Dopesick (2021), BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, produced by Danny Strong based on the book by Beth Macy, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001ys7b/dopesick?seriesId=m001ys7c

I already knew the story of the Sackler family, having read and reviewed Patrick Reeden Keefe (2021) Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Family.

Patrick Radden Keefe (2021) Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

Greed has consequences. This eight-episode dramatisation of the American dream turned nightmare for the little people is still being played out. An on-screen calendar flickers back and forward to show how corruption works and eats into people’s lives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(miniseries)

The first episode, ‘First Bottle’ flashes back to the beginning of the opioid—OxyContin—crisis. All the main players are brought in.

Michael Keaton as Dr. Samuel Finnix,

Peter Sarsgaard as Rick Mountcastle,

Michael Stuhlbarg as Richard Sackler,

Will Poulter as Billy Cutler,

John Hoogenakker as Randy Ramseyer,

Kaitlyn Dever as Betsy Mallum,

Rosario Dawson as Bridget Meyer,

The initial focus is on the Christ-like figure of Dr. Samuel Finnix. His practice in the mid-1990s, the West Virginia mining town of Finch Creek. His wife has died from cancer. He goes that extra mile to ensure he takes care of his patients. For example, before going home, he nips into an elderly patient’s home that has dementia and makes sure she’s taken her tablets. He knows all his patient’s names and is too good to be true.

His nemesis is up-and-coming swaggerer Billy Cutler. He’s selling this new wonder drug. An opioid with little or no side-effects. Finnix is sceptical. He knows about opioids and their addictive properties. It’s a mining town after all. He’s not going to get sold moonshine. But he’s no match for modern marketing techniques. Cutler tells him what he’s been told. There’s a less than one-percent chance of addiction because of all that sugar coating.

Poor  wee Betsy Maullin. Generations of her family have fed the mines with their bodies. Her mother and father are on first-person speaking terms with Jesus Christ. They pray before meals. The kind of family that would tend to vote for the moron’s moron Trump and praise the Lord for his inequities (I’ve gone off track here). Betsy has a terrible secret. She doesn’t like boys. She prefers girls. She wants to run away with a girl at work. But she gets hurt in a workplace accident. Her back is out. She’s out, but not in that way. If she can’t work she’ll have no job. She’ll have no dream to run away to.

The Christ-like figure of Dr. Finnix brought her into the world. He cannot let her suffer. He prescribes her this new wonder drug. And it is, at first, a wonder. She is painless. She can go back to work. We know the fallout. But well worth watching. No rich person was hurt in the making of this mini-series.      

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Angela Carter (1984 [2006] Nights at the Circus.

Angel Carter’s Nights at the Circus explodes on the page in the form of six-foot-two, eyes of blue, fourteen stone Fevvers, a feminist icon, who has wings and really can fly. Or so it seems, she’s an aerialiste that needs no high wire. The high-flying star of Colonel Kearney’s circus—a fool and his money are easily parted; never give a mug a break—courted by Royalty, The Prince of Wales, painted by Toulouse Lautrec. She’s the toast of Paris, of Berlin, of Europe. Her tour will take her from smoke-filled London of 1899 to the beginning of a new century, and to dazzle St Petersburg and onto the cold wastes of Siberia.

Magical Realism hadn’t been invented. American reporter Jack Walser finds himself trapped in her London dressing room after another wildly successful show. He plans to include her in a series of stories about the great humbugs of Europe, but the questions he asks isn’t the questions she answers. Her constant companion, Lizzie, is also an unsettling presence. He’s befuddled and intoxicated in more ways than he knows.

‘Lor’ love you sir! Fevvers sang out in a voice that clanged like dustbin lids. ‘As to my place of birth, why I first saw light of day in smoky old London, didn’t I! Not billed “the Cockney Venus”, for nothing sir, though they could just as well ‘ave called me “Helen of the High Wire”, due to the unusual circumstances in which I came ashore—for I never docked via what you might call normal channels, sir, oh, dear me, no, just like Helen of Troy was hatched.

Hatched out of a bloody great egg, while Bow Bells rang, as ever is.’    

Angela Carter’s short-story, Lizzie’s Tiger, begins in a quieter way. ‘When the circus came to town, and Lizzie saw the tiger, they were living on Ferry Street, in a very poor way’.

