I, The Machine - Paul W Fairman

I, THE MACHINE - PAUL W FAIRMAN

Another sci-fi book that I've bought and read based solely on its cover. If only life could be as simple. Published in 1968 in larger print than usual for this kind of book, and 'printed on scientifically tinted non-glare paper for better contrast and less eyestrain'. Again, if only life could be as simple.

It's pretty obvious just from the cover that there's something odd about I, The Machine. It's Pop Art, isn't it? A mixture of collage, cut-up, and psychedelia. Story-wise, it's science fiction of the weird kind. It's science fiction on drugs.

I wonder if anyone has mentioned this drug aspect in any past reviews? I suspect not, so let's take one for the team and just consider it for a moment, shall we? If you were ever to indulge in a drug of the psychedelic kind, a non-user might be inclined to ask you what it's like? But actually, that's not the right question. Instead, what should be asked is 'What's it about?'. There's a bit of a difference between the two and it's an important enough difference to solicit the right answer. But how to explain that answer? How to put it into words?

There are echoes in I, The Machine of The Matrix, Zardoz, Logan's Run, The Time Machine, Forbidden Planet, and even One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in the way that a mental asylum can be a metaphor for America. Set in the far-distant future where the earth has been devastated by war, what is left of civilization is now under a protective shield in a man-made world called Midamerica, where every conceivable need is catered for. It's the ultimate, fully-realized technocracy where no-one works, no-one struggles, and no-one is deprived. A world where every whim can be resolved at the touch of a button; maintained by robots and managed by an all-seeing eye of providence, not unlike The Orb's 'Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld'. Not unlike that which is symbolized and can be found on the Great Seal of the United States and on the back of a dollar bill.

From this world emerges one man - one citizen - by the name of Penway whose thoughts become troubling: 'An axiom shaped for him: There is no such thing as unreality. All things, from the most indestructible plastic to the vaguest of hallucinatory dreams, are real, and must be dealt with as such. Reality is nothing more than effect. Everything that impinges upon the human consciousness leaves a greater or lesser effect. Therefore, everything of which consciousness can become aware is real'.

Without even taking any drugs, they're the kind of thoughts that could easily fit into a Bill Hick's 'It's just a ride'-type monologue.

Things don't just stay at this level, however, for it's when the same citizen discovers a community of naked people living 'underground' who call themselves the Aliens that the shark is jumped, as they say.

'Penway felt electricity running through his nerves, sparking at his nerve ends as he saw her standing there. She had sprayed off her suit and was nude. This revealed a surprising thing. Jenka had a thick, darkly gold pubic growth. It was the first one Penway had ever seen. Few females allowed hirsute disfigurement of any description on their lower bodies. But instead of being shocked, Penway found himself erotically stirred. He had never seen anything so attractive. Noting the direction of his eye, Jenka lowered her own. "It is our badge," she said. "A symbol of the Aliens."'

From there on, revolution and the destruction of the eye of providence is in the offing.

I, The Machine is pulp fiction of the science fiction variety but as I maintain: the medium is not the message and it's yet more proof if needed that pulp fiction-type books are not to be belittled or viewed dimly; and that old, paperback pulp fiction books can often wield hidden treasures. That's not to say this particular one is some sort of long-buried, hidden gem but it's certainly a weirdly rarefied one.

John Serpico

The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise - Brix Smith Start

 THE RISE, THE FALL, AND THE RISE -

BRIX SMITH START

It's no reflection on Brix Smith Start but in an autobiography of 461 pages it's not until page 147 when Mark E Smith enters the story that things start to get interesting but then understandably so given him being the stuff of such cantankerous legend. Before this, it's all about Brix growing up in Los Angeles where she lived on some sort of ranch with her dysfunctional, psychiatrist father. Do we really need to know about the pet tortoise Brix had as a child? Well, no, not really but it's forgivable because such attention to detail bodes well for when she starts writing about her time in The Fall. And that's why we're all here, right? That's what we've come for?

Does The Rise, The Fall, And The Rise warrant our attention? Is it worth the effort of ploughing through what is a near-tome of a book? I would have to say yes but you need to have an interest in The Fall to act as a motivator as without that you might just as well read Viv Albertine's autobiography which if not better, is definitely shorter.

As I said, it's not until Mark E Smith enters the story that things start to get interesting but the high comedy starts when Brix leaves America in May of 1983 and flies to England to live with Mark in Manchester. 'I never expected Manchester to be so grim,' she writes 'Nobody smiled. Everybody looked so poor. All their clothes were drab. Where was the colour?'

