Peter Hope - Boost / 2nd by 2nd (both 2023)

I sometimes find it difficult to work up enthusiasm for contemporary writing, and I'm growing increasingly suspicious of that which offers its contemporary status as but one of its many virtues. Leaving aside the usual creatives, content providers, and loyal servants of the franchise, even the supposed alternatives are looking ropey these days. Among the transgressives I found one internet twat helpfully making blog posts about how avant-garde fiction is easy, fun, and here's how you do it; and if the Neo-Decadents seemed initially promising, I've been somewhat put off by the unmistakable aroma of boys who went to better schools having a jolly wheeze; and of course this sorry state of affairs echoes the culture I inhabit as a whole. Daily existence has become, just as it was for the Aztecs, a balancing act - a matter of keeping those forces which influence our lives at a distance. In political terms, there no longer seems to be anyone who isn't part of the machine. The right seeks allies while the left seeks traitors. There's no-one on our side, the machine is out of control, and the wheels have come off.

Thankfully, Peter Hope understands this all too well, and articulates it in terms which resist reframing as the usual rebel product.

Let's go walking through the bluebells with our statins and beta blockers, the buttons are popping and the blinkers are in place, surely we'll all be in a continuous state of dependent bliss before nightfall.

I hestitate, wondering if it's my role to highlight any of this or whether everyone should be allowed the freedom of their bad decisions.

A new disquiet is all around and the legal documents are being drafted to obscure contradictory history. It gets harder and harder to focus on the grey area between black and white, it jumps out of its shoes and picks up a bread knife from the cutlery drawer, upending the furniture and threatening to carve us all new eye sockets.

I hear the beep from a thousand phones letting the populace know it's no longer ok to breathe openly.

Boost and 2nd by 2nd are chapbooks - about fifty pages each, which seems exactly the right length - expanding on this theme - the world right now as experienced by one man, because the political as a universal and absolute response to ethical dilemmas is taking us to some incredibly shitty places. There's nothing here so tidy that it will fit on a placard or lend itself to elitist jargon of the kind which left at least me scratching my head over just what the fuck a red-brown tankie is supposed to be; and the reason there's nothing of that type is because grow the fuck up!

It isn't quite poetry, and it certainly isn't fiction, and although both books carry the same argument, where Boost is hard-headed and direct, 2nd by 2nd takes a more hallucinatory approach, I suppose you might say. The argument, which essentially summarises how well life inside Guy Debord's predicted Spectacle has been working out for us, frames the problem in terms which may hopefully inspire resistance, or at least some genuine commitment to leaving the world in a less shitty state than you found it.

Please someone take some fucking notice.

These are, by the by, almost certainly no longer available but keep an eye on the Wrong Revolution Bandcamp page if you're curious.

DISCLAIMER: If I know you either in person or through social media, or if I've written about something you wrote on this blog, criticisms made in the first paragraph almost certainly aren't referring to you. You hopefully know who you are.

Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (1847)

I tend to think of my secondary education as having been fairly crap, but on the other hand we had an English teacher who made us read this so it clearly had something going for it. On average I read Jane Eyre roughly every ten years, not as part of some long term schedule but simply because it works out that way. If it's a fairly straightforward, linear story, the level of detail and description is of such complexity as to yield fresh revelations with each reading, and this latest engagement has been no exception.

Jane Eyre, as you should probably know, is the story of Jane, participant in a partially autobiographical existence, who endures childhood misery, harsh schooling, crushing expectations, and the one man she would consider marrying harbouring a deranged wife in the attic of his stately home. It's about female agency, to some extent, as the tale of a woman who resists the expectations of nineteenth century society, forging her own path despite forces which might promise a quiet life at the expense of autonomy. I suppose, by extension, one might almost say it's a novel about the nineteenth century, the age in which truths held previously unassailable began to look a bit crumbly around the edges - notably with the death of God and the notion of progress and change as desirable or even necessary. Jane lives in a world dependent on certain truisms being taken for granted, notably those of sex and class, but her society is illusory - a spectacle in the sense of that which Debord describes in The Society of the Spectacle - demanding that she makes her way by critical means, basing decisions on that which is demonstrably true or at least ethically correct.

This isn't what makes Jane Eyre a great book so much as the poetry of how it undertakes to dissect nineteenth century society and to highlight wrongs in realistic and compassionate terms without the occasionally cloying sentiment of, for one roughly contemporary example, Dickens. With few of the book's demonstrable real world details adding up to a consistent chronology or year, Jane Eyre has been described as a fairy story, and certainly it can't be deemed a realistic novel in the conventional sense despite concerning itself with the real world. Aside from the ubiquitous atmospheric effects continuing the legacy of the Romantic era, it's a book full of implied spirits, spectres, and otherworldly influences - even though the only plausibly supernatural occurrence is a brief moment of long-distance telepathy between Jane and Rochester near the end. The brilliance of the book is, I would say, rooted in the apparent contradiction of what it does, namely that it uses the language and imagery of the haunted, the spooky, and the ethereal in presenting an argument in support of realism, critical thought and not just doing something because that's what everyone else is doing and that's how it's always been innit. Even the fearful mad woman in the attic is never quite reduced to just a symbol of the kind used by authors to hammer some black and white point all the way home.

However, it does much more than just the above, and describing some of the mechanism as I have done, does little to convey the true complexity, elegance, or beauty of this novel. I don't know if it's truly the greatest novel in the English language, but it surely has to be a contender.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City

DBC Pierre Meanwhile in Dopamine City (2020)
Up until this year I had assumed that DBC Pierre had jacked it in following the thorough slagging which I seem to recall Ludmilla's Broken English had garnered. I looked online but could find nothing more recent. Then taking another look just a few months ago I discovered at least three novels I'd somehow missed, so not only is he back, but it turns out that he hasn't actually been away.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is nothing less than a dissection of why everything is shit. Some will tell you that the idea of everything being shit is an erroneous assessment, even suggesting that we've perhaps forgotten about rickets, cot death, and Adolf Hitler. The reason it's an erroneous assessment is usually because you're old and not everyone who likes manga is necessarily a kiddy fiddler, which is racist to say, and all sorts of other poorly defined reasons which twenty-something victims of product placement wearing cat ears will generally hide behind slogans, flags, hashtags, retweets, and strength in numbers because it's all about how you feel, and you just a hater. Get over it. You're like really old LOL.

This is a story about a father who strives to separate his nine-year old daughter from her smartphone, and it could have gone the Richard Littlejohn route, except DBC Pierre is a master of nuance, with not a molecule out of place in his scathing testimony, no ambiguity, not even a gap by which to accommodate anything he didn't actually say - before anyone starts rolling their eyes over cancel culture or its alleged non-existence. This being the third of his novels that I've read, I can see the pattern and feel I understand the first two a little better. Pierre writes satire in the Swiftian sense, but his escalation of reality is so extreme as to border on the Bugs Bunny cartoons of the forties, with Will Self growing a vagina at the back of some rugby player's kneecap seeming almost sober by comparison. Yet, Pierre's prose is of such precision as to nail his narrative firmly to something we can only recognise as reality. If this one is almost science-fiction in its dabbling with cyberspace, social media, and quantum bollocks, it feels like the novel which William Gibson has been trying to write but never managed because he gets too hung up on designer labels and usually forgets to fucking say anything.