Nights at the Circus has tigers and Princess and a strongman rapist but ever stronger women, who tend to stick together. After all, Fevvers (a nickname derived from the feathers that sprouted on her back) was raised in a brothel and then adopted. Lizzie breastfed her, but she had a multitude of mothers who were well aware of what men were like in close quarters.

Lizzie had to step down from her harlotry and become a housekeeper because she asked too many awkward questions as Angela Carter does of her readers. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Have you a soul?’ ‘Can you love?’

With subcategories that tend to be didactic. Attitudes to ‘white slave trade?’; ‘rights and wrongs of women?; ‘universal suffrage?’; ‘the Irish question?’; ‘the Indian question?’; ‘republicanism?’; ‘syndicalism?’; ‘abolition of the House of Lords?’.

‘Nothing can come from nothing?’ And the question that Othello dare not ask adds a learned Shakespearian tone to what is in essence a love story as Walser goes incognito and joins the circus as a clown and travel to St Petersburg to find out the real story about Fevvers.

Essence is a theme. ‘Singularity,’ where gravity become strong enough to bend spacetime, where physics breaks down, but this is what Lizzie urges her not-so-little Fevvers to avoid, to keep her essence, to keep her singularity and not become the property of a man, any man, including the clown Walser. To keep her wings. To keep her singularity so that she can be who she is and fly and be herself.

An explosion of colour and depth, with an emphatic understanding of what it means to be poor. (The rich tend to be villains.) Well worth reading. I haven’t captured the essence. I’ll be reading more of Angela Carter’s works.

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Cheryl Strayed (2012) Wild: A Journey From Lost to Found.

I’d picked this book up and put it down several times. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild was nearer Lost than Found. I got it was some kind of travel journal. Cheryl Strayed had walked part of the Pacific Crest Trail that stretches from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border and goes through a lot of places I’ve little or no knowledge but might be vaguely interested in because of the naturalist John Muir (a fellow Scot and honorary American). That doesn’t sound interesting enough for a book.

But I was wrong. Strayed nails it, while walking most of the way and loosing six of her toenails in boots that are too small for her and carrying a backpack far too big for her called Monster.

She segues in and out of the life she had been living. Her mother had married her father when she was nineteen. He beat her and was a violent presence in their little lives, but they didn’t know that because they were children. Three children. How her mum found the courage to leave and find the cheapest apartments and worked as a waitress to live and somehow survive. They gained a stepfather along the way, Eddie, who broke his back. Then her mum got cancer and died, when she was 42.

Cheryl was 22. She was carrying a lot of grief on the trail. Grief for her marriage to a good man she’d fucked up, because she wasn’t mature enough yet to settle down. How her new man got her into smoking heroin. Then injecting. But she wasn’t a junkie. Not really. She was just trying to live. Trying new things. Joe went one way. She went another.

Her determination to walk the 1100 miles of the trail is dented on the first day. She can’t lift her pack. She needs to cross the ice and snow of the Sierra Madre. Where Humphrey Bogart cheated and got cheated by another fusty old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And she had to cross deserts and avoid stepping on rattlesnakes. But first she had to get the Monster on her back. She couldn’t do it. It was too heavy and cumbersome. Hiking hurt, even before it started to hurt.

‘I didn’t know how living outdoors and sleeping on the ground in a tent each night and walking through the wilderness all day almost every day had come to feel like my normal life,  but it had. It was the idea of not doing it that scared me.’

Strayed brings what it feels like to be alone in the world, but figuring out the costs of not being alone, of being someone she was not. She had to bury her mother, not in the ground but in remembering her as she was. Fully human. Fully alive. Read on.

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Deborah Levy (2016) Hot Milk

Sophie Papastargiadis, aged 25, and her mother, Rose, aged 64, are in Almeria, Southern Spain. A desert where immigrants work long hours in greenhouses at well over one-hundred degree Celsius heat and in humid conditions to produce tomatoes for stores in Europe. They are not tourist. They have rented a small beach-front property. Rose has re-mortgaged her London house to attend the Gomez clinic in the hope of a cure that has left her unable to walk. Sophie is her legs.

Sophie is the narrator. She has given up studying for an Phd in Anthropology to become her mother’s carer. She is making a study of her mother’s illness     

‘History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.’

Rose’s medical history is the art of clinging to belief and disbelief. Like Carl Sagan’s baloney test about the ‘fire breathing dragon in my garage’, her symptoms are tested by Dr Gomez, but for every physical test, Rose offers an alternative view of why it hasn’t worked. She clings to her illness. Her daughter’s part of the fallout.

A Greek tragedy, like her marriage was, but with hints of matricide and rebellion.  

Dr Gomez seems like a charlatan. A purveyor of false beliefs and miracle cures. Yet, he warns Sophie not to begin limping after her mother. He tells her mother’s symptoms are ‘spectral, like a ghost, they come and go. There are no physiological symptoms’.

Rose depends on Sophie. Sophie has become dependent on her mother. An unvirtuous circle in the hellish heat of the Spanish sun in which something has got to give. Read on.

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Ewan Lawrie (2024) Bronte’s Inferno.

Ewan Lawrie (2024) Bronte’s Inferno.

Writers create versions of themselves on the page. Ewan Lawrie is a better version of myself on ABCtales. I read Bronte’s Inferno in one go. I couldn’t decide whether Bronte’s Inferno with a veiled reference to the Bronte sisters and the mystical worlds they created with their brother was also a satirical play on the great English novel. Or a pastiche of the great Russian and Soviet writer, who was actually from Ukraine, Mikhail Bulgakov and his satirical take on 1930s Stalinism, with a bit of help from the devil. Certainly the devil is here, Editor-in-Chief, offering the narrator a contract many of us writers would sign, sight unseen, promising fifteen seconds of fame (it used to be 15 minutes, but post Andy Warhol has since been scaled back). We also have the overly familiar black cat with an unwholesome liking for hard booze. Charon, ferryman of the underworld, provides a Rolls Royce and later a more inauspicious car to take our narrator to sign the contract which will end his life as he knows it. Charon is a woman, a mishmash of Hella the witch and Suzi Quatro who can pick up a knucklehead with one hand and show him ‘devil great drive’, especially in a shitty London pub.  

Ewan Lawrie’s Gibbous House trilogies are perhaps his best-known works, despite largely falling off the end of the world of publishing and ignored. A feeling many of us know too well. The plotting of the Master and Margarita injects a bit of whimsy, a bit of magic into Bronte’s Inferno. Not the Harry Potter kind, but perhaps more E. L. Doctorow’s dictum: ‘Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go’.  

The parallels are legion. Master (as in Margarita) is an unknown Ukrainian writer. His novel about another writer, Pontius Pilate. His mea culpa about his limited understanding and meetings with Jesus Christ isn’t panned, directly. Worse, his manuscript is rejected, largely sight unseen. He is locked up in the loony bin. The best place for any writers that has a messianic complex and believes they can make a living from writing.

The world-weary narrator of Bronte’s Inferno feeds on the same reality and displacement. Locked in a life, before his house burns down of a familiar routine of nothingness. To paraphrase, Victor Hugo, ‘Worlds trapped in a person’ who is of no interest to others. He finds enough energy to castigate his readers for failing to have noticed Moffatt’s triple murders and identity theft on the wrong side of the Atlantic in a place I once visited. Pay attention, the narrator of Bronte’s Inferno reminds readers, like a sharp-beaked teacher.  

  Devils remain who they are, no matter the dishonourific titles of Editor-in-Chief, or the appearance of an uncertain humanity. Woland magics a grand ball in Moscow in which the living meet with the dead. Writing confronts questions of identity, especially when ghost-writing celebrity non-fiction. The Editor-in-Chief has the final say. What way would you go? Read on. Write on.

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Muriel Spark (1992 [2009]) Curriculum Vitae.

If you’re like me, you’ll associate Muriel Spark with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I don’t think I’ve read the book. I’ve seen two television versions. Miss Jean Brodie really is a gift to any actress with our Dames playing the lead roles. Muriel Spark reminds us teachers in the James Gillespie’s Girls’ School in 1930s Edinburgh were also actors that had to instruct their audience: ‘the creme de la creme’. Not just by teaching, but charismatically added that certain something that fuelled youthful imagination. Miss Jean Brodie, or real life Miss Christina Kay, did just that. The irony here was the fascist leaning, Mussolini loving, Miss Brodie, who worshipped at the altar of the leader who made the trains run on time, would have seen Muriel Spark whipped off to the death camps. Muriel Spark (nee) Muriel Camberg, her brother Philip and her father, Bernard, were Jewish. Many people who denounced others were spared, so if her mother, a woman who was Christian enough, had done the same, she might have been spared such malign fictions (which have become reborn).

