Body to Job

Christopher Zeischegg Body to Job (2018)
I don't know how it's taken me so long to work out that The Magician wasn't actually Christopher Zeischegg's first, but better late than never, I suppose. It's two years since I read The Magician, but Body to Job inhabits similar territory from what I can recall, being grown from the same autobiographical soil without necessarily bringing forth the same fruit. Zeischegg was enough of a name in the porn industry to accrue fan mail, and Body to Job is about that. A few sections are obviously fictional, although there's otherwise no clear line drawn between reality and allegory, presumably on the grounds that certain events are better described as at least partially fictional. Honestly, it's not the sort of subject to which I'm ordinarily drawn, but Zeischegg is one hell of a writer.

I don't really have a problem with porn, my take being that I'm not entirely sure what I think about it, or even whether whatever I may think about it matters. I understand Andrea Dworkin's reasons for wanting it banned but, realistically speaking, I suspect this may be one genie that's never going back in the bottle; so I suppose beyond certain reforms, I simply believe it should be more difficult to access. On the other hand, I distrust sex work replacing older, apparently more offensive terms simply because I distrust grown men dressed as either ponies or little Japanese girls screaming whilst waving sex work is work placards, because I'm disinclined to enable debilitating psychological conditions, and because I don't actually recall anyone ever claiming that sex work wasn't work, one branch of which is reputed to be the world's oldest profession, after all. Anyway, Zeischegg seems attuned to where I'm coming from.

Neoliberal pundits whining about my job to earn ratings and book deals and spouting bullshit advocacy claims for people they'd never met pissed me off. So I decided to take a stance and balance out the conversation.

This is more or less what this book does, being the word of someone who has lived this stuff in detail - as distinct from simply having opinions; and so Body to Job is fascinating in describing territory quite unlike what I guess many of us had assumed was a map. His prose is tight, functional and efficient, delivering meaning without drowning everything in mood, adjectives, or anything surplus to requirements, because nothing described herein requires a melodramatic soundtrack telling you what to feel about what our guy is going through with his doomed porn shoots, gynecological misfires, and that endless line of strangers waiting to have sex, rip him off, or both. It takes skill to write with this level of precision, delivering meaning without dressing it up in bullshit; and it works and is refreshing given that bullshit is traditionally the means by which most porn is communicated, I would argue.

Body to Job isn't porn, although that's what it's about - not even the sort of joy of squalor variant you might expect of transgressive fiction - if we really have to use that term. On the contrary, Zeischegg's testimony borders on cheery, or at least amiable, regardless of what he's going through. The possibility of sunlight is implicit during even the darkest passages, and yet without turning it into just the sort of empowerment bollocks I was grumbling about two paragraphs back. There's even a comic undercurrent felt here and there, just like you have with real life.

'Okay,' she said. 'Carry on.'

'The name of my film is Death and Sports Bras.'

The professor shifted in her seat. 'I still don't understand. What are your characters' motivations in this story? Who is the protagonist?'

'Well, I've been listening to a lot of black metal. And I have this thing for sports bras. Because they look kind of like an androgynous, uh, futuristic uniform. But I guess that doesn't really answer your question.'

About half way through this novel, autobiography, collection, or however you chose to frame it, I realised Christopher Zeischegg doesn't actually remind me of any other writer that I've read, which is kind of a rare thing; and yet his voice is strong and distinctive which seems to make the lack of obvious parallels all the more unusual. It inhabits a world we probably take for granted, the oldest profession, cargo cult enactments of the most fundamental human transactions, the deed upon which most of our jokes are based, and Zeischegg reveals how little we really know, perhaps about anything. Who could have foreseen that something quite so profound could feature so much screwing?

Moon of Mutiny

Lester Del Rey Moon of Mutiny (1961)
I'm unlikely to ever push expectant mothers into oncoming traffic in order to get at a Del Rey I haven't read, and I didn't really have coherent plans to read any more, but this popped up in a crappy book sale - along with Nerves - and would have been pulped in the absence of a buyer, and somehow I just couldn't let that happen. It's another juvie, as might be surmised from the title and - as with a number of Lester's other juvies - stars a plucky young space cadet who brushes his teeth and doesn't want to disappoint dad - who happens to be a space general or something of the sort. This time it's young Fred Halpern who gets booted from the academy for failing to go by the book, and whose freewheeling ways somehow end up saving the day on the moon. It would be sheer arseache under any other circumstances, but Del Rey's writing is always a pleasure, and so much so that it's fairly easy to forget that you're almost reading Enid Blyton in terms of plot. Moon of Mutiny is hard science-fiction in the Asimov sense, and Del Rey communicates some truly peculiar ideas about rocketry and lunar geology without lecturing or jeopardising his popular touch; and as always, the hokey message you're probably expecting never quite materialises in familiar form, leaving us with a startlingly original rendering of a tale which probably would have been a waste of time with anyone else sat at the typewriter.

Forever

Thomas Moore Forever (2021)
Once again I'm pretty much lost for words, Moore's prose being of such scalpel precision as to render whatever I might have to say about this unusually short novel equivalent to it's really smart innit. Our man travels to Paris, hooks up with strangers, and coasts through his own fragile existence with the detachment of one whose time is running out, and who acknowledges that none of it truly amounts to anything.

Capitalism is everywhere - especially death. But after death it's gone, like everything else - I presume it will mean nothing. Things will lose their meaning. Things won't matter to me. I won't be me. All this will be just - I should just start leaving blank spaces on the page. I don't cruise again. I don't look at any more websites. Sex is gone now. It feels like a big thing to put to rest. I don't know if it is or not. It's hard to tell if things matter or if they just feel like they do.

Moore somehow manages to describe that which probably cannot be described - emotionally speaking, by mapping the empty spaces around it, and somehow achieving it with as few words as possible; and it's beautiful to behold, even though it really shouldn't be.

Incredible.

Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People

Paul Woods & Gavin Baddeley
Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People (2010)
It's taken me an entire decade to get around to reading this one and for numerous reasons, the main one being that I've known Paul - the author, or one of the authors, I guess - for nearly thirty years and distinctly remember a phone call ending with I'll have to go now, Lawrence, I've got to translate this incoherent piece of shit into readable English before the weekend. I think he was referring to Gavin Baddeley's Lucifer Rising which he'd been given the task of editing for Plexus Books, which didn't instill me with much confidence in their subsequent collaboration.

For what it may be worth, I'm also a contributor. Specifically Paul phoned me back when he was putting the book together asking for a painting of bodies impaled on stakes, mainly because, as he described it, visual material relating to Vlad the Impaler was a bit thin on the ground. It seemed an odd request, but I did what I could and was paid for it, although I'm still not that convinced by the thing I came up with. Nevertheless I'm thanked in the front of the book, and in fact I'm thanked within the same sentence as Boyd Rice. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that but I'm probably about due for cancellation anyway, so I don't suppose it matters.

Online criticisms include one particularly peculiar accusation of homophobia which I can only assume must refer to descriptions of sodomy given without any attendant suggestion of it being a powerful and inspiring challenge to gender stereotypes; and a general whine of discontent about a lack of academic rigour evinced by a haphazard citation of sources. The second of these is true in so much as that this is arguably a populist dissertation, but it seems a little unfair given the scarcity of source material regarding the historical Vlad Dracula necessitating a speculative approach, and that this book is as much about the subsequent myth and our interpretation of the same. Certain speculative passages are written as fictionalised accounts, striking an initially odd note akin to a written equivalent of those bloody awful historical television documentaries which pepper the narrative with scenes of underpaid actors hopping about, pretending to be Shakespeare or to have invented fire or whatever; but the scenes are well written - probably by Paul, I suspect - if gruesome, and surely serve to communicate the visceral power of the mythology under discussion better than would any more sober description. This seems to matter because, I would argue, I think this subject needs to be communicated in terms which may upset the reader in order for us to fully understand it. So, one might term the book a personal vision in the sense of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which would have amounted to little more than a list of names and dates without the stewardship of its author.

Another criticism I've noticed has been the narrative's tendency to digress, to flit off elsewhere with discussion of Al Capone, Ian Brady, de Sade or whoever for the sake of comparison, which - true enough - would be a distraction in something more academic, but which I believe serves this sort of discussion very well. The epilogue details the mythic appeal of Dracula in the field of black metal and similarly unlistenable genres, which admittedly seems a bit surplus to requirements; and additionally asks the aforementioned Boyd Rice what he thinks, and what he thinks is unfortunately quite interesting and perceptive, which is yet another argument I am absolutely not having ever again - but otherwise it all hangs together beautifully, I'd say. It may even be that digressions made for the sake of comparison somewhat alleviate the potentially overwhelming parade of wooden stakes going up arses, page after page after page.