Lon sucked a blast of crisp air through his nose, rinsed it around as if to renew his brain as the world renewed around him. He didn't know if it was bad shit out and good stuff in - nobody knew if it was bad shit out and good stuff in any more. For Lon's money the Medinas hadn't been bad shit, Capital hadn't been a bad bank, waiting for the hair to arrive on your parts hadn't been a bad time to start talking teabagging, but now it was shit out, shit in, and nobody knew which was which any more, nobody seemed to care - it didn't matter if it was bad shit, there was no bad any more, there was no good, no scientific basis for either, it was all shit out, shit in.

The bad shit is, in case you haven't looked out of the window lately, pretty much the voracious ascendance of what Guy Debord described as the Spectacle and the devaluation of reality and human experience by ideology, even amorphous corporate driven almost ideology. Pierre communicates the divide with a shocking switch of narrative technique, the first hundred or so pages of poetic second person prose flipping to disorientating first person accounts sharing each page with a sidebar, essentially splitting the narrative into a plurality of cause and effect. This takes some getting used to. I read each first person account then flipped back to catch up on the sidebars, which sort of works. The sidebars comprise the kind of sub-newsy shite the internet chucks at you at almost every click which, in this case, informs what's going on in the novel and is in turn informed by it.

78177407943098723-0203437: Donkeyhooty de la Munchies announced he's going 'quad' and moving on to all fours for life. The move has been hailed by the wider Low-Responsibility Individuals community - better known as Loris - as a major step towards its recognition as a thriving lifestyle sector. Though not originally a Lori himself, Donkeyhooty aligned with the movement after being forced to defend his right as a quadruped to relieve himself in public, if only in parks and on verges. A recent survey reported that Loris have overtaken Emos as the lifestyle of choice for disaffected under-thirties, though they still rank well below haulers.

I've attempted to reproduce the author's de-emphasis by use of greyed-out text, which I assume attempts to invoke the attention span which is typically applied to such information. In contrast to the familiar human drama of the main text, the narrative unfolding through the sidebars jumps a shark every third or fourth page yet without diminishing the integrity of the whole, and anyone claiming otherwise - particularly anyone invoking hyperbole, overreaction or hysteria - might start by looking up either Richard Hernandez or Anthony Loffredo. Never in human history has there been a better time for the expression of self-loathing.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is not an easy book, and even though it works, and works well, the split narrative is too disorientating to facilitate anything you could describe as a comfortable ride, but it's undeniably and cathartically exhilarating as blast of random noise, like William Burroughs but with a much sharper focus; and I'm not sure I've read a more thorough, convincing, or funnier damnation of our times.

The Thief's Journal

Jean Genet The Thief's Journal (1949)
I'm not quite sure what brought me here, but it was probably something to do with Amphetamine Sulphate given that, with hindsight, The Thief's Journal seems ancestral to at least a couple of their titles, notably Josiah Morgan's Inside the Castle.
 

Genet - as I will freely admit I didn't actually know until I looked it all up about a month ago - was a petty thief of no consistently fixed abode who took to writing and so caught the attention of Jean Cocteau and other poetic types of his generation. The Thief's Journal is approximately autobiographical in being an account of Genet's existence on the periphery of the law, but rather than reading as a straight narrative comprises a flowery existential analysis which sporadically refers to events from Genet's life, mostly nicking stuff and encounters with men's cocks - these being the main reasons for its apparently having been embraced as transgressive literature, on which subject my friend Paul Woods had this to say:

I liked the couple of early books I read of his when I was a kid and enjoyed a couple of his plays which I saw in filmed versions, but I never really got why the transgressive literature label was applied to him. I suppose it might be straight literati types getting all excited about a writer who's actually from the underworld. I was reading a biography of Genet when I was on a mini-tour with Damo early this year and it struck me that, for someone who called his own semi-autobiog The Thief's Journal, he was pretty piss-pathetic as a thief - stealing shirts and books from Paris shops. More of a failed kleptomaniac really. I remember when my old man had been home from the nick for a couple of years (who really did earn the title of professional thief - or recidivist from the law-enforcement point of view) and he took my copy of The Thief's Journal off the shelves to read. A night or two later he comes in the living room, points at me, says, 'You're fucking mad!' and walks out again. I suspect that may have been old Jean's description of dropping his drawers to other men to earn a crust.

Anyway, Genet takes an aesthetic position loosely comparable to that of Esseintes in Huysmans' Against Nature.

Abandoned by my family, I already felt it was natural to aggravate this condition by a preference for boys, and this preference by theft, and theft by crime or a complacent attitude in regard to crime. I thus resolutely rejected a world which had rejected me.

It's also comparable to certain Shamanic ideas informing members of the priesthood in Mexica society before the conquest, specifically their embracing the filthy, the unclean, and the transgressive as pertaining to the sacred through existing beyond the limits of the traditionally acceptable. Genet therefore finds endless beauty in the world he inhabits.

The beauty of a moral act depends on the beauty of its expression. To say that it is beautiful is to decide that it will be so. It remains to be proven so. This is the task of images, that is, of the correspondences with the splendours of the physical world. The act is beautiful if it provokes, and in our throat reveals, song. Sometimes the consciousness with which we have pondered a reputedly vile act, the power of expression which must signify it, impels us to song. This means that treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing.

The Thief's Journal is therefore mostly about Genet finding poetry, and unusually florid poetry, in dirt, poverty, degradation, shame, small acts of betrayal, and a seemingly never ending procession of men's spunky cocks - this novel having been written back when homosexuality was a somewhat more contentious subject to the point of representing an open act of rebellion against some notional natural order. So as with Sartre, then Debord, William Burroughs to some extent, and more recently the aforementioned Josiah Morgan, it's actually about how reality relates to our perception of the same, or something in that general direction.

Unfortunately, whilst Inside the Castle - for one example - was a punchy forty pages or thereabouts, The Thief's Journal is more than two-hundred, allowing me ample scope to tire of endless descriptions of men's amazing cocks to the point of turning to Fred and Judy Vermorel's Sex Pistols biography on a couple of evenings for the sake of reading something which didn't feel like homework. I can appreciate both Genet's craft and his philosophical depth - if that's what I mean - but other's have done this sort of thing better with significantly less droning.

The Exegesis

Philip K. Dick, Pamela Jackson (ed.) & Jonathan Lethem (ed.)
The Exegesis (2011)
Today is the first day of my reading Dick's Exegesis, specifically a thousand-word volume distilled from a much longer, rambling text most likely destined to remain unpublished. It's the size of a house brick and could be used to stun cattle, which is why it has sat untouched upon my to be read pile alongside Alan Moore's similarly hefty Jerusalem for a good couple of years. I generally prefer to read books which can be digested in three or four days - allowing for the fact that I tend to read for an hour in the morning, then another before I go to bed. Anything of greater length becomes a more immersive, demanding experience, one that isn't quite like reading a book, which additionally means that it really, really has to be something worth reading; which Jerusalem probably wasn't.

