the lit bit - july 2o26

Dhalgren (1974) - by Samuel R. Delany

Figure this took more or less the same amount of time to read as my first go-round.

Overall, it feels Unlocked.  I get where Delany was coming from, and what the materials were, and how he mixed them.  Cruising was a huge turn of the key-- once I realized that this story of metamorphosis opened with cruising, it told me not only who the narrator was, but where the hunting grounds were.  

Obviously one part of that Big Answer was The 1970s.  The readership for this book, as I imagine it, was in two discrete parts-- the Delany fans, who were championing youth, intersectionality, and an adventurous imagination; and the closeted readership, who were not (I am fairly sure) exclusively cisgender nor inexperienced.

We queers had kind of emerged, in the wake of sexual liberation, but we weren't entirely accepted or understood by our communities, and so a great many of us were D.L.-dormant or selectively closeted.  A lot of us were eager to be seen, but the realities on the ground were... not dissimilar to today, really.  Bisexuals and non-denominational freaks were (and to a greater or lesser extent still are) The Queers to the "strictly" hetero- and homosexual spheres.  There's a lot of gatekeeping in the gay & lesbian communities-- a degree of it is necessary, to screen out sketchy creeps & users  --but there's also a component of that mentality that is inherited, or adopted, from the straightlaced.  Because when everyone is telling you what your spirit & body are ALREADY telling you ("Sex is sacred!  Sex is vital!  Sex is integral!") only they're using borrowed & purloined ideologies & terminologies, well, those Good Intentions are actually chaff, being thrown into your affairs, just to fuck with your radar.

I don't believe anybody is 100% anything besides themselves.  Everyone travels their own road, and arrives at their own conclusions.  That is not a comfortable conclusion for the majority of us, particularly those of us who would like to believe the best of our fellows.  We don't want to believe there are Users and Bad Actors among us, stealth agents for the christo-fascist agenda, weirdos who harbor genuine concern over caucasian birth rates.  Perhaps we do not want to believe this because-- whither utopia?  Perhaps because we crave the notion of a people unified by charity & largesse of spirit.  If humanity is, as we queers so wish to see it, a calculus-- a process, not merely Of Change but Of Being Changed by process --then the terms being definite (or not) are part of the equation.

Perhaps the unchangeable, the normies, the straights, the idol-worshipping dotards, are always going to be with us.  Perhaps America-- the Mythic america, the Idea of america, the Sales Brochure cannily folded between the bars of our cribs, the america of potentially incalculable virtue & barely choate utopian instinct --is the greater problem.  Because it isn't just religion, or capitalism, that's the bug in our program.  It's the fundamental bullshit that blinds us, literally.  It's the fundamentalist tendency.  The one that's addicted to false binaries.

America is THE land of false binaries.  Two parties, two genders, two polarities.  Rich & poor, blessed & accursed, high & low culture.  We carry these notions of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil everywhere with us and (intentionally or not) slather these assumptions all over.

We particularly treasure being able to use these assumptions--  whether it's Rebel Forces versus Tyrannical Empire, or Invisibles versus Myrimidons  --to construct alternate Americas within the greater geographical confines of this thing we recognize as society, on this continent.  Consequently there are as many Americas as there are sub-genres of science fiction.  There is america for the law-abiding, and america for the criminal underclass; america for the wise, and america for the deplorable.  America the beautiful, and america blackpilled.  American pastoral, and america-built-on-bones.

But, to return to Science Fiction...  America perhaps most resembles that.  America most definitely is a fiction, and its nature, as an evolv(-ed/-ing) nation-state, is absolutely indebted to science.  America is wedded to a certain idea of process, and believes that process-- let's call it capitalism --to be synonymous with Progress.  America is vast, and in its vastness there is a foolhardy tendency to believe its resources inexhaustible.  Science fiction was one of the major social indicators, over the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that ingenuity, adaptibility, & a knack for invention were proof that we Knew What We Were Doing.  No science fiction, no space race, right?  And space was the place we were going.  We were going to take our successes, as one nation under god, indivisible, straight the fuck over that final frontier.  Fer shure.

Now let's retrench to Delany, and Dhalgren.  Because the science fiction in this book is a fiction about sciences, social & practical.  Sex undergirds ALL that-- point of fact, Delany seems to be saying rather explicitly that sexuality IS the science whereby we may understand ourselves.  Sexual chemistry is the engine of growth in the artificial heart of urbanism.  If you can't get along with your fellows, you can't co-exist, let alone propagate.  And since the advent of psychology as a science with a little 's', it's become axiomatic that sexual identity is a fundamental component of the human psyche.  There are more sexually aware, and active, people in major urban centres than anywhere else in the country.  It's not just a numbers game:  it's how things Actually Work.

But of course cities train humans to exist within them, therefore American cities teach their inhabitants to be schizoid about their desires.  Our educational system is not, contrary to the pledge of allegiance, indivisible, nor under god.  Liberty & justice are at best tertiary concerns to the fact that this shit is Too Big To Fail.  And that's what urbanism was finally starting to do, with the advent of the 70s:  caucasians were realizing their racial caste was imaginary, but they weren't necessarily waking up to it, whereas non-caucasians were wider awake than had ever been permitted; women were realizing their power need not be limited to interactions with men, and the realization was starting to make the greater masses of men shit scared; and the queers, darling, were realizing themselves.

I know, blah, blah, blah.  I do this every time.  I talk about a book by not talking about the book.

(At least this time, not by talking at bible length about myself.  Much?)

