Hellspawn

Much like the subject of today’s blog post, I am returned to the land of the living from the awesome weekend that was Chris’ stag do in the fine city of Nottingham. Had a fantastic time, and I hopefully I will have some, uhh… ‘content’ for everyone reading this very soon!

Dinner is served, bitches.

Today I picked up the complete Hellspawn collection (all of the issues, cover gallery, additional art, behind-the-scenes content, etc.) for a pretty reasonable £30 and so far it’s been excellent. It’s actually the first Spawn comic that I’ve ever owned, despite having read most of the origin story and being pretty familiar with the general gist of things mostly due to the popularity of the franchise back in the 90’s. I also recently started watching the animated series online and got to about episode 6 when I discovered that it had been cancelled after the third series (only 18 episodes) and thus nowhere near a conclusion. I regrettably dropped it after that, as I knew I’d never get any closure on that particular strand.

Aside: Talking of things that have been cancelled, I was pretty gutted to see this news piece about the progress of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. Basically, Universal studios have refused to greenlight the film – a proposed $150 million live-action epic, with James Cameron as executive producer and Tom Cruise rumoured to be starring. The reason? Well, basically it comes down to the fact that it’s Lovecraft. Del Toro, and the story itself, need an ‘R’ rating in America, but the studio want PG-13 to reach a wider audience and make money back. Also, the fact that it’s a bleak tale of unimaginable horror with no happy ending or anything easily marketable to the masses probably didn’t help.

Still, there is hope out there. The studio isn’t completely ditching the project; word has it that he’s shopping it to other studios; and he’s also been attached to Pacific Rim as director (it looks like it could be pretty sweet – not Lovecraft, but sweet nonetheless). Hopefully we’ll see some cosmic horror on the big screen soon enough! Also, there’s a new Spawn animated series in the works, which we may or may not see this year according to various sources.

The Pigeon

Moar Süskind

 You’ve had it! You’re too old and you’ve had it, letting yourself be frightened to death by a pigeon…

A pretty short novella, The Pigeon is the story of Jonathan Noel, a meticulously organised, largely friendless and introverted security guard who has worked the same job, standing on the same three steps of the same bank for decades. This book is extremely Kafkaesque in its approach; Jonathan’s life is turned upside down when contrary to any of his preconceptions he is startled to find a pigeon sat in the hallway of his apartment building. When the line between reality and surreality (sic) is blurred in the context of almost painfully everyday, nondescript life is something that always interests me. This book achieves that in our protagonist’s almost hysterical response to the appearance of this bird. It also managed the same thing that Camus’ The Outsider did for me, which was encapsulate a quintessentially Parisian/French approach to everyday life (and in particular food). Obviously the main merits of this book however lie in the way it manages to extrapolate the significance of seemingly insignificant moments of disorder in the life of Jonathan; and show us how precariously close we perhaps all teeter toward the edge of sanity, cushioned and numbed as we our by our own habitual lives and firmly held beliefs in the perceived natural order of everyday existence. Jonathan Noel’s existential terror and blind panic in the face of his disrupted routine could quite easily be our own.

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oë

It seemed to me that our single grave was going to spread out forever all over the world. 

This book was a little hard to get a hold of (I have had it on my ‘want’ list for nearly a year before I could get a new copy) and once I started it I was immediately hit by how bleak and stark Oë’s wartime Japan was compared to the other books that I have read since Christmas. Compared to the junky numbness of Naked Lunch, the time-travelling surrealism of Slaughterhouse 5, the aromatic richness of Perfume, and the encapsulated Americana paranoia of The Crying of Lot 49, this book pulls very few punches.

It is not that it has a lack of attention to detail, or a tendency to stick to the mundane (it is also not to say that some of the aforementioned books didn’t have their bleak moments; not at all). This is the cold hard slap of real life as experienced by you, the reader. Nip the Buds… is the story of a group of reformatory boys who are sent to a rural village in the mountains to work during the war, where they are reviled by the locals. Soon after their arrival, plague breaks out and the boys are abandoned and barricaded in by the villagers, left to die. As the blurb puts it so well, ‘The boys’ brief and doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love and tribal valour fails in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.’ 

There are obvious comparisons to be cast here with Lord of the Flies, amongst others, and its obvious anger, its painful confrontation of Japanese society and the myriad reasons that made Oë the winner of 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature make this a book that everyone should (if they can) pick up and give a read. Also, it’s one hell of a literary debut.

Perfume

Perfume by Patrick Süskind

Forgive my literary heathen ways, but I had never heard of Patrick Süskind until I read a recommendation for both this and The Pigeon on, of all places, the old Anaal Nathrakh forum boards in the book thread. Little did I know that there was a film version from 2006, that the book itself was written in 1985 and is pretty well-known, and that it has even inspired songs by artists as varied as Nirvana, Air and Rammstein.

Slaughterhouse 5

Slaughterhouse 5, or the Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut

So it goes.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel, along with each of the other books that I have read so far this year, there is a recurring theme. The lead character is, or at least could very well be, completely unhinged. If it’s not that they have lost the plot (perhaps some time ago) it is that they are losing it, never had it, are under the influence of drugs or alien forces, or perhaps are just hallucinating the entire thing.

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

 My shrink, pursued by Israelis, has gone mad: my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; my one extra-marital fella has eloped with a depraved fifteen-year-old; my best guide to the Trystero has taken a Brody. Where am I?”

