The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959

William S. Burroughs & Oliver Harris (editor)
The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959 (1993)
Much as I loves me some Billy, I've never found this one particularly enticing - four hundred plus pages of private correspondence which I picked up from somewhere or other mainly out of a sense of duty to the author, because I probably have almost everything else he wrote. Thusly has it sat untouched on my shelves year after year emanating an aura which, even as I approach sixty, I still associate with homework. Nevertheless, having committed myself to reading all those books I never got around to reading and having now read most of them, I finally come to Billy's letters, partially thanks to Ted Morgan's biography providing an incentive.

It turns out that my instincts were coincidentally on the money for the first hundred or so pages, taking us up to the early fifties and Burroughs' time in Mexico City. Our man spent the second half of the forties mooching around the US, attempting to get rich though farming. Much of his correspondence from this time fixates on how much dosh he thinks he's going to make, insisting Ginsberg at least think about growing carrots, whining about unions and liberals, and helping the reader understand just why his long-suffering parents considered him something of a disappointment. It's frankly a bit of a chore getting though this first quarter, and so much so that you're almost looking forward to him accidentally shooting his wife and thus generating something worth writing about.

Ted Morgan's biography reveals, at least in part, a side of Burroughs which wasn't really obvious from the books or the attendant legend, namely that he was initially something of a lost soul, fecklessly wandering along with no real idea of where he was going, screwing up and never quite having to face the consequences of the same thanks to the pocket money which Mom and Pop continued to send every fucking month. The letters clearly demonstrate that Morgan wasn't just making that stuff up.

Anyway, It gets more engaging once he's settled in Mexico, and remains so as he moves all over - South America, Paris, Tangiers, London and so on, very much sharpening his wits in the process and gradually gearing up towards the work for which he is most widely celebrated. There's a very strong sense of progress running throughout these monthly, often weekly reports, and one which affords an insight which isn't framed in quite such direct terms by Literary Outlaw, and it's an insight for which even the first hundred or so yawnsome pages are probably essential. The closer I get to Burroughs, the more important he seems, and the more obvious it is how poorly understood is most of his writing, even by those who seem to think they've got it.

So that all worked out very well.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Charles Bukowski Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
This fell into the shopping trolley not through some burning need to read it, but more because I knew I'd eventually wonder why I hadn't picked it up when I had the chance. The posthumous Mathematics of the Breath and the Way from 2018 was likewise an assemblage of odds and ends, newspaper columns and so on, and while there was much to recommend it, as a collection it felt a bit of a slog where a Bukowski usually passes through the reader like curry at the end of a night on the sauce, at least in my experience. Notes, on the other hand, was compiled back when Chuck was still mostly in the land of the living, deriving from weekly columns in Open City, an underground Los Angeles newspaper. I gather Open City were happy with Bukowski submitting whatever the hell he liked in a general spirit of literary freedom; so if there's an occasionally topical observation to remind us this was a newspaper column, it's otherwise a principally autobiographical novel, albeit one with column length chapters written in whatever order he felt like writing them. There's quite a lot of booze, gambling, a fair bit of screwing, general grumbling about writing and writers, and even a few amusing pot shots taken at perceived literary golden boys of the day, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Chuck didn't really do sacred cows, or indeed anything which he saw as getting in the way of the truth. I quote the following in full understanding of some readers being too fucking stupid to understand.

I laugh. he's comfortable and he's human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he's good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers - intellectually, just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left-wing - intellectually. I don't care which way it goes - I only know: there are too many people afraid.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns out to be the collection I was hoping for when I picked up The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Bukowski's observations regarding all which continues to render life such an uphill and often joyless slog are on point and sadly timeless. It's ugly, uncomfortable and it smells bad, but truth is always more beautiful than the alternative, and that's what we have here.

The Yage Letters

William S. Burroughs The Yage Letters (1963)
I know Ginsberg gets equal credit as co-author on the cover, but I'll come to that in a minute.

The Yage Letters is one of those obscure early pamphlets dating from before Lady Luck smiled upon Uncle Bill and got everybody to buy his books. It was always listed as one of his numerous works in the front of those I read, and some time passed before I realised it had been reprinted. Chronologically speaking, it's approximately the one after Junkie but before Queer, although its status as a novel is questionable, even by Burroughs' standards. All we know for certain is that our boy envisioned something along the lines of travel writing, beyond which it seems to have found its own way into print without much conscious direction on the part of the author. It's billed as letters, specifically Burroughs writing to Ginsberg about his daily experiences as he schleps around Colombia and Peru in search of a hallucinogenic vine, but this was most likely simply a means of framing his observations long after the fact; although I gather some of the material duplicates actual letters sent to Ginsberg at the time.

