‘I first read Morvern Callar when I was about the same age as the eponymous heroine, living in Glasgow, depressed and increasingly isolated. A rare friend came to visit and gave me the copy of the 1995 novel I still own – a red-toenailed foot on a deep blue background, and a coy blurb on the back that gave me little warning of what I was letting myself in for (“What she does next is even more appalling …” OK!)
‘I read it feverishly on my breaks at the chain coffee shop where I worked. At the time I felt strongly that I was failing at most things, including the very basic acts of living. In my spare time I flailed towards something by sporadically writing. My stories were populated with neat, functional characters, characters you could root for. Their goodness was signposted from the get-go; they “deserved” the happy endings that, increasingly, I didn’t feel I did.
‘So I was struck then by the inscrutable Morvern, who blindsides us from the start. She narrates Alan Warner’s novel, and yet we rest glacially on the surface, often literally – she’s more likely to describe in detail the painting of her nails than her feelings. Her focus on her physical self has been criticised as that of a male writer trying to imagine the bodily preoccupations of a young woman, or taken as a comment on the blank-eyed capitalistic ennui of young people in the 90s – so dead inside! – but I now read it more as emphasising the boundaries between Morvern’s mysterious internal world and her external. Her self-containment cannot be breached for long. Events from the mundane to the horrific are narrated with equal calm, brand names scattered here and there. The levelling effect is disconcerting.
‘Badly behaved heroines are more celebrated now, but they still generally have to be made palatable with charm, or an explanation. They still operate within recognised moral codes. They might get their comeuppance. Morvern, though, reminds me that doesn’t need to be the case. She remains gloriously strange. She’s laconic, strangely innocent, drifts along under her own logic with no discernible masterplan. At no point is she punished, or even at risk of being punished, for her actions. And the only place where she does let us in, in the end, is not through eventual regret, but through small moments of joy. In the feel of sun on skin. In landscapes both Scottish and Spanish, the anonymity of a rave. In the music she listens to constantly through her Walkman, soundtracking her every move, highlighting her dissociation even as it provides us with a way to get in closer. She doesn’t question this joy. She doesn’t have to do anything to earn it. It’s just there for her, if she looks closely.
‘It’s a novel that taught me about control, about the space of what’s underneath a story and what can be left unsaid. About our capacity to root for a character who is, seemingly, totally amoral. And it also taught me there was artistic, even aesthetic, value in my grey little life; things I could use and transform.
‘In the novel, cheap Mediterranean hotels and supermarkets are given a gravity and poetry. The world itself starts to feel like a dream – there are no consequences, ugliness metamorphoseses into something more transcendent. There is a surreality to elements like the sinister resort bar where you can pay for your beer in blood, the glitter left in Morvern’s knee from an accident, a nightmarish swimsuit-swapping competition. It’s our world, but it’s not, because when the moral code is upended, questioned, anything can happen. And in the gaps ambiguity creates, beauty can rush in.’ — Sophie Mackintosh
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Further
Alan Warner Site
Alan Warner @ goodreads
BOOKS OF MY LIFE BY ALAN WARNER
Alan Warner | Five Things Right Now
Alan Warner: Imagining Scotland
Heimat, masculinity and mobile narration in Alan Warner’s The Man Who Walks
Alan Warner on Can’s ‘Tago Mago’
Podcast: “Their Lips Talk of Mischief” with author Alan Warner
Interview: Alan Warner
A literary Withnail and I
INTERVIEW with ALAN WARNER
Alan Warner: Escape from Masculinity
‘With each novel I dare myself to try something risky, asking – have you got the guts?’
Small talk: Alan Warner
Just a Big Silver Light
Alan Warner: In tune with material girls
Buy ‘Morvern Callar’
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Extras
Trailer: Lynne Ramsay’s film adaptation of ‘Morvern Callar’
Alan Warner – Les étoiles dans le ciel radieux
Alan Warner Interview – Director’s Cut
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Interview
Scottish Review of Books: In Morven Callar, you write, ‘The hidden fact of our world is that there’s no point in having desire unless you’ve money. Every desire is transformed into sour dreams… There’s no freedom, no liberty, just money.’ Am I right in thinking that money, what it can do for a person, how it oxygenates the class system, is a theme that still interests you? For example, in The Stars in the Bright Sky Kay tells Ava, ‘I think you can afford any failure,’ after Ava describes how ‘There are two sets of drug laws in this country. One for the rich and famous and one for the people in the housing estates.’
