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PROLETARIAN POST-MODERNISM OR FROM THE ROMANTIC SUBLIME TO THE COMIC PICTURESQUE by 'Stewart Home'; from 'his' anthology of previously unpublished 'short stories' by diverse hands Suspect Device, Serpent's Tail, London 1998.
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ARE YOU DRUNK????????
It may appear strange that I should advise readers to skip this introduction and turn directly to the stories that make up this anthology. In many ways this is a strategy that has been forced upon me. The fictions that follow are not difficult to read but the editor pressurising me to piece together a justification for the choices I have made won't concede that the type of dialogue he is urging upon me is a form of violence against the effects I wish to produce. I am not interested in philosophic discourse and I find Platonic dialogue particularly problematic in this context. Lyotard has observed that the poet is not concerned, after his statements are made, to enter into a dialogue with his readers to establish whether or not they understand him. Unfortunately, I have to deal with an editor who imagines that he has been arguing with me about whether or not I can 'access' the 'mainstream'. For those of us who live in a world of proliferating margins, there is no 'mainstream' to 'access'.
The stories collected together in this anthology were written neither within nor against the various canons of English literature. I do not wish to establish yet another canon and I have no interest in the mythologies of literary undergrounds. While the writers represented here all have some connection with the British Isles, the hybrid nature of their work is very much the product of transnational cultures to be found throughout the Atlantic littoral. As Paul Gilroy has explained in works such as The Black Atlantic, the image of a ship travelling between Africa, the Caribbean, America and Europe, is central to an understanding of these hybrid cultures and the claims they make on (post-) modernity. Clippers not only carried slaves and manufactured commodities west, while raw materials were brought east on the return voyage, the men and women who traveled onboard these ships sustained ever evolving cultures in the face of degrading and inhuman conditions.
One of the peculiar features of literary canons is the way in which those individuals and institutions that pursue this form of closure exude an exaggerated sense of their own cultural superiority while simultaneously laying claim to some mythical humanising essence that after Matthew Arnold might be designated by the phrase 'sweetness and light'. I have little interest in either individual works of 'literature' or the institutional systems erected around them. Literature is just one fictional genre among many others. Characterisation and obsessive attempts at replicating a quasi-Platonic system of grammar are of no concern to me. Likewise, there are times when I find genre distinctions between 'fiction' and 'non-fiction' more of a hindrance than a help.
What the writers gathered between these covers share is a range of concerns that will be incomprehensible to individuals who believe 'English literature' is a culturally and politically neutral subject. While familiarity with novels like Negrophobia by Darius James or Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tilllman will assist readers in their navigation through this anthology, an appreciation of the texts collected here requires more than a mere acquaintance with modern fiction. This can be illustrated by way of reference to Neil Palmer's story Vegan Reich. The background to this piece clearly lies in the emergence of the modernist conception of Europe. After atheism won acceptance as a viable form of intellectual discourse, new negations took shape and fought for a favourable reception. However, negations such as anarchism were simultaneously bound up with positive assertions about the world. The anarchist critique of authority was and still is grounded in an acceptance of the ideology of the aesthetic as a mode of internalised legislation that generates a white, bourgeois, able-bodied, male subject.
Like the other writers whose work is collected in this anthology, Palmer's modus operandi is self-consciously intertextual. He reworks and rewrites earlier fictions to create a narrative space where he can investigate the Eurocentric idealism that produces the illusion of a transcendental white male subject which is then pressed into service as a model for the subjectivities of all people, everywhere. Among the more obvious precedents for Vegan Reich are Simon Strong's A259 Multiplex Bomb 'Outrage' and my novel Pure Mania. Even the name of the piece ironically undercuts the titles I've given to my books, many of which are appropriated from punk songs of the late seventies. Vegan Reich is the name of a particularly reactionary Californian straight-edge band who advocate the physical liquidation of smokers and meat eaters in I, The Jury, a song whose title is lifted from a right-wing thriller by Mickey Spillane.
