digest what you’ve witnessed. You can name-drop antecedents (Lynchian, Beckettian, Auster-esque, a room in a Tom Waits nightmare) but comparisons are all bullshit. For this is a unique construction of music, poetry, conceptual art and cinema, ultimately one that’s beyond the sum of its constituent parts and which visibly brought some participants to the point of tears without any of them really knowing why.

As if by accident, you chance upon its sister work The Dark Pool (1995). Located along a landing that is festooned with planks and building materials, the setting is like some forbidden part of the gallery in the process of renovation or demolition. Even the door seems to belong to a forgotten attic. Inside is a dimly-lit hermitage in which you’re invited to explore or intrude upon before whoever resides here returns. There’s a dusty portrait of the Virgin Mary, several disconnected telephones, tiny words cut out of newspapers. Stories emerge from gramophones about mass psychosis and electro-magnetic forces. Pipes with unknown (bodily?) fluids pumping through them. Unopened letters, stained teacups, a coffin-shaped box leaning against the wall. An unmade bed someone has just seemingly rose from. A radio plays snatches of “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Tins of Queen Mary Tea, antique books pinned open at “Why the apple tree grows in the pine woods” or the phrenological head-shape of “a conceited simpleton.” Alice through the Looking Glass. Ephemera is scattered everywhere, boxes that could be filled with anything. Inside one such briefcase is a twilight-zone lake scene, lit by a row of tiny bulbs, tiny parked cars and figures round a sinister lake that looks like a murder scene or the flooded remnants of a meteor strike.

In the corner is a prototype “wishing machine,” a work of art in itself with operating instructions - “place photo or symbolically related object in slot between copper plates.” Within it, visitors have placed notes with hopes and desires written on them, some mundane, some mysterious, some intensely moving: “return to joy,” “no more fear,” “baby,” “my mom was alive,” “I wonder if you know what you’ve done.” What you first took for a piece about madness or loneliness seems much more than that and you think maybe we missed the point and this, for all its darkness, is someone’s idea of happiness and just one room in another entire universe.

There are other works by Cardiff and Bures Miller present here: audio walks, notebooks filled with unrealised projects, slideshows narrated by the artists but the last major work is easily the most malevolent. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s nightmare prophecy In the Penal Colony, The Killing Machine (2007) is another glimpse into a subterranean otherworld. A dentist’s chair covered in pink fur is placed at the centre of the room. Before it is a desk and seat and beside them a button to be pressed to start the ordeal and implicate us in what will happen. It initiates a mesmerising robotic ballet, the seat rises and falls, mournful classical music hails from the loudspeakers, a robotic arm moves gracefully even tenderly around the chair as if considerately examining a patient. A reassuring voice begins to speak. The lights catch a disco ball, fracture and begin to arc around the room. As the first arm is joined by another, the music rises to a high pitched squeal and the arms switch from caressing motion to one of butchery, precisely and violently stabbing areas where a victim’s body would be placed; the eyes, the genitals, the throat in a chilling mix of sensuality, fetishism and horror.

Weirdly for a machine that’s so futuristic looking, it’s the past, rather than some dystopia to come, which gives the piece its clout. In Goya’s phrase “these things happened” and if not precisely so in real life than certainly equally as terrible. The mind is flooded with images: Mengele’s experiments, Bataille’s Ling Chi photographs, Beria’s cellars, Japan’s Unit 731 and, in times recent enough for the torturers to still walk the streets, the White Lion and Red Rooms of Saddam’s regime, the desaparecidos of Pinochet’s Chile and Cambodia’s “Hill of the Poisonous Trees.” Places like this existed, where human beings were taken apart and made to disappear and, in the dark arts of rendition and black operations, they likely still do. Ultimately, the art is simply presented and the implications take place in your own head.

The Killing Machine is the exception of the three major works here in that it suggests a definite meaning, the others elude it. Overall, Cardiff and Miller raise more questions than they answer, something all great art should do. They introduce themes and trust their audience enough not to over-explain but to just imply and let the imagination race outwards like shockwaves from an impact. There’s a real sense that they’ve tried to preserve the mystery of the art from the tyranny of having to understand. And there’s a certain liberation in not knowing everything, in art that doesn’t teach, cower behind kitsch or indulge in introversion but just, like life, immerses. You can attach meaning as labels to try and rein it all in but it’s a futile gesture. Instead this is art you step into and lose yourself in, the closest to enlightenment we can get.

As the invisible narrator of Opera for a Small Room says, “The music doesn’t really change anything, but it helps him in some way he doesn’t understand…it’s an opera, after all, everyone dies in the end.”

At Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh until September 28th. Free.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Darran Anderson is an Irish writer from Derry, currently residing in Edinburgh, Scotland. He co-edits Dogmatika, Laika Poetry Review and 3:AM. His hero is Fantomas. He writes short stories and poetry, the latest collection of which is entitled Tesla’s Ghost. He is the Pete Best of the Offbeat Generation.

Popularity is So Boring

Andrew Stevens — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:33:11 +0000

By Heidi James.

Lydia Lunch, The Gun is Loaded, Black Dog Publishing, 2008

This book of images is a scrupulous examination of the aesthetics of trauma, auto-violence and female priapism. A celebration of transgressive sexual desire (by transgressive I mean that which doesn’t induce commerce), brutal tenderness and the bloody fragility of the human psyche. The photos have a feral impact, with rich tones, and colours, and duplicitous layering of multiple images, which creates a subtlety and beauty that, is unexpected. This book isn’t an unsophisticated compilation of angst, linear and adolescent, but complex, humane and innocent.

In this book Lydia Lunch challenges our most cherished and fetishised territories, including childhood and blows the whistle on sentimental and wilful ignorance of suffering and torment. These luminous images seem to toy with absurdity and nihilism in order to confront us with death, and yet I think the photos in this collection are an anti-nihilism or active negation of the negative, avoiding all that is kitsch, the pictures revel in the viscera of life, the muck and thrust, the inevitable curtailment and therefore valourise life and extreme experience. Ms Lunch’s obstreperous vision reveals cruelty, a humiliation of the senses and is transcendent for it, attaining the poignancy of an icon of Christ’s Passion, the images unveil a nostalgia for authenticity. Self-preservation is the domain of the slave, the reactionary, gathering up their bourgeois health in order to weary on – Lydia Lunch is the visionary who confronts her own being, squandering her self, her life force with the fervour of an obscene martyr.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Heidi James is Arts Editor of 3:AM. Her novella The Mesmerist’s Daughter (published by Apis Books) was published in July 2007 and her novel Carbon (Wrecking Ball Press) is forthcoming. She has a column in Dazed and Confused and is a regular contributor to Another Level. Her essays and short stories are published in a variety of anthologies and magazines. She is the proprietor of Social Disease and a recipient of the Sophie Warne fellowship.

There Is Nothing Like A Biscuit

Andrew Stevens — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:11:59 +0000

By Paul Ewen.

Daren King, Manual, Faber, 2008

I read somewhere recently that around 28 new novels are published in the UK every day. That’s over 10,000 newly published novels every year (compared with 50,000 in the US, but that’s another story). Imagine if these novels were stacked, vertically, on a road. The result, I’m quite sure, would be a veritable skyscraper of books, possibly rivaling the tallest buildings in the land. I mention this because Daren King’s latest book, Manual, is partly set in the financial district of London, where there are many tall buildings. And also because Manual is, itself, a new novel, and has recently been added to this towering list of recent titles.

The majority of these 10,000+ novels are likely to be somewhat less than groundbreaking; I think it’s fair to say that. A crueler man may suggest that, for the most part, they will be rhubarb. In the same way that little boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy dog tails, the average outcrop of novels is generally made of reading fodder, rehashes of other commercially successful books, and recognisable examples of genre fiction that are readily digested by an easily pleased audience. Manual, Daren King’s latest book is thankfully an exception. For those familiar with King’s work, this won’t come as a surprise.

Manual was first mentioned to me earlier on this year by people who hadn’t actually read it. They mentioned it because it was a new book by Daren King and this was news in itself. Often news such as this carries all the trappings of hype; the publicity machine cranking up in some well-lit room, telling us we should be excited about this thing or that without giving us a chance to decide for ourselves. But if that were the case here, I’d like to think it was a more innocent hype, the kind generated by readers, not PR types. People, I suspect, get excited about a forthcoming Daren King book because they rightly imagine it will not resemble any other offering on the new novel pile. King, I would argue, has that one thing which every second book jacket blurb would have us believe they offer: an original voice.

Manual follows the life of Patsy and Michael and their owl called Owl (his “wool dark as moss”, knitted over a period of two days “by an old lady in a charity shop”). For the first twenty odd pages we follow their work in the sex fetish industry, jumping from one business engagement to the next, finding out what their work consists of and what services they “do not offer”. There is some wonderfully funny stuff here:

“I bend the client over the table, tie him to the tabletop. Here, by the glass door.

We sit on the patio and read The Times.”

The novel then moves in focus to concentrate on one full time client, Edward, a senior financier in the City. Edward throws money at Michael and Patsy, and throws his well-connected weight around on their behalf also. His fetish is a 15-year old girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Michael, it emerges, has a fetish too. He fantasises about bespoke suits, ironed shirts, and a job in the City.

While it would be easy to give a broad outline of the plot, it is in the small details that King really excels. One of my favourite passages:

“A dog walks past. Then, a man. The dog looks at us. Then, the man looks at us. There is humour here.”

In normal company, Manual is quite a difficult book to fault. It’s original, humorous, contemporary and clever. This also makes it difficult to compare with other contemporary novels, my only sojourn being a brief vision of an Easton-Ellis-inspired world; perhaps it was the suits, the creepy dinner parties and the bespoke trousers. But while E-E’s central characters are essentially shallow and nasty, Michael & Patsy are, like Owl the knitted owl, warm and fuzzy.

Tellingly, it is within the Daren King oeuvre itself that I found the real challengers to Manual. It is difficult, first of all, to read this, his latest book, without thinking of Boxy an Star, his 1999 debut. Michael and Patsy are almost inseparable from the characters of Star and Bole, making it difficult to read Manual without the inevitable comparison between King’s much lauded first book. Boxy an Star blew many cobwebs out of the rather staid British literary scene, while Jim Giraffe, King’s follow up, joyfully clomped off in a completely different direction again. While better in my view than Tom Boler, novel number three, Manual didn’t quite present me with that same feeling of unchartered territory as that of his first two books. An unfair comparison in a way, but one which highlights the literary niche that King maintains, where desperate reviewers such as this one are forced to look at what little reference they have to hand.

But if Manual is to be judged amongst the skyscraper of newly published novels, where would it then sit? Well, at this point in the year, given my limited delving into the colossal stack, I would certainly place it in the upper suites, perhaps with roof access, where a hot tub would be bubbling, a fluffy towel would be carefully folded, and a bespoke silk dressing gown would beckon.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Paul Ewen is the author of London Pub Reviews.

ever cranked-up stories of ruthless murder

Andrew Stevens — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:31:29 +0000

By Richard Marshall.

Jeremy Reed, The Grid, Peter Owen, 2008

Reed ‘s dazzling, exotic writing is an odd tangent, being like his own assessment of Smart’s Jubilate Agno, ‘ the secret union between the eccentric and the neglected…’ such that most others are fit only to preach of the iron-age. And so he is the greatest of our poets, being truly ultra-modern real and equipped with the polished deviance of Joris Karl Huysmans’ A Rebours or the strange deep space/time of Michael Bracewell’s Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty.

His hyper-city is London, his city is like the city of Brian Michael Bendid, Michael Avon Oeming and Pat Garrahy’s Powers. Who Killed Retro Girl? a crunched, hectic, ripped-up sketch of acceleration slowed down to new level altitudinous attitude: read in conjunction with Prynne’s Biting The Air … ‘ get a vaccine on/shipment perish thread your face why yours/if told more, stable on a tilted capital field/suspected more often./ Give out a version amplified with strings to obligate a boundary check, felt/damp echo ethic manipulate its life exemption,’ you face up a city with great un-dead secrets and a fat source co-opting a cool skein of doomy puerile malcontent in broken, fragmented, ultimately volatile sentences, legal and the other. It is no coincidence to stream the reading with other poets nor to quote Prynne quoting Ockam’s Summa Logicae, I:24 ‘Every property is the property of something, but is not the property of just anything.’ And London is also Tokyo, obviously.

So which properties have we here? Necromantic books of heaven, holy terrorists with smart bombs, rat gangs with knives, soccer sheik billionaires, sado-necromantic metro-sex and Big Brother, a Faustian world of subtle syllogisms moonlighting to the compendium of placed memory whilst killers roam networks of lanes that are all Hog Lane retros.

Hog Lane, aka Petticoat Lane, the place where knife victim Marlowe was a knife thug before, later, he too was skewered to young death at twenty-nine through an eye, is thus a place of double agency, double face, double dealing, one thing being one thing and then the other and sometimes both. Marlowe is thus both murderer and murderee, and the complexity of historical Marlowe’s brilliant writing, notorious thuggery, double agency, and the double face of the gay cruiser is the template of the double cross of Reed’s narrative. Marlowe’s portrait in Corpus Christi Cambridge is inscribed in the top left hand corner with the Latin motto ‘Quod me nutrit me destruit’ – ‘that which nourishes me also destroys me’ and even if it is not Marlowe in the picture after all but some ‘amorous gent of Milan’…the provenance of such things being a source of disputation, and such disputation is the very crux of this narrative, the motto still rests on Marlowe as both apt and prophetic. In Hog Lane, where the city began and ended, maybe that’s where the deal was done, where Faustus winked a deal with Mephistopheles, Marlowe with Shakespeare, or vice versa, and all hell was let loose.

Reed writes with the radioactive nutrients from these elsewheres and pollinates them into some deadly-fallout x-rayed zap-writing that is more essential, more plausible, more ennobling than the often too rigidly processed, too unbiologically tampered dystopias of others. Reed’s novel is like Milo Manera and Federico Fellini’s Trip To Tullum, where an unrestrained erotic imagination melds itself to a science fiction intent that reaches perversely into a long deranged back-history and flights of redemption. At the heart of the narrative is the great death in a little room in Deptford, the contamination of literature written by an alien curator who is acquiring his own version of the best of it. As Iain Sinclair says of such gatherers, ‘survival is the only justification,’ hence the necessity to emphasise that Reed is, in all, the poet surviving our futures.

The ‘contamination’ of writing is Shakespeare himself, as evidently as anything in plain sight can be, someone who becomes an unnoticed (until too late, and now, latterly with Reed, of late) Armada, a metaphor of deadly oncoming consumption, a weird magical being constructed from the unshrined windows of St Helen’s Church Bishopsgate (which were once caught up in an IRA bombing campaign in the 1990’s) and is now the emblem of whatever writing and literature is made to mean by its national and transnational enforcers. Reed’s novel is the surveillance helicopter that throughout the book hovers over London as it tears itself apart in a dreamscape of violence and corruption that parallels the Bubonic Plague of Marlowe’s original. The landscape is strangely distant as if observed through the wrong end of a telescope or an unfulfilled strange longing but there’s a sense of history in this, and its not technique but what Mark E. Smith in Renegade writes about in his chapter Death Of The Landlords when commenting on working on I Am Curious, Oranj, adapted from the Swedish porno film I Am Curious, Yellow: ‘ … we all share some kind of common knowledge that’s within ourselves; that comes out in all sorts of things. Some people call it a gene pool. It’s as if you already knew subconsciously about historical incidents…’

The presence of Shakespeare is overlaid by the presence of the substituted other, Christopher Marlowe, murdered at Eleanor Bull’s closed house at Deptford Creek on the evening of Wednesday 30th May 1593. The puzzle of who killed Marlowe, and why, has been a labyrinth from as far back as Lord Burghley saying it was so, who pertinently added that the matter was ‘easier to enter into it than to go out.’ When Charles Nichol wrote his book The Reckoning about the killing in 1992 he asked of his investigation: ‘Is this a true story?’ and avoided answering himself straight on by commenting; ‘I have not invented anything.’

Reed’s novel is far more ambitious than such hesitancy and therefore tries nothing so confidently, imagining instead with cautery and the tones and confusion of saline, counter-stairs, the music of stars, fruit soft flesh, feral gang war and a continual dream of burning futures that all feels like the seventies and eighties (touched up with reassembling sixties mostly…) that what he’s telling is a tale of Lowellian ‘unrealism…[that] eats from the abundance of reality.’ As Reed himself puts it when discussing poetry but which seems to me apt here, ‘ The subject…is the true unreal’, by which one means that area of the consciousness in which inner and outer worlds find a congruity, and are heightened by their interdependence.’

As always, Reed fuses his musical pantheon with his own corrupting, beautiful prose-images: On the fade-out of a song a character comments, ‘ It’s as breezy as Morrisey in the eighties, when he had something to sing about. Pure pop.’ His central character Nick muses, ‘ … because he was so much younger..[he] felt liberated by having so little music history. He’d compensated by listening to a retro palette and by doing his own thing. He put it down to being gay that he beamed in on torch music, with its emphasis on personal tragedy in the singer’s life and its own overblown coloratura. Garland and Bassey were in his genes as archetypes, but so, too, were Bolan and Morrisey, Bjork and Radiohead, Tricky and Moby. Pop, he had discovered, was a sound collage in which every strain of music was assembled and reassembled to reflect the studio integration of its various sources.’

(Read the book just for the pop references and his reflections on each and already there’s more here than most music critics working that field offer.) Reed has already written deeply and perceptively about a few of his musical archetypes elsewhere (e.g. Lou Reed, Marc Almond, Scott Walker), but here he sprinkles the narrative with asides that adapt the atmosphere of the novel to a multi-level cognition of the driving theme of inner corruption. What Reed creates is his version of music – the book assembles and reassembles exactly that ‘studio integration of its various sources’ that he discusses and he imagines that, were Shakespeare and Marlowe to be writing today, they would have to be pop stars rather than playwrites and poets were they to ever register influence. The appreciation of what genius is is therefore connected to a specified context and the novel suggests that the bright and commercial power of Marlowe and Shakespeare should be directly compared to that of the contemporary music scene.

This gives the novel a curious edge where the spectacular, daring and camp speculation at its heart is able to reach out to another, different atmosphere that is as dark, convoluted and mashed up as anything written by Iain Sinclair. The Ballardian conceits – deranged pilots flying closer to their targets in civilian London, a kind of post 9/11 nightmare re-imagined as nightclub-fazed plasma-screen mosh-backdrop, knife wielding gangs emerging like fashion-crazed glam-dolls, rubber killers from disturbias’ social vectors, thorax manipulators, gay boys cruising for serial killer thrills, all these as signs of something else, not deeper, but laid out next to the scholarly ferroconcrete blocks of literati detection, bullshit and genius that perhaps move more in circles that in a line, that fit in between the speed next door as cork damns to bottled mayhem. Reed has a speculation running through the novel that performs the detonating siglum to resolve the very act of writing itself. It is the nature of the Faustian pact, the selling out, the corruption of everything, certainly that of innocence, though of a specialised, intelligent innocence -if innocence can ever be like that – that this novel registers.

