DC's

The blog of author Dennis Cooper

DC’s Scary Candy News Outlet & Sales Emporium, 2026 Edition

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In 1964, Long Island housewife Helen Pfiel was arrested for handing out goody bags containing dog biscuits, steel wool pads, and arsenic laced ant traps to teenagers who she felt were too old to be trick-or-treating. Concerned parents contacted police and Phiel was arrested, taken in for psychiatric evaluation, and charged with child endangerment.

 

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Secondhand Swabs: These gross little Halloween treats are made with Q-Tips, mini marshmallows, and melted caramel. DIY

 

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‘If you have this candy at home, or your kids picked it up on Halloween, throw it out, as it’s been linked to at least three Canadian children killing themselves minutes after eating it.’

 

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Chocolate Deviled Eggs: White chocolate w/rice krispies & red sanding sugar, individually wrapped. $18.50

 

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Gravy Candy is here! Gravy is one of those things that improves just about everything it touches and that includes candy. This brown and white striped candy looks just like candy that grandma would keep in a bowl and tastes just like the herb-infused gravy she’d make for holiday meals. $5.95

 

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Authorities say 9-year-old Savannah Hardin died after being forced to run for three hours as punishment for having lied to her grandmother about eating candy bars. Severely dehydrated, the girl had a seizure and died days later.

 

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Despite their inherent messiness, everyone loves Cheetos. While fake cheesy goodness is something everyone can get behind, the Japanese have apparently taken this game day classic and enhanced it to, well, not make any sense. Introducing strawberry-dipped cheetos. Nothing more than the corn puffs sans the cheese and dipped in what appears to be a gooey strawberry-chocolate mixture, these recently released in Japan only morsels of contradictory goodness are reported to be “very good.”

 

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Teens Find Razor Blades In Halloween Candy

 

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What looks like forensic microscope slides with drops of blood-like specimen, is actually made from sugar, corn syrup and red food dye. It’s cheap and easy to make and will stand out from other ghoulish candies.

 

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Just before 10 p.m. on June 12, Adam Budge, 18, and Elijah Stai, 17, were hanging out at Budge’s East Grand Forks home when they mixed a white power — 2C-I — with melted chocolate and ate the drug-laced candy. They then went to a McDonald’s. An hour later, Stai began “freaking out” and acting as if he were “possessed,” foaming at the mouth, hyperventilating, and smashing his head against the ground. By 1:30 in the morning, Stai was dead.

 

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Gourmet Foie Gras Bubble Gum: For those evenings when you’re craving goose liver but don’t want to get off the couch we offer these Foie Gras Gumballs. Each 3-1/4″ x 2-1/2″ x 3/4″ (8.3 cm x 6.4 cm x 1.9 cm) tin contains about twenty-two gumballs that taste vaguely like the decadent french delicacy. £3.90

 

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A woman with special needs who was thought to have died from natural causes was found with candy wrappers stuffed down her throat when her body was being embalmed. When 70-year-old Kathleen Mcewan’s body was found at her apartment in Roxborough, Philadelphia, there were not thought to be any suspicious circumstances surrounding her death. However, when undertakers attempted to embalm her body the next day they discovered up to 10 inches of candy wrappers stuck in her throat.

 

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Polar Poo Bear Candy Dispenser! Pop open it’s head, fill it with candy, such as nerds, jelly beans, or anything small and round, white or brown color candy works best for effect. Then push on it’s legs and it poops it out the back! $4

 

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As much as everyone would love to see a bunch of stoned little kids running around dressed like baby Groot, or whatever, it’s probably a good thing that Colorado police are trying to make sure trick-or-treaters don’t accidentally eat any weed candy this year. The video intends to show parents how to identify an edible. The trouble, though, is that pot-infused candy is often visually indistinguishable from its non-paralysis-inducing counterpart—sometimes it’s literally just ordinary candy that’s been sprayed with cannabis oil—and if you munch on it as you would any other sweets, ignorant of its dark power, you might end up alone and afraid, taking shelter under your bedspread, begging for it to end.

