Fuck All This Lying
Over at The Millions, Colin Marshall offers up an excellent primer on the novels of B.S. Johnson: …Even if Coe’s book were the greatest literary biography ever written — and having just finished it moments ago, I can assure you that it’s in the running — asking somebody to tuck into a nearly 500-page tome […]
Same as it ever was: Newark in the 1960s
Porambo also provides lovingly rendered pen portraits of Newark citizens, and one is particularly memorable: John Smith, the taxi driver whose arrest in July 1967 triggered the Newark riots. Smith is revealed as a bad driver who drove too close to the police car in front, triggering his arrest. Beaten by police at the Fourth Precinct, Smith was accused of resisting arrest. Porambo writes: ‘The image of a shouting cab driver, a toothpick stuck in his mouth, ripping down Springfield Avenue, might be a handy explanation for what happened here, but Smith had been miscast. Always a lonely, rootless man, the riot had not changed his quiet and elusive character and its aftermath left an articulate man given to long lapses of thoughtful silence.’
Karl Whitney on Ronald Porambo‘s No Cause for Indictment: An Autopsy of Newark.
3:AM Cult Hero: Serge Gainsbourg
“For me provocation is oxygen.” One of this summer’s must-see flicks has to be Gainsbourg, vie h éroïque, directed by graphic novel wunderkind Joann Sfar, who told the Telegraph (sadly, not on-line): “Like many French kids, when I first saw Serge Gainsbourg on television I found him funny. As a child I would just see […]
His Dark Materials: An interview with Craig Clevenger
A good writer is a good writer, and a good story is a good story. I can only speak for myself, about what drives me and how I find satisfaction in writing. It always comes back to raising the bar with each project. Taking personal risks and pushing my command of the prose. I want to be not only better with each book, but also a completely different writer. I’m reaching for a different style this time, as well. Something other than the rapid-fire staccato prose of the Contortionist’s Handbook or the florid, acid-fueled prose of Dermaphoria. I’m trying to keep the syntax much cleaner and more linear, and plotwise unfolding the events chronologically, as much as possible, instead of interlacing present narrative with backstory.
By Gregory Frye.