Strangeland

Tracey Emin Strangeland (2005)
I didn't even know this existed until John Serpico wrote about it on his excellent blog, the Art of Exmouth. To start at the beginning, I attended Maidstone College of Art at the same time as Traci, so I knew her and, seeing as it's the question everybody always asks, no - my name wasn't in the tent and the only thing I have to say on that subject is how surprised I was by the name embroidered in the largest letters, which was that of a quiet, vaguely lumpy looking bloke from the sculpture department. I met Traci through my friend Carl, and her first words to me were in't your 'air 'orrible? delivered with a caustic scowl, although to be fair my 'air was indeed pretty 'orrible at the time. She set up a reading event in one of the lecture theatres for herself, Sexton Ming, Billy Childish, and Bill Lewis. I don't recall much of what she read but it may well have included some of the material reprinted in the first part of this collection. I'd actually forgotten she ever wrote this sort of thing. Her delivery was kind of harsh and forceful but I don't remember much else about it. Childish on the other hand was impressive, dark and bitter, painfully honest, and he gave the impression that he really, really, really didn't want to be there. Traci mentioned that she had a few of his books for sale after the show - slim collections of dyslexic poetry he'd published himself. I bought one and was so knocked out by it that I asked if she had any others. She was in the process of breaking up with him at the time and had no problem selling me everything she had, a few of them even signed for Traci love Billy x. I never saw much of her art, at least not until the final year. She had an exhibition in the college gallery of oil paintings done in Amsterdam over the summer, mostly canals, barges and the like, and they were actually pretty great. The last time I saw her was in Rochester High Street, a couple of years after we'd all finished college. She was pushing a supermarket shopping trolley full of junk and said that she'd just married a Turkish fisherman which had proven problematic due to his already being married. Under other circumstances it would have seemed a bit unlikely but I don't recall being particularly surprised.

So that's my Traci Emin story, such as it is. A couple of years later she began turning up on TV as the next big thing. She had apparently reinvented herself, or had at least been through a personal year zero by which all previous work no longer counted, presumably including the Amsterdam paintings. This also pertained to a painting she'd sold to the late Tim Webster for a fiver*, as Tim found out when he attempted to have it valued and was told that she denied having painted it. I was quite fond of Tim (and am still depressed by the fact of his having kicked the bucket back in 2020) so this struck a bit of a sour note for me. I never had any strong feelings about Traci's reinvention as a notionally conceptual artist, beyond enjoying Billy Childish observing that (and I'm paraphrasing here) the difference between my paintings and what Tracey does is that if you chuck my stuff in a skip, it's still art; but I nevertheless got a massive vicarious kick out of her success. It felt as though one of us had broken through, regardless of why it happened, even if she's disowned the rest of us.

Anyway, Strangeland is divided into three main sections dealing with her early life in Margate, then in Turkey, and then everything else. The first two parts are astonishing, vivid, and enough so to leave me hungry for more. Some of it is pretty harrowing, but nevertheless powerfully told because Traci is very, very funny and the horror is contrasted with a surprisingly tender insight. The third section is mostly what came after year zero and feels patchy, barring the chapters dealing with her abortion. David Bowie's private jet gets a mention, as does one of Vivienne's tops, and Billy Childish is written off in a couple of paragraphs without actually being named. Childish himself has admitted that he treated her like shit and the downs and even further downs of their relationship are detailed in unflinchingly brutal terms in those chapbooks Traci sold me back at Maidstone. At the time I recall being told that he was on at least a bottle of whisky a day. All the same, that single scathing paragraph seems a little unfair, truthful though it undoubtedly is, at least given the extent of his influence on her work and by extension presumably even her reinvention. There was a time when she was regarded as more or less an extension of Billy, and his influence is discernible throughout Strangeland. That said, the notion that she was ever truly an extension of Billy is clearly bollocks, and Traci's near relentless burst sewer pipe of hard reality may also serve to explain what drew the two of them together in the first place.

I have a feeling Traci would have ended up either well known or at least notorious for something, and her career in the art world from the nineties onwards would have looked the same or similar had she never met Childish. What you see is what you get, as they say. She has a relentless, near indestructible quality, and the biggest gob in the world, which I state out of admiration. She genuinely seems like she would be hard to kill, as Henry Rollins would put it, and Strangeland captures this in what may be more detail than you need.

I just wish she'd carried on in the vein of the Amsterdam paintings.

*: I remember this as being an actual portrait of Tim himself, but I may be wrong. For what it may be worth, I wrote a memorial to him called Let's Think About Living which can be found here.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

Charles Bukowski The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018)
At the risk of becoming repetitive, today's bewildering Goodreads dunce is an individual who regards this book as representing the point at which Bukowski turned himself into a stereotype - as he puts it - seemingly referring to Chuck's emphasis on drinking, shagging, and manual labour - although the latter is referred to only in passing in The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Naturally, I had to ask, because the review in question read a lot like Charles Bukowski keeps talking about women's tits and how he's definitely not gay because he was a bricklayer which is really, really boring actually. Thankfully this wasn't quite what the reviewer meant, so far as I could tell, but his suggestion of Bukowski playing up to a certain image seemed kind of redundant given that the author actually states this in several places; while Chuck's purportedly macho pose is, I would suggest, somewhat undermined by the fact of his spending most of the book writing poetry while listening to classical music, activities which do nothing to suggest we're dealing with a sort of Los Angeles Gary Bushell here.

Never mind. I'm sure the man himself often had to contend with much worse.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way collects a series of columns written for various magazines and newspapers, some fiction, prefaces to other people's books, and a couple of interviews. Bukowski is mostly on form.

Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

Even Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb - seemingly an experiment in non-linear pseudo Burroughsian narrative - yields the occasional gem.

Political fervour is the blight of the young. History is too long—the tail swings the dog.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole the collection is a bit of a slog. Much of the word count is taken up with musing upon the act of writing and the life of a writer, with unfortunate emphasis on poetry; which is interesting up to a point, or may have been when broken up into weekly or monthly instalments, but assembled between just two covers becomes a mammoth helping of what is essentially the same thing.

Excepting Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and no-one else I can think of off the top of my head right now - although I'm sure there must be someone I've overlooked - I really find it hard to care about poetry. Oddly, Bukowski feels the same way.

Probably the greatest thing here is the theme song, an essay amounting to writing advice for aspiring authors, and that advice is to go and spend an afternoon at the race track betting on the geegees. Almost all writing advice will be bullshit by definition, but this is pretty solid. To be fair, most of The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way is pretty solid, but possibly not all of it works served on the same plate.

Taking Candy From a Dog

Vic Templar Taking Candy From a Dog (2010)
I lived in the general vicinity of the Medway towns from 1984 to 1989, and the first thing which struck me about the locality was that everyone seemed to be doing something. I don't mean doing something in the sense of a couple of local bands and maybe a bloke who wrote a fanzine. There seemed to be hundreds of bands in Medway, three or four gigs in different parts of town every night - most of them decent, a few of them fucking astonishing - and a house brick randomly launched from the upper deck of a bus heading along Chatham High Street would, nine times out of ten, most likely hospitalise someone who'd written a book, or at least published a collection of poetry. None of this would be particularly significant were it not for the high quality of this creative wellspring, and how little of it seemed affected, not even the self-conscious acknowledgement of itself as a scene.

Of the bands, my favourite - favourite in so much as that I still listen to them - were probably the Dentists, and this guy was their drummer. I knew him at the time, if not well, and was vaguely aware of him having had a couple of things published through Billy Childish's Hangman imprint. I should have picked them up when I had the chance, but never mind. I had a feeling Vic would probably have something interesting to say, but I hadn't considered the possibility that it would be this good.

