Fleshbait -David Holman and Larry Pryce

 FLESHBAIT - DAVID HOLMAN AND LARRY PRYCE

Pulp fiction of the lowest common denominator but Fleshbait by David Holman and Larry Pryce is also classic New English Library, published in 1979 and now long out of print. I paid a whole 20p for it but on googling it there's a copy for sale on AbeBooks for £114 and on eBay there's a copy going for £242. On Amazon there are no copies currently available but the price tag says 'Paperback from $1047'. Not that this means anyone is actually going to pay that amount but context is all, and that's the amounts being asked for.

Is it important that anyone be told what Fleshbait is about? Does it matter? Of course not, but as we're here, it's about a spillage of nuclear waste contaminating the rivers and coastline of Cornwall and in the process causing a mutation in fish. They suddenly become stronger and super-intelligent, and with this they're suddenly out for revenge against humankind for hunting them not just for food but also for sport. Suddenly the tables are turned and now it's humans that have become the prey.

There's some sort of environmental message here but for the most part it's ridiculous, mainly because we're talking fish. For sure, sharks and piranhas can be a bit scary but trout? It doesn't quite work. It's all written, however, with serious intent, with people being killed left, right, and center. It's all very breathless with no let-up in attempts to raise the terror stakes but in doing so it sometimes falls flat on its face.

For example: 'We lost our vicar early in the summer, he was strangled by a pike', as one of the characters says. For clarification, the vicar was actually strangled by fishing line whilst fishing for pike, not strangled by a pike's bare hands - or fins. And then there's this description of one of the characters: 'Gregg Travannion, skipper of the lugger Cornish Maid, leaned against the wall of the fish market smoking a stubby black cigar as he contemplated the price of pilchards, the weather and his worn tackle, in that order'. His 'worn tackle'. Make of that what you will.

For all this, there is actually a hint of a good idea here to do with nature hitting back at mankind. It's the kind of idea, however, that might have been dreamed up for a Dr Who series - Jon Pertwee 1970s style - which means the special effects are pretty naff and the acting overblown when not wooden. But Dr Who is classic, cult tv so this comparison in itself puts Fleshbait into the same cult category but in book form. Which means Fleshbait shouldn't be sniffed at and dismissed but rather acknowledged and appreciated for what it is.

John Serpico

Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman

 STEAL THIS BOOK - ABBIE HOFFMAN

Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman, as described in the blurb on the back cover is 'A handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock Nation'. The question to ask, of course, is whether any of it still has any relevance? The answer is that due to it being written in 1970, the vast amount of the information it contains is useless as it's just too out of date. So, Steal This Book is a book of and for its time, and therefore in that alone it's now an irrelevance. Up to a point, at least.

All of the addresses and telephone numbers it lists are obviously obsolete as are practically all of the organizations it mentions. But what of the ideas? Or rather, what about the mindset it lays out? Well, if you need a manual and a guide on how to shoplift, then you probably shouldn't be shoplifting or even contemplating it in the first place. Likewise for making molotov cocktails. This sort of stuff should be instinctive and born of need not desire, and if there's no need to throw molotovs - only a desire to - then in my book you're basically fetishizing them. 

There's that scene in the BBC drama Our Friends In The North when the father confronts his son with the bag of submachine guns his son has stashed, that have been used in an attack upon the Spanish Embassy. 'You're kinky', the father says, to which his son doesn't really have an answer apart from 'There's a bloody war going on out there!'. The fetishization of molotov cocktails, pipe bombs and guns for the revolution is the equivalent of extreme virtue signaling but a lot more dangerous.

The same can also apply to the advocacy of shoplifting in the name of some noble cause. The problem being that once you start stealing, then all boundaries come down and you can start stealing from anyone and anything. I can remember as a kid being at the Stonehenge Free Festival and somebody stole a pipe or something similar from a stall. The stallholder, however, had spotted him and as the thief walked off he called out to him: 'I saw you take that and do you know what? You're a cunt. I know it, all the people around now know it but worst of all - you know it yourself. You're a cunt.' 

It's an incident I've always remembered because in the rarified atmosphere of the festival where everyone was turned on and tuned in via copious drug use, the accusation hung heavy.

Steal This Book also offers advice on dumpster diving and eating for free, living off the out-of-date food thrown out by supermarkets. This is all well and good if needed but to advocate it as a way of living rather than a way of survival is ridiculous. I remember during the late Nineties or thereabout when I was living in Bristol and there was a Swampy-like campaign to stop the expansion of a quarry in a place called Ashton Court.

The campaigners/activists were filmed confronting the contractors who were there with their diggers and whatnot, and the contractors - who were all ordinary working men - were being harangued. The contractors were very calmly and very politely explaining they were just ordinary blokes working to pay their bills and to feed their families, whilst the activists were telling them they should find another way of living. 'How are we meant to eat? How are we meant to feed our kids?' one of the contractors asked, to which one of the activists replied 'You could dumpster dive'.

The lack of any sense of class consciousness on the activists part (whose spokesperson's father was an airline pilot) was shocking.

For all this, there are bits of Steal This Book that still has some semblance of relevance such as the advice on how to create posters and newspapers, for example. In today's age of the Internet and social media this is less important than it used to be but it's still useful to a point.

'If your scene doesn't have a paper,' Abbie Hoffman writes 'You probably don't have a scene together'. Which is kind of true, even if the 'paper' nowadays is an online one.

Abbie Hoffman was an interesting and somewhat important character during the Sixties, and Steal This Book serves as a reminder of the state of play back then. There are lessons to be learned here. One of the most telling things about the book, however, is that it was written whilst Abbie was in jail. Make of that what you will.

John Serpico

A Spy In The House Of Love - Anais Nin

A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE - ANAIS NIN

There's that thing, isn't there, about how men might only read Playboy magazine or Men Only for the articles? Well, that can go also for reading Anais Nin and A Spy In The House Of Love that I've just read due only to Nin's connection with Henry Miller whose work I greatly admire. And it's just as well, really, for if I had read it for the sex, I'd have been mightily disappointed.

A Spy In The House Of Love is a book you read for the art, for it being the voice of a woman that when stood alongside the likes of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Antonin Artaud and even John Steinbeck, can hold its own. It's a book that when reading, you need to change down a gear so as to be on the same contemplative level as the author. Once you do this, there can be at moments what Patti Smith once called a 'brainiac-amour', where the inner voice of Anais Nin swirls up from the pages and talks to you over the passage of the years.

What comes across and between the lines is a desire for liberation. To be as free as some men appeared to be back then in 1954 when it was first published - but more so. Free of attachment. Free of dependency. Free to love and to not love. Liberation also from the monotony of repetition and the idea that there is only one of everything: One birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage, one maturity, one ageing, one death. There being the desire instead for the myriad and the infinite multiplicity of experience.

This is what A Spy In The House Of Love is about. The desire for more. The desire for something greater than that which is offered. The desire to move beyond and above. The desire for love and life beyond the given. A Spy In The House Of Love is about the ardent frenzy of desire and all that it entails.

John Serpico