Tag Archives: tom mccarthy

A Moveable Feast For the 21st Century

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Repeater Books‘ Josh Turner holding an advance copy of We’ll Never Have Paris, which comes out on 21 May.

ARCs of We’ll Never Have Paris hit Chicago (photo: Jonathan Maunder)

And here’s the info from the publisher’s website:

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris”, wrote the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in 1894.

The French capital has always radiated an unmatched cultural, political and intellectual brilliance in the anglophone imagination, maintaining its status as the modern cosmopolitan city par excellence through the twentieth century to today.

We’ll Never Have Paris explores this enduring fascination with this myth of a bohemian and literary Paris (that of the Lost Generation, Joyce, Beckett and Shakespeare and Company) which also happens to be a largely anglophone construct — one which the Eurostar and Brexit only seem to have exacerbated in recent years.

Edited by Andrew Gallix, this collection brings together many of the most talented and adventurous writers from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia and New Zealand to explore this theme through short stories, essays and poetry, in order to build up a captivating portrait of Paris as viewed by English speakers today — A Moveable Feast for the twenty-first century.

We’ll Never Have Paris has contributions from seventy-nine authors, including Tom McCarthy, Will Self, Brian Dillon, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Max Porter, Sophie Mackintosh and Lauren Elkin.

The Momus Questionnaire

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Gallix, Andrew. “The Momus Questionnaire.” Minor Literature[s], 3 November 2017

Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night, edited by Richard Cabutt and Andrew Gallix, is an academic investigation into the legacy of punk, featuring contributions from Penny Rimbaud of Crass, Tom Vague, Mark Fisher and many more. Investigating the philosophical lineage of punk, and the matrix which it provided for its adherents to explore fashion, politics and art, Punk is Dead brings together some of the most astute and insightful critical thinkers on punk in one volume. Andrew Gallix is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 3:AM Magazine, and lectures at the Sorbonne.

The Momus Questionnaire was created by musician Nick Currie, and is designed to identify the aspects of the subject’s personality which give them a positive self-image, or ‘subcultural capital’.

Have you rebelled against someone else’s dreary expectations of your life, and become something more unexpected?

My own, rather than someone else’s (then again, je est un autre). I promptly crush such occasional bouts of rebellion by expecting the unexpected, thus defeating the object.

What in your life can you point to and say, like Frankie, ‘I Did It My Way’?

Or, more fittingly in this instance, like Sid! Pointing is rude, but a recent ill-judged collaboration with a soi-disant friend does spring to mind. This dispiriting experience was an eye-opener worthy of Un Chien andalou, if you see what I mean. After all, vitreous humour is no laughing matter. As Flannery O’Connor observed — through her sizeable spectacles — some people ‘are interested in being a writer, not in writing. They are interested in seeing their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what’. Let them eat deadlines; I prefer mine alive!

What creative achievements are you most proud of?

My son, William.

If there was one event in your life which really shaped you, made you the person you are today, what would it be?

Being separated from my mother as a child was terribly traumatic. The pain was unspeakable, and it left me with a pervasive feeling of unreality. Being sent to France, when I did not speak a word of French, also left me with a lifelong sense of exile. Punk, which came along when I was 11, provided a refuge from all that. It was a home for the homeless. In his recent Asperger’s and Me documentary, Chris Packham talks about how punk allowed him to materialise his difference and flaunt it in the face of the world. I can really relate to that. I think that partly explains why the phenomenon was more important to some people who were involved than others.

If you had to make a rap song boasting about your irresistible charm and sexiness, how would you describe yourself?

As a filthy liar.

Have you ever made material sacrifices because of your integrity?

How long have you got?

Describe a public personality who exemplifies everything you’d like to be yourself, then another public personality who incarnates everything you’d least like to be.

