More Books! They're Horrible!

Here are the latest three instalments in my 4,727,727-book series Intimidation Through Tedium—a series of memoirs so excruciatingly dull, from the rubble we can rebuild contemporary literature. All titles available from your friendly Romanian bookseller:

Obsessive, Anal, Insane, or Just Human?

Someone on the internets pointed out that I might be a wee bit obsessive. This was in response to my recent discovery of Ali Smith, author of Hotel World and The Accidental. I read her latest book last weekend and loved it so much I resolved to read her entire canon at once. I drew up a list of her books and got Laura (the woman I live with) to fetch them from the Glasgow Uni Library. Luckily, or unluckily, they had all her books in stock.

So I set about reading them, one per day. On top of this, I had to write 1000 words of my novel per day, eat at designated times and go outside to fetch utilities. It seemed a little challenging but I like the discipline and sense of accomplishment that follows such an undertaking. So I performed this heroic reading task, omitting one book of short stories through exhaustion. Q: Does this count as obsessive, or merely an act of readerly love?

Then it occurred to me: I’ve been carrying out this sort of obsessive, pointless behaviour all my life. It also occurred to me I probably share these afflictions with other beings. So in the spirit of sharing it might help to catalogue some of this obsessive/anal behaviour. I think there’s a marked difference between anal and obsessive. Who knows where I stand. For example:

1. I used to make collage cassette tapes, mixing music with sound effects and radio clips. If a noise, cut-in or sound was not perfect I would erase this microsecond of sound and record it again and again. No one listened to these tapes but me.
2. When I was a video game addict, I always had to complete games in the most perfect way possible. In the case of Crash Bandicoot, this involved resetting the console whenever I fell down a pit and lost my shot for the perfect score and gems.
3. When playing someone a song I love, they must listen to it in silence, and may not speak until the final seconds of the running time are up, even with songs that fade out.
4. Until recently, I could never give up on a book, even if I hated it from the beginning. I persisted in the belief that my own weakness as a reader was at fault, and at some point the story would captivate me, and readerly heaven would dawn.
5. Books with heavily creased spines stick out on one side. I have to sandwich them so tight in the bookcase, I can pull the stuck-out side in line so it becomes as straight as the other books. I also have lists of which books have problem spines and a list of which books to replace with brand new hardback editions.

I have also—through Laura’s doing—been sucked back into watching popular comedy drama Due South. This childhood favourite is so irresistible to me, I’ve had to set aside a spare our or two to catch up on old episodes among the reading and writing. So to cut a long story short, I haven’t left the flat much. I’m sure Glasgow’s nice. I’ve yet to find out.

Into the Rowdy Bowels of Hell

Concert — Howling Bells @ Òran Mór, Mon 19 Sep

Having left the hallowed Victorian recesses of Edinburghshire—leaving behind a cloud of desperate Morningside housewives, their bellies plump with cake and their hearts sick with love—I sallied forth to the hip concrete dosshouse of Mother Glasgow to start anew. My new residence in fishing distance of Dowanhill—where rampant housebound nannies crave hourly intercourse with lanky former students—I was free to resume the philandering and copious cake consumption as befit my past life.

I had grown attached to those Earl Grey afternoons: running my left hand through a shrub of pubic hair, cramming a Waitrose fancy into my mouth with the right. Waiting for spouses to return to add fire to our lovemaking—sometimes bringing in strangers to assist with light duties (keeping the testicles well sated with saliva, holding inhalers to the ladies’ mouths so their heart rates didn’t rise while rutting). I had come to cherish those moments. To me, Edinburgh will forever be the quivering want of a waiting vagina and a slice of shortbread perched temptingly over a saucer.

Bliss.

Now, I crave moments that charge the nerve-endings. I want sensations that tingle the testes. Live music has much to offer on both counts. Stood before four passionate artists, each sweating out ultramundane sounds, feeling the pure rush of Great Art riding deep within one’s bones. Sadly, this is not the live music experience at Oran Mor: a converted church turned restaurant and nightclub. What follows is a personal account of one evening: these are thoughts from an abnormal mind. Let me make it clear.

I belong to a certain group of people. As teenagers we devoured music obsessively, listing and compiling and acquiring new sounds at a fantastic rate, often at financial and personal costs. In our bedrooms at night, we cosied up to sounds that belonged to us, to us alone. Our discoveries never tainted by the world of criticism. What mattered was our instinctual kinaesthetic responses to what went in our ears and up to our brains. If a deaf one-legged man wailing through a soup can pricked our skin and wet our cheeks: this was the only thing that mattered. Music was our soul and our saviour.

Then the world came along and muscled into our cellars. Those sounds we loved were shared by dozens, thousands, millions of ears: some ears on the heads of wankers! Was it possible that the people we hated so much—i.e. everyone else—also shared our passion for early eighties skronk? For dreamy avant-pop with violins and harmonies? The saddest day for the music fan is learning that the Belle & Sebastian B-side he loves is also loved by his mortal enemy. The man who will one day cut him down.

And so, last night, at a simple Monday night concert, I felt the liars and fakers seep into my private sound-world, colliding in a rush of rage, dismay and misanthropy. It is my assertion that live gigs in underground venues are the enemy of pure musical pleasure. Not to mention repulsive reminders of the transience of friendships and our failure to truly connect with other human beings in our short dismal lives. A brisk walk up the street from my digs, picking up my companion on the way, led me to the luminous front of Oran Mor. We were round the back. At the not-so-luminous end.

Our evening began in the queue. Oran Mor has an awkward staircase that twirls around as it descends, with a little space at the bottom for a long-ish line to develop. So our waiting begins halfway up the steps, where I get a chance to assess the lifeforms inside: students. All students. All of them: students. I feel faintly sick already.

Then a little incident kicks off in the entrance hallway—a space so anorexic Kate Moss can barely squeeze through—when I approach Father Dougal McGuire at the door about our free entry status. He directs us to a secret booth on the left-side wall, forcing us to cut back through the six people already blagging at the box and the queue behind. In a brief attempt at politeness, clearing space for paying punters, I park midway at the box queue: a gesture Dougal interprets as a dozy coup on the queue, informing us: “If you guys could go to the back of the queue. That’s how a queue usually works.”

Already a little red-faced about having my free ticket status announced to the line, this remark turns me into a vengeful wasp, eager for a nice ginger beard to sting. I open my mouth to release my comeback to this witless Guardian of the Door. As I cut to the back of the box queue—standing half out the door again, confusing new queuers as to our in-or-out status, forcing us to squeeze ourselves back in the door when the box line moves up an inch—I mutter something about the ‘patronising lecture,’ audible enough for the line to hear and think me a basic nutter. We get our stubs.

There’s no time to brood on the moment: into the cavern we go. Stepping into a live show is always like reliving the best bits of World War Two. For the seasoned music pro, ears adapt to the onslaught, but for a bookish Burgher used to diddling spinsters, the transition from cake to quake is harder to make. We find half a couch and perch upon it, surveying the scene. Clearly, we are not Oran Mor's more usual more usual clientele.

I observe.

And so. Deep within its lava-lamp depths we go, into a room crawling with Freemans catalogue models—from the stick-thin unshaved males to the gaggling fashionistas—forced to seek refuge in upholstery while a tumult of drums and violins seize our senses in a sexy way. It occurs to me how primitive, how Middle Earth the nightclub environment seems to be. Around us, the young stand entranced by strange tribal drums, like pixies gathering around a freshly slain baboon. In this environment, I become an information wrangler. If I say one thing out of line, I am ripe for sacrificial slaughter.

I begin to pull facts about the young and their medieval entertainment rituals. I aim to inhabit their skin tonight: to understand their devotion to these ear-searing rhythms and sounds, where they discipline themselves to stand upright for four hours, sweating in a cavern while spending their entire week’s wages on drinks and merchandise. To understand a method of unwinding which—by anyone else’s standards—would be a form of torture. I fear for my sanity during this exercise, and retreat.

As I survey the space—the dark purple walls and artificial rock moulds, like a velvet hankie dressed up as a bile duct—behind the student bodies sit my brethren, the Soul Seekers of Sound. A close-knit collective devoted to the pursuit of pure euphonic pleasure, our one rule is we never commune, no matter how lonely we become. Music is our one true friend and the only sense we deign to entertain. We observe this rule blindly.

Among the seekers at this venue, a middle-aged woman on crutches, her face a mosaic of unhappiness, bopping her head in time to the sexy fuzz of Aerials Up: four women who travelled from the bog peats of Kilmucridge to make their fortune in the caves of Glasgow. An obese couple stare at me as I sit on the sofa, leaning into a dim red lamp in my stripy blue seawear (a stance of deliberate untrendiness to set myself apart as a true Seeker of Sound), writing this review as I wait for the Howling Bells to emerge from beneath the stage, having tunnelled through from Australia’s wettest outback. Who are these blank hunters of rare aural truth? Perhaps they seek my words as nourishment, as a means of comprehending the dark life of the information wrangler.

My attention turns to the swamp of cardboard humans: the couples, so many couples. Before me sits a black-haired woman in a zebra crossing: arsecrack exposed to us appreciative sofa-dwellers, adding erotic stimulation to our cache of pleasures.* The nightclub, as a place to meet new people and pierce the hellish loneliness of meals-for-one and B&W movies, is absolutely useless. Those who venture solo into this cave with a view to meeting and laughing and living will go and stand on their own, and go home and cry and want to die. Sweating in their thick woollen articles, lost in the blancmange of paired-up twats, closed off from all romcom encounters. Such is life.

Cold Specks are up next. They emerge to a single whoop (not me) and launch straight into a slow, unremarkable number, every inch Howling Bells-lite. Their music lends itself to a more intimate setting and Oran Mor is not such a setting: not unless a sea of loud pointless gabble is your idea of intimacy. Their set is doomed from the start, but these are the horrors bands face when peddling their beauty to those with no respect for the remotely beautiful. Fact. Their next tune fares better: a slowly rising ballad with a glistening and wide chorus, like soaring across the Australian plain on a very large glider. My companion remarks, knowingly, how the intro to another resembles popular childhood number ‘Three Blind Mice.’ I tell her I’ll put that in the review.

More notably, halfway into their set, an old man limps across the floor, scoots around the technician and disappears behind the bar. Suddenly this band have magic powers: their nimble hands can conjure up geriatrics from the base elements of sound! I make sure to get a CD afterwards. Their sixth song has a lovely drone guitar and hits a transcendent note, a moving little showcase of guitar and violin.

Anyway. There is, at some point in this tale, a Howling Bells review. I think we’ve reached it.

Howling Bells emerge: three men and the Boudicca vamp of eyepleaser Juanita Stein. Opener ‘Charlatan’ commences with a cool tingle guitar and growling bass, its verses laying down a little rock bravado, its choruses keeping it country and simple. Earlier single ‘Blessed Night’ sets heads bopping and torsos leaning back and forth (the Scots equivalent of dancing) with another bluesy series of slick and cool verses. At this point I spot an old friend in the crowd and we begin an awkward shouting catch-up. I talk about the Howling Bells formula: creative time signatures, neat grooves and slick vocals that fill out the verses, and choruses that blast out a powerful disappointment of mainstream indie. The old friend nods, remembering how difficult it is to talk to me, noise or not.

Highlights include the sultry ‘Setting Sun’ which again proves more delightful in the verses. ‘Gold Suns, White Guns’ boasts a dreamy solo and spacey percussion from some geezer in the darkness. Lowlights are the samey ‘Sioux’ and ‘Ballad For Bleeding Hearts,’ which doesn’t quite hit the romantic highs it needs to. Stein is in another world during the performance and the band-crowd rapport is quite stiff, giving the group a more businesslike flavour. ‘Wilderness’ closes the set pleasantly, with Stein stroking her guitar, unsure if she should be playing or not. All the boys go home dreaming and all the girls go home dreamy. All in all, a mixed night out.

————

* This woman I will see, from the front, the next day on Dumbarton Road, parlaying shopping back to her home. She’s still wearing the zebra crossing and as I pass by, I have the childish notion to mutter ‘lovely arsecrack.’ I disabuse myself of this notion and walk on.

My Month in Novels (Sep)

Hello. I am a reader. Books are what I read. Here are the books I read between September 1-September 30.

1. Gustave Flaubert — Bouvard and Pécuchet

Although Flaubert intended to make chumps of his protagonists, B&P are actually lovable eccentrics, whose inquiring minds put our dull unquestioning conformist lumps to shame. A tour through the humanities, sciences, and theologies woven around a tale of two civil servants free to pursue a life of the mind outside the drudgery of work, Flaubert’s last book is far from becoming the final masterpiece he intended, but still dazzles, tickles and titillates with erudition and high-class humour.

2. Xiaolu Guo — A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

A bleak romance tale between a Chinese student and an arrogant vegetarian van driver, narrated in oddly distancing Engrish. Like Guo’s other künstlerroman Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, it paints a painful picture of immigrant life abroad, and kicks One Day so far up its sanctimonious arse, one can barely glimpse Anne Hathaway’s goofy grin from Ursa Minor. The style is slightly similar to Palahniuk’s Pygmy, though this came first, and the humour is less bourgeois satire, more Chairman Mao’s Big Book of Communist Funnies. As a bedtime read it's splendid and lively, then bitter and heartbreaking.

3. T.C. Boyle — Drop City

The collapse of the sixties free love movement is perhaps the greatest defeat Western society has endured. The flower children believed in a world unshackled to government control and white-collar slavery, they believed in an autonomous collective of free love, drugs and sex. By listening to the Doors and smoking hash in Californian tepees, they hoped to bring about a social revolution, to overthrow the squares by doing nothing whatsoever. Then again, they only believed in this because their bourgeois parents had the misfortune to raise them in a time of plenty, giving them the freedom to run off and party in multicoloured pants with a wad of hard-earned notes in their tote bags. I hate hippies.

Drop City has little sympathy for the hippie movement as it cocks a snook at the idle brothers and sisters whose goal was, essentially, to avoid work at all costs and puff on drug pipes. Nowadays, hippies are known as PhD or liberal arts students, and the drug consumption remains the same. Centring on a large cast of caricatured free-lovers, Boyle’s detached narrative style has the surgical cynicism and breathless rush of Foster Wallace, with the compassionate satire of Kingsley Amis.

Although his narrator goes a sentence or three too far with each description, he hits a note of buzzy mania, perfect for the vibrant rush of the era, though obviously quite infuriating in its excess. As the commune (based on a real commune in Colorado) battles nasty Nam dropouts and a planned council demolition, the group hotfoot it to Alaska, where they take refuge in their iced-out bus and numerous well-insulated shacks. Star, the least loose of the women, is somewhat the centre of the novel, though Boyle’s narrator is more of your top-down move-the-marionettes model, less personally committed, and little genuine empathy is achieved for any of these freeloaders and grizzly weirdoes. It’s a fun ride, regardless.

4. Michel Faber — The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

Sometimes I write reviews and have nightmares about how appalling and misinformed and rubbish these reviews must look on the ALMIGHTY WALL OF REVIEWS, and I must step back into the reviewing box and tackle books with a heroic second heave, like a bleeding Ali lunging for the last time at Trevor Berbick.

So: this novella is an endearing mixture of modern horror and romance. It falls into the camp of modern “character piece,” focusing on Siân, a Welsh-born student architect digging up remains at Whitby Abbey who unravels a family scroll given to her by cringey student doctor Mack. The novella unearths revelations about Siân’s accident in Bosnia while relating an 18thC murder intrigue and does so with wit and natural charm. In the original review I posted a picture of Roy from The IT Crowd, but the shame has haunted me ever since, so from now on it is text text text all the way, baby.

5. Ismail Kadare — The Successor

Read this to help clear my desk. Interesting Albanian thriller with a clever structure. I wasn’t that thrilled. The writer looks like a sinister KGB Eric Morecambe.

6. Ewa Kuryluk — Century 21

Another staggering dense impossible hilarious maddening insane longer-than-it-looks novel from the Dalkey catalogue. Kuryluk’s first (and only, it seems) novel in English, Century 21 is a mosaic novel blending fictional dialogues with Ancient Greeks, postcolonial European authors and a Moon scholar, along with long narrative threads told from obfuscated points of view, making the work an inscrutable ludic exercise in meaning.

An AIDS-ridden Djuna Barnes mingles with Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides in Manhattan, Malcolm Lowry baits Joseph Conrad’s attempt to Anglicise his works and erase his Polish identity. The Ancient Greeks go on at length in effusive tracts bordering on the maniacal, among them Latin poet Propertius and Ptolemaic Queen Berenice. The novel abandons, as says the blurb, the unities of time, so all these people orbit each other’s narrative strands, the Latin poets popping up in modern day New York. All sense of where, what and why is nowhere to be seen, though the novel builds its own internal sense somewhere down the line, partly since Kuryluk’s prose is outstanding.

A triumph of style, shifting narrative voices and esoteric academic wankery, Kuryluk demonstrates a mastery of language in a book dense with allusions, references, Latin and German and Italian quotes, and inherently absurd situations rife with high-brow comedy. Another tough, dazzling and original work form the Dalkey staple, fated to rot in obscurity.

7. Émile Zola — Thérèse Raquin

You know how it is. Your mother marries you to your sexless cousin and in silent defiance you enter a torrid affair with a peasant painter. All those hours spent humouring the dull man in your dreary shop, waiting for your next animalistic tussle with your fiery lover. Then one day, you realise the conventions of early 19thC society are going to prevent you from ditching the boring old blood tie, and you will never be free to give yourself to true love.

God, the boredom! I mean, you can’t even knit properly, can you? That last cardigan was missing an armhole and wasn’t even big enough for my nephew! So what do you have to live for? You are, after all, a docile little mouse brimming with despair and desperation whose only chance at happiness lies in the arms of a bone-idle gadabout who only wanted a quick shag anyway. Perhaps if he bumped off your other half, made it look like an accident? Oh now you’ve gone and done it. Didn’t I warn you watching your husband drown would come back to haunt you? How do you expect to look your mother in the eye ever again, you dozy bint? Well. I suppose it’ll have to be several years of mental torment, depression and unrelenting misery, followed by a teary confession to your paralysed mother, until someone finally pours you a cup of poison and ends your sorry lot once and for all. Hold out, there’s hope. But not in this book.

8. Guy de Maupassant — Pierre et Jean

Unlike Robbe-Grillet’s predatory eyes and unspoken menace, Maupassant offers a tale of overt bitter jealousy, with a healthy dose of bastardism thrown into the mix. Jean is the sole inheritor of a family friend’s fortune, leaving his brother Pierre dazed as to his own bad luck. Quite rightly in that situation, you’d be gutted—nothing for me? who was this tosser? So Pierre arrives at a simple conclusion that tears his family apart, all very suddenly, after many pleasant pages of boating and courting and happiness. This edition has an unbearably long and dry introduction . . . so maybe seek out another, if scholarly use be your bag.

9. Alain Robbe-Grillet — Jealousy

A key text of the nouveau roman, an unnamed ‘all-seeing eye’ narrator navigates his way around an African banana plantation, obsessively describing a potential affair between Franck and A . . . in a state of continual present (or ‘pressent’ as Tom McCarthy quotes from Joyce in his introduction). In French ‘jalousie’ refers to a window, making it harder in English to position the narrator as a jealous husband, crucial for decoding the book.

The detailed geometrical descriptions of the house and its inhabitants form its emotional nucleus: one can imagine the distraught husband poised outside taking notes and embellishing details. This makes all the action and description unreliable, giving the book its detective novel reputation: is it possible to make sense of all the repetitions, random scene breaks, contradictory sentences, squashed centipedes, apparent car fires and form a coherent plotline? Look upon it as an IKEA self-assembly novel. Right now, I only have the scaffolding erected, I still have weeks’ worth of drilling hammering and screwing to do before anything satisfies.

10. Philippe Djian — Betty Blue

Betty Blue is venerated on campuses for its anti-establishment, free-spirited, all-you-need-is-love-provided-the-bitch-is-hot stance: the film is a hotbed of classic French passion and anarchic comedy. The novel however, is more in your Bukowski-Miller vein, with its likeable tossbag narrator and occasional moments of hideous self-aggrandisement.

Béatrice Dalle was about twenty in the film: in the book Betty is thirty. So this is not a story about young love that can’t be contained in a series of small pathetic provincial French towns. This is more a tale of life-scarred soldiers seeking that elusive something that keeps them bound to the world. Betty finds it through her lover’s novel, the narrator finds it through Betty and his enslavement to her charms (whatever these might be), and throughout, the love between them seems almost entirely one-way, as Betty slides into dementia.

The novel is stylishly written in the first-person but the American translation is a little corny in places, like listening to dubbed actors saying things like “hey, baby” in a studio. And again, that gaping question remains: is the narrator so stupid he can’t see Betty’s mental illness coming a mile off? Are we supposed to believe he doesn’t want to face her illness in case he loses her? Hmm. Also: it’s shocking how faithful to the novel the film seems to be. Barely a scene here has been omitted, though the book doesn’t open with a three-minute explicit sex scene in a slow zoom. In fact, sex isn’t really integral to the novel. I’ve lost you now, haven’t I? Oops.

11. Colette — Claudine’s House

A wistful memoir of a bucolic childhood idyll—or part of Colette’s Claudine cycle, who knows—this slim volume contains vignettes of French provincial life (Colette’s French provincial life), with emphasis on the lush countryside, sneaky cats and dogs, passing aunts and uncles, and formidable French mothers. Each remembrance is crafted like a flawless short story: precious, warm, intelligent and softly heartbreaking. Far from being magical, often these stories take dark and melancholy turns, especially as time passes and Colette takes over as maman of the estate. A delightful volume from Hesperus Press.

12. Émile Zola — For a Night of Love

A short collection of three tales. ‘For a Night of Love’ pits poor lovestruck Julien against the Ice Queen Thérèse. He tries seducing the merciless maiden with his sublime flute skills, only to find himself in her bedroom disposing of the corpse of her half-brother-lover. I hate when that happens. Having sneaked the corpse out of town undetected, he lays his weary burden by the riverside, confusing tiredness with a death wish. ‘Nantas’ pits another down-at-heel against an Ice Queen. This time, the titular hero inherits money and power by covering for Flavie’s accidental bastard, earning her devoted contempt. As he ascends into high office, it occurs to him he is in mad drivelling love with the horrible bitch and flings himself at her feet. Melodrama with a cheery (and implausible) ending. ‘Fasting’ is quaint padding. Excellent stories.

13. Denis Diderot — Jacques the Fatalist

For those exhausted or defeated by Tristram Shandy, here is a precursor to the postmodern novel that packs in more incident, philosophy, bitching and warm humour in its 237 pages than most modern avant-garde writers manage in a whole corpus. Jacques—the titular Fatalist—attempts to recount the tale of his “first loves” while accompanying his Master on a series of oblique misadventures that invariably end up as digressions and more digressions. All postmodern tricks—stories-within-stories, frames-within-frames, direct reader-insulting—are present, and better than in 1971. This is a wild and hilarious romp with a fiercely readable translation from the unfortunately named David Coward, and this edition has an exemplary introduction that neither squeezes all life from the work nor drowns it in academic verbiage. Proof once again the French are the true genitors of all great literature. So it was written up there, on high.

14. Jacques Roubaud — Hortense Is Abducted

From Jacques the Fatalist to Jacques Roubaud: OuLiPo’s lesser-known practitioner and most famous surviving member, excluding Harry Mathews, who isn’t really French anyway. For some reason, Dalkey Archive have only released two volumes in the Hortense trilogy—the first, Our Beautiful Heroine, has been translated by Overlook Press, but is due a reprint—but grumbles aside, there’s much ludic OuLiPo larks in this farcical detective spoof. A brief scan of this book’s blurb sums up the anarchic and delicious imagination of this professor, scholar, wit and all-around genius. Daft, ingenious, hilarious postmodern fun for the high-brow reader too proud to read Sedaris.

15. Patti Smith — Just Kids

There is a whiff of earnestness about Patti Smith but now we’ve got that out the way, shut up and listen to Horses, Easter, Gone Again and Trampin’ back-to-back for a whole month. If your nerve-endings and spatial awareness aren’t merrily bamboozled with light and love, you are not fit for human habitation. For Patti is a creature unto herself.

Just Kids radiates pure, unfiltered love for her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, and its simple prose tells a powerful tale of two driven artists seeking release into a wild and beautiful world. For all those stargazing liberal arts majors interning in publishing houses, get out there, get thee to a garret and get thee to a used copy of A Season in Hell and learn how to live. That is an order, divined upon thee by the almighty Gods of heartbreaking original life-shaking capital-A art. You must learn. Brave the winds. The only thing to fear is the unpure image.

16. Pierre Albert-Birot — The First Book of Grabinoulor

This is a mere excerpt of a lifelong work from an influential Surrealist: if a Surrealist can be called influential and not raisin custard splash-splash booger-doop-doop-waa-waa-pants. Grabinoulor expanded into a six-book cheese mangle, and it’s easy to see why only the first book has been translated. A high modernist relic, sans punctuation, time-space-plot, andsans most things one might expect in a novel, except words, it has some of those. Dalkey don’t usually publish typographically inventive books: this is the one aberration in their canon. If they did, I would be up them like a silver ferret to reprint B.S. Johnson’s Travelling People and they would be sorry they ever published Daniel Robberechts instead. So this: about as tolerable as a Surrealist text gets, and as the OuLiPo said, the Surrealists were always “intellectually puny.”

17. Nicholson Baker — Vox

I liked this. Right now it’s 11.51PM (later when the review is complete) and I would rather be munching a shellfish platter than writing this review, but here goes. (That was not an innuendo, in case you were worried. However, it is a little known fact that men are attracted to oysters as it’s the closest they can get to cunnilingus in food form. I was told this at a marine snack-shack in Orkney). So. Two people dial a sex chat line, switch to a private room, and have a natural conversation that culminates in mutual masturbation. That is Vox. I think we can safely say, without a moment’s hesitation, this book is Romeo & Juliet for the postmodern age. Right. It’s now 11.54PM. I’m off to bed. I liked this.

Book of the Month: Denis Diderot — Jacques the Fatalist

Intimidation Through Tedium: A 4,727,727-Book Series

I was sharing a hookah with the editors at Penguin last night. We talked about memoirs and how people love to read about mundane lives, providing the authors have heat. For those who don’t care, HEAT is another word for shit-flavoured. It means somewhere, at some point in the afternoon, a TV camera is pointing at you and people want to know how it feels to be you. The editors suggested I embark on writing the most audaciously detailed memoirs in history. Something that would start as a literary experiment, but grow into a worldwide phenomenon so unconscionably boring people would have no choice but to revert to reading proper works of well-crafted fiction.

The idea is to isolate all the nano-moments in between microseconds. Or even shorter than that. Imagine Ulysses slowed down and stretched out over a four million book series, covering all possible things in each moment from getting out of bed to eating breakfast. How would this work in prose? Obsessively detailed descriptions of each nano-thought, object, movement, physical process. Such endless, obsessive detail about a boring life taken to such a horrifyingly precise extreme, the reader would have no choice. He would have to read something good. Roddy Doyle, James Joyce, Philip Kerr, anything!

The editors call this strategy Intimidation Through Tedium. Instead of establishing an illusion of excitement at first—a celebrity, a singer cavorting with riches—then deadening the reader with dull books, the books would come first, and a fascination with pure boredom would develop. Soon, the reader would be so consumed with boredom, in a last-ditch act of suicidal desperation, they would reach for a Haruki Murakami or John Burnside. Because the alternative, well . . . they never want to go back to that horror. NEVER!

Death of a Blogger

Last week, hanging out at the Canongate offices, I spoke to the editors about my new book proposal. In this novel, Death of a Blogger, the protagonist murders himself in cold blood then blogs about the experience of being a dead person. His posts set the blogosphere alight. Twitter goes into meltdown with links. No one can take their eyes off these insightful but badly spelled posts about what it’s like to be a dead man blogging.

The editors raised a few logical questions, as they always do. How would readers know the blogger was truly dead? He’d post pictures of his decomposing corpse on Twitter, silly. Set up a special Flickr account with daily shots of his body as it wastes away. The uglier each picture became, the higher his fame would rise. What would make the posts so special? They would chart the physical and emotional sensations of being a dead person. How it feels in the skin and bones and, most importantly, in the heart.

Canongate love a book with movie tie-in potential. They want truckles of money in buckets, and they want it now, baby! So we struck a deal. Four million bottles of Evian for the first two hundred words. Deal! The book would be written in the first-person then switch to the disembodied third upon the protagonist’s death, because that sounds clever. In practice, it would make the narration rather odd, having a dead man talk about his former self in the third person, but these are tough times. If it ain’t fresh, it ain’t shit.

To research this novel, I have cut my throat. As I write this, blood is dribbling onto the keyboard, making it rather difficult to press down keys with all the gummed blood. The protagonist should shoot himself in the heart. Something with metaphor potential. I have started a separate blog for my posts and so far, no one has commented despite a viral marketing campaign: milking my death on FB, Twitter and YouTube. I might have to record a song or perform a public stunt to increase my heat. Perhaps I could suck the blood of small children while singing a Mariah Carey number. Whatever works.

Other problems have arisen: people I live with have gone insane at seeing a corpse walking around and conversing like a normal human being. The world of science and reason have collapsed to their knees at the discovery someone might slit their throat and carry on as normal, despite losing all his blood and severing his windpipe to prevent oxygen intake. This will all have to go in the book. I see an epic novel and film franchise on the horizon!

It’s not too bad being dead, really. It’s actually quite liberating. I don’t have to worry about council tax or anything. Hey . . . I now have three opening lines for the book! Some things just write themselves.

P.S. My story "A Disquisition of the Importance of Scottish Heather" is here in Barge Journal #1. Not free.

P.P.S. My story "Frankie & Johnny" is here in Duality 5. Also not free.

Glasgow & Other Twonkery

OK, so this blog is not exactly fizzling with activity. I have an excuse, however. I was, last Tuesday, given the Most Concise Hermit Award in the Hermitage. Apparently, all those years giving uninteresting two-word responses to people have paid off, and I am now the proud owner of one shiny quartz mantelpiece filler. Little do they know, I am merely the last in a long line of Scottish men who really don’t have much to say for themselves.

We acknowledge the general limitedness of small talk among all subsets of society, and choose not to participate in the vocal inevitabilities. Among co-students, phrases were parsed pertaining to essays, along with hilarious asides about a frazzled mental state derived from writing so damn hard and fast one’s nerve endings were shot to buggery. In truth, I don’t find writing too hard, it’s the sitting down every day that really smarts. My following contributions to the MA banter were: “Ha ha. Right.” And the classic: “That’s good.”

But enough of this silliness. Did you know that I’ve moved cities? Yes, I am now in Glasgow, looking down upon the burly Glasgow folk with a critical eye, as if to say: “Oh, you silly peasants!” The move felt right: Edinburgh was fine for a certain period in my life, a period we’ll call “education” for ease, but Glasgow is more about living like an actual human being. Not some amorphous brain vacuuming up facts and knowledge. But. My flat is, oddly, about two minutes away from the Glasgow campus. Ahem.

I like Glasgow already. It’s not as cramped. I can swing four cats without killing a tramp. And the tramps are more spaced out. No more strategic triangulation outside the train station. Simple swerves around postboxes or pretend gazes off into the distance. And the air! Well, it might smell like sewage and blubber in a cheese and onion crisp packet, but it’s better than the perfumed oil slick stench from Auld Reekie. Fact.

Edinburgh retains a sense of haunting desolation from when it was the murder capital of the UK, and although this might please those insufferable twonks who think ‘death’ and ‘blood’ are cool (why isn’t the hospital the coolest place in town, then? tell me that, brothers!), for those like me prone to genuine moments of loneliness and despair, Glasgow has more scope for genuine violent interaction. There’s nothing like a good kick the nuts to bring you screaming back into life, in all its giddy pointlessness.

P.S. New short at Metazen.