Books: Notes on My Better Reading Experiences in 2015

Readers: I have not been doing the OG much over the past year, my previous post being on July 23. The reasons available to my conscious mind are numerous. Do a search for "why I quit blogging" and one of the most-cited reasons is depression. I think I've had some of that, but I guess I internally framed it in other ways: frustration/anger/hopelessness. How does someone make money writing? Where are we going in Unistat, politically? To quote the old Stones song "19th Nervous Breakdown,": "Nothing I do don't seem to work/It only seems to make matters worse. Oh pleeeeeeeze."

But I hang in there. I teach guitar and music theory and love my students and most of 'em love me. I love doing it. I did it a lot in my 20s. Boy, have things changed with the digital world vis a vis music teaching!

Over the last six weeks or so, I realized: well, about five people read this blog (the numbers that Blogger gives you for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly readership seem infinitely corruptible; never for one second did I believe 683 people had actually read anything from my blog in one day), and when I did write I almost always wrote a "tl/dr" post. Apparently? Anyway, I realized, there was a therapeutic aspect to posting an article/essay/rant/whatever. Even if one person "out there" liked it and never commented, I guess I'm now cool with it. (I imagine that one Ideal Reader of the OG, btw.)

Moreover, I recall one of the writing gurus - fergit which 'um - titled a book Writing To Learn. And I bet it was Zinsser, but I'm too lazy to look it up and it's immaterial anyway: it was a way to learn. That sealed it: I stopped going on. I will go on. I...

So yea: books I read in 2015 that I really really RILLY liked...

Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair, by Th. Metzger (1996)
Metzger's essays first showed on my radar in supplements to the yearly Loompanics catalog. As far as I can tell, he has yet to collect those in a book. He's taught college in upstate NY for awhile and I consider him one of the greats in the so-called "marginals milieu." He writes fiction too. (Check out Big Gurl. ) B&V is a gripping, well-researched and in-your-face look at the early uses of electricity in capital punishment. There are scenes that feel like Wm. S. Burroughs at his most depraved. These were liberals who wanted a more "humane" way to kill people. Because killing is just plain wrong, we're gonna kill ya, in the name of The People. Recent news stories of the "kinder" method of lethal injection and the specific, horrific ways it doesn't work the way rationalists thought it would might prepare you for Metzger's descriptions of the experiences (if you can call them that) of the earliest electric chair recipients. We also get vivid pictures of Edison and Tesla: their personalities and attitudes towards science, business, ethics and fame. Most readers of a blog like this probably already know: the two geniuses couldn't possibly be more different. I love how Metzger depicts late 19th.early 20th century American society and its excited misunderstandings of an emergent electrical world.

Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy and the Power to Heal, by Tom Shroder (2014)
Journalistic, and among a sudden welter of books and articles in major publications about how psychedelics are slowly re-emerging after perhaps the most egregious moral panics of the 20th c. When I took this one home from the library and did a quick thumbing for index, structure, bibliography, style, etc: I was excited to note that a major section of the book was about Rick Doblin and his long strange trip trying to get psychedelic drugs back in the hands of researchers and scientists. And that part of the book delivered, for me: Doblin is one of the names that should be better known among those who consider themselves among what may be termed the psychedelic cognoscenti. But the interwoven story of the Iraq war vet with PTSD, and his treatment: utterly gripping. The descriptions of what this young guy went through gave me a bit of quasi-PTSD, and the only thing that would've alleviated it would be his ability to deal with life effectively after treatment, with a psychedelic drug, under knowledgeable, loving medical care. It worked!

Overall, the gradual acceptance that psychedelic drugs may have profound therapeutic effects seems to me one of the happiest of historical turns for our years, early 21st century. Know Thyself. Set and Setting. Sacrament. The Numinous and healing. A 2011 study revealed that one major psilocybin trip could make a person open-minded to new viewpoints and experiences for life. Let us weigh the pros and cons and the in-betweens?

Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, by Scott Timberg (2015)
I first became aware of Timberg many years ago when I read a feature piece he published in the LA Times, about a ridiculously erudite classical music clerk at Tower Records in West Hollywood, California. This book seems to have grown out of that piece and several others like it: the old business model for writing and performing music, poetry, doing architecture, cultural criticism - most of the creative arts - has changed so radically with the digital revolution that we're suddenly in a winner-take-all situation that seems unsustainable. And how some record store and bookstore clerks had been minor cultural heroes themselves, with tiny cult followings, simply because they knew so much and were tremendous sources for people who are into Their Thing. These clerks and weirdo-experts go away too, when it's all Amazon from here on out. Timberg is wonderful in fleshing out the etiology of all this, and has some compelling suggestions for how we get out of it. This book was written, seemingly, with almost all my friends I've ever had in mind. I do wish Timberg had suggested the Universal Basic Income idea, but you can't have everything...or rather: if you're trying to make a living doing creative work in the Arts, you can barely have anything. This book seems vital for those who have disposable incomes but who are only transiently aware that real people are behind their joyful cultural consumptions. The problem is: if these people thumb the book in a kiosk somewhere, it's likely to look like too much of a bummer, and they won't read it. It seems written for the very class who are suffering under the current dispensation. Timberg loves independent music, writers, weirdo painters, visionary builders. He really knows...more than you do about all these people and how they sought to contribute to culture. The book seems to function as: hey, thanks for reading, and I'm here to tell you I hear you. Maybe things will get better. It's very well-informed, empathetic, but  a bit of a reality sandwich for many of us. Still: I couldn't put it down.

Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists and the Search for Justice in Science, by Alice Dreger (2015)
This might seem like a weird riff, but right off I'm going to assert readers of Robert Anton Wilson will probably love this book, which I think will prove to be influential in the sociology of science. Especially if those RAW readers liked his The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. (<---of course I'd say this, but one of the great underappreciated books in the sociology of science) Only Dreger is not taking on CSICOP, but liberal academics who attack other scientific researchers for coming up with data, information, journal articles and books that offend - in the widest sense - Political Correctness. I've long been fascinated by the late 1960s-now fallout around the cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who famously studied and wrote an ethnography about the Yanomamo. From there: sociobiology/evolutionary psychology and the raucous campus backlashes from feminists, charges and counter-charges, how knowledges are constituted, the political ramifications of knowledge, the molten topic of what's "human nature," etc. And this is but one tendril in Dreger's story. For me, it's easy to see why the Right attacks science it doesn't like; what I want is a more balanced view: how do liberals react to science they don't like? The stories here are sobering. If you're fascinated by intersex folk and the political in-fighting among transsexuals, between those who brook no dissent from the line that "I was born in the wrong body" and those who changed sexes because they thought it would be exciting and sexy (I'm simplifying), here is a story for you. Or: what if your data shows that rape is not - according to feminist dogma - always and only an act of violence, that there's a sexual attractiveness component to rape? And that this data could be placed within the framework of evolutionary psychology? Even if you're a male feminist/liberal and know your data will cause great anger, do you deserve death threats? To get fired? All of the stories Dreger covers seem to violate this basic sequence: First: do good science and trust in your methods and data and your scientific peers. Second: we hope social justice will occur. If you get these two backwards, you may be in for a world of hurt. A captivating read for me, and Dreger combines her (rough) academic life with a journalistic flair. She's fearless, frank and I love her. Maybe some day I'll meet her.

Eminent Hipsters, by Donald Fagen (2013)
The brainiest and wittiest rock star book I've ever read. One half of Steely Dan, this is a short work in which the latter half Fagen describes in great detail what it's like to do the rock star tour when you're around the age of 60. The road, the dealings with different concert attaches, the poor sleep, whether to sleep on the bus on in your room, etc. And Fagen is cantankerous, if highly literate and funny. You understand why young rock stars trash hotel rooms, overdose, turn in bad performances, and act like ridiculous assholes: constant touring is rough on the nervous system; it tends to drive people nuts. And here's 60 year old Fagen doing it, making the best of it. There are short essays about taking LSD at Bard College, reading science fiction and Korzybski and the Beats, growing up in post-war suburbia, slowly developing musical chops and an esthetic. I hadn't ever heard of the Boswell Sisters, but Fagen sold me. Chevy Chase once played drums in a proto-Steely Dan? Yep. Fagen is, one of my musical gods: I love his composing and piano playing, not to mention that any studio guitarist who played on a Steely Dan record has...unworldly chops. To this day I go ga-ga over any lead break in any SD record. (Jimmy Page said his favorite solo of all time was  "Reelin' In The Years," which was by Elliot Randall; if I were forced to pick one it would be Larry Carlton's first solo in "Kid Charlemagne" which is about Owsley. Carlton's second solo in that song is merely great.) One last tidbit in this capsule quasi-review that kept me thinking for a long time: I have long had a very deep love-hate relationship with television, and Fagen's take on much of his audience addresses this when he uses the term "TV Babies" over and over when sizing up his audience:

"Incidentally, by 'TV Babies' I mean people who were born after, say, 1960, when television truly became the robot caretaker of American children and therefore the principle architect of their souls. I've actually borrowed the term from the film Drugstore Cowboy, in which Matt Dillon, playing a drug addict and dealer, uses it to refer to a younger generation of particularly stupid and vicious dealers who seemed to have no soul at all." (pp.98-99) This seems a pungent articulation for the loyal opposition, if you like what TV has done to you and balk at the idea that it was the "principle architect" of your "soul."

Ahem. Well. I see I've done it again: I meant to write about another 15-20 books, but the word spewage is probably too much for the Busy Person, so I shall quit for the day.

                                          artwork by Bobby Campbell

World Book Day/Night 2015: "Dangerous Books"

Happy birthday 451st (probably?), Billy Shakes!

23 April is World Book Night.

I'm on record here as not only defending oddball and "dangerous" books and literature, but I've also been a champion of the idea that books indeed do have the potential for "danger" in all its forms...or as much as we can wring from the term vis a vis books. Of course, it's the yoga (orig. Sanskrit derivation of the woid) involved: no book, residing on some shelf somewhere, can do any damage. (Unless someone has hallowed it out and placed a ticking time bomb inside it...has that ever actually been done?) It takes the book PLUS the reader PLUS action to do any damage. Methinks the human(s) has/have the lion's share of the blame here, but still: what was it about that book that led to that building being blown up? We have the First Amendment in Unistat. And: ideas can have consequences. This seems to me at the core of one of the hottest ideas we have. We want a dynamic culture, and this set of ideas is a powerful engine.

                                          money shot of some of my shelves

Of course, most books, having been read and cogitated upon, chewed, swallowed and digested, will not lead to bloodshed or death. It seems safe to say that most well-read books will change their readers' interiors. You know how that book you read last month affected you; your friends might not notice any changes in your behavior. But according to neuroscience, your experience with that book literally changed neural circuitry in your brain, at least a little bit. And so, in this way, books are like very powerful drugs. This may be an unconscious reason why some people are scared of some books. They don't want anything to change. Like the moronic idea that white heterosexual Christian status is "the best."

Aye: other books scare some people who haven't even read them. Possibly they've "heard" about what's in the book and they don't like what they've heard, so they must take action. These idiot souls are working with lousy brain software programs, but they - the idiots - will always be with us. Oh, but they are priestly types, these idiots: it's not enough for them to be scared of what they've found in a book (some ideas they don't like). They will not have that book in their household. Their children will not read it. But that's not enough for them: these priestly idiots take it upon themselves to try to stop those scary ideas from getting into your brain. How? They harass librarians and booksellers. They burn books. They steal them from the public libraries.

Here's an idea that scares the hell out of me: sometimes they succeed. (Because they know better than us, know what's good for us, do it from Brotherly Love, etc?)

