Sex Pistols File

Ray Stevenson (editor) Sex Pistols File (1978)
I borrowed this from some kid at school and spent the next couple of weeks absorbing more or less every last detail. With hindsight, I'm not even sure I had any of their records at that point and may only have known them from Sid's versions of Something Else and C'mon Everybody. By the time I had enough of a disposable income to buy my own copy, it had vanished from the shelves and the moment had passed. Now catching up, four decades later, I'm astonished to realise that I vaguely knew the guy who put the book together. My friend Carl came to know Ray Stevenson fairly well in later years and so I met him down the pub on a couple of occasions. I knew he had one hell of a reputation as having taken many of the best known photographs of the whole punk era, and I vaguely recall he had some great stories, but somehow the penny didn't quite drop beyond something fairly basic about my probably having seen his work in Sounds.

Well, fuck me.

The book is a scrappy splatter of Ray's photographs along with articles and interviews from the papers arranged in roughly chronological order so as to provide a pleasantly impressionistic summary of the rise and fall of the Pistols, and one which - oddly enough - seems to work better than the usual biographical narratives through the image and noise being preserved without any dominant authorial voice getting in the way. So it reads now just as it did then, from my perspective, as the fortunes of a bunch of older kids who were trying to make things a bit more fun and interesting than they had been for some time. Maybe it's not so much that I lost sight of what this book did for me, but I'd forgotten how much of it came from this thing. This was where I learned that sometimes it's necessary, even positive, to point out when something is dull or stupid or needs to be replaced by something better. We seem to have forgotten this of late, at least judging by the number of times I've had some self-appointed gatekeeper set me right about adults dressed as characters from children's television shows, or insisting that I really should try with such and such a fucking Yes album because the musicianship blah blah blah...

I don't really care that Rotten sells butter and votes Donald, and I don't really care that they were a boy band. They taught me the joys of saying no, and unpopular opinions, and not turning into your parents, and never having to say you're sorry. I sort of wish I'd realised this and had been able to directly thank Ray Stevenson when I had the opportunity, but never mind. It probably would have come across as slightly weird.

This one, in all sincerity, changed my life.

1985

Anthony Burgess 1985 (1978)
Hanging out on social media as I often do, there have been a couple of occasions of right-wing shitheads proclaiming that Orwell's 1984 was a warning against the evils of socialism, an observation made with some frequency during Donald Trump's first year in the hot seat, back when his Proud Boys were regularly firing up those tiki torches in protest against political correctness and the like; and it was an observation usually made within minutes of someone else pointing out that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, so it was the rest of us who were the real Nazis. Naturally, having read both Orwell's 1984 and his collected essays, I rolled my eyes.

Anyway, while the idea of socialism being the same as national socialism is obviously bollocks - the ethnic or cultural exclusivity of nationalism being in direct contradiction of socialist ideals, it unfortunately turns out the Trumpanzees were sort of right about 1984, albeit possibly for the wrong reasons; and I'm not sure how I missed it. Orwell, like Burgess - and me too, quite frankly - considered himself a socialist who despaired at the more didactic tendencies of the left, those prioritising ideology over people and whose ruthless zealotry had ultimately led to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. So while 1984 describes an oppressive totalitarian state, it's a satire quite clearly extrapolated from everything which kept Orwell awake at night back in 1948.

Burgess' response is 1985, a book divided into two complementary parts. The first comprises essays analysing Orwell's novel in comparison with how well socialism has been coping here in the real world. Burgess concludes that 1984 was not only lousy in a predictive sense - as the majority of science-fiction tends to be - but wasn't even particularly great as satire, being riddled with contradictions and ideas which seem hysterical in relation to that which inspired them. His point is that 1984 never happened, and couldn't happen, and his argument, as set out in the first half of this book, is convincing, illuminating, and extraordinarily perceptive - possibly one of the most insightful summaries of the politics of the last century that I've read.

Unfortunately, the second part of the argument employs a fictional narrative to make its point, whatever the hell that might be. It seems to be Burgess rewriting 1984 as he believes it should have been done, but as a satire based on his own era, specifically the late seventies. The elements of parody and exaggeration are either well done, or at least make sense in the context of what 1985 is trying to do, but being as the subject is socialism pushed to a ludicrous ideological extreme by the sort of wankers who presently hang around on Twitter policing the perpetrators of wrongthink, it comes across like a fucking Two Ronnies sketch about all those unions going on strike over the spoons in the staff canteen, coupled with the usual scaremongering about Islam. Were someone to commission Richard Littlejohn to write a satirical summary of left-wing politics in Britain in the seventies, I don't actually know if it would be much different aside from the quality of the writing. 1985 is not entirely without worth, and the overeducated street gangs are sort of amusing, somewhat harking back to A Clockwork Orange, even if the impression they leave seems to rest upon the idea that everything would be better if we all just made the effort to listen to Beethoven and read a bit more Shakespeare.

Having myself been in a labour union for two decades, and having come to conclude that said labour union didn't always have the best interests of its membership at heart, I see where Burgess is coming from because no system is immune to corruption from nest-feathering infiltrators; but ramping up the satire to the point at which it begins to resemble a Franklin cartoon in The Sun doesn't seem like a great solution; unless it's actually a parody of 1984 which targets what Burgess sees as Orwell's essentially conservative rhetoric, although even in such a case, it's still barely readable. So it's a game of two halves, Brian, one of them wonderful - perhaps even essential - and the other, a waste of everyone's time and coincidentally representative of exactly the sort of hyperbole which helped get Thatcher into power.

Unfortunately, even though everything Burgess says regarding 1984 is spot on, Orwell nevertheless wrote the significantly better book.

Chapped Lips

Peter Hope Chapped Lips (2021)
You may recall Peter Hope as vocalist of the Box, or from any of his more recent expeditions on the fringes of music where jazz, noise, and blues turn out to be different expressions of more or less the same thing. Chapped Lips, which we should probably term an existential monologue for want of a better description, seems to be a variant means of communicating that which was explored on recent albums by Hope's Exploding Mind. What that might be possibly depends on what the listener can hear - or the reader discerns in this case - but it's one of those deals where there's really no reliable shorthand for what happens. Simply you have to read the thing and get through to the other side, although helpfully this edition also comes with a CDR of the author reading the text in full, which you could probably call an audiobook if you felt so inclined.

Viewed from one angle, Chapped Lips seems to be Hope's assessment of his own place within the broader span of human existence, and of his own existence, and whether any of it means or amounts to anything - narrated as a stream of consciousness illustrated with metaphors and particularly tactile images. The impression garnered from both reading and listening is deceptively surreal - possibly I mean hyperreal - and vaguely hallucinatory, despite that this train of thought follows a very specific, directed route with very little which seems random or accidental.

the fat man was back in the pool. he had an inflatable hippo penis sticking out from between his legs. he was pink and naked and chuckled loudly as he massaged and waved it around. there was a woman, two floors up, shouting, in what was probably Ukranian, with a coiled extension cable and a glowing three bar electric fire balanced on the handrail. and then the fat man and his penis floated apart.

There are other passages which better exemplify the main theme or themes of Chapped Lips, but I'm not sure they work in isolation. This territory can only be directly experienced and resists summary.

On a purely technical level, in the event of such observations being any use to anyone, being reasonable familiar with Peter Hope's recorded works, I knew this was at least going to be interesting. However, I'm genuinely astonished at the level of accomplishment here, the sophistication and subtlety of what is communicated. I'm not sure material operating by such degrees of introspection - or this structurally experimental for that matter - is particularly easy to pull off without it seeming like a random assemblage - see also the notion that Burroughs' cut-ups were simple because any kid can take a pair of scissors to a newspaper; but this is a masterpiece which communicates almost by means of its own language, hence the immersive quality by which the reader acclimates to that language.

Thirty or so pages is just about the right length for a narrative of such density, and is additionally conducive to being read again and again, as is probably necessary; but hopefully, on the strength of this, there may be more to come.

Spiral Scratch

Gary Russell Spiral Scratch (2005)
One thing I took from Harold T. Wilkins' Flying Saucers Uncensored, and probably the only thing, was that I should probably get around to reading Spiral Scratch. Wilkins' book refers to a folk tale about a couple of mysterious children who turned up in rural Suffolk back in the twelfth century. They spoke a language no-one could understand and had green skin, so the legend has it, and I recalled this particular piece of Forteana from the opening pages of Spiral Scratch, a Who novel I'd started three or four times but never actually read beyond the first chapter; and the reason I'd never got around to reading it was because it can be unfortunately difficult to get excited about anything written by Gary Russell.

As Doctor Who obsessives doubtless recall, the television show went a bit wobbly back in the second half of the eighties, resulting in Colin Baker being unceremoniously replaced by Sylvester McCoy as lead actor, meaning Baker never had a proper on-screen swan song. Unsurprisingly there have therefore been a number of fan-generated versions of Baker's final story, thus attempting to send off the sixth version of the character with a bit more dignity than Sylvester McCoy in a blonde wig. Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon took a shot at it with Time's Champion which, as I recall, was pretty bloody awful, and there's also this.

Spiral Scratch is one of those alternate realities deals. Something called the Lamprey is consuming variant universes and only Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford stand in its way, with chapters all named after songs by the Buzzcocks, which is at least less obnoxious than the usual roll call of Morrissey b-sides. It's not the greatest thing I've ever read, although it's probably amongst Russell's better efforts. His prose tends towards workmanlike descriptions of occurrences one can imagine happening on the telly without too great a stretch of the imagination. There's a little more reliance on sentiment than I generally enjoy, and too many nominal sentences as bloody usual, but Russell is far from the worst offender in such respects, and almost gets away with it here. If the story was a little more coherent he probably would have got away with it, but it's a little too easy to lose track of who is doing what and why. Oddly, the end result is vaguely reminiscent of Moorcock's occasionally free range or otherwise impressionist narratives, which is no bad thing, and the dialogue is likewise not without a certain wit.

So it's nothing amazing, but neither is it irredeemably terrible, and the main problem is that it avoids irredeemable terribility for more pages than you really need when the best that can be said is that it's approximately readable. I've read better, but I've read much, much worse, so I suppose that's a recommendation on some level.

Flying Saucers Uncensored

Harold T. Wilkins Flying Saucers Uncensored (1955)
I found this in Half Price, incorrectly libraried away on the science-fiction shelf, or possibly correctly depending on how you tend to view this sort of thing. It seemed promising with a back cover listing chapters on The Coming of the Titans, Stories of Colossal Space Ships, and the Mystery of the Martian "Death Ceiling" - no idea why the aforementioned death ceiling should be in quotation marks, and I can't even remember what Harold had to say about it; and this sort of thing seems to be getting a bit thin on the ground these days, what with the presumably increased collectability of vintage saucer literature and today's potential readership apparently being more interested in fat orange men from New York than little green ones from Mars. The author's home address is even given in the back should you notice anything a bit weird which he might want to write about. I couldn't really not buy it.

Unfortunately, Wilkins was very much a student of the Charles Fort school of paranormal journalism, writing in a very similar style and looking you right in the eye without flinching as he states that most reputable scientists now agree that both Atlantis and Lemuria existed and had flying machines. This would be okay but for his book settling into a steady and distinctly Fortean rhythm of endless newspaper excerpts reporting strange and inexplicable occurrences, many of which aren't even particularly weird. Therefore, as soon as Wilkins settles on, for one example, the subject of mysterious explosions, it becomes difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the impending twenty pages of single paragraph newspaper articles quoted verbatim on the topic of inexplicable bangs, punctuated only by somewhat minimalist commentary just in case we've forgotten the involvement of an author.

Strangely enough, a few days following this fire, the water mains in this same San Mateo region broke, and for hours streets and highways were flooded. The explanation was—just 'faulty valves' . . . . But much stranger is this: Two boys were riding bicycles in Millbrae, near San Mateo. They were not riding together, nor did they know each other; yet they suffered similar injuries at about the same time, 4PM. Neither could remember how the accidents occurred, or what happened just before the accidents. Both suffered head injuries and one was injured in other parts of his body. One of the bicycles was smashed.

I expect it was aliens, although Wilkins doesn't actually say, preferring to taunt us with an enigmatic just ordinary accidents, reader? despite that none of the rest of us have any fucking clue because we weren't there and the account is patchy at best. Such flim-flam is, I suppose, at least marginally preferable to the chapter on mysteriously shattered windows to which our host's contribution is the occasional interjection of here we have some more accounts to confound the scientists, and where one such interjection actually uses the word followeth. Fort did the same thing with endless lists of claims, few of which appear significantly mysterious, all working up towards an overarching loopy theory about how we're all living inside a hollow sphere and stars are in fact upside down active volcanoes. Wilkins doesn't even bother to pull all of this random crap together by means of some hypothesis which would at least justify our suffering, instead being content to bury us beneath endless newspaper articles while pulling a spooky face. Brad Steiger has been known to peddle some preposterous shite in his similarly themed books, but at least he kept it entertaining. I have to admit I may have skimmed the second half of this one.

Wow, No Thank You

Samantha Irby Wow, No Thank You (2020)
I'll begin with the customary whining, specifically that I feel I'm beginning to see too much of this sort of thing, namely collections of wackily confessional autobiographical essays. While I'm aware that wackily confessional autobiographical essays existed before David Sedaris first began tapping away, it feels very much as though the current wave have been surfing along on the same ticket. I regard David Sedaris as unreservedly wonderful - although I generally prefer his readings of his essays to their printed form; and while I  enjoy wackily confessional autobiographical essays for the most part, I'm seeing a bit too much of a pattern here, and we've got to the point of the wackily confessional autobiographical essay as an end in itself*.

The books - many of which often began life as a blog - usually have some single knowingly peculiar image on the primary coloured cover, with a self-consciously quirky saying or phrase for a title, and it's all starting to feel a bit obvious. There was Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Samantha Bee's I Know I Am, But What Are You?, and David Thorne's I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs, and about fifty billion others. My wife rates the Samantha Bee and Jenny Lawson books fairly highly. I tried Let's Pretend This Never Happened but felt my buttons being pushed in an effort to make me laugh, which would have been fine except that seemed to be all that was going on. I bought my wife the David Thorne book as a birthday gift because it seemed kind of funny, but turned out to be a collection of notionally comic emails by some guy who once wrote jokes for David Letterman - money for old rope. In publishing terms, it seems we may have reached a point equivalent to that year during which the field of stand up comedy was suddenly flooded with a million unfunny laddish cunts who'd doubtless gone down a storm in the work canteen and had decided to make a go of it.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened sold so well that Jenny Lawson was able to open up her own book store here in San Antonio, which is where I came across Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You. There was a bunny on the cover and a quick flip through brought forth chuckles, so it seemed like it would make a good anniversary present for my wife. She read it and laughed a lot, then insisted I give it a go, so here I am.

My first impressions were good - those being the impressions which inspired me to buy the thing on the grounds of it being something my wife might enjoy, which she did. My second impressions were more subdued, because a random paragraph read in the book store doesn't get chance to outstay its welcome; and despite initial promise, I found myself reading something by someone with whom I seemingly shared only a few points of reference. Samantha Irby is fifteen years younger than I am, black and female, and there's a lot about moisturiser, chick stuff, and the internet - and to the point of influencing Irby's style of writing which is full of net slang and contractions - LMFAO, hashtags, and things which work fine on a webpage but look fucking silly in print. If I'm reading a book, I like to feel some effort has gone into the writing, and that it isn't simply a copy-pasted treasury of - oh, off the top of my head - Simon's most LOLworthy facebook posts. I wasn't quite feeling this with Wow, No Thank You, but the thought was at the back of my head. It was confessional, almost gratuitously so, communicated with a shitload of sarcasm in the form of sentences which didn't quite seem to know when to stop. It was good, or at least I wasn't not enjoying it, but…

I skipped to the end, to an essay about how Meaty, Irby's first book came to be published, which seemed potentially a little too self-aware for its own good, but I wanted to get a handle on where the woman was coming from; and that's when it all clicked. Despite either appearances or my preconceptions, Irby seems to have been as much bewildered by her own success as anyone, and once you realise this, the rest makes a lot more sense. If her focus seems a little arbitrary, it's because she's writing what the fuck she wants to write about, when she wants to write it. There's no calculation going on here, no pandering to an audience, just scatterbursts of honestly righteous testimony seasoned with a wit that could take your eye out.

