JohnHolten

The Readymades in Lodown Magazine - Interview Coming Soon...

2012-01-23T18:10:00.001+01:00

Reading To Warmann

2011-11-20T12:38:00.002+01:00

John Holten from Paris who edited To Warmann by Djordje Bojic in an empty gallery in Brussels. Milos Lubarda from The LGB Group and the public are invited to create anew the text.

The LGB Group in Brussels at D.O.R. Gallery

2011-11-09T21:10:00.001+01:00

LGB

12/11/2011 - 02/12/2011

Vernissage 11/11/2011
19.00 - 22.00

Finnissage 02/12/2011
19.00 -

The tripartite exhibition at Gallery D.O.R. has its starting point in the novel The Readymades written by John Holten (Broken Dimanche Press, 2011) which tells the story – through a unique use of montage of found historical and contemporary documents – of The LGB Group. In order to execute the fiction of this book a collaboration with Serbian artist Darko Dragicevic resulted in the realm of the novel being extended into the world of contemporary art through the creation of a body of work corresponding to The LGB Group. Seminal works from the oeuvre of the group will be presented at D.O.R. through supporting structures such as the LGB art collection of Galerie Gojkovic, performative public interpretations of The Readymadesand relational social happenings over the course of the exhibition.

Djordje Bojić,
Zukunft I / Future I
oil and varnish on canvas, 3 x 1,5m. Private collection
2007

CHAPTER 1: Djordje Bojić LGB years: 1995-2008 Djordje Bojić.
Vernissage: November 11, 19.00 - 22.00
A curated selection of some of the seminal works of LGB artist Djordje Bojić, an artist born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1974. He studied philosophy at the University of Belgrade before abandoning his degree after the success of the show LGB with Aleksandar Gojković and Miloš Lubarda. His text based work dating from 1995 was interested in form and the concretisation of everyday realities. He was also the curator of some of the LGB Group’s seminal exhibitions. Notable shows include LGB 1995-2005, a retrospective in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (25 February - 20 March, 2008) and Around is Back Again, Today, 20 May - August 4, 2002, in Gallery Michael Jetzer. He died in Paris in 2008. His estate is managed by Galerie Gojković.

CHAPTER 2: It‘s already a success!
Saturday, November 19th – Friday, November 26th
Over the course of the second week of the LGB exhibition there will be a performative act by the publisher John Holten (Broken Dimanche Press) who is responsible for the publication of the manuscript “To Warmann“ by Djordje Bojić. Bas Jan Ader’s work from 1972, The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls will be reinvigorated by Holten in order to further facilitate the work of Bojić. Ader, in 1972, sat twice daily in an empty gallery, reading a short story. During his gallery readings, Holten will be accompanied by Bojić’s best friend and collaborator, another LGB artist, Miloš Lubarda. He will pick up certain words that play homage to Bojić’s project, each day creating a different story, different meanings.
Twice daily performace: 13h – 14h & 18h – 20h

CHAPTER 3: Three course meal
Sunday, November 27th – Friday, December 2nd
In 2011 German artist Jan Offe invited guests once more for dinner, feeling that the time was ripe to revisit the primal social scene of life: the communal dinner. The tropes of late 1990s relational aesthetics have become associated with Offe, and his dinners, replacing cutlery with our readymade human utensils, have put him squarely in the lineage of Spoerri to Tiravanija. At once a nostalgic homage to the late 1990s, when we were all that little bit younger, but also a social occasion to celebrate the on-going legacy of the LGB Group with one of the key names of the group, Herr Offe, Gallery D.O.R. will play host to the time before we’re all still in the process of over-coming.

Jan Offe
3 Course Dinner
beet root, carrot, apple, pesto, ricotta, spaghetti,
mango, strawberries, blue syrup, white wine, red wine
220 x 180cm. Courtesy the artist.
2011

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Darko Dragičević (b. 1979, Belgrade) studied Visual Arts at The International College of Arts and Sciences in Milan where he received a Master Degree in Art Direction. Since then he ́s been working in Europe and USA as a Visual Artist and Filmmaker. His works have been featured in Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (won the 3rd price with the video “Ah!“), Ann Arbor Festival Michigan, Future Shorts London, as in various solo and group shows. Upcoming events count the exhibitions at mianki Galerie Berlin, D.O.R. Gallery Brussels and an auction in Berlinische Galerie in collaboration with KUNST Magazin Berlin. Currently he lives and works in Berlin.
www.darkodragicevic.net

John Holten (b. 1984 in Ireland) is a writer and editor living in Berlin. He has a BA International from University College Dublin in Ireland having completed an Erasmus year at Paris IV-Le Sorbonne in France and an MPHIL from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland. He has curated, together with Line Madsen Simenstad and Ida Benche The Kakofonie – A European Journal of Art and Literature since 2009, showing the edited work in various European art institutions including Gallery Block T (Dublin), Stattbad (Berlin) and Pygmalion (Dublin) amongst others. He has had fiction and poetry published extensively, most recently in Lamination Colony and the AADK Press. The curated book project he co-edited represented Ireland at the prestigious Charlemagne Youth Prize in 2010, coming second out of 27 countries. His writing on art has been most recently published by The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. During the summer of 2011 he co-curated and ran the series ‘Exhibiting Literature’ at Buro BDP, Berlin. In 2011 he received a Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. His first novel,The Readymades, was published in September 2011 by Broken Dimanche Press.
www.johnholten.com

Broken
Dimanche
Press (b. 2009, Berlin) is a work of fiction. All characters, situations, conversations, scenarios, art and cultural occurrences are the invention of the publisher.
www.brokendimanche.eu

New General Opening Hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
15.00 - 18.00
or by appointment

Review of The Readymades...

2011-10-13T15:19:00.000+02:00

Read the full review here

Violence as a gift

By Anna Aslanyan

The Readymades, John Holten, Broken Dimanche Press 2011

Last July Birkbeck College held “the first” symposium on Tom McCarthy’s work (quotes are not mine – McCarthy’s). It comes as no surprise that so many people now are not only reading Remainder, Men in Space, C, but also researching them – that his novels should find an audience was only a question of time. Young writers could do worse than take a leaf from McCarthy’s book; John Holten, for one, whose debut The Readymadescontinues the European tradition without trying to pass itself as a book by a Continental author. To say that McCarthy’s shadow is hanging over it would be unfair – rather, his themes are played anew, at times convincingly, at times tentatively, but for the most part boldly and with an honesty bordering on desperation.

Tomorrow I'll Be Happy @ Motto Berlin

2011-09-22T12:50:00.003+02:00

The tour continues with one of our biggest exhibitions yet of LGB art. One of my favourite bookshops will be the venue for a unique vitrine exhibit of work from The Readymades.

If in Berlin, come along!

To mark the German launch of The Readymades by John Holten, Broken Dimanche Press are pleased to announce an exhibition by Darko Dragičević at Motto Berlin.

Found within the pages of The Readymades is the seminal text on The LGB Group (1995-2007) by one of the group's leading stars: Djordje Bojić. Extending the world of the book, BDP in conjunction with Galerie Gojković, are pleased to transform Motto's courtyard vitrines with some of the group's more renowned works.

The liminal space of Motto's courtyard will play host to work from The Readymades by:
Aleksandar Gojković (SR)
Miloš Lubarda (SR)
Elaine Pettifer (US/SZ)
Ivan Veselin (HU)
Matthias Nagry (HU)

Serbian artist and filmmaker Darko Dragičević has created the artwork.

The exhibition is presented in conjunction between BDP, Galerie Gojković and FUK Laboratories Berlin (www.fuklab.org)

The Golden Bough - Publication

2011-09-12T16:40:00.003+02:00

I have an essay in this Hugh Lane Gallery publication about artist Brian Duggan which I'm very excited about. My sister Katie is also in it, so that's nice!

Brian has work in Dublin Contemporary.

The Private Notes of Philip M. Dearne

2011-07-15T15:38:00.003+02:00

I have writing and some translation in a new book by the AADK Press. Its release is part of four day long performance festival in Berlin AADKunexpected. The project has been quite an experience: expanding a short, strange text from the inside and in tandem with Decottignies and Green. We've gone places we never imagined going...

The Private Notes of Philip M. Dearne

By Adam Green, Thierry Decottignies, John Holten – The AADK Press (Bilingual English and French).

"'A painting is not a construction of colours and lines, but an animal, a night, a cry, a man, or all of this at the same time'
(CoBrA, in 'Connaissance des arts' n° 666)

'It was only then that I noticed the position of her hand. In the course of what could only be described as some kind of fit, all be it a seemingly happy one, her dress had ridden up and revealed, bunched up above a pair of near translucent legs, the white shocking mass of her undergarments, and completely inexplicably her hand nestled inside. She was looking straight at me....'

-The Private Notes of Philip M. Dearne, a collaborative literary project by Adam Green, Thierry Decottignies and John Holten, will be presented as part of the 4-day event AADKunexpected at Galerie161 - featuring a live installation with performance artist Vania Rovisco.“

Saturday 16th July, 4 pm-6 pm, Galerie161 (Torstr. 161), U8 Rosenthaler Platz, Bus 142// www.torstrasse161.de

The Readymades - Novel

2011-07-04T15:36:00.002+02:00

My novel The Readymades, which tells the story of the neo-avant-garde group I created, The LGB Group, is off to the printer next week.

Review copies are available:

Email editorkakofonie@googlemail.com with your address and potential online/print publications and such.

Footnotes

2011-05-11T17:54:00.003+02:00

Finally I've joined a band. We have our first rehearsal tomorrow in Berlin and our first, and probably last performance on Friday. The ambition is to place several footnotes into a song.

The Readymades, or part of it, uses footnotes. They were nice to write. People have been telling me of Nabokov's Pnin, but I've never read it. I think a reader can feel a sense of the make-belief in footnotes and a writer can get lost in them.

But the other band members are certainly interesting and more talented at all this than I am, check them out. www.jeleton.com

María-Ángeles Alcántara-Sánchez (1975, Murcia)
Jesús Arpal-Moya (1972, Barakaldo)

—A team to operate in places for common negotiation such as iconographic, musical and literary repertories. To propose self-teaching practices and publishing of provisory results for debate. To subject authorship to situations of inexperience/humour/appropriation. To disperse the results through space, time and the distribution channels, so to hinder their deactivation by the presentation context.

es insoportable la idea de autor, o la idea de artista
(dora garcía @ el país)

—Jeleton's activity has been incorporated in public art research projects, exhibitions, documentary projects, workshops (recently "Manifesta 8", Murcia, 2010; CA2M, Móstoles, 2010; Casa Vecina, Mexico City, 2010; MACBA, Barcelona, 2010; Le Centquatre, Paris, 2009; Abisal, Bilbao, 2008) and has been supported by grants and research funds (recently Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, 2008).

no te preocupes me han dicho que sí que les mola / que hagas esa cosa que haces tú
("de moda", los punsetes)

Friday, May 13 Altes Finanzamt
Jeleton (text, vinyl record)
performance + opening
Turntable Piece

Artistic team Jeleton makes annotations on cultural consensus through
drawing, performance, music or writing. The term turntable is for a vinyl
record player but also for a revolving table or a turn alternator. Their
"turntable pieces" are exercises on how to perform a vinyl record, how can
be reactivated the listening or receiving situation of a prerecorded
message. Talking to the records, reading texts to them, manipulating them
through scratch.

Galerie Gojković Relaunching www.johnholten.com

2011-05-02T19:58:00.005+02:00

Please check out www.johnholten.com which is now hosted by Galerie Gojković in collaboration with BDP. I'm really excited to get to have the endlessly talented, general Renaissance man and great friend Darko Dragicevic and his work on my webpage.

This is just the beginning: The Readymades are coming!

Please continue to check back and stay in touch, more artwork from Dragicevic and news of a touring LGB exhibition this autumn will be posted online in the coming weeks.

http://johnholten.com/

Notes toward New Collaborative Project

2011-03-11T13:59:00.005+01:00

2011-02-19T16:34:00.001+01:00

"I remember the sky over Paris sulked with the streets, each sharing their grayness in return for a poor slice of the winter-season. Our first meeting happened in the Marais, a small café with a horseshoe bar which we sat at, and where this lingerer in the tortures of memory politely offered wearied answers to my questions[1]."

...

[1] Questions and answers that would later appear in Issue 23, Volume 5 of Art Monthly

State of Motion

2011-02-02T15:01:00.004+01:00

I have a short text on LGB artist Zoran Živković's meetings with John Holten in Paris. In a lovely publication State of Motion edited by the Collectivo Piso and designed by Bolos Quentes.

Firday night with Dieter Roth et al,

2011-01-29T20:56:00.000+01:00

Acervos/ Collection Catalogue

A selection of purloined "works" from the private collections of Francisco Queimadela, Lorenzo Sandoval, Mariana Caló and Pedro Serrano.
These collections consist of several unsuspected "art-leftovers" or diverted "works" from various international artists. An “acervo” as we want to present it, suggests something beyond the mere act of collecting, a creative act in itself.

