Trejo

Danny Trejo & Donal Logue Trejo (2021)
I bought this autobiography for my wife's birthday with no particular plan to read it myself; but she insisted that I do so, and I like Danny Trejo, so I did and here we are. The two of us - Bess and myself, not me and Danny - saw the man speak at some vaguely charitable thing to do with the opening of a rehab clinic a few years ago. He was very entertaining and I've been well-disposed towards him ever since, to the point of believing that people who don't like Danny Trejo probably have something wrong with them.

I had some vague idea of the general shape of his existence, how he got where he is today, but not in this sort of detail. He was a bad ass, a career criminal, a violent nutcase, a substance abuser in and out of prison; and then he had a revelation about where his life was going, cleaned up, and has now spent the majority of his life dedicated to being a better person, and above all to helping others be better people. Never having struggled with addiction - apart from the fags, I suppose - I've occasionally found the language of recovery and its ruthless optimism a little headachey, but then it doesn't really matter what I think and if it works, as it certainly can do, then it's a beautiful thing; and by describing the context of his formerly troubled existence with such powerful clarity, Trejo really slams the message home without even a trace of preaching, or indeed anything surplus to requirements, resulting in a genuinely inspirational autobiography.

The account of his criminal past is, honestly, about a thousand times more interesting than Genet, and framed in such a way as to involve the reader. You know exactly where he's coming from, or at least I did; and sure, it's a celebrity biography with two names on the front cover and at least one account of hanging out with De Niro, but it's really a great fucking book because Trejo is a great fucking guy, and he's very funny, and being a genuine tough guy, he has no need to keep telling us how tough he is.

Edward James Olmos doesn't come out of it very well though, which is unfortunately amusing.

Collected Essays

Aldous Huxley Collected Essays (1956)
I've been well-disposed towards Huxley since I read Brave New World, then Crome Yellow, and more so since I discovered his association with D.H. Lawrence; and while the sheer volume of this collection (four-hundred pages, dense text, shitloads of classical references) meant it took me at least a year to gear up to reading it, I'm glad I made the effort. Huxley writes about more or less everything ever at exhaustive length and in painstaking detail, inevitably yielding a number of essays which went way over my head, being outside the scope of either my interests or my schooling; but for the most part he's perceptive and insightful even when navigating territory which is, for me, relatively unfamiliar. In this respect his essays remind me a little of the mighty Kenneth Clark, or Brian Sewell, or even Robert Hughes; and most of this stuff still applies today - perhaps now more than ever before.

It is vulgar, in literature, to make a display of emotions which you do not naturally have, but you think you ought to have, because all the best people do have them. It is also vulgar (and this is the more common case) to have emotions, but to express them so badly, with so many, too many protestings, that you seem to have no natural feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a process of literary forgery. Sincerity in art, as I have pointed out elsewhere, is mainly a matter of talent.

Written in 1931, this nevertheless neatly summarises much that is wrong with the stories we tell, social media and, by extension, western civilisation in 2022. While, focused on the work of Breuhgel for one example, Huxley's specific observations often seem to have a near universal prescience.

In every age theory has caused men to like much that was bad and reject much that was good. The only prejudice that the ideal art critic should have is against the incompetent, the mentally dishonest and the futile. The number of ways in which good pictures can be painted is quite incalculable, depending only on the variability of the human mind. Every good painter invents a new way of painting. Is this man a competent painter? Has he something to say, is he genuine? These are the questions a critic must ask himself. Not, does he conform with my theory of imitation, or distortion, or moral purity, or significant form?

That one's from 1925, back in the days - one might suppose - when we still had the chance to learn the lessons which we are quite clearly still to take on board.

The history of medical fashions, it may be remarked, is at least as grotesque as the history of fashion in women's hats—at least as grotesque and, since human lives are at stake, considerably more tragic.

Elsewhere in the collection, Huxley covers more or less everything you could possibly want from him - art, music, literature, travel, politics, religion, society - without shorthand, summary or skimming for the sake of anyone failing to keep up, including me, meaning I never quite made it to the end of 1941's Politics and Religion. Much of what was written here fed into Brave New World by one means or another, and the collection also includes that other smash hit, The Doors of Perception from which the band took their name, and which is interesting but probably not so earth-shattering as its reputation might suggest. If you have the patience, Huxley's Collected Essays otherwise rewards the effort many times over.

The Zaucer of Zilk

Al Ewing & Brendan McCarthy The Zaucer of Zilk (2012)
This was one of those things I missed, having long given up on 2000AD comic. I'd heard of it, but the title sounded like something you would expect to find in 2000AD and thus failed to pique my curiosity; at least until I happened upon this reprint and realised it was by Brendan McCarthy - which changes everything, obviously.

I still don't really know what to call this sort of thing, or even that it matters. The Zaucer of Zilk is Brendan McCarthy doing what he does best, and nothing else has really come close, certainly not Hewligan's fucking Haircut or - ugh - Really & Truly, or even Rogan Gosh for that matter. This, on the other hand, seems to exhibit kinship with Alice in Wonderland, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Vance's Dying Earth, Windsor McCay, and thankfully none of the also-rans who would give their collective left one to be this strange but just don't fucking get it - looking at you, Tim, Neil, and all of your self-consciously kooky spawn - also anyone who ever mistook the Cure for a wild display of imagination.

The Zaucer of Zilk tells a surprisingly traditional story using characters and settings which wouldn't seem out of place on a Nurse With Wound album, and to similarly disorientating effect but for the presence of a beating heart where one might, under other circumstances, expect to find the usual emotive button pushing. McCarthy has always been in a class of his own, but rarely has it been so obvious as it is here.

Nerves

Lester Del Rey Nerves (1942)
This is the novelisation - updated and expanded in 1975 - of a shorter story first published in 1942, but Lester insists it's essentially the same thing so that's what I'm going with. With the passage of time having overtaken the science-fiction element, Nerves was left beached as, I suppose, a medical thriller - not really my sort of thing, but scooped up regardless for reasons described nearly a year ago. It's set in a nuclear power plant, and the title refers to the tension which tends to mount when a nuclear power plant explodes, but also to the synaptic connections of Jorgensen, the man who knows how to stop the nuclear power plant exploding if only they can get him to wake up after the core went meltdown with himself inside.

Having been written in 1942, Nerves imagines those nuclear power plants of the future in the same way that Gernsback imagined us eventually sucking baby food from feed tubes so as to dispense with the grinding hardship of chewing. The power plant of Nerves not only supplies power to a massive community of erm… atomjacks and their families, but also manufactures super-heavy stable isotopes for use in whatever sciencey stuff we'll be doing in the future; and these super-heavy isotopes found somewhere on the periodic table way past plutonium and the others are stable, as I say, so they aren't really radioactive; but even if they were it wouldn't matter because if you're exposed to radiation there are all sorts of treatments available and in certain cases you just have a bit of a rest and you're usually fine. I suppose I should just be happy that no-one develops mysterious super powers.

Science-fiction has generally had a lousy track record in predictive terms, and Nerves is an example of science-fiction getting it really wrong. Science-fiction getting it really wrong can often be massively entertaining, but Nerves focusses on the tension, which doesn't work quite so well as it probably did in 1942, before even the immediate effects of exposure to radiation were fully understood, never mind what happens when one of the fucking things blows up. Furthermore, it attempts to weave tension from too large a cast of fairly generic characters, at least a couple of whom spend time talking about how they'll be able to pipe the waste into the local river and get rid of it that way - and these are good guys saving the day, not Mr. Burns and Smithers.

I assume Nerves was pulled out and given a fresh coat of paint partially in response to just how much the public loved their disaster movies during the seventies, but given how faithful it seemingly remains to the magazine version of 1942, it seems a little like reprinting First Men in the Moon as a Star Wars cash-in.

D.H. Lawrence and His World

Harry T. Moore & Warren Roberts D.H. Lawrence and His World (1966)
Always room for one more biography of D.H. Lawrence, I guess, and this one made the cut because it's full of photographs I'd never seen before, which really helps refine one's impression of the man and his world - as promised by the title. Additionally, being more visually orientated than usual, the text is snappy and to the point, distilling the usual four-hundred page account into just over a quarter of that, so what it may lack in detail is compensated by a more coherent summary of Lawrence's life as a whole. This is the third biography I've read of the man, and I've found plenty that I missed through other versions having their noses pressed up so much closer to the screen, figuratively speaking.

One minor reason for my enduring interest in this writer is how my own life seems to have echoed his, at least geographically speaking, and entirely by accident. We were both born in the Midlands, gravitated to south London, then Mexico City and Oaxaca, and then the American southwest give or take a few hundred miles. The patterns are only loosely parallel with plenty that doesn't match up, but are at least close enough for me to have raised an eyebrow at instances of having stayed in the same hotel and suchlike; and I feel it affords me a certain perspective on at least some of what he wrote, which this biography underscores.

How to Get to Apocalypse

Erica L. Satifka How to Get to Apocalypse (2021)
Keeping in mind that I make no claim as to having my finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction publishing, I'm nevertheless beginning to suspect that Satifka may actually be our greatest living science-fiction author. At least I don't recall having read anything vaguely of the moment which has been anything like so good, and even if we expand our definition of contemporary back by a decade or so to include a few of the allegedly heavy hitters - Reynolds, Stross or whoever - I stand by my statement.

Her writing has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick with some frequency, and some justification, although it also recalls the parables of Ursula LeGuin and, more than anything, the dynamic of all those cyberpunk writers warning against the corporate commodification of society; although personally I've only read William Gibson on that last count and I like Satifka more. Whilst I'm reluctant to analyse my own preferences, or possibly biases, there are certain things I look for in a piece of science-fiction writing.

• I like to be drawn in by something which doesn't make immediate sense, which needs figuring out, and which, once I've figured it out, will have something to say beyond simple statements of its own weirdness.
• I dislike the weird or brain-meltingly futuristic just for its own sake. I'm not keen on flashy or self-consciously edgy.
• I'm not actually adverse to adventures, except they're usually too predictable to allow for much wiggle room in terms of the first point. I'd prefer to avoid anything which reads like it would rather be on TV.

Satifka ticks all of these boxes while telling stories of survival, or of just about getting by, amongst people who work at fast food restaurants or have trouble making rent, the sort of people Dick wrote about - those of us who, if we ever make it into space, will still be cleaning the fucking toilets because they can't get a robot to do it. This means a lot to me, because I don't want to read another novel opening with anything like this ever again:

Space Security Agent Lucas Manning watched the red light winking across the screen of his operations monitor with a growing sense of alarm.

In case it's not obvious why I should regard the above as the worst sort of generic bollocks, State of Emergency, the first of the twenty-three short stories in this collection, kicks off like so:

In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone.

See! It only gets stranger from that point on, but stranger by terms which come to make perfect sense. All of the stories here inhabit variant versions of the end of the world, or of a world, none concluding with a bang but most with a sigh of such depressing resonance as to crack the foundations of whatever you're stood upon; and depressing because this is satire at its finest, a horrible mirror held up to our own increasingly desperate existence with home truths delivered before you've even noticed anyone was maybe trying to tell you something you needed to hear.

Satifka delivers accounts of places which feel like the world outside our windows, at least thematically, combining the painfully and playfully familiar with wildly flamboyant flourishes of imagination that - just like the real world - defy our ability to predict just what the fuck is happening; and she writes clearly and beautifully without treading narrative water, while making it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

Honestly, this one makes all of those New York Times Bestseller guys clogging up the book store carousels with their eight-hundred page contributions to the Asimov revival look like wankers.

DON'T PISS ME OFF!!!

Meg McCarville DON'T PISS ME OFF!!! (2022)
I've come across this sort of thing before, even done it myself to a certain extent - self-published collections of emails and the like which you really felt were worth preserving for the benefit of future generations. However, this is different because we're talking Meg McCarville, with what she describes as a collection of my most violent, viral, and vicious emails, text messages, and Yelp! reviews. This isn't one of those things where some web designer you've never heard of passive-aggressively corrects plebeian clients who have failed to comprehend the basic principles of design.

The next day it was 90 degrees outside and I slowly started to realize that my room had no air conditioning. Besides that, it had black mold in the bathroom, no remote control, a bizarre closet with no bar with a door that might only barely fit a human carcass inside, with a wooden desk pushed up against the door. The desk had a drawer that had FUCK OFF carved into it. This drawer also had creepily opened and closed of its own will, but I have two dealbreakers. Bed bugs and no AC.

The first message kicks off on the very first page, no foreplay, no preamble, just straight into are we LONELY on thanksgiving you dumb fucking crackhead CUNT? There's no title page, no fancy shit, a freewheeling approach to punctuation, a ton of the angriest CAPSLOCK you ever did see, and what amounts to Meg backing an eighteen wheeler dump truck up to the reader and unloading a megaton of weapons grade sarcasm and wrath, the kind which reduces the harshest, blackest metal band you've ever heard to Daniel O'Donnell; and she's very, very funny because these are mostly righteous sermons which really needed to be made; and they're massively satisfying because most of us have been on the same end of at least one of the shitty sticks described herein, or at least I have. That said, some of the fury tips over into the sort of disturbing territory which means you're probably not going to find copies of this on sale at the counter of your local bookstore next to Who Farted? She reaches such a peak of anger during the final ten page tirade against an unidentified party that she's hitting the wrong keys half the time, leaving us to unscramble the RESULTIDGN cASPLOK CHOAS, which actually sort of works, weirdly enough. If I had any complaint, I suppose it could have been longer, but being as the existing sixty-nine pages read like a continuous rocket blast in the face of everyone who ever said something stupid, it's probably the length it needs to be.

Buy as many copies as you need here, then also pick up American Victim which is incredible and for which I'll get around to posting a review at some point.