My Fault

Billy Childish My Fault (1996)
I first encountered Billy Childish at Maidstone College of Art, late 1984 I think. Traci Emin, who probably doesn't need much of an introduction, was on the printmaking course and had organised a poetry reading in one of the lecture theatres. I had no real interest in poetry, except I'd heard of Childish, having read about his band, the Milkshakes, in Sounds music paper. Sounds seemed to think he was a big deal and this was enough to spike my curiosity. I enjoyed the reading, and Bill Lewis in particular gave a memorable performance. Childish himself seemed less of a showman, and read aloud from his own book as though he was keen to get away or was expecting to be challenged over the quality of his work. He looked as though he was ready for a fight - which wasn't necessary because the quality of his work was astonishing and not even the resentful monotone delivery could diminish its impact. Traci had copies of the recently printed Poems from the Barrier Block for sale after the show so I bought one.

I was nineteen and it was the first time I ever truly connected with anything which had been sold to me as poetry. The words - spelled phonetically without grammar or punctuation, numbers as shorthand, 2 and 4 standing in for to and for - seemed like bursts of rage splattered across the page, but not even rage - more like the numb sensation left in its wake when, confronted with the severity of one's own bullshit, you just have to accept that that's how it is. Like the very best punk rock - to which Billy's writing was clearly a cousin - it seemed simple but wasn't.

Had it been as simple, as raw, and as basic as it looked, everybody would have been doing the same thing, or doing the same thing better than they were.

It turned out that Traci had recently split with Billy - a separation seemingly foreshadowed by the appearance of Kera in Poems from the Barrier Block, presumably referring to Kyra De Coninck - and was thus getting rid of various chapbooks he'd given her, many of them signed. I bought the lot. It seemed like I needed as much of this stuff as I could find.

Five or six years later, I ended up living in Chatham, and being on the dole I spent a lot of time in a cafe on Rochester High Street. The cafe was named Gruts after the Ivor Cutler monologue and was where all the bands hung out, and being in a band, that included me. Billy Childish was also a regular. It took me a while to speak to him because I was awestruck by both his writing and his work ethic, and slightly terrified. He was huge - tall and fiercely handsome. His arrival always silenced the piano player. He kept himself to himself and I was never knew whether his presence represented tranquility or menace. By his own testimony, he'd been through the wars and you could tell. He seemed like he'd be hard to kill. It felt as though the second I opened my mouth I would become painfully aware of my own bullshit, the existence of which was beyond question.

Anyway, as the weeks passed, I realised Billy had enough of his own thing going on to care too deeply about whatever the rest of us were selling. We eventually talked to pass the time, we joked, and we even played chess - although it took him about three minutes to wipe me off the board. Against expectation, I found him surprisingly amiable and very, very funny.

I met him in passing years later at Highbury & Islington Tube. He didn't remember me but conceded your face looks familiar, I must admit. That was good enough for me, should it seem as though I'm trying to sell anyone on the idea of my old pal.

The point of this preamble is to illustrate why I probably lack objectivity when it comes to My Fault, Billy's autobiographical debut novel; also to underscore that while I don't actually know the guy and never really did, it feels as though I've spent time at the periphery of something that was quite important in its own way, and still is quite important - at least moreso than my occasionally having crossed the orbit of Trace Emin - and it's important because of its honesty, which I would argue borders on unique in the year 2025 through the subtle distinction of a man trying to make a living by it, rather than selling you something.

My Fault is roughly the first twenty years of Billy's existence, much of it miserable for reasons which will be familiar to a few of us. It succeeds because the author is interested only in the truth, including the bits he'd made up, which are made up so as to better illustrate the truth. He was never concerned with painting himself as a victim of circumstance, or even as necessarily sympathetic, but neither is there any suggestion of ticking the usual bad boy boxes, because that would be as much about bullshit as any of the forces busily going at it with the slings and arrows. Shitty schools, shitty father when he's even there, disease, poverty, bullying, bad teeth, rape, sodomy, kiddy fiddling, booze, ciggies, endless disappointment, the long shadow of the second world war, failure to learn how to read and write - it's all there in unflinching detail, occasionally thrown into sharp relief with flashes of sunlight, although it's mostly rain. My Fault is unmistakably the author of those poems getting to grips with the written word, joining the gaps and filling out the picture. The influence of Céline is tangible, although much of it may simply be the Childish cultural DNA being so steeped in post-war cultural austerity; and it reminds me a little of Genet but for being more direct, and frankly just plain more interesting.

