First, a confession:  I’ve never read Trainspotting.  I’ve  seen the film (as if that’s any compensation) and thought it was excellent, and have meant to read the book, but found the dialect in the writing too damn dense.  I had Filth recommended
to me by Brandon Wilkinson some time ago and I decided that, since he’d spoken so highly of it, I’d make a real effort to get through it.

Once I got a feel for the rhythm and worked out what ‘ken’ meant (know/knew), it was a straightforward read.  Funny, dark, twisted and with a marvelous little twist in its rear.  I’ve suddenly gained an even greater affection for what I already thought was a rather sexy accent, and the text is so much richer for being written with that accent woven straight in.

I’ve not seen so many dark spirals in a narrator, either.  Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson started out as a complete arsehole and then he gets so, so much worse through the investigation into a messy murder.  He goes on a jaunt to Holland, has a lot of sex, does a lot of drugs, and undermines everyone around him.

And then there’s the contributions to the story from his ‘pet’ tapeworm, whom I grew very fond of the more I read.

After finding this a far more enjoyable read than I had anticipated, I’m rather up for having another go at Trainspotting now.

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Here’s me with the big cardboard Wall E at our local CineWorld, generally looking like a bit of a dork.  I have come to embrace them after they drove the cinema I worked at out of business.  It’s because of reasons such as this.

Saw Iron Man this weekend and was very, very impressed.  It seems to have smothered to death the curse of super hero films where you feel you’re sitting through a lot of ‘origin story’ crap waiting for the comic book character to appear, and before they become super heroes, the characters tend to be whiny, annoying little sods whom you wish would stop talking.  Tony Stark, however, is cool.  He is, in fact, bad arse.  This makes him outside of the clever suit very watchable (Robert Downey Jr - you rock) and then he is epically cool inside the suit.  Much love.

I wore my current favourite t-shirt too, which brought me additional joy and warm fuzzies.

Short story conference this Saturday.  I’m paying Simon in Relentless, chocolate éclairs,  a Little Chef friend breakfast, petrol money, parking money and a giant pizza to take me there and back.  I may or may not be drunk when I finally get up to the podium for my bit.  Fear has turned into nausea, now.  Shall post how it went if something doesn’t make the news by vomiting on someone important…

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I’ve been interested in this book for a few years and was very keen to find out where the title had stemmed from when I started reading it.  Turns out that testicles look like eyeballs when both are popped out of their respective cubby holes, and our dear sweet Simone, fuck-buddy of the protagonist, likes to have both put and pressed into her sweet spots.

To say this surprisingly short story is about sex would be a wild understatement.  I’ve never seen a story so totally consumed with sexual frustration and profane acts, and I thought I’d seen it all after Peter Sotos’ Index.  Bataille’s first work is shocking, oddly stimulating and wholly imaginative as he studies and revels in the closeness of sex, violence, madness and death.  Still, no wonder he wrote it under a pseudonym.

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This is Logan’s first collection of ‘industrial fiction’, consisting of eight stories that take place in a world of electrical monsters, steel webs and sad televisions.  It’s a bold movement into a ‘new’ genre, and I can tell that his heart’s really in the right place, but it just doesn’t come off.

The pacing within the stories feels awkward and I couldn’t help but think that he’d have been better off combining all eight stories in some fashion into one longer, more focussed piece.   Still, it’s an interesting enough collection of dead-eye, steel-wool characters and some of the industrial concepts are pretty cool.

On  a side note, the editor of this thing should get sacked immediately.  I’ve never seen so many grammar mistakes and typos in a published book before.

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This has been praised as ‘the’ seminal book on transgression, though I would say that Chris Jenks’  more far more recent Transgression is a really good lead-in to this book.  It’s dense, chewy and thoroughly academic, yet also very readable.

It seems to cover the following, though:

* Fairs (some of which evolved into…)

* Carnivals (one of the key cornerstones of transgression, which was controlled in as much as it could be by the government/church before they panicked at events taking place and just tried to squish it out of existence instead.)

* Pigs (and their peculiar position in the animal kingdom in relation to man, specifically.)

* Filth (the association of ideas opposed by the bourgeois being closely associated by them with filth and dirt)

* Maids (said bourgeois becoming sexually obsessed with the ‘lower class’ of people who work for them whilst they are children, holding both authority over them and not having power at the same time)

The authors cover things very thoroughly and make the theory very understandable.  It was a good read, even if the last few chapters were quite a slog.

It’s not a book about transgression in literature, but rather an analysis of the concept as a whole.  Jenks takes the same approach though does dedicate a chapter and a bit to looking at literature which seeks to transgress.  To the best of my knowledge, a long study into transgressive literature doesn’t exist yet.  Hmm.  PhD worthy?  I rather think so.

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The second collection of short stories, poetry and playwriting from the University of Gloucestershire Creative Writing students and it’s longer and better than the first. There’s a delicious mix of comedy, tragedy and boundary pushing here, and I’m certain we’ll be seeing a lot more from its contributors.

Nancy Drew is the story I have in there, which I think is the first, truly transgressive thing I ever wrote. It started me on a very enjoyable writing path, and I was congratulated that never before had my tutor seen a class so united in disgust by an opening paragraph before. This story was written in vaguely-remembered bouts and always under the influence of Jack Daniels. The twist towards the end was a surprise to me, but it couldn’t have concluded any other way.

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‘This collection of short stories, poetry and personal accounts showcases the work of both new and previously published authors. All of the authors have generously given their work to the MS Talent project, which aims to raise funds for charities in the U.K. helping people with multiple sclerosis.

Charities benefiting from the project include the MS Society, the MS Trust, the MS Resource Centre and Kent MS Therapy Centre (one of many therapy centres throughout the UK offering services such as physiotherapy and counselling to people with MS).’

I have two short stories in the beginning of this book: Justicia and Seahorses.  They are the ‘nicest’ stories I have written that are published.  For a laugh, I pitched them under ‘Krax the Mighty’ then laughed like a loon when they accepted both the work and the pen name.

There’s a very fun game you can play now.  You type ‘Krax the Mighty’ into Amazon and a book comes up.  It’s quite amusing.

Okay, not a game with a lot of replay potential, but it makes me snicker.   Figures that the only stuff that isn’t lewd, profane or profanity-ridden would be what goes under the pseudo name.

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I finished my conference paper on Taboo Collections this evening, and it’s actually shaped up a lot and took an hour less time than I had allotted for the final drafting.  So I spent the rest of the time reading bits of Dolls, which I haven’t looked at since sending the polished draft to bluechrome to pass on for editing.  I’d forgotten bits of it and I found myself smiling at the in-jokes and where I’d made references to my friends and their misadventures.  I’m a big advocate of the saying that writers are like magpies: we’ll steal anything if it’ll make a good story.

And the more I read the more I thought about how much David would like this: how it’s right up his street.  David was a neighbour a few years ago.  We chatted a bit on msn and I babysat his two little boys whilst he and his wife went out.  He was one of those cool types who invited me to use the internet and to help myself to the liquor cabinet.  He particularly recommended the Black Label vodka and said it’d go well with a Red Bull.  He always left a can for me in the fridge even though I never drank it.  I found out after he’d died that they were actually seeing a couple’s therapist those nights.

My Mum told me he’d killed himself literally as I was walking out the door to work.  It was an offhand, ‘oh by the way’ thing that took thirty seconds.  I didn’t start crying until I got into my manager’s office and asked for the night off, then I drove up to Simon’s to talk about it.  I came home when my shift was due to finish so my folks wouldn’t know I’d skipped work.  We drove around for an hour after I got there because I needed to feel in control of something.  Mum had told me he’d gassed himself in his car.  I saw his wife driving that car a few weeks later and couldn’t get my head around why she would be driving the car her husband had killed himself in.

The truth of it slipped out some months later when Mum was telling someone else about it across the dinner table, and it slipped out that he’d hung himself.  I asked why she’d lied and she said that hanging was such a horrible death that she preferred me to think he’d gassed himself.  I’d always thought gassing would be quite a horrible way to go: nausea, convulsion, etc.  Pictures of hung men with black tongues and bulging eyes kept coming to me from Bizarre magazines I’d looked through years ago.  It felt like I was grieving all over again, but Mum told me not to be stupid and to forget about it.

David had a blue and white sports bike that made an electrical whining sound when he revved it.  He loved that bike and he took me out pillion with him twice on it.  It was the first motorcycle I’d ever ridden, and I remember how I wouldn’t let my knees touch his body because it felt too intimate.  He had a really thin skull but, wearing a helmet, all bikers pretty much look the same.  I still see him sometimes, even though I know they got his body down from a pub sign years ago for his wife to identify.  I think it’s one of the reasons I don’t like crotch-rocket bikes - why I want a hulking, low slung cruiser like my dad’s.    85% of wooden roller-coaster struts serve no purpose but to provide a visual reassurance of stability.  I want miles of chrome pipe and bulging exhausts on a bike.

David had a quick, slightly warped sense of humour that rubbed off on me and I can see it in Dolls.  I’ve still got a copy of a meme he did once on my computer, and I used a short extract from that in the book.  It feels strange to be magpie-ing from both the living and the dead, but these stories and personalities are as important to me as the books I read, the films I watch and the music I listen to.  They shape me and what I write, and I feel like I’m preserving something core and precious about the people I care about in my work.

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Well, isn’t this all cool and professional? Didn’t know I’d been tagged until I hovered over ‘Kylie’ (Anthony’s pet name for me) and found it linked here. So, with only a fuzzy idea of the rules, here we go…
1. Link to the person that tagged you - the blueblog - CHECK

2. Post the rules on your blog - CHECK

3a.Write your own six word memoir

Meandering path forged from sheer stubbornness.

3b. Write six random things about you in a blog post

(i) My first car was a mini a few weeks older than me called Hubert. It was white with a green roof and one green stripe up the bonnet. The windscreen had a white band two inches thick around the border that I thought was a design thing from a respray but was actually a very bad case of de-lamination and it was going to shatter any day. Hubert also cut out in the rain, had to be put into second gear on the motorway when the engine died and bits fell off, including the heater which trapped my foot on the clutch. Hubert has now gone to a nice man who restores Minis and has been blinged out with chrome, a red paint job and is covered in Taz pictures.

(ii) I still thought 7 Up was called ZUp until a few years ago. This was corrected with much mocking.

(iii) I used to listen to films instead of music whilst doing work, and wore out somewhere near 50 VHS tapes over several years. I can still quote Con Air, Armageddon, The First Wives Club and The Muppet’s Christmas Carol nearly word-perfectly.

(iv) Nancy Drew, my second published story, was written and redrafted entirely whilst at least tipsy on Jack Daniels. The goats in the desert were as much a surprise to me as anyone else.

(v) I only play Nintendo games with Mario in them, but if there’s an option to play Yoshi, I’ll be on that dinosaur like herpes on an old hooker.

(vi) I tried to be an artist before this writing gig. Found out that it really wasn’t for me halfway through an Art Foundation course when I was shockingly bad compared to the other students. Now, the only painting I do is once-a-year commissions for friend’s birthdays. This year, it’s a painting of River Tam firing a bow and arrow with her feet with the Serenity logo in the background.

4. Tag six people in your post.
Everyone already has been. Foiled. Oh well.

5. Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. - See above.

6. Let the tagger know your entry is up. -CHECK

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A while ago I read a squeamishly good little book called Exquisite Corpse. It was about necrophilia and cannibalism. Great stuff on top of being very well written. I decided that I rather liked this Brite girl, and picked up Liquor, which was pitched to me as a story of two cooks setting up a liquor-themed restaurant in New Orleans. So, given that Brite is one of the most visceral and exciting writers of gothic horror, I was expecting a touch of Sweey Todd with the cooking of people and serving them to paying customers. Sort of like that dodgy bit in Hannibal when you realised Thomas Harris had sold out (further confirmed by the travesty which was Hannibal Rising).

I got about forty pages in before these expectations of blood, gore and outrage fizzled out. It’s a book about two gay guys (but not written in that ‘we’re here, we’re queer!’ way that some authors feel they have to adopt with homosexual relationships) who get out of their shitty line jobs under an arsehole boss and set up for themselves. It’s, well, nice. It’s a comfortable book with a lot of well-researched and obviously enjoyed recipes and points about working in a kitchen. There’s a follow up book, Prime, which continues with the same two chefs and I wouldn’t mind giving that a read either.

If you like Brite’s bloody and deliciously descriptive books about nasty things (you do my heart proud), then this isn’t necessarily the book for you. This is a good book to kill a day or a flight, with likable characters and it’s not a brain strain but nor is it simply throw-away. It’s good to see a writer writing outside of their niche, though, as it’s a bitch once you get pigeon-holed. This switch in style is something I’ll definitely be doing at some point in the future, just to make sure I can. There’s nothing like being stuck writing in one style/genre because that’s *all* I can write to wake me up in a cold sweat.

Still, I’m gonna fly the banner of ‘fuck the bourgeois’ for a few more years yet.

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