Stewart Home's Blog
September 18, 2020
SEND CA$H: The Collected Poems of Stewart Home
Stewart Home is a prose machine but when his settings malfunction sometimes poetry spews out instead. He is the author of sixteen novels including the pulp/avant-garde classics “Slow Death,” “Tainted Love,” “She’s My Witch,” and “69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess.” His work since the late 1970s has included visual art interventions, music and seven books of cultural commentary. This is the first collection of his poetry, song lyrics and an appendix of his mother Julia Callan-Thompson’s poetry. Released: 9 May 2018 ISBN 978-0-9956450-6-6 Available here: https://morbidbooks.bigcartel.com/product/send-ca-h-the-collected-poems-of-stewart-home
Below review of SEND CA$H by Tony Oats from: http://www.creatrixmag.com/stewart-home-send-cash/
YOU ARE YOUR OWN POETRY MACHINE!
We can all be poets and linguistic warriors. And if we can win our wars for the liberation of language we can win something else in the bargain: The ability to express ourselves again. Or at least have fun trying.
���I found myself getting up on stage to perform short banal pieces as a humorous riposte to a horde of po-faced hacks wallowing in misery. I wanted to make still life pictures in words and provide a quasi-punk counter-offensive to the bloated gothic whinging that too many selfstyled ���serious��� ���young��� poets were grinding out at that time.��� ���Stewart Home
Preach it Brother Home, I feel you. We all feel you. We all remember the age of whinging oh-so-serious poets ��� ���the drone wars��� as Penny Fate used to call it. Oh my god what was that mess? It���s no fucking wonder people hate poetry. It stems from that moment when poetry began to hate itself. It was a system-wide artistic suicide pact using kambucha instead of Kool Aide. And what was Stewart Home doing in those days? Well, he stepped up to the mic and smacked poetry upside the head with a two-by-four. No, that isn���t right. He smacked it with a giant dildo. Because humor counts too.
The secret sauce is right there in the introduction to SEND CA$H ��� poetry as riposte; for context matters a lot. Poetry should never have been framed up like little pictures to be aesthetically contemplated by the chronically undermedicated. It needs to play against the rest of language. Unencapsulated. It is a war for the liberation of language. It is a war for the joy of language. It is, if you think about it, the only war that matters.
Stewart Home isn���t the first person to move down this path. There have been plenty of so-called ���anti-poets,��� including my personal hero, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, and Greece���s Elias Petropoulos and the ���anti-literature��� folk and, the Hungralists, working in the Bengali language. But Home brings a very different aesthetic ��� more of a prankster aesthetic, and more than a little bit of a punk aesthetic.
I do have a complaint though: The label. Why does THIS poetry have to be called ���anti-poetry���? Those whinging po-faced hacks are the true anti-poets. They are hella anti-poetic, and they descend from a long tradition of the anti-poetic and anti-linguistic ��� all those people trying to chain up language and like Procrustus and his perfectly sized bed, stretch poetry or chop it just enough to fit their bed of official meters and dactyls and in some cases, fucking rhymes. My point is that poets, like Home, should be in the language liberation business, and the language-play business, and in the anti-business business, and into your business and the state���s business and above all it should be at war with those who would tame language and turn it into a suicide-inducing drone fest.
And this brings me back to the Collection, and it is certainly a Collection with a capital C ��� a Collection of work that spans several decades and that evinces the retired weapons the prosetry wars. And yes, at times it feels one is wandering in a Medieval armory, looking at maces and lances and the odd crossbow, all of them still bloody because why would a poet want to clean up the mess?
There is deep truth in this Collection. The bits of language that are spoken and written may not be the actual poetry; those things may simply be epiphenomenal ��� the causally inert byproducts of the true poetry ��� which is a mode of living. Thus, Home writes:
“But while my Collected Poems may be a slimmer volume than the fat tomes documenting the output of those who had nothing better to do than write verse, I have lived more poetically and produced a perfectly formed body of work with a very strong pelvic floor and transverse abdominis.”
True that; in a world that venerates manias, we seem to have confused poetry with graphomania, and scribomania, and nonstop graphorrea, and above all tipomania. Just stop already and live like poets instead of meth-addicted Medieval scribes!
Part one of the book is the material from the 80s war against the ���po-faced hacks,��� and here there is at least one additional deep truth, and that is the idea, alluded to earlier: Poems are not self-contained. They play against each other, and the poetry of others, and against canonical language itself.
