I hadn't read a Stewart Home book for years when I started the new one, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Let me be more precise. I hadn't read a Home book properly since 1996, when I spent six months in a room in Brixton, so damp it had plants from outside growing up the insides of the walls, trying to write about him but unable to build a journalistic structure into which Home's work might fit. I have never counted the thousands of words I drafted. I just laboured, and laboured, then gave it up. I have the print-out somewhere in one of several archive boxes, packed away with the books, leaflets, articles, pamphlets, flyers, punk CDs and 'Will Self Is Stupid' badges Home gave me to help with my researches. So many different authors, formats, purports; except that all of it was really done by him.

LRB 9 May 2002 | PDF Download