Marlowe’s version of Dr Faustus is fittingly double-ended and indecisively concluded. It’s weirdly completed aura is aptly turned by Reed to illuminate both a Shakespeare and the industry that proclaims him now as the greatest ever writer, a heritage freak, who becomes also the alien messenger of our own hyper-city psycho-culture. Side by side, the novel also locates a mythic emblem to carry the symbolic weight of the deal with the devil that compromises us. Faustus, and everything that Faustus means is imagined as the strange, ruined uber-pop star Michael Jackson, who haunts the novel as a ghost-like figure supervening on all our fantasies and denials. As in a trance-like hallucinatory state, we are given glimpses of this mutating, extra-terrestrial pop icon, the Faustus figure himself. It is a brilliant conceit, fixing the terrain with all the devious complexity of our riddled, riddling network of popular culture. Into Michael Jackson has been poured all our modern fevers: fame, glamour, pigmentation, greed, beauty, riches, perversion, madness, death and horror. Jackson is a projection of all our collective fantasies, all our guilt. And for the reader it is his friendship with Elizabeth Taylor that also holds a further fascination as one recalls the necromantic auto-erotic fantasy of Ballard’s central character in Crash whose perversity is a fixation with the famous film star involving a fatal car crash and sex. Michael Jackson is the dark star that riddles us all, the Dr Faustus for our times.

So Reed is ambitious. This is not something that is unusual in itself – so many writers have big ideas, big hopes, big visions but so few of them are true enough to pull them through to the end. But Reed is. He attends to the specifics of the dreamscape and knows where the essentials begin and end. He is the artist who bleeds into the work from a brain that is cut into the execution of words, creating a document of ‘…its own apocalypse, its core infected by the power mad tsars and their entourage of druggy, discredited celebrities who hijacked its privileges.’ His imagination is that of the Japanese Englishman, the book if it were a film would be best shot by the Takashi Miike of MPO-Psycho tales Drifting Petals, Memories of Sin, How to Create a World, Life is a Constant Double Helix, How to Create a World, Coronation of a Cursed King, Ascension of Spirits and Bonds of Mankind, each being surreal, violent, beautiful and touching films capturing a pure and perfectly futuristic imaginative zest without losing the dirt and grit of the urban junkyard backdrop that makes them necessary.

And side by side with this is our own familiar London, the London that has seen (as I write) eighteen teenagers stabbed to death since January, a city where people cannot sleep because everything rises up in the night to remind them that when time is finished, when everything is bought then there is the horror of nothing. Dylan’s ‘When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose’ is a refrain that glides like a child’s voice through our nighttimes, and there’s a sense in which knives are sharpening in these hideous voids. I work in North London and one of the recent murders was of a young boy who had just finished his GCSE examinations in one of the schools I work with. He wrote a narrative where he imagined himself being stabbed to death. Knife crime is no mere literary conceit nor just a rememberance of Elizabethan times past, but who knows what to make of the dead boy’s own imagination, his attempt to ask a literary forgiveness of the killers even before he was literally struck down.

Suddenly Kit Marlowe is transmuted into the pantheon of these dead youths, these roaring boys, and new ways of processing the horrors are blasted into the imagination through the prism of Marlowe’s Faustus. The frantic, hysterical screams from the press boys and gals, the necro-politics of the new Mayor whose own deputy has had to resign accused of corruption including – damningly – cruelty to children, the panic is something that crosses the Thames, both to the North and to the South and it all connects with the thuggery of Skeres, Poley, Thomas Walsingham and plots against the monarch, and with Faustus and his notorious pact with the devil, forcing us to ask, perhaps in a scared whisper, ‘What price all this?’

Reed gives us the intricate map of these connections, strikes us with this alternative grid of London souls and asks - what are these pacts we’ve made? It’s Jack Nicholson’s Joker – ‘Did you ever dance with the devil in a clear dark night?’ and there’s a horrible pitch feeling spreading all over; someone, somewhere, has made the wrong deal. Certain, you can’t walk the streets of London without the thought of young blood splashing across your neural pathways, and blades in the babby hands of les cocus du vieil art moderne, London’s free newspapers circulating ever-spiralling, ever cranked-up stories of ruthless murder next to the thousand upon thousand drained out pics of Amy Winehouse and the Beckhams. Reed’s English is the bilingual edition of this nasty, relentless, monotonous junk, the pearl that comes out of shite.

Throughout his book the mythic Michael Jackson glides in a black limo and as the book begins to reach its impressively fantastical climax Reed offers one of the many juxtaposed images that resonate with the damned currency of the present: one image; ‘… a psychic diagram, its molecular building blocks patterned into imagery. In his vision he could see Michael Jackson, arms open wide, dancing on the roof of a Canary Wharf skyscraper as a Boeing, piloted by a naked psychopath, narrowed in on a collision course with the thirty-second floor…’ set next to a second one of ‘Fortnum’s lapsang.’ The crushingly weird combo of an apocalypse tea-time is the kind of perfectly rendered snapshot that captures our super-modern, hyper-city, urban culture, a kind of global etiquette of genocidal tendencies that our Faustian pact has engendered and that Michael Jackson symbolises.

In The American Weekly of 24th February 1935 Salvador Dali was described as a super-realist rather than a surrealist. His approach to responding to the crimes of New York was to draw a man’s decomposing head, seemingly lying on his back, with ants crawling out of his nose and hidden mouth. The comment from the pedestrian journalist covering this and other drawings suggested that what Dali was trying to do was ‘…lead art away from old conventional lines.’ Reed’s novel is similarly ‘super-realist’ and by working his way through speculations regarding Shakespeare and Marlowe he unrelentingly forces himself upon a very fixed source of conventional line and daringly suggests a new trajectory. It’s hard to think against the normal, against the given.

The teenage knife deaths of London are beginning to circle all the inner heads of Londoners in sad and sleep-interrupting dreams. Roads and trees and shops and bars and bus-stops and schools and houses and shoes and shirts and skirts and signs and stations and parks and tv programmes and films and airports and beaches are become strangely mythic. They pick up and transmute to the poetic ‘mental refuge’, as Reed calls it in a brilliant essay In A Dark Time: Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, of Roethke’s own poem The Far Field: ‘Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,/Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery,-/ One learned of the eternal…’

What we have now is the ordinary rubbish of damned, revolving life revealing eternity, and it terrifies us. We read the novel as we have to now, in a time where ‘Man … can be turned inside out… one lack’s the protection of one’s skin, the walls of one’s skull leave one’s mind visible as the bubble in a spirit-level.’ (In A Dark Time…) Young men, disattuned to their environment, or too attuned to the rhythm of the sold-out violent nerve wires, get murdered under the over-reaching arc of the banal and the clichéd mind, and for as long as such an arc looms over them their deaths shan’t be understood. There has never been a more intense need to record what is what than now. London is the world. We are at war and we drink lapsang. We walk along a road and a child is hacked to pieces.

Reed has forced us to encounter the odd inside flame of the darkness of London, a psychotic preoccupation with money and power, sex and violence, that taps into the hollow of the mind rather than its juice, like a screen across sensibilities of something, anything. He writes about a combined awareness, the drained out fag-end of beauty and its ulterior interior which brings relief from corruption. It’s the dream of redemption, Shakespeare asking for Marlowe to love him again whilst knowing that the knife that took away his life first time around was a deal in collusion with bought-off talent (mere talent). This book redeems Shakespeare. So it’s not his fault. Condemns him. But it’s still not his fault (perhaps…) because ‘They were one body, the first and the last poets, and he intended to keep it that way.’

But the Faustian pact is ours. Michael Jackson is driven silently in slow motion , as if underwater, through London’s blooded streets and a million pictures of him insist that he is our secret privacy, as stars always do so insist. Reed’s novel is the fast poetry of the damned winding out like a drowning, ‘the hurtling velocity of flesh breaking itself against water.’ (The Black Screen)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Marshall (centre) is former editor of 3:AM and his essay on Stewart Home appeared in its fifth anniversary anthology The Edgier Waters (2006). He lives in London.