My favorite poems go like this.
the sun set like a broken armchair
being dropped from a third storey window
I say favorite poems, plural, because there are 34 poems in the Collection that go exactly like that. The only thing that differentiates them are their titles, which, when listed, generate a kind of poem all of their own.
JOHNSHAVEN, BOLINAS, DULWICH, SWANSEA, PONTARDDULAIS, CAMBERWELL, BRIXTON, ELEPHANT AND CASTLE, WATERLOO, REGENTS PARK, BRIGHTON, HOVE, CAMDEN, SOHO, COVENT GARDEN, EUSTON, BATTERSEA, VAUXHALL, CLAPHAM, KINGSBRIDGE, SALCOMBE, EAST PORTLEMOUTH, HALLSANDS, WOOD GREEN, PORTSLADE, DUNDEE, STRATFORD, WANDSWORTH, MORTLAKE, ALBORAYA, BLACKHEATH, VALENCIA, CANALS, XATIVA
Like I said, the poems are not self-contained, they play off of each other (and their titles) and probably your knowledge of British and Spanish geography, encapsulated within London and Valencia region.
In a similar vein, there are 42 ���ATM��� poems, the first two as follows.
ATM 1 There are 3 ways to learn wisdom: 1st, SEND CA$H, which is noblest; 2nd, use PayPal, which is easiest; & 3rd write a cheque, which is the bitterest. If you don���t feel cheated you haven���t lived! SEND CA$H!
ATM 2 Ever wondered why I���m known as the human tripod? SEND CA$H to find out!
Et cetera. The cross-poetry connections (and humor) are obvious. It is perhaps also worth observing that the message in these poems is fundamentally the true message of every poem of the last 100 years.
It���s not all ca$h and sunsets, however. The other poems are tiny gems that show how less is more, even when describing heroes, dispensing advice and crying out in existential despair ��� yet another deep truth about the capacity of poetry that has been largely forgotten since Sapho.
SINGING SURGEON
needles
thread
music
WHISTLE EVENT
blow a whistle
TOMATOES
I���m sick and tired
of fried tomatoes
that always sound the same
that sizzle in the fat
and then fall silent
on my plate
PRESS
O
Part two is entitled MINING SPAM FOR FLARF POEMS and it involves a technique that has been used with great success (and failure) by a number of experimental poets (sometimes called ���spam poetry��� or spoetry, in this case ���flarfing���), and it is clearly related to cut-up techniques. I myself have anthologized the Magellan Poetry of Urizenus Sklar, which built poems from lists of the ���last ten searches��� from the pre-Google Magellan search engine. Home���s discoveries here deliver more blows to the head with a dildo, pulling sex-based spam out of its context and shoving it into the poetic context and making us all see, whether we want to or not, exactly what our language has been up to.
From: COCK HUNGRY BISEXUAL REDHEAD
pretty young stripper
just 21 years old
is ripped up with a dildo
a hot steamy whore who likes her ass fondled
as Latino lesbians lick taco
to a 70s disco soundtrack
Part three is called SONGS, RANTS, & PLAGIARISMS, but he could have just called it all PUNK!, because, as it turns out, the poems have a punk etiology.
“[T]he longer ranting work in part 3 is possibly my oldest surviving poem. It was written to illustrate how easy it is to produce pieces in that vein, or at least easy for me because even back then I���d already ���composed��� dozens of punk rock songs.” Home.
I���m not sure which poem he is talking about, because none of them are that long, but I want to believe it is the poem KILL, KILL, KILL, if only for the ���chorus���.
Kill, kill, kill, fucking kill everything
Kill, kill, kill, practically everything
Kill, kill, kill, fucking kill everything
Kill, kill, kill, practically everything
Kill, kill, kill, fucking kill everything
Kill, kill, kill, practically everything
Kill, kill, kill, fucking kill everything
Kill, kill, kill, practically everything
Even the ���philosophical?��� poems are punk. I give you a snippet from ARSEHOLE.
Arsehole, wanker, shitbag, scum
Plonker, dickhead, extension, length!
You think you know it all with your Catholic hang-ups
But your philosophy is bullshit, you���re just a washed-up empiricist
You don���t know a thing, you don���t even doubt effectively
And Descartes never told you hate proves we exist
You might be tempted to say, ���hey I could write that shit,��� and here, like Meno���s slave, stunned by Socrates��� barrage of questions, you are on the brink of understanding. Fucking right you can!, for this collection is also an instruction manual, and it comes with its own motivational speech.
These days if you want to encounter a poem worth hearing you pretty much have to write it yourself��� What are you waiting for? You are your own poetry machine!
