The Best 12 ANZAC War Stories EVER!

I may just have found the very most awesome book in the history of ever. Ever.

"Take that, cobber!" "Achtung!" "BANZAI!" "Donner Und Blitzen!" "Ye Gods!"

Hoo boy.

The ship is on the ocean, so to speak

She says "You don't read women authors do ya?" / at least that's what I think I hear her say / Well I say "How would you know, and what would it matter anyway" / Well she says "Ya just don't seem like ya do", I said "You're way wrong" / She says "Which ones have you read then?", I say "I've read Erica Jong" / She goes away for a minute, and I slide out, out of my chair / I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody's goin' anywhere

-- Bob Dylan, Highlands

Reading Eric Jong (Fear of Flying) is turning out to be quite the experience. Frankly it's upsetting, and unsettling, and I haven't even finished it. It's the (in)famous one, the one about trying to reconcile passion with feminism, the one about the "zipless fuck" -- in which the narrator Isadora Wing details her fantasy of elated anonymous sex -- sex without strings, preambles, or consequences; sex with a stranger on a train, an itinerant Romeo who comes, sees, conquers, and disappears into the mists of the station.

What was it about [committed relationships] anyway? Even if you loved your [partner], there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger. And you longed for an overripe Camembert, a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hoofed.

I was not against [committed relationships]. I believed in [them], in fact. It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you'd be loyal to no matter what, one person who'd always be loyal to you. But what about all those other longings which after a while the [relationship] did nothing to appease? The restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the cunt, the longing to be filled up, to be fucked thorough every hole, the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses........*

The zipless fuck, the (comparatively; relatively) meaningless encounter, dalliance, "affair" or just the one-nighter -- that's the ideal. The irony: Fear of Flying demonstrates the unavailability of the zipless fuck. Far from being an inspirational story (as it is routinely billed) of a woman's escape from a dead marriage and discovery of erotic pleasure and independence, it's the tale of a woman who ditches her husband only to find in the arms of a lover first impotence and frustration, then heartbreak and abandonment. Hardly the embodiment of female liberation -- or 35 years later, the evolution of the committed relationship and the shedding of it's (co-)dependence on monogamy; hardly what I was hoping for.

How disappointing.

Then with timing that's so good it's almost suspicious, you meet the person who throws your world into a spin; the person who throws a dart through the fug of your complacency; who causes you a sharp intake of breath and the racing of pulse and the blah-de-blah. That person who through no act nor blame of their own makes you wonder and ponder long-and-hard at their seeming-suitedness to you; now you're left doubting your commitment and wondering, simply, "am I with the right person?".

And am I able to ever trust your impulses, reasons, rationales, insights (or not) again.

This post was inspired in part by Harvey Pekar; ordinary life IS pretty complex stuff, indeed.

Mayo Thompson - Dear Betty Baby (2.62 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Christina Nehring on Erica Jong and the zipless fuck
Erica Jong on Bob Dylan

*excerpts from Christina Nehring and Erica Jong reproduced without permission.

Lunar park

My current project of rereading all of Brett Easton Ellis's books, in order, has culminated in me devouring his latest Lunar Park in a matter of hours, this week.

It's absurdly good. It features the main character Bret Easton Ellis, a wildly-successful author who achieved notoriety and success at a very early age, who has spent the subsequent twenty years getting fucked up, and whose life with new wife and kids has now fallen virtually to pieces. Yes exactly -- it is literally autobiographical, at least in part.

The book also features characters from Ellis' work, namely Patrick Bateman, who generally terrorizes him and goes about in Brett's neighborhood recreating the murders and violence of American Psycho. (We know it's Bateman because the guy looks a bit like Christian Bale, who played Bateman in Mary Harron's film adaptation of Psycho.) He is also being menaced by at least one of his former selves, and his dead father, and a child's toy bird which he gave to his daughter and which may or may not actually be a grotesque monster from another world. So it's really some kind of meta-novel -- a Stephen King-style pulp-horror fused with a soap-opera he-said she-said couples-counselling marriage falling-apart drama, all bound up in the sort of post-modern self-referential hyperreal structure that frankly I don't believe anyone but this author could get away with.

At some point Ellis observes that these terrors only exist because he -- at some point or another -- wrote them into existence; he immediately sets about penning a quick short story about the demise of Patrick Bateman, trying to write him out of existence again. It doesn't work.

