After a nine month absence, Scarecrow have spawned a Brutalist/Off-Beat monster: “This gathering of like-minded individuals, who all eschew the current trend in publishing, have acted alone. We are elsewhere. We don’t belong. We have, more or less, turned our backs on the conglomerates; we ignore those vainglorious money-men who’d rather lunch in the stinking, laughable Groucho than sniff out new writing talent; those moronic cretins hell-bent on sales, sales, sales; we ignore marketing departments; those same bozos responsible for the horrid 3 for 2 dross in every high street bookstore; those grand panjandrums that are mostly responsible for everything that is wrong with contemporary literary fiction in this country.” * Lee Rourke has been busy, though—Everyday, his collection of short stories, will be released by Social Disease later this month. * Tony O’Neill is hosting the NYC event for Dennis Cooper’s Userlands, 23 March @ 7:30pm in Barnes and Noble, Park Slope. As Sean Lynch of Ten Point Press has already mentioned this, I guess it’s okay to say that a Tony O’Neill poem will be the next broadside release from Beat Scene Press. O’Neill is in good company—he follows Dan Fante, whose Supermarket was given the Beat Scene Press/Ten Point treatment. * The Collective talk to David Lynch about Inland Empire. See Ellis Sharp’s take on the movie. * Dennis Cooper visits the David Lynch retrospective in Paris and checks out the coffee: “It’s very American tasting coffee, no surprise, presumably what Dale Cooper would have been drinking in Twin Peaks. It’s not the best coffee I’ve ever imbibed, but it’s not too bad, and it’s David Lynch coffee, so who cares if it’s cuisine.” * Dennis Cooper also offers up 25 rock shows I saw when I was younger that make me a lucky stiff: David Bowie eight times, most notably : 1) on the Ziggy Stardust tour at the Santa Monica Civic, LA, 2.) on the Aladdin Sane tour at the Long Beach Arena, LA, 3.) on the Diamond Dogs tour at the Universal Amphitheater, LA, 4.) on the Low tour at the Forum, LA. * “Getting a job behind the counter at Vic’s place, albeit part-time, was enough to boost my cred a hundredfold. It had an effect on the girls — an effect I liked — and, erm, another effect on the boys. Quite a different effect.” David Bowie recalls his job in Furlongs record shop. * Louis Wener, singer of that (dreadful) Britpop band Sleeper, on how she reinvented herself as a novelist: “When Sleeper collapsed Wener had a solo record deal, but her heart wasn’t in it and, distracted by the lure of a new typewriter, she began to tap out a novel. Her first attempt — a comic thriller about the music business with a million different characters and a tortuous plot — was hopeless. Then, a third of the way through Goodnight Steve McQueen,she decided she might have something worth reading, and — after a fortnight in which she spent every afternoon in the cinema to distract herself from the fear of rejection — the publishers agreed.” * Paul Collins, of The Collins Library fame, writes on Leo Guild, the “best worst pulp novelist ever“. * A collection of vintage toy robot heads (via BoingBoing) * 10 reasons why comic books are better than films: “3. Comics are more experimental, vital and bold. Why do you think the film industry steals every decent idea that comic books have? The amount of films based on comic books has increased considerably over the last ten years or so. But ask yourself: how many can you think of that are anywhere near as good as the original in terms of artistry, boldness of vision, uniqueness, or even plain good story-telling? Only the American Splendour film comes to my mind.” (via Bugpowder) * Rick Poynor on the various covers of JG Ballard’s Crash: “Over the years I collected editions of the book, partly to see whether any publisher could ever visualise a piece of writing which is prepared to be, in Ballard’s words, ‘openly pornographic’ as a literary stratagem. On the whole, though, image-makers have been defeated by Crash. A book that ought to have inspired covers to match and reflect its status as an underground classic has often received visual treatments marked by incomprehension and evasion.” (via Design Observer) * The Rare Book Room (via Maud Newton) *KGB Bar Lit run a short interview with Joshua Cohen (scroll down): “I probably read over one hundred books for this book. There’s a section in the book about violin making, so I read a lot about that. And I read a lot of composers’ memoirs. Composers’ memoirs are brilliant. They live great lives. They’re in a different town every night, with different women every night. There are drinks on the table, warm beds in elegant hotels. So it came a lot from that lore. And when musicians take a break, when they “take five,” and sit around smoking cigarettes they always end up trading stories, so there’s that verbal element too. * An interview with Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid: “Me and William will always yell at each other. We always have, we always will. I don’t really know how it’s gonna go, nobody does. But we have to do this to find out whether it’s going to work or not. I really am nervous. We haven’t played music together for about ten years, so it’s going to be … interesting.”
First posted: Monday, March 19th, 2007.
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