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.

Ed Pinsent - Henrietta (1995)

 

Subtitled The Pirate of Love, I'll admit I picked this up because of the adults only warning on the cover supplemented by a list of transgressive acts depicted within. Whatever I imagined didn't seem like the sort of thing Ed Pinsent would have drawn and so I was naturally curious. Thankfully Henrietta isn't like anything I imagined and the adults only tag seems mainly precautionary, given our living in an age of persons deeply traumatised by exposure to anything they didn't want to see. Rather than following in the lineage of Oh Wicked Wanda!, the book's more potentially contentious elements are probably closer to the spirit of Rabelais and are, in any case, details rather than the driving force of the enterprise.

Just as aspects of quantum mechanics appear to crumble under the weight of their own description, I feel Ed Pinsent's strips work best as read because attempts to describe what he does will usually unwittingly hammer the narrative into a shape which is mostly in the eye of the beholder, so I'll keep this minimal: Henrietta is a tempestuously libidinous redheaded woman who visits a certain bull in his dreams and who additionally spends time as the captain of a pirate ship. At one point she has sex with an octopus, which is conducted with more charm than anything else you're likely to find at the end of such an ill-advised Google search.

Pinsent's art inhabits what may as well be its own cosmology, with tales told therein relating to mainstream equivalents at much the same kind of tangent as did the Residents to the rest of the music industry in the seventies. It isn't weird as such, or at least no more weird than the art of Edwards Ardizzone, Gorey, or Campbell with whom it shares a similarly whispy quality, as though its reality could be carried away on a sharp gust of wind. It could probably be dismissed as streaky marks on paper but for this ephemeral or hallucinatory quality pinned down with surprising gravity by the strength of its own conviction, by its consistency of vision and belief in whatever it happens to be saying; and the effect is even more powerful in full colour, as is Henrietta.

So we have a sort of myth, or something mythic which follows its own logic with an almost classical sensibility informing its prevalently nautical atmosphere. It's funny and often moving without anything reading too much like a performance, and startles with occasional asides which seem like they should break the spell but never do. I felt as though I could hear waves and the sound of someone honking away on an accordion as I read, and was left with a sensation of having learned something touching and profound which probably wouldn't translate into words, hence the pictures; and crucially, I would suggest that this tale couldn't be told in any other way than what you have here, for adaptation would only result in a different animal altogether, which - if you ask me - is the measure of true art.

Thar she blows!

Fred & Geoffrey Hoyle - Fifth Planet (1963)

 

I promised myself I wasn't going to have any more on the grounds of 1970's Seven Steps to the Sun having bordered on unreadable, but here I am. Seven Steps to the Sun featured this sentence:

A duck looked at him from the water and laughed in cynical fashion.

Fred Hoyle, as you may recall, was the astronomer who briefly taught Stephen Hawking and became one of his most vocal opponents, actually coining the term Big Bang while taking the piss out of the theory. Fifth Planet is better than Seven Steps - which was also cowritten with his son - although it suffers from traces of the same clunk. Domestic scenes abruptly focus upon the musings of Conway, the main character, and segue without preamble into five or six pages of theory concerning rocketry, orbital dynamics of planets, gravity or whatever. These digressions are reasonably interesting and doubtless Asimov would be proud, but the switch from one form of description to the other is clumsy, particularly when the straightforward narrative passages are themselves distinctly weird in tone:

Mike was waiting for her. He was a big, powerful fellow, with shortish hair, handsome rather than good-looking. In his official dossier he was described as well coordinated, and the figures for his reaction times were very good indeed.

Fifth Planet is set about one hundred years in the future, at least as of 1962, and writing in the introduction, Fred himself admits that attempts to predict the shape of future society usually end up looking pretty silly, so the world of Fifth Planet is conspicuously extrapolated from 1963, but 1963 as experienced by an unswinging science guy who probably doesn't play well with others, doesn't fully understand women, and fucking loves equations. Anything outside his somewhat sheltered existence seems to be drawn from movies, television, or cheap paperbacks, at a guess - James Bond mashed up with bits of kitchen sink dramas, retold by someone either on the spectrum or who is simply wound too tight. To be fair, the limits of such a perspective are acknowledged if not actually understood by the main character, and presumably at least one of the authors.

Although he could hardly believe it, Conway realised that to most people things were the other way round. It was usually the calculations on paper that seemed obscure. To most people calculations only acquired a meaning when they were translated into material terms. It was a question of the way you saw the world. Conway saw it in terms of the abstractions of the mind, not in terms of concrete everyday things. 

This goes some way towards alleviating the otherwise uneven and slightly rigid tone of the opening chapters, and once we're done with this admission, the novel starts to look up.

Conway is married to a woman he doesn't understand, a smashing dolly bird - as they were known back then - who isn't very bright and openly shags other men, with hubby obliged to accept that this is simply the way she is. Meanwhile, an alien solar system crosses celestial paths with our own, close enough to shift a few of our local planets into slightly wobblier orbits, but also close enough to visit in rocket ships not much further advanced than those which would take us to the moon at the end of the decade - and the technology involved seems to be the only concession to this being set in 2087. Expeditions are sent to Achilles, the planet of this roving system which most resembles Earth. They find plants but no animal life, and both teams, Russian and American, experience difficulties weird enough to have been drawn from the zone in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. Some of them make it back to Earth, but there's an alien consciousness among them, one which ends up migrating to Conway's wife.

If the novel retains its clunk in certain respects, this is easily forgotten by the second half, which compensates for any literary shortcomings with disquieting surrealism founded in some of the weirder claims of theoretical physics, and even the unflattering portrayal of Conway's wife is redeemed by the story. This is probably the best Hoyle I've read, which I didn't expect. It opens as a humourless version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and yet somehow ends up making Arthur C. Clarke seem frivolous.

Ed Pinsent & Mark Robinson - Silver Age Superman (1993)

 

Should the name be unfamiliar, Ed Pinsent is probably as close to a living legend as you'll find in the world of small press comics, having done much of it first, better, and for longer than most whilst remaining absolutely faithful to a vision entirely his own, stylistically some way outside the mainstream yet neither esoteric nor indulgent and near impossible to mistake for the work of any other artist. His strips tend to combine art and writing in a single visual train of thought, but Silver Age Superman seemed to demand a different approach, not so much an homage or impersonation of Superman as a form more suited to what Ed had written. Enter Mark Robinson who matched Ed's enthusiasm for the undertaking.

As is probably obvious, Silver Age Superman wasn't published by DC but has succeeded - or at least eluded legal scrutiny - by virtue of a format bearing no similarity to anything official, and through terming itself fan art, almost a love letter - certainly unlike the more acerbic reading one might expect from the small press taking on an icon of the mainstream. It's faithful to Superman with none of the gritty revisionism which has become such a cliché, but does more, straying into the introspective realms of the small press; and the magic is that even in doing something different, it remains true to Superman, albeit a Superman of whom we've had only glimpses.

This Clark Kent is an amiable reporter but never quite one of the gang in terms of humanity despite his best intentions. The recurrence of a puzzling memory sends him back through time to the Great Library of Alexandria, the dissolution of the monasteries, and other lost repositories of knowledge in hope of answering an existential question - whether knowledge can be reconciled with understanding or experience. At least that's how it reads to me. It's a weighty subject, but doesn't feel unduly ponderous due to the telling which cannily retains the charm and wonder of the finest Superman strips. I also enjoyed the church and its predecessors acknowledged as central to the development of civilisation, and sponsors of art and science as was historically the case whether we like it or not. Tales of this stripe so often invoke religious institutions mainly for the sake of ill omen, softening us up for the inevitable appearance of Aleister bleeding Crowley; and as if to underscore the refreshing spirit of the enterprise, Pinsent and Robinson have Superman meet John Dee without any of the traditional beastliness.

This one really is a breath of fresh air, a reminder of what we may have lost and of how exciting it once seemed - a breezy philosophical rumination without posturing which, if instilled with a certain melancholy, nevertheless warms the heart and leaves us with smiles on our faces.

Genuinely amazing.

...and you can find it here!

August Derleth (editor) - Worlds of Tomorrow (1953)

It feels like it's been a long time since I read one of these collections and I warmed to this one quite quickly, enjoying the spirit of the enterprise even where a couple of the stories were underwhelming for one reason or another. The spirit of the enterprise was, in this instance, visions of tomorrow, I suppose - which was doomed to failure given science-fiction's somewhat shaky predictive track record; but at the heart of that spirit was the notion of there being a future as something exciting or at least vastly different to the present. I feel we've lost sight of this, so it's nice to be reminded.

Anyway, aside from a few clunkers reliant on twist endings which have since become massive clichés - and may even have been clichés in 1953 for all I know - the collection is mostly great, and actively astonishing in a couple of cases. Jogging straight past the first Earthman on Mars ending up in a Martian zoo, Frank Belknap Long's The Great Cold reminds us of the genre's roots in - or at least its passage through - weird fiction, taking us to a far future where super-evolved barnacles rule the Earth, which the author somehow manages to write as genuinely weird and upsetting rather than just plain screwy, additionally using his beautifully vivid prose to say something beyond weird innit! Somehow, there's a lesson for us even in this world of super-evolved barnacles.

It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The Fires Within by Arthur C. Clarke is similarly fantastic, with weird physics performing the heavy lifting for what is essentially a conversation between a couple of eggheads at a research centre. Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, and Simak collaborator, Carl Jacobi all turn in respectable pieces, but the finest are possibly the last two. The Martian and the Moron may be the best thing I've read by Theodore Sturgeon, and it could be significant that it contains no traditional elements of science-fiction, or at least, the detail upon which the story spins remains ambiguous, leaving us with a radio ham who may or may not have picked up an alien transmission, and his son's relationship with a person I won't describe here because, despite having read the story, I still can't work out what or who she's supposed to be. The Martian and the Moron puts the reader to work, but it feels worth the effort. Finally, William Tenn's Null-P serves up an unfortunately familiar future history of the United States with lashings of sardonic wit. Despite what I wrote in the first paragraph, this is one case of a prediction having been fired in the right direction even if he doesn't quite hit the bullseye. Tenn's future America is founded on a fear of book learnin' with stupidity reclassified as a mark of character. Tenn fails because, as an optimist, he didn't account for basic greed as a motivating factor, with lies and telling people what they want to hear as a means to this end; but it's a wonderful piece of writing, alternately chilling and funny without resorting to slapstick.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Timequake (1997)

 

This was his final novel, and I'm calling it a novel regardless of ambiguity on the grounds of its predecessors being novels. It began life as the tale of a timequake, causing time to slip backwards a decade, then start again, obliging everyone to relive the previous ten years one moment at a time without being able to change anything. Unfortunately it just didn't want to be written so the author eventually cannibalised it and made a stew incorporating autobiographical elements. You could call it an autobiography or an extended essay, but novel works just as well. Kilgore Trout from Slaughterhouse Five features heavily, as do many, many short sketches of his stories, regarding which - in case you can't be arsed to skip back to August 2024:

Kilgore Trout was more or less invented by a friend of mine, Knox Burger, who was my editor in the early days. He did not suggest that I do this, but he said, you know, the problem with science-fiction? It's much more fun to hear someone tell the story of the book than to read the story itself. And it's true: If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it's over in a minute or so. It's a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarizing, and I suppose I've now summarized fifty novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them.

It works pretty much as autobiography, even with the fiction embedded, and honestly isn't much different to Slaughterhouse Five, to which it might be deemed a sequel, I suppose.

Vonnegut's recycling of his own incomplete material is inspired, with the timequake itself serving as metaphor to the ageing process and its shifting emphasis on memory - the author being well into his seventies and duly reflective by this point. As a slightly jazzy thesis on memory and the passage of time, the book also serves to illustrate the slow disintegration of culture during the twentieth century, not so much for the sake of shaking a fist at clouds, but a lament at our having lost sight - as we most certainly have - of what makes it fun. Contrary to the publicity, this isn't a bunch of random observations indulgently slung together but a very clear and direct summary of our world interspersed with jokes and asides, specifically because jokes and asides - and even throwaway synopses for science-fiction tales which will never be written - are the details which matter most. It's sad, funny and, as always, thought provoking.

I'm a bit disappointed there wasn't much about James Blocker and his ongoing fight with the Droon from Rigel, but you can't have everything.

Richard Webber - 50 Years of Hancock's Half Hour (2004)

 

In my own personal hierarchy of character comedy - where the belly laughs are generated by a performance more than a description or a representation - you have Laurel & Hardy, Hancock's Half Hour, then everything else with a substantial drop off just after Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and before you ask, no - Young Sheldon didn't make the cut. With the dynamic of the cast and what they achieved in Hancock's Half Hour, the radio show represents something of a lost golden age for me in its faithful preservation of actual working class humour, the sort of stuff which kept us going through many a back-breaking slog in the warehouse, the factory, the car plant or walking the streets. Much of the humour was presumably born from the same battered camaraderie which helped men such as Spike Milligan survive the horror of the Second World War, which also meant that early radio comedy tended towards variety - short improbable sketches interspersed with music replicating how the concert party once kept the troops entertained. The great leap forward introduced by Hancock's Half Hour was its loose concession to realism, favouring recurring characters in short comic plays rather than unrelated sketches punctuated by singing. To call it the first sitcom, as does the author, may be stretching a point, but its long term influence on the genre was substantial and should not be underestimated; and most important of all, it was fucking funny.

Webber does a fantastic job of documenting the show in the context of its era with copious support from the testimony of writers, cast members, and others, while keeping the humour firmly in sight - as opposed to crushing the sheer joy out of the thing by pinning it to the dissecting table. There's also a complete episode guide for both radio and television series along with two untransmitted scripts in their entirety from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. I still regularly listen to what Hancock I am able to thanks to the 2001 release of all surviving episodes as fancy CD boxed sets, because the humour and pathos ages more like a fine wine than jokes cracked seventy years ago; so this tome is probably as close as I get to a Bible.