T-shirt printing 'companies' are the latest phenomenon in the increasingly dull alterna-rebel music scene. Every other day some chump prints Kate Moss with corpse paint on a t-shirt hoping to breakout at the next Drop Dead clothing company, not realising that photoshop, google image search and Stu No Rules screen printing does not a company make. Organic Anagram is made up of what I can only imagine are earnest and well meaning kids, probably Europeans living in London, who are somehow trying to assimilate 24 clothing and Greg Bennick into a single package. Their 'products', albeit grossly overpriced, at least attempt to maintain some sort of DIY hardcore credibility, although capitalism is always going to be capitalism, no matter how much you try to dress it with x-swatches and limited print runs.
For some reason, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile intellect with fashion, Organic Anagram have decided to release a book of short stories. I say book in the loosest of terms, as the thing is less pages than my last zine. I say short stories in the loosest of terms, as you get two stories, one of which isn't even in English. Andto plump the whole thing out you get a lovely gallery of holiday snaps.
Anyway, the stories man the stories, this is a book blog damnit. Well, one story could well be the best thing ever fucking written, the limited-press, low-key introduction of the next Hemingway, I have no fucking clue though cos the story is in Spanish. It might be so funny it's like A Confederacy of Dunces throwing a cream pie at Trout Fishing in America, it could be so tragic it would make me tear the page out, fashion a knife and drive it through my broken heart, hell it could even be a bit shit, but I don't know because I can't read the bloody thing. Why the guy didn't put both stories in both languages and run them concurrently on separate pages I don't know. It's not like he was pressed for a word count, the thing's only 20 odd pages long.
The first story, Slaughter (which I could read) was passable, if not good.. If it had been in a compendium of upcoming writers, I would have given it time, plodded through, and thought to myself 'not really my cup of tea' and moved on to the next. However, given this is the only piece of literature within the bastard thing that I could understand, thus in essence have paid 8 euros for the pleasure of reading, I feel I should get a bit more of my money's worth. Slaughter is tortuously over-worded, it reads like a thesaurus. I am sure the dude who wrote this is super intelligent (he can write a story in one more language than me for a start) but it doesn't do a story any favours when you can't make out a story for 4 adjectives on top of each other. The closest comparison I can come up with is something like a badly translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez where the translator is some arrogant fuck who wants to make his translation the best shit ever and just pukes a gallon of uneccessary words in for no fucking reason. The worst is the final couple of pages where the writer is clearly trying to incorporate his Bennickian hardcore philosophy with supposed cave dwellers. Wow, what a juxtaposition maaan. Here's an example:
This bleak, pessimistic commitment. We barely sleep; we just let the dark feel some solitude, resting our minds while our body is lively in the depths of the gloom. Crying is a way of expressing our real nature. We feel this shortage acutely. We were given desks in adolescence, but why wake up when we could be lying down in bed, if not for the sake of our appearance? If one is given a glimpse at the future's features, he would be starring (sic) at the void. An insignificant encounter, left to the circumstances. Let the children sleep in peace, in a room where birds don't sing at night.And so it goes on, ad nauseum. The thing reads like one of those junk emails you get with penis enlargement links that have titles just filled with nonsesnse like 'open your door to grassroots airplane opportunities' or 'swallow life encompasses your dairy love'.
This story pissed me off a great deal mostly because I paid 8 euros for the priviledge of reading it, like people involved in this venture feel the story is worth such a sum of money. It's not, it's offensive to literature. There were semblances of a good story within slaughter, totally obstructed by overwrought word craft and a sickening sense of literary superiority. I would be hard fucking pushed to read something that pissed me off more this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment