June 02, 2003
Hip Survival Bulletin #28 - June 2003
Gentle Readers,
A full elucidation of the next month's events after last week's cut out and keep guide.
MONDAY JUNE 2ND – BOOK LAUNCH : 6.30pm
A Fête Worse Than Death – A Journey through an English summer by Iain Aitch
Published by Headline Review
In the company of the author
A Fête Worse Than Death is a comical trip around England where Iain meets shin-kickers, crop circle makers, stag parties and a dog-bitten woman who asks him to marry her at Stonehenge, witnesses the sailing of a Cornish pasty, plays cricket with trainspotters, gets all vitriolic about the horrors of Stratford Upon Avon. He also meets the very English Luftwaffe, and attends more village fêtes than it is healthy for one man to do.
Come for the guess-the-weight-of-the-cake competition and stay for the human fruit machine. There will also be a short reading by Iain as well as bunting, books and music.
About the author : Born in Margate, Kent , Iain is the inventor of World Phone in Sick Day, writes for a host of newspapers and magazines and has never slept with Tracey Emin.
THURSDAY JUNE 5TH –BOOK LAUNCH - 6.30pm
The Air Loom Gang by Mike Jay
Transworld Publishers
In the company of the author
‘I have never seen the logic of madness, of a particular delusion, presented so clearly and convincingly.‘ Oliver Sacks
The Air Loom Gang tells James Tilly Matthews’ remarkable true story. Incarcerated in the world’s most notorious madhouse - the Bethlem Royal Hospital – Bedlam; Matthews’ case became celebrated as the most complex and bizarre ever recorded. He remains one of the most famous cases in psychiatric history - the first man to believe that his mind was being controlled by an ‘influencing machine’ - The Air Loom – which works by animal magnetism and sends invisible rays to control the minds of its victims - politicians and generals bent on plunging France and England into war.
But the truth of his case was even stranger than his doctors realized: many of the incredible conspiracies in which he claimed to have been involved were entirely real.
About the author : Mike Jay is the author of The Air Loom Gang, Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, Blue Tide: The Search for Soma and Artificial Paradises: A Drugs Reader and editor of 1900: A Fin-de-Siècle Reader.
FRIDAY JUNE 6TH –BOOK LAUNCH - 6.30pm
Victims by Travis Jeppesen
Published by Akashic Press
In the company of the author
"Victims may by the most exciting first novel I've read in a decade or more. This is a brilliant, haunting, and, strangest of all, very funny novel."
-- Dennis Cooper, author of Frisk
Their struggles to reconcile their faith in Jones's teachings with the emotional ups and downs of their relationships, jobs, and interactions with the natural world form the subject of this exquisitely written and highly original novel.
Based on extensive research into the rhetoric of religious cults, 23 year old Travis Jeppesen’s first novel Victims centres around the final days of a religious cult called The Overcomers. Like the infamous Heaven's Gate cult whose mass suicide gained world media attention in the 1990s, they are a small group of lost souls guided by the teachings of a charismatic leader, Martin Jones. The Overcomers go about their lives preparing for the cosmic event that will signal the end of their time on earth.
Jeppesen has written a novel with a philosophical bravura rarely seen in the work of contemporary American writers. This is the first book published upon Dennis Cooper’s Little House On The Bowery imprint.
About the author : Travis Jeppesen was born in Ft. Lauderdale in 1979. His fiction and cultural criticism have appeared in Book Forum, 3am Magazine, The Stranger, and other publications, and he is a contributing editor to Pavement Magazine. Victims is his first novel. Having resided in Charlotte, Seattle, New York, Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, Jeppesen currently resides in an undisclosed Eastern European country.