Daredevil

Stan Lee, Wally Wood & others Daredevil (1965)
The constitution of Marvel's great innovation - that which stamped its mark firmly on the public consciousness back in the sixties - hadn't really occurred to me, nor perhaps been expressed so well, until I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels. It wasn't simply the timing of the superhero revival, breaking out during a significant lull in the popularity of Superman, Batman and others. It was the blending of superheroes with other popular forms of the day, the romance, monster, humour, and horror comics - or what horror comics had become in the wake of Wertham's purge. It seems so obvious now, and I have no idea why I hadn't already seen it. Of course, it isn't that Superman's adventures had failed to incorporate elements of romance, humour, or whatever, but the emphasis seems more pronounced in those post-Fantastic Four Marvel titles where no issue passes without the necessity of secret identities causing a testosterone implosion in someone's trunks, or yet another subterranean monster whose name ends with a vowel finds his way to the surface. That said, it seems a safe bet that the shocking dynamism of Kirby and Ditko should also be considered a factor, rendering the blend all the more dramatic by having it seem to almost leap off the page.

Unfortunately, they can't all be classics, and while Daredevil doubtless went on to great things, his first steps were pretty subdued when compared to those of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and so on. This is because Daredevil - or specifically the first eleven issues as collected here - feels very much as though, having blown everyone's mind with the Hulk and the rest rendered as a series of explosive, angular punch-ups bordering on Vorticism, the Bullpen may have been wondering if there was still any mileage left in the traditional formula, hence something which is approximately a cross between Spider-Man and Batman - neurosis, doomed romance and weird powers combined with metropolitan decay and otherwise conventional detective stories.

I guess there was some mileage, although most of 1964 and 1965 were spent messing with the formula and not quite getting it right. The art is decent, mostly great, and occasionally stunning, yet pedestrian compared to Kirby - descriptive rather than expressive; and the ideas are as wacky as you like, but suffer from the means of their communication which is excessively wordy even by Marvel standards of the time and leaves the reader wading through verbiage for relatively little reward given that most of the verbiage is describing what we can see with our own eyes.

The premise of Daredevil, namely that a man blinded by some vaguely radioactive material will develop his other senses to a superhuman degree, while no more unlikely than any other implausible Marvel origin, tends to appear more and more ludicrous the closer you look. So Daredevil's endless account of his own powers as he reads a newspaper by feeling the ink on the page or decides that it sounds like the woman who just came into the room is wearing a red coat serve to highlight the inherent absurdity of his abilities rather than leaving us awestruck, as I suspect was the intention. Additionally, the whole notion of the sightless compensated with amazing hearing or sense of smell seems a bit Ricky Gervais in 2022, but never mind.

More than its contemporaries, the early Daredevil feels a little like a throwback to strips of the previous decades, the era of bank heists and henchmen and criminal masterminds revealed to be unscrupulous city councilors; and the weirder details work against themselves, somehow serving to emphasise the conservatism of the title. That said, early Daredevil wasn't actually bad, and certainly had both charm and potential; although in 2022 is probably mainly interesting as an historical piece.

All of the Marvels

Douglas Wolk All of the Marvels (2021)
I nearly shat myself when I first heard of this having been published. All of the Marvels is a general summary produced by a man who sat down and read almost every Marvel comic ever published from the first issue of Fantastic Four to the present day, and I nearly shat myself because I've been working on something vaguely similar, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale and which probably won't sell shit. Thankfully it turns out that Wolk's magnum opus isn't quite the same deal as that which I've been working on; although of course I had to read it to be sure, and because it seemed like it would be worth reading.

Roughly speaking, it's a history and analysis of the Marvel Universe, the environment shared by everyone from Spider-Man to Howard the Duck, allowing them all to turn up in each others comic books without the kind of contradictions which lead to knife crime at fan gatherings. Because we're talking about a world described across more than twenty-seven thousand comic books, Wolk tends to focus on those themes and characters of the larger narrative dearer to his heart, so it's a subjective, free-wheeling analysis rather than an academic exercise, which is probably as it should be. Happily, this also means that because the Marvel Universe began life in primary colours and isn't anything like so complicated as where the rest of us live, arguments made for details tend to say a lot about the whole, notably the chapter dedicated to issues of the relatively obscure Master of Kung Fu.

While I'm sure it may seem harsh to suggest that Marvel disappeared up its own arse during the nineties and has never really recovered, this is more or less how it has felt to me. It isn't that they haven't published anything decent in the last thirty or so years, because clearly they have, but there isn't much of it that speaks to me in quite the same way as it did during the years when even the pure garbage was kind of interesting by some definition. Consequently I didn't find the second half of Wolk's journey quite as engaging or convincing, and while it's interesting to read about what became of this or that character, it hasn't inspired me to track down any back issues - possibly excepting some of the Dark Reign material which seemingly foreshadowed the Trump presidency back in 2009 with disturbing acuity.

Wolk's slightly rambling style is very readable, although I found the endless footnotes a little irritating given that most of them could surely have been woven into the main text without significant disruption; and the fifty-page introduction telling us what is about to happen seems excessive and unnecessary given that All of the Marvels isn't actually a scientific thesis proposing to unscramble some previously impenetrable mystery. I gather the introduction is intended to serve as preparation for those who've never read a Marvel comic and er… who probably aren't massively likely to want to read this either, I wouldn't have thought.

We also have the not unexpected minor instances of sneering at white heterosexual males, because how dare they etc. etc.

The only kind of gatekeepers who have any business being around comics are the ones who make sure the gate stays wide open to anyone who wants to come join the fun.

Personally I don't always have a problem with gatekeepers. They tend to keep out the wankers who only appreciate your thing once they've turned it into something completely different, and which will usually be shite. Maybe it's just me. If I'm flying from one country to another I'd rather not do it in an aircraft built by persons who were happy for just anyone to come join the aircraft construction fun.

Griping aside, if it's not the Homer's Iliad claimed by all those completely impartial comic book authors who've praised the book on the back cover, it has a lot to recommend it, throws up a whole bunch of stuff that even I didn't know - sad gatekeeping fucker that I am - and leaves one feeling surprisingly warmed by its subject, reminding us that even if the medium is essentially corporate and sales driven, that which Marvel communicated between 1963 and 2017 was nevertheless often the work of genuine nutters and visionaries.

