Bella Union Week :: Sleeping States Book Club!

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In a Country and a culture that seems to be obsessed with throw away acts and instant cash-ins, a band who have taken time to write and record an album feels like a rarity. Linked to this is that fact that Markland seems unperturbed by quoting WG Sebald in the PR for Sleeping States‘ debut album: they are no ordinary band. As part of our Bella Union week, we got Markland Starkie, the man behind Sleeping States, to discuss some of the more literary influences on his music and recommend us some reading matter.

“The Stars My Destination” by Alfred Bester
My addiction to science fiction began in my early twenties, reading ‘cross-over’ novels from Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon and then on to Philip K Dick before slipping into an SF abyss of thought-provoking alternate histories, imaginative future socio-political models and awesome lazers. It has waxed and waned since then but I still devote a large portion of my reading to the genre. One of the hill of novels I’ve read in this genre that has stayed with me years after reading is Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination. People think that cyberpunk started in the ’80s with William Gibson, but people are wrong. It started in the ’50s with Alfred Bester. Specifically with The Stars My Destination, his third novel, although his first novel, The Demolished Man, also show signs of it (his second novel, Who He?, which I haven’t read, wasn’t science fiction). The noir-ish, hyper-urban landscapes of all flashing lights and super technologies that defined the cyberpunk movement are there, as is the page-turner action plotline and loner-against-the-world antihero. But all this cyberpunk stuff is an aside really, as it’s actually just a solid and hugely inventive piece of fiction in its own right.

Set in a future where people have learned the ability to teleport themselves anywhere except through outer space, The Stars My Destination (which was originally published in the UK under the name Tiger! Tiger!) focuses on Gully Foyle, a lazy, directionless regular Joe who finds himself stranded on his spacecraft after an accident kills the rest of the crew. Abandoned by a nearby ship that passes close enough to investigate the wreck but instead continues on, Foyle (eventually rescued) is consumed by a desire for vengeance against the people responsible for the ship that left him to die. The remainder of the novel sees him act on his desires, uncovering layers of political corruption and capitalist greed in his quest for revenge; his quest made all the more difficult after his eventual saviours (a tribe of lost scientists living on a nearby asteroid) tattoo his face with tiger-like patterns while he’s asleep, effectively removing the anonymity he needs to continue his pursuit.

A major criticism of science fiction is that, while imaginations do indeed run wild throughout the genre, the actual writing is fairly laughable. And… yes I have to admit I’ve subjected myself to actual crimes against English literature. But The Stars My Destination is excellently paced, with a complicated plot that never lags. Bester spent several years writing for DC Comics, and the influence of that experience is evident throughout the novel – in fact a while ago I found and bought a graphic novel adaptation of The Stars My Destination, adapted by Howard Chaykin, who went on to write the fantastic comic American Flagg!. Okay, it wasn’t the best adaptation ever, but the single paragraph that sits on the first page of Chaykin’s graphic version pretty much sums up my own feelings about the original book: “Simply put, it is a legend in its own time. Innovative in style and sophisticated in approach, it is one of the most incredible science fiction novels to have been published in the past thirty-five years.”

“Pop Gun War” by Farel Dalrymple
I got into comics late in life; I missed out on the teenage induction to DC and Marvel, and while they vaguely appealed, I was put off by the sheer number of titles, storylines and characters to follow. Also none of my friends were into them, so I had no guide to signpost any good starting points. And, well, as I watched enough bog standard superhero violence on TV, I didn’t really have an urge to read it as well. Later, at university, a friend introduced me to Urusei Yatsura, a Japanese comic about an alien princess, which I loved in part because of my fondness for Teen-C and Urusei Yatsura (the Scottish indierock band) and all that late 90s trashy twee stuff. And so at some point I found myself in a comic shop in Norwich, faced with walls of Batman and Buffy, trying to find more volumes of Urusei Yatsura, when I came across a comic cover with a single, painted image of a girl holding an electric guitar against a plain pink background with ‘Pop Gun War’ written in small letters above her. It was different enough from the regular sea of titles that my interest was piqued and I bought it, along with whatever volume of Urusei Yatsura I had found.

The contents of that issue (number three of what would turn out to be five instalments) didn’t really make sense; there was this little girl called Emily who plays in a band in Manhattan, and her brother Sinclair has angel wings growing out of his back to fly around the city with, and a sometimes-dwarf, sometimes-giant called Sunshine, whose friend is a floating goldfish, tries to prevent children being tempted away by a bald man with a decapitated head in his carpet bag, and it’s not really about any of these things anyway, maybe. I was hooked. After buying up issues one and two, it felt like an age before four and finally five made their way to my little East Anglian comic shop over several months (or maybe even a couple of years).

What little plotline there is in the other issues doesn’t expand much beyond what I’ve already described. Dalrymple’s mastery is really in the vignettes, the details: Sinclair carefully putting on a clip-on bow tie before going to bed, the sour faces of the unnamed vandals in issue four, the dream-like non sequiturs that run throughout the dialogue. Also, the art itself has a detailed quality that often looks more like a montage of painter’s sketches than a strip; which at the time I didn’t really think about too much (not having read many comics to compare it to), but over the years, as my appetite for comics has developed, these panels have become more striking and original to me.

Pop Gun War has since been published in trade form so is these days available in one handy volume, and Farel Dalrymple has since had a number of stories published in anthologies, as well as doing artwork for titles like DC’s Caper and Marvel’s Omega the Unknown, both of which I enjoyed muchly (the latter more than the former if we’re taking sides). And while I don’t consider myself anywhere near an expert on these things, I have since read and loved a lot more comics and graphic novels over the years; navigating my way through many other underground classics, from Maus to Optic Nerve, American Splendour to Love and Rockets, as well as the more mainstream (but no less wonderful) worlds of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, etc. (I still haven’t fully immersed myself in the rest of the Marvel and DC universes, but there’s time for that yet.) But it’s the recent rumours of a new Pop Gun War series apparently in the works that has got me excited all over again, I’m looking forward to continuing a series that helped to kick start my own love of comics.

“The Emigrants” by W.G. Sebald
I first knew of Sebald as a lecturer in German Literature at my university during the time I was studying there, though I didn’t read any of his novels until later, after I had graduated and moved to London. The Emigrants was the first novel I read of his, although I can’t now remember why or where I picked it up. I have a feeling a friend of mine (who also introduced me to the works of Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, the former of which I loved, the latter I’ve tried on a couple of occasions and struggled with each time) lent it to me, as I have vague memories of a conversation about Sebald and being told how wonderful his writing was. Anyway, while I’ve read and loved most of his novels (that is, read most and loved all of those), The Emigrants is the one that has stayed with me strongest, possibly for the simple fact that it was my first.

Like Sebald’s other novels, Emigrants reads like a collection of anecdotes and observations, threaded through with a memoir of a specific period in Sebald’s own life; in this case, Sebald focuses his writing on the lives of four people unconnected save for the fact that (like Sebald himself) they all grew up in Germany but eventually relocated to other countries. And beyond that… I have a terrible memory for books I’ve read – I even started reading a collection of short stories last week that I didn’t recognise sitting on my bookshelf, only to realise two-thirds of the way through the first story that I had actually read it two or three years ago. And I must admit, the details of The Emigrants have long fallen from my memory; of the four stories in the book, the only one I remember with any clarity is the story focusing on Sebald’s childhood school teacher. But for me the plot was never the essence of the book. In fact, those wanting a traditional plotline will get pretty bored with this, as it’s much more meandering than your standard setup-dilemma-resolve structure, and I admit I remember the book at first being more chore than joy. But there’s something rather comforting about Sebald’s style of writing, it’s colloquial and friendly, which makes the extended passages of description and reflection that fill the book easier to digest, and some of the ways he puts things are just so… good. And poignant and rich and nostalgic without being sickly and stuff. For me it also generated a personal reflection, which again was comforting; the memories of his home in Norfolk triggering memories of my own years spent there.

Sebald was killed in a car crash in 2001, while I was working on the student newspaper at university, and I remember it being a big deal in those academic and literary circles, but at the time I didn’t really empathise on any kind of personal level beyond a standard ‘oh, dead lecturer, that’s sad’ response. But years later, having read his writing, I realise better how tragic it was. I briefly thought about including a passage from another of his books, Rings of Saturn, a book which I ended up writing some sort of response to in a song of the same name, somewhere in the liner notes on the latest Sleeping States record as an epigraph. I decided against it as I didn’t want the record to become too ensconced in Sebaldism (and it is possibly just the slightest bit pretentious), so instead I will put it here:

“At earlier times, in the summer evenings during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days, I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air.”