The American Library Association recently reported that "Young Adult" books and graphic novels by people of color and writers who are comfortable with sex have been under siege by the idiot priestly types in all areas of Unistat. I took a look at that list and, as always, was forced to make a decision: which of these do I read first? Hey, it's not out of spite (well, maybe there is a little of that), but from something I learned in my early teens: if some book is being banned (or some idiots are trying to get it banned), I want to read it. It usually pays off. I find it fascinating to read and learn about ideas that scare other people. I tend to find "controversial" books fascinating, because I get to read on another "meta" level: I read and interpret the text using my strategies AND all the while I'm also reading and thinking, "Here's what riles up some of the more fearful and ignorant of us." There's the ideas in them (some of which are very olde news to me); then there's the idea that others are so intolerant and mentally impoverished they think these ideas are going to do "harm" to society, or to the "good" people in their own imagined society. "Know thy enemy"? Here's one solid way.

Of those Top 10 from the ALA, I'd already read Morrison, Alexie, Satrapi and Hosseini. So I've put on hold in my public library The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Chbosky and Telgemeier's Drama. Nothing human is alien to me. Also: apparently YA fiction is still not alien to me, even though I'm technically old enough to be a grandpa-pa.

Alice Dreger's Recent Book
Titled Galileo's Middle Finger, it's ostensibly a plea for free scholarly inquiry and evidence-based science as one of the healthiest aspects of a democratic society. And I couldn't put the book down. Dreger's an academic with activism in her blood. She takes Galileo as her heroic source and gets into some ultra-nasty squabbles with ideologues (close cousins of the priestly idiots in every state who want to burn Harry Potter books for the "satanism" they think those books promote) who don't want questions about their picture of how the way things ought to be. The issues Dreger gets involved with go from how we treat "intersex" children, and lead her to other areas of academia, most notably sociobiology and Napoleon Chagnon, "humanist" anthropology and Margaret Mead, and the great debunker of "recovered memory," Elizabeth Loftus. Scientists Thornhill and Palmer's book A Natural History of Rape were not read very closely (if at all) by their very very vocal detractors. There's a lot of interesting ideas about sex and identity in Dreger's book, and Dreger changes with each of her encounters. She's always learning, always questioning herself, standing up for marginalized groups against the State and official establishments, and quite the peripatetic one.

The aspect of academic postmodernism that says science is merely one of many narrative-truths gets shredded by Dreger. Why? Because human lives are at stake. The postmodern idea about science - that it's a potent set of narratives, but only one of many - seems to me to have its earned place in epistemology, but it fails miserably in ethics. Similarly, a variety of academic feminism gets skewered (roughly the same variety that Robert Anton Wilson had troubles with), and the academic community of Anthropologists receives some sunlight. The American Anthropological Association just looks embarrassing.

But early in the book, Dreger - a meticulous researcher, academic detective, activist, ethicist and engaging writer for the educated lay public - hints that perhaps the deepest problem we have is not only ideology, but a taboo against knowing who we are.

I highly recommend Dreger's book if only for the way she addresses this question. Capital enn Nature throws all sorts of things at us. We forgot we have reified comparatively narrow categories of the way things should be, naturally. And the human fallout is heartbreaking. A stunning point in the book is that right now, another possible DES or Thalidomide-like story may be taking place. Dreger tried her best to stop it, but it's SNAFU. Yep: this one's a winner. And in keeping with the motif of "dangerous books" the book is chock-full of books that set others off, sometimes toward making death-threats to authors.

                                           photographer unknown (anyone know?)
                                           lady unknown to me (cryin' shame!)

Hot, Controversial Books That For Some Reason Go Out-of-Print
Often, they almost disappear or become very expensive and difficult to hunt down. Some books just never find an audience, or their publisher didn't push the book hard enough, or maybe it's just not a very well-written tome. But I've always been fascinated and alarmed by missing books that don't fit any of those examples.

