Rather than commissioning pieces, the fourth issue of Beat the Dust was open to all writers to submit work. No theme – anything was considered. So, expect blasphemy, a gravedigger in Disneyland, Mark Ronson having sex with Lady GaGa on a piano, a dwarf pissing on dolphins, an actual message in a bottle thrown off the Isle of Wight Ferry and a child killer. Yep, it's creamy literary goodness, folks.
1. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Gil Scott-Heron 2. Blowin’ In The Wind - Bob Dylan 3. People Have The Power - Patti Smith 4. Lyndon Johnson Told The Nation - Tom Paxton 5. War - Edwin Starr 6. Get Up Stand Up - Bob Marley and the Wailers 7. Fuck Da Police - NWA 8. Change is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke
Submission Date:
14 May 2010
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
Wounding
Excerpt:
Heidi James is the author of the novel, Carbon. Here’s an exclusive extract from her forthcoming novel, Wounding...
Author of Burn Your Belongings, David F Hoenigman’s Top 5 Horror Films:
J: Noriko's Dinner Table (2006 – Sion Sono) A: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989 – Shinya Tsukamoto) P: 964 Pinocchio (1991 – Shozin Fukui) A: Noroi (2005 – Koji Shiraishi) N: Gozu (2003 – Takashi Miike)
Submission Date:
08 Dec 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
An excerpt from David's novel, Squeal for Joy
Excerpt:
but I know she hasn’t given up. I know that wasn’t the last of it. but if you have – she thinks. if you have renounced any hope for happiness or that you as a man can ever move beyond this. and you’d like everyone to. just so you can pretend it’s common and expected and rational and noble and sensible and inevitable and natural and just and sound and stable. then I’m a threat to you. and you might as well hit me again and again until the bones show through my skin. I’ll believe there’s something better for me in the moments between when your hand raises up and comes down...
J: The Stalin A: Boredoms P: Gauze A: Hanatarash N: The Blue Hearts
Submission Date:
08 Dec 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
The Marketplace – An excerpt from Steve’s new novel, White Gardens
Excerpt:
Saturday, December 12, 2007, 22:00; Ameya Yokocho, Ueno, Tokyo, Japan: Rain drips from the metal stanchions of the railway tracks, forms puddles on the scarred concrete. Great clouds of steam billow along the alleys, obscuring food stalls, knife sharpeners, and moneylenders. Gas lamps poke their buttery light into the darkness and, as the steam evaporates, Osamu steps from an unlighted doorway. His grey douchuugi covering his midnight-blue faux-Prada suit. Generator-driven neon highlights the jet variations of Osamu’s hair, kaleidoscoping the crop with twisting primary flashes. He bows, more a dip of the head, to the bouncer standing outside the Buson Bar...
Steve Finbow’s playlist prompted by seven words selected at random from Protest!:
P: Nature - Wood Beez by Scritti Politti R: Adrift - On Some Faraway Beach by Brian Eno O: Face - Gangsters by The Specials T: Happy - Use Somebody by Kings of Leon E: Vagrant - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars & Tom Waits S: Sea - Endless Sleep by Jody Reynolds T: Nothing - Kill Your Idols by Sonic Youth
Submission Date:
06 Nov 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
balzac of the badlands
Excerpt:
The café is full of locals. Shift workers. Railwaymen. The unemployed. The steam from the coffee machine hangs in the air above our heads like the London sky outside. I can smell leatherette, dried ketchup, mustard and the sweet whiff of marijuana. I take out my notebook as I slip a tricky piece of egg yolk and the butt of a sausage into my mouth, my head turned sideways so I can eat and read at the same time. Tuesday 7th May, SB goes missing. Last seen lunchtime 2pm, Palmers Green, getting into black Saab with three guys, look like Kurds. Friends, relatives, boyfriend – nothing. Thursday 9th May, Mr. Beckford goes missing. Last seen morning, 6 a.m., home Muswell Hill. Wife, employees, friends – nothing. A piece of black pudding crumbles as I fork it, a large fatty piece falls into my second egg yolk turning it a purpley orange. Now it looks like an embryo. Toss!...
B: The Amorous Humphrey Plugg - Scott Walker L: Merry Xmas Everybody - Noddy Holder A: New Face in Hell - Mark E Smith C: Shangri-La - Ray Davies K: Live Bed Show - Jarvis Cocker H: Anything Goes - Cole Porter E: Too Much Monkey Business - Chuck Berry A: Creeque Alley - John and Michelle Phillips T: Philadelphia - Howard Devoto H: I Don't Mind - Pete Shelley
Submission Date:
07 Oct 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
advertisement
Excerpt:
A middle-aged man in search of a monkey. And I don’t mean Attenborough. A middle-aged man balancing on rafters. He's in here somewhere, he’s thinking. Here in the dark. Here among the cobwebs. Somewhere here. Must be. Living with the spiders. Luke the Sock Monkey. Loft dweller. In here somewhere, surely. The smell of cardboard and dust. Cobwebs and fibreglass rolls; blackened candyfloss. Here must be treasure. He fully realises that most went to the cubs’ jumble sale a long time ago, but not all of it. There will still be relics...
B: Needle and the Damage Done - Neil Young L: All You Fascists - Woody Guthrie A: How Soon Is Now - The Smiths C: Tube Disasters - Flux of Pink Indians K: Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday H: Cut-out Witch - Guided by Voices E: Waterloo Sunset - The Kinks A: Telstar - The Tornados T: Axel F - Harold Faltermeyer H: Green Onions - Booker T & the MGs
Submission Date:
07 Oct 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
a nasty piece of work
Excerpt:
They sat on tiny trendy chairs, saying nothing initially, and Urich hoped that Hunst would turn the big TV on. But Hunst, still not saying anything, left the room and went into another, which was lit up by a red light. Within a minute, he returned, smiling, and carrying a metal box. This he placed on a table. Then he said something unsettling, and random.
“You do seem like a good egg,” he muttered, opening the lid of the metal box, “but I think you’d be happier if you were just a bit fried"...
Matthew is the author of The Red Men. Here’s his Top 8 book/shopping-related playlist:
B: The Past Is A Grotesque Animal – Of Montreal (Electro-epic stream of intellectual consciousness: “I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met. Who could appreciate Georges Bataille. Standing at a Swedish Festival, discussing Story Of The Eye.”) O: Manhattan Research Inc – Raymond Scott (The new plastic sounds and electronic abstractions of Raymond Scott were the sound of the future for advertising in the 1960s. It is his promotional recording for Bendix lauding their futurist division, The Tomorrow People, that Jay Dee aka .J.Dilla sampled for Lightworks from his Donuts album.) O: Moonbeam Levels – Prince (“Yesterday I tried to write a novel but I didn’t know where to begin so I lay down in the grass to feel the world turn.” Unreleased Prince song reveals his aborted foray into fiction.) K: Ulysses – Franz Ferdinand (Beyond the Wizards Sleeve Re-Animation. Everyone should remix Ulysses once in their life.) S: Alice – Tom Waits (Exploring Charles Dodgson’s dangerous love for Alice. “I skate over the ice of your name,” sings Tom, alerting us to Alice’s treacherous second syllable.) H: Paperback Believer – Go Home Productions (A mash-up of The Beatles’ Paperback Writer with The Monkees’ I’m A Believer that I consider to be an expression of faith in the future of the novel.) O: Shadows of Tomorrow – Madvillain featuring Quasimoto (The poetry of Sun Ra inspires multiverse-spanning rap.) P: We Live So Fast – Heaven 17 (The band that critiqued the emptiness of 1980s sex and shopping materialism from a literary perspective, being named after a fictional band in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange.)
Submission Date:
05 Sep 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
frank bulmer’s day off work
Excerpt:
Cameron drove The Baby at a hunting clip, his demeanor privately amused, his aim true. Driving was an expression of his athleticism and his ideology. He regarded the etiquette of the lanes, the democracy of traffic, as a contemptible order devised by the mediocre for their own protection. Their weakness and hesitancy deserved no mercy from him. Dispassionately, he violated these superstitions of lesser men...
L: Walk away Renee - The Left Banke O: What is life - George Harrison V: It’s only love - The Beatles E: All you need is love - The Beatles
Top 4 hate songs:
H: I’m ugly and I don’t know why - The Butt Trumpets A: Mother and child reunion - Randy California (Kapt Kopter and the Fabulous Twirlybirds) T: But you know I love you - Kenny Rogers and the First Edition E: Under my thumb - The Rolling Stones
Submission Date:
08 Aug 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
susie idel
Excerpt:
Rollie’s the apartment manager, a youngish middle-aged guy with dark hair and Hawaiian-type shirts. He seems like a swinger and his bleachy blondy wife with the too- dark tan skin seems like a swinger too, but who’d want to? I think they invite us over once or twice, and I think we don’t go...
The song, poem, play/script and novel I’d like to hear on my death bed:
I want silence on my death bed, or certainly nothing man-made. Perhaps just birdsong.
