The White Notebooks #15 ]

then your life becomes a travelogue, spent in clouds at icy altitudes

[ the white notebooks #15 ]

Corned Beef Sandwich Conversations I can imagine myself having, only someone else got there first

the time so Young thought he was doing alright by this, GUS GRISSOM: What is it? even though it was a breaking of the rules. Up in space he JOHN YOUNG: Corned beef sandwich. shared the sandwich with his fellow astronaut Virgil ‘Gus’ GG: Where did that come from? Grissom, and they eventually got a reprimand for it. Their JY: I brought it with me. Let’s see how it tastes. in-ﬂight discussion of the sandwich has become legendary Smells, doesn’t it? even though Young later thought everyone was making an GG: Yes, it’s breaking up. I’m going to stick it in my unnecessarily big deal out of it; not only that but it was pocket. being done in a way that was obscuring the actual JY: Is it? It was a thought, anyways. achievements of the mission. GG: Yep. It was eventually realised by NASA that no actual JY: Not a very good one. harm was done by Young’s action although in zero-G a GG: Pretty good though, if crumbling corned beef sandwich could certainly be seen as it would just hold together. a potential harm to instruments. But the fact that he did it JY: Want some chicken leg? set in motion in NASA an introspection before being GG: No, you can handle that. ﬁnally put to rest and memorialised in transcript. So in the spirit of John Young’s effectuating sandwich, I’d like to point out that I particularly like snatches of dialogue (and occasionally monologue) that ONE OF MY CHILDHOOD HEROES was the American illustrate moments where logic and reason cast light on Astronaut John Young, although this only came about moments of opacity, ignorance or stupidity, particularly when he got to travel to the moon as commander of Apollo when it’s done in the names of science or peace. But let’s 16 in 1972 – I was too young to have followed his career not be elitist about this: such enlightenment can happen with the Gemini program. But having a Young on the moon anywhere, even somewhere as mundane as Twitter or my was a big deal for me. We even shared the same birthday, Facebook feed. Collected here are an ongoing series of thirty years apart. found encapsulated conversations or monologues that On 23 March 1965 Young famously smuggled on result in a moment of clarity being reached, if not in the board the Gemini 3 spacecraft a corned beef sandwich. mind of one of those speaking then at least in the mind of NASA were actually researching how people eat in space at the reader.

then your life becomes a travelogue. . . [ the white notebooks #15 ] April 2562/2019 a print perzine for limited distribution, available for ‘the usual’ also at efanzines.com. email: [email protected] 136/200 Emerald Hill Village, Soi 6, Hua Hin, Prachuap Khiri Khan 77110, Thailand set in 9/12 Didot and Letter Gothic above: John Young, age 34, 8 March 1965 (NASA, public domain)

[ 1 ] SAMUEL R. DELANY Quoted in Spider Robinson, Off DOUG SPENCER Facebook, 21 December 2017 the Wall at Callahan’s, 1994 Julia: “I apologise for doubting you.” “Rupture” occurs when you think you are in the Me: “No, no, doubting me is good technique. I often middle of a conversation with someone… and doubt myself, and I’m always right.” suddenly discover that you’ve merely been making noises at each other, that there is a previously unsuspected chasm between you. LUCY HUNTZINGER Facebook, 8 January 2018 Me, age 5-58: What do you mean you only read ten new books last year? Are you ill? Me, age 60: No. No. I just. I don’t know. No one writes ELLE OH HELL Twitter, 14 January 2019 MARIE KONDO: Does this item spark joy? the kind of books I like to read anymore. Except for ME: no those few authors who are reliably great and some MARIE KONDO: Does this spark joy? non-ﬁction I enjoyed. ME: No, it doesn’t Past Me: Dude, you don’t read books because you’re *three hours later in an empty house* guaranteed to like them. You read to discover new ME: Oh wait I have depression ideas, new information, new beloved authors. What’s wrong here? Present Me: ... Past Me: Look, you need to read new books. Your TADE THOMPSON Facebook, 29 January 2019 brain isn’t getting any bigger re-reading books you Me: Shall I get laser surgery? know by heart. How about one a month? Fiction, Opthalmologist: Sure. It’ll reduce your prescription non-ﬁction, whatever it takes. strength. Present Me: That doesn’t seem unreasonable. But I Me: so I’ll still need glasses? don’t have any books in the house I haven’t read. Opth: (laughs) you will always need glasses. Well, John’s. But his are all histories of battles and Me: (laughs) why are we laughing at my blindness? guys with beards and stuff. Past Me: His don’t count. You have to read stuff you feel intrigued by. Plus Neogenesis is out now. Go! DOUG SPENCER Facebook, 23 March 2019 Read more books! Ian: “There’s a word for it, a word I can never remember because I’m convinced it starts with a P So I am going to do that. Twelve books this year. It when in fact it starts with an S.” seems completely ridiculous that I have to make a Me: “Tautology.” statement about it and promise myself I will read Ian: “Yes! You can see my problem.” more often. But here we are.

TADE THOMPSON Facebook, 4 April 2018 LIZ WILLIAMS Facebook, 30 December 2017 This will only make sense to some of you. Me: [mutters to self on way to work] Talk less, smile Tarot client: (female, friend of a friend, in the G&P) more, don’t let them know what you’re against or what So do you do the Tarot for yourself? you’re for. Me: Yes, but not a lot. I might pick a card a day to see Me: [15 mins into working day] *Loud, emphatic what the day will bring. [picks a card] statement about personal philosophy as intersects with Client: What is it? work* Me: Three of Cups! Me: [1 hour into working day] *Delivers socialist Client’s female friend, suddenly appearing: Hi! manifesto with dark threats of revolution* Would anyone like a drink? Me: [At end of working day] Tomorrow, I’ll talk less...

LIZ WILLIAMS Facebook, 25 December 2017 ÅNNI AJOOTIAN Facebook, 17 March 2019 Trevor Jones: I need to make a tinfoil hat. some stagehand probably: mr. tchaikovsky sir we Me: :: raises eyebrows:: can’t actually hit the drum this hard it will break the T: for the TURKEY... [withering look] It’s afraid of instrument the microwave. potyr ilyich tchaikovsky, wheeling a cannon into the theater: does it look like i give a fuck, johann psilentasincjelli: someone told me once that shooting stars are really just angels throwing away their LIZ WILLIAMS Facebook, 26 December 2017 cigarettes before God could catch them Twas the night of Christmas and all through the smoking house, not a creature was stirring, not even a— Trevor Jones: [in the pantry] Oh fuck! #someone get me a young child i have wisdom to Rat: Oh fuck! pass on

