The Death of David Bowie

It’s strange, even though in the last couple of days I was thinking about Bowie’s mortality, I never thought that it would happen, as absurd as that sounds. I was thinking, “Well I hope he lives at least another decade, just think what else he could do.” He’s always been there for me, an inspiration, a connection with the strange and the brilliant; he shone like no other and most of all he was my friend. Bowie really was the all round entertainer - he had something for everyone and for every mood and every situation. In times of trouble you could whack that certain Bowie album on and it would help get you through. As someone once said, he was bullshit and totally genuine at the same time; he had artifice but he also had a deep soul and could articulate something universal that we could all connect with.

I loved everything about Bowie, his music, of course, but also his intellect, his artistry, his poise and grace; his darkness and his melodrama and pretense. He had it all and even his artistic failures were fascinating. He went out on the edge and sometimes he would fail, but that was ok, he could always charm his way out. It’s hard to fathom that I’ll never see another up to date picture of Bowie, to be able to wonder what he is up to and what amazing moves he could pull next. He really was a genius and I’ll love him forever. Thanks David, thanks for all the times I listened to one of your records and was transformed, thanks for all the gigs and for just being you. You gave it your all. Goodbye.

My Back Pages

Looking back on 2015 it was quite a varied year in terms of reading, although I would liked to have read much more, if only time would allow it. However there were plenty of highlights during the year. Late in 2014 I met one of my musical heroes in the form of Steve Kilbey from the Australian band The Church. In January I read his excellent autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar (2014) and then met him again with the rest of the band in July when they toured the west coast (they were brilliant by the way...). When literature and music meet I’m a very happy man indeed.

My book club reads this year yielded both pain and pleasure, with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) taking the crown for the best book I’ve read this year. The Secret History was compelling, absorbing, manipulative and most of all just brilliantly written. Other book club related highlights include Ian McEwan’s succinct and stylish The Children Act (2014), Richard Flannagan’s Man Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) and Joan London’s The Golden Age (2014), which managed to both charm and move me in equal measure. Book club pain came in the form of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), which was not mediocre by any means, just long winded and intensely and neurotically self-conscious. It was also a fascinating and challenging read, so in the end I’m grateful to have read it and I will certainly remember it for a long time to come.

If The Secret History was the best book of the year (in fact one of the best I’ve ever read...), then the biggest disappointment was Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977). Perhaps Chatwin had great adventures in Patagonia, but he managed to make it totally boring on paper. Luckily there were plenty of other highlights from my own (non book club) reading to make up for the tedium of Chatwin. Miranda July weirded me out in a good way with her debut novel, The First Bad Man (2015) and Michel Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976) was simply a great piece of experimental cult fiction. Other highlights were Axiomatic (1995) by Greg Egan and Seven Eves (2015) by Neal Stephenson, both of which left me wanting to read much more of their work.

As for next year I aim to finish the thousand plus pages of Peter Watson’s Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (2006). I’m reading it a bit at a time, mostly late at night, so hopefully I’ll get through it! What I really have my eye on though is my first love - science fiction. After reading Egan, Stephenson and then recently Huxley, it’s time to catch up with contemporary science fiction and some of the classics that I’ve never got around to reading. Maybe I’ll even read Philip K. Dick’s crackpot The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (2011) this year - now there’s some holiday reading....

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (1932)

Earlier in the year I was thinking about re-reading novels that I had first read in high school; the novels that were perhaps wasted on the young and naive. Brave New World was one of those books I read in year eleven when I was more interested in slacking off than absorbing important literature. Since those days I’ve read a number of Huxley’s books: Point Counter Point (1928) and some of his droll satires such as Chrome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923). Looking back I realize that I avoided re-reading Brave New World because of its classic status; it seemed just too obvious to read when there is so much unknown literature to explore. Now that I’ve rectified this oversight I’ve found that Brave New World justifies its place with the established canon of important literature.

Brave New World is so thematically rich and layered that it could power whole university literature departments. Set sometime in the twenty sixth century, Huxley’s future society features such science fiction chestnuts as genetic engineering, a rigid genetically based caste system, lab grown humans, subliminal conditioning and of course, permissive drug use in the form of soma. Of course this future Utopian society is not all it seems and Alpha class worker Bernard Marx is suffering from various inadequacies due to possible flaws in his development and conditioning. Thanks to his job at ‘Hatcheries and Conditioning’ he is able to travel and stay at a so called savage reservation, where he meets the son of a woman who was thought lost in the wilderness by Bernard’s manager during a past visit. John, the savage, and his mother, who has now slipped into an otherwise avoidable middle age, travels back with Bernard to the brave new world of modern humanity only to find, for all involved, disappointment and tragedy.

A colleague at work, the coordinator of the museum attached to the library, spied me reading Brave New World and informed me that she had recently read both Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). She then asked me to read both and tell her who got it right in terms of predicting the modern world. I am intending to read 1984 again, but probably not for a while. Coincidentally however, whilst looking at the Wikipedia’s Brave New World entry, I discovered a section discussing the differences and similarities between the two novels. In 2015 it is easy to see elements of 1984 throughout many societies, but Huxley’s visions are perhaps less obvious, but they are there. Orwell postulated a society in which books were mostly banned, Huxley thought they could become irrelevant (here Huxley is perhaps more on the money); Orwell foresaw deprivation of information and propaganda, Huxley postulated that we would lose the truth within a media of superficiality; Orwell foresaw control and captivity, whilst Huxley foresaw the irony of freedom without meaning. Thinking about it I came to the conclusion that both Orwell and Huxley were ‘right’ about the future, as far as any writer of futurist narratives can expected to be. One cannot consider the prevalence of CCTV throughout most cities and the online surveillance undertaken by authorities without thinking of Orwell. In turn one cannot help but think of Brave New World when considering the prevalence of escapist drug culture and most pertinently the alarming decline of serious journalism coupled with humanity’s addiction to mostly mindless entertainment.

With Brave New World Huxley originally aimed to write something that was a parody of H.G.Wells, but instead the work developed into a serious rumination on both Huxley’s own time and what the future could hold. No novel that is set in the future should be overly criticized for not getting it right, as it is all just speculation; however Brave New World contains themes that have strong contemporary relevance. One of the inspirations behind Brave New World was a book written by Henry Ford called My Life and Work that Huxley happened upon during one of his visits to the USA. Ford’s thoughts about capitalism and mechanization partly inspired Huxley’s future society in which humans are merely another product that economic rationalization could be applied to. As capitalism influences democracy and society in more intrusive ways how close are we to humans becoming something that can be owned by a corporation? Could a company grow humans and therefore own them? Could companies claim ownership over parts of human bodies? Far fetched perhaps? The recent supreme court battles over the ownership of a particular gene associated with breast cancer could well be merely the beginning of a brave new world that could be very chilling indeed.

The Golden Age - Joan London (2014)

Joan London is a Perth born writer of some renown, although not as highly regarded as Tim Winton, perhaps in part due to London’s sporadic output since the nineteen eighties. The Golden Age is only London’s third novel and first since the well received The Good Parents in 2008. Although London has not amassed a great body of work she has more than made up for it by the quality of her novels. This was recently recognized when she won the Patrick White Award for 2015, an award set up by White in 1973 with his Nobel Prize in Literature money to help draw attention to otherwise unrecognized Australian writers. According to Wikipedia White wanted the award to be announced just a week after the annual Melbourne Cup horse race in an attempt to draw attention to literature rather than sport! A great curmudgeonly tactic there Patrick.

The Golden Age is set in the mid nineteen fifties during the polio epidemic that would eventually infect some 40,000 Australians. The novel takes its name from a hotel that was converted into a hospice situated in the inner city Perth suburb of Leederville. Here we meet teenager Frank Gold, a Hungarian WWII refugee with an interest in poetry and pretty fellow teenager Isa. Their relationship and the hospice itself are the focal point around which a series of vignettes unfold that reveal the inner workings of a young society trying to cope with the tragedy of polio and the aftermath of WWII. The parents who come to visit the children interact in ways that reveal their class anxieties, a concept the children find alienating after the great leveler of polio has given them a common connection. The relationship between the children and the nurses brings a warmth and depth to the narrative that is palpable. The most significant minor character is Sister Olive Penny; an example of a post-war woman living independently of men and marriage.

London’s prose style is deceptively simple. Within what seems to be merely a teenage love story lurks great depths. All it takes is a quiet turn of phrase to open up the psychological world of a character. Frank Gold’s musings, romantic yearnings and earnest attempts at poetry all conspire to engage the reader. At times I had strong emotional reactions to what I was reading that seemed to come from nowhere. Cleverly, without you really noticing, in just over two hundred short pages London reveals the inner workings of 1950s Perth family life and society as a whole. The Perth of the past is evoked beautifully, with the summer heat, old buildings and beach settings.

The end of novel is set far into the characters futures and is both satisfyingly realistic and profoundly effecting. The way London deals with the characters’ emotional lives is remarkably nuanced and touching. Also the brevity of the end section provides just enough to satisfy the desire generated in the novel’s main body to know just how the future will pan out for the principal protagonists. On the evidence of this novel London is certainly a top class writer in the league of Tim Winton and has written one of the definitive novels set in the isolated wild west of Perth. London missed out on winning the Miles Franklin Award for The Golden Age, but I’m sure it will not matter as a novel this good will definitely find an audience.

The Go-Betweens Anthology Volume 1: 1978-1984 - Robert Forster et al (2014)

The Go-Betweens back in the day - Forster front left, McLennan middle rear.

This book is only available as a part of The Go-Betweens box set: The Go-Betweens Anthology Volume 1: 1978-1984, although such is the quality of the writing I’m sure at some stage after the third volume is released it will all be published as a stand alone tome. The Go-Betweens formed in Brisbane in the late seventies and were nurtured within the punk/post-punk scene before emerging to become one of the most influential pop-rock bands of the nineteen eighties. Although mostly commercially unsuccessful at the time the band were the critics darlings and have since been rightly remembered as a great Australian band.

The Go-Betweens were a very literary band, so it was no surprise to learn that the two founding members, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, met whilst attending an English course at Queensland University in 1975. Inside the pages of this beautifully presented book the story of The Go-Betweens is cleverly retold by Forster in the third person with an immediacy and poignancy that is addictive to read. There’s a kind of romantic innocence about two awkward outsiders creating themselves as the rock equivalent of cult fiction. Whilst most Brisbane bands practiced noisy punk or rancid metal they wrote songs about librarians and faded movie stars. They casually self mythologized, labeling their music as “That striped sunlight sound”, giving them a certain level of pretension that worked both for and against them.

The book features archival photography from the band’s earliest days and ephemera such as gig posters, critical reviews and single covers. There are many choice items, such as a reproduction of a review of Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall (1977) written by McLennan whilst at university. There’s also a post-card sent by McLennan to Forster commenting on some demos the latter had sent hoping to pique the former’s interest. Forster’s brilliant anthology notes ends in 1984 and is followed by several essays by people who were associated with the band. There’s the obligatory detailed discography and then most surprising of all a section of Grant McLennan’s poems from that era, some of which are actually pretty good.

The music featured in what will be the first of three vinyl box sets is the sound of a band growing up in public; initially ramshackle but sometimes oddly brilliant, then flowering into sublimely evocative songs that connect both intellectually and emotionally. As brilliant as this box set is I’m slightly disappointed that I didn’t manage to get my hands on one of the first 600 copies that contained a book from Grant McLennan’s massive personal library, all verified and signed by Forster and some with notes in the margins from McLennan himself (apparently there are another twelve hundred for the next two sets...). Sadly Grant McLennan died aged 48 in 2006. A few weeks before his death Forster and McLennan met for the last time, as recalled by Forster in this piece for The Monthly. As Forster was leaving McLennan’s house he pulled from the letterbox an issue of the New York Review of Books and commented that he didn’t know that McLennan had subscribed to that particular literary magazine. As Forster drove away he thought that McLennan was probably the only singer-songwriter or rock star who had such a subscription. I have no doubt that Forster’s assumption was correct, after all The Go-Betweens were that kind of band.

A Brief History of the Future - Jacques Attali (2006)

I bought this book on a whim a year ago, having spied it on the shelves of one of my favourite bookstores, Diabolik. I thought I’d better read it before the future arrived, not realizing that it had been published in 2006! I’ve long been a sucker for any kind of media that attempted to forecast what the future may be like. We do seem to be on the cusp of massive changes on this planet, but just what will they be? Will it is be dystopia or utopia for humanity? Typically the future will probably be somewhere in-between these two extremes. When you pick up a book entitled A Brief History of the Future the expectation is that it will have at least some feasible answers. After all, according to the blurb on the back of the book Attali had previously predicted the financial rise of Asia, the advent of what he refers to as ‘nomadic technologies’ and the GFC. I approached this book with great enthusiasm, but unfortunately left it feeling underwhelmed and entertaining the thought that I would make a better futurist than the likes of Attali.

