Surplus Matter

Two brief field surveys, carried out to / walk upon the beach / accumulated rainfall and runoff pollution which / snotgreen, bluesilver, rust / where U is wind and T is days / have modulated on the lyre of / drainage flow-rates for / the mermaids singing, each to / the ‘first-flush effect’, as visible in Fig. 3 / forehead is still red from the Queen’s kiss

Tom McCarthy has written a story to illustrate a mermaid figurine for Significant Objects. Both the figurine and story are up for auction on eBay. All proceeds go to 826 National.

There is another way to think about prosthesis - as a form of puppetry. In his 1810 story-cum-essay “On the Marionette Theatre”, the German Romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist recounts a meeting, at a fairground, with a choreographer who, watching marionettes being manipulated, marvelled at the way in which dance “could be entirely transferred to the realm of mechanical forces” and “controlled by a crank”. “Have you heard,” the choreographer asks the narrator, “of the artificial legs designed by English craftsmen for those unfortunates who have lost their limbs?” The implication is clear: prosthetic-clad man is like a puppet - which invites the question: who’s the puppeteer?

Tom McCarthy on David Lynch in the New Statesman.

Tom McCarthy lists the books that have influenced him in Frieze Magazine.

A Frieze Foundation podcast of a talk between Alasdair Gray and Tom McCarthy which took place on Friday 17 October 2008.

Tom McCarthy’s Agamemnon - a Play in Two Acts appears in Everyday Genius courtesy of Lee Rourke who is curating the site throughout October 2009.

The British premiere of Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take, written by Tom McCarthy, takes place at the BFI London Film Festival (15, 16 and 19 October).

Tom McCarthy will give a talk on David Lynch’s work at Tate Modern on Halloween.

You can now watch a video of Tom McCarthy’s “How Marinetti Taught Me to Write” talk delivered at the Futurism and the Avant-Garde symposium at Tate Modern on 27 June 2009.

We begin by congratulating the Obama Administration on commissioning this report from the INS. Turning to an organization whose thinking is steeped in literature, philosophy, and the arts in the hope of acquiring insight into the economic recession and suggestions as to how this hardship might be overcome may to some smack of desperation. Yet the INS commends the administration’s decision to do so as both courageous and enlightened. In (implicitly) acknowledging the critical role played by art in creating (and subverting) value, President Obama has, symbolically at least, righted the wrong done to the poet Seanchan in W. B. Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold.

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy’s “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” from the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

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!