scarecrow editorial

13: Offbeats & Brutalists

2007-03-13T15:54:00.001-07:00

If you’d have asked me one year ago if a literary scene existed and was alive and most definitely kicking in London, or New York, or California . . . anywhere, I’d have laughed at the very thought. We’re still standing in that long, drawn out shadow The Beats created I would have wailed. I would have bemoaned the very nature of it (not that there is anything wrong with The Beats really – I mean, has anyone actually touched the genius of William S Burroughs since? I very much doubt it). I hate the word scene anyway. But now, one year on, ask me. Go on, ask me.

Well, it’s already happened. I think. And it seems to have happened right under our noses. And we’ve created it. It was our design. Not a marketing team in sight. We stand alone.

I don’t really care for names, but two seem to have immerged: The Offbeats and The Brutalists respectively. Both these movements encompass a varied and capable horde of writers. It’s funny, really, most reside in London, and most are originally from the North of England – born outsiders it seems.

"Brutalism calls for writing that touches upon levels of raw honesty that is lacking from most mainstream fiction. We cannot simply sit around waiting to be discovered — we would rather do it ourselves. Total control, total creativity. We Brutalists see ourselves as a band who have put down their instruments and picked up their pens and scalpels instead. The only maxim we adhere to is an old punk belief, which we have bastardised for our own means: 'Here’s a laptop. Here’s a spell-check. Now write a book.' " [The Brualists].

Three very determined independent publishers have immerged also: Social Disease (London)[check out their myspace page], Wrecking Ball Press (Hull – although this well established publisher has existed long before many of us picked up a pen), and Burning Shore Press (US). Each of these publishers is crucial; they take risks, they shun current trends.

"[Heidi] James sums up Social Disease’s raison d’être as: “Zadie Smith is not fucking interesting”, and neither are Monica Ali and the dozens of other writers of similar social comedies that emerged in the wake of White Teeth’s huge success. “All this postmodern irony is just so dull,” James explains. “And I realised that I really hate the homogeneity of the publishing world where it’s next to impossible to get genuinely interesting work published. The big publishing houses would have you believe that there isn’t a market for new and exciting work that takes a few risks and makes a demand on its readers, but that’s bollocks. Absolute bollocks.”" [Sam Jordison, The Guardian].

As I have already mentioned before this gathering of like-minded individuals, who all eschew the current trend in publishing, have acted alone. We are elsewhere. We don’t belong. We have, more or less, turned our backs on the conglomerates; we ignore those vainglorious money-men who’d rather lunch in the stinking, laughable Groucho than sniff out new writing talent; those moronic cretins hell-bent on sales, sales, sales; we ignore marketing departments; those same bozos responsible for the horrid 3 for 2 dross in every high street bookstore; those grand panjandrums that are mostly responsible for everything that is wrong with contemporary literary fiction in this country.

The Offbeats and The Brutalists are a reactionary crowd of literary dissidents who just want to hear a new voice; we have evolved, little by little, on our own terms and have never bowed down to the conglomerates’ demands – not that they care who we are or what we do anyway. This is a new northern passage, a new way, of course it is, and it is largely due to the hard work of Andrew Gallix and A. Stevens of 3AM Magazine who have, over the last five years banged the drum for the marginalised, and have, in the process, unearthed, some of the most exciting writers of our generation.

An alternative route, a Brobdingnagian backlash of our own making, a reactionary leviathan with a sting in our tail – call it what you will.

Long live the dissenters I say!

This issue of Scarecrow is a celebration. It is dedicated to each and every one of you. Names need not be mentioned for you know who you are.

Lee Rourke © 2007

For more information see >HERE<, >HERE<, >HERE<, and >HERE<.

Latest Off-beat & Brutalist gathering: pictures on Scarecrow Gallery.

12: Death of Language

2006-06-18T12:13:00.000-07:00

Dare I say it? Many people won’t get Travis Jeppesen’s latest offering. I can hear them now: why bother writing poems while watching TV? Some will ask: why bother writing poetry at all? Others will read his, at times, difficult and awkward verse and be immediately shocked by its brusqueness, its anger, its cryptic playfulness. But then there will be those who tune in to his unique airwaves, those who bother to listen - the enigma-crackers - those willing to spend some time with this extraordinary book. And it is these readers who will gain the most – and ultimately matter.

The very idea of letting foreign TV creep into the mind is as intriguing as it is baffling, yet Travis Jeppesen’s marvellous collection is - as topsy-turvy as all this seems - accessible (accompanied as it is by Jeremiah Palacek’s striking paintings) and it matters. Jeppesen’s language, although new in approach, unhinged and at odds, still manages to invigorate the reader. It is fresh, and as compelling to us as first switching on the TV in a foreign hotel room for the first time: it taps into our natural curiosity, our shared sense of the other. Travis Jeppesen’s hypnotic collection should be applauded for this.

Maybe this new language we are witnessing, this sudden emergence of a group of writers (interlinked via the internet and spanning the globe) who have eschewed the glut of the conglomerates' writing-by-numbers formulaic nonsense, designed for the consumer and not the reader: this same “lifestyle fiction” novelist, artist and essayist Tom McCarthy so bitterly laments and writes against - maybe Travis Jeppesen is part of this?He is certainly hard to ignore. He is well aware, of course, that he is not alone. This new system of language and literature he speaks of isn’t solely his – and it is this awareness that makes his work all the more relevant.

The system of language in Poems I wrote While Watching TV is striking:

“Through the thin haze of her shadow dented across the shudders, the/weatherwoman can make out her husband fucking some other cunt/with too much lipstick on” ['Psykologikal Make-up of the Avokado' Pg 11].