Alan Warner: I am not sure it is a theme at all so much as an inevitable trope of writing about contemporary society. Especially in such a socially divided Britain – which is becoming more divided. The drama exists in the class difference alone. There’s nothing to write! (laughs). Also these are views expressed by characters – and characters don’t necessarily express themes, or of course, the author’s views. In the first quote by Red Hanna – Morvern’s foster father – he is essentially expressing the process of Thatcherism – that there are few societal goals and achievements remaining for people – apart from cars and houses and the things we fill them with. Values and experiences of solidarity and happiness outside of that are diminishing. Of course he’s an old socialist who has seen almost all he believes in withered away. He and his wife Vanessa have fostered Morvern since she was little. They’ve taken in other female kids too, who Morvern mentions. Kids who have been sexually abused and their stories have – I believe – traumatised Morvern in some deep way. So I find Red Hanna and his wife very admirable in many ways. They practise what they preach despite their faults. There are dramatic and plot reasons why he makes that statement as well – since later in the narrative Red Hanna is suspended from work for drinking in a pub “on duty”. His words are prophetic as he is going to see his own full pension threatened. But it’s also wildly irresponsible of him that Morvern’s foster father has a sexual relationship with Morvern’s best friend. I do think Red Hanna is cracking up at this point and I do think Lanna does things just to test Morvern, but it seems to me Morvern is betrayed again and again by those closest to her, which adds to this terrible loneliness she seems to embody.
SRB: You were saying that when you first started writing you were fired up by wanting to see the life you’d known growing up represented in fiction. Was the fact that it hadn’t been seen until then an oversight, a book waiting to happen, or was the omission cultural or political? If it was political, should I take it as read that something of the same thing goes on today? I’m thinking of the paragraph you wrote that concluded your recent review of Ross Raisin’s Waterline: ‘There is a sly, unspoken literary prejudice at work in Britain today, and it is not against how the novel is written, nor what happens in it. The battleground consists of who the novel can be about, with a reluctance in a certain readership to accept that profundity can be found in working-class as well as middle-class experience.’
AW: I wonder now if the “oversight” was largely personal and familial? It always stuns me how invisible literature and specifically Scottish Literature was to me, until one or two specific days when I was aged 15. And I’ve never known who to lay that at the feet of other than myself. It feels pompous and self-important to be pointing fingers and moaning about the majority culture of the late 70s, the programming at the BBC, etc. I wanted for nothing as a child in an affluent household. But my parents had both left school at age 15 and there was no history of reading or art or further education in any branch of our family or relatives. Everyone was a grafter. Except me. We didn’t have many books in our house and certainly no fiction – that is true – but we did have some books and it was me who didn’t read them, nobody else. I’ve talked before in interviews about how, shortly after I started to read a great deal – when I was 15 and 16 – I saw a first copy of Lanark in an Oban art shop and actually turned to my friend and stated, ‘So is there actually a Scottish person writing novels today, in Scotland?’ How could that happen in a culture? How did I grow up in a vacuum like that? I guess that was my Oban in 1980/1; culture and art was not on everybody’s lips! I had presumed novels were an art form which only happened elsewhere and had died out in Scotland around the time of Walter Scott. What a very curious but genuine assumption. On the other hand, I could argue this was because local bookshops were stuffed with Scott and not a single work of modern Scottish literature or otherwise; not even Compton McKenzie or Buchan. It was only when I reached Glasgow independently when we went to rock concerts that I found a wonderful surfeit of books. Ach well. I can’t lay the blame of my cultural impoverishment on the stock-taking policy of John Menzies newsagent. Fifteen is a good age to discover the whole world has a literature. I might have been turned off at some younger age.
What was it Melville wrote about whalers before Moby Dick? ‘Theirs was an unwritten life’? There are still so many unwritten lives and I greedily and expectantly wait for writers to bring these forth. When I spy men in harnesses working at the top of electricity pylons, I immediately want to read a great novel about these guys. Novelists are going to emerge in disparate and unpredictable ways, geographically, culturally, ethnically. We can’t make a demand that so many novels must emerge per-hundred square miles or per-thousands of our population! Yet simultaneously, I would argue that in Britain today there is an overpopulation and overexposure of what I would call the Oxbridge novel. I think the definition of an Oxbridge novel is extremely obvious.
SRB: You’ve written two “sequels” of sorts now, although they don’t feel particularly like sequels. Taking the first one, These Demented Lands, which is a “sequel” to Morvern Callar – or is it? The Morvern who appears here has a distinctly chattier tone, less “blank” (or perhaps I should say “practical” following on from your earlier answer). Is it the same Morvern? And why kill off a character (as The Man Who Walks confirms) you and her readers were clearly fond of?
AW: I am very fond of These Demented Lands. I wanted to do a novel completely outside social realism at that juncture. Morvern Callar had been a “big success” in publishing terms and I think I was perversely looking for my own Reichenbach Falls moment for the poor lassie. I was being kept up late with too many telephone calls from film producers! When I sat down to write it, I clearly recall saying to myself: ‘Alan, you can go anywhere and write exactly what you want, so just let rip.’ That’s exactly what I did. That novel seemed to just come out of my dreams. Of course it is surely clear it is set in some antechamber to Hell? Thus the glaring references to Golding’s Pincher Martin. But many critics seemed to take it not as a fever dream (possibly a dream Morvern is having, safe in her bed, pregnant?) but as a work of pure realism! I think that dreamlike quality accounts for Morvern’s more proactive nature. I am very heartened as there is a fine Irish writer called Sean O’Reilly who once told me reading These Demented Lands just freed him up to realise he could proceed writing his own stuff with no need to be bound by hard realism. It’s odd. I can’t believe I’ll write in that manner again but I’ve learned you never know where you will be stylistically – if you are blessed enough still to be breathing – ten years further down the line.
SRB: Going back to Morvern Callar, there are a good number of unanswered questions in the book. Unanswered and even unraised by Morvern. I don’t want to rob the book of its mysteries, but I wondered if we could hover over one or two of the more intriguing aspects of the plot. The book for example she claims credit for. Would one be right in deducing that the reason she gets away with it is that the novel is in some way about her, which is also why the unnamed boyfriend also tries to cut his hand off; some sort of extreme authorial guilt? On which subject, many of the stories that feature across your “Port” novels have the feel of great yarns told in the pubs. Have you ever felt a throb of authorial guilt over borrowing from local myths and stories?
AW: I’m jumpy that there is something pejorative about the term, “pub yarns” – and also I believe it’s a chicken and egg scenario. But to answer the first part of your question, I agree. One imagines the novel Morvern’s dead boyfriend has written isn’t about pylon repair men. Those publishers (I’d never met a publisher then) seem to accept without question that Morvern is the author. Possibly a certain wryness seems to be apparent in that mysterious, unseen work? You are correct, it must have some “female perspective” – which is of course, doubly ironic. I also have the feeling the boyfriend’s novel is rather beautiful, in some subtle way. It is pretty much apparent that Morvern doesn’t bother to even read “her” book which I think is wonderfully arrogant. Or has she read it at some later date outside the temporal scope of her text, and she has been deeply moved? Are we now reading the text she has written in response; is it a form of correction, a search for grace and redemption, a guilty true confession in reaction to the conceit of His fiction? Because it’s obvious we are reading a text, with pasted-in maps and illustrations which Morvern herself has written down and knowingly epigraphed. Has she too become a reader? I recall the actress Samantha Morton, who played Morvern in the film version, told me that when she auditioned for the part, she read the opening sequence of the novel, ‘As if it was a confession to the bloody cops.’ I thought that was very interesting. But for me it’s a definite written text. I think Morvern Callar is a very angry first novel. It is a subversion of the “first novel” concept, because of course I wasn’t confident enough to believe it might ever get published – like Morvern’s boyfriend seems to be. I think Morvern Callar grew out of those insecurities and that cultural isolation in a very smart way which still surprises me today. It is very much a “manuscript found in a bottle” which was designed to be discovered long after my own demise. A first novel about a ghost first novel which is appropriated by a cold and sometimes chilling voice, hostile to pretence and to artifice. Of course all my sly moves were left-footed when the bloody thing was quickly published!
