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Let’s Kill The Novel & Remake The World! Stewart Home interviewed by Raül De Tena

Monday, April 30th, 2012

This is an interview I did recently with H Magazine around the publication in Spain of my novel Memphis Underground. They will have run a Spanish translation but here it is with my original answers in English. I know some of my bilingual readers have enjoyed comparing the original interviews about the Spanish edition of Memphis Underground and their translations… so this provides another opportunity for them to do so. For those of you who don’t speak Spanish but are fluent in English, you get to read something you wouldn’t have access to otherwise. I haven’t run through all the Spanish interviews I’ve done yet but I’m tempted to call it quits with this one for now…

Raül De Tena:. At one point in Memphis Underground you say that you’re gonna use one of the sentences you just wrote to answer a random journalist. That part of the book scared me when I started to write down these questions… Are you gonna answer the truth and only the truth in this interview? Or is it better keep the mystery to make the interview more appealing?

Stewart Home: I don’t think I wrote that in the book but this might be because of the way the passage has been translated or perhaps you’re misremembering it. My memory is often so faulty that I’ve no idea about the actual content of things I wrote last week, let alone a few years ago! And the same goes for what I read, but much more so!

Anyway, I think the passage you’re referring to is the following: “In my rereading of Marcuse, I paid particular attention to the chapter entitled The Aesthetic Dimension, since I thought it might be amusing to bamboozle a journalist by using this as a theoretical justification for my own work.”

This is from one of the diary sections in Memphis Underground written as if it is a piece of non-fiction by me, rather than one of the fictional sections, so I’m not surprised it would worry you as a journalist. In journalism (and I too write journalism) we assume that truth is something we can reach, but as an anti-novelist I have to assume it is something slippery that escapes us but that can be approached more closely through fiction than non-fiction. The tricky bit here is that Memphis Underground contains both fiction and non-fiction, or at least blends them.. One of the intended effects of much of my prose is to amuse – and also if the reader thinks deeply about how I’m giving them laughs, to leave them all at sea! Confused? You will be!

Raül De Tena: Anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography are three important concepts in Memphis Underground. Do you think a reader who doesn’t know anything about those concepts can enjoy the book? Or you don’t even care about those considerations?

Stewart Home: I don’t think most people need to know anything about anything to enjoy the book – as long as they haven’t been brainwashed into thinking about ‘literature’ in the restricted sense of bourgeois subjectivity. Those who think that books are about linear plot and plodding characterisation will have a real problem with my writing. We can liken those with this outlook to people who think paintings have to be representational – they’re living in the past and incapable of understanding contemporary culture. But aside from plonkers of this stripe, I don’t think anyone will have any problems understanding Memphis Underground. I think it’s a very accessible book for contemporary readers, and they’ll laugh their asses off as they go through it.

Raül De Tena: The concepts I just mentioned are referred to a lot in the book, but how do anti-literature, neoism and psychogeography influence your writing and your style in Memphis Underground?

Stewart Home: Of these three concepts the most important is anti-literature – this is a tradition that predates literature and that encompasses black humour, theory and experimentation with prose and poetic forms. One could cite anything from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to the works of Kathy Acker by way of Karl Marx…. The important thing is not to restrict yourself to the genre known as literary fiction. Most of the contemporary writers promoted as being worthwhile by the bourgeois press are in fact boring, and this is precisely because they project themselves as being serious. To do anything worthwhile you have to get over the adolescent mania for being po-faced and grow up and grow into humour and laughs. The adolescent thinks that to be adult you have to always act like grown up – whereas the precise opposite is the case. To be properly grown up and to do anything really serious you have to do it with humour and levity. There are just way too many middle-aged writers out there whose misplaced sense of ‘gravity’ and importance reveals them to still have the minds of adolescents. Only anti-literature attains the levity that is a necessary corollary to real gravity.

Moving on, neoism is a prefix and a suffix without any content…. but then as Hegel demonstrated if you have nothing you have to have something because one is meaningless without the other. And if you’ve something and nothing then you must have becoming and from this foundation Hegel builds his entire philosophical system – which I find pretty hilarious, although I wouldn’t go along with it’s final realisation in the Prussian State and God, which is unfortunately where Hegel took it…. Returning to neoism, if it is nothing then it must be everything… And it can be pretty much whatever you want, so my take on neoism in Memphis Underground is subjective and possibly solipsistic!

Finally as regards this question, psychogeography is now so popular with the chattering classes and sections of the literary establishment that pretty much everyone who ever had anything to do with it in its earlier incarnations tends to disavow it. But for the situationists it was a way of drawing up new emotional maps of the city, although before doing this they’d have to get blind drunk or really stoned and then wander around letting the unconscious solicitations of the architecture draw them on. It was only by getting completely out of it that the situationists were able to do psychogeorgraphy and this is something that seems to be lost on many contemporary practitioners of the craft… and may explain why their results, in England anyway where psychogreography seems to be most popular, are so utterly useless…

Raül De Tena: When you read through Memphis Underground you are left thinking that the book is a direct attack on two concepts. First of all, art as a business and as a dead scene. Is there no hope for art in the 21st Century?

Stewart Home: As the radical New York group Up Against The Wall Motherfucker (UATWM) declared back in the 1960s: “Art is Dead Baby! Burn The Museums!”

Raül De Tena: It’s interesting that the only hope for art in Memphis Underground is precisely through fakery. But even that practice seems to be pretty ridiculous… Don’t you trust the fake as a motor for art any more? Or is even fake art a business?

Stewart Home: Well you know what they say – “Fake It Till You Make It!” This is also called the ‘act as if” doctrine and in English it is a common catchphrase that exhorts us to imitate confidence so that as the confidence produces success, it will generate real confidence. Fake art all too often falls into this trap and becomes real art, and I’m definitely faking it here coz I just copied and pasted the previous sentence from Wikipedia…. But to return to what I was saying, even being landed with the label art is a problem nowadays because it means people can put something that might otherwise disturb them in a little mental box and not even think about it. This was not a dilemma the Dadaists had to deal with when they embraced the negative a century ago… But Dadaist art trapped in museums does become a part of this problematic. Duchamp says somewhere that art dies (it has a life of maybe 30 or 40 years) and then ends up in graveyards called museums…. The same can be said of anti-art and fake art nowadays, except the half-life of such projects is getting shorter by the minute.

Raül De Tena: Your interest in fakery seems to relate to the annihilation of individuality (this is the other main concept Memphis Underground appears to be attacking). In the book you’re always ‘playing’ with the reader so the reader never knows who’s really the main character – or if it’s even the same person. Are you trying to annihilate the usual certainty of literature about the main character’s individuality and psychology? Or is this just a game played with the reader?

Stewart Home: There’s a difference between us all being unique individuals (although not necessarily that unique in our desires and tastes) and the ideology of individuality. I see characterisation in literature and all psychology from Freud to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and beyond, as bourgeois. Therefore this trope in literary fiction and the psychoanalytic theories associated with it for the past hundred years or so do need to be smashed! So what you’re asking me about is more than a game played with my readers….

Raül De Tena: Memphis Underground seems to be divided into two parts. The first half of the book is more classical, and the second half is perhaps your revenge against those who thought the whole book was gonna be easy reading… Is that division into two parts intentional? Do you usually think about the accessibility of what you’re writing?

Stewart Home: I always think about the audience for what I do, but the audience does not have to be broad, although sometimes it is. No book is going to have universal appeal. Memphis Underground has four main parts and some nice fills between these… and the opening was designed to read like a really typical piece of bland contemporary writing, which is then smashed up against a description of a map like you’d find in the French nouveau roman. So the book does set up the expectation that it will be more conventional than it ends up being, and I rerun that trope as you move through the text. But I don’t think that makes Memphis Underground hard to read for those have open minds, but it does create an accessibility problem for those who have been conditioned in their expectations by conventional bourgeois literature….

Raül De Tena: Lady Di and Death appear as characters on Memphis Underground. I find this awesome… But didn’t you think it was gonna be a dangerous move? Do you think you succeed using them as characters?

Stewart Home: Unless you’re prepared to take chances, and really willing to fail, then you’re not going to move writing or any other cultural form forward. Lady Di was probably the biggest celebrity we had in England for a hundred years, and like all celebrities the coverage of her drained her of all real humanity until we were only left with a cipher…. So I don’t think I could easily go wrong with her… In his 1957 movie The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman has a knight play chess with a personification of Death and I thought that was hilarious. So that was my starting point but obviously I wanted to trash Death up and not treat ‘him’ too seriously. So the humour in my use of Death is intentional, whereas in Bergman’s case I suspect it was unconscious…But again judged on my terms I’d say my use of Death was a huge success….

Raül De Tena: You mention Joyce and Finnegans Wake as the death of literature. Haven’t you found any interesting authors after Joyce? Could you mention some and why you find them interesting?

Stewart Home: There are many… Clarence Cooper Junior for his vision of prison and junkie life. Blaster Al Ackerman for his fried humour. Ann Quin for her deployment of a ventriloquist dummy in her first novel Berg. Alain Robb-Grillet both for his use of repetition and multiple perspectives…. and also for attacking the bourgeois disdain for pleasure – of which humour and laughter are important examples, as well as eroticism which is the springboard for Robbe-Grillet’s critique. British beat novelist Alex Trocchi for being a friend of my mother, and the fact they dealt smack together…. The list could go on and on and on! But I’ll stop here!

Raül De Tena: Your vision of London in Memphis Underground is fairly negative. Has it changed recently? How is your vision of London right now?

Stewart Home: London is always best in winter and in a recession, it ain’t a pretty city but it can be picaresque. Unfortunately the fact that there is a global market in London property means that the process of gentrification is continuing and rather than the rich and poor living side by side as has been the case for hundreds of years, the city is in danger of turning into somewhere like Paris with poverty concentrated in a ring around the outside, that is to say in the suburbs. So London ain’t what it used to be but then change is an integral part of the urban experience. But London is now much more like any other European city than the place I knew as a kid and teenager, when it was much dirtier and more smashed up, but also more unique….

Raül De Tena: Music is pretty important in Memphis Underground… Aren’t you afraid someone could think you’re part of pop literature (such as Nick Hornby)?

Stewart Home: I wouldn’t mind being seen as a part of pop literature if that meant like Michael Moorcock or some cool sci-fi writers. But Nick Horby! Ha ha ha! He just completely sucks….

Raül De Tena: You’re gonna be in Barcelona in May as part of Primera Persona. What can we expect of your lecture?

Stewart Home: Expect the unexpected – and loads more of the same as you get in this interview! My writing will give you better orgasms, but seeing me in the flesh is even better!

Raül De Tena: Javier Calvo’s gonna be with you at Primera Persona. Do you know his work? What do you think about it?

Stewart Home: I don’t read Spanish but I’m told by people who do that his writing is fabulous. So it will be groovy to appear with him!

Raül De Tena: Right now in Spain you’re considered a big influence on some important writers. Do you think your work has any connection with contemporary Spanish literature?

Stewart Home: I feel a strong connection for sure – and especially to hot female Spanish writers… I think I can develop my relationship with Spanish literature much further by getting to know some of these lit chicks intimately. I’d particularly like to meet some Spanish girl power writers who are churning out novels about sex and proletarian revolution – and who like to wear short skirts and white boots! But even if they’re not writers but are hot and like to wear white boots and skimpy dresses, then I’ll still be happy to meet any Spanish girls when I’m in Spain or if they come to London….

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: act as if, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alex Trocchi, anit-literature, Ann Quin, Barcelona, Blaster Al Ackerman, Clarence Cooper Junior, Dada, dadaists, death, fake art, fake it till you make it, Finnegans Wake, Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, Ingmar Bergman, James Joyce, Javier Calvo, Karl Marx, Kathy Acker, Laurence Sterne, Marcel Duchamp, Memphis Underground, Michael Moorcock, neoism, Nick Hornby, nouveau roman, Primera Persona, Princess Diana, psychogeography, Raül De Tena, Situationists, Stewart Home, The Seventh Seal, Tristram Shandy, Up Against The Wall Motherfucker, Wikipedia
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

No Piece

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Stewart Home: Don’t send a work to the art show. Tell the curator it got lost in the post. Do it again for the next exhibition. No art is the best art!

Curator: Great event score! I will use that as your contribution to the show (unless the postman happens to have found it).

Stewart Home: Only a dishonest postman could find a work I didn’t send, they only fake my work so they can make money from collectors, ingrates!

Curator: Bastards!

Stewart Home: At least they’re ripping off the collectors. But they ought to give me a cut of the dosh!

The anti-performance script in the top line of this post is one of many pieces not included in my mini-retrospective Again, A Time Machine on until 20 May 2012 at SPACE, 129-131 Mare Street, London E8 3RH, UK.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Again A Time Machine, anti-art, art, London, Mare Street, Space, Stewart Home
Posted in art criticism, exhibitions, humour | 20 Comments »

Get Down On It: Stewart Home interviewed by Jaime Casas

Friday, April 20th, 2012

I did this interview for a Spanish newspaper El Pais a few weeks ago and figured I might as well run it here in the original English. The Spanish publication of Memphis Underground has been generating a lot of interest there….

Jaime Casas: I see many different genres in Memphis Underground: from autobiography to meta-literature, but above all there is a sense of passion in everything said and done by the characters. It is a very a nondescript book it seems, and an experiment. But, I guess there are some ideas and intentions, what are they?

Stewart Home: At the most basic level I’m saying there are many new ways in which we can write, and by analogy many new ways in which we could organise the world. My writing varies from book to book, but very often I sample a lot of other writers (and correct them too of course), so that what I do becomes a collective authorial practice. Actually Memphis Underground has less of this sampling than many of my other books but it is still an attempt to move away from the ideas of possessive individualism and character (or what I view as bourgeois subjectivity) that characterises the reactionary literature of the capitalist ruling class. Most successful writers subscribe to the backward world-view of the bourgeoisie because they are more interested in being celebrities than in writing worthwhile books. Time will judge them very harshly – or to put it another way, they will very quickly be completely forgotten.

Moving from the macro to the micro level of the book, I’m dealing with how large sections of the working class has been forced out of London through the process of gentrification. Unlike in much of Spain, the property bubble has yet to burst in London but there is also a debate to be had here on how we can be more proactive rather than just waiting for the next crisis of capitalism.

Jaime Casas: Anyway, I’d say the protagonist Jack Johnson, has a lot of you in him, and yet many other modern characters too. It seems that he is some sort of collective consciousness…

Stewart Home: John Johnson is feisty like the boxer Jack Johnson – and he has some of me and some of a lot of other people in him. He’s a kind of (post)-modern everyman figure… We’re all unique in that we’re different people but actually the similarities between us far out-weight the differences – and so I’m not into creating the kind of generic but supposedly unique ‘characters’ you find in bourgeois fiction. As a consequence I’m able to think of John Johnson as my pet rock… so it doesn’t really matter whether or not I remember to give him food and water… he’ll just keep on keepin’ on right to the end of the book.

Jaime Casas: So he is not an alter-ego although you have described yourself as “an egomaniac on a world historical scale”; but is he still a platform from which you provide people with a different perception of yourself as an artist, writer, or whatever you consider yourself…?

Stewart Home: The protagonists in my books could never be identical with me even if I wanted them to be – and this definitely isn’t my intention anyway. When I call myself an egomaniac on a world historical scale this is intended to be humorous – and obviously I’m invoking Hegel in particular and to a degree Marx too. However, humour should be like an iceberg. The laughs are the ten percent visible above the water but the real matter lies below.

Historical changes in how egomania is perceived and what it means are certainly worth considering here. Max Nordau in his infamously reactionary late-nineteenth book Degeneration used the concept of egomania to attack the avant-garde of the fin de siècle as criminals and madmen. I wouldn’t want to defend politically all of those Nordau savages – including Wilde, Ibsen, Wagner and Nietzsche – but at the same time I’d want to resist his line of attack. And because many people still use the term egomaniac in the moralistic and negative sense Nordau deployed it, I think it is worth adopting as a form of self-description for humorous purposes.