Submission Date:
03 Jul 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
Carbon
Excerpt:
I am shorter. I can still reach the light switch as before, I can still reach the shelves, my clothes don’t trail, I appear to inhabit the same proportion of space as always; but I am shortening. My cumbersome mouth flaps about my morning mug of tea, morning again. I have become peripheral to myself, to my body. It’s slumped around me, tripping me up. I move about the house avoiding the critical surface of the mirror; what do I care what it reflects?
Mark SaFranko identifies the novel/play/poem/song he wishes he’d written
Script: Allan Scott's adaptation of Daphne DuMaurier's Don’t Look Now. Why? It's utterly perfect. As perfect as the screenplay for, say, Chinatown.
Novel: Dostoyevsky's The Devils. For its uncanny anticipation of a few days that would shake the world.
Poem: An obscure poem by Charles Bukowski called Giving Thanks. For having the balls to say what no one else would dare say.
Song: I'd hardly know where to start. But today I'll take The Pleasures Of The Harbor, the song by Phil Ochs. Why? Because it has a great melody. Don't hear them much nowadays. I'm a sucker for melody.
Submission Date:
08 May 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
hating olivia, an extract from Mark SaFranko's novel
Excerpt:
A video recording of Mark SaFranko reading a short extract from his first Max Zajack novel, Hating Oliviapublished by Murder Slim Press.
Christiana Spens identifies the novel/play/poem/song she wishes she’d written
Novel: The Talented Mr. Ripley. I'm reading it just now, and I'd love to have accomplished that perfect, witty, modest prose.
Play/script: Clueless. Such a great script to read, so much fun, and I adore the doe-eyed sarcasm.
Poem: The Sick Rose by Blake. For whatever reason, it's the poem that always touches me the most.
Song: It's a tie, right now, between This Time Tomorrow by the Kinks and Play With Fire by the Rolling Stones.
Submission Date:
08 May 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
the idiots’ club, the first page of a new, unpublished novel by Christiana Spens
Excerpt:
Clementine died sometime in between the third course and the fourth, but nobody noticed her demise ‘til breakfast time. Emmanuel and Ivana were upstairs together so they didn’t notice anything was strange until the sirens woke them from their sleep. By the time they got downstairs, Angie was in hysterics and a lot of the guests had left already, running away and pretending they had nothing to do with this whole misdemeanour. Ivana realised later that she should have followed them.
DF on John Fante (picture left, from a family album circa 1960): John Fante's unflinching honesty and frankness about his emotions, set a tone for my work. An example of what is possible in modern fiction.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
ask the dust
Excerpt:
Dan kindly gave Beat the Dust permission to publish an extract from the start of his father’s novel ask the dust.
One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under the door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: Now this is an incendiary topic, especially in today’s PC world. Long ago I began to notice that many right-wing or reactionary artists – some so far off the charts they could be considered Nazis or Fascists – were far more interesting than the lefties, both as artists and as personalities. I’ll throw out some names: Dali…Pound…Kerouac…Hamsun…Celine…Mishima (if there was ever a more fascinating or complex human being, I can’t think of one)…Isaac Singer…Simenon…Dostoyevsky. I could drop more, and there are lingering suspicions about others, like Bukowski. Is this just my imagination? A coincidence? Is there more room on the right fringe than the left for lunatics?
DF: Mencken was a brilliant social critic too. And you mentioned Hamsun. I also consider Hesse to be a radical thinker, not a fascist, but a revolutionary. Kafka too. Nietzsche as well. For me, those who set themselves apart, who speak from a sense alienation and anger, are powerful voices.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
chump change
Excerpt:
Dan introduces an extract from his debut novel, chump change:
My first story (undestroyed) was my novel, chump change. Two years in the writing and editing and re-writing. Here's the start of it...
My name is Bruno Dante and what I’m writing about here is what happened. On December 4th, the St. Joseph of Cupertino Hospital alcohol and nut ward in the Bronx, on Moshulo Parkway, let me go. Released me, again. Each time I took their twenty-eight-day cure I found out how much their in-patient charges went up. This last time, I stabbed myself in a blackout and they almost wouldn’t accept me as a patient. This last time was the worst, because all that I could remember seeing when I came around was the blood gushing out my stomach onto my clothes.
Dan Fante is interviewed by Mark SaFranko (continued)
MS: From the beginning I realized that since I had no money I would always have to work a job or jobs to support my artistic pursuits. This in turn meant that I would have to learn to work anywhere at anytime, in fragments, whether fifteen minutes or forty-five or whatever. How about Dan Fante? Take me through a Dan Fante day from morning until night. Has it changed much over the years?
