Category: [Books, magazines, etc]

I am the Law?

As I’ve said more than once, I grew up on British comics more than American ones, most notably 2000AD, whose most iconic character, of course, is a certain officer of the law. Obviously, being only about eight years old when I started reading The Galaxy’s Greatest Comic, I had no real conception that Dredd and the Judges were essentially operating a fascist, hyper-authoritarian system, not until the strip itself started addressing the whole issue of the absence of democracy in Mega City One… by which time I had aged into double figures and impending teenagehood, and frankly still didn’t understand the political issues or really care about them that much, really.

But Dredd was the hero, wasn’t he? Dredd was the living embodiment of THE LAW in Mega City One (and indeed outside it). The figure we were supposed to look up to. THE LAW was sacred to him, and, let’s face it, he was there to administer it to a bunch of unquestionably Bad People. He was opposed to Bad People. He was the Good Guy.

Wasn’t he?

Dredd co-creator John Wagner said of his creation in 1977:

This was back in the days of Dirty Harry, and with [Margaret] Thatcher on the rise there was a right-wing current in British politics which helped inspire Judge Dredd. He seemed to capture the mood of the age – he was a hero and a villain.
That villainous aspect to Dredd’s character – and the Draconian laws of Mega-City One [the post-apocalyptic metropolis Dredd polices] – really caught the readers’ imagination.
Occasionally we’d get letters from children who seemed to be agreeing with his hard-right stance, so we made the strip more political to bring out the fact that we didn’t agree with Dredd. We introduced a democratic movement in Mega-City One as a counterpoint. So in a way the readers helped the character develop.

So, basically, kids not getting the point of the strip was what caused Wagner to be more overt, cos he was a bit alarmed by what he had wrought. But it took me rather longer to appreciate that point myself, and indeed I’d argue that I only finally did so tonight, when someone posted the meme at the top of this post on the PIAT FB group. Cos on more recent reading about 2000AD and its history, I’ve been kind of struck by the often-expressed notion that TGGC was related to the punk movement of the same period, which I could see in a lot of instances, yes, but not with Dredd, who was the flagship character of the comic, he was specifically mentioned in the cover logo for years. He was… not punk particularly.

But yeah, thinking about it now from the perspective offered at the top of the post, the idea that the Judges were just another gang in Mega City One… that makes a certain sense. The gang with the best resources, evidently, and the power to declare themselves THE LAW. The gang that, to some extent, took over the territory of the erstwhile United States from someone even worse than them, the gang that just destroyed democracy rather than most of the rest of the world like Bad Bob Booth… the gang that, per that particular Dredd story, was supposed to restore democracy eventually but just became dictators, the gang keeping on top of and wiping out its competitors for decades… some of whom are still even worse than them. The devil you know, indeed. I don’t know who made that meme, but after 40 years I think I understand Dredd much better now…

Cumberland blue

Nice to be able to report that Cumberland City Council undid a bit of stupidity it enacted last week:

A controversial ban on same-sex parenting books at libraries in part of western Sydney has been overturned at a marathon late-night meeting after large crowds of protesters clashed outside the council chambers.
Cumberland city councillors voted 13-2 in front of a crowded public gallery on Wednesday night to revoke the ban, two weeks after it was introduced.
The council’s u-turn followed a widespread backlash and a warning from the NSW government that Cumberland risked losing its library funding.
Councillors narrowly voted on 1 May to “take immediate action to rid same-sex parents books/materials in council’s library service”. During the meeting, the councillor who put forward the motion, former mayor Steve Christou, brandished a book he alleged had received “really disturbing” constituent complaints, saying parents were “distraught” to see the book, A Focus On: Same-Sex Parents by Holly Duhig, displayed on a shelf in the children’s section of the library.
At a fiery meeting on Wednesday, Christou attempted to have same-sex parenting books restricted to the adults’ section of the library.
When that failed, his Our Local Community party colleague Paul Garrard tried to have the same restriction placed just on Duhig’s book.
Ultimately, all but two councillors supported a motion put forward by Labor’s Kun Huang to reverse the ban and ensure all books were catalogued according to national library guidelines, including having Duhig’s book in the junior non-fiction section.
Eddy Sarkis was the only councillor who supported Christou.
Labor councillor Mohamad Hussein, who had voted for the ban originally, changed his vote at the last minute. Hussein declined to comment when asked by journalists why he had changed his mind.