That said, I would also reject the more recent positive use of the term to describe the quest for success and celebrity by the likes of businessman Donald Trump. A business celebrity like Trump is a superficial egomaniac who doesn’t take the concept seriously enough to make it worthwhile pursuing. Trump doesn’t want to change the world we find ourselves living in today, he just wants to sit on top of the stinking capitalist heap. There’s not much ambition in that – which is why I would distinguish world historical proletarian egomaniacs like myself from the half-hearted capitalist egomania of Trump. My ambitions aren’t focused on the world we live in but on one we’ve yet to create – which is why I (like all self-conscious proletarians) am genuinely ambitious and tossers like Trump aren’t worthy of our consideration.

I think the whole purpose of revolutionary activity is to overcome capitalist canalisation. Rather than being one thing we should all be many things. So I can take on the role of artist, writer, egomaniac etc. But what I want to avoid above all else is being ‘myself’ – accepting a limited identity which is exactly what capitalism encourages us to do. Instead, the proletariat does much better by working through in practice the theoretical implications of the slogan: “I am nothing therefore I must become everything….” And so one minute I am a comedian and the next I am a lover… and I consider one of my greatest accomplishments to be the fact that I can make my lovers laugh at the same time as they have an orgasm…. Which is, of course, one of the many reasons why I’m sexy, seductive and smart!

Jaime Casas: The paradoxical relationship between the hero and the anti-hero is perhaps an integral part of this book?

Stewart Home: In this fractured world we must leave for a better one we’ll create collectively, we’re all as imperfect as each other… we need to do away with the notion of heroes and the anti-hero can play a role in that…. The important thing is not to get too caught up in any role, including that of the anti-hero.

Jaime Casas: As a free form expression, it seems that this novel is a complaint against the British high culture, or at least that kind of literature covered by this concept…

Stewart Home: The conventional novel is the most favoured and privileged cultural vehicle of bourgeois ideology – although obviously it would be pretty useless were it not backed up by the army and the police force. The emphasis on character in the novel reflects the bourgeois conception of the individual as the sole proprietor of his or her skills and as owing nothing to society. These skills (and those of others) are presented to the reader as a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market in a society where a solipsistic and unending thirst for consumption is considered the crucial core of human nature. These ideas found their clearest articulation in the non-fiction of liberal political writers such as Hobbes, Harrington and Locke; but they have also formed the bedrock of bourgeois literary fiction for the past few hundred years.

Jaime Casas: The language that you use in this book is very direct, very in your face and spoken as if you were a tough or a hoodlum; is this related to the narrative or just the way you like to use language.

Stewart Home: I prefer to use direct language so that my meaning is clear. I say what I want to say as simply as possible – that said a complex idea requires more complex expression. In other words it is easier to say ‘fuck off’ than it is to articulate a critique of commodity production and capitalist alienation. Nonetheless, I try to keep things straightforward and at the minimum necessary level of complexity for what I want to say. Literary writers do the opposite, their defences of bourgeois society are really very simple and not at all convincing, which is why they try to dress them up in unnecessarily mannered and complex language. In this and all other senses literature is decadent. And it is also why in the long run literature stands no chance against those who – like me – have learnt the collective strength ‘secrets’ of the proletarian superwomen.

Jaime Casas: I know that you are not the biggest fan of most well-know English writers, people such Martin Amis. Do they represent an idea if England that goes against yours? Or is just that they are in your opinion “bad writers”?

Stewart Home: Bourgeois writers like Martin Amis represent a world I want to leave behind. I am against nation states and have no time for the idea of England; whereas these hacks want to deny the power of the international working class and thus are very often fixated on national differences. Their bad writing follows on from their reactionary political views and vice versa – each flows from the other. Those that want to defend a discredited capitalist system can’t write well, they have to obfuscate.

Jaime Casas: As you said when we interviewed you in London, capitalism has led to an individualised culture and this is weaker than one that is created collectively. How we can stop this process and recover some kind of common creativity?

Stewart Home: I think the answer to this problem can only be found collectively, and in a continual reforging of the passage between theory and practice. This is not something that one person can resolve in isolation. It requires mass movements and we’re beginning to see these becoming more effective in the face of the ongoing crisis of capitalism. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and the indignant ones (indignados) provide a great starting point – but things need to be taken much further.

Jaime Casas: In a society that has overcome any postmodern considerations and is no longer affected by anything, it seems impossible provoke any commotion in the audience, but you still do. In a way, we live in a hyperbolic reality, where we accept everything without questioning anything. We accept everything in the a context of hyperreal simulation, as theorised by Baudrillard. But provocation seems to be an essential part of your work!

Stewart Home: It is interesting to go back to Baudrillard’s earlier work of the 1960s and look at his attempts to break with Marxism; and when you do this his whole project and critique becomes much clearer. I’m thinking of books like Mirror of Production and For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Those are his better works, but if you think of Baudrillard’s later writing in relation to Marx then you can see that rather than breaking with Marx, what Baudrillard did with his notions of the silent majority, the destiny of objects and simulation was invert him. So in the critique of alienation where through the process of commoditisation subjects appear to become objects and vice versa, Baudrillard is simply celebrating what Marx condemns. Rather than seeing alienation as a bad thing, Baudrillard argues the masses taking on what he calls ‘the destiny of objects’ is something positive. Once you understand matters such as this you can see that post-modernism is a continuation of modernism rather than a break with it. The basic nature of capitalist alienation has not changed and yes, what I write provokes those who wish to defend the global capitalist system because I am able to focus on this rather than being distracted by irrelevancies. Obviously to claim that society and/or the masses are not effected by anything is both ideological and untrue. Right now you can see the effects of the banking crisis everywhere in Europe.

Jaime Casas: The transmedia narrative brings new meanings with changes in technology but I think you are also drawing from older forms – from pulp fiction to avant-garde literature, and even many influences from music. What are the main reason that you have used these things and how do you see the evolution of transmedia narrative after the irruption of technology?

Stewart Home: Again the problem I see here is a failure to think historically and an over emphasis on what is alleged to be unique now. Technology has been transforming the world for hundreds of years. One could compare the introduction of the internet to the introduction of the railways. Both transformed society and have had a massive impact on everyday life. The railways made it possible to commute long distances to work and led to a process of suburbanisation; in theory the internet should act to bring this process of suburbanisation to a logical conclusion with home working – but in practice we’ve yet to see it have much impact in this area.

One can look at the avant-garde and transmedia practices without over emphasising the distinction between them. These are often grossly overstated anyway, given the ongoing blurring of lines between them. For example, when I checked it just now, Wikipedia (in English) defines flarf poetry as ‘an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century’ – and obviously flarf poetry would not exist without the internet (since it is generated through the deployment of search engines among other things). Likewise all culture today exists partly in and through the internet. Once cannot escape the implications of this – which is why in my last anti-novel published in English – Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – I incorporated a huge amount of penis enlargement spam.

Likewise it is not a matter of doing away with the culture of the past in its entirety – but rather of bringing selected parts of it back into play. In many ways so much has now been written that all we need to do is plunder and rewrite what’s already online – and this is in many ways the basis of new movements in the arts such as conceptual literature. It is no longer a question of writing but of editing – and editing with a complete disregard for the logic and narrative structure of the texts we plunder. As the Lettrists declared back in the 1950s, the cultural heritage of mankind is to be cut-up and used for partisan political purposes.

Jaime Casas: New technology and the internet has created new ways to consume culture. Its seems to have created a new passion for music and all kinds of old pop manifestations, from you side, how do you watch that new phenomenon?

