Elizabeth McCullough digests two takes on eating disorders in Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted and Marianne Apostolides’ Inner Hunger Joining an abundance of self-help and resource manuals on the topic of anorexia and bulimia are two recent first-person accounts from sufferers of these disorders. Though speaking with very different voices, the authors of Inner Hunger and Wasted […]
Kevin Mulroy : Western Amerykanski: Polish Poster Art & the Western : How The East Was Won
Jeffrey Sharlet charts the unlikely impact of Westerns on Polish poster art and politics Look up “Shane” (as in Alan Ladd) in a Polish literary dictionary, and you’ll find the following definition: “a psychologically credible personification of goodness.” The movie itself, when it played the Polish provinces, was titled The Man From Nowhere. To Polish […]
Jim DeRogatis : Paul Morley : Let It Blurt : Nothing : Critical Mass
Brian Dillon on the lifechanging journalism of Lester Bangs and Paul Morley Lou Reed’s magnificent “Rock’n’Roll” recounts the peculiar tale of a five-year-old girl living in a blank suburb where there’s ‘nothing happening at all … not at all … Then one fine day she turned on a New York station, she couldn’t believe what […]
Naomi Klein : No Logo : Ad Nauseum
Gary Marshall gets angry about advertising with Naomi Klein’s No Logo “If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself… there’s no fucking joke coming. You are Satan’s spawn, filling the world with bile and garbage, you are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourselves – it’s the only way to save your […]
Tupac Shakur and Death Row Records : Have Gun Will Travel and Rebel For The Hell Of It : Murder Was The Case
Gary Marshall on the history of gangsta rap as documented in Tupac Shakur: Rebel For The Hell Of It and Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records Under the guidance of its founder Marion “Suge” Knight, Death Row Records became one of the most successful and most talked-about […]
The Bible : Canongate Pocket Bible Series: Revelation And Redemption
Lewis Owens on twelve meditations about the significance of the Bible at the end of the millennium The twentieth century has been a predominately secular one, asserting its autonomy after the apparent “death of God”. Our present “post-modern” world disallows any all-embracing meta-narrative that stands outside of both the author’s intent and the reader’s interpretative […]
J.G. Ballard : Crash : Prophet With Honour
David B. Livingstone on why J.G. Ballard is one of the most vital writers of the 20th century “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish!” It was with these ironic words that an editor at J.G. Ballard’s publisher futilely urged the suppression of Crash over a quarter-century ago, a book which many have […]
Alexander Poznansky : Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man : Enigma Variations
Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man Alexander Poznansky Lewis Owens More than a hundred years after his death, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky remains a greatly loved but still deeply enigmatic figure. However, in his comprehensive and illuminating biography Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man, Alexander Poznansky has brilliantly employed the personal correspondence and documentation […]
Irvine Welsh: Alan Warner: Queerspotting: Homosexuality in contemporary Scottish fiction: Queerspotting
Zoe Strachan drags Irvine Welsh’s and Alan Warner’s writing from out of the closet… Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electric tin openers. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. But […]
Nikos Kazantzakis : The Last Temptation Of Christ : Always Thirsty
Lewis Owens on the uphill path of Nikos Kazantzakis Although many people may have heard of the novels Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, both of which have been adapted into films, it appears that few are so familiar with the name of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis. Although a national hero in […]
Thomas Bernhard: Failing To Go Under: An essay on the 10th anniverary of his death
Stephen Mitchelmore reflects on Thomas Bernhard’s work on the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death ‘Literature can be defined by the sense of the imminence of a revelation which does not in fact occur.’ (Borges) Like Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, the novelist, playwright and poet, died young. At this end of the century, 58 is young. […]
Irvine Welsh : You’ll Have Had Your Hole : You’ll Have Had Your Theatre
Dr Willy Maley applauds the theatrical assault of Irvine Welsh’s stage play You’ll Have Had Your Hole Brecht once remarked that he’d like to see the kind of people who attended football matches at his plays. Scotland has not had a particularly distinguished record in the field of football, but in recent years, blessed with […]
Tupac Shakur : Priests, Poverty And Popular Culture: Priests, Poverty And Popular Culture