Preach it, Brother Home. We can all be poets and linguistic warriors. And if we can win our wars for the liberation of language we can win something else in the bargain: The ability to express ourselves again. Or at least have fun trying.
SEND CA$H was published on: 9 May 2018 ISBN 978-0-9956450-6-6 Available here: https://morbidbooks.bigcartel.com/product/send-ca-h-the-collected-poems-of-stewart-home
September 15, 2020
DUAL FLYING KICKS BY STEWART HOME & CHRIS DORLEY BROWN
Five Years, 3a Boothby Road, London N19 4A. June 2018
Dual Flying Kicks collaborative work by Stewart Home & Chris Dorley Brown plus solo work by Stewart Home. The show was facilitated & organised by Esther Planas with the assistance of the rest of the Five Years collective.
Dual Flying Kicks is an exhibition by Stewart Home and Chris Dorley-Brown. The collaborative works are two series of photographs. Firstly Occult Androgyny, morphs in which Dorley-Brown has photographed Home imitating pictures of a witch incarnating the triple goddess in her maiden form. Home and this Spanish but London based witch merge to create a higher being that has evolved beyond binary gender oppositions. In the second collaborative work, Dual Flying Kicks, Dorley-Brown has photographed Home imitating the hypermasculine poses of small plastic Bruce Lee toys. The plastic toys that served as models for this are also on display.
Of particular relevance to Home���s artist film Re-Enter The Dragon included in this show is the genre of kung fu movies – sometimes featuring Bruce Lee clones – known as Brucesploitation. Home explores the connections between eastern and western mysticism and the relationship of ���the spiritual��� to bodybuilding and martial arts; while simultaneously delineating the ways in which hypermasculinity inevitably finds itself tipping over into the feminine. While Home is looking back to a film-culture of the seventies and eighties, he is also looking forward to a new world we have yet to create.
Home���s solo work in Dual Flying Kicks utilises digital video and text alongside found objects and imagery to explore cultural hybridity among other things. In the dialogue he wrote for his 40 minute art film Re-Enter The Dragon, Home brings together his theoretical and practical understanding of gender roles and androgyny, using occult and philosophic discourse to deepen understandings of the issues raised by the photographic works he���s produced in collaboration with Dorley Brown.
Smaller elements within the show have the function of unifying and illuminating the main works; viz Home���s film and the two sets of photographs produced in collaboration with Dorley Brown. For example tiger print material hung from the ceiling echoes a rug seen in the morphs but simultaneously invokes Brucesploitation because a number of the genre���s movies include the word ���tiger��� in their titles. DVD releases of a few Brucesploitation flicks, including Return of the Tiger starring ���Bruce Li���, are on display in the show. There is also a framed portrait of Bruce Lee bought from the shop Umit & Sons in Hackney, a cult film emporium Home was first taken to by his friend the Spanish witch Estrella who merges with him in the morphs.
An arrangement featuring a Chinese tea service, fortune cookies and a Mexican tray with a picture of masked wrestlers, is used to link the Occult Androgyny morphs to Home���s Re-Enter The Dragon film; while simultaneously touching upon martial arts, occult beliefs and problematic colonial histories. To address the latter first, in Filipino history the period from 1521 to 1898 is sometimes called the Spanish colonial period; this spans the Captaincy General of The Philippines located in the collection of Islands invaded by Spain and called by this imperial power ���Las Islas Filipinas���, which were ruled from the part of Latin America known as New Spain until Mexican independence in 1821, when Madrid took direct control of The Philippines.
Although initiated into English Wicca, the witch featured in the morphs was born and raised in the mountains west of Valencia and is influenced by Spanish as much as English occult and religious traditions. For Estrella the Catholic faith she was brought up in finds its full realisation in Wicca, and she does not view witchcraft as in any way running counter to what some Protestants demean as ���Mariolatry���. The found footage used in Home���s film features ���the Bruce Lee of The Philippines��� Ramon Zamora. Filipino culture is extremely hybrid with Chinese and Polynesian influences merging with cultural elements associated with the powers that colonised its islands, initially Spain and later the USA. Home has edited the found footage he���s utilised in Re-Enter The Dragon to draw out Catholic and homoerotic elements within it; in the former in particular similarities between Mexican and Filipino cinema may be apparent to those familiar with both.
Some of the work in Dual Flying Kicks was previously exhibited in the Glasgow International show Re-Enter The Dragon at Queens Park Railway Club, other pieces are new and previously unseen.
