Genet and Chris Kraus in Copenhagen with Iceage

"I believed he’d shared wine with Heraclitus, smoked opium with Baudelaire, broken bread with Cioran"

The following is from my Zagreb Book Review Column published March 2020. Read the intro to my columns about reading and travelling here.

The UV Race toured Europe in 2014. When we were in the UK, we stayed with Chris Tipton from the record label and promoter Upset The Rhythm. I spoke to him of the difficulty I’d had in finding Genet’s The Thief’s Journal. He immediately pulled a copy from his bookshelf and gifted it to me, a beautiful gesture, and one that I honoured a couple of days later, abandoning this book in a bunk bed of a Belgian hostel on the final night of tour… I was halfway through, and losing a book when it has its teeth in you is an awful experience… the world you’ve grown accustomed to, suddenly inaccessible… the voice that has comforted or stirred your passions, silent… I try to be equal to the gesture at any opportunity if someone is browsing my books and exclaims their surprise at seeing a wanted book, I generally insist they take it home, half of my library is out th…