BLATTFEST
2 – 5 May
Blind Eye, Vlkova 26

...I didn't intend to write but I just slipped into it from
doing music reviews and composing song lyrics... My first novel Pure Mania
was based around music, the rise to fame of a neo-punk band called
Alienation. All my early novel titles were lifted from relatively obscure
punk songs too, regardless of whether the book had any actual music
content. But while I grew up around the late seventies London punk rock
scene, the other thing that was very big at that time among my peers was
obscure sixties American soul music; what in the UK is often called
Northern Soul. This is also something I love and my recent novel titles
have been taken from soul and jazz tunes rather than punk rock songs. But
the musical influence goes deeper than that in the books, since the rhythm
of my prose is very important to me. Likewise my mind is saturated with
tunes because I listen to music all the time, even when I write, and I’ll
 use odd phrases from songs in my prose...

P: You state in your mission statement on your website that one of your
motivations is blurring the lines between artistic mediums and literary
genres. What do you hope your readers gain from this blurring of the
lines? Is genre a limitation? Couldn't one say that by denying genre, you
are therefore creating a new type of genre, a "non-genre"?

SH: Well I’d use the term audience, because sometimes I work the same material
through different mediums such as writing, film, sound pieces, gallery
work. But to narrow down what we’re speaking about, I don't find
traditional literature very interesting, and in all the high modernist
prose that interests me (surrealism, nouveau roman etc.) you witness the
appropriation of hardboiled prose and other forms of genre fiction. I
attempted to take that further by creating a self-conscious simulation of
genre plotting in my earlier novels... I think that by blurring boundaries
you can create more interesting prose. But things move on, what is
progressive at one moment will cease to be so at other times. And of
course one has to live out the contradictions of the world we live in, so
"non-genre" (the "anti-tradition" is the term one sees more frequently
used to describe this in the Anglo-American world) becomes another genre,
just as so called "literature" is in fact just another genre and not
something that rises above genre.... But a lot of the anti-tradition
figures that interest me work across different mediums, and to take just a
couple of well know names, you see Burroughs working a lot with sound and
later in art galleries, and Robbe-Grillet working with film.

P: It's interesting that work such as yours which attempts to cross borders
parallels what is happening in the world right now in terms of
globalization, the spread of English as the lingua franca, and blurring of
 gender distinction.   Do you believe that genre and distinct artistic
mediums don't or shouldn't play a significant role in a society such as
the one we live in today?

SH: I guess I come at this from a slightly different angle to you. To me the
social relations that produce cultures are more important than the
cultural objects (be that books, paintings, films or whatever) that emerge
from them - and I really don't like the commodified society we live in.
Genre is used to sell products, so the ad runs if you liked Martin Amis (I
didn't and don't) then you'll also like Will Self (I don't). We need to
get away from the idea of genre precisely because it is a function of
commodification, it is all about making books (and other cultural
products) saleable. So I think getting rid of genre distinctions is a
small part of a much larger struggle, which is abolishing the capitalist
society in which we live and under which we have all lived for some time,
it is about opposition to both command and free market economies...Moving
on, I think the blurring of gender distinctions can occur in both
progressive and retrogressive ways, that the ability of women to
collectively empower themselves is progressive, and that attempts to leave
men feeling insecure so that they become better consumers of beauty
products is retrogressive... I'm not against men becoming more beautiful,
I'm against beauty being used as a vehicle for commodification. And while
men wearing dresses is a good thing, it is not so great if this is done
half-heartedly, they really need to walk the walk and talk the talk like a
woman. For a man to pass as a woman takes effort, and I really appreciate
it when I see a good drag queen; but a dress alone does not a woman make,
and I think there's nothing sadder than a half-hearted cross-dresser. And
moving on again, there is a difference between gloabalisation and
internationalism, so I'm against the former and for the latter. English is
 obviously a very flexible language, since it is essentially a Creole
created from other languages, but its success does make it very difficult
for writers outside the main language groups to find an audience in their
native tongue, and these problems shouldn't be glossed over, since the
success of English has downsides as well as benefits.

P: Can you tell our readers something about your twelfth novel *Memphis
Underground*?

SH: It is written using a time slip device, whereby I have inter-cut chapters
describing the life of the same person six months apart, during which time
they assume a false identity and are forced to move from London to an
island off the north coast of Scotland by their economic circumstances.
This is a device one encounters most frequently in science fiction,
although I haven't written a science fiction book, and I'm using it in
part to explore ideas about the relationship between what in the US would
be termed the ghetto and the suburbs. It is annoying to see the way in
which inner London is being suburbanised by the influx of the very rich as
the City increasingly re-establishes itself as the financial centre of the
world. This is of course running in parallel with the rise of the
internet, which by removing the need many people used to feel to travel to
urban centres to keep up with the latest cultural and other developments,
also contributes towards the suburbanisation of urban areas in the
overdeveloped world.

