Vispo: Too Bookish? / 70s Teenage Rampage! / We're all crazy now! (full mental helmet) /Madness

 

Too Bookish?, RTomens, 2026

We're all crazy now? More on that later...

Can you be too bookish? I dunno. I found the quote 'too bookish, too literary' in a book (ha-ha!) about Ezra Pound. I haven't read the book; not more than a few lines. It's one of those books...you know, so cheap you can't resist and you really think you'll get something out of it - I'm not even that interested in Ezra Pound other than his current (?) outsider status, cancellation by the Common Sense police? Well, he did propagandise for the Italian fascist party, didn't he? Yes, he did. he was also a key figure in...the...modernist movement? Was he? 

I wasn't a bookish child but I loved books. Tom Swift...Stig of the Dump...The Borrowers...I borrowed them all from the library in my village. Actually, I was given the Tom Swift book as a prize for English at school and, you know what? I don't even think I have it anymore, which I really regret because it was one of the few actual documents testifying that I could achieve something at school.

School's out! Alice Cooper playing on the 8-track cassette player in my friend's older brother's Volkswagen. He drove us around in that. One day we came across a gang from another village and drove past, close to the kerb, with the passenger side door open. I can't remember if we hit anyone. Ah the good ol' days of mindless violence! 

1972. Discos. Birds. Clothes. Music. Punch-ups (not me). What more could anyone want from their early teenage years? I wasn't very bookish then. One of my abiding memories of books at secondary school is of the Great Book Battle that took place in the annex on the fourth floor before the History teacher came in. I don't know how it started, but when it was at it's peak the fluttering pages as their covers became wings was a site to behold. Some went out of the window. There were a few casualties from heavy hits by hardbacks. What fun!

'I wanna see everybody get your boots on - everybody, everywhere!'

Slade used to be skinheads, for five minutes when their manager suggested the jump on the bandwagon in the late-60s. But even after they'd gone full Glam they were still the band for ex-skinhead yobbos like us with our hair grown out (feather cut or just touching your collar) and baggies replacing Levis. Slade and Gary Glitter made the best foot-stomping gang anthems. It was us vs the greasers at the disco and we had the best tunes. They had Silver Machine by Hawkwind and Spirit In The Sky by Norman Greenbaum (the latter I now recognise as a classic, of course, but back then it was their music).

Fast forward 54 (!!!) years and I'm referencing Slade in an email to someone about the artwork I'm creating for a forthcoming William Burroughs event later this year (I'll keep you posted). 'We're all crazy now!' I quote Noddy Holder. Thankfully he's old enough to get the joke. In reference to what? Another joke I'd made earlier about not wanting to be driven crazy by constant reworkings of the art. 

I joked but...really...are we ALL crazy now? It's tempting to think so, largely because, courtesy of the internet, we're allowed access to the inner workings of maniacs all around the world. Not just maniacs, but nut jobs, political nut jobs...and those with 'mental health' issues (shucks, who ain't?). When online make sure you're wearing your (mental) crash helmet. It's best to actively work at avoiding falling into anyone's mentally disturbed 'rabbit hole'. Namely: don't follow them! Online lunacy is hard to avoid, I know. That person you befriended on Facebook out of the kindness of your heart is now filling your head with crap! Unfriend. 

A friend admitted recently that by backing away from politics I was probably doing the right thing. He's still trying to shake off the addiction that gripped a lot of us around 2020 in the lockdown days when we had nothing better to do (it seemed) but read/listen to Politics online. Thank god I got that out of my system, eventually. Nowadays I only read the headlines. That's enough to tell me what's going on. I'm not even tempted to watch footage of recent horrors in the UK. They used to call it 'car crash TV'. Today we all have endless channels of disturbing footage at the tap of a finger. What good does it do us? I'm not saying ignorance is bliss but it can be better for your mental health.