A Guide to Electronic Music

Paul Griffiths A Guide to Electronic Music (1979)
Back in 1981, I won the school art prize for drawing pictures good. They asked me what I wanted and I said this book, which I'd noticed in the book shop at Warwick University. I'd discovered Throbbing Gristle through raids on Graham's older brother's record collection, and had somehow come across the suggestion of electronic music having been originated by Stockhausen and others associated with the classical tradition. Unfortunately, Griffiths' guide struck me as a bit dry back in 1981 even before factoring in the absence of pictures, and I never got around to reading it.

Forty years later, having discovered a couple of Stockhausen discs in a local record store, it seemed like time to make the effort.

Actually, it is kind of dry, if reasonably informative in terms of the history of electronic music as it stood in 1979, and the stuff about Pierre Schaeffer and the subsequent artistic division between musique concrète and pure electronic sound; but it's also a tad limited in scope, with no mention of Russolo - who should surely count at least as a precedent for non-musical sound repurposed in a musical context - and a certain classical bias revealed in the token section on rock music. While I didn't really expect entire chapters devoted to either Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire, both of whom were very much on the radar by 1979, a greater page count than would seem warranted is devoted to Switched on fucking Bach and those bands apparently legitimised by sheer technical achievement such as Yes and their ilk. Punk rock, for example, is dismissed as a reaction to technological sophistication. This seems to present a contradiction given the enthusiastic focus on avant garde classical pieces dispensing with tradition by embracing chance and improvisation as legitimate methods of composition and performance; and once we're done with the historical testimony, the remainder of the guide mostly provides descriptions of pieces I haven't heard by composers with whom I'm only vaguely familiar, the value of which is probably subjective.

Classical music isn't really my territory, and although there are pieces I appreciate, my appreciation is intuitive and emotional, so neither the mathematics nor the ingenuity of the composition make much difference to me. While I find the factors informing the composition of certain pieces by Stockhausen interesting, for example, the last word for me is whether the piece works when you listen to it. Unfortunately I get the impression that the historical and artistic value of classical music tends to be inextricably tied to technical concerns rather than whatever we may feel when we hear it, and this applies as much to avant garde classical despite it being additionally associated with modernism as the musical counterpart to painting, writing and so on. This constitutes something of a contradiction given the shift of creative emphasis introduced with Cubism, for example, in contrast to traditional nineteenth century painting. If an equivalent shift occurred in classical music, the hegemony of structural and compositional sophistication as indicative of value remained as it ever was, hence innovation within any other field, particularly rock, garnering an indulgent pat on the head for having succeeded despite the patronage of chavs, teddy boys, and other unwashed types. In other words, if one is allowed a simple emotional response to the paintings of Pollock or Rothko, appreciation of Stockhausen and his colleagues remains an exclusive club. I suspect this may have been what Cornelius Cardew was getting at, although writing condescending songs in honour of all his cloth-capped pals down t't pit probably wasn't the greatest solution.

Griffiths' book works well enough as a guide and an introduction, having furnished me with the titles of at least a few things I feel I should hear, but is otherwise hampered by its tone and general criteria being so deeply embedded within the academic tradition it discusses with all the usual biases of class, high art, and people who went to proper schools. Just this week I listened to a CD of works by Schaeffer, Stockhausen and the rest followed immediately by Smell & Quim's Nativity Colostomy, and they all sounded like different expressions of the exact same tradition with the transition from one disc to the other barely even registering as such. Admittedly, Griffiths' book was written well before pretty much all music counted as electronic music, but I feel there really should have been something in here which allows for the existence of Smell & Quim, amongst others.

The Lost Girl

D.H. Lawrence The Lost Girl (1920)
The Lost Girl was written around the same time as The Rainbow, then rewritten for publication in 1920, presumably incorporating semiautobiographical details of much which had occurred within Lawrence's world since the first draft. It's difficult to gauge the extent of the revisions, but there are points at which the tone switches so dramatically as to leave the whole feeling a little like two different books, albeit both telling the same story. The first chapter, focusing upon the father of Alvina, our Lost Girl - herself loosely based on Frieda, Lawrence's wife - makes numerous references to nineteenth century novelists - George McDonald, Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others - whilst betraying an influence of the same, strongly suggesting the possibility of having survived the 1920 rewrite more or less unchanged.

By contrast, the second chapter introduces Alvina in an unusually light, jocular tone very much contradicting the received wisdom of Lawrence lacking a sense of humour, particularly once we meet the theatrical sideshow performers who catalyse the action of the novel, specifically Alvina's escape from both a stifling home environment and then England itself. The performers, clownish and exaggerated, are described with sardonic indulgence rather than sentiment or anything so dismissive as the frowning misanthropy we are supposed to expect of Lawrence. He didn't much like the vulgarity of the modern world, but clearly shared the working class love of spectacle and garish folk tradition. The flamboyant Natcha-Kee-Tawara theatre troupe, for example, perform dubious Red Indian scenes at the newly opened cinema - James Houghton's latest doomed venture; and if Lawrence regards them as brash, describing their performance in anthropological terms as he would later describe actual Taos Indian rituals, he is sympathetic, seemingly regarding the noise as more honest than the moving pictures of Houghton's cinema and so more in tune with his class.

The introduction of the Natcha-Kee-Tawara additionally seems to suspend reality in some vaguely Shakespearean sense, allowing for the derailment of narrative conventions and for occurrences of the chance and unexpected, notably Alvina encountering Cicio with whom she eventually flees to Italy, as did Lawrence and Frieda.

Unfortunately, the general tone changes once again from this point on, reverting to Lawrence's more familiar landscape of emotional tumult and psychological undercurrents which, given the contrast with the first half, suggests either indecision, a lack of direction, or simply that The Lost Girl needed a little more work prior to publication. As it stands, the transition from relative whimsy to the cloying Dickensian sentiment describing the death of James Houghton and the subsequent fate of his daughter is jarring, giving an impression of certain passages having been subject to much greater revision than others. We almost have two books here, at least in terms of tone, and while one is certainly respectable and consistent with the author's reputation, the other one could have been great.

The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks

SJXSJC The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks (2021)
To kick off at something of a tangent, back when I was a self-involved teenager and my mother was doing a literature degree of some description at Warwick University, she often dropped me off at the university's expansive library so as to keep me occupied for an hour or so. I expect she hoped I'd discover Dickens but I usually ended up browsing the William Burroughs shelf. I'd just discovered his writing and the university kept original hardbacks of all the obscure out of print books, a few of which I hadn't seen before and have never encountered since. A couple of these were illustrated with collages by Burroughs himself, or Brion Gysin, or somebody else - stark black and white things, often jarring cut-up images very much belonging to the same lineage of juxtaposition and dissent as Steven Purtill's illustrations for The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks, which similarly reminds me of that initial thrill of discovering Burroughs for the first time. This one comes from Amphetamine Sulphate's science-fiction imprint. As may be obvious, it's more Burroughs than Asimov and as such falls under the heading of things which approximately continue the experimental thrust of Moorcock's New Worlds.

