Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman
Thursday 22nd September 2022
Manchester Arena, Manchester, England
It’s a strange homecoming that takes a man to the farthest reaches of the universe. But strange things are the stock in trade of Oldham lad (and internationally renowned physicist) Brian Cox, whose Horizons Live tour winds down with a return to Manchester. Galaxies, suns, quantum mechanics and, of course, black holes – oddities that, when delivered by Professor Cox on stage tonight, seem as natural as the air outside.
I was sceptical of the Horizons Live tour before booking my ticket. I passed up the opportunity to see the Manchester show when it was originally scheduled and it was only because of its Covid-induced cancellation that I was given a second chance on this Thursday night a year later. I wondered what it would involve: it would be a visual treat, no doubt, but would such an extravaganza turn it into a circus? Would its discussion of astrophysics be too complicated or, in trying to reach laymen like myself, would it be dumbed down to the point of insult? I read popular science, listen to podcasts, even write my own science-fiction; what, I asked myself as I opened my wallet, would I be getting out of Horizons?
🌃🔭This evening, we're lucky enough to explore 'Horizons' with @ProfBrianCox!
Professor Cox, too, is aware of the strange dimensions of his show. On stage tonight, he remarks with warmth on how so many people have shown up for Horizons in an arena usually reserved for concerts. There are mathematicians in the audience. Cox mentions that his support act, the comedian Robin Ince (who also co-hosts his podcast), told him not to refer to the show as a lecture, “not at these prices”. It’s a joke, of course (though an inaccurate one – have they not seen the current level of tuition fees?) but it addresses the elephant in the room. Horizons Live is an astrophysics lecture, but in the best possible sense. It’s a lecture delivered by a charismatic and knowledgeable lecturer at the top of his game, augmented by powerful cinematic imagery far beyond what you’d find in a university lecture hall.
It is this imagery which, with all due respect to Professor Cox, is the main selling point of Horizons Live. As Cox leads us through a two-hour tour of the universe and our knowledge of it, covering gravity, spacetime, black holes, quantum physics and the origins of life on Earth, this backdrop shifts between various interactive images of stars and galaxies to match his script. The visuals on the screen are incredible; some use the same technology used to create the black hole in the film Interstellar (as Cox acknowledges); others I recognise from the inspiring short film Wanderers. For one brief moment, Cox’s iPad fails and he appeals to an IT geek off-stage (IT being the only vocation that deals in witchcraft more than an astrophysicist). Otherwise, the display is in perfect rehearsed synchronicity with Cox’s delivery, punctuating his points as he makes them.
At its best moments, this is awe-inspiring. The most striking moment comes when Cox presents one of those high-resolution images of the universe captured by space telescopes, but moves us through it in 3D. All the galaxies shown in the image are calculated at their correct distance from one another, and we move forward through them as through a flock of fireflies. I’ve been sitting quietly throughout the whole show, but at this moment I’m also quiet in my soul. I can’t think of anything that has impressed upon me so greatly the sheer scale of the known universe. Any residual scepticism I have about Horizons Live has vanished.
A new image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, similar to the one Cox pulls a rapt audience through in 3D. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI.
Another welcome feature of the show is the contribution of Robin Ince. Recognising the intellectual heaviness of the lecture, Professor Cox turns the stage over to his companion during various intermissions, in which Ince has the daunting task of delivering some science-based stand-up comedy, but in such a way as to make our return to Cox’s serious lecture seamless. This Ince carries off with aplomb, remarking on our collective furrowed brows and equation-induced headaches, and contrasting his own looks with the similarly-aged Cox’s rock-star features (“time ages us at different speeds”; “a man who declines to follow the law of entropy”). It’s a valuable part of the show: when Ince emerges to provide relief during a later intermission, it’s a crucial intervention at a point when our minds have begun to unspool in following Cox’s discussion of quantum mechanics.
I cannot provide a full review of Horizons Live as that would involve discussing in depth the ideas Professor Cox unpacks. And, as Ince might say, that would require me to have some understanding of what’s going on. But it’s to Cox’s great credit that he can summarise his key points without talking down to the audience, and lead us on a tour through the universe and its hidden trails without us ever feeling lost, or needing to grip his hand more tightly. There’s a confidence to Cox’s lecture and a naturalness to how it unfolds. From Einstein’s equations, he explains, there emerged so many questions and inquiries, and he weaves important but lesser-known luminaries like Karl Schwarzschild and John Wheeler into his scientific tapestry with skill.
There is, however, one concept which dominates the evening, just as it dominates our imagination when we think about the universe. “I want to talk about black holes,” Cox says. He has a book about them coming out in a couple of weeks, and clearly they are on his mind. They are the “Rosetta stones” for understanding our universe, he says, and he talks us through their emergence in post-Einsteinian theory, the scepticism and then acceptance shown towards the idea of them, before talking about Hawking radiation and the black hole information paradox. When the big screen behind him shows the famous photograph of a black hole, captured in 2019, it’s an image no doubt familiar to everyone in the audience, such is our fascination with them.
Cox’s anchor in this discussion is the Penrose diagram, which is used to explain the relationship spacetime has to black holes. It remains on the screen as Cox discusses the event horizon, singularities, world lines and the multiverse – it’s a marvel that Cox is able to lead us down this path without losing us. The use of diagrams might sound off-putting to one who has not seen the show, but they are used sparingly (earlier, Cox unpacks an equation he has put up on the screen, something which, in a nod to the Arena’s more usual musical acts, he calls an “equation solo”). The more powerful visuals mentioned earlier dominate, and the show as a whole is well-balanced between popular science and providing glimpses of the cutting edge.
The Penrose diagram used by Professor Cox in Horizons Live, also available as a t-shirt at the merchandise counter. Spacetime bulges in the middle when I wear it.
It has indeed been a strange homecoming for Cox. I’ve been to the Manchester Arena multiple times, both before and after the attack in 2017, but no visit has been as peculiar as this: thousands of people listening intently to an astrophysics lecture. For all the spectacular visuals, the night has essentially been one mild-mannered man talking on stage. It’s been a great display of human intelligence and inquisitiveness, not only from Cox but from the audience who have eagerly followed him on his path. Even the comic Ince returns to the stage to deliver a profound poem he has written.
Our curiosity has been indulged, but rather than sated, the show has inspired us to ask more about the universe. Cox quotes the physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who wrote that beauty is that which resonates with us on the deepest level, and certainly the night and the stage has produced plenty of beauty and resonance. Even black holes, which in the popular imagination are imposing destroyers of stars, are shown to be key to our future understanding. They are phenomena that link universes together in a web of Penrose diagrams; the eddas of black holes which proliferate throughout the universe perhaps not holes but stitches of repair.
One of Professor Cox’s stated aims for Horizons Live is for audiences to leave with a greater sense of wonder at their world, and to go out into the night and look at the sky a bit differently. But in thinking back on the night I have a moment of understanding before even leaving the Arena. And as I drive home through the Manchester night, fog settles on the road, yet the thought becomes even clearer. At the start of the show, after the stage lights ebbed and the arena went dark, and the professor emerged to begin his tour of space and time, members of the audience who had not yet reached their seats used the light of their smartphones to find their place. Searching in darkness, with small lights used to illuminate their path; while, before them, the story of the universe is already unfolding.
[Author’s Note: The collective noun used here for a group of black holes, an ‘edda’, is my own invention. It is inspired by the Poetic Edda that speaks of Ragnarok, the assembling and the twilight of the gods.]
It is hard to write about music because it is an elemental thing. Even among artists and other creative types, musicians occupy a special sphere. There is a line attributed to Walter Pater that all art aspires to the condition of music, and even an ordinary musician can, with a few strums of a guitar and some simple lyrics, bring forth the harmony that is in the world much more effectively than a great writer. Certainly, writing about music often ends up destroying the magic in it, turning the experience of sung gold into mute and lumpen lead.
“My hands are little, but they’re strong,” Sierra Ferrell says at one point on Monday night, in between songs, and on that stage those small, dainty hands touched upon the casual magic that music has but which is much harder to find in other art forms. She is certainly no ordinary musician. To hear Miss Sierra sing for the first time is an experience, whether on an album or a video online. To listen to her live is to witness one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World (others include the Empire State Building, the International Space Station, and how Pete Davidson is attractive to women). It is hard to describe her voice, not only because of the problem of writing successfully about music, but because its qualities shapeshift elusively as you hear it. To describe it as earthy misrepresents its femininity; to describe it as tender or melodious undersells its power. It is note-perfect, and yet with a ruggedness that stays true to Sierra’s West Virginian roots. It is like an angel who has decided to no longer serve, but has not turned away from the light either, and instead chooses to sing according to what it feels truly shines.
I have travelled the thirty-five miles from Manchester to Liverpool precisely to experience this wonder, and the show does not disappoint. In the last couple of years I’ve become a fan of this new country scene – much to my own surprise – and the old iPod I’ve loaded up for the car journey is full of Sierra’s music, mixed with Nick Shoulders, Colter Wall, Charley Crockett and Tyler Childers, among others. The first song on shuffle as I pull away from home is ‘Silver Dollar’, and whether by coincidence or kismet, it’s the first song Sierra plays after I arrive at the packed, dark Future Yard in Birkenhead. After a strong opening act by Josh Beddis, filled with slow songs and including a rolling closer called ‘The River’ – “sinners, won’t you find your way back home” –plenty of goodwill has been generated in the crowd by the Welsh picker’s genial stage presence. The atmosphere is further enhanced when Sierra arrives on stage and throws what appears to be confetti or petals into the crowd. They don’t reach beyond the first row, but unless she deployed a t-shirt cannon they wouldn’t have found me anyway. I’m standing at the very back of the room, near the bar, though I’m not drinking tonight (I’m driving home after the show). If I was any more of a wallflower, I’d be singing ‘Sixth Avenue Heartache’.
The venue, the Future Yard, is the perfect size for the performance that Sierra and her band – Oliver Bates Craven on mandolin and fiddle and Geoff Saunders on stand-up bass – are about to deliver. It is large enough to generate an atmosphere but small enough to emphasise the power in the songs, whether that’s the tender intimacy of ‘Whispering Waltz’ or the raucous energy Sierra finds in ‘Fox Hunt’ or ‘I’d Do it Again’.
On stage, Sierra places her small frame behind her acoustic guitar. She has a crown of flowers sown into her wheat-gold hair – a striking array of pinks and reds and oranges and yellows. She looks like she has stepped out of an Alphonse Mucha painting. And when she begins to sing, the effect becomes otherworldly. Her body sways as she sings and strums on her guitar, and she won’t break the spell she has over the room for the rest of the night.
The opening ‘Silver Dollar’ is followed by ‘Give it Time’, with Oliver and Geoff harmonising on the chorus to give it a throwback bluegrass feel. It’s a sign that, for all of Sierra’s unique ability, she is also supported by formidably talented friends. The third song, ‘Why’d Ya Do It?’, features some great fiddle from Oliver; the first sign that while the crowd may miss the incredible Josie Toney – Sierra’s regular fiddle player who, for whatever reason, has not travelled for the UK tour – they need not mourn her on the night.
The performance reaches another level with the fourth song, ‘Bells of Every Chapel’. Sierra introduces it in her tender Southern accent, saying it was inspired by watching the Netflix show The Crown with a friend. It’s a reminder that she hasn’t stepped out of one of Mucha’s art nouveau paintings, or a Roaring Twenties honky-tonk, but exists in the here and now. The song was co-written by Oliver Bates Craven and he leaves another mark on it with a mandolin solo. Not to be outdone, Geoff Saunders delivers a solo on his stand-up bass. Solos from both artists will become a regular and welcome feature of tonight’s set. A high note at the end of this song, held by Sierra for a long time, gets the crowd whooping. The trio on stage will maintain this level for the rest of the night.
A release is provided by the slow and intimate ‘Whispering Waltz’, showcasing Sierra’s vocals on a night when that could be said about every song that’s heard. It is followed by a reprise of ‘Silver Dollar’ – a surprise, particularly as there later proves to be no place on the setlist for ‘In Dreams’, another signature song. The seventh song of the night is the lesser-spotted ‘Littlebird’, from the 2018 album Pretty Magic Spell. Its warm reception from the crowd returns an almost shy thank-you from the artist, as though Sierra is surprised that people respond to her music.
As though to shake off this bout of shyness, Sierra and her band launch into the best song on the night, the as-yet-unreleased ‘I’d Do it Again’. She plays up the cuteness of the lyrics, selling it with a wink here and there, and displays great control of her voice as she hits all the right beats without pausing for breath. Even after solos from each of the three players – including a brief one from Sierra’s acoustic guitar – I’m still surprised when the song, which in its versions online has a charming Cole Porter vibe, reaches a raucous end that gets the crowd going again. Sierra roaring “I’d do it again – three times!”, refusing to let the song end, shows how the versatility in her vocals is matched by the flexibility in her songwriting. ‘I’d Do it Again’ was the most unexpected performance of the night.
Matching the earlier effect of following ‘Bells of Every Chapel’ with ‘Whispering Waltz’, Sierra changes pace after the frenetic end to ‘I’d Do it Again’ by singing the sweet and accepting ‘Made Like That’, followed by ‘Lonesome Feeling’, an Osborne Brothers song introduced as an “old bluegrass number”. Talk of West Virginia in between songs leads to an apparently impromptu rendition of John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’. Seemingly suggested by someone in the front row, the audience is only too happy to sing along.
Sierra is not yet ready to leave her home state, and begins to sing ‘West Virginia Waltz’. It is another impressive vocal, holding a long note on the word ‘flame’ as the song builds. Her voice proves the strongest even when harmonising with two men, though for the next song Sierra stands alone on stage. She plays ‘Rosemary’ from her 2019 album Washington by the Sea, a murder ballad that is intriguingly followed by the unreleased ‘Fox Hunt’. Sierra plays fiddle on this song, with Oliver also on fiddle and Geoff switching to acoustic guitar. This was the song I anticipated most before the show, with the versions I had seen online finally convincing me that I had to see Sierra live. I don’t expect the new verse she delivers, which suggests that this crowd-pleasing foot-stomper may also morph into something of a murder ballad or outlaw song itself. It’ll be interesting to see what its final form will be when it’s finally cut for an album, but, as Sierra says when the song is finished, “don’t ask me when that is”. It will be quite a task to replicate the live energy of this song in the studio.
Sierra follows up ‘Fox Hunt’ with two other unreleased numbers, ‘Lighthouse’ and ‘Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down’. The three musicians harmonise on one mic for ‘Lighthouse’, and the song hints that Sierra is far from finished in building her stable of quality tunes. Despite the relative unfamiliarity of these two numbers, she still has the crowd in the palm of her hand and has them waving their arms in an arc during the chorus of the next song, the hopeful ‘At the End of the Rainbow’.
The sight of swaying arms also proves appropriate to summon the next number, ‘The Sea’. Though Sierra has returned to a familiar song here, she still has a surprise or two in store. ‘The Sea’ starts as expected, a slow, jazzy piece, but then gets unexpectedly high-tempo. Oliver and Geoff perform some now-signature mandolin and bass soloes to complement the song’s new swift current.
The band and the room are still full of energy, but we’ve reached the last song of the night. Sierra launches into ‘Jeremiah’, and the song seems all the sweeter for knowing it is the last. Another welcome surprise of the night: Miss Sierra begins to howl like a wolf on the final verse of the song, much to the delight of the crowd. Perhaps she’s been spending too much time with Nick Shoulders, her yodelling and whistling sometime-tourmate who seems nuttier than a shaken sack of squirrels.
Sierra and the band leave the stage, bowing to the cheers and the applause of the crowd, before returning for a brief encore. “You guys like honky-tonk?” Geoff says, before they sing the old bar-room song ‘Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)’. As a nod to the British audience, a line is changed to “that pub down the street”. It can sometimes feel like country fans from outside West Virginia or Texas or the Bluegrass State, particularly those in other countries, are excluded in the name of protecting the genre’s authenticity, but the music never sounded as natural in England as it did tonight. The spell cast is complete.
