To Ann, Finally…
By Alice Butler.
Dear Ann, you were the danger secretary too. You put the secret in secretary. I think of you clocking off from your typist job at the Royal College of Art, and catching the bus to your Notting Hill bedsit, where you would tap away at the manuscript of your first novel. It was named after that painter you had a crush on: Adrian BERG.
Dodie longs to write like Kathy Acker, but I wonder if Kathy Acker longed to write like you.
Adding Colour
By Dominque Cleary.
One Sunday, in the spirit of de-cluttering his life, my father mentioned a first edition book for which he had no further use. It probably was the only one he still owned. He told me the author was Wallace Nutting. I hadn’t heard of him so didn’t react. He hadn’t offered it to me outright so thought he might give it to one of my siblings who live abroad. But then he told me he had only recently read it, he would probably not read it a second time and that I might find it interesting. I told him most people don’t ever read the first edition books they own. They just collect them like trophies.
Frames
By Daniela Cascella
1. Click, Slide
Between 1938 and 1940 a teenager student attends a series of art history lectures at Bologna University in Italy, in a dark small classroom with tall desks and a screen behind the teacher’s table: a classroom like a desert island, in the heart of a night with no more light. The lecturer bears the unreal aspect of an apparition. ‘He was, in fact, an apparition.’ On the screen: slides of early Renaissance paintings by Masolino and Masaccio, faces and limbs caught in expressions and angles that draw and embody a partial architectural space, and appear as hinges between people and history, people caught unguarded on a screen by means of formal arrangements of gestures.
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It’s a convergence of sense, split across frames and punctuated by clicks.
It’s a trying to think through fractured forms and jolts of history, click, slide, click, slide.
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Try to think transience, to linger on the impalpable quality of the light projections, the barely audible yet punctual clicks of the slide carousel, interferences of apparitions, rhythms and gestures.
A Literary Atlas for a Dispersed Form
John Holten interviewed by Rob Doyle.
[PDF]
The Readymades, John Holten‘s 2011 debut novel, was a marvel. A Bolañoesque, avant-garde page-turner, it trained a breezily pan-European sensibility on the story of a shadowy Serbian art collective at large in Paris, Vienna and Berlin. Alongside the book’s heady inventiveness, there were ample doses of sex, drugs and alcohol, and exhilarating, wistful evocations of being young, broke and brilliant in post-Cold War Europe. Beautifully published by Broken Dimanche, the press Holten himself co-established in Berlin, where he now lives, The Readymades was largely ignored by the literary mainstream. One of the most remarkable novels of recent years, it has been read by relatively few people. Earlier this year, Broken Dimanche Press published Holten’s second novel, Oslo, Norway. Slimmer than its predecessor, it is no less abundant in flair, formal daring, and breadth of vision. There are metafictional tricks and turns, effervescent sexuality, apocalyptic visions, ruined love, Nordic alienation, and a Cortazarian invitation to read the novel in any number of ways. Holten is as much of a wandering spirit as the bright young things without borders who populate his fiction. I tracked him down between various art exhibitions and projects he’s been involved in, to talk about books, art, influence, travel, the future of fiction, and why it’s fun to write about threesomes and drug binges.