Books to Bury Me With: Steve Finbow

The book I’d want to take with me to the grave:

Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time argues that death is a personal and non-transferable event, the most intimate experience, yet one we cannot directly experience. Upon dying, we cease to exist and have no subjective experience of death, making it unique compared to other life aspects where we project our being into an inauthentic future. Our entire existence is a being-towards-death. Having nearly died multiple times, testing this theory feels like a terminal dichotomy paradox where we never reach death but continually experience fleeting and forgotten orgasms of authenticity in our movements-toward-death, our Vorlaufen.

The first book that hit me like a ton of bricks:

Arthur Rimbaud – Complete Works, Selected Letters. I read extensively as a teenager – Lovecraft, Hassel, Richard Allen’s skinhead books – but discovering Rimbaud through Patti Smith changed my life. Poems like “Voyelles” made me question what language is and what it can do. Rimbaud led me to Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Surrealism, and eventually to French philosophy and critical theory.

The book that’s seen more of my tears, coffee stains, and cigarette burns:

J.G. Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition. I rarely cry. I don’t drink coffee. I have never smoked. This collection of interconnected stories remains shocking and relevant. I return to it as if it were a warm bath full of blood and razor blades. Ballard employs his usual threesome of doctor, psychiatrist, and wife/lover to explore society’s obsessions with violence and celebrity. Instead of tears, coffee stains, and cigarette butts, there is blood, semen, and syringe scars.

The book that shook my world like a goddamn hurricane:

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari – Anti-Oedipus. If Heidegger is humourless, Deleuze is hilarious. D&G take chisels and hammers to the whole edifice of psychiatry – no one is safe, not Marx, not Nietzsche, not Freud. Their theory of schizoanalysis – a state of free-flowing, unbounded desire as resistance against capitalist society – generates interesting quotes: “Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!” and “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.” Revolutionary.

The book I wish I’d discovered when my liver was still intact:

I wish I hadn’t discovered all those books that no serious-minded person over the age of 25 should read – all of Kerouac, apart from the opening pages of Visions of Cody; most of Bukowski, especially the poetry; anything by Huncke and Cassady. Drunken and drugged exploits are fine, but when they are related in over-written or badly written shock-schlock prose (your choice), they soon become superficial and embarrassing.

The book I’d shove into everyone’s hands if I were king of the world:

Stephen Greenblatt – The Swerve. I recommend this book to everyone, but most ignore me. Greenblatt recounts how the rediscovery of Lucretius’s ancient poem On the Nature of Things by 15th-century scholar Poggio Bracciolini sparked the intellectual movement that led to the Renaissance. The text, with its radical ideas about atomism and the material nature of the universe, challenged the dominant religious and philosophical views of the time, contributing to the modern world’s emphasis on secularism, science, and humanism. This serves as an antidote to all the religious quackery that inexplicably still exists today. It also shows that, in a few cases – da Vinci, Mirandola, Dürer, Montaigne, Cervantes, and Shakespeare – the human mind has not progressed in 600 years.

The book that nearly drove me to madness:

James Ellroy – The Cold Six Thousand. I love Ellroy. I hate this book. I have read American Tabloid three times and Blood’s a Rover twice. I have tried to read The Cold Six Thousand on several occasions and failed each time. The staccato prose grates and hinders the flow of the narrative. Ellroy usually gets this right, but in this novel, it is overdone and almost a self-parody. I admire experimental fiction, but he overuses sparseness and multiple perspectives to the point where I felt claustrophobic. I have left two unfinished copies in hotel rooms and one – pardon the ecological pollution – I threw into the Gulf of Thailand to bore the native reef-dwelling convict-surgeonfish to death.

The book I can’t keep my hands off of, no matter how many times I’ve read it:

Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two. These three novellas – Great Expectations and My Death, My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini being the plus two – are introductions to Acker’s themes of appropriation, plagiarism, desire, trauma, identity, and power. If I am blocked while writing, I return to these texts to see how she did it. Maybe this time I will see the joins – some are obvious, others not. Acker was the force behind the concept and construction of The Mindshaft, my book on gay SM bars in NYC in the 1970s. For further reading, see Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker and the work of McKenzie Wark.

The book I’d hide in the back of my closet, pretending I’m too highbrow for it:

Nesbø’s Harry Hole books. I like a good crime novel, and, along with Sallis’s Lew Griffin novels, this series is one of the best. What I enjoy is that the heroes in these books are aggressive masochists rather than passive sadists – they enjoy a good beating – as does Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

The book that left a scar I wish I could forget:

Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. The story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where one million Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa were murdered in 100 days. Gourevitch interviews survivors, uncovering the meticulous planning behind the genocide, reflecting on the darkest aspects of human behaviour – the Bataillean profane, where violence and hatred dominate. The title comes from a letter by seven Adventist pastors who sought refuge in a hospital, only to be killed the next day. Amidst this horror, Gourevitch captures the resilience and humanity of survivors, hinting at the Bataillean sacred, the potential for renewal and redemption even in the face of ultraviolence and tragedy. The prose is as sharp as a machete – the weapon of choice during the genocide.