It is unlikely that Sierra or the band will remember this night. Pretty soon they’re travelling on to London, and then Europe, and there’ll be stages and festivals and honky-tonks aplenty when they head back home to the States. If there remains any natural justice in art today, Sierra Ferrell will be in high demand. She proved tonight, if it needed to be proved, that she can do it all. The high notes and the low, the raucous songs and the tender ones. The voice is the thing that alters you when you hear it, but what is clear throughout the night is that the songcraft is also strong. Old favourites and new soon-to-be-favourites have been played, and ‘The Sea’ and ‘I’d Do it Again’ in particular have changed form without being diminished. It requires a feat of musicianship to bring all this together. It’s most noticeable, of course, in the stand-out moments – the high held notes of Sierra’s singing, the solos from Oliver and Geoff – but also in the night’s smaller moments – the light touches on Oliver’s mandolin, the backbeat of Geoff’s bass, the inflections in Sierra’s voice as it rolls over certain lyrics.
It’s these small moments that return to me after I leave the venue and start the late-night drive back to Manchester. I missed an opportunity to have a photo taken after the show – Sierra and her band mingled with fans at the bar – as it seemed awkward to stick around when I was alone and could not drink due to the need to drive home. I remained a wallflower to the end. But I clutch a black Sierra Ferrell t-shirt with ‘the bee’s knees’ on it, and smile. It seems absurd to purchase a memento when the night itself has been unforgettable, and perhaps it was the final symptom of the spell Miss Sierra had cast. I remember a song from earlier in the night. “Little bird,” she had sung. “Now won’t you sing to me. I know you’ll sing for free. I’m right where I wanna be.” I don’t expect her to sing for free, but on Monday night in Liverpool I was right where I wanted to be.
Setlist:
(all songs from the album Long Time Coming and written by Sierra Ferrell, unless noted)
Silver Dollar (Ferrell/Nate Leath)
Give it Time
Why’d Ya Do It?
Bells of Every Chapel (Ferrell/Oliver Bates Craven)
Whispering Waltz (Ferrell/Craven)
Silver Dollar (reprise) (Ferrell/Leath)
Littlebird (from Pretty Magic Spell)
I’d Do it Again (unreleased)
Made Like That
Lonesome Feeling (Billy Henson) (unreleased)
Take Me Home, Country Roads (John Denver/Bill Danoff/Taffy Nivert) (unreleased)
West Virginia Waltz (Ferrell/Leath)
Rosemary (from Washington by the Sea)
Fox Hunt (unreleased)
Lighthouse (unreleased)
Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down (Traditional) (unreleased)
At the End of the Rainbow (Ferrell/Leath)
The Sea
Jeremiah
Encore: Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music) (Joe Maphis/Rose Lee Maphis/Max Fidler) (unreleased)
A number of frustrating technical issues have meant I’ve been unable to deliver further news on my writing in a timely manner.
For some months, my novelette Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog has only been available on Amazon Kindle and on Gumroad in epub, mobi and pdf formats. I’ve wanted to upload it to Smashwords for a while, because they also distribute it to a number of other selling platforms, but I’ve struggled to find the time to undertake the formatting required.
Now, after some delay, I’m pleased to say that Wanderer is now available on all the major ebook platforms. You can now find it on Smashwords, Apple Books, Kobo, Scribd and Barnes & Noble. It is still available, as before, on Amazon and Gumroad.
August has been a hectic and frustrating month for a number of personal reasons not worth going into, and it means I’ve not had time to compose a feature blog post here. Instead, I have a few updates perhaps worth mentioning:
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is now available on Gumroad.
After experimenting with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service for a few months, I have decided to expand the availability of my literary sci-fi novelette Wanderer to other platforms. While still available on Amazon Kindle, the ebook of Wanderer is now available in epub, mobi and pdf formats on Gumroad. It has already recorded its first sale there (a generous £6, against the £1.50 RRP, under Gumroad’s voluntary “name a fair price” principle), with more platforms to follow.
The Amazon experiment was worthwhile, but constricting: its Unlimited service requires exclusivity, but it doesn’t really do anything to elevate the visibility of its titles. The only real engagement through Amazon came when I used one of my designated promotional periods to offer the ebook for free for a limited time. Speaking of which…
The first reviews have been coming in for Wanderer.
During the afore-mentioned promotional period on Amazon, I promoted the offer on various social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads and Reddit. Despite its reputation as hostile to self-promotion (which is usually well-deserved), Reddit proved to be the most productive of these. The subsequent traffic to my Wanderer story saw it spend the weekend atop a few of Amazon’s bestseller lists.
I was brought down from these heady heights by some of the usual Reddit frustrations, but I also got good feedback from a number of Redditors. It also led to some of my first Amazon reviews, which were uniformly positive and can be read here. Suddenly, with the addition of verified customer reviews and star ratings, Wanderer’s lonesome posting on Amazon began to look respectable. So too the Goodreads listing.
A special long-form review on LibraryThing.
LibraryThing is a Goodreads-style website that I’ve been using regularly to post book reviews for years, and it led to my first unsolicited review for Wanderer back in May. However, I was delighted to receive a review this month from the LibraryThing commentator known as Waldstein. Alex is perhaps the best long-form reviewer on the site and someone who has provided gracious feedback on a number of my own long-form reviews since he read my review of Lolitaback in 2017. I posted excerpts from his astute review of Wanderer on my Instagram account, but the full text is beautifully composed and is worth reading in its entirety here.
Hopefully reviews will continue to come in for Wanderer – and hopefully they will continue to be positive.
Updates on Mick’s Café.
One of my other projects has been the subreddit Mick’s Café, a place I set up to find and post hidden gems in contemporary literature, music, fine art and film. I posted its mission statement on my blog here. However, after some promising initial growth and engagement, it has now stalled. I’m not sure how else to get the word out, or how to encourage engagement from its current membership (which stands at 68).
Reddit’s hostility to self-promotion even extends into mentioning your subreddit on other subs, and it’s wearying to source opportunities, and compose posts and comments (for both Wanderer and Mick’s), only to see them removed, shadowbanned or downvoted, even when I’ve followed the byzantine and often-contradictory rules many subs possess. At the moment, it seems that, with Mick’s Café, I’ve created the only corner of the internet where people don’t feel inclined to offer their opinions. I suppose that’s a feat in itself.
My own book reviews.
I continue to write reviews of everything I read, and while August might appear to be a leaner month than others (five or six books, where I might usually read a dozen), this is in no small part because I decided to tackle Anna Karenina, the huge novel by Leo Tolstoy. This has long been on my list to read, as I’m sure it has been for many others, but I didn’t want it to be just another title crossed off my list. I tried to give it the attention it deserved, and I composed my thoughts on the book here.
I’ve always written these reviews for my own edification, often not realising precisely what I’ve enjoyed or disliked about a book until I’m writing my own review of it. Nevertheless, I’m always surprised whenever someone mentions they’ve read them, whether this is another user, like Waldstein above, or another author.
I had cause to be particularly surprised this month, because a review I wrote last year, on the contemporary novella Milton in Purgatory, had come to the attention of its author, Edward Vass, and he posted excerpts from my review on his Instagram. This unexpected interaction reinforced a point I’d like to make to my own readers and prospective readers: as a writer, it’s great to see reviews of your own stuff. Not only for the sales it might encourage, but because writing (particularly self-published writing, like in my case) is often a very lonely and futile endeavour, and good reviews can often make the struggle seem worthwhile.
So anyone who is interested in Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, please check it out – and reviews are particularly encouraged!
You are walking blindly through the dark streets in the middle of the night. A fog has settled and nothing seems to be happening. The world seems empty. You wander off the beaten path and realise you are lost. Then you hear some music coming through the mist from up ahead. It sounds good. Damn good. The sort of thing you’ve always been looking for but didn’t have the words to express. You see lights. The fog clears and a bar appears ahead of you. The sign says “Mick’s” and the door is open. You go inside.
Mick’s Café is a sub I recently created on Reddit. The intention was to establish a place to find and share the creative gems hiding in our contemporary culture. It hopes to amplify artists who ought to be better known, to try and counteract a culture that seems to gaudily push superhero movies, autotuned music and superficial fiction into our faces.
If you feel that our popular culture doesn’t offer up much of worth, Mick’s is the place for you. If you’ve ever told a friend about a great book or band or film and been met with indifference, here’s the place to find receptive ears.
The subreddit was founded on 4th July 2021 and has been steadily growing its membership since. The idea behind it came about for two reasons. The first was when I realised that whenever I came across an artist I liked, it had always happened through serendipity. The things that were promoted in the media were always corporate, superficial, juvenile, but every so often I would stumble across something by chance and think “there should be billboards dedicated to this”. There would be – if our culture still had a healthy appreciation for art, instead of platforms manipulated by money, hustle, networking and the general decline in standards. I wanted to find a happening place where I could be introduced more reliably to the stuff I only really found infrequently and by blind chance.
The second reason was a more selfish one. Much earlier, I had realised there didn’t seem to be much genuinely literary writing around. I wanted to provide some, and so I wrote a novel. However, when I finished the manuscript, it was rejected repeatedly by the publishing industry. They said (those who replied, at least) that the book was good – but not commercial enough. I increasingly noticed articles and tweets from literary agents and publishers who glibly mentioned that they’d found great writing in their slush piles, but had rejected it because it was “too difficult to sell”. I read these tweets and thought, “I’d want to read that book”, but a gatekeeper had decided I never could.
I came to suspect that perhaps one reason there weren’t many impressive books around was because they were being nixed at source. Regardless of whether my own writing was of any worth, it seemed the industry was prioritising pulp that could be sold easily, and then blaming “market forces”.
The good stuff must surely be out there, but the people creating it aren’t being backed by the shot-shy creative industries. Where are our contemporary Dylans, Hemingways and Van Goghs? Perhaps they’re toiling away without an audience. Meanwhile, celebrities and vloggers get multi-million-pound book deals, and there’s a deluge of derivative, formulaic fiction.
I decided to self-publish some of my own writing but, as I suspected might happen, I found it just about impossible to find an audience. For writers, it’s a hostile environment. Good writing can’t stand out amid that same deluge of formulaic trash, and honest artists are drowned out by those who shout the loudest. I found that my promotional efforts were unfocused and ineffective. Social media in particular seemed a mess, pandering to outrage, short attention spans and the lowest common denominator. Even on Reddit, for which I initially held out some hope, I discovered most of my posts had been shadowbanned – even, ridiculously, from subs that explicitly said writers could promote their work without fear of being shadowbanned.
My suspicion is that many people are yearning for art with integrity, but don’t know where to go. Creatives lose confidence and are distracted from their art by the exhaustion of the self-promotion hustle. Audiences are starved of real, sustaining art to experience and they lose faith in their own culture. It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sound from the noise. People can’t connect. That’s when I realised that if I wanted to find a happening place I needed to make one myself.
Mick’s Café takes its inspiration from Rick’s Café in the classic film Casablanca. I hope the subreddit will, in time, generate its own vibe and culture; a place to find hidden gems, cultivated by a community that has standards. I also hope it will become a place for sincere artists to find a platform and, in this respect, Mick’s is inspired by the dissenting force of the French Impressionists. When Monet and artists like him were prohibited from displaying their work at the official Salon in Paris, they set up their own exhibition instead. It changed the course of art history.
It may seem too ambitious, even hubristic, but it’s hoped that the sub will become an influential hub for the sort of creative endeavour that has integrity, purpose and meets a certain artistic standard. A place for things that are dying out of the world, that aren’t really amplified elsewhere in our society. If you’ve ever thought that the films released today don’t match the standards of previous decades, that musicians or writers don’t compare with those of the past, this could be your opportunity to try to change that. At Mick’s, you can join a community of people who are trying to find those artists who do compare: exciting new films which don’t get the box office returns; musicians who invest in melody and musicianship; writers who work for years on an original manuscript instead of weeks on a formulaic thriller.
If this sounds appealing, you might want to head over to this obscure corner of Reddit and take a look around the Café. Come up to the bar and tell us about the hidden gems you’ve found: the books, the bands, the films.
And if you leave and you pass any recommendations on to others, let them know you heard it at Mick’s.
You can visit Mick’s Café on Reddit by clicking here.
‘Night Shadows’ by Edward Hopper is a public domain painting accessed via Wikimedia Commons.
After I had finished my story Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, I realised an odd thing. The story was set on the distant moon of Europa, one of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, and yet I hadn’t really been influenced by any sci-fi in the writing of it. Despite the story’s literary aspirations, it was most definitely a piece of science-fiction.
I don’t tend to read much dedicated sci-fi, though I suppose I ought to. I read a lot of standard literary fiction and plenty of popular science, and the amalgam of those two when I’m writing becomes, well, science-fiction. I felt like an imposter, not only because I had self-published a piece of sci-fi without “paying my dues” to the genre, but because I was promoting the story in various sci-fi forums online.
To illustrate this curious “no sci-fi” situation, I’ve decided to compile a list of the 10 main influences on the writing of Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. This should give readers a taste of how an original story can sometimes be constructed from rather strange and disparate elements. If a writer has a truly open mind, they can find inspiration in all sorts of places.
For those who have already read Wanderer, the list should also provide some insight into the author’s intentions, and the various themes and techniques developed. (Those who haven’t read the story can find it here.) Hopefully this deeper dive will enhance the reward that comes from reading a piece of literary fiction. Such rich influences certainly enhanced the writing of it.
1. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
Detail from ‘Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich (1818)
Let’s start with an obvious one. My story uses the same title as the 19th-century German painter’s most famous piece – a striking composition that I also used for my front cover. Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is perhaps the most well-known representation of philosophical contemplation and wanderlust in Western culture, and I tried to reflect some of the feelings it evokes in my own story of David Casper (the name is no coincidence), the freewalker wandering across Europa moon.
Friedrich was an extraordinarily vivid artist, and his Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog was not the only painting to inspire my story. The Sea of Ice (1824), shown at the top of this article, served as a general mood piece for the icy landscape of Europa moon, which is known to astronomers as “chaos terrain”. Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824) inspired the flashback scene where David Casper and Lucy Ortega roam across the American landscape in spring. Cairn in Snow (1807) and Cabin in the Snow (1827) inspired the ‘Casper’s Cache’ shelter the two construct on Europa.
2. Big Two-Hearted River by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
Detail from ‘In the Forest of Fontainebleau’ by Paul Cézanne (1879)
Hemingway, the master of the short story and an immaculate prose stylist, is perhaps the single biggest influence on my writing. This will no doubt prove to be folly on my part, for the path to literary glory is littered with many writers who have tried and failed to imitate this great artist.
Influence, however, is not the same as imitation. I believe many of those imitators are led astray by the masculine, adventurous “Hemingway myth”, and forget the man’s understated ‘iceberg’ writing style. ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ is a prime example of this style; it is, on the surface, a simple story of a young man interacting with nature on a fishing trip in the American hinterland. The key to appreciating it, however, comes in a letter Hemingway wrote to Gertrude Stein, saying that he was “trying to do the country like [Paul] Cézanne” did in his paintings. And, certainly, when you read the story you get that same rich, restful feeling you get from contemplating a fine landscape painting.
I attempted the same in my own story, with Friedrich’s Wanderer painting in place of Cézanne. A key motif of Friedrich’s painting is the “Rückenfigur”, or ‘figure seen from behind’. Consequently, the raison d’être of my story was the contemplation of David Casper, the Galilean, from the point of view of Mr. Reeve as he stands with his back to him among the water jets of Europa moon. It was what I wrote towards from the very start. That entire scene was my attempt to recreate the deluge of thoughts which emerge when contemplating Friedrich’s remarkable painting.
Some of my thoughts on Hemingway can be found in my various reviews of his books on my Goodreads profile. For my assessment of the writer and his legacy, my review of his Selected Lettersis perhaps not to be overlooked.
3. The Future of Humanity by Michio Kaku (2018)
Detail from ‘Artist Concept of Europa Water Vapor Plume’ (2013). Credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI.
Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and, to my mind, one of the most potent science popularizers alive today. His 2008 book Physics of the Impossible was recommended to me by a friend and inspired a number of technologies in a science-fiction novel I wrote (which, unfortunately, remains unpublished at time of writing).
The Future of Humanitysees Professor Kaku write engagingly and accessibly about, well, the future of humanity in outer space. His speculations are fascinating and his discussion of transhumanism helped to scope out my Wanderer story in its earliest stages. In fact, in an early draft one of my characters was named Dr. Crisper, in light of Kaku’s discussion of the gene editing technology known as CRISPR. I ultimately decided this was too on-the-nose and he was renamed Dr. Verdmann.
4. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin (1969)
Detail from ‘Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion’ by John Martin (1812)
I introduced this article by stating I hadn’t been influenced by any sci-fi in the writing of my Wanderer story. There was one exception, however, in the earliest genesis of the idea. Years before I put pen to paper on Wanderer, I read Ursula Le Guin’s classic sci-fi novel The Left Hand of Darkness.
One passage midway through the book led me towards a fruitful tangent. What would it be like, I thought, to have a technology that would allow you to walk around an alien planet and breathe the air without a spacesuit? This planted a seed which eventually became the sensory experience of the Galilean in Wanderer, as he allows the water jets of Europa moon to burst over his skin.
5. Give Your Heart to the Hawks by Win Blevins (1973)
Detail from ‘Sierra Nevada’ by Albert Bierstadt (1871)
Immediately after I read Kaku’s book, I read Win Blevins’ open-hearted tribute to the mountain men, those larger-than-life adventurers who were the first white men to roam the rawland of the American West. I began to conceive of the Galilean in my story as a legendary mountain man, only this new frontier is the surface of the ice moon Europa. This allowed me to ground my story in authentic character and setting, rather than the often-absurd flights of fancy that can sometimes characterise science-fiction.
The Western influence would perhaps become even stronger than the scientific element in creating Wanderer (see also number 9 on this list). A. B. Guthrie’s novels The Big Skyand The Way West were also influences on the direction of the story. I was inspired by Guthrie’s boldness in allowing his story to proceed at a leisurely pace, rather than pandering to those readers who are conditioned to a short attention span. You breathe his air and it fills your lungs as you read.
6. From Giotto toCézanne: A Concise History of Painting by Michael Levey (1962)
Detail from ‘Hunters in the Snow’ by Pieter Bruegel (1565)
I have already mentioned the influence of European art on my story. However, when writing Wanderer I realised that blind inspiration would not be enough. I needed to learn more about the techniques and principles behind some of the finest paintings ever created. Rather serendipitously, I soon came across Michael Levey’s book. It proved to be a fantastic introduction.
This lucid, illustrated art history not only helped me understand basic principles of visual art, but also introduced me to a number of other paintings, beyond those by Caspar David Friedrich already mentioned. These other paintings inspired certain scenes and ideas in Wanderer. Levey’s discussion of John Martin’s Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion gave me the name ‘Sadek Martin’ for the corporation that creates the Galilean’s bio-tech (a typo in Levey’s book names Sadak as ‘Sadek’). Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow served as a mood piece for the arrival at Emmaus Station in my story, as well as the final scene where the Galilean leaves again. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and Rembrandt’s painting of the same name inspired the journey to the Station, discussed further in number 7 below.
7. The King James Bible (1611)
Detail from ‘Supper at Emmaus’ by Caravaggio (1601)
WandererAbove the Sea of Fog is not a religious story. I don’t know how far I can be considered an atheist (I have detailed this part of my intellectual journey in my review of the King James Bible here). I had a secular upbringing, but I became interested in the Christian stories due to a long-standing fascination with Greek mythology, and I saw similarities in how they could be used for allegory and allusion in literature. If my writing displays any Christian sensibility, it is only because I continue to explore and utilise these fascinating ideas.
My Wanderer story begins with a quote from the Book of Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:4). I initially chose this out of a mysterious artistic hunch that it would set the tone, but it soon became apparent just how appropriate the quotation was. A large part of my story had begun to address the role of ‘giants’, not only the role of massive Jupiter with regards to the moon of Europa, but also the relationship between the Galilean freewalker and those under his charge, the ethics of scientific progress (with regards to the Isaac Newton line about “standing on the shoulders of giants”), and the giant redwood trees mentioned in number 9 below.
Another significant Biblical influence on my Wanderer story came from the New Testament story of the Road to Emmaus. Prompted by the paintings of Rembrandt and Caravaggio mentioned in number 6 on my list, I recognised the similarities between my plotline in Wanderer and the story tropes from the Gospel of Luke. In this story, Jesus travels with his disciples on the road to the town of Emmaus, but they do not recognise him (this is after his crucifixion and return). This theme of perception influenced Reeve’s path towards understanding the Galilean in my own story, and when the Galilean reflects on those individuals who move humanity forward, he is also commenting on the often-thankless role played by artists. Jesus, after all, was a storyteller, and the Galilean can be seen as a Christ-like figure: voluntarily wounded, an imitator of Christ – that is to say, a Christian.
8. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
Detail from ‘The Contemplator’ by Ivan Kramskoy (1876)
This is the hardest influence on the list to explain. Unlike the others on this list, Dostoevsky’s masterpiece did not inspire any specific ideas for Wanderer. Instead, I happened to be reading the book during the most productive period of writing my story. The painting detailed above is The Contemplator by Ivan Kramskoy, and is discussed by Dostoevsky in chapter 6 of Book Three of The Brothers Karamazov.
The Brothers Karamazov not only saw my head swimming with various philosophical thoughts, but the writer’s cadences and sentence structure in these discussions began to supplant my more long-standing Hemingway influence (mentioned in number 2 on this list). In particular, Dostoevsky’s narrative voice was dominant in my head when I wrote what is perhaps the most important passage in Wanderer. Standing amidst the water jets of Europa moon, the Galilean ponders the nano-technology coursing through his blood:
“… the realisation, for those who carved the path, was the hell of knowing it would never satisfy. The nano could cure, but it made you aware of the great curse; that if all ailments were resolved, then all the distractions of the world were gone, and such a man was confronted more completely with the fragmentary horror of the mind, the thing that truly terrified and which men went out into the world to avoid. The wanderer, the outlier, the Galilean – he was unnatural, but not because of the nanotech which streamed in his blood and made a home for foreign air in his lungs. He was unnatural, he was shunned, because he had come to realise that one of the reasons man wandered was to seek his own destruction in the world. Man always needed a cross to bear, and did not always want to see the end of that road.”
9. Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck (1962)
Detail from ‘Redwood Forest, Yosemite Valley’ by Gilbert Davis Munger (1885)
Unlike some of the other books on this list, John Steinbeck’s late-career travelogue, in which he goes on a cross-continent road trip with his faithful dog Charley, is just plain fun. The author is astute and draws his characters well, utilising all the literary skill he had built up over a long and stellar career, but the joy in the book comes from its vivid, ambling romp across the American landscape.
Though I have not yet been to America, the American landscape has always fascinated me. As already mentioned, the Hemingway story ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ was a huge conceptual influence on Wanderer, as were the stories of the mountain men who roamed the unsettled West. Travels with Charley developed this love further, and after Steinbeck wrote of visiting the giant redwood trees of northern California (Charley pees on one), I decided to use the great sequoias for a flashback scene in Wanderer. In the initial draft of the story, David Casper and Lucy Ortega were found in a copse in New England during their field tests, but the giant redwoods of California made more poetic sense. Not only were they more iconic, but they tied into the ‘giant’ theme I had been developing (see number 7). They also allowed me to deploy a forest fire to further illustrate the characters’ imperviousness.
In the course of my research, I learned that these giant redwoods are replenished after forest fires by the wet fog coming in from the Pacific. This was perfect for my story’s theme – and its title – as the Galilean, the long-lived ‘giant’, finds himself restored in part by contemplation at the water geysers of Europa moon. Such moments of literary serendipity can only come about when a writer keeps an open mind, and recognises that stories can be constructed from very disparate elements.
10. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1885)
Detail from ‘Morning in the Giant Mountains’ by Caspar David Friedrich (1811)
This final influence on my Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog story sees the list come full circle, for Nietzsche’s work is often considered in the same tradition as the earlier paintings by Caspar David Friedrich.