In leafing through Robert Anton Wilson's encyclopedia of conspiracy theories, Everything Is Under Control I noted two places where he notes that a good, vital writer or book is now unfindable. In the entry under "Federal Reserve Bank" we see this:

"Critics of banking rant so often against the Rothschilds and David Rockefeller because the Rothschilds Bank of London and Chase Manhattan (Rockefeller's own) are said, we know not on what authority, to own most of the Fed. Matthew Josephson, a conspiriologist of the 1930s-1950s, whose books are currently unfindable, insisted the real power was held by the Warburg Bank of Amsterdam and was part of the 'Orange' take-over of England and America, after the mildly illegal installation of the Dutchman William of Orange as King of England." Josephson had a best-seller in his day called The Robber Barons, about vast inequality in the 1890s. It's the only book I've read by Josephson; I had been working in a library and noticed the title on the shelf and found Josephson a wonderful Marxist-ish conspiriologist.

Now: Wilson published his book in 1998, just on the cusp of the ascendancy of Amazon and eBay and other digitized bibliographies and online vending outposts. Anyone can find most of Josephson now, and The Robber Barons can be bought used for a price in which you'd pay more for postage than for the book itself. Other books must be accessed via large public libraries or university libraries. (Try Interlibrary Loan! Ask your librarian!)

Again: in the entry under "Mary Pinchot Meyer" RAW writes the last paragraph:

"In 1979, Deborah Davis published Katherine the Great, a book about the Washington Post, which included some details on Mary Pinchot Meyer. The publisher printed 25,000 copies, but within a few days withdrew them from the bookstores and pulped them."

And...it later was re-published by smaller presses and I just now saw I can get a used copy from half.com for $1.33. Hardcover. Again, the postage would cost more. (Questions for Deborah Davis about her book on Katherine Graham.)

But: There are still some who are keeping track of this and trying to bring controversial books back into print...or as e-books, at least. One is Mark Crispin Miller. Of all those, I've only read Christopher Simpson's Blowback (fantastic!) and Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism (prescient?). I want to read them all, but I wish Soft Skull Press or Feral House or another of those cool publishing houses would being them back as dead-tree books. I will probably end up finding most of those in university libraries.

For those interested in Miller's brought-back dangerous books (gee...dangerous to who?), see HERE, and this 7 minute interview with Thom Hartmann. And: here Miller talks about five books the Establishment doesn't want us to read, with the comely Abby Martin.

                                           the Severn Bay reference library

Eric Schlosser's Plays
His Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness and Command and Control  triumvirate constitute a counter-narrative to much of Unistatian history and feel like throwbacks to the Progressive Era muckrakers's books (like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle), but I recently found out he'd written a play titled America, in 1985. It was about US imperialism and Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President McKinley at the 1901 Pan American Exposition because of Unistat's colonial war in the Philippines. Czolgosz, usually written off as yet another nutty violent anarchist - as if they all are - saw himself as a patriot who wanted to warn his countrymen about imperial wars. It turns out Leon offed McKinley at the advent of Unistat imperialism, which hasn't stopped since. Leon: you tried, man. In 1985 Schlosser has Czolgosz saying:

"You are going to be punished for what your government is doing right now, and your children will pay for your outrageous vanity. And when this great nation of ours goes down in flames, when our cities are in ruins...don't say nobody warned you. When it comes, you deserve it, and I told you so."
(I'm quoting from the introduction to a chapter on Schlosser from Robert Boynton's book The New New Journalists.)

The Wikipedia page for Schlosser mentions that the play/book is unavailable in Unistat.  However, it was put on in London in 2003, to good reviews. If I want to obtain a copy from a library, the nearest one is University of Calgary Library, 969 miles from my city. There's a copy at Harvard, 2600 miles away. And then, it's Lancashire County Council Library, UK: 5100 miles away. But, BUT!: Say what we will about the drawbacks of Amazon: I just now looked, and it appears I can score a used copy for about $4. Still: why do I have to buy a Schlosser book? You'd think after his deep delvings into the drug war, migrant farm workers, and the insane missile defense system he'd have so many admirers some publisher would bring Americans (which contains America and another play, We The People) into accessible print. What am I missing here?

(Schlosser's 2003 plea to Londoners about to see his play, America: "Not All American Are Evil." Especially see the last paragraph.)