Muriel Spark made that long journey to becoming a Roman Catholic. This is in the last third of the book. By this time, the award-winning poet had married a man who was unhinged, jealous and insane. Moved to Southern Rhodesia. An apartheid regime based on the South African model. She tells the story of a man who shot and killed a ‘pickaninny’ boy because he’d looked at his wife breastfeeding. And of a settler, who killed a black cyclist, drove over him, because he wouldn’t give way on the narrow strip of tarmac. Among the group of white wives, this was considered acceptable behaviour in polite society. No surprise that Hitler admired the British Empire’s ability to subjugate such a large group with so few men. She contacted blood poisoning and with no penicillin, it was touch and go whether she’d live. Her husband’s insanity meant she knew she’d have to get home with her son, even though there was a war on.

She settled her son in Edinburgh and went to work in London for MI6. They helped fabricate false accounts of the German war effort. Her middle-class background meant that she found accommodating, but she was also writing poetry and got jobs with some literary magazines.

It gets boring here. A settling of accounts of who said what, which for the general reader (me) is time wasted. We know, of course, Muriel Spark would become a literary giant. She won an Observer short-story writing competition. That gave her access to publishers and commissions for books as yet unwritten and articles published in literary magazines.

Her debut novel was largely, write-what-you know, based on her experience of taking Dexedrine (amphetamines) which kept her appetite down. During 1951-52 rationing was still in place. Skipped meals the norm for many mothers so their children could benefit.  

‘I didn’t feel like a novelist,’ she wrote. The Comforters, published in 1957 was also based on her hallucinatory experiences. She compares it to the dialogue Job had in The Book of Job with his Comforters.

By coincidence, Evelyn Waugh also wrote a book the same year about his reaction to different pills which mirrored Spark’s. His endorsement helped legitimise her book. And more important, by association, it got reviews in the right kind of papers. Spark’s trajectory was upwards. But she admitted often debut novels (a testing ground for publishers) were often followed by literary flops. Not in her case, of course. She had plans to write a second part of her biography, which would cover her more successful years. I’m not sure if she wrote it. I’ll give it a miss. Read on.   

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Sebastian Barry (2009) The Secret Scripture.

You should never step into the book you’ve read before (or something like that). Sebastian Barry is a terrific writer. This book won the Costa Book of the Year 2008. The Secret Scripture is in many ways the story of Ireland after the Famine, with a centurion Roseanne McNulty providing the handwritten shape of her life played out against the Civil War years in Ireland and the world wars that also came to Sligo.

Beginnings: Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself (Patient, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital 1957—)

Roseanne’s testimony of herself is a narrative story of her girlhood and young adult life before she was incarcerated in Sligo’s Lunatic Asylum. The question of why she is there is implicit in her writing. But there is another narrative interbody with it. This comes from the psychiatrist who oversees her care, Dr Grene. The old hospital is closing. He is nearing retirement. In trying to decide about where Rosanne should go, the rights and wrongs of what has been done to her, he also has to map out the shape of his faltering marriage and what to do with his own life. One lies on and relies on the other. Judgement is dependent on knowing what you know and what you don’t know.

‘…it wasn’t so much whether she’d written the truth about herself or told the truth, or believed what she wrote or said was true, or even whether they were true things in themselves. The important thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable, living and complete…from a psychiatric point of view I had totally failed to ‘help’ her to, to prise open the locked lids of the past…I preferred Roseann’s untruth to Fr Gaunt’s truth, because the former radiated health.’

Father Gaunt haunts Roseanne’s life as priests haunted Ireland. Roseanne was immediately suspect for being female. For priests such as Father Gaunt, even the Virgin Mary would have been suspect unless the Lord Jesus vouched for her. Roseanne was also suspect because she was extraordinarily beautiful. The kind of beauty that led men to temptation. Father Gaunt’s solution to marry a sixteen-year-old girl to a widower three times her age, had the merit of taking her out of circulation. And since she was Protestant destined for Hell, making her a follower not only of her husband, but the one true church and saving her soul.

Roseanne proved to be not as pliable material as Father Gaunt hoped. Her extraordinary story is not of failure, but of high spirits. A different kind of beauty. I can never remember what I wrote the last time, so I’ll reiterate it here, the ending was too chocolate-book for my liking. But this is a great story. Well worth the reading or re-reading. Read on.

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Beastie and The Psychic Fairy Queen.

