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[9.7.05] [Andrew Gallix]
THE MISSING LINKS
 David Grindley, who is reviving Joe Orton's posthumous masterpiece What the Butler Saw at the Hampstead Theatre (London), writes in The Observer: "In many ways, Orton has not had the respect he deserves as a playwright. To many, he is better known for the details of his unconventional life. For years, he lived in one room with his lover, Kenneth Halliwell. On 9 August 1967, Halliwell's jealousy of Orton's talent, celebrity and promiscuity drove him to bludgeon his protege to death before killing himself. These facts, and the salacious nature of Orton's material, have blinded us to what a superior craftsman he is. He deserves to be regarded as the worthy successor to Oscar Wilde. . . . Orton's work refuses to be pigeonholed. There's been nothing like it in theatre before or since. It's certainly lost its capacity to shock, but it has not lost its ability to provoke". * More summer reading. * JT LeRoy interviewed in The Independent. * Irvine Welsh reviews James Meek. * Bill Drummond's Soup Line tour. * Elias Canetti on Iris Murdoch, that "unutterably petit bourgeois shop-girl". * British painting still rocks, says protestor at latest Saatchi show. * Iconic Screamadelica cover artist commits suicide (you'll find an interview with the late artist here). * A report from Camp Idle. * Kevin Sampsell is interviewed over at Bookslut. * Adrian Maddox of Classic Cafes fame is interviewed by Londonist. * Rick Moody describes his band, the Wingdale Community Singers, as "like punk rock made by people in their 40s basically" (in Suicide Girls). * The Black Smiths. * The "envy cordiale". * Another interesting litblog: ResoluteReader. * Britain's parochial literary scene (more here). * French new wave. * Great Splinters entry on Brit swear words. * The Jean-Paul Satre story Biff style. * Brenda Kahn. * A book about gay penguins! * Susan Hill's Long Barn Books for first-time novelists. * Toby Litt is interviewed in Dogmatika (see our interview here). * Susannah Breslin in Wired on Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, "a collection of essays written by a generation of authors raised in a media-saturated culture": "The book features 25 essays, including several by authors whose careers have been profoundly affected by the internet, including Douglas Rushkoff, Elizabeth Spiers and Neal Pollack. Contributors, who range from age 19 to 40-something, are torn between playing Grand Theft Auto and writing the next great American novel. Or they're debating whether bloggers who get book deals are 'real writers' and googling their own names when they know they should be writing." * Parati's international literary festival. * Humpty Dumpty in Maori. * Big-up to Four-Eyed Bitch for the kind words. On the subject of 3:AM, she writes: "It's eclectic but I love everything on it! How is this possible!". * Former 3:AM editor and founder of Newtopia Magazine Charles Shaw has been imprisoned in the States after being found guilty of "drug possession". * The godlike genius of Ricky Gervais. * Ian McEwan on the London bombings: "We have been savagely woken from a pleasant dream. . . . Who will want to travel on the tube, once it has been cleared? How will we sit at our ease in a restaurant, cinema or theatre? And we will face again that deal we must constantly make and remake with the state - how much power must we grant Leviathan, how much freedom will we be asked to trade for our security?" * The power and the station. * The late Screaming Lord Sutch. * Howard Jacobson reminds us that "Once upon a time, when we knew aesthetically what we were about, the novel was comic or it was nothing. . . . The first novels ever written were novels that made us laugh. We laugh rarely when we're reading now, aloud or to ourselves. The blockbusters which people take to the beach, like the novels solemnified by 9/11 -- though those make it far less frequently to the seaside -- are read as though in a trance. Pornographers will tell you that laughter in a sex scene is like a pistol shot at a concert. It ruptures the fantasy. In their guidelines for aspiring writers of eroticism, the publishers of Black Lace warn specifically against comedy. What they do not go on to say is that laughter is the operation of intelligence, an act of criticism, and the moment you subject porn, soft or hard, to intelligence, it comes apart like a mummified artefact exposed to light. Ditto The Da Vinci Code. Ditto the modern novel of highly responsible ideological intent. By some perverse twist of intellectual history, the very reason we once read novels -- to be liberated from solemnity and absurdity, to be engaged in a merry war with everything around us -- is the very reason we won't read novels which perform such a service now. The isolation of comedy from everything else we do is symptomatic of this. We are right to shrink from the very idea of a 'funny' book. There should be no such genre. We should expect laughter to be integral to the business of being serious. We are back in a new dark age of the imagination. We read to sleep. . . ."
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