DF: As you know I’ve had a hundred jobs but I’ve always been a hustler. Had I gone to school I might have learned to subsidize myself in an anal academic environment. No such luck. My favorite jobs were the ones I did alone: Cab driver, chauffeur, hotel night manager. These days I get up, have my coffee, then do an hour or more of secretarial snot, answering e-mails and business correspondence, then I write. Writing nurtures me. Stretches me. I keep discovering, turning corners. So far, the pond is still deep enough to catch a decent fish from time to time.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
mooch
Excerpt:
Dan introduces the extract from his second novel, mooch:
The telemarketing business saved my ass and destroyed me simultaneously. Struggling to stay sober and hold off my demons, I found a phone-sales gig hawking computer supplies. I became good at it, slamming the mooch on the other end of the line. Very good. Then, as fate would have it, I met the love of my life (at the time), a crazy ex-lapdancer named Jimmi. Jimmi taught me what real pain was about.
MS: You were once led by a psychic to a forgotten manuscript written by your father that was subsequently published. And you and I have known each other for what has turned out to be many years now, a relationship which has resulted in several rather uncanny events that I won’t go into. Actually they’re so unusual and fortuitous that someone once suggested to me that we were brothers in a past life. Are there unseen energies and powers in life that we will never understand? It’s my feeling that despite the rise of religious fundamentalism, the present age is a spiritual void. There also seem to be more atheists than ever. But it seems to me the height of arrogance to suggest that any of us knows anything one way or the other with such dead certainty. Isn’t mystery at the core of the universe in the end? Shouldn’t that in itself provoke some kind of awe?
DF: My mother, Joyce, was a wonderful Tarot Card reader and a practitioner of Wicca. She taught me card reading. I have done it for over thirty years. But there’s another aspect. I’m also sober quite a while now and have practiced an absolutely necessary spiritual discipline for years in order to contend with my own personal madness. My thinking. My mind.
This has led me to experience several unusual events. I call them spiritual. For instance, last year I was in Italy touring with a rock band. I was alone in my hotel room summarizing a poem to be translated into Italian. The poem was about my mother. She’d been dead for three years but we had never really resolved our differences. For instance, she was very difficult to converse with toward the end. Very absolute. And very caustic. I was relieved when she died, not saddened.
As I was transcribing the poem she appeared in front of me in the form of energy – I could feel her in the room. It was overpowering. I began talking to her. It was as real to me as you are. And it was absolute and clear. Lately, I’ve started to talk to people like my dead brother and my father. Usually, on long rides when I’m alone, I experience a kind of conversation with these guys. There it is. Go figure.
Submission Date:
03 Apr 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
86'd
Excerpt:
Dan introduces an extract from a chapter from his forthcoming novel, 86’d, (which will be published by U.S. Publisher Harper Perennial in September 2009. Harper Perennial will also reissue Dan’s previously out of print novels chump change, mooch, and spitting off tall buildings in December 2009):
My brother was a very smart guy, much smarter than me. But, like me, he had a nasty alcohol jonz. This story is dedicated to him. Included here is a chapter from 86’d called my brother was dead…
On April 6, 1978, 35-year-old Emmett Grogan was found dead on an F Train subway car in New York City, the victim of a heart attack, possibly induced by chronic heroin use. This has been disputed and alternative theories exist.
Submission Date:
07 Feb 2009
Category:
Novel extract
In Chap-book
Title:
ringolevio
Excerpt:
It was the last Sunday in November of 1965 and his twenty-first birthday when Kenny Wisdom landed at Idlewild airport, which had been renamed John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
A lot of things had changed. Kenny's parents had moved to a different section of Brooklyn a few years back. He took the crumpl...
AS: Which one writer first inspired you to start writing? HJ: I've always wanted to write, was fascinated by language. I remember being four and standing under the kitchen table listening to my Nan and Aunts talking about deeply personal things and having the realization that there were so many ways to use magical words.... I come from a very unliterary family; we had few books, though I was always desperate to read more. My mother would moan that my nose was always in a book.... I learnt to read early and couldn't stop.... I started stealing penguin classics from WH Smiths (I figured they must be the right thing to read) when I was 10 and fell in love with Joyce.... Didn't understand it, but knew it was extraordinary....
AS: Is it true you were kicked out of GCSE English? Did that affect your desire to become a writer? HJ: Yes, the bastards.... Wouldn't let me submit my poetry so I lacked enough course work. The teacher concerned took great pleasure in denying me entry.... Bitter old cow....