The big concept of Dhalgren, to me, is that Delany realized american urbanism was a science-fictional state, and that living in a science-fictional state, in a major metropolitan city, stresses & reshapes the sexual individual.  Cities force change.  The modern american city, at the time of Dhalgren's publication, was in crisis, with infrastructure breaking down, racially-charged rioting, and scarcity being accelerated by (purposefully gamed,) asymmetrical systems of commerce.

How do you find unity within that?

Why, you find it by looking for it.  Maybe you find it by asking your neighbors.  Maybe you find it by accepting a name, or rôle, or position.  Maybe it was already there, waiting for you to seek it.

Dhalgren is, after all, a quest novel.  But perhaps a unique quest novel, in that it asks whether the quest necessitates a hero.  If the quest is just going out and getting laid...

Yeah, folks, I'm not getting to a Final Point with any of this maundering.  Dhalgren is a fascinating little thing.  It can be infuriating, even.  The text is unstable to the point of disintegration, and interminable if you're short on patience (or just not fond of logic puzzles), but it's brimming with self-awareness and a real zest for asking Why, Goddammit, Do You Think It Has To Be This Way.

I don't believe in the great american novel.  I think the great american novel is a rosy bucket of balls.  But Dhalgren is definitely one of the great lowercase-'a'-merican novels.  It does so by breaking the definition of science fiction as being stolidly Science-y, it restores sexual honesty to the generally muddied and messy state of city (& communal) living, and it asks, over & over again:  "Do the categories matter?"  Do the classifications apply to you?  Are "you" who You think you are?  And what is that, exactly?

Dhalgren is exactly nothing.  It does not contain every possible variation of every possible formula for what can be; in fact, it doubly refuses the Joycean dead-end of Ulyssess, with its white male hero(es) in their eternal peregrinations in a city whose imaginal limits are determined by colonialism & cultural "wisdom", because it neither requires nor accepts ANY SINGULAR INTERPRETATION as a genre work.  Dhalgren is not utopian, dystopian, or even queertopian.  Dhalgren is, exactly, no-thing.

Dhalgren is Bellona.  And Bellona--  goddess of war, leveler of cities --is the greatest american city that never was, viewed from within the event horizon of its author's experiences in Great American Cities, viewed from as many angles as may be found within its borders.  These are plainly marked, if one may see through the fug of words to perceive them.  There are multiple points of view, and multiple bolt-holes through which to See, what Dhalgren is about.  And... ultimately?

It's problematic.  Its problems are america's problems.  They are not American Problems, exclusively.  But they are the terms by which Delany's equation may be read.

Which solves the puzzle well enough for me.

What's it about?  It's about 801 pages.

the mytho-literary calculus of considering cruising ÷ the dérive = a night journey, or, i am why you hate blogs

(sundry notes regarding queertopian artfaggotry)

panel to panel transitions have been less on my mind as i work increasingly ONLY in single panel images, no longer concerned with greater page or presentation, those variables having been ruthlessly determined to be fixed & beyond my artistic control, so no more really fucking cute games involving page layout or movement of bodies (or directed flow of dialogue) at diagonals intersecting with the Focal Points of BLAH FUCKING BLAH.  the panel is the Non Submersible Unit, just as the sentence is the emotional core of the paragraph, to entirely misquote gertrude stein, bless her dead ass.  you work on each panel equally; no panel takes priority.  every panel is another part of the story.  the only one that was a Big Deal was figuring out the very first image.  once i had that, the rest was flow.  the script is very interesting to me right now as i build it; there's a renewed sense of surprise & invention in the moment-to-moment of my experience as i write.  when the characters surprise me, or do something other than i originally intended, it's always a treat.  when it occurs in an erotic context it's especially intriguing to me, as i generally don't consider myself that inventive or horned-up enough to write Pornography.  sex is a very Literary thing to me, as it's an internal-- or perhaps most aptly --interior state, a state of Being: "outside" of (the bog standard linear perception of) time.  sex is also an artistic thing, a preoccupation bordering on obsession, in how to present it in my art without looking like more of a weirdo than i already am.  i feel judged enough on all number of things:  actually putting my sense of sexuality out there & cojoining it to my artistic impulses, that requires raw courage of the average joe.  i'm not average, or normative, in a great many senses; not because i have outre tastes or behave like a weeaboo-- like that even matters anymore, living as i do in both a culture, and sub-culture, that's too far gone in jerking it publicly to judge nothing ol' me for my dull hangups  --but because i haven't had the experiences (or built up the bank of experience) that the majority of gay men have.  mostly i haven't had the opportunity, or the physical, sexual courage, to celebrate my body or my desires the way most queers my age have.  i have limits, and my hangups are to do with my face.  i want to be exhibitionistic.  i want to be proud of my body, and to show off, and to feel Present and Real in my physical being-- to be myself.  but i can't, because i have the Wrong Face.  i'd like to have pictures taken of myself, to be in videos, to be a cute little freak like all the other cute little freaks up and down my beach, to hang out with my equally fucked up friends and be vain and do the selfie thing and talk endless drama about how hard it is to have a good time and still earn a living selling underwear and whatever...  but i'm not that, and i think that's all well & good but also my brain never shuts off unless i'm fucking or making art or lost IN art or bicycling or maybe exercise, yoga, if i'm lucky, so i can't check out and pretend people give a shit how i look or particularly want to fuck me anyway because i have the Wrong Face.  so i spend a lot of time window shopping, daydreaming, and writing little erotic "skits" that ultimately get refined into parts of stories.  i think they're smutty but i also believe they're good writing for the kind of story i want to tell (ultimately, a positive one), and honest interpretations of human experience.  so yeah, i dunno....  judgy old queen writes litporn instead of giving in to a lifelong urge to behave like a hedonistic ho.  newsflash, or something