Vlad Dracula was a minor regent in a part of the world which has been absolutely central to the history of human civilisation up until recent times, and Woods does a great job of impressing upon the reader that Western Europe was very much an obscure fringe concern for most of this story, which itself maps most of why we're here today, culturally speaking; and Vlad Dracula was a fascinating, thoroughly brutal figure, yet by no means the worst of his cultural sphere, and who probably wouldn't have generated quite so strong a legend without some potentially redeeming features - or at least redeeming in the context of fifteen century Wallachia. This book, which is nothing if not thorough in examining its subject from every conceivable angle, explains the appeal of the myth in such convincing detail that I almost want to give Bram Stoker's dreary novel another read.

Getting Even

Woody Allen Getting Even (1972)
I'm not sure there's really much I can say about this one which I didn't already say back in April last year, so in summary - yes, the man is a wrong 'un, but unfortunately this is still funny. Sorry.

Highlights include:

Therefore the Cartesian dictum 'I think, therefore I am' might better be expressed 'Hey, there goes Edna with a saxophone!'

...and, of course, the astonishing testimony of Friedrich Schmeed, barber to the Third Reich:

I did not know Hitler was a Nazi. The truth was, for years I thought he worked for the phone company.

As in Without Feathers, it's mostly a transparently formulaic juxtaposition of allegedly high culture with the prosaic, mundane, and conversational, but it works for me; and at just a little over a hundred pages, Getting Even doesn't find time to over-egg this particular pudding.

Dubliners

James Joyce Dubliners (1907)
I'd been umming and ahing about tackling Ulysses before my brain fully reverts to adolescent slush in the wake of my having resumed reading comic books with teenage fervour. Nick Sweeney, or possibly someone else, suggested I first give Dubliners a shot, and so I have.

I thought A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was mostly wonderful, inhabiting territory with which I was loosely familiar. Dubliners I've found a little more impenetrable in so far as I couldn't really tell whether there was anything to penetrate, so to speak. I picked up a few hints from the internet, but mostly themes which I'd already noticed, or at least suspected might be in there somewhere, none of which significantly increased my reading pleasure. Dubliners is a collection of short stories describing significant moments of understanding in the lives of Dublin people around the turn of the century, but feels a little like a novel given the consistent themes running through these fifteen vignettes; and the progression from youth to age, book-ended by death in both the first and final stories is surely deliberate. The turn of the century apparently saw a rise of Irish Nationalism, notably in Dublin, which Joyce views with scepticism, regarding it as a stifling influence. Much of the book is concerned with inertia and the weight of tradition or expectation, with the contrast of modernity and social progress faintly tangible as occurring around the edges of the narrative.

I could tell what the collection was doing, and I enjoyed most of the stories, but the sense of detachment was a little overwhelming in places, with the author leaving us to pass judgement in situations which seemed to rely upon a much greater investment in the culture of Dublin than I've ever enjoyed. This isn't to say that I needed - ugh - identifiable characters, so much as that it was all a bit too relentlessly brown for my tastes. It felt like reading a Walter Sickert interior of roughly the same vintage.

Probably a bit too soon for Ulysses then.

Nine Inch Nails

Martin Huxley Nine Inch Nails (1997)
This is the sort of rock star biography for which the writing process presumably entailed the author sat in a room with a laptop surrounded by towers of magazines and music papers; and perhaps unsurprisingly, he's also published books about AC/DC, Eminem, and Aerosmith. All the same, I never read any of the magazines from which Trent Reznor and others are quoted at considerable length, and almost everything here was news to me and accordingly fascinating. I fucking love Nine Inch Nails without reservation, and although this biography could have gone horribly wrong given Reznor's completely bewildering admiration for panto-metal and scary face acts such as Ministry and -ugh- Skinny Puppy, Huxley gets the balance absolutely right, picks up on the subtleties of the man's art, and gives duly respectful testimony without kissing ass. Even the term industrial is used relatively sparingly, and usually with a disclaimer. Good job, all things considered.