AS: Who was your teenage pin-up? HJ: Lou Reed.... Boys in eye liner....
AS: What would be your Death Row meal? HJ: Venison in red currant sauce, a bottle of Amarone.... good cheeses, Italian ice cream.... Sounds good....
Submission Date:
02 Sep 2008
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
wounding
Excerpt:
There is no gratitude in mercy and in medicine Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
She is reminded of an early love. Her feet are tucked behind the legs of her chair. She leans forward on to a small round table, just big enough for two, child-like, her elbows eith...
DAD: I don't like the title of this novel. What's so fucking obvious about it? BG: They were all eating cream of wheat, get it, cream of wheat.
DAD: Your mother's not dead. Why are you pretending your mother is dead? You know that shit's gonna make her cry. She's always crying. Is that what you're trying to do, make your mother cry? BG: I know she's not, but you remember that one day don't you, the train tracks, the macaroni and cheese? All the ants surrounding our picnic table.
DAD: What did I tell you about picking your goddamn nose and writing stories about it? BG: You told me it was ok to use my brother's hamster as a basketball and shoot him into your old shoeboxes we set up all over the living room floor. We stopped when its little eye popped and bled on the carpet and mom was boiling water for tea.
DAD: I just told you to stop talking about your mother, and her tits, why are you mentioning her tits in this novel? BG: You never said no to me. Not even when she potty trained me. I shit my pants until I was 10.
DAD: At least you had pants. Who bought you your fucking pants? BG: Mom.
Submission Date:
02 Sep 2008
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
a summation of all things obvious (atlantic city blues)
Excerpt:
I was picking my nose and rolling the boogers into little balls and listening to whatever stupid shit was on the radio. I usually roll the window down and stick my hand out and let the wind blow them off the tips of my fingers but it was raining. I tried to flick one on the passenger side floor but ...
Q: What's in the bag? A: A pen, a wallet, a notebook, a paperback, an asthma inhaler and my insulin kit.
Q: Where have you been recently? A: Berlin, Rome, Tangier, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo.
Q: Drink much while you were there? A: Try the Schwarze Café, Bar San Calisto, Dean's Bar, Grassroots Tavern, Vesuvio, Hank's Bar, Bar Kamiya.
Q: Who should I take on holiday? Woodrell, Nunn, Gutierrez, Miller, Thom Jones and that Acker chick if you like it rough. A: How long you staying? Until the shrimp cocktail's finished.
Submission Date:
05 Jun 2008
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
nothing matters – chapter one of a novel in progress
Excerpt:
Leaning over the coffin-style freezer, I search around the butterball turkeys until I find her. She isn’t quite solid. I pull her out & leave her in the backyard to thaw. While the sun warms her, I iron her outfit & search for her bobble hat, finding it tucked under a pile of muscle mags in her bedr...
SJ: You’re a hot sexy stud muffin MC: Um, you’re thinking of Joe Ridgwell SJ: Oh…yeah you’re right MC: People get us confused all the time; he’s my altar ego SJ: You mean alt… MC: I’m a pigment of his imagination SJ: You mean, piglet MC: Hah! you got me; feels good don’t it SJ: Feels real good MC: So, we hard? SJ: Yeah, we hard
Submission Date:
05 Jun 2008
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
shy girl killing - chapter one of a novel
Excerpt:
A boy goes out walking his dog. Late evening, dark, raining. Wearing pajamas and a coat over. Bedtime, but has to walk the dog first, every night before bed.
The dog snarls, breaks free, chasing something in the night. Big dog, angry now, growling, running full speed into the darkness. The bo...
ZA: Both of your novels satirize the American Dream; specifically, Lounge Lizard is a vicious indictment of the Reagan years and the "ME" generation. Do you consider your writing to be, to some extent, social criticism?
SaFranko: I would say yes, insofar as you’re reading the inner life of an outsider, a malcontent who happens to be stuck inside a machine that’s antagonistic, or at least not sympathetic to, his deepest self. Max is a man out of step with the world. But at no time does anything political interest him, or me, in the least, which is not to say either of us is unaware of what’s going on in the world. So that’s a modifying element here. I suppose you could call it informal social criticism.
Submission Date:
12 May 2008
Category:
Novel extract
In Podcast and Chap-book
Title:
no strings attached - chapter one of a novel awaiting publication
Excerpt:
Clever, I remember thinking at the time. Very, very clever. Because I had it all figured out. At least that’s what I told myself. You know how it is. Y...
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