The author who made me think, “Now that’s a soul in torment”:

E.M. Cioran. “Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.” “Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.” And to start a dialogue with Heidegger: “Man accepts death but not the hour of his death.” “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” “Death is not altogether useless: after all, it is because of death that we value life.” “We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it.”

The book I’d get a tattoo of if I had the nerve:

Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons. I don’t have tattoos but maybe I would have something from the “Objects” section of this book. Stein’s language challenges traditional notions of meaning and syntax. I can envisage asking the tattooist for, “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass. A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange.” I would want a Morandi vase but end up with a Sonnenrad. When younger, my friends had red-rose tattoos on their upper arms; one had a yellow rose just to be different – “A Rose. A single image is not splendor. Dirty is yellow. A sign of more in not mentioned, a sack in is not silent, in between.” That yellow rose now looks like a Brussels sprout. Stein’s description of a carafe as “a blind glass” plays with the idea that objects and their meanings are not fixed but constantly shifting, blurring boundaries between categories, this anticipates Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics and Derrida’s theory of différance.

 

The book that made me question everything I thought I knew:

V. S. Ramachandran – Phantoms in the Brain. This one is difficult because if I am not challenged by the ideas in books I read, I cannot fully engage with or enjoy them. Most recently, this book, suggested by my partner and collaborator, Irina Vladi, rocked the foundation of my understanding of the human brain and body by exploring the world of neurological disorders and their strange symptoms, including Phantom Limb Syndrome: sensations, pain, or movements in amputated limbs. Hemineglect: ignoring one half of the body or space as if it doesn’t exist. And my favourite – Capgras Syndrome: believing loved ones are impostors.

 

The book that’s so damn good I’d never loan it out:

Francis Bacon – Catalogue Raisonné. A five-volume publication documenting the entire oeuvre of my favourite 20th-century artist. It includes 584 of Bacon’s paintings, around 800 illustrations spread across 1,538 pages, sketches, photographs, and images of Bacon’s furniture. I treated myself to it a few months before leaving France and discovered that, not only would I never loan it out, I couldn’t, because it’s too heavy. I also have another 50 books on Bacon – I am not sure why…

The book that’s been my companion through the darkest nights:

W.G. Sebald – The Rings of Saturn. The joy of Sebald’s prose, his fusion of biography, fiction, memoir, history, and photography, is the perfect antidote to the stress and anxiety of contemporary life – even though his subject matter can be extremely dark.

The book I’d throw in someone’s face during a heated argument:

In my pretentious teenage years, I had a one-volume hardback edition of the fiction of Franz Kafka – the book looked like and had the weight of a brick. I would use it on those who think Kafka is depressing and repeatedly on people who do not find Nabokov funny.

The book that reminds me of a lost love or regret:

John Cage – Silence: Lectures and Writings. Cage writes, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” When a long-term relationship ends, this is blatantly not true.

The book I wish I could have written, but know I never could:

Michel Foucault – The History of Sexuality, 1-4. Foucault wrote this while dying from AIDS. He knew he didn’t have much time to finish it, so his prose is more lucid than in previous books but his mind is still frighteningly complex. I know my mind does not and cannot work on that archaeological level. In each of the books I have written, Foucault has been on my shoulder (if I had a parrot, I would call it Foucault), daring me to go deeper, to move beyond the limits, to uncover the underlying structures that shape how people think and speak about various subjects, including death, illness, and sexuality. But I always feel that I have failed to be as bathyspheric.

The book that makes me want to drink myself into oblivion:

Derek Raymond – I Was Dora Suarez. Raymond’s “Factory” series questions the structures and themes of crime fiction. It is literate, violent, and disturbing. I thought, “You asshole, that’s so good,” and probably had one more beer than I would usually have. I had the same response to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, thinking, “You bastard! What’s the point of writing novels?”

The book that’s been my refuge from the world’s cruelty:

Gordon Burn – Happy Like Murderers. To say I go to this book for comfort might seem strange as it is the story of serial killers Fred and Rosemary West. Burn submerges himself in the depraved banality and psychological mechanisms of this couple, exploring themes of incest, rape, torture, and murder. When I had finished reading it for the first time, I had the overwhelming idea that the majority of humanity is – in comparison – decent, loving, and charitable. I don’t believe that, but at least I had the feeling for a fleeting five minutes.