Burroughs had studied ethnography in Mexico City, but his travels were specifically conducted in search of a drug which he'd been told bestowed telepathic abilities on the user; so as with much of his writing, we need to take a shitload of poetic license into account. That being done, we're nevertheless left with something which is pretty readable and rarely boring. He hangs out in villages with Shamanic types, he chugs ayahuasca, he throws up quite a lot, and he struggles towards some sort of insight.

That described thus far comprises the main section of the book, aptly named In Search of Yage, which is supplemented by additional material which may or may not have turned up in later editions - the introduction from Oliver Harris who edited the thing could have used a little more focus and I've lost track of what first appeared when. The supplementary material comprises Ginsberg's analysis of the first part, and Burroughs response to the same; which would be fine but Ginsberg's analysis is mostly blandly mystic observations on the nature of reality, third eyes opening, all that sort of guff. I'm sure I recall the Bhagavad Gita getting a mention at some point. I personally find Ginsberg marginally more interesting as Billy's pal than as a writer, but even then, honestly not that interesting. I'm quite happy to believe that the manuscript would have ended up at the back of a drawer were it not for Ginsberg's efforts, but his writing simply doesn't interest me because I don't see that it adds anything.

In Search of Yage is mostly worth a look, even if it's hard to tell quite what it's supposed to be, beyond which Yage Letters mostly serves as a testament to less being more.

Interzone

William S. Burroughs Interzone (approx. 1958)
Interzone comprises material written after Queer but prior to publication of The Naked Lunch, for which it is proposed to have been something along the lines of a dry run. Although Burroughs' refers to his attempts to write a novel called Interzone in various letters, whether this is really that book seems debatable given its having been reconstructed around 1989 from fragments found in unexpected places, also incorporating excerpts from letters to Ginsberg, and the lengthy WORD which was excised from Naked Lunch. Seemingly true to its notional constitution, I've had Interzone sat on my bookshelf for many years before realising that I'd never actually bothered to read the thing. I'm not even sure where my copy came from.

So, we're pre-cut-up, but getting there given the non-linear thrust of the narrative which may not be entirely due to Interzone comprising off cuts and notes left out for the milkman. Themes seem to emerge, mostly driving towards the international zone of Tangier from which the title derives; and this weaves in quite nicely with Burroughs' notes to Ginsberg concerning his attempts to write a novel as he claws his way gradually towards the sort of process from which Naked Lunch resulted. It's insightful, mostly fascinating, up until we come to WORD, which is sixty pages of undifferentiated non-linear narrative - the usual stuff about cocks and prehensile piles - which at least proves that the apparent chaos of later novels isn't just some random flow turned on and off with the twist of a spigot, and it proves this because WORD is tedious and a slog to get though. I guess what Burroughs learned from WORD may have been that you have to carve the material into some coherent shape if you want it to work rather than simply drowning whatever it may have to say in a deluge of arbitrary scat.

Don't Hide the Madness

 

Steven Taylor (editor) Don't Hide the Madness (2018)
...or William S. Burroughs in conversation with Allen Ginsberg as the subheading promises, which began life as an article for the Observer vaguely intended to promote Cronenberg's attempt to film Naked Lunch. The idea was that the editor would hang around with Burroughs and Ginsberg for a couple of days, recording their conversation on tape in the hope of a written piece being mined from this wealth of source material. Handily, Taylor already knew Ginsberg well, and Burroughs as a friend of Ginsberg, and there were a few others hanging around and chipping in - James Grauerholz, various friends and neighbours and so on. Don't Hide the Madness is three-hundred pages of transcript whittled down from eleven cassette tapes of the gang yacking away without any obvious attempts to steer the conversation.

Taylor claims to have edited out the really inane stuff, so we don't get to hear Ginsberg spotting an apparently discarded shoelace in the corner of the room, then pick it up to discover that it's actually string, then spend the next twenty pages talking about how it really, really, really looked like a shoelace. We do, on the other hand, get to sit in on them talking about guns, which is mystifying, being mostly a series of numbers presumably describing what type of gun someone is waving around.

Yet, as with real life, attention wanders and certain points keep swinging back around, restoring our focus; which keeps the emphasis fairly light, conveys a touching sense of moment which might have been otherwise lost, and even communicates the more intensive subjects by allowing for nuance, and which might not have been quite so engaging had it been pared down to just Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, and the stuff directly relating to Burroughs as author.

I don't remember particularly liking the Cronenberg movie on the one occasion of my seeing it - although I don't think his work is really my thing - but Burroughs' take on it, which is generally positive, is fascinating; not least because it all seems to tie into wider discussion of the ugly spirit, to which Burroughs attributes blame for his having shot his wife all those years ago. This comes up because at the time of recording, and of the release of Naked Lunch, Burroughs was looking into exorcism, and had been subject to some sort of spiritual cleansing by a local shaman. It's the kind of discussion which might inspire the rolling of eyes and general grumbling about new age bollocks under other, more formal circumstances, but here it's revealed as simply the easiest way to discuss and deal with something which otherwise resists analysis in more coldly analytical terms. The pay off, should we need it, is that Don't Hide the Madness actually explains pretty much everything you ever needed to know about Burroughs and his writing, but delivers the information as low-key conversational dialogue which communicates a hell of a lot more than the traditional lists of names, dates and places. As a particularly weird consequence, it very much separates the author from his work in revealing Burroughs as a genuinely nice guy, someone who would be fun to hang around with, or at least I thought so.

He loved his cats, so he's fine by me.

The Mechanical Bride

Marshall McLuhan The Mechanical Bride (1951)
Back when I were a lad, I asked someone - possibly my mother - about the beat generation, who they were and so on. She told me William Burroughs, Marshall McLuhan, Allen Ginsberg and a few other writers of that vintage. Ginsberg didn't sound that interesting, and it was through reading Burroughs that I had encountered the term beat generation in the first place, which left just McLuhan. I found this in the library of the South Warwickshire College of Further Education, but sadly, despite having pictures, it was a bit too deep and dense for me at the time so I never properly read it.

Thirty years later, I still find it a little chewy in places, but ultimately worth the effort. Of course, it turns out that McLuhan had no coherent association with Burroughs, at least not beyond occasional invites to the same parties and 1964's Notes on Burroughs which he wrote for The Nation - so far as I am able to discern. Nevertheless it's easy to see why they might be mentioned in the same breath, sharing arguably related views about the mechanisms of human society and the role of information therein.

The Mechanical Bride was McLuhan's first published book, a collection of essays inspired by advertising and media images of the day, with each essay dissecting the meaning of a particular subject, then the wider implications within the context of industrialised society. For example, regarding Superman he writes:

The attitudes of Superman to current social problems likewise reflect the strong arm totalitarian methods of the immature and barbaric mind. Like Daddy Warbucks in Orphan Annie, Superman is ruthlessly efficient in carrying on a one-man crusade against crooks and antisocial forces. In neither case is there any appeal to process of law. Justice is presented as a case of personal strength alone. Any appraisal of the political tendencies of Superman... would have to include an admission that today the dreams of youths and adults alike seem to embody a mounting impatience with the laborious process of civilised life and a restless eagerness to embrace violent solutions.

This particular argument may seem a simplistic - although is at least surely preferable to Grant Morrison wibbling on about consciousness being the missing dark matter of the universe - until we take stock of it being no more than McLuhan's starting point and that it was written in 1951. The essays in The Mechanical Bride tend to focus on material culled from magazines of the day because television was not yet quite in the picture, and is mentioned in passing only a couple of times. So this was a very different world, which makes it all the more astonishing, even scary, just how much of McLuhan's testimony remains relevant. For example, and just in case anyone might still be smarting from the above assault on their beloved Clark:

If there is any harm done by the Digest or by any of the related entertainment industries, it is in supplanting better fare. It is the sheer presence of successful stupidity which commonly blocks and clutters the minds of those who might conceivably prefer something better. The Digest is also typical of all these agencies of mass diversion in eagerly creating an aura of intolerance around itself and its readers. Enfolded in its jovial, optimistic, and self-satisfied version of the higher things, the reader soon hardens into a man who knows what he likes, and who resents anybody who pretends to like anything better. He has, unwittingly, been sold a strait jacket. And that is really as much as need be said about any of the effects of commercial formula writing, living, and entertainment. It destroys human autonomy, freezes perception, and sterilises judgement.

He's referring to Reader's Digest, but in 2016 it could apply just as well to any mass-produced entertainment product, and yet we're still mostly holding on because apparently no-one can stand to give up their security blanket or to not take it personally.

