Steven Wells – Princess Diana is exhumed, re-animated and killed again on a weekly basis in order to keep the public docile with grief

Steven Wells, Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty (Attack! Books, 1999)

Avant-Pulp & Social Surrealism:
Novel writing isn’t an "art form". It’s typing on drugs.

«He sets out his stall in the opening pages, describing an England where Princess Diana is exhumed, re-animated and killed again on a weekly basis in order to keep the public docile with grief. He then overturns his stall by revealing this to be merely the drug-induced fantasy of Jello Cobain, publisher of a whole string of hyper-pulp novels such as the one we're about to read. From that point on there's a vague semblance of a plot, involving assorted revolutionary acts perpetrated by the members of Karen Skull's Anti-Crap Jihad: but it's established fairly quickly that this is just an excuse for Wells to line up everything and everyone he hates, so that he can kick, blast and sodomise the shit out of it.
If you're familiar with Wells' journalism, then TTTT is the same only more so, without the requirement in journalism to have some sort of coherent point at the end of it. The result is, frankly, a bitch to read. The style is great for a couple of pages, but as you get further in it becomes more and more exhausting. Everything's played at warp speed as lists of crap things, huge clusters of adjectives and endless usages of the formula "x is like y on drugs" all pile up in a heap of hugely over-extended sentences (one of which goes on for six bastard pages without a full stop). However, if you take it in small doses, with a break for fresh air and exercise every hour like you're supposed to with video games, it's a hoot. Even if you don't agree with all the opinions Wells forces down your throat (and he has a curiously big problem with vegetarianism), the sheer manic pace and endless bag of invective tricks make all other literature look like the watery dribblings of a vindaloo-force-fed diarrhoetic's prolapsed arse. On Ex-Lax. OFFICIAL!!!» - www.gleeson0.demon.co.uk/attack.htm

«This book is unreadable. It also boasts that it has a higher death count than the Bible. I wasn’t going to count up both tallies to see if Swells was right, but I can hazard a guess that it is a close call. I can also guesstimate that this novel has more sex in it than the whole of the Swedish porn industry.
Let me ask you, what kind of twisted mind can alliterate whole pages, write descriptions without putting in spaces, make 2000 word stories rhyme, add the odd KABOOM and put in a 24 point AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGH that lasts for 13 pages?
The action is set 10 years after you’ve heard of this book, the setting is England, Heaven, Hell, the odd planet in a galaxy far far away and a satanic transit van.
The plot is splattered across the wall like a comedy custard tart and you get the feeling that the book consists of a series of strung together NME Banging On pieces. Then again Tits Out is the work of a fictional semi-lobotmised, drugged up, artificial orgasm powered rock hack working in a literary sweat shop in slavery to a mean piggy publisher.
It does have its clever bits though. The manuscript of Tits-out appearing in the plot written on the palm top of Bobo the incredibly intelligent Chimpanzee. The Story of Chog, Spog and the chemical bog. And the Yin-Yang ping-pong cosmik-feedback loop cum Mobius strip cum daemonic domino effect created by Helen Keller’s Iron Lung the satanic rock band.
It’s the sort of book your mum wouldn’t touch with a rusty barge pole. The day this gets put on the A-level English Literature List is the day the pundits should start tearing their hair out and asking for changes in the education system. But then that’s what it aims to do.
5 bubbles at times, but it’s the literary equivalent of listening to music masochists Atari Teenage Riot in a cupboard at 3 squillion decibels which leaves us with a: » - Rachelle Ansell

«Aieee! Completely bug-eyed rant-athon which makes your eyeballs bleed! Princess Di resurrected and zombified by a blood-crazed tabloid-reading public! "The insance christian god, 'God'"! Really weird quotes from anti-disco campaigners and Joseph Stalin! An entire chapter set aside to taking the piss out of Oasis! "Jimi Hendrix smiled that famous supercool smile that made him look like a cat that had just drunk a pint of brandy laced cream and was now having its little ginger cock sucked by an expert cock gobbler with a PHD in making cats come slowly."! Completely implausible plot developments involving time travel! Aleister Crowley! Plus the usual array of drug-fulled violence, violence-fuelled drugs, shagging, swearing and cop-hating. That will do nicely.» - www.uncarved.org/archive/reviews230900.html

«Thus, like Austen, Wells has seen the need for a new kind of literature, a new kind of English novel. His target, those spunk-smelly, yob/youff, Viz/Sun scanning, ‘Page 3’ drooling, Eminem/Puff Daddy imitating, Robot War/Match of the Day obsessing, mental Play station game playing young men - form a constituency that has been neglected or wilfully left out of the remit of the English novel. What novels are available for this group?
Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty was published with a cartoon cover illustration depicting a gun toting Lara Croftish sex babe on its vivid green,black and red cover. It carries an endorsement quoted from Trainspotting best seller drug/clubbing Scots author Irvine Welsh in stacked up upper case letters: “Fucking brilliant”.
Its iconclastic, eye catching title and cover is equalled by a cranked-up prose of cartoon violence and sex that would please anyone looking for a paperback thrill. It is using the very devices that make The Sun such a spectacularly successful organ of propaganda for the right but using them to very different, radical, dissenting ends.
If the tabloid journalism of the political right is the context out of which Wells has written as well as being a target for his splenetic satire - both as a novelist as well as in his other activities as a star journalist for the New Musical Express and script writer for numerous tv shows - it is the failure of the so-called quality British novel to address the young male reader and the right-wing agenda that also draws his fire.
Running through the mission statements for Attack! Books and the Wells novel itself is a sustained scorn for the New Parnassian style of top English writer Martin Amiss. Amiss by name and nature, this writer represents all that is amiss in the world of English novel writing for Wells. Martinamiss is the generic name which heads up chapter 14 of the Wells novel. The high art cred of Martinamiss and all would-be Martinamiss writing is called into question because it fails to engage with what in the end seems to be a very class-driven issue.
Whereas for Wells writing a novel today is a relevant and serious critical project, where the aim of any author should be to do to literature what punk did to rock , what Dirty Harry did to cop cinema and Judge Dredd did to Dan Dare - that is, test it out to a state of completion that looks and feels like destruction - the Martinamiss writers have withdrawn from the battle.
They look down with anguish and disgust at the rest of us from elegant, posh, privately-educated, Oxbridge Ivory Towers. In a strange language they produce novels about elegant, posh, privately-educated, Oxbridge sensibilities anguished by the terrible state of the world or their own febrile, tremulous lives. When they do reach out to the rest of us they do it just to show how clever they are - real experience and politics are used as materials upon which they can work their spells and nothing more. It is an utterly trivial, politically conservative and deeply unworthy approach to a genre that in the past has coughed up Defoe, Swift and Jane Austen.
As an example of the High Triviality of this New Parnassianism, we can note how all Martin Amiss seemed to be doing in his book Times Arrow was to utilise a little bit of reading about the Nazi holocaust and some popular science to cook up a minor exercise of astonishingly ugly taste. The hopeless moral failure of the book was that it was about investigating the nature of the Martinamiss style rather than investigating the nature of the nazi crimes. It’s this sort of precious, solipsistic and disengaged writing that Wells hates.
Wells’s hard alliterative rhythm of his bomb-lobbing prose comes from his Bradford Old and Middle English speech but his assault is more than merely a style thing. Or if it is a style thing, it’s because style is not just about style. After all, Amiss himself doesn’t footle around with mere Gielgudian Smooth. He doesn’t touch the elocutionary velvet tone of drained-out lifeless prose; his bag has ever been the invention of low-life demotic, a “Conradian urgency”, to quote Jason Cowley’s recent description, that closes in on the atmospherics and pyrotechnics of laddish banter, laddish cool.
For Wells, it’s this “invention” of a working-class vernacular hipness that stuffs Amiss. There is a mediocrity that comes from the banality of its target because in the end all Martinamiss wants to do is have us admire the mannerisms, the flash surfaces, the mastery and ownership of the game. It avoids the crackling bite, the violence of thinking and engagement, the eroticism of taking a point of prejudice for a long and bracing walk, which is what a novel can do. By not caring a fuck, it cannot fuck, is what Wells might argue.
Martinamiss adopts voices in his novels like a rich posh guy imitating and ridiculing the lower classes he despises, fears and envies. “I don’t want to write a sentence that any guy could have written,” the real Martin Amiss is quoted as having once said. Fair enough you might say. Nothing wrong with ambition. We all want to be winners. But for what end? What purpose? Which readers?
These are the real questions that Wells addresses. His novel has sentences no one else could have written, but they have a focus that goes beyond the delivery. They have a reachy slap that smacks into the complacent cheeks of the Martinamiss writers and enlarges the space for eloquence, discursiveness and the imagination.
In an essay on Saul Bellow from his collection of critical essays The Moronic Inferno Amiss writes of what he calls The High Style: “To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his [Bellows’] work. The High Style attempts to speak for the whole of mankind, to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten.” It has also been Amiss’s self-imposed challenge.
That nostalgic elegiac tick, looking back to times past when things were done better – “… to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten ...” - is the mark of the true conservative. No wonder he has become the name given to all that the dissenting Wells attacks. He sounds like the dull old Tory Wordsworth rather than the youthful enlightened radical one.
For Wells all Amiss and his type have done is produce boring and self-regarding empty prose whilst at the same time making sure they remain aloof of the arguments of the hack, the journalist, the pulp and genre writers who have managed to keep up with the century. Amiss is in that line of writing which Wells sees as emerging out of Bloomsbury’s Virginia Woolf school of novelists where the self absorbed angst of well-off middle-class people are written about at length in forbidding and boring prose to the exclusion of anything else and to the exclusion of anyone else except other middle-class members of this Club Ennui. For Wells this is intolerable and a disaster.
When one of Wells’s characters says that “...the Modern English Novel is so boring, dull, self-referential and wonderfully utterly up its own arse that very few people want to read it and instead turn in their unwashed, stinking, non Oxbridge and non-public school educated millions to the flash, glamorous, fast, moronic and typhonically titillating trashy joys of American ‘genre’ fiction…” we hear Wells’s own position expounded in the wild comic routine of the performance poet he once was.
He continues though by explaining why the Martinamiss school are happy about this exclusive state of affairs, “…a state of affairs to be warmly applauded because the last thing that we literary types want is for our books to be read by an audience of stinking prole scum who aren’t dead from the neck downwards no-nob stiffs sunk in the 19th Century.” The class basis of the literary argument is clarified with rude satirical abruptness.
The Attack! Book project in its essential thrust ventriloquises in maniac tongues the organising idea of John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses. The idea in Carey’s book is that modern literature, as opposed to other types of writing such as pulp and genre fiction, is a strategic response to mass literacy by an intellectual elite wanting to keep out the great unwashed and thus maintain what Bourdieu would call their cultural capital.
Stylistic failure is a moral failure for Wells; no amount of stylistic felicity and cleverness can excuse the Martinamiss writers from taking an essentially exclusive and mandarin class perspective on language and writing. Those journalists, hacks, genre and pulp writers mentioned above are heroes because they have the qualities of real engagement, the ‘to the moment’ feel of actual argument with and about the world that Martinamiss‘s approach refuses.
So Wells, a journalist himself, gives it large to Amiss because of the self regard of the writing coupled, crucially, with its lack of moral resonance. It is disengaged stuff, working Arnoldian disinterestedness rather than Hazlitt’s. This is a rooted aristocratic pose for the New Parnassians. Where Arnold believed that the critic should not take sides but look on neutrally like an old-style Civil Servant, Hazlitt in using the term “disinterested” was saying that the critic should respect her opponent but of course have a perspective.
The Attack! Book project is therefore an attempt to throw into relief the massive failings of the Martinamiss school of literature as well as redirect the tabloid journalism of he Sun. His own book, Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty is its massy, foundational core, a hot stew of messages, possibilities, gags, rants and splenetic knock-about that is the opposite of the Martinamiss cool and controlling audit of the language as High Art literature routine. The five other books out on the Attack! Book imprint follow up and develop the agenda with iconoclastic fervour reflecting the dissenting comic genius of their rancorous general editor.
Against Martinamiss’s New Parnassus Wells launches a tanked-up anti-literature that belches, farts and roars itself into a demented lunacy of extremist, secularist hywl, a word that describes the kind of impassioned almost supra-linguistic delivery usually found in raving mighty Welsh Evangelical preachers. Again and again the dissenting author creates a moment where language breaks down into nothing more (nothing less) than a roar of possessing anger, a monumental crash of barmy noise that signifies, like Lucky’s speech in Godot signifies, the monstrousness of traditional power , its language and conditions.
There is no neutral ground. And it is humour, the cocky stand-up routine humour of the club/rock live act that surfaces, the vernacular pulse of lived in, throat sore speech language rather than the miserabilist prose of the tight-arsed attic ghosts of the Martinamiss school boys and girls. When Wells connects his writing to Joyce – “… a book that makes James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake look like Janet and John dumbed down for dyslexics. On Crack. OFFICIAL!” - he is seriously reminding us of that republican, dissenting and cosmopolitan tradition that will not equivocate or dissemble even as he does this to get a laugh.
So there you have it; what he’s up to is writing brilliant prose just like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice!!! But whereas Austen, as noted earlier, did not announce her dissenting project -- being as she was the ever decorous, divinely so, Jane!- Wells has no such qualms. He’s Jane Austen popping out of the bodice of that decorum. Jane Austen with her tits out! On Crack. OFFICIAL!» - Richard Marshall

«Why is it that the people with the most profound stuff to say are also those who are the least capable of being able to express that profundity?
I am talking about us. The mutoids. The abyss starers. The already organ-bagged cancer boys. While we are in some mere state of deterioration, our ability to comment is still possible. It might even be occasionally interesting. Certainly every writer who has ever contracted cancer has thought so. We can make cancer jokes. Existentialist jokes, even. The world is ours!
But then as one nudges closer to the edge, in the eye of the tiger storm (Tiger Storm, quite possibly the worst line and the best band name ever written), one is more inclined to shit oneself (literally and figuratively) than to throw shit at the system. Which is wrong and weak and lazy but kind of understandable. As is my wife’s fury this morning upon her discovery that a pair of pre-adolescent oiks destroyed a 95 percent-completed jigsaw puzzle (of cats) in the family waiting room. Even as her own dear husband was having his savagely jigsawed abdomen dressed in a hospital room but two doors away.
But life isn’t that banal or that stupid. Life isn’t about grit and grime and squalor. Life is getting angry at destroyed cat jigsaws. Life is the amazement at seeing the Vanity Fair title erupt as a scarlet mohawk-cum-quiff across a dainty Johnny Depp’s forehead, and the drooling anticipation of watching a Brian McManus-recommended terror-comedy on my computer later tonight. And of course the sight of tireless, tie-less and tire-burning liberal rioters taking to the streets of Tehran.
I speak as someone whose greatest craving at this exact moment is not world peace and universal democracy or a rational and global redistribution of wealth, but a can of ice cold ginger ale.
And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity -- the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans -- the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks. (Check out the AMA logos, those smiling beasts are not snakes.)
You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.
Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.» - Steven Wells [his last column]

«This morning I received several emails about the death from cancer of Steven Wells. Swells was best known as a music hack and was the dominant figure at the New Musical Express for much of the eighties and nineties. While he was at the NME, Swells was always prepared to go out on a limb with an opinion to support off-beat bands and writers. It was Swells who penned the infamous quote about Will Self and me that both AK and Do-Not Press used as a blurb on my books:
“Stewart Home’s sperm’n'blood-sodden scribblings make Will Self’s writings read like the self-indulgent dribblings of a sad Oxford junkie trying to sound hard.”
This quote really rattled and angered Self. Swells knew exactly what he was doing; he wanted to help me find a larger audience and this soundbite created a big stir. And I wasn’t the only person Swells pushed in this way, he did it for a legion of people. He was very loyal and if he though what you did was worthwhile, extremely vocal in his attempts to create space for you in an overcrowded cultural arena. Swells wanted to make things happen, he wasn’t interested in passively reporting cultural and other news.
Swells was a laugh to be around and you could always count on him for a good argument too! His essentially Trotskyist stance rubbed up against my left-communist positions with at times explosive results. Nonetheless, the biggest blow-up we ever had occurred when I said I didn’t like the film Apocalypse Now, and Swells insisted it was impossible for me not to like Apocalypse Now. What followed was a good humoured and thoroughly enjoyable ding-dong; we were sitting in a cafe on Beak Street and some of the other customers seemed worried our disagreement would end in fisticuffs, they didn’t understand we were friends with passionate but opposed opinions. Such differences never stopped us working together. Swells brought me in as an extra on some of his GobTV/Pig Productions pop videos, and also put out ‘my’ novel Whips & Furs: My life as a bon-vivant, gambler and love rat ‘by’ Jesus H. Christ on his short lived Attack! Books (co-run with Tommy Udo).
Although Swells initially made his name as a poet, his real strength was as a stream-of-consciousness prose writer. His book Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty is a sustained assault on the idea of what the novel should be, and it is stuffed with his crazy word play – brilliant turns of phrase like ‘a pol potpurri’. After his move from London to the USA, Swells was writing for the Philadelphia Weekly, and you can find his final piece of writing for them and links to other pieces by him HERE.
Steven Wells born Swindon (England) 1960, spent much of his childhood in Bradford (England) and moved to London (England) as an adult, died from cancer Philadelphia (USA) 23 June 2009.» - Stewart Home


