A life at the end of history
Posted in Books, The Seventies on 15 November 2009
If you haven’t seen it already, here’s Thomas Pynchon (as Doc Sportello, the book’s protagonist) reading a blurb about his new book, Inherent Vice. A hoot and hip to the core, it takes place in Manhattan Beach (renamed Gordita Beach), California in 1970. Proving, as fans always suspected, that he wrote Gravity’s Rainbow (published in [...]
Posted in Fraught Aughts on 12 February 2009
On the Saturday none of us in Victoria will ever forget, I decided to do the dishes, despite the 46.4°C heat and no air conditioning. My wife and daughter had wisely gone to the movies, to see Slumdog Millionaire. It was five in the afternoon and with a fan stationed on the counter behind my [...]
Posted in The Sixties on 28 June 2008
**To Abel Debritto, whose email out of the blue invoked this long ago night.**
It must have been mid-April, 1968. I had just published the second and last edition of a mimeo poetry mag called The Willie. It sold for a buck with a print run of about 100 copies, and featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, [...]