Never trust pilots who believe in the afterlife

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Grot Scrabblers 

“Screens are ruining young lives. We’re not standing for it!”

I’ve come to Portslade to meet Gemma and Curtis Chance for an unusual foraging trip. Gemma explains,

“Youth mental health problems map perfectly to the rise of smart phones. We’re not prepared to put our boy through that and although he’s almost completely socially ostracised, it’s worth it. A huge concern is the access to extreme pornography that’s twisting young minds. We decided to do something about it.”

Curtis expands,

“When I was a hormonal young lad, porn was a precious treasure stolen by other boys from their dad’s collection or found under bushes in parks and wasteland. I wanted that for my lad.”

This is why the Chances started Grot Scrabblers, a small but growing group of concerned parents and enthusiasts who forage locally for pornography in the traditional manner.  We head through a strip of woodland that runs beside a main road, eyes to the floor. A pile of fly tipped rubbish yields nothing of erotic interest. A tiny clearing with recently discarded cider cans looks promising but alas, no jazz material. I offer that although I don’t go specifically looking, it’s been a great many years since I saw any discarded porn. Gemma smiles.

“So you see the problem. That’s why we’ve pivoted our aim.” From her bag she produces a Bravissimo catalogue and tucks it beneath a holly bush. 

“It’s just a bra catalogue but it’ll do in a pinch.”, adds Curtis. “We’ve got some stronger stuff but we’ll leave that deep in some gorse. Make ‘em work for the top grot. Hopefully a teenager will find it and enjoy it. Just maybe they’ll turn off their X Station or whatever and go outside to discover magic and adventure in the real world”.

It’s all rather moving.

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Planks Constant

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The Comforters by Muriel Spark (Penguin, 1963)

Following up an intriguing reference in Mimi Pond’s Do Admit, I’ve started reading Muriel Spark’s novels. Aware of Maggie Smith’s iconic turn as Miss Jean Brodie I had always presumed that the film, and novel, were heart-warming, family fare, not realising that the titular ‘hero’ is, among other things, a fascist. Smith’s performance is justly feted but the film is histrionic in comparison to the spare, precision of the novel, wittily entertaining as it slides the knife between your ribs.

Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, is a gawky adolescent in comparison. Written in an attic room in Camberwell soon after Spark converted to Catholicism, it is a genuinely and winningly weird book. Charming in its awkward ‘try anything’ debut manner, it strings together a rum selection of mid-century bohemians, BBC announcers, Catholic gentry, book dealers and grandmothers in a convoluted plot involving diabolism and diamond smuggling.

Caroline, herself an aspiring novelist and Catholic convert, comes to realise that she is a character in a novel, and an absurdly constructed one at that. In Caroline’s rebellious criticisms of the novel’s picaresque coincidences and crime caper tropes, Spark gets to auto-critique the awkward joins of her debut, yet carries on gluing it all together, seemingly having a ball.

Yet neither is it all just a joke. Spark’s characters suffer religious crises and spiritual anxieties in earnest, and her leisurely prose occasionally leads the reader, almost imperceptibly, into moments of understated violence or disconcerting ontological horror.

The Comforters comes to us now as if from another world, an exotic post-war Britain where people (admittedly of a certain social milieu) had time for Soho leisure and an inclination for metaphysical, and indeed, metafictional speculation. But perhaps that world was only ever a figment of Spark’s mischievous, savagely bright imagination.

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“Hail to the king, baby” – The Arrest (Jonathan Lethem, 2020)

It is now easier to imagine an end to capitalism than it is to imagine the end of the world. This is not necessarily an improvement when we can see those with power seeking to gain purchase on the most profitable collapse. Visions of kingship are now openly shared, and the dreaming is flooded with new futures: images of robots wiping bums for winners, endless shifts in the martian hellscape out back for the rest. 

Sorted. 

Back in the early plague age Jonathan Lethem tried to journey into a different landscape. The Arrest is one of his purer genre exercises, which means it’s less convincing than his peans to the city and the forces that shape and reshape it. (Check out Brooklyn Crime Novel for the revelation that – *SPOILERS* – Lethem himself may be the perpetrator.)

Reliably self-aware, Lethem cops to this distance in two ways. First, by showing us the novel’s Ursula Le Guin/Kim Stanley Robinson post-collapse sustainable farming community through the eyes of “Journeyman”, a low profile script doctor whose lack of handiness is a running joke in town. Second, by incorporating archived visuals from The Wicker Man and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen to contextualise the big fantasy elements in the story.

For all their charm to those with the right damage, these images come close to making The Arrest too cute. Thankfully, the narrative perspective provides necessary resonance. Haunted by the supercar that rolls into town due to his connection to its driver – childhood friend turned Hollywood exec, stories and espresso keen to occupy other hands – Journeyman is oblivious to the ritual of banishment until he has to play his part in it.

Against forces so inescapably chatty, our opportunities for response may appear similarly oblique: “If you’ve never seen it done, you wouldn’t believe it possible.”

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A Spell of Binding - Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe.

A detail I appreciate in Gundam is the enemy pilot death. Amongst the squadron of enemy Mobile Suits, there will suddenly be a cut to inside one. Not a sinister faceless mook like in Top Gun or Star Wars. Some poor dude who just has time to offer a line or exclamation before he absolutely eats shit. For a few brief seconds they are humanised before they die. Weirdly consequential in a robot cartoon.

So, Hathaway’s back. Still traumatised from killing people when he was fifteen and still haunted by Amuro Ray’s insistence that mass violence is not the way. The beautiful thing about Gundam is the psychic connections of Newtypes mean it could just be one man’s mental health struggles externally projected or an actual ghost.

What is the Mobile Suit but a metaphor for the body? You spend your life wondering when you’ll feel like an adult. What does adulthood actually feel like? Assurance? Strength? Maybe what you’re really hoping for is the feeling of stepping into a Mobile Suit.

Hathaway remains a Peter Pan. His late twenties tied to the trauma of his mid teens. ‘Their souls are bound by gravity’ goes the series insult to those trapped in the old ways. The Oldtypes. It’s always been a conflict between youth and their elders. In Hathaway we find arrested development cases. Hollywood probably can’t have anything as the internal externalised so bluntly as GiGi monologues ‘so, I have daddy issues’, but giant robots call for the Shakespearian.

So, Hathaway isn’t weighed down by gravity, or so he thinks. Reinforced by the uncanny flight of the gravity defying Xi Gundam. But the man who spoke those words, the man he’s desperately trying to live up to was a black hole looking for something to fill it. A cause. A person. Something to fix his daddy issues.

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I AM, TOO TOUGH TO DIE

Gave it a good go this last fortnight though, perhaps in simpatico with the legend and my favourite childhood superhero Peter Optimus Prime Cullen, perhaps in a bid to steal the light from my sibling’s surgical procedure, I underwent a process to discover I had - very gangsterly tbqh - had a heart attack without realising and then got shot off in a ambo to Edinburgh for open heart surgery. My mother’s father died at 46 of a heart attack, I am 47. Frightening.

 “Been hit with a few shells now I walk with a limp (I’m aight tho)” as the mayor of New York’s enemy puts it. Anyway I like to extemporise on heroism here a bit, which I think is not something you can do solely in words and have to embody and be, and you know who are perfect angels of humility, temperance and care are (okay 95% of, there’s one major exception and we all know her name) the nurses of the NHS. Fair play to the surgeons and that too but they are the basis. 

Some self-interest cos they did a spectacular job with me, but these are people who do a proper adult job, under rewarded, every day and an absolute foundation stone of Britain. If I was American I am fairly certain I would be dead or would be grubbing online begging barrels to extend my lifespan minimally, I have no idea how that selfish, sociopathic country works, well I do, it leaves unfortunates the like of me by a roadside. Utterly humbling experience and I mean that positively.

CHICKS DIG SCARS

I watched the Frank Miller documentary on Amazon today, I highly recommend it but it was a revelation - and Transformers was utterly a Marvel product, it made mine marvel for 42 years, far more than any other thing - to discover Flint Dille the screenwriter of the animated film (back out Thursday folks!) is his best friend. Reminded me of some apocrypha that either Miller or Steve Gerber had said to Dille to kill Prime; I think this is exemplary children’s fiction, having visceral and distressing events happen to non-humans. (Spider-Man never got over Gears’ “death”, a pivotal moment). The best other example I have is the Robin Jarvis Deptford Mice series which are essentially very gruesome occult murders and evil gods but it’s fine cos it’s just mice. 

Ehh that’s all about I can manage this week, what’d’you expect?! This is how to become a dead demon rider.

NO BAD ENERGY PLEASE NO BAD ENERGY

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Practice, as it were, the remembrance of death

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Last night on earth 

There's ten gold days every summer’s end. The tourists are gone but the evenings are mild and the sunsets burn, and all the town’s left just for us to enjoy. Week-weary but good, on the way to yours for talk and smoke before home and weekend.

Backlit from somewhere beyond the behind of the head, but inside, a switch clicks on in space opposing my left ear, changes colour, wells up and beams out through my eyes in spidery rays, changing the whole world, the whole world changing to meet it in return. Looking up, the omen is unmissable.

Down towards the sea, gulls circle the clock tower, bobbing in the thermals pulling upwards from the cars and tarmac. Their backs have merged into the late horizon, underwings and bellies glowing from the lights in the spire, bus-stops, barfronts. They look the way a child draws birds, vivid ems pinched into the sky by angel fingers.

At yours you’re only half here. Kind as ever, but full of holes. There’s usually monkish kefir water but tonight a treat: cold Cokes. We bubble, plans for moss walls and political clinics, but you keep slipping away. There’s a Britney oracle deck on the table, the fun of living with so many witches, and we spread them out for focus. You ask silently.

The Siren, legs at right angles, netted in toxic stars. We ignore the obvious and turn again quickly, to grand schemes and women, some greatest hits. You’re swimming back. Then the little Thoth pack on the sofa.

Number 16 falls to hand easily. And just for a moment you sink away into its compressions, I try to tell you about Frida Harris’ original, how none of the photos came out right, how I couldn’t look at it for long or see it all at once, how it collapsed inward, bleeding all over the gallery, and how it brought the whole world to tears.