Interview with Matthew Cooperman - Imago for the Fallen World - I love this book. And the good thing

    I was reminded of this when it appeared on an episode of Fresh Meat recently. As much as the first Smiths album, Prefab Sprout's Swoon  and Postcard-era Orange Juice, Soul Mining by The The was part of my teenage vinyl-pantheon, laconic anthems for bedroomed youth that seemed to vindicate and feed my sociophobic introspection.      And as with Morrissey, McAloon and Collins, it was the lyrics that seized my interest as much as the music. Where Matt Johnson diverged from the wittier, more tongue-in-cheek  tristesses bmi index of the others - and in this allying him to another of my favourite lyricists, Ian Curtis of Joy Division - was in an approach seemingly grounded in the gloomy, no doubt self-obsessive existentialism I had begun to explore in my early reading. bmi index I remember the thrill of connectivity I felt when I came across a line from another single from Soul Mining, 'Perfect Day', in Sartre's Nausea: "What is there to fear from such a regular world?"  Johnson's lines had the feel of diary-jottings from a soul in crisis: what a brilliant opening couplet " You didn't wake up this morning cos you didn't go to bed/You were watching the whites of your eyes turn red"  is. The incongruity of pairing such angst with catchy, jaunty melodies played on instruments like accordion, bmi index harmonica and acoustic guitar was no doubt the secret of Soul Mining's unique - and continuing - appeal.     (Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, whose appeal didn't last beyond those teenage, bedroomed years.)
oliver dixon My first book of poems Human Form was published in March 2013 by Penned in the Margins.My poems and reviews have appeared in the Sunday bmi index Times, the Forward Book of Poetry 2014, PN Review, New Welsh Review, The London Magazine, The Wolf and other places. My day-job bmi index is as a college lecturer working with students with learning disabilities. View my complete profile
"His poems unfold down the page like maps opening up, their images constantly altered by the revelation of what comes further along...Archive of the fleeting, Human Form is a work of suspended animations whose captures rarely linger enough to seem artificially preserved." Lytton Smith, LA Review of Books
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Documenting China’s Fake Case Against Ai Weiwei - “You criticize them too much. If this was 1957 they would have killed you already,” Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s worried mother tells him in a new documentar...
Can-can. Can't-can't. On Flora, Feminism, and Laureation - Linda France has won the National Poetry Competition with her poem ‘Bernard and Cerinthe’, which has been published in Saturday’s* Guardian*. The judge...
The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavic - My review of Ivan Vladislavic’s novel The Restless Supermarket has been published at Music & Literature: bmi index Narrated by the cantankerous Aubrey Tearle, a reti...
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Review of Dante’s Inferno tr. Philip Terry - *Dante’s Inferno by Philip Terry, pub. Oystercatcher Press. £4.50* This short pamphlet contains selected cantos from The Inferno, rendered into contempor...
Interview with Matthew Cooperman - Imago for the Fallen World - I love this book. And the good thing about loving a book these days,