H. P. Tinker - Surreal messages from another world about this one

HP Tinker, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity, Social Disease, 2007.


"The first two pages of the story You can probably guess my trajectory may be enough to prove that when HP Tinker is writing, all trajectories are unguessable. One thing you can be fairly certain of, and that is, in whichever direction the narrative suddenly veers, famous people from the past and present are fairly likely to materialise. Thus, in a surreal channel-hopping daze, it is possible to witness the arrival and swift departure of Wagner, Lewis Carroll, Jay MacInerney, Max Ernst, Magritte, Brett Easton Ellis, Aldous Huxley, Paul Gauguin, Simone de Beauvoir, Tom Paulin, Thomas Pynchon, Robin Williams, and Ezra Pound, all pirouetting against a backdrop of the author’s sleeve notes on minimalism, Hitler Youth, pornography, Morrissey and Britpop, among other things. A mash-up worthy of investigation." - pulp.net

"HP Tinker does a very convincing impression of a semi-effeminate and well-groomed, or possibly just metrosexual, Mancunian writer labouring under the misapprehension that he is the accidental by-product of Simon Prosser’s “controversial attempt to genetically engineer a brand new radically hip Brit Lit author by cloning the narrative technique of William Burroughs with the social largesse of Kingsley Amis.” Therein lies the first clues for both the kind of book that The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity represents (it’s not ‘gay interest’, amazon take note) and Tinker’s metier and broader literary agenda.
Regarding the literary kingmaker’s cynical attempt to garner yet more profit for the Penguin Books conglomerate, Tinker quips (of himself) “Somewhere - dear God - the experiment went horribly wrong.” Yet, appropriately enough for a fit of self-mockery, the notion of ‘horribly wrong’ is entirely subjective and in this case simply, well, wrong. Horribly wrong would be yet another ‘hip-lit’ foisting on the 3 for 2 tables via an obligatory appearance at a certain west London ‘literary nightclub’. True, Tinker has been lauded in the past by the literary pages of England’s broadsheets and I’ll borrow from their praise when they say his prose “fizzes with the kind of zany, surreal conjunctions that recall Barthelme and Pynchon in their prime.” Yet attempting to outline this book to the uninitiated is akin to describing that bizarre dream you had last night to your partner once you’ve woken from it. Yes, the word ‘surreal’ is often used in the context of HP Tinker, as in the dream-state signifier, but with such glorious synopsises as “Paul Gauguin considers himself moderately in love with Jacqueline Du Pre” and “due to the greatest hits of Tina Turner a woman’s feelings are never truly considered”, what else could you expect? The man’s reverence for Francis Bacon goes far beyond sharing a fondness for rather fetching leather jackets.
The Britlit motif continues unabated in masterpieces like Kandahar, which does proclaim:
“Currently, the favourite TV programme on Kandahar State Television is Johnny Spastic starring Matt Dillon as Johnny Spastic — a show which is beamed twice weekly into over 12,000,000 homes direct from Zadie Smith’s subconscious.”Tinker is not afraid of wry pops at other targets either, suggesting a versatility all his own, as the same story shows:
“Although there are no homosexuals in Kandahar — and homosexuality does not officially exist here — it has not been outlawed. In fact, new homosexuals are now actively being recruited to run media-friendly virtual tapas bars and funky post-coital noodle eateries…”In spite of broadsheet goading, he shows no signs of playing the game and writing a novel that can be cynically marketed as author product, hence this collection of surreal messages from another world. HP Tinker is a yet to be discovered national treasure, though this book should for all intents and purposes point people in the right direction." - Andrew Stevens
"It's not very often that you come upon a writer whose prose is so addictive that you keep coming back for more. That's what I've been doing since my last Buzzwords entry when I introduced you to HP Tinker and his Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity website, which he describes as "a refuge for stories I couldn't sell or get published". Apropos of Intermezzo, HP Tinker says that it's "basically a notebook I filled up in New York". It begins thus, in medias res: "happily growing breasts in NYC until you exploded midway through Macy’s red and blue and golden like the 4th of July cheap jewellery assistants flying customers ducking themselves down into small customer piles like unwanted news sheets the contents of my head involved in aerial moves of an unpredictable nature my injuries minor all wounds fortunately..." And, yes, he manages the tour de force of sustaining the momentum all the way through. That's what I call staying power! It put me in mind of Molly Bloom's unpunctuated monologue in Ulyssses, although HP Tinker was probably going for Kerouac whose picture adorns the page.
Another one you must check out is Paul Gauguin Trapped on the 37th Floor: "Paul Gauguin was one of those chance things - I was studying a TV guide and noticed a Paul Gauguin biopic was followed by a film called Trapped On The 37th Floor. So, I had the title, I just had to write the story..." And write the story he did, I'm telling you!
HP Tinker is "a secretive chap" who likes "the work to speak for itself". The bio on his site is completely made up, but he was kind enough to give us a little background info. Mr Tinker, 32, lives in the North of England, but don't you dare call him a "Northern writer" because he hates that. (You wouldn't call The Buzzcocks a northern band, would you?) He started writing in 1997 and his very first short story, Vic Chews It Over was snapped up by Ambit, Britain's most prestigious literary journal. Since then, Ambit have published more than half a dozen of his short stories.
"A couple of years ago," HP Tinker confided to 3am Magazine, "I wrote a short novel called Jack Shit On Mars, an experimental, cut-up comic thing - but I've never been very sure about it and it's still lingering on my harddrive. I'm not exactly a career novelist, you see. (I've always concurred with Morrissey and Cilla Black that "Work Is A 4-Letter Word".) The writing's the thing with me. If it's good it's good, and if it gets published somewhere that's fine. I don't write as much as I should. Because the market for my type of thing isn't huge, I tend to only write the things that really force themselves to the surface... The novel I'm working on is in its infant stages, so there is not a lot to say - yet. I've only written 8,000 words! But I have a working-title: City of Women. I don't know what it means, but it sounds interesting enough to continue with. I don't like to talk about things too much until they're almost completely finished. If you do, I find something always goes wrong." - Andrew Gallix

"HP Tinker is not unhappy, I think. He should be unhappy living in Manchester, but he's not, I think. I'm unhappy though and I don't live in Manchester. I used to live in Manchester and funny enough I was happy. This review is going to be incoherent and all over the place. There, I warned you. Why? Because I'm tired of well polished reviews. I bet you're also sick and tired of the same formulaic reviews. Here's a new one. I enjoyed reading HP Tinker's book of short stories. I know no history, I have done no research, I have not been in touch with HP Tinker, all I've done is read the book. When I finished reading the book I was unhappy. But I found that I could reread the book and this made me happy, and like reading Kafka I found new things that popped out like when the last time I reread The Castle it was paper, yes paper, The Castle is all about paper. Tinker's book, the best title of a book to come out in a long time, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity, it gets me every time, is all about...
Reading Tinker's book is analogous to watching Coronation Street on acid. Trust me. Yes and the cast must be: Nick Nolte will play Jim McDonald, Vera Duckworth I think Sharon Stone, Warren Betty has to be Ken Barlow and Bob Hoskins must play Mike Baldwin, I leave Jack Duckworth to play Jack Duckworth. The Rovers Return will be in a desert, maybe Kandahar, why not? Is Kandahar a desert? Anyroad, Kandahar is the place to be:
Happily, on March 26, Kandahar celebrates its birthday at London's South Bank with Roger Wright, controller of BBC Radio 3. John Travolta has sent his congratulations. Bob Dylan will sing 'Mozambique'. Charlton Heston has made risotto. Giorgio Moroder has broken off from his record-breaking tour of Hungary to perform Wagner's Parsifal, Bartok's ballet scores, and extracts from The Dandy Warhols' second album. On a lighter note, there will also be a performance of The Death of Klinghoffer, the comedy-opera based on the Palestian hijack of the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985, starring Robson and Jerome. The new Mayor of Kandahar, Pierre Boulez, calls me into his office, a great honour.Pynchon? Barthelme? Beckett? Joe Orton? Woody Allen? Nathanael West? Mancunian humor? Will Manchester miss Bernard John Manning? Will the Blues top those Red **@#@**@#@#@**&? A friend caught Morrissey coming out of Marks and Spencer's in Manchester. He was carrying two shopping bags. My friend followed Morrissey to a parked convertible BMW. My friend was very unhappy. My friend lives in Manchester. Morrissey lives in L.A.
Somebody came up with the wise adage never judge a book by its cover. But that's where I'm going to start. I must go back to my university days, reviewing this book I feel as though it is not malapropos to state that I did three years somewhere studying something gleaning somewhat. I once studied the History of Photography in a very dark room. There was this girl that would sit at the front of the class and whenever the man with the button showed a dirty black and white picture the girl at the front of the class would moan with pleasure as though her clitoris was being rubbed. It was both very funny and perturbing. At home looking over my notes I'd find Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh OOOOOOOOOOOOO Ahhhhh OOOO. I think she must have orgasmed a lot. The biggest moan came when Mapplethorpe's Man in Polyester Suit appeared.
The Advertisement: It's a great book to read while having a shit. It's small and the pages bend. There's 145 pgs and the lettering is big. Perfect! BUY THE BOOK YOU BASTARDS!!!!! Just under seven quid, it's a steal. Pynchon's V in Hardcover is now selling for two hundred pound. The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity, it gets me every time. I'll say it again: The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity, it gets me every time. There's a joke on every page, there really is. Trust me, I'm the reviewer!
Now the academic stuff. I wonder what Lucian would have made of Derrida et al? Lucian the Father of science fiction? Tinker, I believe, likes to read science fiction. Lucian the friend to Plato and Socrates! He abhorred windbags and rightly so. It's all semantics, trust me! Wittgenstein said, "word games." The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity, it gets me every time, is a damn good book. I'm repeating myself.
Tom Paulin once said on late night television, "Electric knitting." O what an acerbic judgement!
A good book has a heart, lungs, kidneys, arteries, veins and more importantly a soul. Yes, a good book has a soul. The reviewer must be the anatomist. So the reviewer must inexorably dissect the front cover of the book for it is obviously the first anatomical landmark. Sterne dead a cadaver was stolen shortly after he was buried beneath the terra firma and sold to the anatomist for dessection. It was recognised by somebody who knew him and discreetly reinterred. Crazy stuff. I got the book from Amazon and you also can. Now back to the book in question. The front cover. August Sander took some of the most amazing protraits of men between the wars. They are truly amazing. Each one is a statement, they illustrate the antithetical, the unreal, and paradoxically the truth, they stand up to Nazism, the ethos of the Aryan with veracity and bravery. Sander is Arbus and Arbus is Sander and HP Tinker is the man behind the chair and the chair is a little man that once worked in the Swank Bisexual Wine Bar (it gets me every time). Where did Arbus come from? Manchester is full of Wine Bars. You might even seen the chair serving cocktails with names like

The General
The General deplores bad language of any kind.

(Just Like) Tom Paulin's Blues.
On hearing these words, I felt something eerie chilling me to the very core…

My Hitler Youth
I was masturbating alone in Greenwich Village.

Me: Why did you pick the photograph?
HP Tinker: (Indirectly, I have never talked to HP Tinker.) to me, the man in the picture is the type of gauche person who might think they want to visit such a wine bar... only to be bitterly disappointed when they get actually there.
Now the guts, the blood, the feces.
The stories are built up of facts, there are sentences upon sentences, a myriad of them, facts, facts, facts, but the stories are filled with lies, fabrications, mendacities, word games, Paulin's never had the Blues, but still there are facts, here we hit the wall of paradox. Can a fact be a lie is a lie a fact I know a fact about a lie it goes like this there was once a lie but it became a fact it had something to do with this war that went on for ten years in some remote place it is a fact although some believe it to be a lie. There's a place called Rover's Return and that's a fact, but it doesn't serve real beer it's a place of duplicity, the fighting is staged, the cussing is bleeped out and there's no condoms in the men's toilet. Tinker is Sander, a fact. That is real another fact. I like the book, a fact. I'm real, a fact. His portraits are filled with lies facts but they hold up the mirror to our society. He pokes a finger at those stars we hold dear, a fact. He mocks them, a fact. There's all kinds of facts, mocking facts, facetious facts, commonplace facts, dirty facts, fucking facts, copulating facts, bisexual facts, a litany of facts, reeking facts, mirth facts, Rabelaisian facts, Sterne facts, English tea time facts, hard inventories of facts, satirical facts, penis facts, Hitler youth facts, Gauguin facts, the best facts, but never superfluous facts, here's a fact
Pornography was first widely popularized by Al Johnson.And so there it is The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity, it gets me every time, my ribs are killing me, I've got to stop. Fuck it, from this day onwards I'm only going to write happy stories, a fact!" - Paul Kavanagh

3:AM: Will you really never write a novel?HPT: No. Why should I?
3:AM: Why not?HPT: My style works best over short distances. So in that respect I really am doomed. Sadly, the common view of the short story is that is it somehow an intrinsically inferior feast, a light bite compared to the meat and two potatoes of the novel. It’s a retarded view, but one popular with Jeremy Vine.
3:AM: Do you think this view is ever likely to change?HPT: It’s unlikely. When everybody else starts writing short story collections, maybe then I’ll sit down and write a novel. It’s important to be contrary. Never give them what they want, that’s what I always say.
3:AM: Do you read more short stories than novels? Do you personally find enough ‘sustenance’ in short stories?HPT: Most modern novels make me want to bang my head against the pavement until I’m nearly dead — so I don’t actually read them anymore. I think all the best short stories implode with immediate intensity, illuminating everything in an instant… then rumble along through the rest of your life, if you’re very lucky." - HP Tinker interview (3:am Magazine)






HP Tinker, The Girl Who Ate New York, East London Press, 2015.


East London Press is proud to announce their second publication - the long-awaited and hotly anticipated publication of - The Girl Who Ate New York - 15 comically surreal love stories from influential and highly original short fiction writer HP Tinker. If you’ve never heard of HP Tinker then don’t go admitting that in public as it will mean instant social exclusion. Here’s why-
Discovered and supported by Martin Bax at Ambit, novelist/editor Nicholas Royle and 3:AM Magazine's Andrew Gallix, his avant-garde comic fiction has been compared to Donald Barthelme and Paul Auster, though because he prefers to eschew readings and public appearances he has also been called "the Thomas Pynchon of Chorlton-cum-Hardy".
Since having his first short story published in Ambit in 1996, he has gone on to become one of their most prolific contributors, and in 2010 he appeared in the 200th edition alongside Sir Peter Blake and Jonathan Lethem.
It is not widely known that his uncle was the late theatre critic Jack Tinker, who famously blasted Sarah Kane’s Blasted. (Her later play Cleansed features a villainous character called Tinker.)
More recently, his classic story “Alice In Time & Space and Various Major Cities” was included in a Best British Short Stories anthology and he has just finished his first novel, a very short trilogy called Conspiracy of Eunuchs.


