SPONGE!

Start Again . . .

2011-07-21T00:33:00.000-07:00

Hullo, I've decided to start blogging again. I have no idea why. To celebrate here's me reading from The Canal over at InDigest Magazine.

New Stuff . . .

2010-12-22T01:30:00.000-08:00

Hullo, I've not been on here for a while (for myriad reasons), but shortly I will be posting a whole wealth of new stuff. I've mainly been trying to finish my next novel 'Amber' (which should be done and dusted by the end of Jan). Other than that I've just been hanging around with my two cats and writing bits and bobs for newspapers.

So, like I just said, I'll be posting some new stuff on here pretty shortly. In the meantime watch this (check out the pylons at the beginning):

Brutal Myth . . .

2010-10-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

I hope this clears up a few things: it's not the symbolic beauty of the swan I find remotely interesting, it's the return of the image of the swan back to butal, violent myth that interests me:

Bookslut: Swans form an important piece of imagery in this novel. Can you talk about the role they play in your book?

Lee Rourke: Oh, I love swans so much. When I see a swan on the Regent’s canal in London it’s quite hard for me not to be affected by the stark juxtaposition of beauty and environment, I mean they are just brilliantly, beautiful creatures and I always want to say to them: what are you doing here? Why here? Of all the places for you to live your life, why the Regent’s canal?

But seriously, swans figure symbolically throughout the novel. I am interested in the myth of Leda and the Swan in its various interpretations (there is much Greek myth interwoven within the structure of The Canal, for instance and returning to your earlier question, if I was to give the woman in The Canal a name it would have to be Cassandra). Apart from the beauty of the swan and Leda’s naked form portrayed in the Hellenistic Reliefs, or da Vinci’s paintings, it is a rather brutal myth, and one that forewarns a major catastrophe (catastrophe is something that hangs above The Canal like a phantasm). Leda was Tyndareus’s wife, a Spartan king, although this was never enough. There was always the suspicion that Leda wanted to transcend this position. When Zeus, in the guise of a swan commits his despicable act upon Leda, she is yielded by him four eggs and is given god-like status. She gives birth to Castor, Polydeukes, Clytemnestra and most importantly Helen. An act of violence, not only rape, but fratricide (many Reliefs depict the siblings attacking each other), begets the bigger catastrophe: the act of genocide committed in the Trojan war. I am interested in Yeats’s reading of this myth in his poem "Leda and the Swan" -- it is a poem that underpins the whole of my writing of The Canal. Yeats’s poem can be read as a completion of image, taking in and re-processing the various iterations of this myth over many epochs. Yeats takes the image back to antiquity, back to the myth. In "Leda and the Swan" Yeats says: "A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead." Not only is he returning the image back to violence, but also back to myth -- where it belongs -- away from beauty and form.

I wanted to repeat this completion of image in my own iteration of Leda and the Swan as myth within The Canal. There is a sense of the unknown in The Canal, a sense that the actions inside the novel are a signal to an impending catastrophe. The woman is fully aware of this; she forewarns the man right at the beginning when they first meet. It takes the man right up until the dramatic conclusion to work out exactly what it is she means. Like Cassandra she is misunderstood, or more directly he refuses to believe what it is she is saying. Yet, there is always something to reveal. In messing around with this myth in The Canal I am hoping to reveal to the reader a mythical past that is our continual present.

[read more]

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Booker (not) . . .

2010-09-01T00:33:00.001-07:00

It's time for The Guardian's 'Not the Booker Prize' again and it looks like a few people have nominated The Canal. I can't thank people enough for this. I'll be interesting to see who makes it on to the short list.

"This year, the fun of complaining about the Man Booker prize has been rather spoiled by the fact that the judging panel appears to have compiled a pretty strong longlist. Disappointingly, nearly all the books appear to be interesting – and at least two on the list – The Slap and Room – are even proving excitingly divisive and controversial.

The talk hasn't been so much about dull worthiness and yet more Irish dolour and north London angst as about abuse, tangled race issues and outrage. Oh, yes – and pleasure that some fine authors are getting recognition. As ever, there's been plenty of comment about notable omissions – but this year, most of it has related to Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, and few are claiming that the current novels from the web's favourite whipping boys have suffered an injustice."

My money is on 'Even The Dogs' by Jon McGregor.

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Logical Positivism . . .

2010-08-31T03:49:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across Ned Beauman’s (author of the highly entertaining Boxer, Beetle) musings on Heidegger’s Being and Time the other day. Although his approach/reading stems from a rather conservative, logical and staid comfort zone I still found it interesting in its honesty and I’ve always admired people who can form an opinion with conviction and vim. But, it’s still the same old logical positivist’s argument, something I’ve often found to be quite stationary. I like things – including nothing – to be a little bit more malleable, you know.

But that’s by the by, and down to personal opinion. No, the thing that rankled - which is nothing to do with Ned Beauman himself - is this:

“1. I've always disliked Beckett. Then someone told me that to understand Beckett, you have to read Being and Time. So I read Being and Time. Then I read some more Beckett. I still dislike Beckett. But I'm glad I read Being and Time. (There is no primary evidence, by the way, that Beckett himself had any interest in Heidegger.)”

I beg your pardon? Did I read that correctly? I know reading him requires a certain mode of patience but if you really want to understand Samuel Beckett then read, read, read Dante Alighieri. Forget Heidegger immediately. Everything you need to know about Samuel Beckett is right there in The Divine Comedy.

I thought everyone knew that?

Update: Actually, if anyone is interested, some of the best writing on Beckett can be found in Simon Critchley's 'Very Little . . . Almost Nothing'.

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Ann Quin . . .

2010-08-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

The Independent have published my 'Book of a Lifetime' - it's Ann Quin's 'Berg', which if you haven't read, I suggest you give a try. It's simply wonderful. It's also a peek at what the British novel could have been.

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Rising Star . . .

2010-08-05T00:14:00.001-07:00

My novel The Canal has been included, alongside eleven other debut novels, in Amazon UK's 'Rising Stars - Best New Literary Fiction' list for 2010. What this means is a big promotion push from Amazon UK and the chance for The Canal to be voted the overall winner in October. The voting process is all rather simple: the debut with the highest amout of customer reviews wins. I am up against three very strong title so I am asking anybody who reads this, or who has read The Canal to kindly leave a review HERE. It only has to be a couple of sentences if you are pushed for time. I truly appreciate those of you who already have and I cannot thank you enough for helping to spread the word.

It seems things have started well, so I guess it's all about keeping it up. My publisher Melville House are currently running competitions on Twitter (you can win signed copies of The Canal, et cetera) - please do follow them.

So, please remember to leave a review HERE.

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Author Events . . .

2010-07-07T14:52:00.001-07:00

As I type this we are just eight days away from the *UK launch* of The Canal. Below is a list of my readings and events for July & August:

July 12th:

To Hell with the Lighthouse, featuring authors Adam Marek, John Niven and Lee Rourke (free, from 7.30pm at Peter Parker's Rock 'n' Roll Club, Denmark Street WC2H 8LP).

July 14th:

Literary Death Match London is thrilled to make its Concrete debut with an '80s-themed night of literary mayhem celebrating the launch of Bret Easton Ellis' Imperial Bedrooms (think Less than Zero 25 years later). The seventh London LDM will feature readers Nikesh Shukla, poetess Clare Pollard (representing Bloodaxe Books), novelist Lee Rourke (The Canal), and Milly McMahon.

July 15th:

*Official UK publication date* for The Canal. Available in all good bookshops and online stores.

July 20th:

Launch Party for The Canal, 6.30PM, To Hell with Books, 10 Woburn Walk, London, WC1H 0JL. Q&A with author & literary critic Stuart Evers. Free drinks.

July 21st:

Reading from The Canal at The Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1, Brampton Park Road, Wood Green, London, N22 6BG.

August 3rd:

Reading from The Canal at Broadway Books, 6 Broadway Market, Hackney, London, E8 4QJ.

More events to be announced . . .

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The Canal . . .

2010-07-01T03:45:00.001-07:00

The Canal is now published in the US and available from all good bookstores and the usual online booksites such as Book Depository, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Powell’s, et cetera . . . You can also cut out the middle-man and order it direct from Melville House, if you so desire.

It’s a great feeling. I have just arrived back from a mini book tour of the US and we had a wonderful time hanging around Brooklyn and meeting everyone at my publishers Melville House. I’d like to thank everyone who came to my launch and readings – I really, truly appreciate it.

So far things look good. The Canal seems to be selling and it has been quite well received (there are further reviews about to be published). There were a couple of sarcastic reviews on Goodreads.com – but that is to be expected. I’m fine about that.

I am now gearing up for the UK launch of The Canal. The official publication date is 15th July and my launch will be on Tuesday 20th July (6.30PM) at the wondrous To Hell With Publishing Bookshop in London. I will post more details about this and a busy reading schedule in the coming days.

If you are a US reader reading this and you have finished reading your copy of The Canal then please tell your friends about it . . . and if you feel inclined, I would especially be grateful for a quick review on Amazon.com – there are a few on there already, but some more would, of course, be great.

Expect lots more here soon! In the meantime check out my interview with Catherine Lacey over at the excellent HTMLGIANT.

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Vapour Trails . . .

2010-04-19T04:46:00.000-07:00

I am currently missing the planes above London. I always watch the planes at they make their way to Heathrow, or climb into the sky from City Airport. The sky is oddly quiet without them. And I miss the vapour trails, those vapour trails we all deplore, yet still they are so beautiful up there, cutting accross the sky.

Anyway, that's enough of that; here are some things I have been up to of late:

1/ The Canal is now at the printers all set for the US launch in June. I think I will receive my copies in May (that's if there's no more volcanic and geothermal activity).

2/ Writing my Fables book.

3/ Sitting in the garden drinking wine.

4/ Cooking lots of good food.

5/ Burning my face.

6/ Reading lots of Jon McGregor (I'm a late-comer to his work - he's very good!).

7/ Fostered an addiction to Ricola.

8/ Re-reading Kafka (shorter fictions/Diary and letters).

9/ Re-reading Blanchot (his writing on Kafka).

10/ Reading Plato.

11/ Wondering if I should buy some new clothes.

12/ Going to the British Library a lot.

And I reckon that's about it. as you can see, I don't lead an exciting life, buy hey! Once the fables book is written (I have a deadline for the 25th May), things should start to hot up on here again in preparation for the launch of The Canal.

Roubaud Interviewed . . .

2010-04-04T16:25:00.000-07:00

Below is a great interview with one of my favourite writers, Jacques Roubaud:

"Not many writers write from both the right and left brains, but Jacques Roubaud bridges that chasm much like an expert martial artist—in a way that makes it seem simple. Or not. Roubaud is an encompassing author. He writes through a full spectrum of the “simple” (i.e. his poetry for children) to mind-bogglingly dense pieces underpinned by mathematical concepts incomprehensible to many left-brained creative folks. After all, the title for his first book was a mathematical symbol—graphic and discrete, yet to explain what it means would take more words than I have been allotted.

Then there’s his life. Child of French Resistance parents. Member of Oulipo, short for the Ouvroir de Litterature Poténtialle, commonly translated as “Workshop for Potential Literature.” Inventor of the “clandestine hunger strike” during his tour of duty in Algiers and translator of Lewis Carroll. University professor of mathematics, but not “a very important one,” as he says, “I didn’t want power!” Survivor of tragedy—World War II, the early death of his wife. Writer through prodigious memory, therefore inevitably grappling with Proust, with whom one senses Roubaud has a wary relationship. But Roubaud himself is now a revered figure in French literature—a postwar writer who, thanks to the ongoing invention of “constraints” demanded by Oulipo, always seems cutting edge, as evinced by some of his books available in English: Hortense in Exile; Hortense Is Abducted; Some Thing Black; The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart; The Great Fire of London: A Story With Interpolations and Bifurcations; and, most recently, The Loop.

Either Roubaud allows the wiring and the plumbing to show, or draws over it a perfect veneer of simplicity. Strangely, sometimes jarringly, his language can veer toward the winsome, a light joke, silliness, croissants, figs, even while he struggles with an engulfing darkness, delivering a stream of words to explode grief, to versify death. He approaches the past with a multitude of linguistic and formal tools, and while he told me that he wrote to destroy memory, I didn’t sense any kind of satisfaction, or resolution. Instead, he seemed to grieve the loss of these memories even as he, like Jean Tinguely, set in motion the destruction of his own creation. How and to where do you move forward, I wanted to know, once you’ve gotten rid of your memories? Whither to?"

[read full interview with Jacques Roubaud here]

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New Josipovici . . .

2010-04-04T15:53:00.001-07:00

News of some new Josipovici via This Space . . .

"The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing — a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.

Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism.

With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but contemporary culture itself." [Yale University Press]

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Gabriel Josipovici . . .

2010-03-23T01:38:00.000-07:00

Novelist and literary critic Jeff Bursey has reviewed Gabriel Josipovici's 'After & Making Mistakes' over at The Quarterly Conversation.

'Like Beckett’s plays, Gabriel Josipovici’s works fend off resolution; also, his texts have more white space than is found in most novels (mainstream or not), and there’s a great use of dialogue. Great, as in its great compactness, naturalness, and poetry—but also as in a lot. There are few narrative passages in the recent novels Goldberg: Variations (2002) and Everything Passes (2006). The space around the words emphasizes that each line counts, and allows each line to breathe on its own. They have, so to say, sentience. The lulls and repetitions of Josipovici’s prose give readers the opportunity to see how his characters come across while they think, feel, talk, repress, obfuscate, and go about their business.'

[read more]

Here's my review of the same book for the Independent.

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Interviews(1)

2010-03-22T03:23:00.000-07:00

Non-Working Doing Its Work: An Interview With Hendrik Wittkopf & Lee Rourke

By Andrew Gallix.

3:AM: How did the collaboration come about?

Hendrik Wittkopf: We engaged during discussions of Lee’s first novel, and he published some of my paintings in his online journal Scarecrow. We just connected through words and images.

Lee Rourke: I first saw some of Hendrik’s paintings at an exhibition some time ago and was immediately struck by their layers of intensity. I visited his studio to look at more of his work and when we began talking about art and literature we seemed to share the same ideas. I tackle the writing process in the same way Hendrik approaches his paintings. So, it just kind of made sense to do something together.

3:AM: What inspiration did you draw from Beckett’s essay, “Les Peintres de l’empêchement”?

HW: Beckett’s way of writing is very close to what I think, and reading him it feels as if he was painting himself. Most of my inspiration from Beckett dates back some time ago. When I was young, I read his texts as if they were the very translation of what I did with my painting, only stretched out over pages, whilst I stuck all of it on different layers, vertically, a frame, a still. I am not interested in creating something meaningful, but in confronting the perpetuity of creating ’something’ within a framework of constant change. Trying to do this within a two-dimensional playground of colours gives me immeasurable pleasure and immeasurable pain.

LR: Beckett points us towards rapprochement, or the struggle of bringing the objects of our consciousness together. Contained in this struggle is the concern of ‘empêchement,’ where the object becomes invisible and unrepresentable because objects are what they are. Beckett’s essay merely illustrates to us the thin veil of transparency that separates our practice: a shared struggle to represent the objects of our consciousness. Although, I don’t wish to wrap our art in theory to such an extent that it removes the viewer from the thing itself. The philosopher Simon Critchley (who has written some of the best stuff on Beckett today) calls this thingness art’s ‘truth.’ I guess – and I feel Hendrik feels the same way – we want to avoid what Critchley calls a ‘Philosofugal’ situation, where theory ’spins out’ from within to cover art, or smother art’s truth. I think we are attempting an outwards, ‘artopetal’ state where any ‘theory is drawn into the orbit of the thing’ because our show is what it is and nothing besides. All this is contradictory, of course, but it is what interests us right now. I think we are just trying to show the unrepresentableness of things.

3:AM: Is the title, non-working, a reference to the gap between word and image that you wish to explore?

HW: The title links Lee’s and my work, literature and painting. I like to think of literature and painting as something that continuously changes its frame of reference; non-working as outside/beyond such a frame of reference to what we like to see as a meaningful work; non-working asks what is meaningful work; non-working presents the continuous dialogue we engage with, as in “it works, it doesn’t work, it works, it doesn’t work…”; non-working as the inevitable failure of this show; and to make it five, non-working as something we thoroughly enjoy and still pursue with gusto.

LR: We are both quite obsessed with stripping down our work, peeling off layers in the process of editing (in my case) and painting. Doing the work that makes art look like it has taken no work to produce. As Bram van Velde so precisely pointed out: “You have to let non-working do its work.”

3:AM: How did the collaboration work, or rather not-work?

HW: We had extensive discussions about how we could position our work next to each other, and the parameters shifted numerous times. What we came up with might change again between now and the opening. I see this as an ongoing project, which is open-ended, and we plan to take this show to other places next year, to engage with a different setting and different audiences.

LR: I suppose it’s difficult to ask viewers to engage with text in a gallery scenario, especially when exhibited next to paintings. So, naturally, I enjoy that confrontation. I have kept the text minimal; layered images, based on a theme of transparency, polymerisation and fossilisation (amber, and copal fissures are the ideal image for me in these texts). They are taken from a larger collection of poems I have recently completed called Succinosis which will be published at some point towards the end of next year. My writing reveals no connection with Hendrik’s art other than our shared philosophical practice. It will be interesting to see if people can make this connection just by looking at our work side by side.

3:AM: Tom McCarthy claims that the art world is far more interested in literature than the publishing world, which is largely in the hands of the money men and marketing departments. Do you agree with this?

HW: The art world might have slightly closer links with public funding and non-profit organizations, and a lot of great stuff is driven by curators who are critical towards their own institution and position within the market. That doesn’t mean that capital doesn’t determine the production, distribution and consumption of art. And the commodification of a painting and of a book is comparable, and it proves equally damaging for the artists themselves. Visual artists who do engage with the place and the politics around their work will always challenge these parameters, and per definition their work is incompatible with the idea of art as a commodity: the moment your work becomes a commodity it becomes less meaningful, the moment it is musealized it turns against itself. I am part of the New International School, where this is addressed. This is still the serious struggle of many great artists, who mostly resent the way their work becomes fodder for mass entertainment the moment it finds a wider audience.

LR: Well, Tom is absolutely right. I always remember a very prominent editor from a large publishing house who requested to meet myself, Heidi James, Ben Myers, Adelle Stripe and a few other emerging writers in a pub in Clerkenwell. All we wanted to do was discuss literature, philosophy and art’s meaning; why we are writers, who makes us tick, et cetera. We wanted to talk about the things that mattered to us, to pass on a sense of why we all do what we do . . . all the editor wanted to do was snort lines of coke and get wasted with the ‘writers’ . . . It was all very sad.

[original source: 3:AM Magazine, Thursday, November 19th, 2009]

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Melville Award . . .

2010-03-12T02:15:00.000-08:00

Melville House’s The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, has won the Best Translated Book Award for Fiction, while the Ugly Duckling Presse book The Russian Version by Elena Fanailova, has won the award for poetry. Hareven’s book was translated from the Hebrew byDalya Bilu, and The Russian Version was translated by Stephanie Sandler and Genya Turovskaya.

The award was announced Wednesday night at the Idlewild Bookstore in New York City. The prize is administered by the University of Rochester’s Three Percent, an organization that promotes international literature. The award is, as Three Percent noted in its press release, “the only prize of its kind to honor the best original works of international literature and poetry published in the U.S. over the past year.”

“We’re delighted to receive this award on behalf of the author, Gail Hareven,” said Melville House co-publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, “as it represents what we see as part of our mission at Melville House: Not to publish both fiction and nonfiction in translation just for the sake of essentially preserving it, as if it were something on the verge of going extinct. That strikes us as a way of further ensuring its obscurity. Rather, we see it as our mission to trumpet that work loudly, and to work aggressively to get that work in the hands of as many people as possible, especially those who would not normally encounter translated literature.”

Ugly Duckling’s Matvei Yankelevich said, “It’s a great honor to receive this award — it’s a wonderful public recognition of Genya and Stephanie’s courage in taking on the imposing task (so often deemed ‘impossible’) of translating a great poet. We should all be grateful to the judges who gave of their time and to the people at Three Percent (and other organizations involved) for shining a little light on literary translation, if only once a year.”

The fiction judges were Monica Carter, Scott Esposito, Susan Harris, Annie Janusch, Brandon Kennedy, Bill Marx, Michael Orthofer, Chad W. Post and Jeff Waxman. Poetry judges were Brandon Holmquest, Jennifer Kronovet, Idra Novey, Kevin Prufer, and Matthew Zapruder.

[Read More]

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In Print(11) . . .

2010-03-01T00:41:00.000-08:00

What goes into a great translation?

Recently Michael Hofmann's new translation of Franz Kafka's entire oeuvre landed on my doormat. I love reading Kafka; I always have done, even as a teenager when I didn't understand him. Just the sheer slog of it, the energy it consumes within, the time taken to devour each word. And in all this time, never once have I thought about the translation I have been reading. Never. Until now.

The difference is noticeable from the very first line, so immediate are Hofmann's translations. For instance, and to use Kafka's most famous opening sentence, here's Hofmann's offering:

"When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed."

Compare this to any previous translation, and you'll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended.

It is the word "cockroach" that tickles me the most. At first it seems incongruous (as pointed out in Nicholas Lezard's recent Guardian review). But it is clever. In the original Prague-German, Kafka uses the word "ungeziefer" which literally translates as "vermin". Kafka wanted to denote the marginalised, detested individual. Hofmann could have used the word "vermin" but, though still denoting something to be looked down upon, it would have taken us away from the crucial image of the insect (although it is interesting to note that when Kafka contemplated his story being illustrated he envisaged a picture of a man lying in the bed and not an insect). So Hofmann uses the word "cockroach", the duality of which is unmissable. A brilliant stroke

These new efforts from Hofmann are heartening. His translation is less literary, less prosaic, and less ... English. It is without style, form, finesse, or melody. It is, most importantly, Kafkaesque. In his introduction, Hofmann argues that "Kafka offers very little to the translator, there is no 'voice', no diction, no 'style'." It is hard to disagree.

This aspect of Kafka's writing fascinates me and, it seems, Hofmann too. He has cut through literary pretension to seek out the heart of Kafka's work - the very "particles" of his writing, as they have been called. His translation shows Kafka as a modern writer whose work was beyond that of anything written at that time. It's why we re-read him today, and will continue to re-read him tomorrow.

So if Hofmann can do it, and do it so well, why do so many translators these days ruin contemporary work? Stifling the writers' intentions with their egos or, as with recent Michel Houellebecq translations, expending no effort at all? How long did it take to translate La Possibilité d'une Île? Six weeks? Surely not. Can we honestly take a translation seriously when a title as mouth-wateringly brilliant as Extension du Domaine de la Lutte is translated as the ludicrous Whatever? I can't. What is it, then, that Hofmann knows and the others don't? What makes a great translation these days? I think I already know.

[original source: The Guardian, Thursday 7 June 2007]

In Print(10) . . .

2010-02-25T04:52:00.000-08:00

Who cares about Ann Quin?

"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . ."

For me this is the greatest opening first line of any novel I have ever read. It is from Berg by Ann Quin: a debut novel so staggeringly superior to most you'll never forget it - and by one of our greatest ever novelists too. The thing is, though, no one ever seems to have heard of her. It is something that has rankled within me for a long time now: why, I demand to know, does nobody care about Ann Quin?

Quin was born in 1936 in Brighton, one of our more interesting seaside towns (she died there too in 1973: swimming out to sea one morning by Brighton Pier never to return to our shores again). Four books were published in her lifetime: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969), and finally Tripticks (1972). Berg is her most famous (and possibly my favourite). It is a paean to the Nouveau Roman of writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, eschewing the literary trends of her day: those angry, realist campus yawns that put the British working-class voice on the literary map. Ann Quin's was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and - dare I say it - ultimately European. It looked beyond the constructs of our society. It was fresh, alarming, and idiosyncratic. It wasn't static; it moved with the times.

It was Calder Books who first published Quin, immediately grouping her with Beckett, Sarraute, Duras, Pinget, Burroughs, Trocchi et al. It won her two fellowships, including the DH Lawrence fellowship, which took her to the US for a year. It's hard to believe now how avant-garde these Calder Books writers were, so engrained are most of them now in literary culture and history today. Ann Quin was up there with them then - just as she should be today.

Which begs the question: why is Ann Quin not published here in the UK? Why is she barely read over here anymore? Why did it take Dalkey Archive Press in Illinois, USA to bring her back to us? Where is the literary biography of Ann Quin? What is it about her we just don't get? BS Johnson, for example, doesn't suffer this contemporary obscurity (interesting to note both writers were of the same epoch; similar in literary and experimental outlook; both choosing to end it all in the same year)? Is it a gender thing?

The news, to be fair, isn't all that bad. Writers such as Kathy Acker and Stewart Home have openly referenced/alluded to Ann Quin in their own work, and if you take time to surf the myriad literary blogs and sites, such as Mark Thwaite's RSB, you'll begin to see that Ann Quin crops up time and time again. But is anyone actually reading her?

Berg is a beautiful novel: it is dark, esoteric, haunting - sometimes disturbing. It is saturated with detail, particulars and minutiae. A novel of voices and voice. The best novel ever set in Brighton in my opinion - forget Patrick Hamilton (as splendid as he is), Ann Quin's Berg is the real deal. It cuts through the superfluous like acid and marvels in the seamier mystery all our seaside towns, and especially Brighton, keep hidden. For an insight into what British literary fiction could have been if we'd only have listened, I'd start with Berg by Ann Quin every time.

[original source: The Guardian, Tuesday 8 May 2007]

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Influential Novelists . . .

2010-02-19T03:45:00.000-08:00

I was thinking the other day about which contemporary, living novelists have influenced my own writing the most. I have compiled the below list, each of these novelists has inspired me greatly, and I hugely admire their writing and artistic practice.

1. Jean-Philippe Toussaint
2. Tom McCarthy
3. Stewart Home
4. Tao Lin
5. Gwendoline Riley
6. Gabriel Josipovici
7. Lydie Salvayre
8. Dumitru Tsepeneag
9. HP Tinker
10. Niven Govinden
11. Tony O'Neill
12. Ben Myers
13. Noah Cicero

I think what I admire in each of the above is their steadfast individuality and approach to their work. All their work stands out alone as original and completely relevant. If you haven't read any of the above I would suggest you do so.

I reckon a future influential novelist will be Steve Finbow. Just finished his debut novel Balzac of the Badlands and I can't wait to read more of his work.

*

INS Manifesto . . .

2010-02-18T05:02:00.000-08:00

I re-read the first INS manifesto today. It’s possibly one of the most thought-provoking and utterly maddening manifestos I’ve ever read. It serves as a vehicle that delivers us to our own everyday impossibility: that of defeating gravity.

Here is the manifesto:

We, the First Committee of the International Necronautical Society, declare the following:-

1.That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.

2. That there is no beauty without death, its immanence. We shall sing death's beauty - that is, beauty.

3. That we shall take it upon us, as our task, to bring death out into the world. We will chart all its forms and media: in literature and art, where it is most apparent; also in science and culture, where it lurks submerged but no less potent for the obfuscation. We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies - by radio, the internet and all sites where its processes and avatars are active. In the quotidian, to no smaller a degree, death moves: in traffic accidents both realised and narrowly avoided; in hearses and undertakers' shops, in florists' wreaths, in butchers' fridges and in dustbins of decaying produce. Death moves in our appartments, through our television screens, the wires and plumbing in our walls, our dreams. Our very bodies are no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably towards death. We are all necronauts, always, already.

4. Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft* that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. With famine, war, disease and asteroid impact threatening to greatly speed up the universal passage towards oblivion, mankind's sole chance of survival lies in its ability, as yet unsynthesised, to die in new, imaginative ways. Let us deliver ourselves over utterly to death, not in desperation but rigorously, creatively, eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.

* This term must be understood in the most versatile way possible. It could designate a set of practices, such as the usurpation of identities and personas of dead people, the development of specially adapted genetic or semantic codes based on the meticulous gathering of data pertaining to certain and specific deaths, the rehabilitation of sacrifice as an accepted social ritual, the perfection, patenting and eventual widespread distribution of ThanadrineTM, or, indeed, the building of an actual craft - all of the above being projects currently before the First Committee.

*

Islington Tunnel . . .

2010-02-18T01:43:00.000-08:00

The Canal, a novel by Lee Rourke.

In Print(9) . . .

2010-02-18T00:31:00.000-08:00

After & Making Mistakes, By Gabriel Josipovici

In his 2007 lecture "What ever happened to Modernism?", Gabriel Josipovici argued "the trouble with novels is that the only meaning they can have is that conferred on them by their authors". He added, "but what authority do they have to confer meaning? None, is the answer." He has been addressing this largely ignored Achilles' heel in a career that spans over 30 works of fiction, theatre and critical theory, in which he repeatedly calls for this "bad faith" of the novel to be acknowledged by authors and critics.

Josipovici's two new novellas, published in one beautifully produced book, are fine examples of a mode of fiction that does away with the "bad faith" of "meaning". They are written in the fragmented, action/dialogue-led style he has made his own, though applied this time with a lighter, semi-comic brio. This is a dialogue of action savvy enough to reveal that even a narrative of fragmentation retains its centre. In this case, it's an unnerving quiet despair, meaninglessness and charming politeness that is unmistakably British.

After is a fiction of conversations. Alan, an academic writing a book about François Rabelais, is rattled by the appearance of an ex-lover, Claude, whom he hasn't seen for over 15 years. Claude, who insists on calling him "Alain", is desperate to discuss a pivotal moment from their past, a car accident, that somehow marked the end of their relationship. This shared trauma is explored through the architecture of memory and repetition, where outcomes of the same event blur into a miasma of vacillation. The repetition of pithy exchanges between Claude and Alan/Alain, where the car crash is relived in a series of flirtatious provocations, wheel throughout the narrative as a reminder that it is fiction's possibilities at play and not any concrete actuality. This is a work of fiction after all. Yet the remarkable thing is that meaning is somehow created out of nothing. This lightness of touch, where each fragment of memory seeks its own alternative explanation, begins to show us the psychological complications of each character.

Continuing this lighter touch, Making Mistakes manages to make infidelity and separation strangely amusing through a series of polite and comic tête-à-têtes, mostly about relationships. An insouciant re-working of Mozart's opera Così fan Tutte, the novella centres on a group of middle-aged intellectuals. Charlie is cheating on his partner Bea, whose sister Dorothy is married to Tony, who in turn leaves his fiercely intellectual wife for his plain and "boring" secretary.
While Bea and Charlie project themselves as the classic "open" couple, Dorothy and Tony project a more outwardly harmonious union. The spanner is thrown into the works when Alfonso, a guest at Dorothy and Tony's dinner party, reminds everyone of a "little experiment" while they were all at university 15 years ago. It appears that Alfonso had orchestrated them to swap partners temporarily.

What follows is a comedy of decisions and accidental meetings, relayed in snappy, amusing dialogue which gradually unfolds into a parable for modern living. In both novellas, Josipovici has created a modern fiction that "feels caught between the pointlessness of mere surface and the pointlessness of mere depth", creating a space of endless discovery.

[original source: The Independent, Friday, 16 October 2009]

*

In Print(8) . . .

2010-02-11T01:08:00.000-08:00

Running Away, By Jean-Philippe Toussaint (translated Matthew B Smith)

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, a recent Prix Decembre recipient in France, has carved out a niche in pared down, slapstick literary fiction, within which a serious philosophical undertone lurks. In Running Away – the second in Toussaint's "Maria" series to be translated into English – much of the humour has been discarded to reveal a dark novel about relationships, distance and misunderstandings. Running Away begins with an unnamed narrator travelling to China for a mix of business and pleasure, a "sort of mission" or a "pleasure junket". The narrative hangs on an errand he has to run for his girlfriend, Maria.

The errand is something to do with $25,000 in cash and a man called Zhang Xiangzhi in Shanghai. Zhang is a business associate of Maria's, although it is not revealed why, or how. At an exhibition the narrator meets a Chinese woman, Li Qi, and agrees to travel to Beijing with her. A strange ménage à trois is completed when Zhang offers to travel with them. It soon becomes apparent that Zhang and Li Qi are acquaintances, either lovers or business partners (he isn't quite sure).

A novel of dizzying movement ensues. Ostensibly set in the summer, much of this takes place at night, where everyone seems to be in a state of "perpetual jetlag". Characters are constantly travelling from one person and place to another, or just about to set off to yet another destination. There is a constant blurring of perspective and reality is always shifting as if through the lens of a rotating prism.

There is only one real moment of clarity and stasis, on the night train to Beijing, where the narrator and Li Qi lock themselves in the cramped confines of a bathroom and kiss passionately. It is at this precise moment the narrator receives a call from Maria announcing the death of her father and again, only this time with a dramatic weight, the narrative slides further into an alternate dimension with the voice on the phone, "thousands of kilometres away... despite the expanse of night". Again, things move on.

The narrator cuts the trip short to travel to Elba for her father's funeral (which he doesn't attend). He begins to feel terrible guilt, believing himself the "person responsible for her suffering". This is Toussaint's darkest novel yet, one in which everything seems to be heading towards the blackest night imaginable. Yet even this looming presence of death is made to feel somehow exhilarating. It is further testament to Toussaint's standing as a master craftsman of the contemporary novel that he can give such shifting insouciance its weight.

[original source: The Independent, Friday, 4 December 2009]

*

Canal Art . . .

2010-02-10T15:38:00.000-08:00

The Canal, a novel by Lee Rourke.

In Print(7) . . .

2010-02-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

After The Fire, A Still Small Voice, By Evie Wyld

As in all catastrophe, war creates its own aftermath. It leaves in its wake all manner of human detritus – physical or emotional – alone to cope with its horrors in silence. Evie Wyld's debut novel attempts to decipher the trauma of war. Unfolding in eastern Australia, within an unrelenting landscape, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice tells the stories of fathers and sons learning to cope with the realities of wars they do not understand.

Following a miserable relationship, Frank moves to his grandparents' old shack by the sea. He tries to fit in with the local community, living off the land, drinking heavily and trying to make sense of his shattered life. Leon, the son of European immigrants, witnesses the breakdown of his family after his father returns from the Korean war a changed man, before finding himself conscripted as a machine-gunner in Vietnam – leaving him with no other alternative but to escape.

Landscape plays a major role in Wyld's writing. It opens up the narrative, creating an eerie metaphorical space, or silence, between each character, mirroring the physical and mental fissures that separate each generation. Although nothing is truly silent: even the landscape is "thick with insect noise". The power of this mesmerising novel hangs on the premise that silence is impossible, while such impossibility forces the men who litter its landscape to desire it all the more.

Frank seeks a silence his father and grandfather could never attain. Leon, like his own father, is seeking the same but, like the echo of a machine-gun, each reverberation hangs too heavily to ignore. Both are suspended in a present that doesn't belong to them. Within this space there is nothing to do other than look back at the catastrophes that have shaped their lives.

Wyld's writing is assured enough to elongate metaphor and symbolism, creating a novel both taut and otherworldly. This adroit examination of loss, lostness and trauma is the beginning of great things.

[original source: The Independent, Wednesday, 23 September 2009]

*

The Canal . . .

2010-02-04T11:10:00.001-08:00

This is the cover for The Canal (a novel by Lee Rourke) published in the US on the 15th June and in the UK on 15th July.

The cover may differ from the published cover i.e., new blurbs and quotes et cetera.

The Canal is ready to pre-order here and here.

Journalists wanting to write about The Canal please contact Megan Halpern [megan at mhpbooks.com] at Melville House.

Book reviewers please email me [ljrourke9 at hotmail.com] and I will put you on the review copy list.

Also, you can follow The Canal's progress at Random House's 'author spotlight' - sign up here.

There will be more details to follow.

McCarthy on . . .

2010-02-04T03:12:00.000-08:00

There is a very good essay on Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the latest LRB.

"For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint."

As Andrew Gallix rightly pointed out, Tom's essay pretty much reads like a personal manifesto.

[read more]

*

Shane Jones . . .

2010-02-02T00:37:00.000-08:00

There's a very nice interview with author Shane Jones right here. Light Boxes is one of the most original works of contemporary fiction I've read in recent years. It's quite astonishingly good.

He also has a new novel - The Failure Six - out soon on Fugue State Press that I cannot wait to read.

"This sick little fairy tale took me to a world without speech, a world of recycled bureaucracy, a place of tests and windows, foxes and leashes, men with green beards, extended onomatopoeia, geometric shapes everywhere, and certain execution. The thing is, Jones does all of this unassumingly. His writing is unadorned but somehow still poetic. This is a story about failure, but not just failing once. No, that would be too easy. These characters fail again and again, each time worse than the one before, each time more wary of punishment. I left this book feeling destitute, and that was ok by me. Shane's gotten a lot of press lately because of the well-deserved love of his first book, Light Boxes, but people, don't forget about this one! Love this one too! Shane makes me smile. Lily Hoang, Big Other

In The Failure Six, a group of messengers, who work for a vast bureaucracy, all struggle with the same task - to retell the life story of a woman named Foe who seems to have lost her memory. The irrepressible emotions of the messengers - and Foe's clear need to be left alone in her amnesia - make for a strange, unaccountable, untellable story.

In this town, speech is accomplished through stacks of paper so tall they touch the sky...the floors of a teahouse are built in seconds...and a mysterious character named DH threatens the town with bombs and his "Deliverer" who wields the world's most expensive revolvers. The Failure Six is a mystery grounded in Kafka, Gogol, and human dreams."

*

In Print(6) . . .

2010-02-01T15:54:00.000-08:00

Noir, by Olivier Pauvert

Noir, Olivier Pauvert’s debut novel, is an examination of crippling paranoia within a future France, governed by a democratically elected fascist National Party and where a daylight curfew forces nonwhites to live in near seclusion. It is a cheerless vision, explored with great vim, that grows brutal at an alarming rate.

The dystopian thriller is narrated by an unnamed white man, who discovers the mutilated body of a young woman hanging from a tree. He is arrested for the crime and thrown into the back of a police van, but en route to a location out of town, the van crashes and the narrator finds himself the sole survivor. Panic-stricken, he wanders the streets of Paris trying to piece together what happened, soon realizing, with a “piercing sense of déjà vu,” that he has been transported twelve years into the future. The novel then follows a trajectory of malevolent discovery: The narrator has no reflection, his body has morphed into that of another person, and he can kill others with his maniacal stare. He is neither dead nor alive, a “Bastard With No Name, neither chosen nor condemned, an In-Between, a remanence,” hiding from a government that has devised a method of collective mind control. Only the Noir, a disparate group of nonwhites who fight “not to change anything but just to avoid disappearing altogether,” can help him.

As is often the case with thrillers, however, plausible endings are hard to come by, and Pauvert fails to reclaim Noir from the genre’s well-worn tropes. At times, his interest in fostering a sense of macabre violence overwhelms the book’s examination of fascism and its exploration of a nocturnal underworld, inhabited by shady characters who flit into and out of the narrative only when required. Pauvert’s writing is the novel’s saving grace. The latter half of the book, set in alpine landscapes and small towns, can be sublime. Elsewhere, the author’s language, punched up by Adriana Hunter’s translation, is cerebral and quite original: The pacified society gives off “a whiff of disinfected brains,” screeching police-van tires sound like “children being flayed alive,” and the weather of Paris is “the colour of pigeons and pavements.”

A timely sociopolitical edge lends the narrative cultural weight. Noir is an affront to the traditional ideals that have been adopted by President Sarkozy, debunking the premise behind his Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. The novel posits a future of extreme racial control and discrimination, while implicitly attacking the people who voted for Sarkozy—those who were mollified, as is the narrator, by a seductive rhetoric of change. Nevertheless, the reliance on heavy-handed genre conventions undermines the power of these parallels; like George Orwell’s 1984 —to which Pauvert’s novel has quite rightly been compared—Noir is guilty of moments of clunky, plot-driven excess. It is shocking and occasionally brilliant but would have benefited from a steadier pace.

[original source: Bookforum, January 2009]

*

In Print(5) . . .

2010-02-01T00:45:00.000-08:00

Dazed & Aroused, By Gavin James Bower

There exists within Gavin James Bower's canny novel an all-knowing shallowness that in lesser debuts would seem flawed. But to ignore, or worse still debunk, such wanton shallowness would miss the point of this critique of consumer society, especially one caught in the far-reaching web of the fashion world.

Following an already-jaded male model, Alex, on his rise to fame, we are allowed a flashing peek into a world most people only see within the covers of a glossy magazine. It comes as no surprise that life behind the super-hyped patina of the fashion industry is just as dismal as in any other substratum of society that demands the real from the unreal. Modelling, like most things trading in ephemeral charm, isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially if, like Alex, one is painfully aware of the facade.

Bower makes all this brilliantly clear in adroit, humorous flashes of insight, revealing a maddening world of myopia and sheer vanity. When Alex introduces his flatmate and fellow model, Andreas, we are instantly informed that he "is with Creative Model Management (like me), has medium to long blond hair and blue eyes (like me), and is tall and slim with a well-defined body (like me)". Alex, saving the novel from the same narcissistic affectation that permeates the whole fashion industry, adds: "I assume the agency put us together because they thought we'd have things in common."

Alex ums and ahs his way through a miasma of castings, photo-shoots, parties, women, men and pills, each as unsatisfactory as the next. In a world of ephemera, where everything has its price, there needs to be something solid to cling on to – and Nathalie, Alex's on/off girlfriend since university, is his foothold in life. But even Alex cannot control this centrifuge and things soon fall apart. Dazed & Aroused is an insightful debut from a novelist who already shows an ability to cut through the hype and reveal the dark heart of everyday life.

[original source: The Independent, Monday, 3 August 2009]

*

JD Salinger . . .

2010-01-29T00:49:00.000-08:00

RIP JD Salinger

Manchester Derby . . .

2010-01-27T03:32:00.001-08:00

It’s the second leg of the Carling Cup semi-final tonight, between Manchester United and Manchester City. The Manchester Derby has always been a tense affair. Being from Manchester myself I grew up with this fixture. Being a red I’ve not had it half as bad as the blue quarter of Manchester but I still get nervous before every derby . . . and tonight’s is no exception. I am not going to make any rash predictions here as to the outcome of tonight’s encounter, I will just cross my fingers and hope for the best. Above is some footage of the United end at last week’s first leg at Eastlands. The United fans had found out that City's officials were planning to dim the lights and bathe their stadium with the ‘blue moon’ of Manchester City as the players entered the tunnel. Such a fitting repost then, that United painted the whole stadium red, completely outshining City’s moment in the spotlight. As the saying goes . . . no matter the result . . . Manchester is, indeed, red.

*

New Litro . . .

2010-01-27T00:32:00.000-08:00

There's a new issue of Litro out, featuring another short story by Gabriel Josipovici. Here's what the editors have to say:

"Crime does look profitable, these days! Never have we had such a torrential or varied response from would-be Litro contributors.

Valerie O’Riordan’s short ‘The Explosion of Josiah Bounderby’ will knock you for six, while Kevin Brown’s ‘Odds Are’ depicts the sorry triumph of modern fear. Iphgenia Baal’s smart squib is anchored in forensic contemporary observation, in contrast with Larry Lefkowitz’s brave venture into Holmesian rigour, bringing you the story for which Conan Doyle’s readers were famously ‘not yet prepared’.

We are also proud to continue our ‘Gabriel Josipovici mini-series’: if you enjoyed December’s ‘The Two Lönnrots’, skip straight to his latest short, ‘Love Across the Borders’. This and Phil Bennett’s superb ‘Mikel’, an evocation of an autistic child’s experience of civil conflict in Chile, keep faith with Litro’s aim to bring the whole world to you in short stories.

Lastly, we have poetry from two writers who know their crime backwards: one from Paul Lyalls and four from the late great Charles Bukowski. No-one ever said the Post pays…

Sophie Lewis
Editor"

Here's a little snippet from the Josipovici story:

"- Take your coat, Veronica says to her son as the 11.52 express from Milan glides soundlessly into the main line station of Geneva and comes, almost imperceptibly, to a stop. Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.

On the platform she takes his hand. – Can you see a taxi sign anywhere? she asks him.

- There, Mum! he says, swerving off suddenly to the left. Once again she marvels at how big he has grown in the past few months.

In the taxi she gives the driver an address and sits back, peering short-sightedly at the passing houses.

- Are we going to see Philippe?

- Not now. We’re going to the hotel first.

- And then we’re going to see him?

- No. Tomorrow morning."

[continue reading]

*

In Print(4) . . .

2010-01-26T00:48:00.000-08:00

Caught by the River, Jeff Barrett, Robin Turner and Andrew Walsh (editors)

In Caught by the River, writers, musicians, environmentalists, anglers and poets contribute to a tranquil collection of accounts of time spent with a favourite river. "Rivers run through men," begins John Berry's "The River Alness", "as surely as they run through the landscape". The temptations of consumerism make it easy to forget the wonders around us. The river cuts through countryside and cities alike, gathering at its own pace towards the sea, offering solitude and respite.

Such is the strength of the emotional spell a river can cast, it comes as no surprise that the majority of the writing here concerns itself with the past. Passing generations are marginalised by gentrification and childhood adventures (with the obligatory father-and-son "bonding" yarn) take place in an idyll long disappeared. Such passing of time is evident in Robyn Turner's assured "Endless Summer" and Matthew De Abaitua's lament on the demise of the Liverpool docker, where "the engineering of man and nature" once complemented each other.

Childhood friendships are galvanised by an unsuccessful fishing trip for chub by the Wear in Ben Myers' exploration of place, "The Dirt Waterfall". But it's not all about the architecture of memory. Jarvis Cocker's "South Yorkshire re-creation of Apocalypse Now" is genuinely amusing, even when his River Porter voyage, "Acrylic Afternoons", becomes a metaphor for life.

There is much to glean from this collection, especially in the writing that eschews sentimentality and delivers a psychogeographical odyssey. Sue Clifford and Angela King's "The Language of Rivers" is a treat, as are the ever-knowledgeable Bill Drummond, Peter Kirby and Jon Savage.

The editors have shepherded a spirited and diverse collection of nature writing. Caught by the River taps into a growing unease with a present which is felt to be leaving us behind, and where the idyllic past we crave seems further from our grasp each passing day.

[original source: The Independent, Wednesday, 1 July 2009]

*

On Boredom . . .

2010-01-25T00:29:00.000-08:00

Andrew Gallix emailed me the other day to mention that there was a rather interesting article on all things boring in the New York Times. As those who know me this is of particular interest. My non-fiction work On Boredom should be finished this year, which traces my thoughts and reactions to those in both fiction and popular culture who have embraced boredom in all its phases.

"And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth."

*

In Print(3) . . .

2010-01-22T07:31:00.000-08:00

The Power of Flies, By Lydie Salvayre (trans. Jane Kuntz)

Blaise Pascal—the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher centrifugal to Lydie Salvayre’s The Power of Flies—underwent, in the latter half of his life, some kind of personal metamorphosis: he morphed, quite publicly, from a man of scientific methodology and knowledge to a deeply religious philosopher committed to the Augustinian idea that man’s descent had putrefied human spirituality to the core. He then, in a paradoxical somersault of quite gargantuan proportions, it would seem, spent the rest of his life writing an apologia for the new belief system he had so deeply adopted: Christianity. These later writings were never completed, and after Pascal’s death they were published collectively to form what later became known as his Pensées.

It is in these Pensées that Lydie Salvayre’s main character—a nameless museum guide at Port-Royal-des-Champs awaiting trial for his father’s murder—finds his philosophical solace and manages to espouse his own rage in a way that gives him a “foothold in the void.” Port-Royal-des-Champs is the abbey that in the 17th century offered a home to a variety of Jansenists, and most notably Blaise Pascal. Not only are the Pensées the narrator’s obsession, they are also the novel’s—and ultimately Lydie Salvayre’s.

Lydie Salvayre is a novelist of philosophical and theoretical ideas realized through voice, and not plot or characterization. This is not to say that her nameless museum guide is not a believable character—he wholly is—it is to emphasize that Salvayre’s own ontological progression throughout the work is far more important, especially to readers who want their literature to ask them questions and to ultimately engage with the text. When reading The Power of Flies we are witnessing a work that intelligently eschews the flabby trappings of the modern, commercial novel.

Born in France to Spanish Republican Communist/Anarchist refugees, Salvayre is a writer that creates novels at once unconventional and delightfully marginal, suspended on the peripheral vantage points of the social order. Her first novel La Déclaration (The Declaration, 1990) was written in her mid forties. Early in life Salvayre abandoned her literary studies to pursue a career in psychiatry—which she still practices in Seine-Saint Denis—and its influence on her work is undeniable. Nearly two decades on from her literary debut Salvayre has produced some startling works: La Vie commune (Ordinary Life, 1991), La Compagnie des spectres (The Company of Ghosts, 1997), Quelques conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers (Some Useful Advice for Apprentice Process-Servers, 1997), La Conférence de Cintegabelle (The Cintegabelle Lecture, 1999), among others. It is an idiosyncratic oeuvre that is at once distinguishable by the spoken communications embedded within: lone voices that are indefatigable in fervor, serving as verbal conduits that deliver to us the myriad intrinsic desires of the individual. Many of these voices zero in on the social and personal intersections of violence that society, upbringing, and parenthood help to create.

