YEAHS & NAHS RETURN!
ft. Thomas Pynchon, Sammo Hung, Important Cinema Club + more!
Drongoloids!
How the bloody hell are ya? After too long an absence, I wanna welcome ya back to YEAHS & NAHS, YNR’s recap and recommendations column for paid subscribers!
Now, these were initially weekly, and I’m hoping they’ll go back to being weekly soon enough. Apologies to my paid subs, but the past six months have been a bit hectic for yours truly. I lost my job, I got very very sick with COVID (and then a nasty flu), I stopped taking my meds, and my debut novel NOCK LOOSE finally came out July 1 to critical acclaim! As great as that critical acclaim is, that, and months of interstate travel for various writers’ festivals seriously muddled my pretty fragile mental health, and I’ve been expending a lot of energy ducking mania and the inevitable heavy hitting down swing, which has finally caught up to me with full prejudice this past two weeks.
What this means is that a regular weekly column is/has been hard to maintain. Hopefully things balance out a bit soon, and I can keep my substack duties nice and regular.
Bipolar etc is a bitch of a thing that you’ve got to ride like one of those bucking bulls in a half-empty cowboy bar. I know the key to substack is consistency, but the very nature of said bucking bull makes consistency near impossible for me on a long term basis. Still, a cure (lobotomy with sledgehammer) may be just around the corner—if so, consider these weekly ramblings all yours!
Let’s hop to it anyway, eh?
THE ROUND-UP!
where I catch you up on what’s been going on…
Buy NOCK LOOSE…it’s very good!
NOCK LOOSE has come out since we last talked here and I could not be happier with the reception. Major journals/critics have compared it to Joyce, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, and have generally praised its ambition, scope, style, and most importantly to me, sense of fun.
This is a post-modern novel in a country which has actively avoided post-modernism, published by an independent press in a state whose cultural output goes largely ignored by the literati in Melbourne and Sydney. To have it selling as well as it has been, being received and reviewed as well as it has been, truly makes me feel like the decades I’ve spent honing a voice critics kindly/repeatedly describe as a “fever dream” has been kinda sorta worth it, almost.
But there’s a lot more to do, and a lot more NOCK LOOSE news, reviews, and events to come (I’m appearing at The Blue Mountain Writers Festival this coming weekend, in fact, so if you’re about, come say hi).
Here’s how you, dear Drongoloid, can help my little book: buy it, review it, insist your book club read it, post it to socials and tag me—any and all of the above makes a massive difference in Australia’s relatively tiny book market, seriously.
Don’t believe my prattle? Here’s a quick list of the major NOCK LOOSE reviews and interviews:
Eli McLean in The Australian Book Review (made me cry).
Dan Hogan in Overland (also made me cry).
An interview with Ramona Magazine.
Russell Thompson in Good Reading Magazine.
Academic waffle in The Conversation.
The Lane Bookshop comparing it to The Age of Innocence.
and here’s my interview with OzLit substack megastar
, who was kind enough to describe the book as “genius.”
Like I said, there’s more news, interviews, panels, and reviews to come, and I’ll be uploading the audio of the Melbourne launch with Evelyn Araluen here sometime this week! Until then, buy the book! Order it into your local bookshop! Demand publisher’s hurry up and get on the 4 other finished manuscripts I’m sitting on! And yes, tag me in all the NOCK LOOSE adjacent memes you see about! I love them.
The Battler is going off!
In the couple of months I was kicking about Melbourne, I was stopped by around 10 or so fans at places as diverse as the national jousting tournament (more on this later) and the Australian ballet. It is a surreal experience to have a stranger peel off from a pack of their friends to approach you with a John Hinckley Jr. twinkle in their eyes and introduce themselves with their best Japanese Sopranos impersonation.
It’s truly humbling.
We’ve had so many guests, goofs, and gags since I last wrote about it here. The best way to keep up with what’s going on is to tune in weekly wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got big things coming.
p.s. if you’re a listener, send us your merch ideas! All of our best thoughts re this so far will land both Tim and I in court/our Pine Gap minder will be miffed w. us, so your input is required.
Talkn’ NOCK LOOSE’s film influences on RTR.fm’s Movie Squad
I was recently on RTR.fm, Perth’s primo community radio station, talking about the cinematic influences of NOCK LOOSE with local legends and film buffs Simon Miraudo and Tristan Fidler as part of their show, Movie Squad.
It’s a fun little chat, where I cover about a 10th of the filmic influences that went into a book that includes Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins and Muriel’s Wedding in its DNA.
I’m dropping a big guide to the novel’s influences (film, literature, music, and beyond) here soon, so tune into this if you want a little taste!
Talkn’ Cuck Country Blues
Right here on YNR, I wrote about Australia as American vassal state, and the humiliation that inevitably entails. Check it out!
Cuck Country Blues
Before we start you should uhhh totally buy my critically acclaimed debut novel NOCK LOOSE if you haven’t already, cheers!welcome back to YNR. Sorry I’ve been a bit absent. I’m back on track (kinda) now. Every subscription keeps me chugging. $5 goes a long way for me rn. Love ya, cheers!
YEAHS & NAHS…
ft. Thomas Pynchon, Sammo Hung, Important Cinema Club + more!
That’s enough of my blathering about the doggone book, yeah? Let’s get into what you’re here for: those good ol’ YEAHS & NAHS!
Now, the system has been even more refined since we last did this. Gone is the old “nah, yeah” (meaning “yeah”) and “yeah, nah” (meaning nah) simply because what few American subscribers I have kept shouting “WHAT THE SAM HECK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?!” over the heavy gunfire that dampens so much of their conversation.
It can’t get any simpler than this:
Yeah = stuff I like 👍 and reckon you’ll like 👍
Nah = stuff I don’t like 👎 that sucks big time 👎
Even the smoothest of seppolopods can follow that, ay?
But hold up…
YEAHS & NAHS are for paid subscribers only. If you want to become an S-tier Drongoloid, then you can sign right on up. It’s just $5 a month. It’s my sole source of income atm, so your support truly is appreciated. I was back at the dole office just this morning and I forgot how badly it makes me want to [REDACTED] myself Mishima style on the steps of parliament.
Anyhow, let’s go!
YEAH…
Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket
Cracking open a Pynchon novel can feel like whipping open the newspaper to the funny pages then being smacked in the back of the head with An Encyclopedia of Dirigible Parts & Pilots (or some such) so hard that you slam head first into said funny pages so hard a big imprint of Heathcliff or whoever permanently tattoos itself across your forehead.
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