The Urge to Destroy
Perhaps Johnson was ahead of his time because by 1973, the year in which Malry was published, he was a man out of time. Johnson was an experimental writer but not in some nancy-boy post-modernist way; he’d done National Service and been touched by the iconoclastic spirit of the ’50s Angry Young Man before it turned to conservative bile. Later the openness and explosive creativity of the ’60s suited the playfulness and cosmopolitan feel of much of Johnson’s fiction. He looked to Europe and the Nouveau Roman and Beckett’s prose (then little appreciated here compared to his plays); and to Brecht too who’s quoted in Malry, for Johnson was a man of the left.
By Paul Tickell.
Three Poems
i am a desperate man who loves the simplicity of painting
and hates gallarys and white walls and the dealers in art
who loves unreasonableness
and hot headedness
who loves contradiction
hates publishing houses
and
also I am Vincent van gogh
By Billy Childish.
hallucination=cell
the end of the cell the DIGITAL_aerofoil of the brain of the madman to the eye of the synapsetic rhinoceros of the embryo that creates the intention of the rhinoceros bar murder of the cloud to my velocity of light=storage of the immortality that flutters to the murder medium of the lightning speed of anti-faust and recover the hell of the micro=larva guerrilla is my soul done to the chaosmic=cyber of BABEL infinite divergence and the cell war of the hell of the sun in the outer space of the brain of an embryo gimmick bisexually??
By Kenji Siratori.
Maryland
Private cloaking systems had kicked off when an inventor found he could go anywhere and be ignored so long as he carried a charity can. Now Failsafe walked invisibly out of the night and through the crowds at the crime scene. It was a media event, all harsh arc lights and generalisation. He followed unseen behind Chief Blince and a trooper as they approached the chapel.
By Steve Aylett.
Ecosystem Discovered in Saatchi’s Pocket
Some funding is allegedly imminent. Rocco submitted sheaves of documentation explaining in a hundred different ways that it wasn’t going to be essentially a Playboy Channel thing like the last one. Cal starts whining about wanting to go. He’s hungover from AM drinking. Courtney wanders off into the kitchen while Rocco is distracted.
By Alistair Gentry.