While Palmer revises the regional setting of my writing, his relationship with East Anglia is sufficiently critical to make him doubt whether there is any longer a meaningful distinction to be made between the country and the city. The dubious use of the terms country and city as rhetorical devices in the outpourings of a number of eco-activists is one of the factors that structures the critical parody of Vegan Reich. As well as attacking anarchism, Palmer uses Vegan Reich to mock East Anglian separatism, an ideological trope that has close connections with the libertarian creed. While in purely political terms the demand for East Anglian independence is currently a marginal phenomenon, its entanglements with other totalising cultural formations make it something that is worthy of attention. One of the stalwarts of the East Anglian regional cause is the Cambridge based ley spotter and rune magician Nigel Pennick. A rune that particularly fascinates Pennick is the swastika, and as long ago as the seventies he was using forums such as Stuart Christie's Anarchist Review to propagate his peculiar views about this symbol.
While satire disperses meaning, critics often experience difficulty with this process unless they have some knowledge of the subject that is being dissolved. While readers do not need to be familiar with the writings of Nigel Pennick in order to enjoy Palmer's text, they will blind themselves to the extraordinary fecundity of Vegan Reich if they look for psychological insight or characterisation. Those who seek the tropes of realism in satiric fiction rarely realise that they are simultaneously transforming themselves into figures of fun. Readers of this type will not derive much satisfaction from Palmer's prose unless they happen to be masochists. Since there is much humour in repetition and doubling, those who are able to hear what is being (un)said are generally happy to find themselves lost in the text. At least one commentator has claimed that in decrying 'the night in which all cows are black', Hegel ended up making a joke at his own expense. Likewise, it is not always possible to separate writing from reading or speaking.
Jonathan Swift in his introduction to The Battle Of The Books observed that: 'satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. But if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned from long experience never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke; for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent.' Satire dissolves character, and so it is comic writers who are most likely to be peculiarly misunderstood. A widespread appreciation of Swift's oeuvre has certainly been retarded by popular caricatured portraits of the satirist which depict him declining into misanthropy as he aged.
My fiction was, and to some extent still is, generated from a self-consciously comic reading of the entire output of various 'trash' authors as a single 'nouvelle' roman. Palmer, in his turn, productively (mis)reads my novels as an interminable medieval romance. Such readings are simply one of Palmer's procedures for dissolving a regional identity he critically rejects. There is a considerable body of writing devoted to tracing the 'origins' of modern drama - and thus through the influence of playwrights like Shakespeare, all contemporary literature and culture - to East Anglian mystery plays. In conversation, Palmer expresses amusement about the fact that many of those embroiled in this discourse are academics working at Cambridge University in East Anglia. Palmer's response is to use medieval texts and the imaginative recreation of medieval ways of reading texts as a means of writing himself outside the bourgeois culture imposed upon him during the course of his working class schooling in rural Cambridgeshire.
It would be a mistake to view Palmer's modus operandi as a return to tradition, or indeed, a rupture with it. A critical response to modernity does not necessarily make a writer a primitivist - even when, as in Palmer's case, they openly proclaim their interest in medieval prose. It is worth recalling here what Marx had to say about the English and French revolutions in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: 'In these revolutions, then, the resurrection of the dead served to exalt new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution rather than to set its ghost walking again.' Derrida's 'enlightening' commentary on this trope can be found in his book Specters Of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Routledge, New York and London 1994).
While, like Palmer, I try to avoid over determining meaning in my prose and readers can read my texts any which way they like, each individual has to live with the consequences of any reading they choose to make. While I do not wish to impose a single monolithic meaning on my fictions, the fact that I am frequently misidentified with my subject matter demonstrates not so much that I've been successful at avoiding closure, but that many 'critics' no longer know how to read, or indeed, how to write intelligently. I'd imagine that most of those represented in this anthology have experienced or will experience similar problems. In saying this, I am not suggesting that everything collected here should be read as satire. I have made Vegan Reich the focus of this preamble precisely because no useful purpose would be served by indulging in generalisations about the texts that make up this anthology.
Obviously it is didactic to state that the compilation of anthologies, even anthologies of previously unpublished fiction, has a long association with pedagogical discourse. While certain readers may view what follows as reproducing or even parodying such revisionist cultural forms, I do not wish to promote the work collected here as delineating a movement or tendency within contemporary culture. As things fall apart and discourse is endlessly reconfigured, what was formerly projected as the centre has lost its stranglehold on 'literary production' and those who once made an unconditional defence of modernity find the values they previously upheld transvalued. Since I credit readers with the wit to realise it is neither possible nor desirable to explain everything, I have always but not already said too much.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
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| INTRODUCTION |
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The Stewart Home Project was launched on 24 March 1979 by the Celtic bards K. L. Callan and Fiona MacLeod. The idea was for diverse individuals to produce a body of work that would be credited to a fictional author called Stewart Home. Under a variety of pen names Callan and MacLeod were simultaneously involved in a propaganda campaign attacking Home and 'his' work as a means of creating media interest in this phantom novelist. Unemployed actor Tony White agreed to play the part of Home whenever public appearances were required.
Due to disagreements between Callan and MacLeod over what might constitute an appropriate introduction to this anthology, it has been decided to reveal that Stewart Home is a collective pseudonym. As well as the introduction at the beginning of the book, we offer here two phantom introductions that given their placing in this short story collection might be read as fictions. They have been arranged in two different columns, one on the left and one on the right. The prose in one column is satirical, the writing in the other column is serious, it is up to the reader to decide which is which. Anyone perplexed by this strategy should consult Iain Sinclair's introduction to his Conductors Of Chaos anthology and Swift's A Tale Of A Tub, since both are fine examples of recalcitrant prose that operate within the same discursive field as the work in hand.
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| ARE YOU DRUNK??????? |
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Introductions to prose anthologies are supposed to pull everything together, rather than fly off at a tangent. This may account for the fact that the explanations editors give of their selection procedures tend to annoy me. Anthologies are usually put together using the same principles that structure those tiresome 'Best Of The Year' space fillers which appear in the arts sections of newspapers soon after the winter solstice. Everyone knows that these lists are really a map of the compiler's social network. Editors of prose and poetry anthologies usually have more space in which to cover their tracks than Fleet Street hacks. Wantonly ignoring the fact that time itself is an epistemologically questionable construction, anthologists often claim to have discovered some new cultural trend. What's actually going on is considerably more sordid. Writer X will have been included because s/he has shagged the editor, while writer Y will be there because the editor wants to get into his or her knickers. Editors are also predictably biased in favour of those helpful individuals who put them up when they visit New York, Berlin, Delhi and elsewhere. It can be an amusing pursuit working out how many of those included in a collection have written favourable reviews of the editor's previous books, or included the editor in their own anthologies.
The absence of Iain Sinclair from this anthology may be taken as an indication that I don't suffer from run-of-the-mill literary vices. The first time I ever laid eyes on Sinclair, he was standing behind a suitcase on the Bethnal Green Road flogging that fabled novelty item known as Leaping Panty Hose. I'd spent most of the morning and what remained of my unemployment benefit seeking mystic inspiration in a bottle of 100 Pipers. One of the advantages of blended Scotch to those wanting to open up their inner eye - other than the fact that it is considerably cheaper than malts such as Laphroaig or Talisker - is that by the time a typical booze hound has reached the bottom of the bottle, they are virtually unconscious. People often ask me why the characters in my early novels always drank 100 Pipers. This is a question that I'd previously put to the now deceased pulp hack James Moffatt. He generously explained the notion of placement to me. Moffatt had experimented by dropping the names of different booze brands into his books and quickly discovered that the makers of 100 Pipers were more generous than any other whisky producer. They sent him a crate of Scotch every Christmas.
'Watch them jump!' Sinclair was calling as I staggered into the Bethnal Green Road.
