Spring Rain, Summer Heat

Josh Peterson Spring Rain, Summer Heat (2020)
To kick off with a characteristically self-indulgent preamble, some time ago I painted a provisional cover for one of my own efforts. The novel is called Early Morning and features, among other things, a couple of patchwork men made from bits of other people and thus loosely resembling the Universal Pictures version of the Frankenstein monster. The cover painting depicted the two of them posed in arbitrary homage to David Bailey's well known portrait of the Kray twins. Some writer was asking me about Early Morning, so I showed him the painting.

'Duality,' he said. 'Interesting.'

It struck me as one of the most gormless observations which has ever been made about anything I've done; and I have an uncomfortable suspicion that my reaction to Josh Peterson's two previous works may amount to more or less the same thing, words offered in the hope of it seeming as though you've understood something when actually you don't have the first fucking clue.

Duality, my arse.

So I suspect I may be guilty of overthinking my response to Peterson's writing, where it isn't actually anything like so complicated as I apparently believed. Spring Rain, Summer Heat, much like the other two, is a memoir formed from Josh Peterson slicing open his own brain, pressing it against the scanning screen of a photocopier, hitting copy, and the book is what came out of the slot - memories scattered in order of significance - or something non-linear at any rate, mashed up together with their own analysis, then typeset in a sequence which makes emotional sense but specifically as a book, rather than anything subscribing to the usual logic of mind as a movie screen; which is why it's a book, obviously.

As to what the memoir is about - sex, drugs, rock and roll but not in any of the conventionally spectacular senses. It's more to do with communicating the experience than that which is experienced - if that's even an actual fucking sentence.

I've destroyed and deleted so many photographs, pictures and keepsakes as if they were evidence. Gone to a ridiculous length to ensure there were no backups and no trace was left in cases of items being burned et cetera. Not just to suppress those particular narratives, but to prevent myself from living vicariously through the past. And then compensating for this tic by writing about it.

Unless I'm still tipping my head to one side and smarming, duality - interesting, without even realising it, this seems to amount to an unapologetic self-portrait on the part of the author, answering how did I get here? and determinedly reluctant to fall for even his own bullshit. Some of the sex will doubtless trouble the squeamish, but everything here is more or less real by any definition that matters.

For some reason I got a lot more out of this one than Granite City Blues or Missing, although it could be that I've just become acclimated to how Josh Peterson writes, which is nice because he writes beautifully, and certainly more beautiful than you might expect given the drugs, the surgery, the piss, the bodily fluids, and impassive reportage of the same. Spring Rain, Summer Heat hints fairly heavily at the influence of Simon Morris - an association I'd apparently forgotten since the previous book - but, with apologies in advance to anyone who is likely to get the hump here, now does it much better for my money; or at least made me work harder for what has seemed greater reward. Additionally, it's massively refreshing - illuminating  even - to read about gender dysphoria as it occurs out here in the real world without having to wade through the usual rainbow unicorn bullshit and cult jargon; and if it isn't obvious, I'm saying this is a great book and that you need to read it.

If You Have Ghosts

Douglas Payne If You Have Ghosts (2019)
Here's another coming of age narrative - as I'm sure some idiot will eventually call it - from Amphetamine Sulphate - very much its own thing, but likely to strike chords with anyone who enjoyed their books from Meg McCarville or Josh Peterson; so we're dealing with childhood, memory, emerging sexuality, and often in terms of the details most writers tend to excise, the parts which don't fit. Despite any reputations which may still be lingering, I'd say Philip Best is right to harbour a certain ambivalence regarding the transgressive tag. If You Have Ghosts isn't the Waltons, and Hollywood would leave out all the elements which make the story what it is, but this is only outsider when you consider that most of us are outsiders by some definition, at least anyone worth talking to. We all have ghosts.

This one had me hooked from the first page, upon which I read.

Aside from Barney and his space exploration, I loved a Sesame Street video where Big Bird and Snuffleupagus are in ancient Egypt. Big Bird dies and he is judged by Osiris in preparation for the afterlife, his heart weighed against one of his own plucked feathers.

As with the best of the imprint, Ghosts keeps hold of its sense of humour without feeling the need to crack jokes and renders emotion without resorting to sentiment, limiting itself to just the stuff you need. Weirdly, and it may be due simply to the amber tint of south-west geography, Payne's writing reminds me of Ray Bradbury of all people, except where Dandelion Wine all but chokes on its own syrup, this one is clear, uncongested, and rich in flavour. It may even be the most powerful, convincing and confident piece of writing that Amphetamine Sulphate have published since the New Juche books.

I know literature is supposedly a dying art, but it doesn't much look like it from here.

Granite City Blues

Josh Peterson Granite City Blues (2019)
It took me a while to get settled with this one, if settled is really an appropriate term here. Josh Peterson writes the dense autobiographical narrative of an existence which endures despite poverty, degradation, meth, and kiddy fiddlers. It's transgressive literature if anything is transgressive literature, although I doubt Peterson - or indeed anyone with a brain - would be entirely happy with the categorisation. I have the impression that, having set up shop, Amphetamine Sulphate have become subject to all manner of unsolicited submissions from persons actively setting out to write transgressive literature, and I recall Mr. Best himself darkly muttering something about bad copies of Sotos. Anyway, Granite City Blues gets off to what initially seemed a poor start blending Peterson's somewhat forensic analysis with references to or quotations from Whitehouse, Burroughs, Sotos - your basic transgressive box ticking, then a run through of certain books or records - which Simon Morris did to better effect in his books; and it isn't that any of this is without value, or a point, or that snippets of insight don't come as part of the collage, but it feels somehow obvious - at least initially. The references are the sort of thing which, as I say, have worked for Simon Morris, possibly because Morris' narrative voice is a little more conversational with his motives better communicated. Here they are distracting, particularly embedded within such a dense monologue delivered with a cadence approaching that of a medical textbook. I was struggling, and if it's any indication of why, I found a 204 word sentence on page eighty-four.

That said, this opening section yields a fairly satisfying summary of two inspirational authors whom I assume to be respectively Peter Sotos and New Juche - neither directly identified presumably through Peterson wishing to avoid ticking boxes on the transgressive reading list which, if so, suggests that he's at least aware of the pitfalls. I've never read Sotos, so I'm not getting into that fucking argument, but for what it may be worth...

The former exudes a consistent acknowledgement of the pain of a life lived where the latter seemed to have found a natural talent at soothing it. The former has my respect more for being true to who they are (or were), rather than any boastful suppression of instinct; without which we'd lack the society from which these men allegedly transgress.

Anyway, as I say, such instances of anonymity seem to suggest a need to maintain a certain thematic purity, or at least that Peterson wasn't sat in some darkened room with just a candle and a Maurizio Bianchi album, frantically scribbling his descriptions of sexual acts previously seen only in Johnny Ryan comics, occasionally pausing to throw back his head and cackle, 'Just wait until those fools read this!' Indeed, when it comes to self-image, self-mythologisation, or any of that shite, Josh Peterson seems refreshingly lacking in ego.

There are some reading who may still be in possession of some of those trash samizdat that I self-published. I'm inviting you to piss on them. To photograph yourself or your girlfriends or your female friends or really whomever, pissing on them, so that I can clearly see both the person urinating and the target and the stream of urine.

Given this last point, I'm inclined to wonder whether the opening pages might not represent some kind of test, something to separate the wheat from the chaff; although it probably isn't anything quite so deliberate.

People act as if you actually want or choose to be whomever you are, when rather only a very small percentage of us ever accept and decide to enjoy the lack of options.

References to obscure authors, noise gigs and so on, tend to present an impression of an author speaking directly to a limited audience of personal acquaintances, maybe a circle limited to those who liked the last one on Goodreads; which is fine but makes it a frustrating, even pointless read for those of us outside the circle. However, once we're past the references to Whitehouse, the tone seems to shift towards something broader and which communicates one hell of a lot more, even if it isn't necessarily anything we're going to enjoy hearing. The sentences reduce to double figures, and Granite City Blues draws closer to the thing promised by its title as Peterson picks apart his own existence and attempts to make sense of it in moderately less clinical terms than I recall from Missing, or even from the first twenty or thirty pages of this one. He's thus far had an interesting life - in the Japanese sense of interesting - and one I'm fairly happy to read about as having occurred to someone other than me; and, as is probably obvious, adversity is nothing if not educational and so you could probably learn one hell of a lot from this book.

Peterson is almost the New Juche of shitty urban America in terms of understanding his environment and in being equipped to analyse it without arbitrary moralising; and there's even a brittle sort of poetry to his analysis. Regardless of the opening bars, this is a great book, possibly with greater to come, going by his present trajectory.

Missing

Josh Peterson Missing (2018)
I went into this expecting something along the lines of a criminal investigation, partially due to the blurb on the back cover, and partially the Amphetamine Sulphate web page describing it as a true crime novella. I suppose it isn't that the description is in any sense inaccurate, but its meaning is broader than one might expect given the title of Missing with its implied absence of either bodies or evidence. Rather, the crime and that which is deemed to be missing is something of the contemporary human psyche. Reducing the book to its most basic state, it's Josh Peterson pointing out where we've all been going wrong over the course of fifty or so pages - a monologue randomly swerving into forensic digressions which illustrate the main argument without its principal points seeming anything other than incidental. It would be a rant but for the absence of wrath, or even anything particularly judicial. Practically speaking, this takes the form of a trawl through the minutiae of a daily existence most of us will recognise to one extent or another, even if we haven't directly lived each detail. It's mostly on point, or at least well-aimed, and so sobering as to be almost chilling.

I wish I had more to say about Missing, but the novella itself has already said everything; which is why you should read it. In fact, maybe everybody should read this one.