Author: Whitney Robinson

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir, mental illness, psychiatry

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: In a way it is not odd because psychiatric memoirs are thick on the ground these days. But in a sense this book is very odd because being given an invitation to look into the mind of a person actively suffering from schizophrenia is in and of itself a strange, unsettling experience.

Availability: Published by Process Media in 2011, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Just warning you now, dear reader, that this discussion is going to be one of my trademarked Very Long Discussions with Lots of Quotes from the Book, coupled with a very personal reactions to the text. For those who find a 8000 word or so discussion excessive, here is the tl;dr version: This is a very good book written by a very good writer and you should buy it and read it.

I read a lot of mental health and mental illness memoirs and this was the first one I ever considered odd enough to discuss here. I very nearly missed reading it. I had run into a spate of memoirs that left me cold, and had the online acquaintance who recommended the book to me and then sent me a copy offered it two weeks earlier than she did, I would have declined. But just before she discussed the book with me, I had finished a very good, very honest mental illness memoir, Stacy Pershall’s Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl. The offer to read the book came at the right time after the right book.

It would have been a shame to have turned down this book because of the often sorry shelf-company it is forced to share. And I don’t mean to demean the genre because people gets all kinds of help in all kinds of ways that I may find less than helpful. It’s just that lately some of the books I have read wore very thin for me. It seemed like the authors, mostly women, had romanticized their illness. To paraphrase Elizabeth Wurtzel, patron saint of fucked up women of a certain age, they had fallen in love with their illness. The devastation the disease wreaked on their bodies, their education, their relationships – it all was a back story to a fabulous disaster narrative.

Also there is a current theme in mental health studies that posits that mental illnesses, or neurodiversity, are a form of genetic selection for arts, letters and speculative science and therefore celebrate the conditions. I can see the logic. Not only is there a long record of acclaimed people who created great art and propelled science, but as a person with mental illness, I like to think that there is a purpose behind my at times terrible brain chemistry. But I am made uneasy by some of it because even though Van Gogh left behind astonishing paintings and Virginia Woolf left behind masterful prose and John Nash was a great boon to speculative physics, would any of us really want to live their lives? It’s all well and good to see the up side of having appalling brain chemistry, but I often fear that people who are suffering will read such examinations and decide that their affliction should not be treated, should not be seen as a disease that needs to be addressed in order for them to live the best life they can live. As much as I adore Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry, and I have no real way of knowing how much his deep depression truly affected his writing, thinking about the sorry end of his life makes it just a little harder to enjoy the beauty and truth of his words. Art that comes from a truly suffering person will always have a pall cast over it.

This book does not engage in the sort of celebration and art uber alles justifications for mental illness that I have encountered as of late. Whitney Robinson’s memoir gets everything right. She shows the wreckage. She shows how mental illness swooped down into her life and changed everything. A natural writer with a near-intimidating intelligence, Robinson tells the story of her illness, the demon that came into her brain, and how she came back out the other side. It is an erudite, honest, and at times darkly humorous look at what it feels like to have your brain behave in ways you have no control over. Schizophrenia is one of the hardest mental illnesses for people to truly understand, and Robinson writes a fascinating book that is never once a freak show. It is never an attempt to glorify conditions that can ransack a person’s life. This book is never a voyeuristic peephole into the at times salacious subject matter of mental illness.

It is a rare invitation to understand.

I don’t suffer from schizophrenia, but a voice in my head landed me in a locked psych ward when the voice told me, in very specific detail, to kill myself. I had been given medication that made me psychotic, and once my mind cleared from the toxic influence, it seemed hard to believe that such a thing had happened to me. Surely I had not heard a voice talking to me, a voice that sounded so much like my own, a voice I could converse with. But it happened. Luckily my husband prevented the worst from happening, and I don’t think such a thing will ever happen to me again.

But even taking all of that into account, I was shocked at how much this book seemed at times like it was speaking directly to me: the weight gain from the medications, the change in how her family regarded her, a sickening suspicion that even as she respected her psychiatrist, he may not know the best way to handle her illness. And though almost all mental health memoirs can make a reader wonder if they have the specific affliction discussed in the book, Robinson’s narrative at times gave me pause because some of my mental glitches showed up in her prose. It was unsettling at times, actually.

Robinson, who is still in her 20s, grew up in rural Massachusetts, a much-loved little girl with atypical parents. Her father she describes as an eco-fascist, her mother an artistic Christian. She was home schooled and lived a relatively solitary existence until her teens. It is hard to know if schizophrenia showed early signs in some of her childhood behaviors, like her tendency to collect small animals into glass jars without regard for their capacity to survive the experience, but I think such attempts to backtrack are ultimately futile. Many children interact oddly with animals when very young and it is something they grow out of. Robinson grew out of it, but the impact of her innocent collections haunted her later, causing her to to think herself a monster in the depths of her illness.

Robinson began attending her freshman year of college just as schizophrenia really began to take hold of her mind. She withdraws into a strange existence that leads to two psychiatric hospitalizations. Robinson’s attempt to make sense of her disease using the intellectual arsenal available to her – philosophy and religion – lead her to call the voice that plagues her mind a demon, though she certainly does not see it as a demonic possession, as some might infer from the title. And she never once shies away from telling hard truths about herself, using a prose style that seems at odds with her youth, but like I said earlier, Robinson is a natural writer.

Robinson was an unusual little girl but she rang utterly true to me in some respects. Here is an early passage in the book. Robinson was at a body of water near her home, capturing some sort of amphibian in a bucket when a man began to speak to her in an alarming manner. Robinson, still a little girl when this happened, somehow sensed the man meant her harm and she instinctively ran from him. But that survival instinct was tempered by a strange affinity to darkness:

Did he want to kill me? A delicious shudder ran through my body. Here was my Dr. Lecter, the closest thing I might ever have. It was late at night, when I found my first love object. My friend asleep beside me on a cot that smelled like cat pee, the television playing out the terrifying and blessed confirmation that I was not alone in seeing the world as I did, full of words like scalpels and jars of eyes and freezers full of human hearts. Sometimes I’d wonder, what if I’d been born into a different body, cast into a different life? What if I’d not been a little girl with golden hair whose mother read her fairy tales? What if I’d been a boy with crooked teeth and a slimy nose, a bastard child no one wanted? What if I’d had an excuse.

That fascination with very bad men, the desire to be both harmed and to be a person who harms is something I am uneasily familiar with. My first love objects were Ted Bundy, whom I saw as a force set to obliterate feminine beauty, and Clint Eastwood, an icy-eyed assassin who meted hard justice. At its core, this fascination with darkness for me was and still is a strange desire to obliterate myself combined with a need to know that if I must, I can do harm. Of course, like the author, I have no excuse to be a person who does harm, which makes the fascination with bad people all the more unsettling.

There were moments, however, when even though I felt a strong kinship to Robinson, her mind showed itself wholly unlike mine. Rather unique, really. These are Robinson’s thoughts as she is getting ready to go out on a first date with her college lab partner:

Don’t get me wrong, I want to form some meaningful connection with the people around me… It’s just that talk across genders forms expectations and bodies are a problem for me. Pale, quivering sacks of blood and bones – they do not compel me to perpetuate the species, or pretend to. Animals have poetry in their shape and motion, but people never really stop looking half-formed, still fetal, even as they begin to decay. There are many words in English for dead bodies, yet none to distinguish one that is specifically alive. I think that’s telling.

I think it might be tempting to file this interesting passage under the tab of “she was becoming ill.” I don’t think that is accurate. What I think this shows is that Robinson would have had a very interesting mind even had she not developed schizophrenia. It is not her illness that makes her sui generis. The illness gave her the topic and focus to write this book but the way she processed being ill is indicative of the mind she had before she fell ill. But the atypical way of looking at the world was there all along, I think. The little girl who captured animals and kept them in jars did so because they had a certain poetry to her and she grew into the woman who linguistically found support for her idea of humans as half-formed. That is the power of this particular narrative – Robinson’s mind never becomes secondary to her disease even as she expresses ideas many would consider odd or strange.

The date does not go as well as Robinson would have hoped, though Scott, the lab partner, as later evidence in the book shows, is clearly smitten with her. Robinson’s conversation over coffee shows her interests to be quite different than those of other people, or at least the very normal, seemingly average boy sitting in front of her.

“The only blood and guts I like are in zombie movies, and I’m pretty sure that stuff is all fake.”

“Actually, it’s probably pig viscera, too. Pigs are physiologically similar to humans. You can even fool the experts sometimes. Like snuff films, you know, where they supposedly kill someone on camera? There have been a lot of fakes, Some were so convincing that the FBI got involved, but they were uncovered as staged in the end. I think it turned out that the blood and guts were mostly from pigs.”

Scott is looking at me oddly. “And you know this how?

“I dunno, some documentary on the Internet? Haven’t you seen it?”

“Actually, no,” he says, and I realize that snuff films are one of those subjects you are supposed to avoid on the first date.

Again, I appreciated how much of Robinson’s mind I got to see reading this book. Because even though this is a mental illness memoir, it is also Robinson’s memoir of being a highly intelligent, awkward girl. It is the awkward, intelligent girl having this conversation, not the demon-plagued young woman. That is what made this memoir so appealing – commonality with this unusual mind, unusual even without illness. As Mr Oddbooks can attest, there are many young women who do not avoid such subject matter on a first date.

It is subtle, how Robinson lets you into her unusual mind and then slowly begins to show you the disease. If you have ever wanted to read clearly what it feels like to have schizophrenia, Robinson will show you. This next passage occurs when the disease is really making itself known to Robinson. Her mother has rousted her from her college apartment to force her to go to the dentist, and the experience she has in the waiting room is horrific. This also shows some of Robinson’s dry and at times dark humor.

I grab an issue of Highlights for Children and take a seat. Inside, I find a garden in which thirteen butterflies are hidden.

Can you find the butterflies?

Can, or will die trying.

But the butterflies begin to take on strange meaning to Robinson as her illness causes her to begin to misperceive her environment.

A shadow passes across the hallway door, gone by the time I look up. Maybe it was my imagination, but the figure that crossed my peripheral vision seemed furtive and distorted. It might have been carrying some kind of sharp instrument. Possibly one with a gleaming metal blade. Something in the room seems to curdle. The receptionist clacks at her keyboard with her back to me. The tapping has an unsettling rhythm, mathematically wrong. I am fairly certain that if she turns around she will have no face. I glance warily down at the magazine. They are liars; there are only twelve butterflies. The last butterfly is a fabrication to make small children go insane. The fish tank gurgles in amusement, a wet, choking sound.

This scene make my skin prickle because I have moments of strange paranoia and begin to perceive things that are not there. I will see strange connections in books to specific events in my life and will become convinced that my husband knew of the links when he gave me the book. When the strange cloud passes, I can see how irrational I was, but in the middle of one of the episodes nothing can convince me otherwise. I’ll develop strange aversions to textures, seeing lunar surfaces on pizzas, recurring faces in brick patterns and sponges, and then it goes away. I read this and could feel the uneasiness and fear Robinson experienced as she realized there may be meaningful pattern to the typing, that the book was deliberately misleading children. That there was a sinister purpose behind it all. And if you have never had moments like this happen in a sober brain, this passage is an excellent step in beginning to understand certain brain misfires.

I have no idea how much of the carelessness and at times deliberate violence Robinson exhibited toward animals was affected by or caused by her mental illness, but I can say her experiences in this regard were uncomfortable to read. As I have mentioned before, I cannot abide cruelty to animals and cannot read about it. But I forced myself to power through it and read sections that upset me because this was not just some attempt at a gross-out. Rather, reading about Robinson’s actions with animals was important to understanding this book and her illness.

In her teens, after watching a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer, Robinson decides to kill a fish. She and a friend had an unspoken competition as to who would obtain the most exotic and pretty betta fish. Her friend had bested her and obtained a lovely fish and full of a strange anger, Robinson decides that if she cannot possess the fish, no one will possess it. She spills a bottle of perfume into the bowl:

The perfume spread through the water in a floral atom bomb cloud, and the fish ricocheted from corner to corner in search of safer waters. After a minute it hung listlessly, fins trailing down in ragged strings. Gradually it began to list to one side until finally it floated on the surface of the water, its lovely fins fanned out like flower petals, now translucent and drained of color. The gills were motionless, dilated and bloodshot, and it soon became clear it was dead.

[...]

Dizzied by a sudden vertigo, it seemed like there were physically two of me in the room and my perspective was trapped between them, a bodiless observer torn between possible selves. One of these creatures was filled with a terrible sadness and the other blazed with savage joy, and I could not have said which one was real.

It seems as if the dark other, the demon that comes to haunt Robinson’s mind, is present, if not understood, long before her diagnosis. As I read this, I recalled once reading about people with forms of OCD who overcompensate because they are certain they are destructive or a killer in disguise. There can be a fine line between those who pour perfume into the fish bowl and those who do all they can to avoid even reading about those who pour perfume into the fish bowl. The voice in her mind brings up over and over all the things that Robinson believes she is – a killer, a torturer, and someone to be feared. Despite her collections of animals in jars and killing the fish, I do not believe Robinson’s schizophrenia fuels cruelty. Rather, I think her fascination with cruelty when twisted by the demonic voice of her illness becomes something far more sinister than it was.

Here’s a passage wherein Robinson did nothing wrong but the disease twists her mind into thinking she is a person capable of doing grave harm. This passage comes from when she babysat some children when she was a teenager. One of the children pretended to be dead and Robinson’s brain went to a place wherein the child was really dead and she was responsible, a dark fantasy of herself as a killer.

The girl who was supposed to be keeping them safe locked herself in the bathroom and confronted a demon that happened to look exactly like herself. She called out for the children to go to bed, and for once they listened. She waited for headlights in the driveway, collected her twenty dollars, and never went back.

It was then that she… that I began to consider the morality of my continued existence. Clearly there was something fundamentally broken in me – in whatever way the brains or souls of Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer were missing some key element, I seemed to have been set down similarly unfinished, a half-formed clay fetish that was animated with the breath of life and the power of speech but not fully human. There were moments when I felt empathy and sorrow and perhaps even love, but they flitted in and out of their own accord – I could not call them up at appropriate times, and in most situations I found inside me only an unsettling blankness, or sometimes the opposite of what I ought to feel. Wires had crossed somewhere, that much was clear.

She contemplates suicide but without meaning to, she finds a salvation of sorts in animals, for they see her by her actions, not the contents of her mind:

It came to me then that as far as this horse was concerned, I was a blank slate. Just one of a dozen teenage girls who rode him in circles each week. I hadn’t yanked on his mouth and now I was possibly going to give him a carrot, so life was good. He didn’t see me as a dangerous carnivore, he didn’t smell the ferment of evil in my blood or psychically sense my black thoughts. His entire concept of me was predicated on how I had treated him so far, a contract extending into indefinite future.

I feared what was going to happen next, that perhaps Robinson was going to harm the horse, but she is not a monster – just a young woman with mental illness:

I finishing untacking the horse, fed him a carrot, curried his sweaty saddle spot, and shut him safely in his stall for the night. I went home and did not shoot myself with my father’s guns. It seemed like I could still feel the horse’s eyes on me, calm and trusting. All of literature’s meditations on redemption might not have convinced me that my soul was salvageable, but in the wordless gaze of an animal who knew not my sins, nor cared of them, I found some sort of peace.

Robinson ends up under the care of a dedicated psychiatrist, and under his care Robinson goes psychotic and slashes her arms. She ends up in a psychiatric ward and feels the same sort of… relief? blankness? that I felt when the drugs began to come in ever increasing dosages and the voice that was mine yet was not mine went away:

To have a drug encamped in one’s brain is not so wrong as having another ego there. It acts with no malice, no free will. I close my eyes and am not so sad to have lost my mind. If I can’t have it, no one should.

This was very interesting to me. Her brain, the fish – her life is a black and white slate of possession. It’s almost too tempting to jump from her desire to possess her mind to her decision to regard the voice symptom of her schizophrenia as a demon. But that’s exactly where my mind went when I read this.

I suspect that in addition to the sheer appeal of Robinson’s prose, I loved this book because it was the first time I think I have read anyone whose hospitalization experiences seemed like mine, or at least mirrored elements of how the experience went down for me.

Though my first instinct is to struggle and flail and shatter things until I am free, I force myself to remain calm, not give them further proof that I’m part of the natural scenery of this milieu. Besides, whatever they’ve given me has possibly had some sort of toxic effect on the… thing. The voice. Don’t give it a persona. The disease of mind.

I swallow the pills.

Yes, I took the pills and they made the voices stop almost immediately, but I was still shaky and afraid. And, yes, this is exactly how I got out of inpatient as quickly as I did. I  realized that normal to those people in charge meant disengaged, quiet, unaffected, and I took enough drugs to fell an elephant and told the psychiatrist I wanted out so I could vote. A brief political conversation followed, she agreed to let me go home as soon as she could arrange the paperwork (voting and civic duty evidently seemed extremely sane to her). I think many of us fake it until we are released.

Robinson has a startling clarity of how she sounds and reacts, an awareness that I had and that I think many would never suspect the deeply mentally ill to possess.

Worse still I’m a biased narrator here, with a vested interest in sounding rational and far more clever than reductionist doctors with Mafia-dark eyes and dark suits worth more than my soul. Maybe I’m not as smooth and logical as I’m trying to sound, maybe my syntax isn’t as crisp as all that and my voice is lost among my words. Maybe I sound like every other frightened mental patient…

I was acutely aware of how I looked and sounded. I don’t like remembering it. It is very dehumanizing to have a sense of your sanity but know there is no way anyone will hear you because you are Mentally Ill.

And just more of the shocking commonality of experiences…

I had thought my release would be momentous, the free world rushing back to greet me as the vault doors open like the hold of a submarine. But once I’m outside, the return of normal context makes me realize how abnormal I feel inside. I had hoped this might be solved with clove cigarettes, poetry, and strolls in a peaceful garden. A civilized nineteenth century rest cure. Not with horse tranquilizers and unspeakable labels that start with schizo.

Once I was out of the hospital I had a brief, charmed existence because I was so happy to be out. But nothing had changed, really, except I was full of chemicals that would later become their own horrible problem to be dealt with, and people all regarded me differently. I too had some sort of belief in the idea of a sedate, Victorian rest, but really the locked ward was a place wherein no one could sleep, constant noise would have made the completely sane edgy and everyone was freaked out as their med doses changed. One of the nurses had told me to look at it like a vacation. Others cooked my meals, so I guess it was a rest in that regard. Sort of…

And here’s the passage that made me worry that these commonalities render me unable to see the whole of this book as others see it but I also know that these common experiences show me the truth of her life in a way that some may miss. This somewhat funny passage as Robinson returns to the hospital for the second time could have come from own hand:

“What are you reading?” asks the nurse, glancing down at the book after I’ve emptied my pockets and relinquished my Swiss Army knife, which I’d forgotten was there.

“Twilight of the Idols,” I tell her.

“My girlfriend said those books are good, but I’m not really into vampires.”

“Neither was Nietzsche, as far as I know.”

The nurse shuffles through my chart. “Are you hallucinating now, Whitney?”

“Um, no…” These admittance conversations are always uncomfortably direct, and one never manages to answer poetically.

“Do you feel like hurting yourself or someone else?”

“No.”

“What’s written on your shoes?”

“Words to live by.”

“I’m afraid I need to take them. The laces.”

“What about them?”

“They could be dangerous.”

“Because they’re long enough to choke someone?”

The nurse doesn’t answer, just waits while I take off my shoes and hand them over.

I hated having to give up my shoe laces. I also had to pull the drawstrings out of my hoodie and my sweatpants. But then again, a girl found a way to pull her shower curtain down and tried to hang herself with it so I can see why they take away all things that can be used as a strangulation device. But as Robinson shows in her memoir, when her roommate tries to kill herself using a CD, there is no way to prevent all the ways people can kill themselves. I had my own Twilight moment, as well. I was reading Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, an historical bibliography of books that have been lost to history. A nurse asked me what the book was about and I told her.

“How do they even know about them if the books were lost?” she asked, with near contempt in her voice.

“Other writers and historians read and referenced the books before they were lost,” I explained.

“Referenced,” she replied, as if the word was somehow a curse word.

Shoe laces and nurses who don’t get our books…

People who know that I often write down “take a shower” on my list of things to do will understand why I so liked this passage explaining life when Robinson is out of the hospital for the second time:

Each day, I write down a series of small tasks to be performed: Buy groceries, make dinner, twenty pushups, fold the laundry. It seems vulgar to break one’s life down into a series of mundane accomplishments – surely everyone of consequence has lived a continuous and poetic existence, no need for daily goal sheets – but it succeeds in filling the hours so that each one passes relatively smoothly into the next, so maybe I have learned something from my Life Skills Training after all.

There is something heady about being a person who just one week/month/year ago was so ill that I had to be in a mental ward and being the person who can now write a list with a pen on paper and cross items out. It seems mundane, or “vulgar” as Robinson puts it, but appealing nonetheless in the face of potential disruption.

And even when there was no commonality of experience, there was Robinson’s astonishing story-telling skills (and the “he” in this passage is the voice, the demon):

In my room, I face the surrounding walls with the intensity of an FBI agent sizing up a group of murder suspects. But the one will not confess its secret, and the others will not capitulate and give up the fourth wall. There is a charge in the air now that tells me he could say something if he wanted to. This, perhaps, should signal me to take another pill, diffuse the potential. But maybe it’s better to have a mind and an adversary than to be empty and alone. It seems to be a question of Which is Worse from those girly magazines Alexis is so fond of. Hair in your food or food in your hair? To burn alive or suffocate in silence? I don’t remember that one in Seventeen.

I did not stay on the sorts of drugs Robinson was put on for very long, but I do know that so many who have prefer not to take them report that it was better to burn alive than suffocate in silence. People who have never ingested anything like Geodon, Risperdal or Clorazil have no idea how much more preferable it is to be completely mad than to be completely numb, unable to think, living mentally in a block of ice. Such people wonder why those who have severe mental conditions stop taking their medications, as if it is some sort of perversity that makes people choose mental illness over the treatment. But it’s indeed because it is better to have a mind than to be empty.

I think Robinson wholly won me over with this next passage because while it may seem like she is engaging in the sort celebration of mental illness that I find worrisome, she isn’t:

They say that mental problems plague philosophers. John Stuart Mills had a nervous breakdown around my age, and Nietzsche spent most of his twilight in an institution. But maybe this isn’t permanent, just an object lesson of a breakdown. Maybe I can still go to one of those old-fashioned asylums where you write in a journal in a walled garden until you are well enough to join the world. And then I’ll become a thinker, a writer, something of value. I’ll justify my existence somehow.

This is not a trainwreck celebration of the artistic side of mental illness. Rather it is the attempt of a young woman in dire mental straits to find some meaning in what is happening to her, an escape hatch wherein she can find purpose despite her illness. I cringe when people tell me I have an artistic personality because what it means is that I have so many strange mental issues that they assume all my creative endeavors are fueled by my mental tics. The truth is that anything I manage to do I manage in spite of my brain chemicals, not because of them. I may know the mental conditions that plague every artist I admire, but I suspect they justified their existences as well, rather than deifying the chemicals that often interrupted their flow, their fire, their talent.

But as I mention several times throughout this discussion, Robinson is a gifted writer, borne from an astonishing intellect. In this passage, she is speaking to her psychiatrist, Dr. Caspian, who is trying very hard to get her the sort of help he think she needs but she uses her intense intellectualism to process what is happening to her in a disturbing way:

“Well, the other day there was an incident that troubled me. While I was sitting in my philosophy lecture, I was overwhelmed by the certainty that I would truly be able to see if and only if I cut out my eyes. Except don’t worry, I’m not quite that far gone. But he likes vivid images and desires to make them actual. It’s an aesthetic thing, he’s hopeless that way. Yet I’m not sure if it was he or my body itself that willed this action so deeply. It felt obligatory, like I had to do it, as opposed to supererogatory, which is just like a nice thing to do. But it wasn’t so much a matter of deciding what is morally right, but an overwhelming knowledge of what I needed to do next, combined with the physical sensation of being choked by some sinister plant. It reminded me of the categorical imperative, which, um, Immanuel Kant developed as a formula to determine right action.”

This passage is important because this is such a fine example of Robinson’s invitation to understand. Her description of her mind as she discusses the philosophical importance behind the voice telling her to cut out her eyes is… Well, it’s unsettling to see such potential for harm made sense of. Or perhaps this won’t make sense to you and it is a sign of how my mind works that this makes perfect sense to me.

During another argument with the well-meaning Dr. Caspian,Whitney demands to label her experience as she sees fit, even as her brain shows how all over the place she is:

“Yeah, I’ve read Occam too, except you probably haven’t. And to be perfectly confessional, neither have I, but that’s beside the point. I get what he was trying to say: Why posit a demon when some faulty wiring will do the trick? But did you ever notice how fond the great minds are of hypothesizing demons? Nietzsche, Descartes, all those physicists. Supposedly they’re just to illustrate, but with so many diverse sightings, might it not be more parsimonious to make them real? All the hypothetical demons existing in some realm of universal truth, drinking their blood-laced wine and playing dice with the universe?

There is such a thin line between when the disease is fueling her intellect and when her intellect is parsing the disease. And I think this is why Dr. Caspian ultimately decides he cannot treat Robinson and refers her to another doctor. There are not many patients who can analyze themselves so clearly and to a doctor who has seen the ravages of the disease, the inability to corral Robinson’s mind in such a way wherein she relinquishes control of her mind had to have been terrifying to him.

I’ve never much cared for Nietzsche but Robinson finds much truth in him:

My demon offers me the world and in return asks only for my soul, that gemlike point of light we imagine lodged in our meat-based hearts, the only thing that’s every really ours to give. And when I offer this, I will be pure, because what is done for love is always done beyond good and evil.

It’s so tempting to argue with this, isn’t it? But if one of the world’s most revered philosophers’ words can so easily be used to describe the bargain in her fractured mind, what exactly is sane and what is not.

Some of the most compelling writing in this book comes when Robinson shows exactly how schizophrenia affects her. Interestingly, this scene happens on the way home from one of the hospital stays, and again, the “he” is the demon, the voice in her head:

On the ride home, the world passing by the window looks like an alien planet. People walking dogs, chasing taxis, striding along with briefcases and self-important airs. Through a tunnel, I see my face reflected in the glass, pale as a cave-dwelling frog with eerily reflective eyes, unreadable even to myself.

What have I done. What can I say? Unless I’m deceived, the girl’s gone gray.

Tell me you do not speak in rhyme now.

No no only when I’m happy. Veryvery happy. Proudly preening on my pretty perch. Prediction is matching up beautifully with the collapse sequence. Barely a trickblur when laid across one another. You’re destined for great things, softsoftsoft as butter.

My head spins with his bright bursts of repetition, helium pitched and unlike anything I have heard from him. Isn’t he angry?

Angry? Certainly not. His voice regains its knife-edge composure.

You came back to me.

What can you even say to something like this when you know it is not fiction?

Robinson shows also the impact the disease has on her family. Holiday gatherings are strange and strained. Her parents seem almost betrayed by her illness, as if it is a referendum on them that their daughter has mental illness. But most of all she shows the strange guilt that comes from realizing that which you cannot control has the potential to harm those around you.

I’m sorry,” I say finally, my eyes still trained on the unicorn fleeing the urban wreckage. Silken and swift and silver they streak, they have galloped through yesterday into next week…

“Sorry for what?” My mother’s eyes search my body for new signs of damage.

I close my eyes. “Everything.”

They have all disappeared to the back of beyond and into the flowering moment of dawn…

“Do you want me to call Dr Caspian?” says my mother, alarmed because I have probably never apologized for anything before. “Do you need to go back to the hospital?”

“No,” I say, taking a few steps back. “I’m fine.”

Buddhists say that certain souls are incarcerated together into families to force each person to confront lessons unlearned in previous lives. I hope my purpose here is not to teach my parents about the pain of attachment, how all things leave us before we are ready to let them go.

That last paragraph broke my heart a little.

Robinson considers her changed relationship with her parents and the world:

The knowledge that I have become a person with whom it is not safe to be alone is like holding some wicked medieval weapon I don’t know how to use, or want to, but can’t set it down. Once you’ve crossed that line of being a danger-to-self-or-others, are you allowed to come back? Is it a painted traffic line you can cross whenever you’ve got the nerve, or does a razor-rimmed fence spring up behind you as soon as you’ve entered the wrong lane.

Here, at least, they give me an excuse for what I’ve become. They say, your brain is broken. These pills, for as long as you take them, will keep you safe. They are vehement: You must take your medication. Your enrollment in the program is contingent on your cooperation. In theory, I agree. Do whatever you must to maintain order. I’ve violated the social contract in the worst possible way, not in action but in mind and in heart. You’ve earned the right to tinker with my chemicals. More to the point, they have made me slow, unimaginative, too literal to be seduced by demons or other creatures of poetry and dreaming. Indeed, I am closer to being an inanimate object than I have ever been in my life.

Being mentally ill and having it manifest as violence against yourself should not be a sign you are dangerous to others, but it is. My roommate at the hospital, upon learning I had attempted suicide (in a particularly bloodless manner, using pills), said, jokingly I think, that she hoped I was not going to hurt her, too. But I eventually rejected the idea that they had the right to continue to experiment in my brain, especially since their experimentation caused the suicide attempt in the first place. Robinson eventually comes to similar conclusions as she exercises her strong will against the demon and engages in therapy that enables her to cope when the unreality of her disease descends upon her. But this passage of how being mentally ill renders a person thing-like, an entity to be controlled rather than a person helped to live, is an important message to those who have never had to make the choice of whether or not they are such a danger to themselves or others that they may have to become a thing to repair the broken societal bonds, bonds that they never meant to break.

But she also shows so clearly why it is she is, at least in her own mind, someone to be feared as a bond-breaker. Take this scene with Scott, the lab partner whom she likes and who likes her. The demon won’t permit her to have a relationship with Scott and reminds her of the worst fears she has about herself.

No, I will not. I will not give in to you. I will grab his hands and kiss him here in the middle of everything. I will fall into his arms as I lose consciousness, and when I wake up, you will be gone.
His eyes are pretty, aren’t they?
They’d look nice in a bottle of formaldehyde.
You could have them to look at whenever
forever
You’re good with a scalpel.
Scott stares at me in alarm as I stumble and claw ineffectually at the base of my throat. I am sure a tentacle of vine is going to burst through my trachea at any moment, like in that movie.

If you know this is what is happening in your brain with a voice that seems like it knows everything about you, how can you really feel safe?

Later Robinson attends church services, and a young priest performs a mild, church prayer sort of exorcism for her. I wondered for a moment if faith was going to save Whitney from her brain, primitive that I can so often be, even as I claim atheism. I genuinely believed for a moment that this might silence the demon.

I stand stupefied before the the stained glass saints, not even pleading. Agnes, holding her lamb, is serene. In my mind, there are lights shining down on a metallic surface and my scalpel is touching a spongy wad of tissue, trembling because I could not separate it from myself in my mind.

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow, he burbles as I relive the perforation again and innumerable times again.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
I never paid enough attention in Sunday school to know whether it’s faith or grace I lack, but I end my stint as a born-again Christian by throwing a piece of baklava against the side of the church. It hits Saint Agnes between the eyes.

But the failure of the tepid exorcism prayer to expel the voice does not mean it is not a demon. Increasingly, I sense that the demonic is too personal to be absorbed into or dealt with using faith.

But there is something to be said for being open to strange or atypical ideas. Robinson attends an alternative health “expo” and views the crystals and amulets and anti-science methodologies on offer, and comes to the following conclusion:

I’ve heard more coherent worldviews expressed in an actual mental hospital, and the Babel of voices surrounding me has the ring of a hundred false prophets crammed into a room that, next weekend, will be full of computer geeks or sadomasochists or aestheticians. I leave for my shamanic healing an hour later with a rose quartz pyramid, a sample of carrot-mangosteen juice, and three books that promise to tell me what this all means, each filtered through their strange, implausible, and yet not perfectly improbable lenses.

I include this passage mainly because I found it amusing and an excellent example of Robinson’s wit and her capacity to see all kinds of truths even as her rational mind finds it strange. Robinson eventually finds a measure of peace with her condition using Eastern medicine and non-traditional therapeutic methods. The girl who asked a priest to exorcise her is the same young woman who explores all avenues available to her, taking a uniquely strong responsibility for her mental health.

Robinson writes a paper about her experiences with schizophrenia and wins first place in a competition, a feat that many would have found impossible for a person with her disease. She is going to be honored in a ceremony and her parents take her shopping for new clothes.

We go out to dinner afterward, to some restaurant with candles melting down the necks of old wine bottles, and little dishes of withered olives on the table. It seems like a fancy sort of place, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to eating from trays. My parents keep telling me how proud they are, but they look perplexed too. I can’t really blame them, because so am I. What was I thinking? I’ve never told anyone, not even Dr. Caspian, some of the things I put in that paper. When my steak comes, it bleeds red juice onto my plate and I hear malicious laughter sizzling in the hot fat. I look down at the knife in my hand, and suddenly I can’t eat a bit. I’ve made a terrible mistake, letting this thing called desire have its way with me. There’s no telling what it will want next, what kinds of dangerous freedoms it will demand.

I cannot imagine the fear she must have felt. To reenter society. To be the girl who, even after having the mettle to write a paper and win an award, still hears malicious laughter from beef fat has to be terrifying. Just another look into her psyche, a short but meaningful look at the brain of a schizophrenic.

Still, that paper is the beginning of better times for Robinson. She manages to find some stable ground and returns to school and sees Scott, the young man who had been so interested in and concerned for her, with a new girlfriend:

I kept my head down as I passed. The world is full of others, after all, and in the end there is only so much we can explain to them when their eyes are so close to ours and so full of reactions, like chemistry sets changing their color and acidity in response to every word. Everything is changing, changing, falling apart, putting itself back together again. Suddenly I’m afraid, and I want to go home. I want to have a disease, to be exempt. If I said I can’t take this, I can never be one of these bright and normal creatures, if I were to collapse and fetally regress and watch the world pass by from a room that still holds too many mementos of childhood, people would understand. It’s shocking how easily everyone accepts excuses from me now. But after all this it just wouldn’t be a very poetic ending, and I don’t know of any better criteria by which I should determine how to live. So in a fairly inconsequential action that nonetheless requires more of me than anything yet, I enter the room and find a seat among my classmates.

Reentering the fray when those around you may know that you are ill is hard. Everyone, even if they are not kind enough to offer you excuses, certainly will not be surprised if you decide to sit life out. People have an idea of what it means to be mentally ill and it has been informed by film, books and other media that paint the most dramatic picture of people who are afflicted. Bipolar girls in mania rushing about in a delicious haze, broken men at the mercy of Nurse Ratched, Angelina Jolie in a New England psychiatric hospital – all images of the disease as it affects people, but no real story of how people deal with their mental illness. We need more memoirs like Robinson’s. We need more people to tell us exactly what mental illness feels like without all the Hollywood trappings that have been assigned to illness. We need more proof that being ill does not mean one cannot learn, live and move about life, that the cure does not mean that the ill suddenly are well, but rather that even the ill can prosper in their own ways as they find their footing and the treatment that gives them the most hope in their own lives. This was one of the best such memoirs I have ever read, with quiet hope, intellectual resolve and a refusal to pander. I cannot recommend it enough.

Authors: Rodney Perkins and Forrest Jackson

Type of Book: Non-fiction, true crime, cults

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It was a look at the Heaven’s Gate suicide when events were still relatively fresh and mass cult suicide is always a bit strange. The book is also listed as a source in the amazing book Strange Creations by Donna Kossy and would be a honorary odd book on that merit alone.

Availability: Published by Pentaradial Press in 1997, you can get a copy here:

Comments: When I began reading this book I thought there would not be much that was new to me. I had already read quite a bit about the Heaven’s Gate cult, those strange, asexual computer geeks in California who killed themselves en masse to be able to board the spacecraft they were sure was traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet. And in a way, I was correct. The book tells very succinctly the story of how two lost souls – Marshall Applewhite and Betty Lu Nettles – met and fed off each other, creating the New Age death cult that became Heaven’s Gate.

All the details that caught the public’s morbid imagination are there. The androgyny of those who took their lives, the voluntary castrations of some of the men, the presence of Nichelle Nichols’ brother among the suicide victims. It all made for very tawdry television.

The case interested me for a couple of reasons, above and beyond the strange details of the suicide and Art Bell phone call that some believe was the genesis for the belief that there was something following behind the Hale-Bopp comet – later interpreted as a space craft by Heaven’s Gate members. By killing themselves, they thought they would meet up on the space craft with Betty Lu Nettles, who had died, and achieve what they called T.E.L.A.H. – The Evolutionary Level Above Human.   All of that was sort of interesting, but strangely bloodless in a way. The way the cult killed themselves was orderly, calm, and without the sort of horror I associate with mass suicides.

And the calm bloodlessness of it all was actually very fascinating to me because despite knowing that few people who are wholly emotionally sound enter into a cultish situation, and even though the cult took its followers from the their families and held their money, the manner in which these people went to their deaths seems to belie any real coercion or desperation. They died because they genuinely believed they would achieve a better life once they were dead.

I’ve never been one to think that people who kill themselves are cowards or that they owe anyone any explanation as to why they take their lives. Of course, I always hope that people who have mental illnesses that make death seem better than life get help, and I hope that people who find themselves in tough situations decide to ride out the situations and see the other side. But I also think that a person whose mind will not clear and whose body will not heal has the right to die without condemnation. I also think that if people have the belief that there lies beyond this world a far better place for them and they want to go there, it’s not unethical to let them go where they want to be.

I was able to maintain the idea that people should be able to go where they want even if it involves death because Heaven’s Gate was not a heavy recruitment cult. In fact, the book shows that at one point the cult shut down recruitment entirely. So if a suicide cult wants to commit suicide and it’s all adults involved who made the decision to die, however twisted that may seem to more well-adjusted people, I had no problem with it.

Except this book shows the cult engaged in some recruitment that I found decidedly unsettling, that gave me some pause and pretty much wiped away any sense that I could look at the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide the same way. Jackson and Perkins, who pulled together a surprising amount of research about the cult very quickly after the suicides (the bodies were found in March of 1997 and this book was released in July of 1997), got their hands on a really creepy recruitment attempt, a chat log wherein a member of the cult was doing his solid best to get a young man to come and work for the web-development company that funded the cult.  This is important because the cult members all lived together and all worked together.   A job offer was invitation to join the cult.

A chat between a cult member called “CandlShot” and an 18-year-old man named Jason Bolton on IRC was, in retrospect, chilling. CandlShot began by offering Jason some help with his web site and after looking at Jason’s site, begins to praise him and offers him some work. Jason thinks CandlShot is thinking about contract work, but alas no… I’ll reproduce parts of the chat log, and it was creepy beyond all measure, from the sort of language CandlShot used to his refusal to take a hint when Jason shoots him down to his refusal to answer any questions Jason poses. Bold parts mine, and all errors in original:

CandlShot: Do you like what you see?

Jason Bolton: Holy crap… the graphics on here alone are worth money…did you go to school for this?

CandlShot: Not exactly. As I was saying, if you’re interested in work, we may be able to accommodate.

Jason Bolton: Where are you located?

CandlShot: California.

Jason Bolton: Whoa..that is kinda far.

CandlShot: Well, if you agreed to work with us, we would like to have you live here with us, but we could accomodate you where you live. Where do you live?

Jason Bolton: In the COLD state of Michigan, ;)

CandlShot: Actually, if you could no relocate, we are looking for associates in that area.

Jason Bolton: Well, I couldn’t relocate.

CandlShot: That is understandable. However, you can still meet our needs. Do you live with family or friends?

CandlShot: Actually, this is a conversation we should be having over the telephone. May I have your number so I may call you?

Jason Bolton: Um…well…no. You know how it is…you don’t give out your number over the Net, besides…I just met you.

CandlShot: You will not succeed unless you trust. Do you trust me enough to give me a set of numbers?

Jason Bolton: No, I’m afraid I don’t. Sorry… how about this…I’ll call you? I couldn’t talk long, but we could get something done.

CandlShot: No, I’m afraid that we cannot really have calls coming at this time.

Jason Bolton: Well, you can e-mail me

CandlShot: That would be feasible. Your address?

Jason Bolton: xxxxxxxx@xxx.net

CandlShot: Thank you. I’m sorry that you are not more trusting. If we have need of you, we will send you mail.

Jason Bolton: I’m trusting, I just know the rules on here.

CandlShot: If you must follow rules..

Jason Bolton: Dude, I don’t have time for this. If you were serious, you’d understand my reluctance. Beside it seems as if you guys do far better work than I.

CandlShot: we would teach you what you would need to know, and make you far more productive than you expect yourself to be.

CandlShot: but I’m afraid I must go. It has been a pleasure. Take care.

Man, this is twitchy stuff. Very twitchy, and all the more so because CandlShot was so robotic. It puts the cult into a different perspective realizing that they did engage in blind recruitment (or relatively blind since CandlShot did at least know Jason was a computer whiz of sorts and might have the sort of mindset that would make people fit into the cult).  CandlShot tried his best to find out about the kid’s home situation, tried to make the kid feel like a hide-bound rule follower for not giving out his number and revealed little about himself in the process.  It’s one thing when a disenfranchised person seeks out a cult. It’s another when a cult is preying on teenagers online.

The book also looks into the Heaven’s Gate cult toward the end, when all the members adopted extreme androgyny and were planning their deaths. The cult’s food habits and movie selection were… also unsettling. This book ended up far creepier than I expected.

This is a short book, 128 pages with the appendices and index, but it offers more than just an overview into the cult and the lives of many who lived and died in the cult. A fast read, it was one of the first books about the cult suicide and in spite of its brevity, it gives a complete look at the cult and for a novice looking into the Heaven’s Gate cult, this book is the best place to start. Highly recommended.

Author: Donna Kossy

Type of Book: Non-fiction, aliens, bad science, utter insanity, conspiracy theory, evolutionary theory, whacked theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: AQUATIC APES!

Availability: Published by Feral House in 2001, it appears to be out of print, but you can still get a copy here:

Comments: I know absolutely nothing about Donna Kossy aside from the fact that she clearly revels in bizarre ideas and has more knowledge on the topic of strange people and crackpotology than I can safely absorb in one sitting. Just reading the bibliography for this book was vaguely exhausting. I have extraordinary respect for anyone who has read Helena Blavatsky from cover to cover, even if it was abridged. I have similar respect for anyone who managed to make it through Atlas Shrugged in one go. Such people are made of sturdier stuff than I am.

I wanted to read this book because it discusses one of my all-time favorite whacked theories, that of the aquatic ape. As I read, I discovered an entire world of bizarre, unique, unnerving and upsetting theories of the way humans evolved or came to be. In fact, this book made it look easy, reading such dense and lunatic theories and making sense of them, that it was the inspiration for my now-aborted “Alien Intervention Week.” As much as I love the strange, I have my limits.

But Kossy is an intrepid woman and possesses not only the skills to make the most extreme idea accessible to her readers, but is a writer skilled in revealing the humanity and humor in some of these beliefs. I will admit I never want to read the phrase “root race” ever again, but aside from that, I found the surveys of belief in this book fascinating and utterly readable. I was disappointed when, after a search on Amazon, I realized Kossy has only written two books and I already own the other, entitled Kooks. I comfort myself that even though there is no more Kossy for me to read, she led me to some superb and lunatic books. I will totally be discussing Behold!!! the Protong here at some point.

Chapter one begins by discussing that topic which so utterly thwarted me when I set out on my own: alien invaders shaping the Earth. Her distillation of the the topic made it seem very accessible, though it is an incredibly dense read. Because he was the most unknown to me, I was very interested in her discussion of Zecharia Sitchin‘s ideas. His ideas, riffed on by Paul Von Ward, seemed very intriguing to me but after slogging through Von Ward, I am unsure when I am going to be able to stomach Sitchin in an entire book. But despite how daunting he seems, Kossy cut his strange interpretations down into small, easily chewed bites.

Since the first specimens of Homo sapiens were created as hybrids – like mules – they were infertile. It was only through genetic engineering that our ancestors were given two sets of sex cells so that they could reproduce. This is what the story of Adam and Eve is about. In the story, eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a symbol for the primeval pair’s newfound ability to reproduce.

And that is what is so tantalizing about this for me, because I cannot get enough of alternate history (most of the time). But Kossy has no problem calling a spade a spade and is less amused by Sitchin and writers like him than I am.

Obviously, Sitchin’s popularity comes not from the strength of his arguments. He’s more concerned with “proving” his alternative history by bending the available evidence than altering his theory to fit the facts. Like von Däniken, he has tapped into the imagination of the popular mind which is disillusioned and distrustful of hard science, even while embracing many of its accomplishments.

Ironically, Sitchin’s interpretations of myth are embedded in a stubborn materialism usually identified with science. To Sitchin, myths don’t depict anything spiritual or intangible at all; they depict only hard, historic events. Ea wasn’t the god of wisdom, he was the god of mining. Though Sitchin’s conclusions seem imaginative, they stem from a lack of imagination shared with some fundamentalists, an inability to connect with the cosmos and its mysteries in any but the most literal way.

This was not a perspective I would likely have considered without Kossy pointing out the obvious. Because even as I am charmed by this strangeness, it very definitely mirrors some of the more detestable elements of fundamentalist religious interpretation. I still find it exotic and very interesting, but I didn’t really see the complete lack of intellectual subtlety until Kossy had pointed it out.

The next chapter covers de-evolution and was fun, fun, fun to read for this former SubGenius:

Broadly speaking, de-evolution – the idea that humanity is in a decline, be it spiritual or physical – is a universal concept, common throughout history and among diverse culture. According to historian J.B. Bury, the modern notion of “progress,” from which sprouted the theory of evolution, is a historical anomaly. Diverse peoples through the ages more often viewed life and history cyclically, with humanity sliding down the declining arc of the cycle.

[...]

With the veneration of antiquity goes the denigration of the present.

Simple enough.

But never fear, Kossy takes a look at those who have made the theory of man’s degeneration their life’s work. But then again, maybe you should be afraid because part of it involves Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. I cannot even begin to tell you how tiresome I find HPB and Theosophy in general but Kossy explains well and in a manner that doesn’t necessitate clawing out my eyes:

In Blavatsky’s cyclic version of Earth history, humanity proceeded through seven “Root-Races” on seven primeval continents, each Root-Race representing a step down – spiritually – from that which preceded it. In the process, matter attempted to triumph over spirit, but failed, and humanity both “evolved” and de-evolved.

During the first epoch, lasting millions of years, a race of immortal giants with ethereal bodies lived in the Imperishable Sacred Land at the North Pole. The second race – giant androgynous semi-humans – resulted from the first attempt at material nature; they lived on a continent called Hyperborea, south of the North Pole. The third race represented the “fall of man” because they were divided into two sexes; they lived during the Golden Age, 18 million years ago, when the “gods walked on Earth and mixed freely with mortals” on the continent of Lemuria. The fourth race lived on Atlantis, and the fifth, called “Aryans,” lived in Europe. Two more races are supposed to follow before the end of this cycle or “Round.”

So yeah, this makes perfect sense on every level and there’s nothing to discuss, really. However, you know that when you read the word “Aryan,” in nine contexts out of ten it’s not gonna be good, and since it’s been at least two decades since I was foolhardy enough to try to read Blavatsky, I don’t recall how overtly racist she was. Doesn’t matter that much because she has all the key words. Where there are references to degenerate men and the North (or in some cases South) Pole, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to repellent racist theories:

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829) first used the term “Aryan” to denote an aristocratic race of ancient Indians, purportedly the ancestors of the Germans. Thus some of the early freethinkers who rejected the biblical Eden replaced it with an Asian one, populated by Aryans. The Aryan myth, which developed during the first half of the nineteenth century, was first embraced by the German Romantics, then by Theosophists and occultists, and later, by the Nazis.

It goes on further:

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), founder of “Ariosophy,” was among many in pre-Nazi Germany who adhered to more esoteric versions of the Aryan myth. Calling the Aryan homeland Arktogaa, which is Greek for “nothern earth,” von Liebenfels taught that non-Aryans were the result of bestiality between the ancient Aryans and beasts. One of his disciples lectured that humanity was the result of a forbidden mixture of angels and animals and used the Bible to back it up. Each race, he said, represented a different percentage of angel and beast, the Aryans coming out on top, with one percent angel.

Yeah, nothing says de-evolution like angel-animal hybrids.

And we sink further down into the sewer:

The Nazis adopted their Aryan myth from Alfred Rosenberg, author of the 1930 best-seller Myth of the 20th Century, and through the revisionist science of Herman Wirth. In his 1928 book, The Rise of Mankind, Wirth wrote that humanity began at the North Pole, having split from the apes millions of years ago. After shifting continents and poles made the nether regions uninhabitable, the Arctic Aryan wandered South. The remnants of Aryan high culture survive to this day only in the blind, bearded Eskimos found by the Danish “Thule Expedition” of Knud Rasmussen. Implicit in all of these stories is the idea that much of present humanity has degenerated (for various reasons such as mixing with Jewish blood) from its former superiority and purity. Only Aryans retained the former glory.

Kossy goes on to discuss the works of the man who, after Nietzsche, is most quoted by “racialists” and those who attempt to give their racism a tinge of intellectualism: Julius Evola. I cannot even bring myself to discuss him because I have spent far too much time in my life talking to people for whom Evola is a god, whose writings are a means by which they can assign their race hate an esoteric definition and therefore rarefy their motives. I tire of such things these days. That’s largely why I find little interest in most origin stories, from the Bible to evolution. Sometimes it seems like even the kindest mind is able to take an origin story and twist it into evidence of his or her superiority.

So with the above stated, let’s just skip chapter three, wherein the Bible, the Koran and elements of evolution are used to prove that blacks and Jews are the devil, that Caucasians are the devil and people from Asia and Africa are closely linked to simians, which means they are not godly and are therefore the devil. Yeah…

I almost don’t want to discuss the next chapter on eugenics but there were elements of this chapter that were new to me. For example, I had always attributed the phrase “survival of the fittest” to Darwin, when it was really Herbert Spencer, a Darwinist philosopher, who created the phrase. I wonder how many of the Tea Party quasi-Libertarians with their heavy reliance on the Bible would respond if they realized that much of their tenets were shared by an evolution proponent (politics, strange bedfellows, etc.):

To Spencer, biological evolution implied moral progress. “Progress,” he wrote, “is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the embryo or the unfolding of a flower.” Thus, the state was foolish in supporting welfare for the poor and diseased, tampering with the natural process of evolution. Instead, the unfit should be eliminated: “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better.”

And it goes in a similar but uncomfortable vein. But then Kossy discusses the Oneida Community, which I had heard of before but not in any detail, and it was utterly fascinating. The brainchild of John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida Community was a commune of sorts in New York. Based on bits and pieces of the Bible, the commune practiced “complex marriage” (which reads to me like a strange way for the middle-aged and older to prey sexually on the young but perhaps there is more to it than that) and “Stirpiculture,” which was a form of selective breeding. The whole thing was bizarre, with couples having to seek permission to have sex, male continence and in the mid-1800s, the commune produced 58 children, all of whom presumably were scientifically superior to kids whose parents didn’t practice eugenics.

Interestingly, the superior children the Oneida Community claimed to have produced (who were called “stirps”), were likely better off because of the child-centric mindset under which they were conceived. Sadly, the community disbanded before any real scientific measure could be made of the children produced with “barnyard ethics.”

Then the chapter on eugenics takes a dark turn and we move from positive eugenics, wherein people breed with an eye to excellent offspring, to negative eugenics, wherein those considered unsuitable are prevented from reproducing and in extreme cases are killed off entirely. The usual “academic” studies are mentioned, including the Jukes and Kallikak family, which led “to the public crusade against what became known as the ‘Menace of the Feebleminded.’” But then it exploded into the belief that things adults engaged in, aside from the obvious ringers like drinking when pregnant, could make them a potential threat not to just the moral fiber of the country but the overall genetic health of the nation. After urging the youth of 1920s America to avoid victims of VD and the mentally retarded as their spouses, the advice just got more icky, as psychiatrists were sure that masturbation was “one of the great causes of insanity.” So you’d have to be sure to avoid masturbators, too. Good luck with that.

As I read chapter four, I had a hard time understanding how it was that eugenics could be considered an origin theory. Kossy cleared that up for me:

Indeed, many scientists, educators and authors believed in eugenics with a religious faith: they replaced Jesus Christ with Charles Darwin, brotherly love with better breeding, and the Second Coming of Christ with the prospect of a perfect race. Though many mainstream clergymen – especially Catholics – bristled at this new religion, some accepted, and some even embraced it. In 1926 the American Eugenics Society sponsored a eugenics sermon contest. Three hundred sermons of various denominations were inspired by the contest, and 60 were submitted for judging. Protestants reinterpreted the Bible as a eugenics book, claiming that Jesus was born into a family resulting from “a long process of religious and moral selection.” Jews accepted eugenics as just another commandment of God: as one Rabbi put it, “May we do nothing to permit our blood to be adulterated by infusion of inferior grade.”

And of course, as it does with all origin theories, it breaks down into an us versus them wherein people decided they were the best example of genetic purity, aligning themselves with racial ideals of racial superiority, with some interesting and borderline humorous results. Kossy quotes from the 1937 book Apes, Men & Morons by Ernest Hooton, who attended a genetics conference to hear speak a man whom he had never met but was evidently one of the best examples of the Nordic race:

From my obscure and remote table of uncelebrities, I peered myopically to catch a glimpse of this dolichocephalic, blond Viking who was to embody the physical, intellectual, and scientific ideals of the “Great Race.” At first I got the elevation of my sight too high and saw no one standing at the speaker’s table except the blandly smiling president who had made the eloquent introduction. Then I heard sounds of broken English, and, lowering my gaze a foot or two, I was able to discern its source. It was a sawed-off, rotund person with a head round as a bullet, black hair, a blobby nose and a face reminiscent of the full moon – in short, the complete Alpine. I thereupon decided that every man is his own Nordic, and I am afraid that I leaped to the conclusion that eugenics is a lay form of ancestor worship…

And anyone who has ever been sucked into the practice of Asatru can holler a hearty, “Amen!”

From there we slide into Hitler, Mengele, Nazis, Nazis, Nazis… Yep, almost all origin myths seem to result in genocide. That’s why I so love the Aquatic Ape theory because as of this writing, it has only resulted in anti-Aquatic Ape smuggery and nary an instance of race hate. But for now, let’s have a look at chapter five. Creationism.

Sigh… Yeah, yeah, dinosaurs and man walked together. The Earth is 6,000 years old. I have little sympathy or affinity for those who espouse this utter bullshit but Kossy explains them in a manner I would find impossible:

Today’s fundamentalists seek to convince themselves and others that their conception of natural history which relies entirely on a literalistic reading of one sacred text – is consistent with current observations of the world – and they’ll do anything to defend it. Rather than endure a soul-testing crisis of faith, fundamentalists prefer to think that their creation myth is somehow different from all the other creation myths in the world. It’s unique, it’s literally true, and what’s more, it’s scientific.

Kossy then goes on to discuss that various amounts of science that these creationists, mainly Christian, have to ignore or warp in order to ensure their version of events remains true to them.

There was not a lot that was new for me but there were some issues that are of concern for those of us who have been standing on the sidelines as pseudoscience has been taking more and more ground in public discourse and education:

The scientists slowly noticed that science education was under attack, and have been actively combating the creationists ever since. While the Tennessee law challenged by Scopes forbidding the teaching of evolution was obviously a draconian measure, the legislation introduced by creationists in the ’80s looks much more benign. All they want, they say, is “equal time.” If you teach evolution, they argue, then to be fair, the public schools should also teach creation. By this argument, the Aquatic Ape theory, various alien intervention theories, de-evolution, and countless creation myths and alternative theories of evolution should also be given “equal time” in the classroom. “Equal time,” in fact, is just a device creationists use to ensure their own voices are heard over the threatening sounds of secularism they hear in the schools, on television, and at the movies.

I would go further to say that equal time is a ploy wherein creationists hope to replace all other theories with their own – that’s why the Aquatic Ape theory is not taught because it’s not about equal time. It’s about wriggling into the system and eliminating all other educational options. And it’s worked. In the face of all reason, it has worked, and even though evolutionists and scientists have worked hard to dissuade the public from adopting methods of pseudoscience, it seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Explaining the subtleties of current evolutionary theory to people who get their history from docudramas and their science from the Discovery Channel isn’t easy; evolutionists might do better if they simply accused creationists of molesting children.

It rankles people to read this, to realize that this is all boiling down to a lowest common denominator argument. But people who don’t see creationism as dim should realize that creationists do, in fact, appeal to emotion and poor thinking and analysis skills.

The creationists want to have it both ways: when defending creationism, it’s just a matter of philosophy, but when attacking evolution or demanding “equal time” in science education, it’s a matter of scientific evidence. The authors are chained to Scripture, but refuse to admit it.

But it gets far worse than just engaging in spurious reasoning. Some creationists take it to that next, repellent level.

But fossils that turn out to be genuine after all are not allowed as evidence for evolution, but instead “might well represent disease or degeneracy.” And if that argument doesn’t convince you to abandon evolution, try this one: evolution causes racism. “It is important to recognize,” say the authors, “that racism in its virulent forms is mainly a product of evolutionary thinking,” because even recent history can be shaped to fit the creationist mold…

Then the name Hitler is invoked and it goes downhill from there.

But the hell of it is, in some respects the creationists are right. Of course racism existed long before Darwin came onto the scene and the existence of the Christian Identity movement show that Christians don’t really have clean hands. But all creation theory lends itself so well to this sort of thinking.

The creation chapter, like all the others, descends into a look at some fascinating and completely lunatic methods of proving the Earth was made by some divine creator. Reinterpretations of time as it is presented in the Bible. Genesis denizens in space. Proof positive dinosaurs walked the Earth alongside men. Some of it is amusing, some of it is horrible, but all of it is interesting.

And finally we reach chapter six and can discuss AQUATIC APES. I have no idea why I love this theory so much but there you go. Life is strange. One day I will discuss the book, The Aquatic Ape. Until then Kossy’s take on the book will have to suffice. Anyway, Elaine Morgan, a feminist writer, came up with the Aquatic Ape theory and perhaps one of the reasons I love this theory so much, other than just how awesome it feels to say AQUATIC APE over and over again is because the theory, at first glance, seems so reasonable.

Its ideas were irresistible. The Aquatic Ape turned out to be one of those books – one of those theories – that fits everything together so well you feel it just has to be true. For weeks after reading, I pondered the theory. Soon I found myself preaching the gospel of the Aquatic Ape to my friends.

That was more or less my experience. Of course, after a while reality sets in and holes in the theory become apparent, but there are holes in all theories so I didn’t get as hung up on them as I perhaps should have. Regardless, AQUATIC APES is the most charming, inoffensive origin theory I’ve been exposed to in about 15 years or so.

So here’s the Aquatic Ape theory (AAT):

The Aquatic Ape theory observes that various human traits, such as bipedality, speech, lack of body hair, subcutaneous (under the skin) fat, weeping, face-to-face copulation and sweating are unique among primates and therefore hard to account for by conventional theories of human evolution. But if humanity was at one time aquatic or semi-aquatic, these traits could be easily explained. The AAT tells us that we share many traits with aquatic mammals which we don’t share with our closer relatives, the primates. Therefore, says the AAT, we acquired those traits in an aquatic environment. The beauty of this theory is that is seems to solve, in one fell swoop, all the mysteries of human uniqueness. It’s also championed by a skilled writer, unencumbered by the stringent guidelines of scientific research.

Yep, Elaine Morgan was no scientist. She was not an anthropologist, but rather she was a feminist writer, and from my perspective, the whole AAT was a feminist reaction to a lot of evolutionary theory that was macho-man oriented that didn’t have a whole lot to back it up. Kossy was on the same page as me. Observe:

The Aquatic Ape began as an essentially female version of human evolution, an antidote to what Elaine Morgan then called “The Mighty Hunter” – a brutish ape-man who used to dominate popular stories of human evolution. The Aquatic Ape, by contrast, emerges from the sea, like Venus or an aquatic Madonna-and-child. Some of the appeal of the AAT might stem from Morgan’s depictions of what is essentially a mother goddess.

Before Morgan presented her take on the AAT, a British marine biologist called Alister Hardy presented the idea and it even has a mention in Desmond Morris’ The Naked Ape. But it was not until Morgan infused the theory with her feminist challenge to male-dominated theories of evolution that the AAT really got its controversial legs.

Riffing off Hardy’s ideas and adding her own interpretations, Morgan postulated that resource scarcity forced early hominids from the forest out into the savannah. These hairy apes found life hard and were often fodder for predators. Then one day, a former tree-climbing ape carrying her child fled into water to escape a quadruped predator and thus became the progenitor to aquatic apes. Fleeing into the water when in danger caused these hairy apes to undergo the same evolutionary changes that oceanic mammals underwent – becoming more hairless, developing subcutaneous fat, among others. Standing in the water aided walking erect posture and having to spend long periods of time in the water caused the apes’ fingers to become more dexterous and led to effective tool use. But one of the reasons why this theory was so compelling to me was how Morgan took Hardy’s assumptions and added her own in her book, The Descent of Woman:

Hardy had explained hair on the aquatic ape’s head as protection from the sun while wading, but Morgan explained it as a way for the aquatic ape baby to cling to its otherwise naked mother… This also explained male baldness because “in communities where the males took no part in the bringing up of the offspring, there would be nothing to prevent their heads going bald as their bodies…”

She later refined these ideas in The Aquatic Ape and The Scars of Evolution. The media and the general public rather liked the AAT but the academic and scientific communities were not impressed, almost universally dismissing it.

Much of the chapter deals with scientists discussing the AAT and proving that it is false, that the fossil record does not support it, and Morgan insisting that the fossil record does, in fact, support her theory. Frankly, as a non-scientist I tend to think the fossil record does not support the AAT as the bulk of the examples of hominids walking erect were found in dry places, whereas if Morgan was correct, we would expect to find them near the water. But reading that Kossy, a writer who clearly has more discipline than I do, found the theory as embraceable as I did when I first read about it, makes me want to get all of Morgan’s books and read them in sequential order and see what I think once I am finished.

Chapter seven was sort of a trashcan chapter, with all the odd origin theories that could not fit into the proceeding chapters. Kossy called these the “aberrant anthropologies” and begins with the strange anthropology found in The Urantia Book. Those of you who are debunkers or fans of the late Martin Gardner may find the name Urantia rings a bell. The Urantia believers, whom I have to give their due for slogging through that brick of a book (over 2000 pages), believed William Sadler channeled space aliens in his sleep. There’s a whole lot more to it but just know that the Urantia theory was a strange Seventh Day Adventist shoot off that included some members of the Kellogg family and theories of eugenics as appalling as all the others discussed in this book. Add in some alien intervention urging human kind via the sleep trances of William Sadler to achieve racial purity and it’s just bleah all over again. I think the section on Urantia was most notable because the followers in this weird cult were puritanical in their approach to life and their work ethic and nothing in their lives seemed like it was the least bit enjoyable.

