Do The Right Thing
‘You do only the right thing, the right thing and the right thing and the right thing, going back all the way.’ This is the parent of one of the polio victims. ‘You try to be a thoughtful person, a reasonable person, an accommodating person, and then this happens. Where is the sense in life?’ That’s the lament of the Swede – the assimilated hardworking American-Jewish male who fights for his country and takes over his dad’s glove factory only for his daughter to blow up his dreams along with the local post office. The lack of mortal karma is another big theme in Roth (also a big theme in life: as Morvern Callar’s dad says, most people work hard and end up with nothing) the anger of the good man who does everything correctly and still goes to the wall.
Max Dunbar reviews Philip Roth‘s Nemesis.
The Missing Links
Steve Finbow discusses Shuichi Yoshida‘s Villain & Japanese crime fiction on BBC World Service’s The Strand. * New literary gang around town, includes Ned Beauman & Evie Wyld. * Popular culture goes back to the Thirties. * Dancing on Hot Bricks, Virginia Woolf in 1941 [PDF] * Thomas Bernhard, the alienator. * “To read Bernhard […]
Fabulosa
Highlights in a book with pleasures, allure and surprise round every other line-break, ‘Polari’ is a celebration of the dying-out slang-language once widespread in London’s gay community and ‘Sunglasses’ is, self evidently, a poem in praise of those “mystique enhancers.” The Marc Almond CD is a treat too, including acoustic versions of treasured old numbers from the Soft Cell and solo catalogues, such as ‘Sleaze,’ ‘Fun City,’ ‘Twilights and Lowlifes,’ ‘Seedy Films’ and an alternate version of ‘Soho So Long,’ from Almond’s latest album, Variete. Heard acoustically, his Soho songs seem more desperate, wistful and weary, almost. But in the same breath there’s fascination and temptation, so that the CD feels like a fond adios and a nostalgic re-animation of a Soho that is disappearing.
Colin Herd reviews Jeremy Reed‘s Piccadilly Bongo.
Hair of the dog
“[Jim] Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way… He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning… His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as […]