Der Baader Meinhof Komplex and the German cover of Tao Lin’s eeeee eee eee. * The Soho Archives exhibition runs until November at the Photographer’s Gallery in London * Christopher Hitchens on Brideshead Revisited: “it is entirely possible to feel nostalgia for homelands, and for periods, which one has never experienced oneself. This applies to imagined times and places as well as to real ones: Waugh uses the phrase ’secret garden’ and also — alluding to the Oxford of Lewis Carroll — to an ‘enclosed and enchanted garden’ reachable by a ‘low door in the wall’. The yearning for a lost or different upbringing is fairly universal, and one of Brideshead’s keys is precisely the one that unlocks the gate to it: Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence”. * Author signatures and publishers’ bindings. * The late David Foster Wallace: “…[I]f you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: the only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. …In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive”. More here and there (including Tom McCarthy’s tribute: “Infinite Jest, along with Whatever, was the best novel of the nineties. Here was a writer really getting to grips with the shape of the world and the shapes and shapings of literature: the challenges laid down to it by information technology, corporate culture, the manifold addictions that bind us to our bodies and to one another. The essays were even better: geometry and tornadoes, craft as represented by the art of tennis, pleasure by the horror of a luxury cruise. His death (’demapping’, as he’d say) is very sad”). * Donari Braxton interviews Hillary Raphael: “I have asked my readers (with varying degrees of success) to contribute to the narrative process online, either by uploading a backpacker sex story to tokyomonamour.com, or purchasing a pair of used panties (worn by a fictional character) on neogeisha.org. I do this because I hate being the only author of a book. It can feel lonely and masturbatory. It’s better when the story evolves post-publication”.
* Viking noir. * Houellebecq: “Other people, perhaps, have been able to make love while completely sober. I don’t envy them. All I have ever been able to accomplish while completely sober is to do my accounts, or pack my bags”. * The Beat the Dust Bookshop is now open for all your Offbeat needs. * Darwin’s London. * 3:AM’s Steve Finbow on Murakami’s latest in The Japan Times: “A fish-and- vegetable-eating fitness fanatic replaces the image of Murakami as a beer-swigging, chain-smoking Japanese version of Raymond Chandler and Raymond Carver”. * David Cameron and Graham Greene. * The riot grrrannies. * Minimum Rock’n'Roll. * Lies/Isle: a new experimental literary zine. * Sir Ben Kingsley pays tribute to Minor Threat! * An extract from Sam Jordison’s latest (plus Sam on Sky News). * Lindsay Anderson, the “pepper in the arse of the establishment“: “As David Storey sees it, ‘the venom with which he attacked society was an expression of his own inability to come to terms with himself. He was what would be called in the old days a ‘passive homosexual’. At the Royal Court, Tony Richardson nicknamed him ‘the singing virgin’. He did remain virginal to the end as far as I was aware, and that was a cause of great pain to him — the fact it was a purely celibate existence. …Malcolm McDowell…later recalled that Anderson had expressed the hope that his gravestone might feature the inscription: ‘Surrounded by fucking idiots’.” * Please squeeze here. * Travis Jeppersen (see here for news of his forthcoming book) on Jeremiah Palacek. * Toby Litt [explaining what drives him to write]: “The things I think writing can and should do that it hasn’t done. Which amounts to trying to tell some sort of truth”. * The Times publish two extracts from the new Clash autobiography, and from the archives, a review of the band’s legendary gig at the Rainbow. * Popular Aristocracy. * Alasdair Gray: “Having said that, please enjoy Roger’s book. I will not authorise another biography”. * A great interview (film) with Mark Amerika. * A review of Chris Killen’s new literary night in Manchester and an interview with the man himself. * On the Alasdair Gray biography. * Junot Diaz interviewed. * Saramago has started blogging. * Period Booker — who wants a literary award anyway?
First posted: Saturday, September 27th, 2008.
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