Tag Archives: andrew gallix

On Notable American Women

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In 2007, I wrote four entries for The Little Black Book of Books (Cassell Illustrated) edited by Lucy Daniel.

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Here is the full-length entry on Ben Marcus‘s Notable American Women which was abridged (p. 759).

Key Passage: introduction
Title: Notable American Women
Date: 2002
Author: Ben Marcus (1967 – )
Nationality: American
Impact: The book that sealed Ben Marcus’s reputation as one of the most singular voices in contemporary fiction.

Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women (2002) is a work of baffling originality which often reads like a user’s guide to some weird-but-wonderful contraption that does not exist. Ostensibly, it is a dystopian family drama set on a farm in deepest Ohio. Jane Marcus joins a feminist cult that aims to achieve total silence and stillness. As a result, her son (Ben) is subjected to the mother of all child-rearing experiments while her husband (Michael) is confined to a hole in the backyard.

Most of the action, however, takes place at a linguistic level. The figments of the author’s fertile imagination are couched in legalese and other technical terms culled from how-to handbooks or business manuals. Freed from its utilitarian raison d’être, this affectless — mock-unheroic — prose produces a jarring poetic note which sounds “like nothing at all” and conjures up the dream of a book that “would go without saying”.

One could argue that Notable American Women dramatises the tension between what goes “without saying” and what goes unsaid. The female Silentists’ decision to suppress their own voices is primarily a political act, but it is also reminiscent of the aesthetics of silence which — from Rimbaud’s agraphia to Cioran and beyond — has cast a shadow over contemporary literature. The first part of the novel is a “disclaimer” attributed to Michael that aims to “mute all that follows”. In a bid to pre-empt the symbolic killing of the paterfamilias (the author plays upon this Oedipal dimension by lending his own name to the protagonist), Michael discredits his son’s credentials as a writer and a human being. Ben, we are told, is ugly, weak, neurotic, retarded and — worse still — an unreliable narrator whose book he invites us to burn: “[H]ow can a single word from Ben Marcus’s rotten, filthy heart be trusted?” For good measure, he exploits the anxiety-of-influence motif by explaining that a father is “the first author” of his son’s work and that the latter’s voice is the product of “sheer ventriloquism”. The struggle to reassert authority which lies at the heart of these notes from underground could be construed as a deranged revenge — beyond the Barthesian grave — of the author over the scriptor.

On My Idea of Fun

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In 2007, I wrote four entries for The Little Black Book of Books (Cassell Illustrated) edited by Lucy Daniel.

littleblackbook

Here is my original entry for Will Self‘s My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale which I then cut down to size to fit the format of the book (p. 698):

Book: My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale
Date: 1993
Author: Will Self (1961- )
Nationality: British
Impact: The enfant terrible of British letters lives up to the hype.

My Idea of Fun (1993) was greeted with the kind of vein-popping indignation Will Self had probably anticipated when he chose the title. One reviewer famously described it (on the strength of a couple of American Psycho-style scenes) as the “most loathsome” book he had ever read — a verdict the enfant terrible of British letters must have relished. Self’s debut novel was so much more, however, than just another succès de scandale.

Under the tutelage of a gargantuan Svengali called The Fat Controller, Ian Wharton comes to see himself as a “towering superman” whose gratuitous outrages are beyond good and evil. The protagonist’s “divided personality” (marketing executive / serial killer) enables Self to play upon different levels of reality (à la Lewis Carroll) and tap into the rich doppelgänger tradition (which he would revisit almost a decade later in Dorian). Is The Fat Controller simply Ian’s “personified id”? By undermining all ontological certainty, the author gets to grips with the very nature of fiction.

The plot revolves around a Nietzschean struggle between Apollonian and Dionysian forces. Ian is an eidetiker who can “replicate” anything he sees “with near-photoreal accuracy” — a gift which also turns out to be a curse. The Faustian bargain he strikes with the Mephistophelean Fat Controller (“the Dionysian other”) stipulates that penetrating a woman would result in the immediate loss of his penis. Fearing that he may be “suffering from an excess of imagination” — a charge often levelled at Self himself — he attempts to leave behind the world of magic (but also of incest, masturbation and autism) in order to become “generic”. The whole novel is an analeptic account of how this plan fails. The pleasure principle seems about to prevail, in fine, but Ian’s desire to destroy his suburban idyll can also be seen as the impotent rage of the alter deus unable to bridge the gap between fun and the retrospective “idea of fun” which is only a “tired allusion” to the real thing. Replication (read: realism) cannot grasp the essence of things.

Slow-Cooked Books: The Virtues Of Writing Slowly

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This was published in Guardian Books on 3 July 2007:

Slow-Cooked Books: The Virtues of Writing Slowly
In an age of unreflecting haste, there are many good reasons for authors to take their own sweet time.

Responding to an article in these very pages, back in February, I expressed concern at the accelerating pace of publishing and called (half-jokingly) for the creation of a Slow Writing Movement (SWM), modelled on the Slow Food phenomenon. Word processing probably enables people to write faster than ever, and the internet provides the sometimes dubious means of instant publication.