“3AM: When did you launch Attack! Books and, more importantly, why?
I was hacking away at a Stuart Home influenced psycho-novel titled Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty, about what would happen if everybody who has ever taken ecstasy suddenly went totally INfuckingSANE and started hacking up their nearest and dearest with garden tools and safety scissors.
Tommy Udo then invited me along to his "extreme spoken word" club The Shining Path where these mad scribblings went down a storm. It was the start of a brutally beautiful sado-masochistic sexual relationship. Tommy had some cash left over from his disastrously brief career as a Channel 4 TV presenter and wanted to start a publishing company.
Soon we had a name—Attack! Books. And a shitload of titles: Pagan Bastards!, Fat Goth Chick, Legalise Cannibalism, Apes of Wrath, Vatican Bloodbath, Prince Bastard (followed by King Bastard and Intergalactic Emperor Bastard) etc.
And a manifesto:
"ATTACK! WHERE THE NOVEL HAS A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN!
This generation needs a NEW literature—writing that apes, matches, parodies and supersedes the flickeringly fast 900 MPH ATTACK! ATTACK ATTACK! velocity of early 21st century popular culture at its most mEnTaL!
HARD-CORE ANARCHO-COMMIE SEX PULP
We will publish writers who think they’re rock stars, rock stars who think they’re writers and we will make supernovas of the stuttering, wild-eyed, slack-jawed drooling idiot-geek geniuses who lurk in the fanzine/internet shadows.
HORROR! SEX! WAR! DRUGS! VIOLENCE!
"Subtlety" is found in the dictionary between "shit" and "syphilis". The self-perpetuating ponce-mafia oligarchy of effete bourgeois wankers who run the literary scene‚ must be swept aside by a tidal wave of screaming urchin tits-out teenage terror totty and DESTROYED! ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! Hail the Social Surrealist revolution! Death to Brit Lit! Meet the New Barbarians!"
And a concept:
"Attack is punk rock—but for books! We are the Tamla Motown of publishing! In your face, down your trousers and up your arse like a shit-eating rabbit on speed! Written by psychopaths! For psychopaths! Gratuitously violent, stomach churning two-fisted avant-pulp rock'n'roll fuck-fiction! Attack! is the literary equivalent of being spit-roasted by two horse-cocked muscle studs! (On crack, obviously).
Our novels will be hacked out by ranks of glassy eyed author-serfs, the skeletal fingers of these mindless minions tip-tapping away at 200 words per minute for 24 hours of every day of every week of every year churning out an endless stream of pulp fiction classics with titles like HUGETITTED SPUNKSUCKING NAZISNAKE SLUTNUNS IN CYBERSPACE!, FISTFUCK TO FREEDOM! , JOYRIDING INTELLECTUAL CRACKBABY BLOODFIENDS!, GASHCRAZED MEDICAL STUDENT CANNIBAL PARTY PAEDOPHILE CRACK-MASSACRE!, SUBMISSIVE BOOTBOY SMACK ADDICT SEXTOY!, I KILL FOR LAGER!, SKINHEAD TAKES IT UP THE SHITTER!, MENTAL SELF-MUTILATION FRENZIED KUNG FU GLUESNIFFER SPUNK RIOT!, I SHAT THE HOT-CUM OF A BILLION NEW LABOUR SPIN-DOCTOR SCUM IN A CRACK-WRAP LITTERED AND BADLY-LIT BACKSTREET BOMBAY BUMBOY BROTHEL FOR BASTARD YONKS!, MY LIFE AS THE DRUG-DERANGED AND SAVAGELY UNDERPAID MAD MONKEY WAGE SLAVE OF CUTTING EDGE ENFANT TERRIBLE BAD BOY NOVELIST MARTIN AMIS FOR PEANUTS AND LOVED EVERY FUCKING MINUTE OF EVERY CUNTING DAY! And SHITSURFINGFISHNETS TOCKINGEDI NTELLIGENT JUNGLECRAZEDMUTANTFERRET SEXSLAVECANNIBALSPUNKADD ICTS INGLEMOTHERDRUGALIEN CRACKSMUGGLINGCOPKILLERAND ROIDRIOT GRRLWHORENUNS FROMREABCLINICCOLDTURKEY HELLVERSUSTHECOCKSU CKERMER CENARYSKULLFUCKEDPSYCHODRUG KOPSPACEFASCI STRANGERSFA NSFROMSPEED GABBAKEBAB PUKESMEAREDMINICAB HELLPLANET 9ONSMACK! 2—THE SCREENPLAY which will sell in their millions.
The stinking ranks of pulpspewing semi-android hacks’ hideously swollen heads will all sport heavy steel headphones which blast cutting-edge extreme pop sounds straight into their shaking skulls whilst banks of video machines spew looptapes packed with horrific images of slaughter, torture, kid’s cartoons and triple-X rated hardcore-europorn straight into each slackjawed slave’s visual cortex through a complicated spaghetti of multi-coloured wiring. Using these revolutionary production methods we aim to flood the English reading world with thousands of utterly psychotic sure-fire smash-hit but shudderingly subliterate teensploitation novel mindlessly churned out in a few hours by the utterly drugboggled brain of an anonymous kidnapped rock hack whose finer sensibilities have been mercilessly crushed by a relentless and totally desensitising non-stop barrage of gratuitously-violent, overtly sexual and utterly tasteless cultural effluent and then smashed into atoms by the computer generated super-orgasms that thrash their emaciated body as a reward each time they concoct a savage sentence, sordid sex scene or sickeningly violent pig-getting-his-ear-sliced-off-in-Res Dogs style scenario that leaps clean over the boundaries of civilised good taste and falls screaming into the abyss of barbarity, perversion and dangerously demented decadence beyond."
And a press release:
"Attack! Books are gaudily painted ruffian whores blatantly flourishing the rouged lips of their distended genitalia and giving you the come on. You are aroused to passion. Feverishly fingering the cheap pages, you speed-read the sordid contents, your mind reeling under the savage mental carpet bombing of the fuck-frenzied prose. At last, satiated and weeping, you collapse in a heaving heap. Then you sit down at your computer and start to write. The world must hear of the glory, the frenzy, the dementia and—yes—the love that IS Attack! Books. The pulsating glory that you once thought could only be found in the screaming amplifiers of beautiful and tragically thin young proletarian sex-rock gods thrashing machine-gun fuck rock out of cock-level held and crude-slogan plastered electric guitars has now found its literary equivalent!
The doors of perception are ripped off their rusting hinges and smashed into worm-ridden matchwood by a barbarian horde of Viking berzerker skum who stomp into the darkest corners of the human soul, howling like crazed wolves, roaring like priapic mastodons, screaming like blood crazed bull-chimps and shitting in your spanking new trainers like naughty puppies. Did someone say punk rock? Fuck punk rock! Did someone say Acid House? Fuck Acid House! All cultural references are redundant. Attack! is like The Battle of Stalingrad experienced by a five year old psychopath on Jacob’s Ladder style CIA experimental combat acid! It’s like being butt-fucked to a bloody pulp by a detective chief constable with a hammer head shark for a cock. It’s like wading knee deep through a sea of used condoms casually tossed aside by the Ghaddafi trained lesbian terror squads whose mission it is to inject infected semen into the arteries of the common mind. But basically, chum, it’s about love. Let’s not forget that, OK?"
But unfortunately Tommy had no money left after having to pay for a series of operations following a disastrous move to America where he tried (and failed spectacularly in front of 7.8 million TV viewers) to make it big on the WWF pro-wrestling circuit.
So we hawked it around: MAJOR PUBLISHER: So who's the target audience for Attack!? US: Um, working class and lower middle class males. Probably. MAJOR PUBLISHER: Do they go into bookshops? US: AAAAAAAAAARGH!
So eventually we fell in with Creation books (nothing to do with Creation records) and put six books out. Tits-Out Teenage Terror Totty by Steven Wells, Raiders Of The Low Forehead by Stanley Manly, Satan! Satan! Satan! by Tony White, Get Your Cock Out by Mark Manning (AKA Zodiac Mindwarp), Vatican Bloodbath by Tommy Udo and Whips & Furs—My Life As A Bon-Vivant, Gambler And Love Rat by Jesus H. Christ (edited by Stuart Home). But that relationship is coming to an end and we are currently looking to go solo and are in negotiation with some RICH PEOPLE to make this happen because we got TONS OF SHIT-HOT MANUSCRIPTS screaming to be born.
…Good luck to anybody out to sir up the stagnant, class-ridden cesspit of "serious literature" but the New Puritans seem to be reformists and, as it says on the tattoo on Tommy Udo's horse-sized cock: ONE SOLUTION! REVOLUTION!
3AM: You want a "NEW literature" for "this generation". How would you define this new type of literature?
That slogan: Punk rock for books! It's a tad crude (hem hem). Especially when we're talking about a medium which, in musical terms, hasn't even had its bebop yet. We want literature that is the literary equivalent of No Limits by Two Unlimited, Gabba, Hard Core, Grindcore, The Sex Pistols, Digital Hard Core, Daphne & Celeste, Little Richard, Apocalypse Now, The Beatles Live At The Hollywood Bowl, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Akira, amphetamine sulphate, The League Of Gentlemen, fucking on poppers, the screams of 80,000 assembled screaming teenypop fans, John Zorn's Torture Garden, Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner, Brute!, the beach scene from Saving Private Ryan. ALL AT THE SAME TIME! We want literature that reeks of the sex, speed and violence of 21st century culture at it's most mental! Writing that sucker-punches you in the heart, head, guts and gonads at the same time!
We're offended by the very concept of "serious" literature. It's so one-dimensional! We're sickened by the constant elevation of prematurely middle-aged 19th century style wannabes as cutting edge enfant terribles. A university English Lit course that fails to teach comics is as redundant as a media studies course that fails to mention television. Fucking hell! Robert Louis Stevenson's wife burnt the first draft of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde because she thought it was shit. So the nutter hammered it all out again from scratch in 72 hours while off his fucking skull on medicinal cocaine. THAT'S Attack! It's about dumbing UP! More is More! Screaming tabloid headlines, Stalinist aesthetics, situationist rhetoric, twisted morality, an ultra-modernist social-surrealist agenda, chips shops on both shoulders—who needs "character development" and "plot" when you've got a manifesto, a hit-list and a billion drugfucked chimps hammering away 24/7 on stained and battered Macs?"I wanna start with an earthquake and build to a climax!"—Sam Goldwyn
Avant pulp is Social Surrealism.
Most novels take one or two good ideas and string them out over 200 pages. Fuck that. We want TEN great ideas. PER PAGE. Grab the reader by the throat and pummel him or her to a bloody pulp. And then fuck the corpse. Live on prime time terrestrial TV.
The swearing, violence, drug abuse and sex in Attack! Books is extreme, savage, frequent and utterly gratuitous. But we’re NOT into middle-class ooh-mummy-look-at-me "mondo" decadence. Pornography is dull. Avant pulp is mindblowing. And Attack! avant pulp is "moral"—from an extreme nutter anarcho-commie perspective. Ie all Tories, smothermummies, wankers, fascists and bastards DIE! Spectacularly.
It isn't "literature." Oh GOD! Fuck NO! The "serious", "psychological" novel is the most tedious genre going. It sucks. It’s boring. Who wants to read about the inside of some knuckle-suckingly middle-class fucker’s head when they could be reading about vampires, aliens, mutant alligators, drug crazed zombies, Margaret Thatcher sex golems, deranged ex SAS assassins, killer-priests, frankensteins, satanic rockers, football hooligans etc etc etc? You know—exciting, fun stuff. Mad POP stuff. Most of the manuscripts we get sent try to be "literature". They fail miserably. Don’t give us "an idea!" Give us a universe! Preferably one per chapter. Be honest, face facts. You know three chords. So hammer out some hilarious, ranting, frenetic, breathless punk rock. Leave the symphony till later. Get loose, Let rip. You’ve got the rest of your life to be boring.
SO - TO SUM THE FUCK UP - WHAT IS ATTACK!?* It’s Motown for Pulp.* It’s literature that reflects the insane revved-to-fuck flick’n’fling pace of the century that spawns it.* It’s extreme digital hard core punk rock’n’roll speed gabba for books. * It’s about whacking 50,000 volts through the corpse of an artform that is so moribund and up its own middle class arse that it considers sad bastard public school Oxbridge junkie Will Self to be a punk rock enfant terrible. Is he fuck! He writes like a sanatogen-sodden geriatric! And you can stick Martin Amis up your arse as well. * It’s in your face, down your trousers and up your arse like a shit-eating rabbit on speed. * It’s a REVOLUTION!
To save the English novel we must first destroy it! Attack! is an unequal-opportunities employer, we’re out to finally and irrevocably destroy the Oxbridge upper-middle class death grip on "literature". Our bible is John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia (Faber, 1992). We have swallowed wholesale the knowledge that the reason novels got so tedious, self-referential and dull in the early 20th Century was as a reaction against mass-literacy. They didn’t want the oiks to read books. God no! Well fuck you, you snobs! The oiks are biting back.
We’ve gone back to Swift, Defoe and Austin and brought them screaming forward into the 21st century. We’re sick of desiccated and prematurely middle-aged bores telling us that comics and action movies should be more like novels (character development, grandiose statements about the human condition witter, drone, bore blah blah blah). Fuck that! Novels should be more like comics and action movies! Visceral, gaudy, exciting, vulgar, cheap, nasty, banal, cheesy, tasteless, head-exploding and gut-wrenching technicolor roller-coaster rides through the nerve-shredding extremities of human behaviour. Cheap thrills! Books that spew 10 ideas a page at you, that leave you breathless, sweating, frightened, excited, inspired and with urine-drenched trousers. Novel writing isn’t an "art form". It’s typing on drugs. “ – 3:am Magazine Interview