I can't watch This Is Us because even though the brothers are hot and the dad is a smoke show, in the first couple episodes the fat girl doesn't get to be much more than "fat," and wow, no thank you! Maybe there are fat people sitting around silently weeping about being fat every minute of every day, but that is a redemptive arc thin people like to see on television, and it's just not the fucking truth. And I like physical comedy as much as the next guy, but it's also super gross to watch a fat bitch just bounce off shit all the time? I don't know, dude, sometimes the chair with fixed arms isn't going to work for me, but it's not like every time I sit in a desk, I get up and take the whole thing with me, or I'm sighing wistfully as everyone else at brunch joyfully eats their quiche while I pick at a piece of boiled lettuce. The shit is called Meaty, and sometimes I hate my body not because it's fat, but mostly because I never wake up in the morning to discover it has transformed into a wolf or a shark overnight. When is the last time you watched a show with a fat woman who didn't at some point reference a new diet or some ill-fitting old jeans? Also this idea that fat people only get pity sex from recent parolees or whatever is bullshit; I've never fucked a repulsive loser ever in my life.

While I wouldn't say the book is exactly free-range, it swings around wildly from one page to the next, requiring that the reader acclimate to its rhythm - but is worth the effort. For what it may be worth, I additionally enjoy the fact of Wow, No Thank You being the testimony of a chunky black lesbian from an economically impoverished upbringing who communicates without recourse to any of the usual reductive box ticking so beloved of middle class pronoun wankers; and ultimately it becomes apparent that Irby and I have a lot in common, and that which we don't have in common, I can at least understand - even the moisturiser, sort of.

I began with the suspicion of there being too much of this sort of thing, but on close inspection I realise I was wrong, and that there isn't anything like enough.

*: I'm aware this may seem a little hypocritical given that much of what is said here might just as well be applied to my own self-published An Englishman in Texas, amongst others. My defence is that I generally regard such material as secondary or supplementary in the wider context of my writing, and as such the only buttons I'm bothered about pushing tend to be my own.

Blindness

José Saramago Blindness (1995)
Ursula LeGuin seemed to think this was something special and it sounded great. Happily, I chanced upon a copy at Half Price and Ursula was right, as usual. The quick version is that Blindness is Day of the Triffids had it been written by Borges, but deserves a somewhat more thorough account. Our story begins when everyone in the world - so far as we're able to tell - is suddenly unsighted for reasons which remain undiscovered and which probably don't matter. The blind are at first quarantined in an abandoned asylum, with food left sporadically at the gate in the hope of their being able to fend for themselves without infecting anyone else; except, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be a disease and the food deliveries soon cease. Naturally, it doesn't take long for civilisation itself to cease, and human existence becomes a vision of hell as all that we take for granted is stripped away - electricity, running water, law, order, food, transport and working toilets. Blindness is potentially one of the most harrowing things I've read, except Saramago clearly understood that what he wanted to say about human nature might be lost to the visceral horror of its telling. In fact, he specifically states as much near the end of the novel while additionally describing one of his solutions.

Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.

Additionally, as you may notice from the above, Saramago utilises his own conventions of punctuation and grammar, embedding dialogue within the text without indicating quotation or even direct attribution to the speaker, instead trusting the cadence of the words to distinguish speech. He abruptly switches tense or makes occasional authorial observations, even speculating what may happen next, and there are plenty of commas, not many full stops, and very few paragraph breaks. It's initially disorientating - not least because we never learn the names of any of our people, persisting with identification such as the doctor, the doctor's wife, the boy with the squint and so on right up until the end - but it soon becomes absorbing by somehow placing the reader at the centre of the horror, so it feels as though the book is occurring around you rather than simply on the page; and it really is horror of the most harrowing sort, the kind which occurs here in the real world when we reduce ourselves to living garbage. Yet Saramago keeps his emphasis firmly focussed on the positives, even when those positives constitute just the faintest glimmer of hope in a brutal world of blood and shit, forging a powerful parable about human nature without it reading like transgressive body horror drivel, and yet without pulling any descriptive punches. Blindness is honestly not like anything I've read before.