Jerusalem is informed by its author having discerned patterns which would seem to place his home town, and by extension himself, at the absolute centre of reality; which is fine, except Moore tends to avoid discussion of the possibility of his understanding being a simple matter of perspective and therefore fairly common - unless he saved that for pages following the point at which I lost interest and stopped reading. Everyone is at the absolute centre of their own reality, and it will always seem more significant than mere coincidence. My wife is related by marriage to Johnny Cash; a friend of her previous husband vividly recalls what a pain in the ass George W. Bush was as a child; my mother's school friend married the brother of a Beatle; my previous girlfriend was related to Charles Darwin; I used to enjoy a regular correspondence with Cosey of Throbbing Gristle; and there's this guy Ben who lives in Arizona, whom I know through the internet. We're about the same age, and had known each other, or known of each other for maybe five years before he realised I was an admirer of Philip K. Dick, with whom - it turned out - his father had been fairly close friends. Ben recalls Dick stopping by for dinner when he was a kid. At one point Ben sent Dick some of his own juvenile short stories, hoping for feedback. I can't remember whether Dick replied directly, but it seems that his quoting Robert Herrick's An Ode for Him - a poem beginning with the address, Ah Ben! - in the opening pages of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was an affectionate acknowledgement; and I myself am at the centre of all these connections, or so it seems to me. I am therefore at the centre of modern culture which in turn stems mostly from myself, which I'll admit to finding endlessly surprising.

See?

It's not a big deal.

It's also sort of what the Exegesis is about, specifically Dick attempting to make sense of his reality as shaped, or at least informed by visionary - or hallucinatory, if you prefer - experiences arising from what were probably episodes of frontal lobe epilepsy. The difference between what Dick experienced, Alan Moore talking about himself for 1,266 pages, and my knobbing Darwin's great grand niece - or whatever the proper familial term would be - is that Dick investigates the convolutions of his own perception without ego, and with some understanding of all the philosophical gubbins necessary for getting to grips with the nature of reality.

I tried reading this before but only got so far, finding it incomprehensible; but apparently I'm more intelligent than was once the case because now, if not exactly light reading, it seems to have a more conversational tone and Dick's argument really isn't that hard to follow. This itself seems to relate to the ideas he discusses as the book opens, namely information travelling back to us from the future as tachyons - as consistent with the idea of a universe which emerges from entropy to achieve order and complexity.

The Constitutional guarantees of our country have been suspended for some time now, and an assault has begun on the checks and balances structure of the government. The Republic is in peril; the Republic has been in peril for several years and is now cut away almost to a shadow of itself, barely functioning. I think they are carving it up in their minds, deciding who sits where forever and ever, now. In the face of this no one notices that virtually everything we believed in is dead. This is because the people who would have pointed this out are dead: mysteriously killed. It's best not to talk about this. I've tried to list the safe things to talk about, but so far I can't find any. I'm trying to learn what the Lie is or what the Lies are, but I can't discern that anymore. Perhaps I sense the Lie is gone from the world because evil is so strong now that it can step forth as it is without deception. The masks are off.

He wrote that in July 1974. I am able to read it in 2018 either as a chillingly prescient prediction of the present, or an indication that nothing much has changed. Either way, I'd argue that it proves that Dick achieved a perceptive and lucid understanding of the world, regardless of where that understanding came from, and regardless of delusional episodes.

Day 2. Phil discusses the possible origin of the voices he hears in his head, usually delivering fragmented messages in Greek, often quoting maxims subsequently found in texts he's never read before, which proves that it's really happening. This reminds me of the incident with my friend Nelly and her narrowly avoided car accident. The accident was narrowly avoided through Jesus Christ levitating her Mini Cooper at the crucial moment and then gently placing it down, unharmed, on the other side of the crash barrier. This happened at two in the morning during one of her not infrequent manic episodes.

'How can you be sure it really happened?' I asked.

'Well, summink must have lifted me car up and put it down on the uvver side innit. How else do you explain that, eh?'

'And you say it was Jesus?'

'Well I dunno who the fuck else would of done it.'

Phil identifies one of the voices as being that of Asklepios, Greek God of Healing, and whom he describes as his tutor. He also discusses the Essenes, a pre-Christian sect of which Jesus Christ was reputedly a member. This information seems to be coming from the past, although there may be some subtlety of Phil's model of time which I've failed to grasp.

His testimony becomes a little more manic, reminding us that voices in the head are generally diagnosed as something akin to crosstalk between the two hemispheres of the brain which have ceased to communicate as they should, either through some naturally occurring condition or by taking a ton of drugs - as discussed in A Scanner Darkly which he was about to start writing. Phil seems to believe that this division is the normal default state.

This isn't to say that what he writes is without value, and it's certainly more than random gibberish. His discussion of the division of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos reminds me a little of Debord's description of the Spectacle, and then there are examples such as this which somehow feel right regardless of objective reality, and which neatly provide the building blocks of Phil's universe.

Sometimes for extended time periods the person (any given person) must of necessity be placed on hold - he must mark time until the rest of the cosmos is ready, since everything has to be coordinated. If it were not this way, we would soon have no cosmos. This is why we sometimes have the deep and acute intuition that we are accomplishing absolutely nothing, and no matter how hard we try we can't overcome what we call inertia. Actually, somewhere in the world other pieces of the puzzle must work out their paths so that we can join them; there is no other viable way to handle these things.

I also quite liked this one:

I submit to you that this entire cosmology which I've presented to you in these pages bears an organic relationship to my entire body of writing, to my basic theme of what is reality? I think I have transliminated - coughed up into consciousness - my subcontinent which has given rise to all my work and to all my theories and thinking.

Even though he says it himself, this at least underscores why the Exegesis is significant in terms of the body of his work, rather than simply being the bit where he lost it at the end.

Day 3. Last night I was too tired to read anything more demanding than Sir Les Patterson's Traveller's Tool, having been taken out by a combination of cold weather and Chinese food. I read the usual twenty-five or so pages this morning. I considered reading fifty for the sake of catching up, but it seemed like twenty-five was more than enough given that the material is fairly repetitive.

Phil reconciles how his visions of times past can be considered information travelling back from the future, although I didn't really understand the explanation. Nevertheless it seemed to work because I don't really understand quantum theory either, or orthogonal time, and his testimony now seems to impinge on both, although it's hard to tell whether or not he was entirely aware of this.

He also writes about Enough to Scare the Dead, a novel in progress which I guess he never finished. It was, or would have been, built on the usual themes, all the stuff we find in VALIS and The Divine Invasion, but the window dressing seemed at sufficient variance to suggest it would have made an entirely respectable novel in its own right.

There's also some speculation about the relationship between the Greek God Zagreus, and Jesus Christ - one for the old school Who fans there. Talking of Who, Dick mentioned some guy called Philip Purser in the pages I read yesterday. I wonder what Philip Purser-Hallard made of that passage, if he's read it.

