R.I.P. Sean Connery
actor
1930 - 2020
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Monday, October 26, 2020
'Amazing' Escape Artist, Magician, And Skeptic James Randi Dead At 92
James Randi hated tricking people. Sure, as The Amazing Randi, he pulled off amazing escape acts and sleight of hand maneuvers faster than you could see — but it was all in service of proving that he wasn't magical in any sense of the word. He hated tricking people so much he made a career out of debunking so-called psychics, faith healers, and fortune tellers of all sorts.
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
Society Of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
Guy Debord was a founding member and the prime theoretician of the Situationist International, an art school that developed out of the later stages of the Surrealist movement. They were reacting against commodity fetishism, as it was defined by the Surrealists, the idea that consumer goods hold a magic power over their owners. Eventually the artistic side of the group fell away and the remainder of the SI turned to urban guerilla politics. They played a key role in the events of May 1968 in France. Debord’s Society Of the Spectacle outlines his concept of what commodity fetishism does to the masses and how it alienates them from themselves.
This short treatise utilizes ideas from Hegel and Marx. From Hegel’s phenomenology we get a description of a “geist”, which could be defined as a type of motivational spirit that defines a particular society and era. Debord here is defining this geist as the Spectacle, the post-World War II capitalist boom in which a deluge of luxury consumer items were made available to the masses. Along with this surge of material goods came advertising, a solidification of the hierarchical nature of society, and the resulting psychological anomie. This is where Marx comes in.
Marx, in his day, introduced the concept of “worker alienation”, the syndrome where a factory laborer feels no personal connection to the machinery they operate. They spend the majority of their time pulling levers and turning gears on machines they don’t understand to make products they will never afford to buy in order to make money for the bourgeoisie that they will never personally know. The end result is the disappearance of meaning in life. Debord extends and shifts this idea to mid/late capitalist society where the consumer finds identity in what they own. While the existentialists said “you are what you do”, the Situationists said “you are what you own”. If people’s identity is defined by what they buy, then they invest most of their mental energy into the purchase of consumer goods, most of which have no functional or inherent value, and become alienated from themselves. Lacking reflective self-consciousness, anomie and depression become more intense as they get blindly led like rats through the capitalist maze with no exit, being lured along by advertisers in pursuit of fulfilling an elusive desire that they can not even control or comprehend.
Guy Debord was a radical leftist but he had no sympathy for communism despite his use of Marx in his critique of society. A whole section of this book is about the miseries of the Soviet Union, a corporatist political construct in which state ideology is the spectacle, or geist, to which people collectively adhere. Communism has no room for individual expression because individuality leads to disruptions in the direct line of communication from the dictators of the ruling class to the submissive block of factory and farm workers whose sole purpose is to follow orders, maintaining the functionality of the state machinery. Debord thus concludes that, while both communism and capitalism are inherently miserable and oppressive systems, capitalism is better because it leaves open more possibility for subversion. An individual can buy a printing press or a movie camera and make consumer goods, like newspapers and films, that can be weaponized to destroy the domination of the spectacle, freeing the masses from the illusion.
These are some of the most interesting ideas in the book. Other topics briefly covered are the spectacle’s evolution throughout history, its relation with time and space, and the need for the proletariat to awaken to their role as subjective actors in the historical process. That last point could use further development and criticism. Debord falls into the same trap that makes so many leftists ineffectual: leftists are good at diagnosing and articulating society’s problems but they fall short when it comes to providing plausible solutions. Society Of the Spectacle is no exception in this regard.
Guy Debord’s short tract lays out a vision of the spectacle as a motivating but damaging illusion that drains modern society of its passions, vivacity, and meaning. As a philosophical work, it does not argue or assert its argument. Debord instead describes it as he sees it and lets the reader decide on its accuracy and merit. The critique is rudimentary but would later get elaborated on by Jean Baudrillard. If you think Situationism is outdated or inaccurate, try applying the idea of commodity fetishism to the current obsession with smartphones and tablets. The younger generation lives their social lives by creating internet personas on social media platforms; they manufacture their own image and identity and invest so much energy into doing so that the end result is epidemic proportions of depression, loneliness, suicide, mental illness, and social dislocation. Agoraphobia has become normalized. Recent studies have shown that IQ levels have been dropping since the internet became the central focus of our culture. Debord’s thesis may have been rudimentary in its time but it also was prescient, seminal, and prophetic.
Debord, Guy. Society Of the Spectacle. Black & Red, Detroit: 1983.
Friday, October 16, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
Scientologist! William S. Burroghs and the Weird Cult
by David S. Wills
The lifestyle and literature of William S. Burroughs were both equally unorthodox in practice. The strange life lived by the author of Junky and Naked Lunch was often as surreal and inexplicable as the themes and imagery of those two classic and disturbing novels. Burroughs’ literature and the detailed biographical portraits we have of him can be bound together to form what could be called the Burroughs mythos. Up until recently, one piece of the Burroughs mythos has not been given proper attention; the missing piece is the time he spent as a member of The Church of Scientology and how it influenced his works. David S. Wills fills in this gap in his book Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult.
This book is broken into four sections. The first is a general overview of Burroughs’ life up until the time he started to seriously pursue a career as a writer. Wills covers his childhood in St. Louis, the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy, his introduction to the occult by his mother and nanny, his fascination for quack cures and pseudo-science, and a few other traumatic events along the way. The years of his early adulthood were just as strange. Burroughs began experimenting with drugs, traveled in South America, got involved in criminal activities, tried and failed to operate a grapefruit farm in Texas, and met up with future Beat Generation superstars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. And, of course, there is the time Burroughs shot his wife in the head in Mexico City. In short, this section is a standard overview of William S. Burroughs’ life. There is one hitch, though. The author David S. Wills has an annoying approach and takes every chance he possibly can to take swipes at the man for either doing stupid things or having stupid beliefs. It’s not that Burroughs lived an exemplary life or had infallible views; Burroughs fans take these things for granted. Wills fails to understand that these are what makes Burroughs such a mythical character and beating up on him just makes Wills look like a smug and condescending asshole.
The editing in this book is poor. I will mention it but won’t dwell on it too much. The text is permeated with spelling errors, improper word usage, awkward grammatical constructions, and poorly organized paragraphs. Sometimes it gets bad enough that I had to go back and reread a sentence or two to figure out what Wills was actually trying to say. At least William Burroughs was intentionally trying to confuse his readers. Wills just accomplishes this through carelessness.
The author also adds some sporadic details that don’t quite fit the narrative. For example, he mentions Brion Gysin’s creation of the Dream Machine and the sad details of Burroughs’ relationship with his son; while these events are true and also represent significant details of the general biography, they have nothing to do with Burroughs and his relationship to Scientology. They are not well incorporated into the narrative. Most readers already know these things anyways. These parts stand out in uncomfortable ways like pieces of broccoli in a bowl of ice cream.
And couldn’t he have come up with a better title than Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult? That sounds like something you would find in the National Enquirer.
Moving on to the second section, as Burroughs’ life continues, he begins making waves with his second novel Naked Lunch then heads off for more exotic locations where the police won’t be breathing down his neck. He ends up in Tangiers, Morocco and that is where he meets Brion Gysin, the man who introduces Burroughs to both the cut-up method of writing and Dianetics, a new form of therapy devised by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the future cult leader of The Church of Scientology. The two men were not impressed with each other at first but they later struck up a friendship in Paris where Gysin was running the now-legendary Beat Hotel.
Wills really cocks up the narrative by going into a muddled account of when Burroughs first heard of Dianetics. He goes into some detail based on letters exchanged between Burroughs and Ginsberg because he wants to prove that Burroughs never accurately stated the proper date when he learned of the technique. Why should we care what the exact date was? The very fact that it happened is more interesting and relevant to the story. Wills is, once again, making a petty attempt at debunking Burroughs. This section of the book is also annoying because Wills writes about how Burroughs was condescending to Ginsberg in his letters, something that didn’t appear to bother Ginsberg much since the two maintained a close friendship until both of them died. Wills also expresses a lot of contempt for Brion Gysin, who he obviously doesn’t like. There are times when Wills’ cheap shots almost ruin the whole book.
Nonetheless, William Burroughs, with his penchant for occultism and fringe science, took to Dianetics and its use of the E-meter/lie detector to erase language and memories of traumatic experiences from the unconscious mind. The goal is to become “clear”, a state of mind where a human reaches their full potential because all the junk they have accumulated in their thoughts throughout their life is no longer there. One strong point about this book, and one that Wills deserves credit for, is demonstrating how the traumas of childhood, the drug addiction, the manslaughter, the homosexuality, and failed attempts in psychoanalysis made Burroughs a prime candidate for membership in L. Ron Hubbard’s cult, as if it were tailor made for Burroughs to begin with.
At about the same time, Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up technique. In this method of slicing up written texts and randomly putting them back together again, Burroughs saw a useful counterpart to Dianetics therapy. He saw it as a way of tearing through the clutter of language to recreate the relationship between the individual person, time, and space. Burroughs went on to use cut-ups as a writing technique which he employed in the novels of the Nova trilogy. Wills runs into some more trouble here. He tries to make the case that since Burroughs saw a connection between Dianetics and cut-ups that he somehow lifted the idea of cut-ups from L. Ron Hubbard. But it was Burroughs who conflated these two practices, not Hubbard. There is, as far as I know, no mention of anything resembling cut-ups in Hubbard’s literature.
There is another aspect of cut-ups that Wills overlooks. The technique was less likely to have come from Dianetics and more likely to have originated in modernist, avant garde art, particularly the technique of Analytic Cubism. A direct line can be traced from that seminal movement to Brion Gysin who was briefly a member of the Surrealists before their final demise. Surrealism grew out of Dadism which grew out of Cubism with Pablo Picasso being one of the connecting threads through all three movements. Brion Gysin in Here to Go: Planet R-101 stated that painting is always fifty years ahead of writing. Backtracking from 1960 to the pre-war years, we arrive in the neighborhood of Analytic Cubism, which depicted the fracturing of physical surfaces, and Dada collages and montages which made combinations of unrelated found objects and images. The Dadaist poetry of Tristan Tzara was randomly constructed word-salads meant to be nonsensical. The Dadaists sought to destroy language because language means logical structures and logic is what led to the atrocities of World War I. Therefore disrupting all lines of communication would liberate humanity from future atrocities. That idea brings us full circle back to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. Cut-ups are the application of Analytic Cubism and Dada techniques to the physically realized literary text.
“Rub out the word” and “language is a virus” are quotes that Burroughs reiterates throughout his writings. According to Scientology, the reactive mind and engrams act like tape recorders in the mind by constantly replaying language associated with, and accumulated by, traumatic experiences in life. They unconsciously control a person’s outlook and behavior. This idea is a key theme in understanding Burroughs’ literature and it is correct to attribute Scientology as a source of his inspiration. The problem for Wills is that he overplays his hand in this matter. Burroughs had discovered the theory of General Semantics as proposed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski long before he had discovered Dianetics. This concept is also prevalent in the theories underlying hypnotism, psychoanalysis, and the system of magick developed by Aleister Crowley, all of which Burroughs had toyed around with before he knew about Scientology. Wills says as much in the first section of his book. Therefore, his assertion that Burroughs borrowed his ideas about language from the cult is overemphasized. It did play a role in the development of Burroughs’ themes but there is a lot more to it than that. Wills makes it sound like the Nova trilogy is a treatise on Scientology and this is not entirely off the mark but inaccurate nonetheless.
The third section of Scientologist! Is the strongest part of the book. Wills really gets to the heart of the matter here by telling the story of how William S. Burroughs actually joined The Church of Scientology in London, going through the auditing sessions with the e-meter, taking their classes, and eventually reaching the stage of clear. Burroughs eventually lost interest in the cult and published some scathing articles about their shady practices, authoritarian nature, and obsession with making money. They once conducted a high level auditing session with Burroughs in a broom closet. A clear picture of what it would be like to be in this church is given to those of us who would never consider joining.
Burroughs’ motives for joining are also examined. This section culminates with a dispute between Burroughs and a spokesperson for the church that plays out in the pages of the pornographic magazine Mayfair in which Burroughs had been writing a monthly column on the cult for some time.
But despite this well-detailed and well-researched section, David S. Wills still manages to drop the ball on a couple significant points. One example is his assertion that Burroughs was so enthusiastic about Scientology that he failed to recognize its darker aspect of being a mind-control cult. But this contradicts what Wills says about Burroughs approach to Dianetics in the second section; he claims that Burroughs was initially skeptical of L. Ron Hubbard’s motives, seeing him as being a money-grubbing, power hungry conman. This also contradicts Burroughs’ statement that he joined Scientology as an anthropologist, also mentioned by Wills. It might be more accurate to say he joined as an investigative journalist. But anyhow, my contention is that Wills misinterprets Burroughs’ motives because his own underlying intention is to prove that Burroughs was stupid. From my vantage point, I think Burroughs knew from the start what he was getting into. I do agree that he naively joined the church to reap the benefits of their therapy and come to terms with the nightmarish memories he had accumulated. Burroughs was about the age of 40 when he joined and it appears to me that this might have been the onset of his midlife crisis, a detail that Wills never considers. I also think Burroughs joined because he needed a new angle for his writing. It is not uncommon for authors to feel they have run out of ideas and go in search of something new, especially as they approach middle-age. Scientology was new territory, not just for Burroughs, but for everybody else as well since it was so new. I think Burroughs did know they were dangerous and joined for that reason. He was not a man who was averse to risky behavior, whether it be a matter of playing with guns, exploring the jungles of Colombia and Panama, experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs, or even buying a citrus farm in Texas hoping to get rich. Even his novels were daring; he possibly even wrote Naked Lunch with the intent of getting it prosecuted for obscenity; it is a work that takes extreme artistic, as well as, legal risks. It is part of the Burroughs mythos that he was attracted to danger while maintaining a calm, cool exterior. Wills never seems to put two and two together to get four; he lists all the separate pieces of the equation but never calculates them in order to come up with the correct answer.
Wills also overemphasizes the role Scientology played in its influence over Burroughs’ writing. As previously mentioned, the place it holds in the narratives of the Nova trilogy is significant but the claim that The Wild Boys is a novel directly influenced by Scientology is a stretch. Wills points out two minor and densely opaque passages in that book that refer to Scientology but the novel overall has little of anything to do woth that subject matter. The story celebrates a group of young men who live in the wilderness of Morocco. They reject society for the sake of living a free life of unrestrained indulgence in drug use and gay sex. They form an international cabal that sabotages the machinations of the puritanical American establishment. This anarchic vision is more like a direct contradiction of the end goals of Scientology rather than an affirmation.
The fourth part of Wills’ book simply narrates the remaining years of Burroughs’ life and how aspects of Scientology continued to linger in his thoughts. A glaring omission in this section is the influence of Burroughs’ theories on the early industrial music scene of the mid-1970s which is indirectly related to Scientology. Not only did Burroughs work with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle but his theories of language, social control, his cut-ups, and his audio tape experiments provided the theoretical framework for industrial music. P-Orridge and Christopherson released a record of cut-ups on their Industrial Records music label long before the two of them went on to form their own cult, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth which bore some similarities to Scientology via their practice of magick, an original influence on L. Ron Hubbard. Genesis P-Orridge was also influenced by The Process Chruch Of the Final Judgment, a cult that spun off from The Church of Scientology. The original idea behind industrial music was to bring hidden cultural taboos to the surface of consciousness for the sake of erasing them and liberating the individual from the mechanisms of control imposed by the establishment in modern culture. As Michel Foucault would say, the structures of cultural power and domination are largely invisible to the people who are manipulated by them. The idea that language is a virus means that language, as a mechanism of control, is hidden in the way Scientologists conceive of engrams and the reactive mind. Alexander Reed’s book Assimilate: A Critical Analysis of Industrial Music gives a comprehensive account of how industrial music grew out of William S. Burroughs. His involvement with Scientology did play a significant role in this.
Scientologist!, despite its obvious flaws and amateurish writing, is a book that had to be written in order to fill a gap in the mythos of William S. Burroughs. David S. Wills does a good job of detailing this story. He does a bad job of interpreting what it is all about. He comes across as some douschebag millenial with a chip on his shoulder who wants to prove that baby boomers suck; if that is his hidden agenda, he has failed. William S. Burroughs may have believed in things that weren’t real but he does prompt his readers to question the realities of the world we live in. In the end, he wasn’t a scientist or a philosopher, he was an artist and a writer of fiction. If believing in bullshit resulted in him writing novels that are truly profound in the effects they have on the reader, then so be it. Burroughs is iconic because of his beliefs, not in spite of them. Behind his fringe ideologies is a stubborn insistence to reject the miserable conditions of the world and create a better way to exist, a way of life that embraces pleasure, freedom, peace, and the ability to be who you are while minding your own business. Besides, I know from experience that while under the influence of drugs, things like orgone energy, Dianetics, and famailar spirits can make a lot of sense. It’s just that when you come down from whatever high you are on, the illusions wear off. How can you get yourself permanently into that ecstatic state of mind? Burroughs never figured it out. Hopefully someday somebody else will.
Wills, David S. Scientologist!: William S. Burroughs and the Weird Cult. Beatdom Books, United Kingdom: 2013.
Monday, October 12, 2020
The David Lynch Retrospective
The David Lynch Retrospective
critical analysis of David Lynch's films
by The Cinema Cartography
(2020)
Experiments In the Revival of Organisms
Experiments In the Revival of Organisms
short Soviet documentary film about bringing dead dogs back to life
directed by D.I. Yashin (1940)
Friday, October 9, 2020
Pierre Kezdy, bass player for influential punk rockers Naked Raygun, other Chicago bands, dead at 58
Pierre Kezdy, bass guitarist for Naked Raygun, one of Chicago’s most influential and best loved punk rock bands, died Friday at 58 at a hospice in Glenview. The longtime Evanston resident had cancer.
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
Story of O
by Pauline Reage
In the 1950’s a journalist and professional translator wrote a series of letters to her husband. He was an enthusiast for the writings of the Marquis de Sade and once told her that no female could ever write erotic fiction as well as a man. The wife set out to prove him wrong and those letters were collected into a novel that eventually became published as Story of O by Pauline Reage, the pen name of Anne Decile Desclos. The book was controversial from the start and is now considered a classic in some circles. In our age when anything and everything is available on the internet it does not have the same impact it did in the 1950s. But if you approach the story with the right set of expectations, it might be a good book. Ultimately, a lot depends on who you are and what you are willing to tolerate.
To start off, Story of O is not pornography. Pornography is explicit and its primary function is to sexually arose the audience. In porn story is less important than the sexual activity, if there even is a story to begin with. Pornography contrasts with erotica which is sexually oriented by nature but includes more emotion and character development even if the characters are shallow. Erotic art is less crude and allows more room for context and expression. But Story of O does not fit easily into either category. It blends elements of the two and hovers somewhere in between, almost as if it forms its own genre of literature. It tells the story of a woman who voluntarily enters a sado-masochistic relationship in which her boyfriend, Rene, takes her to a chateaux called Roissy. It is there that O gets tied-up, whipped, and forced to have sex with several anonymous men. Rene asks her permission before any of this starts and she agrees. She has become his slave and he can do with her whatever he wants.
The description of physical sensations is central to both pornography and erotica. The sensations described by O are not necessarily sexual. It is true that she gets penetrated by men throughout the book, sometimes by multiple men at the same time, but the description never goes beyond the act itself. It is not phallo-centric in any way nor does O say what it feels like to have sex. The process leading from arousal to climax is given no attention. Actually, most of what she describes are secondary details like the textures of clothing, the softness of a bed, the surface of stone floors she kneels on, and, most importantly, what it feels like to be put in bondage and whipped. The act of tying her wrists and restricting her movements make her limbs feel separate from her body which results in a sensation of disassociation. When O gets whipped she has sensations of her body dissolving so that she feels outside of herself. In fact, when the men in the story bind her and flagellate her they describe it as “opening” her body. When the beatings stop, the sense of relief from pain gives O pleasure, probably a rush of endorphins. The relief gained from having her ordeals ended tends to be the point where agony turns into ecstasy.
Roissy is a secret society, maybe like what people imagined the Hellfire Clubs of the 19th century to be like. When Rene takes her away, he gives her a signet ring with a triskellion symbol on it meaning she must submit to the desires of any man who knows what the symbol means. As the story moves on, O is coaxed into having a sexual relationship with a fashion model named Jacqueline. She is also handed over to Sir Stephen, a superior to Rene in the Roissy society.
O’s subjectivity is described along the way. At the start of the novel, she agrees to Rene’s requests because she loves him and wants his acceptance. This need for acceptance plays a running theme throughout the story. O also describes her desire to be treated like an object and deprived of her ability to choose. Why she feels this way is never explained. This is one shortcoming of the novel; O says how she feels about her situation but she doesn’t say enough to give the reader a deep understanding of what she truly wants. The descriptions of her subjectivity give her depth but do not go deep enough.
Sir Stephen takes over as her dominant partner but again, she gives her permission to him and Rene before they begin their dominant/submissive relationship. Every time O reaches a new stage in her development as a submissive woman, she is asked for permission before the torture begins. O feels a lot of ambivalence every time she is asked to cross that line and it is the resolution of that hesitancy, fear, and desire for pain that gives her pleasure. The physical sensation of torture is less important to her than what it does to her psychologically. Keep in mind that this type of ambivalence is called "cognitive dissonance" and the process of helping someone overcome that state of uncertainty is used by cult leaders as a method of coercion and manipulation, making the person more loyal to the group through resolution of their conflicting emotions
Speaking of psychology, as her relationship with Sir Steven intensifies, she goes back to Rene who convinces her to lure Jacqueline into going to Roissy. Rene says he loves Jacqueline. O does not want her to go there because of her infatuation and does not want her to suffer. However, when Rene says he loves Jacqueline, O is inflamed with jealousy and it is then that she wants to see Jacqueline tied up and tortured with tears running down her face. O has reached another turning point: she is no longer just a masochist because the doorway to her sadism has been opened. Rene appears to have learned from the others in Roissy how to manipulate women and get what he wants from them.
At Sir Stephen’s Request, O is taken to the luxurious house of Anne-Marie, a middle-aged lesbian who has three younger female slaves working for her. As the bondage and whippings continue, Sir Stephen asks O to allow herself to be branded and to have her labia pierced in order to hold two links of a chain and a pendant stating his ownership of her. Again, O is asked for permission and she gives it. She also sleeps with Anne-Marie before going back to her apartment. It is interesting that Anne-Marie will not allow herself to be seen undressed. At this point O’s body is scarred and covered with welts but she is also becoming more confident in her status as a slave. But is Anne-Marie’s refusal to be seen nude an indication that her body is just as scarred as O’s? It is possible that Anne-Marie may be serving the function of a role model for O as she progresses up the hierarchy of the secret society.
Roissy does have a hierarchy. Rene gives O to Sir Stephen as a gift but towards the end another mysterious man called the Commander enters the story. He is the man that Sir Stephen takes orders from. But where O is a two and a half dimensional character, the men in the story are one dimensional. On the surface this may look like a flaw in the writing but as the wider picture of the Roissy society emerges this gives the novel a little more depth as you begin to wonder who these men are and what they are up to. The chateau and the society itself reek of wealth, privilege, and aristocracy. How powerful are these people in the outside world? Is dominance and submission merely a hobby for them or are they part of something larger, something with a hidden plan? The lack of detail and closure makes the whole story more creepy. And who are all the people attending the party at the end?
O is eventually taken to a villa outside Paris by Sir Stephen and the Commander. O is completely nude except for an owl mask over her head; Jacqeline’s younger sister leads her along on a leash attached to her leather collar. In some cultures, owls are symbols of evil and in others they are symbols of wisdom. In reality they are nocturnal creatures and birds of prey so this marks another transformation in O’s status. O has taken another step deeper, and possibly higher up, in the secret society. At the villa, there is a large party going on in the moonlight. O gets put on display to the guests. Sir Stephen and the Commander have put her on a figurative pedestal and she is admired as an idol and an example of what other female guests at the gathering should aspire to be. By the end of the book, O is the center of attention and she says she is proud of what she has become.
Story of O possibly makes some people uncomfortable because of the ambiguities it arouses in the readers as well as the shock value of what takes place. Is O being coerced, manipulated, or brainwashed? It is possible that the questions it raises are more unsettling than the descriptions of the ordeals O goes through. If a person uses their freedom to choose to give up their freedom of choice aren’t they actually free? If a woman chooses to be submissive, does she have a certain power that she can not obtain in other ways? When people use use their freedom to choose to do something we find repugnant or disgraceful, do we have any right to condemn them? Does O benefit in any way from her subservience? A lot of people don’t like these kinds of questions and it is difficult to get through this novel without confronting them. The story provides no answers. You have to figure it out for yourself or, certainly, you could always ask someone from the BDSM community to help you understand. If you approach them with sincere interest, many of them would be happy to share their thoughts on the matter.
This novel certainly has some problems. The prose is long winded and sometimes vague; paragraphs go on far longer than they should. This is partly a translation problem because French does not translate into English without causing these types of problems. Still, the section titled “Sir Stephen” is especially dull and unnecessarily wordy. There is an abundance of description but a lot of the things being described are of peripheral importance to the story; for example, some passages about clothing and furniture are too ornate and descriptive for their own good while some of the sex and BDSM scenes could benefit from more detail. The characters also lack depth. The writing suggests that they have depth but doesn’t actually deliver it.
Still, Story of O is an interesting book. It goes just a little bit beyond ordinary erotica. One thing that makes it unique is the understatement of O’s psychological development. It is there but it is buried and hidden beneath the layers of florid prose. It is like a small reward for those readers who look hard enough and pay attention to the fine details. As a work of pornography it fails and people who approach it as such will be disappointed. Even if those subtleties are not handled as well as they could have been, those understated details are what give Story of O its charm.
Reage, Pauline. Story of O. Ballantine Books, New York: 1973.
Monday, October 5, 2020
Call It Sleep: A Situationist Film
Call It Sleep: A Situationist Film
directed by Isaac Cronin and Terrell Seltzer
Sunday, October 4, 2020
Book Review
Book Review
The Revised Boy Scout Manual:
An Electronic Revolution
by William S. Burroughs
In the early 1970s, William S. Burroughs was mostly writing articles for underground newspapers and pornographic magazines like Mayfair. The hippie scene was winding down and urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Angry Brigade, and the Red Army Faction were springing up all over the place. Burroughs had just voluntarily left the Church of Scientology because of their authoritarian and potentially fascist overtones and was trying to maintain his status as a writer and counter-cultural icon. He began work on a manifesto to explain his unorthodox world viewto the younger generation. He never completed the project but parts of it were sold as spoken word pieces on cassettes and other fragments were published in scattered places. These pieces were put together as The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution and recently published in paperback. The finished product serves as a good, but incomplete, overview of his ideas.
The opening sections of this short work lay out strategies for overthrowing the established order and explain a variety of weapons, both conventional and unconventional, that can be used in the pursuit of building a free society. These passages are seasoned with little bits of Burroughs’ acerbic humor and eventually make a transition into fantasy vignettes that read like the fiction Burroughs is famous for. A smooth transition is made from realistic-sounding essay writing to the gallows humor of his dark scenarios. Readers who are less experienced with Burroughs’ writing style may get disoriented and wonder whether they should even take this prose seriously. The answer is both yes and no or at least the intent of his writing is serious while the realized result is fiction. But that is how Burroughs always operated. He melted the boundaries of reality like hot candle wax dripping into a pool of molten lava. He didn’t merely think outside the box; he did everything he could to destroy whatever box it is you are in when you think.
There are key ideas to this revolution. One is that ten percent of the human race has to be killed but it has to be the ten percent that is responsible for controlling and oppressing everybody else. His idea that ten percent of the population controls ninety percent of society prefigures, by forty years, the contention of the failed Occupy Wall Street movement that one percent of the population controls ninety percent of the wealth. Political activists of our day should take note because they are not as unique or original as they think they are. To add to this idea, Burroughs points out that genocides and mass murders have historically been acts of violence perpetrated by the powerful elite against the masses of common people. Another component of this revolution is M.O.B. which means “mind own business”. When governments and police do not allow people to live freely then they are not doing as such; M.O.B. is to be the cornerstone law of a newly liberated humanity. The result of the revolution will be communal societies, some of which will be located on the beaches of Ecuador or in the dense jungles of the Amazon River basin. It is not surprising that Burroughs’ preoccupation with power, domination, and control made an impression on the mind of a young Michel Foucault who cited him as an influence on his philosophy of biopolitics.
The rest of the book suggests ideas for experiments using film and audio. By the 1970s, Burroughs wished to expand on his practice of cut-ups to apply it to other, more current forms of media. A lot of the tape splicing he describes are now common practices in editing sound, music, and video. Some people have claimed his hypotheses are silly, ridiculous, and impossible but they may be misunderstanding the concept of experimentation. That particular word means to try something new and see what happens. The outcome may or may not be predictable but you really can not know until it is tried. Most experiments fail. Sometimes the intend outcome is not realized but serendipity occurs and a new method of doing things is accidentally discovered. In the end these tape recorder experiments had a profound influence on music and other arts. Burroughs used tape loops and sampling long before hip hop artists did and his philosophical ideas had a directed impact on industrial and punk music in the 1970s.
Another aspect of revolution Burroughs explores is the presence of language. He briefly explains how language can be used as a mechanism of control. He also writes about the encoding of meaning in words by the speaker and the decoding of its meaning by the listener; he makes suggestions for experiments with language scramblers to determine if a listener can unscramble distorted messages subconsciously. This is a crude take on semiotics but it explains some passages from his novels that read like disorientating gibberish; some of his texts were scrambled using cut-ups and montage and it is up to you to decide if you can derive some meaning from it. Burroughs also suggest eliminating the words “the”, “either/or”, and “is” from the English language. He describes the way “is” causes distortions in our perceptions of reality. This sounds like an idea lifted from Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics but actually it is inspired by the General Semantics theory developed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski in the 190s. In any case, these ideas anticipate the philosophies of poststructuralism and deconstruction by at least a few years.
A lot of people have criticized William S. Burroughs for believing in things that are simply not true. They also overlook the fact that he was primarily a writer of fiction and fiction, by definition, is not true. But good fiction makes statements about truth. The Revised Boy Scout Manual should be read as a fictional document, maybe even as comedy or satire, but keep in mind what it actually says about the world we live in. It is some of Burroughs’ most clear and direct writing and does a good job of explaining his theories in a way that can clarify some of the confusing and opaque passages of his difficult prose.
Burroughs, William S. Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus: 2018.
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