I’m concerned your suggestion about the severing of the boyfriend’s hand is straying into The Symbolic Use of Colour in the Work of Marcel Proust territory. I have had a hundred academics tell me how I was playing with concepts of the Death of the Author – and I guess they are correct. The boyfriend died for sure! I wanted the boyfriend’s suicide to be very savage and without doubt, thus the very decisive, violent attack on himself which seems to suggest a real self-hatred which is sad. Is he guilty about his own privileged upbringing and this is why he passes all his money on to Morvern? Suicide has always disturbed me and I have lost friends to it. But to be pedantic, is it not his left, non-writing hand he has almost severed, with the weapon in his stronger right hand?
Pub Yarns. I do solemnly confess, too much of my life was once spent in pubs and I still convince myself there is a noble literary tradition attached to this. I hardly drink at all anymore but I believe that I’m using fiction and imaginative tales in the FORM of a pub yarn or a local myth. I think it is that roving, versatile structure I am attracted to. I have used tales and stories from family and from friends; things that have happened to me, to others, all mixed up with invention. I find as years go by I forget the sources of many of these anecdotes. Many are invented, some I believe happened to so-and-so but actually happened to such-and-such – and even more bizarre, I genuinely have believed certain things have happened to me whereas I’ve been corrected and they definitely happened to someone else! Such are the dangers of too many pubs and a fantastical if meagre imagination. But there’s something else more significant.
Since my parents ran a hotel, as a kid I spent long summer holidays with a Gaelic speaking family on Uist and Barra. I am the last type of personality to claim membership of some kind of ersatz culture here. We did not cluster round a two bar electric fire swapping fabulous stories of the islands. (Though Tales of the Toddy was one of the few books always sitting in our house – and I later read it with delight). But among the adults on Uist and Barra there were drams and tales swapped at night – in English and Gaelic – and we children often listened with absolute fascination before we were sent up to bed. I used to have a wee bit of childish Gaelic that has since been nudged aside in my storm-tossed mind. Often tales were translated for my benefit alone, as I was the only non-native speaker there. So I have heard stories from an early age from Gaels and a good few of them put shivers up my spine. Also, my mother’s family is a very large farming one, of brothers and sisters and cousins galore on Mull, and tales would and still do fairly fire round the scullery there. In a completely unpretentious way, my mother, father, sister, uncles and aunts were often relating wild and very funny stories and I was exposed to that long before I was a reader. It’s inevitable this was a big influence.
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Book
Alan Warner Morvern Callar
Penguin
‘Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern’s reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape-from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene-we experience everything from Morvern’s stark, unflinching perspective.
‘Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.
‘In much the same way that Patrick McCabe managed to tell an incredibly rich and haunting story through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed boy in The Butcher Boy, Alan Warner probes the vast internal emptiness of a generation by using the cool, haunting voice of a female narrator lost in the profound anomie of the ecstasy generation. Morvern is a brilliant creation, not so much memorable as utterly unforgettable.”‘ — Penguin
Excerpt
He’d cut His throat with the knife. He’d near chopped off His hand with the meat cleaver. He couldnt object so I lit a Silk Cut. A sort of wave of something was going across me. There was fright but I’d daydreamed how I’d be.
——He was bare and dead face-down on the scullery lino with blood round. The Christmas tree lights were on then off. You could change the speed those ones flashed at. Over and over you saw Him stretched out then the pitch dark with His computer screen still on.
——I started the greeting on account of all the presents under our tree and Him dead. Useless little presents al ways made me sad. I start for me then move on to every body when I greet about the sad things. Her from Corran Road with all sons drowned off the boats. She bubbled till she lost an eye. I greeted in heaves and my nose was runnmg.
——I dropped the Silk Cut and it burned to the filter on a varnished floorboard. I stopped the greeting cause I couldnt breathe and was perished cold. I slowed down the speed of the flashing Christmas tree lights. I put on the scullery light then the immersion heater then the bar fire but I didnt put a record on.
——I supposed I was stewing over going out to the box by the garage to phone police or ambulance or whoever took things to the next stage. Then all in the port would know. They’d print a photo in the paper. His old dad who lived away in a country would have to be told. My fosterdad and the railway and all in the superstore would know.
——That immersion heater took a half hour and it was eightish on the video. I needed to boil the kettle to get the mess offof my face, what with the greeting and that.
——I couldnt get past Him without stepping in His blood and I was scared to go too nearish so’s I got my things in the bedroom. I took the last pill in that cycle.