I'm doubtless biased, being familiar with a few of the names, places and even pubs herein, but I feel there's something universal here, some fairly profound insight into our lives at this end of the twentieth century, regardless of how much of this we have ourselves experienced. I hesitate to claim My Fault as the greatest novel ever written, because that would be ridiculous, but I've a feeling it sort of might be.

Strangeland

Tracey Emin Strangeland (2005)
I didn't even know this existed until John Serpico wrote about it on his excellent blog, the Art of Exmouth. To start at the beginning, I attended Maidstone College of Art at the same time as Traci, so I knew her and, seeing as it's the question everybody always asks, no - my name wasn't in the tent and the only thing I have to say on that subject is how surprised I was by the name embroidered in the largest letters, which was that of a quiet, vaguely lumpy looking bloke from the sculpture department. I met Traci through my friend Carl, and her first words to me were in't your 'air 'orrible? delivered with a caustic scowl, although to be fair my 'air was indeed pretty 'orrible at the time. She set up a reading event in one of the lecture theatres for herself, Sexton Ming, Billy Childish, and Bill Lewis. I don't recall much of what she read but it may well have included some of the material reprinted in the first part of this collection. I'd actually forgotten she ever wrote this sort of thing. Her delivery was kind of harsh and forceful but I don't remember much else about it. Childish on the other hand was impressive, dark and bitter, painfully honest, and he gave the impression that he really, really, really didn't want to be there. Traci mentioned that she had a few of his books for sale after the show - slim collections of dyslexic poetry he'd published himself. I bought one and was so knocked out by it that I asked if she had any others. She was in the process of breaking up with him at the time and had no problem selling me everything she had, a few of them even signed for Traci love Billy x. I never saw much of her art, at least not until the final year. She had an exhibition in the college gallery of oil paintings done in Amsterdam over the summer, mostly canals, barges and the like, and they were actually pretty great. The last time I saw her was in Rochester High Street, a couple of years after we'd all finished college. She was pushing a supermarket shopping trolley full of junk and said that she'd just married a Turkish fisherman which had proven problematic due to his already being married. Under other circumstances it would have seemed a bit unlikely but I don't recall being particularly surprised.

So that's my Traci Emin story, such as it is. A couple of years later she began turning up on TV as the next big thing. She had apparently reinvented herself, or had at least been through a personal year zero by which all previous work no longer counted, presumably including the Amsterdam paintings. This also pertained to a painting she'd sold to the late Tim Webster for a fiver*, as Tim found out when he attempted to have it valued and was told that she denied having painted it. I was quite fond of Tim (and am still depressed by the fact of his having kicked the bucket back in 2020) so this struck a bit of a sour note for me. I never had any strong feelings about Traci's reinvention as a notionally conceptual artist, beyond enjoying Billy Childish observing that (and I'm paraphrasing here) the difference between my paintings and what Tracey does is that if you chuck my stuff in a skip, it's still art; but I nevertheless got a massive vicarious kick out of her success. It felt as though one of us had broken through, regardless of why it happened, even if she's disowned the rest of us.

Anyway, Strangeland is divided into three main sections dealing with her early life in Margate, then in Turkey, and then everything else. The first two parts are astonishing, vivid, and enough so to leave me hungry for more. Some of it is pretty harrowing, but nevertheless powerfully told because Traci is very, very funny and the horror is contrasted with a surprisingly tender insight. The third section is mostly what came after year zero and feels patchy, barring the chapters dealing with her abortion. David Bowie's private jet gets a mention, as does one of Vivienne's tops, and Billy Childish is written off in a couple of paragraphs without actually being named. Childish himself has admitted that he treated her like shit and the downs and even further downs of their relationship are detailed in unflinchingly brutal terms in those chapbooks Traci sold me back at Maidstone. At the time I recall being told that he was on at least a bottle of whisky a day. All the same, that single scathing paragraph seems a little unfair, truthful though it undoubtedly is, at least given the extent of his influence on her work and by extension presumably even her reinvention. There was a time when she was regarded as more or less an extension of Billy, and his influence is discernible throughout Strangeland. That said, the notion that she was ever truly an extension of Billy is clearly bollocks, and Traci's near relentless burst sewer pipe of hard reality may also serve to explain what drew the two of them together in the first place.

I have a feeling Traci would have ended up either well known or at least notorious for something, and her career in the art world from the nineties onwards would have looked the same or similar had she never met Childish. What you see is what you get, as they say. She has a relentless, near indestructible quality, and the biggest gob in the world, which I state out of admiration. She genuinely seems like she would be hard to kill, as Henry Rollins would put it, and Strangeland captures this in what may be more detail than you need.

I just wish she'd carried on in the vein of the Amsterdam paintings.

*: I remember this as being an actual portrait of Tim himself, but I may be wrong. For what it may be worth, I wrote a memorial to him called Let's Think About Living which can be found here.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

Charles Bukowski The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018)
At the risk of becoming repetitive, today's bewildering Goodreads dunce is an individual who regards this book as representing the point at which Bukowski turned himself into a stereotype - as he puts it - seemingly referring to Chuck's emphasis on drinking, shagging, and manual labour - although the latter is referred to only in passing in The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Naturally, I had to ask, because the review in question read a lot like Charles Bukowski keeps talking about women's tits and how he's definitely not gay because he was a bricklayer which is really, really boring actually. Thankfully this wasn't quite what the reviewer meant, so far as I could tell, but his suggestion of Bukowski playing up to a certain image seemed kind of redundant given that the author actually states this in several places; while Chuck's purportedly macho pose is, I would suggest, somewhat undermined by the fact of his spending most of the book writing poetry while listening to classical music, activities which do nothing to suggest we're dealing with a sort of Los Angeles Gary Bushell here.

Never mind. I'm sure the man himself often had to contend with much worse.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way collects a series of columns written for various magazines and newspapers, some fiction, prefaces to other people's books, and a couple of interviews. Bukowski is mostly on form.

Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

Even Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb - seemingly an experiment in non-linear pseudo Burroughsian narrative - yields the occasional gem.

Political fervour is the blight of the young. History is too long—the tail swings the dog.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole the collection is a bit of a slog. Much of the word count is taken up with musing upon the act of writing and the life of a writer, with unfortunate emphasis on poetry; which is interesting up to a point, or may have been when broken up into weekly or monthly instalments, but assembled between just two covers becomes a mammoth helping of what is essentially the same thing.

Excepting Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and no-one else I can think of off the top of my head right now - although I'm sure there must be someone I've overlooked - I really find it hard to care about poetry. Oddly, Bukowski feels the same way.

Probably the greatest thing here is the theme song, an essay amounting to writing advice for aspiring authors, and that advice is to go and spend an afternoon at the race track betting on the geegees. Almost all writing advice will be bullshit by definition, but this is pretty solid. To be fair, most of The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way is pretty solid, but possibly not all of it works served on the same plate.

American Splendor: Another Day

Harvey Pekar, Dean Haspiel & others

American Splendor: Another Day (2006)
Ten years later and I only just discover that Vertigo published Harvey Pekar, which is about the one thing to inspire regret at my having lost touch with what was going on in the comics biz back then, and additionally means I can forgive Vertigo for driving me away with Grant Morrison's Unreadables and Garth Ennis' award-winningly awful Preacher, a comic predicated on the daringly innovative high concept of rural working-class Texans being uneducated with a tendency to marry their own sisters. Nice work, Garth - very brave.

Backtracking further, by 1989 I had finished a three-year fine art degree course and was living alone and on the dole in a damp single room bedsit in Chatham, Kent, sharing a house with ageing alcoholics and persons who were more or less just living there whilst waiting to die. The degree course had left me no more employable than I'd been when I started it, and had taught me only that I had nothing in common with anyone describing themselves as an artist. In June I went for an interview with Royal Mail, and was taken on as a postman, a job in which I remained for the next two decades; but meanwhile back in 1989, Bill Lewis - who lived in the same road - sold me a stack of American underground comics, including a couple of issues of Harvey Pekar's self-published American Splendor, notably issue three which included a story called Awaking to the Terror of a New Day wherein our man forces himself to keep on moving forward through a seemingly futile existence more or less identical to my own without slashing his wrists. That was when I realised that Harvey had something unique, or at least something which is generally in short supply. Harvey understood.

Autobiographical comics briefly became a big thing around the early nineties, although not many of those I saw were that good - the worst possibly being Joe Matt describing his heavy pornography habit in one comic in wilfully lurid detail, then spending the next issue describing his girlfriend's reaction to reading the comic describing his heavy pornography habit with masochistic relish. On the other hand, American Splendor coming from a sixties blue collar sensibility was always heads above other representatives of the genre - a unique hybrid which somehow really needed to be a comic rather than just prose, and yet which never bothered with any of the comic as arts cinema pretensions associated with the comic book's supposedly having grown up - even though that's exactly what this is, and far more so than whatever the latest reinvention of fucking Batman may be. Harvey told it like it was, making wonderful use of the timing and emphasis afforded by sequential panels, then stopping when he'd said what he wanted to say - no real punchline, often not even a moral, sometimes leaving us wondering what had happened to the rest of the story and all because that's how life works, I suppose. It may seem mundane, and it may fixate on details like what thoughts run through your head when asking a neighbour to come and fix your toilet because your eyes don't work so good and you've lost your glasses and all he needs to do is fix the chain back onto the stopper, but never mind comics, this stuff is poetry.

To further infect the review with autobiographical detail, I'd had a shitty day, suffering in the heat of Texas in August, worried about a stray cat which has stopped eating and generally succumbing to good old existential nausea. I'd been reading one of the worst things I'd read in a long time - and the quality of my reading always affects my general mood - and had become fixated on all those people who just can't find it within themselves to add anything good to the world, instead just leaving a path strewn with worm-casts of recycled culture. Who are these people, these product-sponge cunts - as Louis CK calls them? Why are they alive? Why must I be aware of [name of person who doesn't matter excised for the sake of diplomacy]'s existence, and of the blog he has written explaining what he was trying to say in his five-thousand words of generic fanfic delineating a further adventure of [description excised because I'm not having that fucking argument again].

So I picked this and sure enough I feel restored, because Harvey always seemed to understand. There's something profound in his comics, and I've now been reading them for nearly three decades, but I still find it hard to pinpoint what it is, except that I know it's something between the lines, or the panels, I suppose. It may even be as much what it isn't as what it is, if that doesn't sound too preposterous a proposition. There's something calming about Harvey's voice, it being something far removed from all the bullshit and the shouting, or which is at least able to understand and make sense of the bullshit and the shouting - just read Delicacy in this collection, two wordless pages illustrated by Hilary Barta, the comic equivalent of a silent film, I suppose, and packing such a punch that I laughed out loud. That's real art, and if you don't see that, then I feel sorry for you and for the fact that we have nothing to say to each other.

As with David Bowie - of all people - I somehow still can't quite believe that Harvey is gone, because a world which doesn't have Harvey Pekar in it seems weird and unfamiliar, but thankfully we still have his voice.

Supernatural Horror in Literature

H.P. Lovecraft

Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927, revised prior to 1937)
In the interest of achieving a better understanding of horror fiction, having been left underwhelmed and unusually opinionated by a Clive Barker comic book, I turn to this, a brief history of the genre as of the 1920s or thereabouts by an author of pants-shitting tales that I've enjoyed without reservation.

Weirdly, I bought this book from Bill Lewis in about 1988, and have thus now had it in my possession for a quarter of a century without ever actually having read it, despite it being only a little over one hundred pages in length. Similarly, during these twenty-five years, I've read very few of the authors discussed by Lovecraft in this book - one of the few being Bram Stoker whose Dracula struck me as immensely overrated - which inspires me to wonder just what I've been doing this last couple of decades, and whether or not, without realising it, I may actually be a bit of an idiot. I suppose I got there in the end, and it's probably a little harsh to beat oneself up over a general lack of curiosity where horror fiction is concerned, but nevertheless, it strikes me as strange.

Anyway, it's been suggested by somebody or other that both Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula were, in part, attempts to address the issue of life after death, the fate of the human soul following the supposed death of God as brought to term by the industrial and scientific revolution of Charles Darwin and others. By extension, I wonder if the developments here discussed and described by Lovecraft might represent a similar response by the wider literary world: just as science-fiction attempted in part to extrapolate futures from the increasing body of present scientific knowledge, horror fiction, or at least the gothic novel, was likewise a reaction, processing the unknown newly revealed in so much as the advent of science had begun to expose just how much we really didn't know; or an effort to reintroduce mystery, or at least uncertainty, into what some may have regarded as an increasingly mechanistic world, which at least explains all those symbolist painters who, it might be argued, were sort of doing the same thing but with paint.

Such interpretations are what I take from reading Supernatural Horror in Literature rather than being indicative of anything directly stated by Lovecraft himself; from which I conclude that which I already suspected, namely that mere shock effect, stories in which kidnapped hitch-hikers have fully functional human bumholes grafted onto their faces - the written equivalent of death metal - represent a mere microcosm of the horror tradition, and one that should probably be ignored just as anyone who enjoyed Tolkien's Hobbit should probably steer clear of those shitty films. Clearly there is a great deal more to this genre than one might gather from the current appetite for the gratuitously vile, and this extended essay presents a fascinating and fairly broad view of that which has since been unfortunately eclipsed by a shower of generic intestines, at least from where I'm standing.

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.