“This book is a form of automatic writing – driven by and to the spirits – an album of rhetorical missives which I never sent home at the time.”—Richard Cabut Richard Cabut’s Ripped Backsides is not a memoir, nor a travelogue, nor a novel. It’s a séance disguised as a book—a fragmented, flickering chronicle of lived intensity, cities and selves collapsing into poetry, philosophy, and psychic drift. Published globally by Far West Press on 24 June 2025, this defiantly unclassifiable work weaves together prose, photography, and personal mythology into a hypnotic, hauntological collage. Subtitled Postcards from Beneath the Pavement, Ripped Backsides unfolds as part dream-diary, part psychic field manual, part poetic dérive—charting a hallucinatory route through the urban subconscious. Amsterdam, Berlin, London, LA, Manchester, Marseille: each city becomes a portal into remembered lives, sublimated loves, aesthetic debris, and symbolic ghosts. Cabut, a former punk musician, cultural theorist, and long-time chronicler of subculture, writes with cinematic flair and poetic dislocation. The book takes its place somewhere between the streets and the spirit world—where fragments of dialogue, deranged aphorisms, found postcards, and intimate flashbacks form “a literary mosaic... a creative directory... a ruined map,” in the author’s own words. In his foreword, playwright Jeff Young calls the book “shrapnel on a moving escalator”—invoking the likes of David Wojnarowicz, Joe Brainard, Walter Benjamin, Chris Marker, and Pessoa’s trunk. “It inhabits a space between anxiety and uncertainty; its beauty lies in the unstable territory of notebook and dream diary.” As much an excavation as an offering, Ripped Backsides reads like a reel of unreleased scenes from a life lived at full tilt. It is, ultimately, a love letter to the margins and the memory-traces that live beneath the pavement.