Can Xue – Quicksand Mirrorbox: What happens if you use your own spear against your own shield?

Can Xue, Five Spice Street, Trans. By Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Yale Press, 2009)

"No one and nothing may be trusted in Five Spice Street, the first of Can Xue’s full-length novels to be translated into English. In the neighborhood where the story is set—a three-mile-long street actually—nothing is certain. There is no one truth. Doubt overshadows everything. In this story, a dissonant chorus of voices argues, interrupts, disrupts, contradicts, and gossips, forcing everything into flux. Static, distortion, and noise rule here. As “the writer” suggests:
The crowds on Five Spice Street always had to think everything through every which way: they never reached a verdict lightly, and would never give up on a riddle just because they were temporarily stumped: they had to give it hard thought; if they couldn’t solve it, they would keep their eyes open. Sometimes, a small matter could trigger their thoughts for a long time, and another small matter could suddenly enlighten them.
Parsing out who said what and why within this cacophonous polyphony is challenging, as Xue’s story is filled with parenthetical intrusions and asides and even the simplest statements are placed in quotes. Rumor and gossip amplified to the nth degree: this is what awaits readers in Five Spice Street. Surrendering to the novel’s style, however, is just the beginning. Beyond lie the fabulist and hyper-erotic elements in the story, the many clues found deep within the narrative, and the novel’s “innumerable nested boxes,” as one character puts it. But once the challenge has been met, you just might burst out into hysterics at the wonderful insanity of it all. You have been forewarned.
Five Spice Street is divided into two sections. The first, “Preliminaries,” is an overview of the major characters, among them Madam X, the Widow, Mr. Q, the lame woman, and the young coal worker. “Preliminaries” depicts their intertwining stories, conflicts, and dilemmas, all of which are obscured by the numerous conflicting accounts. The main character, Madam X, brings to mind John Singer Sargent’s painting of the same name, a portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a Parisian socialite, who, after rejecting numerous proposals to be painted, finally agreed to Sargent’s request after realizing it would serve as an opportunity to advance in Parisian society.
The painting, like Madam X, is a study in contrasts, Gautreau’s ivory white skin and her black satin dress, the light from her skin emanating against the russet background, her voluptuous figure and her angular face, the painting’s play of revelation and concealment, control and abandon. The Madam X in Five Spice Street is also a mysterious bundle of contradictions, and surely Xue, like Sargent, employed the name as a way of expressing both anonymity and mystery, as well as raising her own character to the stature of myth, symbol, and archetype. It certainly helps that her namesake was rumored to have been guilty of numerous infidelities. And I wonder if Madam X is also a pseudonym for Can Xue, already a pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, which means “dirty snow.”
There are at least twenty-eight views on Madam X’s age—at one end of the spectrum she’s as young as twenty-two and about fifty at the other—and at least five opinions on Mr. Q’s looks. But there is much more to Madam X than what meets the eye—for instance, her eye. The first time “Mr. Q looked at X’s whole face, he saw only one immense continuously flickering saffron-colored eyeball.” And through the course of their affair the “light waves in her senseless eyes,” whose “intensity can illuminate everything in the universe,” was all he could see. Other fantastic rumors abound about X: She’s suffering from a disease. She has supernatural powers to manipulate people and events at whim. She can force people to their grave. She makes dynamite with the intention of destroying a public toilet. She raises scorpions. There are accounts of her using countless mirrors as a kind of magical portal toward achieving cosmic transcendence. But of course doubts are raised about all of these reports. As for Mr. Q’s looks, he is either ugly, or not, that is, if one subscribes to the Chinese proverb “There’s no such thing as an ugly man.” The consensus, if one may call it that, is that Q is “a large man, either ugly or handsome, or with nothing remarkable about him, with a broad square face, and an odd expression, a little like a catfish.”
The rivalry between Madam X and the Widow is one of the novel’s primary plot devices as is the “sex research” they both practice. Madam X’s “dispel boredom movement” (her mysterious system where “spare-time recreation,” one of the many comical euphemisms for sex in this book, is used as a transcendental act) leads to a series of bizarre escapades. One afternoon when “the sky was that kind of sentimental color, without a cloud to be seen, and the edge of the sun is filled with sharp triangles,” Madam X, “lying alone on the beach at the riverside... felt the reality of carnal intimacy.” Aroused, she undressed and then “flew in the burning heat, running around wantonly, wildly.” A few women in the town were “inspired” to mirror her. This leads to the entire town “hugging and kissing everyone they saw, touching everyone all over their bodies. One or two even ‘got on with it’ on the spot. It was a noisy, rollicking scene. Everyone was sweating profusely and breathing hot and heavy like oxen.”
Madam X, while largely despised and feared, is often approached for advice, for guidance. Especially in the chapter “Madam X Talks Abstractly of Her Experiences with Men,” we find her in philosophical mode. After laying out her thoughts about the importance of having a mind free of conventional considerations, she says:
Language is also a way of hinting at feelings, because try as hard as you can to communicate your ardor and your dreams to the other, you can’t just show your feelings through action—that isn’t enough. And so you use language. At this time language doesn’t have just the everyday meanings—perhaps it is some simple syllables, some little sounds that have sprouted wings. I can elicit that kind of special language.
The novel’s second section, “The Way Things Are Done,” casts doubt on everything that transpired in section one. The disorientation is extreme, as the first section was itself a shifting kaleidoscope of stories, images, and memories, so disorientating that it’s almost as if a giant reset button had been pressed. The lame woman, in her “official account,” perhaps best reveals the character of Five Spice Street’s second half: “I must tell you again: your imaginary experiences don’t exist. They don’t even have a foreword. All the beginnings you’ve imagined are subjectively trumped up: they’ve resulted from sloppy romantic sentiments spilling over. The real beginning is lost, never to return.”
Can Five Spice Street, with its multiplicity of voices, reportage, affidavits, shifting points of view, be termed a “novel”? Conceiving To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf knew that she wanted to draw directly from her own memories and that the work would not correspond to conventional narrative form. In her diary, she wrote: “I have an idea that I will invent a new name for my books to supplant ‘novel.’ ...But what? Elegy?” So what is Five Spice Street? A remarkable prose object? Mirrorbox? Or simply call it “novel,” understanding it to mean “fresh” and “new” as in: Can Xue’s novel approach to writing fiction in Five Spice Street offers the reader a delightful puzzle whose pieces constantly change shape and shatter into ever smaller fragments.
The book is challenging, and deciphering its conclusion, having something to do with “a beautiful wave of the future,” is a task in itself. But the fainthearted may use something the young coal worker said as a guide to understanding the book, or any other “difficult” work of fiction, for that matter: “Sometimes, we have to change our way of thinking and look with brand-new eyes before we can enter into the essence of something. This seems difficult and troublesome, but with hard struggle you can make it.” - John Madera

