Intercourse

Andrea Dworkin Intercourse (1987)
Intercourse is the tract wherein Andrea Dworkin famously stated that all men are rapists and that heterosexual sex is rape, just like the joyless dungaree wearing dyke she was. However, bothering to read the book reveals that she never said anything of the sort, and that her argument as set forth herein is not actually unreasonable. That being said, it's no walk in the park either. Dworkin is not an easy read. She's absolutely uncompromising and unwilling to soft soap, prettify or simplify her argument. The reader is expected to shut the fuck up, pay attention, and no fidgeting if they know what's good for them; and actually, it is good for them, certainly potentially educational.

Essentially it's nothing less than the history of sexual politics mapped out in our changing, evolving attitudes, at least for the last five-hundred or so years, as revealed in the fiction of Tolstoy, Lawrence, Hemingway and others. Dworkin pulls apart established models of human intercourse, social and sexual, with surprising deference reflecting her genuine appreciation of at least a few of these authors, but she pulls no punches and is very good at revealing that which has been staring us in the face all along and which suggests we, as the testicular half of a species, might like to think about growing the fuck up.

To be specific, Dworkin doesn't say anything as blunt or stupid as all sex between men and women is rape, but rather that it can't be anything but rape within the context of the patriarchal structures which inform society; and she's unfortunately right. The revelation is just how much is tied in with those structures, in which respect she's also very thorough, extending her analysis to the extremes of the Nazi death camps and how even there we find echoes of the man sticking his thingie in because he believes it to be his due. It's a solid argument, but one of such composition that there's not much point trying to break it down. Intercourse is, by some definition, an academic narrative, but the dialogue by which it sets forth its argument seems partially intuitive and therefore possibly of such complexity as to defeat being broken down into anything bite-sized.

Intercourse is intense but incredibly rewarding, and if you haven't read it, there seems a reasonable chance that it probably isn't what you think it is. If you're not already on board, it may be time to get over whatever has been holding you back and listen to what the woman had to say.

Also - for what it may be worth - I found Dworkin's filleting of Bram Stoker's thoroughly mediocre Dracula highly satisfying because I was beginning to think it was just me.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Jack Kerouac & William S. Burroughs
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945)
I walked right past this one when I first saw it in the used book store. I'd heard the title from it being listed amongst a vague group of Burroughs' lesser works and related oddities, but had never really considered it as something which would interest me, which is partially due to the involvement of Kerouac. I have nothing against Kerouac, but neither have I ever felt a strong desire to read anything he wrote, which is possibly an adverse reaction to people who don't really know me telling me to read On the Road because it's just the sort of thing I would like. Such recommendations further foster my impression of Kerouac as a sort of written equivalent of Jim Morrison - great singles and a decent voice, but I probably wouldn't want a whole album, and anyone who seriously regards all that frowning and glowering as indicative of something profound is probably an idiot.

Anyway, I bought it on my second visit to said book store because I realised that I would have been pissed off had I gone back to the rarities shelf and seen that someone else had beat me to it; and I'm glad I did because it's a fascinating curio, you might almost say Burroughs' first novel. In 1944, he and Kerouac were unpublished writers, or aspiring writers, hanging around together, drinking beer, taking on the occasional dead end job and generally just drifting. When one of their loose assemblage of friends murdered another, they decided to write a novel about it, each fictionalising the tale in alternate chapters told from his own point of view. It's fascinating as a period piece of life amongst not quite Bohemian types in New York as the second world war grumbled towards its conclusion across the other side of the horizon, and it's decent as a novel in its own right, even beyond the element of curiosity.

I gather both Kerouac and Burroughs had agreed to stick to a fairly basic, stripped down form of narrative so as to maintain a certain consistency; and although I'm not familiar with Kerouac, Burroughs' voice is already beginning to take shape:

Later, when we were sitting in Riker's at the counter eating eggs, Ryko told me that Betty-Lou had taken a great dislike to Philip.

'There's something rotten about him,' she had said. 'He has the smell of death about him.'

'That's one for the book all right,' I said.

The title derives from a news report coming over the radio during a conversation between Kerouac and others, with alternate lines of unrelated dialogue mashed together in a way which prefigures Burroughs' later use of cut-up technique - which probably indicates the intimacy of the collaboration given that it isn't Burroughs writing it in this instance.

Most of the detail of daily life falls somewhere between Hemingway and Bukowski, albeit a Bukowski who hangs out with poets or occasionally considers paintings by Modigliani. It is vivid and well-paced, with Kerouac's efforts to find work on a ship and travel to Europe providing a backbone of narrative across which is framed the complicated relationship of David Kammerer and Lucien Carr, leading to the murder of the latter by the former. An odd note is struck by the defining of the Kammerer-Carr relationship as homosexual in contrast to whatever else the other characters have going on, which isn't really given a name beyond a heterosexual default suggested by occasional use of the term fag as applied to David Kammerer, or Ramsay Allen as he is named in the novel. Initially some of this read a little like self-loathing on the part of the authors - at least to me - but given that neither of them were otherwise particularly reticent regarding expression of their respective sexual preferences, I'm guessing they simply may have felt it prudent to tone things down to some extent in hope of getting published; and it is clear that this was written in hope of publication, but then forgotten following a series of rejections.

Additionally there seems to be a theme tantamount to the random, meaningless interactions of wild animals gathered at a waterhole, and the occasional frictions which might arise: the hippos boiling in their tanks, one lion killing another over a piece of meat, or Lucien braining the obsessive David before pushing him from the top of a tall building. I suppose that might be the existential element of the narrative, as promised by James Grauerholz in the afterword.

The fact of this remaining unpublished for over half a century says more about the publishing industry than the formative talents of its authors, although I suppose had it seen print they might both have ended up on very different paths.

... and it's great, by the way - seeing as I haven't actually yet said that out loud; which means I should probably read me some Kerouac.

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
William Burroughs said of the cut-up technique he introduced to literature - as formalised by himself and Brion Gysin - something along the lines of the novel being some twenty or so years behind painting, the art world having dispensed with the purely representational in the wake of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, roughly speaking. Artists had begun to screw around with form, to create bold new images beyond that which existed in nature. Burroughs therefore likened his own reorganisation of existing texts to Dadaist collage. All well and good, but the premise of one form necessarily needing to catch up with the other was a bit of a straw man argument, given that both the Dadaists and Futurists had already applied collage technique to the written word and, as I'm beginning to appreciate, for most of the twentieth century literature has remained very much in step with the times as represented by whatever cultural swerves were taken in painting and sculpture. Hemingway is a case in point. The narrative unfolds in a straight line for sure, but the means by which that narrative is communicated is as much stripped down to pure form and rhythm as anything painted in the decades leading up to the big post-war freak out of abstract expressionism.

The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett's hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the lights from the open shops, then it was dark, then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue de Gobelins. The street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett's face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. Her head was down.

The rhythm may be erratic, picked out in the division of sentences into component statements and the repetition of certain words, but it is nevertheless as much a rhythm as anything painted by, for one example, Max Weber - whom I name specifically because Hemingway's above quoted opening to chapter four brought Weber's Rush Hour, New York of 1915 immediately to mind.

Anyway, The Sun Also Rises concerns itself with what Gertrude Stein identified as the Lost Generation, those left wandering and lacking purpose in the wake of the first world war, a war which - it might be argued - left existing ideas of morality looking somewhat ineffectual. The roughly autobiographical protagonists of The Sun Also Rises are rich kids who spend a lot of time talking about things of no real consequence, dining, travelling, having unsatisfactory affairs, eventually ending up in a small town in Spain having a bit of a wheeze during all the gore of the bull running. The gang have their emotional ups and downs but appear to remain unaffected by their environment. In chapter thirteen, Mike reduces military medals to a decorative feature of his dress, which may possibly have had more resonance between the wars than it does at present; and then there's the blood and innards all over the streets of Pamplona reduced to spectator sport, and in a way which I'm tempted to suggest may have been intended to echo the class divide painfully emphasised by the war. Carlos Baker as quoted on Wikipedia reckons that in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway presents his notion that the Lost Generation, considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong, but personally I don't really see it. I found them feckless and slightly irritating, and I was reminded of the counterpart bullfight in D.H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent also published in 1926 which could almost have been a direct response but for the timing. Naturally Lawrence's version entails more heaving and thrusting with brows furrowing darkly left right and centre, which seems to me a more natural response to such gruesome spectacle; and in the same novel we find:

She thought again of going back to Europe. But what was the good? She knew it! It was all politics or jazzing or slushy mysticism or sordid spiritualism. And the magic had gone. The younger generation, so smart and interesting, but so without any mystery, any background. The younger the generation, the flatter and more jazzy, more and more devoid of wonder.

Which quite adequately describes Hemingway's bunch, for my money, regardless of at least one of the two authors under discussion being something of a nutter who may not actually know what he's talking about all of the time.

So in lieu of a coherent summary, the short version of the review is that it was okay, but failed to deliver the life-changing experience I had been promised. I can see why The Sun Also Rises is regarded so highly, and much of it is beautifully put together, but it wasn't quite  my bag.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
I've always been a little scared of James Joyce, not least because he used to come around to our house every third Friday of the month and demand money with menaces back when I were a lad; although admittedly that may not have been James Joyce - I was very young at the time and my memory is hazy. Also, he famously wrote books making use of long made-up words. Anyway, my point here is that, being entirely unfamiliar with the man's oeuvre, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man seemed as good a place to start as any, given that it was his first and is as such supposedly not quite so weirdly impenetrable as his later page-turners.

Joyce famously wrote his narratives as a stream of consciousness, swerving from random thought to subject to event and back often without warning - the prospect of which is probably what kept my curiosity at bay as I imagined something like an Irish William Burroughs but more extreme and with none of the endearing toilet humour. Thankfully I was entirely wrong, and it hasn't required quite so much homework on my part as anticipated to appreciate what Joyce was doing. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is roughly autobiographical, with the specific focus being its principal character developing a sense of aesthetics; and it's probably entirely pertinent that this was written during those decades when European artists - or at least the painters - were most noisily engaged in the development and declaration of new ways of seeing by which to replace those of the classical tradition. Joyce seems less conspicuously modernist than Hemingway in this respect - Hemingway being Joyce's drinking buddy and my other recent point of reference here - but his narrative seems to share some common ground with the swirling subjective imagery of the Symbolists and other decadent types, albeit pared down to the microcosmic world of Stephen Dedalus.

Joyce, it turns out, was keen on rhythm, less in terms of there being a young lady from Ealing, and more so in the same sense as certain modernist painters of his day, persons such as Max Weber or Umberto Boccioni - thinking specifically of the States of Mind series here. I should probably stress that this is something I've noticed rather than necessarily indicative of anything directly or specifically relating to the author or his influences. Maybe it would be easier to simply give an example, such as the swell of the ocean as suggested by the repetition of the word waves in the following paragraph:

How pale the light was at the window! But that was nice. The fire rose and fell on the wall. It was like waves. Someone had put coal on and he heard voices. They were talking. It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell.

Rhythms shape the overall structure of the novel as well as the detail, informing the relationship of the five chapters, each representing a distinct age in the development of Dedalus, and almost certainly echoing some theological form of which I am unfamiliar through having little background in that area. That said, the structure reminded me somewhat of the five directions, the five points of the Mexican Nahua world through which one must cycle in order to achieve completion; and so it feels like Joyce may have been doing something similar here, assembling five formative pieces in order to achieve a whole in acknowledgement of some specific pattern.

This development of themes is seen in Stephen the child losing his glasses early on in the novel, for which he is punished over and above simply being unable to see; reflected by his development of aesthetics in the final chapter as he is reborn by some definition, although reborn not necessarily of the vaguely traditional fire, fire having been earlier defined as having two forms - that which God made for the service of humanity, and that more fierce variant which torments the sinners in hell. Stephen appears, at least to me, to take his own path, embracing science whilst refuting the priesthood without any flags unnecessarily nailed to the masts of any ship which might sail too far in any direction other than his own, that of the great craftsman and artist as signified by the name.

Stylistically, Joyce's innovation - so far as I am able to tell - was in banishing all but the purely subjective voice of the world as experienced by his character, placing the reader at the centre of the novel in an entirely new way, but without any of the usual compromises which reduce narrative to sequential melodrama. So we are expected to make some effort to join the dots and to keep up, which can't really be done without superimposing our own subjective experiences onto those of Stephen Dedalus. Returning to possibly spurious comparisons with early twentieth century painters, the steady internal rhythm of this dialogue, coupled with Joyce's refusal to render speech as separate from the narrative, presents a sort of written equivalent of the bold surface of the work of certain Fauvists such as André Derain, no area of the image taking precedent over another, everything levelled out to an even if not necessarily uniform texture.

—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

So, whilst a degree of contextual depth is necessary to appreciate the narrative beyond that which is set down in the novel, we supply that depth, and Joyce therefore has more common ground with his friend Hemingway than may be apparent from first glance.

The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension.

Hence the unrelenting subjectivity of the narrative.

Pretentious as this all may seem, not least because there's a strong chance I've been firing blanks and in the wrong direction all along, it should at least communicate that there's a lot going on here for those who wish to work at it, and so, as the above probably indicates, I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Nevertheless, I take away from this novel that whilst Joyce's written style may seem an initially daunting prospect, there's really nothing to be afraid of, and this specific portrait makes for rich and particularly rewarding reading.

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast (1964)
I can be a bit clueless when it comes to the history of literature besides that which generally has a picture of a spaceship on the cover, although possibly not quite so clueless as some, but more clueless than I would like. Having been drawn to the probably inaccurate idea of Hemingway as a man who wrote books and enjoyed a good healthy punch-up, I decided to start with A Moveable Feast on the grounds that I sometimes like to know something of the character of an author before I proceed further, and being an autobiographical account of our man's life in Paris in the 1920s, this seemed like a good place to start.

Being rather less clueless when it comes to the history of twentieth century art, I'm interested to find that Ernest spent a lot of time hanging around with artists whose work I know, forming opinions which tend to support that which I suspected. He likes Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, finds Aleister Crowley unsavoury, and summarises Wyndham Lewis in a way as to suggest parallels with a certain weird little fannish hard-boiled egg man presently spewing out a million internet words a day on how Terrance Dicks' Doctor Who and the Giant Robot novelisation recontextualises proto-Shakespearian misogyny as a millennial détournement of Situationist theory, which is a shame as I always liked Lewis' Vorticist work, but never mind.

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

This passage stood out for me as a good example of Hemingway's greatest strengths, the style he developed, and because of the thematic link to the proto-Cubist painter, Paul Cézanne. Stylistically, Hemingway appeared to be reacting against the baroque excesses of Symbolist writing - if that's what I mean - with an efficient and stripped down text delivering solid blocks of meaning in straight lines without the distraction of adjectives or hyperbole. It is, I suppose, a style that has come to be identified as hard-boiled, at least by me, and might be seen as partially ancestral to the written work of Charles Bukowski, Billy Childish - albeit maybe with a dash of Louis-Ferdinand Céline - and even Philip K. Dick. Rather than presenting a dry, emotionless narrative, this technique instead offers one which might in fact be characterised as more emotionally honest - providing the components of the image, allowing the reader to perceive that which is seen along with the emotional response; or less is more; or as Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

To get to the point, this is essentially similar to what Cézanne and those influenced by him, most notably Picasso, were doing with painting, stripping the subject down to its most basic essence in order to expose artistic truths which had for so long been eclipsed by the artist as the most important part of the equation. In other words, this is what art, whether written or painted, used to do before shit television fooled us into believing sad scenes require tears and Murray fucking Gold sobbing into his London Philharmonic Orchestra in order to convey emotion.

Apparently he wrote better than this, but A Moveable Feast has nevertheless made for a very refreshing change.

Equations of Life

Simon Morden Equations of Life (2011)
Equations of Life is the first of a trilogy, a novel presented to me for my birthday by my brother-in-law, and probably not something I would have picked up on my own impetus largely owing to an extraordinarily poor sales pitch on the back which incorporates the equation of Russian mobsters + Yakuza + Something called the New Machine Jihad = One Dead Petrovitch. Samuil Petrovitch is the hero of the piece, and whilst this sort of mathematical strapline worked a certain charm on posters for the Ritz Brothers' The Gorilla, a 1939 film promising thrills + laughs = entertainment, it seems cheesy here, suggestive of airport bookstall action thriller landfill.

Happily the novel itself turns out to have a low cheese index, although it reads in places as though there may be something of a balancing act going on. I tend to dislike fiction which suggests it really wouldn't mind too much if someone turned it into a gritty television drama in which Ross Kemp impersonates Bruce Willis bending the rules but getting the job done. I don't really want to read books that wish they were on telly because it feels like a waste of everyone's time. Peter Hamilton sometimes skates perilously close to this sort of thing, and Equations of Life seems occasionally torn between media.

'I reckon on another hour, Princess, and the Paradise militia will be having a fish dinner in your old man's Zen garden.'

'Your band of criminals will be slaughtered by my father's men. Then they will come for you.'

'I don't think so. First sign of them or your jihadist friends, and that trolley you're attached to goes out the window. Seems a shame to waste a good pair of cuffs, but you've got to make sacrifices.' Sorensen snorted at his own attempt of humour.

To be fair, that's the only paragraph in the entire novel which struck me as sufficiently reminiscent of some exhausting Lynda La Plante miniseries to warrant being set aside for later sneering; and this probably constitutes an achievement given the general thrust of the narrative. It should perhaps be noted at this point that I'm somewhat ignorant of action-thriller-crime-drama or whatever this is as a genre, and so my prejudices may result from simple lack of familiarity with a certain style of writing.

Whilst we're here, I tend to find myself on amber alert when reading something in which it becomes obvious that the author believes his years at an English university amount to sufficiently rich a cultural experience to instil every word with the cosmopolitan veracity of ten eight-hundred pound male Hemingways. This is a significant problem particularly in Doctor Who tie-in fiction wherein we can travel halfway across the universe to discover that the people there are also into Vic & Bob and Ned's Atomic Dustbin, and they too worry about making their grants stretch to the end of the year. It  comes across as arrogant, insular and wanky, and unfortunately I now find my hackles making an ascent whenever I read a novel about a university graduate conspicuously written by a university graduate.

Samuil Petrovitch is a student at a London university studying very hard sums, which raised an eyebrow given that his author seems to have had a similar educational background; but nevertheless Morden gets away with it, deftly avoiding potential pitfalls with the grace of a master, even keeping it going as our hero meets sexy gun-toting nuns and prevents London being taken over by machines. It's a story falling roughly between Johnny Nemo and Judge Dredd somehow rooted in something that works very much like unshaven contemporary reality of the kind which keeps Ross Kemp in work. Told as a fast paced page-turner*, the whole thing really should fall apart like a soufflé in a late 1970s situation comedy, and yet somehow Morden gets us through, keeping it all in place even as our hero devises a working theory of everything and a virtual reality representation of Japan achieves sentience and tries to remake London in its own image. I suspect the key is that Morden sticks to the script, resists the sort of knowing winks which could have turned the entire narrative over to parody, and simply, he's just a decent writer who really knows what he's doing; or at least that would be my best guess.

Equations of Life reads like something that will probably soon be turned into a shit film with a ton of CGI and people grunting and swearing at each other in the pouring rain, so it might be wise to read it now before Jason Statham puts you off the idea; and it really is worth reading. Even aside from whether it actually does anything beyond engaging one's attention - which it does very well, by the way - the setting of an alternate London as the terrible consequence of unchecked capitalism is both horrifying and fascinating.

*: I would argue that all novels are page-turners, with the possible exception of those novels written entirely upon one side of a single massive sheet of paper.