If you can believe it, I’ve had no time to update my myspace since last year. And now we’re already five months into the new one. How can it be? Well, for one thing: I finally finished the novel I started back in February 2024. Fourteen months, 160,000 words and a whole lot of stop/start, this-is-good, no-it-isnt, isnt-this-traumatic inner conflict. But it is done, and for the first time ever I feel comfortable with what I have written. No inclination to downplay myself, no need to line up excuses before handing it off to anyone else to read. It’s rather nourishing, and all it took was to drop the style and the acting and the poetry and simply write from the heart, just as Tom Waits says so. The next step, as usual, is to tame the behemoth, slim it down and then send it out for critical evisceration.
Other projects in the works include the novel I wrote in 2023 and never touched again, a graphic novel based on a film treatment I sold a couple of years back (just before the production house went bankrupt), a feature-length movie script, a short feature and a new thing - perhaps a novel - about narcissim. All to play for, no time to play it in.
I’ve updated the site a little bit and added the following:
- A link to Du, an art magazine whose most recent edition (about James Turrell) I translated recently
- A mock cover to The Many Paths of My Life by Brigitte Zimmer (translated and edited by me)
- A link to a huge project I translated a few years back on behalf of the Tages-Anzeiger about heroin addicts in Zurich
In publication news, I…haven’t exactly been submitting anything for almost a year now, with the exception of four poems, all of which will appear in the anthology Hatred is a Bitter Fruit at the end of the month. The launch event for the anthology is this Friday (May 10). I won’t be in attendance, because it’s in London and I’m currently melting in the Athens chaparral.
One final bit of chat: I’ve founded a residency in Crete! Well, kind of. It’s year one, so maybe it’ll end up being a one-off, but as for now I’m bringing together a handful of somewhat jaded Millennials for 11 days to escape the relentlessly wearing news cycle in pursuit of a temporary peace in which ideas and impulses are given space to flourish. The name of the residency is ATARAXIA, which the wily Ancient Greeks coined to describe the state of mental and/or emotional tranquility, and it’ll take place in July. I’m hoping to document the whole thing, whether through photography or video, and to write a short chronicle of how it went.
Book of the month: Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman. If it wasn’t clear by now that the ‘art of the deal’ actually means ‘the impulse of an ADHD toddler’, then this book, which serves as a biography of Trump and a record of seemingly everything he did and said during his first presidency, leaves no room for interpretation. Scarier than Rosemary’s Baby, honestly.
Film of the month: Gun Crazy, directed by Joseph H. Lewis and written on the sly by the then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. It’s a slight movie, but it oozes class and celebrates unusual camera angles in a way that many modern films don’t. There’s one long, unbroken shot involving a bank robbery, which is filmed from the rear of the getaway car, and it is sublime. Definitely paved the way for Bonnie & Clyde.
Album of the month: Under Tangled Silence by DjRUM. Some artists, especially electronic ones, do the same thing album after album. Others evolve their sound little by little. DjRUM (like Floating Points before him) decided to go from Cro-Magnon straight to Homo Sapien and deliver a magnum opus that effortlessly fuses IDM, UK bass and modern classical. I believe this will be quite delightful to see live if a full orchestra is involved.
Water music by TC Boyle:
