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.

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!