The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
About eighteen months ago, I went for a drink in the Arts Café in Islington. I was taken there by a woman I had only recently met. You reach the entrance down an unpromising side street off Essex Road, and climb the stairs where photocopied posters for small gigs or poetry readings are tacked to … Continue reading Gardening Through the Apocalypse
'The writer's task is to invent reality.' J.G. Ballard. On a recent trip to Heathrow, I travelled along the Westway. It's been a few years since I headed out on that road, not since a friend of mine passed his driving test and we made a specific trip out west with Low by David Bowie … Continue reading Terminal Realism: Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Zadie Smith
Which of them will triumph? I would see our trumpeter on visits to the town. A scruffy but amiable figure, standing outside the old museum. He had worked in the same office job for as long as most could remember. But a dispute broke out. These are difficult times. He lost his job. Anyone could tell you a similar story. … Continue reading Trumpet Wars of the Old Town
'Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.' J. G. Ballard In retrospect, I should have known I was in trouble when someone asked me to list the influences of my novel All The Dogs. I named William Blake, Flannery O'Connor, Michael Reeves, and Graham … Continue reading Writing and Painting
These cool spaces, always light and airy, retaining their silence through a fragile, communally agreed sense of order. The smell of paper, and plastic wrapping, which, for me, still remains an evocative association, almost painful in its intensity. My first library was a travelling yellow bus which stopped off every week in the village where … Continue reading Libraries
'first a man and then a street' - Iain Sinclair Influences are tricky things, running like pathways of mercury through a writer's life. In part, to name a literary influence is to limit yourself, to take a place on the second step behind some greater figure. Sometimes, though, the opposite is true, and by naming … Continue reading London Smoke: Iain Sinclair
'I stopped my bicycle under a street lamp near Riddervolds Square and spread out the map to see where I was going.' Over the last years, loyal to the time in my life when I eschewed travel for reading, when the word edged out the world, I've taken to choosing a novel or book of … Continue reading Trapped In Oslo – The Blue Room by Hanne Ørstavik
'I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's.' William Blake I've always avoided writers' biographies, beyond the potted versions at the front of the work. It was an early decision, and one I've more or less stuck to over the years. When you start out at writing, it's tempting to go looking … Continue reading Influences
'Words sing what mind brings' Jack Kerouac If you want to develop as a human being, never mind a writer, it's probably a good idea to kick any idealisation of the Beats. I've lost count of the number of people who have passed through my life with the appetite for a Beat biography without putting … Continue reading Multi-Media Beats
'They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass' John Ashbery I first read On the Road at the age of sixteen, during a family holiday in Anglesey, where I burrowed down in a caravan sleeping bag, taking secret nips from a bottle of White Horse whisky while my … Continue reading Why America?
Absence Club 