When you look in the dead artist’s garden pond now, all you see is some kind of slimy, feathery-looking weed moving to and fro in the cloudy water. It might be growing on something, some shape you can’t quite bring to mind. Overseeing it from a short plinth of home-made concrete is a ten-inch figure [...]
Entries from April 2009
April 23, 2009
literary scandals
To pass the time–time I don’t have–I played the game “Strange Bedfellows” with my newly pruned bookcase. Here are the As & the Bs, as they cuddle up to one another on the shelves–
Carolyn Abraham
Kathy Acker
Martin Amis
Kent Anderson
Guillermo Arriaga
HE Bates
Nigel Balchin
T Behrens
John Bliebtrau
Harold Bloom
Marc Bojanowski
Roberto Bolano
Elizabeth Bowen
Charles Bukowski
Michel Butor
Dino Buzzati
There are two games to be [...]
April 21, 2009
ballard
Great tribute by Mike Moorcock over at Ballardian. Mike supported Ballard (& Ballard supported him) when that was a harder & lonelier task. I didn’t know Ballard well, & I turned up at New Worlds a bit late for the main event. But what I remember about those times was being stunned–given pause–by his first [...]
April 21, 2009
i always knew this
The brand of rum is a safe bet, of course. As for the raspberries: Irene the Mona must have had her hair done. Am I going to apologise for the shallowness of this post ? I’m not, actually. It’s April.
April 15, 2009
some good fantasy
The House on the Borderland, 1908, William Hope Hodgson
The Wind in the Willows, 1908, Kenneth Grahame
The Great Return, 1915, Arthur Machen
From Ritual to Romance, 1920, Jessie L Weston
Nosferatu, 1922, dir FW Murnau
Mr Weston’s Good Wine, 1927, TF Powys
War in Heaven, 1930, Charles Williams
The Green Child, 1935, Herbert Read
At the Mountains of Madness, 1936, HP Lovecraft
At [...]
April 13, 2009
virtues
“Stones and grass have many virtues,” Roberto Bolano has a character say, “but words have more.” I’d reverse that.
In unconnected news: the first two sentences of my review of Marcel Theroux’s Far North originally read, “Far North is a cowboy labour-camp eco-disaster movie, in which a woman passes herself off as a man. Every base [...]
April 8, 2009
spot the old hippie
Festival del Centro Historico, DF. Bruce Sterling, Chris Priest & MJH at the Templo Mayor.
Photo: Chris Nakashima-Brown.
April 6, 2009
performance related
7 & 8 April: Tim Etchells’ performance That Night Follows Day, with its cast of 16 children & young people, produced by the Flemish theatre company Victoria, will be at Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank in London as part of the SPILL festival. I’ll be there on the 8th.
Then, at the Soho Theatre, 21-25 [...]
April 3, 2009
alarma!
When they talk about a cold day in hell they must mean April 3 2009, Barnes Common. Three cheery policepersons in stab vests watch everyone over the Beverley Brook bridge, just to make sure they’re all perfectly safe. Have a nice day, Barnes wives & spaniels, & mind how you go.
Someone send me back to [...]
