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Jackie Leven: The lovely beautyin what’s left behind
(guest post)
As part of an ongoing series of articles, interviews and reminiscences about and inspired by the late Jackie Leven, the following short feature by Liam Carson was written around the time Jackie was working with writer Ian Rankin on the music and spoken word project that would become Jackie Leven Said.
This picture of Jackie from the cover of a Norway-only mini-LP released in 1984, entitled ‘Some People Are Ratz’
[continue reading...]Recent Posts
wordsSHIFTminds - writing that changes your mind
This is the website of author, twitterer, blogger and editor Chris Bell. wordsSHIFTminds is its own mission statement: writing that changes your mind. That change might come via a story about an imagined future Auckland and a regime that has outlawed the internet, which survives underground in dens where the citizens connect to their past via a kind of neural Wayback Machine. Or the shift might happen through trying to remember a time of innocence when it was hard to beat the taste of granny’s toast.
It’s perhaps best summarised in a quotation from Russell Hoban, taken from the Preface to A Russell Hoban Omnibus, which Indiana University Press kindly granted the author permission to reproduce in the Expanded E-book-only edition of the short story collection The Bumper Book of Lies:
“It seems to me that the realest reality lives somewhere beyond the edge of human vision; I don’t know that it can ever be seen, but I’ll keep looking.”
Interviews
Five minutes withDave Pell
Dave Pell, the founder of delivereads – curated content delivered to your Kindle – is an internet early adopter who’s stuck with it, in spite (or perhaps because) of having blown cash and time on more than 50 startups, including: Corrigo, Dealbase, GrubHub, Liftopia, Marin Software, SendMe, Three Rings and Trazzler. He also tweets and blogs on Tweetage Wasteland. His posts are syndicated on NPR, Gizmodo, Forbes and Huffington Post. delivereads sends articles from the likes of GQ, Esquire, the New Yorker and the Boston Globe direct to your Kindle – the most satisfying place to read an article apart from on paper.
Five minutes with Steven Pressfield
Steven Pressfield says inspiration comes from the Muse. I no longer believe in angels or muses, but I do believe writers tap into the collective consciousness, and having now read Pressfield’s motivational books I’m willing to suspend my disbelief. I’m not the first writer to confirm his methods succeed – what we have in common is that we’ve sat down and are writing. It’s that simple, so far. As revered screenplay instructor Robert McKee says: “When inspiration touches talent, she gives birth to truth and beauty. And when Steven Pressfield was writing The War of Art, she had her hands all over him.”
Five minutes with Lisa Dierbeck
Lisa Dierbeck is the author of two novels, The Autobiography of Jenny X and One Pill Makes You Smaller, a New York Times Notable Book. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Dierbeck has contributed to the Boston Globe, Glamour, New York Observer, New York Times Book Review, People and O, The Oprah Magazine. The Washington Post Book World has described her as “An undeniably talented writer”, and the Los Angeles Times as “passionate, observant, and funny.”
Five minutes with Chad Taylor
New Zealand writer Chad Taylor (this photograph by John Hagen) has been described as “the Nick Cave of New Zealand literature”. ‘Departure Lounge’ has been called his best book to date. His previous novels are ‘Pack of Lies’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Shirker’ and ‘Electric’.
Chris Bell
“Over the years, publishers have become increasingly slow to react and less likely to accept unsolicited work. Where once I was able to sell a story to multiple small press markets simultaneously, these days publishers increasingly demand exclusivity in return for not very much.” Tim Jones’s interview with Chris Bell, from the Books in the Trees blog, 15 July 2010.
Five minutes with Alain de Botton
“We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater [or more critical] than the malice we ourselves feel in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.” So wrote Alain de Botton in How Proust Can Change Your Life.
Short-shorts
Fareham Fourth Dimension In a fourth dimension somewhere, on a windy day, Jackie Leven is carrying a rustling Somerfield carrier bag towards what appears to be the Fareham Burger Van. The man in the van, the Burger Man, seems to be Russell Hoban. Inexplicably, he is wearing a Sunderland team soccer jersey. He is holding a bottle of bright red, almost radioactive chilli sauce.
E-books
Dream Me An Island An island rising from the sea, sand strewn with coconut husks frothing at its perimeters; the hills a mirage of purple looming from the rainforest… Set on an imaginary Caribbean island, ‘Dream Me An Island’ tells the story of local taxi driver Charles Wesley ‘Smiley’ Gumbs, who is coerced into using Obeah Magic to pressurise a multinational corporation to stop mining for gold.
Poems
Mapmaking in the realm of dreams (WIP) I’ve always wanted to write about the topography of dreams but never quite knew how to describe it. This poem is a work in progress.
Excerpts
Sustain: Saccade, an excerpt The resonance of Himalayan singing bowls sustains in your head all week, so the following weekend you return to the farmers’ market.
The square of carpet and the singing bowl man’s stand are there, along with his arrangement of bowls, his incense burner, his CDs, but not the man. You circle the market once, hoping he will return, but he is nowhere to be seen.
You leave several folded banknotes under one of the bowls and take a CD from the display. No one observes you leaving and the singing bowl man does not materialise.
From the NZBC archives
Amis-hater challenge I’d decided not to re-publish an old post about Martin Amis, until I discovered a David Barrett article on Standpoint. I was defending Amis’s writing long before it became fashionable to deride him for being, as some would have it, “a really lousy writer”, “talentless” and, heaven forbid, “really annoying”. But if Barrett’s examples from Amis’s body-of-work are unconvincing, it’s incumbent on the haters to dazzle us: specimens from his superiors should be so incandescent that quotes by a talentless and lousy writer would shrivel and turn to ashes in our hands. I challenge anyone to do that by posting examples of inarguably better writing than the ones Barrett quotes. In the long silence inevitably to follow, here’s what I said about London Fields.
Stories
The Vale of Health “I’ve not been well. Too much noise in my head, a kind of teetering, skittering feeling as though everything’s about to come crashing down. I’m in need of a different sort of distraction; something grounded, with less noise than the internet. The look of one of the trees in the park opposite my study in the summer light; that occulting of sun on leaves stirring in the breeze — so complex; such a manyness of brightnesses and shade — reminds me there is something larger than us in a way my computer cannot, and I need to be reminded of that.”
A short story about a painting that has a life of its own.
Interviews
Five minutes withDave Pell
Dave Pell, the founder of delivereads – curated content delivered to your Kindle – is an internet early adopter who’s stuck with it, in spite (or perhaps because) of having blown cash and time on more than 50 startups, including: Corrigo, Dealbase, GrubHub, Liftopia, Marin Software, SendMe, Three Rings and Trazzler. He also tweets and blogs on Tweetage Wasteland. His posts are syndicated on NPR, Gizmodo, Forbes and Huffington Post. delivereads sends articles from the likes of GQ, Esquire, the New Yorker and the Boston Globe direct to your Kindle – the most satisfying place to read an article apart from on paper.