Pam Ayres - With These Hands (2021)

 

You couldn't escape from Pam Ayres when I was a kid. She was always faster and what with those extendable arms on the box, or at least it felt that way, and so we took her for granted. At some point I was given Thoughts of a Late Night Knitter for Christmas, or possibly a birthday. It made me laugh, and joined the other books which made me laugh on the window sill - or wherever I had them at the time - and so became part of my personal mythology.

Forty years later I spot this in Waitrose, Kenilworth while visiting my parents in England, and I'm pleased to see that it exists, and that it's on such prominent display in a supermarket, because it means that Pam Ayers and all she ever meant to any of us hasn't quite yet been concreted over alongside the others we no longer discuss because they failed to foreshadow the exact same opinions we now regard as gospel. I bought it, not because I felt a particularly deep connection, but somehow I felt I should, that I needed to show my support in some way.

Pam writes poems that rhyme so hard it makes your eyes water, covering homely topics which once made sense to almost all of us. I don't know if it's art, but would argue that it probably is because she does what she does so exceptionally well, and popularity alone should not be considered a disqualifier. Pam wrote for an audience which found common ground in her strange little tales of domestic confusion, not for an audience busily dividing itself up into increasingly esoteric sects. With These Hands presents a selection of poems and song lyrics interspersed with autobiographical material serving to introduce the same. The poems are great, just as I remember them albeit nothing like so cosy, peppered as they are with minor shocks, twists, and yelps of involuntary laughter. The linking prose has the cadence of something transcribed from a spoken performance, but was powerful for me given that I grew up in the same world of spotted dick, grinding poverty, no telephone in the house, and wasn't really aware of it having vanished. She even mentions the village where my grandparents lived.

It's not that everything was better then, and there was much which was a lot harder to endure; it's just that certain aspects of daily life weren't so fucking stupid as they have become. With These Hands goes some way to explaining why without delivering any specific statement of the same. Sorry.

Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (1847)

I tend to think of my secondary education as having been fairly crap, but on the other hand we had an English teacher who made us read this so it clearly had something going for it. On average I read Jane Eyre roughly every ten years, not as part of some long term schedule but simply because it works out that way. If it's a fairly straightforward, linear story, the level of detail and description is of such complexity as to yield fresh revelations with each reading, and this latest engagement has been no exception.

Jane Eyre, as you should probably know, is the story of Jane, participant in a partially autobiographical existence, who endures childhood misery, harsh schooling, crushing expectations, and the one man she would consider marrying harbouring a deranged wife in the attic of his stately home. It's about female agency, to some extent, as the tale of a woman who resists the expectations of nineteenth century society, forging her own path despite forces which might promise a quiet life at the expense of autonomy. I suppose, by extension, one might almost say it's a novel about the nineteenth century, the age in which truths held previously unassailable began to look a bit crumbly around the edges - notably with the death of God and the notion of progress and change as desirable or even necessary. Jane lives in a world dependent on certain truisms being taken for granted, notably those of sex and class, but her society is illusory - a spectacle in the sense of that which Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle - demanding that she makes her way by critical means, basing decisions on that which is demonstrably true or at least ethically correct.

This isn't what makes Jane Eyre a great book so much as the poetry of how it undertakes to dissect nineteenth century society and to highlight wrongs in realistic and compassionate terms without the occasionally cloying sentiment of, for one roughly contemporary example, Dickens. With few of the book's demonstrable real world details adding up to a consistent chronology or year, Jane Eyre has been described as a fairy story, and certainly it can't be deemed a realistic novel in the conventional sense despite concerning itself with the real world. Aside from the ubiquitous atmospheric effects continuing the legacy of the Romantic era, it's a book full of implied spirits, spectres, and otherworldly influences - even though the only plausibly supernatural occurrence is a brief moment of long-distance telepathy between Jane and Rochester near the end. The brilliance of the book is, I would say, rooted in the apparent contradiction of what it does, namely that it uses the language and imagery of the haunted, the spooky, and the ethereal in presenting an argument in support of realism, critical thought and not just doing something because that's what everyone else is doing and that's how it's always been innit. Even the fearful mad woman in the attic is never quite reduced to just a symbol of the kind used by authors to hammer some black and white point all the way home.

However, it does much more than just the above, and describing some of the mechanism as I have done, does little to convey the true complexity, elegance, or beauty of this novel. I don't know if it's truly the greatest novel in the English language, but it surely has to be a contender.

Heat Death No. 1

New Juche Heat Death No. 1 (2023)
One of the most inspiring, original and groundbreaking artists writing today, according to Dennis Cooper, and sure enough there's an undeniably spacious wilderness dividing the writing of New Juche from that of almost everyone else I might name off the top of my head. The latest evidence comes in the form of this irregular - but hopefully not too irregular - journal. Heat Death sees our man venturing forth to the island of Phuket where a once fevered tourist economy has been destroyed by the pandemic leaving only the desolation of tropical ghost towns. Given that his words and powerfully stark images document a cultural signal to noise ending in a sea of undifferentiated trash, it's tempting to read the title of the journal as a metaphor, referring as it does to entropy and the eventual extinction of the universe; except this is no metaphor.

More than once I've encountered a sort of running joke, popular amongst the pre-digital generation, about how the first photographs you take when someone - usually employed in further education - hands you a camera will inevitably be of ruined buildings and urban decay. The humorous aspect of this truism is supposedly that it's a cliché amounting to teenagers expressing affected and therefore fashionable alienation. It's therefore a revelation, at least for me, to view the images of ruin reproduced herein - and New Juche is also a superb photographer, for what it may be worth - as pertaining to something truly profound, in turn suggesting all those alienated teenagers were genuinely reaching out for something even if they were ill-equipped to express it in original terms, or even anything more lucid than society innit.

 

I am perplexed as to what taking pictures of modern ruins means, and I'm ambivalent about why they attract me so strongly. I think that for Europeans they are cursed to evoke the Second World War and its photographic legacy which appears so difficult and prurient to people today. Just like photographs of suffering bodies or corpses, one that shows the modern ruins cannot be seen by Europeans as purely didactic tools like memento mori, nor as a subject that can be interpreted with reference to more-or-less-classical aesthetics in isolation from historical and social context. A photograph of a modern ruin, and only a modern ruin, may suggest prurience or exploitation because it shows individual, collective, economic, or ideological failure in a purely aesthetic rather than social context, such that it evokes or appears to nourish schadenfreude. Pornography appeals to specific lustful tastes, provokes sensation, is designed to titillate and arouse, can be the fruit of unequal relations, coerces the individual into the general. I aspire to pornography and often think of myself casually as a pornographer, further still, the precise sexual value of ruined buildings and their penetration is a particular one for me that will be difficult to explain here. But ultimately my attempts at pornography are themselves a failure because I can never seem to render anything in what is called a purely aesthetic context.

 

Nevertheless, Heat Death comes so close as for it to make little difference from where I'm sitting, building something which has the cumulative effect of music with its relentless barrage of hundreds upon hundreds of images of ruin, desolation, abandonment and lives indefinitely postponed. This effect is strongly reinforced during the final thirty or so pages - full colour and double page landscapes of relentless landfill which repetition gradually transforms into something entirely and confusingly natural before it comes to resemble abstract expressionism. It's absolutely overwhelming and hardly the effect you might anticipate from a book in which the author doesn't once get his chopper out; and ultimately New Juche does indeed explain that which will be difficult to explain here.

Darker than dark though his subject matter may occasionally seem, there's something very life-affirming in New Juche's unflinching dedication to mapping even the smelliest, most neglected corners of human experience.

Lazarus Planet

Mark Waid and a cast of thousands Lazarus Planet (2023)
I really should have limited myself to the issue featuring the Doom Patrol, although I suppose had I done so I would have been left wondering whether the rest was any better; but no, I just had to buy the collection because I wanted the whole story, except it turns out this isn't the whole story and the saga - such as it is - somehow manages to sprawl off into issues of World's Finest, Batman, and others because can you really have too much of a good thing?

Lazarus Planet is DC's version of the White Event from Marvel's New Universe line back in 1986, or possibly an homage to that issue of the Simpsons comic where the power plant blows up  irradiating everyone and turning them all into superheroes. This telling of the same tale features a magic volcano which erupts, blanketing the Earth with material which causes certain individuals to develop special powers. However, this collection isn't so much a conveniently linear account as a bunch of loosely related strips set against the background of the aforementioned occurrence, and most of them are pretty much self-contained to the point of being incidental. Being the work of writers and artists other than Mark Waid and Riccardo Federici - whose alpha and omega issues sandwich the bulk of the narrative and are the best things here by some margin - Lazarus Planet looks a lot like obscure hopefuls given the chance to create exciting new superheroes for the DC Universe because, as we all know, if there's one thing wrong with the DC Universe it's that it doesn't have enough superheroes.

So once you're done with Mark Waid and Riccardo Federici's bookends, this thing looks massively uneven and, on close inspection, not actually much good. Sure, it's lavishly produced, printed, and coloured, and it looks expensive, but the taint of manga is overpowering with big eyes and cutesy postures at almost every turn, because apparently that's what the kids want. I remain unconvinced by homegrown American manga on the grounds of it all looking the fucking same with a homogeneity that not even seventies Marvel managed. It pushes buttons rather than making its point with an actual narrative, so far as I can see, and its a lazy affectation. Everything on the page is a quotation. Maybe there's some good stuff out there somewhere but I've yet to see it, and what we apparently have right now makes everyone channeling Rob Liefeld back in the nineties seem like a period of wildly adventurous experimentation.

This wouldn't be so bad were it limited to the art, but much of the writing is engaged in the same bland low calorie impersonation - cutesy TikTok teenagers with purple hair going crosseyed when confused, communicating in teenspeak, short clipped sentences dripping with irony, like yeah, right? Take the imaginatively named City Boy, a spawn of that pesky magic volcano. Here's a kid who casually notices that he's acquired powers akin to psychometry which somehow put him in touch with the soul of Gotham city, so he can sink into the pavement or see through the asphalt to the utilities buried beneath the streets. He finds an old tiara which his power tells him was mislaid by some society woman many years before. He meets Nightwing, Batman's pal, for no obvious reason beyond establishing continuity. Then he finds the society woman, now an old lady, and returns the tiara which makes her happy; and that is somehow the fucking story because it's job, I assume, is to impersonate something you've already read. It sits on the page, barely moving, and with less actual content than a three-panel Garfield once you're done looking at the cheekbones, lacking even presence sufficient to be condescending in its pose of simplicity. Stay tuned for more from the same spigot, loyal consumers.

So yeah, Lazarus is mostly bollocks, and the latest Doom Patrol revival doesn't fare much better for looking as though it was drawn by Philip Bond, perhaps even written by him given the dreary emphasis on the power of friendship and hugs. The back story to the entire thing is drawn from the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, which likewise deserves better than this.

I guess the comic book industry has been merchandise to its own big screen success for a while now, which is presumably why so much of Lazarus Planet screams tie-in product and no-one is reading the fucking things these days.

The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959

William S. Burroughs & Oliver Harris (editor)
The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959 (1993)
Much as I loves me some Billy, I've never found this one particularly enticing - four hundred plus pages of private correspondence which I picked up from somewhere or other mainly out of a sense of duty to the author, because I probably have almost everything else he wrote. Thusly has it sat untouched on my shelves year after year emanating an aura which, even as I approach sixty, I still associate with homework. Nevertheless, having committed myself to reading all those books I never got around to reading and having now read most of them, I finally come to Billy's letters, partially thanks to Ted Morgan's biography providing an incentive.

It turns out that my instincts were coincidentally on the money for the first hundred or so pages, taking us up to the early fifties and Burroughs' time in Mexico City. Our man spent the second half of the forties mooching around the US, attempting to get rich though farming. Much of his correspondence from this time fixates on how much dosh he thinks he's going to make, insisting Ginsberg at least think about growing carrots, whining about unions and liberals, and helping the reader understand just why his long-suffering parents considered him something of a disappointment. It's frankly a bit of a chore getting though this first quarter, and so much so that you're almost looking forward to him accidentally shooting his wife and thus generating something worth writing about.

Ted Morgan's biography reveals, at least in part, a side of Burroughs which wasn't really obvious from the books or the attendant legend, namely that he was initially something of a lost soul, fecklessly wandering along with no real idea of where he was going, screwing up and never quite having to face the consequences of the same thanks to the pocket money which Mom and Pop continued to send every fucking month. The letters clearly demonstrate that Morgan wasn't just making that stuff up.

Anyway, It gets more engaging once he's settled in Mexico, and remains so as he moves all over - South America, Paris, Tangiers, London and so on, very much sharpening his wits in the process and gradually gearing up towards the work for which he is most widely celebrated. There's a very strong sense of progress running throughout these monthly, often weekly reports, and one which affords an insight which isn't framed in quite such direct terms by Literary Outlaw, and it's an insight for which even the first hundred or so yawnsome pages are probably essential. The closer I get to Burroughs, the more important he seems, and the more obvious it is how poorly understood is most of his writing, even by those who seem to think they've got it.

So that all worked out very well.

The Dreamthief's Daughter

Michael Moorcock The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
I had no plans to read beyond the first six tidily collated Elric books given that everyone's favourite albino sword swinger sits at the very edge of my field of thematic interest, and wouldn't get a second glance from my direction were it anyone other than Moorcock; but I had four of the six and needed to fill the gaps, and this was on the same eBay page as the other two, so fuck it, I thought.

The Dreamthief's Daughter turns out to be a big, fat novel rather than short stories welded together in a slimmer volume, but serves as a good example of Moorcock's tendency to stretch genres beyond breaking point in the name of keeping things interesting. This one inhabits his celebrated and frequently imitated multiverse, without which we probably wouldn't have had the Moore or Morrison versions, and the camera is pulled back so as to reveal Elric as inhabiting just one segment. Another segment, which may or may not be where we live, is occupied by Ulric von Bek, an Elric variant who has the misfortune to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, which is itself tied in with goings on in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos. If this is sounding a bit familiar, you're possibly thinking of one of numerous cheap, less satisfying imitations, because Moorcock merely joins dots while resisting the temptation to reveal that Hitler was actually working for those outer space robot people, or Cthulhu, or the three-legged bloke on the Manx flag. Nope - these Nazis are the real thing, driven by exactly the same bullshit which seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity out here in the real world. This presents a canny balancing act given the celebrated Nazi love of mystical bollocks remaining bollocks in the context of a novel featuring actual magic swords.

Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

Thus we get an Elric book which seems to channel Abraham Merritt - given how much time is spent underground - gets the absolute best from its genre, has quite a lot to say, and keeps Nazi Germany in horrifying perspective without turning the fuckers into generically cool bad guys to be booed and hissed like the empire in Star Wars. Possibly ironically, given my opening paragraph, this may even be the best Elric book I've read.

St. Mawr and The Man Who Died

D.H. Lawrence St. Mawr and The Man Who Died (1928)
I've been working my way through Dave's back catalogue in roughly chronological order, and this one comes as a massive relief after The Plumed Serpent and Moanings in Mexico - although I probably mean this pair given that it's a couple of novellas in one book. Of course, they do the same thing as most of his fiction did at this point, but the grimacing, clenching, and general xenophobia has reduced, and digestion is less problematic. Our man wasn't long for the world by the time he wrote these, and began coughing up tubercular blood before he'd finished St. Mawr - marking the beginning of a decline from which he never recovered.

St. Mawr is the story of a vaguely familiar and entirely self-contained woman of wealth who is more or less Mabel Dodge Luhan - Lawrence's landlady during his time at the artists colony in Taos, New Mexico - possibly with some Frieda in the mix too. St. Mawr is a stallion of the kind about which Sexton Ming sang in Muscle Horse.

High on a hill, I stand erect,
My flanks are sweaty.
I am Muscle Horse!
I am Muscle Horse!

Lawrence drew a lot of his fiction from his own life, and the central character is nearly always himself to a greater or lesser degree. I've seen it suggested that Dave is actually St. Mawr in this one, but it seems unlikely beyond the horse representing his ideas about blood consciousness - and doing a frankly better job than anyone in The Plumed Serpent. Beyond the woman based on Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Phoenix who is clearly intended to be her Native American husband, Tony, where St. Mawr draws from Lawrence's existence, it doesn't draw so much as to constitute autobiography.

Anyway, the tale is that our gal purchases the horse, they all move to America, and the character of Phoenix in particular allows the author to explain why he never liked Tony Lujan. The horse represents Lawrence's conception of the most fundamental spiritual truths of nature at its most primal. He's a sort of Platonic ideal of how the world looked before we all started drowning everything in ceremony and bullshit - something priapic to which we should aspire but can't because we're full of shit. He's a horse, and unlike Mr. Ed, is therefore unable to convey specific meaning beyond general truculence, and yet everyone in the novel is directed by his silent power, even when they sail to America to live on a ranch.

Most surprising to me was that none of the inhabitants of the novella are painted with quite the same scowl as Lawrence tended to deploy when basing characters on people he regarded as arseholes. This makes a pleasant change from the grimacing and muttering of The Plumed Serpent, presenting a breezier narrative, and certainly one which doesn't feel quite such an uphill struggle with so little reward for one's efforts. Even Phoenix appears relatively amiable up until the end, as marked by several pages of malicious sneering which feel as though they may have been written immediately in the wake of a coughing fit - malicious and actually sort of racist, although at least without a significant suggestion of the character assassination applying too far beyond its unfortunate target.

The Man Who Died, on the other hand, is essentially a missing adventure in the Jesus canon, retelling the resurrection of Himself after his having come back to life in a cave, followed by a number of encounters which probably weren't in the Bible. Firstly there's the incident with the rooster equivalent of Houdini which gave the story its original title, The Escaped Cock. Naturally, the publisher suggested this made it sound like a story about a penis, to which Lawrence expressed unconvincing astonishment followed by testy denial, but the title was changed anyway. Jesus ends up making sweet lurve with a priestess dedicated to the Goddess Isis, establishing the sacrificial link between Jesus and Osiris while also bringing us:

He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.

'I am risen!

No, it's not about erections as a matter of fact, Lawrence tersely explained to his publisher, although I don't think anyone bought it. As with St. Mawr, the story is approximately about the fundamentals which contemporary religion has been misinterpreting, getting wrong, or ignoring altogether - following a theme which has permeated almost all of Lawrence's writing; and here adding understandable ruminations on mortality and its attendant promise of everlasting loneliness.

Although far from Lawrence's greatest, it - or rather they - make up for the previous couple, indicating that he hadn't lost it after all, and possibly also that growing awareness of his own mortality restored a sense of perspective which had been lost to him at least since the end of the war.