Mr Hyde's House of Mystery

Dubiouser and Dubiouser...?

2007-07-04T03:34:00.000Z

Ahem... well, the dubious poetry came out rather fucked up, didn't it? The formatting went weird, and I have no idea why... nor any inclination to sort it out right now.

It's 4:30 in the morning and besides, it's not a new poem so I've gone off it long ago. To quote the Dude himself: "Fuck it."

I will leave it to the deities that control such things and leave the mess in place, claiming psychedelic inspiration for the unintentional desecration of my uptight Petrarchanism...

~ Om Mane Padme Hum ~

Dubious Poetry, Anyone?

2007-07-04T03:19:00.000Z

Here's a poem I wrote as an exercise, not having done such a thing in years. It's a Petrarchan sonnet on the subject of my first experience under LSD... and, yes, it's very bad indeed!

Lysergic Sonnet

Back when the Mondays were the Stones and the Roses were the Beatles and I gave a shit,
me and Heidi, backlit by MTV, each placed a square of blotter on our tongues and felt
that special imaginary bitterness, waited the breathless wait, an hour until I said It
isn't working, then oh, fuck – blurring, expanding, pleasure shivers, a melt

ing wave of laughter – spinal column vibrating, all six senses on fire – the world
malleable, strange, brand new – the commencement of ego-death – the lesser
subsumed by the greater – a fat Buddha in flight, we watched his white wings unfurl
ing in beatific dissolution – pulsing, now – Albert Hoffmann Vs. Mad Professor

throbbing in the walls – lost in thought, word, wallpaper – pattern of music in my
pores morphing into breathing rhythm, hallucinating rhythm – Primal Scream
exhorting come together – a nexus, perfect alignment, an explosion of utter clarity
minutes impersonating hours imitating eternity in a split-second flash – a dream

that never ended but burnt off like mist in the soft pink sunrise – we ended
up waving goodbye in the rosy radiance – wordless, happy, united, boundaries transcended.

(Dedicated to Heidi Rocke - hey babe, you out there?)

2007-07-04T03:09:00.000Z

Clamp: The One I Love

I bought this for Plaxy for Christmas, but I think I liked it more than she did...

It's actually by half of Clamp, written by Nanase Ohkawa with cute, ultra-girly art by Mick Nekoi – the look is kind of a hybrid of Clamp-style cool and old-school shojo. The book is a slender collection of twelve seven-page stories on the theme of love, each based around a single word (my favourites were “Aitai”, I miss you, and “Kirei”, pretty) and accompanied by a short essay.

It's a more satisfying read than the size and format perhaps imply, and because each story is so like a natural little train of thought (a feeling reinforced by the brief, amusing essays) the overall impression amounts to more than you'd expect. The stories are highly personal and rather literary in flavour – like a lot of manga shorts, they're more impressionistic than an artsy Western comic would dare to be, and the content is very ordinary and universal – not quite what we expect from the creators of Magic Knight Rayearth!

A fun, unusual shojo manga that's well worth checking, especially if you've never ready any romantically-inclined comics before.

2007-05-12T18:57:00.000Z

Gosho Aoyama: Case Closed 2 & 3

The first book was cool, but Aoyama's really starting to hit his stride in these books as the plots become more concentrated and the blend of genres sometimes leans more toward mystery than comedy.

Having previously been transformed into a first-grader, our hero Jimmy Kudo/Conan Edogawa is now faced with an almost Chandleresque tangle involving a billion-yen heist and a seemingly unrelated missing person, a haunted house mystery and a classic plot combo – a locked room murder on a liner ship!

This time out Conan's got some more cool gadgets to help him out (including electroschockin' sneakers and super-elasto-braces!) and in one case he goes adventuring with his new friends from grade school, but it's his deductive powers which really get the workout this time. I also like the fact that the people around him are starting to get suspicious now rather than five volumes down the line, and the fact that the case-by-case structure works rather well with the soap-operatic aspects of the manga and the continuing storyline of Conan wanting to be Jimmy again.

Aoyama's art is as cool and funny as ever, and the plots are light and fun but still satisfying mini-mysteries way above and beyond anything you'll find on Murder She Wrote... basically, I can't wait for the next book!

2007-05-10T14:54:00.000Z

Takeshi Konomi: Prince of Tennis #11

This was a curiosity buy which only served to further pique my curiosity, but it's certainly more involving and entertaining than I expected from a manga about a bunch of youth playing tennis... rather squeaky-clean youth, too, although apparently some (gasp!) underage cigarette smoking was airbrushed out to protect America's young from the evils of... um... well, pseudo-reality, because it looks like only the nasty kid smoked anyway! Oh well.

The art is bold and dramatic, the characters well-designed and obviously strong enough to carry the series between tension-fraught tournaments... although this book's all tension-fraught tournament, so there wasn't a lot of character stuff going on.

Overall, I liked it, but I'd probably only pick up more if it landed in the bargain bin again – although I'm curious, is it the dramatic tennis or the character drama which made this so popular in Japan?

A storyless paragraph...

2007-05-02T00:34:00.000Z

It surprised me when it appeared silently, unannounced, one spring morning, and it annoyed me when, by noon the next day, I realized it wasn't going anywhere. It was purple, approximately star-shaped, made of translucent stuff through which bright indigo veins and a pulsing crimson heart were indistinctly visible, and in the centre on each side, one huge eye, the size of my head, just a big white and a perfect ink-black pupil, smooth as oil, forever dilating and contracting to stimuli unseen by such weak eyes as mine. It made no sound but I could hear it singing in my head, always. It moved around me at will, moved by its whims. If I was in a small room or traversing a narrow way, it hung back two feet above my right shoulder like my conscience. If I was walking a hill or settling to sleep or in a crowded place, it would rise some ten feet into the air and hover directly above me. Then again, when I was alone with it, it would often float before my face, and I would gaze into its eye, for hours on end sometimes, numbed by its overwhelming presence, its painful inscrutability. I had thought, before it came, that I knew what it was to be alone. I now find myself an unwilling student, learning day by day that there is no limit that can bound loneliness.

2007-04-26T05:59:00.000Z

Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany's

At slightly less than a hundred pages long, Breakfast at Tiffany's, rather like its subject Holly Golightly, falls into the “small but perfectly formed” category.

The feel of 1940s New York is captured with crystalline clarity, but this is all about character – an achingly precise portrait of Holly and the neighbour, admirer and unnamed narrator whose strange non-relationship with her is the heart of the story.

The reader simply sits back and observes what feels like the radomly-remembered details of messy, complex lives and emotions unfolding with deceptive simplicity... until the end, when the scheme of the work reveals itself and the author's careful, subtle design becomes apparent.

It's a brilliant little novel, neat and near perfect with economy and grace to spare, and Capote's writing has a lightness of touch and a swift-flowing readability which conceals deep currents of meaning and emotion.

These traits were also evident in the three short stories which round out the slim volume, of which my favourite was “House of Flowers” – beautifully written in a cool, quick style – though both “A Diamond Guitar” and “A Christmas Memory” are excellent.

Why James Ellroy Rocks

2007-04-23T23:39:00.000Z

Book Review: The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy (2001)

I fell in love with James Ellroy's classic noir plots, slick '50s street slang and mercilessly modern cynicism in his L.A. Quartet, but his take on the political mythology of the 1960s still managed to give me the shiver of pleasure you get from an amazing new discovery. The novel opens on November 22nd 1963, the day JFK was assassinated, and ends in June 1968, just after Bobby Kennedy followed his brother into the azure, with the killing of Martin Luther King in between, very real events around which Ellroy builds his fictional depiction of the dark and dangerous underside of that most mythologised of American decades.

It's Ellroy's writing which first catches the attention. There's hardly a paragraph in my copy of The Cold Six Thousand which runs over three lines. In fact, over half the paragraphs in the novel are one or two lines long, and those which run over invariably contain dialogue. The stripped-down prose represents a leap which few writers would have the balls to make. An excellent example of this subtractive method is Ellroy's vivid introduction of Saigon, where some of his characters are refining heroin on behalf of “the Cause” – four paragraphs, a total of 29 words:

"Dig it:

Rickshaw bikes and sandbags. Gun nests in frangipani trees. Grenade nets and gooks.

Saigon at high noon – Brave New Fucking World.

It's big. It's tricultural. It stinks."

From there the picture of Saigon is built through the characters and their actions, adding details here and there in every terse paragraph until the look, sound and physical feel of the place is more solid than a passage of purple prose could create. The sparseness of the writing is an obvious asset when it comes to action – whether it's a murder or a detailed investigation, the point-by-point presentation of events or facts is clear, concise and compelling – but Ellroy's command of the technique is such that it doesn't detract from the emotional impact of his story.
Where a more conventional approach to inner turmoil is to write an interior monologue or to work through a strand of a character's thoughts from start to finish, Ellroy deploys his staccato paragraphs to incrementally build an emotional state, usually negative. Paragraph by paragraph he will give us a thought or idea, an action or reaction from the character, an image, a fact, a recalled phrase, some telling physical description, they are allowed to pile up as individual ideas or moments until we're seeing the characters physical posture and expression as well as their train of thought, without an ounce of unnecessary explanation but always clear and intensely detailed.

Added to this, Ellroy has used document inserts – briefing documents, Police reports, FBI phone transcripts, newspaper headlines – both to round out the story by providing information (for example, a very handy briefing on the situation in Saigon) and to quicken the already hectic pace. Although both transcripts and documents are common devices in crime fiction, Ellroy has an ear for hard, fast dialogue and a sense of style which saves the inserts from stilted speeches, dullness and cheese (all faults endemic to the “Police procedural” school of crime novels, which lean heavily on such devices). He also has a deft touch in how he uses the device – I was particularly interested in his use of a string of newspaper headlines to show an event significant to the plot disappearing from public view, until only the characters and the reader know how it pans out in the end.

Ellroy's cast of characters play out the behind-the-scenes portions of the actual public events alongside real-world cameos from the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes, Sonny Liston and Sal Mineo, but while this is a novel about conspiracies it is nonetheless overtly fictional. The plot, like the characters themselves, is designed to illuminate the political concerns, financial motives and American psychological aberrations which caused the assassinations to take place – and, indeed, the Vietnam war and the CIA's drugs trading and anti-Castro activities (the futility of which was recently underlined by his retirement, long after the fall of McCarthy and Hoover), pointedly written in a new dark age of American overseas intervention.
Each character is intimately tied to the key events of the era, involved with one or more of the groups which benefited politically from the war and the assassinations – the FBI, the CIA, the KKK, right-wing Cuban militias, the mafia and grey-area corporate concerns – and their combined life-stories between the end of '63 and the Summer of '68 combine to form the novel. Plot and character are as skillfully combined as history and fiction, and each of the central characters can be seen to somehow embody the era or play out its dramas in microcosm. From the introduction of Wayne Tedrow Junior at the opening of the novel, Ellroy starts as he means to go on:

"They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn't sure he could do it.

The Casino Operators Council flew him. They supplied first-class fare. They tapped their slush-fund. They greased him. They fed him six cold."

Wayne Junior is the novel's protagonist, and his character arc is probably the best example of how skilfully Ellroy has entwined plot and character. At the beginning of the book he's a fairly straight arrow, not above a bit of strongarm work, but unwilling to play ball with the corrupt Vegas cops and opposed to the extremist views held by his father, a wealthy Mormon businessman who also deals in mail-order tracts on white supremacy, Jewish conspiracies and the allied evils of Communism and Martin Luther King.

Then the aforementioned Wendell Durfee rapes and murders Wayne Junior's wife, and his transformation begins. His investigation in Darktown leads him into an ever more violent world where his gun earns more respect than his badge, and his reputation gets him in with entirely the wrong people. Slowly, over the course of the novel's six-hundred-plus pages, he is suborned into increasingly dubious situations. His father helps him track down Durfee, in return for a little consideration, and when Wayne Junior kills his man it's Wayne Senior and his shady connections who make sure he gets away with it. In return, he helps them out with their interests in Saigon, all the time being drawn deeper into the twilight world of the American far-right which he once hated, until at the end of the novel he's driving the car which takes Dr King's killer away to safety.

There's much more to the novel – plot summaries of Ellroy's work are almost impossible and utterly pointless – but what lingers is its singular intensity and the author's obsessive probing into the dark spot at the heart of American public life.

The House of Mystery: Enter Here!

2007-04-23T22:51:00.000Z

Shortly after his thirty-third birthday, Mr Hyde opened the doors of his enshadowed home to the world at large...

This is where I'm going to post bits and pieces of writing and generally air my cultural obsessions and opinions. I'm interested in mostly genre fiction - fantasy, science fiction, horror, crime and mystery, suspense and old-school pulp - plus comics and manga, movies, martial arts, anime, various oddities of music from the 1920s to the present and future... and here I'll be posting reviews, reccomendations, musings, ramblings and other entertaining stuff.

First up, a book review...