If he had any remaining sense Shug Hanlan should be making last-ditch efforts to complete his PhD at Glasgow University or persuading publishers to put out the follow-up to his 2000 novella and short story collection ‘Hi Bonnybrig and Other Greetings’. Instead, the old fool spends most of his time watching the Hallmark Channel (‘Dr. Quinn’), listening to Jah Stitch bootlegs (‘Scratch’), pouring over the local paper (‘Denny X’), and betting heavily on the greyhounds while under the influence of powerful narcotics (‘Drugz & Dugz’).
Hanlan is not the brutally honest and fearless writer normally associated with this site. Critics will note that nowhere during ‘Dr.Quinn’ does he mention the celestial creature revenge programme ‘Touched By An Angel’, claiming that it is too medieval for his tastes and citing his fear of heavenly bodies who choose to help people facing unseen crossroads in their lives especially ones that resemble Toni Morrison or the drummer in the Corrs after catastrophic cosmetic surgery.
More of his stuff can be found in magazines such as Rebel Inc, Northwords and Billy Liar and in the anthologies ‘Ahead of It's Time’ and ‘The Knuckle End’. Hanlan currently works in a sausage factory in the Tamfourhill area of Falkirk and performs on the local Intellectual's Tribute circuit under the moniker Naw Ah'm No Noam Chomsky.
Click image to read Alexander Laurence's interview with Sorrentino on the Write Stuff website; to read Sorrentino's obituary on the Guardian Unlimited website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.MARK LEYNER
Click image to read Alexander Laurence's interview with Leyner on the Write Stuff website; to visit Team Leyner: The Unofficial Mark Leyner Links Page, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.JAMES PURDY
Click image to visit the James Purdy Society website; for a profile of Purdy on the Wikipedia website, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.BANANARAMA
Click image to visit the official Bananarama website; to visit Team Leyner: for the Bananarama Info Site, click here or for related items on Amazon, click here.
I began to discern a distinct pattern to my pummelling when I received a severe booting beside a Banknock chip-shop, closely followed by a proper kicking in Camelon High Street, then a right leathering near Larbert Train station, all culminating in the time I got a really good doing at Denny Cross.
How good was my doing? I have a great aggregate of pains; my nerves are shot, I sustained a broken cheekbone, a punctured lung, swollen genitals and bruises all over my body. My spine might even be irreparably damaged. But I felt it was a really valuable experience.
The police asked me all sorts of ingenious questions about the doing. It
seems they wanted to locate those that did the doing in case they did anything like it again. I told them that my direct experience of my doing was really good. I said it felt “revelatory”, that the doers seemed “nice”, were “sweet-smelling”, and “gave off a soft glow”. The police said these descriptions would do no good in a court of law.
I’ve not been doing very much since I got my really good doing. The doctor has placed me on Invalidity Benefit and described my condition as “enervated” and noted that I am “near spiritual extinction”. I mostly sit around the house all day and only know it’s Thursday when the local paper gets delivered. I read about what other people are busy doing; graffiti clean-up squads in Carronshore, befriending schemes in Bonnybridge, digital photography classes in Dunipace and Challenge Enterprise weekends in Westquarter. It makes me cross to hear about them wasting their furious energies taking on the world when all they are all really doing, like me, is dying.
THE BOOKS ON DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN’S BEDSIDE TABLE
In my rough-hewn but comfortable log cabin I normally have 4 or more bedside books
going at any one time.
I hardly read any twentieth-century nautical poetry but ‘The Love Boat Book of Verse’, set amidst the cruise ships of the mid-1970s was, I found, strewn with a giddy,
quasi-erotic tension. The ship’s Boutique manager’s seductive and satisfying sonnets
which find him self-consciously wrestling with the ferociously complex predicament
of finding that his ex-fiancées (all three of them!) have stowed onboard during a trip
to the Caribbean were profoundly appealing.
The Yeoman Purser’s deliberately artless haiku:
Andy Warhol’s
Due onboard
In 15 minutes.
Is a modern classic.
(“Fifteen Minutes“)
‘Short Walks and Fragments’ by Jake and The Fatman was fabulously readable. The
intimate photographs of William Conrad in a Doughnut shop doing research for his
role as Jason Lochnivar “Fatman” McCabe alone are worth the price. An
extraordinary glimpse of Conrad’s trailer reveals with trenchant realism an inner
world not normally associated with a mismatched crime-fighting duo: briar pipes, a
box of Smokies, some glass knickknacks and a well-thumbed copy of ‘Gravity‘s
Rainbow’. However, the lack of a good editor is keenly felt.
A lesser team of odd-ball soldiers of fortune may have simply dwelt on their Vietnam
War experiences and later TV adventures but in the haunting and accomplished
anthology ‘The Parents that made us The A Team’, Smith, Baracus, Peck and Murdock
have fashioned something much more profound.
Col. John “Hannibal” Smith’s initially wistful evocation of his early love of
theatricality, and extended family outings when each child was initiated into the
mystery of disguise becomes a truly gripping read when he successfully impersonates
both Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho during a particularly tense moment of the Paris
peace talks.
Born into an extremely wealthy but borderline insane family, Capt. H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock sits at his mother’s knee and is instructed in the
occult, painting upon glass, saturation bombing missions and method acting.
Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck’s father is revealed as a strongman of unorthodox
opinions on soldiering, codes of conduct and chivalry, insisting that his son become
“the Green Beret’s most handsome nonentity”.
