Issue One launch
Please join us to celebrate the publication of Issue One, with short readings from Desmond Hogan and Rob Doyle. Copies of the journal will be on sale on the night.
Quitting the real
Bookslut interview Chloe Aridjis.
Certainly an inspiration for the first novel was a book of Joseph Roth’s brilliant essays on Berlin, written in the 1920s and the deepening shadows of the early ’30s; although he was writing about what he observed around him, they of course reveal a great deal of the author himself. The same could be said of Robert Walser’s and Walter Benjamin’s Berlin. The more infused a city’s portrait is with the author’s own spirit, the better.
Film remains open
http://youtu.be/SpptSPy_SCM
Alain Robbe-Grillet on Michelangelo Antonioni’s aesthetic in L’Avventura and Blowup (via).
London kills me
In The White Review, Heathcote Williams on William Burroughs’ London years.
I think Bill found London bleak. He once said with cold sarcasm at UK Customs on being asked for his reason for visiting Britain: ‘Number one: the food. Number two: the weather.’
Initials BB
Dermot Bolger on Brendan Behan.
The tragedy was that by 1958 Behan was becoming as well-known for his drinking as his writing; for being the ultimate dangerous live television guest; for unprintable soundbites and missed deadlines; for riotous scenes in hotels and airports; for the fact that – long before the age of celebrity – he became an international celebrity.