point being, thinking about time, pacing, presentation.  the beats of the story.  the music of the experience.  because sex & musicality aren't--  though dancefloor culture would have you believe otherwise  --exclusively driven by beats, and time is queer.  time is queer, in sex, and in how time expresses itself through art; time is a suspension, in comix:  each unit, each panel, considered as a "whole" moment, an integer of time, is a Monad, the nucleus of the atomic circumference of the greater story:  so too is the Self whole, in the heightened awareness of sex that comes from being both embodied and outside concern with restraint or convention or table manners.  not to get all wittgenstein but the world is all that is the case, and if you're in the world, and in the moment, it's all about balance, ultimately.  set, and setting.  i know i overthink shit and i yammer and nobody cares but this is what is always happening, and it's why i make art, and comix, and it's why i blog.  because otherwise these would be the substacks NOBODY WOULD READ, because who needs to read my pseudophilosophical daisy chains anyway.  *i* don't.   (i just keep compulsive notes)

somethings i write in notebooks like this, and brother, the typos would make samuel delany wince because at least he had dyslexia as an excuse

anyway.  where was i.  oh yeah.  the panel.  i spent a long time thinking about dick tracy, this past winter, and it all comes down to the panel.  that box is a microcosmic unit of perfect potential.  i get why the modernists were obsessed with its structural utility.  i've spent most of my life thinking about little boxes, what to put in them, and what order to put them in.  i've gone through a lot of notebooks.  and i'm never gonna be done with filling 'em.  i have been haunted by sequences of squares my whole life, almost as much as i've been haunted by lettering.  i have a pattern seeking mind.  and the panel:  the panel IS the most powerful thing there is.  it can be a page, or multiple pages at once, even as it may only ever be but a sliver of story.  there is an awesome malleability to what may be done with it.  i don't know if i recognized that before my recent meditations on chester gould's art, and comic strip art writ large.  i believe i knew it, that it was in the fundamentals of my toolkit, but i don't believe the fundamental Facts of the art had explained themselves to me, before indulging my OCD and studying the shit out of dick tracy for like four, five months

incidental to that insight, i've always had a fixation on the comix page as being analagous to the architecture of the physical space in a story.  of it being an architectural cutaway of a building, or the dimensions of the panel conforming to the space of a stairwell.  it's a Will Eisner stagecraft thing.  my favourite frank miller comix make use of the conceit.  everybody lauded the hawkguy comic for doing it, everybody loves it when frank quitely does it...  it's a real boss move, taking the little boxes and using them to capture the feeling of bodies moving through a Lived Space.  you see where i'm going with all this stuff, right?

the erotic potential of cities, capturing life in little boxes, putting it all on array like windows in a building and building the story pane by pane, glimpse by glimpse.  lighting the windows the right way, so you can find your way back to them, to stare in again, and marvel at life & how it is lived, in all its curious detail

i'm nearly done re-reading dhalgren, and it's been extraordinarily useful to me, on the heels of rereading 'the screwball asses', in re: the whole queertopia thing.  our experience of society, and of social spaces, and natural spaces, and shared spaces...  all very much on my mind.  plus i have this whole Very Gay beach right next door to me, and the lights tend to be off in the park a lot.  the city has a lot to say about the human condition beyond being horny, of course.  but it's nice to recognize the positive, in life as much as in art & one's experience of it, and i have not spent nearly as much of my fifty years on this planet as i would have liked, being happy about being a gay man, and liking men.  men have not done much to make this world pleasant, these past fifty years.  i find i empathize perhaps too well with the amoral Kid at the center of dhalgren.  i get where delany was at when he wrote it.  he was very conflicted about the world that produced him.  i do not feel dissimilar.  but i do find joy in this life: an extraordinary amount: and i believe i have found the means & the medium by which to express it.  which is also where i think delany was, when he wrote dhalgren (and the book(s) that dhalgren contains-- beause, as a container, it refers to notes towards a modular calculus, which is a structural conceit within delany's corpus which contains all of neveryon + trouble on triton).  

boxes within boxes within boxes

(it just ends there)

shutdown(s) & selling wolf tickets

There will be times this blog is deactivated.  If it's not here, it will be back.  It will always be back.

Currently on deck:

• HERO OF THE FEVER--  a queertopian sci-fi soap opera Infinite Scroll style webcomic --is in process.  Debuting soooooooooooonish.  Don't crowd me.
  
• THE BRIDGE OF MANIPULATIONS will be published next year.  It's a comic.  It's a tarot card set.  It's my life's work.  It's true!  This is the place to peek at it.
• DENIZEN, a bio-comic chronicling William S. Burroughs' involvement in the Carr-Kammerer murder case, is working.  It will be serialized as a webcomic, aimed at print.  With any luck I don't get sued.
• THE AZURE PANTRY, a dating horror graphic novel, is also on the slate.  Maybe it'll run alongside DENIZEN.  Maybe they have things in common.  Maybe?
• THE KILL HOUSE: an extremely meta vapor-comic which queers some Image Comics / Wildstorm / DC comics characters everyone's forgotten.  A military adventure thing with conspiracy frosting!  And sprinkles!
  
• and, as ever, there's PAINLESS, which was meant to be my attempt at a Disney money cash-in, but now it's dead bottom of the deck.  Who doesn't love a bootleg Wolverine yarn?  Besides copyright holders.

to wound the autumnal

Cities, cities, cities.

There's a lot I don't talk about.  Mainly because it makes people uncomfortable.  I do that.  Easily.  By talking.  Most citizens of the you ess don't want to talk about material reality.  The incalculable, mountainous waste and its (arguable) redistribution.  The inhumanity & the conditioning required to maintain it.  The filters we are not born with, these blinkers-that-do-not-blind, which we inculcate in the young.  I've seen it all--  though, not like Waits, not exclusively --through the yellow windows of the evening train; through silver rain and jitterbugging snows; through piney carnage adjacent to the tracks, in pressboard lean-tos toppled by police order; through the narrow angled concrete armpits of overpasses, overlooking the topographic impasto of leaves, flattened to-go cups, and silver plastic pouches ground together & mixed by the witchy hands of seasons, zephyrs and storms.

Like Dane McGowan and Austin Osman Spare, I've seen the wildstyle murals in the living rooms of the invisible, and found them beautiful.  Like them, because "real" & Not; like them, because pale & forgotten; like them, because barely the main character of my own life.  (Parasocial cretin!)  Like them, because I am quite unlike anyone I've ever met.  People rarely admit to being truly lost, let alone admit to homelessness as a semi-constant in these inconstant States of amnerika.

Cities are where I live, eat, sleep, and think, and they are where I have done most of my Time on this prison planet we call North America.  They're where I've found sufficient bits to collage together, to approximate the Human Suit which camouflages the inchoate ugliness of my psyche.  Cities taught me to write.  I write because it's easier than drawing.  Because even though I'm worse at writing than drawing, drawing takes more time & concentration, and the elements do not always permit it.  Sometimes the elements are environmental-- the noise and weather of bad emotions, of barroom chatter, of human imposition and resentment, of bodily complaint  --and sometimes the environments are elementally cruel and careless.  Drawing and painting are high concentration, whereas any fucking fool can blurt a sentence.

I've yet to form a sentence that accurately captures what hell is.  Much less bliss.  Cities are both.

Yeah, homelessness is part of everything.  Class neurosis.  Like the anxiety over brain damage.  It's inescapable.  It's part of me:  I talk about it / I don't talk about it.  Like being queer.  Or being a half century old.  I don't expect to be listened to.  I turn my ears off too.  It's all very inelegant and tiresome, and it tends to not have a Point, because it is a chronic condition of this life we are, we say, acclimated to.

Do you want to hear about it?  I don't.  I have been homeless several times.  Had "phases" of it.  If a 'phase' may be terrifying and interminable and a hidden stain on one's will to power thru Life.  Because, in the long view, cities have been my salvation as much as they've played purgatory.  Cities are the counterbalance on the scale of justice, for me; when I fled the countryside and the wilted flower power entrenched there, the failed and fractious past that is the american South, I found the future-- not in science fiction, but in the science fictional state OF city existence.  It is not natural.  It is far from nature.  In theoretical practice as much as reality.

But what is nature?  At the end of all this.  It's the rat with one eye who bounds from beneath the crumpled rear fender of your neighbor's Uber, to stop at the concrete bumper by your feet, to rise on its hindlegs and sniff, as if to say "Fancy meeting you here," before fucking away to the evening's routine.

Samuel R. Delany does not entirely capture this state of grace, in Dhalgren.  But he gets right up on it.

That's all I have to say, today.  You don't need to hear the rest.

nightmares & how to ride them

Just part of the game.  Your body can be at ease and your mind can be placid as a lake when you arrive in bed and you can still wake straining to wake, shouting and tossing and unsure where you are.  It's normal.

Sig never remembers me waking that way.  Generally.  He's so forgiving.  Also, too sleepbrained to register it happening.  He'll check on me, ask what it is, then entwine his fingers with mine, and it's okay, and he's out.  It's enviable.

Me, it'll take twenty, thirty minutes to unclench, get my heart rate normal, ease the muscles.  Thirty minutes at least, if I decide to write the offending 'mare up in the journals.  A trip to the toilet.  Some breathing exercises.  Once all the thoughts are arrayed and the thing examined, it's fine.  I can sleep again.

But it's hard to remember life before Sig was there.  The nightmares were a facet of my Life Before, living & sleeping alone, years at a stretch.  Then it was just get up.  Do some exercises.  Take a night ride on the bike.  Write it all out.  Read the old journals.  Then stay awake until whenever.  Sometimes all night, sometimes until work the next day.  Rest was a thing that existed in parings, trimmings, snippets.

Today sleep isn't the enemy.  My subconscious isn't the enemy.  There is no enemy.  "Enemy" was only a game my brain was playing with my instincts, a preparedness drill...

It's okay, buddy.  You got out.

an inverted monolith

 It's always postgame here at the Echolocution desk.

 

So I'm re-viewing Backrooms, back to front, for no reason other than boredom, really.

