“Nothing was to be seen of the Castle hill; fog and darkness surrounded it; not even the faintest glimmer of light was present to suggest that the Castle was there.” Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated by Jon Calame & Seth Rogoff, 2014, Vitalis Verlag
“The Castle hill was hidden veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there.” Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated by Willa & Edwin Muir, 1930, my edition Penguin Modern Classics, 1984
The Castle (Penguin, 1984) vs The Castle, (Vitalis, 2014)
I have a possibly bad habit of buying multiple copies of books I love, if I see them for a good price with a cover that I like and don’t already have. Fairly often, I won’t ever read the new-to-me edition unless I happen to be in the mood for that particular book at the time of the purchase, because after all, it’s the same book. Or at least it usually is. I’ve had my 1984 Penguin Modern Classics paperback of Kafka’s The Castle for decades, though it was already second hand when I bought it. I first read the book at high school, a falling-to-bits old hardback from the school library. I have no idea which edition that was, but when I read it again in my early 20s, the novel seemed just as I remembered. That school version was almost certainly some edition the 1930 translation by the fascinating Scottish couple Willa and Edwin Muir, since they were the first translators of Kafka in English and theirs was and to some extent still is the standard version. Indeed, the couple introduced Kafka and his particular aura to the English-reading world; which is quite a big deal when you think about it.
Recently, in a charity shop, I came across a copy of The Castle that I hadn’t seen before, with a cover I was immediately drawn to. It’s from 2014 and though it’s in English it’s was put out by by Vitalis books, a publisher which, judging by its Wikipedia entry, sounds uniquely suited to the works of Kafka, a German-speaking Czech Jew who was raised in a Yiddish-speaking household:
Vitalis Publishing is the only German literary publisher in the Czech Republic. Founded in 1993 by Austrian-born physician and medical historian Harald Salfellner, it harks back to the cultural heyday of the fin de siècle before 1914, a period of shared German, Czech, and Jewish influence. The publishing program features Czech (Jan Neruda, Božena Němcová), German (Gustav Meyrink, Rainer Maria Rilke), Jewish (Oskar Wiener, Oskar Baum), and Austrian (Adalbert Stifter, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach) authors as common representatives of Bohemian literature.
My old Penguin paperback of The Castle, which features two chapters not included in the original 1930 UK edition (which were separately translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser), is from of my least favourite stylistic phase of the Penguin Modern Classics series. In that point in the early 80s, the spines, in a nostalgic nod to the classic early (orange and white) days of Penguin. It does have a nice cover illustration, by Elizabeth Pyle, but otherwise the design is a little drab. The book is 298 pages of fairly small but readable print. The Vitalis edition is far more stylish and the cover artwork uses a beautifully evocative photograph of (Bohemian?) “Peasant women” from 1918 and a photograph of Friedland (or Frýdlant) castle in Czechia. The type looks around the same size as the Penguin edition, but though the book is slightly bigger than the Penguin, it has 382 pages.
Even allowing for the fact that the Vitalis Castle includes nice, dark, moody and scratchy illustrations by Karel Hruška, it’s a noticeably longer book, and the reason for that is revealed in the two quotes at the top of the page. The Muirs’ prose – like Edwin Muir’s poetry – is terse and spare, but also flexible and evocative. It’s the “voice” that Kafka has had for me since I was a teenager. It also has the benefit – or at least I think it’s a benefit, more later – of having been translated close to Kafka’s own time. When that first British edition of The Castle was published and Edwin Muir wrote in his introduction “Franz Kafka’s name, as far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers,” he was talking about an author who had only been dead for six years, and the book itself had only been in print in Kafka’s own language for four years.
Calame and Rogoff’s writing is slightly more lyrical to my ears/eyes, a little more long-winded, but in its way just as precise. I very much appreciate the two semi-colons in the first sentence of the passage above. The cumulative effect of their translation is a book which feels familiar but gently different. Another comparison, this time the opening of chapter 10:
“K. stepped out into the windswept street and peered into the darkness.” (Willa & Edwin Muir) versus “K. stepped outside onto the wildly windswept steps and peered into the darkness.” (Calame and Rogoff)
Which is the better sentence is just a matter of taste; the Muir version doesn’t feel especially superior to me, but on the other hand it does feel more ‘Kafka-esque’ – but is it? And what about this, from the end of chapter 15?
“And he pressed her hand cordially once more as he swung himself on to the wall of the neighbouring garden.” (Muirs) versus “He was still pressing her hand fervently as he swung himself onto the fence of the neighbouring garden.” (C&R)
Well; ‘cordially’ and ‘fervently’ are two very different things aren’t they? To me, that word choice significantly changes the tone of the passage. And this time, it’s the modern version that feels more redolent of Kafka as I think of him; which isn’t the same as saying it’s a better translation of the original text.
I have no idea whether it impacted on Calame and Rogoff or not, but modern translations of Kafka are made in a world where ‘Kafka-esque’ is a thing, and where Kafka himself – both his image, with those big, dark, suspicion-filled eyes and the hypersensitive personality from his personal writings, prone to intense feelings of harassment and persecution – colour how we see his work. The Trial in particular feels like that persona, that image, shaped into a novel, and surely anybody embarking on a new translation of the book could be uninfluenced by its familiar Kafka-ness, regardless of how faithful or otherwise they were to the original text.
Faith and Faithfulness
witty (if dated) wordplay in Asterix
There’s a mystery to what faithfulness means in translation – Google translate and AI are perfectly capable of making word-for-word translations of texts, but they seem somehow unable to make living, readable prose out of them. When I think of books that I’ve only ever read in translation (and I’ve never read more than a few pages in any language other than English or Scots, alas), going all the way back to childhood and the Asterix (René Goscinny, trans. Anthea Bell & Derek Hockridge) and Tintin (Hergé – Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper & Michael Turner) series’, I realise how much of the character of those books is owed to their translations. In those particular cases the translations seem almost miraculously good. To capture witty wordplay, puns etc while also keeping the original narrative flowing is a formidable skill. I can’t help thinking that if I read literal translations of those books, or learned to read French myself (let’s not get carried away) and read the originals, I would only discover a new respect for both the translators and the original authors.
wordy whimsy in Tintin
Translating from one language to another seems like it should be a practical rather than artistic thing, but the extent to which Kafka’s work is ‘Kafka-esque’ in English is in some ways a choice, and as time goes on more and more choices are available to the translator of any text. The obvious choices – whether to be true, word-for-word, to an author’s text, or to their ‘voice’ and atmosphere, whether to provide a faithful translation or a ‘good read’ have always been there. But with the passing of time and arguably just as important, is the decision of whether to make a novel or piece of writing true to its time and place or to our own. This isn’t a small thing, it’s both the readability and the character of a book. The right thing to do presumably varies from book to book, but in my experience, you don’t really know what you prefer until you come across something you don’t like.
Dostoevsky presented as a trashy airport novel (with no translator credit)
With The Castle, although the more modern text felt different to me, it wasn’t a difference that spoiled or significantly altered my enjoyment of the book, it was just something I noticed. But those translation choices can be jarring. A recent example of this came when reading two novels by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna – The Year of the Hare (1975) and The Howling Miller (1981). Both were (which I find obscurely annoying) translated into English from French translations rather than from Finnish, but while The Howling Miller (which I read first) was written in straightforward, simple and clear English prose which felt a bit basic, but entirely appropriate to the subject, the translator of The Year of the Hare made the (completely valid) decision to translate the casual, slang-filled prose of the French translation (and presumably the Finnish original) into supposedly modern and slang-filled British English, which was deeply irritating and also damaged the integrity of the novel. Standard phrases like “bloody hell” or whatever are one thing; so familiar as to seem timeless and universal. But more slang dates quickly, is often generationally specific and can be weirdly embarrassing to read, if it’s not your slang.
Even worse in narrative terms, using regionally specific terms when you don’t change the distinctively ‘foreign’ names of characters or the setting of a book can give a feeling of unreality to the whole text. Quite possibly it’s just me, but reading a passage where a character called Kaarlo Vatanen, living in rural Finland, refers to having “twenty quid” in his pocket is kind of like reading Crime and Punishment and coming across something like “Shit! It’s the pigs!” hollered Raskolnikov. Don’t do that please.
But even though I didn’t like the idiom the translator used for The Year of the Hare, the arguments for doing it are pretty sound. When adapting a foreign, unfamiliar book for a new audience, making it accessible is clearly important. That novel was published in 1975 and implicitly set in that period, so there’s nothing technically wrong with writing it in modern, slangy English, except that it’s not set in Britain and so it feels wrong to pedants. Related but probably more difficult is translating a classic novel into modern English. I’m not really a Dickens fan, but when I think of the few books of his that I’ve read, his prose seems inseparable from his stories and from his period. Does that mean that Tolstoy or Zola’s works should be translated into “Victorian” English? Annoying as that might well be, I’m tempted to say that for me, the answer is yes.
Positives and negatives
It’s a different kind of translation, but making books into films brings these kinds of questions into focus. There have been several film adaptation of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds, but for all of their virtues, if you return to Wells’s novel it seems obvious within the first few pages that though it’s eminently adaptable, a film of the novel set in 1898 would be far better (but presumably ridiculously expensive to make) than the existing versions. Similarly, no adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four has quite captured the stark, bracing post-war, entirely British greyness (in a good way) of Orwell’s prose. It’s that tone, as much as anything, that people think of as “Orwellian,” even though outside of Nineteen Eighty-Four and (to a far lesser extent) Animal Farm, it’s really not the usual tone of his writing.
The other dystopian novel frequently paired with Nineteen Eighty-Four is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but despite the relative closeness of age, class and education of Orwell (born 1903) and Huxley (born 1894), they could hardly be tonally farther apart. As someone who first read and loved Huxley’s earlier, satirical social comedies like Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), the thing that struck me most when I first read Brave New World (1932) is how similar it is in its prose. Although, unlike The War of the Worlds but like Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s set in the future, any film of it should really be set in a 1930s future and have a slightly old fashioned, ‘Boy’s Own adventure’ flavour which seems completely at odds with the book’s grim dystopian reputation. When reading the novel, its tone (which feels more post-WW1 1920s than pre-WW2 1930s), feels entirely natural and is a part of what makes the book so readable. But is it that tone there in modern foreign translations of the book? Possibly not, and when you think about it, why would it be?
The Bible and the Bloody Countess
John Donne: a portrait of the poet as a young dandy
As anyone who has had to “do” Shakespeare at school – or who likes reading him – will know, 16th/17th century writers had a respect for and love of puns that is far removed from their current status as vessels of knowingly lame humour (that said, ‘brave new world’ is from Shakespeare, isn’t it?). It’s sad that that love of wordplay has become so debased, because even though I personally do love puns even just as lame humour, it means we have to consciously think or analyse in order to appreciate the breadth of allusions and associations and therefore feelings that a writer could evoke in their readership (or a playwright in their audience) without having to labour a point.
Partly, it was easier to pun meaningfully before spelling was fully standardised. When John Donne wrote The Sun Rising* , it was risqué in the mild way it still is – the poet is complaining about the sunrise because he doesn’t want he and his girlfriend to have to get out of bed – but also in a far more daring way. To a Jacobean audience the sun (or sunne, or sonne) rising would automatically create an association with the son (of God) rising, a pun that transforms and strengthens the meaning of the poem, since, then as now (or more than now), the earthly representatives of God were not especially keen on young unmarried couples lying in bed together.
*published in 1633 but necessarily written earlier – he died in 1631 – and probably quite a lot earlier since he was known as a poet in his youth but a priest and preacher from 1615
And that textual richness just the intended meanings and associations – but as language evolves so does meaning, and so, whether one likes it or not, do associations. Since the 1960s, seeing the title The Sun Rising may well make people think of Rolf Harris’s 1960 novelty pop hit Sun Arise – a kind of well-intentioned but not unproblematic pastiche of Aboriginal Australian music that was a big hit all over the English-speaking world. Harris’s subsequent career as a popular children’s entertainer and, latterly, a hugely unpopular sexual predator make the already iffy song even more dubious, but even that creates its own set of unexpected cultural associations. Back in 1971, before settling definitively on a kind of bad taste, pantomime horror modus operandi, the American rock band Alice Cooper (then the name of both the singer and band) experimented with a kind of general absurdist, transgressive approach. To that end, on their third (but first commercially successful) album Love It To Death, alongside paeans to troubled teendom (I’m Eighteen, Is It My Body?) and old horror movies (The Ballad of Dwight Frye), the band recorded an amusingly straight-faced cover of Sun Arise, just to be smartasses. Only 40 years later did the song, turn out to be a masterstroke that unexpectedly fit in with their macabre and tasteless raison d’être after all; patience is a virtue, clearly.
But anyway, the idea of translating The Sun Rising, with even its intended meaning intact, into a language that doesn’t share common roots and words with English makes me think of Philip Larkin saying* (wrongly, I think) “A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.” It makes sense in a way – there can be an impersonal quality, especially when reading poetry in translation, that makes lots of translations feel the same, not that that’s always a bad thing necessarily.
*in a 1982 interview with Robert Phillips in the Paris Review (Philip Larkin, Required Writing, p.69)
Another Penguin Classics book I love is the 1965 collection Poems of the Late T’ang, in which A.C. Graham translates the works of seven Chinese poets whose lives span more than a century, from 712 to 858 AD. In his introduction, Graham stresses the differences between poets, contrasting the ‘bare, bleak style’ of Meng Chiao (751 – 814) with the ‘strange and daring’ poetry of Meng Chiao’s friend Han Yü (768 – 824) but although I love both, I don’t really find a huge tonal difference between them (just to quote the first examples of each that he publishes):
Above the gorges one thread of sky: Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords (opening lines of Sadness of the Gorges)
And
A frosty wind harries the wu-t’ung, (parasol tree) The crowded leaves stick wilting to the tree (opening lines of Autumn Thoughts)
It might just be me, but I don’t even detect major differences between the poetry of between Tu Fu, writing in the 750s or 60s –
The autumn wastes are each day wilder: Cold in the river the blue sky stirs (opening lines of The Autumn Wastes)
and Li Shang-Yin, who was writing almost a century later:
The East wind sighs, the fine rains come: Beyond the pool of waterlilies, the noise of faint thunder. (Untitled)
I wouldn’t expect poets in English to write this similarly, but of course the words I am reading are AC Graham’s and not Tu Fu’s or Meng Chiao’s. These are beautiful poems and if there’s a deficiency in them it’s mine, not the poets’ and certainly not the translator’s. In poetry that’s this compressed and distilled there must be a whole world of meaning, allusion and subtlety – the sort of thing I can see (when forced to think about it) in Donne – that AC Graham was aware of but could only explain in footnotes and appendices. And I’m sure that’s exactly what Philip Larkin referred to in his strictures about language – but if a writer can have only truly have one language, “if language is going to mean anything to him,” what about translators, who are almost always also writers in their own right? And what about unusual cases like JRR Tolkien or Anthony Burgess?
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite novels – it’s also the product, very obviously, of someone who could speak and think, fluently, in a lot of languages – ten is the number he usually gave, ‘with bits and pieces of others’. Burgess created the book’s slang, Nadsat, in order to write about ‘the youth’ in a way that didn’t date like real slang and it definitely worked. Rightly, I think, Burgess didn’t want a glossary of Nadsat terms in the book. Although some publishers have added one anyway, the book works far better if the reader just immerses themselves in the narrator’s voice and his disorienting world. But Burgess was only human, and in perhaps the novel’s weakest moment (because it takes us out of that world) he couldn’t resist pointing out that the language his young narrator Alex speaks isn’t just whimsy on the part of the author:
‘Quaint,’ said Dr Brodsky, like smiling, ‘the dialect of the tribe. Do you know anything of its provenance, Branom?’ ‘Odd bits of rhyming slang,’ said Branom, who did not look quite so much like a friend any more. ‘A bit of gipsy talk, too. But most of the roots are Slav. Propaganda. Subliminal penetration.’ ‘All right, all right, all right,’ said Dr Brodsky, like impatient and not interested any more.
I’ve always felt that Brodsky’s impatience is really Burgess’s mild embarrassment at finding himself pointing out how clever he is, but who knows? How A Clockwork Orange works in translation I can’t imagine, especially in countries with the Slavic languages Burgess borrows from, but I can imagine it must be both a joy and a nightmare to translate.
I hope those for the sake of its readers that who tackle A Clockwork Orange come up with words as horribly effective as Burgess’s. When Alex and his gang (yes, I know they are his droogs) come across a rival gang attacking a child, Alex says that they were “just getting ready to do something on a weepy young devotchka they had there, not more than ten, she creeching away but with her platties still on,” The word “creeching” is clearly just “screeching” without the s, but somehow it seems harsher, more intense, implying a rawness related as much to a croak as a screech; Burgess knew what he was doing. So, in his very different way, did Tolkien, another linguist, who gives the cultures and places of Middle Earth their individual, believable textures via languages that draw on real prototypes in the same way as Burgess’s Nadsat does. It’s also worth comparing Tolkien’s beautifully translated Beowulf with Seamus Heaney’s very different, but equally beautiful one. Both writers have a reverence for the original text and their interpretations are similar enough to suggest fidelity to the original – but they are also different enough to demonstrate just how flexible language can be.
That flexibility suggests that no text is truly beyond translation, and the fact that fictional cultures can be realistically portrayed by the words they and their creators use hints at the power inherent in language. Like any power, it can be used in negative ways as well as good ones. Translations can, or at least could, be withheld when it was felt expedient to do so, though the internet has probably made that more difficult. It seems trivial, but something that was (up until the 1960s I’d guess) fairly common and which I’ve occasionally come across in older books, are translations of foreign texts where the narrative lapses into its original language – it even occasionally into French in books actually written in English – when the writing becomes ‘obscene.’
trashy 70s paperback of non-trashy 50s meditative biography
An example that springs to mind, because I have it, is the 1957 biography of the notorious medieval Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Bathory, by the surrealist poet Valentine Penrose (nee Hugo). In its English translation – by the also somewhat notorious Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi – Penrose’s text is rendered into sensual English, except, that is when Bathory’s predatory exploits against young peasant women in her orbit become too explicit, at which point the text falls back into French. No doubt the publisher, John Calder – who specialised in avant-garde literature and especially previously banned books – was wary of obscenity charges, which he would later fall foul of with Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book and Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Ironically, my 1970s NEL edition, though by design a trashy, titillating paperback, reproduces the Calder text, elisions and all. (It also features a lazy, sensationalist blurb on the cover which reveals that the publisher didn’t know that Valentine Penrose was a woman, which is unnerving).
But even if British publishers were self-censoring for mostly legal reasons, the clear lesson that comes from old editions of transgressive texts is that those with a classical education – that is, the upper classes, who routinely learned Latin, Greek and French at school, but only they – could be entrusted to read all the sex and violence they liked. I’m in two minds over whether the reason for that is the literally patronising one of ‘protecting the children’ or the more generally patronising one that the upper class could be trusted with that kind of thing but the more animalistic and irrational the lower classes might be led astray by it. Either way it’s kind of ironic, given that centuries earlier, the impetus for publishing anything at all in English was to allow the expanding literate population to read the Bible in their own language.
And if the translation of a modern text into modern English can create variations as different as a cordial vs a fervent hand-hold* imagine the pitfalls inherent in making the translation of an ancient text central to a modern civilisation. And not just ‘an ancient text’ but a collection of various ancient texts, partly written in obscure and difficult language. And add to that that key books of the text purport to be eye-witness accounts which are however written in Greek, but reporting on sermons and parables originally delivered in spoken Aramaic.
*if that seems trivial, imagine receiving an invitation to some kind of gathering that begins, “you are cordially invited to… versus “you are fervently invited to…” The second would seem a little alarming to me
We’re used to the fact that almost everything in the Bible is open to interpretation, partly because by now ‘the Christian church’ is actually hundreds of Christian churches, each with its own version of what the Bible means, and that’s just talking about the Bible as it is now, regardless of how accurately modern translations relate to the original text, or how accurately the original text relates to the events it describes. It doesn’t take much reading to discover that things as fundamental to the faith as the monotheistic nature of the Old Testament god, or the Virgin birth in the New Testament are dependent on translations which may be approximate rather than precise. Just as one example, writers – both scholarly and crank-ish – have observed that the word used to describe Mary’s state, “parthenos” in ancient Greek texts generally refers only to a young woman and not necessarily, not even usually, a virgin. Getting into murkier waters, it’s therefore been credibly suggested (by Jane Schaberg, among many others) that in the Gospels God therefore only blesses Mary’s pregnancy, rather than causing it himself. Credibly, that is, if one’s main issue with the story of Jesus is the Virgin birth, rather than the existence of God in the first place.
possibly less begetting and smiting in this bible
But however one chooses to interpret it, interpretation is required when looking at events which have come down to us in much the same way as Homer’s Odyssey, and with as many different voices involved along the way. Even if one takes the Bible at face value – notoriously difficult, in its contradictory entirety – and accepts it as truth, it’s a problematic text, to say the least. The Gospels were written down by followers of Jesus – who they knew personally, and worshipped – in the aftermath of his early death. For parts pre-dating their association with him, they are presumably relying for some parts on accounts given to them by the man himself. These would be based on his own memories of his youth and childhood, but for the circumstances of his own birth thirty-three years earlier, he presumably only had the accounts of his parents (whether earthly or divine) to rely on. Unless Jesus spoke Greek (I feel like they would have mentioned it if he had), those memories were then translated into a different language with different allusions and associations from his own, before being subjected to centuries of edits and deletions, only later being given ‘authoritative’ editions (different ones for different countries and sects), each of them offering its own, rather than the definitive truth.
So, whether we are reading Homer or Ovid or the Gospel of St Luke, or The Castle, or Asterix the Legionary in English, we are reading an adaptation, a work imagined into existence by more than one writer and if we’re lucky it’s Willa and Edwin Muir or Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge. If we’re not so lucky we may end up inadvertently worshipping a false idol or something and, who knows, even facing eternal damnation if you believe in such things. It’s an important job.
credit where its due: the translators get (almost) equal billing with the authors
Remembering 1984 as someone who was a child then, I find that although the clocks didn’t strike thirteen, the year – as encapsulated by two specific and very different but not unconnected childhood memories, as we’ll see – is almost as alien nowadays as Orwell’s Airstrip One. Of course, I know far more now about both 1984 and Nineteen Eighty-Four than I did at the time. I was aware – thanks mostly I think to John Craven’s Newsround – of the big, defining events of the year.
Surely the greatest ever cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four, by Stuart Hughes, for the 1990 Heinemann New Windmills edition
I knew, for instance about the Miners’ Strike and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but they didn’t have anything like the same impact on me personally as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I remember Zola Budd tripping or whatever it was at the Olympics and Prince Harry being born, but they weren’t as important to me as Strontium Dog or Judge Dredd. Even TwoTribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood made a bigger impression on me than most of the big news events, despite the fact that I didn’t like it. My favourite TV show that year was probably Grange Hill – and here we go.
Grange Hill, essentially a kids’ soap opera set in a big comprehensive high school in London, ran for 30 years and I recently discovered that the era of it that I remember most fondly – the series’ that ran from 1983-6 – is available on YouTube. When I eventually went to high school later in the 80s, my first impression of the school was that it was like Grange Hill, and now I find that despite the silliness and melodrama, Grange Hill still reflects the reality, the look and the texture of my high school experience in the 80s with surprising accuracy.
But anyway, watching old Grange Hill episodes out of nostalgia, I was struck by how good it seems in the context of the 2020s, despite the obvious shortcomings of being made for children. Check out this scene from series seven, episode five, written by Margaret Simpson and aired in January of 1984. In among typical story arcs about headlice and bullying, the Fifth form class (17 year olds getting towards the end of their time at school) get the opportunity to attend a mock UN conference with representatives from other schools. In a discussion about that, the following exchange occurs between Mr McGuffy (Fraser Cains) and his pupils Suzanne Ross (Susan Tully), Christopher “Stewpot” Stewart (Mark Burdis), Claire Scott (Paula-Ann Bland) and Glenroy (seemingly of no last name) (Steven Woodcock). It’s worth noting that this was the year before Live Aid.
Suzanne: [re. the UN]:"It's about as effective as the school council."
Mr McGuffy: "Oh well I wouldn't quite say that. The UN does some excellent work - UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN Peacekeeping force..." [...]
Claire: "What's the conference gonna be about?"
Mr McGuffy: "The world food problem. There was a real UN conference on this topic ten years ago..”
Glenroy: "Didn't solve much then, did they? Millions of people still starvin'"
Stewpot: ”Yeah that's cos they ain't got no political clout to do anything about it though, ain't it"
Glenroy: ”Naw man, it's because the rich countries keep them that way”
Suzanne: “The only chance a poor country's got is if it's got something we want”
Glenroy: “That's right - they got something the west wants and they'd better watch out because the west starts to mess with their government."
Mr McGuffy: "Well it's clear from what you've all said so far that you're interested in the sort of issues that will be discussed that weekend..."
Suzanne & Claire, 1984
It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that that is a more mature political discussion than is often heard on Question Time in 2025. Interestingly, it’s not an argument between left and right as such, but between standard, humanitarian and more radical left-wing viewpoints. Needless to say, if it was presented on a TV show that’s popular with ten year-olds nowadays, a certain demographic would be foaming at the mouth about the BBC indoctrinating the young with “wokeness.” But as a kid this sort of discussion didn’t at all mar my enjoyment of the show – naturally there’s also a lot of comedic stuff in the series about stink bombs and money-making schemes, but one of the reasons that Grange Hill remained popular (and watchable for 8 year-olds and 15 year-olds alike) for so many years was that it refused to talk down to its audience.
The way the writers tackled the obvious big themes – racism, sexism, parents getting divorced, bullying, gangs, sex education etc – are impressive despite being, quite broad, especially when the younger pupils are the focus of the storyline, but what makes a bigger impression on me now is the background to it all. It’s a little sad – though true to Thatcher’s Britain – to see through all this period the older pupils’ low-level fretting about unemployment and whether it’s worth being in school at all.
And maybe they were right. In 1984, when Suzanne and Stewpot were 17, a fellow Londoner who could in a parallel universe have been in the year above them at Grange Hill was the 18-year-old model Samantha Fox. That year, she was The Sun newspaper’s “Page 3 Girl of the Year.” She had debuted as a topless model for the paper aged 16, which is far more mind boggling to a nostalgic middle-aged viewer of Grange Hill than it would have been to me at the time. Presumably, some parts of the anti-woke lobby would not mind Sam’s modelling as much as they would mind the Grange Hill kids’ political awareness, but who knows?
Sam Fox in (approximately) Grange Hill mode c.1986, not sure who took it
Naturally, the intended audience for Page 3 wasn’t Primary School children – but everybody knew who Sam Fox was and in the pre-internet, 4-channel TV world of 80s Britain he had a level of fame far beyond that of any porn star 40 years later (arguments about whether or not Page 3 was porn are brain-numbingly stupid, so I won’t go there; and anyway, I don’t mean porn to be a derogatory term). Anyway, Sam (she’ll always be “Sam” to people who grew up in the 80s) and her Page 3 peers made occasional accidental appearances in the classroom, to general hilarity, when the class was spreading old newspapers on our desks to prepare for art classes. It was also pretty standard then to see the “Page Three Stunnas” (as I think The Sun put it) blowing around the playground or covering a fish supper. It wasn’t like growing up with the internet, but in its own way the 80s was an era of gratuitous nudity.
a nice Yugoslav edition of 1984 from 1984
Meanwhile, on Page Three of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith – who is, shockingly, a few years younger than I am now – is trying to look back on his own childhood to discern whether things were always as they are now:
“But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux, occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) P.3 – New Windmill edition, 1990
By contrast, some of the roots of 2025 are plain to see in 1984, despite the revolution of the internet that happened halfway between then and now. As the opposing poles of the Grange Hill kids and The Sun demonstrate, there were tensions in British society which would never so far be resolved, but they would come to some kind of semi-conclusion at the end of the Thatcher era when when ‘Political Correctness,’ the chimerical predecessor of the equally chimerical ‘Woke’ began to work in its unpredictable (but I think mostly positive) ways.
Most obviously, Page 3 became ever more controversial and was toned down (no nipples) and then vanished from the tabloids altogether for a while (though in the 90s the appearance of “lads’ mags” which mainstreamed soft porn made the death of Page 3 kind of a pyrrhic victory.) More complicatedly, the kind of confrontational storylines about topics like racism that happened in kids shows in the 80s became a little more squeamish, to the point where (for entirely understandable reasons) racist bullies on kids’ shows would rarely use actual racist language and then barely appear at all, replaced by positivity in the shape of more inclusive casting and writing. All of which became pretty quaint as soon as the internet really took off.
a very 1984-looking edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1984
So, that was part of the 1984 that I remember; what Orwell would have made of any of it I don’t know. It wasn’t his nineteen eighty-four, which might have pleased him. For me, it all looks kind of extreme but also refreshingly straightforward, though I’m sure I only think so because I was a child. It’s all very Gen-X isn’t it?
The prejudice against transgender people in the UK has, after years of furious lobbying, reached the level of a moral panic, and thanks to the pressure of the lobbyists (and perhaps even more, the money behind them) transphobia is now essentially written into British law. It feels like bad form to quote oneself, but four years ago I wrote “The unstated aim [of a moral panic] is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy … And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.” That’s true here. The stated aim of the pressure groups – and now, the legislation – is to protect women, ostensibly from male violence, but not only does the law not do that, it actually reinforces the status quo, where crimes against women are often overlooked and always inadequately policed. It’s a policy that doesn’t try to benefit anybody, not even those who have rabidly pursued it – but, indirectly it benefits the very group it purports to punish; male abusers of women.
Claude Cahun in 1928 – “Neuter is the only gender that always suits me”
At its heart there’s a fundamental irony embedded into the moral panic about trans people. The heart of the issue is that there are people who simply don’t want trans people – primarily but not only, trans women – to exist at all. But in trying to wish trans people out of existence, what the transphobes are really doing is insisting on their presence, heightening it (and simultaneously making trans people a way of defining their own identities too) and of course punishing them for their continued existence. The idea of trans people just being, and being accepted as the people they are, obviously isn’t any kind of threat to society; but then, choosing an invisible ‘enemy within’ has always been the agenda of paranoid reactionaries and is such a familiar trope that there’s really no need to list the atrocities these kinds of policies have led to throughout history. Under normal circumstances, the trans women and trans men vilified by activists and politicians are just women and men; the woman who works in your office, the man at the supermarket checkout, a teacher, a librarian, a lifeguard. But when looked at through the eyes of the paranoid bigot, their very unobtrusiveness becomes sinister; someone ‘posing as’ a lifeguard or ‘infiltrating’ a school to pursue their malevolent agenda.
The worst thing about a law that denies the identity of a group of people is, naturally, the impact it has on those people, but it also does nothing to address the problems it’s disingenuously put forward to solve. Male violence against women, wherever it happens, is a serious problem in British society. And yet at every stage – from early displays of ‘light-hearted’ misogyny and harassment among children and teenagers to actual physical assault – society and the law tend not to take it seriously enough, with the result that crimes are under-reported and under-prosecuted and punishments are often laughably mild. At the same time though, harassment and assault et cetera already are criminal offenses, and they don’t become any more criminal, or any better policed, by persecuting a minority group. In fact, the opposite is true, since the focus on trans women as potential aggressors not only takes the focus away from the people who are overwhelmingly, the perpetrators of violence against women – cisgender men – it’s essentially misogynistic and threatens the very safety of the women it pretends to protect.
the late cis-gender, heterosexual musician Vinnie Chas in 1989 – which toilet should Vinnie have used?
It’s perhaps important to point out that the Supreme Court’s ruling states that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex at birth, so that only those born female are recognized as women under the Equality Act – it’s simplistic (human biology isn’t) and it doesn’t mention bathrooms at all. But the toilet is central to the ideology of ‘gender critical’ activists. Policing who uses which bathroom is a bizarre preoccupation of the anti-trans lobby, but it’s indicative of the generally perverse and in one sense unserious nature of their obsession with trans people. That being so, public toilets have ended up being a key part of any debate around trans rights in Britain. How ‘correct’ toilet usage is enforced throws up the immediate problem of who polices it and what the criteria are for using a gender-specific toilet. It’s not enough to say, as the Supreme Court ruling implies, that women’s bathrooms are for those who are biologically female from birth, because in many cases there’s no obvious way, short of an invasive genital inspection, of working that out – and there shouldn’t be. In any kind of free and democratic society, the way someone dresses, or the hairstyle and aesthetic they adopt – in short, their identity – is nobody else’s business unless they explicitly make it so, and setting up some kind of ‘toilet police’ can only increase the harassment of women, both trans and cis. The kind of concern I express there often leads to accusations of hysteria, but this week, the prominent anti-trans campaigner Maya Forstater explicitly said this: “Not being allowed into the mens by rule does not mean you have the right to go into the ladies. That may seem unfair, but these are life choices people make. If you make extreme efforts to look like a man, don’t be surprised if you are denied entrance to the ladies.” It’s hard to know where to start with this venomous nonsense. But for a start, what does “extreme efforts to look like a man” entail? What is ‘looking like a man’ anyway? Which man? These people come across like Mary Whitehouse wringing her hands over Boy George’s appearance on Top of the Pops 40 years ago.
The Beautiful Boy (2003) by genuine TERF Germaine Greer; but is this boy manly enough to use the Gents?
For some women, regardless of their gender at birth or their sexual orientation, just having a short haircut or choosing to wear trousers is enough for some people to accuse them of looking like men, regardless of what their intentions were when choosing a haircut or getting dressed that morning. The idea of ‘not being ‘allowed’ into one or other toilet surely also entails some kind of enforcement. There are so few manned public toilets in the UK that presumably, the current bathroom attendants won’t expected to take on the duty of somehow determining who is an acceptable ‘customer’, but someone will have to, if it’s not just empty rhetoric – which it may well be. But it also creates a genuine possibility of toilet vigilantism, which sounds hilarious, until you really think about it. And what qualifies someone to be a toilet police officer or bathroom blade runner? Is there a test they need to pass? Will there be gender-determining questionnaires or apps, or inspections?
The British cis-gender, female artist ‘Gluck’ (Hannah Gluckstein) a century ago in 1925 – which toilet should she have used?
Presumably there were, until now, no laws dictating who can use which bathroom and yet, men (including trans men) tend to use the mens and women (including trans women) tend to use the womens, without any resulting fuss. Somebody who lurks in any bathroom with the intention of assaulting someone is already breaking, or planning to break the law and nothing about this legislation seems likely to deter the few people determined enough to do such a thing. What seems far more likely is that people innocently needing to use public toilets – and it’s not something most people do except in the direst need – will face some kind of additional unpleasantness, especially if their physique and appearance isn’t one that fits the standard, traditional gender norm.
TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) is a useful shorthand term for people like Forstater and JK Rowling, but it also gives them a validity that they don’t deserve, because difficult to see any kind of feminism, either radical or orthodox, in a policy that requires women to conform to a specific kind of approved appearance to be accepted in female-only spaces. I would like to be able to substitute the term ‘right-wingers’ for TERFs, but in fact this whole issue reinforces my growing feeling that the ‘left’ and ‘right’ binary is no longer useful when looking at political and cultural issues. I am definitely left-wing, but then so, one would hope, is the Communist Party of Britain, which publicly supports the Supreme Court’s ruling. I shouldn’t be surprised though, because the mistake I – and many people, it seems – make is assuming that communism is left-wing. If I really examine what I mean by ‘left-wing’ I find that the correct word would be the much abused and misunderstood one, ‘liberal.’ And, as no less than V.I. Lenin went to great pains to explain in 1920’s charmingly-titled pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, there’s nothing inherently liberal or democratic about communism. It’s easy to forget that, because left vs. right feels so logical, but history proves the point – if left-wing means what people think it means, and communism is left-wing, then the Hitler-Stalin Pact would have been completely unthinkable. Whereas, looking at Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR it seems not only logical but inevitable.
Uncle Vlad’s toxic 1920 pamphlet
Hitler and Stalin’s ideologies diverged in many, quite fundamental ways, but at heart, both were really about power – who has it, and who is subject to it and can be coerced by it. And as citizens of the kind of society that wants to police who uses its toilets, we might want to consider that.
But even though an attack on the trans community is an attack on the freedom and individuality of us all, and even with all of the serious issues and implications from the corruptibility of British politicians to the possible dystopian outcomes for our society, the most important point by far is to remember that this is happening now, and that the target is a small community that includes some of the UK’s most vulnerable people. It’s evil and it’s indefensible, but it’s not irreversible – so those who object should make their voices heard.
This article (like several others) came out of a conversation with my friend Paul, and he writes better than I do about 80s horror (and many other things) at Into the Gyre
The 1980s was, famously, the decade when pop culture became corporate, encapsulated in the omnipresent corporate or corporate-style logo. Obviously both corporations and logos long pre-dated the 80s, but it was in that era that it became an all-encompassing ideal. In the 1960s, the first really modern teenagers* had written the names of their favourite bands on their school books or bags and twenty years later their children were doing much the same thing, only they were painstakingly copying logos from album sleeves or tape inlay cards.
*you could say the 50s teenagers were the first, but they were pioneers; the 60s generation was the first to grow up with the expectation of being teenagers, with all that entailed in terms of pop music and rebellious teenage behaviour
As a young horror fan in the mid-to-late 1980s, one of the things that made the notorious video nasties of the previous generation seem so alluringly grimy and disreputable was their lack of slickness. 1980s horror franchises – in themselves a symptom of the decade of accelerated capitalism – even ones with their roots in the 70s independent cinema boom like Halloween – had logos, they had mascots like Freddy and Jason and Pinhead, they had rock songs on the soundtrack – they were corporate and, to young teenagers at least, they were cool. There was no way to make a grotty, un-theatrical, special effects-free film like I Spit on Your Grave seem cool. There was an attempt to make a franchise out of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Leatherface wasn’t iconic in quite the way that Jason was, let alone an almost cartoon character like Freddy Krueger. Murderous, inbred yokels in rural Texas might well be scary but they weren’t easily assimilated into glossy hair metal videos.
the flamboyant 60s/70s Fellowship of the Ring vs its more businesslike 80s update
The publishing world was no different. In the fantasy realm, the hippyish typefaces and sometimes grotesque psychedelic imagery of the great 60s and 70s paperbacks were replaced with foil letters in block type and tastefully elevated landscapes. Tasteful is of course a relative term and within a decade, that utterly 80s look – a publishing counterpart to magnolia painted walls and a beige Laura Ashley aesthetic which married an almost clinical sense of restraint, as if embarrassed by the childishness of elves, wizards and dragons, but combined it with bold, business card-style, metallic sans-serif lettering – would seem just as trashy in its way as the more florid 70s fashions had at the time.
70s horror classics redesigned for the 80s
But, unlike fantasy fiction, where the biggest name in the 80s remained the late J.R.R. Tolkien, the horror genre had star writers who transcended the genre and became part of the pop cultural zeitgeist, Most of the current ‘big names’ in 80s fantasy, like Terry Brooks and Stephen R Donaldson, were writers whose key works belonged firmly to the post-Tolkien 1970s and never escaped a (very big) fantasy audience. Horror was different. Like the fantasy genre, its biggest names – Stephen King (everywhere) and James Herbert (especially in the UK, though his books sold millions worldwide) – had had their first successes in the first half of the 1970s, but as the 70s evolved into the 80s, both their work itself and the way it was packaged began to align with the spirit of the age. The fanbase for horror broadened until the big horror novels became the big airport novels and big supermarket novels and the basis for successful Hollywood movies. The books became bigger and more cinematic (but I talked about that here so won’t again) and their design more stylish, until they resembled the movie posters of the time; but with one major difference. There were of course iconic directors in the 80s, but even the biggest of them – Steven Spielberg, say, or Martin Scorcese – naturally didn’t dominate the posters for their films the way that Stephen King or James Herbert did on their books. In that respect, the authors were more like the star actors of the day, but where Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger were only one element, albeit a dominant one, in their star vehicles, with the books you knew that whatever you got would the real, unadulterated thing, unless you happened to be a fan of Virginia (“VC”) Andrews, but she was a special case back then.
The first, strangely romantic adventure-looking Shining (with Warren Beatty-esque hero) and the classic 80s Stephen King logo edition
The extent to which the star authors, rather than the books themselves, were the selling point, can be seen in their evolving covers. After a decade of disparate designs and variable artwork, often not especially horror-centric, publishers like New English Library, Futura and Star began treating books by horror authors as franchises, each with their own logo and aesthetic. Stephen King and James Herbert, to stick with the big two, demonstrate contrasting, but very 80s horror alternatives. James Herbert – who, with a background in advertising and art direction, took a direct interest in how his novels were packaged – went with the 80s version of classy as epitomised by mid-priced boxes of chocolates; a restrained palette dominated by either black or white, with lettering in gold or silver foil. They were eye-catching, moody and, to a teenager, adult looking.
New English Library offering James Herbert as a box of Black Magic chocolates and Stephen King as a hair metal album
Stephen King’s UK publishers (including Herbert’s publisher N.E.L. – but frustratingly, including several others; keeping one truly consistent image annoyingly out of reach) clearly realised that the selling point – the brand, in the parlance of the times etc – was King himself. To that end, the actual cover illustrations and even the prominence of the titles of the books took up less and less space, while the author’s name was treated to something like the logo of a metal band, and was big enough to be spotted across a crowded newsagent or bookshop. Sometimes the author’s name was in foil, sometimes it was embossed, but for at least a few years the covers of his main series of novels – as with James Herbert’s – had the uniformity of a corporate identity.
Stephen King’s Greatest Hits
Where the genre’s biggest stars and their publishers led, others followed; all of the big names of 80s horror tended to follow either the King or the Herbert approach; after wildly variable and sometimes lamentable 70s editions, Ramsey Campbell’s books took on the sleek, Herbertian image. American blockbuster authors like Dean R Koontznd Peter Straub’s books tended to follow the King blueprint.
80s gore (Richard Laymon & Shaun Hutson) vs 80s slickness (Shaun Hutson & Ramsey Campbell)
Gore authors had a kind of niche of their own. The early books of the UK’s most notorious horror author of the era, Shaun Hutson, played down the author’s name in favour of a gaudy movie poster look with the titles in a distinctive ‘slug trail’ font – and his US counterpart Richard Laymon’s works were very similarly packaged (the covers above both look like they could be the work of Danny Flynn, mentioned here, though I haven’t checked). As the sales of both authors increased during the boom years of the 80s, their packaging became – like their work – relatively more sophisticated. In the UK, Sphere mimicked the classy Herbert look for Hutson’s later 80s novels like Assassin and Victims, with the author’s name (embossed, in foil) becoming more of a focal point, while Laymon’s name became almost as logo-like as Stephen King’s. Laymon was far from alone in this. The brand-like identity of Stephen King, and the sheer volume of his sales, meant that the classic ‘logo’ look of his books was highly influential, to put it mildly. The range of King-influenced cover art ranges from the definitely ‘post-King’ 80s covers of authors like John Farris and Rex Miller, to the frankly imitative NEL covers for Stephen Laws, whose 80s books bring to mind the theoretical “Moron in a hurry” cited in court in cases of trademark infringement; not that said moron would have a bad time if they accidentally bought a Stephen Laws novel – but they would know they weren’t reading Stephen King.
the other Stephen of 80s horror
In almost all respects, Clive Barker was the outsider in the world of 80s horror – most definitely of it, but not defined by it. His debut novel The Damnation Game was initially packaged as typical mid-80s horror stodge but graduated, as his reputation grew, to Stephen King style packaging, even as Sphere Books simultaneously took the bold step of publishing his Books of Blood short story collections with Barker’s own fantastical (and in come cases gory) paintings on the covers, immediately putting the author in a dangerous-looking category of his own. Clive Barker’s books looked both more graphic and more outlandish than the usual blockbuster horror authors. From then until the end of the horror boom his work coexisted in the two camps of mainstream and (for want of a better world) alternative horror. The packaging of the 1989 first edition of his short novel Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is pure, commercial 80s design; it looks more like a movie poster than the actual Nightbreed movie poster and is complete with logo-like title and gold foil for the author’s name. But around the same time, his dark fantasy masterpiece Weaveworld featured a more imaginative, sophisticated style, taking its lead from the Books of Blood. Weaveworld had a more formal design sense that was flexible enough to be applied to the rest of Barker’s oeuvre, so that when the horror bubble burst and everything 80s suddenly looked as cringingly tacky and dated as mullets and shoulder pads, Barker’s brand alone among his horror peers easily made the transition into the new decade.
Clive Barker as standard 80s horror author, blockbuster 80s horror author (x 2) weirdo 80s horror author and weird-but-classy fantasy author
From 1990 until at least until the turn of the millennium, Stephen King’s publishers experimented with everything from tasteful minimalism to gaudy dayglo colours, the only constant being the prominence of the author’s name on the covers. That sense of immediate brand recognition dissolved around the time of The Dark Half has never been quite as strong since, and an 80s Stephen King collection still has a satisfyingly coherent look that isn’t matched by later editions. James Herbert mostly stuck with the ‘classy’ look of his late 80s books but with a sense of diminishing returns as the titles and cover images became less confrontational and the whole look less fashionable. In the 90s, much of what had been packaged as full-blooded horror tended to be given more of a fashionable ‘urban thriller’ look, just as in cinema, the Freddy and Jason franchises limped to an ignoble (if temporary) end, Hannibal Lecter emerged as a supposedly less cheesy horror villain and nobody wanted hair metal on their soundtracks anymore. It was a new age.
Slugs (1982) vs Slugs (2016) – eventually even the ultimate 80s trash schlock horror novel would be given the ‘tasteful’ treatment (which to be fair does look kind of cool)
Kind of shocked to discover that I haven’t done any of my once-regular Play for Today roundups since 2019! Last time around, rather than doing a proper playlist, I just mentioned some interesting things that had come my way (that I didn’t review for any magazines or websites), so I’ll do that again, possibly interspersed with things I’ve been playing a lot (in fact not; maybe later). These are all from the past few months and I haven’t necessarily given them the time they deserve, but I think they’re all worth a listen…
I loved Nechochwen’s Heart of Akamon and was quite shocked to find it’s now a decade old. They’ve released good music since then, notably a split album with Panopticon, but spelewithiipi (catchy name!) really reminded me of just how much I loved Heart of Akamon. For those who haven’t come across them, Nechochwen are an acoustic dark folk band (sometimes including metal elements, I kind of prefer when they don’t but it’s all good) that explores (as they put it) ‘the indigenous roots and history of the Upper Ohio River Valley.’ Their music is autumnal and haunting, and I love the imagery too. spelewithiipi is a beautiful album, and it’ll sound even better later in the year.
Ghost World have made some of my favourite albums; I was immediately smitten with their 2017 debut album, which was my album of the year that year and at first the 2018 follow-up, Spin was disappointing to me, but ultimately went on to be one of my all-time (so far) favourite albums, so there’s some kind of lesson there. Anyway, Armadillo Café is an odd, whimsical but lovely concept album that so far is taking longer for me to absorb, but it’s full of good tunes and I’m confident that I’ll end up loving it without even noticing again.
Hmm. I gave this a go because, despite the fact that industrial metal is one of my least favourite genres of music in the world, Swiss black metal has a special place in my heart and LADLO is a very dependable label. And..? Well, not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s good, there’s a nice chaotic, noisy atmosphere and it reminded me at times of Abigor (who I do like) and Blacklodge (who I occasionally like). The atmospheres and the choral bits are really cool and the noisy stuff with sirens etc is impressively alarming, though not nice if you have a headache.
Kati Rán – LYS (10 Year Anniversary) (Svart Records)
More ‘dark folk’ (“Nordic/Pagan” this time, though Kati herself is Dutch I think) – LYS is an album that I very much enjoyed when it came out and then pretty much forgot about, so it’s nice to hear it again and find that it really is lovely. She’s an amazing multi-instrumentalist and even though I have no idea if the music would sound at all familiar to the Nordic peoples of centuries ago, I feel like it evokes those ancient times and cultures perfectly for a modern audience (i.e. me). The follow-up, ‘SÁLA’ came out last year and I still didn’t get around to hearing it, but now that I’ve had this reminder I will
BOOTSY COLLINS – Album of the Year #1 Funkateer (Bootzilla/Roc Nation)
I reviewed this for Spectrum Culture so won’t say much about it here, but in these tense and miserable times, Bootsy’s indefatigable enthusiasm and uplifting silliness are more welcome than ever. Plus it’s just a really good album. The man’s a genius.
the poster for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Killing (1988)
I don’t believe in the death penalty. In this, I’m in the majority, globally. I’m not sure when exactly I became against it; until at least the age of 12 I was pretty much a proto-fascist with an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ sense of justice, as boys tended to be in those days and for all I know still are. But I know that by the time I saw Krzysztof Kieslowski’s brilliantly grim A Short Film About Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) when I was 16 or so I was already anti-death penalty and have remained so ever since.
My reasons are, typically, kind of pedantic. There are many obvious arguments against it; there’s the ‘what if you accidentally kill the wrong person’ argument and that’s a pretty strong one – it has happened and does happen and is irreversible. There’s the fact that the death penalty seems to have a negligible effect on the crime rate. In fact, countries with the death penalty on the whole seem to have more rather than less murders (not that there’s necessarily a link between those two things). Even from the coldest and most reptilian, utilitarian point of view of getting rid of the problem of prison overcrowding, any possible benefit is negated by the fact that in most countries with the death penalty, prisoners spend years on death row being fed and housed, rather than being quickly and efficiently ‘processed.’ There’s also the Gandalfian(!) argument from The Lord of the Rings; “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.” This wasn’t just a handy deus ex machina because Tolkien needed Gollum to survive in order to destroy the ring. It was that, but Tolkien was also a devout and serious Christian and that was his moral outlook. Thank the gods that unlike his friend CS Lewis, he deliberately left religion out of his books though! In the Biblical commandment Thou Shalt Not Kill, the Christian/Jewish god doesn’t list any exceptions or mitigating circumstances – in that one instance. Of course elsewhere in the Bible there are many circumstances where humans killing humans is considered appropriate and even righteous – the ultimate irony being that Jesus, kind of like an anti-Gollum, has to suffer death through violence to achieve his purpose. Religion is odd; but I’m not a Christian or Jew.
All of those points are relevant, but for me personally, it’s far simpler than that; if you can be legally killed, that means that in the eyes of the state there’s essentially nothing wrong with killing people. I think there is, and I don’t think that it should just be a matter of having the right paperwork. In essence, to kill a murderer is not telling them ‘what you did is wrong‘ so much as ‘you did it wrong‘ which I don’t think is a minor difference. And on top of that, there’s the whole question of who you are handing this responsibility of life and death to. I have a lot of respect for some lawyers, attorneys, judges, police officers etc, but there are others that I wouldn’t trust with my lunch, let alone my (or anyone else’s) life. States have a character, and often it is institutionally biased regarding race, class, gender and sexuality. Giving that kind of power within that kind of framework seems likely to make far more problems than it solves. But even in non-death-penalty countries like the UK we routinely give people the legal right to take other people’s lives, all they have to do is join the armed forces.
British volunteers in the International Brigade, 1937
I’m no more consistent than anyone else and my attitudes have their exceptions and contradictions. I (predictably) don’t philosophically differentiate between the military and mercenaries, because what ‘serving your country’ means in practical terms is carrying out whatever the policy of your government is that week, with no certainty that it won’t be contradicted by a new policy (or a new government) the next week and if enemies suddenly turn out to be allies or vice versa, the dead remain dead. That said – here’s the contradiction – I’m not a pacifist absolutist either, and I think, or like to think that if an invading army arrived in my country I’d take arms against it. These things are particular though; everyone likes to think they’d fight for a good cause, but the Spanish Civil War stands out for the number of anti-fascist fighters from all over the world who took up arms in defence of Spain. But that happened partly because so many people were ready to – and wanted to fight. Many of those – George Orwell is a prominent and typical example – belonged to the generation who had been just too young to fight in World War One and whose feelings about war – including a considerable amount of survivor’s guilt – had been shaped by it. And the fascist attack on the Spanish republic gave them a clear-cut situation to intervene in, in a way that the more political rise of fascism in Italy and Germany didn’t.
But anyway, the death penalty. People of course do terrible things, but although lots of them are significantly more horrific than a lethal injection or the electric chair, the end result is the same. Being – odd, brief segue but bear with me, it’s relevant – a fan of black metal music, the subject of death and murder is one you come across in a different way from just being, say, a fan of horror movies. Because the poser-ish ‘darkness’ of black metal spills over (though less than it used to) into ‘real life,’ almost as if the kind of art you make bears some relation to the kind of person you are. I won’t go into the tedious-but-fascinating Lords of Chaos stuff about Mayhem & Burzum or Absurd because it’s not quite relevant here, but the story of Smutak (Pavel Selyun) who ran Morak Production record label in Belarus is.
In 2012 Selyun discovered that his wife, the artist and singer Frozendark (Victoria Selyunova) was having an affair with the artist, zine editor and musician Kronum (Alexey Vladimirovich Utokva). Sticking with the psuedonyms seems appropriate, so anyway; Smutak murdered both Frozendark and Kronum, dismembered them and was apprehended on the Subway three days later with Kronum’s head (or skull; same difference I suppose – some accounts say he boiled the head – I don’t need to know) in a bag. After his arrest, he was imprisoned in Minsk and after a confession gained under torture and the failure of various appeals he was executed two years later, by being shot in the back of the head. A horrible postscript that demonstrates how the death penalty punishes the innocent as well as the guilty; after the execution the authorities failed to hand over Smutak’s body to his mother or tell her where he’s buried, the case was handed to the UN Court of Human Rights.
Not many people (and certainly not me) would say that Selyun didn’t ‘deserve’ his treatment. But still. He possibly tortured and definitely killed people and then was tortured and killed. There is a kind of balance there, but it’s one in which the act of torturing and killing itself is made neutral. Whoever tortured and killed Smutak doesn’t need any kind of defence because they did it in the name of the law, but the idea that torturing and killing is morally neutral because you don’t have any emotional investment in the act is an odd one. Smutak had nothing to gain from his actions other than some kind of horrible satisfaction. The person or people who did the same to him got paid for it. Which is morally, what? Better? He reportedly felt the same kind of fear as his victims; well good, I guess, but that did nothing to benefit the victims. It may have pleased the victims’ relatives but I wouldn’t want to examine that kind of pleasure too closely.
The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.
But more to the point; why does the killer (assuming their motives are the ones that are being extrapolated from the crime) care anyway? If actually shooting someone dead in the street is okay, then surely being indirectly responsible for the misery and possible deaths of others is barely even a misdemeanour. It amounts to the kind of Travis Bickle movie logic I’m sure I’ve sneered about elsewhere; complaining about the decay of social values and then committing murder is not reducing the sum total of social decay, it’s adding to it. A society where evil CEOs are shot dead in the street is a society where human beings are shot dead in the streets and that becoming acceptable is not likely to be the pathway to a more just, equal or happy society.
Michael Haneke’s disturbing Benny’s Video (1992)
What the death penalty does do, and probably a key part of why it’s still used in some countries, is offer a punishment that seems (in the case of murder at least) to fit the crime. Interestingly, public executions – which counterintuitively seem to have no better track record as a deterrent than any other kind – are now vanishingly rare. Part of that is no doubt to do with public disgust and part with institutional secrecy and shame, but I imagine that part of it is also the fear that the public would enjoy it too much. I’m not sure if I would think that if it wasn’t for the spate of Islamic State beheadings that were so widely watched on the internet back in the early 2010s (was it?) I watched one, like most people seem to have, and still wish I hadn’t; but you can’t un-ring a bell. That was at the back of my mind when I wrote about saints and martyrdom for this site and I can bring images of it to mind horribly easily. But even before that it shouldn’t have surprised me – like many other teenage horror movie fans in the pre-internet era I watched exploitation videos like Face of Death that featured executions, accidents etc, and in doing so realised that I was a horror fan and not whatever fans of that are. I should have learned my lesson there, but it’s undeniable that these things have a murky kind of fascination; since then, thanks to one of my favourite writers, Georges Bataille, I’ve ended up reading about Lingchi (‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’) and looking at the chilling and depressing photos of it, been appalled by postcards of lynchings, seen revolting photographs of soldiers’ desecrated bodies and murder victims… I haven’t gotten used to those images and I hope I never will. Teenage me would no doubt sneer at that because he thought that things that are ‘dark’ are cool, but that seems like a laughable and childish attitude to me now, so I can take his sneering. I seem to be edging towards the point that Michael Haneke is making in Funny Games (1997), which I find a bit tiresome and preachy (even more so the remake), but I’m not. I disagree with the premise of that film because I do think there’s a difference between fictional horror and real horror, and that enjoying one isn’t the same as enjoying the other. I think his 1992 film Benny’s Video makes a similar but much more subtle and complex point far better.
Imprisonment (whatever your views on the justice system) is a pretty unsatisfactory solution for most crimes, but it’s difficult to think of a better one which doesn’t essentially exonerate the kind of behaviour we want to characterise as abnormal or criminal. Stealing from a thief is obviously ‘justice’ in the eye-for-an-eye sense, but as a punishment it’s laughable. Raping a rapist would be grotesque and double the number of rapists in the room every time it happened. But even so, it’s never going to be comfortable that the tax payer is contributing to the relative comfort of someone like (I’ll only mention dead ones, this isn’t a complaint about the legal system being soft on psychopaths) Fred West. A solution l think I might suggest is one which I’m very dubious about myself from lots of different humanitarian, psychological and philosophical points of view; why not offer (and that word alone would make people angry) ‘monsters’ – the kind of killers in a category of their own, who admit to horrendous acts of murder and torture and whose guilt is not in doubt – those who will never be allowed freedom – the choice of a lethal injection rather than life imprisonment? That’s a horrible thing to contemplate, but then so is paying for the meals and upkeep of someone like Ian Brady, especially when he essentially had the last laugh, exercising his little bit of power over the families of his victims and having his self-aggrandising bullshit book The Gates of Janus published.
Anyway, that last part was kind of icky and uncomfortable, but so it should be – the whole subject is. So for what it’s worth, those are my thoughts on the death penalty. Time for a shower; until next time, don’t murder anyone please.
Everybody has their comforts, but after trying to analyse some of my own to see why they should be comforting I’ve pretty much come up with nothing, or at least nothing really to add to what I wrote a few years ago; “comforting because it can be a relief to have one’s brain stimulated by something other than worrying about external events.” But that has nothing to do with what it is that makes the specific things comforting. Like many people, I have a small group of books and films and TV shows and so on that I can read or watch or listen to at almost any time, without having to be in the mood for them, and which I would classify as ‘comforting.’ They aren’t necessarily my favourite things, and they definitely weren’t all designed to give comfort, but obscurely they do. But what does that mean or signify? I’ve already said I don’t know, so it’s not exactly a cliffhanger of a question, but let’s see how I got here at least.
I’ve rewritten this part so many times: but in a way that’s apposite. I started writing it at the beginning of a new year, while wars continued to rage in Sudan and Ukraine and something even less noble than a war continued to unfold in Gaza, and as the world prepared for an only partly precedented new, oligarchical (I think at this point that’s the least I could call it) US government. Writing this now, just a few months later, events have unfolded somewhat worse than might have been expected. Those wars still continue and despite signs to the contrary, the situation in Gaza seems if anything bleaker than before. That US administration began the year by talking about taking territory from what had been allies, supporting neo-Nazi and similar political groups across the world, celebrating high profile sex offenders and violent criminals while pretending to care about the victims of sex offenders and violent criminals, and has gone downhill from there. In the original draft of this article I predicted that this Presidential term would be an even more farcical horrorshow (not in the Clockwork Orange/Nadsat sense, although Alex and his Droogs might well enjoy this bit of the 2020s; I suppose what I mean is ‘horror show’) than the same president’s previous one, and since it already feels like the longest presidency of my lifetime I guess I was right. So, between the actual news and the way it never stops coming (hard to remember, but pre-internet ‘the news’ genuinely wasn’t so relentless or inescapable, although events presumably happened at the same rate) it’s important to find comfort somewhere. The obvious, big caveat is that one has to be in a somewhat privileged position to be able to find some comfort in the first place. There are people all over the world – including here in the UK – who can only find it, if at all, in things like prayer or philosophy; but regardless, not being so dragged down by current events that you can’t function is kind of important however privileged you are, and even those who find the whole idea of ‘self-love’ inimical have to find comfort somewhere.
But where? And anyway, what does comfort even mean? Well, everyone knows what it means, but though as a word it seems fluffy and soft (Comfort fabric softener, the American word “comforter” referring to a quilt), it actually comes from the Latin “com-fortis” meaning something like “forceful strength” – but let’s not get bogged down in etymology again.
But wherever you find it, the effect of comfort has a mysterious relationship to the things that actually offer us support or soothe our grief and mental distress. Which is not obvious; if you want to laugh, you turn to something funny, which obviously subjective but never mind. Sticking to books, because I can – for me lots of things would work, if I want to be amused, Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books and, less obviously, The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson always raise a smile or a laugh. Conversely, if you want to be scared or disgusted (in itself a strange and obscure desire, but a common one), you’d probably turn to horror, let’s say HP Lovecraft, Stephen King’s IT or, less generic but not so different, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. But as you might have guessed if you’ve read anything else on this website, I’d probably all of those things among my ‘comfort reads.’
not my comfort reads
But whatever I am reading, I’m not alone; people want ‘comfort reads’ and indeed there is a kind of comfort industry; these days. Not just these days, but over the years it’s developed from poetry anthologies and books of inspirational quotes to more twee versions of the same thing. I think of books of the Chicken Soup for the Soul kind (I don’t think I made that up; if I recall my mother owned a little book of that title, full of ‘words of wisdom’ and comforting quotes) as a 90s phenomenon, but that might be wrong. But at some point that evolved into the more widespread ‘mindfulness’ (colouring books, crochet, apps), Marketing-wise there have been phenomena like hygge (as far as I’ve seen books of the Chicken Soup type, but with more crossover into other areas, as with mindfulness) and, in Scotland at least, hygge rebranded, aggravatingly, as ‘coorie.’ In this context ‘coorie’ is a similar concept to ‘hygge’ but it’s not really how I’ve been used to hearing the word used through my life so something like ‘A Little Book of Coorie‘ just doesn’t sound right. But maybe a book of hygge doesn’t either, if you grew up with that word?
People take comfort in pretty much anything that distracts them, so often the best kind of comfort is being active; walking, running, working or eating, and I understand that; nothing keeps you in the moment or prevents brooding like focusing on what you’re doing. But, unless you’re in a warzone or something, it’s when you aren’t busy that the world seems the most oppressive, and while running may keep you occupied, which can be comforting, it isn’t ‘comfortable’ (for me) in the usual sense of the word. Personally, the things I do for comfort are most likely to be the same things I write about most often, because I like them; reading, listening to music, watching films or TV.
Comfort reading, comfort viewing, comfort listening are all familiar ideas, and at first I assumed that the core of what makes them comforting must be their familiarity. And familiarity presumably does have a role to play – I probably wouldn’t turn to a book I knew nothing about for comfort, though I might read something new by an author I already like. Familiarity, though it might be – thinking of my own comfort reads – the only essential ingredient for something to qualify as comforting, is in itself a neutral quality at best and definitely not automatically comforting. But even when things are comforting, does that mean they have anything in common with each other, other that the circular fact of their comforting quality? Okay, it’s getting very annoying writing (and reading) the word comforting now.
Many of the books that I’d call my all-time favourites don’t pass the comfort test; that is, I have to be in the mood for them. I love how diverse and stimulating books like Dawn Ades’ Writings on Art and Anti-Art and Harold Rosenberg’s The Anxious Object are, but although I can dip into them at almost any time, reading an article isn’t the same as reading a book. There are not many novels I like better than The Revenge for Love or The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis. They are funny and clever and mean-spirited in a way that I love and I’ve read them several times and will probably read them again; but I never turn to Lewis for comfort. But even though he would probably be glad not to be a ‘comfort read,’ that has nothing (as far as I can tell) to do with the content of his books. Some of my ‘comfort reads’ are obvious, and in analysing them I can come up with a list of plausible points that make them comforting, but others less so.
random selection of comfort reads
In that obvious category are books I read when I was young, but that I can still happily read as an adult. There is an element of nostalgia in that I’m sure, and nostalgia in its current form is a complicated kind of comfort. I first read The Lord of the Rings in my early teens but, as I’ve written elsewhere, I had previously had it read to me as a child, so I feel like I’ve always known it. Obviously that is comforting in itself, but there’s also the fact that it is an escapist fantasy; magical and ultimately uplifting, albeit in a bittersweet way. The same goes for my favourites of Michael Moorcock’s heroic fantasy series. I read the Corum, Hawkmoon and Elric series’ (and various other bits of the Eternal Champion cycle) in my teens and though Moorcock is almost entirely different from Tolkien, the same factors (escapist fantasy, heroic, magical etc) apply. Even the Robert Westall books I read and loved as a kid, though they (The Watch House, The Scarecrows, The Devil on the Road, The Wind Eye, the Machine Gunners, Fathom Five) are often horrific, have the comforting quality that anything you loved when you were 11 has. Not that the books stay the same; as an adult they are, surprisingly, just as creepy as I remembered, but I also notice things I didn’t notice then. Something too mild to be called misogyny, but a little uncomfortable nonetheless and, more impressively, characters that I loved and identified with now seem like horrible little brats, which I think is actually quite clever. But that sense of identification, even with a horrible little brat, has a kind of comfort in it, possibly.
The same happens with (mentioned in too many other things on this site) IT. A genuinely nasty horror novel about a shapeshifting alien that pretends to be a clown and kills and eats children doesn’t at first glance seem like it should be comforting. But if you read it when you were thirteen and identified with the kids rather than the monster, why wouldn’t it be? Having all kind of horrible adventures with your friends is quite appealing as a child and having them vicariously via a book is the next best thing, or actually a better or at least less perilous one.
But those are books I read during or before adolescence and so the comforting quality comes to them naturally, or so it seems. The same could be true of my favourite Shakespeare plays, which I first read during probably the most intensely unhappy part of my adolescence – but in a weird, counterintuitive way, that adds to the sense of nostalgia. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books are kind of in a category of their own. When I read the first one, Adrian was 13 and I would have been 11. And then, I read the second a year or so later, but the others just randomly through the years. I’m not sure I was even aware of them when they were first published, but the ones where Adrian is an adult are just as funny but also significantly more painful. It’s a strange thing to read about the adult life of a character you “knew” when you were both unhappy children. Although she had a huge amount of acclaim and success during her life, I’m still not sure Townsend gets quite the credit she’s due for making Adrian Mole a real person. Laughing at a nerdy teenager’s difficult adolescence and his cancer treatment as a still-unhappy adult is a real imaginative and empathic achievement. Still; the comfort there could be in the familiar, not just the character but the world he inhabits. Adrian is, reading him as an adult (and as he becomes an adult) surprisingly nuanced; even though he’s an uptight and conservative and in a way a little Englander and terminally unreliable as a teenager and loses none of those traits as an adult, you somehow know that you can count on him not to be a Nazi or misogynist, no small thing in this day and age.
But if Frodo and Elric and Adrian Mole are characters who I knew from childhood or adolescence, what about A Clockwork Orange, which I first read and immediately loved in my early 20s and which, despite the (complicatedly) happy ending could hardly be called uplifting? Or The Catcher in the Rye, which again I didn’t read until my 20s and have been glad ever since that I didn’t “do” it at school as so many people did. Those books have a lot in common with Adrian Mole, in the sense that they are first-person narratives by troubled teenagers. Not that Alex is “troubled” in the Adrian/Holden Caulfield sense. But maybe it’s that sense of a ‘voice’ that’s comforting? If so, what does that say about the fact that Crash by JG Ballard or worse, American Psycho is also a comfort read for me? I read both of those in my 20s too, and immediately liked them but not in the same way as The Catcher in the Rye. When I read that book, part of me responds to it in the identifying sense; that part of me will probably always feel like Holden Caulfield, even though I didn’t do the things he did or worry about ‘phonies’ as a teenager. I loved Crash from the first time I read the opening paragraphs but although there must be some sense of identification (it immediately felt like one of ‘my’ books) and although have a lot of affection for Ballard as he comes across in interviews, I don’t find myself reflected in the text, thankfully. Same (even more thankfully) with American Psycho – Patrick Bateman is an engaging, very annoying narrator (more Holden than Alex, interestingly) and I find that as with Alex in A Clockwork Orange his voice feels oddly effortless for me to read. Patrick isn’t as nice(!) or as funny or clever as Alex, but still, there’s something about his neurotic observations and hilariously tedious lists that’s – I don’t know, not soothing to read, exactly, but easy to read. Or something. Hmm.
But if Alex, Adrian, Holden and Patrick feel real, what about actual real people? I didn’t read Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice until I was in my early 30s, but it quickly became a book that I can pick up and enjoy it at any time. And yet, though there is a kind of overall narrative and even a sort of happy ending, that isn’t really the main appeal; and in this case it isn’t familiarity either. It’s episodic and easy to dip into (Jon Ronson’s books have that too and so do George Orwell’s Essays and Journalism and Philip Larkin’s Selected Letters, which is another comfort read from my 20s) The culture of Japan that Adelstein documents as a young reporter has an alien kind of melancholy that is somehow hugely appealing even when it’s tragic. Another true (or at least fact-based) comfort read, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I only read in my 40s after meaning to read it ever since high school, has no business whatsoever being comforting. So why is it? I’m not getting any closer to an answer.
Predictability presumably has a role to play; as mentioned above, I wouldn’t read a book for the first time as ‘a comfort read’ and even though I said I might read a familiar author that way, it suddenly occurs to me that that is only half true. I would read Stephen King for comfort, but I can think of at least two of his books where the comfort has been undone because the story went off in a direction that I didn’t want it to. That should be a positive thing; predictability, even in genre fiction which is by definition generic to some extent, is the enemy of readability and the last thing you want is to lose interest in a thriller. I’ve never been able to enjoy whodunnit type thrillers for some reason; my mother loved them and they – Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Sue Grafton, even Dick Francis, were her comfort reads. Maybe they are too close to puzzles for my taste? Not sure.
So to summarise; well-loved stories? Sometimes comforting. Identifiable-with characters? Sometimes comforting. Authorial voices? This may be the only unifying factor in all the books I’ve listed and yet it still seems a nebulous kind of trait and Robert Westall has little in common with Sue Townsend or Bret Easton Ellis, or (etc, etc). So instead of an actual conclusion, I’ll end with a funny, sad and comforting quote from a very silly, funny but in some ways comforting book; Harry Harrison’s 1965 satirical farce Bill, the Galactic Hero. The book is in lots of ways horrific; Bill, an innocent farm boy, finds himself swept up into the space corps and a series of ridiculous and perilous adventures. The ending of the book is both funny and very bitter, but rewinding to the end of part one, Bill has lost his left arm in combat but had a new one – but a right arm, which belonged to his best friend, grafted on:
He wished he could talk to some of his old buddies, then remembered that they were all dead and his spirits dropped further. He tried to cheer himself up but could think of nothing to be cheery about until he discovered that he could shake hands with himself. This made him feel a little better. He lay back on the pillows and shook hands with himself until he fell asleep.
Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero, p.62 (Victor Gollancz, 1965)
Although Mr Musk’s* statement about Hitler, Stalin and Mao is (surely not unexpectedly) ignorant and abhorrent, he is making a serious point that’s worth remembering, even if his reasons for doing so come from a paranoid, (wouldn’t normally go straight for the WW2 analogy but he already did, so why not?) bunker-mentality sense of self-preservation.
Hitler was the main architect of the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities from murder to mental/physical torture to the indoctrination of children in a misanthropic ideology, and so he therefore bears a large part of the moral responsibility for it. BUT, he genuinely wasn’t standing there in the streets of Warsaw or the hills of Ukraine, swinging small children by the legs and smashing them to death against walls or leading groups of half-starved prisoners into ravines and machine-gunning them, or even holding a gun to the heads of those who did to make sure they did it.
*nice innit? Sounds kind of like a fox from an old children’s book
Stalin’s policies led, both directly and indirectly to the death of millions, but he wasn’t personally there in the salt mines working people to death, or stabbing them in the head with ice-picks or torturing and shooting them because their vision of communism differed from his, or simply because they refused to agree with him.
Mao Zedong instigated vast, dehumanising programs that decimated the people of his country through famine and starvation and led campaigns that ruthlessly wiped out political opponents – but he did it with words or with a pen, not with bullets or by actually snatching food from people’s mouths.
In all of those cases, those atrocities happened for two reasons; most importantly, because the instigators wanted it; they would not have happened without those three individuals. But also because others, most of whose names are now unknown to us without a lot of tedious and depressing research, were willing to make it happen. The people who murdered and tortured did those things, some no doubt more enthusiastically than others, because they were paid to do so. Now, there are people ending international aid to starving children, or impeding Ukraine’s fight against the invading forces of Russia, or firing veterans or ‘just’ setting up armed cordons around car dealerships and arresting people that they or their superiors are pretending for ideological reasons to think are dangerous aliens – and whatever the level of enthusiasm, they are essentially doing those things because they are being paid to.
Some of these people (it doesn’t matter which era or regime you apply this to, as bodycam and mobile phone footage testifies) perform additional cruelties which they aren’t specifically being paid for, and that their leaders may never even know about, just because they can and because it gratifies them in some way, while others are simply following the orders they are given.
But ‘just following orders’ – complicity, in a word – wasn’t considered a reasonable defence in the war trials of 1945 and it still isn’t one now. And the reptilian act of formulating and issuing dehumanising orders, even (or perhaps especially?) without personally committing any atrocities oneself isn’t any kind of defence at all. It was and should be part of any prosecution’s case for maximum culpability. Leaders require followers and followers need leaders, but you don’t have to be either.
Way back in April this year Henrik Palm released an album called Nerd Icon (via Svart Records). It’s very good – 80s-inflected melodic hard rock is as good a description as any, I guess, but it has a very individual personality and none of the pomposity or poser quality of that kind of music (no offence to actual 80s rock, which I love). In fact it’s one of my albums of the year (see short list below somewhere). But thinking about ‘albums of the year’ (yes, I probably whinge about this annually) especially in the context of Henrik Palm’s work makes me think of what a meaningless accolade it is. Not because there isn’t lots of good music produced every year, but just because people who love music don’t generally accumulate favourite albums in a real time, chronological way. The point of recorded music is that it has been recorded and can be therefore enjoyed outside of the time and place that it was made.
To labour the point, if music only moved forwards, with this year’s top 50 (or whatever) albums superseding last year’s and so on, ‘classic albums’ wouldn’t exist and once-obscure artists would remain obscure and people like Nick Drake (obvious example I know) would be only loved by the shockingly tiny handful of living people who bought his work at the time. But even before the internet that wasn’t the case and it still isn’t, so end of year lists end up being as peculiar a time capsule as the top 40 from years ago is. Yes, they are ranked by quality rather than popularity, but as looking back at these things demonstrates, they are no more reliable for that.
Not an album of this year, but an unexpected favourite
But the reason Henrik Palm illustrates this point for me is that in 2020 he released Poverty Metal, I heard it at the time and quite liked it but I don’t think I wrote about it anywhere, though it got a surprised mention in 2022 – and to my continued surprise I still play it fairly often. It’s an album as unassuming and quirky (I mean that is the right word but bleh) as its title – melodic, sometimes kind of 70s-ish, sometimes not, rarely very metal, often quite delicate and always thoughtful. It’s peculiar, but part of what makes it peculiar is how conventional it is – but at the same time, how unusual it is by the standards of those conventions. I guess it has become one of my favourite albums, which I don’t think anything on my actual 2020 ‘albums of the year’ lists did. And after the dust has settled on 2024, it may be that if any album from this year enters my personal pantheon, it could be one that hasn’t really registered with me yet or that I haven’t even heard.
Now that I’ve undermined it in advance, here’s my ‘albums of the year’ feature.
My favourite albums of this year are two which I (obviously) think are great, but for varying reasons I don’t know if they will stick around my personal playlist like Poverty Metal has – but they may.
The first is In Concert by Diamanda Galás (Intravenal Sound Operations). Live albums are interesting in that many people (including myself) can be slightly dismissive of them (“_____ has a new album coming out! Oh, it’s just a live album“), a strange reaction, because if you’re lucky enough to see your favourite artists live you never think “oh, it was just a live performance.” In the context of home listening, none of the ephemeral magic of a live show – the stuff that’s really about you – is present, but theoretically the most important part is. In comparison with Galás’ recent, brilliantly gruelling work (Broken Gargoyles was my album of the year in 2022) the album is simple, or at least unadorned; just her extraordinary voice and uniquely expressive piano. But that’s quite a ‘just’ – and she plays a set of songs that are urgent, deeply moving, haunting, wise, shockingly relevant and occasionally wickedly funny. What more do you want? It’s about as far removed from a stadium band delivering polished versions of their greatest hits as you can get and though it would no doubt be a fantastic souvenir and reminder if you were lucky enough to see the performance, it’s entirely transporting just as a record. Will it join the Masque of the Red Death trilogy, The Litanies of Satan, The Sporting Life and Broken Gargoyles as one of my favourite Diamanda Galás albums? Who knows? Some of her work takes time to really get to know in a way that In Concert doesn’t, and I feel like I’m still ‘working on’ (not the right phrase) some of her older work – what that means for this album I don’t know, but I do know that nothing this year has cut deeper.
Joint album of the year – The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World
My second album of the year is Songs of a Lost World by The Cure (Fiction), which I reviewed here, which is just as visceral for me, but for completely different reasons. It is, as an amazing amount of people seem to agree, a superb album, moving and memorable and all of that; but I have been a fan of The Cure since I was seventeen and there hasn’t been any point where I stopped listening to them completely. That doesn’t necessarily mean I was predisposed to like it – their last couple of records didn’t do much for me, though they have their moments – but it is relevant to my personal response to it. Even though by any objective methods of analysis (there aren’t any) Songs of a Lost World is probably as good as anything the band has done, will it join Seventeen Seconds, Disintegration, Japanese Whispers and Pornography as one of my all-time favourite Cure albums? Or even Faith, The Top, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, the Head on the Door and Boys Don’t Cry as my second-tier, almost-favourite Cure albums? Only time will tell, but in that time I will no longer be the me that was most receptive to their music and the band will have to compete with far more music (old, new, whatever) than they ever did when I obsessively listened to them. Then I had no way of getting their work except by buying it or making tapes from friends who owned it. I definitely think I love music just as much as I ever did, but I don’t obsessively listen to anything the way I did in my teens and early 20s. The older Cure records, even the ones I liked relatively less, like Wish and Kiss Me… are imprinted on my brain in a way that just doesn’t get a chance to happen now. But in a way I feel like Songs of a Lost World addresses and encapsulates all of those feelings, which is one of the reasons it’s so good.
Not sure if it’s coincidental or significant that both of my favourite albums of the year are by artists I’ve been listening to for decades, but it’s interesting either way. So anyway, a wee list of honourable mentions and we’re done with this for another year
Henrik Palm – Nerd Icon (Svart Records) – sort of 80s-ish, sort of metal-ish, 100% individual
Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Feeding Tube) – I loved Not So Deep as a Well ten years ago (mentioned in passing here) and love this even more
Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight) – wrote about it here – for me it doesn’t top my favourite Das Seelenbrechen, but it’s as good as any of his others
One of my top 3 or 4 albums of all time, John Cale’s Paris 1919 was reissued this year, his latest POPtical Illusion was good too
Mick Harvey – Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute) – lovely autumnal album by ex-Bad Seed and musical genius, more here
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Wild God (PIAS recordings) – for me a good rather than amazing Nick Cave album, but he’s better than most people so still easily made the list, though I’m not sure I like it more than his old colleague’s work
Aara – Eiger(Debemur Morti Productions) – Superior Swiss black metal, conceptual without being pompous and full of great tunes and atmosphere
Claire Rousay – Sentiment (Thrill Jockey) – bracingly sparse and desolate but lovely too
Alcest – Chants de L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast) – seems so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but this was (I thought) the best Alcest album for years, beautiful, wistful and generally lovely. I talked to Neige about it at the time, I should post that interview here at some point!
eh, Mel Gibson: but he played a good Hamlet (dir Franco Zeffirelli, 1990)
With apologies to Marcel Proust – but not very vehement apologies, because it’s true – the taste of honey on toast is as powerfully evocative and intensely transporting to me as anything that I can think of. The lips and tongue that made that association happen don’t exist anymore and neither does the face, neither do the eyes, and neither does one of the two brains and/or hearts* that I suppose really made it happen (mine are still there, though). In 21st century Britain, it’s more likely than not that even her bones don’t exist anymore, which makes the traditional preoccupation with returning to dust feel apt and more immediate and (thankfully?) reduces the kind of corpse-fetishising morbidity that seems to have appealed so much to playgoers in the Elizabethan/Jacobean era.
Death & Youth (c.1480-90) by the unknown German artist known as The Master of the Housebook
Thou shell of death, Once the bright face of my betrothed lady, When life and beauty naturally fill’d out These ragged imperfections, When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set In those unsightly rings: then ’twas a face So far beyond the artificial shine Of any woman’s bought complexion (The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606/7) by Thomas Middleton and/or Cyril Tourneur, Act one, Scene one)
*is the heart in the brain? In one sense obviously not, in another maybe, but the sensations associated with the heart seem often to happen somewhere around the stomach; or is that just me?
More to the point, “here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft“, etc. All of which is beautiful; but for better or worse, a pile of ash isn’t likely to engender the same kind of thoughts or words as Yorick’s – or anybody’s – skull. But anyway, the non-existence of a person – or, even more abstractly, the non-existence of skin that has touched your skin (though technically of course all of the skin involved in those kisses has long since disappeared into dust and been replaced anyway) is an absence that’s strange and dismal to think about. But then most things don’t exist.