As a result, what often passes for fiction today would have been considered no more than an early draft only a few years ago. In truth, however, the digital age has simply compounded a problem caused by the increasing hegemony of one school of writing (the Ionic) over another (the Platonic).

Platonic writers tend to see their works as imperfect reflections of an unattainable literary ideal. They do not celebrate the birth of a new opus so much as mourn the abortion of all the other versions that could have been. In short (a keyword here), written books are sweet, but those unwritten are sweeter. Authors (and characters) belonging to this lineage have been known to give up writing altogether or contemplate destroying their own works, although they usually settle for spending an awful lot of time producing precious little.

Platonic writers are the antithesis of Grub Street hacks: for them, less is resolutely more. Since publication is, of necessity, an abject compromise with base reality, they agonize over endless revisions (like William H Gass whose novel, The Tunnel, was 30 years in the making) or grace the world with a slim volume of acerbic aphorisms whenever they can be arsed (à la Cioran).

In Plato’s famous dialogue, Socrates argues that the eponymous Ion and his fellow rhapsodes (the slam artists of Ancient Greece) are possessed by the gods whenever they tread the boards. According to this tradition, the artist, in the throes of creation, is under the influence — be it of the Muses, drugs, alcohol, a dream vision or some other variant of divine inspiration. Ionic Man does not speak: he is spoken through (or played upon like Coleridge’s Aeolian harp), hence the cult of “spontaneous prose” in its various guises. The work of art comes as easily as leaves to a tree, appearing fully-formed in a blinding flash of inspiration or in an accretive, free-associative manner as if under dictation. In both cases, logorrhoea beckons.

The Surrealists‘ experiments with automatic writing belong to this school. So do the numerous penis-extension tall tales of binge typing. A driven Kerouac composed On the Road in a three-week, benzedrine-fuelled session after fashioning a scroll manuscript which allowed the all-important free flow of words to go unimpeded. Capote‘s famous quip — “That isn’t writing; it’s typing” — unwittingly captured the histrionic quality of Kerouac’s feat. This is action writing that transforms a sedate, sedentary, haemorrhoid-inducing activity into a heroic performance.

Another prime instance of Ionic braggadocio is the legend according to which Georges Simenon once locked himself in a glass cage to toss off a novel in three days and three nights while spectators gawked. This planned publicity stunt never actually occurred, but it may well have inspired Will Self who, back in 2000, wrote a novella in a London art gallery during a two-week residency: the words were projected live on to a plasma screen behind the desk where he sat. These experiments, and others like National Novel Writing Month, are all interesting enough, but perhaps the time has come to ditch literary hothousing in favour of the Platonics’ “precious little” aesthetics.

Yes, of course, there is a social angle to all this. The Platonics belong to an aristocratic lineage which is at odds with our egalitarian times (how many authors can afford to be so unproductive?), but that should not blind us to what they have to offer. They write as if their lives depended on it. Whereas the Ionics try to merge life and literature into a seamless continuum, the Platonics, spurred on by what Paul Eluard called the “difficult desire to endure”, often sacrifice the present on the altar of posterity. How many works of fiction produced today have any staying power?

Everything comes to those who can wait, so join the Slow Writing Movement — if not now, then when you get round to it.

Rebel With a Literary Cause

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“Rebel With a Literary Cause” was published in the Guardian Books Blog on 2 May 2007:

Rebel With a Literary Cause

From Goethe to Rimbaud, a new book from Jon Savage reminds us of teenagehood’s bookish origins.

Rupert Brooke

Through some felicitous coincidence, a stage adaptation of Absolute Beginners recently premiered in London just as Teenage was hitting the bookshelves. Colin MacInnes‘s late 50s cult masterpiece — often described as Britain’s answer to Catcher in the Rye — takes up the teenploitation motif almost exactly where Jon Savage teasingly leaves off. Mirroring the transitional nature of its subject, Savage’s Teenage chronicles the “creation of youth” from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the second world war. Like Peter Pan, this “prehistory” is frozen “in a state of suspension, of permanent becoming.” In its end — the birth of the modern teenager circa 1944 — is its beginning.

Savage has produced a work of cultural history, not literary criticism, but he clearly shows that the proto-teenager was essentially a literary construct. Chatterton and Goethe provided the live-fast-die young blueprint which — via Rimbaud’s disappearing act and Rupert Brooke‘s shattered beauty — would lead to the James Deans and Kurt Cobains of later years.

Premature death is one way of burning always with the hard, gem-like flame of youth and avoiding the dreaded pipe and slippers. The other is fiction. Apropos of Alain-Fournier (who, incidentally, is not mentioned in Teenage although Raymond Radiguet gets a look-in), Adam Gopnik makes a distinction between the “novel of arrival,” that charts the young protagonist’s journey to maturity, and the “novel of adolescence” where adulthood is rejected in favour of extended adolescence. Le Grand Meaulnes, that supposedly archetypal coming-of-age novel is, in fact, a “refusal-to-age story” — a Bildungsroman that builds nothing.

It is precisely this literature of arrested development that holds the key to the dark secret lurking at the heart of Savage’s Teenage. Shifting skilfully from biography to fiction and back again, he makes much of the obvious parallels between Dorian Gray and Peter Pan: the “Faustian nature” of the “contra naturem” contracts and the death instinct that derives from the cult of eternal youth. We learn, for instance, that Rupert Brooke — a devotee of Wilde who was obsessed with J M Barrie‘s “tragic boy” — believed that the world’s great fault was that “its inhabitants grow old.” Talk about dramatic irony.

“It’s funny,” says Nicky in Noël Coward‘s The Vortex, “how mother’s generation always longed to be old when they were young, and we strain every nerve to keep young.” This transformation was brilliantly analysed by Witold Gombrowicz, the great Polish writer Savage fails to mention and who remains steadfastly ignored in Britain (although Updike, Kundera and Sontag rank among his most fervent admirers).

In the most famous passage of his debut novel, Ferdydurke (1937), Joey Kowalski — an amorphous thirty-year-old — is visited by an eminent old professor who treats him like a kid before marching him off to school where he fits in as naturally as a pupil half his age. If Kowalski embodies the notion (later popularised by Sartre) that identity is in the eye of the beholder, his own sense of immaturity reflects Poland’s cultural inferiority complex which, in turn, comes to symbolise the growing infantilism of society.

Ferdydurke dramatises the emergence of the “new Hedonism” Lord Henry had called for in Dorian Gray as well as the shifting human relations Virginia Woolf observed in the early years of the twentieth century. Gombrowicz was the first to sense how curiously one-sided the age-old battle between old age and young bucks was becoming. Outwardly, he says, we strive for completion, perfection and maturity; inwardly, we crave incompletion, imperfection and immaturity. The natural progression from immaturity to maturity (and death) is paralleled by a corresponding covert regression from maturity to immaturity. Mankind is suspended between divinity and puerility, torn between transcendence and pubescence. Through Kowalski, but also the characters of the schoolgirl and the farmhand, Gombrowicz diagnosed this tantalising tryst with trivia which defines the modern world.

The Fascination of Phantom Bands

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Here’s a slightly longer version of the piece published by the Guardian on 27 December 2007:

The Fascination of Phantom Bands

Remember that time you opened the NME and chanced upon a picture of The Perfect Band? The one that was going to save your life? And then you read that they sounded like the roar on the other side of silence — only better? And then you rushed out the next day to buy their single (a limited pressing on 4’33” Records) but it had already sold out? And then you had to wait several long months for their eagerly-anticipated debut album that turned out to be…well…just ok? Tired of musicians who fail to live up to their hairstyles? Why not dance to the spirit ditties of no tone?

You see, when it comes to music, I take my cue from Keats: heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter, hence my infatuation with L.U.V. or the Flowers of Romance. Even the greatest bands are mere approximations of the impossible dreams that conjured them up in the first place. However brilliant The Clash or The Smiths may have been, they often fell short of their own Platonic Ideal. More recently, The Libertines‘ music never did justice to the Arcadian rhetoric that made them so damn exciting.

Releasing a record is, ipso facto, a compromise whereas an unreleased (preferably unrecorded and strictly imaginary) record remains pure potentiality. In the final analysis, music can never compete with the silence it comes from and returns to — the silence inhabited by phantom bands.

In Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds defines phantom bands as ones that exist “mostly as a figment of bragging and gossip”. The archetype is Liverpool’s The Nova Mob which included Julian Cope, Pete Wylie and Budgie. Cope explains that they had decided to form a purely conceptual group “that didn’t make music at all” but simply sat in cafés discussing imaginary songs — a practice they called “rehearsing”. Of course, they eventually went and spoilt it all by playing a disastrous headline gig at Eric’s following which they did the honourable thing and disbanded. Others, though, never sold out.

Designed to subvert showbiz from the inside, the proto-Pistols Chris Gray Band never existed beyond a few daubings in the vicinity of Victoria Coach Station. What they would have sounded like is anybody’s guess, but in my mind’s ear they are a gloriously shambolic cross between T.Rex and the MC5.

Talking of glammed-up rabble-rousers, no survey of phantom bands would be complete without a mention of London SS — probably the most influential group never to have released a record or played a single gig. Revolving around Mick Jones and Tony James (who are reunited today), their short existence was one long audition that brought together most of the major players on the future London punk scene. Legend has it that a demo tape exists somewhere, but the two founders have vowed, in true phantom band style, never to release it. Don’t you just wish more musicans followed their example? No Music Day would never sound the same again.

****

Here is the version that appeared in Guardian Unlimited:

The Fascination of Phantom Bands

From a ghostly Sex Pistols’ forerunner to Julian Cope’s conceptual collective, some of the greatest groups of all time were the ones that never happened

Julian Cope

Remember that time you opened the NME and chanced upon a picture of The Perfect Band? The one that was going to save your life? And then you read that they sounded like the roar on the other side of silence – only better? And then you rushed out the next day to buy their single (a limited pressing on 4’33” Records) which had already sold out? And then you had to wait several long months for their eagerly-anticipated debut album that turned out to be … well … just OK?

If this sounds familiar — if you’re tired of musicians who fail to live up to their hairstyles – why not dance to the spirit ditties of no tone? In other words, when it comes to music, I take my cue from Keats: heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Hence my infatuation with phantom bands, such as L.U.V. or the Flowers of Romance. The appeal of semi-real or imagined groups is obvious, as even the greatest bands are mere approximations of the dreams that conjured them up in the first place. However brilliant the Clash or the Smiths may have been, they often fell short of their own Platonic Ideal. More recently, the Libertines‘ music never did justice to the Arcadian rhetoric that made them so damn exciting.

In Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds defines phantom bands as ones that exist “mostly as a figment of bragging and gossip”. The archetype is Liverpool’s the Nova Mob, which included Julian Cope, Pete Wylie and Budgie. Cope explained that they had decided to form a purely conceptual group “that didn’t make music at all” but simply sat in cafés discussing imaginary songs – a practice they called “rehearsing”. Of course, they eventually went and spoilt it all by playing a disastrous headline gig at Eric’s, following which they did the honourable thing and disbanded. Others, though, never sold out.

Designed to subvert showbiz from the inside, the proto-Pistols Chris Gray Band never existed beyond a few daubings in the vicinity of Victoria Coach Station. What they would have sounded like is anybody’s guess, but in my mind they are a gloriously shambolic cross between T Rex and the MC5.

Talking of glammed-up rabble-rousers, no survey of phantom bands would be complete without a mention of London SS — probably the most influential group never to have released a record or played a single gig. Revolving around Mick Jones and Tony James (who are reunited today), their short existence was one long audition that brought together most of the major players on the future London punk scene. Legend has it that a demo tape exists somewhere, but the two founders have vowed, in true phantom band style, never to release it. Don’t you just wish more musicans did the same? No Music Day would never sound the same again.

Half-Hearted Confessions of a Gelignite Dolly-Bird

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I was feeling homesick for the event while it was happening
– Douglas Coupland, Generation X

Daintily, a faun-like figure stole across the cluttered room, pirouetting over the bottles and ashtrays that littered the splattered floorboards. She was the first to notice, having been awakened by a muffled squishy sound as of manifold foreskins peeled back in unison.

Fanny sat up and fumbled for her cigarettes, which she dimly recalled leaving beside a dog-eared magazine. She pouted outrageously, mimicking Nina Hagen on the glossy cover, but feeling more like Mme Pompidou gone feral. Not that anyone could see her, of course; nor she anyone. Except when she sparked up and caught a glimpse of the other partygoers who had crashed on the rugs. The expensive Persian rugs with their expansive mindfuck designs: it was all coming back now.

actuel

Guy Debord in hot pursuit of a statuesque demi-mondaine modelling a lampshade hat. That fucking twat, with his sweater knotted around his neck, whose inanities were still audible above the UK Subs. Astrid surrounded by livid creatures of indeterminate gender lapping up the dark glamour of a voluptuous runaway terrorist. The lead singer with a pretentious Parisian band reclining on a Moroccan pouffe drinking champagne from a shiny boot of leather. An amazon (with a blonde beehive and the blank expression of a blow-up doll) fellating an oversize banana in some dark (dank?) corner. Jacques Lacan doing the twist to Martha and The Muffins: rather tentatively at first, then letting rip. Some obscure artist (with an impressive pompadour and an unresolved mother fixation) showing off his collection of individually-numbered potato prints. A boy who looked like a girl almost kissing a girl who looked like a boy before recoiling in sheer horror. Astrid astride an up-and-coming Post-Structuralist who kept neighing and bucking bronco-fashion. Malcolm McLaren describing his new film project as Blake Edwards meets Russ Meyer. A statuesque demi-mondaine modelling a lampshade hat in hot pursuit of Guy Debord…

…At some point, there had been a blackout. Matches were struck, candles were lit, she could remember that distinctly.

Probing eyes, disembodied, unblinking and bloodshot, trained on her, boring through. Bleeding gashes in the cloak of night.

Writhing couples, vertical, horizontal or higgledy-piggledy, their serpentine hips suddenly illuminated like quattrocento manuscripts. A torch flashed into the deepest recess.

Astrid, bent over a Formica table, Jackie O hairdo in disarray, retro ski pants concertinaed around her ankles, emitting unmistakably teutonic grunts while a rolly-polly Pataphysician with a twirly moustache bobbed up and down behind her in slo-mo.

Wall-to-wall hip young gunslingers, no worse looking than Johnny Thunders, every one a Sex Pistol.

Pointillist ponces in pointy shoes atomised under the strobe light: lithe, lank youths, all floppy fringes and flailing arms, moonstomping to the B-52’s like there was no tomorrow, although tomorrow was today.

Today was tomorrow when Fanny’s angelic features were bathed in gold, her halo melting like fondue cheese, and sparkling fruit carved in dewdrops dangled lasciviously from chandeliers like overripe testes.

How could she ever forget what it was like?

He had pounced out of nowhere and pinned her by the arms to the soft furnishings, his breath as fresh as a lungful of menthol, his greedy fingers foraging deep and she had put up a feeble show of resistance like a heroine in some cheap novel and the only time he ever smiled was when he slapped her and it only made her wetter still and she was confused because her mum was a feminist and The Buggles were on the stereo and she closed her eyes as soul surrendered to body and the world melted all around.

“You can only take so much beauty,” he said blowing a plume of smoke at the plaster putti on the ceiling, “before you hit the bottle.” Up close, he looked even more like Paul Simonon. Same fragile strength. Same studied abandon. A panther in a tonic suit. A pugilist cherub after a few rounds.

Later on that night, Fanny pictured him whizzing by at the speed of light on his shiny Lambretta, pork-pie hat cockily at half-cock, skinny tie flailing the air, high on hormones, bent on being. He was just wind in her hair now. A dot in the distance, merging with the background, at one with the cosmos. Pure life force. …Just wind in her hair. …She closed her eyes, but the world did not melt like it had the first time.

How could she ever forget what it was like? What it was like would never be forgotten, but what it was like was not what it was.

Yet her head still pounded to yesterday’s pogobeat. Someone said: Nobody has ever been this young, whereupon Astrid and her fawning retinue repaired to a dodgy sheesha bar near Les Bains Douches. In the metro, they mingled with the vanguard of the rush hour. Overground, daylight was competing with sodium. Several other revellers had woken up to the dinky farting sound of the faun darting around. As their eyes adjusted to the semi-obscurity, it transpired that he had been dipped, stark naked, in silver greasepaint. It also dawned on them that he was stealing everything his slender frame could carry. They all looked on, entranced, as if he were a cross between Vaslav Nijinsky and Arsène Lupin. A smattering of applause accompanied his final exit while tears rolled down Fanny’s eyes. In that instant, she sensed she had lost something she had never found.

Her heart still pounds to the Burundi rhythm of yesteryear.

Surfing the New Literary Wave

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Am mentioned in Sam Jordison’s “Surfing the New Literary Wave”, Guardian Books Blog, 12 February 2007

There may not be many new movements in books, but that’s probably because all the action’s online

Although it’s never entirely enjoyable to be proved wrong, I was still very pleased with the response to a blog I wrote at the end of last year about the lack of literary movements in contemporary literature. My contention might have received a firm rebuff, but following the suggestions in the comments has been most rewarding. They may not signal a new movement exactly, but if our times lack a Generation to rival the Beats, there’s no shortage of energetic underground activity – in cyberspace.

Admittedly there are as many yawning chasms of dull writing as high peaks of excellent prose, but for the past few weeks I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring this new landscape. So, with the zeal of the newly returned traveller, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the highlights.

One of the first stopping points has to be the excellent 3:AM Magazine. 3:AM (with apologies for straining my geographical metaphor yet further) more than delivers on its promise to provide a “dip in edgier waters”. If you scroll down the huge home page, you’ll find a healthy selection of interviews and a large array of short stories. I’d recommend Nathan Wilkinson’s Probability Anxiety for one. Elsewhere, 3:AM editor Andrew Gallix’s own work is well worth reading too.

Closely associated with 3:AM is the Offbeat Generation, a loose confederation of writers, who all – at the very least – show considerable promise. Worth investigation are: HP Tinker, Ben Myers, Paul Ewen, Heidi James, Matthew Coleman, and, especially, Tony O’Neill. The latter seems to be the figurehead for this burgeoning scene. He’s a man who has taken the phrase rock’n’roll poet to its furthest edges, as a former member of the infamous Brian Jonestown Massacre sacked for behaviour too wild even for that notorious band. Having finally cleaned up his act he’s written a memoir due out in April and (already touted as the next underground classic) and some quite brilliant, not to mention shocking, short stories.

The even more sweary cousins of the Offbeat Generation are The Brutalists, following whose trail led me into fascinatingly unexpected territory. Sure a lot of the writing was of the “I’m young! I’m in London! I’m drunk! Look at me!” genre, but there was no denying its energy. Clicking through the links on these various myspace pages was also an amusement in itself. I kept seeing a bare-chested man with a gas mask on his face called “T”, for instance.

I’m reliably informed that this is the author Travis Jeppesen, but all I got from visiting his site was horrific black metal from a band called Krieg and the information that T would like to meet “denizens of the next level” and is interested in combat boots and dwarves. Unsettling as that was, it was Mr Trippy (apparently a pseudonym of the always interesting Stewart Home); who finally convinced me I’d journeyed far enough down that particular link chain, thanks to his offer of “avant-garde porn” and “better living through chemistry”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic resides the daddy of all online magazines, McSweeney’s. It now has as many detractors as loyal readers, but still seems to have the edge on young pretenders, the particularly user-hostile Underground Literary Alliance and the smart n+1 magazine.

