This Is Memorial Device

David Keenan

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571330843
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017
ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTH
LRB BOOK OF THE WEEK
CAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTH
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE

This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock.

It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends.

Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction to Why I Did It
• 1. Hidden Occluded by Chemistry by Water
• 2. This Is So Pointlessly Wrong
• 3. Daytime Hangovers That Can Only Be Remedied by a Session of Furious Masturbation
• 4. The Next Thing I Knew Remy and Regina Were Dating (If You Can Believe That)
• 5. Rimbaud Was Desperate or Iggy Lived It
• 6. Everyone Was Looking for That Mythical Ménage à Trois
• 7. Wisps of Blonde Sawdust (Blonde Stardust)
• 8. A Beautiful Form of Self-Scarification and Of Course Endlessly Attractive
• 9. He Had Tried to Have His Testicles Removed on the NHS
• 10. The Golden Light Coming From the Window and Spilling Over the Pavement Like a Perfect Dream
• 11. Poor Condition With Promo Stickers
• 12. A Likely Candidate for Sex for Marriage for Kidnap for Another Kind of Future Altogether
• 13. Kitty-Catting into the Night Burglarising My Dreams
• 14. Scatman and Bobbin the Dynamic Duo
• 15. The Day of the Frozen Vampires
• 16. Holdin Cells fur Oerweight Ballerinas
• 17. Chasing a Twenty-Year-Old Girl Halfway Round the World and Setting Up Shop in a War Zone
• 18. This Is Where I’m Gonna Sit It Out and Then Impregnate the Future
• 19. A Minor Cog a Small Life a Little Bird
• 20. I Thought They Had Cut the Top of His Head Off and Were Spooning Out His Brains
• 21. Every Disappointment Was Like Something Awarded You in Heaven
• 22. Ships Rising Up and Passing Through the Water Full of Sunlight and Memory the Tricks That It Plays
• 23. An Inoculation Against Spirit-Devouring Life as Practised in the West Coast of Scotland
• 24. Blood and Water Inside Me That Needs an Example
• 25. My Dream Bride Which Is Of Course My Mother but Not With a Vagina Please
• 26. I Saw All These Dead Moons Circling a Star
• Appendix A: Memorial Device Discography
• Appendix B: A Necessarily Incomplete Attempt to Map the Extent of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978–1986
• Appendix C: This Is Memorial Device
• Appendix D: A Navigational Aid
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright