London Peculiar And Other Nonfiction

Michael Moorcock

Description

In this seminal collection renowned writer Michael Moorcock, who is best know for his rule-breaking SF and Fantasy, personally selects the best of his published, unpublished and uncensored essays, articles and reviews covering a huge range of topics. Drawn from over 50 years of writing,these pieces showcase Moorcock at his acerbic best. Included is 'London Peculiar', an impassioned statement of his memories of wartime London and the rebuilding 'improvements' which followed.

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 25 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604866988
• Langue: English

Extrait

MICHAEL MOORCOCK
Winner of the Nebula and World Fantasy awards
August Derleth Fantasy Award
British Fantasy Award
Guardian Fiction Award
Prix Utopiales
Bram Stoker Award
John W. Campbell Award
SFWA Grand Master
Member, Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
‘A major novelist of enormous ambition.’
Washington Post
‘Moorcock’s writing is top-notch.’
Publishers Weekly
‘He casts a heady, enslaving spell.’
Daily Telegraph
‘He is … [in his nonfiction] scathing about "the anaemic, phallocentric self-advertisements of Notting Hill colons or East Anglian clones", but full of affectionate enthusiasm for such friends as JG Ballard, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Andrea Dworkin. He writes movingly and at length about Jack Trevor Story … and about Mervyn Peake … "who made me realise it was possible to confront real human issues through the medium of fantasy". He writes wittily and perceptively about such elective literary forefathers as Aldous Huxley, HG Wells, George Meredith and W Pett Ridge, author of Mord Em’ly …
‘These days he lives with his American wife in Lost Pines, a liberal enclave of Texas, and deplores the way in which England seems to be shedding her virtues as fast as she can, celebrating her vices … as class-bound as ever, and in some ways far more repressive than similar Oriental cultures …
‘Moorcock is elegant and aggressive ("badly educated people are suspicious of ambiguity"), consistently entertaining, and frequently wise and generous. One applauds the louder when he adds: "Our scientific advances will be merely obscene unless they help the large part of our world’s population emerge from miserable uncertainty and debilitating terror".’
Spectator
‘Moorcock’s … book is an astounding compilation, displaying a panorama of sympathy and engagement over a lifetime’s reading and writing. The Monument Valley which is Moorcock’s mighty imagination here provides us with the background reading to his career. Many of these encounters are not merely intellectual engagements, but personal ones too. In a poignant account of the life and times of Jack Trevor Story we learn that on the Christmas night which became the hinge of that troubled writer’s existence, he had been spending the evening with Moorcock before setting off home with his girlfriend. The forces of law and order banged him up, unjustly, and effectively drained him of hope for many years to come. In his account of Philip K Dick we learn how Moorcock intervened to try to help that author make more money, though it came to nothing. He then looked on at a slight distance as Dick became famously loopy. Moorcock does not merely befriend Mervyn Peake’s highly distinctive imagination; he befriends the Peake family too. He writes of Iain Sinclair, a writer he admires, who is also a personal friend. And so it goes on. This isn’t name-dropping, because Moorcock is as big a name as any of the ones he mentions …
One of the most striking things about this prodigiously gifted and productive writer … is the unexpectedness of some of his liaisons and alliances. Like New Worlds under his editorship, he seems to exist to demolish boundaries. I had the constant sensation of being accompanied through the metropolis of modern culture by the most engaging companion I could hope to meet.’
Alan Wall, ReadySteadyBook.com
‘Moorcock is a throwback to such outsized 19th-century novelistic talents as Dickens and Tolstoy.’
Locus
‘No one … is doing more to break down the artificial divisions that have grown up in novel writing realism, surrealism, science fiction, historical fiction, social satire, the poetic novel than Michael Moorcock.’
Angus Wilson
‘He is the master storyteller of our time.’
Angela Carter, author of Nights at the Circus

For Jean-Luc Fromental and Lili Sztajn
London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction
Michael Moorcock
© 2012 by Michael Moorcock
This edition © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
Bibliography reprinted with the kind permission of Moorcock’s Miscellany ( www.multiverse.org )
ISBN: 978-1-60486-490-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927964
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
Cover photo by Linda Steele
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Published in the UK by Green Print, an imprint of The Merlin Press Ltd., 6 Crane Street Chambers, Crane Street, Pontypool NP4 6ND, Wales
ISBN: 978-1-85425-106-0
Contents
THE MAN ON THE STAIRS: INTRODUCTION BY IAIN SINCLAIR
EDITOR’S FOREWORD BY ALLAN KAUSCH

