“I’ve long realized that a general puritanism in the US and a fear of difficult subject matter and a deep disrespect for the minds and ideas and emotions of teenagers and so on were going to be a problem my work would always face. It interests me to try to sneak through and around that prejudice.”
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“Daniel leaves Ireland because this love and the new Republic of Ireland cannot co-exist. So he flees the island because of something negative, rather than because he is searching for love. I think a huge amount of people were suffocated by this new Ireland.”
“I think horror’s been a bit too polite for a while now – it needs to be a bit more edgy and underground and not worry so much about upsetting people. In a way, I feel like we need to go back to a time when horror was seen more as an exploitation genre and less like something you go and see on a Friday night alongside Mamma Mia and Harry Potter.”
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“In most films and books which deal with the end of the world as we know it, it’s presumed that people will just accept that Armageddon has arrived and start trying to survive it. I don’t actually think that’ll happen. I think many of us will bury our heads in the sand and try and convince ourselves that things will get better. It would actually be a hard thing to accept that your time’s up.”
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“It’s only rock and roll, a little bit of entertainment after a day’s work, or looking for work. It ain’t life and death. A lot of good stories are spoiled because people tried to be too clever writing them. The whole point of pulp is to come out with the same old chestnuts driven by interesting characters. It’s escapism plain and simple. I live real life everyday, trust me. When I’m indoors I want a little bit of good old bullshit to take my mind off it.”
“Baise-Moi has nothing to do with “bad girls”, it is a low budget, punk, violent movie. Forget the tits and cunts, for one second. The key words here should be: gun, death, fake blood. I don’t care those two characters have cunts. They are archetypes: violent outcasts.”
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“There’s a real thrill in finding some home-made personally-put-together comic offering that does outclass the expensive, glossy but often very shallow output of the mainstream. I guess the musical equivalent would be discovering those rare obscure 45’s that you can’t believe aren’t more well known.”
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“I was for a very long time, a big letter writer, a big postcard writer. After college, after I moved away from home, my grandfather and I wrote letters back and forth, and that was an important time in my life. Now I suppose it was after I stopped writing letters and postcards, that they took on a new form—the epistolary novel and the postcard life stories. Anyway, the thing I most love is the intimacy that is conveyed.”
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“In high school, my friends and I drank whatever malt liquor was available, usually Olde English 800, in forty-ounce bottles. In my heyday I could down two of these at a go through a beer bong. That’s eighty ounces of the lowest quality liquor available ingested in around ten seconds.”
“That kind of thinking drives me crazy. It shows a complete lack of understanding regarding the purpose and possibilities of art in general. Murder ballads are nothing like real murder. They are rituals to celebrate the fleeting beauty of all things.”
“I’ve thought of each of my novels as comedies, in a certain sense. They’re easier to write if you don’t take them – or yourself – too seriously.”
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The best test of a good book is when you get through it rapidly, unable to pry your eyes from the ink on the page. Jenn Ashworth’s A Kind of Intimacy feels extraordinarily real in depicting loneliness, delusion and deception, with a fantastic pace and a vivid protagonist whose cleverly delineated psychology is testament to Ashworth’s cunning ability as a writer. A book that is at turns hilarious, sinister and poignant. As Annie Wilkes might say, “Oh darling it is so wonderful….”
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Tom Bradley’s latest books are Vital Fluid (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), Even the Dog Won’t Touch Me (Ahadada Press), Put It Down in a Book (The Drill Press), and Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (Dog Horn Publishing). What follows is a “post-neoplatonic dialogue” between Bradley & Mikael Covey, on food, music and books, but not religion and fucking.
Mikael Covey: There’s this image of Tom Bradley as the madman from across the waters. But is the real you perhaps a kind, gentle, loving husband and father who quietly nurtures tomato plants in the backyard garden?
Tom Bradley: Fuck no. I’m a crazy mean son-bitch. As for tomatoes, I behave sadistically toward them, with my teeth. But nobody’d better dream of calling me a vegan. If you’re looking for a mean son-bitch, just briefly consider breathing the word vegan within three city blocks of my bristly knuckles.
MC: Thanks for the warning.
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N. Frank Daniels’ Futureproof is an exhilarating take on the coming-of-age novel. Drugs, sex, frustration, anger, it’s a modern-day Catcher in the Rye, if Holden Caufield had fucked the prostitute; a Romeo & Juliet for the chemically numbed post-grungers. Frank describes himself as the “luckiest asshole you’ll ever know” but, as you’ll read in the interview below, Daniels is one tenacious bastard. He worked long and hard at getting Futureproof read (including flogging his gear on eBay to fund a promotional tour of his (then, self-published) book). And Futureproof is worth reading. Don’t believe me? Ask Jay McInerney. Or Sebastian Horsely. Or Jerry Stahl. Or, indeed, the Futureproof 500. Like his favourite artist Banksy, N. Frank Daniels isn’t afraid of flaunting authority, of breaking the rules. The name of this interview, I’ve stolen from Bansky – “Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.” It makes sense Frank likes him.
