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Meades, recalling an interview with Anthony Burgess, gives us a quote with which it is appropriate to end our random reconnaissance. He describes him as an ‘ambulatory encyclopaedia’, who suffered from the ‘all-too-English disease of being too clever by half’ and reminds us that this is ‘rather better than being moronic, but there is this English prejudice against cleverness’. It exemplifies why Meades, like another in his pantheon of heroes, the Sixties novelist Robin Cook (aka noir novelist Derek Raymond who would, like his admirer, eventually leave Britain and become domiciled in France), is not a popular pundit or household name in his native land — he doesn’t easily fit into any establishment. He’s not clubbable. He’s too perceptive. And, as this anthology shows, he’s still fired-up, on form, and as fertile as ever.
Nicky Charlish reviews Pedro and Ricky Come Again by Jonathan Meades.
Robert is outwardly sociable but profoundly solitary. His relationships are stifled. While he and Karijn have an active social life, share domestic chores, and communicate in constant, grating wisecracks, Robert keeps things from her. These secrets are unsettling not so much for being secrets as for the undeveloped way they exist alongside the supposed intimacy: there seems neither dissonance nor habit about them. Robert’s mode of operation is an unostentatious self-isolation, and most of the other men in the novel — including Patrick, Vanyashin, and Liam, the friend whose wake he attends, seem to share a version of it.
Louis Rogers reviews Chris Power‘s A Lonely Man.
That is why the tomb into which we deposit life post-mortem is not the only tomb about which to speak. The autopsy, the burial, occurs in life itself, when we entomb living experience, when we carve meaning into pain. Life is not possible if we do not bury the most significant parts of its experience. Meaning is the first “form” of this burial, in the service of which memory forms the borders of the tomb. In order to make real progress” in the form, we must force life to resolve there. To bear, we must bury.
Liza Michaeli investigates memory.
Written beautifully and gleaming with insights that bring to mind the joy of writing, it is a hard and painful but necessary read, which reminds us that we need to develop a culture of care. Although initially reluctant to identify with the term ‘carer,’ Mills ultimately celebrates it, surrounding it with a wave of empathy and new wisdom — a much needed recognition of the vital role carers play in society, and how it affects every aspect of our lives. This memoir will stay with its readers. It is a masterpiece of a memoir.
Susana Medina reviews Sam Mills‘s The Fragments of My Father, out now in paperback.
Art corresponds to the human tendency to self-destruction. When a person wants to create, has inspiration, he or she destroys herself, surrendering to his or her interactions with chaos. Art denotes chaos, and opposes itself to established meanings and orders. And our desire for death, or self-destruction, is associated with our fondness for chaos and the transgression of established meanings and orders. It is not that much about how art affects the mental background but about how art is a way of interacting with what attracts us and what destroys us psychologically.
Julie Reshe interviewed by Svetlana Gusarova. Translated from the Russian by Duane Rousselle.
Another word for “dregs” is “lees,” the gritty residue left over when the wine glass is all but drained, and I was reminded of a bleak Cioran epistle: “Having verified all the arguments against life, I have stripped it of its savours, and wallowing in its lees, I have experienced its nakedness. I have known post-sexual metaphysics, the void of the futilely procreated universe, and that dissipation of sweat that plunges you into an age-old chill, anterior to the rages of matter.” Dregs‘ objective may be to allow us to experience that nakedness of existence, Burroughs’s “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
Laurence Thompson reviews Chris Kelso‘s The Dregs.
But — and here’s the key — in addition to this new approach to the main vocal, using collage rather than character study, Remain in Light contains a secret weapon — its backing vocals. It is the use of backing vocals on the album that gives it the weight of truth, the veracity of human experience. They are the album’s Greek chorus, offering an alternative commentary to the main narrator. My contention is that, taken together, the vocals and backing vocals on Remain in Light contain nothing other than the secrets of the universe and, making such a huge claim, I’d like to look in some detail at how the backing vocals work.
Richard Skinner revisits Talking Heads‘ masterpiece.
The interesting critic should breathe into that “certain pain arising…” because there are the riches — when one can’t say for sure, we might be better off with awe and acceptance of limitation, as in Frank Kermode’s describing two lines of Wallace Stevens as “among the most beautiful in Stevens and I do not know what they mean.” I don’t go to a review for a plot recap, I want to know what the art did to someone’s soul — show me tire marks!
Greg Gerke interviewed by Garielle Lutz.
These works resulted from training an Ai image generation algorithm with my asemic writing – the outputs from the algorithm I then used as raw material for these pieces. This is something I have been experimenting with recently using photography and I wanted to see how this technology would interpret asemic writing. In a nutshell these algorithms ‘dream’ up images for you based on the library of imagery that you train it with. This is a technology that will most likely be extremely prevalent at some point in the not too distant future. How quickly it will develop, who can say, but when it reaches fruition we can expect that it will be almost everywhere, and before long we will forget that it’s there.
In the 117th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Mikael Buck.
The next person who wags his finger at me is going to get it bitten off, A. Schopenhauer thought.
Short fiction from Nathan Knapp.