Elsewhere(1) I have incorrectly described Lydie Salvayre’s writing as a series of soliloquies—they’re not. There is a slight difference: A soliloquy traditionally serves as a work’s defining moment,(2) when things become clear, bringing things to a logical closure, whereas the nameless narrator’s monologue in The Power of Flies merely rants; it offers no conclusions other than to lend an insight into his blackened heart. Salvayre’s entire narrative can be seen as an orchestrated othering of words; a form of dislocation; a dismemberment of voice. Or, as Stefanie Sobelle quite rightly states, “A peculiar kind of exterior monologue, wherein the speaker employs an unnaturally elevated language.”(3)
And truly it is an unnaturally elevated language:

“Make a statement? And what am I to state? If your Honor will allow, these details are of no importance. If I were you, I wouldn’t bother with them. You know how to do your job, you say? I hope so, Your Honor, I hope so.”

So begins The Power of Flies, in a courtroom, where the nameless narrator is being interrogated for his crime: the murder of his father. This maniacal museum guide is the novel’s singular voice. Moreover, it is within this voice that he is forced to reveal all his naked, vainglorious conceits, in a series of conversations with the judge, a lawyer, his wife, and a doctor. It is the intensity of his answers that is most shocking: an exalted language that cuts through the fatty, rancid deposits of the traditional novel and surpasses everything that is deemed superfluous, a shimmering singularity that is unsurpassed, executed with razor-like precision:

“Tie up an animal, I tell them; for, not unlike yourself, Your Honor, I have a penchant for argument. Observe the animal. Day after days, you will watch it tug at its rope until chafed raw. Then howl at death. Howl at death, I tell them, hoping that death itself might come to deliver it. Then waste away. And die . . . Men are like dogs, I tell them. On uttering these words, Your Honor, I think back to Mamma, who was as good as dead before dying, and I see her pale face hovering above all my memories . . . I see the face of her killer who watches with an expression I am at pains to describe, but which fills me with terror; her killer—that’s what I’ve called him ever since I’ve been able to talk—her killer, whom my mother, from beyond the grave, still makes me call Papa . . . Men are like dogs, I tell them, Your Honor. They are bonded together by feelings, and their bonds strangle them.”

These are the words of an angry man. They are also strangely elevated words, steeped in hatred, yet the repetition of “Then howl at death. Howl at death” is hauntingly poetic. They mimic the narrator’s own caterwaul. They are immediate, but there is a distance too. In an article by Warren Motte,(4) published in the academic journal Substance in 2004, Lydie Salvayre’s and her narrator’s polyphonic voices are examined in minute detail. Motte intuitively turns to Maurice Blanchot’s notion that all narrative voice emanates from a kind of disappearance from the external world,(5) from something other. The voice, that of the nameless narrator above—and Salvayre’s herself—does seem to appear from this same disappearance, from outside of literature. We seem to be behind the voice and not within it—or, better still, the voice is, or seems, in front of us and we are forced to observe, to listen, as if we are watching it performed before us. This makes for a strangely real interaction with the text.

“Do you know, Monsieur Jean, that when hatred sets in, it takes hold of your entire being? And infests it. And devours it whole. Hatred, Monsieur Jean, has the power of flies. At times father gets nostalgic. So he sings some flamenco. Or rather, he brays it. But no matter what he does, I hate him. Everything he does is base and rank. Hatred, Monsieur Jean, is undiscerning. It enjoys the dull mindlessness of flies.”

This is uttered with Blaise Pascal’s famous maxim in mind. The whole book—from the title to the monologue’s conclusion—hangs on it. “The power of flies; they win battles, hinder our souls from acting, consume our bodies.”

For Salvayre’s narrator these flies are death itself, they consume us, they infest us, breeding fear that develops into hatred—our true distraction. Pascal’s flies are the infinitesimal distraction that builds up to reveal being as a whole: the minute irritations that accumulate over time into a paralyzing fog. A fog that cloaks us, either enabling us to do the things we thought impossible or suspending us in permanent dread. There is ontology at play here, an undercurrent of existence’s weight(6), yet it is still a constant wonder as to how much consolation the reading of Blaise Pascal can bring the narrator. The answer is none. Pascal’s words serve to fuel him, to help elevate him, to shoehorn into him the supercilious impression of self-importance and disgust he so obviously possesses. Without Pascal, Salvayre’s nameless narrator would be nothingness incarnate. Which poses Salvayre—and it is definitely the author speaking here—to ask in a chapter consisting of this one single question:

“Should the reading of Pascal be considered a form of entertainment, Monsieur Jean?”

Nevertheless, with Pascal’s obdurate Pensées rattling inside his head he can exist, he can be, he can make sense of the world as it closes in around him. Yet for all the narrator’s anger and braggadocio, for all his sense of being in the suffocating world around him, it is Pascal who elucidates his reasoning for him in a simple, quiet way, something he cannot reconcile with, something that rankles deep within him. And for as much as he would like us to believe him, as much as his insouciance digs deep into us, we know that he is completely aware of his delusion. Which makes it all ultimately more intriguing for us.

“I read. I read. It’s a vice. I read, goaded on by some compelling desire, some urge that’s totally out of my control. I read as if my days were numbered, as if death awaited me that same day. I read happily. I read with delight.”

Blaise Pascal is Salvayre’s nameless narrator’s minute diversion; Pascal is his entertainment; Pascal’s words have consumed his mind, they have “hindered his soul from acting” and such entertainment has left him paralyzed with hatred, cruelty and delusion. In spite of this, for us readers—his audience—he is a pure joy to listen to, no matter how shocking his words may be. Salvayre, in using monologues so precise in their otherness, is creating a cacophony of voices in her work that serve to dismantle ordinary narrative and rebuild, mould, and shape it into a concise, single-handed performance.
____

1 Rourke, Lee. “A Shocking Novel of Ideas. Must be French,” The Observer, Sunday, January 13, 2008.

2 William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is a fine example of this.

3 Sobelle, Stefanie. “Blaise of Heaven,” Bookforum, 2007.

4 Motte, Warren. “Voices in Her Head,” Substance 104, Vol 33, no 2, 2004.

5 Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature [trans. by Ann Smock], University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

6 Other than Blaise Pascal’s famous maxim we are also close to Martin Heidegger’s notion of “profound boredom” here which he discussed at length in his lecture “What is Metaphysics?” in 1949.

[original source: The Quarterly Conversation, 2009]

*

Canal Biking . . .

2010-01-22T04:35:00.000-08:00

(between 1.59 and 2.10 is of particular interest)

The Canal - a novel - is published by Melville House Books US 15th of June and UK 15th July

In Print(2) . . .

2010-01-22T01:05:00.001-08:00

Wildlife, By Joe Stretch

"It's amazing what we can do with computers nowadays" is a mantra that cuts through Joe Stretch's second novel like a short circuit in a motherboard, endlessly sending the same signal. It's heartening to discover that the contemporary novel can still do amazing things, too. In his debut, Friction (2008), Stretch quickly announced himself as the sexy chronicler of the grotesque, yet in this second novel he takes a step back from the shock tactics of an eager debutant and delivers a serious meditation on technology and individualism. It is Ballardian in scope, and equally as exciting as his brutal debut.

Set in a world where "TV is dead", Wildlife follows four dispirited and lonely individuals looking for a way out of their boring "real" lives. Art school drop-out Anka is now a presenter for late-night "Quiz TV" on "Channel Manc". Janek, a session musician, has been "waiting his whole life for something to matter". Roger, a blogger, is literally metamorphosing into technology and Joe, morbidly fascinated with his ex-girlfriend's excrement, will do just about anything to get her back.
The online temptations of the -social network "Wild World" hang over this group like a blue sky of possibility. This new technology, a feeder of vainglorious egos, pulls these characters together. Wildlife explores the determined fervour and crippling pointlessness of their yearning for individualism. The idea that a true individual can never find peace with the self is given added gravitas when their worlds come crashing down around them. Except that, online, there is no one to pick up the pieces.

Wildlife succeeds in its assured surveillance of the myriad possibilities available, much more interesting than the characters' own lives, on a burgeoning technology. This dark and twisted exploration of ego reveals life as we would like it to be, uploaded for our pleasure. The novels of Joe Stretch, like Ballard's before him, transmit back to us our continuing inability to grasp hold of modernity.

[original source: The Independent, Tuesday, 28 April 2009]

*

Smallest Stuff . . .

2010-01-21T15:27:00.000-08:00

The Canal is published on June 10th [Melville House].

In Print(1) . . .

2010-01-21T03:21:00.000-08:00

The Bird Room, By Chris Killen

No more than 26 pages into Chris Killen's debut novel, its narrator reconciles himself to the fact that things aren't going to get much better. "I don't want to be part of things any more," he laments. An impatient reader might acquiesce, mistaking this novel as yet another male-in-crisis fiction about unrequited love and loneliness. But those who seek something unique in the contemporary British novel will delight in this adroit, snappy debut, a dark and beguiling meditation on the weight of being, conveying the notion of the trapped individual riveted to an existence that makes no sense.

Yet The Bird Room is a novel so fresh it practically pings with energy. The bulk of this slim debut follows narrator Will, a bored twentysomething stuck in a job he hates, as his relationship with the smart and alluring Alice slides deeper into paranoiac turmoil. He becomes convinced that Alice is about to embark on an affair with his childhood friend, a minor artist also called Will. Mirroring this forlorn tale of niggling unease is the darker account of Helen, a wannabe actress who prefers to find work answering strangers' lewd propositions on internet "adult contact" sites.

The Bird Room is a novel of masks and shifting identities, used by each character to hide from an alien and mesmerising world. The most interesting of these masks, apart from Helen's somnambulistic veil, is possibly the artist Will's, as he floats from one exhibition to the next in the vainglorious hope that some kind of authenticity will be achieved. Will's art, his pursuits of the opposite sex, and the art world, are all meaningless. Yet there is also something undeniably real about him.

The fragmentary make-up of The Bird Room is seamlessly woven into a perfectly formed whole that fizzes with deadpan wit and cutting one-liners. Killen peppers the narration with modern technologies; whereas lesser writers using similar hooks might get carried away, Killen possesses enough savoir-faire to understand that a story still needs to be told. The Bird Room, a novel of misguided youth, is an exciting debut from a novelist already beginning to display maturity beyond his years.

[original source: The Independent, Thursday, 12 February 2009]

*

Go Around . . .

2010-01-21T00:51:00.000-08:00

The Canal is published on June 10th

Zachary German . . .

2010-01-16T15:23:00.000-08:00

Zachary German's debut novel 'Eat When You Feel Sad' is published on the 9th February [Melville House]. I'm really looking forward to this one - I'm especially interested how this novel will be received in the UK. Nobody, and I mean nobody, writes like Zachary German in the UK. His voice is both original and familiar. It is both funny and sad . . . and completely modern.

"Eat When You Feel Sad is a novel about Robert. Eat When You Feel Sad is a novel about a generation. Robert was born in the 1980s. He was born in the United States of America. In Eat When You Feel Sad, Robert feeds his cat, watches television and drinks beer. In Eat When You Feel Sad, Robert gets mustard on his clothes, rides a bicycle and talks on Gmail chat. Eat When You Feel Sad takes place in cars, houses, and apartments. Eat When You Feel Sad takes place in a school, a community center, and several Chinese restaurants. Eat When You Feel Sad is a selection of scenes from a life.

Eat When You Feel Sad will be found on a short shelf of short literary novels that includes Bret Easton Ellis's Less than Zero and Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee--where young people seek their own reflection, and face reality with humor and hope."

From 'SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED TODAY':

"i got on the L train at 8th avenue

i noticed that a black woman didn't get off the 8th avenue bound L train

she stayed on it as it became a brooklyn bound L train

i saw her sitting across from me

later i didn't see her

later she was sitting next to me

she said 'can i ask you a question'"

[read more here]

*

Tony O'Neill . . .

