Hank William's life was one long rabbit hole

Hank left us with music that still crackles with the torment that drove it.

Born in Butler County, Alabama in 1923 Hank arrived with Spina Bifida Occulta, a birth defect which affects the spine and can result in lifelong back pain. Such was Hank's lot.

Back then radio was king, Hank listened, got himself a guitar and looked for inspiration. Street performer Rufus 'Tee Tot' Payne was his muse, ('Tee Tot' beacuse his bottle usually held a mixture of tea and total booze, hence 'Tee-Tot') Tee Tot taught Hank the basics of guitar playing, chord progressions fret-work and such and Hank took it all in.

He added stories as lyrics and began playing on the street in Montgomery Alabama, often in front of the office of radio station WSFA (the initials stood for With the South's Finest Airport...I love that!)

WSFA producers heard him and invited him to play the occasional song live on-air. The audience loved it and demanded more of 'that singing kid'. Hank was given two 15 minutes slots a week on a salary. Was that the first view of the rabbit hole?

This local fame and the cash meant Hank could form his own band 'The Driftin' Cowboys' and drift they did across the adjoining states, playing bars, honky-tonks and anywhere else they were invited. Touring then had no tour bus, just a couple of jalopies with Hank often on the back seat, nursing his back pain with whatever bottle of booze came handy.

The rabbit hole grew bigger as war took hold. The rest of the band were enlisted but Hank fell off a bull at a rodeo in Texas and was medically deferred. His continual boozing lost him his radio show and he spent the rest of the war working in a shipyard and playing in bars.

Hank once again fell down the rabbit hole due to booze when it meant his being dropped from the 'Grand Old Opry', a TV show which, for others, was a step into stardom.

The rest of Hank's life was to him, a blur of booze and pills. To others it seemed a mystery how Hank could, time after time, turn gold into dust.

Hank died in 1952 on the back seat of  a Cadillac aged just twenty-nine

Thankfully the music survived, Youtube has Hank singing 'I Saw The Light ' and thankfully Mark Ribowsky has supplied the best memorial to Hank in this new and beautifully crafted biography.

Scribble down the ISBN 9781631491573 and take it your local bookshop, it's in stock at mine.

Another rabbit hole soon...

JG Ballard wrote rabbit holes..

I think it is safe to say that JG Ballard dug more literary rabbit holes than any other tweedy middle aged man living in London's definitively suburban Shepperton.

It is also probably safe to say that JG Ballard dug more literary rabbit holes than any other modern author...full stop.

It has been said that Ballard 'thought the unthinkable', the famous  response from a publishers reader having read the manuscript of 'Crash' was “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” 

Ballard took it as a compliment. 'Crash' was published and Ballard even curated an exhibition with the same name.

The site slashseconds gives the full details here slashseconds.org . 'Crash' still sells and is probably the deepest rabbit hole he dug. Read it and he holds your hand as you tumble down the hole together into a world where most people, however much they recoil and find it repulsive continue reading, if through parted fingers, anxious to get the end to then wonder...and think.

Ballard spent a fractured childhood in wartime Shanghai, which he described in 'Empire of the Sun'. He then arrived in post-war London which, to him was a strange, unworldly place. He tried medical school in Cambridge, then, in 1954, joined the RAF and served in Canada where he found American SF magazines. The writing rabbit hole for Ballard opened.

Back in the UK he slowly established himself as an SF writer, finding success with 'The Drowned World' in 1960. The sudden death of his wife in 1964 left him responsible for their three children. His writing became a warren of rabbit holes  and JG explored them to the end of his life.

The genius of Ballard is most fully explained in book form in an extensive and fascinating collection of interviews with JG collated by Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara in 'Extreme Metaphors'

Read these interviews and JG Ballard will shine a very bright light on the walls of all the rabbit holes he dug. For a copy of 'Extreme Metaphors' take this number to your local bookshop ISBN 9780007454860, as usual it's in stock at mine..

There are also many interviews on Youtube and the full Ballardian experience online is here at ballardian.com

Warning: Compulsive reading...don't expect an early night!

Another rabbit hole soon...

Yuri fell down a rabbit hole...

There are a lucky few who achieve something that can never be taken from them. Yuri Gagarin was one of those, he was, and always will be, the first man in space.

 Yet, having been to new heights, he went down a rabbit hole.

Born in a rural Soviet Union collective farm in 1934 to a carpenter/bricklayer father and milkmaid mother Yuri was always going places. Intelligent and possessed of a winning personality Yuri progressed through the educational system, became an air cadet and joined a flying club. First glimpse of the rabbit hole.

His aptitude as a pilot led him to be promoted to Senior Lieutenant and he was one of twenty pilots inducted into the search for the man who would be first into space. The selection course was tough and when anonymously asked who they thought should be 'the one' among them, seventeen voted for Yuri.

So Yuri it was who flew into space for one hour and forty-eight minutes on 21st April 1961 in a metal ball, a silent Soviet era video is here and celebrates how Yuri becomes the first man in space

On landing Yuri became  an instant hero both in the Soviet Union and worldwide, his engaging smile shone out from TV screens, newspapers and postage stamps.

 

 Fame for Yuri had the same effect it has had on many thrust into the limelight. The rabbit hole opened when the vodka bottles opened.

The Soviet authorities, conscious of his propaganda value,  forbade him from any further space flight in 1967 after the crash-landing of Soyuz 1, (for which Gagarin was back-up crew) and the death of its cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, a close friend of Gagarin.

After qualifying as a fighter pilot Gagarin died on  March 27th 1968 when a routine flight ended in disaster, killing both Yuri and his flight trainer Vladimir Seryogin.

The crash has been grist to the conspiracy-mill ever since.

In 'Starman', by Jamie Doran and Piers Bizony, Yuri Gagarin has a written testament as valuable as any of the many medals and awards that he has received over the decades and shows how even the man who flew higher than anybody else can fall down a rabbit hole.

As usual take the ISBN, 9781408815540, to your local bookshop, its in mine!

 Another rabibit hole soon.

Roger and Cathy fly down a very deep rabbit hole..

'Golden Age' is a term full of warmth and comfort so to see it in a book title next to the word 'hijacking' meant I had to read it and I'm glad I did because I found Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow, who fell down a very, very long rabbit hole in 1972.

When they met Roger was a disgruntled veteran of four tours in Vietnam where he had been seen as just another black 'grunt'. Cathy was working in a massage parlour.

Roger's anger found it's focus in the trial of radical Angela Davis, a plan formed in his head. Cathy was rootless and looking for fun.

The rabbit hole took shape.

Roger drew up a plan, they would hijack a plane, demand half a million dollars and the release of Davis. They would fly to Vietnam together then move to an idyllic life in Australia.

Mechanical reality got in the way, the plane they hi-jacked, as the pilot patiently explained, could not reach Vietnam.

Fate and asylum landed them in Algeria where they soon became the darlings of the Black Panthers in exile and icons for radical Europeans.

Algerian left wing President Houari Boumediene was intrigued by the pair and met them, took one look, decided they were fakers. They were forced to move to France where they were feted by the radical left, but it turned sour, big time. A rift developed. Roger returned to the US and narrowly escaped time in prison.

In his book Brendan Koerner holds our hands and takes us down the rabbit that was the golden age of hijacking.

It is a strange world, nobody from the hijackers to the airline companies to the FBI to the press saw straight so wildly spinning was the rabbit hole.

The spinning slows when Koerner relates meeting Roger Holder decades after the events took place. Now we have fisrt-hand perspective on a strange, strange time in American history.

And Cathy? After they moved to France she....disappeared.  The FBI would still like to say 'hi Cathy!'...

Brendan Koerner spins an engrossing tale which distils the US of the sixties and seventies in the book and talks about it here.. but for the full experience of this rabbit hole you need to read the book, as usual scribble down the ISBN 9780307886118 and take it your local bookshop, it's on the shelf in mine;)

Another rabbit hole soon..

Jim found a deep and dark rabbit hole to fall down...

  It has to be one the most confusing rabbit holes anybody has fallen down. How did a man who, in his young days, espoused Marxism and became a champion of the underdog and a supporter of Civil Rights in the USA of the 1960's become the leader of a cult which imploded into the mass suicide of 918 people in 1978?

The answer lay deep inside Jim. Born in poor circumstances in Crete, Indiana in 1931 throughout his childhood there was 'something' about Jim. He hung out with the local kids, but when play ended there was no going to  a friends house for supper, no sleep-overs at friends because Jim had no friends. The other kids were wary of Jim, he would conduct funerals for roadkill animals, sit on his own and read the Bible. Not the sort of kid you invited round.

