Adventures in bookclubbing: Trends and portents

My one-person book club fell by the wayside when we moved down south, but I picked it up again recently because it really is immensely rewarding, and I've been able to find all sorts of new literary thrills, no matter where I live in the world.

I've been sticking to the rules of the club for years now -  I try to get into as many non-white guy English-speaking writers as possible, I try to stick with something that has come out in the past few years, and I insist that it is something by a writer that I've never heard of before.

For all that, it is also very nice to break the rules, and I have done that with the past three books - they were all still by authors that I never heard of, and were all by women or non-English writers, but they were also all written and first published decades ago, and have been reprinted in all new editions. 

The first was Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns, which I 100 percent got just because I loved the title; the next was Arto Paasilinna's The Year Of The Hare, which answers the eternal question of what happens when you abandon your life to wander Finland with a hare; and the latest was The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon, which was very, very Belgian.

They're full of strange perspectives and dated language, but the ones that get the flash new reprints do tend to be seem to be a certain type - they are thoroughly middle class concerns, with the main characters often having to deal with unruly maids and other useless staff, even as the old world rots around them.

They can still come with remarkable imagery that sticks in the brain - the fate of the baker in Comyn's book is particularly rough and something I'll never forget, because it's such an awful fate for a poor bastard who just wanted to make nice bread for people, while the protagonist's use of alcohol to get through the day in the Simneon book is particularly cutting. 

The funny thing about the Finnish book is that it's about someone who hates their life and wanders away from it to find themselves, and that's the plot of a lot of the contemporary books I see as I browse for the next selection. 

You see the trends so easily when you're looking at he blurbs for every single new novel in the book store. There was a whole year of almost nothing but 'I thought I knew my mother, but when I came home to Buttfuck Idaho for her funeral, I found out the real her'; followed by a strange deluge of content based around the Holocaust (obviously raising awareness about this event, while also reeking of crass exploitation).

The next book is unlikely to fit into any of these categories. I can't wait to see what it is. 

This is a House of Stelfreeze (part 2 of 4)

 

Gory madmen behind the camera, very polite in person

I never fail to find it delightful when it turns out that almost all of the directors of the horror films that I got told were warping my brain so much growing up in the 80s appear to be thoroughly nice guys. 

Clive Barker's movies would skin you alive and drop you into the never-ending shadow of Leviathan, but Barker himself was always charming and affable, and surprisingly modest for somebody who had entire universes of different magic rolling through his head.

Wes Craven could drop something as shocking and genuinely upsetting as Last House on the Left, while never coming across as less than incredibly thoughtful and empathetic, and many of the people behind the most outrageous movie shit are lovable dorks.

I know there were still a lot of creeps in the industry, but horror movies directors seem to be the most well-adjusted crowd. Getting all the darkness out of their heads and splattering across a movie screen really does seem to be good for the soul. 

Life without Stinky

After 30 years, you might think you know what to expect from a Hate comic from Peter Bagge, but I still never expected to feel actually feel sorry for Stinky. 

Stinky!

It's been years since the wonderful Hate Annuals slowly faded away, and  Hate Revisited - Bagge's return to the misadventures of Buddy Bradley and the gang - has most definitely been a cause for celebration.

The art is not as slick as it once was, and it looser, thicker and sloppier in an extremely appealing way, but Buddy is still the same old affable loser that he's always been, holding on to his very Gen-X sense of irony in an age of political strife with a surprising deftness (at least in the first couple of issues of the new series).

But then you get to see Buddy and Stinky's first adventure together, and it's weird and fucked up and a little sad, because it's clear that fuckin' Leonard never stood a chance.

Stinky died years ago, and you'll never know if it was a suicide or stupidity, but it still has echoes down the years. It always felt like Buddy was always reacting to Stinky's death with exasperation, and never had the chance to properly mourn his shithead of a pal. It's genuinely pleasing to see him finally tell Lisa, who is just as wonderfully messed up as ever, because if he can't tell her, who could he ever trust?

We all know somebody like Stinky, just too wild to ever grow old, and we can miss them forever, even as they stay young in our memories.

Fucking Stinky, man.

A particularly American gut ache

I got the second worst food poisoning of my life the day they held the 2000 US election. It was some dodgy Burger King, and I was so sick I couldn't really sleep, and could only fade in and out of consciousness, while American news networks breathlessly covered the race between Gore and Bush for the White House.

There was, of course, no result that night, except in my fevered dreams, where I'm sure they announced at one point that the cookie Monster had won Ohio.

And to be honest, looking at the state of US politics over the past quarter century since, where the worst impulses of the American electorate have grown to grotesque and deeply embarrassing proportions, I'm not convinced that fever dream ever ended.

The worst food poisoning I ever had was from some KFC, the night before my big High School science exam. I got a B+, which was pretty good, when I was so queasy I couldn't read the words, but I didn't eat at the Colonel's for five years after that, and then I've been a fiend for it ever since. But the fate of the fucking free world wasn't at stake that night.

Always something new to say about the galaxy's greatest comic

If Tom Ewing's in-depth look at the entirety of Cerebus The Aardvark was right in my wheelhouse, and helped reassure me that there was still some excellent long-form writing about comics out there, his latest series about the earliest days of 2000ad is even more on target.

You can find it on Tom's site here. There's only a couple of entries so far, but I highly recommend it, with Tom finding new things to say about the oldest stories in the galaxy's greatest comic (the discussion of the Volgan War being more open-ended than the real-life conflicts other comic strips were based on is particularly astute, especially as Pat Mills has gone back and turned the Volgan War into the first real forever war, with a clear through-line through to the ABC Warriors and Nemesis The Warlock).

A lot of words have been written about the impact of 2000ad on comics and culture, but after 2400-odd progs, there is always more to say. It helps that Tom's stuff is so sharp, and well worth the effort.

RIP, my King!

Return to Planet Fiction: Writing for fun (and not a lot of profit)

Almost all of the writing I do for fun - as opposed to the stuff I do get paid for in the day job - is for this blog, and after 15 years of it, it remains an enormously satisfying outlet for the rubbish that builds up in my skull.

But I also still write fiction for kicks, outside the howling needs of this daily blog. And while I've shared parts of it here, I'm usually useless at actually doing anything with it, mainly because I lose all interest once I've finished. It's getting the thing done that I'm in it for.

One of the hoariest of clichés is that writers hate to write, but love to have written - but puzzling it out, getting the plot in order, trying to make the characters sound like actual human beings, that's the game for me. Once it's done, I'm on to the next thing, and it's all a good workout for the mental muscles.

I still get enormously stuck on things. I got incredibly mired in a novel I've been working on for a while - a family epic about life in late 20th-century Aotearoa filtered through the lens of one night in 1979 - and was sitting at the 60,000 word mark for almost a year, before I got off my arse and got cracking again.

(It was the tangled weave of the plot that brought it all to a halt - it always is - and it was only one I could get around by slicing 10,00 words that I'd already lovingly crafted and cutting out the bullshit.)

But I'm glad to be on that wagon, and I'm ensuring that I spend at least half an hour every day on it, even with two pre-schoolers, I can usually find 30 minutes somewhere in the day. And when I go to bed at night, I'm always slightly strangely chuffed that I've done something, even if it was a tiny bit of revision, or a hundred new words.

It certainly helps that I have recently been reading some of my very favourite books and comics, the ones that always fire me up to write something myself. Almost all of my (not that regrettable) fan fiction days were written when I was high on 90s Grant Morrison comics, I couldn't finish Flex Mentally without being inspired to do something - anything - to keep that vibe high.

The issue with that is that I have to make an extra effort not to just echo that stuff that inspires me. Things like the Deadwood TV show or James Ellroy's books always make me want to do it for myself, but I've got to be really careful about imitating those very specific styles.

(It's a bit like binge watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I do not recommend, purely because you properly can't help yourself from turning into Larry David.)

But any kind of art that inspires you to put more art into the universe is good and worthwhile, for yourself, if nobody else. Go on and get stuck in.

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Tired.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Very good.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Their ghastly task.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Do I?

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Crazy.

 

Seven perfect panels from Brian Bolland: Tinged with faint despair.

Seven perfect panels from Brain Bolland: All the contestants nearly bought it.

Seven slices of cinema: What have I done?

This is my life now: Faster than the Flash

When it comes to the perennial question of whether Superman or the Flash is faster, I will 100 percent always maintain that the Flash should win that race, because he's the fastest man alive. It's just a law of the universe.

But I'm still faster than the Flash when the Fatboy Slim album You've Come A Long Way Baby is on the car stereo, and reaches track three. Because when that one kicks off, I'm skipping to number four quicker than Wally West's mood swings.

It's a very, very uncool album to be rocking out on the stereo as we drive around town in the year 2024, but the kids love those big beats of the 90s, and things like Fatboy and the Chemicals provide plenty of that. They love the rap, and definitely like the groove of the Wu-Tang and the RTJ, but there is a lot of questionable lyrics that we can not have them repeating in the pre-school yard.

So we play the Fatboy album a lot, and the kids dig the tripping of gangsters and the praising of you, and while language is a social construct and profanity is always funny as hell when it comes from young mouths, I know I will be judged unfavorably if they start walking around talking about 'fucking in heaven'.

That wouldn't end well for anybody.