Day 4. Once again I was too tired to read last night, having been to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the Queen biopic - never really my favourite band. The film was riddled with gaffs and even outright lies but was otherwise hard to dislike, like a big, amiable goofball of a movie. Meanwhile Phil continues to ramble on about time travelling backwards without the argument ever quite seeming to connect to anything external to itself until it stumbles on a reference to Phil having photographs of Victoria Principal, star of Dallas, taped all around his house; which seems oddly reminiscent of Zippy the Pinhead fixating on Loni Anderson in Bill Griffith's newspaper strip, somewhat tipping the precarious balance from ontological analysis over into just plain nuts. Once again I am reminded that my working model of seventies Phil as an enquiring and rational mind analysing its own madness by way of a thought experiment - a self divided with some potential irony in much the same way as is the world Dick perceives around him - is probably either wrong, or overly generous. There may actually not be a whole lot of difference between the Exegesis and George's notebooks in Peter Bagge's Hate comic, and it's only Dick's way with words which make it seem otherwise.

Day 5. Phil ruminates on the possibility of his religious visions being characteristic of a superman in the van Vogt mold, and that the question may actually be not so much why he received this specialist insight as why the rest of us haven't. The fact of the voices in his head being messages spoken in Greek, a language he doesn't understand therefore necessitating translation by someone who does, prove that they are real, he says, and so we're back to the mysterious force which levitated Nelly's Mini over the crash barrier, and how it must have been Jesus because she dunno who the fuck else would of done it. For a moment it occurred to me that it must surely be considered significant that nutcases - to use the accepted medical term - rarely seem to suffer from scientifically inspired delusions, but then of course I remember Andy with the mathematical equations and statistics of planetary rotation scrawled all over his wall in marker pen; and to be fair, Phil's musing gives a good impression of at least having its own internally consistent logic, which I'm not sure is true of - for two examples - either Richard S. Shaver or Robert Moore Williams.

After fourteen months all I really know is that I don't know anything except that it happened to me, and what I saw during that short time was real. That's not much to come down from the mountains with, for the edification of my people. Maybe there just is no common language between our space-time universe and the Eternal World.

Day 6. Once again, I was too tired in the evening to cope with Phil as bedtime reading, so I opted for something hypothetically less demanding. I chose Laughing Matter II, a 1977 anthology of mostly British humour edited by Kay Batchelor and Keith Maylin. Someone gave me the first Laughing Matter collection one Christmas, and even at the age of ten it struck me as kind of laboured, utilising material recycled because someone had noticed how well those large format Monty Python tie-ins were selling. I bought Laughing Matter II because it was in some second hand store for a dollar - seemingly a strange thing to find here in America - and I was curious because I was surprised that they had managed a second book; which suggested that maybe I'd missed something and the first one had been better than I remembered, or else that I'd simply been too young to appreciate it at the time. Anyway, it seemed less demanding than the Exegesis, and I hadn't actually got around to reading the thing beyond a quick skim.

It seems my initial assessment made at the age of ten had been pretty much on the money. No-one could possibly accuse Laughing Matter II of aiming too high. The humour is mostly based around comic misunderstandings experienced in a dizzying variety of situations - on the golf course, whilst out motoring, in the pub, or when discussing insurance at the office. There's a page of Irish jokes, because why wouldn't there be? There are excerpts from books published by comedy celebs of the day, Tommy Cooper, Harry Secombe, Patrick Campbell and so on, mostly stuff which probably worked a whole lot better on either stage or screen, the most depressing of which is an attempt to novelise a scene from Hancock's Half Hour by Tony's wife, an effort which well and truly kills the wit and timing of the original. Elsewhere we find zingers from The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club, as hosted by Bernard Manning and Colin Crompton, a show which I recognised as being shit even as a kid. The zingers take wry sideways glances at the lighter side of sexual harrasment, amongst other subjects, and are helpfully illustrated with photographs of our hosts embellished with badly drawn pints so as to further invoke the side-splitting hilarity of the show.

Then we come to this:

Once you're done rolling around, hammering the floor with a fist and screaming with agonising laughter, there's a whole page of these, kindly supplied by the genius who brought us Fred Basset. The joke in this particular example seems to be the displeasure of the man whose grandchildren have just discovered his strawberries, and this one is the closest we come to an actual gag. The others mostly depict people noticing objects or other people whilst describing this act of observation. Graham, as he signed his name, presumably made a living out of this stuff.

As this digression doubtless will indicate, I am perhaps beginning to experience some Dick fatigue, if you'll pardon the expression. I've made it to page two-hundred of the Exegesis, and it's becoming thematically repetitive, even though he continues to examine the subject from different angles, at least not quite repeating himself in that respect. More frustrating is that he seems to accept the possibility of his mania being a self-sustaining delusion and therefore something he will probably never understand. The arguments constituting his continuing dissection of the nature of reality remain philosophically interesting in isolation, but the more one reads, the clearer it seems that it isn't adding up to much.

Also, it's probably not a great sign that I've started reading the editors' footnotes. I ignored them at first, resenting any break in the flow of the text, but the break has become necessary. On the other hand, Laughing Matter II didn't suddenly read like a sparkling treasury of repartee and chuckles in comparison, so at least that's something.

Day 7. It's starting to pull back together once more, which is nice. I suppose I'm at something of a disadvantage in that I'm not widely read where philosophy is concerned - although thankfully I've apparently read enough to be able to just about make sense of this, although I can never quite tell whether what I'm reading is profound or merely gibberish. It feels profound, but then what do I know? In places it also reads like certain pieces I've read in New Scientist and which I've mostly dismissed as meaningless quantum bollocks - the quantum computer which gives you an answer even without your needing to turn it on, the universe is a hologram, the electric universe blah blah blah… I suppose what matters is that it felt profound to Phil, in so much as that the composition of this great work did a job.

What I must realise is that it is a bourgeois prejudice to suppose that for something to have worth, there must be a practical application. The ancient Greeks knew that pure [philosophical] understanding for its own sake was, even just in terms of the quest, the highest value or activity of a man: Homo sapiens: man who knows.

However, look what this three year ongoing quest to understand, learn and know has done for me: joy, awe, peace, tranquility, a sense of purpose. Of personal worth - and above all meaning, from my awareness of God.

The essays which follow the above quote are particularly enlightening in examining Phil's mental state as patterns thrown up by a chemical imbalance whilst concluding that regardless of root cause - whether any of what he has experienced is real by some definition - the outcome is the same in terms of his own personal development; and that his revelation of March 1974, the event which the Exegesis attempts to explain, left him a different, probably better person in providing an arguably healthier purpose than deducing which secretive agencies were trying to get at him.

Day 8. I'm at page three-hundred, therefore nearly a third of the way through without any obvious ill effects as yet. I gather the editors have imposed some sort of thematic order on Phil's otherwise random musings. It works and the text seems to progress with some semblance of internal logic, or at least without anything which jars, which is helpful. Yesterday, for example, I came across the suggestion that where all of Phil's writing up until March 1974 should be considered as akin to the gathering of evidence, the books written after that date were mostly analysis - which seems a useful way of putting it.

On the other hand, there was also this. The symbol on the left is a variation on the ichthys, a symbol adopted by early Christian sects.

