I added a page here about my novel The Broken World – the cover is above. The book looks great and it’s released on 3rd July. I’m hoping that the Live Art Development Agency online bookshop Unbound, as well as the Forced Entertainment online bookshop, will be carrying copies – I’ll be signing some for each of them. Impatient people, or people unconcerned with my signature can already advance order the book from Amazon.
Strange feeling on the arrival of the ‘actual’ book – not the page proofs, not the printed proof edition but the actual thing. A worrying ‘finality’. As soon as it’s out of the Jiffy bag I am scouring it to check the places where I made changes in the last proofs – are all the changes there, do they make sense? After a few minutes of randomly opening it at different parts, reading passages I’ve read (and propbably rewritten) a million times I realise that in fact what I’m doing is looking for a mistake. It takes me 15 minutes to find one – a place on a certain page where a the word ‘world’ has dropped a letter and mutated to ‘word’. It’s a strange mistake and easy enough to see how it has slipped through – because the error is an actual word, not a nonsense, and because in the context of the sentence ‘word’ almost makes sense. Apparently though, I’m satisfied to have found this error (proof that there’s nothing definitive about the object, in that sense nothing ‘final’ at about it at all) and once that’s done (the object is just a process) I put it down on a pile of other things and get on with my day.
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Meanwhile my friend Asta Groting, for whose ventriloquism project I wrote the performance Dead Air has a new website, where you can check out her projects, and clips from her videos. A clip and some info on the piece I wrote for her is on this page – second video clip down is mine, first on the same page is from her piece with Deborah Levy. Buddy Big Mountain is the performer in each case.
The Broken World, 2008