JR McGheeGrowing up in books

Tex Avery, King of Cartoons (Joe Adamson, bought Mar 2012)

I’m crazy for Avery, always have been.  Watching the early Tex Avery feature I Love to Singa on teatime BBC1 is one of my earliest TV memories.  Avery’s surreal havoc still cracks me up now: Bad Luck Blackie, Red Hot Riding Hood, King Size Canary, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.  The hair-in-the-projector-gate gag in the Magical Maestro remains a riot, if strangely chilling.

This 1975 retrospective of Avery’s work is a quick read and a useful introduction.  After briefly retelling animation’s early history (taking Winsor McCay’s Gertie The Dinosaur as its starting point) the book recounts Avery’s career through his best and most famous cartoons.  King of Cartoons closes with three chatty interviews.  Adamson talks to Michael Maltese and Heck Allen, two of Avery’s gagmen, and Avery himself.  There is some fascinating material here, particularly the gossip on Avery’s producers: the commercial-minded Leon Schlesinger and his love of gambling, the managerial Fred Quimby and his seemingly absent sense of humour.

Adamson’s writing is exuberant and he writes as an informed aficionado.  There is a flavour of Adamson’s exuberance in this passage, where my all-time favourite Avery creation is described:

Screwy Squirrel is Daffy Duck taken one step further than he absolutely has to.  A funny character who is slightly insane, like a Harpo Marx or a Woody Allen, has a subversive sort of captivating quality, but a maniac who resolutely flaunts his insanity is a little more than frightening.  His starring vehicles take a hardy constitution to endure, though they exhibit their creator’s comic genius all the same.

Thanks to the internet, many of Tex Avery’s cartoons are freely available to watch.  As is, incidentally, Gertie The Dinosaur.

VALIS (Philip K. Dick, bought Jan 2012)

A hundred and fifty pages into reading this novel and you think – right, this is going nowhere.

The quasi-religious, semi-autobiographical ramblings of the first half of this book are intriguing (if a bit impenetrable) but the plot is meagre: the protagonist, Horselover Fat, sees God in a flash of pink light and becomes a lunatic, whilst his interchangeable associates live, die and discuss the nature of reality.  There are extended quotations from books of philosophy and theology, reportage from the inside of an asylum and, really, nothing much happens.

But then Horselover Fat goes to see a low budget science fiction film called ‘Valis’ and the story accelerates.  There is a mystery. a conspiracy, time travel, a two-year old messiah, rock stars and lasers.  The narrator disappears.  The second half of VALIS is dizzying.

I was left wondering: does VALIS make sense?  Is it a good book?

Search me.

The story’s narrator, in describing the film-in-the-novel, says ‘on the surface the movie made no sense whatsoever.  Unless you ferreted out the subliminal and marginal clues and assembled them all together you arrived at nothing’.  So it goes with the novel itself.

There are memorable lines and concepts: ‘to fight the empire is to be infected with its derangement’; ‘Fish cannot carry guns’; ‘The Black Iron Prison’; ‘KING FELIX’.  There is something here, in this book.  I just don’t know what it is.

Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction (Charles Platt, bought Jan 2012)

There was a time when Philip K Dick wrote sixty finished pages a day, propped up by amphetamines, in order to keep his family finances afloat.  Recently, I tracked down this book, Dream Makers, as the source of this illuminating (if terrifying) statement on PKD’s unhealthy hyper-productivity.

Dream Makers is a collection of succinct profiles of 30 famous science fiction authors written at the end of the 1970s.  Revisited now, it is a fascinating curio.  Isaac Asimov and PKD were two of my favourite writers in my teenage years, and many of the other names in Dream Makers are familiar: Robert Scheckley, Kurt Vonnegut, Frederik Pohl, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Robert Silverberg, Brian W Aldiss.

Platt prepared his profiles in a clear, inquiring but more-or-less respectful mode.  His interviewees are a colourful bunch, for sure: systems-driven AE van Vogt, flashy Harlan Ellison and self-confessed “no-bullshit” hack EC Tubb.   Tubb’s profile, one of the most enjoyable in the collection, is unexpectedly disarming, as Tubb sardonically discusses his life’s work, writing grandiose space opera.

The glimpses given into each authors’ working practices are compelling: Asimov, sitting all day in his spartan, artificially-lit writing room; Algis Budris, so fatigued working on a novel that he “suffered from auditory hallucinations.”  The profiled authors, many of them, are seemingly workaholic, compulsive writers – either through inclination (like Asimov, say) or necessity (like PKD).

Katerina Brac (Christopher Reid, bought Jan 2012)
A Scattering (Christopher Reid, bought 2009-ish, probably just after it won the Costa)

Two skilful and erudite poetry collections.  Katerina Brac’s crafty blurb says Brac is a “too little-known poet”, an “artist under pressure”, now translated into English by Reid.  Of course, Brac never existed and the rustic and dreamy style of these poems is Reid’s, albeit filtered through the imagined voice of an Eastern European poet, a woman.  The ventriloquism is sustained, credible throughout.  Recommended.

Twenty years later, Reid wrote the poignant and finely honed A Scattering.  Collections of elegies can be rather hard-going – I read Jacques Roubard’s Something Black last year, which was dazzlingly written but almost too upsetting to finish.  A Scattering delicately contrasts the mournful with the uplifting.  Essential.

Crow by Ted Hughes (bought online, Jan 2012)
The Hell of It All by Charlie Brooker (Christmas present, 2009)

Right, let’s see: a bleak worldview with a well-disguised core of humanity?  Inventive, extreme and rude?  Dark humour? Trendy haircut? Published by Faber?  Ticks in all boxes, Ted and Charlie both.

When read concurrently, these two collections have concerns that are surprisingly similar.  The despair of Hughes’ poetic sequence Crow (sorrow, horror, death, emptiness, gore, anguish) could be seamlessly drag-and-dropped into The Hell of It All, Brooker’s most recent collection of Guardian columns.  “Real life… a cruel and horrifying string of random unfolding events” is pure Crow but actually comes from Brooker’s column on the last days of Gordon Brown.

Poetry and comedy are sometimes so samey and lazy.  Great to read instead two well-defined voices, still sounding fresh, still biting.  Sure, Ted Hughes didn’t write very much about Tekken and Doom and The Apprentice, and Charlie Brooker only discusses the ultimate futility of human existence in about two-thirds of his columns, but I think the comparison stands.  Utterly worn out, utterly clear equals Go away.

AND: The second of the Black Mirror episodes, 15 Million Merits, was just about the best thing on TV last year.  A really clear-headed piece of writing.

AND: Hughes’ Examination at the Womb-Door in Crow is devastating, but Simon Barraclough’s riff on it, Examination at Doom’s Door, is also compelling.  By putting Ted Hughes in the context of computer games – specifically Doom, “the king of all first-person shooters” – has Barraclough inadvertently imagined what the poetry of Charlie Brooker might sound like?

Bestsellers, A Very Short Introduction (John Sutherland, bought online Jan 2012)

The Constant Nymph; The Private Life of Helen of Troy; This Man Is Dangerous; I, The Jury;  Anthony Adverse; Black Oxen; David Grieve; The Green Hat; Ragtime; Wheels; The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Mary Barton; The Green Light; The Blessing Way; Trinity; The Viper of Milan; If Winter Comes; The Moon Is Down.  This is absolutely the last thing I need!  A parade of novels that I’ve never read or even heard of.  All bestsellers in their day.

For their brevity and informality, I’m a big fan of OUP’s Very Short Introduction series.  Bestsellers is a tidy discussion of a sprawling topic, a worthy quick read.  Now, where on earth can I track down a copy of Sorrell and Son?

Apathy and Other Small Victories (Paul Neilan, bought online May 2010)
A Firing Offense (George P. Pelecanos, bought at The Bookseller Crow, Dec 2011)
All The Flowers Are Dying (Lawrence Block, bought in Toronto, sometime in 2008)

Ed McBain, James Ellroy, Raymond Chandler, Charles Willaford: if you’re going to write a crime novel, it had better be as good as these guys.  Good luck with that.

Neilan’s debut novel Apathy is more of a comic romp than a mystery.  It’s in intentional bad taste from the outset and has moments when it’s extremely funny.  The narrator, Shane, is a reluctant insurance temp and Neilan’s descriptions of futile office life are sharp. The central crime, the death of a deaf woman, unfolds lethargically (which is completely in line with the overall theme of apathy).  Maybe there’s an excess of grotesquery and an over-reliance on movie and pop culture references but overall, it’s a decent read, good fun.

Even more pop culture references in A Firing Offense.  How much you like this novel depends on how much you enjoy hanging out in Washington DC with Pelecanos’ characters listening to them riff on new wave and punk music.  I enjoyed it greatly.  Nick Stefanos is an advertising director for a hi-fi superstore chainstore/private investigator (stay with me here) who agrees to look into the whereabouts of a missing warehouse worker.  Like Apathy, the story takes a while to get going but Pelecanos’ detours are really engaging (the mundane subterfuge of shop-floor salesmen, for instance, and tales of combat drinking in skinhead moshpits).  When the mystery comes together, eventually, there’s a breathless action climax.  A Firing Offense was Pelecanos’s debut and it’s not bad at all.  Not as good as his later work on The Wire – what could be? – but good enough to encourage me to pick up his other Stefanos novels at some point too.

But this is more like it.  Block’s Eight Million Ways To Die is one of my favourite crime novels, and Matthew Scudder one of my favourite PIs.  In All The Flowers Are Dying, there’s much more murder, carnage, gore and ghastliness here than in Apathy and A Firing Offense put together.  In New York, an aging Scudder and his wife are being hunted by a serial killer, a maniac, a right piece-of-work.  “Serial killers are always a bore in my book” said Mark E Smith in A Past Gone Mad, and normally I’d agree but this is so horrible, so vastly over the top, that I couldn’t help but keep turning the pages.  Actually, in its more elegiac and less hysteric moments, All The Flowers… is quite charming, moving even.

Never thought I’d say this but I’ve got too many books.  Way too many.  They clutter up the flat.  The shelves are in disarray and boxes and boxes of dusty paperbacks linger in storage.

And, for every awesome book that I’ve been lucky enough to own and read (Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual and Canetti’s Auto de Fe), I’ve got a foxed copy of something odd that I haven’t as much as opened yet: Thinning The Herd: Tales of the Weirdly Departed, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, an implausibly dog-eared copy of Time’s Arrow.

In If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Italo Calvino describes different categories of “Books You Haven’t Read” including:

Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages
Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read
Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered

I’ve got every one of these, multiple examples.

And still they come.  Every Christmas, I love to get books as presents.  This year, I received the new Kurt Vonnegut biography And So It Goes and Robert Bolano’s monster 2666.  Fantastic, really look forward to reading these, I thought as I shelved them next to gifted books from last year which I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet.  Next to unread books from the year before.  And the year before.  Then I looked at the pristine copy of The Man Without Qualities, 1,130 pages of mindbending Austrian angst which I’d barely opened since I got it as a present for Christmas five years ago.

Enough is enough.  Apart from those books in storage (which I’m not counting, and trying not to think about), there are 188 unread books on my shelves at home.  Untenable.  I’m going to read every one of the blighters this year.  Or, if that doesn’t work, I’m declaring book bankruptcy, pitching the lot in the trash and starting again.