So, I got around to reading Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright (recommended by S.J. Watson) which the film of the same name was based on, and which I wrote about here. It is a remarkable, vivid, and wry piece of writing, still fresh after over half a century, and I thoroughly recommend… Read More »Oh God, That Light!
Mark Simpson checks out The Voyeur’s Motel I recently watched a documentary on Netflix. Which is what I seem to mostly do, TV-wise, these days – being middle-aged and male. This one wasn’t about Hitler, or unsolved grisly murders, or steam trains, however. It was called Voyeur. So, I think… Read More »Welcome to the Hotel Scopophilia
It’s LGBT History Month. So I thought I would share with you my hitherto hidden love for my favourite ‘gay’ novel. The Heart In Exile, published in the UK in 1953, by Rodney Garland – real name Adam Martin De Hegedus, an Hungarian émigré. Though as the date and morose… Read More »The Heart in Exile – The Strange Case of the Peculiarly Prescient Pre-Gay Novel
The Psychopathology of Everyday Driving by Mark Simpson Do you fantasise about roadside executions when someone fails to indicate? Find yourself talking back sarcastically to motorway dot matrix signs talking down to you in HUGE LETTERS? Abandon all hope for humanity whenever you visit the Hobbesian horror of your supermarket car… Read More »Driven Dotty
‘Has any book in recent memory not actually about wizards provoked so much interest?’ Mark Simpson on the most eagerly-anticipated music biography ever. C4 News, 14 October, 2013 MORRISSEY HAS ALWAYS enjoyed the last laugh. His entire career has been based on it. Back in the 1980s, when he was in… Read More »Will Morrissey Have The Last Laugh – Again?