Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’

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And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Deconstructing Goodreads ‘reviews’ – or the not so Great Leap Backwards!

Wednesday, December 28th, 2011

I just read through all the reviews of my books on the Goodreads website – and a lot of the negative ones are premised on the retarded assumption that realism is the only valid form for ‘fiction’. I’ll begin with some examples of this from Goodreads ‘reviews’ of my anti-novel 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess:

J.C. Moylan: “stewart home needs to learn how women think if he’s going to make his protaganist (sic) a woman.”

What a plonker – and dig the lower case spelling of my name, although I doubt this is an e. e. cummings fan.

Likewise, C. Vance: “very few men can write from a woman’s point of view.  very few men can write from a woman’s point of view this poorly – especially the first-person recollections of sex. after the narration of her ‘meat curtains’ and his ‘fuck stick’ i was done. inane nonsense with regurgitated lit theory to try to make it seem like legitimate fiction instead of another smut book.”

Which leads us on to the same error made from the opposite perspective by Tess (no surname give) on her Goodreads ‘review’ of Dead Princess: “too many references to pulp fiction get in the way of this book actually BEING pulp fiction, which is what I percieve (sic) as the author’s intentions.”

What I’m actually trying to do is render all genre boundaries meaningless – and not just those between pulp and literature, but also fiction and non-fiction -  none of which are actually real, but they are nonetheless perceived as ‘real’ by those in thrall to them. It should go without saying that genres evolve over time, and that what is included in any particular genre also shifts historically. Given that I’m going beyond literature, I’ve no interest in the straight production or reproduction of other genres either. Literature is in part created by its division from pulp, these two categories both conjure up and buttress each other – what I want to do is overflow canalisation of this type. While those who berate me for failing to write realist literature tend to be way more obnoxious when giving vent to their ridiculous opinions, anyone who tries to understand my anti-novels as pulp has also failed to grasp what it is I’m doing (and is therefore unable to pass worthwhile judgements on my books).

Returning to Dead Princess but moving onto another common misunderstanding when it comes to my writing (and, indeed, the work of all those who have grasped that literature is dead), we get this from Alberta (no surname given):

“disappointing… the writing seemed too rote… like he was anxious to get everything down but he didn’t care how he said it. ”

Which echoes but is less explicit than a comment I noticed on a Goodreads review of Steve Beard’s Meat Puppet Cabaret:

Becca  “… i think that a book which strays so far from conventional narrative, it should have more exciting language.”

The complaint that I suspect is being made here is that the language isn’t literary – unfortunately many  ‘reviews’ on Goodreads are so short and/or poorly expressed that it is often difficult to understand very precisely what the poster is trying to say. That said,  I have been told numerous times that I can’t write because I don’t use flowery literary language. Those who make this claim simply don’t understand I want my words to flow so I make my sentences as simple as possible to achieve the effect and ‘meaning’ (or in many cases disillusion of ‘meaning’) I’m aiming at. Mostly complexity in my books comes from a piling up of concepts, not from individual sentences. That said my prose is worked at – you don’t get smooth and rhythmic sentences from a first draft – and obviously I am not aiming for literary effect (since that would mitigate against what I set out to achieve – the supersession of literature among other things).

The problem with Goodreads – and Amazon ‘reviews’ too for that matter -  is that many of those who presume to pass judgement on my writing lack the skill and knowledge to do so. A ‘good’ proportion of these would-be ‘critics’ have been brainwashed into thinking that all books should be judged by conventional and hackneyed nineteenth-century literary standards. While I don’t doubt that readers of this type dislike what I write, were they able to understand my books I might yet groove them – but even if after gaining a little relevant knowledge they still loathed my prose, it would be better if they were able to express an opinion about my writing without making complete fools of themselves. Those who’ve never encountered tripped out post-fiction in all its (un)originality – and haven’t yet understood the nature of modernism’s break with realist tropes – aren’t so much reversing into the future as plunging headlong into the past!

Of course I wouldn’t stop these ill-informed bozos from adding their reactionary inanities to Goodreads – after all their failed attempts at putting down my books simply add to my credibility.  The question is to what extent we should bother to engage with small ‘c’ conservatives who base their criticisms of 21st century post-fiction on the conventions of nineteenth-century realist prose? They might learn something from us but should they fail to do so, then having anything to do with these imbeciles is just a complete waste of time.

Just in case you want to see it here is my author profile at Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/29676.Stewart_Home.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Occupying my future, reclaiming my past!

Thursday, December 22nd, 2011

Asserting that ‘we are everywhere’ is probably more convincing than the claim that ‘I am everywhere”. Nonetheless it doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief before I’m able to convince myself that indeed “I am everywhere” – after all, I’ve been billing myself as ‘an ego maniac on a world historical scale’ for years! Recently I stumbled upon someone on Goodreads with my name who has been promoting my books rather energetically over there – unfortunately this Stewart Home can’t possibly be me since he joined the site in July 2007 (whereas I joined yesterday) and he’s based in the USA. My author profile at Goodreads is here.

When I read what other people write about me it can often seem like I’ve been even busier than I actually am. Reviewing my recent White Columns show in the New York Times on on 18 November, Roberta Smith wrote: “A brochure written by Mr. Home explains a lot, if not everything. For that, there is his lavishly detailed Wikipedia entry, which also appears to be his handiwork.” To me the entry in question has an inconsistency which makes it obvious it is a collective effort rather than mine. I suspect that some of the imbalances in the article are the result of other people using Wikipedia to promote themselves. For example, while many of my books and exhibitions are passed over without discussion, there is a bizarre passage about the Evening Falls nightclub (including the fallacious claim that I didn’t read there). Likewise, when I last checked, no one had updated my list of exhibitions on this Wikipedia page to include my recent White Columns outing.

Moving on, I’ve also seen some nutjob using web 2.0 comment facilities to allege that I write my own Amazon reviews…. of course they offered no proof, and had obviously missed the fact that I just don’t take the user generated content on that site very seriously. As you’ve probably gathered by now, way too many of my leisure hours are spent reading about myself for me to have the time to write reviews of my own books for Amazon. Likewise, it will come as little surprise to most of my readers that one of the things I love about the web is the way it allows everyone to turn over their own past – and in some cases rediscover material they’d pretty much forgotten. I didn’t have any images of the Anon exhibition I’d been a part of in Luton back in 1989 until John Wynne posted some photographs of it on his Facebook profile. I immediately snaffled those featuring my contributions and added them to my Flickr photostream – where they look absolutely fantastic in an utterly weird eighties appropriated post-pop art kind of way. Likewise, earlier this year I finally got around to putting an image of my ‘original’ Art Strike Bed onto Flickr, done several years before Tracey Emin attempted to recuperate this particular assault of mine on the sensibilities of the London art establishment.

I could use this piece as an opportunity to write about how I’m attempting to replace the planking fad with a craze for photos of people standing on their head – there are currently a dozen pictures of me doing headstands on my Flickr profile (see if you can find them all). However, rather than banging on about my topsy-turvy online presence, I’m now going to get even more self-referential and obsessive. What I’d like readers of this blog to do is tell me in the comments below whether I used the best possible title for this post, or whether I should have reversed it so that it ran: “Reclaiming my future, occupying my past”?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Terry’s Taylor’s cult novel ‘Baron’s Court, All Change’ is a classic – official at £238!

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Copies of Terry Taylor’s 1961 novel Baron’s Court, All Change don’t come up for sale at all often but until now when they did they’ve never been particularly expensive. I have a paperback that came from an exchange stall and it cost 20p. I was looking for a hardback for about 4 years until I finally acquired one via eBay – and no one else even bid on that copy of the book. I’ve been checking the obvious online places for further copies since then (eBay, Amazon, Abe Books), and I’ve not come across a single instance of Baron’s Court being offered for sale over the past few years until now. As I write, Repton Readers are offering a copy of Barons Court on Amazon UK Marketplace for a whopping £238 plus postage.

So how does a hard-to-obtain title go from being offered for sale for a few quid to an asking price of hundreds of pounds? Obviously, it is a combination of buzz and a bookseller chancing it with a high price. Baron’s Court is a far-out drugs novel that fell through the cracks and disappeared for forty odd years – the main problem being that it was at least five years ahead of its time. That said, it only needed a handful of relatively ‘young’ hipsters to realise that the book described mod and the counterculture in very early stages of their evolution, that it was the first British novel to mention LSD, and that the author Terry Taylor had a quite incredible life story, for interest in it to rocket. Since my mother (Julia Callan-Thompson) was a friend of the author, when I started researching her life at the turn of the millennium, I came across Baron’s Court and once I’d obtained copies for myself I started talking the book up. I not only wrote about Baron’s Court, I was so knocked-out by this novel, I mailed photocopies of it to key contacts – and after receiving a Xerox from me, Andy Roberts even bigged it up in his recent history of British acid culture Albion Dreaming.

If you want to know why Baron’s Court is so hard to find,  you have to understand both publishing and the used book trade. It is the difficulty of obtaining a title like this that leads dealers to asking an exorbitant price for it. I don’t know the print run of the hardback edition of Baron’s Court, but I’d guess it would have been between two and five thousand. It seems to have generated some coverage, but not massive interest – after it was published Terry Taylor was invited to do some reviewing, but the paperback rights didn’t immediately sell. Taylor’s follow-up, which drew more explicitly on the literary experimentalism of figures like William Burroughs, was rejected by his publisher. So Taylor has been to date a one-shot novelist, and was thus unable to draw readers to his earlier book through the publication of further tomes.

The publication of a Baron’s Court paperback four long years after the appearance of the MacGibbon & Kee hardcover edition is probably best explained by the burgeoning drug culture. By 1965 ‘with-it’ publishers were aware of a growing interest in drugs and casting about for books dealing with the subject. The Baron’s Court paperback was published by Four Square (later New English Library) who by the late sixties/early seventies did first printings of their books in runs of 20,000 and they only reprinted if this first run sold quickly (see my interview with NEL editor Laurence James as an example of background research I’ve done in this ares). If we assume the company worked in the same way in the mid-sixties, then 20,000 seems a reasonable guess for the print run of Baron’s Court in paperback. We can conclude that in its two editions to date possibly as many as 25,000 copies of Baron’s Court were printed. Most of them will now be destroyed. I don’t know exactly how the book sold, but since it clearly wasn’t like ‘hot cakes’ (if it had there would have been more reprints), it is possible some copies were pulped by one or both of the publishers. I have yet to properly determine the initial reception of the book, and if anyone can point me in the direction of contemporary reviews I would be grateful.

Mass market paperbacks put out by companies like Four Square are cheaply made – perfect bound rather than sewn and printed on pulp papers that deteriorate quickly – after being read a few times this type of book tends to fall apart and get thrown away. Although the paperback will have been printed in a far bigger run than the hardback, my guess would be that far fewer copies of it survive than of the first edition. That said, I wouldn’t be particularly optimistic about many copies of the first edition surviving either! It is likely the majority of hardbacks sales would have been to libraries, and library books are often roughly handled and suffer damage – before being either sold off or thrown away at the end of their lending life.

But what about those copies of Baron’s Court that were offered to secondhand dealers over the years? Since the book had no buzz about it until recently, few dealers would have wanted to buy copies even if they had recognised the title or author (and very few would have done so); and if they did acquire copies in job lots of books, they may have simply thrown them away or used them for fuel. Owners of copies of Baron’s Court who were unable to sell them to dealers may have treated this once hard-to-sell tome in an equally caviler fashion. Precisely because until recently there has been little to no market for Baron’s Court as a novel, the overwhelming majority of copies will have been destroyed.

Now there is some buzz about Terry Taylor and Baron’s Court, the remaining copies of the book have a greater potential value than many other out-of-print titles precisely because its earlier lack of popularity makes it rare. Baron’s Court is also, without a shadow of a doubt, not only a cracking good read but of considerable historical significance. So fingers-crossed that some clued-up publisher puts it back in print, and rather than having to shell out hundreds of pounds for a used copy, you can buy it new for roughly the same price as any other mass market tome. And if there are any interested publishers out there, I’d be happy to put them in touch with the author who still controls the rights….

Terry Taylor’s story is one with a relatively happy ending for those who like to believe fairy tales about ‘literary immortality’, but don’t let it blind you to the fact that the vast bulk of books published every year are very quickly forgotten!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

The sinful nuns of St Valentine meet the Marquis de Sade at the Borders closing down ‘sale’….

Sunday, December 13th, 2009

Watching capitalist corporations fail is a groove sensation, and it takes me right back to everything from the three day week to the ‘winter of discontent’ in the 1970s. All those who love power cuts will recall that the mid-1970s was a real peak for this type of fun in London. As a long-term fan of this great anti-tradition, you can’t keep me out of shops that are closing down. The last 12 months has been a real bonanza for entertainments of this type: first there was the closure of Woolworths, then there was Zavvi, now there is Borders (UK)! Okay, so the flagship Borders store in Oxford Street has already gone, but the sense of chaos and anti-climax in the still just hanging-on-by-a-thread Charing Cross Road branch really gives me the horn. The stock is in disarray, with books and DVDs spilling off half-empty shelves, the toilets (for me what was once the main attraction in the shop) are closed, and there are mugs and other breakable crap – rather than bestsellers – at the front of the shop. The place looks like the set for a disaster movie, which is why for as long as it remains open I’ll continue to goof around in this wrecked ‘retail’ space…

That said, now Borders is closing I only go for the ambiance (rather than ‘Toilet Love’), and to laugh at those buying goods that after being marked up to more than twice their market value are currently being sold at between 20% and 50% ‘discount’. One of the things that caused me to chuckle on the ground floor of Borders while I was enjoying the chaos there on Friday was a display of Redemption DVDs. These were priced at £7.99 minus 30% discount (i.e. £5.60), and there were some Eurosleaze classics among them including a whole bunch of Jean Rollin lesbian vampire movies… But you can buy many of these on Amazon Market Place for around £4 (including postage), or if you can’t wait for them to arrive by mail, all the titles in Borders and many more are sold in Lovejoys a couple of minutes walk down Charing Cross Road at £6.99 each or 2 for £12 (i.e. £6 each when you buy two – not greatly more than the Borders sale price). Likewise I’ve seen these Redemption titles around in secondhand shops at about £3. Which means, of course,  that even in the Borders sale, these items (like most of their discounted stock) still pan out as being more expensive than picking them up elsewhere. So don’t bother with the sale, just dig the collapse…. or go in dressed in an over-sized coat….

And talking of Redemption, I read a truly bizarre story by Lucy Tobin about this company in The Evening Standard on Thursday 10 December, entitled Film firm that made Koo a star collapses: “The cult movie empire whose back catalogue includes the risqué films of Prince Andrew’s former lover Koo Stark has collapsed into administration. Redemption Films, based in Wigmore Street, Soho, was set up by Nigel Wingrove, Britain’s answer to Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Administrators were called in today at the distributor of gothic horror movies, whose past titles range from Sinful Nuns Of St Valentine to Ms Stark’s cult 1977 hit The Marquis De Sade’s Justine….”

There is a lot of misinformation to unpack in this story, but let’s start with the headline, since Redemption Films did not make Koo Stark a star. Redemption was set up in the 1990s and Stark became a minor starlet on the back of a couple of mid-seventies movies -  Emily (1976) and Cruel Passion AKA De Sade’s Justine (1977) – and then briefly a media celebrity in the 1980s when she dated inbred British royal brat Prince Andrew (“The Duke of York”). All Redemption did was acquire some of Stark’s back catalogue as a film actress and issue it on VHS tape and then DVD long after she’d become a household name in the UK.

Likewise, I find the idea of Redemption being a soft porn ‘empire’ on the same scale as Larry Flynt’s American Hustler operation risible (it is about on a par with suggesting that ‘Boris Johnson is Britain’s answer to Barack Obama’). During the 1990s my friend Nik Houghton worked for Nigel Wingrove and I went into their office on the odd occasion; at that time the business consisted of Wingrove and his part-time assistant Nik in a moderately sized room. Wingrove’s operation may have grown a bit since then, and it has definitely moved to a slightly more upmarket address, but it is still closer to a cult-film one-man band than a porn empire! However, as ever with The Standard, the point of the piece seems to be to pack in as much gossip as possible, rather than to report news. Therefore it should surprise no one that Wingrove’s professional involvement with Georgina Baillie – ‘the granddaughter of Andrew Sachs who was at the centre of the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand telephone scandal’ – gets a passing mention too.

For anyone who has looked into the ways cult films and music are milked for profits, I’d see Redemption going into administration as business as usual within this sector of the culture industry. Cult means niche and there are usually very few buyers for operations in really specialist areas like Oi! music or Eurosleaze films; therefore a businessman (or woman) who knows their way around one of these ‘cult’ areas will often run their limited liability company into bankruptcy while paying themselves a hefty salary. This is a way of writing off debts, because the ‘former’ owner can buy up the assets of the concern they’ve deliberately run down for less than a song: they use another company they’ve set up for this purpose and then proceed to do the same thing again, and again, and again! And what’s more, given that we live in a capitalist society, this is more or less legal! It is precisely the sort of thing so called ‘wealth generators’ do for ‘a living’ and illustrates why businessmen and bankers should not be allowed to reward themselves with anything above an average workers’ wage, let alone ‘bonuses’. I don’t know if this is how Nigel Wingrove operates, but I am familiar with other individuals working in the cult sector of the culture industry who do business this way.

If Wingrove was planning to write off his debts by buying himself out, The Standard story could be bad news for him, since it might stir up interest from other ‘wealth generators’. That said, Wingrove is also a film-maker himself, so perhaps he just wants out…. Moving on, if you believe what you read in The Standard, you may well have been hoaxed into thinking I wrote the Belle de Jour blog and books, so it isn’t exactly surprising their Nigel Wingrove and Redemption Films story is so inaccurate!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

The 1960s nude murders & the 17th century Whitefriars punks who liked to give head…

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

Having spent some time looking at my mother’s life and in particular her time from 1961 onwards in Notting Hill, I have inevitably had cause to ponder Jack The Stripper and the nude murders. At least six west London prostitutes died in a bizarre series of mid-sixties sex slayings but the killer was never caught. I have always been more interested in the victims than their murderer(s), but I felt it worth commenting on a recent book that claimed to identify the killer. My focus in this review was on the author of this travesty, since he made a number of outrageous claims without any proof to back them up. You can read my review here. Despite this, via the mail form on my website, I get a fair number of messages about Jack The Stripper. Indeed, I got one yesterday that read:

“Nude Murders. Dear Stewart, would you be interested in discussing this subject with me. I believe that 2 people were responsible for these murders. The first is Mungo Ireland, the second Harold Jones, a near neighbour of Ireland. Google Neil Milkins for more info on Jones. Neil Milkins.”

Mungo Ireland is one of the usual suspects put in the frame for the Jack The Stripper murders, alongside the likes of boxing champion Freddie Mills. I hadn’t heard of Harold Jones before. After doing a web search I discovered Jones had been convicted of killing two children in 1921 when he was himself only 15 years-old. Milkins has produced a book about the case entitled Every Mother’s Nightmare: Abertillery in Mourning (Old Bakehouse Publications 2008) and as The South Wales News of 8 November 2007 explained: “After many years of researching the subject, Mr Milkins threw himself whole-heartedly into the project after leaving his job as a tree-feller due to an injury.” When I checked yesterday, the book only had one Amazon review, but it was enthusiastic and gave a 5 star rating:

“Kevin Milkins (Wick/Scotland). I have just finished reading my brother’s first book and found it a great and informative read. Well done Neil for turning an interesting factual story into print for all of us to share. Can hardly wait for your next book.”

My web searches also revealed that Neil Milkins had drummed up some local newspaper coverage for his Jack The Stripper theories. For example, the Hounslow Chronicle ran the following under the headline “Author uncovers new suspect in sixties murder mystery” on 26 August 2008:

“While the hedonists of the King’s Road were preoccupied with the swinging sixties, a grim orgy of killing was taking place just a few kilometres to the west.

“A serial killer obsessed with prostitutes murdered six, possibly eight, young women between 1964 and 1965, dumping their naked and mutilated bodies on the banks of the River Thames. His heinous acts earned him the moniker Jack the Stripper – but he was never caught.

“Now the dormant investigation has been given a boost after the name of a notorious Welsh double-child murderer was put in the frame for the killings.

“Harold Jones was aged 15 when he was convicted of killing two girls, aged eight and 11, in Abertillery, Wales. He served 20 years for his crime and was released in 1941 and moved to Fulham.

“We know he was living in Hestercombe Avenue, Fulham, as Harry Stevens until 1962, said author Neil Milkins, who conducted research into Jones’ movements for his book Every Mother’s Nightmare.

“The next record is from 1965 when he is living in Aldensley Road, Hammersmith, as Harry Jones. But his whereabouts during the years of the killings is unknown. I don’t know that he was involved in the murders, but it is certain a psychopath with the capability of committing callous crimes and covering them up was around the area.

“Mr Milkins examined Jones’ psychologist and prison reports at the National Archives Centre, in Kew, before handing his suspicions over to Scotland Yards murder review team.

“But Neil insists: The coincidence of Harold Jones being there just jumped out at me and I’m hoping people come forward with more information on him where he worked, who he associated with and the kind of person he was. I want to find out where he was between 1962-65, the answer to that may answer a whole lot of other questions.

“Harold Jones died in Hammersmith in 1971, his death certificate names him as Harold Jones, otherwise Harry Stevens.”

Moving on from this newspaper report, I happen to know that Milkins is an Irish name, whereas Malkin is an English name, and these two surnames have quite distinct origins. Nonetheless, some people might be struck by the similarity between Neil Milkins’ surname and the name Malkin, and then read something into the fact that malkin was a slang term for a lewd woman in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. For an example of the word malkin being used in this fashion we might turn to Father Hubburd’s Tales by Thomas Middleton: “and none can justly except me but some riotous vomiting Kit or some gentleman-swallowing Malkin.” (Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2007, page 166; the tale we’re dealing with was first published in 1604). A kit is, of course, a loose woman… but the phrase ‘some gentleman-swallowing Malkin’ is the one that really gets me going, since it might be taken to mean a prostitute doing ‘French’ (i.e. performing oral sex, giving head, providing a blow job etc.). It is thought Jack The Stripper killed his victims by suffocating them with his manhood as they gave him oral sex…

A lot can be (mis)read into the fact that Neil Milkins’ Irish surname sounds similar to the unrelated English name Malkin. Likewise it may appear curious that a Welsh double-murderer seems to have been living in west London when the Jack The Stripper murders took place, but given the size of the population in the area at the time it is unlikely he is the only psychopath who might be put in the frame for the killings on the basis of past record. I haven’t seen anything that convincingly links Harold Jones to these unsolved crimes. And for me the victims are still of greater interest than the killer… To finish, f you want an example of a contemporary Malkin whose reputation is considerably lower than that of a Whitefriars punk, then right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin fits the bill….

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!