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.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Signal to Noise (1989)

 

What exciting times they were. Neil Gaiman turned up seemingly out of nowhere and everything he wrote was amazing, and there was suddenly a lot of it about, so much so that it was difficult to keep track of it all. This one was serialised in The Face, which I browsed in WHSmith but didn't buy because it was The Face and I've never really given a shit about exciting young designers and how they've revolutionised trousers yet again. But I've always liked the title, Signal to Noise, and all that it seemed to promise, so I always intended to read this, assuming it would eventually be collected because it's Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and so here we are.

Signal to Noise is the short tale of a film director ready to begin work on a film about the end of the previous millennium when he discovers he has cancer and only months to live. He's never going to finish this latest undertaking, which now seems crucial in view of his impending mortality; and yet he finishes it because what else is there to be done?

That's the story in full, more or less, and it's nothing earth shattering but it's beautifully told, poignant, and thought provoking without any of the dreary goth twinkle which would come to inform and infect Gaiman's subsequent writing. It takes the form of a comic strip in so much as that time unfolds across a series of sequential images with the occasional speech bubble, but it arguably has more in common with Robert Rauschenburg or William Burroughs than Batman, at least in how it's told. It's ingenious, often beautiful, and with surprisingly little suggestion of anyone doing an Alan Moore or a Bill Sienkiewicz; but somehow it falls short of the hype. It's great, but not life-changing because, I suppose, we all hoped they'd both go on to even better things, which didn't really happen. So Signal to Noise is a lavish but brief promise of what might have been but wasn't. All the same, it's nice to go back to a time when I could read something by Neil Gaiman without giving myself a headache from the constant involuntary rolling of my eyes.

It's funny that he's never written anything starring a bloke who works on the bins or in a biscuit factory, wouldn't you say? I wonder why that should be.

pStan Batcow - The Sleeping Party (2025)

 

Veterans of the weirdy tape and/or mail art scene may recall former Ceramic Hob pStan Batcow as the prime mover behind Howl in the Typewriter and Pumf Records. He's been at it since the eighties, and not only has he failed to slow down a bit, as many of us have done, but if anything he appears to be accelerating. This is his first novel, although it doesn't read like a first novel having arguably spent at least four decades in the making with many of the texts found herein originating as Stanzines, as he deemed them - short zines of Batcow fiction or simple rumination periodically produced by the man seemingly because he just couldn't stop himself. I had a couple here and there, notably This Bleeding Heart which doesn't seem to have made it into the novel and which I remember as noteworthy. So the prose and general composition are confident and accomplished as the work of a man who found his voice - as the saying has it - many years before. This ain't his first rodeo.

The premise has a group of people monitored as they sleep, their dreams recorded herein towards ambiguous ends. It's structured pretty much as a loose tangle of unrelated lengths of super-8mm film edited together into a single continuous strand, and it would be fair to call it an experimental novel; although unlike a few experimental novels I've encountered of late, this experiment is undertaken by someone who has some idea of what the fuck he's doing. We meet our cast as the book opens, learn what they're about to do, and the rest is one individual testimony after another - either unrelated, or related by means which aren't immediately obvious. Former Stanzines appear as Rachel dreams about reading them in a library, which is cheeky as fuck in compositional terms but the material blends beautifully into the whole regardless. We alternate autobiographical musings with surrealism and punky philosophy and somehow it all hangs together as a sort of social realist Naked Lunch written under the influence of Lewis Carroll, amongst others. It kicks against the pricks while remaining generally humanist and refreshingly low on the kind of cynicism to which the Batcow might be entitled given a few of the more obviously autobiographical details. Themes emerging may depend on where the reader is sat, and I found something generally positive with a firm grounding in reality amounting to we're all in this together so let's not be arseholes, as proposed by our narrator's thoughts as he observes a couple of rats.

The crouching rat hadn't moved, but he sensed that it was very aware of his presence. It was plainly terrified, but resisting its natural instinct to flee. In a bizarre moment of empathy, he realised that these rats were mates, and the one lying dead was being watched over, protected posthumously by its loyal and mourning consort.

It was a touching tableau, sorrowful yet a somehow uplifting scenario. He was witnessing something that seemed to mirror what should be the very meaning of existence - something that should be duplicated in spirit as the blueprint for a perfect world.

It's a weird one, as might be expected of such an assemblage, but it holds together beautifully even if it isn't always obvious why, effortlessly drawing the reader though to the point at which it ceases to feel like random images.

Buy as many copies as you can afford here.

T.G. Engle - Silent Dawn (2017)

 

It began life back in 1993 as a play and was rewritten as a novel in 2017, which explains my initial impression being that of a recently revised early novel. Before it occurs to anyone that I may mean early novel in dismissive terms - given that Silent Dawn is also self-published - I should clarify that it does certain things which first efforts tend to do in so much as that the narrative has a loose, somewhat improvised feel and we seem to get a lot of new characters complete with physical descriptions introduced before anything has really started moving. With hindsight I can see some of this may be the trail left by the journey from stage to page - a journey which, I hasten to add, makes a lot of sense given the sheer geographical range of this thing

Beyond these details, Silent Dawn reads like a self-published early novel by someone who really knows how to write. There's a minor issue with formatting, the indention of paragraphs and where it occurs, which I gather is pretty much standard for anyone self-publishing from Microsoft documents; and it's distracting, but not so much as to detract from a novel which otherwise writhes with confidence. As for the usual crimes of the self-published - inactive non-sentences, inept grammar or spelling, absence of proofing, crowd pleasing pop culture references, narrative developments which would transparently prefer to have been on telly, and so on and so forth - we suffer nothing of the sort in this book. Particularly impressive is that in Pastor Stanshall we have an irredeemable monster who, without ever becoming even remotely sympathetic, is easily understood; so his evil - which is the optimum strength fully leaded version - is  believable where, in less capable hands, it could easily have slipped over into pantomime. There are many finely struck balancing acts going on here, which I suspect I only even noticed through having read at least a couple of novels by authors who weren't up to the job.

Silent Dawn is a hard-boiled satire set amongst warring factions of the US population about a thousand years from now. It's not exactly post-apocalypse, but civilisation is a thing of the past and daily life is otherwise about as bad as it can possibly be - rape, pillage, no law, few utilities despite the government still being hidden away somewhere, and a shitload of praising Jesus while passing ammunition. It's like William Burroughs' take on Mick Norman's Hell's Angel books, directed by John Waters, soundtrack by Motorhead - but better. There isn't a whole lot of rib-tickling, and yet it's darkly funny throughout; and certain caricatures which rarely amount to anything more than a groanfest of recycled clichés - not least evangelical preachers and good ol' boys - are delivered as readable and even wildly entertaining, which is a rare thing in my experience. Whatever I read, as soon as the Texan shows up, I'm usually about thirty pages from throwing it across the room and switching to something else, which didn't happen this time.

The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959

William S. Burroughs & Oliver Harris (editor)
The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945 - 1959 (1993)
Much as I loves me some Billy, I've never found this one particularly enticing - four hundred plus pages of private correspondence which I picked up from somewhere or other mainly out of a sense of duty to the author, because I probably have almost everything else he wrote. Thusly has it sat untouched on my shelves year after year emanating an aura which, even as I approach sixty, I still associate with homework. Nevertheless, having committed myself to reading all those books I never got around to reading and having now read most of them, I finally come to Billy's letters, partially thanks to Ted Morgan's biography providing an incentive.

It turns out that my instincts were coincidentally on the money for the first hundred or so pages, taking us up to the early fifties and Burroughs' time in Mexico City. Our man spent the second half of the forties mooching around the US, attempting to get rich though farming. Much of his correspondence from this time fixates on how much dosh he thinks he's going to make, insisting Ginsberg at least think about growing carrots, whining about unions and liberals, and helping the reader understand just why his long-suffering parents considered him something of a disappointment. It's frankly a bit of a chore getting though this first quarter, and so much so that you're almost looking forward to him accidentally shooting his wife and thus generating something worth writing about.

Ted Morgan's biography reveals, at least in part, a side of Burroughs which wasn't really obvious from the books or the attendant legend, namely that he was initially something of a lost soul, fecklessly wandering along with no real idea of where he was going, screwing up and never quite having to face the consequences of the same thanks to the pocket money which Mom and Pop continued to send every fucking month. The letters clearly demonstrate that Morgan wasn't just making that stuff up.

Anyway, It gets more engaging once he's settled in Mexico, and remains so as he moves all over - South America, Paris, Tangiers, London and so on, very much sharpening his wits in the process and gradually gearing up towards the work for which he is most widely celebrated. There's a very strong sense of progress running throughout these monthly, often weekly reports, and one which affords an insight which isn't framed in quite such direct terms by Literary Outlaw, and it's an insight for which even the first hundred or so yawnsome pages are probably essential. The closer I get to Burroughs, the more important he seems, and the more obvious it is how poorly understood is most of his writing, even by those who seem to think they've got it.

So that all worked out very well.

Literary Outlaw

Ted Morgan Literary Outlaw (1988)
Bill was still more or less with us when I first read this, so the re-read seemed about due given the number of his books I've been getting through in recent times. I've absorbed enough to have formed a reasonably accurate impression of the guy's existence, but it's nice to be reminded of all the small print I'd long since forgotten. Literary Outlaw is blessed with a lot of said small print and couldn't be termed a casual read by any description.

As one might expect, Morgan kicks off with a history of Burroughs' lineage, the adding machine which wasn't quite so significant as we have apparently remembered, and a family who remained poorly defined in his fiction out of all proportion to their influence. No attempt is made to paper over the cracks of the man who shot his own wife, or to facilitate the patronage of those who require that their authors tick all the boxes on whichever morally responsible list is doing the rounds this month. Additionally, the author knew Burroughs and makes sparing use of his narrative technique on the grounds of fiction occasionally serving as a more faithful transmission of truth than simple reportage. Some of it is horrible, not least the tragedy of Burroughs' emotionally estranged son, author of Speed and forever doomed to remain a footnote in the life of his father; but it's all part of the general weave and, I would argue, essential for an understanding of the man.

Despite everything, Burroughs comes out of it well - if not someone you could ever have described as cuddly, certainly someone you could respect and a sympathetic figure - which may have surprised some. I don't honestly know whether he was the greatest writer of the twentieth century - assuming such an accolade has any meaning - but there's a fair chance that he may have been, and Literary Outlaw presents as good a supporting argument as you're likely to find.

The Naked Lunch

 

William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch (1959)
This was probably the third or fourth Burroughs I read, back in the first flourish of youth when I was reading everything I could find by the man. I therefore suspect I may not have read it since the early eighties, which would at least explain the deficit between what I've read just now and what I vaguely remember.

I'm sure you all know what Naked Lunch does and I don't see much point going over it yet again; but for what it may be worth, it's essentially a written equivalent to one of those Heironymous Bosch paintings commenting on the questionable state of his society by showing a thousand tiny figures with foreign objects projecting painfully from their bumholes. I'd somehow forgotten that it slightly predates Burroughs' use of cut-ups, so although we have random narrative swerves and streams of consciousness implied by Céline's three little dots, it's muted compared to the impersonal onslaught of undifferentiated meaning we find in subsequent books. Mostly we have routines and dialogue, essentially similar to what we read in Junky and Queer but without the linearity.

