Book Review

The Concept of Dread

by Soren Kierkegaard

     This has to be one of the worst books every written. Soren Kierkegaard apparently wrote The Concept of Dread in his younger years as a writer. Reading this short and indigestible tract is equivalent to breaking off the ends of asparagus stalks, not the tips which you can gently cook and easily eat in a wide variety of ways, but the bottom parts that are hard as wood, fibrous, and nearly impossible to chew. Lacking in any clear purpose, direction, or relevance, this is one work of literature that can be spat out into the garbage so you can move on to something more nurturing and digestible.

It is not easy to tell why Kierkegaard wrote this. He never explicitly states his reasoning behind the matter. He apparently wanted to write something about psychology, or at least he keeps mentioning psychology and saying that it has severe limitations, something he claims to demonstrate. But the definition or purpose of psychology is never examined. He says its is inferior to religious dogma but he doesn’t get around to saying why dogma is more useful. In fact philosophy, in the truest sense of the word, is meant to do away with dogma, a system of beliefs that does not require proof or systematic thinking. After reading The Concept of Dread, you can possibly deduce that Kierkegaard preferred dogma to evidence based reasoning because he had no talent for logic or methodical thought. He never argues a point. What he says is true because he says it is true and you are stupid if you don’t agree with him. End of argument.

You could invoke Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy is meant to be descriptive of reality rather than argumentative, an assertion that has merit when used in its proper context. But if that is what Kierkegaard was up to here, he fails miserably to convince through description. The descriptiveness starts with Adam, alone in the Garden of Eden. Kierkeagaard objects to the story of Adam and Eve being interpreted as an allegory or a myth; we have to take it as historical fact. Why? We can’t know because he never gives a reason for this. But let’s be nice readers and take him at his word for the sake of following his discussion. Adam, the first man, was paradoxically outside the human race while being the human race at the same time. Why is this important? Who knows? Did Adam have language? He didn’t need it because he had no one to speak to until Eve came along. Only God spoke to them but God is omnipotent so would he even need to use language to communicate with them? Couldn’t he just implant information in their heads without the medium of speech? Kierkegaard raises this question but never attempts to answer it. And that pesky serpent didn’t actually speak because snakes, by nature, don’t talk.

So when Adam is confronted with the possibility of committing Original Sin he hesitates because he feels...GASP!...a moment of dread. Yes those butterflies in his stomach were a paralyzing anxiety that made him see a future full of infinite possibilities that could result from his desire, decision, and consequent action. But Adam has faith and takes a leap, crossing over the abyss of anxiety and commits Original Sin. And we, the descendants of this mythological first man, have been doing the same thing ever since. This is a profound insight by Lierkegaard’s standards. But this is the same dread felt by every teenage boy the first time he tries to kiss a girl. It is the dread you feel before going to a job interview. It is the dread you feel the first time you score a bag of weed or use a fake ID to buy beer at a convenience story. No doubt, it is the dread that Evel Knievel felt every time he revved up his motorcycle engine before jumping his bike over a line of parked cars. Yes, people get nervous before they do something risky. It is a mundane insight by most people’s standards. 150 years after Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Dread we have self-help books with titles like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyways. Thanks Soren, you really did the world a favor by writing this book. It’s not easy to comprehend what the field of psychology was like in the mid-19th century but certainly they were farther along than this. He doesn’t advance his thought much beyond this simple assertion and his claim that psychology is inferior to dogma is undercut by the obvious fact that he didn’t seem to know much about psychology to begin with.

How does he claim to know what Adam was feeling at that time? Did he travel back in time and ask Adam about the matter? He couldn’t have been relying on someone else’s testimony because no one was there but Eve and the snake. By Kierkegaard’s admission, the snake couldn’t speak and it hasn’t been established that Adam could either. Is any of this important anyways? Nope. Kierkegaard doesn’t grasp the idea that philosophizing and quibbling are two different things.

There is also a wonderful mess of insights we get from the rest of the book too. Original Sin entered the world through Adam but it is possible that Original Sin was first a part of God; after all, if it entered the world, it must have entered from someplace, it had to exist first in order to enter. Every human is a sinner but each one has to start the chain of sin themselves; humans are born as an eternal chain of recurrence and sin starts anew with each one. “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”, says Edward Norton’s nameless charcter in Fight Club. Great idea, Kierk, old buddy...where did you get it from? Socrates, right?

We also get a long digression into the description of time and eternity, though it’s not explained what purpose this serves in developing the thesis, though it’s not quite clear what the thesis is. Time is the measurement of eternity’s flow through the present into the past. A moment is a segment of eternity but it is a segment that lasts forever. Eternity only extends into the future because once the present becomes the past it no loner exists. But doesn’t that mean that eternity has a boundary and a limit, making it, therefore by definition, not eternal? “Shut your mouth”, shouts Kierkegaard from his grave, “logic is nonsense when being confronted by the truths of belief and dogma.”

Towards the end he claims that people who have faith are able to overcome dread but people who oppose faith because they fear it become locked up inside themselves because without faith, they are unable to make the leap of faith that overcomes dread. What logic! Did Kierkegaard personally know of anyone who fit this description? How can he claim this to be a universal truth when he spent so little of his life around the other human beings that he despised so much? The guy didn’t have many friends and apparently he didn’t want any either. He probably never even traveled outside of Denmark. These concepts of faith, dread, and fear of faith are vaguely expressed and some concrete examples of what they mean would have gone a long way in clarifying matters and proving they have any validity. Kierkegaard lacked an epsitemology and his wrtigins suffer terribly because of that omission. Of course, he believed faith mattered more than facts so why bother with proof?

Don’t forget that spirit is what binds the soul to the body and Hegelian philosophy, science, paganism, and anything that isn’t Christian is twaddle, an oddly annoying word that gets used often whenever Kierkegaard makes an ad hominem attack on anyone he disagrees with. To be fair, this overuse of “twaddle” is probably the fault of the translator. But even so, at an intellectual level intellectual level it’s like calling someone a poopy-face or saying, “Yo mama’s so hairy you got rug burn when you was born.”

The book actually gets easier to follow towards the end. The theme of “dread” that is supposed to be the thread tying the whole book together but it is not strong enough to do this. The comprehensible parts of the book are random and don’t complement one another. The Concept of Dread is formless, sloppy, lacking in structure, without clear purpose, and never presents any ideas that are relevant to anything in the real world. If you are not a Christian, then it is based entirely on a false premise. You may want to be a good sport, keep an open mind, and try to see this from the point of view of someone you disagree with but that does not add up to much when the author does such a poor job of stating what his purpose even is. Even if you are a Christian there is a definite possibility that you won’t understand or accept what Kierkegaard is yammering on about because he does such an insufficient job of writing clear and meaningful ideas.

