I've been having one of those days where blogging seems like a really self-important and ultimately indulgent pastime, but I think I'll carry on regardless.
According to his publisher, advances of Uncle Tom's new book won't be available to anyone until publication date on December 5th, but they've put me on the list which is double exciting.
Martin Amis' latest attack on humanity comes in the form of a short story entitled The Last Days of Mohammed Atta, and it can be found in full in the Observer Magazine this weekend. I just read an excerpt and it's actually quite good.
I officially need to stop ordering books. I now have at least 5 mouthwatering ones waiting for me; The Rifles - Vollmann (arrived this AM and looks great,) The Human Stain - Roth, Lord of the Barnyard - can't remember the author but it also looks great and will probably be next, A Void - Perec, and Slow Learner - Pynchon.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
WWWHUT!?
It's becoming a bit of a slog this night. Saturday was good in terms of exciting performances but wasn't worth the effort financially. I think it really is the last time I'll do grime, excluding Wiley. Turning up 1.5 hours late when you have about 3 fans is just plain dumb, no wonder everyone's pretty sick of the stuff.
Next one is gonna be myself, Space Hail and Luke 'Hot Knives' Morano. Oh god, the silly shoreditch infection that Hold Tight! caught is spreading. Still, it'll be more fun and probably more popular.
Nice email from the badly run venue this AM telling me that September needs a 'real push.' Fuck off.
Next one is gonna be myself, Space Hail and Luke 'Hot Knives' Morano. Oh god, the silly shoreditch infection that Hold Tight! caught is spreading. Still, it'll be more fun and probably more popular.
Nice email from the badly run venue this AM telling me that September needs a 'real push.' Fuck off.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Thorne on Wash On
Good old Thorne soars up the league tables of all round good guys by writing the most accurate piece yet on Will Ashon. Does that make the latter a New Puritan? Nah.
What next? Thorne records live webcast with Uncle Tom from NYC hot tub? If only.
What next? Thorne records live webcast with Uncle Tom from NYC hot tub? If only.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Smoke
It's day three of no cigarettes and going pretty well, although yesterday I was extremely moody and emotional! Last night I had two beers and it felt like my gums were screaming for nicotine. I had the strange, schizophrenic experience of having to force myself away from a cashpoint and the shop in Liverpool St. station on the way home. I managed to get back there and drink lots of water while watching V for Vendatta though, and woke up feeling pretty good.
Tonight is gonna be bad though. Me versus the psychological power of a Friday night? Eeek.
If I do succeed in not smoking til tomorrow AM i'll have hit the magic three day mark, and I may reward myself by buying Vollmann books; The Rifles and The Royal Family (my copy disappeared.)
The main upsetting thing about yesterday is that the copy of Slow Learner that I ordered last week was sent to my dodgy-communal-post home address, and has disappeared. I was fantasising about seeing someone leaving the block with it in their bag and righteously beating them about the head with it.
No fags = weird stuff.
Tonight is gonna be bad though. Me versus the psychological power of a Friday night? Eeek.
If I do succeed in not smoking til tomorrow AM i'll have hit the magic three day mark, and I may reward myself by buying Vollmann books; The Rifles and The Royal Family (my copy disappeared.)
The main upsetting thing about yesterday is that the copy of Slow Learner that I ordered last week was sent to my dodgy-communal-post home address, and has disappeared. I was fantasising about seeing someone leaving the block with it in their bag and righteously beating them about the head with it.
No fags = weird stuff.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Good advice for Chris Hale
Here's Warner on ecstasy use.
take note space boy.
AW: That (the chemical generation) was something invented by an editor called Sarah Champion [music journalist and editor of the 1997 anthology Disco Biscuits, which included a short story, ‘Bitter Salvage,’ by Alan Warner]. I mean I think you can write a good story about a nightclub but I don’t think you can base a whole literary movement on writing about nightclub life and ecstasy use. What bothered me about it is it was getting to be more about the writers than the writing, there was something egotistical and silly about it, "Look, we go to nightclubs but we are writers," so fucking what. I’m interested in great books not the social life of writers. On a personal level I used to take ecstasy and go to Edinburgh Zoo. It was much better than a rave, cheaper admission, prettier girls, colourful parrots and there’s even a little licensed bar there. No bouncers either, just kangaroos.
Showreel 3
Here's a P51 called Susy which had just started its prop up about 10 feet away. It was, to say the least, windy.
And, perhaps more interestingly, here's a sneak preview of the next Hold Tight! mailout.
This disgusting individual has posted his new song up on his blog, but to stop people visiting the horrors that dwell there unwittingly, here's the link.
And, perhaps more interestingly, here's a sneak preview of the next Hold Tight! mailout.
This disgusting individual has posted his new song up on his blog, but to stop people visiting the horrors that dwell there unwittingly, here's the link.
WWWHUT!?
Scorcher definitely seems to be making some noise at the minute, I just hope the word has spread that he's appearing on Saturday. I didn't get a chance to do much fliering.
Apparently there's a new blog dedicated to campaigning against FWDs no grime policy, and people have been desperate to see Scorcher appear somewhere east. Well, here he is!
Monday, August 21, 2006
Thorne V Vollmann
Fantastic interview over the weekend, here, between William T Vollmann and Matt Thorne. Two of my favourites, as made obvious below. Maybe not as in depth as the previous Vollmann interview, but great to read one of my favourite British writers covering such a great US contemporary.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Thorne
Personally, I really like Thorne. He's ambitous, very English, clever and readable. 8 Minutes Idle is a really disturbing book simply because the average, (well, not too average but...) middle English story it tells is frightening in its disaffected, damaged, desperate way.
Anyway, he likes some other writers, and here's his top 10 books that are from or have had an influence on his 'new puritan' movement.
More please, Matty.
Anyway, he likes some other writers, and here's his top 10 books that are from or have had an influence on his 'new puritan' movement.
More please, Matty.
Grass
Hmm. What to think about Gunter?
Initially I thought he'd just been called up on a conscription, but it seems he did volunteer to fight for the Nazis, although he didn't realise it'd be in the SS. Apparently he was a Nazi sympathiser in his early years, but this revelation has definitely caused a fuss. A few weeks before his memoir is due out? It's got to have been timed to garner ample attention no?
Still, he's got Salman on his side.
Initially I thought he'd just been called up on a conscription, but it seems he did volunteer to fight for the Nazis, although he didn't realise it'd be in the SS. Apparently he was a Nazi sympathiser in his early years, but this revelation has definitely caused a fuss. A few weeks before his memoir is due out? It's got to have been timed to garner ample attention no?
Still, he's got Salman on his side.
Hot bitches
As much as I don't condone the rubbish usually posted on this degenerate blog, it has got some good pics from last night. MORE DOGS!!!
Mitchell
Big On Road
No quite sure what I think about Mitchell. I know that I really enjoyed reading Ghostwritten, and Cloud Atlas was very addictive and clever, but I'm not sure I was left with very much afterwards. Cloud Atlas is almost a set of perfectly conceived pastiches, rather than a bold new voice dazzling with relevant content and exciting form.
It's as if the writing is dressed up as very modern and literary, lots of intersecting narratives and fragments etc, but at heart it's traditional English literature with a central moral message and a nice neat ending.
That said, it's probably just snobbery really. His prose is utterly incredible, rhythmic and deceptively simple; meaning is everywhere. Gotta be a good thing for writing from Britain, even if he is moving back to Japan.
No quite sure what I think about Mitchell. I know that I really enjoyed reading Ghostwritten, and Cloud Atlas was very addictive and clever, but I'm not sure I was left with very much afterwards. Cloud Atlas is almost a set of perfectly conceived pastiches, rather than a bold new voice dazzling with relevant content and exciting form.
It's as if the writing is dressed up as very modern and literary, lots of intersecting narratives and fragments etc, but at heart it's traditional English literature with a central moral message and a nice neat ending.
That said, it's probably just snobbery really. His prose is utterly incredible, rhythmic and deceptively simple; meaning is everywhere. Gotta be a good thing for writing from Britain, even if he is moving back to Japan.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
£25 well spent
The heat is rising. Here's a big piece in the Independent from today, all about Uncle Tom. it reprints his statement re. the new book in full. It really is an event. I'm off to try and find a copy of 'Slow Learner,' Amazon never has it but the excellent www.abebooks.co.uk might well.
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Wallace
David Foster Wallace doesn't do interviews anymore, but he's given some great ones in his day. Here he is talking to good ol' Larry McCaffery and getting annoyed with the constant lit. theory terms the latter is so fond of. He's an impassioned man, that's for sure.
Here's an excerpt:
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's a cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house.
It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means "we're" going to have to be the parents.