——I came back towards the scullery then took a run ning jump over the dead body. The sink was full of dishes so I had to give them all a good rinse. The face was by my bare foot. I fitted the kettle spout under the tap. Then I put my underwear over the spout and tugged the elastic round the sides. When the kettle boiled I put the warm knickies on. I jumped back over Him ready to throw the kettle away, after all you don’t want to scald your legs. My foot came down in blood. I stepped forward and swore out loud. I wiped my foot on the rug.
——I washed my face in the sort of burnt-smell kettle water then I needed toilet.
——Sitting there I saw I’d locked the door even though He was dead. I did a number-one then a number-two remembering always to wipe backwards. Though He was dead I used the air freshener spray.
——For sake of something to do I tidied away all the presents for Him, Red Hanna, Vanessa the Depresser and Lanna into the boiler cupboard. I lit a Silk Cut. I lined up the presents for Him to me then just tore them all open one after another like apple boxes at the work: a polished steerhide jacket, a packet of yellowish low denier stock ings, a lighter that looked goldish, a basque thing all silky and a dear-looking Walkman with batteries in. I started to greet again as I stepped in the blood and knelt. I ended up touching His hair cause the rest was cold. All floor blood had a sort of skin on. When I saw it burnt down I pushed the Silk Cut butt in the blood and it hissed snub bing out.
——I’d been greeting so long the water would be hot. Bits of the blood-skin hung from my legs when I stood up and fresh drops came off. My bare feet left blackish foot prints across the floorboards. I wiped the footprints into smears with the shiny Christmas wrapping paper.
——I kneeled in the bath. I washed my knees and legs and in me. I got my legs warm so there were no goose bumps then shaved them and that. I gave my shin a wee nick with the razor and blood lifted in a bubble then trickled quick. I put in a splash of the bubblebath and filled the tub. The water was too burny so I put in cold.
——The flat had warmed up and was quite cosy. I used every clean towel on me. In the bedroom I used mois turiser all over and put the knickies back on. I adjusted the straps on the new basque thing and buttoned up a long shirt over it. I used a touch of Perfect Plum Glim merstix and Raspberry Dream powder blush then did my lips with Unsurpassed Wine. When I held the tissue taut to take the excess off the paper ripped, so I did a deep breath and used another. My nails were in a state as per usual so I sat blowing on them after putting a little more Dusky Cherry on.
——I tied the reddish scarf into my hair and put the greenish socks on. I was stewing over the yellowy stock ings under the velvet trousers which feel quite rampant, or the jeans with the knees out and all the slashes up the back to the bum with tights under. I plumped for just the velvet trousers. I laced on the baseball boots and used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut. When I put the steerhide jacket on it had a smell and creaked as you moved the arms. I put the Walkman in the pocket and the plugs in my ears after fitting the long ear-rings on. I took some cassettes: new ambient, queer jazzish, darkside hardcore and that C60 I’d made with Pablo Casals doing Nana on his cello again and again.
——I sat on the toilet with the door locked listening to all the stuff on the Walkman; the Auto-Reverse turned the cassettes without having to take them out! I tried the goldish lighter on Silk Cuts. Every now and then I lifted the toilet seat to drop the butts in.
——When I came out, the video showed twelvish. Every one who was going to work from down the stair would have gone so there would be less chance of nosey-parkers when the ambulance or police came to take Him away.
——On the computer screen was:
——NOTE ON THE DISC
——xx
——I pressed the diddleypush to eject the floppy disc after Z&Y-ing the keyboard then I pulled out the plug. I put the disc in the jacket pocket. I grabbed two packs of Silk Cut out the carton and put some of the cassettes in the jacket pockets. I switched off Christmas tree lights, fire and immersion heater then counted the change in my purse for phoning police or ambulance or whoever, from the box by the garage. I wasnt going to have enough till payday. On the mat was a catalogue from a model shop in the south. I chucked it in the bin, locked up careful then moved down the stair past the doors of other flats.
Out there were no people. Puddles were frozen and wee ones off from school had burst all ice. A car passed and you saw smoke clinging round the exhaust. Miles Davis doing He Loved Him Madly offof Get Up With It was going in the ears. My hands were in the jacket pockets, the nose was cold like it was pinched between finger and thumb; I touched the computer disc in the other pocket, as I walked up to the phonebox I felt the cassette moving next to one pinkie, and it was that bit where the trumpet comes in for the second time: I walked right past the phonebox. It was the feeling the music gave that made me.
