Conspiracy of Eunuchs*

ALICE IN TIME & SPACE AND VARIOUS MAJOR CITIES

2011-11-11T06:49:00.000-08:00

Gradually the climate changed around me.

First came floods, then the smell of rotten eggs. An age of perpetual Coldplay descended, overshadowing nearly everything with the ambience of Brian Eno. Epic days ensued during which even hardcore bachelors circumnavigated the planet submerged by global gloom and widespread pandemonium. Ballet was declared illegal, latent homosexuality mutated into a more virile form and hypothyroidism became particularly rife within the theatrical community. Men still walked and talked as they had in times of David Foster Wallace, but the city I once loved was now illegally occupied by a vague gastronomic expansion of more than a thousand nouvelle restaurants. As the world slipped inexorably toward mindless idolatry, I sat down Indian-style and did nothing, unintentionally alienating several friends and numerous acquaintances. Time, meanwhile, was still in motion. Summer turned to winter, quite quickly, before anybody noticed. Soon it was June in January. Next it was bitterly cold and rather autumn. I waited alone inside my four blazing walls like a sad typist whose dreams of a career with promotion prospects had never quite materialized. I slumbered, dear reader, oh how I slumbered. With just a very fake sense of American optimism to keep me going I retired to bed with a bottle of Benzedrine and read Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, Isaac Babel’s Collected Short Stories, Borges’ Labyrinths and Other Inquisitions, Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, Rudy Wurlitzer’s Nog, Isaac B Singer’s Gimpel the Fool, Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant and The Magic Barrel, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, everything I could find by Samuel Beckett, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Max Frisch’s I'm Not Stiller and Man in the Holocene, Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, Tommaso Landolfi’s Gogol's Wife, Thomas Pynchon’s V, John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig and The Blood Oranges, Grace Paley’s Little Disturbances and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Susan Sontag’s I, Etc. and Against Interpretation, Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Updike’s The Coup and Rabbit, Run, The Paris Review interviews, Rust Hills’ How We Live, Joe David Bellamy’s Superfiction, the Puschart Prize Anthologies, Sternburg’s The Writer on Her Work, André Breton’s Manifestos of Surrealism, Robert Motherwell’s Documents of Modern Art, Hugh Kenner’s A Homemade World, Flaubert’s Letters, Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Joy Williams’ The Changeling, Joe David Bellamy’s The New Fiction, Tim O'Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Amos Tutola’s The Palm-Wine Drunkard, Ann Tyler’s Searching for Caleb, Kenneth Koch’s Thank You, Frank O'Hara’s Collected Poems, John Ashbery’s Rivers and Mountains, Wesley Brown’s Tragic Magic, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies and The Pleasure of the Text, Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel, Ann Beattie’s 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’s Advertisements for Myself, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Kobo Abe’s The Box Man, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Kaspar and Other Plays, André Breton’s Nadja, John Barth’s Chimera, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Jayne Anne Phillips’ Black Tickets, Peter Taylor’s Collected Stories, Colette’s The Pure and the Impure, Carver’s Will You Please be Quiet, Please, Leonard Michaels’ I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, Max Apple’s The Oranging of America, Cheever’s Collected Stories, Eudora Welty’s Collected Stories, Flannery O'Connor’s Collected Stories, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Carlos Fuentes’ The Death of Artemio Cruz, Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Wayne C Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, the second edition with the additional afterword and supplementary bibliographical information.

An extract. The full story can be read in AMBIT 206.

JUMP-CUTS, PORTHOLES, METAFICTIONS

2011-11-10T07:48:00.000-08:00

HP Tinker’s work is about as far removed from an Aesopic fable
as one can imagine, yet it still contains the same heady mixture
of the fabulous and the surreal. His collection of what I would
call post-fabulist metafictions, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of
Modernity is a heady intersection of metafictional mischief and
garrulous intellect. After reading his work, the world around us
– a series of interpolations, bifurcations, jump-cuts and portholes
to the symbolic and literary order, if HP Tinker is to be
believed – begins to take on a whole new complexion. Unlike
the pared-down language of Blake Butler, HP Tinker allows
as much as possible to filter into his writing, and his influences
are wide-ranging, from Paul Gauguin via Tina Turner, Jacques
Derrida, Thomas Pynchon, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr
to Morrissey, creating a series of fictions that explain their own
unique purpose as they are written. Even if we just read some
of the titles of his stories recently published in Ambit65, we start
to see a clearer picture of just where HP Tinker’s imagination
lies: ‘Son of Sinbad’, ‘Winter Kills Love Among Other Things’,
‘The Dead Palace’, ‘At The End of the Hellenic Period’, ‘The Fall
of Bohemia’, ‘The Modernist Uprising’ and ‘Alice in Time &
Space and Various Major Cities’. Indeed it’s a grand symphony
of intertextuality, tomfoolery and theoretical intent...

Extract from Lee Rourke's A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction, Hesperus Press. OUT NOW.

SCENES PERTAINING TO THE RECENT APOCALYPSE

2011-03-24T08:45:00.000-07:00

The city outside was now almost entirely fictional: an assortment of rotting space debris, discarded gas masks, dilapidated sculptures, broken down franking machines permeated by a variety of curious bodily odours. Minus my usual senses I ambled brazenly through streets largely untroubled by concerns of conventional narrative. Everywhere, people were complaining. A cluster of blank-faced bank clerks openly questioned capitalism out loud. Puerto Rican prostitutes waved anti-abortion placards. Meanwhile, over on a corner, a group of dissident artists were beating up a grand piano. Unseen and unheard, I headed south vaguely, stumbling through the ruins of the former BBC, sidestepping the horribly mangled bodies of unemployed documentary makers who had been stripped and mutilated – though from the looks on their faces many had enjoyed the verisimilitude of the experience – across a terrain of incredibly deadpan exteriors through a desolate sub-zero landscape utterly devoid of vegetarian options in an unnecessarily complicated journey characterised by frequent hail and/or snow, unconvincing electrical storms, sudden outbreaks of American cinematic mythology, occasional cannibalism, near unimaginable incidents and peculiar twilight encounters with feral foxes, rabid rabbits, drooling dogs and ratty looking rats about the size of your average cocker spaniel. Following a surprisingly barren trail through the dunes of some terminally sick scenery I passed darkened lakes, bleak rocks, blasted trees, wilted flowers then crossed a gigantic man-made junkyard as infinite as any Chinese firework factory. After several minutes of arriving nowhere I wandered down to a dreary canal through a slew of pernicious Ruritanian debris (crooked trees, cracked paving stones, smoking bodies, crumbling walls, deserted country churches, chipped china tea cups, wreathes of roses, rotting council houses, bent fishing rods, torn gypsy smocks, upturned caravans, traditional English rain, etc.) and came to the aftermath of the crisis itself, the interminable landscape JG Ballard warned us about in his numerous novels, short stories and occasional documentary-style TV appearances: vast grey tracts of empty space interspersed with broken fragments of vintage Americana. There was precious little other scenery to mention, but the pavement was the colour of pigeons and in the middle of the landscape sat an abandoned Ford Capri, the Mark III version with the shorter bonnet and hatchback. After a moment a naked man on a motorbike rode past in a rubber Ronald Reagan mask:

"Heh-heggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he cried.

I asked him for directions to the nearest gent’s outfitters.

“Scum!” he screamed at me, his face overcome with contusions.

THE MODERNIST UPRISING

2010-05-06T06:08:00.000-07:00

Today I glimpsed Esther Williams riding a unicycle through Bloomsbury, dressed in the glorious raggle-taggle gypsy apparel of the wayward daughter of the Lord of Bostick. I gazed at her for several seconds half-transfixed, quasi-perplexed, semi-tantalised by her kerchiefed head, tattered petticoat, bare legs, vagabond sandals… between stiff doses of Benzedrine and tales of her savage Apache lovers, we talked of memory and truth and observed the polite etiquette of consuming good salad.

“You eviscerated lately?” she asked, between forkfuls.

“Yeah,” I admitted, knifing sub-zero lettuce. “There have been some small moments of quiet evisceration.”

She drew in her legs and raised my eyebrows with an emphatic emphasis on the inclusiveness of the first-person plural.

“The struggle for life is exhausting!” she cried. “This is a time of war! We are the fighters of the war! This, finally, is our war! Let’s fight it then! Fight it and fight it and fight it some more with all the passion we have and all the resolve we can summon and/or muster… You see, a bit of action is required every now and again, and in a time of war action is so precious, especially to younger people with nothing to do… We must face our destiny shoulder to shoulder, you and I. Embrace the void. There is nothing to fear here anymore. The conflict shall be cathartic. We will force them to be free!”

Then she removed her dress to reveal a gleaming metallic bathing suit beneath.

“I may look like Henry James,” I told her, reaching for an electric can opener. “But I feel more like Robert Frost…”

Of all the 3000 girls of the uprising, she remained my favourite by far. As soon as she left, everything looked immediately bleak again. Like Walt Whitman's New York, George Gissing's London, Philip Larkin's Hull, this city was dying, frozen in the icy grip of the contemporary literary novel...

OUT NOW in the bumper 200th AMBIT also featuring Peter Blake, Jonathan Lethem, Posy Simmonds, Peter Porter, Geoff Nicholson, Sam Riviere and many significant others.

NOSFERATU IN MANHATTAN

2010-03-20T04:11:00.000-07:00

Winter in Manhattan.

Nosferatu is in his kitchen staring pensively into space, wearing a black roll neck sweater and red-lined cloak. ‘It’s Armani,’ he tells me over takeaway coffee and croissant. ‘The jeans and jumper are Emporio and the cloak is the main line. But the belt is by Prada. I’ve worked with Armani before. He designed my skullcap and hemmed my pants the last time I attended the Golden Globes. Normally I’m far more casual at home though. I just wear a t-shirt and Converse trainers in the later style of Ethan Hawke.’

We are sitting cross-legged in darkness on the polished terrazzo of the great vampire’s seventh-floor, one-bedroom apartment listening to a random selection of music from his iPod, (‘the white 160 GB classic,’ he confirms): ‘Blueberry Hill’ – Louis Armstrong, ‘Enfantillages pittoresques’ – Frank Glazer, ‘A Fool Such as I’ – Elvis, ‘Make the World Go Away’ – Jim Reeves, ‘Try to Remember’ – The Kingston Trip, ‘Blue Bayou’ – Roy Orbison. ‘Silent Night’ – Robert Farnon, ‘Any Major Dude will Tell You’ – Steely Dan, ‘True Love’ – Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly, ‘Love is Coming Back’ – Genevieve, ‘Stardust’ – Artie Shaw, ‘The Planets Suite: Mars, the Bringer Of War & Venus, the Bringer Of Peace’ – Gustav Holst...

With a deliciously dramatic twirl of his cloak, Nosferatu rips open the velvet drapes, flooding the entire room with a rich veil of golden light. ‘My musical preferences have always been pretty eclectic,’ he notes adroitly. ‘Soft rock, 60s garage pop, classical, Northern Soul, Klaus Nomi, bluegrass, Motown, Death Metal, even Paolo Nutini if I’m in that kind of a mood.’

Read the full interview with Nosferatu in "Bloody Vampires" published by Glasshouse Books.

THE PLAINS OF ANHEDONIA

2010-03-18T03:24:00.000-07:00

High streets, high rises...

... the city below being a wheel whose hub is the place where you remain immobile, listening to the hollow sounds emanating from the gin palaces at night. While the city moves, ancient records spin on distant gramophones, the saddest music in the world coming and going in gusts, oscillating down in the rumbling soundtrack of a familiar cinematic nightmare, a reminder that the city is a distant rumble at the bottom of an ear, a hum of voices, a buzz of wheels, a cache of secret passions hidden from a world that would otherwise condemn itself to eternal Autumn. The last of this city's dispossessed having long since retreated underground, suddenly leftfield and freewheeling. They grew up among the ruins, of course, awakened in the night by alcoholic admen, fresh-faced fillies, barely-legal beauties in their glass-plated kiosks selling pies and pirate CDs near the ancient river, their former king now a mummified man in a pexiglass coffin. Somewhere in the mysterious hinterland lies another land of discounted department stores where the self-hating, pale-skinned, upper-class ectomorphs are dancing again across the broken-hearted cityscape towards the arcane architecture of death itself and on to the plains of Anhedonia beyond...

FABLES OF THE DECONSTRUCTED

2010-03-12T10:47:00.000-08:00

"Coming soon from Hesperus Press, Lee Rourke’s Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction. In the meantime, here are Lee’s Top 5 Modern Post-Fabulists:

1. Shane Jones is the leading light in post-fabulist fiction. Both his novels Light Boxes and The Failure Six are quite wondrous things, each managing to bathe the reader in a sense of fabulous wonder. They are unlike anything I have read in a very long time. Spike Jones‘ adaptation of Light Boxes is one to look forward to. As is the Penguin edition of this beguiling novel.

2. Joseph Young’s collection of microfictions Easter Rabbit, published by Baltimore’s Publishing Genius Press, is one of those books you find yourself carrying around with you, or take from your shelves in moments of despair or bonhomie. It possesses both an ethereal yet soothing quality. Microfiction has finally found its voice.

3. Blake Butler is so far in front it hurts. Scorch Atlas is a book so imbued with language in all its brilliant nuances it’s no wonder we are unable to keep up. His novella Ever is a post-Beckettian labyrinth where language itself is the narrative’s sole protagonist. When the light is turned on behind our eyes, it’s the language within us that comes rushing forth. It is fiction that is permanently switched on.

4. Jonathan Lethem’s fictions are an anthropomorphic stew, where the surreal fuses within a reality lost within itself. Tigers roam the streets, stoners yearn for the past and holes appear out from the ether, ready to swallow whole both the stuff of fiction and reality. Lethem’s fictions take hold of the simulacra and endlessly run with it, creating a world as beautiful as it is horrifying.

5. HP Tinker’s work is about as far removed from an Aesop fable as one can imagine, yet it contains the same heady mixture of the fabulous and the surreal. His collection The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity is a meeting of meta-fictional mischief and garrulous genius. After reading HP Tinker the world begins to take on an altogether different complexion."

(Thanks to Lee Rourke and 3:AM Magazine.)