[ 2 ] Tr a v e l s

Clint Fox

TIME WAS WHEN I BELIEVED having an American friend, at years, isolated on separate sides of the Atlantic. the dreadful Catholic boys’ school I attended in Reading What brought us back together was Clint’s father, in the 1970s, possessed a certain caché. Clint Fox and his who had passed away in the mid-1990s. He wanted his younger brother Eric lived not far from me down one the ashes scattered in the River Thames at Sonning, and ‘best’ roads in the area; in other words, one of the richest. Clint’s brother Eric came over to the UK to do the job. The houses were generally huge, or at the very least old While in Reading he happened to run into my own and well preserved, and the Foxes lived in just such a younger brother, who had been as firm friends with Eric place known as Red Fox Cottage. Clint’s father, a as I had been with Clint. We quickly re-established confirmed Republican, worked in the nearby office of a contact. He was living in Houston and getting married US oil company that made pipelines, and he did indeed soon – how about I come over for the wedding? A few take home very good money, so much that he was also able months later I made it to Houston a few days early for his to set up a sideline business making quality penny- big day with Cheryl, his bride-to-be. He was living in a run farthing replica bicycles and selling them across the world. down apartment and was now working as a double-glazing No adult I knew was as cool as Clint’s dad, who was even salesman. “My father died a drunk,” he said in conver- more cool than my own dad the way he’d casually strut sation, early during my stay, “and my mother remarried.” around his house in a white vest over his huge belly plus I’d liked his mother too, but Clint’s new stepfather was cut stripey boxer shorts, without any thought to decency in from a very different cloth, outwardly affable but inwardly front of his kids’ friends. When you yourself have a father moody. No matter, Clint and I went on the road to New who does the gardening in a shirt and bow tie, the Orleans and had our own two-man bachelor weekend, but sartorial contrast becomes more than just noticeable, it because I was the only other guy I was wondering by this becomes categorically antithetical. time if Clint actually had male friends. New Orleans was as Clint’s garage had a pool table, there was a fun as we’d expected but after just one night we had to basketball hoop over the garage door. This was an all- drive back for the wedding the next day. I asked Clint if we American family, and Clint fit the best stereotype of weren’t cutting it too fine. “Nah. It’s all in hand. That’s the American youth: tall, blond-ish, square-jawed, confident, Best Man’s job.” The Best Man was, of course, Eric. wisecracking, a hit with some people but certainly not all. The night before the wedding I slept on Clint’s When he joined our year at school some boys couldn’t battered old sofa under which was a large stash – and he stand him, but he saw in me the kind of kid who probably had made no effort to hide it – of men’s magazines: could, and we became firm friends for most of the years Penthouse, Hustler, Celebrity Skin. Ah, okay, mate. his family stayed in England. I gave him licence to be who The wedding actually went fine. Cheryl, from he was, unlike other kids who didn’t trust his alienness. Florida, seemed nice. She’d given away one of her kidneys In turn I introduced him to a harmless hobby, to a complete stranger. They planned to live in Seattle. and as teenagers we fell in together as trainspotters – a On the way back to the UK I flew into Toronto to Californian with a British trainspotting habit being a very see my own long-distance girlfriend. She caught on that rare beast indeed – and we travelled the length and the whole Houston gig somehow sat ill with me. breadth of the country in our early teens with some very Six months later, after five months of living in trusting parental permission. A Saturday trip from Seattle, Cheryl left Clint for Florida. “She hated the Reading to Plymouth, or Eastleigh, or Derby, or Cardiff, or weather up here,” was all he offered by way of explanation. Crewe was not unusual whatever the weather. We excelled I could go no deeper, the subject was effectively closed off ourselves one Saturday in 1974, age 13, with a one-day trip and further leading questions were efficiently batted away. via London Euston first to Birmingham, then Glasgow, Clint flip-flopped politically, too. At the time of then Edinburgh then back to Kings Cross and finally my visit to Houston in 1998, he was a confirmed Democrat home to Reading. That was our crowning trainspotting and our political talk was fun. A few years later, after 9/11 achievement, but somehow it went downhill from there. he’d flipped, talking like a Republican hawk with fantasies Despite the qualities I list above, Clint was also of reprisal and vengeance – “They must be made to fear an average student, almost exactly as average as myself us” – a confirmed Bush/Rove disciple. Then something who habitually scored around 45-60% on just about any else happened: he flopped, embarrassed about his test, and his schoolwork was a disappointment to his escapade into the New World Order. He reclaimed his parents, as was mine with mine. His father put pressure on Democrat credentials, and politics was fun again. By then I him to do better, and somehow that pressure was passed had seen that his window business in Seattle was doing on to me in the form of forcing me to choose between him well, and because he was making better money something and other friends amongst our school year. We had fallings else happened: by 2006, he’d flipped again. “Seriously, I’m out, then reconciliations, then further separations as making far too much money now to vote Democrat.” Clint’s dominant and control-freak tendencies took over. It I came to the conclusion that with Clint I’d been became a cycle. By the time we were to quit school, we swimming in the shallow end of the pool the whole time. were barely talking to each other. His family went back to End of story. I wish you well, mate, but please be California without farewells, and there it rested for twenty true to yourself and your friends. Those that you keep.

[ 3 ]

Dystopia Mon Amour

No Way Out: Two Opposing English Dystopias

DYSTOPIAN SOCIETIES THAT ARE impervious to the idea of And yet I find an opposite dystopia, of sorts, in change might be easy enough to create in the writer’s Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), nominated for the mind when their oppression is facilitated merely by Clarke Award, a novel that for full effect is best machinery and/or computers, but the sophistication of a approached with as little foreknowledge as possible, dystopia is dependent on the future extrapolation of the however as we’re discussing dystopian fiction here this society under question. Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger gives you a clue as to part of its content. Ishiguro grew up Games, for example, shows a depleted and weakened in England and possesses something of an outsider’s America in which the most prominent form of execution is perspective on English society (and, for that matter, carried out by bows and arrows wielded by children, no Japanese society), and while this may be at its core a less. There is little technology on show, which is indicative dystopian novel it is on its surface about the ethics of of these books’ originality in dystopian terms. cloning, and through the lives of the Technological dystopias can either be principal characters the reader gets a similar sophisticated and facilitated by a focus on their outsider’s perspective on what, to them, technology, or remain unsophisticated when must be a perfect dystopia given that they the oppressive technology is left largely hidden have no way out of it. An unempathic or undeveloped yet is still very much in place. member of the society depicted would Giving a latter example, Philip E. experience it as partially utopian in its High [1] was a writer whose plots were often success in solving the problems of longevity embedded in various kinds of societal discord, and death. Ishiguro’s narrator, Kathy, first and his most unapologetic dystopia was The brings you deep into her everyday life as a Mad Metropolis (1966). It is not a particularly modern day schoolgirl, though it’s only after edifying novel, and as was common with much a couple of chapters that you begin to notice of High’s plotting, he pitted a lowly individual the absence of... certain essentials. The with some as-yet-untapped extraordinary subtle hint of unease that pervades the book abilities to take on the established order, in is captured well in one early scene, and from this case a monolithic society controlled by a there the reader’s perception is given small well-meaning but poorly programmed central seismic shifts by the revelations held in computer known as Mother. Mother controls small incidents. Kathy’s ordinariness absolutely everything in Free Cities One and contrasts with the extraordinarily cruelty of Two (New York and London), and micro- her existence; she and her friends Ruth and manages the details of all citizens’ lives Tommy twine around each other and including their stratified parameters, while also interconnect like strands of a triple helix, somehow making allowances for the ultra- always looking back because they have no capitalist ethos of those in the higher strata. future, a situation that a more traditional For no apparent reason, proletarian worker science fictional rendition would probably Stephen Cook gets booted out of a bar one have had them rebelling against. This is a evening and finds himself not only out in the linear book that rarely reveals the turns up dangerous streets but also a persona non grata ahead, and is all the more observant and everywhere he turns within his society. While unusual in its restraint because of Ishiguro’s there are a number of militant factions all controlled avoidance of dramatic dis- pitted against Mother, it’s only Cook who, now tractions. For the whole experience there is having the necessarily high IQ, is able to get Mother to also the film of the book [2], which contains one perfectly quit by leading it into making some rather basic logical horrific extra scene that encapsulates society’s treatment of deductions about its destructive behaviour. As I’ve these people in mere seconds. But for all its dystopian experienced before with Philip E. High, it feels like a elements the British society depicted in Never Let Me Go rushed novel where too much of the first draft has still strikes me as one that has the capacity to change for remained unexamined, much as with many of the novels of the better should people, having opened their eyes to the his transatlantic contemporary, Philip K. Dick. cruelty of their society, want it badly enough. [1] http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/high_philip_e [2] http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/never_let_me_go