Here's an excerpt:
For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you're in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it's great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat's-away-let's-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody's got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there's a cigarette burn on the couch, and you're the host and it's your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house.
It's not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it's 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody's thrown up in the umbrella stand and we're wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back--I mean, what's wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren't ever coming back--which means "we're" going to have to be the parents.
Legions
Don't forget about Hold Tight! tomorrow night at The Legion in Old Steet. Myself and DJ Sace Hail will be, as usual, seamlessly melding music we like into music that makes girls dance on tables. 8.30 - midnight, don't miss.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Wash On
Here's a piece I wrote for Flux on Will Ashon. His debut book is here, and it does for England what the best Americans to for the U.S.A. Buy it here
---
What do you do when you've already made a name for yourself as the country's foremost hip-hop journalist, then set up one of the genre's most artistically worthwhile record labels? Well, in Will Ashon's case, you write a novel, and one that has nothing to do with hip-hop.
'Clear Water' is a darkly comic critique of Britain, breaking the national convention of class literature and treating the collision of it's central characters in the ambitious, far-ranging manner of the best American writers. Flux caught up with Will near Big Dada's south London HQ.
'I try not to introduce myself at all, I'm not very good at small talk, or big talk either,' he laughs when asked about his schizophrenic career paths. 'My wife gets very annoyed with me because she thinks it's rude, but I was brought up to think it was immodest and wrong to talk about yourself, very un-English!' And the book's introduction? 'It's a book about contemporary England, a bleak but funny book I hope. It's the Da Vinci code of literary fiction!' Queue another laugh. 'If the person was still interested, I'd tell 'em a bit about the characters.' And what characters they are. A lifestyle journalist starting to seriously doubt the impact of his career, a burnt out, addict cricket player, a wartime temptress and a would-be messiah, all of whose lives connect in a dramatic, resonating conclusion.
Having written one novel in the past ("I was into my French avant-garde writers, but I guess there wasn't much room for the avant-garde in the mid 90's") hip-hop writing, even 'the really bad reviews' took up most of the subsequent creative energy. A sense of time running out provided 'Clear Water's' genesis, and it was time, not motivation, that proved the problem. 'The only time I could find was on the tube.' If the story wasn't interesting enough already, it turns out the entire novel was written on a PDA to and from the office!
The most exciting thing about 'Clear Water' is that it's every bit as encompassing and epic as a Don Delillo, or Pynchon novel, but is uniquely concerned with Englishness. 'It's what I know about to some extent, and I didn't want to write the middle-class campus novel or a story about the working class, I wanted it to include those things but not be limited by them.' 'Clear Water' combines all these ambitions, and achieves them in an entirely, extremely compelling book.
---
What do you do when you've already made a name for yourself as the country's foremost hip-hop journalist, then set up one of the genre's most artistically worthwhile record labels? Well, in Will Ashon's case, you write a novel, and one that has nothing to do with hip-hop.
'Clear Water' is a darkly comic critique of Britain, breaking the national convention of class literature and treating the collision of it's central characters in the ambitious, far-ranging manner of the best American writers. Flux caught up with Will near Big Dada's south London HQ.
'I try not to introduce myself at all, I'm not very good at small talk, or big talk either,' he laughs when asked about his schizophrenic career paths. 'My wife gets very annoyed with me because she thinks it's rude, but I was brought up to think it was immodest and wrong to talk about yourself, very un-English!' And the book's introduction? 'It's a book about contemporary England, a bleak but funny book I hope. It's the Da Vinci code of literary fiction!' Queue another laugh. 'If the person was still interested, I'd tell 'em a bit about the characters.' And what characters they are. A lifestyle journalist starting to seriously doubt the impact of his career, a burnt out, addict cricket player, a wartime temptress and a would-be messiah, all of whose lives connect in a dramatic, resonating conclusion.
Having written one novel in the past ("I was into my French avant-garde writers, but I guess there wasn't much room for the avant-garde in the mid 90's") hip-hop writing, even 'the really bad reviews' took up most of the subsequent creative energy. A sense of time running out provided 'Clear Water's' genesis, and it was time, not motivation, that proved the problem. 'The only time I could find was on the tube.' If the story wasn't interesting enough already, it turns out the entire novel was written on a PDA to and from the office!
