Book Review: Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 by Ronald Atkin

Revolution!

Mexico 1910-20

by Ronald Atkin

      Mexico exploded right after the turn of the twentieth century. Political change looked impossible and life for the poor was stagnant and increasingly looking more and more hopeless. Ronald Atkin’s Revolution! Mexico 1910-20 gives an account of this most turbulent decade from multiple points of view.

This history starts with an explanation of the social, economic, and political circumstances that made the Mexican Revolution almost inevitable. The president Porfirio Diaz had stayed in power through dictatorial means for several decades. He had close relations with international businessmen and cientificos, educated members of the upper class who played a similar role to what conservative think tanks do in the USA. Diaz centralized his power through influence over the governors of each state in Mexico. Also of importance was the hacienda system of agricultural production. Led by wealthy hacendados, each hacienda was like a medieval kingdom in miniature with a feudal class structure. The haciendas were like villages where the villagers, campesinos and peons of mostly mestizo and indio ethnicity, lived and worked as sharecroppers and subsistence farmers with most of what they produced being taken to market by the hacendados who enriched themselves on it without giving anything back to the farmers. Outside the haciendas, the peons lived in villages with ejidos or communally owned land where they grew their crops. Since the land was not legally owned by anybody, the hacendados were seizing the ejidos and incorporating it into their haciendas, forcing the peons to work for starvation wages on the haciendas to survive.

Atkin begins by addressing the political structure from the top down. He gives a history of Porfirio Diaz’s regime and how he worked through corruption, nepotism, the media, and fake elections to remain in his place. Despite his old age and growing unpopularity with the Mexican masses, he refused to step down. As we should know by now, the most likely way of ending a dictatorship is through political violence or revolution. That is exactly what happened in Mexico.

From another angle, Atkins writes about the Mexican Revolution and how foreign governments and businessmen were either responsible or influential over it. Those businessmen, mostly American and British, though some were also French and German, were extracting natural resources in Mexico and paying little more for them than shipping costs. This was made possible through a loose network of diplomats and journalists who had access to the president, advising him that relations between their countries would remain strong as long as he allowed the businessmen to do as they pleased. This was not popular in a nation struggling to modernize itself at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Many believed that those resources belonged to the Mexican people and not to wealthy foreigners who cared nothing for their country. When the Mexican Revolution started, however, American president Woodrow Wilson took sides with the rebellion because of his commitment to democracy and political stability. Some of the weapons used by the revolutionaries were purchased from the nortenos and the US actually invaded Mexico twice during the revolution, once in Veracruz and once at the border in Ciudad Juarez.

Ronald Atkin also identifies the significant leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Francisco Madero was the ideologue who sparked the upheavals. After some battles in Sonora and Chihuaha, his forces moved on Mexico City and seized the National Palace. Porfirio Diaz fled the country, and Madero got elected president. Unfortunately he was naive and politically inept. His military general Victoriano Huerta overthrew his government, seized the presidential office, had Madero murdered, and returned Mexico to a dictatorship. This caused another round of battles in the northern states and the Constitutionalist Vensutiano Carranza chased Huerta out of the country. Carranza was an hacendado and even though he sided with the Mexican Revolution, he ultimately used it as a vehicle for seizing the presideny and then throwing the lower class revolutionaries under the bus once he took office.

The alliance between the democratic Constitutionalists and the revolutionaries was never that strong. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were concerned with land reform and economics while the Constitutionalists were more concerned with gaining and maintaining power, mostly for their own benefit. Pancho Villa was the strongest of the agrarian revolutionary leaders. His populist revolt took place in northern Mexico and sometimes it even spilled over the border into the USA. He was the first to see the value of using the newly built railroads to transport troops and war materiels throughout the country. He also saw the value of sabotaging train tracks as a strategy to prevent the movement of the Mexican military.

The other leader of importance was the charismatic Emiliano Zapata. His initial rebellions in Morelia and Puebla started without any imput from the northern revolutionaries. It wasn’t until the Conference in Aguascalientes, in which Zapata’s representatives were in attendance, that the forces agreed to join. Their alliance was not a strong one though. Even though Villa and Zapata eventually did meet once, the two never succeeded in coordinating their military assaults on the government.

Ronald Atkin gives a thorough, fact based account of the Mexican Revolution. He clearly identifies the important people involved, the issues at stake, and the events that impacted the course of the revolution the most. His inclusion of the foreign influences on the Mexican Revolution is also unique in its execution, even if it makes the narrative a little biased towards the American and European point of view. He does capture a lot of nuance though and the minute details are written with clarity despite their complexity. The writing is a little dry though and sometimes lacks the spark it needs to be interesting. It is a history book and historians are not known for being great authors. The biggest disappointment about this book is the overemphasis on the Villistas in the north and the underwhelming account of the Zapatistas in the south. Atkin writes like he has no interest in Zapata’s guerilla warfare campaigns and mentions him only because he feels like he has to. There is so little detail about that aspect of the Mexican Revolution that you have to wonder why Atkin left so much of it out.

If you want a good introduction to the Mexican Revolution, then this is a good place to start. It might be a little dull at times, but it does point you in the right direction if you want to pursue this subject in more depth. It may not be of great interest to experts in Mexican history, but for the general reader it serves its purpose well.

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 2

by Jerry A. Lang

      It was the fall of 1990, less than a month after I had caught a Butthole Surfers show at the notorious Lyric Theater on 42^nd St. in Manhattan. (I suppose the Danceteria didn’t invite them back, haha) Poison Idea was playing in a small club with a two foot high stage that was so narrow that the gargantuan band members barely fit on it. These guys were said to collectively weigh over a ton at one point. I stood in the front, two feet away from Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts whose guitar looked tiny in his massive arms. Jerry A. was on his best behavior although his fire breathing act probably singed a few locks off some spiky haired members of the audience. He was giving high fives in the crowd so I reached out and he shook my hand; it was like shaking hands with a grizzly bear. There is no sense in describing the music but a Poison Idea concert was like being in the middle of a cyclone of fire. It was ferocious, nihilistic rage to the extreme and it felt so goddamn good. There is a strand of the punk counter culture that starts with Iggy Pop and The Stooges, connects them to Johnny Thunders and the Dead Boys, The Germs, and GG Allin; Poison Idead sits comfortably in that lineage. I hate to get mystical sounding about it, but there is a transcendental state of ecstasy that can be achieved by abandoning all caution, spinning wildly out of control.

In the first volume of Jerry A. Lang’s autobiography Black Heart Fades Blue he tells us about his troubled childhood and teenage years, the time when he moved to Portland, Oregon and got involved in the punk and underground music scene. He also tells us about his precocious encounters with drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence. Volume two picks up where that left off. As Poison Idea’s popularity grew, so did their good and bad times, and so did their reputation as being a problem child of the music industry. But this book isn’t about the band so much as it about Jerry A. It’s not that he denies the importance of the other people in his life; it’s just that he knows their version of events won’t match his and he doesn’t want to speak for them. So he makes sure that we know that this is how he sees his life as only he can and leaves it at that.

The story isn’t anything unique. Most rock bands follow the same path of putting out records, building a following, partying to an excessive degree, and then going into decline as their drug habits take over. The most unique thing about Jerry A.’s story is how high he got and low he sank. Jerry A.’s intentions were to pick up where Darby Crash, lead singer of The Germs, left off. That meant pushing all limitations in terms of lifestyle and music well beyond what anybody had done previously. One of the songs on Poison Idea’s War All the Time LP was called “Romantic Self Destruction.” The catch here is that Jerry A. was not only physically bigger and stronger than most other rock stars, but he was also made of sturdier material than most other people. On top of that he had a complex personality, a strong mind, and a surprising awareness of morality and social justice that helped him navigate through the scummiest of the scum pits in the world. Those finer aspects of his mind included appreciation for art and literature, a wide ranging taste in music, a love of nature, a curiosity about the world and its variety of cultures, a willingness to defend outsiders and misfits, a respect for women’s rights, and an anti-bigotry stance on issues of race and gender issues. Sounds like one great guy.

Not so fast. As Jerry A.’s life spun out of control, mostly because of drugs, alcohol, and violence, those refined attitudes receded into the background. But they never entirely disappeared and that is the key to understanding where this autobiography is going.

As Poison Idea toured America, Europe, and Japan, the band was having a non-stop party. Jerry A. loved drinking; he could chug a whole quart of whisky without taking a breath. But on top of that he, and other band members too, got hooked on heroin. Drugs and alcohol are fun until they aren’t. They went from being a band that used drugs to drug users who had a band to support their habits. Things took a nasty turn for the worse. The combination of drunkenness, heroin withdrawal, and diabetes resulted in some disgusting injuries and illness and a couple near death experiences resulting from overdoses. Jerry A. tried to clean up with Alcoholics Anonymous and methadone and has some interesting things to say about what a sleazy grift those clinics and therapy groups are. To support himself, he got a job as a professional jizz mopper in a porn store. Then just when you think he had hit rock bottom, he sinks even lower as the methadone doesn’t help and he turns to stealing and ripping off drug dealers to get his fixes. Jerry A., along with Pig Champion, end up homeless at one point. As far as stories about junkies go, there isn’t anything too unique about these events. It’s just that the story is told with the same intensity and power that Jerry A. put into his music. This is the kind of harrowing literature that makes you feel like you’ve been kicked in the balls with a steel toed boot. As far as accounts of heroin addiction go, this autobiography is in league with William S. Burroughs and Jim Carroll. It’s tempting to say it might even surpass the works of those authors in terms of their impact on the reader.

This subject matter may be too much for some to handle. The abrasive details are described in a smooth, easy going writing style though. The writing itself is not challenging although there are some flaws. Jerry A. sometimes repeats information as if he forgot that he has already told us some of his stories before; this is no big deal though because he doesn’t dwell on these details for so long that it ruins the narrative. Some of the sequencing can be a little disordered too. In one chapter he’s homeless, in the next he’s living in an apartment. At the beginning of a chapter he goes to the methadone clinic and then he shoots up heroin a few paragraphs later. It’s like he wrote everything down in the order that he remembered it rather than putting into an organized timeline. Also, his unwillingness to write about people he was close to leaves some huge gaps in the story, but he has his reasons for doing this and as a reader, we have to understand where he’s coming from.

None of those flaws are bad enough to make this unworthy of reading. What Jerry A. does get right is what matters most. This isn’t a work of self-aggrandizement nor is it a work of self-pity. It is neither a work of self-celebration nor is it a work of self-hatred. He obviously regrets a lot of what he did, but he writes in such a calm and detached manner that presents us with nothing but the facts, or at least the facts as he understands them to be. This is a work of self-evaluation, like a surgeon who removed a tumor from his own body and then studies it under a microscope as objectively as he possibly can. This is the kind of book a complete fuck up would write when they decide to turn their life around and make themselves into something better. There is an undercurrent of self-respect here and an attempt to reclaim some sense of dignity after surviving a hurricane of self abuse.

Watching somebody self destruct isn’t pleasant. You shouldn’t expect it to be. You wouldn’t read a book like this for simple entertainment though. Black Heart Fades Blue tell Poison Idea fans a lot of what they need to know if they ever wondered where this band was coming from. Jerry A.’s childhood was nothing to envy. We see how he grew up without parental guidance or restraint, had some intense experiences at a young age, and then spent his life in reckless abandonment, seeking out any experience more intense than the last. Or maybe he was trying to numb the pain with heroin and alcohol then trying to undo the numbness with sex, violence, and music, an eternally repeating cycle that fed addictions of all kinds. You can feel sorry for his bad childhood if you choose, though I don’t think he wants that. One thing is certain: if he hadn’t grown up the way he did we might never have been blessed with one of the greatest hardcore punk bands that ever existed, if not THE best. Poison Idea named their first LP Kings of Punk and they earned their right to that title. And if you think that’s all there is to this story, than remember that hitting rock bottom always offers the opportunity for redemption. Be sure to read volume three of these memoirs for that part of the story if you haven’t already. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Skeleton's Holiday by Leonora Carrington

The Skeleton's Holiday

by Leonora Carrington

           Leonora Carrington, British citizen who adopted Mexico as home, wife of Max Ernst, and a premier female member of the Surrealist art group is also known for being a writer of fiction. Her novel The Hearing Trumpet is possibly the greatest work of Surrealist literature ever written. Her collection of short stories, called The Skeleton’s Holiday, doesn’t quite live up to her other achievements though.

In this slim collection of seven stories, spanning less than fifty pages, we get a variety of wildly imaginative vignettes. In “White Rabbits”, a girl gets invited into a home owned by an older couple whose elegant mansion is filled with rabbits. In “The Debutante”, a teenage girl convinces a hyena to take her place at her debutante ball. In “The Oval Lady”, a teenage girl gets punished by her father for magically transforming herself into a horse. In “The Skeleton’s Holiday”, we get introduced to a mischievous skeleton who likes pranks.

Certain motifs and themes reoccur throughout the stories. Houses are used as symbols of the unconscious and whatever else is hidden from public view. Animals, especially horses, are used as alter egos. Family conflict is another theme taken up by Carrington. The girl in “The Debutante” is at a crossroads with her mother because she doesn’t want to attend her own party. The magical powers of the teenage girl in “The Oval Lady” are a source of discord with her stern and unimaginative father. In “Uncle Sam Carrington”, a family dispute is solved by two women in the forest who torture vegetables. This style of irrationality is another theme in these stories since the solutions to family dysfunction involve things that make no sense. Likewise, the father in “The Oval Lady” punishes his daughter for her magical transformations by whipping an imaginary horse. One other theme is social dislocation. Some of these stories are narrated by a teenage girl who penetrates into a world she cannot understand, one in which she can only observe without participating. In “The Debutante” she outright refuses to be a participant and in “My Flannel Knickers” we have a story about a girl who gets forced out of society and publicly humiliated, again in a way that is incomprehensible to rationalists.

Carrington is a great writer. The whole problem with these stories is that they are so short that it makes it almost impossible to draw definite conclusions about what she is trying to say. They are more like sketches, vignettes, or introductions than actual stories. She feeds us scraps of information and then cuts off our nourishment just as we begin to chew on it. It’s hard to interpret these vignettes when there is just enough information to arouse our interest and then abruptly stop just when the stories should be picking up and moving along. The sense of incompleteness just makes them fall flat. It’s hard to tell if this is intentional since Surrealism is all about relinquishing control of rationality and allowing psychological content to run free. Carrington may have intended to break off the narratives just when we begin to analyze her symbolism by recognizing patterns. I’m not convinced that is the case though. These stories just feel like literary sketches that she probably intended to build on at a later date and then never got around to doing so.

In this brief volume, almost so thin it is difficult to even think of it as a book, the author gives us some unique and provocative ideas. They are so unique and provocative that it is disappointing they aren’t drawn out further. We are given canapes when we are in the mood for a banquet. If you’re interested in Leonora Carrington, then The Hearing Trumpet is a far more fulfilling read. She really developed her talents in her paintings though, and the sorely underrated book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick gives an excellent introduction and critical analysis of her art. The Skeleton’s Holiday is an interesting diversion, but it probably works best for diehards of Carrington and devotees of Surrealism. 

 

Book Review: Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 by Jerry A. Lang

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1

by Jerry A. Lang

      This review is dedicated to the memory of D.H., the biggest Poison Idea fan I’ve ever known. I miss you, brother.

By the late 1980s, hardcore punk was starting to run out of steam. People were bored with three cord thrash so both bands and audiences began branching out into other styles that were punk adjacent. Punk/metal crossover was growing in popularity especially because thrash metal was making inroads into the mainstream. Around that time Poison Idea released their first full length lp Kings of Punk. The cover had a picture of lead singer Jerry A. after carving the band’s name into his chest with a razor. Poison Idea weren’t a crossover band, but they had a definite metal tinge to their sound that was harder, more brutal, and distinctive due to the better than average musicianship and outright sincerity in their expression of rage. While typical hardcore punk was falling out of favor, Poison Idea took the style to a whole new level. It had enough power to propel the band through more than a decade of touring and recording. The music was an overload of anger and some punks wondered just where exactly these guys were coming from. Now Jerry A. Lang has published a three volume autobiography called Bacl Heart Fades Blue and of course the first volume is all about his childhood.

Jerry A.’s parents were a couple of rednecks who had him when they were seventeen years old. Soon after, they had two more kids, one daughter and a younger brother. Then they split up. Jerry A. was bounced back and forth between the two parents, each taking care of him for about a year at a time. His father lived in Eugene, Oregon and his mother lived in West Bumfuck Montana. Though he had a deep love for the natural surroundings there, especially the rivers and forests, his mother was an alcoholic who went through a long string of loser boyfriends and the local cowboys bullied Jerry A. to no end. Eugene was a little nicer even though his father was a complete asshole. In Eugene Jerry A. discovered rock music, looked up to the local hippies, and started using drugs and alcohol before the age of ten. Back in Montana, he was also involved in troublemaking and that is where he learned how to fight. Rock music had always been an important part of his life, but when he discovered the Ramones and Sex Pistols, he knew he had found a key part of his identity, a part that would stay with him until the end. Throughout his childhood, he suffered from any kind of abuse or neglect imaginable. And yet he had an undying curiosity about the world and a touch of intellectualism that kept him going.

At the start of his teenage years, Jerry A. moved to Portland and got involved with the underground music scene. He sometimes played with the avant gardist noise band Smegma. This was in the transition period between first and second wave punk which combined political anger with nihilism in its lyrics and attitude. Darby Crash had died of a heroin overdose and the music was getting stripped down, more basic, and faster. Bikers like to chop their Harleys, removing all the unnecessary pieces to make them lighter for the sake of going faster; punks did the same thing with rock and roll, eliminating all the extras to emphasize the most basic elements that were played at maximum speed and volume. Portland, at that time, was a shithole of a city, nothing like the gentrified hipster haven it is now. So Jerry A. put together his own hardcore punk combo that took on the guitarist from another band called The Imperialist Pigs. That morbidly obese, record collecting, cocaine dealing guitarist was Tom “Pig Champion” Roberts, a man who later proved himself to be the premier genius guitarist of second wave punk rock. Some would say his style and ability surpassed other hardcore legends like East Bay Ray and Greg Ginn. Poison Idea was born and their music was simultaneously rough and smooth, chaotic and neat, and its anger was infectious to any punk who felt like they were being screwed over in life. With their growing popularity, Jerry A. drank heavily, did drugs like speed and cocaine, had lots of sex, and got involved in a lot of street fights. It was just the typical trajectory of an up and coming rock star. But despite his thuggish ways, he always had a taste for Leftist politics and social justice causes. As the band evolved, Jerry A. sank into a whirlwind of self-destruction and it was all so much fun.

This first volume ends around the time that Poison Idea’s classic album Kings of Punk came out. Like the music of punk, the writing is fast paced, direct, and to the point. It isn’t overly descriptive, but it is descriptive enough for the reader to see everything that is going on. Jerry A. tells his story with a clarity of self-perception that is unique. This is the kind of insight you gain when you are older and have looked back over your life with analytical eyes, trying to make sense of it all. Part of what is interesting is how he tells his story with the detached objectivity of a journalist. Despite how rotten his childhood was, he doesn’t indulge in self-pity and he doesn’t even express much anger at the unfairness of the life he was born into. This kind of calm self-reporting is what you get from a mature man who has made peace with that infuriating part of himself. Judging by what happens in the second volume of these memoirs, you can tell he really struggled to make sense of his life. Jerry A. doesn’t sound like he’s full of himself either; he doesn’t brag about being a survivor of a rotten childhood. If it had been up to him he obviously would have chosen a better upbringing, but he had the wits to stay alive and sometimes even benefit from his situation. He just doesn’t stand around shouting about how great he is for not ending up dead or in jail. He saves the shouting for his music.

If there is anything to criticize here, it is that some potentially interesting things were left out. Jerry A. doesn’t say much about how he actually met Tom Roberts and the other band members. He doesn’t say much about his siblings either, but to be fair, he does explain that he doesn’t want to tell other people’s stories for them, especially when they don’t have the opportunity or the desire to share their side of it all with the public. Most significantly, Jerry A. doesn’t say much about Poison Idea’s earlier records. He does talk about the Pick Your Kings ep and says a little about Kings of Punk, but he doesn’t even mention the Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes ep. It would have been interesting to hear what it was like to work with Pushead, the artist who did album covers for The Misfits and Metallica and put out Kings of Punk on his own Pusmort record label.

Black Heart Fades Blue Vol. 1 is a good, solid start to the autobiography of Jerry A. Lang. It makes Poison Idea less enigmatic and gives good insight into the source of the author’s anger as well as his impish sense of humor. If you think volume one is fascinating enough, you might as well get ready to read volume two. Beware though. What comes next in this series is a nasty and soul crushing story that might leave you with a touch of PTSD if you aren’t ready for it.

 

Book Review & Literary Analysis: Miss MacIntosh My Darling by Marguerite Young

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

by Marguerite Young

      It’s all about the isolation of the individual. It’s also about the interrelationship between life and death. More or less. That’s it. But such simple concepts get stretched out into 1,321 pages of dense, long winded, and sometimes opaque text that is written less like a novel and more like an extended prose poem. Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is like atomic fission. Just as a nuclear physicist takes a microscopic atom and smashes it against anothet atom to make a bomb explode, Young takes the tiniest of ideas, clashes them together like cymbals, and the result is an explosion of contemplative language.

Vera Cartwheel is the narrator. At the start of the book, she is a thirteen year old girl, living with her invalid mother and being raised by a nursemaid named Miss MacIntosh. Vera thinks of Miss MacIntosh as her mentor and hero. The elderly woman is described as being plain, practical, and pragmatically opposed to any embellishments or flights of the imagination. The education she gives Vera involves doing chores in preparation for her future as a housewife and making her memorize the facts in an almanac. They live in a mansion owned by Vera’s bedridden mother on the ocean shore in Massachusetts. Then one day, Miss MacIntosh wanders off into the sea and disappears.

Soon, we find Vera Cartwheel on an old bus, traveling at night through Indiana, going in the direction of Miss MacIntosh’s hometown in Iowa. Aside from Vera and the bus driver, there are two other passengers, newlyweds named Madge and Homer. The two have a long discussion about Homer’s ex-girlfriend who, according to Madge, is dying of tuberculosis. Homer had never heard this news and Madge chatters on about it all throughout the bus ride. We never find out if Homer’s ex is really dying or not, but it is quite obvious that Madge is jealous of her. In this conversation, we get introduced to a theme that gets examined throughout the whole novel: the relationship between marriage and death. Closer to the end of the bus ride, the couple also discuss other people in their town and the themes here morbidly involve poverty, incest, mental illness, suicide, and the possibility that a woman who had married two brothers in two separate marriages had murdered both of them. Another interesting thing to notice abput their conversation is that the two of them hardly know each other. Madge and Homer’s discussion about the dark side of their hometown is one of the only instances of actual dialogue throughout the whole book. Thus, the two characters who display the deepest level of intimacy are two people who barely understand each other. Other character speak in the forms of soliloquies or monologues, sometimes with Vera listening with only minimal participation.

The bus driver is another example of this. While drinking whiskey throughout the entire trip, he drunkenly talks endlessly about why he never cuts his hair, how he is unmarried and lives with his mother, and then obsessively rants about a senile doctor who tries to drive a car that is falling apart and has delusions about delivering babies. The doctor delivers babies that never exist. Death, life, presence, and absence are all intertwined. You can’t even be sure that the doctor is real as the bus driver’s babbling seems to veer off into delusion too. In fact you can’t even tell if the bus driver and his leaky bus are real or figments of Vera’s imagination. Throughout the prose, from beginning to end, the interpenetration of reality and fantasy are just as prevalent as the mixture of life and death or presence and absence. One thing is for certain: this bus ride represents to Vera a journey into the unknown and a place where all reference points of familiarity recede. But then again, nothing in the novel, from the start, can ever be known with certainty.

By this point, it becomes clear that this Herclitean dichotomy, this clash and harmony between opposites are a defining element of Young’s writing. Norman Mailer uses this dichotomy to a different effect, but with similar results in terms of expansive prose. Once you latch onto this theme, the ideas become easier to follow. The writing remains dense and heavy until the end though. It moves slowly like a Stanley Kubrick film, say Barry Lyndon, and reading it slowly but steadily helps to move it along with consistency. If compared to music, you could say it moves, possibly at the pace of a glacier or tectonic plate, not with the verse-chorus-verse structure of a rock song, but like the movements of a symphony. It is an exercise in variations on a theme, and the theme is repeated rhythmically like calm waves on a gentle shore.

So as the bus driver pulls into the destined town, Young takes us back to the New England mansion where Vera lives with her mother and Miss MacIntosh. Vera’s mother is bedridden and addicted to opium so that she floats in and out of hallucinations so freely that it is impossible for her to tell what is real and what isn’t. The porous boundary between the real and illusory allowed for visitations of guests from ancient times and the presence of the dead. Through her we get introduced to a whole constellation of objects that may or may not be symbols depending on the context in which they appear. Doorknobs, apples, moths, stars, fireflies, starfish, seashells, and all kinds of other things appear in conjunction in ways that sometimes make sense and sometimes confuse you. It is possible that a state of confusion is what the author is sometimes trying to achieve, especially in some passages relating to her friend Mr. Spizter. Otherwise, the presence of horses is another constant in the text as is the presence of water in all its forms, especially in the form of fog as an element of concealment and confusion, and also the ocean which sometimes acts as an element of consciousness. In any case, water in its varied forms is closely related to revealing and concealing hidden aspects of the writing.

While Vera’s mother lives in the flux of her fantasies and realities, her friend Mr. Spizter lives a life of restraint, rarely ever venturing outside his self-imposed limitations. He hunts butterflies, capturing them and then enclosing them in glass cases for his own private collection, symbolically killing the free spirited creatures of flight to be permanently imprisoned, like Mr. Spitzer is inside his own head. Mr. Spitzer also composes music in his head that no one will ever hear because he never plays it for anybody. Instead he writes it on scraps of paper and cloth in hopes that when he dies, someone will piece them all together to form complete works of music. Is that an indication of the author’s intention? She feeds us loads of information and leaves us to our own devices to piece it together to make a coherent whole. As readers we may never be certain if we put the pieces together in the right way or not. Mr. Spitzer is also a lawyer and executor of last wills; his job is to hunt down lost relatives who, without knowing so, are heirs to abandoned estates. He never succeeds though, so the man who hunts and captures butterflies is never able to track missing ancestors of the deceased. It probably doesn’t matter anyways because the deceased, being dead, can’t know that their relatives are absent. And Mr. Spitzer’s mind is saturated with silent music.

The most distinctive thing about Mr. Spitzer is that his twin brother died. His brother’s first name is Peron and his first name is Joachim. Peron is the opposite of Joachim who lives his life though the avoidance of taking chances while Peron lived by doing nothing but taking chances. He earned a living by being a professional gambler. There is a catch to all this because Vera’s mother was in love with Peron even though Joachim is in love with her. She doesn’t love Joachim though and his presence in her life represents the absence of Peron because Peron, allegedly, committed suicide. The suicide is alleged because we never find out if it really happened or not. It is possible that Joachim and Peron are actually the same person, a point driven home by the complete absence of any references to Joachim’s life before Peron’s death. The way that life and death and presence and absence dance around each other in this book takes on a dizzying pace at times.

Through Mr. Spitzer, we also learn about Cousin Hannah, a suffragette and union leader who traveled all around the world at a time when women rarely left their homes. Mr. Spitzer is the only person present as Hannah lies on her deathbed, a strange paradox considering her supposed fame and distinguished life. Hannah was once a woman who appeared in the newspapers and now she is dying forgotten and alone. Like Vera’s mother, she is in opposition to Mr. Spizter who stays within his own boundaries. While Vera’s mother goes outside her boundaries mentally in opium induced hallucinations, Cousin Hannah went outside her boundaries through travel and activism.

Hannah’s romantic relationships are a prevailing thought at the time of her death. She was once on the verge of getting married and then disappeared from the public on the day of her wedding. There are overt hints that she is a lesbian. She once fell in love with another woman. They were climbing a mountain together during the winter. After ascending to the peak and starting down the other side, Cousin Hannah lost her skirt. Her lover was waiting for her return and when Hannah came back over the peak without her skirt, her romantic interest insisted on going up and over to get it and bring it back, only she never returned, presumably dying in an avalanche or from something else like hypothermia. Here we are again with love-death-marriage-life-presence-absence and the ubiquitous water in the form of snow, ice, fog, and tears.

Narratively, the stories of Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah are told in the first person omniscient by Vera who probably isn’t even present in the room as Mr. Spitzer patiently waits for Hannah to die. This is a strange trick to pull off since the narrator presumably has no access to the inner workings of the others’ minds. The two of them do soliloquize parts of their story, but these passages are largely told from Vera’s point of view. This is strange also because, even though the two characters sometimes speak in monologues, neither of them actually interacts with each other. This is true throughout most of the book; characters mostly overlap while their actual interactions and conversations are minimal. What this does is highlight the individuality and solitude of each character, emphasizing the empty and impenetrable spaces between people despite how proximate to each other they might be physically. Each character is like a tightly sealed container with massive spaces, heavy with emptiness, between them.

The central passages about Mr. Spitzer and Cousin Hannah get to be redundant, excessive, and sometimes confusing. But we get a break from all that when Mr. Spizter goes to a funeral for a frog that once lived in a deaf mute’s mouth and did all his speaking for him. Presence and absence. After that, Mr. Spitzer has a transcendent experience, reminiscent of James Joyce, in which he finishes composing the silent music in his head and “hears” it in the form of hallucinations. It is like French Symbolist poetry where you need to interpret it according to how it feels rather than what it means.

And then the last 400 pages are the strongest, and weirdest, part of the novel. Vera reappears in her mother’s house and learns the darkest secret of Miss MacIntosh before she disappears into the ocean. The secret involves her inability to grow hair and the absence of one breast. In an earlier part of the book, Vera had a dream in which she learns this secret. Learning the truth in a dream is another plunge into uncertainty and also emblematic of how close fantasy and reality are in our consciousness. This secret acts as a broad framing device in this maximalist novel. After the disappearance of Miss MacIntosh, some odd characters enter into the narrative. One is an insane old woman who insists Vera’s mother hired her to be a new nursemaid even though Vera no longer lives there. And when I say this trollish woman is odd, I really mean she is odd.

Then with another broad framing device, we return to Vera on the bus as it pulls into a town at daybreak in front of a hotel. Vera checks in and encounters more weird people. One is a devout Christian farmer who claims to be making the world a better place by being a professional hangman. His wife committed suicide by hanging herself from a peach tree and his kids amuse themselves by hanging dolls, teddy bears, and a sick dog from the same branch. His moral dilemmas run between the same points of certainty and uncertainty that so much of the book is about. He resolves this moral contradiction by pegging it to the certainty of his religion.

Vera also encounters the senile doctor that the bus driver talks about obsessively at the start of the book. This ties in with a waitress Vera encounters in a diner named Esther Longtree. The waitress tells her life story and we learn she has a unique problem. She gets pregnant over and over again, but each term ends in a miscarriage. Now she is pregnant again, but the baby is long past its due date. Esther’s problems are deeper since as she tells her story it gets more and more contradictory. Her miscarriages may be self-induced, they may be abortions, or she may have committed infanticide, killing the babies after they were born. But she so desperately wants to have a baby even though she may have gotten pregnant while being raped. We never know if she was actually raped or not because she has always been eager to get pregnant even if that means sleeping with complete strangers. She repeatedly gets raped or willingly seduced, we can never know for sure, by different men although some of them might have been the same man wearing different disguises. Esther spends her life in the presence of absent babies, each one stillborn or dying at the time of birth. Death-life-absence-presence-confusion-clarity-fantasy-reality-sanity-insanity-certainty-uncertainty. It’s a whirlwind that never stops until the novel ends.

Overall, Young’s novel is an extended meditation on the previously mentioned themes. And by extended, I mean extended to the limits. This is a maximalist novel if there ever was one. By establishing separate points divided by vast open spaces, say stars and fireflies on the beach or starboard and larboard, a vacuum is created to be filled with an influx of semantics, signs, and symbols to be unpacked and analyzed, but then again, sometimes it is a novel to be experienced more than understood. The contemplative themes are basic enough, but if this novel says anything definite through the way it portrays people, it is that we live ghostly existences permeated by nothingness. We barely exist except in the traces we leave behind in the memories and impressions left in the consciousness of others. Notice how other people like Peron, the senile doctor, and Homer’s ex-girlfriend are all explained through the narratives of characters in the narrative of Vera Cartwheel. In a Hegelian sense they may be real people with imaginary stories, alter egos, or pure delusions. We can never be certain and we can never know what separate, incomprehensible lives we may be living in the minds of other people. And if we live in solitude, we may barely even exist at all. We are barely anything more than nothingness that passes away into death anyways, eventually to be forgotten as all the people we knew in our lives die too. And as Esther Longtree explains, we are largely defined by everything we’ve lost. Isn’t this what Derrida’s deconstruction is all about?

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an acquired taste. It is not easy to sink your teeth into and it is not easy to digest. Sometimes it is like eating a sandwich that is bigger than your head. Probably most people who attempt to read it will give up. But it’s not impossible to understand and it is rewarding if you make the effort. 

 

Book Review & Analysis: Frogs At the Bottom Of the Well by Ken Edgar

Frogs At the Bottom Of the Well

by Ken Edgar

      Back in the 1970s, there were roughly two competing strains of feminism. One was that of the upwardly mobile career woman who strove to break the glass ceiling and change the system from the inside. That was reformism. The other, radicalism, was about destroying the whole system and rebuilding everything anew from scratch with an emphasis on replacing the so-called patriarchy with a matriarchy. Psychology professor Ken Edgar’s novel Frogs At the Bottom Of the Well addresses both political tendencies and it is clear from the beginning which one he supports.

The reformist element of the two headed feminist dragon is represented by Molly Reagan. She is the top performer of the Indianapolis women’s division of the police department which is headed by a tough old battle ax who looks over Molly Reagan with barely concealed lust as she changes in the locker room after a shift. This novel was published by Playboy Press after all. Considering that, it is surprising how sexually tame this story actually is though. Anyhow, the boss has come to summon Molly to a meeting with an FBI agent who has selected her for a secret assignment in New York City. She fits the bill quite well because, not only is she the best female cop in the region, but she is also beautiful, in part because of her long red hair. Redheads were considered to be hot in the 1970s, especially those who were true redheads, if you know what I mean.

On a side note, I’d like to point out the significance of Molly wearing pants throughout the whole novel. Younger readers probably won’t catch the cultural reference and the virtue signaling in this detail of fashion because social norms have changed to the point where a woman wearing pants means little if anything these days. Besides, 21^st century Americans have no sense of fashion to begin with. I mean, geez, have you ever seen such a poorly dressed nation anywhere on Earth? Even affluent people here dress like the dishwashers at Denny’s. But back in the early 1970s, pants were a symbol of female liberation. Ken Edgar didn’t break any new ground by having Molly Reagan wear pants since she certainly wasn’t the first, but it does show that he is on the side of sexually liberated women according to the semiotics of that time period. Edgar was certainly not the first to cast a woman as the protagonist in a police thriller novel either, but that still was a fresh and edgy idea at the time this was written.

Since Molly fits the necessary profile so well, she is sent to Manhattan with a sidekick to pose as her husband. Her assignment is to infiltrate a gang of lesbian terrorists led by a woman named May-One who has a fetish for redheads. When May-One falls in love with Molly, a little too easily to be believed, the undercover cop gets initiated into the group. In fact, May-One is so blinded by love for Molly that she lets her in on all the terrorists’ secrets without any suspicion that something might be wrong. Umberto Eco, in The Prague Cemetery, says that every secret society has at least three true conspirators and two infiltrators. In this novel, his formula falls short by one, but the idea still stands as Molly proves herself by staging an assassination of a police officer with assistance from the FBI. With this event, the narrative becomes a little disappointing. The author uses foreshadowing to set us up for the tension of action and then the action goes as planned. A plot twist or two to subvert our expectations would have gone a long way in making this a more exciting story.

Anyhow, as May-One and company take Molly on the lam, hiding out in a remote cottage up north in the Hudson Valley, she learns the backstories of each one and how they ended up as radicals. They mostly all came from upper class families, as radical activists often do, and all have issues with losing their fathers. Some had fathers who cared more about climbing the career ladder than having family relations with their daughters. Others died from accidents or injuries related to work. One got rich by destroying beaches in California while setting up oil rigs along the shore. Ken Edgar makes it clear that these women, tragic characters but not evil, all have legitimate grievances against the capitalist system. In this way he humanizes them, to a small degree, while acknowledging that American society has its flaws. It may be understated, but this book does not present a one sided view of political activism. The presented idea that radical feminists become what they are because of absent fathers might be overly simplistic, and also outright wrong, but then again this isn’t highbrow literature either so your expectations for insightful analysis shouldn’t be too high.

All along, Molly knows the importance of her mission. The lesbian terrorists have made contact with an organization of nuclear physicists who are assembling a suitcase sized atomic bomb which they will use to blow up the World Trade Center. That should make your head spin a little. It is highly unlikely that Al Qaeda found inspiration in this novel, but it was published seventeen years before they tried to blow up the World Trade Center the first time and twenty-five years before September 11, 2001. And we can’t overlook the theme of nuclear armed radical lesbian terrorists blowing up New York City as being almost reason enough to give this book at least one read. This idea is so over the top that it almost treads into John Waters territory. John Waters is far more creative and original that Ken Edgar and he would have done a much better job with this material, but for now this is all we’ve got.

While staying in the group’s secret hideout, Molly encounters Sun, the nuclear physicist who is in charge of the whole operation. He is an oversized egomaniac whose IQ is supposedly off the charts even though he comes off as being an intellectual mediocrity in the story. His motivation for wanting to erase society and start everything new? He can’t sleep and, actually more importantly, he can’t get it up. Yes, he builds nuclear bombs because he is impotent. Actually, even if he could get a stiff one, he probably wouldn’t get a chance to use it anyways because he wanders around the lesbian hideout looking like a dork in boxer shorts and dirty shirts. Somehow, Molly crosses the line of professional distance and ends up in bed with Sun. This is odd because everybody Molly encounters wants to get in her pants, but aside from May-One and Sun, no one ever does even though they might be better catches. Molly cures Sun, straightening out his overcooked strand of wet spaghetti, but even though he finds new power in his prick, he isn’t deterred from carrying out his nefarious plans of world destruction. May Lex Luthor live forever.

I won’t divulge any more details, but the end of the story is predictable as is almost everything else in the book. Molly Reagan’s defeat of the lesbian terrorists signifies that the heroics of the upwardly mobile, career advancing feminist is acceptable while the lunacy of radical feminism is naive and dangerous, though certainly more interesting.

This novel certainly has its flaws. It Is formulaic and predictable. The characters are cliché by today’s standards even if the police were considered progressive by the standards of the early 1970s. The characters are, however, well drawn enough to make them somewhat believable and more than just action figures in an action novel. And while Molly is interesting enough as a protagonist, a book about lesbian terrorists with am atomic bomb promises more from its villains. The action in the story isn’t strong enough to sustain our interest and the villain’s are the biggest selling point the novel has, but Ken Edgar doesn’t do enough to make the villains as exciting as they should be. Such an outrageous premise should revolve around outrageous characters. May-One, Sun, and their gang are outrageous, but not so much as to make this as exciting as it could have been. Edgar is too cautious as a write to push them over the top the way he should have. On a technical level though, Edgar is a good, if conventional, author. The pacing is fast, there is little in the way of loose threads, and he has a talent for building suspense. His ability and willingness to portray all sides of the conflict could have been more developed, but it is an adequate effort.

Frogs At the Bottom Of the Well has such a provocative premise, but Ken Edgar is such a middle of the road author that it doesn’t shine when it should. It could have the potential of cult status if only it had been a trashier, a little more weird, or a little more ironic in a humorous way. Instead it reads like a novel written with the intention of being made into a movie script, a slightly better than average undercover police action suspense story, but not one that could achieve classic status. It does reflect some of the moods and ideas of the time it was written in though, but this will only be recognizable to those with experience and a working knowledge of America in the mid-1970s.

 

Book Review: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti by Milton Rokeach

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

by Milton Rokeach

      It was the late 1980s when a group of my friends gathered in front of a TV set with a couple six packs, a bottle of vodka, and a bag of joints. It was a special occasion. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show was on. It’s not that we had any particular fascination for that kind of trash talk show. It’s just that her guests were a special sort of people and we tenuously knew one of them. He was the cousin of someone we knew from high school and he, along with the other two guests on the show, believed that he was Jesus Christ. What ensued was a shouting match between the three kooks, no doubt encouraged by the shows producers for its entertainment value. We were rolling on the floor with laughter. This was real John Waters kind of stuff. And that friend of ours, with his cousin the nutjob messiah, may never have recovered from this incident. Anytime we ran into him after that episode of of The Sally Jessy Raphel Show, he looked kind of sheepish as we teased him about it. He went on to become a college professor and then died about a decade ago. I guess that means he’s over it by now.

On a slightly more serious note, in the 1950s a psychologist named Milton Rokeach gathered together three inmates at a psychiatric hospital in Michigan. All three believed themselves to be God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost or some sort of combination of the trinity. He wanted to see what would happen when three people who all claimed to be approximately the same incarnation got together in a room to talk shop from a deity’s perspective. He wrote about his experiment in The Three Christs of Ypsilanti.

Rokeach starts by introducing the three subjects. Clyde is an elderly Midwesterner who doesn’t have much to say aside from interjections meant to correct the false beliefs of the others. When someone says they are God, he gets angry and shouts at them because he is the one who is really God. Other than that, he mostly keeps to himself. Joseph is a bit smarter. A highly educated French Canadian and devotee of classic literature, he also believes he is God. Furthermore, he also believes the psych ward is a castle and an outpost of the retreating British Empire. He vows to fight in its honor, but often makes requests to be repatriated to the U.K. Aside from his delusions, he is functional on a day to day basis and can read Tolstoy and Flaubert, able to describe them, analyze them, and interpret them with clarity, accuracy, and freedom from delusional perceptual distortions. I actually took a liking to this guy. Then there is Leon, the youngest of the three. He was raised by his mother, a religious fanatic who was probably mentally ill herself. Leon is highly articulate, believes he is married to a yeti, and lives a life saturated in the muck of psychotic delusions. He is confused about his sexuality too and keeps insisting that people call him by names other than his own. Those names change according to what is happening in his life.

Rokeach’s expectation from the start is that, when the three Christs encounter each other, they will break free from their delusions of grandeur and realize they are not Jesus. His intention is to see what happens when the cornerstone of an individual’s identity dissolves and how that affects their beliefs and behavior. This, however, never goes as planned and the three patients persist in believing themselves to be God. In fact, instead of discussing their false identities with each other, they tend to avoid the subject altogether.

Rokeach’s brand of experimental psychology has two major components, one of which is more controversial than the other. The less controversial one involves daily soirees. The three paranoid schizophrenics gather around a table to chain smoke and talk. The more controversial one involves Dr. Rokeach impersonating different people in attempts to influence the patients’ behavior and beliefs. With Leon being the most articulate of the three Christs, the most interesting results come from him. The doctor writes letters to him claiming to be Leon’s wife named Madame Yeti Woman. By impersonating and manipulating Leon’s delusions, the complex, and sometimes confusing, nature of his belief system is revealed, involving an alternate race of yetis, hermaphroditism, first name changing, and ritual masturbation. Leon also begins constructing masks out of colored cellophane, cardboard, and rubber bands which he wears to avoid eye contact when in the presence of a female doctor he is sexually attracted to. Dr. Rokeach gets less spectacular, but significantly revealing results, when he writes letters to Joseph, pretending to be the director of the psychiatric hospital. The intention is to convince Joseph to embark on a writing project. This, along with another experiment in the use of placebo medications, ultimately leads nowhere.

While Rokeach’s attempts at persuading the three Christs to shed their false beliefs ends in failure, he does provide an interesting analysis of the content of their delusions. There are definite patterns as to when and why the delusions come out as well as a logical consistency, maybe even a symbolic role, that the delusions play. These three men suffer from problems of inadequacy, fear of failure, anxiety over social conflicts, and sexual frustration. Leon himself appears to be confused because he is bisexual. Rokceach finds that their delusions are all strategies created to help these men manage the turmoil of their inner conflicts. The difference between them and non-schizophrenics is that they construct false identities and delusional beliefs to avoid facing their problems whereas other people deal with similar issues in ways that are more in line with what is considered normal by society’s standards. Furthermore, these three men have weak and fragile egos that could easily be shattered when confronted with ideas that conflict or threaten their sense of self. Their delusions act as a bulwark against such threats and protect their egos from fracturing whereas people with effectively formed egos are able to withstand the stress of social pressure. This is also why these schizophrenic men spend more time alone than people with more well-adjusted ego formations.

Although this book is dated in its theory and methodology, it is still an interesting read. Rokeach is a talented writer and is highly successful in describing the personalities of Joseph and Leon. This is one of those narratives where the characters are so distinctly drawn that you feel as if you know them from the start. It is a perfect balance without any over- or under-writing and this is mostly accomplished through the use of dialogue. Rokeach, a sharp observer of human behavior and character, could have been a good novelist if he had chosen that path. It is also a great story. Based around a scientific framework, it starts with a proposition for investigation, gathers and describes the found information and data, interprets the data, and leaves us with a deeper understanding of human nature. What I found most important in the end is that Rokeach humanizes his subjects by showing that they struggle with issues that are common to many people. It is just that they depend on alternate ways of handling their problems that are idiosyncratic to the rest of us.

Otherwise, the theory and practice of this study are undoubtedly controversial by today’s standards. Rokeach’s theory of schizophrenia being the result of improper ego formation and psychological adjustment during childhood is ancestral to Freudian thought. I don’t keep up with contemporary practices in the field of psychiatry and therapy, but I do know that psychoanalysis has largely been rejected long ago. The ethics of Rokeach’s methods are questionable too. His intention of shattering the ego of a schizophrenic just to see how it effects their behavior and beliefs could be harmful to the subject and might even lead to permanent psychological damage. Why don’t we just crack somebody’s skull open with a hammer or break a couple ribs just to see what happens? Also, the three Christs are not violent or self-destructive and are actually quite high-functioning for psychologically disordered people. It is probably unethical to even be keeping them locked up in a psychiatric facility when living under care in the wider community would be more beneficial to them. Then there is the issue of impersonating people like wives and hospital directors to manipulate their behavior. I’m not convinced that encouraging delusions is the best way to help schizophrenics manage their lives, especially because there is more emphasis on controlling them than there is on curing them. The authoritarian overtones of the doctor’s practices are a little discomforting. But then again, Rokeach was working with the available theories, ethics, and knowledge that were available to him at the time he did his research so he can’t be entirely blamed for not living up to whatever standards we have in our present day. That is the nature of science and society at large so I’d argue that postmodernists who insist that a literary text be isolated from the author, time, and place in which it was produced are entirely wrong if we are to make a fair judgment about its value and meaning as a written work.

When taken as it is, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti is a fascinating story. Despite being dated, it offers a working theory and framework of interpretation and, even if it is not congruent with current ideas, the relation between that framework and the information it explains makes for a neatly packaged story and set of ideas. And even though Rokeach did not get his intended results, he does demonstrate how a lot was learned along the way. In the end, I’m left with some interesting questions though. For example, why is it that so many psychotic or schizophrenic beliefs are expressed through religious delusions and what does this say about the nature of religion? And why are there so many psychological studies of the mentally ill and so few studies of the psychology of psychologists and psychiatrists? Finally, to what extent do we all use systems of belief to protect our egos? If beliefs and truths are separate ontological categories of knowledge, does that mean all beliefs are potentially delusions? How do we sort out delusional beliefs from legitimate beliefs? I don’t have the answers to these questions and I suppose you don’t either. Stay humble. Just because you’ve read Plato or Nietzsche that doesn’t mean you know anything.