Much to my surprise, and regardless of whatever I thought first time round, Naked Lunch is a transitional novel wherein the author is still very much finding his feet; and it feels as though those feet were mostly trudging. Of course, it throws up plenty of interesting ideas, but nothing which wasn't better expressed to greater dramatic effect in the novels which followed, most of which additionally benefit from a greater variety of narrative techniques. While Naked Lunch is arguably important, its reputation refers mostly to it having been unlike anything published at the time. This particular edition commemorates this by reproducing three or four months worth of sniffy editorials and related correspondence from the Times Literary Supplement on the subject of how Naked Lunch was either disgraceful or the bestest best thing ever. Both Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess chip in for the defense but no conclusion is reached, and the strangest realisation is how closely this lengthy exchange - beginning in November, 1963 - resembles the incoherent slanging matches seen on Twitter whenever someone points out that women don't usually have cocks. The language may be elevated and the sentences constructed as though by Renaissance architects according to the golden section, but the arguments still amount to burrows is shit LOL #cantfuckinwrite followed by a string of those horrible crying with laughter emoticons, which I feel sort of proves Billy's point about one or two things.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Charles Bukowski Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
This fell into the shopping trolley not through some burning need to read it, but more because I knew I'd eventually wonder why I hadn't picked it up when I had the chance. The posthumous Mathematics of the Breath and the Way from 2018 was likewise an assemblage of odds and ends, newspaper columns and so on, and while there was much to recommend it, as a collection it felt a bit of a slog where a Bukowski usually passes through the reader like curry at the end of a night on the sauce, at least in my experience. Notes, on the other hand, was compiled back when Chuck was still mostly in the land of the living, deriving from weekly columns in Open City, an underground Los Angeles newspaper. I gather Open City were happy with Bukowski submitting whatever the hell he liked in a general spirit of literary freedom; so if there's an occasionally topical observation to remind us this was a newspaper column, it's otherwise a principally autobiographical novel, albeit one with column length chapters written in whatever order he felt like writing them. There's quite a lot of booze, gambling, a fair bit of screwing, general grumbling about writing and writers, and even a few amusing pot shots taken at perceived literary golden boys of the day, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Chuck didn't really do sacred cows, or indeed anything which he saw as getting in the way of the truth. I quote the following in full understanding of some readers being too fucking stupid to understand.

I laugh. he's comfortable and he's human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he's good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers - intellectually, just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left-wing - intellectually. I don't care which way it goes - I only know: there are too many people afraid.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns out to be the collection I was hoping for when I picked up The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Bukowski's observations regarding all which continues to render life such an uphill and often joyless slog are on point and sadly timeless. It's ugly, uncomfortable and it smells bad, but truth is always more beautiful than the alternative, and that's what we have here.

Conversations with William S. Burroughs

Allen Hibbard (editor)
Conversations with William S. Burroughs (1999)
Given that Burroughs oeuvre can often prove somewhat repetitive, it's probably testament to the man's ability that new details remain to be discovered even when you've read pretty much everything. I haven't read everything but I've read the major novels and a significant quota of those lesser known, with this being my spooky twenty-third Burroughs title. As may be obvious, it's a collection of interviews spanning his career of which only the one first seen in Re/Search is familiar to me; and taking in subjects adjacent to the writing, whatever Bill felt like talking about at the time, it feels like a more thorough overview of his work than, for example, John Calder's William Burroughs Reader, not least in its reiteration of themes which we may or may not have noticed in individual novels - notably that Burroughs' life work can be distilled to a desire to communicate that which we already know, but don't realise we already know.

Also, this collection roughly maps out the shape of Burroughs' intellectual progress over the years, particularly as he dismisses and moves beyond earlier fixations. This is in particular a relief as the first third of the page count is dull as fuck, adding nothing new whilst endlessly retreading everything we've already read in Naked Lunch and others in response to the enquiries of overly earnest young men with long hair and beards, the nadir of which has Burroughs concluding that the revolution will not only be won, but will probably be won by the Rolling Stones.

It gets a lot more interesting once we're past the sixties and Bill's habit of predicting massive cultural shifts which never came to pass, which also means we have to talk about telepathy, mind control and the like, but at least he has his gun pointed in the right direction. By the time we come to the last page, the journey has proven mostly fascinating as our boy pontificates on his life, influences, favourite painters and writers, and other subjects which fed into the novels without any more overt manifestation therein. I'm still not sure he was the most important writer of the twentieth century - let alone that such an accolade means anything - but he was certainly one of the most interesting.

Antic Hay

Aldous Huxley Antic Hay (1923)
In The Plumed Serpent of 1926, Huxley's pal, D.H. Lawrence wrote:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

If it's about anything, Antic Hay specifically concerns itself with the jazzing of this younger generation, although Huxley spends less time sighing and rolling his eyes than Lawrence. Although billed as the exploits of the supposedly Rabelaisian Theodore Gumbril, Antic Hay flits amongst various members of his circle as they strive for purpose in the wake of the first world war, the death of God, and the advent of modernism. In many senses it's almost a rewrite of Huxley's first novel, although Crome Yellow is arguably funnier and more scathing for its somewhat tighter focus. Antic Hay may possibly represent attempts at a new form of narrative, something presenting themes as part of an overall texture rather than anything you could call a story - Oscar Wilde doing a Burroughs but without the actual cut-up technique, I suppose you might say. For the sake of argument, we may as well assume Huxley had been thinking about Dadaism, this being the cumulative effect of all the interpersonal relationships arbitrarily mixed in with the likes of Gumbril's inflatable trousers and the peculiar twenty-second chapter.

As with Crome Yellow, certain elements foreshadow Brave New World - notably the eugenically directed vivisection, which is thankfully lacking in detail - but it only really scrapes by as a novel in its own right, at least compared to Huxley's hits. Gumbril and pals are building a new world, having done away with the old one, but find themselves floundering without the foundation of tradition upon which to build; which is mostly entertaining, but as I say, covers familiar ground to lesser effect.

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.

A William Burroughs Reader

William S. Burroughs & John Calder (editor)
A William Burroughs Reader (1982)
This was my first Burroughs, and actually the first I ever saw in a high street store, proving for me that the man existed in the real world beyond the limits of Throbbing Gristle fandom. The high street store - or more accurately shop - from which I purchased this book for £2.50 was Midland Educational in Stratford-upon-Avon. I know this because the receipt fell out from between the pages as I was reading on Friday the 11th of November, 2022, and I was interested to note that I'd bought the thing on Thursday the 11th of November, 1982. So I bought the book, read it, and then exactly forty years later to the day, I plucked it from the shelf more or less at random and decided to give it another look.

Weird, as Burroughs himself would doubtless have said whilst pulling that boggle-eyed face which people do when they've just noticed something weird.

Arguably weirder still, is that this sampler is quite a tough read, where the novels from which the various excerpts were lifted generally aren't; and given Billy's love of jamming random slabs of text together, you would think this might have been the bestest Burroughs book ever. The most surprising realisation I draw from this is that Burroughs' writing is less effective out of context, where you might think it wouldn't matter. One possible reason may be psychological in that for all their scrambled narrative, his novels tend to be quite breezy - never more than a couple of hundred pages with large type widely spaced. A William Burroughs Reader on the other hand crams everything in with type so small it could be an anarchist pamphlet from the eighties. It feels heavy, and it feels uphill, which works against what is communicated - or at least the means of its communication - by emphasising the disorientation. I suppose it could be argued that one is expected to dip into a sampler such as this rather than dutifully plough through the whole thing from cover to cover, but that's not how I read.

As a greatest hits of sorts, I was expecting to glean an overview, some sort of perspective on the shape of Burrough's career; which emerges albeit in a vague sense, and although the selections communicate why one might like to read The Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night, and most of those which came between, this remains a surprisingly poor second to making the effort with the actual novels.

It was nice to find a few chapters from The Third Mind included given that it's presently out of print, but otherwise I guess Burroughs is simply one of those authors who doesn't translate well into shorthand.

The Yage Letters

William S. Burroughs The Yage Letters (1963)
I know Ginsberg gets equal credit as co-author on the cover, but I'll come to that in a minute.

The Yage Letters is one of those obscure early pamphlets dating from before Lady Luck smiled upon Uncle Bill and got everybody to buy his books. It was always listed as one of his numerous works in the front of those I read, and some time passed before I realised it had been reprinted. Chronologically speaking, it's approximately the one after Junkie but before Queer, although its status as a novel is questionable, even by Burroughs' standards. All we know for certain is that our boy envisioned something along the lines of travel writing, beyond which it seems to have found its own way into print without much conscious direction on the part of the author. It's billed as letters, specifically Burroughs writing to Ginsberg about his daily experiences as he schleps around Colombia and Peru in search of a hallucinogenic vine, but this was most likely simply a means of framing his observations long after the fact; although I gather some of the material duplicates actual letters sent to Ginsberg at the time.

Burroughs had studied ethnography in Mexico City, but his travels were specifically conducted in search of a drug which he'd been told bestowed telepathic abilities on the user; so as with much of his writing, we need to take a shitload of poetic license into account. That being done, we're nevertheless left with something which is pretty readable and rarely boring. He hangs out in villages with Shamanic types, he chugs ayahuasca, he throws up quite a lot, and he struggles towards some sort of insight.

That described thus far comprises the main section of the book, aptly named In Search of Yage, which is supplemented by additional material which may or may not have turned up in later editions - the introduction from Oliver Harris who edited the thing could have used a little more focus and I've lost track of what first appeared when. The supplementary material comprises Ginsberg's analysis of the first part, and Burroughs response to the same; which would be fine but Ginsberg's analysis is mostly blandly mystic observations on the nature of reality, third eyes opening, all that sort of guff. I'm sure I recall the Bhagavad Gita getting a mention at some point. I personally find Ginsberg marginally more interesting as Billy's pal than as a writer, but even then, honestly not that interesting. I'm quite happy to believe that the manuscript would have ended up at the back of a drawer were it not for Ginsberg's efforts, but his writing simply doesn't interest me because I don't see that it adds anything.

In Search of Yage is mostly worth a look, even if it's hard to tell quite what it's supposed to be, beyond which Yage Letters mostly serves as a testament to less being more.

On the Road

Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
One of the most important and powerful novels of our time, it says here and, although I know at least a couple of people who might agree, I also seem to have heard On the Road written off as a massive pile of wank on a number of occasions - and by persons whose opinions I generally value.

On the Road is Jack Kerouac's approximately autobiographical account of travelling around America in the company of friends who share his interests in titties and beer, with the occasional syringe full of marijuanas thrown in where available. Some readers may recall having once attended a house party - usually during the teenage years - only to find oneself cornered in the kitchen by a dope enthusiast who insists on relating more or less his entire life story up to that point, usually opening with the otherwise innocuous promise of something hilarious he did with his mate whilst partaking, if you know what I'm saying, bruv. On the Road is, for better or worse, that same story, mostly less annoying but about a million times longer.

I'd be seeing old Denver at last. I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who was walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only word I had was 'Wow!'

Kerouc had many, many, many words more than just that one - and some might even say too many - but most of them amount to wow. This is probably a good thing in that a more acerbic account of all that happens here would probably be unreadable, but the wow factor does tend to even out the natural up and down of the narrative to a seemingly endless flow of undifferentiated what we did next, somewhat reducing the potential for consequence.

Kerouac's prose is beautiful, but certain passages inevitably bore, I found, just as others better hold the attention - notably hanging out with William Burroughs and his wife and the excursion down to San Antonio and then Mexico City near the end. I found the jazz references a little mannered and hence annoying, as teenage fixations tend to become with the passage of time, particularly the use of -arooni as a suffix, and referring to people as cats.

It's a bit of a slog, albeit with some value beyond the merely historical, but I really don't know if it deserves its reputation. Burroughs was funnier too.

Amazing Stories (December 1965)

Joseph Ross (editor) Amazing Stories (December 1965)
Well, the conclusion of Murray Leinster's Killer Ship failed to rescue the story, which is a shame; and my frown was sustained during Cordwainer Smith's On the Sand Planet, which doesn't seem to have improved since I read it as part of Quest of the Three Worlds a couple of years ago. As ever, his prose is delightfully ornate whilst failing to amount to anything, and it's not even engaging as a peculiarly incoherent ramble. Your average Burroughs cut-up text honestly communicates more than Cordwainer Smith's aesthetically pretty glossolalia.