I’d an online meeting yesterday with The Psychic Fairy Queen, Jan Murphy. We share the same publishers. I suppose in a world in which there are synchronicities, Spellbound would publish The Psychic Fairy Queen. I’m just the smelly mate that tagged alone by coincidence, even though there is no such thing as coincidences. If by coincidence you’re reading this then you’ve probably read my book Beastie.

That’s a gently nudge. Yes, I’ve read a little about nudge theory too. I’d read The Psychic Fairy Queen when it was first published on 19th December 2024. My book Beastie hit the shelves almost a month later (and if you’ve forgotten to leave a review, I won’t mention nudging anymore and will show up at your doorstep).

Jan and I or Jack and Jan, which has a nice ring to it, were talking about marketing. Before we got down to book business, I did what everybody else does—and I apologised, because I just had to do it, like a kid asking for a sweetie—I asked her to read me. Tell me something fabulous. Enlighten me with something that I didn’t even know. Tell me something that would have Jesus turning to God the Father and saying, ‘I didnae know that either. Where’s the Holy Ghost when we need him and I’ll ask him?’

She did tell me something fabulous. Something that will change your life. But I can only share it if you offer up—in my writer friend Sooz’s language, proof of purchase and an a Amazon review.

Jan had the same symbol, sacred geometry that is on the cover of her book, hanging on her wall behind her head. I could describe it, but it would be easier if you haven’t already bought her book to do so.

We both faced the same problem. A common problem for booksellers, worldwide. The Weathergirls got it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5aZJBLAu1E

For the Weathergirls the street was the place to go. Instead of men, it’s raining books. Every five seconds a book is published by Amazon. In Scandinavian countries such as Norway, every second person has published at least one book. Those unpublished are regarded as illiterate or worse, English or American. This was before COVID, when they had more time and even more books were published, and just after the election of the moron’s moron Trump, for the first and last time, so Scandinavian attitudes may have hardened since then.

Jan did chastise me a bit for not fully believing that my book would get taken up into the ether and land the coveted Number one, New York Times’ Bestseller List. In her world, if you don’t believe, you don’t get. In my world, our parallel worlds, you don’t get, and you get kicked for not getting. But I’m always happy to split the difference. I’ll kick anybody to sell another book.

What Jan has done is pay for advertising on Amazon for her book. Algorithms rule the world. That is one way in which she can get bounce on her local sales (which have been good). What it means is paying homage, economic rent, to the handful of richest men in the world.

I, of course, would do the same. It would allow me to tell the story of how Jeff Bezos once followed me on Twitter. How I’d both Hillary and Bill Clinton in my feed. Before I was found out as a charlatan and not even a billionaire. Of course, I was unTwittered (that was before it was the mighty falling and failing into X).

Jan had tens of thousands of likes and hits on her book in India. India is the most populous region in the world. A Hindu culture. She might well be onto something here. But neither of us were sure how that translated into sales.

I’m pretty unfussed about the graph on my Amazon page when it jerks up and down like the Dow Jones Index, which, in general terms, means I’ve sold a book, or perhaps two. I’m looking for trends. When it starts plummeting usually, it’s the death star.

I know also that TikTok (which is for those much younger than Jan or me) can still nudge book sales in the way Twitter used to. I joined TikTok yesterday and watched all the videos and listened to the bumf, so I know how #BookTok works. I’ll start posting and mess about and see if it influences sales.

I’ll get back to Jan and ask her how Amazon is working for her book. If it works for her, I’ll jump in and start giving one of the richest men in the world economic rent. Nothing comes from nothing, Shakespeare, King Lear and all those crazy Trumpian right-wingers keep reminding us.

If #BookTok works for me, I’ll show her how to do it. Invite her to jump right in. We’re collaborators on a small planet that keeps spinning and will continue doing so, even when we step off it. I’ve got another couple of novel-sized stories I should be working on. One I should be starting. Marketing is such a joyless trudge. We’re not looking for recognition, just movement in the right direction. We’ve split the world in half. She gets Amazon. I get the Chinese whispers of TikTok. We’ve brought two worlds together. Game on. Read on.

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Kerry Hudson (2024) Newborn Running away, Breaking from the past, Building a new family.

Kerry Hudson makes the personal universal. She’s forty and having a baby in a maternity hospital in Prague, while the country, indeed the world has shut down due to the COVID-19 virus. She has a section and a wee boy who is perfect in every way. Her partner, Peter is waiting for her and they take their baby back to their rented apartment in the city centre. End of story.

