Jazz poet Roger Singer shares a vision of Kerouac on occasion of his 89th birthday The first book I read by Jack Kerouac was The Town and the City. It was his first novel in a long succession of works that followed and numerous books of poems. While reading this first published work by Kerouac […]
Berlin, Bromley – Bertie Marshall
Bertie Marshall provides a sneak preview of his own punk memoir documenting his suburban transformation into Berlin Berlin, Bromley – Bertie Marshall See all books by Bertie Marshall at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com THREE PIECE SUITE. A fading Polaroid of the twilight world, of a London suburb. It’s net curtains, privet hedges, Pebbledash, Fishmongers and draylon […]
Tenement Sonata #2 – Lisa Stopless
My upstairs neighbors inspired me. Heard ’em packing up. Getting out. Rent’s late. Work’s slow. They’re fast. Heard ceiling scrape in dream. Woke up. Dark, still dressed. Head full. Power off. Milk lumpy. Sluggish panic. Man, this bites. Towel moldy. Called Devon. Collect. Sold the car. Sold the ounce of weed in the car. Sold […]
The Sugar Mummy: Bertie Marshall
Psychoboys is set in the cities of Moscow and Berlin. It tells the story of Rez, a rent boy living on the streets, and his fight for survival in a world of bizarre strangers. He meets a riot of characters – Ms Thing, a transvestite sugar mummy who educates him in the art of coprophilia […]
The Basquiat File
Robert Knafo In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, […]
X20: Richard Beard
SPIKE presents an exclusive extract from this hilarious cigarette obsessed debut novel DAY 1 DR WILLIAM BARCLAY, born 7 March 1936, died 3 March 1994, age 57. Mysterium Magnum. The principle of all generation is separation, he used to say. Distract your mind. Take up a new hobby. Occupy your hands. He said that the […]
Brian Patten: The Minister For Exams
When I was a child I sat an exam. The test was so simple There was no way I could fail. Q1. Describe the taste of the moon. It tastes like Creation I wrote, it has the flavour of starlight. Q2. What colour is Love? Love is the colour of the water a man lost […]
Brian Patten: Armada
Long, long ago when everything I was told was believable and the little I knew was less limited than now, I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond and to the far bank launched a child’s armada. hidA broken fortress of twigs, the paper-tissue sails of galleons, the waterlogged branches of submarines – […]
Son Of G, 1993 (after Allen Ginsberg’s Howl)
Annalise Bomenblit I saw the best minds of our generation silent before a fluorescent light that screamed like the rainbow sky of the drowned man’s last memory who tried to fight it with pilgrimages at night to food and other scarce suburban treasures speaking of things they bought and things to buy and things to […]
