Neil Palmer

Place Explosion Neil Palmer

From Magic Localism to post-regionalist eco-apocalypse realism, from materialist anti-irrationality to the livin' end of punk rock mythology, from collective identities to utter individualism, from alienation to belonging, from Cambridge Royal Mail sorting office to Hove public library, the stories collected together in Place Explosion describe the fistula between knowledge and consciousness that has emerged in this totally precedented era of total control. With obsessive focus, Neil Palmer's stories travel beyond the exo-political world of ideas and narrate the deterioration of the life of the mind of a self-taught intellectual in the aftermath of a late-20th century university education - a waste land become an investment opportunity, where inspiration is viewed as an unwanted irrational intervention, or at least willful ignorance, and idealism is cast as dumb insolence. Place Explosion delves deep into the unlucky dip of popular culture in the long late-20th century, drags out its most enduring archetypes and ciphers - politics, identity, culture and the weird ? and makes them sing and dance for their very existence.