The website of writer and poet Daniel Bennett
Kurt Vonnegut, maybe. I bought the Dell edition novels when I lived in America. Like Vonnegut, I had been a smoker, and I would find a beguiling correlative between those small light paperback editions and a packet of cigarettes. I devoured those books in a single sitting. And maybe Philip K Dick too. I read his books with … Continue reading The Compulsive Joy of the Series
'Convinced of decrepitude By so many noble certainties of dust, We linger and lower our voices Among the long rows of mausoleums' Buenos Aires is a hybrid sprawl, a city driven by the tension of its tripartite cultures, the European, American and indigenous. In Palermo all the young speak English with dislocating American accents, and … Continue reading Recoleta Cemetery by Jorge Luis Borges
'Cigarette smoke hanging on in the living room. The ship's lights out on the water, dimming. The stars burning holes in the sky. Becoming ash, yes.' - 'Tomorrow' Every poet is a critic, at least if you believe Harold Bloom. In The Anxiety of Influence, he imagined the great poets of the twentieth century wrestling … Continue reading In a Marine Light: the poetry of Raymond Carver
I've never really got to grips with short stories. It wasn't like I didn't try. My first literary hero was Edgar Allen Poe, and I spent my mid-teens writing tales which delighted in darkness and imagination. I had a favourite English teacher— a neat and dapper man who smoked Marlboro Reds and drove a 2CV— … Continue reading Short fictions
But do I, really, envy him? At night he must rush home to change into black-tie for the evening’s reception. Work has been busy, but he barely has time to kiss his wife on the cheek. Television is the baleful light that illuminates his children’s faces. Later, there is the meeting of the governing body. … Continue reading Dog Dream of the Boss
We met on the beach. The tall black buildings, the upturned boats. A summer on a contract, re-laying the walkway underneath the cliff tops. Hungry days. Life guards shouting jokes from the pavilion, tourists complaining. No one really applying themselves, except you. At work early, reading Mircea Eliade by the war memorial, the names of … Continue reading Boom Years
One of them wears the bluest trainers I have ever seen, blue like the carrier bags given away at Brixton market which is about the bluest thing in this city during late October when the rain comes down. The drunks board the tube train at Stockwell, five or six of them stepping from the platform. … Continue reading Drunks
'I know the island well: I am not afraid of an army if it tries to find me at night.' Island fiction, that specialised genre, exploits the novel's innate artificiality. The relationship between setting and structure become so pronounced as to be almost indivisible. According to Raymond Chandler, any writer short of ideas about what … Continue reading The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
'Los Angeles is not a city but a series of suburban approaches to a city that never materializes.' More by accident than any kind of plan, one of the early features of this blog has been the relationship between word and image. And so, to follow that theme, I thought I'd write about a novel … Continue reading The Slide Area by Gavin Lambert
Around 2001, I worked in a university library. Like most such places, the campus employed security personnel to keep the librarians away from the messy business of letting people into the building. They were contract workers: a mixture of the under-skilled and unlucky, the fallible and hopeless. A woman who hoarded takeaway chicken bones in … Continue reading Kulture!
Absence Club 