Violator

Alan Moore, Bart Sears & Greg Capullo Violator (1994)
Here's another one I'd never heard of through having given up on comics, or most comics, around the end of 1991. It's billed as one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote by the online advertising, but I'm suspecting a certain bias given that they obviously wanted me to buy the thing - although the sales pitch worked so I did, for what it may be worth. This dates from the period during which Moore had become thoroughly browned off with DC due to the publication of the Watchmen Babies meet Archie crossover, while still needing to pay off a substantial phone bill incurred through calling the Post Office Dial-a-Disc service in order to hear Whigfield's Saturday Night over and over and over. The Image Comics boys had seen the sense of having their drawings of massive tits, angry faces and explosions scripted by some guy who could do word stuff good, and so here we are.

Violator is a demon at large on earth in the form of a member of Insane Clown Posse, apparently, and a character who first appeared in Todd McFarlane's Spawn; and Spawn is what happened when pow! the comic book grew up - lavishly crosshatched goth-metal art beautifully reproduced on glossy pages, swearing and a shitload of gratuitous violence in what otherwise may as well have been a seventies comic book about a guy in a cape. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nevertheless, Violator is a lot of fun. It's fucking stupid, but as I say, it's a lot of fun and Moore clearly had a blast with the dialogue, although I'm guessing he probably zipped it off in the caff one morning while waiting for his egg and chips. There's a story, sort of, but only just, which doesn't really matter because Violator is, roughly speaking, D.R. & Quinch reimagined as a track on an Insane Clown Posse album, which I say as someone with quite a few Insane Clown Posse albums. It falls some way short of being one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote, but it's better than Jerusalem.

The Ship of Ishtar

A. Merritt The Ship of Ishtar (1924)
Of Merritt, this is the fourth I have read and for the author it was book the third, serialised originally in the Argosy All-Story Weekly. I would venture that one single story, Merritt had, the victory or defeat of which lay in the telling for otherwise, samey, they are, if but slightly so. Henry Rider Haggard, his influence prevails to no little extent, and voices speak in florid tones like unto persons who don themselves in capes and do beckon to the northern wind. Exhausting, it can be. Heed also that Merritt has told, on more than but one occasion, of an adventuresome bloke. Encounters he a fair maiden of mystical countenance, and in each volume of my ken thus far.

Dreamily he answered her again: 'Yes—you are very fair.'

'I love you—Shalamu!'

He thrust her from him: 'Her eyes are like the Pools of Peace in the Valley of Forgetfulness! When she comes near me the doves of Ishtar beat their wings above my head! She walks upon my heart!'

Narada drew back, scarlet lips pale, brows a menacing straight line: 'The Priestess?'

'The Priestess,' he answered. 'Her hair is like the cloud that veils the sun at dusk. The wave of her robe scorches me as the wind from the desert noon scorches the palm. The wave of her robe makes me cold as the wind of the desert night makes cold the palm.'

In essence, Merritt is Mills & Boon for men, cleverly offsetting the heaving bosoms with just enough grunting swordplay to keep anyone from doubting their own sexuality. Thankfully, that's not all he does, but this one still could have used a bit more in the way of a story.

The Ship of Ishtar introduces John Kenton, a sort of two-fisted archaeological egghead who receives a stone artefact from ancient Babylon. The artefact accordingly crumbles to reveal an ornately jewelled model of a ship, and Kenton somehow finds himself transposed through both time and space to the decks of the original craft for reasons I didn't quite follow. There's some sort of war going on between Ishtar and Nergal, so Sumerian mythology seems to inform much of the background detail; but apart from the element of Kenton fancying the woman who embodies Ishtar, I have no idea what happens in this novel. I found myself drifting from one chapter to the next without any of it taking hold.

It's beautifully written, and I can see why it's highly rated by at least some readers, but I suspect that, as with Asimov's Foundation, you really need to read it at a specific age, because otherwise it feels like a heavy weight held at arm's length for far too long. The Ship of Ishtar isn't without worth, but I preferred Dwellers in the Mirage.

Freedom of Choice

Evie Nagy Freedom of Choice (2015)
This is one of a series of books, each dedicated to the discussion of a classic album - although most of them are exactly what you would expect from the term classic album - the usual Mojo magazine suspects which I've either never heard or which have otherwise left me unmoved; but happily, Devo somehow made the cut. I still find this, their third album, a bit of an odd choice for the series. For myself, their greatest album is usually the one you're listening to, possibly excepting Smooth Noodle Maps which somehow feels as though it went into a room to look for something and then forgot why it was there. Freedom of Choice always felt like a transitional set to me, lacking either the uneasy mania of Duty Now for the Future or the synthetic Spartan polish of New Traditionalists; but it's the one which sold by the truckload and which briefly transformed Devo into a household name, and of which the band themselves seem to be the fondest, so why not? If it's Devo, I'm not complaining.

Excepting Arthur C. Clarke's communication satellites, Devo may be the one example of science-fiction actually predicting something; and while de-evolution might seem an unusually pessimistic idea, perhaps even one reliant upon specific readings of societal facts, the last four years of US politics look one fuck of a lot like something from the Devo manual. This is a group to whom we probably should have been listening.

Nagy anatomically dissects each individual track of the album, taking her conclusions as starting points for biographical detail and  observation, orchestrating it all as a pleasantly unified thesis in support of just why we should have been listening to Devo, even why the world would have been a better place had we been listening to Devo - although I can't actually be sure that this isn't something I've read into the text rather than something Nagy necessarily wrote. In any case, it's a fascinating read, and one which threw up quite a few surprises; plus it reminded me why I hate the NME, which is always worth remembering.

I still don't really know how to explain Devo to those who don't get it, but this book made me feel a little bit more righteous nevertheless, so praise Jesus and pass the spud-gun.

Psi-Force

Danny Fingeroth, Fabian Nicieza, Mark Texeira & others
Psi-Force (1989)
I'm gearing up for a mammoth read of every single mutant book published by Marvel up until about 1991 - the point at which it all went tits up so far as I'm concerned - which I plan to write about as I go, an enterprise which will probably take up at least a year. My currently reading this, the complete run of a single comic book, should therefore be considered training, although it also constitutes homework to some extent. I retain a vague impression of Fabian Nicieza having been in some way culpable to it all going tits up, and yet I remember enjoying his run on Psi-Force; so I'm taking stock of my own powers of recall, amongst other things, one of those other things being that I needed light relief from Genet.

Anyway, as you may recall, New Universe was one of Marvel's earlier concessions to pow! the comic book growing up, adding a new layer of realism to its standard fare in the same way that the Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four once added a new layer of realism to the primary colours of their predecessors back in the sixties. So the New Universe was our world to which the Bullpen introduced superheroes - or at least persons with unusual powers - and let things happen as they might have happened in what we recognise as real life, give or take some small change. It may be a waste of time looking for industry parallels, but Star Brand was probably the New Universe version of Superman with Spitfire as Iron Man, DP7 as the X-Men, and so on. Psi-Force were possibly also the X-Men, or maybe a hybrid of the X-Men and Voltron, the giant robot formed from a group of smaller robots. Anyway, there were five of Psi-Force, each with psychic abilities which our New Universe seems to have assumed were possibly real even before the white event gave everyone powers; and under certain conditions the five combine to create a giant winged composite being called the Psi-Hawk.

Fantastic though this may seem, Psi-Force managed to go a full year without trying to dress anybody in spandex or having them answer to a superhero name. Our five psychics are teenage runaways whose powers have left them no option but to hit the road, and so they've all ended up in San Francisco at a home for missing kids, which perhaps provides early clues as to why the New Universe went tits up at the end of its third year. The comic had grown up in so much as that we had unlikely powers without anyone deciding to be Batman, but it was otherwise business as usual in terms of modular teenage angst communicated through thought bubbles and excessively wordy captions describing what you can see on the page and have presumably already worked out for yourself; and our five Psi-Force kids comprise the angry loner, the inevitable athletic black guy, the shy but well meaning foreigner who doesn't always understand what's going on, the snooty Asian girl who is obsessed with clothes, and the much younger awkward four-eyed brainiac. Take away their powers and it's The Breakfast Club. They don't actually drive around San Francisco solving crimes with the help of a sandwich eating dog, but it wouldn't seem out of character if they did.

Yet Psi-Force isn't entirely without redeeming qualities. The story is well told and inventive within certain limits, if a little more wordy than it needed to be during its first year; and Mark Texeira's art is fucking gorgeous - enough so as to negate the occasional hint of the kind of cheese inevitably generated when secretive government agencies are on the hunt for moody teenagers with unusual powers.

Fabian Nicieza stirred things up when I guess sales figures made it apparent that the New Universe was proceeding with maybe a little too much caution, and that it might be possible to ramp things up without giving everyone a cape. As a writer, he's since become something of a big deal, not least as the creator of Deadpool, but I found him uneven - at least his early writing. Whatever was happening always seemed to be the work of some secretive government agency, the kind which gets about in black helicopters. It conspicuously felt as though notes had been taken from reading comics by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, notably the stuff about screwing up the lives of your characters. In fact, it conspicuously felt as though Nicieza's influences were limited to other comic books and maybe a couple of action movies. It felt like fanzine level writing with influences as placeholders for inspiration.

Yet, even in his first published work on Psi-Force, there's something sparky trying to break free from the confusion of Nicieza learning on the job. The ideas are weirdly engaging, even when it's obvious where he got them and what he did to twist them into something less transparently derivative; and so we end up with Psi-Force kidnapped and held prisoner at the Siberian Project, a secretive Soviet government agency which strives to turn mutants paranormals into an elite fighting force, and it almost works.

The problem here, at least by the end of the run, is that hardly anyone was reading so I guess the company was reluctant to spend money on any of the New Universe books, and the art is fucking terrible, possibly the worst I've seen in something which wasn't actually drawn in biro then photocopied; and passing references to conflict in Afghanistan aren't quite enough to make it seem all grown up and plausible.

Chains generally being as strong as their weakest links, the best one can say of Fabian Nicieza's run on Psi-Force was that he almost got away with it despite almost everyone else letting the side down; and the best one can say of Psi-Force as a whole was that Mark Texeira's art was wonderful and that it tried its best, and at least succeeded in communicating its own potential even if the stuff dripping out of the spigot at the other end wasn't always great. Having said that, I nevertheless thought it was amazing at the time, and sometimes that's all you need. Not everything has to be King Lear.

Our Lady of the Flowers

Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers (1943)
I didn't get on very well with The Thief's Journal but somehow picked up the idea that this was the one I should have read; so now I've read it.

Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers in prison with a broken pencil and sheets of brown paper squirrelled away from whatever forced labour the authorities had deemed might keep him out of trouble. The manuscript - because I suppose that's what it was - was found and destroyed at some point or other, probably by another jailbird - and so Genet started again; although I suspect it was probably more the case that he simply carried on given that the novel comprises philosophical musings entangled around a vivid fantasy existence, so the narrative structure seems pretty much analogous to what happens when you twist a spigot. I doubt the destruction of the earlier draft has deprived us of any particular episode or insight which hasn't been regurgitated here.

Genet was a petty thief, amongst other things - barely even a decent criminal - someone so profoundly unlikely to ever fit in that he's barely even a snug fit within his own mildly transgressive mythology, but his writing was powerful, vividly poetic and arguably unique, even if a little goes a long way. Our Lady of the Flowers is horribly self-indulgent to a point bordering on masturbation, rendering it somewhat impenetrable to the casual reader, which seems to have been Genet's intention - specifically art without compromise and which is absolutely true to itself.

The world of the living is never too remote from me. I remove it as far as I can with all the means at my disposal. The world withdraws until it is only a golden point in so somber a sky that the abyss between our world and the other is such that the only real thing that remains is the grave. So I am beginning here a really dead man's existence. More and more I prune that existence, I trim it of all facts, especially the more pretty ones, those which might readily remind me that the real world is spread out twenty yards away, right at the foot of the walls.

The subject is Genet himself as reflected in his brutally, cramped microcosm merged with that of his own imagination, and with very little dividing the layers. So we don't hear a great deal about other inmates or humorous misunderstandings in the mess hall, and it will probably be some time before we see this adapted for telly with Ross Kemp donning the stripey pyjamas, but we spend a lot of time inside Genet's head, populated mostly by homosexuals, drag queens, pimps, addicts, and other refugees from some Lou Reed album. I suspect my description may here strike a potentially contentious note, although I feel that to adopt drearily empowering contemporary terms would be doing both Genet and the reader's intelligence a disservice.

Society generally took a dim view of homosexuality in Genet's day, and Genet conflates his own sexuality with its unfortunate associations, the bestial and perverse, the dirty and the irredeemable to an almost fetishist degree of association where even acts of betrayal and dishonesty seem to take on a near divine quality in which, as with certain Shamanic systems, sin approaches the sacred through existing beyond the limits of the ordinary and socially acceptable. Anyone requiring parables of honour amongst thieves or the dignity of the outcast is unlikely to find anything here.

I might, just as she admitted to me, confide that if I take contempt, but rather in order not to be ridiculous, not to be reviled, by anything or anyone, that I have placed myself lower than dirt. I could not do otherwise. If I declare that I am an old whore, no one can better that, I discourage insult. People can't even spit in my face any more.

Of course, it's a defence mechanism to some extent, but any self-flagellation involved should be taken as essentially celebratory, a relishing of sin without attempts to turn it into anything more conventionally noble.

I want to sing murder, for I love murderers. To sing it plainly. Without pretending, for example, that I want to be redeemed through it, though I do yearn for redemption.

Our Lady of the Flowers is therefore, from one angle, Genet maintaining his sanity by modelling his world in something approximating his own image, and the act of writing it down may be what made it real, or at least real enough for his purposes.

But I know that the poor Demiurge is forced to make his creature in his own image and that he did not invent Lucifer. In my cell, little by little, I shall have to give my thrills to the granite. I shall be alone with it for a long long time, and I shall make it live with my breath and the smell of my farts, both the solemn and the mild ones. It will take me an entire book before I draw her from her petrifaction and little by little impart to her my suffering, little by little deliver her from evil, and, holding her by the hand, lead her to saintliness.

Despite an erotic undertone, I'm not convinced that it's really about sex, gender identity or anything involving orifices, and sexually ambiguous males such as Darling, Our Lady and the rest drift in and out of the visionary narrative perpetrating small acts of betrayal upon one another apparently for the sake of mapping the territory. Indeed, to colonise Our Lady of the Flowers in service of gender theory - as I see has already been done in a few bits of internet - seems reductionist and divisive when all the information one might require is already to be found explicitly stated in the text.

Which is all very nice, but actually reading the thing night after night is exhausting because Genet writes entirely for himself, leaving the rest of us to make the best of it. When he says something interesting, it's wonderful, like crisp sunlight breaking through grey cloud in the wake of a storm, but such instances are few and far between, presumably unless one treats the whole as poetry, taking it slowly, one paragraph at a time. Without it representing any sort of failure on Genet's part, given what he was doing with this novel, Sartre's fifty-page introduction is a lot more engaging and a lot more enlightening. None of which is to say that Genet wasn't a great writer, or that he lacked philosophical depth, or even that this work shouldn't be considered a masterpiece - because it probably is by some definition - but I nevertheless found it a chore and I guess Genet just isn't for me. I tried, and I'm glad I tried, but there it is.

Planet Explorer

Murray Leinster Planet Explorer (1957)
I think I generally prefer his novels. As with The Forgotten Planet, we have four thematically linked short stories, in this case all featuring Bordman, the Colonial Survey Officer. Bordman's job is to fly around the galaxy visiting newly discovered habitable planets and give them the thumbs up for future colonisation, or not as the case may be. Here he visits worlds which are respectively too cold, too sandy, too wild, and too wet for further settlement, in each case tackling some ecological obstacle which ultimately facilitates his being able to give settlers the thumbs up. The stories work - assuming here that we all agree they work - in much the same way as Asimov's robot tales. They are environmental puzzle boxes which the reader is invited to see if they can figure out before Bordman comes through with the solution, as he usually does. Leinster was at least on top of his game when he wrote this material, so nothing quite reads like a manual on structural engineering despite the stories being fairly dry and low on incident. Planet Explorer therefore just about succeeds where The Forgotten Planet kind of doesn't, representing one particularly ponderous strain of written science-fiction which is unlikely ever to be adapted and translated into another medium for the convenience of dullards; so it's readable.

It's also a record of changing attitudes which can be enjoyed, more or less, without getting too indignant about its failure to chime with contemporary sensibilities. The settlers of the world in Sand Doom, for example, are mostly Native American or African because they're better able to stand the sun of Xosa II - which is okay - and Leinster scores points for not only cultural sensitivity but for allowing non-Caucasians some dignity without condescension, but the suggestion that the African settlers seem in particular well-disposed towards manual labour is kind of awkward. Also we have the apparent mass extermination of an indigenous species in the nevertheless Hugo award winning Combat Team, just in case any of us should have forgotten that the thrust of the collection is specifically colonial. On the other hand, Huyghens in Combat Team seems to express libertarian views without being a walking cliché, and yet is countered by our man.

'In a way,' said Bordman, 'you're talking about liberty and freedom, which most people think is politics. You say it can be more. In principle, I'll concede it. But the way you put it, it sounds like a freak religion.'

Planet Explorer is fairly ponderous for Leinster, although most of the pondering relates to the mechanics of environment, and yet it's thought-provoking without pushing any one particular agenda; so I suppose it might best be described as a slightly more self-aware representative of its genre - perhaps nothing spectacular, but respectable nonetheless.

I'll therefore overlook the cover illustration depicting nothing which actually occurs in the pages that follow, although it would have been nice had they spelled his fucking name right.

Drugs Are Nice

Lisa Crystal Carver Drugs Are Nice (2005)
I was dimly aware of the existence of something called Suckdog back when it was a thing, but couldn't tell if it was a person, a band, or what, and never investigated further because it sounded like it inhabited approximately the same territory as Costes and GG Allin.

For the sake of qualification, GG Allin was a rock dude who famously incorporated actual human poo into his stage act; and I'd once had a letter from Jean Louis Costes - because my mailing address had been in some fanzine or other - specifically a letter written on the back of a photocopy of a photograph of himself in the nip sporting a massive erection - which was at least thematically consistent with the tone of his correspondence. It was funny rather than annoying, but I didn't get the impression we'd have a lot to say to one another should I take him up on his offer, whatever it was.

At some point in the nineties I learn that Lisa Suckdog is actually a person and that she lives with Boyd Rice, which I hear because the band I'm in use the same distribution company. I'm not quite sure what to make of Boyd Rice - which is probably the whole point of Boyd Rice, it could be argued. His records are massively entertaining but something doesn't sit right - even given the possibility of stances adopted mainly for the sake of pissing off liberals. Gibby of World Serpent - this being the aforementioned distribution company - informs me that Boyd is now a father, but the kid has some sort of congenital birth defect. It's all very sad, although I can't help wondering how this squares with all the social Darwinian bollocks our man has taken to spouting, because the potential for contradiction seems unfortunately enormous, not to mention tragic.

So, given that Lisa Carver was romantically involved with both Jean Louis Costes and Boyd Rice, and given her occupation of cultural territory with which I'm roughly familiar, the autobiographical Drugs Are Nice seemed like it might be worth a look. Also, everyone seemed to think it was amazing.

For once, everyone turned out to be right.

I've got to the point where a lot of that transgressive stuff looks kind of samey, even predictable, and always reminds me of my friend Carl's sarcastic summation of the daily routine of certain performance artists of our mutual acquaintance which was, off with the clothes, on with the jam. This has very much been Lisa's territory, but rather than the usual Re/Search magazine style catalogue of routine shocks to the conservative and sensible, she understands the things she's done and has been able to learn from them and move on, rather than just going around in ever-decreasing poo-stained circles. She's had a tough fucking time too, and a lot of this will ring bells with anyone who has ever been in an abusive relationship, or even a just plain averagely shitty relationship; so it's a tough, even brutal read in places, but rewarding and even curiously uplifting due to Carver's determination to find the good in even the worst of situations, because some times that's really the only option; and she does this without the whole thing reading like self-help literature which in itself seems like a minor miracle. She really knows how to pull a sentence together, and is consistently witty, and has a gift for metaphor - all of which differentiates her work from just about every other industrial music footballer's biography out there.

Speaking of which, for any industrial music trainspotters who might be wondering, Boyd Rice doesn't come out of this one too well, and the same goes for Anton LaVey, but everyone else does, or as well as could be hoped for. The world needs more like Lisa Crystal Carver and Drugs Are Nice will almost certainly be the best thing you could ever buy from the section of the book store where you find it.