Reflections of A.E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt Reflections of A.E. van Vogt (1975)
A.E. van Vogt was one of a number of persons interviewed as part of an oral history project undertaken by three universities - Colombia, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. This lengthy interview was eventually edited and published as Reflections of, which is as close as we'll ever get to a van Vogt autobiography. By this point, I think there are three van Vogt novels that I still haven't read - out of God knows how many - so it's probably fair to say that I'm very much a fan. Accordingly, I've found this to be a fascinating read.

Here Alfred Elton talks about growing up in Saskatchewan, his first writing sales to the magazines, Dianetics, the development of his technique and his theories about writing, particularly what he tries to do in his science fiction; and somehow I'm left with even more questions.

As you may know, van Vogt cultivated a particular style which, for want of a better description, seems to do to the page what German expressionism did to the cinema screen. You have to hold on tight because it can be disorientating, confusing, and dreamlike, often with the most confusing elements left deliberately bereft of explanation. My first reaction to van Vogt was this guy can't write, which changed to drunk in charge of a typewriter, until I realised the disorientation was on purpose and the result of a very specific methodology. As an aside, it's therefore probably a good thing that his just about an autobiography came from a series of lengthy interviews rather than more directly from the man himself.

As I expected, he was never shy when it came to blowing his own trumpet - much of which is admittedly justified - but it's particularly interesting that he should have also been so finely tuned as to his own failures, stories which didn't quite hold together - which is a relief because I've often thought it was just me. I suspect that these days we would describe him as having been somewhere on the spectrum, but I won't because I remain unconvinced of such a term being truly helpful. Aside from his occasionally startling directness, van Vogt comes across as an autodidact, although I suspect some of the grammatical eccentricities may stem from his having spoken Dutch until the age of four. Yet the image he presents of himself is itself contradicted by his views on L. Ron Hubbard, and on other authors he admires, and on what he tried to do with his own writing. I'm still not sure I fully understand what he tried to do with his own writing, although it refers to Marshall McLuhan as well as Korzybski and entails use of fictional sentences, whatever they are. Of course, it may all be word salad and inherently batshit, but the fact of van Vogt's greatest successes working just as well in the world inhabited by the rest of us support the idea that he may have been onto something.

Above all, Reflections leaves one with the impression that while A.E.'s Venn diagram - or Van diagram if you like - may not always have intersected tidily with the planet upon which the rest of us live, he seems like an incredibly nice guy, and one whom it would have been fun to hang around with.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
I seem to have had a somewhat intermittent relationship with television over the years, at least compared to most people. I'm sure I spent the average daily hourage glued to the box when growing up, then left home in 1984 to take a fine art degree. Excepting a few months of temporary residence at my dad's house, I didn't have a telly until about 1993 because I couldn't afford one and didn't really miss it. The irony here is that my fine art degree was one specialising in time based media, specifically film, video, and television.

We were trying to make video art. One of the pieces which had the most lasting effect on me was by Brendan Mooney, a fellow student who ended up playing rhythm guitar for Dave Vanian's Phantom Chords. I don't recall what it was called, but the video was shot in an empty studio with a stationary camera pointed at the wall. Every few minutes, Brendan would appear, peering at us cautiously from one side of the screen or another as though hoping we wouldn't see him, and each time he appeared, an uproarious laugh track filled the room despite that nothing funny was happening. After a few minutes of this, it became difficult to watch without laughing at the absurdity of it, and after another minute or so the obvious means by which the viewer was being manipulated left us feeling quite uncomfortable; and while it's not true that I've been entirely unable to watch sitcoms ever since, they have to be funny. Some guy pulling a face and saying now that's what I'm talkin' 'bout no longer cuts it for me, regardless of canned laughter.

Not all television is a waste of time, but the great majority of it is, and I no longer have the patience to sit in front of the box for an entire evening. Amusing Ourselves to Death is one of those books which sort of explains why everything is terrible, and has therefore come as a massive revelation because now I understand exactly why I've had this difficult relationship with the goggle box, and also because it's nice to know that I'm not crazy and that it isn't just me.