The Ironic Skeletons

Colby Smith The Ironic Skeletons (2022)
Colby Smith is a writer associated with the Neo-Decadent movement, and while I remain massively sceptical of any movement which would have me as a member, there's a strong chance of Smith being the one you really need to read. I've occasionally found some of his writing inscrutable, therefore carrying the unfortunate implication that I may not actually be quite so intelligent as I'd hoped, but his meaning is so clear in The Ironic Skeletons as to border on caustic, presenting so ruthlessly efficient a dissection of psychological collapse that it's a mercy, and probably necessary, that the book should be so short in terms of page count. Paleontology, or at least the subject of paleontology, here serves as analogy to the crumbling existence of our protagonist, D.W. Lambert, and even to the crumbling of meaning itself.

People often mistake me for an archaeologist, but I work with the corpses of things that died before the first written word, before the first uttered word, before the first thought.

The Bible erred when it placed Words before the creation of the world. The word is a recent evolutionary invention. The language I write this in will become extinct some day, just like the creatures I have dedicated my life to studying.

Babel was built for naught.

I don't know why I am writing this down, or why anyone writes anything down if their memory is to dissolve with time. I do it anyway, because I must be a narcissist like everyone else.

If the notion that someone has bolted an obsession with prehistoric animals onto a map of a nervous breakdown seems arbitrary, then you really need to read the thing because my description is unlikely to do it justice; which I say having once endured a psychologically adjacent interlude - which I survived, obviously - meaning The Ironic Skeletons taps into a strain of existential horror which, for me, seems fairly fundamental and quite overpowering. References to Hallucigenia or the Permian extinction shouldn't present an obstacle to comprehension given the context and that such details are but one part of the tapestry of D.W. Lambert's struggle for purpose; but if you're alive you should know that shit anyway, quite frankly. My own reading in this field is possibly pitiful, relatively speaking, although I've apparently picked up enough to have yelped out loud at the suggestion that therapsids may have lactated - following a quick butcher's on Google to make sure this isn't one of Lambert's paleontologically themed hallucinations.

As with a few rare pieces of music, it's quite difficult to write about this one because it explores territory which itself is best described by reference to its peripheral sensations - not unlike extinct ecosystems summarised by the skeletons they've left behind, which may or may not be a deliberate parallel. Given that Colby Smith has quite clearly lived at least some of this novel, I pray that there may be many more to come because I don't think I've read anything quite like it.

Becoming a Capstone

Omotoyosi Adebayo Becoming a Capstone (2020)
I was puzzled when this emerged from Santa's wrapping paper, given its resemblance to some sort of self-help, or at least motivational tract, and therefore not traditionally my kind of thing.

'It's David's book,' my wife explained helpfully and the penny dropped. David is one of her work colleagues. We attended the naming ceremony for Heaven, his baby daughter, about a year or so ago, which was a pleasure and felt like a great honour. David came to America from Nigeria and I've yet to meet an African I didn't like.

Anyway, this is David's story, how his family came to cross the Atlantic, and how they settled here in Texas. To get it out of the way, it's obviously the work of someone for whom English is not a first language, but the grammar and pace are simply unconventional - at least to me - rather than lacking in expressive power or elegance, and David peppers his account with a wonderful, even poetic turn of phrase. This means that the narrative voice acquires an unmistakably African accent after just a few pages, and so we get some very long sentences.

Segun sat in the middle, staring at everyone and weighing his father's words over the phone in which he told him that he would have to start college from scratch once he got to America in order to acquire a certification that would make him employable after college and give him an edge over those applying to work with foreign degrees.

Under other circumstances, the grammar of Becoming a Capstone might seem a hindrance, but the story takes over and to such an extent that the page turner promised by the back cover is delivered, despite being like nothing else I have read. David's progress from Nigeria, to a listless existence sharing a house with other recent immigrants, to minor brushes with the law, to success as some sort of programming whizz has none of the predictable quality of a typical rags to riches tales, and is told without recourse to any of the usual narrative tricks or short cuts, so the sense of consequence seems very real here; with the tone dictated by our man choosing to focus on what he gets right more than the inevitable stubbed toes.

My only real criticism is that at just over a hundred pages, Becoming a Capstone is surprisingly short for the story it tells. David has a great way of capturing detail and communicating feeling without resorting to sentiment; and I could have stood to hear about life in Lagos in maybe a little more depth.

When the Sleeper Wakes

H.G. Wells When the Sleeper Wakes (1903)
This was written as a serial and published in the Graphic, whatever that was, between 1898 and 1903. I assume it's therefore different to Herbert's 1910 revision as the novel, The Sleeper Awakes, which I haven't read. I gather Wells was dissatisfied with the serial version and took the opportunity to iron out a few of the creases, which I understand because I too am dissatisfied with the serial version.

The story follows a man called Graham who sleeps for a couple of centuries, wakes to a futuristic society which has come to regard him as a near God-like figure for no immediately credible reason, and who then comes to take a dim view of the aforementioned futuristic society. It's a dystopia and is thus ancestral to more or less an entire genre, although Wells' version of the future foreshadows that of Aldous Huxley more than it does Orwell's 1984, particularly with the babble machines feeding the populace a steady diet of complete bollocks in a spirit we have come to associate with Fox News. Science-fiction has a generally poor track record for predicting the future which, to be fair, isn't always the intent so much as passing comment on emergent trends of the time in which it was written - which is the point that poor old Hugo Gernsback seemed to miss. Sleeper, unfortunately, doesn't even seem to say a whole lot about the nineteenth century aside from its characteristic obsession with aviation. Also the race thing is a little uncomfortable, with an imported black police force here serving for the brutal nightstick of the state. Nevertheless, the term savage is used just once so far as I noticed and it would be unfair to castigate Wells for having grown up in colonial Victorian society. Certainly his attitudes seem mild in comparison to Edgar Rice Burroughs dog-whistling the Klan or Lovecraft inserting the phrase let's go, Brandon into every other tale.

Wells wrote some astonishing books, but I've found the ground tough going once you're past the hits. In the Days of the Comet is mostly decent, but I found The War in the Air pretty thin and The Food of the Gods borderline unreadable; and Sleeper probably isn't as good as even The Food of the Gods which at least had jokes, or tried to crack jokes. It's not terrible, but it's a bit of a chore because there's not much to be said once we're done with how the times have changed. I ended up skimming the last thirty or so pages just in case anything happened, and nothing did apart from Graham crashing his plane. Wells just about communicates his loosely socialist views along with a well founded suspicion of anything calling itself a revolution, but it's all bogged down in the humourless drone of Graham's protracted sighing about the state of the world and how everything used to be better, albeit with some justification.

I suppose I may one day take a shot at the revised version should I happen upon a copy, but I'm not in a hurry to seek it out.

Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Asimov's Science Fiction 392

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 392 (2008)
I've encountered an unusual number of recurrent patterns in this issue, some to the point of irony, not least being Robert Silverberg mourning the progressive spirit of science-fiction's new wave as a casualty of the juvenile and populist, whilst mentioning in much more than just passing the publication of his own Lord Valentine's Castle, of which the looooooong excerpt I read in Fantasy & Science Fiction a while back seemed the very definition of the stuffily traditional crowd pleaser; but never mind.

During the course of his book reviews, Paul Di Filippo laments that while there have been numerous heirs to the traditions of Clarke and Heinlein, there haven't been so many following in the footsteps of that other member of the big three after which this magazine is named; and this lament occurs in the very same issue as William Barton's novella, In the Age of the Quiet Sun which revisits Asimov's tales of asteroid mining without necessarily repeating them. Barton avoids just photocopying Asimov by means of a narrative voice grounded in the immediately recognisable world of an astronaut who makes throwaway references to episodes of Land of the Lost which he saw when he was a kid, and which I didn't so I had to look it up. It could have been horribly post-modern but is handled well and is convincing, even for a story in which we discover a sophisticated extraterrestrial derelict in the vicinity of Jupiter. Indeed, the prosaic clutter of our guy's thoughts renders Barton's story all the more credible in terms which seem very much like an update of what Asimov did on his good days. In the Age of the Quiet Sun turns out to be one of the better things in the collection.

I found Horse Racing by Mary Rosenblum a little charmless. It imagines a conspiracy whereby super-rich venture capitalists buy - although sponsor might be a better word - promising children without anyone realising, assuming the good fortune of their getting to go to a better school or whatever is down to pure luck; but it isn't, because this is how said venture capitalists ensure that someone who might grow up to cure a disease or solve the issue of global warming gets to do so, which is cute, not least in seeming to support the notion that all of the worlds ills may be cured through the wonders of a free market. Maybe I just misread the thing. Maybe it was actually a parody of that which it appears to propose.

I gave up on Derek Zumsteg's Usurpers after two pages. He's a sports writer and this was his first pro-fiction, written in experimental style and so reminding me of that thing about those who run before they've learned to walk - which you would think might have been obvious to a sports writer of all people. I gather it's something athletic, and locker room high jinks ensue in loosely punctuated present tense sentences clipped so as to create impressions rather than statements.

Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over. Vinyl benches tied up their back if they're from a poor zip. Those boys recognise King, stop him as he passes. Exchange complicated handshakes. Wish him luck and mean it. Tell him to fuck shit up and mean it.

The whole thing is written in this way and is as such unreadable, resembling the thought bubbles of persons in eighties X-Men comics which at least had a visual context to make sense of the shorthand, and I've no fucking clue what vinyl benches tied up their back is supposed to mean; but then I don't understand why sports writers even exist. I cycle twenty miles a day but not once have I felt the urge to read about cycling.

Following which, it gets better. Soldier of the Singularity by Robert R. Chase is good, or possibly efficient, with a twist ending which is at least integral to the story and doesn't just pull astonished faces at the reader. Midnight Blue by Will McIntosh pulls off a reasonable Ray Bradbury impersonation without being too obvious about it. Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone by Ian Creasey is briefly satisfying and nicely observed.

Slug Hell by Steven Utley is set in the Paleozoic and is probably the greatest of the shorter short stories in this issue. Nothing really happens aside from a few time travelling paleontologists holding forth on the subject of prehistoric invertebrates and continental drift, but sometimes that's all you need.

The Ice War by Stephen Baxter gets the cover for obvious reasons, and while I remember it as amazing, this time around I'm troubled by details which I'm not sure I even noticed fifteen years ago. It's approximately a prequel to Anti-Ice, bringing those peculiar ice things to Earth in the eighteenth century, and specifically to the attention of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Isaac Newton as the three of them happen to be sharing a coach journey, which all feels a bit too Doctor Who for comfort, not least because even though each of them just happens to mention their respective famous novels, as they would, only Newton seems to have a legitimate reason for his presence, in this case engaging in discussion of whether God intervenes or simply prefers to leave things running. Swift dies before he's able to finish Gulliver - for some reason - and Defoe only seems to have showed up for the sake of mentioning that he wrote Robinson Crusoe, so it all seems a bit gratuitous; but outside of this, it's still Stephen Baxter and is therefore fucking fantastic in all other respects. If anyone is still writing science-fiction in a couple of hundred years time, someone will write a novel about an alien invasion as experienced by Irvine Welsh, Stephen Hawking, and J.K. Rowling as the three of them try to enjoy a lovely day out at the seaside.

There was also some poetry but, well, you know…

Norstrilia

Cordwainer Smith Norstrilia (1964)
It's taken me a year to get through this one. I started it in April last year, failed, read something else instead, tried again, failed again, read a different book, then came back to this one and returned it to the shelf in defeat, telling myself I would get through it when the time was right.

This time, I cracked it. I even enjoyed some of it, although it remains painfully apparent why I stalled and stalled again back in 2021. Cordwainer Smith spins a wild yarn informed by Chinese folklore, amongst other things, not in terms of characters and situations but in the general rhythm of his fiction, the way in which it feels a little like a parable and makes narrative twists and turns with the cadence of a dream. In practical terms, this means we have something which very much foreshadows Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time in relating only loosely to the rest of science-fiction as a genre, and generally doing its own peculiar thing in the expectation of the reader being able to keep up.

Norstrilia begins on a planet which is essentially a colony of Australia complete with all the stuff about hats with corks dangling from the rim. Rod McBan is a sheep farmer, tending flocks of giant immobile sheep which exude some substance that bestows immortality. One night he's gambling on his computer and wins so much money that he comes into possession of planet Earth, to which he then travels disguised as a cat person - you get the picture.

It's all very entertaining, and it doesn't quite feel like the series of random twists of gratuitous surrealism possibly implied by the above description, but Cordwainer Smith tends to jabber, and all it takes is one paragraph's worth of lapsed concentration and you're fucked, with no idea of what's going on or who the hell these people are supposed to be.

Anyway, I did better this time around - although I've no idea why. I hung on tight and discovered the first half to be massively entertaining as well as impressively weird. The appendix refers to Norstrilia having originally been broken up into two parts and published as separate novels with the addition of supporting material, so my guess would be that the first of the pair was the strongest. I didn't have so much trouble with McBan's travels on Earth as I did with the first half back in April, 2021, but it felt a little surplus to requirements, possibly because by this point the reader has come to expect the arbitrary swerves as a matter of course. Given Smith's background, it seems fairly likely that Rod McBan is intended to be a sort of rough edged Buddha or Christ figure coming in from the wilderness, then walking amongst mankind, anonymous and yet heir to all the riches of heaven; but unfortunately, I found it hard to care, and if anything profound was said, it wasn't said in any language with which I'm familiar. It's not difficult to see why this guy has such a reputation, but for my money he works best in short, sweet bursts.

Shogun Warriors

 

Doug Moench, Herb Trimpe & others Shogun Warriors (1980)
As a kid growing up in the late seventies, I was obsessed with Micronauts, but inevitably there was a limit to how many of those things I could buy given the economics of pocket money and that the more extravagant figures and their vehicles didn't seem to be available in the UK. I'd seen boxes of Monogram's Shogun Warriors model kits on the shelves, but they looked slightly ridiculous - exaggerated and improbable figures when compared to the Alan Bennett documentary which constituted the world of the Micronauts. Running out of vaguely futuristic stuff to accumulate, I eventually caved in and bought one out of curiosity - Grandizer, I think. I glued all the bits together, painted him, stood him amongst my Micronauts then tried to imagine what they might be talking about. I'd thawed to the Shogun Warriors, although even I had to admit they didn't really do much. They could raise their arms, turn their heads, and a couple of them were able to fire plastic missiles or even their fists, but that was about it. Not knowing what else to do, I bought the other five over the next few months, or however long it took.

 

Then I spotted a Shogun Warriors comic book in the newsagent, issue four of this thing to be specific. It was American and therefore part of a world I didn't fully understand, and it wasn't in quite the same league as 2000AD or even the weekly Star Wars comic, but there was no getting away from the fact of it featuring giant robots. I don't think I had realised they were supposed to be on the same scale as Godzilla until I read the comic book. I bought an issue whenever I saw it, amassing a gappy collection of just five or six issues determined by an unfamiliar publishing schedule and the unreliability of my being able to find a copy.

Now, forty years later, all becomes clear, not least where Danguard Ace and Combatra had sprung from and why Raydeen was the only one I recognised from his model kit. The Shogun Warriors were a line of die-cast robot figures marketed in the US by Mattel, a pantheon from which the six larger Monogram kits were drawn. Most of them began life as Japanese kids' cartoons - as is probably fucking obvious - only to be bundled together under the Shogun banner at Ellis Island, meaning that our Shogun Warriors were actually, it could be argued, forerunner to the Sense of Right Alliance, the superhero team formed when Superman, Spider-Man, Shrek, and Lightning McQueen from Cars came together in the name of justice 'n' stuff.

 

Anyway, this isn't an - ugh - graphic novel, because the publishing rights to licensed characters are apparently a logistical nightmare in legal terms, not least with the three Shoguns starring in this book belonging to different licensees; so it's doubtful that the comics will ever be reprinted, meaning my only option was to buy a stack of back issues - which was easy enough because they're still cheap and it was cancelled after issue twenty; and so here I am at the age of fifty-six reading a pile of comic books about giant robots routinely saving the world from other giant things.

I don't recall being particularly knocked out by the comic even at the time, although it seemed to have something. Trimpe's artwork reminded me a lot of Jack Kirby, seeming faintly ridiculous and simplistic to my untutored eye, and there's a lot of corn here, not least that the Shogun Warriors are pitted against bad guys who are aware of being evil and even rejoice in the same - but it doesn't fucking matter because - duh - giant robots, you idiot! In case it isn't already clear I'm hereby invoking a variation on the Godzilla defence which neutralises criticism by virtue of the fact that he's Godzilla. If that doesn't work for you, maybe you shouldn't have dropped out of law school.

Anyway, the story begins with our three main guys Richard Carson, Ilongo Savage and Genji Odashu. They all have exciting, action-packed jobs - movie stuntman, test pilot and so on - somehow making them obvious choices for Shogun operators, and thus are they spirited away to the hidden base of the Followers of the Light somewhere in the Japanese countryside. The Followers of the Light are a group of ancients, possibly immortal and not entirely human - even though one of them resembles Graham Linehan and smokes a pipe. They fought evil during the previous Chaos War then went into suspended animation, only reviving now that the sorcerous Lord Maur-Kon is back in business. The Followers of the Light have built three giant robots with which to fight evil, but the robots can only be operated by pilots sat inside their massive frowning metal heads, much like the Numskulls from the Beezer.

It's the same sort of ham-fisted pop mythology as informs the Godzilla movies, and it works because it takes itself absolutely seriously, fully expects you to be entertained, and because giant robots. If it seems pale and superficial in comparison to - off the top of my head - Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, then you may have missed the point, the point being giant robots. It may also be worth noting that our Shogun Warriors, aside from being direct ancestors of the otherwise fucking ridiculous* Transformers, provided a shitload of inspiration for the movie Pacific Rim, and not just the enormous robot exoskeletons. Pacific Rim is pretty much Shogun Warriors with swearing and oil stains.

To finally get to the point, Shogun Warriors may not have been the greatest comic book ever published, and it's hard to imagine it having endured beyond these twenty issues without eventually becoming repetitive, but it nevertheless had a hell of a lot of charm. For all of his simplistic lines and shapes, Trimpe does a great job of conveying sheer scale, and after a few issues one begins to realise that he isn't just doing a Jack Kirby. If the influence is obvious, not least in the exhausting dynamism bursting from each page, his figures - amongst other aspects - are significantly less exaggerated, allowing for a sense of contrast which Kirby didn't always achieve. If it's not always easy to pinpoint Trimpe's strengths, sharp contrast is provided by Steven Grant and Mike Vosburg's fill-in issue which conspicuously lacks the charm or imaginative flair of Moench and Trimpe. As with the Ramones back catalogue being similarly resistant to analysis, there's something very satisfying here, even absorbing, and to the point that it seems only natural to feel slightly sorry for everyone involved when the run comes to its end. Moench gave Richard, Ilongo and Genji a slightly more formal send off in Fantastic Four #226, finally revealing that Raydeen, Combatra and Danguard Ace had been destroyed. It made for a surprisingly depressing coda, which itself underscores the sense of idiot joy communicated in the pages of the comic during its short run. They'll probably never get a reprint, but they shouldn't be forgotten.

*: There has never been a really good reason for a massive futuristic robot from outer space to disguise itself as a truck, aside from that Convoy would have been a better movie.

Mars by 1980

David Stubbs Mars by 1980 (2018)
This is approximately the book I was hoping Paul Griffiths' Guide to Electronic Music would be, give or take some small change. As promised by the cover, it traces the history of the form from Russolo to the present, albeit with a fair bit of lateral waggle once we're past John Cage. Of course, the term electronic here encompasses plenty which isn't strictly electronic but which is at least progressive in forging an unorthodox path either at odds with, or at least adjacent to the mainstream. I suspect that any respectable attempt to cover this broad field will be obliged to take a subjective route if only for the sake of focus, which is what Stubbs does, and why his account succeeds for the most part.

Somehow this is the first time I've read about a great many of these people in this sort of detail, and the first thing I've read which has bothered to admit that Russolo's ambition - for one example - far outstripped his achievement. The reasonably lavish background detail on both Schaeffer and Stockhausen is also greatly appreciated, as is Stubb's reluctance to waste time and brain cells on Switched on fucking Bach. Of course, given the unashamedly subjective composition of this particular journey, I was left with at least a couple of questions. If Stubb's criteria for who made the cut depended on extent and spread of subsequent influence - which I suppose justifies the presence of Depeche bloody Mode - the relative absence of SPK, Hawkwind, vapourwave and more or less all rap music seems a little puzzling, although not enough so as to unbalance the whole.

The title refers to the historically Gernsbackian thrust of electronic music as something which looks to the future, a quality which might be deemed inherent to the exploratory nature of the form; then asks whether or not this is something we have lost in recent times. It's a good question, although I'm not convinced that it can have a single coherent answer, depending as it does on who and when we're asking. I personally suspect that there's something in Lawrence Miles' ghostpoint which proposes that innovation itself may have ceased for our culture, replaced by cyclical revision with each leap forward being no more significant than the latest smartphone - nothing but updates as far as the eye can see; but it's a pessimistic view and possibly works only as a rhetorical generalisation. Stubbs seems to conclude that the current standard bearers for electronic music demonstrate the same creative vitality as their ancestors, despite the increasing ubiquity of the form, and he's probably right.

The only problem I see with this account is that as an argument for the revolution remaining continuous, it hangs together, but only just, being stretched thin across a dizzyingly broad span of digressions and rabbit holes - all fascinating, but which tend to distract from the theme as a result; but this is a minor quibble which shouldn't really be taken as a complaint given that the journey seems to be the point here, and frankly it doesn't get much better than this.

I've always thought David Stubbs was a great writer, but this is exceptional beyond my expectations.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1966 (1966)
Having done my homework on this occasion, I've discovered that Cohen's time as editor of Fantastic was characterised by most of the stories in each issue being reprints, these presumably being cheaper than new material. Five of the seven in this issue are reprints, from what I can tell, and it's not looking great.

I actually plucked this one from the shelf upon seeing Murray Leinster's name on the cover, and while The Psionic Mousetrap isn't necessarily anything amazing, it isn't entirely lacking redeeming qualities. Similarly reprinted is August Derleth's Carousel. Derleth's contribution to the field as editor and publisher shouldn't be underestimated, and when the stars are aligned in a certain configuration, he's even been known to spin a decent yarn, but Carousel is unfortunately not one of them. It's not terrible, but you can pretty much tell how it's going to end before you're half way through the first paragraph. Swinging back to 1932, David H. Keller's No More Tomorrows doesn't make a whole lot of sense but is at least short, so most of your time is spent waiting for him to explain the guy with a massive head and just one eye, which he doesn't; and You Can't See Me! by William F. Temple is harmless, fairly stupid but not without a certain screwy charm.

A regrettably sizeable chunk of this issue is occupied by Eando Binder's The Little People dating from 1940. Eando Binder was a literary gestalt of brothers Earl Andrew and Otto Binder. They had a big hit with Adam Link, a robot character starring in a series of short stories, but whatever magic they may have pseudonymously wrought in issues of Amazing and others is not immediately obvious from The Little People. The Little People is forty leaden pages of science discovering real fairies on the grounds of Charles Fort having proven their existence beyond any doubt whatsoever because of all those myths and legends 'n' stuff blah blah evolution blah blah blah Eohippus was a tiny horse meaning that blah blah blah. It might be less annoying were it not written like Enid Blyton for adults, or at least Enid Blyton for older girls and boys, but mostly boys - although I read one of her Wishing Chair books a couple of years back as an experiment and Enid can be impressively weird in places, whereas this is just squaresville from beginning to end. Recidivist fairies, for example, are punished by reduction to what the Binder lads term woman-status, meaning their duties are limited to cooking and cleaning for a year. Even the illustrator apparently couldn't be arsed to read the thing all the way through, cladding his fairies in tiny versions of human clothes, contradicting the revelation of their captor, the evil scientist Dr. Scott, denying them such traditional fairy clobber.

Never mind.

Of the new material, there's Rocket to Gehenna by Doris Piserchia which I didn't read because it's one of those stories told as an exchange of correspondence, and I can't be doing with that shit. The other one is Roger Zelazny's For a Breath I Tarry - although it actually turns out to have first appeared in New Worlds six months earlier. Anyway, it's more of what I suppose must be Zelazny's customary science-fiction as pseudo-Buddhist parable, as was Lord of Light, but being significantly shorter is more easily digested and is actually pretty great. In fact, it's probably the best thing I've read of his which wasn't an attempt to make sense of Philip K. Dick.

So it's not a great average for this issue, but I guess a few decent efforts mostly cancel out the duds, although I still say The Little People was a barrel scraped too close to the grain.

Body to Job

Christopher Zeischegg Body to Job (2018)
I don't know how it's taken me so long to work out that The Magician wasn't actually Christopher Zeischegg's first, but better late than never, I suppose. It's two years since I read The Magician, but Body to Job inhabits similar territory from what I can recall, being grown from the same autobiographical soil without necessarily bringing forth the same fruit. Zeischegg was enough of a name in the porn industry to accrue fan mail, and Body to Job is about that. A few sections are obviously fictional, although there's otherwise no clear line drawn between reality and allegory, presumably on the grounds that certain events are better described as at least partially fictional. Honestly, it's not the sort of subject to which I'm ordinarily drawn, but Zeischegg is one hell of a writer.

I don't really have a problem with porn, my take being that I'm not entirely sure what I think about it, or even whether whatever I may think about it matters. I understand Andrea Dworkin's reasons for wanting it banned but, realistically speaking, I suspect this may be one genie that's never going back in the bottle; so I suppose beyond certain reforms, I simply believe it should be more difficult to access. On the other hand, I distrust sex work replacing older, apparently more offensive terms simply because I distrust grown men dressed as either ponies or little Japanese girls screaming whilst waving sex work is work placards, because I'm disinclined to enable debilitating psychological conditions, and because I don't actually recall anyone ever claiming that sex work wasn't work, one branch of which is reputed to be the world's oldest profession, after all. Anyway, Zeischegg seems attuned to where I'm coming from.

Neoliberal pundits whining about my job to earn ratings and book deals and spouting bullshit advocacy claims for people they'd never met pissed me off. So I decided to take a stance and balance out the conversation.

This is more or less what this book does, being the word of someone who has lived this stuff in detail - as distinct from simply having opinions; and so Body to Job is fascinating in describing territory quite unlike what I guess many of us had assumed was a map. His prose is tight, functional and efficient, delivering meaning without drowning everything in mood, adjectives, or anything surplus to requirements, because nothing described herein requires a melodramatic soundtrack telling you what to feel about what our guy is going through with his doomed porn shoots, gynecological misfires, and that endless line of strangers waiting to have sex, rip him off, or both. It takes skill to write with this level of precision, delivering meaning without dressing it up in bullshit; and it works and is refreshing given that bullshit is traditionally the means by which most porn is communicated, I would argue.

Body to Job isn't porn, although that's what it's about - not even the sort of joy of squalor variant you might expect of transgressive fiction - if we really have to use that term. On the contrary, Zeischegg's testimony borders on cheery, or at least amiable, regardless of what he's going through. The possibility of sunlight is implicit during even the darkest passages, and yet without turning it into just the sort of empowerment bollocks I was grumbling about two paragraphs back. There's even a comic undercurrent felt here and there, just like you have with real life.

'Okay,' she said. 'Carry on.'

'The name of my film is Death and Sports Bras.'

The professor shifted in her seat. 'I still don't understand. What are your characters' motivations in this story? Who is the protagonist?'

'Well, I've been listening to a lot of black metal. And I have this thing for sports bras. Because they look kind of like an androgynous, uh, futuristic uniform. But I guess that doesn't really answer your question.'

About half way through this novel, autobiography, collection, or however you chose to frame it, I realised Christopher Zeischegg doesn't actually remind me of any other writer that I've read, which is kind of a rare thing; and yet his voice is strong and distinctive which seems to make the lack of obvious parallels all the more unusual. It inhabits a world we probably take for granted, the oldest profession, cargo cult enactments of the most fundamental human transactions, the deed upon which most of our jokes are based, and Zeischegg reveals how little we really know, perhaps about anything. Who could have foreseen that something quite so profound could feature so much screwing?

Moon of Mutiny

Lester Del Rey Moon of Mutiny (1961)
I'm unlikely to ever push expectant mothers into oncoming traffic in order to get at a Del Rey I haven't read, and I didn't really have coherent plans to read any more, but this popped up in a crappy book sale - along with Nerves - and would have been pulped in the absence of a buyer, and somehow I just couldn't let that happen. It's another juvie, as might be surmised from the title and - as with a number of Lester's other juvies - stars a plucky young space cadet who brushes his teeth and doesn't want to disappoint dad - who happens to be a space general or something of the sort. This time it's young Fred Halpern who gets booted from the academy for failing to go by the book, and whose freewheeling ways somehow end up saving the day on the moon. It would be sheer arseache under any other circumstances, but Del Rey's writing is always a pleasure, and so much so that it's fairly easy to forget that you're almost reading Enid Blyton in terms of plot. Moon of Mutiny is hard science-fiction in the Asimov sense, and Del Rey communicates some truly peculiar ideas about rocketry and lunar geology without lecturing or jeopardising his popular touch; and as always, the hokey message you're probably expecting never quite materialises in familiar form, leaving us with a startlingly original rendering of a tale which probably would have been a waste of time with anyone else sat at the typewriter.

Forever

Thomas Moore Forever (2021)
Once again I'm pretty much lost for words, Moore's prose being of such scalpel precision as to render whatever I might have to say about this unusually short novel equivalent to it's really smart innit. Our man travels to Paris, hooks up with strangers, and coasts through his own fragile existence with the detachment of one whose time is running out, and who acknowledges that none of it truly amounts to anything.

Capitalism is everywhere - especially death. But after death it's gone, like everything else - I presume it will mean nothing. Things will lose their meaning. Things won't matter to me. I won't be me. All this will be just - I should just start leaving blank spaces on the page. I don't cruise again. I don't look at any more websites. Sex is gone now. It feels like a big thing to put to rest. I don't know if it is or not. It's hard to tell if things matter or if they just feel like they do.

Moore somehow manages to describe that which probably cannot be described - emotionally speaking, by mapping the empty spaces around it, and somehow achieving it with as few words as possible; and it's beautiful to behold, even though it really shouldn't be.

Incredible.

Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People

Paul Woods & Gavin Baddeley
Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People (2010)
It's taken me an entire decade to get around to reading this one and for numerous reasons, the main one being that I've known Paul - the author, or one of the authors, I guess - for nearly thirty years and distinctly remember a phone call ending with I'll have to go now, Lawrence, I've got to translate this incoherent piece of shit into readable English before the weekend. I think he was referring to Gavin Baddeley's Lucifer Rising which he'd been given the task of editing for Plexus Books, which didn't instill me with much confidence in their subsequent collaboration.

For what it may be worth, I'm also a contributor. Specifically Paul phoned me back when he was putting the book together asking for a painting of bodies impaled on stakes, mainly because, as he described it, visual material relating to Vlad the Impaler was a bit thin on the ground. It seemed an odd request, but I did what I could and was paid for it, although I'm still not that convinced by the thing I came up with. Nevertheless I'm thanked in the front of the book, and in fact I'm thanked within the same sentence as Boyd Rice. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that but I'm probably about due for cancellation anyway, so I don't suppose it matters.

Online criticisms include one particularly peculiar accusation of homophobia which I can only assume must refer to descriptions of sodomy given without any attendant suggestion of it being a powerful and inspiring challenge to gender stereotypes; and a general whine of discontent about a lack of academic rigour evinced by a haphazard citation of sources. The second of these is true in so much as that this is arguably a populist dissertation, but it seems a little unfair given the scarcity of source material regarding the historical Vlad Dracula necessitating a speculative approach, and that this book is as much about the subsequent myth and our interpretation of the same. Certain speculative passages are written as fictionalised accounts, striking an initially odd note akin to a written equivalent of those bloody awful historical television documentaries which pepper the narrative with scenes of underpaid actors hopping about, pretending to be Shakespeare or to have invented fire or whatever; but the scenes are well written - probably by Paul, I suspect - if gruesome, and surely serve to communicate the visceral power of the mythology under discussion better than would any more sober description. This seems to matter because, I would argue, I think this subject needs to be communicated in terms which may upset the reader in order for us to fully understand it. So, one might term the book a personal vision in the sense of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which would have amounted to little more than a list of names and dates without the stewardship of its author.

Another criticism I've noticed has been the narrative's tendency to digress, to flit off elsewhere with discussion of Al Capone, Ian Brady, de Sade or whoever for the sake of comparison, which - true enough - would be a distraction in something more academic, but which I believe serves this sort of discussion very well. The epilogue details the mythic appeal of Dracula in the field of black metal and similarly unlistenable genres, which admittedly seems a bit surplus to requirements; and additionally asks the aforementioned Boyd Rice what he thinks, and what he thinks is unfortunately quite interesting and perceptive, which is yet another argument I am absolutely not having ever again - but otherwise it all hangs together beautifully, I'd say. It may even be that digressions made for the sake of comparison somewhat alleviate the potentially overwhelming parade of wooden stakes going up arses, page after page after page.

Vlad Dracula was a minor regent in a part of the world which has been absolutely central to the history of human civilisation up until recent times, and Woods does a great job of impressing upon the reader that Western Europe was very much an obscure fringe concern for most of this story, which itself maps most of why we're here today, culturally speaking; and Vlad Dracula was a fascinating, thoroughly brutal figure, yet by no means the worst of his cultural sphere, and who probably wouldn't have generated quite so strong a legend without some potentially redeeming features - or at least redeeming in the context of fifteen century Wallachia. This book, which is nothing if not thorough in examining its subject from every conceivable angle, explains the appeal of the myth in such convincing detail that I almost want to give Bram Stoker's dreary novel another read.

Getting Even

Woody Allen Getting Even (1972)
I'm not sure there's really much I can say about this one which I didn't already say back in April last year, so in summary - yes, the man is a wrong 'un, but unfortunately this is still funny. Sorry.

Highlights include:

Therefore the Cartesian dictum 'I think, therefore I am' might better be expressed 'Hey, there goes Edna with a saxophone!'

...and, of course, the astonishing testimony of Friedrich Schmeed, barber to the Third Reich:

I did not know Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was, for years I thought he worked for the phone company.

As in Without Feathers, it's mostly a transparently formulaic juxtaposition of allegedly high culture with the prosaic, mundane, and conversational, but it works for me; and at just a little over a hundred pages, Getting Even doesn't find time to over-egg this particular pudding.

Dubliners

James Joyce Dubliners (1907)
I'd been umming and ahing about tackling Ulysses before my brain fully reverts to adolescent slush in the wake of my having resumed reading comic books with teenage fervour. Nick Sweeney, or possibly someone else, suggested I first give Dubliners a shot, and so I have.

I thought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was mostly wonderful, inhabiting territory with which I was loosely familiar. Dubliners I've found a little more impenetrable in so far as I couldn't really tell whether there was anything to penetrate, so to speak. I picked up a few hints from the internet, but mostly themes which I'd already noticed, or at least suspected might be in there somewhere, none of which significantly increased my reading pleasure. Dubliners is a collection of short stories describing significant moments of understanding in the lives of Dublin people around the turn of the century, but feels a little like a novel given the consistent themes running through these fifteen vignettes; and the progression from youth to age, book-ended by death in both the first and final stories is surely deliberate. The turn of the century apparently saw a rise of Irish Nationalism, notably in Dublin, which Joyce views with scepticism, regarding it as a stifling influence. Much of the book is concerned with inertia and the weight of tradition or expectation, with the contrast of modernity and social progress faintly tangible as occurring around the edges of the narrative.

I could tell what the collection was doing, and I enjoyed most of the stories, but the sense of detachment was a little overwhelming in places, with the author leaving us to pass judgement in situations which seemed to rely upon a much greater investment in the culture of Dublin than I've ever enjoyed. This isn't to say that I needed - ugh - identifiable characters, so much as that it was all a bit too relentlessly brown for my tastes. It felt like reading a Walter Sickert interior of roughly the same vintage.

Probably a bit too soon for Ulysses then.

Nine Inch Nails

Martin Huxley Nine Inch Nails (1997)
This is the sort of rock star biography for which the writing process presumably entailed the author sat in a room with a laptop surrounded by towers of magazines and music papers; and perhaps unsurprisingly, he's also published books about AC/DC, Eminem, and Aerosmith. All the same, I never read any of the magazines from which Trent Reznor and others are quoted at considerable length, and almost everything here was news to me and accordingly fascinating. I fucking love Nine Inch Nails without reservation, and although this biography could have gone horribly wrong given Reznor's completely bewildering admiration for panto-metal and scary face acts such as Ministry and -ugh- Skinny Puppy, Huxley gets the balance absolutely right, picks up on the subtleties of the man's art, and gives duly respectful testimony without kissing ass. Even the term industrial is used relatively sparingly, and usually with a disclaimer. Good job, all things considered.

Cities of the Red Night

William S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night (1981)
The first Burroughs I read was Exterminator! back in June 1982. I was seventeen. I'd read another four by September, at which point I checked Cities of the Red Night out of the library in Stratford-upon-Avon. I remember reading it, but nothing of whatever impression it made, and this is the first time I've read it since, so far as I can tell. For some reason I actually thought I had a copy of my own.

I now realise Cities was fairly different to those I'd already read - all thematically and stylistically much closer in spirit to Exterminator! - and I probably spent much of the page count wrestling with the variant style whilst failing to get almost all of the references. Never mind.

While no-one could possibly describe Cities of the Red Night as a complete departure for Burroughs, it's almost a linear narrative, or as close as he came in later years, with cut-up text applying only indirectly as informing the dream logic of what occurs. It's still riddled with and divided by non-sequiteurs, not least the alarming leaps from eighteenth century to the present and back again, but it's held together by its own momentum, requiring only that the reader trust in there being reasons for elements failing to add up with quite the elegance you might expect of a more conventional piece of writing.