This chapter also discusses the Heaven’s Gate cult, the group of mild and meek cultists who believed the mothership was coming for them behind the Hale-Bopp comet. They committed suicide en masse in California in 1997 and an appalled nation got all kinds of unseemly details as we learned most of the men had castrated themselves.

But the best part of this chapter was the section that dealt with Stanislav Szukalski. Oh good lord, this small section of a very involved book just revved up that part of my brain that loves the strange but has no desire to engage in dogma. Szukalski, I suspect, is perfect for my undisciplined mind because he is less strange religion than he is rogue ideas filtered through the brain of a genius or madman. Szukalski was a Polish artist who emigrated to America and became friends with people like Clarence Darrow and Sherwood Anderson. His return to Poland to create art for the goverment was cut short when Poland was invaded during WWII, forcing Szukalski to return to the United States, where he begin to refine his theory, researching languages and archaeology.

Szukalski’s origin theory involves humans, apes, and de-evolution but is still somehow wholly unique in its own bizarre right:

According to Szukalski, our blood has already been mixed; not with inferior human blood but with that of apes – human history is the story of the struggle between the true humans and the a-human Yetinsyny, who even now live among us in human society. They speak our language and they sometimes even take over our nations, but a few of their physical features give them away as the gluttonous anthropoids they are.

During his studies of language in California, he made a major discovery:

His studies of pictographs and illustrations of archaeological finds culminated in the discovery of what he called “Protong,” or the “proto-tongue.” Protong, claimed Szukalski, is the mother of all languages, a pictographic language common to all cultures before the Tower of Babel.

He died not long after he wrote up his theories and his works were discovered by underground artists who exhibited his art and published his treatise on “Zermatism,” the science that evidently explains all of his theorizing.

Szukalski’s belief that humans had been sexually mixed with violent, rapacious apes, can be seen illustrated throughout history. To him, the Greek god Pan was an ape variant that raped women. Some of the ape women were seductive enough to attract men and the offspring of these interspecies unions have ruined the world, creating a de-evolving race that is overwhelmed by war and strife. (Also, please note the random capitalizations. That is a sign of quality in crackpotology.)

Szukalski enthusiastically identifies the descendants of these couplings by such traits as an “undercut nose,” long upper lip, long torso, short upper arm, wart nose, pot belly, and sometimes even a tail. These bastards typically end up as dictators, political subversives, and communist agents in all nations. Their compulsive opposition to human decency is the cause of all our troubles, past, present and future…

[...]

According to Szukalski, these Yetinsyny, once identified, should never be allowed to enter politics or the the military service, for they are “devoid of all the genteel traits of [humanity] but retained all the avaricious, vengeful, ferocious traits.” They only enter public service “for the purpose of attaining positions that allow them to gloat in Vengeance for their obsessive psychosis of Inferiority.” And there they bide their time until they get a chance to “exterminate Handsome mankind by the millions.” Politically dangerous Yeti have lately included such historically influential characters as Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Nietzsche, Bakunin and Kropotkin.

Behold!!! The Protong contains many of Szukalski’s drawings and his theory, Zermatism. I have it on my shelves, ordered after reading this book. I hope I get to read and discuss it sooner than later.

Kossy’s book, aside from simply being an entertaining read, was important for me because it ultimately showed me why my innate atheism is the only rational choice I have. I have often wondered why it is that, given my predilection for lunacy, I have never been able to embrace for long any of the ideas that so enthrall me. I can dip my toe in the water but I can never go for a swim, and in my attempts to find some truth, I have tried to open my mind to ideas uplifting and despicable, but none ever stuck. I had always been able to see the threads that run common in all the major religions, but I couldn’t see the common threads in the more crackpot ideas that I, by all rights, should have adopted by now.

Perhaps I knew it subconsciously, but Kossy lines up clearly for me, all the commonalities. Alien intervention, eugenics, race hate, rampaging apes, bizarre castes of human existence – it seems that with the exception of the AAT, all of these origin stories wove at least two of the above threads into tapestries that ultimately do not look that much different from each other. With so many common elements, it’s clearer to me why I, a borderline lunatic, have never completely descended into solidly odd beliefs. I find all the offerings at the crackpot buffet to have come from the same cookbook.

But as much as I cannot embrace the bizarre, these ideas that Kossy examines puts into perspective the less strange creations on the landscape. With precision, a love of the strange yet with a distance that enables her to dissect and analyze dispassionately, Kossy’s book is a masterpiece of crackpot beginnings and crazy origin theories. I highly recommend this book and hope that when you read it, you come back and tell me the origin theory that made you log onto Amazon and order a book so you could find out more. Then mourn with me that we have only the two books from this writer.

Author: Adam Parfrey

Type of Book: Non-fiction, conspiracy theory, history, sociology, pop culture

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, the cover was pretty much a dead giveaway, what, with the David Koresh angel of justice drawing. But then you factor in that Adam Parfrey, owner of Feral House and an all-around-odd-content kind of guy, wrote most of the articles in the book and you’ve got an odd book on your hands.

Availability: Published by Feral House in 1995, it’s out of print, but you can still get a copy relatively cheaply online:

Comments: Lord a’mercy, I love books like this. I love these sort of collections of whacked culture, weird theories and weird people. If you’ve read Apocalypse Culture or Apocalypse Culture II, you have a good handle on what to expect from this book, though I sensed a healthy amount of snark from time to time. Or maybe I was just projecting my own snark. But even if there was not any snark, it was still a fun, entertaining book.

Over 15-years-old at this writing, much of the book could seem dated to a person who needs to be up-to-date on their high weirdness and occult-goings-on. Luckily, I need no freshness when it comes to topics odd. But even taking into account the relatively dated elements of some of these articles, this collection was informative, interesting, saddening, silly, funny and in some respects quite disgusting.

So, to make it easy on myself, I’m just gonna discuss the articles in the order they occur, but I will group the ones that left me with literally nothing to discuss at the end. I think my verbosity where certain articles are concerned may be a very good look at my id at the moment. Clearly harmless crazies, Nazis, gross people and certain areas of feminist thought incite my love of typing.

The first article, The Gods Must Be Crazy: The Latter Days of Unarius, discusses the delightful apocalyptic cult led by Ruth Norman, aka The Archangel Uriel. Ruth always reminded me of Mrs. Slocombe from Are You Being Served? with an irritating, mystic edge to her. Despite the fact that Ruth died in 1993, the cult still limps along today. If you know about this cult and you aren’t a complete loon like me, it’s likely because the group was a popular topic during the talk show explosion in the early 90s. The Unarians channel aliens and think they have a line on a new way of looking at science, with all the usual attendant failed prophecies but since both of the founders, Ruth Norman and her husband, are dead, it doesn’t creep me out as a mass suicide waiting to happen. But this article discusses the cult during the time when the fickle sun of the media was shining on them but before the Internet made it easy to know every detail about every wacky cult out there. They were still pretty exotic at the time of Parfrey’s writing.

I entered this article thinking I had nothing new to learn and I was proven wrong, but then again, I had never really ventured past the outer layer of Unarius’ weirdness because these channeling cults bore me (because the Lemurians, ancient spirits, Atlanteans, Ramtha and all the others seem to say the same things, so why bother?). All I knew really was that the Unarians were a bunch of channelers who talked to the dead and gave their beliefs a patina of respectability via pseudoscience. So while I did not know that Ruth liked to engage in past life psychodramas, the whole of the insanity of it should not have surprised me. Yet I was surprised and a little amused but mostly appalled in that way you are appalled when your right wing lunatic relatives talk about race relations over Thanksgiving dinner. I searched the Internet for a sample of her psychodramas, specifically the one called The Ballad of Annabelle Lee, because Parfrey describes it as being “the kind of project that would make John Waters green with envy.” Alas, I could only find it on sites for weird film, available for trade, and I don’t have enough time left in my life to deal with video traders, so let me share what Parfrey described, because hoo boy, is this some horrible, wonderful crap.

Let me set the scene: A man in black face and in pillow-stuffed drag to make him look like a black Mammy caricature called Nell is caring for his/her young charge, Annabelle. Two other women in black face are flitting about as well. Annabelle is played by a 75-year-old Ruth Norman.

“Today’s the big day,” announced Nell. “Miss Annabelle Lee is goin’ a courtin’ on the riverboat!”

“Oh, Miss Annabelle,” coos the mammy, “you always my beautiful girl. You got mo’ beaus up and down the Mississippi than anyone cans hake a stick at.

“What’s all that commotion, Nell?” cries Annabelle, the most ancient ingenue to fill out bloomers and hoop skirt. “I’m sleepy!”

“Miss Annabelle must be tired, tryin’ on all dose dresses and wigs all day long!”

A banjo twangs a Stephen Foster tune which inspires Miss Annabelle to go all misty-eyed as she heart-to-hearts with her faithful servant. “It is said, Nell, they don’t treat you black people on the riverboat like I do — and you might have to take lodging down below, way down below.”

“Miss Annabelle, you treats us black folks, so good, so good!”

“God loves all God’s chilluns!” replies Annabelle profoundly, a beatific smile on her face.

And it just gets worse from there. Annabelle’s Nell is forced to swab the deck by a Simon Legree type, Annabelle somehow drowns and Nell is hanged for a crime she didn’t commit. Later, in comments after the film, Ruth babbles in complete defiance to the facts laid out in the film, indicating that Nell had murdered her. But beneficent Annabelle doesn’t blame Nell for the senseless murder:

“Nell loved me so,” reasons Uriel. “She would never have deliberately hurt me. I was born the same time as one of Nell’s daughters, but she gave more attention to me than her own little pickaninny.”

Yeah, this psychodrama was filmed in the early 1980s but even then this had to have sounded racist and completely insane. And this scene pretty much explains why you should never obtain religious beliefs from anyone who claims they spoke to otherwordly beings the rest of us can’t see because chances are they are going to be more than a little crazy and if you ever regain any self-awareness, you will be horribly embarrassed by the shit you engaged in. All in all, an amusing article about a largely harmless but clearly batshit cult.

From Russia, With Love: The Business of Mail-Order Brides also suffers a bit from the passage of time but when it was written, I don’t know if the idea of mail-order brides had been explored so much by media, and if they were, much of the focus was on South America or the Far East. Recent cases of murdered Russian “internet order” brides have brought full-force to the media this bizarre tradition of eschewing us American bitch harpies for more compliant women from the former Soviet nations. The stories were grotesque, sickening and salacious. I ultimately don’t resent how any person obtains happiness in this life, but as an American woman who is pretty certain that Russian women aren’t really that different than me aside from the economic climate in which they live, I knew Parfrey and I were going to be on the same page before I ever even read the article. From the intro:

My interviews with the American boors in the market for a Russian sex slave revealed themselves as victims of an inferiority complex. The interviewees embodied the Reichian “Little Man” — prone to psychological overcompensation by securing women they can easily dominate.

The men in Parfrey’s article had to pore over photos printed on paper rather than viewing pictures online, but they more or less followed the same procedure those who want to obtain a foreign bride use today: use an agency that tries to pair off single American men with women in Russia made desperate by economic privation. Some of these agencies have the best interests of both parties involved but even the best operate with the profit motive as the main objective, and woman are a cattle-like commodity to be selected by the more feminine human equivalents of checking their teeth and hooves.

Okay, my vague disgust isn’t so vague but Parfrey’s article doesn’t have to work hard to show the repellent natures and shady motives of the men who were seeking these women. On Russian women with children:

Does the fact that she has a child phase [sic] you?

“Yeah. I mean, that doesn’t bother me. As a matter of fact, that would probably be a safer bet than having a single gal come over here that has no kids, you know.

Safer? In what way?

“With no kids, she might be inclined to wander.”

These are the words of an American pilot with a spare tire around his middle and a couple of American girlfriends who are baffled by him.

Here’s a charmer who is explaining his desire to import a bride:

“See, we spoil them in this country. They all are looking for their superman, so to speak. They see tv, they see Kevin Costner, they see the heroes there. They’re quite demanding, and there’s so many people it’s easy come, easy go. If you’re one of the few who have very wonderful endowments, you’re okay. It’s difficult in a sense that I’m past my prime. It gets harder and harder to compete and you have to put up with so much stuff. The thing about this country, even if they’re Gravel Gerties they’ll make demands.”

Yeah, I had to look up “Gravel Gertie.” This is a middle-aged man whom Parfrey describes as being bird-like in appearance. He had initially sought a wife via a Scandinavian agency but found the women not to his liking because evidently only tall, leggy blondes get his motor running. But given that Scandinavia as a whole beats the hell out of the USA in terms of quality of life, those who wanted an American husband didn’t suit his tastes as they were not the “quality” he had been led to expect from Sweden. I guess only the Gravel Gerties in Scandinavia wanted out.

I don’t know if I ever have read an article wherein the author didn’t even have to do anything other than let the interviewees hang themselves with their own words. Actually, Parfrey is a master of this, of letting people’s words stand for themselves, though often he cannot resist adding some of his own snark from time to time. And given some of the people he interviews, who can blame him.

The Devil and Andrea Dworkin was one I looked forward to reading as I knew it had been featured in the infamous “Rape” issue of ANSWER Me!. Though Parfrey apologizes in his intro for equating mainstream feminism with Dworkin’s extremist stances, and I appreciate it, the fact is that so many people, mostly men, who want to denigrate elements of feminism look to Dworkin as their go-to-girl, as if her polemics about men are in any way a good view of the female struggle for equitable and, in some cases, merciful treatment in the modern world. But the fact is that the older I get, the less of a shit I give about any philosophy because the binary nature of American politics has ensured any thought is an either/or proposition and that all conversation, especially online, becomes a nasty clusterfuck of shouting everyone down.

But this article, if you bear in mind that Parfrey has already copped to his “lazy, misogynist assumption” equating feminism to Dworkin, is pretty interesting. It’s hard to approach Dworkin with an open mind because her essential premise is so extreme only a handful of people can find much merit in her arguments. In my traditional manner, I have a lot of sympathy for the devil and I have a soft spot for Dworkin, even as her arguments repel me. I adore the scariness of her mind the way I adore Peter Sotos because mental extremity forces reaction. And make no mistake – Dworkin was scary. Anyone who looks at all acts of heterosexual sex as rape are frightening, because no one comes to a conclusion that upsetting unless some heavy shit has come down in his or her life. To see the very act that perpetuates the species as a violation, a sex crime, implies that the mind who thinks this way has suffered deeply.

But Dworkin needs no apologists nor would she want them were she still alive, and this article cuts her zero slack, engaging in the sort of language that would be most insulting to a woman like Dworkin, as well as many others who never once considered sex as rape (cooze, caterwauling, tube steaks, cunt) but my eyes and ears are not that delicate. Also, I’ve always thought a man with good intentions in life can only react in rage to the sorts of ideas Dworkin put forth. I appreciated Parfrey’s disgust at Dworkin’s explanation of a sexual act that contains none of the thrusting she found so soul-shattering. The presumption Dworkin needed to prescribe an acceptable sex act reeked of Popish-approved sexual positions and a zealotry that is, and I invoke this word again, scary. But zealotry has a short shelf-life and Dworkin was a relic even when she died. I can’t imagine she comes up much in the feminist discourse of women 20 years my junior and that’s a good thing. Ideas burst forth, they get examined and when as bad as Dworkin’s ideas, they get buried. I once wanted to write a book about pagan feminism (and still sort of do but that’s neither here nor there) and maybe it’s good I didn’t. All these ideas of utopia and we still can’t even get equal pay for equal work. Who needs another fucking treatise, eh?

Back on track, there are many reasons to read this article, among them the acerbic and perverse reactions Parfrey slams on the table:

Those who most treasure Dworkin’s hysteria aren’t mainstream feminists but prohibitionist paper-pushers and the fundamentalist right. I’ve envisioned a scene fit for a Jodorowsky movie in which Richard Viguerie and Jesse Helms go down on Dworkin and MacKinnon on a bed of severed penises.

Harsh and full of names that might trip up the average 25-year-old but all the more reason to read it, I say.

Oh god, I just died a million times inside when I read The Girlfriend Who Last Saw Elvis Alive Fan Club. I wrote a well-received story many years ago that I only last year realized was fan fiction. It was a weird feeling, knowing I had written fan fiction, though fan fiction has come a long way since Parfrey wrote this article, and while he says he feels “shame over the article’s laconic sadism” he also goes on to say:

Why begrudge, even make fun of, the only escape route open to the genetically deprived?

In Parfrey’s defense, the fan fiction in this article defies sane fandom and the poor woman depicted in this article is a near-perfect example of the stereotype of the pitiful, obese, weirdo living in their parent’s house, scrawling out page after page of questionable fiction that inserts them into their favorite book or the life of their favorite star. Debby Wimer was a member of the Ginger Alden Fan Club. She was emotionally fragile, dense, and sort of gross and she evoked nothing short of utter disgust in Parfrey. But given the details he shares in the story, even if he was exaggerating a bit, the then 35-year-old Wimer was pretty grotesque.

Who was Ginger Allen, by the way? She was Elvis Presley’s girlfriend at one point, the woman who found him collapsed in his bathroom, and the women who formed her fan club loved her “the best of all the women Elvis was involved with.” Her fans think she was not only the prettiest of his women, but also that she was just more virtuous:

“Priscilla and Linda Thompson seemed to be out for the money. Ginger isn’t. I never liked that kind of person.”

So in defiance of all that seems like it is worth doing, a fan club grew up around this golden-hearted woman who was there when the King breathed his last, and some incredibly bad, Mary Sue-laden fan fiction came into being. It’s worth a read if only because it’s an interesting look at fandom and how it seems utterly trivial to those of us not bitten by the bug. These days half the people I know write fan fiction of some description, but I do hope they don’t live a life of quiet, repellent despair. My desire to respect human dignity, such as it is, and my innate tendency towards snark were at war with each other when reading this article. Don’t miss Debby Wimer’s story, “Spanish Eyes.” It follows the article and it inspired such second hand embarrassment that I actually had to stop and look away from the pages when I read it.

I have remarkably little to say about Will Somebody Please Find a Mate for This Nice, Well-Mannered, Aryan Psycho Killer? Yet I bet I will still throw a few words at the article anyway because that’s just who I am. The article is interesting enough in and of itself but it’s really just another look at a sexually-demented, white pride lunatic who killed, went to prison and became a footnote in history, relegated to books like this. Maybe it’s because I spent way too much time exploring the white pride movement in the United States and pretty much already know that a statistically significant and startling number of the men are violent and utterly twisted sexually. Kevin Strom, though he never killed anyone, comes to mind. At any rate, although interesting and well-written, it’s just another look at a man who is a terrible physical representation of the Aryan culture he touts so highly, bitching about how he couldn’t find a pretty Aryan woman to polish his knob because they all dated Jews, Mexicans and African-Americans, and this made him nuts. Of course, the fact that he is a fucking white supremacist who looks like he barely made it off skid row and has a sexual ethos that was vaguely alarming even to an old jaded broad like me is a hint as to why no woman, Aryan or otherwise, wanted anything to do with him, but the obvious answer to Jonathan Haynes’ problems was to kill a plastic surgeon who created fake Aryan beauty. But if you are an Aryan beauty who feels that “National Socialism encouraged a pragmatic sort of sexual freedom…” you are in luck. In 2002 or thereabouts, the governor of Illinois pardoned Haynes and he is no longer on death row. Act quickly and maybe you can land a be-prisoned pseudo-intellectual who combines weird sexual ideas with race hate to compensate for being a complete loser at life. You know someone reading this will jump at the chance to get to know this dude – I think there are reality shows about this topic of ordinarily sane women dating the worst sort of scum behind bars. It could happen (and probably will). Be sure to read “The Sex Economy of Nazi Germany,” which is Haynes’ weirdo treatise, helpfully included by Parfrey. I could summarize it but I just don’t want to.

The Endangered Freak was an article with an interesting premise and one that covers a lot of ground. He discusses how the biologically atypical have been granted a sort of purity of spirit and mind as modern culture has romanticized the disabled and imbued them with a saint-like image that ultimately is demeaning. I recall, back in the days before Jerry Springer became a show wherein half sisters slept with each other and flashed their breasts to the audience, former carnival freaks who were frequent Springer guests, bemoaning the death of the freak show. A woman who was a former human torso had been retrained as an office worker when her carnival shut down and as a result made far less money. She infinitely preferred the day when people were open about their shock rather than condescending to her as she struggled to file receipts in an office with her mouth. Parfrey compares the saccharine storyline of Forrest Gump, wherein the “biological deficient are compensated with a purity of heart and nobility of soul unattained by those of sound body and mind” with the hard reality of Tod Browning’s Freaks.

The age of Tod Browning’s Freaks did not stoop to portray monstrous specimens as moral Pollyannas but as a kind of Mafia that found solace and power in acts of brotherhood and retribution. Ruling this hierarchy were the true biological anomalies rather than the “gaffed” or faked freak; the value of the congenital freak was most clearly demonstrated in the size of the weekly paycheck.

This article discusses this issue in depth – the acceptance of physical abnormality for what it is and refusal to make it a condition that implies a higher spiritual plane or a closer link to God in contrast to those who want to imbue simple biological differences, however mild or catastrophic, with holiness.

