Review: The Golden Calf

Talk hard. There are some books that everyone should read. Books that would make us better; make the world a saner place. Maybe teach us some things, so we wouldn't have to learn everything the hard way. Like reading could actually function beyond entertainment...

Devils and Dust: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian revisited

Darran Anderson Horse operas they used to call them, evoking stories of blood feuds, gambling and butchery. It's a fitting title for the finest westerns: whether that's the Zen and laissez-faire savagery of Sergio Leone, the kamikaze nihilism...

How do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death?

06 June 2008 "In the hands of a novelist, the most abnormal actions can be used to illuminate what we call the normal world. Only the hopelessly illiterate are unaware of this fact and waste time arguing about it."

Not stirred

31 May 2008 "The greatest tribute you can pay to a secret agent is to take him for a moron. All he has to do is to make sure he doesn't act too exactly like one."

Touch Sinister

28 May 2008 "There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and vision, beyond...them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil." From Borges to Mark...

Review: Vacation
Got to get away. Jeremy C. Shipp's debut novel, Vacation, begins as an academic conspiracy yet quickly morphs into one involving the controlled mind in a hostile, remote forest environment; the implication being that the two settings�war-torn forest...

Tea at Trimalchio's XLI
with Paul Kavanagh uncle seth Every Friday I had a drink with Uncle Seth. Uncle Seth was a cantankerous man that enjoyed his beer and food with eupeptic fashion. When I went drinking with Uncle Seth I always made sure I had lots of...

Jeff Torrington RIP
16 May 2008 "Better to say that he dared to laugh." James Kelman and...

Substance
11 May 2008 "At the heart of daily punishment and sufferings, in the very wheels of encroaching mediocrity, are found both the keys and the doors to inner worlds."

glitter, doom, the night sky & other waitsian b.s.
11 May 2008 "People Envy Happiness Dogs Though Sense Courage Knowing Jubilation Means Better Ass-ets. Pretty profound. " The guiding word of Tom Waits' US summer...

dogmatika @ 3:am

08 May 2008 The blogging contiues over at 3:AM.. This month so far:

the immoralist

06 May 2008 "Schiele was one of the first to tear back the frocks and show how it was rotten to the core, teetering on the brink of destruction." ...

Tea at Trimalchio's XL

with Paul Kavanagh a long journey It is going to be a long journey. It is going to drag on and on. It is going to be the kind of journey that elucidates the elasticity of time. Time is a puzzle we believe and on a journey this hypothesis is brought...

how's my blogging?

28 April 2008 "The highlight of Memorabilia for me, though, had to be the fourteen illustrations from Cruiskeen Lawn, drawn by O Nuallain under his pseudonym of "Kilroy" (what is it about these boys and their aliases?) with accompanying text by O'Brien, colourful illustrative explosions bringing out the best of Myles."

Review: Savage Night

A Bloody Noir Massacre. Edinburgh writer Allan Guthrie's latest noir offering is, in its way, an instant classic, assuming you like your classics drenched in blood and spattered with gore.�Do you remember director Danny Boyle's first feature Shallow...

c*** fiction
27 April 2008 "Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon."

disembraining ubu
26 April 2007 "We're the only band in the world which has for more than 30 years followed a Jarry-esque, or even 'pataphysical course in rock music." [Detail from Ubu Roi by Daniel...

Vanishing Point:
An interview with Nicholas Hogg Darran Anderson: Show Me The Sky can be read as a crime novel, a mystery tale, a travelogue and an existential treatise, what it also seems to be is a story of one man's obsession, with James Dent as a kind...

The Filth & the Purity: An interview with Sein und Werden's Rachel Kendall
"I like the grey concrete of metropolis, the stink of the opium den, the ravings in the lunatic asylum. There really is little difference between good and evil when you cut out the fluff in between." Susan Tomaselli: When did you start...

Review: Lounge Lizard
"It's nothing less than what we have grown to expect from an uncompromising voice," writes Tony O'Neill. It's always a cause for excitement when a new Mark SaFranko makes its way to me, doubly so when the book in question is the follow-up to...

Tea at Trimalchio's XXXIX
with Paul Kavanagh watching movies There were three dead bodies, victims of gratuitous violence, it was a sickening scene, scattered all over the front room. Through the carnage two males and one female could be made out. One of the males had...

Modern Haiku XVIII
Elizabeth Rose Murray departure Her voice a whisper Gentle threats to save him Not destroy herself � Elizabeth Rose Murray 2008

dogsbody
22 April 2008 Quick lit [and alt.cult] hits around the web.

the humour of hunger
22 April 2008 "I think Hunger is a funny novel, and I feel confused that people don't seem to pick up on this much. Maybe my idea of comedy is different to everyone else's. I don't know. But when I read Hamsun I laugh a lot."

the funnies
22 April 2008 Your fortnightly comix news. Charles Burns does Tintin Dean Haspiel's Next-Door Neighbor: "Everybody...

stick 'em up punks
21 April 2008 "It's not so much out-of-date jokes the author should be apologising for, but the whole sorry enterprise." A snippet from my review of Tank Girl, the novel, in 3:AM Magazine:
Before he started monkeying around on...

Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Fuku Versus Zafa: the Slow, Wondrous Rise of Junot Diaz. Lots of bad luck and trouble out there, mostly attributable to fuku, a curse that attaches when least expected.�But Junot Diaz [1] has a major counterspell or zafa thing going...

kawaii grotesque
18 April 2008 "Warhol as marketer." There's a major retrospective on in New York of superflat artist Takashi Murakami's...

the whisky and soda anti-establishment outsider
17 April 2008 "Ballard's considerable creative intelligence isn't always matched by his powers of analysis, a kind of thinking with which he anyway shows a certain amount of impatience: he's proudly anti-academic. But he is also unquestionably a novelist of ideas.."

oh yeah!
17 April 2008 Paul Kavanagh on Seven Beauties:

Dogmatika: Main headlines

Review: The Golden Calf

Devils and Dust: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian revisited

How do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death?

Not stirred

Touch Sinister

Review: Vacation

Tea at Trimalchio's XLI

Jeff Torrington RIP

Substance

glitter, doom, the night sky & other waitsian b.s.

dogmatika @ 3:am

the immoralist

Tea at Trimalchio's XL

how's my blogging?

Review: Savage Night

c*** fiction

disembraining ubu

Vanishing Point:

The Filth & the Purity: An interview with Sein und Werden's Rachel Kendall

Review: Lounge Lizard

Tea at Trimalchio's XXXIX

Modern Haiku XVIII

dogsbody

the humour of hunger

the funnies

stick 'em up punks

Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

kawaii grotesque

the whisky and soda anti-establishment outsider

oh yeah!