dreamwork

Pilot, atomic physicist/cosmologist, jockey (national hunt), folk singer, writer: I was always determined to have the job of my dreams & avoid all the real ones. If you’d asked me between five & twenty years old what my dream job was, it would have been one of the five above. Four of them required talents I turned out not to possess, & didn’t survive contact with the reality principle. By the time I was twenty, writing was the only option left. Luckily I had come pre-loaded with all the necessary talents & tendencies for that. I stared out the window a lot, read furiously, wouldn’t take life advice or direction, & could manage temporal shifts in a complex Victorian sentence by classic parsing. I had written my first adventure novel, a 20 page hymn to Mickey Spillane & the Golden Amazon, at thirteen.

some news

Wish I Was Here arrives in paperback from Serpents Tail on the 7th of March. A cute little version of the hardback package. Order now from your favoured outlets.

Haunt Game is a music and spoken word piece by pivotal contemporary composer Matt Rogers and writer M John Harrison, based on Harrison’s anti-memoir Wish I Was Here, now on CD. High-resolution audio, 24bit/48kHz, lossless FLAC. Includes PDF booklet. For details, samples, video, etc, go to Pyrofon, here.

More music stuff: my contribution to PVA’s collection, You Spin Me Round, is an essay on a lasting relationship with Bob Dylan & his Johanna. I love them both, I construct them both for my own purposes. Since 1966, they focussed me in ways I can’t explain, though I know how to explain them exactly. You Spin Me Round, out this month and pre-orderable here.

Deeply immersed in the new novel. Seven thousand words in the last thirty days, breakneck pace for me, as anyone who knows me will know. Working title ANABASIS but I daresay it won’t actually be called that. It’s not exactly the novel I would have submitted to New Worlds in 1967 if I’d had the skills to write it, but it’s certainly that type of novel.

The real news is that there’ll be some news soon that quite a few people have been hoping to hear for quite a few years; I say no more because I am still a tease.

twelve eight twenty two

The windscreen of a parked car just out of view across the road reflects the late afternoon sun, directing it at an oblique angle into our front room and projecting the shadow of a window box of pelargoniums on to the net curtain inside. The silhouettes of the pelargoniums appear sharply delineated and surrounded by a strong but diffuse white light; but in places the original clusters of flowers can be made out through their own shadows, as if a dull red bleed is part of the projection. Such a theatrical effect from such a simple set of circumstances.

The Lodgers

‘“As a bored and nervous young girl,” Holly Pester’s unnamed and disorganised narrator says, without stopping to find out if she should open up to strangers like us, “I often imagined myself climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” She’s tired. She’s been travelling all day. She’s moving into a new flat, which resembles a triangular sandwich package, sublet from “a paranoid boy” she’s never seen. The details of the arrangement have a wry, playful quality, but there’s an underlying nervousness; the room doesn’t feel real to her. A glass smells of dirty hair, a window affords nothing “except the stillness of a town at night”, the “origin point of boredom” in her life…’ Holly Pester’s debut novel of a nightmarish precarity, played for the blackest of laughs, fizzes with the life it reflects. Read the rest of my review at The Guardian.