John Lydon - Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993)

 

I had a feeling this one might not have stood the test of time quite so well after I read Lonely Boy, and although it probably isn't quite such a riot as Steve Jones' account, it's pretty fucking good and remains a refreshing alternative to the usual bollocks about how the Pistols were actually the Raoul Vaneigem of their day - or what amounted to the usual bollocks for a long time - not to mention all that Malcolm's masterplan shite to which a few idiots still seem to subscribe.

That said, Rotten has the initially off-putting cadence of one of those as told to autobiographies, but you get used to it and the stuff that matters is what's said more than how it's been set down. Of course, Rotten has fallen out of favour of late thanks to both Country Life butter and his vocal expressions of admiration for both Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. Whilst I'd suggest that the Country Life thing only constitutes a betrayal if you've ever mistaken the man for Joe Strummer - and I doubt even Alan Moore managed that leap - the chuckling praise for complete shitbags seems entirely consistent with everything else he ever said in pursuit of annoying those who deserve to be annoyed as much and as often as feasibly possible.

A lot of people feel the Sex Pistols were just negative. I agree, and what the fuck is wrong with that? Sometimes the absolute most positive thing you can be in a boring society is completely negative. It helps. If you're not, you show weakness, and you must never do that.

Having never experienced any desire to belong to any club that would have me as a member, I really felt that I got what the Pistols were about from the moment I first went around my friend Sean's house and, instead of listening to Remember You're a Womble as we usually did, he somehow had a copy of that pop record with all the rude words; and so, regardless of the music, I've never understood why there are still people who don't get the Pistols, persons who presumably never developed any sort of inherent scepticism regarding those claiming to have our best interests at heart. Is it not just common sense?

With this in mind, it's worth noting that Rotten incorporates statements and even entire chapters from others who were around at the time, even where Lydon's own testimony is contradicted. If you don't understand why anyone would do that in their own autobiography, you probably need to read this and to keep reading it until you're no longer a twat.

Sorry. That's just how it is.

Interzone 217/8 (2008)

I bought these back when I was trying to get a handle on the current state, as was, of the science-fiction short story. I went to Borders on Tottenham Court Road one Saturday afternoon and came back with the latest issues of Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and Interzone. Of these four, Interzone was the only homegrown publication, the others being American, and I'm afraid it didn't make much of an impression on me beyond that I liked it more than Analog - which isn't saying a lot. I'd hoped it would blow me away because, being English, I was rooting for the home team.

Revisiting issue 217 fifteen years later, I find that my initial impression remains more or less unchanged. There's nothing actually bad here, and it has its good points, but somehow it's difficult to get excited about any of this. A Google search for Karen Fishler, whose Africa somehow warranted the front cover, brought up only dimly related hits, mostly former readers opining that Interzone was way past its best and subscriptions would not be renewed. These gripes were from 2004 from what I could tell, so I don't know if this issue was more of the same, or even representative of a return to glory.

To get the grousing out of the way, the art is mostly knocked up on a computer and faintly unpleasant in the same way as early seventies art from that year when everyone discovered the airbrush, but never mind. The fiction is mostly decent, or at least readable. The aforementioned Karen Fishler's Africa reads somewhat like Jack Kirby at his most portentously cosmic without the pictures, which doesn't quite work for me. Paul G. Tremblay's The Two-Headed Girl and The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain by Jason Sanford are both engagingly weird, but probably not quite enough to justify second or third helpings. Only Paul McAuley's Little Lost Robot had enough zing to pin his name to my inner corkboard for future reference. If Fishler was channeling Kirby, then Little Lost Robot has a strong hint of Pat Mills in its DNA and seemed to warrant my picking up his novel, Whole Wide World when I chanced upon a copy. I'd read his Eye of the Tiger a few years earlier and thought it was complete bollocks, and Whole Wide World was unfortunately not all I'd hoped it might be; so the best thing here is also the best thing I've read by an author whose work I haven't otherwise enjoyed - which hardly seems like a recommendation.

The review section devotes more pages to film and telly than seems entirely warranted, although said reviews are at least well written, beautifully argued, and certainly a cut above the mumbling generally found in the back pages of other digest magazines*; and Torchwood gets a filetting so thorough that I punched the air.

Sorry kids, but it was fucking garbage and anyone who enjoyed it should feel bad about themselves.

Actually, I'm not sorry in the slightest.

Despite the above, I somehow dutifully picked up the issue which followed, and despite the wonderful cover art by Warwick Fraser-Coombe, it's taken me fifteen years to get around to reading the thing - which is probably the fault of the previous issue.

Anyway, for what it may be worth, 218 is a little more convincing than 217, comprising six short stories which at least rate better than not actually bad - although Hannu Rajaniemi's His Master's Voice admittedly felt somewhat like every other box-ticking cyberpunk page filler I've ever read. This one was a Chris Beckett special, so we get three from him along with an interview which, I felt promised a lot more than his fiction delivered. It sounded great, but didn't quite come together in the pages which followed, although it's difficult to say quite why in so much as that Beckett's writing clearly did everything promised on the tin. My best guess is that it somehow felt like science-fiction written by a social worker, that being the author's day job. All the same, Rat Island, the last of the three, probably would have won me over had it been reproduced in isolation; or would have inspired a more vigorous winning over, I suppose I mean. There's enough here to warrant the assumption that he may well have written something amazing at some point.

*: Probably also a cut above the mumbling you're reading right now.

D.H. Lawrence - John Thomas and Lady Jane (1928)

 

Lawrence was, by his own admission, not very good at coming up with titles. This one was suggested by Aldous Huxley's wife, possibly in a spirit of sarcasm, for Lawrence's second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover which didn't see print until the seventies, long after the definitive third version had scandalised those persons who make it their business to be scandalised by literary implications of men having it off with ladies. I haven't yet read Lady Chatterley so I don't know how well the second and third versions compare with each other, and all I know about the third version is that it made some people very angry because of all the shagging; also some vaguely recalled statement by Lawrence amounting to well, my critics say I write pornography so fuck it - let's give it to them. Obviously I'm paraphrasing here.

It's taken me all this time to get around to Lady Chatterley, albeit the rehearsal tapes in this case, mainly because the suggestion that Lawrence wrote mainly about shagging always struck me as ridiculous, so I didn't relish a novel amounting to him sneering ever get the feeling you've been cheated from the stage of the Winterland Ballroom before kicking off like Derek and Clive. Thankfully, if that novel exists - which I now realise may not actually be so - it isn't this one. Contrary to at least some of its reputation, while it's the story of an upper class woman having an affair with her gamekeeper told with particular emphasis on the sexual intercourse, it isn't even remotely pornographic. Lawrence goes into detail, but it's not the sort of detail which you'd find on the Fiesta letters page. Indeed, I'm not sure if the count of contentious words - penis, vagina and others you couldn't say back in the twenties without special dispensation from a medical professional - even reaches double figures.

That being said, I'm not convinced you could really call it erotica either, because its scope is broader and no more than a slight shift in Lawrence's usual focus on the politics of relationships between men and women. Typically, it's difficult to miss the autobiographical aspect of this tale. Constance, who is more or less Frieda with a few of Lawrence's own less acerbic views in the mix - is frustrated by her intellectually elevated but impotent husband - Lawrence the invalid, waiting for death and increasingly misanthropic - has an approximately guiltless affair with the gamekeeper, who himself amounts to Lawrence as he would wish to be, a man of honest instinct and will stripped of all bourgeoise tendencies. So it's Lawrence still trying to reconcile himself to his wife's compulsive polygamy - and almost succeeding - in a critique of his own contradictions, hypocrisy, and general bullshit. It's only erotica if you've missed the whole point.

John Thomas and Lady Jane aims fairly high in its attempt to dissect the complexities of human relationships, taking in class as well as sex; and it does well as the work of deathbed Lawrence who, by this point, was writing with unusual clarity, even maintaining the heavily symbolic import of his imagery without everything getting bogged down in metaphor and extended observations concerning flowers - although there's nevertheless plenty of flora and fauna in this one too.

Charles Bukowski - Factotum (1975)

 

I've read it many times before but it never gets old, never loses its relevance, and never fails to pack a punch as visceral as an actual punch in the face. The usual people continue to whine about either failing to get Bukowski, or otherwise expressing despair at those who do, for they must be simpletons and easily pleased because where's the fucking poetry? Anyone can describe a hangover or a fight in a dive bar and it goes to show how little you've read blah blah blah…

The poetry isn't so much in the words as in that which they evoke, because no-one ever congratulated Pablo Picasso on his decision to use blue paint. That which Bukowski evokes will be familiar to a few of us because we've been in the same places with the same people and the same diminished prospects; so it could be that Factotum may not resonate quite so strongly with you should you be sat reading it in the conservatory, or like the Goodreads twat who so loved Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico, early on a summer morning on the porch with a cup of coffee at hand. This is not just entertainment, nor mere diversion. It was never supposed to be entertainment. It's more serious than that, and maybe it just ain't for you. You ever think of that?

As for those of us who will get something from this, I don't know if there's really much point in trying to describe what it does, because most likely you will already know. This is how the real world works once you've got down beneath all the layers of bullshit, deception, and flim-flams; and, as such, Factotum is almost the perfect novel.

The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Dave Ball - Electronic Boy (2020)

Soft Cell were fairly important to me and continue to be so by some definition, so this seemed like essential reading; and sure enough, much of it is fascinating, particularly Ball's account of the early years. Additional points might be dispensed for Electronic Boy being a rock star autobiography free of the telltale as told to Lippy Scrungebucket or whoever in tiny letters beneath the name of the author, except I feel this one may have benefited from a more hands-on editor, or at least somebody with a strongly expressed second opinion. This isn't so much a complaint about anything bad as a feeling that it could have been better with just a little more fine tuning here and there.

Dave Ball has an amiable, conversational tone, and most of his book is engaging, although one's mileage may vary with the lists of various synths and effects boxes. A certain quota of clichés are committed, which is probably inevitable - observations in the immortal words of such and such, or the occasional sentence describing how I opened the door and who should be stood there but my famous friend Ray Reardon, the snooker champion*. However, Dave Ball is primarily a musician, and an exceptional one for what it may be worth, so it would be churlish to criticise him for failing to replace Shakespeare as our number one English language word doer, particularly where the whole is so entertaining. The problem seems to be one of focus - plenty of it for the years up to Soft Cell falling apart in the wake of their third album, after which it gets very uneven, zipping through the last couple of decades as though skipping through a DVD in search of a particular scene. I could have stood a little more detail with English Boy on the Love Ranch, the Grid, and other post-Cell endeavors; and when we come to 2002's Cruelty Without Beauty, we're half way through the account before it's even clear that they're not only back on speaking terms but have actually reformed. On this score, there's an entire chapter reproducing Dave's diary entries from crossing the Atlantic in a boat, and we don't actually discover why he was crossing the Atlantic in a boat until the following chapter. So it's a bit like having a conversation with someone who keeps playing with their phone - gems scattered here and there, but somehow it should have held together better.

It's still a great book though.

*: To be fair, this example is actually from the Cosey Fanni Tutti book.

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 

I read this mainly because it had begun to feel a bit weird that I hadn't, given the shadow it casts across various stretches of popular culture. Having been found in the pocket of the bloke who murdered John Lennon, and then again in the fictional narrative of Margaret Thatcher's aspiring assassin in Grant Morrison's St. Swithin's Day, I'd always assumed Catcher to be about a neurotic outsider who flips and consequently pops an innocent with a firearm - the blueprint for all those school shootings. Thankfully it isn't anything quite so obvious and the general concept of both teenagers and their inherent disgruntlement was still very much in development back in 1951.

So Holden Caulfield isn't the tidily modular rebel who rejects whatever you've got on principle, but rather is someone who has failed to connect with aspects of his own existence - like a more freewheeling version of Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea, the first English translation of which had appeared just two years earlier, it might be noted. My own stepson had a couple of years at one of those supposedly prestigious military academies to which Americans with too much money send their offspring, and so I recognise Caulfield's environment, finding it both reassuring and depressing that someone else identified the exact same problems with such places over seventy years ago. Caulfield isn't a bad student, or a kid with any  psychological issues which would today be medicated to drooling oblivion. It's simply that he's just smart enough to recognise bullshit when he sees it and struggles to reconcile himself to what is expected of him, most of which is predicated on the existence of a noble world full of grand achievements, aspirations, and fine men delivering speeches in front of marble columns, as distinct from a world made entirely of bullshit. He's been taught to hold truth as among the highest of virtues and so cannot help but revolt against that which it reveals. In practical terms, this amounts to his dropping out of school and vanishing off into the wild, blue yonder over the course of a weekend, as told in rambling first person with endless digressions and passing distractions in Caulfield's own distinctive if occasionally limited turn of phrase. You might argue the case for it being a more populist Nausea with Caulfield, lacking Roquentin's philosophical rhetoric, obliged to define his disconnection in more familiar terms, or terms with which I was more familiar at least.

It isn't a literary precursor to Ill Bill's Anatomy of a School Shooting, despite the reputation, being concerned with cause more than dramatic effect, and I doubt it would have endured so well were that the case.