Ben Myers has a very thoughtful and thought-provoking article on the Guardian site entitled "Does literature of the homeless exist?" It's a theme that's been rattling about inside my head for a while, since the recent cold spell.

A year and a half ago, my uncle Eamon "Budgie" Anderson (my cousin by birth but brought up alongside my dad and his brothers) died. He was a street alcoholic and he froze to death while he was homeless. The powers-that-be saw fit to close down the refuge that they had for street drinkers in Derry because of a lack of funding. For whatever reason, they ended up turfed out onto the street and Budgie died because of it. The reaction following his death, too late for him sadly, nonetheless showed the inherent decency of the people; most were shocked and appalled it could happen and shelters have been arranged since (one coming from an anonymous local businessman) but it took a man (a father, son and brother) to die for anything to happen. There's a BBC news archive on it (including an interview with his mother, my aunt Margaret).

Reading Ben's article got me thinking about it all and how it's almost impossible to articulate what someone goes through in that position (Orwell's Down and Out In Paris and London and Masters' Stuart: A Life Backwards are both stunning works but still somehow lacking). After all, it's people like Budgie who have truly lived it right to the sad end and who'll never get to tell their stories.

I started thinking of times when he would come up to me when I was a teenager, at the corner of Waterloo and William Street, and say "you're Seamus' son" and tap me for change and I'd give him some and have that self-satisfied glow that people get when they give money away. in reality I was more often embarrassed to the point of, I'm shamed to admit, quietly denying that he was a relative and just wanting him to beat it if I was standing with my mates or a girl.

walking around Edinburgh in the last months with the snow two feet deep and winter winds howling in, I couldn't believe how many junkies and alcoholics were still on the streets at night, in sleeping bags by North Bridge or huddled in phonebooths on the Royal Mile and I kept thinking how the fuck do they survive and kept putting that shitty little voice out of my head, the inner Tory in everyone, that gets annoyed with their presence, the same one that's embarassed by a relative who's struggling and who's gone through a million times more than I could ever endure. anyone of us could slip, most of us being two wage packets or one breakdown away from destitution and that it's a constant fight to stay human these days, not for the homeless person necessarily but the person stepping over them. but you forget, you get lazy and the worst side of your being tends to take over which is why books and things are there to remind us I suppose; to stay human and not join the cynics. anyways check out Ben's article and Budgie, rest in peace.

Began the week lying on the X-ray table of Leith Community Hospital (I've had better Mondays) so will be offline while I convalesce in a sanitorium somewhere north of Geneva. Will return soon, the grim reaper permitting, to speak to the void on some writing projects I'm working on at the moment. On the plus side, thanks to Grevious Jones Review for kindly reviewing my recent poetry chapbook (their "favourite of 2009" no less). It makes me feel like the Elephant Man when he's allowed to leave the freakshow and go live in a museum. Hopefully there will be a happy ending too just like Mr Merrick's. Incidentally, for those who like seeing the English language dragged into disrepute, Tesla's Ghost is available to purchase from Blackheath Books (quality independent publishers of Billy Childish, Adelle Stripe, Jenni Fagan, Ben Myers and a raft of other fine writers).

just finished reading Ben Myer's forthcoming novel Richard (my bi-polar computer ate it but then it reappeared two weeks ago as if by witchcraft). It's a fantastic read and the man writes with such skill it almost makes me physically sick.
Due out soon on Picador, buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy (preferably buy).
I'm no Richard and Judy but I reckon this, Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon and Lee Rourke's The Canal are the main contenders for this year's underground literary heavyweight belt. Buy them all and do your bit to support your local writer's various vices and addictions.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed..."

Revisiting England's greatest poet and painter, the legendary William Blake for 3:AM Magazine,

"When the ghost of William Blake is wheeled out by some kind of jingoist windbag, remember that this was a man who was anti-authority to the marrow of his bones, remember that his soul belonged to the half-demented inner streets of London rather than the chancels of Canterbury or York and that if Jerusalem is an alternative anthem it is one, not for a nation of Thatcherite shopkeepers or the psychotic traitors lodged in the citadel of the Square Mile but rather a mystic Internationale, for the unsilent minority, those bellowing down the centuries for social justice and the freedom to be whatever they choose, the culture-bearers and fuck-ups, not the disgusted of Tunbridge Wells but the disgusting of Soho. In other words, he is yours."

Cigarettes and Alcohol

Discussing poetry, religion, drink and the forgotten art of the sea shanty with the magnificent Adelle Stripe over on 3:AM Magazine:

"My Grandma gave me these weird Watchtower books with all the bible stories in them, re-written with a fundamentalist Jehovah Witness bent. The JW artists create pictures of heaven, hell, paradise, sin, damnation – perfect families living perfect lives and a world free of disease. I know for a fact that some of the artists started subverting the medium and pictures appeared in Awake where in the foreground a lion would be lying down with a lamb and in the background – if you squinted – you could see a man jacking off in the bushes… They really are completely nuts. It’s a glorified Apocalypse Cult. I knew from a really early age that it was all a load of codswallop, but I was totally enchanted by the art… Those pictures pretty much sold the idea of sin to me. Sin looked like a right laugh. Paradise looked fucking depressing..."

Tesla's Ghost

"Blackheath Books is proud to present an eclectic chapbook collection of sea shanties, drunken laments, murder ballads and cautionary tales, written whilst floating down life’s gutter. Featuring a cast of clairvoyants, sideshow freaks, fallen angels and body-snatchers and cameos from Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Sitting Bull.

Witness a President’s head exploding on Dealey Plaza!

Hear tales to bend the bones; the true story of Jonah in the actual belly of the whale and dastardly Judas on the run!

Strike fear into your mortal soul pondering the very end of the world, the Day of the Dead and the terrible mournful tones of the Shipping Forecast!
Bask in the glamorous deadbeat life; searching for missing teeth on a barroom floor and contemplating Free Derry Corner with a bellyful of rum.

Hold hands and tremble around the flickering lamplight as we channel the ghosts of Elvis’ twin and the great Nikola Tesla, inventor of the death ray laser beam.

Tesla’s Ghost is the latest collection (and first to see the light of day) from the metaphorical deformed stepchild locked in the attic of Irish poetry. But, good people, he got out…"

The Spiritualist

"Ghosts are as they lived. Some are snobs. Some wish to be celebrities. Some are intolerable bores who only want to speak about themselves, weaving vastly inflated accounts of their lives and their deaths. Most just function, spend their eternity in a state of quiet desperation, not really doing much. Some are accountants. Some still stampede into sales and gaze longingly in the reflections of shop windows. Some have lingering nicotine addictions and float around ceilings in smoke riptides. On rare occasions, they can still surprise. A railway conductor, with his jaw missing seeking tickets. A blood-spattered drunk shrieking for a drink in a crowded bar. The ghosts of cavemen running petrified from motorways..."

Short story "The Spiritualist" on the spiffing Lee Rourke-curated Everyday Genius site.

”You remember Davies? He died, you know..."

"RS Thomas was many things but a barrel of laughs was not one of them. He had a seemingly permanent scowl and foreboding air that, as was often-commented, seemed to fit his thin undertaker-style frame. An ordained Anglican priest, he tended to parishes in the dark interior and storm-lashed peninsulas of Wales, the weather and remoteness matching and amplifying his stern character. He was fond of bird-watching, much less so of human beings. An unapologetic Luddite, he banned electrical appliances from his home and delivered rambling diatribes from his pulpit against such things as televisions, microwave ovens and fridges, all of which he saw as the devil’s work.

His depiction of Wales was never likely to make it into a tourist brochure (his is a country of inbreeding, rotting carrion and endless rain). Yet he proudly counted himself as a nationalist, refusing to vote for Plaid Cymru as they recognised English authority and advocating the burning of holiday homes, whose absentee owners were pricing locals out of existence in their own land. So remarkably contrary was his nature, that it comes almost as an aside that RS Thomas happened to be one of the 20th century’s finest poets."