Vanitas: Still Life with Skull (c.1671) by an unknown English painter
But honey does exist of course; and the association between human beings and sugary bee vomit goes back probably as long as human beings themselves. There are Mesolithic cave paintings, 8000 years old or more, made by people who don’t exist, depicting people who may never have existed except as drawings, or may have once existed but don’t anymore, plundering beehives for honey. Honey was used by the ancient Egyptians, who no longer exist, in some of their most solemn rites, it had sacred significance for the ancient Greeks, who no longer exist, it was used in medicine in India and China, which do exist now but technically didn’t then, by people who don’t, now. Mohammed recommended it for its healing properties; it’s a symbol of abundance in the Bible and it’s special enough to be kosher despite being the product of unclean insects. It’s one of the five elixirs of Hinduism, Buddha was brought honey by a monkey that no longer exists. The Vikings ate it and used it for medicine too. Honey was the basis of mead, the drink of the Celts who sometimes referred to the island of Britain as the Isle of Honey.
probably my favourite Jesus & Mary Chain song: Just Like Honey (1985)
And so on and on, into modern times. But also (those Elizabethan-Jacobeans again) “The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite.” (William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c.1595) Act 2, scene 6) “Your comfortable words are like honey. They relish well in your mouth that’s whole; but in mine that’s wounded they go down as if the sting of the bee were in them.”(John Webster, The White Devil (1612), Act 3. Sc.ene 3). See also “honey trap”. “Man produces evil as a bee produces honey.”You catch more flies with honey.
But on the whole, the sweetness of honey is not and has never been sinister. A Taste of Honey, Tupelo Honey, “Wild Honey,” “Honey Pie”, “Just like Honey,” “Me in Honey,” “Put some sugar on it honey,” Pablo Honey, “Honey I Sure Miss You.” Honey to the B. “Honey” is one of the sweetest (yep) of endearments that people use with each other. Winnie-the-Pooh and Bamse covet it. Honey and toast tasted in a kiss at the age of 14 is, in the history of the world, a tiny and trivial thing, but it’s enough to resonate throughout a life, just as honey has resonated through the world’s human cultures. Honey’s Dead. But the mouth that tasted so sweetly of honey doesn’t exist anymore. Which is sad, because loss is sad. But how sad? Most things never exist and even most things that have existed don’t exist now, so maybe the fact that it has existed is enough.
“Most things don’t exist” seems patently untrue: for a thing to be ‘a thing’ it must have some kind of existence, surely? And yet, even leaving aside things and people that no longer exist, we are vastly outnumbered by the things that have never existed, from the profound to the trivial. Profound, well even avoiding offending people and their beliefs, probably few people would now say that Zeus and his extended family are really living in a real Olympus. Trivially, 70-plus years on from the great age of the automobile, flying cars as imagined by generations of children, as depicted in books and films, are still stubbornly absent from the skies above our roads. The idea of them exists, but even if – headache-inducing notion – it exists as a specific idea (“the idea of a flying car”), rather than just within the general realm of “ideas,” an idea is an idea, a thing perhaps but not the thing that it is about. Is a specific person’s memory of another person a particular thing because it relates to a particular person, or does it exist only under the larger and more various banner of “memories”? Either way, it’s immaterial, because even though the human imagination is a thing that definitely exists, the idea of a flying car is no more a flying car than Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a flying machine was a flying machine or that my memory of honey-and-toast kisses is a honey-and-toast kiss.
If you or I picture a human being with electric blue skin, we can imagine it and if we have the talent we can draw it, someone could depict it in a film, but it wouldn’t be the thing itself, because human beings with electric blue skin, like space dolphins, personal teleportation devices, seas of blood, winged horses, articulate sentient faeces and successful alchemical experiments, don’t exist. And depending on the range of your imagination (looking at that list mine seems a bit limited), you could think of infinite numbers of things that don’t exist. There are also, presumably, untold numbers of things that do exist but that we personally don’t know about or that we as a species don’t know about yet. But even if it was possible to make a complete list of all of the things in existence (or things in existence to date; new things are invented or develop or evolve all the time), it would always be possible to think of even more things that don’t exist, – simply, in the least imaginative way, by naming variations on, or parodies of everything that does exist. So supermassive black holes exist? Okay, but what about supertiny pink holes? What about supermedium beige holes? This June, a new snake (disappointingly named Ovophis jenkinsi) was discovered. But what about a version of Ovophis jenkinsi that sings in Spanish or has paper bones or smells like Madonna? They don’t exist.
JAMC Honey’s Dead, 1992
Kind of a creepy segue if you think about it (so please don’t), but like those beautifully-shaped lips that tasted of honey, my mother no longer exists, except as a memory, or lots of different memories, belonging to lots of different people. Presumably she exists in lots of memories as lots of different people who happen to have the same name. But unlike supermedium beige holes, the non-existence of previously-existing things and people is complex, because of the different perspectives they are remembered from. But regardless, they are still fundamentally not things anymore. But even with the ever-growing, almost-infinite number of things, there are, demonstrably, more things that don’t exist. And, without wishing to be horribly negative or repeating things I’ve written before, one of the surprises with the death of a close relative was to find that death does exist. Well, obviously, everyone knows that – but not just as an ending or as the absence of life, as was always known, but as an active, grim-reaper-like force of its own. For me, the evidence for that – which I’m sure could be explained scientifically by a medical professional – is the cold that I mentioned in the previous article. Holding a hand that gets cold seems pretty normal; warmth ebbing away as life ebb away; that’s logical and natural. But this wasn’t the expected (to me) cooling down of a warm thing to room temperature, like the un-drunk cups of tea which day after day were brought and cooled down because the person they were brought for didn’t really want them anymore, just the idea of them. That cooling felt natural, as did the warming of the glass of water that sat un-drunk at the bedside because the person it was for could no longer hold or see it. That water had been cold but had warmed up to room temperature, but the cold in the hand wasn’t just a settling in line with ambient conditions. It was active cold; hands chilling and then radiating cold in quite an intense way, a coldness that dropped far below room temperature. I mentioned it to a doctor during a brief, unbelievably welcome break to get some air, and she said “Yes, she doesn’t have long left.” Within a few days I wished I’d asked for an explanation of where that cold was coming from; where is it generated? Which organ in the human body can generate cold so quickly and intensely? Does it do it in any other situations? And if not, why not? So, although death can seem abstract, in the same sense that ‘life’ seems abstract, being big and pervasive, death definitely exists. But as what? Don’t know; not a single entity, since it’s incipient in everyone, coded into our DNA: but that coding has nothing to do with getting hit by cars or drowning or being shot, does it? So, a big question mark to that. Keats would say not to question it, just to enjoy the mystery. Well alright then.
Klaus Nomi as “the Cold Genius” from his 1981 version of Purcell’s “The Cold Song”
But since most things *don’t* exist, but death definitely does exist, existence is, in universal terms, rare enough to be something like winning the lottery. But like winning the lottery, existence in itself is not any kind of guarantee of happiness or satisfaction or even honey-and-toast kisses; but it at least offers the possibility of those things, whereas non-existence doesn’t offer anything, not even peace, which has to be experienced to exist. We have all not existed before and we will all not exist again; but honey will still be here, for as long as bees are at least. I don’t know if that’s comforting or not. But if you’re reading this – and I’m definitely writing it – we do currently exist, so try enjoy your lottery win, innit.
Something silly about music next time I think.
Ancient Roman vanitas mosaic showing a skull and the wheel of fortune
My old Penguin paperback of The Castle, which features two chapters not included in the original 1930 UK edition (which were separately translated by Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser), is from of my least favourite stylistic phase of the Penguin Modern Classics series. In that point in the early 80s, the spines, in a nostalgic nod to the classic early (orange and white) days of Penguin. It does have a nice cover illustration, by Elizabeth Pyle, but otherwise the design is a little drab. The book is 298 pages of fairly small but readable print. The Vitalis edition is far more stylish and the cover artwork uses a beautifully evocative photograph of (Bohemian?) “Peasant women” from 1918 and a photograph of Friedland (or Frýdlant) castle in Czechia. The type looks around the same size as the Penguin edition, but though the book is slightly bigger than the Penguin, it has 382 pages.
Even allowing for the fact that the Vitalis Castle includes nice, dark, moody and scratchy illustrations by Karel Hruška, it’s a noticeably longer book, and the reason for that is revealed in the two quotes at the top of the page. The Muirs’ prose – like Edwin Muir’s poetry – is terse and spare, but also flexible and evocative. It’s the “voice” that Kafka has had for me since I was a teenager. It also has the benefit – or at least I think it’s a benefit, more later – of having been translated close to Kafka’s own time. When that first British edition of The Castle was published and Edwin Muir wrote in his introduction “Franz Kafka’s name, as far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers,” he was talking about an author who had only been dead for six years, and the book itself had only been in print in Kafka’s own language for four years.
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is one of my favourite novels – it’s also the product, very obviously, of someone who could speak and think, fluently, in a lot of languages – ten is the number he usually gave, ‘with bits and pieces of others’. Burgess created the book’s slang, Nadsat, in order to write about ‘the youth’ in a way that didn’t date like real slang and it definitely worked. Rightly, I think, Burgess didn’t want a glossary of Nadsat terms in the book. Although some publishers have added one anyway, the book works far better if the reader just immerses themselves in the narrator’s voice and his disorienting world. But Burgess was only human, and in perhaps the novel’s weakest moment (because it takes us out of that world) he couldn’t resist pointing out that the language his young narrator Alex speaks isn’t just whimsy on the part of the author:
I loved Nechochwen’s 
Ghost World have made some of my favourite albums; I was immediately smitten with their 2017 debut album, which was my 
Hmm. I gave this a go because, despite the fact that industrial metal is one of my least favourite genres of music in the world, Swiss black metal has a special place in my heart and LADLO is a very dependable label. And..? Well, not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s good, there’s a nice chaotic, noisy atmosphere and it reminded me at times of Abigor (who I do like) and Blacklodge (who I occasionally like). The atmospheres and the choral bits are really cool and the noisy stuff with sirens etc is impressively alarming, though not nice if you have a headache.
I 
The current case of Luigi Mangione is far stranger. It’s the only time I can recall that the supporters (in this case I think ‘fans’ would be just as correct a word) of someone accused of murder want the suspect to be guilty rather than innocent. Whether they would still feel that way if he looked different or had a history of violent crime or had a different kind of political agenda is endlessly debatable, but irrelevant. It looks as if the State will be seeking the death penalty for him and for all the reasons listed above I think that’s wrong. But assuming that he’s guilty, which obviously one shouldn’t do (and if he isn’t, Jesus Christ, good luck getting a fair trial!) Mangione himself and some of his fans, should really be okay with it. If he is guilty, he hasn’t done anything to help a single person to get access to healthcare or improve the healthcare system or even effectively protested against it in a way that people with political power can positively react to. UnitedHealthcare still has a CEO, still has dubious political connections and still treats people very badly. That doesn’t mean that it’s an unassailable monolith that can never be changed, but clearly removing one figurehead isn’t how it can be done.
Henrik Palm – Nerd Icon (Svart Records) – sort of 80s-ish, sort of metal-ish, 100% individual
Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Feeding Tube) – I loved Not So Deep as a Well ten years ago (mentioned in passing 
Ihsahn – Ihsahn (Candlelight) – wrote about it 
One of my top 3 or 4 albums of all time, John Cale’s Paris 1919 was reissued this year, his latest POPtical Illusion was good too
Mick Harvey – Five Ways to Say Goodbye (Mute) – lovely autumnal album by ex-Bad Seed and musical genius, more 
Aara – 
Claire Rousay – 
Alcest – Chants de L’Aurore (Nuclear Blast) – seems so long ago that I almost forgot about it, but this was (I thought) the best Alcest album for years, beautiful, wistful and generally lovely. I talked to Neige about it at the time, I should post that interview here at some point!
