Ed Vulliamy looks at the legacy of Colin MacInnes: “MacInnes was the decadent chronicler of 1950s Notting Hill, a restless, volatile neighbourhood which was home to one of the UK’s biggest West Indian immigrant communities, and the scene of notorious race riots in August 1958. Openly gay when homosexuality was still an illegal taboo, MacInnes revelled in what he saw as the impoverished area’s exuberant exoticism. Absolute Beginners was the first novel to capture the city’s emerging youth culture, its lustful, teenage adventure dovetailing into MacInnes’s sexualised idolisation of black life in Notting Hill and climaxing with the riots that seared the neighbourhood. Nowadays known to many only by way of Julien Temple’s almost universally derided film of 1986, Absolute Beginners and MacInnes’s preceding book City of Spades, achieved cult status after their publication, and were the first to chronicle, for a white audience at least, the culture of the new immigrants to London. * What’s on Tom McCarthy’s iPod? The Fall, for starters: “W.B.” - I assume the title is a reference to W.B. Yeats, because The Fall are super-literary. Mark E. Smith was basically this working-class boy from Manchester who never had much formal education, but sort of came across Modernist literature in a drug-addled haze and really loved it. I’ve seen The Fall quite a few times. I mean, I don’t go see that many bands, but one band I always go and see when they’re in town is The Fall. Mark E. Smith is like the original classical figure of the poet—he’s like Orpheus, you know, who’s just halfway dead. He’s got one foot in the underworld. He’s just picking up some transmission on the threshold between sense and complete nonsense that might contain all these incredible words of wisdom, or might just be complete garbled rubbish. But you know, in Greek plays they have seers and oracles who always talk in riddles. I always get the impression that Mark Smith is like an oracle. {via LHB} * Recent 3:AM interviewee, Steven Hall shows Largehearted Boy his Book Notes for The Raw Shark Texts: The Littlest Things by Lilly Allen. If there were one thing I could ask of the film people it would be for The Littlest Things to run over the opening credits of the film. I love it that this song is so fragile, simple and everyday. It’s not a song that brings to mind gigantic conceptual sharks, or adventures, puzzles, codes. This is just a song about a girl missing a boy and a life that isn’t there for her anymore. That’s really the heart of Raw Shark for me. * BookBlast, co-founded by “L’enfant terrible of British publishing” [Le Figaro, 1999] — and 3:AM columnist — Georgia de Chamberet. * Tony O’Neill [and Social Disease] got a nice mention The Times, by way of Toby Litt: “It’s a druggy book, but while lots of people take drugs, only few can write as well.” * The London Zine Symposium takes place this Saturday at The Horse Hospital. More info on Bugpowder. * The beauty of litblogs in motion: the LBC’s Read This! Spring selection, Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories. * Hanif Kureishi says he was censored by the BBC.
First posted: Wednesday, April 18th, 2007.