"There’s an old Chinese fable that goes like this: A weapons vendor at market touts his unbelievable spear (mao)—it can pierce shield (dun)! Then he turns around and talks up his amazing shield—it can withstand any spear! But then a child asks, “What happens if you use your own spear against your own shield?”
That tale spawned a noun in Mandarin: maodun—whose meaning falls somewhere between irony and paradox, and implies getting pulled in opposite directions. It’s a pretty good word for what’s been going on with Can Xue (pen name for 55-year-old Chinese writer Deng Xiaohua): The more vigorously she protests that her fiction isn’t political commentary, the firmer the consensus grows among Western critics that it’s a massive indictment of her homeland. Can Xue has had four books of surrealistic, sometimes grotesque short stories translated into English, each volume further cementing her reputation as a radical who offers, in the words of a 1991 New York Times review, “nightmare images of life under a punishing regime.” But Can Xue continues to insist she writes only of her inner world. “Real literature faces the soul,” she tells me, when I interview her with the aid of a translator at Manhattan’s Yale Club during her recent visit to the United States.
What’s going on here? Maybe the American view of China has become so politicized that we inevitably find critique where there is none. Or maybe a writer like Can Xue has to downplay her political themes to placate Beijing, which has suppressed her work in the past. But which is it? The new release of Five Spice Street,written in 1988 and her first full-length novel to be translated in English, is unlikely to resolve the issue.
A reader today might be forgiven for seeing the book as a dead-on portrayal of late-’80s anomie in the People’s Republic of China. With its excavation of rampant mistrust, spying, and carnal jealousy in a tight-knit rural community, Five Spice Street seems to peer through a magnifying glass at the disintegration of Mao’s utopian socialist order. The novel revolves around the ethereal Madam X, a transplant to the eponymous street—she and her husband run a fruit stand there, although it’s said they used to be party officials somewhere. (Is this a veiled reference to the decline in the prestige of the Maoist old guard?) Speculations about Madam X consume her neighbors, and her essential qualities change depending on whom you ask: Perhaps she’s a potent sexual sorceress, but perhaps her private life is completely banal. The denizens of Five Spice Street, who both despise and adulate her, can’t even collectively determine whether she’s 22 or 50 years old. She’s a temptress and a tease, driving the men and women alike wild, although they don’t know if she could even deliver the goods if they managed to possess her. Could Madam X represent that elusive Social Ideal, whether communism or democracy?
Way off, if you ask the Can Xue, who claims she’s operating on a different plane entirely. Calling Five Spice Street her “spiritual biography,” she tells me, the characters all represent her own desires and dissatisfactions, and that Madam X embodies the author’s personal idealized life. According to her, the story has nothing to do with the real world: Naturally she borrows details from daily existence, she says, but these are just “materials for her factory,” where she “weighs down everyday feelings to a deep place, and then retrieves them.” This method is responsible, she says, for the “strange feel” of her prose.
It’s certainly true that the novel is far from naturalistic, although it paints a more concrete, less dreamlike realm than her other translated work so far (Dialogues in Paradise, Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas,and The Embroidered Shoes: Stories). But its atmosphere is still an uncanny one of occultism, portents, and metamorphoses. Characters’ eyes in particular are sites of magic—perhaps apt in a neighborhood consumed by voyeurism and rumor. “Flickering waves of light” are said to “radiate from Madam X’s eyes, turning people into grotesque shapes.” Meanwhile Old Woman Jin, a rival of Madam X, looks out of “two fluctuating red orbs, at once bulging out of her eye sockets, and all at once drawing back in.”
With her flair for supernatural-tinged farce, Can Xue is incessantly likened to Franz Kafka. But Five Spice Street even more recalls the output of another Eastern European modernist: the Polish short-story writer Bruno Schulz, whose fabulist tales of rural boyhood are cast in the same lush, earthy tones that resonate in Xue’s novel. Some of her anthropomorphic descriptions— “a puff of fog from a green meteor on the horizon startled the hill” — strike with Schulz’s dark beauty. And both writers’ power lies in their shaman-like ability to animate hyper-local superstitions and fears.
Schulz’s stories also took place against a significant historical backdrop—namely the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And while themes of social decay are ever-present beneath his writing, they never overpower the specificity of his imaginative universe. Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for reading Can Xue—her political context shouldn’t be ignored, but neither should it get in the way of appreciating her work for what it is—world-class art." - Eli Epstein-Deutsch

"Who is Madam X? Madam X sells peanuts at the stand with the red-painted sign. Madam X is an occultist, a collector of mirrors and corrupter of neighborhood children. Madam X is a home wrecker. Madam X is a threat to communal harmony and morality. Madam X is a sexual deviant. Madam X is a virgin. Madam X is fifty years old. Madam X is twenty-two. Madam X is having an affair with Mr. Q. Madam X wishes to be famous. Madam X hopes to be forgotten. Madam X is the elected representative of the people of Five Spice Street. Madam X is the wave of the future.
The question of Madam X's identity is at the center of Can Xue's Five Spice Street, a novel that is by turns confounding, comic, and sharp in its portrayal of communal life on a small street in an unnamed country (but which bears an unmistakable resemblance to China). It is a question that is not so much answered as it is endlessly speculated upon by the street's residents, who observe Madam X's activities (Madam X doesn't say much, so they must watch her vigilantly) and then provide their own explanations. As a result, Madam X at first becomes a repository for the people's biases and prejudices. She is thought to be having an affair with a certain Mr. Q, and despite the fact that other residents engage in similarly shady sexual behavior, Madam X is shunned as a degenerate. But by the novel's end, after the people of Five Spice Street have exhausted their speculations, Madam X is honored as a visionary who "represents a society of the future," and she is elected representative of the street.
A tidy plot summary does not begin to capture the novel's tangled versions of reality. The reader sinks into a cacophony of street voices and their competing narratives like a castaway falling into quicksand. An unnamed writer narrates the story, and he reports diligently on the "facts" of the case, trying to reconcile each variation he hears from the residents of Five Spice Street. The first lines are a clue to what follows: "When it comes to Madam X's age, opinions differ here on Five Spice Street. One person's guess is as good as another's. There are at least twenty-eight points of view. At one extreme, she's about fifty (for now, let's fix it at fifty); at the other, she's twenty-two." Consider yourself warned: it only gets foggier from there.
The spark that sets off this fuse of speculation about Madam X is her alleged affair with Mr. Q. A widow notices Mr. Q's comings-and-goings and soon the whole neighborhood is talking about it. Both have spouses who are "childlike," devoted, and don't seem to care much at all about the rumored affair. Madam X says that she "never laid eyes" on Mr. Q, and one of the neighbors, "a female colleague" of X, explains that "X didn't look at people with her eyes… After she bought the mirrors and microscope from the junk shop, she even announced that her eyes ‘had retired.' That is, except for things in the mirror, she looked at nothing." Euphemisms, such as "spare time recreation" used in place of "sex," are deployed by all residents of Five Spice Street. Everyday conversations are beset with the uneasiness of Orwellian doublespeak.
Mirrors and microscopes, spare time recreation, a main character who can only see reflections in a mirror, and a plot that is riddled with random events and characters who flit in and out of the novel seemingly without purpose (a partial list of such events and characters: the collapse of Madam X's house, Mr. Q's discovery of a bouncing ball, Old Woman Jin's affair with a young mining worker, Old Meng's affairs with various women, a widow's neighbor shitting on her front steps, a lame woman recounting a twenty-three-minute staring contest)—this is dangerous territory. Five Spice Street is a novel about the meanings and sources of identity, about the relationship between the individual and the community, about the gap between public and private selves; it is a critique of narrative storytelling, of relationships of cause and effect, of the idea that anything that springs from the human mind can be called truth. It is a novel that rejects the senses, building its fictional universe by subtracting them. What little the reader can hear, see, touch, smell, or taste on Five Spice Street is ultimately uncertain, ephemeral, subjective. The reader, on this arduous journey with an author who isn't explaining or taking questions, is bewildered.
All of this makes Five Spice Street a challenging, frustrating read, but, as with quicksand, it helps if you don't struggle. The rampant gossip, the maligning of character, the elaborate explanations for mysterious behavior, all bring to mind pre-capitalist-reform China, when even the most innocuous behavior could be taken as subversion and lead to public denunciation by friends, neighbors, or colleagues, followed by a trip to a "reeducation" camp. Although the book is set in an unknown city in an unknown year, it is easy to imagine Madam X's neighbors reporting her to the police or some party apparatus that deals with dissenters and social misfits. But instead of a reeducation camp, Xue devises a hilariously backwards ending. After years of denouncing her, the people of Five Spice Street decide that Madam X is really "ahead of her time," and they elect her the people's representative, a job she does not want. By now her husband has left her and her house is literally falling down, but when she appeals to the government committee in charge of house renovation and construction to have her crumbling house fixed, her applications are taken as a kind of statement on the political system and ignored. Two weeks later the house collapses. The temptation for the reader is to interpret the collapse as symbolic of something—its occurrence is so random, so unaccounted for, it would be hard not to—but it isn't symbolic, it's meaningless. The collapse is the culmination of the trick that Five Spice Street has been playing on the reader all along: on Five Spice Street, nothing means anything." - Brendan Patrick Hughes

Other books by Can Xue:

"Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it." - Steven Shaviro

Ellis Sharp - Surreal, Politically Enraged And Utterly Invigorating: Che Guevara Meets Loch Ness

Ellis Sharp, Dead Iraqis: Selected Short Stories of Ellis Sharp, Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2009.


"Dead Iraqis brings together the best short fiction of one of Britain's leading underground writers. Written against the grain of commercial literary fiction, these stories from the era of neo-liberalism are often darkly comic in thrust, with a strong historical or political dimension. Emily Brontë runs off to Nicaragua and starts a new life as a guerrilla. Stalin fakes his death and becomes a Conservative MP. Karl Marx is discovered alive and well and living on the Isle of Wight. Using a range of techniques from collage to surreal satire, Sharp savages the values and delusions of the age, mocking everything from crop circles to political biography and imperialism. But Sharp is also a writer acutely conscious of literary tradition. Informed by influences as various as Swift, Gogol, Proust and Joyce, these fictions engage with language and the nature of narrative as they explore history, story-telling, memory, philosophy and the monstrous temper of an age steeped in blood."

