"QUEEN'S WASPS OF HATE SEIZED"

What could give a Londoner more pleasure more simply than a selection of random cut-ups of lurid Evening Standard billboard headlines? Other than Boris Johnson being crushed to death beneath the collected works of Pliny, of course...

Drinking and Reading, Reading and Drinking

All you lucky souls in London Town have the chance to hear me reading again in November. I'm going to be doing my 10 minutes at 3AM:PP on November 4th. It's the second night promoted by the esteemed peoples at 3:AM (of course) and is put together and marshalled by the formidable Sophie Parkin (don't pitch your tent near hers - I mean this literally, not metaphorically). Anyway, the night involves one fiction person (me), one non-fiction person (the sculptor Andrew Logan), two poets and two musicians. The other names haven't been announced yet, but I'll pass them on as they come in... Anyway, details: Upstairs @The Green Carnation, 5 Greek St, Soho, from 7pm. And no, I don't know what the PP stands for...

Multi-Story Revisited

You may or may not remember that I told you in a past post about the strange story-relay Matt Thorne asked me to contribute to along with Ewan Morrison, Chris Manby, Stella Duffy, Alison Macleod and, of course, his good self. The result was called "Messenger," I said, and was published in the new issue of Another Magazine. But I also said you couldn't read it there and it turns out I was wrong. Go to "Literature" on the menu at the top of the page and then "NEW Another Document" on the far right of the menu that appears. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "Download Another Document (PDF)" and it shall be so. The whole thing is edited by Dan Crowe (Zembla man) and contains writing from AM Homes, Willy Vlautin and many other good and worthy individuals...

Holy Roll-Outs

And just in case you're reeling from the sheer artiness of yesterday's post, here's a YouTube classic - much Christian ecstatic dancing cut to a d&b soundtrack. "Somebody make some nooiiiiise!" (With thanks to Infinite Livez for the link...).

Ubu Roi!

How to acknowledge a link w/out looking like you're name dropping, part 99. I recently read "The Broken World" by Tim Etchells and enjoyed it so much that, like the sad fanboy that I am, I 'befriended' him on Facebook. Recently Mr Etchells posted a link to www.ubu.com, describing it as "YouTube for the avant garde" and he wasn't wrong. If you've never been to the site I'd highly recommend it as it's an absolute treasure trove of 20th Century art, music and writing, with hundreds of audio clips and films. So far, some of my best finds include:
"Film" by Samuel Beckett starring Buster Keaton, which I haven;t seen for the best part of twenty years.
John Cage Meets Sun Ra, which I didn't even know existed.
And a doddery Bill Burroughs making his 'shotgun paintings,' because it's funny.
More will undoubtedly follow...

The Irresistible Rise of Roberto Bolaño

A sneak preview of Roberto Bolaño's poetry in translation is available here. It's taken from the collection that New Directions are publishing at the beginning of November. The American edition of the English translation of "2666" follows at the end of the month from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, with the UK version traipsing in from Picador next January. I can only hope that Picador bother to print it properly. I recently bought "The Lazarus Project" by Aleksandar Hemon in hardback and it looks like they bashed it out on a dot matrix printer that was a little low on ink. If you're going to ask people to spend fifteen or sixteen quid, surely you should make some kind of effort?

Beyond Our Ken

And while I'm going YouTube crazy, here is the marvellous and sadly deceased Ken Campbell on the Big Bang. Long may he haunt the internet...
Oh, and check this one, too. It's about Jackie Chan, eventually (part 3, I think). Aren't they all?