In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs extrapolates a present founded on various pseudo-historical self-governing but short-lived Libertarian communities of the eighteenth century, creating a mythic precedent in the cities to which the title refers, situated in the Gobi Desert some hundred-thousand years before and in many respects echoing the present. It all adds up to something, approximately, or at least makes narrative sense if you squint a little; but it's the first half of the novel which really seems to represent Burroughs exploring new territory, and upon which its stellar reputation is presumably founded. Unfortunately, the second half - at least some of which visits the named ancient cities - returns to the familiar territory of guns, erect penises, and rollerskates, which is okay but for that it doesn't seem to add much; and while this time around I was equipped to pick up on all of the references to Uxmal, the Maya, Ix Chel and so on, it didn't really help and I experienced some zoning out here and there.

It's still a great book for all sorts of reasons, just not the masterpiece it could have been, so I'm not complaining.

The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis The Rachel Papers (1973)
It's a coming of age novel, according to someone or other, probably the late Simon Morris. Our teenager is Charles Highway, and the title refers to a folder full of notes he compiles in preparation for seducing someone called Rachel. I assume the compilation of said notes is therefore an immature enterprise from which Charles is liberated once he gets to knob the aforementioned Rachel; and it's a load of musings on paper, just like a book - so that's all a bit postmodern, I guess.

The thing is, nice idea though it may well be, it's difficult to say whether the correlation of Charles' presumably creepy notebook actually makes much difference to the subsequent penetration of Rachel, or even to anything at all. Whilst I violently reject the insipid notion that a novel should include sympathetic characters, it usually helps if you don't actively hate those featured, and Charles just seemed like your average over-moneyed Oxford-bound Hooray Henry, inhabitant of a world of braying wankers to which I have never been granted access. I found it not only difficult to care what happens to the twat, but even to be amused, or to find much of a point to this novel having been written in the first place. Everyone drifts through their slightly privileged existence, from cradle to grave without consequence, idly marvelling at their own progress from time to time as though lacking any idea as to why any of it is happening; all seasoned with descriptions of it going in and out, complete with smells, which I'm sure impressed the hell out of Simon but did bugger all for me.

It's not the worst book I've ever read. It's about fifty billion miles from being the best. It's just there, keeping you busy for a couple of hours with its underwhelming and ever so slightly smartarsed wisecracks.

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
During the thicker, chewier novels, I'll occasionally take a break around the half way mark to read something—or even anything which feels a bit less like being at work; because I like to enjoy what I read, that usually being the entire fucking point of reading something in the first place. Sometimes if I discover that I've actually been reading an overextended gusher of piss bladdered by an idiot who doesn't deserve my patronage - as occurred with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, I'll give up, just stop reading, perhaps even hurl the book across the room and switch to something better. This didn't really feel like an option with Moby-Dick, given that the first hundred or so pages are astonishing and that it has a certain reputation, but I reached the point where I needed a break, and in fact ended up taking two separate holidays - about half way and then again just before the end - still with no fucking whale in sight. I read no less than ten other, considerably more enjoyable books during those two periods of rest. Some of them were comic books, although I'm not sure that necessarily has any bearing on Melville's inability to hold my attention, aside from that Superman was, on this occasion, more interesting than - off the top of my head - the entire chapter describing a bit of stick against which harpoons may be propped when not in use.

Actually, the chapter about rope was probably worse.

Fucking rope.

To start at the beginning, I assume we all know what Moby-Dick is and what it does, more or less. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that, having read Superman comics, my twenty-first century expectations may perhaps be unfairly accustomed to the sweet, sugary taste of an instant populist fix, meaning I'm unlikely to be well disposed towards an entire fucking chapter about a piece of rope the more plodding, archaic narratives of the nineteenth century; although actually I've read plenty of novels approximately contemporary with this one and haven't had a problem, or at least no problem of the kind I encountered trying to frog march my attention span towards the chapter in which shit actually happens. It may be that Moby-Dick had less work to do in 1851, back when the world's oceans were as much unknown territory as outer space became during the century which followed; and it's worth remembering that the majority of the novel inhabits the realms of water, air, fire to a lesser extent, and with earth as nothing more reliable than the deck beneath the feet of its unfortunate cast. So it's a novel which creates a world of its own, far removed from anything familiar, and maybe that was enough in 1851.

The first one-hundred or so pages, during which Ishmael meets and forges a rudimentary friendship with Queequeg, his future shipmate, are wonderfully vivid, strange and engrossing, and seem to promise much for the rest of the book. Then we set sail, meet Ahab, and settle into a droning testimony about whales and how to kill them which surely didn't need to be anything like so long as it was, and which feels as though the author is desperately scrabbling for fascinating facts by which to keep us interested while nothing happens due to no-one having yet spotted the whale which took Ahab's leg. I can see how the immersive level of detail - mostly gore and slaughter reduced to an industrial process - and the duration of its long-winded delivery might serve to impress upon the reader just how much of a whaling trip is spent hanging around, and how much is at stake, but it nevertheless reads like the work of someone without anything much to say who nevertheless doesn't know when to shut up. Even D.H. Lawrence noted:

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick. He preaches and he holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

Melville will tell us that at this juncture the delivery of my news must apply itself to a more earthy subject than might delight listeners' ears, namely that I would deliver information concerning and detailing my intent to adjourn to a secluded spot so fashioned for the broad and impolitic custom of its dispensation, rather than guys, I'm going for a shit, okay?; and it becomes exhausting, just as America's love of ceremony, capes, ionic columns, and the longest, long speeches ever has always been exhausting, and an overcompensation. Should any of it deliver us unto anything of consequence, it would be fine or at least appropriate, but it doesn't. The Ahab of myth may be a man driven by his own mania, but the guy in this book is just a bit of a cunt, and probably less nutty than you would expect of a man who once had his leg bitten off by a whale; and the novel may well be about the death of God, or proof of how little the universe cares about any of us, but Melville seems to depend on scale alone for the communication of his message, whatever it was - if he even knew.

The literary potential of whaling as a metaphor is astonishing, at least as of the mid-nineteenth century, given the whale as the largest living creature then known to mankind - something more like an ecology than an animal. A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine developed a theory about the influence of the whale on human history - all founded on many world cultures supporting creation myths based around giant oceanic monsters - Tiamat and Cipactli to name but two - and the apparent global prevalence of solar symbols combining a circle with a chevron which, my friend suggested, might be derived from whale vertebrae. There was more to it, and although it was overly reliant upon coincidental resemblance and didn't really explain anything which wasn't already supported by a decent explanation, the idea was nevertheless an impressive attempt to grapple with our experience of reality and the assumptions we make about it; and I really feel that Moby-Dick should have done the same thing, but better.