 

This was worth watching in the theatre, mainly for the sense of scale.  Without the Big Screen, this could easily be a webisode.  What I failed to pick up on, when we watched it, was the truly subtle shit.  Like the Kubrick.  Not the Shining references-- that's as on the surface as the overlay of the Red Room onto the Backrooms.  No, it's the Monolith:

The monolith is all over this thing.  And not just the implied dimensions of the hole in things that the Monolith represents--  the monolith, inverted.  Look at that top shot, of the abyss the door is perched over, and the stairs leading up.  That's this 2001 shot, turned inside out:

 

No naked vacuum of space above, no structurally sound archaeological dig & secure ground below, and a sadistically ordinary household door with a petflap, lording over it all.  That's a really, really wildly interesting inversion, to me.  Because it says something and it's mute, all in one.  Like the monolith.  Like the phenomena of the backrooms, its actual pop culture ubiquity.

 

We choose art because it reflects something in us.  Art, like our friend the monolith, is the o.g. black mirror.  And there's no small amount of art that goes into figuring out why an image Speaks, and what it's saying.  In this instance, for me, it's all about capital, baby.  The backrooms is about what america is, and has been since before my grandparents were inclined to have kids.  It's a machine for living in, and getting lost in, which only knows how to propogate the images it steals, and it's increasingly shoddy, slapdash, and surreal.  And the way you get there is by stumbling through a door you either didn't realize was there, or, by falling through an opening that wasn't all that hidden or structurally sound to begin with.

Capitalism, and its discontents...

 

I've heard a lot of chatter about the Still Lifes in the backrooms being a metaphor for the AI bullshit that's drawn all the flies, and yeah, sure.  But AI is just capitalism, too.  The material reality of AI is that it's just a tool, and the tool's utility is down to our ability to imagine uses for it beyond, y'know, cannibalizing everyone & everything it has ever brushed against.  It's an outgrowth of capitalism, that's all.  It's not the Dominant Metaphor for how much America sucks, even if it is in the running for top five examples.

 

No, at the end of things, the backrooms are the monolith:  a dark slab of potential, containing anything we care to envision.  We like to pretend we can envision Infinity, Eternity, and the Silence of God in all their terrible, meaningful aspects, but the fact is that Void of Potential & its Projected Contents will stun and belittle us and leave us feeling very old and alone with unkind, inevitable death.

Because...  That is the end of 2001.  Starchild notwithstanding.

 

Because there's nothing for that weird, isolated foundling to stand on.

Lest I sound like there's no Happy Ending, well--  there was.  In the original book version of 2001.  (Has that been revised by Clarke & his estate?  I've only read the original novelization.)  The starchild returns to earth and takes out our nuclear missile defense network and all the satellites attached to it.

Kubrick cut that shit.  And Kane Parsons doesn't leave us in any less enigmatic of a place.  Those final images, my friends.  Instead of a sinless, reborn infant wombed by naked space, we're left with a fragmented (therapist's!) self-image, adrift in a non-place.  Tell me that isn't saying something very specific & true about the involuted maze america is beginning to recognize itself as.

Yeah, yeah, spoilers:  NOBODY GETS OUT.

Is The Backrooms a great movie?  No.  But my god, it's full of sta

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - June 2o26

June?  We've survived into June...?  How about that.

The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy & David Hine

How many times have I read this, at this point?  Six times?  More?  Sad fact is, I don't know enough about the history of orchids to say whether their symbolic use in this comic works.  But most everything else does.  Future histories are tricky business.  This one holds up, even if its fashions don't.

Tyranny Rex (1998) - written by John Smith & illustrated by (deep breath) Steve Dillon, Will Simpson, Mark Buckingham, Paul Marshall, and whatever other flying monkeys were indentured at 2000ad on a given week

Tyranny Rex starts funny and ends by never fucking ending.  The first arc, with Steve Dillon, is full-on comedy.  It's got some great sight gags.  Then it's au revoir Steve, and hello muddy inks from everybody's least fave, grottiest Hellblazer artist, Will Simpson.  Whom I frequently confuse with Mike McKone, of 'Sex Warrior' infamy.  But yeah.  From Will Simpson onward, I have no clear idea what Smith intended to accomplish with these comix.  Comedy?  I guess Tyranny was meant to be a female counterweight to Devlin Waugh, but wotta bellyflop.  Like the kind that causes a body to lose consciousness.

Fires & Murmur (1988 & 1991) - written & illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti

These are Vibe Comix.  Like, on an intellectual level, the plot of Fires is easy enough to piece out.  But it's never quite about the business it declares-- there's a shiftiness to these books, both on the artistic & narrative levels, such that you're never quite certain what you're reading.  The easiest dismissal would be to call them dream comix, or art comix, but even if they are those things, they're not.  Because the pages, the pages always tell you something different.  Panel to panel, chapter to chapter, they're not interested in lining up so much as communicating the vibe.  These books vibrate with captured energy.  Murmur is the slipperier of the two books.  One is a horror comic, the other is a metaphysical wrangle with self.  But which is which, and why does it matter?  Just lay back with 'em and let the vibes wash your kinks out.

Exquisite Corpse (199o) - written by Jerry Prosser & illustrated by The Pander Bros.

Speaking of kinks.  This was a weird one.  Have I talked about this before?

So I was seventeen, and a virgin, and didn't know a single thing about sex, really, despite being raised by degenerate hippy scum, when this comic showed up in a quarter bin.  I was always convincing my aunt to take me to the one comic shop Dogwater had to offer, and she was always reluctant.  Like, waits in the car reluctant.  She wouldn't go into a record shop, even.  That could be because the one CD store we had in town hoisted a flag-sized poster for Ritual de lo Habitual over the register...  It could also be because my aunt Edwina was a classic repressed churchgoing lesbian.  Anyhow.  She thought filth was everywhere--  and was she wrong?  Because in that dingy quarter bin I found one issue of Exquisite Corpse.  A book that seemed quite unhappy about sex, gray and antagonistic and menacing.

What I could not know, then, is that I'd found the least explicit & disquieting of the three (unnumbered) issues.  I'd seen a couple house ads in issues of Dark Horse, promoting it, and I knew the Pander Brothers from reading Grendal, but as to what the comic -was-, its narrative intent, I couldn't decipher.  It seemed like a dying dream, or fantasy.  I knew it was one of those books it would be a bad idea to get caught with.  By that point I'd already been suspended for "trafficking pornography" at school--  i.e. bringing an issue of Heavy Metal to use for reference for a painting.  So I knew what smut was, even as I didn't have the slightest idea what sex was for, or about.

Because let's be up front here:  my school did not have a sex ed course.  It disguised its sex ed course as Home Economics, and squirreled away the realities of sexuality in an elective.  So I got what passed for sex ed, because I wanted to take a course on sewing and balancing a chequebook.  What I knew about sex, you could've inscribed on an oyster cracker.  I was a hick.  But I knew enough to realize that Home Ec was not actually teaching us anything other than some murky biological realities; Home Ec was on the curriculum so the school could argue that it was not teaching anything godless.

Point being, even dumb as I was, Exquisite Corpse felt dangerous.  It wasn't trying to sell a hollywood notion of fucking, and it wasn't pushing a heteronormative, judeo-xtian agenda.  It also wasn't interested in talking down to the reader.  If I'd been able to get the other two issues, when I was seventeen, and if I'd been caught with them...?  Those books would have been burned.  By my parents.  Who grew up rebelling against book burnings, public pyres of Beatles records and being told that masturbation would result in disease & insanity.  They grew up knowing what repression really was, and they tried to avoid me experiencing it, but by god they would have disapproved of these comix.

Because they're grimy, and unpleasant, and grim.  But they're also really well built, artsy little things.  Three issues, which may be read in any order.  And you should.  Do what I did, find 'em on the 'bays.  They're cheap.  They're beautifully packaged, with photo covers, and fun design elements--  each issue, in lieu of a # number, is represented by a type of knot.  And they're quite elegant little knots, dedicated to a knotted subject: abuse.

That's me putting a trigger guard in there.  It's just not a nice book.

I don't know how successful this little project was.  Honestly I'm amazed Dark Horse was able to publish it at all.  In most places, as I understand, these books were relegated to the Adults Only bin.  With reason.  But yeah.  Solid book.  And the least sexy thing you're guaranteed to read this year.

Dick Tracy:  the Ballad of Crewy Lou (1951) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould & Dick Locher

You've never heard of Crewy Lou!?!?  Well, it's not like she didn't try.

The bodycount on this one is something.  Crewy's no The Brow, but she herself straight up threw a bedridden mobster over her shoulder and stuffed him into a medical sterilizer like he was a load of wash.  She was primed to crank the steam when she was stopped.  Nothing is beyond her villainy.  Look at that hair!!!  Ruthless.  Cracked Tess Trueheart in the head with a rock and kidnapped Bonny Braids!  As icy & craven as they come.  Doesn't even hesitate when it comes to offing Brainard, her big brother, neither.  Hell, the number of cars she goes thru...  Crewy Lou's harder on wheels than Furiosa!!

Yessir, mmm-mm!!  Good comix.

Devlin Waugh:  Chasing Herod (1999) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Steve Yeowell w/ colouring by D'Israeli a.k.a. Matt Brooker

Let us return to joy.  There is no higher joy, for sheer pulp thrill, than Devlin Waugh.  He's a queen, he's a brawler, he's a bastard, and yes, he's even a prissy sniveling coward.  Goddamn, do Yeowell & Brooker make him vogue thru it all.  Forget Sean Phillips, forget Colin MacNeill (I really would like to), the buzzing semicoherent spy-fi turbulence of this arc is why I picked up Devlin Waugh: Swimming In Blood in the first place.

But I didn't get to read this arc, back in the 00s & 10s--  if I had, I would have toppled my graven idols and taken a blowtorch to all my effigies, because this, my lovelies, is the True Shit.  You don't need Grant Morrison.  You don't need Peter Milligan.  You don't even really need Alan Moore, except for the fact that Moore does hew to constructing & following rules-- "Logic" being something John Smith doesn't feel all that beholden to.  Yes, this not-so-little arc is Smith wilding the hell out and threatening to take the Dredd cosmos down with it.

And here it comes, the shit talk deluxe, the MOAB of absolute trash:  this bitty book is better than anything with Judge Dredd or even Judge Anderson attached to it.  Judge Dredd became an ikonic character so that we might have, for this briefest of windows, a reason to wake up in the morning and smile.  I love these comix.  Chasing Herod is the mustache ride to end worlds.

whilestones o1

As in, whiling away the time.  Portmanteau, with "milestone".  As in, implied marker.

Yesterday's Whilestones were:

(i)  Inking a portrait of David Kammerer, which I penciled months ago.  This is the second rendition of Kammerer, and the correct one.  Began inking approximately ten minutes before--

(ii)  Doing a radio interview with Eamonn Clarke in Wales(?) about John Smith & Jim Baikie's 'The New Statesmen'.  Had kicked around the idea of doing a podcast about it a year ago, and then last month Eamonn hit me up and said let's do it.  So I finished my re-read of TNS at 6am, then wrote up my notes, had an orange & some tea, inked for a minute, and did the thing.  It was enjoyable & embarrassing, all at once, because I've no right to talk shit about Alan Moore, but then, perhaps I do have right inasmuch as I'm queer and Moore isn't.  So I slagged 'Watchmen' some, and I praised 'The New Statesmen' some, and I generally hemmed & hawed & eventually figured out to take a cue & record an outro.  Eamonn was most kind & generous.  It was one hell of a way to start celebrating...