August 30, 2020
Stewart Home Recent Manifestations
13 SEPTEMBER ��� 13 DECEMBER 2020
Darling Pearls & Co, 18A Kinnoul Mansions, Rowhill Road, London E5 8EB. Free.
Stewart Home & Itziar Bilbao Urrutia joint exhibition Sexus Maleficarum.
29 AUGUST 2020
Publication of Denizen of the Dead: The Horrors of Clarendon House edited by Stewart Home (Cripplegate Books, London).
29 JULY 2020
Publication of Stewart Home���s novel She���s My Witch (London Books, London).
25 FEBRUARY ��� 15 JUNE 2020
Scheduled Stewart Home events in Hong Kong, London & Trondheim postponed or cancelled due to Covid 19 pandemic.
21 FEBRUARY 2020
Close-Up Film Centre, 97 Sclater Street, London E1 6HR. 7pm. ��5.
Stewart Home introduces the 12th Liberated Film Club mystery screening.
25 JANUARY 2020
The Kenton Pub, 38 Kenton Road, London, E9 7AB. 8pm. Free.
Stewart Home reads with Bridget Penney, Paul Holman, Johnny Pulp, Jacqui Ennis Cole, Simon Pomery, Martin Wakefield, Matt Martin and Chloe Aridjis.
6 DECEMBER 2019
Cable Depot, Unit 8, Warspite Road, London SE18 5NX. 8pm. Free.
Yes, but is It Porn? Stewart Home, Itziar Bilbao Urrutia and Misha Mayfair discuss art, porn and censorship.
20 NOVEMBER 2019 ��� 2 FEBRUARY 2020
Cable Depot, Unit 8, Warspite Road, London SE18 5NX. Free.
Stewart Home is in the group show Unicorn V. Medusa. The other featured artists are Itziar Bilbao Urrutia, Misha Mayfair, Nick Kilby and Holly Crawford.
15 OCTOBER 2019
Burley Fisher Books, 400 Kingsland Road, London E8 4AA. 7pm. Free.
Stewart Home reads and presents readings from other authors in the Semina series of novels he edited for Book Works at the launch of Aliasing by Mara Coson ��� also featuring Bridget Penney, Iphgenia Baal and Katrina Palmer.
5 OCTOBER 2019
Odd, M��ntuleasa 4, Bucharest, Romania. 5pm. Free.
Stewart Home gives a talk about his work entitled It’s not politics, it’s not art, it’s voodoo���
3 ��� 5 OCTOBER 2019
Odd, M��ntuleasa 4, Bucharest, Romania. 6pm. Free.
Learn To ���Write��� A Novel In Less Than A Week, Plagiarism Really Is Necessary! A series of workshops with Stewart Home.
29 SEPTERMBER 2019
Cell Project Space, 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA. 4pm. Free.
Stewart Home and Mathieu Copeland in conversation about the No! Art movement.
30 AUGUST 2019 ��� 1 SEPTEMBER 2019
Cable Depot, Unit 8, Warspite Road, London SE18 5NX. Free.
Porn The Theory – Fantasy The Practice – an installation and two films by Stewart Home & Itziar Bilbao Urrutia.
30 AUGUST 2019 ��� 1 SEPTEMBER 2019
Cable Depot, Unit 8, Warspite Road, London SE18 5NX. 8pm. Free.
Porn The Theory – Fantasy The Practice ��� artists talk by Stewart Home & Itziar Bilbao Urrutia.
10 JULY 2019
IFAC Athina, Galaxia 11, 117 45 �� Athens, Greece. 5pm. Free.
Oedipus Wrecks: Sex, Violence & Incest – Stewart Home screening including new collaborative film made with Itziar Bilbao Urrutia.
24 JUNE 2019
BFI Southbank, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XT. 6.30pm. ��6.
Stewart Home talk New Writings: Re-Enter the Dragon with William Fowler.
12 ��� 26 MAY 2019
IFAC Athina, Galaxia 11, 117 45 �� Athens, Greece. Free.
Stewart Home has work in the group show Eaux d���Artifice.
29 MARCH 2019
Redon, Cambridge Heath Road, London E2. 6.30pm. ��6.
Stewart Home performs his live action Bruce Lee Vs. William Beaudine as part of Only One Way Back. Also featuring Sophie Cameron’s Red Raw with TNTX, Bed-Dataries, City Dragon, Callum Hickey & Tatiana Correia, Dr Kunst, The Nighthaunts, Stanley Schtinter’s Great British Jukebox, Caught Short, Videonen.