Postman expands on McLuhan to some degree, although he draws a more ominous conclusion. The central thesis of his argument is simple, namely that we have gone from being a text based culture to a visual one, and that because different media tend to dictate what can be said, this has profoundly influenced our way of thinking; and because visual media tend to reduce complex narratives to easily digested aesthetics, we are now living in a post-truth world where people who think they're vampires can actually be vampires and a game show host can occupy the White House; and should you happen to mention any of this on social media, someone will inevitably bleat about how there are some really good documentaries on television these days, which more or less proves the point.

We've spent a lot of time congratulating ourselves at having avoided the totalitarian future described by George Orwell's 1984. Postman argues that we've actually ended up with something much closer to Huxley's Brave New World wherein the problem is not that books are banned or routinely burned, but that we've ceased to care about books and, by association, truth, because we're too busy being entertained. Of course, as with any argument on this sort of scale, there's a lot of wiggle room - although it seems telling that everything stated back in 1985 applies equally well to the internet and other more recently developed media, and so much so as to require no great extension of the argument - and this is what those few Goodreads reviewers to take issue with this book have picked up on, usually in terms which may as well be how there are some really good documentaries on television these days.

Everybody needs to read this book, and if you believe those who tell you that they don't watch television do so in order to appear superior, then you're almost certainly a massive fucking tool and you really, really, really, really need to read this book.

The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid

Octavio Paz The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid (1972)
I've had this since 2003, as suggested by a couple of bus tickets preserved between the pages - a return to Tottenham Court Road on Saturday the 2nd of August of that year, so I'm assuming that's when and approximately where I bought the thing. I've been under the impression of this being a book I never got around to reading - which is why I took it from the shelf on this occasion; except I find handwritten footnotes within, and obviously mine, suggesting that I've read it but have no memory of doing so.

Complete crap is probably an overstatement given that it doubtless depends on the source to which Paz was referring. Back in 2003, I tended towards overcompensation when it came to Mesoamerica; plus I'd bought this book because there was a pyramid on the cover and was most likely bewildered by much of it - which probably explains my being unable to remember it.

Now that I'm older, marginally wiser, and living significantly much closer to Mexico, it makes more sense than it probably would have done on the number forty from Tottenham Court Road. Additionally, I'm living fairly close to the border so Mexico's relationship with the United States has become part of the wallpaper of my daily existence, and while this is arguably peripheral to what Paz writes about, it's nevertheless applicable and his insight is astonishing - at least now that I have some frame of reference.

The United States, smiling or angry, its hand open or clenched, neither sees nor hears us but keeps striding on, and as it does so, enters our lands and crushes us. It is impossible to hold back a giant; it is possible, though far from easy, to make him listen to others; if he listens, that opens the possibility of coexistence. Because of their origins (the Puritan speaks only with God and himself, not with others), and above all because of their power, the North Americans are outstanding in the art of monologue: they are eloquent and they also know the value of silence. But conversation is not their forte: they do not know how to listen or to reply.

However, The Other Mexico is principally about how Mexico relates to itself rather than to its neighbours, and attempts to reconcile the apparent contradictions of a national politic which abhors the horrors of the conquest while nevertheless celebrating that which was born from the same. We begin with the Tlatelolco massacre of October, 1968 where government troops slaughtered several hundred unarmed student protestors, compared by Paz to something like a mass sacrifice of the kind for which Ahuizotl was famed in the days before the Spaniards turned up. Given the improbability of ever fully explaining anything so horrific as the Tlatelolco massacre, Paz makes as much sense as anyone and he expands his argument with what feels like a certain sort of poetic truth.

