The Relentlessly Depressing Squares Have Taken Over
Everyone I know starts off by listening to records, music. So there’s this background, shared points of reference. Listening to The Doors, Velvets, Punk, then reading Burroughs, Camus, Sartre and Hunter S. Thompson etcetera and there’s a whole load of people who have missed out on that whole journey and I find it hard to relate to them. These are these supposedly in touch people who are making a lot of decisions about what our culture is. It’s like your uncle and aunty are running the show.
Richard Marshall interviews Graham Bendel, writer, filmmaker and founder of Fortune Teller Press.
A Book Place to Visit
The Amuti Gallery and Bookshop at 10 Woburn Walk, London, WC1H 0JL is a great place to visit if you’re waiting for a train from Euston or King’s Cross, or if you want to pick up first editions from the likes of Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Hunter S. Thompson. Then again, you […]
Reflexive misanthropy
There’s a guy, Roger, who Stretch uses as a cipher to parody blogging culture. God knows bloggers take themselves far too seriously and the medium carries a danger of becoming a floating head. Roger posts as ‘El Rogelio’ and can’t have a bowel movement without writing about it. Eventually, he blogs so much that, get this, he turns into a computer. And shits a motherboard. This is watered-down Burroughs. And Burroughs wasn’t even that fucking good.
Max Dunbar reviews Wildlife.
Journey Into Being
Journey Into Space is closer to the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip K. Dick in this approach to science fiction than it is to that of Robert A. Heinlein or Iain M. Banks. M. John Harrison being the only author this reviewer can think of who works within and yet subverts and perverts the genre. This foregrounding of the difficulties of language in describing things — such as trees and what they consist of both physically and linguistically; bark/trunk against signifier/signified — is more Martian school (Craig Raine, Christopher Reid and Martin Amis) than Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury).
A review by Steve Finbow.