Allan Cavanagh (or @AllanCavanagh, as I fondly know him) just tweeted to ask me, "have you got a poetry collection coming out?" Which is one of those embarrassingly intimate questions about shameful practices best unmentioned. Apparently he had heard the magnificent Jessie Lendennie mention it earlier tonight on Lyric FM.
But the question reminded my that I haven't actually talked about, you know, books. The things I write. And what state they are in. For a long time. So let's deal with that distasteful stuff, category by category.
1.) Poems. Yes, I do have a poetry collection coming out. Salmon Poetry will publish my first collection in February 2010, God willing. It will contain all the poetry I've ever written that I'm not utterly ashamed of (which means, mostly, the recent poetry written in Berlin, and a mutilated fistful of older pieces), and all the Toasted Heretic lyrics that are fit to print. Working title is Free Sex Chocolate (collected songs and poems). And if anyone has a suitable cover image for such a book, with such a title, I'd be very interested to see it. It's poetry, so there's not much of a budget, but the glory! The glory! (You can contact me through the Mail Me button, off down there to the right.)
2.) Novels. Yes, Jude: Level 2will finally emerge into the harsh global spotlight in June 2010, blinking, eating roadkill, and shagging anything that moves. It's set largely in London, and indeed may well get called Jude in London. You can read a piece from it here.
3.) Short Stories. I am very happy to be the official representative of the Republic of Ireland in the Dalkey Archive's scarily ambitious anthology, Best European Fiction 2010. If I were capable of humility, I'd be humbled. Here's a description I nicked off Amazon:
"Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur “Genius-Award” winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what’s happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered."
Number one in a very occasional series, in which I bring you up to date on the continuing adventures of the other members of Toasted Heretic, the "messy beat combo" (courtesy Andrew Mueller, Melody Maker, circa 1991), in which I whiled away my youth.
Aengus McMahon has been running along a beach in Mexico. You can read the full story here, and even leave a comment, ideally sarky (sample comment so far: "Don't come to Dangan if you catch a flu :))") but meanwhile here's the picture, 'cos he looks so cool in the heat...
I am in Tipperary, for reasons mysterious. And yes, that means I am typing on a computer older than time. I strike a key; the computer begins to think about perhaps carrying out an action; I go off and make coffee, play a game of chess, solve a major global problem, write my memoirs in longhand, and return to the computer; it carries out the action; I realise I had pressed the wrong key; and so the long day passes.
So no complicated blogging.
But, seeing as we were talking about Toasted Heretic (about a week ago)... I was interested to see that an act of wanton vandalism by, er, me, has been chosen as one of the Top Twenty Moments in The History of Irish Indie Music by Hot Press magazine.
Hmmm... I may have photos from back then... It would take me about six hours to put up a photo here, but I might when I get back to Berlin...
Meanwhile, all you pop kids (well, the Irish ones) - Hot Press are asking what would you nominate as your top Irish Indie Moment. Throw in your fivepence worth in the comments section here. And paste a copy down below, I'd be interested. My top Irish indie moment (leaving aside Toasted Heretic) was probably Cathal Coughlan-related. Personally - seeing him play an astounding lunchtime set with Fatima Mansions in a slightly dodgy club New York, and then getting trapped there for half an hour afterwards, as the cops fought a gunbattle with some drug dealers a little further down the street. (And this was lunchtime, imagine what that street was like at 3am...) Must have been 1990.
A more objective top Irish indie moment (ie one I didn't see myself), has to be Cathal Coughlan buggering himself onstage with a plastic Virgin Mary holy water dispenser in front of 50,000 very angry Italians, when he supported U2 in Milan.
I could write a small essay about the significance of that moment, but I am very tired.
Speaking of Toasted Heretic has reminded me of a small but annoying itch I'd been meaning to scratch. Here goes.
The report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse has finally been published in Ireland. It is 2,000 pages long. It tells us that the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland (which ran most Irish schools until very recently, including the one I attended, the Christian Brothers, Nenagh), systematically sexually and physically abused the children in its care, particularly the boys. In particular the "industrial schools" run by the religious orders were tiny gulags. I have been reading, with mild annoyance, responses to this. John Banville's, in the New York Times, is typical:
"Never tell, never acknowledge, that was the unspoken watchword. Everyone knew, but no one said.
