World Famous In San Francisco

Tuesday, May 20, Books Inc., San Francisco

After rehearsing for this coming Thursday’s show, I had a couple drinks at daddy’s, then the 2 for 1 at Midnight Sun, equaling five, sinking disdainfully into more self-hatred, smoldering at the hideous face of Adam Sandler illuminated on giant screens just above me. Finding my way eventually into Books Inc., whereupon I eagerly listened to author Alistair McCartney reading from his first novel. I sat in a folding chair and watched quietly as faggot after faggot not altogether quietly snickered at me for apparently stinking of vodka. “I’d like to know what the hell they were all douching with!”

http://www.myspace.com/alistairmccartney

Apparently, our young Mr. McCartney, Alistair, (not to be confused with his make believe nemesis, also Beatle, McCartney, Paul, and referred to with no small amount of enmity and spleen under the letter “M”.) was quite the young obsessive, hunkering over many a volume of The World Book Encyclopedia , a young boy in his native Perth, Western Australia, imagining far too much, stoking the fires of his own horrid pessimism and putrid sexuality
You just don’t know if he’s yankin’ ya, gankin’ ya, or just plain making shit up. He is clearly no stranger to the fine art of exaggeration or embellishment.
Alistair McCartney’s first novel, The End of The World Book, is an encyclopedic romp through the author’s faggoty and often beguiling memory, intertwining fiction, memoir and even some cultural history. For instance, and beginning alphabetically with the letter A, which stands for Adelaide, the author’s mother’s hometown, wherein occurred the murder spree of young boys whose bodies are discovered in champagne crates, or the letter “M” for Macramé, “The most significant art form of the decade known as the 1970’s, was undoubtedly macramé, that coarse lacework produced by weaving cords into a pattern.”
Layered like a prose poem, cleverly obsessive and foreboding, it’s been called an alphabetical guide to the apocalypse. From Kafka, Franz to Krueger, Freddy, McCartney meanders through history, antiquity and the very near future, stopping now and then to perversely look up the pant leg of a particularly hairy uncle or to admire the sunburn lines left by a hooligan’s wife beater.
He’s not from San Francisco, although he lives in Los Angeles with his partner artist Tim Miller, so not a lot of sense in regards as to why I’m writing about him for World Famous in San Francisco. I just wanted to give a shout out to independent bookstores in our fair city.