Chad Oliver's Final Exam is approximately readable but mainly through being mercifully short, comparing the plight of indigenous Martians to that of Native Americans without any conspicuous excess of cultural sensitivity, and a tweedy professor lights up his pipe on the very first page; and continuing our cautious ascent towards reading pleasure, Robert Sheckley's Restricted Area is kind of stupid but fairly entertaining, amounting to a Star Trek away mission to a planet with an ecosystem designed by Dr. Seuss.

Finally, The Comet Doom by Edmond Hamilton reprints a story first published during the Gernsback years of Amazing as very clearly signposted by the arguably clunkier aspects of the tale; except it remains a great read regardless, presumably meaning Hamilton actually knew his way around a typewriter. It somehow manages to surprise, even to communicate a certain sense of wonder with stuff that otherwise feels vaguely familiar through repetition by numerous other writers - cybernetic invaders with organic brains inside robotic bodies, earth pulled out of its orbit, the one man who knows and who has to stop them, and so on and so forth. I think I'll see if I can't find me some more Hamilton.

Excepting Hamilton, Nowlan, and possibly Robert Sheckley, it seems fair to say that things weren't looking great for Amazing Stories during the second half of 1965 with tales which, for the most part, weren't amazing, and with the absence of anything amazing thrown into uncomfortably sharp relief by both the editorial and letters page. The latter reproduces a number of bewildering testimonials to Amazing as the most amazing of amazing things ever to amaze its amazed readership, whilst the editorial mounts a bitter campaign against the haters and those who might believe Adequate Stories to have been a more appropriate title, only to end up looking like a complete wanker with a diatribe approximating to yeah but no but yeah but no but Kurt Vonnegut thinks he's so lush now 'cos he says he don't write science-fiction and he thinks he's too good for science-fiction these days even though everybody knows he writes science-fiction and he thinks he's all that but he don't know nuffink.

Maybe it's just me.

Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Cities of the Red Night

William S. Burroughs Cities of the Red Night (1981)
The first Burroughs I read was Exterminator! back in June 1982. I was seventeen. I'd read another four by September, at which point I checked Cities of the Red Night out of the library in Stratford-upon-Avon. I remember reading it, but nothing of whatever impression it made, and this is the first time I've read it since, so far as I can tell. For some reason I actually thought I had a copy of my own.

I now realise Cities was fairly different to those I'd already read - all thematically and stylistically much closer in spirit to Exterminator! - and I probably spent much of the page count wrestling with the variant style whilst failing to get almost all of the references. Never mind.

While no-one could possibly describe Cities of the Red Night as a complete departure for Burroughs, it's almost a linear narrative, or as close as he came in later years, with cut-up text applying only indirectly as informing the dream logic of what occurs. It's still riddled with and divided by non-sequiteurs, not least the alarming leaps from eighteenth century to the present and back again, but it's held together by its own momentum, requiring only that the reader trust in there being reasons for elements failing to add up with quite the elegance you might expect of a more conventional piece of writing.

In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs extrapolates a present founded on various pseudo-historical self-governing but short-lived Libertarian communities of the eighteenth century, creating a mythic precedent in the cities to which the title refers, situated in the Gobi Desert some hundred-thousand years before and in many respects echoing the present. It all adds up to something, approximately, or at least makes narrative sense if you squint a little; but it's the first half of the novel which really seems to represent Burroughs exploring new territory, and upon which its stellar reputation is presumably founded. Unfortunately, the second half - at least some of which visits the named ancient cities - returns to the familiar territory of guns, erect penises, and rollerskates, which is okay but for that it doesn't seem to add much; and while this time around I was equipped to pick up on all of the references to Uxmal, the Maya, Ix Chel and so on, it didn't really help and I experienced some zoning out here and there.

It's still a great book for all sorts of reasons, just not the masterpiece it could have been, so I'm not complaining.

Will

Will Self Will (2019)
A Memoir is the sub-heading, and it's autobiographical rather than an autobiography at least in so much as that it's an autobiography of Self's addiction more than it is of the author, dividing into four seemingly pivotal years of our man's relationship with the arm candy. That being said, the narrative swims back and forth up and down its own timeline, not so much stream of consciousness as following causes, effects and back again and in doing so simulating the way in which memory works, and in which experience is informed by the same. At this juncture it seems to be customary for someone to point out that Will Self is in fact fourth in line to the throne, is never seen without his characteristic top hat and monocle, and has no business telling us about anything which is rightfully the intellectual property of the working class - swearing and smoking fags for example. Also, if we really want to know what it's all about, we should read some Irvine Welsh.

Well, I've tried and I didnae like it, finding it all a bit screechy and pleased with itself whilst revelling in its depictions of people pooing into used syringes then injecting in hope of harvesting just a few remnant traces of lovely, lovely skag; and I don't care if he's from the streets because so am I, if we're going to take that as any sort of achievement. Will isn't from the streets in the sense of Irvine Welsh, but to be fair it makes no such claim, instead preferring to just get the fuck on with it and tell it like it was, with or without instances of cinematically crowd pleasing squalor. The shadow of William Burroughs, another young man of means with a penchant for recreational substances, looms large over Self's life, his writing, and this novel - and it is a novel in the sense of How the Dead Live, Dorian and the rest. We follow his addiction from its north London conception to building sites, Oxford university, Australia, India, and finally to rehab, a circuitous route peppered with cultural debris, earworms, and homilies repeated to the point of achieving mystical escape velocity. The will of the title, quite aside from attempts to give up the smack, seems to be about the desire for forward motion, inertia, and consequent failure. Perhaps inevitably, Will is not quite an easy read and is fairly disorientating, but in this respect seems true to the chemically refined focus of its subject.

'Woodbines, eh,' says Freddy, 'old man fags.'

Will takes one as well, leaving a single slim white missile. Yes . . . old man fags - the fags smoked by entropy itself . . . then crushed into a flying-saucer-shaped-ashtray heading for a black-fucking-hole . . .

Regardless of idiotic concerns about the qualifications of the author, Will communicates something rather than just waggling it in your face, although there's some of that too; and if the author's distinctive voice renders comparison to Burroughs a little pointless - aside from the non-linear thing - it pisses all over Confessions of an English Opium Eater. So that's a thumbs up from me.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interzone

William S. Burroughs Interzone (approx. 1958)
Interzone comprises material written after Queer but prior to publication of The Naked Lunch, for which it is proposed to have been something along the lines of a dry run. Although Burroughs' refers to his attempts to write a novel called Interzone in various letters, whether this is really that book seems debatable given its having been reconstructed around 1989 from fragments found in unexpected places, also incorporating excerpts from letters to Ginsberg, and the lengthy WORD which was excised from Naked Lunch. Seemingly true to its notional constitution, I've had Interzone sat on my bookshelf for many years before realising that I'd never actually bothered to read the thing. I'm not even sure where my copy came from.

So, we're pre-cut-up, but getting there given the non-linear thrust of the narrative which may not be entirely due to Interzone comprising off cuts and notes left out for the milkman. Themes seem to emerge, mostly driving towards the international zone of Tangier from which the title derives; and this weaves in quite nicely with Burroughs' notes to Ginsberg concerning his attempts to write a novel as he claws his way gradually towards the sort of process from which Naked Lunch resulted. It's insightful, mostly fascinating, up until we come to WORD, which is sixty pages of undifferentiated non-linear narrative - the usual stuff about cocks and prehensile piles - which at least proves that the apparent chaos of later novels isn't just some random flow turned on and off with the twist of a spigot, and it proves this because WORD is tedious and a slog to get though. I guess what Burroughs learned from WORD may have been that you have to carve the material into some coherent shape if you want it to work rather than simply drowning whatever it may have to say in a deluge of arbitrary scat.