(iii)  My fourth birthday.  I keep thinking it's been five years since I cracked my skull, and it hasn't been.  It's only been four.  Four very busy years.  Siegfried wanted to take me out to get my nails done, but there weren't any slots open, so it's scheduled for later in the week.  In the meantime, we--

(iv)  Planted two native pollinators in the community garden and did some upkeep on our plot, before...

(v)  Going to Kathy Osterman beach and picking trash.  It's a habit, cleaning up the minute shards of plastic & half-eaten straws & desiccated cigarette butts, bottlecaps & sandy napkins & deflated mylar balloons.  The buried children's toys, sandbox molds & hearty injection-molded trowels, those we put aside for some seekers of joy to find.  And then we--

(vi)  Retired home for a bit of art.  Got surprisingly far with that portrait, yesterday.  Didn't intend to.  But basic linework's half-done now!  I tried to record the process but that only resulted in some choice footage of the back of my ear.  So...

(vii)  There was another whilestone, but the veil of discretion must be drawn over its celebratory nature & causal placement in the chain of accomplishment & pleasure that resulted in my turning 4, or 50.  Because technically, it's fifty.  But technically, my legal birthday isn't for another six months, either.  At any rate, a good day overall, because--

(viii)  I wasn't this guy four years ago, and this wasn't my life.  It's wonderful to grow into being myself, at long last, and shake off the South.  In the south I couldn't have told my husband how much he's changed & revitalized me.  In the south I couldn't recognize myself or my aspirations.  More than anywhere else in america, the south conditions the human animal to repress & censor & deform itself.  It teaches us to betray our own best interests in favour of What The Community Thinks.  It teaches us the belt, the paddle, and the freshly-cut privet switch.  It teaches us to hate ourselves, just enough, to deserve saltine cracker Christ.  Man, leaving Atlanta was retiring from a gig hoisting a pitchfork in hell.

(ix)  Also to be filed somewhere in all that were some re-reads.  I reread the 11th chapter of Watchmen, to confirm a thesis spouted aloud during the pod, because from the moment Eamonn stopped recording I started asking "Did I free-associate that shit?"  Re-read confirmed what I knew:  Joey & Aline are collapsed atop one another against the spraypainted Hiroshima Lovers, the sacrifice New York's publishers demanded of Watchmen's author.  As a corrolary, also re-read 'The Screwball Asses', an auto-critique of queer revolutionary tendencies in France in 1973.  Because these are the things I think about as I build a queertopian webcomic, which...

(x)  I totally failed to promote, coherently, on the Mega-City One podcast.  Self-promotion does not come natural, even to the sort of self-absorbed dinosaur who still believes in The Power of Blogging.  Hey, it's a beginning.

broadcasting resumes

 Over tea and a slightly savaged orange.

the lit bit - june 2o26

After Kathy Acker (2o17) - by Chris Krause

I don't do bios very often.  Maybe one to two a year, on average.  No real reason other than mental hygiene.  Fiction's my thing.  I try not to learn too much about my fave creators.  Because scuttlebutt may be part of art but it shouldn't be a primary point of access.

This was finished two days ago.  Normally I wouldn't carry over, and leave this last month, but...  Hell, it's the scuttlebutt aspect.  Kathy Acker knew Neil Gaiman.  Or was it Neil who knew Kathy?  There's an ambivalence in the text to this, in a book replete with tales of Who Fucked Whom.  In the light of Neil's troubles, and the fact that he could afford to throw lawyers at Todd McFarlane (with help from Marvel), it's near impossible not to speculate.

See, Kathy was in the London S&M scene, and she bought & sold 3-4 different flats around London & Brighton.  As Neil puts it, it's the resale of one of these flats that caused their friendship's elision.  He thinks.  Kathy was notoriously flighty with her friendships, and her passions, if they weren't one and the same.  And they rarely stayed stably in any of the three categories:  friendly, fucking, and friends who fuck.  It was pretty well known how she handled her intellectual & amorous affairs, which is why the reluctance around Gaiman's appearances stands out...

There was a specific lover who Kathy called "the German", and he's distinct from Gaiman in terms of having a proper name and different vocation, but there's some overlap in The German's m.o. in how he & Kathy conducted their affair.  The German, like Gaiman, was married.  Like Gaiman--  reputedly  --The German loved power games, headfucky semi-public scenarios, and thrilled to theatrical cruelty.  While it's possible they didn't ball, similarities between The German's amorous m.o. & testimony from Gaiman's accusers about the games he played are remarkable.  Maybe she told Neil about her adventures with The German, and he decided to re-enact those games with later partners.  Perhaps?

The ambivalence in Krause's narrative around the period these two are onstage with Acker is extremely curious; there is a sense of overlap between the characters for several pages, then the affair ends, quite abruptly, and Kathy sells her flat, fleeing London, optimistically, for a return to New York.

Gaiman doesn't show up again until the final two chapters, and that's when their friendship drifts out.  Over a real estate favour, where Gaiman was somehow responsible for selling her then-recently acquired but never-lived-in Brighton digs.  Gaiman himself sounds uncertain about what happened.  "I didn't sell it fast enough, I suppose," he mulls.  There is no further speculation.

