[un]apologetiks

Does the devil have the best tunes?

I reckon he has the ones you can dance to. If it makes your hips move, the devil had a hand there, at least in production. Plus I think the devil could make a decent go of EMO. Thwarted time and again, the devil is a king of self-pity, which would probably clean up with those teens who weren’t into anything danceable. So he’s got his bases covered pretty well. But then there’s gospel.

Labels: 3:am, charlie williams, interviews

3:AM: There’s a new Boris Vian due out from TamTam Books soon - To Hell With The Ugly. Can you tell me a little about it? And your two-version release plan?

Tosh Berman: To Hell With The Ugly is a Vernon Sullivan (Boris Vian) novel, and it’s a combination of the Hardy Boys meets HG Wells meets James Bond meets vintage porn. In other words, it’s Boris Vian’s world and you are welcome to it. The book reads like a pulpy serial to me, so on my blog I am putting up To Hell With The Ugly chapter-by-chapter. It has incredible imagery, and the hardcopy of the novel will expose that side of it. Jessica Minckley did the art and illustrations for it as well as with Tom’s book design. It’s going to be an incredible package.

Labels: 3:am, boris vian, tamtam, tosh berman

Charges of Iceberg Slim’s misogyny may well stick, but he wrote from the inside, documented people who snorted cocaine and stuck needles in their arms, people who sold their bodies, who wore expensive clothes, who beat women with coathangers. As Irvine Welsh says, “one of his most endearing features was that Iceberg Slim never sought any insincere exoneration for the life he led…Iceberg Slim did for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the homosexual and thief and William Burroughs for the junky: articulate the thoughts and feelings of someone who had been there. The big difference is that they were white.”

Labels: 3:am, iceberg slim, review

The book is essentially a fable disguised as a detective novel. I began with some ideas about sleepwalkers, a file clerk, and a dream conspiracy, but once some detectives appeared on the scene I needed to learn how to write a mystery novel. That structure turned out to be just what I needed to tell the story I wanted to tell, and I came to admire the genre tremendously. What was surprising to me was how well the fairy tale and the detective story complemented one another. There’s something strange and dreamlike about my favorite works of hardboiled fiction - even more so about their film noir counterparts. And both the fairy tale and the detective novel have certain archetypes at their heart which I found compatible: knights and quests and witches, detectives and case files and femmes fatales…

Labels: 3:am, interviews, jedediah berry

The Fire Gospel is Faber’s not-so-thinly disguised attack on the publishing industry; not so much Faber biting the hand that feeds him, but taking the whole arm off. Robert Louis Stevenson said that regardless of the plot, characterisations or setting, the thing that lingers longest in a reader’s mind is the personality or “feel” of the writer, and this applies to Michel Faber, only not with The Fire Gospel. Compared to his other works - Crimson Petal, The Apple and Under the Skin - his dark satire fails to ignite. A lesser Faber.

Labels: 3:am, michel faber, review

This was as much a book for [Alasdair] Gray fans as for the man himself or for future critics. It seemed the most sensible and entertaining way to go about telling the story of his life and work which are so closely linked anyway. Right down to the fake footnotes, it’s all on purpose. I also thought that by dealing with Gray on his own terms I’d be in a more interesting, perhaps compromised position, to criticise from. Still, regardless of Alasdair’s style, a personal biography was the only style I could have written. I don’t pretend to be the closest person to him in the world, but I certainly cared a great deal. I had to be honest about that, or else readers would be right to doubt me.

Labels: 3:am, alasdair gray, interviews, rodge glass