10 NOVEMBER 2018
The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Pl, London W1T 1JB. 6.30pm & 8pm. Free.
Stewart Home, Tim Wells & Paul Hallam are featured in a Creases Like Knives promotion Suedeheads, Sorts & Smoothies in the early evening slot. From 8pm there is a 3AM Magazine promoted night of anti-literary readings featuring Stewart Home, Louis Armand and Johnny Pulp.
6 NOVEMBER 2018
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX. 7pm. ��16.50���Stewart Home live action and reading prior to Insecure Men concert. The Honey Hahs and Mellah perform prior to Home.
3 OCTOBER 2018
UK cinema release of Human Female Animal (2018) a feature film in which Stewart Home has a very small cameo ��� with one line of dialogue. Directed by Josh Appignanesi & starring Chloe Aridjis & Marc Hosemann.
1 OCTOBER 2018
TANK, 91-93 Great Portland St, Marylebone, London W1W 7NX. 7pm. ��8.
Stewart Home & Chloe Aridjis talk to Lynne Tillman about her new novel Men & Apparitions.
30 SEPTEMBER 2018
Ondernemershuis Crataegus, Meidoornplein 40, Amsterdam-Noord, Netherlands. 11am. Free
Stewart Home presentation about Spectres of Modernism, alongside talks about public art by Lara Almarcegui, Marinella Senatore, Adeola Enigbokan, Massih Hutak and Monnik. Part of Public Art Amsterdam programme organized by TAAK.
24 SEPTEMBER 2018
Publication of Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema by Stewart Home (Ledatape Organisation, Melbourne).
15 SEPTEMBER 2018
Athens School of Fine Arts, Pireos, Ag. Ioannis Rentis 182 33, Greece. 6pm on. Free.
Eclipse & Re-Emergence of the Oedipus Complex, Stewart Home���s 2004 film about his mother will repeatedly screened until late as part of the week long event The Garden of Dystopian Pleasures.
8 SEPTEMBER 2018
Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenpl. 2, 10997 Berlin, Germany. 4.30pm.
Stewart Home & Florian Cramer performance lecture Transgressions Then & Now: Does The ���Alt-Right��� Reenact Counter-Culture? as part of the Disruption Network Lab conference Infiltration: Challenging Supremacism. Tatiana Bazzichelli will moderate a discussion with Home, Cramer & the audience after the presentation. Day ticket (7���) or two day ticket (12���) to conference required.
30 JUNE 2018
Rich Mix Centre, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA. 7.30pm. Free.���Stewart Home participates in The Oldest Sports: A Literary Celebration of Wrestling and Boxing also featuring Lynn Nead, Oliver Goldstein, Declan Ryan, Anna Whitwham, Toby Litt, Simon Pomery, Iris Colomb, Joe Turrent & S. J. Fowler.
17 JUNE 2018
Five Years, 3a Boothby Road, London N19 4AJ. 3pm. Free.
Stewart Home hosts an afternoon of Brucesploitation bad craziness with a talk, screenings & live performance.
10 JUNE 2018
Five Years, 3a Boothby Road, London N19 4AJ. 3pm. Free.
Stewart Home hosts an afternoon of witchcraft taking in discussions, screenings & tarot readings.
1 ��� 17 JUNE 2018
Five Years, 3a Boothby Road, London N19 4A. Free.
Stewart Home & Chris Dorley Brown exhibition Dual Flying Kicks.
27 MAY 2018
Venu��e ve ��vehlovce,, Slav��kova 22, Praha 3, Czech Republic. 9.30pm. Free.
Stewart Home participates in Prague Microfestival: International Writing, Art, Film and Performance. Home reads from his books SEND CA$H & Defiant Pose. Readings & performances on this day start at 6pm, Home performs last. Other readers/performers for this night: Erica Hoelper with Jo Blin, Max Oravin, Rikki Ducornet, Germ��n Sierra, Jeroen Nieuwland & Au��ra Kaziliunaite.
25 MAY 2018
Venu��e ve ��vehlovce,, Slav��kova 22, Praha 3, Czech Republic. 4pm. Free.
Stewart Home participates in Prague Microfestival: International Writing, Art, Film and Performance. Home is part of Manufacturing Dissent panel discussion. Also on panel Vanessa Place, Jan B��li��ek and Louis Armand, moderated by Benjamin Tallis. Panel concludes at 6pm, there are then readings & performances until 10pm.
11 MAY 2018
Housmans, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DX. 7.30pm. ��3 (redeemable).
Stewart Home & Lewis Parker read poetry from their Morbid Books collections.