That being said, while I presume the influence of Burroughs may figure in there somewhere, and the occasional passage suggests something of his voice, this is nevertheless something new, or at least new to me. The narrative is delivered in short, functional sentences, sometimes without verbs, and with an overpowering tendency towards what may initially seem like the sort of random digression which results from cut-up texts. There's a fairly high degree of repetition, and while some of it may indeed be derived from the cut-up technique, the whole seems quite carefully directed towards specific effects and is therefore a long way from comprising random phrases plucked out of a top hat.

Human as alien as animal as transformative substance. My gills again. My lungs left behind. The anti-intro that discusses mutations only. New genes discovered in the side streets of North Inglewood. My personal mental fitness … a direct agency to despair. Psychedelic mathematics … the double helix … organisms occur as new species … desirous selection.

It's all like this, nearly two-hundred pages, and the cumulative effect is akin to a wall of noise with little variation in tone. Nevertheless the reader will begin to notice patterns emerging from the static, not unlike images seen flickering within flames, and after a short time it feels as though you're reading something with a conventional, if not exactly traditional, narrative hidden within the information overload. Much of the content contradicts and even skewers attempts to make sense of what may or may not be happening, not least occasional half-glimpses of cyborgs and flying saucers intruding on whatever reality our narrator occupies, and yet the suggestion that we're reading something more structured persists.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but I suppose it could be viewed as narrative which gives equal emphasis to experienced reality, stray thoughts and memories, and even alternatives occurring somewhere within the many realms of possibility. Our narrator is involved with someone named Madhab, or maybe he's Madhab, but the perspectives remain fluid to the point of even gender drifting back and forth. They or he or she or whoever move around from place to place, brains fried by chemicals, engaging in auto-erotic asphyxiation amongst other pastimes. It might almost be a road movie with the first few Chrome albums on heavy rotation, but one where that which is described represents a mere fraction of the greater reality as though we experience only the sharp peaks of something otherwise too vast to operate as text in a meaningful way.

As will hopefully be clear from the above - keeping in mind that this is just my interpretation - The Sex Shops of Sherman Oaks really isn't much like Burroughs aside from the short-circuiting of consensus reality which it effects; and surprisingly, it's not even a difficult novel once the reader has dispensed with any of the usual expectations. I remain confused but am nevertheless violently impressed.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination March 1963 (1963)
Here's another one of these, costing peanuts and picked up from the second hand place mainly because Simak is mentioned on the cover. It also seemed like I should have another go at enjoying J.G. Ballard, but A Question of Re-Entry isn't quite the lost astronaut tale I might have hoped for, instead concentrating on those sailing up and down the Amazon in hope of locating his capsule. As with most Ballard that I've read, it's well written with a reasonably literary flourish but the narrative just sort of floats along without doing much of anything and I couldn't get on with it, and the missing astronaut element may even have been tagged on so as to justify publication in one of these digests for all the difference it makes. That said, at least I finished the thing, in contrast to Roger Zelazny's Nine Starships Waiting which I gave up after about five mystifying pages.

In addition to the usual short stories, Fantastic was in the habit of reprinting forgotten or otherwise mislaid works from before the dawn of the science-fiction and fantasy digests, of which three turn up in this issue. Guy de Maupassant's An Apparition is distinctly underwhelming, the plot being that it's a ghost, which most of us will have guessed from the title. I've encountered the name of Maupassant as significant in the history of literature, but this example contains few clues as to why. Marginally more whelming is Jean Richepin's The Wet Dungeon Straw which is essentially a slightly depressing shaggy dog story but is peculiar enough to be enjoyable. Finally Austyn Granville's His Natal Star features a person who finds himself subject to the gravity of a distant star, and enough so as to cancel out the pull of the Earth. The story, such as it is, is mostly our man walking around on the ceiling marveling at all those tables and chairs up there, but it worked for me.

Coming at last to the main feature, Simak's Physician to the Universe - which it turns out I haven't read before - is odd even by Cliff's standards, sustaining the atmosphere of a de Chirico painting, albeit one depicting a swamp, for the full forty or so pages. Here Simak does that van Vogt thing of having each paragraph bring more questions than it answers and when the end delivers resolution, it actually sort of doesn't and leaves us more bewildered than ever. This is something I enjoy about Simak's writing, namely that his explanations often serve to emphasise the sheer scale of the mystery more than they illuminate. Here his protagonists are exiled to a swamp serving as a form of limbo - locales which Simak has used more than once to place his characters outside of space, time, and  conventional reality. Somebody will one day write a thorough examination of Simak's oeuvre, it patently being of a depth and complexity sufficient to warrant such an undertaking, and light will hopefully be shed on the significance of the swamp to which he returns time and again. Until then I don't have much idea, but it's fun to ponder.

Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class

Paul Embery
Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (2021)
Brexit has been explained to me over and over since 2016, but only twice in terms I understood or with which I could sympathise, even though I remain convinced of it being a terrible idea; and now, this is the third time, and the most comprehensive version of the argument I've yet come across. Embery argues that Britain needed to extricate itself from the European Union in order to free itself from the neoliberal hydra which has been busily asset stripping the economy for the last couple of decades. I've seen the same argument phrased as, once we leave Europe we can get rid of the Tories and vote in a proper Labour government, the sort of thing of which Tony Benn would have been proud. While I have no strong desire to have this particular argument all over again, I can certainly see the desirability of such a proposal, hopelessly optimistic though it may be. Embery suggests that working class support for Brexit has principally been moved by the above sentiment, or that it has been a protest vote amounting to the same.

Having lived in Texas for the last decade with every intention of staying here, I no longer feel deeply invested in either the Brexit circus or its monkeys, but as someone who has grown increasingly exhausted with the modern left, Despised seemed worth a look. The parallels between Brexit and what has been going on over here have been difficult to miss. I have friends who voted for Trump, for example, simply because the alternative really didn't seem like any sort of alternative. They're not racists or Nazis or even the deplorables described by Hillary Clinton, despite that I live in Texas, and despite what people who've never been here but who went to better schools may tell you. Had I been able to vote, I wouldn't have voted for Trump, but I don't know how great I would have felt about voting Clinton either; and the suggestion that persons such as myself might have been somehow scared of her because she's brilliant and she's a woman is just plain fucking silly.

Anyway, the point of Embery's book - to which the merits of Brexit or otherwise are arguably secondary - is the tendency of many representatives of the modern left to shut down debate by branding anything with which they disagree as hate speech. In this respect, the book is pretty much on point from start to finish. I recognise the sort of reductive dialogue by which those failing to toe the party line are habitually branded racist, homophobic, transphobic, or just too fucking thick to be allowed a vote. I've even been on the receiving end, because it doesn't matter so much what you may actually believe once you've expressed misgivings, or simply failed to wave a particular flag with due enthusiasm. Embery is a former firefighter and trade unionist from Dagenham and is therefore qualified to talk about the actual working class, as distinct from what persons subject to regular childhood piano lessons may believe the working class to be; so he understands the accusations and refutes them with authority, even to shed insight on the psychology of all those online versions of Rik from the Young Ones, forever pointing a finger and calling the rest of us Nazis; and as more and more of us get shuffled off to the sidelines and told to shut up because we're too old, too white, too square, or just not one of the cool kids, this book represents the sort of conversation we need to have.

That said, Despised is best taken as the opening of a conversation rather than a scientific treatise for although much of what Embery claims seems solid, I would argue that there's room for interpretation here and there - as one should probably expect of something which treads such a fine line and is, in certain respects, a discussion of nuance. While his summary of the British working class as essentially decent squares well with those two decades I spent working for Royal Mail, the notion that neither steaming xenophobia nor tabloid scare tactics influenced the Brexit result is a little disingenuous, given almost all of the relevant conversations I've had with members of my own immediate family back in the UK; and I personally suspect he's way off in believing that neoliberalism can be sent packing simply by getting it on its own and voting it out of existence.

Nevertheless, I'm very glad that we've had this conversation.

The Bladerunner

Alan E. Nourse The Bladerunner (1974)
Nope, not that one. This is the original novel from which Ridley Scott pinched the name for his movie about how robots have feelings too. He thought Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? sounded a bit gay or something. This is why the term bladerunner doesn't actually appear anywhere in the Ridley's high-tech Hovis commercial, and nor does the movie feature anything to which it might apply, unless you regard Han Solo's job as sort of like running along the blade of a massive knife. Here the bladerunner is one Billy Gimp, and his job is to literally run scalpels and associated medical paraphernalia to a medical professional operating outside the law; and so the title makes some fucking sense, Ridley.

Anyway, griping aside, Nourse's novel seems unusually prescient - and keeping in mind that the science-fiction novel has historically been fairly lousy at predicting the future once you get past Arthur C. Clarke and Murray Leinster. Here we find a world for which 2007 was about a decade ago, so it's more or less the present, and although it's a present which approximately resembles 1974, technologically speaking, we have huge sections of the American populace turning its back on the medical establishment, refusing vaccines and so facilitating a massive pandemic. The social furniture is otherwise mostly different, and thankfully Nourse was wrong about the medical establishment pursuing a eugenic agenda, but as a doctor, his predictions regarding the treatment of illness in modern America - or the disease industry as Jello Biafra has called it - were unfortunately well informed in many respects. At least you can see how William Burroughs found potential in this material when it came to writing his treatment for the movie which was never made.

The Bladerunner is approximately a high-tech thriller, or at least high-tech as of 1974, and it's interesting that its urban landscape seems somewhat closer to what we saw in the unrelated movie than anything from Dick's novel; but it's probably not an overlooked classic. The prose does its job, but had the movie option been taken up beyond just a cool title, it's hard to shake the feeling that it probably would have been a Lorimar production featuring Roddy McDowell and Patrick Duffy. Also, the happy ending feels a little weird given the somewhat darker build up.

Yet it's still fucking better than Robots Have Feelings Too.

D.H. Lawrence - a Biography

Jeffrey Meyers D.H. Lawrence - a Biography (1990)
I picked this one up back in the late nineties during an unusually heavy D.H. Lawrence binge - which is a sentence you don't see every day - along with the biography by Brenda Maddox. I'd already read the Maddox version as a library book, but read it again because I'd enjoyed it and so somehow never got around to this one, having heard it wasn't anywhere near so good as The Married Man. Nosing around online would seem to yield the same opinion expressed many times over, specifically that Meyers didn't do anything like so good a job as Brenda Maddox. It's been a while since I read the Maddox biography but I'm no longer convinced. This one feels pretty fucking thorough to me, and I find it encouraging that Meyers' other biographies seem mostly to be of persons from Lawrence's circle, or at least approximately adjacent - Wyndham Lewis, Katherine Mansfield, Joseph Conrad and so on, contrasting with Brenda Maddox having written biographies of Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher; which isn't to say that The Married Man wasn't as great as I seem to remember, only that Jeffrey Meyers wasn't fucking around here.

As biographies go, this one is hardly what you'd call an easy option and becomes distinctly chewy in places. Meyers combines his account of Lawrence's life with a fairly extensive analysis of the autobiographical aspects of the man's writings, meaning there's a degree of zipping back and forth between actual events and the publication of Lawrence's vaguely allegorical reiterations. Progress is therefore occasionally slow, with discussion conducted at an almost archaeological pace, but the book rewards the reader's effort and at no point does it become a slog. In other words - and in response to the naysayers - if all you really want to know is which celebrities he used to hang out with or what his favourite colour was, this probably isn't the biography for you.

For the most part I've generally considered myself moderately knowledgeable regarding the life and works of our Dave - hardly an expert but blessed with at least some understanding of the guy. Meyers' biography has therefore been one hell of an eye opener and positively revelatory in places, not least in confirming hunches which I've felt were probably on the money without quite being able to say why - not least dispelling the notion that he was ever a fascist in any meaningful sense, as distinct from a man prone to expressing an occasionally caustic or otherwise uninformed opinion. It was obviously a fucking nightmare having Lawrence as a friend, but there were reasons for his extraordinarily abrasive personality, and it clearly wasn't all about the thunder clouds. Indeed, Meyers successfully communicates what a joy his companionship could be under the right circumstances and why D.H. inspired such loyalty and devotion. Part of my reason for reading this biography right now was so as to be better armed when tackling The Lost Girl - which is the next one on the Loz pile - and I'm very glad I did.

Ground Zero

Peter David, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen & others Ground Zero (1988)
I never really felt one way or the other about the Hulk, but picked this up because it includes issue 340, an X-Men crossover which otherwise costs several hundred dollars these days. Before we proceed any further, here's what someone called Aurora thought of it on Goodreads:

I haven't read much Hulk, and this is pretty much why. The basic metaphor of Hulk and Bruce Banner is only so interesting, and there just isn't much else here. Also! The art is sooo bad. Everyone has mullets! The X-Men show up and Wolverine and Rogue have mullets!

Yeah, I sort of enjoyed it but I can't really disagree with that. Ground Zero wasn't quite pow! the comic book growing up, but its voice had broken, it couldn't talk to girls, and it was still playing with action figures while dreading any of its pals finding out. It's written by Peter David whom I recall as being not without certain qualities, although for some reason his only regular title which I can recall off the top of my head was when he turned X-Factor into a vehicle by which to bag sales for all those other mutants usually seem hanging around in the background of better stories. David kept these seven collected issues reasonably interesting in terms of doing weird things with the characters, which probably wasn't easy given that the villain combines a porno-moustache with a giant throbbing brain and is seemingly aware of being a villain. At one stage he transforms a couple of the Hulk's enemies into monsters named the Rock and the Redeemer, then later finds it advantageous to betray the pair, and so we see a memo added to the to do list on his fancy computer screen in futuristic Asimov font so as to ensure that he doesn't somehow forget to stitch them up like kippers:

LIE TO ROCK AND REDEEMER.

What a wrong 'un, he is!

Unfortunately though, the art isn't great and the best I've ever been able to say about Todd McFarlane's work is that he's consistent. He's not the worst, and true enough some of those Spider-Man covers had something, but his figures are clunky, resembling Stretch Armstrong dolls pulled into uncomfortable taffy shapes which no amount of crosshatching can conceal; and there's not much variation from his three basic expressions - surprise, anger and glee on faces with otherwise more than a touch of Archie about them and which don't really gel with the mood of the book. He draws a decent grey Hulk but has difficulty with anything that's supposed to look like a person. Bruce Banner here resembles the Archie version of Harry Potter, for example.

That said, Ground Zero is good enough to leave me wishing it had been better, which is, I suppose, a recommendation.

Asimov's Science Fiction 26

George A. Scithers (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 26 (1980)
Based on what I've read, I'd formed the impression of Asimov's being a decent magazine if marginally more conservative than Fantasy & Science Fiction. This is the earliest issue I have by at least a decade, picked up - from what I'm able to remember - back in 2008 from a second hand book store in Looe, and only now have I got around to reading it, for some reason. I think maybe the cover put me off.

I've seen it claimed that the state of written science-fiction was getting pretty desperate towards the end of the seventies with everyone churning out soupy sub-Tolkien drivel until William Gibson blasted it all away with his edgy cyberpunk revolution just as the Pistols had made all those music biz hairies look a bit dated. I've seen this claimed mainly in preface to interviews with William Gibson so I'm sceptical, and yet...

The best thing in this issue is Isaac Asimov's factual editorial discussing the classification of planets, meteorites, and other celestial bodies. I learned a few things and it beautifully illustrates why the man is remembered as such a great communicator. Travels by Carter Scholz, in which the consciousness of Marco Polo encounters a philosophical artificial intelligence in deepest space is also pretty great; as are Sheridan A. Simon's The Eumenides in Koine and Relatively Speaking by Lee Weinstein and Darrell Schweitzer, although these last two are both very short and therefore lack the presence to help towards balancing out the rest.

A. Bertram Chandler's Grimes and the Great Race reads very much like the writing of a former naval officer. James Gunn's analysis of the history of the science-fiction novel conveniently chooses Asimov's Foundation as typical of the genre, explains the plot in detail, and then proposes that its success is due to it being such a brilliant book - suggesting a certain lack of impartiality and failing to explain anything at all, and certainly nothing to anyone who found Foundation massively underwhelming, as did I. I started Joan D. Vinge's The Storm King but it seemed to be all swords, dragons, mead and people saying behold and I stalled after about the fourth of its thirty or so pages; and Jo Clayton's forty pages of Southwind My Mother looked like more of the same with a hey nonny no, none of which squares with why I would have bought an issue of a magazine which specifically refers to science-fiction in the title.

I guess it was early days for Asimov's Science Fiction, and everyone is entitled to fire a few blanks from time to time.

 

Sex Pistols File

Ray Stevenson (editor) Sex Pistols File (1978)
I borrowed this from some kid at school and spent the next couple of weeks absorbing more or less every last detail. With hindsight, I'm not even sure I had any of their records at that point and may only have known them from Sid's versions of Something Else and C'mon Everybody. By the time I had enough of a disposable income to buy my own copy, it had vanished from the shelves and the moment had passed. Now catching up, four decades later, I'm astonished to realise that I vaguely knew the guy who put the book together. My friend Carl came to know Ray Stevenson fairly well in later years and so I met him down the pub on a couple of occasions. I knew he had one hell of a reputation as having taken many of the best known photographs of the whole punk era, and I vaguely recall he had some great stories, but somehow the penny didn't quite drop beyond something fairly basic about my probably having seen his work in Sounds.

Well, fuck me.

The book is a scrappy splatter of Ray's photographs along with articles and interviews from the papers arranged in roughly chronological order so as to provide a pleasantly impressionistic summary of the rise and fall of the Pistols, and one which - oddly enough - seems to work better than the usual biographical narratives through the image and noise being preserved without any dominant authorial voice getting in the way. So it reads now just as it did then, from my perspective, as the fortunes of a bunch of older kids who were trying to make things a bit more fun and interesting than they had been for some time. Maybe it's not so much that I lost sight of what this book did for me, but I'd forgotten how much of it came from this thing. This was where I learned that sometimes it's necessary, even positive, to point out when something is dull or stupid or needs to be replaced by something better. We seem to have forgotten this of late, at least judging by the number of times I've had some self-appointed gatekeeper set me right about adults dressed as characters from children's television shows, or insisting that I really should try with such and such a fucking Yes album because the musicianship blah blah blah...

I don't really care that Rotten sells butter and votes Donald, and I don't really care that they were a boy band. They taught me the joys of saying no, and unpopular opinions, and not turning into your parents, and never having to say you're sorry. I sort of wish I'd realised this and had been able to directly thank Ray Stevenson when I had the opportunity, but never mind. It probably would have come across as slightly weird.

This one, in all sincerity, changed my life.

1985

Anthony Burgess 1985 (1978)
Hanging out on social media as I often do, there have been a couple of occasions of right-wing shitheads proclaiming that Orwell's 1984 was a warning against the evils of socialism, an observation made with some frequency during Donald Trump's first year in the hot seat, back when his Proud Boys were regularly firing up those tiki torches in protest against political correctness and the like; and it was an observation usually made within minutes of someone else pointing out that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, so it was the rest of us who were the real Nazis. Naturally, having read both Orwell's 1984 and his collected essays, I rolled my eyes.

Anyway, while the idea of socialism being the same as national socialism is obviously bollocks - the ethnic or cultural exclusivity of nationalism being in direct contradiction of socialist ideals, it unfortunately turns out the Trumpanzees were sort of right about 1984, albeit possibly for the wrong reasons; and I'm not sure how I missed it. Orwell, like Burgess - and me too, quite frankly - considered himself a socialist who despaired at the more didactic tendencies of the left, those prioritising ideology over people and whose ruthless zealotry had ultimately led to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. So while 1984 describes an oppressive totalitarian state, it's a satire quite clearly extrapolated from everything which kept Orwell awake at night back in 1948.

Burgess' response is 1985, a book divided into two complementary parts. The first comprises essays analysing Orwell's novel in comparison with how well socialism has been coping here in the real world. Burgess concludes that 1984 was not only lousy in a predictive sense - as the majority of science-fiction tends to be - but wasn't even particularly great as satire, being riddled with contradictions and ideas which seem hysterical in relation to that which inspired them. His point is that 1984 never happened, and couldn't happen, and his argument, as set out in the first half of this book, is convincing, illuminating, and extraordinarily perceptive - possibly one of the most insightful summaries of the politics of the last century that I've read.

Unfortunately, the second part of the argument employs a fictional narrative to make its point, whatever the hell that might be. It seems to be Burgess rewriting 1984 as he believes it should have been done, but as a satire based on his own era, specifically the late seventies. The elements of parody and exaggeration are either well done, or at least make sense in the context of what 1985 is trying to do, but being as the subject is socialism pushed to a ludicrous ideological extreme by the sort of wankers who presently hang around on Twitter policing the perpetrators of wrongthink, it comes across like a fucking Two Ronnies sketch about all those unions going on strike over the spoons in the staff canteen, coupled with the usual scaremongering about Islam. Were someone to commission Richard Littlejohn to write a satirical summary of left-wing politics in Britain in the seventies, I don't actually know if it would be much different aside from the quality of the writing. 1985 is not entirely without worth, and the overeducated street gangs are sort of amusing, somewhat harking back to A Clockwork Orange, even if the impression they leave seems to rest upon the idea that everything would be better if we all just made the effort to listen to Beethoven and read a bit more Shakespeare.

Having myself been in a labour union for two decades, and having come to conclude that said labour union didn't always have the best interests of its membership at heart, I see where Burgess is coming from because no system is immune to corruption from nest-feathering infiltrators; but ramping up the satire to the point at which it begins to resemble a Franklin cartoon in The Sun doesn't seem like a great solution; unless it's actually a parody of 1984 which targets what Burgess sees as Orwell's essentially conservative rhetoric, although even in such a case, it's still barely readable. So it's a game of two halves, Brian, one of them wonderful - perhaps even essential - and the other, a waste of everyone's time and coincidentally representative of exactly the sort of hyperbole which helped get Thatcher into power.

Unfortunately, even though everything Burgess says regarding 1984 is spot on, Orwell nevertheless wrote the significantly better book.

Chapped Lips

Peter Hope Chapped Lips (2021)
You may recall Peter Hope as vocalist of the Box, or from any of his more recent expeditions on the fringes of music where jazz, noise, and blues turn out to be different expressions of more or less the same thing. Chapped Lips, which we should probably term an existential monologue for want of a better description, seems to be a variant means of communicating that which was explored on recent albums by Hope's Exploding Mind. What that might be possibly depends on what the listener can hear - or the reader discerns in this case - but it's one of those deals where there's really no reliable shorthand for what happens. Simply you have to read the thing and get through to the other side, although helpfully this edition also comes with a CDR of the author reading the text in full, which you could probably call an audiobook if you felt so inclined.

Viewed from one angle, Chapped Lips seems to be Hope's assessment of his own place within the broader span of human existence, and of his own existence, and whether any of it means or amounts to anything - narrated as a stream of consciousness illustrated with metaphors and particularly tactile images. The impression garnered from both reading and listening is deceptively surreal - possibly I mean hyperreal - and vaguely hallucinatory, despite that this train of thought follows a very specific, directed route with very little which seems random or accidental.

the fat man was back in the pool. he had an inflatable hippo penis sticking out from between his legs. he was pink and naked and chuckled loudly as he massaged and waved it around. there was a woman, two floors up, shouting, in what was probably Ukranian, with a coiled extension cable and a glowing three bar electric fire balanced on the handrail. and then the fat man and his penis floated apart.

There are other passages which better exemplify the main theme or themes of Chapped Lips, but I'm not sure they work in isolation. This territory can only be directly experienced and resists summary.

On a purely technical level, in the event of such observations being any use to anyone, being reasonable familiar with Peter Hope's recorded works, I knew this was at least going to be interesting. However, I'm genuinely astonished at the level of accomplishment here, the sophistication and subtlety of what is communicated. I'm not sure material operating by such degrees of introspection - or this structurally experimental for that matter - is particularly easy to pull off without it seeming like a random assemblage - see also the notion that Burroughs' cut-ups were simple because any kid can take a pair of scissors to a newspaper; but this is a masterpiece which communicates almost by means of its own language, hence the immersive quality by which the reader acclimates to that language.

Thirty or so pages is just about the right length for a narrative of such density, and is additionally conducive to being read again and again, as is probably necessary; but hopefully, on the strength of this, there may be more to come.

Spiral Scratch

Gary Russell Spiral Scratch (2005)
One thing I took from Harold T. Wilkins' Flying Saucers Uncensored, and probably the only thing, was that I should probably get around to reading Spiral Scratch. Wilkins' book refers to a folk tale about a couple of mysterious children who turned up in rural Suffolk back in the twelfth century. They spoke a language no-one could understand and had green skin, so the legend has it, and I recalled this particular piece of Forteana from the opening pages of Spiral Scratch, a Who novel I'd started three or four times but never actually read beyond the first chapter; and the reason I'd never got around to reading it was because it can be unfortunately difficult to get excited about anything written by Gary Russell.

As Doctor Who obsessives doubtless recall, the television show went a bit wobbly back in the second half of the eighties, resulting in Colin Baker being unceremoniously replaced by Sylvester McCoy as lead actor, meaning Baker never had a proper on-screen swan song. Unsurprisingly there have therefore been a number of fan-generated versions of Baker's final story, thus attempting to send off the sixth version of the character with a bit more dignity than Sylvester McCoy in a blonde wig. Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon took a shot at it with Time's Champion which, as I recall, was pretty bloody awful, and there's also this.

Spiral Scratch is one of those alternate realities deals. Something called the Lamprey is consuming variant universes and only Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford stand in its way, with chapters all named after songs by the Buzzcocks, which is at least less obnoxious than the usual roll call of Morrissey b-sides. It's not the greatest thing I've ever read, although it's probably amongst Russell's better efforts. His prose tends towards workmanlike descriptions of occurrences one can imagine happening on the telly without too great a stretch of the imagination. There's a little more reliance on sentiment than I generally enjoy, and too many nominal sentences as bloody usual, but Russell is far from the worst offender in such respects, and almost gets away with it here. If the story was a little more coherent he probably would have got away with it, but it's a little too easy to lose track of who is doing what and why. Oddly, the end result is vaguely reminiscent of Moorcock's occasionally free range or otherwise impressionist narratives, which is no bad thing, and the dialogue is likewise not without a certain wit.

So it's nothing amazing, but neither is it irredeemably terrible, and the main problem is that it avoids irredeemable terribility for more pages than you really need when the best that can be said is that it's approximately readable. I've read better, but I've read much, much worse, so I suppose that's a recommendation on some level.

Flying Saucers Uncensored

Harold T. Wilkins Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955)
I found this in Half Price, incorrectly libraried away on the science-fiction shelf, or possibly correctly depending on how you tend to view this sort of thing. It seemed promising with a back cover listing chapters on The Coming of the Titans, Stories of Colossal Space Ships, and the Mystery of the Martian "Death Ceiling" - no idea why the aforementioned death ceiling should be in quotation marks, and I can't even remember what Harold had to say about it; and this sort of thing seems to be getting a bit thin on the ground these days, what with the presumably increased collectability of vintage saucer literature and today's potential readership apparently being more interested in fat orange men from New York than little green ones from Mars. The author's home address is even given in the back should you notice anything a bit weird which he might want to write about. I couldn't really not buy it.

Unfortunately, Wilkins was very much a student of the Charles Fort school of paranormal journalism, writing in a very similar style and looking you right in the eye without flinching as he states that most reputable scientists now agree that both Atlantis and Lemuria existed and had flying machines. This would be okay but for his book settling into a steady and distinctly Fortean rhythm of endless newspaper excerpts reporting strange and inexplicable occurrences, many of which aren't even particularly weird. Therefore, as soon as Wilkins settles on, for one example, the subject of mysterious explosions, it becomes difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the impending twenty pages of single paragraph newspaper articles quoted verbatim on the topic of inexplicable bangs, punctuated only by somewhat minimalist commentary just in case we've forgotten the involvement of an author.

Strangely enough, a few days following this fire, the water mains in this same San Mateo region broke, and for hours streets and highways were flooded. The explanation was—just 'faulty valves' . . . . But much stranger is this: Two boys were riding bicycles in Millbrae, near San Mateo. They were not riding together, nor did they know each other; yet they suffered similar injuries at about the same time, 4PM. Neither could remember how the accidents occurred, or what happened just before the accidents. Both suffered head injuries and one was injured in other parts of his body. One of the bicycles was smashed.

