Ultimately, Billy’s refusal to leave the town of his birth (in which, whilst going about his business, he is often subject to insults and catcalls related to his facial hair and sartorial choices) is that an innate topographical knowledge allows for the expansive journey to the self, and Billy Childish’ significant body of work is auto-fictive, an archaeology of the Self. His work is ‘unhygienic’, visceral, and playful – redolent with the human, with experience, with the blood and guts of auto-voyeurism.
Heidi James reviews the casual small town cruelty of Billy Childish’s the idiocy of idears.
Terry Glavin’s odyssey of extinction concerns itself with everything precious that is slipping away from us: birds, fish, animals, fruits, vegetables and yes, even entire dialects. Even though he is offering his findings to a society whose general environmental concerns lie elsewhere he is neither pleading nor aggressive in tone. He simply presents the facts in clean, spare prose, leaving the emotional side of things for his readers.
Her sardonic humour and matter-of-fact attitude clash with her charismatic and compelling allure – a mix that leads one character to describe her as “like Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings combined”. Like Rebecca, her illness and inevitable death is never a bodily tragedy but rather a social one; the ramifications of AIDS are measured against the New York culture of arty, underground communities populated by beauty-driven models and photographers.
I know what a bad poem is, I think every reader has an instinctive understanding – but a good poem is that strange, indescribable moment of connection between the reader and the writer. It’s a sucker punch in a crowded bar, that sends you staggering outside, gasping for air.
Psychogeography as a concept is nothing new. The psychological influence of habitat and locale is one that has been explored by writers for many years. The writer as walker is a similarly well-trodden path; whenever I think of Rimbaud he is forever on the move, wearing away shoe leather on an open country road. Self is a pleasing addition to the tradition. My problem with the genre – if it has yet gathered its own classification – is the often overly lyrical nature of the prose its authors produce.
I rendered ‘documentary fiction’ as a psychogeographic tendency. I took out maps and located all three. The map in the final end was started from scratch on blank wallpaper. I sketched it out using different coloured sticks. As always Gavin Everall had done the right job. This was the kind of slog books are for. Books to get inside your ventricles, hobble your blood streams, clog you up a bit. There’s something here to court a demise, where all your instincts for cleansing, cutting, knowing, dissecting emerges in the pure wee scratch of humourless autopsy.
The old master is not shy about treating this delicate work with his characteristic robustness; on the contrary, Miller burdens Long’s elegant narrative with more than the brief novella’s wispy frame can bear. One can see the appeal of Cabeza de Vaca to Miller, exhibiting as it does a sense of mysticism and social conscience found in his own work. Moreover, Haniel Long’s interest in Walt Whitman – which found fullest expression in his academic career - is certainly evident here, and equally so in Miller’s novels; yet for all the common ground the two contemporaries shared, Miller’s effusive praise encumbers the book more than it illuminates it.
Seth’s story is also one of discontentment, nostalgia haunts It’s a Good Life. Panels of wordless street scenes and landscapes brilliantly show the passing of time as Seth, an out-of-time curmudgeon, longs for a bygone era. Under the cloud of “a vague depression”, he is disillusioned with modern culture (a large part of his time is spent in museums and old, run-down neighbourhoods): “I look forward to the future with nothing but dread. Things are getting worse and worse every year. As awful as things are right now, I’d be more than happy if the world would stay relatively like this until I die. I can’t face the next fifty years.”
There is a slow dream emerging from this little book. It is a memory book, but the memories are structured as terminal dreams we had, or memories of disjunctive books we had adults read to us when we were children and they are now regained in slow motion, with enough time to count to ten in between each page, fine-grained enough to disturb and vague enough to slip and slide around afterwards, changing shape in the head.
Up on the stage of the 100 Club for National Poetry Day, Horovitz rallies and drifts, dithering over what’s next, he’s entirely comfortable to bumble across the microphone knowing always that his audience is with him, on his side cheering. And if you start to wonder if art should be mixed up in politics, doesn’t Billy Bragg slightly stain a good pop tune? What did Lennon sing about? Remember what Picasso said when asked: what is the function of Art? To Combat the Darkness.