9 MAY 2018
Morbid Books publish SEND CA$H: The Collected Poems of Stewart Home.
See front page of site for more 2017-2018 events.
27 OCTOBER – 5 NOVERMBER 2017
HilbertRaum, Reuterstr. 31, 12047 Berlin, Germany. Free.Stewart Home is part of the group show Human Machine Interface. Also John Butler, Erica Eyres, Michelle Hannah, David Hoyle, Patrick Jameson, Conor Kelly, Andy Kennedy, Paul Kindersly, Ellis Luxemburg, Craig Mulholland, Mark McGowan, David Sherry, Becky Sik, Urara Tsuchiya, Joe Walsh.
See front page of main site for many other events….
July 30, 2013
The Berlin Wall Considered As A Work Of Conceptual Art
June 28, 2013
The Downing Street Affair
May 29, 2013
The haters still love to hate me!
April 29, 2013
The Avant-Garde & Pamela Anderson Versus The Playland Arcade & Punk Rock ��� Steve Finbow Interviews Stewart Home
We were to meet in a pub that���s name is a mash-up of Poe���s Masque of the Red Death ��� concealed identities, immorality, disassociation, depersonalisation and Gothic materialism ��� and the trending critical theory of hauntology all retro/futuristic absence/presence, the past inside the present. But the Masque Haunt has no postmodern pretences and the closest it gets to Derrida���s Spectres of Marx is the library named after the 19th-century revolutionary socialist a ten-minute walk away in Clerkenwell. The Masque Haunt is a Wetherspoon’s boozer ��� low on prices, high on pissheads and it���s located on the corner of Old Street and Bunhill Row ��� Silicon Roundabout and William Blake, Bunhill Fields and the bodies of plague victims ��� hauntology a go-go. Stewart had just returned from California where he had been promoting his new novel Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane, and I had just recovered from a burst appendix and a laparotomy leaving my abdomen looking like it had a purple zip from sternum to pubic bone. I fancied a pint and I owed Stewart a glass of Islay (but he was drinking lime and soda ��� result). We were there for a catch-up and to talk about the new book, which I had just read and enjoyed, as I have the majority of his 20-something works over the past 25 years.
From Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane: The essence of a great genre movie is that it is as much like every other film from its category as possible. It is not originality that makes genre flicks classics, but rather the complete opposite.
Steve Finbow: Forgetting Benjamin to Baudrillard via Barthes reproductive simulations, your books (I belch and say books rather than novels) flirt with genre rather than full fist them, are you interested in crime/sci-fi novels (take your pick) or genre writing���s non-canonical stance/state?
Stewart Home: Genre fiction and literary fiction produce and mediate each other – of course genre fiction is preferable to literature and is less obnoxious but ultimately you can���t just abolish one of these categories, you have to get rid of both. That said I find elements of interest in both crime and sci-fi. Crime in particular often features nicely stripped back prose as opposed to the prolix bollocks of British literary fiction in particular. And the way, for example, Mickey Spillane treats the passage of time in his Mike Hammer novels (through the abbreviated description of the consumption of a pack of cigarettes among other things) is a lot smarter than what you���ll find in most literary fiction. Likewise, the way Jim Thompson gradually undoes the reader���s belief in the first person narrator in books like The Killer Inside Me by showing the narrator to be crazy and unreliable puts most literary post-modernism to shame. On the other hand, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker or Ann Quin all do these things just as well in their own way and in what is treated as literary fiction. However, the bigger names in literary fiction ��� Martin Amis or Philip Roth for example ��� do everything very badly. So while in pulp there is a mix of good and bad writers at all levels, literary fiction is dominated by a load of extremely bad and boring writers. Ultimately we need to get rid of all these genre categories that produce and mediate each other ��� and literary fiction is, of course, in itself a genre ��� and get rid of all received ways of reading and writing, and instead create something new and truly contemporary, while not forgetting that the communities that throw up cultures are more important than the cultural artefacts we���re left with.
MC&M-J: All great artists have a famous doppelganger.
SF: If that���s correct, who is yours? Who is the anti-Stewart Home?
SH: I think that���s false because the idea of great art is ridiculous. But if it was true I guess my doppelganger would have to be Pamela Anderson, who is seriously hot but shows no interest whatsoever in creating a new world without art or any of the other elitist garbage that characterises the reigning society. And one of the great things about writing fiction (or even non-fiction if you happen to be me) is that it allows you to take on and explore subject positions that are in fact NOT your own.