I can’t think of two public figures who would really fit the bill offhand, but I can relate an odd anecdote that occurred, if memory serves, in the early 90s. I was walking in a local park, in South London, when I came upon a guy who was the spitting image of me. We walked past each other, then both stopped in our tracks and turned round at the same time. We faced each other — I myself and he himself — in shocked silence for a few seconds, then turned round and walked on again. I sometimes wonder if my doppelgänger (the word means double walker in German) is living the life I would have led had I remained in England. Has he stolen my life? In Johan Grimonprez‘s film Double Take, written by Tom McCarthy and based on a short story by Borges, we are told that ‘If you meet your double, you should kill him’. Is he still out there somewhere — and does he want to kill me?

If you were an Egyptian pharaoh and had to be buried with a few key objects to take to the next world, what would they be?

My collection of music papers and magazines that I began in 1977. When my mother moved into a smaller house, in 2012, I had to get rid of quite a few of them, but I managed to hold on to all those spanning the glory years of 77-81 and took pictures of all those that I disposed of. I know exactly where I was when I read a specific issue or article and, for some reason, they have always been of considerable importance to me. A tangible link to my past, no doubt. It’s also the interface between writing and punk that makes them so special. I was fascinated by people like Mark Perry, or Patrick Eudeline in France, who navigated from the page to the stage. I wanted to be a fanzine writer more than a musician. When my mother died, earlier this year, I had to bring the papers back to my place. I am surrounded by them now, and the realisation that they will never have the same significance to anyone else once I’m gone is rather disquieting. You keep all these things that mean the world to you, fret over losing them, and then you die.

Do you have a favourite joke, quotation or proverb?

Quotations. ‘”Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,” the Consul liked to say’ (from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano). ‘Awesome is the God who is not’ (from George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books).

Proverb. Never trust a punk with a property portfolio (from experience).

What’s your favourite portrait (it can be a song, a painting, a film, anything)?

My favourite portrait hangs in London’s Courtauld Gallery, sort of. On one occasion, I seemed to be the only visitor in the museum. Each new room I entered was empty, except one. At the far end stood a very elegant lady, probably in her late thirties, wearing an outsize New Look-style hat. She was gazing intently at a small golden frame in which one might expect to discover a little gem by one of the lesser masters. She looked round towards me, before departing, and I was able to see that she was also stunningly beautiful. I rushed towards the picture that had caught her attention for so long only to discover that it was a mirror.

Peter Rabbit is to be Found in Everything

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Interview with Andrew Gallix, “The Brief: 3:AM Magazine,” Silent Frame 1 April 2017:

3:AM Magazine is a literary webzine that comprises reviews, critical essays, prose fiction, poetry, and interviews with prominent writers and philosophers. The interview responses below are given by the site’s Editor-in-Chief, Andrew Gallix. Alongside editing 3:AM, Gallix works as a freelance journalist, translator, and lecturer at the Sorbonne in Paris. He has written for various publications, including the Financial Times, The Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement. With Richard Cabut, he co-edited and contributed to Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night (Zero Books, October 2017).

Which book would you recommend to our readers?
Remainder by Tom McCarthy. The best French novel ever written in English. It has a special place in 3:AM Magazine’s history, as we were the very first to champion it. This is where twenty-first-century literature began.

Which film would you recommend to our readers?
Berberian Sound Studio, directed by Peter Strickland, which revolves around a particularly gruesome giallo, evoked only through sound effects and snatches of overdubbed dialogue and howls — because films should be heard and not seen.

Which architectural work would you recommend to our readers?
The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, where Peter Pan poetically dwells — a new pavilion is built from scratch each year.

Which television episode would you recommend to our readers?

‘Episode 8’ from Series 1 of Life on Mars, directed by John Alexander — the episode where time-travelling protagonist Sam Tyler comes face to face with his young parents, and even catches a glimpse of himself as a child.

Which Mexican artwork would you recommend to our readers?
Under the Volcano, a novel by Malcolm Lowry. What I most admire about this most admirable novel is the line, ‘Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit’.

[NB: Though an English author, Lowry briefly lived in Mexico, where Under the Volcano is also set.]

Which Serbian artwork would you recommend to our readers?
Complete Poems by Danilo Kupus, some of which were inspired by Beatrix Potter — because Peter Rabbit is to be found in everything.

Can art erase history?
No, but history can erase art. If art is a de Kooning drawing, history is Robert Rauschenberg’s rubber.

Can children make art?
Yes, but can adults?

Could art end civilisation?
No, but I suspect all great art aspires to do just that.

Is the alphabet a system of oppression?
Absolutely. Language, as Roland Barthes once remarked, is ‘fascist’. It speaks us; compels us to see things in a certain way.

Why discover?
Because the temptation to peek underneath is too great?

What question would you like to ask other Silent Frame interviewees?
What question would you fail to answer?

More to discover: You can read 3:AM Magazine here, visit Andrew Gallix’s website here, view his contributions to The Guardian here, and follow them on Twitter @3ammagazine and @andrewgallix.

Click on any of the following links to find out more about today’s recommended artists and artworks: Remainder (excerpt), Berberian Sound Studio (trailer), The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (information), Life on Mars (trailer), Under the Volcano (excerpt).

That Few Seconds of Silence on the Tape

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Tom McCarthy, How to Stop Living and Start Worrying by Simon Critchley, 2010

Memory is always a narrative, we have this mechanism in our brains that turns ones and zeros into a narrative thread, which is memory. Interestingly, very often in cases of trauma, that part goes off to strike. So you got the data, but it has not been dealt with. And the catastrophic event keeps coming back. That gap, or absence, that few seconds of silence on the tape, become real; since everything else that is on the tape is fake, that gap must be real. This is a construct, a completely artificial construction. But it’s interesting that the event then stands in the place of authenticity.

The Tip of the Bull’s Horn

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Tom McCarthy, “Writing Machines,” London Review of Books 18 December 2014: 21-22

In ‘Literature Considered as a Bullfight’, Michel Leiris compares the writer to a toreador. Imagine a bullfight without the bull: it would be a set of aesthetic manoeuvres, pretty twirls and pirouettes and so on — but there’d be no danger. The bull, crucially, brings danger to the party, and for Leiris, that’s what the real is: the tip of the bull’s horn. He, too, disappoints by offering candid confession and exposure of personal peccadillos as examples of dalliances with the bull-horn — i.e. Oprah literature. But Leiris’s conceit is rich in ways that even he seems not to realise. Think about it: if a matador is gored, the bullfight, the entire spectacle, suddenly comes to an appalled halt; what the bull’s horn brings to the party is not just danger but also the possibility that the party itself could be catastrophically interrupted. If the bullfight is an analogue for literature, and if the bull’s horn is a vision of the real, then what the real represents is an event, something that would involve the violent rupture of the form and procedure of the work itself. The real, here, is no longer anything like a fact or a secret. It doesn’t depend on any putative correspondence between the writer’s work and the empirically understood world. And it certainly has nothing to do with authenticity.

. . . The matador is gored, the real jumps out and punctures the screen or strip of film, destroying it. This is a real that happens, or forever threatens to happen, not as a result of the artist ‘getting it right’ or being authentic, but rather as a radical and disastrous eruption inside the always and irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real; a real that is psychoanalytic as much as literary: the real that Lacan defines as ‘that which always returns to the same place’ and as ‘that which is unassimilable by any system of representation’. The challenge isn’t to depict this real realistically, or even ‘well’, but to approach it in the full knowledge that, like some roving black hole, it represents (though that’s not the right word anymore) the point at which the writing’s entire project crumples and implodes.

What We Can’t Articulate

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Tom McCarthy, “Kafka and the Crash of the System: An Interview with Tom McCarthy” by Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire 26 February 2015

In a way, all of my books are about this kind of quest for the now, to close down the buffer zone of consciousness and self-awareness and irony or language or whatever. Just to close that down and occupy “the now” — which is an impossible or unrealizable fantasy. I guess that’s what Present Tense Anthropology ™ would be. But U. never achieves it. All he ever achieves is buffering. That space of delay and separation. . . . Nothing is less contemporary than contemporary art or fiction. Than art that has something to say about the now. I think the whole point of the now is that it’s precisely what we can’t articulate.