I didn’t in fact read Thus Spoke Zarathustrauntil after I had written and published Wanderer, though I was familiar with many of Nietzsche’s ideas second-hand – most notably the cultural crisis caused by the “death of God”. I was acutely aware when writing Wanderer that my main character – a genetically-enhanced man – could be seen as one of Nietzsche’s “Übermensch”, or ‘supermen’.
Now, Nietzsche’s ideas were later intolerably corrupted by the Nazis, and he still unfairly carries the stigma of this unwelcome association (Nietzsche actually spoke against anti-Semitism in his time). But those who are bold enough to banish the stigma find that Nietzsche’s ideas are remarkably potent and prescient – and great to wrestle with. His ‘superman’ idea wasn’t an Aryan race-fetish but instead a response to the “death of God”, speculating that Man could resolve this crisis by transcending Christianity and creating his own morals.
I decided to read Zarathustra in part out of a sense of obligation, for my own story’s premise had evolved into a perspective on the Nietzschean ‘uber-man’. I felt I ought to have at least read the book which posited the idea – for my own self-respect, if nothing else. When I did, I was pleased to find that the conclusions I had reached in Wanderer survived the confrontation with Zarathustra.
In my story, David Casper, the Galilean ‘uber-man’, is redeemed by the part of himself that remains human (see also the Christ analogy in number 7 above). This conclusion proves to be in line with some of the contemporary criticism of Nietzsche. The popular psychologist Jordan Peterson, for example, is himself influenced by Nietzsche, but has recently written a partial refutation of this ‘superman’ idea. In Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, Peterson argues that, in light of discoveries in biology and science, “only a fool would now dare to claim that we have sufficient mastery of ourselves to create, rather than discover, what we value” (Peterson, pg. 164).
It is a subtle difference, but an important one. I created a story, but I could only discover what values it held.
These, then, are 10 of the most significant influences and inspirations for my Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog story, a 12,000-word science-fiction novelette available now on Amazon. Every writer, of course, is influenced by a wide range of art, media and personal experiences. There are far too many to count – or even recognise.
The 10 cited above helped ensure the story on the page was as close as possible to how it was in my head. Something is always lost in an idea in its journey from the brain and out through the fingers onto the keyboard, but a healthy stock of fine writing, artwork and philosophy as inspiration can ensure a story retains its qualities during the transition.
Newton (and Dr. Verdmann) remarked that “if I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. Anyone can see, by the calibre of the books and artwork I have detailed above, that I too have stood on the shoulders of giants.
But have I seen further, or have I only left a dirty and unwelcome footprint on those shoulders? You can read the story, and let me know.
The image used in number 3 of the above article is ‘Artist Concept of Europa Water Vapor Plume’. Credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI. Original ID: PIA17659. All images have been used in accordance with relevant guidelines and their use in no way impliesendorsement of this website or its content.
The otherimages used in this article are public domain paintingsaccessed via Wikimedia Commons.
Whenever I am unimpressed by the latest hyped novel, film or musical act – which is something that seems to happen increasingly often – I find myself lamenting that there do not seem to be any artistic greats among us nowadays. I begin my own novelette, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, with a well-known quote from Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days”. Regardless of what the Nephilim truly were in the Bible – fallen angels, an ancient race, or heroes among men – the verse continues to resonate. As our culture falters under the weight of economic depression, societal deconstruction and artistic philistinism, we find ourselves looking desperately for icons who could explain it all. But whether they died out or we drove them away, the giants who could stand astride a culture seem to have vanished from the earth.
However, with Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday arriving this Monday, it is well to remember that one such great is still among us. Dylan’s legend is gigantic but, remarkably, his talent keeps pace with it. From the astonishing lyricism of the freewheelin’ folk songs of the early Sixties to last year’s remarkably fresh Rough and Rowdy Ways album – which contains the song ‘Murder Most Foul’, a show-stopping meditation on American decline and hope – Dylan has always been there to provide genuine artistic insight into our world. “I contain multitudes”, as Walt Whitman wrote – and Dylan is one of the rare few who has not only faced the yawning cultural pit, but has proved equal to the task of filling it with courageous art.
This adventure hasn’t always been smooth, and there are plenty of failed experiments in Dylan’s career that people use to try to diminish his achievement. Some criticisms are merely ignorant and superficial – his supposedly ‘nasal’ singing voice, for example, is in fact remarkably adept at interpreting songs – but others carry more weight. With that in mind, I have decided to comment on an underappreciated aspect of Dylan’s career: his forays into the written word.
In 2016, the announcement that Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature was scoffed at in some quarters. Certainly the prize was heavily influenced by Dylan’s genius lyricism in his songwriting, but at the time I had already read both of Dylan’s published works and had been impressed by both, and I saw the scoffing as unwarranted. What follows are two book reviews from my Goodreads profile: a reappraisal of Dylan’s much-maligned 1966 novel Tarantula, and a further review of his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One. I hope these two pieces of writing go some way towards paying tribute to just one of this giant’s multitudes.
“Like the animal of the same name, you’re instinctively scared of ‘Tarantula’…”
Bob Dylan, Tarantula (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 116pp. Originally published 1971.
It’s not that bad, you know. I mean, sure, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in October 2016 they probably didn’t have Tarantula, the songwriter’s only published ‘novel’, in mind as an example of his excellence. It is a rambling, nonsensical stream-of-consciousness piece of absurdity and only for the most patient or obsessive of Dylan fans.
It does have a certain rhythm to it, even if it doesn’t always make sense, though we can’t blame the usual precariousness of translating song lyrics to prose for the strangeness of Tarantula. Whilst Dylan’s imagery does suffer from the lack of the “dobro’s F hole twang & climax from disappointing lyrics” (pg. 14), there is a lot of stuff in here that’s just plain baffling. A magazine article once highlighted the ‘unintelligible’ line, “now’s not the time to act silly, so wear your big boots & jump on the garbage clowns” from page 2 of Tarantula. I assume they chose this early example because they didn’t want to read any further; there’s certainly plenty of other choice absurdities (my favourite is “little girls hide perfume up their shrimps & there are no giants – the warmongers have stolen all our german measles & are giving them to the doctors to use as bribes” from page 58). There’s also evidence that Dylan didn’t want the book published at all, so we shouldn’t judge him too harshly for it. But, clearly, anybody looking for a fearsome piece of poetry along the lines of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ or the eloquent phrasing of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ (both written around the same time as Tarantula) is going to find slim pickings.
That said, some nuggets do emerge from the stream-of-consciousness style. The book defies rigorous analysis, but “if youre going to think”, Dylan advises, “dont think about why people dont love each other – think about why they dont love themselves – maybe then, you will begin to love them” (pg. 109). Riffing on Woody Guthrie, Dylan writes “this land is your land & this land is my land – sure – but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway” (pp75-6). Such thoughts are in short supply here, but the rampant procession of song lyric snippets and literary references and the usual mid-Sixties Dylan stuff of lawyers and senators and mayors and garbage men all makes you realise just how much stuff we’ve got swimming around in our brains. In the introduction – or rather, the disclaimer – we are told the book is “about Bob Dylan thinking aloud” and there is more to this than apologia. As early as page 2, Dylan is talking of “bombing out your young sensitive dignity just to see once & for all if there are holes & music in the universe”, an image the streaming prose returns to on page 68, when in the “vast desert” of his head he “lets yokels test bombs in his brain”. There’s certainly value in letting a talent like Dylan use your head as a nuclear lyrical testing ground, banging away like Curtis LeMay. Like the animal of the same name, you’re instinctively scared of Tarantula, but a calmer and closer look reveals it’s rather more graceful than you first thought. But you still wouldn’t like to get too close to it.