Stewart Home: The internet has meant that there is a greater accessibility to pop culture. For example, for years I had been hearing rumours about a film called Bruce Lee Vs Gay Power, but many people doubted it existed. Now it is possible to view the whole of that film online and discover that the English translation from Portuguese is not exactly accurate (the film itself is not available in English dub or with English subtitles). The original title of this Brazilian film is Kung Fu Contra as Bonecas – and when I saw it I immediately understood that it was a mid-seventies parody of the popular Brazilian genre of bandit films, and that the kung fu comedy element within it has more to do with David Carradine than Bruce Lee. I don’t speak Portuguese but whether the film has anything to do with ‘gay power’ is also something people are still arguing about online.

On the one hand it is possible to have instant access to all sorts of things online… and to me this is great because it demystifies and devalues them. When I was teenage I would hear about films and bands and would sometimes have to wait months or even years to see or hear them. That meant when I did get access to something that had really captured my imagination I paid it a great deal of attention. Among those of us with instant access on the web neither I – nor those who are still teenage – tend to give what we’re accessing nearly the same amount of thought. One day I’ll discover an incredible cover of the song Gloria by US sixties act Robb London and the Rogues, and the next I’ll have forgotten about it because I’m trying to locate a streamed online copy of Official Exterminator 3: Joy of the Living Dead. Right now Official Exterminator 3 is holding my attention because I can’t even find a single scene from it uploaded online – but once someone makes the whole film accessible to me my interest in it will no doubt wane.

The profits to be made from films, books and music have declined greatly with the rise of the internet. This is a good thing because it has resulted in such pursuits being of less interest to those who merely wish to make money and/or become celebrities. Those of us wanting to develop proletarian culture into something even more revolutionary will keep doing what we’ve always been doing and we’ll become even more effective at it.

Jaime Casas: Is passion the ultimate appeal of pop culture?

Stewart Home: Pop culture and high culture produce and mediate each other. If I had to choose one then of course I’d take pop culture. But I don’t have to accept class society and so my aim is instead to overthrow all capitalist canalisation including the division between high and low culture. While there is still more passion in pop culture than art, I don’t think there is much real passion left in either and our passion should be directed towards overthrowing both of them.

Jaime Casas: What does the term post-capitalism means for you? (I ask after listening to your words in our video)

Stewart Home: Post-capitalism will be a world in which money, commodities, nation states and classes have been abolished. It will be characterised by the free movement of vast majorities – and exactly how it operates will be decided by those vast majorities from moment to moment without interference from so called leaders or states.

Jaime Casas: In Memphis Underground music plays a strong role. You write about a very concrete period of the music history but without any sense of nostalgia of the past, and I think that’s the difference. Would you agree?

Stewart Home: I personally like the sounds of the 1960s and 1970s best because that is the music I encountered as a child and which had the greatest immediate impact on me. I had less to judge the music against then but if I was 8 years old now I’d probably be knocked out by Lady Gaga rather than Marc Bolan and T.Rex. That said, in the eighties I was massively into everything from early hip hop to go go to techno; and in the nineties I remained impressed by a great deal of minimal techno and breakbeat. I have seen fewer musical innovations in the past ten years but while I love music it is not the only thing I live for, so there is no reason to be nostalgic about the past. Some things are better and some things are worse than 50 years ago – and we can be sure we are closer to overthrowing capitalist social relations now rather than then. I certainly wouldn’t want to revisit London in the 1960s or 1970s for the food, which was terrible then and is much better now!

Jaime Casas: The northern soul period, the punk and the rave music explosion (from Madchester to Summer of love and the pirate radios scene from the 90)… all of that music movement were assertive. Is there any new genre, movement or ideas that could do the same now?

Stewart Home: I think the things that have come closest recently seem to have emerged from south London (where I was born) in the form of grime and dubstep. But maybe something even better has emerged more recently and it just hasn’t come to my attention yet…

Jaime Casas: What kind of music do you listen now?

Stewart Home: I listen to many different things but soul, jazz and funk from the 1960s and 1970s more than anything else. Willie Mitchell, Eddie Bo and Eddie Harris, number among my favourites.

Jaime Casas: Do you think that is possible to break the boundaries between the art and the politics? What do you think about the new protest movements (Occupy WST, 11-M, Arab Spring)?

Stewart Home: I find it incredibly exciting to see and participate in such movements. I was lucky in that I was in New York for some of the highlights of OWS, but was also close to the Occupy movement in London. Close up one can make many criticisms of these manifestations, but from a distance they are a massive inspiration to many across the world – and I think that for now that inspiration is more important than the criticisms one could make of the politics connected to these mass mobilisations. Of course, they need to go much further but then that’s something we all need to participate in to make taking these movements further a reality.

And as I’ve said, what I’m interested in is overcoming capitalist canalisation, so of course the distinctions between art and politics need to disappear into a revolutionary praxis.

Jaime Casas: There is a formal critique in your work of the gentrification of the cities, but London has the strongest role, of course. Do you think that this is a irreversible process?

Stewart Home: The gentrification of London and New York in particular has been horrific, but this could still be reversed even under the capitalist system – and may well be depending on what happens economically. Of course, in a post-capitalist world there will be no gentrification since private property will be abolished and this is the solution we should really be aiming for.

Jaime Casas: We met at William Blake’s tomb and there is a quote from him in your book. The “greatest artist that UK has had”, as someone said. Could you tell me something about him?

Stewart Home: What I like most about Blake is the way the City of London dislikes him and the fact that his tomb is in the City of London. Much more than his poetry and art work, his real value lies in the way he is perceived as a threat by financial self-interests…. Blake serves us well as an example of the proletarian flood that must sweep over the over-cultivated planes of capitalism. The City of London can celebrate republican leaders like Cromwell (there is a tower block in The Barbican complex named after Cromwell), but those who stand fundamentally against the idea of leadership like Blake are anathema to them.

And yes there are even more interviews around the publication of Memphis Underground in Spain that I may or may not post in English on this blog in due course…..

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: avent-garde, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee Vs Gay Power, conceptual literature, David Carradine, Degeneration, Donald Trump, Eddie Bo, Eddie Harris, egomania, fin de siècle, flarf poetry, For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gloria, Hegel, Henrik Ibsen, indignados, indignant ones, Jack Johnson, Jaime Casas, James Harrington, Jean Baudrillard, John Johnson, John Locke, Karl Marx, Kung Fu Contra as Bonecas, Lady GaGa, Lettrists, London, Marc Bolan, Martin Amis, Max Nordau, Memphis Underground, Mirror of Production, Occupy Wall Street, Official Exterminator 3: Joy of the Living Dead, Oliver Cromwell, Oscar Wilde, penis enlargement, pet rock, possessive individualism, Richard Wagner, Robb London and the Rogues, Stewart Home, T. Rex, Thomas Hobbes, transmedia, William Blake, Willie Mitchell
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour | 24 Comments »

I Just Can’t Get Enough Spanish Fly: Stewart Home interviewed by Joan Cabot

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I did this email interview a few weeks ago for Mondo Sonoro in Spain who mostly cover music but were interested in the translation of my novel Memphis Underground. I figured they’d have had time to run it in Spanish so I might as well run it as I wrote it here now.

Joan Cabot: Memphis underground is the first of your fiction books translated to Spanish, can you tell me more about your previous fictional works and how MU fits into your writing practice?

Stewart Home: My writing generally emerges from my reading, so my earlier novels were a product of my attempts to read in new ways certain strands of British pulp fiction that had interested me when I was 12 or so years old. When I was in my early twenties I started reading through all the books I could lay my hands on by a number of authors as if they constituted a single work. Among the many writers I re-read the one I liked most was Mick Norman (AKA Laurence James), in whose books the the gay hell’s angels were even harder than the straight bikers and whose politics were of the liberal left. The best known of these hacks is James Moffatt AKA Richard Allen who wrote a series of skinhead books.

With this more focused re-reading, what I noticed is that a lot of the authors I’d checked out when I was young repeated plots and sentences and sometimes even paragraphs from one book to the next. So I thought it would be interesting to write fiction about youth cults in which I compressed this process, with every other page being an almost identical sex scene (which made writing the books very easy). I decided to use lots of deliberately repeated words and phrases in a single book.

I was taking different influences and mixing them together. I was aware of the way surrealism and the French nouveau roman had inscribed elements of pulp prose into what were essentially non-linear and highbrow novels. I wanted to take that further and apply Jean Baudrillard’s notions of simulation (it was the eighties) to plot within my books – so they resembled pulp more closely than say the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet but at the same time because they collapsed the repetitious effects of reading a dozen novels by the same pulp author into one book, they effectively deconstructed themselves as fiction and escaped being easily categorised as either art or low brow prose.

Over the course of five very similar novels – Pure Mania, Defiant Pose, Red London, Blow Job and Slow Death – I felt I’d perfected what I wanted to do with this approach to writing. Therefore after completing Slow Death, the last and I’d say my best book using this third person condensed and collapsed pulp style, I wanted to move on. I then decided to do a self-consciously non-linear book about the occult and mind control. My first five books were written in the third person and I wanted to switch to writing in the first person; this really limits what you can do as an author but I figured if the narrator’s personality changed every time he had an orgasm (due to mind control – and there is a lot of sex in the book), then working in the first person wouldn’t be too difficult. Once this book – Come Before Christ and Murder Love – was published, the critics in the UK immediately noticed I’d been influenced by Robbe-Grillet, whereas although he was a major influence in my earlier books the way I worked this through was less obvious and many critics didn’t understand that I was producing a simulacrum of pulp and had no interest in writing pulp books.

Anyway, as I’ve continued to write novels I’ve used different approaches with different books. But until my last anti-novel I stuck with first person narration – in both male and female voices. I’ve tried to structure each book differently. With 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess I set the book in Aberdeenshire (which is a part of the British Isles not much used as a setting for fiction) and incorporated a lot of capsule book reviews. With Cunt I was self-consciously creating a post-modern variant on the picaresque novel. Whips & Furs was a cut and paste novel where I simply altered two nineteenth-century books and spliced them together to make a work with a more contemporary structure. In many ways that was an editing job since I did very little original writing to produce it. In Down & Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton every paragraph was exactly 100 words long. With Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie – my most recently published book and written after Memphis Underground – I wanted to make bigger changes to my writing style so I wrote in the second person (which I hadn’t done before – addressing the reader as ‘you’ rather than referring to the narrator as ‘I’) and I used a lot of sampled penis enlargement spam in the text. With Memphis Underground I wanted to structure a book using a classic science-fiction device but at the same time not write sci-fi. So the first half of the book is the events in the life of the narrator six months apart and cut against each other chapter by chapter, and because the narrator has changed his name the reader may not realise straight away that the alternating chapters are about the same person.

Joan Cabot: In the book you write that MU is a book about how housing projects affect people’s life (sorry, it may not be the exact words, but I have to translate the translation…), but I think you talk about a lot more things in the book…

Stewart Home: Obviously Memphis Underground is also about art and London and celebrity and many other things. It is also concerned with writing and how most so-called contemporary literature is old-fashioned and ill-suited to the times in which we live. Of course the book also deals with sex and the idea of death… But there’s no point providing an exhaustive list of the various subjects it covers, including of course train travel in Germany!

Joan Cabot: I think art is in fact the main subject of the book. How will you define your relation with the art world?

Stewart Home: I think that my relationship to the art world is troubled. But at the same time I’m well connected within it, particularly in London, and could be described as an art world insider. It is part of the nature of the art world that no one thinks they are truly inside it, but of course many are. Where I take a different stand from many others is in being more critical of the commodification of culture and in viewing the role of the artist dialectically. Thus because I know disalienation is integral to the communist project, I also understand that to become truly human we have to realise every aspect of what we are – what is sometimes called our ‘species being’. Aside from being social that also means integrating our physical, emotional and intellectual activity. So rather than one person being a brain worker (white collar) and another performing physical labour (blue collar), in a classless society (which will also be one without money and nation states), we’ll all do a bit of everything and have a lot of variety in our lives. To look at the role of the artist in a positive light, it is a deformed prefiguration of how we’ll all be in post-capitalist society. But the artist is also a specialised non-specialist in a commodified gallery system, so you can also look at that role negatively and stress it’s alienation and disconnection from what it is to be truly human.

Joan Cabot: I always though that art should be indistinguishable from vandalism nowadays…

Stewart Home: There’s not much new in that, it runs through a lot of modernism and post-modernism. Dada was the first worthwhile modernist movement to stress the suppression of art and negation and the negative in general, and I find that preferable to surrealism that mistakenly attempted to realise art rather than treating it as a product of capitalist society. In the second half of the twentieth-century the negative again rose to the surface in art movements ranging from nouveau realisme through Fluxus to auto-destructive art. In the visual arts post-modernism has tended towards a recuperation of this negative attitude and its diversion into commercial ends. Late twentieth-century writers such as William Burroughs and Kathy Acker were on the whole using the negative in more interesting ways than gallery artists.

Joan Cabot: I’m sure you have another idea about the motivations to work against the establishment of modern art, but, isn’t it fun just to piss them off?

Stewart Home: Sure. That’s why I inserted the names of many well-known artists into the penis enlargement spam I appropriated to use in my last book. In New York the piece that got quoted the most was: “7 inches simply isn’t big enough to pleasure the Gorilla Girls.” And while many found that funny, those who make the mistake of taking post-modern art seriously were upset by it.

Joan Cabot: You’ve written books about utopian artistic movements and punk… Which interest came first? How much of the relation between art & music movements are true and how much just a way to legitimate the music that we like?

Stewart Home: One interest doesn’t really come before the other – although I was into pop music first. I have clear memories from when I was two years old. So I remember some sixties music from the time – but what I mostly heard when I was small wasn’t of much interest to me. Too much of The Beatles and not enough of mod and freakbeat bands such as The Small Faces, The Who, The Downliners Sect, The Creation and The Action. I remember one morning when I was taking the bus to school and all the kids were talking about the news that the Beatles were breaking up. Some of the older children were quite upset but I was one of the younger ones and I really didn’t care about The Beatles and the fact they were breaking up didn’t bother me. The first music that got me really excited was glam rock. I liked T. Rex best of all. I liked it most when they were doing tunes like Get It On And Jeepster. I also liked bands like Slade and The Sweet – and from the USA Alice Cooper and Suzi Quatro. But then just silly songs like Me & You & A Dog Named Boo by Lobo also appealed to me. But after 1973 the quality of glam singles started falling away. So by the time I was 12 I was looking back into the history of pop…. That’s when I discovered old soul records like Tainted Love by Gloria Jones, or You Can’t Sit Down by the Phil Upchurch Combo: and at the same time started digging all the London mod and freakbeat groups of the 1960s….

I came across dada and happenings and pop art when I was about 12, in books to start with. I guess I was into music before that but the two interests both kept growing – with music way ahead until I was about 20. The idea of what art is has changed a lot of the last thirty years – so now you have people talking about pop music and football as art, which didn’t happen in the old days. The most over-hyped relationship between music and the kind of anti- art that interests me is found in discourse around punk, which some pundits claim is situationist inspired. Such claims are ridiculous as I demonstrate in my book Cranked Up Really High. It’s just a way for silly American music journalists to pretend they’re art history professors, and for English cultural studies lecturers to pretend they’re hip… Rock and roll is somewhere else entirely!

Joan Cabot: Do you think that your books are understandable and enjoyable for anybody. I mean, what kind of people is interested in your work? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

Stewart Home: My books are written for people with a sense of humour. I really enjoy the way they wind up and upset those who are upright and serious about literature and music and art. I tend to scream along to the sound of my keyboard as I type my novels, and I’m very happy when my readers laugh out loud when looking at my books. Intellectuals are a sorry bunch so I don’t expect them to be grooved by my prose.

Joan Cabot: Some of your former fictional books are not translated in Spanish. Do you know if there are plans to do so?

Stewart Home: I guess if Memphis Underground sells well then more of my novels will be translated into Spanish. But I haven’t signed any contracts for more books yet. It’s curious watching which books get translated into what language. I have books in many languages but it was my two full-length non-fiction books – Assault On Culture and Cranked Up Really High – that appeared first in Spanish. Both those and another non-fiction book came out in Italy before a small publisher did one of my novels there. In French, Russian, Finnish, German, Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian etc. I only have novels published. In languages such as Lithuanian, Portuguese (with a Brazilian publisher) and Polish only my non-fiction books are translated. It is very hard to predict what will happen with translations.

Joan Cabot: What are you working on now?

Stewart Home: I recently finished a novel based on the life of one of my relatives who was a famous cat-burglar and prison escaper – he was originally from south Wales but pursed his life of crime in London from the 1940s to the 1970s. That book’s called The Nine Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones. This week I have to install a solo show in a London gallery. But with the nice coverage I’ve been getting for this new translation of Memphis Underground I think I might well spend the summer getting to know some hot Spanish girls very very well… that’s the kind of ‘work’ I like doing best!

Joan Cabot: In the book, you say that you cannot distinguish between England and any other country, but I think that something like MU is in some sense a very British book…

Stewart Home: There are different cultures around the world and what you’ll write in English is going to be different to what you’d write if you were using – for example – Spanish. That said I’m against national borders, not against regional difference. But London is now a very European city. It is much much cleaner than it was when I was a child in the 1960s and 1970s, and with that cleanness it has lost much of its old identity. That said not everything has got worse. The food you can eat in London today is way better than what you got when I was small! The food used to be really terrible but now it’s actually very good if you pick and choose. I’m not sure that Memphis Underground is that British, I think I’m more a product of London, and I find it extremely difficult to identify with the rest of England let alone the rest of the British Isles… My mother was Welsh but came from an Irish family, so we’ve been moving slowly east. I don’t really want to go anywhere, I like London… although it is always nice to have a change and visit somewhere like Barcelona or Bilbao or Valencia or Madrid, or even some of the smaller towns like Burgos or Carmona…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Alice Cooper, alienation, art, Auto-Destructive Art, Barcelona, Bilbao, Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, Blow Job, Burgos, Carmona, Come Before Christ and Murder Love, communism, Cranked Up Really High, cunt, Dada, Defiant Pose, disalienation, Down and Out In Shoredtich and Hoxton, Fluxus, freakbeat, Get It On, glam rock, Gloria Jones, Gorilla Girls, James Moffatt, Jean Baudrillard, Jeepster, Kathy Acker, Laurence James, Lobo, Madrid, Me and You and A Dog Named Boo, Memphis Underground, Mick Norman, mod, Mondo Sonoro, nouveau realisme, nouveau roman, Phil Upchurch Combo, post-modernism, pulp fiction, punk, Pure Mania, Red London, Richard Allen, Slade, Slow Death, Spanish Fly, Stewart Home, surrealism, Suzi Quatro, T. Rex, Tainted Love, The Action, The Beatles, The Creation, The Downliners Sect, The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones, The Small Faces, The Sweet, The Who, Valencia, Whips and Furs, William Burroughs, You Can't Sit Down
Posted in books, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

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Friday, March 30th, 2012

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Tags: AdWords, Amazon, Apple, Bing, blog, bookmark, bookmarked, bot girl, Camern Wake, car insurance, cash back, Catholic weddings, cyber sex, Digg, email alert, Facebook, Google, hot sauce, iPod, Jake Long, LinkedIn, Linux, Microsoft, Mister Trippy, MSN, NFL, online poker, porn, Reggie Bush, rss, search engine optimisation, Sears, SEO, smoking pipe, Twitter, Web 2.0, Wikipedia, WordPress, world wide web, writing, Yahoo, Zune
Posted in advertising, humour, literature, scam, Web 2.0 | 20 Comments »

Yet more reasons to be an ego-maniac on a world historical scale!

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

I was asked to answer these questions for an event in Barcelona and having done so figured I might as well post them here too. You couldn’t make it it!

1. When were you happiest? I’ll be at my happiest in about 10 minutes when I’ve answered these questions – coz then I can make another huge pot of espresso and watch yet another Godfrey Ho movie.

2. What is your greatest fear? That the list I have of Godfrey Ho movies is complete and that before long I’ll have watched everything he ever made. Fortunately not even Godfrey Ho can remember all the films he made and there’s a good chance of many more being added to the 150 we know about.

3. What is your earliest memory? Going to the Isle of Wight by ferry when I was 2 years old. It was raining.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My modesty. I feel I need to be more egotistical.

5. In what historical time would you have liked to live? I like the times I’ve lived in best – and would only want to live in London (or possibly New York) at any time. I wouldn’t mind going back to the 1960s for the music, the 1970s for the feeling the whole political system was going to collapse (but then it feels like that again now), and the 1980s for seeing Godfrey Ho movies as they appeared at the point this director was most prolific.

6. Ever been in a fight? Of course! No idea how many.

7. Where do you stand politically? Ultra-left.

8. What do you owe your parents? I can thank my mother Julia Callan-Thompson for my intelligence and good looks, and great stories to tell people about her life as an original mod and then in the 1960s counterculture. Also my great taste in music, since my mother was listening to cool modern jazz all the time she was pregnant with me. I don’t know who my father is so I probably don’t owe him anything – but I reckon he owes me a big bundle of used notes!

9. Who would you invite to your dream party? Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Lopez and Godfrey Ho, among others.

10. If you could edit your past, what would you change? I wouldn’t have gone to see Joy Davison who are a lousy band and unfortunately I knew what I was doing when I went into the gig. I definitely wouldn’t have seen The Police either, but they were a last minute substitution among the support acts when I went to see The Brian James All Stars in 1978 (and I did go to the bar and turned my back on them when they played). I can’t be blamed for seeing The Police because I didn’t know I was going to see them when I went into The Electric Ballroom – but I wish I hadn’t seen them.

11. When did you last cry, and why? In 1971 when I lost a ten pence piece down a drain. We’d only just had the change in the UK to decimal currency and I thought it was a fifty pence piece, which is why I cried.

12. What is the closest you’ve come to death? Sitting in the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood in east London one winter day. I was leaving my body behind and entering this golden tunnel of light and thinking how great it was to be dead, when one of the museum attendants shook me awake and asked me if I was alright. I was very disappointed to still be alive coz death seemed like it was a groove sensation!

13. What do you consider your greatest achievement or quality? My ability to talk endless and without any prompting – even when I’m standing on my head!

14. What song or songs would you like played at your funeral? “Burn, Baby, Burn” by Mel Williams.

15. Why and when did you decide to start talking about yourself? As soon as I could speak – so when I was about a year old. I didn’t have a reason then, it was just intuitive. Now it’s a case of I started doing this in 1963 so why the hell should I stop?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, Brian James All Stars, Burn Baby Burn, egotism, Electric Ballroom, Godfrey Ho, Isle of Wight, Jennifer Lopez, Joy Division, Julia Callan-Thompson, London, Mel Williams, New York, Pamela Anderson, Stewart Home, The Police
Posted in exhibitionism, humour | 20 Comments »

You’ve Read This Blog Before!

Sunday, March 18th, 2012

1. If you’re a time traveller from the future with a special interest in this little corner of cyberspace…

2. If you consider contemporary writing to be thrillingly unoriginal and you see this blog as just words other have used before with some very minor variations in their order.

3. If you’re into the late-seventies Boston band The Nervous Eaters and you realise I’m just riffing on their tune “You’ve Heard These Chords Before”….

4. If having read this blog as it was originally posted in March 2012 on the Stewart Home Society site you then came across it copied and pasted elsewhere – or even reposted at more or less the same place…

5. If having come across this blog copied and pasted elsewhere or reposted here, you’ve now discovered the original blog…

6 If you liked this post so much you’ve come back to read it again….

7. You’re experiencing a strange sense of deja vu….

8. You’re really stoned… really tripping… out of… you’ve gone and… you shouldn’t have gotten this high… you didn’t take enough acid to get this high… even your playthings walked to Saturn… bend pencil erasers… delicious… apples explode into butterflies… you gotta get outta here… one two three four… you can hardly see… tombs interlocking… too much acid… too many colours blown up in your face…

9. You could swear someone else wrote this….

10. You’re sitting on a frosted snowflake in a purple bubble in the sky…

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: cut and paste, deja vu, high, Nervous Eaters, post-modernism, postmodernism, psychedelia, repetition, Saturn, self-referentiality, Stewart Home, Stewart Home Society, stoned, time travel, tripping, You've Heard These Chords Before
Posted in exhibitionism, humour, Web 2.0 | 22 Comments »

Love Comes In Spurts: Stewart Home interviewed by Jesús Rocamora

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

This is an interview i did with the arts editor of Spanish newspaper Público a month or two ago. I figured I’d let enough time pass to run it here for English readers since it was translated for publication in Spain….

Rocamora: The writer and journalist Kiko Amat says in the introduction to Memphis Underground’s Spanish edition that it is a “book of ideas” – a philosophical novel. Is it a political book? In what sense?

Home: Everything is political. The conventional bourgeois novel is conservative and is all about reproducing the ideas and subjectivities of the dominant class – that is why it is so concerned with what is euphemistically called ‘character’. And while bourgeois novels don’t reflect the world we live in, they exhibit an obsession with realism, naturalism and nineteenth-century ideas about narrative because these are the distortions and blinkers through which the ruling class wishes us to misperceive the world. Just breaking with such nonsense is political – but the way issues such as housing in London are addressed in the book is even more explicitly political.

Rocamora: The story is fragmented. In this sense, Amat invites readers to read your books as “a serial of radical and fascinating articles about all kind of concepts, cults and ideas” that interests you. Which ideas or concepts did you want to write about?

Home: Among other things I wanted to demonstrate that literature was dead – I didn’t so much want to write about this as show it! The opening of the book is a parody of the kind of mediocre writing that is currently popular in the UK, then I slam into a description of a map that is obviously inspired by the French nouveau roman. The juxtaposition was intended to be humorous but at the same time I think it illustrates very well that what passes as contemporary literature today was old-fashioned and out-dated fifty and more years ago. But I feel showing these things is more interesting and powerful than simply providing an explicit written denunciation of them.

Rocamora: And what effects do you want to evoke in reader’s mind with this kind of fragmented narration?

Home: I’m crediting the reader with intelligence and imagination, as well as giving them more freedom than they’d find in the dead literature of the ruling class. The reader can fill in gaps and the juxtapositions can be funny, beautiful or startling. Readers can take them any which way they want. While I’m not interested in realism, the fragmented style I use is in fact closer to what we experience in daily life than conventional literature. Our minds flip from one thought to another, we flick through channels on TV and move from stories about the massacres in Homs to documentaries on the sex life of rare sea species, and from that to gymnastic and cycling competitions, and on to shopping channels and chat shows. Such flipping from one thing to another can be done like a sleepwalker, or it can be done critically.

Rocamora: Aren’t you interested in making literature in a traditional way? What ‘tricks’ or ‘vices’ don’t you like in the literary tradition?

Home: This question reveals a lot about how backward literature has become. I think it unlikely you’d ask an artist why they didn’t want to paint like Goya or Velázquez. Certainly when I talk about the art work I do in galleries I’m never asked questions like this. People understand that visual art has moved on over the past few centuries. Why would I want to write like nineteenth-century novelists such as Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? Aside from the fact that I find such writing both boring and reactionary, those who still produce superannuated prose of this type are expected to behave as if they are dull and square (which since they mostly are obviously isn’t a problem for the sad sacks still writing nineteenth-century literature today). The public image of the serious writer requires that they don’t do the sort of things I like to do – such as standing on my head and reciting passages from my books when I appear in public. By way of contrast I like Goya and Velázquez but there is no point in painting like them now – they did their own period very well and we have to (un)make art for our own.

Rocamora: Another remarkable features in Memphis Underground are these long descriptions about streets and houses, in which you write as a map or (sorry for my insolence) a GPS, as well as detailed description of daily acts, like shaving or cooking scrambled eggs. What roles do this features play in your writing?

Home: I explained the map before as an invocation of the nouveau roman – when I was teenage I read through lots of modernist literature by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute. Such descriptions serve to break up the text, change it’s texture and challenge traditional notions of what it is entertaining and worth reading. It reflects the interest in the everyday that you can find in discourses as diverse as fine art and sociology. And also I find it side-splittingly funny!

Rocamora: And what role does sex play in your writing? Why are sex and pornography so present in Memphis Underground?

Home: Sex and pornography are very popular. On the internet, in films, in books, in magazines, at home and even on the street. Indeed, many of the Spanish women I’ve got to know intimately are very fond of fucking in the street – so I think it’s useful to have a lot of sex in my first novel published in Spanish, coz the Spanish women who’ll read it will know I’m not uptight and it will alert them to the fact that if they get it together with me then they’ll have a really good time! I also like to use repetition to structure my writing and sex is very repetitive – and I can dig that!

Rocamora: You wrote Memphis Underground in 2004, and in its pages we can find social references, about the British youth, pop culture, business and some 21th century’s ways of life. Do you think Memphis Underground can operate as a social reflection of your country at the present time? Are you trying to reflect your society?

Home: I think you end up reflecting the time you live in whether you want to or not. People writing traditional literature reflect the fact that too many people are living in the past albeit without necessarily knowing this…. I want to consciously reflect the times I live in and right now – I want to show up what’s wrong with this world and the direction we need to move in to make positive change. One thing we need to do is put an end to nation states. I find the very existence of England and the United Kingdom utterly ridiculous and am keen to do away with all nation states in the very near future.

Rocamora: From nothern soul to urban tribes, in what ways are you interested in pop culture?

Home: I think it’s important to understand pop culture historically – so my interest goes back to things like true crime writing of 400 and more years ago, people like the sixteenth-century English writer Robert Greene. When you look at pop culture and so called ‘high’ culture then you can see that they interpenetrate and mediate each other – one would not exist without the other. So while I prefer popular culture to high culture I want to abolish them both and create a new communist culture without hierarchies.

Rocamora: Why do we still distinguish between high culture and pop culture?

Home: Because we live in an alienated capitalist society that creates false divisions…. proletarian revolution will necessarily be an overflowing of all such canalisation.

Rocamora: You wrote Memphis Underground with first person voice. How biographical is it? In general, how much of real experience is there in your literature?

Home: My sex life is very toned down in my books, but in general I’m not just drawing on my own experiences but on everything I’ve seen or heard, it’s based on the experiences of people I know as much as my own. Truth is a slippery construct but in fiction we can approach truth more closely than through documentary writing. Memphis Underground is, of course, completely biographical because it is an accurate record of the keys I hit on my computer as I was writing it. This is a new type of autobiography, one stripped of all romantic and personal content.

Rocamora: Why do you interviewed yourself as a part Memphis Underground?

Home: I’ve long promoted myself as ‘an ego-maniac on a world historical scale’ and any ego-maniac worthy of the name would want to interview themselves way more than anyone else. I thought it would be funny to do this too. Although actually the interview is a mash up – a series of questions I put to someone I interviewed for a magazine cut against the answers I gave to an interview for a completely different publication.

Rocamora: Do you believe in some kind of global conspiracy or maybe it’s only a trick, a game, as narrator? I think, in this sense, in this kind of writing and that of authors like Pynchon (who uses magical elements in his stories) the reader is being invited to “play” with the veracity of the story.

Home: I don’t think there is any kind of global conspiracy but the idea that there is can be used in fiction to point up the absurdity of this idea. People who get seriously involved in conspiracy theory and who believe they can uncover ‘the truth’ end up crazy (if they weren’t already mad when they set out on this path). When I write fiction about conspiracy theory I want to show it is useless. There is no need to uncover hidden truths about who controls the world – our oppression under capitalist social relations isn’t hidden, and conspiracy theories are a distraction from the ways in which we can remake society.

Rocamora: Which authors do you like?

Home: There are many but Lynne Tillman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Barry Graham, Bridget Penney and Darius James, would be a few contemporary names among those that write fiction in English.

Rocamora: “Nostalgia is the future”, says the main character near the beginning of the book. Do you think cultural industries are exploiting consumers’ nostalgia to survive in 21th century?

Home: Nostalgia is not a good thing because it is conservative – there is no golden age in the past, we have a world to win. The main character is fictional, he is therefore able to express opinions with which I’d disagree. That’s one of the things I like about fiction, it allows you to explore a broad range of subject positions.

Rocamora: Sorry if it is a personal question: how is a day in your life, from when you wake up until you go to bed?

Home: Every day is different. Some days I get up and go to the gym, others I start writing or working on gallery stuff after eating breakfast. My meal times vary every day too. Tonight I was at the pub with three friends who work for different London publishers, the night before I went to a poetry reading, the night before that I stayed in. That said, most days I spend an hour or two walking the streets so that I can meet some hot Spanish girls. It isn’t difficult as there are a lot of Spanish girls in London. One of the more curious Spanish women I met recently works professionally as a porn actress under the name Snake Girl. She has a snake tattoo on her body and is what as known as a fetish model and actress. I was just standing outside a pub in Soho when I got introduced to her. However, while there are lots of hot Spanish girls in London, there are even more in Spain, which is why I always enjoy visiting cities like Barcelona. My days are varied and I have to travel quite a lot – for example I went to New York three times over the last four months, and many other places too. And it’s as easy to meet hot Spanish girls in New York as it is in London! But when I’m not meeting hot Spanish girls I’m mostly eating, writing, drinking or working out in the gym.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Barcelona, Barry Graham, Bridget Penney, Charles Dickens, class and culture, Claude Simon, Darius James, ego-mania, Goya, Jane Austen, Jesús Rocamora, Kenneth Goldsmith, Kiko Amat, London, Lynne Tillman, Memphis Underground, modernism, Nathalie Sarraute, naturalism, New York, northern soul, Nostalgia, nouveau roman, pop culture, pornography, realism, Robert Greene, sex, Snake Girl, Soho, Stewart Home, Thomas Pynchon, Velázquez, youth culture
Posted in books, counterculture, exhibitionism, humour, literature | 20 Comments »

Cyber Sex With A Bot Girl: It Was Bound To End In Disappointment!

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

“Amy Hastings” sent me a friend request on Facebook on 12 February 2012. I think “she” had four or five friends by the time I accepted. She didn’t have a profile picture or any other photos up on “her” page. I waited to see what happened next and wasn’t particularly surprised when “Amy” sent me an unsolicited message. Here it is followed by my and “her” replies:

Amy Hastings on February 13: I have some really erotic photoz, but I can’t post them here. Do you have an email or mobile number I can send them to? That is if you want to view them.

Stewart Home on February 13: I wouldn’t want to view them if they contain anything illegal or feature anyone under the age of 21. If you can clarify what these are and assure me that they don’t feature anyone under 21 then I may be interested. Thanks.

Amy Hastings on February 15: I relaly (sic) am turned on so I put tgoether a page clcik (sic) to http://*************** betetr (sic) sign up clarfiy (sic) you’re 18+ ok giong (sic) to in aasp (sic) my usernmae (sic) is missE934 see u three (sic)

Stewart Home on February 15: Sorry but if this isn’t dodgy can you please answer my questions. Are you able to assure me your pictures don’t feature anyone under 21 or anything illegal? Until I know that I won’t go and look at them. If you don’t answer my questions then I will assume that the material in question is illegal. Thanks.

When after 10 days I heard nothing more from “Amy” I unfriended her. “She” still didn’t have a profile picture but by this time had 50 friends. I haven’t checked out the link “she” sent me as I wasn’t interested in her ‘erotic photoz’: I was just curious to see to what extent ‘she’d’ engage with me – and if ‘she’ had I would have gone on to tell her I found the number of typos in her messages a huge turn off and to insist politely but firmly that ‘she’ needed use a spell checker to sex ‘herself’ up!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: Amy Hastings, bot girl, cyber sex, erotic photos, Facebook, Miss E934, porn, scam, sexed up, spam, Web 2.0
Posted in humour, porn, scam, spam, Web 2.0 | 22 Comments »

Weasel coffee – made from beans eaten and shat out by wild weasels!

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Pho is a small chain of family owned Vietnamese cafes. They have 5 branches in London and one in Brighton (UK). There are two branches in the west end, one in Clerkenwell, and one apiece in the Westfield shopping centres in Shepherds Bush and Stratford E15. Their food is both good and modestly priced but it was only recently that I noticed they sold weasel coffee for £5.95 a cup. This struck me as cheap for the world’s ‘most expensive’ coffee – since I remembered reading newspaper articles a few years back about how the brasserie at the Peter Jones department store in London’s Sloane Square was selling a single cup of this rare brew for £50 (US $79.00) a cup.

Pho offered the following description of the coffee in their menu: “For the more adventurous try one of the rarest coffees in the world exclusive to Pho in the UK – Chon Ca Phe aka Weasel coffee. This coffee is eaten, digested and then passed by Vietnamese weasels – a process that dramatically enhances the flavour of the deliciously tasty roasted beans! Served with or without condensed milk.”

I talked to a waitress about the coffee and she said that although a lot of people expressed interest in it and wanted to ask her questions about it, not so many actually ordered and drank it. What put people off it seems is the fact that after the weasels ate the beans they then passed through their digestive tract. A weasel eats the berries for their fleshy pulp. In its stomach proteolytic enzymes seep into the beans, making shorter peptides and more free amino acids. Passing through weasel’s intestines the beans are then defecated, keeping their shape. After gathering, thorough washing, sun drying, light roasting and brewing, these beans yield an aromatic coffee with much less bitterness than other types. Weasel coffee is widely reputed to be the most expensive in the world – with prices reaching as much as $160 per pound.

I’ll try almost anything once as long as it doesn’t entail cruelty – and my understanding was the shat out coffee beans were recovered from the poo of wild – or at least free range – weasels. At Pho the coffee came in a filter cup and I had to wait for the hot water to pass through the filter before drinking it. Since I usually drink espresso I didn’t bother adding the condensed milk that came separately. The coffee was reasonably strong and definitely less bitter than I’m used to. To make a comparison with whiskies, the weasel coffee was like a smooth Speyside – whereas the espresso I make at home is more like a smokey and fiery Islay. And yes you guessed right, Islay and not Speyside is my whiskey of choice. I don’t want a smooth whiskey or coffee, I like the kick of Islay and bitter espresso.

So I’ll leave Chon Ca Phe to those who are grooved by Speyside whiskey – the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee is not for me! And can anyone tell me whether a reassuringly expensive £50 cup of weasel coffee is any better than one that costs £5.95 from Pho?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Tags: amino acids, Brighton, Chon Ca Phe, Clerkenwell, Coffee, coffee beans, excrement, Islay whiskey, London, peptides, Peter Jones, Pho, Pho Cafes, poo, proteolytic enzymes, Shepherds Bush, Sloane Square, Speyside whiskey, Stratford, Vietnamese food, weasel coffee, weasel poo, Westfield Shopping Centre
Posted in drugs, food and drink, humour | 21 Comments »

Mister Trippy

Archive for the ‘humour’ Category

Let’s Kill The Novel & Remake The World! Stewart Home interviewed by Raül De Tena

No Piece

Get Down On It: Stewart Home interviewed by Jaime Casas

I Just Can’t Get Enough Spanish Fly: Stewart Home interviewed by Joan Cabot

12 Hours Of Spam – or Poetry In Motion….

Yet more reasons to be an ego-maniac on a world historical scale!

You’ve Read This Blog Before!

Love Comes In Spurts: Stewart Home interviewed by Jesús Rocamora

Cyber Sex With A Bot Girl: It Was Bound To End In Disappointment!

Weasel coffee – made from beans eaten and shat out by wild weasels!

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