[ 4 ] Ten Formative Travel Memoirs

THE MORE I THOUGHT about my two essays ‘Thirty Genre Ted Simon Books of Personal Significance’, Parts 1 and 2 in the last Jupiter’s Travels two issues of The White Notebooks, the more I realised that 1979 there are so many other books I wanted to write at least a In 1973 Ted Simon embarked paragraph about. I could have taken a straight aim at on a sponsored 64,000 mile ‘mainstream fiction’ but that would be too predictable by journey through forty-five half – maybe later when I’ve thought about it more. More countries on a 500cc Triumph interesting to my current state of mind is an assembly of Tiger 100 motorbike. I inspiring travel writing. One book not listed here is The remember Simon certainly did a Granta Book of Travel from 1998, a door-stopper of an good job of taking me along anthology that I enjoyed greatly when I read it in 2000. with him, but there were gaps in There is also an element of anticipation and the book that were filled in with forward-planning involved here: I hope that one day Miles the sequel Riding High, which I and Sky will ask me “Dad, what were the books that never read because this one felt influenced your thinking in your twenties and thirties as a self-contained enough, and as a critically-functioning adult?”, to which I’ll now be able to wanderlust-filled twenty-some- reply, as casually as possible, “Why, it’s all in these here thing I wanted to experience fanzines, son(s).” – all those hours of good reading and such a well-rounded journey for learning might otherwise be wasted, languished, under- myself. I wonder if the same employed, abandoned and lost in time like tears in rain, journey could be done today. before it’s my time to die and take it all to the grave with Probably not. me. Thankfully there’ll be no chance of that now. Robyn Davidson Jack Kerouac Tracks 1980 On the Road 1957 Davidson was living in London with Doris Lessing when she The ‘big deal’ about this book wrote this truly engaging was mostly lost on me when I memoir of her single-handed read it back in 1978. The second journey across the Australian time around in 2006, having desert with several camels. It learned more about Kerouac in was Davidson’s independent the interim I could understand spirit that first attracted me, but what set him off back and forth it was Lessing’s words about this across the US, but the excess of book that have stayed with me stimulants still left me non- longest: ‘Travel is about plussed. Neal Cassady, incarn- shedding burdens.” ated here as Dean Moriarty and Oh yes. being both the heart and tao of the book and the whole Beat William Least Heat-Moon Generation, was the focus Blue Highways around whom the more obser- 1982 vant Kerouac bracketed his own search in the character of Sal I remember commenting to Paradise. There are some great myself that this was a monster of passages and the last trip into a book and endlessly engaging, Mexico feels like an encore to an after reading it in 1985. Heat- already epic story, the whole of Moon was taking a trip around which is written in rather the small roads of America, sentimental style compared to avoiding the Interstates and his later ‘stream of conscious- meeting the country folk and ness’ approach. I still think he natives who live somewhere in was intellectually lazy in compa- the margins of mainstream rison to Burroughs or Ginsberg American life. I never read Jan but On the Road – or more Morris’s highly popular Coast to specifically Moriarty himself – Coast, but I imagine this would still takes you on a fast and be a worthy companion – the thrill-seeking ride, the impetus other half of the American of which is hard to shake off. gestalt, as it were.

[ 5 ] Franklyn Wood Simon Winchester Cola Cowboys Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving 1982 Relics of the British Empire 1985 I recall reading this book in 1982 as soon as it hit the shelves of In the late 1970s and early 1980s WHSmith, and was rather taken Winchester travelled 100,000 with its ramped-up journalistic miles across the world to report style that clearly relied on some on the rather shabby state of the exaggeration of the truth in colonies at the far edges of the order to entertain. Okay, I was a fallen British Empire. Forget any culture shocked 21 year-old notion that Winchester did this having recently returned from for a cynical laugh; no, he tells it Saudi Arabia, so it was the straight and true, but clearly trucker’s trip from the UK to the with a glint in his eye and on the Middle East that I was interested lookout for the farcical. in and not the finesse of the Winchester’s encounter with writing. The way the journey ‘The World’s Most Travelled ends is kind of perfect too, Man’ on Ascension Island is because these hardened guys something I have never really don’t give a shit about forgotten because it is simply what’s in the back of their truck, lovely travel writing. it’s only the paycheck at the end of the trip that interests them. I Matthew Parris do wonder how much money Inca-Kola: A Traveller’s Tale of Franklyn Wood made out of this. Peru 1990 Lucy Irvine Castaway For the full Peru travel 1983 experience one really needs to read Nicholas Shakespeare, but Gerald Kingsland British MP Matthew Parris also The Islander turns in a good yarn or two 1984 about the country I first visited In 1980, former journalist in 1995. Parris’s fourth trip there Gerald Kingsland advertised in went awry as he and his three London’s Time Out for a companions fell in with bandits, companion to accompany him prostitutes, peasants and riots. on his year-long Robinson His wit is what saves this Crusoe quest to Tuin island, in memoir because he’s not always the Torres Strait between complimentary to those who Australia and Papua New may deserve better, so there’s a Guinea. Lucy Irvine answered whiff of aloofness about Inca- the ad and was picked. As with Kola that I found a little Davidson’s Tracks it was Irvine’s uncomfortable. But we read unconventional spirit that first travel books to learn, don’t we? attracted me, and the one to have capitalised more on this Bill Porter adventure was certainly Irvine Road to Heaven: Encounters with whose memoir was something of Chinese Hermits a bestseller. But on the whole I 1993 found her story rather irritating in a self-serving, navel-gazing What happens to an American kind of way, instead of being guy after he gets divorced and about her relationship with explores his interest in Chinese Kingsland or the island itself. So philosophy? He ends up in I bought The Islander to get the remotest China searching for other side of the story and found very old Taoist hermits who are it to be a far more balanced and always somewhere over the next interesting read. Comparing mountain, and also, probably, these two books usefully showed well over 100 years old. This is me some of the dos and don’ts travel writing that broadens the of how to write about travel. mind and the Taoist spirit.

[ 6 ] Markers

lightly edited

WAHF . . . Typing Things Up. Jae Leslie Adams, Doug Bell, Bruce Gillespie (“Actually, I I did, a long time back, start with good intentions rather liked the idea of having a BNF in the WAHFs” – Leroy of cataloguing and databasing my own books and CDs, Kettle), Earl Kemp, Roger Levy, Liam Proven, Alan and even had a system where I could just enter and ISBN Sullivan and Bridget Wilkinson. and get all the details back from the web, but for some reason I never got much beyond the first shelf. I keep ROBERT LICHTMAN, Oakland, CA; 1 January 2019 meaning to resurrect it but there’s always other, more Thanks for this issue, in which I particularly enjoyed your pressing, stuff to do, and anyway, if I want to know if I comments about Phil Dick and Three Stigmata – one of my have a book it’s still easier to go and look at the shelf than favorites from back in the day. I used to read and reread to go upstairs, fire up the PC and type in a search for it. his novels – a habit I broke eventually when I realized Perhaps it would be easier if it was on a mobile device, but they were messing up my mind, and not in the best way. my bargain basement tablet seemed to spend 99.9% of its time constantly updating itself to the point that it was JERRY KAUFMAN, Seattle, WA; 8 January 2019 unusable for the first 30 minutes after I turned it on, and Thanks for this issue of The White Notebooks, with its sluggish as hell thereafter. It went back in its box after a numerous remarks about writers and books. I’ve read a few weeks and has sat there ever since. couple of Mosley’s ‘Easy Rawlins’ books, and found them There’s something odd about the font you’re interesting and entertaining, and one or two of Ishmael using for this issue [#14] and I didn’t really notice it until Reed’s (although I didn’t think of them as crime novels, seeing the double c in “inaccurate” in Brian Ameringen’s but as experimental fiction), but nothing by the other letter, and after that I kept seeing it everywhere. Why black writers you mention. At this point I can think of would someone design a font where the lower case c was more SF/Fantasy writers of color than I can of crime/ just noticeably taller and slightly more curvy [technical mysteries. I wonder why? Could it be that I’m just more au term] than all the other letters? That’s just weird. courant with the sf and fantasy field? ~ I use Pages to create The White Notebooks masters, and I’ve read a number of the books you highlight as export the PDF from it using the ‘Better’ option of Good/ having personal significance, but although I enjoyed them, Better/Best for image quality. Maybe this also affects the the only one I’d say had personal significance to me was font, which does come out a tad thinner. I notice the The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which questioned change to the letter c comes about when viewed at 150% perception and reality in a way that hit me where I think. or below. On my laptop, at any rate. ~ I was glad to see that Somtow is getting his old work back into print. Here’s a funny thing, though – I Strangely, despite most of my small screen went to the Diplodocus Press website, but My Cold Mad viewing consisting of either quiz shows or detective Father isn’t there. (Amazon lists it, so I know you didn’t thrillers (including various Scandi and Continental noir), hallucinate it.) largely because Vikki owns the remote, I have hardly read I only saw the first episode of Wild Palms, and if any actual detective fiction, although I am becoming memory serves, only to catch a glimpse of Bill Gibson, addicted to Ben Aaronovitch’s ‘Rivers of London’ series, who appeared in a party scene early in the show. which is a curious blend of police procedural and comic supernatural fantasy. Also different in that PC (now DCI) ~ I went from being ambivalent about Wild Palms on my Peter Grant is the son of Nigerian immigrants as well as first watch of the series to being a rabid fan on my second, being a practicing magician and married to the goddess of a few years later. I’m even blessed with owning the rare a small London tributary. For a long while, I have been The Wild Palms Reader, which I will never lend to anyone. ~ reading these in parallel with Charles Stross’s ‘Bob Howard/Laundry’ series, which does a similar mashup of STEVE JEFFERY, Kidlington, England; 10 January 2019 supernatural horror and spy thriller (though more Callan ‘Mindless Zombie Data Entry’ is how you describe this or Harry Palmer than James Bond. Apparently the name stage of cataloguing your books at the bottom of page 12, Harry Palmer was made up for the films and doesn’t but that’s half my working hours you could be talking feature in Deighton’s books. “There’s not many people about there. I keep being promised menial scribes for this, know that.”)* so I can get on with the more interesting (to me, anyway) *except the thousands who have ready the books design and build parts of the job, but inevitably they are or seen Wikipedia. Not having done either, I learned pulled off onto other jobs at the last minute, leaving it from Michael Caine, reading from his biography on the muggins here to spend inordinate amounts of time just radio. And he claims never to have said “There’s not many

[ 7 ] people know that”, which was invented for him by Peter attitudes) not the answer. Don't get me started, etc. Sellers. Priest’s Fugue did show some impressive clear In ‘It’s Still Wednesday in Macondo’, you lament thinking and focus, particularly notable as a leap up from that “the ISFDB has no function to ‘group’ stories other his looser and milder first novel. So much worked well, than to compile them into a series”. This could indeed be and from what you write still does. a bit of an oversight, especially for a genre that is As for your “personal significance” sf books, the sometimes as self-reflexive and internally self-referential list exposes my uninvolvement with sf novels later than as sf, where stories and novels can often comment, expand Three Stigmata. My loss I suppose. Actually I found the or riff on previous ones. items in TLS seemed more tempting were I thinking of reading more – such a variety of books in those four. ~ When the ISFDB was created, on the Sixth Day, it was Thank you. probably as basic as you could get, with no way to record cover art or interior art, crudzines were lumped in with JOHN HERTZ, Los Angeles, CA; 7 February 2019 filthy-pro glossies, and online fiction was completely off- Let me join those who call your attention to Oscar limits (it mostly still is, but with exceptions for “stable” Micheaux (1864-1951). Famous – if he can be called so websites). Loads of functionality has been added since (by even now – he does have a star on Hollywood Boulevard – our tech-master Ahasuerus), but at the moment there’s as a pioneering black filmmaker, he also wrote half a dozen still no way of grouping other than as a series. Maybe there novels I know of 1913-1947. I recommend The Story of are limits to the Python software, despite claims to the Dorothy Stanfield (1946). He always said he wanted to contrary. ~ portray everyone, and everyone is in Stanfield, as educated, For instance, how to link Harlan Ellison’s ‘Prowler in the bums on the street, from top to bottom. It is among much City at the Edge of the World’ to Robert Bloch’s ‘A Toy for else what you’ve called black crime fiction. Juliette’ which inspired it, or the several incarnations of I also join in commending the Strugatskys’ Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius in stories by other authors Roadside Picnic (1972). I have the 2012 Bormashenko (and MM’s own reuse of other writers’ characters). They’re translation; the 1977 by A Bouis has an introduction by related works but not (to my mind) technically a series. A Sturgeon, the Bormashenko has one by Le Guin; getting way of following these cross associations between different authors of their magnitude was a compliment; both stories and authors would be useful indeed, even at the unfortunately less than at best, the weak spot of each was danger of losing entire afternoons following and reading POLITICS, which I dare say to you expatiate how links. “dystopias” (wretched word) are good because they’re warnings. Of course that’s essential to Picnic, as it’s ~ Going back to Ben Aaronovitch, I’d personally love to essential to, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four. But Nineteen Eighty- figure out a way of properly grouping/linking his Doctor Four does not stand or fall on whether it’s politically acute. Who novel The Also People with the Culture novels of Iain There’s far more to s-f, indeed to art, than whether it M. Banks. There has to be a way, dammit. ~ rewards my friends and punishes my enemies. If you want I can checklist most of your own Books of Personal a warning, take Nabokov’s, “Minor readers like to recognize Significance in part 2, although Marianne de Pierres’s their own ideas in a pleasing disguise.” Glitter Rose is new to me and I have gone off Bacigalupi Last and First Men (1930) is indeed extraordinary. after reading The Water Knife and finding it far too close to He did even more with Star Maker (1937). torture porn. I would probably choose a different book ~ I’ve often said that Star Maker feels like it’s as far as you from Stross’s ‘Laundry’ series (but which?) but then I can go with the human imagination. ~ haven’t been Tuckerised in any sf books (to my knowledge). In my list, two books I’d almost certainly want At Denvention III (66th Worldcon) Evelyn Leeper to include are Holdstock’s Lavondyss and Crowley’s Little moderated Silverberg and me on a Stapledon appreciation Big (or AEgypt; I really can’t decide). Seconds after I hit panel. In File 770 #155 I reported (p. 26), Send on this, I will think of at least two others that must Leeper said Stapledon was one of her favorites, with go on this list. Borges. Silverberg said the protagonist in Odd John couldn’t successfully encounter society so formed DAVID REDD, Haverfordwest, Wales; 18 January 2019 his own; the book was called daring, which meant Thanks for nos. 14 of TWN and TLS. Sorry to be brief; erotic. I agreed with Sam Moskowitz in Far Future between cataract ops; normal service will be resumed next Calling that Sirius was Stapledon’s best novel. month when new glasses can be prescribed and delivered. Silverberg said Last and First Men and Star Maker Black detectives and crime-by-sf-writers meet in weren’t novels; Star Maker was the greater, but it had John Brunner’s ‘Max Curfew’ thrillers. Half a century ago no characters. I said all of his books were doomful. he spotted a gap in the market (or more likely a gap in From the audience, what about his errors? Silverberg society) and would have written more than just the three said it was a mistake to expect sense from science given a chance. fiction. From the audience, do people find these Dystopia – yes, we’re about there. Incoming books too hard? Perhaps, I said, but (not to defend migrants adding to an unstable society, mushrooming them) as Castiglione wrote in The Courtier there is underclass bankrupted by Universal Credit, not good. also “That pleasure which is had when we achieve Social media (knee-jerk reactions from entrenched difficult things.”

[ 8 ] Tr a v e l s

Chris Whitehouse and Jon Farrar

WE MET AS THREE backpackers on San Raphaël’s beach in someone whose first real experience of it was via the the south of France in 1982, all of us English, in our early sudden culture shock of finding myself living and working twenties and thoroughly tear gassed. I had slept rough on in Saudi Arabia, and wanting more of whatever travel that beach for two weeks already; Chris and Jon, who had experience I could now find closer to home, hence France. not previously known each other, had both had a little I was still restless, and wanted mostly to do this alone. I longer. We all found it dryly amusing, even surreal, that the travelled with notebooks and ideas for a novel, A Fictional gendarmerie would chuck a tear gas canister at one end of Englishman, that would of course come to nothing. the beach at 4am every Wednesday morning, in an effort to The grape-picking work was back-breaking, day deter the accumulation of unwashed foreign vermin that in, day out. Chris, Jon and I would get a ride to a field of congregated in their town each summer, and no doubt to grape bushes and spend the whole day hunched over with amuse themselves too. More than once I was wakened in secateurs, amassing new scratches and cuts daily until this way as the gas drifted up the beach. Itinerant sleepers mid-afternoon. Evenings always brought a meal of rabbit would emerge panicked from sleeping bags that were stew, which I avoided having then been vegetarian for two butted up against the beach’s low concrete wall. It was years – I can’t remember what I ate instead, probably easy to tell the novices from the old hands, who ran at bread and cheese. This routine went on for around six ninety degrees to the prevailing wind either towards the weeks. ocean or inland, coughing and tears streaming our faces, There were travellers from other parts of the while the newbies ran down the beach away from the world, all there for the vendange. Two who we got to know source of the gas and therefore never actually escaping its well were Julie from Bristol and Alison from Calgary, path. It only took one gas attack for this lesson to sink in. Canada. They were looking for a place to stay as the room One day Chris – who was, as I later learned, the they were sharing was infested with cockroaches, so Chris, luckiest traveller alive – found out there were jobs going as Jon and I invited them to stay in our large room in a grape-pickers over in Châteauneuf-du-Pape, about a day’s Châteauneuf townhouse, above a garage that housed a trek away. So, Chris from Northampton, Jon from Hitchin large tractor and other farming equipment. The room itself and Pete from Reading packed up and set off to the was completely empty of furniture, it was easily big nearest westbound main road. We managed to scrounge a enough for five and our sleeping bags had no extra lift on a big white rig with enough cabin space for all of us comfort other than what was offered by the concrete floor. plus our backpacks, and set off for Marseille. The driver It was a simple living arrangement; we got on well, played was a middle-aged Algerian with incredibly bad teeth, and cards, told our stories. We learned not to go in for late eager to practice his English. nights as we had to be ready for work by 6am. We were dropped at Marseille station from where We also had two regular early morning visitors, we jumped on a train to Avignon without paying. By the Tariq and Ashraf from Morocco, both quiet, reserved, time we got there it was early evening, and none of us had middle-aged Muslims who’d been regular grape-pickers in the inclination nor the cash necessary to find accom- the south of France year after year, and were sleeping in modation so we slept in our sleeping bags on the grass at another room at the same townhouse. Their clothes were the side of the road outside Avignon’s town walls. always filthy and they were both even skinnier than Jon. Probably around 5am, before any police moved us on, we I’d sometimes wake up at 5am to see them smiling in the packed up again and walked the last twenty kilometres. doorway in the semi-dark, silently taking it all in. Maybe it Chris’s approach to travel could be described as wasn’t true after all, these rumours they’d heard about ‘casual yet capable’. Tall and blond, he exuded confidence Western women. Our sleeping bags were all equally such that unsure travellers seemed to attach themselves to spaced around the room and with just one occupant each. him, something Chris didn’t actually mind as Jon and I Eventually Chris, Jon and I went our separate had obviously done the same, albeit at Chris’s invitation. ways. Jon had suggested we go to Crete in time for some Jon’s approach to travel at that time – not that we orange-picking. With our aching backs Chris and I didn’t ever discussed this – was more “throw myself out there fancy that, so Jon headed for Spain. That turned out to be and see what I find”. Dark, thin and even taller than Chris, an important move for him. Chris had college to go to he had a distracted mien that nevertheless gave hints that back in England, and I was at a loose end. I can’t remem- he was searching for something from a starting point of ber where Julie and Alison disappeared to. I stayed in that knowing next to nothing. room for two more weeks, writing badly – actually it was My approach to travel at that time was as more the mental activity of trying to wrestle written ideas

