So. The Broken World is launched. We had some very nice drinks to celebrate.
Mike Harrison (M. John) blogged about it here - I only recently noticed that Mike started blogging again, at a new address. So Uncle Zip's Window is gone, but Ambient Hotel is just as good a place to be.

Reviews of The Broken World are slowly starting to appear - I will update as and when more come in. The best of the bunch so far is from Stuart Kelly writing in Scotland on Sunday:

"..an exhilarating and poignant tale of love, loss and computer games that ought to make the leap from "cult classic" to"popular success"... The Broken World is ultimately a humane and heartfelt book, with a proper emotional core wrapped up in a giddyingfantasia. It manages to be desperately sad and desperately funny at the same time. It is a book of big ideas, cunningly delivered through a slacker's shrug."

You can see the whole of the review here. So-so from the TLS, but it's not online. And an interesting, positive one from Matt Thorn writing in the July edition of the Literary Review, also not online.

Great blog responses so far from Big Dumb Object here, Marcus Gipps here, and from Graeme's Fantasy Book Review here.

I've also been doing some online interviews etc. Here you can see the one from Metro here, the one for Big Dumb Object here and the one for Blackwells Bookshop here. More of these to come... will post links.. and try not repeat myself too much

The alarm does not even go off but I stir anyway at 6.10 and realise I have 15 minutes to get out of the room and downstairs into the taxi. Time stretches.

In the taxi I'm barely functional - still too close to the sleep world - but as we wait at some traffic lights some way into the journey to Tegel ask about a building we are stopped near.

Is it a prison?

Yes. But for economic crime.. not murders and such.. I dont' know what you call it. White collar crime?

White collar crime.

Its the place they kept Erich Honecker and the last politicians of the GDR.

I nodd. Yeah. OK.

Then a minute later, a way along the road, I ask:

Are they all dead now, those guys?

Yes. I think so. He died in Chile, he asked for asylum there and died there.

OK. Yeah.

The next light we stop at the driver reaches for a card index box on the dashboard. Flips through it. I'm thinking that she probably checks her next job, or consults some personal info about a doctors appointment of something, thinking that this is a very bureaucratic taxi driver.

She looks up, slides the box back.1994 she says. He died in 94.

I'm pretty puzzled. I wait a moment and then I ask - What's the card index?

Thinking that it's very weird to have a card index in your taxi that contains this kind of information.

I write things down, she says. From the newspaper. Just facts and things. Things you dont find in the guide books. Sometimes I do guided tours. So I write down interesting things. Things people might want to know.

We drive in silence for a while. But the rest of the journey I'm thinking about this card index. The kinds of things it might or might not contain.

A chunk from a long piece I wrote a while back about Eva Meyer Keller's brilliant performance Death Is Certain:

Deaths are enacted on cherries, one by one. When the last cherry is killed, the performance is over. The execution of the performance (small pun intended) is as perfectly simple, as lacking in frills or ornamentation as the structure. Meyer Keller moves between the tables in her deadly kitchen, moving from one killing to the next, in a mode that might be described as neutral or functional, but which in any case declines to signal comment on her task. She makes no drama of her decisions, no comedy or tragedy of her actions and no melodrama of her reactions. Slightly brusque, with a faint hint of the laboratory or cook’s assistant in her demeanour, her manner might best be described as that of someone simply doing a job. She does what’s needed, not more and not less. After an initial acknowledgement of those watching, she does not bother much with the informally grouped audience; does not seek eye contact or look for reactions to what she is doing. She is self-contained, to all extents and purposes too busy with her job to have time for social niceties and in any case, clearly convinced that what’s she’s doing – demonstration of death on her thirty-five cherries – both speaks for and is clear enough in itself not to warrant further mediation or explanation from her.

What I'd forgotten, watching the piece again last week in Toulouse was how much Eva's performance tunes you to see detail. The difference (visually, emotionally, physically, performatively, metaphorically) between a cherry skinned with a razor blade and a cherry stripped with the abrasive edge of a nail file, the particular crackle and fizz of bare electrical wires pushed into the cherry on the plate, the way the smoke from a cigarette curls and shifts when trapped inside a plastic cup (gas chamber to some other unfortunate cherry). For something so small - a performance that takes place for the most part on two table-tops - it's extraordinarily vivid. Made me think a lot about the way that any work creates an economy of expectation - a set of parameters  - which it then exploits. It's great how sometimes the strictest of these restrictions create the most  beautiful resonant things.

He says he walked two hours to the station and that the strange thing is he didn't see anything. I mean normally you see something - a building, or people, or a street, or something interesting to remark on. But that morning he did not see anything. Only later, thinking back on it did he remember that the people there seemed to put many little things in their windows - pictures of family members in plastic frames, small trinkets and souvenirs, or flowers, or dolls or statues, or those little plastic cats that look back at you.

*

"It winds me up. I can't go nowhere without them following me," said Michael, 18, after what he said was his fourth stop. "I got back from work and as soon as I got out the van they were just taking photos of me straight away zooming in on all the patterns I've got in my hair."

Strange scenes in this link Ant sent me a while back to a piece on police surveillance-as-systematic harassment in Essex.