Spelled [blawg, blog] noun, verb, blogged, blog·ging.

Noun. Weblog. Example: The blogger blogged about his books.

Let us remember the days when our opinions were wasted on our peers and our poetry was destined never to see the light of day; a pencil scrawl in a diary. The days when we transported music on a cassette that held only fourteen tracks and waited for hours outside Woolies for a friend to turn up, because we had no means of sending a message asking ‘WHR R U? IM COLD N ALONE. LOL.’ Now look at us, typing our every incidental thought and contemplation onto a web log, for the world to peruse.

According to Completelynovel.com, in 2010 there were over ten thousand published and unpublished authors blogging their wares online. This is the precise equivalent of the town of Wells hollering the contents of their 1989 diaries really loudly. The numbers will almost certainly have risen since then, with the result possibly being, at least, akin to the inhabitants of the town of Stowmarket travelling the planet with a megaphone and their poetry in tow. Nonetheless, blogging is now considered to be an art in itself, so much so that Completelynovel ran the Author Blog Awards in 2010, in an effort to reward writers for ‘engaging’ with their readers. The internet has certainly made this engagement real and easier to accomplish; far easier than travelling the entire world donning a sandwich board emblazoned with literary musings.

So, does a writing blog or book blog make a writer more accessible, or less exclusive? A combination of the two, I would suggest. Being in a fortunate enough position to hole oneself away, knowing that the public want to read your words so much that they don’t care they don’t get any for free must be a wonderful position to be in. But, for the rest of us, a blog is an effective means of transporting our ideas to the populous. And far, far easier than wandering the world barefoot with a megaphone and some hastily photocopied diary pages.

Karina Evans

Perversion, what’s it all about?

Perversion is like religion: One man’s religion is another man’s mythology.

Porn, Paul Kavanagh tells us you’re quite a fan of the 70s…

The first two efforts I ever sold were porn. Straight ahead slambam stuff. I got $35 cash for each. They appeared in a local Portland tabloid HUMP MAGAZINE in the spring of 1972, just as I was graduating from college. In the next year I wrote two novels, THE PUSSY NUTS and BALLBUSTING IN THE BOOKHOUSE. I submitted the former to some publisher in NYC whose address I grabbed off a paperback before putting it back on the shelf in a downtown Portland porn shop. The publisher wrote back, some Italian name as I recall: “You handle the prose well. Stick to the specs and you’ll have yourself a sale!” He was offering me $250.00, with no royalties, and the “specs” were a list of a dozen absurdities, such as: No use of the Name of the Deity, Only one perversion per chapter, Each female character must be cycled through the following positions … and so on. I write for fun. I never rewrite for anybody.

That was the end of my porn career. At any rate, BALLBUSTING IN THE BOOKHOUSE had already developed into a vaguely serious novel: a neurotic tale about a clerk in the downtown Portland public library who kept having sexual encounters with patrons and staff down in the stacks and in the back meeting rooms. As a hobby, though, I did follow ’70s porn. Annette Haven was my favorite performer. She seemed rather a frigid bitch, but she looked intelligent and sometimes even talked that way. Here is my experience with 70s porn in a nutshell:

THE PORNO STAR
For Annette Haven

In sheer blouse,
high heels, nylons and
skimpy skirt disclosing
the moving wonder of her thighs,
she shakes henna hair
over a shoulder
and gets into the black chrome Lincoln
that drives off

to flash up to a California mansion.
The chauffeur with so much class opens the door,
before she swings out and the sun
spits her sunglasses and her lipstick
and she shakes
henna hair and walks
toward the mansion and the camera
adores her nylons
as high heels click on sun-drenched pavement.

And inside that lovely California mansion, surrounded by eucalyptus
and Norman Rockwell caricatures and a high oak-panelled high high ceiling,
clothes gone, disappeared in a heap, gone somewhere off stage –
totally nude, with a tiny little gold chain
around her waist and red polish on her toenails
and purple polish on her fingernails,
she fingers herself in a mirror
while the audience, hand in pants,
bogs in lust never wanted ended
dead.

And:

THE $1.98 PORNIES

I have been sitting inside the theater for forty-five minutes and still have my coat on. When I came in I was so anxious to start looking at the screen that I forgot to remove my coat. I don’t want to start taking it off now, because somebody, maybe one of the burly crewcut drunks behind, will notice and think I am getting carried away.

It is getting damn hot. On the screen five or six young men and women are balling frenziedly. It’s too late. I can’t take it any longer. I start taking off my coat. Nobody takes his eye off the screen.

America, what’s going on? The Occupy Movement, how do you feel about it?