Attali notes in his forward that the shape of our future is being set by events and choices that we are making in the present; therefore logically past events have always set the future in motion. With this in mind he then proceeds with a potted history of the past, including when life itself emerged from the oceans and that momentous time when our ancestors first began to walk upright. This chapter reads like a highly generalized and accelerated version of prehistory, which unfortunately doesn’t give the reader much confidence in what will follow. There are also some glaring flaws, although they may well be caused by a fault in translation (Attali is French). Attali refers to the likes of Homo ergaster and Homo heidelbergensis (and others) as primates, when I’m certain the correct term is hominids. Also some assertions are already dated, with Attali claiming that “All these primates - neighbors but not of kin - coexist without interbreeding.” In recent years a great deal of evidence has emerged that interbreeding between some hominids was occurring. These criticisms are perhaps unfair, however much more glaring is the total lack of referencing throughout this and the following chapter. Attali makes claim after claim regarding the lives and practices of early humans without citing any kind of reliable sources. Is it really “doubtless” that cannibalism began 300,000 years ago? And that around 160,000 years ago slavery began? What discoveries or research led to these notions? Are we just meant to take his word for it? (like I ask you to take mine?).

The long chapter entitled ‘A Brief History of Capitalism’ is far more coherent and persuasive, despite its lack of citations. Attali details the history of what he refers to as the mercantile order and suggests that as the mercantile order evolved over the centuries it fostered more and more individual freedoms and therefore became an engine of democracy. Attali’s principal argument focuses on the nine ‘cores’ of the mercantile order that have been at the forefront of capitalism over the centuries - Bruges, Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Boston, New York and currently Los Angeles. This long chapter leads to, almost inevitably, a chapter entitled ‘The End of the American Empire’. Logically the evolution of capitalism over the centuries points to an inevitable decline in the dominant core, something that has happened again and again; mostly caused by internal dysfunctions, mainly financial, and challenges from the outside. Attali’s arguments are persuasive simply because it is all too easy to see past trends emerge again. He argues that as soon as post 2030 the “ninth form will have lived its day” and that America could become a Scandinavian style social democracy or a dictatorship. Well, we’ll see!

As to what comes next Attali points to three possible ‘waves of the future’ for this century: planetary empire, planetary war and planetary democracy. While it is too complex to adequately sum up how and why each wave could be possible there are a number of key points for each worth noting. Planetary empire involves a possible decoupling of the mercantile order from a central city core, becoming a roaming entity mostly via the borderless world wide web. Planetary war all too ominously involves multiple scenarios ranging from endless minor conflicts to all out war involving what he calls ‘pirate’ entities taking it up to the major powers. ISIS is certainly shaping up to be such an entity. Planetary democracy is, rather optimistically, the inevitable endgame for the century. While some of his arguments for this third wave are sound, some are also are also dubious. Attali cites the emergence of  ‘vanguard players’, or ‘trans-humans’; altruistic citizens that will “...run relational enterprises in which profit will be no more than a hindrance, not a final goal.” The cynic in me can’t help but consider that this viewpoint is naively Utopian and that humanity will not be able to curb its self destructive impulses.

A Brief History of the Future is a moderately interesting book with some compelling ideas. Ultimately, however, the book is flawed, particularly the chapters that deal with the future, which simply make too many assumptions. It’s a tough business this futurism, but in a strange way Attali makes it appear that anyone with some understanding of history and capitalism could give it a go. I’m certainly ready and willing. I have a reasonable knowledge of emergent technologies and have a pretty good understanding of history and current events. Hey - I’m a futurist! Personally I believe that certain emergent technologies could completely alter society and what it is to be human, even more so than current computer technology coupled with the internet. If genuine AI technology is developed, possibly coupled with quantum computing, then that would be a huge game changer. If longevity drugs, now entering an exciting research and development phase, come to fruition, then society and the economy will be challenged with significant changes that have never been seen before. These three technologies (five actually - but don’t get me started on robotics and 3D printing) were touched on only briefly by Attali, leaving me to think that his vision of the future is only part of the possible story at best.