[ 9 ] into some kind of shape that I found enjoyable, but the personal fulfilment in joining a born-again Christian mountain was too high and I eventually gave it all up, community. I was pleased for him, with the usual atheist realising I’d not had nearly enough life experience to be reservations. I went there myself in 1983 just to check in able to write anything even half-way good. To alleviate the with Jon while I was Interailing around Europe. Part of his resulting mild depression, I’d go and spend the nights in work there was to save the souls of the thousands of an empty hut by a lonesome tree (above), up in the sinners who had strayed there on holiday, tempted by sex grounds of that decayed ruin on the hill, the actual ninth and/or the devil, and he would hand out leaflets on the castle of the 14th Century Pope John XXII. That simple street that encouraged people to repent and go to a few hut turned out to be the focus of where I spent one of the Prayer Meetings. He was happier and more relaxed, but his happiest, freest times of my life. intensity was still there and his quest for meaning still Chris, Jon and I kept in touch by letters, and I seemed to be not entirely satisfied. He came to a good went to a rather debauched party at Chris’s place in party at my house in Reading in 1992 and seemed to enjoy Northampton in 1984. After college finished, true to form himself (probably with Christian reservations) and left he hitchhiked across America from east to west coast with early to drive home to Hitchin. Jon and I lost touch a few just a single lift, with a woman he ended up also having a months after that, but not before he had begun teaching, good relationship with before returning to England. Not and I visited his place in Hitchin once. I enjoyed Jon’s long after that, he flew to South Africa and cycled all the company because he had found more direction with his way up to Morocco to raise money for Oxfam. Some of the own life than I had with my own at that time. things he experienced on that trip, such as being rescued from near-destitution by people who themselves had * * * nothing, gave him an abiding love of humanity and After writing the above early one morning in February Africans especially. Not long after that, he was leading 2019, I naturally googled both names to see what I could ghost tours around Oxford. The last time I saw him, find about them. With Chris I drew a complete blank – around 1994, he had cycled down from Oxford just to there are so many Chris Whitehouses and none provided meet me at a party in west Berkshire, then cycled back to details that might positively identify the CW I was after. Oxford that evening. Chris and I have now lost touch, and Jon was easier: the top hit informed me he died in 2008, I consider it a big loss. age 48, after a five year battle with Motor Neurone Disease. Jon’s route to Spain took him as far as He had been head teacher of Pirton School in Hitchin, Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol, where he found some one of the UK’s top performing JMI schools of 2004.

k Biopics

Hitchcock 2012, Sacha Gervasi

I don’t know how this highly enjoyable movie slipped under my radar when it was first released. It didn’t do especially brilliantly at the box office but it has garnered quite a bit of positive commentary over the subsequent years. ‘Hitchcock the enigma’ has proven to be the most magnetic attraction for anyone in the film industry: you don’t have to obsess over the details of his movies to acknowledge an artistic intensity that thrived on taking risks. This movie is about one such risk: that time when he dared to defy just about everyone with the making of his 56th film, Psycho. This movie by Sacha Gervasi started life as a projected TV series of Stephen Rebello’s non-fiction book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, but morphed into a feature after a few script revisions. It quickly attracted an all-star and prominently British cast: Anthony Hopkins, as one might expect, makes a convincing Hitch as he wrestles with himself and everyone else to get the job done, Helen Mirren plays his ever-loyal wife Alma Reville with consummate ease and Scarlett Johannson sparkles as Janet Leigh, the young actress who must overcome her nerves about that shower scene. But the one who opened my eyes wider than expected was James D’Arcy, who was perfectly cast as Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates. One scene near the end (which I won’t spoil) sums up Hitch’s success tellingly: he was a highly manipulative bastard, but he also knew he was brilliant at it.

[ 10 ] I Ask the Questions

What was the fate of Helena Wanda Blazusiakowna, traced Helena via her daughter Bogumila in 2000. whose appeal scratched on the wall of her cell in Helena was not killed by the Nazis. Her written Zakopane Prison inspired Henryk Górecki’s Symphony testimony of her escape is stored at the Museum of War No. 3, the ’Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’? and Martyrology in Warsaw, in which she says that on 22 November 1944 she was put on a train probably going to Henryk Górecki [1] (pronounced ‘Go-RET-ski’) was a Auschwitz, but the train was ambushed by the Home Army Polish avant-garde composer who wrote the hugely (the Polish resistance), and she was told simply to run. She popular Symphony No. 3 in 1976. He lived 25km from the walked to the town of Nowy Targ, eventually making her Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Katowice, way back to her hometown in Szczawnika where she was Poland, where he died on 12 November 2010. hospitalised until the end of the war. She later married, Most British people will have first heard his raised five children and lived and worked in the town of Symphony No. 3, Op. 36, also known as the ‘Symphony of Wadowice, 25km southeast of Auschwitz, for thirty years. Sorrowful Songs’, on the newly-launched national radio She died in 1999. station Classic FM when it was released in 1992: you About the Third Symphony, Górecki has said, simply couldn’t get away from it, being given almost daily “Many of my family died in concentration camps. I had a airplay for months, such was its popularity. The soloist for grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You this particular recording was the American soprano Dawn know how it is between Poles and Germans. But Bach was Upshaw. The CD was released to commemorate victims of a German too – and Schubert, and Strauss. Everyone has the Holocaust and it sold more than a million copies, his place on this little earth. That’s all behind me. So the making it one of the bestselling contemporary classical Third Symphony is not about war; it’s not a Dies Irae; it’s a recordings of all time. As someone who doesn’t go out of normal Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.” his way to listen to much classical music, the symphony Górecki has also commented about Helena nevertheless stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it Blazusiakowna several times in interview since the release on my parents’ radio in England back in 1992. of the CD in 1992. “I have to admit that I have always been The work consists of three movements. The first irritated by grand words, by calls for revenge. Perhaps in movement is a 15th Century folk song where the Virgin the face of death I would shout out in this way. But the Mary speaks to her son dying on the cross, and the third sentence I found is different, almost an apology or movement is the lament of a mother looking for her son explanation for having got herself into such trouble; she is lost during the Silesian uprisings of 1919-1921. The second seeking comfort and support in simple, short but movement, however, was based on graffiti scrawled on the meaningful words”. Also Górecki has said, “In prison, the wall of a cell in ‘The Palace’, the Gestapo’s Zakopane whole wall was covered with inscriptions screaming out headquarters, by eighteen year-old Helena Blazusiakowna: loud: “I’m innocent”, “Murderers”, “Executioners”, “Free O Mamo, nie płacz, nie. me”, “You have to save me” – it was all so loud, so banal. Niebios Przeczysta Królowo, Adults were writing this, while here it is an eighteen year- Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie old girl, almost a child. And she is so different. She does Ave Maria not despair, does not cry, does not scream for revenge. She does not think about herself; whether she deserves her fate Mother, do not weep or not. Instead, she only thinks about her mother, because Most chaste Queen of Heaven it is her mother who will experience true despair. This Support me always inscription was something extraordinary. And it really Ave Maria fascinated me.” Górecki had seen a photo of the graffiti in a book, and was I recall a BBC special made about Górecki and fascinated by the “courage and calmness” he saw in the Symphony No. 3, broadcast around a year after the CD’s message. He then searched for twenty years to find out release. It featured the whole recording with the composer what had happened to her, without success. talking between each movement. It ended with Górecki With an online search I found a 2010 post titled offering nothing more than a sigh and a shake of the head, ‘Tea for Sad People’ [2] by Bob Bibby, who had successfully as if unable to express himself with any more words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henryk_G%C3%B3recki [2] http://bobbibby1.blogspot.com/2010/11/tea-for-sad-people.html

