Steve Underwood - Even When It Makes No Sense (2024)

 

Apparently I already missed a book about Ramleh, but thankfully I've been able to pick up a copy of this before they all vanish. Ramleh, as you may or may not recall, were the original power electronics act that weren't named after a bongo magazine, who expanded and evolved into something else entirely and whose influence seems to have been more far reaching than any of us could have predicted. Broken Flag was the label run by Ramleh's Gary Mundy - mostly tapes, but also some vinyl, some printed material, and which was firmly enmeshed in a pre-internet network of like-minded individuals and artists spread all across the planet. Given that the weirdy music tape scene of the early eighties was arguably too broad and expansive - both in terms of aesthetic as well as where it was happening - to ever be done justice by a single definitive tome, the best we can probably hope for is this sort of sharp focus on a particular group of individuals which we can take as in some way generally representative of the bigger, more nebulous picture.

My shelves never sagged beneath the weight of Broken Flag releases, but I had a couple of things and would have had more had my pocket money stretched further. I know a few of the people who turn up in this book, and have probably stood in the same room as about half of the rest. I've even recorded in the same studio as Skullflower, with the same engineer, and recall a good few of the major live events described here, even though my attendance was prevented by my living in the wrong part of the country and having school in the morning. It's fair to say that I'm invested, and doubtless biased to some extent, but I really feel that this account does a tremendous job of capturing something which was important on some scale beyond just those involved, because as Gary Mundy says:

The period of music and culture we grew up with and inspired us was like nothing else and will never happen again. This in itself justifies our recording it as much as possible.

What the fuck are we talking about here, you may well ask. It was music, electronically originated or otherwise flying against both convention and tradition, and mostly born at a tangent from punk with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and SPK as midwives. It's what Ministry fans who weren't there now term industrial music, not having realised that Monte Cazazza was joking when he came up with that one - although little of the music squared well with so limited a term. Most people discovered it either by accident, or by knowing someone who had themselves discovered it by accident, because it was generally ignored - even shunned in a few cases - by the music press of the time, arguably excepting Sounds*1. You bought records if shops had them, or you sent for tapes through the post, often produced by one bloke running off cassette copies of his own strange noises on a home stereo with artwork photocopied at the local college; and it was fucking exciting because often you had no idea what you would get beyond it being something you'd never heard before, and it was our thing; and it seemed like part of more than just rock and roll and the music business, as heir to modernism in the art and philosophy of the twentieth century - music which sent you off to the library to look for Burroughs or Genet or Francis Bacon or Stockhausen or whoever else, more than it made you wonder what their first album sounded like or whether they were into the Stones.

This is what is communicated in Even When It Makes No Sense, which additionally brings in a great many of the original artists to describe what they were trying to do, making for a thorough discussion of extreme or unusual art and its aesthetic - which I applaud as a vital undertaking given some of the bullshit that has been thrown around in recent years regarding labels such as Broken Flag, Come Organisation, and others, invariably with little effort made to understand why anyone would present art as an attack, or why we really needed to glue pictures of Benito Mussolini*2 onto the covers of our tapes of distorted short wave radio.

My personal outlook at the time was a kind of weird amalgam of anarchism, libertarianism, and a warped kind of socialism. I sympathised with some of what was being done at the time, but it was all so negative and humourless, and a lot of people involved in those left-wing organisations were such wankers. It became difficult to want to associate with them. They seemed to be advocating a really grim future where everyone was equal, but everyone was fucking miserable also. Part of what I did was definitely intended to piss those people off. Some of what I did went against my personal beliefs, but it was worth it just to try and shake them up. Unless you were there, it's difficult to explain. The comedian Alexei Sayle once said that when you told a joke, there would be a pause while people analysed what you had said before deciding whether it was appropriate to laugh, and I think there was a lot of truth in that. That said, yes the Falklands was a pathetic war, yes, Thatcher was a cunt, but no way were the youth at large going to support Red Wedge with its Soviet grimness. I felt the only way forward was what I saw as a real kind of punk ideal of embracing everything and making personal decisions about what you wanted and being true to yourself and not joining tribes. Very few of us took that message from punk, but I did and, to a large extent, still do. I've never understood party politics. My views are a mixture of bits of most parties' ideas, with a few of my own thrown in for good measure. The idea that a large group of people can always agree on every issue is insane. It goes against human nature.

Finally, the book reprints the two issues of the original Even When It Makes No Sense produced as A5 zines. I had the first one but flogged it on eBay because it didn't have any pictures and I didn't understand it, but being now older and marginally less stupid, I'm very glad to have a second chance with the thing which, if slightly uneven, provokes thought beyond simply serving as a snapshot of its time and place - and particularly with the anonymously authored*3 six page assemblage, treatise, or whatever you'd call it on G.I. Gurdjieff and Syd Barrett, which has itself sent me off to eBay for a copy of Colin Wilson's The War Against Sleep - his biography of Gurdjieff. Four decades down the line and this gritty well-spring is still throwing off sparks, taking us to new places.

