LIBRARY artefact #021
IT WAS THE ‘90s
(Prior to the mid-‘90s, no-one had ever asked me to do any public readings of my work and to be honest there didn’t seem to be any point, as most of my writing was for comic books which don’t tend to make for great live performance.
(However, in 1998, editor Sarah Champion asked me to contribute to a collection of contemporary travel writing she was assembling, entitled Fortune Hotel.
(For “It was the 90s”, I chose to come out with a gonzo remix of my May 1994 trip to Kathmandu in the company of friend and Mixers bandmate Ulric Kennedy.
(During this escapade, I had a peak experience, alien abduction, drug hallucination, Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, temporal lobe seizure, or something which fit all those descriptions and more – an event which completely changed my life and inspired the cosmology of my Vertigo comic book series The Invisibles. I’ve spoken about this experience numerous times since then but aside from the journal entries I made in the immediate aftermath of the incident, this is the closest to a real-time account of what happened. On the downside, the full detailed description of the trip was edited down to its heavily truncated form here on the grounds that no-one would care to read about a grandiose drug hallucination! Readers familiar with my various retellings of this experience will have heard more furnished accounts but its cynical framing here as a shameful shamanic lads’ weekend provides an unusual context!
(I also contributed a story for Sarah’s Disco 2000 anthology - entitled I’m A Policeman, it was reprinted in 1998 as part of a collection of my short stories and plays to that time, entitled Lovely Biscuits by Oneiros Books – more on that to come…)