Some of The Mechanical Bride may appear to state the obvious, an impression which I would suggest derives mostly from just how much of this material has filtered into mainstream thought, albeit on a generally superficial level. Whilst the text goes into depth, the basics of how advertising plays upon our insecurities and suchlike are immediately recognisable from that which McLuhan either predicted or inspired. In fact, more than anything, The Mechanical Bride reminded me of Mad magazine features from the sixties deconstructing soap powder commercials or whatever Madison Avenue was really trying to sell, because the satire of Mad looked a lot like McLuhan's ideas resurfacing in a mainstream context, perhaps even assimilated by the enemy.

Perhaps not quite the enemy: McLuhan dissects as an aid to comprehension in the hope of society achieving a better understanding of itself. Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle makes a similar effort by entirely different means whilst quite clearly serving as a warning, as is similarly true of the more recent television documentaries of Adam Curtis, notably The Century of Self which begins with an examination of Edward Bernay, the man who more or less singularly responsible for the spectacle which McLuhan would deconstruct only decades later in this very book.

The Mechanical Bride is dated, but only in so much as that I don't immediately recognise the products under discussion, and most of the arguments will remain valid whilst our society continues in its present form. The text is a little dense in places, as I said earlier, and sometimes a degree of re-reading is required in order to get the arguments to connect as intended, but that's it. It would be nice to report that this book has dated because here in 2016, we know it all, but it turns out that knowing is sadly different to understanding.

Last Words

William S. Burroughs Last Words (2000)
Towards the end of his life, Burroughs began to experience difficulty using a typewriter, and so James Grauerholz gave him bound, blank books in which he could write as journals, the end result of which is what we have here. What entries Burroughs wrote were more or less daily, so I was sort of expecting something like:

Today was pretty boring. I didn't do much. I watched a film in the afternoon but I can't remember what it was called. It had that Robert Morley in it, so it was probably an old one. Beans on toast for tea. Phoned Ginsberg but he wasn't in, as fucking usual. I might mow the lawn tomorrow.

Whilst there's an element of diary to this material, it's minimal and mostly written in terms that made sense primarily to Burroughs himself, requiring an appendix which decodes certain innocuous passages as referring to him spending the day shooting a pop video with U2, for one example. So it's some of that, along with rambling ruminations on private theories, observations, memories, short scenes written as fiction, and a lot of cats.

It has been suggested that Burroughs became a crazy cat lady in later years, although with just six cats on the clock, I'd say that makes him a relative amateur - a part-timer, if you will - which I state without judgement as a fellow crazy cat lady supporting a congregation of somewhere between twelve and fifteen depending on the weather and whether or not we're counting strays or other members of the b-team; but then anyone who likes cats, as Burroughs clearly did, is okay by me.

However, reading Last Words as the final journal of a crazy cat lady helps make some sense of it in so much as that this is Burroughs' writing at its most private and personal, and so his weaknesses are revealed here and there; and whilst he was capable of great insight into the human condition, the nature of civilisation, reality and all the rest, he had his flaws even without the whole accidentally shooting her indoors thing. Novels have been played to his strengths, but here we encounter blind spots, his being ill-equipped to grasp, for example, why Carl Sagan regarded belief in things which don't actually exist as unhelpful. Burroughs has always inhabited a magical universe, but here it becomes clear just how attached he was to some of that stuff, and how susceptible he could often be to complete bullshit for the sake of poetry. Of course this doesn't make him a bad person, and in Last Words it seems to render him easier to understand as a fellow human being, or at least enables us - and by us I mean me - to identify with him a little better. Above all, Last Words leaves us with the realisation of how much Burroughs cared, and not just about his cats, but about the world we live in, and how poorly we treat each other. Admittedly this isn't anything new, but the emphasis is different; although that said, it's still very much Burroughs with random swerves in the narrative adding up to something which leaves impressions rather than describing anything in any linear sense.

Last Words is confusing but also quite moving, and it makes me realise how much I miss this guy. I can't believe it's been nearly twenty years.

The Book of Misplaced But Imperishable Names

Bill Lewis The Book of Misplaced But Imperishable Names (2005)
I first encountered Bill Lewis back in the eighties as he'd begun to achieve some fame as one of the Medway Poets, a group of writers hailing from the next town along when I was taking a fine arts degree. At the time I actively disliked poetry, or at least a great deal of that which happily identified itself as such, and I continue to do so in a general sense. Few writers, so it seemed to me, were ever at their best in verse, and the rest may as well be chuckling Richard Stilgoe types composing odes to the amusing misery of making a claim on one's car insurance so far as I was concerned - the sort of smirking crap that eventually rendered BBC Radio 4 almost completely unlistenable. I was therefore astonished to find that I very much enjoyed the poems of Billy Childish, mainly because they resembled nothing I had experienced as poetry, and did a lot of the things I generally like writing to do, just in shorter and sharper form. I saw Billy read, sat smoking at a desk in his old man's suit, reciting accounts of his continued survival as though delivering statements in a police interview room. He'd been caught red handed, but he was fucked if he was going to say sorry.

Bill Lewis was, so far as I saw it, the other big name of the Medway Poets. He seemed to have the highest visibility and was an undeniably dynamic performer, violent and explosive where Billy seemed to brood and simmer. His material too felt more travelled, somehow more universal in compensation for lacking the visceral edge of Childish's writing. He seemed like someone who could have hung out with Ginsberg or Lenny Bruce in another life; plus he knew at least one tribal shaman and had involved himself in South American revolutions from time to time. Drawing on this wealth of experience, he generally manages to communicate something vital without it coming across like an affectation, as it could have done and has done for other more cynical and hence lesser talents; and although I must own up to never quite enjoying his use of a traditional native drum, that isn't really Bill's fault.

Anyway, still going strong thirty years later, this collection serves as a reminder of all that defined the voice of Bill Lewis as carrying such a distinctive tone back when I was younger and not quite so fat. The poetry is well represented in his consistently elegant use of language and thoughtful narrative, although the form taken tends towards short stories, essays, observations, and vignettes - probably easier to just call it writing. He shares that same roughly working class edge as Billy Childish without it serving as either a substitute for content or letting it define him, as beautifully illustrated in Tomatoes, another autobiographical snippet in which he introduces a fellow worker to the poetry of Pablo Neruda:

'Sod off! I'm reading a poem.'

The woman and the two men next to her started to take the piss 'Oh lah dee dah... we didn't know we woz mixing wiv the gentry. It's Lord Muck of Turd Hall.' They soon grew tired of it and went back to their lunch.

'Sometimes I think we're our own worst enemies. The British working classes might as well walk around with a Kick Me sign stuck on our backs,' he said and then returned to the page.

He read the title again, then he read the poem. He read slowly. I saw him smile a couple of times.

Yes, I've been there. In fact I was there for about twenty years, and for me this piece epitomises what I like best about Bill's writing and, by extension, about Bill himself: his endless enthusiasm and sheer passion for communication and that which excites him, and that he's plainly the real thing and doesn't really give a shit what the rest of us may think. That is to say, what you get in this book is not some projected persona, nor anything representing strategy in any shape or form - another aspect he shares with Childish. Of course, honesty and enthusiasm by themselves would be useless were it not for the author's willingness to get out there and experience the world on its terms, even in places where curiosity can get you killed. He dips toes - at least up to the waist - in native American lore; which is something which would ordinarily bring me out in hives for the reason that if I want to know about indigenous cultures of whatever form - as I often do - the last thing I want to know is what some white guy thinks, for that way lies Sting, Bonio, and other tosspots taking their cheap holidays in someone else's ethnic diaspora; but Bill gets away with it, and even brings back something interesting, because he understands myth and its place in common human experience; and he does it without losing his sense of humour.

Of course there are some points he makes which just don't work for me - which I mention here for the sake of quantifying the praise - but Lordy - I don't see that anyone with functioning brain cells could fail to find this an absorbing and enlightening read. Bill Lewis is a true original.

Not sure about availability but you might do worse than trying Bill's site.

Supergods - Our World in the Age of the Superhero

Continued from here.

Grant Morrison Supergods - Our World in the Age of the Superhero (2011)
I've had this one for a few months but haven't quite been able to face reading it for fear of coming across some point so annoying as to drive me to a reaction like that lorry driver who famously kicked in his television set when the Sex Pistols used some of those street-credibility words on the Today programme. Grant Morrison has written at least two of my all-time favourite comic books, and at least one that I've loathed almost more than anything else I've ever read. From Zenith to Doom Patrol, the boy could do no wrong in my view, and although I'd read the tripe he'd had published in Near Myths back in 1978, that was clearly early material produced before he'd learned how to stop being a tosspot which could thus be dismissed as uncharacteristic, or so I believed. Unfortunately when The Unreadables was published, it became suddenly and painfully obvious that Morrison himself hadn't regarded Gideon Stargrave or Time Is a Four Letter Word as clumsy formative fumblings so much as the purest, undiluted strain of what he'd really been trying to say; and what he'd really been trying to say was look at me - I'm weird and a bit mysterious. See me walking to school with a Gentle Giant album under my arm. I could have put it in a carrier bag, but then you wouldn't have been able to see what the album was, or to appreciate that I'm not like other boys.

For sake of further contrast with Alan Moore - returning to the theme of the supposed eternal duality of two comic book writers - I briefly encountered Grant Morrison at a comic convention in London in 1990 or thereabouts. My friend Carl and I were crossing a road outside the hotel at which the convention was held when we ran into Rian Hughes, designer turned comic artist for Morrison's version of Dan Dare. Carl knew Rian fairly well and all three of us had worked for Million Dollar, a company set up by Trevor Myles who had sold the Let It Rock store on the King's Road to Malcolm McClaren. Accompanying Rian was a weasely looking person in black clothes and sunglasses who stood at a sulky distance busily sucking his cheeks in. 'This is Grant,' announced our mutual acquaintance, and the penny immediately dropped. We said hello, but he gave no reply. He didn't even turn to look at us. I couldn't tell if he really wanted to be elsewhere or was simply effecting studied indifference, and I found it peculiar to come face to face with a writer whose work I admired with such passion and to find myself unable to get over the impression of him being a complete tosser.

It was a first impression of course, but then so was that of Alan Moore a year earlier, and both encounters, regardless of whatever behind the scenes details had shaped them, now seem consistent with other aspects of the work and conduct of these two very different writers. In particular it seems telling that whilst Morrison has publicly made an issue of his having hit the big time as a comic book professional back when Moore was still drawing cartoons of Elvis Costello for the NME, the point seems dubiously made given the quality of the work. I haven't seen whatever masterpiece Morrison wrote for Starblazer, but the Near Myths material was frankly fucking shocking, particularly when compared with Moore's lumpy yet enthusiastically witty Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation drawn for Sounds music paper only a year or so later.

Furthermore, it might be argued that the supposed parallels expose the futility of drawing such comparisons between the two writers in the first place. Alan Moore has always been essentially an underground comix artist in the tradition of Robert Crumb, Bill Griffiths and others, albeit an underground comix artist who dabbles with the mainstream. Morrison on the other hand has only ever really aspired to the mainstream, to produce superhero and similarly operatic material which occasionally borrows from counter-cultural sources. To suggest that he either works in Moore's shadow, or conversely that his work is in some way artistically superior to that of Moore is bollocks, and meaningless bollocks. Whilst Morrison's attempts at subversion are no doubt sincere, he appears to miss the irony of so much of his yappy counter-cultural bleatings being owned and distributed by Time Warner. His supposed narrative subversion serves as window dressing, a stance which walks the walk in pursuit of a particular aesthetic, and his poor judgement is revealed in Supergods by, amongst other things, the apparent inability to distinguish a William Burroughs novel from a 1960s Batman comic.

Anyway, let's start at the beginning.

Supergods is two or maybe three different books seamfully woven into a single stream of consciousness of the variety that most would classify as thinking aloud. It isn't really about our world in the age of the superhero, and nor does it explain what masked vigilantes, miraculous mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville can teach us about being human, or at least no more so than any book purporting to relate ancient wisdom ever contains much that is old or in any meaningful sense wise. It's a selective history of superhero comics mashed up with Morrison's autobiography and some sort of peculiar self-help thing, presumably for the sake of a sense of narrative progress. As a history of superhero comics, it's reasonably engaging up until the publication of Watchmen providing you don't mind its being written from such an obviously subjective perspective and can overlook the occasional excess of editorial bullshit - the four colour printing process likened to alchemy, Captain Marvel's origin described as Shamanic and so on, the sort of thing one begins to imagine read aloud by Peter Cook:

As distinct as they were, Superman and Batman would eventually become friends. This future meeting would inaugurate the dawn of the shared DC comics universe—an immense virtual reality inhabited by fictional characters, spanning decades and hundreds of thousands of pages, with its own rules, laws of physics, and alternative forms of time. The first emergent comic book universe began with this grand separation of light from dark, is from isn't, this from that, up from down, in a kabbalistic, Hermetic symmetry. The first light had cast the first shadow.

A kind of alchemy was under way.

I read this passage out loud to my wife as we sat in bed one evening with our respective books. She had asked why I kept sighing.

'Jesus,' she exclaimed. 'How can you read that shit?'

Morbid fascination I suppose, and the most mystifying revelation is that whilst Morrison weaves prettily descriptive metaphors around his analysis of superheroes, he doesn't actually understand them as well as he seems to believe; and his understanding, such as it is, is hardly of sufficient complexity to warrant four-hundred pages. Morrison's superhero is an Olympian ideal to which we aspire, Godlike, something nice and bright with which to illuminate our thoughts as we live in the shadow of the atomic bomb, civil unrest, cancer, and ELO reforming to record a new album. He seems to miss the point that what makes our fictional superhuman interesting is not that he or she is super but that he or she is human, a mirror of ourselves which is able to overcome that which is otherwise beyond us. This goes right back to Gilgamesh who can be defined not by his supernatural heritage so much as by the fact of his being human and therefore very much like the rest of us. Ancient Gods were depicted as anthropomorphic figures rather than the disembodied forces they represented because it allowed our ancestors a better means of understanding them. The front cover of Action Comics issue one - as discussed by Morrison at such length as to yield the suggestion that even the whitewall tyre in the bottom right is trying its best to get away from the destructive muscleman - is significant not because some powerful force is destroying a car, but because that force resembles ourselves.

Much of what follows on from the dissection of the cover of the first ever issue of Action Comics relies heavily on Morrison's interpretation, which is fine in the context of autobiography, but can be irritating whilst the book seems unable to decide quite what it wants to be when it grows up. The author superimposes his own agenda upon the history of comics, which works providing we're all agreed upon the genius of the Beatles, John Lennon, Timothy Leary and others employed in service of dubious comparison, but for those of us who aren't agreed, it comes across as lazy, even slightly inane in a few instances. Allen Ginsberg, for example, I seem to recall as being the beat poet who wrote Howl, proudly homosexual, a big fan of the old space fags and a pal of William Burroughs. Maybe he did write a few issues of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen but I definitely don't remember his having done so, and I would suggest comparisons may be stretching a point at least as much as all those hey, comics aren't just for kids articles of the late 1980s. It seems almost like excuses, like Mystic Baldy needs a more profound reason to be writing about what are mostly no more and no less than comic books aimed almost exclusively at young children, as though he fears that we view him as a grown man reading something frivolous and juvenile, on which note...

I get the impression Grant Morrison has given a great deal of thought to how he is perceived by others, even that this may be his main motivation - the presentation of an image concordant with how he would wish to see himself. His own comics are, in my estimation, at their best when they're all surface - Doom Patrol, barely mentioned here, is essentially a series of surreal gags without any particular strong message. The star of Zenith seemed to take pride in his own lack of substance. Even Seven Soldiers, for all the panoramic scenarios into which we may read meaning was a series of reference points which worked in so much as they served the illusion of satisfying depth, inspiring but not necessarily answering some meaty questions. There's nothing wrong with liking the Ramones more than Jethro Tull, but there's a lot of contradiction here, not least being Morrison's understanding of Alan Moore's Watchmen which I read as a quest for flaws made in order to support a hypothesis of Watchmen as inferior work. Morrison dubiously attributes to Alan Moore that which he has himself done on numerous occasions, and nothing like so well because his own counter-cultural credentials run no deeper than David Beckham wearing a Crass T-shirt. Most of his career has been a Gentle Giant album artfully placed in the crook of an elbow as he heads out of the door to school, hence The Invisibles, a stupid person's idea of deep and meaningful.

For the purposes of Supergods, an additional problem is that whilst Morrison may be prone to inspired bursts of raw poetry on the page of a comic book, he writes the prose of a complete cunt. Much of this reads like the autobiography of some footballer or Katie Price, and as such might as well be retitled Grant Morrison's How I Done It. This becomes particularly apparent during numerous paragraphs in which he desperately explains to us how cool he is or aspires to become, for example describing Zenith who shagged page three girls and pursued a vapid, style-conscious, utterly vacuous existence of the kind that I was still convinced I coveted. As juvenile aspiration this is probably no big deal:

Reading interviews from the time makes my blood run cold these days, but the trash talk seemed to be working and I was rapidly making a name for myself. Being young, good-looking, and cocky forgave many sins, a huge hit British superhero strip did the rest and proved I could back up the big talk.

Know what I mean, Harry? Unfortunately he doesn't seem to learn from any of this and continues to measure success in terms of space-age bachelor pad music and the latest CDs from Paris and Tokyo DJs played in my house of magic, swirling lights, and designer chairs. He revels in the friendship of cartoonists from the more self-consciously hip end of the spectrum, becoming drinking buddies with Philip Bond, Jamie Hewlett and other cutesy Camden-based peddlers of twee illustrated lists of fave bands, men who had, like, done it with real girls and everything; which must have been well weapon, yeah?

I'd also just met my wife, Kristan, a stunning, brainy blonde who dressed like Barbarella to go to the pub, worked as a corporate insurance broker, and read Philip K. Dick.

Oh wow, Grant, and a blonde too! If nothing else this proves that even if you do spend weekends filing your Superman comics in strict alphabetical and sequential order whilst wearing underpants bought for you by your mum, you're definitely not saaad and clearly have no trouble getting fit birds to nosh you off in cool clubs and that. How we envy and admire you, you complete fucking cock.

Worse is to come as he morphs from Katie Price, to Bez out of the Happy Mondays, to Deepak sodding Chopra, somehow having missed the memo that lengthy accounts of hallucinations experienced whilst off your tits on acid are invariably pure arseache for anyone other than the person who did the actual tripping, and that one should probably try to avoid taking drug-fuelled encounters with God too seriously. Grant of course regards his own visions as revelations on the grounds that they occurred specifically to him, thus allowing such mind-bending insights as:

I felt sure that in some way what we call consciousness would turn out to be the long-sought unified field.

Yeah, that's probably it. Typically and annoyingly so for one who spends so much time banging on about a wide-eyed sense of child-like wonder at colourful costumed characters unsullied by the dark, cynicism of that Alan Moore, he seems convinced that events or ideas have genuine significance by virtue of their specifically having occurred to him - basically the worst sort of religious thinking by which nothing is conceded value on its own terms: the Grand Canyon is not a spectacle due to geological factors, it is a spectacle either because I'm here to see it or because Jesus is love:

Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no-one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen—the thermodynamic miracles of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass.

Sure that's amazing, but so are pussy cats, the night sky, planting and growing vegetables in your own allotment, reading a book about rocks, putting on a clean shirt, chicken fried steak at Jim's diner, a good night's sleep, and all the other less glamorous daily experiences. It's the guy who whines that books are booooooring, who is able to understand the profound only when it is saturated in novelty, garnished with explosions and flashing lights, who has not yet learnt to find wonder in anything, instead insisting it must be delivered to him in a fucking sippy cup designed by Philippe Starck. It's the clueless tosspot Doctor Who fan sneering at Mike Leigh because real stuff is like y'know, it's like boring and shit, yeah?

Every man and every woman is a star, wrote Aleister Crowley, little suspecting how literal those words might become in his prophesied new Aeon of Horus. With cameras everywhere, even on our personal computers and phones, we may as well be actors, performers, and stars in some filmic archive of the microscopically commonplace—every gesture, every frown recorded, filed away in some CCTV surveillance central AI that might as well be Braniac, recording us down to the last byte and love bite before he shrinks Las Vegas into a jar and routinely demolishes Earth on December 21, 2012.

Just because there's a resemblance, doesn't mean it's the same thing, or that the resemblance is meaningful. It has remained a source of surprise to me that people continue to take this sort of recycled Robert Anton Wilson material seriously, and I say that as someone who believes that the subterranean Mexican post-mortem realm of Tlalocan is real in all senses that matter; but of course, as stated at least once, it isn't so vital that what Grant Morrison writes is cool, as that we regard it as cool, yeah? In terms of sheer poetry of imagination, he may well be the greatest comic book writer we've ever had, but as to whether any of it means anything is in the eye of the beholder.

My theory is that Grant, I would suggest a possibly insecure individual, wanted more than anything to achieve fame by means other than anything reliant upon possession of a personality in which he did not have full confidence. He wished to be admired in the same way he had admired Moorcock or the members of some fucking awful psychedelic band, and so he worked at presenting the same mystique in both comics and music. Perhaps perceiving what he interpreted as a kindred spirit in Alan Moore, he reached out, hoping to find his praise returned by someone whose work he deemed genuinely inspirational. Alan Moore, possibly a little creeped out by the attention of someone he understood to be a bit of a goon - and perhaps with some justification - told him to piss off; and the rest has been butthurt all the way.

I'll really show that Alan Moore this time, as he rolls up his sleeves and writes another hilariously ironic tale of a wisecracking superpowered acid casualty buggering a suspiciously bearded kiddy fiddler from the town of Northapmtno.

Supergods would be a decent read if it were written by someone else - Andrew Hickey for example, but Morrison's strengths are to be found in his fiction, which is probably ironic on some deeply tedious level.