Amid all the reaction to these terrible revelations, I have heard no one address the question of what it means, in this context, to know. Human beings — human beings everywhere, not just in Ireland — have a remarkable ability to entertain simultaneously any number of contradictory propositions. Perfectly decent people can know a thing and at the same time not know it. Think of Turkey and the Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century, think of Germany and the Jews in the 1940s, think of Bosnia and Rwanda in our own time.
Ireland from 1930 to the late 1990s was a closed state, ruled — the word is not too strong — by an all-powerful Catholic Church with the connivance of politicians and, indeed, the populace as a whole, with some honorable exceptions. The doctrine of original sin was ingrained in us from our earliest years, and we borrowed from Protestantism the concepts of the elect and the unelect. If children were sent to orphanages, industrial schools and reformatories, it must be because they were destined for it, and must belong there. What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours.
We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."
Hmmm. "Everyone knew, but no one said." Below are the lyrics of a Toasted Heretic song, released in Ireland (on vinyl and cassette) as part of the Smug EP in 1990 (well within Banville's definition of that "closed state"). The song is called "They Didn't Teach Music in My School". Its real title is, of course (as it should be in any good pop song), the key line of the chorus, "Sliding Up Seamus". However, we foolishly believed that it was a good song, that it was - in as much as a pop song can be - an important song, and that the national broadcaster RTÉ might actually play it, so we made life easier for them by giving it a title they could actually read out on air. They, of course, didn't play it.
They Didn't Teach Music In My School.
"When your calls go uncollected and the neighbours have electrified the fence
Then will you start thinking, will it sink in, will you exercise some sense?
Everybody hates you, thinks it's great you got the flu, do you know why?
It's because you're such a shite we'll laugh all night with sheer delight the day you die
Your hand inside your habit, you would grab it and emit a gasping noise
As you walked in your black cassock past the showers and slapped the buttocks of the boys
But we got out alive
We're rich, we're famous
And you're inside
For sliding up Seamus
In our religion classes you would glare through black-rimmed glasses down the back
And summon up the sinner who'd regurgitated dinner, to be smacked
Vomiting in terror was a tactical error, he'd find
As you lowered his trews and began to bruise his behind
Picture our joy when you were caught inside a boy behind the bike shed
Oh summer holidays forever, and much better weather, when you're dead.
But we got out alive
We're rich, we're famous
And you're still inside
For sliding up Seamus..."
Of course, pop culture never gets much credit for saying anything of any importance, though it often speaks truth well ahead of high culture. John Banville, who is an excellent writer (though of the kind of novel I don't like), and by all accounts a very nice, decent man, appears to be speaking for Ireland when he tells the readers of the New York Times "Everyone knew, but no one said." "What happened to them within those unscalable walls was no concern of ours." "We knew, and did not know. That is our shame today."
Well, it's not MY bleedin' shame, mate. "Sliding Up Seamus" was being played live in towns across Ireland, and being cheered to the rafters by pupils and ex-pupils of the Christian Brothers, twenty years ago, before it was even recorded. And my friends and I officially released our report, on vinyl and cassette, 19 yearsbeforethe Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released its report.
And, of course, being a disposable piece of pop, existing only in analogue recordings on vinyl and cassette, on an indie label, before the internet, it has vanished almost entirely now. I don't even have a copy myself. But just to prove it existed, here is a rotten recording, with terrible sound, of a live performance of "They Didn't Teach Music In My School" - which we may as well officially rename "Sliding Up Seamus", now that it doesn't matter any more - in Róisín Dubh, Galway, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour Tour.
(The actual vinyl version was unusually well recorded, for a Toasted Heretic song, and sounded darn good. Renouncing our 4-track Tascam 244 for the first time, we recorded the Smug EP on 16-track in West One, with the great Pat Neary engineering.)
A final point: The song, rather optimistically, places the chap in the black cassock behind bars. In that, "Sliding Up Seamus" was less a description of the Irish present in the late 1980s, when it was written, and more a projection of a possible future, a wish-fulfillment exercise written to cheer up some friends of mine, who had suffered under the regime, and give them a laugh. No priests or Christian Brothers were getting jail sentences back when that song was written. But it is slightly sad to be reading this on Wikipedia, twenty years later:
"The report itself cannot be used for criminal proceedings (in part because the Christian Brotherssuccessfully sued the commission to prevent its members from being named in the report) and victims say they feel "cheated and deceived" by the lack of prosecutions,[18] and "because of that this inquiry is deeply flawed, it's incomplete and many might call it a whitewash."[17]"
Note for younger readers: Toasted Heretic was the band in which I invested the golden coin of my youth. Back in the 1980s, we looked a bit like this:
And we sounded a bit like this. Think lo-fi. Now think even lower-fi. No, lower... (There's a "play" button for each song, down the left side of this page.)
In 2005, after rather a long break, we looked a bit like this:
We are currently all growing long white beards, in preparation for the next performance in our grueling schedule, pencilled in for late spring of the year 2039.
Well, it's not the end of the world, but it's going to feel like it for quite a while. The US government bail-out plan was voted down by Congress a few hours ago. If the plan had been passed, it would have given the illusion that things were going to be OK. (Things would not have been OK.)
Now, we won't even have the comforting illusion.
An an Irishman with my fortune (eleven euro) in an Irish bank account, I have a keen interest in the future of the Irish banking system. The main question seems to me to be, in what order will they fail? I reckon it's going to be a photo-finish for first place between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life and Permanent. (Though will dark horse Irish Nationwide Building Society make a late surge for the line?) After that, who knows. But they're all banjaxed.
Every Irish bank is massively over-exposed to Irish and UK residential and commercial property, and to Irish developers who can no longer service their vast loans. The Irish banks have been keeping their developers afloat artificially for the past year, in the hope things would miraculously turn around. Things haven't, they won't for years, and soon all the bad debts will have to appear on the books, dragging both banks and developers under. If the Germans and Swiss find the books of the Irish banks too revolting, and can't bring themselves to purchase the wreckage, then the Irish government (with some very irritated help from the European Central Bank) will have to recapitalise the entire banking sector. All this will have to be done during a global financial crisis. It's going to be comically awful, like having to change your tyre in the middle of a demolition derby.
I lived through the Irish property boom of the past decade with ever-mounting incredulity. It really was the most extraordinary case of mass delusion since everybody drank Kool-Aid in Jonestown. And if you want cast-iron evidence that I'm not pretending to be wise after the fact, here I am on Irish television, in May of 2007, saying exactly that, to the stony silence of the studio audience, all of whom had just bought an investment property the day before, and would be buying another one the day after.
(Oh yeah. banks and hedge funds and other financial institutions will also be imploding across America and around the world after this, but I'm so bored with the USA, I thought I'd talk about Ireland for a change... Ah heck, one more US prediction: good, old-fashioned, retro, Depression-era bank runs in America, starting tomorrow.)
Along with a few other writers (DBC Pierre, Howard Marks, Sebastian Horsley etc) I was asked to contribute some of my few surviving tattered memories to the current issue of Hot Press. The issue is a wonderfully exploitative and tacky DRUGS!!! special, with a coke-smeared model on the cover who happens to look a bit like the young Irish lingerie model, Katie French, who died recently after her coke-fueled 24th birthday party.
As the memories I contributed were from the same place and time as the Toasted Heretic gigs we've been discussing in the forum, I thought I'd repeat them here...
My earliest experience of drugs was as a member of a small tribe in Galway.
We would collect magic mushrooms in the traditional manner, on the sacred golf-course of Knocknacarra. Every season, Joe Seal, a priest of the tribe, would make magic mushroom wine. My first trip, the young men of the tribe gathered in a holy place in Salthill and drank deeply of mushroom tea. A heck of a lot of mushroom tea. Then we went to the Warwick. The night lasted several years, and I sank into the floor several inches whenever I lay down, which was often. Then it started raining in the Warwick. Then tribes of pygmies wandered across the dance floor.
It was unnerving, and many of our tribe fled. (Days later, we discovered that a busload of dwarves on holiday were staying in the Warwick: and that the place was so packed the condensation had been pouring from the ceiling.)
Some of us ended up in Spar, where one of our number demanded that the shopkeeper slice his Mars Bar into many slices with the bacon slicer. However, his urgent request was not understood, and our tribesman fled. Soon many of the tribesmen were in flight, through space and time. Several walked a number of miles out of town. One slept in a field. Another was found at dawn, still walking, past Spiddal, and was brought home by the forces of law and order.
They were the best days of our lives, and they destroyed many of us. Over the next few years, some of us achieved enlightenment. Some of us died. Joe Seal died in India. A girl I liked killed herself. A girl I loved lost her mind and never found it again, and is still lost. Quite a few of us ended up in psychiatric hospitals, or with terrible depressions… We didn't know what we were doing, we didn't take it seriously enough. As Philip K. Dick said of his friends, and of mine, "They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed - run over, maimed, destroyed - but they continued to play anyhow."
I have two very strong opinions on drugs. Those who are against drugs should take more of them: those who are for drugs should take less of them. Most societies make sure that their young people take dangerous drugs in controlled circumstances, very rarely, and with an experienced guide to make sure they come back with new knowledge of themselves, and of their relationship to the universe. We neck anything that's going, head down to Abrakebabra, and fight. Few achieve enlightenment in Abrakebabra.
The second image is of Yapa, Joel, JJ, Posen and Albi, visiting London from the island of Tanna, at the southern tip of the island nation of Vanuatu. It is from the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary, Meet The Natives.
The third image is a crop of a digital landscape called "Enlightenment", created using Terragen by the Arizona artist Pat Goltz.
I've been having a great, nostalgia-saturated conversation with Rachel King's sister Naomi, over on the forum. Apparently Naomi's first ever gig, aged fifteen, was Toasted Heretic in Clogs (the legendary pub in the legendary Galway Centre for the legendary Unemployed), in 1988.
That distinguished lecturer in linguistics at Trinity College Dublin, Dr. Breffni O'Rourke, is also chatting with us on the thread. Breffni may be better known to some of you as Toasted Heretic's chiselled-featured rhythm-guitarist in those early days (and resident Sex God, till Barry Wallace, now of The Rye, joined and took over that important role). It turns out Breff has a tape of the gig. He's a fountain of knowledge, I'd totally forgotten that decade, let alone that night. Apparently the original title of the song "Charm & Arrogance" (later the title track of our second album) was "Everybody Wants To Shag Julian Gough". Who knew?
So if you're into the intimate details of a particularly obscure Toasted Heretic gig in Clogs pub off Dominic Street in Galway city in 1988 (a gig so obscure even I'd forgotten it), by golly you've come to the right place. Click HERE...
Meanwhile, as I was reading the account of the Ireland-Brazil friendly unfolding on the Guardian's minute-by-minute live report, and as I threw in the odd email pulling the Guardian journalist's Offaly leg, I read (in the 83rd minute of the live report... the match must have hit a dull patch), that I had been, em... involved with his wonderful sister a couple of decades back, in Trinity.
As a result I am suffering an almost lethal overdose of nostalgia, and may need to do something terribly modern to get over it.
But by jingo, this is what the internet was invented for. Gathering round the global campfire, telling tales from the old days before electricity. Hurrah!
My site traffic counter tells me there's been a lot of visits to a rather obscure page on the Forum this week (the Good Lord alone knows why). The page discusses Toasted Heretic's 1991 hit single, "Galway and Los Angeles", so I thought I'd add these links for the various versions of "Galway and Los Angeles" available free on Youtube...
1.) The second version of the original video (slightly muffled audio, I think it was uploaded from an old VHS tape). There was an earlier, artier version of this video, which I prefer (one long take of my mouth singing, it gets hypnotic, and the lips, when closed, start to look like a leaf or an old sofa after a while), but I don't know where to find it. Brian Shanley shot the original, but the record company freaked out and wanted another version, so we shot some stills of photos by Aengus McMahon and cut them in to make this second version:
3.) Toasted Heretic play "Galway and Los Angeles" live in Róisín Dubh, Galway, August 2005, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour tour... (Very dodgy one-camera version! This was an all-ages, alcohol-free gig, in the daytime, so that the band's children and the children of our original fans could come. Thus the kids doing the amusing hand-gestures down the front. We did a far more blood, sweat and alcohol-soaked gig in Róisín Dubh the night before, for adults only, so don't worry if this version doesn't tally with your memory of the Róisín Dubh gig you attended...):
While I'm at it, this is our most popular video on Youtube... Toasted Heretic do "Stay Tonight" (off Charm & Arrogance), on the Den with Zig and Zag... in which I stand on Zig, and throw a lot of dollars in the air, Declan speaks fluent Guitar, and Zig and Zag provide rather lovely backing vocals...
The splendid Tony Wilson, former head of Factory Records, died on August 10th, aged 57. The death of the man who gave the world Joy Division, New Order, and Happy Mondays, and who built the Haçienda, has been attributed to complications arising from kidney cancer.
Nonsense.
I blame Tony Wilson's sadly early demise on the sequence of ferocious blows to the head he received from my friends Gareth Allen (the artist) and Phil "The Punk" Rose (the photographer), during a Toasted Heretic gig in the Powerhaüs in London around 1990. (Tony Wilson and some heavy friends were checking us out, after Factory's A&R chief at the time, the extraordinarily nice Phil Saxe, had praised us highly.)
Sadly, only one photo survives from that night (and it's here). Phil and Gareth, to add a little class to the evening, mingled with the crowd while wearing Roman togas (made from the curtains of their flat in Walthamstow), and fed the crowd grapes. When the grapes ran out, Gareth and Phil began to bang Tony Wilson on the head with a Charles and Di Royal Wedding full-colour souvenir teatray, tastefully adapted by Gareth with felt tip pens so that Charles and Di had swastikas for eyes. (Was a young Bobby Gillespie in the audience and taking thoughtful notes for these Primal Scream lyrics? We shall never know...)
It started out as a quite friendly tapping, and Tony was nervously amused. But soon the Romans were beating Tony Wilson like a gong, putting many dents in the tea tray, bringing him to his knees, while Wilson's extremely heavy minders looked on in tremendous confusion, unsure if this was part of the show, which was already a bit out of hand. (Maybe "out of hand" isn't quite the term. While I was singing "Lost and Found", a girl plunged a hand down the crotch of my skintight pink jumpsuit, and discovered that I wasn't wearing anything else. One of those awkward social moments, where you both hesitate, neither party quite sure what the etiquette is. I kept singing, though my voice may have briefly risen an octave.)
It ended, as did many Toasted Heretic gigs, in confusion.
We did not sign to Factory Records.
Later Gareth, while attempting to mount a bronze lion, fell into a fountain in Trafalgar Square and split his head open. Gareth and Phil wandered off, in their togas, in search of a hospital. We carried the drums and amps back to their place, and wondered would we see them again.
At dawn, Gareth, his soaked and bloodstained toga long lost, arrived home triumphant, having travelled barefoot across London wearing a backless hospital gown which revealed his bum. Protected only by his Virtue, and by Phil in a toga.
Ah yes, in those days we made our own entertainment. So anyway, Gareth and Phil murdered Tony Wilson. A long-forgotten fragment of Royal Wedding Tea-Tray must have shifted a fatal millimetre.
Some nice comments on the Loudness War piece over on my myspace page (from Debbie Lear and Michael Knight), so I will return to that subject soon, and tell the True Tale of Toasted Heretic's Part in That Great Battle.
Meanwhile, this post is terse and businesslike. The novel comes out in two weeks, so here's some last-minute news:
I'm reading in Geneva this coming Monday (18th of July 2007). Do tell any Swiss friends who might be in the neighbourhood. More info from the Geneva Literary Aid Society.
And we're bringing out a hardback of Jude: Level 1. Probably a limited edition, probably signed (by me). It should arrive in the shops around the same time as the paperback. More news on that soon. Everything's gone to press now, so it's starting to feel real. My copy of the hardback is in the post. I'll put the new, finished cover up on the website as soon as it arrives. I'm told it's only gorgeous.
It looks like I'll be doing a few readings over the summer, in Geneva, Galway, Dromineer, and several in the UK (including a damn good music festival) which will be confirmed very soon. More on those once they're definite...
Some radio stuff is being firmed up, both English and Irish, also some press and magazine stuff... more when the dates are nailed down. Subscribe to the RSS feed, if you're keen to hear it all as it's announced...
When people say that music doesn't sound as good these days, they usually just mean they aren't having as much sex these days.
But, if you liked the way pop music used to sound fifteen years ago, then the music genuinely doesn't sound as good these days, and it's for straightforward technical reasons.
For several years, record companies have been fighting a secret war, the Loudness War, and it has changed the sound of pop music. Really, "changed" is too small a word for it. It has abolished the dynamic range of pop music. The loud bits are no longer loud, and the quiet bits are no longer quiet. And here is why…
Record companies want their albums to sound louder than the other guy's album, in shops, on your hi-fi, wherever, because people tend to think that the louder of two songs is the better of two songs. That’s just the way our brains are wired.
