The Thief's Journal

Jean Genet The Thief's Journal (1949)
I'm not quite sure what brought me here, but it was probably something to do with Amphetamine Sulphate given that, with hindsight, The Thief's Journal seems ancestral to at least a couple of their titles, notably Josiah Morgan's Inside the Castle.
 

Genet - as I will freely admit I didn't actually know until I looked it all up about a month ago - was a petty thief of no consistently fixed abode who took to writing and so caught the attention of Jean Cocteau and other poetic types of his generation. The Thief's Journal is approximately autobiographical in being an account of Genet's existence on the periphery of the law, but rather than reading as a straight narrative comprises a flowery existential analysis which sporadically refers to events from Genet's life, mostly nicking stuff and encounters with men's cocks - these being the main reasons for its apparently having been embraced as transgressive literature, on which subject my friend Paul Woods had this to say:

I liked the couple of early books I read of his when I was a kid and enjoyed a couple of his plays which I saw in filmed versions, but I never really got why the transgressive literature label was applied to him. I suppose it might be straight literati types getting all excited about a writer who's actually from the underworld. I was reading a biography of Genet when I was on a mini-tour with Damo early this year and it struck me that, for someone who called his own semi-autobiog The Thief's Journal, he was pretty piss-pathetic as a thief - stealing shirts and books from Paris shops. More of a failed kleptomaniac really. I remember when my old man had been home from the nick for a couple of years (who really did earn the title of professional thief - or recidivist from the law-enforcement point of view) and he took my copy of The Thief's Journal off the shelves to read. A night or two later he comes in the living room, points at me, says, 'You're fucking mad!' and walks out again. I suspect that may have been old Jean's description of dropping his drawers to other men to earn a crust.

Anyway, Genet takes an aesthetic position loosely comparable to that of Esseintes in Huysmans' Against Nature.

Abandoned by my family, I already felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. I thus resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me.

It's also comparable to certain Shamanic ideas informing members of the priesthood in Mexica society before the conquest, specifically their embracing the filthy, the unclean, and the transgressive as pertaining to the sacred through existing beyond the limits of the traditionally acceptable. Genet therefore finds endless beauty in the world he inhabits.

The beauty of a moral act depends on the beauty of its expression. To say that it is beautiful is to decide that it will be so. It remains to be proven so. This is the task of images, that is, of the correspondences with the splendours of the physical world. The act is beautiful if it provokes, and in our throat reveals, song. Sometimes the consciousness with which we have pondered a reputedly vile act, the power of expression which must signify it, impels us to song. This means that treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.

The Thief's Journal is therefore mostly about Genet finding poetry, and unusually florid poetry, in dirt, poverty, degradation, shame, small acts of betrayal, and a seemingly never ending procession of men's spunky cocks - this novel having been written back when homosexuality was a somewhat more contentious subject to the point of representing an open act of rebellion against some notional natural order. So as with Sartre, then Debord, William Burroughs to some extent, and more recently the aforementioned Josiah Morgan, it's actually about how reality relates to our perception of the same, or something in that general direction.

Unfortunately, whilst Inside the Castle - for one example - was a punchy forty pages or thereabouts, The Thief's Journal is more than two-hundred, allowing me ample scope to tire of endless descriptions of men's amazing cocks to the point of turning to Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols biography on a couple of evenings for the sake of reading something which didn't feel like homework. I can appreciate both Genet's craft and his philosophical depth - if that's what I mean - but other's have done this sort of thing better with significantly less droning.

The Face in the Abyss

Abraham Merritt The Face in the Abyss (1931)
It seems that Merritt was a big, big deal in his day, a name which dominated the fields of fantasy and science-fiction at the dawn of the pulp era before anyone had quite decided which was which or where to draw the line; and then he just went away, barely surviving as a footnote in popular terms. He significantly influenced both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, but my own interest stems almost entirely from his influence on the work of Robert Moore Williams.

The Face in the Abyss is the first of Merritt's books I've even encountered on the shelves of a second-hand store, so naturally I snapped it up, although I suspect it probably wasn't the best place to start. The influence of H. Rider Haggard is tangible, so we have what feels a little like a more literary Edgar Rice Burroughs - intrepid explorers discovering lost civilisations full of dinosaurs and that sort of thing, embellished with occasional flourishes of sciencey ruminations.

The caverns of the face might be a laboratory of Nature, a crucible wherein, under unknown rays, transmutation of one element into another took place. Within the rock out of which the face was carved might be some substance which by these rays was transformed into gold. Fulfillment of that old dream… or inspiration… of the ancient alchemists which modern science is turning into reality. Had not Rutherford, the Englishman, succeeded in turning an entirely different element into pure copper by depriving it of an electron or two? Was not the final product of uranium, the vibrant mother of radium - dull, inert lead?

Yeah, I know - it still belongs to the special kind of ray school of technological speculation, but my point here is that this is essentially a fantasy novel wherein the magic is explicitly identified as advanced science.

The Face in the Abyss is otherwise very much of its time. Our hero learns of the lost gold of Atahualpa, setting off to find it in the inexplicable company of ruffians. Not a night seems to pass without one of them pulling a gun on the other three, tying them up, then delivering one of those hard boiled speeches about how he's known all along how they would turn out to be dirty, double-crossing rats, in light of which maybe he'll be keeping all the gold for himself, see? Of course, everyone is friends again next morning, having somehow risen above their little misunderstanding, at least until they encounter creatures which would almost certainly have been animated by Ray Harryhausen had this book ever been adapted for the big screen.

Merritt's prose has been generously described as florid, or as purple by less sympathetic critics. I fall somewhere between the two in holding that while his writing is ornate and often quite beautiful, a little goes a long way. Hoodlums aside, everyone in The Face in the Abyss speaks in what I have come to think of as Marvel Shakespearean, not quite the full my liege at the termination of every bleeding sentence, but certainly a lot of persons asking what say you, my friend?, and not a whole lot of chuckles to lighten the atmosphere of what begins to feel like one of the more portentous Ultravox records, thematically speaking.

I can see how Merritt's influence on Robert Moore Williams is at least as profound as that of A.E. van Vogt on Philip K. Dick, and I can see why he was popular for at least a couple of decades; and while this novel had a lot going for it, I unfortunately found it a bit of a trudge getting there.

Reach for the Sky

Paul Brickhill Reach for the Sky (1954)
I vaguely recall having been told to pick a book and read it back during the latter phase of my time at Ilmington Junior and Infants school. I would have been about nine, maybe ten, and none of the available selection had been written by Terrance Dicks, so I picked this, possibly because I'd seen the 1956 film starring Kenneth More, or more likely because I'd heard of Douglas Bader and liked the title; so it probably counts as some sort of first in my formative reading habits, what with it not being off the telly, at least not directly.

Should the name be unfamiliar, Bader was an RAF fighter pilot who lost both legs and yet continued to fly planes regardless, scoring countless victories before ending up in Colditz for the remainder of the war.

To briefly ramble at something of a tangent, following the passing of the aforementioned Terrance Dicks, I've seen it opined that he got children reading books like no other writer of his generation, although the claim is often made by persons of my age who seemingly read Doctor Who books to the exclusion of anything else, so I'm not sure it's entirely the same. On the other hand, reading is reading and maybe it doesn't matter. There'll always be a few who stick to a familiar furrow for the duration, and my own mother - who now routinely reads things no-one else understands - began with a shitload of Enid Blyton; so dogged allegiance to a particular author or even genre probably isn't the fault of whoever happens to be sat on the other side of the typewriter.

So I read and enjoyed Reach for the Sky as a child, regardless of the absence of Daleks, hence curiosity sufficient to justify my buying a copy found in Oxfam, Coventry, not least because it's the very same edition - a tidy little hardback with an orange cover.

Brickhill was a journalist who flew planes during the war, and who also famously wrote both The Dam Busters and The Great Escape. His prose has a certain trim populist efficiency and might be described as pleasantly musty - to borrow a term from John Bagnall. The narrative reads a little as though it has been dictated to a secretary, with pacier sections succumbing to clipped non-sentences - although thankfully without the usual suggestion of anyone attempting to invoke Orson Welles - and with the occasional weirdly arresting passage.

Among the survivors fear and tension lay under the surface like taut sinews in a naked body, but always decently covered with understatement.

Bader comes across as having been a bit of a tosser prior to losing his legs, none of which quite detracts from Reach for the Sky serving as a genuinely inspiring story, even gripping, which is doubtless why it worked on me as a child. It's of its time, as the saying goes, but our man's slightly boorish youth of physical combat and mean spirited pranks is swiftly eclipsed by that which came after. I dislike the term hero but he was undeniably something in that general direction, and this biography goes a long way to breaking my association of aviation with lonely nutcases.

Halcyon Drift

Brian Stableford Halcyon Drift (1972)
Back in what I calculate to have been 1978, or 1979 at the latest, my second (or possibly third) year English class was running some sort of book club whereby we could buy cheap books direct from the publishers. Amongst the promotional material we were sent was a poster featuring the covers of thirty or forty science-fiction novels published by Pan including Michael Coney's Brontomek!, Simak's Werewolf Principal, Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth, Dick's Galactic Pot-Healer and others - notably this one. The other side of the poster was Angus McKie's gorgeous cover art for Brian Stableford's Rhapsody in Black, a spaceship called the Hooded Swan which likewise appears on the cover of Stableford's Halcyon Drift, which is the first in a series. The point of this extended digression is that it was this poster which most likely imprinted me with those spacecraft painted by Angus McKie and others, and which has ultimately informed my reading habits for at least some of the last decade; and when I happened across this one in a used book store with that immediately familiar cover, I nearly lost my shit.

Inevitably, Halcyon Drift could never have lived up to four decades of expectation, but it's decent of its kind. It's space opera, essentially a western set amongst the stars, but is well-written, even crafted, and with just the right quota of mind-expanding concepts to keep things interesting and even unpredictable without stretching the genre too far. I'd say it's in the vein of Larry Niven, except I always seem to find myself irritated by Larry Niven; and whatever his crimes may be, Stableford manages very well without them. Being space opera, a genre with which I feel entirely sated by this point, I would say Halcyon Drift does very well in instituting a series that I very much doubt I'll read, but - let's face it - a few more with Angus McKie covers would probably be enough to swing it.

2000AD Summer Offensive

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and others 2000AD Summer Offensive (1993)
Not a collection, in case anyone was wondering - but eight back issues of the comic nabbed from eBay and dating from a year or so before I gave up on the galaxy's greatest and flogged my entire collection to Skinny Melink in Lewisham. I remember Big Dave being great, and as something which is obviously never going to get a reprint, and the Summer Offensive sounded fun as I applied myself to Wikipedia in an effort to jog my memory of having read the thing.

The idea was to hand the editorial reins over to Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith for a couple of months just to see what would happen - these being three writers who had distinguished themselves with sparky, volatile strips characterised by a reluctance to play it safe, or summink. Maybe someone was hoping to revive that wave of lucrative outrage which had greeted 2000AD when it first appeared in the seventies.

Big Dave is as horrible as I recall it being, and therefore justifies this return visit. It's essentially real world Biffa Bacon from Viz turned up to eleven, working mainly because it really doesn't have any redeeming features whatsoever and constitutes a psychological portrait of the worst aspects of nineties Britain, and because Steve Parkhouse's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best he's ever drawn. Big Dave arguably defies criticism by already being everything bad you could possibly say about it.

Then there's the rest, none of which I was able to remember from the first time I read this stuff back in the nineties, and now I know why. Morrison and Millar's version of Judge Dredd isn't bad but it's no Cursed Earth, and only really feels like Dredd because of Carlos Ezquerra's characteristically exceptional artwork, which I guess at least distracts from a story which might otherwise seem fairly average; and the Indian Judge is named Bhaji and comes fitted with speech patterns very much in the vein of Apu from the Simpsons, so that's a bit of a bore.

Back in April, I wrote a satirical thing called 2000AD After I Stopped Reading which proposed a number of strips which may or may not have featured in the comic since I lost interest, informed mainly by sarcasm and vague memories of the formulaic composition of some of 2000AD's lesser series. Anyway, Mark Millar's Maniac 5 and John Smith's Slaughterbowl read unfortunately as though they were expanded from vague ideas I came up with when taking the piss. Maniac 5 looks amazing, having been drawn by Steve Yeowell, but that's all; and while Slaughterbowl isn't entirely without worth, John Smith has written much better, and it reads as though the other two were egging him on, insisting he make it even more offensive; which I suppose at least conceals its parentage in those earlier future sport strips which were mostly just Roy of the Rovers with jetpacks.

I'd say Really & Truly is as bad or worse than I remember it having been, except I had no memory of ever having read it; so it's as bad or worse than I would have remembered it being had I been able to remember having read it, which wasn't the case. It's like a conversation with a pothead, the word wow in faux psychedelic lettering dragged out over eight agonising instalments, or hits if you prefer, man. Groovy. The plot - and it should be noted that were I to frame the word plot as it applies here between accordingly ironic quotation marks, the necessary degree of irony would demand that said quotation marks be of such scale as to force the rest of my text right off the edge of the screen - is almost identical to that of Everyman and shares similar affectations of nadsat, drugs, and self-consciously quirky characters on a really amaaaaaaazing trip, meaning it's unreadable and a criminal waste of Rian Hughes.

So that was the Summer Offensive - Big Dave, a cover version of Judge Dredd, a couple of participation award winners, and a strip which really, really wanted to be Philip Bond's Wired World from Deadline, which was itself a massive pile of wank: not very zarjaz at all, it has to be said.

The Book of Sand

Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Sand (1978)
These short stories apparently number amongst Borges' last writings, and I gather the collection is regarded as being amongst his lesser works. Personally, although I didn't find much which packed quite the same punch as any of the stories collected in Labyrinths, it may simply be that I had a better idea of what to expect with this one, and it seems simply a quieter, less demonstrative work. A couple of the tales simply pass beneath one's gaze, like watching a stream from a bridge, leaving only a vague impression; and yet even in such cases, Borges' voice remains gripping, pulling the reader into the narrative regardless of how well the story appears to be shaping up. It's quite difficult to work out how he does this, but he does it very well, and the effect is slightly eerie, underscoring the notion that maybe we're reading something which is more than just fiction.

The years pass and I've told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it's only my words I'm remembering.

As a writer who appears to speak directly from within his own pages, Borges writes books within books, implying layers of reality which blur the distinction between the reader and that which is read. These tales are short and evoke the mystery and serenity of de Chirico's art, fleeting presences half seen around a corner. In this one we have forgotten languages, a book which reads differently each time one opens it up, and even a tribute to those forbidden texts so pivotal to the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft - who, for all of his qualities, probably doesn't quite deserve such a tribute. This collection leaves the reader with the impression of having said a great deal, even though it's just a whisper, and the words seem to be different each time.

Lo!

Charles Fort Lo! (1931)
I never really considered the possibility of this having been published as a paperback, and never expected to see a copy, or to ever be in the position of reading the thing. My knowledge of Fort is sketchy beyond that the term Fortean - referring to mysteries which seemingly defy science and rational understanding - derives from his name, because he seems to have been one of the first to attempt to quantify paranormal phenomena as a legitimate area of investigation. Despite having regularly read Fortean Times for at least a couple of years back there, I'd fostered an image of Fort as a late Victorian iconoclast taking a sort of proto-Dadaist delight in that which made no sense and which pissed off scientists. This, it turns out, is only part of the story.

For starters, I have my dates wrong, and Fort's Book of the Damned was published in 1919 so he's more recent than I had realised. Nevertheless, he writes like a late Victorian, and his understanding of the sciences seems mostly pre-Copernicus in so much as that he doesn't seem to be entirely convinced of the Earth moving around the sun. The case for the defence, at least on this score, holds that Fort was throwing stuff out there for the sake of argument without even necessarily believing it himself, just to keep us on our toes. This may well be true, but it doesn't really help anyone engaged in the act of trying to read the fucking thing.

Fort's testimony is both absorbing and infuriating, and probably absorbing because it's infuriating. He digresses, breaks off and switches track half way through a sentence as one might in spoken conversation, talks to himself, speaks in riddles, forms new words, and cloaks half of whatever he's trying to say in the most ludicrous - if admittedly vivid - allegories or similes, requiring a certain degree of translation on the part of the reader. His narrative voice has something of the carnival barker about it with touches of a Victorian William Shatner, and certain passages are accordingly both exhausting and impenetrable.

March 23, 24, 25—a watery sky sat on the Adirondack Mountains. It began to slide. It ripped its slants on a peak, and the tops of lamp posts disappeared in the streets of Troy and Albany. Literary event, at Paterson, N.J.—something that was called "a great cloudburst" grabbed a factory chimney, and on a ruled page of streets scrawled a messy message. With the guts of horses and other obscenities, it put in popularising touches. The list of dead, in Colombus, Ohio, would probably reach a thousand. Connecticut River rising rapidly. Delaware River, at Trenton, N.J., 14 feet above normal.

That which he writes about is intriguing - showers of fish or frogs, mysterious lights in the sky, strange noises in the night, missing persons, or persons such as Kasper Hauser who seemingly appear from nowhere; and Fort takes obvious and infectious delight in relating incidences of this sort of thing, noting common patterns, and refuting what explanations may have been given. He even attempts his own explanations, invoking supposedly spontaneous instances of teleportation as a sort of common cause, which works for the sake of argument but places the author on an increasingly shoddy footing as the book squirms towards its profoundly unsatisfying conclusion.

In his favour, Fort presents a sturdy argument against science as dogma, and takes communicable pleasure in doing so.

Our data have been bullied by two tyrannies. On one side, the spiritualists have arbitrarily taken over strange occurrences, as manifestations of "the departed". On the other side, conventional science has pronounced against everything that does not harmonise with its systematisation. The scientist goes investigating, about as, to match ribbons, a woman goes shopping. The spiritualist stuffs the maws of his emotions. One is too dainty, and the other is gross. Perhaps, between these two, we shall some day be considered models of well-bred behaviour.

This works fine until the reader notices what he's actually been saying with all those colourful metaphors. What, he asks, if the stars are not so far away as we have been told, but are actually more like heavenly volcanoes studding the inside of a vast sphere? It would explain a lot, he suggests, and certainly it would explain the phenomena he has described, but for the fact that it's obviously bollocks and here we've been sat all this time, labouring under the illusion of dealing with a man who knows what the fuck he's talking about, or even one who knows what is meant by the term evidence. Mysterious clouds of volcanic ash may prove such and such a point in the absence of actual terrestrial volcanic activity, but possibly not when your evidence of the absence of actual terrestrial volcanic activity is simply being unable to find any newspaper article referring to the same for that particular month. Likewise, the last few chapters of the book border on embarrassing, muttering and mumbling over how that Mr. Einstein probably made most of it up whilst affecting a display of laughter at the occasional errors of astronomers, yet apparently missing the point that if astronomers are even able to make errors calculating the movement of celestial objects, then maybe it's because those celestial objects are actually moving rather than being stationary upside down space volcanoes, you fucking tit.

It's entertaining up to a point, but I'm reminded that Lo! belongs to the era of the Nazis with their similarly nutty ideas regarding the possibilities of a hollow earth, world ice, and racial supremacy, in which context, Fort's baroque bullshit seems less charming. As Willy Ley wrote from his own experience in Pseudoscience in Naziland, as published in Astounding back in 1947:

When things get so tough that there seems to be no way out, the Russian embraces the vodka bottle, the Frenchman a woman and the American the Bible.

The German tends to resort to magic, to some nonsensical belief which he tries to validate by way of hysterics and physical force. Not every German, of course. Not even a majority, but it seems to me that the percentage of people so inclined is higher in Germany than in other countries. It was the willingness of a noticeable proportion of the Germans to rate rhetoric above research and intuition above knowledge, that brought to power a political party which was frankly and loudly anti-intellectual. The Nazis not only burned books they disliked, they also classified theoretical physicists with Jews and Marxists.

Small wonder the pseudoscientists experienced a heyday under such a regime — but it would be a mistake to believe that these pseudosciences which I am going to describe, originated with the Nazis. They existed, and to some extent even flourished, before Hitler. But then they were hemmed in by the authority of the scientists—after Hitler had become Führer it was almost the other way round.

I'm not trying to suggest, that pseudoscience is necessarily dangerous in itself, but it can be symptomatic of a certain strain of fuckwittery which has proven itself historically conducive to the rise of dangerous mad cunts; and Fort's crowing whilst stood on such thin ice was never a good look. Nor, I might argue, was it particularly helpful in shedding any light upon that which he purports to investigate, and which seems deserving of better than either sneering dismissal or Fort's own fevered patronage.