"a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art"

Coming soon courtesy of Blackheath Books, a collection of sea shanties, drunken laments and cautionary tales written whilst floating down the gutter.

The Spiritualist

"Ghosts are as they lived. Some are snobs. Some wish to be celebrities. Some are intolerable bores who only want to speak about themselves, weaving vastly inflated accounts of their lives and their deaths. Most just function, spend their eternity in a state of quiet desperation, not really doing much. Some are accountants. Some still stampede into sales and gaze longingly in the reflections of shop windows. Some have lingering nicotine addictions and float around ceilings in smoke riptides. On rare occasions, they can still surprise. A railway conductor, with his jaw missing seeking tickets. A blood-spattered drunk shrieking for a drink in a crowded bar. The ghosts of cavemen running petrified from motorways..."

Short story "The Spiritualist" on the spiffing Lee Rourke-curated Everyday Genius site.

”You remember Davies? He died, you know..."

"RS Thomas was many things but a barrel of laughs was not one of them. He had a seemingly permanent scowl and foreboding air that, as was often-commented, seemed to fit his thin undertaker-style frame. An ordained Anglican priest, he tended to parishes in the dark interior and storm-lashed peninsulas of Wales, the weather and remoteness matching and amplifying his stern character. He was fond of bird-watching, much less so of human beings. An unapologetic Luddite, he banned electrical appliances from his home and delivered rambling diatribes from his pulpit against such things as televisions, microwave ovens and fridges, all of which he saw as the devil’s work.

His depiction of Wales was never likely to make it into a tourist brochure (his is a country of inbreeding, rotting carrion and endless rain). Yet he proudly counted himself as a nationalist, refusing to vote for Plaid Cymru as they recognised English authority and advocating the burning of holiday homes, whose absentee owners were pricing locals out of existence in their own land. So remarkably contrary was his nature, that it comes almost as an aside that RS Thomas happened to be one of the 20th century’s finest poets."

- RS Thomas, the Clint Eastwood of the Spirit.

"today is the day when the streets are full of hearses..."

“Leave everything… Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.”

David Gascoyne, Surrealism and the Vanishing Muse @ 3:AM.

Stations of the Cross

“An autobiography is only to be trusted” George Orwell once wrote, “when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” With Last Days of the Cross, Joseph Ridgwell, bastard son of Arturo Bandini and the Artful Dodger, admirably rises (or perhaps sinks) to the challenge... Misery, debauchery, destitution, thwarted dreams and the burning resolve of the damned. Last Days of the Cross has it all in abundance. It is also one of the funniest books you’ll read this year."

Review of Joseph Ridgwell's Last Days of the Cross over on 3:AM Magazine.

For the Discerning Bibliophile...

"Not content to get into bed with Tangerine Press for a special collaborative issue in June 09, Beat the Dust have only gone and done the same with Blackheath Books now an’ all – tart! Run by Geraint Hughes, Blackheath Books is that rarest of things - an artisan publisher with an ethical approach to book-making and a love of books and great writing. Providing ‘a home for the literary outsider’, each limited edition, signed copy is hand-crafted using 100% recycled paper and card. For this special Blackheath Books edition of BTD, then, we have some of the latest work from a selection of Blackheath authors…

Featuring sample writing from Blackheath stablemates Billy Childish, Adelle Stripe, Joseph Ridgwell, Ben Myers, Jenni Fagan, Miles J Bell, Darran Anderson, Vic Templar, Garrie Fletcher, Graham Bendel and an interview with head honcho Geraint Hughes.

The Ship is Sinking

"Everyone knows where they were when Walt Disney defrosted. When Joan of Arc crawled from the ashes. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. First, there was the small matter of dying. And we all had to do it."

Novel The Ship is Sinking and poetry collection Tesla's Ghost to follow soon...

(picture courtesy of Caireen Burns)

The Man with the Gallows Eyes

Billy Childish, the finest artist and moustache-curator of our times has released his new collection of poems and spirituals Unknowable But Certain with the mighty Blackheath Books.

Needless to say, each book is a work of art, crafted from the finest Welsh hemp using the latest Victorian technology and then thigh-pressed by 72 successive virgins. (Tesla's Ghost and the magnificent Adelle Stripe's latest collection to follow from Blackheath, watch this space).

8/1/1949 - 9/11/2009

One of the greatest fucking writers on this planet has died.
Jim Carroll Rest In Peace.

Death of a Ladies Man

"Bunny Munro is an ultra-lech. An alpha-lech. He lives out those fantasies of irresistibility and unaccountability that are harboured even in the dimmest of minds. It doesn’t matter that in every one of his debauched episodes, there’s already traces of depression, pangs of decline, a stud turning… Stringfellow. Bunny is obsessed with sex to the point it goes beyond sex and becomes something approaching the demented, the hallucinatory. He sees women as Hans Bellmer dolls or as disembodied floating genitalia. In one memorably depraved scene, he looks out upon women in a park on a summer’s day and instead sees a seething cornucopia of flesh. In another, “he thinks with a sudden terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.”

Reviewing Nick Cave's new novel The Death of Bunny Munro over on 3:AM Magazine.

On a completely different note, have an article in this month's Verbal Magazine (available as pdf file online or in print via The Derry Journal and Belfast News for those in the north) on forgotten female Irish writers (including the anti-Cecilia Aherne the great Lola Ridge) that was written for International Women's Day but fell through the cracks.

"A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides for the wisdom of serene old age." So went President De Valera's vision for the new Irish state, broadcast over the radio to the nation on St Patrick's Day 1943. By implication, De Valera was also outlining what his Ireland would not be. In effect, cosmopolitanism and enlightenment would be sacrificed for a sleepy parochial version of Ireland. That this idealised land of “comely maidens” and “cosy homesteads” had never existed before (nor ever really could given human nature) was beside the point. It was just the acceptable face of the prevailing puritan streak in Church and State, the same smothering conservatism that had driven the nation's greatest cultural figures to take refuge abroad (Joyce, Wilde, Beckett, Yeats) or in the undeclared free-thinking republic that were the bars of Dublin (Behan, Kavanagh, O'Brien) or even the grave as in the sad disgraceful case of Charles Stewart Parnell. Within this blueprint, the role of women would largely follow the German model of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). The idea of Kathleen Ni Houlihan as Ireland's poetic embodiment had less to do with any high opinion of women and more to do with placing them safely on a pedestal, out of sight out of mind, a sort of silencing by romanticising. Thankfully, there have been plenty of fearless female writers prepared to subvert stereotypes, create unique visions at great personal cost and who, despite everything, refuse to be written out of history."

PS Thanks to Kevin Williamson, Jenni Fagan, Word Power and everyone who showed up at the recent reading for a great night.

Beyond the Fringe

Coming up for air to report, I'll be reading this month as part of the Edinburgh Book Fringe with two sterling writers: Jenni Fagan (Urchin Belle) and Kevin Williamson (In a Room Darkened, Rebel Inc). Given Rebel Inc's the reason I started trying to write, it's a pleasure to be appearing alongside Kevin and I can't recommend Jenni's poetry chapbook Urchin Belle enough - it's published by Blackheath Books.

The original plan of the reading consisting of the telling of lies, slanders and idle drunken boasts has been substituted for a rambling diatribe about writing from the ditch (from Rimbaud onwards) and some stuff from the forthcoming poetry thing Tesla's Ghost and maybe a wee bit of the novel The Ship is Sinking.

Anyways it's at 4 o'clock next Saturday at Word Power so anyone kicking around the festival feel free to stop by (Edwyn Collins is on before us and Tom Leonard the night before both of which I'd highly recommend), pretty sure we'll be having a few ales in The Pear Tree opposite afterwards.

On the topic of the festival, in the absence of the Spiegeltent, this year the Assembly Rooms seem to be offering the best gigs. Check out Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, Camille O'Sullivan, Circa, Jason Byrne and friends' late night show and the Pajama Men, all of whom have been brilliant this year. Thomas Truax's forthcoming Steampunk night The Arrival of Airship R1001 at te POOKa and Amanda Palmer at the Picturehouse will be well worth frequenting. Tally ho.

