Palintology.

Forced bonhomie? Yes, we can!It’s a bit fucking rich, presuming to comment on something as big as a country. I mean, how do you know the country you’re talking about bears any resemblance to the way someone from a different socio-economic group, or race, or sexuality sees it? Plus, if you’re a foreigner like me, you almost certainly don’t have the same depth or subtlety of perspective as someone who’s lived there all his life. Then there’s the problem of unreliable narration, which happens whenever you sit down in front of a computer screen and have to keep fighting off the urge to reduce the vast swathe of contradictions which defines your subject into a single, cogent and patently untrue account, because that always sounds so much better, doesn't it?

Having said that, I'm now going to go right ahead and make that same mistake. What a tool.

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The Imperialism of Porn.

I wrote this piece about a month and a half ago. Two weeks later, porn was in the headlines again after Baroness Greenfield said it would destroy children’s brains, and it seemed like a good time to get it up here, if you’ll forgive the expression. But then real life eclipsed everything else and I’m only just getting round to posting it now…into the black airless vacuum of unremembering space. It’s a lonely furrow I plough, but I plough it defiantly, with my trousers down. Anyway, here goes.

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Rimbaud in Space.

They say Rambo drew first blood, but we all know that really it was Rimbaud, the demonic, visionary iconoclast poet. Here's a response to one of his poems, 'Les Ponts', with particular reference to concepts of urban space.

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Bread and Stairs: Reflection on Exile

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale. [You will prove how bitter the taste of another man’s bread is, / And how hard it is to descend, and climb, another man’s stair. Par XVII: 55-60]

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Breathless.

Here’s a piece about why writers hold their breath or something. I don’t know what it’s about, to be honest, as I was on laudanum when I wrote it. I swear I saw Xanadu, and fricking Olivia Newton-John was there in her roller skates. It was absolutely wicked.

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