To a palate jaded by the offerings of the mainstream literary world, this book came as a tonic, a welcome reminder of the excitement literature can still offer when you come off the publishing highway.
John Ashbery described the late Lee Harwood as Britain’s best-kept secret; H.P. Tinker is another, even better-kept secret. His work has appeared regularly in the magazine Ambit, where I have read some of the stories; I have also read his first collection, The Swank Bisexual Wine Bar of Modernity (Social Disease Books, 2007). Lee Rourke devoted a chapter to Tinker in his A Brief History of Fables (Hesperus Press, 2011). But beyond a relatively small band of cognoscenti, he is largely unknown. So now is a good time to let others in on the secret. Because this is one of the wittiest, most allusive and elusive collections I have read in years. It’s frustratingly difficult — possibly impossible — to adequately convey its appeal for the benefit of the uninitiated. But I’ll try.
Firstly, the range of cultural reference is staggering, both high and low, but use of those references is so disarmingly funny that its import is, deliberately perhaps, subverted. Structurally, there are events but no plots here, except in the most basic, archetypal forms. The stories are usually narrated by a self-aware, non-ironic ingenue, often in a quest for love or erotic adventure, ideally both, in the shape of an elusive, fully ironic woman, typically a cultural herione of the present or recent past, pursued through an apocalyptic social landscape. Occasionally, the narrator is an interviewer, as in the brilliant ‘Nosferatu in Manhattan’. There are also a number of parodies of detective fiction. Parody, though, is the wrong word, as these are more elaborate celebrations of the genre, subverted by deadpan wit into existential enigmas similar to de Chirico’s paintings; intellectual culs-de-sac.
The immediate appeal of these stories lies at the level of the sentence — every sentence can be savoured for its shape and wit — but the effect, and importance, lies at the level not of the story but the collection. Any sentence, chosen at random, would exemplify that wit, but at the same time give an entirely false impression of unrelenting cultural clever-cleverness. Even a longer quotation runs the same risk, but the risk will have to be taken in order to make concrete my point. Here is the opening of ‘Excerpts from the Extraordinary Autobiography of Mister HPT’:
I was born on a mountaintop in Montana during an entirely unexpected flower festival. My mother was a blooming orchid, a dazzling drop of golden rain, a sizzling sunshine shower who worked in retail fashion. Raised in a brothel on the wrong side of the tracks, she found salvation as a part-time good time girl until she met my father, a Texan rustler only just re-released into the wider community. Soon wrangling Levi jeans for a living, father became a semi-professional metaphor for rural American life and flew us to England for narrative reasons…
Around March 1975 father became increasingly delusional.
He began dressing in ill-fitting maternity clothes and declared himself to be the long lost brother of Gore Vidal… Eventually he was imprisoned for smuggling imaginary cocaine to footballers and not long after an intruder broke into the family home and stole all of my mother’s affections. In buoyant mood, she left for Calais on the newly-invented hovercraft before throwing herself over the side just five minutes later. She left behind few clues why — only some laminated suicide notes and an erotic mural of Anne Sexton eating pizza…
You may respond to that; you may not. I wouldn’t like even an extract that long to function as a litmus test for the collection — ideally you should read the full story at least. Because I’m conscious that I have failed to explain even to myself why this book gives me so much pleasure. But the failure is itself a tribute to Tinker’s genius, which is, despite passing similarities to possible forebears (a postmodern Beachcomber? an eschatological Ivor Cutler?), ultimately sui generis. It’s an acquired taste, like single malt whiskey, but a taste worth acquiring for the pleasure it gives.
It’s also great for one-upmanship: along with the infinity of names you can drop from his work, you can add that of H.P. Tinker himself.
But it has importance beyond that: in a universe converted by the Theoreticians into a constellation of signs without wonder, how do we respond? Tinker’s response is to relax, consume as much of the cultural menu as possible, and convert the signs back into wonder at the gargantuan richness of it all. His conversion of high culture into an intellectual adventure playground makes concrete the argument that literature has no function beyond its existence; it is not a preparation for life, nor imaginative training for life, but a life in and for itself, with its own intrinsic and unique rewards. And Tinker reminds us, when we need it most, how bracing the rewards can be. - David Rose