Scratching a Living
A Child’s Christmas in the Blitz
LONDON
Heart and Soul of the City
A Place of Perpetual Rehearsal and Audition
Building the New Jerusalem
City of Wonderful Night
London Peculiar
Introduction to Gerald Kersh’s Fowlers End
A Child of Her Times
Mysteries of London
Benglish for Beginners
Cockney in Translation
OTHER PLACES
Diary: 13th October 2001
Diary: 30th August 2003
Diary: 7th January 2006
Diary: 26th October 2007
Diary: 12th April 2008
Diary: 4th October 2008
Diary: 28th March 2009
Diary: 31st October 2009
Diary: 15th May 2010
A Review of Another Fool in the Balkans: In the Footsteps of Rebecca West by Tony White
A Construction Site of the Mind
ABSENT FRIENDS
The Patsy
Jack’s Unforgettable Christmas
When the Political Gets Too Personal
Andrea Dworkin: Memorial
JG Ballard Introduction
Time Made Concrete
The Voice
The Atrocity Exhibition
JG Ballard: In Memoriam
Introduction to The Secret of Sinharat by Leigh Brackett
James Cawthorn: 1928-2008
Fascination with Mortality: The Late Thomas M Disch
Tom Disch Tribute
A Constant Curiosity
Introduction to Expletives Deleted by Angela Carter
Ted Carnell
A Review of No Laughing Matter by Angus Wilson
Mal Dean
The Ego Endures
MUSIC
Adding to the Legend
Phil Ochs
The Deep Fix
Death by Hero Worship
Living with Music: A Playlist
Signs of the Times
Rewriting the Blues
POLITICS
To Kill a King
Before Armageddon
A Million Betrayals
INTRODUCTIONS AND REVIEWS
The Cosmic Satirist
Dark Continents, Dying Planets
A Fiercer Hen
An Introduction to The Babylonian Trilogy by Sebastien Doubinsky
Like a Fox
Button-Holed by Erudition
Cricket by Moonlight
Introduction to The Aerodrome by Rex Warner
Les Livres Dimanches
Echoes of Peake
Breaking Free
The Time of The Time Machine
Ubu C’est Moi?
What to Buy for the Grown-Up Boy
Yesterday’s Tomorrow
A Review of Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
North Pole Ghetto
Wagner and Wodehouse, Together at Last
Homage to Cornucopia
Forever Dying, Forever Alive
Introduction to Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge by Iain Sinclair
Norton Goes to the Seaside
How to Poach Magpie Eggs
The Triumph of Time
Conan: American Phenomenon
Learning to Be a Jew
Introduction to The Hooligan by Rudolf Nassauer
When Worlds Collide
Kit Carson Rides Again
The Undertaker and the Actress
The Spaces in Between
Bites at the Red Apple
The Water Maze
Sexton Blake, Detective
A Review of The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
Paraxis Introduction
Frances Bret Harte

AFTERWORD BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Man on the Stairs
Introduction to Michael Moorcock
I could never quite persuade myself that there was any such human entity as Michael Moorcock. I mean in the sense that you could touch him, or talk to him, or sit down with him for a meal at which the seamless stories, the astonishing anecdotes, the myths and memories, would ravel and unravel, lap and overlap like swirling, contradictory, sediment-heavy Thames tides. The man was too fecund, too prolific, in too many places, high and low culture, for me to believe that he was one person and not a Warholite factory or a nest of Edgar Wallace typists. Comics, sombre periodicals, political pamphlets, rock shows, numerous TV and fanzine interviews: Mike was a shape-shifter, a character actor in the labyrinth of his own fictions. He was Sydney Greenstreet, Robert Morley, Akim Tamiroff. And the always reliably untrustworthy Colonel Pyat. He played so many parts in this complex, many-chaptered, cliff-hanging serial of a life that readers, panting to keep up, were left dizzy and breathless by the rush of language. But somewhere beyond the Casablanca cafés, the arms dealers in the lifts of Cairo hotels, somewhere behind the smoked glasses, the Bedouin headgear, is a well-setup Englishman with a proper pen in his shirt pocket and a sturdy notebook tucked into his linen jacket. A person quite capable of writing with the precision and clarity of a coin-per-word professional. Nobody knows better than Moorcock how to manipulate the white spaces, how to compose pages so slick with narrative devices that they do the turning for you. Our trust has been won by the confident and breezy tone of the author’s address; very soon, we are walking in his sleep, navigating by the architectural markers of a fantastic city much like London. Moorcockian prose is discovered, not prescribed or advertised. You will come across it like a monument in a park you thought you knew. His books seem to have been there for generations, waiting on readers with the right password: affection. Affection for self, for a remembered and ever-present past, for place. For people. The bruised and the blustering mob of individuals.
The trappings of style are just part of a magician’s kit, like the conjuring tricks of Orson Welles, the pass of a scarlet cloak disguising the authorship of Citizen Kane and an afterlife of sherry commercials. That Moorcock beard has a genealogy of its own: Rasputin, James Robertson Justice, Robert