Shoddy Diagrams Stolen From The Internet

Don't blame me, blame Google... (one day they are going to eat you).

Lee Harwood, Marginal Gloss & Synchronous Mottramisation

Here's a good enough excuse that I can justify my theft (re-blogging?) from my dear, anonymous, unknown online source of refined literary youngsterism, Marginal Gloss. Outside my bathroom is a big pile of books which were on some shelves which had to go somewhere else. Near the top is an old collection of Lee Harwood's poetry, "Monster Masks," that I bought many years ago. The other day I sat on the floor reading it while I waited for my son to finish on the loo and go to bed. It includes the excellent "The Beginning Of The Story," which Marginal Gloss has now discovered a pdf of online (you have to scroll down through the other piece. Or read it and discover that you have it in a book you've found piled up outside your toilet...). I interviewed Lee Harwood around sixteen years ago when I lived in Brighton. He had me round for tea and was absolutely lovely. I was trying to be a poet but luckily I was far too bashful and awed to ask him to look at anything I'd written, despite (because of?) the debt it owed him. I was very pleased to find out, years later, that the article ended up on file in King's College as part their Eric Mottram archive. Mind you, he had a lot of magazines. I hate to think what the hall outside his bathroom looked like...

Superb Diagrams Stolen From The Internet

Part 1 of a series of diagrams stolen from across the World Wide Web... In this case, their theme is the superbity. Stay tuned...

News, You Lose

Just in case you care, I wanted you to know that my Twitter story, Trundlespike, is once again All Systems Go. I'm up to 80 tweets on that bad boy, so don't miss them. I like, in particular, that none of them make any real sense in isolation, so they are kind of anti-tweets. Anyhow...

In other 'news,' I'm writing again, properly, with some real sense of forward momentum and purpose. I have been working on a book in some form or other constantly since summer 2001 when I started "Clear Water". Then this February I finished a draft of something and just... stopped. I fiddled around with an idea, did a couple of months of research, began writing and then realised my heart wasn't really in it. Truth be told, I felt like I was doing it more because I felt it was the sort of book people would feel I should be writing than because I wanted to write it. Since then I've been dabbling with an idea which I've been thinking about and developing for years, an idea which, I've often felt, may well signal literary career suicide. But I guess I don't have much of a career in any case, and it's only in the last week or so that I've developed enough momentum to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile (from my point of view). It's such a great feeling and one I've missed. It will all vanish again, shortly, of course, and I'll be left with upward of a year's worth of plodding towards the end, but I'm enjoying it while it lasts. Updates to follow...

In the meantime, revel in my Boredom playlist on the Evil Empire of Spotify. It does exactly what it says on the box.

Thatcher Dead...

Funny yet disappointing all at once...

Free Ebooks - Tony White Bridled

James Bridle of booktwo.org has launched his new venture, Artists' eBooks, with three short stories from Tony White, all available for download to read online, on your mobile or iPhone, or an an e-Reader (though not the Kindle, haha). They're in the ePub format which it is generally hoped will become the industry standard, as, unlike the aforementioned Kindle's AZW, it's an open, non-DRM format.

All three stories "grew out of a residency at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London, and are part of an ongoing series called Balkanising Bloomsbury. Each story was written using a process which included cutting-up, remixing and renarrativising fragments from a number of sources including travel writing, Hague tribunal transcripts and mass media texts, to create completely new works of fiction which explore ideas of European identity." Mr White's work is always superb and Mr Bridle is a whizz-bang techno animal, so I'm off to download them now.

Apologies, Excuses, then Greene, Lin, Conrad, Bolaño, Vila-Matas, Marias & Barker (N)

I am thoroughly ashamed of myself. Not only have I failed to stick to my seven-posts-a-week rule with my twitter story, Trundlespike, I haven't posted anything on here for ages either. I looked at Marginal Gloss last night and thought of ripping off some of his posts, but I tried to load some flash game called Small Worlds he had said was "one of the most unlikely, thought-provoking online experiences I’ve had in some time" and it crashed my browser, which can only be taken as A SIGN (and not even a very unlikely one).

This morning I rowed half-heartedly with my little-but-good-peoples publisher and then we all made up again and agreed to Battle Onward. I did an interview about the record label with the esteemed Stevie Chick for a book about Ninja Tune. I read some Graham Greene.

I haven't read Graham Greene for absolutely years - over 20 I would think. But I went to a gig a few weeks back (the most-excellent Juice Aleem, who reminded me why hip hop will never completely die) and on my way to the tube I walked past two dodgy geezers laying out secondhand books next to the Cafe Nero on Tottenham Court Road. In the dark... I bought "The Honorary Consul" for £2 because it looked at a distance like it might be a first edition (WRONG! It was a Book Club edition) and because I thought I'd read somewhere that it was his darkest and best work (WRONG! That one had something to do with World War II and this one is set in Argentina in the '70s). But mainly because you don't often come across mobile booksellers at 11.30 at night on Tottenham Court ROad so I felt I should. Anyway, I haven't got to the Catholic Bit yet, so I'm quite enjoying it.

Before that, I read "Shoplifting From American Apparel" by Tao Lin. Hmmm. Dunno what to say really. I really loved "Eeee Eeee Eeee" but in his attempt to stop himself inserting the stuff which he says he deliberately inserted to "ruin" that book (in particular, the animals) he's made something which is maybe more true to his aesthetic but less sympathetic with my head. It works. It does work. He's still a million times better than all the Tao Lin imitators (and he must be doing something right to have spawned these bastards, who remind me of the lesser lights on anticon). But it doesn't catch me in the same way as it did with the bears. I really liked the bears.

Before that I read "Lord Jim," by Joseph Conrad which was strange and marvellous, oscillating between the sheer magnificence of the first section, the slightly odd colonial fantasy of the second section and then the fiendish denouement of the third, which makes sense of the second and casts the first in a completely different light.

Further back before that I knocked off "Skating Rink," the latest Eng-lang mini-masterpiece from the Bolaño estate. Familiar characters (minor South American poets ending up as exiles/immigrants in Spain and, in particular, working on a campsite) but here roped into the clutches of a murder mystery of some sort, in which the murder is the least important aspect.

Now we're working back into the mists of time and "Montano" by Enrique Vila-Matas, his follow-up to "Bartleby & Co". While I loved that book, Vila-Matas got a little too European on my ass this time around. I still read it all and bits were really funny but I'm not sure I wanted a book on literature sickness and the death of literature etc etc. I haven't got a degree in English Lit so I don't see why I should be subjected to this stuff now. Nevertheless, it has something - just maybe something a little too intellectual for me. I could kind of see why it had never made it into paperback, though.

Ooh, it's getting dark, or grey, or just hazy. I read the first part of "Your Face Tomorrow" trilogy by Javier Marias (I believe the last part is about to come out). I quite liked it but the sentences were all too long, which made it far more exhausting than it needed to be. That and the fact it was about memory (whilst purporting to be about predicting people's future actions) account for the reference to Proust on the back. But blimey, how many sub-clauses can I hold in my head at once..? Less than Javier, obviously. I like a nice full stop, me.

And I reach full stop with "Darkmans" by Nicola Barker, read some time last century (or maybe at the end of the summer?) which I absolutely loved. A big book made to seem short. She's a very unassuming writer - full of ideas and theories but wearing them lightly, slightly in love with all of her characters, amiable but tough, too. Much darker and odder than the summaries of it suggest. It's a really good book and shows, for that year at least, that not all Booker shortlists are full of unadulterated bollocks. Huzzah!