All this did was remind me of Was God an English Astronaut? by Tim Brooke-Taylor, a fake bestseller excerpted in The Goodies' Book of Criminal Records so as to take the piss out of Erich von Däniken's ancient astronaut theory.

See what I mean?

Day 8. First mention of Terrance fucking McKenna, but never mind. The holographic universe is apparently because holograms are formed from the interference pattern of two lasers, and our universe is formed from the interference pattern of two real universes, except one of them might be dead, which is where the Black Iron Prison comes from. Pages 300 to 350 seem unusually coherent given the subject, and are probably the pages you should read if looking for specific insight into the novels. I'm also interested to note how Dick's higher and lower realms - as David Gill describes them - of empathic and unpredictable man over unfeeling programmed machine - so closely mirror those of the Nahua cosmos as inhabited by the Mexica with its duality of heat and animation over cold and inertia. Equally worth noting is that Dick was already aware of the meme before it became common knowledge - specifically meaning self-replicating ideas rather than amusingly captioned pictures of Donald Trump.

Can anti-info have a life of its own? The problem of spurious info. The lie - look at the level it's raised to. It's pure death - but where does it originate? Does it have its own radio station? Yes - that's the first thing: I picked up. It yammers at us all the time. We are the battlefield.

It's possibly significant that he'd been reading William Burroughs.

Perhaps inevitably, the more I've read of this collection, the more I begin to see myself in there. I assume this will probably be the same for everyone. I'm now at about the same age as Dick when he was writing the Exegesis, the age of the mid-life crisis, the point at which sufficient time has passed for one to be able to look back upon formative years as though they were a foreign country, a perspective which tends to inspire an urge to dissect and examine and ask what the hell was that all about? I myself have memories of peculiar occurrences or realisations which probably would have seemed just as spectacularly apocalyptic as Phil's revelation had I been taking the same drugs.

Day 9. I'm particularly struck by how these points resonate with Nahua cosmology - a correlation which I noticed only yesterday. From our modern perspective, one of the oddest, most obvious peculiarities of Nahua cosmology - as distinct from Abrahamic equivalents - is its bifurcating into hot and cold rather than good and evil, and here Dick seems to have discovered a possible relationship between the two seemingly quite different models.

(19) The adversary of the brain, something which repeats itself; i.e., is static and not growing. The adversary is heavy, inert, and warps thought (and so actions) in dead circles around it. The brain is in dialectic interaction with it, freeing minds from its tug.

(20) Those minds warped into dead circular thinking imagine their thoughts still progress in a straight line. But in fact nothing new ever occurs to them. They therefore represent a reversion to fossil forms.

(21) Unfortunately, these people have been woven by the "magnet" into the power centers of mankind; this has long been so. They rule by lies and coercion.

Which again brings us back to the reality of wor Donald and those who got him where he is today. The thing with all of this is that had Phil genuinely been taken over by something masquerading as a first century Christian so as to expose the illusory nature of our reality, the Exegesis is exactly the text he would have written, for whatever that's worth. Whilst this may be the same argument as it must have been Jesus because I dunno who the fuck else would of done it, I'd argue that it's the same argument sent through college to emerge with a first class degree and then on to win a Nobel for discovering something weird and terrifying in the field of astrophysics.

Day 10. Phil now feels that he has answered the questions posed over the preceding pages and accordingly solved the mystery of just what happened to him in 1974. Needless to say the answer is itself of such complexity as to rule out the applicability of exclamations along the lines of I knew it!

Day 11. Half way though and approaching the material leading up to Phil writing VALIS - he may have solved the mystery but naturally there's still plenty to discuss - no well, I'd say that just about wraps it up for this guy. Erik Davies elegantly summarises this aspect of the Exegesis in his footnotes.

Just as Wagner philosophised through music, Dick philosophised through fiction - and in the Exegesis, made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as a rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return.

Day 12. Passages of VALIS begin to emerge from the text, although I only actually recognised one of them. Steve Erickson, one of the group who have helped edit and provide annotations to the Exegesis, notes the elegance of a particular sentence whilst admitting that he has no idea what it actually means, which is reassuring.

Day 13. Apparently what I'm reading represents about a tenth of the material, the rest being mostly paranoid ranting which is as such likely to remain unpublished; so that's good to know.

Day 14. More and more I'm beginning to find the Exegesis a bit too chewy to digest before bed, although for some reason I still find it quite engrossing in the morning over toast and coffee. Today I found this passage particularly thought provoking:

[47:696] This is world self-caused and self-generating and self-moved: what the Milesians sought as cause and origin of the world. There is no external deity and nothing prior to the world. This is God in Spinoza's sense. The pre-Socratics drew the right conclusions: if there was no adventitious deity to cause, control, drive and direct the world, then the world itself possessed sentient or quasi-sentient faculties and volition, "and [was] responsible for its own growth." What has happened is that religion - especially Christianity - restored the nonexistent adventitious anthropomorphic deity, the artificer-artefact model, so world was again not seen organically, as self-governing and alive and responsible for its own growth. Otherworldliness returned, and the Christians were "in but not of" world; they were hostile to world and saw world as hostile to them. they located God in a mythical place called "the pleroma." So world is depreciated and devalued and it is stripped of its life and volition. The work of the pre-Socratics is undone. God is not sought in world but over and against world, and he is sought in an alleged spiritual realm. Weird concepts such as "original sin" are brought into existence, and ideas of reward and punishment, turning the clock back to before the Milesians. The supernatural is evoked to explain phenomena, and the dark ages begin.

Day 15. It has occurred to me that what we regard as entropy may actually be the universe - which is an intelligence in its own right - assembling itself, but seen in reverse if time is, as Dick seems to suggest, travelling backwards. I'm not sure whether this means that I'm beginning to understand this stuff - because the Exegesis is beginning to seem more coherent than it has been - or whether it means anything at all. For what it may be worth, this passage from Folder 49 reminded me of Martin Bladh's Marty Page:

This is the essence of tragedy: the collision of two absolutes. Absolute suffering leads to—is the means to—absolute beauty. Neither absolute should be subordinate to the other. But this is not how it is: the suffering is subordinated to the value of the art produced. Thus the essence of horror underlies our realisation of the bedrock nature of the universe.

Day 16. I've just realised that Enough to Scare the Dead was Radio Free Albemuth; also, I've made it to page six-hundred. I'm finding some passages a bit chewy, depending on my mood, and have begun to alternate with P.J. O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptile which is lighter with better jokes. This is a reflection on myself rather than on Philip K. Dick.

Day 17. Phil believes that Christianity is the content of a system rather than the system itself, which is interesting. He thinks his own worst novel was Deus Irae, which seems like an odd choice.

Day 18, the day upon which I had presumed I would finish reading the Exegesis, based on my reading about fifty pages a day, half of that in the morning and the other before I go to sleep; but I've missed a few evenings so I'm still two-hundred and fifty pages short, but never mind. Here Phil acknowledges that his analysis of 2-3-74 has been going around in circles, and so turns his attention to what this repetition might say about the nature of reality and where he himself fits in. Following a fairly pleasing account of a discussion between himself and God on this very subject - written up as a conversation as though in a novel - he begins to wonder what role Satan may have had, and even whether he himself has been inadvertently praising the man downstairs all this time, having mistaken the devil for something more benign.

In other news, Jonathan Lethem's footnote discusses micropsia, a powerful hallucinatory episode common among children, rare in adults, in which the body is experienced as a vast, inert form over which a shrunken-to-pinpoint consciousness roves, as a Lilliputian roves over Gulliver. The sense of detachment from the physical universe, and a vast reorientation of scale, has a cosmic, trippy quality. Except when it's a symptom of something dire, micropsia is harmless; it can be terrifying, but also enthralling. This is mentioned as a potential medical explanation for some of what Dick experienced, and I'm inclined to wonder how this may relate to Return to Lilliput, reputedly Dick's earliest but subsequently lost novel, written when he was about fourteen.

I found this interesting because I too experienced micropsia as a kid, and this is the first time I've seen it acknowledged as a thing and given a name. It's also nice to know that it wasn't just me.

Day 19. Another interesting observation from David Gill in the footnotes - Phil's recurring discussion of empathy or the lack thereof may relate to guilt over what he perceives as his own possible inability to empathise in certain situations. This would explain his occasional tendency to be a bit of a tosser at times.

Day 20. I began to alternate with one of the Lemony Snicket books, The Bad Beginning, borrowed out of curiosity from my mother-in-law, a former teacher, but I don't think it's something I can really throw myself into. It's unambiguously a children's book, and specifically for small children, although exceptionally well written, witty and original, and lacking any of the cloying sentiment which often spoils the form.

Meanwhile, Phil's latest conclusion is that his Exegesis has failed, although it sounds like he means it this time, and as is noted in one of the salient annotations, this is one aspect which distinguishes Dick from other possibly manic theorists, namely that he seems to remain aware of the possibility of it all being bollocks - unlike Shaver, Robert Moore Williams and others if we're to pretend they're comparable. Indeed, Phil's analysis is often astonishing in its perception.

[75:D-9] I have been looking over Scanner, the intro to The Golden Man and VALIS. The continuity is pain, emotional pain; this goes back to Tears. It is obvious that I have no defence against pain, that I am a—lunatic, one driven mad by—not pain—but by a comprehension of pain (like the Buddha). Comprehension of pain (spiritual and mental, especially) is the basis of my writing, as is my awareness of the frailty of life and how easily it passes over into death.

Additionally he discusses the idea of himself as wise fool - one of those archetypes which occur throughout his fiction - and further examines the nature of reality in terms which, as it is pointed out in the footnotes, significantly arrive at the same place as certain ideas within the field of quantum theory. He sees himself as having uncovered some potential universal truth and accordingly laments his own inability to quite get to the bottom of it, writing that someone must come along and play the role of Plato to my Socrates.

I doubt that's going to be me, although I'm damn certain it wasn't William Gibson or Ridley Hovis advert Scott.

I should probably also mention that I've discovered Tessa B. Dick, Phil's fifth wife and author in her own right, to be a facebook presence. I sent a friend request along with a predictably nosy enquiry about The Owl in Daylight, her version of the book her husband was in the middle of writing when he died, and she responded and even answered my question, so I'm now virtual pals with the wife of the guy who wrote this thing; which is weird, and a kind of weird which has probably already been explained by what I've read so far. It's as though the Exegesis pulls you into its reality.

Day 21. The Exegesis remains a little too chewy to be read before bed, and now I've switched to Marvel comics, specifically the 1987 limited series pitching Mephisto against the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and other caped types. It's by Al Milgrom and John Buscema, firmly predates the comic book having grown up, and is therefore full of panels in which superheroes describe what we can quite clearly see them doing whilst explaining what they hope to achieve. It's doubtless artistically worthless but I'm nevertheless enjoying it tremendously, which - and I realise this may be reaching somewhat - puts me in mind of Dick's idea about God speaking through trash, pulp, or pop culture, and the value of that which we tend to ignore. That said, I have nothing interesting to conclude from this parallel, and it could simply be that I'm actually still an eight-year old boy.

Next morning I return to find Phil back to discussing quantum theory and how it may relate to his vision, a discussion which leads into his proposing that only a mad person could have experienced what he has experienced, and yet mad people don't generally consider themselves mad. I've actually known a good few exceptions to this, but the point was nevertheless worth making.

Zeno, the Sophists in general, saw paradox as a way of conveying knowledge—paradox, in fact, as a way of arriving at conclusions. This is known, too, in Zen Buddhism. It sometimes causes a strange jolt or leap in the person's mind; something happens, an abrupt comprehension, as if out of nowhere, called satori. The paradox does not tell; it points. It is a sign, not the thing pointed to. That which is pointed to must arise ex nihilo in the mind of the person. The paradox, the koan tells him nothing; it wakes him up. This only makes sense if you assume something very strange: we are asleep but do not know it. At least not until we wake up.

In light of observations such as the above, my take on the Exegesis is similar to my view of religion, or at least certain aspects of religion, namely that is any of it real? may not be a meaningful question and tends to miss most of the points that matter. Discussing whether 2-3-74 actually happened is probably as pointless as asking whether Philip K. Dick really experienced the events he designates 2-3-74.

That said, it's still tough reading in places, although that's probably inevitable given the subject; but on the other hand, as a body of work it either succeeds in what it sets out to do, or comes so close as to make no difference. Oddly, as an autobiographical autopsy on the nature of existence, it shares some common ground with both Grant Morrison's Supergods and Alan Moore's Jerusalem, both of which look for God in low and unlikely places; but where those two lack either humility or perspective, essentially being authors talking about themselves for way too many pages, the Exegesis - which isn't anything like so reader friendly - succeeds without ever seeming particularly self-indulgent.

Day 22. We're now mostly focussing on post-match analysis of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which is fairly interesting and brings the revelation that Angel Archer is Dick's own twin sister, the one who died at the age of six months, even though Phil didn't realise this while he was writing the novel. His musings now appear to be leaning a little more towards 2-3-74 having been an unambiguously religious encounter with not much ontological wiggle room, which makes for marginally less engaging reading. He mentions The Weaver's Shuttle as his first, presumably lost, novel, which is yet another one I hadn't heard of, and which Andrew M. Butler doesn't seem to have heard of either.

Day 23. It turns out that Dick was offered a small fortune to rewrite Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a novelisation of Blade Runner, which would have meant Androids as it stood being withdrawn from print, and probably that he would never have gotten around to writing The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. He turned the deal down and instead wrote Archer for substantially less. He made the right choice.

We're now up to June 1981, and he's had a dream wherein he is given a prescription drug called Diatheon, a name plucked from the subconscious but which Phil believes refers to his ideas regarding theological duality; which inspires lengthy examination of the notion, concluding that Jesus exists as living information formed by the proximity of two persons inhabiting his brain at the same time, these being Phil himself and, I suppose, Bishop Pike who was the inspiration for the character of Timothy Archer. It's a bit heavy going in places.