Reverend Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou on Generation X and the crisis in the African-American church I wouldn’t have religion I couldn’t feel sometimes! -African-American Spiritual In an all African-American male Sunday school class, we were supposed to be discussing Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac. Tupac Shakur became the pertinent ram in the bush. I […]
E.M Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond
Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran refuses explanation “Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system.” What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a […]
Marie Darrieussecq : Pig Tales : Shelf Life
Chris Hall gives the lowdown on Marie Darrieussecq Who’s Marie Darrieussecq? The 28-year-old author of debut novel Pig Tales, which has taken France by storm. The book took just 24-hours to be accepted after she sent her unsolicited manuscript to publishers Big deal. Well, quite. It’s sold a staggering 250,000 hardback copies and has been […]
Toby Litt : Beatniks : Shelf Life
Chris Mitchell gives the lowdown on Toby Litt Who’s Toby Litt? “Britain’s answer to Douglas Coupland“, according to various critics. “If you don’t want to be him or have him, you’re dead” drooled Julie Burchill with her characteristic understatement Our very own homegrown Generation X guru, then? Last year’s debut short story collection Adventures In […]
JG Ballard: Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course In The Fiction Of JG Ballard
Chris Hall gives a crash course in the fiction of JG Ballard Existing somewhere between the manifest edifices of Crash and Empire Of The Sun, the rest of JG Ballard’s fiction glides and grinds like vast tectonic plates. Those already acquainted with Crash, the polar extreme of Ballard’s oeuvre, and his most successful book, the […]
Keith Haring : A Brief Meeting : Hieroglyphic Icon
Michael Morrissey recalls a brief but memorable meeting with Keith Haring Remembering is a strange voyage. The mind, a dreamy traveller, retraces its steps to an event in ways elevatory. It turns a simple statement into so much more. Looking back on meeting the artist Keith Haring in November 1989 puts me at an odd […]
John seabrook: deeper: no flame, no gain
Deeper grew out of two articles John Seabrook wrote for The New Yorker magazine. The premise of the book is both simple and effective: the “newbie” is sent on a passage to cyberspace, armed only with rudimentary vocabulary and a tube of factor 30 to protect against “flaming”. The voyager then records his progress and, […]
Body Piercing: The Customised Body And Tribal Transgression: Remake, Remodel
Spike enters the strange world of body modification [Award Winning Tattoo Designs – The Biggest And Best Collection Of Tattoos.] Tattoos. Piercing. Dreadlocks. Body Art. What is the world coming to? It would seem if we follow the lead of much of the popular press a minority of degenerates are corrupting our sensibilities, and so […]
Samuel Beckett: Beyond Biography: The Last Modernist by Anthony Cronin and Damned To Fame by James Knowlson :
Despite two recent authorative biographies, Stephen Mitchelmore argues that Beckett remains an enigma It has not been easy assimilating Beckett into our culture. While his mentor James Joyce made with ease the familiar journey from public outrage and bewilderment to universal love and admiration, Beckett, seven years after his death, remains as distant as ever. […]
Keith Haring : Keith Haring’s Journals : Artist Or Radiant Baby
Spike looks at the man behind the spray can with the publication of Keith Haring’s journals At the close of the twentieth century, trying to find a stable definition for the term “art” has become increasingly difficult. The traditional notion of art as the privilege of the educated and wealthy, preserved within galleries and private […]
Francis Ford Coppola : The Godfather : Saturday Night Fever: John Badham: Sex And Spaghetti
Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man, from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever With The Godfather recently re-released in a new print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths, screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia families – all with excessive amounts of […]
Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing: In Search Of The Miraculous
Spike on the enduring enigma of Bruce Chatwin’s travel writing Bruce Chatwin was a truly singular voice in British travel writing, and whose silence is now all too apparent. Since his untimely death in 1989 of what was described at the time as a rare Chinese disease (but which was later admitted to be AIDS), […]
Graham Duff on the Edinburgh Festival: Lunatic Fringe
Comedian Graham Duff Now more than ever, publicity and promotion can spell life or death for an Edinburgh Fringe show. The people on the front line are the Leafleters, or as they are courageously known in the world of promotion, Foot Soldiers. The people whose job it is to whittle away a fad wad of […]
