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.

The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis The Rachel Papers (1973)
It's a coming of age novel, according to someone or other, probably the late Simon Morris. Our teenager is Charles Highway, and the title refers to a folder full of notes he compiles in preparation for seducing someone called Rachel. I assume the compilation of said notes is therefore an immature enterprise from which Charles is liberated once he gets to knob the aforementioned Rachel; and it's a load of musings on paper, just like a book - so that's all a bit postmodern, I guess.

The thing is, nice idea though it may well be, it's difficult to say whether the correlation of Charles' presumably creepy notebook actually makes much difference to the subsequent penetration of Rachel, or even to anything at all. Whilst I violently reject the insipid notion that a novel should include sympathetic characters, it usually helps if you don't actively hate those featured, and Charles just seemed like your average over-moneyed Oxford-bound Hooray Henry, inhabitant of a world of braying wankers to which I have never been granted access. I found it not only difficult to care what happens to the twat, but even to be amused, or to find much of a point to this novel having been written in the first place. Everyone drifts through their slightly privileged existence, from cradle to grave without consequence, idly marvelling at their own progress from time to time as though lacking any idea as to why any of it is happening; all seasoned with descriptions of it going in and out, complete with smells, which I'm sure impressed the hell out of Simon but did bugger all for me.

It's not the worst book I've ever read. It's about fifty billion miles from being the best. It's just there, keeping you busy for a couple of hours with its underwhelming and ever so slightly smartarsed wisecracks.

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
During the thicker, chewier novels, I'll occasionally take a break around the half way mark to read something—or even anything which feels a bit less like being at work; because I like to enjoy what I read, that usually being the entire fucking point of reading something in the first place. Sometimes if I discover that I've actually been reading an overextended gusher of piss bladdered by an idiot who doesn't deserve my patronage - as occurred with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, I'll give up, just stop reading, perhaps even hurl the book across the room and switch to something better. This didn't really feel like an option with Moby-Dick, given that the first hundred or so pages are astonishing and that it has a certain reputation, but I reached the point where I needed a break, and in fact ended up taking two separate holidays - about half way and then again just before the end - still with no fucking whale in sight. I read no less than ten other, considerably more enjoyable books during those two periods of rest. Some of them were comic books, although I'm not sure that necessarily has any bearing on Melville's inability to hold my attention, aside from that Superman was, on this occasion, more interesting than - off the top of my head - the entire chapter describing a bit of stick against which harpoons may be propped when not in use.

Actually, the chapter about rope was probably worse.

Fucking rope.

To start at the beginning, I assume we all know what Moby-Dick is and what it does, more or less. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that, having read Superman comics, my twenty-first century expectations may perhaps be unfairly accustomed to the sweet, sugary taste of an instant populist fix, meaning I'm unlikely to be well disposed towards an entire fucking chapter about a piece of rope the more plodding, archaic narratives of the nineteenth century; although actually I've read plenty of novels approximately contemporary with this one and haven't had a problem, or at least no problem of the kind I encountered trying to frog march my attention span towards the chapter in which shit actually happens. It may be that Moby-Dick had less work to do in 1851, back when the world's oceans were as much unknown territory as outer space became during the century which followed; and it's worth remembering that the majority of the novel inhabits the realms of water, air, fire to a lesser extent, and with earth as nothing more reliable than the deck beneath the feet of its unfortunate cast. So it's a novel which creates a world of its own, far removed from anything familiar, and maybe that was enough in 1851.

The first one-hundred or so pages, during which Ishmael meets and forges a rudimentary friendship with Queequeg, his future shipmate, are wonderfully vivid, strange and engrossing, and seem to promise much for the rest of the book. Then we set sail, meet Ahab, and settle into a droning testimony about whales and how to kill them which surely didn't need to be anything like so long as it was, and which feels as though the author is desperately scrabbling for fascinating facts by which to keep us interested while nothing happens due to no-one having yet spotted the whale which took Ahab's leg. I can see how the immersive level of detail - mostly gore and slaughter reduced to an industrial process - and the duration of its long-winded delivery might serve to impress upon the reader just how much of a whaling trip is spent hanging around, and how much is at stake, but it nevertheless reads like the work of someone without anything much to say who nevertheless doesn't know when to shut up. Even D.H. Lawrence noted:

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick. He preaches and he holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

Melville will tell us that at this juncture the delivery of my news must apply itself to a more earthy subject than might delight listeners' ears, namely that I would deliver information concerning and detailing my intent to adjourn to a secluded spot so fashioned for the broad and impolitic custom of its dispensation, rather than guys, I'm going for a shit, okay?; and it becomes exhausting, just as America's love of ceremony, capes, ionic columns, and the longest, long speeches ever has always been exhausting, and an overcompensation. Should any of it deliver us unto anything of consequence, it would be fine or at least appropriate, but it doesn't. The Ahab of myth may be a man driven by his own mania, but the guy in this book is just a bit of a cunt, and probably less nutty than you would expect of a man who once had his leg bitten off by a whale; and the novel may well be about the death of God, or proof of how little the universe cares about any of us, but Melville seems to depend on scale alone for the communication of his message, whatever it was - if he even knew.

The literary potential of whaling as a metaphor is astonishing, at least as of the mid-nineteenth century, given the whale as the largest living creature then known to mankind - something more like an ecology than an animal. A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine developed a theory about the influence of the whale on human history - all founded on many world cultures supporting creation myths based around giant oceanic monsters - Tiamat and Cipactli to name but two - and the apparent global prevalence of solar symbols combining a circle with a chevron which, my friend suggested, might be derived from whale vertebrae. There was more to it, and although it was overly reliant upon coincidental resemblance and didn't really explain anything which wasn't already supported by a decent explanation, the idea was nevertheless an impressive attempt to grapple with our experience of reality and the assumptions we make about it; and I really feel that Moby-Dick should have done the same thing, but better.

Deadman

 

Mike Baron & Kelley Jones Deadman (1989)
The closer I get to actually finishing Moby fucking Dick, the harder it becomes. I'll open the book, set my eyes to yet another droning chapter, and before I know what's happening, I'm half way through something more enjoyable - even anything more enjoyable given that it's a massive fucking category encompassing every book ever written except for Moby-Dick and possibly the works of Dostoyevsky. This time it was Deadman, specifically a single story spanning a couple of prestige format series - two issues each - published '89 and '92 respectively.

Deadman is the creation of Arnold Drake, who also came up with the Doom Patrol, and is similarly at odds with the mainstream caped milieu upon which he occasionally intrudes. His superpower is that he's dead - hence the name and the red costume with a big white D on the front. Specifically, he's a crime-solving ghost, or at least that's the resume. The supernatural is a realm where DC Comics always fared quite well, not least since Alan Moore knotted all of the various characters together into a single spooky continuum during his run on Swamp Thing, and which arguably resulted in the founding of the Vertigo imprint. I liked Vertigo, but I still think their best stuff happened before they felt like they had to give it a special name - Mike Baron's Deadman, for example.

Firstly, the art of Kelley Jones is incredible, drawing on the expressionism of all those pre-code horror comics to render something which is as much its own visual language as Giger's biomechanics - to which it's a sort of swampy, mushroom festooned rural cousin. Mike Baron's writing further abstracts the story from its distant caped origins to forge what I suppose you might call tender horror, allowing a crushing sense of pathos to a character who may as well be the contents of a butcher's shop window and without any obvious aesthetic contradictions. Deadman falls in love with another ghost, it all goes horribly wrong, and ludicrous though it probably should be, it still does its job better than Herman Melville evidently did his. This is one of those things which I had on eBay for a while, but no-one bought it presumably due to none of the usual attention grabbing names being involved. This has at least meant that I haven't had to buy the thing twice - as happened with a few of the comic books I ended up selling - but seems like a sad indictment on the taste of the comic buying public.

(R)evolution

Gary Numan (R)evolution (2020)
I've always had a lot of time for the Numan and never really bought into the idea that he ever truly fell off, so to speak. Some of his greatest albums, at least to my ears, were those which seemingly went more or less direct to the bargain bin, Berserker and Strange Charm for example. The late eighties were a bit fucking rough for me personally, and it was significant that I couldn't actually afford to buy new records for a couple of those years, which is how I came upon Strange Charm - which really got me through that rough patch. It's sad to realise that the man who recorded it now regards it as a bit of a dud, and even more depressing to read that the one occasion of This is Love getting airplay was followed by Steve Wright taking the piss out of it for being saaaaaaad.

I've always loathed Steve Wright, the unfunny fucker.

Anyway, this is a showbiz autobiography reading, as they tend to do, very much like a showbiz autobiography with the cadence of something dictated; which doesn't really matter because Numan is an interesting guy and he avoids the pitfalls which usually render this sort of thing unreadable. I'm not sure how this relates to Praying to the Aliens, the previous and now out of print account, but it doesn't feel as though anything has been left out. Numan recalls his initial rise and subsequent - and eventually temporary - fall from grace in fascinating and self-deprecating detail without mistaking record sales for artistic achievement. He's aware that the media thought he was weird, and remains thankfully unapologetic, even disinclined to portray himself in a necessarily flattering light. Above all, the aspects of this account which I hadn't anticipated are the amiable tone and the sense of humour. He doesn't really tell jokes, but he's naturally funny, and the narrative begins to feel a little like something that happened to a character played by Tony Hancock or perhaps even Robin Askwith after a few chapters - it's something in how Numan's enduring, perhaps naive optimism contrasts so dramatically with the string of custard pies which life seems to have flung in his face to a regular schedule, and not even in terms of anything so prosaic as record sales. I'm talking punchlines, like the Florida gig where an overhead waste pipe somehow broke and showered the sound desk with actual shite. It's a mercy that our man has been able to laugh at this kind of thing because the book is packed with it and to the point of reading like Davy Jones drawing the exploits of some comedically unlucky character in the pages of Viz. I expected mostly boasting, self-importance, and a million written variations on those tracks - of which there was one on each album for a while - about how the press hates Gary Numan but that's fine because Gary Numan doesn't care even though this is yet another song about how much he doesn't care; but this is a warm, genuinely thoughtful, and frequently funny book. As rock star autobiographies go, it doesn't quite top Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, but it comes surprisingly close.

Kid Eternity

Grant Morrison & Duncan Fegredo Kid Eternity (1991)
I bought it when it first came out as three prestige format books - as I seem to recall them being termed. I read it once, didn't understand it, then eventually flogged it on eBay. I moved to the United States, and now I've bought it again reasoning that it couldn't have been that bad, surely?

It isn't, but I see why I only read it once then flogged it.

Kid Eternity was some golden age character, a small boy who lived on a boat with an old sea captain who could summon up historical persons from beyond the grave - presumably George Washington and some other guys, but mainly George Washington - to help him foil nautical bank robberies or fight monsters or whatever it was he did for a living. Fast forward to the early nineties and pow - the comic book had grown up and thus was every other creaky old cape botherer from the forties and fifties deemed ripe for revival as an edgy, angst ridden Tarantino knock off; and DC comics had stood Grant Morrison in front of one of those automatic tennis ball launchers - but loaded with money - because he was a terrible infant, for which I'm sure there's probably some French term.

Duncan Fegredo's art is frequently beautiful, and there are some incredible panels in this thing; but I've often found him too dark in a general sense, with page after dark brown page obscuring whatever the hell is supposed to be happening and to whom in an amorphous wash of muddy paint splatter and scratchy lines. This wouldn't be a problem if Morrison hadn't left so much of the actual story telling up to the art, presumably for the sake of mood. I mean, it's not entirely awful, and most of it's easy enough to follow if you're paying attention and don't mind not knowing what the fuck is supposed to be happening until long after it's happened; but, with the best will in the world, it's DC's pseudo-mystical cosmos divided into chaos and order beefed up with a shitload of chaos magic bullshit of the kind favoured by people who own way too many Coil albums* and who take them far too seriously - people who, like Grant, genuinely believe that dark matter, the missing mass of the universe could be human consciousness; and we learn that during his golden age youth, Kid Eternity was actually being bummed flat by that horny old kiddy-fiddling sea captain, because why wouldn't he be? There's also a recurring sequence about urban legends, but it's anyone's guess how it relates to the whole. Kid Eternity is better than the Invisibles, for which it reads like a warm up act, but that's not saying much. It has some really nice ideas, but much of the flavours are lost in the soupy whole.