"Ellis Sharp writes fiction unlike any other writer I have encountered to date... his books are jam-packed with wondrous things." - Lee Rourke

"Ellis Sharp is an outstanding rebuke to all those who think political fiction means drab and po-faced fiction. Who says it can't be surreal, enraged and utterly invigorating?" - China Miéville

" 'Please abandon your realist expectations,' says a talking train in one of the stories collected here. Ellis Sharp demands that we set aside a whole set of expectations, not only about realism, but also about political fiction and English literature. The techniques that Sharp employs in these stories - jump-cuts between different ontological spaces, words becoming worlds, facts bleeding into fictions - are familiar enough from postmodernist fiction. What makes Sharp unique is his application of these to British politics. The closest comparison that leaps to mind is Iain Sinclair - Sharp has something of the same feel for English place - yet Sharp's writing has none of the opaque hermeticism of Sinclair's. Even at its most playful, its least constrained by narrative, its most densely allusive, Sharp's writing has an openness, a lightness and a lucidity that Sinclair's work often lacks.
Dead Iraqis collects short stories that Sharp wrote between 1991 and 1999. At one level, Dead Iraqis can be read as a phantasmagoric alternative history of postwar England. It begins with a story in which the narrator - an unborn child - refuses to leave the womb for the whole duration of the Atlee government. The next story, "Dobson's Zone", follows the decline of Sixties radicalism into disillusion - "Lyotard and Baudrillard, post-Fordism, the world made safe for Nietszsche and NATO". "The Bloating Of Nellcock", meanwhile, is a ferocious broadside against Neil Kinnock: Sharp takes literally the former Labour leader's image as a "windbag", transforming him into a grotesquely inflated homunculus.
The title story, written in a similar spirit of Swiftian satiric savagery, is like a literary equivalent of Martha Rosler's photograpic collages, Bringing the War Home. Like Rosler, Sharp juxtaposes atrocity and death with scenes of domesticity. Rather than being kept at a safe distance, the "dead Iraqis" from the first Gulf War are dumped on English lawns, but they prompt neither horror nor outrage from the British public. They become instead a waste disposal problem, one more thing for homeowners to complain to the authorities about:
I rang the Town Hall and asked for the Dead Iraqi Disposal Officer... She wanted to know how many dead Iraqis were in our garden.
At that point I am sorry to say I became petulant. How was I supposed to know how many dead Iraqis were in the garden? You know how it is with dead Iraqis -- they are almost always papery and fused together. It is like someone emptying two hundred packets of crisps in your garden and asking you how many individual crisps there are.
Sharp uses the same technique, but in reverse, in the later story "The Henry James Seminar At My Lai": here, the genteel and refined world of literary scholarship finds itself pitched into the middle of a battlefield.
In his informative introduction, Macdonald Daly (who some suspect is none other than Sharp himself - a conjecture that the ontological spirals of Sharp's fiction was bound to inspire) maintains that Sharp was at "the height of his confidence and consistency" at the time of his 1995 collection, Engels On Video. I must respectfully disagree with Daly on this point. The two stories from that book collected here - "An Interview With Nietzsche's Moustache" and "A Maze, A Muse, A Mule" - strike me as both over-indulgent and exhausted (and exhausting). The conceits - an expedition through a Nietzsche's moustache hyperbolically-inflated so it becomes a whole landscape; Engels meeting Janis Joplin and Nico - are not strong enough to hold together Sharp's teeming gaggle of tropes, jokes, speculations and leaps between worlds.
Sharp's stories work best when there is a logic - not a traditional narrative logic, but a logic of association and correspondence - motivating his juxtapositions. This is emphatically the case in Sharp's masterly 1992 story "The Hay Wain", in which the serenity of Constable's supposedly timeless painting is violently disrupted by proletarian rebellion. In "The Hay Wain", English culture and history become a repeating labyrinth where the rebels are always on the run from the forces of power and privilege. Fleeing Peterloo, Jack Frake eventually stumbles into the Suffolk scene Constable is painting; meanwhile, in 1990, a Poll Tax rioter takes refuge in the National Gallery and "notices what he has never noticed before on biscuit tins or calendars, or plastic trays on the walls of his aunt's flat in Bradford, those tiny figures bending in the field beyond."
Sharp replaces the dominant pastoral image of the English countryside, not with a deflated quotidian realism, but with a different kind of lyricism, one coloured by revolt: fields and ditches become hiding places or battlegrounds; landscapes that on the surface seem tranquil still reverberate with the unavented spectral rage of murdered working class martyrs. It is not the sunlit English afternoon that is "timeless", but the ability of the agents of reaction to escape justice. When the Poll tax rioter is clubbed by police and his blood starts to stain Constable's emblem of English nationhood, we're uncomfortably reminded of more recent episodes. "He was resisting arrest, right? Right mates? (Right, Sarge.)... We used minimal force, right?... Don't piss yourself and we'll see this thing through together, right mates?... Everyone'll be on our side, remember that. The commisioner. The Federation. The papers. And, if it comes to it, the Coroner. Now fucking go and call for an ambulance." - Mark Fisher

"The title story of this volume was, we are told in a note at the end, written between 10.30am and 4.45pm on 3 March 1991. This is more than a mere detail: it is the day after the US 24th Infantry Division, at a cost to themselves of one damaged armoured vehicle, one tank, and one wounded soldier, more or less wiped out the Iraqi Republican Guard as they retreated, two days into a ceasefire, from Kuwait along the coastal Highway 8.
Sharp's response is savage, as savagely indignant as Swift. He paints a hurried picture (the story is almost the shortest in the book) of an outraged narrator who rings up the council after waking up to discover "a quite astonishing heap of dead Iraqis in our front garden. There were so many that some of them had spilled over the top of the hedge and on to the pavement."
In a way, this is not wholly representative of Sharp's work. A more typical example of his skewed vision comes in the story "A Maze, A Muse, A Mule", in which we meet Friedrich Engels sitting in a bar called El Quijote, drinking tequila. Up comes Janis Joplin, who offers to buy him a drink. "Engels could see at once that Janis Joplin was one of those young women who are suffering because of the relative disappearance of a generally accepted systematic metaphysics that bears on daily life." That last phrase, as I doubtless need hardly remind you, comes from "Anni Mirabiles, 1921-1925: Reason in the Madness of Letters", one of the American critic RP Blackmur's lectures on modernist poetry. "Janis was dazzled by the clarity and power of Friedrich's prose. It was after reading The Bakunists at Work that she wrote 'Mercedes Benz'."
At which point I found myself becoming quite fascinated by Sharp. His first name was also the first nom de plume of Emily Brontë - and she features here in a story called "Shooting Americans with Emily" ("Her family. They drove her to it. Sister Charlie a real bitch, sister Anne a pious worm"). He had existed on the fringes of my consciousness; a rumour more than anything concrete. He was published only by one obscure independent publisher (Zoilus Press), and went out of his way to shun publicity. "Sharp's scalding up-front politics and the literary demands he makes on his readers will inevitably alienate him from a mass readership," says Macdonald Daly in his introduction (and I would be very surprised, incidentally, if "Macdonald Daly" and "Ellis Sharp" were not, in reality, the same person. Daly does the criticism, Sharp the fiction).
But, as I hope I have indicated, Sharp can be funny ("a spectre is haunting Ventnor - the spectre of Marx"), although the humour can be appalling, saturated in unease. "'Literary criticism can be a powerful thing,' agreed infantryman Roschevitz as he shot three participants in the head with an M-16 'for not having anything new to say about the first paragraph of The Ambassadors." (This from the arrestingly titled "The Henry James Seminar at My Lai".) But elsewhere Sharp exploits the full comic potential of the language of revolutionary communism, and makes play with the movement's historical figures. Stalin fakes his death and becomes, after some initial resistance on its part, a member of the West Bognor Conservative Association. ("Does he look like a mass-murderer?") A disgraced civil servant travels to cold-war era Russia in order to unravel the mystery of Lenin's trousers.
But other stories pile anything and everything in. One would not have thought an author could link Che Guevara and the Loch Ness monster, but Sharp does. Sharp is sui generis. At times he comes across as if he were a compound hallucination dreamed up by Iain Sinclair, William Burroughs (formulaically only; few drugs and no pederasty here) and... well, himself. This might sound like an unappealing mix but I am delighted to have read him. You can trust him because beneath the zaniness, at the level of the sentence, he is very good indeed. This is not magic realism. These are the bad dreams of the 20th century." - Nicholas Lezard

Steven Shaviro - When you open your mouth-or your ass, or your cunt-there's no way of knowing what `foreign particles' will enter

Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction about Postmodernism (Serpent's Tail, 1996)

"Doom Patrols is a rollercoaster ride through late-20th-century culture. Considering topics as diverse as Elvis worship, the erotics of cyberspace, fantasies of the millennium, multiple personality syndrome, and the molecular logic of insect DNA; ranging from William Burroughs to Dean Martin, from Michel Foucault to My Bloody Valentine, from Andy Warhol to Bill Gates, the essays in the collection take an idiosyncratic look at the forces and counter-forces currently transforming American and world culture."

"In Doom Patrols, Shaviro is out to prove that he is not just a nerdy literature-and-film professor, he is also a member of the hip-oisie who (gasp!) goes to rock concerts, reads comics and uses the word fuck. Through 17 loosely defined personal essays on subjects ranging from Bill Gates to Truddi Chase (of 92-personalities fame), Shaviro expounds on postmodernism. He applies the idea that essence is obsolete to examples from American culture (many already overanalyzed) including Kathy Acker and Cindy Sherman. Shaver's style is at times self-consciously smart ("This ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere... is the defining characteristic of what it means to be American, or to be human") at other times embarrassingly confessional ("I needed your wound, but since that night you've withheld it from me"), always deliberately quotable ("war is menstruation envy"). Oddly, race has virtually no significance in his version of the postmodern universe. While Shaviro draws some interesting connections between the theory of natural selection and postmodernism, his book is still a party gathering the same tired, talked-out guests: Warhol, Burroughs, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Foucault. One gets the sense that Shaviro is trying way too hard to impress a readership of the converted-people who are easily wowed by ponderous statements such as: "When you open your mouth-or your ass, or your cunt-there's no way of knowing what `foreign particles' will enter." That may be true, but some of us have a pretty good idea." - Publishers Weekly

