Editor: John G. H. Oakes

Type of Book: Non-fiction, collection, mental illness, outsider literature

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It studies the writings of people diagnosed with mental illness, including people with schizophrenia and people who spent their lifetime in mental institutions.  It sort of approaches being an “outsider” literature collection.

Availability: Published by Four Walls Eight Windows in 1991, you can get a copy here:

Comments:  It’s no secret that I am a sucker for books about mental illness.  Though many of the books I read are never discussed here, you could get a taste of my mental health reading habits on my dead site, I Read Everything.  As a person who struggles with a relatively mild mental condition (mild in the spectrum – it sucks, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing akin to having schizophrenia or bi-polar), I find reading about the illnesses of others illuminating and instructive.  But this book was important to me because it features work by Henry Darger.  The book takes its name from Darger’s work, and features a long sample of his work.  I’m in a Darger mood lately, collecting books about him, reading about him, watching the documentary about him over and over, so it was great when my sister-in-law sent me this book for Yule.

But along with my tendency to want to read about mental illness is my tendency to gather up lists of books I am interested in without knowing a whole lot about the books.  I couldn’t begin to tell you my decision calculus for obtaining a book, because it’s immediate, mercurial and often very shallow.  I sort of approach books the way a kid approaches candy.  I see some chocolate gum and think, “Hey, I like chocolate and gum, so let’s try it.”  And of course it sucks.   This book is not an utter failure, like chocolate gum.  It’s more like a delicious Belgian chocolate with a bitter licorice center.  This book is very interesting on some levels, but at it’s core, the book fails.  In spite of this, this is going to be a very long discussion because even as the book fails at its premise – an attempt to present the works of insane writers without comment – there are elements that are interesting and good enough that they, temporarily at least, overshadow the failure of the premise.  There are snippets of writing from genuinely mentally ill people that resonated with me deeply or troubled me, and the inclusion of two writers who were not really insane, Henry Darger and Mary MacLane, improved the reading experience.

So let me get to the premise problems that harm this collection.  In the Realms of the Unreal is a collection of various writings from people who, in some loose sense, fit the description of being “insane.” Sort of. The writings range from poems to involved works of fiction to intense biographies to snippets of what can only be called word salad. And when you have such a range of works under the heading of “insane writings,” it can make you wonder what the methodology of this book was. In the Editor’s Preface, it sort of explained things, but at the same time, it makes it clear that there really was no methodology beyond what the editors had access to within their parameters of unusual behavior.

From the editorial preface, an attempt is made to explain that insane means a lot of things and that their primary goal was to include a variety of writings, knowing full well some may not pass the sniff-test for true insanity.

An effort was made to include a wide variety of authors: living and dead, free and institutionalized, foreign and American, contemporary and antique.

But even within that paradigm, the editors give themselves a lot of wiggle room. They exclude the works of more famous “insane people,” like Antonin Artaud, because they made a living from their writing, but include Mary MacLane, whose writings were widely popular when they were initially published.  It’s also odd because MacLane was definitely not insane, period, and the explanation for her inclusion is odd.

…MacLane’s work was never accepted into the literary canon. She had the double strike against her of being a woman and an eccentric during a period when society was particularly unforgiving.

The editors also have to explain their inclusion of Henry Darger:

We were looking for unusual poems and stories, often by people who had been or were currently institutionalized – although someone like Henry Darger (whose epic text lent its title to this volume) to our knowledge was never treated for “mental illness.” The amount of material produced by these unusual thinkers has greatly diminished in the modern era, principally because of the use of psychiatric drugs that often dull creativity, even as they help a patient adjust to life in conventional society.

I don’t know what to think of that statement about drugs dulling creativity because in my experience it is definitely untrue and it is often the mantra that so often prevents people who need help from getting it, but okay, let’s just roll with it for the purposes of this book.   And as we roll with it, let’s just accept that “insanity,” for the purposes of this book, is whatever the editors decided it is.

But there is another problem with this collection.  Again, from the editor’s preface:

No common theme to the book should readily emerge. To again borrow a phrase of Roger Cardinal’s, we are exploring an archipelago of ideas, rather than a continent.
[...]
These writings are not presented as clues to someone’s “illness”: they are published for their intrinsic worth.

This approach is problematic.  Writings of genuinely insane people are chaotic at best.  Without a common theme or at least an attempt to classify these writings, the reader is confronted with a wall of illness-influenced words that become amorphous and meaningless without context.  The only divisions in the book are institutional and chronological, which is sort of helpful because one can almost see how anti-psychotic medications changed how mentally ill people interacted with their disease, but even that is not enough to give this work the sort of focus that prevents these works from becoming an assault on even readers who seek out this sort of literature.

Finally, I find the notion that “they are published for their intrinsic worth” to be utterly specious.  Much of the work in this book is not good, and failure to link the work to the illness that may have fueled its creation, in my opinion, strips the works of their worth.  To say that all of these pieces from the insane have intrinsic worth just because they were written by insane people is akin to saying that all diary entries from teenagers have intrinsic worth because they are from teenagers, or that all poems written by people in wheelchairs have intrinsic value because they were written by people in wheelchairs.  It is disingenuous to compile  a book of writings selected not because they were well-written but because they are the works of the “insane” and then tell the reader that one should not look at these works using a framework of insanity.

What other framework can the reader use to determine value?  Most of this book is not genius borne from madness.  It’s just madness.  With the exception of a handful of writers, including Darger and Mary MacLane, these are not the works of natural writers.   These are the works of people with a specific story to tell – the story of being mentally ill.  There is no way to evaluate these writings without discussing the illness and experience of illness that inspired the writing in the first place.  I think culturally we need to understand that 20 years ago, the liberal idea of colorblindness and being “handicapable” were in full swing.  One was not supposed to see color, race, religion, disability or illness.  One was just supposed to see people (leading to the now derided and utterly ridiculous insistence that black, white, pink, or purple, liberals don’t see color, just people).  It’s easy to understand this approach to egalitarianism but such an approach denies the experiences of specific people as we deliberately refuse to see the things that define another person’s experience in this world.

So now that you know that this is an unorganized collection of works from people that may be insane or may not be insane, that the works are not necessarily going to be good, and that I plan to completely ignore the exhortation that we overlook the insanity that may have fueled these writings, let’s discuss the individual components that made this book worth reading.  I am going to discuss the best of the poetry and prose from the people in this book whose work was not embraced in their lifetimes or posthumously, and I will save  Henry Darger and Mary MacLane for last.  Please be aware that many of these works contain grammatical errors and unique spelling that I plan to reproduce without comment.

I am hamstrung a bit because I am not a person who can critique poetry as well as I can prose. But even taking that into account, there is some poetry here that has a deep emotional punch.  Here’s a snippet from a poem called “Let the Deer in the City” by David Wikar, whose mental health history is not explained in his biography:

Then you will be asked to let the deer in the city
and they will walk on your cement and broken glass,
and their gentle child-like feet will bleed.

The poem is a bit on the nose in other places but in utter violation of the mission statement of this book, it is hard not to see the child-like state of people in the throes of medication, subdued and yet still facing danger. I suspect the first night in an asylum would be like a deer walking along broken glass.

Though I don’t know from poetry, I like the precise anger in Beth Greenspan’s “Praying to the Gods of Office Ceiling Sprinklers in Juniper Street”:

I’ve got a headache THIS FUCKIN’ BIG
And it’s thanks to you, you, you, you, you
And me and none of your useless white pills
Is going to set me free,
Think of needles through pinched skin
With lead weights hanging off the tips.

Here’s another Greenspan poem called “Betsy,” a miserable, desolate story of people unable to connect:

We were in the restaurant
The waiter hung around our table
Like a damp rag.
You weren’t there, really.
You were cloud-like.
Your black velvet hair
Was the point
On which I focused-
Your eyes like China beads.
The moment was lost
In a swirl of plates
Landing on our table.
Chicken salad.

Beth’s mental health history is not explained aside from mentioning that she was only 25 but had spent 12 years as a “system inmate,” but also that she was a student studying English and founded a literary magazine.

Some of the essays are extremely interesting. Here’s an essay from Richard G. Love, whose biography indicates that he had been receiving psychiatric care from a young age, though the nature of that care is not explained:

ANGER

A lot of people who are in the hospital as staff say that anger is to be talked out calmly, coolly and in normal tones at all times.

I say that doesn’t work all the time.

As an example, when I was growing up, people liked to be mean to me, including my own brother, to make me mad so that they had a reason to beat me up. Even if I asked them to stop it or ignored them, told someone or got angry at them the way the hospitals and school teachers said, I’d still get beat up and laughed at.

What I’m trying to say is that controlling anger has its place. Sometimes you have to yell, scream, punch someone, even fist fight to get the point across.

Now if none of these efforts work, then it just isn’t worth it.

I can understand Love’s premise that sometimes anger is necessary. When I was in the worst part of my depression, I really got tired of the condescending attitudes that anger is toxic and that anger is bad and must be conquered. It was advice given to meek and baffled people whose anger was often justified. Anger is an energy and I’ve always considered it misguided to try to deprive lucid and sane but otherwise depressed people the right to exercise a basic human emotion. You can’t have fisticuffs constantly, to be sure, but righteous rage has a place that is often overlooked in modern therapeutic methods.