*1: Before anyone starts, no, it was never championed by the fucking NME as I've heard said a few times. Fuck off.

*2: To be fair, it was usually Adolf Hitler. I personally favoured Mussolini because I wanted to be different.

*3: Although I'd put money on it having been written by Philip Best.

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.

Trejo

Danny Trejo & Donal Logue Trejo (2021)
I bought this autobiography for my wife's birthday with no particular plan to read it myself; but she insisted that I do so, and I like Danny Trejo, so I did and here we are. The two of us - Bess and myself, not me and Danny - saw the man speak at some vaguely charitable thing to do with the opening of a rehab clinic a few years ago. He was very entertaining and I've been well-disposed towards him ever since, to the point of believing that people who don't like Danny Trejo probably have something wrong with them.

I had some vague idea of the general shape of his existence, how he got where he is today, but not in this sort of detail. He was a bad ass, a career criminal, a violent nutcase, a substance abuser in and out of prison; and then he had a revelation about where his life was going, cleaned up, and has now spent the majority of his life dedicated to being a better person, and above all to helping others be better people. Never having struggled with addiction - apart from the fags, I suppose - I've occasionally found the language of recovery and its ruthless optimism a little headachey, but then it doesn't really matter what I think and if it works, as it certainly can do, then it's a beautiful thing; and by describing the context of his formerly troubled existence with such powerful clarity, Trejo really slams the message home without even a trace of preaching, or indeed anything surplus to requirements, resulting in a genuinely inspirational autobiography.

The account of his criminal past is, honestly, about a thousand times more interesting than Genet, and framed in such a way as to involve the reader. You know exactly where he's coming from, or at least I did; and sure, it's a celebrity biography with two names on the front cover and at least one account of hanging out with De Niro, but it's really a great fucking book because Trejo is a great fucking guy, and he's very funny, and being a genuine tough guy, he has no need to keep telling us how tough he is.

Edward James Olmos doesn't come out of it very well though, which is unfortunately amusing.

Psi-Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Lady of the Flowers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Palm Sunday

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Palm Sunday (1981)
Most of Vonnegut's novels constitute autobiography of one form or another. Palm Sunday goes a little further, being an assemblage of essays, reviews, newspaper articles, speeches, unpublished introductions to other people's books, and notes reminding the milkman that no further yoghurt will be required until the weekend; so it's the same sort of deal as Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, except ordered as a chronology with added material framing most of the reprints in the wider context of Vonnegut's existence.

There are several problems with this as a collection. Firstly the fifty pages of Vonnegut dynastic history covering four generations - or what felt like four generations - written by a distant relative is almost certainly more fun to read if you're actually a Vonnegut. Secondly, despite much of Vonnegut's oeuvre being approximately autobiographical, it's rare that he talks about his career as a writer - excepting parodies by way of Kilgour Trout - and I guess that was a good thing. Here he talks about the art of writing, about the business aspect, and about hanging out with other writers. Some of it's sort of interesting - notably what an arsehole Jack Kerouac obviously was - but somehow this daylight cast upon magic seems counterproductive, suggesting a Vonnegut with more than a touch of the Richard Stilgoe or Ronnie Corbett about him. There's a whole blogging genre out there born from young, slightly clueless university educated men who've decided to pursue careers as authors of Doctor Who novels, having somehow failed to make the distinction between the world of Camus and Genet and exciting telly adventures featuring outer space robot people; and whilst these young lads may well be as harmless and amiable as their work, their online musings are purest grade one ballsache.

Where I get my amazing ideas...

Analysing the genius of Stephen Moffat…

A day in the life of an unpublished author...

Wish me luck! I'm thinking of pitching a story pitting the first Doctor against the Sontarans…

Oh look, yet another charity anthology…

I suppose it's my own fault that I'm even aware of such twattery; but to return to the point, Vonnegut's reportage of certain aspects of his writing career unfortunately convey a similarly sense of indulgence, as though he's just got settled in his favourite armchair, pipe at the ready, and a wry wink as we embark on the first anecdote of many. You don't have to be crazy to write these books, but it helps!

On the other hand, even at his cosiest, Vonnegut mostly remains at least self aware and disinclined to brag.

I would add that novelists are not only unusually depressed, by and large, but have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetics consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

There's just about sufficient quality material laced through the collection to justify ploughing on through the cosier sections, observations regarding Dresden, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Céline being of particular note.

Now is as good a time as any to mention White House prayer breakfasts, I guess. I think we all know now that religion of that sort is about as nourishing to the human spirit as potassium cyanide. We have been experimenting with it. Every guinea pig died. We are up to our necks in dead guinea pigs.

Palm Sunday is unmistakeably the work of the guy who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and the rest, with that same scathing wit and ability to cut to the chase; but it's nowhere near so good as the novels, and there's a seam of schmaltz running through it which jars almost as much as its peculiarly Stilgoe-esque cover.