So record companies have been boosting the overall loudness of CDs. But there's a maximum loudness limit to the digital signal on a CD. Increasing the overall loudness increases the loudness of the quiet bits: but it doesn't (it can't) increase the loudness of the bits that were already at maximum loudness.
Imagine the loudest part of a song as Mount Everest, and the quietest part as the bottom of a valley, five miles below. There is a physical upper limit on how loud the song can get on a CD: metaphorically, nothing can be taller than Mount Everest. Ten or twenty years ago, songs had a five-mile dynamic range: songs had dramatic peaks and troughs. Quiet bits whispered, and loud bits roared.
By raising the volume of the quiet bits, the Loudness War has filled in the valleys. Which makes the mountains seem much, much smaller.
The loud bits still roar: but now the quiet bits roar too. So you turn down the overall volume on your iPod or stereo or computer, to a more comfortable overall volume. Which means that, perversely, you don’t get the benefit of the “louder” album. But you do lose the dynamics which made the original song interesting.
This is why re-releases of old albums often sound strangely flat and undramatic compared to your memory of the vinyl or early CD original. They ARE less dramatic. They’ve been remastered “louder”.
It also makes them more tiring to listen to.
You know how you talk to your friends? Mostly you’re just talking away, but now and then one of you gets excited and shouts, and it’s exciting because it doesn’t happen very often? Well, if Warner Brothers reissued that conversation, YOU WOULD ALL BE SHOUTING ALL THE TIME. PASS THE SALT. THANKS. I’M GLAD IT’S RAINING, THE GARDEN NEEDS IT. WOULD ANYONE LIKE A COFFEE? SURE. ME TOO. YEAH I’LL HAVE A COFFEE, NO MILK. I LOVE YOUR HAT.
Very, very tiring. And if someone got shot in the middle of it, Jesus Christ appeared, and the world ended, you wouldn’t notice, because it would all happen at exactly the same volume as a polite request for a biscuit.
Here’s a great visual explanation of what’s been going on, in three minutes of excellent video:
One of the more peculiar side-effects of my winning the National Short Story Prize has been the appearance of my venerable old band, Toasted Heretic, on Ireland's oldest and most venerable television chat-show, the Late Late.
After a brief interview (where I was asked about the prize, modern Ireland, and Jude: Level 1), I wandered across the studio to join the rest of Toasted Heretic and we played "Galway and Los Angeles", which was originally a hit single in Ireland in 1991. (It peaked at number 9. It was also Single of the Week in the dear, departed (Allan Jones/Chris Roberts era) Melody Maker in the UK. In France, an import copy was played by Bernard Lenoir on French national radio until the grooves wore flat, though the single was never officially released there.)
A strange but enjoyable evening. Everyone who was ever in Heretic played, so it was the full wall-of-guitars line-up (seen previously only on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour tour): me on vocals, Neil Farrell on drums and sampler, Declan Collins on lead guitar, Aengus McMahon on electric rhythm guitar, Breffni O'Rourke on acoustic rhythm, and Barry Wallace on bass guitar.
Let us draw a silken veil over the debauch which followed, in the Westbury Hotel.
I've been talking to Aengus, official photographer to the band (ie the only guy who had a camera in the old days... now a very successful professional photographer), and we're going to stick up a bunch of old Toasted Heretic photos here in the next month or two. Watch this embarrassing space...
Julian Gough
The website of Julian Gough, author of Connect, Juno & Juliet, the Jude novels, and the ending to Minecraft. He is also the author of the Rabbit & Bear children’s books (illustrated beautifully by Jim Field).
This sidebar rather cunningly links you to the official Substack newsletter for The Egg And The Rock. That is where I am writing my next book, in public. Which is both terrifying and exhilarating… What’s it called? Er, The Egg and the Rock. It is a beautiful book about our beautiful universe. Go and subscribe, if you want to be kept up to date as the book develops. Or if you would like to help me develop it: I love to get your comments over there. It’s free, and once you’ve subscribed, you will be emailed each new piece of the book as I write it. There is also some other fun stuff going on. Click now! Subscribe! You will not regret it! (Well, you might regret it, but then you can just unsubscribe.)
In 2010, I plan to make lots of paper aeroplanes
