Reading Morrissey’s Autobiography. Very enjoyable. My favourite line so far: Morrissey summing up an incident in which his father crashed the family car into a front garden…

The gentle householders of old take us in to sooth our nerves, whereas today’s indignation generation would pellet writs at us from upper windows.

Further to Cliff Twemlow’s The Pike, here’s some archive footage detailing 1982’s sadly aborted movie version featuring Twemlow, Joan Collins, and the brilliantly awful mechanical pike.

In this documentary Twemlow informs us that “the largest pike ever caught was nineteen foot.” A statement so wrong I am going to pretend that it is true from now on.

By noted English “actor, nightclub bouncer, horror paperback writer and library music composer” Cliff Twemlow.

Sadly out of print, but available in dog-eared form from the usual places. I admit that I’ll buy most books with a pike on the cover, but this really is good. I’ll be tracking down a copy of his other novel The Beast Of Kane.

Here’s a picture of Cliff.

Random line from his wikipedia entry – “The Mechanical Pike apparently now resides as an exhibit of robotics in Japan.”

More info at http://itsahotun.com/Cliff_Twemlow.htm

“it is hard to imagine the planning of the mandrill, except by a malignant fiend”

EJ Sullivan
The Grotesque (from Form issue one, 1916. Edited by Austin Osman Spare & Frederick Carter)

As reported in Phil Baker’s Austin Osman Spare – The Life and Legend of London’s Lost Artist

Arthur Machen says it best:

He and his father seemed to pass down an avenue of jeers and contempt, and contempt from such animals as these! This putrid filth, moulded into human shape, made only to fawn on the rich and beslaver them, thinking no foulness too foul if it were done in honour of those in power and authority; and no refined cruelty of contempt too cruel if it were contempt of the poor and humble and oppressed; it was to this obscene and ghastly throng that he was something to be pointed at. And these men and women spoke of sacred things, and knelt before the awful altar of God, before the altar of tremendous fire, surrounded as they professed by Angels and Archangels and all the Company of Heaven; and in their very church they had one aisle for the rich and another for the poor. And the species was not peculiar to Caermaen; the rich business men in London and the successful brother author were probably amusing themselves at the expense of the poor struggling creature they had injured and wounded; just as the “healthy” boy had burst into a great laugh when the miserable sick cat cried out in bitter agony, and trailed its limbs slowly, as it crept away to die. Lucian looked into his own life and his own will; he saw that in spite of his follies, and his want of success, he had not been consciously malignant, he had never deliberately aided in oppression, or looked on it with enjoyment and approval, and he felt that when he lay dead beneath the earth, eaten by swarming worms, he would be in a purer company than now, when he lived amongst human creatures.

The Hill of Dreams (1907)

Captain Haukelid (Kimber Pocket Edition, 1955)

Snagged last Sunday in Dublin. What a brilliant cover.

Some kindly soul has put up several old clips of Jeff Lint’s seminal but often misunderstood cartoon Catty and the Major on youtube.

My first exposure to Lint was around fifteen years ago when a work colleague loaned me a tattered, weather beaten copy of Lint’s début novel One Less Bastard, along with a “like new” copy of 1966’s Prepare To Learn.

And learn I did.

My friend refused to take them back, and that was fine by me.

Unfortunately, both books were lost in a fire some years ago.

Just noticed that scfi.com have the full text of Thomas M. Disch’s classic short story, Descending, in their archive.

It is magnificent; a story which starts off as innocent and playful as a kitten with a ball of yarn but soon turns into a syphilitic eight-cocked demon with an utter absence of empathy in its eyes that wants nothing more than to make you pay for all the awful things that you’ve done.  At least, that’s the mood I took away from it.  Your experiences may be entirely different.

You can read it here.

Disch shot himself in his New York appartment on July 4th, 2008.

Crossed by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows.

It has everything the regular Ennis reader expects from a comic: murder, cannibalism, infanticide, nuclear explosions and, of course, copious amounts of buggery. And Burrows’ art is, as usual, brilliant.

Issue two just came out from Avatar.

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

Before this the only Chomsky book I’d (attempted to) read was Fateful Triangle.  That was a bit bloated and dry but this one is excellent.

A close and worthwhile look at the smegma festering beneath the wizened patriotic foreskin of Imperial America.

Steve Aylett’s biography of pulp sci-fi author Jeff Lint. Ye fucking gods, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Three random lines . . .

Lint would allude to this time in his story ‘Ghostly Hens Forever, Forever’, published as ‘The Man With the Stupid Arm’ in issue 87 of Terrible Stories.

Lint said the painting was ‘better than it looks’.

The cover of that issue showed an oriental magician beckoning some sort of horned kangaroo out a sewage outlet.

It is a masterpiece, worthy of the great man at it’s heart.

This is the cover to the UK edition.