Five T'ang Poets (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-yin) translated by David Young (1990)

 This followed on from a 1980 original which had only the first four poets. It's a fascinating thing. The first major question which arose for me surrounded the position of these writers in the Chinese society of the eighth and ninth centuries. Young provides piercing introductions to each, as well as an overall one. I didn't get the impression they were courtiers of the type we can possibly imagine. They seemed independent of at least some of that, though I'm sure there were influences, preferment, pensions and so on which arose from that centre of power. What I was after in thinking about that was a definition of the word "poet" in this circumstance. They seemed glimpsers, still-pensive-moment recorders, rather than prolix commentators. The job of poetry was a little different. Is it poetry at all? Or is it even more concentratedly so? (Don't like the idea of the "it's just different" dull-minded imagined reply.) The "what is poetry?" discussion, especially across cultures, is an interesting one. These things went through my head. The major revelations in the introduction were quite how much leeway there was in terms of translation on the one hand, because of the mechanics of the Chinese language, and contrastingly the fact that these works in their original could exude meaning not only horizontally but vertically - the characters as they were written influencing each other multi-directionally. This element is no doubt often, or even always, lost in translation, along with the highly specific cultural references which underlie parts of the expression. All of which has the corollary of congratulation to Young for a book so pleasurable to read. These poems are surprisingly corporeal, but I guess that surprise emanates from too little knowledge. They use very tight images of things, juxtapose them with one another, and extract highly distilled direct meaning - there's nothing particularly identifiable as diffuse here. Or hard to fathom in essence, though in line with the above we may well be missing tangents. There is a definite feeling of looking out at a landscape, the seasons, birds, in many cases, careful feeling of the way through to significance in few words. There is also a slight smile in some, mention of drunkenness and self-pity, loneliness and yearning, again sparely. And sensuality has its part, particularly in some works of the last poet, Li Shang-yin, where images feel as though they could be (highly civilised!) double-entendre. As one perhaps imagines, green is the signal colour throughout. Goodness knows how many times it is mentioned in this book: suits me very well.

H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq (1991)

 I've read quite a few essays which were published before the Second World War, and I haven't yet come across one which valorises overstatement as though it were passion. I don't quite get the genesis of this recent peculiarity, particularly among the French. It seems a superficial understanding, to be frank, of the terms of passion, like a little kid's idea of love. One can imagine the child, having seen some films, emoting like hell, waving their arms about, and saying something hilariously smoochy and over the top. This feels a little like that, but with an academic carapace. The further astonishment is that academia has seriously taken this attitude of "passion" on board, as though it's a new language, a development into subtlety and deeper understanding. I've read a little bit of Lovecraft, and have absorbed whatever that's given me of his way with things, have a sense of how he goes about telling his tale. So when I read things like "a supreme antidote against all forms of realism" as describing Lovecraft's modus, I feel I'm at sea (already, as this is on the first page). Lovecraft seems to use all manner of realistic tropes, for one. One might say it was this situating realism that made more of his fantastic exertions. So, a dubious claim contentually, and then put in this "all forms", "supreme"-ly excessive way, evocative of French academia's worst. But, if one can mentally filter out the noise from all this stuff, there's a load of interesting detail here. Biographical notes filling in a picture of this worried, harassed, bitter, socially limited man in particular. Again filtering like mad, one can build up one's own picture of who he was, how he functioned. Another observation: I can't put this down to Houellebecq alone, because it's more universal than that, but there is the "usual" commentary here about how, in Lovecraft's stories, we come face to face with (definitively and classically) absolute terror, complete horror, etc. It seems to me that, in the stories I've read at least, the impact is not that. It's much more of a hinting. I don't get creeps up my spine, I get a feeling of fascination tempered with the author's love of queasy detail. Biographically, Lovecraft seems "ick"-laden: he had a horror, post the New York years particularly, of other races and their seemingly animalistic qualities; even earlier, he withdrew in a nervous state from the world for a long period, and then delimited his life to gentlemanly and polite pursuits after the big reclusion had ended; he didn't want to much engage with sexuality or the elements of any sort of physical hedonism, certainly not publically anyway. The impact of his stories seems allied to this - a feeling of ick. And, thanks, despite himself, to Houellebecq, I now see this echo more clearly. Lovecraft and Houellebecq are the two primary authors here, but there are a couple of others to mention: Stephen King provides an introduction, and celebrates the author's "passion", whilst also decrying it - very gently; Dorna Khazeni is the translator, who has felt the need to add an appendix listing all the times she found it impossible to locate Houellebecq's sources for quotes. He mentions early on that this book, his first, was "almost a first novel" - giving himself a neat little out for invention? I dunno, it doesn't recommend itself as a cause for confidence. The details through this piece are great, despite one's need to constantly mentally edit as one reads, until Khazeni's appendix is reached. I think on the whole Houellebecq can be relied on for the spirit/essence of his "facts", but can't help feeling a sense of caution.

The Call of the Cormorant by Donald S. Murray (2022)

 This is a book which is in some senses local to me. Shetland, where I live, is mentioned a few times, and the author lives here. It's also set, in its earlier sections, in Faroe, which is not too far away, and similar in a range of ways. I don't know the author, but could come across him at any time, given the small population here. Which brings up a standard difficulty when one has criticisms and lives in a relatively unpopulous community. Due to proximity, should one just shut up, and look to "propriety"? Or conversely see this journal for what it is, and speak? That's preferable to my thinking, but I know I need to be meticulous - and would like to think I am that habitually, anyway. Choice made...and hopefully not regretted. The subject matter of this book is a chap called Karl Einarsson, an Icelander/Faroe Islander, most of the meat of whose life was lived in the first half of the twentieth century. The book is a novelisation of his life, and has as a subtitle An Unreliable Biography: the author is at pains to point out in notes that it's a work of imagination, not only through choice, but also because of a paucity of available facts. Looking at what information there is, and reading between its lines, Einarsson emerges as highly evasive and highly eccentric. He harboured all sorts of ideas and identities: St Kilda was the only remnant of Atlantis, which had its own language (which he presumably invented); he, despite never having been there, was its self-styled "Count"; he also adopted the title Emperor Cormorant XII of Atlantis; was known under several other pseudonyms, including academic ones; having moved to Germany before the Second World War, he broadcast for the Nazis to his old homelands; after the war, he befriended Nobel winner Halldor Laxness, by whom some of his ideas and exploits were recorded. All this points to someone with significant pathology, very unlikely to be pinned down, except wholly in these terms. And that leads to a first criticism - the character here is, in his youth, a fairly average boy, who is mysteriously seen as a bit of a blowhard by some of those around him, but never really shown to us to be. Almost as though the oddness perhaps couldn't be depicted? It would certainly be a tall order for a writer; one would need virtuoso skills to do it convincingly, and perhaps Murray shied away instinctively. But it would have been there, in reality, and isn't here. Which makes the work of imagination which is this life quite a bit less convincing. An essential element is missing. When this Karl goes on to Denmark as he gets older, leaving the restrictions of Faroe behind, we get the slight shifting of axis so that some of the real character's later excesses can begin to be explored. But because of its earlier absence, his oddness is not compassed even in this section. He's made instead into more of a manipulative and evasive conman, though how that change comes about from the earlier ordinary boy is not overtly covered. It just happens to happen. Karl the boy here and Karl the man here don't really relate to each other. Two unreliable biographies. Proof of this pudding comes when the real Karl's written works are mentioned. Their nature does not match his as depicted here, like a fundamental disjunct. Other sections of the book come from Karl's sister Christianna, and tell a parallel story which stays in Faroe, detailing her falling in love with a shipwrecked Hebridean sailor, eventual marriage to a local, frustrations and dissatisfactions, unrequited love for another, and horror when she hears Karl's voice on the radio from Germany. These are far more anchored somehow, and it's a fastening we need, I think. We would no doubt have needed this strand even if the depiction of Karl had been a unified and convincing one, it would have formed something for that craziness to push against. There is, unfortunately, another criticism here: Christianna's voice is largely the same as Karl's. They have the same method and manner of investigating their inner workings and revealing their concerns. So, a little flat and underimagined to some extent. There is a last concern with this book, and it lies in the nuts and bolts of the writing. Firstly, Murray has the tendency for malapropism in similes: when the "constant" praise of his work by colleagues, necessarily episodic, is "rattling away like the drum downstairs", when someone with snow-white hair shifts their head, and "looks for all the world like a flurry of sleet or a blizzard", when the smells of a Copenhagen neighbourhood are "as regular and persistent as waves that crashed against the coastline of my home island", and many another example, one's confidence in the author flags a little. Secondly, there are enough typos and missing minor edits here (repeats of the same word within one or maybe two clauses, for example) to underline the need for these skills at publishing houses. The publisher of this is quite tiny. But there is also a proofreader mentioned in the acknowledgements - hmmmm. So, a plentifully fascinating subject, not well reached; it still has colour and interest, which go some way towards compensation.

