RECURRING RHTYHMS

​If it wasn’t for Rhythms etc… thanks then to the mag and DES COWLEY for this amazing review of Stranded. I love the way Cowley so easily bats off the petty carping that still seems to haunt the book. The two main gripes were/are that a) the author himself is present as ‘I’ in the narrative, and b) the author’s choices, in terms of the emphases the book places. Well, umm, a) like you’ve never heard of the new journalism? and, umm, like, the author wasn’t a player in this story? The criticism was “outdated even” in 1996. And b) for most people who didn’t like my choices it was because they were my choices and not theirs (funny that); as Cowley says, “Walker mostly got things right. And if he stumbled now and again, it’s still the case he was streaks ahead of the pack when it came to grasping the magnitude of the moment.” With the surfeit of lauding/documentation on whether Nick Cave, the GoBetweens or the Triffids and others these days, it seems as if the world is finally catching up. But who else was suss/game enough to do it 25 years ago? In full here.