Nathan Cain Popular culture is, for the first time since Aldous Huxley published his (in)famous book The Doors of Perception in 1954, without a narcomancer. With the recent passing of Terrence McKenna, a void has been left in our culture. No one dominant individual is out there positing far out theories about the purported benefits […]
Paul Celan : After The Disaster
Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan “With a variable key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that spurts from your eye or your mouth or your ear. You vary the key, you vary the word that […]
Tim Parks: Destiny
Stephen Mitchelmore I am attracted to stories of the aftermath. At the end of adventure movies I want to know, for instance, what happened after the astronauts make it back to Earth, or the killer is caught, or the girl is finally got. I find the peace at the end of, say, Event Horizon, deeply […]
Saul Bellow: Ravelstein
Stephen Mitchelmore "I stood back from myself and looked into Amy’s face. No one else on all this earth had such features. This was the most amazing thing in the life of the world." These sentences come from the final page of Saul Bellow’s previous novel "The Actual", which, I seem to remember, he said […]
Mark Danielewski: House Of Leaves
Gary Marshall House Of Leaves is one of the strangest books we’ve seen for some time. With multiple narrators, a mass of footnotes and direct transcripts of video tapes, the novel has been described as a "literary Blair Witch Project’ – a description we’d wholeheartedly agree with. The novel is narrated by Johnny Truant, a […]
William S. Burroughs: Last Words
Nathan Cain The works of William Seward Burroughs have always, even among those who think themselves the hippest of the hip, been considered a bit much. Without a doubt, Ginsberg and Kerouac have been the most popular authors of the Beat movement, but the fact remains that Kerouac’s reputation is based on one work of […]
Half Man Half Biscuit : Trouble Over Bridgewater
Gary Marshall If there was any justice in the world, it would be illegal to own Simply Red albums and Half Man Half Biscuit would be worshipped as gods. Unfortunately, the vagaries of the music business mean that the band who brought us the immortal lyric “God, I could murder a Cadbury’s Flake, but then […]
Illiad – Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell
Gary Marshall Even by the standards of American humour, Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell is unusual; a book of cartoons that should carry a set of minimum system requirements. Where Scott Adams’ Dilbert series concentrates more on universal office themes, with a worrying tendency to fill half of the books with new age self-help nonsense, […]
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 […]
John King: Headhunters
Jayne Margetts By nature, the female of the species should NOT enjoy the works of British writer, John King. Why? Because he is everything that the Loaded-generation embody. Because he is a male chauvinists’ dream. Because women are only vessels of sexual gratification for men. Because his novels are filled with the testosterone of too […]
James Gleick: Faster
Chris Mitchell Faster is a survey of the speed of modern life. Subtitled "The acceleration of just about everything", it’s a book which takes time out to stop and think about the breakneck pace at which we live our lives and the ramifications of doing so. Unsurprisingly, technology has played a big part in increasing […]
Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant Than The Sun
Chris Mitchell Technology is often seen as having a negative influence on music. Ever since the advent of sound generated by machines rather than traditional instruments, there have been dire predictions about the death of the Song. More Brilliant Than The Sun takes the opposite attitude and celebrates these strange new technologically-based forms of music, […]
Toni Davidson: Scar Culture
Jayne Margetts Canongate’s Rebel Inc imprint has become the torchbearer for the Dysfunctional Generation. If grim reality, catharsis and profane verse is your poison then chances are they can prescribe a literary hotchpotch of cutting-edge contemporary writers to suit your taste buds. Feeling pessimistic or down-right suicidal then look no further than the critically lauded […]
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 […]
Jorge Luis Borges: The Total Library
Stephen Mitchelmore The last story in The Book of Sand, a collection of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, is itself called "The Book of Sand". It is a story about the discovery and disposal of a book whose pages never remain the same from one reading to the next. The book is in effect infinite, […]
William Gibson: All Tomorrow’s Parties
Chris Mitchell William Gibson is never going to be able to live down being the sci-fi author who coined the term "cyberspace". First used in his debut novel Neuromancer which was published during the early 1980s, it was soon picked up on as an uncannily accurate description of the then-emerging Internet. His latest novel is […]
Douglas Coupland – Miss Wyoming
Gary Marshall With the success of Generation X, Douglas Coupland found himself in the role of spokesman for a disaffected generation, documenting the ennui of twentysomethings in a world where even the most radical youth movements are quickly co-opted and commercialised by the mainstream. Microserfs followed soon afterwards, a soap opera covering the tangled relationships […]
Joyce Maynard – At Home In The World
Bethan Roberts In the last couple of years there has been a shift in confessional writing from the craze for tortured self-absorption (from Elizabeth Wurtzel and Andrea Ashworth, amongst others) to the impulse to torture a friend/relative/lover, preferably a famous one. Joyce Maynard’s book, along with the du Pre siblings’ A Genius in the Family […]
Crowded House : Afterglow
Gary Marshall In a decade where most music was aimed at eight-year-olds, Crowded House were a band out of time. The unassuming Antipodeans had no image to speak of, no manifesto or world domination plan. Instead, they created album after album of resolutely adult songs. Few bands cite them as an influence, yet you’ll find […]
Metallica : S&M
Gary Marshall Rock and classical music make uneasy bedfellows. Whether it’s heavy metal bands performing with ‘real’ musicians, orchestras tackling the hits of the day or rubbish Britpop bands trying to be taken seriously, the results are usually uninspiring. While S&M avoids most of the common traps, it’s still a flawed effort. S&M teams the […]
Kevin Kelly – New Rules For The New Economy
Chris Mitchell Despite its dry title, Kevin Kelly’s book isn’t just another self-styled business bible for the information age. Instead, it’s an overview of what he terms the “network economy”, which is not only superseding the old paradigms of the industrial economy but transforming how we live. The network economy has been brought about by […]
Charles Leadbeater: Living On Thin Air
Chris Mitchell Thanks to the globalising effect of new technologies, Britain is transforming from an industrialised economy to a knowledge based economy. Unlike previous generations, many of us make our livings not by producing anything tangible but through the absorption and analysis of information. This, maintains Charles Leadbeater, is the advent of a new economy […]
Mark Taplin: Open Lands: Travels Through Russia’s Once Forbidden Places
Gary Marshall During the Cold War huge areas of Russia were strictly off-limits to foreign visitors and, in classic tit-for-tat style, Russian visitors were allowed entry to the USA provided their travels didn’t take them anywhere there were roads, people or small animals. In 1992 both superpowers signed the “Open Lands” agreement (from which Mark […]
Susan Maushart: The Mask Of Motherhood
Bethan Roberts Often witty and certainly subversive, The Mask of Motherhood is, as the blurb puts it, not a ‘how to’ book but a ‘how it really is’ book. I’m not sure what this cliché actually means (how it is for who, exactly?), but it’s true that Maushart quickly gets to work, debunking all the […]
Ed Jones: This Is Pop
Gary Marshall It wasn’t a rock gig, it was an event. Journalists from all the major music papers were there, and even the local newspaper had marked the event with a special supplement. Celebrities air-kissed backstage, and the band took the stage in front of thousands of people. For Wigan musician Ed Jones, the gig […]