- RS Thomas, the Clint Eastwood of the Spirit.

"today is the day when the streets are full of hearses..."

“Leave everything… Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.”

David Gascoyne, Surrealism and the Vanishing Muse @ 3:AM.

Stations of the Cross

“An autobiography is only to be trusted” George Orwell once wrote, “when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” With Last Days of the Cross, Joseph Ridgwell, bastard son of Arturo Bandini and the Artful Dodger, admirably rises (or perhaps sinks) to the challenge... Misery, debauchery, destitution, thwarted dreams and the burning resolve of the damned. Last Days of the Cross has it all in abundance. It is also one of the funniest books you’ll read this year."

Review of Joseph Ridgwell's Last Days of the Cross over on 3:AM Magazine.

For the Discerning Bibliophile...

"Not content to get into bed with Tangerine Press for a special collaborative issue in June 09, Beat the Dust have only gone and done the same with Blackheath Books now an’ all – tart! Run by Geraint Hughes, Blackheath Books is that rarest of things - an artisan publisher with an ethical approach to book-making and a love of books and great writing. Providing ‘a home for the literary outsider’, each limited edition, signed copy is hand-crafted using 100% recycled paper and card. For this special Blackheath Books edition of BTD, then, we have some of the latest work from a selection of Blackheath authors…

Featuring sample writing from Blackheath stablemates Billy Childish, Adelle Stripe, Joseph Ridgwell, Ben Myers, Jenni Fagan, Miles J Bell, Darran Anderson, Vic Templar, Garrie Fletcher, Graham Bendel and an interview with head honcho Geraint Hughes.

The Ship is Sinking

"Everyone knows where they were when Walt Disney defrosted. When Joan of Arc crawled from the ashes. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. First, there was the small matter of dying. And we all had to do it."

Novel The Ship is Sinking and poetry collection Tesla's Ghost to follow soon...

(picture courtesy of Caireen Burns)

The Man with the Gallows Eyes

Billy Childish, the finest artist and moustache-curator of our times has released his new collection of poems and spirituals Unknowable But Certain with the mighty Blackheath Books.

Needless to say, each book is a work of art, crafted from the finest Welsh hemp using the latest Victorian technology and then thigh-pressed by 72 successive virgins. (Tesla's Ghost and the magnificent Adelle Stripe's latest collection to follow from Blackheath, watch this space).

8/1/1949 - 9/11/2009

One of the greatest fucking writers on this planet has died.
Jim Carroll Rest In Peace.

Death of a Ladies Man

"Bunny Munro is an ultra-lech. An alpha-lech. He lives out those fantasies of irresistibility and unaccountability that are harboured even in the dimmest of minds. It doesn’t matter that in every one of his debauched episodes, there’s already traces of depression, pangs of decline, a stud turning… Stringfellow. Bunny is obsessed with sex to the point it goes beyond sex and becomes something approaching the demented, the hallucinatory. He sees women as Hans Bellmer dolls or as disembodied floating genitalia. In one memorably depraved scene, he looks out upon women in a park on a summer’s day and instead sees a seething cornucopia of flesh. In another, “he thinks with a sudden terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.”

Reviewing Nick Cave's new novel The Death of Bunny Munro over on 3:AM Magazine.

On a completely different note, have an article in this month's Verbal Magazine (available as pdf file online or in print via The Derry Journal and Belfast News for those in the north) on forgotten female Irish writers (including the anti-Cecilia Aherne the great Lola Ridge) that was written for International Women's Day but fell through the cracks.

