More Old Links from a New Man

What with my last links being at least 15 years old, I thought I could get away with this one from May. Micachu is meant to be recording something for an artist on Big Dada next Monday but besides that I've got nothing to do with her except I think her music is really good. She's a fantastic contrast to all those singers using a UK accent as this year's pop affectation, she records hoovers and is signed to Accidental, which is itself some kind of recommendation. Oh, and the film is really funny. Have a good weekend!

Pynchon On Sloth

Wandering the byways of the internet I came across this. It's fifteen years old but very good and funny. It's in the New York Times archives so you have to register but it's free and there are other goodies to find, like this, in which Mr Pynchon asks whether it's okay to be a Luddite and coins the immortal phrase, "except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual". Amen.

More Drink = Less Reading

More information has been forthcoming about next week's reading. The evening runs only from 7pm to 8.30pm so don't be late. The "PP" in the title "3:AM-PP" stands for Pen Pusher magazine, of course. Other people reading include Lana Citron and Joseph Ridgwell plus the previously mentioned sculptor Andrew Logan plus "Marie Murphy on vocals and Lizziness on Bond Girls" (I'm not quite sure what that means or entails, but I'm sure it'll be fun).

Anyway, the address (again) is upstairs at The Green Carnation, 5 Greek St, Soho. If you want more info and are on facebook, check the page for it here. Oh, and it's next Tuesday 4th November...

Ivor Cutler, Looking For Truth..

...while a young lady waggles his squeeze box. The Poet Laureate of Spam in existential beauty shock..

Cormac McCarthy - "The Road," God and Toothpaste

Finally got round to reading "The Road" this week and it does most of the things it says on the tin, even if I'm slightly concerned about how many times it's acceptable to use the verb "to lave" in a book (I would have said once, but McCarthyland is no country for old pedants). Anyway, once I'd finished blubbing and tearing my hair out and promising to remember to turn off all the lights behind me, I couldn't also help wondering about America and the God Thing. I mean, really the only reason the boy doesn't get spit-roasted and eaten is because he stumbles across some Chrissies. And his papa gives God and the Carrying The Fire thing quite a working over, too (someone should do a fan fiction version about a Salvation Army brass band). Following hot(tish) on the heels of the publication of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech (?) to Kenyon College in which he seemed to say that if you didn't worship one god or another you were doomed to a life of misery, and a US presidential election in which everyone's pastor has been scrutinised, I was wondering if there's anyone left in America who doesn't believe in God? Or, even better, who - placidly, calmly, without screaming - doesn't believe in any Big Thing?

Talking of ol' Cormac, I was having a writer's whinge to a friend a few month's back about my general lack of success and, to cheer me up, he used McCarthy as an example of a writer who had spent years toiling in obscurity before his rise to the tippety-top.

"Yeah, it got so bad, apparently," he told me, "that to eat he had to steal the toothpaste samples from other people's mailboxes." My family will sleep sounder for that...

"More Colgate, darling?"

My (weakest) Link Contributions To The US Presidential Election

I'm not American so I have no idea whether the Huffington Post is a Good or a Bad thing but I enjoyed this post from Larry David. And for US election commentary combined with major conceptual art figures and bad German pop, go here. Yes, that's Joseph Beuys on Ronald Reagan. Dancing. And check out this Grauniad analysis of the Presidential "Bend Sinister". Don't say you never learn anything here...

"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...