 

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Give someone the gift of a Krabby Patty Coal Shaped Slider this year. Ingredients: Glucose syrup, sugar, gelatin, sorbitol, modified corn starch, citric acid, pectin, malic acid, artificial flavors, glazing agent (palm oil, carnauba wax), sodium citrate, artificial colors (caramel colors, titanium dioxide, yellow 5, yellow 6, red 40 , blue 1). $3.95

 

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Four days after Halloween 1970, Kevin Toston, a native of Detroit, died of a drug overdose. A drug analysis initially showed Kevin’s candy to be laced with heroin and quinine in powder form, but investigators later discovered that Kevin had stumbled upon his uncle’s drug stash and had accidentally poisoned himself. The family, fearful of charges of child neglect, sprinkled Kevin’s candy with the drugs in order to protect the uncle. No charges were filed.

 

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Have you visited IKEA lately? I could not believe yesterday in their food hall they have packets of marshmallow sheep with the title of GODIS SKUM. I have written a complaint and advised it should be rebranded. 99 kr

 

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Spirits were high for Rakesh alias Guddu and his three cronies. They were attending a marriage party on the lawns of the Jehangirabad Palace, which adjoins the district magistrate’s residence in Hazratganj. A video clip (now with the police) clearly shows Guddu dancing away on the lawns, whipping out his gun occasionally and firing in the air. It was perhaps for a break or on an impulse that he left for the candy store located on the same premises, some 50 yards away from the lawn. The youth came in the store around 11.30 pm. The candy store had already put up a closed sign outside its door as it usually does at 10.30 pm, though it does entertain families who might drop by after that hour. When they asked for a cassata candy attandant informed them it wasn’t available. At which, Rakesh stepped ahead, took out his pistol, placed it on the 20-year-old Raghuraj’s temple and shot him dead.

 

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The Barfo Family Candy was unleashed by the Topps bubblegum company in 1990. The armless & legless torsos featuring an unhappy, nauseated, white bread family, with their heads mounted on accordion-like shaped bodies containing a delightful glop- like gel/”candy” (ingredients: sugar, water, glycerin, gelatin, citric acid, potassium sorbate, artificial flavors, artificial colors). $99.00

 

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Weird Japanese candy

 

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A Denver man accused of shooting his wife while she was on the phone with 911 dispatchers had eaten marijuana-infused candy before the incident, authorities say. Investigators reportedly found receipts for “Karma Kandy Orange Ginger” and said he appeared under the influence of drugs during an interview. Kristine Kirk, 44, was shot in the head Monday almost 13 minutes into her call with 911 dispatchers. Police had not yet arrived at the time of her shooting. Throughout the call, the AP reports, Kirk said her husband, who was reportedly hallucinating and asking her to shoot him, had frightened her and her children.

 

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Cricket Crunch Bar: “Cricket protein is similar to beef and salmon when it comes to quality protein,” he said “It has all of the essential amino acids and is packed with B vitamins with a perfect balance of an Omega 6:3 ratio of 3:1. In addition, crickets have more calcium than milk and more iron than spinach.” $3.95 $1.25

 

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In 1974, 8-year-old Timothy O’Bryan died as a result of eating cyanide-laced Pixy Stix given to him by his own father, who likely wanted to collect on a large insurance policy. The dad had poisoned 4 other children’s Pixy Stix as well to make the act appear “random,” but none of the other children ate the poisoned candy.

 

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Taste testing odd Halloween candy. I forgot to rate the last candy, but you could easily tell what the rating was.

 

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Peppermint Broken Glass Candy: When my dad got home, he actually thought I had bought some weird glass sculpture and freaked out. Then, to make it even better, I smashed the whole ‘glass sculpture’ with the rolling pin right in front of him. Recipe

 

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One of the killers of a father-of-three has boasted about the cowardly murder on Facebook from prison – saying ‘I kill people for candy’. Curtis Delima, 22, was convicted of murdering 47-year-old Mark Witherall in April 2008, along with his smirking and sniggering teenage accomplices Mark Elliott and Gerry Cusden. The trio who were accused of behaving like a pack of hyenas as they kicked the builder to death after he refused to give them Halloween candy at his home in Whitstable, Kent, in October 2007.