That’s the newborn part. Kerry Hudson doesn’t usually do happy endings. Which I appreciate. Nothing spoils my day more than some middle-class turnip wandering off and living a Mills and Boon, happy-ever-after ending.

There’s also the sudden Russian invasion of Ukraine. And a Czech response that shames Britain.  Kerry also offers her home to a refugee. Well, refugees, if you include a cat and dog.   

She was worried that although she’s mastered the C-section shuffle, the Slovak language remains beyond her. Baby Sammy and her are healthy enough candidates for early discharge, but she’ll accidentally ‘fuck it all up’.  

Despite being an award-winning writer, her carefully constructed world will unravel. All the carefully propped up ladders in her life will give way. She’ll be found out. Her fall will be unbroken. There will be no more Little House on the Prairie kind of life, or move inside the bright primary colours of Sesame Street, she watched on the telly as a kid. Reality will be what she knew and come to expect. She is reminded of this by a well-wishing fan and acquaintance from her early life in Torry, Aberdeen. (I’ve been to a few of the pubs near the Harbour).

She’s in her rented flat, holding a baby that gives her life purpose and joy, holding photos from her past. Her mother was beautiful, but not a mother. She’d leave Kerry as a package behind any door with whoever was available for days at a time. Her father was double her mum’s age, but not a father. An alcoholic, needy soul, with mental-health issues.

Philip Larkin nails it in This Be the Verse:

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,

Your parents they fuck you up,

“They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.”

Kerry Hudson’s personality, her personal reality of rape, assault and abuse, are captured in those photos. And in a story her older cousin reminds her, when like so many other working-class babies, her mother was cleaning her in the kitchen sink.

‘Your mum was washing you in the sink while talking. You started crying, maybe with getting soap in your eyes. She issued a parade ground-type        BE QUIET! And you stopped crying. I was struck by your expression. I thought – This little child is AWARE.’

This reminds me of the orphaned children of Romania after the execution of the Ceaușescus. Wee babies who didn’t bother crying. Self-aware enough to know if they cried nobody would come to comfort them.

Kerry Hudson would not let her own fucked-up past fuck up Sammy’s future. Post-natal depression, the baby blues, sleeps deprivation. A potent enough cocktail to destroy any relationship. Peter was in the firing line. Kerry was in the firing line too. Too exhausted to care. We know where this is going…Shit a happy ending of sorts. At least it’s not Byres-fucking-Road. Read on.

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Pre-order on Amazon, Bronte’s Inferno by Ewan Lawrie

Reading is what I do. Writing, not so much. But for most folk, that’s already too much. There’s a book in everyone. They’ve got one and they’re sticking with it. So I’m in a minority. I’ve also been thinking about class. I should probably use a capital C here, Class. I was reading yesterday that less than twenty-percent of youngsters (if you’re on Facebook sorry, you’re not young) didn’t know what a ‘scab’ was. I’m the kinda guy that laughs at my own jokes, but that’s no joke.

In my head, the book about how we lost the propaganda war would so obviously have a chapter, Coal (hint, it powered the industrial revolution).I took it for granted people would know what I was talking about. Scabs wasn’t something on your knee, they were much lower than that. G for Grenfell where class and race meet in North Kensington another entry point.

The Queen (old Lizzie) gets a walk-on part. I get a walk-on part too as a Scottish Republican ‘shite’ talker. Not in history. I’m already there. Playing the back of Dr Finlay’s head as he drove away (but I can’t remember where to). And a bit-part as someone yakking in the background as Mark McManus’s Taggart. No idea what I said, but the other extra wasn’t interested either. It was £80 for hanging about, which was good money then. A lunch wagon that offered the whole gamut of gamuts. It served everything but booze. Free tastes better than salted. Like Klondike for most writers, or a life’s earnings for an afternoon’s work. Either way, we’d never had it so good. So here I was a footnote in Ewan Lawrie’s trilogy Gibbous House, At The Back of the North Wind, which has nothing to do with pub’s opening hours but does have a Foreword (do books need Forewords in the same way that in the old days the tendency was to read the Daily Record backwards, from the Sports to the so-called news stories)?

