Writing
My first short story, “Vegan Reich”, was published in a collection called Suspect Device (Serpent’s Tail, 1998), edited by Stewart Home. My most recent publications are two essays on film — “Mystery and levity: an introduction to the films of Billy Childish” and “The disappearance and re-emergence of Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains” — in No focus: punk on film (Headpress, 2006), edited by Chris Barber and Jack Sargeant.
Here’s some of my work:—
Novella
Executive Sufficiency
Stories
Cambridge Post Office
This story instantly evokes Bukowski’s finest novel and improves on it by locating the action in the ultra-enclosed social territory of 1980s Cambridge.
Ex Libris Judas
A female undercover operator investigates sex magic, psychological warfare and occult political activity in post-Cold War Cambridgeshire.
Mental Disc Selecter
This has been accurately described as “a terrific yarn set partially in Hove Public Library”. This is a time-travel-paradox tale set mainly in Hove, which shuffles some generic archetypes - including the device of the unreliable narrator, the form of the short story, and the occult truism that rarity defines great rock ‘n roll tunes - and ventures asideways look at authenticity fetishism and self-possession.
Only One Life
A simple story of a common-law husband’s struggle with the complex, passionate inner-narratives wrought by low expectations and self-loathing. Needless to say, it has a surprise happy ending.
The Creeping Past
It appears that something arises periodically from its ancient undersea dwelling off Hove, seeking to wrest the melodic being from the very throats of those who sing the tunes. Features the last ever live appearance of quasi-legendary Brighton psych-punk, freakbeat groop, 7 & 7 is. Also see here.
The Story of My Returning
A dynamic first-person satire on the reductively secessionist narrative of cultural identity - even unto the realms of the self - that tends to emerge relatively unformed from notions of place and belonging based on Celticism. Hopefully, there is also something in it to divert the media-friendly resources of autobiography, cultural history and Englishness studies.
The university is permeated with the odour of kerosene
As its name suggests, this story is inspired by middle-of-nowhere primal dumb punk crud. Ashamed and emboldened by the pitiful smallness of the culture he was somehow expected, or supposed, to inhabit, a youth is minded one night to use his ultra-limited aesthetic and political personal lexicography to describe the destruction and reduction to rubble of the cultural institution of Cambridge.
Vegan Reich
Basically, a riff on Stewart Home’s “Anarchism is Stupid” refrain, with an implicit criticism of activist ideologies that are relentlessly marketed as a political necessity when they are mostly a front for look-at-me eco-bores. It also deals with the potential linkages, as apparent in the late 1990s, between right-wing, anarchist and regionalist political activists.
Selected poems
Dream-Quest of 2001
In the early 1980s I was out of my knowledge in Cambridge
Local history courses
Long brightfastness fades
On Oakington
Thresholds and labyrinths: lines on “travel” and “place”
Articles and essays
Englands
Rockhunter
Rockhunter: Your No. 1 Site for Antiquarian Sounds
Rockhaunter
Rockhaunter: Your No. 1 Site for Hauntiquarianism, Sound and Vision.
Rockhaunter: conceptual gaiety in sound and vision. Limited run magazine, 2007. £2.50. Available by post from neil@feastofpalmer.com.
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