Attired in his customary patched up secondhand book dealer's suit, Iain Sinclair was pitching to four or five gawkers. A familiar street scene in the Brick Lane area on a Sunday. As luck would have it, the item to which Sinclair referred was his latest novelty sensation - Leaping Panty Hose - an ingenious device made of soft, flexible, flesh-coloured plastic in the shape of a tiny pair of panty-hose that lunged and flopped wildly at the end of a miniature air tube each time the rubber bulb concealed in the costermonger's hand was squeezed. The crowd was staring in rapt, hypnotised fascination and only Sinclair noticed as I grabbed a black doctor's bag that was wedged between his feet. As I stumbled away through the threshing crowd, pandemonium broke loose. Six meat wagons descended on the market traders and Sinclair was amongst those seized.
Having made my way to Christ Church, I sat down on the steps of Hawksmoor's masterpiece and examined Sinclair's black bag. It contained some bloody medical implements and a lot of hardcore pornography. Several weeks later I ran into Sinclair at a literary event and he thanked me for helping him evade the bust. He didn't seem to realise I was a thief and when he asked me to return his bag, I arranged to meet him in a pub on Fieldgate Street. Sinclair bought me several drinks and didn't seem bothered that his wank mags had become badly stained while they were in my possession. I had no use for the bag or medical implements and since seeing a video featuring an actress giving a donkey a blow job, I viewed Sinclair's porno glossies as a little too tame for a man of my tastes. I gave Sinclair copies of all my novels and not long after a very positive write-up appeared in the London Review Of Books.
As well as Sinclair, another name missing from this anthology is that of Doctor Al Ackerman, from whom I have stolen shamelessly during my long and distinguished career. Even if it is not very instructive, it will at least fill some space to reproduce what the good doctor wrote about me in his introduction to the 'Ling' section of Blaster: The Blaster Al Ackerman Omnibus: 'I was told, there was a deranged fellow in London a few years ago, a sort of penny-dreadful pornographer, who created an unpleasant scene in the Charing Cross Station early one morning by spilling what he called his 'genetic wealth' on a basket filled with skinhead gear, old pieces of laundry, dead pea fowls and artificial limbs - all this while dressed in a pillowcase hood and claiming to be 'Young Ling.' That is almost enough to make a person more careful about how he handles his scissors.'
Immediately after I'd written the preceding paragraph, my seventeen year-old girlfriend Poppy stumbled in from turning a few tricks on Wentworth Street and then using the money she'd earned to feed her dope habit. After bawling me out for blowing the rent on several dodgy crates of Four Roses bourbon bought from a market stall trader who was introduced to me by Iain Sinclair, Poppy observed that I never made any dosh because I was constantly writing new introductions to a fiction collection for an editor who rejected everything I did. Poppy might be a runaway and a crack addict but she isn't stupid. She observed caustically that pretty soon there'd be enough rejected introductions to Suspect Device to be turned into a book in their own right. This reminded me that another voice excluded from the anthology is that of Ben Watson. Out To Lunch - as Watson is known to the readers of his 'underground' pamphlets such as DIY Schizophrenia - sprang to mind because he writes at the beginning of the book Art, Class & Cleavage: A Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix: 'My publishers tell me that they fear the book's 'unorthodox' political assumptions will render its thesis incomprehensible... They advise me that upfront exposition of its tenets would make Materialist Esthetix more effective...'
Watson is confronting a problem that anyone who credits their readers with the possession of critical faculties is likely to encounter when dealing with British publishers. The average editor wants work that is pre-digested pap. I'm told that I have been producing 'anti-introductions,' some of which have been criticised for being too difficult, while others were rejected as too flippant and all of which - it is alleged - will 'turn readers off.' Rather than allowing readers to make connections for themselves, I am being pressurised into explaining everything in advance. While this may be the manner in which the pod people of PR hype are processed, it is not something that interests me. I could, of course, argue that most English literature has been shunted onto a privatised railway sideline whereas the work I've gathered together represents a continuation of the trajectories to be found in the modernisms and post-modernisms of the Atlantic littoral. However, my editor really doesn't want to hear this and since he is the gatekeeper I have to get past, I'll just have to provide the explanation of my selection procedures he is demanding.