Here’s a bit from an essay from Karoselle Washington, a devoutly religious woman whose affliction is not revealed but who clearly spent time in a locked psych ward. It’s one of the longer essays in the book and describes too clearly what time in a state home feels like. The essay is called “The Killing Floors:”

It seemed like everytime I went into the bathroom there was a lethal mess. The women used the toilets and refused or didn’t bother to flush them. Sticking toilet paper, clothes and state dresses in the commodes. Some would drag around coffee and spill coffee grinds all over the basins. Cups with coffee in them sat on the basins in spite of the fact, the cleaning women came in everyday to clean. The women still messed up everything, dropping Cigarette Butts on the floor and in cups. It was one big stinking mess all the time. The so called doctors didn’t care. All they would say was, are you taking your medicine. I couldn’t see why they weren’t trying to help us, since it was so obvious we needed help. Everyone needs help now and then. They did not help us and we spent most of the day doing nothing.

Karoselle’s essay, especially this paragraph, reminded me of the nastiness of confinement. My roommate was in bad shape and seldom cleaned herself. She hoarded food as well, and because I did not want to get her into trouble, I said nothing. I just dealt with the funk in our room and brushed the ants away. She had no one to visit her and was broke. I left her all my change when I left because she hoarded food because her meds made her ravenous (if you have ever been on an atypical antipsychotic, you will know what I mean). She was starving half the time, so when people had leftover snacks, or didn’t eat their applesauce with dinner, she would take the food and hide it away so that she was not crawling inside out with hunger when the pangs hit her (and no, no accommodations were made for the terrible hunger side-effects of medications). But even in my private, slightly upscale hospital, it was grubby, we could have no fresh air and there was a constant stink and funk that made me, a neat freak, very nervous. It reads very much like Karoselle and I were cut from similar cloth where our inability to block out foulness is concerned. (And just to clarify, my time in a psych ward was brief.  I was misdiagnosed with bi-polar and a bad psychiatrist yanked me off medications and put me on new meds that made me go psychotic.   But though my time in the hospital was brief, it took me about a year and a half to recover entirely from the chemical soup that sent me to the psych ward and the corrective soup that actually made things worse, but I’m back to what is normal for me now, and likely will never repeat the experience unless I permit professionals to dink with my meds again.)

These two prose examples are pretty lucid, but some of the work in this book comes from some seriously mentally ill people, like Mary Rand, who committed suicide in 1985 after years of suffering from a “ravaging psychiatric disorder.” In an essay of numbered paragraphs, she discusses her life in a calm yet disjointed manner that is deeply unsettling.

3. Lately I have been feeling like the worst part of a bad novel, and they put the wires to my head every week now. But God cannot commit suicide: he is eternal by definition, poor trapped bastard. Time got left somewhere in the sky many years ago leaving everyone on the brink of violence while I am on the brink of emptiness, as one outside might say to another. People are beginning to crush me like I want to crush them. I lost contact with my mind months ago, so I need to come home and put myself back on the road to goodness and God, and all the luscious white storks. I am alone in my little white room playing solitaire and listening to Mexican songs and wondering whatever happened to time that there’s none left.

Then there are the essays from the seriously mentally ill who were seeking help long before there were adequate drugs to treat such illnesses. Take this passage from a man named Karl A., an institutionalized German schizophrenic who wrote this in 1909:

I undersigned at end remember exactly that as a little boy I took the juice of a hatched snake egg, because the mother snake was taking a bath in the nearby river and I used this moment to take an egg, the little eggs sat close together in a clump, and when I opened the egg, a small one slipped out, it happened in bright sunshine, and the little one was black or, rather, the young one fell to the ground, and the juice of the egg ran over my fingers, which I licked with my tongue, the young one grew before my seeing eyes, turned snow-white from the sunrays, and I ran away and the little snake after me but couldn’t catch me and I was happy that I luckily escaped, the juice tasted so sweet, and I was enchanted from that hour on, and I often had the wish to once more take the juice from such an egg but unfortunately I never had the chance, the juice had that ability it swelled my head and gave me such a handsome appearance which I would have liked to tell others, therefore I was and am the little enchanted Emperor’s son Prince F.C.W. v. A.H. Aherenottjberg secondly the juice has probably helped to keep a man’s virility in the bones and was not lost and I have drunk a lot of water with that until the sweet taste was gone.

Oh dear lord. This one was a huge smack in the brain. It evokes the sexual menace of Emily Dickinson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass.” It evokes the creation myth of the Serpent in Eden. It forces into the mind all the psycho-sexual implications of snakes and eggs and juices. I know just enough about schizophrenia to know I know too little to discuss it, but had I been a Jungian and had access to this man after reading this little essay, it would have been tantalizing to question him deeply, to see how much of this was the disease and how much of it was the subconscious.

Here’s a bit of a piece written by a schizophrenic named August Klett, written in 1912:

The zero or Madame Luna indicates a lady in blue on the floor, a black dog in the white fork of the pants, a universal dog on the left, whose genitals she plays with, while the other licks like all get out: Friedrich Glaser should examine that fishy character before entering the athletics club, “you are bastard pig, the honor is mine, says Dr. Sailer, it’s supposed to have happened that he fucked somebody in the ass, named Supp” on the right a brother, during the act “rocking by himself” the other one she is supposed to have loved with even more horniness: it is supposedly the skyturning, the tossed bosom, the upper and lower, letting father and brother do it to her at the same time, even while standing on her head…

I reproduce this passage mainly because it actually reminds me of some of the writings I associate with brilliant, modern writers. When Kathy Acker got on a roll, her writing had a similar flavor, a stream-of-consciousness of complexity and borderline filth.

All of this is vastly interesting, and there is so much more that I could not even hope to discuss, but as fascinating as some of this writing is, I think the two writers featured in this book that are worth the most discussion are Henry Darger and Mary MacLane. Arguably, neither writer should have been included in this volume at all because neither ever received any sort of official diagnosis (as far as I can tell – perhaps they did and I have not come across this information yet). Both were troubled in some regard, but it’s quite easy to make the case that neither of their bodies of work are “insane” and that neither of them were “insane.” Odd, definitely. But not insane. But they were included and since they were, I am discussing them.

And in my usual manner of bitching endlessly, I need to mention that including Darger in any sort of compilation and not including his drawings is bizarre.  I guess if you didn’t know that Darger illustrated his magnum opus, the 15,145 page work called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, then reading his words without his illustrations may not seem so hollow.  But he did illustrate his work and those illustrations are important to understanding Darger’s mind and intent.  But alas, there are no illustrations in this book.  Just a clump of his prose with zero context.

Darger was a man whose childhood was a misery.  Born in 1892, he was just four-years-old when his mother died soon after giving birth to his sister and the little girl was given up for adoption.  He never saw her again.  His father died when he was 12 and Henry was sent first to a Catholic orphanage, a place that he was largely fond of. He later was sent to an institution with a diagnosis of “self abuse.”  Yes, an adolescent was sent to an institution for masturbating.  The institution was a workhouse with children as forced labor and he ran away several times.  When he was 16, he got a job as a menial laborer and he worked in such a capacity, mainly as a janitor, for the rest of his life.  There is some belief that Darger had Tourette’s Syndrome, and he was a man who lived a very unconventional life.  He interacted with few people, the sole time he ever had sex he claimed an Italian girl raped him, and he spent almost all his money buying blow-ups of images of little girls he used to trace to illustrate his work.  He had an unclear knowledge of female anatomy, drawing most of his girls with penises, but as primitive as elements of it could be, his work showed a deep, abiding, complex desire for human justice.  Having been abused and having witnessed institutionalized abuse, Darger became socially frail, but his mind created an extraordinary manner of achieving catharsis.  He was not insane, though he likely had mental illness.  Some speculate that he had Asperger’s but the extraordinary empathy he shows in his works makes that seem unlikely to an armchair psychiatrist like myself. His works were discovered after he died and he never really shared that he spent most of his leisure time in the pursuit of righting childhood wrongs and creating a world wherein children actively fought against their own suffering.

That having been said, here’s a passage from his writing as presented in this book:

For it would imply that countless multitudes of the innocent should suffer indescribable cruelty it would attempt the impossible feat of justifying the smiting of these four big towns where all the inhabitants lived lives of peaceful, helpful industry, mostly Catholic of like population, very religious, children brought up the way they should go and the sparing of communications and communities where no man or woman served the gods of dishonest wealth and wicked slothful idleness. Children were from far away places sent to that convent, because nuns there knew how to bring up and train children, the way these children were in that Convent, youd a believe they were already Saints.

And also this was no vengeance decreed for human Short comings. God does not make or order disasters. And neither does the devil though it is said he has the power to do so.

God wont let him. No sir-ee. These disasters are superhuman but not supernatural. It was but a manifestation of the very unchangeable irresistible forces of nature governed by physical laws which are inexorable. To blame God for this disaster would be rank rash blasphemy.

Nature knows neither revenge nor pity. Old Mother Nature does not select her victims, nor does she turn aside to save the good who are in her path. Besides powerful as Mother Nature is she cannot prevent what is going to happen.

Oh, did I mention that after running away from the institution for the last time, Darger encountered a tornado that destroyed a swath of central Illinois?

Would the above passages have meant as much had you not known Darger’s experiences with Catholicism – largely pleasant but experiencing harsh judgement as he was sent away for basic human instinct – combined with his loathing for the workhouse? This information would have been helpful but his biographical information includes none of this, aside from the name of his master work. His portion in this book, a book he did not belong in, was just a context-less, meaningless word dump.

Now for Mary MacLane. Here’s the bio the book has for her:

Mary MacLane was a solitary eccentric born in 1881 in Canada and lived her entire life in Butte, Montana. She harbored literary ambitions at an early age, and a small publisher in Chicago published her diaries, The Story of Mary MacLane, by Herself, in 1902, from which this text is excerpted. This afforded Mary some little fame (she made a brief trip to New York City), which she craved, but like Emily Dickinson, hers was a loner’s soul. She published a novel in 1903 and another memoir in 1917, and in 1929, Mary MacLane died as she lived, alienated and alone in Butte.

Her inclusion in this book was surprising to me for two reasons, one which I will share after discussing her. The other I have already mentioned: she was not insane. Not even close. I know little about her other than small bits I have been able to glean from the Internet, but Mary MacLane was far from insane. So her presence in this book is bizarre. But in a way, I am very glad she was included because I don’t know that I ever would have truly been aware of her otherwise.

My first response to reading Mary MacLane, whose work spans 14 pages in this book and makes up the most coherent chunk you will find, was that she sounded like every over-intelligent young woman whose personality can unflinchingly make the rapid turns from grandiosity to depression, from invincibility to a place of deep suffering. Melodramatic young women are thick on the ground, it seems. Hell, I was one once.

But then I reread her words in this book and tried to experience what it would have felt like to have been Mary MacLane in a backwoods place like Butte, Montana in 1902, a time when women could not yet even vote, a time when being a woman with an extraordinary intellect ensured not just feeling apart from others, but possibly actually being apart from others. Being a very smart, difficult, interesting young woman in Butte in 1902 was wholly different than being a smart, difficult, interesting young woman in Dallas in 1990, mainly because there was little context then for being the sort of complicated young woman that Mary was. That Mary framed her life using a context of her own, analyzing her experiences from a wholly new way of looking at young women, makes her unique.

But make no mistake, Mary is vainglorious. Take this snippet from her entry from January 13, 1901:

I of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom this world contains not a parallel.
I am convinced of this, for I am odd.
I am distinctly original and innately and in development.
I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life.
I can feel.
I have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness.
I am broad-minded.
I am a genius.
I am a philosopher of my own good peripatetic school.
I care neither for right nor for wrong – my conscience is nil.
My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility.
I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness.
I know myself, oh, very well.
I have attained an egotism that is rare indeed.
I have gone into the deep shadows.
All this constitutes oddity. I find therefore, that I am quite, quite odd.

I know, it is tempting to write her off as the sort of young woman who would have a very bleak Tumblr. Perhaps Mary is the patron saint of every young woman who has a burning need to communicate with the world and is certain no one can understand her, but tries anyway because the burning need to speak is too great. But as I read her, I was taken with the idea that she believed she had an unusual intensity for life. I cannot quote all of her words, though it may seem like I actually can given how much I do quote from works, but MacLane was deeply solitary, despising the company of others and very happy in her own company. Her intensity of life seemed to come from an internal fire, and that was indeed quite unusual. Think of her peers, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was a bisexual adventurer and a woman who was actively passionate about politics. That was the face of changing artistic womanhood. In comparison, even wanting to share a life of thoughts rather than a life of action was an act of courage, and one that people responded well to at the time.

The thoughts she shared at times, again, seemed like a basic teenager’s lament, but remember, she was sharing these during a time when motherhood and what it meant to be a devoted daughter were idealized and driven by Christian ideals.

There is absolutely no sympathy between my immediate family and me. There never can be. My mother, having been with me during the whole of my nineteen years, has an utterly distorted idea of my natures and its desires, if indeed she has any idea of it.

When I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few.

I suspect many women feel this way but it was not a commonly expressed idea then.

Mary seemed to me to be suffering from a profound metaphysical depression, a deep ennui, but she found simple pleasures where she could.

I have no particular thing to occupy me. I write every day. Writing is a necessity – like eating. I do a little housework, and on the whole I am rather fond of it – some parts of it. I dislike dusting chairs, but I have no aversion to scrubbing floors. Indeed, I have gained much of my strength and gracefulness of body from scrubbing the kitchen floor – to say nothing of some fine points of philosophy. It brings a certain energy to one’s body and one’s brain.

This was interesting to me because when I contrast this to the antics of other women of her time, intelligent women who wanted to write, their lives are involved to the point of exhaustion – wander lust, physical lust, adventure – or at the very least a desire to obtain greater education. It’s hard to say just from these passages whether or not Mary adapted her life to Butte or rather if she was oddly suited for Butte, even as she felt alienated there. But given that she seemed so internally-focused, it seems like MacLane would have been alienated and yet self-absorbed no matter where she lived. Self-absorption can be a negative thing but sometimes, it’s not, especially when the self is genuinely the most interesting thing around you in which to be interested.

But even as Mary spoke of her gracefulness and her uniqueness, she showed a heartbreaking vulnerability. This is from her diary entry on October 28, 1901:

…none of them, nor any one, can know the feeling made of relief and pain and despair that comes over me at the thought of sending all this to the wise, wild world. It is bits of my wooden heart broken off and given away. It is strings of amber beads taken from the fair neck of my soul. It is shining little gold coins from out of my mind’s red leather purse. It is my little old life-tragedy.

It means everything to me.

Do you see? – It means everything to me.

At the end of this, that is the idea I took away. Mary MacLane showed her readers everything, along with the implicit dangers that come with doing such a thing. She could have been accepted, which she was in her time, selling many copies of her diary, or she could have been rejected, but regardless of the reaction of others, she still had written her everything down and let others see it. In a way that is far more radical than the sexual escapades of Edna St. Vincent Millay or the outspoken social and feminist stances of Rebecca West. All it seems that MacLane had was her mind and she shared it, even as she feared the consequences.

I find MacLane deeply interesting and intend to read more about her, which brings me to the second reason why her inclusion in this book was so surprising to me. New readers here may have missed it, but I discussed a book written by a man called Michael R. Brown. I don’t wish to link to it or the nonsense that ensued, but he and I butted heads in a very unappealing way (butting heads can be quite fun if done correctly). I subsequently banned him from this site. Seeing MacLane in this book was startling because the only person I had ever known to mention Mary MacLane before was Brown. He wrote a book about her that was released last year, and has studied her and written about her in the past. Most of her information on Wikipedia directs back to Brown in some manner.

With some trepidation, I contacted Brown about MacLane and had a reasonably normal exchange with him about her. I extended an invitation to him to come back to my site to discuss Mary if he so desires, as long as our earlier interactions remain in the past. I will unban him so he can share if he thinks it appropriate. It seems sort of petty to have access to an expert on a writer I find fascinating and refuse to speak or interact with him. Though I may be wary around Brown even if this turns out to be a fine exchange here, the fact remains that it would also be very nice to have civil communications with him so that if I choose to read his books on MacLane (and another comes out this year) and discuss them here, I can do so. It’s bizarre to discuss anything written by a person you have banned from your site, so why not try to let strange kerfuffles stay in the past. It if fails, I can always reinvoke bans.

I tell you this so that if anyone sees Brown commenting and the comments are pertinent to MacLane or my analysis of her writing, in so much as one can analyze 14 pages and come out with a strong conclusion, that there be no unpleasantness. My desire to discuss The Word is stronger than my desire to hold a grudge, so let’s all be respectful to each other. Let’s not bring up anything that does not enhance the discussion of this book. And if unpleasantness happens, I’ll be the  la grosse dame sans merci you have all grown to know and love .

Back to the book. Even as I condemn the very premise of this book, it’s worth a read, if only as an introduction to Darger and MacLane. The other writings in this book are meaningful as well, but that is so subjective that it would be hard to say definitively that you will find something that means anything to you. The real reason to read this book is to ignore the editor and read these stories, essays and poems with full knowledge of the minds behind them as a means of having a look into the lives of people most of us may never encounter in our real lives. So on that basis, it is worth a look.

Author: Mary Woronov

Type of Book: Non-fiction, memoir

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There is nothing particularly odd about Andy Warhol, but the majority of the people who made up the Factory are very interesting and quite strange. Add to this that Woronov’s prose is unusual (in a glorious way), and this book just had to be discussed here.

Availability: My copy was published by Journey Editions in 1995. Other editions are available, and you can get a copy here:

Comments: I read Ultra Violet’s Famous For 15 Minutes just after finishing Woronov’s book, and I think the comparison between the two made me understand that Woronov’s book was odd. Ultra Violet was a conventional woman drawn to unusual people, and her memoir, while interesting, makes it clear that her scene was far more interesting than she was. Though if I think about it, I should not be too hard on her – better than anyone else I have read, she seems to understand why Valerie Solanas just needed to shoot Warhol.

Woronov, however, outshines those around her in the Factory. She writes with an icy fire, a remarkable combination that seems to encapsulate who she was at the time (and may well still be – aside from knowing her work as the principal in Rock N’ Roll High School and the female lead in Eating Raoul, I know little about her beyond this book). Her tale is not just a perfect capture of a moment in history, but it is the odd tale of an odd woman with an odd mind. Oh, I have such a girl crush on Woronov now and intend to read everything she has written and see every movie she has been in.

Before I begin, I have to admit that I’m not a Warhol fan. I don’t condemn those who love him, but I find him tiresome. He was an amazing parasite who convinced his hosts that it was beneficial to them that he consume them and give little back. When they finally objected to him leeching them dry, he finished his hosts off and yet people find it easy to remember him fondly. Clearly he must have been very good at it because he attracted such a collection of genuinely talented people while making mass market prints of soup cans. Not to say the man was not a marketing genius but he was no artistic genius, though these days one is hard pressed to tell the difference between the two. In that regard he definitely was a visionary. But let it not go without saying that I am not a fan. I find the people he surrounded himself with infinitely more interesting than the man himself.

Woronov’s tale of her time in the Factory is a sharp slice of a tin-foil covered history. An intense woman, she seemed naively charmless, and that, of course, was her charm. She “whip danced” with Gerard Malanga, performing with the Velvet Underground in the early Warhol presentation called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Also, she was in the only movie Warhol made that does not make me fall into a boredom-rage-sleep, Chelsea Girls (though I have to admit I saw it so long ago that I don’t remember much except reacting in surprise that no one stabbed Brigid “Polk” Berlin). She paints a picture of herself as a cold, imperious young woman, sexually aloof even while engaging in provocative dancing with whips, under pulsing lights. But even as beautiful, aloof and talented as she was, she was not immune from the mercurial, nasty nature of Warhol.  In many ways, her story was probably the same story of many of the women involved in the Factory.

The book begins with a young Mary being saved from drowning. During a day at the beach, Mary and her mother swam out too far and hit a riptide. Mary was sure she was going to drown but her mother somehow saved the day. Back on the beach, drained from the experience, Mary has a surprising revelation:

I started shaking. I just couldn’t stop no matter how many blankets they gave me, but Mom, she was happy again, her body glistening white against the fallen night. It was like old times – people fussing over her, me feeling pathetic, worried over nothing. I hated it. Every time she looked back at me huddled in my blankets, that strange smile would curve her lips, her eyes would glitter again, and my gratitude at being alive shriveled. She knew what she was doing all along. She had done it before, swimming out too far, scaring people so they paid attention to her, and now letting me swim into a riptide so she could save me. I hated her.

This isn’t just angst. It’s foreshadowing. I seems a perfect encapsulation of the Warhol experience for many people.

Woronov’s brain is a crispy, knife-edged place and this is a very bestial, feral book.

There is Violet, my dog – my violent temper – the kind of thing you get a reputation for, and I must also confess to being the abused owner of a rage rat. This rodent is a voice in my head that never shuts up. I don’t know how I acquired it. I suppose it was given to me at an early age by some malicious adult, or perhaps every head comes equipped with one – you know, the “rodent included” plan. I’ve already packed these two in their traveling boxes; others are too prehistoric to catch, nobody would want to go into the black waters where they live. And there are also animals I don’t want to catch; rather I’m afraid of them catching me, like coyotes that carry insanity like a plague. I’m afraid they will find out where I’m going and follow me. Every time I find a new animal, like my party squirrel or my comedy crow, I give it a cage and a feeding schedule. And of course there are the rabbits – little habits that I’ve stuffed into every possible space in my suitcase – habits of speed, junk, pills, and any other poison I can get my hands on.

Either this passage grabbed you with both fists and shook you a bit and you need no explanation as to why I found this so amazing, or it meant nothing and any explanations would be meaningless.

But it fits in well with Mary’s opinion of herself:

“I wasn’t born with a father, I’m not really connected with men. I was a box baby, a preemie. I was born so early I had long prenatal hair everywhere and a spinal tumor that looked like a tail. Yeah, it was gruesome. I looked like a monkey. Every time the nurses rolled me in, my grandmother screamed at them to roll me back out, you know, like I was some kind of mistake. I think it kind of set the tone for the rest of my life.”

Uneasy around men, Mary found a strange comfort around “drag queens,” as they calmed the anger in her:

There was only one way to shut my rat up, and that was to be around something even more enraged. At first I thought this was impossible, but then I met my first drag queen. Rat relief at last. Finally someone angrier than I was, with a sense of humor about the whole thing. I felt calm, tranquil, as if I had found religion, and as long as I was around the queens even my rat assumed table manners, cracked jokes, let other people talk. Pretty soon I was a drag queen junkie.

Mary met her favorite drag queen, Celinas, at the Factory, when Celinas showed up with Brandy Alexander, and this tale, referencing beasts yet again, shows clearly the nastiness of the Factory if one was not careful (and actually, even if one were careful, one could end up savaged, but more on that later…):

…Brandy was her opposite, the obvious, overdone showgirl-type queen… Desperate was too exotic a description for her; let’s just say she was bugging everybody that day, waving her airbrushed 8x10s dangerously close to Warhol’s nose. The polite light went out, and Brandy became free bait; the tinfoil walls of the Factory flickered like silver water; the smaller surface fish – visitors and squares, scattered and knotted in excitement; and from out of the aluminum depths glided the larger fish – predators, attracted by the commotion. Billy Name, one the Great Whites, appeared and disappeared. Often his presence signaled the difference between light play and heavy, hardcore shit.

Generally the use of semicolons annoys the hell out of me, but perhaps I dislike the use of semicolons that announce themselves too loudly and destroy the flow of the sentence. I did not notice these semicolons until I typed it out, which means they did not interrupt my reading the first time around. That seldom happens.

The scene continues, with Gerard Malanga taunting Brandy with some transphobic shit and everyone was hoping he’d get the crap punched out of him, but Mary was focusing on Celinas, who stood stark still, likely terrified.

I didn’t know what she wanted, or why she had come with Brandy, but I did know the last thing she ever expected to get was me. I slid in close to her, mesmerized by the panicked rabbit jumping up and down in her jugular. Maybe you should sit down, here on this silver couch that, by the way, is just as dirty as the gutter. When she sat, she crossed her hands and ankles perfectly. Yes, yes, everything was in the classroom. We chatted, bonded, as Brandy flopped around on the silver concrete floor with the silver hook still in her bloody mouth. Both of us were excited. Celinas tried to climb into her purse, which was filled with dirty broken makeup, the true sign of a queen. I was thrilled she had let me look, even slip my hand into it for a moment.

There was no way for me to look at this passage as anything but Mary saving Celinas from a terrible trial by fire. But the scene continues:

I let her huddle near me, but when she tried to clutch my hand I had to recoil. I hated being touched by anything in the human-skin package.

Like I said, this is a bestial book, and is it surprising that human skin repelled Mary? I wonder how much of that remains with her.  Still, Mary, for all the animals in her and around her, has a very icy, distant persona. She reveals a teenage rejection that makes her believe that when she feels attraction, it is never reciprocated. Which is odd because she was a tall, gorgeous young woman, but when you have a rat in your head, I guess it isn’t that unusual.

Mary felt deep feelings for a Factory member called Ondine, but the feelings centered more around enthrallment than love. Here’s a scene where Mary and Celinas joined a dinner with Ondine and Andy Warhol:

So far I had only watched him from afar because, like everyone else, I found him intimidating, but now as his eyes looked at me I did not squirm as I had imagined, instead I felt released. I could detect no revulsion or hate as his eyes opened my darkest corners in a matter of seconds.

As I read on, it was probably a good thing that Mary kept herself so remote, at least initially. Ondine read like the sort of man who would wear a person out.

Then his attention returned to the crowd around him. While he spoke he changed their gaze into utter discomfort by putting a dinner napkin over his head like a kerchief. It made him look foolish and matronly. But no matter how humiliating he looked, it was his audience that felt embarrassed, and he seemed to enjoy this. I started to laugh, and he laughed too. Celinas and the others shifted in their seats, but his voice prevented anyone from leaving; it was like a tempest coming at you from all sides.

And it was vaguely disappointing learning what this voice that prevented people from leaving actually said.

“Those dogs out there – sniffing each other’s assholes. Oh please, the idea is even boring, darling, sniffing assholes is boring, and if you don’t know that I can’t help you. Then by all means tell them to come in here, hah, they wouldn’t dare. Celinas, dear, how are you? Ah, you’re mute, what an attribute. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m being mummified. Yes, mummified, but this – all this, and her. She makes me sick. No, I don’t mean you, you poor warped boil. Who could ever forget you – oh, if only I was humiliated, if only you could humiliate me, what a divine experience, but not by you, you’re boring, boring, my dear – yes, you heard me – I want an ambush, to be ambushed, but they don’t understand.”

I wonder if Ondine ever got humiliated before he died. I don’t think he really wanted such an experience – that shoot down wherein he declares his audience too boring to do it gives a little clue, I think.

Oh Mary, beautiful Mary. Her descent into drugs, into becoming one of the Mole People – this is when things begin to get out of hand for her, and she recreates this time, how quickly she sank, with startling clarity.

