What Else Is There? A Tribute to Sebastian Horsley
I wrote this because I didn’t want the news of Sebastian’s death to be dominated by all of those piss-poor journalists who didn’t know much about him other than his press kit, and who routinely demolished him for being style over substance (which was particularly funny given the fact that this was Sebastian’s express intent). He was something of a failure at being superficial, though. After all, he accidentally wrote a book of substance that will live on in infamy for years to come. Sebastian was a true original, a character, and someone who truly didn’t give a fuck. I hope that some of his spirit lives on through his work, and through the people whose lives he touched. We need people like Sebastian now more than ever.
Tony O’Neill pays homage to Sebastian Horsley.
How the Light Gets In
It’s a lazy truism that repressive governments use imaginary enemies to distract the population from state crimes. Press TV rolled out the usual propaganda about Zionists, imperialists and neocons, but before the election Iran’s dictatorship employed the more effective technique of displaying a smug ignorance of the very possibility of opposition: ‘referred to as ‘certain circles’ or ‘those who have been gulled by the West’ or ‘a handful of malcontents’. Now, for the first time, the schisms have been acknowledged and the reformists are publicly accused of being counter-revolutionaries.’ The message this sends is intentional and unintentional. One: we’re on to you, so don’t mess. Two: you are not alone.
Max Dunbar reviews Afsaneh Moqadam‘s Death to the Dictator!
R.I.P. Sebastian Horsley
Writer, artist and Soho dandy Sebastian Horsley has died of a suspected heroin overdose, just days after after a play based on his memoir opened in London. As Toby Young says, “I’ve met a few Soho characters in my day and most of them were drunken bores. Not Sebastian.” He continues: “He styled himself an […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Literary Traveller
I find Toussaint difficult to categorise. Just when I decide I have him pegged as a writer of Kafkesque claustrophobic psychological mazes, in which characters never quite confront their Existentialist crises, I take a turn in one of those mazes and find myself bumping up against potently hilarious Absurdism, in the line of Beckett and Pinter. At other times his humour seems more in-tune with the Minimalism of Mary Robison, and then there’s his debt to Nouveau Roman, which reveals itself not only in the formal distinctness of each of his novels but also in his deft unstitching of stable self-hood and his explorations of specific spaces and sites. None of which really captures what I love most about his novels: their charming woundedness and mannered humour.
Colin Herd on Jean-Philippe Toussaint‘s Self-Portrait Abroad.