The best US site that I visited came thanks to a tip-off from the editor of the (also excellent) Internet Board Poetry Community blog. It’s MiPoesias, a site distinguished by the realisation that the internet offers unparalleled opportunities to let visitorshear as well as read poetry. Their online audio show isn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it does offer some fantastic readings from authors, as well as some fine interviews. (The best I’ve heard so far is a retrospective interview with the grand old man of American poetry, Donald Hall.)

Finally, in case anyone is feeling overwhelmed by all this enthusiasm, here’s a healthy dose of cynicism about the whole myspace phenomenon from the excellent Scarlett Thomas. For this link – and several others – I have to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Brunner, a poster on my movements blog. Thanks! I do consider myself enlightened – and, as you suggested, chastened. If anyone else would like to point out significant sites that I’ve missed, please go ahead.

Literature For the MySpace Generation

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Am mentioned in Sam Jordison’s “Literature For the MySpace Generation,” The Guardian, Wednesday 7 February 2007

Sam Jordison discovers how a new wave of publishers and writers are harnessing the power of MySpace and print on demand to bypass their bricks-and-mortar competitors to find new audiences

Journalists have an appalling track record when it comes to predicting revolution in the publishing industry, particularly when related to new technology. It was only at the turn of the millennium, for instance, that we were confidently forecasting that the rising “e-tide” would wash away the old publishing houses. Electronic books were going to make the traditional ink and paper product seem as ludicrously old-fashioned as Moses’s stone tablets. Meanwhile, the free transfer of data on the internet was going to make publishers’ distribution networks entirely redundant and loosen their grasp on copyright so completely that most of their revenue streams would dry up.

Of course, since then, almost the exact opposite has happened. Numerous mergers and acquisitions have ensured that the big houses have a tighter grip on the market than ever before, while the internet has actually generated new millions and new markets as blogs and popular websites have been bought up and turned into successful product. And has anyone ever seen an e-book?

Bearing all this in mind — and remembering that it takes a special kind of fool to augur change in the book world anyway — it’s with considerable nervousness that I’m now going to make my own assertion. A shake-up may well be coming — and it’s thanks to the opportunities opened up by new technology and the internet.

Leading the charge is Heidi James, the 33-year-old owner and sole employee of Social Disease, a new kind of publishing company. It does most of its marketing and talent scouting on the internet and relies on new print on demand technology to keep its costs sufficiently low to ensure that, even if it can’t compete with the publishing behemoths, it won’t be crushed by them anytime soon either.

James sums up Social Disease’s raison d’être as: “Zadie Smith is not fucking interesting”, and neither are Monica Ali and the dozens of other writers of similar social comedies that emerged in the wake of White Teeth’s huge success. “All this postmodern irony is just so dull,” James explains. “And I realised that I really hate the homogeneity of the publishing world where it’s next to impossible to get genuinely interesting work published. The big publishing houses would have you believe that there isn’t a market for new and exciting work that takes a few risks and makes a demand on its readers, but that’s bollocks. Absolute bollocks.”

To prove this point she set up her own company, taking its name from the Andy Warhol quote — “I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs” — and promising to bring back the element of risk that James claims has all but disappeared from conventional publishers’ lists.

“I don’t believe that people are stupid,” she declares. “I do believe that readers are out there. I know that people are interested and like to be challenged, it’s just that no one is prepared to challenge them at the moment. And if the product’s not there, how can they buy it?”

The plan of how to do this is beguilingly simple: there isn’t one. James is the only person in the company, so there are no shareholders to answer to. Social Disease’s costs are negligible: a small amount for cover designs and the time investment necessary to edit the books; and because it’s print on demand, there are no setup costs associated with each print run, the writers receive a healthy royalty for each book sold and profits can be ploughed back into design and marketing.

James claims there has been a significant takeup from independent booksellers, including such major players as Foyles. Meanwhile, the books are easily obtainable through Amazon and a growing community on the social networking site MySpace is already clamouring for the kind of writing that Social Disease promotes.

The implications of all this are intoxicating. Next time a John Kennedy Toole — whose suicide has been directly attributed to the fact that no one would print his masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces — comes along, their work can not only be published online, but stand a significant chance of finding a home with publishers like Social Disease who would risk nothing by promoting them.

However, if the advantages of this kind of small-scale, DIY publishing are clear, so too are the drawbacks. Print on demand is not yet able to provide the economies of scale of traditional print runs (the unit cost of a print run of one book is the same as for 10,000) and Social Disease is never going to make the kind of profits or pack the same marketing and distribution punch as the big publishing houses.

