The Missing Links
On Paul Scheerbart‘s The Perpetual Motion Machine. * Stewart Home‘s 1995 Art Strike Bed. * Early fiction by Osama bin Laden. * Noam Chomsky’s reaction to bin Laden’s death. * Tony White‘s excellent “Auto-Destructive Arts Policy,” a Swiftian satire that uses the cut-up technique as a verbal barricade. More here. * The Futurist Manifesto. * […]
The Consolations of Derision
At a family gathering at his Lacoste villa, the aristocrat, killer and sadist David Melrose takes time out from the socialising to rape his five year old son, Patrick. Afterwards, he decides that ‘he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn’t boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of favourable reception.’ This line, taken out of context, looks like shock mining. In the flow of the novel it fits exactly.
Max Dunbar reviews Edward St Aubyn‘s At Last.