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.

Analog July 1971

John W. Campbell (editor)
Analog July 1971 (1961 but felt more like 1931)
This looks interesting, you think, so the next time you see a copy in a second hand place, you pick it up, maybe acquiring a stack of back issues before you've actually read any of them. Then you read them and a hard lesson is learned.

Campbell's editorial comprises the usual ranting about how hippy beatnik liberals are living in cloud cuckoo land, DDT is good, and how he'd like to see every endangered species wiped off the fucking face of the Earth; and on page seven there's an advert for a hardback collection of previous editorials should you wish to charge your pipe with a goodly plug of tobacco and sit chuckling over accounts of damn liberals and long hairs revealed for the fools they are by the mighty power of scientific discourse; and so to the stories...

Joseph P. Martino's Zero Sum seems to be a loose analogy of what was going on in Vietnam, which eventually comes out as one of those Asimov-style logic puzzles. Here's one sparkling example of its dialogue.

'Anyway, the point is there's one best mix of tactics, and you can't improve your situation by deviating from it. In fact, if you do deviate, your average losses increase. The way we figure it, on each engagement between a Destroyer and a Monitor, on average we should lose three quarters of a man less than they do. Instead, their losses average one and three eights man per engagement more than ours. And the reason is they're using the wrong mix of tactics. If they'd use the right mix, they could cut their losses, and there wouldn't be a thing we could do about it.'

There's a scene of our lads watching governmental speeches about the war on telly which lasts for nine pages. To be fair, it picks up a little in the second half but only in the sense that an Ed Sheeran album probably won't be anything like so terrible as you expect it to be.

F. Paul Wilson's The Man with the Anteater starts off with both the charm and the cast promised by the title, then turns into a pseudo libertarian opinion column while the reader is distracted by union bashing comments on just the third or second page, all of which leaves a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste.

I managed about four pages of Gordon R. Dickson's The Outposter, presumably the second half of a novel here serialised in instalments. It's probably unfair to judge something so poorly on the strength of four pages somewhere in the middle, but I couldn't even plough my gaze through the synopsis of what had already happened in the previous episode. I think it's about a ragtag crew of rebellious space renegades, or pirates, or something. I guess I'll never know.

James H. Schmitz's Poltergeist is, if not amazing, certainly readable; and A Little Edge by S. Kye Boult seems massively out of place here in terms of quality and, weirdest of all, seems to foreshadow the general tone of certain things by China Miéville.

Also there's an article about a computer game excitingly named Spacewar, which is probably hilarious if you care about such things given that this was 1971 and the guy spends twelve pages gushing over what may as well be Pong, but I couldn't give a shit about computer games. I tried half a page and found myself granted particular insight into Midge Ure's feelings regarding the city of Vienna.

The book review section uses up quite a few words in sneering at mainstream literary authors who dabble with science-fiction, for their admittedly well-written efforts are as naught compared to the power of Gordon R. Dickson, or indeed everything else published in the mighty pages of Analog; then spunks away what little validity the argument may have accumulated with praise for something by - ugh - Colin Wilson; which leaves us with just the letters page, which is mostly praise for previous Campbell editorials, including an angry housewife fulminating against kids these days. The one note of dissent comes from an anthropologist defending his field as a legitimate area of study, warranting a significantly longer response from Campbell restating his position that it's not science if it doesn't involved a blackboard covered in complicated equations, and only a fool would claim that blah blah blah…

I've got another four of these fucking things on my reading pile.

Seven Tickets to Hell

Robert Moore Williams Seven Tickets to Hell (1972)
Aside from occasional encounters with Abbott and Costello, little is known of the activities of Frankenstein's monster after the events of Mary Shelley's book, not least his brief career in publishing which brought us the Frankenstein Horror Series back in the early seventies. Frank Belknap Long wrote one, and this is by Robert Moore Williams, of whom I've become quite the fan.

Perhaps anticipating a variant audience to that which presumably read his science-fiction novels, Williams seems to have played it safe with this one in certain respects, channeling his love of Abraham Merritt into a relatively generic adventure which would probably transfer to the big screen with ease, rather than making it up as he went along and stuffing it full of his weirder ideas about the universe and our place therein. It's still reasonably strange given Williams choosing to write in second person, swapping between two main characters addressed as you.

The men you can face. Perhaps they were not as badly wounded as you had thought. This is what you tell yourself. You know this isn't true, you know these men were dead, but you can lie to yourself about them.

He sustains this for the full 190 pages, which is impressive, and the prose positively crackles with that weird energy found in his best books, or his strangest books depending on how you look at it.

Should he require introduction, Williams was a man with certain psychological issues which informed much of his fiction, and many of his common preoccupations and themes appear here as detail to what is more or less Indiana Jones taking on the Mexican narcotics trade, liberally spiced with a heap of mythology-cum-pseudoscience. Of Williams' staples, we get the sacred mountain, ancient underground races, that which man once knew but has since forgotten, a vague cosmic connection, biological robots, and love as a mysterious universal force. There's enough Mexican mythology to suggest the man did his research, and although he gets it somewhat skew-whiff in places, you don't mind because it's Robert Moore Williams and you keep reading just to find out what the hell he's going to do next. Unfortunately what he does next betrays the influence of Merritt more than is usual for this author, so Seven Tickets to Hell isn't anything like so unpredictable or arrestingly weird as Beachhead Planet or The Bell from Infinity; having said which, he's always worth reading, and this one still delivers much more than is promised by the cover - excepting the female secret agent who doesn't seem to be in the book at all, but then it was the seventies.

The Boy in the Bush

D.H. Lawrence & M.L. Skinner The Boy in the Bush (1924)
Mollie Skinner ran a guesthouse in Darlington, Western Australia at which Dave and Frieda stayed. She'd published a couple of books and Lawrence took an interest in her novel The House of Ellis which was then a work in progress. After leaving Australia, he corresponded with Skinner and offered to rewrite The House of Ellis so that it might be published as a collaborative effort, albeit as The Boy in the Bush. It's the story of Jack who arrives in Australia, fresh from England, and views the country through his eyes as he tries to make his way, thus echoing Lawrence's recent experience and allowing him the opportunity to map what he saw as Australia's spiritual dimension.

Unfortunately, if Lawrence rewrote Skinner's prose, it doesn't really show, perhaps testifying to that maxim about the futility of attempting to polish a turd. His own prose on the other hand sticks out a mile, concentrating as it does on the psychic disposition of his characters and their setting, and it's mostly powerful stuff which foreshadows the blood consciousness of The Plumed Serpent to a considerable degree; but these passages form remote islands divided by page after page of Skinner writing something which reminds me a lot of [sentimental garbage written by one of my wife's relatives who will not be identified here for obvious reasons] - coming, going, people eating dinner, other people asking whether they've eaten dinner, ranching, and so on; and I tried but it's barely readable, not grammatically incorrect, just tedious and repetitive. After two or three chapters I was reduced to skimming, which was actually fairly easy, Lawrence's text tending to take the form of lengthy, ponderous paragraphs as distinct from Skinner's endless chit chat. One day someone will isolate just Dave's material to form a decent if slightly disjointed novella, but until then The Boy in the Bush does very little to reward the effort of trawling through for the passages which are worth reading.

Kirby - King of Comics

Mark Evanier Kirby - King of Comics (2008)
I've read several versions of the story of how Stan Lee created Marvel Comics and is directly responsible for more or less everything, ever, and it seemed like high time I took a look at what was happening on the other side of the wall, Jack Kirby being the man who drew a humongous number of those comics which Stan may or may not have written. I found Kirby's art a bit weird when I was a kid and resident of the age group for which they were intended. There was something about his art, but I found the figures weird, forever reaching forward out of the page, smiling hard like John Wayne with that single dazzling white tooth spanning the entire width of the grin. All the same, he obviously made a huge impression judging by how much I loved some of those strips, even though his style had become the standard - from where I was stood - which is probably why 2000AD seemed like such a breath of fresh air.

However, my appreciation has grown in recent years, partially through a better understanding of what Kirby was doing, when he was doing it, and how starkly it contrasted with what everyone else had been doing up until that point. You may already know that Kirby created and even wrote a lot of the stuff for which Stan Lee has been given credit, and sometimes so much credit as to relegate his artist to some talented monkey who was able to hold a pen without dropping it on the floor; and if you're a regular working class person such as like what I am, you'll probably recognise the pattern because getting stiffed by the boss is the story of our lives. This isn't to suggest that Lee was without talent or failed to put in the work but, let's face it, it was mostly Jack. I'm not sure comics as we know them today wouldn't have happened without Jack in the right time and place, but at best it would probably be a completely different landscape.

Evanier's book, which may be one of the greatest things I've read on the subject of the comics biz, balances a sensitive, sympathetic biography with just the right quota of lovingly reproduced artwork to illustrate the tale without it becoming some luxurious portfolio, which most of the other Kirby books seem to be from what I can tell. As a friend and colleague of Kirby, Evanier is particularly well qualified to tell the man's story, and he does so with an incredible warmth which never slides over into sentiment or arse kissing. He paints Kirby as someone you would like to have known, with whom you would have wanted to hang out - or at least I would: imaginative, seriously talented, and above all just a regular working class guy trying to get by, who wanted to do a good job. Weirdly, Kirby puts me in mind of Ray, a former work colleague of mine - English, but the same generation, who bore a more than passing resemblance and who was likewise no stranger to getting stiffed by the boss. This biography accordingly left me with a few feelings I don't normally get from the accounts of the lives of people I've never met. It felt sort of personal, key to which might be Street Code, one of Kirby's very few - possibly only - autobiographical strips, eight pages shining a light on his having grown up under circumstances of grinding poverty during the depression. It's almost Harvey Pekar and has some of the same power.

I can't actually think of anything more useful, or even more coherent to say, but this is a frankly fucking incredible book about an incredible guy who, from my point of view, was one of us.

A Man & His Cat

Umi Sakurai A Man & His Cat (2018)
Some facebook thread on a friend's page recently threw up the assertion that western comics are crap because it's all superheroes while manga is amazing because it can be about anything. This one is about a man and his cat, as the title implies. Unfortunately though, despite the sheer force with which the subject alone socks it to anyone who ever dared take pleasure in an issue of Superman Family, it's still manga.

I'm well aware that manga has its admirers.

I'm not one of them, because to admire something simply because of its format would be fucking stupid, like enjoying vinyl records regardless of what's recorded on them. I liked a few of the Godzilla comics which Dark Horse reprinted back in the late eighteenth century, and Akira and Grave of the Fireflies were great - although they're movies - but I remain otherwise unconvinced.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of cats, which is why my wife and I have a number of them - not less than thirteen, usually more depending on who turns up for breakfast - and we also volunteer for a local cat rescue organisation; so you can sort of see how I ended up with this book, which is a manga.

The story is about an old man - or one who is referred to as an old man despite his depiction - who buys a cat, followed by the usual realisations which occur to anyone who takes on a cat regarding their feeding, use of litter tray, and so on and so forth. Of course, it's mainly about how much the man and his cat love each other.

It's a nice idea except the cat resembles a Pokémon character and seems to have been written by someone who doesn't understand cats - so Fukumaru, as the cat is named, is written with the needy qualities of a dog and eyes abrim with tears for almost half the page count. The purpose of the story seems to be delivery of the narrative equivalent of a series of emoticons, emotional currents reduced to a series of hearts and frowny faces. Consequently A Man & His Cat feels like one-hundred pages of button pushing.

