Those with an interest in writers following on from the Beat tradition may like Spencer Kansa‘s first novel Zoning. The story is about zoning - traveling without moving - and the strange interactions between teenage occultist, Astral Boy and Skyrise Kid, a young budding porn star. We’re in familiar territory here, and Kansa is a fan of William Burroughs, who said of Spencer’s book:
“Zoning reads like an urban Celine.”
It’s the first imprint from Beatdom Books, a small independent publisher, set up by a young Scot, David S Wills, in 2007. Willis also publishes a non-profit literary journal dedicated to the study of the Beat Generation, publishing Beat inspired poetry and prose. He has also issued Beatdom’s second book The Dog Farm - based on Wills’ experiences of living and working in South Korea.
Beatdom is well worth checking out and you can find details of Spencer’s novel Zoning and Willis’s The Dog Farmhere.
For thirty-six years, Norma Farnes was Spike Milligan’s manager, agent and Mother Confessor. She was also his friend. Since Milligan’s death in 2002, Norma has shown a loyalty to their friendship, which our world of social networks, Friending, Following and +1ing may never replace. For Ms. Farnes has been collating and editing the millions of words written by the late, great comedy genius, into a series of books - Box 18: The Unpublished Spike Milligan, The Compulsive Spike Milligan, Memories of Milligan - and now, Milligan’s Meaning of Life, his “autobiography of sorts”.
Who else but Norma Farnes could have edited together this fabulous collection of loose threads, extracts, and letters, which make Milligan’s Meaning of Life, such a brilliant autobiography.
As Norma explains in her introduction:
‘A sort of autobiography’. Yes, Spike would have liked that. I can hear him saying, ‘Yes, well, I suppose I’ve had a sort of life.’
...His many followers will, no doubt, find gaps, but it wasn’t my intention to give a complete account - rather an impressionistic journey. I did my best, but as Spike used to say to me: ‘That’s what worries me.’
Farnes should have no fears, as she has compiled a marvelous book, cherry-picking from the best of Milligan’s various writings. Farnes has a terrific eye for the telling phrase and revealing sentence, which presents Milligan as a bruised, sensitive, mercurial, inspired and very funny man. A man who had long bouts of severe depression, suffered terrible nervous breakdowns, was riddled with shyness and insecurities, yet through it all produced some of the our best, funniest and most memorable comedy.
During his life, Milligan produced over eighty books, ranging from poetry (Silly Verse for Kids to Small Dreams of a Scorpion), prose (most notably Puckoon, one of the best comic novels written), and his 7 volumes of War memoirs, starting with the hilarious Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall, plays (The Bed-Sitting Room and countless radio scripts form The Goons and his own classic comedy series Q. In very real terms, Milligan produced more work, and of a higher quality, than most novelists or writers ever achieve in a lifetime.
Monster Brains has scanned The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album from 1979 in its entirety. WARNING: May cause demonic possession!
You can download “a pdf version of the book with single pages set to 8.5 x 11 inches” here or “a second pdf (set as an 11x17 inch booklet with the pages laid out so that you an print it double-sided and then fold it in the middle to center-staple it)” here.
Duggie Fields is one Britain’s best and most influential artists, whose work hangs in galleries across the world and has influenced art, design, fashion, music, film, and now photography. Over the past few years, Mr Fields has been using his mobile phone to photograph and document the well-traveled streets and over-looked locations around his home in Earls Court. Now, he has collected these beautiful poetic moments together in a book called Just Around the Corner. Dangerous Minds contacted Mr Fields to ask him how the project started?
‘The photographs started a few years back once I got my first mobile phone that had a good camera and didn’t have to self-consciously think about taking a camera out…The phone was just always with me…So the frequency of taking photographs almost daily became a natural occurrence with no plan or scheme as to what…Like a diary of images, starting just around the corner in the area I live in and have lived in for over 40 years, and in which I constantly find things I haven’t noticed before, and still can find beautiful.’
Where did the title Just Around The Corner come from?
‘The title came because it was the description of where the first “Facebooked” were….I started putting them on Facebook as it is easy to do and easier to put there than my website. Soon they started getting followers ‘Liking’ them from all over, which encouraged me to put them together eventually for the book whose title was obvious.’
What inspires you and are there certain themes you find yourself returning to?
‘Themes started with the local architecture combined with the gardens, trees, plants of my immediate neighborhood but then spread to corners across London. Really just everywhere I happened to be going, from parks, to street-markets to car-boot sales. Varying also with the seasons from spring to summer to the snow. They have influenced my painting and are in turn influenced by them. Now from just around the corner they echo organically further in the digital world.’
Stephen King warns his younger self not to do recreational drugs. Alice Cooper writes “Trashy girls are exciting for about five minutes…Keep your eye out for a good-lookin’ church girl. Then you’ll have the best of both worlds.” While Gillian Anderson says, “You are completely and utterly self obsessed. If you spent a quarter of your time thinking about others instead of how much you hate your thighs, your level of contentment and self worth would expand exponentially.”
First of all, you’re right. You’re right about who you think is wrong. You’re right to trust your instincts and to be your own person.
Second of all. slow down. Before you know it you’ll be away from home and you’ll be living your own life. Don’t waste energy trying to make time move faster, because it won’t until one day when you don’t want it to and you’ll wonder if all those nights spent longing for the future are now being paid back by making a beautiful present more fleeting. So please, if only for my karmic peace of mind, chill out about it, ok?
You’re going to be really, really happy one day and you’re going to have a life that is so far from your comprehension right now that I’m not even going to try to explain how it happens. I can hardly work it out for myself. You just have to go with the flow, Alan. Just let go and tumble through life. It will all be okay.
But it’s not a commercial. There are really shitty bits. You don’t even know it but right now there are things happening to you that are too painful to process and so, like the adults around you, you’re just not dealing with them, suppressing them, locking them up in a box in your mind. When you’re 28, that box is going to explode open and tear your life apart. Everything will change and there will be much pain and it will take you a long time to recover. But recover you will, and it will ultimately make you a better person, and those you love will benefit too.
You’re going to have lots of sex and you’re going to feel sexy. Don’t worry. Just try and remember that it’s better for you to feel sexy about yourself than for other people to tell you you are. It’s going to be okay.
In 1997 you’ll meet someone in New York at the party for the opening of ‘Titanic - the Musical’. Now, I am not one for regrets, Alan, and I truly believe that everything you experience between 16 and now all contributes to make you the really happy person that you become, so how could I wish any of it to be different? But, come on, the show is called ‘Titanic’, that should be an omen. Walk away from this person. You’ll never make them not be angry. Later on you’ll see a pattern of you trying to fix angry people and you’ll be able to break it, so do yourself a favour and walk away, let this one be the first. He will try to destroy you. He won’t, but he’ll try very hard.
You will love and be loved and be rich beyond your wildest dreams, and the best thing about this richness is that it has nothing to do with money. It’s all going to be okay.
A teacher at drama school is going to tell you that’ll you’ll never make it as a professional actor. He is wrong. Wrong to say it, and just wrong because you do okay. Try not to let it dent you too much.
You’re never going to have children, Alan. You’re going to try, in relationships with both women and men, but it doesn’t happen, and that’s okay too. Right now you have the happiest family anyone could wish for.
It really is all going to be okay. I’ll see you in 29 years. Enjoy it.
Alan x
More letters from Kathleen Turner and John Waters, after the jump…
Home is where the art is for four different groups of writers, who lived and worked together under one roof, experiencing a cultural time-share that produced diverse and original works of literature, art, and popular entertainment.
The February House
Between 1940 and 1942, “an entire generation of Western culture” lived at 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn. The poet W. H. Auden was house mother, who collected rents and doled out toilet paper, at 2 sheets for each of his fellow tenants, advising them to use “both sides”. These tenants included legendary stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, novelist Carson McCullers and a host of other irregular visitors - composer Benjamin Britten, singer Peter Pears, writers Jane and Paul Bowles and Erika and Klaus Mann, Salvador Dali, a selection of stevedores, sailors, circus acts and a chimpanzee.
Auden wrote his brilliant poem New Year Letter here and fell obsessively in love with Chester Kallman, and attempted to strangle him one hot, summer night - an event that taught Auden the universal potential for evil. On the top floor, Carson McCullers escaped from her psychotic husband, and wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, while slowly drinking herself to an early death.
On the first floor, Gypsy Rose Lee created her legend as the world’s most famous stripper, wrote her thriller The G-String Murders, offered a shoulder to cry on, and told outrageous tales of her burlesque life.
Known as the “February House”, because of the number of birthdays shared during that month, 7 Middagh St. was a place of comfort and hope in the desperate months at the start of the Second World War.
The Fun Factory
The scripts that came out of 9 Orme Court in London, changed world comedy. And if Spike Milligan hadn’t gone mad and attempted to murder Peter Sellers with a potato peeler, it may never have all happened.
Milligan was the comic genius behind The Goons, and the stress of writing a new script every week, led to his breakdown. The need for a place to work, away from the demands of family, home and fame, brought Milligan to share an office with highly successful radio scriptwriter, Eric Sykes.
The first Fun Factory was above a greengrocer on the Uxbridge Road. Here Sykes, Milligan, comedian Frankie Howerd and agent Scruffy Dale, formed the Writers’ Bloc Associated London Scripts. The idea was to bring together the best and newest comedy writers under one umbrella. Milligan saw ALS as an artists’ commune that would lead to political and cultural change. Sykes saw ALS as a business opportunity to produce great comedy. Frankie Howerd saw it as a source of finding new material.
When Milligan asked two young writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to come on board, the central core of ALS was formed.
This merry band of writers expanded in the coming years to include: Johnny Speight (Till Death Us Do Part); Barry Took and Marty Feldman (The Army Game and Round the Horne); Terry Nation (Dr Who and the Daleks); John Antrobus (The Bed-Sitting Room); and with a move to the more suitable offices of 9 Orme Court, ALS was established as the home of legendary British comedy.
Milligan continued successfully with The Goons, before devising the groundbreaking Q series for television. Sykes began his long and successful career with his own TV show. While Galton and Simpson created the first British TV sitcom, Hancock’s Half-Hour, and then the massively influential Steptoe and Son.
9 Orme Court was once described, as though Plato, Aristotle, Galileo and Leonardo Da Vinci were all living in the same artist’s garret.
The Beat Hotel
A run-down hotel in the back streets of Paris was unlikely setting for a Cultural Revolution, but the Sixties were seeded when poet, Allen Ginsberg William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bryon Gysin moved into the Beat Hotel, at 9 Git le Coeur, in the late 1950s.
The literary revolution that started with Ginsberg’s Howl in America was formalised and expanded in the cramped, leaky, piss-smelling hotel rooms at 9 Git le Couer.
Ginsberg wrote part of Kaddish here, as he came to terms with the madness and death of his Mother. First to arrive, Ginsberg was also be first to check out, travelling in search of enlightenment to India.
The wild and romantic Corso produced his best books of poems “Gasoline” and “Bomb”, whilst living the life of an American abroad.
But it was Burroughs who gained most from his four-year on-and-off stay in Git le Coeur. Here he completed Naked Lunch, and wrote the novels The Soft Machine, The Nova Express, The Ticket that Exploded, and together with Bryon Gysin devised the cut-up form of writing, indulged in seances, Black Magic and tried out Scientology.
Like Middagh Street, the Beat Hotel was a cultural and social experiment that sought to inspire art through shared experiences.
Passport from Pimlico
It started with a bet. Three young writers sitting watching Mick Jagger on Top of the Pops, in a flat in Pimlico during the 1960s. The bet was simple, which of the 3 would make the big time first?
It was the kind of idle chat once made soon forgotten, but not for these 3 young talents, Tom Stoppard, Derek Marlowe and Piers Paul Read.
Read and Marlowe believed Stoppard would hit the big time first, but they were wrong, it was Marlowe in 1966 with his cool and brilliant spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic, made into a film with Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtney and Peter Cook.
Stoppard was next in 1967, with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Then Read with Alive the story of Andes plane crash in 1974.
All 3 were outsiders, set apart from their contemporaries by their romanticized sense of Englishness, which came from their backgrounds. Read was a brilliant Catholic author, favorably compared to Graham Greene; Stoppard, a Czech-émigré, and Marlowe, a second generation Greek, who was for “heroes, though if not Lancelot or Tristan, heroes” who appeared “out of the mould of the time.” All three writers were to become the biggest British talents of the 1970s and 1980s.
Vincent Price is on sparkling form in An Evening With Edgar Allan Poe, in which the Master of Horror presents his unique interpretation of 4 tales by “the most original genius America has produced” - “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Directed by Kenneth Johnson, who later created the classic series V, this is a classic TV adaptation from 1970, capturing Price at his electrifying best.
Matter of Heart: The Extraordinary Journey of C.G. Jung is a fascinating 1986 documentary that explores Jung’s life through interviews with the man himself and reminiscences from his colleagues, friend and students, some of whom were analyzed by Jung.
This is a fine introduction to Jung’s concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Written by Suzanne Wagner and directed by Mark Whitney.
About halfway through The Freedom Trap, author Desmond Bagley reveals his hand towards his sources. It comes around page one hundred, when the central character Owen Stannard is briefed by his boss, Mackintosh:
‘What do you know about the British prison system?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I’ll let you have a copy of the Mountbatten Report,’ he said. ‘You’ll find it fascinating reading. But I’ll give you the gist of it now. Lord Mountbatten found that the British prisons are full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Do you know how many escapes there are each year?’
‘No. There was something about it in the papers a couple of years ago, but I didn’t read it too closely.’
‘More than five hundred. If it’s any less than that they think they’ve had a good year. Of course, most of the escapees are picked up quite soon, but a small percentage get clean away - and that small percentage is rising. It’s a troublesome situation.’
I’d picked up a copy because of its cover, who doesn’t? Maybe the French? As once, most of their covers were all the same - that’s equality for you. The cover had Paul Newman, as Stannard, with suit and tie, gun in hand, and it left a fluid memory of John Huston’s rather fine film version, The Mackintosh Man.
Bagley’s story mixes a little bit of fact with a lot of page-turning fiction. It’s a tale of double agents, the British Secret Service and the Scarperers, a fictional organization that helps long-term prisoners escape gaol - all for the right money. Back to our opening scene. Mackintosh now makes it clear he isn’t interested in the “‘murderers or rapists, homicidal maniacs or ordinary small time thieves’” that escape from gaol, his focus is State Security, and how to stop double agents, like the real-life George Blake, turning up in Moscow, “‘where he chirped his head off.’”
‘For the first time in years someone has come up with a brand new crime. Crime is just like any other business - it’s conducted only for profit - and someone has figured a way to make profit out of getting people out of prison…
...an organization was set up, dedicated to springing long-term prisoners who could pay enough, and you be surprised how many of those there are. And once such an organization gets going, like any other business it tends to expand, and whoever is running it has gone looking for custom - and he doesn’t care where the money comes from, either.’
‘The Russians?’
‘Who else?’ said Mackintosh sourly.
It was the Cold War and the Russians were still off the Christmas card list. The way Bagley tells it, the Red Menace was everywhere. In the Freedom Trap, the Reds actively liberating double agents like Slade - as the character Stannard explains when he meets Slade in prison:
It was about this time that I first met Slade. He was a new boy inside for the first offence and he’d got forty-two years, but I don’t believe the First Offenders Act covers espionage. I had heard about him before, of course: the news broadcasts had been full of the Slade Trial. Since most of the juicy bits had been told in camera no one really knew what Slade had been up to, but from all accounts he was the biggest catch since Blake.
To anyone reading this in the early seventies it may have seemed like non-fiction - as it came almost a decade after notorious double-agent, George Blake had been sentenced to forty-two years in jail, and who, only 5 years later, had managed to escape from Wormwood Scrubs Prison, in 1966. Then, it was commonly believed Blake had been helped by an organization, just like Bagley’s fictional “Scarperers”, paid for by the K.G.B., and run by a petty criminal, Sean Bourke.
It wasn’t just fiction writers who believed this was what happened, respected journalist E. H. Cookridge stated in his 1970 biography, George Blake Double Agent that the K.G.B. had financed Blake’s escape, claiming the cost for such an operation was “mere chickenfeed”, and Blake was far too important a spy for the Russians to lose.
This was all fine on paper, but in reality both Bagley and Cookridge were wrong, as Blake’s escape from prison was the work of amateurs and more reminiscent of Carry On Spying than Funeral in Berlin.
George Blake was born George Behar in the Netherlands in 1922. During the Second World War he worked as part of the Dutch Resistance against the invading German army. Blake was so successful he was soon on the Gestapo’s most wanted list. His keenness verged on the fanatical, something which would become more apparent as Blake grew older. His experience with the Resistance highlighted his seemingly natural talent for subterfuge. Arrested by the Germans, Blake just managed to escape, following his family out of Holland to England.
In Britain, Behar was at first frustrated by the long immigration process required to ensure no sneaky German agents were hidden amongst the influx of refugees. To fit in with his adopted country, Behar changed his name to the anglicized Blake, and applied for work in the Navy, his intention was to become a spy, and return to Holland. It didn’t quite happen that way, as his superiors were more than a little suspicious of Blake’s methods which were straight out of the fictional Richard Hannay, and anticipated the fantasy of James Bond and even Matt Helm. It’s worth considering whether Ian Fleming ever met Blake during the war years and if he had, did Blake fuel the writer’s imagination?
After the war, Blake became fully fledged spy, working undercover as part of the diplomatic service. This was when his B-movie imagination kicked-in - writing in invisible ink, arranging bizarre pick-ups for worthless information and running a team of spies.
In 1950, Blake found himself under a different invading army when he was posted to Seoul, Korea. He was captured by insurgents form the North and held prisoner. The North Koreans had no sympathy for prisoners of war, and Blake and his fellow POWs were treated barbarically and forced on a long death march from city to bombed city. Cookridge described part of it thus:
The death march went on for many days. Occasionally there were overnight stops in villages. Usually the civilian internees were packed into one room which had no windows and was covered with vermin and excrement….
...Those who fell by the side of the road, watching mutely as the column passed them by…“We heard many shots…the dying were pushed into the ditch.”
They were repeatedly moved village to village, until they reached their destination, Chung-Kang-Djin. On arrival, the POWs made a rough estimate of the casualties - a least one hundred had died or been shot during the march, just over a quarter of their number. But this was only the start, as they were handed over to the Chinese military, who began a process of brainwashing techniques on the beleaguered inmates.
Blake has since claimed he was never brain-washed, claiming he turned to Soviet Communism because of the horrors witnessed during the Korean War. Whatever the truth, the attempts at brainwashing were later confirmed by his fellow POWs.
After negotiations for a cease-fire, Blake returned home a hero to Britain. Ironically, it wasn’t long before he offered his services to the KGB, and so began his 9-year career as a dastardly double-agent.
Working for the British Secret Service, Blake was transferred to Berlin where he set-up and ran his own spy ring for the K.G.B. Blake’s love of cloak and dagger defined his time in Berlin. He was responsible for the exposure and deaths of an estimated 400 agents - something else he later denied, though his K.G.B. bosses have since confirmed this number as correct. Blake verged on the fanatical with his work, having no compunction in hiring spies to work for him, then exposing them as traitors, as Cookridge explains:
I have a long list of agents Blake had betrayed between 1955 and 1959, but in deference to the regulations of the Official Secrets Act, I shall mention only a few, whose names became known through “show trials” in East Germany.
In 1955 Hans Joachim Koch, a then 43-year-old radio operator, was arrested when emptying a “dead letter box” in Pankow Park, which Blake had arranged and of which he had given the information to the K.G.B….
At about the same time Johann Baumgart, an official of the East German railways, who had produced twenty-five remarkable reports about railway transports, was given away by Blake and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment….
Ewald Jantke, a former Luftwaffe radio operator, and Arno Gugel, son of a Gestapo official, who with a young woman called Ursula Lehmann had formed a successful “cell” in East Germany, were betrayed when Jankte became too cocky and joined the East German People’s Police…
Blake was instrumental in “burning” an outpost established in Dresden, which kept in contact with the secret service in West Berlin by exchanging stamps for collectors…marked with microdots…
The list goes on, but you get the idea, it was all fun and games straight from a John Le Carre. It beggars belief how he wasn’t uncovered, or even suspected as a double-agent sooner, until you appreciate nearly the whole of the British Secret Service was a private members’ club for Soviet double agents, most famously the Cambridge Five (Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross) and most controversially, the suggestion Director General of MI5, Roger Hollis was also working for the K.G.B.
Blake had a good run, destroying most of MI6’s operations in eastern Europe, seeding double agents, and notoriously revealing the tunnel the Allies had built under the Berlin Wall. But all things must pass, and in 1961, the game was up, Blake was arrested sent to trial, parts of which were held in camera for security reasons. He pleaded guilty to the five counts against him, and expected to receive a sentence of 14 years imprisonment. However, Lord Parker of Waddington imposed a sentence of 14 years imprisonment on each of the 5 counts:
“Those in respect of counts one, two and three will be consecutive, and those in respect of counts four and five will be concurrent, making a total of forty-two tears; imprisonment.”
Forty-two years, it was “the longest prison sentence ever imposed in modern British history…” And herein lies the tale of his escape.
Blake wasn’t set free by the machinations of the K.G.B., but by passionate amateurs, who disagreed with Blake’s harsh sentencing.
When he was in Wormwood Scrubs, Blake came in to contact with Michael Randle and Pat Pottle, two men imprisoned for their non-violent protest against USAF Weatherfield, a British airbase used by the American Air Force during the Cold War.
Randle was a conscientious objector, and a member of the Aldermaston March Committee which organised the first Aldermaston March against British nuclear weapons, in Easter 1958. Pottle was a founder member of the Committee of 100, an anti-nuclear direct action group which broke away from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Their outrage at the “vicious” sentence imposed on Blake saw Pottle and Randle team up, once they were released from prison, with another ex-con Séan Bourke, in a bold plan to set Blake free.
Prior to his escape, the police and prison authorities received numerous warnings that Blake would make a bid for freedom. Security was tightened but it was to no avail, as the BBC reported on October 22 1966:
One of Britain’s most notorious double-agents, George Blake, has escaped from prison in London after a daring break-out believed to have been masterminded by the Soviet Union.
Wardens at Wormwood Scrubs prison last saw him at the evening roll call, at 1730 GMT.
An hour-and-a-half later, his cell was discovered to be empty.
After a short search, the escape route was found. Bars in a window at the end of a landing had been sawn away and a rope ladder hung down inside the prison wall.
Sean Bourke had prepared a ladder made from nylon thread and knitting needles. As in Bagley’s book, the ladder was thrown over a perimeter wall, where Slade/Blake climbed over to an awaiting vehicle. Unlike the novel, Blake wasn’t liberated to Ireland and a well staffed safe house, but was moved apartment to apartment, bed-sit to bed-sit by Bourke, Pottle and Randle, never staying anywhere long enough to attract police attention.
Eventually, in a farcical denouement, Blake was driven by Randle, in a Commer Dormobile from London to Berlin, and then through to East Germany. Through the crucial parts of the journey, Blake remained hidden under the bench seat, with Randle’s children sitting comfortably on top. The incident made fools of the security and secret services, but revealed the ability of committed individuals to change history.
Blake became a hero in Soviet Russia, but his actions seemed pointless after Perestroika. In 1990, he published his autobiography No Other Choice, and claimed his time spent in Moscow had been the happiest of his life. Sean Bourke dined out on the escape story for years, becoming the focus for media attention, and, of course, Simon Gray famously turned the relationship between Blake and Bourke in prison into his play Cell Mates- the production Stephen Fry ran out on, in 1995.
In June 1991, Randle and Pottle were eventually put on trial for their involvement in Blake’s escape, but were found not guilty by a jury, after arguing that, while they in no way condoned Blake’s espionage activities for either side, they were right to help him because the forty-two year sentence he received was inhuman and hypocritical.