Above: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — not Marcel Duchamp!

[ 11 ]

Anti-lethologica Listopia

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe. — Angela Carter, ‘Expletives Deleted’, reviewing John Berger’s Once in Europa (The Washington Post, 1989)

This fanzine was put together from 1 January – 5 April GENRE FANZINES RECEIVED / READ SO FAR IN 2019 2019. The title is an amalgamation of two lines from Joni Alexiad #102–103 – LISA & JOSEPH MAJOR Mitchell’s song ‘Amelia’, one of the great songs about travel – DAVE LANGFORD (as is just about every other track on her album Hejira). Ansible #378–381 This fanzine is dedicated to the people who have Askance #45 & Askew #27 – JOHN PURCELL accompanied or taken me to unexpected places, from my The Biluvious & Rat Sass #10–11 – TARAL WAYNE late parents Ashley & Yvonne Young to so many others I’ve Claims Dept. #26 & The Drink Tank #404–408 – CHRIS GARCIA travelled with in many different parts of the world. CounterClock #34 – WOLF VON WITTING “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, The Fannish Worry Book – ARNIE KATZ & BILL ROTSLER travel alone.” – The Dhammapada Journey Planet #41–44 – JAMES BACON, CHRIS GARCIA, ET AL Clint Fox, Chris Whitehouse and Jon Farrar Lofgeornost #134 – FRED LERNER I’ve long been inspired to do written portraits of friends Opuntia #421–439 – DALE SPEIRS after reading, more than a decade ago, the two by Herbert – ALAN WHITE Huncke that are contained in Anne Charters’s The Portable Skyliner #5 Beat Reader. I would prefer to get them as stripped down as Spartacus #28–31 & The Zine Dump #45 – GUY LILLIAN III Huncke’s but there seemed to be too much I wanted to say. Thy Life’s a Miracle – RANDY BYERS Also, I have no friends who have a sustained experience of Trap Door #34 – ROBERT LICHTMAN hard drugs, so clearly this will take more practice. As far as True Rat #1–10 – LEROY KETTLE I know, Huncke didn’t change the names either. Vanamonde, 4 assorted issues – JOHN HERTZ Ten Formative Travel Memoirs This list is far from complete: all travel writing will impart I’M VERY PLEASED TO HAVE at least something useful and only the most self-absorbed enjoyed quite a bit more than my traveller will have nothing observant to say. But I’ve read usual amount of fannish reading enough to know that less than half that I have read actually in the last few months, with deserve structured commentary, let alone the fawning Ansible Editions showcasing reviews they too often get. Leroy Kettle and William F. Temple being the most prominent I Ask the Questions among the last quarter’s offerings. I’m one of the increasing number who now believe the But also eagerly awaited, and now creator of the image ‘Fountain’ at the head of this page at last available, is the selection of needs re-assigning, and I’m now crediting it to Baroness fannish writing of the late Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) who, by all Randy Byers, Thy Life’s a Miracle, edited by Luke McGuff. available evidence, should be credited as the actual artist. As an attendee of Corflu 35 I’m looking forward to Marcel Duchamp was a friend and supporter of the receiving my paper copy, but I can’t wait that long so I’m Baroness. She submitted ‘Fountain’ to the American already a third of the way through the PDF which I Society of Independent Artists in 1917, it was rejected and downloaded just yesterday from efanzines.com. Duchamp, who was a member of the Society’s board, I guess people will be approaching this collection from resigned in protest. Alfred Steiglitz photographed it, the different angles. For me, I’m finding it is that of ‘filling in original was lost and conceptual art was born. In 1935 the gaps’ to give me a more complete picture of Randy’s André Breton attributed the urinal to Duchamp, and long life before we met, plus being able to sample some of his after the Baroness had died Duchamp was happy to earlier fanzine writing that illustrates more than adequately continue being credited for it: it was perhaps one way of why Randy was such a prized writer and well-loved fan. continuing the artwork’s legacy, albeit at the expense of the I’m not going to rush this collection; Randy was a friend so Baroness’s own artistic legacy. Such are the shenanigans I will take my time remembering him in the associated with all conceptual art that challenge accepted most appropriate way. It hardly needs saying, but we all reality: Duchamp seemed to know better than most that all miss him badly. art is a head-game, and often a manipulative one at that.

