Spring Rain, Summer Heat

Josh Peterson Spring Rain, Summer Heat (2020)
To kick off with a characteristically self-indulgent preamble, some time ago I painted a provisional cover for one of my own efforts. The novel is called Early Morning and features, among other things, a couple of patchwork men made from bits of other people and thus loosely resembling the Universal Pictures version of the Frankenstein monster. The cover painting depicted the two of them posed in arbitrary homage to David Bailey's well known portrait of the Kray twins. Some writer was asking me about Early Morning, so I showed him the painting.

'Duality,' he said. 'Interesting.'

It struck me as one of the most gormless observations which has ever been made about anything I've done; and I have an uncomfortable suspicion that my reaction to Josh Peterson's two previous works may amount to more or less the same thing, words offered in the hope of it seeming as though you've understood something when actually you don't have the first fucking clue.

Duality, my arse.

So I suspect I may be guilty of overthinking my response to Peterson's writing, where it isn't actually anything like so complicated as I apparently believed. Spring Rain, Summer Heat, much like the other two, is a memoir formed from Josh Peterson slicing open his own brain, pressing it against the scanning screen of a photocopier, hitting copy, and the book is what came out of the slot - memories scattered in order of significance - or something non-linear at any rate, mashed up together with their own analysis, then typeset in a sequence which makes emotional sense but specifically as a book, rather than anything subscribing to the usual logic of mind as a movie screen; which is why it's a book, obviously.

As to what the memoir is about - sex, drugs, rock and roll but not in any of the conventionally spectacular senses. It's more to do with communicating the experience than that which is experienced - if that's even an actual fucking sentence.

I've destroyed and deleted so many photographs, pictures and keepsakes as if they were evidence. Gone to a ridiculous length to ensure there were no backups and no trace was left in cases of items being burned et cetera. Not just to suppress those particular narratives, but to prevent myself from living vicariously through the past. And then compensating for this tic by writing about it.

Unless I'm still tipping my head to one side and smarming, duality - interesting, without even realising it, this seems to amount to an unapologetic self-portrait on the part of the author, answering how did I get here? and determinedly reluctant to fall for even his own bullshit. Some of the sex will doubtless trouble the squeamish, but everything here is more or less real by any definition that matters.

For some reason I got a lot more out of this one than Granite City Blues or Missing, although it could be that I've just become acclimated to how Josh Peterson writes, which is nice because he writes beautifully, and certainly more beautiful than you might expect given the drugs, the surgery, the piss, the bodily fluids, and impassive reportage of the same. Spring Rain, Summer Heat hints fairly heavily at the influence of Simon Morris - an association I'd apparently forgotten since the previous book - but, with apologies in advance to anyone who is likely to get the hump here, now does it much better for my money; or at least made me work harder for what has seemed greater reward. Additionally, it's massively refreshing - illuminating  even - to read about gender dysphoria as it occurs out here in the real world without having to wade through the usual rainbow unicorn bullshit and cult jargon; and if it isn't obvious, I'm saying this is a great book and that you need to read it.