Notably, the 15 council members who voted tonight were more numerous than those who voted for the ban, cos there were only 11 councillors there that time. Almost like Christou, a far-right shit of several years’ standing, was exploiting the other four’s absence to make it easier to push his ban through or something. Anyway, the grand plan came undone and a bit of sense prevailed for once; Christou succeeded in getting drag queen story time events banned at Cumberland libraries despite the fact that none were planned and none had indeed ever happened in the first place, so I quite like seeing him be told to go fuck himself in this fashion.

Shannon Molloy at News, on the other hand, had an interesting take on the affair; after describing a couple of books full of horrors, he makes this “shocking” revelation:

I’m talking about the Bible and the Quran, of course.
If we’re applying Cumberland City councillor Steve Christou’s same logic about what’s appropriate in a library, then surely those holy books have to go too.
Mr Christou’s opposition to a book about kids with two mums or two dads was to prevent the “sexualisation” of children.
The book in question isn’t remotely sexual. It’s about families.
If Mr Christou is really, truly concerned about the welfare of children and saving them from content that’s inappropriate, he mustn’t waste any time.
He should immediately call a vote of the council and push for the removal of the Bible and Quran from Cumberland’s libraries.
To not do so would expose shocking double standards, which I’m sure he doesn’t hold.
Of course, I’m being facetious.
I’m gay, but I’m also a Christian with a deep fondness for the teachings of Christ. I’m in favour of the freedom of religious practice, no matter the brand of one’s faith.
But the metaphor I’ve used here shows how absurd and hypocritical Mr Christou and the council’s book ban is.
It also demonstrates that censorship – which flies in the face of an open and free society and the democratic values we hold dear – is a very slippery slope.

I don’t know why, but I feel like brother Shannon wouldn’t actually be that bothered if the Qur’an did get pulled from libraries…

Anyway, according to Leo Puglisi on Twitter (yes, I KNOW what I said in the last post; I saw this bit earlier before it went to shit), the book in question has apparently been borrowed ONCE in the five or so years that it’s been in the Cumberland library system. It’s so dangerous that hardly anyone’s read it… and, funnily enough, Steve Christou himself had to admit to being among its millions of non-readers. Because OBVIOUSLY. The only thing I worry about in all this is that the silly cunt might look at all this bullshit and decide he needs to up his homophobia game. Or maybe he’ll just go back to racism. I don’t want to say anything more in case I give him ideas.

Revolt against the modern idiot?

I found myself this evening looking at a Substack by one Mario Visconti, where I discovered there’s apparently been some controversy over the Inner Traditions company publishing the work of Julius Evola. Which, it should be said, they’ve been doing since at least the 1990s, so I’m not sure why the fuss now (or a few months ago, at any rate), but there it is, and here‘s IT’s justification for them doing so:

He was an elitist. He was against democracy, the religions of Abraham, and Egalitarianism—in short, against modern belief systems. His views start with Plato, whose dialogues he absorbed as a young man along with copious philosophic readings in Latin, French, and German. Evola can be debated and criticized, which has been done extensively by scholars, journalists, and philosophers. However, his importance as a philosopher of the Traditional worldview cannot be denied.
To read Evola requires a depth of knowledge and appreciation for other cultures, languages, philosophies, the esoteric, and world history that is not readily present today. In fact, the controversy around Evola’s work perfectly illustrates why Evola revolted against the modern world.
We at Inner Traditions do not agree with all of Evola’s ideas. Further, Evola’s ideas developed from his earliest days as a Dadaist through his defense and promotion of the ideas of Tradition. We publish Evola because he is one of the most significant esoteric philosophers of the twentieth century and has left us a very important oeuvre.

Marco Visconti is having none of this, and his piece further points to this piece by Sam Block who is having even less of it:

Why, then, do people consider this rubbish to be some sort of grand luminary? I mean, I can guess: the man was an egotistical, hyperfascist, woman-hating, violent abuser of not just other human beings but of human dignity itself.  He was barely even an armchair magician (who literally failed at becoming anything more) and was more interested in romanticizing his own ahistorical, easily-wrecked notion of “tradition” that acclaimed the superiority of white men more than anything and anyone else, and such a view is replete throughout all his writings.  As a result of that and his sick self-aggrandizing desire to get people riled up in the usual ways bigotry likes to do, his influence continues to dominate in neo-fascist occult circles and in modern far-right political circles as well.  The sooner everyone drops his shit and leaves him to be swallowed by the sands of time in favor of literally anyone better (and it’s genuinely easy to find anyone better, and I do mean anyone), the better off we’ll all be.

For myself, I’ve actually had reservations about Inner Traditions for a lot longer than this, dating back to when I read Otto Rahn‘s books, which they published, in 2009. (I remember the year cos I was partway through Lucifer’s Court when the stroke happened and I wound up finishing it after getting home again.) Rahn was one of the stranger figures of Nazi Germany—he’s been called the real-life Indiana Jones—though I gather he wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about Nazism as such; he got recommended to Himmler by Karl Maria Wiligut (an even stranger individual) based on his first book Crusade Against the Grail, and Himmler basically funded research for the second, Lucifer’s Court.

This latter volume contained a small detail highlighted by translator Christopher Jones, namely a frankly anti-semitic quote about Europe being cleansed of “Jewish mythology”. The importance of this line is that it’s apparently actually by Arthur Schopenhauer, not Rahn, and that it was inserted by the latter’s editor for reasons best known only to himself; Jones observes that it’s not actually in Rahn’s manuscript. For reasons best known only to himself, though, Jones chose to leave it in his translation. I mean… textual fidelity is a noble aim, but you acknowledged that was an excrescence on Rahn’s original text. There was no reason to include this overtly Nazi-supporting statement.

So I’ve viewed Inner Traditions with some suspicion ever since, especially after I discovered they were publishing Evola as well; they have some interesting titles in their catalogue but, to be honest, I have misgivings about paying for them so I obtain them through *cough* dubious electronic means. My only direct acquaintance with Evola is The Doctrine of Awakening, which I found quite tedious and don’t recall finishing, but I knew of him via Joscelyn Godwin’s book Arktos. The latter is a remarkable book on a remarkable subject, which Wiki sums up as “discuss[ing] pseudoscientific theories about surviving Nazi elements in Antarctica” and a lot more weirder stuff than that; a fascinating book full of right-wing lunacy that I never got the feeling Godwin was in any way sympathetic to.

Godwin is also Inner Traditions’ Evola translator. Oh.

Godwin also wrote this article about him. Oy. New Dawn was a dubious enough venue for this defence of Evola, but it had originally appeared many years earlier in a journal called TYR, which was frankly even more dubious. Whether or not the latter was specifically pro-fascist or neo-Nazi as such, the people involved with it undeniably leaned that way; editor Joshua Buckley was part of an actual neo-Nazi organisation, another editor Collin Cleary is now part of the avowedly white nationalist Counter-Currents Publishing, and editor number three, Michael Moynihan… well. Contributors included people like Stephen McNallen (white supremacist), Alain de Benoist (all-round fascist shit), Nigel Pennick (unfamiliar with, but apparently yikes-some), and Stephen Flowers (questionable at best, presently associated with Arcana Europa who publish several of the aforementioned, including all four issues of TYR. And a volume of interviews with “Edred” co-edited by Moynihan and neo-Nazi Ian Read. It gets whiter and whiter, eh…)

And, of course, Joscelyn Godwin. I don’t know if he’s the white nationalist I’ve seen him accused of being, but he’s clearly moved in murky circles. I loved Arktos. I dislike the thought that Godwin was, even then, more in tune with the cranks he wrote about in that book… or, perhaps worse, became more so after writing about them. Anyway, he was supposed to provide Inner Traditions with a defence of them publishing Evola, but for whatever reason didn’t, forcing them to publish that kind of cringing statement themselves… as for me, for some reason back in 2018 I attempted a reading program of prominent right-wing authors cos I thought having some direct acquaintance of their actual work might be useful and Evola was on the list, but I only got as far as The Camp of the Saints (which you may recall me describing as “evil” recently) before I already couldn’t stomach any more. I may yet read Revolt Against the Modern World, though, cos I do still have that. Unpaid for, of course.

