Book-Jumping - The Man-Metal Mechanoid World of Moderan by David R. Bunch / Paolozzi's Sculptures / Dutch Schultz, William Burroughs & Paul Sann / Collage: Tempted To Kill

 

I'm currently bouncing back and forth in time and place between a bunch of books (and one by Bunch), from Moderan to Kill The Dutchman! to Riddley Walker  - the first and last being contrasting visions of the future, one a plastic-wrapped planet populated by bio-mechanical 'humans', the other a primitive, ritualistic world after science. Both Bunch (Moderan) and Hoban (Riddley Walker) exploit the potential of language as a tool to describe imaginary worlds. 

As with Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and William Burroughs' cut-up 'novels', the brave new words and scrambled syntax used by Bunch and Hoban brilliantly break up common language to leave most formal sci-fi way behind. As you know, the most interesting futures in fiction were created by those who broke the genre barrier.

Whilst reading Moderan I was also revisiting one of my Eduardo Paolozzi books and his sculptures struck me as representations of Bunch's metal-machine men, despite being made decades earlier. OK, they're bronze, not metal, but despite making aluminium sculptures too (see last picture) it's the bronze mutations which seemed to be more Moderan-like since they too retain something human about them, albeit vague and suggestive.

Art and Fiction similarities aside, there's also a connection between Kill The Dutchman! and Burroughs, of course. The latter created The Last Words of Dutch Schultz as a screenplay to a film that was never made. Schultz's last words from a hospital bed were spoken whilst delirious from fever and fatally wounded (lead poisoning); being gibberish, they appealed to Burroughs, who used them as a springboard for his own interpretation. Paul Sann's telling of Shultz's life is so authentically Noo Yawk 30s reporter style you can small the cigar smoke and see the pages through his green visor as he hammers the typewriter keys. The tone is comic, hardboiled, and the book is highly recommended for a flavour of how gangster life and death was described at the time (although it was written circa 1970).

Here's a collage I made a few years ago using an image from the era described by Sann. I called it Tempted To Kill.

RTomens, 2019