Ben Watson would have been included in this anthology if he'd mailed me his story in which I appear as a major character prior to my final selection of pieces for Suspect Device being agreed with Serpent's Tail. I'm also a great admirer of Barry MacSweeney's work but in taking on this commission, I reluctantly accepted the imposition of genre distinctions between poetry and prose. Likewise, I thought Christopher Petit's novel Robinson was fabulous but this author was excluded on the grounds that he used Sting as an actor in his road movie Radio On. A cardinal sin in my opinion. In many ways the selection procedure for this book was quite arbitrary, I threw away all unsolicited manuscripts and refused to read stories from friends that were submitted in spidery handwriting. Next, I went through the covering letters that accompanied the submissions. Seven would-be contributors were rejected for making references to their 'art', twenty-four for mentioning writers I don't like and one for using the word 'caveat'. I was able to eliminate another two authors because of their posh double-barrelled surnames and a third for being called Martin. After twenty-minutes work, I was left with the selection of pieces you hold in your hand.
The Suicide Note by Ted Curtis and a number of other stories collected here feature characters who are devotees of serious drinking. Reviewers often experience difficulty in distinguishing a writer from the fictional characters that populate his or her works. I am often asked by journalists if I am an alcoholic. My standard reply is that if someone who smuggles industrial quantities of duty free booze across the English Channel for their own consumption has a drink problem, then yes, I am an alcoholic. If someone who drinks at least one bottle of whisky a day has a drink problem, then yes, I am a alcoholic. If someone who spends as much time as possible boozing down the pub has a drink problem, then yes, I am an alcoholic. What I can state without equivocation is that as someone who repeatedly drops the names of various class brands of whisky into my prose, I deserve a few free crates of Laphroaig and Talisker.
To sum up, the writers collected together in this anthology tend towards the occult, mathematics and philosophy, particularly Frege and Gotthard Guenther. Their work represents a turn away from realism into the infinite depths of self-referentiality. These crazy writers are a quarrelsome bunch of uptights who can be divided into two antagonistic factions: either they are gay and suffer from an excess of the fraternity spirit, or despite reaching middle-age they are still to be found fondling runaway teenagers with drug problems; they are either excessive beef-eaters or strict vegetarians, uninhibited posers or bashful theorists, and usually both at once. All the writers represented in this anthology are acting out a surreal existentialism. This consists of living in run-down apartments, drinking day and night, cross-dressing or wearing clothing from the nearest Salvation Army shop and reciting J. H. Prynne's Brass several times a day while standing bollock naked on whatever balcony affords the greatest audience. Anything less would be unacceptable, since I am not interested in the processed prose of show-business sell-outs. If anything is anything, then rock and roll is the new rock and roll, while writing fiction is something else entirely.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
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| REPETITION REPETITION REPETITION |
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Introductions to prose anthologies are supposed to pull everything together, rather than fly off at a tangent. This may account for the fact that the explanations editors give of their selection procedures tend to annoy me. Anthologies are usually put together using the same principles that structure those tiresome 'Best Of The Year' space fillers which appear in the arts sections of newspapers soon after the winter solstice. Everyone knows that these lists are really a map of the compiler's social network. Editors of prose and poetry anthologies usually have more space in which to cover their tracks than Fleet Street hacks. Wantonly ignoring the fact that time itself is an epistemologically questionable construction, anthologists often claim to have discovered some new cultural trend. What's actually going on is considerably more sordid. Writer X will have been included because s/he has shagged the editor, while writer Y will be there because the editor wants to get into his or her knickers. Editors are also predictably biased in favour of those helpful individuals who put them up when they visit New York, Berlin, Delhi and elsewhere. It can be an amusing pursuit working out how many of those included in a collection have written favourable reviews of the editor's previous books, or included the editor in their own anthologies.