I expect it was aliens, although Wilkins doesn't actually say, preferring to taunt us with an enigmatic just ordinary accidents, reader? despite that none of the rest of us have any fucking clue because we weren't there and the account is patchy at best. Such flim-flam is, I suppose, at least marginally preferable to the chapter on mysteriously shattered windows to which our host's contribution is the occasional interjection of here we have some more accounts to confound the scientists, and where one such interjection actually uses the word followeth. Fort did the same thing with endless lists of claims, few of which appear significantly mysterious, all working up towards an overarching loopy theory about how we're all living inside a hollow sphere and stars are in fact upside down active volcanoes. Wilkins doesn't even bother to pull all of this random crap together by means of some hypothesis which would at least justify our suffering, instead being content to bury us beneath endless newspaper articles while pulling a spooky face. Brad Steiger has been known to peddle some preposterous shite in his similarly themed books, but at least he kept it entertaining. I have to admit I may have skimmed the second half of this one.

Wow, No Thank You

Samantha Irby Wow, No Thank You (2020)
I'll begin with the customary whining, specifically that I feel I'm beginning to see too much of this sort of thing, namely collections of wackily confessional autobiographical essays. While I'm aware that wackily confessional autobiographical essays existed before David Sedaris first began tapping away, it feels very much as though the current wave have been surfing along on the same ticket. I regard David Sedaris as unreservedly wonderful - although I generally prefer his readings of his essays to their printed form; and while I  enjoy wackily confessional autobiographical essays for the most part, I'm seeing a bit too much of a pattern here, and we've got to the point of the wackily confessional autobiographical essay as an end in itself*.

The books - many of which often began life as a blog - usually have some single knowingly peculiar image on the primary coloured cover, with a self-consciously quirky saying or phrase for a title, and it's all starting to feel a bit obvious. There was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Samantha Bee's I Know I Am, But What Are You?, and David Thorne's I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs, and about fifty billion others. My wife rates the Samantha Bee and Jenny Lawson books fairly highly. I tried Let's Pretend This Never Happened but felt my buttons being pushed in an effort to make me laugh, which would have been fine except that seemed to be all that was going on. I bought my wife the David Thorne book as a birthday gift because it seemed kind of funny, but turned out to be a collection of notionally comic emails by some guy who once wrote jokes for David Letterman - money for old rope. In publishing terms, it seems we may have reached a point equivalent to that year during which the field of stand up comedy was suddenly flooded with a million unfunny laddish cunts who'd doubtless gone down a storm in the work canteen and had decided to make a go of it.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened sold so well that Jenny Lawson was able to open up her own book store here in San Antonio, which is where I came across Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You. There was a bunny on the cover and a quick flip through brought forth chuckles, so it seemed like it would make a good anniversary present for my wife. She read it and laughed a lot, then insisted I give it a go, so here I am.

My first impressions were good - those being the impressions which inspired me to buy the thing on the grounds of it being something my wife might enjoy, which she did. My second impressions were more subdued, because a random paragraph read in the book store doesn't get chance to outstay its welcome; and despite initial promise, I found myself reading something by someone with whom I seemingly shared only a few points of reference. Samantha Irby is fifteen years younger than I am, black and female, and there's a lot about moisturiser, chick stuff, and the internet - and to the point of influencing Irby's style of writing which is full of net slang and contractions - LMFAO, hashtags, and things which work fine on a webpage but look fucking silly in print. If I'm reading a book, I like to feel some effort has gone into the writing, and that it isn't simply a copy-pasted treasury of - oh, off the top of my head - Simon's most LOLworthy facebook posts. I wasn't quite feeling this with Wow, No Thank You, but the thought was at the back of my head. It was confessional, almost gratuitously so, communicated with a shitload of sarcasm in the form of sentences which didn't quite seem to know when to stop. It was good, or at least I wasn't not enjoying it, but…

I skipped to the end, to an essay about how Meaty, Irby's first book came to be published, which seemed potentially a little too self-aware for its own good, but I wanted to get a handle on where the woman was coming from; and that's when it all clicked. Despite either appearances or my preconceptions, Irby seems to have been as much bewildered by her own success as anyone, and once you realise this, the rest makes a lot more sense. If her focus seems a little arbitrary, it's because she's writing what the fuck she wants to write about, when she wants to write it. There's no calculation going on here, no pandering to an audience, just scatterbursts of honestly righteous testimony seasoned with a wit that could take your eye out.

I can't watch This Is Us because even though the brothers are hot and the dad is a smoke show, in the first couple episodes the fat girl doesn't get to be much more than "fat," and wow, no thank you! Maybe there are fat people sitting around silently weeping about being fat every minute of every day, but that is a redemptive arc thin people like to see on television, and it's just not the fucking truth. And I like physical comedy as much as the next guy, but it's also super gross to watch a fat bitch just bounce off shit all the time? I don't know, dude, sometimes the chair with fixed arms isn't going to work for me, but it's not like every time I sit in a desk, I get up and take the whole thing with me, or I'm sighing wistfully as everyone else at brunch joyfully eats their quiche while I pick at a piece of boiled lettuce. The shit is called Meaty, and sometimes I hate my body not because it's fat, but mostly because I never wake up in the morning to discover it has transformed into a wolf or a shark overnight. When is the last time you watched a show with a fat woman who didn't at some point reference a new diet or some ill-fitting old jeans? Also this idea that fat people only get pity sex from recent parolees or whatever is bullshit; I've never fucked a repulsive loser ever in my life.

While I wouldn't say the book is exactly free-range, it swings around wildly from one page to the next, requiring that the reader acclimate to its rhythm - but is worth the effort. For what it may be worth, I additionally enjoy the fact of Wow, No Thank You being the testimony of a chunky black lesbian from an economically impoverished upbringing who communicates without recourse to any of the usual reductive box ticking so beloved of middle class pronoun wankers; and ultimately it becomes apparent that Irby and I have a lot in common, and that which we don't have in common, I can at least understand - even the moisturiser, sort of.

I began with the suspicion of there being too much of this sort of thing, but on close inspection I realise I was wrong, and that there isn't anything like enough.

*: I'm aware this may seem a little hypocritical given that much of what is said here might just as well be applied to my own self-published An Englishman in Texas, amongst others. My defence is that I generally regard such material as secondary or supplementary in the wider context of my writing, and as such the only buttons I'm bothered about pushing tend to be my own.

Blindness

José Saramago Blindness (1995)
Ursula LeGuin seemed to think this was something special and it sounded great. Happily, I chanced upon a copy at Half Price and Ursula was right, as usual. The quick version is that Blindness is Day of the Triffids had it been written by Borges, but deserves a somewhat more thorough account. Our story begins when everyone in the world - so far as we're able to tell - is suddenly unsighted for reasons which remain undiscovered and which probably don't matter. The blind are at first quarantined in an abandoned asylum, with food left sporadically at the gate in the hope of their being able to fend for themselves without infecting anyone else; except, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be a disease and the food deliveries soon cease. Naturally, it doesn't take long for civilisation itself to cease, and human existence becomes a vision of hell as all that we take for granted is stripped away - electricity, running water, law, order, food, transport and working toilets. Blindness is potentially one of the most harrowing things I've read, except Saramago clearly understood that what he wanted to say about human nature might be lost to the visceral horror of its telling. In fact, he specifically states as much near the end of the novel while additionally describing one of his solutions.

Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.

Additionally, as you may notice from the above, Saramago utilises his own conventions of punctuation and grammar, embedding dialogue within the text without indicating quotation or even direct attribution to the speaker, instead trusting the cadence of the words to distinguish speech. He abruptly switches tense or makes occasional authorial observations, even speculating what may happen next, and there are plenty of commas, not many full stops, and very few paragraph breaks. It's initially disorientating - not least because we never learn the names of any of our people, persisting with identification such as the doctor, the doctor's wife, the boy with the squint and so on right up until the end - but it soon becomes absorbing by somehow placing the reader at the centre of the horror, so it feels as though the book is occurring around you rather than simply on the page; and it really is horror of the most harrowing sort, the kind which occurs here in the real world when we reduce ourselves to living garbage. Yet Saramago keeps his emphasis firmly focussed on the positives, even when those positives constitute just the faintest glimmer of hope in a brutal world of blood and shit, forging a powerful parable about human nature without it reading like transgressive body horror drivel, and yet without pulling any descriptive punches. Blindness is honestly not like anything I've read before.

Amazing Stories July 1961

Cele Goldsmith (editor) Amazing Stories July 1961 (1961)
Whenever I pick up one of these old digests - and usually because Murray Leinster is promised by the cover - the story within nearly always turns out to be something I've already read, and usually one of his series featuring Doctor Calhoun, a sort of spacefaring version of the district nurse. Pariah Planet is thankfully not one of the Calhoun stories with which I'm familiar, although it's fairly typical of the series, meaning it may as well have been written by Hank Hill and comprises a sequence of Asimov style narrative puzzle boxes which the reader is invited to see if he, or she - but probably he, can solve before our man gets there. So it's pretty dry and this one isn't helped by a ton of speculation as to what Calhoun might find before he's actually found it, which tends to diminish the potential for surprise and threatens to muddy the distinction between what's happening and what may yet happen; but on the other hand, Leinster is rarely, if ever, a chore, and this episode borders on being a western with planets as frontier towns and our man Calhoun solving medical mysteries on a world overrun with cattle, so I'm not complaining. Also, Virgil Finlay's line illustrations are gorgeous.

Elsewhere, we're very much reminded of the space race transpiring right outside the reader's window with an article on escape capsules of the future, and Gordon Dickson's efficient but underwhelming account of lunar heroism. Thankfully we also have Dan Morgan's implausible but satisfyingly disgusting Father, and The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker.

I hadn't heard of the guy, and The Coming of the Ice is significant as having been the first original story to be commissioned and printed in Amazing back in 1926, everything before that having been reprints of Wells and the like; and it turns out he lived in San Antonio, so that's interesting - at least to me. The Coming of the Ice isn't life changing, but it's snappy, well written, and deliciously suggestive of that short window in publishing history during which no-one was quite sure what science-fiction was supposed to be, and the notion of an idea being too wild was yet to take hold. It concerns a man who is made immortal by scientific means, describing his experiences over the millions of years to come as humanity evolves around him even as he himself remains essentially unchanged. The influence of Wells is obvious, but it's got enough of a spark to get me on the hunt for more Wertenbaker, and more than justifies what little I paid for this magazine.

Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence Women in Love (1921)
Women in Love has been hailed as Lawrence's greatest novel in certain quarters, and while it's undoubtedly up there, I'm not convinced. As you may already know, Women in Love began life as the second half of The Rainbow before evolving into its own thing, and so continues the lives of Ursula and Gudrun whom we met in the first book while inevitably reiterating certain themes of the same, notably expressing the then revolutionary notion of women as capable of leading an independent existence, or at least one not entirely reliant upon the goodwill of men; but I'm not convinced that this is all it's trying to do.

Rather, if we take The Rainbow as a summation of human progress, society, and ethics dating from Biblical times to the modern era - as represented by the stratified generations in the novel - then Women in Love is principally looking forward to speculate on where we go from here.

It was written as a modern novel in a world wherein electric lighting was still very much a novelty, and accordingly borrows from adjacent modernist territories, particularly the visual arts which reoccur as sign posts - or possibly scratching posts - throughout the book, which itself orders its chapters in a sequence suggesting pictures at an exhibition with the reader moving ponderously from one scene to the next as most of the actual narrative motion occurs somewhere off the side of the page. As with individual paintings in an exhibition, each new chapter brings a different emphasis in terms of mood, colour and subject. Chapter six opens with what could easily be a description of a painting by Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec, introducing Minette who is unmarried, pregnant and fearless - much like Boccioni's similarly employed Modern Idol of 1911. If she seems a harshly lit character, it would probably be more accurate to suggest that she is simply described without sentiment, a description underscored by the then fashionable African totems and Futurist art at the house she shares in Bohemia, as such providing contrast to the tradition and conservative values espoused in chapter eight. Further to this contrast, the stately Breadalby House is acknowledged by Gudrun as resembling an old aquatint, while in chapter eleven the larger estate inspires Ursula to comment that one could have lovely Watteau picnics here.

The divide - here referring to culture and tradition as much as to class - is further emphasised by the mechanisation of the mine workers described in chapter nine, as a new sort of machinery in terms which echo the Futurists whilst unfortunately foreshadowing both Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher. Lawrence was clearly aware that where we go from here would be violently mechanistic, having written at least some of the novel during the first great war. Women in Love spends much of its page count engaged in destruction as a creative act, specifically destruction of the old order right down even to basic Victorian sentiment and the comfort of tradition. Gudrun and Ursula are school teachers, modern women teaching the science which has given birth to the twentieth century and even the possibility of the future being more than a simple continuation of the past. Even the title, Women in Love, seems possibly ironic, either a focus shifted to those who were traditionally the object of love and so denied autonomy in the socially sanctioned expression of the equation; or perhaps a bitter comment on love as a more violent and visceral institution than Victorian society would have had it.

Even if, as has been pointed out by Kate Millet, Lawrence's women can never be more than Lawrence's idea of women - an accusation which I rather feel misses the point - the sheer balls of this novel being titled Women in Love in 1921 shouldn't be taken for granted, nor that Ursula and Gudrun are the principal characters, the ones who react against everything herein, not least being the views of the author as voiced through Rupert Birkin. Lawrence was here attempting to cut through the bullshit, including his own bullshit.

Women in Love destroys nineteenth century sentiment without mercy or favouritism, even revealing newly embraced notions of progress as red in tooth and claw, with Gerald Crich exposed as a ruthless objectivist machine in The Industrial Magnate; with the supposed innocence of even children shown as essentially cruel in Rabbit.

What, one might wonder, does Lawrence presume to build in the wake of all this revelation and destruction? I don't know, and I'm not sure he knew, instead finding himself obliged to settle with approximations of what he didn't want and a vague notion of the direction in which we should probably be heading. Inevitably some of the proposed way forward allows for Lawrence's poorly quantified desire for a relationship which allows for a big strapping male friend on the side, but this is a personal preference rather than a manifesto, and I don't think the retroactive application of fashionable gender related neologisms is likely to help anyone in this instance. Otherwise, he's mainly asking questions which no-one had thought to ask in the presumed hope of getting an answer which wasn't too stupid.

