Underground RE/Search
An evening with V Vale: Since launching the well-known zine Search & Destroy in 1977 (with money from Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti), V Vale has tirelessly collected and cataloged the history of countercultural mutation and radical aesthetics. As founder of RE/Search he has published a vast array of books documenting the innovations of the […]
‘A Long Night of Chaos and Desolation’
The Pregnant Widow has been hyped as a four-hundred page orgy, but it’s not. A lot of the time, nothing much happens. Students sit by the pool, talk student talk, attempt coursework. This is not to say that the book is uninteresting. Through his narrator Keith, Amis captures the essence of youth: the sense of being at the centre of all that is possible, and yet somehow missing out – the party down the hall, and the exam in the morning. He lays down the young man’s habits of feeling and thought with an amused and yet ultimately sympathetic pen.
Max Dunbar reviews Martin Amis‘s The Pregnant Widow.
3:AM Cult Hero: Derek Raymond
From Andrew Stevens‘ Derek Raymond’s South Circular: I knocked at a second-floor flat in a dreary house, one of two hundred in a dreary Catford street. After a while I heard steps the other side of the door. ‘McGruder?’ ‘Who’s that?’ said a man’s voice. ‘Who wants him?’ ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Open up. Police.’ […]
Theoretical Animals – In Theory
At first glance, due to its poem-like structure, the text appears to be placed in boxes within display cases. Perhaps nudged by the nautical imagery, I felt I was looking at a collection salvaged from a long ago shipwreck. A surreal display of drowning victims’ debris haphazardly yet somehow surgically assembled by mermaid archivists for some underwater cave museum. But soon, driven by the device of merging the titles with the bodies, and I’m no longer reading them like poems, I’m devouring pages, I’m smashing the glass display cases, I’m mangling my hands, I’m flinging the contents of the boxes down the hallway.
A review by David Hoenigman.
Prism and Prisons – Bill Ectric’s Tamper
For Bill Ectric, it is the glowing lights in the background; a photograph taken with flash bulb in the pitch black basement of a long-abandoned church. Are these lights simply stirred-up dust particles refracting the camera’s flash…or the souls of the departed, who were sequestered here in this basement during the flu epidemic of a half-century earlier. To find an answer to this, and maybe all the mysteries of life, Ectric and friends travel half-way around the world, speak with Leprechauns, and end up in the sealed catacombs on the island of Malta.
Mikael Covey reviews.