I have no idea what is going on in America. I am the wrong person to ask. This seems to be an exceptionally vicious, insane and heartless nation, but maybe they all are. The occupy movement? Tents, people hating the rich. A lot of people like to live in tents for a while; I never held with it much. And, of course, everybody hates the rich. But, uh, who are the rich? Aren’t they just the same people we all want to become? But I just can’t seem to focus on politics. Like I say, I’m the wrong person to ask.

Short stories, when, why and how?

I don’t know anything about short stories, either. And if I did, I would probably just tell you some bullshit about how I only write good prose while receiving a blowjob from a nine-year old domesticated cougar or some such.

Favourite short story writer?

I don’t have a favorite short story writer, any more than I have a favorite sneeze. Jesus of Nazareth was pretty good. I still like that one “Love Thy Neighbor;” what a delightful sense of humor! I also enjoy most other stories classified as “myths,” which includes all those cool stories Jesus, Mohammed, David, Coyote and Shiva wrote.

Joe Frazier or Muhammad Ali? Hemingway or Faulkner?

I don’t know anything about boxing or any other sports. They bore me. The only way I can watch a sporting event is with the volume off and listening instead to Vivaldi or Bach or Purcell or Mozart or something else that makes sense. I never attend sporting events. Hemingway or Faulkner? Oh, Chandler, I guess.

We think you excel at childhood stories. Would you say your childhood was particularly vivid?

No, I don’t think my childhood was particularly vivid. Most childhoods I suppose are more or less vivid. I just never grew up. Adults are children who have become bored with life. It’s easy for me to write about childhood, because I am still there. Children are wonderful creatures: naturally vicious, lewd, filthy, nasty, outspoken, stubborn and inconsiderate; fascinated with wordplay and echolalic chanting:

THE HYPNOTIST COMES TO

I come to as if away from certain nausea.

As a child I went through echolalia,
an ordinary stage of growing up,
a temporary mental disorder
when my brain put in the clutch
and cruised a moment through its growth.
Words repeated somnolently after people
said them to each other,
repeated deliciously inside the numb
cocoon stuffed with cotton
disintegrating continually into two people
talking to each other on the sidewalk.
Echolalia is a feeling
but not a feeling
in the same way that
word is a word for word.

Echolalia has a tinge of eroticism
and yet has nothing to do
with anything bodily at all.
I come to
through remembrance of echolalia.

What’s your opinion of Kindle?

I found something electronic while walking on the bike trail one morning a couple months back. It said it had a book inside it. Which of course it
did not. I puzzled over it a few moments, then tossed the contraption in the garbage. Where it of course belonged.

The most honest being is?

The most honest being is the corpse. The rest of us all have something to sell.

————————————————————————
Read an exclusive story from Willie Smith’s new collection here. You can read about Nothing Doing here.

Every intellectual wanted to fight for something. 73 was a very violent year, the 70s as a whole was a very violent decade. There were a myriad of terrorists groups willing to take help, or money, from an intellectual. Bombs and shootings were happening all over the place. There were groups such as the IRA, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Ejército Popular Revolucionario, the Revolutionary Guevarist Army, Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών, Noxçiyn Respublika Noxçiyçö.

You couldn’t walk down the road without a backfiring car nearly killing you of a heart attack. A dog taking a piss sent you into an apoplexy, you believing the dog worked for the CIA or the KGB, and its penis was a ray gun or a laser gun and it was aiming straight at you because the other night over wine you proclaimed that the Cold War was not really a War but was in fact a money machine for those in power. Paranoia was everywhere. Everybody was paranoid. Black Sabbath hit on the zeitgeist with a song called “Paranoid.” Doris Stokes knew the answer; she had gleaned the answer from the dead, everybody was paranoid. It was the year of the spiritualist and the ouija board. Erich von Däniken blamed the UFO and the alien. There was something in the wine, in the cheese. Maybe, Lysergic acid diethylamide.

Every cocktail party I attended somebody would come up to me and ask me if I needed something. They were asking if I needed money. Of course, I needed money a writer always needs money. All donations were welcomed. During the early 70s, everybody wanted to give me money.

Between 73 and 75 I lived the Good Life. I rented an apartment in Chelsea, I had suits made by Tommy Nutter, I drove a Ford Capri 3.0 S. I made friends with footballers, such as Stanley Bowles, George Best, I played snooker against Ray Reardon, I lost at darts to Jockey Wilson. I dated Soap stars. I drank with Open University television stars. I was the first person in London to try Colombian Cocaine. I dined with Fleming and Greene. Whenever I talked about my writing, at the time I was writing hardboiled stuff, real macho stuff, the pages were full of blood and guts, the money flooded in, my verbosity about death and destruction over wine and cheese resulted in the next morning with the postman knocking on my door and handing over not two, not three, not four, but five or six cheques. The rumor started in 1975. Wherever I went, the next day a bomb went off. It was as though the bombers were following me from shop to pub to army barracks. Twice I was nearly blown up. Of course, by the end of 76 I knew how to play the rich intellectuals. My verbosity grew, my tales knew no boundaries, my depravity was picked from the pages of De Sade, my violence from The Sweeney and The Professionals.