There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of chaos, what then?

The novel is the response, I guess, approximately summarised thus:

'You can only have knowledge, strictly,' he replied, 'of things concluded, in the past. It's like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.'

Women in Love was a massively ambitious undertaking, a novel which, in stylistic terms, seems to map rather than describe the emotional and symbolic meaning of that which befalls Gudrun, Ursula, Rupert, and Gerald; so it isn't a realistic novel and arguably has more in common with symbolist art or even Boccioni's states of mind paintings than with the nineteenth century page turner. Unfortunately it's also much longer than it really needs to be to express that which it expresses, which is possibly a hazard of the exploratory nature of its composition - itself a doubtless deliberate echo of Lawrence's own life at the time, particularly as he leaves England in search of whatever may be out there. So if it's not Lawrence's greatest novel, then it was at least his most daring as of 1921 - assuming The Lost Girl, which I've still to read, doesn't turn out to be five-hundred pages of potato prints with rude words written around the circumference. It's also a bit on the chewy side.

Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin Words Are My Matter (2016)
Ever since I first read LeGuin's review of Jeanette Winterson's Stone Gods in the Gaurdani, I knew she was one of the good ones, someone who understood in a world of complete fucking idiots. She found a lot to like about The Stone Gods but spent a couple of massively enjoyable paragraphs rolling her eyes and sighing over Winterson's refusal to acknowledge that a novel in which someone colonises an alien planet can be termed science-fiction - on the grounds that science-fiction is such a boy thing or some such bollocks amounting to the usual snobbery one tends to experience with proper authors. The review is reprinted in this collection, along with a few similarly righteous and massively satisfying truths fired off in the general direction of Margaret Atwood; so I couldn't not buy the thing.

I'm not usually too stoked at the prospect of a writer writing about writing, but LeGuin's essays are packed with insights of the kind which I'd assumed were just me and probably no-one else in the universe. She dissects the relationship between proper writing and that which has come to be termed genre, bursting a multitude of self-important bubbles along the way, and even tackles the myth about whether people really are reading less these days and which people we're talking about when we make such generalisations. For what it may be worth, she doesn't believe that we are reading less, which is encouraging.

LeGuin proves similarly fascinating when discussing the work of other writers - both as reviews and dedicated essays harvested from various literary mags. Here she sheds fresh light on H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard and others with such clarity and enthusiasm as to have inspired my purchase of a novel by at least one of the names I hadn't heard of - and naturally there are a few. She brings a refreshing feminist perspective to her subject while remaining even-handed and generous throughout, preferring to focus on positives even when dealing with books she clearly didn't enjoy and so eschewing the didactic tendencies of Atwood and Winterson.

Finally, we end with a diary written while at a writers' retreat on some island, with pleasing emphasis on the wild bunnies she encounters. It's not often I find myself wanting to hang out with an author as a result of having read their work, but Ursula really does come across as having been a genuinely wonderful person. We could do with a few more like her, generally speaking.

The Golden Age of Marvel Comics

Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon & others
The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997)
I'm still half-engaged in researching the history of Marvel for something I'm soon to be working on, which I probably shouldn't mention in case I get bored of the idea and it never happens; but thankfully it's a loose form of research allowing for general impressions picked up from a greatest hits collection such as this. I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down expensive reprints incorporating everything right down to the adverts for sea monkeys. I'm not sure I would have the patience to read them, for that matter.

Marvel, as you probably know, began life as Timely Comics publishing its first title just a year after Superman first hit the news stands, so the myth of Marvel having been the lively young marmoset stealing the dinosaurs eggs derives mainly from their having changed the name so many times prior to Stan Lee - or possibly Jack Kirby - introducing acne and difficult homework assignments to the traditional superhero strip in 1961. This is what some of that stuff looked like before the characters took to agonising over teenage concerns.

It's probably fair to say that Lee's big idea - or possibly Kirby's big idea - at the beginning of the sixties was to shift emphasis from story to character, prior to which we had illustrated equivalents to the radio serials of the time wherein mostly hard boiled heroes identify bad guys before punching them squarely on the jaw, thus saving the day. The bad guys here were mostly boggle-eyed Nazis, shifting to boggle-eyed reds after the war, so it's fairly repetitive, trades mostly in clichés, and you can usually see the punchline forming before you've made it to the second page. About three quarters of the stories collected herein revolve around the theft of secret plans. Nevertheless, even within this fairly limited formula, there was a lot of invention, some truly screwy twists of imagination, and even at its most peculiar, the art is rarely less than arresting with panel after panel slapping the reader in the face with its relentless dynamic action. Later Marvel favourites such as Captain America, the Human Torch, the Vision, and the Sub-Mariner began here, and the latter is particularly interesting as he evolves from a triangular headed morally ambiguous enemy of mankind - more or less Tarzan underwater - to whatever he became in the sixties, which at least remained a far cry from the square-jawed guy who foils diamond heists to a daily schedule.

I'm not massively familiar with this era of comic book publishing, and for all their early promise, I guess Marvel were never quite so wild as - for one example with which I'm familiar - Planet Comics, and if there's some weird stuff here, there isn't anything which comes close to the like of Fletcher Hanks; yet there's a lot of charm, even if a little goes a long way, and I'd still rather look at this than Roy Lichenstein's version - or even Neil Gaiman cleverly subverting these tropes towards the usual ends.

Also, having read this lot, Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot now makes one fuck of a lot more sense.

The Ubu Plays

Alfred Jarry The Ubu Plays (1900)
1968 translation by Cyril Connolly & Simon Watson Taylor
It's hard to know where to start with Ubu. I started while taking drama 'O' level when I was seventeen or possibly eighteen, and it made a huge impression on me. It seems fair to say that Ubu made a huge impression on twentieth century culture in general, and if anything can be credited as the singularity from which modernism was born, it's probably Ubu. It's difficult to imagine there having been Dada or Surrealism without that formative kick up the arse provided when Firmin Gémier greeted his theatrical first night audience with a hearty cry of Merdre! back in 1896. Ubu Roi was hardly the first instance of artists thumbing noses at punters, but not even Rabelais did it with quite such riotous enthusiasm, using outrage almost as an end in itself.

Ubu Roi began life as a puppet theatre by which Jarry and his juvenile pals took the Victorian piss out of a hated school teacher, so any parallels one may happen to notice with Viz comic and the like are entirely pertinent. Jarry himself matured whilst ensuring that the scatological purity of his characters remained inviolate even as they moved from puppet theatre to the actual stage, by which point Ubu's focus had expanded to take the piss out of the entire Belle Époque and everything it held dear, not least its ruthless optimism. Pere Ubu achieves this by conquering Poland in the first play, then debasing himself in a peculiarly enthusiastic quest to become the lowliest of slaves in Ubu Enchaîné, the final tale. None of it really makes any fucking sense whatsoever, and that's sort of the point. I may have got more out of these plays had I been armed with a more thorough understanding of European history of the time - and I assume the treatment dished out to the Polish is supposed to be insulting for a reason - but the jokes still work so maybe it doesn't matter.

That being said, this book assembles the three Ubu plays, and although they're mostly entertaining, they work better on stage, as the author intended.