As a writer slash encyclopedist, I'm interested in describing and categorizing both the world (or its end) and the contents of my unconscious, in a manner after Rimbaud, both systematic and deranged.
Alistair McCartney's Details
Status:
In a Relationship
Orientation:
Gay
Hometown:
Perth, Australia
Zodiac Sign:
Capricorn
Occupation:
Writer
Alistair McCartney 's first novel "The End of the World Book" is now officially out, April 1 Posted at 3:33 AM Apr 2, 2008 view more
About me: READING in S.F. AT BOOKS INC. MAY 20 at 7:30
Alistair McCartney was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1971. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Bloom, James White Review, and other literary journals, as well as in a number of fiction and creative nonfiction anthologies, including Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, and Between Men (Carroll and Graff.) He lives in Los Angeles with his partner Tim Miller and teaches creative writing and literature in the BA Program at Antioch University Los Angeles and Antioch Santa Barbara. His first novel, The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin Press) is due out in April, 08.
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The End of the World Book
A Novel
Alistair McCartney
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This is no ordinary novel. An encyclopedia of memory—from A to Z—The End of the World Book deftly intertwines fiction, memoir, and cultural history, reimagining the story of the world and one man’s life as they both hurtle toward a frightening future. Alistair McCartney’s alphabetical guide to the apocalypse layers images like a prose poem, building from Aristotle to da Vinci, hip-hop to lederhosen, plagues to zippers, while barreling from antiquity to the present.
In this profound book about mortality, McCartney composes an irreverent archive of philosophical obsessions and homoerotic fixations, demonstrating the difficulty of separating what is real from what is imagined.
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“If I’ve read a more deeply impressive, beautiful, sweeping, mindful, and innovative first novel than Alistair McCartney’s The End of the World Book, I have no memory of it. McCartney is a writer of peerless, brilliant originality and pure, giant talent.”—Dennis Cooper, author of The Sluts and God Jr.
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“The End of the World Book is in turn informative, playful, erotic, imaginary, witty, perverse, charming, autobiographical, and full of wonders; the letter K, for example, begins with Kafka and ends with Freddie Krueger. If the world is ending soon, I recommend you read it while there’s still time.”—Jim Krusoe, author of Iceland and Blood Lake
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“Beguiling, comical, earnest, and wise beyond its author’s years. Crossing sporadic bursts of linear narrative with a detailed taxonomy of altercation, McCartney has engineered a compelling compendium of integrated distractions, somewhat in the manner of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Read it from A to Z. He knows who you are: you will be quizzed.”—James McCourt, author of Mawrdew Czgowchwz and Queer Street
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www.hometown.aol.com/meaningme
Epreuve... mais une épreuve sans mode opératoire, privée d'observateur; et peut-être qu'il ne s'agit plus même de ça, peut-être que l'épreuve a fini par se désintégrer, par s'affaisser dans l'effort, ou plus bas, dans les nombres, désormais tension sans corps; et la situation en resterait là, irrémédiablement privée de dénouement - ni sanction, ni interruption, ni changement d'état - comme si, désormais, le projet "d'aller toujours du côté de la plus grande souffrance" se présentait sur la tranche, échoué, décarcassé, désossé, débarrassé du souci de se perdre, comme de celui d'exister pour quelqu'un – ne pas disparaître sans autre témoin plus sale que soi à portée de la main, à portée d’œil par le carreau embué de la lunette arrière, cet autre qui ouvre le chemin avec sa vareuse déchirée tandis que soi on est assis dans le taxi, la main crispée au portefeuille, rêvant de la partie de jambes en l’air à venir en fixant ce pauvre salopard qui se tord sous la pluie, c’est pour cette raison qu’on se dit qu’elle a quelque chose à offrir et qu’on pense pouvoir la décrire, qu’on se sent malin dans sa chambre d’hôtel en observant les hélicoptères qui glissent à vive allure sur les câbles à haute tension, pour ceux qui comprendront au quart de tour le désespoir absolu du monde moderne, une giclée de nombres qui vrombit à travers la grille du climatiseur. Maintenant ils se tenaient immobiles à la lueur des écrans. Mais leurs yeux ! Leurs yeux étaient des braises tombées du sanctuaire intérieur, l’âme prophétique soudain révélée, qui renvoie chaque vie au dénuement de l’enfance, calcinant dans un bref éclair toutes les résistances, toutes les capitulations et toutes les coques.
We crawl over a bridge of saloon doors, knees and elbows bleeding forks, blind, screaming through the vertical night, dreaming of the open bed every dripshit is dreaming of. Need for elegance, need for roots are feeding this inner struggle, among corn and lions, over the wide open field of golden hair, waving under a fluoresent plastic storm. Some phrases are made of true flesh, some words just tell stories. The language fixes two ways of life: learning to be born, or learning to obey. Let’s choose not to choose, lets leave the humanity and rejoin the animal. (a rough translation from French...)
Vue d’ici, par delà cette table de soldats où chacun se
regarde sans dire un mot, ressassant une lettre lue, ou à écrire, les mâchoires
creusées par la mastication, chacun profondément détourné des autres et de soi,
dans le vacarme des tanks dont on révise les moteurs, cette construction qui
étire loin ses spirales de béton, ressemble à une arche. Mais plus on
l’observe, plus les surfaces disparaissent au profit des arêtes, éveillant
toutes sortes de pensées violentes, instantanément dispersées, ou amplifiées,
par l’évidence d’être seul.
Hey back Alistair, it was great to hear from you. Thanks for your compliment on my M83 vid. I too think it should have won, but I might be a bit biased. You should visit Toronto. It has a lot to offer- just not in the dead of winter. Keep an eye out for me on facebook.
The voices never stop around the castle; sometimes they are tender, at summertime, just after a heavy rain, but usually they are cutting like knives. I do not understand why I both fear them and desire them so much. Perhaps it is because pain makes me feel more alive?
A naked messenger is running through the forest, wearing a leather helmet. He finds me lying on the floor, with broken fingers, in front of the heavy door. He looks down at me, opens a huge empty mouth and starts to talk, with tears in his eyes. His message is always the same, “stay on the ground, where you belong to”, and then he attacks me. Once, I tried to rise, while he was assaulting me, protecting my face, and my genitals, which he was trampling with anger. But I missed, and I felt on my knees again, looking at his flaming eyes. At that moment, I understood the sick lie of hope, and I accepted my fate : my childhood will destroy me forever.
life is good Alister; I am at the point where I can say without a lie that I don't want change mine anymore against another one. I havre also the feeling, the certitude, that the text I am currently writing, and which leaving the field of so called "poetry" and is running to fiction, locks me free into a long long trip I started without turning back, without any kind of projects, except letting the work decide the ways, letting myself being fed by the surprise.
I am these days writing the "face-à-face" between a boy and a monkey, in an old zoo, somewhere in Germany...
Write this sterile everlasting effort - alone, nothing, never - do not tell, just throw yourself against the meat’s coldness, and crush without renounce, there is no exit – but hope