This week’s guest posts come courtesy of Ned Beauman, author of the novel Boxer, Beetle, which came out earlier this month and was described by the Sunday Times as “original, exhilarating and hugely enjoyable”. He has worked as an editor at Dazed & Confused and AnOther Man and has written for dozens of other magazines and newspapers.
I’m interviewing two indie rock queens for Dazed & Confused. I’m reading a biography of Cornelius Vanderbildt. I’m going to two Szechuan restaurants. And I’m keeping a girl with a broken foot company, because otherwise I’m worried she might go a bit Rear Window.
I come from a whole family of writers so actually I have no trouble explaining what I do. Although I suppose my mum, who is a biographer, might be alarmed if she knew how little time I actually spend working.
Ross Hancock from the third series of Sky One’s Project Catwalk. In other words, like Jake Gyllenhaal if you bought him from a Hackney pound shop.
Spider-sense.
I get worse ‘red wine mouth’ than anyone you’ve ever met.
I didn’t do a creative writing course, but I studied philosophy at university and that was great. Nietzsche, Hume, Mackie, Kripke, Rawls – they’re my boys for life.
Gyllenhaal.
Raymond Chandler used to keep a notebook of good titles for crime stories. One that he wrote down but never used was ‘Twenty Inches of Monkey’.
I’m about half way through my second book, The Teleportation Accident, which is an attempt to demolish the foundations of my first, and should come out in 2012. I’ve also got short stories coming out in a few places, including You Are The Friction.
I used to be a magazine journalist, so maybe that, but I love animals deeply and if fiction didn’t work out I was planning to quit my job and go off to volunteer at an orangutan sanctuary somewhere. I still might. Or I might start one of my own and call it ‘Raymond Chandler’s Twenty Inches of Monkey’.
If someone wanted me to recommend a guide to writing good fiction, I’d give them this book, which was published in 1961. It’s about urban planning, yes, but it tells you so much about how human beings interact with each other. There’s a quote from it as an epigraph to my novel. I’d vote for any politician who was into Jacobs.
This is a niche perfume company founded by a young chemist called Pierre Guillame. My favourite of their fragrances is Cologne Grand Siécle, which only uses ingredients that would have been available in the time of Louis XIV, but smells totally contemporary. It’s a bit like Kirsten Dunst in Marie Antoinette.
I’ve only heard a couple of songs by this band but they’re already my tip for the autumn. Other stuff that I’m enjoying at the moment in a similar dreampop vein includes Echo Lake, Eternal Summers and Memoryhouse. Double rainbow!
This is probably my favourite menswear label at the moment – a bit like Rick Owens but grittier and cheaper. I think in another life I could easily have been a goth. Unfortunately, none of my friends will drink with me if I’m wearing a cape.
My composer friend Edmund Finnis has written the scores for several recent video installations by Anne Harild. I love architectural abstraction and abstracted architecture. She also does drawings. Maybe they should have had her working on Inception.
