It’s far less cinematic than that.  Far less interesting, too.  When I am hit with a bout of my depression, which is sort of akin to a brain fog, I move slower, can’t sleep, and am down, to be sure, but the key symptom is a lack of attention.  I cannot hold a thread in a conversation.  I forget words for common objects.  I cannot really read anything longer than a blog entry, and I certainly cannot write well.  They last anywhere from a few days to a couple of months, but generally I get off lightly as they seldom last longer than a few weeks.

That is what it is, and I came out my my most recent bout in time to post that pile of words about Knut Hamsun.  Then I almost lost one cat, Miss Baby.  While we were worrying about her, a completely unrelated and seemingly healthy cat of ours, Wooster, dropped over dead.  Wooster was a strange, furtive, but lovely cat and his death was a blow to the house beyond anything we could have anticipated.

So I’ve been far more useless than I would like.  I have some interesting discussions in the works: an odd books zine from a writer in Australia, an Alasdair Gray collection, A New Bizarro Authors Week, and more.   I’m looking forward to the latter – it’s been a while since I had a giveaway.

But until then, let me share two of the amazing conspiracy theory sites I found when wandering the web late at night in the throes of insomnia.

The first is the site September Clues Research Forum.   This site is dedicated to the idea that 9-11 did not happen, that the attack itself was staged with media complicity, that no planes crashed into anything that day, and that not a single person died.  I found this site because I had a copy of Don Delillo’s The Falling Man and found myself Googling “falling man,”  the iconic photograph of a man who jumped from the World Trade center.  It was through that Google that I found this site.

It’s a small board, with a max of around 1000 members, far fewer active.  It’s beyond the Loose Change crowd (and the key players on this site declare that Truthers are part of the conspiracy, a smoke-screen so that no one focuses on the “real” truth).  It is some of the most hardcore conspiracy theory I have encountered in recent memory.  Convoluted, intricate and detailed, these particular True Believers have created an alternative reality wherein all the victim photographs are really photoshops or were created from one main photograph using photo manipulation.   The families of the dead are all actors or lying for some reason, the Ground Zero pictures were all staged, and everything we saw that terrible day was an elaborate theater used to trick us into war in the Middle East.  None of it happened.  Famous victims like Barbara Olson didn’t die on the planes – in Olson’s case, they posit that she got a ton of plastic surgery and came back to remarry her husband Ted Olson in a new identity.  Their proof for this is… both hilarious and the result of lots and lots of work.  If there is a means by which I can link to individual comments on posts, I cannot find one, but I also think this is for the best.  Little bits and pieces of this are almost worthless – one has to experience the whole of this by reading posts and threads as they come.

I seriously cannot list the amount of intellectual endeavor on this site, but a word of warning:  the makers of this site and the people who are key in this theory aren’t anything like the Loose Changers.  They are not engaging in a coy, “what if/I’m only asking hard questions” stance that the Truthers use to shelter themselves from the hard criticism that comes from asking “hard” questions.  The main players on September Clues Research Forum believe they have proven their case for this extraordinary conspiracy beyond any reasonable doubt and don’t like people challenging them because they brook no dissent.  So if you decide you want to interact with these folks, bear that in mind.

The second site appears to have been abandoned, more’s the pity, because, while not as outlandish as September Clues Research Forum, this blog contains some excellent conspiracy theory analysis. The site analyzes the use of Monarch Program, Illuminati and Masonic, and MK-Ultra imagery as found in movies, music videos, and photoshoots.   Pseudo-Occult Media is a site after my own heart – verbose, given to extreme analysis of media and completely whacked.  The author, one Benjamin Singleton, does not appear to be writing anywhere else, but if anyone knows where he is or if he is writing again, I would love to know what he is up to these days.

I found this site after landing on the Daily Mail, of all places, reading an article about how happy John Mellencamp is these days after divorcing his supermodel wife, Elaine Irwin.  I wondered how some of the other supermodels from the 90s had ended up and began Googling “Tatiana,”  “Linda Evangelista” and “Karen Mulder.”  It was the search on Karen Mulder that led me to the site, to this article in particular, wherein Mulder’s images and erratic behaviors are discussed with the assumption that she was a Monarch Program victim.  Singleton analyzed dozens of pictures to show the links between Mulder and the Monarch Program and Illuminati sex slave programs.  This is one of those rare sites wherein I don’t want to contact James Randi and see how to debunk it effectively because unlike many True Believers, Singleton showed his work.  While I can look at the work and simply say, “Images of kittens and leopards and butterflies are just common in photography,” Singleton makes an interesting case for how these images are used to tell specific stories and the stories often end up being very similar.  One does not have to believe any of it to just marvel at the work that went into the analyses.

I am not even close to finished reading the site, but I already have some favorite articles.  Singleton’s analysis of the imagery associated with Lana Clarkson, the woman Phil Spector shot to death, was fascinating.   Equally interesting was the use of Monarch imagery and the use of Alice in Wonderland as it applies to programming victims and the images of Peaches Geldof and others.  Whether Singleton is a lunatic or the Sanest Person You Know, after reading his blog, you will never look at black and white stripes, red shoes, butterflies, kittens, wild cat prints and Alice costumes the same way again.  Or maybe it’s more accurate to say you will be surprised at how common and overused they are in media, fashion and film.  You don’t have to fear the New World Order to find this worth a read and Singleton has a ton of content on the now defunct site.

So that’s what I was doing over the past couple of weeks as I waited for my brain fog to lift.  Hopefully y’all will find it interesting to some degree and I’ll have some book content up here soon.  Hopefully the Alasdair Gray discussion will be up Friday or Monday.  If any of you have some odd website, message board or blog recommendations for me to read when the next fog rolls into my head, share them please!

Some of you are aspiring writers. Some of you are published writers. All of you are heavy readers.  And almost universally, my readers are people who love small presses. I myself am a fan of small presses. But sometimes small presses are run by ignorant pricks.

Here’s a handy guide that will help you determine if the editor of a small press is an ignorant prick:

– Did he change the title of your story so that it now contains a misspelling?
– Did he fail to tell you he changed the title of your story before the story went to print in an anthology?
– Did he make you sign a contract allowing the press to edit your work but then confused editing with rewriting?
– In those rewrites, did he change the gender of a character, create a name for another character and include implied rape in a story where there had not been rape prior to the “edit?”
– Did he call you unstable and mock you when you contacted him about these appalling breaches in editorial conduct?
– Did he impugn his own press as he scrambled to call you such a bad writer that no professional press would touch your work?
– Is his name Anthony Giangregorio and does he run Undead Press?

If you answered yes to some of these questions, then chances are your editor is ignorant or a prick. If you answered yes to all, then the ignorant prickiness goes down to the molecular level and you should use your stories as cat litter before you submit them to such a press.

Sadly, Mandy DeGeit did not have this handy list for reference and was fucked over by Undead Press. But through her suffering we’ve all learned a important lesson today, I think.

Much love!
Anita at IROB

PS:  Increasingly, I think that perhaps old Tony is really an evil, ignorant prick.

PPS:  There is now no question about it.  Tony really is an evil, ignorant prick.  He very recently made a veiled threat against writer Alyn Day, mentioned in the link above.  Yes, I can hear the neckbeards explaining, ever so patiently, that old Tony isn’t threatening Alyn.  Why wouldn’t an editor who has been shamed for his dreadful treatment of writers decide to stop by the homes of one of the writers who outed him as a cretinous jerk?  Don’t we always stop by the homes of people who have exposed our shoddy business practices?  Couldn’t possibly be that Tony wants to intimidate Ms Day by implying he plans to come to her home “for a talk.”  So let’s all add whistle-blower intimidation to the long list of things wrong with this choad.

Tony

Author: Knut Hamsun

Type of Book: Literary fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Well, it’s a book without a plot with an utterly unhinged protagonist. Possibly one of the most upsetting books I have ever read.

Availability: This book was originally published in 1890. My edition is from Farrar, Strauss, Giraux in 2008. You can get a copy here:

(If you have a Kindle, dig around because I saw a Kindle version going for free, though that may be because I have a Prime Membership on Amazon)

Comments: I’ve been putting off discussing this book because I don’t know where to start. Hunger really is a book without a plot – in this novel, the same thing happens every day with mild variations on action. There is no character arc because the protagonist is as vainglorious, horribly depressed, and lunatic at the beginning as he is at the end.  This book frustrated me beyond belief and yet I read it through twice because I just had to do it. And as contradictory as it sounds, I hated this book the first read and loved it the second. This is all the more contradictory because even though I loved it the second time, I never want to read this book again.

This book is the literary equivalent of running your soul over a cheese grater. Over and over again. It’s hard to discuss such a book with any skill, though others have. Initially, I thought Paul Auster’s take on this book, printed in the copy I read, was wrong, but later I realized he was correct – he just interrogated the text from a different perspective. He looked at the book from an intellectual perspective and I looked at it from the perspective of someone who has gone insane and felt something akin to pain reading such lunacy.

So I am faced with a problem: how does one discuss a narrator whose highs and lows make Raskolnikov’s public behavior seem normal? How can I discuss a book wherein nothing really changes and there is virtually no character arc? I don’t know. I think all I can do is discuss the parts of this book that resonated the most with me, and even this is going to be sticky because even as I divide the book into specific elements I want to discuss, there will be significant overlap between these elements. For example, as I discuss how the protagonist cannot act in his own self-interests, lunacy caused by starvation also comes into play. In fact, it is tempting to just write the words, “Starvation in a land of plenty will make you insane” over and over until I hit a decent word count. Just bear that in mind – there is a lot of overlap when discussing the narrator’s mind and actions.

Before I begin, I need to mention that I read the edition translated by Robert Bly, widely considered to be the crappiest translation because he evidently “corrected” verb usage to eliminate mixed tenses. Mixed tenses, according to scholars of the text, were to show the disorganization of the protagonist’s mind. So my edition is actually a bit saner than the actual text. Though I sort of wish I had read a more faithful translation of the text, I suspect it is a good thing I read the less crazy version. As it was, the narrator’s mind was an utter vexation.

Hunger‘s narrator is trying to write in a very Dostoyevskian manner. He may be an excellent writer but his topics, “Crimes of the Future” or “Freedom of the Will” lean toward him being a self-impressed hack. His grand ideas are constrained by his grinding poverty and his mental disorganization.  The novel is divided into four parts and begins with him leaving a boarding house (though he could have stayed had he just approached the problem with logic and patience) and living rough. The second part of the novel concerns his attempts to live in a borrowed shack as he tries to write. In the third part, he meets a woman who slowly realizes he is not what she thought he was and the romance is dashed. The fourth section of the novel takes place mostly in a very low boarding house where the narrator, terrified of the cold and of living rough again, hangs onto a roof over his head in a manner so servile and cringing it almost killed me to read it. He finally goes to enlist as a crew member on a ship, which some take as him finally moving on from his despair, but I read as suicide, an interpretation I will, of course, explain. Until then, I will just divide this discussion up into relevant chunks and hope that at the end I have given the reader a good idea of the protagonist and the struggles he faces as he starves nearly to death in a world that often notices him too well or does not notice him at all.

The Protagonist’s Strange, Grandiose Ego
The protagonist, as I mentioned is a writer and is very impoverished to the point of starvation. Yet he has a need to present himself as a man of means, a magnanimous giver to the less fortunate. But unlike most who want to present a facade of wealth, the protagonist often takes things a step too far and actually impoverishes himself further in an attempt to save face in front of others, selling literally the clothes on his back to give a pittance to people who often have more than he does. He does not do this from a need to help others, or from a place of charity. He does it because he wants to be seen as something he is not and it is a blow to his ego that he cannot bear when people realize how impoverished he is. This is particularly sad because his ego destroys any chance he has at maintaining the security he needs to write.

He makes his poverty very clear at the beginning of the novel. He looks shabby.

…my clothes were beginning to look so bad I couldn’t really present myself any longer for a job that required someone respectable.

He has no possessions.

By now I was so utterly denuded of objects that I didn’t even have a comb left, or a book to read when I felt hopeless.

He has no food.

If one only had something to eat, just a little, on such a clear day!

But when he meets a beggar who asks him for money, he questions him and once determining that the man actually had a trade, he says:

“Well, that’s different,” I said. “Wait here a few minutes, and I’ll see if I can’t find something for you, a little something at least.”

He simply cannot bring himself to tell the beggar that he too has nothing to give.

He goes to a pawnshop and takes off his waistcoat. All he has are the clothes on his back but he pawns his waistcoat for one and a half kroner.

I took the money and went back. Actually, pawning this waistcoat was a wonderful idea; I would still have money left over for a good, fat breakfast, and by evening my piece on “Crimes of the Future” would be in shape. Life began immediately to seem more friendly, and I hurried back to the man to get him off my hands.

Note how he has taken responsibility for the beggar. He needs to get him off his hands. He genuinely has a sense that he needs to help the man and that the man will be on his conscience until he helps him. It’s borderline Messianic.

But even the beggar picks up on the protagonist’s oddness.

The man took the money and began to look me up and down. What was he standing there looking at? I got the sensation that he was inspecting my trousers particularly and I became irritated at this impertinence. Did this old fool imagine I was really as poor as I looked? Hadn’t I just as good as begun my ten-kroner article? On the whole, I had no fears for the future; I had many irons in the fire. What business was it of this heathen savage if I helped him out on such a marvelous day.

He criticizes the man for staring at him and the man hands him the coin back. The protagonist begins to trip all over himself in order to save face.

I stamped my foot, swore, and told him to keep it. Did he think I intended to go to all this trouble for nothing? When you came down to it, I probably owed him the money, I just happened to remember an old debt, he was looking at a punctilious man, one honorable down to his fingernails. In short, the money was his… Nonsense, nothing to thank me for, it was a pleasure. Goodbye.

I walked off. At last I was rid of this painful pest, and could be undisturbed.

He hounded the man into taking the money he could not afford to give and that the man knew he could not afford to give, yet when he left the man had suddenly become a pest. He was a man of honor, insisting on paying a debt to a persistent, dunning debtor, not a deranged man who could not afford food who sold his clothes to be able to give money to a man who probably was not as poorly off as him.

There are several scenes like this in the book, wherein the protagonist, unable to endure that anyone looks at him as impoverished, gives away money he has earned or came upon by accident.  For example, the woman with whom he had the failed affair sees him in part four of the book and sends a messenger with ten kroner. He had just been thrown out of his boarding house for non-payment and for being unpleasant, and he could have used the money for food, rent at a new place, or he could even have paid up at the place where he had been evicted and stayed on. Instead he thrust the money into the boarding house owner’s hand so she would understand at last the sort of man she had been dealing with and wanders off in his mania.

His attempts to appear as he was not, his insistence that he be treated with reverence rather than respect, causes a large portion of the problems he has in this book. Swinging wildly between servile and arrogant, self-loathing and grandiosity, it seems clear the protagonist’s low status in life plagues him and he would rather self-destruct than stomach anyone potentially thinking him poor. This creates a spiral in which the protagonist, a bit unhinged in the beginning, becomes more and more lunatic as starvation makes him crazier.

In a similar vein is the protagonist’s tendency to tell himself what his ego needs to hear. He is behind in his rent and cannot bring himself to talk to his landlady (this later has horrible repercussions because his self-eviction leaves him with nowhere to go but an abandoned workshop he receives permission to sleep in). He spins a narrative for himself wherein the room is not good enough for him, especially since he is a man of great intellect. Here are his thoughts as he rationalizes giving up the last form of comfort he has in life because of his extraordinary pride.

This really wasn’t any room for me; the curtains on the windows were a very ordinary green, and there weren’t even enough pegs on the walls to hang your wardrobe on. The sad rocking chair on the corner was actually a joke of a chair: if one started laughing at it, one could die laughing. It was too low for a grown man, and besides, it was so tight, one needed a shoehorn to get back out of it. In short, this room was simply not furnished in a way appropriate to intellectual effort and I did not intend to keep it any longer. I would not keep it under any circumstances! I had been silent in this hole and stood it here and stayed on here too long already.

Bear in mind, he has no money to stay there and has read a letter from his landlady asking him to pay up. He can’t afford those terrible green curtains and that skinny chair, and one is tempted to think he is making excuses, psyching himself for the inevitable by making it seem as if it is a legitimate choice he is making. But he does this so often in the book – affecting a superior attitude even when he is not in a state of extremis – that the reader is hard pressed to tell when he is assuming a delusional role and actually expressing his ego.

The Protagonist’s Strange Theater
The protagonist becomes more and more unhinged as the novel goes on, but even at the beginning, he creates creepy situations or elaborate theater that no one around him understands. As he does these strange things, he feels as if he has gotten one over on the people he baffles. He is certain that the people around him understand he has gotten one over on them, that they understand that they are less than him, butts of his joke. That is never the case and he never seems to notice he is making a fool of himself. But sometimes he engages in these weird situations because they seem to make him happy.

Take this scene, wherein he begins to follow two women shopping in town (one is the lady he later has a brief flirtation with – this scene is where she gets the impression he is a rakish drunk rather than an unhinged poverty case). He overtakes two women and brushes arms with one of them, an attractive woman who catches his attention. His reaction to noticing her and her noticing him is… interesting.

Suddenly my thoughts shot off on a lunatic direction, and I felt myself possessed by a strange desire to frighten this woman, to follow her in some way or other.

This reminded me a bit of Edmund Kemper, a serial killer who once said, and I am paraphrasing, that when he saw a pretty woman, part of him wanted to date her and part of him wanted to see her head on a pike.

He slows to permit the women to catch up to him and told the pretty woman she was losing her book. She had no book with her and she walked on. Her mild disinterest just goads him on further.

My malice increased and I followed the two. I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it. My deranged consciousness ran away with me and sent me lunatic inspirations, which I obeyed one after the other. No matter how much I told myself I was acting idiotically, it did not help; I made the most stupid faces behind the women’s backs, and I coughed furiously several times as I went by them.

He tells her again that she is losing her book.

“Book, what book,” she said in a frightened voice. “Whatever sort of book is he talking about?”

She stopped. I gloated cruelly over her confusion; the bewilderment in her eyes fascinated me. Her thought could not grasp my desperate and petty persecution; she has no book at all with her, not even a page of a book, and yet now she looks through her pockets, gazes repeatedly at her hands, turns her head and examines the sidewalk behind her, strains her small and tender brain to its limit to find out what sort of book I am talking about.

He gloated at what he thought was her confusion, assuming a position of superiority that is borne out as he mocked her silly little brain trying to figure out what he was talking about. He thought his mindgames caused her to try to find the book when she was really just trying to see what on her person would make anyone think she was losing a book, not realizing, of course, that he is insane. Her friend tells her he is drunk and to pay him no attention.

It is very telling what it is that makes him stop following the two women.

I was at their heels, as near as I dared all the time. They turned once, giving me a half-frightened, half-inquisitive look, and I saw no irritation in their manner, nor any wrinkled brows. This patience with my pestering made me ashamed and I dropped my eyes. I no longer wanted to torture them.

When it became clear they were not recognizing him in the manner he wanted – anger or outright fear – he gave up.

While he clearly felt some perverse, malicious drama following the women, he also engages in bizarre theater that is harder to pin down because he is performing for his own benefit. However, in some scenes, he begins a theater excursion, only to be forced back into some sort of reality wherein he has to save face. In part one, he finds himself inside a well-appointed building where he knew no one.

I rang a bell violently on the third floor. Why did I stop precisely on the third floor? Why did I choose this bell, which was farthest from the stair?

Though he clearly is in the middle of some theater that he does not understand, the whole thing takes a left turn when the woman behind the door answers and thinks him a beggar. His diseased ego kicks in and he asks her if there was a man there, an elderly man who needed assistance going out and was willing to pay for help. She looks at him strangely, and tells him there is no such man. But not content to leave it at that, the narrator is hell-bent to make this woman know, by God, he is a man of quality.

“Then I must ask you for your pardon again,” I said. “Possibly it is the second floor. In any case, I merely wanted to recommend for the post a man in whom I have taken an interest. My own family is Wedel-Jarlsberg.” Then I bowed once more and withdrew. The young woman turned beet red and in her embarrassment could not move from the spot but stood rooted staring after me as I went down the stairs.

My peace of mind was back, and my brain clear.

The protagonist, by this point, has been living on the street, has sold his waistcoat, has no access to a place to perform basic toiletries, yet he tells himself the woman blushes from embarrassment for not recognizing a man of quality. But most telling is how calm he feels afterward. This strange theater, his elaborate ruses, give him a buffer between himself and the people he senses look down on him. I very much get the feeling that the hungrier the man becomes, the more able he is to trick himself into believing that he can, through force of will, make people believe what he wants. Either that or he is so removed via suffering from common sense that he genuinely does not understand how bizarre he seems.

Still later, his theater serves no one but himself. In part two, he finds himself staring at what he calls a white cornucopia, which sounds  like the sort of white, paper cups that people serve snowcones in. He stares at one of these discarded cornucopias and decides that there is money at the bottom. He wants to go steal it but a policeman is near.

Then I heard the policeman cough – and why did it suddenly occur to me to do the same? I stood up and coughed, repeating the cough three times so he would be sure to hear it. Now, won’t he jump for that paper cone when he comes near? I sat rejoicing over this joke, I rubbed my hands in ecstasy and swore magnificently. His nose will stretch when he sees that! After this trick, he’ll want to sink into the hottest puddle in hell!

It’s hard to follow but the protagonist thinks that the policeman will find silver in the cone and… And what? I don’t know, but the protagonist is certain it will be a bitter joke. The policeman finds the cone, picks it up, and throws it away, and this also somehow becomes fodder for the strange theater in the protagonist’s mind.

I sat there with tears in my eyes, hiccuping from shortness of breath, out of my mind with feverish laughter. I started to talk aloud, told myself the story of the paper cone, mimicked the gestures of the poor policeman, peeked into my empty hand, and repeated again an again: He coughed when he threw it away!

The narrator is clearly quite mad and there are so many irrational scenes in this book that it is hard to know the purpose of them other than to show the narrator, a weak man before he hits truly dire straits, is unhinged entirely and made completely irrational by the hunger he suffers. And he suffers greatly – more on this later.

But harder to understand are the times when he feels compelled to engage in this theater with no real explanation other than some sort of violent, uncontrollable need.

The Protagonist Cannot Act in His Own Best Interests
I’ve already mentioned how the protagonist, in possession of ten kroner given to him by his erstwhile girlfriend, decides to give the money away to the woman who has evicted him in an attempt to show her that he is a man of honor. I’ve also mentioned how he will pawn even his clothes in order to give money to beggars who are likely not as poorly off as he is. But his self-destructiveness, ironically presented in a manner wherein he is trying to preserve his ego, knows no bounds.

Take this scene when he finds himself locked out of the workshop he sleeps in. The police cannot help him open the door, but urge him to register at the police station as homeless. Doing so will give him a place to sleep and a means to obtain food, two things he needs in order to be able to write. Well, those things can happen if the protagonist is honest with himself and accepts that he is homeless and starving, but he doesn’t. He gives a false name to the officer on duty, telling him that he is a journalist who, after a night of revelry, lost his keys and wallet. The officer on duty gives the protagonist a knowing smile (and presumably mistakes the protagonist’s dreadful appearance as the result of hard-partying) and takes him to a cell.

But in the cell, the derangement caused by a lack of food and the madness latent in the protagonist both rear forth and prevent him from being able to rest in any manner. His mind races all evening, he experiences extreme highs (he creates a new word – Kuboaa – though he has no idea what it means) and extreme lows. He slept for a brief period of time once the sun began to rise, and the next morning realized that the gentlemen who had presented themselves as they were would receive food tickets. Since he was a temporarily impecunious reporter who claimed he had slept like a “cabinet minister” the police felt no need to offer him free food.

A ticket, a ticket for me, too. I hadn’t eaten for three endless days and nights. A loaf of bread! But no one offered me a ticket and I didn’t dare ask for one. That would have caused suspicion instantly. They would have wanted to poke around in my private affairs and find out who I really was – then they would arrest me for giving false information.

Even had he come clean, the police most likely would have chided him for his pride and permitted him a place to sleep and ensured he had food to eat. Maintaining this lie cuts the protagonist off from a major form of support that, had he utilized it, would have given him the foundation upon which to write. And while I mentioned that I don’t get the idea the protagonist is a particularly good writer, if I discuss it in depth, it would make this long essay even longer. But that this man refuses to do anything that will give him the comfort to write makes it seem as if writing is a very secondary thing to him, almost like a prop, a further form of theater to show himself as an intellectual. He does write but he cannot make enough money to support himself and his point-blank inability to foster his talent makes one wonder how much talent he even has.

There are other scenes, where he could have collected on debts owed to him but chose not to, where he tried to sell an item but gives it away to someone who has no money to purchase it. The protagonist is quite simply a man who has no idea how to behave in a manner ensuring self-preservation.

Starvation and Insanity
The protagonist is deranged and part of his mind shows a diseased will, but there can be no mistake that hunger strips his mind of the capacity to think soundly, especially as the book goes on. His hunger is of the sort I associate with death, the pre-terminal state wherein a starving person cannot keep down food because he has been starving for too long. There are times in the book when it is surprising he can even go on, so profound is his hunger. And as detestable as he often appears, one cannot help but feel pity for his plight. Hunger, as the title of the book implies, is the driving force in this book and shapes everything that happens to the protagonist. It may have been exacerbated by his strange need to maintain the appearance of being wealthy, but even had he spent every penny he earned or was given on food, he still would have been chronically hungry.

The book is full of scenes wherein he finally, finally gets access to food but cannot keep it down. He vomits up water, he chews on pieces of wood but real food nauseates him. In one scene, when he finally has money to get a plate of food at a cafe, the results are dire.

The food began to bother me, my stomach felt upset, and I would not be able to hold the food down very long. I walked along emptying my mouth, in every dark crook I passed, fought against the nausea which was making me hollow all over again, clenched my fists, steeled myself, stamped on the sidewalk, and swallowed again in a rage what was trying to come up – all in vain! I ran at last into a doorway, doubled over, blinded from the tears that sprang from my eyes, and vomited everything.

Money, so hard to come by, exchanged for food, and he cannot keep it down. He has clearly been starving for a long time – refeeding syndrome, an often fatal condition, can occur after only a few days of starving. The narrator is very physically sick and it seems that he has no way out. He does ask a man what one should feed a starving person who is beginning to eat and is told boiled milk works well. He gets boiled milk at a cafe and indeed can keep it down. But his poverty does not permit him to coddle his abused stomach this way for long.

It just gets worse for him. Take this pitiful scene:

I was bitterly hungry and didn’t know what to do with my exorbitant appetite. I writhed about on the bench and pulled my knees up against my chest as hard as I could. When it was dark, I shuffled over to the city jail – God knows how I got there – and sat down on the edge of the balustrade, I ripped one of my coat pockets out and started chewing on it…

He is struck with the idea of asking a butcher for a bone, the sort of bones a butcher would give away to someone who wants it for his dog.

I got a bone, a gorgeous little bone with some meat still on it, and put it under my coat. I thanked the man so warmly he looked at me astonished.

“Nothing to thank me for,” he said.

“Oh yes there is,” I said. “This was very good of you.”

He returns to the blacksmith shop, settles into the dark and begins to chew on the bone.

It has no taste at all; a nauseating odor of dried blood rose from the bone, and I started throwing up immediately, I couldn’t help it. I tried again – if only I could keep it down, it would do some good; the problem was to get it to stay down there. But I vomited again. I grew angry, bit fiercely into the meat, ripped off a small piece, and swallowed it by force. That did no good either – as soon as the small pieces became warm in the stomach, up they came again. I clenched my fists madly, started crying from sheer helplessness, and gnawed like a man possessed. I cried so much that the bone became wet and messy with tears. I vomited, swore, and chewed again, cried as if my heart would break, and threw up again. Then I swore aloud and consigned all the powers of the universe to hell.

This was hard for me to read. Very hard. This and all the passages like it. It is all the worse because it is starvation in the midst of plenty. It is a man dying on his feet from a lack of food outside of the constraints of war, genocide, famine or drought. From all accounts, this is something that Hamsun himself experienced and this passage of a man sobbing as his traumatized stomach vomits back up the food he needs to survive is harrowing in its implications because the narrator can not tolerate the ego hit it would take to admit he needs help and yet those around him seem largely indifferent to his suffering. He is starving alone yet with an audience and it is horrible to read and to contemplate. No wonder he acts out such bizarre theater toward those around him – they are watching him die and most don’t seem to care.

Interpretation of the Ending
Because this book evidently mirrors a terrible time in Hamsun’s life – a decade or more of his own suffering – it is tempting to believe the ending is a hopeful one because Hamsun survived and managed to get this book published. In part four, the protagonist, evicted from his home and having given away the money his ex-girlfriend sent him, goes on a sort of rampage, eating cakes and vomiting in the street. He finally goes to the harbor and finds a ship that is sailing to Leeds and then to Cadiz and persuades the captain to take him on as a merchant marine. The captain is reluctant but agrees when the protagonist promises to work hard, even to take two watches if it means he can have the job. The novel ends thusly:

When we were out on the fjord, I straightened up, wet from fever and exertion, looking in toward land and said goodbye for now to the city, to Christiana [Oslo], where the windows of the homes all shone with such brightness.

He’s leaving a place of brightness, where he failed utterly, where he almost starved. But then again, on the ship he will finally receive steady food, perhaps bread and water until he can stomach more. Isn’t he saved? Many seem to think this is the case.

I don’t think so. I think going onto the ship is a form of suicide, and not just because he is going to travel away from a city of brightness.

When the protagonist is in the jail cell, he has a waking dream that tells us quite clearly what he thinks of the harbor, of ships, of the sea.

God in heaven, how black it was! And I started again to think about the harbor, the ships, the dark monsters who lay waiting for me. They wanted to pull me to themselves and hold me fast and sail with me over land and sea, through dark kingdoms no man had ever seen. I felt myself on board ship, drawn on through waters, floating in clouds, going down, down… I gave a hoarse shriek of fear, and hugged the bed; I had been on such a perilous journey, fallen down through the sky like a shot. How good and saved I felt when I grabbed the hard sides of the cot! That is what it is like to die, I said to myself, now I will die.

There is a temptation to say that with death comes rebirth, but this does not have the ring of such an idea to me. Rather, it seems like the sea is where a man who cannot live in the brightness goes, and monsters are waiting for him. They take him down into the sea, kill him and his spirit, initially in clouds, floats down into hell.

For me, joining the merchant ship is the last straw – the protagonist is ready to die.

This is a hard book and I will never read it again. And there are a million ways to look at the text – despite the length of this discussion, I did not discuss much of this book – I barely broke the surface. But if you think you can stomach this sort of madness, this sort of hunger, this sort of repetitive lunacy as a man self-destructs, you will want to read this book. It’s not for everyone. I don’t even think it was for me. But I am glad I read it even as it haunts me.

Author: Mykle Hansen, illustrated by Nate Beaty

Type of Book: Fiction, bizarro, cannibalism

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Okay, it’s like a Jonathan Swift satire mixed with that long riddle people tell on road trips about the man who orders seagull and runs screaming out of the restaurant with a tasty helping of Occupy Wall Street on the side.

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

Comments: Oh, this was a fabulous book, and it gives me an excuse to create a “cannibalism” category. It’s one of those books that is the exception that proves the rule. Hansen tells without showing and 90% of the book comes from the protagonist’s one-sided conversation with a man called Louis, both of which are in chapter one of  What Not to Do When You Write a Novel, but Hansen gets away with it.  Why André’s conversation is one-sided is one of those things I cannot reveal lest I utterly spoil the book. In fact, this is going to be a bear to discuss because I cannot reveal many plot elements without just ruining the book.

Bearing that in mind, here’s as brief a synopsis as my enthusiasm will permit: Aboard the good ship l’Arche, along the coast of an island called Cristobo, André and his partner Marko have been engaging in questionable culinary behaviors. One is that they serve unusual meats to millionaires. They lure in jaded millionaires with offerings like giraffe, dining aboard the ship in monied secrecy. But André and Marko also have an ulterior motive catering to millionaires – millionaires evidently make good eating and André embraces the idea of eating the rich. But millionaires also have friends with ships and the L’Arche is under siege as André and Marko scramble to find a way to escape. Louis, a long-time frenemy of André’s, plays a crucial role in all these goings-on but that’s where I have to stop. To discuss his role will expose too much of the story.

With the synopsis out of the way, but before I begin to discuss the meat of this book, as it were, I need to say that this is one of the better-written bizarro novels. Beautiful word flow, gorgeous word choice, decently-enough edited, I wanted to cry midway through it.  I mean, there were some editing issues, but lately I’ve been smacked in the face and possibly on the ass with several terribly edited books recently and this book was the reward for not chucking out all the strange literature I try to consume and sticking exclusively with Dickens and Austen until the day I die.

And it’s so wonderful that Hansen got that right because this is a novel that demands intense attention to words. When writing of foodie cannibals, one needs a fussy precision and Hansen pulls it off brilliantly. In addition to reasonably clean the text is, Hansen conveys the near-neurotic attention to detail that foodies often exhibit. Not being a foodie myself, I have no idea if this is food-gibberish or not, but it sure has a decided foodie-riff to it.

…before you leave this place I will prepare for you my Millionaire in Limousine: steaming roasted loin of venture capitalist slow-braised in Madeira, served on a bed of squid-ink cabbage poached with chestnuts and Lardons Millionaires. You’ve never had anything like it. I also insist you try my Aspic Sweetbreads of Heiress Dissolu, molded in a swine’s head terrine and tiaraed with clove and apple. So light and delicate, you’d think it’s made of perfumed dreams.

You see André takes very seriously the consumption of long pig.

This is no mere restaurant – it’s a cathedral of food! Pilgrims to l’Arche have by our rare and exquisite flavors been transported, transmigrated, have communed with the great mystery, have wept with joy, have been saved.

Eating rich men is evidently quite a religious experience. And it is through monologue like this that Hansen deftly creates intense characterization. André does very little in this book, and he speaks mainly to Louis, who never responds, but at the end you end up with André as a character-in-full.

André has a specific sort of millionaire he likes to consume. Not just any will do.

It was late morning, a Cristobo waiter named Raoul and I were dumping a bucket of indigestibles over the leeward side, when the asinine scion of some spreadsheet fortune, fresh from Namibia, pulled alongside us on his bright red double-engined landing vessel – dispatched from the belly of a larger service vessel, that in turn follows his father’s truly gargantuan luxury liner around the globe – and deposited this poorly-bled, poorly-iced and shotgun-perforated beast onto our decks – one thousand pounds of unrefrigerated baby giraffe dropped from a crane like an immense spotted bony birdshit without so much as an “are you open?” – and instructed us to drop whatever else we were doing to get it ready for a late supper that evening for his friends. How many friends? What time? Not sure, he said, but save the skin, it’s valuable. And he adjusted his ludicrous sailor’s cap and motored away in a spray of salt water and hundred dollar bills.

That’s the kind of millionaire I like to eat.

And I’m okay with that. Baby giraffe indeed.

And that is the kind of millionaire we serve here at our humble bistro l’Arche: nouveau-riche gadabouts returning from chartered safaris with something they’ve killed. They’re drawn to us like calamari to the lamps of a fishing boat, and with them they bring lions, apes, pandas, eagles, elephants and more. They come to pay reverence to our motto: Consume Quod Interficis.

And again, I’m largely okay with this idea. If one makes a virtue of eating what one kills, perhaps it’s wrong to search for a larger morality in killing millionaires as long as one eats them.

Millionaires in the book, as well as in our current reality, have been taking it on the nose as the economy has been troubled and the poor have been grumbling, and millionaires do like to show their power via excess. André provides access to the ultimate excess.

Killing one another seems to be their latest distraction. An elegant form of internecine warfare has become popular among the rich. They’re armoring their yachts, fitting them with extravagant cannons. They’re arriving at l’Arche under heavier security, with larger and more numerous bodyguards, and their spring fashion is for hand-tooled leather holsters and designer bandoliers.
[...]
Some months back I had an interesting chat with a charming millionaire who posited, over a butter-braised polar bear paw and a second bottle of Riesling, that the world’s rich had been milking one another like an interconnected system of cows for over a decade, without once pausing to ingest any grass. This man called for a great reckoning, a final audit of who owns what and who owes who, and while he didn’t say as much, I imagine his accounting practices were coarser than yours or mine. He seemed to relish the coming struggle: a chance to test his new guns. Millionaires do, I’ve found, enjoy a good struggle, especially when they spot an advantage in the rules.

Curiously, that same millionaire was delivered to our service entrance just a few days later, packed in ice and stripped of belongings – the trophy of another, larger millionaire.

Still, André waxes philosophical about his unsavory blood lust, engaging in rationalizations that make sense but also help him avoid taking on moral baggage:

Food is life, yes, but also: food is death. It’s life eating life. Others must die so that we may live; there’s never enough food for everybody. The decision to live is the decision to kill. The rest is boring details that animals don’t bother with: vegetarianism, veganism, localism, ethical practices, kosherness, organicness – who shall we kill, in others words, and how shall we kill them? Those are the highest values that we may aspire to, we who have decided to live.

I did try to be a vegetarian once, but vegetarianism no longer impresses me. They never wonder where their fields come from, or who had to be removed to make room for the plow. They have no sense of history. Show me a farm, and I’ll show you a battlefield. Vegetarians fetishize inaction, as I once did. They can brag about the evils they don’t do, but what is the good they do instead.

Well, one would assume the good they do instead is not eat giraffe, panda and their neighbor’s kid, but André is not really willing to make such distinctions. But as I read, I realized, to my own terrible shame, that if André had, in fact, just stuck to eating terrible humans, I would have been on André’s side.

But amusing to me was how after André justifies his semi-savage “kill for food” philosophical, he follows it with a sort of apology that one can sort sum up as “return the pain”:

The millionaires, they do not suffer. Yes, they do on occasion have problems – loneliness, infidelity, deceased pets – but generally the millionaires delegate their actual suffering to others. A great deal of human suffering is, in fact, the misplaced suffering of millionaires.

Here at l’Arche we return their lost suffering to them. We help them understand how the other half hurts. That is but one of the many elite services we provide.

Yeah, being skinned, spatchcocked like a chicken and cooked slowly can bring suffering into sharp focus, if only for a few minutes.

But the parts I enjoyed the best were when André describes how his despicable palate serves a greater justice.

The very existence of the millionaires, in the shoddiest of mismanaged countries and at the tops of the most modern western hotels, is an ancient and confounding puzzle. How do they convince the rest of humanity to feed them? How do they dodge the obvious complaint: that they take too much and give too little? In a world of enlightened cooperation they would be banned, taxed, reprimanded, even jailed – or so one would think, but even the socialists have their millionaires. Power simply seems to concentrate, like clots in the blood or lumps in the gravy. In a world of self-interest and greed you’d expect millionaires to be the constant victims of robbery, assault, kidnapping – and true, these things do happen, but with nothing near the frequency needed to make a dent in the millionaire problem.

Take out the part about their power and this is not dissimilar to the reasons why people hunt deer in Central Texas.

André has what he calls an ethical philosophy regarding eating the glut of millionaires:

Let us husband them well, the millionaires. Give them their yachts, their many homes, many cars, many hand-stitched suits of clothing. Send them to the best schools and largest boardrooms. This is what makes them millionaires – what makes them fat and rich and wholesome. Give them the best life that an edible creature could possibly live. It’s what the new organic cattle ranchers have tried to do with their beef, of course, but to a far greater degree than has ever been attempted – indeed to the greatest degree possible. Spare no effort in fattening the rich, work for them and tithe to them and massage them and groom them and put their needs ahead of our own. As it has always been, so let it remain.

Until! Until that day comes when we require their sacrifice, for the greater good. Oh, the ceremony of it: picture this year’s wealthiest industrialists proceeding to the regal altar, bedecked in finest Gucci and Versace, encrusted with fourteen karat gold jewelry and sophisticated personal electronics. We shall thank them publicly, cheer them sincerely, stun them carefully, slaughter them with dignity and roast them with joy.

Free-range millionaires. I still have to think a lot of them would be very gamy.

This book was a big surprise for me. I was not prepared to enjoy a book about eating the likes of Donald Trump so much. The book offers some fine writing, a tense plot toward the end, and enjoyable lectures delivered by a lunatic. I wish I could reveal more of André’s struggles but to do so really would spoil the plot. So buy this book and find out the rest. Find out why Louis is so quiet. Find out if one should fear Marko. Find out how the millionaires respond. Highly recommended.

Mar 27 (7 days ago)

My beloved husband,

I heard you speak of needing space on the Apple TV. I believe I have found a way to get a small chunk of space. Consider deleting the following Horror titles:

Ominous looks like it was cast by a blind man, shot with a cell phone and sound mastered in the dishwasher. Wanted to die after ten minutes.

Removal sucks more than anything has ever before sucked. It’s got the Fight Club trope of OH NO IT WAS ME but no one can act and for some reason Elliott Gould has a ten second cameo. It needs to go away.

The Task was so awful I now have cancer. Of the butt.

Trapped Ashes is a collection of assholes telling unscary stories (one involves cannibal breasts) to get out of a scary house. It could only be worse if my mom had directed it.

Urban Explorer had zero plot and was offensive to every sensibility. Nazi tunnels in Berlin, yay, let’s visit them with nary a gun to defend us from the racist chunnel dwellers we are sure to find there.

Vlog… words fail me. Seriously. I almost want you to keep it so I can dare you to watch it.

Last Breath is what happens when people decide to write a hackneyed script that no one cares about, cast their friends who cannot act, and decide to film it and call it indie horror instead of a homemade piece of amateurish crap that could interest no one with access to a Rubik’s cube.

Grave Encounters sucked the rancid teat of TV’s Ghost Hunters. Oh no, there are real ghosts in this here place that crooked paranormal researchers are exploring. Who would have thought such a plot turn could happen? Who, I ask you? But more to the point, we need to ask, “Who cares?” No one, that’s who.

Fingerprints stars two sisters who look about as related as any two random people might, features an actress who got her start on Laguna Beach on MTV and “acts” via showing her legs and guest stars the animated corpse of Sally Kirkland wielding an axe.

Exorcismus is the sort of film wherein you want the girl to remain demon possessed. You may wonder why the hell the movie wasn’t about the girl on the the promotional cover – I can’t answer that but I suspect it would have been a far better movie than the piece of shit I watched. You also want her parents to die and her boyfriend to grind himself into hamburger, but neither happens so why bother.

Episode 50: See Grave Encounters.

Dario Argento’s The Card Player involves cutting edge computer technology from 1987, a plot so simple Gertie probably wrote it, and it’s mining a trope so overmined the shaft is gonna collapse.

The Cottage features the dude who played Gollum and I couldn’t last longer than ten minutes to see if it featured anyone else because it was all full of “Who fucking cares?” during the first few minutes.

Credo ( The Devil’s Curse ) is plotless, pointless, and you sort of want all the crappy-acting kids to die. Also seems like the sound was mixed in a Port Authority toilet.

Coffin features two living people buried in a coffin who are fighting for life and yet somehow the film still lacks tension. Oh, it’s a ransom film. Oh, it’s a “punish the adulterers” film. Oh, it’s a piece of fucking shit.

Bitten has Jay from Jay and Silent Bob fame when he was still clearly in the throes of some sort of drug addiction and a whiny, often naked vampiress with one of the most interesting overbites ever seen in a leading lady (note – twas not caused by tooth prosthetics). Lots of bodies stuffed in trunks and no one smells a thing and I think if you decide to keep this one, you should have to watch it with me as I mock your pain.

Bereavement makes no fucking sense, is horrible and exploitative (because making kids watch sex murders is a fresh, new, interesting hook, amirite?), and also who fucking cares?

Beneath – I will contact a lawyer if you don’t delete this piece of made for MTV shitburger. Don’t test me on this.

Bane is a bunch of really unremarkable British women tortured and killed for some sort of stupid project involving what looks like an animatronic roach with fangs sporting a large Giger-style hat. Someone inexplicably cast their boneless aunt, the one with the frizzy perm, and I also suspect these women were not given a script.

Amusement is the touching story of a kindergarten vivisectionist who decides to stalk and kill the three girls who were sickened by his mouse-torture exhibit for the school diorama contest. He tracks them down and kidnaps them as adults in a Rube-Goldbergian manner and takes them to what appears to be a disused grain silo with interrogation rooms. Four idiots enter, only one survives, and it’s the one who decided to go to sleep in a room with a human-sized clown doll in a chair. Hardly seems fair.

Medium Raw features a hottie psychologist in an asylum for the extremely criminally insane where people have sex against the walls of cells containing superhuman killing machines for the thrill and people bring their small daughters who wear red coats to work. The sexy psychologist’s husband sounds exactly like Ryan O’Reilly from Oz and there’s a whole subplot with him that involves lotsa flashbacks. The best part of this film was the cannibal lady who, sadly, failed to eat the protagonist, which would have been the best possible ending, in my book. So stupid that if you don’t delete it, you owe me ten bucks on general principle.

Needle is Saw with needles, combined with the first Hellraiser, with even worse actors.

The Quiet features Jack Bauer’s daughter as a bitch cheerleader with Kenny Power’s baby-mama as a best friend. We have beloved character actors Martin Donovan and Edie Falco selling their souls for a paycheck. There’s also a brunette pretending to be deaf and she’s, like, key to the plot but she’s not naked enough for the target market for this film. Incest, murder, who fucking cares. Notable only because of boobs, some of them Carmela Soprano’s.

This should clear up some space.

As always, your devoted wife

This comment, however, went unanswered because I simply did not know what to say. It’s stayed with me for a while because… well, I’ll show you the comment, left to my entry about John Coleman’s book about conspiracy theory and disease:

Im really nobody special. No special degree nothing fancy..just experience. All I can really say is dr. Coleman is gutsy. He taked a big risk. For that I commend him. I will never see another Dr for as long as I live. Its too bad …im only 22 and really wanted a family one day. Dont think I can do that now…its ashame fear runs through me knowing what theyll do to that new born baby. dr. c if you ever read this…I rrally think youd be interested in hearing what my father has come to find. I think you got it but theres more…much more. Maybe you know though, maybefor your own safety you stay quiet on the other things…probably smart however I hopeone day we meet face to face… I feel lonely in this. Its too bad my family wasnt part of the elite, born into it. Four families in this world striving for world domination. Can you guess who they are ? My dad figuredit out. Somehow someway I hope you get tomeet him.

This comment bothers me because it challenges my attitude wherein I enjoy conspiracy and wallow in its lunacy. I do challenge it here from time to time, but I also take an attitude wherein I just revel in the panoply of bizarre belief. But this comment makes it clear that there is a price to be paid with bad belief. Here is a young woman (or so she says – this could be anyone) who thinks that she cannot have a family because something bad will happen to her newborn child. Something so bad it makes her ashamed to think of it. There are other problems with this comment, but that is the one that stood out to me the most – the loss of potential family because of some bizarre, unspecified fear.

Bad belief is so bad because it discourages independent thinking. Bad belief is almost always black and white thinking, an either/or proposition that leaves no room for any middle ground. The middle ground is important because it is a place of no pressure wherein people can find the answers they need. But when you think God/god/Allah/whatever dictates a belief from which there can be no deviation, when you believe that there is a conspiracy of elites set to destroy the world and control your children, it’s hard, if not impossible, to find a middle ground. And without a middle ground that encourages critical thinking, you end up with a 22-year-old who is so scared of the world that she cannot even think of having a baby. She is so certain of external control over her life that she cannot even research alternatives to hospital births, like home births or birthing centers. Half the women I know give birth at home and selectively vaccinate their children. Some question the need for constant well-baby exams. Whether or not I agree with these decisions, there are alternatives to simply refusing to have a child because Doctors Are Evil. But bad belief makes it impossible to see any alternative.

Here’s another comment that alarmed the hell out of me. It alarmed me so much that after a basic Google, I determined that the person possibly existed and I took the editorial decision to X-out all of her identifying information. Rather than reproduce the entire comment, here are some quotes:

I spent the last year worried sick about my daughter(4)-I had never heard of ritualistic abuse in my life, but was researching other types of abuse to see if I could find out what was going on with her. I came across one line about creatures in hooded robes-and ended up on the floor screaming uncontrolably (Ive never been affected like this before, but have always had a deep fear of the occult). I asked my mom about it (a pastor) and she informed me that when the ritualistic abuse scare was taking place in Xxxxxx in the early 90′s that my father was called in as a specialist (he was the chaplain at XX).

So she was worried about her daughter and researched abuse to find an answer. Okay, I guess that is not too unusual, but then she goes on to say she has always been terrified about the occult and that her father was a specialist in ritual abuse and yet she had never, ever heard of such a thing. That raises red flags for me because when you have been taught the world is flat, you live in fear you will fall over the edge. If she was raised with a father who was a specialist in ritual abuse cases, every scab is going to be evidence of torture, every toddler tall tale is going to be direct evidence of actual events because children never lie. It seems impossible that she could have been raised with a father who specializes in such things and never have heard of them.

The next day, when my children came back from their dads (weve been separated for about a year), I prayed for them. Neither of them had heard a word about any of this. When I told them that Jesus gives us power over the scary things, and that they dont have power over us, my children went insane. They started tearing through the house-they talked about sleeping in coffins, rape, spiders, my daughter put her fingers down her throat and told me there was a bad baby inside her and that she was going to have a new mom and a new dad…

If you have read anything about the bad approaches used by therapists and pastors to elicit testimony from children in Satanic and Ritual Abuse cases, you can already see bad things at work here. How does she know the children did not know she prayed? How does she know they are not acutely aware of her searching endlessly for what she thinks is wrong with them? She was raised by a “ritual abuse specialist” and she is so worked up she left a comment on an entry about a book discussing the CIA’s involvement with rock musicians – she’s not really being as discreet as she thinks. And the kids’ reactions? One has no idea what she has left out of the story but again, once you start planting ideas that Jesus protects us from scary things, don’t be surprised if your kids begin to speak of scary things. And don’t be surprised if they continue to overreact and spin stories about coffins, rape and impossible toddler pregnancies. And if they do, don’t assume the toddler pregnancy is real, or that the coffins are real because once you begin to go down that road, you are victimizing your child without meaning to. But the really unfortunate part is this:

I told CPS, and they sent me to a psychiatrist/psychologist thinking that Im insane. My tests all came back normal. I know my children-they couldnt have made that up

So, CPS investigated and determined the problem is the mother. I’m not sure what psychiatrist would tell her she is insane when all her “tests” were normal. I have no idea what test she could be talking about. But instead of gain some perspective and engage in reasonable fact finding and determine reality from fantasy (does my daughter show signs of rape, how could a toddler be pregnant, have I ever seen a coffin at my husband’s place and if not, is there a place he could reasonably hide one from my view, have I been tainted by my father’s odd beliefs, etc.), she digs in further, insisting that a four-year-old could never come up with outrageous stories, even with a frantic, religious woman with a history of questionable belief questioning her. Because even though she says she only talked about Jesus, I wonder what a hidden camera of her examination of her children would reveal. Regardless, I think of this woman from time to time and wonder what the hell is happening to her children. I really hope this was someone yanking my chain. I really hope there is no woman raised by a dogpatch Ted Gunderson mentally torturing her kids.

And just to end this discussion of my comments (and be glad I don’t reproduce the e-mails I receive – be very glad), here’s one that’s creepy in a way that at least does not leave me worried for two possibly fictional children or an undereducated woman whose fear prevents her from having a child. This gem was left in the comments for Part Two of my discussion of 2083. The link takes you to this video:

Oh dear lord, that voice. This is evidently a piece of writing from a person called Mox Mäkelä and the video links to a site where you can experience more creepy, odd videos. Hurrah for things that won’t make James Randi depressed or Penn Jillette shit blood.

Author: Tony Rauch

Type of Book: Fiction, short story collection, bizarro, gently odd

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It has enough qualities of bizarro and the gently odd that it is not mainstream reading fare.

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

Comments: I’ve read Rauch before and found his collection of short stories in the book Laredo to be serviceable and entertaining enough to be worthy of a good review. However, Eyeballs Growing All Over Me… Again is a better collection. Less verbose, less neurotic, more confident – this collection is all together a tighter, cleaner, more relevant book. Rauch’s confidence as a storyteller has improved since I last read him. His stories show their purpose without a lot of hemming and hawing, sometimes even eschewing what I would consider a typical ending or a normal resolution. Not every story in this collection worked for me, but those that did not strike a chord likely failed to reach me for subjective reasons. With one exception, there isn’t an objectively bad story in the bunch.

That is not to say there were not problems. Like almost every bizarro book I read, this book had editing problems that were intrusive enough for me to notice. It’s a shame when an author writes a very good book and routine editing does not catch basic mistakes. This is an issue I continue to have with bizarro books as a whole and one I suspect will not go away anytime soon, yet I also suspect I will keep mentioning it until it stops annoying me. The most egregious issue with this book is that hyphens and em-dashes are used interchangeably. The interruption when I read hyphenated words and had to go back because I realized they were hyphenated and not words connected by an emdash was intrusive to the flow of the book. Perhaps this is a problem only in the e-book. Perhaps it was caught and I was reading an old copy. Who knows, but bear in mind this book did not escape the problem I often have with bizarro editing in other areas as well. On the other hand, this book does overcome one of the biggest complaints I personally receive about bizarro – the books are too short. While I don’t mind paying even for short books, I know many look at book purchases using a cost-benefit analysis and often find bizarro books too short for the price. That won’t be a problem with this Rauch collection.

This book is divided into three sections of stories and there are too many for me to discuss all of them, so I will stick to the ones I consider to be the best, though interestingly, I think the story from which this book takes its title is the weakest in the collection.

The collection begins with the story, “The Stench.” A man comes home to find an enormous, very smelly monster has taken up residence in his home while he was away. His wife is wearing an inhaler mask and has no good explanation for why the monster is there other than it may have wandered in because it’s been hot outside. Still, they play host to the creature, exercising a mild, suburban politeness.

The beast turns its big shaggy brown head to look at me.

Whatever it is, it’s an ugly mother, that’s for sure. I stand and nod to it in a friendly greeting, then tilt my head to look at it one way, and then another. I step forward, hang my hat on the top of the coatrack without looking, and walk across the living room and sit down on the couch, settling in next to the brown, raggy beast. I look him over. Gnats buzz about him. He holds a glass of water on his leg. At first glance, in proportion to him, it looks like a glass of water, but it’s actually an entire plastic pitcher of water.

Despite having a monster in their house, the couple go about their evening and retire to bed wearing inhaler masks, bickering gently over what they should do about the beast. They decide that if the thing is to stay in the house, they should trim it and wash it like one would a stray dog, but when they go to find it, it is gone. They feel vaguely disappointed and the man feels like he missed a chance to contribute to society in some way. He concludes:

“Honey, let’s have children,” I exhale and nod desperately. “Lots and lots of children.”

Where the Wild Things Are played itself out in his home and while not averse to it, the man and his wife decided to clean and sanitize the monster, to make it a family member, rather than revel in the mystery of it, wearing masks to blunt the reality of what we all overlook when we are children – that our fantasies never work in real life and can all too often stink outright. But rather than mourn that lost innocence, the man decides to create more innocence, so that the next time a monster comes in, the monster will be appreciated for what it is. I really liked this story.

In “Gigantic” a huge robot rips the roof off a couple’s house. The man and woman have a strange relationship with the robot, a relationship from the past, and they sense the robot’s loneliness as it picks its way delicately through the neighborhood.

“Send Krupac Through the Portal” is a story that crams into it all kinds of unlikely elements. A lovelorn “nice guy,” time travel, government conspiracy, the number 23, quantum physics in the form of string theory and so much more. A man who loves and is not loved in return decides to visit other dimensions because the object of his affection lets him down easy, telling him:

…that maybe in another time, another place, we were meant to be together, but that she just doesn’t feel it in the here and now. Not now. She just needs time, she says. Maybe in a little while. Maybe in the future. Maybe.

The narrator finds access to a technology that will permit him to find all his other selves, the derivations of himself spread out across dimensions, the copies of himself as he made slightly different decisions and ended up with a different life. His friend Desmond offers him the following opportunity:

He’s thinking maybe the lab guys can zip me into another time stream one of these nights and maybe I can find a Margo that is interested in starting a relationship with me there. She might not even know me at all in one of those other timelines as our paths may not have crossed due to various arbitrary factors that would’ve kept us apart.

So the techs find a parallel world wherein the protagonist died young, several of them where he no longer exists and will not encounter himself, and he sets off to find his love, stalking her across dimensions, certain his life in that current dimension will in no way compare to the potential bliss if he can only find Margo in that other place where she promised him she could possibly love him.

The “New Kid” is a sweet tale of a new boy in school who has an amazing new way to approach tabletop football and an interesting elixir that helps him quickly close the gap between being an outsider and a kid with a new friend. The tabletop football description, full of well-written, kid-sized fantasy, is a delightful scene.

“People Have Been Drifting Away Lately” is an ethereal, lovely magical realism piece. It does what it says on the tin, employing beautiful language. It’s a story of detachment but it’s a calm, peaceful detachment.

Suddenly one of them sort of curls up. He is an older gentleman, all dressed up in an old suit. He seems to flatten out and his body sort of squares up. Right before me, he says, “Oh my,” as this happens. It starts slowly, as if all the air is being sucked out of him. And a bit of wind catches him and he sort of lifts off the ground and just hangs there in the air before us for a moment, then a gust of wind takes him higher like twenty feet in the air. And he slowly spins there in the sky, almost like a leaf or a kite. It’s like a dream, but like watching someone else’s dream from a distance.

Rauch, though much of this collection lacks traditional endings, concluded this story in the best way possible. This was my favorite of his stories.

I also, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, loved “The Bug.” A father and a son are doing battle against human-sized insects infesting their home. But even though the bugs are a menace, the father prevents his son from battering one with a baseball bat. Instead the father and the bug engage in some sort of scrum until the father wrests the morning paper from the insect and bests it in combat. They just want to go into the cool basement and the father cannot fault them for that but he is annoyed that they never learn their lesson as he pummels them in hand-to-hand combat.

My dad slowly walks down to it, bends to reach for some of its legs, swings it around and begins dragging its limp body down the walk to the trash out in the back alley. “I call this one Artie… Man, I tell ya,” he sighs, “They never learn.”

“You’ve seen this one before?” I gasp.

“Oh, sure. He knows the place pretty well,” Dad nods, “…He slept in your bed one night when you were staying over at your friend Terry’s place.”

“Oh yuck.”

“Yeah, they like to make themselves at home. You should’ve seen him there – snuggled up all warm and cozy like. Your mom actually took a picture of him. Said he looked cute.”

“The Procedure” is a sort of unlikely bizarro story in the beginning. It starts as a Gothic tale of a young child being rushed to the doctor in the night with a mysterious illness. A mother wakes her son to tell him his sister did not recover and their father would be bringing her home soon. The mother gasps, unable to explain the terrible accident and the boy does not understand. Then it takes a left turn, because when the father arrives with the sister, she is not a corpse waiting to be buried in the family plot. She just has a goat head. But more than just having a goat’s head, her essence of being human is gone. The little boy is made uneasy as he deals with this terrible change.

He feels betrayed by life, as if a promise had been made a long time ago that these things would never happen, and here something like this was now suddenly allowed, without preparation or warning, as if his sister were sacrificed so others might live out normal lives free from the reaches of such things.

In a way, that gothic tone continues even after we are aware of the goat head girl. Looming unease, the hint of future psychological unspooling, the loss of innocence, potential madness. This was a very effective story.

There are other stories, some very good, guaranteed to satisfy all kinds of bizarro tastes. A strange, stalkery man discovers his neighbor’s clone factory with some fairly disgusting descriptions along the way. A charming vignette of tiny, stampeding elephants. A man whose head grows to an enormous size, whose teenaged child is the only one with any sort of idea of how to react to the situation and is disregarded. A touching story about a strange plant given as a gift that rewards the recipient years later in an unexpected way. A good chunk of this book verges into the strip of literary land wherein bizarro and paranormal fiction overlap. If you think you can stomach the emdash/hyphen substitutions and other small editing issues, I recommend this book. The writing is at once creepy, romantic, strange, and sweet, and the stories are imaginative, amusing, and thoughtful. It’s a very good collection.

Editor: John G. H. Oakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANGER

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

I say that doesn’t work all the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It means everything to me.

Do you see? – It means everything to me.

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

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

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

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

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

Also, lots of people have been sending me books to read and I appreciate it. However, I am behind because of many reasons that have nothing to do with the plague but have everything to do with personal organization. So if you sent me a book and I said I would read it and discuss it, it will happen, in the fullness of time. The only exception would be if I began reading it and decided that even a crushingly horrible review would not be in your best interest. But that’s only happened once so I don’t see that happening.

In the mean time, let me share some links.

Here is the website of Gabriella Chana, a writer who thinks that she is genetically half Catherine the Great and half King David, who has a soul bond, or some such thing, to Brent Spiner, the dude who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Jesuits are keeping them apart, and she has a list of hot, Hollywood stars who want to marry her but all she can do is have mind sex with them. Gerard Butler, Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Jackman and Brent Spiner all long for her, evidently, but cannot marry her due to the Jesuits, though they somehow manage to leave awkward comments on her message board. Plan to devote hours to reading and reviewing Chana’s (aka Gail Chord) YouTube videos. I don’t know why George Clooney has yet to want to marry Chana, but I think it has something to do with the fact that he dates so much the Jesuits cannot keep him in cloned women that have babies to force him to marry them. Thanks to Ted the Romanian for this enormous time suck. Truly lunatic, so lunatic that I feel like it has to be a hoax but it probably isn’t.

Less involved but equally demented (though definitely not a hoax) is this site devoted to the theory that Stephen King killed John Lennon. There’s a book about it and you can be sure that I will be reading this book. Well, it’s actually a booklet, but it seems worth a read. I can only imagine that the reason that Stephen King has not sued the man behind this site is because the theory is so devoid of anything approaching reality that there was really no reason to shut him down. But I found it pretty interesting so you may, too.

Hopefully, this trend of being sick constantly is coming to an end and I can get stuff moving here. Clearly I am not a stoic who can work through such things. I’m pretty sure I would have been one of those people who died very young before antibiotics, vaccines and a modern infrastructure that supports the weak. Bear with me, please.

Down side is that having strep and a sinus infection blows colon. Up side is that they both respond pretty well to antibiotics. So you know, hurrah for modern medicine.

Despite falling ill, I kept trying to work and was going to post an entry about a book dealing with writings from mentally ill people. I worked on it as I was sickening, but glancing over it, it reads pretty much the way one would expect from a person with a high fever and a tendency toward verbosity. So I will work on it and come back here Monday, free of snot and chills, and hopefully post an entry that boasts some level of coherence.

If the antibiotic horse pills knock some of this out and I am safe to be around others, I may go to Domy Books to see a presentation from Process Books. You can read all about it here, and if you are in or near Austin, come. I would really like to meet Isis Aquarian, as well as Adam Parfrey. If you see a short, fat, dazed woman on the arm of a man with an interesting goatee preventing her from wandering into traffic in a fever-haze and you’ll know it’s me.

Otherwise, see you back here Monday. Get hand sanitizer and curse anyone who sneezes in your presence.