Some people say reading Kierkegaard will help you understand the Nazi Martin Heidegger but if you can understand Heidegger at all, reading Kierkegaard doesn’t offer much assistance. Heidegger, the fascist sympathizer who studied under the Jewish Husserl and had and had an affair with the Jewish Hannah Arendt, was possibly nothing more than a master of obfuscation anyways. Bertrand Russel accused him of using complex language to hide the fact that he had nothing to say (I only partially agree with this) and even the Nazis snubbed him, calling his philosophy gibberish, when he petitioned them to be the prime philosopher of National Socialism while applying for the position of rector of an elite Nazi university. (If you are a Kierkegaard defender, don’t whine at me about this digression since Kierkegaard also goes on long, irrelevant sidetracks in several of his books.) Reading Kierkegaard in light of Heidegger is like reading one of those footnotes that doesn’t do anything to enhance the main text.

Over the last 30 years, I have read a lot of philosophy. I have read other books by Kierkegaard too. Abstract thinking is not foreign to me. Other reviewers say they like this book but can’t explain it. Some reviers explain it but their explanations make no more sense than the original text does. I’m calling bullshit on The Concept of Dread. It reads like something Kierkegaard wrote in haste without putting much thought into what he wanted to say. He probably never bothered to proofread it, revise it, or edit it. If he were alive today, he might even be surprised it is still in print. Skip over this pile of detritus and go straight for Fear and Trembling. I don’t agree with that book but at least it is comprehensible and can be understood, analyzed, and debated in a meaningful way.

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Dread. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey: 1973. 

 

The Troublemaker

On a Wednesday afternoon in February 2007, I shared a booth with a man named 26 inside the Travelers Club International Restaurant & Tuba Museum in Okemos, Michigan. We’d picked a spot far enough from the door to give us some respite from the winter blast, and dozens of African masks and beautiful battered tubas lined the walls above us. Police reports have listed 26 as 5' 7" with a “thin” build. In person, it was a little hard to tell how thin he was. He wore a blue crocheted sweater, fraying and loose, and an oversize baseball cap with the logo of the Weather Channel covered his scraggly hair, which was wild and wiry but not yet gray. He wore large rings on almost every finger and projected an amiable fragility

Read the full article on Vice

 

Book Review

High Priest of California/Wild Wives

by Charles Willeford

     In the mid-1980s, RE/Search Publications put together this nice-looking edition of Charles Willeford’s High Priest of California and Wild Wives that also includes a short play version of the former title. The two novels are both centered around a tough, independent male who, despite all his actions, well-intended or not, end up confronting the traditional institution of marriage. While working within the idiom of pulp, noir, and hard boiled detective fiction, these short novels offer a more nuanced portrayal of this subject than you might expect. As nuanced as the stories may be, both are pessimistic in the end.

High Priest of California tells the story of Russell Haxby, a used car salesman in San Francisco who meets a naive woman named Alyce in a dance hall. She takes him back to her apartment and they start circling around each other in a game of seduction. Haxby is the obvious chaser and Alyce is the obvious catch but there is something different about the way she eludes his advances. Haxby is an experienced womanizer and he has never met a woman who resists him in such unusual ways.

Alyce is a strange woman, hopelessly naive, living a dull and sheltered life. She collects stray cats and keeps them in her apartment, never allowing them to go out. Haxby is turned off by this and the way he reacts to the symbolism says a lot about how he treats her later in the story. Knowing that Alyce’s goal is to capture a man and keep him under her control, Haxby nonetheless tells her he loves her and wants to marry her. The cats also symbolize a secret about Alyce that gets revealed later in the story.

The pair of Haxby and Alyce play off another couple in the narrative. Ruthie is Alyce’s roommate and she is involved with a middle-aged man named Sinkiewicz. Ruthie met Sinkiewicz when she worked as a nurse for his bedridden wife. Sinkiewicz is waiting for his terminally ill spouse to die so he can inherit her money and marry Ruthie. Compared to Haxby, Sinkiewicz is dull and sheepish; like Alyce’s cats, he is contained and kept under control by Ruthie. His life amounts to little more than running back and forth between Ruthie, the stronger woman, and his wife, the weakened, catatonic wife who can never get out of bed. Ruthie and Sinkiewicz are one representation of marriage that identifies why Haxby hates the idea of commitment.

The unattached and domineering Haxby contrasts sharply with the married, subservient Sinkiewicz who has more in common with with Alyce than appears at first. Later in the story we learn that Alyce is also married. Her husband Salvatore is an elderly man whose brain is rotting from untreated syphilis. Alyce runs his life because he can’t take care of himself. He has been infantilized, emasculated, symbolically castrated by his illness. Alyce dominated his life; she contains and controls him the same way she imprisons her cats in the apartment. But Alyce is not happy in her marriage. Stanley is a burden and for Haxby he is both an obstacle and yet another symbol of the weakened state of a man imprisoned in a marriage. Stanley is like Sinkiewicz, a man enslaved by his relationship but Stanley is also like Sinkiewicz’s wife, sick and dependent like an unwanted appendage that can not be removed. The trio of Haxby, Alyce, and Stanley mirror and shadow the trio of Sinkiewicz, his wife, and Ruthie. The way these characters play off each other while they interact creates a complex web that gives this easy-to-read novel a great deal of depth and dimension. This structure of characters who dance around one another is slightly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Russell Haxby is a sociopath. He wants to sleep with Alyce and his plan is to get Stanley permanently out of the way so he can do so. Simultaneously he acts as savior, liberator, and malevolent predator. He will do anything he can, be it bribery, flattery, honesty, dishonesty, or violence to get what he wants. But this behavior is not limited to how he treats Stanley; he treats everyone in the book with the same lack of discretion. Haxby controls every character in the whole story. He moves the people around like checkers on a checkerboard, as if he is playing a game with himself as his own opponent. Haxby manipulates everybody, always knowing the right thing to say but Stanley, being stubborn and stupid, proves to be his strongest opponent.

Sinkiewicz and Haxby contrast with one another because Haxby is in almost complete control of his life. A lot about his true nature is revealed during the time he spends alone in his apartment, a room that contrasts sharply with the living quarters of Alyce and Ruthie. Haxby lives in his bachelor pad, complete with classy furniture, a mini-bar, records, lamps, and a desk. He thinks of it as a palace but this grandeur is deflated by the fact that it is a former servants’ chamber, located over a garage, and its windows give him a view of nothing but the backs of other houses. It is physically comfortable but psychologically dark and lonely. The only people who visit him are a cleaning lady and delivery boys. He spend his time reading complicated books and translating Ulysses into language that is easy enough for ordinary people to understand. This shows that Haxby is not only sociopathic but also possessed of a need to prove that he is more clever than everybody else. This is related to the reader in his comments about James Joyce, the way he treats the other characters, the way he tricks customers into buying cars while cheating his boss, and his strange habit of physically assaulting random strangers on a number of occasions. But Haxby’s life is empty and unfulfilling. His power over other people is saturated with an underlying melancholy. He also isn’t quite as smart as he likes to think he is; he throws his copy of Ulysses across the room when he gets frustrated with Joyce’s dense prose. Towards the end of the book, he stays in bed for two weeks, stuck in a rut of depression.

Willeford portrays the married life as being a droll and mediocre prison but he also portrays the life of an aging bachelor as being dismal as well. In the end, we are left with no satisfactory options.

In Wild Wives, Jake Blake is another type of man altogether. As a private eye his business is failing. As this short novel starts, a high school girl named Barbara Allen is teasing and hitting on Blake in his office while her brother Freddy is off someplace else. She begs Blake for him to give her a job as his assistant. He wants to get rid of her so as a prank he sends her off to look for thieves in a department store. This harmless joke proves to be fatal to him later in the story.

Her older brother Freddy is involved in a gay love affair with an art dealer who lives in the same building as Jake Blake. When the detective pays the dealer a visit, Freddy gets jealous and assaults him outside this lover’s room. Jake Blake, being the tougher of the two, beats Freddy up and leaves. Freddy, along with his sister Barbara, will be a part of Blake’s downfall in the end.

These two sordid subplots get resolved later but along the way the main story revolves around Jake Blake’s affair with Florence Weintraub. She claims to be the daughter of Milton Weintraub, a famous architect who has hired two bodyguards to follow her around and keep her out of trouble. Florence is a nymphomaniac and a whole heap of trouble for every man she sleeps with. She hires Blake to help her lose the bodyguards so she can be alone with him for some hot sex which ends up happening on a the balcony of a restaurant.

Even though Jake Blake is a private detective, the story really has no mystery. The biggest secret of the book is about who Florence Weintraub really is and why she is being tailed by the two hired goons. This secret gets explained halfway through the story when Jake Blake goes home with Florence and encounters Milton Weintraub. After Blake learns that the architect is truly not her father, the older man winds up dead on the living room floor. Florence and Blake take off in her car in hopes of getting some money she has stashed in Las Vegas and then flying to Mexico. From that point on, Jake Blake gets himself out of many bad situations only to find himself in worse situations as the story goes on. Jake Blake is the type of macho character who is smart enough and tough enough to get himself out of any trouble but every time he does that, he winds up in a bigger hole than he was in before. He was figuratively born with a noose around his neck and the noose gets tighter and tighter as the events of the novel unfold.

Like High Priest of California, Wild Wives is structured around the theme of marriage and family. Jake Blake and Florence Weintraub get married in Las Vegas under assumed names. Their marriage is based on a reversal of gender stereotypes; Florence is after Blake because she wants to have sex with him and he is only interested in her money. He certainly doesn’t complain about the sex though. They invert the roles of her previous marriage where she married a man for money and he wanted nothing else from her but sex. They hated each other and were incapable of staying together. Likewise, soon after they marry, it is obvious that Blake will never be able to stay with her either, especially after he sees a newspaper story about the crime that happened the night before. Marriage is dangerous for either of them and Jake Blake can only think about getting rid of her in the most honest and expedient way possible.

As mentioned before, the other family nightmare for Blake involves Barbara and Freddy Allen who come back to haunt him in the end. When they show up with their father and a police chief named Pulaski, they prove to be his doom. Family life for the Allens is depicted as being full of dirty secrets, dishonesty, and plots against innocent people.

Jake Blake is actually a somewhat sincere man. Even though he has an affair with a married woman and, in the end, does a cowardly policeman’s job for him, he really is a moral person. His intentions may not be entirely honorable but compared to every other character in the story, he is a paragon of virtue. Like most hard-boiled detectives, he sticks to a code of ethics no matter what but this code of ethics is not powerful enough to save him from his fate. Wild Wives is a darkly humorous tale of a tough guy pursuing his own destruction. The reader may not even realize how comedic this story is until after they finish the last page. You could imagine the Coen Brothers making a great movie out of this. It would probably be a surprise if they were not already familiar with it.

Both Wild Wives and High Priest of California use marriage and family as structural themes for their noir idiom. Wild Wives is a satire of pulp detective fiction and High Priest of California is a pessimistic character study of a postwar American man. It might be wrong to overstate the family motif by calling either of them social commentary but the social commentary is there, giving these easy-to-follow-stories more emotional and psychological depth than you would ordinarily find in literature from this genre. Genre styles of fiction always have their handful of authors that turn the style into art; for pulp noir fiction, Charles Willeford is one of them. 

Willeford, Charles. High Priest of California/Wild Wives. RE/Search Publications, San Francisco: 1987.

 

Phantom

Phantom

short experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto

(1975)

 

Everything Visible Is Empty

Everything Visible Is Empty

short experimental film by Toshio Matsumoto

(1975)

 

Between Time and Timbuktu or Prometheus 5: A Space Opera

television film

based on the writing of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

directed by Fred Barzyk

(1972)

 

Lung

Lung

short animated abstract film by Robert Darroll

(1986)

 

Minsky's Theaters and the Golden Age of Burlesque

     In the 1860s, British immigrants brought a new style of entertainment to the young nation’s shores. They called it burlesque, a loan word from French that signified satire, comedy, and humor. The British Blondes were a troupe that performed dance routines for Civil War veterans and their families. Burlesque, in the beginning was a tame type of variety show that included not just dancers but also comedians, music, melodrama skits, acrobats, and whatever else they could fit into the program. It was family entertainment of the most inoffensive kind. As it became a more popular form of entertainment, shows grew more elaborate. Lines of dancing chorus girls became the closing act at each show and rumors began to spread that they did not wear panties; men began showing up just to see if they could get a peek but that was just a rumor, possibly spread on purpose as a publicity stunt. That rumor was a sign of things to come.

     By the 1890s, the exoticism of burlesque dancers had captured the imagination and they started appearing in a wider variety of venues like circuses, carnivals, county fairs, and expositions. At the Columbia Exhibition of 1893, a dancer named Little Egypt charmed the crowds. In 1899, Watson’s Beef Trust sponsored a show with a bunch of overweight farmer’s wives, each one pushing 300 pounds or more, prancing on stage in bathing suits and cowboy hatsto thrill an audience of agriculturalists. Burlesque had taken a turn towards sexiness that the moralists of the day did not like. But these shows were still tame. For working class families in the era before movies and television, a day of burlesque offered a way to escape on a weekend day off.

     By the turn of the century, burlesque began taking on a more tawdry reputation. The content of the shows had not changed much but two other things had: the locations of the theaters and the members of the audience. While high and middle-brow variety shows were being performed on Broadway and vaudeville theaters, the simpler style of burlesque was patronized more and more by blue collar and immigrant communities. Dancing and music were prioritized because much of the audience were still struggling to learn English. The less than affluent crowds brought in less cash so burlesque was done in low-rent venues, located in the less trendy parts of town. The theaters were small, undecorated halls with raised platforms for stages and wooden benches. Peanut shells and cigarette butts littered the floors. Sometimes the audience members got rowdy, especially if they had been drinking.

     But burlesque was a growing business and travel circuits, called “wheels”, were set up to rotate the performers. The musicians and dancers were transients, spending two or three nights in one city then moving on to another. For most, it was a six or seven day work week with two or three performances every day. And like nomadic people all across the world, burlesque performers become objects of curiosity and suspicion. Church leaders told their flocks that this was a sinful form of entertainment. The vice squads began paying closer attention and people accused the attractive young dancers of being prostitutes. America’s prudent do-gooders told people that the girls were victims of kidnappers who got them addicted to drugs and forced them to work without pay. As usual, none of this hype was true.

     Meanwhile on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a young nickelodeon owner named Abe Minsky began showing silent film loops of ladies lifting up their skirts to show a little skin. His father was not happy and commanded him to shut the operation down. But the old man owned the National Winter Garden a few blocks uptown. The sixth floor had a movie theater and he gave control of it over to Abe and his two brothers, Billy and Herbert.

     Competition in New York was brutal and the big budget theaters around town drew bigger crowds. Even worse, the climb up six flights of stairs to watch low quality films, albeit at a reduced entry cost, was a turn off to the growing patrons of the fledgling film industry. They needed a gimmick and they needed it fast. Vaudeville was popular at the time and the young businessmen thought combining that with a movie would be a good idea. But vaudeville performers demanded too much money. So they turned to burlesque. The dancers had less talent but they worked for lower wages. By then the Minsky’s knew that talent did not mean much when the women were scantily clad so they encouraged them to be a little more risque.

     This gimmick was a hit and soon the Minsky’s had a chain of theaters all over New York City and the surrounding areas. Not only that, but burlesque had started becoming respectable again. Their classier venues, mostly theaters and nightclubs, and the effort put into giving a flashier show, drew a more sophisticated audience. Burlesque slithered its way into the middle class.

     Audiences at the Winter Garden were growing bigger but it still wasn’t enough. After vacationing in Paris, Abe Minsky came back with an idea he picked up when visiting the Moulin Rouge in the Pigalle red light district. Upon his return, each Minsky theater had a runway built from the stage halfway through the theater so that audience members were more up close and personal with the dancers.

     Then in 1917, serendipity created a watershed event in the history of American culture. After an ordinary routine, an absent-minded young dancer named Mae Dix began removing her costume while walking off the stage. The men in the audience began cheering and demanding she return. The quick-thinking manager, Billy Minsky, redirected her back onto the stage and told her to keep taking it off. That is what she did. On that auspicious night, Mae Dix performed the first striptease in American history.

     The Minsky brothers put their heads together and had stripping incorporated into the act. The band was usually a trio with piano, drums, and either a horn, a sax, a trumpet, or a trombone. Some fancier clubs had a couple extra musicians. The music was a raunchy and raw mix of Dixieland and hot jazz. Variations on the style were called things like hoochie coochie, boogie woogie, and tittytwisters; there was an occasional cool jazz or sultry vocal number sung by a dancer with singing talent. Colored spot lights were added and chorus lines remained a part of the show.

     The comedians stayed also. Usually they were a pair with a straight man and a stooge, both of them wearing baggy trousers, loosened neckties, and threadbare coats. Their lack of decorum helped to break down the barrier between the performers and the commoners in the audience. The humor was suggestive and double-entendred, often not very funny and each punchline was highlighting with a snare-roll and cymbal smash just in case nobody knew it was meant to be a joke. “The other day I was standing at a bus stop next to a lady and a gust of wind blew up her skirt. I could see she had nothing on underneath.” “What did you say to her?” “Airy, isn’t it?” “And what did she say?” “What did you expect? Feathers?” Those corny jokes your grandfather used to tell were probably learned from burlesque. Comedians knew when they were bombing. Hecklers made it clear and shouts of “bring on the girls” was an indication they shouldn’t drag their act out for too long. Very few jokes were original and a seasoned audience member knew each one by heart. The best burlesque comedians were like blues guitarists who take a familiar tune and make it into something of their own.

     But some comedians were original and not all of them were bad. The list of stand-up comics who got their start in burlesque reads like a who’s who of midcentury American entertainment. Red Skelton, Bob Hope, Zero Mostel, Milton Berle, and Morey Amsterdam all got there start on the burlesque wheels before moving on to radio, film, and television. One comedian was Pinky Lee whose TV show became the prototype for Paul Reuben’s Pee Wee Herman character. Abbot and Costello first performed their “Who’s on First” shtick in burlesque shows before booking agents for radio saw their potential. Lenny Bruce got his first break doing his own seminal brand of blue comedy when his mother got him a job in a burlesque theater where she worked. And while Bald Bill Hagan was the premier musician of the Minsky circuit, it is also believed that a schmaltzy young crooner named Bing Crosby got his start there as well.

     Some of the comedians were gay cross-dressing men. Their frank and open talk about their sexual orientation was tolerated as long as they made it part of a comedy act. Surprisingly, audiences showed little hostility considering the times and the stage became a place of liberation for these otherwise closeted individuals.

     As for the dancers, as more clothes began coming off, their costumes became more elaborate. Layers of gowns, capes, gloves, scarves, feather boas, and veils were used to cover as much as possible. Long hair was used for a similar effect. Eye make up, fake lashes, and lipstick heightened the sensual features of their faces. As the outer garments came off, they revealed teddies, lace bras and panties, stockings, high heeled shoes, and beneath all that were pasties, g-strings, merkins, sometimes even body paint. Some dancers wore tight skin-colored bras with make-up on the tips to make it look like their nipples were showing. Others glued brillo pads to their panties to make men think they had seen a little bush when a leg was thrust high up into the air. The trick was to tease by showing as much as possible without actually showing anything at all.

     The longer a striptease lasted the better. The aim was to titillate, not to reveal. A little bit was shown, then a little bit more and a little bit more but the end point resided in the imagination. A good performer knew how to look every male member of the audience in the eye and meet their gaze with a look that said,”You’ll be getting something hot in the bedroom tonight but you’re gonna have to wait.” Typical moves were the bump, a sudden, staccato thrust of the bust, pelvis, or butt and the grind, a slow, writhing movement of the hips that evoked images of the dancer in a reverse cowgirl position, taking her time to make the pleasure and ecstasy last. Dance steps and body movements were perfectly times to the high-pulsed and explosive beats of the drums while facial expressions and lingering looks were carried along gently by whatever sweaty lines were being played on the sax. A striptease ended when the dancer was bare except for a see-through negligee or a bikini bottom and tassels tacked onto her breasts. The best dancers could entice the audience into imagining them naked rather than showing off the real thing. Striptease was a sexy, psychological game of hedonistic brinkmanship.

     Many of the strippers were Southern girls who fled to the big cities to escape the hopelessness of poverty. Taking off clothes on a stage before an audience of strangers was preferable to starvation and the trappings and uncertainties of rural, hillbilly life. Most of them were teenagers when they entered the business. Use of narcotics was almost unheard of but smoking and drinking were routine. Alcohol addiction made life rough for many dancers. While wages remained low at working-class rates, the most famous strippers made millions and some went on to become successful businesswomen on their own. Top name performers like Blaze Star, Lili St. Cyr, and Gypsy Rose Lee were blessed with fame and fortune. A small number of dancers were from ethnic backgrounds; an audience might see a Mexican, Asian, Native American or African-American lady on stage, their costumes and performance themes being gaudy caricatures of racial stereotypes, glaring examples of the exotica kitsch that fascinated bland, middle-class America. Sometimes there were even effeminate male cross-dressers doing striptease for comic effect.

     Audience members went through transformations over time. What started as family entertainment changed into evenings out for married couples. They sipped cocktails while watching the show before returning home to relieve the tensions that had built up inside the nightclub. When dancers progressed towards more and more erotic and revealing routines, the couples subsided and single men took their place. Dancers might look out into a crowd of lonely guys in trench coats, their hands in the pockets and their hats on their laps in a vain attempt to conceal the fact that they were playing with themselves.

     In the 1920s, the 18^th Amendment to the American Constitution was ratified by Congress and the Prohibition era began. While Americans had less access to liquor, beer, and wine, the authorities began to loosen up on sexual morality. When the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway began featuring bare-breasted dancers in their chorus lines, burlesque theaters soon followed suit. Some strippers finished their performance by mooning the audience or flashing a nipple. Topless women were allowed on stage as long as their movements were not sexually suggestive in any way. Thus a strange phenomenon was incorporated into the act. While dancers danced center stage, young women who were nude from the waist up would stand in the back, still as statues. If one of them made any movement at all, the police would have the club closed in no time. While more flesh was being revealed it was the plain-clothes police who were doing the most watching. Stakeouts and shakedowns became commonplace. A stripper who spread her legs just a little too far or swiveled her hips with a little too much emphasis would bring on a raid, the girls would be rounded up and taken downtown. But bookings were rare. Sometimes bribes were demanded but mostly the cops just wanted to make a show of their power. It wasn’t uncommon for a dancer to have charges dropped in exchange for a glossy, autographed photo of herself in skimpy clothing.

     By the 1930s, Prohibition had ended and the Great Depression had begun. Burlesque continued to rise in popularity, mostly because the poor, huddled masses of America had so little else to do with their time when unemployed. Sagging spirits and other body parts could be propped up by a day of escapism in a theater with comedy, music, and stripping. There was no shortage of cute young females who were willing to learn a few dance moves and take off their clothes to earn a bite to eat or gain a couple bucks to pay rent. Some audience members were so poor that they couldn’t afford the price of admission so they brought extra dishes or old clothes to be passed on to the performers in exchange for entry. Outside the big cities, nightclubs were often forced out into the seedier neighborhoods on the outskirts of town and often the landlords were members of La Cosa Nostra. Despite that shadowy element, the bars themselves were safe. The crime lords were rarely ever around, showing up once a month to collect rent or sit in with some friends for a performance. Mob business was done off-premises and in secrecy.

     But the arbiters of American morality wanted to be sure that the wicked should never be allowed to rest. New York City’s uptight Catholic mayor Fiorello LaGuardia began to crack down. Raids on Minsky theaters and other burlesque venues became more and more frequent. Undercover cops tried to entrap dancers with offers of money in exchange for sex. Charges of public lewdness increased in seriousness until 1937 when LaGuardia banned all burlesque theaters in New York and a Minsky’s theater got raided and closed down with charges filed against the managers. Jail time was served, fines were collected, but the ban did not extend outside of city limits and the Minsky’s moved their operations to nearby Newark, New Jersey.

     Then the next big event for America, and burlesque, was World War II. Soldiers heading out overseas would go to see burlesque for one last night out before leaving on a journey into a dangerous and uncertain future. Men returning after deployment were also eager to party and a bar full of dancing beauties was just what they wanted. To a man in uniform there was nothing more attractive then a stripper and to a stripper there was nothing more attractive than a man in uniform. Many soldiers departed with pictures of their favorite dancers in their packs. While stuck in trenches or bunks, the sweet gaze of a scantily-clad woman gave any man a fantasy to escape into. Some of the dancers went overseas to entertain the troops. Many strippers were moonlighting as pin-up girls and models for calendars and girly magazines. Other ladies went to work for the notorious Irving Klaw or clandestine photo studios where they posed in bondage, being hog-tied, gagged, and strapped to a wrack or standing menacingly over submissives with bullwhips in their hands. This was the time when burlesque reached its peak in popularity.

     The troops eventually returned home. Soon burlesque had a new competitor. Television was new to the American public. People started spending less time outside their homes. Music and comedy skits could be seen, for free no less, when beamed into the living rooms of many family homes. Variety entertainment could be watched, minus the strippers, on shows hosted by the likes of Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen. People no longer wanted comedy in burlesque clubs so to stay in business, the nightclubs eliminated the appetizer and dessert, serving up only the main course in bigger and bigger portions. Stripping became the main attraction and the performers drew bigger crowds by getting raunchier and more explicit. The art of the tease was disappearing, the bump and grind were growing stale, and the baring of tits and asses for tips became de rigeur. It was the age of felt suits, cheap cigars, and three-martini lunch breaks so managers encouraged the dancers to sit with sexually frustrated businessmen. The price of companionship was buying drinks for the girls at wildly inflated prices. The rum and cokes had no rum and the screwdrivers had no vodka but the guys got to be seen with a nubile-looking young sweetheart who otherwise had no interest in them.

     By the end of the 1960s, the sexual revolution was in full swing and pornography had been legalized. Close-up films and pictures of the human reproductive system, at work in all its variations, proliferated and were on display in dirty bookshops and scummy movie theaters in every major American city. Strippers gave up stripping and exotic dancers took over, sometimes coming onto the stage without any clothes on to begin with. It was all done for quick fixes, cheap thrills, and maximum stimulation. Erotic entertainment was no longer about the tease, the enticement, how much could be shown without actually showing anything, or how to leave the best parts up to the imagination; erotic entertainment became about how much could be shown, leaving nothing hidden and with very little creativity. Burlesque was all but dead.

     But not entirely. In about 1967, the famous striptease dancer Ann Corrio made it to Broadway with her production This Was Burlesque. It was a nostalgic tribute to the edgy form of entertainment of the past but it was also entirely clean. The focus of the show was on comedy, music, chorus lines, and sexy dancing. A tame striptease or two was tacked on at the end but very little flesh was revealed. Burlesque had come full circle. It was family entertainment once again. This Was Burlesque toured around the country and made millions of dollars well into the late 1970s.

     By the 1990s, the end of the 20^th century was coming into sight. Americans and Europeans began to look back over what had gone on for the last 100 years. All things retro came into style. Forgotten trends like lounge music, tiki bars, ballroom dancing, and rockabilly came back from the dead. Along with this vintage revival there was a renewed interest in burlesque. A small number of people got bored with porn and rediscovered the charm of the tease, trying to imagine a lost age of innocence. Neo-burlesque has been with us ever since and its status as an art form has finally been recognized, even if its adherents are just a small number of people. Of course, he new fans are probably hoping that the men in the audience with trench coats and hats on their laps are a permanent thing of the past.

Zemeckis, Leslie. Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America. Skyhorse Publishing, New York: 2013.

 

Why Make the Dogs Bark: a Tale from Communist Bulgaria

Recently, I came across an article in the New York Times about an assassination attempt on a Bulgarian arms manufacturer in Sofia, Emilian Gebrev. They smeared poison on his car door handles

Read the full article on Counter Punch

 

Book Review

Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death

by Soren Kierkegaard

     In the Old Testament, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, his only son. Abraham takes the boy to Mount Moriah, builds a stone altar, and prepares to commit the act of human sacrifice. When the knife if unsheathed, God commands Abraham to stop and kill a sheep in his place. In this way, Abraham’s faith in God was being put to the test. His faith was absolute and his immediate reward for his obedience was that he got to keep his son Isaac. What their relationship was like after this troubling incident, the Holy Bible does not say. But Soren Kierkegaard, in his philosophical treatise Fear and Trembling, uses this story as a means to explain how and individual human relates to God and that theme is carried over into another treatise, The Sickness Unto Death.

     The first thing to take into account when reading Fear and Trembling is that it is a method of analysis and that method utilizes a hierarchy of values. Kierkegaard values the individual over the collective society, he values the inner life of the mind over the social life of the masses, he values passion over rationality, and he values religion over secularism. Rooted in this hierarchy is the method of dialectics, a means of analysis that utilizes two opposing points of view to explain each other; these dialectics would later become known as “structuralism” in postmodern philosophy. It is important to remember that these dialectical pairings are vertical and hierarchical values, entailing the concepts of “superiority” and “inferiority”. Therefore, when Kierkegaard says that the so-called “pagan” philosophers of ancient Greece had some good ideas, this entails the concept that Christian ideas are, by definition, superior. (He fails to realize that the New Testament’s mythology and theology are largely a reinterpretation of the life of Socrates, as so many other Christians have. Christ was not original in any way whatsoever.)

     The next important step in understanding the dialectics of Fear and Trembling is mastering the definitions that Kierkegaard provides. He defines his terminologies technically so it helps to follow his explanations and disregard the common definitions of the words he uses. For example, his explanation of “aesthetics” has nothing to do with art or beauty but rather involves the surface appearances of social behavior; his aesthetics means hiding or obscuring truth for the sake of social harmony. This contrasts dialectically with “ethics” which has less to do with morality and has everything to do with revealing truth rather than hiding it. Kierkegaard’s ethics are inherently about honesty. Therefore, a married couple might act according to aesthetics by pretending to be happy in public but they behave ethically when they tell the public that they fight all the time at home and privately hate each other.

     Now remember that Kierkegaard contrasts society with the individual. The next step in this dialectic is to contrast the “tragic hero” with the “knight of faith”. Both are individuals who have come to an awakening. The tragic hero transgresses some societal rule of the aesthetic and this act of transgression exposes the inherent, sometimes hidden, values of society and thereby reinforces them. The tragic hero breaks a law but their lawbreaking benefits society in the end. At one stage, Abraham is a tragic hero because he broke the law by trying to murder his son; this benefited the Hebrews because it proved that God would reward those who acted with absolute obedience to his commandments. Thus the concept of “paradox” is introduced into the philosophy.

     But Kierkegaard does not have a high regard for the tragic hero because such a person remains an inclusive part of society. Rather he holds the knight of faith in higher esteem. The knight of faith is a paradox because he is both a member of society and an individual who transcends society is his own isolation. His individuality comes from his turning inwards, away from society and into the interior of his mind and spirit. This is where the knight of faith as an absolute being confronts the absolute being of God. The knight of faith puts his faith in God, promising to carry out his commands without question and, most importantly, without regard to what society thinks of him. This faith is absolute and it is absurd, as the author would say. But in this case “absurd” does not mean nonsensical; it means “impossible for humans to comprehend”. Abraham can not comprehend why God wants him to kill Isaac but he obeys the commandment anyways.

     Kierkegaard is calling for the true knight of faith to abandon the world and all its people and, as an individual, concentrate single-mindedly on God alone. He hated society and he especially hated organized religion. He saw the masses of humanity as lacking in passion and self-awareness. They just blindly shuffle through life like a bunch of farm animals. In this, his philosophy runs parallel to that of Nietzsche who addressed the same problem but arrived at atheism as a solution. The two existentialists digress in their approach to the world as well; Nietzsche believes in celebrating life even though the world is a rotten place and Kierkegaard believes in retreating into his own solemn and serious inner sanctum where the pettiness of other people could not intrude on his misery. He believes in a type of ascetic autism, an individual hermetically sealed in their own private world with little or no contact with the outside. Kierkegaard’s mysticism might have been a bitter reaction to his own social awkwardness, his own social ineptness, and his own sexual inhibitions (he was too much of a coward to marry the woman he loved). In his version of Plato’s Allegory Of the Cave, the knight of faith leaves the cave, sees the truth, then decides to never return to tell the others about what he found. He just keeps walking into the light until he dies. Interestingly, in his explication of the knight of faith, the man isolated from society and in the presence of God, there is little discussion about God himself; the description is almost entirely about the isolated and individuated man. There is no theology in this discourse. This is how Kierkegaard came to be labeled as the father of existentialism.

     This analysis of Abraham is a bit dated now. Imagine if a man in your neighborhood tried to stab his son then changed his mind and hacked the family dog to death instead. The the police came and he told them the voice of God told him to do that. He would not be hailed as a hero; he would be diagnosed as a psychotic and thrown in the psychiatric hospital. In the time the Old Testament was written, there was no knowledge of psychiatry, forensics, or neurophysiology. The unexplainable was explained with the best tools they had at the time: supernaturalism and religion. Events like this were given symbolic meaning and absurdities were coopted to teach moral lessons. Kierkegaard may have literally believed in the truth of Abraham’s story but it does appear that he is using it as a vehicle for his own preoccupations, primarily the supremacy of the individual and the inferiority of the common people.

     Kierkegaard, at a distance, advocates for a radical form of selfishness, one that is justified by spirituality and mysticism. His dialectic, if taken to far, could result in an indifference to atrocities like war, mass murder, or genocide. It is highly doubtful Kierkegaard himself would defend such things but his knight of faith, when asked about those horrors, might be inclined to say, “I’m too busy talking to God to worry about what happens to all those people that I despise.” His form of individual religion could result in a systematic ignorance of the world, a turning away from life, ultimately a dangerous form of nihilism and a negation of humanity. The knight of faith is concerned with neither aesthetics nor ethics; he is only concerned with himself.

     In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard analyzes the individual even further. Again, a hierarchy comes into play. At the bottom there is an ordinary person, living in the world and lacking in self-consciousness. This accounts for the vast majority of people. They work, they eat, they sleep, they reproduce and they never think about themselves or their place in society. They go about their business, essentially being nothing more than cogs in the machinery of society. They are mostly happy but simple and their lack of self-awareness prevents them being conscious of “despair”. A small number of people think about their lives and become aware of this despair. They become aware of it but they do not pursue it. They may read some books, do some serious thinking, and become upstanding members of a church community but go no further towards becoming a knight of faith. These two categories of people are not worthy of being in the presence of God because they have made no effort to achieve that honor. That reward is reserved for the strong, the courageous, those who strive and make the most effort. God is only revealed in a type of mystical meritocracy. In our times, Kierkegaard would look at churches as being equivalent to fast food restaurants, serving a cheap and simplified version of McReligion the way those restaurants serve bland hamburgers with no nutritional value, at low prices to people who have no concept of quality. Like his contemporary, the anarchist and atheist Mikhail Bakunin, who Kierkegaard corresponded with, he saw the church as being a method of political control, using religion as a tool to keep the masses subservient.

     The real pursuer of truth is aware of their own “despair”. Again, Kierkegaard defines this term technically, making it mean the divisions of the individual self. The true self exists in absolute purity but living in the world divides the self against the self. It becomes divided between its public functions and persona, its private self, and its internal self. When an individual turns inwards toward God, they become aware of this despair and the more they become aware of it, the closer they get to purity, the absolute self in the presence of the absolute God. Thus, despair is actually beneficial because it motivates the individual to pursue a cure for despair, the cure being absolute faith, achievable only at the time of death. The most important form of despair is sin, which is defined as rebellion or disobedience to the commands of God.

     This is all great for religious people but is there anything in this for those of us who are non-believers? Looking at Kierkegaard in the context of intellectual history, it becomes obvious that he latched on to ideas that were taken up later by other. The idea of differing layers of consciousness is significant, even if rudimentary. His explanation of the self divided against the self was later taken up in the phenomenologies of Heidegger, Husserl, and Sartre and probably inspired the concept of the decentered individual that became so prominent in modernism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. His observation that the masses of people are like a herd of cattle had some grim outcomes in the politics and economics of the 20^th century. That latter assertion of his is one thing that is still relevant now. Kierkegaard influenced a lot of thinkers he probably would not have liked. His philosophy may seem irrelevant today but these ideas were seeds that germinated into greater ideas in later times.

     Soren Kierkegaard was probably not a pleasant man to be around and neither Fear and Trembling nor The Sickness Unto Death have many ideas that are directly applicable to today’s world. In actuality, if God does not exist then these books are rendered even more useless and Kierkegaard’s philosophy is entirely lacking in an epistemology to support it. Taken on their own, these books do not mean much. But taken out of themselves and looked at in a broader context, they add some key pieces to the ever expanding puzzle of philosophy. The picture this puzzle creates can be comprehended without all its pieces but for the sake of completion, it is nice to have as many of the pieces as you can get.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death. Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York: 1954.

 

LUC SANTE: CHRONICLER OF NEW YORK’S ‘LOW LIFE

As a chronicler of New York’s underside and forgotten histories, Luc Sante walked straight out of the pages of Joe Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, the photos of Weegee and the films of Nicholas Ray. Before publishing the book that raised his profile, Low Life (1991), he hung out in all the right places, listening to Lenny Kaye talk at Village Oldies; taking in the good, bad and ugly at CBGB; and combing the shelves of The Strand (where he worked for years). In his new book, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, he tells his own story through a collection of essays, profiles and memoir compiled over the years. Eric Davidson spoke with Luc Sante for PKM

Read the full article on Please Kill Me

 

The Human Body as War Zone and Receptacle of Pain: The Body Art of Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak’s “The Torture of the 100 Pieces”

Represented by a logo of a human eye and eyebrow, with the eye acting as a razor blade, Infinity Land Press is, by its own website’s description, “a press that provides exclusive, clandestine publications which are inoculated against the circulatory system of the established book market.” Created and founded by artists Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak, it has indeed succeeded in editing, curating and publishing truly challenging art books that go against all conventions and morals, that question all positions towards violence, death, sadism, sexuality, pornography, et cetera, and that push forward sincere and honest artistic explorations of and meditations on these subjects. The press has published books by artists such as The Great Dennis Cooper–always with the certainty and intention that books, by their very nature, should always be, for lack of better words, dangerous, “unsafe” things.

Read the full article and interview on Filthy Dreams

 

Zodiac ‘340 Cipher’ cracked by code experts 51 years after it was sent to the S.F. Chronicle

The solution to what’s known as the 340 Cipher, one of the most vexing mysteries of the Zodiac Killer’s murderous saga, has been found by a code-breaking team from the United States, Australia and Belgium.

Read the full article on San Francisco Chronicle

 

Book Review

A Canticle for Leibowitz

by Walter M. Miller Jr.

     Oh yes, they went ahead and did it. Nuclear bombs were launched all over the world, civilization was wiped out, and a few humans beings survived. The North American continent reverted to a pre-technological wasteland and bands of tribal nomads terrorized the remaining population who tried to rebuild a government. Some people survived by joining Catholic monasteries administered by New Rome, located somewhere in the middle of what used to be America. One monastery in particular held the key to the rebirth of technology. This is the premise of A Canticle for Leibowitz by William M. Miller Jr. Many themes are explored in this post-apocalypse science-fiction classic but the idea that ties the whole work together is responsibility.

     This story is actually a combination of three short novelettes, each describing a different situation in a different time but all three take place in the same abbey. The Albertine Order of Leibowitz was named after an American radio engineer who was burned at the stake when humans rebelled against any form of intellectualism, killing scientists, teachers, authors, and anyone who had a talent for thinking. The nuclear holocaust was so terrible they felt they wipe out every knowledgeable person to prevent another Deluge of Fire from happening. The Order collects and preserves as many of Leibowitz’s works as they can find and store them safely for future use. The Memorabilia, as they call it, is comprised of writings, blueprints, scientific manuals, and various other books and documents. None of the Memorabilia is understood by the monks.

     As “Fiat Homo”, the first story, begins, a monk named Francis is fasting for Lent in the desert of Utah outside the monastery grounds. The description captures perfectly the atmosphere of the wide blue skies, the barren landscape with its vast, open spaces and the overpowering quietude. An old man appears, walking down the road and leads Francis to a mound which turns out to be a building, buried under rubble after the nuclear war. The traveler leaves but inside Francis finds some skeletons and a couple documents, one a note with a grocery list and the other a technical blueprint. Francis is mystified by both and understands neither but he thinks he has found some genuine documents written by his hero Leibowitz.

     This story is all about Francis’s commitment to truth. The Abbot Father Cheroki sends the documents on to New Rome to verify their authenticity and to begin the process of canonizing Leibowitz as a saint. Rumors begin to fly around the order that Francis had been visited by an agel who showed him where to find them. Cheroki, who is a bully and sadist with a bit of a mean streak, questions Francis about the incident. Francis tells him the bare truth of what happened without any embellishments or exaggerations. This is a humbling experience for him because Father Cheroki verbally abuses and flagellates him to wring the absolute truth out of him. But Francis sticks to his story no matter how punishing the humiliations get. Francis maintains the consistency of his story because his loyalty is to truth and it is his responsibility to be sincere during this time of trial.

     Francis gets put to work illuminating manuscripts and in his free time he chooses to work on illuminating the blueprint he found in what has been proven to be a fallout shelter for colleagues of Leibowitz. The document shows schematics for some radio equipment but the scientifically illiterate monks do not know what to make of it. The awestruck Francis copies it but adds in stylized lettering and floral motifs around the borders, painting the lines with gold paint. He turns the blueprint into a work of art but remains faithful to its original content because, again, his responsibility is to preserving the truth, no matter that that truth is, even if he can not comprehend its meaning.

     Finally Francis, in his final test, is commanded to bring the documents of Leibowitz to New Rome for the formal canonization ceremony. His illuminated blueprint has also around the attention of the Pope and they want him to bring it along too. On the road, some bandits take the manuscripts from him. As painful as it is for him to give up his work, his loyalty is to the truth and his duty to deliver the papers, so he pleads with the bandits to allow him to keep the Leibowitz document. They decide it looks worthless so they release Francis and let him take it with him too.

     Francis, who ends up as a martyr, is put through several tests. He passes each test by being responsible and honest. This theme of responsibility carries through into the other two stories.

     The second story, “Fiat Lux”, takes place hundreds of years after “Fiat Homo”. The Albertine Order of Leibowitz has expanded and their Memorabilia has grown to be a more complete library. One monk has learned through experimentation how to build a lamp. It is a crude piece of machinery, basically a dynamo made of three wagon wheels that are rotated by three monks on treadmills. Another monk keeps the electrical current flowing by adjusting two wires overhead. The author refers to this contraption as “lucifera”, an ambiguous omen since the same term is used to refer to nuclear bombs in the final story. The coming of this light corresponds with the arrival of a secular scientist named Thon Taddeo. He wishes to study the Memorabilia because he is at a crucial turning point where scientific technology is about to be reinvented and they are in need of the pre-Deluge of Fire textbooks. They designate a room for him to use but the lamp’s light does not reach in far enough so they remove a golden cross that hangs from the ceiling to allow more light to come in. Notice the symbolism.

     The theme of conflict between science and religion, reason and faith, belief and knowledge, is easy to grasp. Predictably, the abbot Dom Paulo is skeptical of the scientist and so are the other monks. They want to embrace the resurgence of technology but they fear a return to the mistakes made during the 20^th century. They approach secular progress with caution, mostly because they do not want another slaughter of intellectuals and they certainly do not want another nuclear war.

     Again, the issue of responsibility comes into play. This time Paulo does not want any new technology to be introduced until the human race becomes responsible enough to us it for good purposes only. Thon Taddeo’s concept of responsibility is to use the intellectual tools that scholars have for the improvement of the quality of human life. Despite his reckless speculation, he does provide a good counterpoint to Dom Paulo’s view by explaining that humans can never be perfect and waiting for them to become so will cause just as much pain as bringing back old technologies. Both men have their own concept of responsibility and both have valid arguments to make.

     This idea of responsibility is supplemented through the character of The Poet, a free-speaking court jester type of man who lives at the monastery. Although his personality is unpleasant, he functions in the story by directly stating the truth when others try to skirt around more sensitive issues. Most importantly, he has a glass eye that he can remove at will. He refers to his eye as his conscience which he can also remove at will. When he wants to be well-behaved he leaves it in but when he wants to get drunk he takes it out. After The Poet humiliates himself, as well as Thon Taddeo, with his own crude behavior, he leaves the monastery and accidentally leaves his glass eye behind. Thon Taddeo keeps it as a souvenir and by doing so, takes on The Poet’s concept of a removable conscience. Thon Taddeo follows his conscience when he speaks about the need for science to improve the human condition but at other times he speculates wildly, entertaining thoughts that could prove to be dangerous; those are the times when he has removed his conscience and Dom Paulo loudly expresses his disapproval.

     As “Fiat Voluntas Dua”, the third and final story, begins, the world is at the brink of another nuclear war. Rather than there being one dominant story line, this chapter is really a montage of three separate plots. The abbot this time is Dom Jethras Zerchi, a tough but earnest leader of the modernized Order of Saint Leibowitz. Zerhci’s main task is to ensure that the traditions of the Catholic church survive as long as the human race does. His responsibility is toward preservation, not of the knowledge that the church and his order hold sacred. The first plot of this story involves his task of finding a priest with experience in outer space, who can lead a team of monks to relocate on another planet. The Order has built a spaceship just for this purpose and one young and inexperienced monk named Joshua has to decide if he is the one to take on the job and deliver the monks, along with the Memorabilia, to a safer place in the universe. This part is simple and self-explanatory and so is the second plot line.

      The second thread starts after the bombs have fallen and nuclear fallout has killed or injured the majority of humans in North America. A refugee camp has been set up inside the monastery grounds and the military has sent a crew of doctors to help treat the wounded civilians. One young doctor is given the task of determining which refugees are too wounded or sick to survive. The ones who have no chance are selected and sent away to a euthanasia camp. Zerhci is not pleased with this as he believes people who are sick and suffering terribly should be left to die a painful but natural death. This sets up a conflict between church and state. The consciences of both Zerchi and the doctor are shaken by this situation and both must choose whether or not to remain loyal to their moral convictions. For both men, this is a matter of responsibility which sometimes means doing something even though you do not want to.

      The third, and most grotesque, thread of this story is about Mrs. Grales, a humble tomato farmer with a second head that grew out of her shoulder because of a genetic mutation that happened after the first nuclear war. The head’s name is Rachel and Mrs. Grales wants her to be baptized. Her priest refuses the rite so she asks Zerchi to do it instead. By all appearances, the head seems to be nothing more than a lump of dead flesh, an extra appendage without any consciousness. But as the story goes on, people think they can see it smiling or sometimes it appears to be whispering to them in an otherworldly voice.

      When the monastery gets bombed, Mrs. Grales is confessing to Zerchi in the chapel. He wakes up with half his body crushed under rubble and as he fades in and out of consciousness, Mrs. Grales approaches him. He has a revelation about Rachel. Due to the nuclear war, humanity is heading into uncharted territory and he thinks that Rachel might be the one to lead them through th wreckage towards salvation. It is hard to tell if Zerchi is hallucinating. In the end he has to be responsible and do what he thinks is right for the Catholic church.

      The theme of responsibility is a thread that runs throughout the whole book. With responsibility comes choice and the stories all revolve around the characters making the right decisions. Francis could choose to promote himself by making his encounter with the old man more fantastic than it really was but instead he chooses to stick to the truth and allow the consequences to fall where they will. Dom Paulo can choose to allow science and rationality to displace religion as his epistemological framework but chooses to stay with religion to promote the idea of caution in human endeavors. Joshua can choose to stay on Earth and help the people who survived the atomic blasts but chooses to leave for another planet to perpetuate his religion. Zerchi can choose to interfere with the government euthanasia program but decides not to even though it is against his beliefs. Zerchi also chooses to baptize Rachel even though he is not sure if she is even alive.

      A Canticle for Leibowitz succeeds on many levels but it also succeeds for what it does not do. Despite being about the Catholic church, the author does not preach; he does not try to convert the reader. There is little content about God, faith, theology, or mysticism. In fact, discussions about God are almost non-existent in these stories; this could be considered an existentialist version of Catholicism, a Catholicism without God. He does not try to shove religion down the reader’s throat and Miller even seems to have some doubts about religion himself. He does allow the reader enough room to decide what is right or wrong and by doing so, he makes his version of religion look good. For Walter M. Miller Jr., religion is a vehicle and framework for ethics and ethics entail the concept of individual responsibility. He heightens the reader’s sense of responsibility and leaves them with the existential choice of accepting or rejecting the Catholic church he has embraced. The only demand he makes is that you take his line of thinking seriously before doing so. That is why A Canticle for Leibowitz is a good science-fiction novel in the post-apocalyptic subgenre. It transcends its genre and works with themes that are important to everybody, be they religious or not.

Miller Jr., Walter M. A Canticle for Leibowitz. Bantam Books, New York: 1972.