Crash: The Limits of Car Safety, Nicholas Faith
It’s got the same name as J.G. Ballard’s book and David Cronenberg’s now notorious film of J.G. Ballard’s book, but it could never have attracted as much attention, presumably because a fiction about people deriving sexual pleasure from deaths and injuries in cars is much more important than the reality of deaths and injuries in cars. Rather in the way the fact that Princess Di died was much more important than why she died – which was because she was travelling in a grossly overpowered machine in a crowded city.
Lots more examples of the psychological paradoxes and lunacies of our love affair with the car can be produced, and this book produces them:
[D]uring Ulster’s quarter-century of Troubles, more deaths have been reported from road accidents than from the civil war.But road deaths aren’t deliberate, resulting from malice aforethought, so there’s no satisfying moral frisson to be had from them and they get ignored. Plus, we simply don’t like to face the truth – it’s too horrible to face it. Unless you stay inside all your life, you have to get near cars sometimes, which means that you can die in a very unpleasant and painful way by being hit by one, whether you’re inside another car or not. It’s much worse if you’re not, of course, because pedestrians take sixth or seventh place in the priorities of city-planners and architects. And car-designers:
One gesture that motor manufacturers could make an effort to reduce pedestrian injury would be to make the front of cars more pedestrian-friendly. The most dangerous vehicles are those with high ground clearance and ornaments, especially bull-bars – designed to show that the owner is used to herding cattle or elephants. These should be forbidden (or, at least, their owners assumed to be guilty if they ever hit a pedestrian).They won’t be forbidden, because some people think they look good and they make cars more expensive, which helps the profits of the manufacturers, who have been putting profit above people for a long time. Cadillacs, for example, used to have
a prominent knife-like projection just above the instrument panel. It was designed to prevent reflection of the instrument panel onto the windshield. To accomplish this minor task, they produced as lethal a device as is seen in any American car.And was it removed when this was pointed out? Maybe. If that didn’t interfere with profits. During the investigation into the way cars built by Ford were catching fire very easily, an American investigator
found various crucial Ford documents, one of which was a letter from the Ford Motor Company arguing why they should not make fuel-tank system improvements. They said that there will be 180 burn deaths per year at $200,000 value per burn death, there will be 180 serious burn injuries at $67,000 value per serious burn injury, and there will also be thousands of burned vehicles and there was a value on that. When you added all those numbers together it came out to an annual benefit of $50 million. Ford said we can fix the problem for $11 per vehicle but if you multiply the $11 per vehicle by the many millions of vehicle made per year, that came out to $150 million. So Ford was arguing that it was cheaper to let ’em burn.The same kind of designers and the same kind of priorities were putting cars on the roads in Britain and Europe at the same time – and still are – and if car-manufacturers here were getting up to the same tricks as some American ones it’s quite possible that they got away with it, because we don’t have the same freedom of information laws:
Perhaps the most nefarious example of GM [General Motors]’s power emerged only in the 1970s through a Senate investigation. This revealed that it had headed a group of major companies that had bought and then shut down the light rail systems used for mass transit in Los Angeles, replacing it[,] partially and inadequately, with buses, nine out of ten of which were made by GM. The 1964 riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles were directly traceable to the inhabitants’ inability to get to work by public transport.That sort of thing shouldn’t be unexpected, but some of the other facts in the book should be. Seat-belts save lives, don’t they? Well, yes, of course they do. Or do they? Maybe not. Studies have been done that show they don’t seem to have had any effect, because they make drivers feel safer, drive faster, and crash more often and with worse effects. Paradoxical, but “paradoxical” is a word that comes to mind a lot when you read this book. Cars have very strange effects on our psychology and for all the huge damage they do and the deaths and injuries they cause, we don’t seem prepared to do anything about them.
Football Against the Enemy, Simon Kuper
Despite everything, football – in the true sense of the word – is still the best, and most beautiful, sport on earth and disliking it because of some of the people who take part in or run it would be like disliking the English language because Tony Blair speaks it or Will Self writes in it. English is bigger than them and football is bigger than sets of Red Devil golf-clubs. It even has good books written about it. This, unlike Nick Hornby’s far better-known Fever Pitch, is one of them. Hornby reminds me of a nose-picker. Yes, he may have devoted a great deal of time to his hobby and derived a great deal of pleasure from it, but why tell the world?
You don’t need to ask that question about this book, because football is the world’s most popular sport and this book is an exploration of how it influences the world’s culture and politics in all manner of strange and unexpected ways. Sometimes disturbing ways too. Or amusing ones. Or both:
The general director agreed to an interview (for free) and the next day I found him in his office. It is basic and battered and located in the basement of the Omnisports Stadium, just a few doors down from the room where he kept 120 pygmies from the Cameroonian rainforests locked up last summer. Milla [a Cameroonian star at the 1990 World Cup] had invited the pygmies to play a few games at the Omnisports, to raise money for their health and education, but he imprisoned them there, issued them with guards (one of whom wore a Saddam Hussein T shirt) and seldom fed them. A tournament spokesman explained to Reuters: “They play better if they don’t eat too much”. As for the imprisonment: “You don’t know the pygmies. They are extremely difficult to keep in control”. The Omnisports cook concurred: “These pygmies can eat at any time of the day and night and never have enough”. The little hunters themselves were too frightened to comment.Absurdity, as the Theatre of the Absurd taught us, can be cruel as well as funny, and Africa can be an absurd place, to the fullest extent of both senses. Football, here as elsewhere, reflects regional character:Their tournament was a disaster. Team names included Bee-sting of Lomie and the aptly named Ants of Salapoumbe, but only 50 fans bought tickets, and most of these came strictly to shout abuse at the pygmies.
Recently, three contracts have appeared for the sale of one player from Torpedo Moscow to Olympiakos Piraeus. One contract is for the Greek tax inspectors, one they show to the player, and the third is the real contract, but no-one knows which is which. (ch. 5, “The Secret Police Chief at Left-Half”)The former Soviet Union is riddled with corruption, and so is its football. You’ll also learn in this chapter that clubs from Eastern Europe with “Dynamo” in their names were usually set up and run by the Secret Police. That is why they were so unpopular, unless they managed to associate themselves with nationalist aspirations, as Dynamo Kiev did. Kuper devotes a chapter to the club, with fascinating details of the “science of football” developed there that allowed Kiev to dominate European football during the mid-’80s with a team of super-fast, super-fit “robots”.
Though one wonders whether pharmacology played its part in their success, as it may have done during the 1982 World Cup, hosted and won by Argentina. Two Argentine forwards, Kuper writes, carried on running for an hour or two after one game, in order to work off drugs they had been injected with on the orders of Argentina’s military dictators. Winning the World Cup was important for public morale, and the generals were prepared to go to great lengths to help the team win it.
Few other sports can affect the mood of an entire nation for better or worse like that, and none can do it as powerfully as football. That makes football uniquely susceptible to corruption, and uniquely placed to reflect national character. Football isn’t the world, but you can find much of what’s important in the world and its people there. If you find yourself wondering how, let Kuper show you, all from the rivalry between Holland and Germany to the Pope’s season ticket at Barcelona by way of an American journalist who holds 0·3% of the shares in Charlton Athletic.
The only complaint I have about the book is the prose, which betrayed occasional tendencies towards one of my pet hates: what Fowler’s Modern English Usage describes as “elegant variation”: that is, referring to a “spade” as a “spade” once, then as a “pedally operated earth-moving implement” before you refer to it as a “spade” again. It’s an aesthetic flaw and that’s a shame in a book about the world’s most aesthetically pleasing sport.
Dougal Haston: The Philosophy of Risk, Jeff Connors
Shortly after Dougal Haston set off for the skiing-jaunt that would kill him, his girlfriend was struck by the impulse to catch a last glimpse of him. She hurried upstairs and looked out over the route he had taken, but she was too late — he was already out of sight. That’s how Jeff Connors starts the book and the story is so appropriate that you start to wonder whether it’s true. Reading on you’ll discover that Haston was always hurrying, always in pursuit of the peak experiences that would lift him out of mundane reality and place him where he wanted to be: up with the Nitzschean Übermenschen he had studied during his never-completed philosophy degree in his hometown of Edinburgh. In a slightly saner world, Mick Jagger would have been the Dougal Haston of popular music; as it is, Dougal Haston was the Mick Jagger of mountaineering, idolized around the world for his joli laid looks and his Byronic aura of tragic, suffering, misunderstood genius.
But it wasn’t only his looks that were odd: he was tall and slender but so “pigeon-toed” that people sometimes wondered how he managed to walk. It’s almost as though he was some new species of human, Homo montanus, mountain man, evolved for the sheer rock and ice of high altitude. A strange contrast with Britain’s other mountaineering genius of the 1960s and ’70s, the stocky, aggressive, almost ape-like Mancunian Don Whillans, born working-class like Haston but unlike Haston determined never to allow people to forget it. The two of them performed one of the great feats of twentieth-century mountaineering: the first ascent of the south face of the Himalayan massif Annapurna on an expedition organized by Chris Bonington in 1970. Whillans’ protegé then, Haston later rejected his mentor, casting one of the votes that kept “The Villain” off one of Bonington’s expeditions to Everest. Whillans didn’t voice open resentment, perhaps recognizing himself that he was rapidly declining from the days of his greatness. Haston’s own position as one of the world’s five or six greatest mountaineers was beginning to be challenged when he died in 1977, strangled by one of his rock-star scarves after he was buried in an avalanche while skiing, and Connors had hinted earlier in the book that he might always have been in the shadow of another mountaineering genius from Edinburgh, Robin Smith.
But Smith died in 1962 on an expedition to the central Asian mountain range the Pamirs at the age of only twenty-three, and his full greatness remains only a might-have-been. Connors’ implied belittling of Haston there isn’t an isolated flaw: this is often a mean-spirited book and Connors sometimes seems to follow the motto De mortuis nihil nisi malum. The Californian John Harlin, a blond “Greek god” who died in a thousand-foot fall climbing the north face of the Eiger with Haston by the direttissima — straight up — comes in for a thorough kicking when he’s literally down, but perhaps that’s the kind of thing Connors enjoys most, as an ex-rugby player. He’s much more sympathetic with the first of Haston’s two major personal tragedies. The second was his own early death, the first the manslaughter of a hiker in a drink-driving incident in Scotland. Haston’s distaste for publicity was increased by the court case and his two months in Glasgow’s justifiably notorious Barlinnie Gaol, and he never liked to be photographed smiling afterwards. The brooding melancholy or scowls by which he became known to the newspaper-reading public increased his legend and he found it relatively easy to earn his living by mountaineering, becoming a climbing-instructor in Switzerland.
But his students were often disappointed: expecting individual tuition from him, they could easily find him “out of sight”, climbing too fast and too skilfully for mere mortals to match. His appointment as the director of the international climbing school at Leysin in Switzerland precipitated his death, when he translated his taste for mountaineering in extremis to the ski-slopes and took one risk too many. Some of those who knew him were surprised only that he died skiing and not climbing, like so many of his friends and colleagues. Even the most cautious and safety-conscious mountaineer places his life in the lap of the mountain-gods every time he climbs, but without risk there is no rush and though Connors dismisses the suggestion that Haston had a death-wish, it’s certain he had a defy-death-wish. “Genius” is an over-used term but Haston’s achievements — Eigerwand by the direttissima, south face of Annapurna, south-west face of Everest — speak for themselves and will continue to do so long into this century.
Lord Gnome of the Rings: The Best of Private Eye 1976, Various
And the best of Private Eye, back in 1976, was sometimes very good: there’s a pastiche of Boswell here, taking the piss of “Doctor Jonathan” Miller, that is as skilfully and compellingly written as the real thing, apart from a “deprived forever of he [sic] who has been for so long its presiding luminary”. Nowadays, Private Eye wouldn’t take the time or the literary trouble to create something like that: rather like a tabloid, it’s written to be read and understood as quickly as possible. Shorter pieces in this compilation are sometimes down to modern standards, however, and what certainly hasn’t changed is Private Eye’s pettiness, prurience, and casual cruelty, or the quality of the cartoons, which were often very good then and are often very good now.
But something you can find only in an old compilation is historical irony: what was funny ha-ha then is sometimes funny hmm-hmm now. Even longer than the “Doctor Jonathan” piece is a less good but still enjoyable parody of the then popular Colditz TV series (but it’s longer because it was run as a series in the magazine). The historical irony here is that the parody is called “Neasditz”: the London district of Neasden was once a popular target of Private Eye for its suburban banality, but there’s almost a poignance to the piss-takes now. Mass immigration has changed the country once known as England into a much less banal and much more dangerous place, and boring old Neasden is fading into history, like many other things whose value we’re only recognizing now that we’ve lost them. There’s a similar irony to a piss-take of what must have been an obsequious interview by a BBC journalist with the “Shit of Persia”:
Chalfont: I would like to turn now to an extremely delicate question...The Shah of Persia was indeed a shit, but the theocrats who replaced him, perhaps because of the support given him by the Americans, were shittier by far and thanks to mass immigration we now have the same kind of Islamic fundamentalism in banal districts like Neasden and banal cities like Luton (see “Terror on the Dole”).(WRINGS HANDS NERVOUSLY AND LICKS LIPS)
It has been suggested by, let me say at once, a very tiny minority of obviously misguided and probably left-wing people – people that is to say who are quite untrustworthy and know nothing about the very real problems that you face – these people, Your Holiness, have sometimes hinted that your government (and let me say at once that I disassociate myself entirely from such suggestions) has on occasion been forced to resort to somewhat coercive methods with regard to political prisoners. I need hardly say that you are entirely at liberty not to answer that question.
Genghiz Khan: Oh good heavens, my dear fellow, of course we torture people. We’re not living in the Middle Ages. We use the very latest techniques.
Chalfont (laughing with relief): Ha Ha. Quite so. I so agree. We too have our ‘subversives’.
Shah: And you too torture them, no doubt?
Chalfont: Of course, of course.
Futurism, Richard Humphreys
The future of Futurism has come and gone and in some ways it was exactly what Futurists wanted. They demanded speed, noise, and violence, after all, and the twentieth century provided enormous amounts of all three. And when I say “demanded”, that is exactly what I mean: like a political party, the Futurists had a manifesto, penned by Filippo Marinetti. Clause nine was this:
We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.And if you’re thinking that sounds rather, well, fascist, you’re right, because Futurism, despite being an avant-garde, fetishistically modern movement, was closely allied with Italian fascism. If that news comes as a surprise when you open this book, prepare for another surprise as you leaf through it, because Futurist art, at least from masters like Umberto Boccioni or Giacomo Balla, is actually interesting, even, whisper it, skilful. Sometimes attractive too.
What it isn’t, however, is particularly distinctive: much of the art reproduced in this book could have appeared in other books in the series, which covers movements in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth-century avant-garde like Cubism, Minimalism, and Surrealism. No, what makes Futurism distinctive is its bombast, its manifestos, and its political allegiances. They’re all described here, and refreshingly they’re not described in the usual stale bourgeois academese of most modern criticism in the arts. That’s not to say all the text is worth reading: for me, analysing a picture is like analysing a joke: it destroys any spontaneous enjoyment. Art is about images and intuition; analysis is about words and logic. They take place in different parts of the brain and they shouldn’t be mixed. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to take Futurist paintings seriously than it is to take Futurist prose:
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.Perhaps the most appropriate response to Futurism in theory was Evelyn Waugh’s vignette in Brideshead Revisited of Futurism in action:
We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes. (Part II, 3)The battle in this instance was against the lower classes of Britain during the General Strike, and the attempt to wage it ended like this:
Jean, who joined another company, had a pot of ferns dropped on his head by an elderly widow in Camden Town and was in hospital for a week.But the embers of Futurism are glowing yet, and this book is a good short survey of the pre-war fires of energy and excitement that gave birth to them.
The Magic of Uri Geller, as revealed by the Amazing Randi
Uri Geller is a luftmensch with chutzpah. It’s no coincidence that two Yiddish words sum him up, because Jews have been as disproportionately successful at fraud as they have been in other professions requiring high intelligence and quick wits. Chutzpah, or brazen arrogance, probably won’t need defining, but a luftmensch, for those who haven’t come across the word before, is literally an “air-man”: someone who makes a living from nothing. Geller has achieved world-wide fame and made large sums of money principally by bending spoons and keys and starting “stopped” watches. Compared to the atom bomb or the moon-landings, it’s hardly the stuff of legend, but the difference is that the men behind the atom bomb and the moon-landings didn’t put a dishonest label on what they did.
Shakespeare wrote in Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In fact, it wouldn’t: it’s well-established in psychology that labels can affect emotion and sensation. The label doesn’t even have to be verbal:
The direct relationship between the quality of a product and the colour of its container is again demonstrated by an American test in which 200 women were invited to judge the flavour of a coffee served from brown, red, blue and yellow coffee pots. Although the same coffee was served in each case, almost three quarters of those tested found the coffee from the brown pot to be too strong, whereas nearly half of the women found the coffee from the red pot to be rich and full-bodied. The coffee from the blue pot was regarded as having a milder aroma, while that from the yellow pot was judged to be made from the weaker blend of bean. (The Colour Eye, Robert Cumming and Tom Porter, BBC Books, London, 1990, "Colour and Quality", pg. 147)Geller attributes his trivial tricks to mysterious powers, helped by a simple equation that has been at work for many thousands of years: ignorance + emotion = the supernatural. When human beings can’t understand something and are excited by it, they have always been prone to seek a supernatural explanation (or rather, non-explanation: the supernatural explains nothing, merely allows us to conceal an epistemological gap in a psychologically satisfying way). When Geller, a master of psychological manipulation, creates emotion by bending a thick key in a way his audience can’t understand, it’s easy for him to convince the gullible that he has special powers. And we are much gullible than we’d like to believe. The Amazing Randi, the author of this debunking book, reproduced Geller’s feats before an audience of scientists, having explicitly stated he was using trickery. Maurice Wilkins, who won a Nobel prize for his part in the discovery of the structure of DNA, then told him: “Mr. Randi, you’ve told us that what you did was accomplished by trickery. But I don’t know whether to believe you or believe in you!”
But then one of the most important points this book makes is that scientists, for all their priestly prestige and status, are not the right people to ask about Geller’s powers:
Certain prominent American scientists have said, concerning the criticisms of their acceptance of Geller, that their detractors are calling them either liars or fools.And since prominent American scientists are obviously neither liars nor fools, Geller must be genuine. Randi points out the false logic:
Neither is correct, so far as I am personally concerned. I call them simply “unqualified” – in this particular field – to pass judgment on such matters. (ch. 16, “Geller in England”, pg. 256)A clever magician can fool a clever scientist, because deceit is a magician’s stock-in-trade. Geller and Randi are both masters of deceit, but Randi is honest about what he is, Geller isn’t. Randi is also a master of readable prose: I enjoyed this book a great deal, and not just because it remains highly relevant, even thirty years after Geller’s heyday. Luftmenschen with chutzpah are still with us and Geller reminds me a lot of Tony Blair. Blair isn’t Jewish, isn’t as intelligent, and hasn’t lasted as long, but the mass psychology behind both men’s success seems similar. Randi quotes the Latin saying Homo vult decipi; decipiatur: “Man wishes to be deceived; let him be deceived.” Like Blair, Geller didn’t have to do much to convince large numbers of people that he was special, but then another important point the book makes, in Geller’s case, is that failure can even be helpful. If Geller were successful all the time, he’d look more like a fraudster who uses trickery. Occasional failure not only makes him look honest but heightens the effect of his successes too, and Randi describes how magicians sometimes exploit this aspect of human psychology by deliberately failing on something small before succeeding on something big.
And not all of Geller’s genuine failures are reported. In one of the funniest anecdotes in the book, Randi describes how, on his triumphant tour of England in the mid-1970s, Geller told a pregnant journalist that she would have a girl in three days’ time:
She had the baby, all right – a boy, a month later. Determining that the lady was expectant was all that Uri had done. And just about anyone could do that, at that stage! But what if he’d been right? The press would have trumpeted it to the world. As it was, no attention was directed to the prediction. (ch. 16, “Geller in England”, pg. 253)Yes, it would have been trumpeted to the world, even though predicting the sex of a baby, at least, is no more difficult than predicting the fall of a coin: a 50% chance of success is hardly unfavorable. But the general public’s ignorance of probability was another factor in Geller’s sucess. When he appeared on a television or radio show with a large audience and predicted strange happenings among his viewers or listeners, he got a a lot of people ringing in to report exactly that: strange happenings. According to Randi, so did a “psychic” called Jim Pyczynski when he appeared on a radio show in New York: lights flickered or went out; a container of milk burst; mirrors “cracked”; pictures fell off walls; cats became agitated; and a clock that had been stopped for years started working again (ch. 12, “The Old Broken Watch Trick Revealed”, pp. 191-4).