                             Alex Jordan, Jr's House on the Rock library in Wisconsin, Unistat

Opium For the Masses, Hit Man and The Anarchist Cookbook
These are just three books that feed into the Walter Mitty aspects of my bibliomania.

Jim Hogshire, one of my favorite authors in the so-called "marginals milieu" - a term I believe was coined by his nemesis in the milieu, Bob Black - wrote a book on how to go to the local nursery, buy the right kind of poppy seeds, and eventually make your own opiate concotions. It came out as Opium For the Masses. Read about what happened to him HERE. As far as I can see, the economic censorship has put Hogshire off to the book writing biz, and it's a big loss to weirdo Mitty readers like myself. Hogshire also wrote humorously and no-holds-barred about what you're facing when you go to prison. I also love his book Pills A Go-Go, a compendium of writing he and his pill-loving f(r)iends originally wrote on the early Internet. Let us not forget Hogshire's wonderful expose of tabloid culture, Grossed Out Surgeon Vomits Inside Patient, which should be read by anyone who saw Ken Burns's brother's documentary on Generoso Pope, Jr and his father. The doc is well-made but completely glosses over what I see as infotainment that plays into fascism. In Ric Burns's Enquiring Minds Pope's pop's Mafia ties are addressed, but a vague mention of Junior's work with the CIA in Italy in 1947 seems criminally overlooked, especially when we find out what the CIA did there, their first big covert operation to interfere with elections in other countries. And Hogshire writes no more, apparently.

("Author of Poppy Cultivation Cleared of Drug Charge")

Hit Man, ostensibly a how-to book on how to be a contract killer, was written under the name "Rex Feral" but was germinated as a crime novel by a Florida housewife. I get the feeling she was writing about her fantasy life, much as E.L. James did when she ended up with Fifty Shades of Grey. Anyway, for whatever she could imagine about being a hired killer, some actual killer offed three people, and said the book helped him out. The small Paladin Press was sued, lost and wanted to take the case to a higher court. (Wouldn't you?) But Paladin's insurers settled out of court, saying another case would cost too much. Paladin Press insisted on its First Amendment rights, but they lost out due to money. (Compare and contrast Hogshire with Paladin here. I know I found out about both Hit Man and Opium For the Masses from the wonderful old, now-defunct Loompanics Catalog.)

("FBI Releases Files on Controversial Booksellers Paladin and Loompanics")

So, yea: we have the First Amendment but Johnny Law's dough can trump that, sorry to see.

Here's a weird story about an author who wanted his own book banned: When I first saw The Anarchist Cookbook (get a load of the "From the Author" bit on Amazon here!) on a bookstore shelf I smelled a rat. "How to turn a shotgun into a grenade launcher"? "How to make TNT"? I perused the thing, didn't buy it. In more ways than one. I'm not interested in making bombs. I object to the idea that that's what anarchists do. I'm an anarchist like Noam Chomsky is an anarchist. Most of us don't want to hurt anyone. And besides, a lot of that stuff in William Powell's book looked made up, but who knew? I think if I had the money I'd have bought it anyway, for my Mitty purposes. (I have a few shelves of crazy stuff like this...just 'cuz. My own Mitty-mind!) Then, Mormon bomber Mark Hoffman was found to own a copy...but it stayed in print! (Paladin got reamed!) Then, after a Colorado high school shooting, Powell once again pleaded for the book to go quietly out of print. But the book has taken on a life of its own.

I've always thought this is a terrific example of a very good title selling books. An ironic example too.

Very good article on the life of Anarchist Cookbook and the mayhem that has ensued, by Gabriel Thompson at Harper's.

By the way: The Official C.I.A. Manual on Trickery and Deception fell into the hands of decent people; I wish I had a copy on my Walter Mitty shelf, but so far: no dice.

________________________________________
Well...I see I can write on this topic all day, but this is another one too long in the tooth, prolix, and trying, so I thank you for reading and till next time!

                                         artwork by the trippy Bobby Campbell