——It was a dead clear freezing day with blueish sky the silvery sun and you saw all breath. I walked by the Phoe nix and the Bayview. Across the bay between the walls of St John’s and Video Rental you saw snow on the moun tains of the island where my fostermother lay buried. Along at the seawall people were crossing the road into shops. All cars and buses had smoke showing round the exhaust. A man inside a car moved his hand at me from across the road. I waved back: it was just Ramraider my driving instructor giving a lesson. A fishing boat was com ing in with a light on the mast. I stopped and watched the boat pass over to the railway pier. I took a big breath of the bright morning and used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut.
——I changed cassettes to Music Revelation Ensemble at the railway station looking up to see the time. I knew my fosterdad was away down through the pass on the early train so I crossed the square. The Christmas tree with the coloured household bulbs was still switched on. The other phones were there so I walked round the corner the way I had for eight year.
——I stopped in the superstore carpark to finish the Silk Cut then when the drums came in after the solo bass on Bodytalk I strode on through the sliding door and up to the signing book. Trust Creeping Jesus to be stood there and he moved his mouth at me. He flicked one of the earplugs out. Youre late by forty-five minutes so get up there, I heard in his south accent. Christ had Christmas already? he says nodding at the steerhide jacket and the Walkman. I put the plug back in my ear and took the door up to the ladies’ staffroom.
——Lanna from bakery was there lifting her hand to lick round her fingers. They were all sugar from stack ing donuts. Where did you get the jacket? she says. I put it round her shoulders and, touching it, she asked if my boyfriend give it me. She called Him by name. I got my locker key and took out the nylon uniform, the apron, the tights in a ball and the schoolish shoes. When I saw the uniform it nearly made me turn round and tell Lanna He was dead. She was playing with the Walkman, winding forward so you heard Music Revela tion Ensemble all far-away-like. Lanna was laying off how bakery had kept her on over five hours without break and there was a law against it. Have you bought all His presents? she says. I nodded and tugged a leg out the velvet trousers then undid the buttons and took off the shirt. You could see the basque thing. I put on the brownish tights and the uniform while Lanna but toned the neck up and smoothed the nylon onto me with her palms. Then she gently.took my earrings out and was biting her lip. You werent allowed jewellery on the section. Why did you go to the fuss of putting these in Morvern? she says. I put the jacket and the Walkman in my locker. Theyre lovely, so is your slip thing, Lanna says, pointing at my chest. Then she goes, since we were off for three day would I come to The Mantrap and get mortal after closedown? She would meet me with a summerbag: shoes and the little black number, though it had a totey hole at the shoulder; I could change in the bogs on the north pier. I nodded, she told me a time and place then showed the half bottle Southern Comfort hid in her locker. She lit a Regal and I took a drag. I nodded. Smiled.
Down the stair the section was pandemonium. Smugslug had gone and let them put too many tatties out on the shelves. Loads had fallen and were getting kicked about by shoppers’ feet. I kneeled to pick them up then stepped in and shoved the tatties to the back of the shelves. I could never grow nails on that job: my hands were all soil.
——Down the tunnel by the fridges, Smugslug tried to give me hell for lateness. I was too famished and walked away. In the fridge I pinched plums and polished them on my apron. I bit leaning forward so the juice dripped on the floor. I loaded a six-wheeler with loose carrots, prepack tomats, icebergs, cos, watercress, loose mushies, prepacks and caps.
——Smiler came out the tunnel, empty boxes stacked on his six-wheeler. He started breaking the boxes down for the baler. Going out tonight? he says. I goes, Mmm. He says, Mantrap? I goes, Uh huh.
