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Terry Hall

Bittersweet snapshots of provincial life shrinkwrapped in what a later U.S. President would call “the urgency of now”. But offered up in the madcap, jaunty spirit of a Bank Holiday fairground ride, the wheels coming off but everyone just about clinging on in a blur of tonic suits and Fred Perrys. Teenage pregnancies, race relations, social collapse can rarely have sounded quite so danceable! And then of course there’s the haunting melancholy of ‘Ghost Town’, which somehow captured the mood of the times as wasteland Mardi Gras: Charles and Diana getting married with all the establishment pomp and ceremony, but in that other Britain, the one most people actually lived in, the real story was one charting a grim course from industrial decline to the utter soullessness of Thatcherism.

Stephen Hayward celebrates the life and work of Terry Hall.

Poem Brut #146 – Avant Garden

Thought Drawings and Vispos from this last year to consider:

A V Ant Garden
Symbolism in Poetryism
and Cities of Flood.

In the 146th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Helki Kallio.

S/Z

Scrambling back, over the rocks, I could just make out the asylum hanging cantilever over the adjacent peak. I had practically run out of money when I disembarked from the train at a little station in the Engadine Valley. A horse-semen thief whose address I had been assigned to expose had convinced me to make a trade instead: a hand-drawn map of the route from the little Bahnhof to the lunatic asylum nestled in the peaks above the valley where a certain psychotic journalist resided, in exchange for leaving the thief unmolested.

A short story by Ben Libman.

Profligacies of Scale

Thus, a nebula can be viewed simultaneously as a view of geomorphically plausible ridges, spires, and amphitheaters, reminiscent of something you once saw at Bryce Canyon National Park, and also as a gargantuan stellar nursery enveloping tens to hundreds of bright new stars and vast expanses of interstellar space. The former is familiar to human experience, allowing the imagination to grasp it directly. The latter is alien to human experience: the imagination is overwhelmed, but we can grasp its stupendous scale using our reason.

An essay by Tim Walker.

Me, Myself, and I: Autotruth and Autofiction in The Red Headed Pilgrim

Semantics aside, the rewards to the author of writing fiction that blurs the lines between their own life and that of their character is the tonal flexibility, the ability to dissect and interrogate their subject with a degree of penetration and precision afforded only to self-analysis. Maloney tears into Kevin in a manner that, were it not for the relationship established early on, would be so harsh as to distract from his book’s narrative progression. As it is, however, the method allows Maloney to frame the entire novel as answering the question of how in the hell he ended up where he is ‘now’, in a fictive present loosely corresponding to when this book was sold in real life.

D. W. White reviews Kevin Maloney‘s The Red Headed Pilgrim.

Richard O’Dreyfuss Steps Outside

A fiction in one sentence; a sentence that’s exactly the same sentence as its title; a sentence that states no more than, no less than “Richard O’Dreyfuss steps outside.”

A short story by Zachary Issenberg.

Poem Brut #145 – The Heart of England

The Heart of England was commenced in Quebec several years ago, and recently completed in Dungeness.
To create the erasure, I used scalpel blades to scrape away unwanted printed words.
The Heart of England collage on the back hardcover comprises accumulated torn pages from the remaining pages of the book.
I have also made several book length erasures, creating a long continuous text rather than single page erasure.

In the 145th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Daniel Lehan.

Minute 9

So begins the first dialogue in Gerry, a full nine minutes into the film, as the two Gerrys ditch the trail and instead head out into the desert itself. Which is to say, life itself. Maybe. Probably. The thing that awaits us all at the end of the trail, so to speak. A finality. No matter your attempts to put it off, to detour yourself, to meander and wander, you’ll still end up there, at the same final exit that one of the Gerrys ends up.

In a new series curated by Nicholas Rombes, writers give us their take on the ninth minute of a film of their choosing. Submissions now open.

London is Dead

A big and bold book, but essentially a quick read because of an excellent flow and pace. Fierce and shocking but also darkly comical. The Michael Keenaghan I have always known. There is a filmic quality at work here. Could easily be the next Gerard Johnson movie. London is Dead is the title, but this debut novel is alive and kicking.

By Joe England.

My Life as a Godard Movie (Extract)

I had waited so long for my moment to become beautiful
I watched out for it carefully but, if it came, I did not see it.
Now I know it has passed me by
But when I look back at old selfies
Maybe I was.
Beauty is never inhabited by the beautiful.

Read the Pierrot le fou chapter from Joanna Walsh‘s My Life as a Godard Movie.

Vibrant Absences

Admittedly, it is difficult to talk about short stories — the great ones are such an auspicious meeting of content and form that using any words other than the story’s is futile. Which means that, as we are unable to conjure it, the short story’s power to haunt us is untamed… which might feel unsatisfactory, unsettling even — we are used to feeling more control than this. But if there is something unknowable about the short story, maybe we can at least hypothesise about its potential; intuit something indefinite but undeniable that it must have — like a literary antimatter.

Tom Conaghan introduces Reverse Engineering II.

柴田 – Every Time I Think of You

By Oliver Court. Melt My Eyez, See Your Future has been in my ears for every step of my walks through the dead streets this week, back and forth from a brand new house that feels so empty, minus the cat. When I arrive, Mariposa asks me everything she wants to know. I do the same. I leave when we run out of questions for each other, so I make sure to always bring answers with me. Saturday night, right at the door, as I took out my earphones, she asked me what I’ve been listening to. I told her