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[3.9.05] [Andrew Gallix]
THE MISSING LINKS
 The real Oliver Twist is revealed in The Independent on Sunday. * 3:AM's Zoe Paxton reviews Michel Faber's The Farenheit Twins: "When Faber sucks you into whatever world he's created, the gap between reality and fantasy closes and -- hey presto! -- you find yourself clawing to get out of a world which doesn't actually exist. Problematic. So laugh away, Mr Faber, for you have officially got under our skin. And quite right too; what else do you want from a short story than a little threat and menace? Raymond Carver would be wetting his knickers". * Zadie Smith is interviewed in The Guardian. Two excerpts. Here's the first: "'Good writing requires -- demands -- good being,' she wrote a couple of years ago, introducing a collection of short stories, The Burned Children of America. 'I'm absolutely adamant on this point'". And here's the second: "'Cambridge was a joy,' says Smith now. 'Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still.' And, elsewhere, 'I was pretty much the only black girl. So I was something of exotic interest, in the same way that I found public schoolboys incredibly exotic, because I'd never seen anybody like that. So, you know, you get laid a lot. That's one advantage ... I took out three student loans and lived the life of Riley'". (Zadie Smith's On Beauty is reviewed in The Observer.) * Peter Ackroyd, who is publishing a biography of Shakespeare, is profiled in today's Observer. On his low profile as a novelist: "'I was treated with derision and contempt,' he has said of the strange position he came to occupy in English literature. He has never enjoyed, if that's the right word for someone who claims to detest the trappings of literary fashion, the sexy profile of contemporaries such as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. This is partly for superficial reasons: his walrus demeanour hardly speaks to the youthful concerns of media and marketing. But it's also because, unlike those authors, he has no appetite for grappling with the concerns of the here and now". On London: "From early on, there has been a strong element of psychic geography in his work. As far back as Hawksmoor, he set about excavating the historic sites of the City of London, looking for the pulse of previous lives. For Ackroyd, Londoners down the ages appear to walk the streets and inhabit the buildings as if they were not contained by what he calls the 'world of time'." * Houellebecq pisses off poncy Parisian critics: "When the celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq launched his latest novel in circumstances of extraordinary secrecy last week, he enraged some of France's most eminent literary critics by witholding copies from them to stave off bad reviews. Now they appear to have struck back by circulating an embarrassing rap album featuring the tuneless voice of the controversial author in an apparent effort to dent his reputation as the bete noire of contemporary French writing". It's not a "rap" album at all, and it's actually pretty good. * Gaby Wood on the new wave of Chinese photographers: "As a form of meditation, Song Dong writes in water on stone every night before he goes to bed, making the diary of his day a letter to invisibility. He writes but does not record; the process is like an expression of memory itself". Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China is on at London's V&A from 15 September to 15 January. * Leland de la Durantaye on Lolita's 50th anniversary in the Boston Globe: "...the most brilliant American novel of the 20th century, now a round and ripe 50 years old, tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words -- and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words". * 3:AM's Richard Cabut in the Daily Telegraph. * The Durham Literature Festival runs from 24 Septemer to 23 October in, er, Durham (England). * The recently-revamped dogmatika on Graham Rawle who, it appears, "has glued 40,000 text fragments, and blunted three pairs of scissors, to create Norma Fontaine, a provincial English transvestite whose feminine persona is based on women's magazines of the era". * Richard Hell, who was recently interviewed in our pages, was recently interviewed by Nick Hasted for The Indie. Selected highlights: "Richard Hell was punk's John the Baptist. In one year, 1974, he found the movement its home (CBGB's), created its style (ripped and spiked), indicated its philosophy (provocative boredom), and wrote its anthem ("Blank Generation"). ...He is a man on whom pop pivoted, one of the few musicians to truly, subtly change the world. ...'At CBGB's, we imagined our own world into being, because we didn't feel comfortable in the existing one. It was a place you could go to every night and feel like you belonged. And that's because it flowered out of our own brains'. ... He remains a ghost in the pop machine, leaving faint, dissident, traces that show no sign of fading". * Can CBGB's be saved? See here. * The reality of Brit gastropubs. * Zagreb's Urban Festival. * Do dog-training techniques work on men?. * It's Oasis v Blur all over again. Not. * Novelist Rick Moody on his band, the Wingdale Community Singers: "Much of fiction, in the early 21st century, can be divided into two categories: literature obsessed with movies and literature obsessed with music. Literature obsessed with movies is content to hurtle along. It favours show-off plot twists and revelations. Literature obsessed with music is slow and stately and is as much about the language on the page as it is about its story. For those of us who are obsessed with music, what could be better than listening carefully while you try to harmonise with another human voice? So: music makes me a better novelist, and makes me happy to be in the world. And so I'm not ready to abandon it". * Edmund White interviewed about his memoir: "How do you get someone to 'open up' when he has waxed poetic about being urinated on in a bathtub, or tied up in a dungeon?" * Welsh air goes on sale. * ReadySteadyBook -- another site to be revamped -- on Lisa Williams' Internet campaign. (See Lee Rourke's review of Williams's Letters to Virginia Woolf. Lee, who was himself recently interviewed for Dazed and Confused, has published an interview with ReadySteadyBook's Mark Thwaite. * I-D Magazine celebrates its 25th birthday. * Scottish novelist Alan Warner argues that "bad writing can be classic writing": "Even after three single malts and a patriotic suppository, (Walter) Scott's ravings remain without charm for me. Technically I know he is an awful writer -- much of his punctuation had to be added by the compositors and this shows -- and that Scott was never capable of writing a masterpiece. Yet I devour his work out of a painful and fascinated curiosity. Walt's contemporary, that unbearable snob Austen, could write very well indeed and Scott could not, yet it was Scott who changed the future of the novel, so I can quite comprehend his sentimental, romantic junk being tagged 'classic'". * Is podcasting the future of audiobooks? The answer could lie here. * The birth of gonzo.
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