This is the third presentation of Acervos, the previous ones having taken place in Sala Josep Renau (Valência) and Espaço JUP (Porto) with works from other private collections and curated, both times, by Forma Cita.

Works by:

Richard Serra, Susana Chiocca, Ben Lewis, Von Calhau, Discoteca Flaming Star, Anish Kapoor, Catarina Miranda, Andrea Winkler, Petrit Halilaj, Takashi Murakami, Laetitia Morais, Jimmie Durham, Cildo Meireles, Simon Fujiwara, Yoko Ono, Pedro André, Martin Kippenberg, Francisco Queimadela, Roman Signer, Left Hand Rotation, Masayoshi Fujita, Francesc Torres, Elfelix, Balla Prop, Giannotti & Giuriat, Lucia Antonini, Lucas Agudelo, Sofia Lomba, Alfonso Escudero, Sara Pereira, Erik Beltran, Francesc Vera, Mariana Caló, Olafur Eliasson, Maria Ptqk, Sonia Genoese, Ignaz Shick, Christian Marclay, Inês Ferreira, Graw Böckler, Alexandre Lemos, Dídio Pestana, Francisco López,João Paulo Feliciano, filipe dias De, Martín López, Anabelle Hubaut, Carlos Amorales, Jaime Raposo, Regina de Miguel, Christina Casnellie, João Alves, Joseph Beuys, Ramsey Arnaoot, Jonathan Saldanha, Virginia Pinho, Lorenzo Sandoval, Matt Mullican, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Marta Leite, Joa Gridfonte Mario Gomes, Filipa Cesar, Marta Bernardes, Hannes Broecker, Dan Graham, John Holten, Eirik Sördal, Urszula Wozniak, and others...

Apocrypha of a Kakofonie - Editorial Issue 3

2011-01-26T12:58:00.007+01:00

In a foray into curating, I ended up with something opposed to how many video art exhibitions work. A real eclectic mix, issue 3 of the Kakofonie is truer in spirit to a journal or a revue than a highly thematised gallery show in which the hand of the curator is clearly seen. In a way, the chaotic madness of the Internet and Youtube is given a frame here. Below is the issue's editorial essay.

Link to issue

Siouxzi Mernagh / Matthew MacKisack / Lauren Moffatt / Gabi Schaffner / Kerstin Cmelka / Gerard Carson / Richard Mosse / Pauline Carnier Jardin / Anna Niedhart

Hating Women
I wouldn’t for the life of me be able to say why history is full of men who hate women. Even if one were to try to answer such a conundrum, they would be left facing the question: why so much hate in history tout court? Let us look at history as a long line of emotions, a scale of feelings, good or bad, disgust or attraction, and we can add here hate and love as two more markers, with the coordinates of events and their repetitions gravitating more toward the former than the later. As soon as you start to plot emotions on a graph you have backed into a dead end.

The Circus
The curious thing about the circus is that one of its features is always to engage the audience; at some point in the evening’s show the ringleader will enter into the tiers and much to the delight of the half-worried, half-self-conscious parents, pick some child already losing the memory of being brought down into the ring to ride the back of some caged horse let loose in a 0 that never ends. The circus is for children but overseen by adults. The circus is an allusion of a trick performed well for an audience adrift in the throes of forced amnesia.

Narrative disjunction
…when the event happens people don’t notice, they don’t notice the State intervening and watching (think of Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses) and then well no, it’s just people walking along the street, the city, the Everyday as profane fairyground. WD walked home slowly, thinking to himself about the graffiti, the marks that he respected but somehow feared…

Michel Haneke
‘I always say that not only film, but books too, are like ski jumps. They have to be built in such a way that people can jump properly. But the film is the ski jump and it’s up to the spectator to jump.’ Let’s have love as a ski jump, too. Perhaps.

Self Perception/External Perception
We see ourselves when other people see us. Sartre bends down and puts his unblinking, ruined eye next to the keyhole and looks on with his breath held. Watching. Behind him on the non-creaking stairs another, the Other, creeps up and watches the philosophe watching and being arises on the dark stairwell like rubbish left on the streets after the carnival.

Interpretation
The beast. Let us not say disability instead of aggression. Revolutionary perception is akin to reasons why Big Brother would carry out an archeological dig.

Insurrection
And preserve the dignity of our people. And preserve the dignity of our people. And because you have killed innocent people and destroyed our homes. And because you have besieged this oppressed people. But the result is the same.
It is death.

Death
This cacophony in our ears then is full of death and love and misunderstanding. The circus shows us how to interpret death: cage it and then forget about it until it next rides into town. Occasionally laugh in its face.

Radio

2010-12-12T14:58:00.001+01:00

Listen here

'I, Coleoptile' by Ann Cotten & Kerstin Cmelka

2010-12-11T19:31:00.003+01:00

The book project I dreamed up and oversaw this year came to life in November, with the first launch in Berlin comprising of a MicroCaberat. I'm very proud of it, lucky to have worked with such great talent!

Buy the book and get more info here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

I, Coleoptile

Ann Cotten & Kerstin Cmelka

2010 English 

127 x 184 mm, 88 pages,

25 b/w photos 2 ill., softcover with French Flaps  

Design: FUK Laboratories

ISBN:978-3-00-032627-1

Ihre Gedichte gehören zum Größten, was deutschsprachige Lyrik dieser Tage kann: Ann Cotten

Her poems are among the greatest to be written in German poetry today: Ann Cotten

— Die Zeit

I, Coleoptile is the first full-length book in English by acclaimed Austrian poet Ann Cotten. A poet celebrated for her inventive, challenging work in the German language, often cited as one of the best poets in the language today, this collection marks an exciting chance for a wider European audience to enter the space of Cotten’s erudite, playful poetry. It also sees a unique collaboration with the visual artist Kerstin Cmelka, making the book at once a stimulating dialogue between two artists in full control of their art and a beautiful book of ekphrasis.

BDP has always been interested in these things: introducing the work of young, critically acclaimed writers into another language than the one they normally work in, as well as allowing visual-textual interaction between writers and visual artists. In this way the work is given space in an environment that can see it as considered avantgarde work: new, combative, unfamiliar, rigourous.

I, Coleoptile follows the unfurling of a series of lines of Cotten and Cmelka’s work: the unfurling of the personal in the world of an unruly, second language, the experience of travel (part of the book was realised on a residency trip to Ireland in July, 2010), the travails of Enzo, one of the book’s many ‘sprouts’, and the investigation into hooliganism and abrasion through Cmelka’s re-shooting of video stills from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s only foray into film, The Young Woman and the Hooligan.

The result is a tightly woven book of poetry and image, with a unique design realisation with FUK Laboratories from Berlin that gives the chance to enjoy some of Europe’s boldest, most original poetry and contemporary art.

---------------

Ann Cotten has publications include Florida-Räume (2010), Fremdwörterbuchsonette (2006) both with Suhrkamp Verlag. She has also published a book on concrete poetry Nach der Welt: Die Listen der Konkreten Poesie und ihre Folgen (Klever Verlag) in 2008.

Kerstin Cmelka most recently she has taken part in Gestures - Performance and Sound Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark (2010), Scorpio's Garden in the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin (2010) and the Gegenwelten-Filmfestival at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.

Speech At Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Dec 3rd 2010

2010-12-11T19:22:00.003+01:00

Guten abend, meine damen und herren,

Madames, messieurs, bon soir,

Good evening, ladies and gentleman,

It’s with great pleasure that I can stand here tonight and address you all on this momentous occasion, I’m very honoured and humbled by the opportunity. For as you all know, tonight sees the graduation of the European Law School’s inaugural graduation class, an evening that sees nine students of remarkable calibre and ability from all over the continent enter into a Europe that now more than ever needs them.

Europe, as we all know, means many things. An economic system, a legal system, a cultural matrix, a dream, a nightmare, history, the future, our very present. Without daring to offer my own definition of Europe, I can only say that Europe for me is a sea of culture, its tide reaching as far as the Urals, the Dead Sea, the polar ice caps, a little island, called Ireland. For myself now today here in Berlin, in this wonderful university so resplendent of history, it’s been a long sea journey from my roots in a small little town on a very troubled border in northeast Ireland. First as a student and teacher in Paris, then in Norway and most recently in Germany, I’ve come to land in this culture, and working in it, embracing it, investigating it as thoroughly as I can, all this has brought me to places I could have only dreamed of as a boy, in front of people as fantastical as those who populated the adventure stories of childhood: it has taken me somewhere as special as in front of you, ladies and gentlemen, this evening. And how very lucky I am.

Dear graduates, as the first of hopefully many to have completed this unique, bold course, you are exceptionally well placed to go out and enter this heaving, shapeshifting sea we call Europe. Navigating it, working in it, living in it, does not mean something abstract, despite my reliance on metaphor! No – it means working like millions have for centuries, taking over the controls that have been so carefully made by your elders.

The only abstractions I would like to talk about this evening – based on my own experiences of wrestling with this sea, of understanding the world I live in – are courage and ambition.

Because what you have experienced during your time in the European Law School and what you will experience as soon as you step out into the world of work or further study, applying this education, is what the French historian and statesman François Guizot first identified as the prime characteristic of this difficult concept Europe – that is: diversity.

To leave the country you grew up in, where everyone speaks the language you’ve known your whole life, a place where you get all the pop-culture references and the cycles of the seasons never seem to surprise: this movement takes a certain, admirable amount of courage, and is only matched in intensity by the amount of ambition you each bring to bear on your successive, diverse worlds. And no matter what definition of Europe you hold to, no matter what form it takes in your head, it is merely like the Aral sea in Uzbekistan, slowly evaporating into non-existence, without the life-giving tributaries that are your, the next generation, ambitions.

And built into ambition is the idea of success. Success is a funny thing: in our present age success would seem to hold sway over many people’s actions and intentions. But success is a hungry animal in my experience: it is very seldom that one sates success’ appetite oneself. It is masked by ambition. But let me do the honours this evening: you have all sated this determined animal’s hunger by graduating from this novel, ambitious study programme. You embody that great thing: success where nobody has succeeded before. And before you let the mask of ambition be donned once more, before you start out on your plans to takeover the captaincy of this ship, pause a moment and enjoy this success.

Everyday now we are confronted with a new ‘crisis’ in Europe. There is no doubt that these are turbulent, and dare I say it, exciting times. My own country not least has felt the pressure. And while emigration has come back to haunt the youth of Ireland, I know myself the benefits to be gained from travelling and living abroad: I came to Berlin two years ago and since that time I’ve done my best to get lost in its cultural marvels, an endless conversation with people from all over the continent eager to create something, to interpret this difficult world. For if the leaders of our respective countries meet to discuss bail-out plans and interest rates, should not we also get to meet each other? And the courage it takes to go out there and meet each other, to find our way in this new place that is somehow supposed to be different because we were born in a foreign land and hold a different passport leads very clearly to personal enrichment, personal success. And it is this personal success each one of you have already achieved that enables the structures overarching the legal, economic and political levels of Europe to exist in the first instance.

My heroes, people who left that little island long ago in times no less turbulent, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, remind me constantly while I try and find my way working in this great diversity of Europe, of the courage that it takes to set no horizon too wide. Joyce roomed around Europe with his family – not always an easy journey, met with derision from friends and family – dodging a war here, a war there, and out of it he created a success many would deem today unsurpassable in the field of literature. Europe was his launching pad, and the cosmopolitan, international centres of Trieste or Zurich – so similar to so many of Europe’s cities today – were his pool of inspiration, and out of Europe he floated works of art that immortalised one little country and showed how even it, an Ireland not yet even sovereign, could join this diverse sea of culture we call Europe.

Beckett even more so: he made France his home; he fought for France; he adopted the French language.

Heroes such as these, for me, betray the lie that the difficulties inherent in Europe’s diversity halt progress, work or inspiration. On the contrary. If the courage is taken to ride out and cross these once barb-wired topped borders, the return is multiplied infinitely: success is yours to be had. There is no such thing anymore as exile in Europe, only a change of one’s scenery. For as another Irishman, Edmund Burke stated as long ago as 1796, ‘No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.’ And it is up to us to defend and bring to fruition the possibilities built into such an amazing idea – none of us can be an exile anywhere on this continent.

And while this for some opens an extremely exciting, new moment of history, for others it creates anxiety, and recourse to those perspectives that have plagued Europe through the centuries. Your challenges today as young legal professionals are legion. The very movement of a globalised world gives rise to a need to review the legal framework surrounding immigration. Free speech, the spread of information, a common EU foreign policy – the examples are endless of what you can work toward. There are forces amassing that echo back to the darkest days of the last century and this city knows all about this echo. And the rule of law, at a transnational level, offers the prospect of what the founding principles of the EU had as their ambition: peace in Europe. Peace built on mutual understanding, respect, justice.

To take on Europe then, whatever definition of it you wish to choose, is a courageous act, an ambitious one. For we must put ourselves out into its waters in dialogue with its great, difficult history. We must confront the wars, the catastrophes as our own, the genocide and betrayals that have plagued the continent: to do this is a real graduation, a real education. Because armed with this past we can work in Europe’s diversity for a remarkable future, a future that is predicated on us having the courage to be our own heroes.