While addressing the reader with its sheer temerity the writing above still jolts us into another undercurrent altogether, a feeling, an image – we read it again and again and we see the cheap make-up, the tight dress, the lacquered hair, the bright TV studio, the shallow existence, the ill-communication, the desperation – and above all Jeppesen knows he needs not mention this: the fact that she wears “too much lipstick” tells us all we need to know. Ultimately Travis Jeppesen keeps his distance, using the clichéd medium of TV to steer us into the direction he wants.

And Poems I Wrote While Watching TV is about this same distance: looking into another culture, another country through the distorted prism of the cathode ray. It is the wrong way of course, yet this is how we encounter new culture, through the manufactured images beamed into our homes/hotels. TV is our first point of contact, like it or not, and it sticks to us like a virus. It is this very retelling, this forced series of images we choose to believe - and as a result it is killing language, all language, and the use of it. We are now force-fed culture [MTV is a very clear example], it is no longer our choice:

“I see through every televised illusion/Word spacing corresponds to handwriting/Between the lines/Of some producer’s coke binge . . . All of America looks/The same I realize from the/Distance of two years and/A foreign screen” ['I See' Pg 3].

Enough said. I think we’ll leave it at that. Besides Travis says more than I ever could right here.

10: Opening Paragraphs

2006-03-19T07:21:00.000-08:00

Recent online musings concerning the value of opening paragraphs in Literature has led to further contemplation here at Scarecrow. I cannot stress enough the power that lies beneath a well-orchestrated opening paragraph [not to be confused with opening lines]. And, although it doesn’t happen enough, it is simply paramount. It is the legerdemain of great literature. It is the hook, the dazzling light that draws us closer, that pulls us into the text. And, to my sheer delight, most of the time we don’t even know it’s happening to us. Although it can’t happen without the presence of voice, it isn’t an event, or a milieu, or some dialogue that pulls us in - it is something much more esoteric; something beyond tonality, voice, scene and setting; it is an unfathomable undercurrent, and it lies beneath each word, each caesura, each sentence. It simply lurks, waiting for us.

Quite possibly the most remarkable opening paragraph I have read [and reread] for some considerable time is Lydia Davis’s translation of Maurice Blanchot’s haunting l’arret de mort [more commonly know to us over here as Death Sentence]. Please consider:

“These things happened to me in 1938. I feel the greatest uneasiness in speaking of them. I have already tried to put them into writing many times. If I have written books, it has been in the hope that they would put an end to it all. If I have written novels, they have come into being just as the words began to shrink back from the truth. I am not frightened of the truth. I am afraid not to tell a secret. But until now, words have been frailer and more cunning than I would have liked. I know this guile is a warning: it would be nobler to leave the truth in peace. It would be in the best interests of the truth to keep it hidden. But now I hope to be done with it soon. To be done with it is also noble and important.” [Pg 1].

The weight in this, on the surface rather simple, opening paragraph is quite overwhelming. [see Steve Mitchelmore] It speaks of the past, of something that has already happened, of something that haunts the narrator, of something that will not end. It speaks of strength, that in whatever has happened the narrator has still attempted to write it down. When he exclaims:“I am not frightened of the truth. I am afraid not to tell a secret.” Is this his strength? And if it is, what kind of strength is it? Read this paragraph again and let each word pull you closer. Consider Kafka’s Überschuß der Kräfte: is the strength in this opening paragraph the very fact that it has been written at all? Amidst all that has happened? His retelling? His suffering? Or is it something else? That unfathomable undercurrent lurking beneath each breath? Here, then, is its power. [See also Lars Iyer.]

Something similarly remarkable happens in the opening paragraph of Margeret Sayers Peden's translation of Juan Rulfo’s [this week’s Scarecrow cover-star] Pedro Páramo:

“I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there. It was my mother who told me. And I had promised her that after she died I would go see him. I squeezed her hands as a sign I would do it. She was near death, and I would have promised her anything” [Pg 3].

The weight of this opening paragraph is not in the mother being close to death but in the squeezing of her hand, the contact, the touch. It is the regret, the passing and sense of life this gesture creates that is so powerful to us. It is something that touches us all. But, rather tellingly, she is not yet dead, she is still alive, waiting. Something else lurks beneath this paragraph. And just as Maurice Blanchot declared:

“There is in death, it would seem, something stronger than death: it is dying itself.” [The Writing of the Disaster].

It is this idea of waiting that resonates within us all. Even if this scenario is meaningless to you, there is something unfathomable in its directness, it reaches out to you as you skip along in life, it touches something in you, something you are/were unaware of. It gradually seeps into you, changing you from here onwards. Susan Sontag, in her revealing foreword, states:

“These sentences, of a bewitching concision and directness that pull the reader into a book, have a burnished, already-told quality, like the beginning of a fairy tale.” [Pg 1].

Here the nail, as rusty as some may see it, is hit firmly on the head. The point of great Literature, then, is to pull the reader into the book, to hoodwink them with understated, simple brilliance, with slight of hand; and I guess it is this “burnished, already-told quality” that Maurice Blanchot [like all writers] was hoping to illustrate.

It is why a book like Tony O’Neill’s Digging the Vein can fall into this category. A book that some may turn up their noses at [as we all do from time to time whilst skimming the surface], a book some may call cult or whatever, ignoring the fact that its surface is exactly that, a façade, and deeper, beneath what we ostensibly see first time around is something else, something powerful, something that pulls us closer even if its subject could not be more diametrically opposed to our very being. Please reread this opening paragraph and I defy anyone to tell me that there isn’t something unfathomable prowling underneath, something lurking, waiting. And if you still can’t find it I suggest you look again immediately, because it's still there, as it always was/is.

