The Man with a Thousand Names

A.E. van Vogt The Man with a Thousand Names (1974)
John Clute reckoned van Vogt's drive had gone by the seventies, and whilst it's probably true that his greatest work had been written a couple of decades earlier - greatest at least in terms of generating an atmosphere so weird as to smooth over instances where the narrative fails to join up - I'd say his success rate remained mostly undiminished. Sure there were a few duds, which was as true in the forties as in the later years. The Man with a Thousand Names kicks off in typically bewildering fashion, so I paid attention and held on tight, skipping back to re-read anything I wasn't too sure about; and for at least the first half it began to feel as though this might even be his greatest work after The Violent Man, possibly due to A.E.'s customarily foggy disregard for cause and effect being written with unusual clarity; meaning that providing one is resigned to the fact that not everything is going to add up, it sort of makes sense.

Our main guy is the thoroughly obnoxious heir to a private fortune, an amoral playboy who is used to getting what he wants without having to care less about the consequences. This seemingly presents a problem for Goodreads types who expect relatable characters, but never mind. Our guy pilots a spaceship to Mittend, our nearest habitable planet, then instantaneously finds himself back on Earth inhabiting the body and life of Mark Broehm, a bartender he once wronged. This occurs a few more times, zapping his brain into the bodies of others he's screwed over, with no real explanation as to why it's happening, and it doesn't even seem to be karma catching up with our boy who remains a heel regardless, even committing rape at one point, suggesting - at least to me - that he's probably not supposed to be relatable. Eventually we learn that this is something to do with Mother, a sort of psychic gestalt representing the first wave of an invasion from another galaxy, by which point I was lost despite my best intentions.

The narrative zips about at least as much as that of Null-A and presumably for similarly non-Aristotelian reasons, and is accordingly dreamlike, albeit a dream reported with the hard-boiled pragmatism of detective fiction; and the whole somehow reminds me of David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus in so much as that it feels heavily allegorical, even symbolic to the point of meaning eclipsing the demands of linear progress from one part of the story to another. I still don't know what it's about beyond that it's obviously about something, but as exercise for my brain, it felt good and was mostly gripping.

The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Joel McIver
The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (2005)
Here's an oddity, one of a series of books examining classic movies - classic movies such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Scarface and er… The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

Me neither.

I guess the general public must have been similarly mystified given that I picked this up cheap from a remaindered section somewhere in the general vicinity of its publication date. It's been sat on my bookshelves ever since, five different bookshelves given the number of times I've moved house since my presumed purchase - presumed because it's a vague impression rather than a definitive memory. I assume it's been there sandwiched between Lydon and Milligan all this time, somehow eluding even those sweeps deliberately intended to select volumes I never got around to reading. Similarly, I've seen The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and don't remember much about that either. I rate the soundtrack album quite highly, and even Moorcock's bizarre pseudo-novelisation of the film is pretty great, but the movie itself…

McIver's autopsy handily includes a scene by scene synopsis, thus allowing me to remember why I've failed to remember the thing, specifically that it was mostly existing footage cobbled together like a last minute homework assignment which cleverly admits to being crap in the hope we won't notice that it is, in actual fact, crap; plus it was McLaren's vision of the Pistols and therefore pretty much a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, in discussing a movie which wasn't anywhere near as amazing as I hoped it would be when I was fourteen, McIver pulls together all sorts of fascinating historical details which somehow failed to make it into other Pistols biographies, or were else so underplayed that I didn't notice. Sid, in particular, comes out of it quite well, and actual light is shed upon why he almost certainly wasn't responsible for killing his girlfriend, which is good to know; and crap as the film was, Julian Temple's justification is interesting. Even Russ Meyer comes out of it well enough to suggest his version might have been worth a look, had it been made.

It's surprising that anyone should have found something new to say about punk rock in 2005 - or if not new, at least something obvious which hadn't been said before - but McIver pulled it off. I'm still not too bothered about watching the movie ever again, but I'm glad this thing found its way onto my shelves.