MC&M-J: ���Who are the real cannibals?��� Is it those in the overdeveloped world or so-called ���primitive��� people? I then told the students that Cannibal Holocaust also delivers a scathing critique of the media, showing how it manipulates events to create news’ stories.
SF: With the News of the World phone-tapping story and the involvement of police and politicians, isn���t it a case of auto-cannibalism, the media���s attempt to create stories created a story about itself that then brought about the death of the media? This is proper viral news, the death of the host means the death of the virus until/unless it is passed on ��� the Sun on Sunday.
SH: I think the phone-tapping story still has a long way to go before it is fully played out and we probably won���t ever know more than 10 percent of what really happened. Likewise, the death of the media is very similar to the death of the avant-garde: rather than experiencing death as silence we get the clatter of neo-critical production announcing a death that is forever delayed by endless chatter about this long anticipated demise. The media, like the avant-garde, might be on a life-support system but news of its death is rather exaggerated.
MC&M-J: When technology completely alienates us from our fellows, the most over privileged people from the overdeveloped world are instantly transformed into the most vicious savages of all time.
SF: Do we have a new Sade among us? A new Bataille? In what way do you think new technology alienates us? Doesn���t it allow us an instant interconnectivity with the other? I jotted this down just after finishing MC&M-J, ���Human beings when solitary are classifiably insane, it is only when we are with others ��� defined and limited by the other ��� that we dare to be reasonable and rational, where we suppress our desires and rages, our perversions and obsessions.���
SH: The Christian fundamentalists in the American Bible Belt are the worst example of ���modern savages��� who are far more barbaric than anything we���ve seen in this world before. They���re armed and they have a massive political influence on the world���s only superpower ��� that���s truly horrific. I understand insanity as a deviation from a social norm, so I would say it isn���t possible for a totally isolated individual to be insane since there is no norm to judge them against. On the other hand I���d also view a completely isolated individual as not fully human since we are by nature social beings. And isn���t that why we���re less than human under capitalism also ��� because although we mix with other people we suffer from social alienation! Moving on, technology isn���t neutral and Web 2.0 is more about consumerism than mass creativity. A lot of the corporate platforms like Facebook, Google+ and WordPress.com are extremely restrictive in terms of their institutional puritanism and deem even items such as Gustave Courbet’s Origine du monde (The Origin of the World���s L���Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) as pornographic when users post reproductions. These platforms aren���t there to enable people to do things, they���re there to serve corporate interest through activities such as data mining.
MC&M-J: Oh, yes it is. Oh, no it isn���t.
SF: Just before this classic piece of dialogue, you write about punk, the Sex Pistols, Sham 69 and the whole anti-prog-rock stance of punk as being more seminal to its founding and development than the political environment; yet prog-rock and punk both suffered from their pantomimic excesses ��� dry ice and bad opera from the former and over-the-top characters from the latter. Do you think the English have a pantomimic DNA?
SH: The narrator isn���t me and doesn���t necessarily express my views. The section about prog and punk is a parody of my experience of being on a talk radio show 14 or 15 years ago with Billy Bragg among others. I���m using Bragg���s position which I���d view as too simplistic, rather than my own views. Pantomime is a big part of our local culture here in London and people throughout England love dressing up ��� punk and prog drag are a not fully expressed manifestation of the desire to cross-dress, something that is far more successfully realised in pantomime (where men often play female roles). However, very often transgendered cross-dressing in pop music is a cover for a lack of talent ��� and I guess it is even more evident in someone like Siouxsie Sioux than it is in Steve Strange.
MC&M-J: The Walton Hop, the disco in the south-west London suburbs where King picked up the child victims he sexually molested.
SF: I used to go there when I was 12 or 13. We used to get the bus from Feltham to Sunbury and walk the rest of the way drinking Newcastle Brown and Newcastle Amber, maybe a dope pipe, some blues. We were Bowie boys ��� bad haircuts, plastic sandals, mohair jumpers our mums had knitted. Where did you grow up and what are your memories of sexual predation?
