Without Absolution

Amy Sterling Casil Without Absolution (2000)
This came into my possession because I'd added it to an Amazon wishlist and somebody felt like buying me a birthday present, which was initially puzzling as I couldn't remember who Amy Sterling Casil might be or why I'd been drawn to the book. Eventually I recalled having read Casil's Mad for Mints in a back issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which only presented further confusion because while I remember thinking it was sort of entertaining…

Well, whatever the case - I'm glad to have read this, not least when considering the alternate realities in which I might not have bothered. Casil's introduction mentions her having been influenced by Ray Bradbury, which I'm definitely feeling, although I think maybe I prefer her writing in an admittedly general sense. It's been a while since I read Bradbury, and I remember a few crackers, but Casil's people seem less at the mercy of the sort of borderline cloying sentiment to which Bradbury occasionally succumbed. That said, Casil's emphasis on evocative image rich detail seems very Bradbury, and she treads a fine line in supporting the narrative on a flow of sensations without formally spelling everything out. In a few cases, it doesn't quite work, and I found An Officer of the Faith a little too abstract for its own good, but mostly it's powerfully effective once you've cottoned on to what's happening.

Without Absolution is mostly science-fiction, or speculative, or whatever you want to call it - that ambiguous literary hinterland inhabited by the aforementioned Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin and others - a non-genre of girth sufficient to encompass both the future of plastic surgery and a sequel to Beowulf - which must have taken some balls to write, never mind pull off, as us rootin' tootin' folk say. There's also some poetry, and I'm afraid I still don't really get poetry, although it's clear that it's very closely related to Casil's gorgeous, if occasionally slightly disturbing prose; and The Renascence of Memory is a masterpiece.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

Charles Bukowski The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018)
At the risk of becoming repetitive, today's bewildering Goodreads dunce is an individual who regards this book as representing the point at which Bukowski turned himself into a stereotype - as he puts it - seemingly referring to Chuck's emphasis on drinking, shagging, and manual labour - although the latter is referred to only in passing in The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Naturally, I had to ask, because the review in question read a lot like Charles Bukowski keeps talking about women's tits and how he's definitely not gay because he was a bricklayer which is really, really boring actually. Thankfully this wasn't quite what the reviewer meant, so far as I could tell, but his suggestion of Bukowski playing up to a certain image seemed kind of redundant given that the author actually states this in several places; while Chuck's purportedly macho pose is, I would suggest, somewhat undermined by the fact of his spending most of the book writing poetry while listening to classical music, activities which do nothing to suggest we're dealing with a sort of Los Angeles Gary Bushell here.

Never mind. I'm sure the man himself often had to contend with much worse.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way collects a series of columns written for various magazines and newspapers, some fiction, prefaces to other people's books, and a couple of interviews. Bukowski is mostly on form.

Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

Even Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb - seemingly an experiment in non-linear pseudo Burroughsian narrative - yields the occasional gem.

Political fervour is the blight of the young. History is too long—the tail swings the dog.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole the collection is a bit of a slog. Much of the word count is taken up with musing upon the act of writing and the life of a writer, with unfortunate emphasis on poetry; which is interesting up to a point, or may have been when broken up into weekly or monthly instalments, but assembled between just two covers becomes a mammoth helping of what is essentially the same thing.

Excepting Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and no-one else I can think of off the top of my head right now - although I'm sure there must be someone I've overlooked - I really find it hard to care about poetry. Oddly, Bukowski feels the same way.

Probably the greatest thing here is the theme song, an essay amounting to writing advice for aspiring authors, and that advice is to go and spend an afternoon at the race track betting on the geegees. Almost all writing advice will be bullshit by definition, but this is pretty solid. To be fair, most of The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way is pretty solid, but possibly not all of it works served on the same plate.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination September 1965 (1965)
This one is dated to the month of my birth, beyond which I don't have anything interesting to add regarding these unrelated facts aside from makes you think, dunnit?

Fritz Leiber's Stardock is one of his Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser tales, a series I've given a wide berth up until now because I didn't like the sound of it. Leiber writes like a dream when he's writing something interesting - expressive and arguably unique in the history of this sort of literature; but Stardock is unfortunately more or less what I expected it to be, namely the adventures of bearded men who point at distant objects and exclaim behold! The bearded men in this case are engaged in mountain climbing in search of the inevitable treasure, and they both get to knob sexy faerie ladies, and it's sixty looong pages which I read in a single sitting because I knew I'd end up skipping the rest if I took a break. It's probably great if you like that sort of thing and I don't, but it's nice to know my instincts regarding whether I'm going to like something or not seem reasonably on point.

Thankfully, it's mostly uphill for the rest of the trip. Simak's You'll Never Go Home Again is characteristically nourishing; and Sally is one of those tales in which Asimov did something other than invite us to figure out the puzzle, so that's jolly nice; and this issue's vintage reprint was David H. Keller's The Worm from 1929 - then much younger than this magazine is now - which isn't anything mind blowing but does a job.

Frank R. Paul's cover illustrates The Man from Mars, his one page speculative essay on Martian biology. It's preposterous but charming and, dating from 1939, somewhat refutes the claim - which I read somewhere or other and have probably repeated - of Simak being the first writer to depict alien intelligence as something other than inevitably hostile.

The finest of the selection is Theodore Sturgeon's The Dark Room featuring a cast of mostly vodka-Martini guzzling fifties men and which is as such absurdly dated but works in spite of itself, and because Sturgeon's prose has a uniquely jazzy energy which crackles off the page.

Interzone

William S. Burroughs Interzone (approx. 1958)
Interzone comprises material written after Queer but prior to publication of The Naked Lunch, for which it is proposed to have been something along the lines of a dry run. Although Burroughs' refers to his attempts to write a novel called Interzone in various letters, whether this is really that book seems debatable given its having been reconstructed around 1989 from fragments found in unexpected places, also incorporating excerpts from letters to Ginsberg, and the lengthy WORD which was excised from Naked Lunch. Seemingly true to its notional constitution, I've had Interzone sat on my bookshelf for many years before realising that I'd never actually bothered to read the thing. I'm not even sure where my copy came from.

So, we're pre-cut-up, but getting there given the non-linear thrust of the narrative which may not be entirely due to Interzone comprising off cuts and notes left out for the milkman. Themes seem to emerge, mostly driving towards the international zone of Tangier from which the title derives; and this weaves in quite nicely with Burroughs' notes to Ginsberg concerning his attempts to write a novel as he claws his way gradually towards the sort of process from which Naked Lunch resulted. It's insightful, mostly fascinating, up until we come to WORD, which is sixty pages of undifferentiated non-linear narrative - the usual stuff about cocks and prehensile piles - which at least proves that the apparent chaos of later novels isn't just some random flow turned on and off with the twist of a spigot, and it proves this because WORD is tedious and a slog to get though. I guess what Burroughs learned from WORD may have been that you have to carve the material into some coherent shape if you want it to work rather than simply drowning whatever it may have to say in a deluge of arbitrary scat.