"Like those strange, fearsome fish that live in the ocean's deepest depths, Shaviro's prose and his ideas may thrive in their own confined milieu, but brought to the surface world where the rest of us live, they explode and die. Shaviro tries to conceal the basic unoriginality of his thought behind a dense patter of quotation, citation, and jargon. And so we are treated to the recycled thoughts of such postmodern sages as Baudrillard and Deleuze, as well as the usual, trite reflections on rock 'n' roll (it induces disorientation, the quintessential postmodern experience) and Disney World (where excess blurs the boundary between reality and unreality and the postmodern world's fetish of the object is fully realized). Shaviro also spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the comic book series Doom Patrol, whose main virtue, apparently, is its deliberate engagement with postmodern themes. But the subject matter is really unimportant. With tautological criticism like this, subjects exist only to confirm a theory. Hence, postmodern critics adore such fabulistic novelists as Pynchon but almost never acknowledge the existence of such doughty realists as Mailer or Bellow. Shaviro jettisons such concepts as theme and coherence, rambling wherever whims and his borrowings take him, perhaps trying to demonstrate tautologically the confusions of a postmodern universe. In short, these essays aren't really about anything at all." - Kirkus Reviews

"This book is a theoretical fiction about postmodernism. Fiction because Shaviro exercises the novelist’s conceit of character and event in carving his preternatural discursions; Doom Patrols is not a declaration of narrative. Postmodern because: "Postmodernism is not a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe."
Steven Shaviro’s gathering of dense, sometimes obtuse, occasionally electrifying essays should never have been published on paper. There is something awry (modernist; pre-modern even) about turning pages, submitting to the tyranny of left-to-right. We need a cerebral plug-in, intravenous disclosure; CD-ROM allows for Burroughsian cut-up (William Seward gets a chapter heading); or to at the very least restrict availability solely to the Internet. But chips like that are restricted to Jack Straw’s wet-dreams, and CD-ROM is never as good as (read Brian Eno - not a chapter heading, surprisingly). And besides, Serpent’s Tail have published it as a book, albeit after months of being available on Shaviro’s own web site.
Postmodernism: Let’s Go!
"To a postmodern sensibility, there’s no contradiction between cool and hot, irony and passion, playfulness and commitment, excitement and disgust, pleasure and anxiety, or camp distancing and involvement to the point of obsession." (from Chapter 1: Grant Morrison.)
"Sincerity is a postmodern malady." (from Chapter 2: Walt Disney.)
In his cover-shot, Shaviro - a teacher in literature and film - faces away but wrests his gaze for a brief glimpse of us. He recognises what he has written: Doom Patrols is a treatise that defies this very review. If there is no difference between cool or hot, camp and obsession, then how are we to accuse anything here of simple right or wrong, stupidity or perception to an nth degree? A mass of his dialogue is most likely bollocks; certainly much is almost impenetrable, compacted thought; mind-fucking inadequacy. And yet... and yet:
"It’s Bill Gates’s world; we just live in it... God, like Gates, has exactly the aggressiveness, the competitive drive, and the sense of entitlement you’d expect in a talented straight boy from a privileged WASP background."
If he builds it, we will come. Shaviro is good at that, lighthousing this ocean of punctuation, a beacon to pilot us through. And to the end is where we go, for no matter how annoying Doom Patrols gets ("detached from referential meaning; the mechanical piling up of fragments takes the place of organic completion or symbolic translation"), it remains compulsively readable. We have to find out who did it.
For every irritation (Chapter 7: Cindy Sherman, "all feminine coquetry and affectation"), there is real juice like the dissection of Twin Peaks in terms of child abuse (Chapter 14: Truddi Chase). Or the last and quite brilliant chapter on the enigma that was Dean Martin ("If Elvis ... is the triumphant product of processes of natural selection, then Dino is the anomalous, ephemeral, and sterile expression of an illicit counter-movement"). Tremendous stuff.
In the end the greatest trick Doom Patrols (the author’s world dissected in relation to the comic, not the celebrated POV-game) pulls is the very sobriquet postmodern itself; it is auto-reviewed. All Shaviro leaves with us are his own quotes. Pop will eat itself. We surrender." - Gerald Houghton

"...as a work on postmodernism, Doom Patrols can only approach its "subject" through performitivity. Or as Shaviro states in his preface: "Postmodernism isn't a theoretical option or a stylistic choice; it is the very air we breathe. We are postmodern whether we like it or not, and whether we are aware of it or not. For this very reason, the word postmodernism isn't explicitly defined anywhere in my text. Its meaning is its use: or better, its multiple and contradictory uses, as these emerge gradually in the course of the book." Thus, if one aspect of postmodernism is that we live in a highly technological society where words and images are constantly being recycled, being "borrowed" from television, the internet, books, magazines, films and CDs, being reproduced, scanned, downloaded, photocopied, recombined, distorted and redistributed privately and publicly, then Doom Patrols must make itself subject to these same "plagiaristic" forces if it is to discuss postmodernism accurately. Marshall McLuhan says that the medium is the message; if we take him seriously, then any work attempting to "study" the messages of contemporary culture must necessarily come to resemble the media which proliferate and perpetuate that culture.
Shaviro elaborates this idea further in "Grant Morrison," the first of the book's seventeen chapters, each named after a media personality or artist. Writer of the DC comic book DOOM PATROL from 1989 to 1992, Grant Morrison and his work actually become emblematic of Shaviro's whole enterprise. For like most graphic novels in the 1990s, DOOM PATROL is actually a reinterpretation of a comic book that originally appeared in the late 1960s. Indeed, the 1960 version written by Arnold Drake featured the same group of genetic and social misfits who put their strangeness to use by becoming superheroes. Yet Morrison appropriates from diverse and often idiosyncratic sources- ranging from chaos theory to literature, philosophy to alternative music-to infuse the 90s version with a mixture of cultural cynicism and camp utterly lacking in Drake's original.
"DOOM PATROL is just the fix I need," Shaviro writes, "It has exactly the right mix of ingredients. Everything is in pieces, everything is borrowed or stolen... Plagiarism, blank mimicry, parasitic borrowing, speaking in tongues: these are the tactics of exemplary postmodern works like DOOM PATROL." Just as traditional images of the superheros like Superman developed in the 1930s get subverted and transformed into "the world's most bizarre heroes" of the 1960s DOOM PATROL written by Arnold Drake, so Grant Morrison subverts and transforms the "naive earnestness" of this original into the "sly hipness" which characterizes the 1990s DOOM PATROL. Shaviro's subversion and transformation of the play on cultural and identity construction in Morrison's book into the "theoretical fiction" which makes up Doom Patrols, then, is merely one more rotation in an ongoing series. The writing and rewriting of DOOM PATROL as a text, thus serves not only to introduce many of the themes Shaviro wishes to discuss, but acts as a strategic statement of the methodology Doom Patrols will employ: "All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow and waste them: spend what we haven't earned, and what we don't even possess. That's my definition of postmodern culture, but it's also Citibank's definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's definition of love, and J.G. Ballard's definition of life in the postindustrial ruins."
With other chapters like "Andy Warhol," "William Burroughs," and "Bilinda Butcher," Doom Patrols appears initially like a series of meditations on the nature of celebrity culture. Yet as we can already begin to sense in a chapter like "Grant Morrison," Shaviro's goal is nothing less than to trouble our conceptions of "individual personhood," and "representation." Through what are both highly autobiographical and extremely theoretical discussions on topics ranging from Elvis Presley to the molecular logic of insect DNA, Shaviro calls attention to the essential fictiveness of "personality," and endeavors to trace out how notions of "reality" have been constructed. The chapter on "Walt Disney," then, is less concerned with our collective celluloid memories of good old uncle Walt than it is with trying to explicate American sincerity, with Shaviro claiming that, "a strange mutation arose in our hominid ancestors, probably less than two hundred thousand years ago. Call it the Reagan gene: the ability to deceive others by first of all deluding yourself."
For all the apparent glibness of this initial remark, Shaviro traces the idea of sincerity back to what Gerald Edelman calls 'higher order consciousness,' or the ability to know that one is merely playing a role, and doing so without this knowledge causing the performance to be any less heartfelt or 'authentic.' This category of 'realness,' Shaviro points out, is precisely what is most prized by drag queens and method actors: the triumph of simulating to perfection a gender or character whom one is not. It is precisely this same quality we admire in audioanimatrons (like the robotic Abe Lincoln in the Hall of Presidents at Disneyworld), creatures that cannot help but mean precisely what the say, and say exactly what they mean. Yet, Shaviro contends both Freud and Marx radically misunderstood the fetishism of the drag queen, and Americans in general, convinced as they were as Europeans that an obsession with surfaces and objects could only be a substitution for feelings of inadequacy, a means of concealing a lack. Yet, "if all you can say about a drag queen is that she's 'really' a man, or that her ostentation conceals a defect," Shaviro counters, "then you've missed the whole point of her performance... This ability to deceive ourselves and to be sincere-far more than language or sexuality-is the defining characteristic of what it means to be an American."
Yet Doom Patrols doesn't limit itself to what some might consider the "standard" postmodern concerns or positions. In "Michel Foucault," Shaviro begins with the wonderful anecdote about a woman who once wrote to Ann Landers asking her whether oral sex meant you 'just talk about it," and goes on to discuss how social constructions of human sexuality are actually much more rigid and intolerant of change than those in the biological world; he ends with an exploration into how electronic and information technologies invite us to imagine a different economy of bodies and pleasures not exclusively bound to reproduction. In "Truddi Chase," Shaviro locates in this case of Multiple Personality Disorder what is perhaps "the best paradigm... for postmodern consciousness," arguing against Freudian and Cartesian conceptions of a radically singular 'ego' in favor of demonology. He argues that we are continually and so powerfully transformed by visceral sensations and emotions as to make any philosophical claim to a fixed and stable 'I' entirely illusory. Shaviro explores in "Bill Gates" how the postmodern God might indeed resemble this brilliant and ferocious man-talented and competitive, an unreliable visionary not at all in control of the forces of liberation and mutation that drive the virulent evolution of cyberlife.
Much of the logic in Doom Patrols is admittedly tautological, and critics of postmodernism will undoubtedly claim that Shaviro's playful, meandering, meditative approach is indicative of an entire movement which is fundamentally anti-intellectual and lazy. I find it utterly impossible to counter such claims. If it seems difficult to weave discussions of the band My Bloody Valentine, tape-worms, Dean Martin, virtual reality, and language as a viral infection into a single, intellectually unified framework, the problem seems hardly to lie with these "objects" themselves as much as it does in the critical project. As Shaviro states in the preface, "I do not propose anything like a balanced and well grounded critique of postmodern culture. To do so would to assert my own separation from the phenomena under consideration." Instead we have a series of gestures, a frenzied dance through the fractured centers and along the dark peripheries of experience. Everything in this book is familiar. Every word is "autobiographical."
"Henry James" is not a chapter in Shaviro's book, but it very well could be. In it we might explore the fate of the printed page in the age of digital reproduction. Or better yet, we might trace out that all too human nostalgia certain humanist intellectuals feel for the peace and sanctity of old mausoleums. That melancholy of anxious critics, as Shaviro describes them, who find themselves unable to adapt to what McLuhan calls 'postliterate' culture. But no, Henry James is in need of no such chapter, for his work is alive and well. His image and excerpts from his books are available for downloading at numerous websites dedicated to his work on the net. His artistic visions and authorial intentions are discussed in electronic newsgroups at many of the major universities, and as soon as copyright expires on his printed works, they will undoubtedly be posted on the web beside those of Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, Henry James as a virus will soon be free to replicate as never before." - Sheldon Robert Walcher

Jesus del Campo - Chaotic, reality TV-obsessed, carnivalesque account of world history, with biblical figures, scientists, magicians and God alike

Jesus del Campo, A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, Trans. by Catherine Mansfield (Telegram Books, 2008)

"So, you’re in search of a new, manly cult novel... you just need something fresh. Enter the Spanish philologist Jesus del Campo and his slim, crazy, funny, History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists, which is exactly what it says it is. It’s a roughly - very roughly - chronological account of world history, marked by the bravado and befuddlement of presidents, biblical figures, scientists, poets, magicians and God alike.
“On the first day God created light,” it begins, “and he saw that he missed darkness. So he bought himself some black-framed Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses and went out into the street, where he came across humans who, not having yet been officially created, were covering their bodies with paramilitary rags, not realizing they were already dressed. He saw them drinking cold beer out of plastic cups and feeling each other’s ribs and whispering about the fearfulness of life under the neon signs for Nokia and Kawasaki and General Electric and Holiday Inn. And God went home feeling dejected, wondering what to create next.”
You can probably imagine some of the things God dreams up. (Hint: the book ends with a man on a TV talk show discussing how he was attacked and sodomized by a penguin.) If del Campo’s history is sometimes too chaotic, too reality TV-obsessed and too carnivalesque, he makes up for it with his soothing answers to a number of age-old questions. In “Spain’s Pain,” we learn why Spain is called Spain. In “Tuscan Confidences,” we (finally) learn what Leonardo said to make Mona Lisa smile like that. We learn the secrets of war (“It’s all very well talking about the strategic intelligence of Egmont and Coligny and a hundred other captains of one religion or another,” says a crow pecking at the face of a dead man, “but at the hour of truth each man has to fight for his own skin, and ends up buried under a chaotic avalanche of oblivion. There’s no cure for human folly, that’s for sure.”), but not the secrets of peace, which is only fitting. We learn why writers dress in black these days (“to hide the burden of their horribly ordinary features, and say that they feel persecuted by their characters, and other things like that”), and the true story of Bob Dylan’s shadow, and the fact that the emperor knows he’s naked. In my favorite piece, “Some Words of Warning,” a disquieting version of the story of the Pied Piper, we learn the limits of freedom.
There’s a great scene in “With No Left Hand” when Miguel de Cervantes confronts an editor, who (leading with, “Look, Miguel, it’s nothing personal”) calls him a “dead weight” and demands that he cut 300 pages out of his novel and get shy little Dulcinea topless before page fifty. “I don’t like the world much either,” says the editor, “But at least I try to enjoy what’s left of it while it lasts. When China becomes a global superpower we’ll cover our heads in ash and go begging forgiveness at the American embassy, and look for hamburger dealers under manhole covers, and watch with Christian resignation as the high altar at the Almudena cathedral is turned into a stand selling spring rolls… Do what I say, come back and see me, and then we’ll see whether we can squeeze anything out of the town councils of the villages you mention in the book. Hey, why are you looking at me like that? Do I look like some kind of a monster?” Miguel smiles. “No,” he says, “No. You look like a windmill.”
A History of the World for Rebels and Somnambulists is not a work of fiction or history - it’s a work of philology, actually, at a moment when rare, good philologists are more essential than they might first appear. Why are you looking for a new, manly cult novel, after all? It’s not really because you want to challenge yourself, to slink around smoking Gauloises and being a sexy literary badass. It’s because you need to be secretly comforted, so that you can survive. “Please, I want to go home,” Eve says to God, “…I suppose I’m allowed to make mistakes, aren’t I?” “Yes,” God answers, “yes, you are. For now.”" - Elizabeth Bachner


Jesus del Campo: Immortality has nothing on the Roma–Lazio derby

They started arriving slowly, with cautious steps, as if unsure of themselves, as if worried that they might be struck down at any moment by a sudden feeling of reverence, and little by little they spread across the square until they had covered it completely.

Once they found themselves all squeezed in there together the mood changed and they started looking at one another with an almost rude curiosity. There were desert nomads proudly holding the reins of their camels and occasionally beating their drums out of fear of losing their companions in the crush of the crowd. There were Chinese torturers with painstakingly curled black hair who were fanning themselves with peacock-feather fans and struggling to breathe under the oppressive Mao collars on their nylon jackets, and astronomers from Cape Verde waving maps of Saturn in the air, and anarchists from Minnesota studying books on phonetics, and deliverymen from Cuzco handing out free painkillers "because today's a special day," they said, "and we're all brothers". And of course there were Romans too: women with plucked eyebrows and men holding their heads up high as if posing for their picture on a coin.

And finally the Pope took the advice of the canticles and stepped out onto the balcony.

"What do you want?" he asked them.

"We're here to protest against mortality!" they shouted back at him in an avalanche of different languages. A group of Eskimos waved a banner in Danish demanding immortality for those who work for it.

An Englishwoman turned to her husband and whispered, "I have to say that the Archbishop of Canterbury, when you see him in person, looks far more majestic than the papists' infallible guru."

"We have to respect the views of the majority, as we agreed," said her husband diplomatically, without looking up from his copy of News of the World.

Then a spokesman stepped forward to speak on behalf of the demonstrators and read a manifesto in Latin.

"After deep discussions," he said, "we have decided to put aside our differences of creed, which at this moment seem of secondary importance, and have agreed to come here, to the centre of world religion, to express our shared conviction that what we have to go through and suffer is simply not fair. No, Your Holiness. It's not fair that we should be weighed down with uncertainty about our final destiny for all our lives, on top of all the other hardships which keep us in a permanent state of discomfort, as well as being blackmailed to do the right thing left, right and centre under the threat of eternal punishment. We have realized that we are all united by the same anxiety, and because of this we want Your Holiness to communicate our protest to He who has appointed you as His representative on earth. We will not move from here until we've had an answer to our request, which is the following: we want Him to declare a 'time out' in the life of the earth, during which not a single creature on this miserable planet will be struck down by death's crushing blow so that, when we've received this guarantee, we will all be able to feel safe at last, and breathe as freely as if we'd never read stories about Original Sin. In short, we want to vent our frustration, Your Holiness, because where there's death, nobody can live."

And the Pope thought in silence for a few moments, and scratched his chin.

"Look, all of you," he said, "I'm an old man and I share your concerns, believe me, I understand it well, but I fear your demands are beyond my powers. I can ask Him for you, of course, and I might even be able to negotiate a little more excitement and less tedium in your view of the world's landscapes: you will have emerald-green skies, sand as blue as sapphires for your beaches, snow as red as leopard's blood for your mountains and water as transparent as Bohemian crystal for your rivers, which furthermore will run full of nymphs and sirens with an open, liberal attitude with whom, if it's any consolation, you will have the chance to live out your most primitive fantasies of entertainment. I might even be able to get you a reduction in the hole in the ozone layer; but oh, my friends, I can't get you the thing you ask for."

"We won't move from here," the spokesman repeated, and his phrase was echoed in a storm of defiant applause, and the first torches began to glimmer in the night amid shouted threats to set fire to Rome.

"But not the taxi stand in the Piazza del Popolo," someone protested;

"Not the Trevi Fountain," shouted someone else;

"Not the statue of Giordano Bruno," somebody else begged from the crowd.

"What time is the Roma–Lazio match?" asked a Spanish demonstrator holding a transistor radio to his ear. And a sharp, sickle-shaped silence spread over the square and trembled in the air like an old-aged acrobat.

"It's already started," answered an Italian, who understood the question. "I'm from Milan and a big Inter fan, what team do you support?"

The Spaniard answered but nobody heard him because suddenly a tumult of voices arose declaring: "I'm a Glasgow Rangers fan," "I support Dynamo Kiev," "I support Ethiopian Coffee from Addis Ababa," "I'm with Yokohama Marinos," and "I'm an Alianza de Panama fan."

And then, above all this noise, they began to hear a dull roar which they hadn't noticed until now coming from the Stadio Olimpico with the swelling force of a sea stirred up by a stormy wind and, little by little, larger and larger groups of dejected demonstrators started leaving the square, speeding up the further away they got. And the Swiss Guards stopped frowning and pointing their halberds at people and let a group of South Koreans take their photographs in exchange for half a dozen CDs of music for Zen meditation.

The Pope improvised a good-natured, routine blessing with the confidence of someone who knows his job inside out, then turned away from the dispersing crowd and glanced surreptitiously at his secretary.

"Please," he whispered to him, "can you find out the score?"

(Translated from Spanish by Catherine Mansfield. )
http://www.thedrawbridge.org.uk/issue_9/immortality_has_nothing_on_the/