I don't want to say any more and, besides -- you won't want me to give it all away, will ya; you'll want to find out for yourself. I have a feeling that I did the right thing in reading all his books in sequence before attacking Lunar Park; his habit of referencing and reviving characters from other works in new books is taken to an illogical extreme here and it helps somewhat to have, for example, every gory detail of Patrick Bateman's bloody rampages fresh in mind. Like I said, though -- absurdly, precociously good.

Some further reading:

Brett Easton Ellis in Wikipedia.
post-Lunar Park interview at The Morning News.
Brett Easton Ellis at e-Notes.
Video of interview on BBC.
Story about Lunar Park and BEE on Chuck Palahnuik's site.

Bright Lights, Big City

Kiran gave me a copy of Jay McInerny's (possibly-)quintesstial 80s-hedonistic-decadence novel last night to read in my (semi-)sick bed. I knew only the film adaptation with Michael J. Fox in the lead role, and to be honest I don't remember too many good things. I'm also having trouble reading the protagonist's second-person dialogue in anyone's voice other than Marty McFly's.

I'm really enjoying the book though, and giggling unselfconsciously at bits like:

IT'S 6 AM, DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE???

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy.

You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder.

Then again, it might not.

A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is the result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

All this really just leads me to the realisation that there have been far too few drinks lately, here at Drinks-After-Work. This is not going unnoticed by management, either. On one hand there is a certain sensible rationalisation going on; indeed, how many times can I really write the same story about going to the pub and watching some band, or a game of rugby, without boring everyone including myself. On the other, the simple, painful truth is that there just hasn't been that much going on. Look how neglected my "debauchery" channel is, for godssakes. Why? I've been tired. Sick. Sore. Busy. You name it, I've been it.

So. This has got to end. here. now. Taken under consideration; report-back expected shortly.

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NP: Boris with Michiuo Kurihara -- Rainbow (aQuarius)

Following their recent successful collaboration with American doom-drone-druids SUNNO))), who could Japanese behemoths Boris turn to for another joint effort in channelling the ultimate in psychedelic heaviness? They'd already teamed up with Keiji Haino some years ago, but there's another underground Japanese psych-scene guitar hero who Boris NEEDED to get freaky with (as proven here), and it wasn't Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple (though that's bound to happen someday...). No, as you already know, it's Michio Kurihara, formerly of Tokyo retro psych legends White Heaven, currently in both Ghost and The Stars. He's also played a bunch with Damon and Naomi, and released his own solo album Sunset, also on Pedal. His West Coast '60s inspired guitar style is virtuosic and distinctive, and certain to spark something special with the Boris crew, as any Kurihara fan would expect .............................

Varg Vikernes, Lord of Chaos

Have finally finished reading Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground. Despite the last little section seeming a little "tacked-on", it's true to its hype -- it's compelling, engagingly accessible, and fascinating. I'd recommend it to any fans of not only the black metal genre, but also to any students of true crime, sociology, and cultism.

"Gripping stuff, a book about scary rock that is really scary."

-- Booklist

Found this rather impressive and prepossessing picture of black metaller, church-burner and murderer Varg Vikernes a.k.a. Count Grishnach a.k.a. Burzum on his official site. He's finally due out of prison in less than 12 months.

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If you're hooked into my podcast feed on the right there, you'll notice that I've done a new 'cast called Poems for the Aching, Swords for the Infuriated. This is the first in a series of black metal comps I've been requested by a couple of mates, namely Button and A.M., to put together. This is gonna be fun.

NP: VA - Poems for the Aching, Swords for the Infuriated podcast (FoxyDigitalis)

Five Great Novels - Philip K Dick

You should buy this. Go on, you know you want to.... it's only 15 quid, and it rules.

Good god..

+ The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
+ Martian Time-slip
+ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
+ Ubik
and A Scanner Darkly

How do you imagine that you might ever go wrong?

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Woot, woot.. Pop Levi tomorrow night.

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NP: John Cale -- Vintage Violence (Allmusic): His first post-Velvet Underground solo album is easily one of his best. Excellent cover art, too.

Queer by William Burroughs: A Legendary Novel

You should buy this. Go on, you know you want to.... it's only $9.50, and it rules.

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David's talk on Saturday afternoon was really good and quite funny. I got a surprise part-way through when a reproduction of one of my own works appeared on the big screen, to illustrate some point or other.



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NP: Billy Preston -- A whole new thing (Allmusic): Mahalia Jackson, Little Richard and The Beatles' keyboards go-to guy goes... disco. With surprisingly endearing results.