Reading Peter Arshinov's 'History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918-1921: Solidarity Black & Red' in bed. Mind whites out in abrupt fade; vision goes the colour of the paper in my hand. A voice.
"So it's going to snow again."
Fade up to the book still vertical on my chest. Tell Sig it's time for me to go to sleep, mentioning the audio, and he smiles. It's a positive forecast, is his reaction. I snuggle up & fade for real.
Breakfast In The Ruins (197o) - by Michael Moorcock
A weirdly cozy one. Maybe it's a cis-het pop trash artist exploring his inner queer that draws me in. His use of genre & popular form as a means of examining class divides, mayhap. Or it could simply be that there's a part of this book which Knows The Gutter, as a creature of cities, and from such earthy vantage is clear-eyed enough to see up our collective trouser leg. This is a book that knows what's what-what & when's never quick enough. Lost track of the number of times I've read it. Like its deadened (dead-end?) narrator, I'll keep coming back.
A Million Betrayals (2oo7) - by Michael Moorcock [essay, in 'London Peculiar & Other Nonfictions']
The Third Policeman (197o) - by Flann O'Brien a.k.a. Brian O'Nolan
More comfort in dislocation. A deeply queer text. Perhaps merits a closer reading on the homoeroticism of hell, as conceptually present here. Also deadly earnest in its circular humour & wit. My first read, back in 2003, was disquietingly uncanny; the book's prose struck me as clammy as stained glass in a bombed-out church, but its absurdity & prosaic beauty wooed me, too. By the end I was determined to own a copy for myself. Essential. Read every other year.
The Fourth Policeman (1997) - by Hugh Kenner [essay, in 'Historical Fictions']
The Condition of Muzak (197o) - by Michael Moorcock
Ahh, Mister C, Mister C. Not a novel so much as a technical triumph. Doesn't stand alone the way the other books in the Cornelius canon can... But it does speak to me, personally, profoundly, as a little kid lost in a world that could care-- and chooses otherwise. I never wanted to be a rock god, magic christian zillionaire, or silver screen diva. Dandy messiah to the age of science, tho? A tastily craven condition indeed, and this book's a shot in the arm against it.
Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (2o23) - by Ian Penman [essay, booklength]
Obsessions & methods, methods & obsessions. A lovely sprawling meditation. About the only questions I had that it didn't answer were RWF's performance & wardrobe in Kamikaze 1989.
Death Is No Obstacle (1992) - by Colin Greenland, interviewing Michael Moorcock
More methodology. Alternated this with Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors for a few days. If I read this at least twice more all Moorcock's methods will probably be engraved on my forehead in reverse for ready reference. Worth reflecting on, if you're like me and a dumbass autodidact.
Unstrung: Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist (2o21) - by Marc Ribot
Funny. Anecdotal. Educational. Bite-sized essays. Still nibbling.
Der Sandmann (1816) - by E.T.A. Hoffmann
Let's write this bit first, then circle back to capsule thoughts about the rest of my reading.
Opening para: Ever slept on an author? To, like, a historical degree? That's me, last night, realizing that 'The Nutcracker' is based off a Hoffmann short story. Hoffmann's been on my mental radar since Grant Morrison was on Doom Patrol-- not because of a direct citation, mind, but because my magpie mind never throws any reference out! Someway I conflated the title of 'Tales of Hoffman' (Doom Patrol #50) and the opening of 'Anyhow Stories' (D.P. #44) to suggest Morrison was using his classical education to browbeat me into reading E.T.A., someday.
Second paragraph: I don't know Lucy Clifford's work from a gap on a shelf, but I have a strong suspicion her Anyhow Stories, published in 1882, owe no small debt to E.T.A.'s fucked up little horror parable about schizoid psychosis & the fear that we could be, are being, replaced by machines capable of every human falsity including "love". Glossing 'The New Mother' this morning, I note motifs of stolen eyes, weird prosthesis, and mechanical simulacra. The influence must be there... But is influence the point? Or is influence just the flu? A nightmare you catch, a hiccough you can't quite shake free?
Concluding para. 'The Sandman', surprisingly to me, has rather incisive insight into the shit women put up with from men, particularly lust-addled men. The character of Clara is the sanest figure in the entire tale, and has the most clear-headed attitude. She's basically a psychologist, compared to the protagonist, who's a total fucking freak. The events of the story might not actually be Nathaniel's fault, it must be said; he might have contracted some sort of brain-damaging illness in his youth, as there's reference to a childhood fever... But whether his brain's gone soft or not, he's all in for bangin' automata, and he seems only too ready to kill & maim to get his rocks off. *
* Couldn't help wondering whether Hoffmann was aware he had syphilis, at the time of writing. According to the timeline he was diagnosed in 1907. Semirelevant footnote...?
Paranthetical coda: there's a structural curio here in that the story starts off in epistolary fashion, with three letters, then descends into the voice of a minor character to start the story anew and recount events with an omniscient eye. There's a tidy device introduced at the opening of this middle third, to explain things, essentially saying that "The Sandman would be an interesting story, told normally, but it's more edifying to explain events out-of-order," arguing how informality & unfamiliarity should be enough to draw a reader in, the way someone in a heightened state of emotion should be interesting to the casual observer.
To wit, reading this short hot on the heels of Moorcock explicating the mechanics of his storytelling was choice. Totally forgot Todorov wrote about Hoffmann's 'Sandman' in 'The Fantastic', too.
The Little Friend (2oo2) - by Donna Tartt
It's been two years since I finally read 'The Secret History' (1992). Overdue. Cracking it now.
Theme this month is: Churchfights! (Where they may be found...)
Elektra Lives Again (199o) - written, penciled & inked by Frank Miller w/ fully-painted art & background assists by Lynn Varley
Hard Boiled (199o-92) - written by Frank Miller & penciled by Geoff Darrow
Post York (2oo8 / 2o21) - written & penciled by James Romberger
[freshly-plagued by biting flies edition. welcome to the heat dome...]
StormWatch #44 (1996) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tom Raney
Fell #1-9 (2oo5-o8) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Ben Templesmith
A Body Beneath: collecting issues 2-5 of the Comic Book Series, 'Lose' (2oo9-'13) - written & illustrated by Michael DeForge
Correspondence from the End of the Universe vol. 3 (2o2o) - written & illustrated by Menota
The Ticking (2oo5) - written & penciled by Renee French
Anti-Gone (2o17) - written & illustrated by Connor Willumsen
Patience (2o16) - written, illustrated & coloured by Daniel Clowes
Days of Hate (2018) - written by Ales Kot, illustrated by Danijel Zezelj, & coloured by Jordie Bellaire
Not much to say here, apart from the epiphany that sometimes, when reading, a work does not sit well with a reader because they have their own book. My experience of being queer in North America is certainly not this author's, and vice versa. But he's using a familiar toolbox, the tools are anyone's to use, & I do not believe what he has built is very like what I have built. It's been a couple years since I decided to create a queer horror novel; I think mine stands on its own, and does not make the choices made here, because-- I'm not writing for the marketplace. I don't want to write for the market. I think orienting oneself towards that goal neuters the actual emotions of apprehension, anxiety, nervousness & fear that power such work. All that said, 'Red X' is not a bad book; but it is not a Great Book, as horror / folklore goes. It reads like work by a writer who feels beholden to the broader history of horror, as chronicled in the twenty-first century; it feels like 'Danse Macabre' and many other King books besides; it echoes too many other things, and speaks not enough for itself. It feels like a second novel, shepherded to print with the assistance of an editor who's looking to make their career off a Hot Young Author. But mostly it feels like I need to stop reading it, soon, because I have forty pages to go and too little patience left.
These days-- these post-drug, post-drink, post-derangement days --reading is a straightforward affair. Like consulting an oracle, or the "books" of the tarot. You go to a book because you know you need something from it: the need is yours, and the reading is For You. One goes for divination as much as inspiration or straight-up knowledge.
It wasn't always so unmysterious. There was a time, away & over my shoulder, in the rearview, that derangement & literacy were glove over hand. The first time I did acid was seventeen. With wages earned at Ace Electronics I bought a couple tabs from Layne Milwood, that band kid everyone wanted to befriend, and early one September night holed up in my claustrophobically cramped bed with my headphones on, the 'Fixed' remix by Coil on repeat as I read Al Columbia's 'Tar Frogs' and whatever else was in that issue of Deadline Magazine that perv at the CD shop, Carl, sold me. Those were not good tabs. It was lowgrade acid, if it even was acid. I recall at some point that the norwegian wood paneling of my room began to flow & pulse like tides of pollen in mud puddles, but there wasn't much-if-any action beyond that. Jitteriness. Anxiety. A sense of being too tightly sewn into my own skin.
To be honest, I got better results from sleep deprivation. Which was my go-to for derangement, as it was cheap and also my natural state. Sleep deprivation, it adds a paranoid cast to people's faces, makes how they perceive you more interesting: livens up conversations by letting folks talk loudly without moving their lips. Sleep deprivation makes you feel like you're telepathic, and in low light conditions, really kicks out the jams. I remember my first real dance with the stuff had me full-on hallucinating; sneaking out to the woods to study the shadows of animals gliding and pouncing through the dark... Good times.
Sleep dep was a drag on my C to D average, though, and took too long to trigger. I'm pretty sure the idea came from the paperback edition of 'Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes'. Insomnia wasn't my natural state, at the outset. After a while fucking with my brain chemistry in this fashion, however, being nocturnal became a habit. I don't think it did me any favours when it came to reading comprehension or retension, though. Pretty sure it did the opposite. Trying to retain information with a sleep deprived brain is a little like trying to make a tape recording with scotch tape over the recording head on a reel-to-reel: the encoding is faint as fuck if not partly absent. So while I read anything I could get my hands on--
(and there was a lot to read, growing up, from sci-fi to horror to "adult comix" to architecture to occultism to engineering to my parents' separate, discrete Secret Libraries of hardcore smut & hippy-dippy witchlore. My parents were the kind of people who built their own bookshelves. Every house we lived in had ever-expanding sets of shelves, in distinct contrast to the amount of living space available. But back to the previous paragraph)
--keeping that data available in my mind was a struggle. It would take my developing some OCD and a tendency, in my twenties, to read every book twice in a row, to make it possible to Know What I Was Talking About. If my memory failed me, usually, I'd bluff. Which is why my test scores were abysmal. Probably. There was the PTSD nobody recognized somewhere in the mix, too. At any rate, all the components for a half-bright artfag's development were in place: a bibliophile with brain problems & a recreational interest in neurochemistry.
At that stage of my life pot wasn't really a thing. I'd tried my parents' stash, once, and didn't dig it. It wasn't until after running away, in my mid-twenties, that I got into that nasty shit, and even then, not habitually. Nope, mostly it was books & being On The Natch crazy. I developed an oracular faith in books; they became my muse & my offboard memory, part of my daily creative process. Somewhere between that first taste of acid and the time I ran away it became common practice to read two to three books at a time. Not that my reading tastes were particularly elevated. I gravitated towards trash, until some sort of personal snobbery developed.
Anyhow. Some two years after bailing from the nest, and plummeting into the depressingly workaday world of being a kitchen drudge, I tried acid again. The tabs were free, this time, a gift from my room-mate & co-worker, Chris Beck. By this time I was into my Burroughs worship, so after hours at our coffeeshop we all dropped. While my idiot friends did their "Whoaaaaa" thing listening to Skinny Puppy by the blue neon of the Galleria's signage, I read The Ticket That Exploded. At some point Chris looked over, incredulous. "Are you reading!? You're on LSD, and you're... reading?" So maybe it was ever-so-slightly his fault when the typesetting spilled off the paper and into the oily fractal patterning that slid over and through every surface, from my sallow skin to the denim of my JNCOs to the checkered tile floor. Maybe I wouldn't have developed that particular hallucinatory default, where I see words materially inveigled everydamnwhere. 'Environments speak to you,' as Ol' Uncle Bill sez.
It's happened since. Without the influence of mindmelting technologies. But putting that aside...
Reading is the practice. Without chemicals for casual inspiration, the shelves are where I gravitate. Mine, or anywhere in the world. If there's a book I go for it. And when I can't get myself to focus on the book I'm in the middle of-- I'm halfway through 'The House of Impossible Beauties' by Joseph Cassara --my brain will drift onto other authors. Usually those I've found most inspirational. Over decades, my shelves have become a repository not simply for fiction but lived experience. Particularly lived experiences of writers whose lives are most unlike my own. Because I don't read just to get out of my own head: I do it to enter others' minds & times. It's the finest escapism I know.
Escapism, and research. Because it's a resource! And a necessary part of having that resource handy is making sure there will always be surprises. If I hit a dead end with a project, I don't want to go to the fucking internet to figure out a solution. I'd rather consult the oracle(s). Like last night. In the Ds, under Duras, there's a translated collection of Marguerite's journalism & essays, titled 'Outside'. Clearly I've never sat down to read it end-to-end, because if I had the presence of an interview with Francis Bacon wouldn't have surprised me.
Most useful, libraries.
I'll post excerpts from the interview, later. But it was revealing. Because there's a writer who's never done art, asking the most incisive questions of a notoriously self-taught & curiously chaotically disciplined artist. It's almost as though they were holding a miniature seminar for me.
Stating all this in light of my recent decision to go 100% sober again. It's not the easiest road to be on, in this life. But it's necessary for body & mind. Because, fuck, have you SEEN Francis Bacon's studio?
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 Vampires (1971) - by John Rechy
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.
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
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.
Man that brain damage don't fade quick. Wrote last month up as April, just like the comix list.
The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Master of Fear (2007) - by Jerry White
Not terribly scintillating stuff. A decent read if you want a clear-eyed view of the early filmography. The plot recaps are the snooziest part, honestly. Not much in the way of interpretation. Baseline competent. I am seriously overdue to watch 'Cloud' and 'Loft'.
Chicago: City on the Make (1951 / 1961) - by Nelson Algren
Annual re-read. Nope, not one word about Chester Gould, nor a single allusion to Dick Tracy. But pertinent nonetheless. One of the best poems I've ever read. You could do worse than try to mimic Algren's voice. The coda, written in '61, has as much snark, sting and stentorian wrath as you might desire, standing directly on the steeltoed tips of the Cuban missile crisis, freshly simmering. I'll probably be clipping & pasting pertinent bits into forthcoming Tracing Gould entries over the next few weeks.
One For Sorrow (2007) - by Christopher Barzak
There's
a movie, which I haven't seen. Thought I'd taste the book first. Not
quite in love with the language. Has a flat, wallpapery affect. I
should finish this before 'Outline Of My Lover'. But I didn't. The writing is soporific. The only thing more flat was the cover art, which looked to be AI generated, cropped weirdly and printed cheaply. A swing and a whiff.