L'avenir est inconnu, mais en même temps, c’est vous. Cela est certain. Et l’avenir dure longtemps.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch noch mal.

Vielen dank.

Blind Mirrors

2010-09-08T15:16:00.002+02:00

Have written a new text and translated from the French another, to be included in the project Blind Mirrors. To be published in the first publication by the AADK Press. Also have recorded the sound installation to accompany book launch.

Event September 9, 20h at Ostbahnhof. Straße der Pariser Kommune 8 in Dome Deluxe

www.facebook.com/AADKgroup

Project co-ordinator: Thierry Decottignies

Design: Adam Green

Contributors: Adam Green (England/Germany) / I.L. Koliner (Israel/Germany) Nicolas Donlon (France/Spain) / Vincent Calvet (France) / Saar Yachin (Israel) Thierry Decottignies (France/Germany) / Yaron Dahan (USA/Germany) / Asaf Koliner (Israel) / John Holten (Ireland/Germany)

The Aedile (Or, the best training you can do for Philosophical Football is [probably] subconscious)

2010-08-22T21:16:00.004+02:00

The Aedile

In my dream the girl knows what an aedile is, the Roman magistrate in charge of public buildings, and our conversations are tendrils of smoke underneath the obtuse right-angles of a perfectly platinum-white ceiling. The talk is of stairways and porticoes, the oneiric potential of the edifices we live in.

Only of course the girl has a morbid fear of obtuse angles, borne from a bad trip in the Chelsea Hotel. And: There are other worlds than what you know. Obtuse angles bred from the girth of buildings and grow is what they do: they never stop.

So what starts as chitchat over a cigarette grows into dreams and fantasy before turning in on itself into horror, terror, the daylight delusion of a bad trip’s flashback. There needs to be laws agaisnt such things; we need to contain the buildings we meet in: we need to try and and live without them such as we try to do in our dreams.

Stimuli + Tropisms

2010-07-12T23:22:00.004+02:00

In the beginning is movement that comes from a need, itself being curiosity or neccessity: both presenting themselves as a need borne out of an active or passive stimulus.

Tropism can be a movement to acquire something new and previously not owned, or involuntary, a forced movement due to prevalent circumstances.

Tropisms can include remizing, translation, transcoding [as in the form art takes] pliage, bricolage, cut ups, etc.

Stimuli can come in many different shapes and forms and can be active or passive.

Tropisms can also be in the form of everyday life.

The purest stilmuli for many today is distraction: reloading of internet pages, status updates, simultaneous channels of information and communication; we do not need the face of Janus, but rather a multifaceted face of some unknown monster.

What kind of tropism is a novel in the face of such a stimulus?

Talking about The Readymades and other tidbits

2010-07-05T16:49:00.002+02:00

Displacement Series: Open Talks

In July PISO continues the series of open conversations with invited collaborators integrated in the Displacement Project.

These working tables will be documented to create an archive that will be integrated in the upcoming exhibitions of Piso Collective and it will be available in our webpage.

Our guests for this month are:

John Holten

John Holten has spent the last two years writing the novel The Readymades, which tells the story of a group of artists that move between Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna and Paris. The novel uses a mise-en-abyme between a thriller novel and a translation of a found academic text in order to tell these artists' story. In presenting the practice that formed the writing of The Readymades, ideas of displacement, translation and transcoding fiction will be discussed, branching out to look at the art of research, recent debates in contemporary art (and their possible use for fiction), a writer's audience in today's Europe and the impact travel and living abroad have on the fiction under discussion.

Presentation will include short readings from the novel.

Bio:

John Holten (b.1984) is a novelist and poet from Ireland. Since 2004 he has moved across Europe between the cities of Paris, Berlin, Oslo and Dublin. His fictional work has often taken the figure of the contemporary artist as its main subject matter, investigating the liminal existence of the nomad and the networked individual. His work as an associate editor with Broken Dimanche Press has also seen him involved in numerous trans-national translation projects.

Further reading:

-www.johnholten.com/lgb

-http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2005/dec/interview_clementine_deliss.shtml

-http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

-www.stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=550

-Altermodern Manifesto

-Three Ragnaröks

..................

Nina Bendzko

Bio:

Nina Bendzko studied Applied Cultural Sciences and a Masters in Creative Documentary Filming. During the past years she has worked and lived in Spain, France and Colombia, collaborating in various film projects. The most recent are the documentaries “Cuchillo de Palo” (http://www.cuchillodepalo.net/) by Renate Costa, “La Terra Habitada” (http://vimeo.com/8051825) by Anna Sanmartí and a new film idea by José Luis Guerín. Now residing in Berlin she is developing her first feature length documentary project “Zwischenräume”.

Further reading:

-ZWISCHENRÄUME

-References

Doors open at 19:00

Entry is free.

--
How to find us:

Altes Finanzamt
Schönstedtstraße 7, access through the yard
U7, Rathaus Neukölln

www.altesfinanzamt.blogspot.com

The Whiff of Sulphur in the Air

2010-06-15T15:46:00.002+02:00

I'm just back in Berlin from a week in Ireland, where I travelled to Dublin, then up to Louth, and then over and down to Offaly, before finally returning to Dublin. A lot of running around and meeting people, from Austrian embassy staff on Ailesbury Road to cement truck drivers from Armagh.

Then I went to Dusseldorf where my sister had a show opening of her latest beautiful work which moves in and around The Golden Bough. (I also got to see some of this work the day before in Dublin at the Rubicon Gallery on Stephen's Green) I then went up to crash on the couch of my brother in Oberhausen before coming back to Berlin the following day for a long weekend of partying.

I list all this not becuase this is what I normally do on my blog and any readers (if there are any) know by now that I do quite the opposite here, but because during the last two weeks or so I had the distinct feeling that no matter where I went, or who I met, I was confronted with outright right-wing rhetoric and at times downright fascism. This, needless to say, became a little unsettling. It has felt as if I was attracted to it, as if I had been out looking for it.

From people I know voting for the Conservatives in the UK elections to the simple, almost jolly, throwaway remark that 'immigrants come here and take all the social welfare, leaving none for the Irish.' To other, more stranger sights such as a father reprimanding a teenage daughter in St. Stephen's Green, on a beautiful summer's evening, my last in the country for a while, decideing to quite forcibly hit her. I mean like raise his hand high above his head and whallop the girl on the head, swearing loudly. In public. I coughed, made my presence felt. He took a moment to turn around, as if forgetting that other people may exist, and that what he just did was out of hand, before raising his finger at me and saying rather cryptically: 'Excuse me.' I don't think he was apologising.

Everything about this little act stank of what is bad about Ireland: patriarchal (the mother just stood by, looking as remorseful as the seated daugher, smoking), misogynist, not afraid to use violence to uphold 'decent morality' (yes, let's blame the fucking church), and no doubt deeply hypocritical. The only strange thing about it was that it was in public. I had also been told that the victim of rape in Listowel town is still being ostracised (for my foreign readers, yes this sentence is strange, but I'm very sorry to say I have made no mistake). And was sad to hear that the literary festival seemed to go ahead without any attempt of a boycott or such.

I could go on; it has been a strange time when people just seemed too happy to casually add a jokingly racist comment or anti semitic rant - aided and abetted of course by Isreal's own recent actions - and it is clear that no matter how well ordered and progressive us humans can be, we are just a moment away from letting out the fascist beast in us.

To round things off I was informed of someone who gave their second vote to the NPD in the recent by-election in Nord Rhein Westphalia. The person in question maintained that their first vote was for the SPD. I don't know what this means really, or the motives, but it put a full stop to what has been a pretty depressing few weeks politically.

At least people still smile.

And this blog post is dedicated to the Persian man who gave me a lift from Oberhausen to Berlin, for free, and shared his stories and his sweets and nuts with me.

Long live generosity!

2nd Prize Karlspreis fuer die Jugen

2010-05-18T17:06:00.011+02:00

So yes, surprise of all surprises occured a week ago in Aachen. BDP got 2nd prize in the huge Karlspreis for Youth. They recognised the quality of our content, our ambition to question the borders of not only 'Europe' but also what young artists and writers and activists can get away with regarding preconceptions toward them and their work. Free of any big organisation - unlike many of the other projects - our work was independent and yet sure of itself.

I was delighted to get to go on behalf of the team and pick up the prize. Line gets to go to the EU parliament this autumn.

I'd like to thank everyone here who worked with us on the book. All our great contributors, our translators (Joy!), our design team, all our hosts, all our supporters, our few and very special buyers of the book, and Youth in Action for first giving us the chance to start things.

Things went really strange just before we were all due to leave Aachen. After a week of drinking and making fun around town, I woke up with no clean clothes left, unwashed hair that was in a bad need of a haircut, a hangover, and a growing feeling that they might have meant what they said about sharing the stage with the bigwigs. An hour and a half later, live on German TV, I found myself about to vomit, and with my great imagination sat through the first half hour of the live transmission of the prize ceremony for Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk picturing myself vomiting, or fainting, or simply standing up and walking (or running, why not?) out the door. I hate TV. Always have. Now I really hate it.

Who knew making books could be so surreal?

Rue Danielle Casanova

2010-05-17T23:56:00.005+02:00

When I first went to rue Danielle Casanova I was homeless. But life was good and the swing of things went from very bad to very good via New York and back again. In the middle of listing all the places I'm sleeping this year, I think Danielle Casanova will remain hard to beat in terms of connotations, memoriesm setting. I think that's why I put it in The Readymades so much: I wanted to write about it the only way I could. Anyway, doing some half baked research I came across the above text. It's wonderful that Picabia - of all people! - lived just down the road, in I think the same building I went many a morning to buy tobacco. It was Picabia's work that started off my writing in my first story, Germania. He is, of course, big inspiration for Djordje Bojic and other LGB artists.

Tada!

First Day of New Camera by Europe's Worst Photographer

2010-05-09T17:44:00.006+02:00

The Newspaper and The Artist

2010-05-06T12:19:00.000+02:00

Guest blog

Cover Design - What's the Opposite of Covers Dictated by Marketing Departments?

2010-05-02T23:52:00.005+02:00

Nice interview, that goes three ways, between Tom Mc Carthy, Dan Wagstaff and Peter Mendelsund around the Knopf cover of TMC's forthcoming novel 'C'. Interesting to hear that Mendelsund felt that it read less as a novel but more than a work of philosophy, that it left him 'changed'. WIll TMC follow up Remainder?

Read the interview

Nice to see a designer who got so into the book and wanted to reflect that as artistically as possible with an optimal design. With Broken Dimanche we of course talk a lot with FUK Laboratories on design and I think they're turning me into the type of guy that design matters to; I've found myself interested a lot in fonts and layout. I've always been taken in by texture and constuction of books of course, but it feels like it's going up a notch.

Why do I find a Suhrkamp cover nicer than a Faber and Faber cover? And why are Gallimard covers more pleasing than both of them?

2010-04-14T10:45:00.002+02:00

Some of my recent words are over at Cristian Dragnea's Romanian-Spanish-French-English blog. Believe it. Outtakes from this long growing sprawl of pluralies Berlin is creating in me:

WE POETRY

Reading

2010-04-06T11:47:00.003+02:00

I will be reading on Saturday here:

The Buntesdruckerei

Axel-Springerstr 40, 3 OG. BERLIN

I think the nearest UBahn is Spittelmarkt

At around 8pm.

The reading will take place at the bottom of a large stairwell which should be nice, and when I heard this fact I thought of Bachelard - stairs being the ultimate metaphor for life, dreams and cauchemars. I think I'll read out a philiosophy of stairs.

2010-04-05T12:41:00.002+02:00

We say goodbye to each other at Bornholmerstrasse, we say goodbye to ourselves on the road home in loud, or first road, the road of our first darkness; we lose ourselves on it as moon alone lights stones endless and ourselves are waved goodbye to, we become one with a world beyond islands -

We grow -

We say goodbye to each other on the quay of Pankstrasse unterbahnhof and once again a train carries us away, like at Ostkruez or Gare du Nord or Oslo sentralstasjon, we go on, we carry on, with precision and ease -

We leave each other with tears and peristalsis going wrong, at Zentral Omnibus station, airports, doorways to new homes. We walk alone and go forth and each time we think we’re joining a party that’s been arranged for us singly when really it is just a waiting group, a waiting room, in caravan, that more or less or great and worse is not for one but noone and we go on - we carry on -

Regardless -

Charlemagne Prize

2010-03-11T00:01:00.002+01:00

Very honoured to have found out today that You Are Here was choosen by a couple of MEPs and the head of the Youth Council Ireland to be shortlisted in Aachen in May. The Charlemagne Prize, both for youths and elders is a very cool thing and I am down with it!

Irish winner who will compete for European Youth Prize announced

'You are here', a book project including contributions from 14 young people across Europe, was today announced as the Irish winner which will go forward to compete for the Charlemagne European Youth Prize in Aachen in Germany on 11 May. The project, which was submitted by John Holten from Ardee, Co. Louth, brought together young people born after 1980, 'who enjoy freedom of movement in Europe and work in a country they did not grow up in.' These young people have also grown up without the shadow of the Berlin Wall. Mr Holten said that the project had succeeded in creating 'greater European awareness among [the] group, including people who would normally not get a chance to meet each other or publish their work together.'

Irish MEPs Gay Mitchell (Fine Gael) and Nessa Childers (Labour Party) were members of the Irish jury, along with Jean-Marie Cullen of the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI). Ms Childers said that she was 'delighted to be involved in a competition which encourages young people to take an active interest in EU issues.' Commenting on the point of departure chosen by the winning project, Mr Mitchell stated that 'to understand Berlin is to understand the European Union project.' Ms Cullen said that 'the NYCI welcomes this initiative which rewards young people's creativity.'

The 'You are here' project, represented by Mr Holten will now join the winning project from each of the other 26 EU Member States at the award ceremony for the Charlemagne European Youth Prize in Aachen in Germany on 11 May 2010. At the ceremony, overall winners will be chosen, and they will receive funding of between €2,000 and €5,000.

The Charlemagne European Youth Prize is organised on an annual basis by the European Parliament and the International Charlemagne Prize based in Aachen. Francis Jacobs, Head of the European Parliament Office in Ireland, commented on the range of projects submitted in Ireland this year. He said that the 'variety of the projects was impressive' and spoke of the fact that 'they bring together young people across Europe, in order to exchange experiences and learn from each other.'

In 2009, a Polish youth project 'YOUrope Needs You' was the overall winner of the Charlemagne Youth Prize. Through a series of secondary school workshops run by university students, this project conveyed interesting facts about Europe to teenagers. The second and third prize went to projects from France and Germany respectively.

Berlin Reading in an Anagram

2010-03-10T23:59:00.002+01:00

Review up on Papervisualart

2010-02-25T09:48:00.000+01:00

New site, check them out.

http://papervisualart.com/?p=1454

Best European Fiction 2010 - Dalkey Archive Press

2010-02-09T17:24:00.002+01:00

Check out the full review here.

Best European Fiction 2010, Aleksandar Hemon, ed., Dalkey Archive Press, 2010

It has been said before, and often, that anthologies are difficult and prone to error, and even if they do their job right they can still leave their readers dissatisfied, yearning for more. Anthologising Europe, in any shape or form, is always a formidable challenge. Dalkey Archive Press have initiated a timely and ambitious effort to try and collect the continent’s best fiction, edited by Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon, translate it and present it to an international, mainly American readership.

This Exhibition is Not the Result of a Thesis, Bit It's Starting Point...

2010-02-05T15:24:00.008+01:00

This qoute came from the exhibition catalogue of The Death of The Audience in Vienna's Secession which Line was lucky enough to see last summer. And the on-going 'transgressions' of the thesis in question is under discussion in the latest issue of the e-flux journal, no. 13.

Meanwhile our own 'thesis' is set to continue with around half of issue 002 of The Kakofonie sourced. It's set to be an extremely interesting and mobile collection of propaganda and art. Send in anything you may have!

The conversation between Elisabeth Leibovici and the exhibition's curator Pierre Pal-Blanc is well worth checking out.

I found it fascinating because it's in the general space of the novel I've just finished writing and the avantgarde group LGB whom I've created and who lie at its centre. I could almost substitute my own creation, Djordje Bojic, into their conversation so similiar is it to what I've been working hard to create.

Take Djordje Bojić [André du Colombier] for instance, a Serbian [French] artist who is even less well-known than those named above, an incredible character who embodied a kind of late version of Dada from the '90s and early 2000s [‘60s to the ‘80s], but with a very precise and concentrated radicality. He constantly worked with common people, less showing work than giving it, a bit like a neighborhood poet, exchanging a piece of work for a pack of cigarettes, generally using the thread of the rumor, the web of the conversation. He used to call up artists or museum curators and make a work from the conversation. Bojić [Colombier] managed to represent a way of being marginal, of staying on the border of exhibitions even while being well-known by the whole art scene...

.... Of course it’s a bit too easy to hide behind the domination and exploitation of artists in authoritarian events such as biennials, but at the same time we can clearly see that the figure of the artist-hero is no longer current, but is rather a historicist view that tries to cling to the branches of the avant-garde. Similarly, in the context of the over-institutionalized Tate Triennial, “Altermodern” works like a parody of the work of the great critics of the twentieth century, up to Pierre Restany or Germano Celant, trying to create a movement. It’s still about trying to create a party, a power position, an adhesion, contrary even to how artists themselves work. Rather than oversimplify the role of the artist, it might make more sense to look outside this figure to a form of organization to be presented or prolonged, one in which the community is involved, where not only the artist but the audience provides a disseminated, deterritorialized experience for the exhibition.

- Pierre Pal-Blanc

Literature & Evil (On TV)

2010-01-13T21:02:00.001+01:00

//

2010-01-11T17:09:00.002+01:00

Piece on Brian Duggan up at Whitehot Magazine.

New issue of Greenbeard Magazine is out now and available here, includes Tunnels of Profit (Bridges of Loss)

One Year Old Review

2010-01-04T22:43:00.006+01:00

I thought I would republish this as Knausgaard, by all accounts, has taken the literary world over in Norway right now, with the publication, in six parts, of his latest novel Min Kamp. The whole enterprise sounds unique, huge in size, and very, very interesting.
Also I talk about Zadie Smith's review essay Two Paths for the Novel which is included in her new book, Changing My Mind, reviews of which I have been reading recently.

A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven

Karl O Knausgaard

Portobello Books

So the debate is on. Or rather, it continues. Zadie Smith (of all people I’m tempted to say) has waded into the session of soul-searching going on over the future of the Anglophone novel. For the last eight years, thanks mostly to the Internet and the astounding uniformity of the ‘marketable’, bland books commercial, regressive and lazy book publishers have forced on everyone, an intellectually hardened, avant-garde yearning milieu have developed. International, well-connected, non-commercial. And I’m not talking here about Dave Mc Sweeney’s Eggers. Zadie Smith is late to the debate, in the New York Review of Books review-essay on Joseph O Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder she very eloquently and intelligently, it must be said, brought to the stall of the establishment sentiments long aired on countless websites such as readysteadybook.com or 3amMagazine.com. As Smith carefully pointed out, for the Anglophone novel, ‘These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.’[1] Well, turn-offs are open, Remainder has caused tail backs (it is the undisputed champion of the so-called Offbeat Generation, revelling in concrete literariness and avant-gardism), and Smith, well-used to the highway route of the conservative novel-writing tradition whose survival she admits to ‘cautiously’ hoping in, has merely turned off late, beeping her horn loudly at the rear. But at least she’s noticed. And at least she’s had the temerity to bring it to James Wood and company[2].

But, this is not a review of a review: it is a review of the Norwegian author Karl O. Knausgaard’s novel A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven. It represents another, much more clearly signposted exit we all know well: translated foreign fiction. If Remainder does anything (and Smith did well to point this out) it highlights the easily won gains of taking non-Anglophone literary traditions seriously. But while McCarthy managed to write a French novel in English, Smith can’t even get her Robbe-Grillet right, she considers Flaubert to be somehow diametrically opposed to the New Novel! Robbe-Grillet considered the vogue for Flaubert a ‘triumph of my own views.’ It’s there in his Paris Review interview. In English. World literature is more nuanced than university modules would lead you to believe, or indeed, it would seem, the venerable pages of the New York Review of Books. Reading Knausgaard’s large, ambitious (I’m going to use that word a lot) novel I could hear the detractors immediately: far off, small, insignificant, reviewers in the Anglophone world who were going to scratch their heads, yawn rudely, and complain about the seriousness of Knausgaard’s novel, the unbridled ambition that drives this novel to a self satisfied righteousness, a grab at totality that demands the humility-liking, literary fiction with a good-plot-and-good-relatable-character type of reviewer to detract from its achievements. There are imperfections of course, but it’s telling what critics have to date pointed out as their points of dissatisfaction in the UK reviews.

This is a review of a novel, on the front cover of which is a picture taken from the 14^th century fresco ‘The Dream of Joachim’ by Giotto di Bondone; it says beside a big angel that it is A Novel of The Nature of Angels and The Ways of Man. This all seems a bit boring and pedantic. The first page takes us to 1551, to Ardo, ‘a small mountain town in the far north of Italy’ and introduces us to the hero of the novel, Antinous Bellori. We’re presently told that we mustn’t turn our attention to the ‘inner’ world of our hero to understand him. ‘Even if the events and relationships of his life were to correspond exactly with a life in our own time, one that we understand and recognise, we would still come no closer to him.’ Zadie Smith and Joseph O Neill would be in trouble here. ‘Antinous was, first and foremost, of his time, and to understand who he was, that is what must be mapped.’ Knausgaard, still on the first page, draws our attention to the legacy of Freud whose ‘confusing of culture with nature, combined with his equally fatal insistence on the external event’s inner consequences’ has messed us all up, and nobody more so than our novelists. This novel’s over 500 pages are an effort in reconfiguring of what we normally expect a novel to deliver us: we are subjected to a treatise on the nature of angels in much the same manner as a readership of 16^th century would expect and with which they would feel at home.

We’re well off the highway now, we’re lost down a turn-off with no signpost. A novel of ideas. A Novel On The Nature of Angels. A historical novel that’s thrown off the lyrical Realism whose survival Zadie Smith so cautiously hopes in; a period novel that adopts the dress of the day and goes about its imaginative business as it feels it must. I have a lot of hesitant feelings toward historical novels, I think writing a story set in the past in the garb of the present is, well, lazy and unprofitable, for both reader and writer. Colm Toibin, managed, with some success, to write in the time and character he plucked out of the defenceless ‘in-the-long-ago’ and managed to write about Henry James qua Henry James. There are other examples, and for all my reckoning (I haven’t read much 16^th century treatises or even the Bible for that matter, young Irish ‘Catholic’ that I am) Knausgaard has managed to pull off the latest such literary transposition.

If Tom McCarthy’s Remainder has been read by many as so much 20^th century French philosophy and Anglo-Saxon literary theory played out and repeated – re-enacted I should say– in a novel, than A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven is, say Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham or even Saint Augustine summed up in a sumptuous retelling of all those stories from the Bible where angels make an appearance. It uses the fictional work by the fictional Bellori, On the Nature of Angels, as its bedrock in the book’s warped and altered biblical exegesis.

While Knausgaard suffers from the threat theoretical longueurs pose to his readers’ ability to enjoy themselves, I think, ultimately the sustained gaze he levels at his subjects, at his stories’ implications, will impress. We move from the first encounter with Bellori as an eleven year old stumbling across a couple of fearsome yet forlorn looking angels, to a miraculous re-envisioning of Cain and Abel. The sheer length of this particular fable (this seems like the most fitting word) is an example of what the Norwegian is doing. A commonplace story, one of the most primal tales we have, Cain killing his brother Abel, is given a telling that would seem to want to trick the reader into believing it is of the tale’s time: its insistence on Cain’s clumsy loneliness, Abel’s pugnacious all-roundedness, the cold aloof father constantly looking down on his eldest son Cain in favour of the more charming Abel. Something strange, in short, is going on here, and I think any reader with a love of stories, of authors who write so well they disappear into the texture of their character’s lives, will appreciate Knausgaard’s ‘longueurs’, will go with him on his long, round about engagements from sentence to paragraph to whole sections of this big book. Those fond of David Mitchell will be at home with Knausgaard.

There is no Freud brought in, that’s one of the rules of the book: this is Old Testament landscape, and I read it as convincing and, I imagine, more fun then the source text.

In the beginning was the word, the sacred Logos, but the word of God, we are reminded, was of no help to the victims of God’s great flood:

The reason no-one spoke was not due solely to weariness or fear, but also because by being silent they minimised themselves, made themselves less exposed, more like the forces that presently ravaged their world. The cellar was one hiding place, silence another. If one of them had broken it, the act of speaking, no matter whether it was nervous, despairing or encouraging, would have been demoralising, for there was demonstrated their vulnerability and helplessness in all their horror: the only thing they had that was their own, that was human, was words. Words made them what they were, and what are words when it comes to the crunch|? What help are words when things really get tough?

None at all?

We are constantly given man’s point of view. God – and his angels – are just a distraction really, the source for the ideas the characters group around often bringing them hardship and strife. Noah is portrayed as an albino-type child, photophobic and who grows up indoors, a scientist by night, a naturalist occupied by the make-up of the world. A world Knausgaard feels free to portray as he wishes seeing as the Great Flood completely obliterated it. Leaving us no trace of this sinful world (they have guns for instance, in this doomed terra obliterato). I would say to take or leave Noah’s bland thoughts on fire: they’re forced and not a little boring.

And while it isn’t to be read as Freudian, we are given lots of chances to read it as just that. Cain and Abel are tied up in a cold family that favours one son over the other; the tortured, often poignant inner world of the likeable Cain are mapped out carefully. This story lays out the ‘psychology’ of man’s first fracticide with precision. Noah’s childhood family is headed by a proud, prosperous patriarch named Lamech who ‘could go an entire day without saying a thing, and then suddenly sling out a sentence or two about whatever he was thinking, which his children, if they happened to be nearby just then, found almost sinister.’ It is testament to the imaginative breadth of this novel that the author can playfully lull the reader to enjoy so many strands of thought and narrative turns and on so many levels, without little heavy handedness. And without resorting to the tried and tested Freudian-Balzacian formulas of inner characterisation.

Translated fiction like this offers a turn off from the dominant highway of current English novels because it offers new takes on the novel that don’t feel new: this novel is comfortable within its own skin, it is fresh. This composure needs to be kept in mind when taking an axe to lyrical Realism. But it’s not a perfect road to follow if rejuvenation of the Anglophone novel is what you’re after: it is, after all, fraught with problems. James Anderson has provided a very fine translation, well-levelled and holding its pitch. Portobello Books are to be commended also for taking on such a distinctly challenging novel. But, without taking away too much of the singular experience of reading this novel cover-to-cover, one had to lament that they started here, with Knausgaard’s second novel. This novelist obviously has an extremely ambitious vision for his work, and this novel offers but a tantalising, somewhat enigmatic instalment of it. In terms of important European novels of this decade, Knausgaard’s first three novels will undoubtedly go down as a seminal roman-fleuve; let’s just hope Portobello Books will deliver us the other two books.

What I’m talking about is the Coda of the book – it ties us in with a bigger story Knausgaard would seem to be telling over the course of three books centring around a character called Henrik Vankel. Out of Old Testament concerns and into late 20^th century neuroses we would seem, for the last 80 pages, to be back in the world of Freud. All the old anxieties. The anxiety Heidegger believed we have to pay for our spiritual freedom, our physical abandon in a savage environment. What Zadie Smith tried to put down in her review of Netherland by O Neill as that seemingly ‘too perfect’ expression of these old anxieties of our day and age (and literature!), are set against, in the last 80 pages of the book, a world set of free of Freud, of Balzac, that world were man met the divine in the form of angels, and ultimately suffered for it. It’s a telling contrast (a wound you could call it, a wound in the novel which the reader feels acutely) and intriguing in the possibilities it suggest. Now you just have to go and read all 518 pages to intimate what those possibilities may be.

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY LAURA HIRD ON HER WEBSITE]

[1] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083

[2] I completely agree with one of the more acute observations of this whole debacle, via Mark Twaite and readysteadybook: Anthony Cummins sums up what is going on behind the line of Smith’s camp, mainly self promotion for her forthcoming non-fiction book 'Changing My Mind'. http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20081114074911

The City & The City

2009-12-31T02:15:00.001+01:00

Finished reading The City & The City by China Miéville, which I had never heard about until it found its way into the house over Christmas. Novel of old and Slavic turns and words and layers of streets bringing out European cities on the sea, string theory, detectives and some old Europe sci fi in the world of today.

The Consistence of the Visible - Press Release English Translatione

2009-12-31T01:42:00.005+01:00

Couldn't find this press release/declaration anywhere in English so translated it myself. Currently editing a draft of a novel I needed it in English; I'm interested in the line Dada has taken, through the 20s and 30s in France to Pierre Rastany and Co. in the 1960s, himself a champion for Bourriaud and the whole scene in France that came with the Palais de Tokyo in the 1990s, 2000s. Its a strange sort of backbone that appears, at times, to be a surreptitious hign Modern line, self assured, strong. Certainly when I got to see retrospective of Nouveau Realisme in 2007 in the Grande Palais I remember being struck by how contemporary they felt, or at least how faded some of the labels seemed - relational aesthetics - in the face Daniel Spoerri & Eat Art amongst others.

Fondation D'Enterprise Ricard

10 Octobre - 22 Novembre 2008

The Consistence of the Visible

For this, the 10th anniversary of the Prix Ricard, it seemed important to me to complete the normal function of this exposition (a thematic presentation of emerging artists from France’s artworld) by having a critical preamble which would include ‘historical’ or confirmed artists. This inclusion poses a very simple question: what marks the boundary of an artwork? By what gesture is its terrain brought about, puts in places its limits, outlines the perimeter of its exploration?

In thinking of the concept of ‘bricolage’ with which Lévi-Strauss defined mythological thought, I thought to present this subjective story in the form of a reunion of fetisches: that is to say, objects which, despite their apparence of detail, represent a complex thought which is found suffused throughout them. Such is a hologramme.

This question, regarding the ‘plan of composition’ of an artwork, is not innocent or free, nor without repercussions from the choice of ‘young artists’ that continue it on.

In one way it underlines the importance of initial gestures and of the necessity, when making a work, of laying out a terrain and to define a specific manner of surveying this terrain. As so many artists today content themselves with the production of objects under a vague ‘theme’, more often than not borrowed from the contemporary ideological notebook, it is better not to forget that an artwork resembles a journey more than a mere tour of the local gallery quarter.

Elsewhere this question shares a surprising point in common, without doubt the only, between two key actors in French art whom this exposition would like to to pay hommage: Pierre Restany and Bernard Lamarche-Vadel. They were, for the young art critic I aspired to be at the turn of the 1990s, two unique role models. Between ‘the technological humanism’ of one, directed toward social production and the totalisation of the visible, and the subtle aristocraticism of the other, through the singular and the inexpressible, we find ourselves in the presence of two disimiliar trajectories belonging to two different generations, but united by the same independent spirit and a similar engagement in the world of the French artworld.

Restany celebrated in 1960 ‘the autonomic expression of the real’ in launching the Nouveau Realiste movement, which insisted in the radical gesture of ‘direct appropriation’, founder of all artistic practice – ‘automatic manifestaion of the sensible’ – explored in a new ‘urban nature’. Twenty-six years later, Lamarche-Vadel was to regroup twelve artists for his exposition ‘What is French Art’, by the pertinance of their ‘posture’ or their ‘process’, that is the invention of ‘ways to put in process (their) existance in the course of creating their artwork’. At first glance dissimiliar, these two propositions constituet in my eyes two levels of the same conceptual discourse.

The nine artists that I have choosen for this 10th edition of the Prix Ricard respond to this double promulgation: supporting their work on one hand with a collective sensibility and on the other with a personal composition, riding the waves emitted by the social but dissociating themselves from it by a singular point de départ. They can subscribe to the formula of Lamarche-Vadel which gives this exposition its title: ‘Therefore what we consider in the visible, the art work, must above all have the texture of an extreme doubt about the consistence of the visible.’

The Europeans en route to the US

2009-12-07T15:00:00.002+01:00

The New York Times. What was the biggest surprise for you, editing the collection?
Aleksander Hemon. It was less of a surprise than a reminder: how unabashedly comfortable many of the writers are to engage with literary forms that would be perceived as experimental or avant-garde here. In turn, I was reminded how deeply conservative contemporary American literature is in terms of form. And that conservative bent is a recent development, I believe. The European form flexibility is not a consequence of some snotty, elitist aesthetic but rather of the fact that there are many stories to be told and many traditions to draw from.

Q. It would be hard from this anthology to characterize a particularly “European” style of writing, to say nothing of a particularly Irish or Albanian or Norwegian style. But in your introduction, you make a compelling case for the role of Europe’s geography and history in shaping the continent’s fiction. Could you, then, venture to define what makes a story particularly “European”? What about specific national characteristics?
A. Europe is fantastically dense, varied and small by American standards. Everything is within two hours by plane. It takes as long to drive from, say, Norway to Greece as it does from Chicago to Miami. And if you were to drive from Norway to Greece, you would pass through countless different landscapes, cultures, languages, histories. Yet each of these autonomous spaces is bound together by a common uberhistory — no country or language or people managed to escape the calamities of the 20th century, for example, or the vast migrations that have been taking place since World War II, peaking in the last couple of decades. It is impossible to retain an ethnically clean space in Europe, despite periodical genocide or the exclusionary policies of European governments. What is European, then, is that cultures and literatures always see themselves in relation to other cultures and languages — sometimes in opposition, sometimes in kinship, often both at the same time. An educated European — a reader of serious fiction — is likely to speak two or more languages.

Check it out.

One Week Not Enough

2009-11-16T10:40:00.005+01:00

Book Release

2009-11-08T21:52:00.001+01:00

Ann Cotten (AT), Anna Clemensensen Bro (DK), Agnieszka Drotkiewicz (PL), Martin John Callanan (UK), Volha Martynenka (BY), Francesca Musiani (IT), Christophe Van Gerrewey (BE), Urszula Wozniak (DE).

Broken Dimanche Press freut sich, die Veröffentlichung ihres ersten Buches You Are Here ankündigen zu können. Als Anthologie mit Essays, Kritiken, Belletristik, Photographie und Dramen zeichnet You Are Here ein engagiertes Europa von jungen politischen Aktivisten und Kulturschaffenden – ein Europa, welches mit dem 9. November 1989 in Berlin in Bewegung geriet.

Wednesday, November 11 @ Basso

187, Köpenickerstrasse

U-Bahn: Schlesisches Tor

(Entrance is in the lefthand corner of courtyard)

Broken Dimanche Press are delighted to announce the publication of their flagship book, You Are Here. A ‘pantholgy’ of essay, review, fiction, memoir, photography and drama You Are Here maps an engaged Europe of young political and cultural practitioners growing out of changes set in motion in Berlin on November 9, 1989. With contributions in five different languages You Are Here has been designed by FUK laboratories™ (Berlin).

Edited by John Holten and Line Madsen Simenstad.
Design by FUK laboratories™
256 pages
18,4 x 12,7 cm
English (with Polish, German, Belarussian, Danish)
ISBN 978-3-00-028868-5

www.brokendimanche.eu

Posted Poetry

2009-09-21T10:31:00.002+02:00

The good man Colm Keegan posted me some poetry as he promised (a long time ago it feels) A very nice surprise.

Chalks

These coloured chalks

Fell into my lap

Fruit from a swaying bag

On a passer by.

So I use them.

To plead and swear

upon the slabs

That you wear and tear upon

and smooth out with your feet.

'Look at me!', I write

'I am beneath you, like the pool

from a leaky radiator,

like the roots beneath the trees.'

My knees don't feel

the cold housed in the concrete

I gave up on heat.

Your street

Is a barren whore to me

Anyway.

I seek to plant nothing

But words.

And if the rain

washes them away

If no-one sees what I say

The chalk dust

At least

will brighten the dirt

trapped by my fingernails.

Utopian Bus Tour

2009-09-11T11:14:00.002+02:00

The Utopian Bus Tour went very well by all accounts. I had a lot of fun working with the group from Mind the Gap and turning all their research and ideas into an alternative Dublin, into a city that doesn't really exist. This is obviously a theme of mine, especially when it comes to writing about Dublin. It wasn't easy though, to envision a different city, a better city even, and perhaps that's half the problem, a failure to see past our current, veyr real cities, and focus on the 'invisible cities' of our own collective potential and imagination.

Mind the Gap

2009-09-04T18:14:00.000+02:00

Mind The Gap is a collaborative public art project initiated by
Michelle Browne to work with artists, designers, architects and
planners to look at open spaces in the city and consider new uses for
them. Over the course of two months the group have explored areas
across Dublin city considering how we can re-imagine our civic
society. Throughout Absolut Fringe we will present a range of
interventions that will inform and delight. The project is based at
thisisnotashop on Benburb Street Dublin 7 where you can get
information and contribute to our exhibition of ideas for the city.

Mind The Gap is an Absolut Fringe Commission.

Participants: Michelle Browne, Siobhan Carroll, Carolann Courtney,
Mark Durkan, John Holten, Colm Keller, Issac Lawless, Bryan O’Connell,
Jeni Roddy, Naomi Ronan, Tom Walsh, Chong Wang.

SEPT 5th - 4.30pm

Utopian Bus Tour – A guided tour through
Dublin with a difference. Drawing on unrealised
proposals for the city and imagining new uses
for vacant spaces, the Utopian Bus Tour will
guide you through an alternative vision for the
city. Leaves from Smithfield Square.

SEPT 12th + 19th 8-11pm

Don’t Quote Me – Projected on the outside
of the iconic Screen cinema, Mind The Gap
looks to the silver screen to investigate
Dublin’s current dilemmas. The city, planning,
corruption, and the fall of a nation are explored
through the history of cinema.

SEPT 7th -12th

Fare Play? – Taking off in a taxi from Foster
Place, Mind The Gap will offer you a chance
to learn about NAMA while visiting the sites
of the nation’s current big question. Informed
taxi drivers will explain the workings of NAMA
and show you where it will all happen. Various
times, limited space, booking essential. Email
for details.

SEPT 11th + 18th 6pm - 6.30pm

Operetta – A lone performer looks out over the
city and sings a lament to its citizens. Mind The
Gap presents a solo operatic performance on
Foster Place of arias that highlight the current
plight of the city and its uncertain future.

SEPT 19th 12pm - 3pm

Flower Show – Following from the tradition of
competitive window box competitions in the
Smithfield area, Mind The Gap offer you the
chance to come to Smithfield Plaza and design
your own flower box display to be adjudicated
by Lord Ross of Birr Castle, Father to Lord
Oxmantown. Take this opportunity to bring plant
life to the plaza.

SEPT 20th 3pm

The Big Freeze – Goethe famously said
“architecture is frozen music.” Taking
inspiration from the architecture of Smithfield
Plaza, a brass band will perform The Ride of
The Valkyries by Wagner. This collaborative
performance highlights the
peaks and troughs of Smithfield Square
as a public space.

Ongoing

Public Seating – Mind the Gap will provide
alternative public seating in the city for
visitors and commuters over the course of
Absolut Fringe. Seating will be provided on
Aungier Street, Hawkins Street and other
city centre locations

Sunken Site – Hammond Lane – A series
of visual proposals will be presented for an
unused site on Hammond Lane and Church
Street. A collection of proposals taken from
an open call from designers and architects
explore the possibilities of the disused spaces
in the city.

Thisisnotashop – The hub of the Mind The Gap
operation, the gallery will host an exhibition of
ideas for the city. Inspired by the urban myth
that Santiago Calatrava designed the James
Joyce bridge on the back of a napkin, we invite
you, the viewer, to present your ideas for the
city of an ever-expanding array of napkins.
The gallery will also host The Smithfield
Archive presenting the history of the area and
unrealised proposals for its regeneration.

Watch out for other surprise events on our blog!

Contact us at

mindthegapdublincity@gmail.com,
www.Mindthegapdublincity.blogspot.com

Fringe Box Office
Filmbase, Curved St., Dublin 2
call: 1850 FRINGE
www.fringefest.com

Thisisnotashop
26 Benburb St, Dublin 7.
www.thisisnotashop.com

Vernissage 001.3

2009-09-01T09:41:00.002+02:00

How to distract yourself from finishing a novel, Part 1

2009-08-23T14:50:00.002+02:00

I have a lot of work to be doing, therefore distractions are on the increase. Tuesday isVernissage 001.3 in Dublin, then on Thursday I'm reading at the Boru Revue in Phibsborough, Dublin from The Bellows City. I've also been invited to work on a text for a great project that's part of the Fringe Festival that will be 'delivered' on Saturday, Septemebr 5th...

So for distraction:

Broken Dimanche Press is interested in what is going on in today's Europe, who is challenging conventions and investigating our shared contemporary. We see ourselves working across borders and in the future wish to translate writers and thinkers into other European languages than those they write in.

The Kakofonie is currently seeking submissions for our next issues:

002 will be concerned with the political, we'll be looking at social democracy in the 21st century and the political capital of the imagination and the arts vis-à-vis the rise of rightwing populism and the crash of the free market. We are open to all art forms and genres, and are particularly interested in receiving fiction that deals with the contemporary in imaginative and challenging ways.

003, this issue will be comprised of video work. We interested in video art, literary videos (including viral promotion work for books etc), experimental documentary and any other work you'd care to send along.

We have finished sourcing material for our flagship book You Are Here, to be published in November. It will include poets, novelists, philosophers, political acitivists amongst other disciplines from across Euorope, including the award winning Ann Cotten (GER), novelist Agnieszka Drotkiewicz (POL), political scientist Francesca Musiani plus many more...

At the moment we are also interested in hearing from anyone who feels committed to experimental fiction and poetry, challenging political journalism, translation and philosophy in terms of book length ideas.

Submit to :

holtenjohn@gmail.com

Multiple submissions are fine.

We will strive to reply to all correspondence.

We can't go on for ever without submissions so please send something!

Kakofonie Vernissage 001.2 Oslo

2009-08-08T13:05:00.002+02:00

Thnx

2009-08-07T12:11:00.001+02:00

Gratitude to: Sylvain Marchand & Lisbeth Løvbak Berg

Vernissage 001.2 Oslo

2009-08-06T11:11:00.000+02:00

As one of the themes of the issue is the transformative power of the walk along the City's streets, the second exhibition launch of The Kakofonie will occur outside on Grønlandsleiret, 0190, the site of the now closed Grønlandshagen. An Oslo favourite in its day, The Kakofonie will return to this shut up site and reinvest it with life for the evening. Come join us for a drink and perusal of the latest issue.

Launch 001.1 Berlin

2009-07-27T12:42:00.000+02:00

Public welfare stuffed full of cultural nourishment

2009-07-08T22:21:00.002+02:00

Everything is moving forward. I've gotten Charlie Stadtlander's crossword in my inbox and I'm like a fucking kid at christmas. The Kakofonie is proving the highlight of the summer already. Then there's Ann Cotten's text Verschwörung und Verwechslung translated wonderfully by Joy Hawley, and my head is spinning. I'm thinking, this is the shit, this is fucking wonderful. You Are Here has received three of its contributions in the last three days and I'm very excited about them, the whole thing is coming together and beginning to show that it's really going to say something. Roll on November 9!

THe Kakafonie is Coming Soon

2009-07-08T13:51:00.001+02:00

Andrea Bedorin (IT) / Andrea DeAngelis (US) / John Lalor (IRE & FR) / Patrick O Beirne (GER) / Luke Sheehan (IRE) / Charlie Stadtlander (US) / Simon Stranger & Susanne Krövel (NOR) / Pia (NOR) / Christian Ward (UK) / Karl Whitney (IRE)

http://www.brokendimanche.eu/kakofonie

Holten Activity in the Bronx, NY, USA.

2009-06-11T15:14:00.001+02:00

Read full article here, maybe if they don't ask for money.

Check out the TREE MUSUEM HERE.

La Porte Russe Remix

2009-06-08T14:27:00.004+02:00

Je vous jure que je fais pas 'un Beckett' - au contraire! PlutOt, quand Alan Cunningham m'a demandé pour une piéce sur la theme 'context is everything' pour la revue Issue, je me suis dis que la langue, aprés tout, n'est que une liste du signes dans une contexte. Mon nouvelle de 2006 The Russian Door a eu une section en anglias mais le narratrice etait francais. Ici, j'ai essayé de traduire cette section.

je dois remercier Alan et aussi Perig LeOst pour son correction. Comme vous voyez - mon francais est terrible!

Extracts from chapbook at The Cadavarine Magazine

2009-05-31T20:40:00.001+02:00

Read them here.

Short Story

2009-05-30T13:50:00.001+02:00

Short story up over on greenbeardmagazine, featuring a return of William Day.

East of Eden Lesung May 12, 21:00Uhr

2009-05-07T14:59:00.004+02:00

Bosco stealing prizes because he's a nice old man

2009-04-22T14:46:00.003+02:00

I'm very happy that my friend Andrew Fox is continuing his onward march into the overgrown territory of Irish short storydom by infiltrating that nettly corner known as the Francis Mac Manus short story comp (last year they gave it to Bosco giving rise to calls of nepotism and dodgy puppetry) Here's the list press release.

Am busy busy setting up Broken Dimanche Press. Send me words and images and I'd be happy to put them up at The Kakofonie.

So far Andrea Bedorin, an Italian poet has two storming modernist pieces up there. More forwardlooking shit soon.

DAP

2009-04-20T23:43:00.001+02:00

Two poems are up at 3AM. You can read them here.

In other news the whole Broken Dimanche thing is going well. We have web presence here.

Soon I'm going to stop using a blog warning: I'm going to stop this crap soon.

New Ireland or Old Ireland

2009-04-14T22:32:00.001+02:00

Easter Sunday in one newspaper in Ireland.

(Article by Luke Sheehan on cultism and madness)

....this Garden of Wandering

2009-04-14T12:01:00.002+02:00

Just finished The Radicant by Nicolas Bourriaud last night, after it followed me around for over a month. I lost a lot of its threads during those weeks so am looking forward to going over it again and maybe writing up a review of it. Very interesting thoughts on translation and a new culture of travel and precariousness - but saying that any hope of writing up a grand narrative is suspect, as Bourriaud himself iterates throughout. It doesn't help that everything I read on his Tate Triennial show was negative. Something else to look into.

Very busy setting up a new venture out of Parking Meter Press - namely Broken Dimanche Press. Suddenly we have resources and lot of projects on the go, as well as a whole load of ideas and future plans. Will update on that as it comes along.

Julian Gough Reading

2009-03-26T18:47:00.003+01:00

Went to Kaffee Burger last night for the first time ever. I got to hear Berlin resident Julian Gough read. He was even kind enough to offer to get me in gratis, a good soul indeed. He's interesting because he is one of very few Irish novelists doing something interesting and decidedly non-John MacGahern. Cervantes and Ballard were both mentioned in the course of the reading, in positive ways, so that means it had to be good.

Afterwards I had to rush off and have drinks with friends. Realising just how far away Australia is and what a shame distance is sometimes.

Short Winner in Symmetry of Flaws

2009-03-21T18:25:00.002+01:00

Just found out today that my short on William Day Tunnels of Profit (Bridges of Loss) has won The Symmetry of Flaws competition over on greenbeard. Nice surprise.

Work going well on daDa project too. Don't have enough money to travel to Serbia, Bosnia or Budapest which is a setback however. Need to win a lot more prizes I guess.

Sektzeit.

Old Essay on Small Press Publishing

2009-03-20T21:38:00.004+01:00

Unremaindered Remainder: a Case Study in Successful Small Press Publishing

Or,

How to Publish a Good Novel in a Roundabout Way

Because, in spite of what he said, it’s not the reactionaries or the old fogey’s who pose the greatest threat to the novel. It’s the dilettantes. The gentlemen (and –women) amateurs. The resting actors and the bored journalists and the ubiquitous media people hungry for kudos and the talented but directionless Oxbridge graduates who’ve all got agents queuing up to take them out to lunch. And because it’s so easy for these people to get published, we end up with bookshops piled from floor to ceiling with novels that aren’t really novels at all, written by people who haven’t given the form and its possibilities a tenth of the thought that B.S. Johnson gave to it before he even set pen to paper.
(Coe, pg. 7)

This essay is about what one of the last English modernists, B.S Johnson, thought to be the threats facing the novel in the English language. It is concerned with writers, like Johnson, interested in the form and new aspects of the novel and their difficulty in getting published in an environment driven by the concerns of large businesses rather then the artistic concerns of individual novelists. It will look at these aspects of publishing by focusing on one contemporary publication history, that of the novel Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, a writer not far removed from the artistic rigour Johnson brought to his writings. In the process of outlining this case history, the importance of literary production outside the Anglophone world will be stressed; the importance and continued security of small, independent publishing will be argued for along with, in an age of ever increasing celebrity and bestseller-fixation, a realistic and focused outlook for new writers and their art.

Each country is a different publishing environment – even within the Anglophone world there exists a wide spectrum of markets and audiences. But this essay is arguing the difficulty of treating the novel as the art form it inherently is and the restrictive restraint put on it by nationality. The novelist is open to outside influence, to die Weltliteratur qua Goethe, and if their publishers are not, then the true aesthetic value of the work will be, in a large, important part, lost. Milan Kundera points out that it is the big context of the die Weltliteratur – not of global Anglophone literature it must be stressed – that alone is best capable of understanding any novel’s aesthetic value. It is a risky business, as far as maintaining an audience’s interest, but necessary he says: a novel’s aesthetic value is not just about the story or the message it conveys, but also how it conveys it. The novel is up against other, more mainstream media such as television and cinema that convey stories just as well, if not better, to the masses. This is to say, that an avant-garde novelist tries to light up the unknown aspects of the novel, find out the newness of form necessary for its continued good health. (La Rideau, p 51) And this spotlight on something new, this looking forward, is clad in that thing which this essay’s argument will hinge. Cervantes’ first publishers knew it, Sterne’s first publishers knew it, Sylvia Beach certainly knew it: risk. This, more than anything, is what we have to talk about when considering the avant-garde writer and the world of publishing. Risk is important for any artist in any media, especially, I am arguing, for what I term the avant-garde novelist; but risk is bad for business.

So the question arises today, as I see it: is the only way to originally respond to the novel’s big context of die Weltliteratur, to push it forward as a form and get published, to by-pass the no risk world of big business and conglomerate publishing houses and go to small presses? Those tiny, shaky businesses driven first by the desire to recognise the high aesthetic value of work they like and who worry about the mass commodity value of it second.

We need to go back to 2004 when Clementine Deliss and Thomas Boutoux, two contemporary art curators, started going about establishing such a small publishing house in that erstwhile centre of literary embarkment, Paris. They made the decision to take Clementine Deliss’ international Metronome series of art publications to a new level and to start looking for those writers who felt there was a ‘renewed need for stories, narratives, and forms of fiction that stimulate and nurture the imagination’ (Le Joker, unpaginated). Their paths were to cross with Tom McCarthy soon after and together, inside the next eighteen months, they would produce one of the most unusual success stories in contemporary publishing.

