Gargantuan backlog . . .

I’m actually feeling pretty good about the new – low-fi – Scarecrow and have been wondering why I have taken so long to kick-start this into gear again. Anyway, there is a gargantuan backlog of fiction and poetry to be published (all those that I have promised to put up over the last year and a bit). So please accept this ditty as an apologia for the wait. I know for a fact that there is one author in New York who might be sending over the heavies if his story isn’t published sharpish (I think the guy has been waiting over a year, in fact I met him in the KGB Bar in the East Village May 2008 and he was asking about his story then!) – so, er, I’ll get to that pretty soon. I’ll also be re-publishing some of the past ‘highlights’ of the old, verbose Scarecrow of yesteryear. Hopefully this will be interesting.


Things are pretty boring right now. There’s the Hay Festival if you’re in to that sort of thing. There’s the Oxford debacle for a giggle. And that’s about it. Oh, 3AM Magazine is looking for an intern, and Tao Lin and Brandon Scott Gorrell seem to have kicked up a shitstorm or two (which is always good fun to read). And that, I’m afraid, is it.

Apart from Marjorie Perloff’s beguiling essay on Beckett

Here’s a snippet:

““Le Chemin de la Liberté” would have been on Beckett’s mind when he composed Godot in 1947-48. The previous six years—the years leading up to his most productive period—had been an elaborate war nightmare—a nightmare Beckett never wrote about directly, although allusions to it are, as we shall see, everywhere in the texts of the postwar decade. The word “war” itself appears nowhere in Godot or in those strange lyrical fictions of 1945-1946, which were published in Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien (Stories and Texts for Nothing, 1955)— L’Expulsé (“The Expelled”), Le Calmant (“The Calmative”), and La Fin (“The End “). But the very absence of the word has an odd way of insuring its prominence in these stories.”

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