Day 24. It's September 1981 and Phil seems to be aware that he is dying. He is preoccupied with the returned saviour whom he believes to be an individual named Tagore living in Sri Lanka. Each time the environment is damaged by, for example, the dumping of nuclear waste canisters in the ocean, a fresh injury appears on Tagore's already ravaged body. Naturally Phil believes himself to be linked with Tagore in some esoteric sense, much as the faithful are linked to Mercer in Androids.

Day 25. Here we're mostly concerned with the Bible as the container of the words which make up our physical reality and how this chimes in with whatever Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said about the noosphere. I'm not sure I understand everything Dick says, but it feels as though it holds together fairly well as an argument, as is true of the Exegesis in general. In any case it at least remains interesting. By December 1981 I gather he's seen rough cuts of Blade Runner and - contrary to the claims of useless fucking wankers on internet forums bleating about how Ridley Scott's movie represents what Dick was really trying to say and anyway movie adaptations shouldn't be the same as the books blah blah blah - he's not happy with it. In fact he describes it as the greatest defeat. There's also this unusually sobering passage:

[62:C-194] I survived 2-3-74 and wrote about it in VALIS and hence made my death my own - by living long enough to write about it, that is, I artistically and creatively depicted my own death, and this is the victory of the heroic over the tragic.

Day 26. Blade Runner is a fascist power fantasy, and God is that which separates us from the world and through which we perceive the same. Phil seems to be back with Tessa on the grounds of it being the right thing to do, despite feelings for some married woman or other. He also refers to The Owl in Daylight in past tense, as a novel he was unable to finish or which broke him, describing it as being about regaining gnosis and liberation. There's also a summary of the plot, although it doesn't reveal much.

Day 27. Here we're mostly concerned with the notion that whatever has been talking to Phil is in some way akin to the invisible Godlike aliens amongst us beloved of pulp writers, Blavatsky and others, which is discussed in scientific rather than theological or philosophical terms. I've realised that the popular idea of Dick's madness is that he spent a day gibbering about voices in his head, then would be lucid and able to discuss it rationally the next day, over and over like a light switching on and off. This is quite wrong as he remains approximately sane and rational thoughout - if the Exegesis is any indication - and consistently aware that whilst examining the fragile state of his reality, the validity of the reality which he proposes as a more plausible, fundamental alternative is itself not necessarily beyond doubt.

[54:K-27] [. . .] Angel Archer, as I recently realised, is the AI Voice directly for the first time expressing itself openly, which is why I can write a novel from the standpoint "of someone more rational, more educated, more—," etc., than I. This mystery is solved: I am nuts, but Angel, the AI voice, is not.

He also explains the phosphene visions of 2-3-74 as a mathematical communication, which actually makes sense. Elsewhere we get a bit more of the plot of Owl, and enough to make me wish the buggers responsible had allowed Tessa B. Dick to keep her version in print.

Also, the problem with Blade Runner came to me as I was making toast this morning - which itself seems a little Dick-esque: the film asks what if the androids are really like us?, where Electric Sheep asks what if we are really like the androids? If you don't see how these are fundamentally different questions - well, I was going to say you have no business working in the movie industry, but it probably means you're ideally placed.

Day 28. Finished at last, and it's interesting that despite the Exegesis being so personal a vision as to be impenetrable at times, and despite it being more or less a nine-hundred page train of thought, it never quite becomes either boring or a chore, unlike - off the top of my head - Alan Moore's similarly distended effort as discussed previously. Possibly this is because the Exegesis is not actually that personal a vision and describes a world which most of us recognise, at least on some level even if the mechanics of the dialogue seem esoteric. The distinction seems neatly summarised in Phil's assessment of his own Galactic Pot Healer.

[54:M-32] This, precisely, is the psychosis that manifests itself in Pot: the effort by a finite creature to suppose the divine without actual experience of the divine ends in disorder and incoherence and, as I so realised last night, the truly desperate. Glimmung is absurd and in fact a travesty and I knew it at the time; never was anyone so aware of the unbridgeable gap between the finite and infinite.

Which is probably why he never felt the need to formally declare himself to be a magician. Yet, the more I've read of this thing, the more I've been reminded of certain Shamanic models of reality, although I'm specifically referring to Shamanic models of reality which themselves seem dimly related to the writings of Plato and the like; so no, despite everything, and despite a few wisecracks earlier in this review - or diary, or travelogue, or whatever it is - the Exegesis is not born directly of insanity. Dick's focus may have been a few sandwiches short of a picnic, but his analysis of what he experienced is otherwise reasonable and occasionally fascinating, with its worst crime being a tendency to ramble.

I feel somehow changed by the experience of reading this, but maybe that's just my imagination.

The Pawns of Null-A

A.E. van Vogt The Pawns of Null-A (1956)
It turns out to be six years since I read The World of Null-A, to which Pawns is sequel, and I've read a ton of van Vogt in that time so you would really think that I might have got to grips with it by now, wouldn't you? By it, I mean general semantics, as developed by Alfred Korzybski - not so much a philosophy as a mental technique with which van Vogt was very much preoccupied for most of his writing career, and which seems to inform a great many of his novels, arguably none more so than the Null-A trilogy.

I'd prefer to avoid repeating myself, but for anyone yet to receive the memo, van Vogt is not an easy writer by any description, and his novels may initially read as weird, disjointed, and amateurish if you don't realise that he's doing what he's doing on purpose, so initial impressions may sometimes be tantamount to looking at a Jackson Pollock and announcing that a child could have done it. A typical van Vogt narrative will be speckled with seemingly random, disorientating swerves described in harsh, angular sentences which deliberately leave out some of the information you might hope to find because the author is expecting his readers to do at least some of the work. These characteristics are partially informed by van Vogt's fascination with general semantics, so he's usually trying to do more than just tell a story about rockets and space monsters, although it's not always clear what that may be.

I've read up on general semantics, and it seems to amount to simple critical thinking based on an awareness that language should not be mistaken for reality. Although there appear to be certain elements in common with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, I'm not convinced it doesn't directly contradict Rand's assertion that reality exists independently of consciousness, and in any case, Korzybski never tried to pass it off as a philosophy. Unless I've misunderstood, most of Debord's Society of the Spectacle could be considered consistent with general semantics, and it seems significant that van Vogt reminds us that the map is not the territory on more than one occasion in this novel. My problem is that the Null-A of the title stands for non-Aristotelian logic, and that we are told this is a non-Aristotelian tale about a non-Aristotelian detective, and van Vogt clearly believes this to represent a great intellectual leap forward with a fervour which remind me unfortunately of all the claims Hubbard once made for Dianetics. It's a whole new way of seeing, we are told, and it could make the world a better place; and yet I'm fucked if I can work out what it is that I'm supposed to have noticed here. It might be argued that critical thinking itself was revolutionary in the time this novel was written, an era during which America was still very much segregated and not so long after Adolf Hitler had built a war on a massive pile of invented shit; although it could also be pointed out that we haven't really come that far, and that we currently have a president who, much like Hitler, just makes shit up because he likes the sound of it - and it should therefore probably still seem revolutionary in 2018, whatever it is. So I'm all for critical thinking - assuming that to be the core of general semantics - but I still don't understand how it figures in this novel, or at least how it figures in this novel in particular.