2010-01-15T06:30:00.000-08:00

I’m good friends with Tony O’Neill [pictured left with me in 'Mars Bar' lower east side New York, both very drunk], so it gives me great pleasure to point you towards this link. Tony has taken over Beat the Dust for one issue. It’s a complete Tony fest and it’s just what you’d expect.

"Nicole drove away from Raphael at a good clip as soon as they had copped the drugs. Nicole was focused and silent. Carl was too. Carl could not drive. Since he hadn’t acquired the skill in all the years he had lived in LA, he safely assumed that he would go to his deathbed without learning.

Carl was in the backseat, tearing open one of the black balloons with his teeth. He had the spoon balanced on his knees. He poured some Evian into the spoon and dropped a nugget of dope into the water. Nicole had the radio on. It was an 80’s flashback weekend again. Every weekend in LA seemed to be an 80’s flashback weekend. Rodney Bingeheimer started to play “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo and Carl yelled, “Turn that shit off, you’re gonna kill my high.”

She stuck a tape in, The Smiths self-titled first album. Carl instructed her to drive steady, as he cooked the dope, dropped a cigarette filter into the solution, and drew it up into 2 syringes. On the backseat was an empty bag of Jack In The Box from last week which had made the whole car stink of stale onion rings. Not even the smell of just cooked heroin could mask it. Carl had a rubber tourniquet around his arm and his syringe between his teeth.

People were honking at Nicole because she was driving slowly, mindful of Carl’s activities in the back seat. A Toyota Corolla pulled around them, the driver gave the finger, and cursed at her in Spanish. Nicole yelled for him to suck her dick. Carl slid the needle in his arm." [read more here]

His novel SICK CITY is out in July.

*

Matthew Coleman . . .

2010-01-14T00:37:00.000-08:00

The artist Mathew Coleman is starting to make waves.

I wrote a short film with Matt once. It's very good. If you have some spare money and you want to invest. please get in touch through the usual channels.

*

In Theory . . .

2010-01-14T00:33:00.000-08:00

My good friend Andrew Gallix has written very well in the Guardian of late. Here's his first in a new series on literary theorists.

*

In Flight . . .

2010-01-14T00:26:00.000-08:00

My novel The Canal is published this year.

Competition Time . . .

2010-01-11T10:48:00.000-08:00

:: COMPETITION TIME ::

I was recently published in Issue Ten of Succour: The New Fiction, Poetry and Art (pictured). Succour is edited by Anthony Banks. I am proud to have been included in such a fine publication.

I have two spare copies of Succour Issue Ten, containing (apart from four poems taken from my forthcoming collection varroa destructor) new work from Gary Cansell, Abi Curtis, John Clegg and Annie Clarkson amongst others. The issue is based on the theme 'The Banal' - and is anything but.

The first two people to email me the correct answer to the following question will each receive a signed copy of Succour:

On which date is my novel 'The Canal' to be published this year?

a) 12 November

b) 10 June

c) 2 March

Please email either a, b or c to ljrourke9 at hotmail dot com asap!

Good luck.

New Decade . . .

2010-01-05T05:28:00.001-08:00

Well, that's another decade of my life reduced to mere memory. Happy new decade to all who find yourselves here.

So, 2010, eh! I don't know what to say, really. But for a start I was completely honoured to have been included in Bookmunch's thorough '50 Books you'll want to read in 2010' list. It's always heartening to be mentioned alongside so many writers I admire.

For those of you who have not seen the list, it is here.

And, just for the sheer hell of it, here is my pick of the bunch (in no particular order, ahem):

Richard - Ben Myers.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell.
The Pale King - David Foster Wallace.
Chronic City - Jonathan Lethem.
Castle - J Robert Lennon.

In a few days I'll post my own list of books I'm looking forward to reading this year. And I'll also begin to post all the reviews and criticism I had published last year.

I met Jonathan Lethem the other night (I’m interviewing him for the New Statesman). He’s a truly interesting man and completely engages with the art of writing fiction. His writing seems to tap into so many different things, it’s all rather incredible. He has been labelled the poet laureate of Brooklyn (which is a fair enough assumption), but I feel his work is far more universal and isn’t necessarily exclusive in that way.

I've been busying myself with my final edits on 'The Canal' - it's all looking good. My editor and publisher Dennis Johnson has done such a great job with the book and has truly whipped it into shape. He just seems to notice the little things that make all the difference - I never see these, maybe they are too obvious and I'm looking to change bigger things. I guess that what makes a true editor (and the fact that Dennis, along with running Melville House, is also an award-winning writer himself, probably helps).

Plus, I need a haircut!

*

Adelle Stripe . . .

2009-12-23T02:31:00.000-08:00

Adelle Stripe has been awarded 'poetry collection of the year 2009' by 3AM Magazine. First of many, I am sure. Well done, Adelle. A truly brilliant voice.

"My Grandma gave me these weird Watchtower books with all the bible stories in them, re-written with a fundamentalist Jehovah Witness bent. The JW artists create pictures of heaven, hell, paradise, sin, damnation – perfect families living perfect lives and a world free of disease. I know for a fact that some of the artists started subverting the medium and pictures appeared in Awake where in the foreground a lion would be lying down with a lamb and in the background – if you squinted – you could see a man jacking off in the bushes… They really are completely nuts. It’s a glorified Apocalypse Cult. I knew from a really early age that it was all a load of codswallop, but I was totally enchanted by the art… Those pictures pretty much sold the idea of sin to me. Sin looked like a right laugh. Paradise looked fucking depressing."

In honour, here is a recent interview (well, conversation) over at 3AM with Adelle and Darran Anderson.

Tao Lin . . .

2009-12-11T07:04:00.000-08:00

‘A kind of themelessness . . .’

Tao Lin speaking about his latest book (and his previous books). What is noticeable in this interview is how in control Tao Lin is. He is a writer who knows exactly what he is doing. It has nothing to do with his age. So many people focus on his age. It is to do with the understanding of philosophy and fiction, and more importantly (for writers such as Tao Lin) a deep understanding of fiction, what fiction is, its limitations, its failings. Tao Lin is trying, with language, to express something we felt pre-language. He is like Beckett in this ontological understanding of things. Tao Lin is interested in the seeing of things . . . Like Beckett, Tao Lin senses things, rather than wastes time with words trying to describe them.

It is of no surprise, then, when Tao Lin says ‘maybe the next stage is to not write a book . . .’

*

Solitary Life . . .

2009-12-09T01:05:00.000-08:00

5,000 Books . . .

2009-12-03T02:13:00.000-08:00

I have been reading quite a lot of Roberto Bolaño of late and eagerly await his last interview [Melville House]. It’s interesting how prolific Bolaño was, not only in his output as a writer, but also as a reader too. Melville’s blog ‘Moby Lives’ will be running a series of posts concerning just this: Bolaño’s reading habits.

From the last interview:

“In reality the five books are more like 5,000. I’ll mention these only as the tip of the spear: Don Quixote by Cervantes, Moby Dick by Melville. The complete works of Borges, Hopscotch by Cortázar, A Confederacy of Dunces by Toole. I should also cite Nadja by Breton, the letters of Jacques Vaché. Anything Ubu by Jarry, Life: A User’s Manual by Perec. The Castle and The Trial by Kafka. Aphorisms by Lichtenberg. The Tractatus by Wittgenstein. The Invention of Morel by Bioy Casares. The Satyricon by Petronius. The History of Rome by Tito Livio. Pensées by Pascal.”

That’s some list right there. It’s interesting because it doesn’t seem to hold a centre; it is far-reaching and spans many continents and epochs. It is sheer devotion; an unconditional dedication to reading that seems to steer clear of any ideological route other than to devour more of the same. It is a thirst for knowledge, for the written word, or the reasoning within the written word, the reason for the written word: the unfathomable nonworking of our existence.

Or it could be the list of a man bored. Simply bored. Bored with the question, bored with life, bored with the finiteness of everything. A list to pass time. A list to amuse one’s self in the meantime, in the interim. A list that means absolutely nothing.

For me this is the beauty of a mind like Bolaño’s.

*

Samuel Beckett . . .

2009-12-02T00:40:00.001-08:00

Everything you need to know about Samuel Beckett . . . and more.

Peter Owen . . .

2009-11-26T00:41:00.000-08:00

There is a fine interview with Peter Owen in 3AM Magazine. Part I. A fine publisher of Blaise Cendrars (amongst others). And French House (boozer in Soho) regular (well, I used to see him in there on Thursdays) . . .

*

David Mitchell . . .

2009-11-24T14:35:00.000-08:00

I have it on good authority that David Michell's next novel is going to be pretty damn good . . .

*

Last Interview . . .

2009-11-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

Melville House are bringing out the final interview with Roberto Bolaño.

I can't wait to read this.

"With the release of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in 1998, journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer “capable of befriending his readers.” After exchanging several letters with Bolaño, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned out to be Bolaño’s last.

Appearing for the first time in English, Bolaño’s final interview is accompanied by a collection of conversations with reporters stationed throughout Latin America, providing a rich context for the work of the writer who, according to essayist Marcela Valdes, is “a T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters.” As in all of Bolaño’s work, there is also wide-ranging discussion of the author’s many literary influences. (Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English-language readers are included here.)

The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bolaño’s deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease."

*

Paris Today . . .

2009-11-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Stewart Home.

Manchester Youth . . .

2009-11-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, people ask me just what it is I got up to in my youth up in Manchester. I always find this a very hard question to answer, but this video by the Happy Mondays seems to sum it all up perfectly:

Fiction Award . . .

2009-11-03T05:31:00.001-08:00

As some of you will know, I was the guest editor at Publishing Genius’s fiction blog Everyday Genius for the whole of last month. I thoroughly enjoyed working with poet, publisher and polymath Adam Robinson. He’s doing some pretty amazing things (unearthing the brilliant Shane Jones for a start). I think, as guest editor, I published some decent writing – I guess I wanted to inject a little British (and Irish (and Scottish)) tom-foolery and brio into the proceedings. I think I succeeded in doing that, looking back, as I have been, over the work published.

So, I am pleased to announce the inaugural winner of the ‘Lee Rourke best fiction award for fiction published during the month of October at Everyday Genius’* is the meta-fabulist and wonderful, all round good egg HP Tinker.

Yes, that’s right, HP Tinker.

Here is the line-up for October. Click on a name and be delighted:

Stuart Evers │ Steve Finbow │ Peter Wild │ Shiona Tregaskis │ Ellis Sharp │ Grace Andreacchi │ Adrian Slatcher │ Heidi James │ HP Tinker │ Ben Myers │ Matthew Coleman │ Jenni Fagan │ Tom McCarthy │ Darran Anderson │ Adelle Stripe │ Maxi Kim │ Hendrik Wittkopf │ Shya Scanlon │ Aimee DeLong │ Andrew Gallix │ Melissa Mann │ Ethel Rohan

* this award is sponsored by ‘Everyday’ by Lee Rourke.

*

New Books . . .

2009-10-27T15:41:00.001-07:00

Came home to Steve Finbow's debut novel 'Balzac of the Badlands' and 'Protest! - fiction by Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann and Joeseph Ridgwell' today . . .

I've been wanting to read Steve's novel for some time now, so it's great to get my hands on a copy. I'll be reviewing it for 3:AM Magazine as soon as I can (have to finish my Brandon Scott Gorrell review first, which is aeons late now).

I feel a special mention must go the to prodution values on 'Protest!' (published by Beat the Dust Press). It's a beatuful-looking book, really great to see a small independent press putting so much into their books. Well done Melissa!

Official Sponsor . . .

2009-10-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

In an unprecedented deal (worth well over £250,000 a year!) Twinings ‘Everyday’ tea has become the official sponsor of my 2007 short story collection ‘Everyday’. From here onwards, included with every copy of my book bought (‘Everyday’ by Lee Rourke), anywhere in the world (including online department stores, traditional independent bookshops and even high street book ‘superstores’), you will receive a free sample (x 1 teabag) of Twinings ‘Everyday’ tea.

Mmmmm, Twinings ‘Everyday’ tea, the only way (along with reading ‘Everyday’ by Lee Rourke) to alleviate the mindnumbingly, cripplingly pointless meaninglessness of everyday life.

*

Suicidal Leaves . . .

2009-10-26T15:40:00.000-07:00

Thanks Ben Myers.

Melville House . . .

2009-10-22T09:51:00.000-07:00

Melville House Publishing wins gong!

"Melville House’s 2008 leap across the Hudson River from Hoboken to DUMBO means they’re fully ours now, and Amen. There is no shortage of small and independent presses in New York City, but Melville House—whose stable includes both an avant-fiction wing, of the Tao Lin/Stephen Dixon variety, and a lively political nonfiction roster that includes Mark Danner, Renata Adler, and Andre Schiffrin—is so firmly the best of them that one wonders what everyone else is doing wrong.

Even Melville’s in-house design team dominates its field. The house’s upcoming books include cartoonist and critic David Stromberg’s graphic novel Baddies and a reissue of New Yorker contributor Lore Segal’s Lucinella novella, a long-beloved send-up of literary New York that, had it been written in this century, would surely have made room for its own little Melville House cameo."

Thoroughly deserved, I say! Long may it continue.

In their own words:

"Melville House Publishing is an independent publishing house born out of the book blog MobyLives and founded in Hoboken, New Jersey, which is also known as the Left Bank of New York City, and which is where Marlon Brando said to Eve Marie Saint (in "On the Waterfront," which was shot in Hoboken), "Come on, I'll walk you home. There are a lot of guys around here with only one thing on their mind." As it turns out, what's on the mind of a lot of those men -- and local women, too -- is good, solid literature, especially literary fiction, non-fiction and poetry. In an amazing coincidence, this is exactly what Melville House provides. Except now it provides it from an entirely new location -- Brooklyn. Yes, the Real Left Bank. Well, except for the Other Real Left Bank, of course. We're in the neighborhood known as DUMBO, to be exact. With a spiffy bookshop to boot. So, to review, that's DUMBO, D-U-M-B-O, as in Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Remember the "O," or it's just dumb. And where would you be without the O? In the river, that's where."

*

Issue One . . .

2009-10-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

Issue one of The Loose Canon has landed on my doorstep.

Highlights include: Dan Fante, Mark Safranko, Tony O'Neill, Heidi James, Matthew Firth, Melissa Mann, JR Helton, Steve Hussy, Peter Stockland, Rob Woodard, Virginia Ashberry, Sabine Walser, Joseph Ridgwell and Richard Watts.

Competition Time . . .

2009-10-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

!! Competition Time !!

It’s competition time again. The first person to email me the following question will receive a free advance galley copy of the forthcoming Jean-Philippe Toussaint novel ‘Running Away’ Dalkey Archive Press (out in November 2009). Like all of Toussaint’s novels it’s pretty damn special.

Please email your answer to the following question to ljrourke9 at hotmail dot com:

What was the title of Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s first novel?

Good luck.

*

Dalkey Archive . . .

2009-10-11T15:54:00.001-07:00

Dalkey Archive have sent me books. Check out their catalogue here. It rocks!

Raymond Federman . . .

2009-10-10T16:04:00.000-07:00

1928 - 2009

More at A Piece of Monologue.

Three Books . . .

2009-10-08T15:05:00.001-07:00

I want to read these three novels:

Shane Jones - Light Boxes

Blake Butler - Scorch Atlas

Eugene Marten - Waste

La Soufrière . . .

2009-10-08T10:42:00.000-07:00

". . . an inevitable catastrophe that did not take place."

Double Take . . .

2009-10-07T15:37:00.000-07:00

Double Take by Johan Grimonprez & Tom McCarthy.

Grimonprez’s second film essay, titled Double Take, questions how our view of reality is held hostage by mass media, advertising and Hollywood. Written by award winning British novelist Tom McCarthy, the film targets the global rise of fear-as-commodity, in a tale of odd couples and hilarious double deals. Paying tribute to the themes of doubling and mistaken identity, Grimonprez creates a unique interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s illustrious cameo television and film appearances, through which Grimonprez examines the influence of this cinema-icon on a deeper, more socio-political level. The film covers the post World War II period, characterized by prosperity and innocent consumerism, as well as institutionalized fear, through the beginning of the 1960s featuring Sputnik, Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon. The cold war era was characterized by the conquest of space, sexual politics, anxiety and paranoia disrupting the idyllic American suburban dream.

In the words of Alfred Hitchcock, “Television brought murder into the American home, where it has always belonged.” Not without humor, Double Take invites the viewer to question today’s hegemony of the image, the truth and lies of reality and its influence on our society, politics and culture. Johan Grimonprez’s work is included in numerous collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, the Kanazawa Art Museum, Japan, the National Gallery, Berlin, Germany, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Curatorial projects have been hosted at major museums worldwide such as the Whitney Museum in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany and the Tate Modern in London, England. Grimonprez achieved international acclaim with his film essay Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y at Documenta X in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, which eerily foreshadowed the tragic events of September 11th in New York. His films have been included in prestigious film festivals in Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo and Berlin. Grimonprez is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts (New York).

Grimonprez’s film Double Take will have an avant-premiere at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles March 12, 2009. It has also been selected for the 59th Berlinale International Forum 2009 in Berlin. It will be included in the following exhibitions: Un Certain Etat du Monde?, at The Garage, Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, Russia, March 19 2009, Magazin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden, March 28, 2009 and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland in May, 2010.

Jesus Christ . . .

2009-10-07T05:13:00.001-07:00

It's official: Tao Lin is a polymath . . . All hail! "Jesus Christ." (the indie band)!

OMG!

Tao Lin is widely regarded as the Poet Laureate of Generation Y. Carles from HIPSTER RUNOFF blog is widely regarded as the subconscious voice of Generation Y. These two influential voices have come together to form "Jesus Christ." (the indie band).

This is not a band--this is a sound project. Tao and Carles are looking to capitalize on emerging music + audio media markets. The product is intended to be something that you can 'authentically empathize with', more so than a traditional 'indie band.'

"Jesus Christ." (the indie band)'s tentatively titled Is This Really What You Want? EP is 'slated' for a Fall release. The two childhood friends spent 1 month recording the EP in Tao's studio apartment. The EP is a soundscape journey through the challenges of a modern relationship. It will be available digitally, physically, and emotionally.

LISTEN TO THEIR DEBUT SINGLE HERE

Gets Better . . .

2009-10-06T00:45:00.000-07:00

Tao Lin gets better and better.
A Piece of Monologue get better and better.
RSB gets better and better.
Steve Finbow gets better and better.
3AM Press gets better and better.

Steve Finbow . . .

2009-10-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

3AM Magazine have just published an excerpt from Steve Finbow's forthcoming novel Balzac of the Badlands.

"Kalaaya was probably the best of the lot – devastating with Dyson, scrupulous with spic, scintillating with span. Had to let her go, though. The Mermaid – my once, sometime, and present partner – popped by when Kalaaya was buffing my toaster. In the pub a week after Kalaaya started working for me, The Mermaid had asked what Kalaaya looked like and I think I described her as a cross between Barbara Bush and Ho Chi Minh – or a frumpy Imelda Marcos. So, when The Mermaid claps her peepers on this tiny beauty, I’m told to give Kalaaya her marching orders before I get mine."

It's published by the good people at Future Fiction London. You can get your early fix here.

I'm really excited about this novel.

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Monty Cantsin . . .

2009-10-02T05:33:00.000-07:00

Everyday Genius . . .

2009-10-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

I am now the editor of Everyday Genius for the whole of October. We have already had Stuart Evers kicking things off yesterday. Today it's a personal favourite of mine: Steve Finbow (check out his novel Balzac of the Badlands out later this month).

Whilst you are pottering about the pages of Everyday Genius, have a look at their books' catalogue and maybe purchase something. They are publishing some pretty fine writers over there.

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Central Station . . .

2009-10-01T06:43:00.000-07:00

My recent review of Kevin Cummins's 'Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain' in the New Stateman and my interview of Kevin for 3AM Magazine has got me thinking about Manchester again. I kind of miss the place. It's been a decade since I last lived there. All my family still live there. I have recently been looking at youtube for old clips of the Madchester era of my youth. It was heartening to find this footage of Central Station Design. Incidentally, Central Station Design's Karen Jackson, seen in the below footage with Matt and Pat Carroll, is my cousin.

Some Things . . .

2009-09-28T05:02:00.000-07:00

Some things I have been recently doing:

• Writing a review of Brandon Scott Gorrell's 'During My Nervous Breakdown I Want To Have A Biographer Present'
• Buying art
• Buying old picture frames from junk shops
• Looking after our cat Rufus (he broke his leg three weeks ago)
• Making sure Rufus doesn't chase after his sister Arabella too much
• Reading 'The Poetics of Space'
• Writing my next novel 'Amber'
• Writing a chapter of my book 'On Boredom' on Tao Lin's work and lifestyle
• Trying not to eat too much
• Thinking about getting my hair cut
• Buying jeans and a winter woolly jumper
• Reading about LHC and the National Grid
• Reading about catastrophe
• Eating Toblerone (always struck me as odd that a chocolate bar should be named after a ‘10-km long defensive line made of ‘dragon's teeth’ that was built during the second World War between Bassins and Prangins, in the Canton of Vaud, Switzerland.’)
• Going to strange places like Chingford
• Looking after Holly (she’s been ill with a cold)
• Making chowder
• Making bread
• Making French onion soup
• Avoiding alcohol
• Wondering what the cover design for my forthcoming novel ‘The Canal’ will look like
• Reading ‘The Drinker’ by Hans Fallada (reads like Knut Hamsun)
• Loving married life
• Trying to ‘knuckle down’
• Preparing the creative writing classes I will be teaching
• Reading the many submissions I have received for my slot as October’s editor of Everyday Genius
• Preparing the accepted submissions for publication
• Looking forward to working on Will Ashon’s new novel ‘Work’ for 3AM Press.

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Nick Cave . . .

2009-09-17T01:17:00.001-07:00

Between the years 2000-2005 I lived in Brighton, on the south coast. Well, in ‘Hove, actually’. Most days I would see, and literally bump into Nick Cave, who lived just up the road from me (in a much bigger house, obviously). It became quite a regular occurrence, this habitual bumping into Nick Cave. If I was walking down the esplanade on a bitterly cold Sunday morning, there he would be, a vision in black, walking towards me. If I was standing in the queue at the supermarket, I would feel this presence behind me and there he would be, in the same queue, towering over me with his basket of organic goods. If I went to my local café for a coffee, there he would be with his children and wife, reading the paper or talking on the phone. If I went for pasta at the cheap Italian restaurant on Western Road there he would be, eating and drinking wine at the next table laughing and joking with the fat owner. It got to the point where we would politely acknowledge each other, and I imagined to myself in some act of vainglorious pride that he must have been thinking ‘Oh, there’s that pasty little lad again’. In fact, I admired Nick Cave for this, his normality, his ‘everydayness’ . . . I admired it a lot.

Anyway, I live in London now, and don’t bump in to Nick Cave anymore. Here’s a review of his latest book by Steve Mitchelmore.

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The Canal . . .

2009-09-16T05:14:00.000-07:00

My novel The Canal goes into production this week with Melville House. This is something I am extremely excited about. Working with my editor; seeing the book develop; reading through the galleys . . . all of that. I like the contact with a manuscript. I like working on manuscripts. Deleting words here and paragraphs there. Changing the feel of a particular scene, or a snippet of dialogue; tweaking individual sentences until they are just right. It is this process, for me, that makes it all worth while.

In honour of my novel going in to production I have compiled a list detailing 10.5 things I like about the Regent’s Canal in London.

1) The old Wharf at Wenlock Basin
2) The graffiti under the bridges
3) The coots, swans, Canada geese and moorhens
4) The reflection of the tower blocks at De Beauvoir Town in the water just before the Kingsland Road bridge
5) The local children fishing in the dirty, scum ridden locks
6) The wood-burning narrow boats and their smug, sometimes moody occupants
7) Islington tunnel
8) The grooves in the brickwork under the bridges, where the ropes from horse-pulled barges have worn away the brick dating back from the 19th century
9) The group of Russian men who sit on the bench below Gainsborough Studios drinking Vodka until they fall asleep
10) The sound the towpath makes in places when cycling along it at speed
10.5) The silence that can be found there

New Fallada . . .

2009-09-14T11:28:00.001-07:00

Melvile House have just sent me Hans Fallada's 'The Drinker' and 'Little man, what now?' both out in beautiful paperback editions.

Here's a brief bio taken from the Melville House website:

"Before WWII, German writer Hans Fallada's novels were international bestsellers, on a par with those of his countrymen Thoman Mann and Herman Hesse. In America, Hollywood even turned his first big novel, Little Man, What Now? into a major motion picture

Learning the movie was made by a Jewish producer, however, the Nazis blocked Fallada's work from foreign rights sales, and began to pay him closer attention. When he refused to join the Nazi party he was arrested by the Gestapo—who eventually released him, but thereafter regularly summoned him for "discussions" of his work.