 

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The Candy Bar is an item used for the Homeless sidequest in Silent Hill: Downpour. It can be found in three different locations depending on the puzzle difficulty. The candy bar must be given to Homer, the homeless man in the Pearl Creek underground entrance, to complete the sidequest.

 

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John P Roberts, 55, a thief out on bail, strangled girl, six, to death and hid her body under his bed after luring her to his motel room with Halloween candy.

 

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After many long years, the hugely popular candy ramen set has returned and it’s much improved! Form the candy dough into the dumpling press, add the stuffing and squeeze! Next come the ramen noodles that magically solidify as they hit the soup! $2.99

 

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On Tuesday, WSB-TV in Atlanta reported that the Waka Flocka Flame affiliate and Brick Squad Monopoly member Slim Dunkin was shot in an altercation that began over a stolen piece of candy. “The information we’re getting, it’s unconfirmed, but witnesses are saying this whole thing started over a piece of candy,” homicide detective David Quinn told “Action News” on camera. According to witnesses, Dunkin, born Mario Hamilton, grabbed a piece of candy from another man while inside an Atlanta recording studio, which led to an argument and then a fistfight. The scuffle ended with Slim being shot once in the chest. He was then transported to Grady Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

 

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Hose Nose: You strap it onto your face, uncork the nose and let the candy drip onto your tongue. $1.69

 

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Murder, Inc. as they were dubbed by the sensationalist press of the day were a loose coalition of gangsters based out of Brownsville, Brooklyn in the 1930s and early 1940s. Though its members were involved in a variety of illicit activities including loan sharking, prostitution, gambling, bootlegging and labor racketeering, they became infamous for their role as the New York syndicate’s so-called “execution squad.” However, their reach extended far beyond the East Coast, they were implicated or suspected in numerous killings across the United States, as far away as Florida, Los Angeles and Detroit. Based out of a 24 hour candy store called Midnight Roses at Saratoga and Livonia Ave in Brownsville, its members were always on call at a moment’s notice to go to an assignment once the directive was handed down. The candy store was located under the elevated train that brought many people too and from Manhattan.

 

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The Red Tent Coffee Shop in the Aomori Prefecture of Japan offers anatomically correct gummy candies in the shape of insect larvae. The candies are filled with a blueberry-flavored jam to stand in for the larval guts. 1,000円

 

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Happy Halloween+ My Halloween Candy! YUM!

 

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In 2000 James Joseph Smith, 49, of Minneapolis had handed out candy bars that he had put needles in. He was later charged with one count of adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm, or illness.

 

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Penis Shape Dispenses Liquid Marshmallow Foam: $7.37

 

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A man who killed his daughter by attacking her with a baseball bat as she was eating her Halloween candy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on Wednesday. Robert Kelly, who told police he was “a little too in the Halloween spirit”, went into the bedroom of his 20-year-old daughter Megan at their home in Oxford, Michigan and beat her to death in May last year. A police dispatcher testified: ‘I asked him if he knew who did it. And he stated, “Yes, I did.”

 

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Pimp your teeth with the off the hook Grillz Candy. Most people can’t afford a diamond-encrusted platinum grill. We know we can’t. Fortunately, most people can afford this tasty candy one. Simply place the lollypop like end into your mouth and suck away (it works like a pacifier). The flavor of the Grillz you receive will be a surprise as they come in sour apple, peach, watermelon and strawberry. $2.99

 

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Heaven Sutton murder 6/27/2012 Chicago, IL: Shot to death while selling candy in front of her house.

