The Alexander Trocchi papers – manuscripts, journals, notebooks, magazines & ephemera, including material relating to the International Situationist movement – are held at Washington University in St Louis
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“In an unpublished autobiographical novel… he used the experience of swinging on the trapeze over the pond at the Arlington Baths as a metaphor for childhood adventures around the tenements & streets of the West End”
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https://arlingtonbathshistory.co.uk/2021/02/11/on-the-trapeze-with-alexander-trocchi/
“For Alexander Trocchi as much as for George Mackay Brown, the world is always in need”
—Prof Alan Riach looks at 2 startlingly different 20th-century Scottish writers: Alexander Trocchi & George Mackay Brown
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#Scottish #literature #20thcentury #Trocchi #GeorgeMackayBrown
“There was a lot of wasted potential when it came to Alexander Trocchi. He did write one great book, though. It is called Cain’s Book and it… contains some of the sharpest and most poignant prose writing you’re ever going to encounter.”
—Morgan Meis on Trocchi, Cain, and heroin
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https://slantbooks.org/close-reading/essays/alexander-trocchi-cain-and-heroin/
I’ve become slightly obsessed with a writer named Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi was a Scottish writer born in Glasgow in 1925. He probably should have died of a heroin overdose, since he was addicted to the drug for much of his life and lived as an addict on the streets of NYC for many years. Alas, he died of cancer in London in 1984. The gods are, as ever, cruel and mischievous. The dedicated smack addict perished from smoking too many cigarettes.
“I think Trocchi is important, more so now than ever. We’re living in a time when the very ‘uncreative work’ against which he permanently struck is dominating culture…”
—A Moveable Void: Tom McCarthy on Trocchi’s CAIN’S BOOK, in 3AM Magazine
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https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/a-moveable-void-tom-mccarthy-on-alex-trocchis-cains-book/
“The plotless beauty of his writing, and its fearless look at the emptiness of his own life, put ‘the Scottish Beat’ on a par with Kafka and Camus.”
—Tony O’Neill on “The junky genius of Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984)”, born 100 years ago #OTD, 30 July – a 🎂 🧵
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/aug/23/thejunkygeniusofalexander
Assoc for Scottish Literature