Even with more of a story, I'm not convinced it would work. As you might expect, it's all giant eyes, tiny mouths and infantilised women, the same style as drawn by a billion others churning out this same corporate variant on cereal box design, all distinctive qualities flattened out to the artificial texture of mass production and candy. This saddens me because I respond to anything involving a cat, but this one doesn't feel entirely sincere. Fukumaru's dialogue substituting you for mew and my for meow just isn't that funny, and the whole thing has the unpleasant angular look of a style copied without much underlying ability to draw or to arrange shapes on a piece of paper; and the supposedly old man looks about thirty, or would if he didn't resemble Christian Bale in American Psycho, or would if he looked remotely human with that weird angular chin. Seriously, it all makes Rob Liefeld look like Leonardo da Vinci and I don't know how people can be satisfied with anything so thin, so lacking in character.

Kangaroo

D.H. Lawrence Kangaroo (1923)
This is one of Lawrence's leadership novels, as they've been called, although I've also seen the same cited as evidence of his fascism. I'm not sure leadership is quite the right term, and Kangaroo is as much a refutation of the notion that Lawrence suffered from a stiff right arm as anything, unless you regard fascism as everything which isn't actually Owen Jones. However, it can be said that it's one of his more transparently autobiographical novels, with details drawn from his flight from England and three months spent in Australia prior to sailing to the Americas. Central to Kangaroo is the rise of a popular nationalist party, some of which is doubtless drawn from what Lawrence witnessed in Italy during the rise of Mussolini, which is where the fascism supposedly comes in.

Kangaroo is the nickname of one of those dynamic leader types around which angry young men who just happen to love their country tend to cohere; and so far as I'm aware, the character wasn't really based on anything inhabiting the Australian political spectrum of the day. It's also interesting that he's Jewish - much like Bertold Goltz, leader of the paramilitary Sons of Job in Philip K. Dick's Simulacra. Kangaroo's somewhat dilute brand of fascism doesn't seem to go further than a not unreasonable distrust of labour unions, typically nebulous waffle about international banking, and some fairly mild racial stereotyping - at least mild for the twenties - and, politically speaking, he seems to represent revolutionary figureheads making the same mistakes as those whom they aspire to replace. His role in the novel, as with those of his supporters befriended by the itinerant Richard Somers, is seemingly as a screen onto which Lawrence projects his ideas about fascism, authority, and everything that was going on in the world, in order to provide a critique; so we're talking about ideas and beliefs which the author is examining rather than necessarily endorsing; and Kangaroo's eventual assassination during a failed coup of his own instigation doesn't suggest a whole lot of faith in the road trodden by Mussolini and others.

Unfortunately though, not all of the novel is as interesting as this may sound, and Somers' time spent with Kangaroo is mostly extended conversational circles about the possibility of love between a man who was never confused and another really strong man without any of the funny stuff getting in the way, which is fairly typical of Lawrence talking to himself and is difficult to imagine transposed to the lips of Nigel Farage.

Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones around our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers - look at those hibiscus - they don't want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned to stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy.

Huh! What a flipping Nazi!

I gather the philosophy which Lawrence eventually developed had some parallels with Buddhism, or at least the idea of there being nothing permanent but change, and it is expressed here at crippling length but without any coherent development, ideas being set down in whichever order they occurred to the author, Kangaroo being one of his semi-improvised works. The accusation of fascism seemingly comes from the discussion of those details already mentioned in combination with Lawrence's growing misanthropy, the contradiction of which he himself remained very much aware.

It's a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You don't like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back.

That being said, Lawrence's cynicism is given thorough account in the two painfully autobiographical chapters flashing back to Cornwall during the first world war. Lawrence had evaded the draft, having been declared unfit for active duty, but was treated with heavy suspicion, and harassed by the authorities beyond reason to the point of being effectively driven from the country; all because his wife was German and he wrote novels and was therefore presumably a bit weird. Anyone who can read these chapters and still attribute authoritarian tendencies to their author is an idiot.

So Kangaroo is some way down the list, but flourishes of poetic genius are to be found throughout, and chapters twelve and thirteen are amongst the most powerful written by the author.