Will Self meets my dad (also: a review of The Butt: “Any novel allowing itself to be billed as ‘an allegory of the liberal west in the post-9/11 era’ has agreed to shoulder a fair amount of weight. Is The Butt up to it? Hard to say”. There’s another review here). * An extract from Mark E Smith‘s forthcoming autobiography. * Will Ashon on novelists and the surveillance society. * Susan Tomaselli reviews Lee Rourke‘s Everyday: “Admittedly it is hardly original, yet this writer, by looking at the pavement and writing from the point-of-view of the pigeons, has crafted miniature masterpieces, made all the more captivating for his enduring fascination with repetition”. * Against reading. * Three new poems by 3:AM‘s Renaissance man Matthew Wascovich. * The 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics. * Wanna sell a manuscript you’ve never written and have no intention of writing? * Academics vs. bloggers: “Interestingly, the Oxford panel unanimously agreed that the Guardian Unlimited blogs, which try to navigate the narrow path between more traditional, expert journalism and everyman, opinionated blogging were singled out as a target for comments of unprecedented ‘vitriol’ and ‘abuse’. Is anyone who presents themselves as a specialist online simply liable to get shot down?” * Why novelists love the 70s and 80s: “Many of these new novels deal with the violence, radical political protest, economic malaise and sense of societal breakdown that defined large chunks of the 1970s and 1980s — trends which, Hensher suggests, are resurfacing in our own time. ‘The sense of historical pressure in 2008 has led many English novelists to return to pressures of a similar nature, 30 years ago…. For Callaghan read Gordon Brown; for the Red Brigades and the Rote Armee Fraktion read al-Qaida; for the violence acted out in punk read the audacious violence acted out in dancehall and hip hop.'” * In praise of the Moleskin notebook. * The perfect library. * Posters from May 68. * An interesting interview (in French) with author-cum-model (see picture below) Fr éd éric Beigbeder in which he describes novelists as ghostbusters. *
The enduring shock value of Pasolini‘s films. * Edgar Allan Poe inspires art project. * Badass Wombles. * Alain Pacadis documentary. * Joe Stretch: “Who the fuck is Steven Hall?”
