“I have never read a Blue Book. I prefer books… in a yellow covers.”
Next Thursday, John Calder discusses a brief history of the Yellow Book. Beloved by the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, the Yellow Book contained contributions from Arnold Bennett, George Gissing, Henry James, Max Beerbohm and was associated, through Aubrey Beardsley, with Oscar Wilde, of course. The Calder Bookshop, London SE1 Thursday 1 July @ 7:00pm Entry […]
3:AM Cult Hero: M. Ageyev
“Instantaneous happiness on a scale I had never dreamed of before.” Andrew Stevens on Ageyev’s 1934 classic: That Novel with Cocaine could be ascribed to Nabokov is hilarious in itself. But such rumours were common currency when confronted with whom to credit with authorship of this soi-disant “Dostoevskain novel of ideas,” as the author concerned […]
Syntheses of Resistance & Transformation: Joseph Beuys’ I Like America & America Likes Me & Harold Jaffe’s Jesus Coyote
Charles Manson and his cohorts’ mass murders were first reported and documented by the L.A. Times with subheadings beneath the headlines which were – appropriately so – saturated with both hints and overtones of sheer brutality – brutality which was either caused or exacerbated by the fundamental details of the murders – brutality which were neither inherently nor even remotely natural from the standpoints of corporate media outlets who milked and profited off the sensationalistic aspects of the murders – brutality which kept the populace pent with fear and purged of concern for larger issues – such as the prolonged war concurrently held in Vietnam.
John-Patrick Ayson on Beuys‘ coyote & Harold Jaffe‘s Manson novel.
Freestyling: An interview with Zachary German
One morning I got up early and lied down in McCarren Park in Brooklyn and read a printed out draft all the way through, making notes and line edits, and feeling really good, like I was a genius who had just found a really shitty book that I could quickly change into something just terrific. Then I made the changes and probably the next time I read it all the way through I thought pretty much the same thing. There were a number of drafts like that, where I felt each new set of edits was a revolution or something. As time went by that feeling got less and less, until it started to just seem like a pretty finished novel.
By Chris Killen.