read this book

Rather than writing, David Constantine seems to perform an act of visualisation on the reader’s behalf; what he makes us see is matter-of-fact but at the same time somehow light, unmoored and thoroughly poetic. His stories are evidence. Everyone in them is a witness, sometimes to a death, more often to a birth; sometimes, to [...]

truelove’s gutter

There’s no such thing as character, D says. There’s only behaviour. We’re memes but we’re careful not to admit it–so careful with one another! That shouldn’t be taken, he’s quick to add, to mean that we exist in some state aside from materiality. We’re subject to material forces but won’t allow ourselves to see that [...]

dead lives

I enjoyed very much Mario the Epicurean’s engagement with The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen. It’s so nice to wake up in the morning to a thoughtful piece on a novelist you love. Thanks, Mario, especially for that last quote–
One’s sentiments—call them that—one’s fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: [...]

blasim & mckie

Hassan Blasim’s savagely comic stories of Iraq, The Madman of Freedom Square. It’s a short volume, 90-odd pages. At first you receive it with the kind of shocked applause you’d award a fairly transgressive stand-up. You’re quite elated. Then you stop reading it at bedtime. At his best Blasim produces a corrosive mixture of broken [...]

fucked off from you

Someone arrived here yesterday by typing, “I am just fucked off from you” into a search engine. What a great last line that would make.

decisive moments

Lucas Green at Porous Borders links Unreal, Municipal Archive & WMC is now here under the rubric “decisive moment literature”. I love this & I think I’d add Tim Etchells.
Reading: Hassan Blasim’s collection, The Madman of Freedom Square. Funny, sad, vicious, excoriating images & narratives of Iraq over the last twenty-odd years, they leave you [...]

caught

S sends me Vanessa Gebbie’s Words from a Glass Bubble. I am captured instantly by the first three paragraphs of the title story, which begins–
The Virgin Mary spoke to Eva Duffy from a glass bubble in a niche halfway up the stairs. Eva, the post woman, heard the words in her stomach more than her [...]

fear & loathing by the rochdale canal

She has so many emails from writers, the bookshop owner says, that sometimes it’s hard to get any work done at all! In those few words the Calder Valley clamps down on you as relentlessly as it did on any Victorian loom operator & you’re deformed instantly by some geographic-claustrophobic metaphor for the whole Ted [...]

tomorrow’s post today

A draft of tomorrow’s post escaped into the wild when I pressed the wrong button, & was frozen in the headlamps of the careering world wide web, how embarrassing. So it might as well be tomorrow’s post today–
See, this is part of what I meant here, & what I meant about bad pub landscapes here: [...]

more on the Theory Cadre

B writes, of my recent post the Theory Cadre in Snowdonia, “Mike, although a picture is mentioned, there’s no picture here.”
Yes, B, there is a picture. But the Theory Cadre, unwilling to give away anything of itself even in such a deliberately revelatory document, has encoded it as text. Another way to look at this [...]