SH: I didn���t like where I grew up so from the age of 12 on I used to go into the West End of London without adults to hang out either on my own or with mates. So right through my teenage years I used to have a lot of closet cases (men who were mostly married too I���d guess) trying to pick me up around central London. None of them were successful although it was sometimes necessary to tell them to fuck off rather forcefully. The closet cases would hang around the streets or anywhere else they might find young boys but they didn���t tend to come into the punk gigs. The sexual predators who came into the clubs tended to either be out of the closet, or were very occasionally much older women who���d offer me and other kids money to have sex with them. I can remember being horrified when the first time this happened, some pensioner came into a punk venue at the end of the show and offered me money to go home with her ��� she must have been in her seventies. I ignored her so she just went around offering teenage boys money for sex until she found one who said yes. There were also guys who���d offer like ��100 if you���d be bum-fucked on camera ��� and they���d say you wouldn���t even have to have your face in the film. Obviously the omission of faces was to protect them since they were going around asking underage boys to do this. They were offering what was a lot of money at the time and I saw kids accept the offer, personally I didn���t go for it. I also heard other kids tell them by way of reply stuff like: ���I���d like to stick a red hot poker up your arse, the wrong way round, so that you burn your hands when you pull it out!���
MC&M-J: The killer doll Chucky is possessed by the spirit of a vicious serial killer called Charles Lee Ray. Chucky self-consciously parodies the studied nihilism of post-modern teenagers, while the scenes in which he strangles and slashes his victims are comic if, like me, you don���t find them terrifying.
SF: Throughout the novel you reference serial killers, do you think a nation is defined by its type of serial killer, or is it defined by its media���s reaction to the serial killer?
SH: I think serial killers are treated in different ways in different cultures ��� so they might be seen as a sort of rugged American individualist anti-hero in the USA, but in Europe they���re more like sad but dangerous nutjobs.
MC&M-J: The campus is a near perfect setting for a zombie film since it is built around a lake.
SF: Stewart Home writing a campus novel ��� Bradbury, Lodge, Coetzee, Roth and now Iyer, Royle and Home. Why this genre?
SH: I thought it would surprise people, but I did it differently from how it had been done before. I really don���t like books like Bradbury���s The History Man, so I thought some genre-bending was in order. Also I wrote about half the first draft when I was writer-in-residence at York University in 2005 and completed the novel shortly after I was out of that post, so the material was to hand. The book just sat around for seven years as I wasn���t happy with the deals I was offered for it. The 7/7 material seemed to really upset a lot of publishers when I was first showing the book around at the end of 2005. If it had just been a campus novel I���d have probably got it published much faster. And of course there are more students now than ever, so a bigger potentially interested audience probably accounts for the renewed interest in the campus novel. I say in the book the campus is a closed institution but more reflective of the gender mix in society than say the military, so it can act as a microcosm of a larger system. Not everything I have the narrator say is stupid, I thought a mixture of sense and nonsense would make the book more interesting for most readers.
MC&M-J: She was followed by the novelist Stewart Home, who seemed more interested in the sound of his own voice than culture.
SF: Talking to Lee Rourke a few weeks ago, we agreed that your back catalogue of ���novels��� should be re-released by a major house. I see them as a collection of trilogies ��� Pure Mania, Defiant Pose, Red London and onward. Maybe with Richard Allen-esque Stewart-Home skin/suedehead poses of the time on the cover. Do you see your work structured that way?
SH: I see the books more or less that way. But the first trilogy is Defiant Pose, Red London and Blow Job because of the way they address anarchism and fascism. Pure Mania and Slow Death kind of work together because they���re about different parts of the culture industry. In terms of a critique of ideology I considered Defiant Pose, Red London and Blow Job to be a conceptual trilogy as I wrote them although they don���t feature the same characters. Mandy, Charlie and Mary-Jane hangs with Cunt; while Down and Out In Shoreditch and Hoxton, 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess and Come Before Christ & Murder Love also work together as a kind of loose trilogy but I wasn���t thinking of those books in this way when I wrote them. Tainted Love bookends with a novel I finished last year that isn���t published called The 9 Lives Of Ray The Cat Jones (both are written as autobiographies and based on a lot of research but since they were written by me and after the death of the person I���m effectively ghosting without their involvement they are fiction ��� the first draws on my mother���s life and the more recent book the legend of the most famous criminal in my family, Raymond Jones). Maybe Whips and Furs should be put with The Art School Daze of David Hockney when I finish the latter project (both use a lot of ���found��� text but rework it as patently fake ���autobiography���). I don���t think Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie or Memphis Underground particularly fit with anything else I���ve done.
MC&M-J: My actions shall live on to inspire future generations.
SF: And the next thing?
SH: When I���ve finished The Art School Daze of David Hockney (a detourned sadomasochistic art school novel) I���m tempted to write a book set around the late-seventies punk scene in London, and in particular the crowd that went to see Adam and the Ants in 1978 and 1979… but maybe by the time I���ve finished the book I���m currently working on I���ll want to do something completely different.