Outline Of My Lover (2000) - by Douglas A. Martin
Michael Stipe's legendarily longest LTR wrote a book about dating Michael Stipe. Figured I'd give it a read. Quite imbibable style. There's an immediacy to the emotional content created by unconventional phrasing. There's more scuttlebutt to be inferred from this than I'd like-- speculating about whether Stipe was ever intimate with Kurt Cobain isn't something I should be thinking --but there's also a very clear moral lesson throughout about fame and its perks. Much as I loved R.E.M.'s music, in my teens, I find the arc of Stipe's career tediously American in a way that doesn't gel with why I loved their sound. He became a rich drunk and drifted into film finance. That doesn't speak to the lonesome love for life that I found resonant, as a young man.
It's a lovely little heartbroken book, and a clear warning against idol worship. And, hunh! I have a Douglas Martin-edited book of interviews with Kathy Acker on my shelf. I didn't know one of Martin's books was in my library. Going to re-read that after 'Cruising' week ends...
Cruising: An Intimate Study of a Radical Pastime (2019) - by Alex Espinoza
Research. It's true! [Reading now. Will update afterward.]
Cruising (1970) - by Gerard Walker
The copy the library sent me was a first edition hardback, added to the Chi library system in November of 1970. Shortly after publication. Now I'm sure-- I am certain --that William Friedkin had a copy all his own. I know he didn't need to check this out of a library... He got a studio to pay rights to adapt it, for fucksake, it's not like he would've been hurting to pay for a copy. Yet I can't help but wonder if he read this book I'm holding, because I'm living in a city where Honorary William Friedkin Way is only a few blocks from my house. These are the tendencies of this broken brain, forever bending reality to in some way reflect on my lived experiences.
But, like I say, research!
Rilly looking forward to cracking this. I've been a fan of Friedkin's film for decades. It will be revealing to see what the source material looked like, after fielding years of critical disdain & speculative scuttlebutt-- which even Alex Espinoza's book indulges in, going straight for the story about Paul Bateson working on The Exorcist, and Blatty feeling so weird about that... he made a movie about a gay serial killer? I've never quite bought that story. So we'll see if it's the book that provoked the film, or if Friedkin's film was a provocation aimed at the public.
After Kathy Acker (2017) - by Chris Krause
Found in a l'il free library, just next door. Sometimes a book is waiting for you to read it. You specifically. Because of course I'm an Ackerhead in addition to all the other nonsense my brain has sponged up in fifty years of being a mutant born to this tortured century & continent. Because of course, me specifically, I'm the person who is supposed to hold this.
I identified with Destiny of the Endless, back when I was a Gaimanfag in high school. Have I ever mentioned this deeply mortifying thing? It's better than when I was censured by every peer on the playground in elementary for pretending to be Diana Rigg doing a Wonder Woman transformation pirouette. Yep, I read Sandman comix, and I really liked Destiny. How she spoke, her punk thing... What I didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was. What I also didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was in relation to Neil, nor why he'd stuntcasted her in his big weird comic confessional of being a serial adulterer and shitty lover who feared the day he'd be called to account for his fuckery.
Can't say that I've quite figured that out yet, either. But this book could go a ways towards unpicking that snarl, maybe.
Anyhoo. Kathy kind of had a hugely belated impact on me, in my thirties, when I finally started killing some of those ubiquitous, unsellable tomes Grove Press ground out throughout the 90s-- My Mother: Demonology remains a favourite, as does Florida --and some of her lit theory stuff, and by then it was too late, the Black Tarantula had her vagina dentata in me, deep.
It's the dada thing, the Burroughs thing, the Rimbaud thing, the aging punk thing. Probably why I'm into Delany at this late stage, when I was too stupid to read him a decade ago. All this is white aging male intellectualism anyhoo, who gives a rat's ass. These are the games we play, amusing ourselves with Figuring Out References and building arcane yarnboards to garrote ourselves with, in the least autoerotic way possible.
Kathy made me look at art different. For real. I did make an aborted attempt at reading her, once, right after I ran away and was too brainfucked to comprehend anything more complicated than a comic book. I think it was 'Portrait Of An Eye'. But she didn't hit for me until around 2011. I stumbled across 'Hannibal Lecter, My Father' in Atlanta's famous, now-forgotten dragon's hoard, a little store known only as BOOKS (r.i.p.), and the little book with the red cover made me think, "It's used, and Semiotext(e)'s always good for a chuckle." And that was it.
She formally introduced me to the concept of antinominalism. Consequently I found her many & varied ways of theorizing about art so beneficial I crawled up my own ass and pulled my legs in after me, in zen tribute: Kathy Acker is how I became a blog.
True story.
Last month managed to go a full month w/ my April stack titled 'March'. Bloody brain damage.
King Tiger - Comics' Greatest World: wk. 3 (1994) - written by Mike Richardson & Randy Stradley, and illustrated by Paul Chadwick
Here we go: action comix, wuxia style, by P.C. A thing I had forgotten exists! Brief, but a lovely little fight comic. I coulda gone for a full-length run of this. Didn't know there was a two-issue follow-up in '96... At any rate. If there's a single drawback in this ish, it's how Chadwick never clearly renders the tats on K.T.'s wrists. Not that it matters. Just curious. The binding magic circle King Tiger draws in this ish is fab. Grant Morrison browsed these, I feel like. What my parents' generation useta call eyeball kicks... A wild li'l 16-pager.
The World Below (1998) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick
Never read, this is yet another entry in the scintillating saga of ebay orders which turfed out because the seller misplaced the item. Seems to be happening with Chadwick, lately. Still haven't gotten my DHP #18. At any rate teething to read these. This is a placeholder.
The Autumn Kingdom, vol. 1 (2o25) - written by Cullen Bunn & illustrated by Christopher Mitten
Freshly arrived at the shelves of the Edgewater branch of Chi's library system. Random selection on the strength of the title / cover design. Should have browsed it first. Not enchanted by the narrative choices: fantasy author father's kids discover the occult "truth" about themselves & how they relate to their father's fiction. Namely, they relate to it with big silly swords and friction-free battles with Mignolaesque monsters. (Apparently Christopher Mitten was a BPRD artist?) I didn't properly read so I sha'n't be cruel. This book was not for me. Returned.
Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (2o25) - written & illustrated by Mike Mignola (& coloured by Dave Stewart!)
Not done here, but completed the titular tale. 'Bowling With Corpses' is the first Mignola comic I've enjoyed w/out reservation since 'The Screw-On Head'. Absolute joy. Thanks for un-retiring, Mike!
I suppose it bears saying, but I tapped out of Hellboy & BPRD when the big art changes began. I didn't want to read anybody else doing the main Hellboy tales. Obviously I've gone back since & done the Corben stuff-- a major oversight, on my part --and I've read the first half of 'Hellboy In Hell'. Hard to see such lovely art and admit I aged out of the character, but I suppose it was inevitable. Hellboy began printing when I was in high school, for chrissakes. BPRD became an ongoing when I first landed in Atlanta! Some stories age like dandelion wine: certain ongoing comix do not.
All of which to explain: the commercial success of HB was what killed the comic, for me. Mignola felt unable to provide interior art on a schedule commensurate with the franchise expansion, so he stepped away and gave the book to Fegrado for a bit. Which was bad enough, as the existence of the book, its very foundations, were in Mignola's ability to enjoy the medium. He became super OCD about his own polish, after the movie-linked sales surges. And, to be honest? I didn't want to see Fegrado aping Mignola-- I need Fegrado to be Fegrado. As for BPRD, the title ran off Guy Davis-- speaking of artists I've been following since high school. A franchise can't frustrate its primary visual creators and stay gold, in my experience. So I dipped on everything.
But selah to all that. Bowling With Corpses is a fresh start, for me & Mignola's thing, that magic he's been pulling off since the Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser adaptations with Chaykin. For me, that's when Mignola's aesthetic clicked. Man's had me hooked ever since. This new thing is the purest distillation of the creative ecstasy Mike expresses via his deeply atmospheric pacing. Nobody draws skulls, clocks and mounds of dusty manuscripts like ya boy!
Buff Soul (2o22) - written & illustrated by Moa Romanova
A library pick purely based on aesthetics. Decadent!!! The story is a charmer. A lovely portrait of friendship & party-lifers, and recognizing priorities. I'll check out more Moa, for sure.
Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt - Watch (2o2o) - written by Kieron Gillen & illustrated by Caspar Wijngaard
At some point it became a project to read as many Watchriffs as I could get my hands on. This riff had eluded me, until now. I like that this is a Big Gay Comic about capeshit. It amuses me that the artist is doing an Eddie Campbell impression. It's in the mail & on the way. It should be a kick.
The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy, David Hine, & Shaky Kane (uncredited)
Refreshing my reading. This time it's the business. Finally, at last, I'm familiar enough with the story to be impressed with the plotting & pacing. Unlike other John Smith jams, this one is structurally a stone cabin: every piece has its place, and all together they form a structure that refuses to tumble. If there's a drawback it's needing to keep notes, because the cast is bloody massive.
Since the last time I read thru, those horsechoker editions of 'The Boys' came across my desk. I'm finding it a little hard to not think about that stupid, stupid comic, and the stupid, stupid, stupid teevee version. Because everyone talks about how Watchmen was grownup, serious, etcetera-- but what always stuck with me, from my earliest exposure, was how British and bloody-eyed the tale is. There's some grotesque violence spilling off the page in that book-- but Watchmen, for all its cred as an adult tale of sex and violence, contains strikingly little of either eyeball kick. If you wanted that (and every teenage boy did, even us gayboys) then you had to march on over to Marshall Law.
But Marshall Law is a revolting-looking book. No disrespect to Kevin O'Neill, who's a titan, but ugh. The bodies and the blood are both repellant. So if it's eyeball kicks and gratuitous, perverse chuckles you wanted, well-- we all kind of had to wait for Ennis and The Boys to happen. Didn't we?
Turns out we didn't. Because there was 'The New Statesman'. A book with nothing nice to say about superheroes, or american politics, that idiotic national pasttime which has somehow come to engulf all of culture, art, and sport. A book which begins its action proper with a hate crime, and the hateful reaction engendered by it. A book that does not like power fantasies because of the power imbalances baked in. You have to be disenfranchised and marginalized and Know It to enjoy american politics and pretend the commentators believe their own chirpy commentary.
This is a book about lies of all sizes. Theirs, and ours, and the world's.
Here we have a power fantasy comic by a gay writer, about being gay, angry & depressed by the status quo. 'The Boys' couldn't manage that, not least because Ennis can't stop laughing about how embarrassing queer sex must be for the queers. This is not to say 'The New Statesmen' is humourless; merely that the laughs are grim'n'gritty laughs, for an audience who feels none-too-secretly bruised by the ceaseless politicization of their sexuality. Here we have a book all the colours of bruising.
The first, foremost moment of fantasy in 'The New Statesmen' is of a queer american victim-- who will never admit he has been victimized --taking out a swath of white christian fundamentalists, in full view of the world. It's the second fantasy, in truth, second string to the actual first fantasy, that of a closeted, queer brit who once did something publicly terrible he can't quite remember. He wants to be Out, to Love, but he's too secretly crazy and filled with rage to have that happiness, and so he accepts his lot, as a bought-and-sold instrument of Empire.
If there's an allegory in there, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the writer's personal position on these matters. Or his position in the culture, working with patient fury (as he once did) to gain entree into American comix, staffed directly behind Morrison & Millar, all of them with eyes further up the line, observing Ennis cutting in somewhere after Mills, all of them at the gate, jealous eyes on Gaiman catching up with Moore as Wagner helps sort the baggage claims at customs.
In this reading, if I find a fault with any of this, it's that there aren't enough women being permitted to make a point about all the bullshit and hypocrisy. The sexism in this book is no less than the sexism of Watchmen-- sexism is a very apt Point, in both Watchmen & The New Statesmen --but it's not one that's made particularly compellingly, with real heart. The sexism is more reportorial than rage-based, more passing observation than rejoinder. The women in these stories are Used, are Useful, but they are not the subject, and their gender is secondary to their sexual utility in the dramatic webs woven.
But who wants a perfect book? It's in its imperfections that 'The New Statesmen' is superior to Watchmen, because it's not pretending to perfection; this fantasy about power is as imperfect as the world it chronicles, and it is with no great satisfaction that I observe that the world in these pages is thuddingly closer to our present than the alternate history provided by Moore & Gibbons. John Smith was lobbing bricks, and their gravity landed in the zone of Truthiness we Americans, regretfully, inhabit. A stark, grubby shithouse of a comic, this.
I need to read it again.
Rice Boy (2oo6-o8) - written & illustrated by Evan Dahm
On my husband's suggestion. What a delightfully expressive style Dahm has. The line I liked on Doug TenNapel-- whom, I was not aware until this morning, is an outspoken homophobe; I had wondered why TenNapel had all but vanished from the popular comix landscape --has a better home here. This is a book drawn & inked by hand, carefully & lovingly with brush. You'll not find better cartooned dropshadows anywhere. I'm still reading, right now, about a third of the way through, so I can't speak to the story beyond being charmed as hell by the whole thing. It's a nice fantasy landscape Dahm has hewn out, and the colours are rich & vibrant & earthy. Quite a lovely change from the grimness of 'New Statesmen'. Looking forward to finishing this, on such a gorgeous and calm day off.
Since I list every other damned thing. Or do, whenever I remember to.
The Steel Spring (1968) - by Per Wahlöö
This manages the pleasant trick of not being a crime thriller, exactly, even as it manages to avoid being a dystopian sci-fi thing in an unnamed european country. In the end it's very talky & very tidy and not very rewarding, but the overall atmosphere & dissociative clarity goes some ways toward carrying the reader through a "cosy" catastrophe. The film nerd in me aches for it to be as messy & choked with noise as 'The Element of Crime', and my inner lit-twit wishes it was closer to 'Dhalgren' or Moorcock's 'Breakfast In The Ruins'. It's for the best that it's not those things.
I already have the n*tflix adaptation of 'El Eternauta', if I need dystopia on tap.
Per plot, it's pretty wild. There's a conspiracy of medical professionals. A cabal of mad, dying fascists in surgical gowns, abducting whole blocks of citizenry to procure transfusions. There's a beatdown, depressed population, utterly unprepared for the occupation. There's a conspiracy of politicians & technocrats & a whole lot of everyone fucking up pretty massively. Literally catastrophic failures of communication.... Although we don't get to see most of that. Inspector Jensen spends the whole book not solving anything, just picking through the aftermath, taking notes, caring for those who let him and nursing the damaged. He's on a doomed mission, and knows it. Overall a very enervated atmosphere.
