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“Writing a book is such a complicated, long-term, difficult process that all of the possible motives that can funnel in will, and a great many of those motives will be base. If you can transform your particular baseness into something beautiful, that’s about the best you can make of your own obnoxious nature.” William Gass

David Keenan – Xstabeth

When I lived in England briefly in 2005 I ordered lots of packages of CD-Rs from David Keenan’s Volcanic Tongue shop in Scotland. I bought The Dead C – Harsh 70s Reality from Volcanic Tongue and that album became a very big deal for me.

I also read him a lot in Wire Magazine. Later I saw him play with Jandek twice in Sydney. I also remember him being a champion for lesser known Sydney bands like Naked on the Vague, who I loved.

His novels This is Memorial Device and For The Good Times are intense and unusual, and brilliant. The link above is to pre-order his new novel Xstabeth, which at this rate will be the only novel published in 2020 that I will read this year, although I have ordered BR Yeager’s Pearl Death, which is not strictly a book.

While I’m here blogging my heart out I’ll list some books I’ve read this year that have been either interesting or enjoyable, or both.

Belladonna – Dasa Drndic
Propaganda – Jacques Ellul
Resentment – Gary Indiana
Depraved Indifference – Gary Indiana
Horse Crazy – Gary Indiana
L’Amour – Marguerite Duras
Republic – Plato
Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The Hard Right in Australia – Dominic Kelly
Graal Flibuste – Robert Pinget

And here’s some music I’ve liked:

Akitsa – Credo
Akitsa – Grans Tyrans
Bell Witch / Aerial Ruin – Stygian Bough
Molly Nilsson – Imaginations
Lustre – The Ashes of Light
Troth – Flaws in the Glass
Troth – Nothing Still in the Stone Garden
Cross Record – Cross Record
Red Wine and Sugar – A Population of Indoor Cats
Fabulous Diamonds – Plain Songs
Maxine Funke – Lace
Disembowelment – Transcendence into the Peripheral
Decadance – On and On