And--  here's a thing  --there is not so much as a single mention of Delirium.  Or Kathy's reactions to being depicted in Sandman.  Which would have come up, as Delirium's development in the comic series occurred as she was living, and in those years Kathy was in her multimedia phase, moving from spoken word recordings to live shows with The Mekons and playing at scriptwriting...  Kathy being Kathy, all-about-Kathy, it's positively bizarre that there's no mention of her reacting to having a comix avatar over at DC.  She would have known.  She would have talked about it.  She had seven years to talk about it!!!

Sandman ended the year before she died.

I am not saying I smell lawyers circling the outer research waters of this book.  Because that would be actionable, and Neil has Miracleman on his side.  They were friends.  What more need be said.

See why I don't read biographies?

High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings (1991) - edited by Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg

Bought this two years ago for an essay by William S. Burroughs.   Contains Kathy and Dennis Cooper and all the other belles of the big gay lit ball.  Since I needed a breather between, embarked on a short story by Gary Indiana, who I've never read before.  Gary was friends (frenemies?) with Kathy Acker & David Wojnarowicz.  Which has sweet fuck all to do with his cred as a writer.  This is strikingly well-written, clear-eyed work, with excellent atmosphere.

 

I'll pursue more Indiana soon.

Cruising (197o) - by Gerard Walker

Another carryover from last month.  Siegfried just finished reading it.  From everything he said about the plot, Friedkin worked to incorporate as much as possible into its film adaptation.  So I'm genuinely curious now.  Started first chapter last night.  Apparently the author was a fan of Samuel Fuller...?  Like, he namechecks Hitchcock, Kubrick, and "Sam what's-his-name, the B-movie guy whose mysteries are so big in France."

As I'm reading the sentence I finishing it aloud, and my husband's like "Knew you would fill in the blank.  Nerd."

The Screwball Asses (1973) - by Guy Hocquenghem

A wonderful little utopian essay about double-standards, doublethink, and dumbness in the sexual revolutionary.  If you want to understand what Queerness means, in relation to the world we all have to "earn a living", pay rent, and pay for our own funerals in, well:  read it.

I have a physical copy on my shelf.  Found in the same little free library in Atlanta where someone left a copy of 'My Loose Thread' by Dennis Cooper.  I've said some terrible things about Georgia, and have some downright hostile insights into Atlanta, but that li'l free library was a reminder-- not everyone In The Community is a class traitor or clone-ass scenester bitch.

Good to re-read.  The right words in my ear, at the perfect time, on exactly the correct project.

Kathy Acker: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (2o18) - edited by Amy Scholder & Douglas A. Martin

Re-reading Douglas Martin's letters from the intro.  Which directed me to an essay of Kathy's, 'Some American Cities', from Marxism Today...

Bodies of Work: Essays (1997) - by Kathy Acker

Which I have!!!  Back on that urbanism track.  Thanks, Kathy!

The House of Impossible Beauties  (2018) - by Joseph Cassara

Next up!  For real!!  Unless further distracted by research.

Dhalgren (1974) - by Samuel R. Delany

Distracted!!!  again!!!!!  by research!!!!!!!!

My second reading.  The first was during covid lockdown.

This book is only confusing if one frames it as science fiction.  Which it is barely is, unless one considers this work as a lens:  for viewing 70s urbanism, with its sexual liberation, roving punk gangs, and apocalyptic art, as a science-fictional condition.  If, instead, one reads it as a gay man, the opening unfolds entirely differently, because it starts with the Kid entering the "autumnal" city park to cruise.  Some semi-visible sex with an ostensible stranger ensues, fraught with worries over identity.  The Kid then moves toward the meat packing district--  where the queers hang out, the text underlines  --where he finds a formal guide to the city's people & pleasures, etc.  It's no surprise that it's autobiographical; the book told me as much the first time.  But as an exploration of urban eroticism, uncovering the erotic potential of city life, this is a wild little novel to drop on readers--  particularly if the reader isn't queer.

This was a seriously subversive thing to publish in 1974.

It's also a pleasurable text, wonderful to fall into the poesy & rhythms of.  Revisiting Bellona is a bit like coming home.  Particularly for me, the teen queer runaway who never got a proper chance to adapt to adulthood until my 30s.  I see cities, and the people who live in them, a trifle differently from the standard model american urbanite.  If one presumes the "average" in question is "heteronormative" or "upwardly mobile" or "middle class".  So, I don't know, perhaps Delany's view is easier to map onto my mind; Dhalgren is a prism, chained to the lens of class & status, but it mirrors the reader's experience, inasmuch as they've had any.

My being a year & a half experienced in Chicago's alleys, lakefront trails, and (more recently) secret celebrations of public sex, has garbed me in weird armor with which to wound this deeply autumnal work.  Because autumnal is the word for the america Delany & I perceive.  America is past the middle of its life, as is the author, as am I.  I was twenty-seven when I landed in Atlanta, and forty-eight when I left it.  Forty-six, when I first read Dhalgren.  And here we are, in the second trump admin, with our economy collapsing, our gov't is incapable of building anything, and major metropolitan cities are treated as a threat to democracy...

Conditions which would only be confusing if one framed them as Reality.  Such a state of affairs are de rigueur for dystopian science fiction.  So hey, enough quibbling from me about what is and isn't.  I'm all right in Delany's book, and he's all right in mine.