The State of Banks’s Art
Like the Discworld series, Banks’s novel is a mirror of worlds. The Concern work principally in a Europe founded on Judeo-Islamic values and menaced by Christian terrorists. The renegade assassin, when d’Ortolan raises the point of Christian suicide bombers, shakes his head sadly and sighs: ‘The religion of brotherly love.’ The inversion gives Banks the opportunity to reflect on the events of the last eight years, on war, power, capital and faith, without it all feeling tacked on. This gives an eerie quality to contemporary debates, showing Banks’s real and enduring strength: to make the reader look at something familiar from a different angle.
Max Dunbar on Iain Banks‘s Transition.
3:AM Top 5: Simon Crump
Simon Crump is the author of the Not the Booker Prize Prize shortlisted novel Neverland, described by John Self as a “a work of conceptual art” and by Sam Jordison as “peculiar, more than a little sick and one hell of a performer.” He is currently listening to: 1. ‘Some Kinda Nut’ – The Moon […]
ampere’s and
Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web: Why adapting a work into a comic book requires more than just illustrating the description and a few word balloons (via @thebookslut) & Penguin Graphic Classics, a Flickr set & Top Shelf‘s $3 comix sale & Don’t buy Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, read these […]
The 3:AM read
This week’s brief review: “Erased, just like that. As if they’d never been alive at all.” When garden tool salesman Theodore Bellefontaine receives a postcard from his dead mother, he heads to Cleveland to find her. Krusoe propels Ted from one absurd situation to the next (biker-chick gangs, strange women’s clubs) in this part ghost […]
For one night only
16 September 2009 From 7.30pm Basement, Zebrano 3am Bar, 18 Greek St, London W1 Free Join us in the dirty beating heart of Soho to celebrate the life and works of legendary music journalist Steven Wells and his Attack! Books. For one night only, the mayhem is unleashed once more as the whole Attack! Books […]
The Missing Links
Gavin James Bower and Sebastian Horsley reading at Aubin & Wills (video). * The ten myths of Riot Grrrl. * Karren Ablaze on zine culture in The Guardian (see her 3:AM Top 5)* Lomo in London. * Jonathan Lethem on “Poet of Desolate Landscapes” JG Ballard. * Douglas Coupland interviewed: “You can’t download getting your […]
Four Poems
With regard to these acts: removal of clothing,
nudity in front of females and before prayer,
the belly a heap of wheat set about with lilies,
a brood of men with bushy locks, black as raven,
the shaving of beards O daughters of Jerusalem,
exposure to extreme temperatures, hot or cold, short
shackling to an eye-bolt on the floor,
spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,
three hundred and fifty incidents of self-harm…
By A.B. Jackson.