In the taxi from Piccadilly train station to where Mark lives in Preston, Mark points out all the must-see sights of his beloved city: 'Look, Brixie, there's the Boddingtons Brewery! There's Strangeways Prison!' All Brix can see, however, are squat little buildings with the words 'Cash and Carry' spray-painted on their front windows. 'I didn't know what Cash and Carry meant,' she writes 'but I had a feeling it wasn't glamorous. It was a long way from Bloomingdale's, that's for sure.'

It's on arriving at Mark's flat for the first time, however, that the comedy goes from observational to full-on Monty Python:

'Shall I make you a cuppa?' Mark asks. 'Yes, please,' say Brix 'I'll get the milk. Where do you keep it?'

'Out the window,' Mark tells her .

'What do you mean, 'out the window'?'

Mark pushes open a sooty window at the back of the kitchen to reveal a cement ledge where perched precariously is a small bottle of milk, a pack of Danish back bacon, a carton of eggs and a loaf of Hovis white bread. Brix is incredulous. Perhaps this is a traditional resourceful British custom, she wonders?

'Where is your washing machine and dryer?' she asks.

'I wash me clothes in the bathtub,' Mark replies.

'Mark, there's no hot water!'

'You have to turn on the immersion heater, love.'

'What's an immersion heater?'

'Do you have a shower?'

'Of course.' Mark then proceeds to show Brix a bizarre hose-like contraption that you attach to the mouth of a tap.

Brix is aghast.

It must be said, this is first-class, top-notch comedy. Things get even more hilarious later on in the book, however, when Brix recites an anecdote about her sex escapade with Micky Mouse at Disneyland. I won't reveal the details but it's genuinely bizarre. And if Brix thought Manchester was a culture shock, she was in for a surprise on her first visit to Blackpool. Her mother and stepfather are coming over from America to visit so Brix asks Mark where they could take them? 

'Let's take them to Blackpool, it's great,' Mark says 'You'll like it, it's like Disneyland and it's by the seaside.'

'My family loves the beach,' Brix writes 'so we rented a car and drove to the most heinous place I've ever been to in my life. It was grim and freezing. They call the amusement park area Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The rides were like the rides of doom, rickety and old. Along the promenade they hang lights, grandiosely called 'illuminations'. They do this in lots of seaside towns. They looked like crude crappy candy canes in black and white. I've seen backwoods country carnivals with better lighting decoration. My mother turned to me and said 'This is the night of the living dead'.'

Brix's book isn't a constant stream of funny anecdotes, by any means. Mark E Smith, for example, is revealed as being a very naughty boy that leads to divorce between Brix and him. There's a lot of airing of dirty washing going on here but then that's the thing about autobiographies in that they allow this. It's probably the only place to do it, really. It's also the place, of course, to settle scores and on that point, Morrissey of The Smiths is but one of the targets. Did Morrissey name The Smiths after Mark E Smith? It's feasible. And what's worse: being fired from The Smiths crew for eating meat whilst on tour, or being fired from The Fall crew for eating a salad? It's obvious which one is the funniest and this also makes it obvious that without Mark E Smith having a central role in Brix's life, her story wouldn't be half as good and would certainly not be half as entertaining. And entertaining it most certainly is.

John Serpico

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

Orbital - Samantha Harvey

ORBITAL - SAMANTHA HARVEY

Well, it's a thing of beauty. Who'd have thought? You walk into a second-hand bookshop and there it is: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. The Booker Prize winner of 2024. It would, of course, be churlish not to buy it because obviously it was meant to be. I mean, what are the odds? It's not just a question of finding a book, however, but more like finding a jewel. An opal. A rare stone. Or of it finding you?

But then no, it's not a jewel. It's not so much a physical object whose value can be put in monetary terms. Rather, it's a thought. A murmur. A consideration. A daydream. A meander. It's that moment when you gaze into space but look at nothing and you're asked 'What are you thinking?' and you reply 'Thinking? I wasn't thinking anything.'

If ever a book deserved to win the Booker Prize it is this one. To describe it as 'a thing of beauty' doesn't even do it justice. The language in these pages is sublime, written by - and could only be written by - a lover of language. There are sentences in these pages that could never be spoken, only written. The imagery is wondrous. The descriptions are breathtaking. The thoughts are heavenly. The ideas human but of the highest calibre.

There is poetry in Samantha Harvey's words. Names of places on earth and the universe alike, tumbling out onto the page over and over, again and again. Like hearing the shipping forecast - Cromarty, Forties, Forth, Dogger, Tyne, Humber - there is comfort and art and wonder. Have you ever tried to describe the world? To find suitable words? Here is how to do it.

Six astronauts are in a spacecraft orbiting the earth, their job being to conduct scientific experiments in regard to life under zero gravity, and to collect meteorological data. They are there for nine months and in that time they observe the earth below rotating endlessly. At the same time, so do their thoughts, dreams and reveries rotate endlessly too.

News of the passing of the mother of one of the astronauts reaches them, subsequently igniting a rumination on the meaning of the word 'mother'. As in mother Earth. They watch as a tornado over the Pacific builds to life-threatening dimensions and in its path is the family in the Philippines that one of the astronauts befriended some years before. There is mention of Michael Collins, the third astronaut who during the moon landing of 1969 remained onboard the command module whilst Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldwin took giant steps for mankind on the moon's surface. It was Collins who took the famous photograph depicting every living person except him. There is mention of Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, the 'last Soviet citizen' having been aboard the Mir space station during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And there is so much more. 

What leads to man wishing to venture into space? Why would anyone place themselves into what is essentially a tin can in a vacuum, just four inches of titanium away from death? Why is man trying to live in a place in which he will never thrive? Is the earth not good enough? Is it down to curiosity or ingratitude? Twelve people have walked on the moon, all American men. No other nationality and no women. And yet we're bound and entwined by our common humanity.

Anyone can be a literary critic. I reflect on books I read and put down my thoughts but I never really tend to recommend as I kind of think everyone should find their own books or even have books find them. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey is a gift from its author and is the essence of the happiest surprise on unwrapping it.

John Serpico

So Here It Is - Dave Hill

 SO HERE IT IS - DAVE HILL

You've got to wonder though, haven't you? What must it be like being Dave Hill of Slade? Pretty surreal, I imagine. I mean, he was always more Ziggy than Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars put together. An ultimate Man Who Fell To Earth. Stranger in a strange land but completely unaware of the fact. The haircut, the boots, the outfits, the teeth, the accent. What the fuck? So yes, being Dave Hill must be a pretty hectic affair. At the same time, however, it's also been pretty obvious he was always a good soul possessed of a solid, working class heart of gold.

There was a time in their early days when Slade's publicist cast them as a skinhead group - all boots and braces and shaved heads - but this was but an aberration of management. For a start, skinheads back then tended to be called Masher, Bruiser, Psycho or Mongo but never Noddy. Apart from this, Dave Hill was always the Glam Pop-God in waiting, not some caricature on the back of a Weetabix box. He was the council estate boy from the Black Country destined to be a British pop culture icon.

So Here It Is, is Dave Hill's autobiography and an interesting thing about it is that it's not like how you might imagine it's going to be at all. At peak-fame during the early 1970s, Slade were all about being loud and entertaining on all levels, and whilst there are tales of mansions and Rolls Royces being bought there's no pop star ultra-decadence or tales of sex and drugs to be found here. In fact, quite the opposite. The book is totally grounded in Hill's working class background and the mental health problems of his mother and it's for this that it's very heartwarming, inducing much respect for him more so as a person rather than for him as a pop star.

The pop star stuff, however, is why anyone would be here of course, and Hill delivers it accordingly. Slade were massive in the early 1970s but unless you were there it's probably going to be hard to fully comprehend this. They were a part and parcel of the British cultural landscape during a time before the Internet when there were only two music programmes on the three available television channels. Top Of The Pops on a Thursday evening was where they ruled, and from where they would cast their light upon the nation. Slade were a good-time band acting as an antidote to the direness of the news and the economic gloom that held sway.

Their manager, Chas Chandler, always knew however, that the mega-fame and the mega-money was to be found in America so in 1975 Slade relocated there so as to be able to tour there more easily as they strove to crack the American market. Essentially, it was a failure and Hill offers some interesting explanations as to why - mostly all cultural ones. On returning to England, Slade then realised that musically everything had changed. Glam Rock was out and Disco was in, whilst on the horizon something called Punk Rock was looming.

Rather than using a ghostwriter, Dave Hill has written his autobiography himself, which is always a good thing in my eyes. Whilst his writing is nothing exceptional, it does the job and tells the story. It's unclear how Glam Rock is actually viewed these days as in whether it's with fondness, incredulity or derision. One thing almost for certain is that it's not really taken seriously but to counter that, it's clear that a band like Slade once played a big part in people's lives. For this reason alone, though So Here It Is doesn't necessarily need to be read, it definitely needed to be written.

John Serpico