Bronte’s Inferno, a manuscript, and footnote to the history of Moffatt’s transatlantic  wanderings. Being a footnote isn’t a full-time job, in the way that being a writer is, but the pay is much the same. I wasn’t thinking of Moffat directly, but indirectly when thinking about class. Gothic encounters of the Bronte variety (like Gibbous House) need a big house, a madwoman in the attic is always a handy appliance, a ghostly encounter and symbolic fire followed by a real blaze. Hints of Dante. Can’t remember much about it, but in translation there’s a special circle of hellbound lovers of Trump, and his little Trumpian neophytes, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. The unctuous simpletons that Moffat would have dealt with and in doing so, would put on their finest regalia and become the characters he dispatches. The moron’s moron Trump is too stupid and psychopathically inclined to be anything other than fictional. Farage too unctuous to be little more than a Dickensian stereotype. But Boris Johnson does leave you with a lot of possibilities. Boris Johnson would be the perfect man to play Moffat. He has a little intelligence, no morals to hinder him and he’s a people pleaser, but only to a certain point where he can take, take, take what he thinks is his unlimited worth.

As a footnote of footnoted worthies, the fictional, ‘Jim O’Connell’ in Bronte’s Inferno I’m sure I’d get on fine with the fictional Moffat and footnote in history, Boris Johnson, in the same way I got on fine with the fictional Larry Avarice and Ewan Ruined. I wouldn’t get on with the fictional moron’s moron or Farage. I’d encourage Moffat to deal with them pronto. Read on and pre-order for less than the price of a pint of Guiness. Meet me not in the flesh.

Notes

• Marie Catherine Laveau was born on September 10, 1801, in New Orleans, Louisiana, when the city was still under Spanish colonial administration.
  • Her mother, Marguerite D’Arcantel, was a free woman of color with a rich heritage of African, European, and Native American ancestry.
  • The identity of her father remains uncertain due to inconsistent spellings in historical records. Some believe it could be Charles Laveau, the son of a white Louisiana creole and politician, while others suggest a free man of color named Charles Laveaux.
  • In 1819, Marie married Jacques Paris, a Quadroon free man of color who had fled from the Haitian Revolution. They had two daughters, Félicité and Angèle.
  • After Jacques Paris’s death, Marie entered a domestic partnership with Christophe Dominick Duminy de Glapion, a nobleman of French descent. 15 kids or more?
• Voodoo Queen and Spiritual Practitioner:
  • Marie Laveau gained fame as a Voodoo priestess, herbalist, and midwife.
  • Her powers were legendary:
    • Healing the sick: She was known for her ability to cure ailments.
    • Altruism: Marie extended charitable gifts to the poor.
    • Spiritual rites: She oversaw rituals and ceremonies, blending elements of Voodoo, Native American practices, and traditional Roman Catholicism.
  • Legacy and Mystery:
  • Marie Laveau’s name is synonymous with New Orleans Voodoo. Her grave at Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1 remains a popular pilgrimage site.

Her daughter, Marie Laveau II, followed in her footsteps, practicing rootwork, conjure, and various spiritual traditions.

Angel Heart.

1. Jane Eyre’s Journey:
   1. Jane Eyre, the novel’s protagonist, embarks on her own infernal journey—a quest for identity, love, and self-discovery.
   1. Her trials mirror Dante’s descent into the depths of hell.
2. Gothic Elements:
   1. Both Jane Eyre and Dante’s Inferno share Gothic elements:
      1. Gibbous House.
      1. Haunting secrets.
      1. Dark passions and murder.
3. Love and Redemption:
   1. Jane’s love for Mr. Rochester mirrors Dante’s devotion to Beatrice.
   1. Redemption through love.
4. Orphaned Heroines:
   1. Miss Pardoner, Jane Eyre and Dante’s Beatrice both grapple with loss and orphanhood.
   1. Resilience feeds the fire.
5. Supernatural Encounters:
   1. Jane’s visions (like ghostly laughter and faraway voices) echo Dante’s encounters with spirits.
   1. Both traverse realms beyond the mundane.
6. Symbolic Fire:
   1. Bertha Mason, locked in the attic, embodies fire and madness.
   1. Dante’s hellfire finds resonance in the Tory Party (hopefully).
7. Moral Dilemmas:
   1. Jane’s choices—to marry Rochester despite his secrets, her secrets and him being a burnt out, blind Tory—mirror Dante’s ethical dilemmas.
   1. Both confront complex moral landscapes.Transcendence and Redemption:Jane’s spiritual awakening parallels Dante’s ascent toward light.

Redemption awaits beyond suffering.

“Brontë’s Inferno” on Amazon now.