I’m not inclined to be harsh on the flailing, hit-and-miss Tarantula because it’s clear Dylan doesn’t take himself too seriously (“Take it easy & dont scratch too much” is his life advice on page 109). The book is mischievous, playful – not artsy or pretentious. There’s a Loki vein of mischief in Dylan’s book (as in much of his music), challenging and ridiculing those who would define or label or analyse him. “To my students”, he addresses on page 107, “i take it for granted that youve all read & understand freud – dostoevsky – st. michael – confucius – coco joe – einstein – melville – porgy snaker – john zulu – kafka – sartre – smallfry – & tolstoy – all right then… now i’m giving you my book – i expect you all to jump right in – the exam will be in two weeks”. Here, Dylan is remarking on the disposability of his book. Why the hell, he asks impishly, are we reading this when we’ve still not read Sartre? You’ve got to admit, he has a point.
“[Dylan] stands astride the divide, while also hoping people with dirty feet don’t use him as a bridge…”
Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (London: Pocket Books, 2005), 293pp. Originally published 2004.
“I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles. I think in the end, he gave up on that.” (pg. 218)
One of the few artists of the 20th century who truly stands apart, it is difficult to pin Bob Dylan down and drag him back to the more regulated cultural strata where we can understand and quantify him. This is the case even when he is speaking directly and disarmingly, as he is here, in the first (and, to date, only) volume of Chronicles, his autobiography. Like the producer Daniel Lanois, whom Dylan is referring to in the lines I’ve quoted above, eventually we give up. We cede the ground and, without irritation, just let this singular artist do his own thing.
Chronicles: Volume One is an unconventional memoir. Its five chapters deal with three different periods of Dylan’s long career: the first two with 1961, before he became famous; the third in 1970, during a fallow period; a fourth in 1989, as he tries to engineer a new sound; and then finally a fifth back in 1961-2, with Dylan on the cusp of his unique fame. The content and sequence betray in part the origins of the book (it started with Dylan writing liner notes for re-issues of the relevant albums – Bob Dylan in 1962, New Morning in 1970 and Oh Mercy in 1989), but you also get the feeling that Dylan wouldn’t have it any other way. We get nothing on the insane run of creativity from 1963-66, or on the Blood on the Tracks album, but he does briefly discuss his time rapping with Kurtis Blow in the Eighties, of all the things (pg. 219). Like Lanois, you want to understand him more as you go along, but you do have to puzzle it out.
Nevertheless, Dylan manages to cover an astonishing variety even within these peculiar parameters. I first read Chronicles about ten years ago and, thinking back on it, I seemed to remember a powerful piece of writing about Dylan’s encounter with Harry Belafonte; that barely struck me this time around. In contrast, I had all but forgotten that Dylan discussed his tour with Tom Petty (even though I was then, and remain, a huge Heartbreakers fan); this time around I found that discussion fascinating. Dylan manages to touch upon, at natural points in the narrative, various personalities he met over the years, whether trifling encounters with the likes of Jack Dempsey, Robert Graves or John Wayne, or with those who had a deeper influence on him, like John Hammond, Dave Van Ronk and Woody Guthrie.
Dylan is particularly good at explaining the influence of various musicians on his own creative outlook; Guthrie especially, though Chronicles also ends with an energizing one-two punch combo about Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Robert Johnson. He’s less good at explaining his own creativity, particularly as it appears so feverish (a passage in the chapter on Oh Mercy, where Dylan tries to explain the new songs and vocal techniques he is developing, is clearly reaching for something ineffable but struggles to reach the reader). I’ve long been trying to formulate an adage that the difference between great writers and average writers is that average writers are trying to explain simple things in a complex way (through big words, fancy techniques, etc.) whereas great writers are trying to explain complex things as simply as possible. I felt something similar in reading Dylan as he tried to express his creative direction: normal artists are trying to be special, whereas Dylan, feverishly atop the strange artistic hierarchy, is a special one trying to be normal.
Certainly, one of the most striking aspects of Chronicles, and Dylan’s personality in general, is his determination to be normal and conventional. In conversation, I often use “catch rainbow trout”, a lyric from ‘Sign on the Window’, one of his New Morning era songs, as a byword for the sort of domestic contentment Dylan is striving for. He wants out of the “rat race” (pg. 114) but is also “fantasizing about… a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard… That was my deepest dream” (pg. 117). In the Eighties, he buys ‘World’s Greatest Grandpa’ mugs (pg. 209). He never wanted to be a countercultural icon in the Sixties – “I had no ambitions to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick” (pg. 35) – and bristles at the attempts to get him to lead a movement (pg. 119). By 1970, he’s completely fed up with the hippies and gatecrashers: “I wanted to set fire to these people” (pg. 117). While never a reactionary or a get-off-my-lawn type, he’s also not the rebel agitator, “the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest”; “whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it” (pg. 120). He stands astride the divide, while also hoping people with dirty feet don’t use him as a bridge – or set fire to said bridge.
For someone with such a strange position in our culture, and who remains so enigmatic even as he carries us across the pages of a dedicated autobiography, Dylan is remarkably self-aware. He says it’s “nice to be known as a legend, and people will pay to see one, but for most people, once is enough” (pg. 147). It says a lot that, even on a second read, his legend takes on new and ever more inscrutable dimensions – most ‘legends’ don’t even stand up to a single glance. Chronicles can sound like a performance at times (“The last time I’d seen her, she was heading West” (pg. 60)), but when this happens it never appears to be out of conceit, a desire to wow the audience with stream-of-consciousness verbosity. Instead, whenever he eludes discussion of more conventional memoir topics like his family (his wife is mentioned but never named) or his relationship with Suze Rotolo (the lady on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album), it has the appearance of practiced shields and well-oiled countermeasures. He’s been throwing up these puzzles and magic signs to bamboozle interlopers for a long time now.
And why not? The interest in Dylan ought not to be in his Minnesotan hometown or his children, but in his unique creative take on things. The literary quality of Chronicles is rarely overt (an exception being “sometimes all it takes is a wink or a nod from some unexpected place to vary the tedium of a baffling existence” on page 43), but it takes technical skill to establish this voice and maintain it during a non-linear narrative. To do so with some occasional genuine insight, and maintaining the reader’s interest, is impressive. When someone comes into writing from a different artistic realm – music having its own unique language – and proves capable of writing well, it’s always an experience to be grateful for. When the world’s most renowned songwriter describes songs as “like strange countries that you have to enter” (pg. 165), you sit up and pay attention. When he describes his legendary image as “a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows” (pg. 147), you realise he’s been to so many of those strange countries which nobody knows, and has been crowned there. Our enduring fascination with his remarkable far-off conquests is never puzzling – how could we not be fascinated? – even if, partly by design, the man behind the legend remains so.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy some of my other book reviews on my Goodreads profile. I have also written a novelette called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, inspired in part by the Genesis verse with which I opened this post. It can be found here.
The image of Bob Dylan used at the top of this post is in the public domain and was accessed via Wikimedia Commons. The book covers of Tarantula and Chronicles: Volume One are the property of their respective publishers and are considered fair use for purposes of review.
On April 30th 2021, I wrote a review of ‘Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft’ on my LibraryThing profile. Unlike my other more conventional reviews, I decided to write it as a pastiche of Lovecraft’s own writing style. The following was the result:
H. P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft (London: Gollancz, 2008), 878pp. Selected and edited by Stephen Jones.
My first abortive attempt to acquire a copy of the Necronomicon came in April of 2018, when I prevailed in an online auction. By chance – or so I assumed – the tome was due to arrive in the mail around the time of Walpurgis Night, that time of year when it is said that Hell emerges on the earth and Satanic minions gather for unspeakable deeds and festivities, which I found appropriate given the nature of the book. However, by mid-May, with the Satanic hordes having apparently receded and the sun chancing to shine, this dark bible of the proto-Hadean races of forgotten aeons still had not arrived. In correspondence with the anonymous seller, he assured me that the book had been posted, but that there had been said to be queer occurrences at his local post office, and perhaps the package containing the tome had been lost.
I suspected at the time that the seller had been reluctant to release the book, given the auction had specified no reserve and I had succeeded with a paltry sum that would have been little recompense to him for such a treasure, and that his vague claims of postal interferences were a ruse in order to retain the tome. Whether truly lost, or withheld, or perhaps intercepted by some third party, I have never been able to precisely determine, but I learned that, amidst our correspondence, the seller had fled to Turkey for a supposed holiday. In the interim, I had acquired a full refund, and the anticipated book never reached me. Whatever my frustrations at the time, I now believe that this Anatolia-bound fugitive, whether out of fear, greed, or perhaps a higher code of honour than is to be found in the eBay Seller’s Guidelines, was, in denying me this foul tome, operating with my best interests at heart.
Discouraged by the affair, and with other disruptive events in my life taking precedence over my naïve foray into the realm of occult acquisition, it was a long time before I made further inquiries into a copy of the Necronomicon. My secundal attempt to acquire the book online proved much less obstructive than the first, and a different copy of the Necronomicon arrived from a different seller one ill-starred day in June of 2020. The book looked impressive – a stout, leather-bound tome promising, in gold filigree on the black cover, ‘The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft’. Here, at long last, was the work of a writer I had long felt a deep and strange desire to read. The name of ‘Cthulhu’, a dread elder god seemingly of Lovecraft’s manufacture, had long been echoing in my head, though with a different pronunciation each time it occurred. Aside from this portentous echo, my only knowledge of the author had been ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, which had served as the basis for a quest in the video game Oblivion, part of the Elder Scrolls series.
Nevertheless, despite my long-awaited success in procurement of the volume, and the enticing presentation of the Necronomicon as a touted Commemorative Edition, it was still a while before I began reading the book. I first cracked the spine of this accursed tome in February of 2021, prompted by the encouragement of a man I had believed a friend. He was a convinced acolyte of Lovecraft who, I now suspect, had darker motives; perhaps a cultist directed by the Old Ones, or a servant of some other demoniac agency, or even a demon himself.
In the months since that portentous day, I have dipped in and out of the Necronomicon with increasing fervour. The stories were, at first, ghost stories; disturbing and inventive ones that could create a deep chill in the reader’s heart. Initial ones like ‘Dagon’, and those which involved dungeon-delving, pleasingly recalled that Elder Scrolls series I have already mentioned. Each story was of a high calibre, and though a formula quickly emerged, Lovecraft’s skill as a writer vanquished any thoughts of sameness. However, the writer was verbose, obscurant and seemed to possess an aversion to dialogue, which made the stories slow and often difficult. Words like ‘fulgurous’ were used without abatement, and there were long, dense passages of prose with long, accumulative sentences. However, the stories were also brooding, Gothic and deeply fascinating; each and every one of them rewarded the effort made to read them. I began to appreciate, respect, and increasingly revere the influence of Lovecraft upon the horror genre.
As I progressed through the book, this respect began to take on forbidding proportions. The stories increasingly displayed an erudition that transcended pulp horror, and established Lovecraft as a literary writer in his own right. The terrors he revealed in the stories were, paradoxically, often left unrevealed: monsters and events that were described as ‘inexplicable’ or ‘beyond description’. Rather than being a cheap trick, this technique was often rooted in archetypal fears of depths, darkness and the unknown: perhaps the unknowable, which goes beyond the bounds of the rational or even instinctive human mind. Even the stories of the Cthulhu Mythos – the entire cycle of which is included in the tome – retained this nameless fear, despite their monster being named and described. The stories, assembled in chronological order, began to discuss quantum mechanics, naming the likes of Planck and Einstein and other venerable interlopers against the hidden hand. So complete was Lovecraft’s oppressive Gothic effect that such scientific discussions often came as a surprise; I had otherwise fallen into the trap of aligning Lovecraft, chronologically speaking, with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, when he is in fact a contemporary of Hemingway and Joyce. For all his archaic trappings, Lovecraft is dealing with modern dilemmas: of the interplay of science and myth, and the Nietzschean diagnosis of a dead God; of the unmanning frontiers of outer space and the deepest recesses of earth and ocean; of consciousness itself and the deeply-rooted Jungian archetypes by which we fashion approximations of our deepest-held fears.
I began to become increasingly convinced of the tales. The dark streets of Arkham became more real to me than my hometown; the river waters of the Miskatonic more natural in their meanderings than any babbling brooks which reside nearby. I dreamed strange dreams and slept mostly in daylight; my mind not daring to conjure in dark midnight hours those images which danced from the pages and found root in the primordial recesses of my brain, as easily as if they had already been nested there in some comparable archetypal form. I noted, with increasing unease, the mentions in the text that the Necronomicon was not a tome comprising ‘The Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft’, but was instead a book-within-a-book, an unspeakable collection of subterranean Babelian invocations and eldritch rites composed or curated, so the story goes, by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I wondered if perhaps my initial abortive seller from two years previous had not fled to Turkey, but was, in fact, returning there, perhaps reined in by a sultanic master or cult suzerain in order to prevent further dissemination of copies of the forbidden Necronomicon.
I wondered, then, why my secundal attempt to acquire the book from a different seller had been so uncomplicated in comparison to the first, and if the acquisition was not perhaps a trap laid for me by unknown agents, or a penalty for not having heeded the warnings from my first abortive encounter. My increasing attraction to and investment in the stories, and the growing madness that I began to associate with them, seemed to confirm this hypothesis. I began to notice typos in the main body of the text; at first a simple substitution of a letter which could be forgiven as a mistake, a transcribing or proofing error; but then entire phrases (“he had and swered” instead of “he had answered”), until finally I noticed that even that demoniac appellation, Necronomicon, had at least once been rendered as ‘Necroriomicon’.
The conventional trappings of the book – the feeling of wood pulp, the publisher’s mark of Gollancz, even the Afterword by Stephen Jones (which, though it would serve better as a Foreword, would still contain lamentably insufficient warning of the corrupting abominations contained within these pages) – did not assuage my unease. I now believe that the mistakes and corruptions in the text were not corruptions at all, but letters fragmented from an extradimensional realm – perhaps Kadath or R’lyeh or the Court of Azathoth – in which such distorted, bonded shapes pass for written language. In this realm, Necroriomicon is not a proofing error replacing Necronomicon, but a name by which the same book is known in a slightly altered realm distinct from ours.
I fear that the potent, eternal Necronomicon that was divined by Alhazred is trying to break out of its linguistic chains and sublimate into our own, through this similarly-titled and seemingly innocuous vehicle for Lovecraft’s stories. I can only hope prospective readers see my growing madness as a cautionary tale and flee from even the mere mention of the name ‘Necronomicon’, even when the seductively chthonic tome is found reasonably priced online. For you see, the typos I identified were not typos at all, but an attempt at communication and dissemination. They were words written by a hand that was not human.
To read some of my more conventional reviews, you can visit my Goodreads profile here. I have also written a science fiction novelette called Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, which can be found here.
The images used in this post are public domain and were made available by the Heritage Type Company here.I have no affiliation with the company.
Perhaps it’s the budding writer in me, but I can’t shake the feeling that I ought to start my first post with something profound and attention-grabbing. Perhaps I should be wracking my brains out trying to come up with something uniquely personal and yet universally relatable.
But having spent a while now obsessing over how to build the website (and developing a greater respect for coders and webmasters), I know that if I allow myself to become too consumed by all the things that go along with trying to promote one’s own writing nowadays, I’ll be keeping myself from doing much actual writing.
As I write this post, I’m addressing an audience that isn’t even there yet (and may never be). It’s hard to know what to write when many things are still up in the air. And when they settle, where should my focus be? Here? On social media? Or should I be focused on my other projects?
It’s a question that will hopefully become clearer over the coming weeks. At time of writing, I don’t even know if this blog will become a regular thing. I’ve written hundreds of book reviews on LibraryThing over the years – some of them even worthwhile – and that’s always been my outlet. I enjoy it and hope it will continue. But will traffic – if it comes – necessitate a focus here, where I can prompt people towards a mailing list? Every new writer is told the mailing list is the most effective way of building an audience.
The only thing that is certain at this time is that the website is up and running and Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is available to read right now, exclusively on Amazon Kindle. The future course of my fiction writing is dependent on a number of circumstances, not least the reception Wanderer receives and the size of the audience it generates. It could take off and provide me with options and opportunities, or it could sink like a stone and make this first post my last.
This is a new experience for me, so don’t hesitate to share your opinions (this is the Internet, after all). You can do so here in the comments, in an Amazon review, or through the links posted on my Contacts page.
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