The Modernist Uprising
As I lay bedridden, paranoiac, underwhelmed by the unprecedented idiosyncrasies of the new metropolis, precocious cultural modernism was being openly touted by effete students in caf és and paraded by bearded professors in bandanas. Just as I had completely lost the ability to speak or write or think of anything coherently, down in the working-class streets, the controversial theme of sexual deviance permeated a landscape largely being held together by wishful thinking: Tim Robbins was completely exonerated, Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević joined a rejuvenated Take That and the reconstruction of Will Self’s ego began in earnest. Mean American memes flourished alongside other kinds of permissiveness: silly symphonies, risible harmonies, gloopy yellow sound…
By HP Tinker.
The Missing Links
Patricia Highsmith (pictured), ‘cantankerous old cunt’ or too subversive to be pinned down? * Patrick Neate‘s Bookslam is bringing out an anthology. * Heavy metal was also first used to describe ugly guitars. The phrase, of course, originated with William S Burroughs in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, featuring Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal […]
Like Milk
if you want, I can switch
from left-handed
can re-learn writing, if you want
which may take some time, but —
what is left-handed to me, hmm? And writing
that way
and hair and sun and breathing, eh?
Do you want me to?
your feet pointing to 01:50
reclined, on the settee
I’m circling now, for time — (I love your walk.
And, for use-value, too, mine
in a non-fetishistic way)
By Richard Barrett.
Paying for the Lights of Bohemia
When is a book not a book, but a kind of cliff or precipice? Such questions are raised but never resolved, which is why Never Any End to Paris resembles an edge or an opening, not onto anything outside itself, but onto literature, a leap from a sheer drop, located within the book’s written limits. In this sense, the text may best be read as its own invention, with no prior knowledge of the life of its author. The true world the book opens onto is one where a writer called ‘Enrique Vila-Matas’ never existed. Let alone Hemingway. Let alone Paris.
David Winters reviews Enrique Vila-Matas‘ Never Any End to Paris.
Hat Tricks Out of a Dictionary
As an account of gang life, Down the Rabbit Hole (labelled a novel, but really a novella) is pretty sketchy compared to, say, Amexica, but the details are especially chilling because we know the narrator’s fingers hurt from playing on Playstation 3, he wants a pet Liberian pigmy hippopotamus and hides a miniature pistol under his samurai hat. Above all, language is everything here, language and the perception of things that people tend to lose with age. It is, indeed, fascinating to read Tochtli’s sentences and try to put yourself in his shoes: how did I first learn the definition of a third-world country? When did I find out that “you take cocaine with your nose and in secret, in the bathroom or inside a cupboard”? Chances are I was a bit older than Tochtli at the time.
Anna Aslanyan reviews Juan Pablo Villalobos‘ Down the Rabbit Hole.
For the Bane and the Enlightening
Fascism tends to rise in landscapes of poverty, but Britain in the 2000s seemed to defy that generalisation. The new millennium held the promise of self-actualisation, that people would be free to transcend the old poisons of nation and race that had got so many of us killed during the preceding hundred years. We had an economic boom, accelerated technology, redistribution of wealth, the potential of the world opening up before us — and yet the national psyche yearned for the old certainties of blood, soil, faith and flag.
Max Dunbar reviews Matthew J Goodwin’s‘s New British Fascism.