Jorge Luis Borges - The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967)

 

One of those books which became part of my personal reference library as a kid was the Piccolo paperback Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts by Carey Miller, which I treasured for both its inclusion of obscure monsters I'd never heard of and the evocative black and white line illustrations by Mary I. French. Online research reveals that Miller made a career from books which terrified and fascinated the children of my generation, another one I owned being the beautifully painted hardback Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts & UFOs from 1977 which only now do I realise was by the same author. This may all seem obtuse as preamble to my writing about Borges, an Argentinian author whose works have, as Wikipedia puts it, contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in twentieth century Latin American literature; but with hindsight it's difficult to believe Carey Miller wasn't cherry-picking from this earlier compendium when compiling her own dictionary given the quota of mythical monsters I've never seen mentioned outside of these two books - the Kujata, the Squonk and the Nasnas, to name just three. This isn't an accusation of plagiarism so much as one of influence given the differences. Miller's purpose being to give kids goosebumps, she includes dinosaurs and Frankenstein's monster.

I'm not sure Borges' intention was at variance but for a slight shift of focus, and we're in roughly the same territory as his short stories, here with narrative boiled down to its essence of time, place, character and so on, delivering equivalent observations and ideas in alphabetical order and without any of it being pinned to the customary progression of regular fiction. Where Miller's scope was sufficiently broad as to include Mary Shelley's hit single, Borges similarly draws in creatures from the writing of both Poe and Kafka whilst himself employing considerable artistic license in relating established mythological figures, and even creating one of his own - the Peryton, a half deer and half bird chimera which somehow casts the shadow of a man. This, I would assume, is because a rigorously scientific bestiary of mythical beasts arguably misses the point of that which it purports to describe, and because the larger world is often mapped from the seclusion of daily existence by fictions or truisms at best; and The Book of Imaginary Beings seems to provide a more informative account of the historical human experience as related to our environment than whichever facts or statistics might apply, even where the facts and statistics are more accurate in material terms.

This distinction is probably something we should try to keep track of, not least in recognising that there is a distinction which doesn't detract from the world described herein by Borges being a wonderful place.

Robert Moore Williams - The Chaos Fighters (1955)

 

It's been a shocking three years since I read my last Robert Moore Williams, a lull accounted for by nothing I hadn't already read showing up in the usual second hand places, before a day trip to Austin opened up an entirely new seam. So Austin is good for something beyond providing twats a point of focus for when they suddenly find themselves required to say something which isn't routinely insulting about Texas.

Happily, The Chaos Fighters has proven to be a good choice in terms of getting back in the saddle. As with much of his writing, it adheres to the unashamedly pulp sensibility of agents figuring things out, embellished with sensational dames but saved from the clichés and stock pieces by its sheer weirdness. Williams' writing has about it a strong touch of the A.E. van Vogt, although his own similarly dreamlike and unpredictable narratives are delivered in terms customarily more analogous to Edward Hopper than Edward Wadsworth, with occasionally a sentence so startling that it borders on Alan Partridge. Bright young things will characterise this as bad writing, which probably isn't an argument worth having; and neither does it matter whether or not Williams succeeds because the energy comes from the teeth gritting determination with which he attempts to wrestle that sucker to the ground. 

We open with our man Haldane entering a shop in pursuit of a mystery, just like the protagonist of van Vogt's Weapon Shops of Isher, which here seems to receive tribute on the very first page in the reference to other agents having vanished on Mars. The mystery stems from a sign in the shop window promising FOR SALE—Homo Sapiens, which is eventually revealed as the title of a book explaining the scientific and spiritual destiny of humanity in cosmic terms, as written by persons stood on the threshold of the same.

'We're human beings in the process of becoming something else. As we see history, the only law apparent in the universe is change. We human beings change too; we become something else, as a race and as individuals. What this something else is we don't know until we become it. Nor will we know what it is until we achieve it and find out what it is. But we are changing, we are evolving, we are moving in some direction.'

You may recognise the obsession with progress, human evolution, and supermen which gripped many science-fiction writers during the first half of the twentieth century, but what distinguishes Williams is how strongly he foreshadowed the utopian movements of the sixties, with whom he became briefly associated, seemingly as a benign guru figure to a commune. Unsurprisingly then, his science-fiction is decidedly fuzzy at the edges with the weird fiction of Abraham Merritt as a starting point, expanding to include all forms of mysticism, whatever seemed to fit, here presenting us with inventors who also summon the occasional mysterious force using incantations from ancient texts. Williams seems to have been a functioning schizophrenic in so much as that he held down jobs, was liked by his friends, and yet was prone to visions and voices in his head - translating to telepathy in The Chaos Fighters.

The voice paused. The spasm was passing in Haldane. He wondered about the voice. Who was speaking in there? In his mind was the thought that no person was in there, that no-one was speaking, that what he heard was a product of his own imagination.

This is illustrated in literal fashion when Haldane's psychic ability communicates with him directly in conversation.

His eyes, in direct contact with their own data, and not giving two hoots about the opinions of his conscious mind, screamed at him that they were not lying.

'We're reporting accurately,' his eyes yelled. 'Not only is the girl getting smaller but the street is stretching out like a rubber band and is growing larger. And the girl is only two feet tall now.'

Communicated as a populist thriller, The Chaos Fighters is therefore Williams' view of where humanity heads in the years to come as drawn and interpreted from his own mental idiosyncrasies. It's accordingly strewn with themes and images which reoccur throughout his fiction - the sound like a bell heard from across the universe, the subterranean tunnels (which we find on the moon in this case); and the hard-boiled familiarity of its settings and characters is offset by the unpredictably surreal twists which the narrative follows in circling and struggling to make its esoteric point. It hasn't predicted anything - at least not yet - but there's too much thought, albeit completely screwy thought, gone into the novel to dismiss it as rambling gibberish; but above all, it's a tremendous and tremendously strange read. It's also possibly the clearest, most overt illustration of the man's unique vision until 1970s pseudo-autobiographical Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight, at least of those I've read.

New Juche - Water Margin (2024)

 

Another chapbook, but as always he makes the words count with more to digest in these fifty or so pages than most writers manage in a lifetime. If you've read New Juche on previous occasions, you'll be familiar with the themes - although there's no sex in this one - but each piece of writing carries a different emphasis or approaches its subject from a new angle, so continuing to yield moments of intense clarity comparable to the proverbial ray of sunlight bursting from behind a storm cloud even given the often immersive degradation of the subject. Water Margin further explores the author's relation to his environment, how he's formed by his environment in certain respects, here with particular emphasis on water as the medium which binds all things almost in the sense meant by certain pre-Christian religions. We open at the Noi Na bathhouse, subterranean and characterised by extremes of temperature, amongst foreigners who no more belong to Thai culture than does New Juche himself yet seem to define him as an outsider. This contrasts with the longer account of our man's visceral struggle with his pond which also serves as a source of food and water, and which cements him firmly into his social landscape as friends, neighbours, or relatives muck in - literally - to help with the drainage, or cooking whatever they can find slopping about in the silt and mud.

It's a physical account which very much reminds me of whatever it was that D.H. Lawrence said about the value of labour and getting one's hands dirty as a more profound and even spiritual pursuit than anything born of intellect. It also represents a communion with nature on significantly more honest terms than those usually associated with such a cliché; and either I'm yet to read another author who has truly given us anything like this (which is admittedly a possibility), or he really is something new in literary history.

Spike Milligan - Where Have All the Bullets Gone? (1985)

 

I'd drifted away from funny books into more po-faced territory by the time this, the fifth of Spike's war memoirs, was published; but having read the first four, and feeling I owe it to my younger self, here I am again. The previous volume closed in harrowing fashion with Spike binned up in Italy with shell shock and an attendant absence of jokes and one liners. I was assuming this volume might represent a deeper descent into the psychological twilight, but no. Spike recovers despite the best efforts of the British Army, who arrange for him to continue his convalescence at a medical facility in close proximity to Mount Vesuvius just as it's about to blow; but in sunnier news, the war is over with Mussolini hung upside down in a garage somewhere. Somehow, this doesn't end the memoir because rather than being sent home as one might expect, Spike and pals continue to bum around Italy for another year, mostly entertaining the troops while playing in a variety of jazz bands, or possibly swing bands - something you dance to anyway. I assume the British Army hung around in Italy after the war as part of some clean up operation, or maybe getting the country back on its feet - Spike doesn't go into detail on this or even much else of the bigger picture unless I blinked and missed it.

Not that it matters because the author clearly never intended to bump heads with A.J.P. Taylor, instead delivering a worm's eye view of the war as many of us working classes would have experienced it - as something too vast and remote to comprehend except when the bombs are dropping directly onto our heads. Now, as the fighting retreats and dribbles away to nothing, our man catches up with himself and the job of existence, torn between the loss of all that was familiar and the pleasures of sun, sea, a different country, and not being shot at on a daily basis. The barrage of jokes and zingers is tempered with pleasantly reflective interludes of the kind experienced when realisation dawns that you've been through hell and survived. It's conversational and with an impressionist grammar that's more or less its own thing, which can be frustrating for anyone wondering why we're suddenly in Florence, or Naples, or wherever else, but is probably the only way to capture this kind of history. That said, the notes and letters reproduced solely as photographs - leaving us to struggle with Spike's handwriting or a typewriter which obviously needed a new ribbon - seem more trouble than they're worth, but your own mileage may vary.

Also, Harry Secombe finally shows up, in case anyone was wondering, and is a lot more funny on the page than I'm afraid I remember him being in real life. It isn't War and Peace*, but it's pleasantly substantial and satisfying compared to at least one of Spike's earlier, scrappier memoirs.

*: I haven't read it either.

Steve Underwood - Even When It Makes No Sense (2024)

 

Apparently I already missed a book about Ramleh, but thankfully I've been able to pick up a copy of this before they all vanish. Ramleh, as you may or may not recall, were the original power electronics act that weren't named after a bongo magazine, who expanded and evolved into something else entirely and whose influence seems to have been more far reaching than any of us could have predicted. Broken Flag was the label run by Ramleh's Gary Mundy - mostly tapes, but also some vinyl, some printed material, and which was firmly enmeshed in a pre-internet network of like-minded individuals and artists spread all across the planet. Given that the weirdy music tape scene of the early eighties was arguably too broad and expansive - both in terms of aesthetic as well as where it was happening - to ever be done justice by a single definitive tome, the best we can probably hope for is this sort of sharp focus on a particular group of individuals which we can take as in some way generally representative of the bigger, more nebulous picture.

My shelves never sagged beneath the weight of Broken Flag releases, but I had a couple of things and would have had more had my pocket money stretched further. I know a few of the people who turn up in this book, and have probably stood in the same room as about half of the rest. I've even recorded in the same studio as Skullflower, with the same engineer, and recall a good few of the major live events described here, even though my attendance was prevented by my living in the wrong part of the country and having school in the morning. It's fair to say that I'm invested, and doubtless biased to some extent, but I really feel that this account does a tremendous job of capturing something which was important on some scale beyond just those involved, because as Gary Mundy says:

The period of music and culture we grew up with and inspired us was like nothing else and will never happen again. This in itself justifies our recording it as much as possible.

What the fuck are we talking about here, you may well ask. It was music, electronically originated or otherwise flying against both convention and tradition, and mostly born at a tangent from punk with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and SPK as midwives. It's what Ministry fans who weren't there now term industrial music, not having realised that Monte Cazazza was joking when he came up with that one - although little of the music squared well with so limited a term. Most people discovered it either by accident, or by knowing someone who had themselves discovered it by accident, because it was generally ignored - even shunned in a few cases - by the music press of the time, arguably excepting Sounds*1. You bought records if shops had them, or you sent for tapes through the post, often produced by one bloke running off cassette copies of his own strange noises on a home stereo with artwork photocopied at the local college; and it was fucking exciting because often you had no idea what you would get beyond it being something you'd never heard before, and it was our thing; and it seemed like part of more than just rock and roll and the music business, as heir to modernism in the art and philosophy of the twentieth century - music which sent you off to the library to look for Burroughs or Genet or Francis Bacon or Stockhausen or whoever else, more than it made you wonder what their first album sounded like or whether they were into the Stones.

This is what is communicated in Even When It Makes No Sense, which additionally brings in a great many of the original artists to describe what they were trying to do, making for a thorough discussion of extreme or unusual art and its aesthetic - which I applaud as a vital undertaking given some of the bullshit that has been thrown around in recent years regarding labels such as Broken Flag, Come Organisation, and others, invariably with little effort made to understand why anyone would present art as an attack, or why we really needed to glue pictures of Benito Mussolini*2 onto the covers of our tapes of distorted short wave radio.

My personal outlook at the time was a kind of weird amalgam of anarchism, libertarianism, and a warped kind of socialism. I sympathised with some of what was being done at the time, but it was all so negative and humourless, and a lot of people involved in those left-wing organisations were such wankers. It became difficult to want to associate with them. They seemed to be advocating a really grim future where everyone was equal, but everyone was fucking miserable also. Part of what I did was definitely intended to piss those people off. Some of what I did went against my personal beliefs, but it was worth it just to try and shake them up. Unless you were there, it's difficult to explain. The comedian Alexei Sayle once said that when you told a joke, there would be a pause while people analysed what you had said before deciding whether it was appropriate to laugh, and I think there was a lot of truth in that. That said, yes the Falklands was a pathetic war, yes, Thatcher was a cunt, but no way were the youth at large going to support Red Wedge with its Soviet grimness. I felt the only way forward was what I saw as a real kind of punk ideal of embracing everything and making personal decisions about what you wanted and being true to yourself and not joining tribes. Very few of us took that message from punk, but I did and, to a large extent, still do. I've never understood party politics. My views are a mixture of bits of most parties' ideas, with a few of my own thrown in for good measure. The idea that a large group of people can always agree on every issue is insane. It goes against human nature.

Finally, the book reprints the two issues of the original Even When It Makes No Sense produced as A5 zines. I had the first one but flogged it on eBay because it didn't have any pictures and I didn't understand it, but being now older and marginally less stupid, I'm very glad to have a second chance with the thing which, if slightly uneven, provokes thought beyond simply serving as a snapshot of its time and place - and particularly with the anonymously authored*3 six page assemblage, treatise, or whatever you'd call it on G.I. Gurdjieff and Syd Barrett, which has itself sent me off to eBay for a copy of Colin Wilson's The War Against Sleep - his biography of Gurdjieff. Four decades down the line and this gritty well-spring is still throwing off sparks, taking us to new places.

*1: Before anyone starts, no, it was never championed by the fucking NME as I've heard said a few times. Fuck off.

*2: To be fair, it was usually Adolf Hitler. I personally favoured Mussolini because I wanted to be different.

*3: Although I'd put money on it having been written by Philip Best.

Robert Heinlein - Podkayne of Mars (1963)

I disliked Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein's alleged classic, probably more than anything else I read that year, and it's taken me about a decade to get over my subsequent aversion to the man's work - which I appreciate is ridiculous given the undeniable quality of at least a few of his books. Stranger didn't really have a story as I recall, being mainly the rambling account of a displaced Martian accepted into the circle of Jubal Harshaw, a massive bore who spends the entire novel expounding on his theories of this, that, and the other. Harshaw is a vehicle for Heinlein's own views on polygamy, incest and other sixties fixations - a pompous libertarian windbag as Rudy Rucker described him - who takes near infinite delight in the brilliance of his own testimony. I skimmed the last two-hundred pages and vowed to never do that to myself again, to which end I adopted the formula that anything written after Stranger should probably be given a wide berth.

After fifty pages of Podkayne with no actual story forming in support to a first person narrative taking suspiciously familiar delight in its own testimony, I realised that, despite all of the above, I hadn't bothered to make any mental note of the year Stranger in a Strange Land was published and had been ill-equipped to veto anything else I happened across in the used book store.

To be fair, it could have been worse in many respects, not least being that the central character and narrator is a fifteen-year old girl who somehow doesn't find herself sexually attracted to a much older man who writes science-fiction novels and who is probably named Bob or something like that; and her testimony is mostly witty and generally less annoying than that of Jubal Harshaw. The story here is that Podkayne and her younger brother travel to Venus with their uncle, and some stuff happens at a pace and in terms suggesting that Heinlein was having a stab at a literary novel rather than another ripping adventure, which sort of works as a travelogue with all the interesting stuff being the background detail of future civilisation, the rigours of space travel and so on. The slambang adventure described by Theodore Sturgeon on the back cover presumably refers to the espionage subplot which eventually develops - something to do with a bomb on the spaceship which I found difficult to follow over the noise of Podkayne jabbering on about life, the universe, and everything, and also because I was bored.

It isn't terrible, and I've a feeling I may simply have picked the wrong day to read it, but it will probably be a while before I give it another shot.

Charles Bukowski - South of No North (1973)

 

Just when I assume I've read all that Bukowski had published as prose - as distinct from poetry, despite the admittedly fine line - another one I've never heard of pops out of the woodwork. South of No North collects short stories, mostly four to six pages in length and reprinted from obscure sources, plus a couple of longer efforts which originally appeared as chapbooks. As you would expect, it's mostly autobiographical and remains approximately so even when swinging wildly off into adjacent genres, notably Stop Staring at My Tits, Mister - a Rabelaisian western which could have been lifted from the pages of Malcolm Bennett and Aidan Hughes' BRUTE! magazine - and The Devil Was Hot wherein our guy encounters Satan himself, currently inconvenienced as a sideshow attraction.

Whatever objections you may already have to the man's work - should you have any - are unlikely to be assuaged herein; and if you're one of those pricks who somehow dispute that the man could write, then you've mistaken something else for writing and your argument doesn't apply; and if you're overly fond of the term transgressive—well, that doesn't wash either given the complete irrelevance of whatever you believe he transgressed from.

Like anybody can tell you. I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

This is why he was great, and why his writing will most likely endure. It has a purity which resists all attempts to co-opt or to colonise, demanding that the reader take it entirely on its own terms and offering no concessions to whatever bullshit he, she or it may have been duped into buying this week; and if you can't appreciate that, then you can't appreciate nuffink.