…there was only one way to go to Brooklyn; take the black subway under the river of forgetfulness. However, this time it did not work; I forgot nothing, and when I was home, I didn’t belong. I had changed. There were no outward signs, but I knew it. It was no longer them, it was us. Their rules were mine, their insanity my reality, and as for the rest of the world, it just didn’t matter. I was a Mole.

Mary discusses how her upper class family did not notice her drug addiction, though it seems like they may have known and just preferred not to speak of it. Her mother would find her on her knees before the open refrigerator, binge eating after the effects of days of speed revelry wore off, cramming whatever she could into her mouth. Noticing a cake in a box on the kitchen counter, Mary dug her hands into the chocolate icing as her mother blithely insists she stop, please stop, the cake is for dinner. During dinner, Mary can barely keep it together:

I held my head in my hands so it wouldn’t roll off into someone else’s plate as Mom and Dad joked about how they had to hide dessert from me because I once ate a whole cake and got sick. It never happened. I could easily eat two and a half cakes, that was what was really scaring them.

Mary would go home to recover, only to leave in a panic because she was terrified she would not be able to find the Moles again. And when she found them, it was a mind-bending recitation of listening to the Duchess (Bridget “Polk” Berlin) babbling about nothing, going to dinners where no one ate “unless someone else was buying” and endless unsettling behavior.

“Champagne! It’s show time!” Rene started screaming. For some reason my legs weren’t working, so holding onto the table, I prepared to do the Warhol watch as Andrea Whips climbed onto her table and the show began. Singing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” Andrea partially stripped and partially jerked off. It was okay, we’d seen it before.

Andrea began to masturbate with the champagne bottle, and her behavior drove away a Hollywood director and his actress friend, who exited Max’s Kansas City post haste.

Everyone cheered. I cheered. It was sort of fun except that Andrea was crazy, well, only slightly crazy; she was at the point where she could only talk to people’s reflections in the little hand mirror she carried around. What we didn’t know was that she would soon throw herself out of a window, leaving behind only a love note to Andy. She was the second in our group to defenestrate themselves. Freddie was the first, a frustrated ballerina; he had been high for so long he asked death to dance out a twelfth-story window. Andrea landed on her feet but that didn’t help; from the waist down she was hamburger meat, while the rest of her was strangely unmarked.

Clearly I am less arty than bookish, but is there any art movement with a larger body count than Warhol’s Factory? It would be interesting to do a study. I don’t recall where I read this, possibly in Ultra Violet’s book, but I know that shortly before she disappeared, Ingrid Superstar called Andy collect and he refused to take the call. His explanation was that if after all that time the best she could do was a collect call… Ingrid was brought into the Factory to torment Edie Sedgwick, to show her she could be replaced. Of course, Edie was driven off and years later died, and her replacement left to get cigarettes in the late 80s and never returned. But her value to Warhol was clearly explained – anyone who placed a collect call was not worth his time.

Mary’s caustic but probably very accurate recollections of her fellow denizens of the Factory made this book quite entertaining. Here’s a snippet from a scene where Warhol is badgering Mary to model like Nico and Ivy:

…all I ever saw Ivy do was take a dump behind the silver couch. This crazy woman wanted to marry Andy Warhol, which meant getting as close to him as she could or leaving a piece of herself with him. She definitely did not have all her oars in the water; if you asked me, she didn’t even know what an oar was. Sometimes Gerard would have to fend her off, or Billy would be called to throw her out of the Factory. Later, the elevator would return empty except for a single, lonely turd, and someone would snicker, “Andy, Ivy’s back.”

Mary’s wry and black humor shines through so well in this scene, where she and Ondine have just taken an epic amount of speed.

Ondine smiled as if he had just baked a cake. “Young love, my dear, isn’t it fabulous?”

I thought of the girl I had just seen, her head wedged between the toilet and the floor staring at the crucifix swaying above her like Poe’s pendulum, and I regretted we hadn’t taken the time to carpet the bathroom. “Ondine, can we get even higher?”

“Yes, I could get you higher. Have you ever heard Marie Callas sing Tosca? So high your blood would explode and splatter your brains all over your cranium – excruciating, you’d love it. But Wonton doesn’t have a record player, instead he has the fabulous Miss Marbles, the siren of despair.”

“Ondine, I have an apartment on St. Mark’s. I have a record player.”

Ondine pulled three worn albums to his chest and in a voice that was deathly serious, said, “If you do this for me you will be saving my life.”

Perhaps lives were saved but the scene ends thusly:

By the third day we were so exhausted that Ondine ended up in the bathtub trying to suck his own dick and I lay on my back with my neck on the bathroom threshold using the door frame as my imaginary guillotine (there comes a time when everyone needs their own guillotine). When I asked Ondine why he didn’t just get someone else to blow him, he practically had a fit. “You think this is about getting off? Getting off what? The planet? It’s impossible, I’ve tried! I am the last Oboroborus left in captivity. Perhaps I should introduce myself, the snake that swallows its own tail. This, my dear, is about resurrection, not sex. And if this were about sex, I don’t think I would be asking you. Everyone has forgotten the origin of the bathtub – baptism. I’m being born, you fool, now close the door.”

“He’s pregnant,” Jane whispered, “Ondine, can I get you some pickles and ice cream?”

“At last, someone who understands. Thank you Jane, that would be wonderful. Now, close the door, darling, I want to see Mary’s head roll.”

Actually, the scene really doesn’t end because scenes with speed freaks never really end. Jane, Mary’s roommate, thinks she catches pregnancy from Ondine and it goes on from there. Jane eventually cracks, as you do when you have a speeded up Mary for a roommate and her favorite person spends hours in your tub trying to blow himself. Mary vows to make sure her life does not harm Jane much in the future.

Mary’s sense of not being good enough plagues her often in this book, yet she has such an ability to see people so clearly (or maybe I think she sees people clearly because her opinions mesh with mine):

That night Andy was drawing noses, before and after nose jobs. When he asked me if I liked it, I didn’t answer. Why bother? I knew that stupid drawing would appear in its silkscreen mode later, worth a fortune. My nose would get out of joint when I thought of my own black and white drawings. Why were they so unloved? Because Mom left me alone in Macy’s department store? It was only for thirty minutes. Who knows, maybe it wasn’t long enough, maybe it should have been three hours in order to form the correct aberrant psyche for a really famous artist. Maybe Macy’s was really this big oven and she took me out too soon, and that was why I was only a half-baked artist. When I started thinking like this, I knew I was getting really high and I shouldn’t be alone, which is why I was standing in this bathroom watching Ondine shoot up in his eye.

That dark humor, that capacity for juxtaposing her relatively sane inner thoughts with her lunatic outer world is a gift, I think.

But even as Mary shows incredible black humor, her life had an huge capacity for what, in retrospect, has to seem like utter horror.  Here’s her take on Rotten Rita, the creator of one of the most horrific scenes:

Most people used only one word to describe Rita, and that word was evil. He was the dealer, and a lousy dealer at that. Trying to cop from Rita was a nightmare. His apartment was a bare room with several glaring sunlamps and one black chair that he would sit in, telling you to make yourself comfortable. In the dead of winter people would be sitting in there. If you didn’t have sunglasses it was hard to stay, but he would start insisting that before you scored you might like to watch his lover, Birdie, sit on a Coke bottle.

Rita maliciously shot up a woman called Ann, who overdosed. Rita suggested that she be shot up with milk to save her. Mary tries to get Ondine to understand that injecting milk into Ann’s veins will solve nothing but he is too far gone to listen to her. And Ann, of course, died. They laid her on a coffee table, as you do, declared that they had trapped death, then shot up to celebrate. Later they dumped Ann in the hallway in a scene that would have been funny in a Coen Brothers sort of way, but mostly horrible given that it really happened.

After a while, Mary’s addictions began to take their toll:

Do not imagine that I scampered around those velvet sewers completely unscathed. You cannot play with shit all night and come out looking like a boarding school virgin. No, no, no, you have some shit in your hair, and a little on your shoe, and soon you’re talking shit. Every time you open your mouth it just falls out. If you dug with the Mole People, somewhere, somehow, either their drugs, one of their thoughts, or just one of their little hairs got into your skin and burrowed deeper and deeper, quietly driving you insane. It was the law, nobody escaped, not even Andy.

It was during this time that Mary began to be stalked by Vera Cruz.

She was a fan. I can never tell you how much I loathed, despised, and prayed to God for this thing’s death. Looking back, I realize that it was my extraordinary hatred that brought her to the attention and later enjoyment of my perverse friends, but try as I might, I could not stop hating her. It was like trying to ignore a one-hundred-and-thirty-five pound tumor, and that was how close she wanted to be to me – me, who groaned at the thought of the hug and even considered the handshake a mild form of social torture. She wanted to be inside my very skull, a voracious boll weevil in my precious cotton brain. Nothing was close enough. If I put my hand out, she wanted to lick it. If I talked to her, she wanted to fuck me.

Vera Cruz was famous for having been born without a vagina, a problem she later had corrected with surgery in Arizona, and because she stalked Mary Woronov. Mary, according to this biography, actually tried to kill her by pushing her down onto the train tracks in the subway but she failed. Vera intruded into Mary’s life in many ways, up to and including collecting Mary’s urine from toilets. When the Warhol-es saw that Vera Cruz was a stick with which to beat Mary, they lunged for her like petty little lapdogs of war.