This rejection gave Jim an empathy with the repressed in America, particularly African-Americans, he understood.

The rabbit hole began to form when, as an avowed communist, he was invited by a Methodist superintendent, to join the church. Jim saw the power the church had over people and, before long, had formed his own ministry to gain followers and further his beliefs. 'Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel' was born.

In the late 1960's Jim became an aggressive pursuer of civil rights, he aided the racial integration of restaurants, businesses, theatres, even a police department.

Jim grew inside, he could chase away the rejections of his childhood by freeing others from rejection.

The  'Peoples Temple' grew and grew, having at it's peak over 5000 members, and so did Jim's need to control it and everyone in it, Jim began to see himself as the 'Peoples Temple' incarnate.

He moved the base of the Temple from state to state, met with such as Walter Mondale and Rosalynn Carter, and received accolades from them. How dangerous this would become.

His early rejections led him not, as you would expect, to enjoy acceptance. Instead, paranoia mixed with his growing Messianic complex led him to reject such approval.

The Peoples Temple, as time passed, became a cult. Jim also rejected the Christian faith he had earlier espoused in favour of his earlier socialism....you can hear him here, full on Jim, the anger, the frustration, the references to his childhood and the growing paranoia, his rejection of the Bible and his own Messianism pour out of him in this audio of a Temple meeting,  Jim Jones preaches...

Eventually Jim moved the Temple to Guyana, where, he determined, the socialist utopia would come to be.

The result, as we know, was disaster.

Jeff Guinn explains how Jim came to find and then fall down a big rabbit hole that confused him as much as it enchanted others and led to the Jonestown endtime in this balanced, meticulously researched and calmly written book.

As usual scribble down the ISBN 9781476763828  and take it to your local bookshop, mine has it in stock;)

Another rabbit hole soon..

Lizzie finds a rabbit hole...

The 'cult of celebrity' and it's attendant inanity are familiar to all and often cited as a modern malaise.

The ancient Greeks are, by definition, anything but modern yet they had a Goddess of fame, her name was Pheme, the Roman version was Fama, see where this is going?

Both were Goddesses of rumour.

In the 'Aeneid' Virgil describes her as a 'swift, birdlike monster with as many eyes, lips, tongues, and ears as feathers, traveling on the ground but with her head in the clouds.'

Ovid in his 'Metamorphoses', describes Fama as living at the center of the world, where earth, sea, and sky meet. From there she can see and hear everything that goes on in the world. She lives in a house atop a tall peak, it has no doors but instead has a thousand windows.

If you found favour with her, notability followed. Fall foul of her and rumours would spread, she is often portrayed with her trumpet, blowing good or bad, depends on how she felt about you.

So, no more disapproving 'sucking-a-sour-lemon' faces please when you see the celeb mags by the checkout at the supermarket. The ancients were at it too.

Which brings me to the book to go down the rabbit hole with.

Pheme seems to have looked over the shoulder of Lizzie Siddal.

Lizzie was born into a working class London family in 1829, her upbringing was uneventful and by the age of 20 she was working as a milliners apprentice when the artist Walter Deverell met her and invited her to model for him. He was a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and introduced them to her.

The rabbit hole was being dug.

Through this introduction she met leading light of the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rosetti. An ill-starred relationship was born.

The rigid class constraints of the time led Rosetti to repeatedly promise to marry Lizzie and repeatedly he broke it off. She, in return used frequent bouts of ill-health to blackmail him to the altar before it was too late. The same ill-health also introduced Lizzie to laudanum, to which she became addicted.

A love/hate relationship ensued as Rossetti painted and drew Lizzie to the point of obsession. Their love for each other was never in doubt but it was as if they competed for who loved the other the most.

They finally arrived at the altar in 1860. Sadness and the rabbit hole followed.

Lizzie's first child was stillborn, the grief that followed sharpened her addiction to laudanum, she died of an overdose aged 32 in 1862.

Rossetti was consumed with grief and Lizzie was buried with a journal containing Rossetti's poetry nestling in her hair.

By 1869 Rossetti was in the grip of booze and chloral hydrate, the attendant paranoia convinced him he was going blind and could no longer paint. Writing poetry would be his salvation. He became obsessed with the poems buried with Lizzie. He applied for, and received, permission to have Lizzie exhumed.

The exhumation took place at night, Rossetti was not present but his agent, Charles Augustus Howell, was. He retrieved the journal and told Rossetti that Lizzies hair had grown after her death and filled the coffin. Rossetti published the poems but the poor response depressed him and he fell into a miasma of chloral hydrate and whisky. He died a recluse in 1882.

Lizzie fell deep down the rabbit hole and found Rossetti, who then found his own rabbit hole.

Their story, the epitome of the tragedy that love sometimes becomes, is best told by Lucinda Hawksley, nip to your local bookshop with this ISBN 9780233002583 for a copy of a beautifully produced hardback  which is full of romance, intrigue, tragedy and, as you look at the cover, and think "Yeah, I know that picture!" look for Pheme, she might be watching you!

Another rabbit hole soon....

Donald went down a rabbit hole...

The worst rabbit hole to fall down is one you create yourself. Donald Crowhurst dug his own.

 

Born in then British India in 1932 of British parents Donald, as a result of his mum's wish for a daughter, was raised as a girl until the age of seven.

Back in the UK he left school before the usual age and, after bouncing around, became an RAF pilot in 1953, that didn't last, the London Gazette recorded his commission being 'terminated' in 1954, no reason given. He moved on to the Army but got busted again.

At a loose end Donald moved to the English South-West trying to turn his habitual inventing/tinkering into business. Debts grew as he tried to support wife and four children.

The Sunday Times made Donald's eyes boggle in 1968 when he saw the announcement of a big cash prize for the winnner of 'The Golden Globe' a solo non-stop round the world yacht race..because Donald was now a weekend sailor.

Time was short, Donald took on a financial sponsor, a publicist and a boat builder. The rabbit hole was looming.

Ever the romantic optimist Donald mortgaged everything he could and laboured over the design of his tri-maran 'Teignmouth Electron' whilst his ex-tabloid journalist publicist wove stories of this brave adventurer.

Unseen by him clouds of concern were gathering. Experienced sailors doubted both his sailing ability and the design of his tri-maran.  These doubts were confirmed when sea-trials went horribly wrong and the deadline was looming.

Donald left Teignmouth in an under-equipped, under-trialled boat just hours before the deadline on 31st October 1968.

Wise heads wore frowns as he became a speck on the ocean.

Communications were by radio only. Donald reported his position only sporadically.  He was doing well. Some wise heads still wore frowns. The weeks and months passed, the better his position became the deeper the frowns.

Donald reported his position on 29th June 1969, he was in the lead or close to it as he raced up the South Atlantic on the way home.

Silence.

Ten days later the Royal Mail Vessel RMV Picardy found the 'Teignmouth Electron' adrift. No Donald.

On board were log books and a journal which showed that Donald had, from the get-go, fallen into the doldrums in the South  Atlantic, had made land for repairs, thereby disqualifying himself and spent months sailing in circles whilst falsifying his position until the other competitors returned to the South Atlantic where he would join in again for the home run.

Those long days, weeks and months of solitary life in the middle of the ocean with only his thoughts and guilt for company led to writing journals which both fascinate and disturb as you read. Are they the journals of a man sliding into insanity or of a man finding a wisdom which escapes the rest of us? I have read and re-read them, still not sure.

The obvious theory is that he found himself in a state of mind which made walking off the back of the boat entirely reasonable.

The less obvious theory?  Donald once again put into port, hired a boat for the day, towed 'Teignmouth Electron' out to sea, set her adrift and returned to port to start a new life. I love that idea, Donald is now living on an island somewhere, happy with his new philosophy of life.

'Teignmouth Electron' was sold as salvage then sold and re-sold as a dive-boat. Eventually she was dragged onto a beach on Cayman Brac, where the remains still lie.

  This photo and a thoughtful blog entry by visitors to the remains is here...http://panexplore.com/teignmouthelectron/


The book is...'The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst'  by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall ISBN 9781473635364

Available at any bookshop worth it's floorspace, including Heffers in Cambridge;)

Donald Crowhurst will come to life again in October 2017 when a film based on the story, starring Colin Firth as Donald, is released. (I have a gut feeling it could be the film of the autumn season...be fun to see if I am right!)

Another rabbit hole soon....