The most exciting thing about 'Clear Water' is that it's every bit as encompassing and epic as a Don Delillo, or Pynchon novel, but is uniquely concerned with Englishness. 'It's what I know about to some extent, and I didn't want to write the middle-class campus novel or a story about the working class, I wanted it to include those things but not be limited by them.' 'Clear Water' combines all these ambitions, and achieves them in an entirely, extremely compelling book.
At the Computer Class
At the facility’s computer class, one of the projects we had to work on one morning was ‘computer personality.’ Each machine was set to run a program which asked us to write the warnings and messages and announcements which pop up on the screen when the user needs to know something. The machine asked me to write a message telling the user to plug the machine into the wall when the batteries were low. ‘WARNING,’ I wrote, ‘Low battery. Please connect machine to mains immediately!’
Lucy, who sat to my right, was giggling at her screen, which made me cringe. She had her hair in bunches, which trembled when she laughed.
The machine asked me to make up a message for when the program you were trying to run might not be very safe.
‘STOP!’ I put, ‘check for virus before loading!’
The teacher was a fat man with a bald patch in the middle of the back of his head. The hair was brushed neatly around it. He wore a red woollen jumper with black bits, and sandals. I was suspicious of him because he was always so friendly.
The computer asked me what the pop-up box should say when a new message had arrived. I wrote ‘You have a new message!’
Lucy was typing a lot. I sneaked a look at her the way I can sometimes do without someone noticing. She has a roll of her stomach that sits over her jeans. She wears too bright clothes, and when I looked really close, I saw she had flaky skin around her mouth.
The program said to write something for when you were accidentally going to close a window without saving your work.
‘STOP! Save before closing!’ I said. I was pleased with this one.
Lucy dressed like she was a little girl, when she was at least thirty, and it made me feel angry that she was so stupid. I didn’t believe her when she giggled.
The computer asked me to write the message for when you have to type in your password. I wrote ‘KILL LUCY.’ I felt much better.
When we had written a few more messages, the teacher walked around talking to people and they all started moving chairs around and fussing which was noisy and made me anxious. He came over to me and talked to me and Lucy. He said ‘Ok you two, swap machines. Time to discover each other's personalities!’
I got up and walked out without saying anything. I never went back to computer classes.
Lucy, who sat to my right, was giggling at her screen, which made me cringe. She had her hair in bunches, which trembled when she laughed.
The machine asked me to make up a message for when the program you were trying to run might not be very safe.
‘STOP!’ I put, ‘check for virus before loading!’
The teacher was a fat man with a bald patch in the middle of the back of his head. The hair was brushed neatly around it. He wore a red woollen jumper with black bits, and sandals. I was suspicious of him because he was always so friendly.
The computer asked me what the pop-up box should say when a new message had arrived. I wrote ‘You have a new message!’
Lucy was typing a lot. I sneaked a look at her the way I can sometimes do without someone noticing. She has a roll of her stomach that sits over her jeans. She wears too bright clothes, and when I looked really close, I saw she had flaky skin around her mouth.
The program said to write something for when you were accidentally going to close a window without saving your work.
‘STOP! Save before closing!’ I said. I was pleased with this one.
Lucy dressed like she was a little girl, when she was at least thirty, and it made me feel angry that she was so stupid. I didn’t believe her when she giggled.
The computer asked me to write the message for when you have to type in your password. I wrote ‘KILL LUCY.’ I felt much better.
When we had written a few more messages, the teacher walked around talking to people and they all started moving chairs around and fussing which was noisy and made me anxious. He came over to me and talked to me and Lucy. He said ‘Ok you two, swap machines. Time to discover each other's personalities!’
I got up and walked out without saying anything. I never went back to computer classes.
Everybody loves a list...
especially when it's this good.
Lots I've read but loads I haven't and want to. Pale Fire is high on the list. Hogg sounds like an interesting prospect too. I read some extracts online and it read like hardcore gay snuff porn. But better, obviously.
Anyway, it's here
and here's an improvised top 20 from me, self-important as i am. Definitely not in order of preference.
1. Infinite Jest - david foster wallace
2. Life A User's Manual - Georges Perec
3. Underworld - Don Delillo
4. Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
5. Alan Warner - the man who walks
6. Phillip K Dick - a scanner darkly
7. Phillip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre
8. Jonathan Letham - as she climbed across the table
9. Paul Auster - New York Trilogy
10. William T Vollman - The Royal Family
11. Alan Warner - these demented lands
12. Hemingway - The Sun also Rises
13. Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man
14. Thomas Pynchon - V
15. Italo Calvino - if on a winter's night a traveller' - this should
actually be in the top 5 it's amazing
16. Faulkner - the sound and the fury
17. Melville - Moby Dick
18. Will Ashon - clear water - I reckon it really is actually!
19. Orwell - 1984 - obvious but it was amazing and it was the first and last
book that made me cry. What a bitch.
20. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
gosh. they're almost all yanks.
Lots I've read but loads I haven't and want to. Pale Fire is high on the list. Hogg sounds like an interesting prospect too. I read some extracts online and it read like hardcore gay snuff porn. But better, obviously.
Anyway, it's here
and here's an improvised top 20 from me, self-important as i am. Definitely not in order of preference.
1. Infinite Jest - david foster wallace
2. Life A User's Manual - Georges Perec
3. Underworld - Don Delillo
4. Mason and Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
5. Alan Warner - the man who walks
6. Phillip K Dick - a scanner darkly
7. Phillip Roth - Sabbath's Theatre
8. Jonathan Letham - as she climbed across the table
9. Paul Auster - New York Trilogy
10. William T Vollman - The Royal Family
11. Alan Warner - these demented lands
12. Hemingway - The Sun also Rises
13. Ralph Ellison - The Invisible Man
14. Thomas Pynchon - V
15. Italo Calvino - if on a winter's night a traveller' - this should
actually be in the top 5 it's amazing
16. Faulkner - the sound and the fury
17. Melville - Moby Dick
18. Will Ashon - clear water - I reckon it really is actually!
19. Orwell - 1984 - obvious but it was amazing and it was the first and last
book that made me cry. What a bitch.
20. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
gosh. they're almost all yanks.
Warner
Here's a piece i just wrote for Blowback on Alan Warner. Buy his new book here
it's incredible, a stunning departure from The Port that's freed him up to let loose in a whole new setting. As usual, it's eerily convincing.
-----
Allan Warner should need little introduction. His debut novel about the existential journey of a vivid, unforgettable young woman, ‘Morvern Callar,’ stunned readers on it’s publication in 1997. Quickly followed by ‘These Demented Lands,’ an astonishing amalgamation of mythology with Scottish grit, Morvern found herself being played by Samantha Morton in a feature film, and Warner went on to create equally vital characters in the school girls of ‘The Sopranos’ and the intellectual, crazed nephew of ‘The Man Who Walks.’ It might be a surprise then, to learn that most of the time he introduces himself as ‘someone who works in computers.’
‘Morvern Callar’ was a hopeless title for taxi drivers,’ he laughs, comically detailing some of the mispronunciations he’s encountered. ‘When you say, “ooh, I’m a writer,” it’s embarrassing y’know?’ But a writer he is, his fifth novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ having just been published. His introduction to the book? ‘It’s literary stuff, don’t bother with it!’ he quips. The cover of the novel shows a gleaming pool, with the novel’s talismanic model aeroplane, the DC-8 Stretch Series, afloat within it. ‘You can’t say anymore, “I want some guys on a beach, playing pool on a table that’s submerged in the water” anymore. The publishers say “Oh fuck off, we spent the budget on Salman’s last novel. They shot the swimming pool in LA!’ he says, ‘they were going on about the light.’ It’s a light hearted, funny, conversational style that will continue throughout our interview, revealing Warner to be as compelling to talk to as to read.
His thoughts on the book’s reception reveal a philosophical side that forms another trait, coming with the first of many enthusiastic references to other writers. ‘Ken Kesey once said about reviews, and this allows me to sleep at night, that “the bad stuff still hurts, and the good stuff doesn’t teach me anything.” You only learn things from other writer’s books.’ The current state of literary criticism is definitely a concern. ‘It’s very hard for literary fiction these days, the bottom feeders have been let loose. I call ‘em the town councillors of literature, “ooh, I don’t like him because his lawn has grown too long.’ Again, he comically draws out his vowels in a lilting fashion that has us both laughing out loud. It’s not always a funny though. ‘The most wonderful books can get destroyed, for example Andrew O’Hagan’s just written a storming new novel, and I just hope it gets the respect it deserves. My heart goes out to the new writers.’
‘The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven’ is a departure for Warner in more ways than one. It centres around his first character, Manolo Follana, to come from the middle classes, but more noticeably, it’s his first book to be set outside of the Scottish port of his previous four. As Follana’s name suggests, this is a novel set in Spain. ‘I suppose in some ways the Port did feel limiting. I think any artist is trying to push into new territory, if you’ve got any balls I guess. I thought it’d be interesting to write about a character who has power and economic security, but who still suffers from the same existential problems that schoolgirls do in the sopranos.’
