Comic Book Tattoo is a series of comic adaptations of Tori Amos songs, published with the full backing of Herself. Check it out here and here.

Here’s our 2005 interview with the Bee Queen.

There was much rejoicing when the book fairy delivered Richard Price’s new novel Lush Life (Bloomsbury) to the Revelatorium. Mr Price, author of The Wanderers, Clockers, Freedomland and the masterful Samaritan, is one of those extraordinary crime writers who combines high literary chops with lowdown street argot and commands the kind of peer approbation usually reserved for Cormac McCarthy or Denis Johnson.
He’s had quite a run of it as a screenwriter too, having scripted Scorsese’s The Color Of Money and the sorely overlooked short film Life Lessons (starring Nick Nolte as a big bear of an abstract expressionist painter), plus Pacino’s comeback picture Sea Of Love, and more recently HBO’s The Wire.

We’ll give you the lowdown on the new book soon as we’ve read it. Meantime, here’s our 2003 interview.

Here’s Michiko Kakutani’s verdict on Lush Life in the New York Times.

And here’s Michael Chabon’s review.

Chistopher Hitchens gets a makeover…

…volunteers for water torture…

…and submits to the HP inquisition.

Isaac Hayes 1942 – 2008.

In 1999, James Marsh made a slow and impressionistic film adaptation of Michael Lesy’s beautiful book Wisconsin Death Trip. He followed it in 2005 with an oedipal Elvis tale entitled The King, starring Gael García Bernal and William Hurt. Now he’s back with a new documentary Man On Wire, the extraordinary story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers.

Watch the trailer here

Hear the NPR review here

Over the span of five albums, Josh Ritter has evolved from a callow young songwriter transparently in thrall to Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt, to an assured artist who’s transcended those influences to find his own voice. But then, he learned his song well before he started singing, having studied the folk song form at University in Boston.

“It was more about the history of song,” he tells us on the phone from New York, on a sweltering early August morning. “I don’t believe anyone can really teach writing, it’s something you either do or you don’t. I think you can get better at it, but in terms of any writing I think you’re your own best teacher. Mostly I was really interested in the stories, and looking at history through songs.

“My parents are scientists and they always talk about the idea that science doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from definite needs in a society; people start studying questions based on what the society needs, and I feel that’s the same way with songs. Not everything, I mean, ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears is a great song and maybe it doesn’t answer a biting social need, but I do think if you go back from a song like that and look at what was going on in the world and in America at the time, that you’d find something interesting that you could put in your back pocket.”

Ritter is one of only a few artists working in the singer-songwriter mill who frequently eschews autobiographical soul-bearing for measured storytelling and third person narratives in songs like ‘Girl In The War’ and the feverish ‘Thin Blue Flame’.

“I guess I get bored really easy and I have to switch styles,” he says, “otherwise it doesn’t feel sincere after a while and I know that people are going to be able to hear that, so it keeps me honest in terms of what I’m doing. The great thing about writing is it allows you to follow your interests wherever they go. Not just in songs, but in all the stuff that you read. I read a lot and take a lot of lessons and ideas from that stuff, and it’s like having an expense account, you can charge all that stuff to your songwriting. That couple of hours a day when you’re sitting out in the park reading – that’s work! I like that.”

Who are his favourite writers?

“I love Muriel Spark and Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. JP Donleavy, he’s really great. Right now I’m moving very slowly through Don Quixote, which is pretty bad-assed too. But my favourite author is Mark Twain. He’s a guy I can go back to. Huckleberry Finn is amazing. Sometimes records and books suffer from being so influential. I mean, I don’t care for On The Road, I’m not a big fan of Jack Kerouac, but I think maybe part of the reason for that is it’s become almost a caricature because it had such an affect on a style. But I never felt that with Mark Twain, I always felt like somehow he’s avoided that kind of thing, where everything that’s come from it has started to detract from the original.”

Josh Ritter plays the Electric Picnic on August 29. A special bonus edition of his Live At The 9.30 Club album, recorded in Washington last October by NPR, will be released on Independent Records on September 5.

Here’s our review of the Christchurch Cathedral show from 2006.

And here’s Stephen King raving about The Animal Years.

It’s been quite a year for reappraising the glory of the short story. First there was Granta’s near definitive Richard Ford-edited anthology last winter, followed by the republication of Joe Hill’s wonderful 2005 debut 20th Century Ghosts. This spring brought Amy Hempel’s The Dog of the Marriage and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, plus advance reading copies of Gerard Donovan’s Country of the Grand, due next month.

Now comes Our Story Begins, an epic collection of Tobias Wolff’s finest short fiction, plus a ream of new yarns. Despite his formidable reputation as a memoirist and novelist, Wolff is a master of the ten-page tale. He once declared that he’s returned to the form again and again because it’s more forgiving than the novel, but today, sat at a table in the Morrison Hotel restaurant, he’s prepared to amend that statement.

“No, the short story is merciless,” he says, a bald, fit-looking 63-year-old with piercing eyes, snow-white moustache and the voice of a veteran sports broadcaster. “I never thought it was more forgiving, what I thought was the short story offers rare glimpses of utter perfection in the way certain poems do.”

The tales collected in Our Story Begins don’t just testify to Wolff’s virtuosity, they also mirror his longer works. Aching tales of adolescence such as ‘Flyboys’, ‘Two Boys and a Girl’ and ‘Smorgasbord’ find their counterparts in his memoir This Boy’s Life and the short novel Old School, while morality plays about stupid white males with guns (‘Hunters In The Snow’, ‘Soldier’s Joy’) play off his Vietnam memoir In Pharaoh’s Army. Do these collected tales serve as a sort of shadow autobiography?

“Yeah, I would say they do,” he concedes. “It’s very much a biography of the inner life rather than tracing things in any eventful detail. There are relics of my life floating up in the stories. But they’re certainly fictions and not memoir. Many of them are just my obsessions, things I’ve had to think about over the years about fraudulance and self-consciousness, the problem of shame and guilt, how you deal with it, especially when those you want to make things right with aren’t there to be made right with.”

As a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University for 17 years, Wolff mentored George Saunders, Jay McInerney and Alice Sebold among others. Does he know which students are special and might go on to make a name for themselves?

“No, I don’t. With undergraduates, 18, 19, 20-year-olds, what will make them really special is if they keep working at it, and I don’t know whether they will or not. But the undergraduate that I taught who’s had the greatest success, Alice Sebold, is not one that I would’ve at the time ever picked out of that workshop as the one who would be a writer later on. But Alice left Syracuse and every two or three years I’d get a manuscript in the mail from her, long after she’d graduated: ‘Will you take a look at this story?’ And then another one a few years later. And y’know, she worked at temp jobs and did all kinds of stuff to keep writing. She was just gonna fuckin’ well be a writer, and that was that! I couldn’t have foreseen that, so I really am not in the business of prophesy, especially with younger writers.”

So while a certain amount of raw talent is required, the clincher is bull-headed tenacity?

“Oh it is. I really think that’s it. I’m not saying this in false modesty at all, but I wanted to be a writer from the time I was about 14 or 15, and when I got a scholarship to this boarding school back east, there were a lot of guys there who wanted to be writers, it was still a glamorous thing to be then, Hemingway was alive, and Frost. And a great many of them were much more naturally talented than I was, but they didn’t keep doing it. They came to their senses, or they decided at a certain point they didn’t care to embrace the uncertainty of this life, people around them were getting their first Volvos and stuff. The only classmate I had who went on to be an artist was Oliver Stone. He’s the only one of a very talented crew of people that ended up becoming a writer.”

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Wolff has all the hallmarks of a classic southern yarn-spinner, but confesses he never felt like one.

“No, I don’t feel like I did, because my mother wasn’t one. Even as a kid when I was growing up among real southerners, I just felt a little different. For one thing there was a tremendous amount of hatred in the kids that I grew up with, and they took it out on black people in their conversation, and that was something that was very alien to my mother, so I felt that difference.

“I mean, my mother was not a Civil Rights demonstrator or anything, she just was not a hater. It was a pretty raw place, the American south, when I was living there. They’re still fighting the Civil War there in a way that the people in the rest of the country aren’t. They still have this sense of injured pride and having been unfairly relegated to a subservient kind of position, which they haven’t been. Yeah, right after the Civil War they were, but for Christ’s sake that was 150 years ago.

“I haven’t lived in the South in years now, so I may be being unfair, but the fact that they’re still having fights over flying the Confederate flag over state houses, Capitol buildings, that tells me there’s a problem. And that Presidential candidates get into trouble for questioning the wisdom of doing this, flying a flag like that in the face of their black fellow citizens? I think they’re still having problems with this. I worry about Obama’s candidacy for this reason. The race thing in our country, we have still not figured this out. I voted for him, I hope he wins, but I worry.”

Our Story Begins is published by Bloomsbury.

This summer’s edition of the wonderful Irish Gothic and Horror Journal.

The death wish of Darby Crash, on film.

Tom Waits live from the Georgia date of the Glitter & Doom tour, two and a half hours streamed by NPR.

The metaphysical poets and the pantheists sought to depict in their writings the glory of God refracted through the prism of nature. This required turning a blind eye to the violent, unforgiving, and sometimes macabre workings of the natural world, with its predatory rats and raptors, its casual acts of cannibalism and infanticide.

The discovery of germs, viruses and parasites caused credo-quakes and philosophical rifts between Enlightenment-era anthropologists and Creationists. If everything on earth reflects the Divine, how does one explain corpse-eating carrion crows? Surely any God that could create such creatures in His image must have a malign streak, or at the very least, a warped sense of humour?

Esther Woolfson’s moment of coldwater epiphany occurs early in the excellent Corvus, a melding of natural history and memoir, when she watches a pair of adopted doves – time-honoured symbols of peace and the holy spirit – savage each other over the right to assume supreme position on her window ledge. Exasperated, she realises these pure white birds are no better than warring beasts and men. And yet, as her doves take wing, the sight inspires her to write with awe of the workings of birds:

“…during the first summer of their lives birds learn the layout of the stars, including the importance of the North Star for navigation. The ‘magnetic compass’, the magnetoreceptor, composed of magnetite crystals situated in a pigeon’s upper beak, is a mechanism that appears to allow it to find its way by sensing the earth’s magnetic fields, although the precise method by which this is accomplished is still unclear.”

Talk about the adoration of the magpie. One might be forgiven for picturing a bedraggled hermit with scarecrow hair, an avian version of The Simpsons’ cat lady. In reality, Woolfson is an accomplished author (her first novel The Piano Angel is due out this autumn) whose work has been anthologized and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She writes in a steely, unsentimental style, backlit by a strong sense of place – in this case, the West Highlands of Scotland. But her prose also exhibits an endearing compassion for the plight of our feathered friends.

“Chance, circumstance, the vagaries of the weather or the activities of the sun may cause birds to become lost. Gales blow them from their course; surges of wind cause geomagnetic storms, distorting the Earth’s magnetic field, interfering with their direction-finding…birds may be aware too of ‘infrasound’, those ultra-low-frequency sounds too low for the human ear, the sounds of the movements of the earth, the deep whisperings, the groanings, creakings, crackings of the fabric of the universe, the sounds of sea and wind, of oceans and volcanoes, the explosion of meteors, the gathering of hurricanes far away.”

But despite her obvious love for all birdkind, corvids are her pets. Some folk see heaven in a wild flower, some become horse shamen, some dog whisperers, but Woolfson divines cosmic order in the fluttering of black wings and the flash of yellow beaks, a fascination that began when her daughter brought home an urchin rook 16 years ago.

She’s hardly the first writer to fall under the spell of these black-clad aviators. In Norse, Celtic and Native American myth, crows are depicted variously as shape shifters, spirit guides, emissaries between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds, and sometimes harbingers of transformation – if not doom. Ted Hughes’s Crow braided Biblical imagery and ancient mythology into savagely surreal poems. Poe’s ‘The Raven’ is a Hallowe’en horror perennial. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Nick Cave’s And The Ass Saw The Angel and Mike McCormack’s Crowe’s Requiem all boasted extraordinary passages derived from corvid lore.

But none of these writers chose to live in a house populated by chattering, gabbing birds, including the aformentioned rook, Chicken, of whom Woolfson writes:

“In time, Chicken developed her full adult plumage and became as she is now, beautiful, as are all crows, rooks, ravens, magpies. She is in every aspect, as they all are, in every movement, a sharp, tenebrous grace in her stillness, in her wings and feet and head. Corvids’ beaks are balanced, proportionate, burnished and striated like the metal of a Damascene sword. The Japanese word ‘shibui’ most encapsulates for me what they are and how they look, a word defined as ‘austere, simple, quietly beautiful’.”

Corvus is published by Granta. An edited version of the above first appeared in the Sunday Business Post.

I took the youngsters to Wall-E on its opening weekend and came away feeling like Johnny Mnemonic after a heavy night’s downloading.

You’ll know the bones of the story already. Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class) is a trash-compacting robot charged with the task of cleaning up and cubing mountains of industrial crap until the end of time, or his batteries go flat. His Sisyphean existence is disrupted by the arrival of Eve, an iPod-contoured interplanetary probe. When this shiny piece of love interest rumbles the first photosynthesized plant life to appear on earth in 700 years, she scoops it up for incubation and falls into a Sleeping Beauty coma until she’s recalled to the great mothership in the sky.

It gets weirder. The smitten Wall-E limpets himself to her shuttle and is deposited on an offworld resort cruiser where humans have devolved into an obese, boneless, slurpy-sucking species trapped in a recreational stasis maintained by AI-regulated life support systems – a barely disguised riff on the fatted-cattle Western consumerist strip-mall nightmare. When a Hal 3000-style rogue computer refuses to get with the Return to Earth pre-programme triggered by the discovery of the regenerated plant life, the resulting conflict propels the human hordes out of their sloth.

Apart from being a good yarn, Wall-E is also an unlikely fusion of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, post-apocalyptic Last Man (or rather, Last Machine) saga, and Vonnegut speculative satire, all wrapped in a U-rated multiplex-friendly package.

But it isn’t Luddite. Our friends electric are largely portrayed as benign, the bipeds, bovine. This viewer was reminded of another thinly-veiled consumerism allegory, The Matrix, specifically the speech delivered by arch-AI-baddie Agent Smith, in which he declares that human behaviour is not mammalian, as one would expect, but viral or parasitic, sucking the planet’s resource centres dry before moving onto the next patch.

The other week I finally got around to buying the (Honest Injun, This Really Is The Absolute, Final) Director’s Cut of Blade Runner. Watching the restored print, one realises that the old two-legs-good/androids-bad paradigm never existed: Rutger Hauer’s replicant Roy Batty really was the angel of the piece, his rooftop-in-the-rain monologue being one of the most poetic scenes in the history of cinema.

The subtext of Blade Runner was not Philip K Dick’s recurring riddle ‘What is Real?’, but ‘What is Human?’ A friend recently sent me a copy of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s mind-boggling 1999 book The Age Of Spiritual Machines – When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Penguin), which projects a 100-year timeline towards a point where soul and circuitry become indistinguishable. Far fetched? Two words: Stephen Hawking, a man who told Charlie Rose that humanity’s only hope of avoiding extinction through eco-disaster lies in space – Wall-E’s central theme.

Maybe Lovelock and Agent Smith were right. Maybe humans are malevolent bugs fit to be burned off the face of the planet by a fever of global warming. Maybe the machines will inherit the earth. Let’s hope they don’t trash the joint as badly as the previous tenants.