Andy couldn’t contain himself. “Oh Mary, Vera’s been telling us that this is your piss. You’ve been letting her collect it for some time now. Why didn’t you tell us? Gerard, why didn’t she tell us?

Gerard: “That’s disgusting, Andy. I don’t know.”

Paul: “Vera’s going to be in our next movie. We’re going to have her collecting everyone’s piss. That should be entertaining.”

Andy: “Yes, maybe you should do a sex scene with her, Mary.”

Vera: “A love scene.”

Paul: “No, no, Vera, that’s too ugly. Nobody wants to see that.”

Andy: “No, we can do that. Oh, Mary, where are you going? Don’t you want to do that? Where is she going, Gerard?”

Mary ceded the field to Vera, knowing too well that her friends wanted her to grovel, to fight. Eventually they missed her and Ondine came to reestablish friendship. When Mary hit bottom, Brigid Berlin took her to a country house and fed her omelets until she regained strength. However, when Mary failed to show the Duchess adequate pity when Rotten Rita screwed her in a drug deal, the Duchess got even by going to Mary’s apartment with a man called The Crocodile and giving Mary’s roommate Jane a ridiculous dose of drugs.

Mary could not survive in New York without splitting costs with Jane but she immediately got her on an airplane home and left the apartment. The essential triviality and relentless cruelty of the Factory denizens finally drove Mary away, but not in anger so much as clutching the idea that she simply could not compete with such nastiness.

Mary Woronov was one of the few members of the Factory who went on to have a career that did not center around Andy Warhol. Lou Reed and the members of the Velvet Underground come to mind as well. That thing that attracted Andy to Mary when she was still a Cornell co-ed was a spark that existed without him. And that spark fuels this biography, because even as Mary shows us how interesting it was to have been a part of that scene, she also shows us how very interesting she is. In this book, she is vastly more interesting than the people around her. And despite how much I have quoted from this book, there is still much more to be read. I highly recommend this book and intend to read everything else Mary Woronov has written. Fascinating book, fascinating time, fascinating woman.

Author: Jim Goad

Type of Book: Non-fiction, parody, humor, human sexuality

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: There are some writers whose body of work points towards odd, even if they occasionally produce work that would appeal to the average reader. Jim Goad is one of those authors.

Availability: Published in 2007 by Feral House, you can get a copy here:

Comments: This discussion is the stretching I need to do before I attempt the marathon that will be my discussion of the compilation of Jim Goad’s Answer Me!, plus a pdf of the infamous “Rape Issue,” which Goad was kind enough to send me. And it will be a pleasant stretch because I found this collection of Goad’s articles over the years to be interesting, amusing and at times, strangely touching. It’s always a good trip when someone invites you into his or her id, albeit sprinkled with mini hoaxes along the way.

There is no way to discuss all of these articles covering almost every aspect of human sexuality unless I really abused the good nature of every person who reads here, which means there is a chance I will not discuss your favorite article and you will think me an asshole. I’m just discussing the ones that stood out for me in some manner or other. Sorry about that, but please be sure to share your perspectives in the comments.

Goad, because he is a man largely misunderstood by liberal audiences and one of those writers about whom people form opinions without ever reading a word he has written, stands in a unique spot. He’s a scoundrel to some and as a result, everything he writes is seen as a real attempt to harm. But he’s also such a good writer that if one does not know who he is, he can make a simple person think that children direct porn and that pugs survive gang bangs. Part of me wants to call such people idiots but I can’t because I personally know folks who were certain Bonsai Kitty was for real and they aren’t completely without merit. But it is a unique place for Goad to occupy – a man seen as a monster by some extreme feminists who can still plug into moral outrage and provoke panic in even the most over-the-top articles. It’s a talent, to be sure. Believe me, there have been times I would love to fuck with people’s minds but I lack the dedication. Or the talent.

On the cover of this compilation, Goad separates this book into “Fake,” “Real,” “Opinion” and “Personal” and I will just follow that handy separation as I discuss the articles that stood out the most for me.

Let’s start with pug porn first. “Pug Porn: Inside the Sinister, Glamorous and Lucrative Underworld of ‘Pugnographic’ Cinema” sports two introductory paragraphs that are so repellent that I sort of want to tell Jim to go fuck himself, and perhaps that is the point. But at the same time, animal lovers will find themselves in a weird place wherein we know it’s a hoax but sort of want to track the dog-fuckers down and beat them with a stick because the description of a doggy gang-bang is sort of sickening. But if you have the strength of character to read on, the article is full of tells wherein Goad cleverly lets us know this article is a riff on all the myriad moral panics that have swept the Internet. Yeah, animal porn exists, and if you’ve seen the movie Zoo, you know that there are tons of people who want to bang animals, and knowing just enough to know that people can be very horrible shuts down our critical faculties. But just like those poor children in the McMartin case in California, Goad gives us enough details so that we know that what he’s describing could not happen. A pug could not survive a gang bang. The picture of

“Bambi Sue,” title character in the World’s Biggest Anal Pug Gang Bang, relaxes after taking more than 100 cocks in her ass over the course of 11 grueling hours – a new World Record for a pug!

is of a puppy, a fat little pug puppy, sleeping sweetly. Add that to the descriptions of Steed Bronson, who has a 23-inch penis, a woman who is the director of REPUGNANT, an anti-pug porn activist group (she orders a coconut-shrimp platter at Denny’s) and two really obvious, horrible photoshops, and it’s hard to see how anyone thought the article was in earnest.

Another excellent hoax article is “The Sad, Strange World of Adult Films Made by Children.” And again, people thought it was real despite some brick-in-the-face tells. The article discusses how

Children are involved in every phase of film production, EXCEPT they’re not involved in the sex scenes as participants. So it’s not really kiddie porn – it’s BY-kiddie porn.

Kids are used as directors because they are cheaper than adult directors because there are so many kids in Brazil that it just makes sense to use them as directors of adult porn. Sure. And then we have this:

“Mario deserves the appellation of auteur,” Bernstein says. “His films display an emotional complexity almost unknown in mainstream cinema, much less pornography. His use of the jungle’s natural lighting is almost heartbreaking in its evocative power. It’s fair to call him the Hitchcock of By-Kiddie Porn.

Mario is six. Goad ends the article imploring his reader to do something to stop this horrible injustice, just like he did in the pug porn. And readers fell for it.

I can’t be too harsh because the plight of animals and children can make idiots of us all. And then there are all those people who think The Onion articles are real. But still, these are clever manipulations, I think, because really, only a complete fool would have believed Goad’s article about the face of the Virgin Mary appearing in a wet spot. Right? Because we all know faces of the holy only appear in toast and the floors of houses in Mexico and Serbia. And I don’t even remember how I know people believed the pug porn and the by-kiddie porn but I know I read it somewhere. I’m digging for the links but I know I read it and was all, “No, really?”

A couple of the real articles jumped out at me, mainly because they were utterly disgusting, though strangely fascinating. Some were just interesting in a web macro sort of way, like articles about relative penis size of various animals. The article “Strange Sex Laws” was pretty amusing.

ALASKA: Moose are not allowed to have sex on Fairbanks city streets.

Well, that just makes sense, right? Nothing worse than copulating moose clogging up the snowy streets. But then we get to this:

Iowa: In the town of Ames, husbands must take no more than three sips of beer while in bed with their wives after sex.

I am left wondering what the hell happened in Ames that forced the city officials to think this was necessary. I’m sure it was epic. I could go on and discuss the foreign laws Goad dredged up, because they mostly involve animals and we covered the whole animal-sex thing with pugs and I’m bestiality-ed out at the moment.

Interesting to me was “Rage Against the Fucking Machine.” I read this right about the time a professor at Northwestern University had a fucking machine live demo in his human sexuality class. I think it was a drilldo or a sawzall, and it seemed strange to me at the time that the prof insisted on a live show when there was so much machine porn online, but never mind. Goad describes fucking machines as a phenomena that “mix the Marquis de Sade with Bob Vila,” and he sort of addresses one of the strangest elements of these machines: why do men like watching women use these machines – because the vast majority of them in porn are used on women and the marketing tends to be toward men. It’s a genre of sex that more or less eliminates a partner from the equation, though Goad discusses a gay man who enjoyed watching the distress of a bound man who cannot get away from the machine. Why do men like watching machine porn? Not sure because Goad discusses the machines more than the porn they have generated, but Goad does make an interesting observation:

I asked a female friend whether she was aroused at the idea of these newfangled electrostuds, and, at least for the record, she denied that they moisten her lap. “I can’t get turned-on by anything that doesn’t have a heartbeat,” she told me, possibly lying.

But then Goad notes:

That all may be true, Toots, but I can’t wiggle my pickle 300 times a minute and keep it up forever. And that is why point, set, and match go to those goddamned fucking machines.

