Kellman, London, Minotaurs
Some slight nuggets of great interest in this week’s Guardian Review
-Alberto Manguel on Jack London’s great unfinished novel the Assassination Bureau. I’d not heard of it before and it sounds fascinating. The concept of the novel itself is intriguing (a bit like a more well thought version of the morally righteous revenge fantasies as explored in the silly but enjoyable daftness of TV’s Dexter), and Manguel is good on London’s politics. Fascinating and chilling, though oddly unsurprising in a way, to learn that Stalin, Hitler and (T) Roosevelt were all fans.
-Salley Vickers on the various literary explorations of the Minotaur myth. Highly interesting material all, though she does miss a trick in omitting Jorge Luis Borges’ brilliant short story The House of Asterion, surely the most weird take on the tale.
-Theo Tait interviewing a hilariously intransigent James Kellman. Poor Theo seems to be doing his best, but Kellman obviously equates any contact with the metropolitan literary establishment as proletarian matter meeting bourgeois anti-matter. Unfair at times he may be, but the man described by Simon Jenkins as an “illiterate savage” is more right than he’s wrong. And a few weeks back there was Joseph Connor’s take on the magnificent Gulliver’s Travels. Everyone standing for public office should read it said Michael Foot. He was right about that, as he was with most things in life (except for how to run an effective national election campaign.)
Other Splinters posts of interest:
