Surplus Matter

How Marinetti Taught Me to Write

Tom McCarthy will be talking about Futurism at Tate Modern next Saturday, as part of a day-long symposium (”Futurism and the Avant Garde”) to coincide with their new exhibition. Tom will wonder “what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have”. Be there or be Cubist!

Croatian Interview

A Croatian interview with Tom McCarthy. The title translates as “All Art is Political”.

Copies Without Originals

The novel is a good, pacey and ultimately unchallenging read. Why couldn’t they just say that on the cover? “Entertaining, zippy and unchallenging — X, author of Y.” The reason they don’t, of course, is that, as with the whiskey-soused prospective purchaser, there’s a bigger sale being made: we’re being asked to buy into the notion that lively storytelling and more-than-adequate craftsmanship constitute great, “classic” literature. I’m not so sure. To bastardize the Latin, emptors need to sober up and exercise a little caveating over that one. I suspect that real, high-karat literature, with its complexity and ambiguity, its general slipperiness, is sitting in another box, one opening to a dimension that How to Sell doesn’t breach (and, to both its and its author’s credit, doesn’t itself actually claim to) — or, to use a fittingly ur-geological metaphor, that it’s lying buried in a rock-seam that this book walks comfortably over the top of but leaves unmined.

Tom McCarthy reviews Clancy Martin’s How to Sell in the New York Times.

Haunted Technology

Right now I’ve just installed a ‘Black Box Transmitter’ in an art institute in Germany. It sends out looping sequences of poetry created by cutting up and mixing together stock market prices, weather forecasts and lines of Hölderlin. Radio really interests me at the moment. I’ve just finished a novel about early radio and its relation to poetry and death. Technology is always haunted, too: that’s what makes it so sexy.

Tom McCarthy profiled in today’s New York Times.

Brute Inscriptions

Really good art and literature is always political—perhaps all the more so the less directly it seems to be. In a way (I’m being provocative here, but I believe this, too), engaging with the symbolic order directly, with the realm of meaning, hacking right into its source code, is more radical than taking meaning for granted in order to simply make a statement.

Tom McCarthy takes part in a roundtable in the latest issue of Bookforum.

Here Comes Everybody

On Thursday 2 July 2009, Roger Malbert and Tom McCarthy will talk about the Parades and Processions: Here Comes Everybody exhibition, and the imaginative and cultural implications of processions and parades.

How Marinetti Taught Me to Write

Tom McCarthy will be talking about Futurism at Tate Modern next Saturday, as part of a day-long symposium (”Futurism and the Avant Garde”) to coincide with their new exhibition. Tom will wonder “what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have”. Be there or be Cubist!

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Tom and Eva on the birth of their daughter, Isadora Stenram McCarthy.

Pawnography

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley publish the International Necronautical Society’s Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics in the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Found in Translation

The Italian translation of Remainder has made it on to the shortlist of Italy’s most prestigious literary prize.