diary

Chart / April

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Squeaking in at the end of the month with a brief update on what’s hot and what’s not in the world of Climate Writer Grant Price (hello SEO, keep me in first place, Google).

First up: publication! I had an essay accepted for the world’s favourite magazine, Litro. What is Litro? Apparently, they “publish stories that transport.” Just like a train. I was very keen to appear in their hallowed pages, so this is fantastic news. The essay is about the Reeperbahn in Hamburg and it features photographs from the Swedish lens maestro Anders Petersen and the black-and-white tyro Daniel Montenegro. It’s not out yet, but once it is published it’ll appear right here (under ‘Shorts’).

Second up: publication! I wrote an essay for a photobook by the photographer Martin Kemper titled ‘Waters take Me’. Again, the book hasn’t been published, but once it’s out…you know the drill.

The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted a new section on the website: NON-FICTION. This page contains all my projects that I have done for other people, either as a ghostwriter, editor or translator. It also lists my own forthcoming photobook, The Burned-Over Country, which is being finalised as I write. More on that in the future. Have a click around and see all the things I do for other people for $$$.

Also, I’ll be merging my photography website with this one soon, so everything is in one place.

Book of the month: Cool Hand Luke. One of those novels I gravitate towards, it’s about hopeless men living dirty and smoking a whole lot. The film is far more famous, but the book by Donn Pearce is well worth a read for the simple, effective prose and an honest look at the US penal system in the 1950s and 1960s. Reminiscent of Ivan Denisovich, Cormac McCarthy and Deliverance.

Film of the month: Heaven Can Wait. Beautiful, tragic, touching and stylish in equal measure, this is an uplifting treat all the way from the troubling days of 1943. It stars Don Ameche, who looks so much like Brad Pitt in some scenes that I had to look him up and check that Ameche wasn’t Brad’s dad. There’s also Gene Tierney, whose life story is just as complex and melancholy as her character in the film.

Album of the month: The compact EP Connla’s Well by Maruja. This is a perfect continuation to last year’s Knocknarea and maybe the pinnacle of what people are calling the ‘windmill’ scene (that’s post-punk British bands that sound like Slint with sad-sounding people whisper-talking over angular bass/guitar attacks). The scene has been going on since 2021, but I’m not bored of it yet…as long as it continues in this vein.

Sounds of the summer:

1 Headache - The Party That Never Ends

2 Michael Vincent Waller - Jennifer

3 Mount Kimbie, King Krule - Empty And Silent

4 Tirzah - F22

5 Daniel Avery - Running

6 Jlin, Philip Glass - The Precision of Infinity

Chart / January

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NEWSFLASH: I’m back.

It’s been a while since I did one of these….September, in fact. The reasons are myriad: I relocated to Athens, Pacific State needed a promotin’ (number #1 for cyberpunk in the USA last week!), and I have a few projects keeping me busy. Two days ago I wrote the last line of a neo-Western thriller I’ve been working on for a year. Perfect timing, because from mid-February I’ll be in residence at JOYA: AiR, a not-for-profit, carbon-positive arts residency supporting artistic projects “at the intersection between creativity and the environment”. My residency will last for three weeks, during which I hope to sketch out the structure for a new masculinity and climate-focused novel and write the first chapter.

Book of the month: Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I’d been aware of this book for many years, but I’d never actually paid it much attention beyond the gnarly cover art. For some reason, I’d assumed it was written in the 1960s. WRONG. It’s a mashup of Conrad, Gibson and Homer. And it’s fantastic. Not since the Three-Body Problem have I read science fiction so rich, with 10+ fully fleshed characters all with their own incredibly well-constructed stories. The world-building is flawless, the language varied and the dissection of religion compelling.

Film of the month:

In November Criterion put up a selection of ‘end of the world’ films, with some of the usual suspects including Mad Max, Threads and Escape From New York. I’m still working my way through the titles I’ve never heard of. Two I did watch were Dead End Drive-In and Night Of The Comet. Both distinctly B-movie, both rough around the edges, both with dodgy pacing, paper-thin characters and editing choices (Night has a pivotal scene where most of the world is turned into red dust by a comet passing overhead…all we see of this catastrophe is one woman closing her eyes and uttering a bored ‘oh’). The saving grace: the sets, costume design and cinematography (particular for Drive-In). Wow. Neon-soaked cities, orange horizons, bloodied skies. It more than makes up for dialogue like “Yeaaaah my name’s Crabsy, because people thought I had crabs, But I don’t”. That’s the protagonist saying it. Our hero. The guy we want to believe in.

Buena Vista Music Club:

1 The Beaches - Blame Brett

2 Phoebe Bridgers - Scott Street

3 sign crushes motorist - theres this girl

4 Pinegrove - Need 2

5 flyingfish - wonder if u care

6 Soap&Skin - Me and the Devil

Chart / September

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Who’s ready for Pacific State? Not me!

The advance review copies are out, the book blog tours are booked, and the world is waiting with baited breath to see if the people’s climate fiction champion, Grant Price, can follow up on the non-smash-hit Reality Testing with a deeper, more complex, more mature and more acerbic textual examination of the climate-ravaged corporatocracy. The only way to find out is to BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY. Fell those trees for my books! Fork over your cash to Amazon! Perpetuate the cycle!

A new low this month in Novel Heaven, Short Story Hell: a short story I submitted in April 2022 was returned to me with the note: “Thank you so much for trusting us with your work! As we are revamping our magazine as a poetry chapbook publisher, we have decided to return all submissions to their owners”. I think I paid a $10 fee for that. Strange business, literature.

Book of the month: Shuggie Bain. Heartbreaking, bittersweet and beautiful. Like a Ken Loach film written by Betty Smith, I devoured this novel (way after everyone else jumped on it beacuse of the Booker thing). The writing is deceptively simple, the characters reassuringly complex, and more than once I wanted to reach into the world created by Douglas Stuart and lift poor Shuggie out of it. This is a book that mums and high-falutin’ dudes alike can love in the same and different ways. It also reminded me of one of the best comedy sketches of all time.

Album of the month: If I divide it evenly between The Beggar by Swans and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan, will I be accused of being so pretentious that I could give Paul Auster a run for his money? I don’t care. I like them both. Swans because it’s maybe Gira’s greatest accomplishment, Roan because why would I ever say no to saccharine-laced-with-fuck-you synthpop.

Film of the month: So I watched The Faculty for the first time since I was 14. What a weird film. Salma Hayek shows up for like two scenes. Robert Patrick plays the T1000. Usher is a shit-talking football star. Josh Hartnett is a 28-year-old high school student with weird hair. There’s a whole ten-minute-long scene that’s an ‘homage’ (rip-off) to The Thing. It doesn’t feel like a Robert Rodriguez movie, not beyond a few superficial flashes of style (sure, why not introduce the main characters with a freeze frame and their names written in graffitti like it’s The Warriors?). It’s still fascinating, though. And short. Just as I was properly settling into it, there was the final boss trying to murder Mr Frodo in the school’s own Olympic-sized swimming pool. Definitely worth watching again.

Profuse music:

1 Jun Fukamachi - Urban Square

2 Tangerine Dream - Rain in the Third House

3 Vril - Manium

4 Ana Roxanne - It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore

5 Japan - The Experience of Swimming

6 Steve Hillage - Garden of Paradise

Chart / July

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Here we go. The Pacific State promotional machine is shuddering into life. Ungainly, reluctant, in need of a good spritz of oil if it wants to actually go anywhere. An early five-star appraisal from the world’s worst book review site, Readers Favorites, has the following to say:

“The story is excellently written, and it exceeded my expectations by far. There was never a dull moment with all the twists and turns. The suspense kept me on the edge of my seat.”

Honestly, if you’re a writer: don’t bother submitting it to that website. It’s utter trash. Yes, I’ll still quote it, but I’d be better off asking ChatGPT to give me a review.

And here’s another from Ben Scharf, producer at Andere Filme and director of the short film Darwin’s Fox, which won the 2022 Cannes Shorts Award:

“Price is redefining sci-fi. Gone are the days of cardboard characters, artifice and an overemphasis on technology. What we get instead is a dissection of the human condition in a reality that is twisted just far enough to serve the story. Playful, exhausting and crafty, all at once.”

That’s how you write a critique.

In other news, I have a short story appearing in God’s Cruel Joke magazine (print & online) this month. That’s right, I found a magazine to submit to that didn’t charge me $10-20 AND paid me….it is possible. I’ll post the link when it’s up.

Book of the month: Absolutely Boys in Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich. Utterly harrowing and heartbreaking, Alexievich gathers testimonies of soldiers, nurses and civilian contractors who took part in the Russian war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, as well as accounts from mothers and wives of the dead. The stories of the mothers are the saddest. What I find astounding is that these accounts sound similar to those emerging from the current conflict in Ukraine: duping conscripts into travelling to a warzone, leaving soldiers underequipped and starving, bludgeoning the population wholesale with cheap propaganda. Obviously I’m not saying “they should’ve given these boys more of a fighting chance!”; it’s just amazing that the Russian high command evidently didn’t learn anything in the intervening 44 years (more power to Ukraine). It has taken me a good couple of months to read, because a few pages is enough to send me into a misery spiral.

Film of the month: TETSUO: THE IRON MAN. Good God, what a film. It is the most insane hour of celluloid I’ve ever seen. I’d been planning to watch it ever since I was 16, but after reading so many accounts online about how low budget and nonsensical it was, I wasn’t willing to part with cold, hard cash for a copy. Fortunately, Criterion had the film up for a little while, and I feasted on it. Body horror, ingenious camera angles, no-holds-barred sex, an exacavator drill and a giant mecha battle. It’s amazing.

Album of the month: Grian Chatten - Chaos for the Fly. The Fontaines D.C. singer delivers a punchy collection of chamber pop in his signature drawl. I like.

A moveable feast:

1 Kettenkarussell - Maybe

2 Fejká - Hiraeth

3 Route 8 - This Raw Feeling

4 Out Of Place Artefacts - PROCYON

5 Lxury - Oblivion