I went to the launch of a new publication last night – called Kakafonie – a mixture of essays, stories, poetry – in various languages – and drawings.

The creator and co-editor of Kakafonie, John Holten, who is from Ireland but talks like a French person with perfect English, is the real deal.

He has long hair and a beard, wears a cheap suit jacket and an extremely cheap tie, and walks around wiping the hair out of his face and talking about Georges Perec and other literary obscurities (Perec is not obscure in France) with an urgency that puts you back in time: specifically Paris, 1898 (or 1968).

Holten’s interest in the obscure is refreshing and not, from what I could tell in the short time that I spoke to him, affected. I have a sense that he was born fifty or a hundred and fifty years too late, and, at least in Dublin, looking for an audience that does not exist – but that’s a cause for celebration, not criticism.

Holten said he wants to publish five issues of Kakafonie and move on to something new.

Kakafonie was also launched in Berlin and Oslo, and I got the sense, though nothing was said by Holten (and this is probably just me projecting), that Dublin is a cultureless shithole compared to Berlin and Oslo. Now that I think about it, I’d bet that Oslo is also a cultureless shithole.

I deeply enjoyed a conversation between Holten and Kakafonie contributor Karl Whitney about Whitney’s essay on Georges Perec, an obscure French writer who wrote an unorthodox autobiography by describing the same street again and again over a period of six years (originally he meant for the project to last twelve years, but perhaps he got bored).

This is a good essay, and if you download the pdf from the website, go straight to it. It’s the last piece.

During the conversation, Whitney looked extremely uncomfortable, as though he’d never spoken in front of a room before, and never wanted to again – and this made him credible and endearing, as compared to the man who read his piece of fiction, who overacted.