The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing (1962)

I must admit that I was ignorant of Doris Lessing until only a few years ago when she was name dropped by Robert Fripp in an interview for Mojo Magazine. In the interview he recalled how one night on tour in the US with King Crimson he brushed off a waiting groupie after the gig and instead went back to his hotel room to read his Doris Lessing novel! He didn’t mention which one, but I wonder if it was The Golden Notebook? (no doubt it was one of her science fiction novels...). My ignorance about Lessing is reasonably shameful because she is a significant writer and a cultural figure of some renown. Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007 and was listed in fifth place on The Times list of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Lessing was also outspoken about feminism, culture and politics and was for a time in the 1950s a member of the British Communist Party, which resulted in her being spied on by the MI5 for twenty years. She even collaborated with composer Philip Glass, writing lyrics for two operas based on her work.

The Golden Notebook is one of Lessing’s most recognized novels and as I was soon to discover also one of her most challenging. The principle protagonist is Anna Wulf, a writer suffering from writers block and also a particular kind of mental anguish that comes with living in the 1950s; confused gender roles, the cold war, nuclear weapons and a stifling conservatism that is already beginning to crumble. The narrative is highly structured; divided into sections according to notebooks - black, red, yellow and blue, finishing with the golden notebook that unites them all. At regular intervals there are sections ironically titled ‘Free Women’ (or “ironical” - a word that Wulf uses incessantly throughout the novel), which feature Wulf, her friend Molly, their children and a host of male characters, most of whom are reprehensible. Like Lessing herself in the 1950s, Wulf is a member of the Communist Party and the red notebook reveals a deep disillusionment with the Soviet Union as the revelations about Stalin’s reign become too hard to ignore. The black notebook explores Wulf’s writing life, with all its inherent frustrations. Wulf is psychologically unable to accept her life as a writer and resents its bittersweet rewards and suffocating writers block. The yellow notebook records her emotional life and the blue her every day life. Both are fraught with the pressures of life and reveal a woman very much on the edge of a nervous breakdown, a theme that Lessing notes in her preface from 1971 as being more significant than the political and feminist themes.

Within the notebook sections there is further experimentation with form, with Wulf creating fiction that explores what is actually happening in her life. There are significant motifs that are repeated throughout: Wulf endlessly wants to leave the Communist Party and she is constantly drawn to married men, or they are drawn to her. Lessing explores changing gender roles in post war Britain, in which female identity is in flux. The irony inherent in the Free Women sections is that whilst the female characters live independently of men, they continually define themselves by their relationships with them. The male characters are generally dissatisfied and are prone to misogynist behavior that is unfortunately all too believable. Some hard ‘truths’ are explored throughout The Golden Notebook and Lessing is rightly admired for having been so bold in both her themes and her execution. However the novel is also flawed, containing a great deal of stilted dialogue. Many of the scenes are designed to put ideas across and then to repeatedly hammer them home. At times the novel is turgid, filled with endless character ruminations about their own situation or the plight of society as a whole. Also it doesn’t help there is absolutely no humour in the novel whatsoever. A mere one hundred pages into the novel it occurred to me that it was the most neurotic writing I’d ever read and Wulf was the most neurotic character I’d ever encountered. The narrative is painfully self aware and is intensely psychological in an uncomfortably way; it just never lets up and is unlike anything else I’ve ever read. It took me two hundred pages to finally become absorbed by the narrative. The middle third, although unrelentingly demanding, was almost enjoyable, yet by the last third I once again felt like I was wading through narrative quicksand.

This uncompromising book is certainly a challenge, but is it a challenge that is worthwhile? To answer that question requires writing endless pages of rumination in several notebooks, followed by periods of angst and the obsessive cutting out of articles from newspapers to stick onto the walls. Actually, whoops, that’s the book! Curiously, however, reading The Golden Notebook was a rewarding experience, although exactly why is hard to pin down. The novel is certainly significant culturally both for its impact on the feminist movement and its brave experiments with form; but the novel has dated significantly, being very much a product of its times and in that context it can perhaps be viewed as an anthropological document of one woman’s struggle to make sense of her life against the backdrop of history.