Zombie Art Form

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Tom McCarthy, “Tom McCarthy by Frederic Tuten,” BOMB 131 (Spring 2015)

FT Every few years or days, we hear the cry that the novel is dead. But then something comes along to prove that it is not only alive, but that it manifests itself in full vitality and beauty. May I ask you what you think of this statement? I believe we share a common feeling that it is not the novel that is dead, but the lack of imagination that invests it.

TM No, I think the novel is and always has been dead, and this is the very precondition of its perpetual regeneration. Don Quixote is a novel about how novels don’t work (the hero tries to enact all these episodes from books, as though to test their propositions, and he, they, flunk each time); about a fundamental, systematic dysfunction written right into the medium’s core. And that’s more or less the first major novel! It’s a peculiarly zombie art form, with all the goriness, the cannibalism, and so forth that that term implies (it’s not as though you need to cut open Ulysses‘s stomach to see what it’s been eating: it’s got everything from Defoe to Sacher-Masoch dribbling down its chin!). The novel stumbles onwards, ineluctably, gorging and disgorging its own death, its own deadness. So the novel’s not just dead — it’s undead. The type that matters at least: the committed, engaged, self-aware novel that wrestles with the contradictions of its own condition. The middlebrow novel, by contrast, the type that doesn’t acknowledge or address this situation, but just ambles along happily believing that a naive, uncritical realism could ever work in the first place, let alone now — that would be undead too, but in a way that somehow doesn’t seem to really matter.

Tom McCarthy, “Tom McCarthy: A Kafka for the Google Age” by Tim Martin, The Telegraph 19 March 2015

“I don’t think we need to abandon the form of the book just because the internet has been invented,” he says. “Most other media formats work: you get an iPhone and it does something, and if it doesn’t do that thing, you take it back for a repair. But the book is deliberately set up not to perform a certain function, to systematically frustrate. It’s always been a dysfunctional medium, and since it never works, it never stops working.” He grins. “So I’m perfectly happy writing books.”

The Impossibility of Writing The Book

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Tom McCarthy, “Tom McCarthy by Frederic Tuten,” BOMB 131 (Spring 2015)

I finished the first draft of C a week before my first daughter was born. Five years and another daughter later, my next — short — novel is coming out. The writing definitely got slowed down. Sleep was a major problem for a couple of years — there just wasn’t any. But it all works its way back into the work. Satin Island is, to some extent, a book about a restless struggle with the impossibility of writing the Book. Social life — well, you go out and meet interesting people, and that galvanizes ideas and gives birth to other projects. It all finds its way back, even, especially, the time-wasting. If you think about it, time-wasting is probably the central theme of most modern literature. Leopold Bloom spends his whole day time-wasting; Marcel Proust, his whole life.

The Book-Beyond-The-Book

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Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015)

…this not-Report you’re reading now, this offslew of the real, unwritten manuscript… (p. 115)

I’d begun to suspect — in fact, I’d become convinced — that this Great Report was unplottable, unframeable, unrealizable: in short, an in whatever cross-bred form, whatever medium or media, unwritable. Not just by me, with my limited (if once celebrated) capabilities, but fundamentally, essentially, inherently unwritable. . . . Even when I reasoned these last, deranged notions back out to the fringes of my mind, I was still left with the immovable fact of the thing’s unwritability. This filled me with anger, and a feeling of stupidity, and sadness, too — grief not for an actual loss but, worse, for a potential or imaginary one: this beautiful, magnificent Report: this book, the Book, the fucking Book, that was to name our era, sum it up; this book that left the format of the book itself behind, this book-beyond-the-book. . . . (pp. 115-116)