Above: Tim Mitchell, via Facebook

[ 12 ] THE THAI LITERARY TLS SUPPLEMENT, #15 APRIL 2562 / 2019

Thailand was never a European colony, so even though the city is very Western on the surface, deep down it’s very Asian. It’s quite enigmatic, and I like that. I can’t get to the bottom of Bangkok, and I never will. — Lawrence Osborne, interview in Men’s Journal, February 2016

James A. Newman Veeraporn Nitiprapha Lizard City The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth 2012 | Spanking Pulp Press, ISBN 978-1-291-08909-7, $1.99 2015 | River Books, ISBN 978-616-451-013-5, ฿399 Translated by Kong Rithdee The 2nd edition of Newman’s pulp horror tale comes with a While on the closing chapters of neat slasher cover, and the book this mostly mainstream novel I itself, as we say in the UK, “does decided this was one of my exactly what it says on the tin”. favourite books of 2018, the The pulp writer Johnny superb 2015 SEA Write Award Coca-Cola has quit drinking and winner now translated into spent time at a Bangkok temple English. It’s the story of three that offers a perfect cure. But if grown-up orphans, two sisters he drinks again, he will see the and a male musician, making feral lizards that people really their way in 1980s/90s Bangkok are underneath, and they will as they try to escape their fates, see him. However, courtesy of a with frequent digressions into mad Bangkok scientist, it turns music, food, sex and the out these reptiles are for real; teaming up with a beautiful occasional, inevitable supernatural encounter. The whole ex-hooker and other macho dudes, he must rid Bangkok of experience reads a bit like a ‘lakorn’ (a Thai TV soap opera) this infestation with a cache of guns, explosives and a but with much more depth and characters you feel for; the bronze amulet, before the US Army nukes the place. ramshackle townhouse they live in, replete with birds and First off, I’m wary of protagonists who are also a great variety of flora, is also depicted especially well. writers – I always suspect there are some short-cuts being But it’s the three central characters who enchant taken with character development, but that’s not really an the most, the two sisters Chareeya and Chalika who mostly issue when the protagonist himself is a pulp horror writer try to avoid drama, Pran the taciturn boy who plays bass in inhabiting a pulp horror universe. So then, so far, so good; a Bangkok band and has differing but complex writer and reader agree there’s not an especially high bar relationships with both girls. Also of particular interest being set here. among the cast of secondary characters is Uncle Thanit, a Except that Lizard City starts especially well: taut travelling cloth merchant who takes care of them from afar writing that hinted at a story that might subtly suggest and who finally disappears into another world in Xinghai, psychological horrors rather than fling them graphically in China – this episode alone would make a great short story your face, which, this being a pulp horror novel, I really if it was slightly rewritten and independently published. should have prefigured would happen soon enough. The The book may have an oddly gothic title and story really is as luridly green and red and often as sexual beautiful cover art, but I didn’t want The Blind Earthworm as you might expect, although I often felt there was a lack in the Labyrinth to end simply because of attention to some necessary copy-editing (one character, Kuhn Veeraporn writes so well. The Frisk, somehow becomes Fritz without Newman noticing). complexities of translating all this If you want cheap, garish thrills this novella is pitched at richness into sophisticated English just the right level, but thankfully Newman’s development must be recognised too, and this as an author hasn’t been nearly so arrested. He has written deserves to be far more widely far better, and other fiction titles, such as his Joe Dylan read beyond the borders of detective series, deliver a far more sustained performance. Thailand.

[ 1 ] e N ON-FICTION

S. P. Somtow John McMahon Nirvana Express Escape from America: Nonfiction Made in Thailand 2018 | Diplodocus Press, ISBN 978-1-940999-25-8, £13.99 2018 | CreateSpace, ISBN 978-1-73118-001-8, $10.00

In 2001, already with a solid Even well-written travel writing career as a genre writer and a can either enchant or annoy, growing second career as a com- usually hingeing on how honest poser of operas, Khun Somtow the writer is being with the unexpectedly jacked in his life in reader, how well the cracks are California and returned to concealed or how adept the Bangkok to experience life in a reader is in spotting them and Buddhist temple. While this seeing through them. The sojourn happens to most young eleven tales in Escape from Thai men, doing it in his early America are varied and all 40s, and with an upbringing interesting, most are personally more Christian than Buddhist, anecdotal but all are told in a was certainly a little unusual. direct way that does engender a It was a stay that lasted just over two weeks, but reader’s trust that he’s not being what Somtow learned in that brief time was a different bullshitted with self-serving waffle (I’ve read too many perspective on life than the one he had been raised with. memoirs of that description). McMahon is clearly not Taking the form of a daily diary, Somtow is careful not to interested in always coming out looking good. bamboozle the reader with the more inexplicable points of Kayaking and cycling in Thailand, Laos and Buddhist philosophy, although there is enough here for Burma are clearly important to him, and the best of the him to entertain us with comparisons to our religious and pieces that cover these adventures are those where, imaginative lives in the West that we have in the forms of occasionally, things go life-threateningly wrong, usually on Christianity, as well as SF and fantasy. Buddhism often occasions where he admits he overreached himself. Were it comes out as being one step ahead… right alongside not for some good fortune at just the right moments, we science. A useful book, and one to ponder over the details. might be reading more tragic stories – or none at all. Rather entertaining in an amusingly voyeuristic way is ‘Religion of Love’, about McMahon’s brush with a Frank Hutson Gregory, Ralph Anthony Freeman Thai muslim woman on a train that descended – that is The Bangkok Cable Stayed Bridge the right word – into a weird and not particularly 1987 | 3F Engineering, ISBN 9-744-10097-4, £18.00 satisfying sexual encounter. Similarly amusing is the final story, ‘48 Hours of How do you construct a bridge Heck in the Hua Hin Hilton’, in which McMahon recounts the size of Rama IX, the first of the experience of getting locked up after a drunken binge five cable-stayed bridges that that ended with him punching a policeman, and all the now span Bangkok’s Chao Phraya accompanying mix of regret and bartering that followed. River? This 1987 book will tell Another essay, and a rather useful one, is ‘Orwell you how in as much detail as any in Burma’ which assesses Orwell’s novel Burmese Days and layman could probably take in his place in a system he came to revile as he is caught in (far more detail than you’ll find the middle of a native conflict. McMahon rightly points on Wikipedia). Built to alleviate out that many rather racist aspects of the novel can also be the congestion at the much found in present-day Thailand, in fact just about any well- smaller nearby Phra Pinklao to-do ex-pat community across Asia. Bridge, Rama IX was planned to For me the best story here is ‘Jim Thompson Rich relieve south Bangkok’s worsen- and Poor’, which compares and contrasts the lives of two ing traffic problems, but what is less well known today is contemporary American Jim Thompsons – one the that the possibility of a tunnel was also researched, also famously disappeared Bangkok-resident spy/silk merchant, with three lanes in each direction, but rejected for being the other the rather less successful Hollywood script 50% more expensive. A cable-stayed design was chosen writer. It’s written with a kind of journalistic detachment over a suspension bridge because it is somehow more that I expect would find it a good home in any number of suited to Bangkok’s soil type – that’s why Bangkok now American cultural websites. has five cable-stayed bridges and no suspension bridges. This collection is mostly free of the affliction of This book is illustrated with many full colour photos of its typos that spoiled for me McMahon’s novella ‘The Titsou construction and completion, plus there’s plenty of of H’you’ – despite that, I certainly won’t be deterred from background and diagrammatic information as well. exploring his other fictions because his is an interesting Certainly a book for engineering enthusiasts, but it’s voice, that of someone who clearly needs to write. mostly accessible enough for anyone else.

[ 2 ]