War Nerd

Have you ever heard of General Butt Naked of Liberia? It sounds rather like the punchline of a joke, but if so, it's a pretty grim one. Apparently, to quote from Gary Brecher's new book of collected columns from the online journal eXile ("Mankind's Only Alternative"), War Nerd: "at the age of 11 he had a telephone call from the devil who demanded nudity on the battlefield, acts of indecency and regular human sacrifices to ensure his protection."

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we'd looted from civilians. We'd slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. [104]

"We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal," the general summed up, in a recent press conference in front of the world's assembled media.

Is this stuff for real? Apparently it is. A quick Google search reveals a Wikipedia article about one Joshua Blahyi (aka "General Butt Naked"). He's repented now, though, after killing approximately 20,000 people during his rampages.

In June last year God telephoned me and told me that I was not the hero I considered myself to be, so I stopped and became a preacher.

Well, that is reassuring. A bit like George Bush Jr. giving up being an alcoholic loser and family ne'er-do-well and deciding to enter politics instead.

War Nerd, sent to me from Canada by my friend John Dolan, is full of such fascinating anecdotes from ancient and modern history. Its author makes no secret of the fact that he gets off on the whole subject of war, and considers virtually any form of violent and excessive human behaviour preferable to sitting in rush-hour traffic in downtown Fresno, where he works as a downtrodden data-entry clerk.

His reflections on the details of human conflict over the ages are, admittedly, disreputably fascinating, but I guess what interested me most about the book as a whole was how difficult it was to dispute the basic tenets of this war-ophile.

Earlier this year I had a go at reading Robert Fisk's monumental tome The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It was a library book, unfortunately, which meant that I had to read ever faster and faster, hundreds and hundreds of pages of massacres, betrayals, genocides, bombings, burnings etc. until the whole gallimaufry began to spin around my head. Finally it had to go back, all possibilities of renewal exhausted, with a good 400 or so pages to go.

I still haven't given up on it. Bronwyn's bought me my very own copy now, so I will adventure down that intrepid path again one of these days when I'm feeling mentally strong, but I guess my point is that Fisk's tome would appear to confirm the view that Brecher is the one who's on the straight and narrow - it's the rest of us with our idealistic notions of the universal power of peace and fair play who are out of step.

And I don't mean to imply, either, that Brecher's book is somehow "justified" by this comparison with Fisk's more sober-sided, serious trawl through contemporary events. I guess my problem with Fisk (and John Pilger, and various other noble-minded crusaders for truth and justice) is that their position gets increasingly paradoxical as they go along, and yet they never actually go back to square one and examine their own basic postulates about politics and human nature.

The trouble with reading a book by Pilger or Fisk is that they first describe, in grim detail, a whole series of appalling injustices, and then vaguely imply that it should be somehow "set right." Set right by whom? What is the norm in human affairs: Assyrian Kings decapitating their foes, Aztecs tearing out human hearts, Spanish Conquistadors working their Indian slaves to death - or tea parties in Mayfair and Manhattan?

Personally (of course) I'd rather be at the tea party, but I soon as I start to dig a little (what we old-fashioned humanists used to call "thinking"), the motives of the waiting staff begin to present themselves as emblematic of an essentially exploitative top-heavy rewards system. Who cleans up the tables after the tea is drunk? Who carries off the trash? Where does that trash end up? Who lives next to (or on top of) the rubbish-dump? And so on.

Mind you, I certainly respect Fisk and Pilger's moral indignation, but I'd rather they did a more grass-roots, Thoreau-style analysis of their own being-in-the-world. Who folds their sheets? Pays their expense accounts? Why do their books get published and distributed? Because they have the end result of supporting the status quo by implying that wars and genocides are occasional, aberrant - though still distressingly frequent - exceptions to the normal run of affairs in late Capitalist society, rather than "politics continued by other means" (von Clausewitz)?

Brecher's a kind of a humourist, I suppose. At least he certainly writes amusingly. And yet he dares to ask these difficult questions and follows through on the answers. He admits that he'd love to be a warlord, that he sees nothing "irrational" in low-profile, grass-roots guerilla wars. It's funny, yeah, but it's also food for thought in a way that Messrs Chomsky, Fisk and Pilger aren't. They fall back on invoking old-fashioned codes of decency, when the world they describe clearly no longer has the remotest use for such bourgeois scruples.

I'd prefer to live in their world than Brecher's, but the picture he paints makes disconcertingly better sense. And, you know, his analysis of the likes of General Butt Naked (whom it 's hard to imagine even accommodating in most conceptual universes) rings bitterly, horribly true:

The sad part is, I can imagine my folks going to see the bastard preach and getting all sentimental when he starts talking about how the Devil captured him at age eleven ... General Naked may be preaching the Gospel now, but that's the kind of job-change psychos like him can do without breaking a sweat. and they can go back to the old psycho-killer job just as quick when the time's right. [105]

In a world where you can still meet people who feel indignant at the "persecution" of that poor old man General Pinochet, when he was finally arrested in Spain and asked politely to attend a non-binding tribunal to inquire into certain crimes against humanity which had been alleged against him; where immaculately-suited, well-fed media commentators seem genuinely unable to explain why Robert Mugabe doesn't simply renounce the Presidency of Zimbabwe, crying out: "Lord, I done wrong!" under the withering hail of "international opinion," I think it might finally be time to get just a little real.

I'm appalled by the brutal world that Brecher paints, but I'm increasingly unable to pretend that he's making it up as he goes along. Give him a listen. And after you've stopped laughing at all those witty asides, you might do worse than start to think about what he's actually saying.

NZSF

Planet Stories (July 1952) -- Philip K. Dick's first published story, "Beyond Lies the Wub" appeared in this issue (though it isn't mentioned on the cover ... I take it that lobster thing is meant to be a moondog rather than a wub).

When Tina Shaw and I were kicking around suggestions for a book we could do together last year, one of the ideas that came up was for an historical anthology of New Zealand Science Fiction. In fact, we ended up editing a collection of contemporary stories about myth instead (due out from Reed in late 2006 -- watch this space), but it still seems to me quite an interesting project.

Now John Dolan writes to say that he's writing an essay on what has (inevitably), to be called NZSF. I don't in the least grudge him his priority. In fact, I'm very curious to see what he makes of it. I hope he's not too unkind to them, though, our pioneering SF writers -- they are, after all, "ours, by God, / peculiarly by virtue of whatever was / held in common with other colonies." (Kendrick Smithyman, "Research Project").

Yes, I mean, how different can a specifically New Zealand SF actually be? Ours ... by virtue of whatever was held in common with other -- in this case pulpy scribblers about Androids and Rockets and Mars and the Future and Alternate History, etc. etc.

I don't know. It would have been interesting to speculate about it. My first impression is that SF has always had slightly more of a high culture cachet in NZ than elsewhere. A surprising number of so-called "serious" writers have tried their hand at it here. I drew up a list of the ones who were most interesting to me at the time, though it could undoubtedly be updated and expanded:

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) Erewhon; or Over the Range (1872)
Erewhon Revisited (1901)

Julius Vogel (1835-1899) Anno Domini 2000; or, Woman's Destiny (1889)

M. K. Joseph (1914-1981) The Hole in the Zero (1967)
The Time of Achamoth (1977)

Maurice Gee (b.1931) Under the Mountain (1979)
The World Around the Corner (1980)
The Halfmen of O (1982)
The Priests of Ferris (1984)
Motherstone (1985)

Margaret Mahy (b.1936) The Catalogue of the Universe (1985)
Aliens in the Family (1986)
The Tricksters (1986)
The Door in the Air and Other Stories (1988)
Dangerous Spaces (1991)
(TV miniseries) Typhon’s People (1994)
A Dissolving Ghost: Essays and More (2000)
Alchemy (2002)
Maddigan’s Quest (2006)

Craig Harrison (b.1942) Tomorrow Will Be a Lovely Day (1975)
Broken October (1976)
The Quiet Earth (1981)
Days of Starlight (1988)

Phillip Mann (b.1942) The Eye of the Queen (1982)
Master of Paxwax: Book One of the Story of Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener (1986)
The Fall of the Families: Book Two of the Story of Pawl Paxwax, the Gardener (1986)
Pioneers (1988)
Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic (1990)
A Land Fit for Heroes. 4 Vols (1994-1996)

Michael Morrissey (b.1942) The Fat Lady & The Astronomer: Some Persons, Persuasions, Paranoias, and Places You Ought to Encounter (1981)
(ed.) The New Fiction (1985)
Octavio’s Last Invention (1991)
Paradise to Come (1997)

Mike Johnson (b.1947) Lear: the Shakespeare Company Plays Lear at Babylon (1986)
Anti Body Positive (1988)
Lethal Dose (1991)
Dumb Show (1996)
Counterpart (2001)
Stench (2004)

Hugh Cook (b.1956) (10 vols) Chronicles of an Age of Darkness (1986-. )

Phillip Mann wrote a very useful entry about it for The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998) 481-83.

My introductory essay didn't really get very far. To be honest, I'm really more interested in trying to write Science Fiction than in writing about it. I suppose I hoped that the two interests might fruitfully overlap -- hence my opening question:

Night in the City:
Strange Days in NZ sf

• 
  How does one actually go about writing a science fiction novel?
  
  In a 1964 letter to his close friend, Ron Goulart, the appallingly prolific (and intermittently brilliant) Philip K. Dick explained how he wrote one:
  
  this is how PKD gets 55,00 words (the adequate mileage) out of his typewriter: by having 3 persons, 3 levels, 2 themes (one outer or world-sized, the other inner or individual sized), with a melding of all, then, at last, a humane final note. [Quoted from Lawrence Sutin, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (1989): 138].
  
  The three characters should be, respectively:
  
  · “First character, not protagonist but … less than life, a sort of everyman who exists throughout book but is, well, passive; we learn the entire world or background as we see it acting on him”;
  · “In Chapter Two comes the ‘protag,’ who gets a two-syllable name such as ‘Tom Stonecypher,’ as opposed to the monosyllabic ‘Al Glunch’ tag for the Chapter One ‘subman’”;
  · “through Mr. S’s eyes and ears, we glimpse for the first time … superhuman reality – and the human being, shall we call him Mr. Ubermensch? Who inhabits this realm.”
  
  So, “just as Mr G. is the taxpayer and Mr S. is the ‘I,’ the median person, Mr. U is Mr. God, Mr. Big” – the plot development of the book is based on blending the original personal dilemma (“marital problems or sex problems or whatever it is”) of Mr. S with the worldwide “Atlas weight” problems faced by Mr. U, until:
  
  The terminal structural mechanism is revealed: THE PERSONAL PROBLEM OF MR. S IS THE PUBLIC SOLUTION FOR MR. U. And this can occur whether Mr. S is with or pitted against Mr. U.
  
  It all sounds a bit mechanical, and certainly helps to explain how Dick managed to churn out eleven novels in two years, but when one adds that among them were classics such as Martian Time-Slip, Now Wait for Last Year, Dr Bloodmoney, The Simulacra, and Clans of the Alphane Moon, one has to acknowledge that there may be something to be said for such formulaic blueprints after all. Possibly the most disconcerting of them all, however, was The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which depicts an invasion of Earth by some kind of Gnostic demiurge who has taken on the form of the slit-eyed, prosthetic-handed, steel-jawed Terran entrepreneur, Palmer Eldritch ...

I'm still very interested in that Phil Dick prescription for how to write a novel, but wresting it around to a discussion of specifically NZ themes was undoubtedly going to be a bit of a chore. So I had go at a different kind of beginning to the essay ...

• 
  
  At the end of his fifties post-nuclear holocaust novel The Chrysalids, John Wyndham’s telepathic characters are making their way to a remote haven in the South Seas called something like “Sealand.” That tends to be it for New Zealand in classic Golden Age Sf: a place sufficiently remote for civilisation to survive there after the devastation of Europe, Asia and America ...
  
  With the advent of the new wave, though, psychological factors began to become primary within a genre previously dominated by space opera and hard science (Ursula Le Guin’s “fiction for young engineers”).
  
  I’m not proposing to write a history of NZ’s involvement with Sf here - that would be a bit beyond my scope, but just to talk about some interesting (and otherwise almost inexplicable) texts which that tradition has thrown up.
  

.... And so on to talk about Mike Johnson's Lear, Phillip Mann's Pioneers, and a few other eccentric (and therefore strangely characteristic) NZ SF classics.

Well, that's as far as I got with the idea, anyway. It's interesting how many of these writers have been transplanted Brits, for one thing ... Anyway, over to you, John.

Dolan Departs

[photograph by Michaela Hendry, cover design by Sarah Maxey]

Well, it's official. John Dolan is leaving New Zealand after more than a decade spent on these shores. In that time he's published three books -- well, five, if you count two Academic works: Writing Well, Speaking Clearly (U of Otago Press, 1994) and Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Palgrave Press, 2000). The books I'm talking about, though, are two poetry collections put out by AUP: Stuck Up (1995) and People with Real Lives Don't Need Landscapes (2003), and, above all, his novel Pleasant Hell (Capricorn Publishing, 2005).

I must confess to having felt a little suspicious of Dr Dolan before actually meeting him (at Bluff, in fact, a couple of months ago). There seemed something just a little showy about that Doctorate on the Marquis de Sade, those slightly smart-arse-sounding reviews and articles one ran across in Glottis or Landfall from time to time. But then we started talking.

Wow. Was I ever wrong! Dolan is not only a fascinating and generous conversationalist, but a genuine polymath. We started on the American Civil War, then shifted to Science Fiction (Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Soldier in the Mist, Jack Vance, and -- of course -- the Master, Philip K. Dick), religion, regionalism, poetry ... You can see it's a bit of a blow for me that he's leaving.

And why is he leaving? Because he can't get a job, that's why. No English Department will hire him. Because ... um, well, just because, actually. He shows up the others too much. He's too large and opinionated. Because he gets things done, perhaps.

Admittedly, it is true that he was "the subject of various voodoo death cults among the Dunedin med students, some of whom even produced a T-shirt with a highly unflattering caricature of Dr Dolan with the words 'BLAH BLAH BLAH' beneath it." That was as a result of having to teach a particularly onerous compulsory writing course to this particularly disaffected and mutinous pportion of the student body, though. When I had coffee with John the other day in the Alleluya cafe, we were accosted by a succession of his ex-writing students who wanted to tell him how much his teaching had meant to him -- I began to suspect him of planting them after a while, but no, they appeared to be sincere.

The blurb to People with Real Lives Don't Need Landscapes goes on to claim that "Cowardice and vindictive paranoia combine to form Dolan's crude blood-fingerpaint poetic style." He certainly has a number of recurrent themes: Huns, Barbarian Invasions in general, the last days of Byzantium, The Lord of the Rings (especially Elven maidens), the horrors of American suburbia, etc. etc.

All of which brings us to Pleasant Hell, Dolan's first (and to date, regrettably, only) novel. How exactly can one characterise this insane work? The main character is called "John," and seems to have had a more-or-less equivalent set of experiences to his creator: Californian upbringing, Academic job in Dunedin, curious passive-aggressive relationship with his parents (sulking for twenty years is, apparently, the only way of solving arguments in this menage) -- oh, and his surname's "Dolan."

It's appallingly funny. It begins with a long rant about the wondrous workings of providence, and how one particularly obnoxious Pollyanna called "Canny Scot"who used to write in to the Otago Daily Times about "God's plan" should be strapped to the front of a squid boat and made to "look down into that writhing, pulsing water and see in it God's plan for this antipodean Alcatraz. Let him see how much we matter in the grand scheme. Rope him tight to that light-pole and keep him out there facing the water all night, drooling half-frozen ropes of spittle ... A little fresh ocean spray will do him good. Taste God's cold pickled water. Smell God's cheap diesel fumes. Watch God's choppy waves for ten hours, spewing God's fish-and-chips into the chop at intervals."

There is much in the same vein until we come to the irrefutable conclusion:

"God created this place [Dunedin] as a critique of me."

The universe of Dolan's fiction is a solipsistic hell. The awful degradations suffered by his main character as he crawls through High School and on into College do, literally, have to be read to be believed. His ghastly malodorous Karate clothes, the leather biker boots which gradually strip his feet of most of their skin and all of their resemblance to normal human appendages, become characters in their own right. So does Max the attack-dog, a pathetic shit-smeared wreck from a pound, whose only remaining trait is the desire to kill (non-white) passers-by.

You may think you had it hard growing up (I certainly remember vividly lying supine on the floor by the lockers at Rangitoto College, as one boy kicked me in the ribs repeatedly -- he'd taken a dislike to me on sight, apparently, and made a point of coming up and bashing me every time we met thereafter -- something about the expression on my face, it must have been. I never consciously addressed a word to him [except, perhaps, "ouch!" or "no, please, mercy!"] so it can't have been anything I said). Your sufferings -- my sufferings -- were a fucking picnic compared to "John Dolan"'s.

I put in the inverted commas because I tried to console myself at first with the idea that he might have made some of it up -- exaggerated it a bit for effect -- but after a while I was forced to conclude that these awful things had indeed happened ...

Perhaps the most terrible, and the most sickeningly funny of all, is the scene where Corey the Klass Klown manages to intercept the note young Dolan tries to pass to the most Elfin of all the girls at his school, a note written in faux-Gothic handwriting (under the influence of that master calligrapher, and adept student of feminine psychology, J. R. R. Tolkien), which reads as follows:

"O Dearest Leigh -- Much have I wished to give to you some testimonial of my affections, yet I know not how. Willt [sic] thou meet me by the stream ere the sun touches the western pines?"

The response from Corey and his cohorts is brutal and complete. "I'm not still standing there, so logically it must have ended," Dolan muses, as one writhes with transferred embarrassment at the completeness of his humiliation. It's not really funny, I suppose, watching another human being suffer. What am I saying? Of course it's funny -- it's the only thing that is really funny (or so John Cleese asserted when trying to account for the popularity of Basil Fawlty).

There's a lot more. It's a pretty thorough denunciation. Nobody I can think of has ever gone further in dramatising his own hapless misery -- but the beautiful precision and effortless competence of the writing makes it funnier to read than P. G. Wodehouse.

The poetry's very good, too -- don't get me wrong -- but Pleasant Hell deserves to become a classic. It's the Catcher in the Rye of the Love Generation (or has someone already said that somewhere online?).

So many goodbyes there've been in my life lately. John and his wife Katherine (an accomplished critic and poet in her own right) are off to Vancouver Island. I hope someone there notices the extraordinary opportunity that has befallen them. The one we've missed.