But then again why bother? Is any of the the above really worth it? Really? Should we really be worrying about the strength of an opening paragraph? Should we? Consider the following paragraph:

"The heroes we know from history or literature, whether they have shouted love, loneliness, anxiety of being, of non-being or revenge, whether they have fought against injustice or humiliation, we don't think these figures have ever been forced to the point of expressing - as their only and final claim - the profound sense of what it means to belong to the human race." [Avant Propos, L'Espece humaine (1947) Robert Antemle (private translation)].

Have we ever truly recovered from the one single true "event" that has shaped our lives? This is something, it seems, even Maurice Blanchot couldn't fathom.

Lee Rourke © 2006.

PS And, please, try not to confuse the above with the great Midnight Bell's views on the opening paragraph.

9: Almost Blue

2006-02-27T09:16:00.000-08:00

It was A. Stevens from 3am Magazine who first referred to novelist Tony O'Neill as a potential "Nelson Algren for the 21st Century". I'm the second and I won't be the last. 3am Magazine having unearthed this extraordinary writer, you'll recall, long before current interest. Talk long ago was about Tony O'Neill's, then, forthcoming debut novel Digging the Vein. Well, we don't have to wait any longer as Digging the Vein has just been published over in America by New York's Contemporary Press. The heavily awaited British release is scheduled for July via the ultra cool publishers of Dan Fante - our very own Wrecking Ball Press.

The book is hard-hitting, yet beautifully written. The first paragraph speaks for itself in its clarity and splendour. It is also a paragraph that articulates many things:

"In Hollywood, the sun rises and stays up in the dirty sky pummelling you into submission for twelve hours or so before sinking behind the hills. Then everybody waits for it to start up all over again, up and down and up and down, futile and ceaseless. No seasons, no change, just relentless brightness. Nobody can ever escape the glare of the unforgiving sun. They just carry on, dumb with sunshine and desert heat, trying to find a darkened corner where they can conduct business that has no place in the daylight." [Pg 1].

With Digging the Vein Tony O'Neill does something quite special: he simply returns literature to its guttural, all too human, roots. He doesn't mystify his words; there is no higher, spiritual, cryptic language or elongated metaphor. Digging the Vein is a human fiction, a book ostensibly about misplacement and love, a book that is true in every sense of the word, penetrating into the deepest, darkest recesses of human existence without fuss, arrogance and obfuscation. There is no need for Tony O'Neill to try and dazzle us with his prose styling [a weight that seems to loom large in the forefront of many writers'mind]; he knows he will be heard, that every word counts, because he experienced each painstaking syllable. Digging the Vein is a book that, although steeped in its genre's traditions [think Burroughs’s Junky here], transcends this very same genre [think Burroughs’s Junky here also]. It is first and foremost a work of Literature - and I can honestly say this without my toes curling in disagreement. For instance:

"That afternoon developed into a two-day speed and heroin run. We cooked up some of my black tar heroin from McArthur Park next, and I was hit with my second revelation: the beautiful intensity of heroin pushed home into the mainline . . . I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I had turned a corner from which it would be very hard to come back, but when you’ve got heroin it doesn’t matter.” [Pg 71].

Good Literature always captures mood and setting correctly - it is never forced - it seeps into the book naturally. There are no secret tools that can force-feed any required milieu to a reader. When this happens it's like waving a rag flag at a bull. Readers spot such tricks immediately. Like all writers of his standard Tony O'Neill possesses voice. Digging the Vein, within its heart-felt pages, contains, above all else: VOICE. Tremendous, unpretentious voice; it is a voice so strong in its conviction it will reverberate within the cranium long after the book has been put down. Digging the Vein will haunt you and like other novels of a similar benchmark this unyielding power lays in the book's honesty [think Fante, Bukowski here]. Voice cannot be ignored when you read:

“Some hours later I was sitting on the can in a toilet cubicle within the casino, pushing a shot of heroin mixed with some crystal meth I had brought with me for emergencies into a large vein which curled around the side of my left forearm. The blood coagulated in the barrel, causing the needle to block with five mls. to go. I withdrew the needle and watched a thick trickle of blood run down my arm, drip-dripping off my wrist onto the floor impassively, as I started to sense the speed roaring around my blood, sending my heartbeat into the stratosphere. As was my ritual I pointed the needle at the gleaming white tiles around me and pushed the plunger hard with my thumb. Sometimes, if that shit was really blocked, the plunger would depress fully with a pop causing the blood and heroin inside to spray back around inside of the barrel. If it wasn’t too badly blocked, as happened this time, when the plunger popped, a thin spray of brown blood streamed from the needle and created a pretty pattern on any surface it hit. Beautiful. I felt like a dog marking its territory . . . Perfect. I was the junky Jackson Pollock.” [Pg 90-91].

These are exciting times. It seems the independents are burgeoning into a sizable force. Voices are being found; they're emerging from under the suffocating arms of our "life-style" obsessed society. And long, long, long may this continue. From the blurb:

“Tony O’Neill’s astonishing debut is based on his own experiences as an addict and sideman to acts as diverse as The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Kenickie, and Marc Almond. Through the eyes of his anonymous narrator, see what few tourists ever will: the needle exchanges, methadone clinics, short let motels, and scoring spots beneath the wings of the City Of Angels.”

And for the hell of it, here's what Dan Fante had to say about Digging the Vein:

"Reading it, I could taste the LA smog. Here, pain comes at you like a Mack truck - relentless and unavoidable. Don't blink. Keep reading."

Enough said.

Lee Rourke © 2006.

Lee Rourke interviews Tony O'Neill >>HERE<<

8: Everyday Life

2006-02-06T05:51:00.000-08:00

Ask most people familiar with the Situaltionists and most probably [in my humble experience at least], eight times out of ten, they will mention Guy Debord. And Guy Debord only. Fair enough, that’s highly understandable. But for all concerned here at Scarecrow the underlying influence that has continued to dazzle and delight is the quite brilliant Raoul Vaneigem [and some of you may now shrug and say “so what?”, to which we reply “He still matters”]. We are ultimately interested in his seminal work: Traite de savoir-vivre a l’usage des jeunes gens [or as it’s more commonly known over here: The Revolution of Everyday Life].

When Raoul Vaneigem proclaims:

“In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young man breaks his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against the wall. Nobody gets excited; the disappointed young man lets himself be thrown out. Yet everyone there could have done exactly the same thing. He alone made the thought concrete, crossing the first radioactive belt of isolation: interior isolation, the introverted separation between self and outside world. Nobody responded to a sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone like the hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one with himself but condemned to exile as long as other people remain exiled from their own existence.” [Chapter 3 “Isolation”, The Revolution of Everyday Life].

We sing from the same hymn sheet, Raoul baby!

Please allow us to embellish this stern proclamation. In our writing we have to reconnect with the bored clientele of everyday life, we have to smash metaphorical bottles over their heads, we have to reawaken these somnambulists, these pampered zombies. Our writing has to hit them like an unexpected jolt of electricity. Dripping with meaning. Our writing has to be loud, there is no time for subtlety - let’s leave that for the academics amongst us. We are writers. We have to escape this “magnetic field of isolation” created for us by those governing the books we are told to read. Ultimately we have to write against our current literary climate - in whichever way one sees fit. There are no rules.

Consider this:

“The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand?” [Chapter 5 “The Decline and Fall of Work”, The Revolution of Everyday Life].

Haw haw, we’re being naughty here, we know Raoul Vaneigem is referring to the construct of work in this passage, but just think about the current book market with this little snippet in mind. The current conglomerates do not need to become dominant through power; they just need to casually manipulate our reading habits. They simply have to create a reading/book buying culture based on choice - their choice of course. We are told what to read everyday. We simply need to turn our backs, we need to walk away, and we need to make our own choices. It’s as simple as that really. If Scarecrow serves at least one purpose then we are your signpost. We aren’t telling readers to do anything, that’s ultimately up to each of you; we’re just trying to point readers towards an alternative reading culture that’s all. We’re not bothered what books you buy, you can steal them for all we care. We just want you to be aware that there is another way.

“The symphony of spoken and shouted words animates the scenery of the streets. Over a rumbling basso continuo develop grave and cheerful themes, hoarse and singsong voices, nostalgic fragments of sentences. There is a sonorous architecture which overlays the outline of streets and buildings, reinforcing or counteracting the attractive or repulsive tone of a district. . .” [Chapter 4 “Suffering”, The Revolution of Everyday Life].

It is time to sing our own songs, it is time to reclaim what we see, how we see it, what is ultimately ours, create our own psychogeography, it is time to walk down our own streets in wonder and write, write, write. . .

Many of the books we see these days perched perfectly in high street seasonal window displays are written by static, worn-out, curmudgeonly blatherskites, pitiful zombies who write by numbers. It’s not their fault, they’re writing for the tastes forced upon us. But they do not walk amongst us; they do not walk our streets. They sit, motionless, staring at blank walls, waiting for instruction. They write their books, these books are posted to publishers and agents in plain brown padded envelopes to be opened in modern, minimalist foyers, to be published in nice, clean pastel shades, to be displayed in identikit formulae - barbed fishhooks to catch the drab passer-by’s eye. These manuscripts have never touched our streets. They’ve been created for another purpose - and it isn’t ours. We do not belong. We are elsewhere.

Onwards

Lee Rourke © 2006.

7: Shindig

2006-01-14T02:57:00.000-08:00

A charming evening was had by all on a bitterly cold late December evening at the joint 3am Magazine/scarecrow Xmas Shindig in the hallowed Aquarium Gallery in Bloomsbury. Reading at this event were underground literary/art malcontent and all-round wind-up merchant Stewart Home, debut novelist Tom McCarthy [his extraordinary Remainder being 3am's book of the year], publisher extraordinaire [Attack! Books and imprint Neo-Attack! Books] and 3am co-chief editor Randolph Carter and myself, Lee Rourke, editor-in-chief here at scarecrow.

Not a scene as such but a gathering of like-minded souls who all eschew the current trend in publishing; this was a room packed with those who have turned their backs on the conglomerates, and ignore those vainglorious money-men who are hell-bent on sales, sales, sales, marketing and profile; those same birdbrains responsible for the horrid 3 for 2 dross in every high-street bookstore [Don't forget your coffee!], those grand panjandrums who are responsible for everything that is wrong with contemporary fiction in this country. This, quite frankly, is a new way. A reactionary crowd of literary dissidents who just want to hear a new voice, those who have evolved on their own terms and have never bowed down to the conglomerates' demands. This new way, of course, is largely due to the hard work of 3am Magazine [Buzzwords' editors Andrew Gallix and Andrew Stevens immediately spring to mind] who have, over the last 5 years, banged the drum for the marginalised and have unearthed, in the process, some of the most exciting writers of our generation [take Tony O‘Neill for instance]. Together, with the help of new publishers such as Metronome Press, an alternative route is being forged - and it's fast burgeoning into a brobdingnagian backlash, a reactionary leviathan with a sting in its tail. And it's not just happening here in London, it's happening everywhere. Long live the dissenters we say!

First to take the floor was myself [reading alongside Jamie Ried's original "Fuck Forever" artwork upon the wall]; after a genial introduction from Randolph carter, who hosted the event, I read The Roof - a short story taken from a collection called Everyday. I wanted to dedicate The Roof to ergophobics everywhere but in my nervous excitement I forgot. Ah, well.

Next up was Randolph Carter himself, reading from an asortment from his own imprint Neo-Attack! Books. Such titles as GM Mutant Baby Plague, Go Fanny Go, 8 Billion Vinnie Jones's and Dirty Manga Bastards were hard to ignore and Randolph didn't hold back in his reading, bringing more than a wry smile to the chops of those present. Randolph was also proud to announce the forthcoming publication of the 3am Anthology - a collection of 3am Magazine fiction and essays.

After a short interval Stewart Home recited from two of his previous novels: 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess and Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton. Adding that he would not be reciting from his current novel Tainted Love until he had completed his "Arts Council funded course in ventriloquism." Those in attendance were treated to a machine-gun delivery as he rattled off two key chapters from memory. Most wanted something from his most recent novel, but I guess we'll just have to wait for him to complete his course for that eventuality. Nonetheless this was vintage stuff from Stewart - and besides, he wouldn't want it to be a comfortable reading/listening experience for any of us.

As with everything Stewart Home is responsible for we have to take it on his terms. Like it or not, and whatever people think about this prolific writer, we just could not escape the fact that we were in the presence of a considerable influence: the shadowy figure behind much of what has happened in the literary and art worlds of subterranean London the last 15 years or so. Fact.

Finally, we were treated to a, very much anticipated, reading by Tom McCarthy from his astonishing debut: Remainder. Hot off the back of favourable reviews in the TLS and Independent this is the book everyone is talking about - a literary tour-de-force that isn't afraid to say so. It is a book that demands to be read and re-read over and over again [read my reviews over at RSB and 3am]. Tom read well, fuelling his words with the attention to detail such a book deserves. And even though the alcohol was in full flow all night [and most of us had tired feet] the room remained silent throughout Tom's reading [it even felt like the traffic had stopped outside, including the ubiquitous police sirens], each of us hanging on to his every word. It was a speacial moment and if you ever get to see Tom McCarthy reading from this remarkable novel count yourselves lucky - we all did.

So, personally, I would like to thank every last one of you who braved the cold on this special evening. Thanks for making these things happen. Thanks also to Stewart Home, Tom McCarthy and 3am Magazine. And let's hope to see you all at the next 3am/scarecrow shindig!

Photos in order: 1: Tom McCarthy. 2: Lee Rourke. 3: Randolph Carter. 4: Stewart Home.

More photos from this [and other 3am magazine events] can be found HERE.

6: Tainted Love

2005-12-12T09:05:00.000-08:00

Has Stewart Home's time finally arrived? Is he, at last, beginning to be accepted? Understood even? Welcomed into the established literary fold? Probably not - which can be construed as a good thing - but he is one step closer with his latest offering, the extraordinary novel about his M/other: Tainted Love.

Stewart Home has been way ahead of our time for, well, a long time now. We have a whole body, a whole decade's worth of intellectual provocation. Rooted, as he is, firmly in London's underground art world we pose the obvious question: would Brit Art be what it is today without his shadowy influence? We seriously doubt it. Stewart Home invented Brit Art we tell you - you doubt us don't you? Well so what, we beseech you to look into the facts. Read his work. But just try telling Brit Art's jet-setting, bed-wetting, Gin-swigging, coke-snorting stars this. They'd ignore you; they'd wander straight past you towards someone who looked more interesting and didn't bother them with questions. You know who they are, we know who they are and they know who they are. But they just won't budge.

It must be a strange predicament to find one's self in: knowing that your work is relevant in every conceivable way but still your publishers and the bourgeois world they inhabit don't know just what to do with you. How do you exactly market Stewart Home? What would you do? Where would you place him? Exactly, you can't. You just allow his work to speak for itself - and it does. As we stated, it was London's art world that first felt Stewart Home's sting, his genius tying them into knots, the vainglorious left in paroxysms of wonder.

His Art Strike of 1990-1993, for instance, was a stunt that still rankles in some quarters:

"The 1990 Art Strike was called as a means of encouraging critical debate around the concept of art. While certain individuals will put down their tools and cease to make, distribute, sell, exhibit or discuss their cultural work for a three year period beginning on January 1st 1990, the numbers involved will be so small that the strike is unlikely to force the closure of any galleries or art institutions. It will, however, demonstrate that the socially imposed hierarchy of the arts can be aggressively challenged.

Art as a category must be distinguished from music, painting, writing &c. Current usage of the term art treats it as a sub-category of these disciplines, one which differentiates between parts of them on the basis of 'perceived values.' Thus the music of John Cage is considered art, while that of Madonna is not. Therefore, when we use the term art, we're invoking a distinction between different musics, paintings, works of fiction &c., one which ranks the items to be found within these categories into a hierarchy.

Given the diversity of objects, texts, compositions &c., which are said to be art, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is no common denominator among these 'art works' which can be used as a criterion for deciding what should or should not be considered art. What distinguishes the art object is the particular set of social and institutional relationships which are to be found around it. Put another way, art is whatever those in a position of cultural power say is art.

One of the purposes of the Art Strike is to draw attention to the process by which works of art are legitimated. Those artists and administrators who are in the privileged position of deciding what is and is not art constitute a specific faction of the ruling class. They promote art as a superior form of knowledge and simultaneously use it as a means of celebrating the 'objective superiority' of their own way of life on the basis that they are committed to art. Appreciation of art is generally used as a mark of distinction, privilege and taste."

Part prank, part serious caterwaul against artists that deem themselves to be existing on a higher stratosphere than the rest of us via their creations, Stewart Home simply wanted to point out that art isn't that important so he encouraged the entire art fraternity to partake in a strike for the duration of 3 years - it is of no surprise, then, that only Stewart Home did [apparently doing nothing all day except sleep and watch Kung Fu films]. The strike, of course, was an act of plagiarism in itself, aping Goran Dordevic and also giving more than a nod and a wink to Alain Jouffroy.

After his strike Stewart Home exhibited the one constant in those 3 long years: his own bed. Do you see where we're going now with this, eh? Understanding the power of plagiarism he knew he could stoke up more than a few fires to help keep his name burning for a long time. Maybe this is something that Tracey Emin - who was exhibiting some of her paintings alongside him at that very same exhibition, at that time an unknown 28 year old - should take into account herself. Who knows? Maybe one day she will?

Stewart Home's literary output over the last fifteen years runs, pretty much, on the same level of insouciance it always has. His work to date being one gargantuan anti-narrative that juxtaposes pulp/trash/porn with high-minded literary/social/political theory - an intertextualising of dissent, and a vital one at that. It's about time we begin to accept that Stewart Home is the shadowy figure lying beneath modern British artistic/literary culture as we know it today - like it or not. Don't believe us? Then we urge you to dip into his numerous essays written, self published and distributed we hasten to add, over the last 10-15 years. Or try Neoism, Plagiarism & Praxis for example. Go on, we dare you. You'll find that his influence is fluent, tangible and integral. It already lies with us; we've just got to scratch beneath the surface to find him that's all. Take Tracey Emin and other British boom artists and writers circa and post 1990 and look a little closer, all are not what they seem are they? Yup, there he is, there's your man Stewart Home, that's him there, lurking beneath their polished façades.

But do we actually care? Robert McCrum et al may not, but we certainly do. We beseech you again to read his work, anything; we don't care just as long as it's written by Stewart Home. As the novelist Ellis Sharp once to us: "...his [Stewart Home] footnote in 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess on the late Ann Quin is worth the asking price any day."

All that Stewart Home is responsible for [including a detailed bibliography of his work to date] is recorded in great detail here.

Lee Rourke © 2005.

5: Chump Change

2005-10-31T09:33:00.000-08:00

Dan Fante had quite a tempestuous relationship with his father, the esteemed author, John Fante - but then again most people who crossed John Fante did. How do you follow in the footsteps of a great writer when he‘s also, to varying degrees, your custodian? Most teenagers who are stifled by their own father’s reputation often run away once they reach adulthood to seek a place in the world of their own making. Often they find a nice, comfortable warm corner and curl up in it to be bothered by no one. Here they rot. Dan Fante on the other hand ran screaming into the very direction his father never wanted him to go. But he did, and there he steadfastly remained.

Dan Fante’s fiction, although still not as well-received as his father's oeuvre, is quickly burgeoning into a considerable work of brutal, white-knuckle, full-punch realism. This is a writer who never, under any circumstance, holds back.

We all know that John Fante was Charles Bukowski’s personal God [I mean, who can forget Bukowski contacting his publisher Black Sparrow Press after discovering John Fante was out of print and had been for numerous years to demand that they republish him immediately or else he would never submit to them again], we all love and cherish his wonderful creation Arturo Bandini - but what we don’t know is just how mouth-wateringly talented his son Dan Fante is.

Dan Fante's first novel Chump Change caused quite a stir when it finally appeared in America [it was first published in France - which is a tremendous start by anyone’s standards]. Chump Change deals with the kind of modern realism that when first encountered sticks in the throat like a fishbone. Most readers, what few there were, were scared away by his sadistic candour - it was an America most didn’t want to read about, let alone admit to.

Let’s just say that Dan Fante has probably seen it all before, from bouts of disgustingly depraved alcoholism, manic depression, the mind-numbing predictability of working in a shit job for useless amounts of money, resigning oneself to the life of a factotum, divorce, embarrassing suicide attempts, selling his ugly body - that sort of thing. It’s small change for a man like Dan Fante. Like Charles Bukowski, Dan Fante’s prose is packed with no-holds-barred honesty; an unhinged honesty that most readers find quite unsettling.

But, this begs the question, when did a book last unsettle you? And I’m not talking about genre titles; I’m talking about a slim, unpretentious little book of prosaic realism. Think back. I’m talking about a put-the-book-down-for-a-moment-walk-around-the-room unsettled? Well? It doesn’t happen that often does it? With Dan Fante, I can assure you it does, and it more-or-less happens every five pages or so. It is realist writing as it should be: terse, direct, brutally honest, scathing and desperately sad; yet containing somewhere deep within a hidden beauty, a secret, a literary dynamo that drives the book along, a force so unremittingly staggering in its execution it is a wonder why his books have not yet become a world-wide literary pandemic so virulent are they in cause. Only time will tell on that one.

Writing that one reader loves and the other hates has got to be the most electrifying there is. You know the kind I’m talking about. If you want to be a great writer like Dan Fante [and there’s no question about his merit] I would suggest you ignore literary trends and just be as honest in your prose as you possibly can without worrying who you offend, or who may turn up their soured nose at your labours - eventually it will send you down dark corridors of creativity you thought could never exist. And by that time there’s no turning back.

Lee Rourke © 2005.

For a recent Dan Fante interview at laurahird.com please click HERE.

Short Bibliography:

1. Chump Change, 1999.

2. Mooch, 2001.

3. Spitting Off Tall Buildings, 2001.

4. A Gin Pissing, Raw Meat, Dual Carburettor V-8 Son-of-a-Bitch from Los Angeles, 2001.

5. Corksucker: Cab Driver Stories from the L.A. Streets, 2005.

4: De Novo

2005-10-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

What should a current student of British post ‘50s literature be confronted with today? How should s/he be provoked? What defines a work of British Literature? What makes any British writer academically plausible? And which British writers of fiction classify an age? A Literary Style? A movement? A shift in Literary perspective? Which works of British Literary fiction can force inspiring debate? It’s the eternal question folks! In a current epoch where more novels are being published each year than at any other moment in history how do we weed out the good from the bad?

The novelist Ellis Sharp recently set his readers the task of devising their own alternative Top 10 British writers of fiction since 1950, having lately observed the tired state of the average university campus’ reading list Ellis, rather provocatively as per usual, produced his own list to help kick start this debate. And a mighty fine list it is too. [See here for his Top 10 Literary Criticism titles].

So, and in following Ellis Sharp’s instruction, we [here at scarecrow] have produced our very own alternative list, and after careful deliberation feel we have produced an unbiased Top 10 that showcases a broad spectrum of literary styles, socio-political awareness, wit and accomplishment fit for any university reading list. These books aren’t necessarily given to you in any order of preference [well, except, maybe, Ann Quin] and aren’t our favourite novels of all time - the list isn’t devised in such a way. Vanity projects are useless. The list is formed to encourage debate, to challenge and open the eyes of an eager student willing to read away from a staid, old and tired Literary Canon. See what you think below - do you agree? Some of you may recoil in horror, some of you may whoop great paroxysms of joy. Some of you may have seen it all before. It’s, as they say, over to you:

1: Ann Quin - Berg.

2: J. G. Ballard - High Rise.

3: Irvine Welsh - Trainspotting.

4: Jeanette Winterson - Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

5: Iris Murdoch - The Sea, The Sea.

6: Alexander Trocchi - Young Adam.

7: Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains Of The Day.

8: B.S. Johnson - Christie Marly’s Own Double-Entry.

9: Hanif Kureshi - The Buddha Of Suburbia.

10: John Wyndham- The Chrysalids.

So there you go. That’s our list. We hope it makes some sense to you - and yes, it’s not as “Cultish” as some may have first presumed. But hey, it’s not always about being cool. Many, many, many books/titles were considered [and we may even publish an alternative list to this alternative - how far can these things go on?], but the 10 titles above, we feel, fully illustrate the complexities and challenging differentiations within the British form. Some have had bigger impacts than others, but all have made their own unique mark within the realms of British/world Literature.

And if we wanted to get really personal then the following three [all way ahead of the pack we hope you'll agree] would have to be included also:

1: Ellis Sharp - Unbelievable Things.

2: Stewart Home - 69 Thing to Do with a Dead Princess.

3: Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.

3: Portslade, Portslade, Portslade

2005-10-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Well, some of you may be familiar with the recent BBC adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s wondrous Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky and some of you may not. Some of you may very well have read everything this alluring writer has written and some of you may well be thinking: just who the hell is this Patrick Hamilton you keep prattling on about? Regardless which category you fall into, please, allow us to introduce you to Hove’s finest export.

Patrick Hamilton’s fiction is a joy to read, his most famous work being the unforgettable Hangover Square. This is the London writer, the “Dickensian Modernist” who created a narrative that looks inwards from each conceivable angle, a narrative that brims, that rattles with the vernacular, the sounds, the smells, the voice of post-war London. Has any other writer captured the unique patter, the banter, the varying idiosyncrasies of this city’s maligned, its lost and forgotten, its stamped-upon-daily hordes? We doubt it. And please, spare us any mention of Martin Amis. Fathoms dear comrades, fathoms. We also deny anyone to pick up a book by this man and not be moved by the world within its pages.

Patrick Hamilton’s novels are highly autobiographical; a Marxist philosophically and politically Hamilton’s hatred of all things Fascist can be found throughout his entire oeuvre and especially in Hangover Square. The Midnight Bell [first book in his Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky trilogy] is ostensibly about his real-life infatuation with a London prostitute, Lilly Connelly. The book is a bitter-sweet account of this disastrous encounter and deals with the same recurring themes endemic throughout Hamilton’s fiction: loss, rejection, desperation and lust. Characters who search out cheap frills in a shallow, materialistic world which is constantly weighing them down [Michel Houellebecq is his natural successor in this respect], wading through the thick, smoggy London backstreets in search of something they can never attain: happiness. There is no redemption in Hamilton’s fiction; there are no happy-ever-afters.

His great ear for speech is second to none and his prose is startling in its immediacy because of this. His novels are littered with the written recordings of the hustler, the drunk, the pimp, the con-man, the middle-classes, the upper-classes, the working-class, the under-class, the down-trodden, the forgotten, the lonely, the pub bores, the blatherskites, the never ending tumult, the whole mesmerising, rotting, obfuscating gambit, the be all, the end all, his wonderful London. Never has a British novelist captured the true desperation that exists within the confines of mass populous, that very human longing that pours from the walls in every smoky, back alley boozer the width and breadth of this sprawling metropolis.

It seems that Hamilton still remains that odd square peg who still, somehow, manages to appear aloof and evade most established critical classifications. This, we feel, can only be a good thing, you see, we need the writers who stand out alone, who turn their backs on the current trends, who never follow suit and who, joyously, we, the humble reader, stumble across by chance without the soul-sapping marketing strategies that now surrounds novelists the world over - and writers such as Patrick Hamilton are made all the more magical because of this.

Patrick Hamilton, the “Dickensian Modernist” [a term he would have found laughable as a Marxist, being quite dismissive of Modernism due to its lack of concern with social reality], the Marxist, the alcoholic, the hater of automobiles has left us a comically grotesque fiction, a body of work with its dark foundations firmly embedded within the fabric of social-realism and a must-read for any serious connoisseur of British post-war fiction.

Lee Rourke © 2005.

Short Bibliography:

Gaslight.
Rope.
Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky.
Hangover Square.
Impromptu in Moribundia.
The Slaves of Solitude.
The West Pier.

