Accumulator Press Update and More Books

 

As the economy collapses around us and costs spiral it might not be a good idea for me to embark on a publishing programme. I decided a few months ago that I won't be writing and publishing an updated edition of my best-selling Subterranean City to which I have the rights. I began to work on the project before COVID and my illness intervened. I now think it would be too expensive to print with its extensive colour pictorial content and there is a huge amount of competition that didn't exist when it first appeared in 2000. Time to move on. I am working on a new book but it is difficult to remain motivated these days - however, each week more words are added. 

Last year I read a lot while ill - part of which was another periodic binge on classic Science Fiction of which my favourites were:

Joe Haldeman The Forever War - far better than I was expecting and still relevant of course. See here 

Philip K Dick The Simulacra. See here

Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan see here   I enjoyed the recent documentary on Vonnegut reminding me why I loved him in my late teens.

The one I enjoyed most was Solaris by Stanislav Lem, rightly deemed a classic. See here. I also watched Tarkovsky's brilliant film adaptation for the first time.

Talking of Tarkovsky I was listening to a fascinating podcast Trickster on Carlos Castaneda last night and learned that the great Russian director wanted to bring Don Juan to the screen, as did Federico Fellini who was also a massive fan. The podcast can be heard here. I found it through the website of Jules Evans whose book Philosophy For Life I am currently rereading. In these turbulent times some other readers may discover strategies for stoically coping in its pages. You can also find on that site an essay about Esalen which I mention in an earlier post. 

In my reading binge I also devoured all of Brian Catling's Vorrh trilogy, an unsettling but incredible feat of imagination. I was particularly impressed by how he could write about non-human 'life'. The books manage to include a number of real people including Eadweard Muybridge Raymond Roussel and Nicholas Parsons! I was thinking about asking him to contribute something to my new book, when I read this week that he had died. He only attained some form of fame, thanks to his books in his sixties. Prior to that he had been known for his art and performance pieces. See here and here. I had seen him a couple of times when he accompanied Iain Sinclair at events in the 1990s and found him pretty scary and intimidating as a performer, which is what he intended no doubt. RIP.    

Borges and Me

 

Another book I've enjoyed this month is Borges and Me by Jay Parini (Canongate 2020) recounting the author's experience, when studying in Scotland in the early 1970s, of driving the protean Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges around that country and the Northern Isles. He had never read any of the author's work at the time and did not appreciate his international fame. Borges was blind and needed Parini to describe in detail the towns and landscapes they were passing through. 

The book is funny, moving and very well written. Parini confesses in the final chapter what the reader has suspected all along - that this could not possibly be a fully accurate account of the encounter as there are long passages of apparently perfectly remembered conversations and monologues from Borges (some of which I think are adapted from his stories). Instead: 'It's a bit of a palimpsest, a text written over another text, with many erasures; the underlying text is barely legible but nonetheless important, its bones poking through the skin. This story was shaped as fiction, or auto fiction, and the residue of that shaping in its transformation into this text, "An Encounter."' There are just too many perfect coincidences - the three 'Weird Sister' 'witches' at a foggy Scone Castle stop for example - enabling Borges to wax lyrical from his formidable literary knowledge. I also dipped into Borges Collected Fictions to reminder me of his unique style. I think I first became aware of Borges when reading Umberto Eco's bestselling The Name of the Rose in the 1980s in which an important character is based on him. I also found the first few chapters about Parini's student life before the arrival of Borges equally absorbing.

Haunts of the Black Masseur

I recently read an autobiography by Jeremy Lewis called Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London (Harper Collins, 1995), chronicling his adventures in London's publishing world of the 1970s and 1980s, a landscape that has since been transformed by mergers and takeovers, so that most if not all the small publishers he worked for are now defunct or part of huge corporate conglomerates.  

It's very readable and offers an insight into a closed world, dominated by an Oxbridge and public school intake - there are many comparisons to various publishers' offices resembling prep schools. It's also quite amusing, although the self-deprecation gets a bit wearying after a while. It introduced me to some new names and books, the most interesting sounding being Haunts of the Black Masseur (1992) which I am currently reading. It was written by a good friend of Lewis, Charles Sprawson, who he accompanies on some of his swimming expeditions around Europe, attempting to discover the sites of ancient springs mentioned in classical literature, often to find polluted horrors or tourist travesties. 

Sprawson's book is recommended: a chronicle of swimmers through literature and history, again revealing the dominance of the public-school educated writers who wished to relive the epic feats of Leander and other classical natators; Byron naturally features heavily. From my present perspective it's a model for how to write about a single subject without becoming too repetitive and boring - Sprawson must have had a large file of quotations gleaned from prodigious reading, before the days of Google. A number of figures familiar from this blog put in appearances - there is a substantial section on Fr Rolfe/Baron Corvo for example - as well as Percy Shelley, Rupert Brooke, Goethe, George Borrow and many others. Swimming also provides a plethora of useful metaphors and analogies for writers, which Sprawson beautifully illuminates.  

Much of the swimming described takes place in lakes, rivers and the sea, what would be called 'wild swimming' today and a lot of it during the winter months, which has recently regained popularity. A few years ago I read Roger Deakin's wonderful Waterlog, which I believe encouraged many people to swim in less frequented places. After years of never swimming, and persuaded by my wife, I started to swim in lakes when we were on holiday in Switzerland and France, the reedy and fast-flowing Rhein at Stein-am Rhein and other less frequented spots. I still find swimming is helpful for the various aches and pains of middle age and we try to swim in the nearby sea, although recent discharges of sewage into the English Channel by Southern Water are discouraging. I think it unlikely that I'll ever swim in the Hastings sea in the winter.   

A review here.

Sprawson's obituary can be found here.

Jeremy Lewis is also sadly no longer with us, an obituary here.