And yeah, it was totally on the nose that Parfrey followed that article with Please, May I Touch Your Scar? Queasy Hours Among I CAN: A Cult of Sex-Obsessed Cripples. Oh man… David and Violet Brandenburger are a physically interesting couple. She’s small in stature and so riddled with profoundly horrific rheumatoid arthritis and other issues that she is a quadriplegic. I can’t recall what is wrong with David. He’s just big, fat and gross, forever going shirtless, wearing shorts so tight and ill-fitting his balls fall out. Violet discovered that she could control pain via pleasure and began a non-profit “human potential” organization based on paganism, new age nonsense and questionable science, all relating back to sex.

Okay, disabled people have sex. This is not a new idea and hedonists and religious whack jobs come in all varieties. It’s just… Sigh… As I read this article, I remembered when Dave Attell visited a sex club (filled with the last people any sane person would want to have sex with) for his sadly canceled show, Insomniac . He saw an old fashioned room deodorant that attached to the wall and said, “Air freshener. The unsung hero of the sex club.” This article evokes a funk. Not a sexual funk, which would be bad enough. Rather, it evokes the funk of unwashed feet, sweaty armpits and, I can barely bring myself to type this, dick cheese. Ugh. Since the folks of I CAN are, for the most part, repellent people (posters of wrestlers adorn the walls, the rest of the house decor is trailer home in Florida circa 1974, David removing his false teeth so he can suck on feet, and a cast of regulars that would have fit in well cast in Gummo) it feels okay to pretty much say I am glad they all found one another because ain’t too many people lining up for a foot gumming. It would be pretty condescending not to call them all gross just because I was keeping their myriad disabilities in mind, though I think the blind guy had it the easiest. I respect human dignity but I don’t get the feeling the members of the I CAN house often had human dignity in mind. Also, if you look too long at the picture of all the house denizens dressed in costumes, most of them as clowns, you will have to go to the hospital. Just looking out for you.

But even as distasteful as this article began, it got worse, discussing a girl who had to live in the I CAN house because her fucking whackaloon of a mother decided it was, you know, a really good idea to expose her kid to a home of unbridled and bizarre sexuality. The thirteen-year-old girl was never forced to have sex with the people in the house, but she was forced to masturbate daily and discuss it in detail. David was the worst, the girl said, and Violet and David ran up her mother’s credit cards. It was all utterly nasty and skeevy and manipulative and about as un-Forrest Gump as you can get. I swear to all that is holy, the picture of David deepthroating Violet’s foot will probably be the last thought in my head before I die. :twitch:

Moving on to a topic that is creepy in a wholly different manner, we have Citizen Keane: The Sordid Saga of the Weepy Waifs. You know those repellent paintings of kids with enormous, crying eyes? Maybe not — a lot of you reading here are pretty young, and they were passe when I was a kid. They were mainly popular from 1950-1970, but have made a comeback in certain ironic, hipster art circles. This article deals with the struggle between Walter Keane and his wife over who was the mastermind behind these wretched paintings. I had read a similar article at some point in my indiscriminate reading past, discussing these iconic but repellent paintings and the problems the Keanes’ divorce caused, but if this is new to you, this was a reasonably interesting take on pop culture, the concept of art ownership and how ego infects even the most humble and silly of art.

G.G. Goes to Heaven is Parfrey’s interview with GG Allin a few days before he overdosed epically on heroin. Oh, I found GG Allin as repellent yet hilariously interesting as everyone else, but as Parfrey says, he “was simply too much of a fuck-up to achieve mythic status.” But I disagree with Parfrey’s assessment that Allin was “nothing less than an Andy Kaufman-type stand up act.” I just never felt there was that much intelligence burning behind Allin’s burnout (though he was clearly not the semi-retarded hick many thought him to be, but there was no advanced theater behind his shtick).

The interview has questions and answers along these lines:

When are you finally going to kill yourself?

The biggest question that everyone keeps asking me is about the suicide thing. For me right now to say I’m going to commit suicide is just way too premature because there’s too many battles and it seems like there’s too many people who want me to do it now, so as long as I’ve got to battle and to fight, and as long as I got some enemies, I gotta keep going to fuck these people up. To end it now is what the government would want and what society would want, and as long as I can be that dagger in their back and as long as I can be the enemy of the people then I’ve go to stay alive.

So you weren’t anybody’s punk in jail?

Fuck no.

Sigh… I can believe the latter but that first answer was just so pitiful. Of course, Allin, unknown by 98% of the American public at the height of his career, and that’s a generous estimate, was no threat to the government or the fabric of the country. His enemy list was mostly the people he’d puked on or flung shit at or stole drugs from but I sense Allin genuinely believed he was a threat, which means he lacked the self-awareness to be as subversive as an Andy Kaufman. But opinions vary, clearly. The interview also contains an affidavit from a woman Allin tortured and assaulted. It’s pretty sordid. Very much worth a read for a look at a redneck punkpuke phase in American music.

Riding the Downardian Nightmare was both excellent and a topic that I cannot go into here because there is no way for me to discuss James Shelby Downard with anything approaching brevity and this article is already way too long. I also feel like I have read this article, or at least most of it, as the intro to the book The Carnivals of Life and Death, but I am way too lazy to go get my copy down because I’m barely five feet tall and it’s on a case that requires a ladder and I sense my memory is pretty sound. But any article on Downard, the possibly non-existent purveyor of ideas of mystical topography, religious symbology and overwrought Masonic fears, is worth it. Totally worth it.

I am too exhausted to discuss Project Monarch: How the U.S. Creates Slaves of Satan by Fritz Springmeier. That’s not Springmeier’s fault. It’s because I am currently fielding e-mails from a woman who insists that she was made into a sex slave by men at Cornell University and forced to sexually service lots of famous names from Bush the Elder’s administration. Her story sounds not entirely unlike that of Cathy O’Brien, who is mentioned in this article, and I have no idea if she is having me on or if the Monarch Project really did make her a sex slave and there are startling commonalities between stories. I have a tiresome inability to tell people whom I fear may be damaged in some manner to go fuck off, and I’ve reached my tolerance level for this sort of thing at the moment. At any rate, if you know your conspiracy theory, there is likely to be little new in this article, though I will admit I was fascinated by the idea that the business of country music is linked closely to the Monarch Project.

I also lack the will to discuss How to Frame a Patriot by Barry Krusch, Linda Thompson’s War and Finding Our Way Out Of Oklahoma. But I am grouping them together because I think they are a very illuminating look at how the “militia” movement and its coverage in the press have changed in the last fifteen years. The anti-Communist, Libertarian, fringe movement’s focus has changed in some respects but at the same time, it still has a similar message and it’s worth a look at these articles to examine how the Patriots of two decades ago compare to the Tea Party of the now.

God, Christ, Satan or Con? Westerners Worship a Hindu Godman, Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment, Guns, Gold, Groceries, Guts ‘n’ Gritz, and SWAT in Theme Park Land are the only articles in this book that mean too little for me to discuss even briefly. It happens. In a book that covers this much ground, it’s surprising there were so few I had so little reaction to.

So, the upshot is that while some of the content is very dated by now, this is still a very entertaining, interesting, whacked, absorbing, disturbing, gross and at times deeply funny book. I say buy it and see which articles make you want to search the Internet for more information.

Type of Book: Non fiction, conspiracy theory

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Conspiracy theory is always odd and this is no exception.

Availability: Published by Adventures Unlimited Press in 1999, I purchased this from my local amazing strange book source, Brave New Books, but they are revamping their online store, so for now, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Okay, this book and others like it are why I decided to ax I Read Everything and make it just an occasional sidebar to this site. You see, I read so much faster than I write and when I take too much time to discuss a book after I have read it, with some books it feels like I have forgotten huge chunks of the content. This happens especially with scatter-shot conspiracy theory like this because at some point, most of this stuff eventually covers the same ground. I mean, I will always know Icke’s alien lizard theory from James Shelby Downard’s mystical topography but unless you are a conspirator rock star, it can be hard to keep things straight unless you discuss the book within a few days of reading it. In order to give my first odd love its due, I need to just focus on the weird, you know?

And this book is wonderfully weird. And in some ways it makes sense and in other ways I can see how I lost the thread of how all of this held together, but Liquid Conspiracy explains an interesting theory, to some observable level of success, though it was all a bit mutable. It’s supposed to be mutable, though. It’s liquid, you see. But give Piccard his due, as he has a pretty interesting theory on how things work behind the scenes and under the surfaces.

Now, if you think the “liquid conspiracy” in this book refers to copious amounts of acid, you are not alone, because that was my first thought too, that all of this revolved around LSD and its impact on JFK, the CIA, etc. But really, Liquid Conspiracy refers to the information Piccard claims he received from a man called Kilder, a man who worked for the RAF during WWII and in his capacity as some sort of governmental flunky managed to find out who the men behind the curtain are and what they want to do. It is, as referenced in the book, a “Grand Unification Theory of Conspiracy.”

The elderly Englishman contacted Piccard with his information and unloaded it all before he died and Piccard did his best to verify it. Luckily, Kilder had a photographic memory (one day I will go off on a rant about how it is eidetic memory does not mean what people think it means and how it is often more than not a relatively useless trait, but that day is not today) and wrote a lot of things down. Of course, the skeptic in me is always immediately ready to snert when a clerk in some governmental agency is able to get the lowdown on the conspiracy controlling the world because, you know, it’s a damn conspiracy and you’d think they’d be a little more careful in how they disseminate their evil plans, especially when they know they have a clerk with a photographic memory who has access to their nefarious plans, but all I can do is give my head a shake, refuse to approach this with reason, relax and enjoy the show. I advise that you do the same.

Relax… Because here it comes. The Liquid Conspiracy features all the usual players in conspiracies that control the world. The Knights Templar, the Knights of Malta, the Masons, the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, Adam Weishaupt, the Federal Reserve, the Catholic Church, Skull and Bones, Nazis, aliens, Communists and on and on. You’ve likely heard it all before or read it on websites that are generally nothing but a wall of Geocities text with a series of eyes in pyramids blinking at you when you reach the bottom of the page. And really, it’s nothing new. There are men behind the curtain, lots of them, some with competing interests but all with a common goal of keeping us, the common men, so distracted from their goals that they keep us in chains and we wreck our interests as they keep all the power and the money away from us.

But the conspiracy Kilder shared with Piccard is that all of the forces that seek to control the world entered into a pact.

The Knights, the Elders, and the aliens made a pact. The conspiracy–its character subtly changed with their recent collaboration–made its final plans for the coming One World Order. The dangerous union of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Templar Knights and the Roman Catholic Church with the support of the Grey aliens, brought to an end a fifteen hundred year struggle. These rival groups came together to put aside their previous animosities and to forge an invincible power.

And why not. Why wouldn’t the Masons, the Illuminati and little green–er–gray men join together? In unity there is strength, right? The proof for this alliance is what Piccard calls “The Breakfast with the Kingmakers of ’45.” Present at this breakfast were representatives of all the major conspiracies, twelve entities in total, and it was then they merged together to form a sort of perpetually moving, form-fitting, Lycra-blend conspiracy.

The new conspiracy was an entity unto itself. Using ritual magic and technologies still never spoken of, the attendees initiated an incredible device. A poltergeist of sorts, an ever-evolving energy form which would transfer power inner-dimensionally, from thought to reality. This curse (and I use these terms with reservation, for there is no other terminology to describe it) would grow, mutate, and adapt to the desires of its masters. The will of the secret world government would come to manifest physically. Still, actual temporal involvement was absolutely required. But with the aid and intelligence of their psychic contraption, their desires faced no opposition in the realm of the feeble masses.

So, it’s not just the aliens and the Trilateral Commission and the Masons and the Illuminati and the greasy soul of Prescott Bush we got to worry about. It’s a device that can… I don’t know… control our minds and adapt our reality on behalf of all these combined conspirators. Yeah, this is one helluva theory. All based on the photographic memory of some British clerk and who am I, in all seriousness, to argue with that.

You think I am being sarcastic? Well, maybe a bit, but for me conspiracy theory in a very real manner is not dissimilar to religion, an attempt to explain that which seems hidden, mysterious, beyond comprehension. There is a gossamer thread that runs from being very suspicious about the Federal Reserve to believing that there is a bizarre cabal that uses an inexplicable “psychic contraption” to blur things so we cannot see how they are perpetually working behind the scenes. One is a reasonable but at times paranoiac topic, the other is an attempt to create a story to force the world into a mechanism that to them makes more sense than the randomness that often surrounds world events, and it is all too easy to start with one and end up wallowing in the other. Human beings like believing strange things. It is a part of who we are as a species.

I mean, is a “psychic contraption” uniting the Bilderbergers and the Catholics and the aliens really that more outlandish than a talking bush afire or immaculate conception or some awesome guy rising from the dead? Of course that’s up to the individual but atheist though I am, I recognize that wacky beliefs fuel the world and I have always wondered why some wacky beliefs make the cut for widespread belief and some don’t. I suspect it is personal salvation and a sense of a larger presence looking out for us in a positive manner, something that most conspiracy theory lacks, but the cynics among us might think that makes conspiracy theory more believable.

But an angel Moroni brought Joseph Smith golden plates and a British clerk named Kilder remembered a bunch of fantastic stuff, wrote it down and shared it with Piccard and there isn’t a whole lot of proof for either happening so all you can do is decide whether or not you believe. I don’t believe either, mainly because I lack of capacity for belief but conspiracy is amazing to me in the same way religion is because I love seeing what it is that make people believe and how beliefs evolve. Conspiracy is a religion, pure and simple, a religion without a savior, and in a way, that makes it all the more amazing. So yeah, I give this no credence but I don’t have to because I love it for what it is, not for its truth or reality.

So back to Piccard. After chapter one, the rest of the book becomes his version of world events filtered through the lens of his take on the conspiracy controlling the world, and even without this filter, this book is a good conspiracy primer because it covers pretty decently a lot of territory, from Operation Paperclip to LSD as a CIA means of mind control and how it influenced the Kennedy administration, the JFK assassination, Area 51 and UFOs, MK-ULTRA, Jim Jones, the general complete anomaly that is the state of Ohio and AIDS. This is just a small sample of what this book discusses and like I said, if you remove the whole Liquid Conspiracy you still get an excellent overview of conspiracy and high weirdness in general. I could spend a lot of time dissecting the weirdness but this is not new weirdness outside of the Liquid Conspiracy. All that is different is the interpretation of the forces behind it. So if you are new to conspiracy, you could do a lot worse than begin your trip into this cloudy place of utter paranoia reading this book.

So I say read it. I haven’t been able to find out much about George Piccard online and that’s a shame that this guy may have petered out at some point, but this kind of thing gets exhausting for men who are not made of stern and lunatic stuff, like Alex Jones. But even as a side player in the madness, I think Piccard deserves a look.

Author: Kirsten Alene

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, novella

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Bizarro, fish, barrel

Availability: Published by Eraserhead Press in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Ahh… Hump day for Bizarro Week. Before I discuss the book, let’s get the business out of the way. I am giving away a copy of this book and all you have to do to enter the drawing for the book is leave me a comment on this entry. The contest runs through 9:00 pm CST today, 2/16/11. Just comment and I’ll put your name in the drawing to win a copy of this book. Easy as using a keyboard to type a name.

Now for the book discussion. Before I say anything about Love in the Time of Dinosaurs, I have no idea if the title is a play on Love in the Time of Cholera or if the book in any way mirrors what I can only assume is a literary masterpiece. I can only assume because I’ve tried before several times to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez and just couldn’t do it. I hate to admit that I may, in fact, lack a certain gravitas where my literary tastes are concerned but hey, I’m a grad school dropout. So, I may be missing out on an excellent chance to compare a bizarro text to a traditional literary text but I’m not gonna rush out and read Marquez any time soon just to make sure. This will not be the first time my intellectual laziness works against me so instead I’ll just play to my strengths.

Love in the Time of the Dinosaurs mines familiar veins. A soldier in a terrible war falls in love with a woman across enemy lines. A man falls in love with a woman from another culture and the couple faces incredible odds. And there is always some sort of commonality in tales of warfare. But within these familiar tropes, Alene lets loose with some incredible scenes of carnage set in a genuinely bizarro world wholly unlike our own, which only stands to reason because unless one subscribes to really fundamentalist beliefs about dinosaurs as antediluvian animals that died when it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, dinosaurs and humans generally only occupy the same turf in Sid and Marty Krofft productions.

The bare bones of the plot, without excessive spoilerage, are as follows: A monk, whose name we never learn, is also a soldier in a war against the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs, whom the monks refer to as Jeremy, came as a sort of plague when a mystical creature went into hiding. These creatures, called the Steve by the head monk, are of varied descriptions, among them fish-headed, winged cats and rhinos with rat heads. The Steve had many secrets and taught the head monk Zohar but when the dinosaurs came, the Steve left. And then the war with the dinosaurs began, with the monks acting as soldiers, trying to keep their walled-in monastery safe from the rampaging dinosaurs, who work together as a tactical army to defeat the monks. Alene’s unnamed monk manages to stay alive long enough to meet Petunia, a new breed of dinosaur, and he falls in love with her. Once his fellow monks clue into the purpose behind his solo visits into the forest, they threaten the love that has come to sustain the monk. Can the monk and Petunia survive the warfare around them? Will they be forced to choose sides? Not gonna tell you, of course.

God, I beat the same two drums where bizarro is concerned. I bitch endlessly about the editing, and that was not a real problem with this book. But I also bitch about the brevity and in this case, I really think this book needed to be about three times as long. At least. Alene created a richly textured other-world, with strange monks with odd traditions. She created an entire, organized dinosaur culture that splinters off into factions. In her world, strange magic taught from the Steve permits men with their bodies blown off from the center of their sternums to live, with a single leg transplanted where their lower viscera and limbs used to be. This is one of the longer books in the New Bizarro Authors Series but man, I needed more. I needed more scenes with the monk and Petunia. I needed more interactions between the monk and the other monks. I needed more scenes within the monastery. Alene is a fine writer and I wished I could have read the complexities of the relationships between the monks and between the monk and Petunia because I sense in her hands, this alternate universe would have rivaled the worlds created by accomplished fantasy and science fiction writers. What was excellent characterization could have been far richer with more length.

And the characterization, even in minor characters, was excellent. The unnamed monk telegraphs early on that he is not of a hivemind with the other humans. Saving his fellow monk Oomka, the monk catches a ride on the back of a pterodactyl and the ride is killing the creature:

Wet tears stream from the eyes of the pterodactyl. I feel an unwelcome surge of compassion and pity, and draw the ray gun back from its temple. Its body quakes feebly as its torn wing flaps at double speed under the extra weight of Oomka and me.
[...]
Our bodies shoot through the air toward the treetops. This is the end. The Jeremy is dead, or will be in a few seconds when it hits the ground. I feel a surge of pity and compassion for the animal and try to shake this strange feeling from my head, not wanting to die mourning the fate of my enemy.

The monk does not die, but that what he thinks may be his final thoughts are compassion for the creature he killed in his quest to save his own life illuminates a lot about the monk and it would have been nice had Alene more space to develop these matters of character. The small amount of space made some of it feel rushed.

The romance between the monk and Petunia also suffers from being compressed, if only because Alene presents a compelling tableau: a monk sick of war, dreaming of comfort with his new love, dreaming of a life he can, in fact, only dream about because reality will not permit it. During a scene where the monk loses an arm and almost his life, in the place between life and death he thinks of Petunia:

I feel a tug on my arm and look down to see Petunia reaching up into the sky. Her hand is wrapped around mine. She is pulling me down. I am in her arms. I feel as if a bluish-gray cloud has encased me.

Petunia is very old as well. She is stooped, her soft leathery skin wrinkled and pockmarked. She smiles warmly at me. Her face is familiar and comforting. I am in her arms, and she walks with me toward a house in the tree rocks. Above us, the fireflies are beginning to descend, one by one, until they fall in a torrent, a deluge of fireflies. They swirl through the air as I push the door open in front of Petunia. We enter our house.

So do the fireflies.

If you read this book and this scene does not make you feel like you sort of want to tear up, all I can say is fuck you because such deceptively simple writing affected me. I know, I know, he’s a monk in an alternate universe and she’s a dinosaur. But he’s dreaming of growing old with his beloved and living in a house with her where fireflies come and go. This is on page 46. Think of what Alene could have done had this book been far longer.

One thing Alene does not skimp on is violence. Horrifying scenes of blood, gore, and unseemly inhuman recreations of body parts should be at stark contrast with scenes of monk and dinosaur growing old together with fireflies but they aren’t. Alene’s simple, spare style lends itself will to both sentimentality and extreme violence and gore. The monk and Oomka are in a tree on watch and battling raptors:

I yell and swing my ray gun around, but it is too late. The monster has withdrawn into the leaves, taking the bottom half of Oomka with it. The top half of Oomka looks at me, his yellow eyes bulging as fluid and blood pour from the remaining half of his torso. Two exposed ribs dangle below a line of jagged flesh. Organs spill out over the tree limb, coating the branches beneath in vivid red. He coughs, and a mouthful of blood trickles down his chin, staining the front of his orange robes.

Never fear, however, because losing the bottom two thirds of his body does not spell the end for Oomka. That scene I quote above where he and the monk are on the back of a pterodactyl and they fear they will die along with the Jeremy when they hit the ground? As they fall, Oomka saves the day in a nasty but inventive manner:

Oomka turns himself around so that his back is against my chest, and he rips open his ribcage. His hollow body cavity acts as a parachute, slowing our speed dramatically. We coast toward the trees and drop slowly through the canopy, unharmed.

Much more blood is shed in this book. If you like bloody battles in a surreal setting, guerrilla warfare with dinosaurs, Alene has got you covered.

I will tell you with brutal honesty that part of the reason I loved this book is because Alene’s style reminds me of my own, back in the days when I tried to write. She has a spare, concise manner of word usage that conveys a lot of imagery without straying into being overly descriptive. I had to fill in a lot of mental blanks as to what things looked like and I prefer my fiction that way. She gives what is needed to get her idea across and nothing more, and that she conveys such vivid ideas with such sparse word usage speaks of a wonderful talent. I want you to buy this book so we have a chance of seeing what happens when Alene is not confined to a novella length work. I suspect, if given the chance, she could be a very strong bizarro voice. I very much recommend this bloody, violent, sweet novella. It’s got love. It’s got carnage. It’s got dinosaurs with guns.

And just to remind you, you can win a free copy. Leave me a comment on this entry today, 2/16/11, before 9:00 pm CST and I will enter you in a drawing to win a copy of this book.

Author: Dr. John Coleman

Type of Book: Non-fiction, conspiracy theory, disease

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, I bought it at the marvelous Austin book store, Brave New Books. That’s a good clue as to potential oddness. The content cinched the deal.

Availability: Published by World in Review Books in 2009, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Take this statement for what it’s worth but it took me forever to write this discussion because I came down with a case of the flu that will not go away. If I were paranoid, I would be very concerned.

Man, I am definitely going to have a good time examining this book in close detail because it combines all the best things I have come to love in lunatic screeds predicting the end of the world, but before I begin, I have to say that books like this make me long for the days of ‘zines. Really, this book is a long form ‘zine, or maybe a very long newsletter. This book should have been written on an electric typewriter, single spaced, no margins, hand-written corrections in the margin and mailed to everyone who signed up for it. This book took me back to those days long past, wherein the only way one could get a hold of a strangely-spelled, interestingly-reasoned screed was to wait impatiently by the mail box.

If you are of the right mind, this book will amuse you to no end. Because when you pick up a book that is ostensibly discussing the diseases that could mark the end of the world, and the disease “Guillain Barre” is spelled “Guillane Barre” on the cover and in the table of contents you find a chapter called, “The Terrible Toll of NRSA,” you know you are in for one hell of a time.

There are moments of complete coherence wherein you think, “Hey, Dr. Coleman may be on to something, though he seems like he may be overstating it.” Then there are moments of utter lunacy wherein you think, “What sort of doctor is this guy anyway?” I still have not been able to determine what his doctorate is in, or if he is an MD, but the little bit of research I did showed me that Dr. John Coleman is a man who should have already been on my radar because he is a conspiracy theory Renaissance Man. Sometimes I am disappointed in myself but I comfort myself with the knowledge that my new Kindle and I will rectify my Coleman deficiency as soon as possible.

So, in just the cover and the table of contents, I already know this book’s content is going to be a bit iffy and my suspicions are played out in the text. This book is ostensibly a treatise on the diseases that could potentially end mankind as we know it, and it takes all kinds of very interesting turns while offering some information that turned out to be more or less factually correct when I looked into it and some that is simply the stuff of conspiratorial dreams (and that is a statement anyone should take advisedly because though I am deeply interested in illness as a topic, I am a liberal arts sort of gal, not a scientist).

It’s hard to buy into the alarmist nature of the book but all conspiracies are alarmist and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I knew I was in for a ride when I read this (and from here on out, just know I am not going to enter the traditional [sic] when there is a grammar, spelling or structural problem in Dr. Coleman’s text because it would become tiresome):

The cardinal sin being committed against God and man by the spiritually wicked men in high places is the destruction of mankind through so-called “natural means.”

Okay, so I now know Dr. John Coleman is going to look at this via a Christian filter of the Apocalypse, which is just fine with me because as an atheist I don’t have any dog in that fight but it also means I will be able to dismiss some of what he considers proof. We also know that we might venture into the idea that some of these diseases threatening us are not natural in origin. Hoo boy, I am very excited now. You should be, too.

Despite the fact that I know that very excellent conspiracy awaits me, I have to say the hands-down best parts of this book are all the left turns that come out of nowhere. The sort of shifts in content that make you shake your head and wonder if you missed a page or something, and realize no, it’s not you. The quote I give above is at the top of page 2. Dr. Coleman then spends three paragraphs discussing disease and how it is that the death toll of disease far outweighs casualties of war plus some fear of Socialist government, which was sort of a “What?” but still mildly topical in context, then :RECORD SCRATCH:

This book is not about politics per se, so I will confine my remarks to posing the question that so badly needs to be asked: What in God’s name are our soldiers doing in Iraq and Afghanistan?

No matter how tragic the Columbine School and the Virginia Tech massacres of April 20, 1999 and April 16, 2007, they cannot be viewed as anything other than sad and terrible occurrences. What is so savage about it all is that the victims were not allowed by law, to defend themselves.

Okay, so we now know this is going to be a roller coaster of weirdness. We now have a pretty good window into Dr. Coleman’s mind: the government is going to kill us with disease, governmental action that Dr. Coleman does not like will be called Socialist and he is pro-gun to the extent that he thinks high school freshmen should carry them to school. And if it sounds like I am mocking Dr. Coleman, maybe I am a little, but mostly I have mild affection for people with mindsets complete different than mine because without them this website would be basically a shill for Eraserhead Press. And, it has to be said, I have been known to harbor one or two wacky ideas myself…

Of particular interest to me was Dr. Coleman’s take on the Clinton presidency refusing to destroy all of the smallpox samples housed with the CDC:

In 1996 the World Health Organization demanded that all existing stocks of smallpox viruses be destroyed. At first the United States was vociferous in its demands, that all nations possessing stocks of the virus join the U.S. in destroying such stocks. All of a sudden, having gotten a taste of what it is like to be mass killers in Serbia and Iraq, the governments of Britain and the United States did a 180 degree turn. “We are not going to carry out our previous decision” (to destroy the smallpox hoard), said Clinton “just in case the U.S. may need them in the future.” This startling announcement came on April 22, 1999. Mark the date well. Future historians will trace the start of the coming apocalypse to this date.

Having read enough Richard Preston to ensure I lost sleep, I have a different take on the U.S. refusal to destroy their smallpox stocks. You see, disease is a form of mutually assured destruction and nations talk a big game about getting rid of disease stocks and nukes but such stores are preventative measure to keep other countries from using disease as a form of warfare because they know we could just return the favor. Moreover, in the event a country launches a dirty bomb against us and we don’t have samples of the disease to make a vaccine, we are sitting ducks. Unpleasant, but true. Stocks of nukes and stocks of disease make for better diplomacy in a world wherein seats of political power are occupied by egoists and madmen. Interestingly, before declaring Clinton the worst sort of bastard for reneging on the U.S. promise to destroy smallpox stocks, Coleman, who has already shown little use for dictatorships and Socialism in general, declares:

When apprised of Clinton’s decision not to destroy our stash of deadly smallpox viruses, Mikhail Shurgalis, Russia’s spokesman on the treaty, denied his country has any stocks of smallpox. Iran and China also deny holding any Biological Warfare stocks.

Okay, I don’t think Dr. Coleman is twisting facts and ideas to suit his particular hobbyhorse. I think riding his hobbyhorse gives him a strange myopia. Does he really trust Iraq, Russia or China’s word on whether or not they destroyed their smallpox stores? And say Clinton had believed them and sometime in our lifetime we found out those nations in fact had their smallpox stores and we had destroyed our disease deterrent as well as the means to make a vaccine? Policy in such matters is cloak and dagger to be sure but not nearly as straightforward as Dr. Coleman seems to think. “Oh, China and Russia say they no longer have smallpox viruses? That’s good enough for us. Those countries have never given us cause to doubt them before,” seems to be the reasoning where disease stockpiles are concerned. Would such a naive approach work in nuclear disarmament? Probably not.

The overall structure of Dr. Coleman’s book makes some level of sense and as a rule, I can see where he is coming from as this sort of conspiracy is nothing new – the government wants us sick and covers it up, the government accidentally makes us sick and covers it up. Many people exhibit this manner of thinking, notably Jenny McCarthy, and it was therefore not that surprising to see it in action here.

Autism in children may be the result of vaccinations. British doctor, Stephen Walker, was the first to discover a possible link between child vaccinations and autism on June 3, 2006. This has led to speculation among medical researchers that there must be a common factor somewhere, but discovery of what that factor is, remains beyond reach. Are we being used as human guinea pigs?

Well, we might be, but not via vaccinations. Stephen Walker has come out and admitted he cannot prove a link between the MMR vaccine and autism and as of right now there is not a single link between vaccinations and autism.

But Dr. Coleman is all too willing to go that extra step in the course of his paranoia despite the fact that one of his own sources has backed down from his initial findings:

We know now vaccines injected into children weaken their immune system and leave them vulnerable to other diseases. Could it be that the grand design is to make children vulnerable to infectious plagues, which will then sweep millions of people to their deaths in far greater numbers than the Black Plague of the 14th Century? After all, didn’t Bertrand Russell say that there had to be a return of the Black Plague. Vaccinations have become the chic way of allegedly warding off terrible diseases, but what we are learning through research into such illnesses as chronic fatigue syndrome is that the more prevalent the inoculations programs are, the more there is a growing incidence of strange and exotic diseases, which hitherto, were unknown or only occurred in limited numbers.

It’s actually extremely questionable that vaccines weaken a child’s immune system when the end result is that children with these vaccinations do not develop mumps, measles, German measles, whooping cough and all the myriad childhood diseases that made children die left and right. And if you don’t get Dr. Coleman’s riff about Bertrand Russell and why his musings on the Black Plague are de facto evidence of anything sinister in the government to sicken people, it’s discussed in the book and evidently in some of his other books and I will touch on it more in a bit. But yeah, it’s conspiri-tastic. And bless Dr. Coleman for associating vaccines with the word “chic.” When I get my next flu shot I better get a Chanel bandaid. I also dispute the idea that CFS is new or burgeoning as it is a disease that most commonly afflicts women and the annals of medical history are crammed with depictions of sickly, easily tired, wasting, neurasthenic women. CFS has been around for a long time but like most auto-immune illnesses, there is still very little known about it.

But don’t get me wrong. I love conspiracy theory but I have no issue discussing where it falls short and can be dangerous. Hell, the conspiracy about vaccines has led some to believe that Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine advocacy has a body count. So while I am largely amused by Dr. Coleman and quite interested in reading more of his books, the fact is, he sort of doesn’t mind mixing it up in a way that makes it hard to swallow even the passages where he gets things right. The government is at fault, Bertrand Russell is somehow behind it, and that’s all well and good because heaven knows Russell could stand to be taken down a peg or two posthumously. But given all the conspiratorial bends this book takes, the following was… shocking… and upsetting to a liberal gal like me:

The incidence of all strains of hepatitis, A-G, is very heavy in Central and Latin America and India, and immigrants from these areas are not screened when they are arrive in the U.S., so that there is a vast pool of infection — a veritable reservoir of hepatitis in our midst. In California the situation has become so serious as to border on panic as more and more people are discovering that they are infected with hepatitis C. Yet, in spite of the terrible dander, concerned citizens who demand medical screening for immigrants are called “racists.”

Terrible dander, eh? One would think a panic about an infectious disease that reduces lifespan would be more than a dander but maybe I shouldn’t nitpick that. Instead let me nitpick facts. In the United States, the vast majority of people who currently have Hepatitis C contracted the disease before blood was tested for the diseases as a matter of course in refined tests to find the disease, which was developed in 1990. Since accurate screening began, the number of people who contract Hepatitis C has fallen dramatically. In the current climate, the top causes for Hepatitis C transmission are via risky sexual and drug usage behaviors. Because Hepatitis C is blood-borne, there is some risk from food-handlers, and to be blunt, no one really knows all the potential methods of transmission but blood seems to be the most reasonable risk.

But as a whole, it is, in fact, racist to say that people from Central and Latin America and India who have Hepatitis C are more likely to become drug abusers and engage in unprotected sex, and statements like this one, a statement Dr. Coleman makes several times in the book, is a rallying cry for people who desperately need to cling to something to prove motive behind their race hate. Moreover, most people well-versed in epidemiology will tell you that we have far more to fear simply from legal travel. A disease like Hepatitis C is small beans compared to the capacity for a super-flu to spread and cause a pandemic because of the ease of rapid air travel. Immigrants with Hepatitis C are the least of our troubles.

But the weird statements don’t stop there, and it would be disappointing if they did:

In a sense, HVC [Hepatitis C] is worse than HIV because there is no indication at the onset of the disease that one is really ill.

Well, actually, there isn’t a whole lot at the beginning of HIV contraction that lets you know you’ve contracted the disease. Obviousness of infection and delay of symptoms are actually a common trait of both conditions.

Then there are the delightful statements, like this one:

It is more desperately urgent, that we defend our liver!

Ignoring the implication that we are all sharing a single liver, I shouted a comma-less variant of this exhortation the day I stopped drinking.

Now here is why Dr. Coleman is such an excellent conspirator: He lays out interesting information that may or may not link together ideas but never really follows through, which is one of the hallmarks of excellent conspiracy:

A horrific outbreak of the Black Plague occurred in 1348, dislocating the wage and price structure producing major economic and political conditions and social crisis, and carrying away millions of people. We are presently living in the middle of economic and political conditions closely paralleling those of 1338, which fit in with the predictions of Ziegler who said a great plague would come by the year 2020. This also confirms the expectations of Hecker who said that each succeeding plague would be more virulent that the last. In 1347, famine in parts of Europe, notably in what is now Italy, helped the spread of the Black Plague. Compare this with Africa today, where millions are dying from starvation and AIDS.

Actually, Dr. Coleman rides off the rails with the AIDS comparison because despite the sheer horror of AIDS, the fact remains that it does not kill with the rapidity of yersinia pestis. A person with AIDS can live a very long time and the way the disease is spread is more selective so while it is a pandemic in parts of Africa, it is not even in the same class of rapid-death disease spread we are discussing when we talk about Black Plague. But this is a tantalizing passage because Dr. Coleman is not talking about Nostradamus-styled predictions. Phillip Ziegler is an excellent source for information about the history of the Black Death and it would have been nice if Dr. Coleman had told us how the economic and political conditions today closely parallel those of 1338 because having read Ziegler (admittedly many years ago), I don’t see the correlations. The Hecker he is referring to is J.H. Hecker and I know nothing of his work so I don’t know if Hecker is a good source, but this could have been such an interesting section if Dr. Coleman had laid out for us how we are looking at a political climate and social climate that could result in a plague. I think such conditions are here. I’ve read enough writers like Laurie Garrett to know that things could become quite dire quite quickly if conditions were right. I just want Dr. Coleman to better explain his alarmist utterings.

And I gotta tell you, his section on MRSA, though he calls it “NRSA” in his table of contents, was damn informative. I have family in the medical community who have echoed that MRSA is a nightmare, that once a hospital has a MRSA contamination, getting rid of it is dicey, that unions prevent some hospitals from removing from service nurses who test positive as being carriers for MRSA via the nose tests, and that in many cases, surgery is a crap-shoot (and if you ever read much about prion diseases, you will fear surgery for the rest of your life, believe me). I had to have a steel plate put in my ankle two years ago and I recall the weird things people told me to do after surgery. One nurse told me that after surgery that I needed to go home and run the hottest water I could stand over my incision, no matter what the doctors said. I didn’t because it would have hurt like 20 bastards in a bastard boat but I always wondered if she told me this because she felt this was a deterrent to MRSA. The parts about MRSA are as jumbled and use as interesting grammar as the rest of the book but here Dr. Coleman was on point and his paranoia, while perhaps overblown and strangely stated, was not out of bounds when healthy teenagers are picking the infection up in locker rooms and dying from it.

And then there are other sections where he starts off strong, with cogent, well-thought out points, but then he just veers off course, falls down the mountain and crashes in the valley below. In an excellent paragraph explaining what he failed to explain in the passage about the Black Plague, Dr. Coleman explains in detail how poverty, overcrowding, and crappy government in Brazil have led to a perfect storm for AIDS that could lead to a complete pandemic. Then he follows that with this:

The monsters in the Club of Rome and those running the Global 2000 mass extermination program are well pleased with their work. Barring a change of plan – - which appears totally unlikely – - billions of people will die of AIDS this decade. If Lord Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells were alive today, they would look upon AIDS as a providential gift, a dream come true.

Dr. Coleman explains earlier in the book what the Club of Rome is and why Bertrand Russell and H.G. Wells are among history’s greatest monsters (they evidently are a part of a plot to kill off “useless eaters”) but I’m weary, the explanations are suitably lunatic and until I read his books on the topics themselves, I will not discuss them, but I wonder why, in the face of actual evidence of wrong-doing that causes problems in the here and now we have to ascribe these ills to the machinations of two dead Brits, one so priapic he barely had time to manage his sex life with decorum, let alone plot to destroy the world a century after his death.

Dr. Coleman’s information about AZT, the drug used to treat AIDS is another instance wherein Dr. Coleman may have been presenting excellent information but the fact that he thinks that Bertrand Russell was a part of a cabal to kill off the world makes it hard to know if AZT is the poison that Dr. Coleman says it is. That’s one of the few times conspiracy theory makes me unhappy – when conspiracy folk may have an excellent point but you can’t trust in it because of all the lunacy that accompanies it. A very basic Google proved that AZT is not in fact the miracle drug I had initially thought it to be. But it is… unsettling that many of the voices who bring us dissenting information are as untrustworthy in their own way as the the standard sources of news.

His take on flu viruses, especially H1N1, was timely but also unnecessarily alarmist:

According to a top scientist for the United Nations, who examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as the victims of HIV/AIDS, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission vectors that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon.

He goes on to cite “scientists,” who are evidently working for the UN, who say that H1N1 was a human-engineered disease, which doesn’t pass the basic skeptic sniff test. The H1N1 virus subtype has been identified for almost a century, both the avian and swine infections. I can only assume that the horror of it creating a Spanish flu-type pandemic (which was caused by the avian H1N1 virus) is one of the reasons people feared this disease so much and as I have begun to note, fear is the cause of most conspiracy. However, unless anyone can give me the mechanism by which they think this known disease was mutated to make it similar to Ebola, I call shenanigans. I can only assume that the reason anyone would link H1N1 to Ebola is because the former on occasion and the latter always cause a cytokine storm in the sufferer. But the cytokine storm was an element of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic so again, we’ve known for almost a century that cytokine storms can happen in flu and it would be hard to say that a flu that causes a cytokine storm is anything new.

The conspiracy continues, and this seems especially odd since Dr. Coleman understands in Brazil how poverty, overcrowding and bad government contribute to the spread of disease:

…I believe that Swine Flu will return with a vengeance once the creators of the virus have finished their new genetic model and it is once again released to run amuck throughout the world. Certainly there have been several major pandemics in the U.S. (poliomyelitis, Spanish Flu and Avian Bird all proven or suspected). With Swine Flu, there should have more than likely been well over a thousand fatalities. But what was the actual count? The only fatality was a child. Of course that has changed but why is it that so many more deaths occurred in Mexico than anywhere else. Other races, even other Hispanics, appear to contract a much milder form. Was this due to the lack of medical facilities and the state of the slums around Mexico City and other major cities? But if one looks at Rio de Janeiro and its infamous “favelez” slums –far worse than anything found in Mexico — the theory does not hold up.

Well, the epicenter of the Swine Flu outbreak occurred in Mexico City, not Rio. Had it started in Rio, would we wonder why people in Mexico City slums didn’t fall as fast or as often? No. Where a disease begins is hit the worst. North and South America had time to react and the disease spread simply didn’t occur the way some panicked epidemiologists suspected it would, exactly as what happened with recent outbreaks of SARS and Avian Flu. And as a whitey white white, I got H1N1 and have never been sicker so I am unsure where the idea that other races are less affected comes from – the people who died in the U.S. were not in slums nor were they uniformly of Mexican descent. My anecdata and the actual data simply do not bear out Dr. Coleman’s beliefs.

And it spirals down the rabbit hole from there, with incendiary insinuations that the WHO sat on information about the outbreak of Swine Flu in Mexico, the WHO may have started the outbreak and bizarre and completely unscientific assertions that it is impossible for “four different viruses from three different animals” to mutate into a single disease.

And that’s the worst part of this whole thing, the sour note at the end of this symphony of sickness: Dr. Coleman has interesting points that are made suspect or outright overshadowed by some of his more lunacy-laden beliefs. I haven’t read anything else by Dr. Coleman – maybe he has a line on information that will completely redefine how I think about Bertrand Russell – but there is enough truth in so much that is terrible in medical history that I really don’t need to know about the Club of Rome or a plan by H.G. Wells to believe terrible things have happened and have been covered up. The presence of such whackadoodlery taints the points that Dr. Coleman could drive to town and take to dinner. Hell, I consider myself a skeptic but still believe Edward Hooper’s research that indicates that AIDS is a zootrophic condition that jumped from simians to humans as a result of the development of an oral polio vaccine in Central Africa. That’s some hard core conspiracy right there but it doesn’t require a cabal of long dead elites – just the hubris of a few men who hid the bad things they did and a compliant and easily redirected medical community and press that would not and still refuses to look hard into the issue.

So, I can’t really recommend this book unless you, like me, like nothing more than out-there conspiracy and stories of disease. I think Dr. Coleman’s works, however, are going to appear here again soon, because I have had ill-will for H.G. Wells after discovering he was a plagiarist of the worst sort. I really want to believe Dr. Coleman that Wells was indeed a terrible, terrible man. But there are far better books that make the case for conspiracy and illness. Tackle one of those first before reading this. But I intend to start reading Dr. Coleman’s works apace. He seems a man who will offer a ton of insanity with a few ounces of clarity and frankly, a few ounces of clarity combined with the entertainment of good conspiracy are worth it for me.

Author: Isis Aquarian with Electricity Aquarian

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir, history, religion, counter-culture

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, it’s released by Process Media, Adam Parfrey’s newest publishing venture. So that’s a good clue to oddness. And while the topic is compelling, I suspect that this book will be of most interest to people who are vinyl-heads, seeking information about fringe music from the 1970s.

Availability: Published by Process Media in 2007, you can get a copy here:

Comments: As I mentioned in my entry about the Books I Thought About Most in 2010, when I finished this book I made flippant references to it in my Twitter and my personal blog. Someone directed Isis Aquarian to the entries and she wanted to discuss the fact that I called the Source a Jesus Freak cult and how I was in error. I clarified in detail the reasons I referred to the Source as both but I never heard back from her. Maybe she thought me too dense to deal with. It doesn’t hurt for me to remember that my blog will trigger a Google alert beyond my 200 readers in my personal blog and show my snark to people who don’t know me well enough to understand my snark is generally followed by some measure of sincerity.

But though I will explain myself here on the whole “Jesus Freak cult” comments and how, while they were flippant, they are apt and not necessarily insults, the reason I found this book fascinating is that as a person who is, for the most part, utterly faithless, I found myself deeply interested in the people who created a life as Father Yod’s acolytes. As I read, I felt a strange feeling that I can only assume is akin to longing, a sense that my faithlessness costs me dearly, though ultimately there is not a damn thing I can do about it. I will, however, be brutally honest that I did not listen to the CD that comes with the book. Largely, the music Ya Ho Wa 13 created, as well as the voices of Father Yod’s followers, didn’t interest me that much, but the fact is, this is a very pretty, interactive book, with tons of pictures of intensely attractive people from the early 70s. Those looking for a very immersive experience will find much to love in this book. As I was writing this discussion, Mr. Oddbooks picked up the book and began flipping through it and remarked that it was one of those books that is as much art as it is a conveyance of words and information.

Isis Aquarian, whom Father Yod appointed the record keeper for the Source Family, reconstructs the life of the group from beginning to end, using recollections from members interspersed with her own text to tell the compelling story of a man who was an interesting mixture of father, lover, trickster, and guru and the stories of those who followed him. Make no mistake, as interesting as the Source Family was, this book at its heart discussed a charismatic authoritative sect, and Father Yod was, any trickster tendencies aside, largely a benevolent charismatic authority, and that is why I feel comfortable dissecting the everloving hell out of this book. When charismatic leaders are malignant, there really is no room for discussion. There is no way to talk about charismatic religious authorities like Roch Theriault without talking about the manner in which naive and impressionable people are ripe for the picking by psychopathic and delusional madmen. There is no discussion other than the depths of suffering the followers of such people experience. That is not the case here. There is a tendency to assume all cults are negative and while I feel comfortable discussing the Source Family as a cult, it was not a malignant cult – though there were some alarming signs for me – nor was Father Yod a mirror of the sorts of men the popular imagination thinks of as cult leaders.

And though I definitely loved looking at all of the beautiful people in this book and found some of the stories in this book amusing, Father Yod is why we are here because it seems to me that it is nothing short of astonishing that so many years later, the vast majority of those who were members of the Source Family remember Father Yod with nothing but fondness and love for the lessons he taught them. Yet even as Isis Aquarian told the story of Father Yod and his family, she shows how even though he was their spiritual leader, he had definite feet of clay.

So let’s talk about Father Yod. He began life as Jim Baker in 1922 and even before he became Father Yod, he had an epic life and was sort of a badass. He served in the Marines in WWII, became a martial arts expert and worked for a time as a stuntman in Hollywood. When he died, Father Yod was on his virgin hang gliding mission and in the group, he had many wives who bore his children. In the 1960s he began to follow fellow travelers into a more natural lifestyle, becoming a vegetarian and opened the Source Restaurant on the Sunset Strip, serving vegetarian fare to hippies (and the Source Family emphatically rejects the label of “hippie” for themselves), burnouts and superstars.

Father Yod became interested in many different branches of philosophy and religion, especially the Vedic traditions, combining them into a world view that had a decidedly Christian flavor (for example, Father Yod updated the Ten Commandments for his followers in anticipation of the coming of the new age and many elements of the cult were reactions to the Judeo-Christian ethos). The cult that built up around Father Yod happened almost accidentally. Young women were strongly drawn to him, as were young men, and the reasons varied from person to person. Some felt he was a paternal figure. Some wanted to be his lover (The Source Family was not anti-gay but the few homosexuals who were a part of the group in the early days were on the outside because the group emphasized the natural and mystical power of the male-female union). Some thought that in his presence they had found a man who would help them find the answers they sought. If you are age 40 or younger and look at the cover of this book and immediately think, “Dumbledore!” you are not alone. I suspect there is an archetype we all have of the Magus, a man imbued with strength, mysticism and moral wisdom and Father Yod fit that archetype. Father Yod’s physical appearance was one of strength and comfortingly paternal to me, and to many of the women in the Source Family, he was sexual force, as well (as is Dumbledore, if you read slash fan fiction and really, you shouldn’t…).

As people were ever increasingly drawn to Father Yod, the members of the Source Family developed a communal lifestyle, living in succession in two large mansions in the Los Angeles area, the Mother house and the Father house. At some times, the family swelled to over 100 members, and despite cramped quarters, the members of the group split work, sharing duties running the restaurant, keeping up laundry for all the members, cooking, cleaning and from the descriptions Isis and other members of the commune give, it worked relatively well. In order to achieve some level of privacy, some members created plywood cubbies that sound for all in the world like those compartment Japanese hotel rooms. Despite close quarters, the Source Family came up with creative and labor-intensive means of dealing with needs for privacy and the infrastructure problems so many people sharing one house caused.

Father Yod also maintained an inner circle of 14 women, the council of women, and as an inversion of the idea of Christian submissiveness, the Source Family promoted a female-centric community and women’s liberation. Of course, Father Yod’s word was important but as he evolved his message he took counsel from his council of women. Although, and I will discuss this later, Father Yod at times made it hard for women to remain in monogamy with a chosen man and the sexual rules of the commune had a decidedly uneven effect, women ostensibly chose their own men and had a strong voice in the commune. Women gave birth at home (and I had no idea home births were illegal in California at the time), breast fed their babies at a time when that was outre and children were homeschooled. The Source Family had a close relationship with another Jesus sect but as too often happens in sects led by charismatic leaders, minor differences caused fractures. And despite the fact that the Source Family lived a relatively healthy life, deep troubles began.

Despite being clean people, when you have 100 people in one house, bad things can happen. A staph infection ran through the commune and sickened a baby and when that child was taken for emergency care, the authorities descended up on the family. Because the group was afraid that the authorities were going to take the children, Father Yod decided to beat a retreat to Hawaii, a decision that had he lived longer, might have proved the undoing of the Source Family, as the locals in Hawaii were hostile to the “hippies” to the point of threatened violence, they had little experience doing the fishing and farming they would need to survive and Father Yod sold the Source restaurant when he left LA. That restaurant had been the primary source of income for over 100 people and without it, the cult suffered financial woes. Father Yod smuggled vans to Hawaii that had not been paid for, and he also smuggled the family’s cat. The drugged cat was taken onto a plane, stuffed into the dress of a female member who pretended to be pregnant – the cat was later eaten by a mongoose, which means this book also gets the “Oddbooks List of Books that Feature Dead Cats” tag. The situation degenerated so bad for the family that they ended up descending on the welfare office near them and more or less forcing the Hawaiian infrastructure to pay for them to leave (evidently there was a fund that Hawaii would use to return US citizens to the mainland if they did not have the money but the sheer number of tickets the family would require was problematic).

Some of the family returned to San Francisco for a bit then returned to Hawaii. It was there that Father Yod was killed during his maiden voyage hang gliding at age 53. Actually, he was severely injured and did not seek medical help, as the group largely did not put much faith in medicine, and was taken back to their home and died. There was a minor controversy concerning his death because Father Yod believed the soul took three days to leave the body and specific death rituals needed to be performed over his body. Since he died in an accident, authorities were concerned that his body was not immediately turned over to the coroner. When another member of the Source Family died in a hang gliding accident a year or so later, several members of the Source Family, including Isis, were arrested for failing to immediately turn his body over to authorities. They were later cleared of charges.

It is a testament to Father Yod’s message that the family struggled on after he died, but eventually, without the charisma of their leader to bind them together, members moved on and most of them moved on to have very interesting lives. But as I read this book, I felt a bit uneasy because I consider myself to have been victimized by a dopey religious cult – the Southern Baptist Church – and elements of the way the Source Family lived set off my “oh-no” meter. So let’s discuss that. First, to clarify, Jesus Freak now is a terrible appellation, akin to calling someone a “holy roller” or similar and it may have been a pejorative 40 years ago but I know many Jesus Freaks reclaimed the word and didn’t accept it as an insult. When I think of Jesus Freaks, I think of what the term meant by those who called themselves Jesus Freaks: adherents of the Jesus Movement who espoused a counter-culture lifestyle, with an emphasis on back to the land, social justice, communal living, and rejection of contemporary dogma. Many of these groups had a profound musical element to them. The Source Family was Christian in origin, though they carried cards professing Sikhism and the beliefs of the group had a synthesis of many Eastern religions and Egyptology. However, the core of the group appears to me to be Christian, though not as evangelical as some Jesus Freaks were, and their close association with a Jesus Cult and the way that Father Yod recreated Biblical commandments makes me lean towards thinking the group Jesus Freaks. Mileage varies and my terminology is just my interpretation and should not be read as an assertion of an absolute truth.

However, the cult aspect of it is where I got uneasy. Of course, the word “cult” today has almost without question a negative bias though that is just connotation after years of malignant sects doing grave damage. Objectively, a cult is a group of people whose beliefs and actions seem strange when compared to more mainstream customs. Nothing nefarious or unhealthy in that and the Source Family falls largely within that definition. But the group also exhibited some of the more exploitative and damaging elements of a group built around the theories of one man. Here are some of my observations:

1) The Source Family was centered around a charismatic leader who “love bombed” people, resulting in the center of the religious experience being the leader and not the religion. In fact, even after reading this book so closely that I can quote passages of it, I have a hard time explaining the core mission of the Source Family, the core beliefs but I know a lot about Father Yod. Magus, who left the cult in early days, described a descent from a innocent beginning to an almost “Aleister Crowley type megalomania.”

2) There was an inability to leave with impunity or finality. Some people did indeed leave, but the problems were there. Magus says he was shunned when he left. When Rhythm left, the whole of the group went to fetch him back to show him that they loved him. But the end result was still that his desire to leave was not respected. When Galaxy was returned home to her parents by the police, Father sent an adult man to fetch her back then marry her so that her parents could not interfere.

3) The Source Family showed some disregard for family ties, making Father Yod the only real connection some members often had. For example, fetching back the underage Galaxy from her family using deception interfered directly with the relationship between parents and their minor-age child. Paralda described how Father Yod interfered in her marriage to Omne soon after he married them, pressuring her to have sex with him. Few people lived or worked outside the Source Family, ensuring the primacy of the relationship with Father Yod.

4) The tenets of the Source Family changed to suit the needs of a charismatic leader. One of Father Yod’s commandments was that nothing should come between a man and his woman… until he found women he wanted more than his then wife, Robin/Ahom. Quick evolutions of matters of faith are alarming especially when they seem to revolve around the sexual needs of the leader of the sect (and though Father Yod may not have begun with the idea of having sex with so many women, some of whom were underage, it did happen and many elements of group belief sprang up making Father Yod’s sexual belief a group belief.)

5). Father Yod created new identities for members, often based on his interpretation of their personalities. Not only did everyone get new names, some several times, but Father Yod also would revoke names to tamper with the idea of identity, as when everyone was called a number for a brief period of time. This was one of the fine line reservations with me as I can see both sides of the argument on diminishing the self and of course some religions emphasize selection of a new name, as Catholics select a new name during church rites. But Father Yod picked his acolytes new names and changed them again when he felt like it.

6) The Source Family exercised sexual control over its members. Men were given a very strict manner in which they could have sex – tantric sex – and if a man could not control the need to ejaculate for a specified period of time, he was looked down upon. Men who could “hold their seed” got all the women, entrenching their place in the The Source Family. But even though these rules created a group of men who could not attain a regular lover and helpmate, Father Yod would assign women to service and take care of these pariah men because their labor was needed in the cult and they could not afford for them to leave if they began to feel too alienated. The tension between have and have-not men was always there because the men without lovers felt they needed to work on themselves because the lack of a sexual partner was seen as a spiritual failing.

7) Members seldom had any control over money. Communal living is not that unusual, but when only a handful of people control the bank account for over 100 people, it can be a very negative thing.

8) The group substituted Father Yod’s common sense for their own. Though clean people, close quarters created a staph infection that ran through the group that was not treated medically and led to problems, the most obvious being Anastasia and her baby. Anastasia had a staph infection in her breast yet continued breast feeding, as the group did not approve of bottle feeding. Her infant fell very ill with staph but did not immediately receive medical care because Father Yod taught the rejection of conventional medicine. The child almost died and Anastasia almost lost her breast. Two children died in the cult. One baby who was clearly failing to thrive evidently never received any medical care before she died, or if she did, it wasn’t mentioned in the book. One of Magus’ sons became very ill with an ear infection and the treatment Father Yod recommended was to shine colored lights on the boy and chant for him. On a more ridiculous level, Father Yod told people to stop wearing their glasses in order to build their eye muscles. Father Yod proclaimed the group for a while would only eat fruits and vegetables whose colors reflected the rainbow. To have followed any of this indicates that Father Yod’s magnetism was more important than common sense.

9) The group had to operate in secrecy, though I openly admit that in a climate where home births were illegal and breast feeding was seen as odd, some secrecy was needed. However, this secrecy set up an us versus them mentality that created hardship. When Anastasia’s baby almost died and it looked like child protective services were going to act because the children in The Source Family did not go to school, there were home births that were illegal at the time, overcrowded living, etc., the answer was not to address these issues openly with either a legal stance to change law or an attempt to work with authorities. Rather Father Yod uprooted the group from LA, sold the restaurant that supported the group, and sent people to a remote Hawaiian island with little support because he hoped there would be little interference from the authorities there.

10) Most alarming to me was that towards the end of his life, Father Yod was beginning to trip down the old eschatology lane, positing about the end of the world, how it was coming soon, and how the family needed to be ready to survive and lead the survivors. That… Of all of the sort of wacky, new age bad decisions that came about, this was the most disturbing to me. Whenever any sect begins to assign an approximate date for the end of the world, it ushers in all kinds of problems.

Yet after reading all of this, still having the capacity to be flippant meant that I didn’t feel like I was reading a small scale People’s Temple that got averted by a tragic hang gliding accident. Despite my innate abhorrence for religion and my admittedly bizarre aversion towards spirituality in general, I found myself wishing I had, in my youth, been a part of something like this. I had a similar feeling when I watched the series Big Love, a feeling that being a loner was definitely working against me and that sister wives might be nice. But then I realized how completely unsuited I am for such a life, channeling Charlie from the movie Metropolitan, who, like me, wouldn’t want to live on a farm (or commune or conjoined houses in Utah) with a bunch of other people. Part of it may have been that the Source Family was a group that reveled in natural pleasure and enjoyed beauty and displays of flashiness and only became ascetics when circumstances forced such behavior, but that was not the whole of it because as a near hermit, I don’t care that much for the physical world and other peoples’ involvement in it.

So how come I find myself wishing I could have a talk with Father Yod and hear what he has to say? As a person allergic to authority and spirituality, why did I find him so deeply interesting? I think, at the end of it, I liked Father Yod because he knew he was not god. He may have been a man who had an enormous ego. He might have enjoyed being followed more than leading, and he definitely had all kinds of issues with his libido (and, frankly, I think he introduced tantric sex as a means of controlling himself and to prevent descending into a priapic orgy, and you can take that about as far as you want given my degree in armchair psychology), but even as this book showed how he had feet of clay, I don’t think Father Yod ever lost track of that himself.

This scene from when a group of men from The Source Family arrived in Hawaii, deeply influenced my belief about Father Yod, showing me his humanity in the midst of what could at times be fawning adulation. This passage comes from Zinaru, who arrived at Kauai to be met with a bowl of magic mushrooms:

It was around this time that a lot of discussion on YHVH began, and there was a shift in Father’s deep commitment to spiritual development and observance of natural laws to seeing himself as the Avatar–the actual incarnation of God. I noticed the women around him reinforced this direction in his perceptions, maybe because this God incarnate status for Father stimulated their own egos and reinforced their own special position as “wives of God incarnate.”

Back to our arrival day in Kauai. After about 40 minutes, the effects of the mushrooms were becoming very strong and it was suggested that we all go take a walk. About 20 of us followed a trail through the property and up the closest hill. Some Family members wanted us to observe the “Sleeping Lady,” a description that local Hawaiians had given to a group of gently rolling hills visible from the highest point on our land.

Due to our brisk walk up the long hill and the blood circulating rapidly in our bodies, the power of the mushrooms really began to peak. Father began to speak, and it was obvious that he was very affected psychologically. Father made a comment about the power of nature while we observed the “sleeping lady.” The sun was starting to go down, and we all stood for a moment in silence appreciating the tropical beauty, our surroundings, and the power of nature.

It was then that Father said in a soft voice, “I am not God. I am only a man.” Immediately Makushla [Father Yod's wife, sort of a first wife among equals] said, “No, no, you are God,” and several women agreed. And he said, “No, I am just a man trying to understand God.” He continued. “I am nothing. I am just a man. I am not sure what to do, really.” Father turned and looked me in the eyes, and I could see he was deeply moved emotionally. I saw his insecurity manifest in his eyes in a way I’d never seen before. He dropped all pretense and was deeply humbled by his augmented state and honest self-perception.

This passage was the most important in the book, I think. It showed me that Father Yod was a guy with some interesting insights who got caught up in an echo chamber and in his moments of extreme clarity, he was under no illusions as to who he really was: a man searching for truth, a man who ended up with many people relying on his judgment, and a man whose responsibilities hung heavily on his shoulders.

And that makes for compelling reading, learning all about this man via the words of others, as well as learning about the people who tell the story. There is a whole lot I can’t really touch on because this discussion is already too long, like the affront Father Yod’s perspective on the name of the creator must pose to Jews, and the band Ya Ho Wa 13 didn’t interest me much. But I hope this discussion shows how deeply interesting this book is. Not only is it quite pretty (the pictures of a time past are amazing — Sunflower bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Oddbooks before he cut off all his hair and I wish more information was given about Snow, the beautiful albino girl who drew my eye in every picture she appeared in), but with the CD, and the participation of so many past members of the Source Family, this book is a well-documented look at a complex man who lived an amazing life during a turbulent time in America. I recommend this muchly.

Author: Jason Offutt

Type of Book: Non-fiction, paranormal, paranormal squick

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: I tend to think most examinations of the paranormal are odd, and this one was no exception.

Availability: Published by 2009 by Anomalist Press, you can get a copy here:

Comments: Oh, lord help me, I love books like this. I love reading people’s accounts of the bizarre and how they filter their experiences through their own beliefs and fears. This book satisfied several book urges of mine at once. Paranormal tales, people telling their own stories, high pathos and low humor. Despite the fact that I had to create a category for this book called “Paranormal Squick,” that is not the fault of the author. Offutt structures this book in a manner wherein he categorizes the stories people have to tell. This book is not an advocacy – it is mostly Offutt’s attempts to sort and label people’s experiences. At no point does Jason Offutt attempt to say that he has a line on an explanation of Shadow People and since he does not have a specific advocacy, the at times horribleness that can come from books about paranormal were not his fault – but more laternon why I got a definite squick from a few of these stories, squick that could be avoided with a judicious application of science and reason.

According to this book, Shadow People are not really ghosts. They are a phenomenon that have occurred in various cultures yet are hard to pin down, definition-wise, as they manifest in various ways and impact people differently. In America, they’ve only really started being discussed in earnest in the last couple of decades but parapsychologists like Brad Steiger believe that Shadow People have always been around. They generally appear as black, opaque, and two-dimensional. Many report having seen Shadow People with red, glowing eyes. Most reports of these entities are negative, as in the person who saw the Shadow Person was scared or felt dread. There were some reports of the Shadow People as a sort of Watcher element, looking over people but not in an evil or negative manner, but the vast majority of Shadow People are reported to be negative entities.

Offutt, who got lots of examples of people’s experiences with Shadow People via his website, divided the stories he was told as best he could, categorizing them in obvious ways, like benign Shadow People and negative or demonic Shadow People. But he also has less obvious categories, like Shadow People wearing hats and Shadow Animals. In the face of the amorphous quality of the experiences and the varied details, Offutt does a pretty good job sorting it all out.

Offutt, who clearly has a belief in the paranormal, does his level best in one chapter to discuss the science of Shadow People, though the science chapter invokes quantum physics, which never fails to evoke a serious eye roll from me because it is, no matter what any True Believer says, a theory attempting to explain a theory and as such is not doing anyone much good as a solution (and Richard Feynman admitted that no one really understands quantum mechanics, so take it to the bank that all those people using quantum anything to explain ghosts, psychics and prosperity theology likely have no friggin’ idea what they are talking about). And to be frank, the other science sources Offutt uses generally back my guffaws but it is interesting to think about string theory and how it could explain seeing Shadow People.

In those ten pages of science, Offutt discusses the most likely explanation for the vast majority of Shadow People sightings: sleep paralysis, which in my mind also edges into the hypnagogic tendency to see and hear things that are not there when one is in a state where one is not entirely awake. But then Offutt starts to discuss archetypes, which is not really a hard science, but rather a soft science, as psychology is a very uneven science at best. So don’t put a whole lot of faith into any of the science in this other than people see things and experience things when they are asleep and just waking up.

And, without belaboring the point too much, it is my assertion that 99.75% of everyone who experiences a paranormal event in the middle of the night says immediately and without any hesitation that what they experienced was not sleep paralysis or hypnagogia. It was too real, the terror too palpable, the vision too clear. But it is my belief that almost all the Shadow People and Animals discussed in this book can be explained via sleep paralysis, hypnagogia and the often overlooked alcohol. In fact, the book contains perfect examples of people refusing to entertain the idea of sleep paralysis or hypnagogia (the latter is not a topic Offutt discusses in depth in the book, just to be clear). Here’s one example from a woman who claims she was attacked by a Shadow Person:

One possible explanation for her experiences is sleep paralysis, but Cathy quickly dismissed this possibility. “I know that sleep paralysis is something that many people would think happened,” she said. “All I can say to those is, unless you have actually been attacked in this way, I wouldn’t chalk other people’s experience up to that. Having experienced this, I know that I was attacked by something.”

So yeah, know that as you read this, Offutt doesn’t really try to force people into a reasonable frame of reference – and I don’t think he should have as letting people’s stories tell themselves is a fine approach – and that seldom does anyone who experiences Shadow People want to consider the idea that these things could have happened for any reason that is not supernatural. (And if there is a heaven, I wish it would preserve me from ever again reading this argument, that until one experiences something one cannot judge the experience. It is a plea in earnest from people that we take them at their word and I am sympathetic to a point but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. “Take my word for it because you haven’t experienced it” isn’t extraordinary evidence.)

Only a handful of sightings reported in this book were positive. Most of the people who saw the Shadow People were scared, but not terrified. But a few were outright terrified, felt the shadows were demonic entities, or that their safety was in peril. And this is where I come to my sense of Paranormal Squick, because any point of view that rejects outright reasonable explanations and embraces a frame of mind that causes them terror and fear is squicky. As I said above, Offutt does not advocate this position. He simply relates the tales but in these tales lies the squicky sense that if people would embrace notions other than an evil presence out to hurt them, their minds, hearts and lives would improve.

Take this disturbing example from Anne Williams from Australia, who was “roused at 3:00 a.m. one day” by a Shadow Person. She felt a presence standing over her, saw a figure that sounds a lot like descriptions of the Grim Reaper. Suddenly Anne felt pinned to the bed, locked down in fact. Then it gets really bad for Anne:

Anne lay on her back, trying to scream as the figure leaned into her. “I felt that it shoved its arm down my neck and was choking me, as nothing came out of my mouth,” she said. “Like no noise. I could not even hear myself scream, but I was.”

Tears ran down her face, soaking her pillow as she tried to scream but couldn’t. “I was trying to get up, which I could not,” she said. “I felt that it was trying to scare me to death.”

Anne invoked the name of God and drove the Shadow away for the night but it returned the next night. She prayed again and again it left. It returned again much later but finally disappeared. Though this woman was eventually rid of her Shadow Person, she was absolutely terrified when she experienced what she experienced and felt she was in peril. The belief that there is a shadowy, not entirely definable presence out to hurt you, rather than accepting that sleep paralysis combined with hypnogogia was likely the best explanation for this experience, left this woman in a state in which she was terrified.

Then take the case of Pat. He has seen Shadow People his entire life and sees them during the day as well as at night.

“I have seen these things in various places and they seem to have been following me around everywhere,” Pat said. “The feeling of pure evil is what scared the crap out of me because there were other instances in my life growing up where my mother or I also felt that strong feeling of pure evil. They have followed me most of my life.”

Although Pat tries not to think about these Shadows, he can’t truly stop. “I’m still curious to what exactly they are and why they are following me around.”

This is utterly heartbreaking to be sure, to spend one’s life feeling as if one is being tracked and stalked by Shadow People with evil intent. And maybe Pat has undergone all kinds of processes before he immediately settled on the notion that he is being stalked by evil supernatural entities. But if so, that wasn’t presented in his story. I really want to know if Pat or his mother ever underwent cognitive tests to see if they process visual stimuli in a manner that might cause them to see Shadow People. Have either undergone psychiatric testing to see if there is some sort of disorder that would cause them to feel a sense of paranoia that evil is stalking them. I wonder if both were exposed to some element in their homes together that could have permanently altered their cognitive processes. There are a lot of questions people should ask before settling on the idea that events are paranormal but often, those questions get pushed aside in the horror of the moment and you end up with a young man like Pat who has spent a life feeling as if true evil was just over his shoulder. Maybe Pat has done all of this. Maybe the paranormal is the only option left to explain these events but I wish I knew more about him.

This book is full of examples of people who are scared, terrified, uneasy and sure that evil lurks and no real sense that much was done to explain those terrible feelings without immediately focusing on the paranormal. That is squicky to me, the idea of people suffering when there could be a very reasonable explanation of what happened to them.

Then, in the midst of all the terror, there was this inadvertently hilarious gem from the chapter on Shadow Cats and other animals.

Max and his cousin sat in the darkness on the back steps of the house. The sounds of laughter poured from inside the house, a party for Max’s uncle nearing full crescendo. As they sat in the tungsten glow from windows that bathed the yard in a dissipating yellow, they could make out the fence that lined the property.

But Max and his cousin wished they hadn’t. “We noticed a Shadow creeping along the fence,” Max said. “I guess it noticed it was being watched and stopped. It was hunched over like it was trying to be covert.”

The boys stared at a black, cat-shaped Shadow in curiosity, but the curiosity quickly faded into terror. “It turned its head to look at us,” Max said. “It had bright yellow eyes. As soon as it looked at us, it turned and ran into the shadows.” They ran inside.

What was the creeping Shadow in the back yard? Max didn’t know…

I’m gonna venture a guess that the creeping Shadow was a neighborhood cat stalking small bugs attracted by the yellow light. The slinking cat noticed there were humans on the back porch and the yellow light reflected off the cat’s already amber colored eyes and made the eyes seem like they were glowing yellow. The cat, realizing there were drunk humans nearby (no one said they were drinking but the idea of a raucous party lends well to the idea that a beer or two may have been consumed), slunk off into the shadows. So… two paranormal-impressionable young men who may or may not have been drinking saw a cat-shape hunched over near a fence line late in the evening, illuminated by yellowish light and immediately assumed it was a terrifying visage of a Shadow Cat. Oh my…

Despite moments of low humor, or maybe because of it, this book is well-worth reading. I appreciate that Offutt wasn’t pushing an agenda, that he let people tell their stories as they interpreted them, and while I was troubled by the fact that people lived in terror rather than examining the ideas of sleep-paralysis or investigating to see if there was a carbon monoxide leak in their rooms, none of that was Offutt’s fault and is an unavoidable by-product of almost all paranormal examinations. All in all, as a skeptic I got to recreate in my head explanations for some of the tales and as a person drawn to tales of the paranormal, I got to wallow in the weirdness. A win-win.

And how can I be both a skeptic and a lover of the paranormal? Though I am a skeptic in all matters paranormal, my mind is still strangely open. Mr. Oddbooks and I had a sustained paranormal experience that lasted for several years and still, from time to time, manifests. We tore each experience apart and could never find any explanation that did not venture into the realm of the paranormal. Mr. Oddbooks is a computer programmer. He is a man ruled by the rational. And I am an atheist who to this day cannot really reconcile the idea that a spirit might have attached herself to us. For if I don’t believe in god, souls, or the afterlife, how could a benevolent soul have come into my life? I am to this day challenged theologically by what happened to us.

But it must be said that when we experienced paranormal activities, we did everything we could to explain them rationally. First, we determined we were still sane (relatively speaking). Then we checked air vents, made sure there was no gas leak, tested sound, determined if there was anything in our environment that could create specific odors. We determined whether or not neighbors were home when certain events occurred. We wondered if our home was accessible to a prankster. We even grilled each other. We mulled every possibility. We could never find an active cause for the activity. But more importantly, we never determined a passive cause for the activity. We never once felt the activities at night. We did not hear voices or smell odors as we were about to fall asleep. We did not waken in the night to be confronted by phenomena. All the events and things we experienced happened during the day, when we were awake and active. The events occurred in multiple dwellings. One of my experiences happened when I was surfing the web and I could have been in a borderline hypnagogic state. Other than that, we were always clear minded, awake, alert and physically active when the events occurred.

But because the experience was overwhelmingly positive, I don’t worry too much. The feeling we had after the events was of comfort, that the Universe is largely benevolent and that there was a force we could not understand that was looking out for us. This is a huge stretch, I know that, to assign such feelings to something we cannot explain, and this is a gray area for us. We ultimately decided that the sense that there was maybe a spirit looking out for us in no way affected our common sense or provoked us into to feeling anything but a warm sense of kindness. The experience did not lead us to think we are bulletproof nor did it cause us to alter our behavior so settling on the idea of a benevolent spirit in no way harms us but also in no way makes us feel powerful. Perhaps one could argue that false comfort is a bad thing but in this case I tend to disagree. So in a sense, it is easier for me than the people who feel they have been attacked or stalked by evil because it seems as if it may be less important to explain lovely experiences than those that terrify you. But having been in a position wherein I could not then (nor can I now) explain what happened, I have a decided preference for looking at all options and exhausting all possibilities before settling on the paranormal. I don’t think I’ll ever have an answer but I keep hoping I will one day and I think that desire to find some explanation is why I continue to read books like this, even when I suspect they will end up worrying me or making me laugh.

So if you have an interest in this sort of thing, you can do much worse than reading Offutt’s work. I think I will be checking out other titles from him. Here’s hoping your holidays are calm and free of malignant spirits, unless you are a Scrooge and need a Marley to come and set you right.

Author: Supervert

Type of Book: Non-fiction, human sexuality, pornography, psychology, philosophy

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: This tiny book’s arrangement is in itself odd, with a scholarly discussion running across the top of the pages, a more personal narration running across the bottom, and large, black squares over all the pictures. Then there’s the content…

Availability: Published by Supervert in 2010, you can get a copy here:

Comments: I have a pretty serious book crush on Supervert. Every now and then you come across an author who seems very much like he or she is on your wavelength, whose words seem like they could have come out of your own brain. Supervert is one of those authors for me. I felt a great amount of kinship reading a few of the stories in Necrophilia Variations (and yeah, when you say that, when you admit a book with this particular title spoke to you directly, you are making a certain statement about yourself and now that I am officially a harmless, middle-aged woman, I feel I am safe making any sort of admission I want). I found myself nodding a lot when reading Perversity Think Tank as the book tried to answer the question of “What is Perversity?”

If I didn’t know this before reading the book, I now understand that defining perversity can be very much akin to holding mercury but Supervert manages to nail down some interesting perspectives on the topic. Mostly, I walked away knowing what perversity isn’t, while marveling that there is another human being on the planet who had thought about the complete narcissism that is involved in reproductive incest, which I will discuss in a moment.

Supervert has a unique insight into perversion. He ran the site PervScan, wherein he scoured news for anything with a hint of sexual deviance to it. While this book was inspired by the musings that the PervScan articles inspired, this is not a compilation of the site’s “greatest hits” though a couple of cases are referenced in the book. Rather, the book uses a couple of cases to ponder what comprises perversion and what does not. Interestingly, compiling all those stories of strange acts showed Supervert that most of the acts he cataloged were not true perversion.

Many of the acts I covered on PervScan – like the three middle-aged brothers who sexually assaulted their bedridden mother while she lay suffering amid lice, roaches, and fecal matter – struck me less as perverse than as ignorant, heedless, cruel. There were days when I thought my compendium of deviant doings was nothing more than a catalogue of errors in judgement and lapses in common sense.

This was an incredibly important point to me because despite my own self-admitted sympathy for the devil as well as an abiding interest in the bizarre and perverted, even I find myself defining any deviation from the norm, up to and including the worst sexual crimes, as perversion when really what was at work was psychopathy or a sub-normal intellect.

Moreover, as Supervert read more and more examples of sexual oddity, that which had seemed somewhat perverted before now seemed somewhat tame.

After you’ve read about a guy who wants to eat his own penis, you feel like you’ve pretty much heard it all. How could mere exhibitionism seem perverted in comparison to a man who wants to fry his genitalia in a pan?

I know, this isn’t the most profound of statements, but it struck me that I don’t know another single person in real life who speculates on such things, who has, in fact, heard it all to the point that little shocks them and the outre seems positively normal and comforting. I often feel as if my interest in perversion is a perversion in and of itself. I wish I knew more people who know the ins and outs of the Armin Meiwes case or all the details about Sharon Lopatka because it would make me happy to know other suburbanites with gray hair and festive glasses and a love of kittens wouldn’t throw me out of their houses if they knew what goes into and on in my head.

Supervert discusses all the various meanings of perversion. He discusses one of the first philosophical interpretations of perversion, an easy conclusion that many have reached before – that sexual perversion is any act that thwarts reproduction. Easy enough but it means that a married couple who have sex after the wife has experienced menopause are therefore perverts and so that really doesn’t fit. Additionally, Supervert brings up Sade, who wrote in The 120 Days of Sodom about a libertine who wanted to masturbate and ejaculate on the crowning head of an infant as it was born. This perversion can only happen because of human reproduction so really, in a sense, this shows the complete creativity involved in true perversion and how useless most definitions of perversion can be. Freud defined perversity as any sex act that diverted the focus of sex from the sex organs. Sort of limiting and pretty much results in everyone who has ever done anything sexual with their hands or mouths in the bedroom in being labeled a pervert and the more the merrier, right? But sweeping generalizations like these do no one any good in understanding the true nature of perversion.

The book brings up all the usual suspects like Sade but then it also discusses those whose opinions on sex are suspect at best and therefore were hilarious to me. The sad, misogynistic, sexually inept Schopenhauer makes an appearance, to my delight. Evidently, he had a foot in a pre-Freud camp that indicated that perversion was anything not involving sex organs because it ensured that those who had bad genes that made them perverts could not reproduce and pass on their defects. Which makes my lack of children somewhat interesting but then again, as Supervert reminds us, Sade had three children. Oh lord, I hate Schopenhauer. His ideas of failsex can only inspire derision in me, his very name makes me groan, and mileage, of course, always varies, but I rather enjoyed the times in this book when I felt provoked.

It was during the discussion on incest that my book crush on Supervert was confirmed. The first part was obvious, but nothing that I had ever really considered. Supervert discusses the perversion in incest and comes to an interesting conclusion. The inbred yokel who has sex with his daughter is likely not doing it in order to violate the taboo of inter-familial sex. Rather, he is doing it because she is likely the only available girl. It is an act of availability that while repellent, is not all that perverse. It is a far different thing for a father to desire his daughter because she is his daughter, or a mother to desire her son because he is her son. A key part of perversion, as far as Supervert is concerned, is consideration for the act itself and not just the easy, sloppy depravity that makes a person simply have sex with whomever or whatever is closest.

But here’s the thing that surprised me anyone else had considered (and secretly thrilled me because when one entertains dark and perverted thoughts, one never thinks anyone else would even in a million years think the same thing): the narcissism present in deliberate incest.

A libertine doesn’t molest his daughter because she just happens to be there. A libertine molests his daughter because he consciously wants to create a being who is both his child and his grandchild – and still a future sex object itself. Then he molests that daughter/granddaughter hybrid to obtain another new being who is child, grandchild, great grandchild – and still sex object.

Once you get to a certain point in this process, the end result is an appalling creation that is more or less masturbation by proxy.

The incestuous libertine approaches ever closer to a reproductive act whose result is a child 100% himself, and yet that ultimate point is always deferred by increasingly small percentages. The libertine can never quite dispense with the shred of genetic material that belongs to the maternal line, and yet the fact remains that, by fucking the offspring of his own offspring, he is inevitably fucking more and more of himself.

It is this awareness of the act and the results that is quite important when considering perversion:

And that, as Sade recognized, is one of the most striking characteristics of perversity: it is deliberate, self-conscious, pellucid. Its hallmark is… its intentionality… The libertine is able to reflect on his unwholesome activities. Self-awareness makes his pleasures all the greater.

Though Supervert discusses much, much more than these conclusions in the book, I think this is quite important and possibly the greatest revelation in this book for me. Too often people with dire sexual compulsions are labeled perverts, people with little control over their acts or those governed by a need that is innate and defies any sort of consciousness. Perversion, as a philosophical approach to depravity, requires far more than a compulsive need or a thoughtless action.

The only part of this book that I found the least bit disagreeable was Supervert’s passage about how rape could possibly be a part of the evolutionary process.

Evolutionary biologists have pointed out that natural selection provides an obvious impetus for it, insofar as rape improves the rapist’s chances for reproductive success. That my friend was raped in Central Park was symbolic: in the greatest swath of grass and trees in New York, she was subject to the Darwinism of her attackers.

Back when I first heard this particular line of thinking many years ago in an anthropology class in college, I was skeptical. Even 100,000 years ago, didn’t women understand the causality between sex and pregnancy even if they did not understand the exact mechanism? Raped women often don’t look kindly on the offspring of rape. If they couldn’t abort, those children were likely abandoned or exposed, or were raised less kindly. The men in societies where their spouses were subject to rape would also have reacted poorly. The rapists were likely subject to physical violence that made them rethink any impulse for rape, if they survived the violence. Or they would get kicked out of the tribe they lived in and would have had a far harder time at surviving at all. If there was ever a genetic code for rape to ensure one’s genetic material lived on, it likely got killed off when the offspring of such unions were subject to abortion, abandonment or resentful care and the men themselves violently neutralized before they could spread very much seed at all. Even if women only became aware of how pregnancy happened during recorded history, I would think that societal reactions to rape would still be enough to wipe out any gene that causes rape within a dozen or so generations. Or that was my knee jerk reaction. It seems there are some who know quite a bit of evolutionary psychology who agree. But regardless of which side is correct, is interesting to me, analyzing what about our sexual natures, dark and not-so-dark, can be seen as innate or learned, or just the result of a bad brain.

Supervert’s book is full of enlightened explanations of the philosophy and reasoning behind some sex acts even I can look at and call bizarre, or perverted, and at times, the best parts of the book were his discourses on the blacked-out images. These images were varied and covered a lot of ground. Like men who like to ejaculate into a woman’s eye. Like a pornographer who wanted to make a skin flick out of a woman giving birth. Like an almost touching picture of a couple on a bed, the man smoking, the woman lying on her side, staring at the man. Like the solipsistic nature of POV porn. Like his reaction to a simple painting and how this painting shows clearly how alone the pervert is in his or her own mind. Like a piece of art that provokes thoughts as to whether or not autoerotic asphyxiation is a perveme (he discusses pervemes in the book – perversion memes). Like a bestiality film clip that proved there is indeed a noise that can inspire disgust. Yeah, I think I most enjoyed Supervert’s reactions to the art he deliberately blocks out of the book.

This book isn’t for everyone but if you are a fellow traveler on certain roads, you will want to get this book. If you do read it or have already read it, I’d love to know how you read it. I read the “top half” from beginning to end, then read the “bottom half.” I paused during the bottom half to read the descriptions that accompanied the blacked-out pictures. I read the book in this manner twice, then looked up the pictures (or as many as were available online) and reread the descriptions. For a small, straightforward book, it requires a lot of attention. While definitely salacious enough to inspire prurient thoughts in those who are simply in this for the titillation, the book is not technically pornography, because the goal is to inspire interaction and thought rather than sexual arousal. In fact, the way the book is set up demands interaction and close attention and is a book I will probably reread again soon. And though I am unsure if the book available on Amazon has the same brown dust jacket as the copy I have, even without it this book is quite lovely. Books as small works of art are rare these days.

(And in the name of all that is sane, of course I don’t advocate incest, pedophilia, bestiality or any non-consensual sex act. It horrifies me that in the course of merely reviewing a philosophical discussion of perversity I have to make this point clear, but perverse thoughts do not equal advocacy nor do they indicate an unsound mind. Any comment along the line of OMG GROCE or a juvenile assertion that exploring these issues is a de facto advocacy of harmful acts will not get deleted because I will be forced to mock such comments because I am weary, oh lord am I weary. )