However, in terms of the larger, historical story of publishing, there wasn’t that much unusual about it, in fact. Indeed, if anything, this merger was to be couched in past avant-garde practices. Deliss and Boutoux’s new venture was to be called Metronome Press and it was to bring their series of artistic publications to the level previously set by people like Sylvia Beach, George Reavey, Jack Kahane and, more significantly, Maurice Girodias. The contribution these people made to 20th century English literature does not need to be stressed here: the first pair both published Joyce, Kahane in the 1930s going on with his Obelisk imprint to publish such luminaries as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Frank Harris and Laurence Durrell. The later man, Girondias, who was to be of particular influence to Deliss and Boutoux, founded the Olympia Press in Paris in 1953. In the post-War years Girondias gathered together scores of displaced British and American writers, all living or passing through Paris and produced ‘DBs’ or ‘dirty books’ under his Traveller’s Companion series. Girondias, as a business man, knew what would sell, and in order to keep his fledging press alive he got some of the best writers of the time to write smut, place it alongside pornography, and sell it. This financed the serious stuff on the side. But it was more than just a cash source: beside the tits and ass he would ‘seduce’ people into buying the new collection of titles with an exposed ankle of script or seductive shoulder of a new novel.

In comparison with the Arts Council reliance and the increasing pressure of conglomerate-takeover of many small publishing houses, Girondias seems adventurous, risky, and perhaps, creative. It worked for him (for a while at least): he published the original English editions of some of the seminal works of that century: JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Nabokov’s Lolita, Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Beckett’s Molloy, to name just a few. He worked against any idea of moral censorship for reasons that seemed to come down to aspects of his singular personality as much as his passion for literature.

How does this relate to the situation half a century later? It does so by giving the framework, and style, to Deliss and Boutoux for them to self-consciously copy and appropriate and in so doing start Tom McCarthy’s career as a novelist.

Tom McCarthy (b. 1969) has led, one could say, the usual sort of life for his sort: his route to publication took him to Europe, Prague in the early 1990s, then to Amsterdam where he was literary editor for the local Time Out and later worked in television and editor in various publications. The first novel he wrote did not make any head way and was not picked up. Around this time he became heavily involved in the London art world, tellingly heading his own fictive avant-garde network, the International Necronautical Society, which echoed Modernism’s big avant gardes, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrrealism, through its structure, organisation, manifestos et cetera. It seems that creatively McCarthy admired his contempories in the artworld for their engagement with his first passion, literature. It also seems to have been a difficult time for a highly literate, passionate author well read in high-end literary theory (McCarthy has taught in Central St. Martins and the London Consortium) and whose work seemed to have little chance of being published. As he put it three years later in an article for the London Times, the distance between the mainstream publishing world and the world of his audience and his work, was widening:

A few years ago I was invited to a dinner for young British novelists at the ICA. The other guests were for the most part successful published writers – unlike myself back then. The talk was of lucrative three-book deals with major publishers, review coverage, agents – anything, in fact, but literature.
When I steered the conversation with a couple of my neighbours that way, I discovered way: they were both indifferent to, and largely ignorant of, literary history. Sure they’d read a book or two by E.M. Forster or Jane Austin back at college – but Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Sterne, Cervantes? Forget it. I did end up having a great conversation about Bataille and Sade, but it was with one of the institute’s curators. (McCarthy, The Times, June 23, 2007)

Nothing in this excerpt should be very surprising, indeed one is tempted to say there is a time and a place for everything, including Joyce and Bataille, but what is surprising and worth pointing out is the insight it gives of a young, unpublished novelist’s disappointment with the mainstream and the honing in on, the identification of, his core target audience. In 2001/2002 McCarthy’s second effort, Remainder, got stonewalled by the conglomerate houses due to a lack of interest from editors or resistance from, as he has said ‘the marketing people who run these places nowadays’ (ReadySteadyBook, interview with Mark Twaite, 18 December, 2005). He turned his attention more and more to the visual art world (it should be pointed out that McCarthy had no background or training in visual art) and seems to have had there, as a literary enthusiast cum budding young novelist, a great time! In the same interview with Mark Twaite he said: ‘In the current climate art has become the place where literary ideas and themes are creatively discussed and transformed – not publishing.’

So this was to be his first audience, the art world – he had correctly identified where the audience and engagement he saw fit for his novel existed. And this is where Deliss and Boutoux with their Metronome Press step into the picture and make McCarthy a lucky novelist by being publishers who fully understood and respected his artistic ambitions as well as understanding, importantly, his audience very well.

Remainder is a novel in which the narrator has suffered an accident that leaves him with a case of post-traumatic syndrome, as well as 8.5 million pounds in compensation to idle away. After a severe bout of déjà vu he embarks on an elaborate series of re-enactments of varying scale, banality and increasingly violence. In a search for authenticity his re-enactments are exact, repetitive and increasingly, deranged. It's a clever narrative for a clever book, a decidedly ‘non-British’ kind of novel involving many echoes of Robbe-Grillet (a hero for McCarthy) and the nouveau roman. 3AM Magazine even called it the first French novel written in English! But saying all that, the style is limpid, clear and it is not at all a difficult read – if anything it is funny, accessible and oddly engaging, a very good read in short. McCarthy was pleased that some reviewers made the link with a lot of contemporary art practice in which artists rebuild and re-enact scenes, stories, environments in videos and within galleries , but he made his narrator an ordinary Joe Blogg without any literary or trendy art world knowledge. The book explores ideas, unusual high end literary concerns, but doesn’t have a word of philosophy in it, or any moralising at all. He very obviously wanted to write a straight up novel, that was not a piece of art or theory, but just a good novel.

When Deliss decided to move into fiction publishing she asked Tom McCarthy if she could read his novel because she ‘was curious to follow up the hunch that fiction within art practice might be the way forward.’ (3AM interview); she knew McCarthy from the art world, liked the novel a lot, and decided to take it on as one of Metronome’s flagship books. Along with Remainder the other novels to be published were Stunning Lofts by Tom Gidley (an artist and co-founder of the powerhouse Frieze art magazine); Fat Mountain Scenes by Phyllis Kiehl (a German artist and writer); and The Young and Evil, a reprint of the 1933 gay cult book by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Deliss said that Metronome Press was to be ‘inspired’ by Olympia Press (she didn’t want, understandably, the multiple bankruptcies that plagued Girondias!), it was to be based in Paris, publish books in English, but not to have any one particular nationalist identity, French or otherwise. As well as being romantic, with a strong wiff of nostalgia, Paris was convenient as a location in that it was considerably less expensive to print books in France than in say, the UK. The books themselves were elegant, compact and reminiscent of an Editions des Minuit or Gallimard paperback.

Judith Ickowicz, a French lawyer and friend of Deliss and Boutoux made out the unique ‘contrat d’agent de passe’ which made Metronome Press a crossroads between places of creation and assured that Metronome Press would act as both publisher and intermediary, a place that, as Boutoux said in a letter in 2005, ‘on (sic) the long term… could give Paris a kind of maison de passe, a place unlike a museum or gallery [or publishing house for that matter!] … where you meet other patients in the sense of people who don’t want to see things happen instantly, and who are not drugged by visibility.’ (Le Joker). In another clause Metronome Press promised the movement and dissemination of the books across geographical frontiers, building bridges outwards from Paris to the major cities across the world. The contract acknowledged the ‘caratère expérimental’ of the initiative and therefore the need for it to function at first on an ‘échelle réduite’, a reduced scale. I think this is very important point in the genesis of Tom McCarthy’s (and Metronome Press’) subsequent success.

The bridges built by this very modest publishing house where precise structures: Metronome Press was only going to supply their books to art institutions! This may have been a literary affair but it was for a very definite audience: the contemporary visual art world. Each novel had a print run of 2,000 copies, selling at €8.50 a unit (£6.50). In France the books were distributed personally to all of two bookshops in Paris, at the Jeu de Paume gallery in the Tuileries and the Palais de Tokyo gallery; in London they appeared in five bookshops such as those in the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Tate Modern among other art institutions.
And with these basic bridges in place, Remainder, quite simply, took off. The art world immediately appreciated its strong concern for matter and representation and saw in it a warm send-up of much of the art being produced at the time; the online literary blogging community reviewed it and interviewed Tom McCarthy himself. The importance of the online literary community cannot be underemphasised in mapping out McCarthy’s success. Only a note can be made about this emergent scene, resplendent with echoes of bygone days, of literary salons and writing circles, the literary e-zines of today are themselves avant-garde networks of which even the big UK daily newspapers must keep tags on to stay up to date. Reviews also appeared in the TLS, the Independent, the Independent on Sunday as well as a full page in the London Review of Books. Crucially, within the contract devised by Ickowicz there was a clause stating that ‘Metronome Press can publish previously unpublished manuscripts without excluding their authors from the possibility of such Metronome Press publications being acquired by a maison d’édition litéraire classique in France or abroad.’ (Le Joker, translation by the author). This perhaps being the key bridge and one that was crossed by McCarthy, and once over he looked around the literary landscape that he had found so inhospitable a year or two previously. There he discovered a new, internationally minded independent press, Alma Books and joined their bourgeoning list. And the terrain grew stranger still – McCarthy soon had an excited email from Marty Asher, US vice-president and editor-in-chief of Vintage, an email full of enthusiasm about Remainder. He is now represented in the US by Melanie Jackson and on Asher’s impressive list. Further into this new landscape, McCarthy sold the film rights of Remainder to FilmFour (the film is in pre-production). The foreign language rights were sold to Japanese, Korean, Greek, Spanish and Croatian houses and in 2007 a French version (entitled: Et ce sont les chats qui tombèrent) was published by Hachette Littérature.

I argue that a lot of this came about by McCarthy correctly understanding what his audience was and the ability of small presses to find them, starting as he did with the smallest of presses imaginable, and choosing Alma Books over the bigger houses that started to reconsider Remainder. Once the reviews came pouring in his response to the many conglomerates who did about-turns and offered to take his book up was full of pique, the kind of pique that had driven BS Johnson before him (‘Well, fuck off: it’s the same book as it was two years ago.’ Tonkin, The Independent) Asked in an interview about the reception of Remainder McCarthy answered that he was, without surprise, very happy with the response and the reviews. But his response is more precise than just a writer basking in the limelight after years in the dark. His response is a worthwhile apercu into the necessity that any intelligent writer needs to know what they want from the realities of the industry:

[Remainder] seems to have by-passed the commercial sector and gone straight into the critical one, which is exactly where I wanted it to play out. Distribution is a problem, though. A corporate publisher would get your book into all the bookshops - but then to be with a corporate publisher it seems to me that your book would have to execute the kind of brief dictated by their market research teams, which would make it not worth writing in the first place. You may as well go into advertising and become a copywriter instead. You'd make more money that way, that's for sure! (McCarthy, ReadySteadyBook)

Alma Books was the perfect house to take this unabashedly literary, Gallic flavoured text on from Metronome Press. Founded just around the time of Metronome Press’ launch, October, 2005 by Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini (also the founders of Hesperus Press) Alma Books’ intention was to put out between twenty to thirty titles a year, forty per cent of which would be translations from European languages. Their partnership with the Oxford non-fiction publisher Oneworld resulted in them also handling the acquired Calder Publications, along with John Calder’s infamous bookshop near the Old Vic in London – a fitting continuation with past European literature in the same spirit as Metronome’s relationship with Girondias. Added to this open, decidedly literate family of ambitious publishing, McCarthy could further enjoy the dedication Gallenzi and Minervini were obviously disposed to deliver to their list:

The company's whole emphasis lies on quality over quantity, all the way from choosing projects for publication to creating the physical look and feel of the books. Alma works closely and intimately with authors to develop the best possible finished scripts, and displays a commitment to the kind of professional editing, copy-editing and proofreading that is dying out elsewhere. (Company Statement, www.almabooks.co.uk)

In short this is an environment in which a novelist could actively engage with the weltliterature of the form and develop challengingly and appealing new forms. Publishers of novels have to be open to outside influence and the reality of literature; without adopting a Marxist approach I argue that if the logic of commodity marketing is applied at editorial level the work that gets produced will be far removed from Kundera’s idea of the aesthetic value of the novel and its ability to advance in form. It is risky to produce and publish this sort of work, that is not being denied, and that is why it seems that small presses are so important. But more than that, the funding that they receive is equally more important. In the UK it seems that funding by the Arts Council has gotten so poor for presses that only in the last few months of 2007 it was announced that a huge impersonal conglomerate would have to bail out a small press such as the Dedalus Press by Informa, a subsidiary of Routledge, due to obligations of ‘corporate responsibility’. This is an exemplary case of the quandary of independent, international minded small presses: Dedalus Press’s £25,000 annual funding was withdrawn by the Arts Council, and as such the press was threatened with imminent closure. Informa moved in, with promises of exerting no editorial influence and three years of assistance. Dedalus’ Eric Lane is now planning to sue the Arts Council. (The Guardian March 7th, 2008) It can be noted here that in 2007 the Arts Council of he Republic offered considerable support to, among others, New Island books (€100,000), Lilliput press (€80,000), Carysfort Press (€100,000). And there is no doubt that this support helps these houses publish novels that may otherwise not be published in Ireland. Smaller presses such as the Stinging Fly Press also have published a small number of important books (most notably in the context of this essay, the formally exuberant Watermark, 2005, by Sean O Reilly). This support is vitally important, because just like in the visual art world were non-commercial art spaces are publically funded in order to guarantee the creation and circulation of non-commodity based art works, the Arts Council needs to fund independent literary publishers directly.

