Excerpt: Jet Set Desolate
On a July night, with the fan whining, I heard Spanish opera through the window. San Francisco’s Tenderloin district sprawled outside my apartment building, full of crackheads and residence hotels, massage parlors and liquor stores that greeted the dawn with a line outside. A bowl with three floating gardenias sat next to the wine, the bottle empty, the flowers delicious. There was something about this flower that always struck me, the waxen abundance of the white petals, the deep verdant leaves, the boutonnière cut like a full stop at the end of a sentence.
By Andrea Lambert.
Bad Girls Go Everywhere
Her bestselling book, Sex and the Single Girl, emphasised in Brown’s chatty, confrontational style that it was okay for women to enjoy sex, to work for a living, to make no apology for vanity, to choose the individual over the group, to screw the system that screwed them, that monogamy is not always the answer, to remain childless, and to stay unmarried beyond the age of twenty-three. Helen Gurley Brown offered little in the way of compromise.
Max Dunbar on Jennifer Scanlon‘s Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown.
Self-Prescribed Psychosis
Eschewing tepid tales about his favourite bands, Bob accurately describes how life was really lived – and death really died – in extreme conditions of debauch and poverty underpinned by a sense of overwhelming stare-at-the-wall-drooling boredom, punctuated only by outbursts of violence and furore, usually fuelled by whatever substances came to hand – including poisonous mushrooms on one disastrous, yet amusingly depicted, occasion. It’s an underworld of alienation, loneliness, hopelessness and anger. Well, it was either that or get a job.
Richard Cabut reviews Bob Short‘s Filth.
Log
The source of the hum is not important however, nor indeed, is the hum itself. For the hum is about to be eclipsed in audibility by the rumble. The rumble begins as a deep, distant roar, like an avalanche in some far-off mountain ravine, or the movement of large tectonic plates in the depths of the earth’s molten core. In the context of an office environment, such a sound might well appear rather disconcerting; ominous even. But the woman sitting at the desk is not alarmed. She continues typing numbers into her computer, engrossed in the finer details of her, rather unsexy, Excel programme.
By Paul Ewen.
Rooms For Improvement
What psychological mechanisms are at play when we feel protective over a section of space we call our own? How are our feelings about a room being ‘home’ different from our feelings about people being ‘home’? In general, how is our interaction with people different from our interaction with spaces? Guy Mankowski, in particular, explores such questions in his tale of a young man welcoming a new lodger into his room. The man calls that place “an extension of his body”, saying “it only makes sense to me… that the room I embody as an adult is like a limb to me.” Indeed, thoughts like this are not foreign to most of us.
Sophie Erskine on 8 Rooms by Legend Press.
3:AM Asia: Anime’s Domestic Ills
Another of Roland Kelts‘ dispatches for the Daily Yomiuri: “News that the Japanese animation industry held its first ever state-of-the-industry symposium last month in Tokyo is as welcome as it is disturbing. Welcome, of course, because healthy organisms generally try to keep one finger on the pulse of their welfare. And disturbing because, after 60-plus […]
Beat to the Beat
But is the book any good? This is a difficult one. How do we be critical of a writer who has morphed into a huge cultural icon of Americana? The answer, I think, is to forget about criticism and concentrate on the positives of having another book to add to the already impressive Kerouac oeuvre. Kerouac, we know, was no playwright, and so criticising his lack of dramatic ability seems churlish. For Beat Generation is a snapshot of a bygone age, and of a great writer operating at the peak of his literary powers, and an interesting insight into the mind of the man.
A review of Jack Kerouac‘s Beat Generation by Joseph Ridgwell.