England, My England

D.H. Lawrence England, My England (1922)
Given that this was first published after Lawrence had taken to a semi-nomadic existence, having left England after some kids threw rocks at his wife, I'd assumed these ten short stories might represent an exercise in nostalgia - capturing moments of an English working class life which, for the author, had become past tense. However, it turns out that the stories were written between 1913 and 1921, albeit with some revision prior to publication, so I could be way off the mark. That said, I suspect there may be some element of attempting to capture a whiff of the old country even if it's hardly one seen through rose tinted spectacles. The cover promises the decline of a whole social ethos in the wake of the first world war, which is pretty much what it delivers, albeit as emotional conflicts - some fairly low level - which are surely as much part of the human condition as the hallmark of any one particular era. There's betrayal, drama, grief, and disappointment, although no more so than usual for one of Dave's books.

Unfortunately, a few of the tales don't really seem to do much beyond invoking the mood of a gloomy Sunday afternoon in rural Nottinghamshire, or at least I found them a little bogged down with their own introspection. Tickets, Please has its moments, and The Blind Man, Wintry Peacock, and You Touched Me are all blessed with just enough texture to keep things interesting; and Fanny and Annie opens with a paragraph so structurally startling as to foreshadow some of A.E. van Vogt's weirder excesses.

Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fir. And the nostalgia, the doom of homecoming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now!

Regrettably, three day later I don't remember anything about Fanny and Annie, and it's the same for a couple of the others. England, My England has its moments, but it's probably not the one you want to start off with.

Strangeland

Tracey Emin Strangeland (2005)
I didn't even know this existed until John Serpico wrote about it on his excellent blog, the Art of Exmouth. To start at the beginning, I attended Maidstone College of Art at the same time as Traci, so I knew her and, seeing as it's the question everybody always asks, no - my name wasn't in the tent and the only thing I have to say on that subject is how surprised I was by the name embroidered in the largest letters, which was that of a quiet, vaguely lumpy looking bloke from the sculpture department. I met Traci through my friend Carl, and her first words to me were in't your 'air 'orrible? delivered with a caustic scowl, although to be fair my 'air was indeed pretty 'orrible at the time. She set up a reading event in one of the lecture theatres for herself, Sexton Ming, Billy Childish, and Bill Lewis. I don't recall much of what she read but it may well have included some of the material reprinted in the first part of this collection. I'd actually forgotten she ever wrote this sort of thing. Her delivery was kind of harsh and forceful but I don't remember much else about it. Childish on the other hand was impressive, dark and bitter, painfully honest, and he gave the impression that he really, really, really didn't want to be there. Traci mentioned that she had a few of his books for sale after the show - slim collections of dyslexic poetry he'd published himself. I bought one and was so knocked out by it that I asked if she had any others. She was in the process of breaking up with him at the time and had no problem selling me everything she had, a few of them even signed for Traci love Billy x. I never saw much of her art, at least not until the final year. She had an exhibition in the college gallery of oil paintings done in Amsterdam over the summer, mostly canals, barges and the like, and they were actually pretty great. The last time I saw her was in Rochester High Street, a couple of years after we'd all finished college. She was pushing a supermarket shopping trolley full of junk and said that she'd just married a Turkish fisherman which had proven problematic due to his already being married. Under other circumstances it would have seemed a bit unlikely but I don't recall being particularly surprised.

So that's my Traci Emin story, such as it is. A couple of years later she began turning up on TV as the next big thing. She had apparently reinvented herself, or had at least been through a personal year zero by which all previous work no longer counted, presumably including the Amsterdam paintings. This also pertained to a painting she'd sold to the late Tim Webster for a fiver*, as Tim found out when he attempted to have it valued and was told that she denied having painted it. I was quite fond of Tim (and am still depressed by the fact of his having kicked the bucket back in 2020) so this struck a bit of a sour note for me. I never had any strong feelings about Traci's reinvention as a notionally conceptual artist, beyond enjoying Billy Childish observing that (and I'm paraphrasing here) the difference between my paintings and what Tracey does is that if you chuck my stuff in a skip, it's still art; but I nevertheless got a massive vicarious kick out of her success. It felt as though one of us had broken through, regardless of why it happened, even if she's disowned the rest of us.

Anyway, Strangeland is divided into three main sections dealing with her early life in Margate, then in Turkey, and then everything else. The first two parts are astonishing, vivid, and enough so to leave me hungry for more. Some of it is pretty harrowing, but nevertheless powerfully told because Traci is very, very funny and the horror is contrasted with a surprisingly tender insight. The third section is mostly what came after year zero and feels patchy, barring the chapters dealing with her abortion. David Bowie's private jet gets a mention, as does one of Vivienne's tops, and Billy Childish is written off in a couple of paragraphs without actually being named. Childish himself has admitted that he treated her like shit and the downs and even further downs of their relationship are detailed in unflinchingly brutal terms in those chapbooks Traci sold me back at Maidstone. At the time I recall being told that he was on at least a bottle of whisky a day. All the same, that single scathing paragraph seems a little unfair, truthful though it undoubtedly is, at least given the extent of his influence on her work and by extension presumably even her reinvention. There was a time when she was regarded as more or less an extension of Billy, and his influence is discernible throughout Strangeland. That said, the notion that she was ever truly an extension of Billy is clearly bollocks, and Traci's near relentless burst sewer pipe of hard reality may also serve to explain what drew the two of them together in the first place.

I have a feeling Traci would have ended up either well known or at least notorious for something, and her career in the art world from the nineties onwards would have looked the same or similar had she never met Childish. What you see is what you get, as they say. She has a relentless, near indestructible quality, and the biggest gob in the world, which I state out of admiration. She genuinely seems like she would be hard to kill, as Henry Rollins would put it, and Strangeland captures this in what may be more detail than you need.

I just wish she'd carried on in the vein of the Amsterdam paintings.

*: I remember this as being an actual portrait of Tim himself, but I may be wrong. For what it may be worth, I wrote a memorial to him called Let's Think About Living which can be found here.

Man Plus

Frederik Pohl Man Plus (1976)
I've read most of the stuff he co-wrote with Kornbluth including short stories, and at least a couple of his own short stories, but Man Plus is somehow my first full length undiluted Pohl. It's nothing life-changing - and I have to wonder what else was up for a Nebula award that year - but is nevertheless a reasonably solid read. Our main guy is named Roger Torraway, an astronaut undergoing surgery and cybernetic augmentation so as to allow him to live on Mars, and we need to live on Mars because Earth is fucked. It's hard science-fiction without being too much of a dick about it, and Pohl writes well - so well that it's fairly easy to see why he was such a great match for Kornbluth, and Man Plus makes good use of just the sort of ludicrously ambitious ideas which put the lead in Cyril's figurative pencil; and Man Plus has the added advantage of being free from the sort of incoherent jabbering to which Kornbluth succumbed from time to time. Classic may be an overstatement, but it's nevertheless very satisfying.

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.