If there's one stylistic element that really sticks with me, it's how colourless the narrative is. This paucity of bandwitdth-- i mean, 'The Steel Spring' is so rarely concentrated on the quality of light all that registers is its relative intensity, or absence --this paucity of descriptive bandwith makes for an intensely constricted atmosphere, such that when Inspector Jensen has his first emotional reaction of the novel, it's 120 pages in. That moment really lands, because there's so little light.
It speaks to this particular moment. For reasons that barely need explaining.
The Twenty Days of Turin (1963-1971) - by Giorgio de Maria
Quick read! Quite like the atmosphere, tho dunno if the translation conveyed the narrative tone entirely. But it's a nicely absurd, unsettling little thing. Has all the ingredients I like: the quantum greasiness of Lem's 'The Investigation' with the neurotic hothouse vibe of Torpor's 'The Tenet' and maybe even a splash of 'Crying of Lot 49' in the cocktail. A very suggestive brew. Doesn't so much conclude as hard stop. Bonus fun: this american translation has appended an essay de Maria did on the fad for "screamer" rock.
Victorian Psycho (2025) - by Virginia Feito
Another quickie, but of a different order. This one I'm *into*, for the general fuckedness. Sometimes when I'm in a book, part of my reading mind scans for Source Code; so in 'Victorian Psycho' I scry Brett Easton Ellis, for obvious reasons, but I also detect the influence of 'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk. (A favourite!) Which isn't to say there's a direct influence on the Writing, because I'm not detecting that. The vocabulary is Feito's, as is the implementation-- she's got a real voice, and very clean, very crisp, and morbidly witty. An excellent read. Going to check out her first book soon as possible.
Dream Police: Selected Poems (1969-1993) - by Dennis Cooper
Sometimes I read poetry....
Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry & Desire (2013)- by Christopher Hennessy
Other times I read writers talking about poetry.
Concrete, vols. 4-7 (1994-2004) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick
Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould
Den: Neverwhere, Muvovum, & Children of Fire (1978, 1983, & 1989, respectively) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben
Why even have notes, if I'm not gonna make notes on these?
Den's a weird comic. It first began life as a short film, which I've never seen, before today, but have felt indicated via the text. Repeatedly. Which is the first weird thing about Den: it's nodding to its own origins, outside comix. The second weird thing is it keeps asking: what the fuck IS this comic, really?
It's only a weird query, inasmuch as there's No Answer. The closest we can get is, "Den is Den." Whether you're talking the series proper, or its own satirical post-script, 'Denz', the series is Corben's instincts, at work & play.
And here's the weird-er, weird-est part-- Den's a queer text. It's a queer text by a hetero: a heterodox doc, if ya like... And me gusta, certainly. When the Corben library was announced, and I found out Jose Villarubia was in charge of the restoration, I was dubious. Because Villarubia, lovely as his work can be, is not the original colourist. I was suspicious. But Villarubia's not just maintained the faith, he's improved upon the original printings by presenting the cleanest, least censorious version of the work I've seen.
Sure, the colours. Everybody talks about Corben's colours. But I'm here for the full-frontal dudity. Den, the character, isn't attractive. Most of Corben's faces & bodies aren't sexually appealing-- to me. But in terms of actually presenting the body in motion, in action, under the influence of momentum & gravity? Unless it's Muybridge, you're not liable to see this degree of accuracy on paper. From tumescence to free-floating flaccidity, the constriction of cremaster muscles are observed, testicles descend & retreat, cocks roll lazily, and buttocks tense.
Hey, kids: comix.
And most of that doesn't happen during sex scenes. The sex scenes are relatively chaste, really. The only actual penetration committed to paper, in the majority of instances, is with either blade or claw. The biggest cock in the second volume, Muvovum, isn't Den's, it's his arch-enemy, Tarn. As in his enemy morphs into a giant purple people-eating cock. Spoilers!
If that scans as less-than-queer to you, then you're definitely not the audience for the third volume, 'Children of Fire', when Den basically disappears from the narrative and all the focus turns back onto The Red Queen, the power-mad & physically intimidating villainess of volume 1-- who had a HELL of a fight scene, in v2, where she breaks all the limbs of an old man, bites off one of his fingers, and kicks him out a window. Volume 3, which dials the Den Saga back to the year dot, doesn't really go out of its way to cater to the original fans. Den is a desiccated husk of an old man, and The Queen is re-cast as his caretaker & guardian, a spacefarer going by the name Kil. 'Children of Fire' tracks Kil's evolution into the Queen and suggests something deeply genderbent about everything we've seen heretofore.