Taking Candy from a Dog is an autobiographical novel fondly remembering details of childhood and growing up in Kent in the seventies, but because memory cheats, because it's often difficult to get all pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back into a shape which makes sense, it's the autobiography of both the author and his sister's sock monkey, a wartime gift from an American GI whose interjections and commentary still carry a faint trace of the Sammy Davies Jr. So, in other words, there's wiggle room allowing for some things which, although true, didn't actually happen.

It could have gone horribly wrong, ending up as Peter Kay chortling over Curly Wurlies. Andrew Collins similarly wrote an autobiographical account of growing up in the seventies in what was a fairly happy home, but I found his Where Did It All Go Right? cloying and a little too pleased with itself. Templar, on the other hand, gets the balance absolutely spot on, perhaps through a focus which relishes the sheer weirdness of childhood without really trying to play it for laughs, at least not as an end in itself.

Yogurt is a game that Kes invented. The rules are very simple. You can't play it in your shoes though. The reason is you have to pull your socks so they hang off your feet like a panting dog's tongue. You then raise your toes in the air so that you're standing on your heels. You then walk around on your heels saying 'yogurt, yogurt, yogurt' in a voice from the back of your throat, like a Dalek. That's it, I told you yogurt was a simple game, didn't I?

There's also the cargo cult re-enactment of Wimbledon undertaken one summer, kicking off with someone playing the theme tune on their cassette recorder, taped off the telly - one of a whole string of sporting reconstructions with various sisters, friends, relatives competing as celebrities of the day.

'In comes John Noakes, off of his long run up, looking for his third wicket of the match. He bowls to Jean Jacques Burnell, who pulls it over mid wicket into Eric's fence for four.'

Most authors writing this sort of thing tend to spend half the time digging the reader in the ribs and grinning, but Templar's deadpan delivery combined with his attention to details - regardless of how much sense they'll make to the rest of us, results in something both profoundly moving and funny without actually cracking jokes. In short, he actually captures, right there on the page, the flavour of growing up in a certain era, and I recognise a ton of my own formative years in here despite the furniture having been completely different. Taking Candy from a Dog serves to illustrate how the most powerful, even profound statements can often be the least assuming, words softly spoken and well meant without the need for a full theatrical production.

...and extra points for remembering that the adult reaction to the music of the Sex Pistols was mostly amusement. It was about time someone actually took the trouble to point that out.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
I'm sure I remember hearing that it was Céline who first came up with the three little dots signifying a pause, although I don't seem to be able to find any sort of confirmation for this. Never mind.

Anyway, I've been meaning to read something for a couple of decades now, at least since discovering his writing to be an influence on that of Billy Childish, and of course Bukowski, and - as I've eventually realised - pretty much everyone else I'd consider worth bothering with. His innovations mainly seem to have been in introducing a crude - although not lacking eloquence - working class voice to literature, and a willingness to examine all of the gritty details, stains, and skidmarks from which we extrapolate reality at least as much as we do from prettier, less disturbing sights. He was never too worried about delivering a crowd pleaser.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me . . . and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my own class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Journey to the End of the Night is roughly autobiographical, kicking off with our man's experience of the first world war and the unpleasant truths accordingly revealed.

People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds.

Driven to the end of his rope, Céline sits out some of the war in an asylum before being sent to French colonial Africa, itself only another variant of hell, from which point the narrative becomes oddly Swiftian, or at least more blatantly allegorical as he becomes a galley slave, rowing to the Americas.

Talk of surprises! What we suddenly discovered through the mist was so amazing that at first we refused to believe it, but then, when we were face to face with it, galley slaves or not, we couldn't help laughing, seeing it right there in front of us…

It's probably just me but this passage immediately put me in mind of Bernal Díaz describing the Spanish forces first arriving in the Valley of Mexico in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain of 1568.

With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.

Of course, if it isn't just me, then the parallel probably constitutes weapons-grade sarcasm, given Céline's time in the Americas representing only a minor improvement on his time in Africa, and that it is characterised by escalating absurdity.

'I believe in the enumeration of fleas! It's a civilising factor, because enumeration is the basis of the most invaluable statistical data! . . . A progressive country must know the number of its fleas, broken down according to sex, age group, year and season . . .'

Indeed, this part of the novel might be taken as a descent into an underworld newly industrialised in the wake of the first world war.

The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

The power of Céline's testimony is such as to deliver something pithily quotable on more or less every other page, hence my thus far having used more of his words than my own. If there's a single theme to the novel it would seem to be humanity revealed as reduced to an industrial resource for the first half of the book.

'But you know, doctor, I'm an educated man. I even studied medicine at one time . . .'

At that he gave me a dirty look, I saw that I'd put my foot in it again, to my detriment.

'Your studies won't do you a bit of good around here, son. You're not here to think, you're here to make the movements you're told to. We don't need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees . . . Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again! We'll think for you, my boy! A word to the wise.'

...and at the risk of hammering this one into the ground:

It's sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines, intent on giving them all possible pleasure, calibrating bolts and more bolts, instead of putting an end once and for all to this stench of oil, this vapour that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their heads. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts.

All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old.

All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn't love it enough the way it was, that's why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

The second half of the book describes Céline's return to France where he sets up a medical practice, which in narrative terms allows for further exposition and reflection on both his misanthropy and its attendant self-loathing. Unfortunately, this second half lacks the dynamic of the first, pinning its narrative to events of lesser consequence, and so feeling a little formless in places, at least to me.

Anyway, the significance of Céline should hopefully be apparent from the quotes, in so much as that as a writer he clearly strove to get to the bones regardless of stroked egos, sales, or pleasing images, and yet without going too far the other way and serving up what may as well be Lovecraftian disgust. That he is not so well remembered as might be the case is unfortunate but understandable given his later antisemitism, and not just the sort of thing we tend to pass off as being of its time, but properly antisemitic material written as a vocal supporter of Hitler and the axis powers.

In his defence, or at least in the defence of Journey to the End of the Night, there's nothing antisemitic here, and not even anything particularly racist, which seems noteworthy given the African setting of a few chapters, and when it was written. In fact, given Céline's generally poor view of authority figures, it's far from obvious how he could ever have ended up as cheerleader for the Third Reich. The key is most likely to be found in his enduring misanthropy.

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals come into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something  . . .

Sadly it seems to be a thin line which divides this sort of general realism from that which gets so thoroughly pissed off at everyone apparently wallowing in their own shit as to get misty-eyed over anything punishing which just so happens to entail jackboots; so Celine's slide to the far right should probably be considered reactionary in the literal sense, a move facilitated by the desire to attribute blame - as he himself once acknowledged.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

It's a fucking shame, and that whole argument about whether it's possible to divorce a piece of art from the shithead who created it is more complicated than I have time to really consider right now, and is an issue which should probably be settled on a case by case basis; but for what it may be worth, Journey to the End of the Night is a genuinely great book, or at least the first half is a genuinely great book, regardless of anything else.

Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway

Stephen H. Morris Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway (2015)
Having spent some time living in and around the Medway towns in Kent, this history held obvious appeal to me. I lived in Maidstone from 1984 onwards, and then in Chatham itself for a couple of years prior to jumping ship in 1989. I played in a couple of Medway bands and knew quite a few of those involved in the local music scene, a scene which had one hell of a lot going on. It's difficult bordering on impossible to make such statements with any degree of objectivity, but it really did seem like the whole thing with bands in Medway - and not just bands but also artists, writers, people putting out fanzines and so on - was unique even in the context of all those other regional microcosms formed in the wake of punk. So this felt like a book which needed to be written. In fact, even at the time, back when I was living there it felt as though somebody should have been writing something like this.

What Morris has done here, he has generally done well, or for the most part well enough to cancel out any urge towards moaning on my part. His coverage of Medway's punk years, with bands like the Pop Rivets, Gash - who I'd never heard of - and Cenet Rox, seems very thorough; and he does a good job following through to the Milkshakes, Prisoners, Mighty Caesars, Daggermen, Dentists and others. I knew a couple of those involved, saw them play, bought the records and so on, so the first half of the book - dominated as it is by Billy Childish - is interesting to me. It seems fair to say the first half of these near five-hundred pages closely resembles that notional book I always felt needed to be written.

The problems become apparent as Morris' chronology aligns to the stuff I can actually remember in greater detail. In the introduction he writes that:

...this book cannot cover every aspect of music in Medway from the mid-seventies onwards. This book, thick enough as it is, would be double the size, perhaps more if I had attempted such a feat. As it is, I have aimed to cover the activities of the usual suspects - along with quite a few less usual ones. If anyone gets to the last page and wonders why their band didn't get a mention, I can only apologise.

Fair enough, and for the record I am myself mentioned in passing by Simon Bunyan of the Men from Memphis on page 206:

There was a guy [from Envy]. I think his name was Lawrence. He was basically miked up with a few sheets of corrugated iron, just hitting them on the floor. It was just arty and surreal - but rubbish.

Unfortunately he's right. It really was rubbish, although it's quite nice to have been remembered regardless of anything else, particularly as I'm surprised to have been mentioned at all. That said, Envy grew out of Apricot Brigade who were kind of a big deal at the time. Ignoring my own brief and not particularly impressive involvement, they played a shitload of gigs, accrued a fairly healthy following, and served as an apprenticeship for two drummers who ended up in the significantly better publicised Dentists - yet Apricot Brigade are referred to once in the whole book, whilst Envy are mentioned only in the context of my own pitiful Test Department impersonation.

It's based on records, I decided at one point, noticing how all bands discussed thus far were those who had released their music on vinyl to one extent or another; which in turn begs the question of why no mention of Konstruktivists. Glenn of Konstruktivists lived in Gillingham for most of the eighties, and if he was never what you'd call a major presence on the live circuit, he played a couple of times, knew a few of the people Morris writes about at length, made the local newspaper, and given Glenn's involvement in Whitehouse, half of the current noise scene is probably his fault. Konstruktivists sold albums all over the world before Glenn moved to Norfolk, and they receive not a single mention herein whilst the Claim get half a chapter about how some guy in Nevada had all of their records.

To be fair, I didn't really expect Konstruktivists to feature in any significant way, but weirder still was reaching page three-hundred and noticing that Tim Webster had been referenced just once due to his having played guitar on some Hyacinth Girls record. By page three-hundred, fucking Dodgy have been mentioned more than Tim Webster, and Dodgy were 1) shit, 2) not from Medway. I suppose the omission at least excludes the possibility of anyone having been left out owing to a bias in favour of bands who played live all the time, or who put out a shitload of vinyl, or who had that whole garage thing going on. Tim Webster put out a very decent six track 10" with the Sputniks, was in seven or eight bands at any one time, usually played about four gigs a night, and still found time to repair everyone's guitars for them. Tim Webster was frankly fucking amazing and I'm sort of surprised there isn't a statue of the guy somewhere. Never mind I can't write about everyone wah wah wah, lack of Webster in a book purporting to be about the music of the Medway towns may as well be that Beatles biography which never mentions Ringo.

Fuck it. I expected omissions, but while we're here the Product, All Flags Burn, Uninvited Guests, the Martini Slutz, Millions of Brazilians, Sexton Ming, and even whatever Smilin' Paul Mercer is calling himself this week - all achieved enough of a buzz in one way or another to merit references longer than one sentence in a five-hundred page book which nevertheless finds time to go through Claim albums a track at a time. There's no mention of the Blue Lagoon even in passing, and the final reference to Andy Fraser promises more on Unlucky Fried Kitten in a later chapter without delivering anything of the sort; so bollocks.

Past the halfway point, we move into the twenty-first century and younger bands I've never heard of, with the previously stated emphasis on do it yourself somewhat undermined by how much stock is placed in sucking dicks at XFM or hanging out with famous friends like that knob out of the Libertines. Some of the bands sound like they might be decent, but it's difficult to keep from tripping over journalistic landmines about things owing a debt to the first Ocean Colour Scene album or some other supposed indie landmark beloved of Jo Whiley. I can't tell whether the writing falls off once we're done with the Childish years or I'd become punch-drunk with Sandiferisms and references to Oasis and Blur made as though either could have anything to do with anything, but the book starts to read like your proverbial local news report about a skateboarding duck during the second half. Sentences are delivered with a wry tilt of the head or a raised eyebrow, and all musical heritage invoked will inevitably be rich, Alan.

The brass effects on the kerosene-fuelled title track recall moments from Shed Seven's glory days while the bluster and bravado from all involved would give Liam Gallagher a run for his money.

See, that would work better if Shed Seven hadn't been a massive pile of shite at the best of times, but never mind.

Then we have Kids Unique, a fairly decent rap group judging by what I can find on YouTube, and inspiration for Morris going full-Eamonn Holmes as he describes the music with its grim, gritty view of life in Medway, there is no affectation of keeping it real with an entourage of bitches and hos, because that's what the rappers do, don't they? You know - the rappers you see on Top of the Pops keeping it real with their bitches and hos.

Anyway, I ended up skimming a few of the later chapters.

I'm just going to come right out and say it. Do It Yourself: A History of Music in Medway is fine as a five-hundred page fanzine, but the writing is kind of lazy and more reliant on hyperbole and  journalistic clichés than I like to see in fancy-pants print. There's too much along the lines of the Milkshakes were sort of like the Kaiser Chiefs of their day, and no-one cares about the fucking Libertines. I expected it to miss out a lot but it misses out a lot more than I expected, instead wasting time and pages on track by track analysis of albums which are almost certainly more fun to hear than to read about. That being said, the book is not without merit, there's a lot which is interesting, and it's still a book which needed to be written.

Nice try, but no cigar - at least not this time around.

...and if anyone is bothered, a load of anecdotal shite of the kind which never made it into this book, much of it involving Medway bands, can be found here by searching for posts tagged Chatham, and some of the music can be found here. You're welcome.

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast (1964)
I can be a bit clueless when it comes to the history of literature besides that which generally has a picture of a spaceship on the cover, although possibly not quite so clueless as some, but more clueless than I would like. Having been drawn to the probably inaccurate idea of Hemingway as a man who wrote books and enjoyed a good healthy punch-up, I decided to start with A Moveable Feast on the grounds that I sometimes like to know something of the character of an author before I proceed further, and being an autobiographical account of our man's life in Paris in the 1920s, this seemed like a good place to start.

Being rather less clueless when it comes to the history of twentieth century art, I'm interested to find that Ernest spent a lot of time hanging around with artists whose work I know, forming opinions which tend to support that which I suspected. He likes Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, finds Aleister Crowley unsavoury, and summarises Wyndham Lewis in a way as to suggest parallels with a certain weird little fannish hard-boiled egg man presently spewing out a million internet words a day on how Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who and the Giant Robot novelisation recontextualises proto-Shakespearian misogyny as a millennial détournement of Situationist theory, which is a shame as I always liked Lewis' Vorticist work, but never mind.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

This passage stood out for me as a good example of Hemingway's greatest strengths, the style he developed, and because of the thematic link to the proto-Cubist painter, Paul Cézanne. Stylistically, Hemingway appeared to be reacting against the baroque excesses of Symbolist writing - if that's what I mean - with an efficient and stripped down text delivering solid blocks of meaning in straight lines without the distraction of adjectives or hyperbole. It is, I suppose, a style that has come to be identified as hard-boiled, at least by me, and might be seen as partially ancestral to the written work of Charles Bukowski, Billy Childish - albeit maybe with a dash of Louis-Ferdinand Céline - and even Philip K. Dick. Rather than presenting a dry, emotionless narrative, this technique instead offers one which might in fact be characterised as more emotionally honest - providing the components of the image, allowing the reader to perceive that which is seen along with the emotional response; or less is more; or as Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

To get to the point, this is essentially similar to what Cézanne and those influenced by him, most notably Picasso, were doing with painting, stripping the subject down to its most basic essence in order to expose artistic truths which had for so long been eclipsed by the artist as the most important part of the equation. In other words, this is what art, whether written or painted, used to do before shit television fooled us into believing sad scenes require tears and Murray fucking Gold sobbing into his London Philharmonic Orchestra in order to convey emotion.

Apparently he wrote better than this, but A Moveable Feast has nevertheless made for a very refreshing change.

The Book of Misplaced But Imperishable Names

Bill Lewis The Book of Misplaced But Imperishable Names (2005)
I first encountered Bill Lewis back in the eighties as he'd begun to achieve some fame as one of the Medway Poets, a group of writers hailing from the next town along when I was taking a fine arts degree. At the time I actively disliked poetry, or at least a great deal of that which happily identified itself as such, and I continue to do so in a general sense. Few writers, so it seemed to me, were ever at their best in verse, and the rest may as well be chuckling Richard Stilgoe types composing odes to the amusing misery of making a claim on one's car insurance so far as I was concerned - the sort of smirking crap that eventually rendered BBC Radio 4 almost completely unlistenable. I was therefore astonished to find that I very much enjoyed the poems of Billy Childish, mainly because they resembled nothing I had experienced as poetry, and did a lot of the things I generally like writing to do, just in shorter and sharper form. I saw Billy read, sat smoking at a desk in his old man's suit, reciting accounts of his continued survival as though delivering statements in a police interview room. He'd been caught red handed, but he was fucked if he was going to say sorry.

Bill Lewis was, so far as I saw it, the other big name of the Medway Poets. He seemed to have the highest visibility and was an undeniably dynamic performer, violent and explosive where Billy seemed to brood and simmer. His material too felt more travelled, somehow more universal in compensation for lacking the visceral edge of Childish's writing. He seemed like someone who could have hung out with Ginsberg or Lenny Bruce in another life; plus he knew at least one tribal shaman and had involved himself in South American revolutions from time to time. Drawing on this wealth of experience, he generally manages to communicate something vital without it coming across like an affectation, as it could have done and has done for other more cynical and hence lesser talents; and although I must own up to never quite enjoying his use of a traditional native drum, that isn't really Bill's fault.

Anyway, still going strong thirty years later, this collection serves as a reminder of all that defined the voice of Bill Lewis as carrying such a distinctive tone back when I was younger and not quite so fat. The poetry is well represented in his consistently elegant use of language and thoughtful narrative, although the form taken tends towards short stories, essays, observations, and vignettes - probably easier to just call it writing. He shares that same roughly working class edge as Billy Childish without it serving as either a substitute for content or letting it define him, as beautifully illustrated in Tomatoes, another autobiographical snippet in which he introduces a fellow worker to the poetry of Pablo Neruda:

'Sod off! I'm reading a poem.'

The woman and the two men next to her started to take the piss 'Oh lah dee dah... we didn't know we woz mixing wiv the gentry. It's Lord Muck of Turd Hall.' They soon grew tired of it and went back to their lunch.

'Sometimes I think we're our own worst enemies. The British working classes might as well walk around with a Kick Me sign stuck on our backs,' he said and then returned to the page.

He read the title again, then he read the poem. He read slowly. I saw him smile a couple of times.

Yes, I've been there. In fact I was there for about twenty years, and for me this piece epitomises what I like best about Bill's writing and, by extension, about Bill himself: his endless enthusiasm and sheer passion for communication and that which excites him, and that he's plainly the real thing and doesn't really give a shit what the rest of us may think. That is to say, what you get in this book is not some projected persona, nor anything representing strategy in any shape or form - another aspect he shares with Childish. Of course, honesty and enthusiasm by themselves would be useless were it not for the author's willingness to get out there and experience the world on its terms, even in places where curiosity can get you killed. He dips toes - at least up to the waist - in native American lore; which is something which would ordinarily bring me out in hives for the reason that if I want to know about indigenous cultures of whatever form - as I often do - the last thing I want to know is what some white guy thinks, for that way lies Sting, Bonio, and other tosspots taking their cheap holidays in someone else's ethnic diaspora; but Bill gets away with it, and even brings back something interesting, because he understands myth and its place in common human experience; and he does it without losing his sense of humour.

Of course there are some points he makes which just don't work for me - which I mention here for the sake of quantifying the praise - but Lordy - I don't see that anyone with functioning brain cells could fail to find this an absorbing and enlightening read. Bill Lewis is a true original.

Not sure about availability but you might do worse than trying Bill's site.

The Darkening Light

Ted Curtis The Darkening Light (2014)
Many centuries ago I printed The Devil Lives in Hackney, a short story by Ted Curtis in some fanzine or other, and still regard it as easily amongst the better things I've ever helped foist upon a largely indifferent public, so I am possibly not the most impartial critic. I knew Ted, or at least knew of Ted as someone living in the same house as Dave Fanning and Andy Martin, best known as formerly of The Apostles who were by that point members of a band called Academy 23, which I'd just joined. I was sat in Dave's room, watching him draw and talking about comics as Ted maintained a silent mohicaned presence on the other side of the room. I'll be honest, it was odd. He didn't seem hostile, but it was like being in a room with an aquarium containing a fish of such volume that you couldn't help but wonder what it might be thinking.

'That Ted is a bit quiet, isn't he?' I later remarked.

'A bit pissed more like,' Dave explained.

I was surprised, because Ted had neither said nor done anything I would have identified as the actions of someone under the refreshing influence of cold drinks. I hadn't even noticed a tell-tale can or bottle, and Dave's hypothesis was illustrated on another, similar occasion, identical to the first but for Ted somehow falling out of the chair without having apparently made any preliminary effort to stand, before departing with think I might go back to bed for a bit, which is possibly the most I've ever heard him say in one go. Once again, I hadn't even realised he'd had a few, and I'd found it impossible to assess the situation, or to imagine what he could have been thinking.

I suspect he may have been thinking thoughts that felt like this novel, a couple of days in the life of vegan anarchist punks in 1986 as they visit that London to attend a Concrete Sox, Eat Shit and Heresy gig, and their van breaks down. It's almost a stream of consciousness that probably could have been written as one continuous hundred page sentence without too much difference to the tone - crappy homebrew, crappy vans, wrists cut on broken windows, self-loathing, amyl nitrate, hangovers, bright orange diarrhoea with no toilet paper, and sharing a glue bag with the bloke out of Conflict. It could have gone horribly wrong, as novels with any sort of musical or subcultural element often do - here thinking mainly of Irvine Welsh rushing to tell the members of his writers' group about the junkie he met in the pub and all the great new material he's harvested - but Ted Curtis doesn't appear to give a shit about impressing the reader with his arcane knowledge, or waving used needles under the noses of whoever is likely to take the most lucrative offence; rather, he just gets on with it and tells the story, and the rest is up to us.

It isn't exactly Bukowski or Billy Childish in tone, but it makes similar moves in describing extreme situations without the hysterics that might get in the way of our understanding them, regardless of how well we may or may not identify. It's not so much Thoreau's men leading lives of quiet desperation, as lives of extremely noisy desperation, seasoned with a reasonable dose of humour of the kind that doesn't need to stick on a red nose and pull faces in order to get its point across; and it feels quite profound, in that even if you've never had an argument about burnt tofu burgers or shat yourself in the corner of a beaten up van, then you should nevertheless still be able to appreciate what The Darkening Light says about the bullshit we all put ourselves through, sometimes because it seems like the only option. It's the best thing I've read in a while by quite some margin, and it's nice to know that at least someone is still writing real books. Buy this fucker immediately!

And buy this fucker immediately from here.