The Indian Rope Trick

Considering the phenomenon of the disappearing writer from Poe to Saint-Exupéry via Rimbaud over on 3:AM Magazine




"At the heart of every writer lies a paradox. Whereas the other art-forms (music, theatre and film in particular) have a natural communal element, writing necessitates a monkish solitude but also a desperate clawing desire for recognition. The turbulence between these two states is the stuff that can make or break a person. Added to this are life’s natural disasters and the neuroses/bohemianism of creative types which have blazed a trail of glory and destruction from John Clare through Sylvia Plath and d.a. levy to David Foster Wallace. Whereas every successful writer’s path is more or less the same, every doomed one has a unique tale to tell..."

Plus there's a short piece on the decline of the modern love song and a celebration of the late great Arab Strap on Friday I'm In Love

"Since the heyday of Motown and Brill Building, the conventional love song has been in terminal decline, ending its days senile, piss-stained and pleasuring itself in that circle of Dante’s Hell known as the Tesco music aisle. Attention must turn leftfield then, to those who address affairs of the heart from a more discerning angle, with a hint of surrealism or debauchery or the gutter. The great love songs of our age have been a diverse fare; Nick Cave bashing a muse’s skull in by a river, Tom Waits singing sea shanties to hookers, Kate Bush hunted by wolves and Leonard Cohen receiving head in the Chelsea hotel. It’s found in the sordid and haunting affairs of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mark Lanegan and Smog. It can have a backdrop of Stalinism (Bowie’s ‘Heroes’), depression (Tindersticks’ ‘Travelling Light’), narcotics (Spiritualized’s ‘I Think I’m in Love’), the loneliness of telecommunications maintenance workers (Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’), paedophilia (Gainsbourg’s ‘Ballade de Melody Nelson’), sadomasochism (the Velvets’ ‘Venus in Furs’) or even the holocaust (Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘In an Aeroplane over the Sea’).

There were few finer practitioners of the dark arts of the soul than Falkirk’s finest Arab Strap; named appropriately and romantically enough after a cock ring. And ‘The Shy Retirer’ is arguably their finest moment, a lament and celebration of a fleeting moment when boy meets girl in nightclub, both off their faces on disco biscuits. A doomed moment of letting go and transcending all the shite of the everyday even if it is a temporary or illusionary reprieve, “Another bloated disco, another sniff of romance I’ll forget / we promised to ourselves before we came out we’d do something we regret / these people are your friends / this cunted circus never ends / I won’t remember anything you say.”

Gone fishing...

Back soon with news of some long-term projects/acts of folly I've been working on. In the meantime, check out Flotsam & Jetsam: a compendium of all things rum and uncanny.

This is a Low

The Shipping Forecast, cow-killing and imbeciles on camping trips over on Dogmatika

"To prepare ourselves for a Jim Morrison-esque mystical journey, we’d ingested magic mushrooms on the bus down which led to nothing more transcendental than bowel spasms and gut-wrenching nausea. We chose the location having been chased away from our favoured spots of Swan Park in Buncrana by a criminally insane horse (reputedly someone had wrenched their own finger off on a fence trying to get away during one of its episodes) and having been flooded staying in the Meegees (no relation). We were thus driven to the edge of the world."

"Where he's from the birds sing a pretty song..."

Review of Thomas Truax's superb new album Songs From the Films of David Lynch on Dogmatika alongside poems from Paul Perry and Susan Tomaselli's roundup of all thing alt-lit.

"Through accident or design, Thomas Truax has so far successfully avoided absorption into the colonic tract that is the mainstream, amassing a considerable following in the process. It’s a folly to attempt to pigeonhole such singular and changeable a style though some do (Anti-folk? Steampunk? Truaxian?). His is music constructed from clockwork and junkyard cast-offs, instruments seemingly fashioned from bits of bicycles, gramophones and washing machines. He takes the stage half-crackpot inventor – half bedlam escapee, armed with a briefcase filled with instruments with names like the Hornicator and Mary Poppins (built from “spoons, aerodynamics, centrifugal force, a motorcycle headlamp and a playing card”). He sings songs about being inside the internet, hunted butterflies and the doomed space-music producer Joe Meek. To his fans, he issues The Wowtown News in which he reports local happenings, from dark tales of spider families and groundhogs baptised Al Camus to ominous headlines such as “Continued Meteor Rain, Roach Exodus” and “The Bee Bonnet Plague.” By admission, his primary influences are “toxins in the water supply.”

From the Bowels of Londinium They Came...

Following the success of the recent London Recession Session night (featuring the likes of Tom McCarthy, Paul Ewen, Lee Rourke, Christiana Spens and many more), Beat The Dust is now running the various stories, speeches, poems and slanders online along with some footage of the night (minus the organiser Melissa Mann, Will Ashon and myself as our moving images cannot be captured due to a thousand year old Carpathanian Gypsy curse placed on the heads of our peasant forefathers - the tape got chewed or something).

Still there are photos of my grotesque visage and some much more pleasing to the eye from the night here. And the writer Sam Jordison has kindly reviewed the shindig for 3:AM Magazine.

Here's a quote from it (which I intend to have etched on my gravestone) - "A person has to have something going for him if he can introduce himself by saying “My name’s Darran Anderson, apologies for the hair” and then tell a story about masturbating in front of traffic and how JG Ballard had put him up to such depravity."

Death becomes him

Pondering the afterlife and David Eagleman's remarkable Sum on Dogmatika.

Sum is written as a series of short philosophical propositions or flash fictions, each beginning at the point at which you die. In "The Cast," you are destined to play a cameo role in someone else’s dream. The curse of fame is explored in "Metamorphosis" in which you only truly die when your name is spoken for the last time and you have to stay in a waiting room until that day. In "Circle of Friends," you return to a sparse world that only contains people you’ve met. The pitfalls of reincarnation, as a kind of anti-evolution, are considered in "Descent of Species." We encounter a creator so terrifying the afterlife should be spent as silently as possible ("Giantess"). We find out God’s favourite book is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (suggesting we are his monsters). God is a microbe who has no knowledge of our existence or we are cancer cells in God’s body. God absconds and leaves his angels to riot and go to war with each other over where he is. There are pit-stops at The Wizard of Oz, surveillance culture, the Big Bang, cartography, the perils of technological progress and a world where all the old defunct Gods live out mundane lives. It is to his considerable credit that Eagleman makes these outlandish ideas seem not only vaguely plausible (at least as much as traditional concepts of heaven or hell) but genuinely riveting...

Mayakovsky Lives!

Comrades!

Workers!

Stinking lackeys of the Capitalist West!

The third installment of the Van Gogh's Ear column featuring Vladimir Mayakovsky is now over on 3:AM.

На здоpовье!

Writers are given to writing manifestos in bars and garrets, heady with wine and death or glory. It’s the dynamic force in art. Mayakovsky and his fellow upstarts would defile their temples and their relics. Set themselves up as barbarians at the gates. It is every radical artist’s role from the poetes maudits to the punks, to attack all but the outlaws of their parent’s generation. What faster track to greatness than to slay some giants?

Not Waving

Interview with Paul O'Connell creator of the superb Sound of Drowning now on Dogmatika.

DA: There’s been a trend for British and Irish writers/artists to be let loose on traditional US comic characters and reinvent/deconstruct them. If you could take on any beloved comic character who would it be and what direction do you think you’d take them in?

PO’C: I’m afraid I think of superheroes as a bit like the colourful and sometimes vaguely entertaining population of a retirement-home cum psycho-geriatric ward. So that’s probably where I’d put them all, losing their marbles and fighting incontinence. Nothing would ever really happen beyond an endless routine of feeding, washing and toileting. It wouldn’t be very interesting or meaningful but then I reckon that’s pretty much keeping things true to the genre. When people start talking about superheroes in any depth it’s like a part of my soul freezes over...

London Calling

"A 3:AM, Beat the Dust, Lost Elation Showcase:

Some of the best minds of our generation take on the summer of discontent in The Recession Session Live! Readings, DJ sets, and a burlesque act, including: Tom McCarthy, Stewart Home, Chris Killen, Paul Ewen, Danny King, Lee Rourke, Tim Wells, Darran Anderson, Mark SaFranko, David Oprava, Vic Templar, Jenni Fagan, Christiana Spens, hosted by Steve Finbow, Joseph Ridgwell & Melissa Mann - plus Cherri Shakewell.

From 7:30pm until late, 24th April 2009

Downstairs at The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road London EC1R 3BL."

drowning the sorrows

Interview with Patrick deWitt, author of the excellent new novel Ablutions, now on Dogmatika.

"I’ve found [the drinkers'] reasons to be unique, though usually stemming from one type of loneliness or another, the need to share space and time with other people. More specifically: some wanted to be entertained, some wanted to be the entertainers; some wanted sex, some wanted violence; some wanted to lie, some wanted to be lied to; and some simply wanted to become drunken without the interruptions or interferences of home. I felt a good many were hoping to re-create an environment of group friendship, and though this was largely false, it was similar enough to satisfy the urge."


ABLUTIONS Preview UK from Patrick deWitt on Vimeo.

Shitehawks at the diner

The latest issue of the cool as fuck Flux Magazine is just out and features the likes of Grandmaster Flash, Benda Bilili, Limi Feu, Stanley Kubrick and my sorry ass as featured fiction writer (the story in question "33" being inspired by an Edward Hopper painting). The issue is available via their website and all good stockists (WH Smith for one).

Murder, she wrote

In advance of their new album Honey Moon, Rennie Sparks (of the wonderful Handsome Family) discusses William Burroughs, love, ghosts and murder ballads with some kind of vagrant (ie. me) now on Dogmatika

“That kind of thinking drives me crazy. It shows a complete lack of understanding regarding the purpose and possibilities of art in general. Murder ballads are nothing like real murder. They are rituals to celebrate the fleeting beauty of all things.”

Going underground

Interview with John Wray (author of the freshly released Lowboy) now showing on Dogmatika (alongside badass writing from Cathi Unsworth and Alan Kelly).

"In much the same way that Canaan’s Tongue was an exorcism of my anger at the American military-industrial apparatus, Lowboy was begun in the hope of channeling my anxiety about climate change into something outside of myself, and thereby loosening its grip on me somewhat. I was having recurring nightmares about it at the time that I began the book, and they did, in fact, grow steadily less frequent as I worked. During daylight hours I’m still shitting my pants, however."

The Last Words of Dutch Schultz

Following last month's Rimbaud column, the second part of Van Gogh's Ear, celebrating writing's greatest scumbags and deviants, is now online on 3:AM Magazine.

This month, it's the turn of the bullet-riddled mobster-poet Dutch Schultz

Poets come in all sorts of guises from misanthropic librarians to paranoid megalomaniacs. Few were as unlikely or unintentional as the bootlegger born Arthur Flegenheimer. Even by the standards of the time, Dutch Schultz was a piece of work. He’d risen from a being an errand boy to stick-up artist to organised crime boss through simple Darwinian ruthlessness, all delivered with a personal and sickening touch. When a rival Irish gangster Joe Rock objected to him muscling in on his territory, Schultz had him kidnapped, hung from a meathook and tortured, personally rubbing gonorrhoea pus into the hostage’s eyes, permanently blinding him. Another adversary was found with his heart cut out. Outflanked by business rivals though and too unpredictable to instil mass loyalty, Schultz’s reign was as brief as it was terrible.

Spying in on police frequencies, the paparazzi soon arrived at the blood-strewn eatery and began taking photos of the crime scene before the wounded had even made it to the ambulance. Underestimating the severity of their wounds, Schultz heckled the photographers and tried to bribe the paramedics while Rosencrantz demanded milkshakes. Given their injuries and the rusted bullets used by their assailants, they were in effect already dead, they just hadn’t realised it yet. Before he expired, Schultz bestowed on the world a lasting gift, a dispatch from the edge of life, in the form of a rambling stream of consciousness monologue. Without it, he would have remained just another arcane name of the mobster era like Cockeye Dunn, Tight-Lips Gusenberg or the Terrible Gennas. Instead, the lowlife got his moment of high art, his own cubist-opera recital to rival Molly Bloom or Tristan Tzara.

Fuck the word the word is dead

A new-look Dogmatika has been relaunched (courtesy of Susan Tomaselli) with interviews with the likes of Tom Bradley and N Frank Daniel, a new music column from Peter Wild as well as reviews and features on all things alt-lit.

Also glad to report the pleasure of contributing a short story (and some fashion advice) to the latest issue of Beat the Dust, as introduced by editorial supremo Melissa Mann:

"...Beat the Dust is now LIVE and breaking obscenity laws from here to Wyoming - ha, well sort of. Yes, we threw down the gauntlet to the underground writing community in a bid to create a themed litzine issue to end all themed litzine issues. The result? Well it's definitely the most experimental edition of Beat the Dust, that's for damn sure. The pieces themselves or the circumstances of the writer, address the theme either literally or in more subtle ways. Hopefully part of the fun in reading this month's issue, will be working out the link to the theme. We've got poetry, short fiction and commentary from Karl Koweski, Tim Wells, Will Ashon, David E Oprava, Justin Hyde, Jeff North, Darran Anderson, David McLean, Misti Rainwater-Lites, Ford Dagenham, Travis Jeppesen, Kevin Williamson, Joolz Denby and the inspiration for the issue herself, Patti Smith. We also have a story told without words from documentary photographer, Neil White and words you can hear but can't see from singer-songwriter, Boo Hewerdine."

"If you only knew how much of a fuckwit you look with that fish."

Sue Carroll and Carole Malone take your wretched faces and begone - 3:AM Magazine are running the first part of a new column entitled Van Gogh's Ear charting the heights and depths of alt-poetry and cult literature starting with the writer, explorer, absinthe drinker, dog-deflowerer and general crazed little bastard, the great Arthur Rimbaud. Next time, I'll be ranting about Johnny Foreigner coming over taking our jobs and women, celebrity cellulite and how Kappa kids should be forced to undertake national service.

Kicking drama from past to the present

From a straitjacket-bound Antonin Artaud to a whiskey-sodden Brendan Behan heckling his own plays, Verbal Magazine are running the second part of my brief history of Irish Theatre in their latest issue - No22 (released in print yesterday but available shortly to download as pdf from the site).

Fencing a rough place

Back from the dead ("They're coming to get you, Barbara"), the Irish culture and heritage site Aughty have kindly republished an article I did a while back on rural poetry in the north of Ireland. It's available to download on pdf here.

"Modern rural verse can be traced back to one defining work: The Great Hunger written in 1942 by the Monaghan poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967). This epic poem liberated Irish verse from the Yeatsian world of fairies and noble peasants, showing rural life as brutal, tragic, bitter, euphoric, indeed everything it actually is rather than the romanticised view of old. Kavanagh had the nerve to include a hero without any heroic qualities, Paddy Maguire, a character who should ‘neither be damned or glorified,’ who struggles through a futile existence on his farm, who is doomed to an empty, celibate life and who, ‘said whatever came into his head / And inconsequently sang / While his world withered away.’

In alternating tones of anger, joy and despair, Kavanagh explodes the myth, the lie that ‘the peasant has no worries / In his little lyrical fields / He ploughs and sows.’

Though it is a work of tragedy, it is filled with remarkable images (‘potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move’) and even in its despair it has a sharp edge of humour from, ‘O Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever’ to the description of Maguire’s dream, ‘to clean his arse / With perennial grass / On the bank of some summer stream.’

The authorities confirmed the poem’s revolutionary power when they saw fit to have Kavanagh’s house raided and have it seized. Nonetheless, it got out and Irish poetry would never be the same again."

From man to hatstand.

Interview with Chris Killen, author of the superb new novel The Bird Room, now on Dogmatika.

(Ben Myers reviews the book over on 3:AM).


Here's an excerpt:

The Bird Room is released and is so successful a range of toy action models are made of Christopher Killen. The merchandising department wish to know what your superpower is or would be?



CK: "Social Awkwardness Man."

I have the following abilities:

* To stop a conversation dead.

* To accidentally alienate myself/others/everyone.

* To sense that someone within a 100-mile radius is either not being included in a conversation, or being spoken about, within earshot, in a derogatory manner (however I don't the ability to do anything about it except cringe).

An American Nightmare - The US versus Nelson Algren

Reassessing a lost legend:

Nelson Algren had it all. A bestselling novelist, he was critically acclaimed for his edgy and urban exposes of the age's underworld and had the Hollywood studios knocking at the door. Yet just a decade later, he stood at the brink of madness and suicide, shunned by associates, blacklisted by publishers and washed up as a major author. It's arguably the most precipitous decline of any modern writer but how did it happen and how did history resurrect the poet laureate of life on the skids?

When he released the killer combination of Never Come Morning, The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On The Wild Side in the late forties, it seemed to herald Algren as a major creative force in American literature. So successfully did he recreate the lives lived amidst the flophouses, speakeasies, drunktanks, whorehouses and shooting galleries, that those very terms have become utterly synonymous with the writer. Though he had mixed feelings about the film version of his junkie tale The Man with the Golden Arm (featuring ol' blue eyes himself), it was a crucial breakthrough in cinema history, injecting (excuse the pun) a new and vital realism to a world that had been traditionally treated as cartoonish, crass and neurotic (see Reefer Madness). Hubert Selby Jnr, Tarantino, Frank Miller's Sin City and a thousand other chroniclers of scuzzballs, lowlifes and grafters would no doubt acknowledge their debt to the man.

Staring into the abyss

To celebrate the launch of Bookkake, we're considering the rise and fall of the literary nasty from Sodom to the Third Reich over on Dogmatika.

The well of transgressive literature is deep and, like the human psyche it reflects, bad things lurk there. Fiction that dares to broach the subjects others flinch at (whether to locate a greater truth, as an act of attention-seeking or just for the hell of it) has a rich if often concealed history. We live in an age where supposed sin is omnipotent, our senses have numbed to it and everything, no matter how debauched, is for sale.

We can look back with a certain grave smugness upon our primitive ancestors who were sheltered and oversensitive enough to be outraged by the likes of Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Molly Bloom’s fantasies. The fact is our liberal assumptions are not as solid as we would like to think and every now and then a work can come along that slips under our guarded sense of irony and seen-it-all-before complacency, books that question the consensus and test how genuine our devotion to free speech really is. Admittedly, in the past creating mass outrage was an easier thing to achieve. Deconstructionism, postmodernism, whatever you want to call it, came around and it was hip to exhibit any emotion except shock. For a time, disgust was the only sin left. But if the last decade has shown anything it’s that the old reactionary bastions of Church and State were written off much much too prematurely and they’ve awoke full of storm and thunder at their funerals. Now free speech is not something to be taken for granted, whether you're a children's writer or a "lyrical terrorist". There aint no doubt about it - battle has resumed.

All whirlwind heat and flash

Short review of The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, now out on Serpent's Tail.

This dark, uplifting, violent, poetic and macabre collection may make as little sense as one of Sonic Youth's albums but sense be damned for it's just as stirring and memorable as their finest work. With the ghost of the music ever-present and the lyrics bleeding into the stories as they have into the lives of the writers, the stories satisfy and tantalise in equal measure, each freshly-discovered severed human hand, ghost, sex shop, revolutionary heiress and molotov cocktail, each remarkable story and unique spin on a song, like every great record is a beginning and not an end in itself.

Interview with James Kelman

Had the pleasure of meeting the writer James Kelman a few months ago and 3:AM are now running the resulting occasionally prickly interview. It's hard to avoid hyperbole but for me the man's work is pretty much unsurpassed amongst contemporary writers and a fiery antidote to the bourgeois horseshit the literary establishment largely peddles.

"The crucial factor is the ability to earn a living, this is what is taken from writers who work on/from the margins. Your question suggests it is a fair go, an even fight, or some such nonsense. It isn’t. One side has power and authority and the other doesn’t. One has the power to stop the other from earning a living. It is better to be acknowledged as a writer than have to continue proving it all the time."

Jammin' in the name of the (dark) lord

Dazed and Confused has done a mini-feature on the Lit-jam we did for Beat the Dust.

In the same issue, there's an interview with Tony O'Neill and a tribute to David Foster Wallace written by Lee Rourke.

It goes:

Literary Jam Session: Beat the Dust

Featuring figureheads from the Brutalists and the Offbeat Generation, online litzine Beat the Dust recently celebrated their first year in the business by throwing in an improvised exploration of collective creative writing - where each one had to write a short story in relay, with the order selected at random. Beginning with the question "What's so special about Kansas?" the 5,600 word story jumps between Doppelganger-populated scenes, muses on causality, spatial and temporal schism, a bipolar Kansas City, and features cameos from Moby Dick's Ploynesian harpoonist Queepueg and Burrough's Dr Benway. Brilliant, but you have got to feel sorry for poor old Toto as Dorothy accidentally sucks the canine up into a Dyson hoover. - William Alderwick.

"On the threshold of another trembling world"

Bobby Sand's, Hunger and How to make a Nation Disappear over on 3:AM Magazine.

Split knuckles bathed in warm water. An orderly sloshing bleach and urine back into the cells. A snowflake melting on the skin of a prisoner. Each close-up is harrowing and oddly beautiful in equal measure. Treat us like animals the prisoners wordlessly say and we will actualise this for you. It is almost an artistic statement in itself and the prisoner’s almost artists, holding the cracked mirror up to a rotten society with the only things they have left - their bodies and their waste. Piero Manzoni may have done it for satirical effect and the money, the blanketmen paradoxically did it for their dignity.

See also an excellent interview on there between Andrew Gallix and Tony O'Neill, Melissa Mann's "We Are At War" plus Andrew Stevens talks to Danny King.

Hunger trailer

The Abbey and the Fine Art of Rioting

"A cacophony of boos broke out. Someone began playing a trumpet. The lead actor Fay tried to calm the dissenters down, even offering them their money back. Seemingly without reason, one man stood up and punched his neighbour square in the face.

Before long the commotion spread and the crowd transformed into a mob of “howling devils.” Synge sat rooted to his chair as some demanded his lynching. Eventually, a handful of police entered the hall and began making arrests. The curtain fell and the agitated crowd dispersed, making it to Westmoreland Street before a brawl broke out again. Yeats soon received a second telegram from Lady Gregory, "Play broke up in disorder at the word 'shift'."

Underwear-inspired riots, dustbin-dwellers, hounded dandies and tee-totalitarianists, the first part of my brief history of Irish theatre is now in print and online in this month's Verbal Magazine (see pdf files on left hand side - Verbal 19).

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL ABOUT KANSAS? IN AUDIO AND ON iTUNES

"October's special birthday edition of Beat the Dust, a story written in relay by ten writers from the Brit Lit scene is now available as a podcast. Words by Brutalists Tony O’Neill and Ben Myers and various OffBeat Generation-type people - Lee Rourke, Paul Ewen, Chris Killen, Steve Finbow, Darran Anderson (whoop whoop), Jenn Ashworth, Matthew Coleman and Paul Kavanagh; music by Beethoven, voice BTD ed's own, hair by Herbal Essences."

To listen to this month's lit jam story 'What's So Special About Kansas?, go here me droogies.

Oh and while we're about it, the Beat the Dust Podcast Series is now available on iTunes.

Jim's episode

Short story "St Ides" now showing over on new lit site Parasitic.

"It’d been three weeks since Jim’s episode. Though he was my cousin by birth, he was a brother to me. Least we hated each other the way brothers do. We got on like a cross on fire most of the time. His mother had an ongoing and well-documented problem with the drink. But he was blood. It’s hard to say if I knew him anymore than anyone else. We lived under the same roof but he spent a lot of time on his own. Liked setting fire to things. That I did notice..."

infinite number of monkeys + infinite number of typewriters =

Rousing myself from my sickbed to report the release of Beat the Dust's special birthday edition in which the finest young British and Irish writers (and myself) have collaborated on a story together entitled What's so special about Kansas?
Check out the site and the message below for full details (podcast version to follow). Now Igor, start the machine!