"A land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides for the wisdom of serene old age." So went President De Valera's vision for the new Irish state, broadcast over the radio to the nation on St Patrick's Day 1943. By implication, De Valera was also outlining what his Ireland would not be. In effect, cosmopolitanism and enlightenment would be sacrificed for a sleepy parochial version of Ireland. That this idealised land of “comely maidens” and “cosy homesteads” had never existed before (nor ever really could given human nature) was beside the point. It was just the acceptable face of the prevailing puritan streak in Church and State, the same smothering conservatism that had driven the nation's greatest cultural figures to take refuge abroad (Joyce, Wilde, Beckett, Yeats) or in the undeclared free-thinking republic that were the bars of Dublin (Behan, Kavanagh, O'Brien) or even the grave as in the sad disgraceful case of Charles Stewart Parnell. Within this blueprint, the role of women would largely follow the German model of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). The idea of Kathleen Ni Houlihan as Ireland's poetic embodiment had less to do with any high opinion of women and more to do with placing them safely on a pedestal, out of sight out of mind, a sort of silencing by romanticising. Thankfully, there have been plenty of fearless female writers prepared to subvert stereotypes, create unique visions at great personal cost and who, despite everything, refuse to be written out of history."

PS Thanks to Kevin Williamson, Jenni Fagan, Word Power and everyone who showed up at the recent reading for a great night.

Beyond the Fringe

Coming up for air to report, I'll be reading this month as part of the Edinburgh Book Fringe with two sterling writers: Jenni Fagan (Urchin Belle) and Kevin Williamson (In a Room Darkened, Rebel Inc). Given Rebel Inc's the reason I started trying to write, it's a pleasure to be appearing alongside Kevin and I can't recommend Jenni's poetry chapbook Urchin Belle enough - it's published by Blackheath Books.

The original plan of the reading consisting of the telling of lies, slanders and idle drunken boasts has been substituted for a rambling diatribe about writing from the ditch (from Rimbaud onwards) and some stuff from the forthcoming poetry thing Tesla's Ghost and maybe a wee bit of the novel The Ship is Sinking.

Anyways it's at 4 o'clock next Saturday at Word Power so anyone kicking around the festival feel free to stop by (Edwyn Collins is on before us and Tom Leonard the night before both of which I'd highly recommend), pretty sure we'll be having a few ales in The Pear Tree opposite afterwards.

On the topic of the festival, in the absence of the Spiegeltent, this year the Assembly Rooms seem to be offering the best gigs. Check out Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen, Camille O'Sullivan, Circa, Jason Byrne and friends' late night show and the Pajama Men, all of whom have been brilliant this year. Thomas Truax's forthcoming Steampunk night The Arrival of Airship R1001 at te POOKa and Amanda Palmer at the Picturehouse will be well worth frequenting. Tally ho.

The Indian Rope Trick

Considering the phenomenon of the disappearing writer from Poe to Saint-Exupéry via Rimbaud over on 3:AM Magazine




"At the heart of every writer lies a paradox. Whereas the other art-forms (music, theatre and film in particular) have a natural communal element, writing necessitates a monkish solitude but also a desperate clawing desire for recognition. The turbulence between these two states is the stuff that can make or break a person. Added to this are life’s natural disasters and the neuroses/bohemianism of creative types which have blazed a trail of glory and destruction from John Clare through Sylvia Plath and d.a. levy to David Foster Wallace. Whereas every successful writer’s path is more or less the same, every doomed one has a unique tale to tell..."

Plus there's a short piece on the decline of the modern love song and a celebration of the late great Arab Strap on Friday I'm In Love

"Since the heyday of Motown and Brill Building, the conventional love song has been in terminal decline, ending its days senile, piss-stained and pleasuring itself in that circle of Dante’s Hell known as the Tesco music aisle. Attention must turn leftfield then, to those who address affairs of the heart from a more discerning angle, with a hint of surrealism or debauchery or the gutter. The great love songs of our age have been a diverse fare; Nick Cave bashing a muse’s skull in by a river, Tom Waits singing sea shanties to hookers, Kate Bush hunted by wolves and Leonard Cohen receiving head in the Chelsea hotel. It’s found in the sordid and haunting affairs of Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Mark Lanegan and Smog. It can have a backdrop of Stalinism (Bowie’s ‘Heroes’), depression (Tindersticks’ ‘Travelling Light’), narcotics (Spiritualized’s ‘I Think I’m in Love’), the loneliness of telecommunications maintenance workers (Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’), paedophilia (Gainsbourg’s ‘Ballade de Melody Nelson’), sadomasochism (the Velvets’ ‘Venus in Furs’) or even the holocaust (Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘In an Aeroplane over the Sea’).

There were few finer practitioners of the dark arts of the soul than Falkirk’s finest Arab Strap; named appropriately and romantically enough after a cock ring. And ‘The Shy Retirer’ is arguably their finest moment, a lament and celebration of a fleeting moment when boy meets girl in nightclub, both off their faces on disco biscuits. A doomed moment of letting go and transcending all the shite of the everyday even if it is a temporary or illusionary reprieve, “Another bloated disco, another sniff of romance I’ll forget / we promised to ourselves before we came out we’d do something we regret / these people are your friends / this cunted circus never ends / I won’t remember anything you say.”

Gone fishing...

Back soon with news of some long-term projects/acts of folly I've been working on. In the meantime, check out Flotsam & Jetsam: a compendium of all things rum and uncanny.

This is a Low

The Shipping Forecast, cow-killing and imbeciles on camping trips over on Dogmatika

"To prepare ourselves for a Jim Morrison-esque mystical journey, we’d ingested magic mushrooms on the bus down which led to nothing more transcendental than bowel spasms and gut-wrenching nausea. We chose the location having been chased away from our favoured spots of Swan Park in Buncrana by a criminally insane horse (reputedly someone had wrenched their own finger off on a fence trying to get away during one of its episodes) and having been flooded staying in the Meegees (no relation). We were thus driven to the edge of the world."

"Where he's from the birds sing a pretty song..."

Review of Thomas Truax's superb new album Songs From the Films of David Lynch on Dogmatika alongside poems from Paul Perry and Susan Tomaselli's roundup of all thing alt-lit.

"Through accident or design, Thomas Truax has so far successfully avoided absorption into the colonic tract that is the mainstream, amassing a considerable following in the process. It’s a folly to attempt to pigeonhole such singular and changeable a style though some do (Anti-folk? Steampunk? Truaxian?). His is music constructed from clockwork and junkyard cast-offs, instruments seemingly fashioned from bits of bicycles, gramophones and washing machines. He takes the stage half-crackpot inventor – half bedlam escapee, armed with a briefcase filled with instruments with names like the Hornicator and Mary Poppins (built from “spoons, aerodynamics, centrifugal force, a motorcycle headlamp and a playing card”). He sings songs about being inside the internet, hunted butterflies and the doomed space-music producer Joe Meek. To his fans, he issues The Wowtown News in which he reports local happenings, from dark tales of spider families and groundhogs baptised Al Camus to ominous headlines such as “Continued Meteor Rain, Roach Exodus” and “The Bee Bonnet Plague.” By admission, his primary influences are “toxins in the water supply.”

From the Bowels of Londinium They Came...

Following the success of the recent London Recession Session night (featuring the likes of Tom McCarthy, Paul Ewen, Lee Rourke, Christiana Spens and many more), Beat The Dust is now running the various stories, speeches, poems and slanders online along with some footage of the night (minus the organiser Melissa Mann, Will Ashon and myself as our moving images cannot be captured due to a thousand year old Carpathanian Gypsy curse placed on the heads of our peasant forefathers - the tape got chewed or something).

Still there are photos of my grotesque visage and some much more pleasing to the eye from the night here. And the writer Sam Jordison has kindly reviewed the shindig for 3:AM Magazine.

Here's a quote from it (which I intend to have etched on my gravestone) - "A person has to have something going for him if he can introduce himself by saying “My name’s Darran Anderson, apologies for the hair” and then tell a story about masturbating in front of traffic and how JG Ballard had put him up to such depravity."