Tom ("Remainder" "Tintin") McCarthy amongst many at Denis Cooper's extensive David Lynch Day

“Lynch’s latest film Inland Empire is stunning: completely literary, labyrinthine, regressive. It’s the best piece of art in any medium I’ve come across for years.

“In terms of now, I think some of the most interesting literary figures aren’t necessarily writers. The films of David Lynch, for example, have an extremely literary logic; his latest, Inland Empire, is structured like Finnegans Wake or the novels of Robbe-Grillet, with a set of repetitions regressing inwards, modulating as they repeat. He’s grappling with questions of narrative and representation and identity in a way that mainstream novelists simply aren’t, and is therefore much more interesting as a ‘writer’, even if he isn’t strictly speaking one.”

“In the ‘geological’ time of the arts, Finnegans Wake happened a few seconds ago: we’ve hardly even realized that it’s happened, let alone set up a coordinated response. The really good artists have realized and are responding: look at David Lynch’s films, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels - but most of the players in the mainstream cultural industries are trying to pretend it didn’t happen, or doesn’t matter; and they’ll be washed away, forgotten, as a result...”