P: *-Memphis Underground* posits questions regarding several contemporary
artistic issues, including who influences the youth culture. Do you
believe youth culture is suffering at the hands of the media and those
adults experiencing a "premature second childhood" that control it, or
blossoming because of it? Should the generation gap also begin to merge?

SH: There is a lot less about youth culture in this book than my earlier
 novels. There is a lot about music but this isn't addressed from the
perspective of youth but rather from the point of view of an adult male
aged around forty. In London youth culture is far less visible than it
used to be twenty or thirty years ago. There are a number of factors for
this, soaring property prices make it hard to run clubs that appeal to
more marginal tastes,  so clubs have tended to become more homogenous and
.try to appeal to everyone; the problem with this is that in trying to
find something everyone likes the successful clubs end up removing all the
specific things specific people like, so in going out of their way to
alienate nobody, they end up serving up a musical experience that is so
bland that nobody really likes it either. Which is why, dub step, the most
interesting thing happening in London recently, is going on in the south
and not the centre of the city.  There are more interesting clubs from a
music point of view in the centres of places like Glasgow, where rents are
not so high and so there is less pressure just to pack people in than
central London. Likewise, much youth culture in London from the late
fifties onwards was based around music, and with the rise of computer
gaming, music is not as important to the current generation of youths as
it was to mine. Add to this the factor that now most teenagers have
parents and grandparents who grew up with rock and dance music, and you
can see it no longer has the appeal of appearing to be rebellious. Moving
on, in a non-commodified world the separation between generations would
not only be undesirable, it just wouldn't happen.

P: In just the first chapter, the novel includes delays, added stress and
practical jokes at the hands of technology and modern machines.  Since
technology isn't going anywhere, should we fight against it and send a
call out to nostalgia, do we have to embrace it or can a balance be
 achieved?

SH: The world is changing all the time whether we like it or not, we can't go
back to the Stone Age. We need technology to support the human population
we now have. But technology isn't neutral, and we need to grasp the way it
moulds and affects our lives and try to work out ways we can make it work
better for us. Again in the commodity culture we live in, technology is
going to appear particularly obnoxious, but we can't just ignore it and
hope it will go away; we have to deal with it.

P: Along the same lines, do you feel that the gradual flow of the written
word from page to monitor is harming the younger generation's experience
of literature, or even adding to the lack of that experience?

SH: I think most people still prefer to read novels on the page than on
screen, but that may change as the technology changes. I don't think the
screen is the problem unless one perceives a decline in reading as a
problem, the reason people read less is because there are other diversions
including access to films, games and music on disk and as downloads. But
there are still kids getting into books, and actually I think the quality
of readers ultimately counts for more than the quantity of them. The young
have the problem of the market being more sophisticated about how it sells
them crap than was the case for my generation, but I think the majority
are intelligent enough to get through that if they want to, and will find
their way towards something more satisfying...So I'm not particularly
worried about them having an impoverished literary experience. While
things might be a little depressing right now, I think that ultimately the
kids will find their way to a new world, in part because this one is so
miserable and unsatisfying.

P: *-Memphis Underground* also deals with the pursuit of fame in contemporary
society. In a world where people will do anything to be famous and others
 will watch them no matter how idiotic the action, what can artists and
writers do to counteract the thoughtlessness and languor? Should we keep
it to the underground, or attempt to cast the net into the greater pond?

SH: My strategy has always been to use all channels available to me. So I've
published with corporate publishers and independents, I've used art
galleries and film. I think it’s important to understand that the market
distorts everything and that much that is interesting currently gets
ignored because of this. So one has to educate oneself in the ways of the
market and exploit its contradictions without allowing what one wants to
do to be influenced by this, the trick while we are living out the
contradictions of this world is to find ways in which the market which is
everywhere will accept what you want to do, rather than producing material
that panders to the market. Ultimately the market will be abolished, and
today’s bestselling books will no longer be consumed, while my writing
will be read by an ever growing audience.

P: What can readers and audiences expect from Stewart Home in the future?

SH: The unexpected. Maybe a porn movie without any sex in it...

P: And finally, do you have any advice for the next generation of writers
and artists?

SH: Yeah, don't listen to the advice people dole out to you. Work it out for
yourself.  Do your thing and don't worry about its reception until you're
ready to deal with that. If you think something is worth doing then so
called "success" doesn't matter, and if you have some success then that's
just a minor bonus...

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