Our tale follows Gilbert Gosseyn, our Null-A detective, across the galaxy as he attempts to defuse the somewhat ambiguous plans of a potential universal dictator named Enro. The text is typically dense, requiring that the reader keep any number of subsidiary elements in mind as events unfold on the understanding that they'll probably come in handy later; and whether or not they do probably depends on the reader's concentration and how much work they feel like putting in. Personally, I found myself sagging around the half-way mark, so I suppose I could have enjoyed this one more than I did. There are some pleasantly peculiar ideas here, and the narrative grips in most of the right places, and we don't have to sit through any of Alfred Elton's weird ideas about sexual inequality; and it was mostly respectable, but maybe just not so good as I felt it should have been.

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls (1842)
Here's another one picked up as part of a vague ongoing effort to edumacate myself with regard to literature 'n' shit, the hook in this instance being that I'd heard of it because Joy Division had a song presumably named after it, albeit a song which Nine Inch Nails did better. Interestingly enough, there doesn't seem to be much common ground between Gogol and Ian Curtis pleading for these dreams to be taken away, specifically the dreams which point him to another day. Indeed, the work of Joy Division seems at quite a remove to Gogol's dark yet amiable chortlefest. So as not to appear completely superficial, I would additionally like it to be taken into consideration that the chap on the cover of this edition vaguely resembles my friend Andrew, and that seemed like another good reason to read the thing.

In case it isn't obvious, my understanding of literary history is sketchy at best, and particularly sketchy when it comes to nineteenth century Russians. I read Crime and Punishment but I didn't like it much. Thankfully Dead Souls is written with a lighter touch, despite what might be anticipated from the title. Key to understanding what is going on here is the setting of rural serfdom in Tsarist Russia, a system in which commoners were regarded as part and parcel of the land upon which they lived, and therefore property of the landowner. Said landowners were required to pay tax upon their incumbent serfs, with the numbers being based on the most recent census figures, regardless of how many listed on the most recent census remain amongst the living. Our man Chichikov discovers there are economic advantages to ownership of a large quota of serfs, and so travels the countryside buying the deeds to those who have snuffed it, but whose deaths have not yet been taken into account by the most recent census. In other words, it begins as a satire on economics and the capitalist systems which allow for this kind of absurdist number crunching, expanding gradually into a farcical critique of class, privilege, and society built on the flimsiest of mutually observed concepts. In fact, it's almost Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle with better jokes and founded on the basic suggestion that we, as readers, might like to consider waking the fuck up every once in a while.

Thus these two citizens lived off by themselves until, now, toward the end of our story, they've popped up like faces in a window, and they've popped up like that to help me answer, in all modesty, the accusations of ardent patriots who, up until now, have been occupied in philosophical speculation or in the accumulation of money at the expense of the mother country they love so dearly. They don't give a damn whether or not their actions are harmful to the country; the only thing that worries them is that someone might say they're harming it.

No, it's neither patriotism nor even honest emotion that lies at the root of their accusations. Something else is concealed here. Why beat about the bush? Who's going to tell the truth if not the writer? So here goes: You're all afraid of a probing eye, afraid of looking thoughtfully into anything; all of you prefer to let your blank stare skim the surface of things.

The great success of Dead Souls is in its bumbling and overly fussy thrust, with Gogol - if we assume this to be a generally faithful translation - utilising the rambling tone of a folk tale strewn with absurdist tangents, obsessive conversational detail, and authorial interjections mulling over the actual telling of the story; so even when we're not quite sure what's happening - because Chichikov's motivation often seems obscure - we don't mind too much because there's plenty of other stuff to consider.

In some respects I suppose you might say it's like Dickens but without the cloying sentiment, although Dead Souls has sentiment of its own, presumably informed by Gogol having written the novel in Italy, flavouring his narrative with an exile's regard for his homeland which is both affectionate and faintly acerbic.

Legend has it that Gogol wrote a follow up to this, his best selling hit single, but this time incorporating characters with redeeming features; then destroyed the thing in a fit of self-recrimination. Personally I'd say the allegorically dead souls of the book do their respective jobs very well and have no more need of redeeming features than the novel ever required a sequel. Would that the Joy Division version had been so witty.

The Age of Reason

Jean-Paul Sartre The Age of Reason (1947)
In the course of one of his jazzier speeches, George W. Bush referred to a game known as show your cards, and so to show my cards I have to admit that I'm in way over my water here, as our penultimate president might have put it. I've consulted Marjorie Grene's Introduction to Existentialism, but I've a feeling I should have looked around to see if anyone had written Introduction to Marjorie Grene's Introduction to Existentialism. Anyway, Gavin Burrows' review pointed me in the right direction, following which I stumbled across this in Grene's book:

According to Sartre, however, God is impossible. To be God is to exist from the necessity of his own nature alone; to be a causa sui. But to be the cause of one's self is to stand in relation to one's self: that is, to be at a distance from one's self, to be what one is not, to be in the manner of consciousness, which is aware of not being its own foundation that is, to be not necessary but contingent. Necessary existence, then, implies its own contradictory, contingent, or nonnecessary existence and is therefore impossible. In other words, if God existed, he would be contingent and hence not God; or if he is God, he is not contingent and hence, since noncontingent existence is self-contradictory, is not. But if we have no maker, neither is there a model by which we can trace the proper pattern of humanity, since the model was conceived of only as an instrument of the maker. Heaven is empty, and we are left alone to create ourselves by our own acts.

The Age of Reason is the first of a trilogy about freedom - whether it's a thing, whether we genuinely experience it, how to get there and so on. Significantly it was written after the end of the second world war whilst being set just before, serving to emphasise the perceptual divide between our cast of four or five characters and the world they inhabit. To bring this together with what Grene says, what I take from this novel is that Mathieu and his pals inhabit their respective existences without quite fully being part of them. As they drift along, the cause and effect of worldly interactions and even each other, appear more like projections upon an enveloping screen, not unlike how Guy Debord describes the relationship of society to its own image in The Society of the Spectacle. The future is bearing down on them, but they remain unaffected, like children only dimly aware of events beyond the horizon of adulthood. Marcelle is herself with child and much of the novel details Mathieu's failure to deal with even the notion that everything will soon change as a result. Similarly, he could go to fight in Spain, but he doesn't. He barely seems to engage with or even respond to the consequences of his own actions, as though to do so might lead to a curtailment of his freedom. He dooms himself to inaction in pursuit of freedom and therefore never quite achieves either freedom, or the age of reason - adulthood to the likes of myself and George W. Bush.

At least this is what I took from it. I suppose it's interesting from the point of view that the kidult was not, after all, invented by my generation; and there's a great deal more to it than my admittedly hastily-written analysis. Indeed, The Age of Reason is supposedly Sartre's philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness rewritten as an episode of Friends - sort of - which is nice because it's surprisingly breezy considering, or is at least breezy compared to Nausea, and I have an unfortunate feeling there probably wouldn't be much point in my trying to read Being and Nothingness. I would be in way over my water; plus, I'm not sure I really need to read the thing seeing as I got much more than I expected from this, the junior version.

I'm not sure what else I can say, and so not wishing to appear stupid, I'll say nothing.