Expect a new blogpost soon. But until then, here’s some updates on the things that have kept me busy.
While on the beach in Barcelona (way back in August) I read debut novels by two names that might ring a bell: Werner Herzog and Michael Mann. Frieze asked me to review them:
The Death of the Auteur: Unpacking Werner Herzog and Michael Mann's Debut Novels
Herzog’s The Twilight World is interesting but where the director’s filmic investigations of people living at extremes allow you to make your own mind up about what that extremity might mean, this novel lacked a bit of critical reflection on the fact that the supposedly noble Hiroo Onoda spent a lot of time murdering unarmed Filipino peasant farmers.
I’m a genuine Michael Mann fan. If you haven’t seen it already, his first film Thief (1981), a heist, is a stunning work of cinematography. I love the fluorescent darkness of a Neo-noir, rain lashing into puddles that reflect neon signage — but Mann’s ‘novel’ Heat 2, is just garbled effluvia toward trying to guarantee funding to make a script for a movie whose very purpose is now outmoded by the fact you can just play GTA V.
For Jacobin, I reviewed Philippa Snow’s debut work of criticism, Which As You Know Means Violence, a peripatetic account of self-injury in performance from the spheres of cultic, outsider art like Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan, to things like Jackass, Harmony Korine, and Logan Paul. It’s an interesting book but I found more flaws in it than the review had space for.
Here’s a paragraph on Snow’s claim that Jackass is the exploration and working through of post-9/11 trauma:
One way that Snow places Jackass in history is by claiming it emerged as a way of processing post-9/11 trauma. How to make sense of living in the arbitrarily violent heart of a global empire, but through the make-your-own-fun of extreme pranks? I found this a generous way of avoiding a discussion of some of the other social functions of violence.
The US and Britain are countries with institutions full of hazing rituals, hierarchy and acts of self-sacrifice: the fraternity, the boarding school, and the military. I don’t want to go as far as saying Jackass is merely the mirror image of the torture at Abu Ghraib (war and violence is an absent discussion in the book, as is the complex histories of race and performance in the U.S.A.). But I felt the absence of discussion of these relationships in the book.
If we take Jackass to be a satire of all-American cruelty (which I think I do), rather than an imitation of barbaric acts then this book doesn’t quite account for that. What’s more, violence itself is geographic in its socio-political history. The placing of Jackass alongside Marina Abramovic does not necessarily allow for an articulation of the different histories too which the works are thinking through.
And lastly, there’s two (can you believe it) events that I’m reading at in London this week.
The first reading is this evening IN SOHO (not a drill), hosted by darling tease and author of Deleted Scenes, Paul Jonathan, alongside my pals Holly Connolly and Zsófia Paulikovics, who I helped a bit with Three Month Fever, as well as beautifully baroque Jago Rackham, an incredible writer and stunning chef. I’m currently polishing off something to read write now (don’t tell my boss).
And on Friday, at Claire de Rouen books, just on Globe Road in the heart of Bethnal Green, Roisin Agnew is launching the Lugubriations book for her wonderful substack project. I’ll be reading my piece about crusties alongside my old friend Andy Key, wonder-poet Paige Murphy, and Alan Fielden.
Would be lovely to see you all at either event. Ta-ra pets.