Camus in Comic Sans

A brief experiment to see what would happen if some of the thoughts of the great Existentialist were refigured using Comic Sans MS, clip art, coloured ink and extraneous punctuation. I think it kind of peps them up a bit, no?

What's wrong with book publishing?

I made my debut on the Guardian books blog yesterday with a piece about Daniel Davies' excellent debut novel The Isle of Dogs. The article looked at how such a great piece of work has managed to get so little coverage and compared the problems publishing is going through now with what magazines went through seven or eight years ago. You can read it here.

Harry Potter is a c*nt

Following on from my piece in last week's Sunday Telegraph, I went on BBC News this morning to explain why adults (like these losers, above) shouldn't be reading Harry Potter books. Interview seemed to go well enough, apart from the fact that contrary to what I'd been told by the booker, I was put up against a very articulate, enthusiastic seven year old. Honestly, fucking BBC - if they're not dicking the Queen over, they're trying to make EFTE look like a hater of children (which I am, but that's not really the point).

Also, spent an enjoyable few minutes kicking it with Simon Fanshawe in the green room. God, I'm a hack sometimes.

The king of British crime

Having constantly seen him referenced by David Peace and other people who generally don't suffer fools, I finally read Derek Raymond's He Died With His Eyes Open at the weekend. First published in 1984, it's a near-flawless piece of British noir touching on sex, the suburbs, alcoholism, murder, casual racism and the occult. The novel perfectly conjurs up the shabby, semi-derelict edge of early Eighties London, but avoids slipping into standard hardboiled territory thanks to the very moral (almost tender) core that Raymond gives his protagonist.

Raymond himself was pretty remarkable; an old Etonian who slipped the moorings of his class and upbringing and went into a life as a criminal, pornographer, peasant labourer and sporadic novellist. Predictably enough, he sold almost nothing for most of his career, although achieved a good deal of interest towards the end of his life. I seriously cannot recommend him highly enough to you.