"To celebrate one year on the underground lit scene, we have a special edition of BTD this month. We brought together ten of the leading lights from the Brit Lit scene for a Literary Jam session to see what impact team-working and improvisation would have on the creative writing process.

The writers who took part were Brutalists Tony O’Neill and Ben Myers and various members of the OffBeat Generation - Lee Rourke, Paul Ewen, Chris Killen, Steve Finbow, Darran Anderson, Jenn Ashworth, Matthew Coleman and Paul Kavanagh.

The short story we've created - WHAT'S SO SPECIAL ABOUT KANSAS? - has now been posted along with specially commissioned mock obituaries and author pics. To see how well the writers performed as a team and what effect collaboration and improvisation had on the writing, go to Beat the Dust and read the issue online or in a printable Chapbook form. We were aiming for extreme creativity and the odd spark of genius from this seat of the pants approach to writing. Did we achieve it? You decide…



PS Check out Beat the Dust's excellent new online bookstore for some choice cult-lit selections.

Waking the Undead

"So there are no vampires in Transylvania? No Count Dracula?"

"Fictions, my friend. The vulgar fictions of a demented Irishman."

There's a features piece of mine on Dracula, vampires and the often-overlooked Dubliner Bram Stoker in the latest issue of Verbal Magazine.

"There was darkness though beneath the pristine surface of the Victorian era. For this was also the age of the penny dreadfuls, sideshows and séances, where emerging forces such as photography, hypnotism and electricity were still wrapped up in an otherworldly sense of mystery. Many freethinkers joined secret Masonic-style societies designed to exploring the realm between this life and the next. Dabbling in the dark arts had become chic in reaction to the increasingly rational Industrial Age. Stoker was no exception and became part of the Order of the Hermetic Dawn, whose alumni would include the poet W B Yeats and the self-confessed “antichrist” Alistair Crowley. With his interest in the occult firmly ingrained, Stoker combined a wealth of influences to form his most famous creation. It would take him eight long years..."

Contributed a short poem to the current issue of The Beat, alongside Craig Wallwork, Daniel S.Irwin and Jerry Vihotti amongst others.
Stop by or, by god, the Hand of Fate will hunt you down.

what're they building in there?

"Under the main thoroughfare of North Bridge, beneath the bustle of the city and within earshot of the hiss of the passing trains is a place of sheer magic, a quality all too rare in the modern world. In its rooms, there’s a house built from books, a mechanized torture contraption and several journeys into the mind of a bedlamite or visionary..."

A review of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller stunning Edinburgh Fringe exhibition over on 3:AM.

Dazed and Confused on Dogmatika

Style mag ...ahem... Dazed and Confused have given some love to Dogmatika in this month's magazine.

There's also some quality writing on badass types like Lee Perry, Shane Meadows, John Waters and Francois Ozon in there.

Click left for the big version or forever ruin your eyeballs.

coming up for air

in between hermaphrodites, fireworks, action-painting, wounded spectators, embittered comics, the usual mix of vomit, tears and the all-too familar stench of regret, there's been a host of things in the Edinburgh Festivals that make life worth living:

Camille O'Sullivan's Brechtian Brelian masterpiece The Dark Angel @ The Queen's Hall



Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's absolutely fuckin astounding Opera for a Small Room @ The Fruitmarket Gallery



also highly recommend Man on Wire which premiered here a while back



and Adelle Stripe's shit-hot poetry collection some things are better left unsaid, which has more balls, skill and beauty in it than anything Richard and Judy could summon from their godless abomination of a Bookclub...



Check the mighty 3:AM for irregular blog updates from myself, when my journey down the gutter-stream passes a computer keyboard.

Flotsam and jetsam

Taking a look at the books that came back from the grave over on 3:AM

It began with a murder straight out of a grisly pulp paperback. The New York Times reported “the discovery of a bound and stabbed body…in the murky waters of the Hudson River.” Several days previous, Lucien Carr had been hanging around the shorefront, drinking with an associate David Kammerer in the early hours. A fight broke out, during which Carr lodged his penknife into Kammerer’s chest. He died almost instantly. Panicking, Carr tied the body up and dragged it out into the water. Then he fled to a friend’s house; a certain William Seward Burroughs.

Devil's and Dust

Revisiting Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian on tha dawg

"Horse operas they used to call them, evoking stories of blood feuds, gambling and butchery. It's a fitting title for the finest westerns: whether that's the Zen and laissez-faire savagery of Sergio Leone, the kamikaze nihilism of Sam Peckinpah or the stunning expansive paintings of John Ford. Cormac McCarthy's visions have the same grandeur and punch as these luminaries whilst also being almost incomparable. He shatters our preconceptions of the West, not just the classic Manifest Destiny propaganda of cowboy's good, Indians bad but also its recent antithesis - the liberal revisionism of Native Americans as noble primitives. In McCarthy's novels, nobility, if it ever existed, was shot in the back or staked out under a Texan sun. His is a Wild West as envisaged by John the Revelator and Blood Meridian is arguably his finest moment."

"come on, come on, hit the accelerator..."

New issue of Straight from the Fridge is now online.

"Hit http://www.upbondageupyours.blogspot.com
for a Brutalist fix of cutting edge, underground poetry and prose.

Featuring Tony O'Neill, Ben Myers, Adelle Stripe, Mike Frankel, Joseph Ridgwell, Ford Dagenham, Melissa Mann, Lisa Payne, Darran Anderson, Steve Ely, Kevin Spaide, Joe Roche, Brian McGettrick, Max Dunbar, Brian Murphy, Geraint Hughes, James Chisholm, Chloe Dyer, Alan McCormick, Puma Perl, Kurt Remington, Michael Grover, Michael McCullough, Hannah Murphy, Alex Fatouros, Justin Hyde, Scarlett Phillips, Rachel Kendall, Garrie Fletcher, Kenn Taylor & Jason Hardung.

SFTF : The original source of no frills literature. Beware of imitations.

XXX"

Vanishing Point

Interview with the author, and Canongate's bright young thing, Nicholas Hogg (Show Me The Sky) now on Dogmatika.

Rebellion and survival may often be the same act. Particularly when attempting to maintain your identity. And in a time where intrusion into who you are is the norm, whether this is CCTV, Facebook profiles, a mobile phone and its twenty four hour connection, a rejection of modernity is one way of defining the line of self more clearly. And as 'self' is not only you, but the people around you, your environment, vanishing can be refuge from the bombardment of living – especially for a globally famous rock star scrutinised by press and fans.

Also on there Susan talks to Sein und Werden's Rachel Kendall along with a host of reviews, features and fiction. Enjoy!

WWW Killed the ISBN?

Been talking to the writers Steven Hall
and Adelle Stripe for an article on the Web and Writing in this month's Verbal Magazine.

The death of the book (along with other traditional media) has been widely prophesied since the internet started to become widely accessible in the late 1990s, but how true is this view? Darran Anderson looks at Writing and the Web and finds that, far from killing off the dreams of a generation of novelists, it could be heralding a brave new world for writing and writers.

The Eurekist and other babblings

Some recent writing for those who care about such things. Had the pleasure of contributing to Melissa Mann's always excellent litzine Beat The Dust, reviewed Before The Rain (featuring Peter Wild, Mollie Baxter and Thomas Fletcher) and Annie Clarkson's Winter Hands and finally had a retrospective look over the life and work of the late great Czech poet Miroslav Holub in the garden of earthly delights that is Dogmatika. Slan.

"It's one of the cruel ironies of life that diseases, so debilitating and corrosive, can be stunningly beautiful when viewed under a microscope. At an ultra-magnified level, viruses, bacteria and parasites can appear as swirls of tropical islands, microbe galaxies, kaleidoscopic in colour and pattern. Look at anything close enough, it seems, and its uniqueness will be revealed.

It was a phenomenon that Miroslav Holub, the late great Czech poet, was familiar with both in a scientific sense (he was leading immunologist) and in terms of his artistic view of the world. A Czech by birth, Holub was born in Pilsen, West Bohemia. During his life, his country metamorphosed through invasion and war, suffering the successive tyrannical rule of the Nazis and the Communists. Conscripted as manual labour under the Third Reich, he was a censored "nonperson" under the Soviets and finally something approaching a national institution in the free Czech Republic. If ever there were a witness to history, it was Holub."
to continue...

Dark was the night, cold was the ground

Blind Willie Johnson, the good lord and the music of the spheres over on Dogmatika.

"There’s no shortage of chills in the blues canon. A myriad variety of murder ballads, field hollers and dustbowl laments map the darker side of life in the South. Standards like Staggerlee and Crow Jane are based on true experiences, real flesh and blood characters that sent ripples through the zeitgeist by their wicked or remorseful deeds. Sometimes the scope is more abstract, existential, biblical but nonetheless just as disturbing; the apocalypse, the Depression, the Grim Reaper, the dangers befalling the working man or simple cold-blooded murder.

The term “Blues” doesn’t do these recordings any justice. These are spirituals, musical folk tales to rival the finest Southern Gothic novels, songs that lament, evangelise and liberate. Amongst them is a wordless dirge, a keening song that Ry Cooder has famously described as “the most soulful, transcendent piece of all American music.” It’s name is Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, one of only 30 tracks captured on tape by Blind Willie Johnson in his short life and one of the most remarkable in recorded music."

Three sheets to the wind

Had a read of the late great Charles Bukowski's latest dispatch from beyond the grave "Come On In!" over here on Dogmatika. Rest in peace you crazy old bastard.

Boredom is counter-revolutionary

Interviewed literary sensations The Brutalists for Dogmatika.



Some choice cuts below:

"The poetry of the likes of Lou Reed, or John Lydon, of James Chance is as important to me as any of the other "poets" you might think of. Establishment poetry is so fucking stale now, fusty and boring. No wonder people are turned off." - Tony O'Neill

"Our critics think we are misogynists, idiots, uneducated, uncouth, and guttural. But that's okay with me, because every poetry movement in history has had exactly the same problem with the poetry establishment." - Adelle Stripe

"I'm wary of any cliques, groups or movements. I just hope people realise that we're doing this because we're inspired to. We're self-funding the work, self-editing. We distribute the books ourselves, stuff the envelopes, do all the design work – this is a label of love in much the same way that William Blake or Billy Childish clearly love(d) their work too." - Ben Myers.

The Anatomy of Unbelief

Had the pleasure of interviewing the great Bernard MacLaverty, author of Cal, Lamb and Grace Notes amongst others, for Verbal Magazine. (The full article/issue can be accessed on the left hand side of their site).

"With regard to the Troubles it was impossible to stay silent. A writer writes about the world and the people around him, their concerns, their lives. To have been reared in Northern Ireland and for it to slide into chaos at the age of twenty-six – at an age when you are trying to write – how could you not say something? But it took a long time to gestate. The first attempt was Lamb a metaphor of something destroyed through misguided love. Then the second novel Cal attempted to deal directly with violence. But in such situations the sword is always mightier than the pen. The pen has to wait."

sound and fury

Review of Bill Bryson's Shakespeare, The World As A Stage now featuring on Peter Wild's excellent Bookmunch alongside reviews of the latest from Mark SaFranko, Jonathan Trigell, Hari Kunzru, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar and Matthew Collins.

Nowhere Fast

Brutalism 1: Nowhere Fast
by Tony O’Neill, Adelle Stripe and Ben Myers

This hard-hitting and emotive chapbook collection contains poems by Ben Myers, Tony O'Neill and Adelle Stripe. Each writing about the respective Northern towns of their adolescence, it marks the public debut of The Brutalist poets. The themes of the poems are captured in refined illustrations by artist Lisa Cradduck. This collection is highly limited to 300 copies and will not be reprinted in this format."

Look out for some Brutalist action on Dogmatika soon. Meantime, a read of 'We are all Brutalists', 'The rise and rise of the Brutalists' and 'We are the Brutalists, fuck you' should bring you up to speed.

Thanks to Susan for this.

The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles.

Been reviewing Todd Hayne's new Dylan film I'm Not There for those who care about such things.
Also on Dogmatika, there's Treading the darkest paths: an interview with Joel Rose, Susan talks to Kristopher Young from Another Sky Press and there's comic delights from Dorothy Gambrell's Cat and Girl, Alan McCormick and Jonny Voss' Dumpsters and more Tea at Trimalchio's from resident scribe and bedlamite Paul Kavanagh.

Also delighted to report that Rebel Inc head honcho Kevin Williamson has some kind words regarding Dogmatika, and our comrades 3AM, over on his blog The Scottish Patient.

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

Henry Miller week over on Dogmatika with contributions from Andrew Stevens, David Thorpe, Steven Wheeler, Matthew Coleman and myself. Also features Ben Pleasants on Bertram Goodhue, Jonathan Woods on Alexander Troochi's Young Adam and a new Hydrogen Jukebox special. Enjoy.

In A Room Darkened

"A Scotsman setting out to assassinate General Franco, Walt Disney's mirrors, Van Gogh painting 'Wheatfield With Crows,' 'Easter Road on a winters night.' In A Room Darkened is as eclectic and radically tinged a collection as you'd expect from the former Rebel Inc supremo Kevin Williamson. In tune to his passions of leftist politics, counterculture literature, music, football and his native Scotland, it's less a new voice in the rich firmament of Scottish literature than the welcome return of one absent for too long."

Review of Kevin Williamson's poetry collection In A Room Darkened now on Dogmatika.

"Doggone if you aint the most rambunctious bronc i ever rode"

New issue of Straight From The Fridge now online featuring the finest brutalist writing from Adelle Stripe, Tony O'Neill, Ben Myers and co plus, i'm pleased to say, my poem Teeth. Whilst on the topic of barefaced self-promotion, there's a review of Vivienne Cash's bio on life with The Man In The Black now online with Verbal Magazine.

On Dogmatika we've stories, poems and features with Peter Wild, the mighty Tom Leonard, former Rebel Inc head honcho Kevin Williamson, Paul Kavanagh, Alan Mc Cormick, Paul Silverman and Ray Succre amongst others.
Also highly recommend Susan Tomaselli's review of Seth's It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken on 3AM and the excellent new issue of litzine Diagram. Slan.

flotsam, jetsam and other curios from the cobwebbed corners of cyberspace

"Old Crow" online over at Modern Drunkard Magazine.

A heap of treats forthcoming from tha dawg this month: an interview with the dapper don Peter Wild concerning The Flash collection (which features my sorry arse amongst others), Perverted by Language and other ingenious projects, This is a Rebel Song protest music special from Susan Tomaselli and yours truly's Hydrogen Jukebox web special.
There's also a fine piece on the tragic life and work of William S Burrough's Jnr from Tony O'Neill over on the Guardian.
Slan.

"a pack of mead sodden braggarts," the Man in Black and other brief tales

Glad to report some writing has surfaced in the North of Ireland, a place once thought to be the edge of the world and now known only as "norn irn" to the half-crazed natives. The Derry-based Guildhall Press have published the Wonderful World of Worders, edited by Jenni Doherty, which features (amongst others) several short short stories of mine about zombies, botched kidnappings and train travel.
Also in Doire-based idle ramblings, there's a review of Vivian Cash's I Walked The Line about her life with the late great Johnny in the stone cold quality Verbal Magazine (expertly helmed by Catherine McGrotty).
As if any excuse were needed, over to JC -

"Fuck that James Dean shit..."

Lots of stuff to report but first-off the excellent Bookmunch is hosting a review of mine on Brutalist primo Tony O'Neill's poetry collection Songs from the Shooting Gallery amongst other eye-feasts.

"...the cerebral mechanics of a man laid out, the doubts, the fears, the whole tangled internal dialogue that’ll drive you mad; Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” in a busted up motel room, Hobbesian social philosophy in a crack den at five in the morning..."

when Coleridge dreamt the internet

To depart from shameless self-promotion for a moment, one of the most mesmirising literary and art websites in existence Dreaming Methods has a new project online entitled Dim O' Gauble. Needless to say it's incredible, drop by and explore.

"it is not god, but doubt, who walks mesmerizing waves"

Following a recent sojourn in the city, i've reviewed the latest edition of The Paris Bitter Hearts Pit
over on Dogmatika.

"If all poems and short stories are word machines then these are dynamos...Uncompromising and taboo-exploring, the contributors may well have their foes but that's half the fun, no permission is sought; this is our truth they say, to hell with apologies."


PBHP4 features writing from Steve Ely, Joseph Ridgwell, Lee Rourke, Glenn Fisher, Adelle Stripe, Vim Cortez, Matthew and Daniel Coleman, Steve Vermilion, Ashley Reak, Jessica Buck and Chris Killen.

"Collapsing buildings in slow motion"

New Hydrogen Jukebox article on Can's classic Ege Bamyasi now over on Dogmatika.

Also fresh on the site is the finest in writing from Paul O' Connell, Lisa Zaran, Jamie B. Wolcott and a host of others.

From the drunk tank

Pleased to report the rather dapper Modern Drunkard Magazine
stateside is featuring a poem of mine, in thrall to the sorry joys of whiskey, called "Old Crow" this month. It's a fine publication not least for the fact sobriety sucks, have a gander. Some exciting news due on the upcoming 40Ft Press soon but for now make mine a double and pour one for the little guy...

Beatitudes

Paying some respect to the man himself Ti Jean, Sal Paradise - Mr Jack Kerouac with a review of the newly re-discovered Beat Generation play over on tha dawg.

""Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like Saint Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practicing a little solitude, going off by yourself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity."

God's Away On Business...

A month of too much drink and too little sleep and the Edinburgh festivals are no more. There's a list of highlights (Amanda Palmer, Rohan Theatre, Picasso and the mesmeric Spiegeltent etc) in the Festival review fresh over on Dogmatika, plus a review of Eduardo Mendoza's No Word From Gurb for some extraterrestrial misadventure in Barcelona.
And with a nod to Stewart D’Arrietta and the acrobats of the Vaudeville Cabaret...

"Up from the Catacombs"

Hydrogen Jukebox article on Jane's Addiction's incredible Ritual de lo Habitual and the final part of the 2000AD retrospective now online.

"Señores y señoras: nosotros tenemos más influencia con sus hijos que tú tienes, pero los queremos. Creados y greados de Los Ángeles, Juana's Addicción!"

The Man who was Tharg and other tales...

Another sterling selection of new and edgy writing from the Chun Li of underground literature Susan Tomaselli over on Dogmatika. Choice cuts include stories and poems from Willie Smith, Maggie Dubris, Alan Mc Cormick, Elizabeth Rose, Jonathan Woods, Jason Earls, Steve Ely, ongoing acts of lunacy from swordsmen Paul Kavanagh and Joel Van Noord as well as features on The Berlin Years, Falling From the Sky, Mad Hatter's Review and from Norman Ball and Johnny Ryan.

Contributions from yours truly include an interview with former editor of 2000AD, and Tharg, David Bishop and a review of Colin Wilson's study of The Angry Young Men movement - The Angry Years with exciting future ventures to soon report. Watch the skies.

En Garde!

Interview I did with the writer and pugilist master of the golden dragon fist Craig Davidson now featuring over on Bookmunch, following the recent review of his fuckin brilliant novel The Fighter.

- "Y’know, I’d have to go with Papa Hemingway. Sacrilege to say it maybe, not to mention speaking ill of the dead, but he doesn’t seem all that tough to me. Bit of a sap. A poseur. Great writer, but, you know, otherwise I’m not convinced. He was in a war, granted, but an ambulance driver or something - and he couldn’t even hack that...So, yes, I’d step in there with Hemingway. Take the starch out of his socks. Though most probably he’d’ve kicked the crap out of me. Maybe his ghost will come beat me up tonight for having the temerity to even challenge him from beyond the grave."

Also on Bookmunch are sterling reviews of Nationality: Wog by Kester Aspden, Salmonella Men On Planet Porno by Yasutaka Tsutsui, All Shall Be Well... by Tod Wodicka, It's a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini and A Girl's Guide to Modern Philosophy by Charlotte Greig from a host of venerable reviewers. Leave this place and check em out, the power of Christ compels you!

"the one who's searchin, searchin to destroy..."

"Yes folks, after 2 years as a print publication, and 12 months on the web, Straight From The Fridge is finally celebrating its online birthday by having a celebration to end all celebrations! Alongside the brilliant Social Disease, on Thursday 5th July 2007 there will be an event featuring many of our regular writers, giving readings, playing records, and attempting to stay sober. The party is at Hedges&Butler, 3 Burlington Mews, Off Piccadilly, London, W1. It's free to get in but you need to email socialdiseasesocial@hotmail.co.uk with a guest list to get in, it's one of those fancy private members clubs don't you know...!

And the line up? Well, of course The Brutalists and The Offbeats will be there in some shape and forms, including anti-readings by Adelle Stripe, Ben Myers, Tony O'Neill, Lee Rourke, Heidi James and Matthew Coleman, alongside a literary lucky dip, writing on the wall, personal readings with the writer of your choice, and very special live guests..."

July's birthday issue features Brutalist writing from Ben Myers, Adelle Stripe, Tony O'Neill, Matthew Coleman, Heidi James, Joseph Ridgwell, Brian McGettrick, Ford Dagenham, Lee Rourke, Mike Meraz, Chris Killen, Luke Brown, Tom Leins, Sophie Woolley, Mark Vanner, Allison Papuga, Mark Colbourne, Max Dunbar, Emily McPhillips,Chris Gutkind, Thomas Spooner, Nash Trevelyan, Jason Michel, Lisa Payne, Miles J Bell, CJ Underwood and yours truly.

And in the spirit of abandon, here's some recent words and lunacy from the king...

Who killed Amanda Palmer?

Amanda Palmer of the mighty punk-cabaret band The Dresden Dolls has had some kind words to say about my recent Dogmatika article on Neutral Milk Hotel over here on the Dolls message board.

Whilst on the topic, Amanda's eagerly-awaited solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? will be landing soon and she'll be performing in the glorious Spiegeltent at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August.

Unless you wish the forces of Satan to take over the world (in the godless guise of Snow Patrol et al), stop by and be dazzled.

Image courtesy of Jamie B. Wolcott.

"Sailor Perkins could eat fifty pigs knuckles at a sitting..."

Review of Craig Davidson's blinding novel
The Fighter over on Bookmunch.
Some words from the man himself coming soon...

"Lye fights. Fists dipped in Thai methamphetamine. Split skulls. Gouged eyes. Concertina wire. Crucifix tattoos burnt onto the flesh with acetylene torches. I don’t think we’re in Las Vegas anymore, Toto."

"the sound of crickets fucking"

Heroes and Villains celebration of the writer Harlan Ellison now featuring over 'ere in the shot in the literary arm that is Bookmunch.

“A writer should be bourgeois in life, so that he can be wild and liberated in his art,” Flaubert once said. Which is one reason why Flaubert is such a tedious dullard. Passionless living rarely equates to incendiary writing. A bloodless, antiseptic life of luxury, stability and listless sobriety, a life without mistakes or risks, does not provide much in the way of insight or feeling. Give us anything, it seems, but accomplished mediocrity. For we require writers that are as shambolic as we are..."

"When this belt is on tight, Fight for right with all your might!"

Review of Dave Gibbon's graphic novel Thunderbolt Jaxon (an off-shoot of Alan Moore's Albion series) now over on Peter Wild's superb Bookmunch.

Also featuring are Joseph Ridgwell on School for Scumbags, Cedar J Forrest on The Officer's Daughter, Jon Wright on Skin Lane and Becky Ohlsen on H P Tinker's mighty fine The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity.

"I've seen the future brother it is murder"

Second part of the 2000AD retrospective now showing over on the dawg, taking a glance over some classics from Chopper, Judge Anderson, Rogue Trooper, Button Man and Nemesis the Warlock.

Also on there is champion new writing from Corey Mesler, James Chapman, Simon Friel, Tom Spooner, Christopher J Dwyer and Jeanpaul Ferro. Good day to you...

"It's the one that says Bad Motherfucker"

The number one contender for the litzine crown, Dogmatika has been relaunched in a frankly fuckin exceptional new form by Susan Tomaselli.

There's hilarious prose from Paul Kavanagh, choice writing from talents such as Peter Wild, Alan McCormick, Doug Draime, JJ DeCeglie, Gary Beck, Charle Head, Steven Minchin and a hoard of all things underground. Proud to be onboard.

"Anna's ghost all around..."

Hydrogen Jukebox article on Neutral Milk Hotel's astounding In the Aeroplane Over the Sea now featuring over on Dogmatika.



"A miasma of fiction and memory, it shifts continually; a Phantasmagoria whirling through a thousand mystifying images, one minute raw and confessional, the next exhilarating and eccentric."

Check it out here.

Meanwhile here is the long-lost band in all their messy beatific greatness, live in the Electric Lounge, Austin, Texas, 1998.

It was 40 years ago today...

30 years and counting...

First part of an article celebrating thirty years of the mighty 2000AD, and it's flagship character Judge Dredd, now featuring over on Dogmatika.

On a similar topic, check out Susan Tomaselli's excellent article on Who took the comedy out of comics? over on The Guardian website.

Sighing babies go to work

New Hydrogen Jukebox article on John Frusciante's masterpiece Niandra LaDes and Usually Just A T-Shirt over on Dogmatika.
Also in the series are Tom Wait's Rain Dogs, Leonard Cohen's Songs From A Room and Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson.
Last words over to the man himself...

Blatt Magazine

Anyone interested in quality art and literature check out the new website of the stunning Blatt Magazine.
Run from a secret base somewhere beneath the streets of Prague, there is no finer, or fearless, voice in international writing.
Aside from celebrating the success of the recent Blattfest in the good city, they're running the magazine (voted best of the year by 3AM despite featuring a short story by me), a novel contest, a stack of performances and an excellent studio.

万歳!

Review of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories now over on the consistently badass Dogmatika. Also featuring are new works from James Quinton (editor of Open Wide Magazine, Travis Jeppesen (editor of the Czech-International Art and Litzine Blatt), Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story -"insightful and utterly authentic" - New York Times Book Review), Joseph Ridgwell, Matthew Coleman, Sean McGahey (head honcho of the immortal The Beat and a load of others. Hats off to Susan Tomaselli for rolling out the big guns. Now good day to you...

His brain aflame with all the ideas it had conjured

Mechanical ducks, shark women that taste of liquorice, perverted sexual shenanigans in cramped office spaces, double-crossing Nazi apologists, bald-headed cultural subversives and celebrity deer-culling - this is just a glimpse into the wonderful and frightening world of Perverted by Language, a collection of fiction inspired by The Fall.

Featuring contributions from Niall Griffiths, Matthew David Scott, Jeff VanderMeer, Mick Jackson, Carlton Mellick III, Nick Johnstone, John Williams, Nick Stone, Michel Faber, Nicholas Royle, Steve Aylett, Stav Sherez, Peter Wild, Nicholas Blincoe, Clare Dudman, Kevin MacNeil, Andrew Holmes, Helen Walsh, Stewart Lee, Richard Evans, Matt Thorne, Matt Beaumont & Rebbecca Ray.

Set to be published by Serpent's Tail in June 2007. You can preorder copies of the book here
The book will be launched as part of the inaugural Manchester International Festival.
There will be a gig by The Fall at the Ritz in Manchester on Sunday 1 July 2007, with readings from Stewart Lee, Rebbecca Ray & Andrew Holmes. You can buy tickets for the gig here.

Highly recommend this book, and the gig will be class no doubt. Been commissioned to write for the Joy Division one next year, provided biblical plagues and natural disasters keep at bay.

Last word to the old curmudgeon Mark E Smith himself:

The Further Adventures of The Flash!

Delighted to announce The Flash book is now on sale over on Amazon.
100 writers. 100 stories. All proceeds to Amnesty International.

Published by Social Disease, it's was officially launched at Foyles on Charing Cross Road, London.

It will also be launched at The Cornerhouse in Manchester on the 18th of May and KGB Bar in New York on the 22nd July (more info coming soon!)...

Curated by Peter Wild, it features Booker Prize nominee Damon Galgut, Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm), Willy Vlautin of the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, the comedian (and author of the funny as fuck Jerry Springer: The Opera) Stewart Lee, Matt Thorne, Nicholas Blincoe (of All Hail The New Puritans fame), Sara Gran, Arthur Nersesian, Nick Johnstone, Steven Almond, Christopher Brookmyre, Jonathan Lethem, Michel Faber, Kate Pullinger, Dermot Bolger, Ian Sansom, Nick Stone, J Robert Lennon and a load of other acclaimed writers.

And me.

On the night Peter Wild, Shiromi Pinto, Nicholas Royle, Andrew Holmes, Conrad Williams, Rhonda Carrier & Nick Johnstone will be reading.

More details soon. Now put that thing away missus...

Kurt Vonnegut Jnr RIP

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."

Just heard the sad news that Kurt Vonnegut died last night. Always enjoyed the man's writing: offbeat, terrifying, confusing, hilarious, sometimes at the same time.

Got into his writing through his masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five (inspired by his experiences as a WWII POW, hiding out in an underground abattoir while the people of Dresden burned above him.)

Also highly recommend his early work Cats Cradle.
Dogmatika
have some excellent links to his life and work.

So long...

"Middle fucking management..."

The article I mentioned previously on the mighty Paul O'Connell is now online over at 3AM Magazine.
If you haven't had the pleasure, check out his website The Sound Of Drowning.
Some of the best writing and art I've encountered in years, nothing short of stunning. In terms of scope and vision there's not a writer out there, anywhere, to touch him.

This Is England review

Have a review of Shane Meadow's awesome new film This Is England featuring over at Susan Tomaselli's consistently cool as fuck site Dogmatika. Short story Monsoon Letter is also featured.
Went up to Glasgow with my compadre Neil Rolland to see this and, after getting carried away on the firewater and missing the last train home, had a night of lunacy, wandering the streets, searching for drinking dens. Good craic in the most masochistic sense of the word. Highly recommend the film, which is in all good cinemas from April the 27th onwards, and Shane Meadow's earlier works of genius Dead Man's Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass

"If there is any justice This Is England will enshrine Shane Meadows as the most powerful and dynamic British writer and director at work in film today. His films are the antidote to all the tiresome lottery-funded rom-coms and mockney gangster shite that masquerades for much of contemporary British film. What Tarantino or Scorsese were to the Hollywoods of their time so Meadows is to British Cinema; a challenge to all that is smug and complacent."

“Tramp burning ain’t no joke Vincent, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

Wholeheartedly encourage everyone to check out Paul O' Connell's genius comic The Sound of Drowning. The most beautiful, funny and depraved thing you'll read this year. "... the rousing sight of a trail being blazed before your eyes; subversive, daring, poignant and infused with comedy that’s as black as pitch. If Beckett weren’t pushing up daisies he’d be reading this."(full article to come soon.)

"More Human Than Human"

The second anthology from Nathan Tyree's Magazine of the Dead
is now available for sale. Stories For Replicants contains all of the recent stories from MotD, plus several new stories that have not appeared on line. It features work by: Darran Anderson, Peter Wild, Harold Wilson, Christopher Allan Death, Norman A. Rubin, James Horn, Aurelio Rico Lopez III, Edward Rodosek, Terry Doss, James Riser, Nathan Tyree, Joey Ketcham, and a classic reprint from E.A. Poe.

Le grand méchant loup aux abois

Tis the late great Serge Gainsbourg's birthday today, check out the earlier tribute of mine to the great man over on Dogmatika. For evidence that he was one of the coolest bastards that ever lived, check these videos and a modern reinvention by the mighty Mc Solaar.