This whole book is a pretty hallucinogenic, stream of consciousness, lucid dream-like stumble upon what may or may not be a great conspiracy… But to start at the beginning, as is the norm, the ‘Lot 49’ of the title is the number of a lot in an auction that occurs at the very end of the book. The lead character, a one Mrs Oedipa Mass (a name that makes me reconsider my somewhat cop-out naming decisions in my own work here) is present at this auction as she has unexpectedly been made executor (executrix?) of an ex-boyfriend’s will and testament, and his items are being sold. The lot in question, number 49 – the significance of which many still disagree upon, is a collection of stamps that may or may not have been deliberately misprinted.

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Ten pounds lost in ten minutes standing with the syringe in one hand holding his pants up with the other, his abdicated flesh burning in a cold yellow halo, there in the New York hotel room… 

You need to read this book.

You also need to read this book for yourself, as this quasi-overview/review thing that I usually churn out simply won’t even begin to encapsulate what is happening within the pages of this book. So I think I’ll leave it very short this time.

You should probably know that this is a gorgeously deranged tab of cut-up junky literature that features a not insignificant amount of pederasty, as well as the obvious heavy drug use. If these kind of things might put you off a book, then suck it up and read it anyway. It was the last book (text only) to be tried under obscenity laws in the US. Whatever you might think of these things, the writing is truly important and just to reiterate –

You need to read this book.

The 2011 Reading List

Here we are in 2011, a new year and a new reading list (with a slight overload of Burroughs perhaps due to some happy coincidences). Note that I still haven’t been able to get a hold of the Bjørneboe trilogy yet, but I’m making it one of my missions for this year. As ever, any suggestions for additions are more than welcome. Happy reading!

Against all Gods by AC Grayling
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Ticket That Exploded by William S Burroughs
The Place of Dead Roads by William S Burroughs
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Nip The Buds, Shoot The Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Slaughterhouse 5, or the Children’s Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut
The God of Small Things by Arudnhati Roy
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Perfume by Patrick Suskind
The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind
The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zombardo
The Art of Noises by Luigi Russolo
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski
The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Soft Machine by William S. Burroughs
Powderhouse by Jens Bjørneboe
Moment of Freedom by Jens Bjørneboe
The Silence by Jens Bjørneboe

Day 02

Man up, caterpillar.

Your First Love

Long before there were girls (one girl in particular, obviously) to worry about, before all my other interests, before gaming, before even music there were… Books!

I remember being told off when I was quite young for reading books under my covers with a torch, hours after I should have been asleep – now no one can stop me bwahaha! One of the first authors I can remember reading as a small child was Enid Blyton – Famous Five and Secret Seven (in retrospect, I can imagine the inkling of the superhero team developing here). Later on came Terry Pratchett and my well-documented love of the Fighting Fantasy series of books. But before either of these, and this will surprise no one I’m sure, there was the Hobbit. What a fantastic book… As always, I am approaching the big screen makeover with a degree of trepidation.

Finally, some people I know got shiny new Kindles for Christmas and asked if  I would like to have one myself. And I must admit that access to a potentially unreadable number of books on a tiny little slim gadget does seem pretty Star Trek (read: cool). However, I really like physically owning a book, feeling like you have something special in your hands, and any number of other cheesier clichés… But the point still stands. When I grow up I want to have a library.

As I Lay Dying

I have read a lot of books this year that I have liked, and as a result Amazon has recommended that I also read some Faulkner. As I had never done this before, but obviously knew the name (there’s a terrible band with the same moniker, no?) and so I picked one more or less at random / on the strength of the front cover (impartial, right).

My mother is a fish. 

After having read And the Ass Saw the Angel by the extremely multi-talented Mr. Nick Cave¹, and similar books besides, I found it fairly easy to get in to the southern twang – which for some can take a fair mental jump. You know you’ve got it when you can’t stop thinking in the vernacular for some time after reading a couple of chapters (zero occurrences of ‘old hoss’ so far – thanks to Marcus for that one). Before getting stuck into the book, I want first to quickly tackle the blurb as it is also something that I would imagine most of us do first in real life anyway. According to the blurb on my Vintage Classics edition,  As I Lay Dying is ‘as epic as the Old Testament [and] as American as Huckleberry Finn.’ This is a pretty fantastic piece of marketing², and I often think of when I did reviews for Bad Acid magazine and had to find ways to describe highly inaccessible music that made sense and weren’t too contrived and wanky.

The book is written by fifteen different narrators, each taking one or more of the 49 chapters to his or herself, and each of them describes their perspective on the death and burial of Addie Bundren, matron of the Bundren family. It is the innermost thoughts of her children, husband, friends and other onlookers as the family attempt to fulfil her dying wish – to be buried in the town of Jefferson. Each of the chapters is pretty short, with the shortest and possibly most well-known, amongst them being reproduced above as my selected quotation. This was also one of the earliest (excluding, you know, Dostoyevsky) and biggest examples of stream-of-consciousness writing, and as such reveals all of the true, ugly, chivalrous, stubborn, honest, selfish and misguided intentions of the narrators. It’s hard to describe much more of the plot without ruining a large chunk of a relatively small book. Suffice to say: a real slice of American literature.

¹This is a fantastic book, by the way. I read it either last year or maybe even the year before, but it really stuck with me. The vernacular of the characters being the writing style obviously helped to emphasise this, similarly to As I Lay Dying, but the story itself is brilliant, too.
²Some of my other favourites include the positive, often hyperbolic praise on vaguely adventure-themed books, e.g. Terminal World – ‘a snarling, drooling, crazy-eyes mongrel’.