As sudden as a bomb exploding, the money donations started to dry up. The bombings were affecting the cocktail parties. It was unsafe to leave the house. Nobody wanted to drive; there was the fear of the car bomb. The intellectuals had to catch the tube, even worse, the bus. Nobody was fashionably late for the cocktail parties. Everybody was early. I did my best to dispel the idea that I was a member of the Irish Republican Army, but with each denial, my membership in the IRA hardened like concrete. As sudden as a car bomb the Che Guevara poster was replaced with the sexy tennis player scratching her beautifully sculptured arse. Whenever the talk of violence reared its ugly head, the conversation turned to Coronation Street or The Good Life. I was deemed a pariah. The intellectuals had been forced to watching the television. The television critic had been given birth to out of the nebula of a pub bomb blast. I was considered a persona non grata. I couldn’t even start up a conversation about South Africa. Finally, I was ostracized.

The next thing I knew MI6 was knocking down my front door. An intellectual that I had contradicted, that I had corrected, he had used Dickensian for Draconian, had snitched on me. I was in bed, I had been out the night before, on my own, I was extremely hungover. The barrel of a machine gun was shoved up my left nostril. I was dragged out of bed and punched in the gut. I was allowed to climb into my trousers, but not my shoes. I was thrown into the back of a Ford Capri 3.0 S, hooded, and shouted at and abused. The car journey stopped and I was carried into a small cell. Somebody handcuffed me and removed the hood. I was beaten up, tortured, quizzed repeatedly, and finally left naked in solitary confinement. As if this was not the nadir, punk rockers took over my apartment and squatted. It turns out the punk rockers composed London’s Burning while I was having my nuts electrified.

(A nod to Harry Mathews)

__________________________________________________________
Paul Kavanagh is the author of Iceberg and The Killing of a Bank Manager.

Nothing Doing is underground legend Willie Smith’s shocking, subversive and darkly hilarious ode to misspent childhood, lost innocence and creeping depravity. Written over a period of thirty years, these stories anatomize America’s most vivid perversions and outsider fantasies with unmatched precision and wit.

• Drawings from Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Bigger version here. [Thanks, DC].

• Collage artist Ion Barladeanu’s work goes on display in Prague until 26 May.

• Some pretty stupendous book carvings from Brian Dettmer.

• RIP, Adam Nathaniel Yauch and Edward C. Zacharewicz.

• Been a while since we linked a fellow publisher, so here’s Nightjar Press – “specialising in limited edition single short-story chapbooks by individual authors.” [Via David].

• The start of something? Hell if we know: Kindle getting elbowed from shelves at Target by the iPad.

• T.S. Eliot, his wife Vivienne and Virginia Woolf.

• The erotic sketches of Pablo Picasso.

• For those in London – a Williams S. Burroughs night this coming Wednesday.

• How Robert Crumb prophesised Facebook.

• Chris Burden’s ‘Shoot‘:

Book reviews for new British writers who advertise on social networks and whose books are available on Amazon, to be precise. I am not (for even a tiny, miniscule moment) suggesting that established authors don’t crave the elusive five gold Amazon stars as much as the hardened amateur; but for new writers they are akin to being crowned as the Most Amazing Person in the World.

Living in the age of social networking, new books are easier to advertise, easier to access and reviews easier to obtain. Does a five gold star review mean as much as it would have meant pre-Twitter? Does a review written by a ‘friend’ whose real life is incidental mean as much as a review written by a beautifully anonymous perfect stranger?

No, is the answer. It doesn’t. Much of modern day life is conducted via virtual reality. Twitter folk know the ‘us’ we want to portray; the us who is perpetually amusing and informative, the us who they love so much they could not bear to allocate less than five gold stars to the book they read because we bombarded them with links for three weeks. Facebook friends know when we are tired, when we have bought a new kitten, when we are eating our dinner.

Generally, we know these people in real life; they know the real-life actual us, therefore they are also likely to put down their kittens and write a stonking review.

People who don’t know us; they are possibly the people who count the most. They read our offerings because they want to. They happen upon them via a retweet or a link to a page, or an inadvertent Googling incident. They read the whole thing, because they want to, then they put it down/switch it off and think ‘I like that so much, I am going to jolly well write a fucking stonking review.’ So they do. And whether they allocate three stars, four stars, or five stars, it means more than the world.

Not that we should be ungrateful; Twitter and Facebook are amazing platforms and we certainly cannot sneer at the opportunities they offer us. However, there is possibly nothing quite as satisfying as knowing that a stranger, the beautifully anonymous perfect stranger, has delved into our words and emerged, satisfied, clutching five gold stars.

Karina Evans

• Leader image by Zdzisław Beksiński. (If anyone knows the title, enlighten us.)

• “Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”

• It feels like an age since we first read about this, but the USPS finally revealed its stamps in honour of Twentieth Century Poets.

• Outerspace Sex Orgy: get it here.

• Ashes to Ashes Dept: so long, Amos Vogel and Levon Helm. (We disgracefully neglected to note the latter’s passing last week, and are suitably ashamed. Music from Big Pink is a favourite here).

• Ezra Pound’s poetry tips.

• The latest Ambit is out.

• Write or Die: the app of choice for dawdlers. (Thanks, Danielle).

• A pair of new Honest reviews for Iceberg (“In spite of its brevity, this book feels like a novel, not a novella. Although each episode of our hero and heroine’s journey is brief, all leave an indelible image in the mind of the reader.”) and Jazz (“I could write a lengthy thesis on all the connections I found weaving their way through each poem like “the soft cry / of the barbary macaques.”").

• Pynchon, Philosophy, Ethics.

• More self-promotion: perhaps you would like to ‘Like’ our Facebook page for The Vorrh?

• The Confessions of Robert Crumb, the 1987 documentary in full:

A few months later, Dale kicked off. It was the water bottle that got him. By then I was eleven and outgrowing the BB gun. I found him dead when I came down into the basement one afternoon to sneak a cigarette. It was only the fourth or fifth cigarette of my life, so I was very excited.
Bloated, stiff, he lay on his back in the middle of the cage.
He had somehow (feet and teeth were his only tools) widened the mesh around the water bottle and dragged the metal tube down to where he could gnaw the stopper. He must have been fascinated by the vegetable odor of its rubber. Or maybe he was bored with life in a cage and knew damn well if he ate enough of that black gummy stuff it would kill him.
I lit my Camel and contemplated the remains. Had Dale been human, he would’ve been a mongrel of James Cagney, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Jimmy Piersall and that rat Francis Gary Powers. Unwanted. A loner. A rebel without scruple. A back alley Dracula. He would’ve been a chain smoker, a whisky drinker, a trencherman – the silent type with a ten word unprintable vocabulary.
Finished my cigarette. Ground it out on the cement.
Gave up guns. To hell with the military. Spit on the Government.
Although, especially after the debates, Kennedy seemed to be looking better and better, resolved I wouldn’t vote for either him or Nixon. It suddenly seemed immaterial whether the Russians, the French or the New York Yankees became our future masters. Lit the half-dozenth Camel of my career.
Maybe it was Dale’s girlfriend’s fault there were never any babies.

—

Nothing Doing, by Willie Smith, coming soon from Honest Publishing.

• Leader image: L’Homme en gloire dans la Paix by Jean Lurçat (1958). Bigger versions of Lurçat’s work here.

• “One is the most innovative writer of the 20th century, the other is James Joyce.” James Joyce vs. Kool Keith.

• Tauriq Moosa on the tyranny of the majority.

• Screenprinted vintage Cuban book covers.

• Gratuitous Issue 2 out now. Typography porn.

• Ken Russell’s The Devils, now on DVD for the first time.

• Günter Grass poem ‘What Must Be Said’ still getting hackles up in Israel. As we missed it last week, here’s the poem in full.

• The Story of Scott Ostrom: post traumatic stress disorder in pictures.

• Bruno Jasieński’s I Burn Paris has finally been translated to English, 83 years after its release. John Self’s Asylum review is here.

• “Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee-drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it’d take him to run down the Base Camp’s long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee.”

• Prescription for James Joyce’s spectacles and How to Enjoy Ulysses, a self-explanatory brochure released by Random House alongside the famously challenging book in 1934.

• Really old but really great piece on Honest Publishing author Willie Smith at Exquisite Corpse.

• Rajan Khanna on the finest non-traditional fantasy settings. Apt, considering one of our future releases.

• Book spine poetry.

• Lit tattoos aren’t completely our thing, but this is an exceptional case.

• All of Carlo Farneti’s illustrations for Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Fullscreening this is advisable:

The bloodcurdling monster
beneath the little girl’s bed
would rather be under the duvet
playing with her sleeve
and listening to her breathing,
with love. Monsters are mad
about night lights that resemble
pink rabbits and quilts
that were stitched by your granny.

Even the warty witch
with her frog’s egg fingernails,
sneaking into the midnight
kitchen to turn the milk sour,
has drenched herself in Chanel No. 5 -
secretly longing for valentines this year.

Would you run a bath for her?
Would you rub her back?
Shh. That’s the frou-frou
of her switch and broom
as she drags them along,
reluctant to leave.

Linda Ann Strang

__________________________________________________________
Linda Ann Strang is the author of Wedding Underwear for Mermaids.