*: By my estimation I'd say that nobody really needs more than no albums by Coil.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Marv Wolfman & George Pérez Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985)
Sometimes if I find something I'm reading a bit joyless, a bit of a chore, I'll take a break halfway through and read something else for the sake of a breather. This time it's Melville's Moby-Dick which has been kicking my ass, and so much so that I took a short holiday around the halfway mark. I'm now taking another break even though I have just one hundred pages to go, because it's like reading a novel written by William Sanderson's portrayal of E.B. Farnum in HBO's Deadwood. There was an entire chapter discussing maritime rope, for fuck's sake, which is why Crisis is the eighth thing I've read which isn't Moby-Dick even as the same remains glued to my bedside table with the tenacity of that nine-incher which no amount of sink plunging can force around the s-bend.

Anyway, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a little before my time in terms of my comic book habit, and I never really felt the need to backtrack. It was an attempt to rationalise, streamline and reset the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest so as to spare us the indignity of having to read stories about Krypto the Superdog or Batman drawing his pension, because that would be like, you know, ridiculous. I can see the sense of the idea, although it seems a bit redundant given that the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest remained pretty fucking ridiculous even without all those alternate realities making the place look untidy. From where I'm stood, this caped stuff tends to work best when emphasising something other than the fact of everyone wearing leotards whilst biffing criminals and returning the stolen wallet to the millionaire, and DC always had a much harder time rising above its inherently wholesome ideals than the competition. Even if the point of Crisis was the excision of talking ducks and crime fighting dogs that we might feel at least a little more grown up when seen reading the thing in mixed company, Wildcat and the Joker still somehow made it past the interview stage. Wildcat is a superhero whose mask features not only cat ears but also whiskers and a cleft upper lip, and this Joker is the guy who leaves comedic clues to his crimes for Batman to solve.

That said, I generally have a lot of time for Marv Wolfman, and he does what he can with the material. I'm not a massive fan of George Pérez and while his art can be occasionally gorgeous, I've always found it a bit too clean somehow. Crisis sort of works in that it deals with events on such epic scale whilst juggling a cast of thousands so that nothing amounts to much more than a passing glimpse of something huge, which probably wouldn't work with a more refined focus; and in keeping everything moving, it tells a story with the tone of hearsay, lending the saga a mythic quality - a tale of war amongst the Gods, which is approximately what it is, despite most of those Gods being essentially ludicrous. There's a problem in so much as that we all know where the story is going so all of those caped types firing rays at one another page after page feels somewhat inconsequential. Much of the story was intended to rewrite its own continuity so that actions would have consequences and couldn't be conveniently written off as having occurred on Earth-180 or wherever; so it's ironic that the epic conflict should feel so arbitrary and lacking in consequence, being just what superheroes do so that we know they're superheroes - an endless repetitive loop of days saved on a Biblical scale.

The inevitable introduction tells us how important Crisis was, how it was the first of its kind, and how it was so much classier than Marvel's Secret Wars; and true enough Secret Wars is pretty fucking stupid and nowhere near so elegant as this, at least in the rendering; but frankly, Secret Wars was a lot more fun with different things happening from one issue to the next, so it didn't really matter that Klaw seemed like a guy who had hit his head and stumbled off the set of Crackerjack. While Crisis on Infinite Earths is readable and reasonably entertaining, or at least more entertaining that Herman Melville describing different types of harpoon, it's kind of underwhelming and it's certainly nothing like so deep as Grant Morrison might have you believe.