Valis by Philip K. Dick (1981)

 After a good number of in-betweeny books, one way or another, it's great to have read a virtuoso performance. Re-instils one's faith in the medium, and, given its date (all the recent mediocrities have been recently published), tends to remind one of what seems a diminution in quality. I hope I've just been unlucky, but, more and more, feel there's something going on - and down. This is in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, but to my mind is essentially a counterculture novel. There is a fictional scientific notion at the back of it, justifying in the loosest sense possible the epithet, but seen through a metaphysical lens in large part. It involves as main character Dick himself, so is approaching autobiography, fictionally transformed perhaps. Also this avatar is split: "Phil" is the author as neutral commentator, whereas "Horselover Fat" is the author as crazed drug-adventurer, traumatised one, and metaphysical explorer. The latter name is advertised as descending from some convolution of 'philip' as 'lover of horses' in Greek (?) and 'fat' from 'dick', the German for that. Of course, 'horse' is also heroin - no idea if Dick's appetites extended that far. These two emanations are part of a small group of friends with very distinct personalities: sarcastic Kevin and religious David are the centre, but two women also have prominent roles, both of whom have died, but who are seen in flashback. Gloria, a troubled, paranoiacally-minded drug-adventurer who ran a sideline in destroying the people around her; and Sherri, a long-time cancer-sufferer, who provides a counterpoint to the mind-expanded views around her in her stubborn Christianity. Dick essays a spiral of themes, as Horselover Fat, who melds into one with Phil at a critical point two-thirds in, deals with insights he gained through a crucial period of drug-taking in 1974, ramifications rattling through all his psychological issues. What makes this different is Dick's extraordinary weave-control as he manages all the threads. He takes the drug-inspired insights and has Fat discover that parts of them were actually true in real time, rather than addled wanderings of the mind. A process is gone through of 'proving' their veracity. Connections are made by interweaving established ancient classical and religious traditions with these experiences - and then further forms of 'proof' are sought, and indeed found. Fat's excitement and amazement at these revelations is strangely palpable, as is all the other mental stuff going on in his life, which is much more melancholic and mixed, and much more guilty. He develops a growing "complete theory" (appended at the end) about humanity's place in things, and modes of thinking, most of which we have no immediate awareness of, but would with the right tools. Without going into too much detail, the origin lies in the illusoriness of corporeal existence, its actual composition as streams of 'information', and the mostly pink beams of light, routed from somewhere in interstellar space which, I think, got the whole human thing going in the first place, and can provide mind-blowing perceptions if we can loosen the mind from its current temporal-substantial grip, and be receptive to them. But this novel also involves further interweavings between 'real' 70s cultural history and subcultures and the world that is created here, with rock bands, freakout films, and cultish tropes. There is a culmination with three charismatic-but-largely-secretive ex-rock star illuminati further north of San Francisco where most of the book takes place. I don't know what Dick would think of what occurred to me during this section, where the current point of fascination, a Giant Intelligence/Saviour Being in the person of a two year old girl who speaks like an adult sage, is investigated. I found it inescapable - Dick is portraying in this section, knowingly or not, in the reactions and paranoias of all the players, a Hubbard-like quality, an (intentional?) dissection of what goes to make a cult, particularly the mania for control, the feeling of special access, and the mistrustful worry. Perhaps what I'm really saying is that his intelligence would have made him, in the right circumstances, and with his special leanings, a disturbing cult leader.