It’s also worth noting that James’s first novel, Carbon, is to be published by more conventional methods (via Wrecking Ball Press), although she does point out that one of her writers, Paul Ewen, recently declined the overtures of a bigger publisher to sign with Social Disease. More importantly, she says, her aim isn’t to make money and sell a product. It’s to nurture new talent, promote new writing, give writers a platform and at the same time offer the public choices that big publishers can’t or won’t.

Alongside James there now stand a growing number of like-minded readers and writers, exploiting MySpace’s networking and self-promotion opportunities as confidently as their counterparts in the music industry. Away from the prying eyes of the marketing departments and bean counters, the kind of community that publishers would love to create for themselves has been spontaneously growing up.

Most attempts have been doomed to failure because the website just doesn’t offer the same advantages to the printed word as it does to music (after all, it’s far easier to listen to a three-minute song than to read a novel, or even a short story, on the site’s notoriously badly designed blog interface). Nevertheless, these literary MySpace pages, complete with links to samples of their work, attract a large network of online “friends” who share similar tastes and interests.

Chief among these are the Brutalists and the Offbeat Generation, who between them boast hundreds of MySpace contacts (including countercultural figures like punk renaissance man Billy Childish, as well as the usual handful of bizarre tribute pages to dead heroes such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs), and whose message boards contain adverts for a bewildering array of literary events and websites offering samples of all manner of new and obscure writers’ work.

The Offbeat Generation is not, as its spokesman Andrew Gallix (the editor-in-chief of the long-running online literary magazine 3:AM) points out, strictly speaking “a generation” (since its writers range in age from 18-40), rather it is a bunch of people “united” because they “feel alienated by a publishing world dominated by marketing”.

The Brutalists, meanwhile, is a cheerfully sweary conglomerate of writers who also claim to be “united by our disgust with mainstream publishing world that consistently rejects us.” As they explain in their online manifesto, Brutalism “means writing that shows no quarter. Writing that rages and burns across the page — writing that doesn’t worry about causing offence, breaking taboos, cutting to the heart of it. Writing that may shock and shake the reader into submission rather than gently caress them. We’re not anti-intellectual or anti-literary but we are anti-apathy and we exist in a highly agitated state.” Pleasingly, they also note: “When they call Pete Doherty a poet — arguably a near contemporary in terms of age/background/interests/location — we can’t help but laugh.”

Both groups have a growing MySpace presence, are widely read on the net and — crucially — both are using that impetus to publish their own anthologies and launch their writers through independent publishers (including, naturally, Social Disease).

At the moment, much of the material you’ll find if you trawl through the links on their MySpace pages are reminiscent of the kind of mini-zine literature that used to be sold in places like the ICA and Tate Modern shop, demonstrating an overpowering influence of Huysmans and Bukowski and labouring under the belief that getting drunk is some kind of artistic statement.

However, as Heidi James points out, web publishing has the distinct advantage in that it’s free. And, whereas in the old days you had to spend your £5 before discovering that you didn’t like the writing in the mini-zines, with the net the worst that can happen is that you’ll hurt your eyes. “There’s also every chance that you’ll be find something you like, you can put it in your favourites to watch how the writer develops and follow the links he or she provides to more like-minded authors. That’s the beauty of it.”

What’s more, while there is a lot of chaff, there’s definitely also some wheat to be found, particularly around both the Brutalists and Offbeat Generation. Even the best writing could arguably benefit from the nurturing attention of a stern editor, but there’s no denying the abundant energy, passion and pleasingly warped imagination of writers such as Matthew Coleman, Ben Myers, HP Tinker, Tony O’Neill and Andrew Gallix — not to mention Heidi James herself. There’s every hope that soon one of them might produce something rather special — and that, if they continue to expand their influence as rapidly as they have been doing in recent months, mainstream publishers will have to sit up and take serious notice.

Mr Writer

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I am interviewed by Kelly Buckley in the first issue of The Great Small Fishes (September-November 2007):

MR WRITER

Andrew Gallix is The Editor-in-Chief at the critically acclaimed literary magazine, 3:AM. Not only has he been hailed as a man who has championed underground writing for years, but his own delicious oeuvre, published via the internet or small press, is well worth checking out. His style has been described as if ‘he invented Warhol on Monday, punk rock on Tuesday and then took the rest of the week off after declaring the project a sodding mess’ by renowned author Jim Ruland. Among other literary-related side-projects of Andrew’s, the 42-year-old is also part of a music band called The Ungodly Hours, the members of which are all writers. Oh, and if that isn’t bohemian enough for you, Andrew is half-English and half-French and lives in Paris.

