sow the thought seeds

pulp friction

Cult?  Been there?  Got the t-shirt?  Maybe it is nothing more than a buzz word bandied about by cynical publicists and booksellers (ahem) to pitch everything from the offbeat to the upbeat (maybe anything with a beat).  But if the idea of publicity seems antithetical to genuine cult, it’s perhaps because of the narrow lens through which we view popular culture.

The etymology of cult reveals the semantic convention of linking its Roman roots in agricultural practice (cultivation) with its Latin ones in religiosity (adoration).  The cultivation of a particular set of beliefs isn’t something that trickles down but is cultured from the ground up, as it were.  It is no surprise that cult can be traced back to the first pamphlets off the printing press while the advent of the pulp novel, in particular the paperback, heralds a golden age of cult. 

Androcentric: cult fiction has tended to be guy-centred partly as a response to shrinking masculine space in real life.  Think Iron John (Robert Bly) for men beating their chests deep in the woods.  Back in the 1950s gender space was clearly demarcated – the cellar, for example, the location where Scott Carey, diminished in size, fought and defeated the feminine other embodied by the inch tall Black Widow spider (Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man) Ballardian (adjective, named after the author) is the mental awareness of something very sinister lurking beneath the veneer of consumer (and often suburban) normality Cut Up: borrowing from the Surrealist painter, Bryon Gysin, William S Burroughs used random combinations of text found in newspapers and books to bring new texts into being.  Musician and artist, David Bowie, borrowed the technique from Burroughs, using it to give voice to his pop character Ziggy Stardust (see BBC Omnibus programme Cracked Actor)Die Young and attain cult immortality, if you believe the many populist books on ‘the ones that burn’ (Malcolm Lowry).  Yukio Mishima was impelled towards death, despite a paradoxical attitude to body cult. Thomas Chatterton, the boy poet, was immortalised by the painter Henry Wallace as a suicidal loner. Death by your own hand isn’t a fool proof formula though. The rising young America writer, Weldon Kees, disappeared on the Golden Gate Bridge, never to be heard of again … or about, for that matter. Ecotopia ‘was the first attempt to portray a sustainable society,’ insists Ernest Callenbach, the author of the 1975 novel.  ‘This more than its modest literary merit, explains its durability,’ he confesses.   It’s certainly the case that there is no shortage of eco cults today.  Even Terry Nation’s cult 1970s TV show Survivors – a green-tinted view of post apocalyptic Britain – is being remade by the BBC. Falling is a recurring motif of cult fiction: in the Walter Tevis novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, Thomas Newton is the Icarus character, an alien whose human transubstantiation is a metaphor of corporate corruption as well as the fallibility of the human condition.   No need to wait for the last judgement … according to The Fall (Albert Camus) it ‘takes place every day’. Genre Blending is the pomo prerogative of cult writers like Stephen King, ostensibly a horror supremo but with more interest in reflecting everyday American life.  Not always proud of the tag Schlock Meister, King has publicly regretted the casual death of so many characters, comparing literary bloodshed to pornography.  Truly transgressive writers like Dennis Cooper provoke category crisis … gay fiction? … how very dare you.  Cooper’s five novel George Miles Cycle tests the boundaries of fiction as characters memorialise their sex-murders of young boys … or do they only fantasise it?   The ‘last true literary outlaw’ (Bret Easton Ellis), Cooper leaves the reader to face up to the dubious pleasure of the text. Hybridity is a popular theme with the integrity of body and identity challenged by the idea of the cyborg.  Notions of pure Japanese national identity are, for example, undermined by the clash of tradition and modernity manifest in Japanese anime (such as the Tomie books by Junji Ito) and manga.   Jefferey Eugenides’ Middlesex, meanwhile, tells the story of a genetic mutation and intersex metamorphosis.  The book itself is a hybrid: according to the author it is ‘part immigrant saga, part psychological novel, part comic epic, part medical mystery’. Imitation is the greatest flattery? Cult books, by definition, draw a small amount of followers.  A very small amount of these see the book less as a work of fiction and more of a template for real life.   Holden Caulfield (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye) was the trigger for Mark Chapman to kill pop icon John Lennon.  Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is behind the formation of many bare knuckle clubs.  Director Stanley Kubrick went so far as to withdraw his film of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange when it apparently led to a spate of copycat crimes. Junkies … alcoholics … sex addicts … such are the characters who people the real-to-life landscapes of William S Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and Chuck Palahniuk. Why? ‘Drugs or overeating or alcohol or sex, it is all just another way to find peace’ (Chuck Palahniuk Survivor).  Kipple is also junk, the emotional and material kind that Deckard is forced to sweep away in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.  ‘I have written and sold 23 novels, and all are terrible except one,’ Dick once modestly remarked.  So which, in his opinion, was not kipple?  ‘I am not sure which one,’ he admitted. Linearity … In Stop-Time (Frank Conroy), chronological time is illusory and life memories cannot be trusted.  Arthur Dent concurs: ‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so’ (Douglas Adams The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy). Metropolitan Metamorphosis is the unnamed psychological malaise whose victims succumb to identity fatigue having become alienated or inept in the ways of modern life: in Metamorphosis (Albert Camus) the protagonist wakes up as a beetle while the protagonist of Hunger (Knut Hamsun) recognises how his whole being was undergoing a change, ‘as if something had slid aside in my inner self, or as if a curtain or tissue of my brain was rent in two’. Nobrow: cult fiction is no longer considered low-brow and John Seabrook’s book Nobrow may answer why.  Although the distinction between high and low has blurred, Seabrook argues that ‘culture’ is market-led.  Consumerism confers the knack of appearing high-brow – we can buy culture and be sniffy about ‘commercialism’ in general.  Very bohemian bourgeoisie. Outside: the outsider finds a home in cult fiction.  H. P. Lovecraft’s protagonist wakes utterly alone (The Outsider).  Meursault, the figure in Albert Camus’ The Outsider (aka The Stranger) is morally on the fringes.  Colin Wilson provides a study of outsider-dom in (you guessed) The Outsider, itself a cult classic as a result of divided critical response.  Many cult writers have themselves felt outsiders: J.D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon and Emily Dickinson all shunned the limelight.  Priest or profit?  One route to cultdom is to literally start a religion.  L Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics is a case in point.  The founder of Scientology is rumoured to have said that religion was the best way to make money (Stern magazine).  There have also been rumours of contributions to Dianetics by Robert Heinlein, but no proof.  In the latter’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the Martian Smith ‘groks’ that everyone and everything is god, even the humble caterpillar.  Heinlein once told a fan that he would never dream of passing himself as a prophet: ‘anyone who takes that book as answers is cheating himself.  It is an invitation to think – not to believe’. Queercore is more than hardcore gay fiction.  Jean Genet’s imaginative appropriation of banal artefacts, such as a tube of Vaseline, amounts to both a magical use of an everyday object (bricolage, see Levi Strauss, Raw and Cooked) and a symbolic up yours to ‘straight’ policing (see Dick Hebdige, Subculture).   Road to nowhere … never mind destinations, just roll with life, scribble it down as it happens, then type it all up feverishly onto one roll of teletype paper … oh, but first organise the notes obsessively and then revise ‘the roll’ meticulously to make the novel publishable (Jack Kerouac On the Road) … and if all that seems a little too laborious and purposeful, take the fast lane riding low with the Hell’s Angels (Hunter S Thompson).  Steppenwolf is a book by Herman Hesse, a name stolen by a rock group.  Soft Machine …. William Burroughs.   Swann’s Way … Marcel Proust.  Actually the list of rock monikers goes on through the rest of the alphabet.  But back with Hesse, and S, Steppenwolf is about an outsider who considers himself better than those about him.  His punishment? -- to ‘listen to the radio music of life’.  Too true? in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, there is no single point-of-view that can reveal truth while, in Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison) speaking the truth is to risk social invisibility: ‘I've never been more loved and appreciated than … when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear’  Ultra Violence  is the hyperreal aggressiveness  performed by Alex and his droogs in  A Clockwork Orange.  Anthony Burgess was inspired by British youth subcultures lashing out against consumer-led class change.  Virtual Reality  it’s getting hard to tell reality from what you viddy at the sinnies (Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange); memories aren’t to be relied upon (Philip K Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and some lives are better lived virually by far (such as Piers Anthony’s paralysed cop character in Killobyte). Way out of War: there are few classic heroes in cult fiction, most characters, like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five struggle to make sense of their lives.  The same is true about villains – people aren’t evil, it’s the absurd human conditions they find themselves in.  Such as war.  In Michael Herr’s Despatches, drugs offer a way out.  Billy Pilgrim deals with war by simultaneously inhabiting a better mental world.   Insanity seems the only way out for John Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, except, of course, there isn’t a way out … not even desertion.  Generation X is the lost generation who followed on the heels of the baby boomers (born, therefore, between 1961-1971).  The term was introduced by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson in their book of the same name as a way of describing Mod subcultural identity and behaviour.  The vox pop style of the book, much imitated by music and style magazines, gave the youngsters an opportunity to tell their own stories.  In Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X : Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the characters tell each other stories to deal with ‘mid-twenties breakdown’, ‘boomer-envy’ and  anomie. Yaqui: Carlos Castaneda’s account of shamanic teaching (The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge) turns out to have been a sham … or maybe all that peyote resulted in him hallucinating the Mexican’s mystical messages. ZigZag: to zig zag is to take a sidestep from the logical and normal.  ZigZag is the character in Landon J. Napoleon’s eponymous novel whose lightning fast mental detours allow him fresh perspectives on life.  In The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time Mark Haddon’s child detective, Christopher Boone, has Asperger Syndrome –he lacks empathy but he’s hot on patterns and truth. 

end papers

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The end paper (sometimes end pages) refers to the folded sheet of paper found at the front and rear of hardbacks.  One half of the sheet is pasted to the cover leaving the other half free.  The end papers provide a finished look to the binding.  Traditionally they are of higher quality than the interior pages, sometimes highly decorated, but often left blank in modern books.  The end papers are rarely numbered.  The half attached to the cover is often called the paste down.  The front paste down is most commonly referred to as the front end paper (Fep) while the back is known as the rear end paper (Rep). The remaining half of the sheet is the free paper, sometimes called the free page.  The front is known as the front free end page (Ffep); the term is deployed by booksellers more frequently than the Rfep since it is the preferred page for gift inscription (e.g. owner’s name to ffep).

Rear end papers from Enid Blyton's Secret Seven Win Through, Brockhampton Press, 1955

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wrappers – april 2008

foxing – march 2008

french flaps – february 2008

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