Like Morvern or the nephew, Manolo feels extremely real and vividly imagined, and it’s the characters that Warner thinks up initially, before their meaning. ‘I think the characters and their situation come first, then it very much happens on the page. You can have has many ideas as you want but you work through them in writing. I abort novels all the time, and sometimes I use bits that didn’t fit in one book in a different book.’ These aborted novels come when a dramatic idea doesn’t prove practical in the actual writing. ‘If you decide to write a novel called ‘Climbing Everest,’ and it’s about a husband and wife who decide to climb Everest and work out their marital problems. You think “wow, what an exciting and dramatic idea.” Then you find out your novel is actually called ‘two people talking in a tent.’ You couldn’t talk on a cliff face, there’d be these huge tracts of silence!’
Warner pinpoints his passion for the dramatic back to extensive reading of the modernist icon Samuel Beckett. ‘I think because of him, I have these really dramatic ideas, but when I get to the page it becomes slow and meditative.’ He asks if I’m familiar with the infamous trilogy, which unfortunately I’m not. ‘People think he’s very intellectual, but he’s so fucking funny y’know? There’s a bit where Mallone is freezing, so he wraps himself in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, which he says are “excellent for concealing the pungency of his farts.” It’s fantastic stuff.’
Whilst Spain has featured as a promised land in previous novels, a bright counterpoint to the cold darkness of The Port, I wonder why Warner decided to set an entire novel there. ‘I have no pretensions of being an Espanicist, the Spain I know is very much one of the pint and the full English breakfast. Beach Spain.’ There is a rather close connection however. ‘My wife is from down here and grew up here, so that’s a big influence, she’s my muse. A lot of the stuff from the Sopranos is from her!’ Anyone familiar with that book will know that its detailing of the lives of a group of energetic, rowdy, tender teenage girls is astoundingly rendered.
‘I think what I try to do is put a character into a situation that’s very unfamiliar to me. I write what I don’t know, try to make it difficult for myself. People just assume you’re an expert.’ That said, the psychology of the provincial, proud Manolo seems highly convincing. ‘I watch a lot, I’m one of those creepy guys that sits in cafes watching,’ he laughs warmly, ‘so I guess that’s where that comes from. Manolo spends a lot of time doing that too.’
Perhaps the main trait of an Alan Warner novel, one which is difficult to express simply, is the odd mixture of darkness and light, or purposeful, keenly felt intellectualism opposed to brutal lack of thought. ‘I guess personally there’s a struggle for identity in a sense. I’ve always been a very big reader, but I would never call myself a down the line intellectual, although some of my friends see me as one. I’m not quite sure where I stand. But I think it’s a good thing for a writer to live on the margins, I’m not sure an Oxford degree in critical theory is a perfect thing for a novelist. It’s too much information, you know?’
‘I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable about books that are too intellectual, but at the same time I’m very uncomfortable with things that are dumbed down. For example I don’t like genre fiction. I know that’s shooting myself in the foot and sounding like a terrible snob, but I wonder what the motivation of the writers must be. A genre is like tying both hands behind your back.’ But this isn’t to say that linguistic gentility is something he approves of. ‘I think Scottish writers of the last ten to twenty years have been questioning the power structures of English literature, that idea that all great writing should be like Henry James. I think James’ prose is terrible, and I believe he spoke the same way he wrote, so I’m glad I never had a conversation with him! That idea that ‘fuck you’ can not be in a work of great art, I’ve always been suspicious of that.’
This leads to a meditative discussion on the nature of language itself. ‘Language controls everything, but language has great inadequacies. I’m trying to question the medium through which the novel is transmitted. It’s true in life as well, the feelings we have are never encapsulated perfectly linguistically. There’s a world within us that’s none linguistic; ‘I am in love, I feel fear, I feel disgust,’ whatever it is we wish to discuss, there’s always an element of doubt, but through the language you’re trying to reach some kind of truth of the human condition.’
Warner doesn’t re-read his books, and his warmest enthusiasm is reserved for the discussion of other writers’ work, be it the short stories of James Kelman, the wonderful, overlooked novels of the German W.G Sebald, the philosophical realism of John King’s ‘Football Factory,’ the youthful British talent of Gwendolen Riley, even the ex-Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock’s modernist, mystical novels. And of course, he’s interested to know my favourites, having read David Foster Wallace and Italo Calvino. When he hears I’m reading Phillip Roth, he recommends ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ ‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about wanking that becomes tragic!’ His friend Michael Ondaatje is also high on the list, the crystalline prose of ‘In The Skin of a Lion’ in particular. Like Warner, he writes and removes huge tracts in his novels, reducing what remains to something of enormous power.
So many books and so little time. ‘There’s so much art out there, there’s not enough time to absorb it all. There’s something quite inhuman about that,’ muses Warner. ‘As Follana says, “there wasn’t enough time in a human life to read all of great literature. What a swindle.’ Luckily, there’s plenty of time to read this best of British novelists, time very well spent indeed.
it's incredible, a stunning departure from The Port that's freed him up to let loose in a whole new setting. As usual, it's eerily convincing.
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Allan Warner should need little introduction. His debut novel about the existential journey of a vivid, unforgettable young woman, ‘Morvern Callar,’ stunned readers on it’s publication in 1997. Quickly followed by ‘These Demented Lands,’ an astonishing amalgamation of mythology with Scottish grit, Morvern found herself being played by Samantha Morton in a feature film, and Warner went on to create equally vital characters in the school girls of ‘The Sopranos’ and the intellectual, crazed nephew of ‘The Man Who Walks.’ It might be a surprise then, to learn that most of the time he introduces himself as ‘someone who works in computers.’
‘Morvern Callar’ was a hopeless title for taxi drivers,’ he laughs, comically detailing some of the mispronunciations he’s encountered. ‘When you say, “ooh, I’m a writer,” it’s embarrassing y’know?’ But a writer he is, his fifth novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ having just been published. His introduction to the book? ‘It’s literary stuff, don’t bother with it!’ he quips. The cover of the novel shows a gleaming pool, with the novel’s talismanic model aeroplane, the DC-8 Stretch Series, afloat within it. ‘You can’t say anymore, “I want some guys on a beach, playing pool on a table that’s submerged in the water” anymore. The publishers say “Oh fuck off, we spent the budget on Salman’s last novel. They shot the swimming pool in LA!’ he says, ‘they were going on about the light.’ It’s a light hearted, funny, conversational style that will continue throughout our interview, revealing Warner to be as compelling to talk to as to read.
His thoughts on the book’s reception reveal a philosophical side that forms another trait, coming with the first of many enthusiastic references to other writers. ‘Ken Kesey once said about reviews, and this allows me to sleep at night, that “the bad stuff still hurts, and the good stuff doesn’t teach me anything.” You only learn things from other writer’s books.’ The current state of literary criticism is definitely a concern. ‘It’s very hard for literary fiction these days, the bottom feeders have been let loose. I call ‘em the town councillors of literature, “ooh, I don’t like him because his lawn has grown too long.’ Again, he comically draws out his vowels in a lilting fashion that has us both laughing out loud. It’s not always a funny though. ‘The most wonderful books can get destroyed, for example Andrew O’Hagan’s just written a storming new novel, and I just hope it gets the respect it deserves. My heart goes out to the new writers.’
‘The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven’ is a departure for Warner in more ways than one. It centres around his first character, Manolo Follana, to come from the middle classes, but more noticeably, it’s his first book to be set outside of the Scottish port of his previous four. As Follana’s name suggests, this is a novel set in Spain. ‘I suppose in some ways the Port did feel limiting. I think any artist is trying to push into new territory, if you’ve got any balls I guess. I thought it’d be interesting to write about a character who has power and economic security, but who still suffers from the same existential problems that schoolgirls do in the sopranos.’
Like Morvern or the nephew, Manolo feels extremely real and vividly imagined, and it’s the characters that Warner thinks up initially, before their meaning. ‘I think the characters and their situation come first, then it very much happens on the page. You can have has many ideas as you want but you work through them in writing. I abort novels all the time, and sometimes I use bits that didn’t fit in one book in a different book.’ These aborted novels come when a dramatic idea doesn’t prove practical in the actual writing. ‘If you decide to write a novel called ‘Climbing Everest,’ and it’s about a husband and wife who decide to climb Everest and work out their marital problems. You think “wow, what an exciting and dramatic idea.” Then you find out your novel is actually called ‘two people talking in a tent.’ You couldn’t talk on a cliff face, there’d be these huge tracts of silence!’
Warner pinpoints his passion for the dramatic back to extensive reading of the modernist icon Samuel Beckett. ‘I think because of him, I have these really dramatic ideas, but when I get to the page it becomes slow and meditative.’ He asks if I’m familiar with the infamous trilogy, which unfortunately I’m not. ‘People think he’s very intellectual, but he’s so fucking funny y’know? There’s a bit where Mallone is freezing, so he wraps himself in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, which he says are “excellent for concealing the pungency of his farts.” It’s fantastic stuff.’
Whilst Spain has featured as a promised land in previous novels, a bright counterpoint to the cold darkness of The Port, I wonder why Warner decided to set an entire novel there. ‘I have no pretensions of being an Espanicist, the Spain I know is very much one of the pint and the full English breakfast. Beach Spain.’ There is a rather close connection however. ‘My wife is from down here and grew up here, so that’s a big influence, she’s my muse. A lot of the stuff from the Sopranos is from her!’ Anyone familiar with that book will know that its detailing of the lives of a group of energetic, rowdy, tender teenage girls is astoundingly rendered.
‘I think what I try to do is put a character into a situation that’s very unfamiliar to me. I write what I don’t know, try to make it difficult for myself. People just assume you’re an expert.’ That said, the psychology of the provincial, proud Manolo seems highly convincing. ‘I watch a lot, I’m one of those creepy guys that sits in cafes watching,’ he laughs warmly, ‘so I guess that’s where that comes from. Manolo spends a lot of time doing that too.’
Perhaps the main trait of an Alan Warner novel, one which is difficult to express simply, is the odd mixture of darkness and light, or purposeful, keenly felt intellectualism opposed to brutal lack of thought. ‘I guess personally there’s a struggle for identity in a sense. I’ve always been a very big reader, but I would never call myself a down the line intellectual, although some of my friends see me as one. I’m not quite sure where I stand. But I think it’s a good thing for a writer to live on the margins, I’m not sure an Oxford degree in critical theory is a perfect thing for a novelist. It’s too much information, you know?’
‘I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable about books that are too intellectual, but at the same time I’m very uncomfortable with things that are dumbed down. For example I don’t like genre fiction. I know that’s shooting myself in the foot and sounding like a terrible snob, but I wonder what the motivation of the writers must be. A genre is like tying both hands behind your back.’ But this isn’t to say that linguistic gentility is something he approves of. ‘I think Scottish writers of the last ten to twenty years have been questioning the power structures of English literature, that idea that all great writing should be like Henry James. I think James’ prose is terrible, and I believe he spoke the same way he wrote, so I’m glad I never had a conversation with him! That idea that ‘fuck you’ can not be in a work of great art, I’ve always been suspicious of that.’
This leads to a meditative discussion on the nature of language itself. ‘Language controls everything, but language has great inadequacies. I’m trying to question the medium through which the novel is transmitted. It’s true in life as well, the feelings we have are never encapsulated perfectly linguistically. There’s a world within us that’s none linguistic; ‘I am in love, I feel fear, I feel disgust,’ whatever it is we wish to discuss, there’s always an element of doubt, but through the language you’re trying to reach some kind of truth of the human condition.’
Warner doesn’t re-read his books, and his warmest enthusiasm is reserved for the discussion of other writers’ work, be it the short stories of James Kelman, the wonderful, overlooked novels of the German W.G Sebald, the philosophical realism of John King’s ‘Football Factory,’ the youthful British talent of Gwendolen Riley, even the ex-Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock’s modernist, mystical novels. And of course, he’s interested to know my favourites, having read David Foster Wallace and Italo Calvino. When he hears I’m reading Phillip Roth, he recommends ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ ‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about wanking that becomes tragic!’ His friend Michael Ondaatje is also high on the list, the crystalline prose of ‘In The Skin of a Lion’ in particular. Like Warner, he writes and removes huge tracts in his novels, reducing what remains to something of enormous power.
So many books and so little time. ‘There’s so much art out there, there’s not enough time to absorb it all. There’s something quite inhuman about that,’ muses Warner. ‘As Follana says, “there wasn’t enough time in a human life to read all of great literature. What a swindle.’ Luckily, there’s plenty of time to read this best of British novelists, time very well spent indeed.
hello
Gosh, a blog. I've set this up to record my scribbles online and in one place. Unless you're interested in literary fiction and, occasionally, music no-one likes, you probably won't like it, but it's here all the same.
Jamie
Jamie
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