The absence of Iain Sinclair from this anthology may be taken as an indication that I don't suffer from run-of-the-mill literary vices. The first time I ever laid eyes on Sinclair, he was standing behind a suitcase on the Bethnal Green Road flogging that fabled novelty item known as Leaping Panty Hose. I'd spent most of the morning and what remained of my unemployment benefit seeking mystic inspiration in a bottle of 100 Pipers. One of the advantages of blended Scotch to those wanting to open up their inner eye - other than the fact that it is considerably cheaper than malts such as Laphroaig or Talisker - is that by the time a typical booze hound has reached the bottom of the bottle, they are virtually unconscious. People often ask me why the characters in my early novels always drank 100 Pipers. This is a question that I'd previously put to the now deceased pulp hack James Moffatt. He generously explained the notion of placement to me. Moffatt had experimented by dropping the names of different booze brands into his books and quickly discovered that the makers of 100 Pipers were more generous than any other whisky producer. They sent him a crate of Scotch every Christmas.
'Watch them jump!' Sinclair was calling as I staggered into the Bethnal Green Road.
Attired in his customary patched up secondhand book dealer's suit, Iain Sinclair was pitching to four or five gawkers. A familiar street scene in the Brick Lane area on a Sunday. As luck would have it, the item to which Sinclair referred was his latest novelty sensation - Leaping Panty Hose - an ingenious device made of soft, flexible, flesh-coloured plastic in the shape of a tiny pair of panty-hose that lunged and flopped wildly at the end of a miniature air tube each time the rubber bulb concealed in the costermonger's hand was squeezed. The crowd was staring in rapt, hypnotised fascination and only Sinclair noticed as I grabbed a black doctor's bag that was wedged between his feet. As I stumbled away through the threshing crowd, pandemonium broke loose. Six meat wagons descended on the market traders and Sinclair was amongst those seized.
Having made my way to Christ Church, I sat down on the steps of Hawksmoor's masterpiece and examined Sinclair's black bag. It contained some bloody medical implements and a lot of hardcore pornography. Several weeks later I ran into Sinclair at a literary event and he thanked me for helping him evade the bust. He didn't seem to realise I was a thief and when he asked me to return his bag, I arranged to meet him in a pub on Fieldgate Street. Sinclair bought me several drinks and didn't seem bothered that his wank mags had become badly stained while they were in my possession. I had no use for the bag or medical implements and since seeing a video featuring an actress giving a donkey a blow job, I viewed Sinclair's porno glossies as a little too tame for a man of my tastes. I gave Sinclair copies of all my novels and not long after a very positive write-up appeared in the London Review Of Books.
As well as Sinclair, another name missing from this anthology is that of Doctor Al Ackerman, from whom I have stolen shamelessly during my long and distinguished career. Even if it is not very instructive, it will at least fill some space to reproduce what the good doctor wrote about me in his introduction to the 'Ling' section of Blaster: The Blaster Al Ackerman Omnibus: 'I was told, there was a deranged fellow in London a few years ago, a sort of penny-dreadful pornographer, who created an unpleasant scene in the Charing Cross Station early one morning by spilling what he called his 'genetic wealth' on a basket filled with skinhead gear, old pieces of laundry, dead pea fowls and artificial limbs - all this while dressed in a pillowcase hood and claiming to be 'Young Ling.' That is almost enough to make a person more careful about how he handles his scissors.'
Immediately after I'd written the preceding paragraph, my seventeen year-old girlfriend Poppy stumbled in from turning a few tricks on Wentworth Street and then using the money she'd earned to feed her dope habit. After bawling me out for blowing the rent on several dodgy crates of Four Roses bourbon bought from a market stall trader who was introduced to me by Iain Sinclair, Poppy observed that I never made any dosh because I was constantly writing new introductions to a fiction collection for an editor who rejected everything I did. Poppy might be a runaway and a crack addict but she isn't stupid. She observed caustically that pretty soon there'd be enough rejected introductions to Suspect Device to be turned into a book in their own right. This reminded me that another voice excluded from the anthology is that of Ben Watson. Out To Lunch - as Watson is known to the readers of his 'underground' pamphlets such as DIY Schizophrenia - sprang to mind because he writes at the beginning of the book Art, Class & Cleavage: A Quantulumcunque Concerning Materialist Esthetix: 'My publishers tell me that they fear the book's 'unorthodox' political assumptions will render its thesis incomprehensible... They advise me that upfront exposition of its tenets would make Materialist Esthetix more effective...'
Watson is confronting a problem that anyone who credits their readers with the possession of critical faculties is likely to encounter when dealing with British publishers. The average editor wants work that is pre-digested pap. I'm told that I have been producing 'anti-introductions,' some of which have been criticised for being too difficult, while others were rejected as too flippant and all of which - it is alleged - will 'turn readers off.' Rather than allowing readers to make connections for themselves, I am being pressurised into explaining everything in advance. While this may be the manner in which the pod people of PR hype are processed, it is not something that interests me. I could, of course, argue that most English literature has been shunted onto a privatised railway sideline whereas the work I've gathered together represents a continuation of the trajectories to be found in the modernisms and post-modernisms of the Atlantic littoral. However, my editor really doesn't want to hear this and since he is the gatekeeper I have to get past, I'll just have to provide the explanation of my selection procedures he is demanding.
Ben Watson would have been included in this anthology if he'd mailed me his story in which I appear as a major character prior to my final selection of pieces for Suspect Device being agreed with Serpent's Tail. I'm also a great admirer of Barry MacSweeney's work but in taking on this commission, I reluctantly accepted the imposition of genre distinctions between poetry and prose. Likewise, I thought Christopher Petit's novel Robinson was fabulous but this author was excluded on the grounds that he used Sting as an actor in his road movie Radio On. A cardinal sin in my opinion. In many ways the selection procedure for this book was quite arbitrary, I threw away all unsolicited manuscripts and refused to read stories from friends that were submitted in spidery handwriting. Next, I went through the covering letters that accompanied the submissions. Seven would-be contributors were rejected for making references to their 'art', twenty-four for mentioning writers I don't like and one for using the word 'caveat'. I was able to eliminate another two authors because of their posh double-barrelled surnames and a third for being called Martin. After twenty-minutes work, I was left with the selection of pieces you hold in your hand.
The Suicide Note by Ted Curtis and a number of other stories collected here feature characters who are devotees of serious drinking. Reviewers often experience difficulty in distinguishing a writer from the fictional characters that populate his or her works. I am often asked by journalists if I am an alcoholic. My standard reply is that if someone who smuggles industrial quantities of duty free booze across the English Channel for their own consumption has a drink problem, then yes, I am an alcoholic. If someone who drinks at least one bottle of whisky a day has a drink problem, then yes, I am a alcoholic. If someone who spends as much time as possible boozing down the pub has a drink problem, then yes, I am an alcoholic. What I can state without equivocation is that as someone who repeatedly drops the names of various class brands of whisky into my prose, I deserve a few free crates of Laphroaig and Talisker.
To sum up, the writers collected together in this anthology tend towards the occult, mathematics and philosophy, particularly Frege and Gotthard Guenther. Their work represents a turn away from realism into the infinite depths of self-referentiality. These crazy writers are a quarrelsome bunch of uptights who can be divided into two antagonistic factions: either they are gay and suffer from an excess of the fraternity spirit, or despite reaching middle-age they are still to be found fondling runaway teenagers with drug problems; they are either excessive beef-eaters or strict vegetarians, uninhibited posers or bashful theorists, and usually both at once. All the writers represented in this anthology are acting out a surreal existentialism. This consists of living in run-down apartments, drinking day and night, cross-dressing or wearing clothing from the nearest Salvation Army shop and reciting J. H. Prynne's Brass several times a day while standing bollock naked on whatever balcony affords the greatest audience. Anything less would be unacceptable, since I am not interested in the processed prose of show-business sell-outs. If anything is anything, then rock and roll is the new rock and roll, while writing fiction is something else entirely.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
Stewart Home, London January 1998.
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