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[25.2.06] [Andrew Gallix]
THE MISSING LINKS
 Sales of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman soar after the book makes a cameo in an episode of Lost! * Ken Russell's pictures of Teddy Girls taken in 1955. * Hugo Williams explains that reading John Betjeman is "an act of mild anarchy". * Margaret Atwood heralds the death of the book-signing tour: "A video screen will link Ms Atwood with the public, allowing them to speak to her. Then, as she signs a personal message at one end, a robot arm instantly replicates the strokes in a copy of the book at the other". * Childish on Emin. * DBC Pierre is interviewed in the Daily Telegraph: "At 38, after a couple of years advertising in the Caribbean, he decided to build one last castle in the sky. 'I knew I had to write the roof off the fucken world,' he says. "I had to have a sense of permission to move on, and part of that started when I began to write.' Armed with that permission, he customised his nickname to Dirty But Clean". The author also reveals that his next book will be "the most excessively decadent book there's been in centuries" (link via the revamped dogmatika). * Les Incompetents. * Soft Skull Press on myspace. * The London Book Fair. * Mountain 7 is well cool (check out their blog), but why haven't they linked to 3:AM yet?! * The Sex Pistols snub Rock and roll Hall of Fame. In the NME, Morrissey declares (on the subject of the Pistols): "I think they changed the world and I'm very grateful for that. I saw them three times at the very beginning and they wrre breathtaking and very necessary and I simply feel gratitude. Everybody on the planet has shortcomings, and most people can't see it through, but it doesn't matter because most people give nothing and they gave so much and they've sustained". Ian Brown: "When I was 14 they were the perfect band, they were like older brothers. I bought 'God Save the Queen' and 'Bollocks' on the day they came out. At that time in Manchester it was considered a bit effeminate to want to be a singer. But I like the way that when you're 14 you're a rebel. The Sex Pistols represented that -- also, it was nice to hear a Cockney accent. They had that beautiful accent that's disappearing. Now, everyone is talking like Ali G". * The Cloud Appreciation Society. * Helen Walsh, the author of Brass, goes to Finland. * Stewart Home interviewed by Mark Thwaite in Ready Steady Books: "Someone else I've spent a lot of time looking at recently is Terry Taylor, who was a close friend of my mother. Taylor's only published novel Baron's Court, All Change is The Holy Grail for anyone serious about collecting British beatnik ephemera. The book was first published in 1961 and reissued as a paperback in 1965. This tale of spiritualism, jazz, drug dealing, busts and abortion set amongst London hipsters is one of the great lost works of English youth culture: a book so obscure that neither Iain Sinclair, nor any of the dealers I've asked about it, had previously heard of this 'reforgotten' classic (Jon Savage is the only person other than me that I know of who has a copy). Taylor's story rattles along, but the author was more extraordinary than his fiction. He was the real life inspiration for lead characters in two bestselling Colin MacInnes novels: the unnamed narrator of Absolute Beginners and the pimp in the follow-up Mr. Love & Justice. . . . Baron's Court, All Change is crying out for a reprint. The book is so cool and the prose is so fresh, that once you've clapped your eyes on a copy, you'll believe it came straight from the fridge!". * The death of handwriting. * Tim Parks's children have started reading his books: "'Why ever would I teach at the university if not to have a constant supply of fit young women to shag?' my son has just read in the first chapter of this novel. His father, of course, teaches at a university, where, notoriously, 90% of the students studying languages are young women. 'Mick,' I suggest, 'if I were you I would have checked out one of the other books first. The one about canoeing maybe. The one about the Medici bank. About football.' 'Oh no, this is OK,' he says. 'Pretty funny in parts. But the sentences are way too long, Dad. You should have shortened them'" (link via Splinters). * Zadie Smith accused of not telling "the real race story" (yawn!) * The latest issue of trakMARX is a Situationist special. * Patti Smith interviewed in Another Magazine. * Dad's the word. * An extract from the new Jay McInerney. * Hanif Kureishi at the Royal Court. * Neal Cassady's birthday (via dogmatika). * Nick Cave's Australian western. * Every song has a story behind it.
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