Surplus Matter

Congratulations to Tom McCarthy whose new novel C is on the Man Booker Prize longlist announced today!

An evening of discussions and interrogations organised by the International Necronautical Society on 29 July 2010 at the Barbican in London:

Tom McCarthy will be joined by award-winning novelist Chloe Aridjis and scholar Richard Martin as they interrogate acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader and leading architect Patrick Lynch. The proceedings will be monitored by INS Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach and INS Environmental Engineer Laura Hopkins.

1. to reinstate Matt Parker to the post of INS Experimental Volunteer. Expelled in the 2003 Purges for the crime of ‘not being dead’, he replied, with impeccable integrity, by contracting cancer. Learning that he wouldn’t be cured, he demanded restitution to his post, then died. The Executive Council has approved this request, cum laude. Every angel is terrifying. Welcome back.

The INS’s General Meeting marking its 10th anniversary.

Tom McCarthy will be appearing at the Centre For Freudian Analysis and Research’s Lacan in the UK conference in London on 3 July.

Tom McCarthy will talk about what Joyce means to the contemporary writer at the XXII International James Joyce Symposium in Prague on 17 June.

The novel centers around Serge Carrefax, who grows up in his father’s school for deaf children in the shadow of an older sister who dies in adolescence. Serge becomes an airborne radio operator in the First World War, then a student of architecture in the drug-fuelled London of the 1920s, then a civil servant in the British Ministry of Communications in Egypt. The novel’s final section depicts the construction of the Empire Wireless Chain – a network of the future – against the backdrop of ongoing archaeological activities leading perpetually back to the past. Throughout the novel radio stands as a correlative to modern subjectivity: fragmentary, cryptic and, ultimately, melancholic.

Tom McCarthy will be reading from and talking about C in Stockholm on 11 May.

A video of Tom McCarthy’s March 2010 talk at the AA School of Architecture. The author discusses the relationship between film and literature with reference to Greenwich Degree Zero, Remainder, Double Take and C.

Tom McCarthy’s blurb for Tony O’Neill’s new novel, Sick City, out in July 2010.

Tom McCarthy will be talking about “his writing in relation to film” at the Architectural Association in London on Friday 12 March.

Fascinating videos of Johan Grimonprez and Tom McCarthy at the Belgian premiere of Double Take at the Ghent Film Festival.