Last year, during a conference to mark the centenary of small press avant-garde publisher George Reavey, a round table discussion that included the poet Billy Mills agreed with the idea of Professor J.C.C. Mays about there being two basic ‘types’ of writers. Those writers who have a lot invested in reaching the biggest possible audience (a writer whom is more and more up against strong competition from cinema, TV, the internet) and a more ‘writerly’ writer who is concerned more with the text, the form, and who sets out to find the unknown aspects and new forms that this essay is arguing are so important for the novel’s continued vigour as an art form. This essay has shown how such small presses render their services perfectly to serious writers passionate about their art form. I would posit that Tom McCarthy is a ‘writerly’ writer, who made the cross over from small press publication to global rights and mass readership. The response to Remainder alone shows that there remains a wide appeal to books that try and push the form forward in terms of both form and content.

It should be restated here that this essay is not some sort of lament for the neglect of the Modernist project in contemporary literature and publishing or indeed a lack of avant-gardism, it is a study in alternative paths to publication for, in want of a better word, ‘alternative’, unapologetic literary fiction. There are a whole plethora of books and writers that I am currently excited by and engaged with, the problem seems to rest in the dissemination, the reality of the market and assuring a wider audience for challenging, literary work. There are a multitude of diverse outlets for quality writing, as this essay has shown. Even as I write Penguin books have launched a new series of ‘digital short stories’ with writers such as Toby Litt, Naomi Alderman and Mohsin Hamid, attracting no doubt an audience more comfortable – sadly – with computer games than hardback books. For the novel too, there are constantly influences outside it that force welcome change and crossover of forms. As Tom McCarthy himself said of the current climate:

I think it’s a great time to be a writer; it’s just an awful time to publish. But…a result of the closing out of literature by corporate publishing here in the UK has been that literature runs underground and bubbles up elsewhere: art, film, philosophy and so on. The borders between these disciplines get blurred, there’s hybridization, new forms emerging. That’s a good thing.

Perhaps here is where a ‘readerly’ writer can find their mass audience – the danger being that what they wanted to do in the first place, write a book, will be lost and subsumed by the other discipline. One problem would seem to be that gifted ‘writerly’ writers now produce work with very little idea of for whom (or indeed how) their novels will be published. Eager to take any contract that comes their way, these writers are more likely to sign their books off to the first conglomerate that comes asking. To whom they plan to sell the book is not considered outside the marketing department; artistic success lies in a few good reviews, maybe a place on a shortlist or other, the people sat in front of their TV sets watching one book club or other (a real non sequitur, that one) that features their literary work. As Boyd Tonkin put it:

Literary fiction in Britain is in a quiet but deep state of crisis. While plenty of publishers and agents aspire to nothing higher than the mass-market heaven of a Richard & Judy pick, awareness-raising rituals such as the Man Booker shortlist make more modest waves then they once did. Beyond the odd blue-moon emergence of a David Mitchell or a Zadie Smith, the business no longer knows how to lead ambitious younger novelists out of a shrinking comfort-zone of coterie approval. (The Independent, 21 September, 2007)

Crucially, this last ‘comfort-zone of coterie approval’ is ambiguous – I am arguing that what Tonkin means is something close to ‘the actors and bored journalists and ubiquitous media people’ that BS Johnson had railed against. Because for a writer who cares deeply about their art and wishes to expand their talents as much as they can within its forms, mainstream approval should not equal artistic success, at least not immediately. Nor should sales figures, nor should a place on some shortlist or other. All artists need to survive (along with everyone else involved in their business) and I am not denying that fact. But to state, as the latest Booker prize winner has, that money helps as a means of measuring your success is, I feel, at a very far remove from the process of art, from the majority of writer’s lives and is, simply, economics not art. In fact I would go so far as to suggest that some novelists, out to cut their own idiosyncratic path, need to work toward much smaller sales figures and to focus on getting the right publisher – no matter how small, how local, how left of the field, and to concentrate on getting directly to their audience, the one they should hope will fully appreciate and engage with their work. This was, after all, the key to McCarthy with Remainder and the art world.
McCarthy went on to publish that first book that was turned down many years before, Men In Space, in autumn 2007. Personally I find this an odd decision for Alma Books and McCarthy to have made. This was an older book, pre-dating Remainder by several years; he reworked large parts of it and it was well covered in the media, releasing another wave of publicity and internet activity in the same vein as Remainder. While not as engaging as Remainder, the appearance of his book perhaps in a way aided McCarthy to finally shake off the restraints he felt from the mainstream publishing industry dating back to his very earliest efforts in publication. And then with Granta Books he published the very well acclaimed Tintin And the Secret of Literarture. All of which hopefully means he is now well ensconced in the literary landscape that Metronome Press delivered him into during the autumn in 2005, and will continue to push the novel in new directions by being able to follow his own unique course as an artist and novelist. A position that is very difficult for young writers to reach, but a position this essay has shown not to be completely out of bounds for those writers eager, intelligent and open-minded enough to get there.

[Essay submitted for academic requirements TCD, Dublin, 2008]

Some of the Poems I read at midnight poetry

2009-03-14T17:50:00.006+01:00

Enjoyed my first public reading of some of my poems. Nice crowd in the very nice Coffee Karma cafe.

Here are some of the poems I read.

Definition

The second largest river in Europe
flows for 1,770 miles,
that being 2,850 kilometers,

from southern Germany to eastern Europe,
this riverrun drains roughly 315,000 square miles
of land, that being 815,000 square kilometres,

it has the largest volume of flow of any European river and
beginning in the Black Forest it empties into the Black sea.
The Germans call it die Donau, I call it the Danube.

(and I thought it was nice place to start).

Bridge

Poland, Paris,
Frankfurt am Oder,
Cottbus.

The ice packed by
countless pedestrians
marching on the ascent
to the station or Kreuz-
berg further across the river.

Going home,
but where’s ‘home’
I do not know, and this makes
me think of all those
extent in the world, right
then under the falling sky
who wish they were on
that train, or that train,
or perhaps standing with me
viewing this O2 World,
this very particular advertisement,
not the one closer to their home,
and whether I want to be
in their place:

crowding at the doors
between carriages yes,
as the train glides into
the Ostbahnhof,
or maybe, with forgive-
ness needed from one,
on my way to others’:

Warsaw, Paris,
Frankfurt am Oder,
Cologne.

Nominal Shifts.

Chaos was the goal, an aim to smash one set of facts against another and to end up living nowhere, to spend the future killing the world, hobbling between the broken list of low-cost destinations as if the apocalypse had descended and différance had grown and finally taken over, leaving nothing identifiable, nothing recognisable or accountable, all footholds gone and obliterated.
Ciampino is not Roma, Torp is not Oslo.
Paris is not Beauvais, the Pryrenees are not the same as Pau; Skavsta is not Stockholm nor is Vasteras; Treviso is not Venice; Brescia is not Verona; Vitoria is not Bilbao; Altenburg is not Leipzig; Girona is not Barcelona; Charleroi is certainly not Brussels; Weeze is not Dusseldorf; Pisa is not Florence; and Stansted is not London.
Torp is not Oslo. Oslo is not Torp.
And while we’re at it: Dublin is not Dublin.

New Bolaño Apparently Found

2009-03-11T23:22:00.004+01:00

Great fucking news that there are even yet more unpublished books belonging to Bolano yet to be published. Recently the man's been weighing heavy on my writing, interfering almost, but I happy for him and his soul that he's got more to give.

Here's the story. (Not that I normally want to encourage anybody to read the dreadful paper that is the Telegraph but it's new Bolano and I'm in a rush)

Interesting blog listing the obvious about independent publishers in these joyously bleak times.

Who said there was anything to be scared about?

Midnight Poetry

2009-03-09T20:57:00.002+01:00

Friday 13 March

11:45 pm

Cafe Karma

Sonntagstrasse 30 (S-Bahn Ostkreuz)

I'm reading some poems this Friday in Berlin. More info here.

Lady Gaby did a good review of all the lit events going on in the city for 3AM. Midnight Poetry and Kaffee Karma get a mention.

Tom McCarthy is in town this weekend too, reading as part of the launch for the German edition of Remainder. Am looking forward to that.

So Long Net Book Agreement

2009-03-03T16:27:00.002+01:00

Very fine article over in LRB by an erstwhile editor. The sense of confusion and, at times, angry dismay, at what the recession etc is doing to publishing is given a good meaningful overview.

If anything it just highlights that commercial concerns are a dead end, both for writers and publishers. Indeed, nowadays it seems like a very good idea to forget commercial aims and concentrate only on the writing. Another good thing about Colin Robinson's article is that it reminds everyone the importance of reading: to read is as important - or even more important at times - than to being read.

House of Leaves

2009-02-26T22:25:00.002+01:00

So I finished reading House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. I was dissapointed in that it wasn't more scary, I never read scary books so thought this would scare me more or something. It was good though, typographically and in ambition. CLever, but also a piss take on being clever.

Danielewski was, I think, the cameraman on the weird and somewhat interesting documentary Derrida. I remember watching it and after I got used to the annoying American voice over talking rubbish, found looking at the old man, who wrote so many words, and who had so many words written about him, almost disconcerting. Watching TV in his little Paris house in that city's interminable suburbs over breakfast. Talking nonsense about love...I wonder if he ever looked over Danielewski's MS.

Don't know what to read next. Have the BS Johnson Omnibus Picador, I think, put out. But I read must of that last year.

Got a new writing studio in NeuKoln for the whole of March so am going to start back into the Dada story, work on poems and maybe some visual work as well.

My last novel, Locus Domus I'm now calling it, has had its recent setdowns. My enthusiasm and belief remain low in it right now.

Remixing

2009-02-11T18:14:00.005+01:00

I've recently stopped writing what it was I had planned as I suddenly realised I was writing boring realist work for others, publishers and prize judges. It was never supposed to be like this I felt, it was supposed to be always new and always exciting. By challenging myself I would challenge my readers and they would repay the effort with their interest and their time. Instead I was shortchanging them, and selling out on myself (without making any money).

The industry of short story writing for instance is a prime example how contemporary English prose is mummifying itself into routine traditional formats that offer nothing new to the reader. Life has changed since Dubliners, everything has changed, and the idea that there should be a strong continuity in the form seems wrong. It is condensed, so there's not much room for maneuver sure. But to think that flast fiction - what a bastard term that is - and other such distortions make literature contemporary is poor avantgardism.

Anyway, fuck all that - recently I've started to 'remix' old work, just like all my favourite DJs used to do when I was younger. All the published work I've had so far is up for change, a remix of form and even content, expansion, repetition, distortion...The only 'short story' I've had published that doesn't need to be remixed is Valhalla: Some Scenes in Foreign Places - and that's because I didn't have to worry about who was publishing it.

I submitted a remix of The Russian Door (west47, 2006) called la porte russe remix Alan Cunningham's small art zine Issue 2.

Here's a preview:

C’est nul. Ridicule. Une putaine de connerie et ça m’ennerve.
Cet mec est un idiot, un vrai con.
Ça ne me ressemble pas d’ecouter des mecs si longtemps.
Le paradis? – c’est pas les autres. Pas les irlandais en tout cas.
Il y a trois ans une amie était en couple avec cet irlandais – deux ans plus tard j’étais lá bas, dans la capitale, pleine d’ennui, toute seule &tc, &tc et on s’est croisé dans la rue Nassau – juste comme ça. Tout simplement il m’a regardé avec un air plein de haine, plein de désir, mes seins comme un spectacle français – pas un spectacle slut-fuck.

UPDATE: Something strange - the selfgenerating guru Tao Lin posted the same day about remixing his work as I did. Strange. It is safe to say that I don't have affinity with Lin, artistic or otherwise.

Short Story Andrew Fox - New Irish Writing

2009-02-04T16:33:00.001+01:00

My friend Andrew Fox has one of his fine stories in last week's Sunday Tribune.

Check it out here.

Three Novels

2009-02-03T12:04:00.004+01:00

Have three reviews up on Laura Hird's latest site.

On Julia Leigh's Disquiet

Chris Killen's deput, The Bird Room

And the singular Norwegian novel, A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven

I jump into the debate Zadie Smith highlighted with her NYRB's article on Tom McCarthy vs. Joseph O Neill. Interesting times...

Went to the American library in Kreuzberg yesterday, got out some CDS, DVDS - listening to Underworld for the first time in an age, rocking like it was the late '90s...

New website/blog

2009-01-24T15:54:00.000+01:00

I got bored with my old website. It can always be reviewed here, but depending on how successful this new blog-turn goes, it will not be updated there. All new material will appear here.

In a way I feel stupid as in a forthcoming review of Chris Killen's The Bird Room I prattle on about how I didn't have a blog but a website - 'a different beast somehow', is what I said. And it's true. But after looking at statcounter results for two months I realised that the multipage website doesn't garner any real advantages and that few - if any - browsers bother clicking and reading.

And I don't blame them.