Long before he became a mohican-haired mechanic or appeared in any ‘Rocky’ movies, Sgt. Bosco “BA” Baracus travelled with his itinerant family through rural areas of Greater Virginia spreading a brand of militant black Methodism. Baracus seems fully aware that his quick temper and “Bad Attitude” stems from his favouring action and fiery preaching over rational argument.
Like other fellow famous medical men, Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, and, of
course, Quincy M.E., Dick Van Dyke’s brilliant collection of stories, inspired by the
scripts of ‘Diagnosis Murder’, offer cold, magisterial judgements while maintaining a
humane attention to the details of ordinary life.
There are so many minor characters one so wishes to read more about, such as the trio
of high-class pickpockets who contract a deadly disease from dipping the pocket of
an ailing mafia chief and later return as astral projections to guide the cops to a store
of drug money concealed in a collection of Quaker furniture. Or the junior members
of the Van Dyke family, all gifted actors and medical students, who perform a
Medicare version of ‘The Blair Witch Project’ in which they highlight the importance
of socialized health care for teens.
‘Little Hair Salon on the Prairie’ is a wry and deftly layered vision of a couple
struggling to cope with the random ride-by scalping of their only child. Even though
their marriage and private lives are spiralling out of control they continue to work at
improving their business. ‘Little Hair Salon on the Prairie’ may primarily be concerned
with loss and grief but it is also by far the best book written about the problems of
dealing with split ends during the Texas cattle war of 1883.
When folks ask me that age-old conundrum, bookmark or page-fold, I just smile and say I much prefer to use a lock of my long, luxuriant hair.
Most musical abuse of children goes unreported. Indeed we first became aware of the
serious and persistent nature of Leigh “Scratch” McMerry’s situation when a local
teacher alerted us to the fact that there was a 10 year-old in her Primary 6 class who
wore his hair in dreadlocks and attended school dressed in a poncho consisting of
partially melted gold CDs. He was proving to be a disruptive element in the
classroom, communicating only in an otherworldly Jamaican accent, calling one
overweight fellow pupil King Tubby and another academically gifted child, the Mad
Professor.
Scratch would interrupt reading lessons by loudly reciting doggerel, the alarming
lyrics of which, (“Me no bed wetter, I and I the wee Upsetter”) revealed how
seriously disturbed the child really was. It also came to our notice that Scratch was
missing afternoon classes in order to go begging in the town centre. On a number of
occasions he was found staggering around the Charlotte Dundas Court area of
Grangemouth, clearly distressed and disorientated, asking passers-by, - Got any spare
ganja on ye mister ? And - Gonnae gea me 10p tae get back tae Ethiopia?
Neighbours insist they made up to eight telephone calls to specialist services due to
concerns about Scratch’s musical tastes and his habit of staying up late deconstructing
bass rhythms. This included an instance when Social Workers were called out at two-
thirty in the morning when it appeared that an unsupervised group of children were
re-mixing The Congo’s Heart of The Congos in Scratch’s bedroom.
Scratch’s parents, Terry and Halle McMerry, both fact-checkers at ‘Brilliant Patter’,
Forth Valley’s premier What’s-On magazine, were unknown to Social Services even
though their actions and occupation should have been enough to place them on the
Hip Young Parents Register, a piece of legislation put in place locally to protect
children like Scratch from music and style obsessed adults.
A recently commissioned independent review has shown how dangerous non-
consensual listening to ‘Best Dressed Chicken in Town’ by Dr. Alimanto or a Trojan
box-set really is for the under twelve age group. The resultant traumatic stress leads to
difficulty sleeping without a nightly spliff, vivid nightmares about monsters of
Babylon, poor concentration and fearful, clingy, anxious behaviour around members
of the Drug Squad.
Musical maltreatment of children in the Falkirk area can be roughly divided into four
main categories: 1) Dub Reggae, 2) Free Jazz, 3) Krautrock and 4) Belle and
Sebastian and their offshoots. The Bainsford College of Psychiatrists are also
currently conducting research into whether a marriage of Yemenite chanting and
Hip-Hop can have a severe adverse effect on a child’s psychological development.
Evidence also reveals that musically abused children go on to be musically abusive
parents. Further studies show that of children subjected to LPs such as Can’s Tago
Mago in the 1970s, nearly half, 46%, were likely to subject their own children to
bootleg recordings of Sun Ra in the 1990s.
Falkirk Council hopes never to repeat the failures of the past, particularly the
unfortunate Skiffle abuse scare of the late 1950s when a group of infants were
discovered in a Camelon caravan site taking part in strange Skifflanic rituals,
involving washboards and broom handles, and were unable to communicate except by
using lyrics from Lonnie Donegan songs. It took Support Workers months of long-
term counselling to assure these children that worrying about chewing gum losing it’s
flavour on bedposts overnight should not disturb their normal sleep patterns and to
assure them that not all their old men were dustmen.
Our vision in establishing the Hip Young Parents Register and implementing other
integrated policies is to provide young people with a range of tailored services, such
as Neighbours Against Nick Cave and PJ Harvey and the creation of Girls and Boys
Allowed Pop Music Playgroups that enable them to lead emotionally and physically
secure and fulfilled lives. Only when we have the mechanisms firmly in place to
provide an alternative to alternative music and life-styles can we be sure that this
Department, and others like us, will never have another Scratch on its hands.
GILBERT SORRENTINO
MARK LEYNER
JAMES PURDY
BANANARAMA