2: Act Now

2005-09-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

We find it quite odd really, that a writer such as Simone de Beauvoir's stature is barely [if ever at all] mentioned these days. Is she still read? Do her numerous books sell? Do we carry her books into trendy cafes, order a double espresso, find a table by the window and open them for all to see like we do with so many other authors we could mention? She only ever, it seems, receives that all too elusive mention in conjunction with some long-gone, pug-faced, unwashed little man. You know the one we're talking about. The balding genius, perpetually photographed whilst bathed in blue/grey pipe smoke and an unhealthy smattering of acquiescent po-faced toadies.

Okay, the days of Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots are over, but we're sure you get the picture - that male dominated French intellectual scene we have all been aping to varying degrees of stupidity for the last fifty years or so in little dark pretentious pockets across the western world. And what fun we’ve had! Yet, and we know you’re thinking what we’re thinking, one thing seems to grate: Sartre and Camus are still read avidly yet Simone de Beauvoir isn’t - fact. Why is this so? Sadly, it seems we still like our literary and philosophical heros to be male. It's all very predictable don't you think?

Although ultimately remembered for her feminist call-to-arms The Second Sex [1949] it was the semiautobiographical The Mandarins [1954] that turned out to be her major breakthrough. Its pivotal protagonists’ Anne Dubreuilh and her husband Robert were a thinly disguised de Beauvoir and Sartre and the American Lewis Brogan was, quite obviously, Nelson Algren. Algren wanted to marry de Beauvoir after meeting her in 1947 when she toured America. Cue passionate intellectual transatlantic fling. She soon left Algren though to return to her Sartre [where she remained until the end of his life - give or take a few distractions along the way].

The book serves as a rallying call to her own kind: those bourgeois swaggering leftist intellectuals that populated the side-streets and cafes of post-war Paris in their droves. A prolonged one-woman bugle call daring each to deny their contrived social standing, to ignore elitism, to crawl back down from their ivory towers and engage in the real world once again below their feet, to become politically active and demand the impossible:

“Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” [Simone de Beauvoir]

Lee Rourke © 2005.

Short Bibliography:

Le Deuxiéme Sexe, vol. 1-2, 1949 - The Second Sex
Le Mandarins, 1954 - The Mandarins
La Longue March, 1957 - The Long March
Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, 1958 - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Perhetytön muistelmat La Forcede l'âge I-II, 1960 - The Prime of Life

1: Ruined Men

2005-08-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Integral to all concerned here at scarecrow is the traditional British boozer, couple this with a love of literature - especially of an obscure nature - and we have a heady combination. It is always intriguing to stumble upon a writer, who not only managed to spend every living hour in his favourite boozer but also managed to produce a marvellous plethora of written work in the process. Step forward one Julian Maclaren-Ross.

In his ubiquitous camel-hair coat and immaculate suits, often sporting a carnation buttonhole, a silver-topped varnished cane, dandy cigarette holder and mirrored sunglasses, Julian Maclaren-Ross cut a sartorially elegant swath through Soho and Fitzrovia matched only by few. Julian Maclaren-Ross was many things, most notably a “novelist, short story writer, bookman, dandy, raconteur, lady’s man, parodist, screenwriter, TV and radio scriptwriter, wartime conscript, Duke of Redonda and incompetent gardener-for-hire in Bognor Regis [he landed in court for uprooting some prize seedlings].”

A man distinctly immortalized in other writers’ novels [such as Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time] as much as in his own writing and the pubs and drinking dens of London [most notably the Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia] he was once, rather melancholically, called “one of the ruined men of Soho…the ruined gambler with one last throw…the Jacobite exile who would live to see the usurpers humbled” [Dead as Doornails, Anthony Cronin].

It strikes one as very odd how a writer such as Julian Maclaren-Ross is practically ignored over here in his native country [he has all the right ingredients to be a literary hero of a certain type] yet other writer-boozers over the pond, the likes of Bukowski et al spring to mind, continue to sell by the Borders-basket load. It seems we just don’t want these types on our doorstep these days, gone are such bibulous literary times, the nearest we get to writers occupying the same space today is online or via email and certainly not in your local pub - it seems technology has put a stop to such decadent showboating.

But, is this really such a bad thing? Wasn’t it Bukowski himself who opined at every instant that in order to be a writer it is better to avoid other writers at all costs? Maybe this is the reason Julian Maclaren-Ross didn’t produce half the volume of work Bukowski did? Whatever the reason and regardless of how little, compared to such luminaries as Bukowski, he produced it seems that it was enough.

We’ll leave you with the classic dilemma of the Fitzrovian writer-boozer in a passage from Julian Maclaren-Ross’s own “Memoirs of the Forties” as he describes his first meeting with the founder and editor of Poetry London, J. Meary Tambimuttu in The Swiss public house, Soho circa 1943:

“’Only beware of Fitzrovia’ Tambi said…’It’s a dangerous place, you must be careful.’
‘Fights with knives?’
‘No, a worse danger. You might get Sohoitis you know.’
‘No I don’t. What is it?’
‘If you get Sohoitis,’ Tambi said very seriously, ’ you will stay there always day and night and get no work done ever.’
‘Is this Fitzrovia?’
‘No, Old Compton Street, Soho. You are safer here.’”

Ah, the last of the Bohemians. Please take time to look at the bibliography below and in the meantime, well why not, pint in The Wheatsheaf anyone?

[This editorial quoted from Julian Maclaren-Ross: The King of Fitzrovia]

Short Bibliography [in print]:

Of Love and Hunger, 1947
The Weeping and the Laughter, 1953
Selected Stories, 2004
Collected Memoirs, 2004
Bitten by the Tarentula, 2005
Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Strange Lives of Julian Maclaren-Ross, 2004