None of this is explained elegantly. This is Corben, after all, and nobody can convincingly argue to me that he's a Writer. He's an ascended fanboy. He's one of the o.g. fanboys of my parents' generation, point of fact. His fan fixations aren't mine-- Corben read all of Robert E. Howard, attempted adaptations of almost every Poe or Lovecraft story you care to name, and he loved the John-Carter-of-Mars series. Madly. Corben was chasing his own fixations when he got hired on to colour the Warren reprints of The Spirit, and he rode that pack of fixations like baying hounds-- the same fixations which led him to film 'Neverwhere', over time, led him to be obsessed with the pop androgyny of the 80s, same as all were: Annie Lennox's buzzcut + Kathy Acker's bodybuilding were as culturally ubiquitous as Patrick Nagel prints.
Which is where I'm at, presently, in my reading: 1989. Year of the Twin Peaks pilot. Scene of the crime, as 'twere, for my generation to figure out what the crimes against women exactly were.
And there's still two volumes to go. Den has only begun to warp. The Big Story will fold-- like origami produced by some blind seer --into itself, in suggestive shapes, inchoate. Corben kept returning to Neverwhere and asking, "Well, what was that about?" only to produce another, stranger, more gnomic variant on the initial work. Not because he was huffing Borges & reading french po-mo homos. Because the entire time he was handcrafting this art, Corben was bluffing his way to market, making & selling these books through his vanity press imprint, Fantagor.
I cannot underline enough: these are some strange-ass books. Especially to emerge from '89. Because 'Children of Fire' was when Corben was serializing Den as a newsstand comic. Den!?! A title most famous for being unafraid to depict the male form, re-formatted with a female (but never effeminate) protagonist who wears clothes, like some beachgoing normie! Of course it's Corben, so the dimensions & proportions of the fantasy are, as ever, fantastical, and consequently threats of sexualized violence are never far away-- but the threats are never given a chance to land, because Kil, not yet the Queen, is definitely more violent & dangerous than Den had ever been.
O, my trash friends & friends of trash, there are fight scenes. These are fight scenes to buy a graphic novel by Richard Corben for. Action like you like it!
Is Kil likeable? Not as such. Den's hardly likeable himself. He's literally a Masculine Fantasy. But this revised Queen is interesting, in all the ways Den is not. She's in tune with, in ownership & in control of her body, her sexuality, & her identity-- in all the ways David Ellis Norman is not. (Have I mentioned how often our acronymic, titular character is sexually assaulted? Have I mentioned how many times he's been raped? Nobody ever seems to. Perhaps I should. At least the end of v1, which ends with our novice, blundering hero being both raped- and rescued -by women; v2 gives Den close to the full hentai treatment, whereas the worst thing to happen to a female character-- Muuta, disney princess of v2 --is being swallowed whole by a massive parasitic cock. (Pause for emphasis. Throat-clearing sfx.) I wonder why more peeps don't get into the weeds about this stuff...) Corben, never the most subtle of creators, works harder than most Accredited, Acclaimed, Award-brandishing Writers of Comix to show us, not tell us, who the Queen is. What's revealed is Kil: a survivor, a striver, an otherworldly-- chthonic, even --figure of myth. Corben doesn't tell us much of any of that with dialogue. Yes, he typesets a lot of text. His best characterization is, inevitably, illustrative.
A woman arising from the ocean, powerful and athletic, cradling a body so wizened it's virtually a cadaver.
That's the cover: that's the story.
You can quibble with my Big Queer Reading. Because obviously there's a lot of eggy symbolism, and squicky talk about "genetics" from an implicitly matriarchal, eugenicist, spaceclone race, etc. Which Kil defies, throughout-- matriarchy isn't her destiny.
Now, conquest, maybe...
Den doesn't exist in 'Children of Fire'. In his stead there's Mal, a frighteningly skeletal figure who eventually cakes up enough-- courtesy of "radiation" and a Neverwhere diet --to become Den's ringer, in this sci-fi ancestor to a fantasy t&a, beans'n'frank comic that's essentially inexplicable & scripted by the creator's id. The plotting is on some Dave Sim shit, in terms of a career arc where a creator is tethered to an Ikonic Comic Character: retroactive justification heaped upon retroactive justification, all for making a Carter of Mars fan film in his youth... Resulting in some very un-Sim self-examination, perhaps.
It's obvious to me that as time did its work on Corben, and Corben did work on himself-- along the way he became a bodybuilder, his own model for Den --he discovered the Queen to be more compelling & capable than his naive boy-in-barbarian-drag, and so re-configured the Entire Work to focus on her, and her role in redefining Den. The books all still have Den's name on them, but taken as a whole, it's not about him. It's about Neverwhere, and why Neverwhere was never quite where he left it, before he returned.
Because, like his Queen, like Den, Corben always returned. Always in different skin.
Marvel Super Special #33: Buckaroo Banzai (1984) - scripted / adapted by Bill Mantlo, illustrated by Mark Texeria & Armando Gil
Den: Dreams & Alarums (1992) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben
Den: The Price of Memories (1994-97) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben
