Permalink

]]>Eat Prey Drug: SummerlandPaul KwiatkowskiWed, 10 Dec 2014 20:49:52 +0000/eat-prey-drug-willow-lake507dba43c4aabcfd2216a447:507dba43c4aabcfd2216a451:5488b16de4b04c36dc7e826dPermalink

]]>Eat Prey Drug: Willow LakePaul KwiatkowskiFri, 07 Nov 2014 17:00:00 +0000/eat-prey-drug-witness507dba43c4aabcfd2216a447:507dba43c4aabcfd2216a451:545be7fae4b0cc936fd764b4Permalink

]]>Eat Prey Drug: WitnessBlack Balloon PublishingThu, 30 Oct 2014 13:00:00 +0000http://airshipdaily.com/blog/an-end-and-a-beginning507dba43c4aabcfd2216a447:507dba43c4aabcfd2216a451:545133e7e4b02e6bd7253119

“And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from."

- T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

This week we acknowledge an end, albeit a bittersweet one: the last day of new content at The Airship, Black Balloon Publishing's daily blog. We are grateful to the many writers and artists who contributed their stories to the site, and you can still read the entire archive online. We’re also grateful to you, our readers, for engaging with and sharing in The Airship since its beginning.

We’re not very fond of goodbyes. They remind us of those hour-long ordeals at the end of stuffy family reunions where Great Aunt Sheila pinched your eight-year-old cheeks a little too hard and shoved stale licorice candies into your pockets as “a treat for later.” So we won’t, loyal reader, subject you to a goodbye.

Instead, we invite you stick around! Sign up to Black Balloon Publishing’s mailing list and be among the first to know about exciting developments to come. You can also follow us on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. We will soon announce big changes, all in the service of innovative storytelling and our dedication to a growing community of writers and readers. 

So really, this isn’t a goodbye at all—it’s the beginnings of a metamorphosis. Thanks again to you, our avid readers, and to our talented Airship contributors. Let’s start making some new beginnings together...

“Oh, it’s delightful to have ambitions. I’m so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them–that’s the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.”

- Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

The Mount is claimed to be the site of various ghost-sightings; why are some canine-related?

“Do you believe in ghosts?” is the pointless question often addressed by those who are incapable of feeling ghostly influences to—I will not say the ghost-seer, always a rare bird, but—the ghost-feeler, the person sensible of the invisible currents of being in certain places and at certain hours.

The celebrated reply (I forget whose): “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,” is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many.

– Edith Wharton, Ghosts

Whether or not visitors believe that The Mount — Wharton’s former Lenox, Massachusetts estate — is haunted, they can certainly thrill at the spooky stories which swirl about it. Many swear that they’ve seen a face outside the three-story-high bathroom window or inexplicable lights and orbs in the stable or, most curiously, canine spirits flitting about. But why would Wharton’s home be haunted by dogs?

Edith Wharton the Dog-Lover

Dogs had been Wharton’s constant companions since her father surprised her at age four with a Spitz she named Foxy. These pets were also one of the few interests that she and her husband, Teddy Wharton, would share in their childless marriage. In their first (and best) years together, their days were filled with Jules, Teddy’s terrier, Mouton, Edith’s poodle, and her two long-haired Chihuahuas, Mimi and Miza. With Teddy often gone to the family’s main estate in Newport, Rhode Island, the dogs kept Edith company when she first began writing at their home in New York. Following the publication of three of her poems, she gained the confidence to start her first book, The Decoration of Houses, and developed her lifelong routine of writing in bed with the dogs tucked in beside her.

Mimi died a year after the Whartons had purchased the 113-acre property in Lenox on which Edith would design The Mount. Mimi's hillside grave, visible from the library and sitting room, was the first of four in the estate’s pet cemetery. The family's next dogs were the Papillons, Nicette and Mitou; after their deaths, Edith only owned Pekingese: Tootie, Choumai, Petite Tootie, Coonie and Linky. They provided her with comfort through her troubled marriage, a possible nervous breakdown, a brief affair, frequent trips back and forth to Europe, divorce (after Teddy, apparently bipolar, spent a large portion of her trust fund, thus forcing the sale of The Mount) and the end of her life in the south of France. Friends said that the Pekingese temperament was much like Edith’s own: stubborn, proud, dignified and independent.

Edith Wharton the Ghost Story Writer

Even fans of Wharton may not realize that, along with her social novels, she also wrote ghost stories. One of her most haunting images from the 1937 collection Ghosts includes a Pekingese, “small and golden brown, with large brown eyes and a ruffled throat,” who “looked like a large tawny chrysanthemum.” The dog is one of four which appears when the lone narrator, a prospective buyer visiting friends in Brittany, explores a deserted estate named “Kerfol.” The first three — the Pekingese, a black greyhound with a lame leg and a “long-haired white mongrel” — stand “looking … with grave eyes” as the fourth, “a white pointer with one brown ear,” watches from a window. They all defy the narrator’s expectations by remaining silent and slinking beyond his reach as he walks deeper into the property, then they reappear again only to stand motionless and mute.

The story concludes with an account of judicial records in which the wife of the Lord of Kerfol is accused of murdering her husband, who is found “dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face and throat, as if with curious pointed weapons.” In her testimony, the wife relates her “desolate” loneliness when her husband would go off for months without explanation. Unable to bear children, she is alone in their gloomy estate until he returns, each time with an exotic gift. One of these presents is a “sleeve dog,” which is small enough to fit in a kimono. When the husband suspects his wife of being overly familiar with a neighboring nobleman, he strangles the dog as well as three other strays she had taken in. The wife tells the court of later, during the night of her husband's death, hearing a pack of dogs snarling.

Do Miza, Mimi and Wharton’s other pets haunt The Mount as the dogs of her story inhabit Kerfol? Visitors looking to discover the truth might want to keep in mind Wharton’s words from The Age of Innocence: “There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.”

Ellen Girardeau Kempler finds inspiration in green places and witty words. An Iron Age boat she discovered on a solo writing trip to Ireland inspired her travel company, Gold Boat Journeys. Her articles and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post and many other publications.

KEEP READING: More on Phenomena

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño thrust these poets into the mainstream, but who were they really?

When Los Detectives Salvajes (The Savage Detectives) was published in 1998, Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño was catapulted from obscurity to fame. He soon found himself on the receiving end of rave reviews and the Spanish-speaking world's heftiest literary prize, the Romulo Gallegos. Then, a few years after his death in 2003, translator Natasha Wimmers dragged the novel kicking and screaming into English, an accomplishment hailed as a major literary event and sparking renewed interest in the "visceral realists" thinly fictionalized in Bolaño's most autobiographical work. But who exactly were these poets beyond the confines of The Savage Detectives?

“Dada a La Mexicana”

The term infrarealism references the radiant energy just beyond the scope of visibility, known as infrared. Neither a school of realism or an unreservedly surrealist effort, the “Infras,” as they were sometimes known, kept one foot on the ground and the other in the realm of dreams. In an interview with BOMB Magazine in 2001, Bolaño summed the movement up thus: “Infrarealism was a kind of Dada a la Mexicana. At one point there were many people, not only poets, but also painters and especially loafers and hangers-on, who considered themselves Infrarealists. Actually there were only two members, Mario Santiago and me.” This sweeping dismissal is classic Bolaño (Isabel Allende famously labeled him “an extremely unpleasant man”) but does a disservice to the dozens of poets and artists associated with Infrarealism in the few short years of its existence.

Unfortunately, the passage of time and the turmoil of the era has erased much of what may have been known about these rebel poets. Information pursuant to them is scarce, especially in English, and what is available to us is owed to the work of a few diligent translators, Wimmer not least among them.

The Savage Detectives, Wimmer writes in the introduction to the Picador edition, "lovingly resuscitates the characters, the love affairs, the squabbles, the pettiest details of Bohemian Mexico City, around 1976." Readers familiar with the book will know already that its two protagonists, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are doppelgangers: the former for Bolaño himself and the latter for the aforementioned Santiago. But aside from Arturo and Ulises, we’re introduced to an ensemble cast of scribblers and artists — the transformed personas of real-life Infrarealists.

“They Say the Infrarealists Beat People Up”

The Infrarealists were better known for disrupting readings than for their own writing. In an interview translated by Altar Piece, Santiago offered a glimpse into the mindset of the Mexican establishment at the time:

In 1975 I founded the Mexican Infrarealist movement. Around then they started to get sick of me, because I was confronting Pacheco, Monsivais, everyone I know of. ... Sergio Mondragon had to refused to give me a job because I’m an Infrarealist. They say I sabotage readings. They say the Infrarealists beat people up. And those idiots allege that I don’t know how to write. Motherfuckers.

Carmen Boullosa, a Mexican writer contemporary with the Infrarealists, paints a complicated portrait of the tensions fueling the Infrarealist’s behaviour. In regard to their famous antagonism towards Octavio Paz, she writes: “Paz was full of praise for the avant-gardes who had been so fond of manifestoes and had himself been closely associated with the Surrealists.” But the Infrarealists, variously composed of anarchists, idealists and disillusioned communists (Bolaño was an ex-Trotskyist himself), thought Paz and his associates were too close to Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party).   

The shadow of 1968 looms large over Mexican society: This was the year when the PRI-led government massacred hundreds of student protesters at Tlatelolco Square in Mexico City. Consequently, the antipolitical tenor of Infrarealism struck a chord with many of the young people of the capital in the ‘70s. And while Bolaño and Santiago’s hijinks may have done little to disrupt the PRI’s entrenched position in the Mexican art world, it did earn them a certain kind of infamy.

The Manifestos

According to Altar Piece, there are at least three Infrarealist manifestos, all penned between 1975 and 1976 in Mexico City. The first was written by Jose Vicente Anaya, the second by Santiago and the third by Bolaño. (Confusingly, Bolaño's piece is subtitled "First Infrarealist Manifesto," which likely reflects an inflated notion of his own importance.)

Bolaño’s manifesto, the most famous of the lot, was published when he was only 23. It reads as a scathing indictment of the artistic community and the “good bourgeois culture.” He urges the reader to break away from normalcy (“try to abandon everything everyday”), and emphasizes the importance of sexuality and conflict (“for architecture and sculpture, the Infrarealists start from two points: the barricade and the bed”).

The common thread of each manifesto is something akin to absurdist militancy. Anaya insists that “conformists suffer from sanity and good sense”; Santiago advocates “converting conference rooms into firing ranges”, and Bolaño, with the post-’68 hangover of Mexican civil society in mind, issues a warning: “Raise arsonist kids, get burned.”

Both of the latter poet’s manifestos pay open homage to Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism. All three pieces are endlessly quotable, although it’s apparent in tracing the sequence of Anaya-Santiago-Bolaño that there is an increasing distance from traditional Marxist ideas into more complex notions of a radical break.

Broke and Scattered

“With the political and economic tragedies of the region” Boullosa writes, “the literary circles broke and scattered, the publishing houses collapsed and Mexico City stopped being Latin America's sounding board. The youngest took their cues from the gringos—they judged the panorama of Latin American writing by which books had become hits in English translation.” In this way, the short-lived movement of Infrarealism came to an untimely end. Bolaño and Santiago left for Europe in 1977, with the former never to call Mexico home again.

Many questions remain about the Infrarealists. The Wikipedia entry for The Savage Detectives includes a lengthy table corresponding each of the characters to their real-life counterparts, but the majority of the links are missing, either yet to be written or their stories lost to time. Who, for instance, were Mara and Vera Larrosa, the sibling artists vibrantly fictionalized as the Font sisters?

Bolaño’s posthumous fame will surely guarantee a sustained interest in Infrarealism for years to come. But hopefully these efforts can shed a little light beyond his work and Santiago’s, and highlight the contributions of the numerous other writers and artists involved in their worlds.

Paul Murufas lives and writes in Long Beach, California. He is the author of dystopian's codependent syndrome (Mess Editions). His second collection of poetry and art, The Nihilist Romantics (Be About It Press), is free to read here. You can get in touch with him on Tumblr or via email at paulmurufas@gmail.com.

KEEP READING: More on Writers

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year, David Small’s Stitches, Julia Wertz’s The Infinite Wait — how do graphic novels plumb sickness so deeply?

One of the first graphic novels to brave the medical memoir was Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year, which he wrote with his wife Joyce Brabner. It opens with the line:

This is a story about a year when someone was sick, about a time when it seemed that the rest of the world was sick, too. It’s a story about feeling powerless and trying to do too much. Maybe doing more than you thought you could and not knowing what to do next.

It’s a mighty first page, capturing what it is to deal with illness in a few short sentences. The line I love most from Our Cancer Year, the one that actually seems the most flippant yet really grounds the whole experience of illness is: “It’s also a story about marriage, work, friends, family and buying a house.” Life goes on even when you’re sick, whether you can keep up with it or not.

Why are stories about illness fit for graphic novels? It could be that they’re more approachable, that the cartoonish medium balances the seriousness of the subject. Memoirs like Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown and The Infinite Wait by Julia Wertz certainly work on this level. But a memoir like David Small’s Stitches is surreal and dark; there’s nothing comic about it. No, there’s another layer to works like Marbles by Ellen Forney, which deals with mental illness. These graphic novels force us to see everything — the small moments and crippling realities — rather than gloss them over. You can see Forney’s medication laid out on the page, you can see Wertz’s terrified expression before a CAT scan. It’s one thing to imagine the surgical scar on Small’s neck, but it’s another to actually see it drawn, to see his expression as he inspects it in the mirror.

The Hospital Suite, John Porcellino’s recent graphic novel, is one of the first I’ve seen that reflects on both physical and mental illness: Crohn's disease and, later, obsessive compulsive disorder. The book was published this September, roughly 20 years after Porcellino’s onset of Crohn's autoimmune disorder. "The OCD was holding me back,” Porcellino tells The Comics Journal when expressing his struggle to put the book together. “When I was in the grips of the anxiety, well, it just frustrates whatever you want to do. I wanted to express it. But the OCD would find ways of throwing me off." With time, thankfully, Porcellino was able to overcome this. The result is a book thats strength lies in its ability to juxtapose the two illnesses: the uncertainty of an illness like Crohn’s, a struggle which Porcellino shares with his then wife, and the more private trials he has with OCD. With both, all Porcellino wants is to get better, to find some sort of solution that will allow him to enjoy life alongside everyone else again.

Though the illnesses differ, the authors all share the struggle to balance life and sickness. There are even details that overlap, like in The Hospital Suite when Porcellino’s wedding ring slips off after he’s lost so much weight and he realizes that Pekar beat him to that powerful scene in Our Cancer Year. In every memoir, it seems, the details repeat: rings fall off; blood tests, x-rays and CAT scans are done; drawing hands swell when IVs are left in for too long.

Yet every illness also carries its own uncertainty. Wertz’s The Infinite Wait is a graphic novel that came out of the author’s struggle with the autoimmune disorder systemic lupus, but it’s also the story of how she fell in love with comics: "I read them obsessively and even started making my own about mundane daily events. I didn’t really know what I was looking at or what I was doing but the proverbial light bulb went on over my head and I knew that comics were going to be my thing."

Illness leaves many of these writers bedridden and jobless, with little else to do but spend time alone trying to recover. For Porcellino, Wertz, Forney and Brown, this time allows them to read up on their disease and figure out how to live with it. Porcellino turns to Buddhist works, while Forney turns to the DSM, Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and works by “Club Van Gogh” artists who suffered from bipolar disorder before her. In Funny Misshapen Body, Brown sometimes illustrates himself in the hospital with a comic book resting on his lap, and when Wertz isn’t illustrated discovering new comics, there remain books strewn about her room.

Illness grants each writer solitude. The awkward benefits of this time alone, as research has shown, include personal freedom, creativity, spirituality — things that ultimately feed great art. In the Philippine Journal of Psychology, researcher Eric Julian Manalastas writes, “Many thinkers, artists, and writers from Michelangelo to Kafka have taken advantage of and advocated solitude in the production of masterpieces of creative thought and expression.” Time alone creates the potential for self-acceptance and self-renewal. In the uncertainty of sickness, these artists are forced to reconsider their identity.

People tell and retell stories to put the world in order for themselves. In an interview with Rookie, Forney says, “If you’re honest, you can tell stories that other people can relate to. If it taps into certain basic human interactions and stories, that’s when it’s not just narcissism or exhibitionism — that’s when the story is worth putting out in the world.” The triumph of all of these memoirs is recovery, the ability to finally live again. And this is what they offer to others struggling with sickness or those who fear it will one day come for them — they illustrate what it is to heal and to not lose yourself to a diagnosis.

Freddie Moore is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her full name is Winifred, and her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily and The Huffington Post. As a former cheesemonger, she’s a big-time foodie who knows her cheese. Follow her on Twitter: @moorefreddie

KEEP READING: More on Graphic Novels

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON FACEBOOK, TWITTER, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Vera Nabokova, Sophia Tolstaya, Anna Dostoyevskaya and Natalia Solzhenitsyna — suffering and child-rearing, while acting as wife and secretary to genius.

6:03am: He’s up, so I’m up. The usual routine: tea on the fire; quills, paper, hot ink (never enough) on his desk; crying babies in the nursery. The sun isn’t even up yet and his door is closed.

8:10am: Buckwheat for breakfast, and tea — bitter, because life is bitter. It's good to teach the children this while they’re still susceptible, but judging by his plumpness little Vova doesn't get it yet. We are all slaves to our volition and our appetites, including children.

9:32am: Little Tanya tells me she wants to be a writer like her father when she grows up and asks would I please look at her manuscripts like I do his. My hands are full but I find time. Ah, that his manuscripts would show the collectivization of hedgehog homes, too! She weaves metaphor as nicely as her father. But I give it back to her and say that in our country women cannot be writers. She throws a tantrum.

10:00am: Math lessons for the children. It’s hard teaching the older ones while all the younger ones want to breastfeed. It is an honor bearing a brood in the hopes that genius continues down the line, but my God do my tits hurt. Little Alyosha wants to know when Father will come out of his office, and I want to explain that the suffering of solitude is what brings great minds peace and inspiration, and to express this inspiration one must forsake comfort and bleed through the quill. “Probably supper time,” I tell him instead.

11:03am: Had to convince him, again, that giving away our worldly possessions will benefit no one. Had to settle with being called “the bourgeois witch” yet again, but I’m not interested in breastfeeding my babies on a stump outside, thank you very much.

11:30am: Preparing lunch. So many little mouths, so many spoonfuls of borscht. Not enough sour cream to go around; shall go without, myself. Only bread and cheese for him. To eat is to suffer, but not to eat brings the right kind of suffering. I think. I get the sufferings all mixed up.

12:04pm: Suffering is watching eight children at once start crying because they’ve all got the idea that they no longer like beets. It’s not possible. You’re Russian. You love beets.

3:30pm: He has gone for a nap. It is time to put my stamp collection into order: I will prove to him that women can be faithful and devoted to at least one thing in their lives. Oh, tiny, sticky squares, you understand me.

4:17pm: Again looked through his diaries he gave me on the eve of our marriage to confess to me all his past transgressions. That attractive serf woman almost makes the gonorrhea worth it.

5:12pm: Reminisced about our four-year-long honeymoon. What a romantic time, those snow-capped Swiss mountains, the French bread every day, the love we made on the mountainside … and getting stuck there because he lost my dowry gambling and we couldn’t pay our way back to Russia. Ah, well, there are worse places to get stranded. Good thing we didn't honeymoon in Siberia.

8:20pm: Evening tea. Told the children to be quiet, stilled my own tears. There was no blackberry jam to go with the tea, and he hates the raspberry. He sighs, and I wonder that my life is filled with such idleness.

9:51pm: Had to save the manuscripts from the fire, again.

10:21pm: The children are asleep. Thank goodness. He’s still in his office. Times like this I can ease back into my wooden chair, the cat warm on my lap, and close my eyes, love the quiet. I think of the quiet in my bedroom when I was a little girl, the quiet that encircled me when I wrote. I stopped my own writing when we married, and seeing his work published makes it worth it.

10:25pm: Alyosha is crying, and so Vera is crying, and Vova will start crying in a moment.

10:47pm: Three sleeping children, tears still wet on their cheeks, in my lap. He finally comes from his room and kisses my forehead, pours some cold borscht, complains that it’s cold and says he has a manuscript for me to look at. It’s worth it. I’m sure.

Rachael Daum is a master’s student in inflicting Russian literature and translation on herself at Indiana University. She appreciates foreign literature, good tea and puns. You can find her on Twitter @Oopsadaisical.

KEEP READING: More on Family

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Herman Melville's masterpiece brought to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room-depth ruin — and a drinking game to accompany it!

Bad movies have a shameless, cult-like power to bring people together. After The Room took its crown as the “Citizen Kane of bad movies,” theatres were quick to capitalize on the occasion by screening it in Rocky Horror Picture Show-style. Its fanbase swelled as viewers joined together to shout “Hi Mark!” and throw plastic utensils at the screen. At their worst, bad movies make us laugh; at their very best (which, in this case, is even worse), they bring us together.

2010: Moby Dick is a classic as far as bad movies go. It poses as a modern interpretation of Herman Melville’s novel brought to viewers by the director behind Robocop 2. Its cast includes Barry Bostwick (otherwise known as “Brad” from Rocky Horror) as Captain Ahab alongside Renée O'Connor from Xena: Warrior Princess, who replaces Ishmael as the story’s newly added “whale expert,” Dr. Michelle Herman. (Pun intended.)

On the surface, the film is based on the book: It’s the ultimate story of revenge sought by a captain who’s had his ship and leg taken from him by a giant sperm whale. As a modern retelling, though, Ahab is a submarine captain and his strikes against the whale involve torpedos, machine guns and nukes. (Yes, nukes.) Not only that, but 2010’s version of the whale doesn’t stick to the ocean; he “swims” over mountains and even flies to attack Ahab and his crew.

Naturally, a film of this caliber needs a drinking game to accompany it. For those down to booze it up, we suggest having a drink any time:

1. Submarine emergency sirens sound;

2. Ahab says the word “whale”;

3. Race awkwardly enters the story (same thing goes for any time something sexist is directed at Dr. Herman);

4. Someone listens to sonar whale sounds;

5. Moby Dick makes rabid bull noises;

6. Someone says the word “hunt”;

7. Anyone tries to say anything remotely scientific.

We all let our guard down for bad movies, in part, because they’re not to be taken seriously. 2010: Moby Dick should be held up as one of the great man-versus-beast bad movie classics, like Deep Blue Sea or Snakes on a Plane. It may be ridiculous, but that’s part of its charm. It’s a film you could watch alongside anyone — book lover or not — and still have a blast.

Freddie Moore is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her full name is Winifred, and her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily and The Huffington Post. As a former cheesemonger, she’s a big-time foodie who knows her cheese. Follow her on Twitter: @moorefreddie

KEEP READING: More on Film

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

On October 22, 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize in Literature, setting a precedent and an example for other writers.

Exactly 50 years ago today, Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for  “his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age” — but he refused it. It's especially difficult for a writer to understand such an action. Sure, we write because we're compelled to, because it's our passion, but how could someone turn down such an accolade — and all that money? Most writers struggle financially, even if they publish regularly. And even though we don't admit it, we all aspire to achieve that level of recognition. But in his letter to the Swedish press on October 22, 1964, Sartre wrote that a writer must “refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances.” For Sartre it was all about authenticity — but authenticity as an existentialist defines it.

If you know anything about Sartre’s philosophical writing, then you know that it requires taking full responsibility for your life, your choices and actions. Since there’s no Creator, according to Sartre, then human beings come into existence without any predefined nature or essence and it’s up to us to continually define ourselves. In a 1946 lecture titled “Existentialism is a Humanism,” Sartre states the fundamental principle of his philosophy: “Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.”

So if you’re a writer, then you’ve made yourself into a writer — you’ve made writing your purpose in life. And while you may tell yourself that you’re not really concerned with winning awards and prizes for your writing, you have to admit that you look at the Nobel Prize with some longing. I mean, if you’ve put a lot of time and energy into being a writer, you’re not grinding away at your craft so no one else will read it, right? You want some kind of audience. You want to share your ideas and opinions and, yes, your talent with the world. And Sartre’s existentialism tells us that sharing ourselves with the world may even be a necessity. In that same lecture, he states that a person “recognises that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked or jealous) unless others recognise him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another.”

And unless you’re a robot, you probably feel some disappointment from the fact that you’re not yet a renowned writer, not a Stephen King or a Suzanne Collins — or even a Jean-Paul Sartre. You may be envious-yet-hopeful, or you may have succumbed to a resentful pessimism. But Sartre’s existentialism shows us that this attitude is not only unhealthy, but unnecessary. In the same 1946 lecture, Sartre addresses this outlook, saying:

Many have but one resource to sustain them in their misery, and that is to think, “Circumstances have been against me, I was worthy to be something much better than I have been. ... If I have not written any very good books, it is because I had not the leisure to do so.”

Some of us may feel this way, at least occasionally. Maybe we are struggling to further our education while trying to put food on the table for our family and have no time or energy left over to complete that novel, or maybe we feel that we’ve had the time and energy to work on our craft but simply haven’t had the good fortune to be “discovered” yet. There are a thousand reasons why we could surrender ourselves up to pessimism and resignation. But Sartre’s philosophy asks us to look again at the situation:

There is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.

While this may sound pessimistic on the face of it, Sartre reminds us that “it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively.” But an existentialist view refuses to define humanity negatively. Sartre sums it up nicely when he says:

You have seen that [existentialism] cannot be regarded as a philosophy of quietism since it defines man by his action; nor as a pessimistic description of man, for no doctrine is more optimistic, the destiny of man is placed within himself. Nor is it an attempt to discourage man from action since it tells him that there is no hope except in his action.

So if you’ve chosen to be a writer, great! Put that nose to the grindstone and churn out your best work. Sartre just asks that you self-consciously commit to it and that you remind yourself frequently that you’ve chosen this destiny, that your path in life is the result of your choices and actions — otherwise you’re not living authentically. And who knows,  maybe someday you’ll even get to refuse the Nobel Prize just like Sartre did.

Steve Neumann is a writer, teacher and philosophile. He used to blog at Rationally Speaking, and you can read his sporadic random tweets at @JunoWalker.

KEEP READING: More on Writing

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Even 165 years after Poe’s death, we still have little idea what ended his life.

This is what we know for sure:

On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond, Virginia with $1,500. One week later a Baltimore printer by the name of Joseph W. Walker sent a letter to a Joseph E. Snodgrass, writing:

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, and he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you he is in need of immediate assistance.

That same day, October 3, Poe had been found in or about Ryan’s Tavern in Baltimore. Gone was his trademark black wool suit; he was instead wearing uncharacteristically shabby and tattered clothes. Delirious, he was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he was sequestered in a drunk tank. Mostly incoherent when he awoke, Poe was denied visitors at the hospital and died there on October 7, 1849. If medical records and documents regarding his death were ever drafted, they have all since been lost.

So what happened?

There are a number of theories regarding Poe’s death, and they range from plausible to disturbing to downright insane. Here are some of the most interesting:

Possible Cause of Death No. 1: Alcoholism

Joseph E. Snodgrass, a temperance man, believed that alcoholism drove Poe into delirium and, ultimately, death. Snodgrass’s testimony, however, has since been disputed, with accusations claiming that his views on alcohol led him to manipulate the facts.

That said, Poe’s friend Susan T. Weiss offers some support to Snodgrass’s theory: Writing well after the fact in 1878, Weiss recalls one of Poe’s last days in Richmond in 1849. She describes the poet then as “so pale, so tremulous and apparently subdued as to convince me that he had been seriously ill.” According to her, Poe made a recovery from his “relapse,” then suffered another one, from which he also recovered. He was told by doctors that “another such attack would prove fatal,” to which he responds that “if people would not tempt him, he would not fall.”

Possible Cause of Death No. 2: A Whole Grabbag of Health Problems

Brain lesions, heart disease, cholera, enzyme disorder, tuberculosis, epilepsy, diabetes, rabies — theories abound about any one of these, or a couple in conjunction, killing Poe. He himself noted in a letter to his aunt Maria Clemm on July 7, 1849 that he had “been so ill — have had the cholera, or spasms quite as bad, and can now hardly hold the pen.” He later wrote, on July 19, that he was in better health, but Poe was occasionally in denial about his medical problems, like in May of 1848 when he rejected a doctor’s heart disease diagnosis. The author was also quite secretive about his health and his past. A nurse who had cared for Poe’s first wife Virginia noted in a letter that “I have seen the scar of the wound in the left shoulder, when helping [Maria] change [Poe’s] dress or clothes while ill. She said only Virginia knew about it.”

Possible Cause of Death No. 3: After Effects of a Robbery

The $1,500 that Poe took with him from Richmond has a number of possible origins:

1. It was a collection for subscriptions to his magazine, The Stylus;

2. It was at least partially an advance for an article;

3. It was the profits from a lecture he had delivered.

Regardless where the money came from, it was gone by the time Poe was found on October 3, indicating that the author may have been robbed. A mugging would also explain his poor physical and mental states.

Possible Cause of Death No. 4: “Cooping”

The political landscape of the 1800s was rife with corruption — judges were bribed, election ballots forged and politically motivated assaults committed. “Cooping” was a form of coercing undecided voters by kidnapping them, plying them with alcohol, beatings or both, then forcing them to vote, sometimes repeatedly in disguise under various aliases.

Some scholars dismiss the theory that Poe may have been a victim of cooping due to his recognizability in and around the Baltimore area. Cooping would, however, explain his change of clothing. Furthermore, Alexander Hynds, an attorney who traveled in circles similar to Poe, claims to have seen a man almost identical to the author near the polls on October 3 — election day. If Poe had been “cooped,” the forced intoxication and/or physical violence may explain his delirium and eventual death.

So, what do you think? Which of the above theories sounds the most plausible? Which sounds the most insane? Have you heard of/come up with any other theories about Poe’s death? Tell us all about it in the comments below.

Nicholas Laskin is a Los Angeles-based writer who primarily works in screenwriting but also dabbles in prose and journalism. He is the co-creator of the upcoming web series Talents and has worked for the American Film Institute and Sundance. In his spare time, he can be found doing one of the following things: reading, writing, binge-watching movies, making meager efforts at the gym or seeking out exotic and possibly dangerous Thai food.

KEEP READING: More on Writers

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

From defunct dive bars to reincarnated cafes, follow the footsteps of the Beat writer through the Big Apple.

I settled down to long sweet sleeps, day-long meditations in the house, writing, and long walks around beloved old Manhattan a half hour subway ride away. I roamed the streets, the bridges, Times Square, cafeterias, the waterfront, I looked up all my poet beatnik friends and roamed with them, I had love affairs with girls in the Village, I did everything with that great mad joy you get when you return to New York City.

– Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler

In this silent five minutes of 16mm film, Jack Kerouac is considering Lower Manhattan. He’s on 3rd Avenue and 6th Street with Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and the Carr family, appearing to be partaking in the hippest meal of the day, brunch, in all his casual glory. While Ginsberg takes care of pleasantries and corrals all in attendance, he makes special check-ins with his notoriously moody friend, coming up to him here and there to speak quietly and closely. Maybe it’s my imagination, but Kerouac seems to be appeasing Ginsberg with this midday family outing. It seems he might feel uncomfortable with the camera on him. We see something rumbling and threatening to surface as he smokes pensively, surveys the landscape of the city — a longtime friend and muse — and examines small details, like the peephole of a door.

They enter a long-gone diner called Harmony. If you stumble after Kerouac’s footsteps in New York, you'll find that so many of his old haunts are long-gone. So close but so far away now are the Cedar Tavern, closed in 2008, and the Holiday Club on St. Marks, closed just a few years ago. The seedy Automats and smoke filled Hector's cafeteria are so distant it's hard to visualize their Bohemian scene at all. Even in this film reel on 3rd Ave, Kerouac must be a little annoyed by the urban landscape in flux — a big, imposing construction going up where something undoubtedly full of history has been razed, right behind him.

The city he loved was dying then, in 1958, as it’s dying today, dying all the time. We bemoan  that all the coolest parts of our city are turning to ash and wistful memory, probably much like Kerouac did. We shake our fists (okay, discreetly roll our eyes and snidely comment) at the condos, chain drug stores and franchises that rise from that ash. But this is how an enormous city like New York functions: mostly blind to its own romance. The city sure can be a cruel mistress to its struggling artists, who writhe in anguish every time a classical institution is ripped from our New York fantasy.

In Kerouac’s autobiographical collection of city scenes, Lonesome Traveler, you get the feeling that his New York is that hushed yet ecstatic conversation between the city’s grittiest, most absurdly hip or heartbreakingly real elements. Kerouac listens intently and records those vignettes we still experience today on the street, in the bars and … well, mostly in the bars.  “Men do love bars and good bars should be loved,” said Kerouac. And from what I can tell, bars are the last remaining places one can go to experience a New York that Kerouac loved dearly. He chose some richly storied, sometimes very notorious venues in which to imbibe. And there’s no question he’s done his research, from bellying up with all kinds of characters at local saloons to keenly observing the Greenwich Village cafe crowd. And those scenes of fringe culture might have faded with the whitebread, ‘50s social standards at which the Beats were throwing up middle fingers to. But there will always be outsiders and the places they go to brood. We all have our favorites. If you’re feeling particularly anti-establishment, hedonistic or just world weary and nostalgic, take a stroll with Kerouac to a couple of these joints, some time-encapsulated and some reincarnated:

McSorley’s Old Ale House

When I ask the barkeep about Kerouac, he quietly searches his memory but can't tell me anything for sure. But I have only two choices, he says: light ale or dark ale. Later he comes to find me sitting at a table in back, a book of poetry in hand that appears to document a bartenders' log going back to the beginning which, in McSorley's case, was before anyone was currently living was born, as the menu points out. The bartender brings my attention to an excerpt in the book, a log from 1958: "guy who wrote On the Road here with Sorrentino Blackburn and the writer bunch say its a good read." I tell him that’s fantastic and he says, “I think so, but I’m biased. I wrote it.” Sure enough, his photo is on the back. He’s worked at and lived above the pub since the early ‘70s, when he started the writing program at City College. Needless to say, if you want some history with your light or dark ale, ask for Geoffrey Bartholomew.

White Horse Tavern

Not too many years before Kerouac frequented this tavern (now a bustling cafe bar), Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in a corner booth. The actual wooden bar is original, says the Sunday brunch bartender. Also original is the grandfather clock, which, like any bar clock past or present, is set a little early and mostly avoided by the eyes of patrons.

Kettle of Fish

The Kettle today on Christopher Street? "With the exception of Lambeau Field, the Kettle of Fish is the best place to watch a Packer game" boasts its website. The Kettle of the 1950s MacDougal scene? A mix of the seedier element and the intellectual scene of Greenwich Village at that time: hoodlums, old timers, artists, beatniks and aspiring folk musicians like Bob Dylan, who played the bar’s underbelly stage, where the Beats were also known to read working poems aloud to discerning bohemians. Joyce Glassman, who stands basked in neon behind Kerouac in an iconic photograph of the poet outside of the Kettle, noted in her autobiography that Kerouac was badly beaten outside his beloved bar in 1958.

Caffe Reggio

Looks very much now like it did when Kerouac frequented the coffee house, and much like it did before he ever planted a squat round the literary roundtable that’d been active there since its opening in 1927.

Minetta Tavern

The Minetta you see today isn’t quite what it seems. This incarnation was born in 2009 and could be described as an upscale restaurant with old school aesthetic, but the original Minetta Tavern was an old Italian eatery with a cheap bar, home base to E. E. Cummings and Ernest Hemingway before becoming one of Kerouac’s favorite spots. The distinctive neon sign outside is original, while the vibe inside has morphed into contemporary West Village chic.

The Marlton Hotel

Where better to write a novel about young, passionate, broke as hell artistic transients than an old Single Room Occupancy. This one at 5 West 8th Street, where Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans, still stands but is now a luxury hotel.

Cafe Bohemia/Barrow Street AleHouse

Craft beer and pub food calls Villagers to the Ale House these days, but the Cafe Bohemia Kerouac frequented in the ‘50s made live record history many times over in the jazz world. The New York jazz scene wasn’t just where the Beats would go for solace and inspiration; it was inextricable from what would become their historical collective identity.

Vazac’s Horseshoe Bar

This one might be up for question: This grungy old corner bar isn't commonly associated with Kerouac or the other Beats, but there is photographic evidence Kerouac hung out right here, caught candidly outside the bar by his pal and East Village inhabitant for many years, Ginsberg, in a series of photos that also includes Kerouac goofing off while striding past Tompkins Square Park (top of page).

Cafe Le Metro/The 13th Step

Yelpers describe this spot today as a “college bar” complete with beer pong. Such is St. Mark’s these days. But in the 1950s, St. Marks was the epicenter of bohemian lifestyle. Here, between the West and East villages, poets like Ginsberg and Kerouac would regularly give readings. If you ask me, the energy of St. Marks is still pretty thick with creative residual — you just have to stand there and close your mind’s eye to the modern day array of cheap alternative wear and even cheaper pizza joints.

Pony Stable Inn/Washington Square Diner

Though the Beats weren’t known for raising up their female counterparts, they were taken in by this landmark lesbian bar, one of the first in New York City. Gregory Corso worked here, and Ginsberg and Kerouac would visit him to write poetry at a special table. Sounds pretty charming. Today this is just a classic diner space, but one can contemplate gender equality in the arts over a reasonably priced cup of coffee under the very roof that sheltered this unlikely pairing of clientele in mid 20th century New York.

Know of any other joints frequented by Jack Kerouac and the Beats? Tells us all about it in the comments below or add it directly to our collaborative Google Map!

Shannon Moore Shepherd is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. She also contributes to Atlas Obscura. She received a BA in English Literature with a Creative Writing Focus from Bradley University in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois.

KEEP READING: More on Travel

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

M. R. James was an English author, scholar and inspiration to Lovecraft, though the world may have forgotten it.

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was the type of gentleman one doesn’t meet anymore: the very definition of the reserved, erudite scholar who was out of step and out of time. A medievalist by trade, his professional life was closely wedded to the academic world. Specifically, he served as the provost for King’s College, Cambridge (1905-1918) and, more famously, Eton College (1918-1936).

But besides serving budding minds, James’s other great passion was the ghost story. The originator of the “antiquarian ghost story,” he took ghosts out of chains and abandoned castles, and injected them into a more real world. The term “antiquarian” in the “antiquarian ghost story” came from James himself, who used his deep love for the medieval world to the fullest extent in stories that invariably pit quiet academics against the manifest legion of the undead.

A natural conservative with a predilection for outmoded settings brimming with historical consequence, James was an obvious influence on the Anglophilic H. P. Lovecraft, who, in a 1935 letter to science fiction author Emil Petaja, summarized James as a unique talent who flourished under the conventions of weird fiction:

M.R. James joins the brisk, the light, & the commonplace to the weird about as well as anyone could do it—but if another tried the same method, the chances would be ten to one against him. The most valuable element in him—as a model—is his way of weaving a horror into the every-day fabric of life & history—having it grow naturally out of the myriad conditions of an ordinary environment.

While Lovecraft adopted much from James, he did not share the latter’s writing style. Lovecraft’s prose was at times purely purple and light on dialogue, where James’s stories are by comparison concise, fluid and far more naturalistic in speech. The best James stories are truly terrifying, often with a grotesque reveal that can challenge any of today’s torture porn. As a prime example, in “Lost Hearts,” the master of large country house in northern England is proven to be a collector of young hearts. (This is anything but metaphorical.)

Although James could and did excel at stomach-churning endings, his forte was always the cold, quiet kiss in the dark — the icy shudder that consumes readers with otherworldly implications. As such, he was the master of the Yuletide ghost tale and the art of telling spooky stories around the fireplace. In “The Mezzotint” and “An Episode of Cathedral History,” a decaying, cloying atmosphere pervades which is not dissimilar to the feeling that arrives when the long, dark days of winter begin to impinge upon the mind. Some call this “cabin fever,” and its best representation in fiction — Stephen King’s The Shining — is very much James-esque.

Because James’s plots are so often set on the rainy coasts of England, in ruined monasteries in the Pyrenees or in airy cathedrals, and also because so many of his narrators and protagonists come from the stiff-upper-lip school of emotionally constrained English Protestantism, his stories have been accused of being lifeless. Lacking in either big or little “r” romance and almost exclusively devoid of love interests or the beasts of passion, James’s oeuvre is much like the man himself. Called “Monty” by the few who knew him well, James was the son of an Anglican curate, and after winning a scholarship to Eton, he would go on to make a life in academia without worldly interruption. His chosen field too required a lonely dedication to dead subjects, and as the master of an all boys’ school, James’s suspended adolescence was exacerbated. Lytton Strachey, the English historian and critic who founded the influential Bloomsbury Group, was no great fan of James’s work; his most damning critique came when he remarked that “It’s odd that the Provost of Eton should still be aged sixteen. A life without a jolt.”

While some of James’s stories run into the realm of unbelievable caricature, he was, if anything, a mature talent, not a composer of magical tales for school boys. And while a story like “Lost Hearts” is built upon re-imagining adult evil from the vantage point of a child, a majority of James’s ghost stories are about older, single individuals who confront even older frights, many of whom are more than just ghosts. In the classic “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” a vacationing professor stumbles across a whistle carrying a Latin inscription in a Knights Templar preceptory, and upon testing the instrument, he accidentally calls back into the world the malevolent spirit of one the long-dead knights. In other tales, monsters more frightening than ghosts appear, such as in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” which contains a devilish, hirsute beast-man, while “Casting the Runes” features an alchemist who attempts to summon a demon in order to smite his professional enemies.

A solitary bachelor and bibliophile, James was the quintessential writer-as-hermit. He was a man who sought out older times all the while remaining mostly aloof to the rapid changes around him. Because of this, his stories are at once timeless and completely foreign. Even among other horror writers, most of whom cultivated a similar air of eccentricity, James lived as he wrote, and he remains the undisputed king of hushed horrors.

Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vermont. He prefers “Ben” or “Benzo,” and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crime Magazine, The Crime Factory, Seven Days and Ravenous Monster. He used to teach English at the University of Vermont, but now just drinks beer and runs his own blog called The Trebuchet.

KEEP READING: More on Writers

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Picking up the famed Italian writer from the airport and running into an anonymous porn reviewer both reveal the dynamic relationship between the author and the work.

As a younger man, I was once deputized to pick up Umberto Eco from JFK airport. By then I had read everything the man had ever written, including the dull stuff on semiotics and some novels more than once. I could open Foucault’s Pendulum at any point and just start reading, and there was its creator, waddling over to me all rumpled and smiles after a long flight from Rome. He charmed me utterly by brazenly smoking in an American airport, ashing his cigarette into an antique pocket-ashtray, silver and worn, which had a spring-loaded lip to pop out and cradle your Lucky Strike. Then he reminded me of his mere humanity by violently passing gas inside my Plymouth. Since that moment 20 years ago I have continued to read everything Eco writes, but in terms of impression, his masterful craft is equaled, in my humble memory, by that tremendous fart. Writers and their books are not the same, and there is a further distinction between the authorial persona and the author’s actual personality.

Having become an author myself, and an imprisoned one at that, I found this question to come to vivid life by the demands of maintaining a marriage through 10 years of incarceration. My wife and I have shared a lot of open, candid communication. The thousands of letters we exchanged replaced many other components of our relationship, so I had to be good; inside the joint, the way to put it was that “my pen-game was solid.” When my wife’s therapist suggested that our marriage was plagued with a problem in communication, she stopped going; I had written her approximately 2,460 letters over the decade, each at least two pages long. We also had frequent phone calls and visits. We talked a lot and about things that regular couples can elide through activities, vigorous and otherwise.

But as an enthusiast for a well-turned phrase or subtlety in quippage, I had to re-learn how to write in order for those letters to matter. The wall between my author’s character and myself was already reinforced by 30 feet of concrete, plus gun towers. My wife wanted an avenue to me, not to fine style. So I learnt to write honestly and plainly, to communicate as myself and not the author, who only existed in ink anyway. Meanwhile, she pushed the boundaries. My wife is a curious creature; for example, she wanted to know what I masturbated to.

The correct answer is, of course, “thoughts of you,” but by the time she asked too much money had been spent in postage for us to lie to each other. I explained, and she luckily found it endearing, funny and very characteristic.

Instead of staring at photographs of retouched flesh, I read porn reviews. In every dirty magazine that I bought secondhand or borrowed, I went right for the couple of pages towards the end where new videos were described and evaluated, usually with a still to illustrate. I preferred Fox magazine — which, in my opinion, exists entirely for the incarcerated market — because it had the best developed review section. I tried reading erotica in Penthouse letters and such, but found the crude style offensive enough to distract me from the true intentions of one-handed reading. The reviews in Fox were just right for me. The writer had a talent for making the reader feel like he was in the room. To this day, my memory contains his work:

The moment when the gang bang is over and the chick has all the sperm she didn't swallow on her face is usually a sensitive one. Not the best time to ask questions, but Bobbi Starr was game. Her attitude towards the porn game was tongue in cheek, sometimes ass cheek. And she didn't mind telling me her story as the man juice slid off her chin onto her luscious breasts.

Years later, I am now free and living with my wife, while those old issues of Fox are stacked beneath someone else’s bunk.

In July, I met Joe Diamond, who has worked between the worlds of flesh and ink, and birthed from this unholy union a chimera called Around the World in 80 Lays. Looking forward to a signed copy of his guide to sex tourism, I got together with him over pizza. He’s a small, intelligent Brooklynite with an odd past. One slice got me to the revelation that an alignment of the stars had occurred: Diamond was my former pornographer. During the years I was reading Fox reviews, he was writing them. Surprised to actually meet a reader of his unsigned work, he filled me in on the details not recorded in his critiques. Questions I nursed for years about porn star hygiene and Rocco Siffredi’s behavior, which I presumed would never be answered, were suddenly clarified.

I asked Diamond what it was like to meet one of his readers. He explained he had never expected to, but then again he had not always been a writer. As a younger man he worked as an activist for “victim’s rights,” which generally meant advocating against parole. Yoko Ono is best known for this, as she writes to the parole board every two years when Mark David Chapman comes up for a hearing regarding John Lennon’s murder and Ono asks that he not be released. The non-profit that Diamond founded helped victims’ families to do such things in an organized way. There were many intricacies and the outfit is long defunct, but in essence Diamond once worked to keep the readers of his porn reviews in prison. I asked him whether this was a coincidence, a craven plot to keep a captive audience or the work of a man who changed perspectives as he aged.

It’s a good thing that Diamond has a sense of humor, because he explained that the evolution of law-and-order Joe to Around the World in 80 Lays Joe was a personal process that left him a different man, one who now regrets some of his earlier work. He wanted to know if many incarcerated readers were fans of his writing. I didn’t think so, as few bothered to read the articles in Fox when the pictures were right at hand, but I did praise his reviews for allowing me to feel like I was there, on the shoots and in the trenches with him. It turned out that was exactly the effect he was going for.

Often the physical manifestation of an author whose work you respect does not satisfy the preconception, and sometimes it leads to utter disappointment. When my beloved Umberto Eco fouled my Plymouth, I couldn’t help feeling whatever the opposite of apotheosis is called. I loved his recent novel The Prague Cemetery, but did it erase the knowledge of his humanity? Unfortunately not.

And what of an afternoon spent with a man whose anonymous writing for a second-tier skin mag had once gotten me off? It was wonderful. It reinforced the explanation I formulated for my nosy wife all those years ago as to why I enjoyed reading reviews of pornography rather than looking at photos: The reviews were testimony to real things, to sexual acts that had occurred on a couch in California, and that excited me. The photos were manufactured fantasies that were so poorly composed they turned me off — endless pizza delivery men and cheerleaders and cops. Being locked far away from real women and real sex, I craved the sense of reality that Joe Diamond supplied by describing what it smelled like on a porn shoot or what the girls talked about while the cameraman changed lenses. He made it real for me then, and I think I was very fortunate to have met him and felt it get even more real. It was that rare moment when the wall between author and work is smashed to wonderful results.

Daniel Genis lives with his wife in Brooklyn and writes for places like the New York Daily News, The Paris Review, Newsweek, Vice and The Daily Beast while shopping around his novel and memoir. He can be reached at genis5000@gmail.com.

KEEP READING: More on Writers

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND PINTEREST.

Dispatches from an angry translator.

Italo Calvino once said, “Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”

While this sentiment is touching to the oft-under-appreciated translator, those who know more than one language and wish to build bridges between literary cultures quickly learn that for every kind word like Calvino's, there are 10 disparaging comments about the craft. These are a few of my favorites, some of which I’ve encountered personally and some that have cropped up throughout history:

“Oh, translating — that must be easy because it's already been written.”

Yes, of course it must be easy because there is always a direct word-to-word, literal translation, and of course we needn't worry about the cultural or linguistic distinctions between situations, objects or intentions (or, you know, sarcasm).

In actuality, people who speak more than one language delight in the untranslatable. Take “schnapsidee” from German, which is an ingenious plan hatched while drunk. Got a quick-fix for that one?

“Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, then it is certainly not beautiful.” – Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russian poet

Discrediting a masterful craft and half of the population in just three sentences. Way to go, Yevgeny.

“I don't trust translations.”

Probably one of the worst things somebody can say regarding translation since it limits all literature, resulting in no Shakespeare outside England, no Kant beyond Germany, no Sun Tzu further than China. The sentiment focuses only on what’s lost in translation, not what may be gained. Even the late great Gabriel Garcia Marquez admitted that Gregory Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the Spanish original!

“Translation is sin.” – Grant Showerman, American scholar

Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride and mastering languages to better inform the world — definitely all on the same level.

“I'm sure it's fine, but I'd really rather read the original.”

The most obvious response to this is to ask how the speaker intends to learn every language of every book he or she might ever want to read. And while that is a very worthy endeavor, it may be a little time consuming and potentially frustrating, especially when there are already qualified and enthusiastic people ready to bring a text to you.

“Translation is much like copying paintings.” – Boris Pasternak, Russian writer

While I'm hesitant to criticize a Nobel Prize-winner, one of the greatest Russian poets of the last century and the author of one of my favorite books (Doctor Zhivago), I can only assume that Pasternak was given special paints with his Nobel. If we follow his metaphor — that is, if translation is anything like copying paintings — then it’s like starting with Raphael’s Madonna and ending up with Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato's: both beautiful, both of the same subject, but certainly not crude copies of each other.

“Isn't Google Translate going to put you out of business?”

Check out this Google translation of the song “Let It Go” from the Disney movie Frozen:

No, I think we translators are going to be just fine.

Rachael Daum is a master’s student in inflicting Russian literature and translation on herself at Indiana University. She appreciates foreign literature, good tea and puns. You can find her on Twitter @Oopsadaisical.

KEEP READING: More on Writing

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Though they may have been atheists, both the German philosopher and the Russian-American author are undoubtedly channeled in Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible.

Despite its name, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan has very little to do with either Satan or his worship. In LaVeyan Satanism, the important god is ourselves and our natural instincts. Borrowing somewhat from English occultist Aleister Crowley and his libertine credo of “Do what thou wilt,” LaVey’s The Satanic Bible outlines the philosophy and rituals behind the Church of Satan, and for the most part, the central figure is the ego and the will of those considered strong enough to accept Satanism.

The Nine Satanic Statements included in The Satanic Bible are:

1. Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence!

2. Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams!

3. Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!

4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates!

5. Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek!

6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires!

7. Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!

8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!

9. Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as He has kept it in business all these years!

By focusing on vitality and a hatred of hypocritical selflessness, LaVey and his Church of Satan expose their less outwardly sinister roots. Namely, their philosophy has two chief architects: Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.

From Nietzsche, who famously declared the death of God in The Gay Science, LaVey lifted not only the categorization of Christianity as a “slave morality,” but also adapted the Ubermensch as the ideal Satanist. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the Ubermensch as a master of “this-worldliness,” a natural aristocrat who denies spiritual redemption in favor for accomplishments in this life.

While Nietzsche’s philosophy verged on the mystical and metaphysical, Rand was a through and through materialist. In her many books, she excoriated not only socialism and the socialistic impulse as tyranny by another name, but also lambasted altruism as a false god kept in power in order to keep humanity from reaching true happiness. Rational self-interest became the rallying cry of Rand’s Objectivism, which she describes in The Virtue of Selfishness as “a morality of rational self-interest — or of rational selfishness.”

Knowing all of this goes a long way towards exorcising the evil from the Church of Satanism. In reality, LaVeyan Satanism presents a materialist and egoist philosophy in Halloween costume. And even though The Satanic Bible takes magic rituals seriously, those spells are predicated upon the projection of will rather than supernatural intermediaries.

The only thing scary about LaVeyan Satanism is its championing of self-aggrandizement. When LaVey proclaims “Satan rules the Earth,” he is proclaiming the primacy of humanity and the glories of natural instincts. It is, in the end, not terribly different from today’s secularism. Perhaps seeing where his and future generations were heading, all LaVey did was give a name to their practice, thus founding a religion of economic comfort and social ennui. No demons need apply.

Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vermont. He prefers “Ben” or “Benzo,” and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crime Magazine, The Crime Factory, Seven Days and Ravenous Monster. He used to teach English at the University of Vermont, but now just drinks beer and runs his own blog called The Trebuchet.

KEEP READING: More on Religion

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

Led by a dream to the Italian writer’s novel; led by the novel back to reality.

I take reading recommendations from dreams more than I’d care to admit. The first time I was drawn to read Etgar Keret I had a dream that I found my fish swimming in a gumball machine almost identical to the cover of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. I don’t believe in “reading premonitions” or anything — I had seen that cover before — but it was a visceral call to the book.

More recently, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities came to me through similar serendipity. I had the dream following the anniversary of September 11 this year, after I had seen the two memorial spotlights projected into the sky. As with all dreams the details are fuzzy, but I was on a train watching the countryside pass when a city appeared in the distance. I got off at the next stop, at a nameless place, to better see the skyline. The city I found was a reflection of the one I was trying to get away from: Out before me was New York. The nameless town I was in was separated from the city by a body of water, but it wasn’t anything like Brooklyn. There was so much grass and only a few homes that lined a winding road down to the water.

I stopped a passerby to ask how New York could be there. In an explanation only possible through dream logic, she told me that the skyline refracted like a reflection over their town — and wasn’t it beautiful?

“Isn’t it strange to have a skyline that isn’t even yours?” I asked her.

“We love it,” she replied in a charming English accent, “living in a small town and having one of the most famous skylines in the world.”

I’m a Brooklyn native who has always lived in New York, and the truth (the truth that might explain my dream) is that I’ve started thinking about other places I might want to live someday. I find myself on Google Maps, losing hours to street views of foreign cities. I look at apartments and imagine what it would be like to live there — someplace warmer, someplace cheaper, someplace unlike New York.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the imposter city, and the next day I dropped by my neighborhood bookstore for a copy of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. The novel had been on my radar for six years since I learned it was one of Jonathan Lethem’s favorites.

The day I started reading it, I was sitting in a bathtub watching the pages curl. I travelled through Calvino’s 11 different kinds of places: Cities & Memory, Cities & Desire, Cities & Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities & Eyes, Cities & Names, Cities & the Dead, Cities & the Sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities. I reached the city of Valdrada and became entranced by its symmetry to my dream:

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror. ... The two Valdradas live for each other, their eyes interlocked; but there is no love between them.

Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a fictionalized conversation between the aging emperor Kublai Khan and a young Marco Polo. Although the book travels from city to city, their conversation is set in one place: a garden. The two ostensibly speak different languages, so much of what is understood between the emperor and the traveler is apparently shaped by large gestures.

“It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear,” Polo tells Khan, revealing that he is fluent in the emperor’s language. After describing a labyrinth of different cities, after trying to place where they might fall on an atlas, it’s clear that each city is the same city from different angles. Some readers like to say that it’s Marco Polo’s Venice; another way of seeing it is that every city is alike in its own way.

There are many facades to Calvino’s cities. There is Despina, which looks distinct depending on whether you approach it by land or by sea. There is Andria, which reflects itself in the constellations, and Olina, which can only be seen with a magnifying glass. Calvino’s cities are magical, dreamlike. Sophronia paints itself in two faces, one of which is always changing:

One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period of its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it, and take it off, transplanting it to the vacant lots of another half-city.

The eerie aspect of each of Calvino’s impossible cities is their parallel with reality. Across the street from my apartment is a large factory that’s been turned into a luxury condo. Down the street, along the Gowanus Canal, is a row of factories that’ve recently been knocked down, places that had been abandoned for years, places that will soon change completely.

Sometimes I worry that New York changes too quickly. I find myself clinging to things, silly things I wouldn’t have imagined, like the Kentile Floors sign or Joe’s Superette. “Brooklyn as brand has overtaken Brooklyn as place,” I remember reading in the New York Observer months ago. So many people move to New York looking for a different version of the city where I grew up. Sometimes, after living for so long in the same neighborhood, it’s easy to be envious of that, to want to move somewhere without nostalgia, to move somewhere that feels totally new.

Invisible Cities isn’t a book about places as much as it’s about the way we choose to live wherever we are. The trading city of Eutropia paints several versions of itself with the intention of satisfying every citizen’s desire to relocate when they are no longer happy where they are:

On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site somehow different from the others.

In every one of Calvino’s cities escape is an illusion. Marco Polo’s way of seeing a place always comes back to Venice: “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.” He explains that the atlas is the only thing that distinguishes each place. (He even locates New York on the map, describing its street grid cut by Broadway.) I don’t believe Calvino’s philosophy entirely — each city is different — but there is a part of me that likes to believe anyone could be happy living anywhere; it’s all in how you take it in.

Raissa is a city where life is not happy, but “at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its existence.” After finishing Invisible Cities I took a walk around my neighborhood and realized that the broken bluestone sidewalk was the same I had always known it to be but that everything above it had changed. I couldn't remember where the abandoned houses were or what the coffee house on the corner used to be. New York fools you in that way: You can never get too familiar.

In that moment between the old and the new I saw New York for the many cities it could be, and for the first time in a while, I was okay with staying.

Freddie Moore is a Brooklyn-based writer. Her full name is Winifred, and her writing has appeared in The Paris Review Daily and The Huffington Post. As a former cheesemonger, she’s a big-time foodie who knows her cheese. Follow her on Twitter: @moorefreddie

KEEP READING: More on Travel

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal helps us understand the pathologies behind A. A. Milne’s classic children’s story characters.

We all know the premise of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh: Boy meets bear, and they have innocent, life-lesson-filled adventures with other animals that don’t wear pants. But what if the cherished characters from the Hundred Acre Wood aren’t actually as happy as they seem? If you don’t want your favorite childhood story to be ruined forever, you probably shouldn’t read any further.

In “Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a neurodevelopmental perspective on A.A. Milne” from the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers Sarah E. Shea, Kevin Gordon, Ann Hawkins, Janet Kawchuk and Donna Smith delve into the psychology behind our quirky, furry friends and completely turn Winnie-the-Pooh on its head. Following the standards of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychiatrist’s bible) and literary analysis, Shea and co. claim Pooh and the gang are not childish, delightful friends in a fairytale world but “Seriously Troubled Individuals.” Let’s see how:

Pooh

For starters, Pooh is not just a beloved ball of fluff. His obsession with honey, repetitive counting behavior and fleeting, “little brain” characterization can be associated with a multitude of psychological disorders. The researchers question if Pooh has a case of “Shaken Bear Syndrome,” along with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). “Pooh needs intervention,” they bluntly state.

Piglet

With his frantic tendency to fear and worry about every little thing, this stuttering, high-strung pig is adorably anxious, but is it serious enough to be diagnosed? Shea and co. believe Piglet’s neuroticism is Generalized Anxiety Disorder, stemming from “emotional trauma he experienced while attempting to trap heffalumps.”

Tigger

His bouncy tail matches his extra-energetic personality. Even though “bouncing is what Tiggers do best,” the researchers claim his impulsive ways and boundless energy — two key indicators of ADHD — are highly destructive.

Eeyore

It’s not much of a surprise that our favorite melancholic donkey is diagnosed with depression. While the psychological study recommends antidepressants, I think Eeyore would feel much better if he didn’t have that pin for his tail constantly stabbing his rear.  

Kanga/Roo

In one of the most far-fetched character analyses, Shea and co. parse Kanga’s overprotective nature as a single mother and Roo’s high chance of failure as a result: “We predict we will someday see a delinquent, jaded, adolescent Roo hanging out late at night at the top of the forest, the ground littered with broken bottles of extract of malt and the butts of smoked thistles.”

When is the psychoanalysis of children’s story characters appropriate? And when does it devolve into a takedown of something pure and innocent? Was Milne in fact exploring the darkness of mental illness? Or did he just create unique, eccentric characters?

Fair questions, though Shea and co. don’t seem to be performing such analysis as much as they’re poking fun at the ridiculousness it can extend to. With the emphasis on needing to pick apart every facet of literature and the ongoing debate over the medical accuracy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, one can’t help but question how much analysis is too much analysis.

Megan Plevy is a recent Villanova graduate and freelance writer. She lives in New Jersey though her heart belongs to New York City, where they have dollar pizza slices. She’s sometimes funny on Twitter at @mplevz.

KEEP READING: More on Science

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

English occultist Aleister Crowley led a raucous life as either a great charlatan or the “Great Beast 666.”

Besides the Devil, who famously convinced the world that he doesn’t exist, the greatest man of the left-hand path was Aleister Crowley. Born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, he would go on to become so infamous that he received the dubious honor of being the “Wickedest Man in the World.” While that would be quite enough for some people, it was actually a demotion for Crowley, who had given himself an even grander title years prior.

In the “Book of Revelation,” there are two beasts, one from the sea and one from the earth. The one from earth is given the number 666 and the power of a false prophet. This is the monstrosity that will challenge Christian faith before the Day of Judgement. This is the fiend that Crowley modeled his image after when sometime during the height of his fame he dubbed himself the “Great Beast 666.”

Many people at the time believed that Crowley was a committed Satanist and a prophet of devil-worship. In reality, he proselytized the worship of himself and of his own religion, which he called “Thelema” and which even had its own central tome, The Book of the Law. In an age when occult theologies and philosophies were being eagerly gobbled up by the intelligentsia and the general public alike, Thelema stood out because of its extreme libertinism and because of its very simple tenet: “Do what thou wilt.”

The sheer volume of newspaper and magazine features about Crowley (most of which can be found at The 100th Monkey Press) testifies that he was no recluse or wilting violet. Biographer Martin Booth has called Crowley “self-confident, brash, eccentric, egotistic, highly intelligent, arrogant, witty, wealthy, and, when it suited him, cruel.” But was he a liar?

There are so many stories about Crowley that it’s hard to distinguish history from fantasy. Let’s start, then, with what we know for sure:

Just the Facts, Crowley

Crowley was born into a very strict Christian household that expressly forbid everything he would later champion. His family came from rural wealth, with his father owning part of a brewing business. Both of Crowley’s parents were strict disciplinarians who openly chastised their son as “the Beast of Revelation” because of his ill-temper and his unwillingness to conform to their strictures.

Crowley’s father died of cancer in 1887, leaving 11-year-old Aleister in control of a third of the family fortune. Young, wealthy and hedonistic is never a good combination, and following his father’s death, Aleister’s problems with discipline intensified. He wouldn’t stay in school past a few terms, and much to his mother’s shame, he began to openly revolt against Christianity. Like any petulant teenager today, Crowley started smoking, drinking and having more sex than a field rabbit. At some point, his dalliances with prostitutes won him gonorrhea, a fact he immortalized in an explicit 1920 poem entitled “Leah Sublime.”

Young Aleister was more than a simple ruffian, though. At about the same time as he was indulging in what were to become life-long vices, Crowley was also developing other interests, namely chess, poetry and mountain climbing.

While at Cambridge from 1895 to 1898, Crowley changed his name from Edward to Aleister and changed his scholastic focus from philosophy to English literature, which wasn’t even on the curriculum at the time. (In this sense, Crowley could be considered the first crazy English undergrad — and his lineage still thrives across the world today!) To the surprise of no one, Crowley proved to be an uninspired student. Like Max Fischer in Rushmore, Crowley’s college years were mostly consumed by extracurricular activities. From making a serious study of chess to beginning his career as a published poet, Crowley in Cambridgeshire was anything but lethargic. On top of this, he still kept up his vigorous sex life with prostitutes and the occasional male lover (he was later very candid about his bisexuality), and again, sometime between 1896 and 1897, Crowley contracted an STD, this time syphilis.

After leaving Cambridge, Crowley traveled throughout Europe, even going so far as to visit the Russian city of Saint Petersburg. He continued mountain climbing as well, and in 1902, he and his frequent climbing partner Oscar Eckenstein attempted to climb K2, the second highest peak on Earth. Crowley, Eckenstein and their team made it to an approximate altitude of 20,000 feet before being forced to turn around.

As Crowley’s career in mountain climbing was reaching a plateau (he would later attempt to scale Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain on Earth, but his partners mutinied and some porters died trying to climb back down in the dark), his interests in Western esotericism were just beginning. In 1898, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a British occult society dedicated to studying ceremonial magic, alchemy and metaphysics. Crowley proved to be a quick study in magic and ritual. Before long he was earning his way into the order’s inner circle, but his unpopularity kept him back. Even in an exclusive club dedicated to the occult, Victorian mores ruled. Members disliked Crowley’s sexual excesses and his recreational use of drugs. One member in particular despised Crowley: W. B. Yeats. (Rumor has it that the “rough beast” in Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is in fact Crowley himself.)

Beginning in 1900 and lasting several years, Crowley traveled the world studying various forms of mysticism. He learned Buddhism and yoga in India, and while in Egypt on his extended honeymoon he tried to invoke ancient Egyptian gods.

In 1904, Crowley claimed that he did in fact make contact with one of these gods, the falcon-headed Horus. According to Crowley, his wife Rose, while under a trance, led him to a Cairo museum where the Stele of Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu, a painted wooden slab, sat as museum item number 666. The stele, which depicts the sun god Re seated on a throne before a Theban priest, supposedly allowed for the disembodied voice of Aiwass, a messenger of Horus who is exclusive to Thelema, to dictate to Crowley a new religious codex for a burgeoning eon. This ghostly communication produced The Book of the Law and designated Crowley as the chief prophet of a post-Christian world. His new purpose, then, was to communicate to humanity the power of their “True Will,” or their destined path in life in accordance with the secret workings of nature. As Thelema expanded, Crowley would add more volumes to his “Holy Books of Thelema,” but The Book of the Law remains the foundational text.

Crowley’s activities didn’t stop with the founding of Thelema. Besides continuing to write prolifically on the occult, Crowley also began publishing short horror stories and even wrote the novels Diary of a Drug Fiend and Moonchild. In 1912, Crowley became the head of the British branch of the Order Templi Orientis, a German occult society that practiced sex magic. Crowley incorporated Thelemic ideas into Order rituals and even composed a Gnostic Mass for combined ceremonies. The height of Crowley’s religious activities came after World War I, when he and others established the Abbey of Thelema at the Sicilian city of Cefalu.

By all accounts, the Abbey of Thelema was a constant Bacchanalia with heroin, prostitutes and sex magic rituals being freely available to the children of Crowley’s followers. Some male followers were forced into having anal sex with Crowley, while others, like the doomed Raoul Loveday, were forced to drink cat blood and even urine.

Loveday would eventually die of liver infection after drinking both Crowley’s devilish mixtures and the unsanitary local water. His wife returned to London and told the British press all about the Abbey of Thelema, and because Crowley, now destitute after a spendthrift life, could not afford the legal services necessary to prosecute for slander, the bad press against him continued without resistance. When the new government of Benito Mussolini learned of the accusations against Crowley, they served him deportation papers and forced the Abbey of Thelema to close its doors for good in April 1923.

For the remainder of his life, Crowley would be dogged by ill health and his many addictions. Still, he continued to travel throughout North Africa and Europe. During World War II, he composed patriotic verses in support of the British cause, all the while naming successors to the Order Templi Orientis, which had been dismantled by the Nazis. In 1947, at the age of 72, Crowley died after a protracted battle with lung infections and heart disease.

The Myth of the Great Beast 666

With a life as alternatively productive and sordid as Crowley’s, fantastic stories are inevitable. And since he was keen on cultivating a cult of personality, it only stands to reason that Crowley loved the myths that swirled around his name like so many phantoms. Detailing all the whispered rumors about him here would be too exhausting, but these tales are musts:

Raising Demons in Scotland

In November of 1899, Crowley purchased Boleskine House in Scotland. Located on the southern side of Loch Ness, the former hunting lodge served as his primary residence until he was forced to sell it in 1914. Boleskine has acquired a sinister reputation over the years because of the black magic ceremonies that Crowley supposedly conducted there. Specifically, many claim that he used it as a secluded spot for raising demons. According to Crowley himself, his activities at the lodge got out of hand and the spirits that he raised there were directly responsible for a series of tragedies, such as a local butcher who bled to death after accidentally severing an artery.

Long after Crowley left Boleskine, the property was purchased by Led Zeppelin guitarist and Crowley enthusiast Jimmy Page. Page conceived of a restored Boleskine as a perfect place to write songs, and many claim that the mystical elements and strange symbols presented on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album were inspired by Page’s brief stay at the lodge.

Stranger still, in an article from Dangerous Minds, writer Paul Gallagher claims to have met a man in Los Angeles who believes that the demon Crowley raised at Boleskine became the Loch Ness monster.

Summoning Pan

Dennis Wheatley, the British thriller writer who used Crowley as the template for his devil-worshipper Mocata in his novel The Devil Rides Out, is the man mostly responsible for this myth. In The Devil and All His Works, Wheatley claims that Crowley and his followers rented the entire floor of a small Parisian hotel for a weekend-long ceremony to call forth the Greek god Pan. According Wheatley’s account, which he in turn claimed came from those who were there, Crowley successfully brought Pan back into the world, but could not control him. The other magician in the room with him was killed, while the whole ordeal left Crowley a “gibbering idiot.”

Wheatley’s account is more than likely sensational, and it more or less conforms to the earlier rumors about Crowley’s time at Boleskine. Still, this story does offer a window into how powerful some people believed Crowley to be.

The Devil was a Spy

Of all the theories about Crowley, the idea that he was a lifelong member of British intelligence has the most legs. Entire books have been written about Crowley’s supposed work for the British government, and in a 1919 newspaper article he himself claimed that he was “in the confidential service of the British government” during the First World War.

This conspiracy theory goes a long way in debunking the idea that Crowley was a serious occultist. Some biographers, such as Richard Spence and Tobias Churton, believe that Crowley began working as spy while still at Cambridge and that all of his subsequent traveling was done partially under the commands of Downing Street. From claiming that Crowley’s relationship with the Golden Dawn was a mere ploy to get close to the Carlist-sympathizers to undermining the idea that his pro-Irish and pro-German sympathies during World War I were anything but field work done in order to weaken the credibility of those causes, the Crowley-as-spy concept is truly all-encompassing.

The most famous theory regarding Crowley’s government work is the notion that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond and a real Naval intelligence officer during World War II, almost got permission to use Crowley as an interviewer during the interrogation of Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess. In 1941, Hess, one of the most powerful men in the Nazi party, crash-landed in England in a failed attempt to get Great Britain to negotiate a peace with Germany. After being captured, Hess was removed to Scotland for interrogation. According to the rumor, Fleming and his boss decided that Crowley would be the perfect person to exploit Hess’s interests in the occult for Britain’s gain. Unfortunately, it’s more than likely that this plan was never conceived. Donald McCormick, a huckster journalist, is the likely culprit behind the story

But it still remains that Crowley did indeed know many members of both the British and American intelligence services. While one of his hand-chosen successors in the Order Templi Orientis was the American army officer Grady McMurtry, Crowley was also acquainted with Roald Dahl and Dennis Wheatley, both of whom spent World War II as intelligence officers attached to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy respectively.

Many of Crowley’s contacts in the British secret service also just so happened to be writers, and it’s well known that Crowley served as the model for many villains in the British potboilers of the 20th century. The first to use him was W. Somerset Maugham (who would later serve in military intelligence during World War I) in his 1908 novel The Magician. In it, Crowley appears as Oliver Haddo, a corpulent wizard whose home is scattered with tubes full of the homunculi that he himself created. In a 1911 tale by British ghost story writer M. R. James, the figure of Crowley is called Karswell, and in “Casting the Runes,” Karswell attempts to send a demon after his enemies.

While these characters, along with Wheatley’s Mocata, are obvious nods to Crowley, it’s not common knowledge that Crowley also inspired certain Bond villains, most notably Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Besides Le Chiffre’s bloated appearance, the journalist and historian Ben Macintyre argues that Fleming gave his first villain Crowley’s sadomasochism, writing, “When Le Chiffre goes to work on Bond’s testicles with a carpet-beater and a carving knife, the sinister figure of Aleister Crowley is lurking in the background.”

In the case of Crowley, fiction is probably the best vehicle for dealing with his eclectic life. Always more myth than man, his hold on us still is mostly due to the sensationalized stories that were common so many years ago. Antichrist, devil-worshipper, drug fiend, sadist — Crowley wanted us to think that he was all of these things, and in reality he certainly indulged in every whim or caprice, few of which could be called good, Christian fun. A libertine at best and a criminal at worst, Crowley remains the archetype of the evil occultist, no matter whether or not it’s all true.

Benjamin Welton is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vermont. He prefers “Ben” or “Benzo,” and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Crime Magazine, The Crime Factory, Seven Days and Ravenous Monster. He used to teach English at the University of Vermont, but now just drinks beer and runs his own blog called The Trebuchet.

KEEP READING: More on Writers

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW BLACK BALLOON PUBLISHING ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, TUMBLR AND MEDIUM.

]]>Eat Prey Drug: Sweet Charity