Entanglement (an extract)

… unexplained death rippling across a city paralysed by overly-ambitious copycat serial killers, bi-curious junkies, homeless Santas… 197 exchange students killed in simultaneous unrelated coffee table incidents… a travelling salesman mutilated in his bed surrounded by obscene cuddly toys… a motivational dog-trainer garrotted in her car by a 5-inch child’s lariat… dozens of art critics butchered amidst some of the countries most innovative new buildings…. several hundred random business journalists killed by lethal injection… the city a vast amoral jungle of blue-haired gamblers and punk rock scholars… on the Sheik-infested streets a thousand tragically sassy beauticians, Rembrandt scholars who don’t like Rembrandt, religious activists sexually haranguing timid agnostics… the atmosphere of each day eerily in keeping with the vapid production values of the entire Sussudio period… Q surrounded by photographs, articles, graphs detailing these sly, wittily constructed deaths: dismembered ex-girlfriends, decapitated nuns, disemboweled cardiologists, violently violated violinists… Q pondering the dark methodologies at work, regularly raising both eyebrows simultaneously…

***

… unshaven in blue underpants, organic cotton, knitted stripes - no logo of any description – Q squinting at cold black newsprint, reading about the death of a former chess champion. Several witnesses saw him fall “almost cheerfully” – after straightening his bowtie, tossing himself from the roof of the building… an ever-increasing grin widening across his face…on impact he was “practically having sex up against a tree for five to ten seconds.”

Q circles the paragraph in bright red ink.

In some advanced technological epoch – Q thinks to himself – perhaps people will wonder why we circled such things in bright red ink…

***

… Q filing away the latest demises…a light-bulb salesman ripped apart by a gaggle of lions… renegade schoolgirls exploded into young pieces, their charred remains distributed evenly across the piazza…

“… my files cannot take the strain of this increasingly worrying information,” he realises. “Soon I’ll be requiring an all-new filing system…”

***

… cryptic messages arriving - from disparate loners: infertile child psychologists, lunatic travel agents, broken down housewives, fairly lethal sounding Hispanic 52-year olds… the latest: Mrs. A, a glamorous cripple in a dark suit, pale tie, gold shoes, legs splayed about a mile wide: “I must interject into your investigation in my customised wheelchair,” she states earnestly, like Kate Bush. “My husband is listed as missing in the places where they list such things – and that’s a distressing state for any husband to be in...”

The rest of "Entanglement" is available right now in "The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime" edited by murder maestro Maxim Jakubowski.

The Consequences of America (an extract)

There is a landscape in the middle years designed to thwart even the noblest intentions.

At the time these latest events took place, I was a middle-class Zombie trying to make a living as a commercial travel writer. Recently my life had been blighted by a series of surreal misadventures. My wife had left me in a North-facing knee length winter coat. Like the ghost of Mr. Nietzsche twelve years after his downfall, she was continually being invoked by the West as the most ruinous image of its loftiest knowledge and nihilism and had sought solace with a crippled taxidermist.

"It’s a hollow, loveless, mechanical kind of sexual arrangement," she explained. "But we seem to enjoy it.”

Overcome with confusion, I floated around my kitchen for days feeling as if I had, at last, left the realm of the living behind. Eventually I ate an amazing scone and contemplated the reality of reality alone.

Nothing about it seemed remotely real.

And following the death of another week - during which I unintentionally alienated numerous others - I spent much of the next month reading and rereading my two favourite paragraphs from Naked Lunch. They didn't seem to help in the slightest. Outside, confusion rained hard. Days began, then ended again shortly afterwards - epic days during which hardened bachelors circumnavigated the globe submerged by global gloom and general dismay...

Still, perhaps the finest literature known to humankind held some answers.

So I sat down with myself and read Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, followed by Isaac Babel’s Collected Short Stories, and Borges, Labyrinths and Other Inquisitions, Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Thomas Bernhard, Correction, Rudy Wurlitzer, Nog, Isaac B Singer, Gimpel the Fool, Bernard Malamud, The Assistant and The Magic Barrel, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, everything I could find by Samuel Beckett, Knut Hamsun, Hunger, Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller and Man in the Holocene, Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales, Tommaso Landolfi, Gogol's Wife, Thomas Pynchon, V, John Hawkes, The Lime Twig, John Hawkes, Blood Oranges, Paley, Little Disturbances and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Susan Sontag, I, Etc, Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle, Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bellow, Henderson the Rain King, John Updike, The Coup and Rabbit, Run, The Paris Review interviews, Rust Hills (ed.), How We Live, Joe David Bellamy (ed.), Superfiction, the Puschart Prize Anthologies, Sternburg (ed.), The Writer on Her Work, André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, Motherwell (ed.), Documents of Modern Art, Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World, Flaubert, Letters, Mamet, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Joy Williams, The Changeling, Joe David Bellamy (ed.), The New Fiction, Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato, Amos Tutola, The Palm-Wine Drunkard, Ann Tyler, Searching for Caleb, Kenneth Koch, Thank You, Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems, John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains, Wesley Brown, Tragic Magic, Roland Barthes, Mythologies and The Pleasure of the Text, Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, Ann Beattie, Falling in Place, William Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Fiction and the Figures of Life and The World Within the Word, Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, Celine, Journey to the End of the Night, Kobo Abe, The Box Man, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Kaspar and Other Plays, André Breton, Nadja, John Barth, Chimera, Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets, Peter Taylor, Collected Stories, Colette, The Pure and the Impure, Carver, Will You Please be Quiet, Please, John Cheever, Collected Stories, Leonard Michaels, I Would Have Saved Them if I Could, Eudora Welty, Collected Stories, Max Apple, The Oranging of America, Flannery O'Connor, Collected Stories, Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Wayne C Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction.

By the time I'd finished and stood back up on my feet again, six days had passed and many things had changed. Historically, we had entered a new era of super volcanoes and climate chaos. The American psyche was in turmoil and a fraud of frankly massive magnitude had spread its tentacles around the globe...

A Few Moments With The Great Man Himself

The Great Man is in his kitchen staring wistfully into space, wearing a black roll-neck sweater.

“It’s Armani,” he tells me, over takeaway coffee and croissant. “The jeans and jacket are Emporio and the sweater is main line. But the belt is by Prada. I’ve worked with Armani before. He hemmed my pants when I won the Nobel Prize. Normally, I’m more casual at home. I just wear a t-shirt and Converse trainers in the style of Ethan Hawke.”

We are sitting on the hard wooden floor of the Great Man’s apartment. Now 83, the Great Man first became a globetrotting metaphysical superstar over thirty years ago. Does he maintain any set working pattern today?

“Oh yes,” he explains. “I rise early for an alcoholic and drink several large jugs of vodka for breakfast. I then dress in a particularly worn pair of vintage trousers from the turn of the century and wrap my head in an old woman’s shawl, like a bandage, affording me a unique gateway into the human condition. After about five minutes at my desk I return to bed and sleep until noon. Around 12:30 pm, I break for lunch. After a cold shower I change into a more comfortable outfit, usually a safari suit. Then I listen to Shostakovich or The Strokes and think about one day painting the room a different colour…”

The Great Man finishes his final croissant in silence. All of the Great Man’s finest works - The Happiness of All Humankind Is Dependant On A Symbolically Pre-Coded System of Incongruent Signs (1972), say, or Fuck Foucault (1987) - deal with the very nature of existence itself and what happens when things stop working properly. So, does the Great man have any lasting words of advice for the human race?

The Great Man removes his glasses, crosses his eyes, and stares right through me.

“Not really,” he admits. “My work is so paradoxical even I struggle to understand it. But I do believe there is a deeper meaning to the universe that science - one day in the very distant future - will totally fail to understand.”

Just then, a grizzled blonde in a powder-puff wig darts into the room on a skateboard.

“One more thing,” the Great Man tells me, ushering me out of the door. “I get most of my jackets from Dolce & Gabbana. They aren’t overly padded and are a really good shape for me…”

I Used To Be Postmodernist (But Now I'm Not So Sure)

The other day I found myself in a landscape that didn’t exist.

It was 1987, around May, and postmodernism was in vogue. Academic folk sat cross-legged on green campus hills, like characters in an Ann Beattie story. Balding professors animatedly discussed Barthelme, Coover, Gass with mini-skirted intellectuals. Ah, these were the happy days of Thatcherism when you actually knew which side you were on: All hail the fearless postmodernists!

I woke to sobering reality.

2008. Realism was back. Big writers writing big books about big subjects, all sweeping generalisations and fake schematics. It’s money for old tropes, of course: a stale set of literary conventions unable to convey the arbitrary, accidental, transitory, dazzlingly disorientating nature of the big bad universe. In this age of the Well-Made Novel, with postmodernist pizzazz pushed to the nether regions, where historiographic malfunctions pass for daring experimentalism, you have to ask yourself:

Is postmodernism, like Bob Hope, dead?

Are we all simply tap-dancing on its grave?

You see, I used to believe postmodernism was The Future, but now I’m not so sure. With Eggers & Co. championed as the cutting-edge, is clever-cleverness redundant nowadays? Is it all too easy to skate playfully across the surface of things, never cutting deeper into the matter of the matter? Former Blur bassist and country cheese-maker Alex James famously griped against the “idealist irrationalism of poststructuralism” – but (and I don’t say this lightly) there must be more to books than Life and the relentless reality of Ackroyd and Amis. Perhaps it’s time for something else then: an exciting, bold New Literature of postmodern emotionalism, high art with heart at its heart…

So, to all Future Writers (the next wave of post-postmodern maximilists, the avant-avant-garde, if you like) here’s some advice:

Remember.

Words come first, sentences second, paragraphs (a close) third.

Build everything from Ground Zero. Never plan a thing. Create fiction out of chaos. Say “no” to narrative. Avoid “themes” and “plots”. To be creative you must be brave and free. Words are your weapons. Take aim. Fire!

Don’t be boring. Don’t study Creative Writing.

Don’t ever look back - and don’t forget to take your cultural baggage with you when you go.

The Fall of Bohemia (an extract)

MEANWHILE,

BACK IN THE VILLAGE...

Sunlight assaulted my head like obtrusive surveillance. All along the banks of Bohemia a distinctive flavour of magic realism. A very Terry Southern landscape of sunshine and shade. Erotic clouds. Modernist underpinnings. Flowery lamps. Blushing wolves. Hidden feelings. Unwanted proposals. A pizza parlour exploding without justification, rocking the shop front parade of black and white parasols… [1]

My face fell.

The rest of my body subsequently followed it down and I came to my senses in a make-shift first aid tent where I found Lord Lucan attending attentively to my wounds. We had met before during the early 1970s, World War III at our backs. Now he boasted a woman whom he currently loved, apparently: “Well, she’s: …semi-Italian; a surprisingly good cook; an early riser; exceptionally solitary; very LA; tiny, frequently analytical with a hard-edged face like a breathless bird; and makes great pasta; has a predilection for self-torture; plays piano - a 1930s Steinway - and once witnessed an obscene act: the attempted buggery of a QC outside the Old Bailey...”

I groaned, tore up my chair, crammed the pieces into both ears, refused to listen.

Outside, the smell of burning spastics drifted across the sky…

Something had ripped through the heart of the city with the rapid intensity of a newfound love. I took off my sunglasses and purveyed the scene. Bewildered psychiatrists were stumbling desperately through burning memories… tired theatre directors dodging hulking pieces of shattered self-esteem… charitable fundraisers scrabbling around frantically in the ruins for personal happiness … retired librarians forging sexually charged relationships with ex-Boyband members… squadrons of malevolent bankers careering stolen Porsches up and down the blazing boulevards… former plastic surgeons slowly wrinkling amidst the smouldering paperwork…

The general devastation in people’s lives was at last evident to me.[2]

I put my sunglasses back on, bit my lip, told no one of the cheap dramatic events I had just witnessed. Sidestepping hairy-shouldered housewives, solitary coach potatoes, blue-stockinged internet masturbators, disturbed 36 stone spendaholics posing as failed Armani models, various discombobulated members of the previously rarefied gentry, I jogged back to my hotel, clearly unnerved…

***

I fiddled with myself while Bohemia burned. Next, I opened a celebrity magazine as if nothing had happened. Night followed day, circumnavigating the afternoon. I decided it was safest not to leave the room and visited many alternative internal directions instead. Leftward journeys to the mini-bar in particular proved a startling success. There was no bathroom as such in my room, only a small void the size of a Philip Larkin look-a-like and I spent much of my time pissing vacuously into the small void the size of a Philip Larkin look-a-like. Ten days of Sir Simon Rattle performing Mozart sonatas on electric violin elapsed, while we (the former people of a once valiant city) survived only on a strict diet of Oysters Rockefeller. I sat tight in my armchair gripped by approximately the same level of anxiety that sane people experience when watching daytime television alone… all the while wondering, what is the exact nature of this catastrophe…?

[1] The Lord Mayor of West Beirut was instantly buried beneath the buttocks of the buxom wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury. “I’m not complaining,” complained the Lord Mayor.
[2] On reflection, this was perhaps the first indication that Bohemia might have fallen.

(The full chilling story of "THE FALL OF BOHEMIA" will be appearing in AMBIT 194 fairly soon.)

Tales of Winnipeg

Obstacles I Must Overcome Prior To My Redemption

Giant radioactive rats
A man calling himself Tony
The death of hope
A 24 hour moral stance
Laxness
Food rationing
Gogol's wife
Generic beauty
Certain unspeakable feelings

***

(Winter came early. No carthasis.)