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thanks! Hope, even fragile hope, is preferable to gloom. Used to be that mosquitos were a summer fling, but the last couple of years their lifespans seem to last until almost November. Love’s good taste is proven yet again. Love in a bit of a state of disbelief that Dolly Parton isn’t still out there somewhere, G. ** Alex Osman, Hi, Alex. Yes, yes, I need to get your new book. I’ll do what that takes pronto. Congratulations, it looks to be fantastic! ‘Bruised Summer’, no, but I’ll look for that too. Oh, yes, Daniel Johns did read ‘Guide’, and he told me he really liked it and thought my usage of him was hilarious. In fact there was a possible film of my novel ‘Closer’ in the works for a while, and he was interested in composing the score. Cool guy. You have a very solid rest of the week too! ** hitchmk, Thank you. What a great association that brought to your mind. Amazing Perec construction, that one. How are you, what’s up? ** Bill, My clothes are totally falling apart because I hate buying clothes so much. I only have one shirt that doesn’t have big holes in it. If only I were a teenager and could pull that off in public. Mutter merch, yum. I haven’t been there in decades, but it’s probably almost exactly the same, I guess. Except for the merch hopefully. ** Adem Berbic, Who doesn’t? Cue almost everybody. I love reading Deleuze. Good prose. Whenever I glance at Lacan, it looks like very dense instruction manual. I think I can do without. Yeah, Sam F.’s book, excellent. Bottom to top scrolling is legit. I’m not overly anal about those posts’ trajectory. Just looking for the right flow, a bit of a surprise every few inches. ** Sarah Palmer, Hi. I saw Brigitte Fontaine perform once on a small boat docked on the Seine. She did a series of concerts on the boat, which accommodated only about 25 people. Pretty amazing. Right now he’s living in this artist residency by Gare de l’Est where I lived for my first 7 or 8 years here. Thanks about the posts. I’ve had De Bruyckere’s work in a few of the thematic posts, but I’ve never seen her work in person. Have the greatest day yourself! ** _Black_Acrylic, Cash flow: excellent! Yeah, don’t spend it all in one place, even a stylish one. ** Steve, Curious about your ‘Castration 3’ review. I assume you’ve seen the others. We’re very early on with the film, still organising how we’re going to do the fundraising. ** laura w., Theory moods are good ones. Like letting your head go to an amusement park. Yeah, the vast majority of ‘gay fiction’ writers back in the dawn of the phenom wanted to be big, popular, conventionally respected guys. Which is probably why so many of them zizzed out. I don’t like Ben Lerner’s fiction, but it’s not to level of hatred or anything. That it’s gone viral is not a big surprise. It’s ‘literary’ in the most uninteresting way, and that’s what people who want to feel smart and discerning without actually being smart and discerning appear to want. I think the last believable guitar smasher was Kurt Cobain? ** Steeqhen, Oops, the blog’s selfish eating habits strike again. Sorry. I have ‘Camp Miasma’ cued up, but I haven’t located the free two hours needed quite yet. The blog didn’t stop you this time. ** HaRpEr //, As with everything, I guess, cosmetic surgery is a case by case thing for me. Nothing against the procedure or the wish to revise oneself. I do find it hard when it’s the kind that it takes away users’ facial specificity and makes them look like members of some weird biological family. Yes, RIP Dolly. She was such an extraordinarily positive being and force. Really sad. ** Dev, Thanks, D. You read ‘Death Sentence’! Yeah, it’s something. I don’t know if I can explain its special greatness to me simply enough to do that here. I guess I think if I had more talent and if that novel hadn’t already been written, I would have made it my goal to write it. Or something. I guess that’s not much help. Yeah, really sad about Dolly Parton. It’s hard to imagine the world without her in it, but I guess we will have to. How are you? How’s everything in your life? ** DonW, Safe last portion of your trek. Can’t you plant headphones on your kids and hit Play on whatever Pixar has in the menu on their screens or something? Luck galore. ** Thom, Hi. Oh, right, I did reference that Burden piece in ‘Closer’, I forgot. Growing up in LA where he was doing his actions all around was super formative. He was teaching at UCLA when I did my three year stint there as a Visiting Art Student Adviser or whatever it was called, so I got to know him. Sweet guy, but really complicated. Cool that you’re reading ‘Mina Harker’. I wish Dodie would finish her decades in the works next novel. A lot of poets influenced my fiction. And you know I wrote a lot of poetry while I was finessing my prose writing skills. Off the top of my head, very big influences would be Ashbery, James Schuyler, James Tate, John Wieners, and the second generation New York School poets (Berrigan, Brainard, Notley, Padgett, and on and on) in general. In LA, it’s basically summer and hot all the way through Halloween horribly, but I would imagine up north you should get fall by … next week? Hope so. ** Right. Today I spotlight a really terrific novel that doesn’t seem to get talked about all that much these days, but it’s pretty killer, I think. See you tomorrow.
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