IN HIS OWN WRITE and A SPANIARD IN THE WORKS
John Lennon wrote these little books in 1964 and 1965, and they are collected here with this slightly trippy cover.
It's frustrating to read this because it never quite takes off. It's a little bit like James Joyce on a heavy dose of acid, but without the insight and multiple meanings that Joyce managed. Some of these vignettes read like Beatles songs that got left out, some are take-offs on BBC style or Sherlock Holmes stories or bits of a newspaper gossip column. Add the bizarre scrawled drawings and you've got a mixture that is rather like a Rorshach test in that you put as much of your own imagination into trying to make sense as the writing itself does.
"No Flies On Frank," "The Wrestling Dog," "The Fat Growth On Eric Hearble," "Last Will and Testicle," and "Deaf Ted, Danoota (and me)." What the... it's very much like some of the later Beatles songs that captured a mood or hinted at some meaning that wasn't quite there. "A Spaniard In the Works" itself is a good example. Most Americans have probably not heard the phrase "throw a spanner in the works" because we would call it a monkey wrench.
I imagine a great many Lennon fans would bristle at this dismissal of what they consider a work by a genius and I can't disagree with them. Maybe I'm just not letting go enough to get it. But one man's Mede is annother man's Persian, innit?