JACK SKELLEY ON LOOKING FOR A KISS BY RICHARD CABUT
In youth, time opens slowly. In age, time closes quickly. In Richard Cabut’s memory-based novel, time is unfrozen and flows back and forth. Somewhere in the 80s, narrator Robert sees “his future self writing about himself in his diary and those events being written about, all at the same time. Quite a trick.” Mirroring the layers of tense and setting are the spiky sublimity of post-punk London, edgy acid insights, hot and dirty romance, and a polyphony of lines that reel like the snarling riffs of the book’s namesake
song by New York Dolls. Fluidly, sometimes magically, this love quest reflects the vortex of consciousness itself. What the narrator terms “the howling infinities.” Presto! Quite a trick.
Richard Cabut
is a British author, journalist, poet, playwright, and musician. He is the author of Looking for a Kiss and the reason why we’re gathered here today. His other books include Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances and Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night. Disorderly Magic and Other Disturbances is a book of poetry that mixes magic, culture, mystery, memoir, history, and melodrama. It is an invocation, an evocation, with dreamlike freedom of movement between past and present, from personal to universal. Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night is an original anthology collection of insight, analysis and conversation that charts the course of punk from its underground origins, when it was an un-formed and utterly alluring near-secret – back in the garage, when the cult still had no name.
Jack Skelley
is the author of the novel The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023), and Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West Press, 2024). Jack’s other books include Monsters (Little Caesar Press, 1982), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press, 2021), and Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX, 2022).