However, unlike Mann, Hesse, and others, Fallada refused to flee to safety, even when his British publisher, George Putnam, sent a private boat to rescue him. The pressure took its toll on Fallada, and he resorted increasingly to drugs and alcohol for relief. Not long after Goebbels ordered him to write an anti-Semitic novel he snapped and found himself imprisoned in an asylum for the "criminally insane"—considered a death sentence under Nazi rule. To forestall the inevitable, he pretended to write the assignment for Goebbels, while actually composing three encrypted books—including his tour de force novel The Drinker—in such dense code that they were not deciphered until long after his death.

Fallada outlasted the Reich and was freed at war's end. But he was a shattered man. To help him recover by putting him to work, Fallada's publisher gave him the Gestapo file of a simple, working-class couple who had resisted the Nazis. Inspired, Fallada completed Every Man Dies Alone in just twenty-four days.

He died in February 1947, just weeks before the book's publication."

Bibliography (English Translations):

Little Man, What Now? (tr. Eric Sutton, 1933; tr. Susan Bennett, 1996; tr. ?, 2009); Who Once Eats Out of the Tin Bowl (UK) / The World Outside (US) (tr. Eric Sutton, 1934); Once We Had a Child (tr. Eric Sutton, 1935); An Old Heart Goes A-Journeying By (tr. Eric Sutton, 1936); Sparrow Farm (tr. Eric Sutton, 1937); Wolf Among Wolves (tr. Phillip Owens, 1938); Iron Gustav (tr. Phillip Owens, 1940); The Drinker (tr. Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd, 1952; and tr. ?, 2009); That Rascal, Fridolin (juvenile; tr. R. Michaelis-Jena and R. Ratcliff, 1959); Every Man Dies Alone (US) / Alone in Berlin (UK) (tr. Michael Hofmann, 2009)

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Jim Carroll . . .

2009-09-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

1949 - 2009

Modernist Charm . . .

2009-09-11T04:44:00.000-07:00

Nice to see an early review of the new Gabriel Josipovici titles [via This Space]:

"Despite his reputation for formidable modernist impenetrability, these are effortlessly readable and charming works. They are written almost exclusively in dialogue, frequently of the frothy, cocktail-party sort. Josipovici is especially good not only when gently satirising the self-regard, banality and indirection of such chit-chat, but also in recognising that this is the only way we have of finding out about those we do not know, and unlocking the secrets of those we do."

I'm currently reviewing After & Making Mistakes for The Independent and I'm sure TLS will be reviewing it. Equally different and the same in a multitude of ways, Gabriel Josipovici is up there with JG Ballard for me; our two most necessary writers.

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Competition Time . . .

2009-09-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

*** COMPETITION TIME ***

The publisher of Evie Wyld's exceptional debut After The Fire, A Still Small Voice has sent me two hardback copies for review (check out my forthcoming review in The Independent). So one is up for grabs. I'll even post it to you free of charge. First person to email me the correct answer to the following question gets the book:

Where is After The Fire, A Still Small Voice Set:

a) Oldham

b) Hoboken, New Jersey

c) Australia

Email me at ljrourke9[at]hotmail.com

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Winding Down . . .

2009-09-09T04:36:00.000-07:00

Well, another independent publisher bites the dust [via RSB]. Marion Boyars are selling up to Penguin. Grrr.

A wonderful publisher; with a wonderful history . . . Gone.

Still, I have my first edition Toussaint’s on my shelves. Thanks for introducing me to some wondrous writers over the years. My first experience of Bataille was a Marion Boyars, as was my first Hubert Selby Jr.

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Ellis Sharp . . .

2009-09-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

As Ellis mentions on his recent blog entry, we bumped into each other at the weekend. I was walking back from the newsagents and Ellis was off on his bike. We talked about pylons and his latest book.

Funny that video of me on his blog; it was filmed by my good, good friend and younger brother Matthew Coleman in my old flat. I look scruffy. And fat. I was drinking heavily in that period of my life. But I still love pigeons all the same.

Also, check out Ellis' Wiki page and his letter to Nicholas Lezard (scroll down a couple).

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American Apparel . . .

2009-09-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

My copy of Tao Lin's Shoplifting From American Apparel has arrived from my publisher Melville House. It's a beautifully produced book from their wonderful contemporary novella series.

The book is an exciting read and will firmly cement Tao Lin into American literary history - I'm sure of that. There is a real art to his writing, as pared down and as meaningless as it seems. I hope the book gains sound critical attention. 3AM Magazine, as ever, are one of the first to review it.

Oh, and no, that isn't a real sheep's head.

Addendum:

I was just re-reading the above for some reason and felt that it wasn’t enough. There is something of ‘the other’ in this novella, something that exists outside of the ordinary, established constructs of ‘Literature’ – it reads like something else, something without established order. It is ultimately modern (in the same way Chris Killen’s writing is). Some writers write about the modern world, whereas other writers’ writing is completely modern in its construction, without questioning anything, or overtly portraying something we may have ‘missed’. Sometimes writing exists alone, on its own terms. Tao Lin’s writing is exactly this: it leaves behind the established order of things and leads narrative construct into new territories – I suppose this is why his writing can generate such conflicting opinions in his readers. Which can only be a good thing in my opinion.

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New Month . . .

2009-09-01T15:14:00.000-07:00

It's September already; the year is trundling along. I can't get my head around time; there's so much of it, but I can never seem to grab hold of it. Anyway . . . It's nearly Autumn. I like Autumn. It's by far my favourite season.

I think I'm going to read a novel by a guy called Shane Jones. Everywhere I click on the internet people are telling me to read it. So, I think it's about time I did. Late, as ever. Swayed, moi? Never!

I think people should start to wear one of these at least one day a week. And then buy the book next year.

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Everyday Genius . . .

2009-08-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

For the whole of the month of October I will be the guest editor at Everyday Publishing's litblog Everyday Genius. The current editor is novelist Michael Kimball and a previous guest editor has been artist Stephanie Barber.

I am currently accepting submissions in fiction, poetry and experimental prose. Please send your submissions to me (ljrourke9[at]hotmail.com)before September 20th 2009.

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Balzac's Badlands

2009-08-28T00:13:00.000-07:00

Steve Finbow's new novel is out very soon.

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y . . .

2009-08-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

Tao Lin . . .

2009-08-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

. . . is turning Japanese.

Beckett Speaks . . .

2009-08-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

This is wonderful (via This Space).

Fuck Literature . . .

2009-08-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

sale from lydia davis on Vimeo.

I'll be reviewing this book for 3AM Magazine very soon! I urge people to read Brandon Scott Gorrell.

Pylon Crow . . .

2009-07-31T10:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Steve Finbow.

Getting Hitched . . .

2009-07-08T07:59:00.000-07:00

Off to get married to my beautiful Holly . . . back in a couple of weeks. Lee.

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Winner is . . .

2009-06-30T00:31:00.000-07:00

We have a winner for the Tao Lin competition. I have posted the book to the lucky winner with the instruction that s/he must blog, facebook, twitter about this book.

Anyway, I would like to thank the 38 people who emailed me (5 of which gave me the wrong answer) and the 6 who facebooked me. The correct answer is, indeed, ‘you are a little bit happier than I am’

More competitions soon.

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Competition time . . .

2009-06-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

**COMPETITION TIME**

The first person to email me with the answer to the following question will win a free galley/review copy of Tao lin's novella 'Shoplifting From American Apparel' [Melville House]. My publisher kindly sent me two copies. It's not officially published until September this year, so think of it as a scoop.

Question: What is the title of Tao Lin's first book?

Email your answer to me at ljrourke9 at hotmail.com.

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Productive week . . .

2009-06-26T04:34:00.001-07:00

The end of a rather productive week. I think I’ve finished the final edit of Varroa Destructor (collection of poems). I’m going to put it aside for a couple of weeks and then pick it up again. See how it reads. If I like it then it’ll see the light of day, I hope.

I have just spent the last couple of days interviewing Heidi James about her debut novel Carbon that’s out on the wonderful BLATT. I read this novel last year and it’s a wonderful exploration of language, greed and disappointment. I really hope this becomes something; it deserves massive, widespread attention. It’s an important book. And the cover is beautiful too. BLATT always have high production values on all of their titles.

I have been thinking of ways to drum up sales for Everyday but so far have thought of nothing. I’m no Tao Lin (the master when it comes to self-publicity). Ah well, never mind.

I’ve got the weekend now to help Holly with our wedding preparation (a mere two weeks away) and to read more about LHC and also about cabin decompression in civil aircraft.

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Massive cascade . . .

2009-06-22T05:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve been so very tired lately; falling asleep on public transport and things like that. At precisely 11.03 AM each day a massive cascade of drowsiness descends upon me that lasts until about 1.00 PM. During this period I eat fruit, in the vain hope that it will fill me with energy, as much of it as I can muster (luckily I get all my fresh fruit for free (another story)). Then it shifts and mostly returns about 4.30 PM. I think my cells are either a) deteriorating b) dying (same thing?), or c) metamorphosising in that strange cyclical way they do from time to time throughout one's life. Who knows? Hopefully the new ‘me’ will be back sometime soon.

Having finished Roubaud I’m now reading Thomas Bernhard’s Frost. I’m about 100 pages in. I’m gripped by its intensity. It’s such an intense book. I have no thoughts about it as yet, but I get the feeling that once the book is done and dusted, myriad thoughts will come flooding in after the book has been put down.

In light of this intensity I was looking about the world wide web for lighter things to amuse me and, well, I found this:

Gained World . . .

2009-06-19T02:40:00.001-07:00

One thing I do often is re-read Gabriel Josipovici’s ‘Everything Passes’. It is possibly one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. And one of our most crucial, in terms of where we should sit as writers/readers. Josipovici has shown his disappointment in British literary fiction on many occasions, but nothing has been as damning as the following extract from ‘Everything Passes’:

“—Rabelais, he says, is the first writer of the age of print. Just as Luther is the last writer of the manuscript age. Of course, he says, without print Luther would have remained a simple heretical monk. Print, he says, scooping up the froth from his cup, made Luther the power he became, but essentially he was a preacher, not a writer. He knew his audience and wrote for it. Rabelais, though, he says, sucking his spoon, understood what this new miracle of print meant for the writer. It meant you had gained the world and lost your audience. You no longer knew who was reading you or why. You no longer knew who you were writing for or even why you were writing. Rabelais, he says, raged at this and laughed at it and relished it, all at the same time.”

For me the importance is in the phrase: “It meant you had gained the world and lost your audience.” I suppose the ‘audience’ here is the other slope of Literature (the sort of Literature the critic Mark Thwaite succinctly labelled ELF): that which governs all plot, narrative, and characterisation. In other words, all the tropes of Literature that do not – even though we are told they do – re-tell our being-in-the-world. This audience expects it to always be told a certain way, a way that is neatly packaged and easy to understand, in a clever ‘Literary’ fashion (such a fashion also injects the reader with a sense of ‘cleverness’ that, I suppose, is crucial to this slope’s popularity). I guess when Josipovici states that in forgetting about this audience he [Rabelais] ‘gained the world’ this world is not only the world of Literature, but the real world around us. The real world is not neatly packaged, and easy to understand, it is fragmented and unquestionably difficult. When, for example William Burroughs stated that walking down the street is just like a cut-up he was right.

Literature is our world, our maddening, topsy-turvy, disordered and mystifying world. Literature should be difficult in this way, it should, like the things, the big things around us, be hard to understand. This is how we gain the real world in Literature.

For me, the importance of all writing is in this forgetting of the audience.

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A Novella . . .

2009-06-18T07:24:00.001-07:00

My publisher Melville House sent me a review copy of Tao Lin’s next book the other day. It’s a novella. It’s really, really good, in an odd, askew kind of way. I’m beginning to think that Tao Lin is well on his way to becoming an important writer. For all sorts of reasons really, many of which will annoy people who read Establishment Literary Fiction and can never see past it. Anyway, look out for Tao’s book when it hits the shops in September.

My internet access has crashed. So things might be patchy here until it is fixed.

Got a lot of writing to do (novel).

I missed the launch of ‘Caught by the River’ the other day. My review of this beguiling book is due in The Independent at some point very soon.

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