Star Trek Log One

Alan Dean Foster Star Trek Log One (1974)
While I've never been a massive unreserved fan of Trek, I've enjoyed some of it, and some of it I've enjoyed a lot. I watched the animated version at the time - around four-ish on a Saturday afternoon as I recall - but have never had any burning desire to revisit the thing beyond vague curiosity about the guy with the three arms who made the cut because they couldn't afford Walter Koenig. Naturally I had no idea anyone had novelised the series in those days before VHS, but they did and so my curiosity achieved the necessary critical mass because it's Alan Dean Foster - who can generally be relied upon to do a decent job in cases such as we have here.

This one rather tidily adapts the first three episodes of the first series, the first of which is oddly familiar, so I guess I must have revisited that debut episode at some point fairly recently, unless they recycled the story for Enterprise or one of the other variations. On the subject of recycling, Beyond the Farthest Star has our cartoon Kirk and pals investigating an alien derelict of several million years vintage, formerly inhabited by massive aliens who were seemingly killed off by the thing which duly wakes up and tries to knacker the Enterprise. It's probably a coincidence that it so strongly foreshadows the half of Ridley Scott's Alien which didn't so strongly resemble A.E. van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle that the father of the iconic Hovis advert ended up settling out of court.

Yes, a coincidence. That'll be it. I'm sure of it.

Still talking of recycling, a fair chunk of One of Our Planets is Missing later turned up in the 1979 movie, it could be argued.

Anyway, Log One comprises three decent and generally engaging stories, all with the inevitably modular quality of Trek episodes, but which nevertheless manage to work some pleasing flashes of imagination into the formula. Alan Dean Foster has the reputation of being something of a hack, having written about a million of these things; but you can't really tell from this one which reads more like kin to the aforementioned Voyage of the Space Beagle - itself an obvious precursor to Star Trek - than words copied from a screen with linking material. Indeed, Foster's retelling crackles with character and jazzy asides and observations, possibly more so than most of what we saw on the telly. This isn't Terrance bleeding Dicks rearranging the usual phrases and expressions in a slightly different order to the last one.

I'm probably not massively likely to start hunting down the other nine volumes, but neither am I averse to the idea. Being what amounts to apple-polishing boy scouts having wholesome adventures in space, Star Trek succeeds mainly when it does something weird or spontaneous, and Alan Dean Foster really brings out the best in the mythology*.

*: I refuse point fucking blank to refer to it, or indeed to anything as a franchise.

A William Burroughs Reader

William S. Burroughs & John Calder (editor)
A William Burroughs Reader (1982)
This was my first Burroughs, and actually the first I ever saw in a high street store, proving for me that the man existed in the real world beyond the limits of Throbbing Gristle fandom. The high street store - or more accurately shop - from which I purchased this book for £2.50 was Midland Educational in Stratford-upon-Avon. I know this because the receipt fell out from between the pages as I was reading on Friday the 11th of November, 2022, and I was interested to note that I'd bought the thing on Thursday the 11th of November, 1982. So I bought the book, read it, and then exactly forty years later to the day, I plucked it from the shelf more or less at random and decided to give it another look.

Weird, as Burroughs himself would doubtless have said whilst pulling that boggle-eyed face which people do when they've just noticed something weird.

Arguably weirder still, is that this sampler is quite a tough read, where the novels from which the various excerpts were lifted generally aren't; and given Billy's love of jamming random slabs of text together, you would think this might have been the bestest Burroughs book ever. The most surprising realisation I draw from this is that Burroughs' writing is less effective out of context, where you might think it wouldn't matter. One possible reason may be psychological in that for all their scrambled narrative, his novels tend to be quite breezy - never more than a couple of hundred pages with large type widely spaced. A William Burroughs Reader on the other hand crams everything in with type so small it could be an anarchist pamphlet from the eighties. It feels heavy, and it feels uphill, which works against what is communicated - or at least the means of its communication - by emphasising the disorientation. I suppose it could be argued that one is expected to dip into a sampler such as this rather than dutifully plough through the whole thing from cover to cover, but that's not how I read.

As a greatest hits of sorts, I was expecting to glean an overview, some sort of perspective on the shape of Burrough's career; which emerges albeit in a vague sense, and although the selections communicate why one might like to read The Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night, and most of those which came between, this remains a surprisingly poor second to making the effort with the actual novels.

It was nice to find a few chapters from The Third Mind included given that it's presently out of print, but otherwise I guess Burroughs is simply one of those authors who doesn't translate well into shorthand.