Blackout in Gretley

Book #10 for 2024. This was one of Valancourt’s cut-price titles for this month (less than AU$5 for Kindle), so I decided why not… The book is a wartime thriller published in 1942, right in the middle of the war, and Priestley was interestingly on the money when he had a character observe that a German loss would result in America dominating one part of the world and Russia the other; given that America had only just officially entered the war (I don’t know the month of publication, but the story takes place at the end of January ’42), that seems reasonably prophetic. (And interesting that Priestley apparently didn’t see the UK as part of the postwar world power deal.) Blackout is a pretty straightforward example of the sort of thing it is; our hero is a Canadian engineer who’s been suckered into working for British counter-intelligence, and the story sees him posted to the somewhat shitty industrial town of the title, because it’s a bit of a clearing house for Nazis sending vital information back to the Fatherland. The problem is going to be working out exactly who the Nazis in town are, cos Gretley offers a number of possibilities… Not exactly a deathless masterpiece of world literature, then, but an obviously solid example of this sort of story, with sufficient intrigue to keep you interested while being short enough to read in one night without feeling like it’s crapping on unnecessarily at any point. And Priestley’s socialist sympathies are in full evidence; if they inspired his positive words about Stalin which have… aged poorly (along with some remarkable and unfortunate racism early in the book), they also inspired the undercurrent of anger in the ultimate revelation of the main villain… which I obviously won’t spoil but I can imagine Priestley genuinely hating the “rightly privileged person” running things. I enjoyed this a fair bit.

The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism

Book #9 for 2024. John Coulthart’s been revisiting surrealism somewhat on his blog in recent weeks, which has in turn kind of led me to investigate it a bit further myself, which I’ve never really done much before. This may or may not have been a good book with which to start building on my existing knowledge. I’ll quote the “about the author” page first:

Patrick Lepetit has written several books in French on esoteric traditions and surrealism. He is a member of the Grand Orient de France and of the Mélusine Network of scholars interested in surrealism. He lives in Mons en Baroeul, France.

I must say the book does give me the impression that Lepetit has spent years immersed in his subject and that it’s a real labout of love from someone who Knows His Stuff (capitals used advisedly). Being French, Lepetit obviously has access to vast numbers of French-language resources of which probably hardly any (apart from a couple of bigger titles like Seligmann’s Mirror of Magic or Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvellous, both of which I’ve got and should finally get around to reading now) has ever been available in English, which does make it a useful resource for the non-Francophone.

And therein, somewhat, lies the problem with the book. Lepetit just throws so fucking much information at you, with quotes from the surrealists themselves (particularly Andre Breton, obviously), fellow travellers like the Grand Jeu mob, critics and commentators and whoever else he can cite. The book opens by observing the surrealists’ fairly unbridled loathing for conventional religion, then spends most of the rest of the book going into their fascination with decidedly non-conventional stuff before ending by asking just how seriously they actually took this sort of thing. I’m not sure how well he answers that question really, but it is intriguing to see just how deep the hole goes. (I for one had no idea Arthuriana was something the surrealists were into. .H.P. Lovecraft puts in an appearance, too, cos the surrealists had a long-standing fondness for him. I don’t think he reciprocated it, though. And even Colin Wilson gets a look in, and I think he would’ve been even less sympathetic…)

So there’s a lot of information in this book… and, as I say, that’s part of its problem, there’s just so much of it and Lepetit also seems to assume a lot of prior knowledge on the reader’s part. Like I said, he has access to a lot of material by people who are for the most part probably best known outside of France by specialists, insofar as they’re known at all, and one of the things Lepetit seems to assume is that you do in fact know who they are. I don’t blame him for this; he’s clearly writing for a French readership that presumably knows these people a lot better, and I don’t suppose he was expecting the book to go any further than that.

It’s just some of the other stuff he assumes you already know, particularly the visual art he describes; the book has some illustrations but nowhere near as much as it needs (I would particularly have liked some pictures of Victor Brauner’s work, which Lepetit writes about at some length). And there’s smaller things like glancing allusions to Breton’s “Great Transparents” that Lepetit never elucidates, and which would’ve baffled me had John Coulthart, again, not posted about them a few months ago. Lepetit’s presentation of all this business is, of course, the other part of the book’s problem; he has a rather thick writing style, full of subordinate clauses and other things that make his text a lot more convoluted than it needed to be. I don’t know if that’s an issue with Lepetit or his translator, but it’s an issue in any case, and the longer I persisted with the book the more of an issue it became.

So, awfully interesting subject matter kind of hindered by how it’s actually transmitted, which is a bit of a shame, though if you’re interested in the subject it’s still worth reading. Just not as a beginner’s book or anything like that. It’s got me interested in reading more on the subject, anyway.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

Book #8 for 2024. Oof, we’re not doing terribly well, are we? Another time-consuming project on top of the classical music collection organising has kind of got in the way, but ANYWAY here we are again… Back to 1915 this time round; I’ve seen two film versions (Hitchcock’s famous one and Ralph Thomas’ less famous one) but it’s been so long that my memories of both are dim… on reading the book for the first time, though, I do notice certain differences between it and the films, most notably the lack of female love interest for Hannay which you could evidently get away with in a 1915 magazine serial but not in a 1935 film. Anyway, our hero Richard Hannay is newly returned home from the dark continent, and London life is boring him; yearning for excitement, a chance meeting provides just that, dropping him in among international intrigue, but he soon finds the true story is a lot bigger than he originally thought. The book is basically kind of a rewrite of the outbreak of a certain war that was going on when it was written, and I don’t think it’s too big of a spoiler to say that Hannay’s efforts don’t stop it from breaking out in the end; the story relies on a few too many coincidences in place of plot development, characterisation is somewhat negligible, and the literary style is kind of blunt. But that does work in the book’s favour; it compresses a surprising amount into a fairly small span and it keeps your attention all the way through, and you want to see how Hannay gets out of the various scrapes he gets into (and where he finds time to breathe in the course of one damn thing after another happening). Can’t exactly call it a literary masterpiece, and that’s fine; solid proto-pulp adventure has its own valid place too, and a bit of B-film vigour never hurts…

Of One Blood

Finally, book #7 for 2024. Struggling a bit with the reading this month, mostly thanks to a time-consuming other project with my classical music collection and re-organising that, but never mind that, here’s this month’s “classic”. Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood was serialised in a magazine she edited from 1902 to 1903, and it evidently leans somewhat heavily on H. Rider Haggard; it’s kind of a domestic society drama at first, albeit one with a peculiar mesmerism undercurrent, but then it turns into an African exploration adventure as our hero signs on with an expedition to find the lost treasures of ancient Ethiopia… and the romance of the first part of the book is revealed as being rather more gothically fucked up than we might have expected (I was actually genuinely stunned by it and had to reread the scene to make sure I hadn’t just imagined it; I’m still not sure it even makes sense) and our hero is not who he thinks he is on multiple levels. This is fucking preposterous, and not in a particularly entertaining way either; Hopkins may have the first of her particular kind (though the book is more fantasy than horror) but that doesn’t mean she was any good at it… if this is indicative, she was a shabby stylist with a propensity for hitting you over the head with Christianity in a manner that became increasingly aggravating as the book dragged on (which it does mercilessly despite being under 200 pages). I did rather enjoy the thought that the book’s thesis that THEM DARKIES really invented civilisation 6000 years ago would’ve made a bunch of racists’ heads explode back in 1903 (much as it still would now), but those racists wouldn’t be reading this in the first place… Anyway, not a fan.

RIP Brian Stableford

Just reading about the passing of Brian Stableford. Never read any of his own actual works, but I knew of him as a translator of French literature, especially for Black Coat Press, in which capacity he’s Englished a whole lot of books in the French fantastic tradition… there being a whole lot of SF, fantasy, horror and pulp in French that’s kind of gone unknown by us Anglophones for literal centuries (apart from Jules Verne, whose first English critics woefully misunderstood as a children’s author). And so it is that Stableford introduced me to two of the most singular books I’ve ever read, Petrus Borel’s Champavert and Edgar Quinet’s Ahasuerus; both published in the early/mid-1830s, the former is a sort of late gothic collection of tales possessed of a very peculiar black humour, and the latter is… just something else. I really don’t know what to call it, basically it’s a vision of the history of the world from the creation to the last judgement, with the latter event going very much not according to plan, but what form is it? A novel told entirely in dialogue without descriptions? A play which features the entire universe as a character at one point? I remember while I was reading it that I could actually imagine the text being sung, as if it were an oratorio or something (and an extremely atonal one at that). So, respect to Brian Stableford for making these two books available to me that I would otherwise never have read…