U.K. Author Spotlight (1) – Gary J Shipley HTMLGIANT

Reviews July 18th, 2013 / 10:34 pm Author Spotlight & Random Rauan Klassnik U.K. Author Spotlight (1) – Gary J Shipley Realizing that they speak and read English in the U.K. and that they write in it too (and because I’m originally from South Africa a kind of diamond and veldt version of the U.K. with much better weather and beaches), I’ve decided to start a new feature that follows kind of in the vein of the Seattle Author Spotlight series. So, periodically, now, I will be featuring a U.K. author. And the first UK Author Spotlight’s of Gary J Shipley. Gary and I recently became email and Facebook “chums” (see how easy this is?) and then he did a nice write-up on my new book and I blurbed his forthcoming book of poetry. Gary and I swap quite a lot of emails and Facebook “Likes” (these, hint-hint, make me feel really, really great.) Gary’s smarter than me, much more philosophical and is able to write a Godless sort of language and landscape that I envy tremendously. When I saw the movie Pina I thought about Gary’s poetry. Gary is also an Artist. Kind of like Michaux. But different. I look very much to one day meeting Gary in person. Also, fyi, this is what Brian Evenson has to say about Gary’s “Dreams of Amputation“: Sunday Service About

Dreams of Amputation reads like the nightmares Derek Raymond might have experienced if he’d written cyberpunk. An exceptionally strange work, but a smart and thoughtful one as well. Disturbing, haunting, and inimitably weird, this is a book like no other. So, anyways, Gary J Shipley’s Author Spotlight consists of a brief interview, Bio photo and Art. Brief Bio: Gary J Shipley is the author of eight books of various sizes. His latest is forthcoming from Blue Square Press. He has published in Gargoyle, The Black Herald, Paragraphiti, elimae, >kill author, nthposition, 3:AM, and others. More details can be found at Thek Prosthetics. Search Archives January 2023 February 2022 September 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 August 2017 July 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 Brief Interview: February 2017 January 2017 Rauan: Does the British Bulldog have any teeth left? (ie, can you tell us a bit about December 2016 the state of British Literature, fiction, poetry, whatever) November 2016 October 2016 Gary J: Yes. It has a single brown stump that bends when it bites you. I know it sounds weak and decayed and like it might smell in addition to these October 2014 September 2014 things, but… August 2014 …there are some good people, a few. A few is probably enough. July 2014 June 2014 RK: How would you compare British indie lit (strange vague term, i know) to U.S. May 2014 indie lit? Cats and dogs? Oranges and lemons? Subservient? Parasitic? Symbiotic? (blah, blah, i can’t believe i used the word “symbiotic”) April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 [ a real head scratcher ] GJS: I wouldn’t. I have enough trouble remaining convinced that there’s something somewhere near here that’s me, let alone that this something (this somethinged nothing) warrants anything as grandiose and facile as a nationality. And that there’s a whole bunch of such things engaged in vaguely March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

similar activities… well it doesn’t bear thinking about. As you can tell, it’s really not something I focus on. But nevertheless I feel a comparison is somehow owed, so maybe this will suffice: one is the shower scene in Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and the other is the shower scene in Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho. I’ll let you decide which is which. I’ll be a sport (I’m English like that) and say this: There’s a reason Paul Stubbs runs The Black Herald from Paris, and it’s not just that his co-editor, Blandine Longre, happens to be French. But then the guy behind > kill author is a Brit, I believe, so just maybe we’re okay. O, and watch out for Hexus, a new journal that hails from these parts for which I have high hopes. RK: are you able to write even with all this Kate-baby messianic excitement? or how about with the Ashes going on? and is it true that British writers have to wear a dark blazer to write and stop for a quick cup of tea at the bottom of every hour? August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 Gary J Shipley GJS: In recognition of the theorizing of Louis C.K., I’m anticipating new possibilities in human whiteness, that wonderful stretched-Irish-cock-meat whiteness. And it turns out my computer screen and that unborn baby have become strangely confluent: blank pages becoming blanker still. It’s almost symbiotic. The Ashes are a source of some bad feeling. My dad watched cricket (and played a bit too) most of his adult life, and I watched him suffer at the hands of the English cricket team throughout the 90s and into the 00s. And what October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 happens: he dies and they start winning again. Maybe when I die Ivanišević November 2008 will somehow win Wimbledon again, and maybe he’ll be dead as well, and that’ll be even more impressive. September 2008 October 2008 Meta Log in

You say it like it’s a bad thing. We all have our standards, Rauan. You’d have us do our scribbling in sloganned T-shirts gulping down endless espressos, I suppose. RK: To give our readers a taste could you plz give us a brief sample of your writing? GJS: LOOKING BACK AT THE EARTH An old woman is dying in Las Vegas and the world is watching. If she dies we die. She’s like bees. She’s the size and weight of a fruit machine in Caesar’s Palace. She’s many-coloured lights. Her life was put together cleaning floors and toilets in one star hotels. There was the want and the doing then for sharing her vagina with bored teenage boys. She’d picture Damascus from a distance when she fucked. She liked the feel of cum moving down her leg as she cleaned away the shit stains and the hair. She was pretty as a cell phone then, when it’s new, in a plastic sheath, with no numbers in it. She liked the way her skin would smell – of cheap generic cleaning fluid. And sometimes cum. And sometimes a difference in the smell. But dying she smells of sheep visited by flies. The cameras in her room are an extra dose of morphine in her cereal at night. The cameras are flowers plucked one by one from the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient. The heat’s a killer that doesn’t kill. Now something is moving down her thighs. She feels it. There’s the urge to clean. There’s the urge she has to tell people how she was once an astronaut looking back at the earth and not seeing it. In this there’s the seed of the reason she doesn’t say anything. RK: what do you think of Oxford and Cambridge? (writers or rowers?) GJS: Oxbridge rowers are a reason for getting out of bed in the morning, for Oxbridge rowers.

untitled (from Shrouds) – by Gary J Shipley RK: Was Shakespeare really a commoner? GJS: As muck. It’s obvious: he invented us in his image. RK: Could you plz give our readers a 2nd taste of your writing? GJS: The film is in the walls. All planes of existence shaved back to one. Nothing is more or less meaningful because of it. I build a composition of a room. It sits inside this one. There’s no place to hide and it hides there. The walls in the film are the walls. Here everything is screen. There’s a want not to become comfortable with this. I never saw a bullet train mistaken for dead.

Her hands are the soil’s half-cup bra. The world is responsible for itself. But the world is a shirker. I never saw the womb that ate the baby whole. RK: who do you think are some of today’s stand out Brit writers? (old as well as up and comers. Academic. Indie Lit. Commercially popular. whatever.) I read a lot of new work, but hardly any of it is British. I have read and continue to read our dead philosophers. And the odd live one as well. I rate Ballard and Ann Quin and James Kelman. Kelman’s A Disaffection and Translated Accounts are works that I think deserve more attention. And that fiery elephant just for being those things. Both at once like that. And he’s a King’s man too. And Chaucer for his darkness and his bawdy excess (see Dark Chaucer). And there’s more dead ones. Always more dead ones. As for the up and comers, I think there’s a new biography of Larkin somewhere on the horizon. RK: do you think Paul Muldoon’s cute? GJS: If Auden’s face is a wedding cake that’s been left out in the rain, Muldoon’s is Arnold Schwarzenegger disguised as a woman in Total Recall. So yes, the answer’s yes.

untitled (from Shrouds) – by Gary J Shipley Tags: Gary J. Shipley, U.K. Spotlight 5 Comments July 19th, 2013 / 12:26 am Ken Baumann— YES. Thanks for this. I love Gary’s writing, and it’s nice to stitch a face to the name. July 19th, 2013 / 11:08 am davidpeak— I’d like to take the time and highlight this bit from Gary’s bio: “His latest is forthcoming from Blue Square Press.” July 19th, 2013 / 11:52 am Rauan Klassnik— yes! — that’s the one I read and blurbed, I think…

July 19th, 2013 / 11:57 am davidpeak— It is! I was sold after you used the words “industrial Grendel…” That shit’s my jam August 24th, 2013 / 11:52 pm U.K. Author Spotlight (2) – Miggy Angel | HTMLGIANT— […] first UK Author Spotlight was of Gary J Shipley and the 2nd one, now, is of Miggy Angel. Miggy and I met on Twitter. It was love at first tweet, […]