[This is a re-writing of Chekhov's short-story Hush! For the context surrounding its creation, I advise you see here]
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“,”, ” …. . ‘…. , , ‘ … …. ‘ …. .” Read the rest of this entry »
! (by Eusen Eof)
23 01 2011Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: chekhov, eusen eof
Categories : Miscellaneous
Eusen Eöf – ‘:?;)’
23 01 2011Fans. They say that every writer has at least one. I used to be one. Yes indeed. Before I became a writer, I was a fan. My hero – and when I say hero, I mean object of an unhealthy obsession – was the young Norwegian novelist, Edmund ‘Blumin’ Ek. Believe it or not, I thought his writing style so exhilarating that I was prepared to marry him on this basis alone – without even meeting the man behind the words. In fact, I pretty much went on to do this. Mistake. Sexy syntax is not enough.
After the marriage ended, I started writing my own things. By this time, I had two fans of my own. One was small, beautiful, Japanese and hand-painted: an Ek family heirloom which I had received as part of the divorce settlement (god bless my lawyer!) The other fan was big bearded and Belgian: a man called Hercule, in whom my barely capable literary ability had ignited the obscure flames of love.
I’d like to say that I didn’t understand his fixation. Sadly, I did. Even if the putrid prose that pours from my fingertips has always lacked the golden honeyed sheen of Ek’s text, I know enough of life to understand that love and logic don’t always return each others’ calls. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: edmund ek, eusen eof, heidi kohlenberg, mary rolfner
Categories : Greatest European Novels
Dinos Tierotis – Perseus and the Pepper Grinder
21 01 2011[I have - in my role as editor - been known to criticise reviews with a tendency to meander off-topic. I have also, as this review reveals, written a few of the same...]
Starting two months ago – and ending last week, due to significant lack of interest – Thursday nights at The Crippled Bee (the finest public house in North London) were set aside for the pastime of Karaoke-Poetry. As I am not the greatest fan of this game (my dear young folk, what will you come up with next?) I will not launch into a discussion of it. I will not even stroll into a discussion of it. In fact, I hardly know why I mentioned it.
An echo of lost thought rebounds off a wall in my head and rockets into the present. As Johannes Speyer used to say: ‘memory was ever a shed of broken boomerangs’. Which is to say: I recall. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: dinos tierotis, keng and brodksy, perseus, updated myths
Categories : Greatest European Novels
Wdj Szesz – Gdansk Haunting
15 01 2011Beginnings and endings: I don’t care for them. There’s only one ending for me, and I haven’t got there yet. I didn’t think much about the beginning. One day I started writing and I’ll keep going till I die. That’s it, really – that’s the way I work. Is there another way?
That’s Wdj Szesz, speaking to yours truly in 2002. Here’s Leo Barnard, monotoning in a yawn-sprinkled auditorium sometime in 2005:
The verb ‘to know’ is an impossible verb. There is no knowing. The only knowing I can conceive is the knowing that one cannot know. All other knowing is a pretence: a meaningless charade.
To cap things off, here’s me, writing in a small Bavarian journal, late last year:
What it is to have experience!
A short quotation this last one, but pertinent in its way. For those who haven’t followed my career closely, you may like to be reminded that my last novel – also my first – contained a character with an unhealthy addiction to narcotic substances. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: gdansk, polish literature, wdj szesz
Categories : Greatest European Novels
