Agitation

Alexandrine Ogundimu Agitation (2022)
This approximately continues the story from Ogundimu's Desperate and is, I would guess, at least partially autobiographical by some definition, because the detail seems too painfully well observed for it to be otherwise. I don't recall Desperate as being particularly lacking in any sense, but Agitation nevertheless seems to take it up a few notches, whatever it is, relating a thoroughly grim narrative yet without itself being grim, refusing to push buttons or play the usual sympathy cards. In this respect it reminds me a little of John Fante, although this may simply be because I read The Road to Los Angeles fairly recently.

I'm almost hesitant to mention that Ogundimu is a transwoman and that V, the narrator of Agitation, is an autogynephile, because although this is an element of the story, it's simply one component of the whole, but one which might be seen to eclipse everything else given the current climate of social media - which would be misleading and a disservice to the author. Indeed, the subject is such that I'm reluctant to elaborate beyond that Agitation sheds a refreshingly honest light on the matter; and by honest I mean unflinching and entirely free of the usual one size fits all empowerment horseshit which I doubt really helps anyone. This isn't porn, but neither is it an indictment or even dirty laundry, so thank Christ someone has the guts to write this stuff without doodling pink fucking unicorns in the margin.

Devil on the Moon

Kenneth Robeson Devil on the Moon (1938)
It's taken me a while to work out what or who Doc Savage is or was. I first heard of him in reference to the disastrous George Pal movie adaptation in the pages of Starburst when I was a teenager. The name was a new one on me, and the piece assumed I would either know who the hell they were talking about or else might at least be capable of making an effort to catch up. This, as an aside, seems a more civilised way of going about things, crediting the reader with some intelligence, as distinct from the contemporary approach which would doubtless endeavor to catch our attention with Doc Savage was kinda like the Commander Shepherd* of his day.

Later I saw some of that movie, and I vividly recall a stereotypical Oirish person who wears a green bowler hat and goes around with a pig under his arm, but I can't find any reference to this character on the internet, and although Monk in the books has a pet pig, the resemblance seemingly ends there. Maybe I imagined it.

Anyway, there are a million volumes of these things to be had in the second hand places around our way, and I figured I should at least try one. The Man of Bronze was the first in the series, and I was holding out for a copy but it never seemed to show up, so I nabbed this one on the grounds of it having a promising cover.

Stan Lee has cited Doc Savage as a prototype for the entire superhero genre, which seems fair. He predates Superman and even got there first with an arctic Fortress of Solitude - which is even identified as such. He has adventures, fights crime, and so on and so forth. Most of the books were written by Lester Dent, Savage's creator, as was this one, although they're all credited to the collective nom de plume of Kenneth Robeson. Dent and his colleagues churned these things out for most of the thirties and forties, and as you might expect they have a pulpy quality - if you'll pardon what has become a somewhat condescending term - emphasis on action, peril, fast-pacing, intrigue, and characters painted in bold colours. That said, Dent knew how to work a satisfying, occasionally arresting turn of phrase beyond the basic requirements of delivering generic thrills, and I particularly liked the scene setting.

The Spanish Plantation was situated in Virginia, near Washington, and its old Colonial architecture was pleasantly distinguished. There was a colored orchestra and a sign which advertised chicken dinners. It was a nice place.

Occasionally we get splashes of the genuinely weird.

But the victim screamed terribly; the ends of his fingers bulged like stepped-on wieners under the pressure, and one fingertip split and emptied crimson.

Somehow I couldn't quite tell what the story was about, except that it involved a lot of kidnapping, plus the intimation of a bad guy controlling everything from somewhere on the moon. It's something to do with certain European countries which Dent leaves unnamed despite that he's obviously referring to Germany, Poland, and others then gearing up for the second world war. The anonymity strikes an odd note, almost implying a reluctance to offend any readers who might have thought Hitler was lovely, but there's nothing in the text to suggest unsavoury sympathies. Some genius on Goodreads has pointed out instances of sexism in the book but, well, you know…

Devil on the Moon didn't change my life, but there's really nothing much to be said against it and it's good of its kind. I'm more likely to pick up one of these than to bother with another Heinlein, for example.

*: Apparently a character from a console game called Mass Effect, which I had to look up for the sake of a contemporary reference. I don't actually know much about the world or characters of console games because games are for fucking idiots.

The Clash

David Quantick The Clash (2000)
I never really got the Clash in quite the same way as at least a few of my contemporaries, but they were a fantastic singles band prior to the execrable Hitsville UK, and the rest I just don't think about. I should probably track down that first album, but their songs divide into either amazing or fucking terrible for me and I can't even tell what distinguishes one from the other, so an entire album - even a reputedly good one - sounds like a bit of a minefield. I stick to the singles, and I really, really, really, needed a copy of the Cost of Living EP so I tracked it down on Discogs and the bloke included this book as a freebie, which was nice.

Prior to reading, I had this vague impression of David Quantick as either readable or at least not entirely lacking in wit, apparently due to association with On the Hour. Closer inspection reveals him to be a former NME scribe who has subsequently generated the kind of CV I associate with Hopeful Herberts of a type I customarily avoid - a few biographies of Mojo magazine cover stars, genial yet slightly acerbic whimsy with a nod to Douglas bleeding Adams, Neil Gaiman was very nice about something or other, and the fucker has even written a Big Finish Who drama.

Well never mind, because I don't know much about the Clash beyond Joe Strummer having been fifth in line to the throne - just behind Will Self - and a string of face-punchingly great singles, so this should be interesting on some level, I decided.

It is interesting, mainly because the story of the Clash is interesting, and I'm reasonably familiar with the territory and most of the other bands who were stood around in the background. My general opinion of the Clash as people is left slightly elevated by Quantick's account, if anything, although Strummer's pretending to be Andy Capp has come to seem increasingly ludicrous over the years, and probably doesn't actually matter. Quantick's book is part of a series called Kill Your Idols which supposedly attempts to biographise the influence of certain difficult to quantify artists, and the Clash count because no-one knows who they were, where they came from, or what they did.

The problem is that Kill Your Idols seems to have been targeted at a young audience, and a young American audience, if this one is any indication. It does that thing with adjectives that YA material always seems to do, apparently having assumed itself to be in competition with either a smartphone or a gameboy, so we have specifically famous friends and bawdy singer Judge Dread; and it panders, twisting its baseball cap to the back and being your homie with references you'll recognise. The relationship between Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes was, for example, kinda like how Pearl Jam were to the Stone Temple Pilots. Sham 69, the Jam, the Ruts and others are dismissed as lumpen copyists while praise is dispensed unto No Doubt, Green Day, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and related unlistenables.

The Clash brought hip-hop and reggae to millions of white people, many of whom refused to listen until the well-rehearsed moronism of the Beastie Boys made it all right to like black music if no actual black people were involved in making it.

Jesus Christ. If all was silence before the Beastie Boys made it okay, then how the fucking fuck did Saint Joe manage to bring the music to millions of white people before they were actually listening to it? The irony of an author failing to understand the Beastie Boys - who were never that complicated a phenomenon - in a book written about the fucking Clash is staggering. Most aggravating of all, Quantick repeatedly takes that populist angle which I seem to recall as having been a particular problem with music journalism in the nineties. If you haven't heard of them, they were most likely really saaaaaaad and can't have been much good, the property of the cool kids, but the new Madonna album is the genuine cool and far more subversive than all your miserable Crass clones etc. Nobody listens to Crass.

Also strange is that something written at more or less the level of an underwhelming fanzine spawned of a media studies course should get an alphabeticised index. In Quantick's favour, his introduction directs the reader towards a couple of other books about the Clash which sound more substantial.

All that you probably need to know about the Clash is to be found amongst the aforementioned string of face-punchingly great singles, and I don't know if the rest matters.

First Flight

Chris Claremont First Flight (1981)
I tried and I tried and I almost did it, but with forty pages to go, my reading glands rebelled and my hand reached for something else as though under the influence of some mysterious external force. I've got a lot of time for Chris Claremont, the man who wrote the X-Men comic book for seventeen years, but whoever told him to try his hand at a novel should take a long, hard look at themselves. I first noticed this title on the shelves of Half Price Books about a decade ago, and I've never been tempted because, to judge a book mostly by its Top Gun-esque cover, it looked fucking terrible.

Well, what do you know?

Somewhere under here, there's a decent story in the general vein of Heinlein, and Claremont knows how to put a sentence together; but pull back and you'll notice that the arresting image he's conjured is actually sprayed on the side of a van heading for Los Angeles with the best of the Doobie Brothers blasting from the eight track and the driver, who would probably benefit from a trip to the barbers, has just addressed you as man. The problem is that where Claremont has been father to many a beautifully written comic book, they're mostly written in collaboration with artists, and if I've taken anything from First Flight it's that the art of a good Claremont story does a share of the heavy lifting. It's not actually bad, but once we've established the narrative with snappy dialogue, it feels as though something is missing, that we should be staring at some galaxy-spanning vista drawn by John Byrne or whoever; because as it stands, the prose communicates very little of the wonder of space travel or our first encounter with an alien species, instead leaving the reader with a vague feeling of it having happened. I found myself drifting off because the characterisation is the only thing which holds the attention, and the characterisation is actually a lot like what I read in those X-Men comics all those years ago. At one point I noticed that our people were on a different spacecraft, having apparently made the transference while I was thinking about something else.

While, we're here, notice how the cover depicts spunky young pilots climbing into their individual starfighters - or summink - ready to scramble, or whatever it is that starfighters do. Well, whatever is going on here, isn't actually in the book so far as I can tell.