Speaking of poetic truths, as I read about the Tlatelolco massacre it dawned on me that it had occurred fifty years ago to the day, and that I was reading about it on the anniversary of its occurrence, by uncanny coincidence; except, of course, I immediately realised my error because the anniversary would have been in 2018, so I was reading about events which had occurred exactly fifty-two years before, and the figure struck me as more significant, being the length of a Xiuhmolpilli by the Mexica calendar; and significant because The Other Pyramid is quite specifically about pre-Colombian systems mapped onto post-conquest reality.

Paz identifies Mexico's colonial and revolutionary systems of government as a continuation of that which the conquest attempted to eradicate and replace - namely what is essentially a one-party state with rulers picked by the governing body rather than the people. It's a convincing argument, and one that seems to go some way towards explaining the Mexican government's peculiar relationship with the drug cartels who, in this model, might be deemed more like a rival tribal group than necessarily criminal or enemies of the state. It's coincidental that I should choose to have read this directly following The Medium is the Massage, but seems fitting given McLuhan's observation that the medium - in this case, Mexico itself - seems to dictate the general thrust of that which is transmitted.

Additionally, it seems fitting that I should find myself reading this on the eve of yet another American Presidential election, given America's apparent descent into what has begun to feel a little like a one-party state policed by what amounts to just another gang; also regarding which:

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

As my younger, more defensive self noted, Paz was misinformed regarding the prestige, or lack thereof, of Chichimec origins in Mexica society, but pretty much everything else he had bang to rights. This time I'll try to keep it all in mind.

The Medium is the Massage

Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore The Medium is the Massage (1967)
I've found McLuhan a little impenetrable in the past, or perhaps not so much impenetrable as so information rich that it can be difficult to process what he's saying. The Medium is the Massage seems to represent a loosely populist concession, representing a few of his core ideas in a more accessible form - almost a pop art translation with heavy emphasis on the pictures, not least because the pictures carry part of the argument. McLuhan's argument seems to be that the electronic communications revolution of the twentieth century influenced the nature of the messages which passed between different parts of society, favouring non-linear narratives and thus allowing for greater spontaneity within society as a whole, hence the revolutionary or reforming tendencies of sixties culture. If it helps make sense of the suggestion, a linear narrative might be, for example, the nineteenth century notion of progress as something moving forward with clear and coherent purpose. McLuhan suggests that the switch to a non-linear narrative has created something like a global village, as distinct, I suppose, from a global corporation or corporations. McLuhan's conclusion additionally seems to account in part for the rise of postmodernism and is essentially optimistic in proposing that a better, more developed society should result.

Weirdly, it's fairly easy to see how human society in 2020 seems to represent a continuation of McLuhan's model, despite our being in an arguably quite different, even devolved place to that which he foresaw, possibly because the last half century of technological progress has comprised revision and development of existing forms rather than innovation on the scale of the printing press being an innovation. Also because postmodernism seems to have proven unusually conducive to the investiture of naked emperors.

That's what I've taken from it anyway. I could be wrong.

Iceman

J.M. DeMatteis & Alan Kupperberg Iceman (1985)
This was a four-issue limited series from before the comic grew up - an era for which I've been feeling increasingly nostalgic. Iceman, as you may know, was from the first line-up of the X-Men, the sixties incarnation which quietly blew my mind before I was old enough to be certain that these weren't real people. He's a fairly obvious attempt to duplicate some of that Human Torch magic but it worked for me; and I guess it still works for me considering I've just read this thing.

Iceman is one Bobby Drake, essentially a variant on Peter Parker, Richard Rider and others. He's a teenager, old enough to be a role model, but not so old as to seem inscrutably adult to anyone under twelve. He's slightly neurotic, and his adventures tend to be seasoned with thought bubbles full of stuff about not wanting a career in accountancy, contrary to the wishes of parents, and the potentially terrible consequences of what will happen if some girl discovers he's really a super-powered mutant; and so on and so forth. If the Marshall McLuhan references seem a bit thin on the ground, it's because Iceman is approximately aimed at twelve-year old boys.

As such, whilst it's hardly life-changing, the series nevertheless does its job very well - telling a story which is surprisingly unpredictable given the rigorously traditional mechanism of its telling. Visiting his parents, Iceman realises that he fancies the girl next door. Naturally she turns out to be a time-traveller fleeing from a terrible authoritarian father figure, unwittingly instigating a series of events which result in Bobby Drake accidentally murdering his own father before he's born, subsequently ceasing to exist and ending up in a realm of non-existence. It's actually a bit like Faction Paradox if Faction Paradox had been created by Jack Kirby in the late sixties; and it could be argued that the series is really just a series of hoops through which Iceman is made to jump, but who cares?

Kupperberg's art is a little uneven, but comes into its own with those peculiar Kirby-inspired outer realms, and DeMatteis keeps you reading, all the while presenting just enough of a glimpse of a truly peculiar background cosmos to demonstrate why Marvel were consistently shitting all over the rivals back in the mid-eighties.

The Mechanical Bride

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bug Jack Barron

Norman Spinrad Bug Jack Barron (1969)
I vaguely recall having been put off Spinrad by one of his short stories in an old New Worlds collection, and put off mainly by prose quite clearly written by a man wearing sunglasses and a beret, smoking one of those LSD cigarettes and listening to jazz - I say man but I really mean some cat; and yet it is this same be bop mangling of language which makes Bug Jack Barron such a great book. Bug Jack Barron is a TV show in which viewers are invited to call in on their futuristic vidphones and bug the host - Jack Barron - about whatever political issue of the day might be bothering them. Barron then vidphones the person or politician responsible live on air and gives them a hard time, and the viewing figures for the show are such that only an idiot would pretend to be otherwise engaged when Barron calls. The book moves slowly in terms of events, taking its time to pick over numerous moral quandaries and to establish an entirely plausible future more or less resembling the present but for a few minor details; yet it doesn't feel at all slow, its first person testimony tearing along with the breakneck pace of a Stan Brakhage film somehow comprising a stream of consciousness rendered as highly caffeinated hipster jargon - James Joyce and William Burroughs collaborating on an episode of Mad Men with a whole load of Lenny Bruce and Marshall McLuhan thrown in for flavour.

As the elevator stopped, Barron looked at the nameless girl clutching his hand, saw the honey-blonde-dyed hair big brown eyes slightly-prosthetic made-for-balling body, saw the latest in interminable line of honey-blonde big-eyed not-Saras, felt pattern enmeshing him like fate, like creature plugged into Kismet-relay circuitry, felt stronger-than-lust weaker-than-love thing for the nameless girl, girl hungry for living-colour image-prick of world-famous Jack Barron.

It can be disorientating but it's really worth hanging on in view of where the story takes us.

I noticed a few Biblical parallels - Jack's symbolic crucifixion and himself and Sara as Adam and Eve tempted by the serpentine Benedict Howards. Actually, they're hard to miss.

'Think about what that means every morning when you wake up, knowing it's all there forever—the way food tastes, the way a woman's body feels, the smell of the air—all of it yours, and all of it forever. Wouldn't you sell your soul for that? Wouldn't anyone? Because you wouldn't need a soul to go somewhere and play a harp when you croak. You'd have it all, right here on terra firma. Forever.... Forever....'

'You sound like you're about to breathe fire and brimstone and ask me to sign a contract in blood,' Barron remarked dryly.

Bug Jack Barron is one of those striking a deal with the devil tales, so I'm sure such imagery is intentional, and the context is capitalist society, specifically the media-driven American version with the significant and still very much relevant problem of morality being defined by the highest bidder. As is probably obvious from the above quote, millionaire industrialist Benedict Howards develops a process which facilitates immortality and is busily buying up senators and congressmen whilst killing at least one president who refuses to play ball. Contrast is provided with snapshots of black America, those getting shat upon at the bottom of the heap for whom Jack Barron has become a televisual campaigner, injustice being his bread and butter in terms of ratings. Howards' brand of immortality comes with a terrible price - as the cliché has it - at which point the novel veers off in the general direction of stomach churning body horror, or at least enough so as to make its point quite clear.

I dislike body horror, generally speaking, having thus far failed to find myself in any way excited by the thought of someone having a penis sewn onto their face - that being the level of thematic thrust the genre so often seems to employ in lieu of actually bothering to tell a fucking story. If anyone feels that such a view represents some kind of censorship or perhaps a violation of their human rights, screw you and grow the fuck up. Winky face. Winky face.

Anyway, Bug Jack Barron does its job extremely well without quite sticking fingers down the readers throat, which is nice; and given the present state of politics and society as it is here in America, this book is at least as relevant as it ever was, arguably more so, and not even the author snapping his fingers with an mmm mmm yeah every few paragraphs quite manages to date it. In fact, when Spinrad names Reagan as having been president - as he does at several intervals - it blends so seamlessly with the landscape that I had to remind myself of this having been written in the sixties.

Possibly the only detail which Spinrad seems to have passed over is the role of the media which here appears less insidious than has been the case in recent years; although passages such as the following suggest this is more to do with the novel focussing on the wider society than any oversight on the author's part:

He put a razor in the last word, signalled to Vince to give him three-quarters screen and zingo, Howards was a scared little twerp cowering below him in the hotseat. He suddenly realised that to the hundred million people on the other side of the screen, what they saw there was reality, reality that was realer than real because a whole country was sharing the direct sensory experience; it was history taking place right before their eyes, albeit non-event history that existed only on the screen. A strange chill went through him as for the first time he got a full gut-reality flash of the unprecedented power wielded by his image on the screen.

Grazing the internet, I find that this seems to be one of those novels which divides people in so much as that some have apparently hated it, even described it as unreadable and slow. As is probably obvious, I belong in the other camp. I suppose my only criticism would be that I've personally never seen the appeal of immortality, but then that isn't really what the book is about, so it's not a problem.

The Shockwave Rider

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider (1975)
Having enjoyed The Stone That Never Came Down many years ago and a couple of his earlier, pulpier novellas more recently, I've been generally well-disposed towards John Brunner; and having almost certainly seen The Shockwave Rider described as important somewhere or other there was just no way I could leave this copy sat upon the shelf in the store. The Shockwave Rider has the reputation of being a sort of proto-cyberpunk novel, which turns out to be something of an understatement as its protagonist, Nick Haflinger, flees the sort of oppressive, corporate society foreseen by Marshall McLuhan, changing identity over and over by means of the computer virus with which he's infected the net. Of course there were numerous, even earlier predictions of the worldwide web and our increased reliance on computers, Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe of 1946 being just one astonishingly prescient example, and electronic data networks were already happening when this was written; but nevertheless, for 1975, The Shockwave Rider is still pretty astounding in terms of how much it predicted and what it got right.

Even so, the second time I read Brunner's The Stone That Never Came Down I found it a little didactic, and the same is true of this one: big and admittedly wonderful ideas and some great, rounded storytelling that becomes a lecture by the time our lad arrives in Precipice, a perfect society where everyone behaves themselves and everything is wonderful contrasted with the corporate hell from which Haflinger has fled. Precipice is a utopia in the Sir Thomas More vein and is unfortunately about as engaging, and to be honest the last hundred or so pages felt like being stuck in an SWP meeting - a simile I should probably clarify by explaining that I have experienced the SWP essentially as a cult which borrows socialist trappings without demonstrating any real connection to or understanding of the causes it purports to champion. In short, The Shockwave Rider started well but soon became so worthy that I found it difficult to either care or concentrate on what was happening upon the page, and by the end I was pretty much lain back, thinking of Texas, and waiting for it to be over; which is a shame for a book that kicks off in such fine form.