But in fact Jim Pyczynski was Randi’s “full-time assistant” and was merely proving a statistical point: “strange happenings” are inevitable when enough people look out for them, and large audiences will also contain liars and fantasists, as well as honest people who, when prompted to do so, will notice what they had previously overlooked. Did the mirrors crack during Pyczynski’s broadcast or sometime before and without being noticed?
And again, the supernatural label helps create emotion that reinforces the appearance of the supernatural. Geller’s tricks are trivial, but we can be taken in by trivial things. Part of Randi’s animus against Geller is perhaps explained by jealousy, but then Randi does seem to be a better magician who, with less honesty, could easily have achieved what Geller has achieved. It’s easy to be a psychic, because people don’t understand how easily they can be manipulated or how predictable human psychology can be. This book or Randi’s website will tell you more about how fraudsters like Geller manipulate and exploit us. For the other side of the story, see this page on Geller’s website, where you’ll find his chutzpah as strong as ever.
The Film Studies Reader, Joanne Hollows (ed.) et al.
There are many rich and noble words in the English language with rich and noble histories. For example: Women. Lesbian. Peace. But there is a very quick and easy way to make them poor and ignoble – simply add “Studies” to them. Women’s Studies. Lesbian Studies. Peace Studies.
And, of course, Film Studies. Film, the most powerful and compelling of all media, becomes Film Studies, the most sub-literate and boring of all subjects. Admittedly, it has a great deal of competition from all the other Studies but I think it sees them off by co-opting them to its degraded cause. In this densely packed volume, for example, one can find Mary Ann Doane’s “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator” and Tamsin Wilson’s “On Not Being Lady Macbeth: Some (Troubled) Thoughts on Lesbian Spectatorship”, fragments of Women’s and Lesbian Studies refracted through filmic discourse to produce visceral, atavistic nuggets of pure waffle and blether, replete with all the features of typical Franco-American academese: polysyllabic jargon, copious quotation from other “authorities”, complete disconnection from empiricism and logic, and ugly, trailing, coarsely nodulated, grittily rhizomated syntax:
Camp is understood within this queer paradigm to be rooted in gay men’s lack of access to the machinery of representation (which is cultural reproduction). For Cynthia Morrill, “Camp discourse is the epiphenomenon of the queer subject’s proscription in the dominant order; it is an effect of homophobia ... Camp results from the uncanny experience of looking into a nonreflective mirror and falling outside of the essentialized ontology of heterosexuality, a queer experience indeed.” (Morrill 1994, p. 119)Oh dear. You start to see the attractions of bookburning when you read writing like that. But this book is very interesting in one way, because it raises a very puzzling question. How did the editors decide which extracts to use when most seem to be completely meaningless?
Since ‘screen theory’ does not make any distinction between how the subject is constituted as a space and specific interpellations, it deduces ‘subjects’ from the subject positions identified by the text and identified by the two. Thus the ‘classic realist text’ recapitulates, in its particular discursive strategies, the positions in which the subject has been constituted by the ‘primary’ processes. There is a fixed identity and perfect reciprocity between the these two structures, which in ‘screen theory’ are, in effect, one and the same structure. The ‘realist text’ is therefore not so much ‘read’ as simply ‘consumed/appropriated’ straight, via the only possible positions available to the reader – those reinscribed by the text. This forecloses the question of reading as itself a moment in the production of meaning. In the ‘screen theory’ account this moment is doubly determined – by the primary subject positions which inscribe the subject in a relation of empiricist to knowledge/language and by those positions as they are reinscribed in the text through the strategies of realism. (“Texts, Readers, Subjects”, David Morley)My explanation is that this book is meant not to be learnt from but to be imitated. It doesn’t matter what you say: it’s the way that you say it. Sprinkle what you write with words that identify you as an engaged academic (paradigm, reinscribe, hegemony), refer copiously to paradigmatic figures of proctoglossia (Lacan, Althusser, Barthes), express your deeply problematic relationship in terms of notions around “objective reality” by putting suitable words in speech marks, and who cares if it actually means anything? It will get you your degree and that’s all that matters.
Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies, Geoff Small
Because Geoff Small is a black journalist he can say things in this book that might have provoked accusations of racism had they been said by a white journalist. For example, he tries to explain the differing levels of violence in the island nations making up the West Indies by the differing natures of the African tribes who were enslaved and transported there. Some tribes were peaceful, some warlike, and Jamaica, birthplace of the Yardies, was populated by representatives of the warlike ones.
Combine that with dire poverty and illegal drugs, add the intense rivalries of local politics and asinine interference by the CIA, and you have a recipe for some very violent and dangerous gangs: the Yardies, named after the Jamaican word “yard”, meaning a neighborhood or district. They started to come to the attention of the media and the general public in the 1980s, as they broke their way into the drugs market in the United States and United Kingdom, and the word used of them then is still being used of them now: “ruthless”. If you have a quarrel with the Mafia, the Mafia will kill you. If you have a quarrel with the Colombians, the Colombians will kill you and your wife. If you have a quarrel with the Yardies, the Yardies will kill you, your wife, and your children.
With anyone else who happens to be in your house or on the street or in the nightclub at the time. In fact, “ruthless” is hardly strong enough: another word that Small uses comes closer to the truth: “nihilistic”. The Yardies seem to cultivate a complete disregard for human life, and anyone who wonders if their bark is worse than their bite is likely to stop wondering when he reads about this kind of thing:
In terms of utter ruthlessness, the killing of Cassandra Higgins ranks high on the list. A Jamaican visa overstayer, she was certainly no angel. Still, her demise was shocking by any standards. The nineteen-year-old was stripped naked by five Rude Boys in an eighteenth-floor crack-house on the Cathall Road Estate in Leytonstone, east London. Then, to the horror of those who looked on, she was thrown out of the window 160 feet to the ground. Higgins’s death, in September 1993, was thought to have been the result of a rudie drug deal double-cross on her part. The brutal murder was witnessed by several people, but true to form the mouths of those assembled were welded shut by the force of the posse code: ‘See and blind, hear and deaf’; in fact, not one person was willing to go to court to testify against the killers.Gangs and gang-warfare are very fashionable at the moment on screen and in print, and this book offers many satisfying fixes for the aficionado of other people’s thuggery as it describes how the Yardies or Rude Boys – “rude” meaning “lawless” or “aggressive” in Jamaican English – invaded expatriate Jamaican communities in the States and UK. Their intent was to take over the drugs-markets there and they succeeded triumphantly through a combination of extreme violence and use of a Jamaican patois that local police forces often found impossible to understand during phone-taps or surveillances. An often fascinating, sometimes frightening book, it seems to me to be more proof of the harm done by the illegality of drugs like marijuana and cocaine. Yardies do not kill and terrorize people simply for the love of it: they do it because there are huge sums of money to be made from the illegal sale of drugs and huge amounts of excitement and satisfaction to be had from confronting and outwitting the authorities. Small describes Jamaicans as naturally rebellious, ambitious, and aggressive, making a mark on the world in international fields like music and sport out of all proportion to their numbers. The Yardies are another example of Jamaicans making their mark in an international field: that of crime. If we legalized drugs, that field would get much smaller.
The Dark Side of the Game: My Life in the NFL, Tim Green
Does the NFL – America’s National Football League – have a dark side? Tim Green, a “former defensive end for the Atlanta Falcons”, certainly thinks so, and says so in the short, crisp chapters of this entertainingly written and highly revealing book. As for me, well, I’ll answer the question at the end of the review.
For now I’ll start by saying that one of the few things that give me hope for the human race is that the most popular team sport on earth is football. That is, the most popular team sport on earth is foot-ball: a ball game played using the feet. Otherwise known as soccer. Like all sports, it has its good points and its bad points, but it has the advantage of combining enormous simplicity with occasional beauty in a way that can raise it to the level of art, and human beings have embraced like no other sport.
Though there are some human beings who would like to change that. They’re called the NFL and Green describes their schemes in one chapter of this book:
…they have watched NFL football become the number one sport in America. But they’re not satisfied with just that. They want to make NFL football the number one sport in the entire world. They’ll do it too.I was worried when I read that, but I was reassured when I checked the date of publication. It’s a long time since Tim Green wrote those words, and there’s little sign of football à l’americaine challenging football à l’anglaise for world supremacy as yet. And I really don’t think there’s ever much chance of it. The rest of the world just doesn’t share the American love of brute force and conspicuous consumption, and unless you love brute force and conspicuous consumption you won’t love NFL football.
Yes, national sports say a lot about national characters, and I’m only glad there’s baseball to put on the credit side of the ledger, because otherwise the diagnosis for the American soul would be a very dark one. I had the same feeling reading this book as I once had reading a book about the Samurai warriors of Japan: that there was something very sick in the world it described. Radically psychotic, in fact. And it reeked of repressed homosexual sado-masochism, as in this extract from a chapter charmingly entitled “Bloodlust”:
[Jerry] Glanville turned to look at me. … The blood was streaming down my face, filling my mouth and spilling down my chin. I blew a crimson spray as I huffed and puffed from the exertion of the previous set of plays. Glanville’s eyes narrowed. I looked like I’d taken a bullet in the face. Then he smiled. Don’t get me wrong, but I think Jerry fell in love with me at that moment. There’s nothing quite like the sight of blood to make a coach happy.Or a homosexual sado-masochist. Don’t get me wrong either: I’m not trying to insult Jerry Glanville, I’m trying to suggest what might be the truth about him. For a man to take pleasure in the sight of male blood and pain suggests certain tendency in that man, and lots of men must take lots of pleasure in the enormous amounts of male blood and pain on display in the NFL.
And even when they don’t, they certainly take pleasure in the brute force and violence that are as inseparable from American football as they are from American foreign policy. Football is the dark side of the American soul in microcosm, and one writer has suggested that it’s no coincidence that the sport first became truly popular during the Vietnam war. It’s an imperialist sport. In fact, it’s hardly hyperbolic to call it a fascist one. Victory is achieved not by subtlety or intelligence but by strength and aggression.
That’s why drugs are so widely abused in the NFL. How much you can improve your performance by use of drugs is a very good measure of the quality of a sport. Drugs work very crudely and coarsely, and if taking them helps you win, the sport you’re taking part in is better suited to apes or some other animal than to human beings. Compared to human beings, after all, animals survive by relying on strength and speed of reaction and foot, and drugs are good for improving those. Human beings survive by relying on intelligence, most of the time.
But not in the NFL. Again, it hardly seems a coincidence that the steroids so widely used in the NFL were first developed by German scientists during World War Two. Steroids don’t make you better at thinking, they make you better at giving and receiving punishment. That’s why they’re almost the perfect drug for football. What makes them less than perfect is that they only increase your tolerance for pain: they don’t let you ignore pain entirely.
For that you need anaesthetics, and if you play in the NFL you will certainly need anaesthetics. All professional sports are dangerous to those who participate in them, because making money from your body often forces you to overlook the damage you might be doing to it. That’s true in golf or skateboarding or archery, but it’s truest of all in the NFL. Right now, men are crippling themselves for life so they can put on helmet and armor and chase an oval ball around a rectangular patch of turf or plastic. I don’t find that admirable, I find it distasteful.
That’s why I found so much of this book distasteful. Even disgusting. The chapter titles don’t say it all, but they say more than enough: “Playing with Pain”; “What’s a Stinger?” (the excruciating sensation of having neck vertebra crushed); “Concussions: Everyone Gets Them”; “How to Shake Hands with an NFL Player” (gently, because his fingers will be chronically crushed or broken); “Thoughts from Inside an MRI”; “Taking the Needle – The Purple Heart of the NFL”. In the last-named, Green describes how a young man called Bret Clark was able to grind one of his knee joints to a “viscous red goop” with the aid of repeated injections of Xylocaine and the eager encouragement of his team coach and physician.
I don’t admire players who endured things like that: I just feel sorry for them and wish it wasn’t necessary for them to go through it. After all, why should someone have to cripple himself as a spectator sport? In fact, crippling oneself is hardly the word: killing oneself is more like it. If you smoke or eat the wrong kind of foods, you are likely to die younger. That’s well-known, and well-publicized. If you play in the NFL, you are likely to die younger too. That’s not well-known, and not well-publicized. After all, there is money to be made and glory to be won, and what are a few years of life compared to that?
But the truth is that if we did to animals what the NFL does to its players we would be breaking the law. Because the players do it of their own free will and are paid for it, it’s apparently acceptable. It shouldn’t be. Yes, there are some decent human beings involved with the NFL as players or journalists or administrators or even coaches – Tim Green seems to be one of them – but the sport itself deserves to be thrown onto the dustheap of history as soon as possible. America won’t be a kinder, gentler nation until it is.
And what about my answer to the question I asked at the beginning? Does the NFL have a dark side? No. To have a dark side you need a light side, and the NFL doesn’t have one.
A History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom
Freudian theory predicts that introverted men will like large breasts, which will remind them of happy, secure childhood hours suckling at Mother’s bountiful, nourishing globes.
Freudian theory, as so often, makes a complete balls-up of it – or should that be boob? Introverted men in fact like small breasts, because introverted men don’t like too much stimulation, and the more breast the more stimulation. For heterosexual men, that is. In the West, that is too. Because breasts aren’t universally regarded as erotic objects by human beings, according to this survey of their cultural and artistic importance by a professor of humanities.
She doesn’t write as badly as that description might make you fear, but you won’t read about that failure of Freudian theory here because her analysis is influenced by Freudianism and its modern mutations. Which means there is quite a bit of waffle, so by far the best thing about the book is its pictures, which collect evidence of Western attitudes to the breast from male-dominated prehistory through male-dominated ancient history and male-dominated medieval history to the still male-dominated present day. Though women are beginning to make their presence felt now and are re-appropriating control over the representation of their own breasts. Post-porn prostitute-cum-sex-activist Annie Sprinkle contributes an image (or images), for example, but I don’t know what it’s (or they’re) like because the page in question was missing from the copy of the book I looked at. Hmmmm. Elsewhere you can find a gruesome “just-before” painting of a Roman soldier applying a pair of giant clippers to the right breast of St Agatha, who was martyred by having her breasts cut off and whose usual representation in Christian iconography – reproduced here in the form given it by Francisco de Zurburán – shows her carrying her severed breasts on a plate.
Besides the chapter looking at those kind of images – and its name escapes me for the moment – there are chapters on “The Pre-historic Breast”, “The Medical Breast”, “The Commercial Breast”, and so on, but no chapter on “The Biological Breast”, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. Books like this are partly a kind of self-worship, and admitting that breasts didn’t begin and don’t end with female human beings would rather defeat that point. Besides which, learning and writing about the evolution and physiology of the breast would have been a lot more difficult and complex than looking at and writing about pictures and texts about breasts, and science isn’t always as easy to reach the appropriate ideological conclusions from.
One puzzling thing about science too: if men control it, as they control the rest of the world, and co-opt its language and representations to their wicked patriarchal ends, why is the group of animals to which human beings belong defined by something that serves no purpose in the male of the species? That is, we’re mammals, from the Latin mamma, “breast”. Is that evidence of male breast-envy?
P.S. The feminist analysis is apparently that Linnaeus had a choice of three (or more) uniquely mammalian characteristics to name us after: 1) the way we feed our young on milk; 2) our hair; 3) the structure of our inner ears. The inner ear was too obscure and men are hairier than women, so choosing that characteristic would link us to the other, lower “mammals” through men. Choosing breasts, on the other hand, would link us through women, so he chose breasts and called us mammals.
Doesn’t seem convincing to me: hair isn’t obvious in mammals like the elephant, rhino, dolphin, and whale, but feeding young on milk is obvious in all mammals (at least as far as I know), so that seems the best choice.
Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinoüs, Royston Lambert
Antinoüs was the Bithynian catamite of the Emperor Hadrian and was discovered dead in the river Nile, apparently drowned, in the second century AD. Why and precisely how he died has never been discovered, but this book is a discussion of the theories that have been devised and of the way Antinoüs’s death has influenced Western art and culture from his own times to the present day.
It’s dense and sometimes difficult to read, with some spectacularly crass metaphors, but it’s still worthwhile, if partly as an illustration of how biography is more a disguised (and sometimes not so disguised) way of talking about oneself than it is of talking about one’s subject. Lambert was presumably a paederast in the classical sense, and all his talk of, respectively, the complexity of Hadrian’s personality and the beauty of body and soul of Antinoüs was disguised autobiography and sexual fantasy. Still, it packs in a lot of classical history and was fascinating on the way the cult of Antinoüs was created by Hadrian and spread throughout the empire.
Among other fascinating sidelights was the story of the Paedogogium in Rome (Trajan’s and, to a lesser extent, Hadrian’s “harem”) and the grafitti scratched there, which seems to record an early Christian pupil being mocked by his peers: a crude donkey-headed Christ crucified, with the subscription ALEXAMENOS WORSHIPS HIS GOD; elsewhere, Alexamenos seems to have struck back by proclaiming himself ALEXAMENOS THE FAITHFUL, which even I found touching. Elsewhere there was a good overview of the representation of Antinoüs in sculpture and coinage and Lambert manages to convey the power of his death in the Nile very well, describing the ancient worship of the river and the only occasionally successful attempts to placate its ferocity and caprice (anyone drowned in the river, however humble their origin, automatically became a god and had shrines erected to them).
The possibilities of why and how Antinoüs died that Lambert discusses: a boating accident; a murder by jealous rivals; a castration for the preservation of his youth that went wrong; suicide triggered by disappearance of youth and hence, inevitably, of Hadrian’s affections; a sacrifice to reverse successive failures of the very important Egyptian grain-harvest, which would soon have triggered trouble throughout the Empire: traditionally the way to appease the Nile was to sacrifice to it.
The Cult at the End of the World: The Terrifying Story of the Aum Doomsday Cult, David E. Kaplan
There’s nowt so queer as folk. If that’s true, there’s nowhere it’s truer than in Japan. On one hand it’s one of the most regimented and conformist countries on earth, with a long tradition of people committing suicide for social gaffes or unintentional breaches of etiquette; on the other you can buy bottled schoolgirls’ saliva from automatic kiosks there or read extreme sado-masochistic comic-books openly on the metro. On the one hand, politeness, gentleness, and concern for the feelings of others are not just a neurosis but a national fetish; on the other, Japan is to date the only country on earth to have suffered religiously inspired nerve-gas attacks on one of those metros where men sit reading extreme sado-masochistic comic-books.
This book is the story of the cult behind the attacks, Aum Shinrikyo. “Aum” is a Sanskrit syllable better known in the West as the mantra “om”, “Shinrikyo” is the Japanese for “Supreme Truth”. The name reflects in miniature one of the paradoxes of Japanese culture: that things so puzzling to the rest of the world can only be understood by looking at the rest of the world. Japan borrows freely, even greedily, from every culture it comes into contact with, but then it takes what it has borrowed, mixes it with something Japanese, and produces something unique. In the case of the Japanese writing system, a mixture of Chinese ideograms and Japanese syllabary, uniquely complex and beautiful. In the case of Aum Shinrikyo, uniquely twisted and ugly.
The founder of the cult, a half-blind megalomaniac glutton and plutophile called Shoko Asahara, mixed Buddhism with apocalyptic Hinduism and Christianity. Syncretic psychopathy is one way of describing the result. Buddhism, for example, teaches that we must kill no other creature lest we be re-born in lower form. Members of the cult took the teaching sufficiently to heart, it appears, to endure bites from flies in the Australian outback without retaliating. Meanwhile they were preparing an experiment in which more than a dozen sheep would die to test the efficacy of the nerve-gas Asahara wanted to use against commuters on the Tokyo underground.
That’s irrational and inconsistent, of course, but religion is exactly that: irrational and inconsistent. Asahara’s adaptation of the Buddha’s teaching on non-violence was that by killing other creatures we can assist them to be re-born in higher form. This was remarkably convenient when an enemy of or defector from the cult had to be removed, as an unknown number were while Aum Shinrikyo spent many millions of dollars in pursuit of weapons of mass-destruction. Asahara had, after all, predicted that Armageddon was on its way, and he and his devoted disciples were going to do their best to ensure that it would arrive on schedule. Ideally, ahead of schedule.
And those devoted disciples were often brilliant scientists who had deserted research in advanced biochemistry or astro-physics to join a cult whose leader sold his bathwater and blood as infallible instruments of spiritual enlightment and who made his followers wear members skull-caps delivering six volts at regular intervals in order to synchronize their brain-waves with his. It seems very odd that scientists, the embodiment of rationality and skepticism, could believe such irrational nonsense. Or is it so odd after all? I don’t think it is. The story of Aum Shinriko is an extended lesson in the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and between knowledge and morality. Brilliant scientists are often very odd and unstable people. They have to be, because acquiring the necessary knowledge to become a scientist, particularly in physics or chemistry, requires a great deal of dedication and singlemindedness.
But scientific knowledge in itself is morally neutral. The way it is acquired or applied, however, is not: that can be either good or bad. For the worst examples, find scientists whose morals are guided, or rather perverted, by politics or religion. The nerve-gas attacks conceived, guided, and theologically justified by Asahara killed more than twenty people and injured many more, but they were mild compared to what Aum Shinrikyo had already tried to carry out. Asahara’s scientists had previously tried to spray the Tokyo underground with spores of the bacterium responsible for botulism. If that attack had succeeded, it would have killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and made vast areas of Tokyo uninhabitable.
As might the atomic bombs Aum tried to acquire in the Soviet Union after the collapse of Communism. That was also where Aum recruited an orchestra to play Asahara’s astral compositions. The orchestra was one of Aum’s many ventures to end in farce and failure, like its early attempts to win power through the ballot box by parading through the streets in Asahara masks and blatantly flouting Japan’s electoral laws by intimidating and censoring their opponents. The story of Aum, which this book tells in clear and compelling prose, is half comedy, half terror. The worrying thing is that another cult, perhaps in Japan, perhaps elsewhere, may already be working toward the same ends, and with killing technology getting both more powerful and cheaper all the time Asahara’s dreams of global Armageddon may be realized yet.
History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
One of the most famous books by one of the most famous philosophers of the past 100 years, but something of a pot-boiler, in my opinion: if Russell had had time to do a thorough revision it would be much better than it is, though it’s still very good in parts.
Russell’s anti-religious and in particular his anti-Christian bias is evident throughout, but I don’t argue with that and his discussion of why Thomas Aquinas is not the great philosopher Catholics of the period regarded him as – the book was published in 1945 – would now be accepted by most Catholics.
So what does the book do? It surveys Western philosophy from its first recorded appearance in ancient Greece to the American and British schools of the 1930s and 1940s. There are a lot of interesting – and mind-bending – ideas on the way, but his treatment of older philosophy is perhaps necessarily sketchy and the book gets more detailed as he precedes and is better, or at least harder, in the section on early and later modern philosophers. One of the great advantages of the book, however, is that it tells a coherent and connected story: Russell points out in the introduction that if the history of ideas has any unity, this can only be set forth in a book if “early and later periods” are “synthesized in a single mind”.
Highly useful as an introduction to and an overview of figures from 3,000 years of Western philosophy – particularly ones who might otherwise only remain more or less famous names: Anaxagoras; Epicurus; Francis Bacon – but Russell’s judgments cannot be regarded as definitive and the book is perhaps better read for enjoyment than for serious education.
When She Was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder, Patricia Pearson
Books change your view of the world, but they don’t do it that often. This one is going to do it oftener than most, I’d reckon:
Once again, the point here is not to suggest that women never act in self-defense – of course they do. The point is that criminologists contemplate no other factors. Whereas they once described violent women as lesbian man-eaters and perverts, we have simply sailed to the other extreme, from whore to madonna. The old fabric of misogyny blends seamlessly with new threads of feminist essentialism to preserve the myth that women are more susceptible than men to being helpless, crazy, and biddable. (ch. 2, “Maybe You Mistook Me for an Angel”)There have been a number of books arguing that female criminality goes largely unrecognized and unreported, and is misinterpreted when it does make the headlines, but this looks to be one of the best. Readable despite lapses in terms of issues around sociological discourse and gender theory, it argues that the late-twentieth-century battles against the old form of sexism must now be re-fought against the new form of the sexism they replaced it with. Although Pearson wouldn’t put it this way herself, I will: feminism is mostly rubbish, and this book offers lots of good examples of how. I disagree with a lot of it, and you probably will too, but it’s still likely to change the way you look at the world and the men and women who inhabit it.
Etruscan: Reading the Past, Larissa Bonfante
This is a very short but very interesting book, exploring the place of the Etruscans in the ancient world and their influence on the Romans, which was considerable: they passed on the tradition of funerary games, augury, and the so-called “Roman” alphabet. With this is an overview of sources for our present-day knowledge of the Etruscan language: tomb art, pottery, and jewellery. There’s a good section taking you through mythological scenes on the backs of Etruscan mirrors, with native and non-native strands picked out: just as the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, so the Etruscans were heavily influenced by the Greeks. (Etruscan art, despite often being more than 2,000 years old, is very realistic, and makes me wonder again whether classical representation of the world in sculpture, carving, and painting was adult, while early and medieval Christian representation was infantile or adolescent?) Last but not least, there’s a glossary of Etruscan words with the meanings scholars have managed to assign them.
Lone Wolf: True Stories of Spree Killers, Pan Pantziarka
I’m not interested in guns and I’ve always thought spree killers were the least interesting kind of psychopath, so this book wasn’t preaching to the converted. Having read it, I can’t say I’m one of the faithful yet but I think I’ve come as I close as I can to understanding what one of these massacres is like short of actually being caught up in one.
And understanding that was a disturbing thing. Spilled brains and strewn viscera are not as unusual in modern life as we might imagine, because car-crashes supply copious quantities of them every day, but the difference with a spree killer is that he supplies them carefully, calculatedly, and purposefully, sometimes over hours or days. The description of the Australian spree-killer Martin Bryant turning a peaceful Tasmanian town into something out of the last days of Berlin will stay with me:
Finishing his meal, he picked up his tennis bag and walked back inside the café, still fairly busy serving lunches and cold drinks.Moments later he’s removed an “AR15 semi-automatic assault rifle” from the bag, shot one Chinese-Malay tourist through the neck, and blown another’s head off, starting as he means to go on for the next few hours. There’s an incongruity about the setting that increases the power and horror of the violent deaths: ordinary people aren’t supposed to die like this, but they have and will continue to do so. Pantziarka looks at seven cases in detail and gives an overview of several more, writing in a clear, precise, unemotional prose that’s rare in true crime studies. He has his own ideas about what should and should not be done about spree killers but presents them in a way that allows readers to make up their own minds. The book’s also useful for its coverage of extreme right-wing politics in the United States, where most of these crimes have taken place and where many of the criminals have been associated with extreme right-wing parties.
Those are the pluses of the book: the minuses, for me, were the tantalizing refusal to follow up some of the more interesting facts dropped into the story – the conspiracy theories surrounding Martin Bryant’s murder spree in Tasmania, for example – and the lack of historical and anthropological context. I think most books on spree-killers must mention the Malay phenomenon of “running amok”, but most that do, like Lone Wolf, do little more than that. It would be interesting to know more and to know how far this type of crime extends through history and different cultures.
Dissecting the Deviant: The Headpress Guide to the Counter-Culture, David Kerekes (con. ed.); Killing for Culture: A Seminal Survey of Death Film from Mondo to “Snuff”, David Kerekes (simul-scribed with David Slater); Sex Murder Art: Inquisitioning the Necrophile Œuvre of Berlin-Based Auteur Jörg Buttgereit, David Kerekes; Ghouls, Gargoyles and Gory Deeds: Celebrationing the Dark Genius of Skywald Comics, David Kerekes (con. ed.); Deaf Certificate: Forty Years of Worship at the Shrine of Led Zeppelin, Hansi Draper and Udo Queenan (ed.) (forthcoming); Puke, Pills and P*ssy: On the Road with America’s Wildest Punk-Rock Performers, Olga Trebor (ed.) (forthcoming); Probing the Personal: The Headpress Guide to Intimate Espionage, David Kerekes (con. ed) (forthcoming); Nuancing the Necrofilmic: Two Shell-Shocked Horror Veterans Survey a Century of “Splatter”, Kevin Humphreys and Maxi Ferguson (ed.) (forthcoming); Softer Machines: A Fetid Tribute to William S. Burroughs, David Kerekes (ed.) (forthcoming); Feral Beacon: The Early Years of Headpress Journal and Critical Vision, David Kerekes et al (forthcoming)
Human gargoyles... snuff-videos... groupie culture... Seminal underground editor/author David Kerekes’s interests are as eclectic as they are esoteric, sharing in common a mutual thread of feral intelligence and originality that stands in visceral contrast to the fetid culture of our increasingly voyeuristic and cretinized times. Meantime, David’s radically strange journal Headpress and publishing house Critical Vision has/have recruited some of the finest scribes and/or artists on (and off!) the planet to probe the outer limits of alterity and ensure key fixes of Otherness for members of the counter-cultural community on both sides of the Atlantic. Whenever I see work/material by contributors to Headpress and related projects, I’m struck by the uncanny breadth of their interests and their effortless, even Zen-like, construction of visceral new paradigms designed to burroughs their way into your consciousness and lay lovingly-imagineered eggs of fetid misanthropy that will keep exploding like feral depth-charges thru a lifetime-a-slime. It’s as though they’ve sailed on the wild side so long they don’t know the way back to less stagnant paths — and are more than happy to keep it that way. As an additional extra bonus, some also carve a fearlessly left-field academic perspective on the arena, seasoning the noxious mix with a soupçon of razor-edge critical theory. To summarize up: if you’re a discerning adult whose intellectual requirements just aren’t being satisfied in terms of either mainstream pap and/or vis-á-vis lesser underground publications, let Headpress Journal and Critical Vision become your 76-wheeler.
Critical Visions: A Brief History of Headpress Journal, Charles K. Bergstein
Transgressive... incendiary... visceral... feral... fetid... You can throw every essential underground adjective in the book at Headpress, Manchester’s finest export since keyly vital punk icons [LK UP 1 LTR], but none of ’em ever sticks. This journal of esoterica and strangeness remains resolutely aloof, grittily unclassifiable, jaggedly non-conformist, orbiting a dead sun in an uncharted star-system of the Other. Comprising of a community that embraces an eclectic spectrum of zeitgeist-warping mavericks all the way from crashed’n’burnt rock’n’roll iconoclasts to sunlight-shunning horror-comic/film obsessives to cutting-edge cultural-theoreticians, it’s impossible to discern a common thread enabling the uninitiated to get a handle on the carnivorous whirlpool of disparately deviant — and deviantly disparate — influences that is Mothership Headpress. You’ll either get it... Or you won’t.
Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Critical Introduction, Andy Medhurst and Sally R. Munt
Is there anyone so spiritually dead as to fail to be overcome by a sense of almost transcendent, macro-cosmic awe when standing in the “Studies” section of a university library surrounded by hundreds of metres of shelving filled with books expensively produced from trees whose usefulness would have been infinitely greater and dignity far less insulted had they been turned into lavatory paper? I hope not. This is one of the books you might pull off those hundreds of metres of shelving. It should of course have been called Queer Studies: A Post-Critical Introduction, but the editors say in their introduction that they have difficulties around issues vis à vis this particularized discourse, or some such rubbish.
And by talking rubbish the introduction sets the stage perfectly for what is to come: pages and pages of self-obsessed, semi-literate jargon and duckspeak, trivial where it isn’t meaningless and meaningless where it isn’t trivial:
The hybrid formations imagined by Deleuze and Guattari – not just the pre-oedipal mouth to the breast, but the pollen-seeking bee to the orchid – mean that sexual orientation has no script. There is, in a philosophy influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, no “homosexual” as such. But there is “homosexual production”, which, as Guy Hocquenghem writes, “takes place according to a mode of non-liminative horizontal relations” (Hocquenghem, 1978, pg. 95). Reading male homosexuality “against Oedipus”, as Deleuze and Guattari have taught him to do, the maverick French psychoanalyst Hocquenghem explains that the very idea of homosexual desire is meaningless: “Properly speaking, desire is no more homosexual than heterosexual. Desire exists in a multiple form, whose components are only divisible a posteriori [sic], according to how we manipulate it. Just like heterosexual desire, homosexual desire is an arbitrarily frozen frame in an unbroken and polyvocal flux.” (Hocquenghem, 1978, pg. 36)But no, I’ve just got bored with making up that second extract. Like books – sorry, “texts” – in the rest of the studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies: A Critical Introduction is written in the stalest and most bourgeois of stale bourgeois dialects: Franco-American academese. Its only conceivable purpose is to justify the existence of Franco-American academics to other Franco-American academics and it has to be admitted that it serves that purpose well: there are many thousands of them all over the world now producing more and more of this. In fact there are computer programs able to produce it to order, but that, like all the other attempts to mock or undermine it, has merely demonstrated again its hydra-like vitality. The Emperors – and Empresses – have no clothes but snug inside their seminar rooms and queer-identity workshops they never notice.In terms of the theoretical formations presently constructed against normative notions of a trans/gendered dichotomy of desire, we find Mangemerde writing (Mangemerde 1992, pg. 392) of a reconceptualized “centre” of selfhood, springing from a rhizomatic program of self re/definition. The obvious asymmetries of the “hydraulic” aspects of this proposal were challenged by Ledrosse and Pedobouche (Ledrosse and Pedobouche, 1974, pp. 456-8), who proposed that foundational aspects of queer identity be grounded instead in a centrifugal meta/narrative defined in terms of its oppositional reality…