 

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Chocolate Scrabble: 32 individually wrapped chocolates, a candy “paper” playing board and a gold caramel trophy. Exclusive licensee for Candyland in a chocolate edition. Kosher certified. $29.50

 

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Prosecutors believe they have a CRUCIAL piece of evidence that proves Aaron Hernandez murdered Odin Lloyd. Prosecutors say they can prove Hernandez stopped at a gas station hours before the murder and purchased gas, cigarettes and BLUE COTTON CANDY FLAVORED BUBBLICIOUS BUBBLE GUM. After Odin was murdered, investigators say they found a shell casing in his rental car that matched the caliber of the bullet used to kill the 27-year-old … and next to the casing — A CHEWED PIECE OF BLUE COTTON CANDY FLAVORED BUBBLICIOUS BUBBLE GUM.

 

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DIY set for making Sushi candy, with candy rice, egg, tuna, salmon roe and seaweed, flavour: grape & soda Popin’ Cookin’ is a series of edible DIY candy in funny shapes, that you can easily make yourself by adding water to the ingredients of the package content: 6x bags of powder with different candy ingredients, 1x spoon, 1x pipette, 1x candy material for seaweed 1x mold, size of the box: width: 14.5cm (5.7″), height: 13cm (5.1″), depth: 4.5cm (1.7″), incl. instructions with pictures. $2.43

 

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Robert Durst, the real-estate heir accused of urinating on a Texas CVS cash register and candy rack when he was picking up a prescription, is one of the strangest cases of a rich man gone off the rails. On Tuesday, after arranging for Durst to turn himself in to authorities in connection with the alleged incident at the drug store, Lewis once again defended his client, whom he said suffers from a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome. “He wasn’t arguing with anybody and he didn’t seem agitated,” Houston police spokeswoman Jodi Silva told The New York Post, adding that she did not know what the prescription was for. “He just peed on the candy. Skittles, I think.”

 

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Have you ever wanted to try haggis, but you just can’t seem to make it to Scotland for some of that entrails-y goodness? Archie McPhee has the answer! For a scant $4.95 a piece, you can treat yourself to these gastronomical delights. While in Scotland, I managed to avoid sampling this traditional Scottish dish of sheep’s entrails and spices, boiled inside a sheep’s stomach. McPhee’s Angry Scotsman’s version is made of butterscotch gummy and crafted to look like actual haggis. $4.95

 

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Eric Morse, who was 5 in 1994, was asked by some older boys in his Chicago neighborhood to steal candy for them. He said no. He didn’t want to steal. The older boys, who were 10 and 11 at the time, determined that Eric, who was growing up in a home marked by frequent parental absence, must be punished for his honesty. The older boys led Eric to an abandoned apartment on the 14th floor of the Ida B. Wells housing project, a high-rise building that had the reputation of being a home base for drug dealers. They led Eric into the empty apartment. It is where they would execute Eric. The older boys then picked the 5-year-old up and threw him out a window. Eric’s body dropped 14 stories.

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Alice, Hi, Alice. I seem to be getting by, thanks. Late happy b’day. B’days are never not confusing. They only get more so. I know a fair number of people who tutor to get by. They mostly seem to think it’s a solid choice. Great that you’re coming to the screening! The struggle you’re going through with your novel seems like part and parcel of getting it right and yours. The worst way is settling on something and going on automatic pilot, which I suspect is the usual way novel-making mostly goes. I don’t know ‘Senritsu Kaiki’, but I will try to find it, obviously. Thanks a lot. All the best to you too, and, yes, it’ll be happy to see you on Halloween. ** _Black_Acrylic, I’ve never owned a pair of dark glasses — weird, I know — but from wearing clear glasses it’s hard to imagine having a long life with them. They were cool, man. ** Tosh Berman, ‘Trawl’ is most excellent. That little doc about him is worth a gander if you can find it. I’ll angle towards ‘Digger’ in a theater then. It’s not as hated over here in France, probably no surprise. Thanks, Tosh. ** Carsten, I have friends who are really into Asia Argento, and it’s true that when I quiz them as to why, it always boils down to them thinking she’s hot. I think Anne Carson is great and deserved the Nobel Prize. I was surprised by the news and quite happy. Huh, then I guess your car looks really good or at least comforting from an aerial view? ** laura w., There are new rock bands I like, but the ones I like never seem to quite fit comfortably in the rock category maybe. I’m a pretty big fan of Tom Verlaine’s solo albums. Especially ‘Dreamtime’. That’s a great album. I was surprised that Anne Carson got it too. Surprised in a very good way. I’ve never watched ‘Rocky Horror’, not even the movie. I think when I found out about it, it was already at the point of having fanatics who saw it a hundred times and wore costumes and danced and sang along, which kind of warded me off. Let me know about the experience. Still no real exciting Halloween stuff to look forward to locally other than the ones you mentioned and kind of this ‘haunted park’ thing they’re doing here which will probably be overly family friendly. ** Adem Berbic, Not to toot my own horn, but I don’t think there’s been any novel that does what ‘TMS’ does. Where’s my Nobel Prize, haha? It’s true that you have to figure out very precisely what the characters’ function within the overall system is, and that’s a tricky thing to negotiate. But possible. I kind of do that with everything I write, they’re just not usually immersed in something so dense. Test Dept. are still working the concert venues? Still banging on the drums and shouting and everything? ** HaRpEr //, When I think about it, I guess I think of myself as a very American writer. Mostly due to my heavy use of particularly American sentence structure and slang and linguistic mess. And the spacial locationing of the settings I use owes a lot to my growing up in LA. I think. I haven’t gotten the new Charlie Fox book yet, but it’s #1 on my list, and I’m going to After8 tonight for a reading where they might just have it. ** Steve, Iñárritu’s films have always annoyed me, so it’s hard to imagine ‘Digger’ will be any different, but cynicism is self-defeating, so … who knows. I hope your today has arrived with improvement in store. I think, if I’m remembering, Rollin knew of my work but hadn’t read it. ** Nicholas., Gaming is a good reason to pay the physical price, I reckon. I think you’re right about resonance. Hm, I’ll dwell there. Me? The usual stuff, dominated by film-related activities and trying on a Halloween-inflected outlook as best I can. Meet the immediate future with your characteristic lustre. ** Uday, Sleep deprivation for me has no positives. My body and brain stubbornly refuse to give me anything of value if I’m worn out. One time I could barely sleep for three days and fell/walked off a metro station platform and crashed down onto the tracks and had to be rescued by a bunch of strangers. For instance. Um, Jennifer? is so lovely. The new Kim Petras … no. I’ll give it a shot. Thanks, pal. ** Okay. Halloween comes roaring back today. See you tomorrow.

Spotlight on … B S Johnson Trawl (1967)

 

‘If anyone knows anything about BS Johnson these days, it is that he was – cue polite sniggers – avant-garde. Or, if that is too French for you, experimental. He cut holes into the pages! He put unbound sheets into a box and invited us to read them at random! He thought he had found a way forward for fiction after the seemingly unanswerable formal advances of Joyce and Beckett! He liked Joyce and Beckett!

‘It is, I suppose, just about possible to have some sympathy with such a middlebrow assessment. Joyce and Beckett’s advances weren’t just formal; they were linguistic. Language, not typography, was what they made dance to their command. For their self-proclaimed heir to use visual trickery may seem a cop-out, or a challenge whose rewards do not make it worth accepting.

‘That’s if you’ve only heard about the work, rather than held it in your hands. Just as it is a delight to see the black page and so on in Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne, more than anyone else, is Johnson’s true literary ancestor), so it is a delight to come across the page with a hole in it in Albert Angelo. But by that stage you will have noticed other attractions.

‘”If only they realised it was funny,” was Joyce’s complaint about those who complained about Ulysses . This is something that is regularly forgotten about so many of the notionally austere modernist writers: they are a hoot. It is the precise attention to detail and significance, and the profound acknowledgment of absurdity, that makes it so. And as Beckett, in particular, is funniest when writing about death, despair and futility, so is Johnson. Albert Angelo may be a bleak story, for it is about an architect who has to make ends meet as a supply teacher (which is also how he meets his end), but it has moments of comedy as good as anything produced in the past 50 years. The section devoted to the schoolchildren’s thoughts about their teacher (“the Boy’s including me just fuk about in class and take the mike out of him”) is Nigel Molesworth with menaces.

‘Trawl, too, is remarkable – easy on the modernist trickery, but a superb mesh of autobiography and farcical sex. (These two novels, first published in 1964 and 1966, give the lie to the idea of that decade as one full of easy sex. Sex in Johnson is a very frustrating business.) House Mother Normal, about the residents of an old people’s home, does make extraordinary use of blank space, random typography and the like – but that is Johnson’s way of representing minds disintegrating into nothingness.’ — Nicholas Lezard

 

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Further

The B. S. Johnson Society
B.S. Johnson @ New Directions
No More Lying: a Primer on the Novels of B.S. Johnson
Modernism’s suicide
B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates: Revisiting the Elegy
B. S. Johnson and the Big Stuff
B.S. Johnson Archive
. . . to B.S. Johnson
Book: Re-reading B. S. Johnson
Bloody Stupid Johnson
‘The Mind Has Fuses’: Detonating B. S. Johnson
B.S . Johnson @ The Complete Review
b.s. johnson, brutalist
Gimme Nonfiction
Forgotten authors No.40: BS Johnson
I Fail To Remember: B.S. Johnson Thirty Years On
Buy ‘Trawl’

 

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Extras


B.S. Johnson on Dr. Samuel Johnson (1971)


B.S. Johnson vs. Death


Fat Man on a Beach (1973) film by B.S. Johnson dir. Michael Bakewell

 

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‘What Do I Know About Beckett?’: B.S. Johnson’s Beckett Notebook

‘B.S. Johnson’s Samuel Beckett notebooks perform an act of remembering. Principally, Johnson wonders what it is possible for him to know about Beckett, an epistemological problem he tries to work out through writing. The scraps of paper and notebook entries show Johnson trying to remember all he can about his onetime friend and major influence: when he read his work, who he was with, what it meant to him at the time.’ — E&DB

 

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B S Johnson: ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde’
by Tim Martin

 

I shall be much more famous when I’m dead,” BS Johnson told his agent the day before he committed suicide in 1973. Four decades on, in a year that marks both the 80th anniversary of his birth and the 40th of his death, it’s still hard to tell whether history has proved him right.

Despite a revival of interest after Jonathan Coe’s superbly perceptive and compassionate biography, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), Johnson’s work remains overshadowed by its novelty value. Beyond a loyal cult readership and a hover of interested academics, he’s likely to be known, if at all, as the man who cut holes in the pages of his novel Albert Angelo to give the reader a glimpse of a forthcoming chapter, or as the writer of The Unfortunates, a box of unbound signatures (sections of the novel) intended to be shuffled and read in any order.

These and other techniques have led Johnson to be tagged as an “experimental” novelist, one of a group of Sixties authors providing a British riposte to the nouveau roman that Duras and Robbe-Grillet were exploring across the Channel. But though he admired the spirit of the British experimentalists, he considered himself to be from a more exalted tradition: as far as he was concerned, he was carrying the baton of Modernist technique that passed from Joyce, “the Einstein of English fiction”, onwards to Beckett. Critics who called him an experimentalist received stinging replies. “Certainly I make experiments,” he once wrote, “but the unsuccessful ones are quietly hidden away and what I choose to publish is in my terms successful… Where I depart from convention, it is because the convention has failed, is inadequate for conveying what I have to say.”

So what did B S Johnson have to say, and what have we been missing? This month is a good time to find out, as five of Johnson’s seven novels are being reprinted by Picador alongside a collection of journalism, plays and short stories. Meanwhile, the BFI is releasing You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, a disc collecting his several contributions to film and TV.

It adds up to the fullest picture in years of a man who at the peak of his career was, as Coe put it, “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde”: a vigorously public poet, novelist, film-maker, playwright, sportswriter, editor and critic who turned out formally daring work at a remarkable rate and backed it with fanfares of unselfconscious boasting. It also reveals that the strengths of Johnson’s writing exist beyond – and often quite apart from – the technical gimmickry that has become his legacy.

In principle, at least, Johnson’s declared mission echoed the great Modernist cry to make it new. Politically socialist and from a working-class London background, he cultivated pithy distrust for the complacency of his novelist peers, “neo-Dickensian” writers, as he called them, who were using a 19th-century form to gratify the “primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know ‘what happens next’”. A truly modern novel would seek, in Beckett’s phrase, a form to accommodate the mess, stripping readers of their escapist illusions while remaining ruthlessly true to the writer’s experience.

This obsession with so-called narrative truth runs through Johnson’s work, accounting for its most unorthodox experiments as well as its greatest flaws. It fuelled the iconoclastic explosion near the end of his second novel, Albert Angelo, when in the middle of a paragraph Johnson hijacks his own narrative with an all-caps howl of “F— ALL THIS LYING!”, shelving the rest of the book in favour of an extended homily on the idea that “telling stories is telling lies”. It is everywhere in Trawl (1966), the third novel, which represented a quixotically dedicated attempt to “shoot the narrow trawl of my mind into the vasty sea of my past” by booking passage on a fishing boat to work and reflect (and, as it turned out, suffer ghastly seasickness) in elemental peace. This was the book that prompted Johnson’s publisher to ask him: “Aren’t you rather young to be writing your memoirs?” – a title he scathingly adopted for a later collection of stories.

In an age where postmodernism is a buzzword, it may already be hard to feel the full force of this furious conviction that we need our ideas on novelistic truth exploded. What makes it even harder is the suspicion that Johnson’s heart wasn’t always in it. “I hate the partial livers. I’m an allornothinger,” says the narrator in Albert Angelo, and Johnson’s mid-Sixties work can often resemble a man cornered in the blind alley of his own principles. The obsession with so-called literal truth, and the conviction that a text could convey it – “To the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure,” he wrote – stand in stark contrast to the work of Derrida and Barthes, who by 1967 were both well advanced in undermining assumptions behind truth and textuality.

All this, combined with the corrosive line Johnson took against critics, has led to a school of thought that sees him merely as a self-promoting aesthetic conservative: there to wag his dogma and damn the consequences. As Coe showed in his biography, though, this position takes no account of the strange contradictions in Johnson’s nature. He was, after all, a deeply superstitious writer, whose professed belief in the inflexibility of truth was ensnared with the kind of personal peculiarities – a troubled credence for supernatural experience, an obsession with Graves’s The White Goddess, a conviction that he’d die young – that hardly accord with the functional rigour of his propositions. Little of this shows up in the books, and his readers might have been amused to learn that the BS Johnson who so stoutly maintained that “I don’t like writing fiction, I like writing truth” did so at a desk with a candle burning in a special holder and a Byronic cup made from a skull.

Seen against this backdrop, Johnson’s pronouncements on realism acquire an edge of concern, as though a sufficiently austere focus on principle, on nailing truth to the wall, might work as a defence against the unknown. Despite repeated assertions throughout the novels that “all is chaos”, their secret impulse was always towards order: even in The Unfortunates, whose unbound structure clearly aims to reflect some of the violent disorder of Johnson’s grief at the death of a friend, is carefully designed to make sense in any arrangement.

Certainly Johnson’s finest novels sprang from a temporary relaxation in his principles. House Mother Normal (1971) channelled his formal ingenuity into creating a superb textual illusion: it consists of eight 21-page monologues, describing a single evening from the viewpoint of the escalatingly decrepit inhabitants of a nursing home and bracketed by the testimony of their vicious and abusive House Mother. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, meanwhile, is a book-long streak of brilliant comic contempt, following an accounts clerk who develops his own system of moral debit and credit. It’s Johnson’s funniest and most bitterly satirical work, as Christie pays off the vast debts accrued by Society (“general educational trauma”, “Socialism not given a chance”) with a cheery campaign of slaughter and public bombing.

What prompted this fictional interregnum is unclear, but these two novels succeed because of their broad-mindedness, their anarchic willingness to hold conflicting ideas in suspension. Here, satirical pronouncements on the deceptiveness of the text (“It is a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull! What a laugh!” observes House Mother) alternate with an infectious joy in the possibilities of form.

 

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Book

B S Johnson Trawl
Picador

‘The novel describes, in the first-person, a three-week voyage aboard a deep-sea fishing trawler in the Barents Sea, not unlike the one Johnson undertook in preparation to write the book. Isolating himself from the world he knows, as well as from the ship’s crew, the narrator reflects on past events and relationships, hoping for some kind of redemption. This convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to get to the heart of the human condition is one of Johnson’s finest novels.

‘In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B S Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Convinced that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ and that he should write about ‘nothing else but what happens to me’, Johnson produced Trawl.’ — Picador

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Excerpt

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Funny, I was just hanging out with someone yesterday who told me about that Argento shop. Dude, those dark glasses! Do you still have them? Chocolate and croissant, nice. I generally think of you as the pizza guy. ** Adem Berbic, There are people who’ve figured out ‘TMS’s total workings, just not so many. To answer your question would take way too many ages for the p.s. In short, it’s both. The novel has many subterranean layers that can be accessed through secret tunnels in the prose that probably can’t be detected until you’ve read the novel through once at least. If you detect the entrance of a secret tunnel, you can decide to enter it and read forward (or backward) in the book and the particular viewpoint created by being inside the secret tunnel reveals things about the novel that are not apparent if you just read it on the surface. In a nutshell. ** Carsten, Hi. I dislike Asia Argento because of her collusion in the JT Leroy scam. I don’t want to get into the nuts and bolts, so let’s leave it at that. Magaluf has an art museum that does very interesting exhibitions, and they asked to show the film, and we were happy to say yes. I know nothing about the place. In the last couple of days there’s been a lot of quite interesting people coming to ‘Digger’s’ defense and praising it pretty passionately. So I am increasingly intrigued. If I can find someone who’ll go see it in the theater with me, which might be difficult, I’ll do that. Otherwise streaming, yeah. ** laura w., Hi. Thanks. Yeah, the current default thing about 1st person is repelling me like default things do or at least should. Agree with you re: 3rd person’s power and value. Originally ‘Guide’ was going to use Blur’s and Silverchair’s real names and lyrics, but Grove Press’s lawyers said I couldn’t, so I changed them to Smear and Tinselstool and distorted their lyrics a little. But that turned out to be much better decision, and just added to the novel’s disorienting through-line. I very rarely use the real names of people who inspired characters, only George and my friend Ziggy for Ziggy in ‘Try’, I think. Oh, and in ‘TMS’ re: Pierre Clementi, etc. I’ve never been very interested in Depeche Mode. I don’t know, I think there are a lot of popular ‘alternative’ bands I’m not interested in. Most of them maybe even. ** Hugo, Hey. Sorry that things are rough for you. Vast, swift improvement on that front. But how cool that you met Ryan! He’s in London, huh. In addition to his genius, he’s very sweet. So cool. ** HaRpEr //, I need to go back and re-listen to those last couple of Deerhunter albums. I was disappointed at the time, but given how blah-ified rock has generally become since then, I would guess they sound pretty strong now. ‘Sophisticated edgelord’, nice. ** Bill, All the luck there is, my friend. Yeah, Frank did good. He’s a pip. ** Uday, I would imagine that Grad School would be pretty intense in the best situation. Cool about Fran Lebowitz. She’s crazy hilarious. Uh, gosh, it’s such an honor to have people like your work and say so, even at length. It’s a gift. I have a little bit of a hard time with praise, at least on the surface, but it means a ton secretly. I’m good, I think. Let me think … Yes, I’m good. Survive and thrive, pal. ** voskat, Hey to you, voskat! 600+ pages! A length I have never and will never remotely achieve. So she’s managing, to say the least. Thank you for the 50 seconds. I’ll listen once I get out of this place. Great. I don’t think it’s bad that you mostly remember the films’ aesthetics or else I’m as bad as you. Plot schmot. Love and its tentacles to you guys! ** Right Today I spotlight a fascinating novel by the generally very interesting writer B.S. Johnson. Have at it, please. See you tomorrow.

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