That led me down a strange but not entirely dark road wherein I wondered if men like watching porn with these machines because the porn is an even better stand in for the all-too-often unattractive men who star in porn. Mr Oddbooks told me that unattractive men in a porn are a selling point to men because if an ugly man can get the pneumatic hot chick, so can the viewer. But that always seemed strange to me because I saw the other side wherein a man would think, “Damn, even a fat bald dude can get a pretty girl and here I am watching porn. AND he’s getting paid! FML!” Perhaps seeing video projector welded to contain a dildo is less threatening to the male-porn-audience’s collective ego than Ron Jeremy with a spray tan. But I’m no sexologist at Northwestern, so what do I know.

And despite the irreverent tones Goad uses in most of his writing, the article “Nunfucked: The Hidden Story of Sexual Abuse by Nuns” was a saddening, sickening read and Goad’s prose reflects the gravity of the situation. Having read about the Magdalen Laundries and the Hephzibah House (a protestant school but horrific nonetheless), none of this was wholly surprising. Still, the breadth of the problem coupled with the fact that society does not like looking at women as sex abusers is brought into startling focus in this article.

Although one rarely hears about it, there are dozens of documented cases of nuns sexually abusing children, most of them girls. Some cases suggest a level of sadism far beyond anything that priests have been accused of doing.

In the past decade, more than 100 nuns have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct with children in the United States alone. Over a dozen lawsuits have been filed in the U.S. alleging sexual abuse by nuns. Most have been settled out of court. But there is no evidence that an American nun has ever been criminally prosecuted for sex crimes.

This is one of Goad’s better articles because while I appreciate his dark, snarky and frequently vulgar sense of humor, Goad also possesses a capacity to write well-researched pieces that are the peer to anything appearing in national, print news. I’m glad he included a few articles like this to show that even as he is writing hoax articles about venereal disease, he’s not being gross because he is capable of nothing else.

However, his opinion articles have that caustic, bombastic, offensive and at times intensely funny tone that make reading Goad so fun. Take “The Vanishing Handjob: Mourning the Death of ‘Heavy Petting,’” an article that makes some interesting assertions about the death of intense making-out:

…back in the 1950s and early 1960s, open talk about sex was still taboo, which makes it more exciting in the same way that severe hunger makes a hamburger taste better. The female orgasm was still only hinted at, like the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Males and only males were thought to have uncontrollable sex drives and the only way to give them “relief” while still retaining one’s hymen and reputation was through the act of “heavy petting” – what today is crassly referred to as a “handjob.”

Just an oldish dude remembrance of the ways sexual mores used to be. The opinion pieces are interesting and funny but nothing too new. Just a man talking about why men like cat fights, the possible links between breast obsession and bottle feeding, and how Muslim women can be sexy. Funny stuff but nothing too mind-blowing because the Internet has several message boards where these issues are being discussed this very second.

But the personal articles were great, some deeply interesting and one so sweet and touching that I will discuss it last because my reaction is all kinds of mushy.

The most interesting was “Pleasuring Myself in Prison,” which does what it says on the tin. It can be a bit rough going and Goad admits it:

The whole experience is often workmanlike and mundane, like taking a shit – just squeezing out the toxins. It’s rarely what I’d call transcendent. But at least I forget about the razor wire for a while. I forget about all the ugly bodies I see in the shower. I forget about having to scrub and mop latrines. I forget about the IRS and the Victims’ Restitution Fund. I forget about all the chances I had to leave this state before I got into trouble. I forget about the fat farmboy’s farts. More than anything, I temporarily forget that I’m in prison jerking off. If I truly pondered the fact that I’m a convicted felon with his dick in his hand, I’d probably never be able to achieve an erection again. What could be more pathetic than beating my meat in the Big House?

Reading about it.

Other personal articles included Goad’s sexual drive in the summertime, a sexual admiration for older women, and testing out Viagra. All interesting, some funny and all vaguely offensive in that way that is inimitably Goad. All in all, the personal articles were the best, I think, raunchy and funny and occasionally a bit gross. Great stuff.

The personal article that I loved was “My Teenaged Celebrity Crushes.” Of course, we all change and who knows if Jim still finds these women attractive but the list was touching and interesting in its omissions. Absent was Farrah Fawcett and Brooke Shields or any other ringer, though Linda Blair and Linda Lovelace made his list. So did Barbra Streisand, whose costumes in The Owl and the Pussycat influenced his youthful libido, and Penny Marshall, whose overbite he found sexy. But the best pick for me was Carol Kane, who was a girl crush for me from the first time I saw her in Annie Hall, with her wild hair and her creepy, pretty eyes. Here’s what Goad says of her:

Bushy hair, dark circles under her eyes, and one of the prettiest faces I’ve ever seen. For years I’ve thought she was the hottest celeb on earth. She is best known as Latka’s wife on the TV show, Taxi rather than as a featured player in my masturbatory delusions.

Also on the list are Bernadette Peters and Donna Summer. I liked this list of women who turned on a young Goad. It was a pleasant look into his id, and a somewhat unexpected look at that.

Unless you are an easily offended person, I think you should buy this book. I have not touched on a tenth of the content, if that, so even if what I discuss here does not pique your interest, there is something in the book that will be relevant to you. Also I think we should all reward a man who saw how beautiful Carol Kane was (and still is). Yes, I am seriously recommending this book on that basis. But clearly the book has other charms, so if you read it, come back and let me know the article that you liked best or the article that appalled you the most.

(Content irrelevant to this entry: The links that take you to Amazon are my affiliate links, which means that if you click the link and order the book, I get a small amount of the purchase price. All other links in no way benefit me and my only affiliate relationship is with Amazon. I loathe that the FCC makes me say this because to me it is akin to begging, making people focus on my affiliate links, and it’s offensive to my readers because I have to think that when y’all see my links to Amazon, you know they are affiliate links. But there you go, this is the world we’re living in. Yay.)

Author: Alexander Theroux

Type of Book: Non-fiction, biography, utter pants

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it is a biography (ostensibly) about odd-icon, Edward Gorey.

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

Comments: As biographies go, I guess you could say this is one. But if you love a good biography, you’re not going to want to read this book. You may not even want to read this review.

But if you, like me, are a Gorey fan, you will both buy this book and read it even after I tell you it’s largely a worthless read. Gorey fans, like all fanatics, want to read anything and everything about the man. I am a moderate Gorey fan. I have one of his drawings tattooed on my body, I have a little shrine set up to him and one day I want to have a collection of Gorey first editions. So even with the status of being just a moderate Gorey fan, I know that had I read a review like the one I am writing before I put this book on my Amazon wish list, I would have purchased it and read it anyway (actually, my copy is a Yule gift from Mr. Oddbooks). Because that’s what an ardent fan does. We collect things relating to the object of our adoration, even if those things are mediocre.

This book has interesting moments but they are few and far between, and those moments are generally content that will not be new to long-term Gorey fans. Still, it was pleasant being reminded of how eccentric Gorey was, how he eventually stopped wearing fur because of his love of animals, how he sewed stuffed animals by hand as he watched television, how he would do work for anyone who asked, even those who could pay very little.

But after one admits that this book has some charm, one can only list its many problems. The first is that in the first fifteen pages, Theroux manages to write in a way that is so alienating that a casual reader might be tempted to give up. I am a reasonably intelligent woman who has devoted my adult life to reading. I fancy that if a reasonably well-educated person with a devotion to books found Theroux’s verbiage cumbersome, then it is safe to say it was, in fact, too much for a biography of a beloved pop culture icon. But who knows? Perhaps the words enchiridion, coloraturas, the French phrase le cercle lugubrieux, and karfreutagian have slipped into the common lexicon without me noticing. If not, they were odd word choices in a biography such as this. This is not the sort of book that can tolerate the interruptions that come when the reader is forced to put the book down in order to look up words and French phrases. But luckily Theroux stops showing off so egregiously around page 15. Still, not a good beginning.

Another problem is that this book would have been far less tiresome had it been a long magazine article because it has so little to say. The only reason the book reached 166 pages is due to sheer repetition. Theroux loves lists, enumerating all the things he found interesting about Gorey over and over and over again. The lists of his shock at the lowbrow media Gorey consumed grew quite uninteresting, especially since it would be hard to say this book follows any sort of real time line. It’s Theroux’s memories as he remembers them and while that can be very charming, when it results in so many interminable and somewhat meandering paragraphs of what Gorey liked and didn’t like, it’s annoying. Recitations of what Gorey liked instead of examples of what he did can wear thin, which is one of the reasons I suspect this book would have worked far better as a lengthy magazine article.

I am not kidding. The lists are all over the book and all over the place. Let me give you an example from the section about the things Gorey liked to collect:

Gorey collected everything. Sad irons. Signs. Dolls. Telephone pole insulators. Masks. Puppets. The statue of an elephant. Big and little seashells. Eggs. Cape Cod candles. Paintings. Odd ashtrays. CDs. He deeply loved chunks of architecture – rare examples of Victorian gingerbread, entablature, cornices, dentil molding, dormer pieces, and so forth Another strange collectible that excited him was decorative finials, for lamps, swifts, curtain rods, pots, Torah finials, newel caps, general blacksmithiana, and cobbling tools, etc. He had a mummy’s hand in a case!

Would it surprise you to learn that this paragraph goes on for another 31 lines, followed by another page and half of this bloodless rendition of the things Gorey collected, with the occasional quote from Marianne Moore to break up the boredom? Does that seem a bit… heavy?

Oh, dear reader, you have no idea how long the lists in this book become and how repetitive they are after a while. Let me give you a few more small examples of Theroux’s lists of what Gorey liked and did not like that clog this book like a wad of greasy hair in a bathroom sink. Here Theroux engages in a flat, lifeless recitation of what it is that makes Gorey eccentric:

Who are you acquainted with, for instance, who has read all of Trollope, all 17 novels, all 47 books, but would not miss a single episode of TV’s All My Children or Andy Griffith in reruns of Matlock? Read Lao-tse with understanding but collected true crime magazines and loved Doctor Who, that improbable science fiction TV series. Cherished Oliver Onions, but watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show episodes and collected current videos? Could speak with total authority on the novels of Theodore Dreiser or Yukio Mishima and yet was word-perfect in the films of English actress Pamela Franklin and could quote chapter and verse from the 1958 film, Fiend Without a Face, in which a scientist materializes thoughts in the form of invisible, brain-shaped creatures which kill people for food? Sat up dutifully by himself to watch movies virtually every night?

This list, this litany of things that Theroux recites as if it means anything at all about Gorey’s eccentricity, comes close to rendering Gorey boring. I dare say almost everyone reading this review knows someone with extraordinarily disparate tastes, people who are interesting but at the same time are not geniuses in the way Gorey was a genius. Yet Theroux is so out of touch with people and society that he thinks this rendition means that it indicates eccentricity. More importantly, it shows us a certain snobbery in Theroux wherein he thinks watching Matlock when conversant in Trollope means one is quirky. We’ll see more of that snobbery later in this discussion.

Here’s another list destined to make your eyes glaze. Theroux is still discussing Gorey’s eccentric tastes and interest in lowbrow culture.

He loved Fu Manchu movies, Charlie Chan and the Thin Man series, and The Perils of Pauline. He was word-perfect about the silents and was widely familiar with early Hollywood and could cite the eclat of long out-of-date actors and actresses, people like Hugh Hubert, Veree Teasdale, Reginald Owen, Walter Catlett, Estelle Winwood, Rex Caldwell, Frank McHugh, Aubrey Smith, ZaSu Pitts, and “dahling” Tallulah Bankhead in her Wanda Myro phase, “the fake Serbian princess.” He knew how early films were made and where and who on the sets was bonking whom. Small things were not lost on him, and he had opinions on everything from John Boles’s mustache to Jane Darwell’s dewlaps to Jerry Colonna’s eyes.

Yes, that list of names means nothing to me either and it doesn’t really give me a grasp on Gorey. The book is thick with these lists. Perhaps 75% of the book consists of lists like this. Part of the problem is that Gorey led an inner life that does not lend itself well to biographies, yet I have read discussions of Gorey that manage to draw life out of Gorey’s interests. Theroux just can’t seem to manage it without turning Gorey’s peripatetic mind into some sort of book-length laundry list.

And do you want to know what is worse than those lists? Lists that are just a dump of ideas and names, lists that don’t even try to be sorted.

Gorey also had lots of peeves. He hated brussels sprouts, false sentiment, minimal art, overcommitment to work, being solicited for blurbs, the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the works of the Marquis de Sade (“absolutely paralyzing prose”), churchgoing, Nixon and Agnew, right-wingers, discussions about his own work, prattling and didactic fools, and all Al Pacino movies.

This list goes on and on listing various likes and dislikes, but I feel I should mention that it also describes me, my father-in-law and my third grade teacher, though she may have liked Pacino.

Don’t even ask me about the tangent Theroux took describing W.H. Auden’s life as it compared to Gorey’s because having reread the section three times, it makes no sense to me. Theroux says they had a lot in common but I’ll be damned if the text he writes would lead anyone to that conclusion. They were both men who liked cats and liked being alone and the rest of the comparisons seem quite forced, and what they had in common hardly warranted several pages in this book.

But the best reason to detest this book is that it is not really about Edward Gorey. This book is about how Alexander Theroux interacted with and interpreted Edward Gorey as he pertains to the mind of Alexander Theroux. If one picked up this book knowing nothing about Gorey or Theroux, one would walk away from reading knowing about as much about Alexander as Edward. For example, I know much of Theroux’s political leanings and his opinion about Columbine (an erroneous opinion, too, since he thinks Klebold and Harris were sensitive boys bullied into mass murder). Clearly, that’s a problem. And what one learns about Theroux is not particularly endearing. Discussing Gorey’s natural introversion:

Above all, he enjoyed being alone, something dim, unoriginal, lazy and uncreative people pathetically often have not a clue about.

Note this not a quote from Gorey. It’s Theroux sharing his uncharitable opinions of mankind. That’s right extroverts! You can suck it.

Discussing Gorey’s enjoyment of doing domestic and crafty work like sewing and cooking:

I believe he sought preoccupations in arts and crafts and such menial work as collecting objects and sewing things to take him away from other preoccupations, more serious things, knocking about in his head. Don’t be fooled. No one with that matchless – and mad – imagination was simply Betty Crocker making buttermilk biscuits.

Oh dear… Would anyone but Theroux think cooking and sewing would somehow diminish Gorey unless it was explained away as a means of keeping deep thoughts at bay? Are there really people left in this world who, upon learning that Gorey sewed, would immediately think him a housemaid and dismiss all his work? Reading this gives you a very good idea of what Theroux thinks of work that is not borne from a place of deep intellectualism.

Goodness, Theroux really does not like the horror genre. Remember – this is him going on at length and not anything Gorey himself expressed:

The cognitive quality of Edward Gorey’s books, that strange dark art opulently, often contagiously assembled out of his searching mind – the seven-zephyred suavity of his impeccable drawings and exact text – rise in the matter of the macabre so much higher than all of those bulbous not-quites – hideously lacking all the conviction while full of passionate intensity – like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, Robin Cook and James Patterson, and their crapulous, hand-cranked, artless, throw-it-up-in-the-air-to-see-what-comes-down doorbuster books stuffed with high-school hoodoo and toy horror.

I don’t know how this passage affected you, but it annoyed the crap out of me. In many ways, this passage seems like Theroux is trying to defend his friendship with Gorey, a man known to have many low-brow tastes, by saying, “Well, at least he was better than all those other writers.” Also note that this is a good example of Theroux’s style when he is not showing off his erudite vocabulary.

And take this passage, as he is discussing how Gorey could best be described as asexual:

Suffice it to say, Gorey saw no reasons to pretend, but he also saw no reason to proclaim either. Whatever anyone chooses to refer to one – a bent, a gay, an invert, a chap Irish by birth but Greek by injection, etc. – I never saw him with a foop, a joy-boy, a shirtlifter, a poof, a puff, or a tootle-merchant, no one, neither an older man – no “dad” or “afghan” – nor even a younger boy, a cupcake, a capon or a Ganymede.

There are two, far simpler ways to have said what Theroux conveyed in this passage.
1) Though Gorey was likely a homosexual, I never once saw him with anyone who seemed to be a male lover.
2) Alexander Theroux is an utter asshole who thinks he is very cute.

Oh dear lord, why did I need to know Theroux’s opinions on Lucas films? Why?

Once or twice I was truly amazed at Gorey’s inexplicable taste – or lack of it! I remember him saying, “Star Wars is very important,” a film (and its sequels) I myself considered not so much Hollywood trash as a fat, inconsequential farce or ersatz theology and simpleminded New Age bollocks all cobbled together out of a thousand filched sources, including ancient Greek Fable, Buck Rogers movies, naval jumpsuits, Japanese samurai swords, mempo masks, World War I German blaster guns, over-simplified “evil empire” fables, Nazi myths, fascist uniforms, quest literature, and, I’m convinced Xerxes of the Persian Wars marching down through Thessaly to Salamis! Except of course, those were interesting.

We can file this under pointless knowledge about Theroux, Theroux’s intellectual snobbery, and interminable lists! It’s a three-fer!

And given that Gorey was a fan of Agatha Christie, and one of his best works was an homage to her (The Awdrey-Gore Legacy and, though this is irrelevant it may explain my disgust, I have been known as awdrey_gore on a major blogging site now for over a decade), why on earth does Theroux need to let us know he personally dislikes Christie? Why would we care what he thinks? The answer is, we don’t care, and this book is half-ruined with his nasty observations and pointless self-references.

So to summarize, this book is not good. It is actually terrible. The few bits we get about Gorey that could mean something – like he never spoke of his mother – are lost in a sea of irrelevant words. We are confronted by list after list, Theroux’s cultural snobbery and prejudices, and we get to know far too much about Theroux in a biography of another man.

If you are a Gorey fan, you’re going to buy this book. You know you will. I know you will. You can’t help yourself. We have to read and then keep all we read about him. My copy will go into my bookcase with my other Gorey books even though I know I will never read it again. If I were to give it away, there would be a strange itch in the back of my brain wherein I knew my Gorey collection was not complete. But just because you buy it doesn’t mean you need to read it. Those of you who are Gorey fans, maybe read it from a John Waters-esque desire to see how bad it really is. Otherwise, let’s all pretend this didn’t happen. Let’s go recite The Doubtful Guest until this terrible memory fades.

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.