Q: How do you think your passion for literature began?
A: Sadness and madness is the short answer. I don’t want to turn this into a sob story, but I had a very unhappy childhood during which make-believe was my only refuge. I used to invent characters I literally lived with: not only did I draw their pictures and write stories about them, but — more worryingly perhaps — I would talk to them all the time in my head. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought for one minute that these characters were real, but their ‘presence’ was such a source of comfort that I came to view interaction with other human beings — especially of my age — as a distraction from my mind games. For instance, I would hold silent conversations with my imaginary friends at the same time as I was talking to real people. The result is that I perceived reality through the idealistic prism of fiction and, like Emma Bovary, found it sorely lacking. Tom McCarthy, the author of Remainder, was telling me about trauma victims’ feeling of unreality and compulsion to re-enact the traumatic experience — the only one that seems real to them. My relationship with books and writing is linked to something very similar. Anyway, those who knew me as a kid always say that I was always either reading or writing. Both activities went hand-in-hand: if I read a book I liked, I started trying to write something similar. Nothing much has changed.

Q: Who have been your main influences throughout life, personally, professionally, creatively etc?
A: I could quote many writers who have meant so much to me over the years, but if I had to single out one defining influence, I’d have to say: punk. The punk movement was my Dada, my Surrealism, my May 1968… Nothing comes close to the adrenaline rush of those days. The fact that I was a kid at the time also meant that I experienced the whole thing at one remove, so it remained untainted by the necessary disappointments of reality. Trying to recapture that excitement is one of my main goals as a writer.

Q: What made you start 3:AM Magazine?
A: The site already existed. It had been launched by an enterprising young American called Kent Wilson. I sent him one of my short stories, he published it, we exchanged ideas on how to transform 3:AM into a proper webzine and he immediately offered me the position of editor-in-chief. Why did I accept his offer? Because webzines were a new phenomenon and everything was yet to be invented. Because I had this clear vision of a magazine which would put cutting-edge fiction into a wider cultural context through literary news (“Buzzwords” was arguably the world’s very first literary blog), or music coverage (many of the authors we liked had been influenced by punk, indie or rave music). The last reason, which I wasn’t fully conscious of at the time, is that 3:AM would provide the perfect excuse not to focus on what was most important to me: my own writing!

Q: What drives you to continue with it and your other projects every day?
A: The main reason why I’ve never been able to pack it in is that we’ve been so damn successful. Lots of other similar webzines have appeared in our wake, but I still think there is something pretty unique about what we’re doing. 3:AM is also a collective endeavor whereas writing is a very solitary exercise. That collective element restores a little sanity in my life.

Q: Did you imagine 3:AM would take off in the way that it has? Did you have a goal in mind at the beginning or has it been a purely organic process?
A: I had a clear vision of a post-punk literary magazine, but I had no idea we would become so influential. The internet was still largely uncharted territory back in 2000. There were already many websites publishing poetry and fiction, but no online literary magazines as such. We pretty much created the template, not only with our blog, but also by embracing the digital age. Most of our contemporaries were secretly hoping to graduate from the Net to traditional paper organs. We didn’t, which is why we soon abandoned the monthly issue format and went ‘live’ with constant updates. Similarly, we were the first truly international webzine with editors located all over the world collaborating on a daily basis although none of us (at the time) had ever met.

Q: You have quite a team working with you now at 3:AM now. How did the team grow?
A: At first, it was just me, then people gradually started getting in touch. Whenever I received really interesting submissions I tried to bring the authors on board. Today, we have a pretty large team but most of the work is still done by two or three people.

Q: Please tell us about the 3:AM book, The Edgier Waters, how it came about, how it was funded, etc?
A: We’d been toying with the idea of an anthology for a while and 3:AM‘s fifth anniversary seemed the perfect opportunity. The main problem is that most anthologies don’t sell, so publishers were very reluctant, which is why I came to the conclusion that we were wasting our time. Andrew Stevens then met James Bridle who worked for a new cutting-edge publisher called Snowbooks and it turned out that they were willing to publish it. There were no funding issues as the book was released by a proper publisher. Had we not found Snowbooks, we may have gone down the self-publishing route.

Q: Please tell us how you make a living — do any of your independent projects make you money?
A: I have been teaching at the Sorbonne University in Paris for quite a while now. The day job funds all my other projects, none of which have ever made any money (apart from journalism). I’d love to be able to write full-time. Then again, having a day job means that I don’t have to make any compromises in my writing. Paradoxically, many ‘alternative’ writers spend their time trying to make money precisely because they have shunned a steady day job, although there is little demand for what they produce.

Q: Can you tell us more about The Ungodly Hours and what exactly your involvement is.
A: I’ve always liked writers in bands, so we decided to create a band composed solely of writers as a kind of art project. Vim Cortez, who edits Paris Bitter Hearts Pit, writes most of the music. Matthew Coleman, with whom I’m editing the forthcoming Offbeat Generation anthology, is the singer. I play bass, drums and manage the band. Film should be a big part of this project (Matthew is also a film director), but we haven’t got round to that yet.

Q: Would you like to get a big publishing deal?
A: I’d love to.

Q: What can we expect next from Andrew Gallix?
A: Well, there’s the Offbeat Generation anthology I’m co-editing, which will be published by Social Disease towards the end of the year. I have a couple of short stories in forthcoming anthologies. I’m also working on a series of interviews for 3:AM, as well as a non-fiction piece. The next big step will be the novel.